The silver Swan, who living had no Note, when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat. Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, thus sang her first and last, and sang no more: “Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! “More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.””
Walk with me. In the wetlands, before the intense cold, predicted for the days to come, is settling in. The air is damp, a grayish blue that intensifies all the yellows and oranges around, the bark of the willow bushes, the buds of the hazelnut trees. (And also makes it very difficult to photograph birds in flight as you will see below.)
A dreamy landscape, with occasional glimpses of the sun trying to break through the cloud cover
Herons and egrets drying off and combing for morsels, respectively.
Bald eagle on the look-out.
Some geese,
lots of duck action, ducks unknown to me,
some happily (?) planning for future ducklings…
The silence, only occasionally interrupted by their flapping wings, or splashing water, is shattered when a wedge of swans appears overhead in flight, calling loudly.
A sight to behold! These are Tundra swans (Cygnus columbianus sometimes called Whistling swans)), recognizable by their black beaks and slight yellow streak around their eye (I could only see that with the single one I caught close on camera, while swimming.) They are native to North America and we can see them in winter when they fly over Oregon, foraging here in our wetlands.
These swans are monogamous and mate for life (they can live for more than 20 years), breeding once a year in the tundras of Canada and the Alaskan arctic. Come autumn, they merge in groups of up to 100 birds to fly south. The journey covers 4000 miles, flown at an altitude as high as 26.000 feet and with speeds up to 60 mph! Their biology is all about making this flight possible: bones are hollow and there are fewer of them compared to mammals; their breathing systems is adjusted in multiple ways – (during flight birds need to breathe up to 10 times faster to enable sufficient oxygen to be delivered to the muscles. All of these details, btw, I found here.)
The lungs have far more tissue density so that more blood can flow through them for oxygen exchange. Their breath flows in one direction only, entering on one path, exiting on another, enabling lots of volume to flow through in a steady stream. Their windpipe, the trachea, is different from ours’ as well – as you can see in the picture, it has coiled loops at the end, rather than going straight into the lungs.
“Why is she blasting me with all these details?” you might wonder. “Do I really need to know tundra swan anatomy?” Well, you might want to if you are interested in the genesis of the phrase “Swansong,” a phrase commonly used to describe the last output of someone before their stage exit or death, often heard in the context of famous artists showering us with brilliant work at the end of their life. (In fact, music today is Schubert’s collection of songs titled Swansong, published posthumously.)
OK, maybe Swansong is not on the forefront of your thoughts either, but it really is an interesting bit of lore – or, as it turns out, a biological fact.
Throughout history, swans have held a special place in mankind’s imagination. Tons of confabulation revolves around them, from the Greek fables to Norse mythology to the European fairy tales of the 19th century. (Details can be found in this essay, which was also the source of today’s entry citation.) One of the lasting assumptions across cultures was the claim that swans are pretty much silent or mute throughout their life time, and only sing beautifully at the point of their death. Some smart cookies, like Pliny the Elder, were already critical of that observation in CE 77, but the belief would not die. Da Vinci noted it, as did Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Coleridge, to mention just a few.
Here is the deal: swans are not mute during their lifetime. But it is also true, that due to the nature of their coiled trachea, they emit a series of long, plaintive tones when their lungs collapse during death and the air gets pushed through the windpipe, probably the base observation that started the legend.
Now where the other piece of persistent lore originates – swans are maidens, who shed their feather coats at night to bathe in the lakes and can be trapped if you steal the plumage – remains a mystery not yet solved by naturalists…
For those less inclined towards biology and more interested in art: Here is a truly terrific collection of 44 art works centered on the myth of Leda and the Swan. The author did an amazing tour de force from Michelangelo to modern photography and everyone in between, with helpful description and discussion of each piece. Really worth a read!
“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” [I.V.211-2])” Shakespeare’s Hamlet after being visited by a ghost.
In the small rural village where I grew up, Martinmas was a big occasion. Celebrating the altruism of a religious figure, a knight who shared his bread and cut his velvet cape in half to help a freezing beggar, the catholic regions across Europe put up a big parade every mid-November. Dressed in our warmest clothes, we were allowed to line the streets to cheer on a fake St. Martin riding on a horse in the evening, a subsequent bonfire at the village’s edge with dramatic reenactment and dispersement of yeast dough baked into little bread men with dried currants for eyes and a clay pipe in their mouths. Have no idea why, but it is a detail stuck in memory.
It was exciting as well as eerie. Quite a few small kids were scared to death, between darkness and fire reflected in his silver helmet and a huge horse getting restless, neighing and bucking. It was also a time when the geese were butchered and prepared for a feast.
I was reminded of those occasions when listening to a song Geträumt hab ich vom Martinszug (I dreamt of the St. Martin’s Parade,) music by Katie Rich and Christian Schoppik, a pair of contemporary surrealist folklore musicians in Germany. Lately they have teamed up with another artist, Johannes Scholar, who is more known for his electroacoustic, ambient music, that combines electronic aesthetic and nostalgia for a lost future.
The trio performs as Freundliche Kreisel (Affable Spinning Tops, album in the link), mixing experimental and acoustic sounds with lyrics that could come from German Romanticism, fairy tales, mythology and plain folk song. Lots of ghosts, sinister scenarios and temporal disjunctions, on another compilation album, Specter Land, as well.
Obviously more accessible to German language speakers, but the feeling of the disquieting undertones, directly and indirectly hinted at in the words, are certainly conveyed when you listen to the music only. The female vocalist (intentionally?) sings like a child, projecting a halting naiveté and vulnerability, before she switches to urgent warnings. Wouldn’t exactly call it riveting music, but with repeat listening its unease gets under your skin, settling like an ear worm – the German word for a melody colonizing your brain – or like the talking ferret alluded to in the lyrics, that lives in the walls and becomes a haunting menace, perhaps a specter. Of interest.
In his 1993 book Specters of Marx, Jaques Derrida coined the term Hauntology in reference to Marx’ and Engels’ claim that “a specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.” Derrida’s concept embraced the idea of a return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, like a ghost, suggesting that Marxism haunted the Western world from beyond the grave. Hauntology has been applied to music as well, our culture’s affinity for a retro aesthetic and an emphasis on cultural memory found particularly in folk music.
For the musicians of Freundliche Kreisel it manifests, among others, in reverence to Friedrich Hölderlin (1770 – 1843) and Friedrich Alfred Schmid Noerr (1877 – 1969). Hölderlin was one of our finest lyrical poets who subsumed the form of classical Greek verse into the German language and tried to embrace a “spiritual renewal,” integrating Christian faith with the pantheon of Greek gods and all that implied. (He lived and died stricken with mental illness, no causality suggested, just a tragic figure.) Schmid Noerr also elevated the cultural contents of different systems, in particular Christianity’s effects on the Teutonic world. A philosopher and writer, he wove tales that bound historical figures to legend, the past forcibly infusing the present.
Despite his fervor for all things occult, mythical and Germanic, something he shared with the Nazi leadership of his time, he was active in the resistance and published, as late as 1939 and 1940 some radically anti-Nazi pamphlets and a draft of a new German constitution.
Which finally brings me to the specter I meant to write about from the get-go today, with your eyes presumably already glazing over: the return of social and cultural elements of the fascist past, a set of philosophical beliefs and linguistic usage that is reemerging into contemporary American and European discourse. A haunting presence.
Consider the historical situation in early 20th century Germany (I am summarizing a more detailed description from here, Eric Kurlander’s excellent book Hitler’s Monsters): modernity challenged traditional religious practices, with science and secularism progressing at a steady pace. The discarded spiritual worldview created a vacuum that was filled by new esoteric (and often science-hating) belief systems. Nazi leadership grafted onto these ideas of the supernatural, the occult, esoteric sciences and pagan religions. It allowed them to attract followers whose disenchantment in the wake of the industrialization of their world gave powerful incentive to cling to irrational ideas.
The content of these supernatural allusions were often racially tinged. Slavs were vampires, Jews were vermin, both trying to undermine the purity of German blood.
“The supernatural imaginary, which mixed science and occultism, history and mythology, also allowed Nazis to pick and choose the characteristics they would like to ascribe them to their enemy, comparing them to vampires, zombies, devils, and demons.”
Green light for dehumanization of those conveniently selected as out-groups that helped foster in-group cohesion among the electorate.
The rise of non-White races impelled people to adhere to a system of racial hierarchies, that assigned supremacy to White men and the history of Aryan or Nordic nations. Conspiracy theories to make sense of an increasingly complex world sprouted everywhere and were used by Nazi rhetoric for their emotional appeal.
“Firstly, the supernatural imaginary influenced Nazi geopolitical views, which manipulated archeology, folklore, and mythology for foreign policy purposes. Himmler and Rosenberg developed these arguments, based largely on folklore, mythology, and border science that for thousand of years the Nordic people were the dominant civilization in Europe and they had a right to reclaim that. Bad archeology, selective use of biology and anthropology, and mythology fueled a lot of ideas about the Eastern Europe and why Germans had a right, like the medieval Teutonic knights, to (re)conquer the East.” (Bolded by me.)
The steadfastly held belief that one group of people was elected to rule over others, biologically, historically and racially superior, helped set the ultimate catastrophe of fascism in motion. And that was before the advent of social media…here is a piece that lays out the implications of algorithms in shaping our understanding of realty.
I am including trees here because German oaks, birches, beeches and willows, as well as forests in general play such a major role in our mythology and fairy tales.
I don’t have to spell out, I presume, how this applies to our current situation. Am I seeing ghosts, drawing the devil on the wall? (The German idiom expresses that someone is being overly pessimistic or only focused on a worst-case scenario.)
You tell me. I certainly don’t seem to be the only one.
Photographs today of typical rural sights in Germany, from Lower Saxony, Saxony Anhalt, Schleswig Holstein and Hesse, with crumbling half-timbered houses offering refuge to all kinds of specters, ghosts and Poltergeists.
“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.” – Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Remember Ariadne? The labyrinth? The Minotaur, half man, half bull? Vague memories of vengeful Cretan king, Athenian hero, lovestruck princess and a ball of yarn? I could not help but thinking of the myth during my first artist visit for this year’s Exquisite Gorge II project, offered by Maryhill Museum of Art. Thirteen fabric artists, in collaboration with community partners, will portray an assigned section of the Columbia river in three dimensional form on frames. The sections will be linked in the end, forming an “Exquisite Corpse” during a public outdoor celebration at the museum in August. I hope to introduce all of them and their work with individual portraits during the next few months.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
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So much to take in at Kristy Kún‘s studio in Ashland, OR. So many associations to the Ariadne myth.
A short refresher: Vengeful Cretan king subdues Athenians in war, extracts human sacrifice ever so often, feeding the youth to his hungry Minotaur, a monster conceived by the queen and an angry God because the king betrayed him with a cheap sacrifice. Half bull, half man, the creature is conveniently stashed out of sight in a labyrinth built by clever engineer Daedalus. Athenian hero Theseus vows to slay the beast. Clever daughter of the king, Ariadne, helps Theseus by providing a spun, woolen thread that allows him to navigate the steps through the maze for his return after the bloody deed is done. He takes her, as promised, away on his ship as his bride, but then dumps her on the Island of Naxos, as instructed by Goddess Athena in a dream. Marries Ariadne’s sister, no less. Depending on who you read (or listen to, lots of opera material!) and in which century, Ariadne either hangs herself out of despondence, or marries a God, Dionysus. Oh, no one lives happily after. Just saying.
Rising Sand 2018 46″ x 26” x 4″ Details below
There were labyrinthine works hanging on Kún’s studio walls or spread on surfaces, pathways ebbing and flowing with no discernible entry or exit.
There were threads pulled from materials, threads criss-crossing layers to be felted, threads waiting in skeins of wool to be pummeled.
There was instance after instance of the application of Ariadne’s thread, a problem solving method – by definition, a logical method that traces steps or takes point by point a series of found truths in a contingent, ordered search that reaches an end position. You solve a problem by multiple means, keeping a record so you can see where you dead-ended or progressed.
It might sound strange to introduce artistic work with a focus on problem solving, but the work at hand requires so many steps, so many intricate levels of processing, so much, indeed, engineering, that a logical, even mathematical mind is required.
The result, flowing, extravagant, holistic beauty belies the tight construction that goes into the creations.
Kún works with felt. Makes felt. Shapes felt. Compiles and arranges felt, with a brain trained as an engineer and the eye of a visual artist.
The matted fabric we call felt is created by binding protein fibers (wool from animals like sheep, goat, yak or alpaca) to each other in a process that involves the physical tangling of the fibers by means of special needles, or by using water and agitation that pummels the raw materials. Ever accidentally shrunk your favorite sweater by 2 sizes in the washer/dryer? That is wet felting…. the hair in the wool consists of shafts that are covered by protein scales. The water and detergents open up the scales and the agitation in the rotating drum, or rolling and rubbing and tossing, binds them together, shrinking them up to 40%.
Dry felting involves barbed needles that you stick into the raw material over and over, weaving the fiber strands together. It can be done by hand or by machine, when large projects are involved.
Felting has been around since at least the 6th century B.C., predating spinning and weaving. It likely originated with nomadic peoples in Asia, and remnants were discovered in burial places all across Siberia and Northern Europe. It was essential for shelter (think Mongolian yurts!) warmth and durability in clothing and boots, and protection from saddle burn for animals carrying loads. Ornamental uses have found their way into beautiful blankets and carpets, now extending to 2-D or 3-D sculpture.
The fabrication of today’s materials has come a long way from being coarse, wet wool stomped by camels, or pummeled by the hoofs of horses. Kún, for example, varies the kinds of fibers going into the felt. The selection involves the density of wool – wool is measured in microns, which describe the diameter of a wool fiber, the smaller the micron the finer the wool.
Micron 23
The artist also uses materials like silk that get entangled into the pressed fibers, dying the silks herself to achieve desired color gradations.
Layered wool and silk get run through the needling machine up to 6 times, then cut into strips, or fins, by a power cutter, wet felt aligned with cheese cloth, worked on surfaces that allow to pool the water.
Eventually the materials get shaped. That includes insane detail work of pulling threads out of the sides by hand to achieve a chenille-like effect that adds to the beauty.
Individual elements are stitched on, wet felt fibers shaved or torched to achieve the desired smoothness.
And then it’s time to finish the design, long planned and recorded to the tiniest detail. Some of the pieces are huge.
Photograph by Kristy Kún.
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The artist with the clear face, beautiful eyes half hidden behind her glasses, is the descendent of Hungarian immigrants who settled in the Mid-West, establishing Presbyterian churches in and around Ely, Iowa, working hard to feed large families. She certainly has inherited that incessant, laser-focussed work ethic, a red thread like Ariadne’s throughout the many changes along her professional path. Trained as a construction engineer at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, she found her first real calling in wood working and furniture making. She settled in Northern California, interned and worked and learned the craft. A marriage to a fellow craftsman dissolved swiftly, leaving her as a single mother to a young daughter, trying to eke out a living in a male-dominated domain.
A side line of supplying crafts materials to her daughter’s Waldorf School led to an import business of Italian wool, selling it to spinners and felters. She got increasingly drawn into the fiber arts world, attending bi-annual workshops and camps for craft artists, the Frogwood Collective among them. Inspired by artists like Janice Arnold and Jenne Giles, Kún turned to felting in a serious way in the last decade, shifting from roles as supplier to that of artist.
It did not make her economic existence less precarious. Now located in Portland, OR, she was trying to support her family, while struggling with the illness of her new partner, who she lost to cancer in a painful battle to the end. Two years ago she moved to Ashland, leaving the familiarity and friendship network of PDX behind, to start a new life with a new love and a new studio, all during pandemic woes.
Life has felted Kristy Kún – my take, expressed with admiration. The various analogues of pummeling and stabbing, prodding and stomping have produced a tough, resistant core combined with (intellectual and emotional) flexibility like the fabric counterpart. Loose threads of flickering temper and intense empathy stick out here and there. Like the matted material absorbs water, she absorbs ideas and visions, turning amorphous input into shaped Gestalt. In addition to her raw talent, her persistence and technical skill have registered with the art world. Her work will be shown at this year’s Smithsonian Craft Show, Future Focus, and large commissions from collectors and designers across the world are regularly received.
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While Kún and Lou Palermo, Maryhill Museum’s Director of Education, brainstormed over technical details of construction and placement of the frames – now stashed in her show room – within the Exquisite Corpse design, my thoughts wandered back to the tale of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur. The myth has inspired countless works of art, from tellings by Catullus 64 and Ovid’s Heroides 10 in the first century B.C., to paintings spanning over 1000 years (here is a link that provides 73 of them!), to musical compositions, Monteverdi in the Baroque period, and Richard Strauss in 1916. And let’s not forget the modern version of myth telling – most recently seen in Dark, the German sci-fi thriller available on Netflix, that makes heavy use of Ariadne’s story and symbolism. A smart review of Dark in the NYT pointed out the particular theme’s relevance to contemporary history.
One of the reasons for its ongoing popularity, I believe, is that one can apply so many different perspectives to any one of the characters or actions involved. Across time you can see how interpretations of Ariadne focussed first on her passivity, her abandonment by yet another fickle male, then on her possible emancipation, her cunning in helping her lover, her ruthlessness in sacrificing a half-brother to a hero she saw as her ticket off the island – you name it. All links to shifting perceptions of gender roles.
Theseus has had his share of fans and critics too, understood as a self-sacrificing hero, or simply power-hungry. His wandering in the labyrinth has been appropriated by psychodynamic approaches in psychology, an archetypal representation of the psyche and a path to individuation, the authenticity you reach when you’ve made your way through the convoluted maze of feelings.
Comparisons to creativity have been offered as well. Serpentine windings to a goal without knowing the way, many a dead end, unclear what fates await – you get the idea. It looks to me that Kún’s creativity has not at all been impeded by labyrinthine obstacles. If anything, her work has blossomed from tightly constructed, somewhat rigid, representational beginnings to more freely flowing abstractions of natural forms that are willing to stand on their own. To link back to Rebecca Solnit’s quote at the beginning: Kún has created a bridge between map and world, walking along in its folds.
This leaves us with one final contemplation, how shifts in perspective define the Minotaur. The creature could either be seen as a bloodthirsty monster, depraved and deserving of slaughter, or as someone who in his deformity had to be hidden away as to not offend the sensibilities of the viewer(s.) Is he an enemy to the outside world? Or is his confinement an act of brutality against him? Do we project our fears of power, aggression, rage, disability and death onto this misshapen creature? Avoid the Other? Classic takes rejoiced forever in his slaying.
There were a few compassionate voices, Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s among them, expressed in a post-humosly published volume of essays, Labyrinth on the Sea, which described his visit to Crete in 1964. Elaborated in a later prose poem, The history of the Minotaur (1974), he sees the misshapen prince as a victim of those who insist on political, social and religious norms as defining who does and does not belong. Which – and yes, we were getting there eventually! – also applies to women and textile art.
I will talk about the history and politics of textile arts in depth at a later point in this series of essays. Let me just say here the very basics: not only were the arts and crafts divided into domains, with gender roles assigned, for centuries. Different arts were also linked to different values – male painters and sculptors scored higher than their female counterparts, the latter for the most part chained to their textile universe behind the embroidery frame. Hidden away in a maze, for all intents and purposes, forever invisible and unnamed even if they created stunning woks of art – just think Bayeux tapestries. Only in the last 40 years has textile art been given a platform, previously reserved for the male dominated, traditional fine arts field. With the help of some pioneers in the early 1920s who opened the flood gates, women have emerged to show the world how true art is independent of medium and how neglected media add novelty to the traditional canon in ways that are intensely beautiful.
Kristy Kún has to be counted among them.
It was a cold night in Ashland, sky shimmering with stars. I would not have found the Corona Borealis even if it had been present (I looked it up, it appears in July) – I barely can locate the Big Dipper. The small constellation of stars is said to represent the crown (corona) that Dionysos gave to Ariadne after she had been abandoned. It comforted me to think that, even if connected to a consolation prize, a woman with a thread is visibly remembered.
