Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Monthly Archives

May 2016

A World of Contrasts and Co-Mingling.

· Portland Japanese Garden in March 2025. ·

“The potter, in his concepts, must possess such a sheer love of truth as will carry him past the dangers of revivalism on the one hand and of futurism on the others.” – Bernard Leach, A Potter’s Outlook, Handworker’s Pamphlet #3, 1928.

I should have known then, when I was barely able to find parking. But who would have thought that in the middle of the day on a weekday, half of Portland’s population and every other tourist in town would flock to the garden? I had made a spontaneous decision to visit without checking the website which I later learned announced peak bloom for the cherry trees. Of course the trees were spectacular. So was the weather’s control over people’s movements. Like one, we ripped out our cameras when the sun appeared, lasting for about five minutes, like one we scurried seeking cover when the torrential rains came down, again for the shortest amount of time. Proverbial April weather on steroids in March.

Once again, the garden offered some surprises. I really have difficulties thinking of a place that so regularly, reliably, offers food for thought at the same time that it gifts us with natural beauty. This time my eye was caught by the visual contrast between nature’s opulence, and that offered by Earthen Elegance: The Ceramic Art of Bizen inside the Pavilion Gallery. My brain, on the other hand, was occupied the minute I saw some antique stencils in the hallway near the Tanabe Gallery (in conjunction with an exhibition by artist Karen Illman Miller, Natural Patterns: Katazome Stencil Dyeing, that would open the next day and will be visited at some later point.)

***

Imagine clouds of pink and white cherry blossom from the weeping cherry at the flat garden, or the old tree near the Café, or the white cherry tree hill – soft, gossamer, delicate and impermanent, all of them, a study in fragility.

Contrast that with the dark hues of the Bizen ceramics, the toughness and resilience of pottery wood-kiln fired at extremely high temperatures for weeks on end. Earthen(ware), down-to-earth, earth-derived and earthbound in its utility, a study in sturdiness.

Manabu Suehiro Yunomi Cup (ca. 2000)

The name Bizen pottery originates with an ancient Japanese kiln from the Kamakura period (1185-1333.) The Chugoku region in the West of Japan is known for its special hiyose clay dug from the rice fields and red pines that are used to fire the kilns to this day, a lasting artisan trade. The vessels are fired in either Noboigama/climbing kilns or Anagama/tunnel kilns, and some of the artisanal skill lies in adjusting distances to the heat source, and changing the amount of heat, up or down, during the weeks of firing, with temperatures as high as 1,200 degrees Celsius.

Depending how much ash adheres to the pottery, the surface layers will appear rough, and depending how close or distant from the core heat, the colors will vary for these traditional storage containers.

Hiroyuki Wakimoto Vase (ca. 1999) Kenji Takenata Vase (ca. 1996)

There are no glazes or final painting of the vessels, no decorative motifs in the tradition. Sometimes the artist will wrap straw around the containers, which creates a unique pattern through the chemical reaction of the Potassium component contained in the straw with the iron oxide component contained in the clay. None of the beautiful red streaks look alike in this Hidasuki method.

Shunichi Yabe “Tsukiyama” Moon Mountain (ca. 2012)

Togaku Mori Vase (ca. 1990s)

Another variation of Bizen ceramic is Goma, with characteristics on the ceramic surface resembling special grainy sesame seeds. The ash of pine wood sticks to the vessels during the burning period, creating these floating seeds or even droplets.

Takashi Mezawa Vase (ca. 1998)

Works on loan from the Collection of David Sneider and Naomi Pollock feature contemporary artists who luckily inherited the processing skills and techniques accumulated across generations. I lack the expertise to pinpoint where they exactly deviate from or improve on the Bizen tradition, but the aesthetics speak to me, however much the past and the present co-mingle. Put differently, the vessels do create an emotional reaction, one that includes being drawn to the ultimate function of earthenware, a desire to use it. There is an earthiness to these containers, the way surfaces are rough, the forms vigorous and for the most part unpretentious, that spoke to me. I would have no qualms sticking some cherry blossom twigs or a magnolia branch into some of them, and reveling in the contrast between the light and the dark, the temporary and the timeless.

Masahiro Miyao Vase (ca. 2005)

***

“Japonisme is no longer a fashion, it’s infatuation, it’s insanity.” – Ernest Chesneau, French art critic, late 1800s.

Eventually, escaping the next deluge, I found myself in the corridor of the Japanese Arts Learning Center. Good thing I was double-masked. Really chanced onto an inconspicuously hung display of antique Katagami paper stencils from the collection of artist Karen Illman Miller, their creators unknown. Perusing these beauties set off a chain reaction of thinking about what I know and what I don’t know, followed later by some serious reading to brush up on the deficiencies. A wild ride, as it turned out. If the curator’s minimum intent was to teach but one person about some intricacies of Japanese cultural productions: mission accomplished.

Antique Katagami Stencil Winding Stream (Artisan unknown)

So what is Katagami? The original stencils were created by making a paper pulp from the bark of mulberry trees, which was then made waterproof by applying a mixture of oil and the fermented juice of unripe persimmons. Next you pile up the sheets and create a pattern with knives and hole punchers all the way down. The top sheet is discarded, and the rest are often paired, with a mesh of human hair or silk threads to prevent tearing.

Left to Right: Antique Katagami Stencil Silk Making Process – (Artisan unknown)- Antique Katagami Stencil Diptych (Artisan unknown) – Antique Katagami Stencil Maple Leaves in Stream (Artisan unknown).

In parallel, you prepare the fabrics that are supposed to receive dye patterns with the help of these stencils, a process called Katazome. Once the fabric is ready, you put the stencil on top and then push something called a resist paste through the holes of the template. The traditional paste consisted of a mix of glutinous rice, rice powder and bran powder, salt, slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), and water. You take the stencil away, let the thing dry, and then color the surrounding fabric with dye or paint by hand, outside of the lines of the resist paste. Once the dye has dried you wash the paste off, traditionally in flowing water at small streams, and you got your kimono pattern in full beauty.

Antique Katagami Stencil Abstract Birds (Artisan unknown)

That art is partially the result of class divisions. The Japanese nobility of the 17th century enacted exclusionary laws that prohibited the wearing of silk garments by the increasingly prosperous merchant class. As a result cotton fabrics became more elaborate in design and complexity, with the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603 ~ 1868) encouraging and supporting artisans in their production of katagami stencils. Traveling traders bought bunches of them and then re-sold them to textile craftsmen throughout Japan, including remote rural regions, eventually enabling peasants to create beautiful garments at least for festive occasions.

Antique Katagami Stencil Tryptich and Floating Flowers (Artisan unknown)

Fast forward to 1854. After 250 years of isolation, Japan was forced open to Western colonial and trade forces. The nation reacted with prompt modernization, including a shift in national power structures, with the Samurai no longer being a force to be reckoned with – including their purchasing power. The search for replacement consumers turned westwards: enormous quantities of artisan wares, wood cuts, Katami stencils, ceramics and porcelain works were exported to Europe which soon landed in the grip of Japonisme: a sensitivity to Japanese culture that had an enormous impact on changes in Western art, shifting expression bound to the past to one open to future developments.

Designers (think William Morris, or the decorative artisans of the Wiener Werkstätten and Art Nouveau) were influenced by Japanese patterns.

William Morris, Green Leaves – Felix Vallotton Laziness (1896)

Painters also adopted new perspectives derived from Japanese prints, perspectives that included flattened spaces, new viewpoints, often from above, or providing a radically subjective positioning of the viewer, cropping of subjects, a tolerance for empty space and last but not least color choices that were no longer descriptive, but expressive instead. (Some examples of paintings and their (in)direct models can be found here.)

Hiroshige Plum Park in Kameido —- Vincent van Gogh Flowering Plum Orchard, after Utagawa Hiroshige 1887

Back to our Katagami stencils for textile printing. In 2015, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden held a phenomenal exhibition of 140 Katagami stencils, Die Logik des Regens, all devoted to the subject of rain, at the Japanese Palais at Dresden, Germany. The curator, visual theorist Wolfgang Scheppe, had found a treasure trove of some 16.000 (!) of them at the Museum of Decorative Arts at Dresden’s Pillnitz Palace, largely unknown. They were held in ninety-two cassettes for more than 125 years.

How did they get there? We know that a purchase was made in 1889 at the height of Japonisme, the seller one Hermann Pächter, the owner of a Berlin art dealership that specialized in East Asian art. The Jewish business was destroyed during Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the surviving proprietor, Pächter’s wife, later murdered by the Nazis in Theresienstadt. So no real provenance from that end. The papers at the museum got lost or burnt during the allied bombings of Dresden. So no provenance there, either.

However, it is speculated that the art dealer bought the entire collection from the translator, diplomat and art collector Alexander von Siebold who at the time lived in Japan. He is another entry, together with his father, Phillip Franz von Siebold, into my Department of interesting People” ledger… the latter a traveler and a highly respected German naturalist and physician in 19th century Nagasaki whose daughter with a Japanese partner became the first female physician in Japan, the former one of his European children who served Japan throughout his life with distinction. If he sold 16.000 stencils, how many did he actually own?

Exhibition views (here and following) of The Logic of Rain curated by Wolfgang Scheppe for the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden © Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Fotocredit for all images: Adrian Sauer

In any case, the 2015 Katagami exhibition was beautifully arranged, hung at eye-level with indirect backlighting enabling the patterns to be seen in all their minimalist glory, details after detail flowing into abstraction. As the exhibition text noted: “140 different ways to graphically represent the falling of tiny drops in a rhythmic pattern.”

A handbook with more than 200 illustrations of these stencils will be published by the curator this August, 2025. I don’t know if and when there will be an English translation. But just seeing the art would be a treat.

The Dresden Katagami exhibition was accompanied by a sound installation of randomised computer modulations of the sound of falling rain, developed in collaboration with the Italian electronic musician Renato Rinaldi. Here in Portland, all you had to do was step out onto the Cultural Plaza and listen intently while getting soaked. Thinking about the flow of cultural practices and ideas across time, or across continents. About how minds open when they appreciate something new, or admire something from centuries ago. About artistic cross-fertilization, and always, always, individuals who blaze a path, approaching novel parts of the world, returning with knowledge, or providing us with art that we would otherwise not easily come in contact with.

The garden, exhibitions and nature alike, once again, an interdependent source of inspiration. A benevolently reappearing sun agreed.

Portland Japanese Garden

Earthen Elegance – The Ceramic Art of Bizen

FEBRUARY 8 – JUNE 9, 2025

Karen Illman Miller – Natural Patterns: Katazome Stencil Dyeing

March 29 – September 15, 2025

611 SW Kingston Ave, Portland, OR 97205-5886

1 Comments

The Ruckus Clause

Remember the Ruckus Clause in the Constitution – the one that says if you create a ruckus in this country while legally visiting from another country, your permit will be revoked and you will be sent back? Ruckus, mind you, defined as voicing an opinion that is opposed to administration think, not a crime, a riot, a participation in illegal activities – simply making use of free speech? Free speech guaranties that apparently no longer apply to green card holders or other legal foreign residents?

Well, I don’t remember it either, but here is Marco Rubio on the specifics of PhD candidate Rumeysa Ozturk:

“We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States … if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”

This is, of course, was the Tufts woman who was snatched by plain clothed, masked goons pushing her into a car and abducting her to an unknown site, unable to speak to her lawyer for 24+ hours and not until after she was in Louisiana — despite a court order that she not be moved from MA. For having voiced an opinion in a student news paper as one of four co-authors, a year ago no less, about Israeli attacks on Gaza and university divestment from funding warfare in the Middle East, with no evidence produced that she did anything unlawful. Rubio claims that they are doing it every day, having revoked around 300 visas so far on the basis of disliked speech, not criminal action.

Then there is the Russian dissident, a scientist from Harvard medical School, who was arrested yesterday upon re-entry at our borders, returning from a research trip to France and having some undeclared items due to messed up papers in her luggage. If she is deported to Russia she will likely not survive as a known, outspoken critic of Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. some claim we are now helping to squash dissent as demanded by our newest ally.

Never mind all the tourists who have been detained, some under torture-like conditions, eventually needing medical attention.

I am trying to get the point across that many people shrug when “Venezuelan gang members” are shipped off to a gulag abroad without due process. That some people are more concerned when they are coming for foreign academics or simple tourists from western countries. That WE ALL should be frightened, however, for one and all, once the normalization of abduction, neglect of Habeus Corpus, and absence of any recourse that due process would allow, has taken place. Every single person can be snatched and disappeared, just as 1930s Germany or contemporary Russia model, with claims that the officials know what they are doing and punishing criminals – how can you prove that you are not, when sitting in a cell with 80 other women, unable to speak the language (some tourists) and no access to lawyers in Louisiana, if you are lucky, or El Salvador, if you are not?

Is it surprising that many countries in the world have now posted official travel warnings against visiting the United States? Or, more nightmarish to me, that prominent scholars of fascism have chosen to leave this country and teach abroad (historian Timothy Snyder and philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale among them?)Not counting the brain drain of our best scientists leaving for countries where their work is revered and can continue in contrast to here with all the department closures?

I was thinking about all this while watching how various wildlife traverse our garden, how freely they move, with no borders to stop them and certainly no ICE or Customs personal snatching them into custody, moving them to unknown locations or sending them back to places where there is existential threat waiting for them.

The deer come and go.

The coyotes come and go, blissfully ignoring my wildly barking dog.

The squirrel has claimed the owl house.

The owl has claimed the redwood where the crows nest. (That is a crow behind the owl, unsuccessfully yelling at the owl.)

The finches and sparrows and various other birds freely come and go, ready to snatch nesting materials.

One of the people detained upon entry to the US last week was composer Andrew Balfour, on his way to perform with the Amabile Choirs at Carnegie Hall, conducting selections from his work Tapwe: Songs of Truth. There was some mistake in his papers, and he was held for hours in isolation, phone and luggage taken from him, until he was given a choice: he could wait (for days) for an immigration judge to decide his detention, or he could take a flight back home to Toronto, to which he was then escorted by armed guards. He was lucky – some have been kept in detention for 2 weeks, completely clueless about what the accusations consisted of.

Anyhow, Balfour is a singular musician in the sense that he has two things that matter for his creative focus: his love for sacred music by Renaissance composers, particularly British ones, and his identity as a Cree, infusing indigenous spirituality into the music he creates. The music I am linking to today takes scores from Byrd and Tallis, and arranges them around Cree and Ojibway words. The project, called Nagamo , which means “sing” in Cree, is not a translation of the old texts, but an infusion of indigenous perspective. It’s quite something.

If you are interested in the whole composition, go here.

Below are some parts that I picked, demonstrating diversity of melodic and rhythmic approaches.

And at the very end you can watch a short video that introduces the composers and his biography.

Let the music fill you with a sense of resolve – people have overcome injustice and trauma for centuries.

1 Comments

The Sultan’s Turban.

– In memory of my friend, Dutch-American painter Henk Pander. You are missed. –

Henk Pander Remembering Haarlem (1922) Painted a year before his death on April 7, 2023.

***

Walk with me, and you’ll get rewarded with a fun fair ride, or a gigantic ice cream cone or a wine tasting at 11:15 in the morning on a Monday – up to you. I, of course, had come to photograph the tulips and the never disappointing sartorial choices that people make when they visit the fields.

On my way to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm, I drove by one of those traffic control machines that flash speed numbers at impatient drivers. Mine said instead: Great Job! I must have been, for once, under the speed limit, but could not help be irritated by patronizing traffic machines that are now talking to me. But I digress. Let us leave quibbles behind and indulge in beauty.

Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm South of Portland, in March 2025.

Claude Monet Tulip Fields at Sassenheim (1886)

Vincent van Gogh  Fields of Tulips (1883)

What used to be a farm with a small store where you could get cut flowers and order bulbs for next year’s planting, is now a consumer’s paradise, with a fun fair, hot air balloon rides, endless booths for food and trinkets.

You have to book tickets on line and decide on a fixed time slot for arrival, so that the acres of parking lots can be managed by the staff. But you know what: it’s fine! Let people have fun in a world that offers little of that, let the kids squeal and the adults delight in a whiff of spring and distraction from daily worries. I certainly had a blast and was grateful to hear so much laughter.

The fields were a bit behind, given the strange weather patterns of this winter, with field color concentrated only in one corner, but found in planters generously spread throughout. What was in bloom showed most frequently shapes that no longer resemble much the sultans’ turbans, etymologically the root of the word tulip, from the Turkish language.

Jacob Marrle Four Tulips: Butter Man, Nobleman, The Great Plumed One, and With the Wind. (1635)

Erkin Tulpen in blauwe Kom (2018) He is a contemporary Dutch realist painter who goes only by one name.

Yellow was definitely coming up, opening wide to a surprisingly warm morning.

Gerhard Richter Tulpen (1995)

Picked this painting despite the ongoing “let’s make them guess” style of this artist (I’m not a fan, as you know), with multiple options including a view from a moving train, fading of memories, or vision problems – which was what I thought about during my stroll. The farm had a sign out that suggested you could borrow glasses that would help overcome color blindness and help enjoy the full glory. I had to look it up, once back home, if these glasses really are able to keep what they promise – and wouldn’t you know it, only IF you have a mild version of the common red-green colorblindness (and not an absence of color receptors,) do they have an effect, enhancing contrast vision more so than color vision per se. (Ref.)

Lots of workers in the fields, picking flowers for sale, transporting goods, weeding, guarding against visitors flaunting the rules. Hard work on a still cold and damp ground.

Lots of appropriately themed garb.

But nothing beats the beauty of the blossoms – or, as a matter of fact, the breeding of new stem colors.

Max Beckmann Stillleben mit Ausblick aufs Meer  (1938)

Paula Becker Modersohn Stillleben mit Tulpen in blauem Topf. 

One tent housed a wood worker who made traditional Dutch Klompen out of poplar wood.

It made me think of the long history of Dutch colonialism, agricultural brilliance, and the 17th century tulip mania that ended in an economic crash. One thought about speculative bubbles led to another, and here I was wondering why so many young men are so attracted by crypto currency speculation, meme coins, and, for that matter, sports betting.

Anonymous The sale of tulip bulbs (17th Century)

For one, it is interesting to see that there are endless postings on the web where tulip mania and crypto speculation are compared and scathingly disentangled – the former bad, the latter good, in very LOUD voices… Of course, if you dig, you find opposing views and people quite worried about another bubble, eventually bursting and dragging the investments of young men down with them. The numbers are staggering – both in terms of how many young men are drawn to day trading, crypto and betting (relative to women and older populations,) how many of them consider themselves addicted in one form or another, and how much money they gain or loose in short amounts of time.

Roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto (when I can barely define what that actually is.) The new administration is helping, in terms of loosening banking restrictions, or active encouragement in investing in these kinds of currencies (Trump just yesterday introduced a new cryptocurrency, the Stablecoin.)

Listen to the expert (and this link leads to a smart, short piece on the psychology of crypto attraction):

Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.

Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.

 Jan Brueghel the Younger Allégorie de la Tulipomanie (1640)

Oh, let’s just return to the beauty out there, and not fret, for five minutes.

Claude Monet Vase of Tulips (1850)

Emil Nolde Tulpen, (ca. 1940)

And one of my favorites:

François-Emile Barraud Parrot Tulips (1931)

***

I was not the only one who found joy.

And Easter around the corner.

The pug, on the other hand, was sort of done with it…

As was he.

Careful, Bigfoot, even the curbs have tulips…

Music today are variations on a famous composition by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt who died in 2012. The piece is called Canto Ostinato (1979). Here is a version for four pianos, recorded live in 1984 and here is one I really like from 2017 at a world music festival, with incredible singing.

1 Comments

The Brain on Art

Confession: I “borrowed” this title from a neuroscience research study that explored the interaction between aesthetic experience and personal relevance when looking at a work of art. I liked the title more than the study, which demonstrated with brain scans what my grandmother could have told you over dinner: different people react differently to different pieces of art, and their reactions are influenced by the rest of their lives….

What, though, if the “rest of our lives” is systematically exposing us to acceptable definitions of art, contrasting it with unacceptable ones, declared degenerate, or met with any other form of denigration?

Am I thinking here of societies where “good” art is defined from above, and cultural centers are taken over to start setting certain standards? Yes.

Am I thinking of Walter Benjamin’s claim that “In fascist aesthetics, the conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.” Yes.

Did these thoughts get triggered by looking at specific art? Yes!

I was interested in the juxtaposition of work of two photographers, and my spontaneous negative and positive reactions to each series, respectively. Both artists are women, both chose to photograph in specific locations historically meaningful to them, and both stage their images. This is where the similarities end. Maria Svarbova, born in 1988, hails from Slovakia, a country that is currently seeing massive anti-government demonstrations against the authoritarian and repressive government of Prime Minister Robert Fico who has become Putin’s new best friend and is head of a populist party accused of major corruption. Nona Faustine, on the other hand, was born a Black woman in the U.S., no need to spell out who is also best friends with whom in this country, at the moment. She died last week, heartbreakingly young at the age of 48. Rest in power.

Svarbova is quite in demand on the international circuit, with commissions by large corporations, and work shown in galleries as well as relevant publications like Vogue, Harpers’ Bazaar and so on. I am focusing on her Swimming Pools series that started in 2012 and is ongoing, often labeled as Nostalgic Futurism, or Retro Futurism.

She selects old buildings in Slovakia and abroad that house swimming pools, and stages models clad in precisely chosen garb and demanding color schemes, preparing the shoots and lighting of the halls with large teams of assistants, to get everything just right. There is no doubt the artist is extremely talented, and knows how to translate visual imagination into spatial and color-bound scenes that are striking.

My reaction? At best, these staged scenes remind me of kaleidoscopes, the thrill of my childhood, with masses of brightly colored pieces of plastic holding patterns in mirrored configurations. Eye candy. Except now “plastic dolls” instead of plastic confetti.

Or maybe they evoke synchronized swimming, albeit without the strength, skill of body control, and sense of perfect timing required by this sport. More like dead fish, sardines, to be precise, crammed into rigid positions in a jar. You realize that these flawlessly arranged, perfect bodies are devoid of individuality, and any hint of emotion.

But really, and here the goosebumps start to crop up, they make me think of the choreography of fascist displays of masses moving, whether the synchronicity of goose-stepping young men, or the gymnastic displays of youth in unison configurations.

I’ll get to that in a moment. Note again, that I describe my associations elicited by the photographs, not my speculation on what the artist intended. She certainly refers to the prominent display of a No Diving Allowed sign in multiple images as a reference to the restrictions upon women who should be allowed just to have fun in the pool.

But over the years, the work has become more technically accomplished, placed in more glamorous locations that had nothing to do with communist East-European brutalist architecture or oppressive rule (never mind that no diving is a safety measure found in pools around the world), and overall slicker.

***

Here is Nona Faustine’s White Shoes series in comparison. She was interested in how the past informs the present, and in creating images that would make us ask questions about and remembering the legacy of the slave trade. Her work has been widely praised and awarded, collected and presented in a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum just last summer.

Nona Faustine “Isabelle, Lefferts House, Brooklyn (Self-Portrait)” (2016) taken outside the Lefferts Historic House museum in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.

The choice of locations for the series was premeditated, just like Svarbova’s, and guides us to relevant places or areas that were constructed from chattel slavery and used significantly to perpetuate white supremacy. She would pose in various stages of undress in these public places with life going on around her, with a few props and the symbol-rich, sensible white shoes.

The representation of a voluptuous, nude, female black body, in a fat-phobic society no less, makes her self-portrait particularly vulnerable. There she stands, props in hand, on the ground that holds the bodies of her ancestors, the buildings above representing the power that put slaves into graves in the first place. Whether you experience her as a symbol for those who were made invisible, or an avenging force who demands visibility, or a woman unafraid to challenge our stereotypes of what constitutes beauty, in each interpretation you find a core of individual agency so utterly lacking in the conventional beauties aligned at the pool.

Nona Faustine “They Tagged The Land With Trophies and Institutions From Their Rapes And Conquests,” (2013) (Outside the Tweed Courthouse in downtown New York, New York, USA)

Her use of self-portraiture urges us to acknowledge the impact of the past on the lived present, to recognize the ongoing consequences of historical injustices on Black communities today. The artist reconstructs a narrative of racist oppression, making us think of the body as commodity – to deliver unpaid work and future generations of workers then, or to be traded in a world suffused by imposed unreachable body ideals, now – traumatic, both. The courage alone produced respect in me; the series as a whole was an aesthetic experience that fed my brain and made me feel sad, more than anything else, particularly now when we incredulously stare at distinct attempts of re-segregating our society. (Exaggeration? Read here and here.)

Nona Faustine  Dorothy Angola, Stay Free, In Land of the Blacks, (2021) (Minetta Lane, Greenwich Village, New York, NY, USA.)

It is the juxtaposition, though, of the two series, that produces an affective aesthetic response colored by “the rest of my life,” informed by my links to German and Jewish history. I am thinking back to a book by Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics in which he talked about the role carefully choreographed spectacles and pageants played in the consolidation of his power. He suggests that Hitler’s “lack of feeling for humans… was already evident at the Nuremberg rallies and other spectacles when his ‘architecturalizing’ of the participants and his deployment of them in geometrical patterns reduced them to noctambulent creatures.” “What his monumental aesthetic would leave behind, therefore, was not the uniqueness of individual human experience or its messy heterogeneity, but monolithic forms that imposed singular meaning on disparate deeds, experiences and lives.” (Ref.)

15,000 people perform synchronized gymnastics at the Nuremberg Rally. Germany. 1938. Imagno/Getty Images

Bund Deutscher Mädchen at gymnastics exercise – 1941

A declaration of what is beautiful and which aesthetic should dominate public (or private) life did not exist in isolation, though, in fascist or other authoritarian regimes. If there is but one standard of beauty, then all that does not conform must be done away with – and here we come to the erasure of those deemed ugly. If you are fat, you need to fast. If you are wrinkly, you need cosmetic surgery.

If you are degenerate, art and human beings alike, you need to be eradicated.

The norms WERE applied not just to paintings, sculpture, music or architecture. They were used to create out-groups that would be convenient scapegoats, or could be killed to ease economic press during the years when fascists were in power. The T4 program, the very first to attack who was deemed ugly, was used to systematically euthanize the disabled. We know what followed.

During the 1930s Paul Schultze-Naumburg—an architect and scholar—traveled Germany, lecturing on mental illness and modern art, flashing slides of avant-garde paintings beside pictures of people living with disabilities.

Fascists “beautified” the world through violence and forced conformity, trying to reduce individuals to non-significance, uniting an entire people as “one,” eliminating any sense of or desire for individual agency when you felt psychologically embedded in the amorphous whole. If you remove differences from public display – all those who are Black or female, for example, you get a mass of White men who no longer draw your eye to distinct visual qualities: de-individuation achieved. Note that it is not just those who are excluded from public life who get hurt. It is also those who remain, who are forged into a whole that can be manipulated at the leaders’ whims, sleep-walking through their use as puppets or eventual cannon fodder.

We are in need of art that fights that notion, and I am wary of trends that hail imagery that homogenizes beauty, reminiscent of a past that unleashed horrors upon humanity.

Music today is about the kind of flood I wish would wash all the evil away…. Sister Rosetta Tharpe sings Didn’t it rain.(1964)

4 Comments

Stone Soup.

It looks like one of the organizations that help folks on the margins reenter social life equipped with new professional skills, is in the process of loosing employment services funding. I am turning to my Multnomah County/PDX friends and readers with an appeal for action today. The rest of you can enjoy my newest montages, or check out if similar cuts are on the docket in your own neighborhoods.

As you know, I care deeply for support of those less privileged than the rest of us, and Stone Soup is a local organization that has done a lot of work to help people back onto their feet with culinary education and job training. They are also first line defenders against hunger among the houseless in our city. I let them speak for themselves below, and am also attaching an easily modifiable template to write to your Multnomah County commissioner – which is the action I recommend today. Your email to your commissioner will perhaps produce momentum towards keeping these services in the FY26 budget for Multnomah County. At least we can try. (If you have forgotten your district number like I did – here is the easy way to find out!)

Stone Soup’s plight:

A Letter From Our Co-Founder March 18th, 2025
Urgent: Help Save Job Training Funding in Multnomah County’s Budget

If you’ve been following Multnomah County politics, you know budget challenges are on the horizon. Service providers across the county—us included—are being asked to tighten our belts yet again. It’s a familiar refrain in the nonprofit world: do more with less.
 At Stone Soup PDX, we currently receive funding for our culinary job training program through a contract with Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services. This support helps us provide Employment Services to our participants—equipping them with skills, experience, and a path to long-term stability. It’s not just the right thing to do—it’s also smart fiscal policy.
 Our Social Return on Investment Calculator estimates that for every $1 invested in our program, local governments save around $8 by reducing the need for public assistance for our participants. I don’t know about you, but if I could get an 8-to-1 return on investment in the market, I’d take that deal every time.
 And yet, the proposed FY26 budget completely eliminates the Employment Services funding line.
 That means no county support for transformational job training programs like ours. It means pulling public investment from participants like the one we highlighted in a recent blog post—someone who went from dishwasher to Kitchen Manager, now earning $64,000 a year plus benefits. These are real outcomes with real impact.
 The good news? The budget isn’t finalized yet. We have until June to advocate for restoring this funding. We understand that cuts are coming. But eliminating this support entirely is the wrong move for Multnomah County.
 That’s where you come in. Take a minute to call or email your county commissioner. Tell them you want to see Employment Services restored in the FY26 budget. Let them know that job training programs work—and that investing in our workforce strengthens our entire community.
 Here’s how to reach your commissioners:Multnomah County Commissioners:
📌 Chair: Jessica Vega Pederson
📌 District 1: Meghan Moyer (Powell Location)
📌 District 2: Shannon Singleton
📌 District 3: Julia Brim-Edwards (Glisan Landing Location)
📌 District 4: Vince Jones-Dixon
Your voice matters. Let’s make sure they hear it.
Craig Gerard
Co-Founder and Director of Community Contracts, Stone Soup PDX   To make it easier, we’ve put together a template email you can use—just copy, personalize, and send it to your commissioner.Click here!

And here is the Commissioner Outreach Template- Stone Soup PDX

Subject: Restore Employment Services Funding in the FY26 Budget

Dear Commissioner [Last Name],

I’m writing to urge you to reinstate funding for Employment Services in the FY26 budget. The current proposed budget eliminates this critical funding for service agencies, threatening the ability of organizations like Stone Soup PDX to continue providing essential job training programs.

Stone Soup PDX equips individuals facing employment barriers with the skills they need to secure stable jobs in the food service industry. Without this funding, many of our community’s most vulnerable residents will lose access to workforce development programs that help them build self-sufficiency.

Investing in employment services isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s a smart financial decision. For every $1 invested in Stone Soup PDX, local governments save $8 by reducing reliance on public assistance programs. By supporting job training initiatives, you are strengthening our workforce and ensuring a more economically vibrant Multnomah County.

I strongly urge you and your fellow commissioners to restore funding for Employment Services in the FY26 budget. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]
[Your Contact Information]

It’ll take ten minutes and is one of the things we can so easily do to fight budget cuts that hurt the most vulnerable among us. Give it a thought, please! And if you want to link to this appeal on your social media to spread the word, that would be cool as well.

3 Comments

Finding Gifts.

Yesterday was a good, a surprisingly good day. I had gone to Sauvies Island, rather than giving in to fatigue, and found myself with an embarrassment of riches. It was as if all of nature conspired to wait for me and shower me with extraordinary beauty, wherever I turned. The wetlands looked like a Dutch landscape painting from the Golden Age.

The willows glowed like little lanterns against soft air.

32 egrets (I counted!) grazed in a field, occasionally flying off to a better spot for hunting.

Sandhill cranes overhead and hopping around in their elegant, if short-lived, staccato dances tugged on my heart strings – I so love these birds.

Ducks joined them.

Swans moved northwards, will I ever see the tundra again? No. That’s ok. Can’t be greedy.

Snow geese rose with a cacophony of noise when spooked by a raptor. When they eventually settled it looked like huge white blossoms tumbling down onto the ground.

And then a pair of eagles decided to show off, noisily announcing their arrival, or yelling at each other, what do I know, maybe they’re courting. Not mutually exclusive, I hear.

So, just for today, I’ll revel in nature’s gifts, leaving politics aside. In that spirit, music will also be enchanting, a new find of an L.A.- based Jazz trio. Little guy below hops in rhythm….

8 Comments

Seeking Warmth.

“It is the fundamental task of art to fight against alienation – to go to bat for authentic hearing, seeing, feeling, thinking against the stereotypes and societal patterns that are full of hostility towards being thoughtful and perceptive.” – Erich Fried in Rudolf Wolff (Hrsg.): Erich Fried. Gespräche und Kritiken, 1986. (My translation.)

***

If you look up the meaning of the word “authentic,” the Thesaurus suggests this: genuine, honest, true, real, original, unmistakable, historical. I cannot think of a better description of the art of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) a Roma artist, Holocaust survivor, and activist whose work is increasingly displayed by major venues, providing welcome contrast to so much of the inauthentic hokum out there.

Ceija Stojka The Mama (detail with gallery entrance reflected in the glass covering the painting.)

Across the last few years the artist’s paintings, drawings and journaling were on view at Gallery Christophe Gaillard in Brussels, the Museum of the City of Lodz in Poland, at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, at Kassel’s Documenta 15 in Germany, among others. Opening in April, they are at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, in a group exhibition, Apocalypse. Yesterday and Tomorrow.

Luckily, we dont have to travel that far. Some of Stojka’s work is currently shown at the Vancouver, WA gallery Art at the Cave, together with exhibits by Daniel Baker and Sam Marroquin, and short videos about the artists by Erin Aquarian, in a show titled “Seeking Warmth.”

Stojka’s father was murdered by the Nazis even before the entire family was imprisoned in concentration camps. She, her mother and all siblings but one brother survived, despite being routed through Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and ultimately Bergen-Belsen. A miracle, given that out of 12 000 Austrian Roma, between 9000 and 10 000 perished during the Holocaust. After liberation, she attended school for a few years before she had her first child at age 15. She became a successful carpet merchant, and had two more children within the decade (two of whom preceded her in death, adding more tragedy.) It was only in her mid-fifties that she started to put her traumatic experiences into diverse forms of expression, music, self-taught visual art and journaling. It is no exaggeration to say her memories poured out, with over a thousand works of art and writing composed during the decades before her death at age 79 in 2013.

Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon in Forest)

Before I turn to her art, a grateful acknowledgement that individual people accompanied this artist to express herself and help bring about the prominence she has achieved. One of Austria’s most distinguished documentarian film makers, Karin Berger, was the first to engage with Stojka in the late eighties. A full documentary about the artist and her trauma, Ceija Stojka: Portrait of a Roma, was published in 1999. Lorely French, who taught German language and literature, as well as film and Roma writers, retiring this May after 39 years at Pacific University, was the artist’s friend. Importantly, she translated the first English version of the memoirs of Ceija Stojka, and is a founding member and member of the board of the Ceija Stojka International Association.

The art on display in the current exhibition is a small-scale version of Stojka’s oeuvre as a whole: there are the paintings that represent a “bright cycle” – scenes referencing life as the Romani people experienced it before the descent into the hell of the Holocaust. The acrylics are expressive, colorful, reminiscent of folk-art, and often quite sophisticated in their perspective for a self-taught artist. They report what was seen, but also communicate a sense of longing for a way of life that no longer exists. Wagons, streams, summer meadows, birds and flowers everywhere, and many people forming community around chores, more often seemingly idyllic than not. Exactly a way a child would experience her childhood, without the adult knowledge of how the Roma had to fight against prejudice and persecution long before the fascists arrived on the scene. It is a remarkable feat as an artist to be able to reproduce that experience from a memory store that by all means should have been overwritten by the horrors that followed.

Ceija Stojka Untitled (Wagon with people at stream)

These very horrors are captured in Stojka’s “dark cycle,” drawings in ink and some other materials that comprise the other half of her output. These drawings are often accompanied by text. For clarity, the English translations are repeating the meaning of the words, accurately conveying what was said (a choice I would have made as well.) What gets inevitably lost – and the part that makes her texts so indelibly authentic – is the orthography of the artist. Having had but a few years of school, after liberation and before she had her first child, Stojka writes how one hears the words, phonetically, and not according to our spelling and grammar rules. It gives the texts a texture of spontaneity and intensity, of words tumbling out of a mouth rather than a pen, providing the message with an amount of urgency that can simply not be captured in translation.

Ceija Stojka Ravensbrück 1944. Liberation 15.4.1945

These two cycles, bright and dark, interact to magnify the void caused by evil, by offering us the memorial building blocs of a remembered childhood, catapulted into the abyss. The longing for the wholeness of life before is drawing us in, and then spitting us out into the agony of what came after, or the bitterness of the realization of what the artist had to endure. The yearning for the remembered ideal frames the depicted trauma caused by genocide, multiplying the horror exponentially.

Ceija Stojka They devoured us.

We find both, personal grief and political anger in Stojka’s drawings and texts. What makes her so effective as a messenger is the concreteness of her reporting. She did seek warmth by resting amongst the dead (hence the title of the exhibition), shielding her from the wind. She fought off starvation by chewing and swallowing little balls of wool her mother had unraveled from the sweaters still on the corpses, or by eating grass pried from under the floorboards of the barracks, or sap clawed from trees. She banned despair by clinging to hope, perceived by her to be what gave them strength.

Ceija Stojka Hope – that was what gave us strength 1944

***

“Was wir suchen ist schwer zu finden. Die Angst, die müssen wir nicht suchen. Die ist da.” “What we are searching for is hard to find. We don’t have to search for the fear. That is there.” (Translation by Lorely French.)

***

Stojka’s relationship to fear is more complex. On the one hand, she models for all of us an incomprehensible amount of fierceness and courage in poems like this.

On the other hand, she describes, again concretely, a typical behavior that is the result of her experience: “You can’t walk along the street without looking over your shoulder.” (This sentence was juxtaposed with a quote by the poet Erich Fried, an Austrian compatriot who fled into exile after the Nazis killed his father and who survived the war in England. “For I cannot think without remembering.”)

Fear permeates the past, her book titled: Even Death is terrified of Auschwitz. It seeps into the presence – already in the year 2000, she worries about next generations forgetting history, and the fact that a far-right party joins the government coalition.

She proclaims soon after: “Ich habe Angst, dass Europa seine Vergangenheit vergisst und das Auschwitz nur am Schlafen ist. Anti-ziganistische Bedrohnungen, Vorgänge und Taten beunruhigen mich und machen mich sehr traurig.” (“I fear that Europe is forgetting its past and that Auschwitz is only asleep. Anti-Romani threats, happenings and attacks worry me and make me quite sad.”) (Ref.)

The fear, however, seems to be one of the motors for her activism to educate Austrians and the world about the history and the plight of the Romani people, activism for which she received accolades and awards. To this day, Austria has not officially recognized the Holocaust or the Samudaripen/Porajmos – in Austria referred to as the Holocaust of the Roma – through any legislative act; the Holocaust of the Roma is instead recognized as an integral part of the Holocaust as such. (Ref.)The Romani people, assumed to have originated in Asia, most likely Punjab or Kashmir, and who have never identified themselves with a homeland, have been persecuted since the middle ages within the various countries where they traveled and traded. The Porajmos saw up to half a million Roma murdered. Like Jews, they were segregated into ghettos before transport to extermination camps. After the war they were forced to settle in various locations. In post-war Czechoslovakia, where they were considered a “socially degraded stratum”, Romani women were sterilized as part of a state policy to reduce their population. As recently as the 1990s, Germany deported tens of thousands of migrants to Central and Eastern Europe, with large percentages of the Romanians among them being Roma.

Postcard work of Ceija Stojka (which I consider some of her strongest communications.)

Fast forward to our own times, where for the first time ever since 1945, Austria saw this far-right party, the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party,) win the most seats in national elections with garnering almost 30% of the vote last September. (The centrist parties managed to form a governing coalition some many months later that excludes the extremists.) A member of the FPÖ had only a few years back distributed anti- Romani, hate-filled videos on social media, but could not be criminally indicted since he is protected by immunity as a member of congress.) Anti-Roma hate crimes are frequent occurrences across Europe, with assault and arson attacks against homes physically endangering people. Ethnic hatred and claims of “Gypsy criminality” are clearly making a comeback in tandem with rising anti-Semitic sentiments fostered by extremists movements and now parties.

Fear can be a tool. It can motivate us to (re)act and fight for justice, as the artist did. It can be both, exploited and imposed by draconian measures and persecution, as radical right ideologies have successfully discovered. Fear of others, of globalization and immigration, of status loss or “replacement,” can be turned into hatred of scapegoats, often ethnicities other than one’s own. Fear of consequences of protest or non-conformity can smooth the path of authoritarians who want to consolidate power.

Ceija Stojka knew that, expressed that, resisted that. In life and in art.

***

Daniel Baker is a Roma artist and theorist of renown who lives in the U.K. He uses metalised polyethelene rescue blankets, sometimes sculpted, sometimes crocheted, to combine conceptual issues related to survival strategies and practices with a visual aesthetic that echos Romani patterns. Part of his theoretical work concerns the (in)visibility of ethnic minorities, particularly those that are not geographically anchored. In a somewhat ironic turn, his work could have been displayed a bit more visibly in the gallery – you had to work to discover it.

Daniel Baker Emergency Artefacts.

Sam Marroquin shows her series The Madness of War in the upper parts of the gallery. An astonishingly large number of charcoal and acrylic paintings were fitted into the space without overcrowding. Kudos to whoever hung this, likely Sharon Svec, whose curation of this exhibition is splendid overall. The paintings are simplified reproductions of scenes depicted on videos and print material of first hand experiences by those living through the hell that is contemporary Gaza. Put on paper with the artist’s non-dominant hand, they appear more like the drawing of a younger person, a lack of perfection and child-like approach that parallels what we see in the paintings of Stojka. Here, too, are concrete depictions of humans in existentially threatening situations, their bodies and spirits bombed into extinction, their grief more than a single life time can hold. Block letters introduce the artist’s suggestions of the emotions and thoughts likely experienced, all universal enough that they promise verisimilitude.

Sam Marroquin Paintings along the Gallery Wall from the series The Madness of War.

The work makes several strong points. For one, any claim that we have moved beyond atrocities imposed on any one group is moot. The indiscriminate killing of men, women and children, of rescue personnel and journalists/reporters is not a thing of the past, intentional starvation included. Secondly, the suffering depicted is universal, even if it is applied in this case to the particulars of the fate of Palestinians. We could as well be looking at Syria, Ukraine, Sudan or the Republic of Congo. And, importantly, Marroquin’s drawings reveal a humanity of the victims that will elicit empathy in all but the most hardened, allowing a sense of shared humanity across borders.

Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War

The issue, then, is the fact that all of these images were, as “originals,” available in public sources, live-reported during this conflict. They never made their way to those fixated on selective mass media or social media sources that are ideologically inclined to show some sides of suffering but not others. The polarization experienced in a country divided about our political future, is reflected in the visual diet that we consume, basically determined by what the powers that be put into the relevant “larders.” In some way, then, art that is not explicitly associated with media that we deem trustworthy or disreputable, respectively, might inform consumers whose minds can be opened if approaching artistic depictions without easily triggered prejudice. In theory. In practice, of course, we have to mourn the fact that the likely distribution of this important body of work pales in comparison to that of even the smallest partisan social media outlet.

Sam Marroquin Paintings from the series The Madness of War

Before we despair, and in honor of the remarkable resilience of Ceija Stojka and others exposed to existential threats, let me close with a poem (Ertrag is the German title) by Erich Fried, whose words introduced this review. (And yes, I’ve been a fan since my teens, when he was first published by the German publishing house Klaus Wagenbach, before anyone else took on his poetry.)

Dividend

Gathering hope
from solvable problems
from possibilities
from all that
which holds promise

Reserving
strength
for only that
which truly
requires action

Is the way to amass
quietly
a supply of
despair
never spent.

-by Erich Fried

SEEKING WARMTH

March 2025

ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660, UNITED STATES360-314-6506 GALLERY@ARTATTHECAVE.COM

HOURS: TUES-THURS 11-5PM, FRI AND SAT 11-6

For specific upcoming programs related to the exhibition, go here.

1 Comments

Hope and Ashes

Would you like to walk with me, or, as the case may be, drive from Oregon’s West across the mountain passes to the High Desert? We’ll see varied beauty of landscapes moving from winter to spring, with remnants of snow offset by greening pastures and budding trees.

Once we have crossed Mt. Hood, the Sisters’ and Mt. Bachelor’s snowcapped peaks form the background for grazing horses, some looking decidedly in search for a prince. Soon you start driving along the Deschutes river, not yet raging at full strength expected after the snowmelt.

If you are curious enough for a small detour, we can visit the Pelton Dam, which impounds the waters of the Deschutes to create the deep Lake Simtustus, filling a narrow canyon about 7 miles (11 km) back to the Round Butte Dam built in 1964. The water is intensely green in parts, despite blue skies, making you wonder about algae. The surrounding rock formations are majestic. See me wince when I assume the name “Simtustus” honors a Native American, and then learn that it does indeed, but one who scouted for the U.S. Army during the 1867–68 campaign against the Paiute Indians. The Snake War, as it was known, has been ignored by historians, concentrating on the contemporaneous American Civil War and its aftermath, instead. Yet the Snake War was statistically the deadliest of the Indian Wars in the West in terms of casualties. By the end, a total of 1,762 men were known to have been killed, wounded, and captured on both sides. By comparison, the Battle of the Little Bighorn produced about 847 casualties. The Paiutes fought bitterly against the encroachment of colonial settlers onto their territory.

Driving further South, we eventually land in Sunriver, a community near Bend, and a favorite vacation spot for outdoors enthusiasts and families who love being in nature with their kids, but also enjoy the amenities of pools, nature centers, tennis and golf courts, maintained bike paths and the like.

One of the most amazing natural sights, next to deep ponderosa pine forests and the river itself,

are the lava fields produced by one of the largest High Desert volcanoes, the Newberry Volcano. Three million years old, it covers more than 2,000 square miles and sent basalt flows down the canyon of the Deschutes River as far as 65 miles from the main crater (overall it just looks like a mountain chain rather than a dome.)

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) considers it to be a very high threat volcano because of its recent volcanic activity (within the past 1,500 years) in an area where numerous people live. Up until now it has been regularly monitored to detect seismic activity, measuring swelling or deflation of the ground, and trying to detect distinctive volcanic earthquakes caused by molten rock (magma) movement beneath the volcano. Who knows if those services have fallen prey to Musk’s chainsaw as well. (I checked, the answer is YES.)

It is a strange feeling to walk on top of this sleeping giant, something I last did a decade ago, and now again, as if nothing had changed in-between, except for my (reduced) speed and level of fatigue after a ridiculously short hike. I was then and still am a speck in space and time, a particle, a glimmer, given the dimensions of this geological behemoth. And I am still in awe of the beauty around me, the sense of grandeur between the expanse of the High Desert landscape and the height of the surrounding mountains.

Yet I am also aware of human achievement, if lasting so many fewer years, reaching across millennia nonetheless. Thinking here of a poem related to volcanoes, by a smart, formerly East-german poet who weaves into his dry observations allusions to Greek mythology and writing – knowledge transmitted throughout the generations (although who knows if we will see it on U.S curricula after this administration is done, installing the Christian Bible as a textbook instead…)

Active

Then someone says crater and you’re tumbling down.
A word from ancient Greek, a fragment, it means
The pitcher, in which they mixed water and wine.
The volcanic abyss, Empedocles’s tomb.

No more than a word, a splinter, and you see the sandals
Perched on the crater’s rim. Peering down through
The hole in the skullcap at the grey matter.—These pallid
Pockmarks puncturing the map of the moon.

You just hear the word crater—there’s a crack,
And the ear conjures myths out of ceramic and molten rock.
Hephaestus, the smith, in scenes with figures of red.
Or Hades, dragging Persephone down to the dead.

BY DURS GRÜNBEIN
Translated by Karin Leeder from the German, below


“Aktiv”

Da sagt jemand Krater, und schon stürzt du hinab.
Ein Wort aus dem Griechischen, Bruchstück, es meint
Einen Krug, in dem mischten sie Wasser und Wein.
Den vulkanischen Abgrund, Empedokles’ Grab.

Ein Wort nur, ein Splitter, und du siehst die Sandalen
Am Trichterrand. Starrst durchs Loch in der Schädeldecke
Auf die graue Substanz. – Diese riesigen, fahlen,
Im Mondatlas abgebildeten, pockennarbigen Flecken.

Du hörst nur Krater – es knirscht, und das Ohr,
Aus Keramik und Lavaschutt, zaubert Mythen hervor.
Rotfigurige Szenen mit Hephaistos, dem Schmied.
Oder Hades, der Persephone in sein Totenreich zieht

Newberry National Monument – Lava lands

The poem is, unfortunately, rather badly translated, which is surprising given the talent and caliber of this award-winning translator.

In my own understanding of the German, the first line describes a rather more violent, instantaneous crashing than tumbling down the slopes of a crater at the mere mention of the word. This sets the tone for the juxtaposition of “active” and “reflexive” or passive, that runs through the poem. In the second verse, the word crater is no longer a fragment but compared to a shard (not a splinter, fitting way better into the theme of the ceramic pitcher). At the end of the verse the poet refers to actually printed maps of the moon on which huge pallid flecks look like pock marks and which hung in children’s bedrooms during the poet’s youth . In the last verse, the translator uses “crack” instead of “crunch”, which is far more applicable to the crumbling lava and ceramic mix that conjures myths. But maybe I’m nit-picking. Let’s look at the references that really make this a memorable poem.

Both meanings of the word crater, volcano and ceramic pitcher, weave through the poem. Both are provided with references to Ancient Greek mythology, from writing, or found in the imagery painted onto the vessels.

The reaction to the mention of “crater” is linked to Empedocles, a philosopher who, as far as we know, was the first to offer a theory about the connection between light and vision, something picked up and developed later by Euclid. He was a strict vegetarian, had some significant ideas about human psychology and was said to have jumped into an active volcano to prove that he was immortal and live on as a God, leaving his sandals at the rim to “prove” that he had departed. There are numerous version about his demise, some claiming he faked it, others attributing it to an erupting Vesuvius which blasted his sandals up to the rim.

Empedocles’ example of a voluntary jump into the abyss provides a clear contrast to the narrator’s sense that he is inescapably falling into the depth. His imagination is active, but the experience is reflexively forced on him.

The next allusions pick up the theme of catastrophic endings by active means or passive experience. Remember who Hephaestus was, so often depicted as a red silhouette on a black vase? He was the God of fire, volcanoes, metalworking, artisans, metallurgy, carpenters, forges, sculpting, and blacksmiths, creating all the tools needed for unleashing war. And if that was not enough, he also brought a first gift to man: Pandora and her miserable box. All of it drowning the world in evil by active design. Contrast this with Persephone, who was abducted into the Underworld, tricked into eating some pomegranate seeds so that she had to stay there for most of the year, no active resistance possible.

Then again, not all is black and white, or red on black, as the case may be. Persephone still helped to bring spring and harvest about together with her mother, upon her temporary jaunts back into the world, and was Queen rather than pure victim in the underworld.

And Pandora, sent to us by a God who also provided us with habitat and tools as well as the weapons of war? She used to be a life-bringing goddess in early renderings of the Greek cosmos (in fact her name means “all-giving”), before she was eclipsed by the death-bringing human Pandora. And in contrast to the misery she unleashed, one thing stayed permanently in the box, not irretrievably dispersed across the corners of the earth: HOPE, still available.

Maybe we feel like being sucked into craters, drowned by evil that has existed amongst humans since people started to record their histories, left with a torched and jagged, infertile landscape. But we have choices: the choice to think of something as providing sustenance rather than demise (pitcher vs crater), the choice to focus on hope rather than conditioned fears that drag us down the slopes of the volcano. And we have all this because the ancients laid out the maps, and our schools taught us the history. The grey matter might be pockmarked, but it can still be put to use. Let it be active and lead to the right moves.

Chem trails in just the right position….


Music today is a life version of Genesis’ Dance on the Volcano. Here is another song from that album that remains one of my favorite of years gone by, Trick of the Tail.



2 Comments

And another one in the interesting people department….

It is March, spring is around the corner and nature is slowly waking up. Dainty snowdrops do their ballerina imitation.

Croci clusters shine in cheerful purples and yellows, attracting early bees.

Early azaleas beckon with soft pinks.

And hellebores rule my friend’s garden, compact, round, frilly or solid, joyfully dotting the landscape.

March is also Women’s History Month, and I’d like to remind us all how much gardening was tied to the Suffrage movement, or any other progressive social reworking since the earliest 20th century. (Much of what I summarize today I learned from George McKay’s book Radical Gardening (2011) and the splendid Smithsonian website about Women’s History in American Gardens.)

Gardens and Garden architecture was for the longest time considered a man’s world. Just think about Winston Churchill commenting to Siegfried Sassoon in 1918: “War is the natural occupation of man … war – and gardening.” In the late 1800s, however, women started to form garden clubs, push for public parks as a health issues, and engage in the conservation of native plants.

No longer content to embody a sentimental and idealized single vision of women posing decoratively in gardens or with plants (as many of the period paintings do that I am introducing below,) women started to use their collective power found in new organizations centered around gardening to support social change.

Frederick Carl Frieseke Lady in a Garden, (ca. 1912.)

The first garden club in the US was founded in 1891. Next, the American Society of Landscape architects saw one female founder in 1899, Beatrix Farrand, who was soon joined by several other women. Soon several schools and colleges dedicated to landscape design and agriculture opened for women. In 1914, the Smith-Lever Act funded the deployment of home demonstration agents – mostly women – to teach up-to-date agricultural, gardening, and food preservation techniques to families of all races living in rural areas. One of the goals of the project was to “develop leadership abilities in rural women and girls.”

Jane Peterson Spring Bouquet, (ca. 1912)

During WW I, there was a mobilization of a Women’s Land Army to harvest crops and produce food during World War I as men left to fight overseas. The organization later leveraged women’s role in the war to win voting rights for women. During WW II they were instrumental with Victory Gardens, soon recognized by the USDA.

Matilda Browne Peonies (cira 1907) They grew in an Old Lyme garden. The woman in white is thought to be Old Lyme, CT resident Katherine Ludington, portrait painter and noted suffragist.

Similar, sometimes more radical, developments happened in Europe. In Great Britain, for example, the Women’s Agricultural and Horticultural International Union was founded in 1899 (nowadays know as Women’s Farm and Garden Association.) The founders were believers in universal suffrage. Soon a Women’s Land Army was established there as well, increasingly popular during WW II with “‘land girls’ central to the anti-fascist ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, with their gendered perspective and an emancipatory rhetoric.” Suffragists, all. And very much in consensus with Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s statement: “We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.”

Violet Oakley June, (ca. 1902)

By then, the Suffragettes, more actively engaged in militant action of all kinds, had also blazed a path. As McKay writes: “Suffragettes were gardeners, suffragettes targeted gardens for attack—in each instance horticulture was politically positioned.”

The most prominent attacks happened in 1913, when Suffragettes attacked the Orchid House at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and burnt down the Tea Pavilion a bit later. Three greenhouses were smashed, and rare and delicate plants, under bell-glasses, destroyed. The gardens were targeted in implicit or explicit acknowledgement of their link with empire, tradition, and male establishment. The women tried to point to their refusal to be “rare and delicate plant”, severing the link between flowering plant and old-style femininity.

The attack on Kew Gardens is one of the most famous incidents for women’s suffrage. It illustrates the political nature of gardening and its symbolic meaning, just like the example of Kew’s role in the British Empire. Destroying flowerbeds and greenhouses seems insane, unless the gardens and the destruction of them by ‘female vandals’ are seen in terms of the power relations in society. Just as the orchid can symbolize extreme wealth, so a flower-bed can express the power of patriarchy in the political order. (Ref.)

Philip Leslie Hale The Crimson Rambler, ca. 1908

Two of the Suffragettes were captured and sentenced to prison for more than a year. Both went on hunger strikes that were undetected for almost a month, leading to such precarious health status that both were released from prison, after unsuccessful and risky attempts to force feed one of them, Lilian Lenton, an activist who scores in my “interesting people I’d like to have met” department.

She was a dancer, and committed Suffragette at an early age – “deeds not words.” She believed that arson attacks on symbolic locales would create a crisis that would make people re-think power relations. When she was force-fed in prison with a tube through her nose down her throat, she aspirated food into her lungs and got seriously ill. The government then passed the Cat and Mouse Act (in reaction to multiple Suffragette hunger strikers who they did not want to become martyrs,) which allowed for the early release of prisoners who were so weakened by hunger striking that they were at risk of death. They were to be recalled to prison once their health was recovered, where the process would begin again.

Lenton became famous for escaping the authorities multiple times after release from prison by using the most daring costumes and escape routes, earning her the nickname the Leicester Pimpernel. “She fled the city in a delivery van, dressed as an errand boy. Taxis took her to Harrogate and then Scarborough from where she escaped to France in a private yacht, although she soon returned to Britain, setting fire to things again.” She served in Serbia with a hospital unit during WW I, and was awarded the French Red Cross medal. She lived to the age of 81, seeing the fruit of her activism with the eventual right of all women to vote (The Representation of the People Act (Equal Franchise) of 1928).

Mary Cassatt Children in a Garden (1878)

Am I saying arson and destroying plants is a good thing? Am I saying political activism that employs radical means after other things failed, has historically moved movements about equality and justice forward? Am I saying individuals can make a difference, when their role becomes symbolic of a “David vs. Goliath” struggle? Am I saying we need models of previous progressive movements in our own learning-curve, when trying to defy a re-introduction to patriarchal hierarchies and norms (check out the proposed SAVE act, people!)?

What do you think I am saying?

Anna Ancher Fisherman’s Wife Sewing (1890)

Here is a list of militant tactics presented by the BBC, of the documented actions of Suffragettes.

“Whether you agree with direct action or not, the suffragette’s militant tactics had a great impact on the government and society. Some of the tactics used by the WSPU were:”

  • smashing windows on private property and governmental buildings
  • disrupting the postal service
  • burning public buildings
  • attacking Church of England buildings
  • holding illegal demonstrations
  • burning politicians’ unoccupied homes
  • disrupting the 1911 census
  • ruining golf courses and male-only clubs
  • chaining themselves to buildings
  • disrupting political meetings
  • planting bombs
  • handcuffing themselves to railings
  • going on hunger strikes

Historians still argue whether or not the militant campaigns helped to further the women’s suffrage movement or whether it harmed it. But presumably they’ll agree, crocheting won’t do the job. And we did get the right to vote. For the time being.

Mary Cassatt Lydia Crocheting in the Garden (1880)

I’ll tackle that debate another day. For now, let’s enjoy the spring bloom!

And listen to Elisabeth Knight.

0 Comments
© 2025