Michael Campbell

AImost a year ago, I had a remarkable dream in which whales were swimming in the sky. As we listened to their song, my “crew” and I built a wooden spaceship in order to rendezvous with the flying whales. This dream had an amazing effect on me and it still makes me feel euphoric when I recall it. A little Internet research produced the suggestion that this imagery is archetypal of the human desire to achieve a sense of wholeness. In his book Flying Saucers, Carl Jung proposes that during times of psychic disjunction, mass observations of UFOS increase significantly and indicate a yearning for integration on the part of troubled humanity.

In his multimedia installation twelve thousand years collapsing into eight seconds, Lethbridge artist Michael Campbell has created a rocketship out of wood, based in shape on the USS Discovery from the 1968 Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The cedar and mahogany body of the ship houses a bank of video screens, in which the artist labours (in his red bathrobe and hockey socks) on a model of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1920, using a hot-glue gun and pencil crayons. There are also video images of lush greenery, indication of a biospheric function to the ship. What is the artist doing in there? What kind of spaceman wears his bathrobe and makes art? His mission has fallen under the influence of a dream and he is no longer taking orders from ground control. This model vessel with media implants snakes through the Plug In ICA main gallery like an echo of retro futuristic fantasy, inspiring, with its multitude of references, personal recollections like my own.

I learn the Pop culture nods I have missed in the catalogue (which is very comprehensive, including blueprints, artist’s correspondence and a thoughtful and thorough essay by David Garneau), produced for the work’s exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. For instance, the bathrobe has multiple movie antecedents: in Silent Running and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as well as in the book and just-released film The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the protagonist wears a bathrobe as he departs from the rules and order of his life and embarks on an urgent personal mission. No stranger to the rogue and rebel, Campbell is also influenced by music and the punk Dry ethic. He even cites The Birthday Party’s Release the Bats as inspirational to this work.

The entire piece reflects the preoccupations of the suburban male. The construction of the ship and the artist’s activities within it speak to the masculine hobbyist tradition of craftsmanship and model making. The film footage of the moon walk was shot from the TV screen by the artist’s father and is included here as an intergenerational legacy and acknowledgement of the dreams of little boys everywhere at that time. The fascination with the space program as the ultimate extension of man’s exploratory nature peaked in the ’60s, perfectly timed for escapism from the options faced by American men going to fight in Vietnam, and providing a sense of optimism for those despairing of their government.

Despite the clarity of these overt references, everything about the work generates the anxiety of the off-kilter. There is a little platform “set” (which, in this exhibition, is installed in Plug In’s adjacent gallery) containing books, a small chair and coffee table, suitable for a six-year-old child. The model of the ship itself is neither large enough to be a working movie prop (and its construction denies this aspiration, as well), nor small enough to be a fan’s home project. On the coffee table in the “set” is a book containing blueprints for the piece, but it is mostly sealed shut. This book glows with a light from a hole in the table but is un-readable. The spaceman/artist is working on a model of Tatlin’s Monument, which was never built, due to the impossibility of its engineering requirements. Other architectural ideals flow throughout the piece—a revolving restaurant mirrors an amusement-park ride and a model of the universe, creating shudders of likeness without implying equivalence.

But the main narrative of twelve thousand years collapsing into eight seconds is found in the sum of all these parts and the viewer’s sense of wholeness as s/he integrates their meanings. This is not a work trying to avoid interpretation—Campbell seems to beg us, dropping clues everywhere, to try to “figure it out”—but doesn’t go too far by showing us what to think. He has simply projected himself into inner space with the fragments of a dream as fuel, and, never arriving but always travelling, we rendezvous at the destination. ❚

Michael Campbell’s twelve thousand years collapsing into eight seconds exhibited at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg from May 27 to July 2, 2005.

Hope Peterson is a Winnipeg-based interdisciplinary artist.