The 20th Century Room

Doom

As we watched, the snowman leaped to his feet, hugging and slapping himself, twisting awkwardly in the narrow space between the stadium seating, and finally falling, still on fire, across his neighboring spectators.

I was so impressed by the scene that I didn't understand for a long time how obscure the image was—even the elemental irony of snow in flames turned out to be hard to convey. And what did it all mean, really? Surely there were elements of morality in the fact that we witnessed this collateral disaster on the road to the Superbowl. In those days the irrelevant bellicosity of pro ball and casual military imperialism were closely allied in my mind.

Doom was probably the first painting I did that consciously tried to create a story. This is actually a really hard thing to do—maybe it's better left to literature, multimedia, and explanations like this. The main figure is our friend and babysitter, Dave Brinck, who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown. Dave was a major influence on us, and one of his persistent theories was this pop-science elaboration of the destruction of Atlantis, probably on Santorini island.

In Dave's platonic conception, Atlantis is a symbol of not human pride or arrogance but of humanity as an organic machine containing the seed of its own inevitable destruction. That flaw is a recapitulation of an atomistic fusion of being and nothingness, which is viewed as the basis of meaning, and always contains its own antidote. We had grown up not only with Dave's endless reiterations, but with a sharp cold-war sense of nuclear annihilation, and this fed into the Atlantis theory well, but you really need to hear this about a thousand times to understand. We spent an inordinate amount of time talking about this stuff as kids.

Dave had always posed as a schizophrenic and was inclined to heavy drinking and obnoxious recitations of his theories. It was really pretty harmless, but at a certain point it became a crisis, and he often confessed in early morning phone calls to an inability to hold it all together. That would result in personal doom, and who knew how far it might extend. In the end, I pulled my famous Judas act and drove with Dave and his parents to the state mental hospital at Warm Springs, Montana. That's me in a one-eyed duplicitous role, standing behind Dave's horrified apprehension.

Was there any justification in mixing the football metaphor with Dave's dire state, or in morphing the melodramatic fiery iceman into a falling warhead? Maybe not. But I still think we're all doomed.