Dark Dreams, Still Life - Christina Schmid
For a first impression, I walk through the gallery slowly. This is what I see: In a small room, a golden car sits silently. Its headlights shine through an open doorway and illuminate a canoe beyond the threshold. Like the car, its hull is coated in bronze-leaf. The boat's rich redwood body holds a small animal figure, cast in bronze, standing upright, vaguely familiar in the way of pop culture's ubiquitous artifacts. The canoe points into a larger space, a long, narrow rectangle of a room where, off center, a formal dining table stands chair-less. On one side, model-scaled oil rigs lean into the table: two of their stilt-like legs rest on the wooden floor, two on the tabletop as if about to sink into its surface, the cool polished metal smooth like water still as glass. On the table's far end four bronze plates sit empty. Below, a thicket of dark lines covers an entire section of the floor. A small figure of a baby boy, his body in a fetal curl, rises from the tangle of iron and paper. Beyond, a makeshift silo looms. It holds no grain but a layer of taconite pellets. Only partially visible iron forms lie buried in the gravel. Across from the structure's entrance, projected images of flowers and mosses ghost across the curving fiberglass wall, close to the ground, like specters of life that once was. Tamsie Ringler titles this arrangement of objects and spaces "Still Life."
The history of art is littered with still life paintings: colorful representations of objects that play with light and shadow, rendered in degrees of faithful realism or fanciful abstraction. Rather than a purely aesthetic affair, a still life anchors ideas about the world: what goes together; what must be kept apart. In countless paintings, tables act as display platforms, windowsills as thresholds. In a well-ordered world, what belonged on the civilized inside was emphatically separated from the wild unruly outdoors. Here, a bouquet of flowers, a candle, a skull. There, beyond the threshold, an expanse of land fading into the blue distance, forever elusive, unknowable, elsewhere. Symbols of life's brevity gather in spurts of formal beauty before vast, indifferent vistas. As a piece of visual ideology, the still life served to stabilize and regulate the proper place of objects in the world. A reassuring political economy of attention was thus established, one painting at a time.
Ringler's "Still Life" breaks with tradition. Her objects echo an order undone. Nowhere does the loss of bearings become more palpable and poignant than in two wall-hung sculptures: ornate frames hold surfaces reminiscent of paintings. But rather than a still life of a well ordered world, a topography of molten metal fills the frames. Welts and bubbles cover a formerly familiar picture plane, as if an eruptive fiery force had covered both canvases and conventions. A sinewy crack curves through one of the sculptures, where the temperature differential between liquid bronze and iron literally tore the work apart. The result: a material landscape formed and ruptured by the life of metals. In letting material forces forge the work the artist cedes control. The act suggests a different ethos for the still life: the world never was ours to mold and order. Humility takes the place of hubris; distance dwindles and gives way to profound intimacy with materiality.
Rather than re-present, as if from afar, Ringler's work insists on being present: "Still Life" is to be walked into. Felt. Objects, familiar though re-purposed, displaced, and configured into an intricate matrix of meanings, implicate the bodies that cross the gallery's threshold in a space thick with the strands of stories the sculptures hold, individually and together. No convenient myth of an elusive elsewhere separates human bodies from nature's realm here: that much is clear. The logic of representation, of nature-over-yonder, wanes. But if we want a different meaning, we have to work for it. The artist is not interested in explaining her work. The only clue she offers is the title, Still Life: a riff on art history, an elegy, a rallying cry, a promise, a prayer.
*
To take a second look, I stand quite still but let my eyes and mind wander. Where does the work take me? What does it conjure if I give it time? Reminiscent of a religious icon of old, the bronze-plated car glints like a latter-day golden calf on wheels, an idol worshipped for the freedom of the open road, available to all who pass the initiation of a driver's test. And yet we know that today's devotion to the democratic freedom of auto-mobility comes at a steep ecological price, a debt carried forward into the future. Car culture is both: ersatz religion and metaphor for an economy of ever-expanding debt ceilings and credit limits. Still Life makes its lingering allure literal: revered, the car -- a mid-sized four-door sedan, reasonable not extravagant by American standards-- is a mobile shelter and also a fuel-guzzling, carbon-emitting machine of destruction.
Re-imagined, the vehicle as mundane tool promises another kind of transportation, a means of transcendence and passage to a metaphysical realm. The canoe furthers this theme: Old Norse burials sent dead heroes to sea in burning boats. In Greek myth, Charon ferried the dead across the river Styx to the underworld. Like Dutch vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, "Still Life" conjures transience and a meditation on mortality. But instead of wilting petals, flickering candles, and so many skulls urging humility and repentance while there still is time, Still Life speaks an altogether different material-symbolic language.
Cast from iron, copper, and aluminum, coated in sheets of bronze leaf, Ringler's sculptures gather the weight of history. Human bodies have known how to manipulate these materials for ages: prehistory faded into the Stone Age, which was in turn replaced by the Bronze Age, which yielded to the Iron Age. Archeology still keeps time in terms of human capacities to manipulate select materials. What if we adopted the practice today? Or imagined how archeologists of the future might remember our time: the Carbon Age, defined by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, epitomized by car culture; the Age when the power of combustion engines replaced the strength of muscles to propel bodies, when roads spread like rhizomes across vast territories and ever more ingenious mechanisms sucked oil from ocean depths and tar sands. The maze of black lines on the floor knots together waterways and interstate highways.
A cast iron map of the Mississippi's watershed lies superimposed on a map of the interstate highways rendered in black paper. One map pictures a system of interconnected bodies of water who are shaping and shaped by the land and, more recently, by human hand: drained, dammed, regulated. The watershed map traces both surface and subterranean bodies of water, thus making strange the contours of rivers and lakes. Though solid iron, the pools and passages retain a subtle pattern of flow left by the traces of once molten metal. The second map traces the interstate system, constructed by homo sapiens. Both maps offer orientation for two modes of travel. One is silent and leaves no trace; the other, noisy, a carbon footprint. Yet the apparent contrast between the man-made and the natural does not hold. In 2012, physarum polycephalum, a yellow slime mold, reproduced the interstate system in a science lab. The organism's inspiration: to transport nutrients most effectively when faced with a set of variables comparable to North American topography. Are highways natural, then? Simply the outgrowth of behaviors proven to yield evolutionary success? Unlike carbon-fuelled traffic, the brainless, single-celled mold does not pollute.
At the heart of the thicket that throws orderly divisions of nature and culture into turmoil: the slightly elevated sculpture of a baby boy in iron polished to smooth black. The figure provokes profound ambivalence: is it a beacon of hope that surely human life must prevail? A rallying cry, then: still, life, despite all odds. Or does the figure's stillness tilt towards death and rise as a silent reproach: this is what you have wrought. Rather than resilient new life, the terrible quiet of stillbirth.
Deep in the Age of Carbon, the poetic drama of the human condition no longer lies at the root of Still Life's melancholy but the knowledge of our collective complicity and culpability in global warming. I belong to a generation that will perhaps be the most hated in human memory, the generation that 'knew' but did nothing or did too little (changing our light bulbs, sorting our rubbish, riding bicycles...). But it is also a generation that will avoid the worst – we will already be dead, writes philosopher Isabelle Stengers. As the planet hurtles ever deeper into the Anthropocene, global warming's effects reverse the emotional timeline of grief: we used to mourn past loss. Now, we mourn the future. This is the space that Still Life holds. It asks us to become intimate with grief by conjuring an intolerable present. It lingers there, entangled in intimate paradoxes.
*
Still curious, I circle back to look again: what do these objects do? What do they whisper when no one's looking? What if I sneak up on them? I crouch next to the canoe. A chorus of spring peepers becomes audible this close to the floor. For a moment, I remember humid spring air at dusk, the smell of soil and lake water, the boat a portal to an elsewhere, an else-when. I imagine the gallery floor transformed into an expanse of water, a shimmering surface above a depth unknown. Inside the hull, the odd little Disney character: Timon from Disney's Lion King. Companion, familiar, guide. (Later, Ringler will tell me about seeing an exhibition of King Tut's tomb in London as a child. Figures of female deities faced the vessel holding the pharaoh's embalmed organs. Protective, the figures chaperoned him into the afterlife. That’s what Timon is doing here, maybe.)
Still Life's sculptures look different from down low. I take stock: a car. A canoe. A table. Paintings cast from metal. Together, the objects hail the human body. They imply a certain height, a reach, a set of proportions. In short, their shapes imply a particular body. Their material presence is far less discriminating: we all carry iron in our bodies. It is what turns blood red like soil, courses through our veins, busy binding, transporting, and releasing oxygen, always on the move through the inner landscape of our bodies. There is no threshold: Still Life's materials are already part of us. Together, they ask for a shift in perspective, a change of scale, a suspension of certainty: where do we begin? Where do we end? How substantial are the boundaries we draw--whether out of habit, necessity, or convenience--between us and others?
Objects shape-shift around me. Their material permanence gives way to something more fleeting, a mood, a moment, something that moves with me, moves me. The exhibition's elegiac tone is tempered by moments of dream-like surrealism, playful and still dark. The floor, a flood; the table, a monumental plain. Four un-brushed bronze plates remind of the table's former life as a functional object. But on the far side, the table ceases to look like just another table: where oil rigs scale its surface, its aluminum top turns to imaginary water. No ripple disturbs its silvery sheen. If I look like this, the plates float on the surface like strange giant lily pads. But the shift in perspective is incomplete: the objects refuse to dissolve into images. They have staying power. I feel their recalcitrance. They insist on being more than just one thing.
In her gallery talk, Ringler offers another association: the ration bowls found in the ruins of the ancient city of Ur inspired the plates. Four thousand years ago, a drought ravaged the once fertile land. A civilization fell apart as people fled starvation, rationing the little food they had left. For three hundred years, the drought persisted. The land changed: topsoil blew away; shorelines receded; the desert spread. Then, it was not human action that led to the change in climate. But the story stands as a cautionary tale whose shadow deepens as 21st-century climate refugees begin their desperate migrations. Will they have a seat at the table when drilling rights are auctioned off to the highest bidder?
I turn and face Still Life's aluminum table again. The drilling platforms, oddly creaturely on their uneven legs and festive strings of blue LED lights, already have usurped seats at the table. Not content to sit politely, they encroach onto the smooth plane: toy and threat at the same time, steeped in a cold industrial beauty that does not obscure the rapacious greed that pushes their real-life counterparts farther out to sea where the risks are higher, the spills more likely. They turn the table into a water table, probed, pumped, and polluted. I know the numbers: close to sixty percent of an adult human body is water. Sixty percent of the land occupied by the United States drains through the Mississippi's watershed. What if land was body, the body a living map to show us the way? What would it look like to turn the tables on drilling's devastating capitalist logic?
The bronze-plated car, too, becomes an incongruous object the longer I look: an undulating horizon line is scratched across into windshield, side and rear windows. Rather than promise to take you there, to that ever-elusive vanishing point where earth meets sky, the car bears the scar of such fantasy. I lean closer still and peer through the gaps in its shining armor: the vehicle has been gutted. Only sand covers the floor of its interior. Lake bottom sand. Prairie sand dug from Midwestern bluffs and carted far north to aid in fracking. In metal casting, sand mixed with adhesive is used to build molds. The sand mold holds the space for things to come: it is a shell of anticipation, awaiting the burn of molten metal. In this car, a Saturn, the sand forms a smooth surface. A metal fish body hovers inside, protruding from the back. A carp. Suddenly, the car doubles as an absurd aquarium, a gilded container for life arrested, frozen in metal, quarantined. Is this the shape of things to come?
The material sensibility of Still Life flickers between different scales for keeping time. There is the unfathomable depth of geologic time presence-d in the heft of iron dug from veins of dark ore; the stages of shared human history, Stone, Bronze, Carbon; the passing of generations figured by the cast-iron baby boy, the artist's son, the soles of his feet touching like hands folded in Christian prayer; the span of an individual life, the artist's, whose works in Still Life were made decades apart; the pulse of time spent in the gallery, a passage, a period of encounter. Relativity theory tells us that time passes at different speeds relative to the chronometer's proximity to a massive object, like a planet: space-time emanates from objects. In orbit around Earth, time passes more slowly. What kind of an object is the human body?
one body. the unitary body. one body was not a sustainable unit for the project at hand, writes scholar/poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Though we speak of different projects, the limitations of the logic in need of undoing are entwined. Philosopher Jane Bennett suggests we "live as earth:" my 'own' body is material and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human. … it is not enough to say we are 'embodied.' We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes. If more people marked this fact more of the time, if we were more attentive to the indispensible foreignness that we are, would we continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways? A body is never alone, its borders never not porous. Material vitality is me, it predates me, it exceeds me, it postdates me.
*
I stumble across another threshold to find myself in the silo, ankle-deep in pellets of Taconite. At a distance, the silo's shape is reminiscent of Midwestern agricultural landscapes. Tall, cylindrical, and designed to store grain, silos hold what is meant to nourish us. This silo, though, is truncated. It holds what Ringler, in conversation, affectionately calls, "seeds of steel." Mined in Minnesota's far north, taconite sustains mining communities on the Iron Range. Such sustenance comes at a cost: tailing ponds and land scarred by extraction.
From up close, the silo resembles an impromptu chapel: a space apart, devoted to contemplation, resonant with the focused quietude of meditation, ceremony, and prayer. But each step I take past the threshold disrupts the memory of such stillness: gravelly pellets crunch against each other. Here, each step has audible consequence.
Standing in the silo's pale shelter, I watch projections of mosses, ferns, flowers, and twigs glow and fade. Hovering barely above the floor, their spectral presence offers more than a memento mori, a note of caution of what is yet to come: they haunt the silo like life that once was. Amid barren metallic hues, they float like insubstantial specks of color, memories of a world long gone. The images are a small tribute to Ringler's grandmother, a devoted naturalist, who took the pictures in the 1960s. The artist's ancestor was instrumental in keeping Lake Michigan's Rock Island from development decades ago. In Still Life, her beautiful Kodachrome slides signify in more ways than one: as studies of botanical life, they capture moments of delicate beauty and fragility. They bear testimony to the efforts of one woman to protect what she loved. And, far from mere melancholia, they insist on remembering the joy of discovering details, of looking more closely still. They preserve visually the biodiversity under siege in the 21st century.
And yet the concept of preservation is a double-edged sword for more reason than one: once a parcel of land is claimed for preservation, the evolution of an ecosystem is arrested, an order imposed. Like this; not that. Each fenced-in wilderness, preserved and protected, inadvertently declares the land outside the fence not 'wild,' not scenic enough to be treated with equal respect. As in still life paintings of old, such boundaries are rife with ideology: the appetite for preserving untouched landscapes runs deep in the global developed north. Often, though, such efforts rely on misconceptions of pre-colonial relationships with the land and its management by indigenous peoples: Nature never really was separate from human society; it appeared untouched only to those who did not know, or did not want to know, how much indigenous peoples had transformed it long before Europeans' arrival. First-world preservation efforts may also run counter to strands of environmentalism rooted in the developing world where the emphasis lies on the sustainable use of resources rather than the fantasy of an untrammelled wild.
Preservation also preoccupied still life painters of old: they sought to preserve one moment of abundance to conjure its inevitable vanishing; impossibly, to arrest time in order to heighten the sensation of its passing: "All is vanityand a striving after wind," declares Ecclesiastes. Such biblical admonitions came centuries too late for Chronos, Greek mythology's counterpart to Saturn, the Roman god of time and changing seasons. Chronos devoured his children to stall a prophecy, halt the rise of a new generation, and preserve his reign. Eventually, his son Zeus outsmarted him. Still Life's objects revel in such stories, ravel and unravel them. We have more than a prophecy in hand to chart our future. Is the most hated generation, the one that could no longer claim ignorance, devouring its children's future? When will they rise and outsmart us? What will it take, asks indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer, to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all of our relatives depend on it. Because they do.
Ringler's grandmother's photographs remind us that agency and advocacy are possible; so is resilience. They beg the question: what will sustain us when we become intimate with grief? Where will we seek refuge in a world whose order seems upside down, when what matters is trivialized, what once was sacred routinely exploited as if there was no tomorrow; when we knew better but still didn’t act. Regret, mourning, and melancholy over aspects that were degraded or lost in modernization processes …turn into more than personal emotion in this context, observes Ursula K. Heise, as public grief over what most societies have not normally considered worth mourning becomes an act of political resistance. Grief refuses to forget and stubbornly keeps caring.
The artist tells me a story of a golden stone. At Kyaiktiyo Pagoda in the mountains of Myanmar, a boulder rests precariously at the edge of a stone cliff. Known as the Golden Rock, the boulder seems to defy the very pull of gravity. Buddhist pilgrims visit Kyaiktiyo to ponder the transience of all life. Male devotees may paste gold leaf to the stone: small acts of individual devotion have created and maintain the Golden Rock. Such humble gestures may serve us well in remembering how connected we are: iron in our blood, water in the fifty-three trillion cells that make up our immediate body, fiery sparks of electricity in our hearts and brains. We are, writes Fred Moten, animaterial: animal, material, joined by mater, the mother who bore us all. In German, the verb stillen, literally to still, means to nurse an infant: one body feeding and soothing another. We can still remember to do this. Small gestures may be all we have and yet they could clear a path to temporary, fugitive spaces where what matters also makes sense.
And still, we learn about new life. In November 2018, international science journals were ablaze with news of a never-before-seen form of life, not plant, not beast, a life so foreign that a new branch had to be drawn on the tree of life. A hemimastigote was at the epicenter of the excitement. Named after a hairy, ever hungry ogre from the traditions of the Mi’kmaq First Nation of Nova Scotia, where the specimen was collected, Hemimastix kukwesjijk made its debut. Still life. Still wonder. The point is not to deny despair but to hold on to our capacity for joy, for play, for action: the silly fun of crunching across taconite pellets; the sheer wonder of the ancient life of metal; the dogged conviction that change is not only possible but inevitable. After all, the stories we tell in words and objects are never over; they just keep unfolding.
References
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 112-113. 120.
Boetzkes, Amanda. The Ethics of Earth Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked. Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990. 132).
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. M Archive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 6.
Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 10. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013. 215.
Morton, Timothy. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press (an imprint of University of Michigan University Press), 2013. http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/realist-magic/
Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. xiii.
Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times. Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press (an imprint of University of Michigan Press), 2015. http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Stengers_2015_In-Catastrophic-Times.pdf
Stromberg, Joseph. "If the interstate System Were Designed by a Slime Mold." Smithsonian Magazine. May 15, 2012. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/if-the-interstate-system-were-designed-by-a-slime-mold-93309928/
For the discovery of Hemimastix kukwesjijk, see for instance:
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/hemimastigophora-protists-06625.html
https://www.livescience.com/64118-bizarre-microbes-new-tree-of-life.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/new-organism-evolution-study-canada-science-hemimastigotes-dalhousie-university-a8636876.html
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-a-newfound-kingdom-means-for-the-tree-of-life-20181211/
