THE AIR BELLOWS DRIVE THRU ART MUSEUM

air bellows drive thru art museum

ABDTAM

 

For a number of years I've been making photographs inside the tunnel under the Blue Ridge Parkway at Air Bellows Gap. The walls were plain concrete since the beginning of the Parkway until one day somebody wrote something on a wall with spray paint in the 1980s. Then another and another until the inside was covered with graffiti  by winter. The next season, more writings and images. Then, of course, a middle-class Flatlander objected, called the Parkway office and pled a prosecutorial case about it being offensive. Parkway maintenance painted the walls an ugly brown, covered the beautiful growing abstraction on the two walls, about 30'x10'. I loved it when the new markings began to cover the brown. A few years later, somebody complained to the Parkway office again and they painted it over again. It was covered up in a year. Then came the Reagan Revolution and transferring money from the Dept of Interior budget to the military. Hence, minimal maintenance since the 1980s, large sections of pavement needing repair. They seldom mow along the sides of the road anymore, which is ok by me. I like to see grass grow and go to seed.

 

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As a result of the budget cuts, the Parkway painted over the graffiti no more. It grew and became beautiful after some years. Then one of my neighbors caught a kid adding to it. He knew the kid's mother, called her, got the kid in trouble with a zero tolerance mom, who got with the Parkway office and they had the kid paint the interior of the tunnel gray. I was so irritated with my neighbor I never said anything about it, because I could not address the subject without getting red in the face and a bit aggressive in tone of voice. What the hell. A fresh canvas. Nobody has painted over it since. Maybe it has been ten or more years that the colors and lines grow on top of themselves, colors galore. Writing on top of writing such that new things appear on top of everything else, then new words and colors appear on top of that, on and on until colors and lines become an abstract canvas. It has no plan, no design, no unifying anything except the space, itself. The patterns are purest chance. Somebody goes in there with a spray can, chooses a spot, scrawls whatever comes to mind and leaves in a hurry to avoid getting caught.

 

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The place seems to me an important spot for the community of the county. Teenagers have no voice in adult society, are paid no attention to. They are nuisances, because adults don't want to be bothered by them, certainly don't want to listen to them. So kids evolve a culture among themselves that concerns offending adults. Pink hair, turquoise hair, tattoos, music adults can't tolerate, graffiti,  slang, sharp sticks in the eye of disapproving adults. I see the impulse to scrawl words and lines on the wall in the tunnel a small gesture of defiance, a rebel gesture, shooting the bird to adult society, the people that look down on them, talk down to them, pay no attention to them, dismiss them as irrelevant. Of course, this is not all the kids. It's largely the outsiders and the ones that feel left out. Only a few can be star jocks and cheerleaders, the only ones with any significance in and outside the school. It's like Miss America. One winner, forty-nine losers. The kids left out listen to hard metal music or punk and wear the most offensive tshirt images they can get away with. The style image is aggressive offensive. The graffiti is another expression of this attitude. Like John Lee Hooker sang in his song, Boogie Chillun, It's in him, it's got to come out. I feel like a localized spot for graffiti functions something like a pressure release valve.

 

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Almost two weeks ago I parked off the road outside the tunnel and went inside to get some photographs. Beautiful walls, but I was not satisfied with any of the pictures. I try to compose them by colors and find compositions of lines in relation to the colors, yet am unable to catch what I see, or what I feel. It finally came to me that what I love about the walls is the spontaneous random chance of every jotting, an abstraction created by pure chance. Cy Twombly is good at making a canvas that looks like chance. These two walls are composed by chance itself. No one artist's mind composed it. It simply happened. Finally, it came to me to make photographs in the tunnel by chance. I drove through it yesterday. Opened the camera ready to go, held it pointing out the driver's side window without looking at the image. Driving slowly through the tunnel, I clicked the camera over and over until I came to the end. Got five images. The images are here, from top to bottom in the order they happened. These are the most satisfying images I've recorded in there. Before, I was looking at it with mind. Take mind out of it and I enter the spirit of the thing itself. I do feel like these five images capture the spirit of the place like no other photographs I've made in there. In a way, I feel like I've found the spirit of the place. It has a spirit I feel driving through it, for me a happy spirit. I don't look at it with judgment and desire to punish. I'm happy it is located so close to my home.

 

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VADA'S NEW FART PUTTY

air bellows drive-thru art museum

 

 

On the road home from seeing the race, I'd made a mental note passing through the Air Bellows Drive-Thru Art Museum to stop and get some pictures on the way back. The light was good. I parked out of the way. It is a natural law that if I were to stop inside the tunnel and get out to take a picture, the first thing to happen would be a car to come along. As it was, as soon as I stepped inside the tunnel to view the two walls, here came a red corvette, a blond babe driving it and a man my age sitting in the passenger seat, out on a Sunday ride with his trophy thangs. I stepped outside the tunnel to wait for them to pass through. He looked at me with disapproval. I looked at him unimpressed. I walked around in the space between the two walls like a Joan Mitchell was on one wall and a Cy Twombly on the other. I was feeling what I feel in museums standing in front of something by Anselm Kiefer or Adolph Gottlieb, the presence of Art. Real art has the presence of a living being. Inside the Air Bellows Drive-Thru Art Museum, I feel the presence of walls as though alive. It helps to be in love with the random and chance. I see the art of chance, pure chance. Chance in colors, chance in words, chance in images. A collage of a lot of different people with no design in mind, only making a mark, adding a color, a name, a word, a phrase, a sentence, whatever happens.

 

 

air bellows drive-thru art museum

air bellows drive-thru art museum

 

I was in a groove, it's the same as the Museum of Modern Art for me, making photographs in actual awe of what I was seeing. My pictures are composed, sort of, level, featuring something interesting, not random. Next time in there, I'll focus on making random photographs. The ideal would be to have Vada in the museum with camera and ask her to take all the pictures she wants. I'd like to take a panorama camera in there. I was flowing in my groove when a mini-SUV appeared, new middle-class model, a woman my age with a coffee house disapproving eye, a flatlander. She stopped at the entrance to wait for me to get out of there so she could drive through. The place is wide enough for a truck with big side mirrors to pass through easily. I backed up to the wall, the one above with Sydney on it, facing the wall above it with the pink heart, holding camera. I was not going to leave so she could drive through. It's a long tunnel and I did not feel like walking the distance out of there and back. She kept on waiting and I kept on standing. I thought, if you can't drive through here, you can wait for me til I'm done. She looked at me in disgust and crept by. On the back of the car a Ben Carson sticker. I thought: you're dumber'n you look. It hit me by total surprise. If I'd had to guess what republican clown sticker would be on the back of her car, I'd have never guessed Carson with a dozen chances. Cracked me up.

 

vada poses

vada dances

 

I arrive at the house. Vada is playing on the kitchen floor. She jumped and ran to me holding a clear plastic cylinder of purple goo. She held it up for me to see. "I got some new fart putty!!!" She was excited as only a child can be. I said, "Fart putty?" She said, "Yeah!" She pushed her fingers into it and it made a fart sound. She giggled like a child. She pulled the purple gom out of the container and it made a long string stretching to the floor. She made a bracelet of it and it slowly slunk to the floor oozing to a small purple circle. She called it cow poop. She wanted me to make donkey poop with it. I wadded some into a ball about donkey poop size. She wanted to hold it. I put it in her hands and its inclination toward the floor began, flattening in her hands, stringing to the floor. She watched the whole process in awe of this stuff that acts like it's alive. She had it in small circles on the floor around her, strings of it like skinny snakes on the tiles, enchanted with this purple ooze. She had a plastic doll six inches or so high, a dress-up doll in underwear, Elsa's friend Anna. Vada shaped the fart putty into a dress on the doll. Immediately, it began the ooze process, and while it oozed, the dress became more and more interesting. She packed it onto the doll, covering the doll from neck down. The oozing created the dress by clinging to the doll while oozing. It was like a dress in a Munch painting, the color too. I didn't think to make a video, it was so spontaneous a moment, Vada so fascinated, so focused, dressing her little plastic dolls in purple fart putty. I did not want to spoil the moment with a camera.

 

vada dances

 

 

the new mancave theater curtain

Settled into the mancave to watch the race at Watkins Glen. Good race. They ran hard. I was pulling for Joey Logano this time. I always pull for Joey Logano. He's a good driver and drives a beautiful car. Kyle Busch has had his share of attention lately. Another driver I like is Keselowski, but his car couldn't keep up today. I like the way Logano smokes the tires after a win. Once, I saw him burn the tires off the rims. Justin watched the race with disinterest today, because Kyle Busch has been winning every race and Jr Earnhardt couldn't do better than fourth and fifth. He doesn't like Logano, doesn't like either Busch, the drivers I like. He doesn't know I'm partial to these drivers, I never speak it. I'm happy for every one of them when they get a win. It seems to me a commendable achievement to outrun all the other cars handled by good drivers going pedal to the metal, fast as the road allows, snapping at your heels. It is a long time from beginning to end. Vada, the natural-born entertainer, danced for me, posed for me, kept my attention from going into stasis gaping at cars and commercials on tv. She likes to pose for picture taking. She likes me taking pictures of her while she plays. A time will come that she'll say, That's enough, and she's done. Persist and she'll say, Stop it! She danced for the video camera, saying at the beginning the redneck's famous last words, Watch this! She danced and danced in her Elsa dress until she'd performed enough. She wanted the camera, took it out of my hands and made video of me. I told her to get her daddy who was stretched out on the couch in semi slumber. She made an abstract portrait of daddy, something director Lars von Trier might like, mostly way out of focus, sometimes sharp focus. Vada was the star of the day.

 

vada dances

vada dances

 

vada and daddy

 

 

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