The Wide Starred Universe

Below is from How Wood Works: The Riches and Limits of James Wood by William Deresiewicz in The Nation (Nov 19, 2008) — which seems to be a cat fight among literary critics. Nevertheless, it’s a good read. Here is a bit from the middle:

For Wood, metaphor naturally runs away with itself, overreaches, and will necessarily at times be unsuccessful. His angled adjectives and mixed metaphors are a form of cognitive exploration, a search party stumbling on its way to new discoveries. What’s more, he claims metaphor is the proper language not only of fiction but of criticism. Because literary criticism, unlike that of music or art, shares its subject’s language, it can “never offer a successful summation…one is always thinking through books, not about them.” Moreover, “all criticism is itself metaphorical in movement, because it deals in likeness. It asks: what is art like? What does it resemble?” The language of literary criticism, Wood says, must be literary, “which is to say metaphorical.”

This is a provocative idea, but it is based on several false premises and, indeed, faulty metaphors. Literary criticism may share its subject’s language, but unlike music or painting, words can also be used to form concepts. Language is not only representational and emotive — that is, literary — it is also logical and analytic — that is, critical. Wood’s distinction between “thinking through” and “thinking about” (both prepositions are also spatial metaphors) is another rhetorically attractive statement that turns out upon examination to be logically void. If Wood’s work cannot be described as “thinking about” books — making conceptual statements about them — then neither word has any content. And the reason criticism needs to make use of the conceptual resources of language is that while it does indeed deal with what art is like, it also deals with what it means.

But beyond his theological preoccupations, Wood never shows much interest in what novels mean. His criticism shuttles between the largest scale and the smallest, the development of fictional technique over the course of novelistic history and the minute particulars of authorial style. His brilliance in describing both is unequaled, but he ignores just about everything that lies in between. He ignores the broad middle ground of novelistic form — narrative structures, patterns of character and image, symbols that bind far-flung moments and disparate levels of a text — and he ignores the meanings that novelists use those methods to propose. (This explains his factual mistakes and interpretive blunders; he simply isn’t paying attention at a certain level.) Wood can tell us about Flaubert’s narrator or Bellow’s style, but he’s not very curious about what those writers have to say about the world: about boredom, or grief, or death, or anything else in the wide, starred universe of human experience. He would always rather spend his time tasting the flavor of a phrase or giving the deck of his theoretical interests another shuffle.

I think art critics are often guilty of this same sort of too-far or too-close analysis of pictures.

Here’s a bit from earlier in the piece that I like because of what I do (image manipulation):

To Roland Barthes’s charge that realism is merely a collection of effects, Wood correctly replies that “realism can be an effect and still be true.” But so can antirealism. Wood defends realism, justly, from accusations of naïveté, but the terms in which he does so make him susceptible to the same charge. “Almost all the great 20th-century realist novels,” he says, “are full of artifice,” which makes artifice sound like a kind of optional ingredient, sort of like sugar, that novelists are free to add in greater or lesser amounts. Of course, everything, in every novel, is artifice. The only distinction to be made is between artifice that is flaunted and artifice that is concealed.

And one last sentence that made me laugh:

At times it seems like he just throws an adjective at a noun and hopes it will stick.

Read the whole article, if you like. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Escaping Flatland

In Felix Grant’s post of last week, The Catastrophic Eye, (which made me laugh excessively as I fantasized about bee-as-Dr-Strangelove) he included this: “… my default setting on seeing a photograph is still the naïve and/or journalistic one: to start by assuming that it is a straight record of what was placed before a camera.” Which is not surprising. That’s the norm for just about everybody, including myself, most of the time. But, as I sit here mindlessly masking (extracting) stuff for my composites, I’ve been pondering the words, “straight record.”

Before about 1850, when photography started to take off, there was no such thing as a straight record. How much of a difference does that make in who we are? Pictures of “now” are valuable for their informational content. But pictures from the past, as more and more of them necessarily are, are different. It seems to me that (setting aside whether or how much of a “straight” record a photograph really is) the ubiquitous presence of something that we believe, instinctively, to be a true record of other times, other places, other people, causes or at least promotes: heightened awareness of difference, otherness, comparative dissatisfaction, competitiveness, and a pervasive awareness of change. This is for yourself vs other people as well as yourself vs yourself over time — or even yourself in the mirror vs yourself in a photograph. Absent such straight records, pre-1850 or so, it’s my (unscientific) supposition that people had a much more cyclical sense of time and a more permanent or common/group sense of their own and their society’s identity — right or wrong.

All of which made me sort of depressed. So I started thinking about what it might have been like if, somehow we could be here and now without photography; without any kind of straight record. Suppose, that when photography was discovered/invented (as it inevitably would have been) some enlightened despot(s) saw it as something like the Tolkien’s palantiri:

A palantír (sometimes translated as Seeing Stone but actually meaning “Farsighted” or “One that Sees from Afar”) is a stone that functions somewhat like a crystal ball. When one looks in it, one can communicate with other Stones and anyone who might be looking into them; people of great power can manipulate the Stones to see virtually any part of the world.

The stones’ gaze can pierce anything except darkness and shadow. A technique called shroudingwas used when something was to be kept secret from the enemies’ eyes. Knowledge of this technique was lost long ago, although Sauron probably knew of it.

Very powerful and therefore possibly very dangerous, as indeed they were when used by Sauron. (Sidenote: imagine the difficulty, however, if six billion people had been looking into or through the stones all at once…)

If photography had somehow been withheld or forbidden to the general population, how would we communicate visually? I would guess that it would be via maps and charts. Data pictures — which would have evolved beyond anything I’m capable of imagining. For a start, here is what Edward Tufte says in his book, Envisioning Information (1990):

Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen. All communication between the readers of an image and the makers of an image must now take place on a two-dimensional surface. Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information — for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariant in nature. Not flatlands.

Perhaps everybody would wear or have embedded in themselves, an RFID chip which they could turn on or off depending on whether they wanted their data “picture” to be taken or read. How might that picture look? A track map of where they had been over some chosen time span? Or filaments of attachment indicating connections to whomever he or she is affiliated with to more than some fixed degree? How would you express the qualia of oneself using data? A portrait would be a cocoon of threads.

Don’t charts and maps tend to accentuate commonalities or sameness? Would not this form of visual information have given us a fundamentally different self-image than what we get from photography? Unifying vs divisive? Emphasis on what is constant vs emphasis on what is not? Familiar vs strange?

Anyway, in a few more days, I’ll have chewed this subject — the “straight record” — to a probably bizarre and fully unbelievable ending and will move on to something else. I like masking, but it leaves the mind unemployed. This is either wonderful or dangerous, I’m not sure which.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Affection

All of the quotes below are taken from an essay, On Hayden Carruth: A Friendship in Poetry by Wendell Berry from Poets.org (2007).

Hayden’s thought, his expectation, starts from and is ever qualified by a careful, deliberate, strictly limited resignation. His work does not arise from a false expectation of ideal causes or effects. He assumes absolutely that life begins and ends on the everyday, the real, the mortal, the “losing” side of the ideal. In the too-quick view, this may seem pessimistic, but it is never that, or never programmatically that:

The point is, there’s a losing kind of man who still will save this world if anybody
can save it, who believes . . . oh, many things,
that horses, say, are fundamentally preferable
to tractors, that small is more likeable than big,
and that human beings work better and last longer
when they’re free.

There is a certain darkness in Hayden’s affirmation of “the loser, the forlorn believer, the passer on,” but it is nevertheless an affirmation. It is a darkness readily lighted by announcements of great happiness and great joy.

I think that Hayden’s idea of a livable life is a life that has affection in it — a life, to give it the fullest scope of his art, in which the things you love are properly praised and properly mourned. What I most value Hayden for and most thank him for (in this age of deniability, when the merest public honesty is made doctrinally tentative) is his wholehearted, unabashed, unapologetic affection: affection for women and men, for neighbors, friends, other poets, jazz musicians, wild creatures, beloved places, the weather. If you know his work, you know you can find dislike in it and anger too. Even so, he is a poet of affection. If he dislikes, that is because he likes. If he is angry, that is because of damage to what he loves. His affection is capacious and generous; everything worthy is at home in it. As he knows, everything worthy is fragile and under threat, is prey to time and invisible to power, and yet affection keeps the accounting in the black. Worthy things, invested with affection, pass into “the now / which is eternal.” I don’t know how this can be, and I don’t think Hayden knows. And yet I believe that it is so; I believe that Hayden believes that it is so.

The essay goes on to look closely at one poem, called Marshall Washer:

The lines of “Marshall Washer” have a certain rough energy that makes them prehensile for the drawing of specifically personal knowledge into the reach of comprehension and affection. The knowledge is clarified and ordered by the same means that order the verse: a strictly maintained integrity and clarity of line, a rhythm precisely inflected and perfectly continuous, a sustained impetus of remembrance and reflection that is never overburdened. The lines are not meant to be lyrical, but they are often as prosodically astute as anybody could wish.

The rest of the analysis does not bear chopping up into quotes – it’s wonderful and needs to be taken in full. I hope you will take a few minutes to read it for youreself. [ link ]

Affectionately,
Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Pares Away the Merely Lifelike

Caught up in the rush of our ongoing lives, we rarely get the chance to step back and reflect on why we do what we do or, more important, why we love what we do. Working with literature as scholars, editors, and critics can become as habitual as any other form of work. Our criticism grows procedural or theoretical, betraying the spirit of the writers we admire. Slipping out of routine into reflection is part of the discipline of literature itself, which pares away the casual and the incidental, the merely lifelike. Instead it concentrates impressions, ideas, and feelings into language that yields meaning. The poem is the poet’s way of suspending time and attending to the minute vibrations of the inner and outer world. The demands it makes on us as readers are personal, not professional, or personal before they are professional.

That’s the first paragraph of an article (originally an address given at a conference), The Undying Animal: A critic reminds us why literature still matters by Morris Dickstein in the Fall 2008 issue of Columbia Magazine.

The phrase, “which pares away the … merely lifelike” stopped me for quite a while. ”Merely”? What is left when you remove the “merely lifelike”? The un-lifelike?

Yet I think I know and even agree with what he is saying. I’ve just never thought about it in quite such stark terms (stark because of the bonds of photography, specifically, to ‘lifelike’ ). Is some (most?) of a photograph’s meaning not to be found in its lifelike-ness? Is there necessarily a qualitative difference in the meaning that is found in the “merely lifelike”?

Here is more from the piece, this first bit from the middle:

The beset protagonist of tragedy lives out on the stage what literature is, its way of taking stock, of becoming aware.

Literature spurs such acts of recognition, but it can hardly be a source of timeless values. Like human nature, it changes from writer to writer, from one culture, one generation, one century to another. Literary works impart experiences, not doctrines. They are more likely to undermine certainties than to uphold them.

And this is the ending:

Shakespeare’s genius was to take a domestic and dynastic quarrel, barely plausible, stripped of ordinary dramatic motivation, and transform it into a disruption of the whole moral order: the exigencies of nature, the betrayal of kinship, the confusions of old age, the inhuman cruelty, the ravages of vanity and sexual appetite, the caprice of the gods. This wide purview, affronting the ultimate, is what leads us to compare Lear to the book of Job and The Divine Comedy rather than to other Elizabethan or Jacobean plays. Yet it is only a more extreme example of what literature always does: to confer order and meaning on a chaos of memories, observations, and feelings, forcing us to “burn through” them, as Keats put it in his sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” like an ordeal of fire.

What does all this prove? Works that channel the vision of King Lear, including some poems of Wordsworth and Keats, plays of Beckett, even the late novels of Philip Roth, especially Sabbath’s Theater, confront our complacency with their dark knowledge. They express the blight or rage of the dying animal. They remind us that the journey toward self-understanding can be rough, that the world is a perpetual insult to our self-importance, that the examined life can only be lived under the sign of death. We cannot even know when we have hit bottom. As Edgar says, “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst’” (IV, i). Less extreme works give us lesser helpings of the same chastening wisdom. We readers and critics do what we do because we love it, but also because it disquiets us, throws us off balance, unsettles our easy assumptions. No two readings of a genuinely significant book, no performances of a living play, are ever quite the same. When they work their spell, they enfold us in an action that is radically provisional, not easily paraphrased, open to interpretation — and therefore to the unexpected. Since literature resists closure, our work — which is not exactly work — remains open-ended, with no real endgame. Always provisional, never definitive, this wisdom is our special form of knowing.

There is much more in the full article. I found it very thought-provoking reference photography (even though he is speaking about literature, not visual art). Read it if you have the time. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Caution! Too much fun can damage your wagger

Tell us about your pets.
My dog, Nelson, sprained his tail this summer. He was having so much fun frolicking in the country, swimming in ponds, and chasing butterflies and frogs, that his wagger just gave out.

That’s from the Powell’s Books Kids section interview with writer Mo Willems. Here is more from his Q and A:

Describe your latest project.
My newest book, Edwina: The Dinosaur who Didn’t Know She Was Extinct, is an exploration of an age-old conundrum: “Is it okay to inform a Dinosaur that she is extinct if she bakes really yummy cookies?”

Most illustrators will tell you that the most difficult part about creating a dinosaur book is accurately depicting the dinosaurs’ behavior and appearance. Let me assure my audience that I did not shirk my responsibility: Edwina’s straw hat and purse are true to the Jurassic Period (the pearl necklace comes from a later eon, but it looked too cute to get all finicky about total accuracy).

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands?
I tried to hold it with my feet, but that didn’t work. Holding it with my elbows was a bust as well. In desperation, I tried to balance it on my head, but I couldn’t see the words. As you can imagine, I was getting fairly frustrated by then. Luckily, my daughter was in the room and suggested I hold the book in my hands.

Thank you, Trixie.

Why do you write books for kids?
I write silly books for people. It just happens to be that usually kids are the first people silly enough to enjoy them.

Who are your favorite characters in history?
Genghis Khan rocked. Not only is he the only world conqueror to live to a ripe old age while remaining in power, his empire was (contrary to popular notions) tolerant, multi-cultural, and fair to its citizens, and he introduced pants to Europe. Now, I don’t know about you, but I love pants.

Whether, how, when to inform someone that he/she is extinct: there are some really deep existential questions here, not to mention tricky issues of etiquette. Good stuff for young minds. Combine that with useful advice about moderation in use of ones wagger, and we have great literature.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Equilibrium

The Equilateral series that I’m now doing probably looks pretty simple. It’s not. It’s wonderfully, deliciously, diabolically tricky to get the supports to balance under the fixed (‘equilateral’) crabapples — and to get the picture’s composition to also be satisfying and beautiful (to me, at least).

There are two ways to that I can push the “satisfying” part of that recipe — by making the ingredients as stripped down and simple as possible, or by going the other way and using as many as possible in insanely unlikely configurations. I do both, depending on …  I’m not sure what.

This one, which I did yesterday, is the former type; the bare minimum. Look at that middle rock (the upper, triangular one). It needs to be holding the upper stick without tipping (pushing) it either up or down, but is also has to be taking most — but not all — of the weight of that stick so that it doesn’t press the right end of the lower stick down; the upper stick must tilt neither left nor right. Does that make sense? I spent about half an hour yesterday just staring at the parts trying to get them to come to rest in my mind. Usually a composition will “settle” in my imagination, but this one is sort of restless because of the two directions of delicate pressure — down through the stone and to the right where the two sticks touch.

This kind of thing — configuring the perfect or at least the most satisfying composition, is, to me, the very best thing about compositing (though I love many other aspects of it).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Have You Always Been So Violent?

Share an interesting experience you’ve had with one of your readers.
I love giving talks at schools, and at a recent one I misheard a question from a young student in the audience. Joe Craig, author of the wonderful Jimmy Coates: Assassin series, was due to be appearing at the school later in the week. What I thought the student asked me was, “Could you eat him?”

I’d met Joe, and he’s a nice guy, but I believe a straight question deserves a straight answer so after due consideration I said: “He’s a little smaller than me, so yes, I suppose I probably could. I don’t think I could eat him all at once though, so I’d have to cut him up into portions, keep most of him in the freezer, maybe cook him a bit at a time…” Lost in the details, it was only then I realised that what I’d actually been asked me was, “Could you meet him?’”

The student was looking a bit perturbed, so I apologized profusely. The young lady raised her hand again and asked, “Have you always been so violent?”

That’s from the Powells Books author interview of children’s writer Sam Enthoven. Here’s more from the Enthoven interview:

Why do you write books for kids?
Several reasons. For one thing, I love the discipline of it. Many older readers seem prepared to put up with almost any amount of description, lengthy exposition, endless period detail and so forth. Younger readers, by contrast, tend to prefer to focus on a STORY — and I do, too.

But (second) there’s also a freedom to young people’s literature — a joyful acceptance of wildness and weirdness, a willingness to take risks. Example: my first book, The Black Tattoo, contains (as well as swordfights, monsters, flying kung fu and the end of the universe) some vomiting bats. Where adults might ask, “Why? Why bats? Why vomiting? What point are you making here?” younger readers (again, rightly I think) will simply say “What? They’re bats. They vomit. Cool.” All too often, and rather drearily, adult readers seem to need to have everything explained to them. Younger readers haven’t forgotten how to have fun.

I am working my way down through the entire Powells list of Kids interviews. Here are a few more (I’ve gotten down to the letter L). First, from Daniel Kirk:

Describe your most memorable teacher.
My high school art teacher, Mr. Mazzarella, inspired me to become an artist; but he had a funny way of teaching. For example, on the very first day of class we were looking forward to meeting our new teacher. When we filed into our seats and waited for our art lesson, Mr. Mazzarella sat at his desk. For the entire period he just sat there staring at us, and he never uttered a single word. Though at the time we thought he was pretty strange, we later realized that Mr. Mazzarella was trying to get us to see that as artists, we would need to take the initiative, to fill up blank space with our own creativity, to make something out of nothing. He always found methods to get us to stand up for ourselves and find what was inside us that we needed to express through our art. If not for Mr. Mazzarella, I don’t think I would have studied art. I might have been a musician or a historian instead!

What do you do for relaxation?
I don’t really believe in relaxation unless it’s creative. I like to think of life as walking a tightrope, poised and controlled yet at peace, in a way, always full of energy and ready to respond to whatever happens. On a tightrope, it’s all about balance and attention.

Next, from Sid Fleischman:

Share an interesting experience you’ve had with one of your readers.

I receive letters from kids every day. Some of them are funny, such as the boy who wrote to say that I was his favorite author, though he’d never read any of my books — but that he intended to. His heart was in the right place. The letter that became an event in my life was from a kid who addressed me as “Dear Mr. Big Shot Writer…” Me, a big shot? I puffed up a bit, though I knew he was only jesting. Still, whenever I get stuck in a story I give myself a pinch to remind myself that I have been regarded as a big shot writer and to get on with it.

It’s interesting how many times a sixth grade teacher is named as influencing these writers. Must be something about that age.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Please Don’t Give Me Any of These

 

A bee wears a 170-milligram (.006 ounces) radio tracking tag, about one-third of its body weight.

The tag, attached with eyelash glue and superglue, is powered by a hearing-aid battery and includes a crystal-controlled oscillator, tiny circuit and an antenna that sticks out from the back. Even loaded up like this, the bees “fly beautifully,” says zoologist Martin Wikelski.

– from National Geographic News

Look at that poor bee, carrying that big, ugly thing that’s one-third his body weight. It’s terrible! Outrageous!

Yet, if you gave me a box of those radio tracking tags and came back a week later, I guarantee you I’d have them stuck to everything that moves in my house, in my yard, in the woods … I’d be out chasing down anything that had so far eluded me. Because I want to know where they are; what they’re doing …

Bugs, birds, snakes, ink pens, glasses, my brain …

So please, please keep them away from me. Thanks. I appreciate it. Really. Especially you, ewythr cymhorthdal, who already has some (and we are very jealous).

-Julie

[of course, if you happen to send me just a few, who would know it was you? I'd never tell ... ]

(other image)

http://www.unrealnature.com/

True Colors: How We Look

On 4 November more than 100,000 people – black and white – gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park to celebrate the election of Barack Obama. There, in the heart of one of America’s most segregated cities, they waved countless little flags. It was a moment of unity in a country where the Red, White and Blue is still tainted black and white. Three decades after the soiling of Old Glory, we have overcome. And we have not.

That’s the last paragraph of It’s not the bus: it’s us by Thomas Sugrue; review of the book, The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph that Shocked Americaby Louis Masur in the London Review of Books (Nov 20, 2008). It begins:

In the United States the flag has the status of a religious icon, a totem. It cannot be carried horizontally or flat, but must always be ‘aloft and free’. There is a protocol for folding it, it can’t touch the ground, it can’t be burned except when it is worn out or irreparably damaged and then only as part of a special ritual. Military men and women salute it, civilians hold their right hands over their left breasts when singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, and schoolchildren pledge allegiance to it. It is also a ubiquitous presence in the American landscape. The Red, White and Blue waves from people’s porches, flies over car dealerships and gas stations and adorns flower-pots; cars are festooned with it in the form of bumper stickers, window decals and antenna pennants. The flag decorates the altars of churches of every denomination except those of a few dissenting sects. And it has become a necessary accessory for political candidates. Early in his campaign, Barack Obama was criticised for his unpatriotic failure to display a flag lapel pin: as president-elect he now regularly wears one.

… Of the various iconic representations of the flag of the last half-century, from Jasper Johns’s series of paintings to the image of construction workers hoisting it above the debris at the collapsed World Trade Center in September 2001, one of the most famous is the subject of Louis Masur’s latest book. On 5 April 1976, the photographer Stanley Forman of the Boston Herald American followed a group of anti-Civil Rights protesters onto the plaza outside Boston’s City Hall. His picture shows Joseph Rakes, a white teenager, wielding Old Glory as a spear, lunging forward as if he were about to impale Theodore Landsmark, a well-dressed black attorney who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the protesters. As Landsmark tries to dodge his attacker, a heavy-set white man appears to restrain him, readying him for martyrdom.

In the bicentenary year of America’s independence, Forman’s photograph was a reminder that, despite celebrations of its revolutionary glory and proclamations of its national greatness, the country had not overcome its original sin of racism. That Forman shot his photograph in Boston, a city that called itself the Cradle of Liberty, made it even more effective. Most Americans associate racial injustice with the South, and many Northerners insist on their racial innocence.

Masur reflects briefly on the history of segregation since 1976, but the heart of his book is a reflection on the indeterminacy of representation, and on the contingency that made Forman’s photograph possible. In the book’s most intriguing section, Masur reconstructs the events of 5 April. Forman got his shot because he arrived late at the protest and stood apart from the gaggle of photographers, all of whom missed the assault on Landsmark. But their photographs –- and those that Forman took but didn’t publish –- capture the chaos and ambiguity of the events at City Hall. Rakes didn’t succeed in planting the flag in Landsmark’s body. The man who appears to restrain Landsmark in the photo, James Kelly, an anti-busing leader and later a city councilman, was actually trying to prevent the assault. The photos Forman took next show that Kelly interposed himself between Rakes and Landsmark, calming the crowd. Forman’s photograph alone is an inadequate document of what happened that day. But it captured the underlying reality of racism –- the arbitrary violence and terror that supported it –- and most important, the way the flag could become an instrument of dispossession and oppression.

… Ultimately, the power of the photograph derives from the centrality of Old Glory itself. Rakes desecrated the flag by using it as a weapon, but in doing so he revealed the inextricable connection between racism and American patriotism, between America’s long history of racial exploitation and its most cherished symbol. In the microsecond it took him to capture the soiling of Old Glory, Forman held a lens up to America’s dualism, and above all to the unresolved tensions of race that are at the core of American identity.

Pictures can make you think. Some pictures can make you know.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Us and the Other: Fragmented Throwback

… the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is … built deep inside of a mountain. Unlike Yucca Mountain, the Vault, which is the world’s largest seed bank, is conceived of as a boon to, not a burden on, future generations. Located near Longyearbyen, Norway, on Spitsbergen Island in the remote Svalbard archipelago, the Vault is some six hundred miles from the north pole. On February 26, 2008, the day of its inauguration, the Vault received shipments of 100 million seeds, “backups” of the planet’s extant food-crop seeds, which are now enclosed in a structure designed to withstand nuclear bombs and global warming. Its back wall, for instance, is concave, in order to repel and rebound projectile weapons. By contrast, the Vault’s facade, bejeweled with an artwork called  Perpetual Repercussion by the Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne, is an inviting beacon, a gemlike installation that visually performs the Vault’s multidimensional implications while vigorously signaling its location with steel, mirrors, and prisms cut into triangles of various sizes. The triangular segments reflect the midnight sun in the summer months: during the four-month polar night, a network of fiber-optic cables casts turquoise and white lights, which reflect between the mirrors.

… For Dyveke Sanne, the Vault’s importance lies less in the seeds it contains than in the reflections and actions its very presence ought to provoke.

… Sanne’s conceptual sculptures explore optics and cognition, the mechanics and metaphysics of the elusive glimpse, and the oscillations of awareness withal. Regarding the Vault, she remarked that it is “the gift that no one wants.” It is indeed a difficult gift, which Sanne has duly wrapped in complex light.

That’s the introduction to a conversation between Dyveke Sanne [Artist] and writer Miranda F. Mellis in the Nov/Dec, 2008 issue of The Believer magazine. (There is only the beginning of the piece which includes my quoted parts; you have to buy the issue to get more.)

THE BELIEVER: In your artist’s statement, you write that the seeds in the Vault are “copies of a diversity which craves a cyclic repetition of treatment, rather than a steady faith in the selected original and a linear progress.” When I read that, I found myself thinking of the fact that the Vault presently excludes genetically modified seeds. There seems to be a metonymic link between the broken mirrors and “broken” seeds. Am I overreading your statement, or is there a link for you there?

DYVEKE SANNE: There is, but not that explicitly. The mirrors play a double role. They both throw the mirrored image back and make it into numerous fragments that are being picked up by the different angles of the mirrors. The reflecting images all become the same: different, but with the same value. In this fragmented throwback, we see the movement of our own thinking. Our reflections blend with those of others, and come back as variant repetitions. When I have used mirrors in my works before, or shadow images that act as simplified copies of an original, it is to investigate exactly this, the relationship between us and the other, me as an original, and a copy of you at the same time. The craving for “the one,” the original that we can blindly trust in, is a ghost that we are carrying with us.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/