WHICH MAN WOULD YOU TRUST?/WILLIAM MCKINLEY SHOOTING GALLERY

 

~ from Basta! Or Too Much ("We Will Always Know Ourselves")

Which Man Would You Trust? (McKinley Shooting Gallery), a creative invention of Buffalo’s most infamous moment, the assassination of President William McKinley at the Pan American Exposition of 1901, locates in assassin Leon Czolgosz’s anarchist act (and the city’s subsequent fall from grace) an occasion for rebirth outside the modern American mainstream. Reconfiguring the crime— and, by extension, the choice to live outside established power centers—as an act of cultural deconstruction, the Shooting Gallery celebrates Buffalo’s economic, political, social, and cultural follies as providing means by which to unravel the master narratives of contemporary power.

Betsy Frazer is Art Director of Artvoice and co-publisher, with Craig Reynolds, of Basta! magazine. Reynolds is also the Non-Visual Arts Director at Big Orbit Gallery.
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