Let’s start this week on a quiet note. Like really quiet, preparing for silence in space – quiet. Not a random choice of metaphor, either, since I learned that astronauts are sent by NASA to an anechoic chamber at the Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota where they practice being in environments where sound does not reverberate.
“An anechoic chamber is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from waves entering from their surroundings.” It turns out that you cannot stand being in one of those chambers for very long – 45 minute has been the longest someone endured before fearing they would go insane. When you hear nothing else, you start hearing the noises that your own body makes, “you become the sound.”
All this came up when, as so often, I randomly ran across a poem that caught my attention.
Anechoic
George Foy stayed in the anechoic chamber for 45 minutes and nearly went mad. He could hear the blood rushing in his veins and began to wonder if he was hallucinating. He had been to a monastery, an American Indian sweat lodge, and a nickel mine two kilometers underground. In the anechoic chamber, the floor’s design eliminates the sound of footsteps. NASA trains astronauts in anechoic chambers to cope with the silence of space. Without echo, in the quietest place on earth, what else can we hold onto? What replaces sound in concert with what you see? The human voice, the timber when a person says kamsahamnida or yes, please, or fuerte, is 25 to 35 decibels. Hearing damage can start around 115 decibels. Metallica, front row, possible damage albeit possible love. The Who, 126 decibels. A Boeing jet, 165 decibels. The whale, low rumble frequency and all, 188 decibels, can be heard for hundreds of miles underwater. I once walked around inside a whale heart, which is the size of a small car. The sound was like Brian Doyle’s heart that gave out at 60 after he wrote my favorite essay about the joyas voladoras and the humming bird heart, the whale heart, and the human heart. Glass can break at 163 decibels. Hearing is the last sense to leave us. Some say that upon death, our vision, our taste, our touch, and our smell might leave us, but some have been pronounced dead and by all indication are, but they can hear. In this moment, when the doctor pronounces the time or when the handgun pumps once more, what light arrives? What sounds, the angels? The Ultrasonic Weapon is used for crowd control or to combat riots—as too many humans gathered in one place for a unified purpose can threaten the state. The state permits gatherings if the flag waves. Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound. It is a navigation device and can help determine if the woman has a second heart inside of her now, the beating heart of a baby on the ultrasound, a boy or a girl, making a new music in the body of another body, a chorus, a concert, a hush.
by Lee Herrick from Scar and Flower, Word Poetry, 2019.
To tell the truth, I was not particularly taken by this poem as a whole. Little things, the list -like quality of researched facts (I mean who knows all those decibel numbers….) or the discussion of hearing being the last sense to go (after he cued in on hearing all along,) and then wondering “which light will arrive,” they irritate me. Or the tale of walking inside a whale’s heart and affixing the sound to the memory of a favorite author’s writing – I was in one of those last summer (they have them as plastic reproductions in all kinds of science museums, and all you hear is the delightful screaming of young visitors around you. Nitpicky, I know. Not granting generous artistic license. Guilty as charged. Perhaps it would help to know more of his work, apparently often preoccupied with hearing, but also quite political. Herrick, of Korean descent, was the poet laureate of Fresno, 4 years ago, teaches at college there. Here is a review.
But one line stuck, and made it worth slogging through all those facts he lines up: Sound can be weaponized or made into art. It can kill. It can heal a wound.
Think of how sound was used to manipulate you when you were a child. Ok, when I was a child, sent off, sickly still, to boarding school. Being yelled at loudly was pretty upsetting. Worse, though, was when punitive words came out really quietly, almost whispered, ominous as can be.
Sounds could be frightening, the pillow-muffled homesick sobs, my own included, of the new arrivals. Sounds could be disturbing, the penetrating school bell that cut time into slices. Sounds could be shaming – the snickering of the girls behind your back. The tsk tsk of a revered teacher, handing back insufficient work, not even worth a verbal assessment, just those devaluing sounds. The screeching of the coach on the sports field, egging you on to run even faster, until your lungs hurt so badly that you were ready to collapse. Sounds that were missing hurt as well: my childhood background chorus of lowing cows and songbirds, the farmer’s peacock.
Sounds could be healing. A hummed melody of a (forbidden) pop song as a reminder that there was still a world out there beyond the dormitory walls. The clinking of the silverware when 120 places were laid for breakfast, the only edible meal, really, of the day. The sounds of the gentle river waves of the Neckar, when you were allowed twice weekly to leave the walled estate, for an hour’s walk. Or being assigned an empty quiet classroom to practice your cello or piano, day after day escaping the noises of overcrowded, restless adolescent girls. Add the music, however incompetently, scratchily executed, with a blueprint in mind of the beauty of the real thing, and you were ready to tackle the next day. Healing, indeed. (My most played piece during those horrid years was this, (Khatchaturian’s Toccata ) allowing rage to flow into the fingers as well. It’s not as hard as it sounds, particularly if you play it slower like the older Russian recordings.)
What counts as healing, though, is in the ear of the beholder. Just a few centuries back the Church accepted only a limited number of intervals assume to please G-d, and that is why Gregorian chants are as they are. And the Church expressly forbade some intervals, including the tri-tone, composed of three adjacent whole tones, because they were thought to be the devil’s interval. Don’t ask me why. Times have, of course, changed.
Wagner used the tri-tone in Tristan and Isolde, to convey forbidden love and longing.
So did Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story.
Beautiful. Unsettling. I guess it won’t be a quiet Monday morning after all. But one where I made you forget about sham trials and deadly viruses for at least 10 minutes!
Need a break from the tumult of this month, this year, from politics, war, pandemics? Never mind the nail biting over the run-off election in Georgia, as I write this?
I have just the thing – something to listen to that offers gorgeous, thoughtful music, surprising with the ease and elegance with which it fluctuates between traditional and experimental sound. The Water is the Shovel of the Shore provides at times a calming mix of folk tunes and natural sound and then it shifts to provocative ways to make you think about the historical implications of our relationship to water, the way it nourishes, punishes, bringing life as well as death.
OK, maybe not a break from politics, war and disease, after all, but time spent that fills you with beauty and, ultimately, hope for liberation from our burdens. The album is at its most effective if you reserve time to listen consciously, not just in the background. Even better with headphones, so many artistic subtleties otherwise hard to notice.
And in the department of “How could this be?”: it is again music that usually does not draw me in, namely one based in folk songs and rooted in British, Scottish, Irish and in this instance Guyanese tradition, beautifully sung both in chorus and solos. (The other was Simmerdim, reviewed here earlier.) The answer to that question is easy: the music goes way beyond tradition and explores and integrates progressive approaches to communicating with sound. It is thematically digging deep into our relationship with water, and artistically varied enough to satisfy my everlasting hunger for intellectual stimulation that does not come at the expense of emotional connection. The album serves both. Come to think of it, it feeds bits of my soul as well, given that it reminds me of formative times spent in England while still young and links to my collage work since 2019 which focussed on ships and water in climate change and pandemic contexts. (All images today are from the various series, using my photographs of ships, landscapes and paintings to be combined into photomontages, printed on German etching paper.)
The nine-person folk ensemble Shovel Dance Collective has made a splash on the scene after only a few years of existence, as evidenced in the glowing music reviews found everywhere. Much to be learned for us uninitiated, from the fact that folk tunes have no fixed composers and thus are open to reinterpretation across centuries, to the fact that love and loss seemed to be always anchored as a dyad in traditional folk songs.
I didn’t need the insights from the reviews, though, to be reminded that labor in all of its nuances and burdens was a traditional topic in folk music. Related to water you have the sea shanties, of course, easing the strenuous work load on merchant marine and war ships (thus extracting more labor, in the end), but the music also reminds of the dangers of industrial work, in harbors, oil rigs, and the likes.
And water’s gruesome role in the perishing of human beings exemplifies what this album manages to pull off: showing that exploitation, violent oppression, denial of rights to anyone outside the ruling class are not relegated to history, as captured in traditional song. An estimated 2 million slaves perished during the Atlantic passage. (I will never get over the fact that cargo insurance did not cover ill slaves or those killed by disease while covering drowned slaves – leading to throwing sick ones alive into the ocean for profit even from their death (Ref.) Maybe a small number of all killed overall, but showing the extent of the profit motive in the barbarism of slavery. )
Not just the past. Of today’s refugees crossing the Mediterranean, 25.313 have died since 2014 and, closer to home, over 800 have perished this year alone by drowning in the Rio Grande or the opposite – lack of water leading to heat death in their approach to the US border.) There is an unbroken chain of themes that these musicians bring to the fore in contemporary fashion, enduring content in marvelously adapted form.
The link between history and our present times is amplified by the various sound scapes recorded from rivers, harbor activity and other sources that firmly anchor the music by Alex Mckenzie, Daniel S. Evans, Fidelma Hanrahan, Jacken Elswyth, Joshua Barfoot, Mataio Austin Dean, Nick Granata, Oliver Hamilton and Tom Hardwick-Allan.
Integrating real life sound into music, or creating compositions made up entirely of that kind of sound, has been around for almost 80 years now, with the French broadcast technician Pierre Schaeffer recognized as the father of this musique concrète movement. Here is one of his extraordinary compositions using but train sounds,étude aux chemins de fer. Water was a preferred sound then already – here is one of my favorites, Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody (for tape) from 1955. Most of us were likely more familiar with the inclusion of extraneous sounds in the realm of more commercial pop music. Remember the traffic noises appearing in the 1966 Loving Spoonful’s Summer in the City? Or the extraneous sounds so dominant in many albums by Frank Zappa, We’re Only In It For The Money, Lumpy Gravy to Uncle Meat included, way before he hooked up with Pierre Boulez, the French composer who is seen as one of Pierre Schaeffer’s successors? (For the fun of it, and I know I’m getting sidelined here, but since I am a fan: Here is Zappa’s Cough Drop commercial using musique concrète. )
Back to he Shovel Dance Collective. The immutable sounds of nature juxtaposed with the arrival of modern aural landscapes, from junkyard work next to Dartford Creek, or rigging and reeds at Erith Marina, to tourists feeding gulls, ferry noises east from London Bridge, and clergy of Southwark Cathedral and St Magnus the Martyr blessing the Thames capture continuity and change, with music as a mode that embraces both, water the vehicle to ferry that idea across, having us gently float on the stream of evolution.
As my regular readers know, I have become interested in acoustic ecology recently, given what I learned about Sonic Mapping, Sonic Spectres, Sound Analogies and Sound Variations. This album adds beauty to it all. For me, an awesome find.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
MAYBE IT WAS the state of wistfulness prompted by the fact that my 6-month project of interviewing the artists of the Exquisite Gorge II project is soon coming to an end. Maybe it had to do with entering yet another world new to me, a world filled with appliqué stitching joined with ceramics. What claimed my focus, intellectually and emotionally, was the idea of transitions. Good thing, too, since it is one of the reference points of Carolyn Hazel Drake‘s artistic vision. In dual ways, no less: the meaning of transition is conceptually expressed in her work, but exceptional attention is also given to the transitional points that connect the many small pieces in her larger installation.
Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project links multiple sections of the Columbia river, represented by as many artists, to each other, forming a giant sculpture made out of individual artworks. Drake’s section 6 covers the stretch of the river that ranges from the Deschutes River to the John Day River, including The Dalles Dam, one of four dams built along this stretch of the Columbia between the 1930s and 1970s that displaced Native American communities and wiped out traditional fishing grounds. Celilo Falls, called Wyam, “echo of falling water” or “sound of water upon the rocks,” in several native languages, had existed for 15.000 years, the river providing salmon, the staple diets for the Tribes, the land a place to live, gather and worship. The historical, political and environmental implications of the erection of the dam and the destruction it wrecked, were enormous.
“HOW DO YOU TELL A STORY that is not necessarily your own? How do you capture a landscape that did not always belong to you? How do you document reality without appropriating someone else’s history? These questions pose themselves to any artist, anthropologist, historian who is aware of the limitations of their own perspectives.” I had written these words in relation to Section 6 when interviewing the assigned non-Native artist for the first Exquisite Gorge Project 3 years ago. They apply now as much as then. Carolyn Hazel Drake gloriously rises to the challenge just as Roger Preet did in 2019.
The story that she tells reflects the transitory nature of the river, constricted by dams, the flow that is constrained or enhanced by external forces, the bi-directional migration of the birds that come and go, always in transition. The beauty of the landscape’s colors is captured in a muted scheme that matches the solemnity of remembering the losses of the Tribes, incurred by forced relocation. It is about the river, its fate as well as its strength, the despair imposed on those who call(ed) it home and the resilience that nature confers.
MUCH RESEARCH, both on site and in the literature, preceded the design. Exploration of palette, gathering of materials, choice of fabric to go into a “river” of linked/divided pieces covered with abstract representations of the flight of geese, and lined by ceramic “stones” representing the river banks.
The geese come and go, helping the eye to move along the river, just as they would when observing them in nature.
The stones sway softly, as will the river as a whole when suspended and moved by the wind in the outdoor installation at Maryhill Museum. The somber tones are offset by an occasional striking burst of color. Drake uses Japanese Daiwabo fabrics, yarn-dyed before woven, with nuanced variations. Some are neutral, some muted and some are toned-down, reminiscent of traditional Japanese colors like gray willow (yanagi-nezumi), color of old bamboo (oitake-iro), or time altered celadon (sabi-seiji), leaves in autumn (kuchiba)and the color of water (mizu-iro / suishoku/).
When examining the thought and craft going into the detail work, all I could think of was: Patience, precision and particularity. The dividers of the panels, for example, are sewn into wool fabric that is used to line the woolen blankets produced by Pendelton. Pendelton Woolen Mills has had a longstanding relationship with PNW Tribes since its incorporation in 1909; their first blanket designer, Joe Rawnsley, appropriated tribal preferences for elements in their blankets. The tribal blankets were constructed then as now in the jacquard method, creating woven patterns in a textured woolen fabric. Today they make custom blankets, (not for public sale) “given to honor events on life’s journey: birth, marriage, coming of age, graduation and even death, as well as special celebrations and gifts.” One annual special blanket is created in order to fundraise for the American Indian College Fund. Blankets are produced in Pendelton, but the finishing work is done in Washougal, WA, right at the banks of the Columbia river.
The hand-stitching of the appliquéd work is beyond regular, requiring the patience of a saint.
The knotting of the bands of “stone” is tight and precise with cotton-string dipped into bee’s wax.
The frame was special-ordered by the artist, with wood matched in color to the fabric installation, blending in with shades of muted green.
New frame on left – the provided one next to it.
I cannot begin to imagine what it took to apply the thousands of small dots, with slight color gradations, with a micro-tipped ink bottle after the porcelain beads were made and glazed. As always when I find myself in serene spaces – and Drake’s studio is bathed in serenity, light, orderliness, simplicity and all – my imagination was allowed to run free, absorbing what was in front of me, rather than being distracted.
The many tiny dots danced in front of my eye, grains of sand from the Columbia shores, salmon roe, tears from the trail(s) of tears, even the shorter local trails after Celilo Falls was destroyed, the flocks of geese that disappear into the distance on their migratory journeys. You choose. Then again, why choose at all. Varied reminders of a landscape and its history might be exactly what we need. Each finding a place in the family of things.
Canada Geese I photographed in January
***
lim·i·nal
1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. – Oxford Language Dictionary
CAROLYN HAZEL DRAKE is a third generation Oregon who acquired her affinity to fabric early on in her mother’s quilting store. She received her BA in English Literature, with a minor in Architecture, and her MA in Education from Portland State University, the first in her family to graduate from College. She taught language arts and art history in Portland’s Public School System for more than ten year and was also a PPS Visual & Performing Arts Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA); come fall, she will be teaching art at Arizona State University. Also in the fall, she will be artist in residence for two month at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. In case you’d wondered how one pulls off a double load, rest assured: she has experience with that! If you look at the number of previous residencies and her role as a member of the Portland Art Museum’s Teacher Advisory Council all successfully integrated with her professional obligations, there is no doubt she will thrive.
The dog and I are, of course, exhausted just thinking about it.
In addition to working with fabric, Drake is nowadays exploring ceramics, particularly smoke firing techniques, and much of her recent work has combined the two in novel ways. One of the things that fascinates her about porcelain or clay is the porous nature of these materials, a mode that allows transition. She is fascinated by liminal spaces, and not just the ones in the geographical world.
Liminal comes from the Latin word ‘limen’, referring to ‘threshold’ or ‘doorway’. Liminal is that which occupies the transitional space at a boundary or threshold, a river being a perfect example of a gateway to new or different locations. Hallways, bridges and crossroads are other geographical locations that link a point of departure with a destination. Liminality is not restricted to a geographic place, though. There can be liminal time, the border between day and night during twilight, for example, or between the old and the new year. Liminal space can also be a cognitive or experiential dimension during times of transitions, when we experience major change, or go through periods of uncertainty. In many religious ceremonies that employ rites of passage, a liminal point is reached in the middle of the ceremony defining a before and after.
I HAD BEEN THINKING about liminal space in a completely different context before I even visited with the artist. There is a fascinating, if strange, development of Artificial Intelligence programs like DALL-E that allow the creation of images from text, having been trained as a neural network with everything art history has to offer – and then some.
“…it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images.”
Let’s say you request a painting of Black men drinking coffee in the snow, in the manner of John Singer Sargent. You utter the words and you get this. Made by a machine. (Well, I got it from reports by Brandon Taylor, a perceptive and witty author whose book Real Life was an impressive debut and who has been playing around with the AI program, posting diverse results.)
Or you ask for a Sargent version of James I and the Duke of Buckingham as a couple.
Or here is a machine generated portrait of the Duke of Navarro by Edward Hopper.
I’m bringing this up because the borderline between AI creations and art made by the rest of us will become more and more porous, it’s early days yet. I am not interested in a discussion of what is “real” art, or if we can ever tell a fake from a human original in years to come, or any such topic. (Nor am I interested in losing more sleep over potential dangers of perfected AI programs – if you dare you can read a basic AI 101 horror tutorial here…)
I am interested in how transitions will unfold between what we embrace and what we reject, and if there are aspects of human creativity that simply cannot be mimicked no matter how many neural nets draw on data from infinite exposure to all of our knowledge sources. Or can they?
Take Drake’s interest in liminal constructs. She plans to use her Sitka residency to create urns and altar cloths, combining, if possible, ceramic and fabric art for both. Urns stand for the remnants of someone who has walked on, transitioning into an unknown place (if you are spiritual,) or into dust (old secular me.) They remind us of humans’ transitory nature, or, by the care that someone takes to create beauty across their surface, that we will keep a memory alive, waiting for the pain of loss to recede.
Altar cloths are used during worship, also devoted to something we cannot fully know, but in whom we invest hope for allowing a transition into a better place. They cover the chalice that carries the Holy elements and the altar itself – should a drop of wine believed to be Jesus’ blood be spilled it will be caught by that cloth, not touching the altar itself. (Ref.)
What I cannot begin to imagine how something so thoroughly, deeply human can be incorporated into AI art. But maybe it can – maybe the sense of unease that is so often associated with liminal places, caves, chasm, empty airports at night, you name it, will find justification when AI turns out to be a match.
In the meantime, we have the quiet beauty and search for meaning that is deeply incorporated into Drake’s art. As real and as resilient as the river landscape that she has sought to depict. No further transitions needed. It is a place to rest.
————————————————————————
THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
Today’s post is dedicated to my grandfather Eduard (1894 – 1977) a musician, bird lover and gentle soul. His birthday was yesterday.
Canada Geese
Buckle up folks, it’s going to be all over the map today.
It all started with a reminder notice that one of the strangest pieces of music, John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP –As SLow aSPossible – was about to change to a different tone on February 5, 2022. The longest composition ever – duration 639 years, you read that right – started in 2001, with a seventeen month-long pause before the first tone of the organ, especially built for the performance of this piece, was to be heard. Here is a video clip that shows the special organ in a small church in Halberstadt, Germany.
One particular tone emanates continually, and is changed at irregular time intervals according to the composer’s instructions. (Here is a calendar that shows the me changes and tone variations.) The current sound will last 2 years. This announcement had me wonder:
While we had to wait for more than 6 long years for the 14. sound change in 2020 , the next one is occurring only a few months hence, on February 5th. Quite a challenge for a subjective sense of time to get the hang of this. For those clinging to their subjective sense of time we might mention that the new sound will last exactly 24 months. Could very well be that those months will pass in a flash.
Honestly, I could not tell if this was meant seriously or ironically – probably a combination of my addled brain and being German. But be that as it may, it reminded me of a dominant topic in my current conversations. How is our sense of time shaped by the pandemic, the isolation, the sameness of the days and, admittedly, by aging?
Snowgeese yesterday
Snowgeese from other years
Cage’s composition was not the only reminder of the languid, unending spread of hours and days that I – many of us – feel, like time stalling. (This stands, of course, in extreme contrast to young families for whom the double burden of professional work and unrelieved childcare at home leads to a sense of having not enough time ever, time on 3x speed fast forward.)
One of the best cinematic experiences I’ve had in these last months also managed to capture a sense of time that is altered, aided by the elongated storytelling formats of TV series—those time-indulgent, episodic ways to weave a tale, unhurried by a two-hour time limit of movies. And no one knows how to unfold a plot in slow-mo better than the modern Korean film makers.
Steller’s Jay yesterday – Grey herons from other years
In Beyond Evil (directed by Shim Na-yeon, available on Netflix) it’s not just about the tempo of the narrative, though. Time itself seems to stand still in a small town haunted by age-old murders and secrets, with an unlikely coupling of 2 unmatched policemen churning the dregs and bringing new sorrow. It is not a serial murder case in the traditional sense, but rather a psychological study of a variety of characters stuck in time as flies are on those strips hanging in country kitchens. The protagonists are honing their compulsions, tending to their losses, and deciding what to sacrifice to remain on the ethical side of things. I know, does not sound enticing, but honestly, it was brilliant.
Sandhill Cranes yesterday
Sandhill cranes from other years
So, I thought, perhaps we should delve into the scientific psychology of time perception, since a lot of research has happened in the field lately. Nah, you can read up on it here. I much rather learn from poets than deal with my own field today.
Hawk from yesterdayHarrier HawkRedtail Hawks from other years
Both of the poems below managed to drag me away from moping about the altered sense of time’s passing, the feeling of being hermetically closed off from a perception of forward movement. They helped me, pushed me towards remembering what I sort of know but always forget: what matters is attention to the moment, the noticing and processing of what is afforded to you by grace of nature or the kindness of others or the tasks that give you pleasure or a sense of having something gotten done or the simple acknowledgment you’re still functioning reasonably.
Bald Eagle from yesterday
Baldies from other years
With Forever- is composed of Nows – Emily Dickinson celebrates recurrence, sameness, un-differentiation, all the while she spent her life in something akin to self-imposed lockdown.
Hummingbird (in February!) from yesterdayKingfisher from other years
Seems like good advice. I figured I’d drag a series of “nows” out of the archives, selecting samples of the last 5 years of early February photographs all taken without travel, in my immediate vicinity (2021 excluded since it was spent in hospital…) The same ducks and geese, sandhill cranes and variety of raptors, the same small folk and an occasional outlier (elk!) thrown in – a forever of joy from repeat excursions, the last one just yesterday afternoon. It helps to live in Oregon, one of the most beautiful places imaginable.
Elk from other years
You can slow down time as much as you want, if you ask me, if it still contains the possibility of momentary encounters, anchoring us in the NOW. Even robins, bushtits, woodpeckers and sparrows in the yard suffice.
Forever – is composed of Nows – ‘Tis not a different time – Except for Infiniteness – And Latitude of Home –
From this – experienced Here – Remove the Dates – to These – Let Months dissolve in further Months – And Years – exhale in Years –
Without Debate – or Pause – Or Celebrated Days – No different Our Years would be From Anno Dominies –
Rufus Towhee from yesterdayDowny woodpecker from other years
With Clocks, Carl Sandburg extends a warning that a focus on the measurement of time can distract us from using or enjoying the one we still have, since we don’t know when time will be cut short for good. Don’t focus on the perception of passage then, but what you can do to fill time with. (Never mind that that opens another problem set during a pandemic…)
HERE is a face that says half-past seven the same way whether a murder or a wedding goes on, whether a funeral or a picnic crowd passes. A tall one I know at the end of a hallway broods in shadows and is watching booze eat out the insides of the man of the house; it has seen five hopes go in five years: one woman, one child, and three dreams. A little one carried in a leather box by an actress rides with her to hotels and is under her pillow in a sleeping-car between one-night stands. One hoists a phiz over a railroad station; it points numbers to people a quarter-mile away who believe it when other clocks fail. And of course … there are wrist watches over the pulses of airmen eager to go to France…
White throated sparrow from yesterday
Sparrows from other years
And for good measure, let’s throw in the advice of Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh who died last month:
“While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.” Why? If we are thinking about the past or future, “we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.” (from The Miracle of Mindfulness.)
Told you, it would be all over the map. Off to wash the dishes now.
Sandhill from yesterday. Music today in honor of my Opa who played the stand-up bass in a small-town orchestra named Fidelio. Here is a creative – and timely – version by the Washington National Opera of Beethoven’s Fidelio, with an explanation of how the new version came to be. Fidelio is a story of hope and resilience, a more desirable focus than speed of time…..
Let me add to the lot of mind-boggling concepts I introduced this week – Fontana’s sound sculptures made of environment-specific noises, Hoyt’s Afro-Sonic Mapping, the Caretaker’s musical representations of the slide into dementia – one more maven who is a game changer with communicating ideas by means of auditory output: Kristen Gallerneaux.
To call her a renaissance woman is likely an understatement. She is a sound-based artist, curator, and sonic researcher with a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University), as well as the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she is in charge of one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. She writes for a variety of scholarly and popular journals, and her 2018 book High Static, Dead Lines was well received.
One of the most fascinating aspects of her explorations is for me the fact that this highly educated, scientifically versed woman does not shy away from topics that might elicit eye-rolling at best and ridicule at worst among her academic peers: the pursuit of sounds associated with a paranormal culture, the possibility of sonic spectres, the idea that objects have a life of their own beyond their relationship to humans (object-oriented ontology.)
I don’t care where unusual interests get started – in her case perhaps with the confluence of upbringing in a Spiritualist household, the lasting damage done to her hearing by badly treated childhood diseases that led to sound-distortions or – generation, or an immersion in folklore and/or narratives from her Métis ancestry (the folks from intermarriage between the first French settlers and the indigenous populations of her native Canada.) I do admire when those interests become passions, ignoring academic head winds and/or popular approval while searching for answers for tricky questions. And I gladly expose myself to unusual topics when they are offered in an approachable way, with clarity, directness and lack of pretensions, as her work does in spades, writing and compositions alike. Plus how can you not be curios about an artist who answers the question of whether she believes in the supernatural with this gem:
“…as for the question “Do you or do you not believe?,” I usually find myself citing one of my particularly witchy academic mentors, who once said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve met them plenty.” It perfectly summed up my noncommittal, gray-zone syncretic beliefs.”
One of my favorite examples of her work is a sound and video exploration of a phenomenon called The Hum. Perhaps acoustic, perhaps psychological, it is a consistent, low-pitched noise or vibration, experienced by a small percentage of people across the world (often plagued by subsequent dizziness, headaches and insomnia) – in Auckland and Taos, in Bristol and until 2020 in Windsor, Ontario. You can find a worldwide map of reports here. Most dispatches come from urban areas, which suggests it might be industrial or urban low frequency noise pollution. Except it isn’t. There are not many scientific studies of this experience, but the ones that we have exclude natural sources (aurorae, lightning, meteors, volcanoes, waterfalls and ocean waves) as well as radio waves or microwave equivalents. Acoustic sources are unlikely, because if you bring multiple Hum experiencers into a room they all match the Hum to different acoustic frequencies. People are now exploring internal neurological processes for lack of satisfying external signal explanations, but here and now we simply do not know what’s going on. One might, of course, ask why should Auckland, for example, have a higher percentage of people with internal neurological quirks than, say, Sidney? Or why does the Hum disappear when industrial steel mills cease operations (like they did last year in Windsor, Canada?)
In any case the black& white video about the Hum is a terrific example of being open to variable explanations and pursuing them with intellectual rigor as well as visual tricks that allow us to believe in gray zones, after all.
For once, let me run with a wild fantasy. Let’s assume we organize a scéance and Gallerneaux is willing to attend. She might want to call on communing with Caroline Furness Jayne. Who, you ask? Jaynes is the author of a 1906 book on string figures, found globally. Known to us as cat’s cradle, they come in immense variations, and are apparently developed completely independently across world cultures. We know little about Jayne (bios are padded with info about her more famous parents and/or son) other than that she was interested in ethnological studies, a consummate traveler, dead for unknown reasons at age 36. Inspired by anthropologist Frans Boas, she researched scientific papers on string figures and published an anthology with places, names and instructions on how to generate these complicated cat’s cradles. You can find the book and the drawings here. And Gallineaux recently released music (Strung Figures, a terrific album) based on the book and those string figures, at the artist’s band camp site.
Surprise! Not Jayne, it is Harry Everett Smith who appears. (I’ve never attended a scéance, so give me some slack in making this all up.) Who he? Come on: The Magus with a magpie mind, as someone once called him, compiled the six-record collection Anthology of American Folk Music. But he was also declared to be an “anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, abstract painter, experimental filmmaker, and full-time eccentric. Smith’s interest in exposing unseen connections — his own form of artistic alchemy — drew him to create artwork that brought together diverse elements in new and exciting combinations.”(Ref.)
Sounds like a soul mate to Gallineaux, particularly when you now add that he was deeply interested in all things occult and worked with string figures. Here is a sampling from an exhibition of his string figures in Brooklyn, 9 years ago. Smith left an unfinished thousand-page manuscript on the practice, with some plainly false claims, I’d add, having skimmed some excerpts. But I’m sure he and today’s sound artist would have a lot to talk about.
Except that he, eschewing academics, might not grasp the mathematical connections to knot theory, and pictorial topology. I bet the bank she would. And, more importantly, be able to teach all of us about it in ways that we can grasp. In the meantime, let’s go dance to Finger Catch from Strung Figures.
Photographs today from fields of dried grass, windswept, where the only noise other than the occasionally lowing cow was the rustle when the breeze appeared. How could it not remind me of visualized sound waves?
One of the pleasures of writing an independent blog is the fact that I can cover topics I know absolutely nothing about, simply because I find them fascinating. You, of course, have a similar choice: you can explore new territory or decide to skip it, since it might involve some effort to listen in new ways. And listen it shall be: this week I am introducing a number of different artists who employ sound in order to map aspects of our world as linked to the past, present and future, or to capture ephemeral processes.
What they all have in common is that they are art – devised as sound sculptures in some cases, associated with visual images (painted, sculpted or digitally created) in others, or plain compositions using sound collected from the environment or electronically generated. I cannot tell if I am more fascinated by some of the underlying ideas, or the art works that result from the ideas. I guess it varies.
Today I will start with two artists who are about the present and the past. Wednesday’s segment will introduce two artists who explore the linkage between sound and psychological processes extending into the future. The two installments are meant as a package, examining working with sound from four different angles. I don’t expect anyone to listen to any of the links in full – that would cost a lot of time – but a bit of sampling will give you a taste of what’s out there and maybe instill curiosity for more.
Composer Bill Fontana is one of the pioneers of sound art in the U.S. with a career spanning five decades and taking him to international acclaim. He collects site-specific sounds and generates sound configurations from those recordings that reflect aspects of the site and are intended to shape our visual interaction with the site or visual surrounding. Working with acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers) that sample the environmental sounds, he creates “sculptures” with the input, musical transformations that are centrally experienced by the listener.
For example, he has composed subtle variations of the music of the Golden Gate Bridge, a live audio/video installation created for its 75th anniversary in 2012, now in the collection of SF MOMA. Here is a link to some of his acoustical visions – the bridge piece can be heard in the third segment.
Another sound sculpture can be found in Rome, in the entry hall of the National Museum of 21st Century Art. He connects Zaha Hadid’s architecture of the building with the acoustic, harmonic and rhythmical qualities of the water that has run in Roman aqueducts since time immemorial. Well, since Roman times. Ok, 2000 years.
You can hear the sculptural sound and the underlying source here.
Miami Beach at Night
And here is a link to one of his most recent projects, Sonic Dreamscapes that connects sounds of the Miami seascape under threat of climate change to our auditory cortex, making the listener aware of the fragility of our world. This multimedia installation was installed in Miami Beach in 2018.
The installation cycle begins during the day with individually recurring auditory recordings answering each other from different spatial points in SoundScape Park. By afternoon, the “musical vocabulary” will grow as additional sounds are added to the repertoire. As the evening approaches, environmentally inspired abstract videos will emerge on the video wall, allowing visitors to experience a myriad of floating sounds and meditative images.
Where Fontana is about connecting us to the sound of places with an eye on change across time, Satch Hoyt is a sound artist concerned with the sounds of people, their movements across space in the past and preserved echos in contemporary music. In addition to actual sculptures that interact with sound installations (link here, scroll down and click on the strips below the images to get to the sound,) Hoyt has an ongoing multi-media project in the works, Afro-Sonic Mapping, which traces specific traditional African music from centuries ago to the contemporary musical styles of the African diaspora.
Street Art in BerlinRemembering Colonial Times….
The project connects archival recordings of African music from Congo and Angola, collected by European anthropologists of the late 1800s and found in Berlin’s ethnology museum, to the urban music in the suburbs of large contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian cities. Turns out, the musical patterns transmigrated to today’s urban music, linking Luanda, Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia, or Dakar, Cali and Lima. With examination of aural histories, interviews and musical exploration with local African musicians to whom Hoyt brought the old recordings, and with collaboration with modern musicians across continents, he re-imagined the sounds, rhythms and melodies, rarely recorded in bygone periods of colonialism and slave trade.
Two years ago the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin offered the first large presentation of the project. Paintings, lectures, videos and 2 concerts attracted big crowds across a full week.Here is some of the music interspersed with an explanatory interview with the artist. The focus was on the lusophone triangle, between the large Portuguese speaking regions of the word, Portugal, its former African colonies (Angola, Mozambique) and Brazil, mapping the sounds, back and forth. I am not sure that Hoyt’s goal to “bring back the music to the places of origin where it was recorded and create some kind of sonic restitution in a postcolonial world, a transformation,” can be accomplished, I certainly would not know how to judge that.
But I find the idea of mapping the network of historical pathways of rhythms or melodies which were, other than language, the only things that could be brought and kept during torturous migrations, fascinating. Musicians acting as archeologists, digging out old artifacts under layers of later civilizations. Sounds of spaces or historical sounds, recorded and re-coded for us to sharpen our listening, to form connections – art as mediator.
Photographs today are of San Francisco, Miami and Berlin, respectively; the Democratic Republic of Congo has to wait for another life time….
Instead of a poem I am posting a short essay today, found here, in Vanity Fair of all places, a publication that has soared lately with progressive editorial decisions. My choice is not coincidental. Kiese Laymon‘s books, Heavy – An American Memoir, and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, an amazing collection of essays, are already wrapped on my desk, waiting to be delivered come Hannukah and Christmas. (Note the website link offers alternatives to Amazon: Black-owned bookstores.)
Laymon’s descriptions bring us to places located within our own country yet utterly foreign to the privileged existence. They educate and enchant with a brilliant mind, and a gift for story-telling that matches the greats in the literary history of this country. Crystal vision originally referred to hippies or a free spirit doing their thing with the crystals; I like to think of his writing as a gaze penetrating through the opaqueness of the glass, willing a view into clarity.
I also was captured by the video mentioned in the essay below, when it first appeared on my feed, soon to burst into variations across the globe. I knew the Fleetwood Mac song by heart all those decades ago…) That explains today’s musical choice. Photography covers street performers and musicians in Louisiana since I never made it to Mississippi.
Early this morning, my mailman read me a story. Two stories actually. I met my mailman, Shawn, in July. While sitting on my porch, Shawn had walked up and asked if Biggie Smalls was my favorite MC. Before I could answer, Shawn said he noticed the portrait of Biggie in my sunroom. Shawn placed my delivery on the steps and asked why I had so many books delivered. I told Shawn I was a teacher and writer. Shawn told me he’d never taught but that he was a writer too. I sat out on that porch listening to Shawn rap one and a half songs about his “old life” in Kansas City and recite the synopses of two projects he needed to finish.
“I’m not sure if they’re screenplays or novels or short stories,” he told me.
This morning, I listened over speakerphone as Shawn read the first five handwritten pages of the two stories he started on my porch. I lay on my bed, the back of my head buried deep into a down pillow that 10 minutes earlier I held like a soft someone I hoped would not leave. I never dreamed that my mailman asking me about the most effective use of third-person point of view would be what pleasure on a summer Sunday morning felt like.
Like so many of my friends, my past eight months have been spent dodging death, mourning the dead, creating art, and loving Black people. I’ve lingered in socially distant conversations with strangers. I’ve cried and laughed at what made me cry and laugh. I’ve made recipeless meals that were so nasty, all I could do was giggle in the middle of every bite. I’ve tenderly touched parts of my body I’d forgotten. I’ve found that pulling the hairs out of my corona beard is actually soothing. I’ve reread, rewritten, revised. I’ve done all of this not simply in the hopes of feeling good, but because I long to feel less like we are going to die tomorrow.
I am a Black southern writer from Mississippi. That is my superpower. Aloneness is our fuel. Loneliness our fire. But this, whatever this is, hurts in a new way. Folks across the political spectrum have talked a lot about normalcy this year, prognosticating when and how we’ll get back to it. In response, there have been heaps of brilliant essays, speeches, and webinars about how the obliteration of an inequitable normal is the first step in creating a place where abusers of power are held accountable and the vulnerable actually have equitable access to healthy choices and first, second, and third chances.
When this new normal is created or accepted, I wonder what will happen to sentimentality—that gorgeous monster James Baldwin called the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, the mark of dishonesty—in art, artists, and the audiences who give us life. How will we distinguish what feels good from what is supposed to feel good when all of our skies are orange and every stranger’s touch is a violation?
After not having touched another human for over three months, the night before I talked with Shawn, I drove to one of the only restaurants in town that still only offers curbside service. I touched the finger of a masked woman who brought Thai fried rice with tofu level 4 to my truck. I tipped her as much as the meal costs and thanked her for committing to curbside. She put the tip in her pocket and thanked me for committing to her restaurant. There’s a sentimental version of this story where, exploitation be damned, we both wait until we are out of each other’s sight to clean our hands, take off our masks and nod our heads slowly up and down at the grit, grind, and grandeur of Americans.
I did not live that version of the story. The kind woman who accepted my money went directly from my truck to the car next to me. I cried alone in my truck.
Later that night, I saw that someone sent me a clip of a brother who goes by the name of doggface208 gliding on a skateboard from the highway on-ramp with a half-drunk 64-ounce bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice in one hand and a phone recording himself in the other. Sixteen seconds into the video, doggface208 bends at the waist and sings into the air. I watched the clip a second time with sound, and everything changed. I notice doggface208’s familiar nod to us, and really him, is so in the pocket of the song.
As Stevie Nicks sings, “Now here we go again, you say you want your freedom,” I notice trucks, factories, and two tattooed feathers behind doggface208’s ear. I see yellow and white lines marking the margins of the highway. I see how baggy and plush his gray sweatshirt is. I notice the familiar way he smacks his lips, relishing the punchy sweetness.
I feel, with every ounce of joy in my body, doggface208’s acceptance of fear and joy when he bends and lip-synchs the lyrics, “It’s only right that you should play the way you feel it.…” I’d heard, and loved, Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” thousands of times, but I’d never felt the freedom in loneliness I felt when watching doggface208’s TikTok.
The video didn’t make me forget that many of us are dying, dead, or mourning. The clip gave me another portal of entry into pleasure and movement. Doggface208 bended, and really blended, my gendered, raced, classed, and placed expectations of revolutionary desire, and art.
“But listen carefully to the sound of your loneliness,” is the next line of the song we do not hear.
Three mornings later, I am sitting in front of a smudged computer screen. Sixty-eight mostly Black high school students from Baltimore’s City Neighbors High School have invited me into what in 2020 we call a classroom. I am expected to read a chapter from my new book and teach the young people about the multiple uses of point of view in narrative art. I do not want to do what is expected of me because what is expected of me will not feel good to anyone.
I ask the students if they’d rather talk about fear and joy and concrete language. The only rule of the exercise is there are no abstractions allowed.
Two hours later, my computer, our classroom, is closed.
I am on my knees wondering why I am energized, satisfied, but not sobbing. Sixty-eight young people from Baltimore did what our geriatric presidential candidates and moderator could not do the night before. They used word patterns they’d never used. They talked freshly about fear of isolation. They collectively unraveled how capitalism encourages a speed that makes love, pleasure, and actual contemplation nearly impossible. They wondered why school didn’t teach them how to gracefully lose and graciously win. They made critiques of the nation and critiques of themselves. They listened to each other toe the thinnest of lines between yearning for pleasure and aching for escape. They accepted that they are worthy of the most exquisite joy. They argued vigorously about the ethics of seeking pleasure at the expense of essential workers, like many of their parents, who put their lives on the line for a tomorrow filled with remedies to overdue rent, grocery bills, bludgeoning debt. They wondered how to make essential labor into pleasurable labor for essential laborers when the nation insists on treating them as expendable at best, and big-hearted collateral damage at worst.
Those 68 12th graders made themselves feel good. Then they thanked each other for making themselves feel good, all the while pulverizing my understanding of sentimentality.
Later that night, I am sent an essay I read the first time one day after September 11, 2001, called “Blood, Bread, and Poetry.”
“Nothing need be lost,” the exquisite Adrienne Rich wrote. “No beauty sacrificed. The heart does not turn to stone.”
I love Adrienne Rich. I have believed Adrienne Rich my entire reading life. I am not sure I believe this Adrienne Rich passage anymore. Beauty is absolutely sacrificed. Our hearts often do turn to stone. This arduous acceptance is a radical pleasure, a sad but sensuous reminder that we are worthy of looking forward to responsibly feeling good in a world of ruin, where presidents shed their COVID-filled masks, wash their nasty hands of death, and the blood drips from the sky.
When the rain washes us clean, we will know. We will feel so good. I believe that. If we find, however, that the rain has actually left more bruises, soaked us in more sour than we ever imagined, and if that bruised sour feels so good, it is then that the pleasurable work actually begins. Many of our hearts are stone. Much of the beauty here has been sacrificed, and most of it stolen. There is no commercial, doctor, or wellness regimen to smudge that truth. Home is gone, but there is responsible pleasure to be found in the wreckage, in the pathways of the wrecked, and in all the goodness beyond where we’ve been allowed to discover.
Everything, finally, is lost.
Music today from the album Rumors.
Here is the original TikTok clip mentioned in the essay, featuring Nathan Apodaca, who is half Mexican, half Northern-Arapaho.
And here is a report on what dissemination of content on the Internet at times accomplishes. It is actually scary, because it feeds into the “everyone can get rich” myth of the American Dream. It is also encouraging because individual creativity echoes across the globe when it previously would have been restricted to the hard conditions of life on an Idaho potato farm.
If Nari Ward, who I introduced yesterday, is a master of conceptual installations, Sam Gilliam stands out with his abstractions. I say that not because his name is all of a sudden popping up everywhere, as if he had just emerged, early notable successes non-withstanding, but because his art is a love sonnet to color. Except it doesn’t keep to the 14 lines rule – or any rule at all but free flow of hues.
I picked a vicarious visit to his works because they instill joy in me; equally importantly, though, I took a few minutes to listen to an interview with him that floored me for its energy of this 87-year old. Do yourself a favor and watch. His paintings are represented also with much better light in the video than in the photos below that I found on the web.
Never mind that the guy represented the US as the first African American at the Venice Biennale almost half a century ago. Forget that he showed at the Tate Modern exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, or that he was commissioned for a piece by the National Museum of African American History and Culture in his hometown of Washington, DC, prominently hung in the lobby. The piece was inspired by a poem, and named after it, Yet Do I Marvelby Black poet Countee Cullen, celebrating the resilience of creativity.
All eyes are upon him because he now has an inaugural exhibition, Existed, Existing, with a posh New York City gallery, Pace. An informative and comprehensive review of the present works in the New Yorker can be found here. It also educates about the artist’s evolution from color field to lyrical abstract painter to something all his own.
What do you make of an introduction, presented on the gallery’s exhibition website, that reads: Sam Gilliam’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Existed Existing debuts new works and artist-led installations that reflect the culmination of his six-decade-long career with color?
Career with color? Sounds like one of those self-help booklets, or a sample binder at the paint store. Artist-led installations? Led? What does that mean? Disciple-followed? Assistant-produced? Directing the movers? Could anything be more vague? No hint at any of his revolutionary moves, or the inclusion of politics, or the race-specific aspects of his work that make it special, never mind his genius with color, career be damned.
The new work includes “pyramids, and circle made from stained plywood and aluminum, which evolved from Gilliam’s exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2018. There he observed the city’s growing population of African immigrants, and was inspired to revisit ancient African architectural forms.” (Ref.) In contrast, I want to show samples of the earlier paintings that so strongly appeal to me, known as drape paintings.
This was the painting that inspired today’s photographs of drooping leaves.
The canvas is taken down from its stretcher, poured and stained with acrylic and metallic paints that spread and mingle while the artist manipulates the fabric. Gilliam drapes the canvas from a wall or a ceiling, allowing it to hang, fold or move in ways not previously conceived. The result is a curious mixture of painting and sculpture, tricking us into multiple ways of perceiving shifting picture planes. While the overall first impression might hint at tie-dyed projects from your youth, a closer inspection reveals insane combination of colors, sparkly detail, and allusions to forms with meaning for the Black artist: the laundry swinging on the lines in front of his D.C. apartment window, looking at the backyards of the projects, or the hoods of KKK members, the way the peaks of the paintings are folded and tied.
Gilliam considers abstraction to be just as political as conventional represential art might be: “It messes with you. It convinces you that what you think isn’t all. And it challenges you to understand something that’s different… Just because it looks like something that resembles you, it doesn’t’ mean that you have an understanding.” (Ref.) Of course that implies that people are willing to open their minds to art as such to begin with. Here is a depressing recent psychological study, that used one of Sam Gilliam’s drawings to look at correlations between people’s willingness to consider it art and their approval of Trump’s politics. You can guess the outcome.
Some of the work is directly tied to political themes, as for example the series about the fate of Martin Luther King, Jr., which includes green and red April in commemoration of the date of assassination.
Gilliam’s work is, in his own words, also influenced by music, in particular Jazz with its ever changing variations on themes. The Music of Color was perhaps the perfect title for his recent European show. The influence is captured in some of the titles he gives his paintings, but also by the fact that any one piece of drape painting is never folded the same way twice across exhibitions. The flux and variability is an important aspect of the power inherent to these canvases.For me, in the end, there is something intensely alive in the abandon to color, color mixes, and wild pattern that reminds me of nature, an association helped by the natural forms of the folds of the materials he uses.
