You can make a mark across the night with the tip of an embered stick, and you can actually see it fixed in its finity. You can be absolutely certain of its treacherous impermanence. Hank knew . . . Ken Kesey, Sometimes A Great Notion, 1964, p.100.
by Jerome du Bois
Presenting another public art idea. I'm giving it away because it makes sense only in Phoenix, a city with no music in its head, so I doubt the piece could be realized anyway. But it would have been fun, poignant, and an eye-opening peek into a past the average-aged American (35), has never known.
I have noticed that many local artists depict, in their art, a fascination and enchantment with some of the trappings of the Sixties, especially pop and psychedelica. And even though most of them are too young to remember those years, maybe they can appreciate this notion.
Let me sidle up to it with a little history. Older readers may guess where I'm going before I get there.
On a particular day in July of 1964, novelist Ken Kesey, Neal "I Tripped For Your Sins" Cassady, Ken Babbs, and the Merry Pranksters came rolling down to Phoenix in their multicolored school bus, FURTHUR. (Or FURTHER; or both, alternately.) It was an election year, recall --Johnson vs. Goldwater-- and the Pranksters, getting into the spirit of the season, emblazoned in yellow Day-Glo paint the slogan A VOTE FOR BARRY IS A VOTE FOR FUN on both sides of the bus.
And then, in a famous pop history vignette, Cassady drove the bus --backward-- down Central Ave a few miles.
This was in 1964. There was no such thing as a hippie. All of these people had short hair. And they dressed in red, white, and blue. Nobody knew what to make of them. And most of the time, most of them, including Cassady --especially Cassady-- were tripping to the eyeballs on laboratory-strength LSD-25.
Fast-forward (there was no such thing as fast forward in 1964, except on reel-to-reel audio tape) to ca. 2005. Here is my idea, in steps:
1. Lease a modern city bus, one pretreated for supergraphic "skin."
2. Create a supergraphic of the four sides of the bus on a 1:1 scale, so that if it was wrapped over the bus an observer could hardly tell the difference.
3. Now rotate the supergraphic 180 degrees and wrap the bus, creating the beginning of an illusion of a backward bus.
That's the main idea --for the outside. We have ideas for the inside, too. But first, refinements for the outside include false headlights, windshield wipers, turn signals at the real rear / fake front of the bus. The ID / Destination LED sign will read, of course, FURTHUR, as will the real front / fake rear of the bus.
The inside will be completely revamped into a Sixties environment with history displays --everything bolted down to walls and floors, as in a boat cabin. More about that in a minute.
The very back of the bus will be converted into a duplicate of the driver's cabin or cage, with the seat, the door-opener, fare machine, all the instruments and steering wheel. And --the coup de grace-- a life-size, realistic mannequin of Neal Cassady, barechested in jeans, left arm extended on the wheel, torso turned in the seat, and leaning forward on the backward bus like a dog on a leash, his right forearm and fist gripping the driver's seat's back. You could even rig his left arm to waver back and forth.
For the rest of the interior, I would want raw history and nothing on the bus that was made after 1964 (except the hidden tech stuff that would run amped-up film archives through vintage equipment).
I would invite the keepers of Ken Kesey's legacy --the family in Oregon, Zane Kesey, Simon Babbs (check out IntrepidTrips.com) --I wonder if Paul Perry is still in town?-- to create this environment. They have reasonably-priced DVDs of the trip all ready to go on their website, but if I was in charge of the project I would hire them as consultants and designers for the whole interior program.
So: Create the bus for Art Detour, hire some actor-lecturers, or other experts on those times, and run the bus around scheduled stops during the weekend. For half an hour at each stop people (over 18; serious security outside) can wander through the bus, listen to music, watch unbelievably wierd authentic film footage from 1964, listen to the voices from forty years ago, and maybe even watch a couple of actors recreate a scene from Kesey's unproduced screenplay The Further Inquiry. This book is uneven, but it contains some gems. Its main fantasy is a courtroom trial where the spirit of Neal Cassady is called to answer for his "crimes." Here's a snippet from an early witness, Roy Sebern:
CHEST [the prosecutor]: Sebern? A Mister Sebern in the court?
BAILIFF: Mr. Sebern . . . ?
ROY: Here. Roy Sebern here . . .
CHEST: Mr. Roy ah . . . what would you say is your occupation at present?
ROY: I would have to say it is . . . artist.
CHEST: A title not taken lightly by you, I can see.
ROY: I am serious about it if that is what you mean.
CHEST: Precisely what I mean. Now, Roy, we would like to inquire about a certain journey by bus that took place across the United States of America in the summer of (riffling through his papers) 1964?
ROY: Sixty-four, yes. Way back there.
CHEST: The bus, way back there, must have looked somewhat different than this. (Chest jerks his chin toward the decrepit bus parked behind them.)
ROY: Its earliest, its first look was plain school bus yellow.
A reel rolls on [a complicated machine], producing a shot of a yellow bus on a green, dewy morn. There is an outdoor sound of kids laughing, birds singing, men hammering and calling to each other in general activity, overlaid throughout with strains of Coltrane's "Greensleeves."
ROY (voice-over): When I first heard Kesey say we were going to paint it the idea didn't appeal to me at all. Because I thought it looked really fin the way it was . . . I didn't see any reason to obliterate it.
CHEST (voice-over): Did you try to dicourage this obliteration?
ROY (voice-over; beginning to speak faster, getting irritated without begin certain why): I may have mentioned just in passing . . . but once it was obvious it was going to happen, I just jumped in with everybody else. I'd been paying attention to abstract expressionism, in other words, "having at" whatever you were painting and just kind of flinging the paint at the canvas. And this bus was a canvas that you could keep "having at" all the way to New York. The longest painting in painting history--
(voice-overs for the rest)
CHEST: New York?
ROY: Where the bus was headed. To the World's Fair.
CHEST: That was its goal?
ROY: Partially. Something more than that, though, something--
CHEST: Further?
Roy doesn't answer. He is watching himself on [the screen] painting on the FURTHER sign.
ROY: I had this very strong feeling that having a name like Further would contribute impetus to keeping it going, --when it might get stuck, or broken down-- that the word would have power --like Shazam . . .
CHEST: And did your "magic word" in fact serve as such on the trip, Roy?
ROY: I really can't say. I wasn't on the bus.
CHEST: Not on the bus!? After you had been with it from its virgin yellow to its burgeoning beauty? After you had named it-- ?
ROY: I had been to New York recently. I didn't feel like making another trip.
CHEST: Even on the longest painting in history?
End of excerpt. Isn't that wonderful? And the backward bus seems fitting for Phoenix art, at least to us --forward into the past.
Anyway, it would have been fun, but we're off the bus --right after Part Five of the Bentley fiasco, probably tonight. Then, who knows what we'll blog about?
Posted by Jerome at January 24, 2005 01:42 PM | TrackBack