The Smuggler Mine in Aspen hosted a light and sound installation last week, commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum.
British conceptual artist Matt Copson designed the piece, titled “Obituary,” in which he explored questions about meaning and the purpose of life through the perspective of an anthropomorphic fox — a “proxy,” as Copson sees it, for a human experiencing an existential crisis.
Copson wrote a monologue for the fox and projected the words on walls inside the mine, so viewers could read it as they walked through the tunnels.
The monologue expressed the fox’s thoughts at the end of its life — often philosophical, sometimes abstract and occasionally gory, as was the case in one series: “Sometimes I wonder / if this is all a metaphor / but then I breathe the dusty air / and feel the sooty particles / secrete through the bloodied gore of my neck.”
Copson also created a laser animation of the fox character, projected in one of the cave-like spaces underground. And throughout the mine, speakers played abstract sounds and music that echoed through the tunnels; the audio component was composed by Oliver Leith.
Reporter Kaya Williams experienced the sights and sounds of the “Obituary” art installation in the Smuggler Mine. And she had the chance to speak with Copson about the ideas and inspirations behind the work for this audio postcard.
The installation was open for two days only during the Aspen Art Museum’s ArtWeek, which celebrates the arts and culminates in an annual fundraiser.
Matt Copson: I thought about the history of cave paintings being the basis and the genesis of all art ever, and so making, kind of, drawings with light on the wall seemed like a perfect way to bring things back to our most kind of primal and primitive form of witnessing art, witnessing the fire and the charcoal on the wall.
And there is something about the cave, and the mine as an idea, that it brings you back to the weight of history all the time.
I mean, the role of art is just to engage with the human condition. I think that’s all it can do, and I think that’s what it does best.
I like using characters in my works as these kinds of vessels. I've used the character of Reynard the fox, which is a European folkloric tale. And it’s one of the first times when an animal was given human characteristics. So in the case of the fox, it's, you know, a sly, kind of devilish creature. A slippery kind of antihero character.
So in the mine, there is this monologue delivered by this fox that's in a kind of state of death, essentially. And it takes you on a kind of narrative existentialist journey. And it kind of riffs on all of these classical constructs of, like, Plato's cave and all of this, but then giving that a kind of twist of the contemporary. So as you'll see, it kind of references things from the outside world a lot — be it Spotify, or bee decline all these kinds of strange things.
The state of the world we're living in, naturally, everything plays into it. I don't have any answers as an artist ever. But I have, hopefully, the ability to prod things. So that's why I kind of like creating these characters, where they can exist in the kind of hypocrisy and the confusion of the contemporary moment. And hopefully, via that, there's some — that's where the relationship with an audience is formed. ‘
The history of cinema even begins with magic lantern shows and haunted houses and all these effects like Pepper's ghosts and all these things. And they were there to kind of frighten and startle and surprise and engage with an audience through storytelling. And so there's a history of that in art as well, where people would light up the backs of paintings with torches of flames and play music.
And I want to engage with that kind of practice and that kind of thinking, but thrusting that form of storytelling into the contemporary moment and the present moment, whatever that may be.
And right now, it feels like perpetual crisis. And so that is kind of echoed in the characters and the kind of existentialism of the themes that I play with.
I do fundamentally think that art is telling stories, because we are narrative beings as humans, that's the thing that differentiates us, the way we experience time is narrative and the way we understand things is always a story. And sometimes art has denied that but I think it is a fundamental.
This transcript has been edited and condensed from the original interview.
