The Woonasquatucket Primitive

End Blog

2007-05-26T18:53:00.000-04:00

Somethings begin, some end . . . except blogs, usually. You show up in the middle of them, and they seem to go on forever, or end without word. A nothing that nothings. Since this was meant to be a "temporary autonomous blog," and since we have attained some closure on the mystery of the Woonasquatucket Primitive, I figure this to be a good enough point to end, rather than go on and on and on. The mystery and experience is still open to you, though, dear reader. Now that it is warmer out, signs of the Primitive are more plentiful. You ain't seen nothing yet. Give nothing a break!
And now, with a slight of hand usually reserved only for higher dimensional entities, I will reverse the course of time, changing a blog into a web narrative with a beginning and an end, so that new visitors will be able to track my process of understanding the Primitive and his art during a few months in 2007. There will be a new arrow at the end of each entry, so that all you need to do is click there and move forward, rather than go back to this index.

Knot Here
Blood Lines
Snow Thing
Indian Dandy
Dump, Cosmos
Shared Metaphysic
Weekend Primitives
Shy Crystal
Chance, Necessity
Doo-Dad
Hysterical Shrines
Tabula Rasa
Under Erasure
Twisty Things
Secret Compass
Moldy Aesthetic
You, Mind
Pinch Me
Superhuman Powers
Familiar Tableaux
Alchemical Transformation
Fishing Machine

Fishing Machine

2007-05-15T18:04:00.000-04:00

"But that one ripple on the boundless deep
Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself
For ever changing form, but evermore
One with the boundless motion of the deep."
--Tennyson

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Alchemical Transmutation

2007-05-14T19:02:00.000-04:00

Or another show of impressive strength . . .

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Familiar Tableaux

2007-05-13T13:23:00.000-04:00

I haven't seen these for a while.

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Superhuman Powers

2007-05-12T16:56:00.000-04:00

The Primitive accompanies his whimsical subtlety with displays of superhuman power. Compare this rock slab with the other rock slabs along the path. To upend this stele would have taken considerable effort, with minimal outcome (like most of the Primitive's interventions, but even more so with this one; his new arrangement is barely distinguishable from the typical order of his environs). Then he goes and insouciantly hangs a plastic heart and bobber on some tree.

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Pinch Me

2007-05-11T18:42:00.000-04:00

Salient Feature #7: The Pinch of Intentionality. The day after I met the Primitive for the first time, I noticed that, in the place where he had been resting, he left subtle markers of his presence. A piece of driftwood was moved onto the bench, and a smooth rock was wedged between the slats of the picnic bench. The latter technique is fairly common for the Primitive--simple objects are stuck, wedged, or pinched in the lattices of a bench or table. It now seems that these specific gestures may be a way for him to memorialize a moment of calm, well-being, or relaxation in the course of a rough existence. Sometimes, the intervention is unadorned--primitive, if you will--as with the smooth rock or crystal. At other times, it takes on the aspects of a drama. As with the straw-structure above, you are initially drawn to the pinch of intentionality, the sense of a prior artful presence, and you stay for the conversation between the the wiry, blackhaired red McDonald's straw and the weird, phallically-capped piece of tree.

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You, Mind

2007-05-04T20:57:00.000-04:00

I found him.
As you can see, he keeps a more robust twisty thing attached to his army duffel bag. As I approached him, I took this picture to so I would know I was not dreaming. But perhaps he was. He appeared to be sleeping. I couldn't help but stand there, pretending to admire the twisty thing rather than outright gawking at him. He must have felt my shadow on his face, because he slowly lifted his head when it passed over him. The following was the only conversation:
"This is great. Do you mind if I take a picture of this?"
"No. That's OK."
"Do you mean you mind or you don't mind?"
"No."
"So it's not OK to take a picture?"
"No."
"You mean I can take a picture?"
"No pictures."
"Are you the person who's been doing all these?"
". . ." (nods)
"I love these. These are really great."
"Thank you."

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Moldy Aesthetic

2007-05-02T08:34:00.000-04:00

"In the middle of the city should be a repository of objects that people don't want any more, which they would take to this giant junkyard. That would form an organization . . . a way that the city would be organized around that. I think that this center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a center of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it."
--Jack Smith

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Secret Compass

2007-04-30T10:55:00.000-04:00

It dawned on my that the reconstructed bowsprit we found a couple days ago was actually a secret compass. Some of today's cairns have projections that also point due north. Are these merely random piles, or a cosmic computer?

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Twisty Things

2007-04-28T11:51:00.000-04:00

Salient Feature #6: Twisty things. When these accumulations of twisted wire appear, they last longer than the other media the Primitive uses, although they soon migrate into the garbage from whence they came. Tom Zummer pointed out to me that the work of the Woonasquatucket Primitive has affinities with that of the Philadelphia Wireman, and these wires are perhaps the Primitive's homage to this classic anonymous urban folk artist. But the Wireman's wires are more easily appreciated outside of their original context; as web sites show, they can be easily, and depressingly, placed beneath the vitrine. As I have been emphasizing about the work of the Primitive, however, these are not as much art objects, but interventions and addresses: a way to connect to the environment and a call out to others. It's a clasp and a patois. A twist and a shout.

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Under Erasure

2007-04-26T16:52:00.000-04:00

Out of all the crap the rain dredged up, the Primitive surprised me today some mini-structures made mostly from lost WaterFire logs. The city keeps this wood hidden in the alcoves that line the watery underbelly of the city. The recent rain set them free from their cords, so that you could find flotillas of cut wood in the dead ends of the Woonasquatucket. Probably there are a few that have beat it out to the sea. Nevertheless, the structures the Primitive composed of them were very simple and some were even precarious, so I made sure to rush back with my camera in case the wind blew some over before I got there.
But it was not the wind that ended up the problem. By the time I got back, the lunch bourgeoisie had erased all signs of the Primitive. I brought Roxy along and it was truly a Snuffleupagus moment. Now, imagine the scene (or look at the last entry if your imagination is strained): there is literally a carpet of garbage on the river walk that still hasn't been cleaned up since the rains, and overflowing garbage cans as per usual. Yet, these self-appointed custodians of the city choose to remove something significant and whimsical. What is wrong with you people?
So I do what any self-respecting documentarian would do. I find the remnants of the most interesting sculpture, thrown here and there in the bushes, and reconstruct it as best as I can from memory.

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Tabula Rasa

2007-04-18T10:16:00.000-04:00

Or horror vacui? The recent wind and rain has washed away most remaining signs of the Primitive, and replaced them with a mulch of garbage and organic matter that carpets the whole riverwalk. The most prevalent items washed up are multitudinous bits of styrofoam and empty containers of 10W-30. At points, it is arranged in such neat formation, that it almost looks like intentional landscaping.

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Hysterical Shrines

2007-04-15T17:34:00.000-04:00

Salient Feature #5: Shrine accumulations. There is a scene in Silence of the Lambs where, after Hannibal Lecter escapes from the cage in which he was painting Florentine landscapes and listening to Glenn Gould, we see his handiwork: a Statehouse guard flayed and crucified, suspended beatifically, expertly lit. To me, it seems a moment not only in character with Hannibal's "classiness," but also an instance of directorial hysteria (who did the lighting, anyway?), where Jonathan Demme is arguing with all his resources that, even though he is playing with the tropes of a B-genre, that this is an A-film.
To what end do I proffer this example?
The Primitive is at times caught up in the same brand of hysteria. Not content on forging a barely visible bind between his/her hand and the environment, the shrine alerts viewers that, indeed, this is art. These shrines originally alerted me to the piece's more subtle interventions and gave me a sense of the overall grammar of the Primitive.
Why the butterflies? My own hysterical Web 2.0 moment, perhaps.

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Doo-Dad

2007-04-07T23:39:00.000-04:00

One could have easily overlooked today's installment of the Primitive. As I said earlier, evidence of his/her handiwork has been scarce. In fact, I didn't even go out with my camera today. Although I ran back home in order to come back and take a picture of this doo-dad, strewn haphazardly, before some street sweeper or happy resurrectionist decided to return the sidewalk to its pristine state. Notice how this sculpture masquerades as garbage--insouciant and misplaced, almost invisible.

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Chance, Necessity

2007-04-06T16:15:00.000-04:00

"Somewhere in the city . . . there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they'll make a work of art. That's Cornell's premise, his metaphysics, and his religion, which I wish to understand.
He sets out from his home on Utopia Parkway without knowing what he is looking for or what he will find. Today it could be something as ordinary and interesting as an old thimble. Years may pass before it has company. In the meantime, Cornell walks and looks. The city has an infinite number of interesting objects in an infinite number of unlikely places."
--Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell
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shy crystal

2007-04-01T20:27:00.000-04:00

The Primitive has not been as prolific as expected, although this lone crystal turned up. Perhaps the Primitive is getting shy, but this is his/her hand.

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Public Service

2007-03-27T16:47:00.001-04:00

Since the Primitive's art creates a dialogue with the garbage that winds up at this end of the Woonasquatucket, I thought it would be instructive to revisit the anti-litter genre of PSA, from the classic instance (with an appearance by the Indian Dandy) to a newer one by David Lynch.

Primitive Spotted?

2007-03-27T11:51:00.000-04:00

Weekend Primitives

2007-03-25T22:56:00.000-04:00

After little sign of the Primitive all week, a tin foil chalice appears. Simple, catching the sunlight, it also has alchemical intensity of emblem and archetype. This is clearly the work of our Primitive. However, it seems that some weekend primitives have taken over the space. Their address is more confrontational, humorless, almost a challenge. I might be a little paranoid, but I am seeing little aggressive jabs at my attempts to track the Primitive, like plastic bags of dog poop on rock pedestals. Or attempts to compete for attention, as in a graffito on a picnic table "escape your prison": a bit of vulgar gnosticism. Just as the art eye is expanded by reflecting on the Primitive's intervention, so the critical eye now finds criticism everywhere now that the blog has been up for a week. I'm finding comment boxes in the branches, feedback on the top of overflowing trashcans. I cross paths with an androgynous skinny kid taking distressed Polaroids and leaving them behind. That's the spirit, but this is not our Primitive. I take a shot of one or two of the Polaroids anyway. I am tempted to take pictures of the dog crap, thinking it might serve a future purpose to prove a visual point. Or maybe there is some clue encoded therein. But no. It's just litter. Pick it up, you schmoe.

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Shared Metaphysic

2007-03-22T21:56:00.000-04:00

Context: The Providence River walk is bloated with monuments and city-sanctioned public art. The hodgepodge is almost endearing, encapsulating the full spectrum of possible modes--from neoclassical war monuments to minimalist structures to "fanciful" art-cow-esque interventions to fluxus anti-sculpture. There is also the River Fire--which perhaps deserves a entry of its own--a happening which, through its institutionalization, channels primal energies more in the fashion of a football bonfire than an art installation. We see weird mixes of the utopian and the memorial impulse, as with signs promising future monuments. Notice how a Holocaust memorial's future site is announced with the solemnity regularly reserved for the opening of a new Denny's. The memorial impulse captures all surfaces, even the paving stones. Because of its ubiquity, one wonders upon the story behind a simple greyish box: what morbidity does this immortalize? However, it is only an engineered enclosure or rather "The Engineered Enclosure"(tm). What does it enclose? Mystery enough for art lovers. There are more modernist structures, my favorite of which can be described as Richard Serra-lite, composed of rusted metal, with a sun roof. What is interesting about this piece is that in a public space, it provides an intimate hideaway; its surface has become a communications network for graffiti artists and others. Just a nose or two above drowning in art-cow tackiness is the man in the river, who floats just a stone's throw from the metallic cock-ring of pain. It's a fine line between sanctioned whimsicality and true mischief. But it's a line that is discernible between the floating man and some ceramic tiles that are attached to random points on one of the small bridges that cross the river. On the surface, they seem innocuous, in the style of fairly typical subway art. But a closer look at they way they are attached to the bridge reveals a shoddy workmanship that would not accompany contemporary city art. Checking their website (included on the tile), one finds that it is a situationist-inspired spontaneous intervention. I think their subversive intent is lost, however, on the casual observer. No, I prefer the blithe junkiness of the Woonasquatucket Primitive after all.

To explain his resistance to public art that reflected communal desire and harmonized with the space in which it was built, Richard Serra pointed out that "there is no socially shared metaphysic" (qtd. Finkelpearl 35). What the hodgepodge of structures on the River Walk reveals is that indeed there is. Everybody loves a miniature golf course.

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Dump, Cosmos

2007-03-21T10:50:00.000-04:00

Salient Feature #4: Indistinction of garbage and art.

"The whole world, everything which surrounds me here, is to me a boundless dump with no ends or borders, an inexhaustible, diverse sea of garbage. In this refuse of an enormous city one can feel the powerful breathing of its entire past. This whole dump is full of twinkling stars, reflections and fragments of culture[.] . . . [A]ll forms of packaging which were ever needed by man have not lost their shape, they did not become something dead when they were discarded. They cry out about a past life, they preserve it. . . . The feeling of vast, cosmic existence encompasses a person at these dumps; this is by no means a feeling of neglect, or the perishing of life, but just the opposite--a feeling of its return, a full circle, because as long as memory exists that's how long everything connected to life will live."
--Ilya Kabakov, "The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away"
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Indian Dandy

2007-03-19T22:17:00.000-04:00

Salient Feature #3: Aboriginal markers. In his Histoire Extraordinaire: Essay on a Dream of Baudelaire, Michel Butor points out that Poe's anti-Americanism, admired by Baudelaire, is deeply American. Notions of democracy, system, and reason are replaced by the sensibility of "Indian dandies" (131) whose knowledge is "encyclopaedic," attuned to "the primitive American substratum" (129). The Indian dandy is a flaneur of nature, capable of responding to it in toto rather than be "confined in the infinitely petty regions of specialization" (130). Such is the method of our primitive dandy, who leaves us with postmodern signs of the aboriginal without referent; s/he plays the primitive but is not content to remain "naturally" one (since s/he makes do with plasticated detritus as much as s/he does with bird feathers and string.) The signs left are not as subtle as the broken branch left by the trailblazer, but they come close, existing as they do at the margins of attention. Again note how a mere twist and knot of plastic holds us to an artistic address. We can only guess at the source of this specifically American creativity. For if we try to peg it too squarely, we fall into the trap that Poe warns against in "The Colloquy of Monos and Una":

Man, because he could not but acknowledge the majesty of nature, fell into childish exultation at his acquired and still-increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a God in his own fancy, an infantile imbecility came over him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. (610)

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Snow Thing

2007-03-18T18:58:00.000-04:00

Is the handiwork of the Woonasquatucket Primitive hidden by the recent snow? Or do we see its nothing more? I'm reminded of the discussion of a Wallace Stevens poem in a recent essay by Nilima Rabl and Samuel Frederick in SubStance ("Dividing Zero: Beholding Nothing"):

"the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"

They go on to write that Stevens is detailing an impossible point of view, in which the perceiver becomes a chilly cipher in the face of nothing. Only thus can one perceive nothing fully. It is a stance which stands against interpretation and encourages a "re-experience . . . [of] the world": "His 'mind of winter' allows him to behold his surroundings without the impulse for appropriation, without a desire to hold them for more than the instant of the beholding glance" (73). Perhaps the Woonasquatucket Primitive's scribbled pilgrims with their empty eyes are snowmen--even though they appear at all seasons. Afterall, Stevens' "mind of winter" seems to be timeless; there is no need to wait for snow to cultivate a mind that looks upon nothing "without thinking of 'misery.' " They continue: "Instead, what the snow man 'beholds' is an emptiness that is also a plenitude--just as the snow man himself is formed of ciphers, shapes that would usually circumscribe the emptiness they signify, but which in this case are full, filled with snow" (73). Are things hidden by the snow? No. Sounds ring out fuller, objects stand out more starkly, like glyphs of a giant book. But nobody is reading the book, and there is nothing to read, since we have suddenly become a black word, inching along, paying attention in an ambiguous tale.

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Blood Lines

2007-03-17T14:28:00.000-04:00

Salient Feature #2: Drawings in blood red scrawl. Pilgrims, witches, familial groupings, mohawked outsiders. A grim memorial to the colonial era, perhaps, or the evidence of a more contemporary communal, family, or personal trauma kept at bay through referencing a deep past. However, they convey sadness only retrospectively. In context, they are hopeful and welcoming if only because they punctuate the mostly fanciful interactions of this absent hand, and stand out from more typical trash. One thinks to unlock the mystery of their arrangements: big pilgrim, little pilgrim, big pilgrim, little pilgrim--nostalgia for parental guidance, regret as to its failure, or something darker? I don't think I want to consider the most representational aspect of this intervention as the cipher to a narrative . . . the "why" of this art. Not yet. If anything, like schizophrenic drawings--which they may very well be--they convey the energy and assurance of an alternative order (which distinguishes these from the drawings of children--who might not have the same sense of cosmology and purpose). I am always tempted to take one of these when they appear. They are the most "collectible" and most obvious sign of the artist. But I resist, even when I say to myself, "It's about to rain/snow anyway. This will be pulp by morning." Because, the more pulpy and damp they are, the better.

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Knot Here

2007-03-16T17:37:00.000-04:00

Salient feature #1: This installation, which has mutated for at least the 9 months I have been here, sometimes fades into the ostinato of plastic bags and pigeon splatter that already decorate the river walk. One of the most prominent thematic elements of it is the knot--degree zero of artistic intentionality, but with a rich history that Peruvian princesses, Lacanian topologists, boy scouts and old salts can understand. These, and other similarly adventurous sorts, are perhaps the ideal audience of this work, even though it appears smack in the middle of a major lunch hour promenade (this is not the "road not taken"). Some might be hard pressed to call it a work. Is it knot-art, or not-art? If anything, the opening of this blog might officially make it, at least, not-not-art, but whether art is sanctified by any critical apparatus is a knotty issue. If anything, the knot points to some kind of presence and attention to space: "I was knot-here." While walking thru the detritus of this ever-changing but dependable collocation of speaking garbage, one reflects on presence-absence. The invisibility of what is right in front of you is a theme. The artist could indeed be one of the many homeless people one sees camping out here in the shadow of Brown, RISD and the financial district. Or it could be a disaffected Brown or RISD student. Or both. Or maybe it's someone who already has had something in the Whitney. Whatever the secret to the mystery, this blog will document the fluctuations of the piece as I see it, and provide a space for dialogue with this intriguing intervention in public space. Holding onto the world with a language of nots . . .

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