The First of the Last of the Many.
Conor McGuigan's closing the doors of Test Pattern and bracing for the open road

www.zwire.com - 12/15/05

He did build it, and they did come. But unlike the fabled Field of popcorn lore, this was not hacked from Iowan farm land and ordered up by a ghost, this was scraped and etched and cobbled from the streets of downtown Scranton and graced with the better angels of art's nature. No, it was not about baseball, it was about ideas the bigger and brighter and bolder the better and the revealing and sharing and showing of those ideas, in whatever color they cared to, dared to come.

An infinitely more sporting proposition than mere pastime.
That Costner weepy feel-good may not be the hippest analogy to apply to a hipster like Conor McGuigan and his ever-hip Test Pattern, but it is squarely apt. McGuigan struck from scratch a world where none existed, built some swell something from a null and void of nothing at all, and did so against the odds and the sods and the myopic mods of convenience.

Now the time has come to close the door on that world and swing open the gates on the vast horizon of possibilities it helped to create. Test Pattern. If you've been anywhere in Northeast PA over the last 16 months you've been there. So has everyone else. Everyone else who mattered.

Everybody who had a matter at hand. Untellable numbers of painters and poets and actors and musicians bared their wares for the great appreciators, through some 14 art shows, over a dozen nights of live music, a staggering slew of dance parties and a deft palmful of performance pieces.

Test Pattern. The little space that could, and did, and just may someday do so again. McGuigan marked the spot and put up a shingle "just to show people how easy it is" to do something striking, to do it oneself. Despite it all, for all it can be worth.

Like the grand visionists behind the scenes of New York's East Village in the '80s, Chicago's Wicker Park in the '90s, and Miami's Wynwood of right now, McGuigan took it upon himself to create a stir. The time was September of '04, and the place was Adams Ave, between a copy shop and a counseling center, three palettes and a hunch away from Courthouse Square, and a whole wild world beyond the yesterday that stood there before.

And what a wild world it was. From the drunk who pissed on one of Jonathan Slingloff's paintings at the Punk Rock Holocaust aftershow to Mayor Doherty's attending the very same opening where he was paired with a Slug in many a walled photograph, from the long and involved days of installing, through the nights and the early mornings of release, the wild was palpably inherent in everything that went on.

And the crowds came on and on. By the score. For the score. Conor, still unable to speak in the past tense, says the "audiences [he] get[s]are completely open, thrilled to have something different to look at."This, of course, only provoked a more openness, incited ever larger thrills, from the town that he proudly calls home.

Sweet, stirful home. Conor, schooled for a time at Pitt, reared on a diet of Big Comic Fortnightly (a British comic collection that featured the likes of the one-fanged Sweeney Toddler), and raised to rule right here, forecasts a time when "[a] lotta kids are not afraid to stay in or come back to Scranton;" sees a place where there's "[a] lotta people hangin' around, tryin' new things 'cause they can." "My hope is that people would see how easy it is" to open, to show, to be, and "go for it" themselves.

So, like the gentleman that he is, Conor's stepping aside so that others may nab the limelight. On his agenda is a vast undertaking: A year or two shooting Wal-Mart Supercenters throughout this increasingly shrinking vastness. Not the simple stores, mind you, nor the Sam's Clubs, but the Supercenters, all 1800 of 'em. "Every shot will look about the same." But there'll be strength and beauty in their obscene numbers. If you can call strong and beautiful a phenomena that's "environmentally, socially, [and] economically negative on all fronts."

It's a work that springs from McGuigan's many-sided civic-mindedness. The stopping of the Courthouse expansion, the greening of an old mine town, and, yes, the creation of Test Pattern. Conor's of that peculiarly American ilk that refuse to sit idly by when something bugs them, when something needs to be done, so he's duly bound to get on with it.

As December ends and Test Pattern shutters a town will mourn the loss by rejoicing in the gain that came about. There'll be tears, of course, but there too shall be smiles, a fond knowing that they'd might not know now what they would've known otherwise if not for that glorious space. And Conor McGuigan, well, he may have hung his Last Show, but it's a bet that we haven't heard the last of that cat. Not even close.