Fluff and Wonder was the fourth piece in my American Foreign Policy series.
Fluff and Wonder was the fourth piece in the American Foreign Policy series that I began in Poland in 2003. It began as a response to my experience as an American traveling outside of the US during the George W. Bush era. In each case I have extended a single action to demonstrate an aspect of our current government’s approach to international relations. This was performed in the Los Angeles area, where the current debate about immigration and building a wall on the border is a dominant topic.
Wonderbread and Marshmallow Fluff are two icons of Americana. While they are consumed as food, they are devoid of nutrition. They also have the eerie quality of never decaying. No mold grows on them. No ants arrive to eat them. White bread. White and whiter.
My plan was to wall myself into the corner of the room, from floor to ceiling, using the Wonderbread slices as bricks and the Fluff as mortar. I had estimated that it would take me 12 hours to build a wall 6′ x 8′, using 200 bags of bread and 72 tubs of Fluff. I wore radio headphones while I worked, listening to conservative talk radio, which I repeated out loud.
However, due to structural problems between the weight of the fluff and the softness of the bread – the wall kept sagging and collapsing every time that it reached my knees. I simply ignored the failure and continued to build on top of the rubble.
An apt analogy?
Fluff and Wonder
Shock and Awe
