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November 23, 2006

Connections Through Time and Space

Recently I went to Beacon, NY, to the opening of a large group show which included three of my boxed constructions. “Rousseau� and “Matisse� replicate famous paintings (“The Dream,� “The Red Studio�) and restore the third dimension inevitably sacrificed in painting. The other diorama, “Charon’s Dock,� is a small all-white assemblage of industrial trusses, stanchions, arches, tracks, lath, mesh, etc.

Too early for the Poughkeepsie train (uncertain traveler that I am), I browsed around Grand Central, bought a picture book--Scuffy the Tugboat--for Tibor Gergely’s somber-cheerful ’40s illustrations. These presaged my journey--up a winding river, through industry and villages; even a glimpse of a lonely tugboat toy-tiny in the distance. While not “red-painted� like the eponymous tug (the life-size one was ghostly white), it did seem as intrepid.

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All aboard and through the tunnel. We spring out, into the metallic blue-gray dusk. After Harlem, a snaking stretch of wasteland. Bridges near and far; trusses and arches; ashy trees and murky factories all dim in the gloom. Night settles gradually, like the fade-to-black surcease of a picture on an old TV.

A youngish woman in a red bandanna sits next to me. She mentions being a Lakota Indian. I'm now reading a book by Joseph M. Marshall III, a Lakota of the Rosebud Sioux tribe. His voice on the companion CD resonates, his r’s hard and s’s sharp; he talks of elders, wisdom, wolves. Red bandanna’s story is like his: though a generation apart, both had been born to teenage mothers, raised on a reservation by tribal elders.

As a child I patently preferred Indians to cowboys. My interest in Native Americans was rekindled when Caleb, much like a wolf-fox, entered my life. Then Tracy joined our pack. A couple of years ago, a mailing arrived from the St. Joseph’s Indian School. From time to time they send lagniappes—the latest, a feathered dream-catcher keychain and a Native dream-catcher prayer.
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Stations flash by. Spuyten Dyvil: where I’d gone to kindergarten over 50 years ago. There I built wood-scrap boats, hammered nails around the decks for rails, sailed them on the floor. Riverdale: our first home—brick apartment house that seemed to be in a woods; a terrace, a driveway that bumped. We race by Ossining, Croton-Harmon, Peekskill, Garrison, Breakneck Ridge. This is the same river whose beginning I’ve lived by, to the south, for 30 years.

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At Beacon station, someone drives me to the gallery, a converted warehouse factory—inside, more like a museum, or a Norwegian icebreaking ship, or the Titanic. Gleaming white walls; nautical white and yellow rails; the hundred-year-old inner structure exposed, raw and rugged—actually rather like “Charon’s Dock,� which hangs on a wall. Amid three vast, open stories filled with art, I find “Rousseau� and “Matisse,� displayed on pedestals. People peer in, smiling. Watching from a distance, I feel like the parent of performing schoolkids.

As I wander around, looking at the art, I begin to feel I’m inside a giant diorama.

I remember thinking, at age three, that when you turn the radio on, a miniature band inside it begins to play. At five I thought Indians and cowboys lived in limbo inside the TV; they resumed their battles when you switched it on. These days, I'm thinking that art and nature waken just when you look at them. And that between times, suspended from observation, they gray out.

Posted by Jane on November 23, 2006 11:38 AM

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