« We can do whatever we like, as long as it’s unimportant » [1]
Goswell Road is proud to present: Jokes About Bombs Will Not Be Taken Lightly — the first solo exhibition in France by multimedia artist Lydia Eccles (b. 1954, USA).
The exhibition is maintained within the framework of Eccles’s seminal project, Unapack: Unabomber '96 Presidential Write-In Campaign (1995–1998), a provocative intervention that took the form of a political campaign to elect the Unabomber as a write-in candidate in the 1996 U.S. presidential election. The campaign’s Shermanesque slogan — “If elected, he will not serve” — was a subversion of the political spectacle. Its theoretical foundation was rooted in the Unabomber’s anti-technology, pro-collapse manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, published by The New York Times with The Washintgton Post on September 19th 1995, and in the subsequent arrest of its author, Ted Kaczynski — a mathematics prodigy and former academic who had renounced modern society to live in isolation in a Thoreauvian cabin in the Montana wilderness for 25 years.
Eccles’ Unapack campaign reached the 1996 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, distributing materials within convention halls and press zones. It attracted both national and international media attention, including the New York Times, Time Magazine, and CNN.
A key contributor to the project, multimedia artist Chris Korda, founder of The Church of Euthanasia, created the Unapack website. This enabled the campaign to gain global traction while paradoxically using the same digital technologies it sought to critique — a contradiction that further confounded the mainstream media narratives. During Kaczynski’s trial, the project evolved into The Exploded Manifesto, shifting its focus from the electoral context to the broader implications of Kaczynski’s ideas, trial, prosecution and subsequent life sentence in solitary confinement. Eccles and Kaczynski corresponded until his death in 2023.
The Unapack project is bookended between two of Eccles’s other significant works. The first is You’re Soaking In It! (1993–1995), a collaboration with Wendy Hamer under the guise of Buffalo Gals, created in response to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s installation of advertising monitors in Boston’s subway system. The duo produced 20 silkscreened graphic/text images, T-shirts, and pamphlets challenging the state's actions and filed a First Amendment class-action lawsuit against the MBTA.
The second is What is Media? (2000–2001), during which Eccles undertook a strict, year-long media deprivation experiment. She abstained from all forms of media consumption — including news, internet, television, film, radio, and post-1990 publications — except for involuntary exposure in public spaces. Throughout this period, she documented her experience through a public diary and research archive hosted by the mini-museum, Local Idea Council, curated by Andrew Guthrie.
Listen! The exhibition is soundtracked and illuminated by Eccles’ Meditation performance videos (2004), featuring the sounds of pigeons, a jackhammer, and ambient noise. The series concludes with Money Meditation (2004), in which Eccles withdraws a $100 bill, consumes it, excretes it, then washes, dries, and redeposits it—completing a visceral cycle of consumption and return—an act of anti-capital resistance and a physical act of love.
[1] Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future, 9.19.1995 (New York Times)
Bio: Lydia Eccles, born in 1954, lives and works between Boston, Massachusetts, and rural Vermont, USA
