Daniel R Small

Excavation II

video TRT: 00:04:05, Bats feasting in the Luxor sky beam, Tracing the narrative camera movements of The Ten Commandments filmed in Guadalupe, CA, The Ten Commandments (1923) recovered plaster artifacts, Luxor Las Vegas murals, artifacts, and mouldings, literature, co-edited wire photographs, postcards. Installation diemensions variable, Mural dimensions: House of Millions of Years of Userrmaatra Setepenra That Unites (The Ramesseum) 10' x 22' Temple at Karnak 12' x 24' Palace in the clouds 5' x 7' Moving a Sphinx 5' x 7'

“If a thousand years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope that they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the valley of the Nile, extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America”

Cecil B Demille

Excavation II centers around a speculative proposal for the archaeological excavation of Cecil B Demille's 1923 film set used in The Ten Commandments that was dynamited, and buried in Guadalupe California, as well as The Luxor Las Vegas' pastiche of meta-narratives that are inseprable from the film and seem to perpetually write and rewrite themselves. Through a triangulation of past, present and future these discursive narratives engage with temporal investigations and representations where each seem indistinguishable from one another. The excavation in its myriad forms concerns itself with becoming fully aware and productively suspicious that history is always being imaginatively figured as it is seemingly figured out. The project proceeds from the awareness that history is written not in the certitude of concrete facts, but rather in the productive unreliability and partiality of lived and invested memories, myths, ideologies, stories, and dreams. The effort therefore moves beyond the recovery and removal of the artifacts in Guadalupe, and recognizes that these errors, myths, confabulations, and inventions lead us through and beyond facts to their meanings, and that the dubious reliability of such wrong tales enhance their historical value in that they allow us to recognize the interests of the tellers and the intentions and desires behind them. Here, historical objects are not merely found and re-presented, but are instead produced as historical.