This marks the first time I have employed a photo I took at a wedding in one of my pieces. Good call, Spencer.
(Continued from this post)
I’ve been going to Smart Bar for close to 10 years now, so it has a special place in my heart. As such, I was sure to include lots of somewhat secret personal references throughout the mural.
For instance, when a German yogi tells you to go deeper and deeper (“tiefer und tiefer”), you do it.
He found me while I was in Hamburg in 2007. I couldn’t get over the unintentional hilarity of a German meditative guru. I felt the Smart Bar mural needed something of a mantra, and what better for an underground dance club than “deeper and deeper”?
I also found this lovely lady in Hamburg:
She ended up driving a bus.
The other symbols are less secret, especially if you’ve read “Kafka on the Shore”. Johnny Walker, Colonel Sanders, a mackerel, a cat, and even Mr. Nakata can be seen in the mural. But like many things, they’re best left being discovered on their own.
In November of 2009 I took a trip to San Francisco. On the flight back to Chicago I started reading Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore”. Not all that significant an event, but for the fact that in my immersion in learning French and German for about two years, I hadn’t so much as picked up a piece of fiction in that span of time. Murakami’s symbol-laden, wildly creative work really took hold of me, and quite literally helped tap parts of my mind that I hadn’t used for some time. I had been in a bit of a creative funk, but Kafka on the Shore seemed to disintegrate walls that had been put up in my head; it more than inspired me to start putting images and ideas together.
At about the same time, I had been commissioned to produce a mural for the nightclub Smart Bar. The 9.2’x66′ wall behind the DJ booth needed freshening up, and I was lucky enough to be selected to put my mark on far and away my favorite music venue.
If you’ve never been to Smart Bar, you may still know about it’s legendary place in the world of dance music. It was crafted in the same vein as Manchester’s Hacienda Club, but has lasted much longer. It’s no exaggeration to say that Smart Bar has played host to the most important DJ’s that have laid hands on records. It’s less to do with famous DJs, and much more to do with music makers – esoteric or not – who are there to do something special while at the peak of their game. I’ve seen Daniel Wang lay down disco there, Steve Bug throw down the most amazing tech-house set I’ve ever heard, and my absolute favorite – a guy that not many had heard of at the time – Erlend Oye – run through his entire DJ Kicks album…live (and danced with the crowd to Prince records afterward).
The space itself is special – it’s in the basement of equally legendary rock club Metro. Taking stairs down to an all black, subterranean space where music thumps on a Funktion One system is quite an experience. Spending a night there to give your mind and body up to your favorite tunes is nothing short of a transcendent experience. It’s with that as the template that I set out on the mural. And it only made sense to pay homage to the story that had acted as my muse.
(Click to scroll through enlarged images)
I split the space into four sections – the area behind the DJ booth (that simply reads “SMARTBAR”), and three narrative sections – The Spiritual, The Everyday, and realm where the two operate as one in the same. Smart Bar, after all, is a place where the real and the unreal overlap, comingle, and even become one.
The monks at left are the spiritual, or metaphysical, components of the story of the mural. They are what cannot be touched, but are the essential idea engine of the space. I was happy to put them to the left of the DJ booth – that’s where the trainspotters tend to lurk at the club. In other words, the people who are less about dancing and more into what records or tracks the DJ is playing tend to gather here and peek over the booth to see what’s going on.
The pedestrians are the everyday, seemingly most “real” (but as Murakami would have us believe, the least real) component. These are the quotidian machinations of human life, the unconscious movements through an ethereal space. This space to the right of the DJ booth is more or less the “VIP” section of Smart Bar. That’s a bit of a misnomer, as Smart Bar is the most egalitarian of clubs, but I loved the idea of friends and hangers-on of the DJ mingling amongst faceless pedestrians going about their very boring lives.
All the way to the right, the metaphysical and quotidian become one – they make up the consciousness of an anonymous, disembodied head that is made up of Chicago structures and laid over CTA buses. It was decided early on that that area should be the focal point of the mural – it is the only part of the wall that can be seen from the entrance of the club, and draws the viewer into the rest of the piece.
Some imagery is further explained in this post.
ruth - whose wedding? Surely this was not the “wedding attire” 🙂