TRANSMISSION ART ARCHIVE
Guns!
1989
Don Joyce, Negativland
A dense, pulsing "action song" whose verses deal with America's intimate relation ship with firearms: "The gun and the Bible carved this nation out of the wilderness," a man exclaims. A tradition unfolds that links the voices of the past as we know them through television cowboy movies and gangster films, to the modern Annie-Get Your-Gun, the business woman of the 'eighties with her handy sub-machine gun. An evolving patchwork of movie excerpts and TV ads, statements and information about guns, and certain phrases repeated like bullets. Commissioned by New American Radio.