please enter the museum

Hey, debuting a new collaborative writing project between Jeff Daily and myself, here is 'museum.' This is the first post of perhaps eight detailing a fictional tour through a fictional museum by a fictional curator. If we offend any of you, oh good gravy! Jeff wrote the descriptions of the art objects, and I've written the dialog of the curator. So goodsly goods then. Also, happy birthday to Jeff Daily, some eighty years old today. Hang in there, fella', you still got a long way to go (congratulations, bud!).

1.

Welcome. Welcome, one and all. My name is Grace Madero and I am the directorial curator at the Boho Coco Museum of Art. I will be giving you a guided tour today of our collection. Some say it is prestigious, but please, save all platitudes for the end of the tour. Also, please hold your questions as well. Thanks ever so much. Now, if you will, please follow me.

Real quickly: on our right here are our enormous elevators. They’re composed of construction materials left over from the previous Boho Coco Museum and tension wires that have been bathed in a mixture of blood, semen, and tears from about fifty or so world famous artists. Renee – oh I’m sure you know him – is among them. Yes. Yes, very special. They zip our art around the building as well, so you know, it’s a good deal for us. And also – just quickly – the Luba Lulu Collective outside of East Aulton fashioned these hulks, so I implore you to seek out their work. They’re really a swell bunch of lads. And, hey, if any of you are in need of some elevators – well… ha!

Continuing then. Here we come upon our first exhibit just around this temporary wall. If you look up, you’ll notice the ceiling is composed of green-tinted glass. It’s slanted as well, but that’s more of a functional question than anything else. The glass panels have been thrice blessed by Amazonian shaman. It is a piece unrelated the one we are about to view, but it’s not less glorious. Really, really lucky to have it.

Anyhow, the exhibit. Yes. Please, gather around. Take a look.

A microphone sits buried in feces, trapped under a tiny glass dome.

It is like the sound of silence. There are pictures of rock stars, the

ones who left behind beautiful corpses, adorning the white walls of

the gallery. Brian Jones stares like a prince. Jim Morrison, bearded,

looks like a mountain man. Janis Joplin grins after the most

wonderful shot of Southern Comfort imaginable. John Lennon

shines on behind oval spectacles. Darby Crash and Kurt Cobain

have the bloody raw punk scarred faces of sad angels. The cord

of the mic has been severed and left lifeless out from under the

dome. On the floor between the feces mic and the photograph

lined walls is a trail of muddy footprints and dollar bills. The air

is stale.

This exhibit was created by a young artist – well he died young – by the name of Arthere Remount. He made this piece in nineteen eighty seven. He called it his – what was it? – his piece de continence? He was actually in town when the museum purchased this piece. Somewhere amidst all the fecal matter tucked under the dome is a golden ring his father had given him upon graduating from the New School School of Art and Design. Yes. Really, really lucky to have this piece, and that piece of information, in the museum. I’ve been told the feces are meant to represent his time spent on the rock ‘n’ roll circuit. Apparently, he was a roadie for some bands. I’m not sure which ones in particular. He spent – oh let’s say five years – performing work of the roadie variety. Afterward – Arthere has often been documented saying – he would spend many sleepless nights with the scent of burning vapor in the air. Apparently the rock shows were fraught with wire snaps and electronic implosions. Instruments gone haywire and such.
His dilemma with this piece, as I’ve come to understand it, was that he did not want to glorify the rockers for dying. He only wanted their fetid sense of death – gone now some twenty, thirty, even forty years – to produce a mental sent for the image of the feces mic. Arthere did not even like rock music, or so he told me once. He was, really, he was a great man. This piece speaks to the struggle within each of us to be famous, but to struggle through endless mess to get there. Or perhaps, once there, to struggle with the world we become surrounded in. Yes, the Boho Coco is a lucky place for this. Please, approach the dome. Remember not to touch, however, ha ha.