Theo Westenberger Estate

Supporting the careers of women in the arts

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On Looking (elegy for a missed mountain)

Contributed by Kate Dakota Kremer, July 2017

Wise, Virginia—where I live when I don’t live in Brooklyn—is a tiny town tucked in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. On a clear day from High Knob, the lookout point at the top of Stone Mountain, you can see clear to five states—Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina—though from that remote vantage the vast and various south appears to be nothing more than an undifferentiated mass of trees pocked only by one or two townships.

From that vantage, and in the view of many of the people who live here, climate change seems distant, abstract, and unreal, although the industry that built this town—coal—represented 24.5 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2012, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. And though the fierce storms and rising seas of a warming planet go unheeded here where spring is comprised of five little winters (redbud, dogwood, locust, blackberry, and britches) that give way to a wet and benevolent summer, the consequences of coal are nonetheless written all over this town.

I can recite this region’s varieties of winter because one day, in late April, after a week of solid rain that turned the acres of lawn by which our little house is surrounded to a sea of sodden green, our landlady ticked them off on her fingers for me (redbud, dogwood, locust, blackberry, britches, and a phantom sixth that some call the whippoorwill) and promised that the sun would return eventually. We agreed that we both like it hot but that other people often don’t; I complimented her on the Sisyphean mowing job, which can take her and her sister up to two days of wheeling around on rider mowers to complete. But in actuality, I know almost nothing about living in this place, having moved here with my husband last summer, and having then almost immediately moved again to Brooklyn, where I spent most of the year.

So when I speak of the “consequences of coal” being “written all over this town,” I am speaking as a voyeur, as someone who looks without feeling the effects of what I see. When I walk or drive around town, I am, as of today, very little occupied with the question of how to support myself here or how to raise children here, and am very much occupied with the question of what kind of art I could make in this place.

The massive environmental damage wrought by coal is most evident in the strip-mined mountains that pepper this part of Appalachia: areas of sudden, astonishing flatness surrounded by bare, scar-like cliffs and frequently converted to some other level, innocuous purpose: a baseball diamond, a football field, a fairground/horse show, a parking lot. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, mountaintop removal and the disposal of excess rock in adjacent valleys results in the permanent loss of surrounding springs and streams, elevated concentrations of toxic chemicals downstream, and the degradation of water quality to the point that it becomes “acutely lethal” to organisms in standard aquatic toxicity tests. And because acid mine drainage diffuses easily, its effects can be very difficult to contain.

No less apparent is the dubious economic impact of coal on Wise and the surrounding towns. In its heyday—when unions in this region were strong and the county leaned democratic—coal did indeed fuel the local economy, although it did so, like an invasive species, to the exclusion of other industries. When the mining companies began to close, the region faced an economic crisis that was as much the fault of coal as their earlier prosperity: there are few other jobs that pay a living wage. And although Trump’s courtship of this region has resulted in the reopening of several mines, even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Terry Headley of the American Coal Council agree that jobs in the coal industry won’t come rushing back. The global market is changing.

The environmental and economic scars of surface mining in this region are dramatic and, in their way, beautiful. The raw cliffs studded with machinery and dilapidated houses, the dusty, ghostly towns, the floodlit fields at the top of the world—all these blemished vistas hold the eye more easily than the virgin hills, which are at once too big and too close to be seen. In this sense, as my husband and I take photographs in the long late afternoon light, we are voyeurs not only in the sense of economic and geographic distance, but also in the sense of the aesthetic pleasure that we take from these images, which, though they contain a critique of coal and its brutalizations, are also frankly sensuous engagements with the romance of the brutal, barren, and broken; with the aesthetics of a devastated sublime, a bigoted pastoral.

In this sense, we participate in a long and intertwining history of environmentalism, politics, and landscape photography. Walking the hills of our new home, we are dimly aware that, as Liz Wells writes, after the Civil War, landscape photographers were employed by government and commercial companies as surveyors of what was, “from a migrant point of view, previously unmapped territory, contributing to a new momentum in terms of the frontier and Manifest Destiny” ( Liz Wells, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture, and Identity. I.B. Tauris, 2011, 126.).

The gaze of the photographic lens, with its simultaneous claim to objectivity and capacity for distortion, is notoriously unscrupulous, and landscape photographers have functioned not only as surveyors but also as purveyors of a mythic American wilderness. And even those contemporary photographers, like my husband and me, who are drawn less to utopian vistas than to what photographer John Ganis terms the “ironic beauty” of what Wells calls the “dystopian sublime,” risk losing sight of the sociopolitical and environmental implications of the scenes we photograph in the contemplation of their aesthetic pleasures.

What, then, are we to do? How not to look, if not to look is to ignore what we might prefer not to see? How to look, if in the act of witness, we risk perpetuating nostalgic myths, losing sight of our capacity to act? How to look without looking? How to look without also looking away?

Any answer, as far as can I see, is ambivalent, partial, and unsatisfying. But when I do not look, when I avert my eyes, I also do not think or remember. What I look at, even if I see with a voyeur’s gaze, I consider—in writing, in photographing—with thought and care. I put myself in relation. My landlady alternates between flying a Confederate flag and a banner chock-full of posies. And I have stood beside her amid the vastness of her absurd, oddly beautiful lawn discussing our eagerness for spring.

Articulating my own partiality, implication, ignorance, and privilege by no means enough. But it is perhaps a beginning: considering the aesthetics, the ethics, of my relation to this place, even as I look for apertures within the rigid impasse of how we ended up here.

Kate Dakota Kremer’s plays include Eye Heart Remote (The Wild Project), Intimatics I-III (Brooklyn College, with iterations in Minneapolis, Brooklyn, and Queens), Porch Play (The Owl and Cat Theatre, StageFemmes, and the Last Frontier Theatre Conference), and Opera of the Telephone at Delphi (Three Cat Productions, New Ground Theatre, and Firehouse Theatre, which awarded her 2nd place in their 2015 New American Play Competition). Kate is the managing editor of the experimental play publishing company 53rd State Press, and is currently working on her MFA in Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College.

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On Turning Toward: ‘Critical Membrane’ by Sonia Mehra Chawla

Heather Davis looks at the work of Sonia Mehra Chawla, as part of her look into Four Figures of Climate Change, July 2017

Sonia Mehra Chawla. Installation shot of Residue from the Critical Membrane Project (2016-ongoing). Courtesy of the artist.

Mangroves are the membrane between the land and the sea. The roots slow the movement of tidal waters, making them essential for the prevention of flooding and the potential devastation of storms. For over five years artist Sonia Mehra Chawla has been studying, in collaboration with the Chennai-based MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), the effects of climate change, deforestation, and changing agricultural patterns on the mangroves of Ernakulam, Kerala, and the Muthupet wetlands of Tamil Nadu. The project is a multi-layered approach to the forests, depicting the devastation of decaying and dying mangroves through overlapping photographs and etchings on plexiglass with the carefully photographed microcosmic worlds of bacterial cultures that are unique to these forest ecologies. Critical Membranes is an investigation with the entangled ecologies of humans and plant life, revealing our co-dependence and co-production of these forests.

When I had the chance to discuss the project with Chawla at the Yinchuan Biennale, I was fascinated with her descriptions of how the forests might be revived. From her detailed research with MSSRF, she relayed how the mangroves had developed in relation to the Indigenous fisherman of the area. When people were allowed back in to fish in otherwise depleted forests, the forests revived. The forests needed these fisherpeople. Elizabeth Povinelli argues, in her book Geontologies, for the importance of paying attention to particular places. She says, following from the teachings of her Aboriginal collaborators, that as humans stop paying tribute, visiting and caring for particular sites, those waterways, forests, or rocks turn away from humans, changing their arrangement of existence. But this turning away is often very bad for human kin. Chawla’s work offers a turning toward the mangroves, showing the veins and the details and the beauty of their liveliness amidst the grief of their death. The installation reveals the necessary entwinement and entanglement of humans and our other-than-human kin. To recognize these world-building capacities offers different models from which to think what environmentalism might mean in the twenty-first century, ones where humans and mangroves might engage in mutual care, a turning toward that involves daily and rhythmic recognition of our inevitable and humbling enmeshment, much like the roots of the mangroves.  

Sonia Mehra Chawla lives and works in New Dehli. Rooted in both her own cultural heritage—she claims inspiration from Indian masters like Francis Newton Souza, Tyeb Mehta, and Rameshwar Broota—and in her globalized, urban milieu, Chawla combines representation and abstraction, reality and fantasy in her work.

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On Extraction: A. Laurie Palmer’s ‘In the Aura of a Hole’

Heather Davis looks at the work of A. Laurie Palmer, as part of her look into Four Figures of Climate Change, July 2017

A. Laurie Palmer. Golden Mollockcrop from In the Aura of a Hole (2014). Courtesy of the artist.

What is the desire to unearth, to upend? Why do we dig? Why do we turn the earth inside out? What secrets are hidden inside that mirror our own bodies or our thoughts? How to relate to the unearthly insides of the planet, the insects and minerals and tiny organisms? The terror and draw of the holes that stretch down into the cold darkness? A. Laurie Palmer investigates these questions through the minerals that are unearthed within the borders of what is now the United States. Her brief stories and singular photographs of each site reveal the ways in which extractivism, as an ideology and as an economic driver, is also a form of subjectivity, is embedded into our bones and ways of life. It forms our social relations and imaginations. These minerals move into our food and our buildings and our technologies. They become a new kind of foundation or infrastructure, indexing wealth, providing networks, seeping into our water. The ground is not a monolithic place. 

We don’t normally think of mining when it comes to climate change. But the two, I think, are part of the same phenomena, the same kind of extraction that brings the innards of the earth to the surface and spreads them around. Sometimes, the earth offers up minerals or oil or coal itself. Bubbling or bursting or slow erosion leads them to the surface. More often, we require increasingly difficult techniques to coerce the earth into giving them up. What is this desire to unearth the earth? Why do we stretch and strain and pull and build our lives around its innards? Do we hope to understand the secrets of the universe? Is this operation a mechanism of objectification or do we deepen our relations, by seeing inside its body?  

A. Laurie Palmer is an artist, writer and teacher. Her work is concerned, most immediately, with resistance to privatization, and more generally, with theoretical and material explorations of matter’s active nature as it asserts itself on different scales and in different speeds. She currently works in the Art Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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On the Earth: ‘Soil’ by Courtney Desiree Morris

Heather Davis looks at the work of Courtney Desiree Morris, as part of her look into Four Figures of Climate Change, July 2017

Courtney Desiree Morris. The Ancestors Prepare for Battle from the series Soil (2016). Courtesy of the artist.

One of the most profound relationships that we have is with soil. We grow from it, with it, and we will all, eventually, return to it, become it. Soil is not neutral, however. There are different types of soils: different kinds of compositions, different bacteria that mark us and inhabit our bodies, different ways in which it gives beneath our feet or falls through our hands. Soil is cultivated, intentionally or not, through our relationships, through what we choose to grow. In this series, soil is the distillation of the labour of Anglophone Caribbean migrants working the sugar fields in North-Central Florida. The images also contain the histories of the radical transformation of the land from wetlands to monocrops. They touch on the stories of the ways in which politics in Florida has always been about sugar, and the ways in which the bodies of the laborers have often been erased. The soil tells of the invention and proliferation of petrochemical fertilizers, of how the water and ecosystems have been transformed by all this sugar. 

But what struck me so deeply is the ways in which the photographs are so cinematic, open up to so many narratives, and seem to time travel. Morris’ body exists in multiple temporalities at once: a vector for a powerful ritual of survival, of resistance. The periodization of the photographs is explicitly sometime in the early to mid-twentieth century, referencing this history of migration. But her face, painted white, with her arms extended out, holding two machetes, speaks far beyond everyday conditions of labour. It is a vision of the past and the future collapsed into one. All the power and knowledge and beauty of her ancestors come alive to open and extend into a world and a future beyond. It is an offering of a vision of the entwinement of soil, as that land can never offer simple belonging to Morris or her relatives due to the legacies of how her ancestors’ bodies were contorted into commodities. And yet the soil remains a grounding, a figure of transformation and transference that enables this kind of time and space travel that remains the condition of the afterlife of slavery. Soil brings life out of death. It is resurgence – a vitality that cannot be quelled.

Courtney Desiree Morris is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University as well as an artist. Her work explores the political relations of ecology and the constant search for ‘home.’

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Embodiment as a Feminist Practice

Contributed by Madison Page, June 13th, 2017

“The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it.  Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed” 

Clarissa Pinkola-Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

The human body is an organism that relates to and is shaped by its environment.  For many  of us this fact feels antithetical to our existence.  As a dancer, movement facilitator, and Pilates instructor, I know that the sum total of our ontology lives in our bodies and is made manifest through sensation, how we respond anatomically or emotionally to stressors, and through tensegrity, how our  muscles, tendons, ligaments, and fascia  are in agreement or disagreement with our bones and one another. Thus, daily interactions and actions, relationship to self, others, culture and environment make for structural changes and adaptations in the human organism.  Budding embodied research from communities of dance like Axis Syllabus and pioneers of natural movement like Katy Bowman, echo similar truths for how western culture might improve its relationship to the body by means of biomechanically sound exercise and movement.  These perspectives establish a  collaboration with the human structure as opposed to imposing our cultural and societal will on it.  

Here are some facts about the body and the relationship to its environment:

The spine’s natural curves exists because of gravity’s effects on the biggest masses in the body-the head and the pelvis.

Lordosis (the natural curve of the low spine) is caused by the environmental gravitational pressures imposed when a baby stops crawling and learns how to walk.

The basis for nature’s energetic and architectural principles also correspond to movement patterns in the human body.

Our bodies carry a consciousness of who we are: everything we’ve decided to be, but more pertinent to this writing, everything our community has imposed on us and we’ve embodied unconsciously.  As a woman in this culture for example, I may (through no fault of my own) unknowingly exaggerate the natural curves of my spine as a point of gaining cultural capital, attention, and sexual advances. Female representation in pop culture shows this posture to be sexy, attractive.  From a purely anatomical perspective what might happen to the spine, viscera, and muscle function from prolonged periods of maintaining this posture?

Some repercussions I’ve seen, just to name a few:

abdominals that cannot stabilize such hyperactivity in motion

compressed/ overworked  low back (propensity for disc bulging, herniations)

compromised respiratory function (anxious breath pattern: breath cannot travel beyond chest)

inflexible spine

tight hip flexors

weak glutes

compensatory joint instability that will travel above and below the spine

On another spectrum, I too often see women in my classes who have described themselves as giving up on their bodies after a decades long hiatus from exercise. One such client having severe kyphosis (hunchback) and low bone mass, first came into the studio with her eyes cast downward, claiming “she’s never been much of a strong person”.  During her sessions, she moves hesitantly, sometimes fearfully, as if she’s bracing herself for what’s to come.  Her head permanently cocks to one side as her eyes dart around.  She apologizes verbally if I offer an encouraging correction, but her whole body has been apologizing long before she mutters “I’m sorry”. The body acts as a truth-telling device in these instances.  

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made the phenomenon of women apologizing a topic of current conversation, but this issue remains moot without discussion on the implications of how a personality such as this might be perceived.  Profuse apologies wouldn’t be that big of a deal if one’s success in American culture wasn’t predicated on an ability to adopt historically masculinist characteristics—drive, self-will, confidence, fast-execution.  In short, internalized and externalized sexism puts the female body at greater risk for developing health issues, and I argue is a determinant factor in one’s ability to manifest success and self-satisfaction in daily life.  

I propose that feminism begins literally within each body. I suggest that aligning our bodies from our deepest core muscles have massive spiritual, emotional, and sociological implications. With such an activation, I have seen women embody personal power, gut strength, and intuition.  I am proposing that we investigate our physical fitness regimens and instead build them from sound anatomical principles and the cyclical nature of the body’s systems.

What if:

We dismantled myths about female body image by investigating the miraculous ways in which our bodies are in a constant process of building up and breaking down?

We moved our upper and lower halves of our bodies more towards the middle?

We replaced physical fitness with a class on finding all the spirals in the body?

Fitness was analogous to nap time?

Artists enjoyed the cyclical nature of an artistic process instead of imposing a product based one?

We discussed over coffee a new discovery that we could feel the weight of our brain for the first time, instead of how much exercise we are getting?

In doing so, we introduce ourselves to ourselves. More deeply, without apology, free from exclusionary ideals.  Coming into bodies that have been waiting to be fully activated, fully experienced, for far too long.

__

Madison Page is a dancer movement person who makes work that, with any luck, examines the relationships between people, process, and performance.  Informed by a background in contemporary dance, her work proposes making dances from models of vulnerability and selfhood.  She is currently an artist in residence at New Expressive Works in Portland, OR; her dances and collaborations have been featured recently at R/SF Projects (San Francisco),  The Hammer Museum with collaborators Samantha Mohr, Caitlin Adams and Chelsea Rector,  and Moskowitz Bayse Gallery with playwright Rachel Kauder Nalebuff  in Los Angeles.  She is a lifelong member of Alexx Shilling’s Modern Dancers of America, and in 2016 performed a live iteration of Shilling’s dance film The Other Side of Stillness with her virtual self at the Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center in New York.  She has danced and continues to dance for Laurel Jenkins Tentindo, Kevin Williamson, Carol McDowell, Devika Wickremesinghe, and Caitlin Adams.  She is a graduate of the World Arts and Cultures Department at The University of California, Los Angeles, and holds a certificate in Dance Theatre from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, England. 

madisonpagemoves.com

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Getting back to the body after (during) being white

Contributed by Casey Llewellyn, 2017

How much time do you think we have left?

Who’s we? 

People. On earth.

We arrived at the moon with nothing. Just our breathing capsules. I had been an explorer in my previous life. But I had never explored the moon. From the moon, the earth looked like a bad idea. It hadn’t been a good idea. But it had been. And that was the part people concentrated on. I could hear some of them through their inhalators. No one had much hope. We had ruined our home planet. I hadn’t spent much time thinking about grass and the blue sky before. I did now. I screened them over the black and the gray in my mind. Earth had been my home. The ocean, rivers. I had thought my home a building, but it was the earth. A voice rattled my helmet and bounced around my face. Was it me or was it just in there with me? “We ruined the Earth. We killed our home. We killed ourselves.” Someone was trying to talk to me through the glass of our helmets. But what was the point anymore? Our saying did not work. What is it to join other people? To actually work together? What could we have done? I no longer wanted to listen to somebody’s pain. I am thinking about the world. You can’t heal when you hate your mother. I am running. Pus fills the bottom of my suit. But I can’t find the wound. It occurs to me now in my lonely helmet that I was part of it. I had been a part of something big. We called it the world.

When I lived on earth, I thought I was white. Innocent. I wore a cloak of non-guilt as big as a mountain range. I was so good at innocence that I killed the whole planet without realizing I was killing myself too. When we called ourselves white, when we called everyone else all those others things, the words kept changing because each new generation was insulted by the word used to talk about the generation before. No change in language could address the insult because the insult was the idea of race itself. White never had to change words. It could never be an insult because white people had made up all the terms and made them sound scientific—Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid—to colonize the earth.1 When we called ourselves white and called everyone else all those other things to take away their humanness, we lost our humanness. We removed ourselves from the ecosystem. We made a word to legitimize the violence necessary to colonize. We called ourselves white to absolve the things we were already doing. We were doing things that everyone who feels knows are wrong. We created in us a white wall that ended feeling. If we could not understand our connection to other people, how could we know our connection to the earth? If white greed was strong enough to imagine other people as property, what could stop it from cannibalizing the earth? Whiteness can never know connection. Connection is God. Connection is: we are not separate. Maybe this is what God wanted. God wanted humans to remove ourselves, so the rest of the planet could go on trying without us. But it’s sad. I guess we really are all in this together, even though so many of us could never feel that when we lived on earth.

(Song…see appendix)

Before we stopped happening, I played a game called Oregon Trail. Oregon Trail was all about the things you had that would ensure your survival as you took over the land that is now the United States. Money basically. But also supplies. You would make decisions and tell the computer about them by pressing the number keys on the keyboard. You floated a wagon on a river. Oxen pulled it. You drove the oxen. Oxen were animals, but they were in the “supplies” category of the game. Then you tried to get more supplies. It would tell you who in your party had died in a sentence that appeared on the screen. I played again after not playing for a long time. My whole party died. My mom has died, my father has died, my boyfriend has died, our mythical children died, the earth has died.

White as in pure, like snow, white as in a lesser evil, white as in a clean sheet of paper, contextless. Distruth that creates a reality. White as in a cloud, harmless.2

People say, work in your own community. (The smell of my own underarms.) But what is my community? I grew up in Boston.

Last night I heard the dogs barking and I was alone in the house in a field at the end of a dirt road, I had wanted to get out of the city and the dogs were barking a lot and I looked for my phone and I couldn’t find it anywhere, I had wanted to be in nature, and I thought did someone sneak in here up here by my bed without me noticing and take my phone? And I opened my computer for light. I was scared to make the click of the lamp turning on. Where was I? Was I German? Was I Welsh? Was I English? Was it whiteness itself that woke me? (The dogs kept barking.) Ever fearful of its violence returning home. The dogs are barking and you don’t have a flashlight, don’t have phone. You have no neighbors. None at least that you wouldn’t avoid if you saw them in the day. Who were the English before they were English? Who were Germans before Germany? Who was I before I was white? I crouched by the door with a bottle grasped by the neck in my two hands. I centered. I prayed. I told myself I believed I could live, that I deserve to. I have been turned off. My whole body has been turned off. I crouched by the door and remind myself to stand up straight. To uncurl even though I am afraid. I wondered if I would die, but it was just the dogs barking.

Perhaps we were not good enough at reading signals. A personal history with land.

My dad went to visit his relatives in Wales. The ceilings in the houses were too short for him to stand at his full height. A Unitarian minister with a statue of Lenin in the entrance of his house showed him around. His relative, who did not speak English (neither could my dad speak Welsh), hugged him.

The United States of America has not always existed and will not always exist. It is a moment, not a place. (This is not my idea. I hear it at a talk at a University.)3

White people in Texas who have land where they’re going to build a wall were featured on tv. The woman in the couple was crying because her and her husband’s farm was already behind a big border fence separated from the rest of the country. They have a special passcard that lets them into no person’s land. They had had a fire, but the fire truck couldn’t get to them. It drove back and forth on the other side of the fence looking for the opening. I guess they must have needed a passcard too. Or a code. Their barn was burning. They had gotten out, but their animals were still inside. This was where she started crying. She was talking about how their goat had burned. How its body had been charred, and she saw it. She was wearing a tank top. She wiped her eyes. They live on land that is between two countries, with a special passcard to liminality. But of course it is all of our land. It is earth.

The United States of America has not always existed and will not always exist.

When we lived on earth, my boyfriend and I used to watch the tv show Planet Earth. We would get high and cuddle in a bed in Brooklyn where neither of us was from and watch the birds one or the underwater one or the bugs one on a little computer screen. I would often suggest we go to Ikea to be more successful at making home.

In New York, I once went to a flower themed party. It was requested that guests wear flower print. At the party, there were magical beverages that someone had made out of flowers to mix with gin or seltzer. Chamomile and hibiscus and lavender, rose and elderflower. Because they were liquid, I had forgotten that they too were flowers. That we can shift shape. The maker told me, flowers make our lives possible. So many times that night, I had made the mistake of thinking that something life giving was decorative. I had brought some flowers that I bought at a deli as an offering. Flowers of three different colors that I didn’t know the names of. I had thrown out the plastic and the rubber bands holding them together. I was nervous to talk to the people. I thought, I am around true witches. It was only later I realized I wanted to be one.

When I was a kid, I associated witches with the drive up Route 1 from Boston to Salem. They had burned witches in Salem. We would drive up Route 1 to see my mom’s friend. No one else we knew lived in Salem. On the way, there was giant dinosaur that marked a mini-golf course and a restaurant in the shape of a large ship that we would pass. There was a large cow outside of a steak restaurant and a giant ice cream cone. Route 1 was fun. It seemed to me that the people of Salem had recovered well from the witch burnings. Giant dinosaurs and ice cream cones were things we, people, made on the land, with a combination of whimsy and businessery at a time when kitsch sold. Perhaps these amusements were decisions made by descendents of those who had not burned. Perhaps the witches had gone underground. We made these monuments to recognizable things because trees did not seem enough. The witches knew how to work with trees and plants, but they and their knowledge had been criminalized. Instead we made amusements that would go out of style with time and parking lots, so that you could get to them easily by car. Joni Mitchell wrote about that. It’s unfortunate that she also wore blackface and didn’t see the connection. There were a lot of examples of that in the music I listened to growing up. Like Ani DiFranco playing a concert at an old slave plantation.

My mom’s friend was a quietly gay artist who drew me a large and beautiful detailed dinosaur on foam core for my 8th birthday. It was a T-rex. It was bigger than me. It was missing teeth, so we could pin teeth on it blindfolded. That was the game. It was not in our minds that in 60 years we too would be extinct on earth. People made a big deal of going to the dentist.

At a restaurant with friends, one friend asked us all to tell our happiest childhood memory. I couldn’t think of anything to share. I thought, maybe I am unhappy, though I didn’t know I was. Maybe my childhood was subdued. Maybe I had subdued it. Then I thought of raking the leaves with my dad and his housemates at the group house where he lived. I would visit him there every other weekend, Thursday through Sunday. I jumped in the piles of leaves as we raked them. My dad jumped in too. I was cared for by everyone, but I paid special attention to the lesbians who I loved. I didn’t know that witching was a woman’s first power. I didn’t realize I belonged to this earth. At the table in the restaurant, everyone’s happy memory happened outside (except meeting Whitney Houston which had occurred in a concert venue). Someone commented, I wonder what this generation of kids’ happy memories of will be. In school and other places, I was taught that my ancestors colonized this land because they needed to, because they sought religious freedom. But I realize now that they were lied to about who they were and what they had the right to. Who are we? Where did we go? I ordered cheesecake at the restaurant. It was known for its cheesecake across all the boroughs. Who are we? Where did we go?

When I lived in Providence, I was bereft, so I went to a Unitarian church sometimes on Sundays. I didn’t know where else to go. Sometimes my boyfriend went with me, but that was before he was my boyfriend. He had gone to a church that hated us as a child, so the Unitarian church in Providence was a welcome, if uninspiring, change. I liked some of the sermons. They were sermons aimed at the mind. Sometimes the heart. Sometimes I felt larger. Sometimes a band played folk music. I liked at the end of church when the reverend stands by the door shaking people’s hands. I felt shy to be addressed as if I belonged there. It is so rare, and I didn’t feel like I belonged. I have no traditions in my life except Christmas, and I cancelled the party this year. I am often scared to talk to other people.

(Song…see appendix)

My parents moved away from their families. Many people do now. I learned my where my ancestors were from for a project in school. English, Irish, Welsh, German, one Swede. That’s pretty much it. What that means, theoretically, is being from an area of the earth. From a landscape that formed, in part, my ancestors as a people. Am I being too romantic? When I visited the landscape, it felt strange and not in my body. What I feel in my body is settler colonialism. My more recent ancestors ripped out their customs, their food, their accents, their religions and became white, so they could make a life for themselves in a society defined by genocide, enslavement and destruction of the earth. For money it seems, or perhaps also safety, or that’s what’s left all these generations later. And a lonely feeling, lost. The food I feel for is the food of capitalism: rice pilaf out of a box, chicken fingers, macaroni and cheese. My accent is American with the unplaceability of the owning class. My customs are shopping when I feel sad, eating out on special occasions, going to the theater, feeling guilty I don’t call or email more, doing important things alone, checking facebook, focusing most of my love on my boyfriend and creating boundaries in relationships with everyone else. When you hack through the mooring of your family, your world—patriarchal and racist—where is there to go? The moon? This hollow center that doesn’t know we are of the earth.

I, like many white people, like to say the word love. I love myself. But love is impinged upon by the white. I can’t see myself because I have learned not to see clearly all these years.

I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. I was told, you can have everything. Everything is already around you and it is yours. There is Walden Pond. Walden Pond is for you. Remember, Emerson? No, I don’t, but I might have gone to highschool with him. A lot of white men will tell you they have the answer to everything. They’ll be obsessive, feel so connected to what they need to say, they forget you. Explain to you the importance of connecting, in the form of a weekend away you can’t afford to take, with the very thing that people like them are destroying, that they have robbed from most people on earth, a place here that hasn’t been poisoned. They will explain to you the importance of health care you can’t afford to address the health problems you have because of changes in your environment that people like them have caused. If we don’t think each other is worth change, what are we living for? If we don’t think ourselves are connected…we will do what we are already doing. We will separate. I can only speak for myself. I am someone who separates like milk from oil. The milk is myself. The oil is myself. I carry myself into the future split. I am moving farther away. You can live. You can live and play Oregon Trail. You’re almost alive, but you’re killing the earth and other people. You will have to go back and read more (reading is your language). You will have to go back and look for your body in the wreckage of your feelings that you watch tv to avoid. I’ve been alive for 33 years. I know. You will have to go back to look for your body. Where is it you left it? You will have to be a person for at least a few more years. Maybe then you’ll understand it. Maybe you’ll (I’ll) be able to unlive the lie of white. The lie of some earth left livable for your (our) children.

You know what they say, the meek will inherit the earth. Who says? God or Jesus. The Bible.

(Song by Mirah…see appendix)

A cockroach crawls into a future.

A list of some moments referenced where I learned from other people and sources:

1. Fake Science. What “oid” means on the end of a word. From Dictionary.com: -oid 1. a suffix meaning “resembling,” “like,” used in the formation of adjectives and nouns (and often implying an incomplete or imperfect resemblance to what is indicated by the preceding element): alkaloid; anthropoid; cardioid; cuboid; lithoid; ovoid; planetoid. Compare –ode.

Origin of –oid: Greek

2. Indebtment to the Undoing Racism workshop by The People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond for this investigation of the language of whiteness. 3. The talk at a university: Talk at Brown University by Qwo-Li Driskill

Appendix of songs:

A song for the beginning of the play: Hey. Being white can’t make me want to go on living. Hey. Being white can’t make me want to go on living. I know I need history now. Hey. Being white can’t make me want to go on living. I know I need history now.

A song for the middle of the play: I sense that whiteness has to do with the destruction of the planet. I sense that whiteness has to do with the destruction of the planet. I sense that whiteness has to do with the destruction of the planet. I sense that whiteness has to do with the destruction of the planet. I sense that whiteness has to do with the destruction of the planet. I sense that whiteness has to do with the destruction of the planet. I sense this in my deepest self.

Song by Mirah for the end of the play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzqvz3CvkzM

[theo-westenberger]

Cracks and Crevices: Writing through Trauma

Contributed by Jordan Alam, 2017

In the labor and delivery room, the birthing person gives a particular type of cry when their contractions get more intense. When contractions layer up on one another, they give the person little pause as their body takes over and moves the baby further and further into this world of air and light. I try to sleep when the parent sleeps and wake when I hear them cry out. I put pressure on their sacrum until the moaning stops and they settle. In the dim light, with the blinds drawn, the room becomes cut off from time – hours turn into minutes and single contractions feel as if they can go on forever. This is where I am when I am not writing.

It takes total focus to enter that room, as it does when I am staffing the shelter floor. There, children are always running through the kitchens and the bathrooms are never properly cleaned. I arrive in the afternoon and I stay till late at night, answering phone calls and attending to the residents’ needs, which can span from mediating conflicts over laundry to calling an emergency vehicle. I listen to countless, countless stories of trauma. I support my clients as they make endless appointments with social workers and daycare providers and housing authorities and managers. Those in the most desperate situations are also burdened with the extra work of proving themselves worthy of care. I shut the door sometimes just to catch my breath; the need is never-ending.

What does that mean for a writer? For me, it means it is harder to contain my jobs within the bounds of the workday. For many months of this year, my words had dried up as I took on the stories of others. I would chew over what had happened that day, about my role, about the structural issues which had brought us to that moment. Journaling used to be a release valve, but during that time it just reminded me of everything I could not fix.

I see the need in classrooms and hear it over the phone. In my various part-time jobs, I connect people to resources and problem-solve around lack. All that time, I am filling up my cup. This is the image I tend to use when thinking about what it means to hold onto weighty emotions: a cup with a steady stream flowing into it, always at risk of overflowing. As Laura van Dernoot Lipsky so cogently presents in Trauma Stewardship, we need to take seriously the experience of vicarious trauma by those who work in social services and other caregiving roles. Though the emotions themselves may be positive or negative, when you are practicing empathy in caregiving you take on the material of that person’s lived experience.

I walk through the world inhabiting multiple identities, many of which are currently targeted ones. I am queer and Muslim, femme and South Asian, all of which are very pivotal identities that show up in the characters I write. It comes as no surprise that the books I am most interested in push characters to contend with high stakes, internal and external. To honor the truth of their stories, I have to talk about the racism that each of us experiences; I have to write about the challenge of violence enacted upon us as communities and individuals. Most recently, I have written about two Muslim teenagers exploring their relationship to one another after one has run away from home. In the draft of my forthcoming novel, I write about domestic violence and the victim-blaming that follows that puts my character in an ever more precarious position until she has to make a major life shift. Some writers contend with the tragedies of our current world by writing utopia, but I am not among them.

Proximity to major life transitions is indispensable to my writing. I am not a parent, but I have had the opportunity to witness people become parents for the first time. I have watched fifth graders write skits about current political issues. I have supported adults through some of their most vulnerable moments, and in the process understood something valuable about resilience. But often that proximity can also overwhelm. Emptying my cup of these stories is not a perfect process. I once thought that making art itself was the cathartic part of the journey, but am now recognizing that this is another part of emotional labor.

How to address this saturation point? Part of the challenge is structural: if we as a society do not fully acknowledge caregiving as work and do not support its workers, then we are perpetually asking people to take on the challenge and then find spare time to heal from it. On a practical level, when I find myself avoiding work or approaching it with a pessimistic attitude, it doesn’t benefit me or my clients. It helps, on an individual level, to be realistic about limits. Care providers I know tend to be overachievers. They get into it because they have been affected by the circumstances or have loved ones who have and they want to make a dent in the suffering they see around them. I also apply this logic to my writing – I want to make a meaningful dent, and put extra stress on myself to do that even after a full day in emotionally draining settings.

I am currently going back over writing advice that has helped me reconceive my projects. The Art of Slow Writing speaks to the idea that strong writing is a long process and gives practical suggestions on how to use one’s time wisely. Writing Alone and with Others directly addresses the idea of writing with and through trauma. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird encourages us to take it one step at a time. And Lynda Barry’s books: What It Is, Picture This, and Syllabus are colorful imaginative pieces that push me to go back to when writing was a form of play.

When I am not writing, I am also doing dishes and folding up laundry. I’m attending game nights and roller derby practices. Errands end up taking too long; there’s not enough food in the fridge. Time that I have planned to write gets eaten up by other obligations. I feel a deep urgency to address social issues in my community and in my art, especially in the current political climate. But that urgency must also be met with my capacity. To echo Dean Spade in Normal Life, I want my activism (and my art-making) to be a decades-long practice rather than one that leaves me burnt out in a couple of years. There will always be more to come, and I am curious about how we get there.

Jordan Alam is a writer, editor, doula, and social change educator based out of south Seattle. Her short stories and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, CultureStrike Magazine, The Rumpus, and AAWW’s The Margins; she has spoken at events including the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Eyes on Bangladesh exhibition. She is also the founder of the Asian American social justice publication, Project As[I]Am. Find more info about all of her projects at her website.

[theo-westenberger]

On Extinction: Allora & Calzadilla’s The Great Silence

Heather Davis looks at the work of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla as part of her look into Four Figures of Climate Change, July 2017

Stills from The Great Silence (2016), courtesy of the artists.

The images pass slowly. There is space and silence and time. An entwined story emerges of the relations between the Arecibo Observatory – a radio telescope built to transmit and receive messages from across the universe – and the parrots of Puerto Rico. It is a story of silence. Of growing silence. The parrot narration that appears as subtitles at the bottom of the screen says: “The Fermi paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is disconcertingly quiet.” Since the Arecibo Observatory was built in 1963, there has only been static – reverberations of the big bang from 14 billion years ago. We are still waiting for the voices of intelligent life to beam across the universe. But the real paradox, as Allora and Calzadilla point out through the video installation, is that we are surrounded by intelligent life. Including intelligent life that can speak to us, that can learn our languages, such as parrots. Why do we think that we could find intelligent life out in space, away from the embedded and embodied relations of the earth from which we are made, if we can’t even recognize our intelligent non-human kin here among us? And the paradox of this situation becomes even more tragic with the knowledge that parrots are in danger of going extinct. In our drive to move beyond the earth, we forgot to look around. We were so excited about what might be out there that we didn’t see what was in front of us. The parrot that narrates this story repeats the words of Alex, the famous African gray parrot, who before he passed away, said to his human caregiver, Irene Pepperberg, “You be good. I love you.” In The Great Silence, the parrot narrator explains that they forgive us humans for not paying attention, for inadvertently causing the deaths and possible extinction of its kind. It leaves us with the same words: “You be good. I love you.” The real question is: how will we learn to forgive and love ourselves? 

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Collaborating since 1995, their work investigates social and environmental politics, while deeply committed to exploring the material world.

[theo-westenberger]

3 Wolf Moon

Contributed by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff for the Theo Westenberger Estate, June 12, 2017

The kind of t-shirt I never used to take seriously. Is this now the answer?

I am thinking about how rarely I can stomach art about the environment. I am trying to figure out if this says more about me or more about art.

I know Anohni’s album Hopelessness is beautiful, but I have no desire to listen to it. Last night in Times Square, I watched Lars Jan’s Holoscenes,  a dance piece that takes place in a giant elevated fishtank. As the dancers perform a duet, the water level rises and falls about them. The New York Times describes the piece as a meditation on “ the uncontrollable nature of climate change.”  Watching it though,  I wasn’t thinking about the environment. I was focused on the beauty of one dancer’s dress floating around her, on the little heartbreak I felt when the dancers dropped their weight entirely against the surface of the water and broke apart, on how impressive it was that both performers looked at each other with open eyes underwater, on how the culture that fuels the advertisements behind the tank is the same culture that fuels the anthropocene—and therefore how important it was that this show was free. So, okay, I was thinking about the environment, but only as it relates to staging concepts.

Geoff Sobelle and Annie Saunders performing in Lars Jan’s Holoscenes, 2017

*

I know that the environment around me is collapsing. I’m not in denial. This month, our president announced that the U.S. will pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. Oil is now flowing through the Keystone Pipeline, and the list goes on. But art about this news feels like pointing to a dead body. I don’t want to look. I’m trying to figure out if that is a fair response and if there are other ways of reckoning with an unfathomable loss.

* The philosopher Timothy Morton has a term for phenomena like climate change that are so large they become impossible to grasp: hyperobjects. “Things like: not just a Styrofoam cup or two, but all the Styrofoam on Earth, ever….hyperobjects outlast me, and they out-scale me in the here and now” (Timothy Morton, "Introducing the idea of Hyperobjects." High Country News 2015). I wonder if it is possible to feel anything about hyperobjects. Or if could politically-aware art address this impossibility of comprehension as a first step.

* 

I am thinking about Jewish funerals and how there are no open caskets. We tell stories about the person who has died. What they meant to us. All the funny and bizarre habits they had that made us love them, all the ways we carry them with us still. There is usually catering involved. And laughter. This storytelling and grieving and celebrating goes on for a full week.

Is what I’m craving some kind of shiva for the planet’s ecosystems? I am trying to picture it: everyone I know, sitting in a circle, telling stories about a tree, a wave, a cat. Remember when we could drink water from the stream—put your cup in it and bring it to your mouth? What a concept! Everyone who remembers this laughs and snaps their fingers. Maybe this is too defeatist because nature isn’t over yet. But there is so much we have lost already. And I have barely begun facing it.

Rachel Jendrzejewski’s play Early Morning Song has a passage that hits me hard. It’s simple. It’s a list of tree varieties.

Screenshots of Rachel Jendrzejewski’s Early Morning Song. The list goes on for 11 pages.

Early Morning Song is a play about the environment, and so it’s clear that the implication of this list is that all these trees will soon be gone. But experiencing the list, it overwhelms me in a different sense.  There are so many trees to admire. It is unbearably beautiful. It is elegiac—mournful and celebratory at once—and makes straightforward commentary feel flat in comparison.

In this light, BBC’s Planet Earth becomes an elegy, so does a landscape painting of the Hudson River, that t-shirt with the wolves printed on it, and any poem about the winter. It is interesting: in our present time, showing nature’s beauty—once the most straightforward form of art—may be the ultimate provocation. This is why so much overtly political art about the environment today feels like putting a hat on a hat.

Landscape near Rome during a Storm, Simon Denis

[theo-westenberger]

An interview with Isabella Cruz-Chong

Contributed by Steph Del Rosso, June 2017

All images courtesy Isabella Cruz-Chong.

I first met interdisciplinary artist Isabella Cruz-Chong in Boston as a part of Oxfam America’s CHANGE Initiative, a training program for college students aimed at fighting poverty through sustainable, campus-wide actions. We became fast friends: we were both 19, both attending school in Chicago, and both intent on tackling that nebulous task that is bridging art and social change. Seven years later, I found myself attending Isabella’s thesis exhibition at the Parsons School of Design where her sound installation, Line of Breath, and accompanying documentary film, Exhale, were featured. Leaning against her replica of the Mexico-U.S. border fence, I listened to the sound of my friend’s recorded breathing, floored by this highly-politicized, liminal space that she had personified, that she had compelled me and other passerby to slow down and notice.  

Over Skype, Isabella and I discussed how her work engages with our precarious environmental and social landscapes.

Steph Del Rosso: In your site-specific piece Line of Breath, you returned to your hometown of Tijuana to install custom speakers that played recordings of your own breathing on the border wall between Mexico and the U.S. When did your experience growing up crossing the international border come to inform your art practice?

Isabella Cruz-Chong: When I moved out. When I was able to distance myself from the space and look at it as an outsider, I realized how it had affected me. It started because I was just homesick in Chicago [going to school at SAIC]. So I began doing images where I would, for instance, compare a photo of me and my brother to a photo of me and my roommates. It came from nostalgia. But then I started juxtaposing not my family but the fence [I use in Line of Breath] with a fence in Chicago. It was the same kind of work, but I moved away from the personal. Although it’s still personal, and that’s something I always say. Even though [my work] can be social and political, it’s mostly personal—or at least it starts that way. I think at the core of why I keep doing this work is mainly my wanting these two pieces of me to be in harmony together. At the beginning [of the process] I did feel a split between these two sides of myself and I wanted them to be one. I was feeling displacement.

The artist in front of Line of Breath.

Del Rosso: But even though your work starts from this deeply personal place, I’m so impressed by how you always zoom out to engage with a more global perspective. Do you consciously consider the community-engagement and interactive aspects of each project, or does that surface more organically?

Cruz-Chong: The community involvement for Line of Breath came about as a very happy coincidence. Tijuana is such a great city—I love it. It is my hometown. Ever since [I lived in] Chicago I was thinking, I need to go back to Tijuana to put up work, to show work, to build a school. But if I did another project [there], I would think more about making a piece that related to the people around it. I think I would need to give something of [myself] to the community, some sort of reciprocal relationship. Because who am I making this work for?

I’m trying to be very careful because I don’t want to just do work in a community and not really get to know [the people there] and maybe even create a bad impact, or use it for self-promotion. So I start with what I’m struggling with emotionally and mentally. And then I do prototypes and I interview people, and then it happens to be that the project includes the community and the community helps me build it. But it doesn’t start that way.

Del Rosso: Have you ever shied away from a project because it felt too personal, too intimate?

Cruz-Chong: It’s funny that you ask that because that’s what I’m feeling right now. I’ve been asked to do a project for Long Beach—to extend the latest project about the fence. I’m just taking my time. Because some things are getting very personal. Looking at fences and divisions and writing about them has started me thinking about my own divisions, in the sense of: when do I feel split? When do I feel like I’m on one side and not the other? And I’m talking everything: in relationships, with my family. I can’t be taking down walls if I also feel like I’m putting them up sometimes.

Del Rosso: You seem to be constantly pushing against the idea that sight equates truth: you interrogate what we choose not to see. I found it so interesting that you admitted how when you were growing up, you found the border fence ugly and you tried to look past it – but then you developed an intimacy with it, and found a beauty in it while doing Line of Breath.

Cruz-Chong: Yes. [It was:] I see you, fence, I acknowledge you. I don’t like what you represent, but thank you for making me who I am, for helping me give whatever message I can give to whoever wants to listen.

Del Rosso: I feel like so much of your work is about unseen realities—what we’re refusing to pay attention to. What do you believe are some of the blind spots of the world at large? What are the things that we, as a society, are ignoring?

Cruz-Chong: I think we refuse to see ourselves. It is very easy for all of us—including me—to criticize, to be intolerant and impatient with other people. It’s clearly difficult to see beyond just your own side—even if you know there’s some kind of in between or the other person has a point. And if I can say something bold, I think that is the essence of all the other walls (physical or not) that we put up. It starts with ourselves and the people closest to us. And I think those are the hardest walls to see: the ones that we have inside, that are extremely painful. Because to see them you have to feel them; you have to live through them. So a lot of the time when I’m doing this work I’m looking inside of myself and saying, ok, what am I uncomfortable with? Who am I fighting with and why? So in a way choosing to not see the wall has nothing to do with the wall—it’s a feeling. The wall is just society’s manifestation of that feeling.

You can look at statistics. The Mexican government will say that a certain number of people move to the U.S. from Mexico, and then the U.S. government will say that same statistic. And both numbers are extremely different. So there is no consistency. And at the end one believes what one wants to believe. But it’s so complex. That’s the other thing that angers me: most of the time, people talk about the border as if it were really black and white. As if it were some sort of math problem. But it’s not. At the core, it’s people who are afraid—on both sides. You have the people coming to the U.S. who are afraid for their families, or are afraid for their future—so that fear is making them move. And on the other hand, the people who don’t want new people coming in are also afraid for their families, and they’re afraid to lose their jobs. At a certain point, it doesn’t even matter whether [people immigrating] are taking their jobs or not, if at the end of the day they’re still afraid. One tends to want very practical solutions to complex things. But that just won’t work because they’re not responding to the source of the problem. They’re responding to a symptom.

Del Rosso: How has the border fence affected the environment?  

Cruz-Chong: The Secure Fence Act of 2006 ignored [and waived] all environmental and conservation laws. So the fence is not good for the environment. In places like Tijuana, there’s trash around [the fence], plants are not growing—there’s contamination. It’s sort of this no man’s land. Sometimes the community gets together to clean, but that fluctuates. And when we talk about immigration it’s not just people—it’s animals that need to get back and forth. And they’re unable to.  

Del Rosso: You describe your piece Rootedness, an interactive installation in which soil creates amplified sounds and vibrations when touched, as “fostering a connection to a natural resource.” As a whole, your work seems to be in conversation with one’s connection to nature, as well as our planet’s terrifyingly transformative ecosystem. How did your work come to incorporate the environment?   

Cruz-Chong: One of my favorite artists is Ana Mendieta. She was an artist from Cuba who did a lot of environmentally-focused performance work where she would place her body in nature, in the soil, pointing towards Cuba. One of the theories is that she felt she had been forcefully taken out of Cuba. So she is really present in my thoughts when I’m creating work.

When I moved to New York, I started programming and I was at the computer 24/7. I was also learning about so many visual effects and new technologies, and I was visually exhausted and overwhelmed. I just wanted to go to Prospect Park and touch soil. The need was there and still is. So it starts with me—what I crave, my passion. At the same time, I was reading about the senses, specifically touch. The reason why I did the custom, copper speakers for Line of Breath was because it made people go to the fence and touch it. And I wanted them to do that. I wanted them to be there, on the ground, with it. I try to mix technology with natural resources in a harmonious way, where they’re complementing each other. [For Rootedness], I had to learn about dirt and how it works with technology—how it becomes dry and humid, how to make it vibrate a certain way. I’ve also learned how people don’t like touching dirt sometimes. They’re scared of it.

Del Rosso: That somehow doesn’t surprise me. We definitely don’t engage with the natural world enough, on a physical, tactile level. Maybe our environment wouldn’t be in jeopardy if we did.

Cruz-Chong: We’re very distanced from [our] natural resources, so it’s harder for us to think of them as something vital, something we need to take care of. We forget to consider that they die, that they need our hands.    

Del Rosso: How has the political climate shifted your artistic intentions?

Cruz-Chong: At first I was just so sad, so depressed, and pessimistic. I knew I needed to continue doing work but I just didn’t feel like it. I saw on Facebook that three different artists that have done art at the border were putting their work up. I immediately thought: are we doing this work to get back at [the president], to answer to him? I don’t want to do that. I want to do [work on the border] because I believed in it and thought it was important even before the election. So the political climate has reminded me how important my work is, reminded me that I have to keep on. But I don’t want to force it. I want to be careful. Maybe I’m scared of messing up. I want it to be genuine.

This interview between Cruz-Chong and Del Rosso took place on May 26, 2017. 

Isabella Cruz-Chong (b.1989) is an interdisciplinary artist and supporter of collective cultures. She takes on the roles of maker, designer, educator and researcher. Isabella’s practice often comes from her experience of growing up crossing the international border between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California. Her interests address boundaries, liminality and unification with a desire to foster self-awareness and blur lines between divisive perspectives. She often uses physical computing, sound, programming and raw materials such as dirt and wood. Her work has been shown at Smack Mellon (Brooklyn 2016), Memorial Union Gallery (Fargo 2016), Rabbithole Projects (Brooklyn 2016), SXSW (Austin 2015), Sullivan Galleries (Chicago 2012) and the Hospital Gregorio Marañon de Madrid (Madrid 2011). Isabella Cruz-Chong received an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently part of the 2017-2018 Artist Studio Program at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY.

Steph Del Rosso is a playwright and educator who splits her time between San Diego and New York.

[theo-westenberger]

Cows Going Home: Revisiting Sylvia Plachy’s photo essay

Contributed by Susan Silas, May 2017

The writer, Mary Gordon, has famously said that nostalgia is the handmaiden to fascism. The longing for the perfect past that never existed seems to characterize fascism and populist movements, while the longing for the perfect future seems to characterize communism, imputing to the complex and murky present the designation of something deeply unsatisfactory. But there is a distinction to be made between the longing for the perfect non-existent past and the longings created by memories of a lived childhood. In fact, part of that longing for the memories of childhood may be to see the world again, unfiltered by the unavoidable ideological baggage that accumulates on the road to adulthood. Or maybe, it is just the longing to see the world as it was before the language to describe it overtook vision.

Transylvanian Woods, 2001

At a moment when a right wing surge is taking place across the Western world Sylvia Plachy’s Self Portrait with Cows Going Home, originally published in 2004, is especially timely. Plachy was born just before the conclusion of World War II in Hungary. Her consciousness was formed in the aftermath of the downfall of fascism and under the yoke of the communist regime installed in Hungary by the Soviets.

 Plachy’s book opens with her memories of the end of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, the country’s failed attempt to free itself from Soviet domination, when the thirteen year old Plachy was wrenched from her homeland, her mother tongue and all that was familiar to her. While the book contains a narrative text, and although Plachy writes well, the photographs outweigh the text. In fact, Plachy’s photographs are able to create entire worlds that don’t require text at all; that seem to swallow up verbalization and insist solely on the visual. It was this ability that made her images in the Village Voice and in The New Yorker so compelling. Her one photograph -- that amounted to having a visual column in each publication -- was never in need of an explanation, creating a space entirely separate from the texts surrounding it.

 I happened to be seated at a table with Plachy at a wedding once. She was not on assignment but she did bring her camera. Watching her move through the room was akin to watching a dancer. Her fluidity and elegance are reflected in the non-dictatorial framing of most of her images. Often they are surrounded by a soft black line. It is as if she doesn’t want to have the window into the world she has created for us butt up against our physical reality too abruptly. In other instances, it is the softness of the images themselves that beckons us to linger over them.

The opening image of the book, Transalvanian Woods, 2001, is an example of one her panoramic landscapes. Many of her panoramic images take up both pages of a spread in the book. By opening with a landscape, she immediately places us somewhere. The images in the book, shot between 1972 and 2003, represent a world which is partly rural, and seemingly lacking in the gadgetry and technology that is so much a part of our current every-day lives. This makes the images seem more remote in time than they actually are.

Fate, Sylvia Plachy, 1993

For decades the Eastern Bloc was caught in a time warp because of the communist regulation of the economy, which resulted in nearly nothing to consume. The cities were gray and drab and the countryside looked the same as it probably had two hundred years before. Plachy’s lens creates distortions and she has an eye for the unlikely juxtaposition, but overall the images focus on the family, on the elderly, on the land and cultivation, on animals. It is an eye with a tenderness for the vulnerability and specificity of eccentricity rather than just its oddness.

 There is a bear standing on its hind legs, its eyes cast upward with its paws raised. It looks as if it were making a desperate plea for mercy and compassion. There are two goats in profile, one entirely black and one entirely white, gently butting heads, there is a sizable black goat in a yard with a tiny black goat riding on its back, there are two dogs sitting on either side of a staircase at the entrance to a building in imitation of the two lions that grace the entrance of the New York Public Library, and there are the cows of the book’s title, winding their way home on the streets of a village at the close of the day.

                                 Black and White, Csikszerda, Romania, 1994

The text tells us an anecdotal family history. Interspersed among Plachy’s own photographs, are images of a great uncle in his World War I uniform, her birth announcement etched by her father, her sixth grade class picture taken in Budapest in 1955, her wedding day in Mount Vernon in 1966. This interweaving of her own images with images culled from her family history create an historical document of sorts; one that emphatically states that the way we are constituted and see the world is based largely on where and when we enter the world stage and how we are made to interact with the impersonal forces of history unfolding around us.

 Plachy is known as a master of the photographic essay. Her photographs do not illustrate the text, and while the photographs are clearly connected by subject matter and sensibility, they do not try to force a specific interpretation of events. They are about her love of this place but they don’t attempt to tell us what we ought to think about it.

Most of the images in the book were shot in black and white, but there are color images too, which help to disrupt our sense of looking at a very distant past. Those color images serve to acknowledge that this country, which was locked away behind the Iron Curtain, does in fact have a living present. All of her photographs have a keen sense of specificity. The book reminds us, that despite the power of pop culture, the world has not been completely homogenized and that much remains of this place where she was born that is particular to it. In the face of the current reactionary political wave, as plentiful in Hungary as it is in the United States, Plachy’s photographs instantiate an openness to the world that is entirely lacking in these political movements and among their followers. That openness is in part an aspect of her creativity but it also partly a conscious choice; a way that she has chosen to see the world and one that she generously shares with us, if we are open to seeing it.

Susan Silas is a visual artist working in Brooklyn, New York. She is co-editor of the artblog MOMMY and a regular contributor to Hyperallergic.

[theo-westenberger]

My Experience as an Anonymous Egg Donor

Contributed by Jennifer L. Carolin, May 2017

My decade long obsession with egg donation was initiated by my own experience donating my eggs to a fertility clinic. I found the application through an ad on Craigslist. “Artistic types wanted” it advertised, under freelance gigs, and the rabbit hole lay at my feet. A lovely website, a collage of pinks and peaches, flowers, healthy pregnant women and smiling babies, led me to the donor application button, and from there I proceeded to list, in no fewer than twenty-five pages, my  height, weight, eye color, skin color, hair color, medical history and physical attributes. As well as that of my family members on both sides of the family, all the way back to my great-grandparents. I called my mother, 

“What was great grandma’s hair color before it was blue?” I asked. 

“What are you doing now?” she replied.

Image courtesy the artist

The donation process was the most intensely one sided job application I’ve ever undertaken. Professions aren’t supposed to ask overtly for your dreams and aspirations, your five and ten-year plan for the future, your childhood experience or family dynamic, or if you plan on raising your own family. Here, however, it was all laid out in short answer essay form.I found myself second guessing my responses. Would I be more attractive if I professed a desire to have my own children? Or was my independent nature a bigger turn on? It was an online dating profile and psychological evaluation all rolled up into one. Later came the actual evaluation with a psychiatrist on the Upper West Side, an hour of awkward professions of philanthropic intent tempered by the assumption that yes, I had answered the ad because I needed the money. 

 I saved the needles. To donate is to undertake an incredible commitment of time and responsibility, and the amount of medical paraphernalia that I had begun to accumulate was astounding. In the talks I’ve given about donating, I’ve brought the needles and vials with me and explained the process of mixing and injecting, as it was explained to me by the nurses. The injections are intramuscular, morning and evening, in the stomach, and I videotaped the ritual and documented the resulting bruising, bloating, and breast swelling. Every other day I visited the clinic for bloodwork and an ultrasound, my first, in which I watched the black dots on the screen grow in size. The doctor was incredibly kind, he remembered small details about my life and asked me about my interests. I looked at pictures on the wall of smiling babies and wondered about my own eggs, fertilized, implanted, brought to term and born by a woman I would never meet.

 I donated five times. With between 12 and 18 eggs harvested during each retrieval, a modest estimate places the number donated for potential fertilization at 60. Naturally, I was curious as to what my contribution to the child’s genetic makeup would be. Being the “artistic” type, I started drawing their portraits, melding my DNA with the DNA of the potential father —a reversal of the online dating game I had participated in with my eggs. I rolled the dice with race, ethnicity, height, weight, build, athletic and artistic inclinations, eye and hair color, and temperament. Working with a master printer, I translated the portraits into etchings, lithography and silkscreen prints. The printed image has allowed for an exploration of variations on the original. I altered each image by hand to provide for a new portrait, while maintaining familial similarity among sets.

 I also wrote letters to the portraits, elaborations on the short answer essays I had composed for the application; brief, warm, personal anecdotes to ghosts. I had always checked the box on the application allowing the child to contact me upon adulthood, and I saw no reason why a letter expressing interest in that life should not be a part of the time capsule of this project. I thought of the work I was doing as a time capsule because it captured a moment in time in which I was imagining the life that might result. My approximations will exist as truth until the time capsule is opened, figuratively, by contact with the young adult, and then the project will take its place as the fiction it always was.

 The clinic’s expectation of discretion irked me endlessly, because I had so many questions. Camaraderie among donors was certainly discouraged, we sat side by side in the waiting room, flipping through fashion magazines, and yet we never spoke to each other. What attracts women to these sites? Why make the choice to donate? What does the exhaustive nature of the application contribute to the experience of the donation? Do the reasons for donating ever cease to be worth the physical and mental sacrifices the process demands? Finally, donors, do you wonder, as I did? Do you look at the faces of the children with their nannies on the upper east side, and look for a resemblance? 

 The anonymity of the recipient has been an even greater test on my psyche, more so than the exhaustive application, and more so than the physical commitment of the injections. Cloaked in secrecy were these goddesses of wealth and position, of whom the clinic encouraged the image of ultimate maternal beneficence. On the day of my retrieval, groggy from the sedative and sore from the procedure, eager to go home and crawl into bed, I was made to wait in the examining room, as my recipient had come into the clinic unannounced and was occupying the reception area. It was entirely taboo that we should pass each other casually. 

 Several years after donating, I organized a panel discussion to coincide with an exhibition of these portraits. The panel gathered together experts and other donors, creating a platform for discussion and giving voice to an undiscussed topic. 

 Visit the project here

The First Communion. Image courtesy the artist.  

Jenny Carolin received her MFA in Painting from Syracuse University, and her BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design.  Carolin’s strong technical training in the traditions of painting and drawing are paired a performance art practice and self-deprecating humor which focuses on characters acting out questions of identity and gender roles. Carolin is a co-founder of the Mudhouse Residency in Agios Ioannis, Crete, and the Director of Shoestring Press Studio in Brooklyn, New York.

[theo-westenberger]

Robert Smithson’s Virgin

Contributed by Shelby Shaw, May 2017

Photograph of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty by David Maisel (1970), Holt Smithson Foundation.

I think of Robert Smithson, with whom I was once in love. In a full theater where I had sat in the center of the elevated seating, alone except for the older couples flanking me on either side, I wept openly at the end of the film as the screen read a single line about Smithson’s plane tragically crashing in 1973. He had been surveying the site of his then-current project, Amarillo Ramp, when the plane had met earth. Of three passengers — Smithson, a photographer, and their pilot — none survived.

Amarillo Ramp is a curve of earth rising up from the ground to eight feet overhead. Originally it was submerged in a man-made lake, but as that has dried up, Amarillo Ramp is now eroding away. When an elevation slowly degrades, it progresses in reverse: it cannot hold onto pride nor growth, it does not continue and it does not remain. An earthwork eroding is a survivor in hospice.

Erosion is the slowest form of loss. It is not the instantaneous collision of plane and land, but the silent, steady spread of cancer. Erosion is gradual. Gradual is cumulative. It becomes. But come is not the root of cumulative. Eros is not the root of erosion.

I do not desire to visit the site of the death of the man with whom I had fallen in love. The location of Amarillo Ramp, while conserved by its indexical place among land art and earthworks, is really only mortal. The annual rainfall in the area is increasing, yet somehow paradoxically the soil is drier as temperatures also increase on average. Rain directly erodes the soil; storms are becoming more violent overall. Sea levels rise yearly so the coastlines keep sinking. Inland flooding is becoming more problematic. The monument of Amarillo Ramp is a reminder of Smithson’s early death, or perhaps, to the angry, a scapegoat. Is it less a work of tragic art and more a memorial tombstone? Nature’s slow destruction of Amarillo Ramp mocks Smithson’s own decay from once having been a mortal man.

Sketch of Amarillo Ramp by Robert Smithson (1973), James Cohan Gallery. 

Photograph of completed Amarillo Ramp (1974).

With help from Richard Serra, Smithson’s widow Nancy Holt finished Amarillo Ramp in Bob’s stead. Yes, I fell in love with a man who had a wife. I fell in love with a man who had a widow because the man was dead by the time I came to know him.

But when Smithson came into my life I had recently fallen for another man — a man who was living and also in love with Smithson. In our triangle, I was the virgin who couldn’t get close enough. I was the other woman who could not consummate with the land. I was swimming to an island that turned out to be mirage.

The man who lived told me about Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. He had not been there once, but thrice. You should go, he had said. I responded that I would like that very much; I flirted with him about  the idea of a road trip. The living man did not offer to take me.

I became fixated on visiting Spiral Jetty for two reasons: as a devotional act for Smithson, and in defiance of the living man. I want to lay my body on the jetty Smithson created, before it disappears, like trying to seduce someone as they are putting on their coat to leave.

But Spiral Jetty is leaving me already. And Smithson is still dead.

Utah’s Great Salt Lake is home to a vast assortment of various halophilic microorganisms, beings that proliferate in environments high in sodium chloride. Halophiles give themselves away by actively changing their pigments, lighting up bodies of water in rich Technicolor. Their presence indicates metabolic performances such as fermentation, sulfide oxidation, sulfate reduction, denitrification, and iron reduction. Halophiles can create their own protection against the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

The Great Salt Lake is depleting from evaporation caused by rising temperatures and is shrinking into an unreplenishable deficit. Like Amarillo Ramp, left to erode by the negligence of the elements, Spiral Jetty is left high and dry by a megadrought affecting the whole of the western United States. As temperatures increase, moisture decreases. Water lost is not expected to return to the Great Salt Lake, which is a terminal basin receiving its body from four major tributaries.

Originally blood-red when conceived in 1970, Spiral Jetty is now a swirl of black rocks, encrusted in white saline residue that no halophiles can paint over nor protect. The sun, bearing down on the exposed spiral with increasing violence, will bleach it white until the whole area is indiscernible, unnoticeable.

The living man I loved was blasé about Spiral Jetty. His presence denoted a quiet gloating about art and taste: I’ve been there before, his reclining body seemed to say to me. He shifted me from admirer to philistine, from fervently curious to inexperienced and naïve. The living man I loved thought he knew everything already, but in reality he was only ever talk. Talk is not an earthly element. It does not erode and instead is forgotten.

Death occurs once when your life ends, and then occurs a second time when people stop talking about you.

Robert Smithson (1969), Jack Robinson Archives.

With every recall of a memory there is a degradation of the quality and truthfulness. The human memory is less hard drive, more malware. Eventually we end up curating what exists in our interiors, discarding what is not so valuable.

The root of erosion is not the misleadingly obvious eros, as in Eros the god of erotic love, the alternative Cupid more carnal than cherubic; or eros, used to refer to a sensual desire or an erotic relationship. Love is to receive another’s stimuli in a reflex of preference and priority. Love, by its endless mutations, is a matter of taste. It is both the object and the subjection. It cannot be reversed, but it can change. It is immaterial but does not always disappear.

Erosion comes to us via French from the Latin erosio, conjugated from the verb erodere - or in English, to wear or gnaw away. To be eroded, then, is simply to be used. To be eroded is to be at the mercy of another who knows no satisfaction. To be eroded is not to be submissive, but to be dismissed - little by little, and permanently removed.

Erosion is a destruction of matter. It is a violence that cannot erase its own trauma. We are not supposed to dwell on irreversible losses, but instead we are encouraged to adopt methods of accepting change.

I found myself alone after the living man I loved had decided I was immaterial. He had said that the memory of us had hit him then with too much regret. The next morning, as I had been planning to do, I drove hours to spend the summer in what became five months of disconnected isolation. I listened to Simon & Garfunkel on repeat in the car, I brought with me books on Smithson and the land and sea. But I had become a memory recalled too often, corrupted with use by the living man who I had loved. He used me to save himself, so I eroded my memory of him: little by little, but permanently removed. It is not easy to melt a glacier taken for granted. And an island never cries.

Shelby Shaw is a writer in New York and Managing Editor of the art and literary journal Storyfile.

[theo-westenberger]

Art, Air, and Glass

Contributed by Celeste Wilson, May 2017

There is often a question about the necessary lung capacity. Beginners are concerned their breath will not be adequate when in truth it has nothing to do with the strength of their lungs and everything to do with the temperature of the material. However, breath is the most effective tool; the use of air is central to the making.

Air and breath, of course, are different things, though breath is not possible without air. A breath can refer to the action - the inhale or exhale-  but it can also refer to the air itself. To ‘see your breath’ on a cold day, is to notice and name the air. The word means both things, sometimes at the same time.

Central to our existence and yet only remembered in scarcity or when made visible, air is one of our rulers. As we grow as a species and influence our environment, we also change our atmosphere and our air. Many artists have used air as a subject and as a material. Marcel DuChamp purchased a sealed glass ampoule in Paris in 1919 and titled it 50 cc of Paris Air, highlighting the contents of the vessel rather than the glass itself. Knowing that air would be trapped and kept as an artifact of early 20th century is charming and clever; and yet there are many other sealed vessels, containing air from all over the world, from thousands of years before DuChamp.

50 cc of Paris Air, by Marcel DuChamp

As the demands of our population exponentially change our planet, clean air becomes an issue. In 2014, Chinese artist Liang Kegang brought a glass jar filled with air from Provence, France, back to his home in China and sold it as artwork to make a point and as a nod to DuChamp. Companies from around the world now send thousands of bottles of clean air to customers in China. In some sense, they are sending empty bottles, but in another they are sending a life sustaining material. Air can be both; “empty” actually means filled with air.

Glass is a particularly perfect material to contain air. Impermeable and transparent, it can be permanently sealed and hold its contents forever. Unless, of course, in the case of 50cc of Paris Air, the vessel is broken and the air escapes and instantly and invisibly mixes with the outside air.  One might argue that artwork has been completely and irreparably destroyed, though it has been restored and is still exhibited. Glass vessels are also made with air, or more specifically, with breath. To make a vessel, glass must be gathered onto the end of a pipe and shaped. Then air is forced into the solid mass, creating a bubble. This bubble grows and grows with the correct heat and the exhales of the blower. If the bubble is sealed off, it could be argued the air inside the glass is actually different than the air outside; as an exhale contains more carbon dioxide than an inhale.

Image by Nate McGarigal

Though ever present, we only notice the air when it is visible in some more recognizable way. A soap bubble is a clear indication of its presence, and the barrier between inside and outside can be manipulated. If that bubble were to pop and disappear or to ‘vanish into thin air,’ it is only the barrier that is lost; the air remains, by all means, present. To see the polluted, gray, human-influenced air is to recognize something previously invisible. This change also calls for an explanation and a solution. We must work to make it remain invisible, so that we can continue to not see it, to use it to make vessels, to believe in empty containers and to turn air into breath.

Celeste Wilson is an artist based in Ridgewood, NY.

[theo-westenberger]

Starting a Band Later in Life

Contributed by Amy Fung-yi Lee, 2017

Some role models, from top-right counterclockwise: Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs (photo by Max Knies), Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead (photo by Sebastian Mlynarski), Satomi Matsuzaki of Deerhoof (photo courtesy of band’s Facebook), and my older sister Angela Lee.

I will never understand hippie culture from the inside; I understand it in relation to myself, noticing the hooks it has planted in Asian foods and healing methods. When I was 18, a good friend of mine, who was kind of a hippie, told me I was a hipster. I’d never heard the word; I learned what it meant to be a hipster in the years that followed as I explored music.

Hippies were around with classic rock. To me, those classic rockers were the progenitors to the guys who “just happened” to play guitar as soon as puberty hit. These boys seemed to have a shared knowledge of American music history, a history I didn’t know how to access. So, after leaving home, I studied American rock bands like any other academic subject—using such primary sources as the Internet, LimeWire, Amoeba Music on Haight Street in San Francisco, and Rolling Stone magazine. I wanted to appear that I, also,  “just happened” to know all the basics, before moving onto Pitchfork.

As a kid, I listened to the Taiwanese Karaoke tunes my parents sang to the TV. There was the occasional English hit. “Unchained Melody” was the main American song choice with my parents’ friends, and I watched the sing-along videos for “Copacabana” and “Homeward Bound” over and over at home. The Laser Disc companies used their rights to narrate Elvis’ “Unchained Melody” with a sort of ordinary-looking brown river that didn’t seem to be flowing to the sea at all, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” to a slow-motion, low-budget picture of a woman rolling around on a bed, smiling up at the camera. Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” was a mysterious gem in those discs, because it was contemporary. This was the late 80s and early 90s, baby!

In my perhaps distorted memory, laser discs are one of the three things my parents would drive us into NYC Chinatown from New Jersey for. The other two things were Chinese vases (never to hold plants, always clean), and dried sea cucumber. Once a month they went to their KTV social, which rotated between houses of the giant group of friends they had who came to the US from Taiwan around the same time as them. I went with them most of the time, weirdly attached in this way, often falling asleep on one of the chairs lining the basement walls. The Karaoke setups were usually in the basement. These overseas oldies are how I got familiar with pop music before I got to 5th grade and we were all rocked by Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill.

I had a few forays into branching out as a child. The most significant was probably in 5th grade (so I remember), when we got to choose an instrument to play at school. I already was playing the piano at home. “No no, no brass.” Can’t even figure out how to make a noise on them. My older sister had chosen clarinet to go with her piano-playing. What a trailblazer she is!

I was a little skeptical about playing the violin, so instead I chose the viola. I felt like a little bit of an Asian rebel. It’s just a touch different. It was a little big for my body. When you listen to an orchestra play, you kind of have to be a viola player to pick it out. It’s that smooth, middle air, creamy stuff that swims below and within the other voices. The solo parts for viola are usually easier than those for the violin. Viola players don’t have to be virtuosos, I’ve heard some say. But some disagree, feel offended, or we don’t talk about it. Anyway, viola players rock.

After leaving home at 18, I always wanted to be in a band. In early years the desire took shape through the visual models I came across: one of those rad girl bassists who are in guy bands, or a slammin’ Asian girl who leads like Karen O in Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Blonde Redhead’s lead singer Kazu Makino, or Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki.

That era has passed. I’m 32 and people started that stuff like a decade and a half ago.

This New Year’s Eve’s Eve, I put my foot down and, partly because I needed a new social track that might engulf me, decided to start the band. I found a few posts with potential on Craigslist. I thought, “This is totally going to work! You already found people!” One of them was more interested in making punk music than I was, but hey, I feel like there’s a lot of overlap between everything anyhow, right? Blending’s cool!

I wrote excited, rambling emails to those two Craigslist posters. I was already pretty sure they would be my future chosen band families. I said things like, “I’ve never actually been in a band,” and “I don’t play any of the ‘band’ instruments but I’ve dabbled a bit in guitar and bass! I’m a super fast learner. And super creative!” They never wrote back.  

The truth is, I have been afraid to use my own experiences to make my own music. I also haven’t searched for bandmates I think are like me, so that I feel comfortable being myself. Instead, I’ve bought so much into what I think being an American band should look like, that I’ve erased my own voice. In those emails, I was asking people in the establishment to adopt me into the system.

I’m 32 and finally, I feel grown enough to not let my perception of my own identity get in my own way. I was raised by engineers and not artists. I learned piano, Karaoke, and Homeward Bound (KTV, not Simon & Garfunkel style) instead of the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, or whatever I’ve made it up in my head is what all those people who get it got fed as babies. I’m excited to learn the cello. It’s a family member with the stringed things I do know, and one of my favorite instruments ever. For now, I’m going to write a bunch of songs – who knows what genre – and figure out how to make an album. Then, maybe, if it’s really musically meant to be, I’ll join a band.

Amy Fung-yi Lee makes visual art about identity and human relationships, using landscape as a storytelling device. She works in many mediums, including painting, drawing, and video. She is currently incorporating songwriting into her creative practice. Lee lives in Brooklyn, New York.

[theo-westenberger]

The “Now More Than Ever” Epidemic

Contributed by Ayden LeRoux, 2017

“Now more than ever” we murmur under our breath. “Now more than ever” the op-eds glow from the screens of computers. Now more than ever the arts! Now more than ever DIY spaces! Now more than ever female photographers! Now more than ever self-care! Now more than ever scientists must tweet! Now more than ever state constitutions matter!

These rallying cries are good and true, and yet the phrase seems to be the only response we can muster to justify all the things we love but perhaps didn’t believe were truly essential before the 2016 presidential election. While the catch-all phrase offers a sense of dire necessity, underneath it indicates how dispensable we once saw the things we attach to that phrase now. Now that there is urgency, we’re serving up prescriptions like doctors.  “Now more than ever” is a cop out, a phrase that marks just how passive we have been, how permissive we’ve been, how we didn’t know how to claim all that we value until now. Now more than ever we are realizing our cowardice. Not to mention, we’ve unwittingly adopted one of Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign slogans.

If you google “Now more than ever” a stream of headlines come up nearly all of them from January 2017. We latched on to this phrase in hopes it would convey the real gravity of the situation, as if every headline was offering a savior, the secret antidote to the next four years. The truth is this is reductive, and offering up why we need Carl Sagan or documentaries now more than ever is putting too much emphasis on the power of just one thing. We need all of these things, yes, but mostly we need more nuance. If we are to sustain ourselves while resisting a demagogue who wields alternative facts, we all need to be our own answer to this problem. No one sector will solve it.

The truth is these things we claim to need now more than ever have been important all along, we just didn’t see how crucial they were until they were threatened. The phrase “now more than ever” has been exhausted and sapped of its potency in the months since November. We should have known better that things like the arts, journalistic commitment to facts, and science about global warming are critical, essential even, before their government budgets got cut or their departments silenced. It feels extreme now as things hang in the balance, but remember that the ACLU and Planned Parenthood and a strong EPA and the generosity of the NEA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were always necessary. Ignoring their importance, or taking them for granted, has meant that we’ve been shortchanging them of necessary support for years. While we are stunned that the things so beloved to us have been compromised, we musn’t become hamstrung.

This one phrase “now more than ever” is proof that our nation has been like Sleeping Beauty. And the truth of the matter is that the so-called kiss of the anyone else who might have occupied the White House would not have been powerful enough to wake us, to alert us to how fragile the existence of the things we believe in is. A kiss would have kept us asleep; a kiss would have only further sedated us.

Ayden LeRoux is an artist, writer, and educator whose work has been exhibited internationally. Her most recent book is Odyssey Works, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2016. Her recent essay, “Matryoshka Doll: On (Be)coming and (Be)longing,” is also on the Theo Westenberger blog.

[theo-westenberger]

Moving In, an essay on returning to my body after helping my mother leave hers

Contributed by Christy Hartman, 2017

Photo by Rachel Hamburg

I remember my first bee sting. I was stung mid-air as a chorus of lifeguards blew their whistles signaling the end of break. The bee got stuck between my toes, freaked out and stung me. It happened all at once. The jumping and falling, the shrill whistle, hot skin hitting cold water and burning needle-like pain. I remember the stinger stayed between my toes and only came out when someone dug it out with a needle. It could only have been her, my mother. When my mom told me that the cancer in her breasts had spread to her lungs, we spent hours on the phone pipe-dreaming. Should we buy one house or two houses in the same town? We both really value independence, but she wanted to live close enough to spend time with my kids. The kids she was hoping to live long enough to meet. She dictated what features she would want in her new car: reliable, colorful, absolutely no brown interior. I began spending hours on craigslist trying to find the perfect everything. 

Mom’s Gloves

One day, without much warning, she bought a plane ticket and I had to tell my  housemates that my mother and her oxygen machine would be crashing indefinitely in my room in our queerdo house. I wasn’t ready, but she said her body told her not to wait. In the emergency room on the day she moved to California, the doctor showed us her x-rays. Her cancer was stage 4. After hearing the extent of her diagnosis, she said in jet-lagged, crestfallen disbelief, “Wow- so-  this is it?”

I have a magnet on my refrigerator. It is a little girl looking out at the ocean. That world is hopeful, composed. It is dark outside but the stars are shining. Nobody can see her face. She is far away, reflecting the seemingly endless horizon. At night in our new house, two small rooms rented from a friend, I would enter her room. My mom would roll onto her belly and pull her shirt up for me to rub frankincense on her back. This time felt intimate, sacred. Often the window would be open and cool air and cricket music joined us. I warmed my hands with my mouth before making contact with her skin, rubbing sweeping circles over her lungs and the enlarged lymph nodes under her armpits. I was afraid of touching her more intimately but I knew the day was coming when it would be necessary. I felt afraid that I would make her uncomfortable because I was uncomfortable. When her breathing and mobility got worse, I sat down and wrote what kind of experience I wanted my mom to have.  I was determined to give her a good death. I needed something short and simple to guide me. A mantra for my frayed heart. Dignity, without shame.

Rise. Check on her. Short conversation. Prepare incredibly detailed Budwig diet breakfast. Deliver. More conversation. Meds. Breakfast for me. Help her change clothes. Help her move downstairs. Adjust oxygen. More conversation on the staircase. Find a movie for her to watch. Make lunch. Adjust oxygen. Get something for her from upstairs. Continue making lunch. Get something else from upstairs. Deliver lunch. She requests Chipotle instead. Dignity, without shame. Adjust oxygen. Get something else from upstairs. Text your friend, forget to hit send. Help her to the bathroom. Conversation on the stairwell, she can’t go any further. Deliver leftover Chipotle to her on the stairs. Bring her a paper towel. Bring her a pillow. Read her Pema Chodron. Get myself dressed. Breathe. She is resting in the stairwell, staring up at the ceiling. Go to the kitchen and wash dishes. Notice there is a world outside. The sight of the sky is shocking. Feel ashamed that my mother is convalescing in the stairwell. Maybe people with money don't die like this. I notice the farmer’s tan on her pale feet, her heels weathered from a summer of gardening. Toes still painted salmon pink. She liked to make the extra effort to keep her nails painted just in case she met someone. She was still hoping someone would fall in love with her. Eat some food. It has no flavor. She wants some fruit and asks for three strawberries. Bring her three strawberries. She has been a grateful and gracious patient and she makes me feel like I won the World Series when she sees the plump red fruit. Wonder how long I can do to this. Never allow that thought to land. 

I see my arms outstretched and I feel like the ends of myself are far away.

They're touching stars.

Only they don't warm me.

They burn me. 

I imagine I am made of paper.

And when I hug myself I ignite. 

My mother no longer needs her favorite underwear. I don't know what to do with them. They make me emotional. I photograph them and put them in the garbage can. The one by the curb, so I won't fish them back out. I hear them in there whimpering that night. Used to love and gentle touch, now surrounded by coffee grounds and cat shit.

She spends her second to last night on Earth throwing up strawberries. I alternate between comforting her and sleeping. Her breathing becomes loud, animal. She is suffering and I am tired. In the morning I feel ashamed when I see that the oxygen tubes have slid part-way off her nose and the tip of her nose has turned blue. Around 10AM, our hospice nurse John arrives. He gives me a look and we leave the room. John tells me that she probably isn’t going to communicate with us again. I nod. We re-enter the room and give her a full body massage with frankincense and grapeseed oil. John tucks her shirt down from where it has bunched up around her ribs. He lifts up her torso and gently massages her back. “Do you like that Elise?” He asks turning his face towards hers. Her eyes are closed. She smiles. “Yeah. I like that.” They are her last words.  

After she stops breathing, I climb into bed with her, still holding her hand and go to sleep. When I wake up the sun has come up and her body is much cooler. Her jaw has relaxed and her eyes are open. She looks dreamy and at ease. I take off her clothes and wash her whole body with a wash cloth. I decide to dress her in blue silk pajamas. I put on her makeup, which seems silly, but it also seems silly not to do it right one last time. I arrange her hands over her abdomen and straighten the legs of her pajama pants. When everything feels done I close the door and wait for the men who will come and take her. I spend much of the first year after her death wondering when my body will fail. I begin touching my breasts for lumps. Rubbing them. Admiring them. I decide to appreciate them while I still have them. I sign up for a burlesque class. It feels obscene to take a class on strip tease so close to my mother’s death. But I do it anyway. I feel that I have nothing left to lose, therefore I = unstoppable. I join half a dozen other women in a cold warehouse in rainy autumnal San Francisco and learn the correct way to apply carpet tape to pasties. When our class performs a couple months later, my mind goes blank I forget the moves, my body totally numb. I am smiling but it is pasted on, like the pink cardboard things on my nipples. I block out those four and a half minutes on stage, but the warmth from the well-seasoned women afterwards makes me feel connected. They welcome us to their ranks, as one naked organism.

I decide to start treating myself the way I wanted my dying mother to be treated. Dignity, without shame.  I decide to stand taller, grounded in the earth, shoulders back, glitter-covered breasts held high. A year later I start seeing a somatic therapist. I tell her that my body is still mostly just a human meat carriage that I drive around. I recently learned the word people use for this: disassociation. Isn't that what everybody does? No. You learned this to survive.   Much of my softening happens in the bathtub. Looking down the length of my nakedness, I can’t help but see my mother's body. Her white abdomen and tan legs jutting out. I imagine her farmer’s tan on my feet.  I am trying to take care of myself. My right nipple hurt this morning, throbbed when pushed, tender far-away cries. I soak it in salt water, allowing the solution to enter and exit the  piercing like water at a cave entrance. And usually I am a bit rougher, but this time I am gentle, merely swishing the ceramic cup suctioned over my breast.

Mom’s Faves

Christy Hartman is an artist who lives in Oakland, CA. She studied at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and overcame her fear of the dark at the age of 28.