"Build It and They Will Come"
2009
Mixed media sound installation
Dimensions variable
 
 

The following text accompanied the piece:

"God knows I gave my best in baseball at all times and no man on earth can truthfully judge me otherwise."  - Joe Jackson

        "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (1889-1951) started playing big league baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1908. He got the nickname "Shoeless" when he played a minor league game in his socks because his spikes had given him blisters. After playing just 10 games with the Athletics he started playing with the Cleveland Naps in 1911, in that year Jackson set the rookie batting average at .408, (a record that still stands today) and led the American League in triples in 1912. By 1915, Jackson reached the peak of his career and was traded to the Chicago White Sox. He helped the White Sox win the World Series title in 1917. In 1919 the White Sox were in for another World Series, Jackson batted .351 during the regular season and .375 with perfect fielding in the World Series, but lost to the Cincinnati Reds. The next year "Shoeless Joe" was suspended along with 7 other White Sox players due to allegations that they had purposely thrown the 1919 World Series, this was to become known as the "Black Sox Scandal". Despite being acquitted by a jury of his involvement in the 1919 World Series fix, the commissioner of Baseball nevertheless went against the ruling and "Shoeless" Joe Jackson was banned from professional baseball for life.

        "Shoeless Joe" was a 1982 magic realist novel by W. P. Kinsella, in the book farmer Ray Kinsella, obsessed with baseball, hears a disembodied voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in his corn field. So he does. The baseball field then starts to become inhabited by the spirits of deceased baseball legends (including the disgraced "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and the other 7 "Black Sox" players) who all want one last chance at playing the game they were banned from in their previous lives.

        In 1989 "Shoeless Joe" was adapted to the big screen as the film "Field of Dreams" starring Kevin Costner, Ray Liotta, Burt Lancaster and James Earl Jones. It made famous the phrase "Build it and they will come". I remembered watching it when I was young. It was shown on TV on a Sunday afternoon not long ago.

        Shortly after that I had a dream that I was in the middle of a hall, it was a large hall, the only way in or out being a set of doors leading out to an indistinquishable landscape. In the room were four slabs positioned in a diamond pattern, constantly shifting in size. The slabs seemed to be trying to communicate with me, they seemed to hold some kind of hidden significance which was wholly other.

The slabs were baseball bases.

The message was "Build it and they will come".

So I did.
 
 
 
 

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