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Politics and Sense of Place: Perhaps Artists Have a New Mandate

September 10, 2012 by Iskra 2 Comments

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

Drawing. Remembering, Studying. Thank you Michael Graves.

September 3, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

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.

: Adrift, powdered pigment and graphite on paper, © Iskra Johnson

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.

Notes from the Road: An Artist’s Trip to the Palouse

August 28, 2012 by Iskra 4 Comments

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.

HAYBALES-FOR-SALE — A clear sans serif always gets the message across.

Turn_Right_Road_Signage — Directional Signage. This is not Canada.

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…]

Summer’s Song Won’t Last Long: New Digital Collage

August 24, 2012 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Summer'sSong_Digital_Collage — Summer's Song Won't Last Long, digital collage © Iskra Johnson

All summer my pond has been visited by a lovely checkered dragonfly. One day he laid himself to final rest on a lily pad. I put the wings on The Shrine of Fragile Things with the bee, the moth and the curled leaf. When I found this ancient Chinese snuffbottle it seemed like the perfect homage to a being who lived only months, from June to August.

Digital Collage created from layered paint, photo transfer and original photographs taken with a Canon G10.

Object Lessons: The Television Buddha

August 15, 2012 by Iskra 1 Comment

Television_Buddha_Digital_Collage — The Television Buddha © Iskra Johnson

The Black Buddha, otherwise known as the “television Buddha” sat for years on my step-grandmother’s TV, his head unironically posed between two silver antennae. Even as a child who had not yet been taught the niceties of good taste I could tell that this statue, although hollow like my milk chocolate Easter bunny, was a Prince among objects. Where the black paint had rubbed away copper glinted. His robes had the sharp cast and sheen only found in metal, and when I picked him up and set him down I could tell he belonged to a different family of dolls.

At some point in my late teens, after reading a book or two by Alan Watts and becoming instantly hip and knowing, which I eagerly confused with being enlightened, it occurred to me that this object belonged in my life. Did I steal it? Did I stand in front of the television as though mesmerized by the cheap print of VanGogh sunflowers and off-handedly tuck the Buddha into my coat? I have a vague memory of light on a dusty window, of the pine tree outside, of family noise and clatter and a moment of rationalization. I hope I asked.

This Buddha has gone with me to every room I have lived in, presided over my inkstone and rice paper and the copying of sutras and 4 AM yoga sessions and detours into Gurdjieff, Guru Mai, and Yogananda. He has never gained or lost weight, or criticized me for being delusional, or asked for water, or offered a word of advice. For years at a time I have not actually looked at him; I’ve even lost him on occasion– buried in a box under the bed. Then I will find him and the fact of him starts all over again. The Buddha is a resonant object, and my mind changes when I look at him.

I puzzle over this quite a bit. What is this alchemy of the object? The historical and real person of Siddhartha, who became the Buddha, never asked to be made into a figurine. In fact the Buddha himself discouraged this as dangerous close-cousin to the worship of idols. Only the image of his footsteps was allowed or perhaps the trace of a wave on the shore, or a hand. Yet today I doubt that any Buddhist anywhere meditates without some image in their mind of –not the breathing, sweating actual human being — but the statue. Leave it to the Greeks to ruin a good thing, the void and the imagination, and to supplant it with idealized form. And now you can buy a guy in a robe with snails on his head anywhere, online next to blinking ads for a flat belly, or in an import store or from a catalogue full of clocks that wake you up with the sound of the ocean.

Through hundreds of years and thousands of places of manufacture, the significant details of the sitting Buddha rarely change. The graceful sloping of the shoulders, the relaxed ease and the simultaneous sense of absolute focus, the circuit of small spheres along the head. And form is important. The shape of the saints is common, but it is not ordinary. The power of shape is a mystery, devotional practice equally so.

Buddha_Garden_Statue — The Standard Concrete Garden Buddha

I have a second Buddha, a pale gray version mass produced and bought at a nursery twenty years ago. He has sat long enough in my garden to acquire the iridescent sheen of actual snails across his knees. Together both statues, indoor and outdoor, do a fine job of gentle reproach as I plunder time and waste it in mindless daily orbit. You would think two would be enough. However, I was seized this spring with a sudden overwhelming desire for a new Buddha, something life-size. I became completely obsessed with the idea that a statue was waiting for me and I had to find it right now. So abandoning my other obligations for a day I scoured every Asian import store in the city. The closest I came to my imagined find was a graceful, stupefyingly beautiful Thai god (god of what, I’m not sure) made of fragile wood and $15,000.87 out of my price range. As I started to leave the shop, my obsession defeated, I noticed the chairs. Simple, magnetically so, projecting a deadpan stoic humor and covered with the patina of decades in an outdoor cinema. If one wanted a reminder to “sit” what could be more potent than a chair, after all? I sat. In spite of the barracks-style severity the chair was surprisingly comfortable. And you can bargain for chairs, although you would never bargain for a Buddha.

The-Sitting-Chair — The Sitting Chair © Iskra Johnson

This is my new garden statue, for now. It lives in the bamboo reminding me to be still, to just sit.

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This is the first in an upcoming series of essays on Buddhist iconography in art and daily life. I will be featuring interviews with artists who work in a variety of contemplative paths, ranging from traditional devotional art to contemporary improvisations, in media ranging from painting and drawing to sculpture, music and video. If you are interested in the subject of the object as a source of contemplation you may want to visit the section of my blog that focuses on response to the book “A History of the World in 100 Objects.”

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