By Ann Treacy Photo Chris Larson
If my 16 year old self knew that one day I’d be talking to Grant Hart about an Irish band covering Diane (my favorite Hüsker Dü song!) or Paradise Lost in his last album, my 16 year old self would have walked with a much better swagger. That conversation happened a few weeks before the opening of Chris Larson’s art installation Land Speed Record at the Walker, but it happened because of it and the circumstances surrounding it gave me an heads up and ongoing insight into the upcoming show. I felt like an insider!
So I was especially excited when Land Speed Record opened at the Walker Art Center on Thursday night. But in a really good way my insider edge melted away with the opening night public talk with artists Chris Larson and Grant Hart. The audience got an occasionally uncomfortable, intimate look at the project and the process. In describing the process, Larson referred to a discombobulated collection of artifacts and ideas … Hart broke in by saying you think that discombobulated, you should see what’s going on here, gesturing to his head.
So how to describe the discombobulated?
Land Speed Record is an installation that includes a video of the personal belongings of Hart that survived a fire in his family home. Actually it’s two films. One is a slow-pan, aerial shot of the collection taken by Larson using a camera on a conveyor-like pulley that passed over the colleges stored in Larson’s studio. The other is a black and white 16 millimeter film of individual objects. The films are shown on opposite walls in the Walker gallery. Between the walls, Larson has set up replicas of the bar partitions from 7th Street Entry – subtly recognizable to frequent visitors in the dark gallery.
The installation also includes audio partial replica of the Hüsker Dü’s Land Speed Record, an early album of Minneapolis 80s punk heroes, Hüsker Dü. It was recorded live at 7th Street Entry – 17 songs performed in 26 minutes, 35 seconds (the accompanying looping 16mm film length is exactly the same as the record – the hallowed 26.35). Hart was the drummer in Hüsker Dü. It is a partial replica because it only includes the drumming – performed by Yousif Del Valle and engineered by Tom Garneau. (The album: a limited edition vinyl LP will be released by the Walker later this summer).
The audio plays through the full album. There’s a break. The audio play through. There’s a break. And so on. Visually, there’s a large, slowly moving video of things: drums, car parts, an old Hootenanny album (from the Replacements), child’s toy where you pull a string and hear an animal and more. It’s like a seek and find book of objects. It scrolls down, like the curtain dropping and First Avenue. The floor is so shiny that it scrolls into a mirror-image of itself, which apparently was a happy unintended consequence. The mirror draws you, but eventually made me a little wobbly too. On the opposite walls you can hear an old 16 mm projector tick away as it shows the black and white close-ups of the individual objects.
It’s a collection of several snapshots in time – the original recording of the album, the time of the fire, the many times represented by the various objects, the time of the recreation of the partial album. You can draw some parallels and find unique qualities in each facet. The 1981 original recording pre-dates me but not by much. I remember the adrenaline that Hart used to describe those early shows. No one watched through their smartphones, subsequently punk rock musicians played, they didn’t perform or pose for the shot. (Nothing wrong with performance – but a little raw energy works too.) Stage diving wasn’t yet banned – even for girls in skirts! Slam dancing hadn’t yet morphed into a mosh pit. And you had to know where to look for shows – you didn’t get a Tweet, Instagram, Facebook invitation or Streak. You had to know – you had to be a fan. It was a fun reminder of that time for me.
I can’t recreate the talk for you but here are a few tidbits I learned at it; things to consider if you see the show…
- After the fire in Hart’s family home, Larson stored his belongings. He looked at it for years and as he said, things in his studio become compelling and become art.
- Larson and Hart have worked several times before. Both are musicians; both are visual artists. They had worked together on Wise Blood, produced at the Soap Factory last year. Only one lasted until the performance due to some bad blood among the crew but this work survived any recoil.
- Chuck Berry isn’t the smoothest safe word to fit into a public conversation to indicate a desired change in topic.
- The drummer who performed Hart’s part is not a punk rock kid. He plays Dark Harsh but listened to the album hundreds of times to get it right. While Hart’s drum kit was on set, it wasn’t used. They had sleek, new transparent drums, which they also used to create the large photo-negative images in the installation.
- If I had one wish for the installation it would be to have a live performance of Hart and Larson annotated the video – Science Mystery Theater style.
Land Speed Record runs at the Walker Art Center from 6/9-1/08/17 at the Medtronic Gallery: http://www.walkerart.org
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