“A place where the dead exert themselves and are loquacious.”

There’s that way, in a good lecture, a phrase or line will surface to capture your attention before sinking back into the texture of the whole. In the midst of Marina Zurkow’s marvelous lecture at Rice, “Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems,” the phrase was this: “a place where the dead exert themselves and are loquacious.”

But what was she talking about might surprise you: plastic. The loquacious dead, sure. But loquacious plastics?

Zurkow discussed a recent visit to the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY festival in May 2013. Here’s a link. She set up a booth offering a free service: petrochemical self-assessment. How much plastic do you carry on your person? After a 15 minute examination of your person and possessions, you might receive a print out detailing quantities and types. Then you’d receive the equivalent weight in plastic pellets.

What fascinates me about this project is the willingness of participants. Dumping one’s possessions in a bin is really the stuff of airports and surveillance. And what to make of the heft of one’s own petrochemical complicity? The weight of it, and the unadorned nature of the plastic pellets, resist sleek convenience.

So before you start assessing your own plastics, one last question. Why are plastics the loquacious dead? Petrochemicals come from oil, oil from hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons from ancient life forms long dead. Death is the motor of an oil-powered culture and plastic is the face of that death.

 

Haunting Marina

Marina Zurkow’s back in Houston, but I find myself thinking about Shakespeare. Don’t blame me: it’s what’s in a name.

To begin with, Marina Zurkow just last night delivered a magnificent inaugural lecture, “Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems” for Rice’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS). This will be the first of a few posts on Zurkow’s projects.

I’ve thought a lot about Zurkow’s work, and am thrilled to be part of a CENHS cluster presenting her work at Rice this year with Tim Morton, Aynne Kokas, and Derek Woods, including an artist’s meal about petrochemicals and geological time called “Outside the Work” in March 2014.

The other component of the project involves appearances of her 2012 software-driven animation “Mesocosm (Wink, TX).” The animation creates activity around a sinkhole in the Permian Basin in Wink, TX. A whole year of time plays out in 144 hours of unique events. At her talk, Marina told us the software was designed to treat all of unique figures–butterflies, birds, men in hazmats suits–all the same. Algorithms give each a chance of appearing in the landscape as clouds swirl by, seasons change, and water swirls endlessly in this man-made and yet natural environment that would not exist without the extensive drilling for oil in the Permian Basin. The sinkhole is a signature of devastation, but as Marina pointed out it is also a place where life blooms.

Here’s a still:

And here’s a link: Mesocosm.

Zurkow’s interest is in creating a language of re-enchantment around energy and the environment, an alternative to what she called the “dark polemical apocalypse” that characterizes much of the rhetoric around ecology right now. Enchantment is no easy thing. Humans are haunted by things both living and dead. And we are haunted by the consequences of our actions, as when a sinkhole, a signature of destruction, becomes a brilliant blue pool.

Here’s another image of the Wink Sink, as it’s called, around which Zurkow designed “Mesocosm”:

Swirling waters bring me back to Shakespeare. One of his weirdest plays, Pericles, features a hapless king washed from shore to shore. He seeks a bride and gets clobbered by a shipwreck. He gets married and has a child–named Marina–and gets clobbered by a shipwreck. Do we detect a theme? Here he is railing at his fate, just having washed up to shore from his first shipwreck:

“Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!
Wind, rain, and thunder, remember, earthly man
Is but a substance that must yield to you;
And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.”

What humility in storm! One little “earthly man,” stripped of power, agrees to yield to the elements and obey them. Zurkow suggest something else in the face of forces and timescales beyond human ken. She wonders what it would be to practice friendliness, a Buddhist meditative practice called Metta, and sensory receptivity to all things: living or dead, bird or beast, canyon or sinkhole.

What’s better for meditative practice than “Mesocosm, Wink, TX”? In my next entries, I’ll say a little more about Zurkow’s lecture but I’ll also report my own results.

What happens when I look–closely, carefully, and slowly–at “Mesocosm” each day?

“What do you mean by energy?” Texas Contemporary Art Fair (Part 2)

I can’t say I know what Leonard Cohen was up to when he penned “Bird on a Wire.” I’m thinking about the phrase because of one of the more haunting pieces I saw at the Texas Contemporary Art Fair in my search for energy-oriented art.

Here’s the inimitable Cohen: “Like a bird on the wire, / like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free.”

Leonard Cohen, Bird on a Wire

Here the bird is a creature out of place, aiming for liberty. In my cursory attempts to track the phrase (is it an idiom with a history?) I found references to birds being trapped with lime on fences and birds being electrocuted on power lines. Here in Houston, I sometimes wonder if the grackles who at times gather in the hundreds on power lines around town, especially at Kirby and Alabama, know something we don’t.

But really I’m thinking about how captivated I was by a series of works by David Zimmer, including “Can You Hear Me” (pictured below):

Under a bell jar sits a little video screen featuring a bird on a branch. Around the screen are the coils and wires that power this little living portrait. There’s a bit of an antiquated–almost steam punk–feel in the mix of technologies: HD screen, metal conductors. The wires seem to merge with the twigs, both distinct and indistinct at the same time.

I have no idea if Zimmer was thinking about energy, but here’s what intrigues me. This work of art depends on an energy transfer that is made especially visible. The technologies are clearly compatible–the screen works!–but they seem from different eras.

And what is it birds do? They flutter about for sure. Are they powered by their own energies or, in this case, does it seem that the bird’s flight is a consequence of the energy transfers at work. Birds also since, and at least since Keats–probably earlier–we’ve wondered about the relationship between “natural” phenomena (like animal cries or song) and human art. As for the distinction between human and non-human song, I’ll leave that for others. What interests me here is the idea that song has an energy source as well–that it’s wired to power transfer systems that are made obvious to the viewer.

What do we hear when we see “Can You Hear Me?” The phrase is a check-in–a testing of the sound system. What do we hear when we check in? Is it the sound of song or the sound of energy thrumming through devices and creatures? Of course the whole work is under a glass cover. We might want to ask, instead, what do we not hear?

“What do you mean by energy?” Texas Contemporary Art Fair (part one)

“What do you mean by energy?” That was the question that answered my question: “Have you seen any art about energy?”

I’ve been getting ready to launch this blog, Alternative Currents, and what better way, I thought, than a visit to Houston’s Texas Contemporary Art Fair. You might say that to be in a Texas state of mind is to have energy on the brain.

For a series of reasons I’ll discuss in the future, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about the connections between art and energy. My sense is that artists across a range of media have for some time been adding to global conversations about energy’s uses and futures. Perhaps it’s time to pay some attention. This blog is my way to do so.

Some artists leap to mind quickly for me, like Marina Zurkow or Andrei Molodkin, both of whose work I encountered in Houston’s rich art scene. Of course, it’s a city saturated in energy money. So many arts institutions would not exist without the energy industry, which is a fact so obvious in Houston it’s quite easy to pay it no mind.

But let’s return to my opening question–“what do you mean by energy?” I happened to ask someone working a booth at the art fair if he had seen any art related to energy. And I realized as he asked it, and as I prepared myself to begin asking a lot of people this question, I needed to flesh out an answer. Here’s that attempt with a few examples from the art fair.

It’s so easy to drift off into metaphor. We use the term energy to describe many things–the way a painter leaves traces of effort in brushstrokes or the dynamism of line in a particularly well-composed photograph. The word traces its origins back to ancient Greek, energeia, which had a range of references including vitality in spoken or written language.

Naively I combed the art, looking for “energy,” whatever that might be. There were certainly works that flagged the consumption of energy. I don’t just mean art that uses electricity (lighting, motors, etc.) but rather art that foregrounds consumption, such as an artfully lit light bulb by Amanda Moss.

Some works seemed to neutralize consumption and operation, like James Drake’s Snakeskin Engine, a motorcycle engine (you guessed it) covered in snake skin, more like an accessory than a device that translates energy to speed. This work echoes an earlier sculpture, Artificial Life in the Valley of the World (1993), which features an automobile engine coated (or swallowed? enveloped?) in python snakeskin.

Other work flagged production and extraction of energy, like photographer Alex Slade’s Plains Pipeline LP Pearsonia Station/ Nature Conservancy Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, Osage County, OK (2013).

But still, I wondered, where’s the eureka moment? The moment when–pardon, dear reader, the pun–the light bulb bursts into incandescence over my head or in front of my eyes. I realized what I was looking for was eerie, disconcerting, and utterly familiar. Over the next few blogs, I’ll discuss some findings as a way of grasping toward a language for the arts of energy.

But I can’t leave just yet without a word about the marvelous Shay Kun, whose painting Good Vibrations (2007) appeared like a vision before me just as I was about to give up. Kun is an artist of marvelously inappropriate juxtapositions. So many canvases appear to be saturated by the conventions of the Hudson River school but supplemented with non-sequiturs. In Eradication, a lovely stand of lakeside trees shares the stage with a killer whale leaping out of the lake as a pair of soldiers slide down ropes from a hovering helicopter.

In Good Vibrations (2007), a serene mountain lake finds its gauzy glory interrupted. At the edge of the lake is poised a drilling platform outlined in vibrant blue. Just behind it, in the mountains above, we see mining equipment. And nearer the foreground we suddenly can make out what seems to be the wreck of a car colored the same vibrant hue as the platform. Kun’s roughly contemporary Melting Midlands witnesses two whales leaping from an explosion–most likely a mushroom cloud–blooming amidst an otherwise pastoral playground of mountain, stream, and tree.

What’s Shay Kun up to? Kun describes these works as “hybrids of absurdities” and yet these images haunt with a feeling of dis-ease that, strangely enough, documentary-style images of ecological destruction no longer hold. Sometimes, absurd is the only way to go.

Coming Soon