Exploring mankind’s compulsion to go to battle, Jim Neel (AL) created Babel during his 2008 residency in the Arts Center’s Arts/Industry program at Kohler Co. Consisting of 50 life-size, slipcast chimpanzees dressed in armor and standing in formation, Babel recalls military conflicts throughout history and the resulting devastation. Neel’s stalwart army emerges from the sand as if discovered during an archeological excavation, conjuring a ghostly military force. Accompanying the chimp formation are 50 voices reading a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Each reader begins the poem at a different point; the resultant sound rises and falls in an unintelligible babel.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Jim Neel 