When We Are Dancing (I Get Ideas)
When We Are Dancing (I Get Ideas) was a large exhibition at the Tang Teaching Museum, curated by Rachel Seligman.
The show, and accompanying catalog, gathered a set of collections I’ve made beyond the scope of my photographic practice, reaching into sculpture, video and installation, all centered around the idea that we accumulate images, objects and ideas when we search for something specific.
Counting In
Counting In is a video made by filming dozens of amateur bands in their practice spaces, and then cobbling together only the “1-2-3-4” counting in calls to form a new song.
Made while I was finding myself newly engaged with songwriting as an art form, I thought it might be a good idea to listen to bands working on music. I found them mostly by asking around in any city or town I was visiting, and would show up just saying I was making an art project about local bands. I admit I entered the project nervous about the amount of time I’d be spending with potentially terrible musicians, but I was immediately and continuously surprised by the amount of passion and commitment I discovered in the basements, garages, former industrial structures of America, which, it turns out, has got talent. I believe these little worlds, walled off with egg cartons and foam, are the true crucibles of the American Dream.
The video is part of a suite of projects about non-professional artists. I myself have had only the tiniest shred of interest in the “professional” art world, and treat it like a supply plane that lands weekly, or monthly on my island. I grew up in a household with professional musicians all around, but who were operating outside the black hole of fame and fortune. Counting In is a song that never happens, three minutes and thirty seconds of total potential, where no dream can be crushed, no aspiration can be unrealized.
The video is accompanied by posters I made for each band. These posters originally had text, but I proved to be a terrible graphic designer. I kept the background color I chosen for each still—taken from one pixel in the image—and left the text out, resulting in a candy colored array of images carrying these dusty but sacred spaces to a new and better place.
Curtain Calls
Curtain Calls is a new video in a suite of projects about non-professional artists.
Filmed at amateur theater productions all around the United States, this single-channel video presents only the curtain calls, editing past the stress of putting on a play, for the ecstasy of relief once it’s been completed. Curtain calls allow theatrical artists to release the tension of a sustained performance, and they provide a natural editing situation, as the lights go down, come up for the bows, then go down again. Each shot is filmed from the back of the house, center, so a series of pleasurable releases becomes one long sustained attempt to maintain applause, almost like a dream that won’t end, or a play whose cast keeps shifting before our eyes.
It’s OK to Hate Yourself
Ebay Lullabye
It's OK To Hate Yourself
Lay Down and Live
Speed of Light
Zombie Mommies
Gloria Alsenor
Just in Time
Profit Prophet
Vulture Sex
It’s OK to Hate Yourself is a large-scale multimedia project involving a professionally recorded vinyl LP of songs I’ve written, and a suite of music videos that accompany each song.
For years I’ve been asked how my photography and my poetry are related, and this project is an attempt to reconcile the two practices. The songs are lyrically challenging and the videos emerge from HD footage I continue to shoot on trips all around the world.
I grew up in a house full of musicians. And for years, I have had found music a more direct conduit to my inner life than any other medium. Writing songs and playing with a band, I’ve discovered a way to make work that is substantially personal. When I look back on twenty-five years of photographing and thirty of writing poetry, I realize that although the work is intent, sincere, and complex, neither my writing nor my photography talked much about me. It was in the third person. Music has brought me closer to the first person, and although this project is far from confessional, I believe it has a much more mature emotional vision.
As we move into a digital age, when everyone (especially professors of photography) is expected to move fluidly through all types of media, “It’s OK to Hate Yourself” is an attempt to produce a body of work that sings for its multimedia supper. Songs, written from personal experience, are married to images gathered from a visual world in constant flux, to produce something like an opera; a total work that pushes the viewer into unexpected experience, and is certainly pushing this artist into more ambitious territory.
The songs are harmonically complex and elaborately arranged pop melodies influenced by songwriters like Vic Chesnutt and Alex Chilton, but also by Ravel and Hoagy Carmichael. The lyrics are tragicomic, and attempt to comingle the wordplay and disgust of my poetry with deeper emotional resonance. Someone recently asked me what kind of music I was writing, and I answered “Schmotown,” then “Chuck John Ashbery.” After three decades of writing, I feel I’ve finally found my medium.
The songs, written by me, were arranged and produced by my brother, Benjamin Lazar Davis, and were recorded at Old Soul Studios in Catskill, NY.
Library of Ideas
The Library of Ideas is a collection of books with the word “Ideas” in each title.
Found in junk shops and thrift stores and on the side of the road, these are mostly unused ideas; ideas that didn’t persist or remain relevant. The furniture for its installation was designed by F/N Furniture.
Light Comedy Grave Rubbings
Light Comedy Grave Rubbings are crayon rubbings made in cemeteries all over the United States, of people with funny names.
I apologize to the ancestors of A. Purdy Outhouse and Eleanor Hammers Boner et al.
South Sea Selfies
South Sea Selfies was made on a long, arduous, magnificent trip to Indonesia.
After a period of very very productive work in Los Angeles (resulting in my book I’m Looking Through You), my family took a vacation. It was hot and hard traveling with a four-year-old and I wasn’t sure I had anything to say about the very foreign culture I was a tourist in. I turned to the age-old subject of people who have nothing else to say: themselves. The pictures were installed on an iPod touch on a selfie stick extending from the gallery wall.
Tunisian Radios
Tunisian Radios–on a trip to Tunisia in 2008, I was moved by the presence of radios everywhere.
In my culture, music was migrating from a public concern to a private one, as people were listening to their own curated mixes on their iPods and phones. It was thrilling to be in a place where all kinds of sounds were being broadcast from sources in stores and souks and domestic windows. I made a collection of these radios and strung them together in a short video.
UN-EZ Listening
UN-EZ Listening is a large collection of Easy Listening albums.
Visitors can play record on three turntables which are designed to automatically repeat. So, three different records, designed to be played innocuously in the background, play at the same time, making us uneasy. Music made to be ignored becomes unignorable.
GOBSTOPPERS EVERYWHERE
A DIALOGUE WITH TIM DAVIS and RACHEL SELIGMAN
Tim Davis is going to make you laugh. But don’t be fooled: laughter is just the beginning.
His artwork explores the intersection of humor and longing where the abject aligns with the beautiful in unexpected ways. The projects that makeup When We Are Dancing (I Get Ideas) evoke hope and optimism in the face of terrible odds, desire and longing, pride and pleasure. Davis understands that playfulness can lead us gently toward the complicated truths of what it means to be human. His work is united by an ongoing inquiry into what makes us tick—what we make, and why we create, collect, and share. An artist, writer, and musician, he makes photographs, videos, songs, and sound and sculptural installations. Davis began as a poet, and his visual practice is laced with a love of language. The pleasure of wordplay is evident in his conceptual process and in his titles.
Rachel Seligman: Where does the title of the show come from?
Tim Davis: It’s from a piece of sheet music that I bought in a junk shop called When We Are Dancing, I Get Ideas. At first, I misunderstood it. I thought it meant that I got my ideas from dancing. I didn’t realize it was an innuendo. Of course it’s as good an explanation as any about where ideas come from. Particularly for me, because my practice is about moving through the world and gathering things that I find. I’m used to anticipating the possibility of finding something interesting to say while moving my feet.
Being a photographer is like being an emperor with no clothes, because at the end of the day, you come back and you don’t actually have anything, you don’t have any stuff. You just have these collisions of your eyes with the visual world, and your latent images. But accompanying that, for me, has always been a kind of rhizome-like reach for other kinds of collecting. One thing I collect is records. I go into the bins at the junk shops and ask people that I meet if they have any old records in their garages. And in the course of that, I’ve collected other things. I find that there’s a lot of different ways to gather, to glean significance and meaning. The show is a series of these collections arrayed around my main collecting practice, which is photographic.
RS: This feels like an optimistic way of being. Have you always been an optimist?
TD: I think of myself as eternally optimistic. There’s a kind of virginal quality to each day for me. It’s like nothing existed before and I feel like I’m starting over, in a good way. But I’m not sure a lot of other people would describe me as an optimist. I mean, just today I was walking around photographing in Schenectady, and I met a guy. I said, “How are you doing?” and he goes, “You know, hanging in there. I can’t complain.” And I said, “Yes, you can. It’s your human right. It’s part of our DNA!”
RS: I’m interested in the intersection between your optimism and your capacity for the negative. How does that sensibility inform your work? I see a combination of incredible joy, playfulness, and optimism on one hand—and irony, an affinity with the lonely and the abject on the other.
TD: I just don’t know how to see the world without that kind of complexity. Complexity feels like an old-fashioned word in art, like some kind of art school thing: “I’m searching for complexity.” But it’s like reading James Joyce or Ezra Pound or something. For me, reading those authors was great. I thought, “wow, this doesn’t make any sense to me. Interesting! I like it. I’ll search further.” That feels old fashioned now. We’re in a world where we feel like we have to deliver something with clarity. But to me, there is no simplicity. Everything either has a weird aftertaste of something else if you linger with it long enough, or, it’s like a gobstopper. The world is just a gobstopper! You lick it and it tastes like one thing and then a little while later it tastes like something else.
RS: Earlier, you referred to yourself as a photographer. But you’re an artist who makes a lot of different things. Do you consider yourself first and foremost a photographer?
TD: Photography is one thing that I’m naturally gifted at. I can express myself to the fullest in photography with hardly any effort. Almost everything else is harder. The reason this show was such a great thrill was being able to step somewhat outside of what comes naturally and work in ways that are connected to my photographic practice but require a different kind of sense, you know, a different kind of song. These works come out of examining what else I have accumulated along the way and asking myself: why have I accumulated it?
RS: What do you see as the relationship between your photography and the rest of these works?
TD: The easy thing about photography is taking a picture. The hardest thing is knowing what it all means, where it begins and ends, and what it adds up to. The works in this show were all things that I could see the ends of before I started them. All artists eventually come to a point in a project where they have a vision of the end. Conceptual artists are supposed to be able to see the end before they start. The conceptual artist has the idea, and then they have to make the thing. These were projects where I didn’t have to build up a series of blind attempts before knowing the idea. These were things that maybe started as observations at some point, but before I’d ever made any of it, I had the idea and it was basically finite. In the field, I don't always have the idea framed beforehand, but I’ve always thought of myself as a conceptualist. I’m out in the world and then I see something, like the reflection of a McDonald’s sign off a house window. And I say, “I’m gonna make a picture of that, and if I make a series of those, I’ve got something.” There’s an idea there, and it develops from walking around.
RS: You started out by saying that you are a collector and that the exhibition is a collection of collections. What does it mean to be a collector?
TD: I guess a collector is somebody who has a hunger for significance, has a hunger for divining, and then for digging the well. They just really want to find it. I think finding it is half of the battle. Owning it, or making it into art or figuring out what it all means is another thing. But the hunger to search for it. That’s got to be a totally primitive hunting and gathering thing.
I’ve been thinking about the difference between a collector and a gleaner. Because I feel more like a gleaner, in that for the most part I am taking from somebody else’s production. Gleaners go into the fields right after the harvest and they take what’s left behind. I’m not making something out of whole cloth usually. I’m not making something that never existed before. That urge to gather something is important to me. And that seems to define everything about my life. It’s such a weird and complicated urge.
I think of everything I do as a kind of “groking,” which is from Stranger in a Strange Land1—a pure way of understanding something. Heinlein’s Martian word has the literal meaning of “drinking,” and to me it means drinking stuff in. And that’s what I do all day. I make photographs, and in between the eruptions of pictures, I write songs in my head. And I collect records, I make little art projects, I think about essays. I write about photography while I’m making it. I’m doing all this stuff at once.
RS: Music is clearly a huge aspect of your work and of your life. Can you talk a little bit about where that interest comes from?
TD: Music is something that I’m not naturally good at. But I think of it as being the religion of my life. It’s the thing that I’ve poured over the details of the most, that I can sit down with other old men and discuss the particularities of, for hours on end. I’ve never really had a religious practice, but thinking about music, listening to music, collecting music, is close to it. I come from a musical family. My father is a musician and I’ve been around musicians all my life. I started out making music by writing songs with my little brother. He would make up these crazy songs, like, “I’m the Weirdest Person in the World” and “Big Hair.” And then, even though I wasn’t trained as a musician, eventually, I started writing my own songs. I’m getting better and better at it. And I now have this band, and we practice a lot. If I had a life coach, they would tell me, “Don’t waste your time with this.” But I am increasingly spending more and more time with music.
Music is a communal thing. And being a photographer is very solitary. Even if you’re out in the world, it’s just you pressing the button. So it’s an interesting, incredibly joyous thing for me to be able to cede control. Music is also this incredibly relevant art form. It’s not something that feels specialized and separate from people’s lives. It’s so intertwined—people are listening to it all the time.
RS: How has music entered into your art making?
TD: I haven’t made any music that isn’t contingent upon something visual. I made the album It’s Okay To Hate Yourself, but I always knew that the real work was going to be the accompanying videos. And the songs I’m writing now are largely written while I’m photographing, and a number of them are about photography. This week, I’ve been writing a song called “The Acid Casualty’s Farfisa.” Farfisa is a great vintage Italian organ. Well, I was in this weird junk shop in upstate New York, and there was a Farfisa, and it was just scribbled all over with all kinds of crazy things, and I photographed it. And then I sent the photograph to everybody in my band, and the bassist, John Rosenthal, sent back a text, “It’s the acid casualty’s Farfisa.”
So while I was on this big photo expedition—I drove all the way to Rochester and back from Tivoli via back roads—I was driving along singing, “the acid casualty’s Farfisa, is missing almost half its keys-a.” So now I’ve got that, and that’s a song. It’s now evolved to be a song about things that I’ve observed in junk shops and antique stores, and the chorus is: And the Salvation Army band, is taking smoke breaks, when they can, to sit and watch us buy a little piece of the past, And so in a way, everything we’re describing is a little bit like if you move through the world, you generate friction, like sparks. You generate little sparks as you move through the world and things that you see and observe provide these sparks.
The video Counting In was an attempt to show that. They are mostly young people, just living the American dream of starting a band. There’s a vicarious thrill in it. I thought about making a self-portrait at one point, and I thought, “people make self-portraits, what would I do?” I thought about that Dylan record, Self Portrait.2 So, I made a self-portrait that is a bust made up of copies of that record. And you know, luckily, I did it in a time when you could still get them pretty cheap.
RS: Aren’t you single-handedly responsible for driving up the price of that album?
TD: Yeah, I did. It was written about in Freakonomics. How one person can affect the marketplace for something. It’s OK to Hate Yourself could have been its own show. I think a lot of people react to that piece much more enthusiastically than they do to everything else in the show. I think it has a really strong emotional content. The songs, in particular, were written at a very unhappy time in my life. So those songs are more personal in a way, and they have a little more pain in them than I’m currently experiencing. Also, it came at this time where I was shooting video. That happened not because I wanted to make video, but because they made a camera that could also shoot video, and everybody was talking about this camera, and everybody seemed to be getting one. So, I got one. And I actually didn’t really like it as a camera at all.
RS: For still photographs?
TD: Yeah. I didn’t like it at all. But the video quality was extraordinary. A couple of months ago, I was photographing in Rensselaer, which is a magical place. And I encountered one bizarre, beautiful thing after another. I was up around the top of the city in a residential area and I decided to go back down. As I start walking down the hill I hear a car alarm, and I turn around and there’s a car completely on fire. The car was just parked on the side of the road, and there was nobody around. And flames are shooting out. But there’s a moment in the middle of photographing this where I stop, because I’m making a new video called Symphony, about music, which is made up of musical things or sound things that have a visual component, and this thing was making a crazy noise. So, I’m trying to make the best possible picture of it, but I then have to turn the camera off and put it down and shoot video in the middle of it. And it was very hard for me to do. It was like talking in a completely different language in the middle of a sentence. I think I missed the best picture . . . because I switched.
RS: When you were making It’s Okay To Hate Yourself, you set out to make videos. Were there moments when you thought, “I should be taking a photograph here”?
TD: The basic structure of what I do is that gathering, collecting, and gleaning, but I can put different filters on my glasses as to what to look for. That was a year where I didn’t really make many photographs, because I didn’t like that camera. But I loved the way it shot video. I was at the house in Iowa where Grant Wood painted American Gothic. And I had my 4 x 5 camera because I was working on a different project. But I also had that other camera and there was a lawnmower going back and forth in front of American Gothic. And I thought, “I’ve got to take a film of that.” That started me thinking about what happens when you make photographs where there’s something moving around. And it was really fun, really special. It was like one of those dreams you have where you discover that there is another room in your house or your apartment that you didn’t even know was there.
RS: You said, in talking about It’s Okay To Hate Yourself, that a lot of people respond to that differently than some of the other pieces in the show, perhaps more emotionally. How is it that you manage to capture this quality of playfulness, but also poignancy?
TD: I just don’t know how to see the world in any other way. And my sense is that if everybody went with me and followed me around, they would feel that way too.
RS: I don’t know if that’s true.
TD: I wonder. If anyone had walked with me through Rensselaer the other day, and met the immigrant from Senegal who had a six-month-old baby in his arms and kept pigeons. And had seen him take a white pigeon out, and hold it with the baby drooling in the sun . . . he was so beautiful, and he was so sweet a person but also somebody who doesn’t have the easiest life. When you get out into the actual world, beyond statistics and beyond ideology, what you find is that people are complicated and that the world is beautiful and painful, all at the same time. And there just isn’t anything else. There are just gobstoppers everywhere.
RS: I know that if we were walking with you, and you stopped and saw that thing, then we would see it too. Because you say to us, look at this and see the essential nature of humanity, which is all of this complexity. But without you as our guide, I worry that we just walk right on by.
TD: That’s hard for me to understand. When I made the music videos I would meet somebody, and I would put the camera, which looks like a still camera, on the tripod. Then I would say, “I want to take a portrait of you, but I have to go get something out of my car, hold on a second, I forgot something.” And then I would just leave the camera rolling and they didn’t know it. And I was gone like five or ten minutes and the person would just kind of stand there and be completely relaxed. That was probably on the verge of being unethical. I could see how somebody would say that it was unethical. On the other hand, these people were all beautiful, amazing, vivid people. And I never made them look bad. I mean, there’s a woman who’s clearly been beaten up in one of them and that image is in a song that’s about heartbreak and the complex beauty of femalehood. Overall, the process that I really believe in as a photographic artist is that we find analogies for our inner world in the outer world. I think it’s healthy. It keeps people sane.
RS: There is plenty of humor in your work and some of your work is very funny. Why is it that most artists are generally afraid of humor in their work?
TD A fear of not being taken seriously. But do we have to make a distinction between comedies and tragedies in Shakespeare? Not really. The comedies are filled with tragedy and tragedies are filled with comedy. There’s no real reason to distinguish. Artists think they have to be taken seriously.
RS: Why?
TD: I don’t know. I think it’s stupid. You know how you have friends who are overly serious and ponderous and take themselves too seriously. You don’t want to hang out with them, you don’t want to invite them over to dinner.
RS: They’re not the life of the party.
TD: I’m not going to go camping with those people. We all navigate the world through humor, everybody does. And yet most of that vanishes, it disappears. How many times in every person’s life have they saved a terrible situation with humor? Like making a child laugh who’s crying over something. So much of that stuff disappears. My first big cultural heroes were comedians: Steve Martin, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor. I had their records, I memorized them. I knew Monty Python and Firesign Theater by heart. I think in my own life, it was a way of handling pain. I like art where I can feel the artist trying to reach me. Humor is one of the ways that you can sense the artist saying, “I got something for you.” And there’s a lot of art that isn’t like that.
RS: I’m interested in humor in art not being taken seriously. You said humor is this thing that has saved so many of us, and it brings us pleasure. Why then is it off-limits, as the subject of a work of art?
TD: Maybe for photography it’s all a vestige of some kind of older thing about the medium. I wrote this essay about photography and humor in particular, about how photographers have always felt second-rate. They need their own special galleries sometimes. Or like in the slide library at the Yale Art Gallery, there were categories like “Sculpture” and “Painting,” and then there were “Minor Arts,” which included photography.
RS: A little inferiority complex?
TD Yeah. I think with photographers, you have to measure up. I think there’s also a whole other thing, editorial photography, and the idea of a sense of purpose. And it has to be this self-righteous, concerned photography. I think that the comedians of the times are the philosophers of the times. Somebody like George Carlin, who is basically reckoning with the meaning of language. He’s somebody that if you really wanted to take a measure of what his cultural time was, you just listen to him. And it would tell you more than lots of essayists. And today, it’s people like Dave Chappelle—he had these two comedy specials last year that were just deeply profound. And delivered in a way that’s consumable. That’s another complicated thing. Humor and music are ways in which the delivery system of the work is a little bit more palatable.
RS: Why do you think narrative is important for us as humans and how is it also maybe our downfall?
TD: I don’t believe that it's possible to experience the world in a nonnarrative way. There is no way to experience language without narrative. If you randomly pick up any two words and you put them together, no matter how disjunctive they are, you create a little narrative. They bounce off of each other and they create friction and bonds start to form between them. I also believe very strongly that narrative is the thing that makes us human as opposed to animals. I really believe that storytelling is what makes us who we are. And art comes from that.
RS: What are your thoughts on the American dream?
TD: It’s alive and well! I feel super patriotic about America. Part of it is that everything I do is a little bit contingent on the fact that nobody is paying much attention to much of what’s going on, in that we don’t live in a codified culture where you know what your place is. I feel privileged and special to be able to pay attention to the things I pay attention to. The American dream is a little bit dependent on a kind of alienation where you don’t know your place. I have never felt like I really had a home. I never felt that I necessarily had a people. I’ve never had any money and I’ve never had too many connections. But I’ve always felt like I can make whatever I want to make out of whatever I can get a hold of. And that feels really thrilling.
RS: I consider the subject matter of much of your work to be the American dream. Do you see it that way?
TD: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been really surprised at all the discussion about religion in this country and yet I don’t think this is a profoundly religious place compared to other places. And I don’t think that even the people who are claiming to be religious really are. But I think it’s obvious that the most powerful religion is daily life; the pleasures of daily life and that people know how to enjoy themselves and take comfort in small acts of daily existence. I am drawn to places that are not succeeding by traditional measures of the American dream necessarily. In a way, despite everything that’s said about Americans being lose-minded and self-interested, the reality is that we live in this open way where we’re available and can be seen by lots of people—on our front porches and in our suburban back yards and most people don’t have a fence. That’s my American dream.
RS: How would you characterize this exhibition?
TD: It’s a kind of fun house with lots of sensory information—maybe a little overstuffed. There’s an aspect of the humor in it which is a little unsettling. I don’t mind making somebody feel a little bit uncomfortable. For example, Uneasy Listening is both funny and a bit difficult to listen to. These things might not all be the most profound things in the world, but they feel really important somehow.
RS: Sometimes you are showing us things that might not be the most important things in the world but they are really important for us to see.
TD: Cleverness is something I value. And it’s another thing that’s marginalized and considered kind of louche. But it’s really important. The grave rubbings, for example. If you’re walking through a graveyard and some of the names are funny, you should do something with that. If you really want to explain who I am as an artist, here it is: He’s in a graveyard, he sees a funny name and thinks, “I want to make a grave rubbing of this.” I’m a photographer, so my initial instinct would be to take a picture of it but then I thought, “you know, I can use a cultural form that already exists to make something that will totally upset our expectations.” It’s definitely not being proper, right? It’s not the reverent thing to do to laugh at somebody’s name. And yet, in the show, there’s also my own gravestone. My own funny gravestone, that I made because I wouldn’t want it any other way. Do you want people to cry for the rest of their lives that you’re gone? No, you don’t. You want them to remember you with the joyous things and the things that make you laugh.
1 Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1961).
2 Bob Dylan, Self Portrait, Columbia Records, 1970, Vinyl LP.
A Hunter and A Gatherer
AN Essay By LuC Sante
Tim Davis is not so much a street photographer as a road photographer.
He goes about his work the old-fashioned way, by hunting and gathering, and he finds wild and unexpected combinations of color, form, and meaning just sitting there on the roadside where anyone could have seen them, but nobody else did. He is an aesthete, an exacting technician, a connoisseur of all the incongruities in the semi-domesticated American landscape— and of course he is a collector. Every photographer is some kind of collector, but Tim doesn’t just collect with his camera. He collects images however he can get them, also sounds, jokes, performances, artifacts of every sort. And he is a very particular sort of collector: Like Aby Warburg or Otto Bettman, he is a typologist. He thinks in series, and he thinks big.
He enjoys the feeling of sheer physical accumulation. The first project-related request I can recall getting from him was for vinyl copies—condition unimportant—of Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait. I didn’t have any, but I was interested: How in fact was he going to make a selfportrait, as he promised, from those Self Portraits? The answer: a stack as high as the top of his head. That is a goal he may or may not have achieved, but it’s the mass of the thing that counts. It would hurt if it fell on you. He has also collected the single deadest genre of twentieth-century American music: the programmatic glop—vocal, orchestral, quasi-jazz, pseudo-Latin—that was the musical equivalent of couch art, the stuff people bought in the 50s and early 60s when they had a fancy new record player but not a clue as to what kind of music to play on it. It was a segment of American cultural production that died unmourned long ago but remains ubiquitous in the secondary markets, precisely because no one has any use for it. Anybody who goes out looking for old records will be confronted by massive accretions of the stuff, some of it continuously on display for over half a century. You can imagine Davis’s glee at having an excuse to adopt those long-term orphans and then redistribute them, foisting them on museum visitors—who will, at length, feed them right back into the Goodwill supply chain.
Davis is a joker and an anthropologist. The comedy of the Library of Ideas rests on accumulation, but it also represents a philosophical inquiry pursued through hundreds of hours of fieldwork—yet again in the garage sales and thrift shops of the nation, those places where onetime personal attempts at innovation or enlightenment go to die or await reincarnation. Light Comedy Grave Rubbings presumably cost the artist hundreds of hours on findagrave.com in addition to the travel time and rubbing labor. Graveyards are the junk shop of lineage, the repository of family names that have died out or been changed due to embarrassment. The collecting ventures resulting in the library and the grave rubbings both involved surveying a territory as vast as the country but nevertheless limited by actuality. Davis clearly welcomes the constraint, but as the Cartoons show, he can be impatient with the demands of mere facts. Being an artist, of course, he can simply supply his own. If it seems surprising that nowhere in the vastness of the nation does there appear to be a chair store called Shack of Sit, he will create it himself. The most anthropologically rigorous works in the show are Curtain Calls and Counting In, which document ancient rituals that may never have been observed quite that way before. Each ritual has its ostensible purpose: the theater troupe assembles in full to solicit applause; the leader of the musical combo establishes the time signature while also calling the band members to attention. Viewed as a chain of brief performances by a variety of outfits, dissociated from context, they reveal their singular dramatic qualities. The curtain call becomes a line dance, the count-in a tense, minimalist existential play employing only four words of text. The curtain call rejoices in extravagant costuming; the count-in pretends its actors aren’t wearing costumes at all. The curtain callers are middle-aged and beaming; the counters-in are young and miserable.
It’s Okay to Hate Yourself, which runs on a medium-sized monitor, shows brilliantly destabilizing images, apparently sequenced to keep viewers on their toes as they flit from indoor to outdoor, day to night, long shot to close-up, humor to sadness to bewilderment. South Sea Selfies are presented true to their nature—on a smartphone at the end of a selfie stick—which makes them easy to overlook and mildly irritating to view, especially since their gloriously sensuous expansiveness must be conjured via a screen the size of a bar of hotel soap. They are expert parodies of the selfie, showing Davis inserting himself, often ridiculously, into the daily activities and incomparable vistas of Bali. Every one of them is nevertheless a small miracle of lighting, composition, physical ingenuity—it’s hard to account for how some of them might have been shot, and were they even taken on a smartphone?—and comedic performance. Davis has constructed a persona as an oblivious tourist, somewhere between Jacques Tati and Harold Lloyd, who strikes incongruous poses in the foregrounds of scenes that magnificently refuse to absorb him. It’s a tour de force, presenting a foreign culture by highlighting the outsider’s awkwardness, making the observer’s paradox the framing device. It may be the heart of the show, and yet Davis has purposefully made it easy to overlook. Davis is a collector and an artist and a joker and a trickster, and his show is a Wunderkabinett.
Portable Hole
AN Essay By Tim Davis
THESIS
I know where I became a collector. I could pretend I know when, but I’d be guessing, and looking very deep within, at a little boy in love with dinosaurs, in love with knowing about dinosaurs, in love with knowing. Knowing that there were gingko trees in dinosaur times, and that the tree down at the end of the block, in the strange side yard of a once-elegant rooming house, is a gingko tree. It was there I became a collector. The same splendid green fans scattered on the grass that were flattened under the Allosauruses as they reared up menacingly. We now think the T. Rex and his three-fingered cousin, the Allosaurus, were likely scavengers, who fell forward low to the ground instead of rearing up. Growing up means watching your myths get unlivable. But the little collector still lives in his myth. He’s maybe three, under the great corner gingko, reaching out for a Luna moth-shaped (and colored!) leaf and knowing, “I know about this.” I’d learned to read at two. I must’ve been cascaded with smiles and displayed to neighbors. Adored. The ginkgo leaf is the bottled feeling of still being in the myth; the myth of Mommy and Daddy and me, and of endless possibility. We live on this block and this block is my range, my world to explore. Memorizing every sidewalk square, the slate ones (smooth, multicolored, irregular, interesting) and the poured concrete (embossed with very recent fossils—a footprint, sometimes even a gingko leaf). There’s a kind of halfway house halfway down the block producing some Appalachian dissonance. And anyway, the whole town is a creepy Victorian spookhouse where our friends live in raccoon-filled gothic cottages with no running water. And I’m not scared to walk all the way to the gingko tree. Even though I’m only three. AndI am brave enough to turn into the strange yard and pick up a gingko leaf and put it in my pocket. I’m not scared of dinosaurs. I know about them.
ANTITHESIS
The Funsters are playing Dungeons & Dragons in the basement of a raised ranch down a divorce-scented cul-de-sac. The Funsters are home alone after school. We’ve just finished making a comedy sketch tape. I have invented a character named John Zimbabwe Ahhhhhh who is some sort of detective, but I can’t stop cracking up whenever I say, “John Zimbabwe Ahhhhhh,” and I’m ruining the tape but it’s so funny that the whole sketch is just preteen boys laughing till they can’t breathe and still trying to say their lines, and you’ll never hear anything funnier. I’d never be able to say it but I knew even then that true friends are the most important collection you make. The ones you admire enough to copy their affect, read their books, listen to their records. The Funsters were theatrical and clever. They were Anglophiles: Monty Python, Brian Eno. They built their own myth, and it was resonant to hide inside theirs, mine having been long shattered.
I ruined the D&D, too: too much protocol. Whatever the opposite of protocol is, it governs me. You have to roll a nineteen or above to use the potion. You can’t access the portal without finding the key. I couldn’t take it. Fun game—got dragons in it—but all these rules, and all you’re really doing is math. The game should be called “Math in a Dungeon.” I knew it wasn’t for me. My people are impulsive, vivid, off-kilter, desperate for attention, utterly out of step with everyone around them. My grandfather would ask any maître d’ or stranger, “Where’s the ladies’ room?” It was a running joke that set so much protocol afire. It was flirty: “I’m not like the others, are you with me?” But it was dirty: “Now, mentally reconsider my gender.” Where is the bathroom? is the second question you learn in any foreign language and my grandfather wielded it like a stiletto, slicing and dicing the sails of protocol. Language is protocol. It’s how we all agree to speak. Watch my people misguide and undermine. Listen as they tip the canoe of agreement over. Listen.
Pizzeria worker: Here you go, sir. One large and one small cheese. My father: Thank you, severely.
The Funsters are playing Dungeons & Dragons and the one thing I collect from the game are the clever ways its makers repaired rips in the sail of protocol. Take, for example, the portable hole. You spend the first part of this grand adventure shopping. Shopping is not exciting. I prefer toilet cleaning to shopping. The founders of this game thought, “Fighting! But first, Shopping!!!” You’re a knight on a long quest. You need armor and weapons and stuff; too much stuff to carry. So, you can buy a “portable hole,” a bottomless pit that fits in your pocket, holding all your plundered booty. Someday we’ll all have portable holes in our pockets that will pillage our time and attention. But for now, I fill my portable hole with failures of protocol. Real giddy glee rises up in things that don’t fit, in seeing things the wrong way ‘round. I know I don’t fit. I know cleverness and unswallowable laughter can save the Funsters from worrying over their single mothers and near poverty. Collecting is the opposite of playing a game. You make your own rules. Poverty is impossible. The world is littered with value.
PARENTHESIS
I’m writing this in the Asbury Park Public Library. It’s a magnificent building, built for a private literary club. There’s an enormous stainedglass window of Ulysses S. Grant, who died during its construction. “He lived to see peace and harmony restored in his country,” is how it is inscribed, on a long, folded ruby glass ribbon. I hope my stained-glass window says the same. Facing west is another window, this one by Tiffany. As the sun sets, the flames on a burning Viking ship come alive. There’s a Longfellow poem rolling like credits below:
They launched the burning ship!
It floated far away
Over the misty sea,
Till like the sun it seemed,
Sinking beneath the waves.1
A burning ship sinking beneath the waves? Remind you of anything? 1 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Tegnér’s Drapa,” 1847. There are still books on shelves here (and a physical card catalog!) but the most vivid function of the public library today is as a soup kitchen for the Internet. An elderly queen is having problems logging into his Yahoo. He speaks prep-school Spanish to the librarian, who is trying to retrieve his password. I hear him guess, “Cherubim1234?” A woman with a Liberian accent needs help with her CV. A middle-aged man is watching Bruce Springsteen videos on YouTube. He’s on his thirteenth or fourteenth in a row. I collect this man. He’s everything to me, everything funny and tragic and literary and off color and particular. What is he doing here? If this is not a question you ask every second you move through the world, you’re either enlightened or incurious. I smile. Maybe the New Jersey statehouse has passed a program to hire suffering people to increase Springsteen’s Internet profile. They are sent out to public libraries to increase the number of his streams. It’s good business for the state, protecting a valuable resource and helping the needy, an Intellectual Property Peace Corps. Big smiles. I should be writing this essay about collecting, and what collecting means to my artistic practice. Instead, I write the theme song of the New Jersey Springsteen Corps.
Baby Bruce, you was the golden goose who satisfied our dreams Born to Run went to Number One in the nineteen seventies Synthesizers colonized ya, sounding like a-doodle-a-day That didn’t stop ya selling papa Born in the USA
And now I’m JACKING UP YOUR STREAMS, JACKING UP YOUR STREAMS I work for the government, JACKING UP YOUR STREAMS
In my head, the song sounds like “Walk This Way” if played by The Kinks. It shakes your booty and makes you smile. I rush into the stacks snorting with laughter. I’m in a public library, laughing uncontrollably while the burning ship sinks beneath the waves.
PROSTHESIS
My father has a darkroom off the kitchen (to this day I get instantly famished when I smell fixer) and I’m curious. He loads me up his Olympus OM-1 and I walk toward the corner gingko. The camera is a portable hole, gathering dozens of dioramas, landscapes, patches of light, people you can’t take your eyes off of. Every picture you take is an assertion of your certainty, a display of your knowledge and awareness, a rung you’ve clung to on the ladder out of ambivalence and doubt. Every picture you take is a stone in your own foundation, and yet it occupies almost no space. It weighs less than a gingko leaf. I float through the neighborhood, instinctively drawn to ways the late day summer sun thickens the details of the strange old houses. Being drawn to is the essence of being a collector, feeling the gravity of the outer world, and letting it pull you in. But a picture isn’t a burden, so gravity releases you as soon as you’ve clicked the shutter, reborn. I feel drawn to, and drawn forth. The collector loves to move, to sift through stuff in search of. I cross the street, beyond what had been the limit of my reach, and down the next block. I’m older now—nine or ten—back here in this town, visiting my father for the summer, partial custody in the myth. This venerable resort destination has as many alleys as streets. Alleys, built for grooms and servants, leave backyards naked and exposed, feinting past the carnival show of a house’s façade. There’s a thrill in it, swimming through the membrane of public and private and seeing what you’re not supposed to, and an incredulity that others don’t see. Three yards down the first one I stop in my tracks. A man is on his back porch, in a samurai sword slice of light, feeding a big white dog from a bottle. A bicentennial American flag, with the cute curly 76, hangs from an enormous copper beech. I see the scene. I recognize its obvious limits and know that what I see is a picture. I slip it in my portable hole. Now I walk down every alley I come to, feeling like I’m in a hidden world, a Narnia or Secret Garden, or that dream where there are uncharted rooms in your apartment. I’ve started a new collection and it’s somehow steadying and unsettling, like building your own myth.
SYNAESTHESIS
In the recurring dream I wake up from a dream. I’m staring at the white ceiling of a white room, vaguely longer than square. There are white curtains hanging at the edges of vision but I can’t follow them down to see what’s out the windows. I now realize that I am paralyzed, and that all I’ll ever see is this parallelogram of white. I am destroyed with despair. I’ve woken up in a ruined world. No accident or meningitis comes to mind. All that comes is the certainty that everything that’s made me me is gone forever. Me is over. I can’t cry but I am dipped in bitterness. All I can do is go back to sleep. I wake up again, this time at night, to the same hideous persistence of vision. I try holding my breath to see if you can suicide that way. You can’t. I didn’t imagine this could get worse, but night makes everything worse. Then a car passes by outside, and its headlights make a beam pass across the ceiling in a delirious elliptical sweep. Soon another passes, and another. The lights play over my field of vision, as rare and tempting as the aurora, as comforting as a lighthouse to a listing ship. I am charged awake, filled with gratefulness and grace, knowing there will always be enough to see.
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Davis makes artwork that explores the intersection of humor and longing, where the ridiculous meets the sublime, and the abject aligns with the beautiful in unexpected ways. The exhibition catalogue includes a new interview with Tim Davis by Rachel Seligman, and essays by Luc Sante and Tim Davis. The catalogue is the latest in the Opener Series, and features beautiful color reproductions of all the works in the exhibition as well as full documentation of the show installed in the Tang Museum’s Malloy Wing.