Gear Jammer Vs. Eagle Eye

March 4th-14th at 205 Hudson Street Gallery

Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer is a performance, video, and sculptural installation intended to deconstruct the national mythologies that were deliberately written into American identity and it’s blueprint for population compliance. I have used the traditional aspect of the wrestling gimmick to mirror the American mythological binary, as well as a mechanism to construct and analyze the archetype instilled upon “the white working man”. I use the work to investigate how the format and viewership of the intentional spectacle could inform the subversive passive spectacle of American information absorption in the real world.  The piece constructs two wrestling gimmicks that mimic the archetype of the white hyper-masculine prescription of the working class American. Their names are derived from my father’s career as a truck driver, where he had two handle names, Gear Jammer and Eagle Eye. The wrestlers are introduced in the format of a pre-match “promo” video. 

The first wrestler introduced in video form to a viewer is Gear Jammer. Gear Jammer is the surface level representation of working class laborers. His intro is in the format of walkie talkie or truck driver CB lingo. His background music is a reconstructed version of Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?”, a protest song used in the notorious coal miner strikes in Harlan County, Kentucky. This song is historical work that is woven in the canon of the American labor movement. Gear Jammer’s version is modernized and mimics the grunge rock sounds of contemporary wrestling intro music. Gear Jammer’s costume is baseline work wear, a Trex Decking baseball cap, a brown leather back support belt and a navy uniform shirt with his name tag on the pocket. His attire is vague, non specific, and could encompass varied working class professions any time within the past 40 years. He masquerades as a bare bones representative, especially after his counterpart is introduced, however, as he is a participant in this arena and is a crafted persona, inevitably through existing, he becomes his own caricature. 

Where Gear Jammer serves the bare minimum aesthetically and structurally, his opponent provides an excessive counter balance. Eagle Eye is a fully adorned spectacle of the nationalist cowboy archetype. His extravagant attire comes ornamented in rhinestones, western fringe and feathers. He wears a cape, a cowboy hat, two layered wrestling onesies, sports sunglasses and white wrestling shoes with tube socks. He is the embodiment of excessive character crafting. His cape is floor length, the bald eagle emblem on the back is lined with gold tassels and sequins.

Although aesthetic opposites, Gear Jammer and Eagle Eye are not contradictions but fragmented parts of the same whole. Gear Jammer’s script includes a narrative where he describes how he and Eagle Eye were once a tag team and that Eagle Eye eventually betrayed him. Their split is a symbolic event where the cowboy archetype is exorcised from his long term host, the white proletariat male. Eagle Eye is the embodiment of the nationalist anti-labor advocacy that has plagued the working class. Gear Jammer is the remainder, the laborer unaffected by the cowboy archetype. The internal conflict is spaced to deconstruct the mythos that plagues the American proletariat and to investigate why he does not advocate for himself as well as continuously misidentifies his obvious oppressor. Although the two opponents are set up to be adversaries, and their juxtaposition is a mechanism to highlight their differences. It can be interpreted that they are essentially the same being, products of the same machine, or ultimately, serve the same function. These adversaries are one and the same, and regardless whether the match does eventually occur, the American proletariat is set up to battle itself, alluding to an inevitable draw before the possibilities of a real fight. The video is set up where the contenders deliver a scripted promo video in attempts to rally a spectacle surrounding the possible conflict. 

As Eagle Eye is a gimmick that is based off of a constructed concept, it was fundamental that he does not read as a single individual.  His script was crafted through an AI generator that was fed historical quotes that were contributors and products of the frontier individual archetype. The AI generator was fed George W. Bush, Clint Eastwood, Joe Biden, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt quotes. After the content is entered into the generator, it regurgitates a summation of that content. These quotations were originally performed by characters that implement the cowboy archetype as methods of American entertainment and political manipulation. The culmination of these quotations through the crafting of Eagle Eye’s script returns the content to its original archetype source and then creates a new product to be delivered by the personification of that archetype. It puts the archetypal output back into one source and functions as a synthetic mending of parts back into a whole. 

As Gear Jammer is the remainder, the human element of the mythos extracted from the archetype, it was essential that the script was also outsourced, not to artificial sources but farmed from human input. His script became a collaboration between myself and the wrestler who performed him. The wrestler outside of the performance is also a blue collar laborer so the input of a working class white male was layered with my intent for Gear Jammer’s narrative.

The installation of the video work is projected on opposite walls from projectors perched on gallery rafters. In between these two projections is a full size wrestling ring that is open to the viewer to walk on. The ring is covered in raw canvas. Throughout the duration of the installation the viewers footprints are tracked in the ring via this easily marked material. This element was vital in the juxtaposition of spectator to spectacle. The viewer is not looking down or viewing the wrestlers from the outside, they are part of the process where evidence of spectatorship is recorded.

The ropes are enclosed in red, white and blue fabric that has been heavily frayed. The unraveling fabric serves as another indicator of the ring’s possible symbolic gesture to the American political arena. The corners are thin plastic fake gold flag poles that are hardly able to bear the weight of the ropes, they bend in towards the center of the ring and continue to lean further in throughout the duration of the work. The four poles are topped with two eagles and two gold leafed crushed beer cans, icons of their respective “corners”. As the ring is made of recycled older wood, the viewer becomes aware of their own body as the wood creaks below them when they step on to the ring.

The ring does not deliver the function of it’s appearance. It visually serves as a wrestling ring, however, the ropes, poles, and possibly the floor would collapse if wrestling occurred within the space. It's a gold participation trophy standing in for the real object. The ring is a notation as the wrestler and their gimmicks are their own notations for something real. The work revolves around the mechanisms of flattening and how that flattening informs spectatorship, public information absorption, and ultimately political and national identity.