I am taking a few days off. I will leave you with this from Rebecca Solnit.
Going to pay a bit of attention to the weather. See you next week.
Here are the songs of a wayfarer….
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.
I know, it’s Friday. Week was long and hard for many. You need some things to smile about, and I will comply with cartoons that landed in my inbox. Well, may be more grimace than smile. Also a reminder: today is the day of Economic Blackout that intends to make our voices heard. Raid the pantry, avoid the stores.
I will also list some of the facts, undisputed by Republicans, that came into view this week, facts relevant to science and healthcare, as we had agreed would be my focus. Well, maybe you didn’t agree, and wished for all art all the time. Not going to happen. We need documentation when we talk to our grandchildren about the speed at which things changed in ways that would endanger them all in the long run.
Healthcare issues directly related to us:
According to the Washington Post, the most upsetting news to the population in general, are the elimination of cancer research and treatment programs, both at the NIH and the VA. It makes no sense to even the most devoted Republicans. In other health news:
- Measles epidemic amongst unvaccinated populations led to first deaths. Since the incubation time is about two weeks, we will see an explosion of cases overall in the coming weeks – our HHS Tsar JFK Jr. flicked it off with a comment that these epidemics are not out of the norm.
- A) not true. B) Easily fixed if we had programs to encourage and normalize vaccinations.
- The meeting to decide which flu vaccine to produce for the fall was called off by same anti-vaxxer health Tsar. Mid-March is the time when people discuss the recommendations for vaccine choice by the WHO (which we have left) and then pharma organizations start production which will need about 6 months to be ready for early flu season. Here are the pitfalls of his decision: if we don’t produce vaccines at all, for fear their approval might be killed by anti-vaccination sentiment from said Tsar (with investment in the production then a total loss), we will have a harrowing epidemic. If we go ahead and make a best guess as to which strains to target, given that official information channels are now foreclosed, we might have a vaccination campaign in the fall, but it might be useless, since vaccine ineffective. “See?”The Tsar can then claim, “Vaccinations don’t work.” – I, by the way, as many of my elderly friends, have a huge stake in this – the flu could simply kill me, given the state of my immune system. The CDC says, for the US in 2023-2024: “Flu vaccines prevent about 9.8 million illnesses, 4.8 million doctor visits, 120,000 hospital stays, and 7,900 deaths.”
- According to WSJ, HHS weighs rescinding Moderna bird flu vaccine contract: The Trump administration confirmed it is reevaluating a $590 million human bird flu vaccine contract awarded to Moderna in the waning days of the Biden administration.
Rest of the world:
- Musk and Trump terminated 5800 USAID contracts – more than 90% of its foreign aid programs – in defiance of the courts.
- All malaria supplies protecting 53 million people, mostly children, including bed nets, diagnostics, preventive drugs, and treatments – terminated.
- All tuberculosis programs, including the Global TB Drug Facility – terminated. – This will lead to treatment resistant strains that will hurt US citizens as well.
- All supplies of US-manufactured emergency food packets for starving children on the brink of death – terminated. newrepublic.com
- USAID’s contract for supplying essential medicines for maternal and child health in countries worldwide – terminated.
- Services from the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation – just one organization – reaching 350,000 people on HIV treatment, including nearly 10,000 children and more than 10,000 HIV-positive pregnant women – terminated.
- Every USAID program in the former Soviet countries in Central Asia, including health programs to combat tuberculosis, along with agricultural programs – terminated. www.voanews.com.
- The Ebola programs were terminated, “a mistake” according to Musk, that he said was rectified. A bold lie, responded the director of the program. A few staff were given waivers to return to work, but the funds remain cut, and the office leases terminated, making the work impossible.
And regarding our health, if not lives, impacted by fire:
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has made steep cuts to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which is under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of the Interior. This reportedly impacts funding appropriated to fight wildfires across the country. The most significant budget cuts is setting the limit for BLM firefighters’ credit cards and travel credit cards to just $1, making it impossible for them to buy supplies or travel to wildfire sites. Additionally, the Trump administration froze the disbursement of approximately $3 billion in wildfire mitigation-related funds. This includes things like clearing dead branches and undergrowth that can help wildfires spread quickly if not removed ahead of time. (Ref.)
Over 1000 staff has been shrunk from NOOA, leaving us without weather warning and maritime predictions. The majority of staff at the only two Tsunami Warning Centers in the US have been fired.
Again, please explain to me what the goal of this is. The remaining people cannot do the work alone. The dire consequences will hurt the population in unimaginably deep ways- what is the possible justification for this?
Music today was written during (and about) the Influenza (Spanish Flu) epidemic in 1918. Darius Milhaud was greatly influenced by the horrors he witnessed. The Sonata’s final movement, “Douloureux,” is perhaps a funeral march. The deadliest flu epidemic, before vaccines, cost, in a range of estimates, between 25 and 50 million lives.
WHAT WAR IS
Maybe someday they’ll decide to write a textbook
only we won’t be invited to contribute
because others always know better what war is
because others always know better
okay
but just one chapter
give us one chapter
you won’t find any supplemental material anyway
this will be a chapter on silence
whoever hasn’t been in war doesn’t know what silence is
but to the contrary, they know
that we don’t know
the way fish don’t know about the water that sustains them and the oil that kills them
the way a field mouse doesn’t know about the dark that hides it from the hawk but
it hides the hawk too
let us write this chapter
i know you’re afraid of blood so we’ll write it with water
the water the wounded man asked for when he could no longer swallow and just
looked at it
water that seeps through a shelled-out roof
water that can replace tears
yes – we’ll come to you with water
we’ll leave no permanent marks
on your slogans and values that we’ve so flagrantly misused
that you can’t even show them to your children anymore
these will be our few pages
and only a few will know they aren’t empty
Timothy Snyder introduced us to this poet and poem on Monday, the three year-anniversary of the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The words speak for themselves. Will we heed them?
The poem is contained in Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine, published by Academic Studies Press (Boston, MA) and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Cambridge, MA). It is available at bookshop.org, or your local bookstore. (As a reminder: this Friday, February 28th, has been dedicated to buying or paying NOTHING, a nation-wide economic boycott to protest the new administration and the businesses raising prices because they can. Put gas in the car and get your groceries on Thursday…)
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Two recommended long reads that you might want to pick up:
Aisha Ahmad, Political Science Professor at the University of Toronto, writes about the consequences of a potential war with Canada.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and writes about a way to think about the current President and his posse’s approach to governing, relating back to a term originally coined by Max Weber: Patrimonialism.
“Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.”
Today minimalist music. The Book of Sounds was composed by Hans Otte between 1979 and 1982. Played here by Carlos Cipa, himself a contemporary classical composer and pianist.
2023 photo montage series about war and nuclear proliferation.
Some persistent bug had me under the weather last week. Consequently I watched even more movies than usual, with shows divided between those I stream while knitting and those I devour intently. Given the quality of what’s currently out there, the “knitting” category covered about 90% of my movie diet, with the remaining 10% providing a sigh of relief.
I photographed at the waterfront in San Francisco in September 2020, around noon. The smoke from the fires blocked out the sun. These colors are not manipulated.
In the latter category, one series stood out in particular. It’s a French/Belgian production from 2020, now playing on the Sundance Channel, called Moloch. Not for the faint of heart – the series contains not just very violent images, it also creates pervasive fear in any viewer sensitive to horror and asks disturbing psychological questions that we have to answer ourselves. It offers magic realism as a plot device, but it is also as smart a documentation as they come of what ails our societies, and delivers superb psychodrama. Next to the terrific acting, the cinematography is brilliant, mirroring the suffering of its protagonists in the desolate land- and cityscapes that are as beautiful as paintings. If you plan on viewing it and don’t want spoilers, stop reading here!
The plot revolves around people spontaneously combusting into columns of fire in a Northern French coastal town. An unlikely duo of a young journalist and an older psychiatrist team up to solve the mystery, both burdened with tragedies of their own. A number of the psychiatrist’s patients are peripherally involved, as potential victims or perpetrators of the deeds, no one knows. As the story unfolds, the crimes are attributed by the increasingly riled population to Moloch, the ancient God of Fire to whom children were regularly sacrificed. (Evidence concerning Moloch worship in ancient Israel, by the way, is found in the legal, as well as in the historical and prophetic literature of the Bible, in the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, the Books of Kings and Numbers. The Moloch cult was an established institution with a fixed location (the Topheth), at Carthage, a colony founded by Phoenicians on the coast of Northeast Tunisia. Archaeological discoveries at Carthage attest some 20,000 burials of infant bones along with animal bones in what are evidently was institutional sacrifice. )(Ref.)
The film’s victims of these seeming self-immolations are all revealed to have been violent, cruel and abusive in their own right, and the steady background noise of radio and news reports points to larger syndicates as well, recklessly polluting the sea with toxic run-offs, setting a general tone of late-stage capitalism dysphoria.
Some part of the population, however, thrives on the sense that justice is done in an unjust world, a world that sees repeat areas of violation: child abuse, sexting among teenagers bent on shaming young girls, crimes related to drug dealing, bankers driving people into ruin, and so on. The treatment of immigration – refugees as witnesses or potential perpetrators – slowly emerges, with a compassionate lens on the fate of African migrants whose suffering makes them buy into religious frenzy of an avenging God.
The core issue, though, turns out to be anger, depicted in various degrees and various manifestations, ultimately so intense in those who have no means to escape it, that it becomes fiery enough to immolate hated targets. And what, at first, was meant to be a crusade for a better world, with victims given a chance to change their behavior lest being punished, becomes in the end a reckless tour of revenge, blind with fury. The allegory of a society devouring its young who then strike back by sacrificing representatives of said system, ultimately ends in self-sacrifice of the perpetrator. And the viewer’s own moral compass is by then upside down, feeling only compassion for a life un-lived, turned to evil. All this is narrated in long, calm, pensive scenes, only occasionally disrupted by action shots.
Who needs such bleakness, you ask? My answer: any work of art that teaches us something about our state of affairs might help us, in turn, to promote some change, if only we are courageous enough to look. Regarding the particular theme of Moloch, the best artists of their times picked it up – just re-watch Metropolis from 1927 or re-read Allen Ginsberg. (More below.)
I think the question why so many young men (and increasingly some young women) are turning to dreams or actualization of violence, to revenge fantasies concerning a world that is seen as depriving them, trapping and suffocating them, needs to be investigated. How can we convey that it is not feminism, or DEI, or some other convenient subgroup thwarting them, dangled as culprits before their eyes by some politicians eager for foot soldiers? Flooding them with ideology that keeps them in suspension, unable to think of and realize a productive future for themselves?
What can be done to unravel myth from reality about the causes of inequality, injustice and purposeless lives for entire generations experiencing a steady drop in life quality and life expectancy, leading to ubiquitous anger? If a film makes you think about those issues along parallel lines, brings them up with metaphors that grab you emotionally as well as philosophically, more power to it, even if it uses the tropes of thriller-cum-horror movie as a vehicle.
Here is poetry published in 1956 (!) alerting us to the point: an excerpt of Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl.
II.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
(The entire written poem can be found here. A reading by Ginsberg himself here.)
Here is new music for an old (1927) silent movie: the Moloch Scene in Metropolis, rescored by Matt Mason.
Just Playin’ Around.
· Exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU ·
“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.” – Friedrich Schiller (Schiller’s Werke, Nationalausgabe, Vol.20, pg.359.)
You don’t have to buy into the absolutism of Schiller’s proclamation to acknowledge that the 18th century poet, playwright and philosopher was on to something with his theories around a human play drive. He believed that play allows an escape from the rigid structures provided by societal expectations, and in some ways melds our sensual experience with rationality, providing a path to both, appreciation of aesthetics and critical thinking. Ultimately he saw play as an expression of freedom.
During the 200 years since, we have seen repeated waves of interest in the relationship between play, or playfulness, and the aesthetic experience as well as the production of art. Freud connected childhood play to creativity in ways that influenced generations:
“Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him ? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.” (Ref.)
The Surrealists embraced both his notions about what drives child play and his concept of the “uncanny,” so often associated with dolls. The Expressionist artists of The Brücke proclaimed that you had to return to seeing the world through a child’s eyes. The movement towards “Primitivism” included not just a focus on cultures untouched by technology and modern civilization, but on childhood productions of art as well. In 1948 a group of French artists formed CoBrA, which publicly claimed the drawings of children as their inspiration. A child-like aesthetic was on the rise, although its content was very much about the existential sorrows of a post-war society. More recently, you have artists like Cy Twombley, Jean Tinguely, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name a few, whose creativity is informed by the processes, forms of expressions or materials involved in childhood play. And now we can engage with work by Ai Weiwei, whose most recent exhibition, Child’s Play, at Vito Schnabel Gallery in NYC ends this week. Using Lego Bricks exclusively, he translates art-historical canvases, famous portraits and political news images into the medium of play.
Child’s Play. It’s your turn to play! Serious Play: Translating Form, Subverting Meaning. Prototyping Play. Push Play. Play Well. Playing Rules! (a weird translation from the literal German show title Playing means Changing.) These are all titles of exhibitions across the last years, some with formidable collections, others with brilliant ideas, most of them with an interactive component that hopes to increase cultural engagement.
***
Play we shall. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU offers the opportunity to play while exploring art (or vice versa?) with its current exhibition Just Playing around. Lucky for us, and unsurprisingly, given the caliber of the curator duo Nancy Downes-Le Guin and Theo Downes-Le Guin, the work on view provides much more than the opportunity to take a break from the real world. There are serious issues to be thought through, new insights to be gained, novel connections established – in other words, reality and critical thinking intrude on the unstructured spontaneity so desired. The show is thus something of an articulation of Schiller’s concept of play: a synthesizing, through contradiction, of the human experience of sense and reason.
The exhibition stretches across two floors, walls painted in saturated primary colors that echo kids’ rooms of yore before the current vibe of sad beige children (a fun meme that is mocking trendy design ideas for pastel environments reflecting parental rather than kids’ tastes.) Exhibits span a range of modes – sculpture, installation, video reels, paintings, and costumes, featuring the work of Derrick Adams, Calvin Chen, Jeremy Okai Davis, Latoya Lovely, Jillian Mayer, Takashi Murakami, Jeremy Rotsztain, Heidi Schwegler, Joshua Sin, Matthew Earl Williams, and Erwin Wurm. The displays are very clearly marked for presence or absence of interaction, with the signage continuing the bubbly graphics of the hand-outs and announcement posters. Playful, perhaps, space-saving for sure – the spatial arrangements allow for introduction of and extended commentary by the artists in tight construction.
Joshua Sin Power Up (2024)
The entrance hall displays two columns made out of furry toys which artist Joshua Sin found in the bins of Good Will stores. These are the kinds of soft companions embraced in the cribs and strollers of the younger set. They are the perfect metaphor for this exhibition, if you consider them transitional objects: a link to D.W. Winnicott’s ‘transitional object’ theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts. During childhood they form a bridge towards growth. The artist, however, reflects on what we loose in the transition: “innocence, imagination and unbridled joy.” Have to disagree – innocence lost, perhaps, but imagination and unbridled joy are available still, and in fact captured by quite a few items within this show, or the reaction of this viewer.
That said, I was quite taken by the other sculpture Sin created: a hundred or so of small, mass-produced Beanie Babies, tightly encased in acrylic boxes, forming columns. They reminded me of display cases in airports or department stores, where merchandise is aimed at customers, young and old; the collectible quality of these creatures lures kids into a mode of amassing toys rather than forming a relationship with a few individualized ones. Creating want, rather than protecting from a world of commerce, shaping future consumers, fixed on brand. A poignant reminder how even play can be devoured by market mechanisms.
Joshua Sin Boxed Dreams (2024)
And speaking of brand, that is how one of the, if not most, famous contemporary Austrian artists is sometimes labeled. Erwin Wurm is represented at PSU with two instantiations of his One Minute Sculptures. This is a series that integrates time into the art work, as well as interaction with the viewer, by offering basic materials, often casually collected as found objects, placed on a pedestal and provided with simple instructions: do this or that with it for a minute, or as long as you can. Photos can be taken and archived, prolonging the otherwise short-lived sculptural constellation of a toy dog hanging on your shoulders. He has been doing this for almost thirty years, restricting displays to galleries and museums for fear of it becoming a gimmick, and proudly announces that “only” 129 or so exist. Define gimmick again?
Erwin Wurm Theory of Hope (2016) (One minute sculpture)
An ongoing retrospective of his life’s work at the ALBERTINA in Vienna (which also shows other, equally identifiable series) at the occasion of Wurm’s 70th birthday, sees the artist expand. The One Minute Sculptures are now rid of pedestals, come without instructions and provide abstract sculptures we are supposed to interact with. It was “too clean” up until now, according to Wurm. Mostly, though, the idea is to undermine the pathos elicited by so many high-brow, serious works of art, and engage the viewer with whimsey, fostering connection by playful interaction.(Ref.) And to be perfectly honest, an installation of his, an upside down truck made into a platform inviting you to peruse the Mediterranean that I saw at an earlier Venice Biennale, was a striking commentary on the movement of goods and bodies across that body of water at a time where the refugee crisis changed political constellations in Europe. More thought, less play. For me, memorable.
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A video screen spanning the entire back wall of the gallery displays a loop of an azure sky with little white clouds and some inverse sky-writing in child-like script, slowly fading into oblivion. Maybe you can’t access your inner child – but you surely can still be treated like one, with the reassuring message that you’ll be ok (where is the pat on the back?). The mirror-image distortion of the words questions said sentiment, of course. What can we trust in a world where up is down or left is right, truth made ephemeral? Where assurances disappear while we are still trying to decipher them? Clever and beautiful work by Jillian Mayer.
Jillian Mayer You’ll be okay (video 2013)
Speaking of inner child, it surely helps to get back into play mode if the appropriate environmental cues signal the possibility of immersion in child-oriented environments. Latoya Lovely provides an inviting installation that is dominated by color, geometric murals, familiar books and object, artificial trees that hold clothes for (encouraged) dress up, and supersized magnetic wall puzzles that multiple people tried to re-arrange during my visit. Environmental immersion is clearly en vogue, and people are willing to wait in line for hours to enter spectacular playgrounds that mix art and playfulness, like Meow Wolf in New Mexico (where I stood in said lines, dished out unspeakable sums of money, and still wonder why,) or now Hopscotch here in Portland. The small scale and appreciated calm of Lovely’s installation somehow made a much more important point than the circus-like atmospheres mentioned above, bent on sating our unquenchable yearning for spectacle: Play (just like art) consists of making, taking apart and crafting back together, transforming space, and improvising, and so on. All of these processes are enabled or fostered by appropriately child-friendly environments where the materials themselves speak of playfulness and encourage reorganization.
Latoya Lovely On a Lovely Sunday Morning (2025)
***
There is playfulness and then there is playing games, both an important aspect of experiencing the world through the lens of play. One is aimless, rule-free, independent. The other is often goal oriented, bound by rules, and certainly open to or even in need of repetitive, practiced sequences rather than spontaneous moves. (Practice those scales and those pitches! Memorize those opening gambits in chess!)
Think of board games, Mahjong or Back-Gammon, or playing a musical score, or competitive games in sport. Jeremy Okai Davis’ paintings on the lower gallery level offer depictions of sports figures who surmounted obstacles and succeeded in a racist world, intentionally questioning the rules of the (larger)game.
Jeremy Okai Davis Crown (Althea Gibson) (2023
His work is well rooted in a long line of art works that made the game, and the social structures surrounding it, itself a topic, starting with the preoccupation with card playing in the 16th/17th century. Lucas van Leyden’s The Card players, Carravagio’s The Cardsharps, LaTour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs are all examples where issues beyond play were slickly introduced: who wants to have fun, who is competitive who likes to take risks or is cautious, who is strategic, who is willing to cheat, and who is good or bad at losing the game. And who is, we can now add, included or excluded, by invisible rules reaching back to Jim Crow. Play and the fate of players as a metaphor, then, representing social conditions.
I am not a gamer, but the role that video games have come to play around the world cannot be underestimated. There are whole museums now dedicated to video game art, offering exhibitions concerned with all the questions I’ve raised so far, applied to the artificial screen. The British National Video Museum, for example, right now offers an exhibition, The Art of Play, that focuses on how artists create the mood and textures of the video scenes. Video games are the perfect template to create or enhance myths, through world building and often sly ideological influence. They can be a vehicle to allow people to tend to baser instincts without real life consequences, but they can also be the seed for incredible levels of creativity in the player who has options to design their path forward.
For me, the most intriguing and thought-provoking installation in the entire Just Playin’ Around exhibition tackles questions around the psychology of gaming. Matthew Earl Williams (Confederate Tribes of Grande Ronde) took stills of the game Red Dead Redemption 2, the successor of one of the most famous video games ever, Red Dead Redemption. Both have won critical acclaim and multiple awards, wildly successful commercially. Set in the late 1800s in the Wild West, with themes concerning cycles of violence, masculinity, redemption, and the American Dream, the role player can choose who to be and with whom to align (multi-player mode possible), making practical and moral choices that have various rewards and punishments attached. Williams created a series of tintypes, popular in the late 19th century, and got permission from various players to capture images of their avatars which they had imaginatively costumed to stay in character. He raised the question why some would wish to be Native Americans during a historical period of their extreme suffering, when most players chose to be cowboys. Alas, no answer to that, as far as I could detect.
Matthew Earl William Indians of the Uncanny Valley (2021)
But the transfer of a digital fantasy creation onto a historical medium, the tintype print, created an illusion of historicity, when it was all frictionless role play safely removed from real life massacres. Add to that the choice of framing: garish, elaborately detailed and carved gold frames, that I immediately associated with the Orientalist paintings you find in the Louvre, or other National museums. The exotic “other” is squeezed into frames representing the taste and status of an entirely different world, their brightness furthermore a visual contrast enhancement of the darkness of their subject. I have no idea if that was intended by Williams, but the association to framing of outsiders was riveting.
Alternatively, these frames could represent the high-brow art found in museum, now linked to the low-brow art of video games, which draw in millions and millions of people, something museums can only dream of. Active play, connected to aesthetic experience of the created fantasy worlds, seems to be an ingredient we should indeed have a closer look at.
***
“Art is a complete fairytale – art is an unending child’s birthday party (forever, and ever, and ever, like cookie monster.” – Jonathan Meese, Ausgewählte Schriften zur Diktatur der Kunst, Berlin, 2012, p.474. (My translation.)
The longing to live in a world of play, and the assumption that play, intent on breaking the chains of reason, will enhance creativity, often go hand in hand in the contemporary art world. There is nothing wrong to focus on escape, when life is overall hard and overwhelmingly complex. Floating 2 story-high yellow rubber duckies on European harbors, as Florentijn Hofman did, or building a pink castle inside a Danish museum, as Meese and associates were known to do, provided fun for most involved, levity that is perfectly acceptable once you relegate high-brow “art” to the background, at least for a stretch of time. Did it bring back a piece of childhood, though, as intended? Can you really reenter a child-like mode of playing, and does that have an actual effect on creativity? Is it not just appearance, a strategy, since the child-like aesthetic, and the juvenile, playful demeanor are a consciously developed style of the artist, one which they consistently extend to adulthood – or so asks art critic Larissa Kikol, who is an expert on the subject matter.
Contemporary psychologists have some answers to offer, although a core question remains unresolved. For one, try as you might, you cannot completely reenter the state of a young child that you left behind long ago. Even if I make it as easy as possible, leading you through age regression via hypnosis, for example, you will draw me a picture you think is that of a child, but which differs significantly from those drawn by actual children. We simply cannot erase all of what we have learned growing up.
In a limited way, however, play does enhance creativity. Research tells us that one of the prerequisites of creativity is to focus less on external rewards and pay offs, and to engage in activity just for the pleasure of it. A sense of play can help with this – after all you are chasing fun. Likewise, a prerequisite for creativity is a willingness to step away from patterns and customs, and explore the unknown and often ambiguous, a willingness to take risks, and free play can help here too. Note, though, that I refer to these as prerequisites. They set the table for the creative process, but there is no scientific consensus on what the process actually involves. It certainly aids creativity if you relax assumptions and ignore boundaries and let your thoughts go wherever they will. But research suggests that these steps give you more options, not necessarily better options. And the creative mind seems able to separate the jewels from the junk. It also makes someone more likely to move into the direction of the jewels. How this happens remains something of a mystery. Can play put you in the right mindset? Often yes. Is play the golden key that unlocks all doors? Likely not.
But for those of us experiencing art, rather than being called to produce it, an invitation to play is often the way to jump over barriers keeping us from enjoying something we fear we might not understand. The gallery attendants, singularly helpful, knowledgeable young people, reported that the rooms fill with students when there are larger breaks between classes. By these reports, they have not previously made much use of the gallery integrated into the PSU complex, and the nature of the exhibition clearly provides a draw. As it should, offering more than just playin’ around.
After all, we need adults in the room, now more than ever, and much of the presented work helps us to get there.
Just Playin’ Around
January 21 – April 26, 2025
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU
1855 SW Broadway
Portland, OR 97201
FREE ADMISSION
HOURS:
Sunday: Closed
Monday: Closed
Tuesday: 11 AM–5 PM
Wednesday: 11 AM–5 PM
Thursday: 11 AM–7 PM
Friday: 11 AM–5 PM
Saturday: 11 AM–5 PM
Many years back I was part of a group of artists invited to spend a full day at the Blue Heron Paper Company in Oregon City, a site long shut down after bankruptcy. Like for so many photographers, decaying industrial sites held a special appeal for me, with beauty found in strange places.
In 2019, the Confederate Tribes of the Grand Ronde bought the 182 acres, and in 2021 publicized plans for the development of the river and Willamette Falls-adjacent property which holds special cultural and historical significance to the Grand Ronde. Here is the vision (captured in a short video) as expressed at the time. The plan included “mixed use for office, retail, restaurants and public spaces near the falls, as well as instructional learning spaces so visitors can learn about the history of the land. The long-discussed riverwalk would also be a part of the plans.“
Rounding up Circles
Progress has been slow, with demolition of select buildings taking a lot of time, amongst permit woes and required resources. Then, 2 weeks ago, a large fire broke out on the site, still smoldering a week later, requiring closure of major thoroughfares. The billowing smoke caught over the small town, with worries about toxic air quality lasting for more than a week. The fire fighting was hampered by the intensity of the fire, and the fact that during an earlier fire in 2020, several fire fighters faced life-threatening conditions that no-one should experience again. The cause for the fire is still under investigation, but tribal authorities are confident that their demolition plans will proceed along the original time line.
Lining up Lines
I was thinking back to my earlier explorations because of an incredibly moving and thought-provoking essay that I am linking to here. I truly recommend reading it, it is not too long and I will myself shut up momentarily, so you have time. The Miners combines current political analysis with history and an ardent love for a State, Missouri, that has seen much destruction through mining extraction. The author describes the beauty of the remaining structures of the mills and the mines, as well as the travail of the aftermath, when companies leave town, and that triggered my memory. Kendzior, by the way, has a new book coming out at the beginning of April, The Last American Road Trip, a collection of essays of her travels cross country. It can be pre-ordered here.
Pipe Dreams
And here are a couple of mining songs…. Lee Dorsey, John Prine, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Jimmie Dean.
Why despair over our descent into a failed democracy, when you can worry about the odds of being hit by an asteroid instead? The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), a global collaboration started in 2013 to monitor and track space objects that could impact Earth issued its first-ever Potential Asteroid Impact Notification for the asteroid, known as 2024 YR4. The football field-sized rock is estimated to have a larger than 2% chance to hit earth in 2023. (Ref.) Give or take a few percent, predictions seem to fluctuate….
There are several reasons why I am bringing up asteroids today.
The benign reason: I recently located my long lost photographs from a trip to Mexico and am eager to share the colors, so prevalent in the entire city scape, on a grey Monday morning. We’ll take cheer where we can find it! The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and caused the extinction of approximately 75% of all species, including non-avian dinosaurs, also hit in Mexico. The Chicxulub impactor struck Earth about 66 million years ago near the Yucatán Peninsula, or so I learn from ScienceAlert.
The re-assuring reason: that new celestial interloper is not assumed to be an extinction event, even though it could do extensive local damage if it would hit populated areas.
The enraging reason: will we have the relevant scientists engaged in monitoring and protection against natural phenomena in 8 year’s time, heck, six months from now? Will we have means of gathering information about scientific data, developments and warnings from official websites, unless we go to international sources outside of the U.S.?
Unless you live under a rock, you will have noticed that scientific websites are disappearing left and right, at the same time that scientists are fired en masse and also threatened not to communicate privately about the state of affairs or else. It might make you think of that movie “Don’t look up” that described the authoritarian mindset of a future US regime insisting that what you don’t see or count, doesn’t exist. That way you can exploit an un-aggrieved population until the last minute before the asteroid hits. We had an inkling of that with regard to the expressed desires by the 2016 iteration of this administration, to disappear Covid-19 statistics when 2020 arrived.
But now it has hit for real: entire organization websites, from weather predictors (NOAA weather and climate science websites have disappeared), to general health access, from reproductive rights information to vaccination information, all gone. As of last Friday, the CDC was ordered by HHS to take down all flu related campaign materials from its website – during the worst flu season in decades. Add to that the growing fear that mass vaccinations are going to be actively discouraged, if not entirely prohibited.
It is not just about public health information and appeals disappearing – whole data sets are purged, a kind of digital book burning. Science cannot proceed without building on established data. And medicine cannot treat without access to available diagnostic tools and treatment options – this is particularly evident in neonatal care: very occasionally newborn babies have unusual, hard to identify symptoms. Access to data bases at the Center for Disease Control or the National Institute for Health can provide quick answers what to expect and what to do. Can? Could. Data have been taken down, more than 8000 pages have been taken off-line, rare disease information included, leaving neo-natal units scrambling to come up with answers in a race against time.
Here is a table with just some of the disappeared or altered data sets. Not a complete sample, since vaccine info removal only happened last week.
Scientists, both on an individual basis and in organizational settings, are trying to rescue whatever data they can with downloading marathons. According to Wikipedia, the Internet Archive has been successful in archiving many health datasets. Internet Archive is also a contributor to the consortium effort of developing the End of Term Web Archive, which attempts to copy every government publication at the end of every presidential term.The Harvard Law School Library hosts the Data.gov Archive, Harvard’s Chan School mirrored public health records. A coalition of data organizations launched the Data Rescue Project “as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts”.
With regard to climate science, or astronomy, to get back to our asteroid projections, the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008. (Ref.) But archived data are harder to access, and eventually of no use, if they are not updated. Today’s (alarmed!) New Republic has a detailed overview of the Republican war on information (their phrasing.)
For me, the question I’d like to have answered is: why? Why deprive a nation of the public good of scientific data? I guess one could follow the money and claim that the absence of publicly available information means we have to pay for it from private providers. Disappearing the language around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion by off-lining any scientific research around vulnerable population might feed into the attempt to eradicate those concepts (and people) from public discourse altogether.
But what use has the undermining of public health by enabling the spread of contagious diseases, or by preventing the diagnoses and potential cures for rare diseases? Is it a religious, anti-science bent that requires acceptance of deadly strikes? Is it eugenic lust for eradication of all who are weak, physically or economically? Is it prediction of future scarcity due to climate effects, scarcity which would be lessened by gradual depopulation? I am not saying it is any of these, I am seriously searching for answers, because the purges of both scientists and scientific data make no economic sense whatsoever for the country as a whole, once a true public health crisis emerges. So “follow the money” simply doesn’t work here. I welcome suggestions!
Music today has the appropriate theme: Prayer Central…. a movement from Terry Riley’s ˆSun Rings” with the Kronos Quartett.
Some claim that Valentine’s Day had its origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, held in mid-February. The festival included fertility rites, wild bacchanalia and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. “Young women’s names were drawn by bachelors from a jar. These matches, initially formed for the festival’s duration, often led to long-term relationships and marriages.”
Enter the church, eager to replace Pagan rites with Christian values. Up pops the symbolic martyr St. Valentine who secretly married lovers, ignoring Roman Emperor Claudius II’s edict that prohibited young men from marrying, as to serve more efficiently as soldiers. Valentinus was executed for his defiance, but lives on as a champion of love. (Ref.)
First comes love, then comes marriage. And then comes the forfeit of women’s right to vote.
Think I am joking? Here is what Wendy Weiser at the Brennan Center for Justice has to say about the consequences of a new Republican voter registration bill sponsored by Texas Republican congressman Chip Roy, the SAVE Act, which experts warn could be a major threat to voting rights for all Americans, and particularly for married women, in addition to people of color, young voters, and other marginalized groups.
“The legislation would require all potential voters to provide, in person, proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they register or reregister to vote.” The bill would not only impact the 21.3 million Americans who do not have ready access to a birth certificate or passport, as well as anyone who relies on voting by mail. It would also have a direct impact on anyone whose legal name does not match the name on their birth certificate or passport, such as the 79% of heterosexual married women, per Pew Research, who take their spouse’s last name. “If a married woman hasn’t paid $130 to update her passport—assuming she has one, which only about half of Americans do—she may not be able to vote in the next election if the SAVE Act becomes law.”
They chitter at each other violently, then hop at each other, until one flies off.
The festival Lupercalia was celebrated in and around caves. Looks like that is the location we are pushed back towards – Project 2025 explicitly condones and seeks to enforce a family structure where only the head of household, the man, votes. This was, of course, a common argument against women’s suffrage before the 19th amendment was introduced.
While I might angrily scream at the hostility extended towards all those threatening the top tier of the power hierarchy, there are others devoted to peace – probably way more effective (and certainly better for your blood pressure…)
You can join them in a Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace this Sunday in Hillsboro, OR. Here are the details:
A Community Event Promoting Unity and Understanding
The Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI), Lutheran
Community Services Northwest (Beaverton Office), the Immigrant and Refugee Community
Organization – Greater Middle East Center (IRCO GMEC), DAWN, and Unite Oregon, in
partnership with the City of Hillsboro and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Advancement,
are proud to present the Multicultural Celebration for Connection, Love, and Peace.
This inaugural event will bring together community members from diverse backgrounds to celebrate culture, share stories, and promote unity through music, dance, art, and meaningful
conversations. This event aims to foster a sense of community amidst the attacks on immigrant and refugee communities in Oregon and across the country by the new administration.
Date: Sunday, February 16, 2025
Time: 2:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: The Walters Cultural Arts Center, 527 E Main St, Hillsboro, OR 97123
Website: https://tinyurl.com/connectionlovepeace
Here is a poem that will be read on Sunday, in various translations as well.
A Proclamation for Peace
Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by migration behind.
Whereas kindness is seldom in the news
and peace an abstraction
while war is real;
Whereas words are all I have;
Whereas my life is short;
Whereas I am afraid;
Whereas I am free—despite all
fire and anger and fear;
Be it therefore resolved a song
shall be my calling—a song
not yet made shall be vocation
and peaceful words the work
of my remaining days.
by Kim Stafford
Photographs from yesterday through my (dirty) window, with House Finches and Junkos going at it, competing for seeds rather than showing some loving solidarity. Then again, maybe they are off mating in a cave, once fed. Happy Valentine’s Day!
Music is a Romanze by Schumann so long held apart from his beloved Clara. I really like this slow version. Brings out the longing.
You know that feeling when you think about something and all of sudden almost everything you read or see somewhat points in that direction? It’s some sort of semantic priming, and mine has been all week around the notion of shelter. How can we find shelter against the onslaught of bad news, the overabundance of worry, the intensity of stress in our personal as well as public lives?
First thing this morning, then, was a videoclip sent from Germany. Someone declared that the current mood, across the world, is like the weather: dark, stormy, and definitely cold. He then argued we all have to be like hats, or jackets, or felt-lined boots used for exactly that weather, offering shelter against what surrounds us, providing warmth for those next to us, out in the cold. I took to that mental image – you’ll be my jacket, I’ll be your hat. Protection found in mutual caring for each other, shelter in loving kindness or chesed, as it is known as a concept in Judaism.
Next thing in my inbox was this week’s Meditation in an Emergency, focused on the need for big tents, another form of shelter. Solnit argues that during emergencies like real world catastrophes people come together to support and protect each other regardless of political or religious differences that usually keep them apart, unless they reside at the absolute extreme ends of the spectrum. The same should happen during political upheavals the likes of which we are currently experiencing. There is value in alliances, then, rather than isolation, protection through coalitions, not undermined by scorn or accusations for previous mistakes. )Although some will always barred from my tent: Republican Darren Beattie, for example, appointed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to be the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior role that represents American foreign policy to the world. Beattie has called for the mass sterilization of “low IQ trash” and feral populations. “Could offer incentives (Air Jordans, etc.).” Nerd-Reich eugenics, anyone?)
Back to sheltering tents: Here is Solnit’s paragraph that registered most with me:
Many powerful forces–the rhetoric of mainstream politics, the framing of mainstream entertainment and news, the version of therapy that reinforces individualism as it tells us we’re here to care for ourselves, end of story–tell us we are consumers, not citizens (and here I mean citizens as members of civil society, regardless of legal citizenship status). That we are here just to meet our own needs and chase our personal desires, within the realms of private relationships and material comfort and security, and that we hardly exist beyond those small realms. It says on the one hand “go have all this stuff” while it quietly discourages us to have the other stuff that is public life, participation, and power. While pretending to point us toward abundance, it deprives us of the most expansive and idealistic versions of ourselves. And most of us really are that larger self, the version that cares about justice, human rights, democracy, equality (withering all that away is a clear part of the right’s agenda at least since Margaret Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society”).
Chiharu Shiota The Network (2024) Musée du Pavillon de Vendôme; Musée des Tapisseries and Chapelle de la Visitation, Aix-en-Provence, France. Photocredir Philippe Biolatto, Ville d’Aix-en-Provence
And then I came across a mention on ArtNet about two current exhibitions of work by an artist who is everyone’s darling these days – not mine, admittedly. Chiharu Shiota’s work has been basically repeating itself for the last 25 years, and some of her installations borrow quite a bit from other people’s ideas. But honor where honor is due: She was one of the early sculptors who integrated fiber into her work, before we saw the explosion of fiber art across the last years. And the theme of interconnectedness has been a red thread (quite literally) throughout her career. (She reserves the black threads she uses for associations to the cosmos, fate, or other intangible things that surround us.) The idea of all of us being invisibly bound together by these webs made out of thousands of threads, and the visual experience of tent-like installations hanging above our heads certainly fit into the associations that came up around the notion of “shelter.” For an introduction to her work, here is an interview with the artist, a good starting point.
Chiharu Shiota Uncertain Journey (2024) Le Grand Palais, Paris, France
Photo credit: Didier Plowy
Here are selective exhibitions still on view:
until 19.03.2025
The Soul Trembles, solo show, Le Grand Palais, Paris, France [touring exhibition]
until 20.04.2025
Between Worlds, solo show, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey
until 28.04.2025
The Unsettled Soul, solo show, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
Chiharu Shiota The Silent Concert (2024) – Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, Czech Republic
Photocredit: Vojtěch Veškrna
until 27.06.2025
The Soul’s Journey, solo show, Fundacion Calosa, Irapuato, Mexico
As I said, she is surely en vogue. Lots of soul in the titles, lots of wool in the air. Clearly resonating with a large, international public. Maybe it is people’s fascination with the nature of webs, strong and fragile at once. Or the rudimentary desire for cocooning. Or respect for the tremendous amount of coordinated work going into these creations. Or humans’ insatiable desire for spectacle, the bigger the better. All not mutually exclusive.
I encountered her work for the first time at the Hammer museum in L.A., when she was the inaugural artist featured in the Hammer’s redesigned lobby, for the Hammer Projects 2023.
Here is an installation in a gallery in Brussels from 9 years ago, that somehow reminded me of a painting by George Tooker, the way my brain works…
Chiharu Shiota Sleeping is like Death (2016) Installation View, photo credit Gallery Daniel Templon
George Tooker Sleep II (1959)
Last year Shiota was invited to show at the Chapel of the Visitation during the Aix-en-Provence Biennial; her installation included letters from people asked to write about their experience with gratitude (does that remind you of Yoko Ono’s installations of trees and letters for peace?)
Chiharu Shiota Beyond Consciousness (2024) Photo credit: Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff
Maybe the idea of gratitude is another way to find shelter: a focus on what we have that is positive. It might just insulate us, if only for short moments, from the fear and disquiet instilled by the news.
Gimme Shelter, indeed… the Stones knew.