Sunday, June 25, 2017

winds

As the stars and gasses were eating each other,
the winds learned from their style

Wherever they went, they founded stars of wind,
cities with children
and dogs of wind playing in the streets

At the births, weddings, and festivals of the
galaxies, the youngest winds presented themselves
as boys and girls at the same time

In the pastures of the sky
they made love with the stars

Some angels called to them,
but they paid them no mind at all

Just as well, some galaxies that wanted to marry them
caressed and gave them food

Tiger gasses with masks traveled the universes
devouring the winds

To keep from crying, the winds learned to whistle

After all the madness and adventures,
one wind went to earth

Cows, corn, stones,
a child’s hair
the wind
had no
favorites

Like King Midas
but different, he made
things talk
wherever he went

In the schoolyard
the sun and the wind fought
over who could take off
people’s clothing

On earth, mountains, trees, and people
lay down deflated, waiting for the wind

Thanks to the wind
cooking day and night,
there were formed
the limbs of trees
and young women’s hips

On Sunday afternoons
the wind would play soccer
with candy wrappers

There were winds circling
around the houses,
waiting for someone to give them
something to eat

I don’t remember them all
but there was one wind that startled us
with sticks and branches in the pathways

(There were times when I
myself behaved
like the wind)

When we rode our bikes
it would caress us with its breeze
and we believed that this
is how life would always be

In my grandparents’ house
the wind and I got up
early to milk the cows

In Nenutz, the winds that were beating against the ocean’s belly for two days, said they only wanted vengeance for the humiliations of a god that nobody remembered.

In the lands of Yanayako
the only thing that interposes between the hunters
and the deer is the wind

But the hunters, in bringing home
meat for their relatives, don’t care if they kill the wind

Knowing that the volcano was going to destroy the town of Nimrod, the wind went about the conversations in the market. Nobody listened but the dogs, some goats, and their owners. They ran to the hills and from there, in the company of the wind, they mourned. The cries of those pleading for rescue were left in the mud, where neither the wind nor God could help them.

The winds that lived with the pirates during the 17th and 18th centuries were their accomplices. The way the drove their ships, won battles, sacked cities, and cut the arms from children. Afterwards, as they dried the mothers’ tears, the winds that had participated pretended it wasn’t them.

In secret, some women in Scotland raised winds in red, green, and purple bottles to sell them to sailors who would release them on their voyages through dangerous routes. The red bottle contained favorable winds, the green, the strongest ones, the third, winds that carried messages to their families.

What happened to the wind that didn’t bring the rain that we had been promised this afternoon? Might it have gone to galaxies where you don’t pay power or water? Or playing pool? Is it stuck in traffic?

Gabriel was the name of a wind that, one Valentines day, found himself with a very fine box. Gabriel, bound madly by the laws of his love, never left the box in all his life. The perfumes of other boxes, the advice of his friends, of his family, and so on, came to nothing.

The wind that blows and I looked at each other through the little window of the microwave for a few seconds while it heated my sandwich for lunch.

It’s not true that
the wind’s
problems
and mine
are different

After so much time in cities, the wind can’t help feeling like the people

One morning as I went about discouraged, the wind told me he didn’t want to do anything either

I remember when a friend drowned,
we felt the wind moan

It came and went down the hallways
of the house as though it wanted to tell us

We cried so much while we buried him
and we asked the wind to keep
blowing for us

For us to be such good friends,
in the past the wind and I
must have eaten guavas
and hung out together

Where could it be now, the wind that came to us
from the trees while we kissed
in front of the chickens on the patio?

Wind and spirit, as though they were not,
are something…

Without the wind’s friendship,
beautiful words and birds
would be stones in the encyclopedias

If it weren’t for its breath
the leaves of the bamboo grove
would stay as silent
as posts

Some day, just like a kite
with its string cut, my spirit
will go off with the wind

This way it will be able to visit all
the places we saw in the movies

Newly arrived in a city, without work and
without friends, it came to tell me
not to worry

One day as I went out for a date with a
woman I didn’t know, it touched
me on the shoulder: “Hello, slow down”

For everything it does
the wind doesn’t
charge us
a single cent

In the festivals of the universe
they honor the sun, the earth
and the moon. They don’t
mention the wind

It’s not the wind’s fault
that in cities of stone
built a thousand years ago
people die of heat

In forest fires
it is not the winds who
who fan the flames
but wine and the songs
sung miles away

If a wind isn’t happy
nobody else can be

A wind that began
as a friend and kissing the earth
now attacks it like an animal

Limbs broken from the trees and houses
upside down are the wind’s worst deeds

If the wind can do what it did
to this town, it must be
more powerful than God

The winds that went about
toppling cities for the Maccabees
will return the day we least expect it

It’s difficult to prevent a wind
that has been mistreated as a child
from becoming a hurricane

When a wind wakes us up
we should ask him what’s the matter

If he comes to knock
on our door
he could be sad

he could have a child
who is sick or want
to tell us something

Yesterday a beast against people and
houses. Today playing with some
little flowers in the garden

To show us that
he’s not an animal, the
wind plays the flute
in a very special way

Without teeth or claws,
the wind is without a doubt a
very different kind of beast

In their own republics the winds do what they want
In the plazas they make love standing up or sitting
The leaves that admire them applaud and toast their health
The panes of some windows simply envy them

For sweet words and pollen
the wind gave its best thought

Even when it says nothing, the wind’s words are lovely

The birds’ wings
the shape of your lips
were once
conceived by the wind

So that it feels better,
let’s tell it that it is more important than the sun,
the moon and the stars

Unlike the moon and the sun, the wind never sets

It’s a disgrace that there are still people who slander and curse the wind
(Don’t they realize that the wind is the first to know it?)

There has still never been
born an artist capable
of making a
wind monument

People joke
but in the past they would listen
to its advice and even trusted it
with their ashes

This wind is all we have

You cannot ask for more

Every New Year the wind raises its cup and stays another year

Like the taxis of New York, there will always be a wind making the rounds there

To keep it happy, we should always give it the best hay and oats as though it were a horse

Nobody breathes the same wind twice

The wind neither is created nor destroyed, it merely changes voices

The next time we find each other in the road, the wind and I, we will have different names

Everything we say about the wind, the wind could say it much better

. . . 


Poems translated from Juan Carlos Galeano’s Historias del viento (2013)



Images from Detroit Institute of Arts:

Mask of Dsonaqua (1940), Willie Seaweed

Sea Boots (1976), Andrew Wyeth

House Ornament (1927), Dick Price
House Ornament (~1880), Unknown Artist

Eastern Sioux and Iowa War Clubs (1835~1840)

Cotopaxi (1862), Frederic Edwin Church

Tripod Vessel with Slab Legs (300~600)

Thalassa (2011), Caledonia Curry

Cycles (1985), Norval Morrisseau

The Moods of Time: Evening (1938), Paul Manship


Friday, June 02, 2017

Matter out of Place



When traveling to install his next exhibition, photographer Alejandro Durán starts by checking suitcases full of still-sandy plastic garbage from over 40 countries, all washed up on just one particular beach on the windward side of the Yucatán. Among the collection, for example, there’s a red flyswatter advertising an insurance company in Warsaw, Indiana, still in unsettlingly good condition. Among other things, Durán is reminding us that when these things appear to leave our hands and homes, there is no “away.”



All this plastic, along with Durán’s large scale photos, went up at the Granary Art Center earlier this summer. The installation and opening coincided with the provincial bustle, deep-fryer haze, and cheap disposable plastic toys, dishes, and cutlery of Ephraim’s Scandinavia Days festival taking place on the same block that same weekend. If we define trash as “matter out of place,” all this seemed at once wonderfully strange and foreign, even exotic, and at the same time uncannily right at home.











The first morning of the install, I took Alejandro on a quick trash tour and photo shoot in the piñon-juniper forests of Black Hill, just east of town. The standard rural rubbish: burned-out mattresses and other furniture; shot-up TVs and other appliances; the bodies of deer, elk, sheep, dogs, and other creatures, matted in miasmic heaps of fur, teeth, and bones. Also, and probably most striking, are the great big knotted bundles of colorful plastic baling twine, dumped in ditches at the edge of alfalfa fields. How compelling he found all this, or how much he was just indulging me, he was too kind and gracious for me to really know, but he did seem to like the neon-orange-on-green contrasts of the baling twine half-overgrown in junegrass. Lots of photos there. (Incidentally, junegrass, sort of like trash, occurs abundantly on every continent and most islands on the planet except, unlike trash, Antarctica.)

from the show statement:

“Washed Up is an environmental installation and photography project that transforms the international debris washing up on Mexico's Caribbean coast into aesthetic yet disquieting works.

“Over the course of this project Durán has identified plastic waste from fifty-eight nations and territories on six continents that have washed ashore along the coast of Sian Ka'an, Mexico's largest federally protected reserve and an UNESCO World Heritage site. He uses this international debris to create color-based, site-specific sculptures that conflate the hand of man and nature. At times he distributes the objects the way the waves would; at other times, the plastic mimics algae, roots, rivers, or fruit, reflecting the infiltration of plastics into the natural environment.

“More than creating a surreal or fantastical landscape, these installations mirror the reality of our current environmental predicament. The resulting photo series depicts a new form of colonization by consumerism, where even undeveloped land is not safe from the far-reaching impact of our culture of disposable products. The alchemy of Washed Up lies not only in transforming a trashed landscape, but in the project’s potential to raise awareness and change our relationship to consumption and waste.”





The ubiquitous accumulation and, in turns sublime, in turns ghastly scale and permanence of (hu)man-made things now seems a definitive characteristic of our moment and era, one that our aesthetics are still struggling to catch up with. (Lucky for us all, this blog isn’t the kind of place for one to hold fourth on things like late capitalism and “zeitgeists,” or we might all be in for a real jeremiad.) But here are a couple more illustrations of the above fact:


“Shrouded in trash bags, the men of El Derramadero walked down from their native mountain and returned three days later pulling a wagon filled with slabs of plastic. Once in El Derramadero, the wagon collapsed and was thrown into the fire pit where they melted the plastic, shaping it into cutting shanks for butchering and forming forks and spoons, letting them cool before sliding them into their utensil trays. They cleared the clumps of mud where their old adobes used to stand and molded igloos complete with plastic hinges. But although the people of el Derramadero were happy for having triumphed over their town’s name, Julieta did not want to live in a town made from melted plastic.”

Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (2005)


“The Matacão, scientists asserted, had been formed for the most part within the last century, paralleling the development of the more common forms of plastic, polyurethane and styrofoam. Enormous landfills of nonbiodegradable material buried under virtually every populated part of the Earth had undergone tremendous pressure, pushed ever farther into the lower layers of the Earth’s mantle. The liquid deposits of the molten mass had been squeezed through underground veins to virgin areas across the earth. The Amazon Forest, being one of the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty.”


Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990)


Also, for good measure, a couple stills from Rian Brown and Geoff Pingree’s Blue Desert – Towards Antarctica.






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