 |
|
Detail
of installation at Nature Museum by JD/2008. |
New Views of Last Days
from the "Jackadandy
in Exile" blog
May 24, 2008
In April, at the
impressive “A
Day in Pompeii” exhibition at the Natural History
Museum in San Diego’s Balboa Park, it was the famous
plaster casts of the Romans who died in the city streets
during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that had me
transfixed. The fallen couple, the slave in
manacles, even the
dog twisted in desperate extremis, all so lost in
silence beneath the ash and pyroclastic flow, still
speaking in their terminal forms to our own bodies and our
own dreads. But it was especially the
man found sitting with his back pressed to a gymnasium
wall, hands over his face, that I could not get out of my
head. In the room with the casts in their glass
cases, a background soundtrack of a continuous low rumble
was just audible, and a timeline on the wall (viewable here)
detailed the events of the day with a clinical
thoroughness that shivered in the spine like the bell
tolling for thee.
Yesterday I went to
check on my installation, Views of a New Desert,
with Landscaping, at the HD Nature Museum, to make
sure nothing had been disturbed or come disarranged.
All was as I had left it: Nine old picture frames
containing crumbling tar-paper from a roll that had been
littering my studio for years; a very aged wooden screen
door, beaten by the sun over decades, with a torn screen;
and limbs of dead bleached oleander set in cinderblocks of
gravel or hanging from above, arrested in flowing
motion like seaweed in a black-and-white photo.
The titles of the
“pictures” were listed at the side:
- News arrives of
food riots in Haiti.
- Truckers in New
Jersey demonstrate as diesel tops $4 a gallon.
- Foreclosures sweep
the High Desert.
- Commodity prices
rise as speculators move in.
- The artist dreams
of Pompeii.
- Armed stand-off at
power-lines.
- Father contracts
bird flu from dying son.
- Tent city grows
outside Ontario Airport.
- Fields of invasive
mustard await spark.
|
