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Selected Disappearances: Part Two
By Lance Blomgren
The Carwash
I visited this site for my first and last time on the night before the scheduled demolition. Members of the Royal Vancouver Pornographic Society—a local preservationist group and social club usually devoted to the preserving, archiving, and screening of 1970s adult films—and Required Field—a group dedicated to injecting life into abandoned spaces—had teamed up to stage a farewell evening of performance, sound, videos, and installations, all non-pornographic.
Image Courtesy of Required Field and
The Royal Vancouver Pornographic Society
This site had been the venue for a number of such events over the years. In one stall as I recall, a car was being slowly consumed by a lovely ooze of soap suds, which appeared to be growing from the drain beneath it.
By noon the next day the carwash was a pile of cinder blocks, the corner a wide-open space that suggested the structure's existence even more emphatically than when it had actually been there.
The carwash had been interestingly anachronistic, not only of time, but of place. Constructed in the open-air style typically found in the dry climate of the American Southwest—where hand-washing your convertible or low-rider is a collective ritual of automotive affection—it was an odd, slightly absurd fixture for Vancouver, where the weather makes vehicular bathing an almost religious test of faith.
I never once saw a car there. When I lived in New Mexico, I loved watching people buff their cars to perfection in a structure like this; at night the stalls would become sites of illicit and sometimes violent activity.
The Butchershop and Seamrippers
There would seem to be a plot against the "unofficial" artist-run centres and alternative venues in town. This month, both the Butchershop—steps away from the carwash, coincidently—and the Seamrippers spaces were closed down, victims of the same officer from the City of Vancouver zoning office. A suspicious mind could wonder if the city arts council is calling the zoning office to check out the organizations that they don't fund themselves.
The visual impact of the former sites of these two galleries is certainly more muted than the carwash; both buildings remain intact.
But the altered facade of the Butchershop (someone has painted the exterior in hilarious, crudely rendered white clouds, the kind of slap-dash mural that would flare tempers in more polished commercial districts) and the sudden disappearance of life forms from the typically busy Seamrippers doorway provide visual evidence of their absence.
For the last couple of years, both spaces have been hosts to some of the most diverse and frequent exhibitions in the city, activities which were successful in bridging a number of distinct communities. Their unrelenting programming workshops, lectures, concerts, and meetings meant that there was activity at these spaces almost every night, with people lingering around outside.
Observing these sites, the flares of recollection are most perceptible in the absence of people, the grouping of human figures, and the bodies of social interaction, something the more haunting for its lack of spatial definition.
Scott 3
In the weeks preceding these disappearances, I had been listening to Scott Walker's extremely melancholy recording Scott 3 (1969) on virtual repeat. His music is a meeting ground for Frank Sinatra, Jacques Brel, and European cabaret. The lilting orchestration and wispy string sections that accompany Walker create an almost narcotic blur of loss when coupled with his lyrics. The melodies had been getting stuck in my head, invariably adding a soundtrack to my perception of disappearance. In the song "Rosemary," Walker croons:
Voices from a photograph
Laughed from your wall
Screamed through your dreams
Wake up Rosemary and wipe your teary eyes
Rise and cross the cold bare floor
And watch the moon through frosted glass
Damn that photograph
I'll have to take it down.
A couple of weeks ago, I realized the song would better fit my idea of visual memory and haunting if the last line instead went: "Damn that photograph / I shouldn't have taken it down." I mused upon the negative space of visual memory; ghosts trapped in an empty vessel while it begins to fill.
Then as I tried to locate the album for another listen, I found the disc was missing from my CD holder. I had left it in the notebook computer at work. I looked for Scott 3 the next day, but could only find the empty case. Although I had the recording copied on my computer at home and was easily able to access the music, the empty slot remained a taunting companion to the theme of loss. I played the digitized album a few times, but found it lacked the same appeal—its time had passed.
Last week I bought a copy of the new CD by Islands, but the sight of this recent purchase in my jewel-case holder only reminds me of Scott 3.
