Ace the Spaceman, Electronic Medicine Man of the Amazing X Nation
As the house lights dim, pulsating color, image flowing into image, fills the big screen, and "truckin' music" floods the auditorium. An exotic-looking console starts to glow with orange cab running lights, and the Great North American Real Life Medicine Show is on.
It's Dana Atchley '63, the Colorado Spaceman, bringing you his electronic magic show, a pop-art son et lumiere production photographed and taped over a quarter-million miles on the road. "It's more than a trip; it's a transmutation," says William Hjortsberg '62, Dartmouth's own sci-fi novelist. Richard Brautigan calls it "A to Z Fantastic." "As if John Phillips Sousa played Gertrude Stein," suggests a self-styled rancher named Dan Gerber. Mostly words fail.
They seldom fail Atchley, who has conferred on himself the sobriquet of Coordinator of Space. "I believe space to be the connector of all things,1' he explains. "Space is what defines the relationships between people. We communicate through space when we talk. We send radio waves through it, along with other kinds of vibratory energies. So one day, I said to myself, 'I will start a company called Spaceco, and become a coordinator of space.' " Conceived and born, Spaceco in time spawned Ace Space Company, Ace TV, and Amazing X Productions to handle his performances and programs - "some 50 or 60 a year, and climbing."
Art major graduating with distinction, Senior Fellow, Reynolds Fellow, recipient of a master's degree in graphic design from Yale, authority on Renaissance book-making, design consultant, poet, printer, composer, Atchley was embarked on a fairly conventional academic career when he started coordinating space. He had taught for a time at the Maryland Institute of Art and moved on to an assistant professorship at the University of Victoria in British Columbia when he got the notion of a do-it-yourself editorial venture, Notebook 1, "a pioneering project of the so-called Correspondence Art Movement." He bought 250 loose-leaf notebooks, sent a like number of invitations to prospective contributors, asking them to return 250 copies of whatever, up to ten pages long. The work compiled, he set out in a VW van to deliver the limited edition personally. At age 30, when everyone else was bucking for tenure," he quit not-so-groovy academe and hit the road as an itinerant showman.
Five yearsand three vans later, Atchley is still coursing the continent,recording on tape and film the ordinary and the bizarre, the ugly and the beautiful of the American roadside and bringing it all together for exhibition at colleges and high schools, in galleries and theaters, prisons and community centers, in bars, coffee houses, and nightclubs. His van, home for ten months of the year, carries portable video equipment, books, slides, film, a press, projectors, the magic console, and all manner of electronic paraphenalia. Although the Real Life Show is the ultimate happening, Atchley's bag of tricks is as multi-faceted as it is multi-media. Want it straight? Schedule his film on The Makingof a Renaissance Book, which harks back to his work at Dartmouth with Ray Nash and later at Yale and the Plantin Press in Antwerp. For a look at "concrete poetry, a synthesis of the languages of words and images," book a slide-lecture "Between Poetry and Painting." Workshops on book-binding or offset printing are available, and videotapes on American artists and craftsmen. Given a two-week residency, he'll produce and present your very own videotape or volume. Notebook 1 and its successor Space Atlas, visual archives of contemporary archeology, are open to inspection by small groups.
The Real Life Show, a kaleidoscopic wrap-up of Atchley's odyssey, is due this month to space out Spaulding Auditorium, under the sponsorship of the Student Forum and the Dartmouth Film Society. This time - resplendent as usual, no doubt, in space suit and a hard hat with a built-in projector - he will open the show playing his own music on his guitar; from there on, it's a reprise of Hellzapoppin. Stand-bys like Flakey Rosehips and the folks at Ant Farm, The Seduction of Mr. Peanut (pre-presidential), the Kansas Balloon Farmer, the Gross National Product, Land Truth Circus, Breakfast at CleElum, the Fat City School of Finds Arts, T. R. Uthco and the Giant Inflatable Worm floating off the Space Needle, and Dr. Brute and his Leopard-Skin Saxes are predictable attractions. A segment in the making is Roadside Trash, a collage of highway establishments built in the shapes of their products or their names: World's Largest Hotdog, Leopard Realty, Cactus Cabaret, and Bomber Gas. Slides, film clips, audio recorded and live, images within images within images blend in disorienting cacaphony. "This continually evolving road show," says Atchley's official biography, "is utterly subversive and entirely persuasive and apart from its redeeming social value is one of the goofiest and most entertaining numbers you are likely to see."
Even a surreal Charles Kuralt can't be on the road all the time, so Atchley returns for a couple of months each year to Crested Butte, Colorado, which serves meanwhile as his mail drop and message center. There he gathers himself and his images together for the next foray and tackles the affairs of Ace TV. His films appear frequently on Crested Butte's cable television - though, he admits, it's "like having the only football in town" - and he has produced and directed programs on the arts for Denver television. He makes video-tapes for small community stations, frequently in collaboration with the subjects.
Atchley takes his Amazing X Eternal Network seriously, if not solemnly, and so do a lot of other people. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the Yale Art Gallery, the Dartmouth Library, in museums and private collections on three continents. He has had one-man shows, been represented in international exhibitions and supported by the Canada Council, the National En-dowment for the Arts, and a bevy of state commissions.
His nomadic existence is a hard living, Atchley says, but "a life-style I like." He considers it a privilege to be able "to visit a great network of friends once or twice a year to entertain them, and be entertained by them. I like to open up the possibility that in the midst of all your work, you can have a good time and still reflect your own interests and sensibilities. My show is about other people - my life is about other people. And yet, I am always there."
So if you have any space to coordinate, get in touch with Dana Atchley. In Crested Butte, they'll know where to find him, and he'll call you from a truck stop - almost anywhere. He's big with the knights of the road. "Breaker, Breaker," advises the Diesel Cowboy. "All you truckers better keep your ears on and your eyes open for the Colorado Spaceman, 'Cause he's got a dynamite show that's loaded with white-line consciousness."
