Checking out SoCal fashion in the rain and cold – crazy weather for mid-April, and clever outfits to meet the challenge, colorful garb gleefully combatting the gray.
Lots of umbrellas, some just carried in case…
The rain check is obviously for writing – I offer you plenty of visual treats, instead.
Heavy weather is today’s aptly named album. A lot of styles I saw here were also worn during the late 70s when this music was performed live by Weather Report .
There have been rich moments during my stay at the Californian Zorthian Ranch, in the course of daily wanderings, or, for that matter, having my coffee on the patio.
Pigs come by and want to be scratched, or, alternatively, bite your ankles (luckily I was warned and the single culprit is easily identifiable.)
Scout the cat visits regularly, and a small dog named Chicken pretends to be fearless.
I have mentioned the owls before, and have come to realize that the entire soundscape is a reenactment of my childhood, on another continent, in an equally rural surround: Goats, cows, roosters and chickens, peacocks, the occasional horse, crows and multiple songbirds – old traces of “home” reappear from some deep place in memory. Except my village did not have Los Angeles or the likes, one of the largest cities ever, attached, but was a truly isolated. I listen to warblers, finches, mourning doves, and am stunned by the arc that my life has taken, from the sugar beet fields of Western post-war Germany, to the San Gabriel mountains in Southern California, with multiple land mark locations in between. So many new beginnings, so many adventures.
How best avoid being eaten: mayflies hiding on lizard’s head….
Next to the rich moments there are magical moments. If you stand still enough for long enough, you can actually watch a pair of tiny wrens build a nest inside some of the discarded machinery. Every time they deliver a twig they serenade, “Look, world, I did it! One more stick to make it a home! Eggs next!”
Gathering twigs
Oops, dropped one
A triumphant trilling after twig deposit in that wheelhouse.
Most moving was the birth of two little goats, literally a stone’s throw away from my porch. I met them not even 24 hours after their birth. Aptly named Chocolate Milk and Brownie by the resident five-year-old, they are exploring their world, trying to persuade their mother to nurse them, for which she has little patience. They romp, they sleep, they are so cute that it brings tears to my eyes, when really, I am not the most sentimental.
Birth: we – I – tend to overlook the enormity of creation, the possibilities of new beginnings, when the world events draw attention so much more frequently to its opposite: death. I have been thinking way too much through the trauma of real wars and our participation in it through acts of commission and omission; the suffering of women condemned to death through new abortion legislation (it is estimated, that over 1000 women each year will dye of ectopic pregnancies alone in Arizona after the lates court rulings that sets the state back to 1864) or reviewing art so completely focussed on the imagination of war action and outcome, as I did earlier this week.
Hannah Arendt ‘s words come to mind, as ever a reminder that we need to fight off a sense of defeat or resignation.
“With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we responded by beginning something new on our own initiative” (The Human Condition 176-7).
The concept, as she devised it, is called natality. It does not simply describe the fact of being born. It embraces the potential that is inherent in birth, a potential that needs to be converted into action to make a difference or some impression on the world. (There are lots of other concepts attached as well, including the way we can and must connect with others, for political action that is part of shaping the world, but that would lead us to far away from my main point.)
We have the choice to act, in whatever minimal ways, as creatives, or educators, or supporters, or by providing mutual aid. We can run for something, or we can donate, we can plant trees, or hold others in their grief. We can decide what we focus on – Death? Birth? – to allow us to preserve a semblance of sanity, or to generate sufficient rage so that we refuse to give up.
I have not yet read a recent book by Jennifer Banks, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth which came highly recommended from the L.A. Review of Books. Banks’s case studies include Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Hannah Arendt as well, looking at the centrality of the topic of (re)birth in the authors’ work. It’s on the list! When I have time to read again, that is, away from the temptation to hang out with the baby goats and photograph the wrens.
Books have always been my source to screw up the courage for new beginnings. They modeled the worlds that a bored or lonely child would consider open, just a step needed to enter a new universe. Who cared that I probably understood only half of what I read, way too early, from the classics of Russian and French literature to the German canon of the Greats, from Heine to Mann. I know exactly what triggered my Wanderlust, though, at age 9 or thereabouts: a book about chasing white Rhinos in Africa, on a land rover trip from Algiers to Cape Town. I never made it to South Africa. The Zorthian farm is enough.
Music today is a 1902 symphony called Rebirth.
“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” – Quote attributed to Leon Trotsky but actually coined by Fanny Hurst in 1941 while addressing a rally in Cleveland, Ohio.
“First time I wore thermal underwear and a down vest to work in April,” said the museum guard standing outside Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass—a 456-foot-long concrete slot constructed on LACMA’s campus, topped by a 340-ton granite megalith. I had not expected such detailed response to my friendly “It’s cold, isn’t it?” directed at the shivering man.
Two views of Michael Heizer Levitated Mass (2012)
Glorious blue sky and sunshine were deceptive. It was cold and extremely windy when I started my visit to LACMA, exploring the grounds first, evading palm fronds flying through the air. Crazy weather, with a few of Ai WeiWei’s zodiac creatures ignoring it all and the lamps standing like frozen tin soldiers..
The shivering, alas, did not end once inside. Not due to the temperature, though, since it was quite toasty in the Resnick Pavilion. Rather, it was induced by the realization that we simply have not learned the lessons from the past – or, alternatively, have learned them all too well: media manipulation plays a significant role in preparing people for war, luring them into support for war efforts, and pulling the wool over their eyes with regards to the consequences of war. Pretending that we can know war by imagining it, is, of course, one way to sell it to the public. We might make very different decisions if we lived through the actual experience which is never matched by the most vivid imagination based on media representations. Watershed events like World War I that changed the course of history, are these days remembered as statistics – if they are remembered at all. 20 million deaths, 21 million wounded, in the span of four years (military personell and civilians combined.) Hard to intuit the nightmare that was, when only thinking about numbers.
“Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media,” offers some 200 exhibits chosen by Timothy O. Benson, curator of the museum’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies. Posters, books, rotogravure graphics, prints and excerpts from films combine to show the extent to which the public’s perception of World War I was shaped in ways beneficial to war efforts by state and private media. Inexplicably, one of the very few paintings on display was chosen to head the exhibition announcement and subsequent reviews, of which there are remarkably few. (You would think in our own time of war, the atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza, an exhibition about the interaction between media and war would be of heightened interest.)
Félix Edouard Vallotton Verdun (1917)
Maybe there is a pragmatic explanation for the choice, after all: Félix Edouard Vallotton’s Verdun (1917) spares you the reality of the slaughter that was unfolding across a full year in the French trenches (where my own grandfather fought.) It immediately lifts the gaze from the bilging smoke and fires to a bright blue horizon, as if there’s hope, something more likely to draw exhibition visitors than horror, I presume. A much more remarkable painting, Gino Severino’s Armored Train in Action (1915) is also reviewed with regularity. Based on a press photograph of an armored train, the museum signage tells us the painting is: “a celebration of a mechanized war, typifying the Italian Futurists’ extolment of the dynamics of energy and destruction.” What is conveniently left out is Severino’s eventual full-fledged support of Mussolini’s fascism.
Gino Severino Armored Train in Action (1915)
The exhibition wanders across four sections, roughly focusing on war propaganda (Mobilizing the Masses,) battle field representations (Imagining the Battlefield,) exhibits introducing the number of international forces involved (Facilitating the Global War,) and a few instances of the attempts to integrate the damage that was wrought between 1914 and 1918 (Containing the Aftermath.) Nestled in between are a few displays of those who made art or comments opposed to the war.
Overall the organization worked for me, but I found the fact that multiple movie screens, mounted up high and continuously rolling cuts of both documentary movies and propaganda films, incredibly distracting. Some of them were, as good propaganda tends to be, almost hypnotic. A German businessman encounters a woman who sells him a magic potion that will reveal “the truth” if poured on paper, before she vanishes into thin air. What appears on the previously blank page: a tank threatening armed Germans, persuading the business guy, visibly moved, to invest immediately in war bonds, so he contributes his bit as well….
The posters on display are probably familiar to many of us. Neither witty nor subtle, they capitalize on installing fear or indignation, or appeal to your compassion.
The photography section gets more interesting. There are a few memorable photographs documenting the war efforts, and the pride in new technology.
Clockwise: William Ivor Castle Canadian Troops ging over the top – James Francis Hurley Death the Reaper (ca 1918 )and Over the Top – (ca 1918.)
For me, the truly gripping parts of this exhibition were the lithographs and drawings. They can be roughly divided into those that educate, often by means of satire or inclusions of script, and those that speak to our emotions, depicting experiential suffering in hopes that it comes across.
George Grosz The Voice of the People (1927. (Money paid for the following propaganda: Hurray, Hurray!! every shot a Russian, down with Serbia, God punish England, and every Bayonet a Frenchman.)
Georg Scholz Newspaper Carriers (1922).
Otto Dix The Cardplayers (1920)
Käthe Kollwitz The Widow (1922) and The Survivors: War against War (1924)
Both trigger empathetic imagination, something that could provide a fertile ground to change views on war, realizing its futility and injustice.
Willie Jäckel Memento (1915)
“Memento 1914/15,” a blistering portfolio of 10 lithographs by Willy Jaeckel, made in 1915 when he joined the Berlin Secession to oppose artistic suppression by bellicose Kaiser Wilhelm II. (Jaeckel was just 27.) Inspired by Goya’s “The Disasters of War,” it features a reclining severed head on the cover page — the “sleep of reason” made permanent, its unleashed monsters manifold in subsequent sheets. (Ref.)
Of course, the very same mechanism, as used by propaganda posters, helps to sell war.
In some ways, this makes the exhibition thought-provoking: how easily can our imagination, needed to approximate a close representation of the war experience, be manipulated? How do propaganda posters, retouched photographs, censored prints affect our imagination? It is not just the official propaganda machine by governments, military and states, however sophisticated. It is also the art that tries to elicit compassionate imagination that played a role mostly in anti-war directions – and managed to be distributed, for the first time, in large quantities, made accessible through the modern printing presses.
ERNST FRIEDRICH WAR AGAINST WAR (1924)
The show is timely. The use of both, image manipulation for propagandistic purposes, and the employment of censorship to prohibit artists from eliciting sympathetic imagination that helps to support just causes, is ubiquitous across the world right now. Just a few days ago, the NYT reported about the chilling effects of the Gaza war on artistic expression and censorship in Germany. NPR reported on the use of misleading videos (old or from video games) flooding the social media to escalate tensions between Palestinian and Israeli supporters, just a few days after the horrific Hamas attacks. Pro-Israel sources claim “Pallywood Propaganda,” accusing Palestinians of staging or faking their suffering.
El Dschihad, no. 25, January 25, 1916, in German prison camp created for muslim soldiers – Raoul Dufy The Allies, (c. 1915) – Lucien Jonas African Army and Colonial Troops’ Day, (1917)
Our increasing awareness of AI’s power in creating deep fakes leads us to discount the veracity of purported eyewitness accounts, sent via videos out of the war zones, with few means of assessing what is real and what is false. That uncertainty, in turn, can lead to a general disavowal of visual reports, a lack of trust that opens doors to political manipulations by those who claim they, and they alone, can guide us to “the truth.”
Art is related to conflict in so many ways – during wars, art is looted as a trophy, art is destroyed as a way of demoralizing opponents, it is used, as mentioned before, as a tool of propaganda in order to generate both psychological and material support for the war effort. Can art that opposes war, as expressed in writing, visual representations, music, really make a difference in our day and age, given our distrust, our being overwhelmed, our dire need to avoid being flooded and wanting to distance ourselves from war imagery? When war defeats the imagination, can art rekindle it? Can it cut through hate, anger, resentment, violence and destruction, change minds? The debate is ongoing.
Sergio Canevari The Russian Peace (1918)
I have no definitive answer. This exhibition’s imagery most meaningful to me, a pacifist, namely the depictions of suffering and the satirical stabs at those who financially gain from war, will likely not speak to those eager to go to war, just like racist propaganda posters embraced by them do nothing for me. Maybe our ideological or political divisions prevent us to think through art that does not confirm our preexisting beliefs. To that extent, art will not be able to produce change, given the strength of our biases. (I have written about this at length recently, as you might remember.)
Pierre Albert-Birot Final study for The War (1916)
However, if I consider what happens when I share the art that appeals to me with other people who are open to it, it surely creates a sense of solidarity and feeling of belonging to that group. Maybe it guides you to find your kind, to strengthen a movement, to empower you to speak up for shared values. If controversial art models courage, it might spark you to be brave and resist, as well. Not a small feat.
Johannes Baader Dada-Dio-Drama (1920)
Right now we look from afar at wars in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Tigray, in Sudan, Syria, in Lebanon, with more on the horizon, should Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, the U.S. or Nato advance to increasing military action. We might not be interested in war, but war will be interested in us. And at that moment we will need allies to resist its pull, some of whom, just maybe, can be found through a shared appreciation of the relevant art as well as shared forms and intensities of imagination, allowing us to keep a critical perspective and fight manipulation.
Am I optimistic about this? Not really.
Hopeful? You bet.
Otto Schubert Watercolor, pen. and pencil on postcards he sent to his future wife. Off to War, November 18, 1915, Fire, Explosion, December 1, 1915 Evening Mood at the Front, January 24, 1916 Argonne, French Prisoners, April 1, 1916 Hot Day at the Front, April 7, 1916
December 3, 2023–July 7, 2024
Resnick Pavilion
Los Angeles County
Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Edward Kienholz The Portable War Memorial (1968-70)
““Precisely the least thing, the gentlest, lightest, the rustling of a lizard, a breath, a moment, a twinkling of the eye – little makes up the quality of the best happiness. Soft!” – Friedrich Nietzsche Thus spoke Zarathustra
I learned some days ago that a new gecko species, discovered in India, was named Cnemaspis vangoghi because the blue coloration evoked Vincent van Gogh’s iconic “Starry Night” (1889.)
Nothing quite that fancy to be found around here, but, in truth, I consider all of the lizards beautiful, and was tempted to name this dotted fellow below Lizard Kusama. If Yayoi Kusama, the princess of polka dots, had the least bit of humor, she’d probably be pleased, given that she specializes in weird, as The Tate once claimed on their kids’ page…
Lots of artists have attempted to capture what is special about these little reptiles, representing their respective mythologies, trying to depict their biological features, or using them as symbols for an array of concepts. In ancient Rome, lizards were a symbol of death and rebirth, given that the animals hibernated in the winter months and reappeared in the spring. The Etruscans believed that lizards went blind as they aged but could regain their sight by bathing in bright sunlight, making them a symbol for light and heat.
Maria Sibylla Merian Lizard with eggs and hatchling, butterflies and banana plant. (1705)
Native American tribes created lots of lizard representations across the U.S, both as petroglyphs and pictographs. Their shapes are also a dominant feature of Aborigine art from Australia and New Zealand and folk art from Mexico and Central America.
Leonardo da Vinci used them for stage settings.
Leonardo da Vinci Allegory on the Fidelity of the Lizard (recto) (1478)
Scientific treatises of the Middle ages mixed fact and fiction.
Konrad Gesner, Historia Animalium Liber Ii : De Quadrupedibus Ouiparis (1586.)
Some artist quite often added them as small details to larger compositions, here one of my favorites for its color.
Paul Gauguin Vairumati (detail) (1897)
Some were playful,
Paul Klee Eidechse (1926)
some were constructed,
Maurits Cornelius Escher Lizard (no.25) 1939
and some are simply allegorical.
Joan Miró Le lezard aux plumes d’or (1971)
Lizards’ rustlings are ubiquitous here at the Zorthian ranch where they abide in abundance. An old, abandoned piano on the patio is home for quite a number of them, begging to be photographed. Although none of these images can live up to what one of the most brilliant Mexican photographers, Graciela Iturbide, has captured across the decades, they, or perhaps the moments when they were captured, are of the quality – little, fleeting – that makes for the best happiness.
That said, do check out Iturbides‘ work – it is phenomenal.
Graciela Iturbide Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas), Juchitán, México. (1979.)
Graciela Iturbide Lagarto (Lizard), (1986)
Music today by Sibelius. The Lizard, of course.
“Certain desert areas have a distinctive and subtle charm, in part dependent on spaciousness, solitude, and escape from the evidence of human control and manipulation of the earth, a charm of constantly growing value as the rest of the earth becomes more completely dominated by man’s activities. This quality is a very vulnerable one …. Nowhere else are casual thoughtless human changes in the landscape so irreparable, and nowhere else is it so important to control and completely protect wide areas.”
– Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr in a 1928 survey for the California State Park Commission.
And here I thought almost 5 hours in the car to get from Los Angeles to Borrego Springs, CA, was a long stretch. Take the amount of time – decades and decades – it took to establish the nation’s second largest state park, the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and the drive was but a blink of an eye. Beginning in 1927, a group of visionaries tried to protect several desert areas for future generations, alert to the destruction of natural habitats by encroaching civilization that parceled up open spaces. Fierce opposition by many interested in economic development stretched out the process across years and years. For once, those concerned with environmental and ecological preservation, prevailed. Since 1974, some 585,930 acres (237,120 ha) of the Colorado Desert, located in San Diego County, are now protected. (For a riveting account of the history of the fight to create this marvel, go here.)
The desert lies along the western margin of the Salton Trough. This major topographic depression with the Salton Sink having elevations of 200 ft (61 m) below sea level, forms the northernmost end of an active rift valley and a geological continental plate boundary (Lots of earthquakes with high magnitudes, every 5 years or so.) (Ref.)
Imagine a large bowl of badlands, surrounded by mountains, with the Vallecito Mountains to the south and the highest Santa Rosa Mountains to the north. The badlands, ancient lake basins, are the result of both, erosion and sediment deposition over 5 million years. what you are seeing is literally what the Colorado river excavated from the Grand Canyon. The eroded and pretty much plant-less areas make it easy to see the dipping layers of siltstone and sandstone. They are filled with fossils, and populated by big horn sheep, neither of which I glimpsed during my visit. What I did see was breathtaking beauty of wide open land, cloudy sunrise, and the tail end of the wildflower bloom, providing endless delight to the searching eye.
No wonder that eco-tourism flourishes here at this time of year: the population of Borrego Springs, where I stayed, increases by about 580% in peak wildflower superbloom season, an increase from around 3400 long term residents to around 200,000 tourists. According to the government’s park survey, 932 plant taxa belonging to 387 genera in 98 different families documented within the park. The plant family Asteraceae (sunflower) is most abundant with 135 taxa identified. Rodents, hares, rabbits, fox, coyote, mountain lion, bighorn sheep as well as many species of snakes make up the fauna.
The region was home to two Native American groups, the Kumeyaay and the Cahuilla for thousands of years, semi-sedentary residents of certain favored locations or base camps. From there they would travel to outlying areas seasonally to harvest food resources and to avoid inclement weather, like winter snows. Leave it to the forces that be to name the park instead for sheep (Borrego) and a colonizing explorer, military officer and politician, 18th century Juan Bautista de Anza.
The progressive vision to protect open spaces was not matched by progressive visions in other domains either: when César Chávez came to Borrego Springs to support local workers who wanted the National Farm Workers Association as their union in 1966, they tried to chase him out of Borrego Springs by not allowing lodging or camping in the usual spaces. He and the union organizers eventually camped at Borrego Palm Canyon Campground, the start of my hike last week, with a lone supervising ranger defending their rights against the town folks who loathed the idea of unionizing workers.
The hike, starting at 7 am with an otherworldly light bathing the landscape, went up to the palm canyon, at my speed taking about 4 hours there and back.
That left a spare hour to visit some additional strange sights, before the threatening rain storm set in. (It dropped over 2 inches in 24 hours for the L.A. region.) In reversal to my earlier complaints about the length of time, these 5 hours felt way too short!
The clouds formed an appropriately dramatic background for an unexpected piece of art, a humongous, corrugated steel sea serpent crawling through the desert. I could not but marvel at the strangeness of the sight and, truth be told, at the skill of the designed and steel welded creation by sculptor Ricardo Breceda. However, there was something odd about plopping some 130 creatures in to the landscape, with people and cars crawling around them like ants, with few of the sculptures true to this natural environment. I mean, elephants and camels? Dinosaurs and tigers? The whole thing was the idea of Dennis Avery, the late land owner of Galleta Meadows Estates in Borrego Springs, adding free standing art to his property and, I guess, attracting tourists this way. and if that’s what draws people to the region, exposing them to the barren beauty of the desert for most of the year, more power to them!
Music reflects John Luther Adam’s view of the desert. Quails and sky reflect mine.
Frankly, I’m torn between my desire to report on a magical place, and my longing for just sitting here and let it all sink in. I am currently staying at an old ranch house, hand-built from sandstone boulders, filled with art by the Armenian immigrant Jirayr Zorthian (1911-2004,) who built it many, many decades ago.
It is located high up in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, reachable via a one-lane, potholed, hairpin-curved dirt road. Driving it down and up once a day is enough to get your adrenalin flowing. Except that levels are high already from the sheer beauty that surrounds you, the house nestled among olive-, eucalyptus-, and palm trees, old oaks and oleander bushes, overlooking Los Angeles in the distance.
It is one of many dwellings on a multi-acres compound that is populated by people who have decided to (mostly) live off the land, many of whom remind me of my own hippie days in the late 60s. You wander amongst trailers, make-shift living arrangements, a communal kitchen, laundry and store, multiple workshops for wood and metal working, and large vegetable gardens.
There is live stock, some of which is roaming freely and becoming my occasional visitors. In fact my 14 month-old granddaughter now consistently makes goat noises when she sees me, having seen them at my place. Old goat, indeed. Happy old goat.
The toddler might as well hoot, since the owls are singing me to sleep every night, the minute the sun goes down, three different species telling by their call, a pair of Northern pygmy owls among them, with their eerie staccato whistling. It is cold up here when the wind blows and dusty, likely hot in the summer. As with every ancient house, some windows don’t open, some don’t close, and there is a resident raccoon in the ceiling, which I have come to expect – every one of my extended California trips had one seeking proximity in the walls of my rooms. True story! (I also hasten to add the wonderful folks here are in the process of chasing it out. As I said, old house, many access points.)
The creativity of Jirayr Zorthian who build up this land, and whose son and granddaughter are currently managing the rentals for concerts, meetings, weddings and lodgers to bring in some funds – and most importantly continue his legacy of celebration of art – is evident wherever you look. PBS had a comprehensive account of the history of the artist and the place he imprinted, calling it a 48 acre art junk yard, in case you are curious. He worked as a muralist, murals which can be found among others at the Pentagon. He partied with the best of them, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, Segovia, Richard Feynman, and many more included, and in his last years allowed people to deposit junk on the property, which his descendants are still trying to get rid off, 20 years after his death.
The house itself is filled with paintings, drawings, prints and small cultural tableaux made from found objects. I’ve been here over a week now and still discover new details every morning. The outside walls that surround the house flank walking paths or little hidden patios, overflowing with objects cemented into the field stones, with a recurring theme of insulators. They come in all sizes, shapes, materials like glass and ceramics, likely collected obsessively since there is not a single view, anywhere, that does not include one or more of these things that are used on telephone polls and wires.
I have been photographing them in all lights and times of day, hoping there will be some creative spark to use them for montages. I feel insulated here, protected from the horrors and sorrows of the world as long as a I stay away from my computer. Insulated from the internally imposed push towards accomplishing something, going to museums, writing reviews. I have literally not done anything other than soaking up nature, and glowing from the joy that is my family here.
Oh, and of course, I have photographed birds. They visit, morning and evening, on the surrounding car wrecks transformed into installations, and the juxtaposition of nature and man-made, rusty objects has been a thrill. They land on artificial trees, blossoming with, what else, insulators. They take birdbaths in discarded bowls and hubcaps. Finches, warblers, mocking birds, hummingbirds, ravens, hawks, sparrows, acorn woodpeckers, you name them.
I can imagine that it is not easy to live in the shadow of such a larger-than-life figure as Zorthian. Not easy to make it in a community that forever changes with people coming and going, with laws restricting the ability to capitalize on the land, an initial lack of experience with animal husbandry or food farming, changing climate conditions and unreliable sources of income to carry a group of committed tenants. As a house guest I reap all the benefits of the beauty, without the cost of the conditions that come with this unusual place. But I can see the absolute thrill of being part of a legacy, of driving (art)history forwards, of maintaining an actual and spiritual independence from the norms that society tries to impose on us all. This place is infused with purpose as well as levity, peacefulness as well as stimulation. I think it conveys, for those who maintain it, a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, a social embeddedness. So important in times of experienced isolation and societal division. For those who visit: a true gift of insulation from the rest of our lives.
Here is one of the prior ranch visitors, Segovia, playing Bach. Then again, I could have chosen Charlie Parker…. but it felt like a sublime day.
You have to be on the lookout – otherwise you miss all the action!
Going: yours truly, driving to L.A. for the next month or so. Dispatches are in the cards, but not on a regular basis! I am hoping for a few Art on the Road adventures, though.
Coming: spring.
At least that’s what it looked and felt like yesterday near the Columbia river when the sun finally broke through, and little puffy clouds made the sky delectable.
Lots of kestrels,
other birds pairing up, or calling for mates
Buds and first shoots emerging,
and the landscape on the cusp of exploding into color, with a few saturated spots already showing off.
Hard to imagine California can beat that. But then again…… stay tuned.
Since I didn’t burden your brain with much text today, we might as well stretch it with some unusual music from Australia. The album title translates as Now; the singer is one of few remaining Butchulla songmen, singing in their endangered aboriginal language.
“If nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with Fascism, there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plentitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of [Walter] Benjamin is there to prove it.” – Fredric Jameson, “Walter Benjamin; Or, Nostalgia,” Marxism and Form, 1971
Bonuspoints for a gallery that makes you wonder before you even set foot into the building! At least that’s how I reacted when I arrived in Vancouver to meet with one of the artists currently exhibiting at Art at the Cave and was greeted by a sign sporting multiple promises – some of which were indeed kept by the work shown inside.
Stitching Stories features multiple artists, loosely connected by work using stitching and weaving, their work triggering immediate associations of past, present and future for me, the flow of time signaling change.
Sharon Svec, part of the gallery team and one of the exhibiting artists.
Sam Yamauchi‘s A Messy Book of Mistaken Identity symbolizes the hazards of both, a search for and communication of identity to others. The stitched collages unfold in the here and now, boldly describing a process affected by variables all too familiar for many of us, rightly questioning if there is a permanent, identifiable self to be found.
Sam Yamauchi A Messy Book of Mistaken Identity
Sharon Svec‘s The Eyes Have It is an enchanting set of three eye-shaped, sculptural mobiles intricately woven from roots of ivy, some starting to sprout leaves in the warmth of the cavernous room. The robust material (have you ever tried to get rid of ivy roots in your garden?) takes on a more filigree appearance when laced together, light suffusing in both directions. The combination of light and eyes, three of them no less, triggered amused associations of clairvoyance, the third eye predicting the future – and the evanescence of such attempts. The German word for clairvoyance is Hellsehen, seeing the light. I have always believed that that is a much more applicable description of our take on the past when we come to inspect it, rather than a grasp on the future. But what do I know.
Sharon Svec The Eyes Have it.
***
The past, as it turns out, is what I came for, drawn by two bodies of work by Ruth Ross, Yiddish and The Doll Dialogues, respectively. More precisely, I was interested in how the artist approaches the past. Honoring the past in an attempt to defy impermanence, holding on to it to prevent its loss, turning nostalgic to retrieve remembered affect? Her frequent use of discarded fabrics, beyond their prime and found in thrift store bins or yard sales, often applied back to front, had a material feel of things dragged up, preserved to last. Yet with all her work, things go far deeper than that.
Yiddish is, in some ways, the perfect vehicle for considerations of preservation and loss, not just in the intimate sphere of what’s spoken in one’s family to which Ross refers. The language itself is about 1000 years old, spoken by Ashkenazi Jews, with the name Yiddish itself meaning Jewish. It had other names as well, Taytsh (German), Yidish-taytsh (Jewish-German), Loshn-ashkenaz (the Ashkenazi tongue), and Zhargon (jargon,) but Yiddish remained the standard reference since the 19th century. Before the Holocaust there were over 10 million people in the world speaking Yiddish, a number that was, in addition to the murder of 6 million Jews, further diminished by processes of acculturation and assimilation in America and the former Soviet Union, and by repression of Yiddish and acculturation to Hebrew in Israel. (Ref.)
Ruth Ross Balabusta (Housewife) Details below
Feh signals contempt…
The language itself went through many permutations but generally allowed people who were living in the diaspora to have a shared means of communication. It consists of multiple elements from other languages, Romance in origin, German and Rabbinical Hebrew among them. Each new region where Jews settled after having been driven out from other countries, developed its own vernacular, creating hybrid words, just as we see in so many other languages. The different dialects spoken throughout different European regions were interspersed in American Yiddish, when the immigrants arrived, and standard Yiddish now contains many English words as well.
It has been a two-way street, clearly. Many of the words Ross chose, stitched with wit, subtle hints, allusions to childhood memories and an attentive eye for type-face design, are part of our own English vocabulary, used frequently without knowing their origins. That is even more true for the German speaker. I certainly grew up with everyday words that turned out to be Yiddish when I thought they were German, adjusted in their spelling. In fact there are over 1000 of them, with about 30 in heavy rotation, Schlamassel (Shlimazl – bad fortune or things gone wrong,) malochen (physical labor, from Maloche – work,) Ganove (Gannew in Yiddish, a petty criminal) or Techtel-Mechtel (a fling, derived from the yiddish word Tachti, which means secret) among them.
Ruth Ross Schlemiel/Schlimazel (A Schlemiel is the person who spills the soup and a Schlimazel is the person it lands on…)
Ruth Ross Nu? (Whassup)
Last year I reviewed Ross’ extraordinary series, Red Scare, about being Jewish, politically active and under threat during the McCarthy era. It had a strong political voice, something that is less obvious but still notable in the current exhibition. To draw attention to a language that has long served to identify yourself as a target for anti-Semitism is the opposite to what so many Jews, particularly of the artist’s parent’s generation, were told to do in order to assimilate. There are whole books written about the slogan Dress British, Think Yiddish that encouraged Jews to blend in, in order to be admitted to institutions of higher learning, in particular the Ivy Leagues. Keep your identity inside, think, don’t speak Yiddish. Variations on this can be found as recent as a decade ago, when the originally Jewish sartorial empire, Saks Fifth Avenue, teamed up with a company that made adjustable stays for men’s shirt collars, imprinted with Yiddish words, functionally hidden from view in their little collar slots. The special collection’s name? “Think Yiddish, Dress British.”
Ruth Ross Schmatta (A rag, or piece of clothing)
Ruth Ross Nudnik (A pestering or irritating person. As the artist related, her Papa used to call her that in exasperation when she disturbed his peace.)
Here is work that draws attention to identity, created during a time when people are physically attacked on the street just for speaking Hebrew, two months ago in Berlin. A time when, closer to home, Marjorie Taylor Green suspected that California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers, and exhibited during a time where Gaza has become a killing field. Plainly there are people in the world who will suspect us, dislike us and maybe despise us because we are Jewish. This point is certainly amplified by many people’s reactions to the horrors unleashed upon civilians in the Middle East. And therefore, unsurprisingly, there is some apprehension associated with letting people know that you are Jewish, and a Yiddish speaker. In addition to concern about vulnerability, many Jews feel some sense of shame or rage about what the government of Israel is pursuing in reaction to the horrifying attack by Hamas, and know we will be called anti-semitic if we voice our anti-Zionism, call for a cease fire or add our voices to the chorus of Jewish voices for Peace. To embrace an essential part of your identity then, in public, is a political act.
Ruth Ross The Royal OY and Gevalt
***
Ross’ second body of work references personal history as well, her life-long relationship with her dolls. Where Yiddish is explicit, straight forward, easily deciphered work, the Doll Dialogues appeared to me to be the opposite. Gauzy layers, combining laser prints on silk, gel prints on silk organza, and lace appliqués with occasional embroidery make for mysterious tableaux each with an obscured doll at its center.
If you are so inclined, they invite psychoanalytical interpretations of childhood memories, symbolized by the dolls, long veiled and inaccessible. After all, here is what Freud wrote:
. . . In the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influence of a variety of later psychological forces. Thus the “childhood memories” of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of “screen memories”and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.
—Sigmund Freud, “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories,” 1901
If you are like me, you will rather think about the symbolic value that dolls take on in their respective contemporary settings. They might not always be as explicit and creepy as the ones used by Hans Bellmer, who withdrew into the privacy of his obsessions in response to the Nazi’s imperatives about healthy rather than “degenerative” art. They might not be as culturally appropriated as Max Ernst‘s works derived from his collection of Katsina dolls of Hopi origin. But dolls do have a role within a political context, just as they had symbolic value since their inception so many thousands of years ago, first in religious settings, then as status symbols for the aristocracy and eventually as a plaything intended to shape little girls into their roles of care takers and mothers in the context of the nuclear family.
Ruth Ross On the Bus
Ross’ depiction of her dolls is shrouded in more ways than the visual one. Their titles refer to occasions down the memory lane of the artist, rather than serving as explanatory pointers. Their appearance is at times surreal, at times androgynous, hazy and dark. Lace and silk notwithstanding, there is no sense of an exaggerated female presence, a dress-up tool or emphasis on beauty. No hint of happy, innocent tea parties. These collages are blissfully free of nostalgia, even when tied to personal experiences of the doll’s owner.
Why do I celebrate that, you wonder? What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia?
We live in an era where nostalgia for the traditional role of women, playing house, being subservient, acting doll-like, enjoying the kitchen (Senator Katie Britt, we see you!) is making an organized come-back. It is signaled to a receptive public, yearning for a “traditional past” by ever so many flags, a baby voice appropriate for doll play among them. It has, however, nothing to do with how the dictionary defines nostalgia: “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”
Rather, during (aspiring) fascistic eras it becomes a political tool: Reactionary nostalgia creates a cultural identity by mystifying past and present. The myths of racial superiority and the claimed heritage of a superior religion or immutable gender hierarchy promises succor to those who are feeling deprived and demoted in their present-day existence. That was true for historical periods in the last century, be it in Germany or Italy, or Spain. It is true now for Russian claims of rights to land and resources, and we see it in our own country when we look at the justifications for political movements, Supreme Court sanctioned and enabled, that try to turn the clock back and remove rights extended to those who did not originally occupy the top of a hierarchical ladder (for that matter, who still don’t…)
Ruth Ross She laid her Baby at my Feet detail below
Rather than engaging in nostalgia, we should acknowledge that the past cannot be completely retrieved, and should inform the present only in so far as it allows us to discern what parts of the past should not be repeated. Clinging to conceptions of power that should be assigned to certain people in perpetuity, at the expense of others, is unjustifiable. So is clinging to ideas of permanent victimhood, used as justification by people to become perpetrators regardless of the horrors that they will unleash.
Ruth Ross Love this Doll to Death
The dolls in this exhibition are ambivalent enough that they invite associations to both, object and subject, good and evil. They are a welcome reminder that we need to lift the veil that obscures some version of truth, a veil fashioned out of our clinging to an imagined past, blocking our vision of a more equitable future.
STITCHING STORIES
Ruth Ross & Sam Yamauchi
MARCH 2024: Artist Talk from 1-2 pm on Saturday March 16; a reading by Ruth Ross’ guest poet Leanne Grabel on March 23 at 3 pm.
ART AT THE CAVE, 108 EAST EVERGREEN BOULEVARD, VANCOUVER, WA, 98660,
Music today, how could I not, is the mechanical doll’s aria from Offenbach’s Hoffman’s Erzählungen.
Today is International Women’s Day. I should probably be writing something about the rights women fought for, gained, have threatened and lost. About women in Gaza who lose more than just whatever rights remain to them, losing their families or even their lives. The women in Afghanistan who no longer have access to education, much less choices to thrive in anything other than the domestic sphere, if there. The women of America whose reproductive rights and bodily freedom are under an ongoing assault. And then we are faced with a reply to the SOTU address by a Republican Senator from Alabama, who sits at her kitchen table (where women belong ?) with a cross studded with diamonds around her neck (in case you forget the goal to make this into a Christian nation after all), all drama queen, stage whispering with fake tears in her eyes, how” illegal” immigrants are murdering our wives and daughters, painting a picture that might as well have come right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.) One might wonder how someone who says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman, is encouraging Americans to vote for a convicted sexual predator.
For the sake of sanity – yours as well as mine – I will instead write about the most glorious sights I encountered this week, providing some diversion from our political reality. Some 40 minutes north of Portland, in the state of Washington, runs the Lewis river, emptying into the Columbia which in turn joins the Pacific. At this time of year there are runs of smelt that make their way from the ocean, up the rivers, to their spawning grounds. These small fish from the family Osmeridae live most of their lives in the sea, and when I consulted wikipedia to learn more of them I encountered this: smelt tastes like smelt. Good to know.
The runs vary in size, with climate change making a large, negative impact already. Across the last years, recreational fishing for them in many regions of the Pacific Northwest was severely regulated, they were so scarce. This year the Fish and Wildlife Administration offered people permits for their dipping nets that were only open for a couple of single days.
The bald eagles who congregate at the confluence of the rivers benefit, of course, when they don’t have to compete with fishermen for the increasingly smaller number of prey. The sight was spectacular. In a landscape straight out of a 17th century Flemish painting, they congregate on trees by the hundreds. A steady coming and going, dipping in the water, then hanging out with their lunch on various snags or branches.
Many of them circling higher than I had ever seen them. I first thought those were vultures, joining the feast, but no, all eagles, many of them juvenile who still have brown feathers instead of the symbolic white heads and tail feathers. Lots of courtship acrobatics in the air, with males and females, mating for life, eventually tumbling down in pirouettes, gripping each other’s talons before landing for the fun to begin.
To see the most amazing close up shots, done with professional equipment that I cannot match, by a nature photographer, Mike Schultz, who really stands out, look here. The pictures are from 2021, when the smelt run was bigger than today.
Images by Mike Schultz
My equipment might not live up to these standards, but my enthusiasm sure did. Standing in sunshine, if cool, listening to the sounds of these birds, as well as the sea lions joining the hunt, my heart simply lifted. There was no pretense, no play acting, no hidden agenda, no political manipulation – just nature doing what it does, surviving the day, planning for future generations and protecting them, being in the moment, rising.
A gift.
Music today is Chopin’s Heroic, dedicated to all women who are, having no other choice. And fitting for the eagles as well…..
I so, so, so long for spring. I guess I have to wait for April…. when in other years magnolias were already in bloom in early March.
Morning – is the place for Dew –
Corn – is made at Noon –
After dinner light – for flowers –
Dukes – for setting sun!
by Emily Dickinson F223 (1861) 197
Magnolias, not unlike those captured in the photographs, were planted in Dickinson’s garden over 150 years ago, species not native to the region. By now they have migrated, to neighboring towns and from there up North, with climate change making it possible for them to survive in habitats not native for them.
Looked at it the other way around, should gardeners help non-native species to survive by adding them to regions that now have temperatures and water conditions suitable for them? They are doomed to die in their original habitats, after all?
Natural range shifts have certainly been documented by living beings that are able to move to preferred locations, like birds, insects and mammals. Historically, those migrations would have brought plants with them, in the form of seeds traveling via droppings, or clinging to fur and the like. But the species that would have dispersed the magnolias – the mastodons, giant ground-sloth and other mega-fauna – are extinct.
Here is the dilemma: on the one hand you might cheer the survival of a species under changing climate conditions, and go all in to give it a horticulturally helping hand. On the other side, though, many new species might then contribute to the decline and disappearance of those that are truly native to a particular region, themselves stressed by the new climate conditions. After all we know from biology research that a species’ risk of becoming invasive increases with the distance of its historic native range from the region it is colonizing. (Ref.)
I have no solution. Let’s just look at these pictures from other years, harbingers of spring, and enjoy them. We have to take joy were we can find it in these dark, wet days, and blooming trees are among the most joyful things I can conjure.
Music offers a spring song from Dvorak’s Poetic Tone Pictures – with a few others from that Opus thrown in as a bonus for being brave and cheerful!
