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This Season’s Gift

In true appreciation of your continued reading, encouragement and critical interaction my gift to you for the holidays is:

No politics today.

No social justice issues today.

Nothing complicated or sad today.

A poem about how to be hopeful with the help of nature.

Here’s a collection of images from a hike up Wahkeena Falls last week, into the mist with a sprinkling of snow. There was beauty and the reminder that there are always more chances. If you had told me in the hospital at the beginning of the year that I would hike some miles up the steep hills of the Gorge by the end of it, I would have declared you insane.

Mist

It amazes me when mist 
chloroforms the fields 
and wipes out whatever world  exists 


and walkers wade through coma 
                              shouting 
and close to but curtained from each other 


sometimes there’s a second river 
lying asleep along the river 
where the sun rises 
               sunk in thought 


and my soul gets caught in it 
               hung by the heels 
               in water 


it amazes me when mist 
                             weeps as it lifts 

 
                 and a crow 
calls down to me in its treetop voice 
       that there are webs and drips 
and actualities up there 


and in my fog-self shocked and grey 
               it startles me to see the sky

by Alice Oswald (elected as the first female professor of poetry at the University of Oxford in 2019)

Here is to crows, blue skies and actualities. I will see you in the – happy – new year.

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And in case you still need more support to get through these next weeks, I urge you to try the following relaxation exercises. If Bruno Pontiroli’s models can do it, so can you! Possibilities abound!

That’ll be me!

Since all the animals reminded me of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival, here is his Christmas Oratorio, equally enchanting. Merry Christmas.

Feathers to the Rescue.

Today is all about counterbalancing my reading recommendations (heavy, in every meaning of the word) with something visually enchanting (light, in every meaning of the word.)

The essays can be found in The Atlantic, here and here. They are asking us to imagine the unimaginable and allowing us glimpses into a world that seems surreal even though it surrounds us, the active work of many to destroy our democracy and passive bystanders paving the way, again. I completely understand if it is all too much to face (although that is some of the problem that the essays tackle,) and offer the sculptural art below as an anti-dote to heavy hearts.

Here is someone who champions feathers. Chris Maynard, with backgrounds in ecology and biology, uses his skills with magnifying glass, forceps and eye surgery tools to create carvings into feathers that evoke fragile, intricate scenes.

Here is a short clip where he explains his work.

Maynard is a member of Artists for Conservation (AFC,) a Canadian based international non-profit that represents approximately 500 artists from 30 countries,in the nature/wildlife art genre who are committed to conservation. One really cool thing about them: they list art on their website linked to categories of beneficiaries, so if you know someone who cares about whales, or owls, or a particular national park and are desperately looking for a meaningful present: voilà!

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Kate MccGwire also works with feathers, in her case in bulk, creating ingenious sculptures that remind more of water than air in the way they capture movement. The British artist’s websites says she collects, sorts and cleans her material – where do you find that many feathers??? Maybe collecting refers to finding sources that provide. Must be.

“Speaking on her use of feather as a metaphor for what she terms ‘the duplicity of nature’, Kate MccGwire has said, ‘My work is inspired by the water forming incredible patterns that are there one second and gone the next. Everything is fleeting on the water, it is beautiful but there is danger and treachery underneath the surface. I’m intrigued by that dichotomy.”

Just look at the flow.

SASSE/SLUICE, 2018
Mixed media with pigeon feathers
60 x 450 x 200 cm

Or the bulk!

And then, there are feathers au naturel. The way I find them on my walks.

May the feathers lift us up. If not, we should crawl underneath and hide. At least it’ll be dry and warm.

Music by Poppy Ackroyd today.

The Bellwether

bell·weth·er

/ˈbelˌweT͟Hər / noun

the leading sheep of a flock, with a bell on its neck.

  • an indicator or predictor of something.

Oxford English Dictionary

Two years ago I had the opportunity of portraying numerous artists of a project called Exquisite Gorge, offered by the Maryhill Museum of Art. 11 print makers, in collaboration with community partners, carved an original artwork each for an assigned section of the Columbia River, all of which were ultimately connected in a two-dimensional, 66 ft long representation on the grounds of the museum. Each artwork portrayed a section of the river itself and linked to the next section, forming an “Exquisite Corpse.”

We are now entering the second iteration of this artistic adventure, Exquisite Gorge II, which will exhibit the skills and creativity of 13 fiber artists whose works will align the very same sections of the Columbia River as last time. I will follow the creation of these three – dimensional art works closely and also portray the community partners involved in multiple aspects of the project, including opportunities to inspire and educate about fiber arts. The culminating event will be on Saturday, August 6, 2022 at Maryhill Museum of Art, where each free-standing “exquisite corpse” section will be brought together to reveal the continuous sculpture formed by upright three-dimensional frames.

In some ways, this first essay is the bellwether then, an indicator of what’s going to be happening across the next many months. The title, however, was mostly chosen because it relates to sheep (wethers are castrated rams, to be precise, who were leading the flock while fitted with bells to allow shepherds locate the sheep across a distance.) The phrase also points to those who establish a trend, and we will discuss that as well. How’s all this related to art? Well, the fiber for many fiber art projects has to come from somewhere, and in some cases the source is, you guessed it, sheep.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

“…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–Artist: Ophir El-Boher
Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Jessica Lavadour
Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún
Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore

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To mortal men the gods allot woes which cannot be foreseen.” 
― Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason and the Golden Fleece (The Argonautica)

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I loved the 3000 year-old Greek tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece as a child. I mean, heroes, adventure, boat trips, flying sheep, dragons, magic, revenge, what’s not to love? Jason’s first wife Medea, I guess; who’d love a woman who kills her own children? But then again, she was betrayed by him after she had helped him acquire the golden fleece that secured him a throne. I would also likely not have loved the fact that the story described, certainly by the time Apollonius composed it in the 3rd century BC, the Hellenistic colonization of the lands around the Black sea. I had, of course, no clue about such things in the late 1950s.

The pre-history of the myth, by the way, is much older. Excavations of the 1920s and 30s, in central Turkey, uncovered Indo-European tablets from a Hittite civilisation dating to the 14th century BC. One of these has an account on it of a story similar to that of Jason and Medea. Fleece played a considerable role as symbols of prosperity; Hittite clans from the Bronze Age hung them to renew royal power. For the ancient Etruscans a gold colored fleece was a prophecy of future prosperity for the clan. (Ref.)

My son sent this when he saw the portrait above…. must have done something right in my child rearing.

Sheep have claimed symbolic roles beyond their fleece, of course. Egyptian deities were depicted with rams’ heads. Christian symbolism had a field day with innocent lambs led to slaughter, shepherds guarding their flocks, sheep being the most cited animals in the Bible with over 500 mentions. Composers like Bach, Händel, Britten, to name just a few, integrated biblical verses about them into their music. Poets would pick up the symbolism, most memorably in William Blake’s Lamb. Novelists would hone in on the image of the Black Sheep, one of the earliest in 1842 by Honoré de Balzac. The tale of two brothers competing for inheritance, of power and cruelty of life has certainly parallels to the old Greek myths. (It turns out, by the way, that wool that has black strands in it can only be sold for a fraction of the price of white wool, because it makes even dye lots much more difficult to achieve.)

And who could forget the invisible sheep in a box in The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella that pointed to the sheep’s possible role in uprooting the horrible seeds of fascism, represented by Baobab trees? Or one of the funniest science fiction novels of all time, Connie Willis’ The Bellwether, which perfectly captures both the way fads are generated and science progresses by stumbling into lucky breaks?

Let’s look at the real thing, though, not just the symbolic use.

The gods certainly allot a share of unpredictable woes to sheep farming, a complex enterprise. The animals provide meat (lamb and mutton,) wool and pelts for textiles (here’s where the art project comes in!,) and milk from the emerging dairy sheep industry. It has been an industry in steady decline in this country, from a record high of 56 million heads in 1942 to 5.17 million heads as of January 1, 2021, according to USDA statistics.

There are multiple reasons for this downward slope: higher feed and energy costs, land disputes and fencing, losses to predators and/or disease, a consolidation of the sheep packing industry and competition with cheaper products imported from other nations. Add to that the fact that conservationists are often in conflict with sheep farmers for areas critical to each group, and that wool in clothing has been replaced to a large extent by synthetic fibers. Meat consumption has declined as well, from an average per person consumption of 4.5 pounds annually in the 1960s to just 1.17 pounds in 2020. Climate change is also having a potential effect on sheep farming with the epic drought showing effects. Range sheep operations rely on grazing on native pasture lands, some of which are increasingly regulated and permit-dependent due to endangered species protection. Clearly, it is an uphill battle. One, it turns out, that some young people, reconnecting to the land, are willing to fight.

Meet Merrit and Pierre Monnat who started a sheep farm in 2014 near Goldendale, WA.

M+P Ranches has grown from fewer than 10 coarse wooled sheep to almost 300 fine wooled Targhee and Rambouillet ewes and grown in size to about 320 acres. The sheep move from pasture to pasture, grazing on dry sagebrush country, perennial grassland and alfalfa fields throughout Klickitat County during the warmer months. In winter they are grazing further East and are fed hay provided locally, to ensure that the ewes produce enough milk for the lambs that start to be birthed in February.

Originally from Texas, Merrit moved to the PNW for internships on farms, and ended up working on Vashon Island, WA, where she met her husband. Pierre, growing up in Seattle, spent many childhood summers on a relative’s farm in Wisconsin. Later he got involved in vegetable farming in Washington, and was ready for farming on his own when they got together. They built the business, quite literally, by hand: the barns, the service buildings, the fences.

The Monnats live in a farmhouse that is over 100 years old, reached by dirt road. Their products – meat and wool – are distributed locally through farming co-ops, and in direct sales from their website. In addition, they have horses, and have built a greenhouse that adds produce to their list of products, appreciated by restaurants that insist on farm-to-table quality.

It is a work-intense and relatively isolated life, with little time for anything else. It took multiple years to find a foothold in the community, although by now the couple feels integrated and appreciates the advice handed down from older farmers. The farm work is augmented by shearing services that Pierre offers with a mobile trailer, a labor that requires intense skill, focus and concentration to avoid harming the live stock. If you hire yourself out to do this you are also dependent on the owners doing the right thing – not feeding the sheep on the day of the procedure and keeping distractions like dogs etc away from the live stock. It can be nerve wracking. It will be fascinating to watch him do a shearing demonstration in front of a live audience at Maryhill Museum during the exhibit opening in August.

In a state that mirrors the national trends, Washington sheep farming has seen a reckoning since the 1950s. By 2019 most of the state’s farm flocks consisted of 24 or fewer sheep being raised at diversified, family-owned farms, with only one last big range operation still featuring a flock of about 5000 heads. (A terrific historical overview of the issues can be found here.) The aging of farmers and their retirement without successors is a serious problem. Primary producers over 65 now outnumber farmers under 35 by more than 6 to 1.

But perhaps ranchers like the Monnats are the bellwethers for a younger generation of people willing to explore something new without the traditional ways of easing into an established family business. Young farmers pursuing the fleece – white, not golden. Not exactly Jason and Medea, but defying the gods nonetheless, with intense work, passion and determination, not the dark arts.

They are part of a movement that contributes to the growth of the local food movement and could preserve mid-sized farms in the country. They are more likely than the general farming population to grow organically, limit pesticide and fertilizer use, diversify their crops or animals, and be deeply involved in their local food systems via community supported agriculture (CSA) programs and farmers markets. (Ref.) And in our case, they connect to local individuals and organizations focussed on art, whether they are providing wool for artisanal processing or education for projects like the Exquisite Gorge II. Let them be bellwethers, by all means!

Rams are kept in the barn for the winter.

And in the building next to the barn the new renters arrived, Margo Cilker and her husband who is a cowboy. Cilker has her first album out to rave reviews, including one on Oregon Arts Watch. Here is one of her songs, That River from the album Pohorylle.

If Life Gives You Shards…

Broken strategies. Broken systems. Broken hearts. Lots of wreckage after the results of this week’s election, and lots of gratuitous commentary by all those who seem to know what should have been done differently. If in doubt accuse progressives, never mind that we have a centrist president, centrist senators who are holding up any substantive legislation and a moderate candidate in VA who lost a substantial point advantage after remarks that triggered parents grappling with increased diversity in their children’s schools. Never mind a progressive candidate for Mayor of Buffalo who won the primaries fair and square being ousted by a write-in campaign supported by her own party’s establishment in alliance with republican donors.

Let’s focus on something positive instead. I am encouraged by art that points the way to something more constructive: take the shards, the remnants, what’s discarded and make it into something beautiful that functions as a reminder of what came before but also points the way to what can emerge.

All photographs of jewelry are from Julie Decubber’s website linked below.

Julie Decubber is a jewelry artist currently working in the South of France. She forges connections between things with a history and new creations, with an exquisite eye towards what compliments or what does not distract from the visual beauty of the material itself.

I was first drawn to her work with old porcelain shards. I have always loved patterned porcelain. In my childhood our plates that so often held food I did not like or was not interested in came from a pattern called Burgenland (Castleland.) It spurred the imagination of the (even then) travel-hungry child. It is no longer produced just like my own 50 year-old china which floats phoenixes (birds, of course!) and ideas of renewal, and which will be proudly used into perpetuity with chips, cracks, and dulled glaze.

Here are some samples found on Decubber’s website that show her work with porcelain shards.

Buttons!

Her newest project, however, is what really interests me. She visited, interviewed and formed impressions of a number of contemporary ceramic artists, all women. They entrusted her with discarded shards from their projects which she then turned into jewelry.

I always admire collaborative projects because they require heightened sensitivity to diverse approaches, but also widen the repertoire of ideas that are collected cumulatively. Before you look at what she came up with it might be fun to check out the work of the ceramicists, linked below.


The ceramists:

Anne Verdier , Julia Morlot , Émilie Pedron , Julia Huteau , Héloïse Bariol , Enrica Casentini , Agnès DebizetUlrike Weiss , Francine Triboulet , Kaori Kurihara , Nani Champy-Schott , Léa Van Impe , Linda Ouhbi , Fanny Richard , Alice Toumit .

Here is some of what Decubber created. The whole collection was shown in an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris which closed last month.

Here is a glimpse backstage, a mosaic from her workshop, beautifully laid out by some clever website designer.

Decubber describes her pieces as history that can be worn, as documentation of the history behind their origins, from porcelain manufacturers of old to the eclectic output of contemporary ceramicists. This history also includes nods to cultural influences rooted in geography, from subsaharan styles to asian forms, stressing the importance of art to break nativist boundaries.

It is perhaps no coincidence that this work caught my eye during a time when the denial of history partially drives election outcomes. “Let’s not make our innocent White children feel bad when they hear in school that humans were treated as animals by their ancestors! Let’s not delve into the racist structures of our nation lest we ourselves would have to admit that we are on the side of evil, if only via complacency. Let’s not even face the fact that maybe, after all, we ourselves don’t think of ranking skin color, religion, class as wrong. As just one example, almost 50% of Republicans assert that only Christians can be true Americans.

seen on Twitter on yesterday

In Virginia it was not just the straw man of Critical Race Theory. A lot of uproar was caused by a 2019 third party – audit report that described public schools as “hostile learning environment” for students of color and that staff often failed to address racist incidents. Multiple students, the local NAACP, and even the commonwealth’s attorney general have called for the public school system to correct systemic racial discrimination.” This led to a 2021 equity plan calling for implicit bias training, enhanced protocols for handling racist behavior, and improved reporting systems for students. Parents erupted, suing the system over the plan, and the Fox news universe took over during a time of parental frustration with school closures due to Covid that had reached the boiling point. (Ref.) Preliminary statistics of voter choice indicate that Republicans gained the most strength in districts that had recently seen increased diversity in their student population.

Nationally we see the same trend emerging, just looking at school board meeting disruptions. It really is a perfect platform. Boards are accessible, they are filled with or represent parents driven to the brink by worries about their children and the burden of homeschooling during the Covid lockdowns. Aspiring candidates are easily financed with organized dark money (like the Tea Party of yore, by the same sources.) And hostile environments and even violent threats drive a lot of parents who were perfectly happy to be members of school boards or other educational settings into retirement.

Let’s face it: we are not seeing a simple misunderstanding about the dog whistle Critical Race Theory being or not being taught in public schools. We are seeing a veiled but deeply ingrained aversion of many parents to a change in racial relations, to a reckoning with racial history in general, a willingness to hold on to their own prejudices. “Yes, slavery was bad, so we ended it hundreds of years ago. Let’s move on, nothing to see here. And if we have to ban Toni Morrison books, so be it.” We see a centeredness on White kids when CBSNews asks “How young is too young to teach kids about race?” while Black kids as young as three years of age feel the implications of their race. For them obliviousness to race is not optional. Why should it be for White kids?

How do you make that an issue as a democratic campaigner, calling out voters‘ explicit or implicit racism, without shooting yourself in the foot? Or, to stay in line with today’s visuals, walking barefoot over broken shards?

Here are shards of light turned to music.

Raise a Voice – Art as Social Praxis

Sooooo – long piece today which was written as a review for OregonArtsWatch over the weekend. You can read it on their site or the usual way below. The latter will, of course, give you the bonus of music, as per usual (the favorite musician of the artist who I interviewed.) This was the first time I venture out in over a year to actually review an exhibition, and I felt grateful that it turned out to be a splendid occasion. See for yourself.

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 …the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And thordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure.” 

– Jaques RancièreThe Politics of Aesthetics – The Distribution of the Sensible.

Theodore A. Harris, Artist

Ownership. It’s a difficult concept to define, given that it can be applied to relations between a person and an object like a painting or a piece of land, or relations to legal entities like a business, a domain or a copyright. Ownership is usually protected by law, although the details of this protection vary according to cultures, economic systems, and other customs. In each case, the details specify who has which rights to what they own, and also who is allowed the use or enjoyment of others’ possessions only with the owners’ consent.

There are often ethical questions around ownership that we have trouble resolving, despite all the laws. Should we appoint scientific ownership to cells taken from an individual without consent? (Think Henrietta Lacks.) The privilege in that case was assigned to the scientific community and the pharmacology industry (which, of course, benefitted heavily from this ownership).

Should we grant ownership of discovered skeletal remains to the anthropology community or to Native American tribes demanding that the remains be returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act ? In the case of Kennewick Man, it took a 9-year legal battle, advances in DNA testing, and a 2016 legislative change that finally allowed the ancient bones to come home to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes for reburial according to their traditions.

Who is the owner of objects that were illegally obtained? Jewish families whose art was stolen or expropriated under the reign of National Socialism have been granted restitution by the courts. African American plaintiffs in a case arguing that daguerreotypes of their enslaved ancestors belong to them and not Harvard University, have been denied by the courts. The argument that the photographs were taken under conditions of slavery and with the explicit intent to demonstrate the “truth” of White superiority by depicting the slaves in full frontal nudity, and thus constitute crimes against humanity, held no sway with the judges.

Theodore A. Harris. Postcard from Conquest (Collage and Conflict series), 2008, triptych, 85″ x 42′ in each panel, collage printed on paper , mixed media collage on panel.

There is a different kind of ownership, no less beset by ethical concerns. This kind lies in the role of the gate keeper who owns the power to control access to a given domain, and, equally important, the power to frame the criteria that define the domain and the rules of participation.

The ethics of gate keeping – in the realm of art as well as politics – are addressed by Linfield University’s new exhibition: 

Theodore A. Harris: Art as Social Praxis – Dedicated to Art Historian David Craven

October 11- November 20, 2021

Opening Reception/Artist Talk: Thursday, Oct 14 – 6 pm – Linfield Gallery, Linfield University, McMinnville, OR 

Theodore A. Harris, Artist

Harris, collage artist, writer and founding director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Black Aesthetics, is based in Philadelphia. He is a warm, approachable man, whose thoughtful explanations are often punctuated by bursts of enthusiasm, quite infectious. As a writer, Harris is co-author of books with Amiri Baraka: Our Flesh of Flames (Anvil Arts Press) and Malcolm X as Ideology (LeBow Books); with Fred Moten: i ran from it and was still in it (Cusp Books); as well as TRIPTYCH: Text by Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (Caza de Poesía). His visual art can be found in public and private collections, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Center for Africana Studies, the W.E.B. DuBois College House, and Penn Libraries, University of Pennsylvania; Saint Louis University Museum of Art; and Lincoln University. Since 1985 he has taught at the renowned Anti-Graffiti Network/Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, which he co-founded.

The artist has created work that is historically pertinent and initiates political thought – two benchmarks that are essential for art to be significant, in the eyes of eminent art historian David Craven (1951 – 2012) to whom the exhibition is dedicated, and whose analytic insights have clearly informed the art before us. (A helpful introduction to Craven’s life and work by Brian Winkenweder, professor of Art History and chair of the art department at Linfield, who organized the exhibition and invited the artist, can be found here.) Winkenweder has a track record of placing his students in first-rate MFA programs, not least by using exposure to the various complex exhibits in the beautiful Linfield gallery as a “learning laboratory.” The university fully supports his endeavors, not something you hear often across art departments in this country, testimony to an institution that understands the value of an art education and the critical thinking that it instills.

Brian Winkenwerder, Professor of Art History, Linfield University

Harris’ work on display is, as it turns out, prescient in some ways, eerily transposable from one era to another. 

Take the collage murals now affixed to the walls opposite the Linfield Gallery. One depicts a young, masked boy – looking at us perhaps cautiously, perhaps accusingly – next to an inverted image of the Capitol building. Created in 1995, the context then was the Rwandan Genocide, the boy witness to the massacres against displaced persons, masked to combat the stench from the scores of killed Tutsis, the ethnic minority that fled Hutu persecution. The U.S. did nothing to intervene in the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousand of people, missing an opportunity to mitigate a crime at best, actively pursuing its own geo-political interests at worst. 

When looking at this collage in 2021, the mask can come to denote another kind of symbolism – the fate of a world exposed to a pandemic and “responses” that again range from missed opportunities or misplaced optimism at best, to the pursuit of political and economic goals while sacrificing lives at worst. The inverted capitol building brings to mind the attacks of January 6th, an attempt to turn the democratic process upside down and put structural agreements enshrined in the constitution on their head.

Theodore A Harris Vetoed Dreams (1995)

The second mural invites the viewer to a mix of visual depictions of armed conflict and text, including a written justification of the Iraq invasion by Condoleeza Rice. The triptych from 2008 is titled “Don’t Shoot the Caregivers.” At the time it invoked the controversy over the true reason for the war, whether the U.S. had to protect the world from weapons of mass destruction or whether an un-satiable appetite for fossil resources motivated the invasion. Independent of reason, the fact remained that the victims of war were those indigenous to the land, its caretakers. Fast forward to 2021 where native populations spear-head the protest against resource extraction and dangerous transport through tribal lands on our own continent. The fight against the construction of various pipelines exposes the caretakers to violence, at times deadly, now on our own soil. Alternatively, 2021 also provides scenarios where the polarization around the vaccination debate has led to violent attacks on caregivers who are trying to heal and protect those afflicted with Covid-19.

Theodore A. Harris. Don’t shoot the Caregivers” (2008)

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The concern about ownership is forced on us by those who ask: 

Is it art? “Oh no,” would the gate keepers of yore respond while clutching, if not pearls, then their tie pins. Belonging to a guild of self-referencing art critics and art historians, learned, territorial critics like Clement Greenberg or Hilton Kramer seek to legislate who counts as an artist and also to frame what constitutes art, in particular establishing formal rules and focusing on the purity of medium and style (no language allowed!) 

Is it art? “The essential kind given its content,” would perhaps be Craven’s answer, “the notion of aesthetic quality has to be expanded!”

This contrast of opinions between progressive art historians and those considered establishment is brilliantly skewered in Harris’ body of work ThesentürConscientious Objector to Formalism, with many examples displayed as large prints in the current exhibition. 

Riffing on Martin Luther’s then revolutionary theses pinned to the church door in Wittenberg, the title points us to the urgency of reform, of change needed when it comes to whose voice is allowed at the table. The various exhibits contain snippets of quotations of and references to the luminaries in the art world, some more accessible than others to the uninitiated. They are anchored by a repeated image of a group of men familiar from Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting “The Syndics” (1666.) These were the men from Amsterdam’s Drapers Guild, appointed to exercise quality control of dyed cloth, assigning prices and marketability during a time of intensifying import/export business and slave trade with the expansion of the East Indian Trade Company, a de facto colonial ruler since 1602. The excerpted image was found by Harris on a Dutch Masters Cigar box. Gate keepers in their own right.

Theodore A. Harris. Exhibits from Thesentür :Conscientious Objector to Formalism series, 2020, 
     46” x 29” in, digital image printed on paper. 
Theodore A. Harris. After David Craven 4 (Thesentür Conscientious Objector to Formalism series), 2020, 
46” x 29” in, digital image printed on paper.

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Voice. The question of who is allowed to speak has been debated since Aristoteles. The decision of who has a voice reflects power hierarchies, then and now, with the Greek philosopher among the first to marginalize certain populations who he deemed not to have logos, the power of speech needed to participate in the political arena. Whether we look at medieval guilds claiming their territories, to the contemporary exclusionary mechanisms reserving access to education to certain classes, or to which nations are allowed to join global alliances, a seat at the table was something that was never guaranteed. The most glaring example in our own country is the institution of slavery, followed (as an obviously related issue) by the question of who has the right and the access to vote. In these and other domains, marginalized populations, including, of course, people of color and women, have had to fight to make their voices heard.

Which voices are admitted will also influence the framing of issues, and this can have major consequences. Is affirmative action a necessity that compensates for past injustice or is it yet another entitlement in a society that (some claim) has reached (or, in the view of the Supreme Court, needs to reach) a state of color blindness? Are vaccine mandates depriving us of guaranteed freedoms, or are they protective measures needed to ensure freedom? Is housing a human right, or is it to be treated as a financial asset only? These are not just theoretical questions – consider, for example, that different framing of crime leads to different political outcomes. If you ask people how to combat crime that “invades the city like a virus,” they are twice as likely to vote in favor of social reform (rather than adding police forces),compared to people who are asked how to combat “crime that preys like a beast on the city.” (Ref.)

Theodore A. Harris. End This War…after Shirley Chisholm (Collage and Conflict series). 2008, triptych. 9” x 11″ in each panel, mixed media collage on board.

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Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) once said that art is no longer able to perform a vital function in our culture. I strongly disagree. Art like Harris’ work lends its power to social movements that add new and different voices to the chorus, voices that help address social inequality. Those previously unheard not only want to have a voice, but they want to use that voice to challenge the framing that favors existing power relations, and encourage transformation instead. No longer content to be silenced, this art provides a template for those gathering the courage to speak up.

The exhibition lifts up excluded voices. It is beautifully curated by Thea Gahr who has been teaching art at Linfield for almost a decade and is a notable print maker in her own right.

Thea Gahr, Linfield Gallery Curator
Teaching students in the print studio

Importantly, it provides a welcome signal at a fitting time and place. Tenured Linfield professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner who had spoken out against university leaders about allegations of sexual misconduct as well as antisemitism and the mishandling of racist graffiti on campus, was abruptly terminated not half a year ago. The move created outrage in the national and international community of educators and scholars, aghast over the silencing of a Jewish voice, and those of the students he encouraged to come forward, by a Baptist-affiliated organization. A since-filed lawsuit by Pollack-Pelzner interprets the firing as retaliation against a whistleblower – a discriminatory business practice with no due process. (Subsequent events seem to vindicate the whistleblower: One of the people accused has now resigned from the Board and has since been indicted on multiple counts of sexual abuse. Another Trustee and long-term donor to the university immediately resigned from the Board in protest of the firing, another Board member stepped down several weeks ago.) Whose voices are heard? 

*

The ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the trueAnd thordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure.”  Harris’ work reminded me of Rancière’s insight, since it develops familiar images and quotations into a truth that can only be discerned by ripping them out of their context. By turning things upside down, the artist encourages us to look and listen in different, new ways, appropriate to moments of crisis. It is enormously empowering in its suggestion that the gate keepers can’t keep out all of us. The potential for transformation is there, repair an option if we use our voice.

Plan a field trip to McMinnville. Talk to the artist who is in residence until 10/14 and the folks who make it all happen. Much to contemplate. 

Theodore A. Harris: Art as Social Praxis – Dedicated to Art Historian David Craven

October 11- November 20, 2021

Opening Reception/Artist Talk: Thursday, Oct 14 – 6 pm – Linfield Gallery, Linfield University, McMinnville, OR 

Staged/Un-Staged

Lots of pictures today. They continue the theme that I introduced at the beginning of this week, varied approaches to memory and change across time.

The first round concerns a German photographer, Birthe Piontek, who is now based in Canada. I came across her work when looking at a review of a current exhibition in Brooklyn, NY, that offers new angles on food photography. Other than that edibles are involved, the inclusion of Piontek as food photography struck me as farfetched – but then so did her artist statement for the staged work, below. It is too bad, since the work itself is creative, clean, with superb workmanship. Meaning must, I guess.

Janus is another iteration of my ongoing inquiry into the topics of memory and change. All photographs in this series were taken in the same corner of my studio as I am interested in how an artist can find inspiration in the limitations of a specific space. …

In some images, the objects are photographed alone; in others, I perform with them. In the combination of body and object, a kinship is revealed. Much of the series rests on the idea of an alikeness of all organic matter that is exposed to the forces of change. We all adapt, mutate, grow and decline every day, even if this transformation is mostly invisible to the eye. Like the ancient Roman god, Janus – the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings – we always try to look into the future while being informed by our past. Thus the current moment, in which change is happening, usually slips by unnoticed.”

Birthe Piontek Pear/Knee
Birthe Piontek Grpefruit/Armpit
Birthe Piontek Parsnips/Hand
Birthe Piontek Strawberries/Elbow
Birthe Piontek Sliced Pumpkin/Back

The second round is devoted to an artist whose work was introduced to me by a friend. (Thank you C.N.!) Deana Lawson uses staged images as well, this time on steroids. Or maybe I should prefer the term grand scale or regal, as it is offered in various glowing reviews of Centropy, her current exhibition at the Guggenheim.

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Boss award, Lawson approaches strangers who she feels drawn to and then elaborately surrounds them with scenes and props that confuse all sense of being rooted in a particular time – they point to past, press, future simultaneously – yet the artist herself calls it time stopping. The exhibition itself adds holograms and light prisms that enhance a sense of the surreal. Here is the entry of the exhibition blurb of the museum:

“… creates images that are rooted in a moment from the tangible world, but ultimately exist in the shimmering in-between space of dreams, memories, and spiritual communion, where the everyday is transfigured into the uncanny and the magnificent.

Then again, when you approach her short film that describes her approach to her work and offers interviews with and about many of her subjects, you are guided by an introduction that points to

“. ..the creation of images of Black diasporic identity that powerfully evoke the self-possession and divinity of her subjects.”

One last take (in line with the relentless praise machinery surrounding the artist): the NYT headlines a detailed review of the artist and her work with this interpretation:

The Artist Upending Photography’s Brutal Racial Legacy

Deana Lawson’s regal, loving, unburdened photographs imagine a world in which Black people are free from the distortions of history.

Can we PLEASE just have the images speak for themselves?

Actually, nope. Because we would miss, (many if not most of us, I certainly,) what is potentially disturbingly problematic with this work, including the art critic’s worries about the abject objectification of Black bodies, of a continuation of degradation and exploitation central to historic photography of Blacks, and of misrepresentation of religious practices in the diaspora. Add to that active suppression of art criticism of this work by the artist and those making money around her art. Sorry, more reading required. Then make up your one mind.

“Young Grandmother,” 2019.Credit…Deana Lawson, from Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
“Ms. Bell at Home,” 2021.Credit…Deana Lawson, from Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Deana Lawson, “Chief” (2019),Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)
Left: Deana Lawson – Nation, 2018 / Right: Deana Lawson – Grace with Woman (Arbeitstitel / working title), 2020. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Deana Lawson – The Garden, 2015. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Alternatively, you can peruse today’s un-staged photographs from yesterday’s visit to a friend’s garden. They document neither history, nor change, nor the future, but simply the persimmons, apples and pears ripened by this summer’s unusual heat. At times I’m content to look at just what IS.

Looking at was is, and listening to somethin else…..

Unseen.

I want things to unfold slowly, often my things are quiet and simple enough that it takes time—a kind of slow overlapping—before people feel it.” – Anna Valentina Murch

Unfold slowly it did. It took me a full decade not jut to feel the art but to actually see it.

I’ve walked by that elevator shaft on the waterfront for years without ever noticing that the windows contained images of water, different configurations of waves illuminated by differences in light depending on cloud formation or time of day.

Created in 2011 by Anna Valentina Murch (lovingly remembered (and quoted) after her untimely death in 2014 by a friend here,) the unassuming public art is called River Wrap. It consists of 40 photographic images on glass that frame the corners of the ten story elevator tower that connects the Darlene Hooley bridge to the Moody plaza below. The photographs are of reflections of light moving across the surface of water echoing the bordering landscape, the Willamette river.

The idea of water seemingly filling a tower might have had different connotations in 2011 compared to 2021. Then it represented beauty, perhaps intended to be soothing, a reminder of waves lapping gently. Now I can but think of the hurricane-induced flooding of buildings, or memorials to rivers run dry, if not the drowned – art does change when historic context changes.

The elevator is currently closed, so I had no chance to explore what they would look like when you travel up and down at slow speed, or if they can be seen from within at all.

Murch was a British installation artist based in San Francisco. Solo works or those together with her husband Doug Hollis often focussed on ways to make people spend time and look: accentuating reflections, sparkle, glow and change in color of light on various surfaces, often water. A more familiar work here in Portland is the light art attached to the Tillicum Crossing Bridge. It uses 178 LED modules to illuminate the cables, towers, and underside of the deck. The base color is determined by the water’s temperature. The timing and intensity of the base color’s changes, moving the light across the bridge, are determined by the river’s speed. A secondary color pattern is determined by the river’s depth, that changes on the two towers and the suspension cable.

Other notable art installations by her can be found here.

So why did I notice River Wrap now and not before? A possible proximal cause: the light hit it just right to sparkle. But it was a gray, diffuse afternoon.

A two part answer could be:

(1) Distraction.

The elevator tower is across the street from the aerial tram station, where comings and goings of those futuristic looking passenger capsules draw your attention. There is also a never-ending stream of people entering or exiting the OHSU medical building, bound to draw your gaze. There is the new(ish) bridge glimpsed in the background at the river, usually the destination for my walks, beckoning the camera. So I never attended to the west side of the Moody Plaza before.

(2) Increased Attention.

Due to restricted movement, my radius of exploration has so incredibly shrunk. No more travel, no more visits to indoor spaces including exhibitions in galleries and museums, alike. No more walking or photographing where crowds of people congregate, all due to the pandemic. Those spaces, then, that are still open to me therefore are looked at in search of anything that is new, or worthwhile thinking through, or good for surprises while I walk there over and over and over again…

After all, the poem below does not apply to me (although I love it, like so much of her work.) I do behave in the cosmos as advised. At least I try to think so of myself…

Distraction

I misbehaved in the cosmos yesterday.
I lived around the clock without questions,
without surprise.

I performed daily tasks
as if only that were required.

Inhale, exhale, right foot, left, obligations,
not a thought beyond
getting there and getting back.

The world might have been taken for bedlam,
but I took it just for daily use.

No whats — no what fors —
and why on earth it is —
and how come it needs so many moving parts.

I was like a nail stuck only halfway in the wall
or
(comparison I couldn’t find).

One change happened after another
even in a twinkling’s narrow span.

Yesterday’s bread was sliced otherwise
by a hand a day younger at a younger table.

Clouds like never before and rain like never,
since it fell after all in different drops.

The world rotated on its axis,
but in a space abandoned forever.

This took a good 24 hours.
1,440 minutes of opportunity.
86,400 seconds for inspection.

The cosmic savoir vivre
may keep silent on our subject,
still it makes a few demands:
occasional attention, one or two of Pascal’s thoughts,
and amazed participation in a game
with rules unknown.

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012): Distraction, from Colon (2005), translated by Clare Cavanagh in MAP: Collected and Last Poems, 2015

One thing is clear, though. So much public art is so in your eye, so prominently placed or gaudily executed that it is almost impossible not to be aware oft it. The quieter kind, like today’s example, then packs the punch of discovery, unbidden, serendipitously,creating a louder and longer lasting emotional echo, at least in my case. A gift.

Water-related music today by Sibelius.

Unimaginable

The light was strange. I walked the Sandy River delta for the first time since January, so grateful to be back and a bit worried if I had the strength for the full round in the 90 degree September heat. Thoughts of the fragility of existence, my companions for too long, were underscored by the wind that came down from the mountains, making the dry branches and grasses bending and trembling, the poplars noisy with their rattling silver leaves, upended by the gusts.

Claude Monet Haystacks 1885

The gusts were hints of colder times, easily ignored during this endless summer, perhaps perceived only because my thoughts were swirling around the essay I’ll urge you to read today, if you have time to read anything (I’ll keep my own remarks correspondingly short.) Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a neoconservative scholar, lays out what quite likely might be ahead for us as a country, and it is frightening to hear its measured analysis by a conservative, no less.

Ermenoville, Department Oise

Yes, politics. Yes, more bad news. Yes, I know the feeling of not wanting to hear one more scary thing in a world full of them.

Claude Monet Poplars at Giverny 1887

Do read it.

Camille Pissaro Poplars, Eragny 1895

You want to be prepared for what one might once thought unimaginable. Even though it is tempting to ignore that there is always a second act in the wings. One we might not like.

I might mention the German election results in passing…. major parties had a head-to head competition with a razor thin edge going, for now, to the Social Democrats – a centrist party who will need to form a coalition with any number of smaller parties to govern, an unwieldy moloch marked by political compromises. All signs point to continuation of the familiar paths rather than radical re-orientation in view of the needed actions for climate change. For me the most frightening number was the fact that among those voting for the first time a higher number picked a business friendly, conservative party (FDP) over the Green Party – so much for the “youth will save us.” And two large states in the Eastern parts of the country, Thuringia and Saxony, went all in for the right-wing extremist AfD. Berlin will have a mayor whose phD title was rescinded for plagiarism and who gave up her ministerial seat as minister for family in the wake of the scandal, now to oversee the government of the capital.

Claude Monet Wind effect (Poplar Series) 1891

I’ll sweeten the reading assignment with some classic paintings of poplars that were brought to mind by the beauty in front of my eyes – in black and white to emphasize the structure and pattern (and similarities) of these wispy trees.

Vincent van Gogh Poplars at St. Remy 1889

Maybe the river will have water again (photograph of the tree lined water is from 2 years ago around this time) – right now it is unimaginably low.

Claude Monet Poplars at the Epte 1891
Vincent van Gogh Poplars near Nuenen 1884

Soon the trees will shed their leaves, and the scent of decaying silver and gold will emanate from the layers and layers that soften your step. I’ll be out there again, soon.

Paul Gauguin Landscape with Poplars 1875

Today’s music acknowledges that somehow most of these paintings seem to have originated in France, even though Germany and the PNW is full of poplars as well. The selection of pieces by Ravel is quite representative of his best work.

Sue Darius Lombardy Poplars

And here is a poem from the late 1800s :

Binsey Poplars

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 
  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 
  All felled, felled, are all felled; 
    Of a fresh and following folded rank 
                Not spared, not one 
                That dandled a sandalled 
         Shadow that swam or sank 
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 

  O if we but knew what we do 
         When we delve or hew — 
     Hack and rack the growing green! 
          Since country is so tender 
     To touch, her being só slender, 
     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 
     But a prick will make no eye at all, 
     Where we, even where we mean 
                 To mend her we end her, 
            When we hew or delve: 
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 
  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 
     Strokes of havoc unselve 
           The sweet especial scene, 
     Rural scene, a rural scene, 
     Sweet especial rural scene. 

Find the Rebels.

I encountered the painting below a few days ago. It is currently making the rounds as a meme on social media.

It brought to mind how we interpret images when taking context into account, whether provided by cultural knowledge or extraneous narrative, including titles for the images, in this case The Irritating Gentleman.

Berthold Woltze The Irritating Gentleman (Der lästige Kavalier) – 1876

Berthold Woltze was a German art professor at the University of Weimar and, besides portraiture, generally devoted to narrative painting in a realist style, the hallmark of art in the Victorian era. Pictures could be “read” through literary allusions, clues through historical markers (costume or props) and explanatory provisions through titles or artist statements.

In the last decade of the 1800s something shifted. Paintings started to be more ambiguous, open to interpretation and they turned to subjects that dealt with issues arising with modernity: the role of women, gender conflict, sexuality and power hierarchies. Textual references were gone, and no clue provided – the audience had to figure out what the depicted dramatic scenes implied.

The genre of Problem Picture had arrived and it took off like wildfire. Art once reserved for an educated elite familiar with the literary canon, was now open to the middle- and even working class. Anyone could guess what seemed to be going on in an ambiguous painting with no references and the press, including publications that reached the masses and produced broadsheets that shifted a focus on art to a focus on entertainment, helped with dissemination. Which is one of the reasons, most likely, that this genre was soon dismissed or even ridiculed by “serious” artists and art critics, who all bent towards a new modern aesthetic of how art made you feel, rather than what a painting meant, and who cherished exclusivity, not the chatter of the masses.

Here is just one example of the shift from defined narrative to ambiguity (it and much of today’s summary were learned from Pamela Fletcher‘s Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture 1895 – 1914.)

The two paintings below, by the same painter, some 18 years apart, have similar set-ups. Legal authorities and a vulnerable witness/defendant, separated by a table. The early ones gives tons of clues: the dress reveals that the Puritans try to hunt down a family member of a royalist family, the title implies it’s the father, during the Civil War. The anxious look on the mother’s face betrays her fear that the boy might reveal her husband’s where-abouts and the larger-than-life central soldier spells the real danger should Dad be caught.

William Frederick Yeames “And when did you last see your father?” (1878)
William Frederick Yeames Defendant and Counsel (1895)

All is ambiguous in the later painting. What did the woman do? What will be her fate? Is counsel on her side, or are they part of the interrogation? Is her expression interpretable? Why are women dragged into court – immediate thoughts of risqué matters were triggered and fed into the social discourse around changes in morality. Did she harm her husband? Betray him? Is one of them pursuing divorce? Is she accused of prostitution? Is it a matter of surreptitiously obtained inheritance?

Here are further examples of these kind of paintings.

Is she coming or leaving, telling them off or being told off? Is the size of the shadow an indication of the parents’ wrath? What do the daughter’s rich clothes imply? Is she impervious, proud or defiant?

Who is the soldier in the mirror going to choose? What does the co-existence of these females roles imply? How would a female audience react, compared to males?

Problem Pictures became a kind of social practice where artists, audiences and the press interacted, with public conversations about possible interpretations providing space for a discussion of changing gender roles and expectations. Art for all, a seedbed for progress.

Back to our irritating gentleman, though.

EXCERPT

The painting was done too early to be counted as a true Problem Picture, although it is currently bandied about as one. The title provides some focus but there is indeed room for interpretation. Here is a very young girl, mourning dress indicating bereavement, sitting in a train compartment, being chatted up by an uninvited guy behind her, despite her tears, bystander pointedly not getting involved. Has she lost her parents and needs to leave home to seek employment as a maid or some such? Is the guy comforting her or capitalizing on her vulnerability? Simple cat call or obscene pursuit?

Some ambiguity, but centered on the dude. Here’s the crux, though: the original title given to the painting by Woltze was Ins feindliche Leben (Into the hostile life.) It was changed only after the painting came onto the market, most likely by the art dealer. The new title The irritating Gentleman shifts the perspective towards the obnoxious caller (a bad apple, a tasteless individual) away from the original title’s focus on a young girl being exposed to a world that will from now on harass her on many occasions, exploit her or even harm her. Into the hostile life is also a line, memorized by about every German school child certainly in 1876, from Friedrich Schiller’s seminal 1798 poem Song of the Bell which depicts gender roles in specificity, with the male having to move into hostile life, scrape and compete, and fight and females deserving the sheltering cocoon of a household and male protection.

The man must go out
In hostile life living,
Be working and striving
And planting and making,
Be scheming and taking,
Through hazard and daring,
His fortune ensnaring.

Der Mann muß hinaus
 Ins feindliche Leben,
 Muss wirken und streben
 Und pflanzen und schaffen,
Erlisten, erraffen,
 Muss wetten und wagen,
 Das Glück zu erjagen.

Clearly, then, these definite titles (one with the typical literary allusion) make us look at the painting in different ways, from an early context of the plight of the poor and orphaned in a cold-hearted, misogynistic world, to the later context of an annoying bloke who might or might not be representative of his sex. To be a true Problem Picture, the title should have been something like The Train Compartment which would have allowed us to disambiguate the whole thing ourselves. Would have loved to eavesdrop on that public discussion! Would there be sufficient irritation to rebel against the omnipresent female harassment implied by the painting?

Can today’s photographs, on a completely different topic, be disambiguated? I’ll leave you no titles….

Music by a German composer who is not very well known, Hans Pfitzner (1869 – 1949). Narrative enough to complement today’s musings.

Sonic Spectres

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?

.