Graham Parker
Opening 8 December 2009

‘Kid Weil’ consists of a red neon sign hanging in space above a shallow, continually replenished puddle of water.

The sign is part of a larger series, each of which displays a word or phrase appropriated from the subject header of a spam email that arrived in Parker’s inbox. In this case, the sign displays a single word, ‘cacklebladder,’ which refers to a prop used by 19th century grifters to fake their own death. It was a pig’s bladder filled with chicken blood; if a con job went wrong, the grifter would stage a fight with his partner and bite down on the bladder, thereby appearing to bleed profusely from the mouth.

The appearance of the term as a spam email subject heading reflects the ongoing pas de deux staged by spammers and filtering software. As spam filters become increasingly sophisticated, spammers develop new tactics to evade detection, such as including obscure words in subject headings. The sign represents a frozen, captured moment from this continuously evolving system.

In 2009, Graham Parker published Fair Use: Notes from Spam with Book Works, exploring the art of deception in networks from 19th century railroads to 21st century Nigerian spam. In keeping with this focus, ‘Kid Weil’ is named after Yellow Kid Weil, one of the most famous and intriguing American swindlers of all time. Weil, in turn, was nicknamed after from an early newspaper cartoon character, the Yellow Kid.