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Art

Unseen.

“I want things to unfold slowly, often my things are quiet and simple enough that it takes time—a kind of slow overlapping—before people feel it.” – Anna Valentina Murch

Unfold slowly it did. It took me a full decade not jut to feel the art but to actually see it.

I’ve walked by that elevator shaft on the waterfront for years without ever noticing that the windows contained images of water, different configurations of waves illuminated by differences in light depending on cloud formation or time of day.

Created in 2011 by Anna Valentina Murch (lovingly remembered (and quoted) after her untimely death in 2014 by a friend here,) the unassuming public art is called River Wrap. It consists of 40 photographic images on glass that frame the corners of the ten story elevator tower that connects the Darlene Hooley bridge to the Moody plaza below. The photographs are of reflections of light moving across the surface of water echoing the bordering landscape, the Willamette river.

The idea of water seemingly filling a tower might have had different connotations in 2011 compared to 2021. Then it represented beauty, perhaps intended to be soothing, a reminder of waves lapping gently. Now I can but think of the hurricane-induced flooding of buildings, or memorials to rivers run dry, if not the drowned – art does change when historic context changes.

The elevator is currently closed, so I had no chance to explore what they would look like when you travel up and down at slow speed, or if they can be seen from within at all.

Murch was a British installation artist based in San Francisco. Solo works or those together with her husband Doug Hollis often focussed on ways to make people spend time and look: accentuating reflections, sparkle, glow and change in color of light on various surfaces, often water. A more familiar work here in Portland is the light art attached to the Tillicum Crossing Bridge. It uses 178 LED modules to illuminate the cables, towers, and underside of the deck. The base color is determined by the water’s temperature. The timing and intensity of the base color’s changes, moving the light across the bridge, are determined by the river’s speed. A secondary color pattern is determined by the river’s depth, that changes on the two towers and the suspension cable.

Other notable art installations by her can be found here.

So why did I notice River Wrap now and not before? A possible proximal cause: the light hit it just right to sparkle. But it was a gray, diffuse afternoon.

A two part answer could be:

(1) Distraction.

The elevator tower is across the street from the aerial tram station, where comings and goings of those futuristic looking passenger capsules draw your attention. There is also a never-ending stream of people entering or exiting the OHSU medical building, bound to draw your gaze. There is the new(ish) bridge glimpsed in the background at the river, usually the destination for my walks, beckoning the camera. So I never attended to the west side of the Moody Plaza before.

(2) Increased Attention.

Due to restricted movement, my radius of exploration has so incredibly shrunk. No more travel, no more visits to indoor spaces including exhibitions in galleries and museums, alike. No more walking or photographing where crowds of people congregate, all due to the pandemic. Those spaces, then, that are still open to me therefore are looked at in search of anything that is new, or worthwhile thinking through, or good for surprises while I walk there over and over and over again…

After all, the poem below does not apply to me (although I love it, like so much of her work.) I do behave in the cosmos as advised. At least I try to think so of myself…

Distraction

I misbehaved in the cosmos yesterday.
I lived around the clock without questions,
without surprise.

I performed daily tasks
as if only that were required.

Inhale, exhale, right foot, left, obligations,
not a thought beyond
getting there and getting back.

The world might have been taken for bedlam,
but I took it just for daily use.

No whats — no what fors —
and why on earth it is —
and how come it needs so many moving parts.

I was like a nail stuck only halfway in the wall
or
(comparison I couldn’t find).

One change happened after another
even in a twinkling’s narrow span.

Yesterday’s bread was sliced otherwise
by a hand a day younger at a younger table.

Clouds like never before and rain like never,
since it fell after all in different drops.

The world rotated on its axis,
but in a space abandoned forever.

This took a good 24 hours.
1,440 minutes of opportunity.
86,400 seconds for inspection.

The cosmic savoir vivre
may keep silent on our subject,
still it makes a few demands:
occasional attention, one or two of Pascal’s thoughts,
and amazed participation in a game
with rules unknown.

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012): Distraction, from Colon (2005), translated by Clare Cavanagh in MAP: Collected and Last Poems, 2015

One thing is clear, though. So much public art is so in your eye, so prominently placed or gaudily executed that it is almost impossible not to be aware oft it. The quieter kind, like today’s example, then packs the punch of discovery, unbidden, serendipitously,creating a louder and longer lasting emotional echo, at least in my case. A gift.

Water-related music today by Sibelius.

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Unimaginable

The light was strange. I walked the Sandy River delta for the first time since January, so grateful to be back and a bit worried if I had the strength for the full round in the 90 degree September heat. Thoughts of the fragility of existence, my companions for too long, were underscored by the wind that came down from the mountains, making the dry branches and grasses bending and trembling, the poplars noisy with their rattling silver leaves, upended by the gusts.

Claude Monet Haystacks 1885

The gusts were hints of colder times, easily ignored during this endless summer, perhaps perceived only because my thoughts were swirling around the essay I’ll urge you to read today, if you have time to read anything (I’ll keep my own remarks correspondingly short.) Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a neoconservative scholar, lays out what quite likely might be ahead for us as a country, and it is frightening to hear its measured analysis by a conservative, no less.

Ermenoville, Department Oise

Yes, politics. Yes, more bad news. Yes, I know the feeling of not wanting to hear one more scary thing in a world full of them.

Claude Monet Poplars at Giverny 1887

Do read it.

Camille Pissaro Poplars, Eragny 1895

You want to be prepared for what one might once thought unimaginable. Even though it is tempting to ignore that there is always a second act in the wings. One we might not like.

I might mention the German election results in passing…. major parties had a head-to head competition with a razor thin edge going, for now, to the Social Democrats – a centrist party who will need to form a coalition with any number of smaller parties to govern, an unwieldy moloch marked by political compromises. All signs point to continuation of the familiar paths rather than radical re-orientation in view of the needed actions for climate change. For me the most frightening number was the fact that among those voting for the first time a higher number picked a business friendly, conservative party (FDP) over the Green Party – so much for the “youth will save us.” And two large states in the Eastern parts of the country, Thuringia and Saxony, went all in for the right-wing extremist AfD. Berlin will have a mayor whose phD title was rescinded for plagiarism and who gave up her ministerial seat as minister for family in the wake of the scandal, now to oversee the government of the capital.

Claude Monet Wind effect (Poplar Series) 1891

I’ll sweeten the reading assignment with some classic paintings of poplars that were brought to mind by the beauty in front of my eyes – in black and white to emphasize the structure and pattern (and similarities) of these wispy trees.

Vincent van Gogh Poplars at St. Remy 1889

Maybe the river will have water again (photograph of the tree lined water is from 2 years ago around this time) – right now it is unimaginably low.

Claude Monet Poplars at the Epte 1891
Vincent van Gogh Poplars near Nuenen 1884

Soon the trees will shed their leaves, and the scent of decaying silver and gold will emanate from the layers and layers that soften your step. I’ll be out there again, soon.

Paul Gauguin Landscape with Poplars 1875

Today’s music acknowledges that somehow most of these paintings seem to have originated in France, even though Germany and the PNW is full of poplars as well. The selection of pieces by Ravel is quite representative of his best work.

Sue Darius Lombardy Poplars

And here is a poem from the late 1800s :

Binsey Poplars

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 
  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 
  All felled, felled, are all felled; 
    Of a fresh and following folded rank 
                Not spared, not one 
                That dandled a sandalled 
         Shadow that swam or sank 
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 

  O if we but knew what we do 
         When we delve or hew — 
     Hack and rack the growing green! 
          Since country is so tender 
     To touch, her being só slender, 
     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 
     But a prick will make no eye at all, 
     Where we, even where we mean 
                 To mend her we end her, 
            When we hew or delve: 
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 
  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 
     Strokes of havoc unselve 
           The sweet especial scene, 
     Rural scene, a rural scene, 
     Sweet especial rural scene. 

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Find the Rebels.

I encountered the painting below a few days ago. It is currently making the rounds as a meme on social media.

It brought to mind how we interpret images when taking context into account, whether provided by cultural knowledge or extraneous narrative, including titles for the images, in this case The Irritating Gentleman.

Berthold Woltze The Irritating Gentleman (Der lästige Kavalier) – 1876

Berthold Woltze was a German art professor at the University of Weimar and, besides portraiture, generally devoted to narrative painting in a realist style, the hallmark of art in the Victorian era. Pictures could be “read” through literary allusions, clues through historical markers (costume or props) and explanatory provisions through titles or artist statements.

In the last decade of the 1800s something shifted. Paintings started to be more ambiguous, open to interpretation and they turned to subjects that dealt with issues arising with modernity: the role of women, gender conflict, sexuality and power hierarchies. Textual references were gone, and no clue provided – the audience had to figure out what the depicted dramatic scenes implied.

The genre of Problem Picture had arrived and it took off like wildfire. Art once reserved for an educated elite familiar with the literary canon, was now open to the middle- and even working class. Anyone could guess what seemed to be going on in an ambiguous painting with no references and the press, including publications that reached the masses and produced broadsheets that shifted a focus on art to a focus on entertainment, helped with dissemination. Which is one of the reasons, most likely, that this genre was soon dismissed or even ridiculed by “serious” artists and art critics, who all bent towards a new modern aesthetic of how art made you feel, rather than what a painting meant, and who cherished exclusivity, not the chatter of the masses.

Here is just one example of the shift from defined narrative to ambiguity (it and much of today’s summary were learned from Pamela Fletcher‘s Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture 1895 – 1914.)

The two paintings below, by the same painter, some 18 years apart, have similar set-ups. Legal authorities and a vulnerable witness/defendant, separated by a table. The early ones gives tons of clues: the dress reveals that the Puritans try to hunt down a family member of a royalist family, the title implies it’s the father, during the Civil War. The anxious look on the mother’s face betrays her fear that the boy might reveal her husband’s where-abouts and the larger-than-life central soldier spells the real danger should Dad be caught.

William Frederick Yeames “And when did you last see your father?” (1878)
William Frederick Yeames Defendant and Counsel (1895)

All is ambiguous in the later painting. What did the woman do? What will be her fate? Is counsel on her side, or are they part of the interrogation? Is her expression interpretable? Why are women dragged into court – immediate thoughts of risqué matters were triggered and fed into the social discourse around changes in morality. Did she harm her husband? Betray him? Is one of them pursuing divorce? Is she accused of prostitution? Is it a matter of surreptitiously obtained inheritance?

Here are further examples of these kind of paintings.

Is she coming or leaving, telling them off or being told off? Is the size of the shadow an indication of the parents’ wrath? What do the daughter’s rich clothes imply? Is she impervious, proud or defiant?

Who is the soldier in the mirror going to choose? What does the co-existence of these females roles imply? How would a female audience react, compared to males?

Problem Pictures became a kind of social practice where artists, audiences and the press interacted, with public conversations about possible interpretations providing space for a discussion of changing gender roles and expectations. Art for all, a seedbed for progress.

Back to our irritating gentleman, though.

EXCERPT

The painting was done too early to be counted as a true Problem Picture, although it is currently bandied about as one. The title provides some focus but there is indeed room for interpretation. Here is a very young girl, mourning dress indicating bereavement, sitting in a train compartment, being chatted up by an uninvited guy behind her, despite her tears, bystander pointedly not getting involved. Has she lost her parents and needs to leave home to seek employment as a maid or some such? Is the guy comforting her or capitalizing on her vulnerability? Simple cat call or obscene pursuit?

Some ambiguity, but centered on the dude. Here’s the crux, though: the original title given to the painting by Woltze was Ins feindliche Leben (Into the hostile life.) It was changed only after the painting came onto the market, most likely by the art dealer. The new title The irritating Gentleman shifts the perspective towards the obnoxious caller (a bad apple, a tasteless individual) away from the original title’s focus on a young girl being exposed to a world that will from now on harass her on many occasions, exploit her or even harm her. Into the hostile life is also a line, memorized by about every German school child certainly in 1876, from Friedrich Schiller’s seminal 1798 poem Song of the Bell which depicts gender roles in specificity, with the male having to move into hostile life, scrape and compete, and fight and females deserving the sheltering cocoon of a household and male protection.

The man must go out
In hostile life living,
Be working and striving
And planting and making,
Be scheming and taking,
Through hazard and daring,
His fortune ensnaring.

Der Mann muß hinaus
 Ins feindliche Leben,
 Muss wirken und streben
 Und pflanzen und schaffen,
Erlisten, erraffen,
 Muss wetten und wagen,
 Das Glück zu erjagen.

Clearly, then, these definite titles (one with the typical literary allusion) make us look at the painting in different ways, from an early context of the plight of the poor and orphaned in a cold-hearted, misogynistic world, to the later context of an annoying bloke who might or might not be representative of his sex. To be a true Problem Picture, the title should have been something like The Train Compartment which would have allowed us to disambiguate the whole thing ourselves. Would have loved to eavesdrop on that public discussion! Would there be sufficient irritation to rebel against the omnipresent female harassment implied by the painting?

Can today’s photographs, on a completely different topic, be disambiguated? I’ll leave you no titles….

Music by a German composer who is not very well known, Hans Pfitzner (1869 – 1949). Narrative enough to complement today’s musings.

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Sonic Spectres

Let me add to the lot of mind-boggling concepts I introduced this week – Fontana’s sound sculptures made of environment-specific noises, Hoyt’s Afro-Sonic Mapping, the Caretaker’s musical representations of the slide into dementia – one more maven who is a game changer with communicating ideas by means of auditory output: Kristen Gallerneaux.

To call her a renaissance woman is likely an understatement. She is a sound-based artist, curator, and sonic researcher with a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University), as well as the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she is in charge of one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. She writes for a variety of scholarly and popular journals, and her 2018 book High Static, Dead Lines was well received.

One of the most fascinating aspects of her explorations is for me the fact that this highly educated, scientifically versed woman does not shy away from topics that might elicit eye-rolling at best and ridicule at worst among her academic peers: the pursuit of sounds associated with a paranormal culture, the possibility of sonic spectres, the idea that objects have a life of their own beyond their relationship to humans (object-oriented ontology.)

I don’t care where unusual interests get started – in her case perhaps with the confluence of upbringing in a Spiritualist household, the lasting damage done to her hearing by badly treated childhood diseases that led to sound-distortions or – generation, or an immersion in folklore and/or narratives from her Métis ancestry (the folks from intermarriage between the first French settlers and the indigenous populations of her native Canada.) I do admire when those interests become passions, ignoring academic head winds and/or popular approval while searching for answers for tricky questions. And I gladly expose myself to unusual topics when they are offered in an approachable way, with clarity, directness and lack of pretensions, as her work does in spades, writing and compositions alike. Plus how can you not be curios about an artist who answers the question of whether she believes in the supernatural with this gem:

“…as for the question “Do you or do you not believe?,” I usually find myself citing one of my particularly witchy academic mentors, who once said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve met them plenty.” It perfectly summed up my noncommittal, gray-zone syncretic beliefs.” 

One of my favorite examples of her work is a sound and video exploration of a phenomenon called The Hum. Perhaps acoustic, perhaps psychological, it is a consistent, low-pitched noise or vibration, experienced by a small percentage of people across the world (often plagued by subsequent dizziness, headaches and insomnia) – in Auckland and Taos, in Bristol and until 2020 in Windsor, Ontario. You can find a worldwide map of reports here. Most dispatches come from urban areas, which suggests it might be industrial or urban low frequency noise pollution. Except it isn’t. There are not many scientific studies of this experience, but the ones that we have exclude natural sources (aurorae, lightning, meteors, volcanoes, waterfalls and ocean waves) as well as radio waves or microwave equivalents. Acoustic sources are unlikely, because if you bring multiple Hum experiencers into a room they all match the Hum to different acoustic frequencies. People are now exploring internal neurological processes for lack of satisfying external signal explanations, but here and now we simply do not know what’s going on. One might, of course, ask why should Auckland, for example, have a higher percentage of people with internal neurological quirks than, say, Sidney? Or why does the Hum disappear when industrial steel mills cease operations (like they did last year in Windsor, Canada?)

In any case the black& white video about the Hum is a terrific example of being open to variable explanations and pursuing them with intellectual rigor as well as visual tricks that allow us to believe in gray zones, after all.

For once, let me run with a wild fantasy. Let’s assume we organize a scéance and Gallerneaux is willing to attend. She might want to call on communing with Caroline Furness Jayne. Who, you ask? Jaynes is the author of a 1906 book on string figures, found globally. Known to us as cat’s cradle, they come in immense variations, and are apparently developed completely independently across world cultures. We know little about Jayne (bios are padded with info about her more famous parents and/or son) other than that she was interested in ethnological studies, a consummate traveler, dead for unknown reasons at age 36. Inspired by anthropologist Frans Boas, she researched scientific papers on string figures and published an anthology with places, names and instructions on how to generate these complicated cat’s cradles. You can find the book and the drawings here. And Gallineaux recently released music (Strung Figures, a terrific album) based on the book and those string figures, at the artist’s band camp site.

Surprise! Not Jayne, it is Harry Everett Smith who appears. (I’ve never attended a scéance, so give me some slack in making this all up.) Who he? Come on: The Magus with a magpie mind, as someone once called him, compiled the six-record collection Anthology of American Folk Music. But he was also declared to be an “anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, abstract painter, experimental filmmaker, and full-time eccentric. Smith’s interest in exposing unseen connections — his own form of artistic alchemy — drew him to create artwork that brought together diverse elements in new and exciting combinations.”(Ref.)

Sounds like a soul mate to Gallineaux, particularly when you now add that he was deeply interested in all things occult and worked with string figures. Here is a sampling from an exhibition of his string figures in Brooklyn, 9 years ago. Smith left an unfinished thousand-page manuscript on the practice, with some plainly false claims, I’d add, having skimmed some excerpts. But I’m sure he and today’s sound artist would have a lot to talk about.

Except that he, eschewing academics, might not grasp the mathematical connections to knot theory, and pictorial topology. I bet the bank she would. And, more importantly, be able to teach all of us about it in ways that we can grasp. In the meantime, let’s go dance to Finger Catch from Strung Figures.

Photographs today from fields of dried grass, windswept, where the only noise other than the occasionally lowing cow was the rustle when the breeze appeared. How could it not remind me of visualized sound waves?

.

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Sonic Mapping

One of the pleasures of writing an independent blog is the fact that I can cover topics I know absolutely nothing about, simply because I find them fascinating. You, of course, have a similar choice: you can explore new territory or decide to skip it, since it might involve some effort to listen in new ways. And listen it shall be: this week I am introducing a number of different artists who employ sound in order to map aspects of our world as linked to the past, present and future, or to capture ephemeral processes.

What they all have in common is that they are art – devised as sound sculptures in some cases, associated with visual images (painted, sculpted or digitally created) in others, or plain compositions using sound collected from the environment or electronically generated. I cannot tell if I am more fascinated by some of the underlying ideas, or the art works that result from the ideas. I guess it varies.

Today I will start with two artists who are about the present and the past. Wednesday’s segment will introduce two artists who explore the linkage between sound and psychological processes extending into the future. The two installments are meant as a package, examining working with sound from four different angles. I don’t expect anyone to listen to any of the links in full – that would cost a lot of time – but a bit of sampling will give you a taste of what’s out there and maybe instill curiosity for more.

Composer Bill Fontana is one of the pioneers of sound art in the U.S. with a career spanning five decades and taking him to international acclaim. He collects site-specific sounds and generates sound configurations from those recordings that reflect aspects of the site and are intended to shape our visual interaction with the site or visual surrounding. Working with acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers) that sample the environmental sounds, he creates “sculptures” with the input, musical transformations that are centrally experienced by the listener.

For example, he has composed subtle variations of the music of the Golden Gate Bridge, a live audio/video installation created for its 75th anniversary in 2012, now in the collection of SF MOMA. Here is a link to some of his acoustical visions – the bridge piece can be heard in the third segment.

Another sound sculpture can be found in Rome, in the entry hall of the National Museum of 21st Century Art. He connects Zaha Hadid’s architecture of the building with the acoustic, harmonic and rhythmical qualities of the water that has run in Roman aqueducts since time immemorial. Well, since Roman times. Ok, 2000 years.

You can hear the sculptural sound and the underlying source here.

Miami Beach at Night

And here is a link to one of his most recent projects, Sonic Dreamscapes that connects sounds of the Miami seascape under threat of climate change to our auditory cortex, making the listener aware of the fragility of our world. This multimedia installation was installed in Miami Beach in 2018.

The installation cycle begins during the day with individually recurring auditory recordings answering each other from different spatial points in SoundScape Park. By afternoon, the “musical vocabulary” will grow as additional sounds are added to the repertoire. As the evening approaches, environmentally inspired abstract videos will emerge on the video wall, allowing visitors to experience a myriad of floating sounds and meditative images.

Where Fontana is about connecting us to the sound of places with an eye on change across time, Satch Hoyt is a sound artist concerned with the sounds of people, their movements across space in the past and preserved echos in contemporary music. In addition to actual sculptures that interact with sound installations (link here, scroll down and click on the strips below the images to get to the sound,) Hoyt has an ongoing multi-media project in the works, Afro-Sonic Mapping, which traces specific traditional African music from centuries ago to the contemporary musical styles of the African diaspora.

Street Art in Berlin
Remembering Colonial Times….

The project connects archival recordings of African music from Congo and Angola, collected by European anthropologists of the late 1800s and found in Berlin’s ethnology museum, to the urban music in the suburbs of large contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian cities. Turns out, the musical patterns transmigrated to today’s urban music, linking Luanda, Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia, or Dakar, Cali and Lima. With examination of aural histories, interviews and musical exploration with local African musicians to whom Hoyt brought the old recordings, and with collaboration with modern musicians across continents, he re-imagined the sounds, rhythms and melodies, rarely recorded in bygone periods of colonialism and slave trade.

Two years ago the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin offered the first large presentation of the project. Paintings, lectures, videos and 2 concerts attracted big crowds across a full week. Here is some of the music interspersed with an explanatory interview with the artist. The focus was on the lusophone triangle, between the large Portuguese speaking regions of the word, Portugal, its former African colonies (Angola, Mozambique) and Brazil, mapping the sounds, back and forth. I am not sure that Hoyt’s goal to “bring back the music to the places of origin where it was recorded and create some kind of sonic restitution in a postcolonial world, a transformation,” can be accomplished, I certainly would not know how to judge that.

But I find the idea of mapping the network of historical pathways of rhythms or melodies which were, other than language, the only things that could be brought and kept during torturous migrations, fascinating. Musicians acting as archeologists, digging out old artifacts under layers of later civilizations. Sounds of spaces or historical sounds, recorded and re-coded for us to sharpen our listening, to form connections – art as mediator.

Photographs today are of San Francisco, Miami and Berlin, respectively; the Democratic Republic of Congo has to wait for another life time….

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Got Wire?

· Woven cultural patterns. ·

The wires in my head got all crossed. So many different associations triggered by the sight of swallows congregating on steel cables, perhaps getting ready to leave for warmer climes.

There was the train of thought associated with one of my favorite childhood fairy tales, Thumbelina by H.C. Andersen, the story of a tiny girl conceived through magic. Many a critter plays a role in this story, toad kidnappers, mouse guardians, mole suitors, and last but not least a swallow, coming to the rescue of our thumb-sized heroine who bravely survives attempts at forced marriage to a furry creature. Eventually, heartlessly, she dumps the infatuated swallow in favor of a flower-fairy prince. Growing wings herself, she happily-ever -after bumbles with him from blossom to blossom.

Oh, being picked up by a swallow and released in Africa – this then imaginative German girl could think of nothing more exciting! (Swallows from Northern Europe did indeed migrate to that continent.) Finding a prince and no longer being an outcast almost felt like an after-thought, but one that raised some pleasant goose bumps nonetheless. It seemed like a story capturing my own sense of being different during childhood, and one of isolation overcome, and also one of agency – the girl did things, however secretly, that suited her, and had the gut to disobey instructions.

Second train of thought fastened on a different tale of surviving isolation, this one decidedly for adults, and literate ones at that, since it revolves around allusions to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and many other literary characters of the Western canon. Jane Gardam (the book blurb correctly proclaims her Britain’s best writer you have never heard of – certainly true for this reader) weaves a spell around another outcast girl raised in rather lonely circumstances, finding an anchor in the willpower of Defoe’s stranded protagonist when she seemingly has none of her own. Crusoe’s Daughter (1985) is a small book, describing nuances of psychological interiors of people caught in or between two world wars in Britain, faith lost and found, and love becoming an afterthought to purpose. It, too, describes the solipsistic power of a woman who defies instructions, social mores and in her case the demands immanent to the last gasps of a struggling empire. An old-fashioned, comforting book, on one level. One that slyly sinks into your brain to make you face some hard truths that you tried to forget and that ultimately shifts to a novel structure of narrative, on another level.

Third train of thought revolved around the fact that age, experience and education really do provide perspectives that were previously missing. Take Anderson’s tale, for example, read for adventure and romance then, and understood now as an attempt of retelling even older tales – Persephone’s travels through the underworld and her reemergence come to mind. There is something of a Christian underpinning as well, the acceptance of the lepers and the grotesque, every outcast being worthy of a happy ending. But his narrative was also a moralistic warning: stick with your own own – hierarchical worlds of upper and lower classes or races (the dark, the brown, stay underground… ) should not mix.

Which brings us to the final train of thought elicited by all those birds on a wire. One of the most exciting discovery of recent months for me was a young South African artist, Igshaan Adams, who is not only a spectacular observer of his environment and a committed bridge-builder between divided groups, but a creative visionary when it comes to weaving wires. His first solo show in the UK, Kicking Dust has recently closed at London’s Hayward Gallery, for me, of course, only digitally available (photos from their website.)

It displayed tapestry and three dimensional installations that allowed you to walk paths between them. The artist was raised in Bonteheuwel, a former segregated township in Cape Town, and his work draws on the country’s history of Apartheid, as well as the behavioral patterns of its inhabitants – whether defined by poverty, customs, segregation or indigenous tradition.

In other words, here is an artist who is willing to witness what defines his environment, able to see the patterns that are laid down, and willing to reach across divides by creating representations full of connections (rather than stay rigidly with one’s own like H.C.Andersen would have us.) He does this with a tool kit of wires, ropes and twine, beads, trinkets and household dyes, all materials easily available at your neighborhood hardware store, with neighbors and family members helping with the weaving process.

The large installation represents the mapped spaces of different townships, connected by “footpaths” that were spontaneously trod by people from diverse, often hostile neighborhoods. The latter were created by an actively segregating government that did not wish to see solidarity between and politically aggregated power among the different ethnic groups – the Khoikhoi, Basters, Xhosa, Tswana, Cape Malays and Indian South Africans. Above the lines of these paths are representations of dust clouds – configurations that pick up the forms of clouds that are made when people performing indigenous dances kick sand.

“One of the oldest indigenous dancing styles in southern Africa, the Riel is traditionally performed by the San (also known as Bushmen), Nama and Khoi people of South Africa. Adams’ grandparents are Nama and as a child he would often join them to see young people dance the Rieldans in rural villages in the Northern Cape. Described as ‘dancing in the dust’, the dance is a courtship ritual where clouds of dust erupt from the ground as performers energetically kick the dry ground.”

You can see the dance and the artist’s explanation here. It’s short and worthwhile!

A state-bound exhibition of his tapestries,Veld Ven, depicting the selectively worn-out linoleum of his township neighbors’ floors, just closed at New York City’s Casey Caplan Gallery.

Here is a good visual overview of the individual tapestries and arrangements, photographed by Jason Wyche. Looking at the photographs, I found the patterns reminiscent of good translation, with all the hard work to capture the essentials in both content and form barely visible beneath the impression of likeness and flow. Then again, he could also be called a kind of cartographer, mapping movement onto two-dimensional patterns, serenely sharing presence and absence of design. Below are samples of the work.

AANKOMS (arrival), 2021
KOPPELVLAK (interface), 2021

NAGTREIS OP N VLIENDE PERD (a night journey on a winged horse), 2021

Maybe migration paths of swallows next? Connecting continents without a speck of xenophobia?

Music today is a bit on the romantic side – so be it.

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Got Sunflowers?

· Helianthus Patterns ·

Over the years I have come back to photographing and writing about sunflowers, just as practically every painter I’ve encountered has included them in their work. I’ve linked them to Blake’s poetry and described the history of their distribution across the world, religious twists included. What is it that draws us to them? Their saturated-color beauty when viewed en masse, their wondrous patterns when viewed in isolation, their ability to signal full, brilliant life as well as elegant decay?

I was thinking of that when encountering a sunflower maze on Sauvies Island last week, your’s to explore if you are willing to enter a farm store and pay $5 for the pleasure. I declined – still staying out of stores, even when wearing a mask and fully vaccinated – and proceeded to just walk around the perimeters.

Some of today’s photographs are from that occasion, others I’ve gathered over time. They were chosen with a focus on pattern, something photography is singularly able to capture when reduced to black & white, in contrast to the magic worked by painters with colors and looser depictions. I thought it would be fun to juxtapose the two – color and pattern – and also remind ourselves that there are interesting sunflower paintings beyond Van Gogh (and even for him some that are lesser known but just as fascinating.)

Let’s start with the Dutch, then, and marvel at the use of color that captures the radiance of these flowers.

Abraham Brueghel added the flower almost like an after thought in the background of the painting.

Abraham Brueghel A still life of fruit and flowers in a footed gadrooned silver vase with a spaniel 1685

His landsman a few centuries later became famous for his favorite subject.

Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Sunflowers Arles, January 1889 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

My preferred of his depictions, however, is this, so fluid and alive even with hints of decay, like little suns floating on water.

Vincent Van Gogh Sunflowers 1887

Paul Gauguin was drawn to the subject as well, but this portrait of his friend Van Gogh is probably one more familiar to viewers than his still-life.

Paul Gauguin Vincent van Gogh painting sunflower 1888

This was the caption from the van Gogh museum site:

Was Van Gogh really painting a vase of sunflowers when his friend Gauguin produced this portrait of him? No, he can’t have been: it was December and far too late in the year for sunflowers. But it’s quite probable that Van Gogh painted a copy of one of his own sunflower pictures around this time. The landscape in the background is also fictional: unlike Van Gogh, Gauguin liked to work from his imagination. They often argued about this. This painting refers to their disagreement. 

Later, Van Gogh wrote about this portrait: ‘My face has lit up a lot since, but it was indeed me, extremely tired and charged with electricity as I was then.’

Diego Rivera, on the other hand, painted sunflowers that are said to reference the style of the greats before him, with, some speculate, a bit of irony. Tahitian beauty with the flower of the Americas?

Diego Rivera Sunflowers, 1921

A spoof of the Impressionist’s short vibrant brush strokes, vividly displayed behind the girl in the painting?

1941

My favorite of his are these sunflowers that seem to provide a shelter, and also act like interested on-lookers, fascinated by the fate of that poor dismembered doll.

Diego Rivera Sunflowers 1943

They are certainly supportive of humankind in many ways. Their seeds are edible and they are rich in vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron and protein. They also act as decontaminators of toxic soil. Sunflowers are so called hyperaccumulators of dangerous heavy metals, extracting in particular radioactive metals, like cesium-137 and strontium-90 from the soil into their stem, leaves and flower head. Sunflower fields have become one way of trying to clean up the results of nuclear disasters, from Chernobyl to Fukushima (although, in the latter case, the wrong species of sunflower was planted, absorbing much less than desired. Pollute and learn.) When the sunflowers in the radiation areas are grown up and before birds become radioactive by eating the seeds, they are harvested and safely disposed of through pyrolysis. This process burns off all of the organic carbon in the plant while leaving the radioactive metals behind. These metals are then vitrified into pyrex glass and stored in a shielded container underground. No wonder the nuclear disarmament movement chose the sunflower as its symbol.

They also absorb some of the most common metal pollutants on our planet, such as cadmium, nickel, zinc, and lead, and so are used these days to clean up industrial pollution sites across the U.S., helping to considerably lower the cost of cleaning toxic soil.

On to the post- impressionists. Sunflowers by Gustav Klimt become more stylized, with a flowery pattern dominating the painting and the configuration foreshadowing his famous “The Kiss.”

Gustav Klimt Sunflower 1906

Egon Schiele returned to the plant over and over again, with most renditions expressing his familiar tendency towards the morbid. This one is still lovely.

Egon Schiele Sunflower 1909

Egon Schiele Autumn Sun 1914

Moving on, there is David Hockney. Not to my taste, but I was amused to learn what other, more educated critics saw in it.

What you don’t see in the interiors you see in the fields: young sunflowers are heliotropic, their heads move with the sun so that they expose themselves to maximum light and warmth which attracts pollinators necessary for reproduction. Ever wondered how they do this, since they don’t have muscles to move their heads? It’s actually an amazing process. Put into simplified terms, their stems grow both at night and during the day. But at night the west side of the stem grows much faster making the head flop eastward in the morning. During the day the opposite is true: the east side of the stem grows more so that by dusk the sunflower head turns westward catching the last of the warming rays. When they are fully grown they end in an eastward looking position to be ready for the sun at earliest possible time. How on earth does nature come up with these tricks????

My favorite still-life for last: Piet Mondrian, who else.

Piet Mondrian Still Life with Sunflower, 1907

Nature’s soothing greens brought inside, the sun’s light seemingly caught and distributed by the flower head, for a soft, shiny day. Wishing us all one of those.

Music today is from Russia. 17th century Tsar, Peter the Great, introduced the sunflower to this country. Suddenly an oil-rich plant, formerly unknown to the Russian Orthodox church, was available to skirt the restrictions assigned to Lent, the season of fasting. The primary rule was to give up sources of fat, both animal and vegetable, with precise designation of exactly which fat rich foods were forbidden. Farmers everywhere began to grow the sunflower since its oils and seed, not on that list, were soon highly coveted during these lean times.

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Tigard Surprise: The Heritage Trail

When seeking beauty under my nose (my goal this week,) the city of Tigard is not necessarily the first place that comes to mind. Home to box stores, multiplexes, industrial sites and bathed in exhaust fumes from the unending traffic at the intersections of 99 W and Rt 217, this small community never beckoned for a visit. Well, that could change.

I discovered its Outdoor Museum, open since 2019, by accident. Visiting an amazing upholstery store (waitlist 6 months! should tell you all) to deal with a couch abused for 26 years by boys, dogs and a lounging blog writer who shall remain nameless, I walked down the main street of downtown Tigard, looking at small shops, street cafes and public art until I came to the Rotary Plaza.

A ¾ mi heritage trail begins here, commemorating individual families representative of the history and changes of this community.

Multiple rusty, angular panels mirror the inactive railroad tracks that run parallel to the trail, and display stenciled and printed information about diverse individuals who shaped the history of the place. Historic photographs bring the stories to life, reminding us that although change ultimately happens only through collective efforts, it is individuals who drive and sustain the collective.

The installations were executed by Suenn Ho who’s firm Resolve Architecture has, among others, a large portfolio in the realm of civic and educational design. Five Oaks Museum (check out their on-line exhibits!) provided the documentation. Various art works by contemporary artists are also on display along the way. In truth, it struck me as a hodgepodge of mediums and styles that were far more authentically representative of a community creating a memorial to its history than any uniformly curated exhibition could ever be. It captures caring about a place, rather than depicting it from an elevated perspective.

Here is a look at the displays. The trail starts with Harry Kuehne who built successful businesses in what was then called Tigardville (later shortened to Tigard by the railroad that wanted no confusion with Wilsonville, one of the near-by stops.) Lover of horses, he was owner of a livery stable that rented horses and carts to the general public and traveling sales men who arrived by train. He later branched out to add a farm machinery shop – his story is cleverly used as an entry to the changes that arrived across time, from rural outpost to connection via railroad to the arrival of the automobile and how all that influenced what farmers grew or businesses adapted to.

Those who are commemorated along the trail are testimony to the increasing diversity of the community. The story of Peter Hing represents the contributions of immigrants from China.

The story of John and Annie Cash does not shy away from reminding us of the constitutionally ensconced anti-Black discrimination in our state.

Next we encounter community leader Evangelina “Vangie” Sanchez who fought tirelessly for educational opportunities and integration of Latino children and families.

Then there are Yoshio Hasuike and Sachiko Furuyama. Although he was born in Tigard he did not escape the fate of internment during World War II.

I somehow missed taking a picture of the last station in this series, commemorating Baχawádas Louis Kenoyer, the last known speaker of the Tualatin Kalapuya languages, who provided testimony of this ancestors and his life on the Grand Ronde reservation. Luckily the story can be found here.

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Along the way, three sculptures by Christine Clark, commissioned by the City of Tigard, pick up the rusty tone of the commemorative plates and guide us along the time-line of people’s experiences: Live, Settle, Advance. (2020)

Live (full and detail)
Settle
Advance

Mosaic artist Jennifer Kuhns represents important features for the region in Tualatin Liveblood (2020) with blue mosaic inlays in flowing patterns. They suggest water, the Tualatin river and Fanno Creek being nearby, and show added objects that were important to the tribes of the region.

Add to the eclectic mix two murals who face each other by Joshua Lawyer and MJ Lindo-Lawyer: here is the explanation for the work from the Downtown Tigard Public Art Walking Guide:

“Supported in part by a $75,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant and funding from Washington County Visitors Association, this mural was commissioned by the City of Tigard as part of the Tigard Outdoor Museum project. The mural depicts the Kalapuyan people – a Kalapuya group, the Atfalati, were the Tualatin Valley’s earliest inhabitants – and what they valued most.

The design showcases large animals as spiritual guides. The wolf leads a young woman on her fishing voyage – an activity that had deep cultural significance to the Atfalati, and which remains very popular in the Tualatin Valley to this day. The other contains references to historic cultures, local wildlife, and water.

The two mirroring artworks painted under the 99W underpass show a contrast in color. One is lit up in mainly orange hues, while this mural is muted in blue colors. The dueling colors depict the two extremes of summer and winter. The seasons were vitally important to the Kalapuyan people, who based their seasons on their crop. The murals’ artists chose to depict the duality of nature, with a cooler scene shown here, and then a warmer, brighter scene shown on the opposite wall.”

Joshua Lawyer (2020) I found my kind of humor on his website….
MJ Lindo-Lawyer (2020)

I liked the fact that all of these women were depicted in modern clothing, placing them here and now in a continuum of their native culture, preserved through their elders.

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At the end of the trail you can cross over into Dirksen Nature Park which offers a loop through old growth forest and savannah and eventually leads across Fanno Creek back to where you started, a total of about 3 miles. (Step by step hike description can be found here.)

At the very beginning there is a new playground that displays serious creativity (and likely serious money.) Yet not a kid in sight when I walked by.

That was very different at about a kilometer south where an old playground with rickety structures was teeming with children of all ages and one lonely port-a-potty sported a line. I had to rest for a while and sat on a bench next to picnic tables where some 12 year-old beauties were trying out nail polish, happily chattering away in Russian. Little boys were chasing each other and screaming in Spanish, and two harried moms called to Ahmed and Arjaf, respectively, that it was time to go home. I was thinking about all the settlers that I had just learned about and how happy they would be to see Tigard as a place that made it possible for all to call it home, meeting and mingling at work, at play – and hopefully at the outdoor museum to understand how integration, both legally and factually, had to be fought for by courageous immigrants and their allies.

So where shall we go next?

Music today is from the Mosaic Concert (New music and art by NW women) presented by Cascadia Composers. Lisa Neher’s composition Look within is played by the Delgani String Quartet.

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Thistles and Neuronal Networks

I intend to keep my promise to write this week about nothing but uplifting, constructive or beautiful things that I find right under my nose. Here is the second installment, triggered by the beauty of thistles that are in full thistle-down stage in the meadows around me. The fluff formations always remind me of neuronal networks and so it was no coincidence that I ended up looking at neuroscience art. What I settled on, though, were not images, but a truly fun experience with language that you all can have as well.

Among the contestants of the 2021 Art of Neuroscience Contest was an entry by Simon Demeule and Pauline Palma from the University of Montreal/McGill University, an interactive program called

What Lies Ahead.

If you click the link it will bring up a few words of explanation and then the invitation to start writing – just type in your first line (no need to click anywhere) and you will see what unfolds. The program is an interactive poetic experience that explores themes of artificial intelligence, language, psychology, and intent. Here is their explanation:

Through a simple text-based interface, this piece creates a game of exquisite corpse between the participant and a text-generating AI, an altered version of GPT-2 trained on the vast Gutenberg English literature corpus. As the synthetic responses unfold, words cascade through all configurations considered by the algorithm, partly unveiling the black box process within. The human tendencies captured by the algorithm resurface, produced by a machine that fundamentally lacks intent. 

As the participant is presented with ambiguity and absurdity, their cognitive ability to bridge gaps and construct meaning becomes the guiding force that steers the evolution of the piece. In turn, participant’s input feeds the algorithm, thereby prompting interpretation again. Through this cyclical, almost conversational process, a unique poem emerges. 

This project was created through the Convergence Initiative, an organisation dedicated to encouraging interdisciplinary work between the arts and sciences.

I tried it out immediately and realized it would not give me the whole poem at the end. I then took screenshots of the evolution of the next “poem”. Here is what AI and I came up with, our combined brilliance now preserved for all posterity …(Their text on white background):

It is really a fun process if a little disjointed, so I tried once again. Note it is an AI program that was trained on literary Greats, randomly sampling and weighing and spitting out these words.

And here is a poem when a gifted, emotional, no-holds barred wordsmith attacks the thistle theme:

Thistles

by Ted Hughes

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

Can we all agree we should leave poetry to actual human beings on their own???

If you still have time and inclination, go back to the art of neuroscience site and look at the other entries – there is so much ingenuity to explore, photography and sculpture included. 175 contestants from over 20 countries submitted nearly 300 submissions, of which one winner and several honorable mentions and staff picks were published.

Album today is Robert Burn’s poetry set to music. The thistle is Scotland’s national flower.

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Beaverton Joy: La Strada dei Pastelli

We could practically be drowning in sadness, between the Haitian earthquake, the heartbreaking plight and betrayal of the Afghan people, the disregard for life and health of Americans of all ages by powers that have made the undermining of health advice an ideological litmus test, and last but not least the relentless, uncurbed advance of climate catastrophe. I will have to fight against being sucked under, and decided the best way to do this is to write this week about nothing but uplifting, constructive or beautiful things right under my nose. Preferably all three.

I found them but a 15 minute drive away, early Sunday morning in Beaverton, OR. One of the consequences of being immuno-compromised is the inability to go to places where lots of people mingle, like Saturday’s Beaverton Night Market, an annual event that showcases art and crafts from many different sources. Luckily, some of Saturday’s creative output remained when I went over early Sunday morning,

with the only other people around some of the chalk artists, a professional photographer

and the hard-working clean-up crews.

What had drawn me was La Strada dei Pastelli, the work of a number of professional chalk artists loosely centered around a theme of portraits from diverse cultural backgrounds. It ranged from beautiful to whimsical to poignant, with impressive detail and above all a luminosity that momentarily replaced any dark thoughts. Mission accomplished! The artistic event was produced by 2D4D, an organization that “intends to empower, engage and advocate 2 D artists and those working on time-based creations (4D) to magnify collective social impact.”

“We believe that it is through our collective voice, works, and actions that the arts inspire, provoke, enhance, and contribute to the emotional and economic well-being of our region. 2D4D does this by providing free and low-cost classes, workshops, networking events, exhibition and performance opportunities each designed to expose the value, function, and necessity for social diversity and dialog. This is only possible by bridging interaction between the arts and non-arts communities to recognize that each supports the other.”

As luck would have it, two of the artists were already on site, touching up on their creations. Jessi Queen who hails from Atlanta, GA, traveled widely after art school and before the pandemic, and has been awarded numerous prizes for her portraits, nationally and internationally. She also does web design and the top of her website clarified her approach with two headings: ART: a question to a problem – see it. DESIGN: a solution to a problem – experience it. Her chalk portrait certainly allowed me to do both.

Jolene Rose Russell lives in Sacramento, CA. With a BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz with an emphasis in painting and drawing, she has focussed on large-scale artwork for corporate, retail and residential spaces. Her passion, though, is still the chalk street art that she started out with. Her self-portrait emphasized the part of her heritage that is Scottish (the Russell Tartan included) with a nod to making the hair a bit more in line with the ancestral average. A 2019 trip to Scotland included vigorous hiking and obviously a lot of creative stimulation. I was struck not so much by issues of resemblance as by the sheer luminosity she was able to bring across even in bright morning light which tends to wash out some of the effect. Pretty amazing.

A good “drawer” she is!

The remaining portraits I saw had to be explored on their own, with no artist there at the early Sunday hour. There was the Moon Goddess by Sharyn Chan from Santa Barbara, CA.

Placed right in front of the library, there was this beauty by Joel Yau, who lives in Marin County North of San Francisco.

And there was Jennifer Ripassa from La Mirada, CA, with patterns galore.

A very different landscape opened up next to the kids’ play area, which by itself had some nice chalk enticements.

A fairy-tale vista by Shelley Brenner, gnomes included, impressed not only with whimsey but also with some intense optical illusion. Drawn out in lengthened perspective, it shrunk to a perfectly proportioned, 3-D painting when viewed from the right angle.

This photographer wisely brought his own ladder, I made due with a rickety stump to document the effect. My ladder-schlepping days are over….

You, too, can book a pigment of your imagination by these artists, something I will remember should we ever have anything to celebrate again.

The work that spoke most closely to my own affinities as a photographer and immigrant, was a drawing of an old black&white photograph embedded in a suggested NW landscape.

Susan L. Charnquist is a Pacific Northwest artist who is sensitive not just to the history of the region but the state of its nature as well. Other Beaverton work (where she went to high school some years ago) that I had seen previously, attests to that.

Mural (2021) on Westside of Ickabod’s Bar and Grill

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It was a quiet morning in Beaverton, and I wondered how a small town had produced or attracted so much talent. It often takes only a few dedicated, knowledgable and passionate people to get the ball rolling (and, oh, does Beaverton have them), but it takes so much more to sustain it, particularly during economic hard times and additional stressors like a pandemic. Now the heat, too. One of the two days of the Night Market had to be canceled due to the heat advisory, just think of the loss of revenue.

And of course Beaverton is not just putting on these outdoor festivals that are so amenable to introduce family and children to artistic ventures. The city has a dedicated Public Arts Program, that includes public art works, murals and revolving exhibits.

Currently under construction is the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, a $48 million dollar project in public-private partnership together with the Beaverton Arts Foundation that promises to be a world–class multidisciplinary arts center offering more access to arts, entertainment, and educational programming for residents and visitors. “It will be an arts and entertainment destination drawing from far and wide; a home for a variety of touring programs, professional performances, and a much–needed rental resource to regional arts groups. The Reser Center will offer educational and family programming in the visual and performing arts, and will host business, civic and social events.” Can’t wait to see it.

In the meantime, I wandered through the still sleepy streets, with the old and the new, kitty corner to each other, providing contrast,

and where Tattoo parlors, businesses and a Masonic lodge share a few city blocks.

The local flower shop is conveniently located across a funeral parlor, luring the Connors of the world with free roses, and showing a sensible approach to the times in other ways as well: just look at the heat proof plants on offer.

Beautification in back alleys and parking lots provided joyful surprises,

overlooked by one of the larger beauties of them all. The mural from the 2017 Forest for the Trees project is by Drew Merritt and called Portrait of Resilience – that title might be an apt description of Beaverton and its arts community as well.

Although, on the sidewalk, the small stuff for the short set still resonated just as loudly. No room for sadness on this Sunday morning, as was the intention.

Music today is by Paul Dessau who composed for Bertholdt Brecht’s plays, the Caucasian Chalk Circle included (I am not posting that because it is too much about war…) Here is his 2nd symphony.

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