Artist Statement
I want to catalogue the minor ideas of the 20th century.  Henry Ford won’t make the list.  The Wright Brothers will be featured, but only for their invention of reverse-threaded bicycle pedals.  The list will include people and ideas that changed the world in small-to-medium-sized ways.  It will be expansive.  Dreamers, middle school teachers, and cartoonists will populate its pages.  Semi-expressionistic painters and co-auteur filmmakers will be there too.  Later on, the list will linger on the Voyager space probes—the furthest manmade objects from Earth—each carrying a gold-plated record inscribed with a sampling of the recorded sounds of the human race.  The list will speculate on how small Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto No. 2” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” might sound 11.3 billion miles away, which is to say the catalogue of minor ideas will also be a record of minor questions.  Some of the minor questions and ideas and people might be seen as really quite large.  This is just fine.