This interactive project, installed at Art Market Provincetown from June 27 - October 8, 2014, asks for help in testing an experimental premise about political systems: Is it possible that our civic life suffers not because of the fetishization of bureaucracy but because bureaucracy is not fetishized enough? Do we feel alienated from local, regional and federal democratic processes because they fail to arouse us?
Civic Engorgement attempts to build more intimacy into our experience of The State by eroticizing the entire zone of things that we think of as civic or political. It's an invitation to take the political VERY personally: to respond to the traditional taunt aimed those who criticize this country's political policies that they should “love it or leave it” by literally loving it. The hope is to invigorate our collective political passions, or at the very least, to make politics seem dirty in a different way than usual...
Model: Max Harless