April 4, 1982
P.S. 1 Gallery, Queens, New York
Palm Sunday afternoon I sat behind a black desk dressed as a soldier and stamped hundreds of people's hands and foreheads with the number of the Beast (Satan), 666, as set forth in Revelations of the New Testament. My chair was half inside a pool of black liquid. Reflected in the black pool was the wall installation of a charred, eight-armed, seven-headed spider-like "Beast" holding guns and knives. The Beast was constructed from a human skeleton and six sheep skulls and was hung on a large barbed-wire spiderweb over a red map of the world. The sound of a civil defense siren, a nuclear explosion, and Handel's Messiah was repeated at a high volume for five hours. The floor was stacked with hundreds of newspapers, the headlines reading, "Hiroshima survivors Testify Before Senators." Projected on another wall was a film loop of a rosy hydrogen bomb blast taken from above the clouds. On the wall opposite The Beast was a large oil painting of Christ crucified on a mushroom cloud over a burning ruined city.
