The Mines of Colorado and Douglas Darden

 

Paris Mill mining structure, Colorado

I grew up in South Carolina. You don't grow up in South Carolina without having spent time hanging out in Confederate cemeteries. They're everywhere, so at some point in high school, you're going to end up loitering in a random, overgrown cemetery in the middle of the woods. Heck, right behind my house was a section of woods that had not been developed because there were numerous graves on that lot. I hung out there a lot.

Now, Douglas Darden grew up in Colorado. I imagine he liked to explore all the old mining buildings scattered throughout the Rocky Mountains. I mean, when I moved to Colorado a third of my life ago, I spent a great deal of that summer before classes traveling with my buddy Scott to various mining camps and derelicts, &c. I have a hard time imagining Darden not doing this. I think about Ben Ledbetter's blog post about being out in derelict industrial buildings and "being in heaven." I think of the way he describes the "cute" industrial building outside of Baton Rouge that he describes in his notes for Oxygen House and Condemned Building. I have a hard time imagining Darden not behaving like this amongst the abandoned mines of Colorado.

And let's be real, these abandoned mining structures are everywhere. Take a drive through the Rockies and look up into the peaks and one will see derelict structures, yellow mine dumps, &c. It is its own form of picturesque.

These must have had some impact on him, as mining and industry feature heavily into his work. Saloon for Jesse James is a bar for the miners that work at the Kennecott open-pit copper mine, and is located on the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake, the area of which is used to mine salt. Lessons learned and themes explored in Saloon for Jesse James would carry over into Museum of Impostors. For instance, "Black Rock" features in both projects, and both projects are situated starting on land and move into water and ending on an isolated feature in the water (fresh water well on an island in the Saloon and a silo in the Museum). The Museum also features mining. In some of Darden's early writings for the Museum, he speaks about Lazaretto Point being leased for strip mining for iron. Mining is just a feature of industrial themes that fascinated Darden throughout his short life, and likely started in his youth.

Beyond this alone, there is something inherent in the construction of these mining structures — industrial structures in general — that are spatially confusing, ambiguous, and even apparently contradictory. Photographing the interior of these structures can be quite odd. I have a minor collection of my own photos inside some of these structures that I take because the view and how I capture it are spatially ambiguous. Am I looking up? Down? Left? Upside-down? Did an architecture student turn the model on its side? Is this zoomed in on something small or zoomed out on something huge? Where do those beams run? It's very exciting to be inside these places, albeit incredibly dangerous.

Such spaces are highly reminiscent of Piranesi's Prisons series. Piranesi would rework his initial drawings and republish them later, in which some of the modifications, while appearing more refined, generate enhanced spatial ambiguity and even impossible geometries. The dark atmosphere, the layering of spaces, machinery, industrial elements with vernacular architecture, perilous and precarious constructions and dilapidations and heights, et al makes these 19th century Colorado mining facilities highly compatible with Piranesi's Carceri. I would go so far to say that one could almost make side-by-side comparisons of the two. Such would be a fun exercise to further illustrate how likely these old mining structures were influential to Darden, given his love and predilection for Piranesi.

Piranesi, Carcer VII, 1761

I recently came across Darden's notes for a faculty seminar on Piranesi. While I was reading these notes, I could not stop imagining these mines I have visited (let's be real, trespassed in). There is no doubt in my mind that Darden visited such places — whether as an aesthetic curiosity or a youth needing a place to trespass — and that they had an impact on him.

Douglas Darden and the Tarot

 

Sketch for Frontispiece of Condemned Building, 1988

Douglas Darden does not strike me as someone who was interested in the occult, and in reality, he likely was not. He was not a practitioner of occult arts nor one engaged in rigorous academic study of the occult ("armchair magicians," as practitioners like to call them). Yet, from time to time I come across something in Darden's work that indicates there were occult subjects that were interesting to him. 

For instance, in Temple Forgetful, there is the memory theater of Camillo. This concept of memory theaters is comparable to memory palaces, which are mnemonic devices, and were considered magical centuries ago. It is a relative of memory magic, such as those spells found in the Greek Magical Papyri, or entire magical experiments, such as in the Ars Notoria. I suspect Darden got this image of the memory theater from Francis Yates's 1966 work The Art of Memory, as I doubt Darden was reading Camillo's work in Italian (still untranslated into English to this day, except in Yates's work).

I digress.

Recently I was going through some materials I have from the project files that are currently in the Avery Archive. I found a scan of an early sketch for the frontispiece in which the tarot was influential, at least for a moment. Darden did a series of sketches for the frontispiece on 12 June 1988, and this is but one. Clearly he was just tossing around an idea. In this sketch there is a rough depiction of The Tower card and the Hanged Man card.

The Hanged Man and The Tower, Smith-Waite-Rider

A few things to note. Darden is clearly looking at the Smith-Waiter-Rider deck. Of the dozens of historical copies of the tarot decks I have looked at, nearly all illustrate the Hanged Man's right leg crossed over, as opposed to his left leg, as is illustrated in the Smith-Waiter-Rider deck. Only one historical deck I have seen has the left leg crossed, and that was a chemical copy, so the entire card was flipped. I am not a tarot expert, so I have only looked at a handful of historical decks, but regardless, the reproduction and distribution of historical decks is something that was not available to Darden at the time, but the Smith-Waite-Rider deck was.

Another thing to note is that Darden has not drawn the Tower as it is usually drawn, i.e. the top of the tower is a crown that has fallen off. We see this trope of "crown" in nearly all Tower cards. Darden simply draws a tower with a crossed gable roof. There is something about the image of the Tower that is intriguing to Darden, but not so much the symbolism, I suppose. At least the crown trope was not important.

The Tower seems to make sense in Darden's philosophy. The Tower is a condemned building — con-damnare — one that is toppling over in catastrophic destruction. Its divinatory meaning is one that is often feared. It signifies a great catastrophe (literally a "turn of events") and change, usually in a horrible or painful way. But the Hanged Man is an unusual choice. The Hanged Man may be an earlier conception of the turtle flipped over — i.e. the turtle in Blade Runner and the turtle shell in his self-portrait and in the Dweller by the Dark Stream prose poem. One may even begin to see the turtle in the self-portrait is hanged on a rope like the Hanged Man, so the hanging turtle may be alluding to this very early conception of the frontispiece.

It stands to reason that Darden is looking at the Smith-Waite-Rider deck, that much is certain. He may have also been looking at Waite's Key to the Tarot, which is pictorial guide to interpreting the cards when doing a reading. The Hanged Man and the Tower have strong divinatory meanings that are applicable to Darden's Underbelly. However, it all feels superficial. It is as if Darden was intrigued by the images, not so much the meaning, and briefly played with them.

Denver and Colorado at large is a strange place of mysticism. Only in Colorado have I met a practicing alchemist (several in fact). I have met great mystics and occult authors. I know several practicing sorcerers and world renowned astrologers here. It is a land that has always had the occult lurking under its belly. Darden must have bumped into one of numerous occultists living in this city and state. Perhaps it even happened in the very brief few months he was residing in Denver before leaving for the American Academy in Rome. One was bound to introduce Darden to the Tarot, even if it was a passing intrigue.

Now, why would Darden not further pursue the Tarot in his frontispiece or at all? The Tarot and the occult is certainly an application of the Underbelly. Magic has long been deemed taboo and forbidden. Some would even say transgressive. Darden certainly was fascinated by meaning and symbolism, even mythologization. As Joe Juhasz once said to me, "[Darden] was Post-Modern taken to the limit." And as Ishmael says repeatedly in Moby-Dick: "These things cannot be without their meaning."

But perhaps tarot was just another set of symbols and meanings that were too far afield, too different from Darden's symbols and meanings. Tarot is certainly an intense study, and maybe Darden just thought it was too much effort to learn a set of symbols that really were not that compatible with the work he had already done. In following Darden's work, seeing it mature and develop up until 1988, purely occult topics were just a bit too much to deliver Condemned Building. Perhaps one day he would have returned to it if he had not passed away, but at the time in 1988 it was a passing intrigue. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I personally find it intriguing to examine these rough drafts to see what Darden was exploring.