Dr Don: or how I learned to stop worrying and love Helen

With an experimental aesthetic and politically informed practice, Scott Flanagan’s artistic career has remained slightly outside the mainstream and most of his exhibiting projects have been with artist-run initiatives. Previous works have included a painting series of large canvas crosswords as a device to demand viewer engagement (clues and pencils were provided by the artist).

Flanagan’s project at The Physics Room, Dr Don: or how I learned to stop worrying and love Helen takes as its title reference the 1963 Stanley Kubrick satirical film “Dr Strangelove Or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb”. Working in installation mode, Flanagan hopes to re-conquest current corporate & political propaganda, which he notes can only exist in society with a large degree of public compliance.

The installation centres around a large map of New Zealand cast in asphalt and moulded to the shape of a bell-curve. Flanagan sees the bell-curve and other tools of statistical appropriation as methods of “institutional norms” hindering the development and understanding of what the human is.

In association with Scape 04

Reviews, Essays & Articles
Dr Don: or how I learned to stop worrying and love Helen
Sampler catalogue: Scott Flanagan
Hay, Jennifer. 

Sit Dog Sit
Presto, October, 2004
Flanagan, Scott. 

Sampler
The Physics Room Annual, 2004
Forde, Rosemary.