I'm still trying to get a handle on Jeffery Yang's work. Vanishing-Line, new from Graywolf, took me by surprise after I finished Aquarium. The narrator's vision in Aquarium had a fairly steady focal range and a consistent format; you looked sequentially at an alphabetized list of creatures through a set of binoculars or microscope set up and handed to you by the narrator. They are all about the same distance away, and you get about the same amount of time to watch each one. Then, on to the next exhibit. Your ecological tour guide does make comments that assess and contextualize the images, but rarely strays from the format, describing each creature from "Abalone" to "Zooxanthellae." Here are the representative opening lines of "Anemone": "Anemones are warriors, colonizing / rock and reef in ranks. The history/ of the world is told thru the eye / of the colonizer, who takes pleasure in / sticking his fingers into an anemone's / mouth until it starves." You see the sea creature and then hear remarks that transfer metaphorically that image to the stage of history. (In other poems, the image transfers to the philosophy or religion or politics.)
But Vanishing-Line follows both a radically different form and works at a different scale. This is a geographic and wide-lens historical view. I think of slow pan in the opening of vistas of There Will Be Blood. The first and last words of the book are "place": the first poem is called "place" and the book closes with a quotation from Robert Duncan on place. In each place he presents, Yang positions "facts." These facts -- about his Chinese grandmother and her context or about the dark history of Native Americans on this continent's east coast-- function as artifacts in an epic reenactment.
These facts form the focus and the medium of the poet, as they so self-consciously did for the Objectivists and Imagists. The echoes and interplays between Yang's work at George Oppen's Of Being Numerous are well, numerous. (Yang mentions Oppen in this book's bibliographic note and in a poem in Aquarium, assuring me that I do not image the influence.) Although the author speaks mostly in the third-person omniscient, he occasionally allows an "I" to appear intimately integrated into the large-scale landscape. In Oppen, that landscape is New York; in Yang, it is the east coast surrounding that city.
I call these poems "epics" because of this scale, and perhaps the most fascinating moments are when an "I" does step into the poem or when the poem shifts from microscopic detail to macroscopic reflection. For example, in one line zooming from the size of a nail in a canoe to the scope of a dynastic nation: "Canoes without nails, scoops for oars // They walked // as Portugal lost its monopoly..."
Lots more to think about and a few more reads before I can articulate clearly what he's up to in this complex book that I highly recommend.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Sprout and the Hyper Local Movement
I'm starting to blog here at Crosscut. This piece is about a great Seattle arts organization. J and I have been thinking a lot about the hyper local movement because of our salon (next one, November 12!).
Locality is old news in the realm of food – everyone (hip) goes to the farmers market and not just the grocery. In the last few weeks with flash mobs attack Cleveland, Atlanta and London, crowd sourcing and local movements have even take on a negative cast. But in visual art and cultural organizations, locality has at once an old history and a new one.
Locality is old news in the realm of food – everyone (hip) goes to the farmers market and not just the grocery. In the last few weeks with flash mobs attack Cleveland, Atlanta and London, crowd sourcing and local movements have even take on a negative cast. But in visual art and cultural organizations, locality has at once an old history and a new one.
I very hesitantly offer the hypothesis that visual art and architecture has a stayed rooted in locality while other art forms – music, literature – have more easily been disassociated (for better or worse) from their physical origins (though there are now reactive movements turning back towards the local). Literature can and has been passed around more quickly from place to place. You can read Lolita in Tehran or Henry James in Idaho or Bannana Yoshimoto in Brussels. But it’s hard to move Bilbao or Falling water, but it’s also harder (though not impossible!) to move a Richard Serra or Tara Donavan piece to New Dehli. These works I select for their modernist, scale-based physicality in particular. That kind of installation/sculpture/etc. appears to be particularly resistant to displacement. That kind of art also dominates our cultural vision of what contemporary art is like. So perhaps it should come as less of a surprise that visual art has quickly taken to the local movement.
I’d like to keep thinking about this movement in “fine” art above and beyond the DIY culture. Yes, I know, craft and art need not be and cannot be entirely distinguished, but it does seem worthwhile to consider whether there is something special happening in that aspect of culture.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Funhouses and Madhouses
J and I recently enjoyed these two shows in Seattle: Funhouse, a show at Western Bridge Gallery, and MadHouses (exhibit now closed) in a row of former Capitol Hill residences sponsored by MadArt and 4Culture. Together, these two exhibits point to the strengths and limits of “public” art and gallery-constrained art.
Funhouse wants to be a party in your backyard. The winking drapes of Martin Creed’s “Work No. 990” flash open and close across the wide entrance windows, hinting that something playful and large hides indoors. In the main room, under the shadow of Creed’s wall drawing, you climb into the show’s center piece, Julian Hoeber’s “Demon Hill,” an optico-kinesthetic illusion: that is, a box with a titled floor. Two or three steps inside the brightly lit, ten by eight foot wooden crate-like structure, you immediately feel sea-sick, despite the plumb line hanging from the ceiling. The simplicity of this architectural gesture points to a strong modernist ethos that undergirds this piece and the show. Essentially, each piece asks the visitor to reassess her commitment to perspectival space, emphasizing constant physical relations just the way a Donald Judd or a Walter De Maria might. The show purports to be about “fun” and “funhouses” which might lead to post-modern pieces that tugged at cultural expectations, but in fact, the work focuses on light and space, the great mainstays of modernist architecture.
In the back room, perhaps the most exciting piece hides: Mungo Thompson’s Skyspace Bouncehouse, a Claus Oldenburg-like version of a James Turrell. On a wood pew in Turrell’s original, you look up to see a square of light from the sky you’ve been in the habit of ignoring rather than worshipping. Inside Thompson’s piece, you bounce over the inflated cushions of a county fair moon-walk beneath a similar hole in the ceiling.
Visitors’ reactions to Skyspace could be shouts of “The sky! The sky!” while hopping like children. But Funhouse is ultimately a gallery show. The hush and dark of the gallery space invites a quiet, “Ah” instead. The roof blocks out the sky that appears in the actual Turell and the white walls and air-condition muffled backroom of the gallery mute the art from an “event” to a set of purchasable pieces.
Madhouses succeeds in offering a more fun place to be than Funhouse, although the actual sculpture does not reach the subtly of those tucked away at Western Bridge. SuttonBeresCuller, creators of numerous architectural-scale works at, for example, Bumbershoot and the Lawrimore Project, installed the initially and outwardly striking, “Ties that Bind,” red bands winding through two houses. Laura Ward’s “Skin” transforms the exterior of a house into a fragile latex cast that underscores the structure’s vulnerability. By padding the interior with used clothing, Luke Haynes points toward the history of inhabitation by past residents and visitors and caretakers that patinas the houses.
The opening of Madhouses included artists and friends but also members of the Capitol Hill community of all ages who happened to walk by the show. Likewise, on a sunny Sunday, a wide swath of the Seattle community – much more diverse than the handful of visitors who make it to Western Bridge – wandered through the structures. The effect of the informal open door policy created the atmosphere of an estate open-house, but one where no one was buying, a trope emphasized by the barcoded price tag in Troy Gua’s “Crysalis.”
Funhouse wants to be a party in your backyard. The winking drapes of Martin Creed’s “Work No. 990” flash open and close across the wide entrance windows, hinting that something playful and large hides indoors. In the main room, under the shadow of Creed’s wall drawing, you climb into the show’s center piece, Julian Hoeber’s “Demon Hill,” an optico-kinesthetic illusion: that is, a box with a titled floor. Two or three steps inside the brightly lit, ten by eight foot wooden crate-like structure, you immediately feel sea-sick, despite the plumb line hanging from the ceiling. The simplicity of this architectural gesture points to a strong modernist ethos that undergirds this piece and the show. Essentially, each piece asks the visitor to reassess her commitment to perspectival space, emphasizing constant physical relations just the way a Donald Judd or a Walter De Maria might. The show purports to be about “fun” and “funhouses” which might lead to post-modern pieces that tugged at cultural expectations, but in fact, the work focuses on light and space, the great mainstays of modernist architecture.
In the back room, perhaps the most exciting piece hides: Mungo Thompson’s Skyspace Bouncehouse, a Claus Oldenburg-like version of a James Turrell. On a wood pew in Turrell’s original, you look up to see a square of light from the sky you’ve been in the habit of ignoring rather than worshipping. Inside Thompson’s piece, you bounce over the inflated cushions of a county fair moon-walk beneath a similar hole in the ceiling.
Visitors’ reactions to Skyspace could be shouts of “The sky! The sky!” while hopping like children. But Funhouse is ultimately a gallery show. The hush and dark of the gallery space invites a quiet, “Ah” instead. The roof blocks out the sky that appears in the actual Turell and the white walls and air-condition muffled backroom of the gallery mute the art from an “event” to a set of purchasable pieces.
Madhouses succeeds in offering a more fun place to be than Funhouse, although the actual sculpture does not reach the subtly of those tucked away at Western Bridge. SuttonBeresCuller, creators of numerous architectural-scale works at, for example, Bumbershoot and the Lawrimore Project, installed the initially and outwardly striking, “Ties that Bind,” red bands winding through two houses. Laura Ward’s “Skin” transforms the exterior of a house into a fragile latex cast that underscores the structure’s vulnerability. By padding the interior with used clothing, Luke Haynes points toward the history of inhabitation by past residents and visitors and caretakers that patinas the houses.
The opening of Madhouses included artists and friends but also members of the Capitol Hill community of all ages who happened to walk by the show. Likewise, on a sunny Sunday, a wide swath of the Seattle community – much more diverse than the handful of visitors who make it to Western Bridge – wandered through the structures. The effect of the informal open door policy created the atmosphere of an estate open-house, but one where no one was buying, a trope emphasized by the barcoded price tag in Troy Gua’s “Crysalis.”
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Lucretius, Greenblatt, and the scale of life
This article about Lucretius tempts me to trust it because it recovers such a lovely text, but Greenblatt makes too many over generalizations and errors to be believed. He claims we live in a “skeptical and secular culture,” reinforcing the secularization myth: the story that liberal atheism will, or has, inevitably subsumed simplistic, religious cult impulses. It simply hasn’t (See Charles Taylor on this non-shift). I live in a credulous, religious culture in which Lucretius is no more welcome than he was in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries that Greenblatt caricatures as dark, unthinking, unerotic times. (As a side note, I have to say that in that description, I think he errs again in over generalization: not every sect of Christianity after the fall of Rome rejected sexuality or thinking. We have the sensual, contemplative writings of Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, and Hildegaard von Bingen for starters. I’m no medievalist, but I know enough of them to believe that there are other conceptions of those centuries than as the “dark ages.”)
But Greenblatt’s discussion of Lucretius goes to the heart of issues at stake in our biopolar or schizoid era: hyper-religious and hyper-scientific at once. Most people don’t like the indifference of atomism; Greenblatt identifies this in the case of his mother, but overlooks it in his culture at large where masses of people pursue religions that guarantee them a loving or passionate or at least judgmental divinity, fully invested in their lives as any creator is in her products. No one wants to die and less do we want to find the intermediary of life to be meaningless. Fortunately, medieval credulity and secular skepticism are not the only options as worldviews. Foundations of meaning have been established on grounds other than immorality or even humanism. Greenblatt senses these alternatives in his frustration with Lucretius at the close of the article. But he does not pursue them in the short essay. I wish he had because those are the truly tricky accounts of how we should relate to this natural world the comprises us and composes us.
Nature can seem indifferent to us humans. We face the ocean, and we do not see any eyes or doors or gestures of welcome. But natural life is hardly indifferent to us or to most of its surroundings; to be alive is to have preferences, pleasures and pains. In that, Epicurus and Lucretius themselves may have overlooked the truly compelling qualities of nature. What fascinates me is that yes, we are made of the same atoms as granite and stars and computer chips, but our living systems contain a level of organization not apparent in these other natural bodies. That doesn’t mean we are supernatural or created by something supernatural. But it does mean that "nature" is not a synonym for "life"; it is a genus containing that species. Living nature contains more than the sum of its parts, its atoms. Atomism understands nature only in terms of parts, not wholes, in terms of the microscopic not the macroscopic. Natural lives that so interest us only appear at the macroscopic scale. That does not make them less “real” than their atoms, any more than a car is less real than its carbon and steel. Nor does it make them any more supernatural than a car.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)