Coffee House Press in the Stacks

The Coffee House Press Writers and Readers Library Residency Program

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New CHP in the Stacks blog

We have a new home for our CHP in the Stacks dispatches and content! Visit our new blog here for all future updates and information on Coffee House Press’s residency program. All content currently on this site will remain here.

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In the Stacks with Lara Mimosa Montes: Wild Style

A few years ago, I attended a screening of Charlie Ahearn’s hip-hop film Wild Style (1983) as part of the Walker Art Center’s Downtown New York: 1970s and 1980s Art and Film series. The film, “a hybrid of a narrative musical and documentary,” follows Zoro, played by graffiti legend Lee Quinones, as he weaves his way through the various hip hop, break dancing, and Bronx DJ scenes in early 1980s New York.

Wild Style captures some of the funky tensions of the time period. For instance, if you were a “successful” graffiti artist in the 1980s, you were, like your peers, probably working your ass off to get your name out there, but not necessarily your face because anonymity back then was definitely an asset. However, if you worked hard and were good at what you did, then you were also probably a hot commodity, sought after by the vultures of the art world, journalists, toys fucking with your shit, the cops, and the MTA. My favorite scene in the film is when Zoro and his friends arrive at a party in Manhattan populated by rich art patrons and the like; one character, Neil, says he runs a museum called “the Whitley” while Blondie’s Rapture is playing in the background; another guy in a suit misunderstands rap music as “rat” and asks Zoro if he works in the dark, how can he see what he’s painting? While this scene is more fiction than documentary, I love the way it posits everyone as a potential insider or outsider, depending on who wants what from whom in any given exchange.

Wild Style, directed by John Ahearn, 1983. Japanese chirashi movie mini poster, 2015. Wild Style mural by ZEPHYR, Revolt, and Sharp.

Following the Q and A with Ahearn that night, I got the impression that there were still a lot of positive feelings and happy memories surrounding the project. The affective glow that emanated from the collective viewing and discussion of the film, coupled with a revived general interest in that particular cultural moment (ie. the short-lived Netflix original flop of a show The Get Down), stayed with me. I mean, to what extent is wildstyle —the term given to describe a particularly complex and difficult to decipher style of graffiti writing—part of my inheritance, my culture, its art history? Given graffiti’s ephemeral nature, I felt intrigued by the possibility of researching this form in its early years from the 1970s-80s. What I came to know and appreciate was, yes, the many works given to us by a generation of gifted writers, but also the work done by artists like Charlie Ahearn, Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, Martin Wong, among others. Without them, I’m not sure how we would remember those early days of the graffiti movement. So, for those wishing to go a little deeper down the rabbit hole, below is a brief survey of some of the landmark texts that document this vibrant period in Bronx history; it is by no means comprehensive—these just happen to be some of my current personal favorites . . . 

Subway Art by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, featuring Dondi, first published in 1984.

“The bible of the street-art movement,” Subway Art was the first published book of its kind to document graffitti. Featuring full-color photographs by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, the book contains many masterpieces by artists such as Blade, Lee, Seen, and more. A beautiful print collaboration between the two foremost photographers of the movement, you can really appreciate Cooper’s and Chalfant’s distinct approaches to shooting the trains. Also, if you’re as excited as I am for Chalfant’s upcoming exhibition at the Bronx Museum, Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987 which opens later this year, now is as good a time as any to revisit this seminal work.

Style Wars, graffiti by NOC 167,1981. Photo by Martha Cooper. 

Style Wars, directed by Tony Silver and co-produced by Silver and photographer Henry Chalfant, released in 1983, is a classic—the documentary features many a baby-faced graffiti artist such as Dondi, Skeme, Kase 2, interviews with MTA officials, Mayor Ed Koch, various masterpieces, and more. If you want to know what these young writers were up against in terms of public opinion and the MTA, definitely start here. Plus . . . Skeme’s mom: God bless her, wow.

City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection, edited by Sean Corcoran and Carlo McCormick, New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013.

I had no idea that the artist Martin Wong was a known collector of graffiti art until I had come across this book, published in tandem with the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition City as Canvas, and yes, I am very sorry I had not seen this show back in 2014 before I left New York. For those skeptical of graffiti’s transition from subway to canvas, this book really made me rethink my assumption that graffiti is graffiti because it lives on in the streets and on the trains but never in a gallery. In addition to color images of works on canvas, archival exhibition shots, and some recollections contextualizing Wong’s relationship to the graffiti community by artists Lee, Daze, and Charlie Ahearn, also featured are images of drawings from various artists’ blackbooks: gold.

Tag Town: The Evolution of New York Graffiti Writing by Martha Cooper, Poland: Dokument Press, 2007.

Before there was wildstyle, there was tagging. Some cool shots of tags by Taki 168, Julio 204, Barbara 62, and even Basquiat, among others. Another great monograph by Martha Cooper, who in an interview said, “I shot tags because I wanted a record of them. . . mostly I just wanted to study what they looked like and to allow others to study them in the future. I was using my camera as a very efficient tool to make a record of something that would otherwise be lost.”

Classic Hits: New York’s Pioneering Subway Graffiti Writers by Alan Fleisher & Paul Iovino, Poland: Dokument Press, 2012.

Classic Hits features photographs by Alan Fleisher, Robert Browning, and Jack Stewart. Filled with an assortment of early masterpieces by writers such as Stay High 149, Blade, Super Kool 223, and others, alongside artists’ recollections. I like this book because it showcases an earlier generation of graffiti writers from the 1970s before things really got wild. Similar to Cooper’s Tag Town, I was able to gather from this one a more expanded appreciation for the evolution of the form.

Dondi White Style Master General: The Life of Graffiti Artist Dondi White, by Andrew “ZEPHYR” Witten and Michael White, New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

OK, so graffiti legend Dondi wasn’t born in the Bronx—he was definitely a Brooklyn writer. Nevertheless, his influence on the larger writing community was so profound, his relevance cannot be understated—it went to the Bronx and beyond. Includes black-and-white and color photographs, early sketches, never before seen collage works as well as works on canvas, and reminiscences by the artist’s friends. Unlike some of the other texts on this list, this one is unique insofar as it’s a book assembled by another well-known graffiti artist, ZEPHYR, alongside Dondi’s brother, Michael, so the insights and anecdotes presented here, especially those from Dondi’s closest friends, really provide a window onto the world of the artist. RIP Dondi, you gave us so much.

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Shift: A Reading with Kathryn Savage

CHP In the Stacks Presents Shift: A Reading with Kathryn Savage, Victoria Blanco, Angela Pelster, and Moheb Soliman. Wednesday, April 24th, at 7 p.m. at the American Swedish Institute.

Coffee House Press and the American Swedish Institute are thrilled to present Shift: A Reading and Artist Talk with Kathryn Savage, Victoria Blanco, Angela Pelster, and Moheb Soliman. Join current CHP in the Stacks resident Kathryn Savage as she reads and discusses new work created during her residency at the Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Laugarvatn, Iceland, with friends and writers whose work is interdisciplinary and fits within themes of shifting, art in the anthropocene, place, identity, and grief.

This event is curated by Kathryn Savage, and the artist discussion will be moderated by Angela Pelster. The reading and conversations will be at the beautiful American Swedish Institute in the Folke Bernadotte Conference Room. ASI will be open that evening, so join us before or after for a visit to the mansion or the exhibit of Erik Johansson's photography!

The reading and discussion will be followed by a short Q&A and reception.

https://www.facebook.com/events/416803732431514/

About the artists:

Victoria Blanco is a writer from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. Her research and writing have been supported by a Fulbright Award, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, a Bakeless Scholarship from Bread Loaf Orion, a writing residency at St. Paul's East Side Freedom Library from CHP in the Stacks, and the 2018 Roxane Gay Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction for the Jack Jones Literary Arts writers' retreat. She was a fellow in the 2017-2018 Loft Mentor Series. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Bat City Review, and Fourth Genre.

Angela Pelster’s most recent book Limber won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for best new book in nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Tin House, Granta, the Kenyon Review and the Gettysburg Review, among others. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and was recently awarded a fellowship in nonfiction to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and a Minnesota State Arts Board grant. She is the founder and director of Writers Go to the Movies and teaches at Hamline University in St Paul.

Kathryn Savage is a recipient of the 2018 Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize. A hybrid writer, her work appears or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Poets.org, the Guardian, Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, the Village Voice, and The Best Small Fictions of 2015. She currently teaches writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), and at the University of Minnesota, where she is pursuing a second MFA in poetry. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, the Weisman Art Museum, the O'Rourke Travel Fellowship and the Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship from the University of Minnesota. She is a program manager at the Loft Literary Center and volunteers with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest whose work is often oriented by themes of nature, modernity, identity, and belonging, often taking shape in writing, performance, and installation projects. In recent years he’s focused on the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland, presenting work under the banner HOMES [Huron Ontario Michigan Erie Superior] in diverse US and Canadian art and public spaces, and he will soon be publishing a related poetry collection with Coffee House Press. Previously, he’s also been awarded grants and fellowships and other support from the Joyce Foundation, Forecast Public Art, Pillsbury House, and the Banff Centre, among others. Moheb has degrees from The New School for Social Research and the University of Toronto, and before his Tulsa Artist Fellowship, he worked as Program Director for the Arab American contemporary lit/art organization Mizna. See more at mohebsoliman.info and agreatlakesvista.tumblr.com.

Kathryn Savage is a fiscal year 2019 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

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In the Stacks with Lara Mimosa Montes: Darrel Ellis

This past March, I visited OSMOS at 50 East 1st Street in Manhattan’s East Village to see some works by the Bronx-born painter and photographer Darrel Ellis. As far as I know, the last time any of Ellis’s works have been shown in New York was over fourteen years ago, in 2005, so it’s something of a big deal to see his work in the real world once again.

When I first began looking a bit more thoughtfully into Ellis’s biography upon recalling that he had been included in the exhibition Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960’s, a basic internet search yielded very few results, especially in comparison to Ellis’s peer group, which includes artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and David Wojnarowicz. Apart from a short entry about Ellis on Visual AIDS and an exhibition catalog from 1996 published by Art in General to celebrate the posthumous, traveling exhibition which featured seventy of the artist’s works from his estate, there remains very little in print on the subject of Darrel Ellis. Given the works of his that I was able to view online and the little bits that I had been able to glean from his bio, this just didn’t sit right with me. This is an artist whose work needs to be known.

Self-portrait based on Peter Hujar photograph, c. 1990, painting on canvas, 22” × 24”. Courtesy of OSMOS. ⓒ Estate of Darrel Ellis.

Darrel Ellis was born December 5th, 1958. He died April 3rd, 1992, a couple of months before David Wojnarowicz, whose full-scale retrospective at the Whitney Museum, History Keeps Me Awake at Night, I saw last fall. Having encountered Wojnarowicz’s presence as a teenager through the fairly obscene underground films of Richard Kern [ie. “Stray Dogs” (1985) and “You Killed Me First” (1985)], it was definitely a trip seeing his work at the Whitney—it was packed to the point that I kind of didn’t want to be there. People love David now, I thought, a little moody.

As I moved through the museum’s galleries, I had to wonder what an artist like Wojnarowicz would think of all this posthumous looking and snapping. I had to ask myself: Why does the art world want to stage its appreciation for an artist like David Wojnarowicz now? Because the fucked up political future he had been observing finally came to pass? And if we are looking at David and the ambitious body of work he assembled during his lifetime and encountering it as emblematic of a certain downtown New York countercultural moment, or an idealized version of some queer, punk sensibility we associate with the ’80s and ’90s, then what else—and who else—in our historicization of that particular time drops out as a result?

I am not exempt from the “we” I speak of here; next to my bed currently sits a newly purchased copy of Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, published by Semiotext(e) just last year. My attention is turned towards David, too, and I suspect, unlike many of the tourists at the Whitney that day who might have been seeing his work for the first time, I had the luxury of living in New York City and participating in the art world in ways that allowed me to encounter his work IRL many times over the years and in several different contexts with varying degrees of politicization. I’ve even been lucky enough during my brief time working at a private arts college to teach and share his work with others. If I have a lot to say about David Wojnarowicz, it’s because I have had years of looking and thinking about his work alongside the many documented accounts of his critics, friends, admirers, and biographers, some of whom were fortunate enough to know him, and live to tell of their experiences (among my favorites of these accounts are those by artist Zoe Leonard, with thanks to Sarah Schulman).

The same, however, cannot be said of Darrel Ellis, so it is still something of an experiment: learning to look at and speak about his work, the impression it leaves on me. As of now, I cannot speculate as to how his art and reputation will fare in the wake of this strangely belated and renewed interest in the art historical ongoings and culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. [1]

Poster for Day Without Art, designed by Danny Tisdale Studio, 1994, offset lithograph on paper; 35” × 25 ⅝”. Courtesy of Visual AIDS. Background image features Darrel Ellis’s Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1989.

When he died in the spring of 1992 of AIDS, Darrel Ellis was the same age as his father, Thomas Ellis: 33 years old. In 1958, Thomas, a postal clerk and aspiring photographer who briefly ran a portrait studio in Harlem with his wife, was killed by the police following an argument with two plainclothes detectives who had blocked his parked car. The injuries sustained from the altercation proved fatal. At the time of Thomas’s death, his wife was pregnant with Darrel. [2] Justice was never served.

These events and the life that preceded them, as documented by the senior Ellis in the many family photographs taken before Darrel was born in parts of the Bronx and Harlem during the 1950s, eventually made their way into Darrel’s work. In 1981, when Ellis was living in the Lower East Side with his then-lover and “unofficially” participating in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, the artist, writer, and independent curator Allen Frame recalls that Ellis had recently acquired some of his father’s black and white photographs from the 1950s which he was reinterpreting with ink on paper at the time. [3]

In 1983, BOMB magazine published some works from this period. [4]

Left: Darrel Ellis, My Mother and My Sister from My Father’s Photograph, 1982. Right: Thomas Ellis, Picnic NYC, 1953.

The diptych featuring Thomas Ellis’s photograph alongside his son’s interpretation published thirty years later is uncanny. In Darrel’s version, there are outlines, blurs, shadows, and contours. Certain details, like the density of the grass or the striped pattern on the young girl’s shorts fall away in favor of other, more plain facts, like “here’s a family.” The position of the subjects in relation to one another would suggest even without our knowing that these folks are kin. Their togetherness in time is an indisputable fact. Prior to Darrel’s being-in-the-world, Thomas’s photograph establishes the family as existing within a shared visual field: they had a life and their being together—whether it was in a park or at home—appears as a notably carefree aspect of that life.

Ellis continued experimenting with his father’s photographs: the layers of technique and reinterpretation that would distinguish his images from the ones taken by his father would become more pronounced. Allen Frame observes, “Between 1984 and 1986, [Ellis] made a series of photographs of his mother, brother, and sisters, from which he produced a new body of work evolving from screenprint to experimental photograph to painting. The screenprints, made while he was living at his mother’s apartment after breaking up with his boyfriend and coming out to his family, were compiled into a book at the Lower East Side Printshop, with the help of Susan Spencer Crowe.” [5] The book, published by Appearances Press in 1986, reveals various domestic scenes and interior living spaces depicting relatives sitting in the kitchen, around the family table, doing each other’s hair, laying in bed. They are sparse in terms of detail, and resemble studies of the generic and the sublime as they depict the taken for granted scenes from a life. Again, what stands out are not the faces of the individuals pictured, but their relation to one another as suggested by their body language, particularly the casual nature of their closeness. [6]

At some point, while looking at the drawings alongside the later photographs, I remember saying to my new friend, Kyle, who had accompanied me to see the show at OSMOS, “I don’t see how the artist who made these drawings also made these photographs. Or rather, I can’t see that the photographs were made by someone who primarily identified as a painter. . .” Kyle responded, “I can see it. . . Maybe it has to do more with understanding Darrel’s relationship as a painter to the photograph as a surface.”

Kyle was onto something. In an interview, Ellis said of his process, “The idea of putting a photo on any surface other than photo paper gives you a lot of freedom. The process became [one] about animating the photo, about revivification.” [7] Perhaps what was painterly about Ellis’s photographs, particularly those that reinterpreted his father’s negatives, was that he treated the original images as content rather than object. In other words, by projecting the negatives on a wall and then experimenting with both his position as the photographer in relation to the projected image and the dimensionality of the surface onto which the image was projected by creating sculptural forms onto which the projections would appear, Ellis transformed his father’s negatives into surface. The resulting images that we are left with therefore are not really appropriations; they’re the being-with of a trace of a lost object—the trace being the negative, and the lost object, the father. As Ellis reflected of his father’s images, “When I look at those photographs sometimes, all I see is holes.” [8] I will never fail to be moved by those words.

Left: Untitled (Aunt Connie and Uncle Richard), c. 1990, silver gelatin RC Print, 15 ¾” × 19 ¼”. Right: Untitled (Aunt Connie and Uncle Richard), c. 1990, crayon and ink on paper, 10” × 12”. Courtesy of OSMOS. ⓒ Estate of Darrel Ellis.

When Ellis was discovered in a coma by his friends Susan Spencer Crowe and Bruce Dow in the spring of 1992 at his apartment off Franklin Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, “his last self-portrait was sitting on his easel beside his bed, eerily depicting him as he was found: eyes closed, lying on his bed in deep repose.” [9] After spending some time with Ellis’s work at OSMOS, I felt better able to appreciate how complicated the idea of the self-portrait must have been for Ellis if he was so compelled to return to it as a generative mode of inquiry. By adopting different mediums such as drawing, painting, and photography, while sometimes blending all three in the process to create an individual work, I imagine he must have felt provoked, if not also a bit estranged, by all the selves he had discovered through his practice.  

Among Ellis’s self-portraits, perhaps the most recognized one is Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe which was featured in the now infamous Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing exhibition at Artists Space in 1989, curated by Nan Goldin. For the show, Ellis contributed two self-portraits, both of which were based on photographs taken of him by Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. The caption in the exhibition catalogue that accompanies Self-Portrait After Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe reads: “I struggle to resist the frozen images of myself taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar.” I’ve never seen either of the photographs Mapplethorpe or Hujar took of Ellis, but I remain haunted by the decision Ellis made to take back his own image. [10] I suspect that if during this time period, Ellis became that much more aware of his mortality following the discovery of his HIV status, then “the struggle to resist the frozen images” through the creation of the self-portrait forms part of the process by which the artist is able to reassert his right to his body as well as his right to explore acts of self-representation. I imagine then for Ellis: the self-portrait is not a luxury, but a vital necessity.

[1] Thank you to Tiona Nekkia McClodden who, through her continued work, conversations, and writing on Essex Hemphill, Julius Eastman, and Brad Johnson, helped me think the most deeply about some of the contradictions inherent in this renewed interest in queer art from the 1980s and ’90s, and so much more.

[2] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy: Variations in Black and White,” Darrel Ellis (New York: Art in General, 1996), p.13.

[3]  Ibid., 14.

[4] Darrel Ellis and Thomas Ellis, "Darrel Ellis, Thomas Ellis" in BOMB, no. 5 (1983): 44. Also see “Two Drawings by Darrel Ellis” in BOMB, No. 8, (1983/1984): 37.

[5] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy,” p. 17.

[6] Thank you to Ricardo Montez who, upon learning about my interest in Darrel, gifted me his copy of the aforementioned book.

[7] David Hirsh, “Darrel Ellis: On the Border of Family and Tribe,” in Disrupted Borders: An Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries, ed. Sunil Gupta (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1993), p.125.

[8]  Ibid., 124.

[9] Allen Frame, “Our Family Legacy,” p.21.

[10] See Kobena Mercer, “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe” (1986) for a more in-depth discussion of the artist’s use of black male bodies.

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In the Stacks with Kathryn Savage: On Land

In the Volcano House movie theater, red lights pulsed beneath chairs. On screen, I watched ash and pumice slowly bury homes in the Westman Islands in 1973. Watched men and women in pale wool sweaters shovel ash off metal roofs.

Some days I drove, aimless, or read about tectonic and volcanic areas, rift zones, main lateral volcanic belts. Read about fracture zones, areas of transformed lineaments, grabens. “The mantle plume disappears under the new Iceland, the island grows and its oldest parts become eroded and disappear below sea level.” [1]

In the hospital when my father was dying, a tube inserted into his nose and throat gave him the pleasure of tasting water but kept the water from reaching his stomach, so he wouldn’t vomit. The day before he died he took big swigs of water, which wasn’t allowed. I’d asked him to stop when we were alone so he could refuse me privately. He wouldn’t give it up, always the rebel I knew. Both of us stubborn. I share his willfulness, his instinct to disobedience that can wound people. His exes called him reckless; mine have called me cruel.

He shrugged me off. “Makes no difference. I’m terminal.”

The water that sinks through pores, fissures and cavities into the abysses below Iceland acquires its own character. It interacts chemically with the volcanic soil and the volcanic bedrock, dissolving minerals and enriching the clay fraction of the soil. The water becomes low in calcium compounds (alias chalk) but relatively high in chlorine (a result of its marine origins) and has an underground pH-value of 9-10. It retains a small fraction of minerals and gases, making it pleasant tasting. [2]

I swam. Took on the scent of the water on my skin, a metallic, mineral smell. Sulphur, clay. After, I felt feral, less domesticated, far from my son, less recognizable to myself, smelling of the soil of an ecosystem to which I did not belong.

Chemotherapy changes the body’s smell too. Over time my father smelled like a different man. Metallic. The oldest parts of how we’d communicate—his hoisting me up in the air as a baby, or sitting silent on long drives in his truck smelling like cigarettes and gas station coffee, sweaty from jobsites—eroded and disappeared.

One day I took a mysterious photo of a page inside a now more mysterious book at the national library in Reykjavík. The page references a novel with characters named Josephine and Bethe and Count Sheridan. The snippet is of a scene after a volcano has erupted. There is a deafening clap of thunder as though the world had been blown in two. The night had vanished and after fiery fragments from the centre of the earth were flying through the sky and missiles like jagged lumps of fire, coming apart in their flight, as liquidy as sealing wax, fell dripping to the water, a crowd of dancers ran from the terraces that surrounded Count Sheridan’s house, ran for their lives.

To study a volcano, to predict large eruptions, geologists measure small earthquakes that happen inside and around the volcano. If pressure increases in a volcano, it produces little earthquakes, and the more pressure on a volcano, the more little earthquakes in that volcano. This slow breakdown of stability inside the volcano produces big eruptions. I learn this and think how human, how frustratingly human. [3]

All that year, my father’s stomach rupturing, holes in his GI tract leaching acid.

Here’s a memory: The day before he died, the last day he could speak, we had a fight about hospice. He was mean, and I was mean back. 

I don’t romanticize death as if it were a lesson in loving, as if he were, finally, a lesson in pain and relief, presence and absence, but I know this one hospice nurse who talks about the dying in a breathless giddy way. Everyone’s relationships are realer, she’s told me. All their shit rising up.

I read Ben Fama’s Fantasy in Iceland.

I’m not afraid of falling in love some die Claire did I thought I saw her today in the metro my heart went crazy [4]

My heart went crazy too. Delusional, from Latin deludere “to play false,” from de- “down” and ludere “to play.” [5] Shape-shifting—the concrete body as fantasy, as an unending unfurling of other bodies. He has not died; or, I catch my reflection and see his face inside my face. I am blown in two.

One day in Iceland, I watched a young couple pose for wedding photos on a volcanic beach, in mist, before the mouth of a cave. It was cold, and the bride’s arms were bare in her pale crepe dress. The bride’s body, simultaneously real and mythological. Like the dead.  

I don’t romanticize death.

Some die / I thought / I saw her today.

But maybe I romanticize the crowd of dancers running from the terrace of Count Sheridan’s imaginary house, romanticize them running, alive with want and terrified, full of their own life’s meaning, running fast for their lives.

Notes:

[1] Living Earth: Outline of the Geology of Iceland by Ari Trausti Guðmundsson, p. 90

[2] Living Earth: Outline of the Geology of Iceland by Ari Trausti Guðmundsson, p. 288  

[3] With thanks to Páll Einarsson at the Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland, who researches volcanology, tectonism, and earthquake seismology, and who I interviewed on July 16, 2018.   

[4] Ben Fama, Fantasy, Ugly Duckling Press, 2015

[5] The etymology of “delusional” is taken from http://etymonline.com/.

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In the Stacks with Casey Deming & Leslie Grant: Collecting

“Whether it’s summer or winter, you freeze. Your hands grow stiff as you try to decipher the document, and every touch of its parchment or rag paper stains your fingers with cold dust. The writing, no matter how meticulous, how regular, is barely legible to untrained eyes. It sits before you on the reading room table, most often a worn-out looking bundle tied together with a cloth ribbon, its corners eaten away by time and rodents. It is precious (infinitely so) and damaged; you handle it cautiously out of fear that a slight tear could become definitive. You can tell at a glance whether a bundle has been opened even once since it was first stored. An intact bundle is easily recognizable. Not only by its level of deterioration—after all, it may have been subjected to damp cellars and floods, wars and disasters, frosts and fires—but by a uniform layer of stiff dust that cannot be blown or brushed off, a scaly hide hardened by the years. Gently, you begin undoing the cloth ribbon the corsets it around the waist, revealing a pale line where the cloth had rested for so long.”

Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 1-2.

You cannot help but consider the physicality of the archive. How your body must engage with the materials and the space where you encounter the collection.

Materials and notes, Carleton College Archives, Gould Library, Northfield, MN

“Research . . . means first and foremost understanding meanings, discovering shortcuts, making connections, and detecting systems, which is why the physical handling of the archive itself—actually touching materials, papers, parchments, and feeling their many forms—as well as writing about it by hand constitute its core content, while also providing the key with which to unlock it.”

Susanne Bieri, “Introduction,” in The Dynamic Library, (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2015), p. 59.

This haptic reading of the archive opens up numerous avenues of engagement for the user. You bring your own path(s) to your investigation.

A box of materials from Wayne Dyck’s personal archive, consisting of photographs and films made while on the job as a foreman for Bertram Drilling.

“The significance of tactile looking . . . is that it is more act than reading; it produces more than it understands.”

Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 3.

A selection from Wayne Dyck’s personal archive, consisting of photographs and films made while on the job as a foreman for Bertram Drilling.

“Archives . . . are not only places of storage, they are also places of classification production, where systems of organization are devised. They are places where society and culture meet, and where the private becomes public, or at least the private encounters the public, and vice versa.”

Susanne Bieri, “Introduction,” in The Dynamic Library, (Chicago: Soberscove Press, 2015), p. 61.

What if the archive remembered you? What if it kept a record of your use of the archive as a site of “play?” How can the systems of organizing the archive nurture these serendipitous and associative ways of looking?

Renée Green, “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae,” in The Archive, Charles Merewether, ed. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006).

“The historian’s approach is similar to a prowler’s; searching for what is buried away in the archives, looking for the trail of a person or event, while remaining attentive to that which has fled, which has going missing, which is noticeable by its absence.”

Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 71.

Archives both remember and forget. Authority is inherent in their structure. What can those gaps tell us about how culture and society account for their past and project their aspirations for the future? Whose voices are left out in that process?

We invite Christina and Frank Lyon to contribute their ideas about archival investigations. They are generously hosting the “Archive Stories” talk on April 7th within the context of their exhibition at Company Projects.

OUECHA is the experimental organization of wife and husband Christina and Frank Lyon based in the Twin Cities. The name emerged by way of misunderstanding and became a mnemonic for their interdisciplinary practice of affinities: a reminder to begin from perspective, patience, openness, and resolve in a conversation that simultaneously prioritizes internal listening and drive with the richness of freshly discovered questions about and through a great otherness. Such is a recipe for change and the willingness to be changed—a neutral handshake with indeterminacy, a baffling hug between meaning and its awkward scaffolding, a pirouette that greets its new and different visions with interest, kindness, and care.

Rogue Curatorial Energy

Is it the right time to ask, what is an institution? We do know it is the right time to ask, “What is an archive?” Our current project, Playtime, emerges from a decentralized practice oscillating between the institutional and the personal archive among the material culture of estate sales: death and material culture as institutions, style as the personal.  

All that makes an archive an archive is institutional support, but with such an excess of material culture in these times you can find archivists everywhere: we are all rogue curators.

Estate sales behave a bit like a surprise archive, often unorganized but nonetheless housed within an institution (the home) where the codes set forth by the systems in place tend to dominate the way it is in most archive buildings. It is here that we must employ our most ferocious creativity—What to glean from a life, from a collection? How to present an assemblage from “rubble?”

The archives among us are raw materials ripe for reassembly, inspiration, and possible answers.  We can defamiliarize the contents of the archives to produce new pathways and a diffusion of subjectivity, power, and institutional biases. We can sew fresh and integral goals and narratives, or revel in goalessness and and nonlinear sensations of meaning.

Questions for a Porous Archive

Is it possible to change the archive’s form without changing its content?

When was the last time you queried an archive?

What does your personal archive say about you?

What can archives do that language and narrative cannot?

How to ventilate the archive?

How to live with archives in an “idiorrhythmic” fashion, honoring the “fugitivity of the code” implicit in centralized archives?

How does the internet scramble our concepts of precious-cizing the archive?

Does decentralizing the archive open up space for the value of pleasure to emerge in how we approach its contents?

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In the Stacks with Casey Deming & Leslie Grant: Work Stories

“It’s not just the work. Somebody built the pyramids. Somebody’s going to build something. Pyramids, Empire State Building—these things just don’t happen. There’s hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, ‘See, that’s me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in.’ Picasso can point to a painting. What can I point to? A writer can point to a book. Everybody should have something to point to.”

Mike Lefevre, steelworker, quoted in Studs Terkel, Working, (New York: The New Press, 1972).

Heli drilling in Alberta, Canada, photograph by Wayne Dyck, Drilling Foreman, Bertram Drilling

We wake up early, before the sunrise, and drive south to Northfield to be there when the morning light is still soft and the shadows are not too dark. The bore field is a dirt plot, basically, with drilling rigs and other trucks, and a few scattered drillers starting their workday. As always I feel nervous, wondering what talking to these workers will be like, wondering what photographing them will be like. I have done this before, many times, and the awkwardness is always there, like a reminder of our different roles, separate lives—and still there is a sweetness to the moment. When would I otherwise talk in depth to a driller? I love this part of working on projects, where I get to spend time with people I might not have a chance to know. And the space between us is exactly why it feels important to me. I remember photographing a sugar refinery worker at his home, which he graciously let me spend time in, and the discomfort I felt because of his point of view that was (really, really!) different from mine. I didn’t enjoy being there, but I also really wanted to be there—to spend time with, and photograph, a person I disagreed with but cared about.

Installation of air-conditioning pipes, August 1969, Carleton College Library Archives

Photographs of people at work—whether in the moment of labor, on a break, eating lunch, etc.—have always fascinated me. What does the experience of work look like, especially work that I have never done myself? As an outsider, I wonder what I can understand from an image of work—about that labor, about that person, about our culture. I love the connection across time and difference I feel, however imaginary, when I look at a photograph of work. And at the same time I worry about the power of the camera, the relationship of representation and oppression, and the possibility of observation slipping into surveillance, or less dramatically, of prying into a life.

“The portrait is . . .  a sign whose purpose is both the description of an individual and the inscription of social identity.”

John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

Justin, Driller, Bertram Drilling, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, photographed by Casey Deming and Leslie Grant, 2018

Paydon Loveshim, Driller, Bertram Drilling, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, photographed by Casey Deming and Leslie Grant, 2018

Steven Potter, Driller, Bertram Drilling, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, photographed by Casey Deming and Leslie Grant, 2018

We photograph the foreman, Wayne Dyck, and talk with him about his long life of drilling around the world and all over the US. We are excited to learn that he has a huge archive of photographs and films he has made of his drilling work. Wayne later sends us a box of photographs from his collection, and his point of view as shown through these images has become integral to the project. I hope this is one way to complicate what could otherwise be seen as a conventional series of worker portraits. And another way—using archival materials from the Carlton Library archives, including maps, historical photographs and books, architectural drawings, correspondence—to connect these workers to the past of this site, of the bore field in which they work.

Installation of air-conditioning pipes, August 1969, Carleton College Library Archives

“So you should simply make the instant

Stand out, without in the process hiding

What you are making it stand out from. Give your acting

The progression of one-thing-after-another, that attitude of

Working up what you have taken on. In this way

You will show the flow of events and also the course

Of your work, permitting the spectator

To experience this Now on many levels, coming from Previously and

Merging into Afterwards, also having much else Now

Alongside it. He is sitting not only

In your theatre but also

In the world.”

Bertolt Brecht, quoted in John Berger’s About Looking, (New York: Vintage International, 1980).

Drilling in Alberta & Northwest Territories, Canada, photograph by Wayne Dyck, Drilling Foreman, Bertram Drilling

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In the Stacks with Casey Deming & Leslie Grant: Land Works

Natural History at Carleton College, pamphlet produced by Carleton College, nd, Carleton College Library Archives

“Northfield is peculiarly located between three great agricultural regions. To the North is the hay and dairy belt, to the south the corn belt, while to the west and southwest are the wheat lands. For students of geography there can be no better locale for field observations of sequent occupance and land utilizations.”

Natural History at Carleton College, pamphlet produced by Carleton College, nd, Carleton College Library Archives

Cross-section through Northfield, Continuum: Threads in the Community Fabric of Northfield, Minnesota, Ed. Lynn Carlin, (Northfield: Northfield Printing, 1976), p. 10.

“ … inland seas teeming with primitive corals, fishes and arthropods covered all of southern Minnesota. And near the beginning of earth history—back more than a billion years—Northfield was perhaps on the edge of a great Precambrian ocean bounded on the north only by bare rock of an early and great mountain range. The seas of this early time were all but void of life; the mountains and land empty of forests or grasses or even small, crawling things. Only the geological forces of erosion and mountain-building were at work shaping the land.”

Continuum: Threads in the Community Fabric of Northfield, Minnesota, Ed. Lynn Carlin, (Northfield: Northfield Printing, 1976), p. 9.

Prof. L. B. Sperry, Geology of Rice County, (Minneapolis: Johnson, Smith & Harrison, 1878), Carleton College Library Archives

Fragment of map from Prof. L. B. Sperry, Geology of Rice County, (Minneapolis: Johnson, Smith & Harrison, 1878), Carleton College Library Archives

“The uses are less different than the livings that incorporate into their present the endless labor all maps embody. This is what means to use a map. It may look like wayfinding or a legal action over property or an analysis of the causes of cancer, but always it is this incorporation into the here and now of actions carried out into the past.”

Denis Wood, The Power of Maps, (New York: Guilford Press, 1992), p. 14.

Glacier transported rock, in Continuum: Threads in the Community Fabric of Northfield, Minnesota, Ed. Lynn Carlin, (Northfield: Northfield Printing, 1976), p. 17.

 "Why is this place the way it is, and like or unlike other places . . . What benefits or costs arise from specific practices or ways of using land, air, and water and to whom do they accrue?"

Rutherford H. Platt, Land Use and Society, (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996), p. XIII.

Geology student Natasha Dietz collecting samples, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, photographed by Casey Deming and Leslie Grant, 2018

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Lara Mimosa Montes in Conversation with Sebastián Pérez: Sophie Rivera

Bronx-born scholar Sebastián Pérez recently chatted with me about photographer Sophie Rivera, whose work was most recently exhibited as part of the wide-ranging traveling exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985. Rivera’s photographs have been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of the City of New York, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the International Center of Photography, and elsewhere. In this interview, Pérez and I discuss Rivera’s series of Nuyorican portraits and the various revelations we experienced while revisiting her work.

LMM: At present, there are very few opportunities to look at, study, and engage the work of Puerto Rican and Nuyorican women photographers from the 1970s and ’80s like Sophie Rivera.

SP: It's ridiculous actually because the work is there. We both know that the archive exists, the images exist, but we don't have access to them because historically no one has paid attention to it in any real specific way or bothered to collect this stuff. Even just trying to find materials from the shows that went up is a challenge; there was never an active archival process, right? It's like, if you’re lucky, you can get a list, but where are the materials? Did these artists get paid? It’s even impossible sometimes to find exhibition catalogs.

LMM: Yeah, you have to look on eBay [laughs].

SP: Or used on Amazon!

LMM: Right. We know the materials existed at one point, but if they're not kept, then they're not findable, and if they’re not findable, then they're not referenceable. I visited The Schomburg recently to look at some of Sophie Rivera’s earlier photographs because they’re one of only a handful of libraries in New York that has those early issues of Nueva Luz. I also saw that she had guest-edited one of their early issues. . .

SP: Yeah, volume 3, number 1, 1989.

LMM: It’s also wild to think about her work appearing alongside those of photographers like Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems—their work was also featured in those early issues of Nueva Luz. How did you come to learn about Sophie Rivera's work?

SP: I started looking at images from the South Bronx during the 1970s and ’80s and I was trying to find out who the female photographers during that time period were; the two most prominent Puerto Rican ones I had come across were Perla de Leon and Sophie Rivera, but trying to track down their work is almost impossible because it’s not widely curated. In Rivera’s artist bio from the premier issue of Nueva Luz, we know that by 1985, she had already shown work at PS1, The New Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and many other art institutions in New York and beyond. I also know that the Smithsonian has two of Rivera’s photographs from the Puerto Rican portraits series in their collection…

LMM: Yeah, I had seen a few from that series at the Brooklyn Museum last summer as part of the Radical Women: Latin America exhibition. When they were shown at the Bronx Museum in 1999—twenty years ago now, if you can believe it—Holland Cotter, in his review for the New York Times, said that her portraits were “incandescent.”

Sophie Rivera, Untitled, 1978, printed 2006, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, © 1978, Sophie Rivera, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2011.24.2

SP: Yeah, I love these, they're so beautiful. I mean, they're huge. That's what I love about them. I’ve also always liked the conceit, a pretty simple idea—Rivera would stop people out on the street outside her apartment in the Bronx and and ask, “Yeah, are you Puerto Rican? Alright, cool, then let's go to my studio.” I like the way that she photographs her subjects with the light coming from behind them, or at least, so it seems. I mean, these are portraits, yes, but the kind of background against which they’re being photographed is something you rarely see. You just never see studio portraits like this with such dark backgrounds, darker than the subject. Most people do not photograph portraits on dark backgrounds because that would lead to some kind of obscuring of the person or subject being photographed, right? But Rivera took these portraits the way she wanted to, defying conventions of portrait photography. I think the dark background combined with her particular lighting choices allows the subjects to appear in a way that is interesting, like as the photographer, she’s not afraid of the negative space of blackness. Those choices definitely say something to me about the artist’s personality, her style.

LMM: I also wonder what it means for these portraits, like the one dated from 1978, to have been exhibited again in 1989, the same year she received a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Photography. When these works were shown at Yankee Stadium and 161st Street, the series was exhibited under the title Revelations: A Latino Portfolio, whereas when they were shown again in 2018 at the Brooklyn Museum’s Radical Women: Latin American Art exhibition, they are grouped under the title, Nuyorican Portraits. I can imagine that the former title, in the context of a group exhibition devoted to Latin American art, would have felt redundant.  

Sophie Rivera, Untitled from “Nuyorican Portraits,” (1978). Courtesy of the artist, collection of Martin Hurwitz.

SP: While all of Rivera’s subjects from this series identified as Puerto Rican, maybe by using the word Latino, she is gesturing towards a more expansive definition of community in 1989, but she’s also playing with the idea of what a photograph does, right? That’s why it's called Revelations. What is the light doing in this work? If you're revealing something, then you're bringing a certain degree of light to that something, but in these portraits, it’s the opposite. It makes you kind of wonder, well then what is the work of revelation? How does her ability in balancing the contrast upend that notion of revelation as a shedding light?

LMM: I never thought of that. Did you know that she produced at least fifty of these, but only fourteen survived a fire in her studio?

SP: Damn. . .

LMM:  It’s so dark, so Bronx.

SP: Rivera chose subjects that kick those taken-for-granted identity categories, like Latino or Puerto Rican, into flux by presenting through this series a bunch of differently raced and differently classed bodies together. When grouped together, these portraits suggest the Puerto Rican who is a Latino is a black person, a white person, is well-dressed, is Urban and. . .

LMM: Maybe also being Latino while seeing Latinidad in all its incarnations is itself a revelation.

SP: There are so many questions I would like to ask Sophie.

LMM: I know! Since I am often interested in an artist’s process, because that is not necessarily something you can discern in a final work, when revisiting this series, I wonder: How long did these sessions last? Did they take an hour? More? Less? Around how many shots did it take to get “the one,” or did it depend on the person? What kind of rapport did she have with these people? I am interested in the interactions between Rivera and her subjects because the subjects seem so present, and, at times, open. How did she draw that out in them? She was not an amateur in the least, and unlike many of the other photographers who featured Puerto Ricans in the Bronx during this time period, like photojournalist Mel Rosenthal or the members of Los Seis del Sur, Rivera did not photograph her subjects in their apartments, or on the street, or at work—she situated them within her studio as photographic subjects, and the only reason she wanted to photograph them was because they identified as Puerto Rican. So what we have on record here when studying her works is not just a record of Puerto Ricans in the 1970s and ’80s, but a record of one Puerto Rican looking at another. It’s quite powerful, to see and be seen. The gaze isn’t casual, or candid: it’s willful, and, as you’ve suggested, subversive.

Sophie Rivera, Untitled, 1978, printed 2006, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, © 1978, Sophie Rivera, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2011.24.1

SP: There are also religious undertones as well. I’m thinking of photos of Christ, like the kind where he has a halo of some kind, where this divine light emanates from within, but also behind. Rivera positions her subjects in relation to the light in a way that suggests everyday people possess that same light. I mean Revelations—that’s the last book of the Bible, right? That book is about the end of the world to a certain degree, so like maybe in these images, we see the end of a certain world, a world in which these people are obscured.

LMM: Yes, and that’s what interests me about Sophie Rivera’s work: her style of looking, her way of capturing her subject’s essence; the way she returns the gaze. The kind of rogue, bold decision making that prompts her to approach a stranger off the street in the first place and ask “Are you Puerto Rican?” Imagine saying, unequivocally: Yes, and that being the starting point. . .

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In the Stacks with Kathryn Savage: Roni Horn’s Library of Water

Roni Horn has written poems and elegies to pools, to meltwater. Vatnasafn, the Library of Water, Horn’s twelve-year site-specific project, archives glacial meltwater in floor-to-ceiling glass tubes in a little former library on top of a hill in the coastal town of Stykkishólmur.

Twenty-four glaciers are represented in the glass columns, silt gathering at their bases and blending with the brown floor, which is, itself, an instillation, inscribed with words like brutal, hazy, bitter. Words that describe qualities of water and weather; words that describe qualities of people.  

The library was empty the day I went, the vibe more house-of-worship than art gallery, (it has been described as: “a sculptural installation and a community centre”). To enter, you must take off your shoes. The library provides a basket with slippers. A small room off the main gallery was devoted to writers and photographers, Emily Dickinson among others, a writer Horn likens to a volcano: “Dickinson invented a syntax out of herself, and Iceland did too. Volcanos do.” The library included excerpts from To Place, Horn’s ongoing intimate prose and photography project about her relationship to Iceland. Horn, an American visual artist and writer, the granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, first visited Iceland in the 1970s, traveling the nation by motorcycle, and now calls New York City and Reykjavik home. To Place began in 1990. From the Guggenheim:

By the end of 2001, she had produced eight volumes, along with additional, unrelated artist’s books. Horn has used some of her photographs in both books and photographic installations. For example, many of the images in You Are the Weather (1994–96)—one hundred close-ups of a young woman’s face, photographed as she bathed in a variety of Icelandic pools in diverse weather conditions—were published in one of the To Place volumes. The images, made during a six-week period of traveling, capture a sense of androgyny and, to Horn, eroticism.

The young woman’s face in the pictures holds three weathers—her own, Horn’s, and Iceland’s. “Everyone has a story about the weather,” Horn writes in the introduction to Weather Reports You (2006). “This may be one of the only things that each of us holds in common.” I felt like I was trespassing, or, more accurately, walking through the library was like being a houseguest left alone in someone’s home while they went to work. The library felt stilled yet animated. It posed its own questions.

Horn’s minimalism first drew me in (although she is more often described as “post-minimalist”), also, the ethics of Horn’s imaginary. “Weather is the key paradox in our time. Weather that is nice is often weather that is wrong.” In the Anthropocene, we are all already ashamed. There’s a distillation in her work that blends science with art, and through her cross-disciplinary simplification, I can imagine into a future where glaciers are no more than evocations, chilly elegant columns charming the entrance to a Reykjavik hotel. My appreciation for the beauty of the columns shifted until it critiqued me back. Questions embedded in the Library project, for me, are, what is the role of the erotic when describing environmental ruin? When is “witness” in the service of spectacle? How does work by Horn, by poets like Juliana Spahr—writing toward our environment in this time—toe the line of complicity, guilt, agency, and desire?

The glacier columns are subjunctive: rare and beautiful, and would that we did not need such artful preservation at all.

“I want to make being here enough,” Horn writes in 1990. “Maybe it’s already enough. I won’t have to invent enough. I’ll be here and I won’t do anything and this place will be here, but I won’t do anything to it. . . . And maybe because I’m here and because the me in what’s here makes what’s here different, maybe that will be enough. Maybe that will be what I’m after, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’ll be able to perceive the difference. . . . I need to find a way to make myself absolutely not here, but still be able to be here to know the difference.”

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In the Stacks with Casey Deming & Leslie Grant: Systems

Air Intakes, New Boiler, Circa 1941-1951, Carleton College Library Archives

You flip a switch, turn on the tap, light the stove, and adjust the thermostat—everyday actions done without consideration of the invisible networks that drive these functions. Gas lines tunnel for miles through earth; water is welled, dammed, circulated; fires feed furnaces. The connective geometry of pipes and wires lie hidden in the soil, tucked away in walls, humming in steam plants.

Carleton College Service Lines by D. Blake Stewart, superintendent of grounds, 1955, revised 1959, Carleton College Library Archives

“Geo-metry—the measure of earth—is a primary act of constructing landscape out of the elemental confusion of water and earth, a fusion paralleled by human confusion: that bewilderment produced by wilderness, which reason seeks to tame in its acts of bounding and enclosure. Little wonder that Aristippus, engaged in the equally primary act of crossing an elemental boundary by stepping ashore from his shipwreck onto the island of Rhodes and spying geometrical shapes in the sands, puts aside his fears: ‘for here are signs of men’."

Denis Cosgrove, “Liminal Geometry and Elemental Landscapes: Construction and Representation," Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), p. 105.

Installation of air-conditioning pipes, August 1969, Carleton College Library Archives

“The pickaxes keep nothing of what they bite; they are not filled. Their mouthfuls pile up at the feet of the men and bury their shoes. But the shovels lay up clay and throw it into the tip-truck that a horse with hairy hooves is going to pull on the muddy rails …

“When the tip-truck is filled, the horse stiffens its haunches; the load rises; and the axles chirp …

“Then the gang turns the crank, lengthens the hooks, takes the tip-truck by the armpits, lifts it up, balances it at the end of its chain, and tips it on the cart where clods tumble down, muttering …”

Jules Romains, 1911, quoted by Williams, Rosalind in Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination, (Cambridge: The MIT Press), 1990.

Tom Cadwell, Heating Plant engineer, February 1990, Carleton College Library Archives

Steam Plant (interior), Carleton College, Northfield, MN, photographed by Casey Deming and Leslie Grant, 2018

Only though the labors of repair, renovation, and installation do these static systems reveal themselves to the ebb and flow of the human life that depends upon them.

New Boiler, 1941-1951, Carleton College Library Archives

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In the Stacks with Kathryn Savage: Qualities of Water

The Blue Lagoon was trashed the day a fellow artist went swimming. Floating solo cups. Drunk couples making out in milky blue water, taking selfies.

“Effluent water from the Svartsengi Power Plant is used to create a warm lagoon of heavenly blue colour, set in a rough black lava field,” writes Ari Trausti Guðmundsson, describing the Blue Lagoon and its properties.

Effluent: “an outflowing” often of “waste material (such as smoke, liquid industrial refuse, or sewage) discharged into the environment,” as defined by Merriam-Webster.

The Krafla Power Station, a geothermal plant near lake Mývatn, feeds the famous Mývatn Nature Baths with water the color of melted club cocktails.  

The Selárdalur Pool, unassuming, small and rectangular, located on the shores of the Selá river, is a popular river for salmon angling.  

Krauma spa: modern and slate black beside fat bright tubes hissing steam piped from the nearby Deildartunguhver hot spring.

Deildartunguhver singlehandedly generates the water used for heating the towns of Borgarnes and Akranes.

Between April 14th and May 23rd 2010, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, grounding 100,000 flights. The eruption created such dense sky ash because the stratovolcano lies underneath a glacier. [1]

Physical geology researchers at the University of Iceland Department of Earth Sciences study glaciology as related to ice dynamics and climate change. Researchers observe and record the decline in the extent and volume of glaciers, permafrost, and sea ice. [2]

In Skagaströnd, in north Iceland, glaciers eroded volcano craters during the ice age, carving rough stone sea cliffs and revealing volcano vents.

Iceland is a continental ecotone. Glaciers and volcanoes, overlapping.

Lakes in Iceland can scald you, cold to the touch but riddled with hot springs along the bases.  

Swimming is deeply rooted in Icelandic culture because there are many pools. Almost every village has at least one year-round geothermal swimming pool.

George P. Mitchell was early to apply the process of fracking to shales for extracting oil. Fracking—hydraulic fracturing—creates “frack fluid” which has been associated with drinking water contamination in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Ohio, and Wyoming. [3]

The Boundary Waters is newly open for sulfide mining, which produces toxic waste and could devastate the water quality in that region. [4]

Near Williston, North Dakota, homeowners have lit flames under their kitchen taps—as a consequence of fracking in the region, gasses and chemicals are released into home water pipes. [5]

“Some people ruin it for all of us,” the artist at the residency said, of her fellow Blue Lagoon-goers, who litter solo cups. I picture water without anyone in it, all milk-blue lit with red.

I live near the Shoreham Yards Roundhouse, a historic landmark built in 1887. It was once a hub for the Sault Ste. Marie and Atlantic Railroad Companies. The Roundhouse is now vacant. A few years back, some fixed-gear bikers wanted to take it over, but they couldn’t develop it owing to ongoing pollution cleanup efforts. Shoreham is a Superfund, the Roundhouse a bullseye for extensive soil and groundwater pollution. [6]

Iceland is geologically porous owing to volcanic activity and tectonic shifts. Tectonic shifts open the earth. Steam and water rise to groundwater, rise to the surface.

From Ari Trausti Guðmundsson I learn 70 percent of Iceland’s energy is culled from domestic sources, hydro- and geothermal. Hot water from drillholes feeds pools. Geothermal energy production isn’t pollution free—releasing volcanic gasses—but it’s renewable.

Iceland’s effluent spa water is good for psoriasis and treating other skin disorders.

Near the Krafla Power Station there’s a shower and sink in the middle of a lava field that constantly runs water. Story goes, someone at the power plant tapped a drillhole and outfitted the little bathroom as a joke.  

Notes: Works I’m indebted to in the research of this post include various sources footnoted throughout as well as Living Earth: Outline the Geology of Iceland by Ari Trausti Guðmundsson. Quoted excerpts are from chapter 9, “The Subterranean Powerhouse,” pp. 329-359. Some of the lines here are direct quotes from sources footnoted. I consider this brief essay a found poem of sorts.

[1] Facts culled from Volcano House promotional bookmarker with facts about Eyjafjallajökull. www.volcanohouse.is [2] Facts culled from an information flyer about the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland Masters Programme in Earth Science. [3] https://www.nytimes.com/news/the-lives-they-lived/2013/12/21/george-mitchell/; https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/fracking/environmental-impacts-water/ [4] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/09/06/boundary-waters-mining [5] Gasland directed by Josh Fox, 2010. [6] https://www.pca.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/g-27-11.pdf; http://www.minneapolismn.gov/cped/projects/cped_shoreham_yards; http://www.journalmpls.com/news/development/2016/08/velodrome-proposal-still-alive-for-shoreham-yards/

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In the Stacks with Casey Deming & Leslie Grant: Firelight

“The German Table (Der Deutsche Tisch),” 1892/93, Carleton College Library Archives

“Fires, candles, lanterns, lighthouses, headlights, and screens emit light. The human eye turns toward emitted light (but away from the blinding sun) probably because humans are hardwired to cherish fire. Aside from the sun, only the stars and lightning (and in swamps, will o’ the wisp-momentarily ignited methane gas) emit light. At night, amid reduced visual stimuli, the human eye fixes on firelight . . . Before gaslight (which rural dwellers understood as a quintessentially modern urban invention) and then electricity, and long before television and video monitors, firelight and candlelight drew the eye and held it. Indoors the flickering light cast all manner of shadows and, for those who stared into the flames or glowing embers, often induced a quasi-trancelike, hypnagogic state called reverie . . . Outdoors, the pinpoint of firelight in otherwise encompassing darkness beckoned humans even as it deflected wolves, bears, catamounts, and other predators thought to shy from it. Firelight deflects demons and other supernatural beings, too.”

Stilgoe, John R., What is Landscape?, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015, p. 38.

Putnam, John Pickering, The open fire-place in all ages, Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1882, plate XXV and p. 37.

“The Ideal Fireplace

“What now would be the action of a fire-place and flues ideally perfect? Ideal perfection would imply: --

1. That all the heat generated by the combustion of the fuel be utilized in heating and ventilating the house, and that the combustion of the fuel be complete.

2. That the supply of fresh air introduced into the house to take the place of the foul air removed be guaranteed perfectly pure; warmed in winter to a temperature somewhat below that of the room; moistened enough to give it its proper hygrometric condition; abundant enough to supply amply the fire and the occupants; so distributed and located at its entrance as to cause no perceptible draught at any point; the gentle air current so directed that it should reach every part of the room; so steady that no part of it should pass over the same spot twice or be twice breathed by the occupants; and so regulated by simple valves as to be under perfect control.”

Putnam, John Pickering, The open fireplace in all ages, Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1882, p. 10.

Nourse Hall fireplace, Carleton College, Northfield, MN, photographed by Casey Deming and Leslie Grant, 2018

“A corner of the Nourse Hall parlors,” Harvey Stork Collection, Carleton College Library Archives

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In the Stacks with Lara Mimosa Montes: Sophie Calle

Saturday, October 13, 2018, I visited the New York Public Library’s Prints and Photographs Study Room to view edition 76/250 of Sophie Calle’s The Bronx, which is part of the library’s Spencer Collection. In 2002, Item Editions published a bilingual facsimile edition of the work in 250 copies.

In 1980,The Bronx was first exhibited at the South Bronx based alternative arts space, Fashion MODA, located at 2803 Third Avenue by “the Hub.” The work, which was initially titled Waiting for People to Come to Fashion MODA and Asking them to Take me Wherever They Want in the South Bronx, was part of a city-wide group exhibition, “Une Idée en L’Air.” Other participating galleries besides Fashion MODA included Artists Space, Franklin Furnace, and Creative Time, among others. While The Bronx was not Calle’s first major work, it was her first public exhibition. Since then, it has reappeared most recently at the Bronx Museum of the Arts; luckily, anyone with a New York Public Library library card and an appointment is welcome to view the Spencer Collection’s edition.

Fashion MODA with mural by Crash (1980)

According to Calle, the work was inspired by “a simple idea: playing with the fear created by that neighbourhood [the South Bronx] and the ghetto aspect.” [1] Calle’s conceptual parameters were fairly simple; the artist invited random passers-by who she met at Fashion MODA to take her anywhere they wanted—typically a place of private, personal significance, or beauty, like the Botanical Garden—“a place that they’d never forget about.” [2[ Calle then documented the experience through a combination of text, photograph, and interview. In some ways, I am reminded of the early works of Adrian Piper, particularly Context #7, a work I’d seen once at the Walker Art Center a few years ago. Both Calle and Piper use minimalist language and ideas to spell out for the viewer the terms of engagement that result in the work.

Sophie Calle, The Bronx, 1980.

Beyond playing with fear, it is unclear what Calle’s initial ambitions might have been. Upon reading and viewing Calle’s later works, like The Address Book and Exquisite Pain, for example, one discerns a similar method and set of interests inform The Bronx. As in Calle’s other projects, The Bronx is a record documenting the artist’s chance encounters; in electing to make a work in the Bronx about the Bronx, Calle deferred to the desires, narratives, experiences, and intuitions of Bronx denizens as the raw materials for the work. [3] I wouldn’t go so far, however, as to describe these subjects who double as participants, collaborators. Nevertheless, in order to carry out the desire to involve others in the production of a work, I imagine Calle had to relinquish some degree of control over some not inconsequential variables, like: What if no one shows up? And you are met with hostility? And who the fuck are you, the artist, to start asking questions, anyway? Or, what if, in trusting someone unknown to lead you astray, you are led to to a dangerous place? Calle’s optimism, maybe attributable to a belief in “the process,” yields final works, particularly prose, which are sharp, distilled, and, what I suspect particular to Calle’s brand of conceptualism, always suggestive of something else, often intangible—the lived experience of making the work, that secret known only by the artist and her subjects.

Sophie Calle, The Bronx, 1980.

And yet all the general details are there. As Calle relates in the text: On Thursday, November 6, everyday, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., for an undetermined number of days, Calle went to Fashion MODA. Throughout her stay, until November 14, eight people participated.

Sophie Calle, The Bronx, 1980.

But the work was not yet complete: “The day before the opening I hung the photos and the texts on the wall. That night, an unexpected and providential collaborator broke into the gallery and covered every possible surface with graffiti.” Looking back on the work, Calle concludes the final result was “much better.” [4] But in the February 1981 issue of Artforum, the reviewer of the exhibition was less impressed, glibly observing: “Sophie Calle’s obsessive and idiosyncratic recording of the behavior of strangers looked as though it might develop into something if she can transcend the whimsical narratives which currently hobble the work.” Grumpy and condescending.

Sophie Calle, The Bronx, 1980. Installation view at Fashion MODA

In revisiting The Bronx, I was able to better appreciate Calle’s influence on contemporary art and writing cultures, which can be seen in more works by writers and artists like Claudia Rankine, most notably in Citizen, or Chloë Bass in A Glossary of Proximity Verbs.

Chloë Bass. A Glossary of Proximity Verbs. 2018. Installation view, A Recollection, Predicated, The Kitchen, January 19–February 10, 2018. Photo: Naima Green.

Chloë Bass. A Glossary of Proximity Verbs (detail). 2018.

I hope readers and writers of contemporary poetry and the lyric essay consider revisiting Calle’s work as one which takes place at an interesting and novel juncture between lyric, experimental, and conceptual writing traditions. [5] I wonder by what accident the Bronx has become an undertheorized epicenter for similar traditions.

[1] Christine Macel, “Biographical interview with Sophie Calle” in Sophie Calle: M’as-tuvue? (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2003), p.80.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Also see Calle’s lesser known, site-specific work, Los Angeles: “On July 14, 1984 I was invited to do a show in Los Angeles. I had fifteen days during the Olympic Games, to create a piece related to the city. I decided to ask people a single question: ‘Since Los Angeles is literally the city of angels, where are the angels?,’” Sophie Calle, Los Angeles (Paris: Item éditions, 2002). Unlike The Bronx, the participants in Los Angeles included established figures such as Frank Gehry, Richard O’Neill, and Larry Gross.

[4] Macel, “Biographical interview with Sophie Calle,” p.80.

[5] See, for example, http://jacketmagazine.com/28/berkson-q.html

[chpinthestacks]

In the Stacks with Kathryn Savage: Shape-Shifting

I was in Iceland less than a day when I was told by an Icelander that if I went for a hike alone in the hills above Laugarvatn, I might see people who weren’t really there. The landscape conspired with perception, revealed visions. It was the quality of the light and lack of trees. What I wanted to see I’d see, the woman who ran the residency told me.  

The first week, I saw a child dancing but it was really a towel blowing on a laundry line.

The second week, I saw rocks jumping sideways through hills but the rocks were sheep. 

It was always daylight in Iceland in July, the sky perpetually soft-lit, and the light foreshortened the landscape. Eventually, I began to distrust my vision and felt a need to clarify what I’d just seen, look again.

Baltic-region mythology depicts stories about shape-shifters, the deception of sight. Icelandic hidden people—the unwashed children of Eve who she hid from God and who are invisible to humans—live in the hills of Iceland unless they choose to be seen. 

The Icelandic folk story “The Sealskin” is about a man who steals a sealskin, and who, upon returning to the site of his theft for more sealskin, finds, instead, a naked woman. She is weeping and he takes her to his house to console and clothe her. Years after his theft of her identity—the sealskin—after his abduction, after they marry and have children, he goes fishing one day and she finds her sealskin in a locked chest in their house. She puts it on and dives back into the sea, never to return.  

Pagan Scandinavian mythology is unabashedly brutal. There are child-stealers, jealous dead lovers, and in the story of “My Jawbones!” to stop the haunting of her hearth, a woman must bury the jawbones of a child she finds in her house.

In one Icelandic myth, a stranger comes to town and encounters bad weather, so he spends the night in the home of an older woman and her two young beautiful daughters. He asks the mother if he can take one of her daughters to bed and she agrees. In bed, he tries to have sex with the woman, but when he touches her, his hands move through her body. “I am a spirit with no body,” the woman explains. “You cannot get pleasure from me.” 

These misogynistic myths of the young woman, someone who is little more than a beautiful body, often alone, primed to be taken, have hung around. Some of the more violent Baltic region mythologies are about women alone in the woods and the bad things that happen to them because they are alone.

The first funeral I went to was my second cousin’s. She was murdered by a stranger after he abducted her. She was rollerblading home alone one dusk on Kittson County Road 1, a northern Minnesota county road flanked by golden grain.

Lidia Yuknavitch’s essay “Woven” discusses Laumes, Lithuanian water spirits who can take the form of animals and beautiful water-women. She writes: “Laumes were both benevolent and dangerous. They could tickle men to death and then eat their bodies. They could protect women and children or punish them brutally.” 

In the same essay, Yuknavitch writes about violence against women and the difficulty of depicting such violence. “In America, it’s tricky to describe violence without it turning into entertainment.”

As a child, I was told my mother’s father was French. More accurately, he was a Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Turkish Jew raised in Nice, France, and later, Brooklyn. 

His mother went to Nice seeking refuge from Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. There, she lived with her two sisters in a small flat where they worked as hat models in the city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. 

I inherited my grandfather’s photos after he passed. Beautiful women in hats. Other details about the sisters’ lives remain hazy. When I write about them I come up with more questions than answers, so this past feels closer to mythology to me, to a set of exaggerated familial beliefs, some, perhaps, fictitious. This was Europe, late 1930s, and they were Jews who escaped to America. In Nice, some versions of the story go, they changed their names and assumed Christian identities. In Nice, they lived as themselves and as false selves. They shape-shifted.  

Intermediate spirits in Icelandic folktales, those who can shape-shift, are depicted, often, as beautiful women. The moral point of the shape-shift narrative is connected to punishment, to reveal dubious or desperate transformation and its consequence. It’s a relational trope reliant on a quality of before and after. Like a good secret, shape-shifting acquires its gravity by what it conceals and promises to expose later. Across cultures and mythologies, some shape-shifters are more deceptive or punitive, many are humiliated for their transgressions, some symbolize inner conflict, such as the werewolf who changes to reveal his true self. In some shape-shifting narratives, once a character takes on a new form, it becomes impossible to change back.

In a 2008 Grand Forks Herald article about my second cousin’s murder, a friend of hers describes how no women or children went biking or skating alone after her murder on the rural straightaway. It would be a betrayal to her memory, her friend said, to do these things alone now.  

In Nice, when Nazi’s found out that my great-grandmother’s sister had been assuming a Christian name, they murdered her children in front of her but let her live. The memory of that sight would be her punishment.

John Berger defines sight as the thing that comes before words. To Berger, the relationship between sight and knowledge is never settled and always relational, mediated by perspective, by sight relative to position. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, on the photography of atrocities, writes that “Photographs objectify: they turn an event or person into something that can be possessed.” Certainly narrative does this work of possession too and I feel the edges of shape-shifting as I write this: anything I say about grief or loss is my singular possession, incomplete and mediated, reflecting my flawed sight. What are the details I’ve included, the details I’ve left out? For you, reader, I objectify my experiences and lay claim to those of my family. I mold, omit, and transgress the past.

But the violence is real, the vulnerability that hangs around the edges of sight. Yesterday, I learned from a neighborhood community message board that a white man driving a gold car tried to abduct a child my son’s age two blocks from our home. When I walk the dog tonight, I stare down every honey-hued sedan, try to see inside every car, to every man I don’t trust, but I can’t. Dusk has turned the windshields to mirrored glass.  

In her essay “The Precarious” from her recent collection, The Reckonings, Lacy M. Johnson writes, “both autopsy and atrocity require a witness—someone who survives, who sees for herself, with her own eyes. But the violence changes the person who looks.”

One day I went for a hike alone in the hills above Laugarvatn. The hills were steep and mossy and rocky. All the people I saw were tourists like me in bunchy jackets and hiking boots. I was grieving and lonely and wanted something revealed to me. I knew this was ridiculous, but I wanted it anyway. Some unnamable more, some sight or being to lure me away from pain. In some shape-shifting stories, the mother appears and beckons the child home. Sometimes, this isn’t the mother, but a dubious figure able to assume the mother’s form. Instead, in the hills above Laugarvatn, behind mossy lava rocks, there were clumps of used toilet paper. A woman’s torn ticket stub from her flight to Iceland from Tel Aviv.

On a gray day at The Skagaströnd Museum of Prophecies, I gave every Króna in my wallet to a fortuneteller to look at my hands and face so she could see into the privacy of my nature, my past, reveal truths I couldn’t yet see.

Notes: Works used to research this post include John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Lydia Yuknavitch’s essay “Woven” originally published in Guernica, and Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings. The folktales and quoted excerpts come from Jacqueline Simpson’s Icelandic Folktales and Legends and Silja Aðalsteinsdóttir’s The Trolls in the Knolls. The Sontag quote can be found on page 81 in Regarding the Pain of Others and the Lacy M. Johnson quote can be found on page 28 in The Reckonings.

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Introducing our In the Stacks Residency at Carleton College

For the next five months, Casey Deming and Leslie Grant will be collaborating on a residency at the Laurence McKinley Gould Library at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. They are investigating the interrelationship of labor, storytelling, institutional infrastructure, and archival knowledge-keeping through the lens of energy—specifically, the historical and contemporary methods of production at Carleton. Read Casey and Leslie’s introduction to their project below.

How do the elements impose themselves upon us?

“Shall we remark upon the weather? Oh, no! It is too cold—20 below zero should not be spoken of unless one freezes ears or nose or toes or some other appendage and wants to account for it so as not to blame, as I have frozen none of my appendages this winter. I shall not say anything about the weather—

My troubles are not about freezing, but about keeping warm and about colds and grippe and inflammation of the nasal passages. I have been hoarse for several days that persons remark about it as soon as I speak to them.”

Carleton College Library Archives, Alice Stratton (Stocker) Papers, 1878-1935

We started this project by photographing employees of Bertram Drilling as they bored geothermal wells on the Carleton College campus, which will take over the energy production of the college in the future. We also asked the drillers to donate their own worksite snapshots to create a dialogue with our images. We then searched the archives at Carleton’s Gould Library for materials about heating and cooling, fireplaces, and the experience of cold, finding photographs, maps, letters, and books.

We are drawn to the networks of labor needed to build and maintain this system, the tools and tradecraft, and the personal stories surrounding this industry. Linking past and present through archival investigations, we are exploring the barriers we erect to guard ourselves from the perennial impositions of the weather.

“Fur coats, fur caps, fur mittens, overshoes buckling almost to the knees, gray knitted scarfs ten feet long, thick woolen socks, canvas jackets lined with fluffy yellow wool like the plumage of ducklings, moccasins, red flannel wristlets for the blazing chapped wrists of boys—these protections against the winter were busily dug out of moth-ball-sprinkled drawers and tar-bags in closets, and all over town small boys were squealing, ‘Oh, there’s my mittens!’ or ‘Look at my shoe-packs!’ There is so sharp a division between the panting summer and the stinging winter of the Northern plains that they rediscovered with surprise and a feeling of heroism this armor of an Arctic explorer.”

Lewis, Sinclair, Main Street, New York: P. F. Collier & Son Co., 1920. p. 82

Casey Deming is a Minneapolis-based artist and curator working with print, bookmaking, and sound art. He has exhibited work at the White Page Gallery, Chicago Artists Coalition, Art of This, Madame of the Arts, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, the Chicago Art Book Fair, and the Printed Matter Art Book Fairs in New York and Los Angeles. Casey curated the Tuesday Series for Experimental Music in collaboration with John Marks (2008-2017) and was a featured musician and curator at the Soap Factory’s 2013 Minnesota Biennial. He has received grants from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and the Jerome Foundation.

Leslie Grant is an artist and educator based in Minneapolis. Through photographic imagery and mixed media, her practice focuses on collaboration and storytelling, and she works with laborers in a range of industries, such as mining, forestry, and refining. Her work has been shown in many alternative spaces, as well as traditional galleries and museums, for example, the basement of a bar in Cuylerville, New York (owned by a former miner), Artist’s Space in New York, the American Labor Museum in Haledon, New Jersey, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.

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Introducing our new In the Stacks Residency

This month, Lara Mimosa Montes will be in residency for two weeks in various parts of the Bronx, attempting to create a psychogeography of the borough c. 1980. During her residency, Lara will visit the Fashion Moda archive at the NYU Fales Library & Special Collections, the Carlos Ortiz archive at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art archives, and the Bronx Documentary Center among others. Read Lara’s artist statement about her project below.

Picture: Gordon Matta-Clark, Bronx Floor: Floor Hole, 1972. Courtesy of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner.

How does one reencounter what has already passed? What does it mean to return home, to acquaint oneself with the place where one imagines oneself to have, “once upon a time,” been born? To continue writing after the line breaks and into the threshole (that point beyond what the line can no longer hold): the fracture, the break that follows a trauma, a violence, the reasons for having gone . . .

By following situationist practices (such as the dérive, or drift), for this residency, I give myself over to disorientation and le sens de l'heur (happenstance) in order to hone, through writing, an openness to intuition, failure, possibility, and chance. I wish to become familiar with what Ivan Chtcheglov, from his influential early situationist text, “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (1953), describes as “the absence of the object [that] becomes a presence one can feel.” This residency is an attempt "to touch what is missing. Ce qui manque" (Nathanaël, The Sorrow and the Fast of It, 2007). An absence, the Bronx: a feeling through the absence. As such, in addition to situationist practices, traditions of somatic writing and experience also inform the methodology by which I attempt to speak of my travel, a return home. [1]

Part of this residency involves rediscovering through various archival and published ephemera the visual cultures of the Bronx, and, in particular, those that feature the borough as a site-specific backdrop or object of inquiry used by artists working in the Bronx during the 1970s and ‘80s. Important works from this period include: Gordon Matta-Clark’s series Bronx Floors (1972-73); Sophie Calle’s The Bronx (1980); Tim Rollins and K.O.S.’s Bricks (1982-1983) and Amerika—For the People of Bathgate (1988); Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style (1983); the sculptures of John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres; and the photographs of Mel Rosenthal, Lisa Kahane, Martha Cooper, Martine Barrat, Sophie Rivera, Perla de Leon, Seis del Sur, among others.

[1] The figure of the urban wanderer (often male) is generally known as the flâneur. According to Merlin Coverley in his book, Psychogeography (2006): “Both Baudelaire and Benjamin locate the flâneur’s literary conception within a short story by Edgar Allan Poe [“The Man of the Crowd”]." Poe once lived in the Bronx at 2640 Grand Concourse.

Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press 2016). She holds a PhD in English from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-A-Day, BOMB, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow and CantoMundo Fellow. Currently, she works as a senior editor of Triple Canopy and lives in the Twin Cities. She was born in the Bronx.

This project is made possible by a grant from the Jerome Foundation, https://www.jeromefdn.org.