Chicago, IL
I have always loved looking at maps. And cows. So Jack Hogan’s video, “Cows and Flies,” pleases me immensely, for how it explores the flattening and distortion of the spherical world created by reducing it to two dimensions; for retelling beloved stories about the absurdities of adults and language; for spending real time with a herd of cattle and making a one-to-one photographic print of them and then putting a herd of humans underneath it; for trying to draw longitude and latitude lines by stringing colorful ropes across a field in a grid; for acknowledging that the drone technology that allows them to film a farmer’s field from above is the same technology that allow for all kinds of new surveillance and extraction; and for a whole lot more, still, for far too many sensitive and unexpected observations to do justice to here, even in a massively run-on sentence. But not for the flies, no not for the flies. The cows never seem to mind them, though I always do. One wonders what the herd thought of the drone overhead, with its incessant buzzing.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-15 8:29 PM