Z & Walker Behl: Storm the Capitol
Insurrection in a Box - The “Big” Edition
Storm the Capitol Game
Z Behl
Walker Behl
Spring/Break Art Show
5880 Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
February 27 - March 3, 2024
Based on our own hot-product family business board game enterprise, we have transformed the Trueanon sponsored hit game “Storm the Capitol: Insurrection in a box” into a life size sculptural installation. After selling out of 2000 games in 20 minutes on January 6th, we are now bringing the second “Speshal Edition” prototype to the fair— where 60 games will be available for purchase.
Like live chess but much crazier, the here-installed “Big” Edition features Karen and Proud Boy avatars that fairgoers can move around the Capitol Building, as they roll to discover hostage senators and steal AOC’s shoes. The game is won by the first player to make it to Trump’s helicopter with 3 prizes— constituted by either senator hostages who’ve hid under desks, or other loot items such as Pelosi’s Laptop or Lectern.
All paintings in the installation are for sale, price list available on Spring Break’s website. Luan Cut Out Paintings are an anchor-piece of Z Behl’s practice, as seen at PIONEER WORKS, 7ELEVEN Gallery, or Kai Matsumiya Gallery in New York City.
The “Big” Edition takes about 20 minutes to play, and invites spectators to enter the realm of fantasy and tactile immersion, departing from relational aesthetics for long enough to enjoy the simple pleasure of rolling the foam dice, or flipping wooden cards. Escapism from within the art world has become more necessary than using art as escapism from the real world. Here we offer opportunities for both.
David Joslit writes in After Art: “image power - the capacity to format complex and multivalent links through visual means - is derived from networks rather than discrete objects. This means that works of art must develop ways to build networks into their form by, for example, reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting existing content - all aesthetic procedures that explicitly presume a network as their ground.”
The game functions for us both as a board game to take home and play with your friends and family, priced at an accessible level to share with the common populace, as well as simultaneously becoming a physical meeting place— a common ground established to open a conversation into imagery that we are already proliferating, manufacturing, and reiterating on the internet and on your bookshelf. After Art ends with the notion "One need not exit the art world or denigrate its capacities. Instead, we must recognize and exploit its potential power in newly creative and progressive ways. Our real work begins after art, in the networks it formats."
Applying these lessons from art to a conversation about image power in general, in politics, in social media, and beyond, the prevailing question becomes how to imagine a new tomorrow. For installation, for art, for global capitalism, for the age of corporations. It’s time to stop looking at our institutions with so much reverence and feel united in our desire to expose our political system for the joke that it is.
Paintings by Z Behl, Concept Art by Walker Behl. Graphic Design by Tavet Gillson and Todd Goldstein, illustration by Leah Shore. Art assistance from Juan Cuadros, Shelby Jacobsin, Eve Thomas and Simone Seigel.
Inquiries: creamhoundgames@gmail.com