Josephine Meckseper’s “Manhattan Oil Project" launched today on a vacant lot one block from Times Square. The piece consists of two classic oil pumps, doing their usual up-and-down amid the passing tourists and New Yorkers. (Click on the image to watch a video of the pumps in action.) I love Meckseper’s mash-up of Texas and New York. It’s a more compelling collision, I think, than the Surrealists’ famous “chance encounter of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table.” (Or do collisions have to be random and uninformative, to work as Surrealism?) Read much more on Meckseper’s project in my feature on yesterday’s Daily Beast.

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