A Little Art On The Prairie

Follow the typical signs, the hand-painted lines, down prairie roads.
Pass the lone church spire.
Pass the talking wire from where to who knows?
There’s no way to divide the beauty of the sky from the wild western plains.
Where a man could drift, in legendary myth, by roaming over spaces.
The land was free and the price was right.
      ~ from Gold Rush Brides by 10,000 Maniacs

The bike ride south of Race Street takes you directly to Meadowbrook Park, which has preserved 60 acres of native Illinois prairie, now all but mowed down and turned into the endless soybean and corn fields of the Midwest. But here, in this oasis of tall grass, turned golden in the dessicated air, one can still get a sense of the “legendary myth of the wild western plains” that Natalie Merchant evoked in the album Out of Eden. This tenacious enclave of rural land serves as an interesting space for the modernist sculptures that are displayed along its pathways. The ample size of the pieces are dwarfed nonetheless by the vast openness of the terrain. The pastoral setting ostensibly serves as counterpoint to the curated artifice, but is itself ironically, ultimately, also contrived. There is a heightened nostalgia for pure, unadulterated Nature by the presence of decadent bourgeois art in this patch of prairie preserve.

Cathedral window with a halo or a crown of thorns. Pat McDonald Open 2006

Brontosaurus feeding on primeval flora. Michael Dunbar Niantic 2002

This same artist did Slow and Steady at the Urbana Free Library. Todd Frahm El-Ahrirah 2000

Naked WASP woman of the prairie. The turquoise-green of oxidized bronze looks stunning against the gold of dry grass. Peter Fagan Marker 1998

One of my favorites, these Jazz Age totem poles and talismans. Love the cocked derby hat! D. Bill Folk Art 1997-1998

Surrealist creature. Ed Haddaway From Night Daddy’s Book of Dream 2001

One of the more comical pieces. Love the red and the hammer heads. Ed Benavente Minimal Response III 1999

Fun with Keith Haring iconography. Peter W. Michel Fathers & Sons 1999

A piece difficult to photograph. It was in a shady corner at the foot of a walk bridge, looking suspiciously scatological. Cecilia Allen and Roger Blakley Southern Passage 1998

The piece that most looked like it belonged there. Michele Goldstron Here and There 2000

The sheen of steel, the precision of lines, contrast with its organic environs. Ron Gard Position #1 2006

Another difficult piece to photograph. I like the reference to the sea in the title, the barnacled texture of the phallic head, the finned tail. Cecilia Allen Prairie Buoy 2001

Looks very solid and geometrically precise, this fluke. Carl Billingsley Fluke 1998

These wings, the title implies, look earthbound and organic. Endlessly photographable with its late afternoon shadow. Alissa Negila Swift 2001

Perhaps it is my being a chemist that makes me blasé about this piece–or that it is really sophomoric, obvious, and dull. Nothing wrong with science inspiring art, done properly. I do like the more inspired ribosomal subunits in glow-in-the-dark colors at the Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB). Christiane T. Martens Molecular Reflection 1997

If Transformer robots were made of concrete… Derick Malkemus Striker 1998

Looks like a blow-up of some kitsch decor in a 70’s Miami bungalow. ‘Nuff said. Larry Young Tango 1997

The perfectly smooth sphere, and the prairie background, saves this piece from being an ordinary pile of concrete rubble. William Carlson Balencia 1999

Now this is a pile of rubble. Barry Tinsley Hamilton 2002

Another comical piece. Its levity is counterbalanced by the chunkyness of the metal. John Adduci Yikes 2000

Related Links:

• Wandell Sculpture Garden at International Sculpture Center
• Complete slideshow of photos at my Flickr website

 

The Leaves Are Falling

Leaves have finally turned color! I had been waiting for this all summer, not having lived north enough before to see the four-season cycle. The streets are covered in opulent gold and red, and gleam in late afternoon light. Color changes first at the fringes. It is not so much the production of yellow, as the retreat of green–the disappearance of chlorophyll–that light-harvesting molecule that transforms air into the trees’ very substance. Now, it is shutting down operations, one-by-one dismantling its photosynthetic accoutrements, until a mere black skeleton remains of a once dazzling fullness–a naked stick to stand up to winter.

Reds and purples also appear, at the right conditions, as excess sugars of winter hoarding are transformed by light into color. An occult conjunction of moisture and weather, the onset of spring, the end of summer. No two autumns are thus ever alike.

Autumn to me was, for a long time, merely evoked by Rilke’s poems in The Book of Images. Ostensibly religious, these perhaps belong more properly to his earlier monastic and meditative work, The Book of Hours.

 

Through the Touch-Screen, and What I Found There

My new MacBook Pro came with a free iPod Touch with the academic discount. (Well, what amounts to the value of an 8GB model anyway–I had to fork out the difference to upgrade to 32GB.) The much touted unibody indeed looks sleek: the edges seem precariously razor-sharp, I get goosebumps when I run my fingers over them; the microphone and LED lights that indicate battery life are mere pinhole perforations, they’re almost invisible; the ON/OFF switch fits snug and flat in its hole, it looks like it was drawn there with a draftsman’s pencil. It looks as clean and keen as IM Pei’s National Gallery (East Wing) at Washington, DC.

Source: Ezra Stoller, The Architect’s Newspaper

This attention to design, perhaps more than its OS X operating system, is the main reason I lean towards Mac. I loved my old 12” Powerbook G4, and did not understand why Apple dropped the size, when, for a time, only 15” and 17” were offered. I did not want to lug a tray around, and almost considered getting the black MacBook. It was a good thing I hung on–the 13” MacBook Pro is exactly what I wanted: sleek, silver, and slim. For a short time, this body type and size was offered as a MacBook. Why Apple did that again boggled me; it only confused/diluted the Pro (Powerbook) brand, and would only alienate customers who bought it before it was upgraded to Pro.

Knock on wood that I don’t dent this unibody. I’m sure Apple would ask a pound of flesh for its repair. This is the problem I have with Apple: when you buy their products, you sign away your soul to the Corporation. They are fiercely proprietary and exclusive, exerting control over the product even after your purchase. I spent $400 to replace the optical drive on my G4 that can only be repaired with original parts in an Apple-certified shop. Customer service wanted me to spend “a bit more” to buy instead a new computer. (This was the time they phased out the 12” model.) No thanks. I didn’t like being bullied into buying. When I wanted to buy the iSight for the G4, they just so happen to have discontinued it to pave way for newer models with built-in camera. Customer service dismissed my complaint by saying that Apple “can’t keep on supporting older models”. My G4 was barely 2-years old at the time. There were no third-party Firewire cameras around, and the prices on used iSight cameras soared at eBay. Appealing to Apple is like talking to a brick wall, the Corporation is as veiled and draconian as a politburo, as self-contained and monolithic as the products they sell.

 

In The American West In The Dumpster

This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.

…

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

…

These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of the photographer.

(Richard Avedon, Foreword, In the American West, New York, Harry N. Abrahams, 2005)

 

Break, Blow, Burn: Paglia Reads Plath

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face

(from Daddy by Sylvia Plath)

30 June 2009. Briefly back in Houston to take stock of stuff I had slowly been sending over in anticipation of finishing my degree and leaving Gainesville at the end of Fall. I did not realize it will take a couple more terms to finally get everything done and find myself another job situation. Needless to say, it has been a long-drawn-out move. My stuff–especially my books–have become what I feared: a ball-and-chain. How liberating it was to have lost all my stuff in a fire five years ago. (Was it that long ago?)

I need to do some long delayed spring cleaning, and kick the habit of desperately hoarding books. Back home, it was rare to find even the likes of Tolkien, Rilke, and Neruda at National Bookstore while I was still in school. Here, there is no reason to hoard; books are a mouse-click away, or, if you live in Houston, they will be at Half-Price Books. My latest haul there: Amy Clampitt’s What The Light Was Like; Seamus Heaney’s Station Island; Goethe’s Faust, Part One (trans. Randall Jarrell); Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante; Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn.

I was surprised that when I was editing the stack of books I wished to bring to Illinois, I stayed away from my stock male poets like Edward Hirsch, Mark Strand, Mark Doty, and Adam Zagajewski, and went for Amy Clampitt (The Kingfisher, What the Light Was Like, Archaic Figure) and Gjertrud Schnackenberg (Supernatural Love)–women poets of dense, complex language. What does this forebode?

In Break, Blow, Burn, “America’s premier intellectual provocateur” Camille Paglia gives “close readings” of 43 poems from her experience as a classroom teacher. (These reviewers make it appear there is a dearth of intellectuals here in the US.) The voice of the text is thus off of a freshman English class–i.e., approachable by a general audience who seek help in appreciating the classics–but also brings to bear the author’s scholarly erudition. The book also appeals to the teacher of poetry, as a superb example of how to make the text come alive in a classroom of even the most indifferent non-literature/-humanities majors. Paglia uses the politically agnostic tools of New Criticism in her readings, but avoids their “genteel sentimentality” with generous helpings of Freud.