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.
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.
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