I've recently been invited to join an old dudes book club, where a few forty-something guys read books about punk rock and get together in a bar every couple of months to talk about what they've read. It's quite possibly the least punk thing I've ever done. As an ardent anti-nostalgite, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the whole thing, but I've started to realize that now is the time that our own personal histories start to get written, and if we want them to be written well, or at least accurately, then we need to participate in the entire process - not just in the consumption of these histories, but in their critique and even their production.
To this end, I have been working on the very early stages of a personal project that I'm tentatively referring to as "Natural History". The idea goes against most of what I've explored artistically and intellectually to date. The project approaches my own personal history (my actual lived experiences combined with fantasies, false memories, imaginings and influences from music, art, film, and popular culture) as fodder for a multi-faceted, museum-style exhibition. Think less Museum of Modern Art and more Natural History Museum. Where the world has been reduced to the size of a man. The man as museum - complete with dioramas, diagrams, puppets, illustrations, photographs, and recordings. The dioramas have become especially fascinating to me as they seem to carry with them the institutional voice of authority (and a certain quaint antiquity) while still being easily subverted. The fractal nature of our experience becomes immediately apparent as models are developed at full scale in a digital environment and then scaled down to be 3d printed, laser cut, or sculpted from materials generally acquired from hobby shops. The viewer's access to information can be easily controlled through carefully constructed apertures that allow only limited views of the action. There can be, both literally and figuratively, elements included in the works to which the casual observer may never have any access. This is an idea that I have often struggled against in contemporary art. The idea of the artist's intent (which can only be discerned through examinations conducted outside of the work) giving the work its meaning and, ultimately, its value, is something I've always taken issue with. On one level, the concept of artistic intent is something that has been used as a key to the capitalist lock in contemporary art. Only a select few are given the tools needed to assess the value of a work of art. Those without the necessary background are left in the dark. It's no accident that Wall Street speaks a language that Main Street doesn't understand. It's not that the people on Main Street are incapable of learning the language, the obfuscation of certain financial instruments is as intentional as the deliberately opaque language and background information surrounding much of contemporary art. I like to think that my approach differs both in practice and intent. The idea of literally burying certain information deep within the work becomes an exercise in what I have come to call "speculative geography" - a way to inhabit the characters of a story through real and imagined connections to place. The exercise can be viewed similarly to the actor who writes a detailed back story for their character. A back story that never ends up on screen, but serves to inform the actor's performance. In a sense, though, what I'm interested in is displaying only that back story without its accompanying narrative.
I have found myself looking for inflection points in both my own real history and in the history of important events that I've used to build my own personal cosmology. These inflection points always seem to be tied intimately to an actual place in time. Sometimes this place is purely imagined or constructed from second-hand descriptions, but I can nevertheless feel the size of each room, the quality of the light and the sound. It's often only through hindsight that one can identify the point where two disparate ideas, influences, or people rubbed up against each other and the world was forever changed - a time when the membranes became so thin that ideas and influences could move across the normal barriers that we encounter every day.
As our first book club assignment, we are reading Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements by Bob Mehr. I'm not even close to finishing it, but I've been struck by a particular scene - the moment where all of the principal players come into contact with each other (without most of them even knowing it). The "meet-cute" as it were. Paul Westerberg is walking home from work along his normal route (in the snow, in my imagination) and he hears the distinctive sound of Bob Stinson's guitar, Bob's eleven-year-old brother Tommy on bass, and Chris Mars on drums, as their band, tentatively named Dogbreath, blazes through an instrumental cover of the Yes song "Roundabout". Westerberg kneels at the basement window of the house at 3628 Bryant Road in Minneapolis and tries to glimpse the source of the racket. I imagine what he hears is mostly Tommy's bass through the thick basement walls. Perhaps he sees the top of the kid's head, his blonde bowl cut bouncing to the song's distinctively quick, funky, prog rock bass line. The Stinson brothers play their own version even faster than the virtuosic tempo of the original. I imagine that it's wintertime because I love the way sounds carry and die on the snowy ground. When the sound of the whole world is softened and muffled under a blanket of snow, the noise of a band like Dogbreath blasting out of a cold Minneapolis basement, on a dark and quiet street, feels all the more strange and cacophonous.
One of the great things about modern speculative geography is the information that is readily available at one's fingertips. Google Earth took me right to the house at 3628 Bryant Road and I tried to glimpse its character through a springtime thicket of trees. I had better luck with Street View where the trees were denuded of their foliage. I took a screen shot of the facade, loaded it into my 3d modeler, and began to recreate the house in my imagined world. I carefully scaled all of the dimensions based on the assumption that the front door was a standard 6'8", as most front doors are. I placed the four doric columns on the front porch, overly ornate for a house so plain. I imagined the interior layout and tried to pull up the property on the Hennepin County property appraiser's site without any luck. I would have to come up with the floor plan on my own. I thought of the classic TV sitcom interior seen so many times, all the way from Archie Bunker to Al Bundy. The front door to camera right, the staircase on the back wall, kitchen to the left. I downloaded a four piece drum kit and a couple of human figures and began to place them around the scene. I will continue to fill out the scene, adding details, decorating the rooms, sculpting the characters faces to fit their likenesses. And I will put myself in the scene over and over feeling the impact of the surroundings and the details slowly recalled. Cigarettes smoked in the cold. The crunch of snow under foot. Westerberg's tracks through the deep lot. The dark house with a faint glow from the low windows. The vibration of absolutely everything at once.
The house at 3628 Bryant Road where the Stinson brothers lived with their mother.
A rendered view of my 3d model of the Stinson house. More details remain to be added, but this provides a preliminary view of the scene to be depicted in the final diorama.