Long moans, yelps, grunts, clicks, mews, hisses and squeaks are the main auditory communications of prehensile-tailed, Brazilian porcupines. Quill rattling and tooth shattering as well. The latter, combined with squeaks of delight and yelps of surprise could be heard from this human as well, during a rodent-rich day of rejoicing at the zoo. A day punctuated by heavy rains and cold wind, while we were doing our annual pilgrimage to a zoo in celebration of our very first date at the Bronx Zoo 42 years ago.
These animals, who can hang with their tail from trees where they spend most of the day sleeping, hidden in the high canopy of South American rainforests, forage at night. The single offspring per breeding cycle is highly dependent on the mother, nursed for weeks before introduced to solid foods, fathers mostly absent. In general, a pretty reclusive and solitary species, with no known predators other than humans and stray dogs who eat them if they can find them (often getting infected at the point with the horrible Chagas disease, since the porcupines carry the kissing bug that transmits it.)
They were not the only rodents we encountered. The flamingos had fled into shelter from the deluge, with a single specimen ignoring the downpour.
Time for the rats to come out – they were everywhere, making good use of the food offerings temporarily abandoned by the birds.
In case you wondered why I’m writing about rats, you can stop now. I am really writing about rituals today. Or, more specifically, rituals in relationships, which turn out to be of enormous value to the longevity of the union, and, more importantly, to the emotional well being of the partners and greater relationship satisfaction. When I say rituals, I am referring to activities that we frame as having some symbolic meaning – me getting downstairs in the morning with coffee already made for me could be a shared routine, or it could be a ritual, if I see it as a gesture that implies a daily commitment to nurturing or some such. Routines don’t have the same positive effect on relationships. What elevates them to rituals is really the shared idea of what motivates the behavior, agreed upon by both partners, which in turn leads to more commitment.
As it turns out, commitment then fosters the duration of a relationship. Which, in turn, benefits psychologically all involved, including the potential entire family system, and the physical well being of the partners into older age.
It doesn’t have to be something big, like Zoo Day has been for us, on an annual basis. Or ways you celebrate birthdays in the family, with rituals extending across generations.
It can be your Friday night Pizza date, if not just a routine, or something as ridiculous as the two of us moving plastic trolls around the house to unconventional locations to surprise the other when they are down.
Since 1982 .we have also been known to engage in multiple exchanges of fortune cookies before we open the ones offered with a Chinese meal, just grabbing them from the other, with no specified iterations. It is completely senseless, not even an in-joke, since we don’t know what the joke would be, and neither one of us remembers the origins, but it is utterly reassuring to be able to predict the ritual will unfold. Knowing each other, sharing, immutable reliance on the familiar interaction – it all makes me – us – happy.
Rodents, rituals, rain – the rare, ravishing day. So grateful for positive occasions in a world that currently offers even more than the usual share of horrors.
Music today is a cover of a Villa-Lobos song from Brazil.
And another piece, for the fun of it, Natania Davrath adding to the repertoire of sounds mentioned today, with the most beautiful of them all.
Nostos There was an apple tree in the yard — this would have been forty years ago — behind, only meadows. Drifts off crocus in the damp grass. I stood at that window: late April. Spring flowers in the neighbor’s yard. How many times, really, did the tree flower on my birthday, the exact day, not before, not after? Substitution of the immutable for the shifting, the evolving. Substitution of the image for relentless earth. What do I know of this place, the role of the tree for decades taken by a bonsai, voices rising from tennis courts — Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut. As one expects of a lyric poet. We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
I do not agree with Glück’s assessment, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” We look at the world – able to see it – a million times, if we only move about with intention. Or share in the wonder expressed by next generations. Or allow art to be more than representation, pointing us to the beauty inherent in the real world. Maybe we can’t return to the exact childhood tree, but there are plenty apples around.
In some funny way, the title of the poem, Nostos, makes that very point, doesn’t it? The term comes from ancient Greece and refers to the homecoming of the hero after a prolonged absence (one of the main themes of the Odyssey.) Not remembered, but re-experienced, connected again, the world seen, not just recalled. If it was only about a particular childhood garden, it should have been Nostalgia, the combination of Nostos /homecomingwith the word Algos/pain, although nostalgia most often descends into this sentimental wistfulness that I can’t stand.
Back to spring: In today’s images, spring has returned, after a long absence. So has this viewer, in my annual exploration of spring’s bounty, seeing it afresh. And so have paintings, that are not molding in museums, but here, in front of our eyes, conveying a shared appreciation of this season. Forget memory! Here are this week’s perceptions, on walks punctuated by heavy rains and sudden reappearance of the sun.
Max Beckmann SPRING NEAR SÜDENDE (1907)
Hawthorne blossoms shimmered through the trees, or exploded in full view.
Dwight William Tryon Spring (1893)
David Hockney Hawthorne Blossom Near Rudston (2008)
Cows were curious as to what I had to offer…
Doris Lee, Blossom Time, 1959
Plants unfurled, echoing van Gogh’s brush strokes.
Vincent van Gogh, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, 1890
Meadows exploded with Camassia, and other early spring blooms, many reminiscent of rockets, all shooting towards the light.
Janene Walkky Common Camas or Camassia quamash (2013)
Then there are the fruit tree blossoms, holding up their own against the orange bloom,
Vincent van Gogh Orange Blossoms (1890)
Claude Monet Spring (Fruit Trees in Bloom) (1873)
Walking through the woods was a green, dripping, wet experience, then sunbursts the next minute.
Abbott Handerson Thayer Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest (1876)
Did someone say birds? Ducklings! Orioles, yellow rump warblers (butter butts!), kill deer, wood ducks, geese, barn swallows and purple martins all showing off.
Magnus von Wright Mallard Ducklings (1841)
Tracey Emin Believe in Extraordinary (2015)
AUDUBON bird Red-Breasted Nuthatch Purple Martin (1890)
A friend sent a poem this week that had me thinking ever since. I was riveted by the way it palpably conveys loss, the way it captures how pain can suddenly emerge in the most mundane situations, and the way it contains phrases that are incredibly well forged, “a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature nature sound.”
There Are Plenty of Angels, She Said in the LADIES
in the rest area LADIES on the road to Terre Haute. Plenty of angels, she said again. But not one, I’ve heard, not a single one will mission to the fade as it does to the darkness. A stall door latched. Her bag got hung. Seen that sign, back west a ways? The one on the warehouse, in a movie marquee? Blessed Hope, it says. Blessed Hope, she said. It’s meant to be a sign from heaven, but hope’s, I’d say, more a human invention, like freeways, she said. Funny word, she said. They call ’em highways when you pay to ride ’em. Mama’s buried off one in Missouri. Had her forty years and forty days on earth. And the day we did it was a noisy day, all out-o’-doors like a day at the beach: the tearin’ down sounds of the sun and the wind, clouds and trees, grass and stones, a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature nature sound. Mother never did care much for nature. Enjoyed a sunset well enough Those shameless ones like colored candy, those ones can look like wall-to-wall in a Cineplex foyer: pinks and purples, reds, she said. It was so noisy, anyway, that day even the birds shut up for once. Or got their singin’ drownded out. But I could hear when the box hit bottom: Get on with it, is what it sounded like to me— She had dried her hands on a paper towel— I’m done here.
From The Paris Review, Issue no. 129 (Winter 1993)
I experienced a noticeably notice-me-I’m-nature nature view a few weeks ago, and was thinking that my own mother and paternal grandfather loved nature, as do my children and now the next generation who partook in the views of that day. Somehow that shared affinity softens loss, since you can always recall the joyful moments when you were inseparably linked in awe.
That morning we drove from Altadena, CA north into the San Gabriel mountains. Clouds of lifting mist weaved in and out of the valleys, giving the scenery a mysterious, fairy-tale look.
Ceanothus covered the hills in differing shades of blue, occasionally punctuated by yellow tree poppies that looked like sun confetti.
Our goal was the Bear Divide, a location on the Pacific Flyway, the north-south migratory route that connects Alaska to Patagonia for innumerable migratory birds. The San Gabriels provide both rest and food for the flocks, who tend to seek the specific passage way at the location that we drove to.
The corridor which allows passage at relatively high altitudes, was discovered by chance in the spring of 2016. Brought to the attention of the folks at the Moore Lab at Occidental College, a systematic monitoring of the migratory flocks started soon after. (Everything I learned, including the statistics, I found here.) In 2023 they counted 53,511 birds of 140 species from February to May, (the return trip for the birds seems to happen somewhere else) with some mornings as many as 20.000 birds recorded. The sheer variety is stunning.
The lab uses the help of citizen scientists, local birdwatchers and volunteers, to help with the observations. As it turned out, we chanced on a group of volunteers with the USFS who were netting and banding birds the very morning we arrived.
The nets are erected in the mornings and inspected every thirty minutes. They catch birds without harming them, who are then banded with a very light metal ring around a leg that provides numbers for scientists all over the world to report on flight routes, durations, survival.
The data reveal helpful information about birds’ responses to changes in environmental conditions and ecological shifts across the world. If that made me feel good, something else lifted my soul even more: seeing son and toddler rejoice beyond the sheer fascination with the procedures, sensing their appreciation of the world around us (if only lifting every single pebble or bug on the path as behooves a 14 month-old) reminded me of my own happiness during nature walks with my mother or my Opa. Little is lost. Much lives on.
Orange crowned warbler
Highway restrooms: I no longer fear you! When hope is met, who cares if it’s a human invention!
Music today from the Bowerbird Collective. The video alone is worth it.
If you asked me if I prefer exhibitions that feature a single artist or those that display the work of many different ones, I’d have a hard time deciding. I always find myself drawn to retrospectives of a particular artist, because they allow me to learn how someone develops, how they are open to change or impress with continuity of a chosen theme, and how life’s experience(s) can shape the evolution of creativity and skill.
On the other hand, seeing the works of many different artists riff off each other, or provide comparison basis for relative judgements, allow an assessment of the current state of the art and often help me to understand my own reaction to art better, my own taste, if you will.
Art at the Cave gallery rooms
Luckily, today we don’t have to decide between the two approaches: I’ll just present both. I managed to see a riveting retrospective of Sargent Claude Johnson‘s work at The Huntington Library in Pasadena, CA, still up until mid-May. I also visited Shapes that Speak, work by multiple members of The Pacific Northwest Sculptors Group (PNWS) shown during the month of April at Art at the Cave in Vancouver, WA. (I chanced on it, just before closing. Some of the work is truly interesting and you might enjoy looking at the portfolios. Here is a list of the PNWS members with their websites for your perusal.)
Tony Furtado Hiro the Hare
Shapes that Speak is such a catch-all title, but I would be hard pressed myself to come up with something more specific for a group exhibition that is not curated around a particular topic. If these sculptures speak, then surely in different languages, with different degrees of precision, loudness and pitch. Structure varies, just as texture and modes of expression. I would not call it a cacophony, but the Tower of Babel did come to mind.
Tony Furtado Husk
In a way that is the one drawback, compared to all the advantages conveyed by being a member of an artist collective – in this case Pacific Northwest Sculptors, long a treasure for the region – that provides mutual support and exchanges resources and ideas, educates and connects. Group exhibitions of member work can so easily become byzantine, with the viewers having to make their way through a seemingly haphazard collection, trying not to be distracted by too many voices at once, to stick with the metaphor. That said, whoever hung this show did admirable work in grouping exhibits otherwise all over the map.
Left to Right: Laurie Vail Dancer – Bill Leigh Flight – Laurie Vail Kingfisher
Left to Right: Jeremy Kester A Drop in the Ocean – LB Buchan Elysia – Todd BiernackiHomage (c’est un Magritte) – LB Buchan Propeller 2
Note that I believe both to be true: the advantages of artist groups like these far outweigh the disadvantages, and exhibitions could be showing off the strength of each artist if curated around a shared theme, or some underlying principle. Simply putting up recent or favorite displays does a disservice to much of the work that would otherwise shine.
Sherry Wagner Mary
Leslie Crist Portrait (photographed from different angles)
Here are some more examples of the diversity I encountered, in no particular order or preference.
Susan Jones Laminar Flow
Anne Baxter Solar Flare
Sherry Wagner Chip
If the work of the Pacific Northwest artists tell many different stories, Sargent Claude Johnson‘s retrospective at the Huntington is devoted to a main focus: the dignity and beauty of the Black subject in an era that still legalized racial discrimination. It is long overdue to see work from a master, namely a quarter century since his work was surveyed at SF MOMA, and one wonders why an artist who was so prominent during his lifetime has disappeared into the recesses of cultural memory.
The Black modernist (1887 – 1967), often associated with the Harlem Renaissance, lived on the West Coast for most of his lifetime and worked primarily as a sculptor in contrast to his painting East Coast associates, which might explain why he fell through the cracks when this movement experienced renewed interest by contemporary art critics. (In this context it might be or interest to visit a wide reaching exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism that just now opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.)
Negro Woman (1933)
Johnson was born to a father of Swedish ancestry and a mother who was part Cherokee and part African American. While his brothers and sisters chose to be recognized as Native Americans or Caucasians, Sargent decided to live his life as a Black. Some of his work, like this portrait, focussed on the duality of his racial background. In his own words, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… One ever feels his Two-ness, – an American, a Negroe; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”
Self Portrait (1950s)
This is about the most political statement by him that I could find. In general, the artist did not engage in propagandistic art, whether in his murals or in his work for collectors, and was wholly opposed to the social realism found in the work of other Black artists, like Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, and Charles White. He shared the somewhat apolitical aesthetic stance of a man he admired : Alain LeRoy Locke, the so-called father of the Harlem Renaissance, whose “New Negro” philosophy assumed that “a vibrant race tradition in art will contribute to American art and, in turn, this achievement will help bring about social equality.” (Ref.)
Langston Hughes, a former protégé of Locke’s, considered the Harlem Renaissance movement a failure because it was motivated by a fantasy that the race problem could be solved through art. He accurately wondered whether the contributions of an elite group of black intellectuals to American culture would bring about social change for the masses of African Americans.
Johnson drew from Southern Black folk-culture and African art as sources of inspiration, but also included aspects of Asian-Pacific art. Many elements of pre-Columbian or contemporary Mexican art can be found in his sculptures and friezes. He experimented with various modes, sculpture predominantly, but also painting and prints. A range of materials, wood, paper, metal, enamel, terracotta and more, can be found in his work.
Singing Saints (1940)
Dorothy C. (1938)
Johnson is probably best known for his sculptures, many of whom depict Black women, often with children inseparably attached, a valuable reminder that family separation is not just a thing of a slavery past. Immigrant families, separated at the border during the last eight years, are still not reunited, often due to (coincidental?) administrative omissions of identifiable characteristics that would allow tracing.
Standing Woman (1934)
Forever Free (1933)
Mother and Child (1932)
Some of Johnsons’ children’s busts received awards. Minor quibble for an exhibition that otherwise does a fabulous job in both placing and signage of work: why elevate the one non-Black head to central and elevated position? The little Asian girl was a playmate of Johnson’s children, but it feels weird that she is surrounded by the Black kids.
Clockwise from upper left: Head of a boy (1930) – Elizabeth Gee (1927) – Chester (1931) – Head of a Boy (1928) – Esther (1929)
Johnson worked all his life in side jobs to sustain his artistic practice. Money was tight, which had sorrowful consequences for his wife whose mental health declined and who spent the rest of her life in a mental institution. (The Huntington is truly helpful in providing much information of aspects related to the artist but not necessarily central to the art in its catalogue.)
Even though Johnson was picked for major commissions, including a 185-foot-long frieze for a San Francisco high school that displays an array of athletes, things never got easy. Other public artworks for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration included work for the California School for the Blind in Berkeley.
The following architectural installations were all made for the CALIFORNIA SCHOOL FOR THE BLIND starting in 1933. There are window lunettes and a stage proscenium. The pieces were dispersed and now belong to the Huntington, The California School for the Blind, the African American Museum at Oakland and UC Berkeley – here reunited for the first time. You are invited to explore via touch!
Below is a video screenshot and sketches for San Francisco’s George Washington Highschool Athletics Mural from 1941. Here is a full video.
Johnson’s life did not have a happy ending. He struggled with the ravages of alcoholism and died in 1967 in a residential hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, a somewhat rough neighborhood. His legacy should serve as an inspiration: he told the story of the dignity of people who were ignored at best, despised and discriminated against at worst, art created during a time where this was an act of defiance as well as an expression of hope against hope to help change perceptions.
Alas, this particular story is still ongoing.
Standing Woman (1934)
Here is music from the Harlem Renaissance. Lift every voice.
Sargent Claude Johnson
Feb. 17–May 20, 2024
The Huntington – Library, Museum, Botanical Garden
Walk with me, on a rain drenched Sunday in the Pacific Northwest. First we trudge through my garden – have the galoshes ready.
These are columbines, some of the early bloomers in spring, dainty as they come, and, as it turns out, a delicacy for wandering visitors. As are the apple trees.
These are deer. They have made daily appearances in the yard for the last week, and as of Sunday afternoon, when I am writing this, there are no more columbines. Blossoms completely depleted. Disappeared. Digested. Man.
I have a choice: mourn the destruction of my flora or celebrate the fact that I look out of the window to see four frolicking creatures, feeling at home, at a location that is a 15-minute ride from Portland city center.
You can see the remnants of the destruction of the winter storm – still a lot of windfall around.
True to form I do both, and then I go visit a friend’s wondrous garden that is carefully deer-proofed and full of spring’s signifiers: growth that is tender, soft colored, dripping with wetness and sending out tendrils and shoots to claim the next cycle of life.
It feels like walking through a watercolor painting when you look at the bloom.
The tree peonies proud like queens,
Just the maple leaves show sharp, contrasting rims, but they, too, are softened by their unfocused surround, enveloping them with diffused light.
They come in so many different colors
Such beauty – let it help start the week on the right note, grateful for what is, not what’s been lost. Now tell me what I should plant that the deer won’t eat….
Here is a romantic period Ode to Spring by composer Joachim Raff.
This week I received an email with one of the irregular posts by the Public Professor, whose writing I cherish. Akim Reinhardt, whose shifts in careers and locations exceed even mine, has the gift to combine learnedness with humor and a way of simplifying complex issues in his writing so that pretty much everyone gets it. What could be easily didactic and preaching, instead often elicits a “Man, so clever and so true!” reaction in me.
When I saw the title – The Barbarians Won – I immediately thought of one of my favorite poems, C.P. Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians, prescient lines written in 1898. The poem inspired Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) a novel by South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. Both poem and novel are considered crucial metaphors in literary reactions to western colonialism and the war on terror.
But Cavafy’s poem was sardonic, while Reinhardt’s latest musings seemed atypically pessimistic (and they were written even before the abysmal farce happening at the SKCOTUS (Supreme Kangaroo Court) hearings this week.) He grants the Barbarians their overall victory and ends with a line, “I should leave.”
I agree that an occasional time-out, a pause to replenish, is restorative and necessary to keep up the good fight – to wit my last month which filled me with joy, among others, watching the ravens. But leave?
The barbarians and their fascination with gadgets have won, the newest one appearing daily. Our eyes forever fixed on blinking toys.
The barbarians and their craving for the now have won, clocks all clicking in time. We march, bedraggled, to the sound of clanging bells.
The barbarians and their printed words have won, page after page stacked and bound. No matter what we want, they cite a passage of denial; no matter what we avoid, they read a mandate.
The barbarians and their lust for shiny trinkets have won, their new world a wasteland of flashy baubles. The stars are washed out above us.
The barbarians and their cars have won, sleek tonnage racing along endlessly. Road kill marks the miles.
The barbarians and their lines have won, squares and rectangles laid about and stacked all around. The circle of life has been shaved and shoved into corners.
The barbarians and their foods have won, boxed mac n cheese and flour tortilla tacos washed down with Diet Coke. We check our cholesterol and blood sugar.
The barbarians and their fashions have won, fast and ready to wear. There’s elastic in our jeans and advertisements on our shirts and hats.
The barbarians and their time have won, clocks spinning and blinking and buzzing. We march on their schedule.
The barbarians and their bar-bar talk have won, countless languages stricken from mouths and ears. We can think only this way.
The barbarians and their arrogance have won, their shouted assertions offered up as commandments. No one can be right who disagrees with them.
The barbarians and their freedom have won, forever doing whatever they want. Individuals left alone to fend for themselves, to decide what miseries they will inflict upon others or endure alone.
The barbarians and their colors have won, white and gold exalted. The black and brown discarded.
The barbarians and their bureaucracies have won, victory in triplicate. We stand in line, waiting to fill out forms and be bound in red tape.
The barbarians and their erasures have won, clean scrubbings of the past. Can we still remember what the barbarians did?
The barbarians have won, and now we are waiting for them to leave.
I should leave.
Generally, I think departing and declaring victory for the bad guys is premature. Let’s focus on some positive occurrences across the last weeks to keep us from despairing:
Ukraine Aid made it through congress, better late than never.
More student loan forgiveness
The FTC banned the use of non-compete clauses, huge bonus for labor.
The DOL strengthened overtime rules
The FCC restored net neutrality
The DOT expanded protections for airline passengers
The School Voucher scam in TN failed to make it through this legislative period.
The Arizona house repealed the 1864 law (even if it took three tries to get there.)
Major American Unions endorsed the democratic Presidential candidate.
Trump LOSES his bid for a new trial or a judgment overturning the more than $80 million verdict for E. Jean Carroll in the second trial.
Even though it looks like a majority of SC judges are perfectly happy to reinstall a monarch (as long as he is not a Democrat) the proceedings in other law arenas seem to indicate that accountability is still on the table. An Arizona Grand Jury charged 11 AZ Republicans and seven former Trump aides with felonies around a fake elector scheme. In NYC, the trial proceedings reveal a flailing, shrinking, feeble defendant – regardless of outcome, the image of a cult leader is starting to crack.
If you have time to read, here is a fascinating essay by John Ganz on the ways Trump embodies two different personae – the actual banal criminal (as seen in the Manhattan proceedings), and the sovereign king with impunity for all crimes (as discussed in the SC proceedings.) The man will eventually succumb, but the idol might very well be enshrined into our laws, if the extremist have their way.
If this is not enough of cheer leading, we can always turn to Marc Aurelius, who was born on this day in 121 AD: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
I’ll go watch the birds some more…. while listening to music about ravens.
My morning visitors, just beyond the kitchen door, were two parrots. I was lured outside because I heard their incredibly loud squawking and wondered what was going on. There they sat, happily chatting or gossiping.
At some point they got fluttery, hopping from position to position on the telephone pole.
Suddenly a pair of acorn woodpeckers made themselves known – I had completely overlooked them on top of the pole, because I was so taken with the parrots.
Aaaaaaaaaaand: attack. Victorious. Parrots fled.
In case that was not enough excitement, my lunchtime visitor was coming by to check out if I had maybe dropped some food, while eating and reading my email at the same time. No luck. She disappeared disapprovingly, picking up the last few peanuts I had offered the ravens (who will soon be featured in another post.)
But that’s not all: around 5 pm this bobcat appeared, and I just happened to have the camera in hand sitting on the patio, to catch her. She left promptly, soundlessly.
Tell me, how can this year get any more magical? We’ll see. I will be returning to this ranch in November.
I am back in Portland, doing lots of catch-up errands after a month away, and sorting through a number of interesting California adventures that still need to be written up. Hope to get back to regular rhythm soon.
Here is music from the land of the parrots, Brazil.
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 Condition176-7).
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.
“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
Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media
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)
