Who’s Been Trashing the Art Motel?

Riding through the Irish midlands last week I was struck by the massive number of what are being called “Ghost Estates.” Half-built housing developments full of new houses in various states of incompletion – assemblages that might contain as many as three, or even four, finished and perhaps even occupied homes, along with a littering of marked out lots, house shaped outlines of block-work without windows, or plumbing, abandoned scaffolding, and a dense, fetid, air of pointless failure.

Current wisdom is that the Irish government intends bulldozing the more than 300,000 empty and unfinished “houses” scattered around the country, however, given the lack of anything that could be called a national economy here, I suspect this bulldozing will not be happening anytime too soon. The fact that some 70,000 poor are waiting on the public housing list is a can of worms we dare not open — because, what would happen to house prices if you paid a cool half million for your semi-detached dream, and the half next door was rented out to an under-educated unemployed family of twelve track-suit wearing Alco-pop chuggers for the grand sum of three euros a week? We shudder at the mere hint of the idea!

All of which reminds me powerfully of a mad and fantastic venture that existed in San Francisco, many, many years ago: The Billboard Café and Art Motel, which was next door to a performance venue called Club Nine. I would like to say I have vivid memories of these establishments, but the truth is that I frequented them while I was in university, and so my recollections are misty with the haze of excess caffeination, lingering teenage hormones, cheap beer, an unbalanced pseudo-vegetarian diet, and chronic sleep deprivation. All three establishments seemed to be attached to one another, a bit like Stickle-Bricks or Lego.

The Billboard Café, served pretty good food, in addition to hosting a massive advertising hording that displayed art from the “MASSIVE ROADSIDE SIGNAGE WITH BIG POLITICAL MESSAGES” school of art. Lyndon LaRouche was a recurring theme, as was his famous assertion that the transmission of AIDS by insect bite was “thoroughly established” (Yes, he really said that. “Strange Twists Mark Prop. 64 Campaign” Kevin Roderick, Los Angeles Times. October 30, 1986:25). The Billboard was big art you could enjoy from inside the bus as you rode by.

Club Nine was equally fantastic. I saw a band called Flesh for Lulu there – their big pop hits were “Baby Hurricane” and “Laundromat Cat.” I saw John Sex there; he was almost as tall as his hair. Club Nine was a wild and amazing venue.

But the best bit was that the whole vibrant pulsing swarm of creativity was further attached to an empty old motel, the rooms of which had been given over to invading hordes of installation artists; I’m not certain, but I suspect that an artist who wanted to show flat pictures inside of neat frames would have been drummed out the place. The Art Motel did art that enveloped you, you had to walk in and let it wrap itself around you. This was stuff you experienced, not something you hung on the wall because it matched the sofa.

I assume the café made money. I know I paid to eat there, and my best guess is that the nightclub did likewise since it was generally jammed full when I was there. I have no idea how the motel sold art – or if indeed it tried to. In fact, I rather suspect it didn’t.

And that is the whole point of this rant. Remembering the Art Motel, and thinking about all our over-priced half-built “homes” has really got me thinking about things like the value of a home, and the value of art. I’m wondering if perhaps we have spent too much time “investing” in things we should have treated with more care, perhaps thought of as having more meaning, and less like an extension of our bank accounts.

Art is supposed to mean something; and your Home is supposed to be where your heart is. Cliché, I know – but clichés become cliché because there’s the seed of truth in them.

We here stopped seeing our homes as homes; an Irish person’s home became that person’s “single largest investment” – and I’m afraid Irish Art has taken a similar hit. God Bless people like Amanda Coogan and Mannix Flynn who don’t make art a buyer can pay for, walk away with, and stick on the wall to watch it increase in value. I am tickled to tears by the fact that Mannix Flynn was elected Councillor for Dublin City last June. Talk about taking performance art to new levels.

I wish someone would find a way to open the Irish Art Motel – here and now: we sure could use a dose of feral creative Art for Art’s own sake!