Once Upon a Time

The camera, set low to the floor, pans around the well-mannered room. The rug is Persian, the sofa white. The requisite art posters (The Water Lilies, an Orientalist painting) hang on the white walls, and well-tended houseplants sit on the floor.

A cat saunters in and is soon joined by another. With another sweep of the camera – it revolves to provide a continuous 360-degree feed – more cats (kittens!) appear, then a dog and then a cockatoo.

But then the rabbit hops into view. Another revolution reveals a macaw now perching on a side table. Off camera, a goat bleats. With each subsequent pass, another barnyard species appears: ducks waddle past, chickens strut, a couple of piglets root around, a llama, a cow, a pony.

And they all make themselves at home: the birds groom one another, one of the pigs sniffs at the camera lens, the ducks check out the next room, the cockatoo and a kitten get into a dust-up, a goat knocks down one of the houseplants and starts munching, and eventually just about everyone takes a drink out of the goldfish bowl.

For 25 minutes, the camera patiently records the unfolding wreckage.

Like Catherine Chalmers' video Safari, Corinna Schnitt’s Once Upon a Time puts its animal subjects in a human context. But where Chalmers plunges her cockroach hero into a Homeric epic – we follow the little guy through an Odyssean journey – Schnitt imposes no narrative. Rather, her camera remains neutral throughout, impassively watching as the animals do their animal thing.

Setting all these domesticated animals loose in a quintessentially domestic setting – the middle-class living room – Schnitt plays with ideas of domesticity itself, with civilization and instinct in a delightful face-off. And all the wreckage aside, animal instinct ends up looking pretty good.

Schnitt’s menagerie may make an unholy mess but, except for that kitten-cockatoo squabble, they all manage to get along in a scene that unfolds like a 21st-century Peaceable Kingdom.

Click here to see a clip from Once Upon a Time.

A List of Reasons to See Lists*

If you're in New York sometime in the next few months, Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art is worth the visit:

1) because it's small in size, the perfect fit for the back pocket of a summer's afternoon.

2) because it's large in spirit, embracing the visual and the literary in a free-ranging conversation.

3) because it's made room for good writing:

a. H.L. Mencken:
"11. I believe in and advocate monogamy. Adutery is hitting below the belt. If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women. My vanity is excessive. Wherever I sit is the head of the table. This fact makes me careless of ordinary politeness. I don't like to be made much of. Such things please only persons who are doubtful about their position. I was sure of mine, such as it is, at the age of 12."

b. Robert Morris, proposing alternate names for earth art:
"Dirt art. Dirty art. Bogs. Geometric quagmires. Square swamps. Minimal muck. Suspicious spongy unsound sod. Gray grass. Slow quicksand. (No rock gardens). (No plants). (No flowers). Plains, heaths, holes, and quick rises. Straight and narrow paths, or no paths at all. (No lanes, bowers, gazebos, nests, hiding places). No hairy grabbing vines. To tormented trees: not even any plane trees. No bushes, golfers or ducks. Nature at her fatuous flat chested best."

4) because it looks good too.

a. Benson Bond Moore: Study of Ducks

b.Oscar Bluemner: List of Works of Art, May 18, 1932

c. Adolf Konrad: Packing List, December 16, 1963 (at the top of this post)

5) because it's light-hearted.

a, Charles Green Shaw's Bohemian Dinner may be dated in the details (not so many Russian cigarettes these days), but stands as a clever snapshot of an evening's excess that ends with "The appearance of the check / The dropped jaw / The emptied pockets / The last penny / The bolt for the door / The hat / The street / The lack of car fare / The long walk up town / The limping home / The Bed."

b.Gordon Newton's voucher to Sam Wagstaff, itemizing rent ($50), materials ($70), Food ($15), and Bad Habits ($5).

6) because it doesn't shy away from tragedy either.

a. Germain Seligman's 1947 List of Objects To Transfer to the USA makes a formal claim to the post-occupation French government to reclaim Nazi-looted family possessions.

b. Carol Thompson's List of Bob Thompson's Paintings and Drawings Destroyed by Fire, 1977 is self-explanatory. Forty-five works were lost in the fire.

c. Henry Ossawa Tanner's undated Notes on His Childhood recount the bitter experience of racism in America.

7) because it's full of the ordinary stuff of life.

a. Elaine de Kooning's notes for a 1954 tax return, claiming a loss of $1,987.74.
b. Leo Castelli's to-do list, from 1968, with a reminder to get travelers' checks right there next to "Phone Nauman."
c. Margaret de Patta's list of orders for jewelry, with each completed item carefully crossed off.

8) because it's an object lesson in how the profound stalks the quotidian.

Franz Kline's grocery list is a masterpiece of the ordinary: "Corn flakes / Milk / Oranges / Bannanas / Cream / Cokes / Bread / Eggs / Bacon / Toilet paper / V8 Juice."

When he died, the list was found in his coat pocket.

_________________________________
* Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art is on exhibit at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY) until October 2, 2011.

The Death Mask in the Darkroom 4: The Death Mask Redux

My previous Death Mask post offered a sampling of contemporary photographs focused on the subject of civilian death*. But the urge to look death in the face isn't limited to photographers, and the death mask itself has had something of a minor renaissance in recent years. 

In the UK, the sculptor Nick Reynolds is perpetuating the tradition. Reynolds has one of those resumes so improbable you wouldn’t dare invent it: his father masterminded the Great Train Robbery back in 1963, he himself served as a Royal Navy diver in the Falklands War, and he currently tours with Alabama 3, the British band that gave us the Sopranos theme song. Oh, yes, and he casts death masks on the side.

 Reynolds generated a fair amount of press for creating the death mask of John Joe Amador, a 30-year-old convicted murderer executed in Huntsville, Texas, in August 2007.

Where Reynolds is all sincerity, Tracey Emin approaches the death mask with characteristic cheek. Emin mines her own life relentlessly for her work: her signature installation, My Bed, featured her own unmade bed, littered with used condoms and bloodied underwear. Cast from her own face, her Death Mask is more of the same — albeit less of a gross-out — and not, of course, a true death mask. In an act of stupendous chutzpah, this world-class narcissist elects herself – in advance of the event – for post-mortem commemoration, offering up this time-warped version of herself as though a specimen in some far-future museum.

With her bad-girl attitude and relentless navel-gazing, Emin is easy to dismiss. She may be famous, but like her fellow YBA Damien Hirst, she inspires a lot of eye-rolling. That said, the way that Death Mask plays the line between life and death seems at the heart of the much of the work under consideration here.

In particular, two photographers -- Torben Eskerod and Alida Fish -- have also used the mask to explore that territory; in both cases, though, the masks are cast from life, not death. Of the two, Eskerod has taken the more strictly photographic approach: his Register series consists of color photographs of plaster life masks, made in the 1940s by a Danish dentist. Eskerod, whose work focuses almost exclusively on the human face, is interested in the emotions revealed. And that expressive quality makes them seem like very lively death masks indeed.

To make her Altered Identities images, Fish created a digital composite that merged a flesh-and-blood portrait with an image of the subject's life mask. In the hybrid image, she's reworked the material to create subtle transitions between skin and plaster, portrait and cast (life and death?).

Fish compares the process of making the casts to that of taking a photograph, with both becoming "an archaeological artifact, devoid of context." And, yet, as with Eskerod's, you can sense the life beneath the mask. It's not just that the flesh is itself is firm and rounded, full of energy and air, but these faces, half-mask, half-flesh, are alive with personality.

For a glimpse of the difference between the living and the dead take a look at this image, one from a collaboration between the German photographer Walters Schels and the journalist Beate Lakotta. To make this series, Life Before Death, the couple asked terminally ill people to allow them to accompany them during their last weeks, to take their portrait in life and then, again, after they had died. For a video about the project, click here.

--------------------------------------------------------

* In thinking about this subject, I've deliberately stayed away from battlefield images. War photographers, by definition, trade in death, But what I'm interested in here is the report from the domestic front -- and the choice to look when we don't have to.

Next in the series: Body Art

The Streetlight Sublime

Metropolis 39°53’N 75°15’W, otherwise known as Philadelphia (where I live).

To make this – and the others in her Lux series – Christina Seely first consulted a NASA map that records nighttime light production worldwide and then set out to photograph cities in the three most light-polluted regions.

  

According to Seely’s website, the top three – the United States, Western Europe and Japan – are collectively responsible for something like 45% of the world’s CO2 emissions and, joined now by China, consume the lion’s share of the world’s energy resources.

Seely is one of those artists emerging now whose work engages what I would call the civic realm. They don’t draw the same attention as the Gagosian crowd, and they can seem quixotic (consider Mary Mattingly’s Waterpod Project). But, bless them, they’re out there, working on the borders between art and activism. In Seely’s case, that means serving as a principal in the Civil Twilight Design Collective, which has proposed, among other things, lunar resonant streetlights as a way of mitigating light pollution, reducing energy consumption, and re-introducing the diurnal cycle to urban-dwellers.

I come from a generation where describing art as politically engaged might suggest 1970s-style agit-prop, but this new crew seems a tad less self-righteous, more willing to negotiate, more grown-up. For one thing, they seem to understand how complicit we all are in the mess we’ve made for ourselves, and they’re less certain that they’ve figured out all the solutions. As social action, their ideas can often look mighty modest – to wit, all on their own, lunar resonant streetlights aren’t going to solve the energy crisis – but, then again, that modesty may just be pragmatism in disguise.

A Little Sublimity

That maturity (wisdom?) plays out in the Lux series. Seely makes no bones about how ambivalent these images are: as she writes, they reveal “the immense beauty produced by man-made light.” 

To draw our attention to the ubiquity of the phenomenon, Seely has buried the identity of the cities she’s documenting. Each image has the same basic title – Metropolis – followed by its geographic coordinates. To figure out exactly where we are, we have to do some digging.

As Seely explains it, this naming device is meant to focus us less on the individual site than on “the interchangeability of urbanization in these areas and their unilateral impact on the global environment.” 

True enough, but it contributes as well to the sense we have, as we first gaze at the pictures themselves, that we’re witnessing a near-infinite view, a little bit of the Sublime.

I think of Turner without the melodrama [Turner’s Keelmen Heaving Coals by Moonlight, 1835 at left; Seely’s Metropolis 50°48’N 4°21’E (Cologne) at right], or Rothko without the detachment [Rothko’s Blue, Green and Brown, 1951, left; Seely’s Metropolis 41°54’N 87°39’W (Chicago), right].

Of course, “a little Sublime” is a contradiction in terms. The Sublime, by definition, is uncontainable, beyond measurement – huge.

So while the individual photographs, gorgeous even in reproduction, invite us into a kind of Romantic swoon, the series experienced as a whole snaps us out of it. As we dig around Seely’s website, searching out our hometown, we return to the bounded world, the anti-Sublime where all those cities are drowning in the artificial light of the environment we’ve made for ourselves.

_______________________

Seely’s work is currently on display in the Earth Now, an exhibition curated by Kate Ware at the Museum of New Mexico, and featured in the accompanying exhibition catalogue.

  

The Death Mask in the Darkroom 3: Some Photographs

Third in a five-part series. Read the previous post here.

It’s a truism of contemporary life, particularly contemporary American life, that we avoid the idea of death like the plague. In this, not entirely spurious interpretation of how we live now, Americans hide away any and all reminders of their mortality. We sent our elderly off to die in old folks’ homes, but when that nomenclature started sounding too frank, we renamed them (nursing homes) and renamed them again (retirement communities) and again (continuing care centers). We removed cemeteries, no longer called burial grounds, from the center of town to its outskirts. We talk about funeral “homes” and call the deceased “our loved ones,” “the departed,” anything but “the dead.”

Like many a critique of contemporary society, it sounds good. Problem is, it only takes in half the picture. Consider the following pictures, offered in chronological order, of the dead and soon-to-be.

 

Josef Koudelka’s Jarabina, 1963.

 

Emmet Gowin’s Rennie Booher, Danville, Virginia, 1972.

 
Nicholas Nixon's Tom Moran, Boston, 1988, from the People with AIDS series.

 

Hannah Wilke's Intra-Venus Series, #7, August 18, 1992 (right panel of diptych).

  

Film still from Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych, 1992

The selection, admittedly selective, pushes back a little against the notion that we shun the very idea of death: in fact, the pictures become more and more immediate with each passing decade. In the 1960s, Josef Koudelka’s gathering of gypsies around the coffin is such an anachronism — the long skirts and babushkas, the humble cottage with its hand-plastered walls — that it couldn’t possibly implicate us, could it? His subjects look as though they’ve wandered in from centuries before, and his handling of the image underscores this sense of a sanctified time past: the family, feet firmly planted in this world, cluster together in the dark, fallen world while the young woman is bathed in beatific light.

A decade later, Emmet Gowin updates this sensibility only a little. As with Koudelka, the contemplation of the dead is frank: we’re staring really at the body in the open casket. The same reverence is in the room, though, and a similar sense of the past. But here, you feel as though that way of life is slipping away, that the passing of Rennie Booher, “dead now and committed to mystery,” as Gowin puts it, represents the end of something more than an individual woman’s life.

A decade later, the AIDS crisis made death a familiar again, something experienced by the young as well as their grandparents. In Nicholas Nixon’s portrait of Tom Moran, the light — like Koudelka’s and Gowin’s — may still caress, but the details of the scene place this deathbed unambiguously in the present tense. Moran is a young man, and we’re struck by the weight of that fact. But it is those telling details — the hospital-issue nightgown, the neatly furnished room in the background — that ground this photograph so firmly in the commonplace.

With her self-portrait, taken in the 1990s as she was dying of lymphoma, Hannah Wilke strips away the pieties. Gone is the reverential tone: the lighting here is hospital-flat and the setting, as far as we can tell, impersonal. Wilke confronts us straight on, but her expression, though hard to read, doesn't seem confrontational. At times, I think she is pleading and, at others, bored. And when I look again, I think, no, she's just waiting.

Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych lays out like a Medieval altarpiece: the left panel  (featuring video of childbirth) and the right (his dying mother) flank footage of a body floating in water. This piece, like virtually all of Viola's work, may be aiming at the transcendent but, as with Wilke's self-portrait, you're firmly in the contemporary world and the deathbed vigil takes place in an institutional hospital setting.

Fifteen years on, Viola is still contemplating the borderline between life and death. His Ocean Without a Shore video installation, which debuted in the Church of San Gallo at the 2007 Venice Biennale, imagines the dead coming back to the world, if only for a short moment. The piece, constituted of three plasma screens mounted on the church's altars, shows black-and-white footage of individual people emerging from the darkness. As they move toward us, they pass through a transparent wall of water and, as they step through this invisible threshold, the image springs to full-color life. (To get a glimpse of the piece and to hear what Viola has to say about it, click here.)

Viola may be one of the most prominent, and eloquent, contemporary artists taking on the question of life and death. But he's not alone.

Next in this series: The Death Mask Redux

The Death Mask in the Darkroom 2: The Window & the Mirror

Second in a five-part series. Read the previous post here.


“The life of the Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures and maintains itself in it.” – George Wilhelm Frederich Hegel

Nothing if not an enactment of Hegel’s dictum to look the negative in the face and live with it, 97537 (Frances Rodick, in death), no. 2 is a deathbed portrait of the artist’s mother. I hesitate for just a moment over the word portrait, for what Rodick has done here is to conduct a digital autopsy, slicing up his mother’s face and then reconstructing it in one of his signature grids. And the surgery hasn’t been altogether successful: she’s been stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, all component parts that don’t quite add up.

But, yet, she’s not so long dead, is she? She still has hair, she still has flesh and teeth. Yes, her eyes are closed but she could have simply been sleeping when her son snapped the shutter. The fact is, as is so often the case with this artist, we’re not exactly sure what we’re looking at.

Rodick’s image occupies an in-between space – hovering somewhere between death (as in this Aztec death mask) and life (as in Richard Avedon’s portrait of his dying, but still living, father).

And maybe that’s the thing about the death mask. It’s also a portrait.

Who Am I?
It’s a long walk from Edward Curtis to Frank Rodick. A product of the 19th-century, Curtis was intent on creating a documentary record — an admittedly flawed record but a record nonetheless — where Rodick is all about subjectivity.

Still, thinking about Rodick's formal choices, I can’t get those Curtis portraits out of my mind.

I’m no expert, but the history of portraiture in the Western world seems to me to take a radical turn with the arrival of the camera. Most traditional portraiture I can recall steps back and looks at the subject from a slight, respectful angle – as if staring straight into the king’s eyes might blind us. I can think of only a handful of self-portraits (most notably Albrecht Durer) and portraits (Holbein’s of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves) that represent the human subject with the clinical, confrontational gaze that Curtis adopted.

And even Holbein put some distance between the viewer and the royal personages.

Who am I? In traditional society, where people were more or less born into themselves, the answer to that question was relatively simple. I am the child of a feudal peon, therefore I am a feudal peon. Self-invention was rare in the pre-modern world, and the portraiture it produced was consequently less searching, more situational than the portrait of the photographic era. As industrialized capitalism began its work of shattering traditional social relations, individuals defined themselves less as social beings — people living inside a nexus of other people — and more as individuals, full stop.

The cocoon of stable social relations disintegrated and we were released into the wide world to figure out, all by ourselves, who the hell we were. From our confusion, from our (vain?) efforts to probe the individual psyche and understand what the self is, something new emerged. You see it in Courbet’s early riff on himself, from 1842 to 1855, that yielded some 20 paintings and drawings in which he hams it up, trying on different personae as readily as Cindy Sherman did more than a hundred years later. (Above, The Desperate Man, 1844-45.)

You see it in Alfred Stieglitz’s extended portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe, about which the subject herself said, “When I look over the photographs…, I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives.”

And you see it in August Sander’s Man of the Twentieth Century, his monumental photographic project that set out to index the German population, and in Edward Curtis’s equally monumental ethnography of the North American Indians.

But Sander and Curtis both took the broad view: unlike Courbet, Stieglitz and Sherman, they were more interested in the society than in the individual. That said, all these artists bore in on their subjects, more often than not with a clinician’s eye. Even the besotted Stieglitz seems intent on conducting a psychological (and erotic) autopsy of his beloved.

Remember You Must Die
The photographer probes. The lens stares down the subject, and the camera exposes the inner person. That’s the idea anyway.

The subject staring directly into the camera lens – directly into the viewer’s eyes – is one of the standard devices of photographic portraiture. In virtually all the images I’ve posted here you can harbor the illusion that you are exchanging glances with another.

Look harder, though, and you see that these portraits leave the question of identity wide open. Stieglitz, Sander, Curtis – none of them offer any definitive solution to the mystery of the self. And, indeed, as with Paul Strand’s Young Boy, Gondeville, Charentes, France or Frederick Sommer’s Livia, the more directly confrontational the shot, the more sphinx-like the subject.

So these straight-on portraits don’t so much confront us with news of the individual as they reflect. Ostensibly probing the identity of the person viewed, they can also be read as a bridge to the person viewing. They serve both as a window and as a mirror. When pushed to their logical extreme, these images can be uncomfortably intimate, drawing us into the realm of another soul, implicating us in another life.

In 97537, Rodick is engaged in a sleight of hand: following the formal strictures of portraiture, he sneaks in an autopsy shot. The image is a straight-on portrait, a representation – albeit highly manipulated – of an individual being. The long, narrow face and high forehead, the down-turned mouth combine to form a distinctive image descriptive of a particular person.

But 97537 is also a death mask, a representation of a corpse, a person now become a thing. The leaching away of color and the collapsed flesh – the vacancy – confirm our sense that the face we contemplate is truly beyond our reach.

You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that Rodick has simply tricked you, setting you up for a person and delivering a body. Following the logic of the portrait, you peer into this image, looking for clues to her identity.

But what looks back? A person – the gender is virtually impossible to read – who has died: a corpse.

And what do we see in the reflection?

Next in the series: Some Photographs

Killing Beavers

At breakfast the other day, I heard a radio report that the gray wolf has been removed from the endangered species list. Part of a budget deal, the move was cheered by some, decried by others, and taken as an opportunity to manage the animals by Fish and Game departments.

"Wolves are classified as a big-game animal in Idaho," a Fish and Game official said, "and we fully intend to manage them like we do our other big-game animals that we've done successfully, bears and lions, for example." Already the department has sent out helicopters to cull the pack: wolves have been killing off too many elk.

Beyond the oxymoronic implications in the phrase wildlife management, the story left me thinking once again about our fractured relationship with animals and how it reflects the even deeper fissure that has so preoccupied artists and thinkers of the modern era: our fractured relationship with our selves.

The Intervention Paradox
The photograph at the top of this post comes from Joann Brennan's long-term project Managing Eden, in which she documents scientists' efforts to maintain the balance between human and animal needs. Titled Contraceptive Testing, the picture shows scientists with the Colorado Division of Wildlife inserting a catheter in the animal's neck so they can monitor contraceptive drug levels in its bloodstream. This work, along with that of the other photographers in this post, are included in at Earth Now, an exhibition curated by Kate Ware at the Museum of New Mexico, and featured in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. (I'll be posting more on what looks like a great show.)

You can imagine Letterman getting his hands on this one: maybe all they really need in Colorado are some of those Idaho wolves. Like a lot of wisecracks, that insight gets to the central conundrum. We must intervene because we have intervened: if we hadn't intervened then, we wouldn't have to intervene now. But can we stop intervening? And how?

Brennan scrutinizes our tangled relationship with wildlife. She describes her work as "looking for moments of contact between man and animal. I feel these moments tell us something about the complexity of our relationship to nature. Through making this work, I have come to realize that our perception of nature and our relationship to wildness is precarious and full of paradox. It can no longer thrive unassisted and more than ever before, nature depends on us."

As in Contraceptive Testing, Brennan photographs the work of research scientists focused on habitat and population management. She's also documented alternative capture systems developed by the National Wildlife Research Center to develop humane, non-lethal tools to manage predators that attack livestock. She's looked at habitat manipulations: a bat house for bats displaced from University of Florida stadiums pens that enable researchers to study birds, electric fencing to keep animals from raiding crops.

The picture above depicts a (failed) effort to protect beehives from black bears: the Colorado Division of Wildlife provided the fencing, but installation fell to the hapless owner. In an irony reminiscent of the Idaho wolf-Colorado elk puzzle, another photographer in this exhibition, Brad Temkin, offered up the picture at left. That image -- Beehives, Chicago -- comes from his Rooftops series documenting the green roofs that have been planted on the top of the city's civic buildings where black bears are few, even on the ground.

What To Do?

The people portrayed in Daniel Handal's collective portrait provide one answer to the dilemma: sustainable, small-scale farming. These photographs, from a larger series Between Forest and Field, document the latest back-to-the land movement as it's playing out in the Hudson River Valley. The young farmers he's portraying, says Handal, “are looking for ways to build a saner, healthier life for themselves and their families while providing healthy, locally grown food for their communities.”

In effect, their full-on rejection of factory farming is an attempt to sidestep the paradox: rather than intervention in the form of industrial agriculture, they opt for collaboration with the natural world. As admirable as the idealism and enterprise of this generation of small farmers may be -- and as seductive their slowed-down, bucolic lives may seem --  their model relies on customers who can afford to pay a premium for their produce.

Don't get me wrong: I'm one of those urban-dwelling, farmers-market customers. But it seems to me that, with a world population approaching seven billion -- more than half of them living in cities -- the locavore movement needs to figure out how to scale up. 

We may really need those Chicago rooftops. 

A Cautionary Tale

I'll close with the story of Phil Underdown and his family, dedicated environmentalists who moved to the Adironacks to be close to nature. Shortly after their arrival, a colony of beavers established themselves in the creek that runs along one side of Underdown's property.

Every bit as intent on settlement as their human neighbors, the beavers dammed a creek, felled trees, and wreaked havoc with the septic system – and a reluctant Underdown hired a trapper. His series, Trapper’s Lament, documents the aftermath: what was left behind after the beavers were removed.

As Underdown writes, “I recycle, I drive a Prius, I give money to environmental organizations … and I kill beavers.”

One way or another, don't we all?

______________________

P.S. Google "Earth Now" and, if you're like me, your first hit will be from the U.S. Geological Survey. The site displays images taken by the Landsat satellites as they orbit the Earth.