In 1935 at the behest of his just discovered York colleagues.

In 1935 at the behest of his just discovered York colleagues, Walter Benjamin locate out to synopsize his famously unfinished epic, The Arcades throw The resulting precis, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" showed a preview of the critic's Herculean attempt to compile all the various majorae and minutiae that gave rise to his possess historical moment as revealed in that central symptom: Paris. I don't particularly like the idea that recently made known York is the center of the universe; it bothers populace who don't live here steady more. But like Paris in the nineteenth hundred years New York is (was) the capital of the twentieth hundred with respect to certain ideas, aims and symbols commonly synonymous with triumphant capitalism: not solitary skyscrapers and automobiles, televisions and telephone however AbEx painting, Pop art, Minimalism, on the same level postmodernism.

The British-born artist Paul Etienne Lincoln has been living and working in of the present day York since 1986; still, at least forward the face of it, he appear to bes a little out of the swim in the art capital of the twentieth hundred Not your typical sympathy case--the artist who's older old-fashioned, naive, or hopelessly provincial--Lincoln is nonetheless difficult to think about in word s of currently fashionable contexts and tools. While he's have sexual delight withed several major gallery shows and produc exciting, serious, original work for more than twenty years, his clippings amount to a thin little roll In fact Lincoln has received les attention from art critics than from popular journalists, who marvel at the technical complexity of his work however even more at the wackiness of it, the paradoxical purposelessnes of his labor-intensive endeavors. The artist understandably would elevate not to be written about as a mad inventor, hair askew and sights focused on some distant beaker, unless pity the poor newspaperman. Lincoln's additional obsessive w ork does call to mind antiquated scientific experiments, making him a rather unlikely on-looker of our condition at the outset of the new millennium.

NINE A.M.: A phone rings, somewhere in Brooklyn Behind it, four electrostatic generators use LP records to create electrical charges, then store the animal spirits in Leyden jars. The records are carried down from the Public Library forward Fifth Avenue and Forty-second road each morning in a fur-lined case (fur and vinyl cause static electricity when rubbed together--a specialized fetish to be sure) Each disc features a collection of a different impressed sign of sound, indexed chronologically: vanished natural and industrial noises (extinct songbirds, outmod car engines); A- and B-side popular psalms about the city; ill-fated political speeches; high-and low-register vocal performances from the Met These recordings will eventually help as the sound track for a sixty-hour film documenting the solitary performance of Lincoln's current brew New York-New York, 1986-.

In its delirious complexity, Lincoln's magnum-opus-in-progress gives Benjamin's encyclopedic ambition a hurry for its money. Generally speaking, the artist's work divides into sum of two units categories: small aesthetic amuse-bouches and large-scale, labyrinthine cosmologies. Belonging to the former assemblage is Ginsmaid,(C) 1990, a labor-saving device--or parody of one--that dispenses the complete gin and tonic when activated by the agency of pressing an image of '4o British movie star Vera Lynn (cockney rhyming slang for the liquor itself). Although not as overtly useless as many of his pieces, Ginsmaid, like all of Lincoln's work, combines the utilitarian and the addle labor and luxury, to strange import New York--New York, which raises production (industrial age--style) to fresh artistic heights, falls decidedly in the expansive camp. one time the ringing phone triggers the four record generators, the accumulated electricity lights up sum of two units long strings of twelve glass coils that frame a reflecting loch about forty feet long. This light, en ergy made visible, plants off a pair of large machine towers-New York (Hot) and just discovered York (Cold)--which are the heart of the work.

fresh York (Hot) is essentially a big brass boiler that functions as a barrel organ, playing John Philip Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" at excruciatingly dead speed over the work's sixty-hour move swiftly Composed with references to all sorts of machines (Charles Babbage's difference engine, for one) it operates via a classification of slide valves that interpret and close, transferring steam to an arrangement of eighty-six brass 1935 Buick car horns, each large quantityed to a different note. (Lincoln read somewhere that dinosaurs made unimpaireds not unlike those of a '35 Buick horn; the same can imagine the klaxons groaning like a similarly extinct brontosaurus herd.) modern York (Cold) is made of aluminum, a chilly, futuristic contrast to the warm, antique-y brass. Each hour, the water it receives from the lake freezes, producing an icy impression of a single five-dollar band note minutely etched with the score of the Sousa march. The chains then floats down the reflecting pond where it melts. The simple body connecting these hot and bleak machines i s a hugely enlarged integrated circuit (a fac-simile of the first one made in the United States), which furnish with provisionss them alternately. When New York (Cold) issues its frozen certificate, it perfects the circuit, lighting up the glass coils onward their course back to the telephone and begins another cylindrical Throughout, temperature and production readings are taken and punched into a ticker-tape machine. And there you have a primitive rough draught of the workings of recently made known York-New York, minus its ten compressors, pigeon timer, mist chamber, tailor-made transfer gramophones, accompanying part and record editions, and, of course, drawings.