WITTE ZAAL Posteernestraat 9000 Gent België/Belgium Preview/Opening Monday/maandag 17.11.2003 18.00 > 23.00 Exhibition/Tentoonstelling 18.11 > 13.12.2003 The WITTE ZAAL open from Tuesday till Friday: 12.30 - 18.00 and Saturday: 14.00 - 17.00 De WITTE ZAAL is open van dinsdag tot vrijdag van 12.30 tot 18.00 en op zaterdag van 14.00 tot 17.00
		Leon Grodski [us] Great Balls of Fire | 2002 installation room video co-edited and co-produced with Pearl Gluck featuring James E. Jones 6:23 min Edition of 5 "Great Balls of Fire" is a document that captures and distills part of my experience of a tragic event. Underneath Jimmy's jester-like speech is the evidence of someone searching (in one way, with the camera in hand, in another, through the camera itself) for a way to understand what he is seeing. At once, the artist behind the camera is perceptive, having had a readiness to shoot what someone like Jimmy was spouting to passersby (like him, surprise was not one of the emotions that I felt that day), and a seeker--though I shot the building on fire for ten minutes, I failed to see that the first building had already fallen. I think Jimmy appealed to me, in his defiance of "normal" reaction, in his complete lack of surprise, in his bigger picture Ken Kesey-like perspective. „Wars have been going on for 10,000 years". Or even a Jim Morrison „What are you going to do about it ? And I don't mean this from any obvious American perspective. For the "it" for Jim Morrison is referring to calling everyone in his New Haven audience a "bunch of slaves." The kind of slavery referred to when The Clash says, „If Adolf Hitler flew in today, they'd send a limousine anyway." I think Jimmy would get a kick out of these lines. Maybe I'll turn him onto them. No, his songs are too pop and play to be merely combative or ironic. The World Trade Center event is an interruption of his everyday. He's been standing there the whole time, shaking his cup to a beat, spouting the well of uniquely connected information he gets from reading three newspapers a day and a multitude of books at the library behind him. One day this July, Jimmy took me for a walk around his home: The Village. He brought me to the house of one of his heroes, William Moses Kunstler, who before he died lived around the corner from Jimmy's spot. Jimmy told me that William Kunstler was an attorney who defended the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, even David Berkowitz, with the belief that it didn’t matter who you are, you deserve the best defense that you could get. I didn't tell him about my hero Frederick Douglass, who taught himself to read and used it to escape slavery. I know that for Douglass, reading and thinking brought about a new kind of slavery. That of the working mind. There were moments when Douglass wished that he hadn't learned to read. It drove him nearly mad to be aware of his condition. I never asked Jimmy which came first for him, reading or escaping. I do know that he and Douglass turned reading into a tool to see deeper into the events of their days and to cultivate freedom as a way of life. I didn't tell Jimmy that one of my favorite speeches is Douglass’ 4th of July Speech, 1852 in which he questions with the sharpness of a knife-blade the idea that freedom in America is a given. I wonder what Douglass would have said about American Freedom in November 2003. You ain't nothing but a hound dog!? Leon GRODSKI http://www.the-sushi-bar.com/