jet lagged and fresh off the heels of joni mitchell's big come back concert, i'm writing to you with bathed in her gifted poetry and the power of a collective teardrop. my best friend and i climbed through the entrance of the hollywood bowl to find an eden of listeners ready to be touched. within the first 10 minutes of situating ourselves in section e, we befriended everyone around us: a young man alone who wanted his photo taken at the bowl; mary and lauri who left their respective husbands decades ago to find a life and a family together in vermont; the lawyer for fema next to us, who said "i'm so glad i'm alive while joni's alive." when the blue lights came on and the stage rotated to reveal joni sitting like a queen on a throne, wearing a beret of course, and holding a cane that she used to keep the beat, we were all in tears. all ....i don't know how many thousand of us (every seat was taken, as far as the eye could see). as she sang, in her voice mangled by illness (stroke) and age (80), we all cried. let me rephrase, we all had that involuntary experience where tears just slide out of their ducts. mary, who sat in back of us, in her late-60s said "joni is the soundtrack of my life." oddly mine too. as i sat their i realized that she has this uncanny ability to sing as if she's whispering ONLY to you, but simultaneously connecting us all to the experience living in a body, feeling, hurting, loving, yearning...together. someone in the audience yelled, "joni i could drink a case of you." it's not just me, she's privately for all of us.
and on that topic of her perfect love song, sit with these lyrics for a moment, if you will:
Just before our love got lost you said
"I am as constant as a northern star"
And I said, "Constantly in the darkness
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar"
On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh, Canada
With your face sketched on it twice
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
And I would still be on my feet
Oh, I would still be on my feet
Oh, I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I'm frightened by the devil
And I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid
I remember that time you told me
You said, "Love is touching souls"
Surely you touched mine
'Cause part of you pours out of me
In these lines from time to time
Oh, you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
Still I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet
I met a woman
She had a mouth like yours
She knew your life
She knew your devils and your deeds
And she said, "Go to him, stay with him if you can
But be prepared to bleed"
Oh, but you are in my blood
You're my holy wine
You're so bitter
Bitter and so sweet
Oh, I could drink a case of you, darling
Still I'd be on my feet
I would still be on my feet
ok, wipe your eyes and send that to someone you love while i introduce you to allie wist. after listening to an npr piece about an artist staging photographs of meals in the future of climate changed world (spoiler alert it was allie) i cold emailed her about a show i was curating at crush curatorial in amangsett. the show was called Eat/ing Your Heart Out, an investigation of how, why, how much and what drives our impulse to eat. Allie enthusiastically joined the show with her piece Recipe for Potable Water, which displayed a method for desalinating ocean water for drinking in the face of sea level rise. Enjoy her marvelous work.
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Allie E.S. Wist is trying to revive ‘being a Renaissance man.’ It is more out of necessity than any old world prestige. We live everyday witnessing the dissolve of discrete boundaries between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ (as human waste now infiltrates even the most remote corners of the globe), good versus evil, and truth versus fiction. Many of these were false binaries in the first place. Wist hopes to suggest we can also reconsider ‘art’ vs ‘science,’ and take seriously artistic practice and sensory experience as capable of producing knowledge. Perhaps just a different shape of knowledge. The renaissance man could be a geologist, poet, writer, natural scientist, artist and philosopher, so why can’t I?
Wist has been called both a docent and a witch of the Anthropocene. Her ancestors are allegedly from the Black Forest in Bavaria, and she grew up in a steel town north of Pittsburgh, PA. She is an artist, writer, and scholar, currently working on an interdisciplinary arts PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she focuses on sensory futures: food, smell, posthumanism, and environmental humanities. She is also part-time faculty at New York University. Her work includes edible and olfactory artifacts, as well as photography and video, which come together most often in multi-modal installation works or performative dinners which question the distinction between the human and the ‘natural.’ She has an MA in Food Studies from New York University and worked as a photo director for food media outlets in New York for over a decade, including Bon Appetit and Saveur. Her work and workshops have been exhibited with Honolulu Biennial, The Wellcome Collection, MIT, the Nobel Prize Museum, and Pioneer Works, and she has given talks with prominent futurist organizations, including the Institute for the Future, and Columbia’s Digital Storytelling Lab.
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what kind of life do you want to live?
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Whenever we found money on the sidewalk as kids, my dad would call it “karma money.” (Please excuse the flagrant out-of-context Buddhism.) The rule was that we had to spend that money doing something nice for someone else—buying flowers for our grandma for no reason is one I remember well. I think this can extend to any privilege or emotional bandwidth you find yourself fortunate with. Can I take the time to tell someone I love them or send them a postcard or (in my world) read their latest abstract? (My sister is an expert at this—you should see all of the beautiful mail I have from her.)
I want to build worlds from inside the disaster. There are so, so many visions of utopia on one hand and dystopia on the other, and almost all of them avoid dealing with the deep, thick time of now. I’m always only partway through knowing what this means, but I try to remind myself to smell wet dirt and stinky plants, to take a walk even when / especially when the weather is moody and inhospitable, and find a way to show up for others each day.
I want to live a life that requires a commitment to other people. For me, whatever existential meaning life might have isn’t usually located in a place or a job so much as in and with other people. I am deeply indebted to my artistic and academic community here in Troy.
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My dissertation is both research and art practice, and so I just finished a multisensory installation at The Experimental Performance and Media Arts center in Troy, which featured live microscope projections of microplastics in Troy tap water I’ve been tracking with a collaborator through Troy’s citizen science organization NATURE Lab, Sarah Cadieux, and my advisor Kathy High. The installation also included hanging censurs which filled the air with experimental petro-scents I created based on asphalt and plastic. I’m looking for a second venue for this work, as well as for my next project, which will be a food-based Anthropocene-geology event that asks how we produce “edibility.” I try to use taste and smell for two things they are largely excluded from: contemporary art and the production of scientific (environmental) knowledge.
The question of edibility has emerged over the course of my research on sustainable food and climate adaptations, which eventually ends in a tangle of contradictions—we refuse to eat insects, but are fine ingesting huge amounts of chemicals. We may not have intended for plastics to be edible, but we are eating them anyway. Clay and dirt have been eaten for centuries, in part for their detoxification capabilities, yet this practice is pathologized as a psychological disorder in the DSM (pica). How do we perceive toxicity and purity in a world where our bodies are already toxic, already deeply altered by the slow violence of ecological collapse? Eating is a fascinating practice where all of the safe and cozy boundaries of ‘self’ vs ‘other’ are transgressed (albeit with many rules), and it is where we have the best chance for realizing that our bodies actually are the Anthropcoene, as my dissertation advisor Stacy Alaimo says. Digestion is how we figure matter with our bodies.
The environment is not ‘over there’—it is in the lingering chemical signatures of drought in wheat contained in a loaf of bread I’m eating; it is in the PFAS and microplastics in my blood. How do we start from here, and take time to actually notice the world we are already in? I am always wrestling with the urgency to articulate real harm done by Anthropogenic impacts on the environment, while being deeply committed to resisting the dangerous politics of seeking ‘pure’ bodies, which leads us to seek ‘pure’ lifestyles, and often a ‘traditional’ time we should steer politics back towards.
I’m currently (and usually) on a hunt for the best industrial heaps and feral industrial ecological sites in upstate New York. I have attempted to climb several giant gravel heaps that often sit at the edges of concrete and asphalt production facilities. I find the futility of trying to ‘climb’ gravel—sliding back down over and over—strangely cathartic. It says something about climate change, a problem that we simultaneously can’t meaningfully address, and yet absolutely contribute to. I have been collecting plants from semi-toxic ecologies near such facilities to make into perfumes and cement sculptures. I recently collaborated with Hans Tursack, an artist and architect, to collect all manner of detritus from demolished buildings in our town, and fill a gabion cage with them. On top of the rubble, I grew edible microgreens into gravel for visitors to the exhibition to eat.
My latest experimental radio show will air on Montez Press Radio on October 23rd at 5:00 PM, [editor's note--this will have aired when the email is sent! go check it out!] which I co-host with Christian Hendricks. The show, MUTAMUR, is a posthumanist radio show that critiques futurist trends from an art perspective, and this month we investigate toxicity and corporeal invasions in an episode titled Breached Bodies. You can listen to more episodes of MUTAMUR, including a recent two-part series on cultivating intimacy with geology, from MPR’s archive or on my website.
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I also have a chapter on my Climate LARPing project in an upcoming anthology on North American Visual Art entitled Unserious Ecocriticism.
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This article is the most recent publicly-accessible piece i’ve written.
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And this is the most recent writing—a paper in a journal on Women in Art and Science—but its behind an academic paywall.
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allie's social impact project
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Free Palestine, Free Palestine, Free Palestine.
Please consider donating to Tharma, a Palestinian organization fostering food sovereignty in Gaza.
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The most long-standing object of my research zealotry is Baseline Shifting Syndrome. It is a term used in sociology and ecology to describe a kind of cultural amnesia—time lags in how humans collectively account for change. I can’t help but be drawn to the disorientation of it. Essentially, it describes how groups of humans often make errors in measuring slow change over time, and with each generation, set a new baseline definition of “normal.” This could be a normal amount of, say, pollution in the environment or fish in the ocean. We can understand changes that happen during our lifetime (our lived experience), but we struggle to account for even extreme change that happens over multiple generations. Surprisingly, even scientists themselves are victims of this syndrome. I’ve made work in response to this idea, including a sensory installation with a perfume that tells the story of an extinct banana variety, and a photo series suggesting how dramatic our new baseline definitions of ‘normal’ might be in a future of higher sea levels, constant flooding, and dramatic changes in food culture to adapt to potential agricultural failures. But there is one film that captures the disorientation of change that slips away, and the insanity felt by those who do try to articulate the loss. It has nothing to do with ecology. It is about a mustache. It is, in fact, called La Moustache. It is very long and very French. But it captures, I think, the unnerving, psychological eeriness that happens when we have to confront loss—especially when it is denied right in front of us (like so much of climate change in late-stage capitalism).
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My friend Carlos Aguilar (Concrete Husband) is one of those truly talented souls—a classically-trained experimental flutist and electronic composer / DJ. He made this track in response to field recordings I sent him of gravel in abandoned lots. It was the soundtrack to a 360o film and edible installation (with asphalt caramels done in collaboration with Primo Botanica) last summer.
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allie's article of the week
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The Age of Hyberabundance by Laura Preston
We are all tired of hearing about AI. This is an great essay that’s ostensibly about AI, but is actually about the affect of contradiction, as it shimmers in and out of our grasp. It is about broken promises of any technology, and the reality of loneliness. It is both devastating and hilarious.
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To be honest, I’ve been eating a lot of clay as part of my dissertation research—I recommend kaolin clay, & I often melt down vegan dark chocolate into a silicon mold, and add big chunks of clay to that.
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Otherwise, I have to make viral my love of the incredible APTEKA restaurant in Pittsburgh, PA. The vegan polish (and often wild-foraged) menu is a perfect fall/winter fantasy.
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The most incredible piece of bread I’ve ever seen was a 3,300-year old mummified hunk of emmer wheat bread in the National Museum of Egypt. The alchemy required to make such a fallible and ephemeral piece of food last for millennia nearly inspires religiosity.
I had started making coal bread for a few of my installations in 2022, and this spring I found two of the partially-eaten loaves in a cardboard box in my studio. They were certainly stale, but I was shocked to find that they hadn’t rotted or molded in the slightest, more than two years later. So yes, I accidentally mummified bread myself. I put it back on display in an exhibition in May.
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and a few picks from push...
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summertime gallery's puppet show is here, and it is glorious. if you've ever wondered what a sexy puppet show would be, well, you'll have to buy a ticket to find out.
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we've long been fans of jeffrey gibson over here. feast your eyes on his amazing new commission for QUEER|ART, and read more here.
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amazing throwback article on oscilloscope on the relationship between movies and mirrors.
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another listen from the New Yorker, Garth Greenwell's fiction story the Frog King.
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we hope you are loving the transitional weather and that you enjoyed another installment of push picks. as always, if you like what you read, forward it to someone or encourage them to sign up. it would mean the world to us 🌎
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