Welcome to the Jungle (Gym)

It's been a few days but I wanted to write a bit about being in St. Louis last weekend. I stayed with my friends Nic & Holly, who got married this past summer, largely just hanging around within the slightly off-kilter domestic scene in their living room: Holly knitting fingerless gloves; Nic pecking away at his laptop; Venture Bros. DVDs running persistently in the background; their cats curled up on the floor or else occupying somebody's lap (or Nic's still warmer laptop, if he wasn't using the computer just then). Both their cats are very sociable and somewhat neurotic. One's a smallish black cat with separation anxiety and the other's a big diabetic Christmas ham of a cat who demands food more or less nonstop and graduates to persistent meowing and turning in tight, agitated circles once somebody actually begins to scoop it out of the can. Both are the kind of cat who walk up to you when you're sitting on the couch and look you in the eye and meow at you, like they expect you know what they're saying. Never having had cats, I have a kind of abstract, puzzled reaction to them. These particular ones are friendly and fun to be around, though, at least once I consume a fair amount more off-brand Claritin than the outside of the box says I should.

Mainly I wanted to mention the City Museum of St. Louis, though, where Nic & Holly took me for most of Saturday evening. The name's extremely bland and inadequate -- it's a converted shoe factory and local artist's pipe dream that mashes together the sensibilities of a Friedensreich Hundertwasser building, a somewhat ad-hoc regional aquarium, and an industrial grade McDonald's PlayPlace. A lot of it's still a work in progress, especially the second floor and its collection of fish and reptiles, but what's there right now is just a neat, bizarre space to be in... What reminds me of Hundertwasser (particularly the KunstHausWien, which I lived across the street from for my semester in Vienna) is the tile-shard mosaic work and the rolling, uneven flooring, but that's almost not worth paying attention to compared to the vast network of slides and crawl spaces made out of plaster or reclaimed construction materials that runs throughout the entire facility. The pictures on the website give you a pretty good idea of what's there, especially the vast, three-story, consciously adult-sized jungle gym that climbs up one side of the building, incorporating a potpourri of steel coils, metal grates, and airplane bodies. Also great is the series of "caves" inside the building, made up of claustrophobic little passages and tight spiraling metal slides that run up and down three or four stories' worth of the old factory. It's great; you crawl around, you get all dusty and sweaty, you scuff up your clothes. (In the morning you find all these scratches and bruises on your joints; something like putting your kneecap on an inch-and-a-half width of ribbed metal cable and then putting your whole body's weight on your kneecap works better when you weigh 75 pounds than when you weigh 175.) The bulk of the crowd consisted of small children up through college-aged kids, with a couple of wedding parties thrown in. In the middle of the third floor there's a windowless bar full of campy bricabrac and red light and cigarette smoke where you can buy a beer, watch the melted ice from the beer cooler drain directly into a bucket in the middle of the floor, wonder just what the hell kind of building codes this place could possibly be subject to without breaking them. On the second floor there's a hallway with a modest collection of vintage opera posters on the walls; this area was closed off the night I was there but from the interior cave space I could just make out some of them through a window and a not-quite-shut black curtain, which is somehow a better way to look at them anyway.

What was most appealing about it to me is how it's full of sharp corners and steep dropoffs and open tanks of water -- among public areas designed to accommodate children, its willingness to be a somewhat hazardous space seems to verge on the chaotic. I can't help but suspect somebody will close it down in a few years because a small child will get a nasty laceration from some rusty metal, or a drunk seventeen-year-old will plummet four stories onto an artificial rock formation below, but hopefully that won't happen. More large-scale installation art should be like this -- something you literally crawl around inside, something that doesn't really function primarily as art, something that draws a little bit of blood. Don't try to get me to think too hard about recontextualizing my space, just hang a bunch of life preservers in a dark room and let me run through them.