Another's Fish Story

Alan Sekula's ""Fish Story" told the industrial, marine side of how humans treat the sea. R.I.P.

Connecting the art market to Fish Story, to the Rockaways, to Memphis in May

Recently, I collaborated with the ecoart collective to send a video proposal to MoMA, on the occasion of their call to "rebuild" the Rockaways waterfront since Hurricane Sandy. http://www.ecoartnetwork.org/wordpress/moma-expo-1-new-york-rockaway/. I believe the same issues facing the Rockaways are facing the fish in Memphis or the art market in NYC. They are all fulcrums. 

The basic response from the ecoart collective was that the very idea of rebuilding the Rockaways waterfront in the anthropocene is an oxymoron. Rather, as the artists Newton and  Helen Harrison have suggested, we need to "withdraw gracefully." The solution I see, isn't always withdrawal. The variations depend on thinking bioregionally and then looking for "trigger points," to effect environmental justice. It always starts, not with the people, but the animals. That is why I keep coming back to fish for Memphis (Fish Story).

On Jerry Saltz's FB page yesterday, Mia Pearlman posted a link to Ed Winckleman's blog decrying the state of the art market today. My response, which I've posted below, was that the art market only reflects the global crisis. To my way of thinking, the ecoart collective's video was a response to that insanity, and for that reason, I would be very pleasantly but nonetheless surprised if MoMA likes it (my implication being that MoMA is the belly of the art market beast). That said, I think the "answer" to the art market/ fish/the anthropocene will be collective. The panel I suggest at the end of this post is specific to the art world but the premises could easily be expanded in the right venue:

Here's the link to Ed's page http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/2013/03/saving-endangered-true-believers.html — with Edward Winkleman. and here is my long-winded response:

I really appreciated this post & thread. I was so dismayed by my art fair experience last weekend that after just one 2 hr stint, I went home & took a long nap. The most interesting work I saw were the women who could walk on ultra-high heels. 

Exhibit A of the NY Art World Fairs

The recommendations (in Ed Winckelman's blog) are great but what I think is happening to the art world precisely mirrors what is happening environmentally and economically: as species (and classes and roles) get hollowed out, connections break and the entire system gets pushed past a threshold point of collapse where it will self-organize.

As an ecological artist, on the one hand, I think it is possible to predict what will precipitate the "last straw" that will create that self-organization. I have been saying for a while, that the best hope is in understanding physics. There is a point (that I call a trigger point when it is deliberately calculated) where Maxwells' "demon information" can displace the old system. I can calculate that environmentally, but the art market in some ways is still less over-simplified than what we see in ecosystems in the anthropocene. The problem I see that needs to be examined, is what are the factors that go into modeling predictively?

I presume, based on thinking about the natural environment, that the greatest factors are neither obvious nor easy to move, such as capitalism run amuck. On the other hand, if my reference to physics is correct, it may just take the right small trigger to effect change.

I can only go back to what I work on in my own practice as a model. 

Right now, I'm experimenting with trying to recapitulate the pressure, multi-tasking and preparation work that will go into solving climate change in a project I'm preparing for May in Memphis (Fish Story). I see that as an endurance performance. The personal trick for me, is how to do that without burning out & crashing before I get there, let alone afterwards.

The relevance of my practice model to the art market is that if the artist is the "trigger point" in the critical shift we all need, the question is how individual artists are going to survive the present? The short answer is not easily and not alone. Artists have been competitively divided from dealers and each other. But no matter how powerful insanity may be in the art world right now, like fracking, there are many more of "us" losing from what is happening than there are of "them" gaining big time at everyone else's expense.  

When Rob Storr recently addressed the College Art Association (CAA) with a litany of what the schools & academia are doing wrong, instead of complaining about how he was a "downer," I think he should have been heard as a clarion call from Cassandra. His talk and some others last month at CAA, this blog and the responses, Jerry's FB page are parts of what keeps me going so I don't crash in isolation as an artist. I believe we can be the 99% if we make ourselves heard. 

The simplest answer to what can be done is to say it more and say it loudly. This is a collective endurance event.

As I was typing this, I got a call from the artist Carolee Schneemann and we talked about where values and discernment had gone these days (out the window). Values & discernment will go the way, I think of this entire world unless those of us who care passionately about a different set of values find our collective voice. That process of finding a collective voice, is, I think the "demon information" that could trigger a change.

Will it bring back a past we loved or at least sentimentally enjoyed in our lifetimes? Not for many polar bears or elephants, not for the people who now have polluted water and not for many of us in one aspect or another of the art world in our lifetimes. But something & some of us will survive with integrity.

My suggestion: put together a panel some place very visible, inc Ed, Jerry, Rob, Carolee, Alain & whomever else has a clear voice (more articulate women) and drag people to it with a media campaign that connects these issues to all the others we are facing globally.

Add Mira Schor and Mierle Ukeles to that panel.

Mierle Ukeles at the Brooklyn Museum on maintenance

In developing Fish Story, I am often reminded of the work of artists such as Mierle Ukeles, known for her work on Fresh Kills wetlands and as the artist in residence for the NYC maintenance department.

Mierle Ukeles is remarkable to me not just for her work but for her thoughtfulness, modesty and generosity to others. I think she lets the work speak for itself without languaging or keywording at all. In this case, the work was all about framing her questions about the meaning of maintenance and the implications of Sandy with peoples experiences, letting the context frame the content.

Mierle began the event with some opening remarks, most of which I missed. Mierle referenced an earlier performance, in the 60's and that now was a good time to revisit the meaning of maintenance. She was seated to the audience's right, on a raised platform podium, at a table and each person sat across from her, like Marina Abramovich at MOMA last year.  She was in a relaxed posture but didn't break till everyone was done, about 6:PM. 

She had sent us questions- how do you survive, how will NYC survive (after Sandy):

What keeps you alive?

What do you need to keep going?

What keeps NYC alive?

What does the city need to survive?

in the short run

in the long run

She also asked us each for an intro.

Each participant was weighed before they ascended & then after they descended the platform.

The entire event was taped and will be available on disk.

A questionnaire was distributed inviting people to list their maintenance activities.

The day interspersed artists, a few scientists with maintenance workers who each spoke precisely 15 minutes. I stayed till the end.

There were several of us present from the ecodialog. Jackie Brookner, Betsy Damon & myself spoke about our current work, respectively in Fargo, China and Memphis. Lillian Ball & Ruth Hardinger were also there. 

Betsy Damon talking with Mierle Ukeles

One account was from a museum window washer, who had had cancer, was a former model. She could be seen washing the windows behind Mierle earlier in the performance. 

The window washer

The maintenance people fascinated me. They were modest, humble & competent. Very smart people and as Mierle said, what keeps us going. They were the people  one Parks dept cleaner said & Mierle agreed, who could just as easily be CEOs.

One particularly riveting speaker was a maintenance man from the Rockaways, who described his experiences with Sandy. His time went double everyone else's. 

Describing the clean-up after Sandy

Mierle listening

These were some of the quotes I wrote down:

What are we going to sacrifice to survive?

I'm proud to be an American and a New Yorker ... there's worse out there

We cried the whole night about Stage 4 cancer and then we were OK

It was magnificent (about people helping with Sandy) ... I wanted to be helpful. I grew to hate the storm.' I'm reporting for duty.' They put me to work and I felt useful. People have to shred more. You could only operate while the sun is shining.

Methane harvesting (at Fresh Kills) for 100 000 homes and generating $1 million for the city

make people biological by connecting them to the land

"You don't know who you are until you know WHERE you are" (Wendell Berry)

How the story will end?  "You (Mierle)" remind us we are all stardust.

Emptying out art

Earlier in the day, I had passed a homeless person, asleep in a  church doorway and wondered what their maintenance was like.

Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Joseph Pilates and trigger point theory

Me in a tree, on the right in a skirt: the early California years.
Photography by Fred Lonidier at Pauline Oliveros' wedding.

"Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism" is the title of my dissertation with the Zurich Node (Z-Node) of the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth, UK. In a series of five chapters, I describe a holistic approach to understanding the space of environmental degradation and resilient restoration with an original theory I've written briefly about elsewhere. Understanding how to embody an experience of space is an integral to that theory as systems theory or Geographic Information Systems science (GISc). I plan is to develop that thesis into a book as soon as I can put the PhD behind me. Meanwhile, from time to time, scraps of my past remind me where my ideas came from, as Steve Paxton's recent appearance at MOMA:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/arts/dance/steve-paxtons-satisfyin-lover-and-state-at-moma.html?nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20121019

I first met Steve Paxton in person, in 1970 in a workshop he did at Ace Galley in LA with Alex Hay. Steve & I were close that summer and I loved his work, esp when I saw it for the first time in 1966 in the Armory "9 Evenings," as part of EAT. Steve Paxton brought a deliberate appreciation of athleticism into the dance world.because he had once taught gym classes in high school. He was part of developing contact improv movement, no doubt inspired by football and basketball, which Simone Forti then sought to develop even further, as what she once described during rehearsal at UCSD I was part of, as a virtuosity of that technique. In Simone's approach, she was recapitulating the historical trajectory of how ballet developed from fencing in the seventeenth century. These two approaches were mirrored in what Joseph Pilates called, "controlology," based on watching animals and doing yoga. 

The New Dance movement at Judson Church in the sixties, fostered by the late Rev. William Moody was not just a series of performances, it was an expression of a zeitgeist of those times as much as Fluxus and Happenings. As individuals, Judson was a group I began to know personally just before leaving NYC for California in 1968 and then early in my career in So Calif: including Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Steve Paxton, Alex Hay, Simone Forti, briefly Rauschenberg, etc. 

"Joe," as he was known to his many students, was not at all interested in what has popularly evolved as a set of calisthenics. He was interested in creating a system of movement, highly sensitized to the environment of movement, which therapeutically reshaped the body's learned distortions, as from conventional sports training and ballet.

What I've spoken about briefly to colleagues and occasional interviewers at various times, is how some of my performance ideas for how to understand the space of a site that has been degraded, are grounded in dance. I trained in ballet and did dressage from childhood. 

My own experiences observing animals and doing dressage opened me to Joe's ideas during my six years of work with him when he was alive. It also gave me a unique perspective on Jill Johnston's brilliant writing for the Village Voice, which I devoured every week for her expression of the relationship between dance and experience of the city as a Happening in those years. I was lucky to experience all that simultaneously.  New Dance was very connected to  Joseph Pilates' thru the sixties, and what I gleaned was later realized for me in my performance group, the American Ritual Theatre (1969-1971). Those ideas are still integrated into my practice.

It was around that time that I also also met & became close to Allan Kaprow and many of the other Fluxus folks, as, Peter Van Riper and Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, etc. I would TA for Allan Kaprow @ Cal Arts in the early seventies and went thru many years of arguments as I hashed out where their ideas began and ended in my thinking. But what I absorbed, has stuck with me and grown over all these years, has been a relaxed but highly sensitized relationship to space in the broadest possible sense. 

To my regret, I didn't hear about Steve presenting his work @MOMA until yesterday and because I fly out tonight to present at the Restore Americas Estuaries National conference:

https://www.estuaries.org/conference/

I will also miss Steve's video this evening but highly recommend it to any of my readers. 

So if anyone else out there can get to MOMA tonight, enjoy for me too!