extension: from a teahouse in New Mexico to a Brooklyn rooftop
an ephemeral act of relational aesthetics
beyond 28 days, towards 2010 begins
5.10.07 Teahouse, Santa Fe, Canyon Rd.
tea artist
We make and drink matcha tea throughout the 28 days. It is a response to our first experience of relational aesthetics as a practice that creates more without excess: practice as passage On day 25, we run out of matcha.
Today, lunch at the teahouse. A perfect place to buy the green powder for a celebration of day 29 in NYC. But the woman behind the counter says: "It's very expensive. That's why we usually sell it only by the cup." OK, we say, we'll wait on the matcha. She rings up the lunch tab. Pauses. "Do you have a wisk at home?" she asks. Yes. She pulls out a small white bag. "I'll give you some." She takes up the tiny scoop. Fills it three times. Just enough for two cups. "Put this in the frig right away," she says, and hands us a celebration.
5.10.07 Red Dog Shed, Madrid, NM
new beginnings and collaborations on the 28th day.
card extended: Chris All the participants are remodeled by it- Haraway
5.10.07 "cool blue"
A smooth vector. A moving site of contact for 3630 miles.
card extended: barely leaving a mark communicative through a language of transitivity itself --richard long
5.9.07 White Sands National Monument
Missiles and the whitest of dunes. The natural and the human meeting in a border town. Riding many edges simultaneously. The 27th day.
5.8.07 The Lightning Field
Monumental invisiblity. "Knowing" the grid enough to release it. Perceptual channels of passage tunneling beyond the horizon. The world will look cluttered after this. Overlay of simplicity. Points of reference. A walk within: line, align, re-align. Line, align. re-align. All directions. Center of the axis extending out beyond. Far beyond. Time. Passage. Storms, set, rises. This is not about lightning, not about rods. Light. Light. Light. Activated and breathing. The event. The big appearance. Spindles of crystal. The last exhale of the day comes through orange, disappearing into sleep. Appear, Disappear. Appear. Disappear. The art of bringing humans out, into, within the landscape. There is nothing here to see and I am here.
card extended: Bill Imaginations extending near to far, self to other
5.8.07 The Lightning Field Cabin
Intentionally bare enough for us to be only "here" for 24 hours. Interface to the outside. The ultimate simplicity with "DIA" details.
5.8.07 The Very Large Array, New Mexico
Signaling scale and universes beyond. Land Art of another kind. Serial. Unison. Seeking contact.
The sky quakes with the sound of jets. Of another world, ours.
5.8.07 El Mal Pais National Monument, Lava Falls
walking on the earth's petrified movement
5.8.07 Ice Cave, Grants, NM
Early morning. Artic algae. 20 feet deep. Frozen year round for more than 1000 years. Collapsed lava tubes. This is a new New Mexico, again.
5.8.07 Continental Divide
the earth folds on itself here
tips over
and down from here to the Pacific
from here to the Mississippi
5.7.07 Cimarron Rose, Grants, NM
creating hospitable environments for birds, animals, humans
passing through the desert
card extended: Sherri, sustainable living practices when bodies move accordingly
5.7.07 Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings
Nestled living within a flow. Signaling Chaco. A National Park, "America's park". Vast expanses between the living past and the living present. Distant views. Populated.
5.7.07 cloud trumps mountain
5.05.07 Shape Typology
28 days of shape. Link here to full study 5.04.07 Color Typology
28 days of passage through color sensation. Link here to full study 5.03.07 Limit Case/Traversing the Colorado Plateau
28 days, innumerable sites.
chosen for their intensities
each one a limit case, an extreme
making them resonate with one another
each looking unreal
feeling unreal
not possible in some way
in mid-trip we realize these sites traverse the Colorado Plateau
they take the forces in play at the making and re-making of the Plateau
to extremes
making them visible and palpable in ways
impossible to go unnoticed
each site is on an extreme edge
of the world's continuous unfolding as planet earth
extreme edges are the new "sustainable"
extreme acts of imagination are required
extreme creativity
not conservation
but extremity
taking innovation to its limits
is the new "green"
5.03.07 Specie Mesa, CO
Experiences have been intense flickers of here and gone, now and then, self and stranger, passing through one another.
Flickering, finding forward during the mesa pause.
card extended: Linda: movement within stillness
4.31.07 Moab, UT
cards extended: Wicked Brew: drive slowly, appear quickly; Kokopelli Lodge: the practice of everyday life is worthy of being called art
4.30.07 Clean Livin' as Living Space at the Apex
We humans face urgent environmental challenges and opportunities that are global in scale. To meet them, we will need to perform unprecedented feats of imagination, innovation, and responsiveness to each other and to the environment.
We came to Clean Livin’ to inhabit a space that was designed to create desires and invent skills needed for imagining, innovating, and responding. We quickly realized that the place and experience of in-habitation—of living within—is directly shaped by what is right outside, just beyond the thin skin of a WWII Quonset hut. We sensed the natural and built environments and human relationalities of Wendover and West Wendover as also residing with us, within Clean Livin’, and vividly so.
We have been inhabiting not only Clean Livin’, but also the multiple, complex, layered, divided, relational and open Wendovers. Our space of inhabitation has become a simultaneous convergence and extension—of forces, flows, pressures, releases—not easily separated from the context of living itself. At times polarities, urgencies, ironies and absurdities verged on the overwhelming, and demanded a creative response.
Clean Livin’ is a carefully designed convergence of human and natural forces—an exquisitely concentrated zone of contact. Its footprint is an apex of crossed, polarized, divided, and “out of relation” spheres of intensity (physical, historical, future, economic, social, cultural, environmental, visual). Their forces flow through Clean Livin’sporous container. Clean Livin’ draws them in, then puts them into creative relation to one another in ways that are at once life-sustaining, ironic, and playful.
This is a living space as nonviolent/creative-zone-of-contact.
Clean Livin’s gift to artists is that it provides us with the means to sustain our focus on and at the apex.
From here, we can embody and (re)imagine these spheres of intensity in fluid, vivid relationality. And this might be the most powerful, urgent, and necessary action we can take as humans and as artists: to expose our bodies and imaginations directly to sites and moments at which natural and human spheres of intensity come vividly and critically into play. To pause at the apex. To feel the reality of relation. To make and create responsively there.
The creative response of our work is to use the arts and aesthetic experience to help people develop both the skills and the desire to live daily life in ways that create “more without excess.”
How Clean Livin' becomes an apex in Wendover:
1) connecting to landscape as "earth" instead of site of exploitation. Energy/resources sensed as limited, bounded, measured out- precious.
2) existing here, not elsewhere. On the edge of a city that is a convergence of casino culture, small town, tourism, abandoned buildings, deeply charged war-time history, a randomly active airport, eerie proximity to the contemporary military industrial complex and the daily effects of a harsh penetrating desert landscape.
3) is porous, open, and filled with apertures within a fenced, guarded, controlled, restricted context.
4) offering simple, yet highly advanced innovations (at remote location) to fulfill human daily practice needs (outdoor pump shower, compost toilet, two-person-power bicycle for retrieving water from miles away, solar-charged batteries for electricity).
5) incorporating the aesthetically felt and immediately experienced inside and out. The living space is "designed" as more than one at once with recycled, found, and borrowed architectural elements (windows as apertures, portals, ventilation; tables as workspaces, eating spaces, aesthetic cuts; electricity as sun converted; bike as plaything, water-retrieving device). A space of play and innovation.
6) inviting change, contamination, and feedback by circulating artists into the space on a rotating basis. Inviting responses, keeping the site in the making...elsing and augmenting subsistence-living innovations from Mexico, architectural history (Buckminster Fuller), and incorporating them into this site. Creating a context to be an artist within Wendover. Offering a sense of distance, remoteness, and change from Wendover the city.
7) being playful in the face of military debris, bunkers, barbed wire, guns going off, litter of bullets, army maneuvers, and rules of conformity.
8) architecture as a ki akido move: moving in accord with straight line energy (bullets, linear thought, rules, habitual ways, already determined policies and procedures) just enough to redirect the straight and the self in new and unexpected and poetic directions.
9) Clean Livin'experienced as existing in direct relation with other efforts to design living spaces that invite more without excess: Bambi Airstream trailer, Chaco Canyon Pueblo Bonito great house, Sundance yurts, Rancho de Taos adobe church. All provide inhabitable spaces within and in response to fixed quantities of resources; without excess; simple forms, curved lines meeting surrounding landscapes; anomalies within their contexts (come upon as surprises, mysteries, questions, imagination, difference); facilitating migrations and flows of humans passing through; as crossroads. Transitional spaces--each and every--existing as relays that draw in and send out, changed.
cards extended to SimpArch: moving through and with one another the world and humans become intense, all the participants are remodeled by it -Haraway
4.29.07 Ghost Town
childhood stories, fantasies, movies, games.
wwII was a fresh memory.
just yesterday.
I grew up imagining fighting wwII
as a bomber pilot
a soldier
a liberator
movies
life magazines
photos
as a kid I probably watched a movie
shot at the Wendover airfield
about training that prepared and inspired
about ingenuity and invention and loyalty and never giving up
and being in the right
and sacrificing for others
and innocence
simple
clean
right
gratitude
relief
it was over
we were safe
always had been
because of what went on at Wendover
thank God it did
they did
we did
what if we hadn’t?
we’re living in a Quonset hut
as artists
it’s within sight of the Enola Gay hanger
in the movie he hand painted his mother’s name on the nose of his plane
“Enola Gay.”
the landscape around Clean Livin’ looks like
Hiroshima
Auschwitz
every Glenn Ford
Jimmy Stewart
Roz Russell
Why We Fight documentaries
every movie set in every film
black and white
still
especially at dawn
4.27.07 Salt Flats
white crust breaking. spring mud. blinding. matte sky unlike any blue I have ever.... open-pure extension. linear. 2 colors. the apex of our journey. arrival. barrier and conveyance. extreme. intensity of line, color, and landscape- meeting of multiple ancient forces in play.
4.27.07 SimpArch's Clean Livin', Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT/NV
Clean livin' is an anomaly, an exception. Context necessitates a more intense form of play. Oasis in camouflage. An elsed quonset in the face of the entrenched realities/patterns/performances/identities radiating from desert debris, abandoned look out towers, and flashing neon. It riffs into play, irony, baring down to meet the dry land on its own terms. It becomes a participant with a twist. Existing alongside, outside, within multiple contexts simultaneously. solar. design genius. "burn it up" indeed. life-force situated within. porous and self-contained. transitional space of the future sitting in the landscape of the past. connector for those who come and go. Hybridity for survival.
4.27.07 Wendover UT/NV
connecting, living, lines, binaries. present/past abandoned/populated arrive/depart weath/poverty east/west in/out darkness/blinding light utah/nevada artist/military pride/shame black/white secure/exposed public/private near/far tourist/local land/humans stay/leave disappear/appear. in relation. here. alongside. ghosts. aliens. extreme. alluding horizon. lines dissolve. lines drawn. borders move.
4.26.07 CLUI (center for land use interpretation, Wendover, UT/NV)
the ultimate "social experiment". it is all questions, which provide the opening for a non-violent contact zone of proximity. side by side. within. contaminated. suspension of belief required.
"It's in that state of uncertainty that your mind is most active. That's the space of change, and anything can happen in that space. And if we can get people untethered, even briefly, then things change slightly, individually, and perhaps even collectively down the road." -Matt Coolidge
card extended: Matt: the history of the body's contact of the world is the respository of all significant knowledge- Jane Tompkins
4.26.07 Sun Tunnels
Remote. Giant shapes dwarfed by extending landscape. full silence. interactive rotation connecting and passing heavens to earth. a conversation. a slowing down. strong. flat rounding, up, over, through.
4.25.07 Spiral Jetty
Remote. Quiet. Edge. Weighted water lapping at the shore. Crystals. The red of dreams and other planets. The shape, just under the surface. A mystic calm. A pause.
4.25.07 Bingham Copper Pit
Eerie mammoth Richard Serra's loom on the horizon. The result of humans moving into the earth for over 100 years. The earth moving back. Shaping and reshaping, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is an operation with a clean surface. A visitor center. A viewing platform. A museum. A gift shop. It ends up being all color, shape, line, intensity, politics... beyond words.
4.24.07 Yurt, Sundance, UT
We take Sundance's three yurts as our focus and our impetus to create a form for our responses to 28 days. We begin with polariods, drawings, and words: image-sensations of our inhabitation of the yurt. A hike with Jessie and Celeste to the meadow and waterfall puts our experiences of the yurts into their broader landscape and context at Sundance--and puts them into relation with Pueblo Bonito at Chaco and the Bambi Airstream at Ten Thousand Waves.
4.23.07
Pottery, Art Shack, Sundance Resort, UT
Centering energy. Watching shapes transform. Infinite shapes within one block of clay. We were welcomed by a gentle guide.
card extended: Tim: spin me 'round
4.22.07
Sundance Resort, UT
Nature and creativity obey the same laws to the same end: life. --Robert Redford
Nothing is more creative and sustainable for the planet than an affirmation of creativity and invention. We've been met with resounding "yes" after "yes" at Sundance. We shared dinner with our hosts here. We all agree that we sense a gathering of momentum--individuals initating their own creative responses (in the spirit of Kyo--see below) to urgent needs for massive and global innovation of sustainable life practices. We sense more openness to collaboration. A growing network of connections around that same sense. To share or give resources the arts and artists even when resources are scarce. To find some way to say "yes" to an opportunity to create newness and difference even when rules and procedures don't yet exist to authorize that "yes."
cards extended: Julie: using difference to connect; Celeste: humans and the world moving through one another; Jessie: follow the joy
4.22.07
Kyo
Bryce Canyon, UT
Today we were visited by a crow.
S/he put two kinds of law into play. Laws that we humans call "natural laws" because they supposedly mark the absolute limits of what can occur on this planet. And laws that we humans make and enforce. The crow's arrival alongside our car brought an unexpected encounter with the laws of the National Park. We learned that how the law is taught or delivered by its enforcers is the space of play within the law. Because it is a living space of relationality between humans.
"Crow is the sacred keeper of the law. Crow medicine signifies a first hand knowledge of a higher order of right and wrong than that indicated by the laws created in human culture. Allow the bending of physical laws to aid in creating the shape shifted world of peace."
In Japan, the word Kyo has connotations of bravery and high intention, of living outside the rules in order to retain the spirit of the rules.
card extended: humans and the world moving through one another
4.21.07 The Rocking V
A bit of vegetarian New York is discovered in Knab, UT.
card extended: "rearranging the ordinary so that moments of epiphany, strangeness, and beauty can slip in like an uninvited but welcome guest"
4.21.07 Monument Valley: Coming into Focus
click here to view movie
Navajo Lands, John Ford Country, Movie set, Postcard, sacred site, trading post, tourist draw, 17 mile loop that took 4 hours, forms of monumental weight, pinnacles toward earth and sky, realizing when to stop taking photos of, the thin line of being responsive, sense of arrival without any sense of how to be “here”…we pack up to leave before arriving. And he walks up to the car window. Silver turquoise necklaces, quiet voice, offering. Mustering the approach day after day. A young Navajo artist who has been told "no" before. Responding habitually, we ask each other if we want one, ask him “did you make them?”, after hesitation, we say “no thank you”. He turns away. Urge to depart. Urge to act differently. A break…a coming into focus. “We have just been approached by a human”. We quickly gather work to offer back, artist to artist. A blue "extension" card: “Life force as texture, color, shape, edge, surface, depth, form." A hand-filled bag of green leaf tea. We tell him “we drink it when we are trying to get inspired”. His quiet smile cracks the universe open, “You’re artists? I am an artist too”. A pause. An arrival. A departure.
card extended: Life force as texture, color, shape, edge, surface, depth, form.
4.20.07 Chaco Canyon, like the clouds, ephemerality lasting over 1150 years.
Intensity. Walking within. Charged silence. Charged light. Charged wind signaling, running rough and smooth over rocks, over and though, the sharp winded wings of black circling birds. Mystery hangs. Projecting imaginations into living ruins, but settling for the ever unknowable. Intellect over intuition. Weathered colors, crumbling, sharp ascent, climb to see the aerial encircle. We are outside, but in relation. Distant views and expanses. Passing though and into the Labyrinth. Ancient, taking in, to a deeper core. Not in psychic sync. Always whispering, alive-still. Roads of arrival. Leaving a mark, more than traces remain. Cycles. Universal tapping into. Lunar, solar, north, trade, sense of discovery, in play with the present. Enormity. Power-center. Pushed out by the wind.
Landscape as Architecture:
Canyon as a “great house”, built structures as rooms within the canyon, roads as architectural elements, landforms as architecture-spaces of inhabitation and daily practice. Built forms oriented to move in accord with natural forms. Architectural colors mirror, blend, and extend into the surrounding landforms. Crossroads channel human movements and exchanges, moving also in accord with sun, moon, and origin stories.
card extended: Russ by moving in accord we release yet unlived potentials for sustainable life practices
4.19.07
Bambi as a force in play; 150 square feet of intensive inhabitation.
We experienced the space as putting many forces into play…movement in play with function, color in play with scale (small space became playful and cheery)…inside in play with outside through a thin skin and reflective surface…mobility in play with accommodation and inhabitation..curved forms of cabinets and surfaces in accomodating relation to human bodies as we moved about and brushed past ... windows and apertures in play with light, time of day and weather…site of relaxation and retreat in play with affordability and access…cozy in play with the compact.
Curved cabinet edges, skylights, aluminum exterior, orange, blue, yellow, green, rounded geometric patterns, lava lamp, fresh fruit, warm interior, situated in forest within steps of spa, private outdoor seating area.
3 cards extended: Kathyrn, Elizabeth, Deborah: follow the joy, the practice of everyday art is worthy of being called art, the "relation" = the smallest unit of experience scale up
4.17.07, Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio, Abiquiu, NM
rules. regulations. habits. institutions.
We are living 28 days as we are right now because individual humans are finding ways to make collaborative exchanges with us as artists as we are in the midst of our project.
We and our project were met by an amazing human today. Her gesture toward us released forces too joyful and alive for rules and conventions. She set life-filled forces in play.
She became one of the many humans who are responding to us as artists not in the usual ways (grants, applications, review committees). But in un-usual ways (micro-residencies, an offer of rates reserved for "friends and family," an invitation to enter his personal space and ancestral home to hear his stories in their context, a creative bending of the rule that would otherwise make something in our project impossible). These human(e) acts are opening up not only unexpected routes for our project--but unexpected and joyful connections with strangers.
Maybe humans are sensing that institutions, habits, rules, regulations are no longer capable of meeting some of the most urgent needs of each other, cultures, and the planet. Individuals seem to be finding creative, idiosyncratic ways to break and enter ... break rules that only further endanger people, cultures, and the environment ... enter into connections never meant to be made. Using our own judgements, we are exploring: can this rule be bent, can this unusual way of collaborating be entertained, might doing this be fun and if so, why not?
card extended: tracestracestraces of meeting and being met
4.17.07, Downtown Subscription, Santa Fe, NM
Complimentary tea on customer appreciation day.
A card left in the tip jar. card extended: more without excess
4.16.07, Taos Pueblo, NM
In a telling that flowed like a stream he said....
He said: It was 1000 years. 800 years. It was today. It was 4 days of non-stop rain after 'gramps' went "home". It was foot races arriving on St. Geronimo day, coming again this September 30th. It was Roosevelt, the draft. We saw brown eyes and heard softening voice. He was going somewhere deep within while still reaching out. He said it was conquistadors, pueblos shining like gold, mistaken for Eldorado, falling into massacre. It was God talking to "all the people of the world in their own languages". It was baked bread. It was an invitation into, that is not usually offered. We sensed a mutual transformation. It was smooth and fluid like the river flowing between the pueblos. It was effortless. It was an unexpected meeting and moving through one another. It was an exchange. It was not a fix, a correction, an understanding, an apology, or an excuse. It contained no ugliness and never had to. There is no need, he said. It unfolded "in the traditional way" - for the future. It was a meeting here, in this existence, because, " this existence is worth more than all the money in the world". It was a deep pause. It was a practice of relationality unfolding delicately, responsively. It was life-forces meeting in the present tense as strangers. It was a stepping away.
card extended: Stillness within Movement
4.16.07, Ranchos de Taos, Taos, NM
She was pulled towards. It was shape, all shape. She wasn't thinking, just moving towards. It was light, form, color, texture. It was dream, imaginations projected, histories read in books and paintings. It was now. Before her. It was her body moving around it. There were cars, people, power lines, interiors, entrances and crosses. She didn't sense any of them, they didn't exist. Three large rectangles and four rounded cones, in symbiotic rhythm and dance together, did exist. They were presence. They existed, they had LIFE-FORCE. Cameras clicked, but fell away. She took out sketch book and pen. Surprisingly compelled. There were forces in play, with her, between her. She sensed and translated: line, gesture and sensation to paper. Only standing here, in this place, could she do this. Only here, moving in relation, seeing these shapes, feeling them loom against this blue sky in this light would she be compelled to "draw". Drawing became gesture, response, image - making. This wasn't a building. It was sun. It was earth. It was living - all and everything. Filled with wonder, filled with aliveness, filled with making- this site activated a life-force within her. It was trans-formatiive. She then stepped away.
4.15.07, Don, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM
He gestured towards us and opened not only space, but eyes and minds. He offered his insights of observation, gently. He opened the 'age old question', "What can be art?", while standing in The Museum. It was unexpected and welcome. It was responsive and genuine, without pretension. It was more than "a job" - his life-force moved accordingly.
card extended: Extending imagnination from close to far, here to there, self to other
4.13.07 Chalmers Capital Ford, Sante Fe, NM
They walked in without expectations. They were met, exceeded, gifted. It was total support without question. It was the dealership without a pitch. The artists were unleashed, sent on their way- out into the world- in motion with cool blue.
card extended: by moving in accord we release as yet unlived potentials for sustainable life practices
4.12.07, Dunshee's B&B, Santa Fe, NM.
It was late, becoming early. They had been traveling for many hours. They arrived at the doorstep to an unfamiliar place, far from home. Snow fell on christmas lights and the smell of rich smoke filled the night air. They passed under the archway to the door to discover a note pinned to the wood. The note addressed them personally. It was a welcoming, from a stranger, at the end of one long journey- and at the beginning of another. In this context, in this moment, the note was received as an extension beyond the commonplace, beyond the everyday. Through the traces of this stranger's handwriting they found a gesture of welcome, beginning, and relationality. It was a passing into 28 days.
card extended: Sante Fe: Aperture. Opening, passage, portal, retreat, exposure, interval
4.10.07, Brooklyn, NY.
On the eve of departure for 28 days Tanya visits. She tells us it is the year of the moth.
"Soon you will start seeing them. I did before I left," she said, looking into the distance. "I like them because they can disappear so quickly. You see them flutter and then they are gone. They leave you wondering if they were really here." She made a fluid, winged gesture with her hand, sat back and smiled.
Two days into 28 days. we have encountered forces in play and have become them ourselves. We have found ourselves moving in accord and those around us moving too. We are continuously surprised how events have unfolded, changed us, and met us, already. Our encounters are becoming the moths Tanya told us about. They step forward to meet us, we meet them, we exchange, and then we all step away. Changed. These experience are intense flickers of here and gone, now and then, self and stranger. Passing through one another.
card extended: Practice as Passage
