[SUBSTRAINS] Frog Belly – The Spirit of the Car

HOUDINI presents a brand new column, SUBSTRAINS. The MindApe picks through the trash strata of neglect culture for interesting specimens and/or signs of imminent danger. Put on your hazmat suits, grab a dosimeter, and join the fun!

Introducing... SUBSTRAINS

Shut up about art! How do you translate the horror of living? The forensics are clear: mutate or die. Join the MindApe as it paws through historic fragments of surrealism, body horror, chance, science fiction, and the underground. Not as commodities to appreciate, but as specimens to test for infection... Come sample the flesh… Only in SUBSTRAINS!

TODAY'S SAMPLE

S12251985: “The Spirit of the Car”

On Christmas Eve, around 1985, Richard Kern and I met David at a coffee shop, then headed out South in his old station wagon. That car seemed like such a piece of shit but it just kept going. Death Valley was obviously not ready for David's car. It was indestructible. David claimed that the spirit of the car was inside this green, red, and yellow hollow plastic frog that lived on his dashboard. Its mouth was wide open and its arms were raised like it was having a fit. David told me to check out the frog's innards. Peeking down its throat, I saw hundreds of dead bugs: moths, gnats, bees, and other scrapings from the windshield and radiator grill. He told me it had a voracious appetite but, if fed, protected the car. I was not one to scoff at this creature, which had done the impossible as far as I was concerned.

—Tommy Turner from David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side

ANALYSIS

It’s always interesting to consider the possibility that an “artist” can be at their most radical not in their major works but in the little gestures and whims that fill the void corners of their life. These parapraxes have the advantage of being ambiguous; simultaneously serious and/or completely unserious; no need to maintain any kind of consistency and no pressure to go beyond a one-off experiment. This is often the zone where the strangest things happen. We need to turn to anecdote, to casual happenstance, and look with a forensic eye for the excluded pieces of evidence. This is what Charles Fort referred to as “Damned” data; extraneous (or at least, extra-catalogue) items. Sometimes the retrospective exhibition brings forth a few tatters of notes, personal items, journals, doodles. DO NOT EVER SKIP THESE. This is where you are going to find the real innovations.

Detours, suppressions, possibilities.

Creativity is not what it seems to be. It works with an alien logic, entirely adjacent to things like effort, justice, depth, experience. It is if anything a total configuration of chance that just happens to exploit features and histories to pad itself out with false leads. The “work” retroactively justifies its existence through all sorts of excuses. But really in the end it is just an alien object towards which any ‘first contact’ is entirely speculative. This includes the creator, who is conclusively nothing but a vector, an infected being. Things can be (it seems) provoked, but this is mostly a case of convenience, exposure: it is magical thinking and ritualistic (read: risky) behaviour that just happens (once in a while) to deliver a real result.

DAMAGE REPORT

Side-swiped by chance; significant repairs needed. Invest in an apotropaic toy for the dashboard.

QUESTIONS:

• Why a frog?
• Is this superstition, or is it poetry? Is there a difference?
• Have you ever fed something living to something inanimate? Would you?
• Who is crazier in this scenario, David for explaining the frog, or Tommy for believing him?
• Is dashboard clutter a lost art?
• Should I print out the SUBSTRAINS FROG COLORING PAGE, color it in a maniacal manner, and mail it to my friends?

Send your responses (and completed coloring paperwork) to the HOUDINI CONTACT FORM with the subject line, “FROGBELLY.”