Journey Through Art In the Orchard

Art In the Orchard is a sculpture trail through an orchard in Easthampton, MA. This year is their fourth exhibition. I’ve always loved experiencing their carefully selected pieces against the backdrop of trees, mountains, and sky. (My poem Garden Man is a response to the second AiO.) This year, I’ve visited twice and the first time I just happened to view the sculptures in reverse order. Three in particular really affected me, and that journey is the heart of the poem below.

If you’re in or near Easthampton this fall, definitely pay a visit to Park Hill Orchard for some fresh apples and beautiful, affecting art.

Easthampton Journey

Art in the Orchard, 2019

The trees in the orchard bear mirrored fruit.

Someone has thrown a fishing net over rotting logs,

shiny rainbows a mysterious catch.

The breeze that makes beautiful things billow 

also stirs strips and sheets of plastic,

sparking hopelessness. The breeze touches all of us

whether sad, sodden, or sinful. Today is sunny and quiet 

in this place of graves and growth.

While someone mourns her lost home

someone else hatches quilted birds from felted eggs.

The worst is the memorial to gun violence,

14,730 people depicted by 14,730 metal washers,

their could-have-been lives shrouding a globe,

rusting in the weather like memory.

Climb upward and you’ll find a pair of tiny lovers

escaping on the back of a sparrow.

Climb higher and you’ll see nothing but a green gesture, 

arm-like shape flung toward the sky.

It’s more absence than substance, like the space

desperate lovers and murdered children leave behind.

I can’t make sense of anything. Everything is curved

but some things are jagged. Everything is jagged

but a serene, painted face moves among them. 

Gun Violence Project

Bird Bird

Lookout

Art referenced, in order:

• Tree of Life - Ted Hinman
• Abundance - Pamela Matsuda-Dunn
• The Three (dis)Graces - Elizabeth Stone & Eva Fierst
• Home - Lynne Yamamoto
• La Cage aux Fowl - The Fiberistas
• Gun Violence Project - Michael Poole
• Bird Bird - Tim de Christopher
• Lookout - Walter Early

Read about them and see pictures: http://www.parkhillorchard.com/media/AIO/2019/artintheorchard-program-2019.pdf

Let’s Try This Again: Time's Avenue

After a 3-year hiatus due to, you know, life and death and stuff, Dragon’s Meow is back! Making time for art, writing, and contemplation never ceases to be a challenge — but I have a hopeful feeling about the coming months, friends.

This post is about an artist’s date I took with my friends Lauren Kindle and her daughter in Manhattan last December. Lauren’s a big Chagall fan, so we started out by visiting Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922 at the Jewish Museum. Then we walked down 5th Avenue and decided to visit the Guggenheim, too, because a friend of Lauren’s had heartily recommended Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future. The show was amazing! Transcendent, even.

Seeing the two shows in the order we did felt like walking through a story of unfolding consciousness. That’s what this poem is about.

Time’s Avenue

In the beginning were the lovers,
drinking wine and dancing in the village.
The houses — upside down and sideways.
The goats — in the air, everywhere.
Next, the idealists moved in.
Angular and colorless, they edged out
the old master’s dream-creations.
Finally, the realist unspooled her mind.
Her thoughts were multicolored,
geometric yet generous, so we could travel
through space and spiral into ourselves,
then out again into a library of voices.


Here are some pictures of the art and architecture that inspired the poem.

“the lovers, / drinking wine and dancing”

Marc Chagall, Double Portrait with Wine Glass, 1917-18

“Her thoughts were multicolored…”

Admiring The Ten Largest by Hilma af Klint

“we could travel / through space and spiral into ourselves”

The “library of voices”

The Aye Simon Reading Room

Birds Playing Guitars

It's a double April Fool's—I'm posting to the blog for the first time in months, and birds are playing guitars. Actually, both of these are not tricks at all. Here's a piece I wrote in response to an amazing installation that I recently saw in Salem.

Birds playing guitars? That is something to see—and hear. When my friend told me about From Here to Ear at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, I didn’t really believe her. She said, “There are musical instruments, and birds, and they interact somehow.”

It was the “somehow” that perplexed me. How can you play a guitar without hands? I imagined a complicated set-up. Maybe the guitars were attached to something that reacted to the birds’ actions, like a cable or another apparatus. I couldn’t picture the interaction between bird and guitar happening without an intermediary of some kind in the system. But that’s exactly what we saw: birds playing guitars. When it was 10:20 a.m. and the guards let us into the gallery, we saw small, colorful zebra finches going about their normal bird business—eating, preening, flying, perching—and thereby playing guitar.

I’d made a lot of assumptions about what it means to “play” a guitar. The instruments weren’t oriented in a typical, vertical guitar-playing position. Instead, they were mounted horizontally on drum stands so they provided an ideal surface for the tiny birds to perch on. Expensive guitars doubled as tree branches and finch feet became guitar picks. The birds’ tiniest movements became sources of melody, electronic but peaceful. The guitars were tuned in harmony with each other, and there was nothing dissonant in the random, reverberating notes.

The effect was an odd but affecting combination of nature and industry. My friend pointed out how noisy it was in the gallery and that the finches didn’t seem to mind it. They also weren’t bothered by having a group of people gawking at them. They just flew around, ate, perched, and sang their own songs—much as I imagine they would amid ambient sounds in nature, especially if they lived near a particular source of noise, such as a waterfall or a highway.

I wanted to spend the whole day there. I wanted to live in there. I wanted to be tiny and have a finch’s eye view of the world. But soon our 15 minutes were up and we were ushered out of the gallery, birdsong and guitar chords reverberating in our minds. 

Portraits of Donuts

Written after visiting "Luscious," paintings by Emily Eveleth, at the Smith College Art Museum.

Why donuts? Well, they're donuts. They're also flesh and blood, shape and color, and whatever else you need them to be.

The canvases are huge, rendering the donuts surreal and completely out of context. Given their size, the paintings are simultaneously representational and abstract.

Sometimes, it's the mess inside that's most interesting. When the donuts appear broken, they're as dramatic as torn flesh. Yet, when intact, they are curvy and sweet as a Classical nude. Dark backgrounds make the donuts glow. One is painted bright white as if the painting is a photograph taken with too much flash by donut paparazzi.

Are these paintings poking fun at traditional figure painting? Some seem to be. Some, with their round, red holes are pretty damn sexual, with donuts pressing on and draping over one another. Other are simply playful. In all, this exhibit feels serious and lighthearted simultaneously. It is fun but not pointless, thoughtful but not heavy.

From Now to the Far Away

Our interaction didn't last long. He wasn't someone I'd imagined getting to know. I remember his first name and I have two letters from him without dates, without envelopes (no return address). The only thing I have from him is our one creation, and whenever I look at it, I wonder where he is.

I'm not talking about a missing father or a lost lover. I'm remembering my one-time collaborator, known only as Chris, who was a counselor the same summer as me at an arts camp in Connecticut. I worked in publications, he worked in book arts. He made all kinds of wonderful books and book-like objects: book with drawers, fold-out books, collaged picture books. The last I heard from him, he was going to teach somewhere in Central America.

Despite the wonders of the Internet, it's still pretty hard to find someone when all you have to go on is a commonly used first name. If I knew how to contact him, I'd say, "Hey Chris, I had so much fun working on that book with you. Want to do another one?" And he'd say yes, and we'd collaborate on a whole series of books that would tour art galleries and museums across the country, ending up in both public and private collections, inspiring the next generation of artists and writers.

Until that happens, though, I'll just share the one book we did make, which is titled (appropriately enough, if Chris is still in Central America) From Now, to the Faraway.

Sculpted Language

Last Saturday I treated myself with a trip to the Smith College Museum of Art, to see the show I Heard a Voice: The Art of Lesley Dill. (Actually, I treated myself with time, but the entrance was free thanks to a pass I checked out of the Lilly Library. What a great public resource.) I didn't go because it was the work of Lesley Dill (I wasn't familiar with her work). I went because Dill incorporates fragments of poetry into her sculptures, predominantly the work of Emily Dickinson.

I had pretty low expectations of the show. Somehow I expected it to be cheesy. Plus, while gorgeous in person, the sculptures do not come across nearly as well when photographed. They're like written-down words that only truly come alive when spoken. All my expectations were completely blown out of the water. I was amazed by the show, and hope to see it again before it closes on September 13.

I can't imagine that Dill's sculptures could possibly do a better job of embodying the ambiguous, troubled, transcendent lines of poetry with which she chose to work. The two main themes in the show were spirituality and language. The materials (thin sheets of tin, thread, luminous silk fabric), the compositions (figures, partial figures, mixed media, collages), and the scale (a few very large pieces and several very small pieces) all do a great job of illustrating either the spirituality captured in the words, or simply the spirituality of language itself.

You can preview the show here.

The Bear Details

If you are anywhere in the area of Easthampton, MA, between now and October, you really should walk around and see the bears. You can download a map here.

All the bears were created by local artists, and they are wonderfully varied in their themes. Some are serious, some are whimsical, some abstract, some historical. The best part of this display is the great attention to detail paid by so many of the artists. A goal of this event is to get people out and walking, and the bears truly reward those who stroll and look closely. Driving through town and seeing all the bears is fun, but walking from bear to bear and viewing them up close is the way to truly appreciate them and the craft that went into making them.
Plus, a lot of the bears have backside surprises that are not visible from the street!

Quote of the Day

"Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act."
- Ram Dass, quoted in Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter

Along the same lines, I just found out that this fabulous speech about the importance of making art, which was given at my Goddard MFA graduation by program director Paul Selig, is now available online.

What Language Can Do

Note: An updated version of this essay appears at ArtID.com

There’s quite an amazing installation on display now at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. Jenny Holzer’s “Projections” casts the text of poems by Nobel laureate poet Wisława Szymborska across a bare, darkened room the length of a football field. Walking through these projected poems is at first like half-listening: you catch fragments of words but can’t put them all together. Then, if you take the time to stand at either end of the hall, you can read each poem clearly as it appears. The lines arrive more slowly than the time it takes to read them. Having a poem gradually fed to you allows for each line to really register.

Reading a few poems in this unconventional way is one thing—but that’s only part of the exhibit. Walk to the far end of the hall and you’ll find another room, smaller and more like a regular art gallery. Here, Holzer has displayed huge canvas reproductions of declassified documents detailing plans for the invasion of Iraq. The simplicity of the words— protect, isolate, detain, free, destroy— contrasts with the mess that’s actually happening in Iraq. What’s also shocking is how the writers of the presentation seemed to genuinely believe that 1) there were WMDs to be found, and 2) that a successful new government could be in place within a mere 135 days.

Upstairs from this gallery is the third part of the exhibit that serves as the very visceral and disturbing punch line. Again, reproduced in macro scale, Holzer has hung an email exchange in which two American soldiers debate the uses of torture, and beside this is a “Wish List” of aggressive interrogation techniques.

What’s amazing to me about this exhibit are the juxtapositions Holzer has created. The second and third galleries show the use of language that is institutional, political, and abstract—it has clearly led to widespread and, in many cases, futile human suffering. In the first gallery, where you are bathed in the light of a poet’s words, language is something very different—it is particular and personal, and while it can’t make sense of suffering, it documents it determinedly and with heart-wrenching beauty.

Unusual Beauty

If I had kids, this is one of those stories I'd tell them dozens of times, until they rolled their eyes: I had an art teacher and he changed my life. He turned my ideas of color inside out, and my ideas of subject matter upside down. He took my art history class on a field trip to a junkyard. He showed slides of graffiti he'd found inside abandoned buildings. He taught at my small private school for four years, long enough to shock some parents and just long enough to affect me forever....

Read the full story on Minds Island.

The Bowl with Gold Teeth

Craving quiet and beauty, I walked up to the Smith College Art Museum this afternoon. I found there an exhibit of Japanese tea wares that spanned 500 years of history. The room was dimly lit and the tea bowls held silence in their curves. I remembered attending tea ceremonies in my adolescence (once at a neighbor’s house and once on a field trip). The care and precision involved were too much for this tall, awkward American. I still can’t imagine enjoying the bitter, frothy tea and turning the bowl just right—but as an outsider in a museum looking at the arrangements of dishes and effects, I could better appreciate the meticulous beauty of ritual.

With the little I know of Japanese culture, craft, and art, I expect all of it to be delicate and nearly perfect. So I was intrigued by an asymmetrical bowl displayed on one wall of the gallery. Brick-colored and rough as cement, its circular form squashed towards oval, it looked— frankly, ugly. The card on the wall said the bowl was about 400 years old and beloved for its imperfections. Some of its defects were intentional; others were an effect of time. The rough texture occurred because the potter decided not to refine the clay thoroughly, so grit rose to the surface when it was fired. Centuries of use resulted in a chipped rim that had been repaired in several places with gold lacquer. These shiny spots, the card said, made the bowl especially prized. I thought: it’s a bowl with gold teeth!

Now, what’s the poetic equivalent of not completely refining my words so that distinctive grit will rise to the surface?