Pure Evel
A visit to an office building to see some art got me thinking
About a month and a half ago I drove to Topeka Kansas to check out David Spriggs work “Astra” that is in the Docking office building next to the state capital. The piece is made from layers of transparent planes. Each plane features a transparent printed image that are aligned in space to form a three-dimensional cloud shape that changes and shifts as you move around it. It’s an extremely impressive work.
While I was in Topeka I also decided to check out the Evel Knievel Museum, and yes there really is one. I wanted to go because there is a reoccurring set of appropriated images that I find myself using from Knievel’s 1975 jump and crash at Wembley Stadium in London.
Knievel was such an odd part of 1970s pop culture, along with things like the obsession with the Bermuda Triangle, Pyramid Power, Aztec Indians being the decedents of extra terrestrials (Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken), Big Foot and other swamp and forest monsters, etc.
It was a weird little slice of time with bad made for TV movies, pulp books and magazines, talk radio shows, and more all dedicated to this stuff and the United States seemed to be deeply caught up in it.
Knievel seemed to be everywhere at the time all the way up to his failed Snake River Canyon jump, and then like the rest of these odd pop culture items, he simply faded away, replaced by the latest fad as we moved into the 1980s.
Anyway, after visiting the museum, I started working on a new series of composited images based on a sequence of Knievel crashing after hitting the 13th bus before the ramp at Wembley. There is something about the images of this man attempting to defy the odds and jump over 13 AEC Merlin buses. In many ways it feels like a metaphor to me for the state of the United States right now. Where the world watches as our current administration continues to do things that baffle the mind. Like a slow motion train wreck that none of us can look away from.
There are five images in all. This is one where all of the crash stills have been composited into a single sequence. The others will be separated out and presented in order leading up to this one.
The original photos are by Bob Thomas and an unaccredited AP Photographer
Evel is definitely part of the pop culture swirl of my childhood. I think you are right in connecting that kind of American showman mythos with what the US and the world is going through these days.
Great concept for a body of work.