In lazy artspeak, one could say that Gerd Verhoeven’s 2001 video The Blob “deals with” giant pumpkins—except that’s just what it doesn’t do. The piece combines footage of the 2000 World Pumpkin Confederation Contest (champion specimens being forklifted around, weighed, and appraised) with a disjointed, indeed spacedout, voice-over that almost comically misses the visual data by miles. “In the field of the original thought matter . . . the flesh of your mind stretched by an idea . . .” rambles the sound track; meanwhile, in their sheer, lumpen thingness, the vast, bloated, slumping pumpkins