Mingering Mike @ Hemphill Fine Arts
Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar is something that you just have to see to believe. The story of Mingering Mike, now on display at Hemphill Fine Arts, is an unforgettable one, crammed with baffling outsider art, obsessive imagination, and music-induced parallelism. The District, during the 60s and 70s, serves as its backdrop. It follows a Washington, D.C. man and his drawn-out fantasy of being a famous musician. Mike’s story was in danger of being lost forever, only to become a long-passed, make-believe chronicle never to be heard. But thanks to the curiosity and persistence of Dori Hadar and Frank Beylotte, this amazing collection was saved from its bleak flea market fate.
The two record-collecting bargain hunters snatched up what they found, nearly 200 fake LPs and 45s stashed away and mistaken for actual vinyl records, and they went searching for the creator of this treasure trove: the mysterious Mingering Mike. They posted digital photos of the collection on SoulStrut to get leads on his whereabouts. Mike quickly became an intriguing character in the record collecting community, and now that his artwork is being shown in a gallery setting, Mike is fast becoming a figure in self-taught visual art as well.
Mike’s world of pretend vinyl covers (and rough-cut acapella home recordings on headphones) line the walls of Hemphill in full color, finally bringing Mike to the adoring audience he always imagined. It’s a gold mine for audiophiles, soul aficionados, and outsider art groupies, displaying replica album covers complete with paper liners to protect the "delicate" surfaces of his cardboard records, detailed liner notes, and extensive catalogue numbers of an imaginary system. He forged grooves with marker, crayon, or pencil – each held by a hand-scrawled album cover, drawn with careful thought and wild imagination. His cover art, line drawings, done in now-fading marker scribbles, show Mike and his entourage of characters acting out the star life.
Mingering Mike visualized an entire rock 'n' roll persona for himself, making use of commonly used marketing jargon here and appropriating well-known song titles there. This discography-on-parade is complete with gatefold covers, specifically cut dust sleeves, and a number of production sub-labels such as Sex, Decision, and Ming/War, Fake Records Inc., and Mother Goose. The color card jackets usually provide a track listing, an inventory of never-recorded songs with intriguing titles like "I Get Caught Up In My Rhymes Girl When I’m Rapping To You." Sometimes he’ll announce the popularity of his unheard albums – a homemade sticker proclaims a record "bound to be another greatest hits album of the future."
Once unheard of and unidentified, Mingering Mike has achieved NPR-acclaimed status and even has his own MySpace artist page where you can listen to his jams and his mouth percussion skills. It could be argued that our mainstream cultural pecking-order has become so self-referential and distilled that the art world has developed a strange fondness for this kind of naïve creative expression … simply because of its prolific peculiarity. Even still, the shear amount of painstakingly drawn and constructed pieces, motivated by nothing more than a man’s need to visualize his daydream, deserves much more than the passing art snob’s quip.
Hemphill is located at 1515 14th Street NW, 3rd Floor and is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mingering Mike runs until July 28.
Images courtesy of Hemphill Fine Arts.