Lisa Link and Io Palmer invited me to participate in their Serve & Project, an interdisciplinary collaborative public arts project seeking dinner napkins from creative thinkers around the world. Part of their curatorial vision is that while food references sustenance it also represents social and political issue.
“Reaping What We’ve Sown,” below, is my contribution to the project. The napkins are linen, initially dyed with chamomile tea, and then painted on, with a sumi brush and ink, and finally, the digital imagery was ironed on. My thoughts about food these days range from the young girls, pre- child labor laws, shelling shrimp in Louisiana for the rest of us to eat – to – Monsanto corn – to – the overfishing of our oceans. Statistically, the size of fish/shellfish has dropped astronomically over the past century, due to over-fishing.
This food landscape painting is about 52″ long, 17″ high. Here is a detailed view:
No one here listens to me when I try to explain chemicals in the food and all this other stuff that is bad for you. Trevor just doesn’t believe it even though his family has a lot of health issues due to diet and now not sure the kids listen. So, here is what I made, with my emails from the Environmental Working Group – fighting to get BPA out of cans….
Here’s the details for the May 4 to May 22, 2012 exhibition:
In the meantime, I’d like to thank my friendly reference librarian at Penn State who assisted me in locating the over-fishing imagery. You can find the originals and more here:
MONTAGNE: And does this, then, settle all the claims against BP?
BRADY: No it doesn’t. This does represent the largest group of plaintiffs that were suing BP – something more than 100,000 people hurt by the spill. These are folks in the sea food industry, tourism workers, but not everyone. Gulf Coast states and the federal government still have claims against the company. The federal claims alone, based on laws like the Clean Water Act, could cost BP billions more dollars. And the amount depends on whether the government can prove the company was grossly negligent. That’s a technical term that would have to be proven in court.
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Then there’s a New Health Claims Process to consider . . . for both Gulf residents and those hired to clean up the spill who have seen their and their children’s health affected by the spill and the clean-up. The NIH and the NIHS both have health studies on the affects of the spill, and it’s looking like these issues will be fought out in court for years to come(despite the settlement).
The politics are ruthless, the corporations are ruthless. Off-shore drilling continues to abound around the world. Regular people are caught in the middle – they need jobs to pay the bills and they need a clean environment for good health. In some cases their jobs and businesses are dependent on having a clean environment.
What leaves me curious is the approach of the Obama Administration. On the one hand, the administration is auctioning off an increasing number of opportunities to drill of our coasts as well as negotiating with Mexico to do so. (Mexico’s regulations and environmental protections are much less than our own) On the other, the U.S. Department of Defense is one of single-most biggest oil users in the world. You can read the Pew Charitable Trusts’ report outlining the DOD’s energy usage. In addition, 80% of supply convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan are for the transportation of fuels. In 2010 alone there have been 1,100 attacks on these convoys. And between 2003 and 2007, 3,000 soldiers died from these attacks just in Iraq. As a result, our military is shifting toward using clean energy to increase national security and to save money. An estimated 10 billion dollar investment by 2030 will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, create jobs and give the green energy sector a shot in the arm that it could really use. Somewhere in my reading, a journalist’s observation was that the administration was operating true to form: extremely pragmatic and predictably annoying to both sides of the issue. I get it.
Clean Water Action is having a press conference at Noon on Wednesday, November 2nd to push the Board of Health to take action on a strengthening and updating of the rules they use to permit toxic emissions. The current rules were written when Reagan was still in the White House and the space shuttle program was brand new. Both of those are gone now but we still use the same rules. We now know much more about the bad effects of toxic emissions and our rules need to reflect that. Many jobs in the “new economy” won’t move here because our air is so bad. We need clean air for the economy that we want. (bump)
A couple of weeks ago I attended Doug Shield’s meeting with the people he represents, ALCOSAN staff members, a PGH public works staff member and one person from the PGH Water and Sewage Authority/Cmte. Plus the expertise of the ED of the 9 Mile Run Association.
From the testimony of average citizens who have written, spoken, called and otherwise communicated through appropriate channels to ALCOSAN, nothing other than new laws are going to generate anything close to a responsible response – and in a reasonable, you can count on it, timeframe.
In 1993. 60,000 – 80,000 was spent on a study of the pipes in back of the main Squirrel Hill stores on Forbes(the owner of Littles testified). The pipes are the original terra cotta and every time it rains, basements of these stores are flooded. No action has been taken on this study – that Shields verified as he was working for Bob O’Conner at the time.
A woman from four mile run showed pictures of water pressure pushing off man-hole covers, spurting 25 feet up in the air – leaving human waste all over her lawn and house.
ED from 9mile run association said we have more extreme water events to look forward to as the globe heats up and cities on the east coast of the country are having experiences similar to ours.
In response to citizen testimony, ALCOSAN staff repeatedly said they had to wait for their current study to be completed to address any of these issues. They appeared to be the human embodiment of sticks in the mud.
The man in the picture is a fireman who has lived in the same house for 30 years. Unlike when he was 5 years old, he has predictable and quite damaging flooding.
The dictionary tells us that a Requiem is a musical composition laying the souls of the dead to rest, presenting listeners with a remembrance of what has passed. Requiem for the Netmakers honors the loss of a way of life given by the sea – to generations of people working in the fishing industry globally – and in particular, the Gulf Coast of the United States. Requiem germinated with a news story on a family business where generations had earned their living through the art of net-making, and the business was decimated by the 2010 BP oil spill. “For the last remaining net maker in St. Bernard Parish, Erwin Menesses Jr., that’s meant a 95 percent drop in business,” read the story.
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Deciphering the art installation-
The installation encompasses two walls in the American Jewish Museum’s Robinson building galleries, intersecting at the doors to the Katz Performing Arts Center. The set-up has an element of ritual, in reflection of my time spent in pre-Katrina New Orleans. I had been entranced by the visual remembrances and homegrown artwork that people put up around grave sites, and hung in the chapel of St. Jude, asking the saint for assistance in the face of disease and loss of life. During the course of the exhibition the flowers will wilt and die and the ocean landscape, boat model and fishing lures may be enhanced with additional articles from the lives of fishermen, shrimpers and the net-makers. [Later in the exhibition I added both fishing nets and buoys to the piece]
The repetition of the horizontal line, in the shelves, arrangement of digital frames, electrical outlets and landscape video monitor are intentionally stratified, visually making present landscape in our art historical catalog, landscape in our ocean’s horizon lines and the landscape of our ever-growing digital networks. The use of wood, intended to harken back to a past life-style and to bring drift wood into the piece — transformed through Angelo Gatto’s contribution and his ease with using large, heavy materials.
In light of the years I spent looking at Anselm Kieffer landscapes and enjoying the gutsiness of Baselitz paintings, these elements make perfect sense for creating a framing foundation for the 2-walled piece – and in keeping an earth awareness in an artwork using a sizable amount of electronics.
The lower tier of digital frames are a family album of the fishing industry, mostly in the Gulf, going back into our history– even to a time when small children shelled shrimp before the implementation of child labor laws.
The upper tier of digital frames presents a series of color permutations on an ocean wave impregnated by oil from the BP spill– giving us an opportunity to be fascinated and disgusted-both by what human beings can do to the vast, beautiful and seemingly impenetrable ocean.
The pulse and heart of Requiem is the musical composition sculpted by Frank Ferraro in response to our back-and-forth conversations over what seemed like a short, intense period of time. we started with my question, “What does oil sludge sound like?” and in response to my queries, the initial dark ambient music was re-written as a 7 minute Requiem with the larger-than-life roles of the Global Corporate Gangsters, the Big Ocean, the fisher people, ghosts of oil drillers, a mermaid chorus and oil covered animals.
In re-viewing the edited video just now, I can hear the overall sadness, the plaintive piano and see the inevitable future we are headed in – unless we alter the course of human behavior on our planet.
