My co-worker called me upset a few weeks ago with a story. I didn't understand why she was so upset at first. She said she found a 1-foot-long lizard in her office when she walked in that morning. It took her 20 minutes to gently coax the lizard out the door and then herd it down the hallway, past the other offices, and out the front door of the building. She sat down on the curb and watched it while it stood on the sidewalk. I was like - this is a great story. Why are you upset?
And then she told me that as she was sitting there, a few seconds later, a crow flew down and grabbed the lizard, turned it over and ripped its belly out while it struggled. Somehow, the crow left the entire heart of the lizard laying in the grass, which she took a photo of, which I have, which is both awesome and very disgusting.
The reason this art piece makes me think of that story is that we don't expect gore and guts and blood to suddenly spout out around us and mess up our nice clean antiseptic reality, but really, isn't our blood and guts what built the machines? The pathos comes from our projection of our own loneliness and fear of death. Onto the broken machine, the struggling lizard, the abandoned toy: That will be us one day.