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Exquisite Gorge II: Felt Worlds.

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” — ― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

***

The last time I was surrounded by, no, immersed in dots, was during a visit to The Broad, L.A.’s museum of contemporary art. If you braved the eternal lines for Souls of a Million Light Years Away, you were accorded exactly 45 seconds to explore the experience once you entered a room full of mirrors and LED lights – guard with stop watch on hand standing outside and calling you out. The installation by nonagenarian artist Yayoi Kusama, obsessed with polka dots, fully insisting that we are all connected souls in the world, felt more spectacle than art, ready for the Instagram crowd.

My visit to Xander Griffith, one of the fiber artists for the Exquisite Gorge II project at Maryhill Museum this summer, put me among the dots again, this time made from felt – but the experience could not have been more different, on so many dimensions, length of time and friendliness of interaction included.

Practicing his art might make his soul grow – looking at it sure lifted mine.

Xander Griffith sitting underneath one of his felt “paintings.”

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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.”

———————–

Originally from Arizona, Griffith is a quick-witted young artist who discovered felt some eight years ago and has pursued working with it with a passion ever since. (He used to do Improv – would have loved to see him there as well!) One of the inspirations came from a chance encounter at the Portland Art Museum when he was visiting Portland from San Diego where he then lived and collaborated with the non-profit arts organizations Sol Diego Arts Collaborative and the San Diego Collaborative Arts Project, working on diverse large-scale creative projects. With no connection to pointillism or any other impressionist artist – Griffith started to work in shipping right after high school, never exposed to formal art training – he was struck by the effects of this painting by Théo Van Rysselberghe.

Theo van Rysselberghe Plage à marée basse à Ambleteuse, le soir (Beach At Low Tide, Ambleteuse, Evening) 1900

He started to cut, roll, shape and manipulate prefabricated felt, the kind you can purchase at any craft store, building, with a hot-glue gun, tableaux that contain entire worlds .

There is no shyness around color, partly driven by what is available, partly an expression of the enthusiasm Griffith brings to describing a world containing beauty. He used to buy the acrylic or rayon-wool blend fabrics by the yard. Eventually he could afford bolts, then cartons of bolts, which lowers the risk that the manufacturers change hue or saturation while he’s in the middle of a project.

Nature in all of its variation is a focus of the displays, but you have to look for it – the felt paintings manage to surprise you with a lot of hidden detail, in color as well as form, once you’ve gone beyond the first overall impression of a riot of saturated pattern. The art reveals itself really with successive inspections, making you interact much more actively with each piece than you would have presumed. (Find the frog or the heron below.)

Griffith is closely connected to nature, living with a rather large snake, a rabbit, and the occasional injured squirrel being nursed back to health, together with his longtime partner in a duplex in Vancouver, WA. The rooms are filled with his creations, a joyous riot of shapes and hues.

Lou Palermo, Maryhill’s Curator of Education, in conversation with the artist.

After the first years of the typical emerging-artist struggles, he was chosen to display his art at Portland Airport. The tableaux were exhibited along the entire Concourse B and thousands of people encountered them. He’s not lacked for commissions ever since, now able to create his art full-time. Here he explains in a short clip his approach to making these felt paintings.

I was taken by the fluidity of the work, unfiltered and unafraid, a sense of improvised decisions guided by intuition, and occasionally “corrected” by removing misplaced sections through application of heat from the back (a great willingness to sacrifice all that labor-intensive placement.) This is one of the contrasts that I alluded to earlier, when remembering Yayoi Kusama‘s work: if you look at the dot patterns on her ubiquitous pumpkins there is nothing that is not pre-calculated to the millimeter, and precision reigns supreme.

The Japanese artist has freely talked about the traumatic events in her early years during a childhood burdened with parental abuse, and I have always wondered if there was an obsessive, even compulsive yearning to control environments with precision, despite their seemingly cheerful subjects.

***

I had another association to Griffith’s approach with something much more closely related visually: Aboriginal Dot Art. A short overview of the history of Australia’s most famous art form can be found here. The almost 80.000 years old indigenous culture without a written language was ephemeral in its art. Some rock paintings survived, but most of the stories told and symbols transmitted were drawn on sand or bodies, quickly removed, meant to preserve ancient knowledge within tribal boundaries, kept secret from outsiders.

In 1971, dot paintings found their way into permanence for the first time, when Aboriginal people were encouraged by a teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, to draw and paint murals, then paint on canvas. Given the general visibility of the art, the need to preserve cultural symbols, it is speculated, led to heavy layering and over-dotting of the paintings as a way to hide and protect their sacred elements in the works that held special internal cultural value.

Yumari by Uta Uta Tjangala, 1981. Courtesy of the British Museum

One can see some similarities in the way animals are embedded in Griffith’s dotted worlds. What sets his work apart, though, is the fact that it has become increasingly three-dimensional. Let me first say: No matter how hard you try, photographs don’t do the work justice. I was really surprised how much looking at the real thing changed the perception – and the feeling the pieces elicited. There is sense of depth, even movement, of warmth from the materials used, that simply doesn’t come across in photographs.

This is particularly true for his approach to depicting his Columbia river section that is to be displayed at Maryhill’s Exquisite Corpse project come August 6th.

His felt creation of some aspect of the landscape are slowly taking shape, still under experimentation.

The individual pieces are stuffed with more hand rolled felt flecks, the manual labor going in to these creations intense.

***

Xander Griffith is a burner. He has attended the annual Burning Man event in Nevada’s Black Desert as well as its regional off-shoots countless times. The open-air art installations and community celebration has grown into a metropolis, one week of the year, that admits close to 80.000 people, charging $575 for a main ticket per person and a $140 vehicle pass plus fees. Cheap it ain’t. Yet tickets were sold out 29 minutes (!) after online sales opened this year after a Covid hiatus. (There are more to be had across different sales venues until August.)

The experience is clearly one that people yearn for, and that enriches them in so many ways that they live with the costs, economically as well as pragmatically: you have to bring everything in (15 gallons of water per day per person included) and cart everything out from an environment that has above 100 degrees during the days and is cold at night. Sustainability is writ large, and requires effort, particularly given that so many art installations are burned to the ground by the end of the week, and so many participants arrive by plane and endless car rides.

What draws so many artists to Burning Man is an environment that has yet to find its match. The folks at the Smithsonian tried to expose this to a larger public with an exhibit about Burning Man 4 years ago at the Renwick Gallery for Contemporary Craft. No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man explained it this way: for one, the scale at which you can work in the desert location is unmatched. Just imagine, 55 ft pieces surrounding you everywhere. Secondly, the installations are complicated enough that they require a community to be set up, only a collective of artists/workers with diverse skills and backgrounds can make them happen. And finally many of the pieces have an interactive quality – their kinetic, light or sound components, their invitation to touch them or climb them, all expect and encourage an involvement of the viewer.

This last component is certainly deeply lodged in Griffith’s art – the pieces invite you to touch, to feel, to peruse. I also am willing to go out on a limb, that the spiritual aspects of the Burning Man culture have found their way into the souls of many of the participating artists – here is a short talk by the exhibition curator that partially speaks to that.

Of course we cannot look into souls, but Griffith’s work is currently used to soothe some agitated ones. PDX airport has recently opened a new sensory room which is available to passengers 24/7, designed to be a therapeutic space particularly for travelers living with anxiety or along the spectrum of autism. His felt designs might be calming, or they might spread joy. I certainly look forward to seeing what he comes up with for the installation at Maryhill, soul growing as we speak.

***

And here is FELT, some sufficiently old psych-prog-rock album to match my mood and age that I listened to when I drove home, through Vancouver neighborhoods full of lush murals on neighborhood stores, a sun way too hot for March but perfect for a band from 1970s Alabama. “Felt” is, of course, not just the material used in the art described, but also the past tense for the verb “feel.” Feeling itself can have two meanings: to touch or have a sensory experience of something, or to perceive or experience something emotionally. The one-wonder album elicited the latter, Griffith’s art, on the other hand, invites both.

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The Red Shimmer of Remembering – Celilo Recalled at The Reser

“…Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill.
The land is a being who remembers everything.
You will have to answer to your children, and their children, and theirs—
The red shimmer of remembering will compel you up the night to walk the perimeter of truth for understanding….” – Joy Harjo – Excerpt from Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015)

Analee Fuentes (Mexican-American) Sockeye Salmon, Spawning Oil on Canvas

Joy Harjo, a Musckogee Creek Nation member and 23rd Poet Laureate of the U.S., urged us in a recent collection of poems, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, to assess our place in the world, to mind our obligations derived from history, and to fulfill our duty to “speak in the language of justice.”

Celilo, Never Silenced, the remarkable inaugural art exhibition at the newly opened Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, provides memory aides that will help us to “walk the perimeter of truth,” as Harjo phrases it, perhaps the first step in the direction of justice.

What was Celilo? Who were the people displaced by a U.S. governmental decision to dam up a river that provided existential, spiritual and cultural essentials at Celilo falls where salmon fishing and concomitant trade meetings for the Pacific Northwest tribes happened since time immemorial? As I wrote before in OregonArtsWatch, the fates of salmon and the Northwest tribes were intertwined and received an immeasurable blow when the Dalles dam was constructed in 1957. The dam inundated the upstream Celilo Falls and Celilo village, the largest trading center for salmon, with scant compensation for the loss. Subpar housing was built only for a few permanent residents of the village who were displaced, ignoring all those tribal members who lived on reservations but regularly came to Celilo to fish and trade. It took until 2005 to start building the promised structures and no serious reparations have been paid for the immense loss of livelihoods that depend on salmon fishing.

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos / Confederated Tribes of Coos / Lower Umpqua / Siuslaw) Disasters of Man Acrylic, Graphite, China Marker, Color Pencil on BFK

I honestly have no idea how many people in Oregon, if approached on the street, would know this history or be aware of its implications. I wager that for most of us there will be few associations, negative or positive. For Pacific Northwest tribes, on the other hand, it was a rupture, endangering fish and river health alike, increasing conflict over ever scarcer resources, and ignoring the spiritual importance of salmon to tribal culture as much as the fact that food security was endangered with less protein available.

Richard Rowland (Hawaiian) Ahikaaroa Firebox Vase Anagama Wood-fired Vase

The Reser exhibition provides an educational starting point for a conversation about Native American losses and the conflict surrounding broken promises, undermined treaties, and the consequences for tribal members in the present and not just some hazy past. That said, the show is also a marvel in the way it collects and displays a wide range of artworks across diverse media, thoughtfully curated by gallery coordinator Karen De Benedetti, showcasing the resilience and power of contemporary tribal artists.

Gail Tremblay (Onondaga and Mi’kmaq) Stone Giants sleeping under the Bear Star Acrylic on Canvas 

De Benedetti knows to give the work room to breathe instead of overstuffing the walls, has a keen eye, and is willing to take risks with selections that vary across styles and accessibility – and all that in a part-time position, which makes the results all the more impressive. Trained as an artist and with a wide repertoire of experiences across educational and exhibitory settings, including positions at two previous art centers started from scratch, she knows the ropes. She managed to compile a set of works that introduce us to a significant number and variety of current Native American artists, one more interesting than the next.

Don Bailey (Hupa tribal member, raised on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in California) Once upon a time on the Columbia Oil on Canvas

Bailey is new to me. I was completely taken with the interplay of ambiguous planes in the painting, as well as the double use of paddle/pestle in the lower right corner, the landscape shifting in and out of configurations belonging to either nature or man.

Fused and blown glass, ceramics, painting, linocut prints, sculpture, photography, archival footage, poetry – smartly arranged, all telling a story, from different perspectives, about a river, a place, a sacred fishing ground and displaced nations – rising in resilience with memory intact and now translated into art. The “perimeter of truth” of which Harjo speaks was really laid out across these walls.

Amply represented is is Lillian Pitt’s intricate work. A member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs/ Wasco/ Yakama, she and Rick Bartow, who was an enrolled member of the Mad River Band of Wiyot Indians, and whose work is also included, probably have the highest name recognition.

Lillian Pitt River Stick Indian Cast Crystal, Steel and Granite

Lillian Pitt Ancestors Fused Glass

Lillian Pitt River Guardian Cast Crystal, Steele and Granite

Another familiar name is Joe Feddersen, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation (Okanagan and Arrow Lakes.) His sculptures exhibit an almost clinical serenity I so often associate with good blown glass, letting us perceive light through reflection and cast shadow, belying the insane skill required to produce such quiet elegance.

Joe Feddersen Fishtrap Blown Glass

Joe Feddersen Fishtrap V Blown Glass

There is archival photography capturing the history and contemporary photography by Joe Cantrell, Cherokee, raised in Cherokee County, Oklahoma who also contributed a driftwood sculpture.

Joe Cantrell Totem Enduring Resilience Driftwood

Joe Cantrell Walking Together Digital photograph on aluminum

***

When you exit the gallery towards the main entrance hall, you step into a large space marked by wood, glass, steel and concrete with a motion-sensitive public sculpture of a dandelion shedding its seeds. Brian Libby, my colleague at OregonArtsWatch, wrote about the history, architecture and philanthropy of Patricia Reser regarding the building here.

Jacqueline Metz and Nancy Chew Puff Rearview Mirror Ball

The Reser Center has at its core a state-of-the-art theatre that has multi-purpose use and, come June, will be presenting Portland Chamber Orchestra’s production of a large-scale work by Nancy Ives, Celilo Falls: We were there. The chamber-music piece will be accompanied by text and storytelling by Ed Edmo (Shoshone-Bannock) and projected photographic images by Joe Cantrell (Cherokee) which explores the geologic and human history of Celilo Falls.

It never ceases to amaze me how a single individual with a vision, means and generosity, can set great things in motion.

Pah-Tu Pitt (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs / Wasco / Yakama / Pitt River (Wintu)) Salish Protector Mask Carved Yellow Cedar – Sean Gallagher (Asuruk, Inupiaq) Arctic Goose Transcendence Acrylic on Canvas

When you walk upstairs you enter a space with a small gallery for emerging artists, which is as light-filled, with giant windows, as the first-floor space that abuts the street. On all levels, the outside is invited in, an openness towards and desire to merge with the community – which is by all reports what the new arts center is all about. Chris Ayzoukian, the Reser’s director, wants to celebrate the different cultures in the community and provide a platform that gives diverse artists a voice with this performing arts center. The building, which makes the inside visible wherever possible, reflects that goal. At the same time, the neighborhood is reflected in the glass of several of the gallery works, including one by Jonnel Covault, also new to me.

Jonnel Covault Undamned Linocut Print

Rick Bartow (Mad River Band of Wiyot Indians,) Fall Hawk I Monotype

Covault’s linocuts capture the landscape in precise and elegant ways, walking a shifting line between abstract patterns and the occasional hyper-representation, often discovered only when you look closely.

Jonnel Covault The Powers that Be Linocut Print

Jonnel Covault Over the Fall Linocut Print

***

Walking around the Reser, art gallery and building alike, I was thinking back to my last visit to The Whitney for the Biennial in 2019. If you imagine a portion of the NYC’s museum for contemporary art, condensed to an elongated miniature block and plopped down in Beaverton, you might find some similarities.

Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art upper left; the rest is The Reser.

Yes, a different world, a different league, but comparable in a shared thematic focus on inclusion of diverse constituencies. Both institutions are partly trying to use art to help us understand, in light of a sometimes violent history, who we and who others are and who we want to be. All of which includes an acknowledgement that there is often a separation between co-existing cultures, driven on one side by anything from racism to ignorance to fleeting guilt-tinged hesitancy to engage in conversation, met potentially by historically justified distrust and desire for inward protection on the other side.

I had written about the Whitney’s approach in 2019 here.

And this is where the power of the exhibition kicks in: demonstrating the brutal division between those of us who are clueless about what many of the artworks imply, and those who get it in the blink of an eye, being familiar with the expressed contents via the reality of one’s daily existence. We might share the same space, in world and museum alike, but we surely do not share a language or the experiences eventually captured by that language when it relates to race, gender, disability, and access.

I tried to explore a possible bridging between worlds by photographing NYC street-art found in Harlem and Bushwick, the East Village and Williamsburg, communal expressions of the issues at the center of the museum pieces, a call and response between cultures.

This year’s Biennial at the Whitney, opening in April, is titled Quiet as it’s kept, addressing our desire to look away from the harm we cause or have experienced, keep it secret and silent, no matter how much trauma ensued. The current Reser exhibition proudly defies keeping it quiet. Like all good art and education, it raises questions, sometimes uncomfortably so, and provides a toolbox so that we ourselves can explore potential answers. In this context it is helpful that there is support through organizations that have a history of engaging in dialogue.

One of those partners is the Confluence Project. The community-based non-profit presents indigenous voices to connect to the ecology, history and culture of the Columbia River System. Besides educational programs – here and here are some about Celilo – there are art landscapes that link present and past, open to be explored by all. One of my favorites is easily reached in the Sandy River Delta. Maya Lin’s bird blind, located at 1000 Acres park, was constructed with black locust, an invasive species to the Northwest. Its use after removal from the landscape underlines the commitment to sustainability. The wooden slats tell the names and current status of 134 species Lewis and Clark noted on their westward journey. As Harjo suggests, the land might be a being that remembers everything. This land art helps us to remember as well.

Make your way to the Reser first, though. Parking is easy with an adjacent structure, (butterfly-adorned, no less, with threatened Fender’s Blues.)

Will Schlough Gather Painted Aluminum

The Max station is a stone’s throw away, and outside seating is available around the arts center to take a break and enjoy spring temperatures, public art,

Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang, StudioKCA Ribbon Concrete, steel, LED

and a bit of reclaimed duck pond. The Westside is lucky to have a new, important destination. Really, we all are.

Artists talks are coming up. More inclusive exhibitions are being planned. Go check it out!

Saturday, April 30th | 2:00 pm – Artist talk with Joe Cantrell, Ed Edmo & Nancy Ives

Saturday, May 14th / Artist talk with Analeee Fuentes & Richard Rowland

Saturday May 22nd / Artist talk with Lillian Pitt, Sara Siestreem, Greg Archuletta and Greg Robinson More details to come:www.thereser.org

 

Gallery exhibit from March 1 – June 5, 2022. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Saturday 10 am-6 pm.

Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, 12625 SW Crescent St, Beaverton, OR 97005

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Bird brain

The good news about being old and decrepit is that you are eligible for a second Covid booster shot.

The bad news is that your brain is mush for about 24 hours, and so can only marvel at the strange tidbits picked up from the daily Twitter deluge.

Good news: if you don’t want to look at my bird brain’s gleanings, look at the bird art instead which I photographed while waiting at the clinic after the booster, so the nurse could be sure I didn’t keel over…

Artist plaque said: Susan Freedman, Beaverton, OR. Here is the website I found. I figured I’d compliment the encaustics with photographs of the real thing, or whatever I assumed the birds to be.

Other news? Here are the things I encounter when doing my morning survey of incoming oddities. You can see why my brain is starting to accelerate towards entropy. Evidence: I thought some of these pretty useless facts were amusing.

  • German word of the day is Wohlstandsverwahrlosung, a state of decay that results from having it too easy for too long, leading you to selfishly compare your own petty grievances &mediocre accomplishments to the pain &struggle of people who know the meaning of real problems.
  • An example of what celebrities can do for Ukraine: Today David Beckham handed over his Instagram account with 71 million followers to Iryna, a Ukrainian doctor from Kharkiv who is caring for Ukrainian civilians under Russian attack.
  • Tell me a simple fact that simply blows your mind. For example, every ‘c’ in Pacific Ocean is pronounced differently. Your turn.

  • The English language makes no sense. You can understand it through tough thorough thought though.
  • Samurai were officially abolished in 1867. The first ever fax machine was invented in 1843 and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. Which means there was a 22 year window in which a Samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.
  • Cleopatra lived closer to the launch of the iPhone than she did to the building of the pyramids at Giza.
  • Joe Biden was born closer to Lincoln’s presidency than his own. 1865 Lincoln’s presidency ends…1942 President Biden is born…and President Biden is now 79. Yes indeed, it’s true.

And finally after yesterday’s Hearings, that would have been disgusting even with an intact brain:

And that is what the News reports “captured” in the everlasting desire to “both-sides…”

I guess mine is not the only birdbrain this week….. so what. (Title of today’s music as well…)

Just twittering along.

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Exquisite Gorge II – Pattern Masters and Master Patterns

Mightily wove they the web of fate, While Bralund’s towns were trembling all; And there the golden threads they wove, And in the moon’s hall fast they made them. ”  – Poetic Edda (Helgakviða Hundingsbana I)

*

Why on earth was I thinking about a bit of Norse poetry while visiting with Mexican artists Laura and Francisco Bautista? Not as far fetched as one might think when you consider I was standing in a studio filled with spinning wheel and looms: the three Norns in Norse mythology are spinning and weaving the thread of life, deciding your good or bad fate and the length of your existence irrevocably at birth.

My vivid imagination as a German child, with Richard Wagner’s Norns singing in the Ring of the Nibelungen as a frequent backdrop, had not served me well. Thread of life, perhaps short, being banged by a beater on the loom? Goosebumps ensued. Luckily for me, that negative association disappeared while looking at the art in front of me and encountering the warmth and sensibilities of the contemporary weavers who had invited me into their home. Their weaving is nourishing souls, rather than crushing them.

Francisco and Laura Bautista

This was my second studio visit for the Exquisite Gorge II project, offered by Maryhill Museum of Art. To repeat, thirteen fabric artists, in collaboration with community partners, will portray an assigned section of the Columbia river in three dimensional form on frames. The sections will be linked in the end, forming an “Exquisite Corpse” during a public outdoor celebration at the museum in August.

———————–

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.”

———————–

Laura and Francisco Bautista came to the U.S. in 2003, from a small town near Oaxaca, Teotitlán del Valle, a center for traditional weaving to this day. The valley was home to the Zapotec (one of the largest indigenous groups), weavers since 300 B.C.E. Archeological evidence from Mesoamerica suggests that weavers used backstrap looms as early as 1500 B.C.E.

Wool—in Zapotec quicha pecoxilla or quichaxilla – sheep and treadle looms were introduced by the Spanish conquistadores during the 16th century, at the same time that they brought devastating disease, decimating the indigenous ethnicities by horrifying numbers. The wool was spun with indigenous spindles, or a manually turned wheel. Other fibers that had been used included the Agave-based fiber Ixtle (quéeche in Zapotec), cotton (in Zapotec xilla) and in rare cases, silk.

All natural dyestuff dyed wool

The area developed a distinctive weaving tradition, which is claimed to be among the finest and most dynamic form of tapestry art in contemporary Latin America. (Many of today’s facts were learned from this book.) There appear to be a number of technical features that distinguish Teotitlán weavings from other Mexican tapestries. These features include the woolen warp, the two bundled warps at each selvage, the warp ends twisted together in groups, and the warp ends left uncut at one end of the web. (Honestly, I have no clue what that would look like, but I thought the community of readers who weave or are interested in weaving history might appreciate the detail.) What I do understand is the effects of historical developments on traditional practices, since the good and the bad often combine, for many mediums alike.

Tension on the loom is the secret to successful weaving

Until the 1950s, the Bautistas’ village had an economy based on subsistence agriculture. Weavings were produced for the local markets and for personal use. Enormous change happened with two external events: for one, the PanAmerican Highway was completed and tourism started to flow into Oaxaca and the surrounding regions, and with it an insatiable appetite for artifacts to bring home as a souvenir. Secondly, the U.S. Bracero program allowed millions of Mexican men to work legally in the United States on short-term labor contracts, between 1942 and 1964, an exploitation of cheap labor for the States, but a chance to send some direly needed funds home for the migrant workers. The tourist demand for weavings encouraged many of the people staying at home to start weaving full time.

The good part about these developments was that it helped centuries of knowledge and specific patterns to be handed down hereditary lines, encouraging families to engage ever more with the craft, since weavers were now in short supply given the rising demand. The not so good part was the introduction of more commercial demands in terms of mass production, leading to a drop in quality for many products, and, in particular, the use of synthetic dyes, since it was too costly and time-consuming to stick with the plant-based dye techniques. Even that, in some ways, might have been a change for the good because it created economic opportunities for whole towns and villages that had been previously foreclosed, in a state that is the poorest in all of Mexico and suffered much with increasing drought, deforestation, overgrazing and soil erosion in terms of agricultural earnings.

***

The three nordic Norns called Urd, Verdandi and Skuld, represent the past, the present and the future, respectively, holding the world’s collective memories according to legend. Laura and Francisco Bautista live and work in the present, but honor the past in their treatment of the materials and the weaving techniques they apply.

The right post of the loom, which was brought with them from Mexico, has all the locations named where they have taken it for exhibits, fairs, and teaching occasions.

The wool is washed and then dyed with exclusively natural colorants. The remarkable biodiversity of the Bautistas’ homeland is reflected in the many plants and other natural dyestuffs that is used for dyeing the wool. The couple uses Marigold, Tansy weed, black and green walnuts, and Indigo, among others, all available here. In general, many of the ancient dyestuffs relied on plants found in tropical regions. Yellow, oranges, purple, browns were all collected from species that we don’t necessarily find in our own latitudes. Blue is derived from an indigo plant called Indigofera suffructicosa, native to the Americas (in Europe blue was derived from woad.) Families would hand down their secrets about useful plants for developing special shades. Marigold petals, añil, pomegranate zest, seed pods, moss and pecan could be looked together, and slight manipulation of pH values would generate different colors.

Some of the botanical species used for dyeing.

Red was, as it turns out, of utmost importance. It was and still is most often extracted from the cochineal insect that lives on the opuntia cactus. The coloring agent is carminic acid, a hydroxyanthraquinone. It produces a bright red liquid and was a prized commodity (red gold!), exported by New Spain to Europe as a profitable trade for the conquistadores. Until the 19th century, that is, when Spain prohibited further imports of cochineal in order to protect their own newly established production farms in Spain. The economy of the Oaxaca region suffered a hard blow.

Someone else looking for cochineal…wrong cactus, alas.

These days there are a few ranches in the Mexican region that grow the insects, providing the colorants for weavers and to international importers who use it to color food. (In case you wondered: here is where all of us are regularly ingesting the output of these critters: products containing cochineal extract include Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice, Dole Diced Peaches, Strawberry Gel Fruit Bowl, Sobe Lizard Fuel, Tropicana Orange Strawberry Juice with Calcium, and Robitussin Honey Calmers Natural Throat Drops. (Ref.)

If acidic liquid is added to the cochineal fragments, the red dye appears. Add some base, and the pH value changes, turning it in this case purple.

There is an embrace of the past, then, in preserving the recipes for and application of these colorants. There is also the preservation of patterns, a flourish of traditional designs and motifs, often with mythical references or other symbolism referring to the Zapotec’s folkloric tradition. There is in addition the pride in being part of a generational chain of hereditary weavers. Francisco Bautista is a fourth generation artisan, now teaching the fifth: his two teenage children, Cinthya and David, who have taken to the looms with curiosity, passion and talent. Cultural identity is successfully transmitted. The family is tightly knit, and they often sit together to brainstorm about new designs or ways to capture their desired expression in woven tapestry.

The Bautista “signature” is 4 dots – they symbolize the seeds of life, 4 generations of hereditary weavers, and drops of water.

Classic weaving pattern with grecas stripes and the “eye of God” in center, the configuration often compared to butterflies symbolizing souls.

Francisco Bautista is a patient man. His temperament allows him to work figuratively (extremely complex pattern weaving) and also makes him a highly successful teacher.

iPhone photo of his last workshop for beginning weavers -with a group of very proud students

Fringe work done with manual rolling for every single piece.

Shaving the weaving with a blade; Lou Palermo, Maryhill’s Curator of Education, discussing the Exquisite Gorge II lay-out with the artist.

Laura Bautista, by her own words always seeking novelty and pursuing diverse approaches favoring highly mathematical, geometric motifs, is in herself an emblem of the future. Until about 50 years ago or so, the Zapotec women of the region were not allowed to weave. They were involved in the task of washing, preparing, carding and spinning the wool, as well as running the households, while the men stood at the loom, introducing their male heirs to all things related to the art from an early age. With the exodus of men migrating North, women were slowly integrated into the weaving world. By now there are all female cooperatives of women who are widowed, divorced, single or otherwise interested in doing collaborative work, who have become part of the artisan landscape of the Oaxaca valley.

One of Laura’s favorite pillow casings – note how saturated and more pastel colors seamlessly flow into each other.

Laura is thrilled that she learned how to weave, since the full time job these days allows her to stay at home, be there for her children, assign her own working hours and listen to music while weaving which she loves. During the last seven years the couple has developed a style that is reminiscent of the 1920’s Bauhaus weaving that was equally innovative at its time. A friend pointed out similarities to an art movement they had never heard of, and provided books to prove how beauty self-generates across generations and geographies, patterns not necessarily culturally defined.

In some funny twist, of course, the Bauhaus weaving department was meant to absorb women students and keep them away from the other, traditionally male dominated domains including painting, in contrast to the exclusion of Zapotec women from the craft. Some of the Bauhaus women signed up grudgingly, thinking it was an inferior domain, but swiftly realized the possibilities of the medium. Here is a link to one of the most successful students, Anni Albers, from a recent retrospective at the Tate Modern.

And here is a short summary of the career of master weaver Gunta Stölzl, who headed the Bauhaus weaving department.  

“Possibly no other form of (artistic) craftwork requires as much concentration, mathematical skills and strength in intuition as weaving.”

Thinking once more about the Norns: they were interpreted, certainly in the Ring cycle, as a form of intuitive and visionary awareness. The same can be said for the Bautistas’ work. They intuitively reposition the familiar into something creative new vision.

The artists are pattern masters, willing to experiment, pursuing reinterpretation of old patterns into new visions, developing designs with both, new motifs and modern color combinations that express their own, individual artistry. They don’t adhere to a master pattern that governs strict preservation of the past and prohibits change. Traditions have continually evolved in Zapotec history, and luckily that continues to be the case.

A tapestry for the American Embassy in Mexico City, I believe

***

I was driving back from their studio to Portland during late afternoon, light slowly diminishing. The Bautistas’ house is situated in the middle of expansive tree farms near Sandy, OR, then lit by a low sun, greens popping as so often at dusk. The endless rows of trees, geometric parallels, reminded me of the striped weavings. The little conical shapes of small conifers, interspersing the rows, or forming rows themselves, looked like a pattern of dots, strewn to the horizon. The weavers seem to live in a natural tapestry, some higher order pattern-master’s sleight of hand. So much beauty, in studio and surround alike. My heart sang. Norns, you may chime in!

Here is an OPB video of the artists at work.

And here are the Norns singing.

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The Central Park Five – Art as a Tool for Justice

“Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it’s true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.” – James Baldwin “An interview with James Baldwin” (1961), in Conversations with James Baldwin.

It seemed counterintuitive, no, odd, really, that my first reaction to a piece of gorgeous, intense, riveting music were thoughts about visibility. After all, what we perceive is more likely associated with visual media, film in particular, and yet here I was surrounded by sound, listening to the orchestra dress rehearsal of The Central Park Five, Portland Opera‘s upcoming production.

Left to right: Donovan Singletary as Antron McCray, Bernard Holcomb as Kevin Richardson,Victor Ryan Robertson as Raymond Santana, Aubrey Allicock as Yusef Salaam, Nathan Granner as Kharey/Korey Wise.

Maybe it’s not so odd after all, when you consider that truly good art makes things visible that are otherwise hidden beneath the mere consideration of images or words. Maybe it is the emotional reaction that music in particular can stir up that connects you to what lies invisible under the surface of narratives. This might be particularly true for stories that you intellectually witnessed in your own time, and thus think you have a grasp on, until art opens up a different dimension previously foreclosed, disturbing the peace. That said, the video projections, the lighting and two opera stages on top of each other, echoing separate worlds and power hierarchies, visually helped intensify the emotions.

On top stage: Hannah Ludwig as the Assistant District Attorney, Johnathan McCullough as The Masque (he plays numerous white characters across the opera.)On Bottom stage, left to right: Aubrey Allicock as Yusef Salaam, Nathan Granner as Kharey/Korey Wise, Bernard Holcomb as Kevin Richardson, Donovan Singletary as Antron McCray.

The Pulitzer Prize winning opera composed by Anthony Davis (Libretto by Richard Wesley, conducted by Kazem Abdullah,stage directed by Nataki Garrett) recounts the horrifying 1989 tale of innocent youths (aged 14-16) accused and convicted of beating and raping a woman in New York’s Central Park, after they falsely confessed but then recanted, with no physical evidence connecting them to the crime. The story focusses on the many aspects that led to this outcome, with lasting damage done to the defendants despite the eventual vacating of the verdict, when DNA evidence and the confession by the true perpetrator exonerated them. The case made salient the racial inequities in our criminal justice system. The $40 million settlement with the state of New York did not buy back the time lost and sorrow inflicted on kids (and their families and communities) as young as 14 years of age, spending years incarcerated (the one 16 year-old 13 years in adult prison!) for a crime they did not commit.

For me, the music captured the tension inherent in an adversarial system built into the criminal courts, the racism both structural and individually applied that so often erupts in cases of violence against white women. It also echoed the preconceived assumptions about crime-prone black youth, and the career ramifications for police and DAs as well as aspiring politicians like a former president who involved himself in fashioning public opinion in what turned out to be a stepping stone to an election campaign.

Christian Sanders as Donald Trump

The music conveyed the fear, the paralysis, the disbelief of the victims of procedural malfeasance. For me, it made the legal and social injustice of this case visible at a gut level, allowing us for a short while to walk in the defendants’ shoes.

Others at OregonArtsWatch, who know much more about music than I do, will write about the Portland Opera production in coming weeks. What I want to do today instead, is to make visible, from my perspective as a former lawyer and psychologist, how this is not an isolated case, however brilliantly captured by Davis and the musicians who moved me so. Let’s look at both the myths surrounding false confessions and the general processes that can create them in ways they affect criminal trials every single day.

***

I believe that many of us share deep concerns about our legal system. The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, but 20% of the world’s prisoners, a huge number especially when we consider the horrific circumstances that define incarceration (Ref.). In addition, black Americans are incarcerated 5 times the rate of white Americans (Ref.). Blacks constitute roughly 14% of the U.S. population, while in some states they constitute over half of the prison populations. You have to worry about what these numbers mean.

Moreover, there is no question that the legal system routinely makes horrible mistakes, including getting the basic facts wrong, as the Innocence Project has proven with the high numbers of DNA exonerations they have brought about. Specifically, scholars talk about myths, that pervade and erode the legal system. One example includes the so-called sexual assault myth – the idea that the prevalent form of sexual assault involves a stranger leaping out of the darkness. The reality is instead that sexual assaults are vastly more likely from someone you know. Given that the American legal system counts on the common sense of jury members to reach a sensible verdict, we have a problem if some common sense beliefs are mistaken and rely on myths: it can have tragic consequences in the legal system and elsewhere.

Left to right:Elliott Paige as Antron’s Father, Babatunde Akinboboye as Raymond’s Father, Ibidunni Ojikutu as Antron’s Mother, Jazmine Olwalia as Sharonne Salaam.

A different set of myths concerns confession evidence, starting with the widely held belief that false confessions are quite rare. And here the common sense appeal is powerful. After all, why would someone confess to a crime, and invite punishment, for something they didn’t do? As a related myth people assume a false confession would only be produced by someone who is mentally ill or attention-seeking, or someone who has been physically coerced (yelled at, threatened, beaten) by the police. (Ref.)

All texts are photographs of the supertext panels that displayed the words that were sung. Surtitles were written and produced by Ethan Cope Richter.

There is no doubt though that these myths are myths. For example a national database of exoneration cases shows us that 13% of the cases involve confessions we now know to be false (another take by the Innocence Project that relies on DNA evidence only, claims the rate may be as high as 1 in 4.) The numbers get worse, much worse, if we zoom in for a closer look. In the same database, among exonerated juveniles, 36% involved confessions we now know were false, and if you look at the youngest juveniles in this data set (12-15 years old) 57% confessed to a crime they did not commit. These were, of course, the ages of 4 of the Central Park Five. Kids this age are less mature, more impulsive than older ones, they are more gullible, and they don’t always think about long-term consequences. 

***

How is it possible that there are so many false confessions? Let’s look at the interrogation process. Police have become remarkably skilled in what scientists call “psychological coercion” (note not physical coercion). This process involves many specific levers, often used in a back and forth combination, but there are three overarching themes. First, no matter how many times the suspect denies the crime, these denials are refused, ignored, or rejected, or even sneered at. The message to the suspect therefore is that not confessing is not an option. To drive this point home, this process can stretch out over two or four or ten hours, leaving the exhausted suspect too tired to resist, and eager to do anything to escape the interrogation room. To up the pressure, police do most of the talking, set the agenda for topics of conversation, decide when breaks are happening and in classic settings – small room, no windows, no clock, no distractions, uncomfortable chair – they keep at it to maximize confrontation.

The second broad theme involves multiple efforts toward minimizing the cost of confessing in the eyes of the suspect. This includes offering the suspect a variety of excuses, “You were drunk, you were under stress, you just ran with the crowd, they asked for it!” and with these excuses the suspect might think s/he is confessing to something that is understandable and not so blameworthy. Often this minimizing is established via presenting a contrast: “We know you are not a terrible person; you’re just a guy who made a mistake.” The police also puff up whatever evidence they have (including utterly false claim about the evidence which they are allowed to make since they are legally allowed to lie in interrogations). The message to the suspect here is that they are likely to be convicted with or without a confession, so that confession costs them nothing.

The third major goal involves a package of strategies that suggest benefits from confessing. Police are not allowed to promise leniency, but they are wonderfully skillful at hinting at leniency along the lines of “How do you think the prosecutor is going to react when she sees that you stonewalled us? And how do you think she would react if you were open and took ownership of what you had done?” Interrogators also suggest psychological benefit from a confession once they have determined the defendant’s allegiances: they lean on religion, if they think you’re religious. They stress the aspects of healing of closure for the assault victim if they think you have some loyalty to the victim. They point at the responsibility towards the community if they believe you have strong links there.

Do these levers work every time? Surely not, but they work often enough that false confessions do happen and that is profoundly troubling because a confession of almost any sort virtually guarantees a conviction.

Johnathan McCullough as The Masque, Hannah Ludwig as the Assistant District Attorney

***

Why do police engage in these tactics? For one, and the data are clear on that, because they do result in factually true confessions a large percentage of the time. But many interrogators also deny the possibility that false ones are happening at all or are happening with regularity, or they are willing to tolerate this error. Secondly, police are explicitly trained to do interrogations in this way with many training programs across the country based on what is called the Reid Technique which instructs in the above-listed application of tools: coercion, situational control, minimizing the cost and maximizing the potential benefits of confessions in their communications to suspects. Even if officers have not had formal training, they learn about these tools from colleagues who had and so continue in this vein.

Police understand that their interrogation techniques are confrontational, often a determined push to confirm their suspicions by alternating carrots and sticks, and even coercive. Police believe, though, that we are all protected by two safeguards. As it turns out, both of the safeguards turn out to be hollow. One safeguard relies on the idea that police can figure out before the interrogation who is guilty and who is not, and therefore they aggressively push for confessions only with presumed guilty suspects. There is, unfortunately, overwhelming evidence, that most police officers when trying to decide who is lying to them and who is not, perform at a level only marginally better than a coin toss. This guarantees that they will use coercive techniques with people that they have wrongly decided are liars.

The other supposed safeguard comes after the interrogation, when police seek further evidence that will corroborate, or perhaps undermine, the confession. Here we run into a problem called confirmation bias, with the essential notion being that, once you have a confession, it biases what other evidence you look for and how you interpret what you encounter. The result? A false confession can invite the collection of further evidence that seems to support it, so that bad evidence leads to more bad evidence.

Babatunde Akinboboye as Matias Reyes, left, Nathan Granner as Kharey/Korey Wise, right.

What can be done about this, especially given how these issues interweave with strong patterns of racial bias? That bias manifests itself in some officers’ willingness to assume a black suspect is likely guilty and proceed accordingly in the interrogation. That bias is also evident in the power dynamic of an interrogation, with a police officer relying on social distribution of power to bully a black youth. There is also a tendency for interrogators (as well as teachers and school administrators) to bear in mind that a white kid is a kid, while failing to make the same crucial adjustments when interacting with a young person of color. Black girls are seen as more adult than white girls at almost all stages of development. Black boys are constantly judged to be older than they are (adultification) and, importantly, the older they seem, the more we consider them culpable. (Ref.) Finally, given the economic inequities in our country, a white suspect is far more likely to have decently paid legal representation compared to the resources available to POC.

Where does this leave us? Here, the importance of art. Narratives and documentaries can inform. Art can move, often in a lasting way. Will it move police officers to change their practices? Perhaps not. Will it shift legislatives votes? Likely not. But we’re at a place in which ordinary citizens can have extraordinary power. In a criminal trial, jury verdicts must be unanimous. (Ironically, this has been true in 48 states for years; it is only recently true in Oregon and Louisiana). On a jury, a single citizen empowered by this production, remembering his or her reaction to the music and the story it conveyed, introduced to reality rather than clinging to myth, can hold firm and may be the stalwart obstacle to decisions resting on false beliefs and leading to catastrophically wrong verdicts. Portland Opera’s choice of a timely and important piece of contemporary music, beautifully staged and performed, might have long lasting consequences and not just providing us with a riveting night at the opera. Art empowering justice

I started with a James Baldwin quote, so let me also end with one:

“Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” – James Baldwin – No Name in the Street.

————————————————————————–

Portland Opera presents:

The Central Park Five

Composed by Anthony Davis 
Libretto by Richard Wesley

Mar. 18  •  7:30PM Get tickets

Mar. 20  •  2:00PM Get tickets

Mar. 24  •  7:30PM Get tickets

Mar. 26  •  7:30PM Get tickets

All performances at the Newmark Theatre 1111 SW Broadway Portland, OR 97205

COVID-19 Guidelines Masks + proof of vax/tests required.

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Windows to Worlds

There are good days. Last week one of those saw two of my interests – art and literature – aligned, when these images arrived in my inbox while I was contemplating writing a review of a spell-binding piece of literary fiction, The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne. The novel provides windows into past, present and future worlds, all shaped by entropy, directly or indirectly related to cosmology, our planet’s exposure to climate change and humanity’s love affair with to power. Sounds heady? It’s a stunner!

Michel Saran Begegnung/Encounter (2020) Acryl on Canvas

Paintings first. Michel Saran is a German painter, trained at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1950s. (The academy boosts an incredible list of alumni, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Gerhard Richter among them). Saran came from East to West Germany in 1961 when the wall was built, and continued his studies at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, known among others for Joseph Beuys and, again, Gerhard Richter.

The artist and I have been friends since 1969 when he taught me art history, and we managed to sustain the friendship despite having lived on different continents for over 40 years now. Friends or not, I have always had strong reactions to his art. The new series is no exception: the works embrace a dialectic, feeding on the tension between serious, sometimes grave underlying themes, but expressed with a visual joy and playfulness that let you forget the darker thoughts.

Michel Saran Diagonale und Rechtecke/ Diagonal and Rectangles (2020) Acryl on Wood

The rectangles remind me of windows, as individual motifs or as groupings pointing to more collective associations. Windows are cross-culturally symbols of so many things, again capturing a dialectic – letting light and fresh air in, but also the opposite, allowing access to dread (window of vulnerability). Come in by the window represents romantic but also illicit access. A window of opportunity points to gains, out the window, on the other hand, refers to an escape route but also loss, something non-retrievable. In painting and literature alike, they have often represented hope, or freedom (Caspar David Friedrich and Leora Carrington among my favorites here,) the longing for and ability to escape (think Rapunzel, or Wuthering Heights). Windows, of course, also frame the border between outside and inside, and for those of us aware that the longest stretch of life lies behind us, a reminder of a choice of time focus: we can look out to a past, or focus on the present view, or dream about an unknown future, a window to a veiled existence if only in our minds.

Michel Saran Ländliches Fenster/Rural WIndow (2017) Acryl on Wood

And then there is the window on the world. This brings us squarely, pun intended, to today’s book review about a novel that helps us view different cultures with powerful strokes of imagination, matched by an equally astute intellectual analysis of history and our role in shaping that history. The Actual Star spans 2000 years, from the ancient Maya kingdom in 1012 B.C. in what is now Belize, a depiction of events in the U.S. and Belize in 2012, to a fictional society in 3012 that is formed by some 8 million humans left over from climate catastrophe, trying to fashion a life on earth that is sustainable.

Each of the three time periods are introduced through a trinity of characters: a pair of twins and a (de)stabilizing third corner of the triangle, a sibling, a lover, a child. Each twin represents an opposite, one who favors the status quo and preserves tradition, the other who is a risk taker and pursues the necessity of change. The eras are depicted within their contexts – the Mayan kingdom is on the brink of dissolution due to climate emergency droughts (giving rise to extreme violence within and beyond human sacrifices). The contemporary Belize is affected by its history of colonialism and capitalist exploitation. The future humans are struggling with the conflict that despite all attempts to prevent previous societies’ errors and eliminate violence, some deep seated psychological needs cannot be eradicated. Common to all three cultures is a longing for knowledge about a place that extends beyond the realm of the real – call it rebirth, paradise, Nirvana, Hades, Xibalba (the Mayan place of fright where the Gods (of death) reside). Humans simply cannot accept that there is finality to our existence and so forever search for the window (as knowledge and passage) into the workings of an afterlife.

Michel Saran Freie Rechtecke/Free Rectangles (2020) Acryl on Wood

The novel is intensely sex-positive, there is not a type of sexual interaction not included, and described in detail. None of it is sordid, and much of it helps to question taboos, given that we are hooked on sympathizing with almost all of the protagonists from the start (who are clearly having a good time in this regard.) It becomes particularly interesting in the future world, where scientific advances have given all humans the relevant body parts of both sexes, and they can choose which gender expression or sexual preferences they’d like to have dominant, with the ability to switch frequently.

In one regard our future descendants have no choice, though. They have to adhere to a kind of religious/moral/ethics code that requires the absence of any personal possession, a life of nomadism, and a separation from birth family, so there is no hoarding of goods, land or emotional tie to lovers and even blood relatives. If they reject those choices, they become stigmatized outsiders, deprived of much the society has to offer. In fact, all are not allowed, except for special occasions and festivals, to ever congregate with more than a few people in their steady wandering across the face of this earth. Conflict ensues, wouldn’t you know it.

Michel Saran Toscana (2020) Acryl on Wood

It is no coincidence that Byrne salutes her favorite SFF authors, Ursula LeGuin and Kim Stanley Robinson, in her preface. She has absorbed much from them, the painstaking research of historical and scientific facts, the focus on human psychology within the political parameters that shape parts of it, the generating of languages that serves multiple purposes. (The novel uses a lot of Spanish and pretend-Spanish, invented words helpfully explained in a glossary. Dialog in the contemporary segment is sometimes in Kriol, not translated, and hard to understand even if sounded out loud. A perfect choice for a Western readership: we can completely intuit the meaning of the language of the colonizers, but the speech among the colonized is somewhat inaccessible.) The role religion – its dangers or promises – plays in the works of all three is surely no coincidence. The authors’ works also all acknowledge the importance of place, both locally, geographically and in a cosmos that reacts to physical changes.

Michel Saran Dämmerung/Dusk (2020) Acryl on Wood

What is all her own, is Byrne’s imaginary power to envision worlds, past and future. A lyrical voice when describing the joy and sorrow of emotional attachments. A probing of entropy. A willingness to upset, to judge, to question. And, importantly, in this novel an instantiated promise that there can be hope attached to loss, and promise to painful change. It is a remarkable book.

(PS: She also has a nicely sarcastic sense of humor – here she reads excerpts from bad reviews of her novel. Stellar review in much more detail can be found here.)

Music today is Joaquín Rodrigo’s symphonic poem A la busca del más allá (In Search of the Beyond).

Michel Saran Verwoben/Interwoven (2020) Acryl on Wood

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Art on The Road: (Un)Predictability

Predictability – noun

  1. The quality something has when it is possible for you to know in advance that it will happen or what it will be like
  2. (often disapproving) the quality somebody/something has when they are exactly as you would expect and therefore boring – Oxford English Dictionary

It has been quite a while since I wrote my last Art on the Road essay, more than two years, in fact. Predictably so, given the pandemic’s impact on traveling. I am still restricted to short car trips, but mobile now, and so hopefully have interesting things to report across the next months.

Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop

Predictability and its opposite, unpredictability, currently loom large in my mind, given the fact that we’ve seen such sudden changes in a world that considered itself, at least from Western nations’ privileged perspectives, relatively stable. Now the horrors of millions dead from or afflicted by the lasting damage of a virus have been joined by the terror of an unprovoked war in Europe, with unpredictable outcomes in a world filled with nuclear weapons.

Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop

Humans like predictability, given its relation to something we crave: a sense of control and protection from randomness which threatens our longing for a rational, just world. As societies we have created norms, both legally and customary, to allow us to predict and trust. Those who defy these norms are usually disliked at best, punished at worst. This rule comes with exceptions, though. People versed in political or militaristic power struggles often favor unpredictability to seed chaos and fear. And those in the sciences and the arts who approach problem solving or creation in unpredictable ways often come up with the most creative solutions.

Sculpture on the artist’s house wall

Another dimension of predictability is what we are trying to predict, based on our understanding of how the world works. Once upon a time, Newton gave us a basic model for prediction: express the immutable laws of the universe in formulas, plug in the data, and do the math. That might work if we want to know when a dropped ball hits the ground, but that’s not nearly the full spectrum. We have trouble predicting psychological behavior given the many visible and invisible factors that affect our minds. And when we do predict outcomes we often have no clue about the underlying cause – just look at the internet’s prediction markets that allow people to place bets on future events. The resulting odds can accurately predict outcomes (who gets elected, what show will thrive) without giving us insight as to why these things will happen.

Sculpture near the artist’s wood shop

And then there is the (un)predictability of the material one works with. Which brings us at long last to the artist I want to introduce today, sculptor and woodturner Christian Burchard. He works with wet and unstable wood which often, if not always, behaves in unpredictable ways. (In fact, today’s title is a riff on the title of a lecture, Predictable Unpredictability, he and another artist, Pascal Oudet, gave at the prestigious Chicago’s SOFA (Sculptural Objects Functional Art & Design Fair) some years back.)

***

I met with the artist at his Southern Oregon wood shop and house, which hold vast collections of his work. It was pretty much a chance encounter. I had come to Ashland to interview his partner and was introduced to Burchard who graciously agreed to talk to me as well and show me around the next day. The beauty of the accumulated wooden objects, turned, carved, polished, raw, strewn about or stashed in shelves outside the usual formal displays one encounters in exhibitions and galleries, caught my eye as an artist. The story behind them caught my ear as a writer. No titles, no dates, no artist statements about this or that series, just the artist and his creations, addressed as “my acrobats” here or “my books” there, a tangible relationship.

Burchard collects, cuts, turns, dreams wood. Almost exclusively the wood of one of the Pacific Northwest’s most distinctive, evergreen hardwood trees, Arbutus menziesii, known as Madrone. It grows on drier, lower elevation sites, coastal bluffs and in the mountains. Drought tolerant, it doesn’t need particularly rich soil and can live up to 200 years, growing to about 75 feet or more in height under ideal conditions. Madrone is culturally significant to the PNW Coast Salish First Nations. Legend has it that during the great flood Madrona trees provided an anchor for their canoes to hold steady and not drift away.

According to Elder Dave Elliot in Saltwater People, “W̱SÁNEĆ peoples traditionally do not burn Arbutus for firewood because it is an important actor in the origin of their people. Some elements of the trees could be used, such as the bark and leaves for medicines. The extent of this tree’s meaning as a symbol of life and resilience cannot be measured.” (Ref.)

Madrone trees that I photographed along the Pacific Coast

The tree, seeking sun, often grows in crooked ways, with lots of burls, interesting shapes, perfect for a sculptor exploring new form. Working with the wood when it is still green, though, introduces not just unpredictable outcomes: how will it warp and flex when it dries? It also contains a serious element of risk – when you put it to the lathe, careful to turn, creating a form, will it snap and break at the last minute? All the work in vain, a good piece of wood ruined? Will charring or bleaching, carving or chiseling enhance the character of the wood or obscure it?

From the series Baskets and Vessels

Burchard is not a stranger to risk taking, in fact I am tempted to describe him as a perennial risk taker, on many levels of a life intensely lived. Judging by the results, and the deep laugh lines around his eyes, it has served him well. Then again, the concurrent losses might not be visible to the stranger, even one who felt the familiarity that so often spontaneously arises when one ex-pat meets another.

Christian Burchard, sculptor and woodturner

The artist and I are both of the same generation, have left our shared country, Germany, within three years of each other some 40 years ago, lived in the same city, and had the travel bug even before we emigrated, spending some chunks of time abroad (Australia and Asia for him, South America and Africa for me.) It cannot have been easy for Burchard. He comes from a distinguished family of politicians, bankers and lawyers who played a significant role in the history of the Hanseatic League, a great-grandfather serving as mayor of its largest city, Hamburg and its immense harbor. Think Thomas Mann’s seminal novel The Buddenbrooks, just in a different town. The small network of patrician families ruled for centuries as a kind of oligarchy, providing mayors, senators, clergy and lawyers, fed by the wealth of a huge merchant imperium and shipping companies. Aristocracy was disdained, as were Jews, even assimilated ones, and a strict separated class system was de-facto maintained despite the official version that in the Hanseatic city each and every inhabitant was of equal standing. You could purchase the right to be a citizen of higher standing (Großbürgerrecht) only with true wealth and that right was then inherited by male heirs, allowing you to serve in political office.

From the Series Spherical

True democracy was, in other words, in short supply, pride, on the other hand, was not. There are reports of Burchard’s ancestor, the mayor Johann Heinrich Burchard, that he ordered the portrait painter Heinrich Kugelberg during the creation of a mural in the ballroom of Hamburg’s city hall to remove the image of a young man kneeling to receive baptism because “Hamburg’s citizens don’t kneel in front of anyone.” (Ref.)

This is a montage depicting the Hamburg City Hall, seat of the mayor, from my series Seeing Strange (2018)

There was some rise and fall of individual families, but across the centuries it was a prestigious, exclusive lot that ran the city’s business, courts and politics, intermarried, and accumulated wealth. Diligence, responsibility, reliability and predictability were all high on the list of values of the Hanseatic classes as was devoted service to their city and a cooly analytic approach to trade. To be born into this world came not just with silver spoons but also intense pressure to perform and uphold those class privileges. If you did not, complete ostracism was one of the possible consequences. I remember the years after my uncle (by marriage), a descendent of another famous Hamburg mayor, Heinrich Kellinghusen, walked out on my aunt, unannounced on Christmas Eve, no less, to move in with – the scandal ! – a purported prostitute, and I was told that no-one ever talked to him again.

From the series Vessels

Others, however, seemed to escape that fate. Another Hamburg lawyer and senator of the Burchard branch, Wilhelm Amsinck Burchard-Motz, became deputy mayor of Hamburg in 1933. The election of the new Senate under Nazi leadership that March prompted him to switch party allegiance from the DVP to the NSDAP. That seemed not to matter in post-war Germany where he served as the chairman for the German Association for International Maritime Law and as Vice President of the German Golf Association and Chairman of the Hamburg Country and Golf Club in the Lüneburg Heath, as exclusive a club as they came at the time.

(Here is his portrait by artist Anita Rée, an insanely gifted avant-garde painter in the 1920s. An assimilated Jew, she converted to Christianity and was expressly anti-semitic herself, only to get sucked into the maws of rising fascism. She committed suicide in 1933.)

Portrait of Wilhelm Amsinck Burchard-Motz by Anita Rée, late 1920s

Another mayor who served the city recently for 7 years is now the German chancellor tasked to bring the world away from the brink of nuclear war. Here is a perceptive portrait of the man from the New Statesman Journal, describing Olaf Scholz’ hanseatic profile and demeanor, assumed to bring us safely through this crisis.

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To defy the strong expectations to follow in the footsteps of your forbears and give up much privilege if you don’t, must have required an iron will by Christian Burchard, an intense wish to control his own fate, or a kind of desperation to get away from it all. After apprenticing as a furniture maker in Germany, he escaped to the US in 1978, at age 23, studying sculpture and drawing at the Museum School in Boston and at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver BC.

Burchard’s Wood Shop

Burchard opened his own studio in Southern Oregon in 1982, supplementing his income with furniture making and house construction, building a house for his own young family, all the while garnering more and more recognition as a gifted wood sculptor. The list of exhibitions is long, he is represented in various private and public collections, and he regularly is invited to the important craft shows of the Smithsonian, or the American Association of Woodturners. In fact, preparations for a cross-country trip, bringing new work to the Smithsonian in D.C., were in full swing during my visit.

***

It is pretty predictable that you find common ground when you share the experience of immigration. There is a tacit understanding that things are lost as much as gained. There is an unspoken agreement that you know some things that are hard to explain to those who did not leave a complicated past behind. In our conversation this became explicit only due to the timing of Putin’s unpredicted, if feared, invasion of Ukraine that very day. The topic of war and its associated frights and horrors was inescapable during a post-war German childhood, stifling and paralyzing at times, guilt-laden or guilt-avoidant, depending on your family, always hovering in the background. Nothing we could control, it controlled us.

All the more it is interesting to see an artist commit to a path – working with unstable wood – where control is ephemeral as well. Maybe it is exactly the balance he craves: where lack of control once created sorrow, here it results in visceral beauty. Something emerges, authentic, if scarred, from unpredictability and takes on a life of its own.

The Lathe

There is a vitality to his small books, a fluttering sense of just opening or just closing, as you wish. But Burchard exerts spatial control as well, introducing his own visual blueprint in his latest framings within quilt-like configurations or wall sculptures. A sense of order direly needed in an environment where climate change has become an agent of chaos.

Wall Sculpture and objects from the Books and Pages series

The beautiful land that he and his partner live on, the goats he rears for making cheese, the pond that is necessary for sustaining their independence with a vegetable garden, are all affected. To meet the danger of the ever closer, encroaching fires, they had to rip out many trees, bushes, much vegetation, fire proofing the buildings. He – half-jokingly – referred to a recently acquired van as something useful for flight, should it become necessary, which brought me full circle to the imagery of our childhoods as related by our parents, the firestorm from bombs destroying large parts of Hamburg and the flight from the invading forces in Berlin and parts further East.

The artist with his goats, and views from his property

Recent psychological research in the study of memory has turned from looking at memory exclusively as the processes involved in preserving the past, to exploring how it is used to predict the future. We have the tools – and the choice – of looking back or looking forward.

The meaning I found in Burchard’s work reflected that dual function. It also reminded me of Antonio Gramsci’s future-oriented declaration:

“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” 
― Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Prison Letters

The sculptures express the optimistic view that the imperfect, the warped and twisted and charred can all connect us to a vision of nature’s beauty, but they also point to the possibility of acquiring a new life after an old one ceased to exist.

Acrobats

***

On my 5-hour drive home from Ashland I left the highway for a break and found a small pond with picnic benches, close to a campground. (Why anyone would want to camp next to I-5 is a mystery to me. Solving it has to wait for another day.) I stopped next to a park-service van and took the left-over from the previous day’s sandwich to the bench. A woman in park service uniform was pacing at the edge of the water, searching for something. It turned out she had nursed a duck, severely injured by aggressive geese, back to health the previous summer, driving over 40 miles every other day to bring food, water and splints for the creature. She had seen the duck during the winter as well, fully restored, but now it was gone. I got the story in more detail than I can relate, her worry for the bird gushing out of her. Her final words before she drove away were willfully optimistic: “Perhaps he found a nice wife and they are off to build a nest.”

Wherever I go I predictably meet people who are passionate about something. What that something might be – a life devoted to being independent and making art, a year devoted to saving a duck – is unpredictable. What I do know, though, is that I am glad to be on the road again, encouraged by people who put their faith in a possible future, during times when dark forces try to drag us back into an oppressive past.

Below is a presentation by the artist.

Music today is by Tuvan Throat singers which hold a special place in Burchard’s life.

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Exquisite Gorge II: Ariadne’s Thread

“A labyrinth is a symbolic journey . . . but it is a map we can really walk on, blurring the difference between map and world.” – Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Remember Ariadne? The labyrinth? The Minotaur, half man, half bull? Vague memories of vengeful Cretan king, Athenian hero, lovestruck princess and a ball of yarn? I could not help but thinking of the myth during my first artist visit for this year’s Exquisite Gorge II project, offered by Maryhill Museum of Art. Thirteen fabric artists, in collaboration with community partners, will portray an assigned section of the Columbia river in three dimensional form on frames. The sections will be linked in the end, forming an “Exquisite Corpse” during a public outdoor celebration at the museum in August. I hope to introduce all of them and their work with individual portraits during the next few months.

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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.”

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So much to take in at Kristy Kún‘s studio in Ashland, OR. So many associations to the Ariadne myth.

A short refresher: Vengeful Cretan king subdues Athenians in war, extracts human sacrifice ever so often, feeding the youth to his hungry Minotaur, a monster conceived by the queen and an angry God because the king betrayed him with a cheap sacrifice. Half bull, half man, the creature is conveniently stashed out of sight in a labyrinth built by clever engineer Daedalus. Athenian hero Theseus vows to slay the beast. Clever daughter of the king, Ariadne, helps Theseus by providing a spun, woolen thread that allows him to navigate the steps through the maze for his return after the bloody deed is done. He takes her, as promised, away on his ship as his bride, but then dumps her on the Island of Naxos, as instructed by Goddess Athena in a dream. Marries Ariadne’s sister, no less. Depending on who you read (or listen to, lots of opera material!) and in which century, Ariadne either hangs herself out of despondence, or marries a God, Dionysus. Oh, no one lives happily after. Just saying.

Rising Sand 2018 46″ x 26” x 4″ Details below

There were labyrinthine works hanging on Kún’s studio walls or spread on surfaces, pathways ebbing and flowing with no discernible entry or exit.

There were threads pulled from materials, threads criss-crossing layers to be felted, threads waiting in skeins of wool to be pummeled.

There was instance after instance of the application of Ariadne’s thread, a problem solving method – by definition, a logical method that traces steps or takes point by point a series of found truths in a contingent, ordered search that reaches an end position. You solve a problem by multiple means, keeping a record so you can see where you dead-ended or progressed.

It might sound strange to introduce artistic work with a focus on problem solving, but the work at hand requires so many steps, so many intricate levels of processing, so much, indeed, engineering, that a logical, even mathematical mind is required.

The result, flowing, extravagant, holistic beauty belies the tight construction that goes into the creations.

Kún works with felt. Makes felt. Shapes felt. Compiles and arranges felt, with a brain trained as an engineer and the eye of a visual artist.

The matted fabric we call felt is created by binding protein fibers (wool from animals like sheep, goat, yak or alpaca) to each other in a process that involves the physical tangling of the fibers by means of special needles, or by using water and agitation that pummels the raw materials. Ever accidentally shrunk your favorite sweater by 2 sizes in the washer/dryer? That is wet felting…. the hair in the wool consists of shafts that are covered by protein scales. The water and detergents open up the scales and the agitation in the rotating drum, or rolling and rubbing and tossing, binds them together, shrinking them up to 40%.

Dry felting involves barbed needles that you stick into the raw material over and over, weaving the fiber strands together. It can be done by hand or by machine, when large projects are involved.

Felting has been around since at least the 6th century B.C., predating spinning and weaving. It likely originated with nomadic peoples in Asia, and remnants were discovered in burial places all across Siberia and Northern Europe. It was essential for shelter (think Mongolian yurts!) warmth and durability in clothing and boots, and protection from saddle burn for animals carrying loads. Ornamental uses have found their way into beautiful blankets and carpets, now extending to 2-D or 3-D sculpture.

The fabrication of today’s materials has come a long way from being coarse, wet wool stomped by camels, or pummeled by the hoofs of horses. Kún, for example, varies the kinds of fibers going into the felt. The selection involves the density of wool – wool is measured in microns, which describe the diameter of a wool fiber, the smaller the micron the finer the wool.

Micron 23

The artist also uses materials like silk that get entangled into the pressed fibers, dying the silks herself to achieve desired color gradations.

Layered wool and silk get run through the needling machine up to 6 times, then cut into strips, or fins, by a power cutter, wet felt aligned with cheese cloth, worked on surfaces that allow to pool the water.

Eventually the materials get shaped. That includes insane detail work of pulling threads out of the sides by hand to achieve a chenille-like effect that adds to the beauty.

Individual elements are stitched on, wet felt fibers shaved or torched to achieve the desired smoothness.

And then it’s time to finish the design, long planned and recorded to the tiniest detail. Some of the pieces are huge.

Photograph by Kristy Kún.

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The artist with the clear face, beautiful eyes half hidden behind her glasses, is the descendent of Hungarian immigrants who settled in the Mid-West, establishing Presbyterian churches in and around Ely, Iowa, working hard to feed large families. She certainly has inherited that incessant, laser-focussed work ethic, a red thread like Ariadne’s throughout the many changes along her professional path. Trained as a construction engineer at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, she found her first real calling in wood working and furniture making. She settled in Northern California, interned and worked and learned the craft. A marriage to a fellow craftsman dissolved swiftly, leaving her as a single mother to a young daughter, trying to eke out a living in a male-dominated domain.

A side line of supplying crafts materials to her daughter’s Waldorf School led to an import business of Italian wool, selling it to spinners and felters. She got increasingly drawn into the fiber arts world, attending bi-annual workshops and camps for craft artists, the Frogwood Collective among them. Inspired by artists like Janice Arnold and Jenne Giles, Kún turned to felting in a serious way in the last decade, shifting from roles as supplier to that of artist.

It did not make her economic existence less precarious. Now located in Portland, OR, she was trying to support her family, while struggling with the illness of her new partner, who she lost to cancer in a painful battle to the end. Two years ago she moved to Ashland, leaving the familiarity and friendship network of PDX behind, to start a new life with a new love and a new studio, all during pandemic woes.

Life has felted Kristy Kún – my take, expressed with admiration. The various analogues of pummeling and stabbing, prodding and stomping have produced a tough, resistant core combined with (intellectual and emotional) flexibility like the fabric counterpart. Loose threads of flickering temper and intense empathy stick out here and there. Like the matted material absorbs water, she absorbs ideas and visions, turning amorphous input into shaped Gestalt. In addition to her raw talent, her persistence and technical skill have registered with the art world. Her work will be shown at this year’s Smithsonian Craft Show, Future Focus, and large commissions from collectors and designers across the world are regularly received.

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While Kún and Lou Palermo, Maryhill Museum’s Director of Education, brainstormed over technical details of construction and placement of the frames – now stashed in her show room – within the Exquisite Corpse design, my thoughts wandered back to the tale of Ariadne, Theseus and the Minotaur. The myth has inspired countless works of art, from tellings by Catullus 64 and Ovid’s Heroides 10 in the first century B.C., to paintings spanning over 1000 years (here is a link that provides 73 of them!), to musical compositions, Monteverdi in the Baroque period, and Richard Strauss in 1916. And let’s not forget the modern version of myth telling – most recently seen in Dark, the German sci-fi thriller available on Netflix, that makes heavy use of Ariadne’s story and symbolism. A smart review of Dark in the NYT pointed out the particular theme’s relevance to contemporary history.

One of the reasons for its ongoing popularity, I believe, is that one can apply so many different perspectives to any one of the characters or actions involved. Across time you can see how interpretations of Ariadne focussed first on her passivity, her abandonment by yet another fickle male, then on her possible emancipation, her cunning in helping her lover, her ruthlessness in sacrificing a half-brother to a hero she saw as her ticket off the island – you name it. All links to shifting perceptions of gender roles.

Theseus has had his share of fans and critics too, understood as a self-sacrificing hero, or simply power-hungry. His wandering in the labyrinth has been appropriated by psychodynamic approaches in psychology, an archetypal representation of the psyche and a path to individuation, the authenticity you reach when you’ve made your way through the convoluted maze of feelings.

Comparisons to creativity have been offered as well. Serpentine windings to a goal without knowing the way, many a dead end, unclear what fates await – you get the idea. It looks to me that Kún’s creativity has not at all been impeded by labyrinthine obstacles. If anything, her work has blossomed from tightly constructed, somewhat rigid, representational beginnings to more freely flowing abstractions of natural forms that are willing to stand on their own. To link back to Rebecca Solnit’s quote at the beginning: Kún has created a bridge between map and world, walking along in its folds.

This leaves us with one final contemplation, how shifts in perspective define the Minotaur. The creature could either be seen as a bloodthirsty monster, depraved and deserving of slaughter, or as someone who in his deformity had to be hidden away as to not offend the sensibilities of the viewer(s.) Is he an enemy to the outside world? Or is his confinement an act of brutality against him? Do we project our fears of power, aggression, rage, disability and death onto this misshapen creature? Avoid the Other? Classic takes rejoiced forever in his slaying.

There were a few compassionate voices, Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s among them, expressed in a post-humosly published volume of essays, Labyrinth on the Sea, which described his visit to Crete in 1964. Elaborated in a later prose poem, The history of the Minotaur (1974), he sees the misshapen prince as a victim of those who insist on political, social and religious norms as defining who does and does not belong. Which – and yes, we were getting there eventually! – also applies to women and textile art.

I will talk about the history and politics of textile arts in depth at a later point in this series of essays. Let me just say here the very basics: not only were the arts and crafts divided into domains, with gender roles assigned, for centuries. Different arts were also linked to different values – male painters and sculptors scored higher than their female counterparts, the latter for the most part chained to their textile universe behind the embroidery frame. Hidden away in a maze, for all intents and purposes, forever invisible and unnamed even if they created stunning woks of art – just think Bayeux tapestries. Only in the last 40 years has textile art been given a platform, previously reserved for the male dominated, traditional fine arts field. With the help of some pioneers in the early 1920s who opened the flood gates, women have emerged to show the world how true art is independent of medium and how neglected media add novelty to the traditional canon in ways that are intensely beautiful.

Kristy Kún has to be counted among them.

It was a cold night in Ashland, sky shimmering with stars. I would not have found the Corona Borealis even if it had been present (I looked it up, it appears in July) – I barely can locate the Big Dipper. The small constellation of stars is said to represent the crown (corona) that Dionysos gave to Ariadne after she had been abandoned. It comforted me to think that, even if connected to a consolation prize, a woman with a thread is visibly remembered.

Here’s an alternative outcome!

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Holes Being Dug

Almost out of the door, I grabbed the small point&shoot camera despite knowing better. It had been a bad week of painful lymphedema in chest and arm around the incisions, and I really should not lift my arm too much. Oh well. Was I ever glad I had at least this camera with me when doing the familiar round at Oaks Bottom. Come join me!

They were out, my cherished crows, in masses, hanging in the trees squawking, strutting through the meadow. Which should be much less straw colored in February, reminding me that we’ve now had four years in a row where rainfall was way below average.

Entering the wooded path, the beauty – Japanese print-like – of the duckweed on reflecting water was inspiring, even with the knowledge that it is found growing in water associated with cropping and fertilizer washout, or down stream from human activities, particularly from sewage works, housed animal production systems and to some extent industrial plants.

Given the color, I was not sure if it was common duckweed or more likely azolla, red water fern. The ducks didn’t care, and neither should we. Both are fascinating plants, providing nutrients and helping ecosystems.

Gadwalls, I learn. They live in the Great Plains but migrate through here.

The herons were unperturbed, out for lunch, ignoring me walking but a few meters away from them. I guess the loudly singing tree frogs at the pond’s rim were on the menu.

Beaver activity was visible everywhere,

but I think this fellow was a muskrat.

I can never tell. A kilometer further down I spotted this guy, and given his lunch, a fish, the likelihood was otter. As I said, cheap camera, not the resolution one would have wished for with this sight. I mean how often do you see an otter eating fish 15 minutes downtown from city center?

When I got to the viewpoint, the extent of the drought became more visible. This should be a lake, folks, not a dry hole in the ground.

If you are like me, it gives you the creeps. If you are like many of our compatriots, it instills fear, sometimes to the point of a condition that the the American Psychological Association (APA) defined as eco-anxiety, ”a chronic fear of environmental doom.” It is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5,) but clinicians all over report attempts to treat it.

Not sure if this was the doe or one of her fawns that I regularly saw last summer

Last April, an article in the Scientific American described in depth what therapists are facing and how they have to make decisions about how to treat the massively increased numbers of patients who present fear if not panic in the face of climate catastrophe. A 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association showed that “more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on the planet, and more than half (55%*) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.” 

Red-tailed hawk

The NYT joined the topic with an article last week, describing the treatment approach by one of the earliest proponents of a necessary treatment approach to eco-anxiety.

Here is the dilemma: there is a tension between eco-anxiety’s role as a rational response to an existing threat, on the one hand, but also a potentially debilitating response, on the other hand.

There’s no clear, standard definition as to when eco-anxiety is unhealthy. It is rational to be fearful in view of a threat, and the threat is real. It is, however, unhealthy if it paralyzes your daily function, as it now does for scores of people. There is also the question of therapists’ own (political) beliefs. If they think your analysis of the threat is exaggerated or delusional (they don’t believe in climate change or its imminence) they will pathologize your response, which will have an impact on your therapeutic relationship.

Scrub Jay

Therapists themselves also feel unable to cope with their own feelings about environmental destruction. “When a therapist hasn’t begun to come to terms with their own emotions around climate change, it can add to the emotional turmoil of clients coping with overwhelming grief and anxiety, said Tree Staunton, a climate psychotherapist in Bath, England. For example, a therapist’s own grief, anxiety or guilt might come off as defensiveness or withdrawal.“ (Ref.)

Then there are the cases of people, in particular children, who have been personally impacted by traumatic events like fires, flood and tornados or hurricanes caused or aggravated by climate change, who are living with actual PTSD that needs to be treated while the threat of these events is ongoing.

Willamette River bank bordering Oaks Bottom on the Westside

The trolls were out, en masse, in the comment section for the NYT article. But so were thoughtful letters to the editor (2 examples below,) that highlighted important facts found both in and beyond the article.

“… the corporate construct that cleverly shifts the responsibility of a carbon footprint onto each individual. This is similar to the way the petrochemical and plastics industries have shifted all responsibility for recycling, particularly of the packaging they create, onto the individual, although the responsibility for recycling plastics should lie with the manufacturers.” (Mary Englert,
Portland, Ore. The writer is a retired licensed professional counselor.)

“youth distress is directly related to the experience of governmental dismissal of and inaction on climate change. Young people are essentially reporting that their governments are gaslighting them by dismissing and devaluing their concerns, and by falsely stating that they are taking necessary action. This has significant political implications. Multiple reviews of the mental health effects of climate change (this is not a new topic in academia) all predict civil unrest and conflict as the long-term outcome. Politicians have a chance to correct course, honor their young constituents’ fears and act decisively. While therapy matters, preventing climate catastrophe matters more.” Mary G. Burke,
San Francisco. The writer is a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the university’s Climate Change and Mental Health Task Force.

Baldies

It is easy to feel helpless and anxious when thinking what we can do about the destruction of our world, when really a few large corporations—and complicit politicians—call the shots. But there ARE things one can do, and in the doing alleviate some of the anxiety.

There are some political moves that can help activists. Science is contributing tools to fight collective helplessness.

There is important information that you can read, outlining possible next steps. Earthtrack, for example, offers tons of information about governmental subsidies that harm the environment. Environmentally harmful subsidies (EHS) are government actions that by design or effect accelerate the production or consumption of natural resources or undermine broader ecosystems supporting planetary health. The data show at least $1.9 Trillion a year (2% of global GDP) being dished out to Energy, Mining(non-energy), Fisheries, Forestry, Water, Construction, and Transportation industries. The organization informs about both the beneficiaries of such subsidies, worldwide, and reports on possible actions against them.

Anna’s Hummingbird

And then there is art. The hole in the ground where the Oaks Bottom Lake should be reminded me of this project from L.A. last year.

In Malibu, a Large Hole Is Being Dug to Contain Your Grief

Cara Levine and associated artists provided their week-long participatory event as a communal reaction to and lifting of grief over the losses incurred during the pandemic – including the land, where the dig took place, of The Shalom Institute campus – which was devastated by the Woolsey Fire of 2018. Might as well throw our eco – fear into the mix, or the hole as the case may be, being strengthened by knowing we are not alone.

Or we could be digging ourselves OUT of a hole by collective action. You know where you find me doing just that.

Scrub Jay

Music today is one of my picks when I try to deal with surges of anxiety.

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Breathing the High-Altitude Ether of Discovery

“Art-making embodies our private struggles with the meaning of life, the relationship between humanity and nature. In a time when our ability to comprehend reality is becoming more and more blurred by our inability to abstract meaning, the visionary abstractionist of natural phenomena represents a way of making art that is inherent and primordial…Through use of organic shapes and a chaotic vocabulary, it is possible to awaken the viewer’s own private demons.” –Frank Kowing (2011)

It all began with a cold call to Linfield University. The family of Native American artist Frank Kowing, one of the first graduates of Linfield’s budding art department in 1966, wondered if they could get help with a treasure trove of work left in a storage unit. Framed, encaustic oil paintings, endless loose canvasses of acrylic abstracts, sculptures made of sticks and found objects, drawings and notebooks were all looking for a home.

Partial Linfield Gallery View

Brian Winkenweder, chair of the art department, was hesitant given the fact that the university is not set up to store collections, but upon seeing it all, was hooked. The quality of the work, the link to the institution and the region all deserved an exhibition, with hopes to connect collectors and art lovers to the work for further distribution.

Partial Linfield Gallery View

Thea Gahr, artist and curator of the Linfield Gallery, had her hands – and her head – full. Selection is always difficult with a plethora of materials, particularly when works range across domains, span decades, and differ wildly in style.

Thea Gahr inspecting one of the many canvases that could not be hung

In her favor, though, were the facts that she excels in taking risks, as I have now seen across several of her curations, had sufficient run-up time to think things through, and commands a space that captures a light seemingly made for or reflected in Kowing’s paintings of Pacific Northwest mountain scapes.

Frank Kowing Mt Hood 2010
Frank Kowing North Cascades 2010

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Frank Kowing: Breathing the High-Altitude Ether of Discovery

Exhibition dates: Feb. 9 – Mar. 18, 2022

Opening reception: Wednesday, Feb. 16, 5:30 – 7 p.m.

Experience the paintings, sculptures, and sketchbooks of Frank Kowing Jr. b. April 1,1944 – September 24, 2016.

900 SE Baker Street
McMinnville, Oregon 97128
503-883-2200

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I don’t follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives. – Raoul Dufy.

I had entered the empty gallery in the morning, wary of inside visits but determined to get to know what the Linfield folks were raving about and had almost an hour to myself, camera in hand, before meeting with the curator.

Some of the work was truly beautiful, much of it disquieting and all of it forcing you to read beyond seeing, the artist himself disambiguating the visual impressions by including text on practically each and every painted abstract or representation. Or, was the intention to make the work rather more ambiguous? Hard to tell.

Frank Kowing Thought Thing 2009 with excerpts

I did notice an intense push-pull exerted on me. The perception of wholes, of representative forms, of the rhythm and flow of the abstract visual input were constantly battling with the compulsion to decipher what the artist had written for you to read, or included in terms of photographs. The focus narrowed on his written communications, as if he intended to protect the beauty – or the meaning – of his painted visions and landscapes from too close an inspection, any possible intrusion. I couldn’t help thinking that the old adage by the 18th century French philosopher Marmontel, “the arts require witnesses,” had to be extended here to the request that the artist’s life, his struggles, demanded witnessing.

Un-numbered acrylic. “Closed into myself as if in mental state, saying please, how soon will this end.”

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Frank Kowing, a member and Elder of the Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde, was born in McMinville in 1944. (I am grateful to the Kowing family to have made excerpts of an upcoming biography available to me, which allowed me a glimpse of the artist’s life.) He served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, traveling extensively across Asia during his R&R breaks, travel an early passion that would hold true for the rest of his life. Europe was next after his tour ended, where he settled in Amsterdam. He attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, an art school that heavily focussed on graphics and design, but probably also provided exposure to the burgeoning neo-expressionist movement that took Europe and then the U.S. by storm during the 70s and 80s, the Austrian Georg Baselitz and Americans Philip Guston and Jeffrey Koons among them.

When funds ran out – a constant struggle throughout a lifetime devoted to making art and forced to making money, in exhausting day jobs as a contractor – Kowing returned to the States, living and working at multiple East Coast locations. He received an MFA from Penn State in the early 70s, joined various art collectives in New York, Pensylvania, D.C. and later Maryland, starting to sell work but never enough to be economically secure, like so many artists. After brief stints in California and a respite year in his beloved Oregon, he joined the Peace Corps in 1985 and spent 2 years teaching children living with developmental disabilities in Tunesia, followed by 6 years as a curator at Meridian House International, a multiservice not-for-profit conference center and museum in D.C.

The frequent shifts in location and occupations where partly the result of structural factors, economic hardship, the opportunities to be part of collectives, a conflicted relationship with established art galleries, the personal anchors of love and friendship found or abandoned.

I also think they were part of an internal restlessness, one driven by an overarching theme in the artist’s life: intense and frequent losses.

He was estranged from his parents, as well as from a son from an early relationship. He lost two beloved wives to death from diseases. He lost his health to a series of grave accidents and subsequent surgeries, the ravages of undiagnosed Lyme disease and increased pain management by self-medicating with alcohol. The zest for life, the passion for nature – mountain climbing in particular, again and again all over the world – the longing for the freedom of high altitudes of any kind, was in increasing tension with the paralysis induced by physical pain and emotional depression.

***

I am writing about this because the work itself draws one into a conversation with the artist’s expressed feelings. When he notates states-of-mind and emotions he communicates with the potential viewer. It is tempting to label him as a confessional painter, just like Sylvia Plath was stereotyped as a confessional writer, given the naked honesty and vulnerable pain and self-reflection associated with her poetry. That would be a mistake, though, in both cases, since the work embodies strategies of communications that are very well aware of the perceiver, and not just centered on self-disclosure, with Kowing implicating the viewer directly in his artist statements.

Frank Kowing – Tree of Life – 2011 with excerpted side-view showing the three dimensional materiality of the work.

“Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.” –  Jean Dubuffet

Among the standard models of intentional communication in my own field, psychology, are the so called Gricean assumptions. Grice proposed that we all want to convey meaning, something best achieved if we stick to truthfulness (maxim of Quality) which would be reflected in an artist’s sincerity to communicate or their skill and the selection of an appropriate style and medium in artistic communication. We should also choose the right level of complexity, (maxim of Quantity,) in painting that would be the appropriate levels of visual complexity. Our communication should be non-random (maxim of Relevance,) expressed in the painting’s subject that might included links to our culture, or to personally relevant issues, or historic symbols. Finally, there is the issue of how obscure an expression is, or structurally sound in terms of a painting’s composition (maxim of Manner.) Forget the science speak. Simply put: if you want to get a message across, to be understood, choose your topic wisely and in context, express it without distraction or excess details, and do so in a manner that does not obscure the meaning. Could have said that in the first place, I know.

Frank Kowing self portrait Journal series (Tyger Tyg, Burning Bright) 2011 with excerpts

Kowing basically breaks all of these rules and has us nonetheless completely fascinated with deciphering the meaning he might or might not convey. That is what true art can do!

Here are just some random examples that speak to that point. I had mentioned before that the layout of the representational paintings, the mountain scenes in particular, draw the viewers on the one hand to the beauty of nature, the pristine peaks, yet bind them to the base of the mountains, chained to deciphering the text, loosing the forest for the trees, so to speak. The mountains come in full view only if you stand far away, but the texts draw you close so you can read.

What is the subject and why is it overlaid by riddles?

It is puzzling, but the work soon conjures some strong emotion in the viewer – in my case memories of years spent in a suffocating, cloistered boarding school in the South West of Germany, looking through my classroom windows into the hazy blue of the Odenwald mountains and the Koenigsstuhl, a longing for being out there, away from it all, so intense it almost hurt. It might be different memories for others, but we probably all share that sense of wanting something, someone or somewhere and not having easy access, if any at all.

Frank Kowing Cascades 2004

The level of complexity of Kowing’s work goes overboard, particularly in the abstract expressionist acrylics that are dotted with snippets of text like his beloved Mt. Hood meadows with wildflowers. The words in the oil paintings are also in ambiguous relation to the complex spatial planes depicted in the painting; the photographs and typed pieces of paper are neither clearly foreground nor background, they remind the viewer that the painting is literally a flat surface, immediately contradicted by the three dimensional parts of the paintings created by layers of paint and wax – tactile mementos of ripped open scars or glorious mountain ridges, take your pick.

Frank Kowing Tree of Life 2011 excerpt

He has taken the inclusion of signs and text from the legacy of his forbears, collagists like George Braques, to new heights, leaving the viewer at times to struggle.

Un-numbered acrylic

Frank Kowing Acrylic # 84 Date not available

And chaos rules, obscurity is writ large. At least in my head, trying to figure out if Kowing meant the accumulation of fortune cookie predictions or other banal proscriptions scattered across his acrylics seriously, or as a tease, ridiculing our desperate need for unambiguous meaning by serving cultural platitudes cold.

A wonderfully humorous trickster, then, in addition to the deeply serious communicator.

That sense of trickster is reinforced when looking at the possibly invented communication with Edward Kienholz in one of the largest works in the exhibition. Kienholz, famous for his elaborate found-object assemblages which convey a harsh scrutiny of American society, was known to pull major pranks himself, in pursuit of chaos many times over.

Frank Kowing The Sea of Kienholz – excerpts – date unknown

I prefer the emotion that corrects the rule. – Juan Gris

I think Kowing would have liked the photograph below that dimly reflects me in the gallery glass door in front of the exhibition announcement. A faint witness to his art, his wit, his struggles. Moved by learning about this work, his life. And wondering what it is with art that allows communication between an artist and an audience even if they are separated by time, sometimes centuries, by cultural back-ground – Native American Oregonian meet German immigrant – by color or class, with some having the unearned privilege of inclusion in mainstream society, while others don’t.

The true artist knows how to convey basic emotions, cross-culturally shared, I suppose, the woes of longing/not belonging, the irreparable hurts of a past than cannot be healed, or the joy of being a small part of a majestic natural environment, that lets us feel free for small slivers of time.

Kowing knew how to tell stories, fully aware that they were likely shared in some, even many details at levels that transcend our roles in life.

The very last painting Kowing painted has an alpine sky-blue rectangle in the center, an empty space devoid of text, mementos, sorrow.

I try to tell myself that when he walked on in 2016, he stepped through that window into the azure light, breathing the high-altitude ether of not discovery, but release.

If you are interested in seeing work of other contemporary Native American artists, here are just a few options from around the state:

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