shuttle 10: stars

‘Galloping horses of the departed century, I will consult ashes, stars, and flights of birds’ (Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Unveiling’, from The Rising of the Sun)

'We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky' (John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos)
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'... Look: the Tower of Babel and the Felicity of Tents; up there are highway robbers, and doves bringing ambrosia to the gods, and the twin horsemen of the dawn;     up there the daughter of the wind, mourning for her husband lost at sea;     the Strong River is there, and the Palace of the Five Emperors, the Kennel of the Barking Dogs, the Straw Road, the Birds' Way, the Snake River of Sparkling Dust;     up there are the nymphs who mourn their brother Hyas, killed by a wild boar, and whose tears are shooting stars;     there are the Seven Portuguese Towers, the Boiling Sea, the Place Where One Bows Down;     look: the Ostriches Leaving and the Ostriches Returning and the Two Ostriches who are friends;     Cassiopeia, Queen of Ethiopia, who thought she was more beautiful than the Nereids, is there, and her hapless daughter Andromeda, and Perseus who rescued her with the head of Medusa swinging from his belt, and the monster, Cetus, he slew, and the winged horse Pegasus he rode;     there is the bull who plows the Furrow of Heaven;     up there is the Hand Stained with Henna, the Lake of Fullness, the Empty Bridge, the Egyptian X;     ...     up there is the Butcher's Shop, the Easy Chair, the Broken Platter, the Rotten Melon, the Light of Heaven;     Hans the Wagoner, who gave Jesus a ride, is there, and the lion who fell from the moon in the form of a meteor;     up there, once a year, ten thousand magpies form a bridge so that the Weaving Girl can cross the River of Light to meet the Oxherding Boy;     there are the braids of Queen Berenice, who sacrificed her hair to assure her husband's safety;     up there is a ship that never reaches safe harbor, and the Whisperer, the Weeping One, the Illuminator of the Great City, and look: the General of the Wind;     the Emperor Mu Wang and his charioteer Tsao Fu, who went in search of the peaches of the Western Paradise, are there;     the beautiful Callisto, doomed by Juno's jealousy, and the goddess Marichi who drives her chariot led by wild boars through the sky;     there are the Sea Goat, the Danish Elephant, the Long Blue Cloud-Eating Shark, and the White-Bone-Snake:     up there is Theodosius turned into a star and the head of John the Baptist turned into a star and Li Po's breath, a star his poem make brighter:     there are the Two Gates, one through which the souls descend when they are ready to enter human bodies, and the other through which they rise at death;     there a puma springs on its prey, and a Yellow Dragon climbs the Steps of Heaven;     up there is the Literary Woman, the Frigid Maiden, the Moist Daughters, and the Head of the Woman in Chains;     there is the Thirsty Camel, the Camel Striving to Get to Pasture, and the Camel Pasturing Freely; there the Crown of Thorns or the crown that Bacchus gave Ariadne as a wedding gift;     look:     the Horse's Navel, the Lion's Liver, the Balls of the Bear;     there is Rohni, the Red Deer, so beautiful that the moon, though he had twenty-seven wives, loved her alone;     up there the Announcer of Invasion on the Border, the Child of the Waters, the Pile of Bricks, the Exaltation of Piled-Up Corpses, the Excessively Minute, the Dry Lake, the Sacks of Coals, the Three Guardians of the Heir Apparent, the Tower of Wonders, the Overturned Chair;     up there is a cloud of dust kicked up by a buffalo, and the steamy breath of the elephant that lies in the waters that surround the earth, and the muddy water churned by a turtle swimming across the sky;     up there is the broken circle that is a chipped dish, or a boomerang, or the opening of the cave where the Great Bear sleeps;     up there the two donkeys whose braying made such a racket they frightened away the giants and were rewarded with a place in the sky;     there is the Star of a Thousand Colors, the Hand of Justice, the Plain and Even Way;     there is the Double Double;     there the Roadside Inn;     there the State Umbrella;     there the Shepherd's Hut     there the Vulture;     look: the Winnowing Fan;     there the Growing Small;     there the Court of God;     there the Quail's Fire;     there St Peter's Ship and the Star of the Sea;     there:     look:     up there:     the stars'.

From Eliot Weinberger, 'The Stars', in An Elemental Thing, New York: New Directions Books, 2007, 174-6

Images: (top) - 17th century celestial map, 'Planisphaeri coeleste', by the Dutch cartographer Frederik de Wit

(bottom) -  the Milky Way in the night sky, photographed by Steve Jurvetson, Black Rock Desert, Nevada, 22 July 2007

shuttle 9: night

'Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is always about time' (Richard Misrach)

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John Paul Caponigro: There was one thing that you said that I found very poetic. You said, when we were talking about photographing at night, "It just lead me to it. I learned that there’s a new language of working photographically at night; I just fell in love with the language." The notion of a language of night is beautiful. Tell me more about it. 

Robert Misrach: Well, thanks very much. I can only go back to when I worked at night, earlier in my career, very early. I found it really liberating just to be able to work at night because there hadn’t been that much done in the history of photography. You know Brassai had worked at night, and there’s been individual photographs done at night, but there’s just so many other things photographed so thoroughly, it was hard to get away from that. It’s a trap in a way. Early on, working at night, there were so many things I didn’t know. Mistakes I made would lead to understanding new things. I guess the language evolved out of that ... 

JPC: It struck me that photographing the desert and photographing the night have similarities, both seem like spaces that when first approached can seem empty and yet when you spend time with them you realize how full they are. 

RM: Right, that’s very good. I was working exclusively at night and it’s only recently that I’ve come back to working at night again. But, as part of the Cantos, the way I’m approaching it now is conceptually much different.

JPC:  How so? 

RM: What’s different now is that I’ve become interested, in the last couple Cantos, with language and the way it shapes the way we see things. I’m working on a book right now. There’s a series of skies where I’ll pick a place on a map, like a Rand McNally map, and go to that place and photograph the sky. What’s in the photograph is not clouds, there’s no horizon line. There’s nothing in there. It’s really atmosphere, light. My idea was that the photographs become a rorschachs. What gives it its conceptual meaning is the name of the place. Each of the places is keyed by where I took it.

The night skies is a follow up on that in what I call the series 'Heavenly Bodies'. What I’m implying is the way that the night skies, the stars and the planets, have been named, is actually very Eurocentric. It’s based on Arabic language and Greek naming and mythology. All these different things that have been imposed on the American Southwest. Even though on one hand it’s sort of innocent, just a classification system, a naming system, it actually has a lot of bearing on how we understand ideas, sort of imperialist ideas about how one culture can lay its system over another – again relatively innocently but actually having a huge impact. Along with the skies which are based on place names, the Heavenly Bodies are based on constellation, star and planet names. What I’m doing is still looks very much like night photographs of the sky, it’s pretty straight forward in that sense. And yet, now with foregrounding the names and the language we use to describe those, at least the way Eurocentric culture does, it adds another element to the Cantos.

What I have done with the Desert Cantos is that each has a different strategy or approach to making images. Sometimes they’re very traditional. Others give you different ways to think about the overall picture, which for me has been the desert for these twenty years. 

JPC: I’m looking at Crimes and Splendors, it looks like there were eighteen Cantos at the time of publication. (In numerical order – 'The Terrain', 'The Event I', 'The Flood', 'The Fires', 'The War (Bravo 20)', 'The Pit', 'Desert Seas', 'The Event II', 'The Secret', 'The Test Site', 'The Playboys', 'Clouds (Non-Equivalents)', 'The Inhabitants', 'The Visitors', 'The Salt Flats', 'The Paintings', 'Deserts', 'Skies', 'Las Vegas' and several 'Prologues'). Are there any other themes that you’ve found since the publication of this book? 

RM: Well at the time of the book there were 18 plus what I call the metaprologue. Since then there have been a number of new Cantos; the 'Heavenly Bodies' for instance is the 21st Canto. And I’ve been doing the 22nd Canto – 'Night Clouds'. The 19th Canto is 'Las Vegas'. The 19th and 20th I’m still working on and I haven’t published any of those yet. The 21st and 22nd I’ve actually been publishing recently and will be doing a book on just those. 

JPC: Your work seems multi-perspectival, it’s almost as if a cubist got a hold of the theme rather the form. And I wondered if you felt that has a scattering influence. 

RM: I think that’s a really, really good analogy. One of the things that was really influential early on was Ezra Pound’s Cantos, one poem he worked on for 50 years. It’s epic. I had a great deal of difficulty understanding it. One of the problems was you’d be reading along in English and he would move to a Chinese ideogram or French--he actually used seven different languages in a given poem. And for somebody who’s not fluent in different languages it has the impact of rupturing your way of understanding something. It was very purposeful on his part to put these obstacles of language in there so that you become conscious of the whole system. You don’t get a neat narrative or a neat poem. Once you run into these obstacles of language you have to stop and think about other things. So, for me, in putting The Playboys or The Paintings or these language things in with these more conventional landscapes they inform each other. It does scatter, it does rupture, the way cubist paintings would. Each gives you a different way to approach something and sheds light on everything else. 

JPC: Right. In a sense, less authoritarian and perhaps a little more true to our experience of life, which these days is none too cohesive. 

RM: Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn’t fit into a grand narrative, the way we’ve been taught to read. Things just don’t work that way any more. [...]

JPC: I find the desert fascinating. It’s a very fragile environment. It also points to our fragility. We’re codependent with the land and when the land is so fragile we too are fragile. Many people see the desert as a place of death. When I first moved from Connecticut to New Mexico it was a pretty barren place to me. But I learned to walk out there and instinctively avoid the cactus, look for the lizards, watch the night hawks. You become accustomed to a different rhythm.

RM: Yeah. When I was kid growing up the desert horrified me. I used to go skiing and we’d drive through the desert. You don’t want the car to break down. You don’t want to stop. You don’t want to get out. You don’t want to do anything. Once you fall in love with it, that’s it. The light, the space, the solitude, the silence. Oh my god. It’s a really powerful place to be. You’re with yourself. But the problem is because people characterize the desert as a waste land that’s why military corporations like to dump their toxics out there, because they consider a place like Nevada a "national sacrifice area." Because it’s a waste land. It’s ugly. It’s barren. And yet it is a remarkable place.

Extracts from an interview with Richard Misrach by John Paul Caponigro, first published in View Camera magazine, September-October 1998; for an online version of the full interview, see here 

Photographs above: Richard Misrach, 'Night' series (1975-7)

For an earlier post related to night in England ('nightfall'), see here 

shuttle: intro to elsew/here

"Never did faraway charge so close" (Cesar Vallejo)

Miss Atomic: "Good evening, pagans, Vegans, insomniacs, gorgeous lizards, hospitality peddlers, sweethearts, assassins. Grab your drink, baby, we're gonna be here for a while. We are desert people. We make our homes in impossibility. We hallucinate regularly. We might have magic lamps, or we may be the type, myself included, to play the genies ..." (The Team, Mission Drift, London: Oberon Books, 2013)
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Over three weeks in the summer of 2013, I uploaded daily posts here as a remote contributor to SHUTTLE: mobile desert performance, at the invitation of Mick Douglas, and as part of his Performing Mobilities Network. For the project website, with further details of those involved and a map of the itinerary – an anti-clockwise loop from Tucson to Tucson, via Utah and California - see here. Other contexts are outlined briefly below.

At the outset, as the crew assembled in Tucson to begin their journey, I only had loose hunches and fragmentary thoughts about what to post in coming days. As I began another week of work in London, circulating in my mind was a slightly bewildering constellation of material related to deserts, in particular those of the American south-west: driving, dust, sand, light, heat, water, geological ‘deep’ time; ‘emptiness’ as a convenient fiction for the open secret and ‘dirty wars’ of military research; silence, silencing and the toxic sublime; writings by Rebecca Solnit, Mike Davis, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Dillard, Bradford Morrow, Leslie Marmon Silko, JG Ballard, Iain Chambers, Trevor Paglen, P. Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, John Beck, Lawrence Buell, Stephen Muecke, Erin Hogan, and others; art works by James Turrell, Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Paolo Soleri, Richard Long, John Wolseley, Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky, Francis Alÿs, Oguri, Tess de Quincey and others; films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Wim Wenders, Nicholas Roeg, David Lean, John Ford, Werner Herzog, Gus van Sant, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Sergio Leone; assorted music, from Calexico and Gillian Welch to Ali Farka Toure; and distant memories of my own journeys through the central deserts of Australia in the mid-1980s.

At this stage I didn’t know what of this would emerge in coming days, in posts uploaded on the hoof in the gaps between my ongoing work commitments here - and quite what it would amount to. Hopefully traces of a virtual, associational journey in parallel, a slight re-directing of the geometry of attention that allows for passages between the close-at-hand and the faraway, the actual and the possible … 

Maybe think of them as a bunch of balloons released in to the air. Although most of them might well drift off forever into the sky, the odd one might just be held on to and bob along with you for a while.

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Email to Mick Douglas, 3 June 2013 

Dear Mick

Thanks again for sharing the SHUTTLE details, and for your kind invitation.

For a virtual contribution/ participation, I'd like to propose something along the following lines: on each of the 21 days of the Shuttle project, 17 June – 7 July, I will post something online – some resources, perspectives, materials related in particular to deserts. These may include propositions or questions, found texts and my own writing, images, sounds/songs, reconstructions, etc. So – traces of a parallel 3-week journey of accompaniment during which my attention here, for a section of each day, will be given over to your group, the route, imaginings of landscapes there, traces of environments here. Cumulatively, therefore, an archive of 21 posts, comprising small invitations and gifts from afar that hope to encourage the possibility of further conceptual and imaginal links, leaks, flows. Associational ripples, modest frictions, 'winds' from elsew/here.

Daily materials would be posted on my blog site skywritings by midnight UK time, each one entitled SHUTTLE and numbered accordingly (day 1 etc.). Along the way, Sue Palmer may contribute some materials about desert flora.

My best to you,
David 
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SHUTTLE 
Mobile desert performance
17 June – 7 July 2013
www.performingmobilities.net

Ten crew open to encounters. Four thousand miles from Tucson to Tucson. Twenty days. A Chevy van. Sonoran, Great Basin and Mojave Deserts. Known and unknowns. 

A collection of international artists, designers, performance makers and researchers journey through the deserts of the American south-west performing an exploration of the aesthetic, political, cultural and environmental resonances of desert ecologies. As a temporary travelling community interested in movement, environment, and performance, the project crew intend to generate new creative practices and works that shuttle between registers of knowing and unknowing by exploring performances of mobility.

In a journey through seminal land art works, ancient settlements, desert conditions, and transit spaces, SHUTTLE will perform daily processes of creating ephemeral conditions and generating encounters. An initial landing event and a subsequent returns event in Tucson, Arizona, welcome public interaction – including collecting offerings from Tucson residents for SHUTTLE to carry forth. SHUTTLE presents an interval at the Performance Studies International ‘Now Then’ Conference (PSi 19) at Stanford University in Palo Alto, and will inform the development of PSi21 ‘Fluid States’ globally distributed events planned for 2015, in particular the Australian project ‘Movement Forms of an Island Continent’. 

Mick Douglas, Beth Weinstein and crew 
Twitter: @SHUTTLEcrew @SHUTTLEbase 

We gratefully acknowledge the support of University of Arizona, Tucson Museum of Art, Exploded View, RMIT University, University of Melbourne, PSi Performance Studies international 
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Journey 
June 17: SHUTTLE encounter: projective conversation + SHUTTLE landing in Tucson

June 18-20: en-route encounters: Chaco Canyon
June 21-24: en-route encounters: Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover
June 26-30: SHUTTLE interval at PSi 19 Conference at Stanford Palo Alto
July 1: en-route encounters: Culver City’s CLUI
July 2-4: en-route encounters: Joshua Tree area + cultural laboratories (CLUI, High Desert Test Sites)
July 5: SHUTTLE returns at Tucson Museum of Art
July 6: SHUTTLE encounter: reflective conversation in Tucson 
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SHUTTLE crew 

Grzegorz Brzozowski is a director and script writer working on a PhD at University of Warsaw researching modern festival communities through the lens of anthropology of performance and sociology of religion.

Mick Douglas is an artist making socially-engaged art and performance, senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, and initiator of journey-based projects that explore the performance of mobilities.

Andrea Haenggi is a New York-based choreographer, visual artist, performer and artistic director/founder of Dance Arts Company AMDaT, who recently established 1067 PacificPeople in Brooklyn New York.

Fiona Harrisson is a landscape architect, horticulturist and senior lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne, exploring the role that citizens’ relation to landscape plays in the crisis of our times. 

Didier Morelli is an interdisciplinary performer and artist investigating the body as a site for change, exchange, identity and belonging. He is an MFA student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

James Oliver is an artist-researcher and Graduate Research Coordinator at the Centre for Cultural Partnerships of Melbourne University developing performative methodologies of practice-as-research. 

Meredith Rogers makes theatre and performance in mainstream and independent settings, is an honorary research associate at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and co-editor of Australasian Drama Studies. 

Sam Trubridge is a performance designer, artist, scholar and artistic director with New Zealand company The Playground who is currently researching nomadic philosophies and practices. 

Unknown Persons may be given passage during the course of SHUTTLE. 

Beth Weinstein is an architect and Associate Professor at the University of Arizona working between architectural and choreographic practices, and research of American Southwest land art and water issues. 
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SHUTTLE remote crew (artists on board in other locations) 

‘Touring SW American deserts & communities online’: Visual artist Alex von Bergen tours online whilst operating the shuttle base. 

‘Vella vehicle accumulations + Vella Piss Takes’: Visual artist John Vella collaborates with Shuttle crew to collate, collect and respond. 

‘Elsew/here (shuttle days 1-21)’: Writer/performance-maker David Williams is blogging shuttle daily from London. 

‘Postcards’: Neal Haslem sends postcards to lost time in the desert. 

‘The Sustained Doodling Project’: researching the challenges of art in space through a creative collaboration between SHUTTLE and Melbourne artist Annalea Beattie.

Photos, from the top: David Lean during the filming of Lawrence of Arabia (1962); still from Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana (1971); still from Gus Van Sant's Gerry (2002). 'The Desert of Culture' cartoon by Biff (The Guardian)