America's Favorite Pastime

Baseball is called America's favorite pastime. A pastime is something you do regularly, for pleasure. By that definition the United States has a second one: it has been at war somewhere for the overwhelming majority of its history, and for nearly every year of the last quarter century.

America's Favorite Pastime holds those two habits against each other. Working in sculpture, assemblage, mixed media, video, and photography, Damon DeWitt uses the objects of the game — the ball, the bat, the pin — to address the continuous combat deployment of America's Armed Forces and the cost carried by the people who serve.

The overlap is not invented. The military has borrowed the sport's vocabulary and its motion for eighty years, from the WWII BEANO T-13 grenade engineered to the dimensions of a baseball to the M67 that soldiers still call the baseball grenade. This series takes the borrowing seriously and asks what it costs.