You’d think when you randomly google “chicken” you’d come up with good news, so direly needed at the end of this week. After all, a certain vice-presidential candidate claimed that his two kids eat 14 eggs every morning and then complained about the price of eggs being $4 a dozen, directly contradicted ($2.99) by the display he stood in front of while being filmed at a store in Pennsylvania. Hard to decide which of these two pieces of information is more out of touch with reality, but the latter was laid at the foot of the current administration, once again falsely blaming them.
So, chicken news. Here are literally the first 4 headlines that came up in a Google search:
Chickens are the most populous bird on Earth and are widely considered among the most abused animals on the planet. Despite their ability to think and feel, billions of chickens are raised and killed for food each year and subjected to some of the worst living and slaughter conditions imaginable to meet the increasing demand for meat worldwide.
I stopped reading after this. Remember, we want good news.
I give up. Enjoy your weekend, have brunch eating eggs Benedict, if you like them. I’ll go and see if I can find a red wheelbarrow to photograph. Maybe good thoughts will appear while staring at a “thing” rather than the news reports. After all, the poet linked below had a famous maxim, “No ideas but in things.”
The Red Wheelbarrow
So much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
“So much depends upon “? What is referred to? Maybe my sanity depends on it – here is a red bench. Red wheelbarrow next…
Music today is Jaco Pastorius and friends celebrating Chicken.
One of the most amazing pieces of music from the romantic period is a song written by Franz Schubert ((1797-1828), The Erl-King or Elf-King. It sets a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) to music, words that were based on a medieval Danish ballad, Elveskud. The narrative describes the night ride of a father carrying his feverish child on his galloping horse. The child fearfully tells his father that he sees the Erl-King, a metaphor for death, but is calmly and rationally told that it is just the wind, fog, trees and darkness that scare him. The Erl-King, after trying to lure the child with promises of toys and amusement, eventually threatens to take the boy by force, and the father gets increasingly anxious, realizing that the vision is not just a hallucination. When they arrive at home, the boy is dead in his arms.
Every school child of my generation had to learn the poem by heart, having no clue what it was all about other than a horror story. It contains many of the elements so important to the Romanticists: nature, death, the supernatural. Goethe certainly knew about fear of death as a youngster – he fought tuberculosis for two long years before he even turned twenty. Schubert’s composition manages to capture dread with changes in key and tempo, as well as introducing 4 distinct voices with different melodies, ranges and key changes alternating between major and minor keys. There is the narrator who frames the story at beginning and end, and then alternating vocalizations of the father, the kid and the Erlkönig. A fifth personality – the horse – is represented by the piano with a relentless, pounding rhythm throughout for the right hand (and the score specifies every single move the accompanist has to take, incredibly thought-out and rigid. The whole things comprises three or so minutes, a good thing too, otherwise your right hand would fall off.)
To this day I know very few pieces that embody dread, particularly the dread of an innocent child that senses death, as well as this song. It gave me goose-bumps as a child. Now the fear of being a helpless parent is more prominent – trying to distance yourself from the realization that horror lurks, and wanting to protect the child (as well as yourself) from that reality, to no avail.
The photomontage is an older one that I recently added to the series of images representing music that matters to me. It captures a torso of a young child surrounded by birches and alders (the “Erl” in Erlkönig is the German word for an alder tree: Erle. Unclear if Goethe ignored the Danish “Elven”, or it was a translation error. My speculation would be that he wanted to stage the eeriness of the moors where alders grow at the damp places. But what do I know.)
I photographed these very trees on the grounds of the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, a camp where so many Jewish children died of disease and starvation, as did their parents, eventually. (52.000 human beings, as a matter of fact, 13.000 of those after liberation of the camp, too starved to recover.)
How does a parent, themselves aware of the inescapability of potential death, protect the last weeks of their children? The history has renewed relevance for us, given the unrestrained rise in anti-semitism, both In Germany and here in the U.S. – an unrestrained rise fueled by unrestrained language encouraging violence against Jews, preemptively blaming them for election losses, and throwing out dogwhistles (serial numbers for to-be- deported immigrants was the latest in Floridian fantasizing, evoking tattoos of the Holocaust, and publicly welcoming fascist ideologues. Here is an overview article in The Atlantic about anti-semitism of the upper echelons of the American right wing. Read it and weep.
I weep also when I think of the mothers and fathers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon desperately trying to find some fashion of normal life for their children among the bombs and the hunger and the disease. It is they to whom the children turn, like the boy in the poem besieges his father, expecting comforting and protection. And it is they who cannot explain that all the laws we thought would protect us, have been cast aside, are ignored, or scoffed at, on all sides.
U.N. experts, for example, consider exploding pager and radios a terrifying violation of international law.
“Simultaneous attacks by thousands of devices would inevitably violate humanitarian law, by failing to verify each target, and distinguish between protected civilians and those who could potentially be attacked for taking a direct part in hostilities….Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life,” the experts said. Humanitarian law additionally prohibits the use of booby-traps disguised as apparently harmless portable objects where specifically designed and constructed with explosives – and this could include a modified civilian pager, the experts said. A booby-trap is a device designed to kill or injure, that functions unexpectedly when a person performs an apparently safe act, such as answering a pager. It is also a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians, including to intimidate or deter them from supporting an adversary,” the experts warned. “A climate of fear now pervades everyday life in Lebanon,” they said.”
Legal experts in the US disagree with each other whether law violations occurred with these booby-traps (Ref.), but nobody disputes that Israel defies the orders from the U.N. top Court to halt its military offensive in Gaza, after South Africa accused it of genocide.
Many argue that targeted attacks against the militants of Hamas or Hezbollah are justified in a war. Civilian casualties are seen as an inevitable side effect and within the boundaries of international law, justified by the warring factions in pursuit of their strategic goals. That cannot, however, count for actions that affect civilian populations most grievously and indiscriminately.
The Gazan children are starving. Over 50.000 children ages 6 months to 4 years are in urgent need of treatment for malnutrition. Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, according to our own government authorities, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
“USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.”
“Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.” (Ref.)
Secretary Blinken and President Biden disregarded the assessment, since it would have stopped us from sending bombs to Israel, per the law. Here are the details from an investigation by ProPublica published yesterday. Aid organizations across the world agree with the original plea by our agencies: CARE, Oxfam and multiple others warn about a humanitarian disaster because of Israel’s obstruction of aid: food, water, medicine. The U.N. General Assembly concurs. Here is the report of their special rapporteur.
What do you tell your child, all over the world, when the Erl-King calls and there’s not a morsel to eat?
Here is a different iteration of the song – above I had linked to Ian Bostridge, here is Fischer Dieskau.
Who rides at a gallop through night so wild? It is the father with his dear child. He grips the boy firmly in his arms, He holds him safe, he keeps him warm.
‘Son, why do you cower so fearfully?’ ‘Father, the Erl-king! Can you not see? The dreadful Erl-king with crown and tail?’ ‘My son, it is mist blown by the gale.’
‘You lovely child, come away with me, We’ll play together down by the sea; Such pretty flowers grow on the shore, My mother has golden robes in store.’
‘My father, my father, oh do you not hear What the Erl-king whispers into my ear?’ ‘Be calm, stay calm, it’s nothing my child But dry leaves blown by the wind so wild.’
‘My fine young lad, won’t you come away? My daughters are waiting for you to play; My daughters will lead the dance through the night, And sing and rock you until you sleep tight.’
‘My father, my father, can you still not see The Erl-king’s daughters waiting for me?’ ‘My son, my son, I can see quite clear The moon on the willows, there’s nothing else there.’
‘I love you my boy, you are such a delight; And I’ll take you by force if you put up a fight.’ ‘My father, my father, he’s gripping me fast! The Erl-king is hurting! Help me, I’m lost!’
The father shudders, and speeds through the night, In his arms he holds the moaning boy tight; At last he arrives, to home and bed: In the father’s arms the child was dead.
Since I photograph and write about what I see and what I think three times a week, year after year (eight years, can you believe it?), there is some inevitable repetition. That is simply because I have been living in the same place for decades, and across the seasons I observe the same things that make their annual appearance. Magnolias in the spring, sunflowers and meadows in the summer, pumpkins and mushrooms in the fall, and eventually the song birds in the snow of my garden. Let’s not forget the frequent repeat of racism, xenophobia and other political recurrences, but that is not today’s concern. We have reached the pumpkin stage, and another scratching of head as to how make it feel fresh, eight years on.
As luck would have it, I came across a video of someone reciting a pumpkin poem with skill and passion deserving a thespian award. The poem’s author turns out to be a fascinating character, a rags-to-riches success story built on fumes, certain talents and an intuitive understanding of the needs of the masses. I had never heard of him, stunned to learn that he was the nation’s most read poet at the beginning of the 20th century.
James Whitcomb Riley (1849—1916) was born in Indiana, and likely considered a black sheep by his lawyer father, a member of the Indiana House of Representatives, since he wiggled out of formal education at an early age, getting into nothing but trouble in school. Instead he started selling bibles, and got paid for painting advertisement signs onto barns and fences while traveling with a patent-medicine show, all the while trying to get his verses published and into greater circulation. He was a real huckster, telling lies to sell the tonics, and submitting his poems as long-lost ones of Edgar Allen Poe, soon debunked and causing a scandal that provided notoriety.
Riley became an alcoholic at an early age after falling out with his father once the latter had succumbed to financial ruin after returning wounded from the Civil War. Lying, cheating and alcohol-infuses anger resulted in break-ups of all of his love-relationships as well, across his life time. The writer started to tour with local theatre companies, still earning a living by painting advertisements, and eventually got hired by a newspaper to write society column, report on local events and submit poetry. Most serious publication refused to print his sentimental poems, but people started to flock to his performances of his work, almost always in dialect and covering romantic versions of longed-for times past. The readings were dramatic and comedic, the audiences loved it. His tours extended from the Mid-West to other parts of the country, and he started to achieve national fame. Fights and lawsuits with his partners and agents brought more notoriety, all strangely helping with sales of his books, making him eventually a wealthy man.
He met with President Grover Cleveland and supported Harrison in his election campaign. When the latter won the Presidency he suggested to make Riley Poet Laureate, but Congress did not comply. Alcohol-related health problems led to an end to Riley’s touring in the late 1800s. By then he had turned to writing poetry for children, with little quality left for his previous types of work, even though popular sentiment still gobbled up what he now published from his early years, dug up from the dust bin. His complete life-works was published in a series of multiple volumes, and honorary Ivy League (!) degrees started to roll in, including doctorates from Yale and Penn. John Singer Sargent painted his portrait. In 1908 he was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters with a special medal for poetry awarded in 1912.
He was known as the Hoosier Poet, whose reflections on small-town life and “Every Man”‘s problems clearly resonated with a large public. He was funny, bent, strangely lucky in his divers endeavors, and at the same time a tragic figure who succumbed to the consequences of alcoholism. Peter Revell once wrote Riley’s dialect was more like the poor speech of a child rather than the dialect of his region. Does it matter? I think what is relevant here is that Riley was a minstrel, a performer, an entertainer. He had a musical ear, clearly echoed in his craft. In that regard I am reminded of Amanda Gorman, the young woman whose poetry is offered at important events of the Democratic party. Her poems rise when hearing them performed (and not so much when read… )
Live entertainment is what people craved in an age before mass media, stunned by someone who memorized up to 40 poems per performance on the lecture circuit, flocking to his shows by the thousands and buying the books afterwards by the millions. It was egalitarian poetry, if bad one, brought to the masses. It is hard for me to understand how a public, just 15 years out of the Civil War, could so much long for “the good old times,” but apparently they did and he served their nostalgia well, a populist to the core. Sounds familiar?
So, I urge you to spend the three minutes it takes to listen to today’s choice of poetry. (No music today, alas, so your time can be spent on the recitation.) The text can be found below. As it happens, I agree with the sentiment, fall as a season of contentment, and a nice time to let go if so asked, spared yet another harsh winter. Riley was not granted that wish – he died on July 22, 1916.
When the Frost is on the Punkin
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock, And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock, And the clackin’ of the guineys, and the cluckin’ of the hens, And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence; O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best, With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest, As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock, When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.
They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here— Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossums on the trees, And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees; But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock— When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.
The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn, And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn; The stubble in the furries—kindo’ lonesome-like, but still A-preachin’ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill; The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed; The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover over-head!— O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock, When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!
Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps; And your cider-makin’ ’s over, and your wimmern-folks is through With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too! … I don’t know how to tell it—but ef sich a thing could be As the Angels wantin’ boardin’, and they’d call around on me— I’d want to ’commodate ’em—all the whole-indurin’ flock— When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!
Since pumpkins, fruit belonging to the family of Cucurbita like cucumbers and melons, are 92% water and the poem speaks of frost, today’s imagery is an icy white….
Yesterday I was surrounded by blue beauty – purplish and silvery hues as well, next to riotous oranges and yellows, an absolutely astounding summer garden. I was surprised by so much blue, associating it more with spring, but here it beckoned in all hues and shapes.
I think Frost was onto something here, even for the non-religious. The absence of constraint in that wide space, the promise of fair weather days, the warmth of sun associated with blue skies, the illusion of easy living – all contained in sky blue. Smoke haze, storm clouds, tornadoes, hurricanes, for now kept at bay.
Enjoy the flowers. I will be taking a bit of a break, working on an art project that fully demands my brain and looking forwards to family visiting. Will resume by mid-August.
Walk with me. Midmorning in the wetlands before the heat rises once again. Yellow meadows, blue skies, make me think suddenly of Ukraine and guilt-infused gratitude rises that here I have the luxury of peaceful meanderings, when others fight for their life. This week has been hard, with all the news in our own country as well, and the inability to decide on what might be the right path forward. When did we even last think about Ukraine, or Gaza for that matter, with our national horror show unfolding?
I chose this walk to leave politics behind me, just watch the birds, but can’t easily let go of so much I read across the last days. Here is a remarkable piece on J.D.Vance from a year ago, that might raise the stakes, if that is even possible. Ukraine will be left in the dust. Well, focus, Heuer. You came out here to recharge, not ruminate.
The bugs are out. So are the bees, legs thickly coated with pollen.
Finches waking up and breakfasting on early elderberries. Bushtits prefer mites on the oak leaves. A pair of kestrels hanging out. Bald eagle observing from on high.
Closer to the water, with slowly drying ponds, hungry nutria. Kingfisher high on his perch. Turtle taking a sun bath.
Some late ducklings, lots of shore birds, the killdeer looking like s/he has a glass eye.
Herons and egrets everywhere, eying each other, herding the geese until some fly off in annoyance.
And then, out of the blue sky, come the pelicans, diving down right in front of me, circling me, eventually coming to rest in the water and starting to preen. These infrequent sightings still make my heart race. In a good way, in this instance.
Gratitude descends. About nature. About the privilege to have access to it and the mobility to enjoy it. About a world in which so, so many people engage in trying to preserve it.
Here are words by William Stafford from over 60 years ago:
Let’s all try to meet the rage without with the wing within.
(PS: Mine is not the Selasphorous humming bird – those are red. It’s the plain Rufous.)
Since today was easy on the eyes and brain, music is going to be a bit more demanding. Truly interesting, though. A compilation of electronic music by Peruvian composers between the mid 60s and 80s.
One of those weeks. Between the heat and a body with its own intentions I had to cancel all planned outings, miffed and distraught. As luck would have it, a friend sent out a poem that shut me up and set me right. It converts disappointment into the insight that all moments matter. They all contain their very own history, asking us to value what is, not what has been or might come along. We are embedded in a timeline, each moment of its own importance.
“So it happens that I am and look.” Which is what I did. At a single plant on my balcony, a blue salvia visited by the occasional humming bird, the bees preferring its neighboring lavender and the yellow zinnias (this year’s color scheme in solidarity with Ukraine. Much good it will do, other than reminding me to be a witness. But I digress.)
No Title Required
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree beside a river on a sunny morning. It’s an insignificant event and won’t go down in history. It’s not battles and pacts, where motives are scrutinized, or noteworthy tyrannicides.
And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact. And since I’m here I must have come from somewhere, and before that I must have turned up in many other places, exactly like the conquerors of nations before setting sail.
Even a passing moment has its fertile past, its Friday before Saturday, its May before June. Its horizons are no less real than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.
This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years. The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday. The path leading through the bushes wasn’t beaten last week. The wind had to blow the clouds here before it could blow them away.
And though nothing much is going on nearby, the world is no poorer in details for that. It’s just as grounded, just as definite as when migrating races held it captive.
Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence. Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone. Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around, but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.
The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense. Ants stitching in the grass. The grass sewn into the ground. The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.
So it happens that I am and look. Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air on wings that are its alone, and a shadow skims through my hands that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.
When I see such things, I’m no longer sure that what’s important is more important than what’s not.
Walk with me. Be warned, though, you need to bring your ear plugs. I, of course, had no clue that they would be needed. The one day last week that I was able to hike was also the day that the Oregon International Airshow opened. Officially it started in the evening, but planes were already practicing during the day, low in the skies over Hillsboro where I happened to make my way through the wetlands.
The noise was deafening, and since I didn’t know then that the air show was slated, my thoughts went immediately to images of training for war, or some kind of emergency. Catastrophic thinking seems to be on a hair trigger these days. I wonder why.
I have written fairly recently about the soundscape of war and its long lasting psychological implications, for people living through war and suffering from PTSD. (Link for new readers, below). So, today I’ll just be looking at the positive side of things and share with you the sights. It will distract me from the fact that only 20% or so of all Oregonians voted, and the candidates I favored were, with few exceptions, not elected. Apathy sure enables the march towards less progressive times.
Here is a link to a video from the airshow that provides a bit of the noise that visitors experience. I was immediately underneath the planes at the time during practice, as you can see from the photographs.
The rest of nature’s sounds were drowned out, particularly the soft twittering from the songbirds and swallows who I had come to photograph.
It was so beautiful to watch them loop around before they went into the nesting sites, or met with their mates on top of them, that I soon forgot the distraction and focused on shimmering cerulean blues and teals and whites instead.
Flora was ready to compete, pink swaths of mallows coloring the meadow, pink valerian (sea foam) dotting the grass, and pink bleeding hearts hiding in the underbrush. Coral bells just about to blush.
Mystery Pink
Bright yellow popped up here and there, with common toadflax, buttercups and thapsias.
There were blue lupines, purplish blue wild irises, and camassia.
Whites everywhere, a perfect match to the white clouds above, the white of the arrowheads, the blackberry blossoms, the cowslip, the dog roses in large clusters, you name it.
Piercy’s poem captures it to perfection, even though we are still in May, not June and the lilies still hesitant. The mood was matched – as long as you kept your hands over your ears, plugging them with your fingers.
Over a decade ago I exhibited Fugue – The Poetry of Exile at Portland’s Artist Repertory Theatre, photomontage work that attempted to transform poems of exile and displacement, mostly by Holocaust poets, into visual images. The show ran in conjunction with a play by Diane Samuels, Kindertransport, produced by Jewish Theatre Collaborative.
It was early days in my montage-making efforts, with still limited technical skills. But the core components were already in place: visual translation of ideas that invite us, are in need for us to witness.
Here is one of the poems that I chose at the time.
My Blue Piano
At home I have a blue piano. But I can’t play a note.
It’s been in the shadow of the cellar door Ever since the world went rotten.
Four starry hands play harmonies. The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat.
Now only rats dance to the clanks. The keyboard is in bits.
I weep for what is blue. Is dead. Sweet angels, I have eaten
Such bitter bread. Push open The door of heaven. For me, for now —
Although I am still alive — Although it is not allowed.
by Else Lasker-Schüler (translated from the German by Eavan Boland)
(Here is a link to the German original – it is even starker than the translation, requesting permission for dying)
The poet, Else Lasker-Schüler, is one of those people I’d elect to take with me to a deserted island, an artist, activist, risk-taking, and deeply independent woman who supported socialist causes all her life. She left Nazi Germany in 1933, and ended up eventually in Jerusalem, where she wrote some of her best poetry before she died in 1945. Her friends and literary circle there included German-speaking Zionists, such as Martin Buber, Hugo Bergman and Ernst Simon who, like herself, favored a bi-national Palestine.
I was reminded of the poem when I read the insightful ArtsWatch review of an exhibition currently at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, while staring at another defunct piano during my LA Sabbatical last month (today’s photographs.)
The Burned Piano Project: Creating Music Amidst the Noise of Hate is a collaboration between composer and pianist Jennifer Wright, her husband Matias Brecher and textile artist Bonnie Meltzer. The artists resurrect, refashion, in some ways rebirth a Steinway grand piano that belonged to three generations of a Jewish family whose house in Portland was destroyed by arson in 2022, fueled by antisemitic hate. The torched instrument reemerged as a kind of glassy phoenix from the ashes:
“The Glass Piano was designed to appear as delicate as a glittering butterfly, a creature more of spirit than of the earth, yet it possesses subtle strength and a range of glass rods and hammers and pitched sounds that can be orchestrally combined in unusual ways.”
Meltzer, in turn, created a large tapestry and a smaller banner with inscribed stitching, incorporating wood, torched strings and other bits and pieces of the charred piano into her work.
While the Holocaust poet looks at the remnants of her destroyed life, embodied by the defunct piano, and wants nothing more than for it to end, the two contemporary artists rely on joyful defiance, changing the ruins into some sort of vibrant reminder that the possibility of transformation has not been foreclosed.
One can speculate whether those divergent sentiments are the result of the intensity of the trauma, the actual threat to existence, compared to the reactions of concerned bystanders to the consequences of racist vandalism.
It does not matter, in my mind, though, as long as art forces our own witnessing, insists that we acknowledge the horrors brought by war and hate.
This is central to the work of Jorge Tacla, whose art I continue to explore. His focus on ruins is one of the main themes of another exhibition, A Memoir of Ruins, currently on view at the Coral Gables Museum in Florida. His paintings offer a veritable graveyard of bombed and destroyed architecture across the Middle East, war memorials of a kind that mourn the victims rather than celebrate the victors (if there are any, given the centuries of strife built into the conflicts.) I won’t be able to visit, but I strongly urge my readers in the Miami vicinity to go and take it all in – you have until October 27th, 2024. It is timely work in the light of ongoing destruction of entire swaths of land made uninhabitable by warfare, erasing life, mirrored in paintings devoid of human figure.
The imagery acutely remind us of the violent urge to reduce everything possibly connected to human habitation, urges acted upon by various warring powers. They spring from the wish to annihilate not just human beings, the declared enemy who shall be starved, maimed or killed, but also all that could provide a basis for resurrection of a group with a given identity. If you bomb houses of worship, schools and universities, the libraries, the museums, the archives, all the repositories of cultural, historical and personal memory into oblivion, you generate a displacement that goes beyond loss of place – you truly vanquish the soul of a people.
Tacla’s work is the opposite of what has come to be known as “ruin porn,” the depictions of desolation as a backdrop in artistic endeavors, be they classic paintings that centered ruins as moralistic symbolism, or the photographs of urban decay, or the film sets for dystopian science fiction movies. Capitalizing on the visual salaciousness of melancholic imagery, while ignoring the forces that brought the world to ruin, from poverty to warfare, stands in stark contrast of what Tacla does. Without being photorealistic, the canvases convey a sense of absolute erasure, seamlessly merging into the actual visuals from places like Syria and now Gaza, that hit our screens. There is nothing of the frisson we so cherish when observing something slightly alarming from a distance. There is just dread, slowly seeping into your system, if you stand for any amount of time in front of these monumental canvases.
Our fascination with ruins – as long as we don’t have to live in or next to them – has been an artistic staple since the Renaissance. The focus during romanticism shifted to the potential for renewal. After world war II it became a national rallying cry, like Auferstanden aus Ruinen, From the Ruins Risen, the title of the German Democratic Republic’s Anthem from 1949 to 1990.
We might do well to shift our focus yet again, from ruins to the looming possibility that at some point renewal is no longer possible. At an age where weapons of mass destruction can wipe out life as we know it, we can hit a point of no return. We have certainly gotten sufficient warning. If you look at the aftermath of Chernobyl, not just in the exclusion zone for Reactor 4, which has become a pilgrimage site for disaster junkies, but in the forests surrounding the nuclear power plant, you’ll find some stark revelations (hard now under Russian occupation.) The trees downwind from Chernobyl all died immediately after the disaster. With the entire landscape poisoned, the agents of decay and thus eventual renewal, have also ceased to exist. No more bacteria, fungi and insects that usually recycle a forest’s nutrients and rid it of debris to prepare for new growth. They, too have been erased, and so you are left with ruins that will practically last forever, dead matter that will not renew in any form, looming over our very own extinction when war descends in its final form.
As I have so often stated here – fully aware how many of my readers disagree – I don’t believe art per se can change things, be a political force of the needed magnitude. But it can be a canary in the coal mine, helping us to start questioning, figure out causal connections, and at least implores us to think about solutions that exclude future ruins once and for all.
