"All
the great artistic visions and masterpieces of the past should be pillaged
and their contents made real: 'subverted', as the situationsists called
it, as part of a real script."
Christopher
Gray - Leaving the 20th Century 1974.
"I
always take my holidays in either fiction or the past, because I feel
that it offends all of the right people. Plus, it's cheap. Go anywhere,
meet anyone. So after many months of being glued to the screen of this
Macintosh, there's nothing I like more than to slip into my favourite
Lager-Lad Timelord Fiction Suit [© Grant
Morrison Inc], and just escape.
So far imaginary travels have allowed me
to light a cigarette on the flames of a first world war flamethrower,
and check out one of the very first gigs by popular beat-combo The SeX
Pistols. But this is only the beginning. Later on this summer I'm hoping
to get the oportunity to shove a Dalek down the lift shaft of our local
multi-story car park, and maybe I can sing 'My Way' with Frank AND Sid..."
Rollo
Kim, The Tardis, 1981.
What is a fiction suit?
Imagine
snapshots from a day-trip inside your favourite film or painting,
stealing a kiss from Marilyn or Jabba the Hutt.
pushing yourself on the swings in the park, ages six and twenty six.
Offering The Smoking Man a light.
Grant Morrison: As you read, the complete human archive - films and diaries and paintings and newspapers, recipes and family photos, abstracted to strings of ones and zeroes - is undergoing a steady, discreet conversion into digital data. Our entire cultural record, available in every home, via the telephone, direct to the screen, making History as convenient as the local 24-hour cornershop.
I submit that, just as the sailing ships of the Mediterranean empires opened the doors to the New World, just as space shuttles ferry our astronauts to the foothills of the infinite, so are our computers prototype time travel engines. The technology may be gumming a rusk but steps to develop the undefiled landscapes of our foremothers and fathers are already being taken. A computer, a digital camera, a modem, some Photoshop packages: all you’ll need to plan your own holiday in All Our Yesterdays. Think of Tom Hanks in ‘Forrest Gump’, schmoozing LBJ, Lennon and Bobby Kennedy. Think of the young Dennis Hopper shanghaied into a car ad by his older, more cynical self. Think, above all, of the potential ;wearing our own cut-and-pasted images like spacesuits, we can freefall into the picture libraries of the past and party with the dead. If the software fits, any one of us can star in ‘Psycho’ or remake ‘The Sound of Music’ with Diamanda Galas in the Julie Andrews role.
Who is Grant Morrison?
In case you aren't familiar with his work, Grant Morrison is the author of the mind-expanding substance known as The Invisibles. Writer of the 'New X Men', Grant Morrison will be remembered as the first man ever to walk on the surface of a fictional universe.
extract from Salonism © 2000-2001 Grant Morrison