Adam Savage here in my cave with a show-and-tell of past artwork of mine I
was so delighted to read all of the responses to my box that houses the keys
to hell and truth eye on that video that was like the last sculpture I made but I
refuse to say that I used to be an artist because of all sorts of reasons
I've spoken to before not part of this show and tell
however I have what I consider to be I think one of the best sculptures that I
made it's one of my favorites and I have a really amazing story about it I have
always been fascinated by lost texts texts and specifically I think the thing
that galvanized my interest in it was the name of the rose by Umberto Eco I
read the book back in the 80s before the movie came out with Sean Connery and
Christian Slater both the book and the movie are really worth watching they're
both amazing but the book goes much deeper into the idea that there are
these important things that we know about like our Plato's Commedia I think
it's Plato maybe Aristotle that we know existed because people have read about
them and commented on them and yet we don't have the original texts that's
fascinating to me because I'm sure in somebody's basement in Rome there must
be a copy of this somewhere right so I became really obsessed with those it
became a sort of a theme to me and at a certain point I thought I want to make
like a book that feels really old and so I ended up making that book and I ended
up making this sculpture which I call the somnambulist travel kit so to start
this was an old sock drawer from a steamer trunk that I found on the street
in New York and carried with me to San Francisco in 1990 when I came out here
and I loved everything about it I needed to do very little aestheticizing I did
have this piece of writing that I put in there of some I think it's Japanese I
have no idea what it says but it seemed evocative to me of an object that I
didn't quite understand and I made this book
and before I revealed the second part of the sculpture we'll talk about this book
this book is built entirely from scratch I used a new canvas new cardboard some
old leather belts and some pieces and I slowly painted it and turned it into
this thing that felt really old and really really satisfying importand
important and then I thought about like what is this book what could it be and
so then I kept this book as an active dream diary for eight months and I don't
know if you've ever written down your dreams before as a recreational activity
I'm here to tell you as a recovering dream chronicler that the more you do it
the better you get at it and the better you get out of it the more you remember
of every dream and then you start writing down more and then you remember
more and you write down more and it becomes this vicious cycle and at the
time I stopped which was I kept this thing as an active dream diary for
months so I filled all of these pages every single one of these pages is
something I wrote in first thing in the morning before wake just as I woke up
and then I started waking up several times per night I wake up after every
dream oh and I'd write down a dream and I'd go back to sleep and I started not
getting enough sleep because I was so attuned to writing down my dreams so
here's the kind of thing that I would write Marc Dave and I and someone else
are in a collector's apartment art collector we're there in a TV program or
maybe a reality show anyway we've been let in and then she comes home the
collector there are three or four of us and we seem to be viewing the event on
TV but are also part of it very meta I seem to also presage that I was going
to end up on television the the collector comes home the floors are
marble the ceilings are kind of low but the place is at least 10,000 square feet
here you just all nonsensical wonderful
dreams and then as I realized the book belongs in the box I thought what goes
in the box and then I thought what would a an eighteenth-century dream chronicler
want to travel with if they were going to seriously start taking keeping track
of their dreams and so I put in the things an alarm clock a compass for
knowing which way you were pointing and inkwell candles and matches to light
those candles and again everything in this is built from scratch and then
weathered to look really old what is the dolls hand doing here
that's part of a kind of a philosophy I have that no box should be filled out of
wholly utilitarian things that you always need one kind of surreal object
to catch your attention and I actually did this in my blade drawer you actually
come on over here you can see so when I made the phone course order for all the
blades and knives I included this weird central separator for this peculiar
exacto blade handled that exacto made and it's not that I use this all the
time I love its shape it's shown up in a lot
of special-effects weapons over the years but I love this weirdness of it
being in the middle and when I put this here I was thinking of that doll's arm
yeah surreal oh yeah that's why that's there so the pen here is in fact was a
birthday present from my ex-wife it's a Mont Blanc Meister stuck and it is yeah
it was expensive birthday present back in the 90s even more so now a more
beautiful writing implement I have never used and in fact I used this very pen to
write down every one of these dreams in brown ink but the story I want to tell
you about this sculpture is a really really good one so I had this in an art
show at my friend Catherine cooks gallery when it used to
be on Hayes Street and after that group show I brought it back to the theater I
was working in I was working at George Coates performance works at 1:10
McAlister near in the Hastings Law School Building and I brought this
sculpture back and like yes it was packed up and put over into a corner and
I think like 10 months went by I kind of knew it was there but I wasn't paying
real attention to it I didn't have a lot of room in the house that I was living
in so I was fine to the store it over at the theater that I was working and to be
clear this theater at one time McAlister is this giant vaulted ceiling sprayed
concrete theater from the early part of the 20th century it's a really beautiful
space but it's like there's holes in the walls because it used to be a dropped
ceiling office and there's all sorts basically it feels kind of like an
archaeological site at least when we were working in it at the same time as
we were using it as an actual theater so an object like this kind of fit in
anyway at a certain point my friend Shane Cooper came up to me and said Adam
someone told me you know about that red box that's in the tool room what do you
know about that red box and I said oh yeah yeah some nebulous travel kit I
built that and he went white I said I'd built it he goes okay dude that thing
has been freaking me out for like a week and I was like what do
you mean and he said well I found this box in the corner of this building and I
saw this book and they opened it up and nothing made any sense and it's
clearly like a hundred and fifty years old
and I couldn't figure out what the hell this was and where it had been found and
what it meant it's been freaking me out and I realized and I said oh my god
Shane you've had the most pure experience of this object that I could
have possibly constructed because this object all the mystery that I put into
it all the the ways in which I gave it a narrative
it's all based on me rooting around in my grandmother's attic and Stephens
landing in the early 70s finding my mom's ex-husbands Telegraph machine and
learning about what a telegraph machine was it's that unpacking of the mind a
kid does is they start to go through the detritus and the stuff of the world
around them and to be honest I'm building these objects to fool myself
and bring myself back to that state of being that kid exploring the world and
learning about it and finding really cool mysteries and things but I'm never
gonna really fool myself but this box being placed in that location in that
room full of dusty artifacts from the past put Shane into a state of mind
where he enjoyed a kind of theater of the exploration of this book that is
absolutely pure like the only way for me to properly show my sculpture I realized
would be to hide it in people's attics and find out maybe years later what they
thought when they came across it because that's the kind of experience that I'm
looking for and that is the somnambulist travel kit thanks for watching