Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens often ask us how long we've lived here, how long did it take to get this way? How many thousands of hours tinkering? What sightseers see is only a snapshot of something non-visual: ways of living in atmospheres. Landscape patches are composed of different tempos and rhythms, the blur of hands seeding and weeding, the speed of root growth and heron migrations, the slow collection and decomposition of garbage. Yardist symbiont people become contented busybodies, endlessly encrusting landscape patches with aesthetic layers as the years fly by. Isaiah Zagar in the Magic Gardens grew three left arms because he works so fast: "My work is marked by events and is a mirror of the mind that is building and falling apart, having a logic but close to chaos, refusing to stay still for the camera, and giving one a sense of heaven and hell simultaneously." Far from being in control, a living machine's engineer just tries to keep up with emergence, just one of the processes that holds the superorganism together.
Over a dozen years every surface in Spunky Monkey Ranch became permeated with art. Visitors entered the land through a twelve-foot arch cobbled out of deadwood, skis, crutches, and scavenged wood panels painted with a bright monkey face and vibrating letters spelling out the yard's name. A smaller arch spanned the path down to the creekside bamboo grove. Held together by wire and tension, the arcs bristled with gravity’s potential, poised on falling apart; they want to move. They match David Pratt’s body – a shaky livewire, hands and boots tapping out excess energy. He likes to work fast to override making too many decisions, swinging lengths of wide transparent tape over a pile of collage scraps so static electricity sucks up an image. Slapped directly onto picture frames, compositions emerge with a depth of multiple layers, some obscured. Art lives off the frame, swallows it up, the same way Susan’s mosaics live on house walls and garden paths. They match her, too – still and patient. Susan has a quiet presence that blends in, then pops out with simple joy and generosity. Spunky Monkey Ranch embodied Susan and David’s still and jittery ways of being.
When they moved out to Further Farms in Elgin, some people were shocked that David and Susan could abandon the art environment and just leave everything to its fate. David and Susan accepted it as part of the place’s lifecycle. David wondered, “How can I take it with me when it all lives here? It’d be like dragging a heavy load around by my neck. I’ve never stuck around anywhere long enough to build a foundation like Vince has” at the Cathedral of Junk. David keeps moving, starting over. Maybe Further Farms will emerge as a foundation, maybe not. While their “everything must go” yard sale moved as much art, plants, and materials off the Ranch as possible, the rest stayed or got tossed. Vince helped move the mosaic Monkey King on his throne. What about the small portable pond? “Well, if it looks like it belongs here, it stays.” It belongs to the place, and maybe some other artist will tend to its life there (which is what happened to the mini-Old West town at Spunky Monkey Ranch in the first place). If not, it goes the way of all mortals and falls apart. Like any garden, it needs tending to exist. Art environments take on a life of their own, but need a spunky cultivator to repair things as gravity, weather, rust, plants, and animals shuffle forms around. Aesthetic patterns materialize through processes of constant recomposition – tending a place’s emergence, laying down layer after layer of endless care and repair. From one day to the next, art environments are never the same.
Before Spunky Monkey Ranch, Susan and David ran the Alternate Current ArtSpace in a rented building on the same South Austin lot. Opening in 1991, this live-in art gallery hosted unjuried gallery shows that art critics and careful curators described as “cluttered.” It was a hodgepodge place where anyone could show art. Themes for group shows were inclusive and quirky: “The Mojo Show,” “White Trash/Black Helicopter,” “He Said/She Said.” Their last show in 2002 focused on 9/11 only nine months after the event. Alternate Current aimed at being a habitat to encourage and support south Austin artists and connect them to an older generation of creative people. Both the gallery and the Ranch were places that gathered an eclectic public of artists, musicians, gardeners, filmmakers, and their kids into a welcoming intergenerational scene.
Like the Alternate Current art gallery before it, Spunky Monkey Ranch reveals the fluidity of places, how fast they change, the inescapable vulnerability of aesthetic patterns in time. In “The Vulnerability of Outsider Architecture,”* Roger Cardinal laments the loss of vernacular art environments as an almost inevitable fate. Given their improvised aesthetic compositions like mosaics or structures held together by gravity, these singular places share an in-built precariousness of form. Without their perpetually tinkering creators (who abandon them in pursuit of lower rent, or are institutionalized, or die, or commit suicide), the places swiftly fall to pieces. Often built of junk, the public can see them as eyesores or rat farms; arsons and vandals assault some places, while municipalities dismantle others on the grounds of code violations or health hazards. Very few are preserved by nonprofit institutions (like the Orange Show Foundation in Houston). As an art historian, Cardinal mourns not only their "extinction," but “that extinction should lead to oblivion: we can only guess at the number of outsider sites which have vanished across the years. The only consolation is that a number of demolished structures enjoy an afterlife” through visual documentation (2000:172). A powerful mode of melancholic narrative presents itself in vanished or decayed expressive forms, lost arts, and extinct species of beauty. The affective pull of lost places, or their potential loss, motivates preservation – the avoidance of "extinction" of singular atmospheres that will never grace the world again.
Is there really any way to freeze these places? Aesthetic patterns in vernacular landscapes cannot be preserved without preserving the process of perpetual emergence, the relationship between spunky monkeys and their homes. If "outsider architecture" takes form through the pleasures of unfolding processes – tinkering, gardening, creating, scavenging, dreaming, partying – preservationists should follow by shifting attention to the vulnerability of action. This reframes preservation and destruction as generative actions in themselves. Rather than a melancholic vision of the loss of place, the vulnerability of art environments helps us to see these landscapes as momentary triumphs of doing or living against the odds -- despite thermodynamics and capitalism. At the same time, animating places through historical narratives helps us understand what drives the pattern of vulnerability itself. Rent goes up. Economic development patterns recognizable as gentrification and code regulation bring about the abandonment and destruction of these precarious urban landscape patches.
Meanwhile, out at Further Farms, Susan’s mosaic and collage patterns begin to encrust the kitchen walls. The trailer’s living room offers plenty of wall space for a gallery of David and Susan’s paintings, collages, and mosaics, as well as art they’ve collected over the years. The sunny open spaces outside called for gardens, and the farm is taking shape as veggies watered with caught rain in raised beds of cinder blocks and car tires. Vince helped assemble fence wood and windows into junkitecture walls for the carport turned studio workshop. The circle of lean cedar elms suggested a sundial, and every equinox and solstice David is out there at sunrise calibrating a solar calendar out of metal poles and mortar chunks gathered from the land. A skeletal metal arch unfolds near the sundial with a chair up top like you could sit there and enjoy a fine view. David calls it "the East Gate to the Garden of Eden, or the West Gate, depending on which side you’re on." The potluck gatherings that connect generations of creative people and families continue at Further Farms with Thanksgiving dinners and Easter egg hunts, when people come together to catch up, share home-cooked food, and play some music. And then there is the new pattern of driving from the exurbs into town, where Susan works for the City, and David has seasonal work with the IRS or as a movie extra. Life is quieter out there, stars brighter, and the art of wildflowers, deer, and hawks graces the fields.
The busybody is ready to mosaic, aching to dig. The relationship between the busybody and living garbage surges with a dream or possibility. Never finished, always ready to start over or go further into what is emerging.
*Roger Cardinal, “The Vulnerability of Ousider Architecture,” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 1-2 (2000): 169-186.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Garbage Collectors
"Ephemerata Gardens collects all kinds of objects and life forms... It is a miniature version of the North Pacific Garbage Gyre (or Garbage Patch), a museum of plastics gathered by the clockwise vortex of oceanic currents. "
Posted on FlowTV.org.
Posted on FlowTV.org.
Friday, September 9, 2011
The Symbiont
The teaspoon of Ephemerata Gardens soil I mailed to the lab tested positive for the Toxoplasma tinkerans brain parasite. I haven’t tested myself, but I’m sure I’m infected. The team of soil ecologists that discovered T. tinkerans last year hypothesize that the endosymbiont alters its host’s behavior by stimulating an obsessive collecting and arranging of objects, generating a landscape patch cluttered with rusty metals. Like the bacteria in early biobattery experiments, T. tinkerans eats iron oxide in soil solutions by prying off oxygen and metabolizing the freed up protons, giving the ground a mild electrical charge. The parasite reproduces solely in human temporal lobes. Hoarders, scrap metal collectors, and people with art yards simultaneously cultivate and are cultivated by the symbiont.
Inside each yardist’s brain is another small garden where the yardist symbiont dwells. Like its close relative Toxoplasma gondii, a transpececific brain parasite that co-evolved with cats, T. tinkerans makes its hosts do things and behave certain ways. Most notably, yardists begin to feel unsettled and uncomfortable anywhere but their yard. They must constantly tinker, becoming part of a living machine. They grow curiously affectionate towards certain kinds of trash, attracting it to them as if by arcane magnetism. The yardist symbiont cultivates secret powers in its hosts that range from an attunement to particular objects in roadside junk, to a dreamy state of awareness or sense of timelessness in which garbage gleams with promises of what it might become. Hosts become overly sensitive to a space's aesthetic saturation, in particular an atmosphere's maintenance needs and patterns of decomposition. Perhaps the oddest and most dangerous symptom is a nascent sense that money isn't everything which, untreated, can grow over the years into an acute dislike of accumulating capital in favor of blatently wasting time. Affection for the valueless eclipses the desire to amass set forms of value -- as if currency, not trash, was dirty and polluted.
How does the yardist symbiont spread? At first I imagined a mycelial matt camouflaged as ordinary sewer pipes and fiber-optic cables creeping out from the Cathderal of Junk beneath the rest of Austin. Working in the garden one day, the yardist-to-be extracts a small twist of wire from the soil and contracts the symbiont. More realistically, the vectors are not underground, but the environments themselves. Just setting foot there you run the risk of contracting the symbiont. It even seems to transmit over TV -- an invisible microbe that infects through visual media. Perhaps it spreads through tainted gifts, like the doll arm, head on a stick, and mullein pups Scott Stevens trasnplanted from Smut Putt Heaven to live in Ephemerata Gardens. Before you know it, an art environment takes over your yard and life. Over the course of a decade, structures like the East/West Gate to the Garden of Eden at Further Farms coagulate from a multitude of rusty taproots emerging directly from the yard. You start eyeing roadside junk piles, compulsively collecting body parts for the yardist symbiont to assimilate into its ever-creeping form.
Inside each yardist’s brain is another small garden where the yardist symbiont dwells. Like its close relative Toxoplasma gondii, a transpececific brain parasite that co-evolved with cats, T. tinkerans makes its hosts do things and behave certain ways. Most notably, yardists begin to feel unsettled and uncomfortable anywhere but their yard. They must constantly tinker, becoming part of a living machine. They grow curiously affectionate towards certain kinds of trash, attracting it to them as if by arcane magnetism. The yardist symbiont cultivates secret powers in its hosts that range from an attunement to particular objects in roadside junk, to a dreamy state of awareness or sense of timelessness in which garbage gleams with promises of what it might become. Hosts become overly sensitive to a space's aesthetic saturation, in particular an atmosphere's maintenance needs and patterns of decomposition. Perhaps the oddest and most dangerous symptom is a nascent sense that money isn't everything which, untreated, can grow over the years into an acute dislike of accumulating capital in favor of blatently wasting time. Affection for the valueless eclipses the desire to amass set forms of value -- as if currency, not trash, was dirty and polluted.
How does the yardist symbiont spread? At first I imagined a mycelial matt camouflaged as ordinary sewer pipes and fiber-optic cables creeping out from the Cathderal of Junk beneath the rest of Austin. Working in the garden one day, the yardist-to-be extracts a small twist of wire from the soil and contracts the symbiont. More realistically, the vectors are not underground, but the environments themselves. Just setting foot there you run the risk of contracting the symbiont. It even seems to transmit over TV -- an invisible microbe that infects through visual media. Perhaps it spreads through tainted gifts, like the doll arm, head on a stick, and mullein pups Scott Stevens trasnplanted from Smut Putt Heaven to live in Ephemerata Gardens. Before you know it, an art environment takes over your yard and life. Over the course of a decade, structures like the East/West Gate to the Garden of Eden at Further Farms coagulate from a multitude of rusty taproots emerging directly from the yard. You start eyeing roadside junk piles, compulsively collecting body parts for the yardist symbiont to assimilate into its ever-creeping form.
T. tinkerans' discovery not only lets us better understand the psychobiogeophysical entities that have stimulated the growth of the City of Living Garbage. More importantly, we can propagate the City by inoculating human populations with the T. tinkerans endosymbiont.
2021
Friday, September 2, 2011
Microscopic Cities
When you step into Ephemerata Gardens, right beneath your feet is a densely populated urban population, the sprawling megalopolis of Soilandia. Of all "Do-It-Yourself" activities, perhaps DIY soil is the one you do least by yourself. Compost heaps are buslting microscopic cities of macroinvertebrate mansions, amoeba apartments, and fungal factories. They say a teaspoon of good soil is home to 100 million to 1 billion bacteria. And the Archaea! Strange to think human food security depends on this galaxy of microbes. So much for doing it yourself -- only we can make soil in an ongoing collaboration with life forms that know just what to do with dead things.
In the drought/recession fall of 2008, Carol Ann Sayle's tour of Boggy Creek Farm opened with an invocation of threat to this we. “I know why you’re here. Things are tough, and we’re all worried. We need true homeland security.” Around sixty people gathered for the tour, most of them in their later years unlike the twenty-somethings drawn to the Rhizome Collective's RUST workshop.
Carol Ann addresses the crowd from her front porch. The house is one of the three oldest structures in Austin, built in 1840 in the bottomlands of the Colorado River with its rich alluvial soil (back when all farming was "organic"). Farms have surrounded the house for most of a century and a half. Carol Ann and her partner Larry Butler bought the place in 1992 and gave it its current name in honor of the creek with concrete banks a block away. Now three other organic farms share the neighborhood. The landscape patch's memories keep popping out of the soil in the form of wild amaranth and horseshoes. Archaeologists from the University of Texas at Austin have come to dig for 19th century debris like kitchen garbage, pottery shards, bones. On the Farm’s website, Carol Ann recognizes the house itself as “a physical testament to the labors of the African slaves who undoubtedly had a hand in its construction, and who worked the fields of this antebellum plantation. This page is dedicated to their memory.”
Our tour meanders from the porch to the front garden, where the gravel driveway and rocks in the soil soak up heat and keep the field a few degrees warmer than the back garden. Carol Ann's tour isn't about plants, but topsoil. “Focus on the soil and forget about the plants.” We linger around the compost heaps, twenty-foot long rows as tall as a person. Every few days they need to be turned with a front-end loader to keep the temperature right and replenish the oxygen inside. On cold days they steam when turned. Carol Ann describes soil production as “not an exact science ... more of an art or common sense.”
The art of composting involves science labs that analyze soil samples. Based on lab results, they add molasses, green sand, sulfur, and other amendments to the compost before putting it in the gardens. Getting the right ratio of 1 part nitrogen to 20 parts carbon begins in the compost heaps. Green plants and chicken manure make for good nitrogen, while fallen leaves, twigs and branches, dry grass, and other brown and brittle trash bulk up the carbon. Carol Ann sees the compost heaps as a form of carbon sequestration, as if they've trapped part of the sky.
Boggy Creek Farm used to collect the neighborhood’s curbside bags full of leaves. Sanitation workers appreciated their free labor. Now landscapers drop off their trash. The compost heaps need to be kept moist as a wrung out sponge to “keep the microbes happy.” Carol Ann pictures them in their giant home, “eating and pooping, mating and going on vacations.... there’s animals in there!” People stick their hands into the warm heaps as we walk by to the back garden beds.
Behind the 200-foot long beds is a small orchard of fig and citrus trees, and some random heaps of slowly decomposing rhubarb stalks. Because the bottomlands’ high clay content causes bad drainage, the beds are raised, but not by building them up in containers. Instead, paths have been dug down between the rows of plants. Before seeding new crops, the farmers walk the rows with a machine that gently fluffs the top few inches of beds that had gone flat over the growing season -– the no-tilling method.
Carol Ann cautions not to do this with a shovel because the beds are home to thriving civilizations. “Those civilizations die when you throw them up in the air like that. That’s what’s happening in Iraq and the Gaza Strip.” Carol Ann points to the chicken coop next to her house. The egg hens seem to know they won’t be killed, so they have “a sense of peace about them” that harmonizes with the microbe civilizations in the raised soil beds. Sometimes this sense of peace rubs off on visitors to the farm. Kids play in a shallow dirt hole near the coop, pushing around battered plastic dumptrucks in the pecan shade.
While soils amended with chemical fertilizers are composed of only .3% organic matter, the labs say 3-4% of Boggy Creek’s soil is rotting plants, manure, worms, fungi, microbes, and the like. To disturb the beds as little as possible, the farmers harvest plants by cutting them off at the stalk. Their nutrient-rich roots can decompose in the soil, and bacteria, nematodes, mycorrhizae, and other organisms are not yanked out of their civilizations. Then the machine fluffs the top few inches of soil, and people use hoes to pull decomposing mulch in the footpaths up onto the beds. Finally, they add an inch of revitalizing compost. A mulch of dry leaves or hay laid down on the paths holds in moisture and marks where to step. Now the rows are ready for planting seeds.
The cultivation of trash into soil takes time, machines, and knowledge. Without people an inch of topsoil forms in 300 to 1000 years, while with people's help, a tree can turn into compost in 1 to 100 years. To get an idea of the labor involved, replace the front-end loader that turns compost heaps with human-powered pitchforks, or the mulching machine with a hand-axe. But the ancient soil civilizations do all the essential work of transforming death into life. Soil is living dust, forming in geological time.
Ephemerata Garden's soil is a probiotic liquid, oozing to the landscape patch's low spots, churned by chickens scratching for earthworms and grubs. It is a vast seed packet, a surprising mycelial network with mushrooms that manifest overnight. The soil gets loamier every year. We build new beds with bag-it-yourself dirt from Natural Gardener, revitalize with locally-produced compost sold at Home Despot. We discover garbage pits of glass bottles and shards, a little walkway of paving stones. The soil city is a random museum where rusty nails, batteries, a pocket watch, half a pair of novelty hillbilly dentures, and other flotsam bob to the surface. The City of Living Garbage is built on this dense subsurface civilization. A restless churning of life forms and their layered traces of inhabitation.
In the drought/recession fall of 2008, Carol Ann Sayle's tour of Boggy Creek Farm opened with an invocation of threat to this we. “I know why you’re here. Things are tough, and we’re all worried. We need true homeland security.” Around sixty people gathered for the tour, most of them in their later years unlike the twenty-somethings drawn to the Rhizome Collective's RUST workshop.
Carol Ann addresses the crowd from her front porch. The house is one of the three oldest structures in Austin, built in 1840 in the bottomlands of the Colorado River with its rich alluvial soil (back when all farming was "organic"). Farms have surrounded the house for most of a century and a half. Carol Ann and her partner Larry Butler bought the place in 1992 and gave it its current name in honor of the creek with concrete banks a block away. Now three other organic farms share the neighborhood. The landscape patch's memories keep popping out of the soil in the form of wild amaranth and horseshoes. Archaeologists from the University of Texas at Austin have come to dig for 19th century debris like kitchen garbage, pottery shards, bones. On the Farm’s website, Carol Ann recognizes the house itself as “a physical testament to the labors of the African slaves who undoubtedly had a hand in its construction, and who worked the fields of this antebellum plantation. This page is dedicated to their memory.”
Our tour meanders from the porch to the front garden, where the gravel driveway and rocks in the soil soak up heat and keep the field a few degrees warmer than the back garden. Carol Ann's tour isn't about plants, but topsoil. “Focus on the soil and forget about the plants.” We linger around the compost heaps, twenty-foot long rows as tall as a person. Every few days they need to be turned with a front-end loader to keep the temperature right and replenish the oxygen inside. On cold days they steam when turned. Carol Ann describes soil production as “not an exact science ... more of an art or common sense.”
The art of composting involves science labs that analyze soil samples. Based on lab results, they add molasses, green sand, sulfur, and other amendments to the compost before putting it in the gardens. Getting the right ratio of 1 part nitrogen to 20 parts carbon begins in the compost heaps. Green plants and chicken manure make for good nitrogen, while fallen leaves, twigs and branches, dry grass, and other brown and brittle trash bulk up the carbon. Carol Ann sees the compost heaps as a form of carbon sequestration, as if they've trapped part of the sky.
Boggy Creek Farm used to collect the neighborhood’s curbside bags full of leaves. Sanitation workers appreciated their free labor. Now landscapers drop off their trash. The compost heaps need to be kept moist as a wrung out sponge to “keep the microbes happy.” Carol Ann pictures them in their giant home, “eating and pooping, mating and going on vacations.... there’s animals in there!” People stick their hands into the warm heaps as we walk by to the back garden beds.
Behind the 200-foot long beds is a small orchard of fig and citrus trees, and some random heaps of slowly decomposing rhubarb stalks. Because the bottomlands’ high clay content causes bad drainage, the beds are raised, but not by building them up in containers. Instead, paths have been dug down between the rows of plants. Before seeding new crops, the farmers walk the rows with a machine that gently fluffs the top few inches of beds that had gone flat over the growing season -– the no-tilling method.
Carol Ann cautions not to do this with a shovel because the beds are home to thriving civilizations. “Those civilizations die when you throw them up in the air like that. That’s what’s happening in Iraq and the Gaza Strip.” Carol Ann points to the chicken coop next to her house. The egg hens seem to know they won’t be killed, so they have “a sense of peace about them” that harmonizes with the microbe civilizations in the raised soil beds. Sometimes this sense of peace rubs off on visitors to the farm. Kids play in a shallow dirt hole near the coop, pushing around battered plastic dumptrucks in the pecan shade.
While soils amended with chemical fertilizers are composed of only .3% organic matter, the labs say 3-4% of Boggy Creek’s soil is rotting plants, manure, worms, fungi, microbes, and the like. To disturb the beds as little as possible, the farmers harvest plants by cutting them off at the stalk. Their nutrient-rich roots can decompose in the soil, and bacteria, nematodes, mycorrhizae, and other organisms are not yanked out of their civilizations. Then the machine fluffs the top few inches of soil, and people use hoes to pull decomposing mulch in the footpaths up onto the beds. Finally, they add an inch of revitalizing compost. A mulch of dry leaves or hay laid down on the paths holds in moisture and marks where to step. Now the rows are ready for planting seeds.
The cultivation of trash into soil takes time, machines, and knowledge. Without people an inch of topsoil forms in 300 to 1000 years, while with people's help, a tree can turn into compost in 1 to 100 years. To get an idea of the labor involved, replace the front-end loader that turns compost heaps with human-powered pitchforks, or the mulching machine with a hand-axe. But the ancient soil civilizations do all the essential work of transforming death into life. Soil is living dust, forming in geological time.
Ephemerata Garden's soil is a probiotic liquid, oozing to the landscape patch's low spots, churned by chickens scratching for earthworms and grubs. It is a vast seed packet, a surprising mycelial network with mushrooms that manifest overnight. The soil gets loamier every year. We build new beds with bag-it-yourself dirt from Natural Gardener, revitalize with locally-produced compost sold at Home Despot. We discover garbage pits of glass bottles and shards, a little walkway of paving stones. The soil city is a random museum where rusty nails, batteries, a pocket watch, half a pair of novelty hillbilly dentures, and other flotsam bob to the surface. The City of Living Garbage is built on this dense subsurface civilization. A restless churning of life forms and their layered traces of inhabitation.
2012
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