Karl Cronin's Experiencing Forms

Karl Cronin
"Populus tremuloides (Aspen)"
2009
In late November, I visited "Ecoarchive: Meditations on Time and Nature," a group show on view at Intersection for the Arts 5M, in San Francisco. All of the work included in the exhibition (on view through January 22, 2011) is intelligent and commendable, but I most appreciated Matthew Moore's video, "Lifecycles," Sam Easterson's video, "The Museum of Animal Perspectives," and Karl Cronin's video sampler of his "Somatic Natural History Archive."

I spent most of my time with Cronin's project. For his "Somatic Natural History Archive," Cronin aims to "document with his own body representational expressions of 10,000 U.S. plants and animals," an undertaking that the artist estimates will take 50 years to complete. To date, Cronin has made "expeditions" to Nashville (TN), Santa Fe (NM), Yosemite (CA), Raleigh (NC), Plainfield (MA), and the Grand Canyon, and he's earned the well-deserved support of the Santa Fe Art Institute, Movement Research, and the Puffin Foundation. The documents of his "representational expressions" are archived in the SNHA Catalogue, each labeled with the observed species' Latin name and common name (e.g., "Populus tremuloides (Aspen)").


Karl Cronin
"Awaiting identification"
2009
With so very many plants and animals to imitate (only 66 of the 10,000 have so far been cataloged online), it's not surprising that Cronin's earnest attempts are uneven; generally, I find his embodiment of plants more intriguing and successful than his animals, but even the less-realized "expressions" made me smile, giddily impressed by the artist's wonderfully quixotic efforts.

Importantly, however, Cronin's endeavor is not mere whimsy. The project may seem simple enough, but I'm certain that it provides the artist with a fundamentally new understanding of (and relationship with) the creatures he studies. Cronin first observes the plant or animal subject, then he perceives it physically, with his body. Watching the artist sway and lean with the breeze in a stand of a grass (an as yet unidentified species, perhaps related to switchgrass), it occurred to me that Cronin is something of a latter-day shaman. "Shaman" is a term abused by new-age prophets and their ranks of well-intentioned, but ill-informed followers, but the philosopher and cultural ecologist David Abram is one of a handful of writers who have given shamanism the thoughtful consideration that it deserves. As I watched Cronin channel a heron, Abram's definition of magic came to mind.

"We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human. [..] Magic is participating in a world of multiple intelligences with the intuition that every form one perceives - from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself - is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations that are very different from our own."

In essence, magic is empathy with other "experiencing forms"; it's communion with other facets of the animate world. Happily, by documenting his work with video, Cronin allows the viewer to participate in the magic. I'm grateful for that.


Karl Cronin
"Caelifera sp. (Grasshopper)"
2009
Note: As a proud natural history geek, I was disappointed that Cronin titled the last of the three videos above "Caelifera sp. (Grasshopper)." In fact, the insect that Cronin imitates in this video is actually a katydid, a species more closely related to crickets than to grasshoppers. Still, while I presume Cronin will make the correction when he adds this video to the SNHA Catalogue, I don't envy him the task of trying to secure a definitive ID on many of the species he works with. Without the help of a entomology expert, he'll be hard pressed to determine the species of katydid in the video above.)

Image/artwork credit: all videos, courtesy Karl Cronin

Jon Rappleye's "Forgotten Planet"

Jon Rappleye
"Where In This Land of Lively Beasts Scatters the Darkness Thin"
2009
Acrylic and spray enamel on paper
42 1/4 x 72 inches

Jon Rappleye's work springs from a teeming imagination and, because he also shares my interest in the messy overlap of natural history and fantastical narrative, it comes as no surprise that I so respond to his mixed media paintings.

Reviewing "Awakened In The Peaceable Kingdom," his 2007 solo exhibition at Jeff Bailey Gallery, I noted that "the relationships between Rappleye's animal subjects have grown more complex and the ambivalent cycle of life and death is more readily observable" than in his earlier mixed media works.

"Forgotten Planet," Rappleye's current show, evidences still more growth. The best of the new paintings are the most nuanced, compelling compositions Rappleye has so far produced. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he includes plenty of snakes and owls, two of my favorite animal icons.


Jon Rappleye
"Awakened From Winter's Tranquil Slumber"
2009
Acrylic and spray enamel on paper
51 x 51 inches

Photo credits: Jon Rappleye images courtesy of Jeff Bailey Gallery

The Wonderful Worms

Jessica Palmer is an artist, scientist and writer. Her blog Bioephemera combines these three vocations to consistently excellent effect. Her current series on the sometimes fractious relationship between art and science (or, more precisely, between artists and scientists) is worth checking out. (Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. More posts in the series will follow.)

As regular HH readers know, I believe that the human animal depends on wonder and awe for psychological sustenance. These complicated, overlapping emotions impel curiosity, creativity and reverence and, in my estimation, science and religion "(re)awaken or invigorate our capacity [to experience] wonder."

Unfortunately, many thoughtful contemporaries disagree, often vehemently. They worry that we're losing wonder, and they accuse science (they often call it "scientism") of demystifying experience. These thinkers fear that science elucidates so thorough an explanation of the material world that scientists (and, in turn, society at large) believe only in the observable and the quantifiable. Metaphysics and transcendentalism are thus relegated to the intellectual dustbin, realms traveled only by the deranged, the fey or the weak-minded.

This worry is unfounded. Wonder can't be extinguished by revealing "the workings" of observed phenomena. Quite to the contrary! Even the most Cartesian of scientific explanations enhances our conception of the material world. In turn, that advanced understanding enriches our imaginative experience of both the material and the metaphysical.

To this point, a blurb in a recent issue of National Wildlife magazine entitled "The Science Behind 'Worm Grunting'" explains the once mysterious cause-and-effect relationship manipulated by "grunting."

"As recently as the 1960s, hundreds of people in the southeastern United States earned a living through a curious practice known as 'worm grunting': driving a stake into the ground, then rubbing the stake with a long piece of steel in order to produce a sound that, for reasons unknown, would drive hundreds of earthworms to the surface where they could be collected for bait. Now biologist Ken Catania of Vanderbilt University has found an explanation for the technique’s efficacy. Without realizing it, worm grunters were imitating the sounds made by worm-hungry moles digging through the earth. By observing both earthworms’ reactions to grunting and their response to the presence of eastern American moles, Catania found that the invertebrates rapidly pop to the surface when they detect the presence of a mole—or a grunter."

I've never gone grunting, but as a child of the southeastern United States, I've done my fair share of earthworm digging in preparation for afternoon pond fishing. I wish I'd known about grunting those years ago, and I'm very glad that I know about it now. I still fish every now and again, so I may yet have practical use for grunting. More importantly, I might also have occasion to educate children about grunting; a vital part of that teaching will be the astonishment the kids experience upon witnessing the worms' emergence. It ain't magic, but it's surefire enough to make this adult shake his head in believing disbelief. Another word for that? Wonder.

For more on grunting, check out this blog post.

Photo credit: Discovery blogs

Coasts

Steep Ravine Trail, Mount Tamalpais, December 29th, 2009

"The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion."

Elizabeth and I devoted the afternoon of my thirty-first birthday to striding down (and then huffing back up) the aptly named Steep Ravine Trail in Mount Tamalpais State Park. During our descent, we paused for a few minutes on a stocky wood footbridge spanning a shallow gully stream. I leaned against the bridge's handrail and appreciated the subtle play of sunlight on the forest's understory, then tilted my head far back to admire the towering canopy. A bird call punctuated the stream's casual susurration.

The impressive montane forest brought to mind a quotation I copied into one of my commonplace books some years ago. In his account of an interview with a Venezuelan native, the celebrated 19th century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt claims that the Indian critiqued the Christian God of the European explorers and conquerors, observing, "Your god keeps himself shut up in a house as if he were old and infirm. Ours is in the forest and in the fields and on the mountains when the rain comes." Although no rain graced Mount Tamalpais this December 29th, the Indian's god was also mine.


Steep Ravine Trail, Mount Tamalpais, December 29th, 2009

Mount Tamalpais is located in southern Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco. The lush Douglas fir and redwood forests of the region are magical places. They served as inspiration for George Lucas's forested moon Endor and they call to mind the epic majesty of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. (In fact, some "Star Wars" fans reasonably suggest that Lucas named his verdant moon in homage to Tolkien. Tolkien, a celebrated linguist and scholar, invented languages for his fantasy fiction and in the Quenya tongue, one of the elvish languages he created, the word for Middle-earth is Endor.)

Of all Tolkien's creatures, the elegant and noble elves of Lothlorien especially appealed to me when I first read "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." The elves are wise, fair and gracious beings, but also wild, intimately attached to the world of the hunter and to Nature's ambivalent magic. Twenty years after my first reading of Tolkien's fantasy epic, I still proudly characterize myself as a Nature worshiper.

The economist and sociologist Max Weber famously said that the secularization of society and increasing specialization of methodological inquiry had led to a "disenchantment of the world." Indeed, they have, but Baruch Spinoza's brand of naturalistic pantheism allows for a happy marriage of the material and metaphysical worlds. The two spheres, like the taijitu's yin and yang, are complementary parts of a whole. Necessarily, then, exclusion or disparagement of one of these two realms is limiting.

Although the Enlightenment's separation of reason and imagination, and of science and religion, has yielded exemplary human achievements, it also alienates us from the integrated aggregate. We no longer conceive of the universe (or our experience of it) as coherent or unified; since at least the 17th century, the prevailing philosophical current is Cartesian, depicting the universe as a random assemblage of disparate parts. As a result, those individuals who, like the brilliant 19th century critic John Ruskin, strive to reconcile "the broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought and feeling, and truth and faith" are considered naive or fey. Even Gershom Scholem, the renowned historian of Jewish mysticism, described his philosopher friend Walter Benjamin's work as "an often puzzling juxtaposition of the two modes of thought, the metaphysical-theological and the materialistic." I align myself with the philosophical dissidents because, like Ruskin and Benjamin, I feel that the material and metaphysical realms are locked in a harmonious, reciprocal relationship. Framed another way, I believe that the mundane is the sacred; I deny the divisive "and."

"My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity."

Steep Ravine Trail, Mount Tamalpais, December 29th, 2009

That December evening, Elizabeth and I motored along Grizzly Peak's ridge line and, as the Pacific horizon took the sun, we admired the colorful strata deposited over San Francisco's hills, city lights and bay. Later, after a lovely dinner in Berkeley, we returned to Elizabeth's home and relaxed with her parents and brothers. It was a superlative day. Yet because I'm accustomed to spending my birthday in brooding solitude, it was also an exceptional one, and therefore I wasn't surprised when, driving to Grizzly Peak, I felt a twinge of regret.

To be sure, the day was nearly perfect, but I had to ignore the call issued by the deep blues and purples of twilight, an invitation to submerge myself in the gathering darkness. I remarked to Elizabeth that it felt very strange to observe my birthday without making space for rumination. We turned onto Grizzly Peak Boulevard. I watched the car's headlights rake across a stand of trees, frightening back the dark.


View of Berkeley and San Francisco Bay, December 29th, 2009

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton described his contemplative practice as "death for the sake of life." Merton may be guilty of rhetorical flourish, but one of contemplation's principal goals is the erasure of self or the death, if you will, of the self-conscious individual. I consider myself lucky; I once experienced release from the first-person, a rare gift in our culture of consumption and distraction. I consider those exceptional moments an ecstatic opening to The All, a glimpse of the integrated, infinite universe.

The word ecstasy is derived from the Greek word for "to stand out of place." On the dike at Heron's Foot, my conscious being was literally outside (or at least without) the self. For a time, the atoms, molecules, cells and organs that comprise "me" were undifferentiated from the greater web. Religious mystics usually refer to this variety of fundamental experience as "seeing God." That name bothers me less than it did in my militantly atheistic adolescence, but I prefer The All (or an apophatic counterpart, The Nothing) because the name possesses majesty and mystery but none of the unfortunate authoritarian baggage. Furthermore, the rituals of institutionalized religion and its "under God" subjects are no more or less valuable than the rituals of the heathen mystic. John Dewey's "live animal" might just as easily be awakened in the gropings of sex as in penitential prayer, and God is just as easily found in the forests of Mount Tamalpais as in the acolyte's cathedral. After all, there is nothing supernatural about ecstasy; it is only a mode of hyper awareness, a more immediate connection to the universe, or at least as much of one as our limited vessels can perceive.

Now, January already half gone, I sit at my day-job desk and look out on Manhattan's East River. The late afternoon sun's angled glow paints the 59th Street Bridge in peach-yellow and refracts off the west face of Citibank's glass obelisk in Queens. A herring gull flaps over Roosevelt Island and the river runs slack as it awaits the pull of outgoing tide. In "Rewriting Nature," an essay published in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote "[Charles] Darwin disenchanted believers in Heaven, but he reenchanted lovers of Earth."

I concur.

"What we have to be is what we are."

Office window view; East River, Roosevelt Island and Queens, January 2008

Note: all indented quotations, Thomas Merton

Photo credits: all images, Hungry Hyaena, 2008

December

Perhaps it is winter's bleached shadow light and contemplative spirit that keep me quietly aglow. Even some recent (and unfortunate) surprises haven't dimmed my mood. They have, however, resulted in little writing and less studio productivity, deficits I hope to address in short order.

Still, December is with me, and I am happy.

I wish you all a happy holiday season and beyond!

Where Has All The Strangeness Gone?

Roosevelt Island and Queensboro Bridge, October 2007

Before moving here in 1999, I romanticized New York City in my way, naively imagining it America's own Victorian London. I believed I would rub elbows with prostitutes and hustlers as often as artists, dancers and yuppies. I also believed - this correctly - that New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore belonged to a special group of American centers, settlements that proudly wear scars of their younger days and offer exciting local histories on every block. Sadly, even the latter assumption is proving false, or, at least, less true than it used to be.

Yesterday evening, I sat in a West Village pub named after a one-time London establishment. To my left was a hearth, on which a small pile of gas logs "burned" pleasantly. The pub's decor and wood paneling were also counterfeit; the Guinness, fortunately, was not. I divided my time between eavesdropping - on a conversation about the American tendency toward Bush/Clinton rule and, for comic relief, a movie trivia game involving an astoundingly clueless couple - and reading the excellent, but depressing "Mystery on Pearl Street," a piece by Burkhard Bilger included in the January 7th issue of The New Yorker. The article details the story of 211 Pearl Street, a building almost approved for protection by the NY Landmarks Preservation Commission, but instead demolished to make room for a(nother) high-rise condominium and office center.

Early on in the article, Bilger supplies readers with this distressing fact: "New York demolishes more old buildings every month than most American cities have standing...in an average year, about two thousand buildings are torn down." Later, Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, puts it to Bilger thus: "New York, to me, is becoming less and less mysterious. Its ghosts, its revenants, they don't have a place to walk anymore. They are being squeezed out....I don't mean to sound like an occultist, but a little bit of strangeness is important to Manhattan."

In the last six months - SIX MONTHS! - four new condos rose on my block in Astoria, Queens; the footprint of another has just been cleared. From my office on Manhattan's East Side, I look down on Roosevelt Island, once named Welfare Island, and see condo after condo ascending. The papers remind us each month of the "exodus of the creative class," a phenomenon attributed to escalating rents and the ever increasing cost of living, but those are not the only factors responsible.

Personally, I'd rather live in a place where the spirits linger. Is Europe the only refuge?


Roosevelt Island and Queensboro Bridge, January 2008

Gallery Report: September 26th, 2007

Paul Villinski at Morgan Lehman Gallery



Paul Villinksi
"Ardor"
2007
Found aluminum, wire, lead and soot
60 x 60 x 11 inches
Morgan Lehman Gallery: Paul Villinski's solo outing, "metamorphosis," proves true the maxim that one can have too much of a good thing. The works Villinski includes - groupings of wall-mounted butterflies, "cut by hand from discarded aluminum cans," and a similar installation using vinyl LPs - are part of a series I was introduced to in July of 2006, when the artist included one sculpture, "Departure," in a summer group show at Morgan Lehman. At the time, I applauded Villinski's willingness to flirt with preciousness. I wrote, "[the sculpture] risks being dismissed as a one-note, kitsch celebration of reincarnation or transformation," but concluded that the work was stronger for taking that risk. "Departure" toed the line successfully, forcing the viewer to question his jaded mistrust of a sincere, simple gesture.

Unfortunately, when the gallery space includes only Villinski's butterfly sculptures, the work takes a sad tumble from sincerity into saccharinity. Butterflies, butterflies, everywhere! Even those visitors who rightly cling to the notion of the gallery as a cultural shrine will be forced to admit that an art gallery is first and foremost a boutique. This context undermines Villinski's labors. I left the show wishing I could view each sculpture apart from the rest because, on their own, they are quite nice.

+++++

Julie Heffernan at P.P.O.W. Gallery



Julie Heffernan
"Self Portrait as Booty"
2007
Oil on canvas
68 1/2 x 65 inches
P.P.O.W.: Julie Heffernan's large, lush canvases are a treat for contemporary painting aficionados. The works on display in her current solo show, "Booty," at P.P.O.W., provide ample evidence of her virtuosity, but are psychologically off-putting.

The paintings function as contemporary Vanitas pictures. Heffernan replaces the oft-used laden table with naked women - all self portraits - and gone, too, are the hourglass and silverware. The works are less meditations on life's temporality than restrained celebrations of ego and excess.

The press release states that the figure "does not stoop under the weight of it all" and possesses "extraordinary grace," but that grace can also be interpreted as ambivalent disregard. Did these women achieve their position, or is this merely their circumstance? In either case, the women are obscene; at best, they are quiet collaborators and, more likely, queenly orchestrators, present-day scepter bearers lording over choked empires and rampant consumption. I am saddened - even made uncomfortable - by these pictures. The artist is looking out at us. We're implicated.

+++++

Daniel Rozin at bitforms gallery



Daniel Rozin
"Weave Mirror"
2007
768 laminated C-ring prints, motors, circuits, custom software and microcontroller
57 x 76 x 8 inches
Edition of 6
bitforms gallery: Daniel Rozin includes three interactive sculptures in "Fabrication," his third solo exhibition with bitforms gallery. One of these, "Snow Mirror," is relatively forgettable, but "Peg Mirror" and "Weave Mirror" may well prove to be among the most engaging works I will see this year.

As their titles suggest, all three of Rozin's computerized sculptures are unconventional mirrors, limning the viewer in plastic rings, wooden pegs, or digitized "snow." The "reflected" images are fragmented or wraith-like. The reflection offered by "Weave Mirror," for example, more closely resembles a shadow than the familiar face in the medicine cabinet mirror. This "other" shadow has a power that our own, neglected shadow no longer possesses. "The Shadow knows," the popular 1930s radio program reminded Americans, and "Weave Mirror" emphasizes our corporeality by summoning the confrontational vestige, a hi-contrast Doppelganger that stares back at us as it mimics.



Daniel Rozin
"Weave Mirror"
2007
768 laminated C-ring prints, motors, circuits, custom software and microcontroller
57 x 76 x 8 inches
Edition of 6
All of Rozin's "mirrors" are playfully mysterious, but "Weave Mirror" is especially so. I circled the construction, and approached its face from all angles, low and high, trying to figure out its whining, clacking workings. I felt I was in the presence of something special, something at once "new" and ancient, magical and mundane. It is remarkable, too, for the method of its magic. It breaks apart the "whole" to transformative effect: revelation through pixelation.

The back of "Weave Mirror" is a plexiglas panel under which all the gears and wires can be seen. Even though Rozin reveals the mechanics of the piece, you need to be a contemporary tinkerer, engineer, or programmer to understand what's happening behind Oz's curtain. For the rest of us, the work remains invested with magic, what Julian Dibbell, writing on contemporary technology, calls "the logic of the incantation." I am, admittedly, something of a technophobe, but Rozin's engineering has all the appeal of steampunk alternatives.

+++++

Photo credits: Villinski and Heffernan images ripped from gallery websites (only due to time constraints); "Weave Mirror" images, Hungry Hyaena, 2007

Jon Rappleye at Jeff Bailey Gallery

Jon Rappleye
"Nightwood Bloom"
2007
Acrylic on paper
42 1/2 x 87 inches

Because our creative siblings produce work that explores overlapping formal or conceptual territory, we tend to judge their output with more rigor than we might otherwise apply. As a result, I hold Jon Rappleye's mixed media paintings to a very high standard.

Like me, Rappleye draws his imagery from the indistinct intersection of natural history, animism, anthropomorphism and magic. I was introduced to his work in 2002; a smallish black-and-white painting hung in the Jeff Bailey Gallery office space. Set against a deep, black ground, owls and padlocks floated in an undefined space. Rappleye's execution was skillful and I responded to the imagery but, at the time, I was still struggling to find my own voice and I was therefore as skeptical of Rappleye's painting as I was excited by it. Does he really know these animal players?, I wondered. Does he fathom the world he depicts? Is he someone who truly appreciates being enveloped by that world? These may seem like strange questions but, for me, they were intrinsic to the spirit of the work.


Jon Rappleye
"In the Quiuver of the Kingdom"
2007
Acrylic on paper
40 x 51 inches

Both Jon and I have grown as artists in the intervening five years and Jon's recent solo show, "Awakened In The Peaceable Kingdom," also at Jeff Bailey, puts those questions to rest. I'd like to believe that the questions fade from relevance and that I can therefore fully appreciate Rappleye's work because I'm secure in my own doings. Perhaps that plays a part, but Rappleye has carefully honed his craft and defined his invented world; the works he produced in 2007 are not only his best to date, several are among the best paintings I've seen this year.

The cast of characters in this new work - hybrid amphibians, woodcocks, cormorants, ravens, poorwills, antlered owls, mushrooms, dead songbirds - is familiar, but the relationships between Rappleye's animal subjects have grown more complex and the ambivalent cycle of life and death is more readily observable. Whereas three years ago his pictures read as pastiche - every crow, owl or rabbit a distinct vignette - a painting like "Awakened In The Peaceable Kingdom" presents the viewer with a viable, if fanciful ecosystem.


Jon Rappleye
"Awakened In The Peaceable Kingdom"
2007
Acrylic on paper
38 x 50 inches

The biomorphic landscapes in this work, too, feel more attended to; alternately bulbous and elongated, Rappleye's trees, stumps and slopes are as cartoony and sexualized as ever, but they take on a more nurturing character, in part because they are more convincingly occupied. Rappleye's fine line work, already notable in 2002, is ever more masterful; I spent long minutes admiring his economical rendering of a mammal's fur and the lustrous detail included in the feathers of a peacock's tail.

Rappleye also includes two sculptures in the exhibition, both cast in china. The new technique is a nice addition to Rappleye's output, and his blind - eyeless, actually - yet watchful owl, perched on a branch in the corner of the gallery, had me wondering if Rappleye might not produce installations one day and, if so, how they would inform the paintings (and vice versa).

Photo credits: all images courtesy Jeff Bailey Gallery

Gallery Report: June 27, 2007

Part Two : Totemic Art


"Power Figure: Nkondi" (detail)
Wood and metal
approx. 24 3/4 x 8 x 8 inches
* * * * *

Kate Horne
"The Escape"
2006
Glazed porcelain & mason stain
9 x 12 x 1 inches
RARE: Artist collectives are a curious affair. The creative communion offered by a collective is appealing to many artists, yet so many of us would just as soon close the studio door and be left to our own devices. But that isolationist inclination makes the concept of a collective more valuable, particularly when the group concerns itself with a set of values or ideas, whether abstract or rigidly delineated, rather than some stylistic mode.


Amie Cunningham
"The Steadfast Warrior (Totem)"
2007
Maple wood, stain
78 x 17 1/2 x 20 inches
The Orchestra does just that. Pat Berran, Amie Cunningham, Candice Hoeflinger, and Kate Horne "[explore] the creation of modern-ray relics with a sensitivity to history, craft, and humans' precarious relationship with nature." An increasing number of young artists, myself among them, are setting up shop in this territory, an unsurprising migration given the complicated, fractured interdependency of modern man and the rest of it. The exemplary pieces in the RARE exhibition, "The Steadfast Warrior (Totem)," by Cunningham, and a series of porcelain relief paintings by Kate Horne, return to a totemic representation of Nature to "search for modern spiritual significance."


Kate Horne
"No Cookie"
2007
Glazed porcelain & mason stain
9 x 12 1/2 x 1 inches
Several months ago, I wrote about the paintings of Tom Uttech, a painter central to my pantheon. In that essay, I described totemic Nature as "a world of symbol and ecstatic interpretation" borne of sensual experience. That may seem a fanciful description to attach to Cunningham's totem or Horne's plates, but their work seems driven in part by a desire for natural reciprocity, a wanting to be alive as part of the greater weave. So many of us today yearn for this forgotten language, straining to apprehend the words despite our tongue's unfamiliarity. A rural childhood attunes the ear more than one spent in suburbia or the city; as we become an increasingly urban species, will we hear our history or taste our present without technological mediation?

* * * * *

"Bamana, Kore Hyena Mask, Mali, Africa"
Late 19th century
Wood, metal and leather
approx. 17 x 9 x 8 inches
Betty Cuningham: I can not say for sure whether or not the members of The Orchestra spent a lot of time outdoors as youngsters, but the artists responsible for the masks, clubs, statues, daggers, shields, and blankets included in "It's All Spiritual: Art from Tribal Cultures" definitely did. The show's curator, Alan Steele, writes, "The title...reflects the belief that all great art - to some degree or another - has a spiritual component and that nowhere is this seen better than in the tribal arts from remote cultures."

The spiritual component of these works - which, by the way, would be vetted even by the likes of John Dewey, as they are beautiful and utilitarian - removes the need for dressy conceptual underpinning. (Discouragingly, the reverse is also true; an alarming majority of contemporary art is largely short on "spirit." As contemporary humanity's relationship to Nature has become more clouded and distressed, so too has our awareness of the immediate, animating forces been thoroughly abstracted. We are no longer, then, satisfied with what is, and we develop a greater dependency on the theatre of possibility and promises of progress, in turn denying the present and the social body, and so exhibiting more pretense, anxiety, and depression. But this is a whole 'nother can of worms.)


"Power Figure: Nkondi"
Wood and metal
approx. 24 3/4 x 8 x 8 inches
One could argue, however, that the tribal works are conceptual in that they draw on the myths and magical narratives central to each culture, but those narratives are themselves the product of a local hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and the iconography is rooted in direct involvement with the resources and ecosystems from which the materials are drawn. I've long felt that the "primitive" works from the Africa, Oceania, and Americas collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are among the most inspiring under that roof. But seen in the context of so impressive and vast a hoard, those objects are most easily read as artifacts, as historical channel markers; the education offered by the museum presentation, while valuable, can distract from direct experience of the work, making it less edifying. This is one reason why we hear so much griping about the museum as mausoleum(1), and why the Betty Cuningham Gallery exhibition, smaller and more random in organization, allows viewers to experience the objects in much the same way they would contemporary works of art. Their vitality and relevance is immediately clear.

"It's All Spiritual" is a hopeful show. On the W train back to Queens I wondered if museums shouldn't start partnering with galleries on a more regular basis. Contemporary artists - indeed, all gallery goers - would be well served by it.


"Human/Prairie Dog Fetish, Southern Plains"
Last quarter of 19th century
Wood, green pigment, brass tacks
approx. 9 1/2 x 5 x 4 inches
* * * * *
Photo credit: all images, Hungry Hyaena

(1) Mausoleum or not, the Met is a true marvel. If you stop and think for a moment about what is housed inside...you gotta pinch yourself. Frankly, I don't spend nearly enough time there.

I finished a new painting this past weekend and thought I'd throw a pic up here.


Christopher Reiger
"between meaning and material (h.H.R.)"
2007
Watercolor, gouache, graphite and marker on Arches paper
32 x 32 inches

I'm feeling very good about the Hysterical Transcendentalism series now. An intellectualized consideration of contemporary culture's relationship to Nature has grown into something more immediate and universal. The paintings are just one facet of a larger project now, a perhaps impossible attempt to reclaim lost communicative abilities. The premise of David Abram's important book, "Spell of the Sensuous," resides at the core of this project: "We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human." More specifically:

"The breathing, sensing body draws its sustenance and its very substance from the soils, plants, and elements that surround it; it continually contributes itself, in turn, to the air, to the
cornposting earth, to the nourishment of insects and oak trees and squirrels, ceaselessly spreading out of itself as well as breathing the world into itself, so that it is very difficult to discern, at any moment, precisely where this living body begins and where it ends. Considered phenomenologically - that is, as we actually experience and live it - the body is a creative, shape-shifting entity...at last, the possibility of a truly authentic phenomenology, a philosophy which would strive, not to explain the world as if from outside, but to give voice to the world from our experienced situation within it, recalling us to our participation in the here-and-now, rejuvenating our sense of wonder at the fathomless things, events and powers that surround us on every hand."

Abram's book was only recently brought to my attention, but it so articulately argues for a worldview I believe essential that I often read passages rapturously, as deeply religious people read their significant scriptures.

In any case, I feel good about life generally - although I still wish I could live in the country and have access to the city's cultural resources...but who doesn't? - and I'm more confident about my art than I can ever recall being. I'm excited about the studies I have going, some of which I will post on my website soon.

Richard Dawkins: Darwin's Rottweiler Becomes Defensive

There are no atheists in fox holes, or so the saying has it. It's also been said that aging fosters a spiritual or religious awakening. Both statements are generally true. Fear, it seems, is the common impetus, and specifically fear born of a proximity to death. The magical hereafter offers solace when you realize your days, minutes or seconds are few. In some respects, belief in the "next world" is a sensible adaptation to the shock of mortality.

But I'm not yet 30 years of age. Neither am I one of the brave, foolhardy or impoverished soldiers serving in a war zone. Why, then, am I becoming increasingly open to the value of metaphysical phenomena? It wasn't so very long ago that I dismissed supernatural explanations as weak-minded silliness. A decade ago, I petulantly stomped around a college campus in combat boots, pierced and angry, all too eager to explain to any intellectual miscreants why their belief in a higher power was not only stupid, but also hypocritical and loathsome. Considering that attitude today, I wince.

Although I still reject the notion of a creative, interventionist God, I find naturalistic pantheism congruent with my thinking. My younger incarnation would have spurned my present worldview, as it marries the mystical to the material and scientific. (Indeed, naturalistic pantheism is often dismissed as "religion for scientists" or "atheism for nature lovers." Worse still, from the perspective of my anti-spiritual past, I tend increasingly toward panenthism.) Whatever atheistic inclination may remain in me, I am today considerably more skeptical of those voices that wholesale dismiss spirituality and, likewise, am more accepting of magic and hyper-perceptual experience.

Last week I listened to a radio interview with Richard Dawkins, a one-time hero of mine. Dawkins, a professor at Oxford University, is a renowned ethologist (a field I have a special affinity for), evolutionary biologist and writer. He was in New York, where the interview was recorded, to accept the Lewis Thomas Prize at Rockefeller University, an honor bestowed upon those scientists who have achieved significant literary accomplishments. His most widely celebrated (and first) book, "The Selfish Gene," caused a stir of controversy in the late seventies - among biologists and theologians alike - and Dawkins has since remained a lightning rod for atheism and evolutionary biology.

Last year he published "The God Delusion," a tirade against religion. The title of the book is inspired by Robert Pirsig's observation, "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." Although I continue to find some of Dawkin's arguments reasonable (even rewarding), his conclusions are as ill-formed and incomplete as those of the religious fundamentalists he most loathes. As the Publisher's Weekly reviewer writes, "for a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe."

My own spiritual "awakening" aside, I'm still adverse to the stridently religious. Like Dawkins, I believe religion is too often decorated tribalism; as such, it remains responsible for the lion's share of world conflict. Even the hope offered by miscegenation will crumble in the face of religion, as our xenophobic instincts would still find in the stripe of faith reasons to identify, persecute and condemn "the other." Furthermore, as we are witness to in Iraq, even invasion and occupation by an alien force fails to trump the hate instilled via sectarianism. Dawkins highlights the tribal element of religion and faith in one of his lectures.

"Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one."

From my mid-teens to mid-twenties, I frequently scribbled Dawkins' quotations in my journals and extensively annotated his books. His intelligence and wit, coupled with his supreme confidence in the promise of science, offered a beacon to which I was drawn. E.O. Wilson, the famed entomologist and another hero of mine, calls for rationalists to "light a brighter candle and chase back the darkness." Dawkins did just that. I adored him for it. In a nod to the man and his work, I continue to wear t-shirts and carry tote bags that read "Atheists for Jesus" or "Charles Darwin Has A Posse." These reflect elements of Dawkins' perspective that I still value. And like Dawkins I continue to label myself an atheist despite recognizing that the stance requires as much faith as a belief in God does. One can not disprove the existence of God any more readily than one can prove it; atheism and belief are therefore flip sides of the faith coin. (A previous post, "Atheists, Naturalists and Fundamentalists" offers a more complete consideration of this idea, as well as some insightful comments by readers.)

But perhaps, all these years later, I've become skeptical of the self-assured position, or rather I've become a traditional skeptic, an individual given to the belief that any and all knowledge is uncertain. As H.L. Mencken quipped, "We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine."

I assume that Dawkins would find my position untenable; he may even argue that it is nihilistic or defeatist in attitude. Furthermore, he would certainly dub my animist beliefs "supernaturalist obscurantism." I disagree, of course, but I wouldn't dare engage him in direct debate; Dawkins' stridency makes it difficult to spar with him. In fact, Dawkins was nicknamed "Darwin's Rottweiler" by Oxford theologian Alister McGrath. The moniker is apt; Dawkins is dogmatic to a fault.

During the call-in segment of the WNYC interview, Dawkins refused to consider a caller's assertion that the Big Bang is "in concept a kind of creation, and that much closer to the concept of a Creator - if not an anthropomorphic one." Why? The caller wasn't asserting that this creation was the event described in Genesis, just that the Big Bang itself, as a scientific theory, is a variety of creation. And so it is. But Dawkins played semantic games to avoid thoughtful consideration of the caller's point. "It's not a creation by an intelligence, it is something we don't understand. It's a coming-into-existence which physicists are now working on."

I'm troubled by his incomplete response for two reasons. Firstly, it ignores the necessity of a finite mind to locate a prime mover or impulse. Secondly (and particularly vexing), Dawkins is totally unwilling to allow for mystery. He admits that we don't understand what preceded or caused the Big Bang, yet rather than invest that void with magic or wonder, he turns it into dulled data; physicists are "working on" it, he tells the caller. But physics is a science of imagination; our finite minds must grasp at abstractions to explain the infinite universe and all its properties, most of which we are unable to sense, much less comprehend. At the very least Dawkins could have celebrated this artful thinking in the same way he does poetry, which he dubs "spiritual."

I believe Dawkins remains a man fueled by wonder. I just wish he wouldn't be so damned defensive about it. It would be much easier for me to continue holding him in high regard if he made room for a little old-fashioned skepticism and focused on the virtues of what he does believe, rather than the failures of that which he doesn't.

Photo credit: Image of Dawkins ripped from San Francisco Gate website

The Sweet Spot: Tom Uttech

Shortly after returning to New York City from my annual winter visit to Virginia's Eastern Shore, I wrote "On The Dike At Heron's Foot." In that post I describe a powerful sensory experience I met with on my coastal property. I now consider that episode an awakening to the integrity of mind and matter. I wrote then, "for the first time I fully belonged to 'my property.' For a brief period (whether moments or minutes) there was no distinction between me and the rest of it. Afterwards, as is demanded by waking life, the experience was abstracted by reason. Still, something of the connection remains."

Because I reject the notion of a creative, interventionist God, I can not explain away mystery by assigning works to His hand, but hard science doesn't always satisfy either, at least not in any immediate way. The surgeon and bioethicist Sherwin Nuland says that wonder "is something I share with people of deep faith." He continues, "They wonder at the universe that God has created, and I wonder at the universe that nature has created. But this...sense of awe that motivates the faithful, motivates me. And when I say motivates, it provides an energy for seeking. Just as the faithful will always say, ‘We are seeking,’ I am seeking."(1) Perhaps, then, it is enough to say that my dike experience was the product of wonder, but the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman provide my experience with an even more poetic, transcendental framing. Emerson characterizes his marriage to the unconscious as a physical transformation: "Standing on the bare ground,-my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal being circulate through me." Whitman also writes of universal tissue, "of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff."

A true rationalist might dismiss Emerson and Whitman as ridiculous transcendentalists, but I departed the Shore just before New Year's, feeling closer to the indefinite whole, the Everything, than ever before. I felt as though I had stumbled ass-backwards into faith; I was calm, satisfied and humbled.

After only a few weeks in New York, fond of it though I am, I felt weary and anxious. The frivolous stress of day-to-day city life made me irritable; I stewed, grumbled, and generally felt out of whack. Close friends mistook my deportment for depression, but I explained to them that I was merely frustrated by city living.

Fortunately, art-making continued to go well, and I found some solace in the long hours spent pondering how best to position myself, geographically speaking, so that I could paint and write without suffering from NYC burn out. I wrote the post "Inside Out (And Upside Down)" in an attempt to work through the issue. I objected to so much in the course of that essay - Art World social demands, consumerism, the cancerous nature of ambition - that one commenter responded, "I...think you’ll be more satisfied once you finally leave the pavement for the woods. Also, why are you tying yourself in knots trying to please an art system whose goals are in direct opposition to your own? I say better to forge your own path." Fair enough. Though I may not yet know where the next five years will take me, I will almost certainly leave New York and, this being the case, I find a great deal of inspiration and hope in the art and life of the contemporary painter and photographer Tom Uttech.

I've been meaning to complete the post that follows for many months, ever since Uttech's Fall 2006 solo exhibition here in New York. As it turns out, I'm glad that the writing took me so long. Revisiting Uttech's paintings and interviews as I edited the piece, I again felt calm, confident that, pending the right choices, I will find what Uttech calls "the sweet spot."

Since 1987, Uttech has lived on a sixty-acre property not far north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city he was "stuck in for a few years." His studio is inside an old barn. As Barbara Joose writes in her 2001 interview with Uttech, "Most artists would have called this place a studio because this is the place where Tom paints. But he doesn't. He calls it a barn...Tom had intended the other room [of the barn] to be a winter studio, but it became a sorting area and storehouse for harvested prairie seeds." Uttech spends the better part of each day outdoors, "planting, harvesting seeds...prairie projects. Or I do birding in the spring...I gradually make my way home and then begin to paint. I paint till my face falls into the palette." In fact, he says his prairie restoration side project has almost developed into a business unto itself. "I collect seeds, grow prairie plants for some of the nurseries...I'd like to do this for a living."(2)

But he doesn't, at least not yet, and the "sweet spot" he speaks of is the kind of life I hope to one day find, even if after years of art school (as both student and, then, teacher) and some critical attention - his work was included in the both the 1975 and 1977 Whitney Biennials - Uttech has little to say about the art world. "When art is about itself, it isn't any good. Those in the art world keep looking at each other....When you begin to seek that as your goal, your art becomes anemic...Dull, listless. Derivative. Vacant." His negative reaction to the contemporary art milieu led him to stop making work altogether. (He describes this decision bluntly, "Just screw it. I'm not an artist. If this is what I have to do to be an artist, I'm not going to be [one].")

Fortunately for the rest of us, his hiatus didn't last too long. Uttech is now in his mid-sixties and his career is established and healthy. All the same, he says, "I've been marginalized by the art world. I'm probably lucky that I've been marginalized. I am lucky - in a lot of ways. I sell everything I do. But I'll never be in the Museum of Modern Art, or a trendy place. I'm not one of the people who are discussed. I'm invisible."(3) Judging by the flurry of gallery shows, museum retrospectives and reviews in the last five years, it seems Uttech isn't so invisible anymore. I'm pleased by the attention his work is receiving and happy that there are exceptions to the rule for younger artists to look up to, particularly when the exceptions are dealing with essential subject matter.

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Tom Uttech
"Nin Baba Madaga"
2005
Oil on rag board
16 1/4 x 18 inches
Courtesy Alexandre Gallery

"I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house."
- Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862)

"I kept seeing things in the landscape that would create a very strong feeling, like an aching, a yearning or longing for something, but I didn't know what. But what I think I'm yearning for is to be that thing, to stop being myself in this body and stop being aware of my life and just be that thing. That's why I paint the stuff."
-Tom Uttech

5:05 PM, and the rain was heavy and cold. Pedestrians huddled under awnings or in the doorways of their office buildings, reluctant to brave the downpour. My umbrella proved laughably inadequate; the wind whipped water horizontal, soaking my arms and backpack. The weather was fitting, though. In 2003, on a similarly stormy afternoon, I stumbled into the ample lobby of 41 East 57th Street to escape the elements. I noticed several galleries listed on the building's directory and decided to look at some art while the rain continued. One of the artists exhibiting upstairs, at the Alexandre Gallery, was Tom Uttech, a name then unfamiliar to me. Now, three years later, in similarly inclement weather, I was heading back to the mid-town building to check out Uttech's latest efforts.

Visiting as many shows as I do, I often see artwork that is relevant to my own. The list of my creative cousins grows longer each year; I'm forever being introduced to "new" artists, both living and deceased. Yet it's rare that I come across a work, or body of work, that I might consider a sibling. Tom Uttech's paintings qualify. I feel elated in their presence, reminded of what it is that impels me to create. It's an intensely gratifying experience.

Reading interviews with the artist, or essays about him, I sense a kindred spirit. Uttech bemoans the contemporary disconnect between man and Nature, while still acknowledging the geologic scale. "People have never been less connected to the natural world...It's bleak. (4) [But Nature] doesn't care if it's a gravel pit or a pecan forest. It's all wonderful for nature, but it's not going to be wonderful for us...Nature doesn't give a shit. Life goes on, with or without us.(5)"

When Uttech extols the plenitude of marshes, he describes them as "an absolute cacophony of noise and activity." Until I read this quote in Lucy Lippard's essay profile of the artist, "Magnetic North," I hadn't come across another who had absorbed (and presumably unconsciously co-opted, as creative people are apt to do) Bern Keating's observation that "poets who know no better rhapsodize about the peace of nature, but a well populated marsh is a cacophony." I was young when I first read the Keating line, young enough that I didn't know what the word cacophony meant, but I dutifully looked it up and the quotation has been a favorite of mine since, even appearing as one of my high school senior quotations.

But naturalist sentiments are by no means extraordinary; they are shared by most environmentalists, wildlife biologists, and outdoor enthusiasts. It is unusual, however, for an individual of this ilk to portray or celebrate a supernatural Nature, one shrouded in magic and mystery, informed as much by the shadows of our interior world as by external observation. More often than not, we "nature guys" produce realistic wildlife paintings or photographic documentary. As a result, I've sometimes felt that I might be betraying my calling, that I, too, should paint the natural world as we "know" it (or, more valuable still, funnel my energy and resources into conservation and sustainable development projects). But when I've dabbled in traditional wildlife painting, I've been dissatisfied. I'm compelled to portray a totemic Nature, a world of symbol and ecstatic interpretation that celebrates the ether as much as it does the tangible or the quantifiable. I'm just now learning how this might be done. Clearly, Uttech already knows well.


Tom Uttech
"Nin Bapinendam"
2006
Oil on rag board
15 1/2 x 19 1/4 inches
Courtesy Alexandre Gallery

The world Uttech depicts is comprised of signs. Every animal, fallen limb or creeping mist is a stand-in for itself, or for the greater self. A Uttech black bear is not just a black bear, but the very manifestation of Bear. The animal is abstracted and ennobled. This totemic understanding of Nature is appropriate in a time when human contact with the "real thing" - wilderness, the circle of life, or whatever you call it - is increasingly mediated, but no less vital. Adrift as we are in the culture of spectacle, distraction and disposability, Uttech's pictures offer the contemporary viewer an opportunity for grounding and surrogate experience; they satisfy our deeply rooted need for the woods and the sky, for a broad, mythic conception of existence, but only if we're willing to open ourselves to it.

In many of Uttech's paintings, animals stand erect and look out at the viewer. In "Assandjigon," for example, four bears, having risen to their hind legs, stare from the edge of a spruce forest. They are rigid and perfectly still, their dark eyes fixed on us. I discussed John Berger's "imperfectly-met gaze" argument in an essay on the work of painter and sculptor, Deborah Simon, but it bears mentioning again. Berger asserts that humanity possesses other species by visual means, objectifying them to allow us the illusion of dominion. The animals that populate paintings by Uttech and Simon, however, return our gaze. We possess the animal, but they also possess us. "This two-way gaze," I wrote of Simon's work, "allows for the erasure of both individual and special (as in 'species') autonomy." Therefore, the viewer must accept her part in the greater whole. Along these lines, Lippard writes, "Uttech's bears, deer, moose, or wolves fearlessly return our gaze, holding their place with uncanny dignity, defying humanity to imagine that it can dominate nature." Uttech himself puts it more bluntly. "They're standing up and saying 'take a look at me. I'm watching you and not just being observed.'"


Tom Uttech
"Nind Ogwissinam"
2006
Oil on linen
43 x 47 inches
Courtesy Alexandre Gallery

Lippard says Uttech is "almost desperately combating humanity's increasing distance from nature." But in rendering a totemic Nature, even one in which the animals engage the viewer, Uttech is not choosing an aggressive path; his paintings are subtle and risk being overlooked by the skeptical and impatient eye of the contemporary art world initiate. The world of magic and metaphysical significance that he celebrates is attached to ancient experience, but by building his pictures of reflections and silhouettes, Uttech leaves room for the viewer to dismiss the vitality as mere signage. Whereas Simon's paintings force the viewer to return the gaze of the animal subject, viewers of Uttech's paintings might elect to ignore the bears altogether. When Uttech discusses his outings in northern Wisconsin, he describes wildlife as being "present without being visible. But if you spend a lot of time paying a lot of attention - if you start to act like a hunter or think like a bird watcher - you get around that invisibility. And at a number of magic times you actually run into things." His paintings call for this same heightened awareness and, because most contemporary viewers will not "act like a hunter or think like a bird watcher," the bear's gaze will likely go unmet, the magic unfelt. This is less a critique of Uttech's work than a testament to how much we, as animals, have betrayed our biology and spirit.


Tom Uttech
"Nin Maminawendam"
2006
Oil on linen
103 x 122 1/2 inches
Courtesy Alexandre Gallery

Uttech's symbolism extends to his handmade frames, onto which he carves, paints or burns "primitive" images of insects, animals, tracks, plants or strange hybrid creatures he calls "tricksters." The "tricksters" appear as though they're lifted from a Hieronymus Bosch tableaux, but Uttech explains that they are loosely based on the Ojibwe character Maymayguishi, or the Wendigo, a malevolent, cannibalistic spirit responsible for, among other things, whisking away that which goes missing. The artist feels that the frame imagery provides further context for the painting, one of "greater magic."

There is another sort of magic present in Uttech's work, however, one that appeals to us in a visceral way. Our evolution shaped us to lust for abundance. Although a surplus of any one species is rarely a net positive for an ecosystem, we associate large numbers of birds, mammals or fish with fecundity and prosperity. When European settlers first arrived in the New World, they marveled at the miraculous bounty available to them. In letters sent back to loved ones and political figures in Europe, the settlers wrote of alewives so tightly packed in rivers that a man could walk across on their backs without getting wet; they also detailed flights of waterfowl so thick that one shotgun blast would fell forty birds and a beaver population healthy enough to provide coats for thousands of sophisticated European ladies. In other words, they were ecstatic salesmen. Even today, when many humans no longer directly equate an animal with commodity - if only because that bloody reality is hidden from the majority view in industrialized nations - we respond to sheer quantity.

Many of Uttech's larger canvases are teeming with life. His skies are crowded with birds and his forest floors and banks are populated by assorted mammals, some hidden, some in obvious view. In the presence of these pictures, one can't help but feel awed. It isn't the paint itself that does this - Uttech is not much concerned with surface or handling, instead choosing to focus on composition, color and narrative - but rather the spectacle he depicts. Because the animals usually move in one direction, reviewers often wonder what has caused the disturbance, what it is that the animals are fleeing. Given our tumultuous times, the assumption of alarm is sensible, but I feel, too, as though the wolves, kestrels, pileated woodpeckers and lynx are propelled by blind exuberance. They aren't necessarily escaping an enemy; they might also be inviting us to discard the Self and run with them into the immensity of the cosmos.


Tom Uttech
"Nin Minodashimin"
2006
Oil on linen
36 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches
Courtesy Alexandre Gallery

Uttech titles each of his paintings using Ojibwe words. He feels these names locate the paintings by honoring their inspiration, the north woods of Wisconsin and southern Ontario. When the artist first began using the language, he had no idea what the words meant; he choose the titles based on "beautiful looking and unpronounceable" map names. He has since studied Ojibwe, but despite what he characterizes as a "complete immersion," Uttech confesses that he has only a very general comprehension of the vocabulary and no appreciation of the grammar. Necessarily, then, his titles make little sense to native speakers. There are some critics of the artist who feel his decision to use a bastardized Ojibwe is an insult to the Indians, a trite nod to authenticity, or both. Their charges aren't unfounded, but experiencing Uttech's work I feel the artist has as much claim to the words as do those who know it as a mother tongue.

Uttech has inherited, if you will, the Ojibwe language just as he inherited their reverence for these woodlands and marshes. He began visiting the region in 1967 and, on his first trip, recognized that the landscape called to his primal nature. "This [is] where my spirit resides," he says; the paintings depict the north woods "because that is what I am." In "Magnetic North," Lippard writes, "There in the woods and wetlands [Uttech] learned to be alone, to deal with blackflies and thunderstorms, to 'walk like a hunter,' and to feel his way confidently through the woods in the dark, every sense quivering - a metaphor for finding his way through art by immersing himself in nature." Uttech's deep connection to the landscape, I believe, makes him a surrogate son, and therefore his borrowing of the region's mostly forgotten language can be forgiven. He may yet be a clumsy child, something of an interloper, but he is fully present in each moment. That's more than can be said for most of us, and reason enough for the rest of us to look at his pictures thoughtfully. Approach Uttech's paintings as John Dewey's "live animal" and you will find that, as Uttech puts it, "what's in the world, it's magic beyond belief."

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Image credits: All images supplied by Alexandre Gallery

(1) Nuland quote from interview with Krista Tippett on NPR program, Speaking Of Faith, January 18, 2007

(2) Artist quote from: Lucy Lippard, "Magnetic North," Milwaukee Art Museum, 2004

(3) Artist quotes in paragraph all from: Barbara Joose, "Tom Uttech: Retreat To Reality," Porcupine Magazine 5, No. 2 (2001)

(4) Artist quote from: Joose

(5) Artist quote from: James Auer, "Wizard of the Wild: State artist explores mysticism, magic of nature," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 10, 2004

(6) Artist quote from: James Auer, "It's All Natural for This Artist," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 10, 2002

On the Dike at Heron's Foot

“Rooting around on riverbanks and mountain slopes, we may be looking for that missing piece, or love, religion and the rest of it – whatever is missing in us – just as we so often are doing in the digging and rooting of sex.”
-Edward Hoagland, "Bears, Bears, Bears," 1973
I own 35 acres on the Atlantic edge of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, my childhood home. The property was originally purchased over thirty years ago by my father. It was then a fallow, frequently flooded soybean field separated from a sprawl of salt marsh and two brackish creeks by a faulty dike. My father’s conscientious stewardship (1) has since turned the acreage into a haven for wildlife and it is today protected by a Nature Conservancy Conservation Easement. In place of an unproductive field, the land now supports a mixed deciduous forest, two pine groves, a shallow water impoundment, and an extensive canal and fortified dike fringing the marsh, as well as some non-landform improvements, including a handsome, if humble bridge, a buried water control system, two hunting/photography blinds and two small docks.

My father refers to the land as “your property” and he relates to me news of recent or ongoing projects when we talk by phone. For example, he'll tell me, "I cut back some overgrown pines on your property this week, Christopher, and I'd like for you to let me know what you think of this surgery when you're next down." Until recently, though, I hadn't contemplated the significance of his appellation. In my estimation, "your property" meant only that I was the legal landowner, committed to paying the modest, annual property tax.

I blame my thoughtlessness on an earlier, biased relationship to the land. Although I spent many days on the property as a child – dove and duck hunting, planting trees, fishing in the canal, reinforcing the dike – I took it for granted. I dismissively referred to the area as "across the road" because the 35 acre parcel was set apart from Heron Hill, my father’s 250 acre farm, by a well-trafficked country thoroughfare. Heron Hill, so called because of the plentiful great blue herons, our family name (reiger is the Dutch and Middle Low German word for heron), and the homestead's relatively high elevation, literally rose above the low-lying, water-logged property "across the road." When my parents sold Heron Hill in the late 1990s, I was surprised that they held on to the marshy nodule, and even more surprised when they deeded it to me.

Fortunately, opinions change and attitudes evolve. Every winter I travel south to the Eastern Shore and, with each passing year, the property becomes more important to me. This is due, in part, to my having lived in New York City for seven years; the restorative powers of the outdoors are more profoundly felt.


View of canal bridge from northeast corner of dike
On my most recent trip, I walked “my property" with a camera. Often an interesting tree or shrub formation provides inspiration for a drawing or painting, and I take a snapshot for future reference. But after a short while, the photography became unimportant. Instead, I inspected animal sign. Three bald areas on the dike betrayed frequent use by white-tailed deer. Bucks displace the topsoil and fallen pine needles when they "scrape," a scent-marking behavior that requires the animal to rub his head and antlers on trees or the ground. I also studied the diggings of a raccoon (or fox) near the canal’s bank, and I spotted a little-used otter slide. The canal, home to a healthy largemouth bass and bluegill population and offering easy access to the marsh, is an inviting residence for a Northern river otter family.

To an outside observer, my activity would have appeared curious. I moved along the dike in a crouch, hopping-and-scurrying as I excitedly looked for further evidence of animal activity. The camera was now slung over my shoulder, and I gave no thought to picture taking. It was a windy morning and various bird calls – snow geese, black ducks, clapper rail, a belted kingfisher – blew to me from the marsh. A group of crows flapped just overhead, fussing about my presence. Thrilled by so much abundance and feeling totally at ease, I remained crouched in one place for a long while, staring at nothing in particular, just listening.

Sometime during this active meditation I lost track of myself. I remember, as if retracing a dream or excavating some buried memory, removing the camera and pawing at the dike. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. It was a purely sensuous experience; I was touching and seeing. And then suddenly I was rolling on the dike’s crest, pine straw clinging to my clothes.

When I "came to," I felt wild-eyed and crazy. I didn't even know where or, more alarmingly, who I was. It took several moments of looking around in mild panic before I recovered my bearings, my sense of self. I’m not sure how long the episode lasted. It was only after I snapped out of the experience that I was able to reflect on what led to my behavior.

I'm still uncertain what prompted it, but I do know this: for the first time, I fully belonged to “my property." For a spell (whether moments or minutes), there was no distinction between me and the rest of it. Afterwards, as is demanded by waking life, the experience was abstracted by reason. Yet something of the connection remains.


On back dike
What happened to me on the dike? Barring a neurodegenerative disease or serious head trauma, most people maintain their sense of self. Indeed, we are individuals, but healthy humans sometimes glimpse their multiplicity. Freud may have been subscribing to Occam’s razor – one should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities needed to explain any phenomenon - when he proposed that the human psyche is composed of three competing parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. As useful as Freud’s psychoanalytic scheme remains, recent research suggests that he vastly underestimated the number of components.

In a normally functioning brain, distinct, specialized areas, called modules, go about the business of identifying, translating, commanding, and so on, enabling each of us to feel that we are the person, the individual, reflected in the mirror. But as Steven Johnson reminds readers in “Mind Wide Open,” "we can experience the modularity of the brain more directly by taking drugs that throw a monkey wrench into its machinery, causing individual modules to take on a new autonomy (which is why people on drugs often feel as though they hear voices).” The auditory hallucinations, or “voices,” associated with ingestion of psilocybin, LSD, and other psychoactive drugs or substances are not really hallucinations, then. They are only the normally ignored commands, thoughts, and impulses of our multitudinous brain. Drug use, in essence, quiets our inner, censorious interpreter and allows us to eavesdrop on the brain's gabble. Necessarily, acceptance of the many-voiced brain raises difficult questions about the validity of the individual.

But I was sober on the dike that afternoon, and I heard no interior voices. To the contrary, I heard only what was outside me, the crows, the kingfishers, and the wind. Still, I lost all sense of self. I was, for a short time, effectively erased. If my "I" wasn't erased by the inner cacophony, the question remains; what happened to me?


Looking over canal to the shallow water impoundment
In this heyday of advertising for pharmaceutical panaceas, we're well aware of how fragile our mind and body are. Last night, standing up after a workout, I pushed and poked at the muscle of my abdomen and at the fat of my lower back, trying to imagine how the different organs were embraced by the ribcage and lower spine. I swallowed and then burped, involuntarily. What an interesting machine!

Like the mind, the body is an aggregate. In turn, the human body is part of a larger organism, and this radiating expansion continues infinitely. Each of us is an insignificant figure in an unfathomably grand equation. This design may seem terrifying, but it doesn't have to be. Contemplation of that grand equation is nullifying but, metaphysically speaking, there is comfort in nullification. The “me” and "I" are spread out such that everything blends into one moment and body. Everyone accepts that each individual is a fraction of infinity, and as Daniel Matt, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, points out, "since infinity cannot be quantified, no matter how it is divided and subdivided, even a fraction of infinity is infinite." Conscious contemplation of this expansive nullification is the intellectual equivalent of Nirvana, a rational rejection of the individual in the name of the Whole.

With respect to practical environmental and social improvement, though, contemplation does us little good. Much of the world’s population is concerned with day-to-day survival; my First World musings are the product of insulation and relative privilege. Rumination and good intentions do little to alleviate injustice abroad or to stave off another species extinction. Yet my experience on the dike can't accurately be described as contemplative. I was not meditating or concentrating on any question when I lost all sense of self. My experience began, in effect, with an absence of thought that was spontaneous, washing over me as I was “rooting around,” as Hoagland puts it, on the dike.


View of marsh from northeastern corner of dike at Heron's Foot
There is, fortunately, a counterpart to contemplation that offers some explanation for what occurred. In his 1943 landmark work on aesthetic theory, "Art As Experience," John Dewey writes:

"To grasp the sources of aesthetic experience it is...necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale. The activities of the fox, the dog, and the thrush may at least stand as reminders and symbols of that unity of experience which we so fractionize when work is labor, and thought withdraws us from the world. The live animal is fully present, all there, in all of its actions: in its wary glances, its sharp sniffings, its abrupt cocking of ears."

I'd like to think that my antics on the dike were those of the live animal. The self-conscious human was, like the camera, for a short time forgotten. The resulting realization that I was intimately tied to the land makes sense; the live animal is indivisible from the rest of it. This concept can be described in more concrete terms. For the live animal, conceptions of property as capital aren't applicable. Ownership as we understand it - taxes and fences - is meaningless without the socioeconomic contract; no one can own property if the currency of power, both literal and figurative, isn't supported by all participating players. Many animist cultures, most of them no longer with us, interpreted land and borders in this more equitable way.

To elucidate the Native-American concept of land ownership in his book, "Changes In The Land," environmental historian Bill Cronon distinguishes between natural and civil rights. The Puritan settlers believed in civil ownership, with strict boundary demarcation and control of all rights to resource consumption within a defined area, whereas the Native-Americans understood land as shared, like water. As a result, settlers often believed they were buying land from local tribe leaders while the Native-Americans instead understood the "deal" as a trade for shared hunting and fishing rights. For the Indians, these deals were "more a diplomatic exchange than an economic one." How does one sell land, after all, if no one possesses it to begin with?


A friend birdwatches over the marsh at Heron's Foot
It's difficult to discard cultural mores. The assumptions we are raised with inform us at the most fundamental level, and property accumulation is for Westerners the ultimate measure of self worth. It's curious, then, that it took a temporary erasure, or warping, of self awareness (and, therefore, self assessment) for me to appreciate the land that (on paper) is attached to my name. Indeed, there is a world of difference between ownership and stewardship. The owner is a possessor, a member of a hierarchal system that determines an individual's societal value by calculating the market price of all their accumulated property. The steward is merely a manager, an agent of another. The conscientious landowner does not think of himself as a title holder first. He is a steward working for the land.

As Bill Cronon insists, true wildness is no more; all land will be marked by man, but we can decide what sort of signature we leave. Aldo Leopold, the beloved godfather of modern conservation, was among the first to write at length of the paradoxical, but vital relationship between the steward and the land. Leopold was a Romantic pragmatist(2), a type as well-suited to diplomacy as to conservation, and he was a proponent of hunting and controlled burning, complicated practices deemed wrongful by armchair environmentalists today. Resource use, like the economy, can be regulated thoughtfully (though it rarely is), but the Romantic in Leopold was dismayed by the dark side of our equating land with money.

"I suspect that the forces inherent in...economic evolution are not all beneficent. Like the forces inside our own bodies, they may become malignant, pathogenic. I believe that many of the economic forces inside the modern body-politic are pathogenic in respect to harmony with land."

He deemed his heroically optimistic response to the increasing pressures of population and market a "land ethic." Despite the difficulties of cultivating such an appreciation of the natural world in the twentieth century, Leopold insisted,

"That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics...A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of land...We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in."

Prior to my experience on the dike last week, I lacked a land ethic. I appreciated my father's attachment to the land, but I did so from an intellectual remove. Slogging through the marsh mud with a canvas sack of duck decoys at nine years of age, I didn't think to myself, "This land is me." Returning home tired from middle school, I wasn't buoyed by any natural high when my father and I crossed the road to plant eight hundred small pine trees in fading light. But, rolling around on the dike this winter I understood something new. I felt as I imagine a first-time parent might when cradling a newborn. The experience shook me up.

Rereading bits of Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" this week, I was struck by his explanation of what a land ethic entails. It "...simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." Is that what happened to me on the dike? Was I absorbed, for a few moments or minutes, as a live animal, into the greater community, into the integrated universe?


Back dike at Heron's Foot
I very much doubt I will return to the Eastern Shore of Virginia to live. In fact, I'm looking northward, to Maine, as my disposition is more suited to cold weather and the rolling northwoods. All the same, I will keep the land in Virginia, and do my best to ensure the conservation easement is maintained and that the land is thoughtfully managed. I feel attached to the property in a way I never did before. I am responsible for the species which thrive there. Reciprocally, they are responsible for my well-being. Some readers will argue that this exchange is a selfish one, that the work a steward puts into the land is driven by pride and want of pleasure. I agree, but the pride and pleasure derived is akin to the satisfaction we feel upon completing a rigorous workout or after we introduce a child to a new idea. It satisfies because we are one body; in some cases what feels good to one person is good for the whole.

A few days after the dike incident, the property was properly named. I no longer refer to it as "across the road." The new name honors the original farm, of which the land was a small, but vital part. It also references the property's low elevation and, lamentably, my discovery of a dead great blue heron, feet bound together by knotted fishing monofilament, the day after I was embraced on the dike at Heron's Foot.

(1) The full story – or most of it, anyway – can be found in my father’s book "Heron Hill Chronicle."

(2) The realist in Leopold forced him to contemplate the greater ambition of conservation as most environmentalists will not. "All conservation," he wrote, "is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish."


Young pine tree volunteers on the dike at Heron's Foot
Photo credit: all images Hungry Hyaena, 2006 (More pictures from Heron's Foot can be found here.)