Many of you have opened this praxis expecting to be wowed by a fantastic, awe-inspiring completion. If it took ol' Unit more than three months to do this task, it's gotta be spectacular, you are not doubt saying to yourselves, lips moist with anticipatory saliva.

I must beg your pardon in advance. This is not, you see, a task which required three months of work. Rather it is a task that took an hour or so. Fifteen minutes back in December, and the remaining forty five minutes last week. In between, it sat neglected. The physical part in a drawer at work. The text among the long list of tasks I have squirreled away from past eras. The meaning buried deep within me. The head of a tick, slowly festering in the dog's ear that is the Burn Unit trajectory of desire.

I wanted to complete this task in a way that embraces the University of Aesthematics trajectory. Today, the University is my Alma Matter. All together now, maestoso, tutti: though we may travel far and wide in pursuit of other desires, we still recall her fondly. At the time this task was conceived, she was my besieged and beloved home.

What is a UA completion of Super Glued, you ask? For a start, it doesn't mean super gluing a replica of David to the pavement. That would be a naive, surface interpretation of the good old University. The group's trajectory of desire is not simply art-stuff=UA, as some have argued. A work from the canon glued to the pavement meant to trick passers by into picking it up has nothing to do with technique, appearance, or product. It is a prank.

I wanted to find an object which becomes art through the act of super glue itself. Not art object qua prank, but glued object qua art. The problem is that any object brings with it associations sure to poison the mind of the audience. If we regard super glue as a technique for producing meaning, we require that when confronting a super glued object it is the super glue, and not the object, which directs the audience's experience.

Talking zebras who hate graffiti and fish bowls full of shells are exciting, but it is the very fact that they are exciting that makes them poor examples of super glue as an art form. Don't misunderstand! I have only love and respect for both those completions. They're both wonderful, judged by any metric except suitability for obsessive UA-related musings.

The struggle, then, is to present the audience with something instantly and immediately recognizable as a super glued object rather than an object which is super glued. Only one item fits the bill: super glue itself. It is both product and technique. The moment it is perceived as a work of art, it instantly and completely describes its own construction to the audience. In some sense, it is only in that moment of perception that it becomes art. Until a passer-by attempts to lift the bottle and recognizes that it has been glued down, the work is indistinguishable from ordinary litter. Before it has been glued to the pavement, a bottle of super glue is a tool rather than a product, much less a work of art. When I purchased three bottles of super glue, the receipt did not say "art."

In fact, the receipt also did not say "super glue," even though the bottles do. The receipt said "Kwik Fix," a brand name which you can find in very small letters along the top of the cardboard package, yet which appears nowhere else on the product. That's a large part of why I decided to do this task in the first place.

In the hardware aisle of a drugstore downtown, my eye fell upon these bottles labeled only, "super glue", in big friendly letters. It isn't often that you find a product with no recognizable branding or trade name. I was intrigued to see these little guys standing proudly among all the Crazy Glues, Gorilla Glues and Perma Bonds, unaffected block letters alone in a sea of cartoon icons, little photos of broken teacups ,and smiling children.

At some point, the design team charged with bringing forth yet another repackaged cyanoacrylate glue made the decision not to compete with the branded products. Rather than trying to convince the customer that Kwik Fix is somehow better than last years model, they instead chose to embrace the generic. With a wink, they point out we're indistinguishable from all the other products here, but at least we admit it!

In doing so, they also provided the perfect object for this particular task completion, since no translation is necessary. One can't get much more immediate or minimal than super glued super glue labeled super glue.

I purchased three bottles, allowed them to ripen in a drawer for four months, and then set out in search of a suitable location. After an embarrassing amount of time spent rejecting candidates for being so secluded no one would find them, or so strewn with garbage that no one would notice them, or so tidy that someone would mind them, I found the perfect place.

I arranged the three bottles about fifty feet apart and out of sight from each other along the edge of a pedestrian walk beside the water. The middle one is labeled, and thus the path forces the audience to encounter one of the unlabeled ones first.