CRWR 520 Proposal (2)

From Brian's down to Westside Road, north to Hwy 97, then south down Old Kamloops Road to 30th Avenue, east to 30th Street, south to Commonage, Carr's Landing, and then Okanagan Centre, where I stopped to take pictures of sandbags.

The picture below features a range of structures put in place to retain the road (concrete blocks), but also to protect it from rising waters (burlap and polyurethane sandbags, as well as rocks and pre-fab road curbs!).

I like these old bags!

CRWR 520 Proposal

I have always admired the work of stonemasons, particularly those who practice uncoursed rubble masonry[1], where intact stones of various sizes are used to create a range of structures, from those that go unseen (foundations), to those that protect those who don’t want to be seen (compound walls), to those that denote the lodgings of those whose labour is devalued when discussing economies where the capitalist mode of production is operative (worker housing).

As a teenager I was told that if I insisted on writing unspectacularly I would do well to learn a trade -- so I read everything I could on masonry. When reflecting on a life in writing, I sometimes wonder if I, like Hesse’s Goldmund, might have been happier had I chosen to make my poems with, say, river rock, sand and earth, and not ink, paper and letters (and now plastic and electricity).

This April the Okanagan Valley experienced a confluence of conditions that resulted in rising water levels and flooding. Because I sometimes live here, and because I believe in the power of the occasional poem, I thought I would propose a collaborative project that linked my work as a (local) writer with those whose work is, if not masonry in the way we have come to know it, based on similar principles -- but with softer, homogenous and more expedient results: sandbagging.

What would such a collaboration look like? What are its terms? How and where would it begin? These are difficult questions to answer. Difficult because if I had answers, I would be on my own with them -- a failed collaborator.

A place to begin my inquiry could be with those who manufacture sandbags. Another place could be with those who have assembled sandbags and placed them in areas susceptible to flooding. A third place could be with those who distribute sandbags at times of emergency -- namely, government (a branch of which is the military).

As far as production methods go, that too is to be determined, based in part on terms offered up by my collaborators. With that said, in whatever discussions I enter into I will introduce the relationship between the written poem and that which is made with river rock, sand and earth, a form that has more in common with something we walk on -- a pathway -- than a poem or a prose paragraph.

At present, my proposal is a fantasy. Or if not a fantasy, it begins as such, perhaps similarly to the way Roland Barthes began his 1977-78 Collège de France lectures. In an essay prior to the posthumous publication of his lecture notes (The Neutral), Barthes writes of his interest in a “phantasmic teaching” concerned with the “comings and goings of desire,” and “that at the origins of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year.”[2]

This year’s fantasy is a trauma fantasy -- brought on by flooding.

1. http://www.readorrefer.in/article/Stone-masonry_6542/

2. Roland Barthes, “Lecture,” trans. Richard Howard, October, no. 8 (spring 1979): 5

In the Pines

On July 15 I posted a picture of Richard Armstrong introducing a group of us to Syilx cosmology. The picture (at bottom) was taken from the opposite angle as the one up top, which was taken last Monday on my way back to the parking lot after our 507 methods class. As for the foot prints, they are paw prints. (Now look again. Can you see the heart that these prints -- and that first tree -- make?)

FINA Gallery, UBCO

The FINA Gallery at UBCO's FCCS Building exhibits student work and work from the university collection. What I like best about the gallery is that the exhibitions change quickly.

The current show is a printmaking show. The picture above is entitled Monster of the Earth (2007) and the artist is Caitlin.

Liz Magor

Like Christos Dikeakos's talk twelve days ago, this Monday's UBCO talk by Liz Magor will have me listening as a writer who writes on visual art, but also as a teaching assistant. Did my assistantship change the way I listened to Chris's talk? It did. Like the students in CCS-250, I also took notes. Which turned out to be a good thing, because later that day I was asked if I would re-capitulate Chris's talk at the start of next week's class.

Listening to Liz will differ from listening to Chris in that Liz will be visiting our CCS-506 class after her talk. In thinking about what I might ask her, and in light of what I think is the artist's interest in memory, I found myself revisiting her Field Work (1989) series.

Here is what Jessica Bradley (2008) and later Mira Berlin (2015) have to say about the work in Canadian Encyclopedia:

Magor's 1989 photographic series, Field Work -- a collection of reprinted images she had captured in the 1960s depicting longhaired hippies in the back-to-the-land movement in moccasins and feathered headdress, cooking over campfires -- came under sharp criticism for what was taken as a mocking display of Aboriginal culture. Put-off by such superficial critique, Magor left Toronto in 1993 and returned to the West Coast.

Here is what Magor had to say of this work in a 2016 interview with Lesley Johnstone:

In 1989 I found some black and white photographs that I had taken twenty years earlier, in the late 1960s. These were simple pictures of my friends as we explored life on the land: camping, fishing, canoeing, cooking in the open, etc. I was surprised at the naivety and romantic drive that were invisible to us in our youth but so obvious twenty years after the fact. So I printed them with some of the titles from Edward Curtis’s photogravures from earlier in the century. He too was a romantic and used images of indigenous people to entertain his ahistorical notions. Anyhow, what I had intended as an exposure of a recurring and enduring folly, others saw as a case of cultural appropriation, and I was pulled up on the carpet and treated to a big correction. Which I took seriously, by the way. I was very chastened by the experience and I spent a good part of the 1990s reviewing the situation and considering my options. I tried contextualizing the Field Work portfolio by making a number of photographic works based on historical re-enactors.

Here is what the National Gallery of Canada has to say on its "Collections" page:

Field Work, 1989

Liz Magor
Canadian, 1948
gelatin silver prints on paper
matted print: 55.9 x 71.1 cm each (some vertical, some horizontal)
Purchased 1993
National Gallery of Canada (no. 37174.1-10)

Liz Magor plays on the element of fiction or dramatization that often colours museum displays. In "Field Work" she presents photographs of her friends taken in the British Columbia wilderness in the early 1970s. The photos are framed with museum-style mats bearing captions borrowed from Edward Curtis's documentations of the disappearing way of life of Aboriginal Peoples. Curtis is known to have asked his subjects to pose rather elaborately, and his captions seem more like fiction than fact. Magor draws parallels between Curtis's efforts and her own youthful role-playing search for alternative values in the same landscape that Curtis worked in. In this work, Magor questions the subtexts of museum display, its claims to authenticity and its implicit theatricality, asking us to re-consider where the meanings of such displays might lie.

*image atop this post is Magor's Fieldwork (Waihusiwa, a Zuni Kyaqimassi) 1988, Courtesy of Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery / photo Michael Barrick

The Royals Are Coming! The Royals Are Coming!

After Kelsie's presentation Samuel called a break and we walked over to the University Centre and purchased soup. Because it was warm, we took our soup outside to eat on one of the Centre's built-in tables overlooking University Way. Cops stood at both ends of the crosswalk that links the path just south of the Fipke Building to the path just south of us.

All morning young men in black t-shirts had assembled a labyrinth of blue fencing, making the campus look more like today's "university of business" than Chicago's Union Stock Yards. At the north end of the Administration Building, another group in less standardized wear assembled a stage, a public address system and a couple dozen rows of chrome and vinyl chairs.



Suddenly, without warning, an RCMP motorcycle cop charged up the hill followed by eight black vans filled with soldiers in camo gear and berets. The vans in turn were followed by eight pairs of motorcycle cops -- the whole lot disappearing around the corner.

A rehearsal, I thought.

For the royals, said Samuel.

We returned to our soup.