Reflections on Rubble Rubble Division, Katie Grinnan (exhibition catalog)
Pomona College Museum of Art, 2006
Katie Grinnan asked me to go on a trip with her to chronicle the journey of a parade float from Joshua Tree, CA to New York- stopping at the Wapatki Ruins, Las Vegas, Crawford Texas, and New Orleans. The float was an evocation of ruins. Click "More" for the whole piece.
Image courtesy of Dawn Kaspar
Robby Herbst
Printed for Exhibition Catalog Rubble Division, Katie Grinnan published by Pomona College.
October '06
RUBBLE REFLECTING ON THE LANDSCAPE
Driving the small white chase car, six days into the ride, Spencer is telling me how something kind of like the Weather Underground is so sadly needed today. I see it a drop differently, but I have to admit that dragging this thing x-country is partly to test the waters. In my mind we are busting into cloistered classrooms, propositioning the kids to leave immediately, because when that bell rings it will mean service in Uncle-Death's army. Clearly righteous explosions are a popular and obvious reaction to the perceived complacency of our time, but aren't bombings precisely how we got into this mess to begin with? So I am very happy that this is just art.
In total we are the Rubble Division: seven folks, a team put together by Katie Grinnan. Katie built the float that we are following in this rental Chevy Aveo. The float itself is dragged by that 15-person passenger van with the black tinted windows. The base of the float is covered in tinsel. The top is made of wood it functions as a platform. The platform supports a tangle of metal rebar. On our cross-country trip, we continuously put-up and brake-down the large flat panels that make up the sculpture supported by this rebar. We do the same for an arsenal of electronics and instruments (percussions, reeds, keyboards, toys and noise makers) for a duo of live musicians that ride the float. The panel sculpture depicts a maze of images of both trashed and becoming buildings. This rubble pile of a sculpture envelope's the two-man free-jazz outfit called the Meat Bees. In Crawford Texas, the Meat Bees get a review from our government's Secret Service, "middle eastern music". And though that is not the immediate sound they are going after, one of the Bees does wear something like a kufi, and the Bees do play a tabla.
As an art piece, Rubble Division holds its signifiers pretty tightly to its chest so it's hard for others to know exactly what we are up to. And this is precisely why Katie has put together a flyer spelling out our journey for the police- those officials in blue and brown we keep bumping into as we haul this twelve foot trailer from Joshua Tree, Death Valley, the ghost town Rhyolite, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, The Wapatki Ruins in Arizona, Santa Fe, Crawford Texas and New Orleans. The flyer declares that our impromptu parades are a work of art with credentials and bonafides to boot. But the Crawford Police need to hear that this is some kind of protest in order to process us into their signifying vocabulary. Protests they are used to (the placards, the clear symbols, the repetitive chorus', the polarizing statements); a weirdo float taking the long-loop by the President's ranch broadcasting free-jazz, parading a catacomb structure of images of concrete, rebar and caution tape, they are not.
________________________________________________________________________
The images of rubble on the float keep peeling off from wind and road wear. To keep the thing together Katie uses bumper stickers as patches: Santa Fe, What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, Don't Steal, the Government Doesn't Like the Competition, What Would Neil Young Do? Because I am "the writer" in the group, I want the job of tacking back on the images with those stickers. Outwardly they hold the clearest possibility for non-aestheticized straightforward communication on the ship. But Katie is "the artist" so putting on the stickers is her job.
On a long drive from the mining ghost town to the native ruins we debate formalism within political and non-political art. What is at stake is how we communicate complex political ideas. Noah paraphrases Ian McKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, who said something like, "a baseball bat can be used to hit baseballs or to bash somebody's head in". This sounds good to all of us, though we are unsure what, if anything, we are accomplishing.
The road construction crew in Death Valley thinks we are going to Burning Man. The lady who watches over the broken buildings in Rhyolite can't stand modern art. The folks on the Vegas strip are alternatively dumb struck, upset and entertained by our presence. The decaying rocks of Bad Water, the gone civilization in Wapatki, the thrashed buildings- boats and lives of the gulf-coast that this sculpture itself reflects upon as it passes through them, they don't say nothing.
The Rhyolite Preservation Society is responsible for this quote and all other forms of boosterism going on there these days. A sun bleached interpretational, sign in what was the old downtown, shows a photo of a parade from back when this place was booming. Bands and dressed up paraders march down Gold Street in Victorian finery. Our float drives the same route those proud, dead and buried Shiners made use of one hundred years ago. All that remains are empty ruins preserved as tourist attractions, though no one else is around this afternoon beside us to enjoy them. The ruins on our float reflect well on the crumbling remains of the town, three skeletal foundations, various decrepit shacks, and two building which have been watched over by the conservation board since the mid 1920's.
town to ghost town gold
street to dust now stoic desert
artful float- birds chirp
Rhyolite is a stone's throw from Yucca Mountain, which soon will be the terminal storage facility for spent nuclear rods from all over the United States. Nevada fought for years to postpone this. Like the oozing former mines in the area, the open stretches of the Desert West are a tribute to poorly planned human activity. If Yucca Mountain is successful it will hide away the wastes of the 21st centuries energy infrastructure for thousands of years. If not, than the entire area we've driven through will come to resemble the ghost town we are now in. Death Valley itself will be expanded to include several counties in South Western Nevada. Really it can go either way, and these spent rods remain potent for eons. Like many things that we do, when you think about it, Yucca Mountain is a just a disaster we are trying to put off for a long while. The music from our artwork bounces off of this landscape receding out onto the desert. I wonder if this can be captured in a bumper sticker?
________________________________________________________________________
Day two: in the truck-stop of a town known as Baker California the bonanza sized thermometer reads one hundred and five degrees. Away from the road it's cooler under oaks shading homes and stores. Spencer is excited for the gyros within the restaurant surrounded by the blue and white awning. The place is called the Mad Greek. Printed on their awning I notice a quote attributed to the doomed father of critical inquiry, Socrates himself- "I am a citizen not of Athens, not of Greece, but of the World," Rhetorically I ask my fellow travelers why the Greek is mad? Though I want to believe it's due to the difficulty of obtaining a solid tomato here in the Mojave desert, the real answer would have to be something like how this country is currently lead by jackasses who rule by manipulating the public's fears- how corporations are thrashing the planet and humanity- and how economic nationalism makes it impossible to solve global crisis in effective manners. The many resplendant statues of the liberally garbed David and proud Athena that serve as barricade for the restaurant's patio/portico, they can do nothing about this. In town gas is $3.50 a gallon, and to arrive at this spot we've cruised care-freely past at least four military bases without even stopping to wave the peace sign once. The ripe metaphor of Socrates trips me out. I go back to the van that's bringing Katie's ruins coast to coast.
Joel of the Meat Bees doesn't see anything "political" about this trip, but to Tim, also of the Meat Bees, it's obvious. He explains, ruins traveling to places of past, present and future ruins, with Crawford Texas as the belt buckle of the journey (The gang will later go on to NYC after I leave it in New Orleans). Dawn thinks that the piece needs to spell things out more clearly if the "message" is to come across. Katie says something like "this trip is a phenomological sounding of the country." Of course all perspectives are correct.
_______________________________________________________________________
It's hard to get out of the parade to observe it from the obverse location of the sidewalk. Driving the van towing the float I imagine is a little like flying the Enola Gay. Getting the payload to the target is enough work, leaving the craft to measure the effect is complicated. Driving up to ten hours between deployments, just being able to set the thing up so that it is ready to parade in under an hour is nice. Watching the wake that the float makes from the comfort of the seat is satisfying. Speaking with cops when they stop us is critical. However in Flagstaff AZ, I make it my job to witness the float as it wanders around downtown.
In the car, parading a length of the Vegas Strip twenty-four hours earlier, I am expecting a lot. But unlike the Strip, Flagstaff isn't full of folks looking to be overwhelmed by sites and sounds. A part of the spectacle of Las Vegas is searching out signs of excess. There the float answered to those expectations and tweaked it just enough to give me delightful views of awe, wonderful looks of puzzlement, and tickling visages of upset mugs as we inched our way through overheated traffic. Though folks react strongly to seeing the float, In Flagstaff the experience of watching the watchers of the parade is underwhelming.
Standing on the street by an outdoor coffee shop, the float approaches with a saxophone's bleat. The small crowd notices the thing coming towards them and strains to process it. Some one on their cell phone animatedly tells the person on the other end," wow, there's a one car parade coming up the street!" The float is next to us, it is confusing, loud, bizarre, and then, like traffic, is gone. There isn't enough time for me to assemble an interview with the gathered coffee-heads who are thunderstruck, but not sure why. I could ask them "what do you think about ruins" but I fear the response would be "oh, is that what that was?", so I don't bother. The float at speed is an experience to behold, not something to deconstruct in an interview. Walking around the scene I expect to feel some residual afterglow or buzz about that free-jazz on wheels perambulating downtown, but it's business as usual: school kids on a field trip walk buddy-buddy in line to a city museum.
Hanging out in the central square, waiting for the float to come around again, there are two familiar ladies. They arrive on beater bikes; one is dressed head-to-toe in emerald green, the other is in solid fuchsia. They are both waitresses at the restaurant where we all ate the night before. They were wearing that same bright clothing then. A year earlier I had gone to that very same restaurant and had noticed these same ladies in those same brilliant clothes. I witness them park their bikes and infectiously chat their way through the business district. They are their own parade, I have to assume every day of the year, carrying a spirit just like this; sticking out as rainbow-brites in this burnt sienna town. Who exactly they are parading for I, cannot tell. However it seems to makes them happy and certainly does get a response. So this is what they do.
"Art in the expanded field" is something I enjoy thinking about- though I prefer the term "art in the expanding field" as it is generative. These women and our float perform equal actions. Like art we all intend to communicate, but because of our contexts we don't immediately read as "art". It may also take repeat viewing to catch on. Through their normal seeming act of dressing up, I suspect that the girl's performance passes under the radar- infecting their public on a subliminal level, like a crush. The float, because it functions as a widely roving "temporary autonomous zone", seems to work differently. Like getting on a horse, or sailing on one of theorist Hakim Bey's pirate ships, those of us riding it feel its effects most strongly. We are the party, and whether others understand immediately may not matter so much. That we have figured out how to do this- make this boat float- may be enough.
For the distance of the trip we are nothing if not a sorts of freaks sailing the Seven Seas. I would love to raise an army. Here our banner is art. Our standard is the possibility of a good conversation. Our very long-term goal, blow some minds.
________________________________________________________________________
Kay Lucas is able to volunteer regularly at the Crawford Peace House. She is there to greet us when we arrive. The Peace House is the counterpoint to the hegemony that the Crawford Bush Ranch exerts on the nation. The majority of Crawfordites are proud of their town's distinction as the site of the "Western Whitehouse". I know this by the welcome-billboard at the edge of town featuring a relaxed photo of the First Couple, a Texas historical marker boasting of the president's arrival there way-back in 1999, and from the purposefully wrong mis-directions we get from the attendant at the Crawford Fina gas station.
I choose to interpret the Peace House as a medium. It is a building set up to channel the powerful energies explosively set off when folks contemplate the disaster this country has become under the rule of George W. Bush. Therefore Kay Lucas is a channeler. I ask her how she manages this. She is confidently relaxed, casually smokes a cigarette, and tells us about respectfully building fences between the Peace House and its neighbors, renting port-o-johns to keep the town clean during large actions, and ultimately working to transform people's anger.
When kids drive-by cussing and flipping-off the house's low fence, plants and white facade, she reminds herself and any other Peace House visitor not to take the bait. Ultimately acting out this way is precisely not what a house of peace does. Anger, she acknowledges, may get somebody to the struggle, but she believes it won't maintain the movement. The most animated moments we spend with her are when she talks about something that happened just last April when she was driven to ecstasy by a smile. She'd been going to the town offices for years; filing permits, working with the town's officials and law enforcement to manage the protest gatherings that balloon the areas population. Local police had warmed to her. She knows the officers first names; they see her as an effective organizer. Yet that lady at the town office doggedly remained stoned face and cold to Kay's service to civility. This past April Kay came yelping home though, having just gotten a neighborly smile from that lady. It seems that by repeatedly doing what she did, showing herself not as some unnamable godless "liberal", but simply as a fine person, her spell had been effective.
Kay's a born Texan and sees support for Bush policies there in very simple terms. "Ignorance." She believes that folks in the area don't know better. They are unfamiliar and scared by differing ideas. Here a Peace House is something new, knowing that your elected officials actively mislead you is new, loving a soldier but hating the war is new.
One of the comforts of the Crawford Peace House is a meditation garden and a spiral labyrinth made of stones. I walk the labyrinth's path and sit in this idea that what the Peace House and our float share is this newness. The Peace House educates and prepares folks for an encounter with differing ideologies. The float prepares folks for different ways to experience a site. When the float is working with its context it is ideally a teleportation device- bringing the ruins of Baghdad to the fields of Crawford, bringing the promise of technological collapse to the electro-capitalist utopia of Vegas, calling out the tragic conceits of civilization in Riolite and Wapatki, calling forth the destruction in Louisiana- like gawking tourists in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury forty years ago.
________________________________________________________________________
Contrary to my expectations, the farm country of Crawford is beautiful. Oaks cluster in low creek valley's forming thick forests, dark, shady, alive. The rolling flats are covered with grasses. Insects, butterflies and robins dart through the air. Adding to the chorus of green, The Meat-Bees play some kind of death raga. Tim has looped "not my president, not my president" and screams into the mike. We creep along at fifteen miles an hour and their sound makes its way to the sparse ranch houses that lie at the distant edges of the fields. Patriotic: multiple shades of green and brown. We stop at an old white church to turn around to get another chance to broadcast towards the gate guarding the president's ranch. Signs by the ranch prohibit parking and stopping. Three minutes back again and we can stare into the booth where the secret service pass there un-eventful days away. Next door, right up to the road, an elderly couple sits on their porch enjoying the setting sun. Unfazed and alarmingly like American Gothic, they take in our spectacle as well. Our sounds are alternatively angry, melodic, cataclysmic, light, and heavy. The entire length of the president's road, whenever we pass by cows they joyously run along with us till they reach the fence lines forming their resplendant cages.
Later that evening in Crawford, and after we've established that we are not terrorists but amiable human beings, Tim asks the cop who pulled us over if our group takes the prize for the weirdest protest float ever in Crawford. The cop says yes. Knowing by now that we're from California, he adds in a genial manner that he believes that our state is full of weird folks. This makes us happy, and we are proud to represent here in Texas.
________________________________________________________________________
On my final night of the trip, we descend from the I-10, down the exit ramp to see the destruction that wrong priorities have brought on New Orleans. Trying to find our way to our hotel in the French Quarter we pass by endless rows of inoperable cars gathering dust underneath the freeway. All around are visibly damaged and abandoned buildings. Soon we come upon and pass by a home displaying an upside down American flag. I've seen this symbol before, but here it has a real impact. It says much more than "Up Yours U.S. of A". It's like that last seen in Planet of the Apes. The one where Charlton Hesston comes face to face with The ruined Statue of Liberty, leaning on its side, half buried in the sand.
Our group finally finds the hotel. It's a charming place seemingly undamaged by the flooding and looting that's changed this city. It's late at night and the clerk behind the desk is glad to see us. When I first ask her about Hurricane Katrina, she opens up with what seems too be a well-rehearsed story, so I am afraid that I am asking her the question that every one whose stumbled before her since the storm has asked. But the more I listen the more I get the feeling that this retelling is as much for me as it is for her. She is making sense of things, and I am glad to be there to listen.
As for the float, according to Katie it tells a highly subjective story. While we who made this trip can tell that it can be done and share tales of our journey, for those who will continue to encounter it, they will read into it what the context and their own personal experiences dictate. "The float lives as a mythological creature... there is so much stuff around it- it ends up being more than an object in a lot of ways," Katie tells me later. I agree its story is multiple. The float is similar to a visitation from a Godzilla, a Pan, an unexplainable phenomena of nature and man. These forces roam the earth bringing what they may- people are left to pick up the pieces.
A bunch of us go out for a drink and a laugh. This is New Orleans Bacchus after all. Our trip has allowed us to do this.
Printed for Exhibition Catalog Rubble Division, Katie Grinnan published by Pomona College.
October '06
RUBBLE REFLECTING ON THE LANDSCAPE
Driving the small white chase car, six days into the ride, Spencer is telling me how something kind of like the Weather Underground is so sadly needed today. I see it a drop differently, but I have to admit that dragging this thing x-country is partly to test the waters. In my mind we are busting into cloistered classrooms, propositioning the kids to leave immediately, because when that bell rings it will mean service in Uncle-Death's army. Clearly righteous explosions are a popular and obvious reaction to the perceived complacency of our time, but aren't bombings precisely how we got into this mess to begin with? So I am very happy that this is just art.
In total we are the Rubble Division: seven folks, a team put together by Katie Grinnan. Katie built the float that we are following in this rental Chevy Aveo. The float itself is dragged by that 15-person passenger van with the black tinted windows. The base of the float is covered in tinsel. The top is made of wood it functions as a platform. The platform supports a tangle of metal rebar. On our cross-country trip, we continuously put-up and brake-down the large flat panels that make up the sculpture supported by this rebar. We do the same for an arsenal of electronics and instruments (percussions, reeds, keyboards, toys and noise makers) for a duo of live musicians that ride the float. The panel sculpture depicts a maze of images of both trashed and becoming buildings. This rubble pile of a sculpture envelope's the two-man free-jazz outfit called the Meat Bees. In Crawford Texas, the Meat Bees get a review from our government's Secret Service, "middle eastern music". And though that is not the immediate sound they are going after, one of the Bees does wear something like a kufi, and the Bees do play a tabla.
As an art piece, Rubble Division holds its signifiers pretty tightly to its chest so it's hard for others to know exactly what we are up to. And this is precisely why Katie has put together a flyer spelling out our journey for the police- those officials in blue and brown we keep bumping into as we haul this twelve foot trailer from Joshua Tree, Death Valley, the ghost town Rhyolite, Las Vegas, Flagstaff, The Wapatki Ruins in Arizona, Santa Fe, Crawford Texas and New Orleans. The flyer declares that our impromptu parades are a work of art with credentials and bonafides to boot. But the Crawford Police need to hear that this is some kind of protest in order to process us into their signifying vocabulary. Protests they are used to (the placards, the clear symbols, the repetitive chorus', the polarizing statements); a weirdo float taking the long-loop by the President's ranch broadcasting free-jazz, parading a catacomb structure of images of concrete, rebar and caution tape, they are not.
________________________________________________________________________
The images of rubble on the float keep peeling off from wind and road wear. To keep the thing together Katie uses bumper stickers as patches: Santa Fe, What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, Don't Steal, the Government Doesn't Like the Competition, What Would Neil Young Do? Because I am "the writer" in the group, I want the job of tacking back on the images with those stickers. Outwardly they hold the clearest possibility for non-aestheticized straightforward communication on the ship. But Katie is "the artist" so putting on the stickers is her job.
On a long drive from the mining ghost town to the native ruins we debate formalism within political and non-political art. What is at stake is how we communicate complex political ideas. Noah paraphrases Ian McKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, who said something like, "a baseball bat can be used to hit baseballs or to bash somebody's head in". This sounds good to all of us, though we are unsure what, if anything, we are accomplishing.
The road construction crew in Death Valley thinks we are going to Burning Man. The lady who watches over the broken buildings in Rhyolite can't stand modern art. The folks on the Vegas strip are alternatively dumb struck, upset and entertained by our presence. The decaying rocks of Bad Water, the gone civilization in Wapatki, the thrashed buildings- boats and lives of the gulf-coast that this sculpture itself reflects upon as it passes through them, they don't say nothing.
In her heyday Rhyolite had 3 water systems, 3 rail lines, telephone and telegraph offices, electricity, over 50 mines in the townsite, 3 Newspapers, an opera house, a symphony, baseball teams, 18 grocery stores, 53 saloons, a Catholic and Presbyterian Church and a very extensive red light district. The Rhyolite Herald proclaimed to the world that "Rhyolite is awakening! Are you a live one or a dead one? We have no room here for the man who won't make a hustle for the good of his town."
The Rhyolite Preservation Society is responsible for this quote and all other forms of boosterism going on there these days. A sun bleached interpretational, sign in what was the old downtown, shows a photo of a parade from back when this place was booming. Bands and dressed up paraders march down Gold Street in Victorian finery. Our float drives the same route those proud, dead and buried Shiners made use of one hundred years ago. All that remains are empty ruins preserved as tourist attractions, though no one else is around this afternoon beside us to enjoy them. The ruins on our float reflect well on the crumbling remains of the town, three skeletal foundations, various decrepit shacks, and two building which have been watched over by the conservation board since the mid 1920's.
town to ghost town gold
street to dust now stoic desert
artful float- birds chirp
Rhyolite is a stone's throw from Yucca Mountain, which soon will be the terminal storage facility for spent nuclear rods from all over the United States. Nevada fought for years to postpone this. Like the oozing former mines in the area, the open stretches of the Desert West are a tribute to poorly planned human activity. If Yucca Mountain is successful it will hide away the wastes of the 21st centuries energy infrastructure for thousands of years. If not, than the entire area we've driven through will come to resemble the ghost town we are now in. Death Valley itself will be expanded to include several counties in South Western Nevada. Really it can go either way, and these spent rods remain potent for eons. Like many things that we do, when you think about it, Yucca Mountain is a just a disaster we are trying to put off for a long while. The music from our artwork bounces off of this landscape receding out onto the desert. I wonder if this can be captured in a bumper sticker?
________________________________________________________________________
Day two: in the truck-stop of a town known as Baker California the bonanza sized thermometer reads one hundred and five degrees. Away from the road it's cooler under oaks shading homes and stores. Spencer is excited for the gyros within the restaurant surrounded by the blue and white awning. The place is called the Mad Greek. Printed on their awning I notice a quote attributed to the doomed father of critical inquiry, Socrates himself- "I am a citizen not of Athens, not of Greece, but of the World," Rhetorically I ask my fellow travelers why the Greek is mad? Though I want to believe it's due to the difficulty of obtaining a solid tomato here in the Mojave desert, the real answer would have to be something like how this country is currently lead by jackasses who rule by manipulating the public's fears- how corporations are thrashing the planet and humanity- and how economic nationalism makes it impossible to solve global crisis in effective manners. The many resplendant statues of the liberally garbed David and proud Athena that serve as barricade for the restaurant's patio/portico, they can do nothing about this. In town gas is $3.50 a gallon, and to arrive at this spot we've cruised care-freely past at least four military bases without even stopping to wave the peace sign once. The ripe metaphor of Socrates trips me out. I go back to the van that's bringing Katie's ruins coast to coast.
Joel of the Meat Bees doesn't see anything "political" about this trip, but to Tim, also of the Meat Bees, it's obvious. He explains, ruins traveling to places of past, present and future ruins, with Crawford Texas as the belt buckle of the journey (The gang will later go on to NYC after I leave it in New Orleans). Dawn thinks that the piece needs to spell things out more clearly if the "message" is to come across. Katie says something like "this trip is a phenomological sounding of the country." Of course all perspectives are correct.
_______________________________________________________________________
It's hard to get out of the parade to observe it from the obverse location of the sidewalk. Driving the van towing the float I imagine is a little like flying the Enola Gay. Getting the payload to the target is enough work, leaving the craft to measure the effect is complicated. Driving up to ten hours between deployments, just being able to set the thing up so that it is ready to parade in under an hour is nice. Watching the wake that the float makes from the comfort of the seat is satisfying. Speaking with cops when they stop us is critical. However in Flagstaff AZ, I make it my job to witness the float as it wanders around downtown.
In the car, parading a length of the Vegas Strip twenty-four hours earlier, I am expecting a lot. But unlike the Strip, Flagstaff isn't full of folks looking to be overwhelmed by sites and sounds. A part of the spectacle of Las Vegas is searching out signs of excess. There the float answered to those expectations and tweaked it just enough to give me delightful views of awe, wonderful looks of puzzlement, and tickling visages of upset mugs as we inched our way through overheated traffic. Though folks react strongly to seeing the float, In Flagstaff the experience of watching the watchers of the parade is underwhelming.
Standing on the street by an outdoor coffee shop, the float approaches with a saxophone's bleat. The small crowd notices the thing coming towards them and strains to process it. Some one on their cell phone animatedly tells the person on the other end," wow, there's a one car parade coming up the street!" The float is next to us, it is confusing, loud, bizarre, and then, like traffic, is gone. There isn't enough time for me to assemble an interview with the gathered coffee-heads who are thunderstruck, but not sure why. I could ask them "what do you think about ruins" but I fear the response would be "oh, is that what that was?", so I don't bother. The float at speed is an experience to behold, not something to deconstruct in an interview. Walking around the scene I expect to feel some residual afterglow or buzz about that free-jazz on wheels perambulating downtown, but it's business as usual: school kids on a field trip walk buddy-buddy in line to a city museum.
Hanging out in the central square, waiting for the float to come around again, there are two familiar ladies. They arrive on beater bikes; one is dressed head-to-toe in emerald green, the other is in solid fuchsia. They are both waitresses at the restaurant where we all ate the night before. They were wearing that same bright clothing then. A year earlier I had gone to that very same restaurant and had noticed these same ladies in those same brilliant clothes. I witness them park their bikes and infectiously chat their way through the business district. They are their own parade, I have to assume every day of the year, carrying a spirit just like this; sticking out as rainbow-brites in this burnt sienna town. Who exactly they are parading for I, cannot tell. However it seems to makes them happy and certainly does get a response. So this is what they do.
"Art in the expanded field" is something I enjoy thinking about- though I prefer the term "art in the expanding field" as it is generative. These women and our float perform equal actions. Like art we all intend to communicate, but because of our contexts we don't immediately read as "art". It may also take repeat viewing to catch on. Through their normal seeming act of dressing up, I suspect that the girl's performance passes under the radar- infecting their public on a subliminal level, like a crush. The float, because it functions as a widely roving "temporary autonomous zone", seems to work differently. Like getting on a horse, or sailing on one of theorist Hakim Bey's pirate ships, those of us riding it feel its effects most strongly. We are the party, and whether others understand immediately may not matter so much. That we have figured out how to do this- make this boat float- may be enough.
For the distance of the trip we are nothing if not a sorts of freaks sailing the Seven Seas. I would love to raise an army. Here our banner is art. Our standard is the possibility of a good conversation. Our very long-term goal, blow some minds.
________________________________________________________________________
Kay Lucas is able to volunteer regularly at the Crawford Peace House. She is there to greet us when we arrive. The Peace House is the counterpoint to the hegemony that the Crawford Bush Ranch exerts on the nation. The majority of Crawfordites are proud of their town's distinction as the site of the "Western Whitehouse". I know this by the welcome-billboard at the edge of town featuring a relaxed photo of the First Couple, a Texas historical marker boasting of the president's arrival there way-back in 1999, and from the purposefully wrong mis-directions we get from the attendant at the Crawford Fina gas station.
I choose to interpret the Peace House as a medium. It is a building set up to channel the powerful energies explosively set off when folks contemplate the disaster this country has become under the rule of George W. Bush. Therefore Kay Lucas is a channeler. I ask her how she manages this. She is confidently relaxed, casually smokes a cigarette, and tells us about respectfully building fences between the Peace House and its neighbors, renting port-o-johns to keep the town clean during large actions, and ultimately working to transform people's anger.
When kids drive-by cussing and flipping-off the house's low fence, plants and white facade, she reminds herself and any other Peace House visitor not to take the bait. Ultimately acting out this way is precisely not what a house of peace does. Anger, she acknowledges, may get somebody to the struggle, but she believes it won't maintain the movement. The most animated moments we spend with her are when she talks about something that happened just last April when she was driven to ecstasy by a smile. She'd been going to the town offices for years; filing permits, working with the town's officials and law enforcement to manage the protest gatherings that balloon the areas population. Local police had warmed to her. She knows the officers first names; they see her as an effective organizer. Yet that lady at the town office doggedly remained stoned face and cold to Kay's service to civility. This past April Kay came yelping home though, having just gotten a neighborly smile from that lady. It seems that by repeatedly doing what she did, showing herself not as some unnamable godless "liberal", but simply as a fine person, her spell had been effective.
Kay's a born Texan and sees support for Bush policies there in very simple terms. "Ignorance." She believes that folks in the area don't know better. They are unfamiliar and scared by differing ideas. Here a Peace House is something new, knowing that your elected officials actively mislead you is new, loving a soldier but hating the war is new.
One of the comforts of the Crawford Peace House is a meditation garden and a spiral labyrinth made of stones. I walk the labyrinth's path and sit in this idea that what the Peace House and our float share is this newness. The Peace House educates and prepares folks for an encounter with differing ideologies. The float prepares folks for different ways to experience a site. When the float is working with its context it is ideally a teleportation device- bringing the ruins of Baghdad to the fields of Crawford, bringing the promise of technological collapse to the electro-capitalist utopia of Vegas, calling out the tragic conceits of civilization in Riolite and Wapatki, calling forth the destruction in Louisiana- like gawking tourists in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury forty years ago.
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Contrary to my expectations, the farm country of Crawford is beautiful. Oaks cluster in low creek valley's forming thick forests, dark, shady, alive. The rolling flats are covered with grasses. Insects, butterflies and robins dart through the air. Adding to the chorus of green, The Meat-Bees play some kind of death raga. Tim has looped "not my president, not my president" and screams into the mike. We creep along at fifteen miles an hour and their sound makes its way to the sparse ranch houses that lie at the distant edges of the fields. Patriotic: multiple shades of green and brown. We stop at an old white church to turn around to get another chance to broadcast towards the gate guarding the president's ranch. Signs by the ranch prohibit parking and stopping. Three minutes back again and we can stare into the booth where the secret service pass there un-eventful days away. Next door, right up to the road, an elderly couple sits on their porch enjoying the setting sun. Unfazed and alarmingly like American Gothic, they take in our spectacle as well. Our sounds are alternatively angry, melodic, cataclysmic, light, and heavy. The entire length of the president's road, whenever we pass by cows they joyously run along with us till they reach the fence lines forming their resplendant cages.
Later that evening in Crawford, and after we've established that we are not terrorists but amiable human beings, Tim asks the cop who pulled us over if our group takes the prize for the weirdest protest float ever in Crawford. The cop says yes. Knowing by now that we're from California, he adds in a genial manner that he believes that our state is full of weird folks. This makes us happy, and we are proud to represent here in Texas.
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On my final night of the trip, we descend from the I-10, down the exit ramp to see the destruction that wrong priorities have brought on New Orleans. Trying to find our way to our hotel in the French Quarter we pass by endless rows of inoperable cars gathering dust underneath the freeway. All around are visibly damaged and abandoned buildings. Soon we come upon and pass by a home displaying an upside down American flag. I've seen this symbol before, but here it has a real impact. It says much more than "Up Yours U.S. of A". It's like that last seen in Planet of the Apes. The one where Charlton Hesston comes face to face with The ruined Statue of Liberty, leaning on its side, half buried in the sand.
Our group finally finds the hotel. It's a charming place seemingly undamaged by the flooding and looting that's changed this city. It's late at night and the clerk behind the desk is glad to see us. When I first ask her about Hurricane Katrina, she opens up with what seems too be a well-rehearsed story, so I am afraid that I am asking her the question that every one whose stumbled before her since the storm has asked. But the more I listen the more I get the feeling that this retelling is as much for me as it is for her. She is making sense of things, and I am glad to be there to listen.
As for the float, according to Katie it tells a highly subjective story. While we who made this trip can tell that it can be done and share tales of our journey, for those who will continue to encounter it, they will read into it what the context and their own personal experiences dictate. "The float lives as a mythological creature... there is so much stuff around it- it ends up being more than an object in a lot of ways," Katie tells me later. I agree its story is multiple. The float is similar to a visitation from a Godzilla, a Pan, an unexplainable phenomena of nature and man. These forces roam the earth bringing what they may- people are left to pick up the pieces.
A bunch of us go out for a drink and a laugh. This is New Orleans Bacchus after all. Our trip has allowed us to do this.