9.   Ur-God Telephone Kite (1971)
Mixed media

Pick up the receiver and listen. This is a replication of the kite line and Campbell soup tin can used in the original God Telephone Kite, the first conceptual art piece that Grieve remembers creating.  Grieve’s conceptual question was, “how do you communicate with God?” To answer this, the piece is designed to fly a kite up to God (or at least close), and then to listen to them by transmitting the vibrations from the sky to the receiver of a “tin can telephone.” To reenact, fly a kite in a medium wind (7 to 15mph) as high into the sky as possible — it is best if you can barely see it in the heavens.  Any kite will work. Grieve used a pale-orange traditional two-stick diamond kite created by connecting a vertical spar running from nose to tail to the horizontal cross spar going side to side. Grieve designed the diamond kite design with a bowed cross spar, which eliminated the need for a tail. He created the kite’s bow (dihedral) by tensioning the spar with string, causing it to “flex. To hear God, next tie a string to the kite line and connect to a tin can receiver. When the kite flies in the sky the line sends vibrations to the receiver that are transferred at the other end into sound. Grieve’s hypothesis was that this contraption is an example of a divine