When I was lent this book in 2016, I was developing a gallery at the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead – a complicated project about an abandoned and unremarkable collection from a museum that didn’t exist any more.
This book isn’t just about a popular techno outfit from the 1990s burning £1m. It weaves a clever and mind-bending story that incorporates such figures as psychoanalyst Carl Jung, writer Robert Anton Wilson and graphic novelist Alan Moore.
It switched me on to the likes of Moore’s ideaspace; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noösphere”, or “sphere of the mind”; chaos magic; Discordianism; and the “Maybe Logic” of Wilson. In short, the book is about ideas and where they come from; our collective unconscious and the reality of the stories we tell.
Don’t tell anyone, but I discreetly incorporated many of the ideas into the museum’s permanent gallery. We displayed objects without labels and arranged displays purely by free association. As I saw it, we had unlocked an occult power held within these lost objects and broke the chains of the usual historical, contemporary museum-style interpretation.
This book revitalised my work for the museum, gave me confidence to further challenge the expected heritage experience – and got me in trouble.
I’ve gone on to work with beekeepers, field recordists, medium secure unit patients, psychics and lifesize cut-outs of Muhammed Ali. Just don’t ask me about the number 23.