goliath
Installation View, Dolly Maass (7.28% Interior Volume), 2016.
Stoneware, Wild Bird Seed, Soil, Wood, Wire, Nails, Screws, Found Pallet.
Stoneware, Wild Bird Seed, Soil, Wood, Wire, Nails, Screws, Found Pallet.
I am staring across my studio at an open plastic bag of wild bird food. It is a mix of millet, sunflower seeds, cracked corn, calcium carbonate, other minerals and preservatives. True to its packaging, I had originally intended for it to feed birds. I imagined that I would wedge it into many pounds of clay, and then use this “impregnated clay” to build forms. I wanted to leave these unfired clay forms outside, and as they deteriorated, they would release their seeds and feed the birds and other critters in and around the sculpture. Eventually the sculpture would be torn apart by wind, rain, and hungry Ones to feed an ecosystem.
I built my first form from this mixture and returned to my studio two days later to discover that many of the seeds were germinating. Unsure of what to do, I had mistakenly “discovered” something so incredibly obvious, that clay is damp earth, and wild bird food is seed, and the combination of the two was a reunion perfect for both. They wanted each other. Combining the two returned each to its essence as generous material. I built forms for them, and the seeds sprouted through the structure, shifting the shape, making it their own. Fungal spores, which must have been somewhere unseen on the seeds, puffed up in and around it all. Then fruit flies found their way onto the sculpture, and each passing day, more were born. Later came other types of fungus, and as millet and sunflower seeds sprouted and took over the shape, small mites and mealybugs joined in on the sculpture. A mouse would visit the sculpture too. At night it would climb up and dig out unsprouted sunflower seeds one by one.
I was surprised by all this. I often think of sculptures as ecosystemic interventions – not only an intervention in a gallery or in a space, but an intervention in the social spaces between and among species and in the great web of things that are alive and dead in this world. In this case, I was hoping the wild bird food, by connecting it with a form, would connect it immediately to other life. But somehow, instead of having created an object that could intervene in an ecosystem, I happened upon an object that was an ecosystem of its own. I didn’t create it, I just thoughtlessly added the ingredients together, and it created it itself.
We often do this kind of thing thoughtlessly. Leave food too long in the fridge and fungus will grow. Leave food on your table for too long, and you may draw mice or insects. Bring fruit home and you may find that you brought some baby fruit flies along too. The world is filled with life. And for good reasons we shut that life out. Life is also death. Life eats and competes and takes what it needs. We avoid the physical danger of other lives, yes, but these days we may also feel it threatening our spirit. Other lives tug at the seams of our individuality, at the borders that separate us and spare us the humility of knowing that we aren’t so special. So we work very hard to keep all the other lives at bay, to create antiseptic environments. Under such circumstances, loss of control or a thoughtless mistake is usually what it takes to let life surprise you.
The human body is itself putrefactive, prone to decay. Within our antiseptic logic, the human body becomes “other,” and in a strange twist we begin to believe that our own bodies threaten our lives. We defend ourselves from this grave threat by retreating from our bodies and into our minds. It is not surprising that the most successful and influential utopian movement of the last century is couched in Silicon Valley promises of eternal life through upload to cyberspace. Their apostles preach that the mind is eternal, and can transcend the experience of a frail human body. To them, it is as if the body is not an essential element of the human experience of consciousness, and even, of aliveness. As absurd as that sounds, when you watch any human deeply invested in his computer or smartphone, it is hard not to suspect that they may be at least partially right. The humans around me are almost all thrilled to be anaesthetized by technology, to be lost in their minds and out of their bodies: out of this world.
The war between aesthetics and anesthetics is ongoing, but the latter is clearly winning. In fact, it has been winning for so long that our popular religions, built environments, our economy and our politics have all become entirely and literally anti-aesthetic. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam avoid carnal pleasures like the devil to promote an ethics of deference and denial. In our cities we are asked to look, to listen, but never to touch. Our economy circulates money that today has no physical referent; dollars exists solely because we believe they do. And our politics have become so bureaucratized and professionalized that for most, the daily tug of war of civic life has been reduced to an anonymous biennial vote, if that.
Not so fast. Give concrete enough time and it always cracks. Cities like mine are in constant need of repair to keep the weeds from breaking through. It takes a huge amount of energy to keep other life out of them, or to manage those others we can tolerate. So despite whatever desires we may have for complete control, we will always be struggling with inevitable failure. No matter if humans upload their consciousness, we will still need someone, or something, to keep the moss and the vines from overtaking the servers. The evidence therefore proves we are not alone. And yet, we find ourselves constantly preaching to the choir, stuck in the echo chamber of our substantially humans-only world. We seem to have forgotten every language but our own.
I look at my sculptures and I see this life growing in them and somehow I’m delighted. I feel some kind of love for the sprouts, fungus, flies, and mites, for this home we have accidentally co-created. I peer over them, watching the mites scurry here and there, noticing new leaves and new growth, finding fungus in unexpected locations, and watching the decomposition of dead leaves. It is endlessly surprising to me, always holding my interest. But sadly, my interaction with this world stays at a distance. I water the sculptures, keep the lights on, and watch. No matter how much I try to commune with them, these other lives remain wholly inaccessible to me. I want to Know them. I want to Hear them. But actually, I don’t even know what I’m listening for. Every language I have ever known falls flat.
When I really try to pay attention and focus all my observational powers on a single sprout, this is the best I ever do:
"It is a young sunflower barely four weeks old. Near base of its soft green stem, its baby leaves are still outstretched like a morning yawn. It sprouted in a box, in soil, in clay, among a dozen others of its ilk. It grows intertwined in millet’s grassy shoots. Its uppermost leaves, while small, are still impressive, spread like wings towards the light. It stands erect, pushing ever upward. The tiny white hairs on its thin green stem make it appear at once foreboding, but also infantile. This empty-headed young sunflower is trying – really trying. It is an ambitious, strong plant. Every ounce of itself pushes out. It is silent and still, but not lazy."
Speak to me, plant, speak! This is inane. My attempt is an exercise in frustratingly ambiguous anthropomorphisms. Maybe I am going about this all the wrong way. Speech, possibly more than anything else, is what distances me from them. In order to know the plants – really know them – I believe I need to hear them on their own terms. Not mine. I almost don’t even want to know the human names of my plants anymore, for fear of distancing them further. What do they call themselves?
Do plants have wisdom? Do plants have joy? Can plants play, too? As much as I am inspired and overwhelmed by the depth of her thinking, I am struck by Donna Haraway’s seeming neglect of the plant kingdom. Are Critters only those who move, those that are untethered to their birthplaces? What is the distinction, really, between plants and animals? Is it that plants are silent? Is it that plants are acted upon? More than any other thing, it appears to me that the difference is in the time scale of activity. Plants rarely react immediately. If the rhythm of their experience is inaudible to us, it is only because we are too impatient.
In order for us to learn the language of plants we have to unlearn the language of animals. Or in a sense, we need to understand that the language of animals is one among many ways of communicating. The awesome breadth of language out there, among all living and dead, is hard to fathom. Humans communicate among themselves with such depth in so many ways, and yet that is just one small subset of animal communication. We can always speak to the plant. We can whisper to it, pet it, breath on it. And we do. But how will we ever even know if the plant responds? We will need to develop entirely new observational modes, to denounce anesthetics and fully embrace the broad scope of human aesthetics. We will need to jump beyond the confines of anthropocentrism and into a new world that lives simultaneously in multiple experiences of time and truly feels.
I built my first form from this mixture and returned to my studio two days later to discover that many of the seeds were germinating. Unsure of what to do, I had mistakenly “discovered” something so incredibly obvious, that clay is damp earth, and wild bird food is seed, and the combination of the two was a reunion perfect for both. They wanted each other. Combining the two returned each to its essence as generous material. I built forms for them, and the seeds sprouted through the structure, shifting the shape, making it their own. Fungal spores, which must have been somewhere unseen on the seeds, puffed up in and around it all. Then fruit flies found their way onto the sculpture, and each passing day, more were born. Later came other types of fungus, and as millet and sunflower seeds sprouted and took over the shape, small mites and mealybugs joined in on the sculpture. A mouse would visit the sculpture too. At night it would climb up and dig out unsprouted sunflower seeds one by one.
I was surprised by all this. I often think of sculptures as ecosystemic interventions – not only an intervention in a gallery or in a space, but an intervention in the social spaces between and among species and in the great web of things that are alive and dead in this world. In this case, I was hoping the wild bird food, by connecting it with a form, would connect it immediately to other life. But somehow, instead of having created an object that could intervene in an ecosystem, I happened upon an object that was an ecosystem of its own. I didn’t create it, I just thoughtlessly added the ingredients together, and it created it itself.
We often do this kind of thing thoughtlessly. Leave food too long in the fridge and fungus will grow. Leave food on your table for too long, and you may draw mice or insects. Bring fruit home and you may find that you brought some baby fruit flies along too. The world is filled with life. And for good reasons we shut that life out. Life is also death. Life eats and competes and takes what it needs. We avoid the physical danger of other lives, yes, but these days we may also feel it threatening our spirit. Other lives tug at the seams of our individuality, at the borders that separate us and spare us the humility of knowing that we aren’t so special. So we work very hard to keep all the other lives at bay, to create antiseptic environments. Under such circumstances, loss of control or a thoughtless mistake is usually what it takes to let life surprise you.
The human body is itself putrefactive, prone to decay. Within our antiseptic logic, the human body becomes “other,” and in a strange twist we begin to believe that our own bodies threaten our lives. We defend ourselves from this grave threat by retreating from our bodies and into our minds. It is not surprising that the most successful and influential utopian movement of the last century is couched in Silicon Valley promises of eternal life through upload to cyberspace. Their apostles preach that the mind is eternal, and can transcend the experience of a frail human body. To them, it is as if the body is not an essential element of the human experience of consciousness, and even, of aliveness. As absurd as that sounds, when you watch any human deeply invested in his computer or smartphone, it is hard not to suspect that they may be at least partially right. The humans around me are almost all thrilled to be anaesthetized by technology, to be lost in their minds and out of their bodies: out of this world.
The war between aesthetics and anesthetics is ongoing, but the latter is clearly winning. In fact, it has been winning for so long that our popular religions, built environments, our economy and our politics have all become entirely and literally anti-aesthetic. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam avoid carnal pleasures like the devil to promote an ethics of deference and denial. In our cities we are asked to look, to listen, but never to touch. Our economy circulates money that today has no physical referent; dollars exists solely because we believe they do. And our politics have become so bureaucratized and professionalized that for most, the daily tug of war of civic life has been reduced to an anonymous biennial vote, if that.
Not so fast. Give concrete enough time and it always cracks. Cities like mine are in constant need of repair to keep the weeds from breaking through. It takes a huge amount of energy to keep other life out of them, or to manage those others we can tolerate. So despite whatever desires we may have for complete control, we will always be struggling with inevitable failure. No matter if humans upload their consciousness, we will still need someone, or something, to keep the moss and the vines from overtaking the servers. The evidence therefore proves we are not alone. And yet, we find ourselves constantly preaching to the choir, stuck in the echo chamber of our substantially humans-only world. We seem to have forgotten every language but our own.
I look at my sculptures and I see this life growing in them and somehow I’m delighted. I feel some kind of love for the sprouts, fungus, flies, and mites, for this home we have accidentally co-created. I peer over them, watching the mites scurry here and there, noticing new leaves and new growth, finding fungus in unexpected locations, and watching the decomposition of dead leaves. It is endlessly surprising to me, always holding my interest. But sadly, my interaction with this world stays at a distance. I water the sculptures, keep the lights on, and watch. No matter how much I try to commune with them, these other lives remain wholly inaccessible to me. I want to Know them. I want to Hear them. But actually, I don’t even know what I’m listening for. Every language I have ever known falls flat.
When I really try to pay attention and focus all my observational powers on a single sprout, this is the best I ever do:
"It is a young sunflower barely four weeks old. Near base of its soft green stem, its baby leaves are still outstretched like a morning yawn. It sprouted in a box, in soil, in clay, among a dozen others of its ilk. It grows intertwined in millet’s grassy shoots. Its uppermost leaves, while small, are still impressive, spread like wings towards the light. It stands erect, pushing ever upward. The tiny white hairs on its thin green stem make it appear at once foreboding, but also infantile. This empty-headed young sunflower is trying – really trying. It is an ambitious, strong plant. Every ounce of itself pushes out. It is silent and still, but not lazy."
Speak to me, plant, speak! This is inane. My attempt is an exercise in frustratingly ambiguous anthropomorphisms. Maybe I am going about this all the wrong way. Speech, possibly more than anything else, is what distances me from them. In order to know the plants – really know them – I believe I need to hear them on their own terms. Not mine. I almost don’t even want to know the human names of my plants anymore, for fear of distancing them further. What do they call themselves?
Do plants have wisdom? Do plants have joy? Can plants play, too? As much as I am inspired and overwhelmed by the depth of her thinking, I am struck by Donna Haraway’s seeming neglect of the plant kingdom. Are Critters only those who move, those that are untethered to their birthplaces? What is the distinction, really, between plants and animals? Is it that plants are silent? Is it that plants are acted upon? More than any other thing, it appears to me that the difference is in the time scale of activity. Plants rarely react immediately. If the rhythm of their experience is inaudible to us, it is only because we are too impatient.
In order for us to learn the language of plants we have to unlearn the language of animals. Or in a sense, we need to understand that the language of animals is one among many ways of communicating. The awesome breadth of language out there, among all living and dead, is hard to fathom. Humans communicate among themselves with such depth in so many ways, and yet that is just one small subset of animal communication. We can always speak to the plant. We can whisper to it, pet it, breath on it. And we do. But how will we ever even know if the plant responds? We will need to develop entirely new observational modes, to denounce anesthetics and fully embrace the broad scope of human aesthetics. We will need to jump beyond the confines of anthropocentrism and into a new world that lives simultaneously in multiple experiences of time and truly feels.
