"Seeds the size of little freckles potentially grow into plants taller than me..."
Posted on FlowTV.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
A Bodiless Doll
Surviving outside through all kinds of weather, the doll head lost its hat and went bald. Little holes stipple the scalp where brittle hair had been. The face is dotted with extremophile mold that metabolizes rubber and plastic. Impaled on a short metal pipe staking up a young Satsuma tree, the neck sprouts two branches that gesture like nyad arms. Maybe the wide-open blue eyes and fixed smile will have eroded away twenty or thirty years from now. Meanwhile, it gazes around Ephemerata Gardens, mana from Smut Putt Heaven.
Scott Stevens gave us the head as a gardenwarming gift. His backyard cactus patch has been filling up with body parts for over fifteen years. A crowd of decaying doll and mannequin heads look in all directions at once. Held up on crutches and metal poles, each is in constant movement, bowing down after rain softens the soil or leaning back to contemplate sky and cosmos. Scott has done the impossible by finding a use for dumpster-dived haircutting academy heads. Decapitated dolls' eyes loll around, staring at their torsos dangling in the pecan tree. As the sun decomposes their polymer chains, plastic crackles into branching patterns like leaf veins or rivers. Fungus and mold spread across the humanoid faces – states of decay that look abject, but are profoundly non-violent. They are the material world’s slow unraveling, given time and visibility. Smut Putt Heaven (a.k.a. “Holiness Church of Wonders and Signs Following”) is a retirement home where decapitated heads and headless bodies can decay in peace. A kind of slow, roundabout way to heal decapitation by letting it dissolve into the landscape.
With fellow yardist Robert Mace, Scott Stevens organized the annual Austin Art Yard Tour in 2010 -- the first full-fledged micro-touristic manifestation of the City of Living Garbage! The Cathedral of Junk was closed by code enforcement at the time. The tour featured a dozen art environments that transform urban waste into otherworldly landscape patches. The 2011 tour featured over twenty sites like a South Austin bridge mosaiced by Stefanie Distefiano and Florence Ponziano’s house, where neighborhood kids gather. Each art environment is held together with signature items of living garbage (be they blue bottles, rusty machine parts, bowling balls, or bones), giving the impression that if every yard was an art yard, there would be no landfill. Scott never misses a chance to encourage people to “start your own art yard.” The tour is a major vector point for an infectious aesthetic, growing every year as tourists become yardists.
Some people see Smut Putt’s decaying heads and doll parts, and start to wonder ... is my neighbor a serial killer? After all, in one of Scott’s favorite movies, Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses, the Mansonesque family has doll heads nailed all over their porch. Scott’s Heaven is other people’s idea of a horror show. His xeno-erotic paintings parade out of the living room gallery into the yard. Lately Scott has taken to painting cast-off ironing boards, starting with a larger-than-life Alice Cooper face. One of his signature Keyhole Girls lives on a hackberry log. Scott also hand-letters signs like the one at the backyard’s entry gate listing Sunday open hours. PRAY, says a painted shovel leading to the “Inner Sanctum,” a little brick sitting area hidden by cacti taller than people where orb weaver spiders, anoles and skinks, and stray kittens live.
You can pray for certain kinds of junk. Scott is a firm believer in attracting things by holding them in mind. “Whenever I needed something for my yard it would appear at the thrift store dumpster or elsewhere, almost like magic.” Yard art supplies materialize on the side of the road: “The pole lamps are bread and butter building supplies, the metal post plugs are perfect armatures for totem poles, the iron board (solid, no mesh) is great for painting on, and the curtain rod is screaming for a doll head to be put on it.” Keeping something in mind is a mode of attention to the world that makes things jump out, like when you learn a new word and suddenly read and hear it everywhere. This manner of following signs – selective scavenging – is best done riding a bike around the neighborhood on large trash day in a state of readiness to haul off good junk at a moment’s notice. This is one of the secret powers cultivated by yardists: an intuitive alignment or resonance between the world as it is and a desired world to be.
Methods of praying also include painting, yard work, digging out caliche, building garden borders with half-buried bottles, and assembling the plastic bottle cap snakes that festoon the pecan tree. Smut Putt Heaven got its start as a kind of playful therapeutic process around the time Scott stopped drinking. Working in the yard derails the mind from a boringly repetitive job or worries about friends’ troubles and loved ones’ health. Like other gardening practices, cultivating art yards pulls people into relationships with places that need them. Tending the yard is a way to “still and sober the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences” through creative labor.*
Some visitors pick up on these therapeutic qualities and encounter Smut Putt Heaven not as a yard stuck in Halloween, but as a "healing machine," a deeply peaceful place resonant with mysterious energy. For around thirty years, Emory Blagdon experimented with what he called his Healing Machine in a dirt-floored workshop on the family farm in Nebraska. Live currents of electricity charged intricate assemblages cluttering the room: hundreds of scrap wire mobiles, geometric paintings stacked like voltaic battery cells, and jars of chemical elements that toned the electricity with particular healing qualities. Visitors could sense “a tickling in your hair ... like electricity going through you; you could feel it.” Some described the spatial warping peculiar to this “panorama – even though it was a small room – it looked like a vast panorama.” Others experienced an atmosphere as different as water is from air: “you must adjust from the terrestrial to the underwater silence, light; the shock of entering another realm.”**
Where tourists experience such art environments as novel, panoramic DIYsneylands, the yardist encounters vastness – the universe in a quarter acre, swirling with ethereal beings and inhuman forces, magnetizing the right junk to the scene. As Scott puts it, “I feel most in tune with the universe when building something in my yard.” Tuning in to the universe like this, something happens to the perception of time. Just as art yards warp huge panoramas of alien worlds into tiny spaces, moments can turn into eternity. It is the same timeless-time that Scott describes as bike time:
One thing that happened is that the single mullein plant Scott gave us went to seed, and now every spring babies sprout up. The second year they turn into tall Mullein People with yellow flowered stalks that make thousands of tiny seeds. One year they migrate out of our landscape patch into neighboring yards. If you need cough medicine, harvest a baby, dry the leaves, and mix with dry mint to make tea.
* John Cage, paraphrasing the Indian musician Gira Sarabhai in an autobiographical statement. Cage expanded musical expression by experimenting with silence, methods of chance composition, and openness to unintended sounds in order to generate contemplative modes of attention in composer/musician/audience.
** Quoted in Leslie Umberger, “Earthly Power.” Raw Vision 59 (2007): 22-29. In 1986, Blagdon died of cancer that had gone undiagnosed for ten years. Art preservationists working under the Kohler Foundation disassembled the Healing Machine from the workshop, uprooting the interconnected mobiles and paintings to climate-controlled storage and occasional exhibition in a gallery. Other parts were sold to collectors. Outsider art historian Leslie Umberger recognizes that the Machine’s components “were not meant to be gazed at or contemplated – they were meant to function.” The emergent powers of the atmosphere did not emanate from any particular part. Now that the disassembled fragments are frozen in time for future gazing and contemplation, can they still heal us?
***Scott Stevens, "Elastic Time on a Bicycle," Kickapoo's Myspace Blog, March 8, 20-09, http://www.myspace.com/26690280/blog#!/26690280/blog/475448844.
Scott Stevens gave us the head as a gardenwarming gift. His backyard cactus patch has been filling up with body parts for over fifteen years. A crowd of decaying doll and mannequin heads look in all directions at once. Held up on crutches and metal poles, each is in constant movement, bowing down after rain softens the soil or leaning back to contemplate sky and cosmos. Scott has done the impossible by finding a use for dumpster-dived haircutting academy heads. Decapitated dolls' eyes loll around, staring at their torsos dangling in the pecan tree. As the sun decomposes their polymer chains, plastic crackles into branching patterns like leaf veins or rivers. Fungus and mold spread across the humanoid faces – states of decay that look abject, but are profoundly non-violent. They are the material world’s slow unraveling, given time and visibility. Smut Putt Heaven (a.k.a. “Holiness Church of Wonders and Signs Following”) is a retirement home where decapitated heads and headless bodies can decay in peace. A kind of slow, roundabout way to heal decapitation by letting it dissolve into the landscape.
With fellow yardist Robert Mace, Scott Stevens organized the annual Austin Art Yard Tour in 2010 -- the first full-fledged micro-touristic manifestation of the City of Living Garbage! The Cathedral of Junk was closed by code enforcement at the time. The tour featured a dozen art environments that transform urban waste into otherworldly landscape patches. The 2011 tour featured over twenty sites like a South Austin bridge mosaiced by Stefanie Distefiano and Florence Ponziano’s house, where neighborhood kids gather. Each art environment is held together with signature items of living garbage (be they blue bottles, rusty machine parts, bowling balls, or bones), giving the impression that if every yard was an art yard, there would be no landfill. Scott never misses a chance to encourage people to “start your own art yard.” The tour is a major vector point for an infectious aesthetic, growing every year as tourists become yardists.
Some people see Smut Putt’s decaying heads and doll parts, and start to wonder ... is my neighbor a serial killer? After all, in one of Scott’s favorite movies, Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses, the Mansonesque family has doll heads nailed all over their porch. Scott’s Heaven is other people’s idea of a horror show. His xeno-erotic paintings parade out of the living room gallery into the yard. Lately Scott has taken to painting cast-off ironing boards, starting with a larger-than-life Alice Cooper face. One of his signature Keyhole Girls lives on a hackberry log. Scott also hand-letters signs like the one at the backyard’s entry gate listing Sunday open hours. PRAY, says a painted shovel leading to the “Inner Sanctum,” a little brick sitting area hidden by cacti taller than people where orb weaver spiders, anoles and skinks, and stray kittens live.
You can pray for certain kinds of junk. Scott is a firm believer in attracting things by holding them in mind. “Whenever I needed something for my yard it would appear at the thrift store dumpster or elsewhere, almost like magic.” Yard art supplies materialize on the side of the road: “The pole lamps are bread and butter building supplies, the metal post plugs are perfect armatures for totem poles, the iron board (solid, no mesh) is great for painting on, and the curtain rod is screaming for a doll head to be put on it.” Keeping something in mind is a mode of attention to the world that makes things jump out, like when you learn a new word and suddenly read and hear it everywhere. This manner of following signs – selective scavenging – is best done riding a bike around the neighborhood on large trash day in a state of readiness to haul off good junk at a moment’s notice. This is one of the secret powers cultivated by yardists: an intuitive alignment or resonance between the world as it is and a desired world to be.
Methods of praying also include painting, yard work, digging out caliche, building garden borders with half-buried bottles, and assembling the plastic bottle cap snakes that festoon the pecan tree. Smut Putt Heaven got its start as a kind of playful therapeutic process around the time Scott stopped drinking. Working in the yard derails the mind from a boringly repetitive job or worries about friends’ troubles and loved ones’ health. Like other gardening practices, cultivating art yards pulls people into relationships with places that need them. Tending the yard is a way to “still and sober the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences” through creative labor.*
Some visitors pick up on these therapeutic qualities and encounter Smut Putt Heaven not as a yard stuck in Halloween, but as a "healing machine," a deeply peaceful place resonant with mysterious energy. For around thirty years, Emory Blagdon experimented with what he called his Healing Machine in a dirt-floored workshop on the family farm in Nebraska. Live currents of electricity charged intricate assemblages cluttering the room: hundreds of scrap wire mobiles, geometric paintings stacked like voltaic battery cells, and jars of chemical elements that toned the electricity with particular healing qualities. Visitors could sense “a tickling in your hair ... like electricity going through you; you could feel it.” Some described the spatial warping peculiar to this “panorama – even though it was a small room – it looked like a vast panorama.” Others experienced an atmosphere as different as water is from air: “you must adjust from the terrestrial to the underwater silence, light; the shock of entering another realm.”**
Where tourists experience such art environments as novel, panoramic DIYsneylands, the yardist encounters vastness – the universe in a quarter acre, swirling with ethereal beings and inhuman forces, magnetizing the right junk to the scene. As Scott puts it, “I feel most in tune with the universe when building something in my yard.” Tuning in to the universe like this, something happens to the perception of time. Just as art yards warp huge panoramas of alien worlds into tiny spaces, moments can turn into eternity. It is the same timeless-time that Scott describes as bike time:
Sometimes when I go riding my bike time is totally elastic. I think I’ve been out for an hour...but the computer says 35 minutes. All of a sudden two miles have gone that I have no memory of. I am lost...in thought. It’s not as if I am solving some great personal problem... my mind is empty. Is this akin to meditation?***A way to pray? Why does turning into a cyborg connected to a shovel or bike induce this sense of timelessness? Computer time, being on the clock, and “time is money” are just as invested in cyborg body parts. Perhaps it is purposelessness that helps eternity slip into time. Rhythms of peddling and coasting, not rushing to a destination but biking just to bike. Stopping to pick through roadside piles. Building something in the yard, working and resting at the same time. No grand plan directs future development. Puzzling together pieces of junk, lost in thought, mind empties and forms assemble themselves. Everything just happens.
One thing that happened is that the single mullein plant Scott gave us went to seed, and now every spring babies sprout up. The second year they turn into tall Mullein People with yellow flowered stalks that make thousands of tiny seeds. One year they migrate out of our landscape patch into neighboring yards. If you need cough medicine, harvest a baby, dry the leaves, and mix with dry mint to make tea.
* John Cage, paraphrasing the Indian musician Gira Sarabhai in an autobiographical statement. Cage expanded musical expression by experimenting with silence, methods of chance composition, and openness to unintended sounds in order to generate contemplative modes of attention in composer/musician/audience.
** Quoted in Leslie Umberger, “Earthly Power.” Raw Vision 59 (2007): 22-29. In 1986, Blagdon died of cancer that had gone undiagnosed for ten years. Art preservationists working under the Kohler Foundation disassembled the Healing Machine from the workshop, uprooting the interconnected mobiles and paintings to climate-controlled storage and occasional exhibition in a gallery. Other parts were sold to collectors. Outsider art historian Leslie Umberger recognizes that the Machine’s components “were not meant to be gazed at or contemplated – they were meant to function.” The emergent powers of the atmosphere did not emanate from any particular part. Now that the disassembled fragments are frozen in time for future gazing and contemplation, can they still heal us?
***Scott Stevens, "Elastic Time on a Bicycle," Kickapoo's Myspace Blog, March 8, 20-09, http://www.myspace.com/26690280/blog#!/26690280/blog/475448844.
2012
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Farm Waves
"A farm homestead grows among the wireless waves that cross our backyard garden patch..."
Posted on FlowTV.
Posted on FlowTV.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Mangled Plastic
Raccoons are the anti-engineers in our backyard pond living machine. Thermodynamics incarnate, they thin wetland habitat by snapping stalks, ripping out roots to eat, and stirring everything up hunting goldfish. The dead plants rot and eutrophy the water if not vigilantly removed while cursing. I wake up after midnight to splashing and peek out to see them destroying everything. Worse yet, scratching or savage fights in the attic in the dark, silent hours.
The large trap catches cats as often as raccoons. In the morning the hissing raccoon has transformed the plastic dish for food bait into an unrecognizably mangled, flattened shred. The local wildlife rescue grudgingly accepts the raccoon for relocation. "Next time just let them live in the yard. If you catch a nursing mom, the babies will die." But the pond is wrecked the next day by one of the disappeared's family members, and there's a clear message in the little crossed logs of scat beneath the figs.
Horrible things happen. One night I forget to coop the two chickens, and in the morning our Plymouth Rock has become patches of feathers scattered around the yard. Too busy to clean out the pond, goldfish die, their oily decay further poisoning the water. The raccoons demand response; the pond must be defended. You can buy fox urine to sprinkle around and scare them away, but the cats would evacuate, too. Time for some vigilanty wildlife relocation?
Raccoons are experts in garbage-making, master artists in the urban aesthetics of nature's irreversible demolition and gleeful mutilation. Their excess makes people snap, like the guy who "heard the coons in his attic again, after months of coon-proofing strategies... He got a shotgun and shot big holes in the living room ceiling. Blood and guts dropped out and fell onto his wife's new white carpet."* You can legally trap and kill raccoons on your property, but you can't release them somewhere. They have broken into urban landscapes and attics permanantly, generations of squatters who come back no matter how many times evicted.
Destructive characters like raccoons or monk parrots can cause a dilemma for people trying to decide who lives here and how to remove or eradicate those who don't. If the problem is defending human territory, the dilemma is deciding how to engineer (temporary) eviction. People outdo raccoons in the destructive arts, with hordes of chemicals designed to decimate certain pests and weeds available at your local Home Despot. But the problem of protecting habitats, native species, and the like makes a double bind. After finding an eagle nest raided by egg-smashing raccoons, Gerald Wykes fantasizes about violent opportunistic revenge:
Contrary attachments to destructive characters can also take hold. Ephemerata Garden visitors tell stories about the crazy lady who fed raccoons in her attic for fifteen years until neighbors complained about the smell of aggregated feces, or the couple who finds and raises a baby that gets into everything and winds up tangled in yarn. They offer excessive tips for adapting to the raccoon's presence, like electric fencing around ponds. Some become endeared to the raccoon's bandit mask and baby-like hands, love the sound the infants make, or admire the sheer tanacity of raccoon inhabitation. It's as if we built all this and keep our garbage cans filled with food just for them.
*Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Durham: Duke University Press (2007), p.85.
**Gerald Wykes, "Why I Hate Raccoons," Naturespeak blog, http://www.blogsmonroe.com/nature/2008/05/why-i-hate-raccoons, accessed July 8, 2011. Even environmentalists set aside a special hatred for raccoons. The blogosphere seeths with tales of tipped trashcans, trashed ponds, butchered koi, and rabid acts of human revenge (shot through with pathos for the babies).
The large trap catches cats as often as raccoons. In the morning the hissing raccoon has transformed the plastic dish for food bait into an unrecognizably mangled, flattened shred. The local wildlife rescue grudgingly accepts the raccoon for relocation. "Next time just let them live in the yard. If you catch a nursing mom, the babies will die." But the pond is wrecked the next day by one of the disappeared's family members, and there's a clear message in the little crossed logs of scat beneath the figs.
Horrible things happen. One night I forget to coop the two chickens, and in the morning our Plymouth Rock has become patches of feathers scattered around the yard. Too busy to clean out the pond, goldfish die, their oily decay further poisoning the water. The raccoons demand response; the pond must be defended. You can buy fox urine to sprinkle around and scare them away, but the cats would evacuate, too. Time for some vigilanty wildlife relocation?
Raccoons are experts in garbage-making, master artists in the urban aesthetics of nature's irreversible demolition and gleeful mutilation. Their excess makes people snap, like the guy who "heard the coons in his attic again, after months of coon-proofing strategies... He got a shotgun and shot big holes in the living room ceiling. Blood and guts dropped out and fell onto his wife's new white carpet."* You can legally trap and kill raccoons on your property, but you can't release them somewhere. They have broken into urban landscapes and attics permanantly, generations of squatters who come back no matter how many times evicted.
Destructive characters like raccoons or monk parrots can cause a dilemma for people trying to decide who lives here and how to remove or eradicate those who don't. If the problem is defending human territory, the dilemma is deciding how to engineer (temporary) eviction. People outdo raccoons in the destructive arts, with hordes of chemicals designed to decimate certain pests and weeds available at your local Home Despot. But the problem of protecting habitats, native species, and the like makes a double bind. After finding an eagle nest raided by egg-smashing raccoons, Gerald Wykes fantasizes about violent opportunistic revenge:
Should I happen upon this eagle nest robber when I'm behind the wheel next time I will swerve toward it. I will not carry it further than that because I can't blame the raccoon. I can hate 'em, but I can't blame 'em. People, you see, are the single most destructive agent when it comes to ... nest destruction. We have destroyed so much native nesting habitat over the decades that it makes the exploits of one raccoon pale in significance. I would be running over myself if I carried out that vehicular varmiticide.**Redemptive violence is marred by the recognition that we are mega-raccoons.
Contrary attachments to destructive characters can also take hold. Ephemerata Garden visitors tell stories about the crazy lady who fed raccoons in her attic for fifteen years until neighbors complained about the smell of aggregated feces, or the couple who finds and raises a baby that gets into everything and winds up tangled in yarn. They offer excessive tips for adapting to the raccoon's presence, like electric fencing around ponds. Some become endeared to the raccoon's bandit mask and baby-like hands, love the sound the infants make, or admire the sheer tanacity of raccoon inhabitation. It's as if we built all this and keep our garbage cans filled with food just for them.
*Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Durham: Duke University Press (2007), p.85.
**Gerald Wykes, "Why I Hate Raccoons," Naturespeak blog, http://www.blogsmonroe.com/nature/2008/05/why-i-hate-raccoons, accessed July 8, 2011. Even environmentalists set aside a special hatred for raccoons. The blogosphere seeths with tales of tipped trashcans, trashed ponds, butchered koi, and rabid acts of human revenge (shot through with pathos for the babies).
2015
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Monk Refrains
Throaty heron caws, bluejay songs, monk parrot squawks. Heron fledglings fall through the fig trees into the yard. Six pack rings drop from the pecan where junkitect bluejays build a nest with plastics and frayed rope scraps. They call out beautiful two note whistles and mad barks at the cats. Monks vibrate the sky with their racous chatter, calling it down to your sensorium. Look up and see them in the busy blue nonhuman city among red cardinals, starlings, little migratory birds, vultures, butterflies, dragonflies, airplanes, longings, nothingness. The monks' calls are only one aspect of a multisensory art project that crosses the sky over Ephemerata Gardens.
Monk parakeets are native to extreme climates of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where their communal nests can weigh up to a ton. They prey on human crops, colonizing tall, non-native Eucalyptus trees cultivated on plantation borders as windbreaks – perfect aeries from which to launch pirate raids on grids of crops below! In the 1970s, Argentina launched an eradication program against the pests. Although a government bounty “resulted in a return of over 400,000 pairs of monk feet in two years” and 64,000 birds were exiled to the US as pets, native monks are still at large in Argentina.1 Ornithologists consider them an invasive species to North America (where European settlers made the continent's only indigenous parrot, the Carolina Parakeet, extinct by the 1920s). Naturalized colonies of escaped and released monks have popped up in California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Connicticut, New York, and other states. One ornithologist who visited Ephemerata Gardens said monks might be like pigeons in a hundred years, flourishing in every city. Todd S. Campbell with the Institute for Biological Invasions remarks, “monk parakeets are probably not beyond control from a biological or logistical standpoint, but they are likely beyond control from a public sentiment standpoint” thanks to human guardians who mobilize against their eradication.1 Urban monks construct communal nests on cell phone towers and electricity junction boxes. In winter 2005 public protests broke out when Connecticut’s United Illuminating (UI) dismantled monk nests on electricity poles. In addition to rallying at nest removal sites and launching a press campaign against UI, people from neighborhoods where nests were being removed built fake nests installed in their backyards. Not many monks moved in.
Monk nests remind me of yardist David Lee Pratt’s description of his interlaced arcs of mangled rebar and other scrap metal at Further Farms: architectural forms that use no nails, no concrete, just intuitive balance to puzzle together a structure that gravity keeps from falling apart. Monks sharpen one end of a stick with their beaks, then jimmy it into the other sticks. Each mated pair builds four or so rooms. They defecate inside, then use their waste as stucco so the house interior becomes sealed against wind and rain. The nests are constructed using the improvisational principles behind the Cathedral of Junk and the open-air rooms at Biosquat. They are composed by weaving things together; they are never finished being woven; they are all built of trash (especially Monk nests, given trash’s etymology of “fallen leaves and twigs”); they are all "beyond control." Like Austin junkitects, monk parrots build something out of nothing, and in the process, pull together communities through their semi-public homes.
As immigrant settlers or refugees from South America, the monks haul tropical sounding atmospheres north in advance of global warming. Like the sonic envelopes of TVs, sirens, and traffic, birds give atmospheres trembling contours, making them moodily alive through repetitions of sounds and colors. Monk parrots alter what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call refrains, “an act of rhythm that has become expressive, ... become qualitative... Not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode, ... the chancy formation of a domain” through synaesthetic labor” (315-16).2 Monk refrains crystallize as chatter, green flashes, and patterns of sticks. The concept of refrains does not approach aesthetics as symbolic arts limited to people, but rather, as embodied expression or distributed somatic intelligence that communicates directly through the senses, literally making sense, sustaining life. Refrains double as a vocabulary for describing patchy landscapes, but also as a compositional methodology. We cannot talk about refrains without making and sensing them. This non-representational approach to built environments recognizes the aesthetic agency of plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing sensations of unison.
Deleuze and Guattari elaborated the concept of aesthetic-ecological refrains by mining natural history and behavioral ecology to illustrate how nonhuman artists throw out “planes of composition,” design territories that improvise homes out of chaos. They love “the magic bird,” the bowerbird (331), that flies into their writing to perform refrains.3 These natives of Australia and Papua New Guinea create elaborate nests to dance around inside, their patterns of color and gesture resounding with songs, including those of other birds. Bowerbird refrains are made of synaesthetic “sounds-colors-gestures” that shuttle between bird and forest (333). In this way, “landscapes are peopled by characters and the characters belong to landscapes” (320). Refrains fly away, a nonorganic life of sounds coexisting in the forest with bowerbirds that is open to becoming something independent of them.4 Refrains are the becoming-forest of the bowerbird, the becoming-sky of the monks.
Music, melodies, and refrains breath life into regions, landscapes, houses, and other atmospheres. They are alternative energy forms that power the City of Living Garbage under the banner "The Survival Circus Marching Band!" Try it: whistling and humming when hungry or tired can recharge you. The affects of sound are strong sensory forces that jump between and vibrate sentient beings as their medium. Katherine Hayles notes, “researchers in virtual reality have found that sound is much more effective than sight in imparting emotional tonalities to their simulated worlds” (219).5 Lawrence Grossberg explores music's “unique and striking relationship to the human body, surrounding, enfolding, and even invading it within its own rhythms and textures” that open up feelings of possibility, freedom, and belonging with such force that it can hold together social movements (152).6 Refrains are collective improvisations that express Ornette Coleman's harmolodic musical theory. “Harmolodics is the use of the physical and mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group” (43).7 Coleman grasps sounds as belonging to landscapes (e.g., in regional musical styles), but also as expressions of individual intelligence released into refrains that recompose minds and moods. The collective song is its own form of life or "unison" that endlessly doubles back into and out of the musicians that colaboratively release its expression. This form of life needs musicians and instruments to shape its refrain, but the harmolodic refrain becomes the aural house where musicians live and that gave them life and instruments in the first place.
1 Campbell, Todd S. “The Monk Parakeet.” The Institute for Biological Invasions, posted December 2000, http://invasions.bio.utk.edu/invaders/monk.html (no longer accessible).
2 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
3 They also fly into Jill Noke’s description of the Cathedral of Junk’s domes as bowerbird nests (Yard Art and Handbuilt Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home. Austin: UT Press, 2007, p.99).
4 While researching Kaluli ornithology in Papua New Guinea, Stephen Feld asked his informant Jubi to match up bird sounds with species until Jubi clarified things for him. “Listen – to you they are birds, to me they are voices in the forest” (Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1990, p.45). Jubi’s remark helped Feld to understand why the birds and their sounds require separate taxonomies among Kaluli ornithologists: they are distinct beings. The bird artists of Papua New Guinea sing and dance refrains, the sounds of which become nonorganic life forms captured by Kaluli songs and dances. The birds’ sounds and colorful feathers enter into a becoming-human through Kaluli ritual practices of “becoming a bird” or “man in the form of a bird” (236).
5 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
6 Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
7 Quoted in Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Monk parakeets are native to extreme climates of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where their communal nests can weigh up to a ton. They prey on human crops, colonizing tall, non-native Eucalyptus trees cultivated on plantation borders as windbreaks – perfect aeries from which to launch pirate raids on grids of crops below! In the 1970s, Argentina launched an eradication program against the pests. Although a government bounty “resulted in a return of over 400,000 pairs of monk feet in two years” and 64,000 birds were exiled to the US as pets, native monks are still at large in Argentina.1 Ornithologists consider them an invasive species to North America (where European settlers made the continent's only indigenous parrot, the Carolina Parakeet, extinct by the 1920s). Naturalized colonies of escaped and released monks have popped up in California, Florida, Texas, Washington, Connicticut, New York, and other states. One ornithologist who visited Ephemerata Gardens said monks might be like pigeons in a hundred years, flourishing in every city. Todd S. Campbell with the Institute for Biological Invasions remarks, “monk parakeets are probably not beyond control from a biological or logistical standpoint, but they are likely beyond control from a public sentiment standpoint” thanks to human guardians who mobilize against their eradication.1 Urban monks construct communal nests on cell phone towers and electricity junction boxes. In winter 2005 public protests broke out when Connecticut’s United Illuminating (UI) dismantled monk nests on electricity poles. In addition to rallying at nest removal sites and launching a press campaign against UI, people from neighborhoods where nests were being removed built fake nests installed in their backyards. Not many monks moved in.
Monk nests remind me of yardist David Lee Pratt’s description of his interlaced arcs of mangled rebar and other scrap metal at Further Farms: architectural forms that use no nails, no concrete, just intuitive balance to puzzle together a structure that gravity keeps from falling apart. Monks sharpen one end of a stick with their beaks, then jimmy it into the other sticks. Each mated pair builds four or so rooms. They defecate inside, then use their waste as stucco so the house interior becomes sealed against wind and rain. The nests are constructed using the improvisational principles behind the Cathedral of Junk and the open-air rooms at Biosquat. They are composed by weaving things together; they are never finished being woven; they are all built of trash (especially Monk nests, given trash’s etymology of “fallen leaves and twigs”); they are all "beyond control." Like Austin junkitects, monk parrots build something out of nothing, and in the process, pull together communities through their semi-public homes.
As immigrant settlers or refugees from South America, the monks haul tropical sounding atmospheres north in advance of global warming. Like the sonic envelopes of TVs, sirens, and traffic, birds give atmospheres trembling contours, making them moodily alive through repetitions of sounds and colors. Monk parrots alter what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call refrains, “an act of rhythm that has become expressive, ... become qualitative... Not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode, ... the chancy formation of a domain” through synaesthetic labor” (315-16).2 Monk refrains crystallize as chatter, green flashes, and patterns of sticks. The concept of refrains does not approach aesthetics as symbolic arts limited to people, but rather, as embodied expression or distributed somatic intelligence that communicates directly through the senses, literally making sense, sustaining life. Refrains double as a vocabulary for describing patchy landscapes, but also as a compositional methodology. We cannot talk about refrains without making and sensing them. This non-representational approach to built environments recognizes the aesthetic agency of plants, animals, microbes, and machines in composing sensations of unison.
Deleuze and Guattari elaborated the concept of aesthetic-ecological refrains by mining natural history and behavioral ecology to illustrate how nonhuman artists throw out “planes of composition,” design territories that improvise homes out of chaos. They love “the magic bird,” the bowerbird (331), that flies into their writing to perform refrains.3 These natives of Australia and Papua New Guinea create elaborate nests to dance around inside, their patterns of color and gesture resounding with songs, including those of other birds. Bowerbird refrains are made of synaesthetic “sounds-colors-gestures” that shuttle between bird and forest (333). In this way, “landscapes are peopled by characters and the characters belong to landscapes” (320). Refrains fly away, a nonorganic life of sounds coexisting in the forest with bowerbirds that is open to becoming something independent of them.4 Refrains are the becoming-forest of the bowerbird, the becoming-sky of the monks.
Music, melodies, and refrains breath life into regions, landscapes, houses, and other atmospheres. They are alternative energy forms that power the City of Living Garbage under the banner "The Survival Circus Marching Band!" Try it: whistling and humming when hungry or tired can recharge you. The affects of sound are strong sensory forces that jump between and vibrate sentient beings as their medium. Katherine Hayles notes, “researchers in virtual reality have found that sound is much more effective than sight in imparting emotional tonalities to their simulated worlds” (219).5 Lawrence Grossberg explores music's “unique and striking relationship to the human body, surrounding, enfolding, and even invading it within its own rhythms and textures” that open up feelings of possibility, freedom, and belonging with such force that it can hold together social movements (152).6 Refrains are collective improvisations that express Ornette Coleman's harmolodic musical theory. “Harmolodics is the use of the physical and mental of one’s own logic made into an expression of sound to bring about the musical sensation of unison executed by a single person or with a group” (43).7 Coleman grasps sounds as belonging to landscapes (e.g., in regional musical styles), but also as expressions of individual intelligence released into refrains that recompose minds and moods. The collective song is its own form of life or "unison" that endlessly doubles back into and out of the musicians that colaboratively release its expression. This form of life needs musicians and instruments to shape its refrain, but the harmolodic refrain becomes the aural house where musicians live and that gave them life and instruments in the first place.
So the monk parrots' chatter and green feathers expressed tropical Southerness even as they refrained a tentative inhabitation: is this the South? Can we live here? Can we enter the fossil record and become native to this new place?
2012
1 Campbell, Todd S. “The Monk Parakeet.” The Institute for Biological Invasions, posted December 2000, http://invasions.bio.utk.edu/invaders/monk.html (no longer accessible).
2 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
3 They also fly into Jill Noke’s description of the Cathedral of Junk’s domes as bowerbird nests (Yard Art and Handbuilt Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home. Austin: UT Press, 2007, p.99).
4 While researching Kaluli ornithology in Papua New Guinea, Stephen Feld asked his informant Jubi to match up bird sounds with species until Jubi clarified things for him. “Listen – to you they are birds, to me they are voices in the forest” (Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pensylvania Press, 1990, p.45). Jubi’s remark helped Feld to understand why the birds and their sounds require separate taxonomies among Kaluli ornithologists: they are distinct beings. The bird artists of Papua New Guinea sing and dance refrains, the sounds of which become nonorganic life forms captured by Kaluli songs and dances. The birds’ sounds and colorful feathers enter into a becoming-human through Kaluli ritual practices of “becoming a bird” or “man in the form of a bird” (236).
5 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
6 Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.
7 Quoted in Gioia, Ted. The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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