Installation: Old Nations, Lost Nations

 This was the map used to locate installation staging areas. Gray stars indicate changed sites.

I installed my ceramic creations this morning, keeping notes on where I had placed them so that I could produce a map rendering for my installation participants to find the pieces themselves. I had the presence of mind to obsessively photograph these mini installations, because I was bested by the experts in the business...ironically, a busload of children were exiting the installation site (a park) as our class critique convened. The space was much changed. 5 out of the 8 sites were noticeably altered, 4 were completely gone. This occurred in less than 6 hours.

He also disappeared

 It was my intent before hand that these figures would not just decompose. During critique we searched for the installations indicated on the map and sometime they wouldnt be there. My installation participants searched and found pieces of pottery, assembling them back in their rightful places in a a reverent way. There is something gratifyingly human in this act - our unique and most charming idiosyncrasies as a species - about wanting to put something back together again, even if we have no knowledge of how it would have existed prior to our discovering it.

Duck Nation, gone without a trace

 Other installation sites revealed tender interactions. In one where I had placed an arrangement of bowls, a campfire, and animals to accompany the scene. I noticed today, bits of grasses were deliberately stuck into the bowls, some were gathered to the terracotta flames of the bonfire, and even the terracotta animals surrounding the camp-fire scene appeared to have been dining on little grass salads....

My study site

I most admire Mark Dion and Joseph Beuys, though they are seemingly talking about different spheres within their work - Dion and his natural history inspired collections, Beuys and his post-war shamanism - I thought it would be interesting to discuss man and nature as a theme. Dion has a reverent and calculated way of categorizing animals, in his taxidermied exhibits, one presenting a wolf on a cart with complimentary habitat - the "Mobile Wilderness Unit" shows mankind has manipulated the wild to displacement, and even if it exists, it is to suit our own machinations, not for the integrity of the 'wild' and the 'wild things' themselves.

Putting the words of other critics aside, I think Beuys' "I like America and America likes me" betrays Beuys' search for the human psyche. The man was locked away with a wild coyote for a day, in America, a country he didn't meet until the day of the installation. He purposefully allows himself to be the passive character, and to be so powerless that it necessitates his transformation into another being to survive. Cloaked in felt and moving with his shepherd's crook, Beuys becomes an archetype for a man, a hermet, a shaman, he is equally as wild as the animal trapped with him, but  you sense the artifice of the entire procedure, of placing a wild coyote and a man in a room, but the presence of the coyote itself has changed the entire dynamics of this 'show'. It heightens Beuys' presence into the realm of the mystical, he is not himself, and neither is the coyote, who also attains his former status - symbolic in the America's as a trickster spirit, creator, and healer, he is now the manipulator of forces.

Joseph Beuys "I like America and America likes me", 1974

It is Beuys imagery which resonates with me the most. For my own installation, I have chosen to work from the wild and out. I chose Frontier Park by old Fort Hays in Hays Kansas, as a my staging area. The old fort represents the last frontier, that last wild place, as the soldiers stationed here were also here to protect settlers, and to wage war against the native peoples they would ultimately displace.

I am part of the native American and the western version of American history, my ancestry is imprecise, with Northern Paiute, Apache, Hungarian, Lakota and German, as well as other unknown lineages - telling of migrations, transatlantic and intercultural marriages of my family.  My pedigree appears balanced and universal, but I feel I am part of a dying culture, or several, and being unable to communicate this loss without appearing cliche is an ever present concern for me as an art maker.

My great grandmother, Angelina Jacinto

 We visit the ruins of southwestern native American peoples who have lived in their adobe and cave dwellings and we forget that some just ‘vanished’, what about the European settlers on Roanoke Island - supposedly gone without a trace?  We think of extinction strictly in terms of animals, again, to the powerless ‘wild things’, and we forget  our modern societies are also adherent to this rule of eventually diminishing. Can people completely disappear? It seems incredulous…but the same has happened here in our own Kansas. Native people once lived around Hays, as did rattlesnakes and prairie dogs and burrowing owls, and all of the artifacts of their living have seemingly gone with them, so this is also a reflection on biodiversity, the total loss of wildlife, habitat and people. Frontier Park is an idyllic place, but it is planted with foreign trees, introduced grasses, its bison are penned and obviously unlikely to ever roam again, and even the creek is bridled, all dammed up and spoiled with deadly nitrogen rich runoff.

Frontier Park, across the highway from the old Fort, bison roam off to the edge of the park, relics of the native landscape.

Mark Dion had a way of coming upon a culturally significant site and reinvigorating it with its untold story, this is my recreation of my ancestral past and the past life of Hays before it was settled by Westerners. I think I can do this most effectively by recreating in miniature, the living areas of a lost world within the park. Im currently making parts for my scenes which will include animals and dinner settings.  The clay figures are made in a basic, abstract manner reminiscent of stone age European ceramic animal figures and cave drawings. I want to make hundreds of these clay figures and set them out in select locations to complete their habitat.


Certain figures I have made  also personally significant. The duck and bowls  represent important aspects of my northern Paiute heritage and the unknowable lore that has never been passed down to me. For instance, the Paiutes were known to be expert animal attractors, using duck decoys and duck calls to lure in their prey, they were and are also renown basket weavers, and so I have made numerous ducks and baskets, a small hunting dream for my ancestors.

These figures will be placed throughout the mapped route. Observers complete this scene as they may come upon a world that is in stillness and decomposition. The people, animals and settings are nameless and without further hint to their function. Campfires are left to burn, animals are left to their own devices, and people are nowhere to be seen...Much in the way I comprehend Joesph Beuys's work, you wonder if this could be a mystical device, the wild is law, and order is no where to seen
- a maddening position for an observer - yet  to me, the imagery is also striking and transformative.

Frontier Park reconnaissance: Yes, this is exactly what it looks like, dog-bone trees and all, to scale.

Map of village area

Project: A commentary on lost civilizations, personal cultural memory, extinction, American westward expansion,

Materials: Unfired clay, found objects from park site, cloth

Time line:
May 2nd - 6th: Concept initiation, sketches, ideas
May 6-10th: Artist research, location and concept formation, blog drafts
May 10-15: Blog drafts revisited, reconnaissance on site with photographs, publishing
May16th: Morning setup, afternoon critique

Artist's inspiring a new installation

For this past installation, my organizational use of organic and found materials are inspired from the methodology of Mark Dion, who, referencing science and natural history was an obvious starting point for me, but trying to find artists before him encompasses new visual vocabulary and conceptual impetus'. Mark Dion is considered a sort of pop-scientist, he regains from what institutions says is important a naiive and more exacting reality of what is pertinent in our daily lives - everything from our spoons and knick-knacks and broken bottles has a place and name, because they have taken part in our daily lives, and it is this reason for which Dion surreptitiously finds a place for all random miscellanea, if history will deign to forget it. He also draws from singularly powerful figures like Robert Bertram and Sterling Clark to recreate and enact their moments in history, also blurring the lines of fact and fiction. As we know, bias is always present within the observer and with a human observer, no matter the methods used, we ultimately delete from historical memory whatever fits the paradigm at the time. Dion strips away even these methods to produce a viewpoint which is beautiful, ironic, and rich with social commentary.

Mark Dion's paper-mache rendition of Sterling Clark's China Expedition. Here is  presenting the wares and tools of the undocumented journey; Juxtaposing the 'phantom images' with the bravado of the trophy room, Dion shows that science and expedition, going hand in hand,were exclusive to a society of privileges as much as to their idealistic and individual curiosity.

Artists who could be the conceptual predecessors of Dion's amalgam of 'natural history, found object reliquaries' are Joseph Cornell and Joseph Beuys, though this can be argued, I sympathized with their organizational and visual inclinations. Both men worked from a post war perspective, so it seems that they were creating from rummaged objects and bare materials a treatment for the subconscious in a tramautic period. Beuys worked as a contemporary shaman with fat and felt, and even had his own personal mythology. Supposedly he was rescued by ethnic Tatars when his Luftwaffe plane crashed in remote western European territories. He said he was nursed to health, bound with fat and felt to stay warm. He returns to these materials again and again, a poetic constancy. Joseph Cornell is a more subdued figure, called by one critic, a 'Dime Store' alchemist, he constructs these hermetic frames (much like Dion's inspiration - the wunderkabinet) for depositing objects in quiet, and sacred organization. His objects are also telling of the people who possessed them, betraying the American link to the western Europe they would be in violent league against.

Joseph Beuys, "I like America and America likes me", 1974

Joseph Cornell, Untitled, 1945

Click on the names below to link with interesting articles on the artist's and their process

Mark Dion

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Cornell


Bibliography:


Scribner, Charity. 2003. Object, relic, fetish, thing: Joseph Beuys and the museum. Critical inquiry. 
                EBSCO publishing: 635-649

Shaw, Lytle. 2009. Docents of discourse: The logic of dispersed sites. Boundary 2. 36 (3): 25-47

Grass Hall Installation

Grass Hall Installation view. Materials: Knotweed, tall dropseed, salt grass, heats, her aster, Snow-on-the-mountain and other dried plants collected from Cheyenne Bottoms. Metallic thread, jute, seed bottles, compass, a madonna icon, fossil, 50 caliber shell, plastic animals, feathers, grass carp gill rakers and teeth, journal entries, red chalk...

Grass Hall detail of handwritten journal entries and notes, with knotweed twigs, heath aster

The previous shots are from a found object installation exhibited in the Hays Art Council salon 1010 in Hays, KS. All of the dried plant material, bones, feathers, with the exception of some miscellanea from my personal collected were all collected at Cheyenne Bottoms, an interior wetland in central Kansas. Finding the objects was in itself a present-building experience in itself, which I can only hope transcends into the manipulated forms of these organic materials. Thinking from a hermetic's standpoint, the grass reminded me of latent potential - the standing litter of last seasons growth has been symbolically repurposed; 'spun' into golden and other metallic coloured threads to convey a sacred intent in their new life. These new boughs of material have been placed in such a manner as to represent otherworldly structures, and also to something more familiar and sentimental, including shadow boxes, nests, and the material surrounding an animal's den. These portals  of grass and bone and feather are meant to conceal and protect the precious things within.

NCECA: Ceramics education in Texas

I recently spent a week in Houston, TX for the 2013 annual NCECA meeting -  the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. This is not an exclusive society, explaining why ceramics single handedly kidnapped me in the middle of the night while I was innocently studying drawing. Rather, all mediums are embraced - the opening NCECA ceremony proves just this, it involved a performance artist as guest speaker, and a mime - who performed a tear jerker of a memoir on stage. This open love of creativity speaks how Ceramics willingly redefines itself into the future.

My own artistic attraction is to describe a personal alchemy. I like piles of tiny delicate objects and I like thinking about how to arrange these personal things into assemblages - like a primitive's curio cabinet, a natural science collection of experience instead of objective records. This aesthetic really reflects the nature collection I began as a small child exploring the woods in Germany -  the germ of my creativity was in finding feathers and creatures and childishly assigning my place within them. So heres a look at my favorite clay experiences from the Houston galleries...

My favorite of all time. Keys, hammers...hands...

Clay layered and fired multiple times to simulate peeling paint on wood.

The 'ingredient's list contained the word 'mum' - took me a second to realise it was the flower..

NCECA Biennial - A memorial to a pianist friend. The artist slip-cast rose twigs and inserted them into piano strings - the hanging chimes in the wind. Eloquent.

This cotton-rat pup, is just a few hours old. He is from a litter born inside a live trap on a transect I was helping with. He and his descendants live at Cheyenne Bottoms, in Kansas. The pup and his litter were released a few minutes later. We watched as the mother quietly came into view, and carried to safety each pup inside her mouth under the safety of a Kochia plant. This maternal behavior was a rare and rewarding sight.

Holding a recent find: a large Cotton-rat. He was tagged, weighed, sexed, and released  - free to go about his business, chewing on tasty forbs.

Petri dish of grass seeds I am working with. The goal is to germinate the grasses for scientific illustration.

The seeds were allowed to germinate. Here is a view of a Little Bluestem cultivar a few days within germination.

The past seven years of my life reflect an intimate relationship with the unique grasslands of Kansas.These pictures and my work reflect how my experiences with this great system and the rural environment it intersects with, have influences my art-making. I am now a graduate student of art with a background in biological sciences. I was a graduate student of Biology too. For the same reasons I entered science, I enter art to maintain a grounded reality. Rangelands create this experience for me. They are known for being wide, unarable places populated by cattle and vegetation - but to me they are one of the rare places on earth where a person can be overwhelmed by place, and actually be present. This connectivity encapsulates knowing not just names of organisms in a place, but understanding their social value - ethnobotany and agriculture for example - and of course, the personal experiences we inevitably gain from interacting within this system as another living being.

Installation using plants collected from the Field in Kansas