Across from it on the south wall is a fireplace in which McMillen has placed a rusted oval ash carrier that sticks out like a parched tongue that needs the water locked up in the locker. And dangling from the ceiling is a moon or stand-in for a satellite made of a ball of tinfoil, whose shadow moves back and forth across the north wall because the low watt bulb that lights the room dimly is attached to the end of a motorized pendulum. Adolescent male wet dream it may be. On the east wall a large gray funnel points its phallic spout across the room at large torus-shaped cake mold whose central hole becomes a metaphoric vagina. And with the nine old pipe organ cones that stand on the fireplace sill like a row of phallic missiles, deprived of their ability to make music and turned into objects that mimick weapons, the last small one crushed and tipped over.
Weapons of war come to displace objects of domestic use and comfort.
War is not exclusively a high tech phenomenon. McMillen's installation probably does not provide an answer to the enigma, but it raises the question of why we focus inordinate attention on it when we should be paying attention to the improvement of our daily lives. Man often exhibits an utter inability to think his way out of war. Men are trained for it and lead into it by their political and economic elites, whom it benefits far more than it does any lowly soldier. The industrial era's unique contribution to it has been the development of military industries whose technology removes us even further from war's gruesome reality and ups the destructive stakes.