You can join me for all the benefits of an outing without:
rattled bones
jolted heart
having to listen to my umpteenth lecture on why I really, really don’t like added attractions in botanical gardens… I declare myself outvoted, promo art is here to stay.
What’s this all about? Drive with me about an hour south of Altadena to South Coast Botanic Garden. When you arrive you have to navigate a road approaching a parking lot, both of which present like egg cartons, made by and for giants, with you driving across peaks and valley, wondering about your bones, even at minimum speed, and what kind of So Cal frost could have buckled the asphalt like this. Not frost, you learn. Rather, this garden, started in the 1960s, was placed on a landfill, the latter a practical solution to yawning pits left over from mining that had started around the early 1900s, and now settling.
Mining companies went after white diatomite, the ancient deposits of marine diatoms. The region offered a continuous 500-foot-thick belt of nearly white diatomite, made of silica from ocean creatures that settled to the bottom of the sea. Over millions of years, with the addition of heat and compression, diatomaceous earth was formed and now mined as a desirable ingredient for filters, toothpaste and compounds used to produce certain forms of pesticides. When the open pits were depleted and subsequently abandoned, the current eighty-seven acres of land had been filled with three-and-a-half million tons of trash mixed with local soil by the Los Angeles County Sanitation District.
So what happens when you place a garden on a landfill? The latter settles because the trash decomposes, causing dips and buckles in trails and road. Irrigation pipes break.
“The intense heat generated as a by-product of decomposition burned the roots of trees and shrubs, leading to much devastation among the early plantings. Pockets of out-gassing methane, carbon dioxide, and sulfur caused “hot spots” to form where nothing would grow. Sometimes, plant roots would get into the trash itself; in one instance, roots grew inside a tire. The soil used to cap the trash deposits is generally low in nutrients and acts much like clay, expanding when wet and cracking during the summer dry season. This puts additional stress on root systems and allows for new gaps to vent gases. As time progressed, new plants were accessioned to replace those lost, and the rate of subsidence began to slow, resulting in greater stability of the land.” (Ref.)
The various folks establishing this garden were passionate and prevailed. Frances Young, a district director of California Garden Clubs & Horticulture Societies, began to promote a regional botanic garden, William S Stewart, then director of the Los Angeles State & County Arboretum in Arcadia joined the cause, and Donald P Woolley was responsible for the landscaping – all dedicated to the ecological use of the existing resources.
The garden has matured pretty well, given how young it is. The front is loaded with the kinds of things most of the general public might enjoy: a slightly overwrought rose garden, a decent fuchsia collection, an impressive staghorn fern collection, and a seasonal spot filled with colorful annuals. Diverse, inviting resting places everywhere.
For me it got more attractive once you wander deeper into the landscape – lots of interesting trees, an artificial stream and lake, both dry during my visit, canyons that provide shade and opportunities for indigenous plantings and wildlife.
Also the stage for a potential heart attack during my meanderings. The garden was in the process of setting up for their annual light show during the dark months, and what I thought were camouflaged projectors turned out to be loudspeakers – imagine wandering along a quiet forest trail and all of a sudden a booming voice shouts “Testing, testing” into your ear. Should have seen me jump….
The current major attraction in the garden are Thomas Dambo‘s sculptures of giant trolls which might make the kiddos jump but not your’s truly. I had previously written about his amusing efforts to recycle wood and place these creatures into the open to lure people into nature. Here now was the opportunity to see the real thing, and I might have enjoyed it more if not for the fact that the signage explaining their mission was so intensely didactic.
There is Ibbi Pip, the birdhouse troll, with birdhouse pointing the way throughout the garden
There is Rosa Sunfinger, the botanical troll,
Here is Ronya Redeye, the speaker troll,
and Camma Can, the trash troll
My favorite, if one can call it that, was Softus Lotus, the listening troll,
and here is Base Buller, the painting troll.
Squirrel unperturbed…..
Then again, who knows for whom it might register and be thought provoking or providing a teaching moment. And if it brings you to the garden, might as well teach about succulents, or the variability in needle trees or about anyone of the 200.000 plants on offer these days. Mission accomplished! She says, grumblingly.
Music is Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite today, am I predictable, or what? Maybe the trolls dance at night.
“At its outset in the mid-1960s, the historic preservation movement contributed to the racial splintering of the nation’s urban fabric. It denied the freeway’s entry into communities deemed historic while granting its passage through communities judged differently. It empowered some communities in their fight against the freeway while putting others at a disadvantage. In the disproportionate number of black communities that bore the brunt of urban highway construction, the preservation strategy had no chance, leaving displaced residents with a meager set of resources to recuperate their connection to the past. This is why we need to pay attention to murals, festivals, autobiographies, oral histories, and archival efforts. In the high-stakes struggles over the fate of the American city, these were the “weapons of the weak,” the tools invented by displaced communities to fight the forced erasures of their past.” ― Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City
WHEN YOU ARE NEW to a city, like I am to Los Angeles, one way of exploration is to hit the history books. I had described my early mapping of the city onto Mike Davis’City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles in April here, while reviewing an exhibition from the LACMA archives, Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany.
This time, I brought Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism by Ehrhard Bahr, thinking I might follow in the footsteps of my exiled Landsmen during the 1940s, artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution. The book’s introduction contains the following description: “Los Angeles has occupied a space in the American imagination between innocence and corruption, unspoiled nature and ruthless real-estate development, naïveté and hucksterism, enthusiasm and shameless exploitation.”
I don’t know about the American imagination, but those of us who devoured Berthold Brecht’s California poetry 20 years later as German teenagers obsessed with America were undoubtedly influenced by his assessment:
Contemplating Hell
Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it, My brother Shelley found it to be a place Much like the city of London. I, Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles, Find, contemplating Hell, that it Must be even more like Los Angeles.
Also in Hell, I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course, Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless
Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos, Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere. And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty, Even when inhabited.
Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly. But concern about being thrown into the street Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less Than the inhabitants of the barracks.
Bertolt BrechtNachdenkend über die Hölle, 1941, translated by Henry Erik Butler
Mural and Paintings by Devin Reynolds on the walls of the Hammer lobby. Contains references to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, displacement from a beautiful home acting as a red thread through the histories of many Angelenos.
Many decades later I wholeheartedly disagree with Brecht’s description – I find L.A. vibrant and fascinating – though not his political analysis. He knew class divisions and precarity when he saw it. By all reports, he clung to negative emotions as a motor driving his writing. But his ability to pick up on what makes this city thriving, underneath capitalistic excess or popular culture driven by interests to keep racial segregation intact, might have been curbed by what was then and still is not easily visible to the outsider. At least that is my speculation after chancing on Eric Avila’s The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City, from which I cited at the very start of these contemplations.
Knowing the history of a place is essential to understanding its character. Who rose to the top and who was pushed to the bottom will define the nature of both the lay-out, the (d)evolution of neighborhoods and the way power hierarchies are distributed. My hometown of Hamburg, Germany, for example, needs to be read in the context of its merchant marine and membership in the Hanseatic League, its intermittent warfare with Scandinavian neighbors, and its destruction under Allied firebombing during World War II.
There are ways of learning about the past of a city and her people that are not found simply by looking in all the traditional places. Clearly, mainstream historians have little incentive to document attempts towards self-empowerment or organized resistance by those not among the ruling classes. Facts about the past are instead often woven into the fabric of experienced daily life, painted on neighborhood walls (I had written about Pacoima, for example, here,) told during story time in corner libraries, experienced during Saturday’s soccer matches at the local park, found during celebrations of special days for different nationalities. Not just the past, I’d add, but the present, as it resurrects what was to be extinguished. Not exactly easily accessible to a foreigner like Brecht, struggling with the language, not particularly mobile, traumatized by persecution and exile, and facing the fact that there are 88 cities, approximately 140 unincorporated areas, and communities within the City of Los Angeles.
Jibz Cameron Cops, Coyotes, Cars, Crows (2023) Watercolor, Correction Fluid and Graphite on Paper
We, on the other hand, are lucky enough to find quite a bit of it all in one place, a weave that is compact as well as sprawling, screaming as well as whispering, consciously representing or intuitively describing, like L.A. itself. It’s made possible by curators who brought a cross section of yet undiscovered stories into an exhibition that in many aspect mirrors the city it drew from.
At least that is how I experienced the Hammer’s current exhibition Made in L.A. 2023: The Act of Living, an iteration of its biennial attempt to showcase new talent, unknown or underrepresented artists, providing access to what is likely hidden to most of us from different cultural enclaves. Guest curator Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, who joined the Hammer museum full-time in June, and Ashton Cooper, Luce Curatorial Fellow, have assembled some 250 works of 39 locally based artists, challenging us to confront our stereotypes and navigate an abundance of thought-provoking art. I come back to what I had written about our own Portland’s current art extravaganza, Converge 45: perceptive curation is a mystery to me, like herding cats, but when it succeeds it is a gift to the community (never mind an intellectual feat.)
Their guiding principles can be found in their statement above.
***
AT RISK OF FALLING for surface rather than structural characteristics, here is an analogy I can’t resist: as L.A.’s neighborhoods differ along multiple dimensions, so does the chosen art in this show. By size, by spacing, by density, by degrees of familiarity. Just as I like some neighborhoods more than others, some leaving me cold, some moving me to the core, some eluding my comprehension, some dull, some riveting, some evoking scorn, and others longing or admiration, so it is for much of the work on display. What registered most deeply was the fact that many of the exhibits taught me something I would not have otherwise known, and how much, sometimes viscerally, texture ran as a common theme through the galleries. Texture, indifferent to past, present or future, is, of course, a stand-out characteristic of Southern California’s nature for this Northerner, with its unusual mix of desert and tropical plants, all ridges, grains, thorns, spines and spikes, peeling bark, twisted fronds, and leathery surfaces.
Kinetic sculpture by Maria Maea“Lē Gata Fa’avavau (Infinity Forever)” (2023) including parts of palm trees, car parts and feathers.
Really, I think there are few materials known to man not included in this biennial. Natural materials like wood, bones, wool, cotton, pearls, wax, mica, graphite, dirt, salt, limestone, copper, leather, feathers, palm fronds, sea shells, corn, corn or other plant based substances. Fabricated materials like acrylic, plastics, paper, forged metal, glass, lead alloys – you name it, it was affixed or served as a constituent even in the context of more traditional forms of painting. Some assemblages consisted of more material detail than you could possibly take in at a single visit. Videos were (blissfully) few and far in-between, although demonstrations of octogenarian Pippa Garner triggered some giddiness.
What follows are some photographs to relate the overall variety of art on display, not necessarily work that I liked, but work that speaks to the range of cultural production, the focus on texture, as well as entryways into histories new to me. I will then turn to my absolute favorites, both artists I had never heard of. In one case, apparently, the same was true for the curators, who only met the young painter upon recommendations of other studios.
Beautiful weavings by Melissa Cody, Scaling the Caverns (2023) at center, detail below
Sensuous configurations of leather, painting- or quilt-like, by Esteban Ramón Pérez,
Esteban Ramón PérezCloud Serpent Tierra del Fuego) (2023) Leather, rooster-tail feathers, urethane, acrylic, nylon, jute wood.
Disquieting collages by King Seung Lee,
Kang Seung LeeUntitled (Chairs) (2023) Graphite, antique 24-k gold thread, same, pearls, 24-k gold leaf, sealing wax, brass nails on goat skin parchment, walnut frame.
(Aside: what it is with chairs that can so easily register as ominous? Look at Tadashi Kawamata‘s currently exhibited at Liaigre’s building in Paris: Nest at Liagre. Or is it just me?)
Photo creditL Sylvie Becquet
From the younger set:
Michael Alvarez 2 Foos and a Double Rainbow (2019) Oil, Spray Paint, Graphite and Collage on Panel
A reminder for those of us who vicariously experienced the AIDs epidemic as young adults when living in NYC, with friends dying:
Joey Terrill works, the selection depicting formative memories and daily experience in queer communities.
The Munch-inspired scream on steroids below attracted a lot of attention, justified, in my opinion, only if you looked more closely on the backside of the sculpture that provided a narrative worth the attention grabbing. The sculpture was co-created by numerous Native Americans.
Runner-up to the works below that inspired me most, was this assemblage using a silk parachute. Talk about texture!
Erica MahinayLunar Tryst (2023) and Details. Acrylic, raw pigment and aluminum leaf on half-silk parachute, lead, ostrich feathers.
And here are Kyle Kilty’s paintings, as vibrant, patterned, and hibiscus-colored as L.A. itself, capturing the imagination with abstractions that turn representational upon closer inspection – just about the same process the traveler experiences when getting to know and learning to navigate this moloch of a city.
For some reason I was reminded of Paul Klee, had he lived in another century, under the California sun and caved to demands for size. (The Phillips had an informative exhibition on Klee’s lasting influence on other American painters, some years ago.)
Kyle KiltyIt could be, Frankly (2022) Acrylic, mica flake and oil on canvas.
Kyle KiltyIt Could Get the Railroad (2022) Acrylic, oil, and graphite on canvas
Kyle Kilty Arranging (2019) Acrylic, oil, and gold leaf on canvas
And here, finally, is the essence of story telling about the facets of this city here and now, its hidden treasures and traditions, the diasporic nature of its people due to displacement from their home countries and/or the grid of highways, literally embedded in the substance of L.A. county itself: the soil collected from its various neighborhoods, mixed with salt, rain, limestone and masa. Jackie Amézquita’s 144 slabs are testament to the unwritten history of the many unseen people who constitute the lifeblood of L.A., the embedded drawings representing typical sights during quotidian encounters.
Jackie Amézquita El suelo que nos alimenta (2023) Soil, masa (corn dough), salt, rain, limestone, and copper
Here you can see her at work and hear her explanations of the artwork. It is terrific on so many levels.
***
THERE IS CHANGE AFOOT at the Hammer. This week we learned of the planned retirement of long-time director Ann Philbin, with a search for a replacement underway. It will be difficult to fill those shoes. Hopefully, the core of her focus will endure, a commitment to contemporary art with a focus on emerging artists and social justice. The 2023 biennial certainly can serve as a model: reconsidering the past in the sense that it paves the way for grasping a more equitable future, but then moving on, creating our own utopias.
Started today with an incisive German voice. Might as well end with another one. If you replace the words “(social) revolutions” with “art,” and “19th” with “21st” century, the museum might eventually follow this model:
“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content.”
Karl Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852
Walk with me. It’ll be the last hike in Oregon for a while. I am going on a roadtrip to Los Angeles this week, and will write from there until my return in November.
The birds were active today. Little finches busily harvesting seeds.
Raptors in the air.
Egrets on the go,
competing with a lot of blue herons for space and food sources.
This little caterpillar portends a short winter, a long winter, a cold winter, a dry winter, oh, if I could only remember.
These guys were fighting over a fish, until one gave up. The kingfisher watched on.
Lots of preening: the bald eagle, the ducks, the mud hens, the nutria.
Lots of flora still clamoring for attention,
some berries ready to provide for times of scarcity.
What I will miss: a concert that I urge you to consider – Annelies: The Voice of Anne Frank, co-sponsored by the Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Details about the Portland performance are in the link – I have heard from several friends who are singing in it that it is beyond amazing, an important reminder of what matters in times when human life is under threat. The link at the end of the blog is a recording of the concert by a different ensemble.
What you will miss (if you don’t get going…): our exhibition The Gorge Beckons: Change and Continuity is still up at the Columbia Gorge Museum in Stevenson until the end of the month. Your thoughts on the work would be much appreciated.
Alternatively you could sensibly decide to enjoy the arrival of autumn in the wetlands instead.
The geese were gathering to fly formation, I wonder if they go South along side of me. I will report, stay tuned!
Music today by James Whitbourn with the MSU Chorale.
At the exit of Portland Japanese Garden stands a sign that I am all too happy to comply with, over and over again.
This time there was a twofold incentive to return. For one, the rains had finally set in, and my hopes for a garden washed clean from the drought’s dust were met. Light reflected from water drops, pond surfaces and glossy leaf and needle trees.
Green, embedded in fall colors of higher wavelengths, gleamed as saturated as one could wish for.
Takahiro Iwasaki was born and lives in Hiroshima. He received his Ph.D. from Hiroshima City University in 2003 and a Master of Fine Arts from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2005. Many of his installations can be subsumed into two large bodies of work, Reflection Model and Out of Disorder. The work has increasingly found international audiences and collectors, including well received exhibitions at NGV (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia) in 2015, and as representative of Japan in the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2017, Venice, Italy (2017).
The newest Reflection Model is presented at our own Pavilion in the garden, and an installation that fits the second category is on view at the Calvin and Mayho Tanabe Gallery, with a title that invites us to see things anew. Let me describe them in turn.
Iwasaki’s early reflection models were scaled-down versions of some of the most famous architecture in all of Japan, seven Shinto shrines. The breathtakingly detailed and accurate representations of these architectural marvels are hand-made of wood, some as large as 8 x 8 meters (26.2 x 26.2 feet). They are suspended from the ceiling, and have a 3-D mirror inversion that simulates reflection in water, as many of the actual shrines are located near bodies of water that reflects or even immerses them with the tide. For many of the larger structures, individual parts nestle into each other with slot and tenon joints that avoid complete rigidity, allowing strength through flexibility, as so many of the building techniques in a nation prone to earthquakes. The wood is untreated cypress, that will eventually fade to silver. (I photographed the model first at 8:00 am, when we had not quite figured out where the lights were in the Pavilion. The images have a grey tone that probably comes closer to faded cypress than those taken when my friendly host found the switch.)
The model on view is a re-creation of the Rashomon Gate at the entrance of the city of Kyoto which played a central role in Akira Kurasawa’s 1950 film of the same name. Kurasawa himself had the gate fashioned as a set piece from historical drawings and literary descriptions. Iwasaki, in turn, looked at images from the movie and recreated the design to scale, with every piece cut by hand, with the sole exception of the the sign that spells the name of the gate. The sign Rashomon (羅生門) was manufactured by a laser cutter and is also depicted as a mirror reflection of each kanji character.
My first reaction was incredulity that someone could make a detailed model of this size by hand: it must take the patience of a saint, the visual acuity of an eagle and the steady hands of a brain surgeon.Never mind the vision of drawing the plans. Nothing but respect for the craftsmanship.
My second thought was focused on the word reflection. In English it has, of course, at least two meanings: the mirroring of a visual object in a reflective surface, and the contemplation of an idea, or some careful consideration or meditation. The suggested mirroring via the inverse doubling of this sculpture puts us in a perceptual quandary: reflection in real life is visually associated with the slightest distortion, the shimmer of a mirrored surface, the undulations of water moved by a breeze. Here static solidity rules, and that sense of an object with its inverse twin frozen in time and space is completely at odds with the seeming lack of gravity. That structure is floating in the air, yet unmoving, the doubling so unnatural that you start distrusting your eyes. The nature of perception: it can be fooled.
Reflection on all that this sculpture invokes beyond perception provides further challenges. The flyer and other signage that is provided to the visitor stresses the art’s connection to the concept of mono no aware (もののあはれ) defined as the understanding of the ephemeral nature of things. For Iwasaki’s earlier shrine sculptures the historical impact of war and nuclear destruction was obvious. For the current installation, the dilapidated nature of of the gate points in that direction, as well as the background information that it was reconstructed from images in the film, with the set piece itself no longer existing. One step further into the past, we know that the actual historical gate into Kyoto has long been destroyed.
Rashomon Detail
The reverence for and connectedness to history clearly informs the choice of subject for both, Kurasawa and later Iwasaki, almost defiantly reconstituting a dissolute architectural object back into existence. Yet both gates remind us in their dilapidated states of the ravages of weather, time and human impact. (In the film you see early on how someone breaks apart the wood of the slatted walls to build a fire.)
Screenshots of the Rashomon Gate from the 1950 film by Akira Kurasawa, in the deluge of rain that sets the mood for the violent story, fortified by music that reminds of Ravel’s Bolero. The film can be watched here.
Mono no aware, I learned, can also be translated differently: it can be a feeling of emptiness, or, literally, the pathos of things, or, in literature and film, it is often associated with “a lack of resolution.” In other words, a story without a clear-cut ending.
That brings us to Rashomon, the film, which has become a cultural icon signifying the lack of resolution to a mystery, because one single truth cannot be discerned among many truths that are voiced. Let me pause here for a moment and introduce the warning given by Portland Japanese Garden in multiple instances.
Portland Japanese Garden cautions potential viewers of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon to be cognizant of the gender inequities and dismissive portrayal of the nameless samurai’s wife. Part of Rashomon’s lasting influence is in how it perpetuates stereotypes about women, and discredits female voices, experiences, and testimonies while upholding the “conventional wisdom” of conservative patriarchal society. Alongside its cultural impact and cinematographic beauty, the film has been described as “unsettling” and “disturbing.” Takahiro Iwasaki, our featured artist, used the image of rashomon purely as a lasting cultural metaphor and did not intend his work to be a validation of the specific content of Kurosawa’s film.
I appreciate the sensitivity to issues that might concern or upset viewers. But if you give a veiled trigger warning it should not be cloaked in generalities. The film’s central action is the killing of a man who witnessed the rape of his wife. In subsequent court proceedings eye witnesses to the crime(s) are heard and tell completely different versions of how things unfolded. These versions are cinematically provided by flashbacks that play the scenario out in different ways, depending on the perspective of those involved: the accused perpetrator who accosted the woman and perhaps murdered the husband, the wife who might or might not have fought valiantly enough against the rapist and who might have killed her husband after he scorned and rejected her for being defiled, and the dead man himself, through a medium, who might have committed suicide to spare his wife shame or because he could not bear his own, due to the stipulated accusation that she gave in to seduction. Another layer of potential misinformation is added by the fact that the court proceedings are related to a bystander by two people who had tangential or not so tangential involvement with the main narrative.
It is important to know these facts because they concern the significance of Iwasaki’s choice of subject to be created, the gate. For this viewer, at least, he links questions that were enacted in eleventh century Japan and asked by a filmmaker in the 20th century to a historical point in time, now the 21st century, where the Me Too debate has reached a feverish pitch and created a significant backlash. Who is to be trusted as an eye witness where accusations and denials are offered not just dependent on perceptions, but on motivated shaping of truths to achieve or escape justice? The lineage of artists who wonder if there can ever be a discernment of truth, or if we need to stress the fact that illusion can be created (just as he creates the perceptual illusion of a mirror effect) now includes Iwasaki.
The point is not that there are no truths – there are. However, they can be obscured by external manipulations of reality, including societies’ misogynistic value systems that often disbelieve, ridicule or even blame female victims, or overrule female witnesses or try to dial back the clock, depriving women of rights that they and their allies fiercely fought for. (As an aside: I read Kurasawa’s narrative as a potential acknowledgment of frequently abused women’s fury that can no longer be contained, since he allows her to voice several truths. The preponderance of evidence speaks to the likely resolution that the wife killed her husband with a dagger when he calls her a whore for having been defiled against her will.)
All of this is additionally connected to a second Japanese concept, mitate (見立て), to see things with fresh eyes, but which can also mean a radical re-contextualization of things that link the past to the present. This approach is exemplified in the other two small installations in the Pavilion. Iwasaki made miniature cranes out of threads pulled from discarded materials, fortified with glue, and stuck them into books related to Kurasawa’s art. It is as if they are lifting the filmmaker and his work out of the (not-so-distant) past into the present, re-igniting or continuing a debate about the dangers of relativism, and the importance of skepticism. These miniatures are displayed in acrylic containers, like artful keepsakes that recall traditional Japanese netsuke, and lit in a fashion that multiplies their reflections. This doubling and quadrupling echoes, of course, the Rashomon theme of various perspectives.
Mitate as a concept of double vision, the past and the present, plays a major role in Japanese textural transpositions as well, often transposing old poetry celebrating high culture into something modern that is more plebeian, occasionally even amounting to parody. Sometimes these additions to verses of old happen hundreds of years later, with the referent not even contained in the new poetry, with the assumption it is known to people. (Ref.)
This re-categorization is achieved by means of a visual symbol that turns the old meaning on its head. The verses I cited at the introduction are the perfect example for visual transposition.
The golden flowers have also bloomed! The true flowers of spring. They look like brass, The color of the gold coins.
I liked the idea of a beautiful flower, symbol of high culture, connecting us to all things Japanese garden, being subsequently turned into an image of quotidian mercantilism. Written, no less, 20 years before the Dutch tulip mania collapsed in 1673, leaving scores ruined from speculation with beautiful flowers….
The reason I bring this up is the fact that you only get the puns or re-contextualizations, if you are familiar with the poets or visual artists of old. You have to be able to move in a cultural framework that requires familiarity with the cues, the connections, be part of a shared body of knowledge. (In Western art I can think of the interpretation of all the cues dropped throughout Renaissance paintings, for example, that allowed the educated viewer to derive meaning.) Knowledge of Rashomon the film, then, matters a great deal for the full appreciation of the art displayed in the Pavilion.
***
The installation displayed in acrylic casing in the Tanabe Gallery simply invites us to see things anew. No higher order cultural knowledge required. It shows a miniature world of Portland’s bridges and other landmarks fashioned out of glue-stiffened threads pulled from the donated or found cloth that also provides the geological strata underneath. The use of discarded objects and household items to fashion industrial or other landscapes is nothing new in Iwasaki’s body of work; here it is geared towards familiarity with our city and likely generates the positive affect that recognition provides. The choice of cloth reveals no discernible pattern, and the display of Trader Joe’s logo, a chain of stores now owned by a German company, remains a mystery.
Takahiro Iwasaki Out of Disorder (Thread through Time) (2023)
The current panorama above, and one from 2015 below, from the Asia Society’s annual “In Focus” series, which was a series of collaborations between contemporary artists and pieces from the Rockefeller Foundation’s collection.
Looking at the miniature bridges certainly elicited pride of place as well as some idiosyncratic associations in my case.
Max Beckman Eisgang 1923 (Ice floes)
The themes of ordinary objects viewed from a different perspective or scale, recycling and reusing discarded materials all matter, and can be used for educating us about perception. In fact, Portland Japanese Garden published a superb curriculum for Grades 6-8 to do just this, linking insights from the artist’s approach back to themes crucial to the garden. It allows a conversation about aspects of Zen philosophy and the possibility of recreating something big with something small, designing landscapes with miniatures, like bonsai trees, or gravel configurations resembling rivers. The artist’s early focus on Manga drawings in the context of new world visions likely informs what we are seeing here as well. This reminds me of a recent Art in the Garden exhibition of The History of Manga and the remarkable collection of materials related to senjafuda, held by the Special Collections and University Archives of the UO Libraries and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. There is digital access to many of these miniature works of arts.
Yet Iwasaki’s Out of Disorder (Thread through Time) 2023 is lacking the truly new conceptualization that evolved in the artist’s Reflection Model work, when turning from shrines to an architectural site that has taken on extreme contemporary cultural significance, namely the Rashomon effect: the relativity of truth and unreliability of memory, with often contradictory reports suggesting biased encoding or motivated forgetting or simply lies in divergent witness accounts.
There is much innovative work going on in the miniature domain, from work linking artists past and present by Joe Fig, for example, who recreates artists’ studios in miniature detail,
Joe Fig Henri Mattisse’s Studio (2007)
to Simon Laveuve‘s apocalyptic visions of dwelling in inhospitable places
Simon Laveuve La Guérite (2023)
to Thomas Doyle‘s Distillation Series about man-made and natural disasters.
Thomas Doyle Drift (2018)
It would be great to see Iwasaki’s creativity in ways we have not yet encountered. His invitation to see things with fresh eyes, however, remains inspirational. Walking through the rain-splattered garden on my way back from the exhibition, the gaze was drawn to familiar constellations now altered by water. The bench at the Sand and Stone Garden looked almost like a rectangular puddle, the stairways ever closer to resembling a tumbling brook.
The Flat Garden pebbles glistened, raked into rice paddy patterns, and the arranged chairs for the moon viewing called for rain paints.
Contrasting trunk and foliage of the maples reminded of the transition from light to darker times,
and the raindrops put new patterns on bamboo and slate alike.
Fall has arrived. Just like the art on display, it brings new beauty to the garden, allowing for fresh perspectives.
Like clockwork pumpkins beckon the photographer at the start of fall, just like sunflowers did in August and September. Like clockwork, the photographer tries to find new angles, opting for detail in some years,
the whole Gestalt in others.
Pumpkins provide never ending joy in their voluptuousness, their variability ranging from highly saturated colors
to visions of water color softness.
I am currently working on a longer essay about the new artist in residence at Portland Japanese Garden, who displays installations based on a theme of visual transposition, mitate ((見立絵))in Japanese. It is a form of literary or visual reconfiguration, seeing something old in new ways, or making allusions that can amount to puns or parody.
Mitate is of course at the core of creating photomontages – transposing the old into the new, shaping reality into something that both maintains and shifts appearances, and, at times, meaning. For today’s topic I have the perfect examples (I have posted some of these images before, long-time readers, please be forgiving.) Here are reconfigured pumpkins. Don’t dare to carve them!
“…and we will remain here as long as we can see ourselves in the stars.”
– Minnesota Poet Laureate Gwen Westerman, from her poem We come from the Stars.
***
IMAGINE coming into a room filled with certain vibes: feeling peaceful, enjoying the flow, feeling grounded, dressed up to party, enjoying the rain, feeling the happiest ever, preparing for a calm rest, ready to unwind, feeling the brightness of the day, blending in, feeling proud of your people, feeling regal, filling the sky with stars. I don’t know about you, but these emotions, expressed in the titles of Lillian Pitt‘s newest exhibition, elicited a sense of joy in me, as well as a smidgen of envy, when I walked among them and the sculptures they were attached to. How can we tap the source of such serenity?
A collection of Pitt’s work is currently on display at the Bush Barn Art Center in Salem. It is an assembly of masks, carved wooden figures, ceramic and cast-glass sculptures, shimmering with color, wit and reflections echoing the positive affect of their titles. The exhibition The Art of Lillian Pitt: Past and Present is on view until the end of October, with an artist talk scheduled for Saturday, September 30, 2023. It is more than worthwhile to visit, if only for the reason that Pitt announced it to be her last public showing. I could not envision a more beautiful way to bow out.
Much has been written about the artist (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs/ Wasco/ Yakama), born on the Warm Springs Reservation in 1943 and living in Portland for the last 60 years, so much that it is hard not to sound repetitive. She is the recipient of multiple arts Awards and part of many, many public and private collections nationally and in Canada. I happily refer to detailed accounts in an Artswatch interview with Dmae Lo Roberts from 2021 and a short documentary video by Jacob Pander from last year. My title lines were borrowed from something Pitt said in that video when asked about her approach to art as well as life.
What I want to focus on, rather than repeating facts about her evolution as an artist, is the double role she has powerfully used to enrich all of us: that of a member of her own Native American community who reminds the world of both the history and the contemporary presence of tribal life, art and achievements, and that of an artist who brings beauty and new knowledge to the rest of us who are exposed to her works inside or outside wherever we happen to encounter them. Works that teach and produce wonder at the same time.
Here are a few examples of public art projects that I happen to encounter on my walks, or when taking the Max train (admittedly before the pandemic.) They introduce both familiar and not so familiar imagery to us passing by, clues of a history that has not necessarily been frequently taught. At the Rosa Parks Trimet station depictions of baskets, pictographs, petroglyphs and salmon remind us of the tribal modes of existence in the Pacific Northwest.
If you live in NE Portland you have surely encountered the Mammook Tokatee Housing around Ne 42nd Ave, which offers surprises around every corner.
If you walk along the South West waterfront, the River Guardian greets you regardless of the weather – but in full brightness, when the sun hits just right during mid-morning, she sends out these luminous rays that feel like a life force.
And last but not least, at the plaza in Hillsboro there are multiple basalt boulders that reveal their secrets with differing degrees of ease – 30 petroglyphs have been carved by Pitt in an installation called Riverbed. It is a timely reminder that the city is located on Tualatin Kalapuya (Atfalati) land, in this specific case. These are just a few of the many examples that can be found. In general, her public art works weave themselves into our daily lives, making us conscious with whom we share a space and how long lasting a culture and its artifacts or religious objects teaches us about the history of the region and its inhabitants that predate us by ten thousands of years.
***
IN CONTRAST to the large configurations discoverable across the city, the current exhibition has many smaller objects, among them Pitt’s traditional Raku-fired masks,
and the familiar presence of She Who Watches.
There were also numerous wood carvings adorned with, at times, whimsical details. I must admit I was partial to these for idiosyncratic reasons. One of my childhood pleasures was to be allowed to open my grandmother’s sewing box and take out a can with buttons, often large and unusual, playing with them and arranging them to my liking. Multiple buttons can be found on Pitt’s work as well, making my fingers itch….
Left to Right: Star person enjoying the Flow, Star person feeling peaceful, Star person feeling grounded, Star person with many stars. Details below.
Details:
Last row: Star Person enjoying the copper rain.
Star persons? I learned from Pitt’s introduction that different tribes had origin stories about the Star People, who helped generate agricultural skills and introduced the most important food groups, according to the Navajo People’s legends; the Sioux used stories of the Star and Cloud people to instill hope among suffering, with animal ancestors coming down from the stars to guide the way home.
These Star People stories have now found instantiations in the star people capturing color and light: here are some of my favorite instances:
Top to bottomt: Star Person ready to unwind, Star Person feeling the brightness of the day, Star Person preparing for a calm rest, Star Person feeling the happiest ever, Star Person blending in.
I could not help but wonder if these were companions during mental preparation for retirement, an artist’s recital to herself that a life so full as her’s deserved a rest, unwinding, happiness. And that that would unfold. I cannot imagine for a second, though, that a creative mind like Pitt’s would ever slow down, much less shut down. Maybe the public exposition of her work, but not the ideas themselves. After all, she is a story teller in the grand tradition of her people, full of experience, wisdom, knowledge to be shared. And storytellers need to tell their stories.
Of course, this is the pleading voice of the audience, here, who doesn’t want to let go of opportunities to explore the legends. To hold the beauty, a beauty, in my book, most emotionally conveyed in Pitt’s ceramic work:
Starperson feeling the strength of the Snake Goddess
Star Person Blushing
Star Person filling the sky with stars.
Resilient, flexible, forgiving: attributes of the clay that she shapes into testimonials to Native American history. Attributes that shaped her into one of our most important sources of artistic expression inseparable of that history.
Dear Lillian Pitt, could we respectfully ask you to please postpone retirement a little longer?
***
Here is the full poem about what the Star People brought.
Wicaŋhpi Heciya Taŋhaŋ Uŋhipi
(We Come from the Stars)
Stellar nucleosynthesis. That explains where everything
in our universe
came from according to astrophysicists who only recently discovered the cosmological constant causing the expansion
of our universe.
Our creation story tells us we came from the stars to this place Bdote where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers converge, our journey along the Wanaġi Caŋku,
in our universe,
that stargazers later called the Milky Way now disappearing in the excessive glow of a million million urban uplights. The original inhabitants of this place,
of our universe,
we are Wicaŋhpi Oyate, People and will remain here as long as we can see ourselves
“Art must be an integral part of the struggle. It can’t simply mirror what’s taking place. It must adapt itself to human needs. It must ally itself with the forces of liberation. The fact is, artists have always been propagandists. I have no use for artists who try to divorce themselves from the struggle.”
–Charles White in Jeffrey Elliot, “Charles White: Portrait of an Artist,” Negro History Bulletin 41, no. 3
Part of this quote greets you when you visit MoMa’s artist page for Charles White. I had tried to figure out which visual artists managed to do the impossible: find ways to depict how to pursue change, as a society, as a nation, as individuals, rather than reminding us of the existing woes. Painting historical events is an indirect way of doing so. Those works show us the injustice, or the suffering, or the might of those who rule, potentially appealing to our conscience or raising our consciousness, or both. Important and valuable. But how do you show the way forwards? White seemed an appropriate starting point. One of his early lithographs suggested to us that hope is possible, and a motivating factor, some 20 years before the Civil Rights Movement brought some change. (And some 60 years before that change is on its way to be reversed…)
Charles White Hope for the Future 1945
If I look at the image, Hope is not the first thing that comes to mind. A dead tree with a noose hung from it, a baby in medium distress, walls closing in with wooden isolation. Yet there are those huge maternal hands, offering strength and protection. They are also notably angular, square. Squarely: in a direct and uncompromising manner; without equivocation, tells me the Oxford Dictionary. These hands are placing blame squarely on racism.
What about the face, though. Do you see hope there? Maybe the shape of the waning moon on her forehead, signaling a hope for he decline of racism? The expression itself struck me as, frankly, angry. And since I still haven’t figured out the answer to my question of how art should depict progressive utopias or the ways to get there, let’s turn to the depiction of anger in women instead. (You know me, thoughts jump around.) Female anger is not exactly a ubiquitous topic in centuries of painting, but one that at least spoke of disruption of rules, since the display of anger was historically considered unfeminine. Verboten, really.
Anger is a somewhat under-researched topic in my field. We define it as an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong. Psychologists are more concerned with aggression or other hurtful behaviors, which is separate from anger, although the latter can lead to the former. Just ask yourself, how often are you angry without aggressive behavior? But also, has anger ever morphed into a somewhat violent act? My guess is the former happens often, the latter rarely for most of us, though it does on occasion. If it happens all the time, then you have a problem.
Giotto L’Ira 1306 (Fresco)
Excessive anger has physiological consequences that harm you, including increased blood pressure that damages the heart, and it interferes with decision making, often leading to long lasting consequences. And of course violent outbursts can and will harm others.
On the positive side, non-violent anger can be an extremely motivating factor to find solutions to the perceived problems and initiate change. It also influences the way you approach or evaluate something or someone. If you are unwittingly cued by angry faces in association with something, you value that something, any given object, more. When you show pictures of angry men, rather than sad ones, they elicit more support. Men who display anger rather than sadness in negotiations are more successful in their demands – people yield to someone perceived to be dominant. (Ref.)
All of this is not true for women, even though they are cross-culturally shown to experience equivalent amounts of anger, both in frequency and intensity, compared to men, clearly a biologically built-in emotion. Anger conforms to display rules – the norms of a given culture what can or should be publicly shown – and women, in almost all cultures, do not act on their anger as men do. Importantly, they also are not perceived more positively when displaying their anger, in fact the opposite is true. Most modern psychologists subscribe to a bio-sociocultural interactive model to explain this fact. There might be biological gender differences that allow women to curb their angry outbursts to begin with – the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in controlling aggressive impulses, is much larger in women. Good thing, too, given that women would easily be harmed by the physiologically stronger males, if they attack them. All kinds of evolutionary explanations have been offered. (For details on biological differences, here is an in-depth review.)
It is always hazardous to indulge in evolutionary story telling, though. For example, it seems entirely plausible, that, over evolutionary time, mothers who were particularly nurturing might have had greater reproductive process; therefor nurturing, not anger, would be favored by evolution. But it is equally plausible, that, over the years of evolution, mothers who were particularly ferocious in protecting their young would have had an evolutionary advantage. This contrasts highlights why many scientists, with a nod to Rudyard Kipling, refer to these evolutionary notions as “Just so stories.”
And speaking of angry mothers: one is Medea, about to murder her children out of rage over her unfaithful husband… note, how we are not even allowed to see her face frontally, and the presumably glaring eyes in particular are even further recessed into shade.
200 years earlier we see a raging Judith, slaying Holofernes, the general of Nebuchadnezzar’s army threatening Judith’s people. Two versions, one by a man, one by a woman painter, see for yourself who is actually expressly raging, spurting blood on her chest. These are of course depictions of a biblical story, so viewers can be amenable to be reminded of the tale.
Caravaggio Judith Beheading Holofernes c. 1598–1599 or 1602
A different approach is to serve culturally-based display demands by orienting the viewer to the (invisible) victim of a woman’s anger: the poor man.
Carl Dornbecher Poor man, 1919
Just a few years earlier, the intensely weird, academicist painting below was meant as a commentary on the new medium of photography, seen by the painter as a positive development: “It has opened our eyes and forced us to see that which previously we have not seen.” Riffing off Democritus’s aphorism: “Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well,” this fury appears with a whip instead of the usual mirror in her hand, revealing the “naked” truth all right. (I fear I’ll never be able to photograph that, even if I was inclined to capture aphorisms…)
Jean Léon Gérôme, Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, 1896
One last, contemporary offering from the sparse menu of angry women in art: Pipilotti Rist’s still from a video of a woman unhesitatingly smashing car windows, extremely feminine in her red pumps, fluttery summer dress and make-up.
Pipilotti Rist Ever is Over All (still), 1997
Here is the video where she is actually smiling and bouncing along. A total disconnect between displayed emotion and enacted behavior, as if even during the outburst you still have to keep that grin on your face. The best part: a police woman walks by, smiles back and salutes her. Worth a few minutes of your time, if only for the sound track!
Of course we all know, if this had been the black child from Charles White’s litho in the beginning, the story would have a different ending. Hope for the future? You tell me where to go from here.
Angry, but beautiful music by Bartok today. In addition to Bela Bartok there is a bonus Schnittke…
Photographic artists Friderike Heuer and Ken Hochfeld have been photographing the Columbia River Gorge for years, often during shared excursions, drawn to its unparalleled beauty. In contrast to many contemporary photographers who long to capture pristine and uninhabited landscapes, the views of yore, both feel that the way the land looks now deserves documentation of an equally tangible and emotional beauty.Hochfeld has photographed the river and the land in a traditional manner with an eye on what has remained constant and a nod to historical photography in the Gorge, but also with openness to the existence of human activity. Heuer bases her photomontages on decades of photographing the landscape of the Gorge, stressing the environmental and political impact of settler activity on tribal land. Both bodies of work were developed as a joint project, informed by intense love for the region and shared hopefulness that repair is at least partially underway.
“To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.”
~ Jean (Hans) Arp“Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs.” (1966.)
***
Full of joy about captures my emotional reaction to Malia Jensen‘s newly installed sculpture at the Arts Plaza of The Reser, her contribution to the many works of art displayed across town during the next weeks in the context of Converge 45‘s Biennial. Endless Pigeons is such a clever sculpture, subversive and learned alike in the way it combines subject, form and a slightly altered utilitarian object for its pedestal.
Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023)
Her commissioned sculpture riffs off one of Constantin Brâncuși‘s most famous works, the Endless Column from 1937. The 98-foot-high column of zinc, brass-clad, cast-iron modules threaded onto a steel spine is part of an installation of three sculptures commemorating Romanian soldiers fighting in WW I. Recently restored after years of neglect, vandalism and governmental condemnation as “degenerate art,” Brâncuși’s sculpture can be visited in Târgu Jiu, Romania. (Actually, this one is the last in a series of endless columns dating back as early as 1918, made of wood, with several others following, two of them around 1928 that are 10 ft and 13 ft tall respectively, and for the first time placed on square pedestals. Both can be seen at the Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris.)
Constantin Brâncuși Endless Column (1937) – Photo Credit: Mike Masters Romania (CC BY-SA 3.0 RO)
Jensen’s column is not quite on that scale, and the elements consist of eight humongous representational pigeons rather than abstract geometric modules, but I take joy over awe any day.
There is a bit of tongue-in-cheek rebellion towards the giant of art history (or perhaps the fan boys of “famous” art in general) in choosing the lowly bird as a replacement, although “lowly” depends on the eye of the beholder and the context. Watching flights of band-tailed pigeons is inspiring, if only for the noise their bodies make. Wading through throngs of tourists in European cities taking pictures among the flocks is quite the adventure, particularly when enthusiastic photographers enamored with individual birds become a tripping hazard.
The perennial pigeon man at the Louvre, Paris; tourists on St. Mark’s Place, Venice
XL Pigeons elevated to art, with the real thing blithely ignoring the gilded additions to its perch. Town hall roof in Alkmaar, Netherlands.
In Portland, a city that has made the meme “put a bird on it” its own – often accompanied by condescending smirks – putting one bird on top of another shows welcome contempt for what is considered worthy art – or not. Jensen’s sculpture evoked in me such a strong sense of the artist’s love of nature, her desire to show the beauty in the ignored or overlooked, her playfulness in the arrangement of the birds, and her skepticism as to who gets to define “art,” that it simply lifted my spirits.
The size contributes; previous works that offered visions of piled-up birds were smaller and somehow more tender. The current large birds almost beckon you to touch them, feel their ridges and explore their patterns with your fingers, a haptic experience made possible by the sculpture’s accessibility. Their bronze plumage shows plenty of detail with a patina that might soon be altered by chance contributions dropped by avian neighbors from the small urban wetland nearby.
Malia Jensen Small Pile, (2010) Bronze 10 1/4 x 6 x 5 inches
Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (1923) Details
Birds have, of course, played a major role in art, and significantly so with multiple contemporaries of Brâncuși within the surrealist movement. Leonora Carrrington used them as a frequent motif in her paintings and lithographs, and I found one of my favorite bird paintings ever in the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico: Remedios Varo‘s Creation of the Birds.
Right: Remedios Varo Creation des las Aves (1954) Oil, Masonite.
They were a central topic for Max Ernst, who relates his obsession with them to the childhood trauma of losing his beloved pet bird at the time of his sister’s birth. For Ernst, birds became symbols of both victimhood and freedom, used in his art as an alter ego, often representing a rising phoenix from the ashes. (I picked an example that mostly resembled a pigeon, photographed at a Hamburger Kunsthalle exhibition, I believe of the Collection de Menile in the early 2000s, I lost my notes. The other images are from a 1975 book of edgings, Birds in peril.)
Max Ernst Oiseaux en péril (1975) Color etchings – Oiseaux spectraux (1932) Oil on cardboard.
Brâncuși, whose work is frequently referenced by Jensen, was preoccupied with birds as well. He was interested in their movement, however, not the way they looked. His series of Bird in Space representations, seven of them in marble and 9 cast in bronze, takes off the wings altogether, streamlines the bodies and adds just an oval plane for a head. The creatures soar, more akin to rockets, really – here is an example from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, CA.
Constantin Brâncuși Bird in Space (1931)
The artist was also questioning the traditional way sculptures were displayed, on top of a pedestal that signals the artistic value of a piece, aiming at ennobling it, elevating it out of reach in ways that confer the preciousness of the object (or the memories it represents.) His contemporary, sculptor and poet Hans Arp who I quoted at the beginning, was even more opposed to traditional pedestals. (Details can be found here.) He felt they enhanced an aura that separated the experience of art from other experiences we have in our lives, distancing us from the work in ways that had to be overcome. In fact, he loathed the way art, put on a pedestal, glorified people – often the very people who brought disaster upon us, just think of all those sculptural memorials to generals and colonialists.
“Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome.”
– Hans Arp “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs.” (1966.)
Abandoning aloofness in favor of enhancing participatory interaction with the art work was the goal. That included ways of encouraging the viewer to circumnavigate a given sculpture, looking at it from different viewing angles, and not being ruled by a fixed position in space. Employing something more akin to utilitarian objects was also believed to help overcome the distance between viewer and object, given that it was less of a demarcation and more of an invitation given the established familiarity.
Jensen’s Endless Pigeons makes great use of these markers that encourage participatory engagement. Her “pedestal” turns out to be one of those traffic barriers, albeit foreshortened, that tell you to stay in your lane, but here, in welcome reversal, functions as an invitation to cross over line that separates art from everyday life.
Stacked Jersey Barriers
Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023)
The way she arranges the pigeons also invite the viewer to walk around the sculpture, wondering about the balancing act exhibited in that column. I ended up speculating about the single, straight backward looking pigeon: an avian representative of Klee’s Angelus Novus, the angel of history always looking backwards towards the past, although he has his wings straight up, if I remember correctly?
Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023) Detail
Circling the sculpture – although these tracks were made by the machinery that installed it, not the author.
Viewing the sculpture from above somehow enhances the sense that the column is slightly teetering and the birds flapping their wings to attempt balance. There is humor here, some distinct signal that we can’t take everything too seriously, (ARRRRRT, as the inimitable Molly Ivins used to say,) and should not cling solely to depictions of the problems of our times.
But there is also the reminder that not only do we, whether scientists or artists, stand on the shoulder of giants, but that the balance needed to achieve the heights we want is inevitably coupled with trust and cooperation, the whole in need of reliable parts.
Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023) Detail
A column of animals perching on each other is a familiar symbol of the power of solidarity for any child raised in Germany. The Brother Grimm fairy tale The Town Musicians of Bremen relates a story of abused and condemned, aging animals banding together and running away from their farms. With combined forces and a bit of slapstick luck worthy of the Dadaists theory of chance, they get rid of a band of robbers that terrorized the town. The donkey, the dog, the cat and the rooster live happily ever after, wouldn’t you know it. Immortalized by sculptor and Bauhaus Master Gerhard Marcks, the sculpture of their heightened power achieved through mutual aid was placed on the Bremen town square in 1953. (The city, by the way, also houses a museum in his honor that has become noted for exhibitions of modern and contemporary sculpture.)
Gerhard Marcks Bremer Stadtmusikanten (1953) Bronze.
Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023) Detail
***
Many of the European artists in the 1930s, when fascists started to move things towards inescapable horror and destruction, showed a renewed interest in nature and its essential value. Hans Arp certainly stressed the importance of unity between man and nature, and many of his sculptures of that era were artistic expressions of those beliefs. One of them, To be Exposed in the Woods, brings me to Malia Jensen’s recent work that is challenging to grasp, in more ways than one. I want to explore it here, because I see a direct link to the work displayed at The Reser. Just give me a minute to set the stage.
To be exposed in the Woods (looking indeed like a partially consumed salt lick out in the woods) came to mind when I thought back over Jensen’s oeuvre Worth your Salt. If you think the pigeons at The Reser are humongous, wait until you grasp what went into the video that Jensen produced starting in 2016. Driven by a sense of a nation mired in divisiveness, a latent disquiet about where we as a country were heading, she turned to nature, hoping for a sense of harmony as well as an embrace of uncertainty and discovery. The artist carved 6 body parts out of large salt licks, with a head that was once again a nod in the direction of Brâncuși or maybe Giacometti, a hand offering a plum, a foot, a breast and a stomach represented by a stack of donuts. (You might have seen that piece at a 2022 show at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, reviewed in ArtsWatch here.)
Malia Jensen Worth your Salt (Nearer Nature project, 2018 – 2022) (All project photos and screenshots credited to Jensen’s Website or lecture videos.)
She then needed to find locations across Oregon that would provide access to animals interested in the salt licks, prevent hunters or vigilantes from easily accessing vulnerable pray (private or land trust land desirable), allow her to place multiple video cameras (18!) with motion sensors that would record the wild life, in positions with maximum light effectiveness, and then be able to come and go frequently to exchange the SD cards of the recordings for months on end.
All that required interaction with previously unfamiliar people, traversing stretches of land with populations not necessarily used to environmental artists, and eventually cataloging, cutting and editing the 10s of thousand of videoclips with a team of multiple assistants to braid into a final video of some 6 hour duration. This video was then displayed in carefully selected locations that included rural grocery stores and bars, elementary schools, the research facilities at OHSU, chocolate stores, mental health clinics and son on, in hopes of instilling a sense of harmony in viewers, or at least curiosity about the unfolding displays of nature, and maybe fill some of the emptiness left from exposure to a world that has us reeling and insecure, if not frightened.
Here are some of the images captured by the cameras. Overall the fauna was diverse, turkeys, bobcats, coyotes, deer, squirrels, a brown bear and, yes, band-tailed pigeons! on the coast, all making an appearance.
Malia Jensen Worth your Salt (Nearer Nature project, 2018 – 2022)
The assumption was that it was a fair deal – the animals, gifted with the needed minerals from the salt licks would in turn provide the artist with footage that would allow people to be alert to the wonders of nature, in an age where species are disappearing at an unprecedented clip. In turn, increased engagement for the preservation of nature might be triggered by the awe instilled by observation. At least that is my understanding of the core idea of the project.
Why am I then, despite my admiration for the conceptual richness and the insane amount of work going into all this and the wit instantiated in the donuts, for example, feeling unease about what went on? I think it has to do with the nature of surveillance.
If you yourself go out into nature, photographing nature, or wildlife in particular, there is a shared space, a shared risk, a one-on-one encounter that somehow shapes the relationship between you and the animal. This is particularly true when there is eye contact.
May 2023 Oak Island Loop, Sauvies Island, OR
That precludes, pragmatically, the acquisition of the amount of footage and the diversity of wildlife on display in Jensen’s work, of course. So if we grant license to work with automated surveillance instead, and use salt as a lure to maximize the encounters, then we could argue, ok, they got something in turn. But here is where things shift: when the salt licks had taken on a particularly pleasing aesthetic, they were removed to be cast in glass, themselves becoming objects of art of a more permanent and transactional kind. (This was originally not in the plan.) Will those exhibits still confer the ideas that motivated the Closer to Nature project to begin with? Where the critters cheated out of the rest of their supplementary diet?
The hand and what was left of the head top right.
It is certainly obvious when you hear Jensen talk about the work, that it imprinted on her soul, moving her, sustaining her through the years of pandemic isolation, so I am not suggesting mercenary intentions. And in any case, artists have to make a living and should sell their art. It also likely brought meaning to many of the people who were able to see the video or the casts. It just feels like animals have not been able to escape the impact of human “progress” and expansion, threatened or dislodged from their habitats, burnt, starved or suffocated by the environmental destruction we have unleashed. Now we spy on them in their remaining spots, lured there by promises of years, not months, of NaCl. Not that they care, they wouldn’t know, of course. It is more about introspection into our own ethical parameters that might or might not be violated when we, too, engage the tools of surveillance that many of us so rage about within the power structures where we humans live and move.
Which brings me back, in case you were worried, to the pigeons. I cannot tell if the expressed deep love for nature was always there or was enhanced by Jensen working on the Nearer Nature project. It is clearly on display in her choice of sculpting the Endless Pigeons, no matter how humorous or ironically it is to be received. I also feel that the decision (and, yes, courage in today’s art world) to create something joyful, vibrant, somehow optimistic (as this column came across to me) is potentially the result of having been given the gift of watching harmonious interaction during her video recording. Not all is doom and gloom. Watching deer and coyote peacefully cross paths at night reminds you of that.
I remember photographing this window display in a small shop in France, that added the “lowly” pigeon to the exterminator’s list among the cockroaches and rats, and thinking, “Hah, they’ll outlast the last of us. No matter how we try to prevent them from nesting, feeding or defecating by hammering nails into windowsills or providing netting for the vulnerable buildings, they’ll reproduce!
Pigeons roosting on a French cathedral
Malia Jensen Endless Pigeons (2023) Details
I can only speculate why this sculpture was placed at The Reser. A practical location? A relation to the environment? A counterbalance to Jorge Tacla’s work inside which confronts us with the dark side of humanity? (I had written about his remarkable paintings previously here.) A result of the fact that both artists are represented by Christin Tierney Gallery in NYC? Who knows. The choice was perfect. We need some straightening to navigate the art world and we need resilience to make it through these times. If anything speaks of resilience, it is pigeons! And they bring joy. Not a small thing.
My daily visitors, band-tailed pigeons.
Converge 45: Public Opening Weekend Celebration at The Reser: Saturday, August 26 @ 10:30 am
Malia Jensen: Artist Talk :September 21, 2023 6:30pm at The Reser
History connects the dots of our identity, and our identity was all but obliterated. Our land was taken, our language was forbidden. Our stories, our history, were almost forgotten. What land, language, and identity remains is derived from our cultural and historic sites . . . . Sites of cultural and historic significance are important to us because they are a spiritual connection to our ancestors. Even if we do not have access to all such sites, their existence perpetuates the connection. When such a site is destroyed, the connection is lost.
-Chairman Dave Archambault, II, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
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The minute when temperatures dropped last week I went for a bit of gallery hopping, early enough in the day that they were all empty. Nothing much to report until I entered Russo Lee Gallery, drawn by Ghosts in the Machine, an exhibition title that spiked my interest. I associate that phrase with British philosopher Gilbert Ryle who coined it to describe the mind/body dualism of Descartes and subsequent philosophers. Ryle picked apart the notion, held since Descartes’ time, that the mind is separable from the body (the ghost and the machine, respectively.) Why would an artist be interested in tackling a controversy that has been long since settled in psychological science? Maybe an allusion to the connection between materials used and concepts expressed?
I was way off – what else is new. The show’s title refers to a recruiting video from the U.S. military to attract attention to its psychological operations division. Watch it here, the selling of psychological warfare is perturbing, to say the least. Creepy, more likely.
According to native-American artist Ka’ila Farrell-Smith (Klamath/Modoc), the art work on view is conceptually linked to he surveillance state, one that uses all kinds of control mechanisms to pursue its goals, including squashing resistance to the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels and other minerals desired by industry. A deeper window into her reasoning can be found on her website in a letter to Sen. Jeff Merkley that outlines her stand as an activist as well as an artist.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine at Russo Lee Gallery
Looking at her work at Russo Lee Gallery, I was taken by multiple aspects of the gray scale paintings. Some interesting visuals, some probing conceptual issues, and some imporrtant questions raised by her exposition. Visuals first: the 21 or so paintings of this body of work use repeat patterns, created by a constrained range of colors and found objects used as stencils that anchor the gaze. They have sharply defined contours and a lot of contrast that the eye is drawn to, in juxtaposition to the hazy, floating color fields that are sprayed and enhance a sense of depth, with occasional hand-drawn patterns alleviating the impact of rigid man-made machinery. They all superficially resemble each other and it takes a while for the variability underneath to emerge – I’ll get back to why that might matter in just a bit.
They also exhibit hints of pink here and there, flags of resilience in a black and white world, beautifully arranged. One of the stencils is amorphous enough that it could be a more biological form, rather than the strict geometry of circles and grids, alluding to the ghost perhaps, and assigned a central role in the smaller paintings.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 006 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
Before you learn even more, these paintings do capture a sense of unease, increased by the disorientation introduced by the many overlapping layers, creating fragmented space. This apprehension is growing when you realize that the pigments are augmented by lithium-infused earth that the artist collected in her travels along the Oregon border and Nevada, site of the struggle over one of the largest lithium mines in this country.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management fast-tracked and approved Lithium Nevada Corp.’s new mine at Thacker Pass (Peehee Mu’Huh) near the Oregon border, 200 miles northeast of Reno, NV, and close to the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Indian Reservation. The Biden Administration has given its support for the extraction project, a cornerstone of its clean energy plans to combat climate change. Mining at Thacker Pass would provide lithium for more than 1.5 million electric vehicles per year for 40 years, claims the company.
Conservationists and adjacent tribal nations have gone to court against the project, on grounds of destroyed habitat for imperiled sage grouse, pronghorn antelope and other species in violation of environmental laws and fearing catastrophic groundwater pollution. In addition, the mine will destroy lands sacred to tribal members, site of a massacre in 1865 that killed many of their ancestors. A month ago, on July 17, 2023, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the final green light for Lithium Nevada Corp. to go forward with construction, ignoring the claims and concerns of the people most affected by the rupture in the land, ruling against their interests.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 004/019 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel. Detail on Left.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 003 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
Some of Farrell-Smith’s paintings allude to this concrete situation, with the chemical notation for lithium – LI – in some of them, or the native-American name for Thacker Pass found in others (Peehee Mu’Huh). But the work, for me, poses a larger question, or actually two of them. For one, why has the U.S. not adjusted its mining law from 1872, a law that precluded options for environmental protection needs or negotiating Indian interests. Secondly, and difficult to answer, what do you do if the overall imperative for societies to combat the effects of the climate crisis conflicts with the needs and demands of some of its constituent groups, continuing a historic pattern of violating their rights?
Here are some facts of the legal history (I am summarizing what I learned here.) Mineral exploration on public lands is governed by the General Mining Law of 1872, which makes “all valuable mineral deposits” in public lands “free and open to exploration.” It used to be gold and silver mining that polluted water and destroyed the land. Now companies are after the so-called “green” metals, lithium, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements used in electric vehicles and other clean energy applications. And of course the return to visions of nuclear power has uranium miners surface again.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 020 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
The law still allows claimants to pay an annual maintenance fee of $165 per claim in order to keep it active. Claimants – mostly multination corporation – can pull unlimited quantities of minerals from their claims without paying a cent of royalties to the minerals’ actual owner, the American public. The law contains no environmental provisions and no reclamation requirements, so corporations can simply walk away from their mines once they’re no longer profitable, leaving the rest of us to pay for Superfund clean-ups. Here are the numbers:
11.36 million Acres of public land staked with active mining claims at the end of the 2022 fiscal year. This is a 932,000-acre increase from the previous year.
228,696 Number of active mining claims covering nearly 6 million acres of federal land in Nevada at the end of FY 2021.
267,535 Number of active mining claims on federal land in Nevada as of June 12, 2023, an increase of nearly 40,000 in just 18 months.
13 Minimum number of active mining claims staked within Bears Ears National Monument since 2016. These claims were located either in the months just before the national monument was established, or after it had been shrunk by then-President Donald Trump but before President Joe Biden restored the boundaries. National monument status bars new mining claims, but does not affect existing ones like these.
$34.4 billion Value of non-fuel mineral production in 2019 on all lands in 12 Western states.
Unknown Amount of that mineral production extracted from federal lands. The number is unknown because federal agencies do not track production. Earthworks, a mining watchdog group, has estimated that $2 billion to $3 billion worth of minerals is extracted from public lands annually.
12.5% to 18.75% Royalty rate on oil, natural gas and coal extracted from public lands.
$14.8 billion Royalties paid on oil and gas production from federal lands in 2022.
$0 Royalties paid on hardrock minerals extracted from mining claims on public land, including copper, gold, silver, lithium, uranium and various “green metals,” between 1872 and 2023.
SOURCES: Bureau of Land Management, Government Accountability Office, Congressional Research Service, Earthworks, Center for American Progress
Note that about 75% of all lithium deposits are on or near tribal land. The conundrum is, of course, that not only the financial goals of the mining operations once again subjugates native-American interests. For me the bigger question is how do you weigh a planet’s need to get away from fossil fuel consumption against the clear damages done to tribal rights? Particularly when it is not even clear how much electric cars are really a net improvement for the environment, given the issues of water consumption during battery production and the lack of safe disposal strategies. Or how much the concept of “let’s build electric cars” distracts from the needs to fundamentally curb driving and flying and transporting goods long distance or stop producing unnecessary consumer goods en masse?
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine Details from various exhibits (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development stated last year: “Lands inhabited by Indigenous Peoples contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity… Many Indigenous Peoples are at the frontlines of resisting the drivers of the global environmental crisis. Yet, international and national policies and laws do not recognize and support their collective rights.”
In our own country, those laws hark back to the Supreme Court’s adoption of the Doctrine of Discovery in 1873, in a case, Johnson v. M’Intosh, where it was decided that Tribal Nations could no longer claim legal title to their own lands as their “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, [were] necessarily diminished.” Natives could not be left “in possession of their country” because they were “fierce savages whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.” As a result, “[t]o leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness”—that is, land that is not commercially exploited or colonially conquered in the name of what was then viewed to be American progress.(Ref.) This is still standing law. Some environmental laws started to emerge in the 1970s and have managed to improve the protection of endangered species, with endangerment or extinction measurable consequences of mining. These laws, however, have not managed to include into their canon the inherent sovereign right of Tribal Nations to protect the lands that contain their sacred sites and the remains of the relatives. These are intangible, cultural values that were simply not taken seriously enough to be fought for by non-tribal movements.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine Left to Right 009/010/017 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
How, then, is the disturbance of sacred ancestral land and defiance of cultural and religious traditions, all in the name of resource extraction to further a “green” agenda (and the profits from it,) in any way different from traditional colonial exploits? I had mentioned at the beginning that Farrell-Smiths paintings superficially resemble each other quite a bit given the constrained set of colors and stencils. I feel that that in itself is a perfect metaphor for what has been done to indigenous interests: over and over and over again we see the same pattern of usurping land and harming cultural or historic sites, with slightly shifting justifications for the destruction of tribal sovereignty. Then it was the Doctrine of Discovery aimed to ban “savages” and “heathens” from standing in the way of “progress,” now it is the dire need for combating climate catastrophe on the backs of those who were perennial stewards of the land to begin with. What gives?
The work is up until the beginning of September – check it out!
