Harry Dodge’s Whacker

I am wantonly isolating Whacker (2005) from the rest of the work of video artist Harry Dodge, who has one of the wiliest names in show business, because the sun is going down and time is short and there’s yet quite a thicket of weeds upon the hill and still more, and less, left to say.

One of the most complex creators of. For newbs (as I was until a year or so ago), there is contagion in the links ahead. Dodge’s world is alive and squirming in the arroyos and furrows that shadow and shape the city’s roadways; the videos filled with zone-stalkers and riveting stumblers, all foraging for ways to navigate and maintain the uneasy intersectionality of soul and surface streets that this famously always-whizzing-by metropolis leaves in its fumes. Dodge—a name that suggests self-preservation as much as deception, not to mention one of the noisiest vehicles still on the road—is chronicling/fracturing/fantasicating the ongoing dispossession that haunts each angle of this city, where everything and everyone seems to be something someone found left on a curbside and turned into something else.