LOS ANGELES — In an alt-facts world that gets more bizarre with every passing day of this new administration, absurdist art that plays on America’s obsession with entertainment provides temporary comic relief. “The Jerry Maguire Video Store” at iam8bit gallery was one such project. For just over two weeks, the walls and shelves of the makeshift store were lined with 14,000 VHS tapes of the hit ’90s Hollywood film Jerry Maguire, donated by people over an eight-year period. Now the collective behind the installation, Everything Is Terrible!, wants to do something even more absurd: raise $400,000 to build a pyramid in the desert to house of all those copies. That’s four times as much money as a group of artists in LA recently raised for the ACLU for an actual political cause.
It may sound like a high estimate for a tomb-like pyramid that will exist only to house a bunch of VHS tapes, but according to Everything Is Terrible! Creative Director Nic Maier, architects, engineers and builders told him the figure was actually on the low end. Originally, the group wanted to put the tapes on the outside of the structure, but quickly killed that idea after realizing the printed Jerry Maguire images would be almost immediately destroyed. If the collective raises the funds, the pyramid will be about 35 feet tall, with a 50-by-50 footprint. Bathrooms and $100K worth of cement will be a large part of the cost, though Maier notes that they won’t know the final figure until they pick a location and work with local authorities and zoning laws. A place in Joshua Tree wouldn’t be the same price as one in Palm Desert, Death Valley, or Palmdale. The southern California desert is vast.
Read the full story on Hyperallergic: http://hyperallergic.com/355822/show-me-the-money-collective-fundraises-for-pyramid-to-house-14000-jerry-maguire-tapes/
