Instant Tunnel
Mira Dayal
August 7-29, 2021
The Gallery Ltd
Brooklyn, NY
Press release
The last work ever made by Marcel Duchamp is a trompe l’oeil diorama constructed in secret from his windowless office on East 11th Street. To view it, you must look through a set of small peepholes carved by the artist into a wooden door. Squinting, you encounter a kind of uncanny forest. The rational mind knows it’s a trick—the scene itself is bizarre enough, but certainly there’s never been a waterfall on East 11th street—however the eye is more imaginative, filling in what can’t be seen to convince you the landscape stretches infinitely beyond your limited field of vision.
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Scene: A desert road. Jagged red rocks dot each side. A dead end. Evening sun hits the flat side of a cliff. Enter Wiley E. Coyote. He unpacks a box labeled Instant Tunnel, the latest product he’ll employ in his series of attempts to trap and then eat the Road Runner. It’s manufactured by the fictional ACME Corporation, whose extensive catalog includes a portable hole, a disintegrating pistol, dehydrated boulders and the do-it-yourself tornado kit. Instant Tunnel appears to owe its effectiveness to linear perspective, which happens to be one of the corporation’s premier technologies. “It’s sad how Wiley E. Coyote is remembered for his violence and not his brilliant paintings of tunnels,” laments an early internet meme.
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Currently under review by Brooklyn’s Community Board 1 is a proposal to redevelop the Gem Street warehouse of Acme Smoked Fish, a New York establishment since 1954. The proposal would add an additional 532,000 square feet of mixed office, retail and pedestrian space to the aging brick facility. Greenpoint’s infinite frontier is set to expand again—glass and steel reflecting light where it was once diffused; an organized set of lines fixed atop the rubble; nine rectangular stories ascending into the troposphere. Acme: the highest point or stage; someone or something that represents perfection of the thing expressed.
Installation photos: Monet Lucki