Shhhhhh! No Talking Circle!

There were twelve of us sitting cross-legged in a circle, a talking circle, and I was lost in us as the face of an analog clock, our host a psychopomp who had told us he would be there on the lawn behind the noisy machine-powered FCCS Building at 2pm to take us not from midnight through the morning (a.m.) to the afternoon and through the evening (p.m.), but to a place amongst ourselves, by virtue of what we had in common.

It would have ruined it to say so, even though our host told us that "to call it a talking circle is wrong," because it is not a talking circle but another of translation's travesties, as if to tell us why.

Each of us was asked to share in clockwise rotation (our host was in the twelve o'clock position, I was in the six o'clock position) a story of someone who had an impact on our lives, a teacher. I had time to think about this, but in thinking I was unable to retain the first thing that came to me, and so I was left not with the story of a teacher and the double portraits they inspire (with their students), but of lessons, authorless texts, a worldlined object in four-dimensional space-time.

Panel Four

He told us he stopped making art for awhile to look after his disabled parents. He showed us pictures of his parents -- separately, then together -- and I thought he might not yet talk about "hybridity" (his father is of Swiss decent, his mother of Japanese descent) but about what "walking on the land" meant when his parents "walked" on hand-powered wheels. Of course I thought about what Carmen had said, about what it is to be in a physical position different from that which is assumed to be the norm.

Later, he presented a book that moved him, and a critique of that book for its failure to consider architecture in a nomadic context.

Heidegger's "Building, Dwelling, Thinking."

Then his paintings, his interest in holes, enclaves. Literal holes, with strange shapes (strange to me), then more recently a series of alley paintings that suggest the kinds of walks required to find them -- dérives!

Like him, she began with who her parents are (were?), and their parents. Where they landed, how the word "settler" was stamped on their immigration documents by government officials.

A walking practice that she did not want to talk about -- "not today."

A recent project that had sugar cookies in unusual shapes (barbed wire, a noose) and distributed on Parliament Hill. For this she did not project its image, but gave its clear-topped plastic box to the moderator to pass around the room.

She had also mentioned that she would leave it to her collaborator (up next) to talk of a performance the two are doing on Friday, and this her collaborator did after introducing herself through a word that evokes "hybridity" but is specific to a particular time and place in the history of this country's histories, but not before speaking of her current work on a PhD that is interested in the "complexities of dealing with indigenous communities through art."

The kitchen table was mentioned as a site of engagement, research and exchange, a curatorial "counterpoint" to ideas that "mirror" those common to "colonial practice," and this too brought to mind the extra-long dining table cloth Farheen spread out for us in front of the Alternator Gallery a couple weeks back.

Then suddenly her talk began to move quickly, too quickly for me to keep up with. Someone was cited, and I was not sure if the citation had ended. She (her source?) said, "Curators should stand beside or behind artists, never in front of them," and then said something that sounded like she had rethought this position.

(Later, at the potluck at Platypus House, I asked her if she thought curation was closer to art history or to studio practice, and she said, as I expected, the latter.)

The kitchen table is to be the site of this Friday's performance.

The final presentation came from someone who asked not to be photographed or quoted without her consent, and this had me taking it too far, missing much but gaining more through listening with my ears, not my hand.

Ethics was a word that was mentioned more than once, and I mention it here because it is a word whose meaning, I wish, meant something to everyone. An eagerness to learn the natural laws of where she is living. Cognitive imperialism is mentioned only because she did not coin the term. An excellent description of neo-liberalism. Work was shown -- an image of a work made with (iron) nails and hair. New work in the studio, and an invitation to visit her there. Am I taking this too far? Maybe. But we spoke after, at the potluck, and I am hoping it is worth the risk.

Walk, Don't Run

At noon today we gather for the fourth of our weekly panel presentations (we are no longer referring to them as "roundtables"). Today's panelists are Leah Decter, Kevin Ei-ichi deForest, Cathy Mattes and Tannis Nielsen. The panel thematic is "How might your art practice embody the original notion of the o k'inādās residency, that of walking on the land?"

In thinking about today's thematic, I went to my computer to see if Nicolaus Roeg's Walkabout (1971) is available online, for free, and saw that it is. The same could not be said of Zacharias Kunuk's Atanarjut: The Fast Runner (2001), which is too bad. Has anyone ever thought to show these films together?

Fraser River, Saturday July 23, 2016 1 p.m.

Today is a travel day.

The Poetry of Place

This past weekend I presented my annual summer lecture/workshop on the Poetry of Place for SFU's Southbank Writers' Program.

Among my first examples is a poem by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), who recorded the United States from its backroads, and a prose work by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), who did something similar, but from the backstreets of Paris. I conclude the lecture with poems and prose works by Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), Daphne Marlatt (1942-) and Annie Dillard (1945).

The Whitman poem is "A Farm Picture" from Leaves of Grass (1855). The Baudelaire prose work is "Anywhere Out of the World" from Paris Spleen (1869).

Here is Whitman's poem:

A FARM PICTURE

Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,
A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,
And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.

And for fun here is one by Ezra Pound (1885-1972), published fifty-eight years later:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Truth to Materials

The UBC Okanagan campus is a sculpture garden of wrapped utility boxes. Most of these boxes are designed to blend in with their "natural" surroundings. One box I noticed was designed to blend in with the brick wall behind it.

I am not sure how I feel about this need to wrap things, hide things so that they do not stand out. I loved those red Canada Post boxes from the previous century, how they contrasted with the greenery, including the British Racing Green that the City of Vancouver used on municipal property (benches and fences) to highlight what we once called "public space" -- when there was such a thing.

Among the community projects I am considering for myself this fall is an investigation into UBCO's role in choosing the content of these wraps. If it is not possible to allow these boxes to exist monochromatically (red, grey, beige or green, as in past instances), then why not as surfaces that include the work of those whom UBCO's Faculty of Creative and Creative Studies employs to teach us about colour, line and form, artists like Tannis Nielsen and Katherine Pickering (see below)?

I would much prefer to look at the work of an artist than at a cheesy trompe-l'oeil magic act that has a utility box blending into -- or disappearing into -- the natural landscape.

Campus

What we have to learn from the land can begin with making oneself available to it, as a reader.

From a distance, the land east of the sidewalk (above) is mounded to separate where one lives from what one travels over. Of this land, much of it -- the topsoil, the sods over which it is placed, and the shrubs -- was imported.

Those familiar with the Okanagan Valley will know that the two holes pictured here were made by burrowing marmots. Those inclined towards creative and critical practices might imagine them as fang marks from institutions that, like most large houses of learning these days, have come to take their orders less from the land than from corporate models associated with private business.

Below are two pictures I took during Tania Willard's Congruent Bodies Bush Gallery presentation, the final presentation of what turned out to be both an emotional and fruitful third roundtable that asked the question: "What body memories and body futures are posited (and possessed) by your practice?"