by Bob Garrett
Sunday Herald Advertiser
May 18, 1975
"Don't take what I say. After all I just work here," said Harry Binder, after a 10 minute explication on the various parts and possible meanings of "Life Game," a large environmentaI sculpture constructed in the sunken courtyard in the Boston Architectural Center.
Binder, a grey haired security guard, has thought the whole thing through. He sits fuming at his desk. "That's the beginning," Binder points to a platform on which lies a half dozen black disaster bags each of them stuffed with a dummy to give the appearance of acorpse.
"This thing here must be a conveyor belt," he nods at a runway on which is one disaster bag. The conveyor belt leads to a sort of pavillion formed by four steel girders. A disaster bag perches on a surface made of glass pinball machine panels featuring flashy motifs—Broadway, minstrel show, space travel, poolside beauties.
Suspended above this by the girders is an opaque box with a jigsaw design on it. Two long steel coils hang down from the box, resembling giant vacuum cleaner hoses with attachments on the ends. One hose rests like a stethoscope on the chest-area of the disaster bag. The other snakes across the pinball panel surface.
"The hanging thing lifts the body to the box, which is heaven or whatever. The box is supposedto have lights flashing. It twinkles like a Christmas tree, only it's not twinkling now because the artist hasn't come in to fix it."
Binder mutters to himself as he steps down into the courtyard to check the wiring and plugs. He avoids an area of the floor which the artist has covered with sand and bones. It looks like an archeological dig site. "The Bible says ashes to ashes, and that's what this sand is supposed to be. Help me with this bench, will you? I want to block off this area. This may be environmental art, but I don't want people tracking the environment thrcugh the building."
Binder muses over a fact sheet on the sculptor, Thomas Faulkner, a young artist whose studio is at the Boston Center for the Arts. Faulkner is an ordained minister, still practicing Sundays at the Espiscopal Divinity Seheol in Cambridge. He began sculpting at Dartmouth, but put his work down in the late sixties to become a· youth worker. He took up art again about three years ago, studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and elsewhere.
Binder frowns. "Why would a minister want to do something like this?" To make people reflect on their mortality on life and what comes after? "Possible. But let me tell you something, the average person is not going to appreciate it. People don't want to bother interpreting this thing."
Binder proceeded to spin out his philosophy of life, invoking the beer commercial ("you only go around once"), reflecting that as far as he was concerned you shouldn't depend on a hereafter—you have to make a heaven or hell on earth.
For someone protesting his indifference, Binder was waxing rather eloquent. The artist could hardly have asked for a stronger reaction from an "average person."
"I know about art. My father is a famous Boston portraitist, Jacob Bonder. He's still alive. Go talk to him about art, he won't give you baloney or any stores."
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