Instructions for Participation in Blued Trees, Part III of three

June 21, 2015 “Blued Trees,”

will launch the overture for a symphony conceived by

Aviva Rahmani at multiple international sites.

Participating international artists and landowners will be announced.

This mage illustrates a portion of the proposed route of the Algonquin 42" "natural" gas pipeline corridor that would abut the Indian Point nuclear facility in Westchester County, New York. If there's an accident, the entire East Coast of North America could experience an American Fukushima. Internationally, similar fossil fuel infrastructure installations endanger the public good. Blued Trees is a symphonic installation for the silent trees that would be destroyed to enable the pipeline. Blued Trees challenges the legal definition of "pubic good" that legitimates eminent domain for fossil fuel infrastructures, with the moral integrity of art under the Visual Artists Rights Act. 
Mapping by Aviva Rahmani.

Art to challenge the amoral control of the world. Blued Trees score by Aviva Rahmani, mapped with Daisy Morton.

"Natural" gas is in quotes because the source is from fracking and the process generates methane. Advertising it as a source of clean energy is at best, a misnomer and as others have pointed out, the marketing strategy is comparable to how tobacco companies historically defended toxic practices.

The Blued Trees score is both a spatial map for installation and a musical composition.
Anyone may be a participating performer June 21, 2015 as part of the Greek Chorus for the Blued Trees symphonic overture. The goal of painting trees in a particular design on the surface and a pattern of distribution across distance is for the purpose of establishing a legally defensible copyright. The documentation of completing the paintings goes into a copyright package for filing, which would be done by at the federal level by attorney Patrick Reilly. Trees may be painted before June 21, 2015.

1 painted tree. Photo: Frank Spinelli

PAINTING TREES:

Simplified recipe for Blued Trees Painting a Blue Wave on One Large Tree

Whisk or mix until uniform:

3 teaspoons ultramarine blue pigment and

12 oz full fat buttermilk (thick, spreads well)

Here's an alt: Squeeze a TBSP of lemon juice into 12 oz of whole milk -- wait a bit for milk to thicken)

Outline the wave --- we used blue sidewalk chalk.

             The wave shape on each tree should be tall, wide and in proportion to the dimensions of the surface.

(see pics on website: www. pushing rocks. blogspot)

A three or four inch brush works well. Have a rag handy to wipe off the drips. (Or don't)

One coat produces a translucent wave,

A second, touch-up coat will stand out 

More information: 
If you plan to paint trees, other relatively permanent vegetation or a landscape feature that isn’t on your own property, please get written permission from landowners. You can purchase sufficient ultramarine blue (a non-toxic color) dry pigment and either fresh or powdered buttermilk to paint your trees or other plant species with stylized waves. The  casein slurry for painting could grow moss in a forest. Source for the pigment includes Dick Blick: http://www.dickblick.com/products/gamblin-artists-colors-dry-pigments/. Sources for buttermilk powder include amazon.com. Purchase a 4” wide house-painting bristle brush to practice painting. The wave shape on each tree should be tall, wide and in proportion to the dimensions of the surface, for example, 10' high by 2' wide wrapping around a good sized true trunk.  See the previous post on this blog to reference how the tree might appear after the painting

Music for Blued Trees.

The measure for the symphony may be repeated in various forms because it has been transposed into music. The measure may be repeated (iterated) and improvised on. The measure changes from a major to a minor signature to express hope. (The clip link records how I worked out the key change with my singing teacher, Debra Vanderlinde.) Performing the music or a variation on it's melodic theme is a way to participate in the score, which will also be copyrighted as part of the same Blued Trees overture. The documentation of performance will go towards effecting the strategy of taking back the justice system from corporatized malfeasance:

Progress of Blued Trees may be followed on twitter #BluedTrees. One note, one tree or group of trees is identified with the Blued Trees logo:

Pocketbooks and Fish

Yesterday, my assistant, Daisy Morton found this slightly battered black and white print from 1969:

The score and another shot of this work are on my avivarahmani.com website.

On my FB page I wrote, "In 1969, I was the director & founder of the American Ritual Theatre in So. Calif. and this was a shot by Fred Lonidier of my performance work, "The Pocketpiece Piece," with Claudia Bader, Barbara Zakarian and myself in Claus Von Wendel's studio, Del Mar, CA. Unearthed by assiduous archival excavation thanks to Daisy Morton." 

That discovery wasn't the whole story.

• After studying this image, I realized this performance version (one of many in Universities & colleges thruout Calif I performed then) was performed in the UCSD Art Gallery that same year. It was in that same period, that Pauline Oliveros & other faculty from the Music & Art Dept.'s asked me to start a Dance Dept there and John Stuart, the then provost, secretly threatened me with arrest if I was ever on campus again, because of my anti-war and pro-feminist speeches at rallies. I also created "Synapse Reality" and "Meat Piece" at this time. When Stuart threatened me, Newton Harrison urged me to go Angela Davis's route publicizing what happened and I did try by going to Stanley Grinstein in LA but I couldn't rally the support or my own conviction (I was 24 and somewhat naive). It was shortly afterwards that I met Allan Kaprow and started at Cal Arts, following another path in the woods.

• I may have taken a different path forward after Stuart's threat, but this image and that performance bear on Fish Story and my current PhD writing because both are about layering unexpected data to discover new knowledge. In the case of the fish, what we need to pat attention to in our layering is not just the loss of the taxa, but all the small decisions globally and personally that result in this loss. What I layered in "The Pocketbook Piece," was the data on rape, divorce and trivia associated with a lipstick, an official paper in the unedited contents of a woman's secret recesses of her pocketbook. What I sought to layer in Fish Story, was the bioregional and international context and relationship to water of built infrastructure, radioactivity and fracking in the world. What I am attempting to layer in my dissertation, are all the ways we can address those systemic horrors.

Fish tales, teams and dominance patterns

 

Fish in the Mississippi River are indicator species for the health of a far larger
biogepgraphic region that surrounds the river.

1: PM

In less than an hour, we will have a Gulf to Gulf webcast session for the team working on Fish Story.

That team for Fish Story, includes:

James Bradley, media provider, Executive Director at WebServes, New York, NY http://webserves.org/

Emily Caigan, Project manager for “Fish Story” West Hurley, NY

Daisy Morton, studio manager to Aviva Rahmani, Vinalhaven ME

Aviva Rahmani, ecological artist, University of Plymouth and INSTAAR affiliate Vinalhaven ME and New York, NY: ghostnets.com, avivarahmani.com

Susan Steinman, Director of WEAD, ecological artist, Berkeley, CA: http://www.steinmanstudio.com/

Eugene Turner, dead zone biologist, and Distinguished Research Master and Professor, Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA: http://www.oceanography.lsu.edu/turner.shtm

James White, paleoecologist, Professor of Geological Sciences, Fellow and Director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder, CO: instaar.colorado.edu/index.html.

We will also be joined by Memphis Social curator Tom McGlynn who invited our participation.

There are going to be a number of important topics I hope we will address but I am still considering the lessons learned and considered about framing from last week's CT event. The two Sunday workshops that stuck in my mind, were the one on creating narratives in social practice, with Suzanne Lacy and Jodie Evans and the one Steve Lambert did about advertising and public art. The latter was intended to define points of entry with a community, how to listen and how to shape a work out of the input. It was mostly a discussion of how to listen, which I'm all for. The most important take away that I related to, was to look for the gap, the paradox, the intersection where values can be aligned. 

In working with scientists, finding that mystical point of entry is the most delicate and important part of my work and aligns with "trigger point theory," that small place I always look for, where hope can start to grow for environmental restoration. The trick in Fish Story will be to align that point of entry with the aspirations and concerns of people I may meet there.

Steve's workshop had us doing a deceptively simple exercize of making columns for old behavior (in this case, gutting the environment) and new behavior (finding ways to live resiliently with the rest of the natural world) and then breaking those two columns down in terms of the benefits and barriers each option convey. So, for example, an old behavior might be that it's easy to overfish and the ease is the benefit. The barrier to fully enjoying that old behavior to change is the fat that if we continue, there will be nothing left to exploit and deplete. The barrier to new behavior is just changing behavior and the difficulty of that change. People don't usually like something easy suddenly made more difficult. Steve reminded us that it's not just about the community we work with, it's also about not allowing ourselves to get burnt out.

In both workshops, the presumption was that an artist is invited in by a community to avoid the critique of "parachuting in" and then leaving. Suzanne and Jodi emphasized that building a good rapport for a project with integrity can take a year or more. But the third workshop workshop I participated in last Sunday, about the landslide caused by fracking in Taring Padi, assembled a memorializing action in one week, which has taken on a life of its own there. So these are 3 diff approaches to developing and sustaining social practice projects. What they all have in common is finding how & where to align an artists agenda with the community where the work will be presented. In the case of "Fish Story," it's not going to be just about those 2 agendas (art & the community), it's also about land management and what science can tell us about what is happening there. And then there's my agenda: to find a trigger point in environmental degradation to effect healing change ... without imposing myself  .... by finding ways to give voice to the voiceless on the ground. Not just fish. The people who want a world with fish.

So the critique of the first two social practice approaches above, is that they both, in effect, manipulate people to effect what a predetermined good may be but that "good" remains anthropocentric, human dominated. So how do I negotiate for the fish? How to I find the voices that speak for the fish among the people in Memphis? That search appears on the surface to argue for an inversion of familiar dominance patterns and by doing so, finding the path to speaking for the fish. It seems like a layered paradox to even consider that challenge. So that is the "little" gap/paradox I hope we will explore today.

4:PM

We had the meeting. I'm in absorption mode. The scientists are open and supportive. Gene showed us a picture of a 300 lb alligator gar which must have been 20' long, caught using a net & held up by a sports fisherman. 

Susan commented at the end of our meeting, "it's (Fish Story) so unlike you. It's so anthropocentric!!" I replied, "well, you can't do much restoration without a few people." I guess that's my paradoxical point of entry. Maybe the question now, is what behavioral change might make a difference, where in Memphis? Jim & Gene commented about how Memphis has seen itself as the center of the world because of it's historical position on the river. So what I might be looking for, is whom can tell me where might be the trigger in that center?

1910 Photo of 10' Alligator gar, author unknown