The Garden of Art: 'The Visitors'

            Want to hear some great music? Go to an art museum.

            A performance artist from Iceland named Ragnar Kjartansson got together with about eight of his closest friends (which admittedly sounds like a joke) and created a piece that's more ethereally beautiful than any attempt at description can possibly suggest.

            The performance piece is called "The Visitors" and it's currently on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. If you haven't been to this museum, the building itself is worth the price of admission plus parking in a nearby waterfront district lot (a piece of pure urban larceny). The site is especially fetching in the summer when you look out over the harbor from a number of perspectives inside the building or sit outdoors on the steps.

            A visit to "The Visitors" left me with this question: Why shouldn't performance art be sensually ravishing and spiritually nourishing? Instead of merely in-your-face provocative,  thought-provoking at best, crude at worst, politically strident -- and all sorts of personally poking and probing -- as it usually is? Other uses of this relatively new hybrid art medium, borrowing from dance, theater, comedy, buffoonery, exhibitionism, action painting, mime, cross-dressing, installation art, video, media art, computer art and all other forms of visual arts (OK music and spoken word as well) may be equally valid. But the confrontational side of performance art seems to be over-represented in most pieces, and the soul-stirring capacities of performance underfed.

            I'm not saying that Kjartansson started out by saying 'let's do something soulful and nourishing'  --but in "The Visitors" that's where he ended up.

            The show is true surround-sound. You walk into a large darkened mostly empty rounded gallery space. Light comes from the half-dozen large screens that line the perimeter wall; two wider screens are mounted back to back on a surface in the room's center. Each screen is a different, human image. We're not faced with something we have to make sense of. We know what we're seeing. In all but one a different musician is both playing an instrument or singing, or doing both. (In the other, a group of people are gathered on a big old-fashioned porch while a man in a hardhat waits under an umbrella until it's his moment to fire off an antique cannon.)

            Some of the performers switch between instruments. All are performing in real time vis-a-vis one another. Though isolated in separate chambers of a large cluttered mansion -- the ICA literature describes the place as a "romantically dilapidated farmhouse" -- without visual contact, the performers listen to each other over their earphones. They perform a single, hour-long composition in a single uninterrupted take. Pianos, guitars, drums, a cello, an accordion; an acoustic sound most of the way powering up into amplification at some points. Their vocals harmonize and trade off in intensity.

            The 'song' they sing has only a few lyrics. The same short verse -- a free-floating leitmotif offered in a mood of lyrical, rhapsodic regret -- is repeated almost without end; it switches out with a second verse at one point, then after the pace slows to a brief musical siesta, returns with an even greater, though contained fervor. The composition is both minimalist and Gospel-intense. The meaning lies much more in the feeling than whatever sense the words ("Once again/I fall back into/my feminine ways") may convey.

            It's pointless to try to explain the audience experience -- described by one reviewer as the realization that you are 'the visitors' -- any further. But it's musical in a way that catching a  favorite song calls us back to some original pleasure and sense of discovery -- and that's a rare experience to have on a first hearing of anything.

            The performers are dressed (most of them) in ordinary clothing, from nightgowns for the women to casual dude-wear for the guys. Kjartansson himself is perched in a bathtub in his birthday suit (seen above; photo credit: Luhring Augustine, New York, and 18 Gallery, Reykjavik), a board placed across the tub preserves a semblance of modesty. This naked bather cameo providing the media with an image that says "well, don't forget, this is performance art." But the total effect of the piece's set-up is the sense that a houseful of peers come together for a weekend in a big country house all get out of bed one morning (one didn't; you glimpse her back while a guitarist sits on the bed and plays)

with exactly the same idea and decide to put it into practice without extensive discussion of what they were doing or why or what it meant.

            Some of all our best days begin that way.

            For the visitors, the physical arrangement of the piece, screens all around us, sound from everywhere, does make us feel in some sense 'inside' the music, and the performance. That's probably part of the magic.    

Summer Hums Along

            August is a bee-loud season.

            We see them everywhere by this stage of the season.

            On the butterfly bush in front of the house. On the Autumn Joy sedum  (second pic) just coming into flower in the last two weeks.

            When we eat breakfast on weekend mornings in the perennial garden, we see them rushing through the black-eyed susans and the flowering mint (third photo). Bees particularly like wildflowers and native plants. The mint grows wild all over our garden, wherever I don't remove it, and the bees rush through the thick patches of fuzzy-blooming mint as if someone has given them the order to double-time through the day. It's amazing they keep out of each other's way. Each bee zooms through every blossom every other bee has already visited. 

            Are they all getting something? Is every pollen seed, every particle, a valuable addition to the health of the hive?

            The bees spend more time among the wilder plantings, but they're not snobs. They visit the potted ornamentals as well, dipping into the orange centers of the marigolds. And, remarkably (see photo) sampling the interiors of some two-toned pink pansies (bottom photo) that have been blooming in exactly the same place since some time in April. 

            Unfortunately, of course, bees aren't really 'everywhere' these days, and their numbers have suffered frightening declines.

            Two days ago, Aug. 16, I am told by an organization called Friends of Earth, was Honey Bee Day. For a couple of years now, since the beginning of the extinction scare that came be called "hive collapse syndrome," scientists and environmentalists have been calling attention to the role played by honey bees in our food production. Fruits, nuts and grains depend upon the fertilization of crops by bees and other pollinators.

            A sense of crisis propelled research into a complex of factors that were causing the radical die-off in bee colonies. One factor these studies isolated is the effect of 'neonicotinoid' (or 'neonic') pesticides as a key contributor to bee declines. Neonics are a new class of insecticides chemically related to nicotine.

            "Neonics aren’t just harming bees," the Friends of the Bees say in a recent post. "They also hurt birds, butterflies, reptiles, earthworms and soil microbes essential to healthy ecosystems and food production. Just one seed coated in neonics is enough to kill a songbird. ...Scientists around the globe are calling for immediate regulatory action to restrict neonics to stop what some are calling a second 'Silent Spring.'”   

            Here's the group's website. www.foe.org/about-us. 

            The Friends of Earth are urging people to write letters to newspapers to put pressure on government to restrict the use of this relatively new pesticide. "Thanks to the efforts of people like you, our campaign to save the bees is gaining momentum." they say. "Last month, you and thousands of others wrote letters to President Obama asking him to push for stronger action to save bees."

The link to their 'how to' page on writing to newspapers is here: action.foe.org/letter/?letter_KEY=1539.

            Even if they weren't central to keeping us fed -- no bees, no blueberries, to take one summertime example -- bees are an essential part of our world. We have a common interest with bees. Neither one of us can happily survive without summer, food, and flowers.

            Not only do they help keep our bodies alive, they buzz in some part of our mind or spirit that would not be the same without them. Poet W.B. Yeats coined the phrase "the bee-loud glade" in his poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Here it is:

       I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

        And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

        Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

        And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

        And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

        Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

        There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

        And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

        I will arise and go now, for always night and day

        I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

        While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

        I hear it in the deep heart’s core. 

          I think whenever we hear, or see, bees working in a flower patch, we have a little peace there. 

Vacation Days: High and Dry in the Garden

            I'm been on vacation, but the garden is still here. It doesn't get to go anywhere.

            The second week of August, when like so many others (as I know from experience, having met them on the highway) I motored away from home to summer places, the season in eastern Massachusetts fell into "the dries," a kind of valley of fatigue, a near-death valley. It happens some time every summer, but since I was gone so much I was slower to pick up on it. Back home this week I busied myself watering the potted plants, oblivious to the general collapse in the perennial beds. Pachysandra lying on the ground in a wilted state of mind, like flocks of thirsty beasts in a desert: never saw that before.

            It's time for cutting back, retrenchment. Humility. That drier, late-summer, less flowery aesthetic. Modest, buttoned down, trimmed back. Thrift arrives, at last. Moderation in all things. The Puritans are about to close the playhouses. Small distinctions matter more now; a second bloom left here and there. A late bloom, a renewed bloom, That rare and cherished late bloomer. A certain sedum's pinkish smile, the bizarre spotted lily. Those September stars, the asters. Those sea-creatures-on-land with their thirst for faraway places, the late-season anemones.

            When I finally realize that my one-man bucket brigade will poop out well before I water the whole critical-list dry-space, and that even some areas, some plantings I've hand-watered the day before are crying out once again for more the following day, I throw in the towel and dig the old sprinkler out of the shed. Every season I say 'let's see if I can get by with measured, anticipatory hand-watering, without resorting to the sprinkler.' Every season I'm wrong.

            So I sprinkle the whole back flower garden, after relying on the water can to cater to the high-priority vegetable garden customers (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, basil). And then, the following day, comes what the newspaper with its usual flair for horror flick hyperbole calls "a wall of water."

            I'm glad. I tune my frame of mind to acceptance. OK, it's middle August. At least after a good rain the plants will be able to decline for a week or two with dignity. "Grow old along with me," as the poem says.

            On the other hand, of course, I am aware of a certain inward tickling urge to go out and buy some more plants.

In the Thick of It: the Garden and the Novel

 

           As the month ends, a great month, a fantastic July for growing things, I have to wonder if it's time to pick some flowers.

            They grew tall this month, some of them, and thick, a lot of them.

            The tall phlox, with its pinkish violet blooms (top photo), push up to grab as much of the mid-summer sun as they can get while they're still fresh and young. They crowd each other and expand into any place they can take for their own before some other plant takes it. I find them in places where I don't really want, but I think, well in a month they'll flower.

            The phlox combine with the yellow blossoms -- the Rudbeckia (top photo, yellow blossoms), the taller and more persistent daylilies, the baby blue balloon (last pic) flowers, the white gooseneck loosestrife, which curve up and then down, little sine-curves of finger-pointing white blossoms, and the white Queen Anne's Lace (last) to make a busy upper-story in the perennial garden.

            Surely they could spare a few blossoms.  

            Bright colors also appear on the cone flowers, the red Mandeville roses (third photo), the red lobelia, the purple fuzzy Liatris, the ever-climbing morning glory (second photo), and a still lively array of newcomer daylilies that I'm grateful to for expanding the season.

            What of the fat fuzzy white "fairy candles"? The bees love them and drag their legs all through the cottony 'candles' of the tall stalky blossoms. The blaze in the shade.

            Should I take some inside. Will they flame as well indoors?

            D. H. Lawrence made the classic case against cut flowers in his iconic novel of young love and mother-love "Sons and Lovers."

            "I don’t want the corpses of flowers about me,” his biographical stand-in coming of age character Paul Morel maintains, in rejecting the desire of his first love, adolescent Miriam, to pick the wildflowers they both admire and take them home to put in a vase.

            Actually, he doesn't like Miriam's whole approach to nature. “You're always begging things to love you," Paul upbraids her, "as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them--”

            Lawrence was a celebrated love poet ("Look! We have come Through!"), travel writer, and early theorist on modern psychology, in addition to novelist. His stand-in spokesmen have scathing things to say about his own early 20th century English society, in all social classes. His deeper characters, whether uneducated peasants, or anguished self-questioning aristocrats, have a deep connection with nature.

            Paul Morel, a coal miner's son just as "Bertie" Lawrence himself was, trekked all over the countryside, drew and painted plants, and bared his soul beneath the stars. It's not surprising he has strong feelings about flowers.

            While still la teenager, working class Paul takes his first fulltime job in a factory. "Already [Lawrence writes] he was a prisoner of industrialism. Large sunflowers stared over the old red wall of the garden opposite... He was being taken into bondage. His freedom in the beloved home valley was going now."

            Does that mean that Paul is right when he complains that cut blossoms are nothing more than "the corpses of flowers"?

            I don't thinks so. Flowers are the plant's way of persuading people to keep growing them -- and allow them to keep going and going and going. We'll never pick them all (and personally I never pick more than a couple). Some of the seed will always escape and find its own little piece of earth to start a new branch of the family. They spread their likeness, root, stem and flower in a deathless expansion of life.

            It appears to be working. Our black-eyed susans, to take one example, are all over the place.