shuttle 5: duster

'Between the earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out' (Willa Cather)

'Dust allowed him a perception of time as a kind of seamless duration in which past and future could not be sundered' (Carolyn Steedman)

'Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The column. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the second you are surrounded by "waltzing Ginns". The third, the sheet, is "copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire" (Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient)
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'Nobody knew what to call it. It was not a rain cloud. Nor was it a cloud holding ice pellets. It was not a twister. It was thick like coarse animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard - a black blizzard, they called it - with an edge like steel wool ... 'Did you see the color of that monster? Black as the inside of a dog' ... 'The earth is on the move'. 'Why?' 'Look what they done to the grass. Look at the land: wrong side up' ...

The rains disappeared - not just for a season but for years on end. With no sod to hold the earth in place, the soil calcified and started to blow. Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or ore in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains - a force of their own. When the dust fell, it penetrated everything: hair, nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom, well. A scoop shovel was needed just to clean the house in the morning. The eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away, like a walk in space, tethered to the life support centre. Chickens roosted in mid-afternoon ...

Many in the East did not believe the initial accounts of predatory dust until a storm in May 1934 carried the wind blown shards of the Great Plains over much of the nation. In Chicago, twelve million tons of dust fell. New York, Washington, even ships at sea, three hundred miles off the Atlantic coast - were blanketed in brown.

Cattle went blind and suffocated. When farmers cut them open, they found stomachs stuffed with fine sand. Horses ran madly against the storms. Children coughed and gagged, dying of something the doctors called "dust pneumonia". In desperation, some families gave away their children. The instinctive act of hugging a loved one or shaking someone's hand could knock two people down, for the static electricity from the dusters was so strong ...

On the skin, the dust was like a nail file, a grit strong enough to hurt. People rubbed Vaseline in their nostrils as a filter. The Red Cross handed out respiratory masks to schools. Families put wet towels beneath their doors and covered their windows with bed sheets, fresh-dampened nightly. The sheets turned a muddy brown ...

A Sunday in mid-April 1935 dawned quiet, windless, and bright. In the afternoon, the sky went purple - as if it were sick - and the temperature plunged. People looked northwest and saw a ragged-topped formation on the move, covering the horizon. The air crackled with electricity. Snap. Snap. Snap. Birds screeched and dashed for cover. As the black wall approached, car radios clicked off, overwhelmed by the static. Ignitions shorted out. Waves of sand, like ocean water rising over a ship's prow, swept over roads. Cars went into ditches. A train derailed ...

'It was like I was caught in a whirlpool. All of a sudden it got completely dark. I couldn't see a thing'.

That was Black Sunday, April 14 1935, day of the worst duster of them all. The storm carried twice as much dirt as was dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal. The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon. More than 300,000 tons of Great Plains topsoil was airborne that day ...

At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered one hundred million acres ... '

Extracts from Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, New York: Mariner Books, 2006
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For driving music on this day of the summer solstice, see here: Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, 'April the 14th (Part 1)' - a song that weaves together disparate events that happened on 14 April, 'ruination day': the assassination of Lincoln, the sinking of the Titanic, Black Sunday

shuttle 3: whirlpool sky sun skin

(1) 'Materials: airplane, jet of smoke'.

In the summer of 1973, the late Dennis Oppenheim created an art work called Whirlpool: eye of the storm: a skywriting piece created in the sky above El Mirage Dry Lake in Southern California. The lines were produced by radio instruction to a pilot releasing a vapour trail of liquid nitrogen. An initial circle of three-quarters of a mile, then the loop repeated with ever-diminishing diameters for four miles as the aircraft lost height above the ground. A schematic, ephemeral tornado drawn on the surface of the sky.

(2) 'Materials: book, skin, solar energy'.

Three years earlier, Oppenheim lay on Jones Beach, New York, for five hours, exposing his skin to the sun's rays, with a copy of the book Tactics: Cavalry Artillery lying open on his bare chest (Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970). Over time his body, made available as a recipient surface like a photographic plate or canvas, gradually changed colour as the skin reddened and burnt around the stencil-like obstruction of the book. A minimalist white square on red. Skin as a surface for inscription by the sun.

Materials. Surfaces. Mark making. Ephemerality.

Energy transactions between bodies and environments.

The giving over of agency to other elemental intensities.

Documentation as trace of absent event. 

For 'hang time', an earlier post about skywriting practices, see here

summer drift

back and forth

Gaëtan Rusquet (France/Belgium)

Scattered on the floor of the light-filled entrance foyer of the College of Social and Health Care, at Kuopio’s Savonia University of Applied Sciences, lie several hundred inflated balloons. Each of them is a uniform sausage shape, and either red, cream, white or brown, as if the space is to be decorated for a children’s birthday party. Taking off his clothes and leaving them neatly folded at one side of the space, performance artist and scenographer Gaëtan Rusquet starts to bend, loop and tie them, as if he’s making balloon animals and other odd shapes. Gradually, over a period of about forty minutes, he elaborates an interwoven structure incorporating all of the balloons, an exo-skeleton or ‘second skin’ full body mask into which he inserts and attaches himself. In this eccentric aggregate, the coloured balloons accrue suggestions of bodily components, an infinitely complex schematic representation of blood, bone, flesh, muscle, like the spatialised interiority of some eccentric anatomist’s écorché. In this somewhat unsettling détournement of balloons’ familiar associations, the insides seem to have burst through the envelope of the skin. This quietly practical task generates squeaks, the occasional pop and some embarrassed giggles from the Children’s Choice Award judges.

 

Eventually Gaëtan all but disappears inside this sculptural structure, only his naked feet still visible to the onlookers. After a pause, he throws himself to the floor and begins to writhe, thrust and roll, using his body’s weight, friction and occasionally his teeth to burst the balloons. The process produces a startling cacophony of bangs and squeals, like a miniature firework display or war zone, each explosion a small violence in such epidermal proximity to Gaëtan’s increasingly exposed body. Many of the onlookers, in particular the children, have their fingers in their ears and their eyes clenched shut. The formal reversal of accretion and accumulation in the clear symmetrical shape of the performance (‘back and forth’) triggers a wide associational field related to bodily and life cycles: the inspiration and exhalation of breath, the growth and decay of cells, the mortal trajectory of all corporeal forms over time. Ultimately Gaëtan’s naked, sweating, marked torso lies still in the debris of countless ruptured balloons. He stands to survey the traces of his Sisyphean task, before silently putting the familiar second skin of his clothes back on and returning to the everyday with a smile. (1)

* Children’s Choice Awards: ‘Most Disgusting’, ‘Most Beautiful’, ‘Liveliest’

(1) An earlier performance of Gaëtan Rusquet’s Back and forth, at the AccionMad Festival, Madrid (November 2010), has been documented on video by Christopher Hewitt, another artist involved in ANTI 2011. The liveartwork DVD issue 12 is available through the liverartwork website.