Wisconsin Death Trip
7 April 2012
The book Wisconsin Death Trip is one of the inspirations for the solo show Black River Falls. I’m not sure when I first heard of the book – sometime after I moved to the UK for my third (and current) (permanent?) period living here, around 1995. It was the reference to my home state that caught the interest – if I’d been living in the Midwest, it probably wouldn’t have registered.
I saw the film version first: black and white re-enactments of scenes in the book juxtaposed with film of Black River Falls in its present day shot in color, thoughtful, beautiful and quite intense narration by Ian Holm. The film made me send away for the book – the first time I bought myself anything through amazon.co.uk. What a fabulous book it is.
Written in 1973 by Michael Lesy, it is simply a series of late 19th Century newspaper articles, contemporary letters and journal entries, about life, death and insanity in and around Black River Falls, along with beautiful glass negative photographs by the town’s photographer Charles Van Schaik. Mr Lesy organized the book carefully: the reader is shown interesting benign images – horses, street scenes, landscape – alternating with images that shock our 21st Century selves: children in coffins, extreme poverty, stark madness. And in between are tales of harrowing life, brutal hardship and matter of fact death in a small Midwestern frontier community. I wrote to Mr Lesy when I first started thinking about making Black River Falls, and this is what he wrote back: “You're on your own, my friend. Just remember: Although the Badger State Banner was published in Black River Falls and the photographs reproduced in Wisconsin Death Trip were made there as well--the book never ever was about Black River Falls alone. Of course, some of the people in the book were from the town. But the book is about the state, the region, and the nation. The misfortunes, cruelties, sufferings, and insanities--and the humor that emerges when the only choices are either to laugh or to scream--were/are our nation's sufferings. The darkness in the book is our shared darkness. Also, please understand: A "death trip" is a psychedelic term. It refers to an acid experience of death and rebirth. "Death trips" were harrowing, but they were redemptive. They were never one-way tickets to hell. Good luck--” Michael Lesy
For the show I use images acquired from the Wisconsin Historical Society and audio recordings of the town’s senior citizens reading old newspaper articles and folk stories. This contrasts with the main story – the life of my sister Jenny who converted to Islam for seven years, married the same Albanian man three times, opened a restaurant near the town, and went a little bit crazy. The old articles I chose reflect tangentially onto Jenny’s life, with the intention of providing some continuity and context – like a well designed binding, a striking font you can use to read her story, and beveled contours, shaded colors – a kind prism to hold between your eyes and her life, lighting the imagination.