" Thirteenth Street was the scene’s major artery; the 3.2 club Malfunction Junction, in a space now used by the Snake Pit, was the epicenter, home to bands like the Jonny III, the Defex, the Violators and the Tots. “You’d spend your whole week looking forward to whatever show was going on that weekend at Malfunction Junction,” says West. “It was mostly rejects who fell into it, the refuse. The original Denver rock scene was for people who had nowhere else to go.” (1)

“ Like the Baroque, late modernism exists in the shadow of a glorious past. Heir to the great political upheavals and artistic revolutions of the early twentieth century, it is at the same time a manifestation of the compromised wealth of that legacy. At once a dazzling spectacle and a freak show, late modernism simultaneously celebrates and exposes the exaggerated social and aesthetic incongruities upon which contemporary culture is predicated. The fullest expression of those incongruities and of the ambivalence they engender, the grotesque represents the playfulness of the melancholic, the tragic as witnessed by the disabused.” Robert Storr, 1986(2)

Robert Storr writes of “the exaggerated social and aesthetic incongruities upon which contemporary culture is predicated.” Fissured social, political and aesthetic times form the basis for the installation, Malfunction Junction. The piece addresses this cacophony through pictorial, light, sound and movement. The rollercoaster, a long popular amusement based on the inherent uncertainty and potential calamity of all forms of motion, seats its passengers as close to fear as it does to laughter. The ride offers a suspension from the hierarchy’s rules, those that suggest that, if followed, all might be “stable, unchanging, perennial”.(3) Through a cacophony of image and sound Malfunction Junction suggests a carnival for the dispossessed, a state of uncertainty, a counter-response to the idea of a pure and unified whole. Embracing the spirit of carnival Malfunction Junction revels in this uncertainty and in doing so crashes the real into the fanciful - in the shape of a question.

“If you were to spend one day on the platform, you would see some of the most unusual people in the world,” Mr. Menditto said. “They all come here. To see the fear on their faces, and the ones who are not afraid, they’re bragging about how the ride is nothing, and this and that. From the guy that thinks he’s a wiseguy and he’s going to conquer the Cyclone and comes out trembling, the people that pass out on the ride - you’re never bored, never bored.” Gerald Menditto, 2003 (4)

1 Living Out Loud Jimmy West revs up the Rock Tots – again. / Laura Bond. Westword, January 1, 2004.
2 Philip Guston / Robert Storr. New York: Abbeville Press, 1986.
3 Rabelais and His World / Mikhail Bakhtin, translated from the Russian by Krystyna Pomorska. The M.I.T. Press, 1968.
4 Still Thrilling After All These Years For 2 Old Friends at the Cyclone a Long and Wild Ride Goes On / Diane Cardwell. New York Times, Tuesday, April 1, 2003.