Found Installation 1: I Heard the Voices of the Angels

I decided to view the world as a great living art gallery, and things that caught my eye could considered intentional "found art" (l'arte trouvee) of the early 20th century. It is a wonderful way to view the world -- suddenly everything has more significance, and it becomes expressionist, postmodernist, conceptual art.

In 1967, earthworks artist and photographer Robert Smithson put together a series of photos which he called "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," in which he imagined the crumbling factories of New Jersey to be monuments. He was clearly making a critique of consumer culture, modernity, and environmentally damaging industrialization (and its aftermath in decaying obsolescence).  I have admired that work, but what I decided to do was to take it even further and include different types of accompaniments (experiential as well as critical).  It is fun to do, and I would like to encourage everyone to give it a try. This is my first.

Here's my first "found installation," which I call "I Heard the Voices of the Angels" 

Narrative Accompanying the Installation: The Homeless Passerby

And then they lifted me up.

I was seated in a chair nicely placed in the shallows of the Arkansas River, near the 11th Street Bridge in Tulsa, Oklahoma where I was fishing for catfish and the souls of the pioneers (they're hard to catch) when the trumpets sounded, the angels sang (or better yet, roared), and my hard-won body ("hard-won" because it's hard to make one's way into an incarnation of any kind, especially that of a human being, and to finally have my consciousness housed in a skin-and-bone bag has been a tremendous relief) flew out of my hands like a helium balloon caught on the heels of a late-March 55-mile-per-hour gust front.

Photo taken of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, OK near the 11th Street Bridge / photo credit: susan smith nash

I was shocked but not disappointed.

This incarnation has not been easy. To all those who see me, I'm a homeless Native American veteran who lives in basement of the burned-out synagogue near Cheyenne Street, who brings bags of Friskies cat food to the feral cats and kittens who live under the 11th Street Bridge. I'm missing quite a few teeth, and people think I'm addicted to meth, but I'm not. I never do drugs. But, I do hear the angels and I do see messages in the clouds, the wind, the currents in the river, and in the song of the Channel Cat, that great, 40-pound bottom-dwelling riparian saint, whose body takes on the plastics, heavy metal, chicken farm excrement, and fertilizer run-off of the upper Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri watershed.

Note the ridge of resistant sandstone. photo: susan smith nash

The chair warmed up in the light of the Sun. The chair suggests what was there before, but now is gone.

But once the initial intrigue has passed, and you're no longer envisioning what was in the chair and why it was there, your focus directs itself to the platform (the riverbed) and to the water's qualities -- its clarity, its current, its surface expression, with ripples, splashes, and deviations around brush, trash, and trees.

The Arkansas River levels fluctuate based on Keystone Dam flood control activity / photo credit: susan smith nash

Narrative Accompanying the Installation: The Observer

What is foregrounded is the notion of what is relatively permanent -- what stays, what persists, what lives on -- when the body that was in the chair flies up and is potentially lifted up to meet its maker (the Rapture is one possible explanatory framework). What lives on after we are gone? And, what were we in the first place anyway?  The body is the wrapper around a mind that imagines itself to be a self; a package for consciousness.

But perhaps the consciousness is not really confined to that wrapper or package (or human body).

What is also foregrounded is the notion of the edge. Notice how the chair is at the edge of a ridge of a rock formation that constitutes part of the riverbed. The riverbed consists of layers of sediment and rock formations of variable resistance to erosion. The harder layers resist erosion. The softer layers are worn away and their grains are deposited in sand bars, points, and little mid-stream islands.

A Navajo sand painter is usually a medicine man of high rank and respectability in his community. The sand painting is a work of beauty, but that’s just part of the story. The purpose of it is to train the mind and to heal the body by means of aligning energies and pleasing the gods. The different worlds are represented, including the underworld, and the notions of past, present, and future come together. The flowing water, the eroding rock, the sand grains that flow down the river to deposit themselves here, and then redeposit themselves there, are very much a living sand painting, and if we sit in the chair so close to the rock and we let ourselves become one of those sand grains, we can find ourselves taken to where Nature wants us to go. We travel. We flow. We pause to nourish ourselves while we listen, sleep, and consider what we understand as reality in our small nook of the world.

Polysemous Interpretation from the Medieval Cleric

Literal / Historical: We see the literal presence of the chair sitting in the middle of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Tropological / Metaphorical: We see the metaphorical implications, and the tension between the permanent and the ephemeral.

Allegorical: There are the existential implications, and the issues of our fundamental ontological insecurity, which has to do with how we see beingness, becomingness, and what it takes to be real.

Anagogical: Then there are the anagogical interpretations, the ones having to do with the individual's progress toward salvation (using a model from the Medieval times, the Scholastics' mindset). The afterlife is at issue here, and yet, instead of coming to this interpretation last, as one would normally do, the "I Heard the Angels" refers to the Rapture, and thus the anagogical interpretation is the first one.

A Post-Midsummer Night's Fire Dance

Shredded tissue.  Crumpled silk.  Clouds moving across the face of the moon shimmering as though already full.

For audio, click here. 

Warm breeze on my face, the rustle of leaves. Laughter.  A country band on the River Parks pavilion, festooned with small white Christmas lights, the only backdrop an American flag painted on a wall constructed of somewhat warped 1 x 8 boards.

I walked toward the pavilion, wrapping up an evening walk on the river's edge, where magic and mystery prevail in the level of the water: today up on the banks, tomorrow almost gone except for stagnant pools between the mudflats. That's how it is for a river functions as flood control for an upstream dam and reservoir. Sometimes I spend time counting turtles on the rocks and logs. At other times, I observe homeless sleeping rough on the grass and residents of nearby half-million dollar homes walking their miniature dachshunds and coveted-breed dogs.

It's 8:30 pm. The days are getting shorter. It's warm, but it's already dark, and I feel a bit sad to usher in the end of the summer, although I love the autumn, with its heady temperature changes, gaudy leaves, and robin-egg football season skies.

Lights are flickering in my peripheral vision. I flash-wonder if I'm genetically doomed to lose my peripheral vision. My dad has fought a losing battle with glaucoma, and although my eye pressures are fine, my opthamologist has referred me to a glaucoma specialist, although he says I'm 20-30 years younger than most he refers. Oh. Well. Thank you.  I guess.  I have researched the items that cause eye pressures to increase, and I realize I already do everything I'm supposed to, except I could cut out all coffee and avoid yoga. I find avoiding the Downward Dog does not present too many problems. Coffee -- well, that's another issue.

So in my still-intact peripheral vision, I see flickering lights. I look toward what seems to be people juggling fire, and I mention them to a couple of people standing near.

"Oh yes -- there's a big group that comes out on Tuesdays. Almost 50. Tonight it's just a few. Real fire, except the light on the ground. The circle of light is an LED light."

I approach and I see two individuals -- a woman with what seems to be a hulu hoop with equidistant sources of flame, and a man with two flaming balls on the edge of what appears to be a long jump rope.  It's a chain with two fire sources, and it's called a "poi."  The woman is working with a fire hoop.

River Parks, Tulsa, Oklahoma:  Performer with Fire Hoop

Their movements are fluid, well-choreographed, and I feel I'm suddenly in the woods on the edge of the palace of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I will never forget the Shakespeare in the Park evenings in Edmond, Oklahoma. My son, then 11, would go with me, and we'd sit on a couple of beach towels and watch the actors. By far, my favorite was their interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, set far in the future, rather than in classical antiquity.

I ask one of the dancers how long she has been fire dancing. She says for 3 years and she runs workshops. I wonder if fire dancing is having some sort of resurgence, with Burning Man vibes.  It merits investigating.

In Chengdu, China, I had the opportunity to go to a Tea House, which was a place you could eat dinner and then see a variety show with acrobatic acts. Juggling was big, and juggling tea pots, ones that actually had water inside them was pretty amazing. There was also a bit of juggling items that could be set alight -- I often wondered what would happen if the flaming items in the air ever collided with the numerous silk scarves one was wont to see in the highly decorated locations.

Others are videoing the dancing, so I suppose it's perfectly acceptable. I take out my phone and capture a few performances, thinking how amazing it is to be able to stand 2 feet from the circle of light, and to be so close that I can smell the fuel, hear the flames. When the lead dancer says "Switch" I watch the movements with delight. I love the way that they incorporate the aleatory yet seemingly perfectly predestined musical accompaniment.

Fire Hoop and Flaming Poi: Performers in Tulsa, Oklahoma

This is not my first close-up encounter with fire and its arts. I will never forget the Novruz Bayram holiday, the first day of spring in Baku, Azerbaijan.  All throughout the city one could see small improvisatory fire art, as people shouted and then jumped over the flames.  The practice dated back to Zoroastrian days, with Mazda the god of light, and a competition between good and evil. In theory, each jump over the fire burned up one year of misdeeds. My curiosity got the best of me and I paid the interpreter to take me to a group with a tiny fire where they would let me jump (for a gift of vodka). I jumped numerous times, but probably not enough to clear the slate. Oh well. It was a start. While I was leaping, I really never felt any fear, or that I’d fall. Granted, the fire was small.

Other fire art could include July 4 fireworks, but I’ve preferred to keep my distance. I, like all other young children, liked sparklers, which I now consider to be good for nothing but mutilations.

Again, my thoughts float back to Shakespeare in the Park and the actors portraying people in varying stages of enchantment. I wonder if someone will sprinkle pansy juice in my eyes and if I’ll be a helpless captive of the first thing I set my eyes on.

Moon higher in the sky. It casts a strangely orange glow. The waters of the Arkansas River (yes, there is water tonight) sparkle and glow with golden moonlight, while the park sizzles and sparkles with the white-light fire whirling in the tender night.

Urban Rivers

The river flows, and it’s hard to tell quite what it was in the past, or even what it is today. As usual, the disgusting possibilities occur to me first: open sewer, carcass-dumping zone, industrial waste disposal, unregulated water taxi and barge thoroughfare.

But, even though the water is not very clean, there are other happier purposes: drinking water source (for animals), fish hatchery, fishing pool, flood control, crew team training course, houseboat pier, in-stream fountains, cooling towers for power plants, reflecting pools, and flower garden irrigation.

I always think of an urban river as an “industrial river.” I like the big rivers that have navigable depths and which eventually achieve an almost mystical confluence with larger, continental rivers such as the Mississippi. They flow, and the moving waters suggest infinity.

They also suggest power: power that can be harnessed, directed, and shaped into various Industrial Revolutions and superhighways of manufactured goods and raw materials that make their way downstream. The rivers can also snap their flimsy harnesses, too, when the rain gods (or HAARP, if you believe conspiracy theories) cause super-collisions of hot, wet Gulf air and the crisp, dry jetstream, and it rains 11 inches in a day.

There may no longer be a need for urban centers to be located near navigable rivers, but they can still be centers of commerce for the post-industrial urban center, which succeeds when it manages calm and provide a sense of a future to its seething, change-addled masses.

River at Tulsa: The Arkansas, flows into the Red River, a tributary of the Mississippi. It reveals its industrial origins with two refineries within several miles of each other, electricity generation, gravel pits, and flood control that results in water levels that verge on the surreal. One day, the stream flows high on the banks. The next day, the water practically disappears and its pools are jammed with ducks and geese, and wide expanses of stinking fetid mud. When I look at this, I remember it’s not the Arkansas River that is navigable. It’s the Verdigris River at the Port of Catoosa.  There’s a big ammonium nitrate plant at the edge of it, which makes me think simultaneously of the Murrah Building (Oklahoma City bombing) and of algal blooms, “red tide” and noxious bio-activity…

Arkansas River: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Rivers at Pittsburgh: Monongahela and the Allegheny. I wish I could time-travel and experience Pittsburgh when it was a Faustian “Witches’ Kitchen” – with forges emulating rounds of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatory – it just seems really ironic these days that the same locations are now graced by genteel baseball stadiums, running (aka “wellness” trails), open-air restaurants featuring “nouvelle cuisine,” and barge-ride history tours…

I suppose it’s all a good thing, and contributes to Pittsburgh being widely touted as America’s “most livable city” but I have to say that I shudder at the de-industrialization because to me it means that we have found a way to sugar-coat underemployment and exploitation of the “brain drain” enticed newly-arrived immigrants, and point out that everyone’s happy if they know where their next paycheck is coming from, and if it’s skimpy, well, then, they can go panhandle on a bridge as sports aficionados file across to watch a Pirates baseball game, or football with the Steelers, or hockey with the Penguins.

Aren’t they somehow ashamed? I long for the muscularity of foundries and vats of molten metal, along with bargeloads of finest-in-the-world hot-burning anthracite coal.

What does having an industrial-level river going through your town actually mean? How does it affect the sense of identity of those who live on the river’s edge? One initial impact is to make you aware of water and the need to cross it. I know that’s shallow – but it’s not just about the flow and the power of the water to transport; it’s also about the way the water can be a barrier, and when in flood, an intruder.

There is a walkway that extends from the Monongahela River to the entrance of the Pittsburgh Convention Center. At first, it seems like a nice stream that flows down from street level to the river where you can walk down the paved pedestrian river trail that parallels the river. In the evening, the stream fountain is no longer merely a rippling, babbling brook that flows over the artificial rocks in the artificial stream. Instead, it’s an intensely and technically choreographed play of lights and “wall of water” fountains.

I felt I was in Cecil DeMille’s production of The Ten Commandments, and the part where the testosterone hero of the age, Charlton Heston, assuming the role of Moses, parted the waters of the Red Sea, and walked through, leading his people. Previously, my drought-jaundiced view was that Moses simply found a place that had dried up due to drought, and he took advantage of an ephemeral meteorological phenomenon. Now, however, I wonder if it was a grand metaphor for the way it feels to walk through corridors of the most intense imaginable white noise and it’s something that makes you feel joy, spunk, and an odd devil-may-care abandon.

Oklahoma City's "Manufactured River," the Oklahoma River: I think there’s a certain charm in the “manufactured” rivers – the San Antonio Riverwalk, and the body of water that was once thought of as the North Canadian River, but now is known as something else as it flows through Oklahoma City’s “Bricktown” – I’d say they are both the river equivalents of an HO-scale model train railroad.

Bricktown, Oklahoma City -- the Oklahoma River

Before the careful grooming and sculpting of the river channel, the North Canadian River (now known as the “Oklahoma River”) was just a click away from being an ephemeral stream, with water in it just part of the year.

With trenching, damming, dozing, and more construction of urban storm water drainage, the “Oklahoma River” is now an urban pressure valve; situated as it is in what used to be an urban war zone, with detox center, half-collapsed boarded-up crack houses, and semi-abandoned old brick warehouses and spurious junkyard-esque shopfronts. There were more Dobermans and pit bulls than people. There was also a lot of crime, and the brick streets were just one vote away from being asphalted over when the idea of turning blight into a species of theme park was born.

Now, the post-industrial urban river, the “Oklahoma River,” sports water taxi rides, outdoor dining, and clusters of colorful, locally-owned restaurants. It is the core of a new collective consciousness; the city reinventing itself, while also giving itself a small place to get away, eat, drink, laugh, bond, embarrass oneself, strike business deals, and dream of connections.

The new urban river may not be harnessed into generating electricity or transporting bargeloads of heavy industry, but it still accommodates (and even transforms) the often very heavy, even overloaded, psychological cargo of the times.