The Air is On Fire

I spent my Saturday inside the GL Strand museum.  All three floors of the museum are currently occupied with one exhibit, David Lynch's installation The Air is On Fire.  The show contains all of Lynch's visual work starting with doodles from a notebook in the 70s and continuing through 40 years of work in different mediums. He even created two mini-sculptures specifically for this Copenhagen show.  I attended this show on a Saturday in the afternoon.  The museum faces the harbor and sits on a very quaint, sunny street.

Very quaint.  Upon entry to the exhibit, one is hit with immediate soundscapes and implications.  There are sculptures in the corners of virtually every room that have these slightly hidden red buttons. I pushed every one of them.  I love installation pieces that force activity from curious viewers.  Something about the risk/reward relationship intrigues me to no end. I love becoming complicit with my own actions, but is that ever a good thing? Anyway, each push immediately changes the soundscape of the room, usually with a shocking or unpleasant sound that lasts a few minutes or so.  Not only did I become part of some kind of atmospheric game, I garnered the attention of other passers-by.  And many many passers-by there were. Saturday afternoon seems to draw an older crowd to the museum scene--more on that later. Besides the button pushing, the exhibit was a pretty straight-forward chronicle of Lynch's work.  As I reached the top floor, though, I found what I was looking for: the screening room.  Lynch personally donated his entire short-works library.  I sat there in an uncomfortable museum "get-in-and-go" chair for about 3 hours until the DVD looped back to the beginning.  What a wonderful screening.  I was sitting in the back row of about six rows.  All six rows in front of me were occupied by white-haired, older women--about 24 women in all.  They must've been part of a tour group, but they sat there with me the entire duration of the screening.  On top of that, they did not move.  They did not shift in their seats.  I thought this might have been part of the exhibit, but on very rare occasions, I heard a few gutteral, visceral reaction noises.  I never thought I would be soothed by the sounds of a phlegmy cough, but I was thankful to know that they were real people.  The screening itself was wonderful.  The standout short film for me was Lynch's AFI project, The Grandmother.  The art direction in the film (the sets look like what I imagine German expressionist backgrounds would look like in 3D) was superb and the switch between animation and the live-action "nightmare" aesthetic told the story of growing up and accepting one's family and one's place very well.  Other standouts include: Boat, Out Yonder Neighbor Boy, and his industrial soundscapes.  What I love most about Lynch as a filmmaker is the way he uses the physicality of the medium to tell a separate story simultaneously with the narrative.  That might sound like the task of any filmmaker, but its never as apparent to me as when I watch Lynch. I just aspire to be able to create an aesthetic tone that can comment on the narrative while the narrative is occurring...but not be too obvious or too heavy-handed about it.  I guess I am trying to say that no matter how outlandish or surrealistic some of his pieces were, I always felt that they had something natural or organic about them.  These weird ideas and concepts are real, and they come from this man.  I can feel that when I watch.  Anyway, I couldn't really take pictures in there, but I snuck a few. The first is a fluorescent sculpture he made in Paris, and the second is a wax/plaster/plastic/found object piece of a man getting shot.  I like the labels.  This piece is the one on all the advertising around the city, so, in a way, its been made iconic.  

Good day.