Hindenburg/Goodyear Reincarnation Cycle
2022
Director/Editor
8 min 30 sec
Two Channel Installation
“This Won’t Last consists of seven new video works by the Philadelphia-based media arts collective Lino Kino. The series questions everyday assumptions about the roles and implicit meanings of monumental art in public spaces by presenting subjects rarely memorialized—such as failure, loss, entropy, the mundane, and the unacknowledged—on a monumental scale.”
“Hindenburg/Goodyear Reincarnation Cycle evaluates the history of the airship as a monument to failure. The Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey—only fifty miles from Philadelphia—was the nexus for airship development in the early twentieth century. In 1937, the German Zeppelin Hindenburg burst into flames at Lakehurst. In juxtaposing the public spectacle of the Hindenburg disaster and subsequent rise of the Goodyear blimp, Ober meditates on the process by which social value is repurposed as commercial value. “If the Hindenburg is a memorial of decay and disintegration,” notes Ober, “then the Goodyear is born from its ashes, emblemizing success, commodity, and American exceptionalism.”