In the mid 80s, while attending UW Madison, I would walk everyday from the East Side where I lived to the capitol square and through the Capitol itself where I could get warm, and then on up State Street to the campus where I took graduate classes. I deeply enjoyed the sense of being in the House of the State; this centralized place of politics where policy is debated and legislation formed.
Attending recent protest rallies reminded me how beautiful the rotunda is: gold and amber mosaics with personifications of Legislation, Government, Justice and Liberty between the arches of the dome, the splendor of the ornate structure looming overhead with the female figure of "Wisconsin" floating in clouds and wrapped in the American flag. As one electrical worker said to me while we leaned over the marble balcony railing, “we sure don’t make ‘em like this anymore!” It is indeed a fantastic building.
In the beginning few weeks of protests I found great solace in our occupation of our building, even for a brief period. In the college kids sleeping throughout the cubbies and hallways, in their impromptu media saturated situation rooms filled with people and laptops, sleeping bags and pizza boxes; in their buzz of activity and energy. In pizza arriving on endless tap, supplied by supporters from around the world, in students at night on hands and knees scrubbing the floor clean, a gesture of care and affection that still chokes me up.
A self-conscious sense of history was palpable as we suspended real life to enter this weird Second Life of drumming and chants of directed outrage and heady rebellion. The drumming, incessant, tribal. The drumming and chanting, at its height, created a synchronic wall, a solid mass of sounds moving like birds flocking in stochastic logic throughout the beautiful volume of symmetrical space, pinging from dome to pendentive, from glass mosaic to classical column. An infernal machine of noise and life that began five weeks ago, and has now been silenced.
Now, as a resident of Fitzwalkerstan, I enter the capitol and wait in a long and anxious line. I am greeted by dozens of cops whose jobs have become to choreograph the theater of security where we are subjects in the performance of control. I am frisked. I am wanded. I am asked to take out anything metal from my pockets. And I am confronted by an exhaustive set of rules, itemized in Oedipal detail.
Our Capitol Building has been free and open to citizens with relatively few restrictions since the building first opened to the public in 1915. For almost 100 years we have been able to walk through it, on our way to work or school, as if it belonged to us. Because it does belong to us.
In an effort to document our fantastic capitol building, I created this stop-motion animation. I walked around the entire outside of the building, stopping every five paces to take a picture. This animation is my elegy, my lament to the loss of our walk-through rotunda.
May our cynical authoritarian regime be short lived.