City Gardens

Two exhibitions currently up at The Print Center in Philadelphia take a look at our relationship to the land: I wrote about Stalking the Wild Asparagus, the upstairs show that focuses on the neo-back-to-nature movement, in an earlier post. Downstairs, Daniel Traub offers his view of the landscapes – by turn, sublime and suburban, tamed and sinister – hidden away in the mean streets of the inner city.

At first glance, this selection from Traub's Lots series might be mistaken for just another exercise in the Dusseldorf school of taxonomic photography. But Traub’s pictures, although as seemingly unassuming as one of the Bechers’ grids of abandoned industrial structures, are tender rather than dispassionate, slyly Romantic rather than sternly empirical.

Traub, who splits his time between China and the States, grew up in Philadelphia. For this series, he returned home to document the city’s mean streets, once-prosperous neighborhoods now marked by emptied-out factories, crumbling row homes, and vacant lots.

As the title suggests, this series focuses on those vacant lots – or, to be precise, vacant single-property lots that are bounded by row homes in varying states of occupancy and repair. Lots is part of Traub’s larger exploration of the neighborhood; a companion series, Inner City, offers up a collection of street corners and streetscapes, backyards and building facades, and portraits of neighborhood residents.

The pictures in Lots are, quite simply, landscapes, with the houses that stand on either side of the small plots serving as frames. You could leave it there – except that, taken together, these images lay out a fairly complete picture of the different ways we have of relating to, and imagining, the land.

In some of these images, the nature that insinuates itself into the city grid is wilderness, pure and simple. In North Nineteenth Street near West Cumberland Street (left) or North Forty Third Street near Wallace Street (at top of this post), for instance, the densely packed lots seem to be reverting, uncontested by an exhausted civilization, to forestland.

In others, though, the scene reads as expansive English landscape, with beckoning vistas that promise escape into a benevolent nature. Or as a Whitmanesque vision of the possibilities offered up by the open, American road: “the world before you the long brown path before you, leading wherever you choose.” (Above: Cecil B. Moore Avenue near North Marston Street.)

Others menace, invoking one of those Grimm tales of children lost in the dark wood populated by adult monsters (the cannibalizing witch of the Grimm tale, the neighborhood molester of a “ripped-from-the-headlines” Law and Order episode). Abandon hope all ye who travel too deep into the wilderness of North Fifteenth and West Boston Street (left).

Still others, fighting back the nightmares, seem intent on replicating compact suburban settings, complete with their cropped-lawn promise of order and safety. Look an image like North Twenty Fourth and North Master Street (above) and you see civilization in action. Whoever is tending to that vacant lot – tending the neighborhood fields – gives me some small hope for the social contract.

Summing up this series, Traub commits himself only to the basics: “Some are strewn with trash and debris, while others are lush and verdant.” But in his statement about Inner City – the related series that takes a longer view of these same neighborhoods – he inches closer to the deeper meaning here: “I am drawn,” he says, “to this raw urban landscape, which hovers between collapse and regeneration, decay and possibility.”

We can hope.

Back to the Garden

Stalking the Wild Asparagus – one of two exhibitions currently on view at The Print Center in Philadelphia – brought back memories of my one brush with hippie communal life.

It was 1975, and I was visiting friends of the brother of a roommate of my then boyfriend. The setting was suitably idyllic: southern New Hampshire in the summertime. The young women, my age and already mothers, invited us to share their meal, served at one long, outdoor table and involving, as I remember, lots of brown rice. The young men were long-haired, shirtless, and gently solicitous of their children who, again in my memory, were all tanned and golden-haired.

As Edenic as it all was, I understood immediately that I wasn’t cut out for this life. I was a city girl and far too skeptical to believe in the implicit promise of the back-to-nature movement that we could return to a state of grace. Sad to say, recent history bears that judgment out.

But the idea of redemption through nature – “getting back to the garden” – has a long lineage: from the Garden of Eden, to Brook Farm, to The Farm with a whole lot of other stops in between, dreams of paradise on Earth die hard.

Off the Grid

Stalking the Wild Asparagus – impishly titled after the Euell Gibbons' classic 1960 guide to foraging – takes the dream head on, presenting six photographers who document intentional communities around the United States. The tone is distinctly counterculture and, at least for someone who remembers poring over Susan Ainslie’s copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue, tinged with just a little nostalgia.

  

A case in point, Lucas Foglia’s Re-Wilding images – or at least the ones shown here – could all be outtakes from the 1960s. Foglia undertook this series to see “what a completely self-sufficient way of living might look like.” His search led him to the southeastern United States and a variety of off-the-grid communities with a variety of often-conflicting motivations (the environment, religion, politics).

The Print Center images are drawn exclusively from the back-to-the-nature folks. In one scene, a father and his young daughter soak, buck naked, in a pond. In another, Dad directs a stream of milk directly from goat’s teat to his son’s mouth. And Creek, Kevin’s Land is positively Edenic: here, in a secluded wood, yet another child bathes in the cooling water as his mother watches by.

The photographs from the religious communities, however, paint quite a different picture – one that evokes a different moment in American history. An image like Rita and Cora Aiming, Tennessee, in which a bonnet-clad girl is learning how to shoot a rifle, looks more like the 1860s than the 1960s. (To see them and others from the series, take a look at Foglia’s website.)

When the Snows Come

None of the work on display is strictly autobiographical, but neither is it purely, objectively documentary. (Foglia grew up on a Long Island farm operated along the principles of the back-to-nature movement.) All these artists here have a personal stake in the subject matter – a fact that somehow enriches the imagery. 

For Kelly Anderson-Staley – whose Hanson’s Tent at Common Ground Fair, Unity, Maine is the first image you see as you enter the exhibition – that means a childhood spent in one of the eccentric structures she documents. In her Off the Grid series, she depicts houses built by some 30 families living in rural Maine. These people have turned their back on the modern world but, although their reasons vary (environmentalism, evangelism, anarchism), they form what Anderson-Staley describes as “a kind of makeshift community.” (For a glimpse of the people who built these idiosyncratic houses, go to Anderson-Staley’s website.) 

For me, the houses called back memories of the treehouse that was the main attraction of Swiss Family Robinson (one of my all-time favorite childhood movies), but for Anderson-Staley, one of them – Staley’s Log Cabin -- is the house she grew up in.

The perspective is welcome – injecting, as it does, some realism into the whole. The Swiss Family Robinson had the good fortune to get shipwrecked on a lush tropical island with a climate that’s a far cry from the interior of Maine. Anderson-Staley does not spare us shots of that landscape in wintertime nor, indeed, of the various privies her one-time neighbors have installed. As she explains in her artist’s statement, “I do not want to over-romanticize this way of living or over-estimate the role it might play in resolving the global environmental crisis….Many of the families in this project describe happiness, even as they recount the daily struggles of survival. It is this mix of attitudes that I am seeking to capture.”

  

By contrast, Justine Kurland’s contribution to the exhibition is, as she admits, “the fantasy vision of communal life.” Again drawing on the artist’s family experience, her pictures are based on her mother’s life on a Virginia farm not far from a number of back-to-nature communes. Following the allegorizing tradition of pastoralists like Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin, Kurland steps back from the larger scene and places her subjects – nudes – firmly in the landscape.

The resulting scenes are sheer Romanticism: a utopian nowhere populated by naked souls living in perfect harmony: harvesting the crops, scything the hay, lolling around in a peach tree. As lovely as the dream may be, Kurland’s vision leaves out too much for me; I lean more toward Anderson-Staley’s approach. Looking at Kurland’s Arcadians, I worry about the mosquito bites and the sunburn and whatever these poor, unclothed folks will do once the snows come.

Frontier Days

For me, the revelation of this show came with the remaining two bodies of work: Taj Forer’s studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer practices and Adrain Chesser and Timothy White Eagle’s portraits of some of its flesh-and-blood practitioners.

Who knew there were hunter-gatherers alive and well and living in these United States?

Forer’s studies document – and pay homage to – the lost arts of hand-to-mouth survival and the world we lost to industrialization. The Print Center displays three diptychs: one depicting front and back views of what I take to be a hunting blind; a second offering top and bottom views of a hand-woven basket; and the third a fireboard, during and after use.

The work, while drawing on ethnographic tactics, is a record of Forer's own personal lessons in the hunter-gatherer way of life: “I have been spending a lot of time learning how to live off the land in the most simple ways imaginable,” he explains, “and I have been photographing this process … these nearly ‘lost’ ways of being.” (To read an interview with Forer, click here.)

In this series, Forer limits himself to documenting the tools of the trade, with not a person in sight. To get a look at what modern-day hunter-gatherers look like you have to turn to Adrain Chesser and Timothy White Eagle’s The Return. This collective portrait depicts a group of “ordinary” Americans who have opted for a nomadic life – a loosely knit tribe of hunter-gatherers who follow a traditional Native-American way of life, known as “the Hoop.” Their range extends from the Pacific Northwest down into the American Desert (the images were shot in Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, California, and Washington).

These latter-day nomads – the two photographs among them – travel with the seasons to harvest native, wild foods; they forage for berries and roots, collect water, hunt and skin small animals, sleep in the open air, and take shelter in wikiups – in short, living out the kind of lives that died, or so I had thought, with the frontier.

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Stalking the Wild Asparagus is a beautiful show – at once heart-breaking and cheering. Heart-breaking because, with history in mind, you’ve got to suspect that the idyll is doomed and cheering because, bless them, people keep trying.

But it's only half the story. Downstairs at The Print Center, a selection from Daniel Traub's Lots series finds the nature in the city. Next up: City Gardens
 

"My Poor Men Who Died So Patiently"

In a current exhibition at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, video artist Peter Campus dips his curatorial toe into the brave new world of digital media. In the show he’s put together – called alterations – Campus riffs on different ways that artists are using digital media to reflect on its impact on the culture.

Jason Varone, whose dystopic Not with a Whimper, but a Bang (a kind of mural-cum-video-projection) combines a news feed of the End Times variety with assorted animals seemingly dropping from the skies.

Nayda Collazo-Llorens, in her multi-media, two-wall, non-linear piece called Aposiopesis, meditates on the complex systems of thought and communication. Aposiopesis, literally “a full silence,” is a sudden breaking off of a sentence, mid-thought, as though the speaker is unwilling or unable to continue – leaving the conclusion to the listener’s imagination. It’s a great title for an enigmatic piece.

Also enigmatic are Kathleen Graves’s Longing for Certain Things digital prints. With a little internet research, I find the series described as a digital study of “technology and human development” as they played out in the Middle Ages and the present day.

Campus’s own contribution – Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay – is lovely. His two high-definition multi-screen videos (above) depict modest landscapes from near the artist’s home in upstate New York. The original footage has been processed, though – Campus won’t say how – to yield a final product that suggests a Cezanne landscape unfolding in time.

IMAGINE

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But the piece that spoke most powerfully to me was Beryl Korot’s Florence. In this somber homage to the Victorian reformer and nurse Florence Nightingale, words – selected from Nightingale’s letters – fall slowly down the video screen against a background woven from footage of waterfalls, boiling water, and snowstorms.

To read what Nightingale has to say, you have to sit through the entire unfolding of the video. The text falls slowly, silently – like snow – to form an illegible mound, with words overlapping words. Korot has carefully paced the release of each word and as you read/watch them drift down the screen, you slow your expectations. You read differently, absorbing the words rather than scanning them.

The underlying power of Florence comes from Nightingale’s words, transcribed here (punctuation added):

G-d must have something for me to do for him or he would have let me die some time ago.

WOMEN DREAM dreams which are their life without which they could not live. Those dreams go at last.

Did not G-d speak to you during this retreat?

Did he not ask you anything?

He asked me to surrender my will.

And to whom?

To all that is upon the earth.

But, oh, you GENTLEMEN. We are steeped to our necks in blood. The wounded left lying up to our very door. Occasionally the roof is torn off, the windows blown in, and we are flooded under water for the night.

IMAGINE. All December in the trenches lying down without food, only raw salt pork sprinkled with rum, sugar, and biscuits.

When we came, there was not a sponge nor a rag of linen. Everything is gone to make slings, stump pillows, and shirts.

Oh, my poor men who died so patiently.

As for me, I have no plans.

If I live, I should like to go to some foreign hospital where my name has not been heard, free myself of all responsibility, anxiety, writing, administration, and work as a nurse for a year.

If not for the story I have to tell, I would never enter the world again.

 

Reading these words, you can readily understand how Korot wanted to see beyond the Ministering Angel cliché that Nightingale’s name all too often evokes. In her cross-centuries collaboration, Korot reshapes Nightingale’s words: selecting and distilling passages from her letters and then incorporating them into this compassionate and sorrowful work of art.

Korot organizes the text in stanzas. Most of the words pile up at the bottom of the screen, but at certain junctures, an all-caps explosion of words punctuates the flow and then disappears. At others, Nightingale’s questions cross the screen on the diagonal. In the last section, the scrolling text appears twice with each word accompanied by its own soft echo. And at the end, that last word – again – fades away altogether and we return to the beginning in an endless loop of grief.

Likewise, Korot uses the audio to signify a shift in tone. In the introspective opening passage, you hear the sound of a distant, rushing waterfall. But to mark the major transition of the piece – the break to Nightingale’s direct address to those anonymous “Gentlemen” – Korot cuts to the sound of falling rain. The rain continues, like the sound of someone weeping, through the description of the conditions under which Nightingale’s patients died and the cri de coeur that concludes the piece.