This week’s architectural subject is the University of Washington stadium project. From a distance I saw three men on huge elevated platforms taking pictures, and I was very envious. I wondered if they were surveying, or if they were part of a formal documentation project. But when I got closer to the shrouded fence surrounding them I discovered, oddly enough, that they were photographing young men in gold helmets and purple jerseys running frenzied relays in the grass.
A recent piece in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi has been on my mind. It is a long and exhaustive political analysis that has caused quite a stir. I won’t go into the partisan issues here. What struck me most was this, which pertains to all factions:
“…..Americans like their politicians to sound like they’re from somewhere, to be human symbols of our love affair with small towns, the girl next door, the little pink houses of Mellencamp myth. Most of those mythical American towns grew up around factories – think chocolate bars from Hershey, baseball bats from Louisville, cereals from Battle Creek. Deep down, what scares voters in both parties the most is the thought that these unique and vital places are vanishing or eroding – overrun by immigrants or the forces of globalism or both, with giant Walmarts descending like spaceships to replace the corner grocer, the family barber and the local hardware store, and 1,000 cable channels replacing the school dance and the gossip at the local diner.”
Being from somewhere. Having a sense of place. As Taibbi frames this the idea of place becomes not just personal, but political. It is much larger than an individual’s nostalgia, more than a sentimentalist’s hymn to a bygone time or a weakness of the populace to be exploited by speech-writers. And art about place takes on a different significance. The day after I read the article I went down to a remaining outpost of the merchant village, a physical “shop” in a “place” where you can buy a camera from a person who will show you how to use it. The block on which Glazer’s sits is in a part of the city undergoing massive, drastic deconstruction and construction. The days of remembering what was here are gone; history has been almost completely erased. On this visit to Westlake I tumbled into the present.
As I leaned over the pit water from the hoses drifted over the chain link fence and onto my arms. The air smelled of wet concrete and the first rains of autumn. Between the roar of traffic on one side and the grinding of machinery below I felt caught in a kind of still white noise in which all movement seemed precise and graceful as butoh. One man drove the excavator and one hosed from above, and it appeared that it takes only two men and one machine to dismantle what was an entire office building. I can’t weep for gargoyles or terracotta fleur de lis or bricks from the Great Seattle Fire. I have no feeling for this building. I have no idea what it looked like when it was a living breathing organism where some version of organized commerce took place beneath the now tangled guts of overhead lighting and heating ducts.
On the other side of the street, from a building close to completion, I could hear the shouts of men operating a crane, hoisting huge stacks of wallboard to the twelfth floor.
Extreme change is a place and a story of its own. As society futurizes at a breathtaking pace I look alternately backwards and forwards, each glance more wrenching and extreme. I want to push pause. And I want to know if anybody else is in this with me. The Rolling Stone article makes me look through a new lens at trends in all kinds of art — visual, written, performance. In particular I wonder about spoken word. As I drive through the city my soundtrack is the radio. It seems to me I hear the art of storytelling evolving in very particular and exciting ways. Listen sometime to the dazzling and surprising Snap Judgement, Story Corps, and of course, the grand daddy, This American Life. In keeping with Taibbi’s point, these programs reach for a sense of the particular and the personal, the epiphanies of place and the equally poignant negotiations with its absence. These storytellers are not packaging a by-gone era to sell it back to us as mood perfume or decoration. This is for real.
One day as I started photographing a site on Greenwood a man in a hardhat approached with an air of authority and asked for my papers. After some discussion I acquired permission to stand on the sidewalk and watch the ruins of one of Seattle’s last bowling lanes re-emerge as an apartment complex. We got to talking. The man had just come from working in Wyoming, in the fracking boom. He shook his head. “It’s a catastrophe in the making. We’re polluting the water, ruining the land and I couldn’t be part of it, I had to quit.” His passion and conviction surprised me. I gladly abandoned whatever preconceptions I might have about men at work.
I have been focused on the abstract beauty of construction and deconstruction, and the human stories had not really entered my mind. Perhaps I’ve been playing Brahms on the battlefield, and seeing only the slanting light, without considering the soldiers. I’ll leave you with another view. Call it a figure study, in orange.
All photos and text © Iskra Johnson
Today I am cleaning up my studio and preparing to draw. Ok if I say that, I really will put the stacks of odd-shaped ideas away and neatly label them as “Misc.” (Or the dreaded “Sub-divisions of Misc.”) I will clear five square feet of table and find some hiding place for what was on the tables and be able to walk through the room waving my hands freely. Maybe I will find that lost scrap of paper under the thumb-tacked clippings from a year ago that says something wise.
Meanwhile, one last hour of procrastination on the porch (in the sun) (with hummingbirds) led to a wonderful article in the New York Sunday Times on “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing.” Thank you Michael Graves for making me want to get up in the middle of this beautiful Labor Day afternoon and go to work.
“…But can the value of drawing be simply that of a collector’s artifact or a pretty picture? No. I have a real purpose in making each drawing, either to remember something or to study something. Each one is part of a process and not an end in itself. I’m personally fascinated not just by what architects choose to draw but also by what they choose not to draw.”
I did this piece to remember what it is to lose someone, and to know, to study, the shape of that feeling completely. You are in between water and shore. An anchor would be in some other kind of drawing.
I believe that scrap of paper said something about boats, about how “one’s life is the project of building the boat. At times there are no oars, until you make those too.” Good to recall this from a fine moment on a sunny day when the tools for construction seem well at hand.
Weeks after returning from Eastern Washington, I can’t seem to put the map away. From the corner of my eye I see the blue of the rivers and the lakes and the pale butter of desert and wheat. The whole map seems cast in the blue of the sky. It keeps me on the road even as I stand in my kitchen looking at weather the color of concrete. I read the names of the towns and put them together, knowing I would believe these people were real if I read them in a story: Clayton Ford, Lamona St. John, Gilmer Packwood, Randle Bingen, or just plain Quincy, with no last name. I want to have a cousin named Mayfield, and I want to marry a man named Dusty, which lines up along the road to Othello right next to Hay. To look at the map, to be in the map, they infuse each other – the blue sky the same color as these meandering backroads. The names of these places are equal parts dirt and aspiration. Yes to the beat up range horse and the saddle whose rosette tooling has worn flat from years of use, and yes to the Spokane carousel whose horses bloom with gilded chinoiserie.
Here in The West, in the upper left-hand corner formerly known as The Oregon Territories, (and before that as the land of the Nez Pierce, the Quinault and the Yakima Nations), we are divided by mountains. The usual associations of the compass don’t hold; The “East” is not know for its Buddhists and pagans and barefoot Occupiers but for small towns with even smaller churches with firmly held conservative beliefs. The West curls its lip at the East and mocks its Bible-quoting politicians and lack of tender regard for restoring the gray wolf. The East would prefer not to sponsor seawalls and fancy underground freeways and weddings in which both the bride and the groom are named Meg. And yet for all its smug urban insularity, people of the West regard the East with nostalgia and they carry a certain ache for its rural beauty. Out there is the land. No matter how thick the condominiums or how constipating the traffic or how high the price of a double latte vente with vanilla on the west side, the land is out there just over the pass saying: we have space and sky here for you. It’s saved for you and in the bank: beauty.
Every few years I make the pilgrimage across the Cascade mountains, to see if that space is still there or if I imagined it. This August I went with two artist friends to stay on a farm outside the farming town of Pomeroy and look after a herd of goats. It was delicious to be with companions who live to stop and to look. We packed a week of lunch, and checked our brakes for the long steep slope down the other side of the mountains.
After a bit, beyond the too-big fruit stand that is now the only fruit stand, in the town of Thorp whose name seems too short and where the massive marquee offers “Antiques | Fruit” which just makes us think of raisins; after that bleak stretch where we think we’re not anywhere at all, we do reach The Road. Here finally is the ribbon of hills. The folding and unfolding waves of gold and green pivoting into creekbeads and scree and broken down things. Shimmering asphalt, blazing hairpins, the river, the barges, the Falls. White butterflies in pine trees. And a sudden leap into science fiction. When did the land become a wind factory? I turned my back and the Germans came and put these white giants, these three-armed industrial starfish on every horizon. What would Ray Bradbury think? Would he lie down beneath them in their protective mote of gravel and toast them with a glass of dandelion wine?
Each windmill earns a farmer $10 thousand dollars a year. Each windmill powers 350 houses. Put that up against an idea,– a relic of an idea — of “landscape” or “natural beauty.” You’ll lose. And so we go farther east, to where the migration hasn’t taken hold, practicality and beauty are in harmony, and the highest best use of land is wheat and peas and these are just coincidentally lovely. [Read more…]