“What is the price of two sparrows—one copper coin? But not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.” —Matthew 10:29

“In my dream I am hiding in a basement full of doves in cages, waiting for the woman upstairs, whom I do not know, to leave.” —Micah Schippa-Wildfong

• 18th century experiments with electricity produced a technique that jolted dead tissue, causing contractions and convulsions in the bodies it was applied to. Named “Galvanism” for Luigi Galvani, who observed the phenomena early in frogs, his nephew would go on to popularize the method, presenting the quivering cadavers of criminals to shocked audiences.

• In Abolishing Freedom, a series of essays on free-will and fatalism, Frank Ruda relays that “[Martin] Luther gave one of the most inhuman, charming definitions of the human being as a piece of shit that fell out of God’s anus. Mankind has an excremental status. The world is but a gigantic latrine. […] Against any trivializations of God’s decisions, against any attempt to mine meaning out of them, Luther defends the knowledge that something unknowable, unthinkable is at work in us.”

• A stuttering élan vital drives the behemoth that is the American national body, a Frankenstein corpse sutured of rotting industrial cores, hollowed-out small-towns and hyper-capitalized data-centers; experts warn that the U.S. power grid, an infrastructure over one-hundred years old, and riven by neglect, regulatory and investment failures, has been pushed to the breaking point by the demands of new technologies and the climate crisis.
Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, a 1942 critical diagnostic of the Nazi regime, contrasted the structure of the fascist state with that of Hobbes’ Leviathan. If the leviathan is a centralized state governed by a domineering social contract, then the behemoth is a chaotic association of cartels and power-brokers maintaining a shambolic zombie-state governed by self-interest and irrationality.

• Winters in the mid-west are now more frequently accompanied by bouts of polar vortexes, large low-pressure air masses which transform the city into a bleak icy wasteland, crippling infrastructure and threatening hypothermia. Temperatures may turn to such frigid extremes that migrating birds freeze and fall from the sky.

• Citing Freud’s allusion to Matthew 10:29, Ruda argues that the most trivial of excretions inverts our sense of understanding, “[leading] to the insight that previously ephemeral things akin to the sparrow falling from the roof (slips of the tongue and other parapraxes) are no longer irrelevant objects for rationalist and scientific investigation. And they may or, more precisely, will lead us to the core of human subjectivity.”

Micah Schippa-Wildfong (b. 1988) is an American artist, writer and musician living and working in Chicago. They have recently exhibited at Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg), The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago), Romance (Pittsburgh), Mickey (Chicago) and Pech (Vienna). They have upcoming exhibitions with Mutter (Amsterdam) and DISPLAY (Parma) later this year.

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Tags: Chicago, Edgewater, Micah Schippa-Wildfong, Twelve Ten Gallery