Artists Who Dissect 'Starsky & Hutch'

Before ending up on-screen, the cameras' images of single words and scenes are run through a homemade computer program that assembles them into a constantly changing series of sentences: For "Animals can smell flowers" the computer cuts from a shot of those sheep to "can" (c-a-n, in front of a little girl about to climb a fence) to "smell" (the word appears in front of a scene of bees sniffing pollen) to "flowers" (the word, propped in front of tiny plastic blooms) before moving on to its next sequence of words. The phrases that come out talk about what counts as "special" to a kid -- maybe about the "Jennifer" side of life.

In the "Scary Things" installation, which works on pretty much the same principles as "Special Things" -- though it's shown in a basement room with spooky lighting -- the sentences go in a darker, "Kevin" direction: "Dogs are fighting children," "You hear dirty animals crying."

The show is typical McCoy. It's built around the cultural theories they were both schooled in in France -- structuralism and its descendant, deconstruction -- which emphasize the constructedness of all experience. The theories insist, that is, that culture, including silly children's books, conditions everything we think we know about our world, such as what counts as "special" and "scary," and maybe also how girls and boys will "naturally" think. (The installations, say the McCoys, were partly inspired by watching Ginger, their 2-year-old daughter.)

But instead of mouthing off about such things, the McCoys' art tries to flesh them out and test them: If our mental and cultural world is supposed to be constructed, then they'll craft building blocks of sense and a machine that lets us watch them being put together into an edifice of meaning.

The result is hardly slick. Their art can look as though it were built in a hobbyist's garage, and that may work as a metaphor for how the world, as we experience it, is a similarly cobbled-together, intractable mess -- and for how analysis doesn't get that far in cleaning it up. "I think that's part of the way the work engages with people -- because it's a little bit disarming and a little bit goofy," says Jennifer.

"Any of these modes of description are constantly getting outstripped by the basic facts of reality," says Kevin. "There's so much structuralist work we love, and so much post-structuralist work we love -- and those traditions drive us insane at the same time."

Classic structuralist theory suggested that all our notions of the world are built around simple oppositions -- raw/cooked, good/bad, special/scary, boy/girl. The McCoys' art seems to descend from such ideas, even if it's only to show that things are less clear-cut than any binaries.

Not that you'd know it from studying the couple's almost perfectly opposed biographies.

Kevin grew up in Seattle, in the early days of the scene that came to be known as grunge. His teen years combined programming Amiga computers with playing experimental and punk music.

For a while, however, he left that artsy mix behind for a BA in philosophy, with a preference for the thorny, high-flown, continental kind.

Jennifer, on the other hand, grew up in sedate Dallas. As a high-achieving teen, she was on the "Whiz Quiz" on PBS, answering questions about abstract expressionism, she said, while her high school's "wicked guy-geeks" handled the sciences.

At Cornell, she started out in interior design, then switched to theater arts and film studies, where a teacher turned her on to radically experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brackage. At the same time her studies turned her into a "hard-core" fan of narrative directors such as Ingmar Bergman and the auteurs of France.