William Benton's "Birds"

In the summer, I read poetry (or try to ... one poem a day). The moment I laid my hands on Birds in the Marfa Book Company, I knew it was mine. It is a handheld gem that will inspire me to be more clever with my typewriter, force me to focus on the form of the word, and remember everything I learned in graduate school about placing text on a page.

I   w   k       u        o    e      m    r    i    g     &     m      h   n   s      w    r       o     d.
      o    e       p        n             o   n   n                    y      a    d          e    e        l

The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems

Hannah loaned me this book months ago and I finally had time to read it this week. I have always felt indifferent to Dickinson but this may change my mind. The Gorgeous Nothings is the most elegantly printed monograph of worn paper and text that I have ever seen. Who wouldn't be enthralled with a page that reproduces aged paper resembling shark's teeth or an arrowhead flake?

The excerpts below focus on Dickinson's interest in birds as their migrations away from the Midwest in the fall are often on my mind. Beside each torn fragment printed to scale, there is a diagram that translates the handwriting into type.

In some cases, I was more enamored with the condition of the paper than Dickinson's text: particles floating on a white expanse, saved from further decay, memorialized in print.

I will leave you with one that was not scanned as the words were more important than the visual representation:

"There are those that are shallow intentionally and only profound by accident."

Ode to Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley, Catholic Birdhouse, 1978

Dreaming of seeing his retrospective. I will settle for hunting down the exhibition catalog.

"Hour of the Cardinals" by Tina Barr

A judge from Tupelo tells me tankers
piss dioxin past the shotgun shacks.
Done eat the asphalt white.
‘Drive til it’s empty’ is what they told.

Sparrows come through portals
in the chain link windows. Colic
means inconsolable, my sister tells me.
The Pope knew about the gassing of the Jews.

He turned like an eggplant when he died,
all black. In my dining room, a horse
comes through the wall, pastels scratched
against the surface of white-washed feed sacks.

At five, in the winter, they come
six or seven, red-feathered in the boxwood,
for sunflower seeds, a heat’s compression
soaked into the cobbled face of a flower.

Abuse travels inside like the shadow of a ricochet.
Lawanda left with her girlfriend
for one of the Carolinas. She emailed
to tell me she’d seen the sea.


                                                                                    -  Tina Barr

Robert Adams: The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs

Ever since visiting the Robert Adams retrospective at Yale University over Fall Break, I have been thinking about this post. Why do I love his work so much? The answer boils down to this: he is a perfect combination of writer and photographer and the understated subtleties of his photographs make it all the more powerful. It also doesn't hurt that the majority of his images come from the West and very specific locations that I like to call home.  Seeing this exhibition on the East coast felt very far from the Northwest which introduced feelings of homesickness on several occasions.

I believe the wall text came from his publications because of its familiarity. Here are two contrasting pieces - one of which could describe where I live now and the other where I lived once before.

Here are two favorites from The New West series.

Adams' photographs are very small and the curators successfully incorporated his books throughout the exhibition. Above was a favorite method of this display and this Anselm Kiefer piece sprang to mind upon my initial encounter.

This page from Adams' journal is sparse. I wondered if this was typical.

The big surprise was the objects included in the exhibition: cottonwood bark cut from a tree in Longmont, Colorado, a bird wing carved from boxwood in 2001 (above), and "a book made with hand tools by Adams in 2000 from an old-growth plank brought up from the beach fifteen years earlier" (below).

I was introduced to many books that I hadn't known about before and immediately placed several on interlibrary loan including the hefty three volume catalog (things I wish I owned but are too expensive to justify).

From the exhibition wall text in a room on the top floor in a quiet space away from the crowd below: "As I recorded these scenes, I found myself asking many questions, among them: What of equivalent value have we inherited in exchange for the original forest? Is there a relationship between clearcutting and war, the landscape of one being in some respects like the landscape of the other? Does clearcutting originate in disrespect? Does it teach violence? Does it contribute to nihilism? Why did I never meet parents walking there with their children?"

Adams' art is thought provoking and quiet; his attitudes about the land run close to my heart. This exhibition is one of my favorites of 2012 and happily marks my first visit to Yale University. There were free posters in the lounge in front of the gallery. I hope I wasn't greedy when I chose two: one to be kept untouched in my closet and the other to hang at school.

"This is about birds..."

Little did I know my interest in art featuring birds started in elementary school.

Birds Part 2

Hmmm... I tend to post a lot of birds, balloons, and globes. Yes, I am fully aware of the symbolism.

Judy Linn, Chicken and Peacock, 1994

Greg Halpern, From A, 2011

Sarah Palmer from The Village of Reason

Laura McPhee, Mattie with a Northern Red Shafted Flicker, 2005

Josef Koudelka, Scotland, 1977

Ricardo Cases via.

Yola Monakhov, New Work

 

Katherine Wolkoff, Cardinal, Cardinalis, Cardinals, Found by David Lewis and Edward Conley. December 5, 1956. From the series Found.

Shelia Newbery, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

RIP: Masahisa Fukase

Twenty years after falling into a coma, Masahisa Fukase died on the 9th June. James Luckett first introduced me to The Solitude of Ravens in 1997. It remains one of my favorite books that I perused regularly at the Center for Creative Photography and still show his images to my students today. The Guardian published this article by Sean O'Hagan in 2010 and the paragraph below captures his intent behind the series:

"In an essay entitled The Art of Losing Love, Oborn notes: 'Fukase's best-known work was made while reeling from loss of love.' She points out that Fukase began his pursuit of the ravens just after Yoko, his wife of 13 years, left him. 'While on a train returning to his hometown of Hokkaido, perhaps feeling unlucky and ominous,' she writes, 'Fukase got off at stops and began to photograph something which in his culture and in others represents inauspicious feeling: ravens. He became obsessed with them, with their darkness and loneliness." The Solitude of Ravens, then, is a book of mourning. (Yoko, tellingly, was Fukase's main subject before he turned his camera on the ravens.)'"

O'Hagan also writes: "In Japanese mythology, ravens are disruptive presences and harbingers of dark and dangerous times – another reason, perhaps, why the photographer was drawn to them during his darkest hour. In 1992, five years after the book was published, Fukase fell down a flight of stairs in a bar. He has been in a coma ever since. His former wife, now remarried, visits him in hospital twice a month. 'With a camera in front of his eye, he could see; not without,' she told an interviewer. 'He remains part of my identity; that's why I still visit him.'"

We lost Fukase in 1992 yet his passing in 2012 is still as sad and foreboding as his photographs.

[All images are from Masahisa Fukase's The Solitude of Ravens.]

A Selection of Birds & One Tiger in "Cutting Edges: Contemporary Collage"

"Cutting Edges: Contemporary Collage" exceeded all my expectations (thank you interlibrary loan). Here is a selection of birds and one tiger from this survey that was published earlier this year.


Emmanuel Polanco, La and Do, 2010


Dolan Geiman, Zerelda's Weathervane, 2008


Dolan Geiman, Field Guide Riverbank, 2008


Emmanuel Polanco, The Raven, 2009


Emmanuel Polanco, Le Tigre, 2009

Since I only now realized three of the above images were from Emmanuel Polanco, I went to his website and discovered even more bird collages! All the images below are from the link above.







Also check out Dolan Geiman's website (this image provides the bird and cat link).