"Clear Water Samples"

It took a very long time to conclude that this series is 1) very small with four images and a sculptural object and 2) a segue into an as of yet unnamed series which features this and this. I am not even sure if it is worthy enough to put on the website but I will include it on this blog as a finished document with an artist's statement. [The sculpture is coming soon as the wood shop is closed for the week.]

Clear Water Sample: La Jolla Cove, CA, 2011

In Werner Herzog’s “The Truth of the Ocean,” he describes two members of the Peruvian Machiguengas tribe visiting the sea for the very first time:

“They went silent and looked out over the breakers…Then one asked for a bottle. I gave him my empty beer bottle. No, that wasn’t right, it had to be a bottle that you could seal well. So I bought a bottle of cheap Chilean red, had it uncorked, and poured the wine out into the sand. We sent the bottle to the kitchen to be cleaned as carefully as possible. Then the men took the bottle and went, without a word, to the shoreline… They waded, looking over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, until the water reached their underarms. Then they took a taste of the water, filled the bottle and sealed it carefully with a cork. [It] was their proof for the village that there really was an ocean. I asked cautiously whether it wasn’t just a part of the truth. No, they said, if there is a bottle of seawater, then the whole ocean must be true as well.”

Clear Water Sample: Jordan Pond, Acadia National Park, ME, 2012

The series, Clear Water Samples, began two years before reading this essay while traveling up the coast of California photographing borrowed containers filled with the Pacific Ocean. A few weeks later in Northern Italy, I collected water in specimen bottles, a pseudo scientific analysis of whether or not it was clear enough to set an artwork free. Two summers passed and soon there were sixteen samples existing as a physical object or a photograph. No longer where they all from the ocean, rather any lake or pool that was transparent.

Clear Water Sample: Neskowin, OR, 2012

I am from the Pacific Northwest and my relationship with place is defined by clear water. I learned how to swim in cold rivers on hot August days and every family vacation featured a blue expanse as the final destination. Standing on Galveston Island looking into the Gulf of Mexico was my first experience with a brown sea and I was repelled. It was there that I resolved never to touch water I could not see through. Years later, I moved to a Midwestern town where not only are the rivers brown but there are traces of mercury, PCB and E. coli flowing through the streams. 

Clear Water Sample: Triple Creek Park, Ucross, WY, 2013

I constantly search for clear water in an attempt to find the places where I belong.

My “truth of the ocean” lies in the fact that it still exists despite my minimal contact. It still elicits wonder and the small part I take away represents the whole of which I must remember. 

Whitney Biennial 2012

Let me start by revealing that I never went to New York City until moving to Indiana in 2007. Since then, I've visited as often as possible because it is an easy flight from Indianapolis and an excellent way to see artwork. I didn't have the opportunity to see any of the Whitney Biennial exhibitions until 2010 and this year's was only my second. In the week and half since, I am struggling with my opinion of it. It was my least favorite show viewed this month. In addition, the last Whitney Biennial was equally unimpressive. I don't know what I was expected but here are some works that were memorable (for better or for worse).


Werner Herzog's Hearsay of the Soul (Detail of installation)

“I’m not an artist,” Herzog said. “I’m a soldier." After reading this quote from Hyperallergic.com a week before, Herzog was destined to live up to the first part (enter eye rolling at the second). I love Herzog's films (and will drive a whole state away to see one) but Hearsay of the Soul, an installation revolving around the small prints of Hercules Segers with the music of cellist Ernst Reijseger, came up empty. Herzog wanted to transform "images into music and music into images." Ultimately it was painfully boring.


Elaine Reichek's tapestries held my interest. She embroidered the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne (above) through hand-stitching and digital embroidery.


Sam Lewitt, Fluid Employment, 2012 [Ferromagnetic liquid poured bi-weekly over plastic magnetic elements, fans]

There was a steady crowd flocked around Lewitt's installation. Here's a video clip very much like mine (though less shaky) via youtube. The ferromagnetic liquid pulsated under the fans. It looked like a science experiment gone awry but was neatly contained on tarps protecting the floor.


Leonard Peltier, Horse Nation, 2011

I was floored by this painting by Leonard Peltier because it was, hands down, the least expected artwork in the Biennial (and therefore the best painting). According to the Whitney's website, it is part of Joanna Malinowska's installation: "...she has hung a painting by the imprisoned American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, which she has 'smuggled' into the exhibition as an intervention. As a Polish-born artist, Malinowska is questioning both her inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Biennial and the absence of Native American art in the Museum’s collection and exhibitions."



It was displayed to the left of Malinowska's This Project is not Going to Stop the War./Journey to the Beginning of Time.



Luther Price's manipulated 16-mm film was so old school and unanticipated, that it was most likely my favorite work in the museum. Various slide projectors were dispersed throughout the galleries. The technology is so archaic and for the Whitney to recognize this as a viable artwork in 2012, made the show.

From the Whitney website: "He re-edits the footage by hand, effaces the image through scraping, buries the films to rot and gather mold, and adds chaotic visual patterns using colored inks and permanent markers. For soundtracks, he frequently uses only the brutal electromechanical noise generated by sprocket holes running through the projector’s audio system. Each reel he produces is thereby a unique object, often altered to such an extent that it struggles through the projector, as if playing out the end of film itself..."



Sarah Michelson's much discussed dancers were doing nothing during my visit. Stretching here and there but most of the time the floor was empty = not that captivating.

Upon retrospect, I wish I had more time to visit Forrest Bess's installation (via Robert Gober) and Mike Kelley's Mobile Homestead. Too much art, too little time.

"The Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

Caves, caves, caves... in Columbus, Ohio with Amelia, Drew, and Maura.


Olafur Eliasson, The Caves Series: Looking Out, 1998


Olafur Eliasson, The Caves Series: Looking In, 1998

There are three movies I have been looking forward to this summer (so much so that I drove to Columbus, Ohio yesterday to see one of them). Werner Herzog's The Cave of Forgotten Dreams was first on the list (next up Terrence Malick's Tree of Life and Miranda July's The Future):



I have been enamored by these caves since I first read this article in the New Yorker in 2008. "...the End Chamber, a spectacular vaulted space that contains more than a third of the cave’s etchings and paintings—a few in ochre, most in charcoal, and all meticulously composed. A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock. As at many sites, the scratches made by a standing bear have been overlaid with a palimpsest of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark."

From the New York Times movie review: "The cave was discovered in December 1994 by three French cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire. Following an air current coming from the cliff, they dug and crawled their way into the cave, which had been sealed tight for some 20,000 years. After finally making their way to an enormous chamber, Ms. Deschamps held up her lamp and, seeing an image of a mammoth, cried out, “They were here,” a glorious moment of discovery that closed the distance between our lost human past and our present."

It was my first experience with 3-D and there were parts of it I really enjoyed but many I didn't. Hand held cameras, especially used while walking, are enough to make me motion sick for days and in 3-D, it was a very difficult experience. I would close my eyes for a little bit as I couldn't look away due to the the glasses and open them ten minutes later realizing I had fallen asleep.

3-D was at its best when the camera moved slowly over the drawings in the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc - truly some of the most magnificent artwork I've ever seen filmed. It is great to see this technology used with something artistic and I hope this is the beginning of many more serious 3-D movies to come.

Highlights of Herzog's film include: evidence of cave bears and the calcite deposits covering their vertebrae; the characters Herzog always manages to find - a circus juggler turned archaeologist, an "experimental archaeologist" dressed in a reindeer outfit on a seemingly warm day who plays a flute made of a vulture bone, a master perfumer who sniffs the earth looking for cave openings; and the couple holding the photograph in the cave after Herzog orders everyone to be silent.

Afterward, there was pizza (shockingly a piece still exists in my fridge over 24 hours later!) and the best ice cream ever and the long drive home. I did manage to work one hour today too. Thursday was indeed my weekend.

Antarctica

Herbert Ponting, Terra Nova, 1911-1912

OR



OR stand in the middle of an Antarctic storm at the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. The "chill room" is -25 degrees and windy. July 2005.



OR don a helmet and listen to freezing pellets of ice bounce off the snow (and your head) in the front yard (the poor remnants of the snow cakes are in the foreground). Imagine a man walking by here wearing shorts just a few hours before.