Jan 09 Spent much of the day at The Chinati Foundation , on the grand tour. The work feels…not exactly off-the-grid (despite being off the grid), but definitely not on the grid, either. It’s a pilgrimage site, a more stubborn, wilder, but gentried cousin of DIA Beacon. Chinati is a dynamic testimonial to Judd’s persistent, consistent vision, to his self-confidence. It’s incredibly smart, subtle and stark. Many of the works are powerful (by that I mean, precise, beautifully realized, well-sited, elegant, simple); the time of the desert and the all-dayness of the tour means you drop down softly into a different expectation of time, slow down enough by the 2nd hour to begin to have a nuanced relationship to details. Not only of the work, but of interior|exterior, here|there, natural|constructed, interior|exterior, pink|white, brick|wood, antelope|aluminum, straight|curved… the list is not exhaustible. This acuteness extends to sound (train moans, grasses hissing, the squeak of tree limbs, and the rainstorm sounds of corrugated metal roofing expanding in the heat), and tactility (more wind, more cold, more warm sunlight, plusher cat’s fur, specific gravel and sand under foot). This sensing extended to the hike I took on a rare stretch of open-to-the-public ranch land. The desert’s conceit of monotony was sharpened and pulled apart into micro-theatrics after experiencing 6 identical U-shaped buildings of fluorescent bulbs (Flavin), a vast hall of smashed and “sexually-fitted” candy-colored car parts (Chamberlain), impossibly pristine rectilinear aluminum iterations (Judd) and twin cylinders of eternally shiny copper (Horn).
Minimalism paved the way for so many art (per)mutations. The hybrid endeavors evident at Chinati have reified into sacred forms, but art|sci, public practice, art + the every day, all the expanded fields are still plastic and expanding…
John Chamberlain: “Being an artist is an initiative occupation…Art is one of the few things in the world that is never boring, and it costs nothing. You don’t have to own it, you just have to perceive it; art is free. As an artist I give away more than I would if I ran a beauty shop.”
(not any more, necessarily…)
Judd. concrete works.Judd, aluminum. Pronghorn antelope. Judd, concrete. Remains of volcano.Carl Andre poem. Funny to find New Jersey here in Marfa. The Texas petrochem landscape is New Jersey squared. Yes I know there’s no petrochem in Marfa.Dan Flavin (realized posthumously, I was sad to find out).John ChamberlainIlya Kabakov, 1993, 7 years after Chernobyl (and resembling the Robert Polidori photo of an abandoned Chernobyl school house).
Marfa sits at 5000’. The sky is a dome, with stars edge to edge. The moon is a mean sliver. I took a bath in the outdoor tub adjacent to my trailer. I had dinner with Erika Blumenfeld and Dahr Jamail, photographer and journalist, who just finished 2 months of intensive work on post-BP Gulf toxicity. Frightening. Look here and here for details, please.
Well I left the beef fat and downstream petro behind, and took a plane to Midland TX. The earth looks scraped clean – and it kind of is, at least in patches (scraped and then bored down down through strata of hard and soft, old and older. Lots of oil pump jacks – the term I like best for them is Thirsty Bird… but more on that soon.
Then I hopped in a rental that looks like a cop car (black 4 door, maybe the FBI will forgive me now) and drove to Marfa. Nice clouds, look scribbled and placed.
HOUSTON (AP) — The Coast Guard says a nearly one-mile stretch of the Houston Ship Channel will be closed for at least four days as workers use pitchforks and fishnets to corral, pierce and remove 15,000 gallons of beef fat.
Coast Guard spokesman Richard Brahm says shipping has not been impacted (but our scheduled boat tour was: they canceled ship channel port tours because of BEEF FAT). The refinery-lined (and beef fat biodiesel storage-lined) waterway is one of the busiest marine thoroughfares in the country.
On Tuesday, about 250,000 gallons of beef fat leaked from a storage tank, and some reached the waterway through a storm drain. The fat solidified when it hit the colder water.
Initially, the Coast Guard thought the channel would reopen early Thursday. But Brahm says the cleanup is taking longer than expected. By late Wednesday only 25 percent of the mess had been removed.
– Representatives of the company say the rupture was the result of an employee error – It’s better than an oil spill, is it not? – This storage tank of tallow was not intended to be edible’ it’s the fat used for cosmetics and soap. – They chunks in the channel are being referred to as “patties.”)
I am in TX — in Houston for the week. It is balmy.
Jan 04 I flew from NY in an extra legroom three-seat row, next to two enormous men (one wide, one tall). Aisle man pushed into middle man, leaving me a minuscule (standard) patch of space next to the window. The aisle guy looked like a student; the middle guy was an oil exec for Schlumberger (I know bc I read all his email). All three of us were reading about geology: The student was reading Bill Bryson’s “A Short History Of Nearly Everything” the oil exec, power point docs about noise reduction in fluids dropped down wells, and I, John McPhee’s Basin and Range (the poetics of geology).
Jan 05 Texas City. This morning I got stopped by private security for photographing the refineries from the road. (Are you following me? I ask. Yes! with a smile; I’d stay put, Ma’am, we have your plates. The police and FBI are coming.) 10 minutes later, the policeman took my drivers license, looked at my photos – the first dozen of which were pretty abstract – and then called his FBI contact from his iPhone. You have a smart phone? I ask. It’s my personal phone. He’s sweet, actually. I’m thinking, Why’s he calling FBI from his personal cell phone? The policeman believed me, I’m nothing more than an artist and so the FBI doesn’t have to come make me delete everything… And he really was a very nice policeman. He suggested that instead of continuing my photography of the refineries, I should go look at the dolphins down at the end of the dike: Our pod is back. I would like to do some testing of their pod’s bioaccumulation (not to mention the people who live in the little sleepy town of Texas City and eat their catch from the 5 Mile Dike.
–––––Texas City, from the 5 Mile Dike.
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Jan 05 Galveston, The Ocean Star Offshore Rig and Museum. Everything you always wanted to know about offshore drilling but were afraidto find out. Fantastic. A working rig, fully labeled; costumes to try on (“so you want a job in offshore?”; personality tests; brass plaques; miniatures; a dizzying derrick; 3D displays of seismic geological detection; an extensive “life on the offshore rig” display; and a corner of the 2nd floor devoted to environmental consciousness and care.
–––The Ocean Star Offshore Rig and Museum.
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Jan 05 Peak experience of the day: driving back from Galveston along the service road of I-45. Just before the causeway back to the mainland, one passes a series of wetlands, called the John M O’Quinn Estuarial Corridor. pull over, as I see birds paddling about. Texas is the #1 birding state apparently. And they are everywhere, squeaking, cawing, peeping, singing, wading, flapping, drying out. But here… so poetic: just beyond the meandering estuary is a long line of freight cars, all oil tanks, and beyond that, the refineries of Texas City. And up in the sky is something pink, the color of sunset (really), I am thinking flamingo, it’s so pink. It’s a roseate spoonbill, it’s exquisite, alone, and flapping its pinkness across the late afternoon.
––The John M. O’Quinn Estuarial Corridor, Roseate Spoonbill
A petrochemical system integrates the country through a continental network of facilities and pipelines. This network, assembled over the last hundred years, moves crude, gas, and chemical feedstock, from coast to coast, production areas to processing plants, tank farms to tanker ports, touching every state. It is a circulatory system of the American Land, moving the lifeblood of the economy, in this Petrochemical Age. Though the complexity, scale, and forms of the industry resemble those of science fiction fantasy, they are real and present. If the oil industry has a heart, then it is Texas. And Houston is its aorta.
— The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau reconstructed at the Menil
Also at the Menil was the exhibition “Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision,” which besides many great gems of the movement, presented a room of objects the surrealists had or would have had to inspire them. These included: “coconut seed resembling buttocks;” “Mickey Mouse Kachina;” and “Pestle in the Form of a Phallus.” 133 objects in total, organized by anthropologist Edmund Carpenter.
Got to hang out with Diane Barber, curatrix extraordinaire, her partner Karen and her 2 dog-buds Bosco and Domino.
Kurt Schwitters. The Merzbau, transformation of six (or possibly more) rooms of the family house in Hannover, Waldhausenstrasse 5. This took place very gradually; work started in about 1923, the first room was finished in 1933, and Schwitters subsequently extended the Merzbau to other areas of the house until he fled to Norway in early 1937
It is difficult not to respond with a biblical chill to the confluence of reports; and no answers – even all disparate causes – are going to be an enormous relief, either.
Millions of dead fish surfaced in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay in the U.S., Tuesday, while similar unexplained mass fish deaths occurred across the world in Brazil and New Zealand. On Wednesday, 50 birds were found dead on a street in Sweden. The news come after recents reports of mysterious massive bird and fish deaths days prior in Arkansas and Louisiana.
The Baltimore Sun reports that an estimated 2 million fish were found dead in the Chesapeake Bay, mostly adult spot with some juvenile croakers in the mix, as well. Maryland Department of the Environment spokesperson Dawn Stoltzfus says “cold-water stress” is believed to be the culprit. She told The Sun that similar large winter fish deaths were documented in 1976 and 1980.
ParanaOnline reports that 100 tons of sardines, croaker and catfish have washed up in Brazilian fishing towns since last Thursday. The cause of the deaths is unknown, with an imbalance in the environment, chemical pollution, or accidental release from a fishing boat all suggested by local officials.
In New Zealand, hundreds of dead snapper fish washed up on Coromandel Peninsula beaches, many found with their eyes missing, The New Zealand Herald reports. A Department of Conservation official allegedly claims the fish were starving due to weather conditions.
While all three events are likely unrelated, they come after recent reports of mysterious dead birds falling from the sky in both Arkansas and Louisiana. Thousands of dead birds were found in Beebe, Arkansas on New Year’s Eve, and a few days later, around 500 of the same species were found 300 miles south in Louisiana. A Kentucky woman also reported finding dozens of dead birds scattered around her home. In the days prior to New Year’s, nearly 100,000 fish surfaced in an Arkansas river 100 miles west of Beebe.
There’s a new shift in the politics of food, not quite a movement yet, more of an eco-culinary frisson. But it may have staying power; the signs and portents are there. Vegans, freegans, locavores — meet the invasivores.
The rumblings go further back, of course, as rumblings always do. The idea of eating kudzu and the recipes for it have been around for decades. More recently, at the beginning of 2009, a San Francisco blogger on matters ecological, animal and political, Rachel Kesel, posted a nicely turned argument for the “invasive species diet.”
Ms. Kesel, who grew up with a father who hunted deer, is now a vegetarian, but she included animals as well as plants in her proposed diet. She said in an interview that she was studying in London when she wrote the post, which grew out of conversations about diet and ecology. “If you really want to get down on conservation you should eat weeds,” she decided. And so she blogged.
She now works for the parks department of San Francisco and said she did indeed pursue the vegetable side of the diet she proposed. “I’m really looking forward to some of our spring weeds here,” she said, notably Brassica rapa, also known as field mustard or turnip mustard.
Ms. Kesel has a flair for the kind of rhetoric that any movement needs. “I’m almost serious here,” she concluded her diet post. “Eat for the environment. Eat locally. Eat wild meat. Eat for habitat. Eat invasive.”
Jackson Landers, unlike Ms. Kesel, is completely serious. As the Locavore Hunter, based in Virginia, he teaches urbanites how to hunt and butcher deer. He has branched out from the locavore life to invasives… What if we developed a similar taste for starlings?
I was pleased to see Canada geese and pigeons included in his list, because in the Northeast, neophyte invasivores face some unappetizing possibilities, like the zebra mussel (too little meat and too much salmonella) and the unpleasant and unwanted freshwater algae, Didymosphenia geminata, commonly called didymo, or, with absolutely no trace of affection, rock snot.
I don’t see the beginning of a menu there. But if we broaden the definition of invasives to include the things that invade the average suburbanite’s yard and golf course, a world of possibilities open up — deer, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, skunks, rabbits and woodchucks.
