Second Workshop #5
March 8, 2007

For our first full session considering material media, Leslie Miller arrived with a pineapple-coconut chess pie, chicken salad casserole, and a modest orange pamphlet she made, called “Jes’ Eatin',” chronicling the history of these two delicious dishes (plus with easy-to-follow recipes!). Not a crumb was left at the end of the night, and workshop members are already attempting their own chess pies.

Amidst the casserole and pie, crudite from Melia Donovan, wine, champagne, and Abi Spring’s Johnny Walker, the evening was taken up with Show and Tell. Workshop members brought objects that had enchanted them—some enduring something that came out of the wide world and into a life to leave it’s mark. Objects can do this—as Frank O’Hara put it, objects enchant us by having “the courage to be what we are afraid to do.” Whether a book, freighted with its story (its vast, expansive interior), or a picture, pregnant with memories or meanings, or even a plain, reticent object like TJ Norris’s mysterious palm-sized puck of smooth, black stone…or so it appeared. This small orb of infinite patience (that TJ brought to share for Show and Tell) produced, on being lifted to the ear, an ethereal tinkling, like the sound of an astronaut urinating in space.

Luisa Guyer brought her copy of Conversation In the Cathedral, by Mario Vargas Llosa, the giant of 20th century Peruvian writing. It begins with Santiago (whose conversations comprise most of the book) ambling into the “cars, uneven faded buildings, the gaudy skeletons of posters floating in the mist, the gray midday,” of Lima and asking: “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” Luisa read the book when she was 12. It stays with her as memory, as life, as imagination, place, a kind of vast wing of consciousness that is peopled with ghosts and the living. We wondered if the two-volume Spanish set she originally read as a child held special meanings for her. It does, but it remains in Peru, to which Luisa travels more often through this object—by reading Vargas Llosa—than she does in body.

Sergio Pastor brought Finnegan’s Wake. The book was battered and worn by years of heavy reading, and Erik Palmer speculated that it must have traveled to Europe. Sergio said this copy had not, but the point was well taken. Books travel, sometimes alone, for decades or centuries. They accumulate history and link readers. In the wear and tear, or the marginal notes and exclamations, we even witness the internal travels of previous readers leaving the bread-crumbs of their own journey through the text we have now picked up to read.

Stephanie Snyder also brought books, but hers was a collection of early 20th century art instruction books for children. She studied the subject at Columbia, with Foster Wygant, in the 1990s. During a break back home with family in Portland, Stephanie grudgingly agreed to join her mother antique-ing in Aurora (Oregon) and there, amidst mom’s piles of beloved bric-a-brac, Stephanie came across a trove of worn, used booklets—the first-hand objects of her study back in NY! These artifacts of an ambitious pedagogy that had included drawing and craft, were overlaid with the trace of the work of the children who had used them. “Laura Brown” (in one case) inscribed her efforts to learn, nearly a hundred years ago, and we now held it. Stephanie also included a small drawing book of her own, from when she was a child, that depicted a dead bunny (in crayon).

Melia Donavan brought a camera, a Duraflex 120 that she had adapted so it could also handle 620 film and 35mm film. She found it in a thrift store in SF during a time when she needed cheap ways to make photos. Opening up the camera, she fiddled with the mechanism of production to McGiver more kinds of images from the tool she’d found. Workshop members who had seen Melia’s PDX window show recognized her enduring interest in the mechanisms for the production of photographic meaning: Earlier, we now found, she took apart the camera; in the PDX window, she took apart the surface of the photograph itself, refiguring tonal differences in each pixel as an analogous topography of spatial differences that could produce the same optical effect as the photo (when viewed from the proper distance). The Duraflex actually stood in for an Argus that had been more important to Melia, and she admitted that the Duraflex did not carry the same meanings for her as the absent Argus.

The Duraflex looked to be the same vintage as Leslie Miller’s View-Master set, a favorite possession from childhood which had been her window onto the bigger world outside Tennessee. Leslie’s aunt gave her the viewer and box of “reels” when she was small. Leslie was especially enchanted by the mysterious Eskimos whose incessant bone carving puzzled her. Cowboys were depicted both in life (roping, branding, riding) and in art (Hop Along Cassidy posing with a gun on his white stallion, and elsewhere). The real revelation, though, came recently, while Leslie was “free saleing” in Portland, and she found the matching projector that could turn her private “View-Master world” into a public show. Suddenly, all the interior dreams of childhood were thrown up against the wall before the eyes of all. Leslie demonstrated with a few selections from her reel library. We discussed the separation of these related objects—the View-Master and the projector—and their transit through the world to eventual reunification in the caring hands of Leslie.

Abi Spring showed us a beautiful rock her father gave her, which he had “polished” by carrying it in his pocket on many long walks. Rocks, and this approach to polishing, were a habit of his. Abi noted how the dense layering of geological time evident in the rock and the gradual wearing away, the softening and exposure brought by the action of “polishing” and handling, were analogous to her own methods of painting. The result—a cool, smooth surface—is the site of meaning in both cases. Stephanie, not wanting to be lewd, nevertheless pointed out that stones like these are, in many cultures “associated with various orifices of the body.” This led to a discussion of the linghams of Thailand, the pleasures of warm versus cool rocks, and an anecdote about a woman standing on a crowded subway who lost her grip on her sequestered Ben Wa balls, which fell to the floor. Helpful passengers instinctively turned and bent down to help, but then hesitated and let the woman handle the errant balls herself.

Our new workshop member, Scott Wayne Indiana, brought a springy, mushroom-shaped cigarette lighter that was expelled from a large motorcycle when it overturned on the Sellwood Bridge. Scott was standing nearby with his bike in stalled traffic when the inattentive motorcyclist had his spill. Scott reported that the man’s head (with helmet) smacked directly onto the pavement and began to leak blood. Scott and a handful of motorists rushed to the prone victim who staggered to his feet, said he was fine, and sped away. The alert rescuers were left standing alone, with each other, on the Sellwood Bridge. They stared blankly, made awkward farewells, and went back to their vehicles. Scott saw the lighter on the ground and took it. Despite placing an announcement about the incident on Craig’s List, Scott was never contacted by anyone, and the lighter has stayed in his possession ever since. He keeps it on his person.

Show and Tell closed with Erik Palmer’s two collections of The Dark Knight, by Frank Miller. Miller’s beautifully drawn Dark Knight, which Erik called “operatic,” had a big influence on some of Erik’s own work, particularly the photography of 2002-2003. He recalls anticipating each new issue, back when they were first published, but felt that the reprint he had brought to class was just as meaningful to him as the original issues that came in the mail (often after painfully long delays in the publication schedule). Erik called these, and other, comics “a critique of mass media,” and pointed out that his own interest (for example, in Richard Avedon) was in mass media more so than art. His doctoral studies are in the School of Journalism, at U of O.

Erik’s recognition that the systems by which objects gain meaning and circulate in our lives are shaped by the logic of mass media was a fitting segue to a quick review of the readings (all of which are posted on the workshop website under “workshop reader”) from Ronald Deibert and Raymond Williams. Both texts describe the historical development of a culture and economy of printed matter, from parchment to printing press to mass media. Sadly, our discussion of the readings was as perfunctory as this summary because time had flown by so swiftly during Show and Tell that it was already 10:15 pm, and time to race down to Holocene to see Matt McCormick’s new film and music performance, “Future So Bright.” Matt will be our guest in the workshop on April 4th.

In the meantime, the workshop will return to Deibert and Williams, who provide historical background to our consideration of Gertrude Stein. Stein’s remarkable efforts to see her own work into publication shaped an odyssey that took her into every part of the literary economy—from obscure small presses to mass market celebrity. A wonderful, detailed history of Stein and publishing, written by Hugh Ford for his book, Published In Paris, has also been posted on the website.

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