Late For Work

 

Late For Work, 1972.
Video,black-and-white, sound, 3 min. 47 sec.

“[. . .] I was late for work, and I wanted to do a piece before I went to work. I was a lifeguard.[. . .]They were tearing buildings down in my neighborhood, so I took a piece of paper and attached it to the wall of one of those buildings; then I went to another one of the building sand attached two pieces of paper. This went through a sequence, as though the papers were going up the wall in a column, but it was going up several walls. Then I had to reverse myself and literally go back and take the paper down. Today, making a piece like that would be silly because you could do it all with editing equipment and not have to go through all that stuff. By the end of the piece, I was climbing up a ladder. I remember it being Buster Keaton-like. It was sort of funny.”

**Glenn Phillips, interview with Jay McCafferty, in California Video: Artists and Histories, ed. Glenn Phillips (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008), 166–69.Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive, GettyResearch Institute, Los Angeles.

Transferred by the Long Beach Museum of Art Foundation and the City of Long Beach, 2005.
© Jay McCafferty

MCC_Video_03

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