REPORTS from the Dropout Center

This report compiles descriptions of a series of visits I undertook after numerous reports of sightings at an abandoned complex on campus.

REPORT 1: Instructions for destruction

As I entered the partially buried structure, it was dark inside, and my only light in the blackness of the northern Scandinavian winter was a headtorch I had strapped on.^[1]

With the wind whistling outside, I scanned the room and caught a glimpse of a stack of papers in a corner. On them, I saw a series of sheets of handwritten script, all in small capital letters. There was also a small red book with spiral binding, with the words “PRIVATE BOOK 1” scrawled on the cover. A circle was drawn in pencil around the number one.^[2]

I shuffled through the papers, trying to get an insight into the character that may have left them behind, imagining I might find a clue that would lead me to discover the cause of the recent disruptions on campus, which seem to be linked to this abandoned space.

Upon reading a few pages in the sharp light of my headlamp, I ascertained that these papers contained a series of instructions. For what? To construct a machine, or for fashioning an escape route? Who was instructing whom in these papers, and what were they telling them to do? I noted that it could be inductions to a cult or “secret society.”

I read: NO GRASS PIECE: GO WITHOUT GRASS FOR THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME AS GRASS PIECE, WHICH TURNS OUT TO BE 33 DAYS. START IMMEDIATELY AFTER GRASS PIECE… PARANOIA STARTS…^[3]

Note: are these papers from a diary? Is this partially subterranean building a place for someone to come to document their experiments? Maybe during their “NO GRASS PIECE” they were creating the smoke and lights that have been reported, making people on campus believe monsters or aliens have been lurking on the edges of the site.

But here’s another page: FOR ME THERE CAN BE NO ART REVOLUTION THAT IS SEPARATE FROM A SCIENCE REVOLUTION, A POLITICAL REVOLUTION, AND EDUCATION REVOLUTION, A DRUG REVOLUTION, A SEX REVOLUTION OR A PERSONAL REVOLUTION. I CANNOT CONSIDER A PROGRAM OF MUSEUM REFORMS WITHOUT EQUAL ATTENTION TO GALLERY REFORMS AND ART MAGAZINE REFORMS WHICH WOULD AIM TO ELIMINATE STABLES OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS. I WILL NOT CALL MYSELF AN ART WORKER BUT RATHER AN ART DREAMER AND I WILL PARTICIPATE ONLY IN A TOTAL REVOLUTION SIMULTANEOUSLY PERSONAL AND PUBLIC.^[4]

Confusion: in the previous pages, the writer was focused on tuning in and dropping out, but this page speaks to more organized activity. Where is the evidence of groups, of meetings? It seems like this is just one person’s writing. Is this a highly individual activity documented in these papers?

It also says on the same page GENERAL STRIKE PIECE… and… MASTURBATION PIECE.

I conclude: a lot has been going on in this shed.

A last page I get to reads: 1^ST WK AUGUST, 71. DECIDE TO BOYCOTT WOMEN. THROW LUCY LIPPARD’S — 2^ND LETTER ON DEFUNCT PILE, UNANSWERED. DO NOT GREET ROCHELL BASS, IN STORE. 2^ND WK AUGUST,71. PAULA TAVINS CALLS AUG. 11 TELL HER I AM BOYCOTTING WOMEN AS AN EXPERIMENT THRU ABT SEPT THAT AFTER THAT “COMMUNICATION WILL BE BETTER THAN EVER.”^[5]

My report on these findings is inconclusive. I have found a diary or letters to others which describe anti-social behavior and possible ways of pushing oneself “to the border.” The results and evidence of any fallout on campus is yet to be determined.

REPORT 2: Site of Production

Reports of loud noises once again sent me back to the partially buried shed on campus. For the second trip, I decided to go in the morning, so that what glimmer of northern sun there was could help me look through the clutter and maybe determine what is causing so much disruption.

Upon arrival, the door was wide open, and a few light cracks were coming through the roof. When I entered, I noticed large shapes, in cardboard, piled everywhere. Shapes that looked like air-conditioning ducts or long snakes of empty spaces that children would love to climb through.^[6]

Note: has someone constructed an impromptu playground, or dumped piles of leftovers from an industrial-sized cardboard mock-up of air-conditioning units? Why do all the pieces fit together so neatly, and what is it assembling towards? Does it lead somewhere?

I noticed that there are only a standard number of shapes—there are about six or eight different shapes, joined together into what seems like an infinite number of forms, which sometimes look like they come from other rooms or up from the floor. I could barely squeeze between the large cardboard shapes, and as I did, I wondered: why would someone spend so much time making this? Perhaps many people have worked on it, perhaps it is not a design at all, just an ongoing thought through form.

Are they prototypes? Do they have a function? Are they a mockery of function?

I knocked gently on them, to see if they were hollow or hiding something. I noticed that the surfaces were covered in fingerprints, so that what initially looked like clean, neat objects seem to have been handled and re-handled multiple times. ^[7]

I walked through the first room of the shed and into the second, where I found metal sheets leaning against the wall. Some sheets were bent in angles, and some were flat. They had thick sides, with shiny metal paint dripping over the edges from monochrome fronts.

I saw tacked to the wall:

CHARLOTTE POSENENSKE

manifesto

The things I make are variable,
as simple as possible,
reproducible.
They are components of a space; since they are like building elements,
they can always be rearranged into new combinations or positions.
Thus, they alter the space.
I leave this alteration to the consumer who thereby again and anew participates in the creation.
The simplicity of the basic geometric forms is beautiful and suited to demonstrate the principles
of rationalized alteration.
I make series because I do not want to make single pieces for individuals,
in order to have elements combinable within a system,
in order to make something which is repeatable, objective, and because it is economical.
The series could be prototypes for mass production.
Series DW (at Fischer’s) is made of corrugated pasteboard which is light and cheap: a material for consumption.
Often the elements or their combinations are very large in order to alter the spatial environment
more thoroughly.
They approximate architectural dimensions and also for this reason differ increasingly from the former gallery objects.
They are less and less recognizable as “artworks.”
The objects should have the objective character of industrial products.
They are not intended to represent anything other than what they are.
The former categorization of the arts no longer exists.
The artist of the future should have to work with a team of specialists in a development laboratory.
Though art’s formal development has progressed at an increasing tempo, its social function has regressed.
Art is a product of temporary topicality, yet, the market is minute while prestige and prices rise the less topical the supply is.
It is painful for me to face the fact that art cannot contribute to the solution of urgent social problems.

Offenbach, February 11, 1968

I understood: this space was being re-built from the inside out.

Conclusion: I believe I have encountered, in the partially buried shed, a portal which seems to contain the makings of something being broken apart and re-formed: social constructions, architecture. But the mystery to me is that there is no one to be found.

REPORT 3: Signs of Life

The shapes in the shed were left undisturbed. The next day I began to write my report but another disturbance of noise and light had been called into campus police the night before.

After lunch, I started on the thirty-minute walk to the shed again, with my handheld flashlight on the thick blanket of snow that had fallen the night before.

My boots crunched and punched down over ten centimeters with each step, and I was out of breath as I reached the woodshed. It seemed to be completely buried now. Somehow the snow had covered it, leaving only a shape, a kind of lumpen mass barely rising from the ground.

Note: the building cannot have been this sunken before.

After searching for where I thought the front door had been, then walking around the snowy lump, I found a door with a window in it around the back, brushed off the snow on the glass and peered in.

A perfectly constructed bedroom! An iron wrought bed, with homemade quilt, a wooden side table, candles, books, plates, a chair, and a small table.^[8]

Someone must be here! I tried the handle, it was locked, and so I jangled through my keyring, and finally finding the right match, was able to step into, or rather down into, the room which was sunken lower than the day before.

The room was immaculate, like a model of a room.

What had been happening here? I read a sign on the wall that contained, in German, something along the lines of “Citizens of Rottweil are welcome here every day from 9 am until 12pm and evenings.”

Note: the rapid transformation of the space again makes me wonder: is someone building fictional social constructions? Has it been used by people? From the neat piles of bottles and the cigarettes in the ashtray, from the deck of cards left in four hands around the table, it appears so.

Surely, this construction in the shed is a strange place to visit, to meet people in the middle of a snowstorm. Coming out here to the edge of campus and going downstairs into a room that appears to be a bedroom, with nothing else around.

I am beginning to wonder, and to start to worry a bit about my reports. How can I describe that I am beginning to believe that everything I have discovered is in some way intended to alter people’s perceptions of their own inner and social workings? How is that going to solve the crime of ongoing and seemingly unstoppable disruptions?

Who is calling these problems into campus police anyway? Why am I repeatedly being asked to walk to the edge of campus, each time finding a completely new set of objects and arrangements, magically appearing and disappearing inside?

REPORT 4: Total Carnage

I decided yesterday that I am out of my depth and that I need to ask for help from someone higher up than me, so that I can visit with backup next time I venture out to the shed, which also seems to be disappearing into the earth. I’m just not paid enough for this.

In order to ask for help, I submitted the three descriptions of my visits in a report titled “Visits to the Woodshed, Unmanned disruptions,” which described my findings in depth and left as a conclusion that it appears that a group of people, or individuals one after another, had been using the shed as a place to conduct a series of experiments on how social relationships are constructed. Yes, strange to do this on the edge of a site (the campus), and yes, strange that each time the characters who inhabit the shed seem to disappear off the edge.^[9]

Something about the entire endeavor seems to be sinking, disappearing, and wily.

Today, the Dean approved a team to join me, including students as they perhaps may have extra information about what has been seen and heard on campus.

We decide to bring cameras, measuring tape, a compass, and flashlights—just in case. Luckily, the snow has melted by now, and the sky presents us with a clean, crisp blue low overhead. It’s a bright, late winter day, and we will be able to see clearly inside. That’s if the building is still there, I think to myself as we set off.

I’ve begun to wonder if all these objects have minds of their own.

We walk for forty minutes on frozen ground, which sometimes releases ice puddles of mud under our feet. We have a map but become disorientated toward the last five to ten minutes, because, as I had worried, there is no shed or structure to be seen. We keep searching in small groups and backtracking to one spot that is clearly marked on the map, looking at our compasses, and venturing out in directions we think will take us to the shed. The day is passing and I’m aware that we may only have a couple hours of light left and need time to return to campus.

Suddenly I hear a shout from another group, someone is waving in the distance and the rest begin to walk quickly toward them.

Someone says they have seen something in the ground, and as we look we can see the shed has completely sunken and looks partially burned.^[10] The roof, which is at ground level now, is blackened and skeletal, and from the edge we can see into the various rooms below. It looks like total carnage.

Each room has a pile of junk strewn across it: beer cans, chains, glasses, cameras, magazines, baseballs, flare guns, leather gloves… There seems to be chain-link fencing, with objects hanging off, and strangely, a good number of aluminum mobility walkers in neat stacks.^[11]

I start photographing each room from above. The compositions are better than the piles of junk. I am seeing beauty in the mess; I feel like I’m photographing a crime scene. Looking down into the rooms, I can see that each “pour” has been left to be seen from above, to be looked down at.

I realize that all these objects that have appeared in the shed in the past weeks have captured, or tried to capture and present, a moment of fleetingness— not in a diaristic form, even though they may have appeared to be so at first. Rather, each document operates as a game-piece on a larger chess board, a board of gestures in relationship to social constructions. And now, as the shed will collapse under the earth, these gestures will continue to exist only in the re-telling of them.