Dan Colen

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In July 1969, Walter De Maria shoots his film Hardcore in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. In 1991, the US Government's Bureau of Land Management issues the first permit for an event called Burning Man in the same location.

In September 1969, one month after the Manson Family's Helter Skelter murders, the teenage sleuths and cowardly Great Dane of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! emerge from their psychedelic Mystery Machine for the first time on network television. This cartoon gang will unmask supernatural villainy as basic human wrongdoing for the next twenty-two years.

In 1980, De Maria purchases an electrical substation in New York's East Village and repurposes this former cog in the public utility grid to become his art studio and monastic personal residence. Outside the building's unusually thick walls, punks stomp around the streets in jackets they've adorned with metal studs.

In 1998, Ryan McGinley moves into an apartment building adjacent to the De Maria studio. Dan Colen moves in with him during the summer of 2001, just before the September 11 World Trade Center attacks in lower Manhattan. The two aspiring artists have a direct view onto the former ConEd station from their back windows, but cannot guess its current use.

In the summer of 2002, the first live-action Scooby-Doo film is released, made possible by the advent of digital animation and a script that reunites the disbanded members of Mystery Incorporated. They are charged with the task of saving Spooky Island, once famously ruled by demons, from what appears to be a contemporary demonic possession-though first they must overcome their own discord.

Time marches on, as they say. But it can also seem to spiral experiences around us like a tornado, mixing the old with the new, the absurd with the sinister, the utopian with the oppressive, the anarchic with the commercial, and the natural with the synthesized.

Perhaps as a way to address these dual behaviors of time, the Mayan Calendar has two substructures. The Calendar Round date gives a measurement according to a repeating fifty-two-year solar cycle, thus corresponding roughly to a human lifespan. The Long Count, used to describe time beyond the localized experience of one generation, begins counting days from a mythical origin date and continues in infinite, non-repeating succession. The Long Count also refers to an occurrence in the sport of boxing, in which exceptional circumstances grant a downed fighter more than the standard ten seconds to stand up and avoid a knock out.

Brass rods, cement slabs, specks of dirt, stainless steel bars, faceted metal studs, cigarette butts, ashes, empty bottles of booze, strands of hair. Hippies, Situationists, artists, killers, ghosts, punks, socialites, chumps, and fools. These units of our greater whole mark time, energy, and, ultimately, the unifying loss of control-because purity is but a component part of the chimera, and all patterns are subsumed by chaos.