A Golem That Plays Piano
Joe Holliday’s stated goal is “to destroy the universe.” He says it casually, standing beside a sculpture called Basil Bisulfate: a tangle of tree roots, animal bones, gorilla fur, and scavenged electrical parts, wired into what he calls a transdimensional golem that reportedly plays piano. In “The Goat and the Hand of the Lord,” a goat’s anatomy is pressed flat against Cold War–era bomb diagrams and steam-engine schematics, soft tissue laid over hard military geometry. There’s no explanation yet, just objects strange enough to make you want to know why.
Why Build This Instead of a Landscape?
The reason, by his own account, traces to two family stories he keeps returning to. The first is where his last name supposedly came from: his father, as he tells it, robbed a bank and used the alias “Holliday” while fleeing police, and it stuck. The second is a specific afternoon at Ayers Rock (Uluru) in central Australia, where he scattered his father’s ashes. That, he says, is where the art actually started.
Where Time Stops Running in a Straight Line
At Ayers Rock, Holliday arrived at a personal conclusion: that past, present, future, and even distant points in space aren’t laid out one after another but cross over. His sculptures and collages are his attempt to make that overlap physical, layering found objects, clinical diagrams, and military imagery with deliberate randomization, “without being a hippy about it,” as he’s put it. Suddenly the golem and the goat collage aren’t just odd objects, they’re an argument built from materials instead of sentences.
The Same Idea, Over and Over
Once you know the logic, it shows up across his catalog. “Save Actaeon” pulls from army first aid manuals, taxidermy guides, and an improvised bomb manual to drop a figure from Greek mythology into modern warfare. “Geese V. Pygmies” layers a diagram from Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) alongside animal behavior books and gun manuals, the same collision of ancient myth and twentieth-century hardware. “What Can Animals Learn?” mixes animal behavior and anatomy books with taxidermy guides and army booby-trap manuals into what Holliday calls an unsafe-looking picture of domestic life. Even “The Machinery of Behavior,” built from alchemical prints, gun manuals, and prairie dog diagrams, follows the same rule: take materials that have nothing to do with each other on paper and force them into a single, uneasy image. The ingredients repeat on purpose, military manuals, taxidermy guides, alchemical prints, stitched together until none looks like it belongs to its original book.
A Legend, Not a Record
Worth noting: no police report, court filing, or outside record has ever confirmed that Holliday’s father robbed a bank. The story exists only as family lore, repeated by Holliday himself. That doesn’t make it false, but it isn’t documented fact either, and in a way, the uncertainty fits an artist who builds meaning out of unverifiable fragments on purpose.
A Résumé Behind the Mythology
Strip away the golems and the family legend, and there’s a working artist underneath. At the time he described all this, Holliday was working with the Rogue Artists Ensemble, a Los Angeles theater company known for blending puppetry, mask work, and modern technology, and preparing to attend the California Institute of the Arts that fall. He takes on paid commissions like any artist trying to make a living, and has been pushing his solvent-collage technique, the layering method behind “Save Actaeon,” into new territory: fabric and silk-screen printing. The man who talks about destroying the universe still has a career to manage, deadlines, materials on hand, and a style he keeps refining piece by piece.