horticulture

I'm relaxing my discipline this evening - it's a Saturday night, and the annual passing-through-Eldorado of the Pride Train, complete with rainbow banners and balloons, always puts me in a good mood ... I'd intended to go out and photograph it, but was out by an hour in my timing.   So, two pictures - exemplifying a typical dichotomy: the pretty picture, about which there's nothing much to say, and then, one of the other kind.   Meredith asked the other day on FB whether one could have too many peonies - she was, I'm sure, talking about her yard, not her bedside table, but waking in the grey rain this morning, her comment was the first thing that I thought of when I woke and saw these, and thought no - not possible to have a superabundance ... so, Meredith, this one's for you.

The reality of a wet day shows up well here, but it should be very good for the herbs - ours, and these.

These are planted outside the latest very-near-to-Eldorado culinary acquisition and temptation, Real Food Nation, just above where 285 joins I-15 - the junction with the Old Las Vegas highway.   The co-chef here used to be at the (now closed) Galisteo Inn: the whole establishment is devoted to local, organic, and slow food, and it's quite delicious.   The dark chocolate cupcakes with caramel frosting and toasted pinons should probably be illegal.   

But this spiral and gridded lines of a watering system (even if not the strange hybrid - a cross between a fried egg and a sunflower - on a stick) had me thinking more about land art / art in a landscape.   To be sure, this shouldn't count at all - it's functional, and if Land Art is one thing, it's non-functional, except in so far as it gets the perceiver to think about space, time, and the relation between aesthetics and the environment - or, rather, because Capability Brown, say, did that pretty well, about the point of art at all.   I read today Erin Hogan's Spiral Jetta. A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West today, which, despite its terrible title, has some very thoughtful insights into how one might respond to Land Art (and her description of her experience at the Lightning Field manages to convey its magic in an impressive way).   One of the points that she raises is that of whom Land Art is for - and how to assess the huge amount of effort (and expense) that goes into some of it, in relation to the relatively tiny number of people who see it, in its out of the way situations - however moved and inspired by it we might be.   This particular curve and set of lines, however, manage to symbolize exactly what RFN sets out to do - a respect for the beauty that can accompany the utility of growing food to eat.   I just hope that my rabbit doesn't make his way up there.

Nina's boots

Today was very dusty: although Nina was lovingly anointing her new (that is, new 2nd hand) boots at lunchtime with olive oil, I had an anxious suspicion that the sandy New Mexican soil was going to adhere to them even more firmly as a result.   

This sandy road was the way up to Star Axis - another piece of Land Art, another non-photographable construction.   I did, though, feel far more respectful of an art work that is in the midst - the long midst - of being built: it's a work in progress that, once finished, is designed to last for 26,000 years (the precession, so called, which is the length of the slow wobble that tilts the Earth's axis first towards, and then away from, Polaris).    Work in progress - however tempting - is not the same thing as a finished piece when it comes to photographing its effects, startling though its geometric lines, and its scale, were.   Whether or not the solar system will be the same, repeating itself in its cycles, at the end of that time, one can't exactly anticipate.   It seems likely - only I'm quite sure that the means whereby we record its motions (whether mathematically or representationally) will not.

In this context of time passing, the fact that Charles Ross has only been working for a quarter century on this project seems like speedy process.   Star Axis is a very different kind of work from Spiral Jetty or the Lightning Field, and a far less sympathetic one, to my mind.   This may have a good deal to do with the sun itself.   I would love to come back at night, and sit in the Hour Chamber, with the north star, Polaris, at the top of the 15 degree opening, and each star on the left-hand side taking exactly an hour to pass to the right, the east (most of all I'd like to come back at that time in August when the Perseides shoot through the New Mexican sky, and complicate this with their shows of burnt out light - August 12th, this year).   The Hour Chamber is at the front of the Solar Pyramid: behind it, is the Star Tunnel, parallel to the Earth's and intersecting with the line of the equator: a steep staircase rises above its bottom chamber, and according to where one pauses on the staircase, one will be able to have a sense of where Polaris was at that moment in history - a going up and a coming down, looking forward and backward, at once.

Looking in either direction today was a vertiginous experience (literally, if one suffered from such physical issues) - of course it would have been good to take out a camera, and capture the brutally angular and exact progressions of light and shadow.   What struck me most, in the bright mid-day sun, was the potential cruelty of the sharp sunlight.   Its long, thin, needle-like piercing triangles of light reminded me horribly vividly of the sun striking the column on ice at the end of D. H. Lawrence's short story "The Woman Who Rode Away," a phenomenon of the winter equinox that signaled the (self) sacrificial woman's deliberate, willed giving up of herself to - as one can read it all too easily - man's phallic (and desired) power.   Late Lawrence is very nasty, sometimes.   But here and elsewhere he gives one pause for thought about what sun worshipers are actually worshipping, and although Star Axis (as its name suggests) is hardly a temple to Ra or Tonatiuh, Charles Ross is fascinated with the sun in all kinds of ways: from constructing prisms through which light falls in meditative or healing places (for the most part one or the other - the chapel of Harvard Business School may currently serve both functions), to making Solar Burns.   To my mind, quite the most thrilling part of the day was seeing not just Star Axis itself, but some of the structures (though not the lenses) used to make the burns, and a number of sets in construction and arrangement in his workshop.   He focuses the sun's rays on wood - for the most part - for precisely nine minutes, the length of time that it takes light to travel from the sun to earth, and at different moments of the year, it performs different curves. He's using the same medium as the photographer, in other words, but instead of light being benign and enabling, he's bringing out its destructive qualities, too, and using them to create art.   This seems to be looping round, in my flash-obsessed way, to the tie-in between the necessity of light for image making, and the cross-over point in which it becomes murderous.

I can't find a way of looping back to Nina's boots, though there could be something potentially cruel about their pointy toes.   But I did want to reflect how wonderful it's been to travel - on and off - with fun, clever, creative people for the past few days, and I'm not sure that it's going to be at all easy to return to my habitual academic orbit.

spiral seed

I very much wanted to write about the difference between the Lightning Field and Spiral Jetty - but I had no spiral jetty to hand today.   So I had to find a spiral... here is a spiral of bird seed on the back porch.   I set it up around lunchtime (it's curled the opposite way round from the SJ, but that's not deliberate - probably linked to my innate tendency to do things counter-clockwise, which made my mother decide when I was about six, and stirring cake mixture widdershins, that I might be a witch) and then photographed it every hour - each time it was a little bit more ravaged by housefinches and some untidy mocking birds.   This evening, after going out for dinner (hi there, UCI gang!), it looks as though something heavy has sat on it.   Probably a rabbit.

For I had intended to explore how the SJ, for me, is a very playful piece of art work - it knows, I felt, that land art is going to seem small and insignificant when set against the grandeur and scale of nature, and wants to have fun with the concept.   Hence its glorious inutility, its acknowledgement that it is decorative, and not in any kind of rivalry.   It's also something that though its stem, the root of the curly lizard tongue, is attached to land, draws the eye on past it to the sparking, crackling salty wastes of its surroundings.

Whereas the Lightning Field is uncompromisingly there.   It makes no concessions to us.   It's indifferent to us, its spectators.   Its poles recede into the night, and are still there, emerging as thin pale grey stripes in the dawn.   It mocks us - you expected an art work to relate to you, humor you, draw you in?   Forget it.   It doesn't have to - any more than nature does.   It takes from nature - at least in daylight - all the time, reflecting (or, for much of the middle of the day) refusing to reflect natural light.   It joins heaven and earth - sometimes in a very secular and pragmatic way, sometimes in a far more glorious and transcendental one.   But we, as viewers, aren't in any kind of control about when this happens - it's up to the art work's interaction with light, not with us.    It belongs to the air and sky, despite being rooted in the ground.

The spiral, on the other hand, is all about the land: made of rocks and sand, and laid flat on the earth.   Or so I thought.   But I was wrong - I watched a five minute excerpt from Robert Smithson's 1970 film about the Jetty today (I am so excited - the whole thing is going to be shown in Albuquerque in August) and in fact, he was inspired by the sun, by its radiant white heat, by the fact that this sun, the source of light - the source of what makes a photograph, one might say - is "a vast spiral nebula of innumerable suns".   His own spiral is, for him, a "circle curling out of the sun."   So it is far closer to forms traced by light than I ever thought (and this has pushed me to learn, as I've been intending to do, more about it - you've not heard the end of spirals, even if this particular one will have been eaten).

This image is from 4.30 p.m. - the hour in which the shadows of the curved chair backs had themselves crept round to add to the spiral's trajectory.