Detail of installation at Nature Museum by CC/2008.

New Views of Last Days
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 Hi-Desert 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:

1. News arrives of food riots in Haiti.
2. Truckers in New Jersey demonstrate as diesel tops $4 a gallon.
3. Foreclosures sweep the High Desert.
4. Commodity prices rise as speculators move in.
5. The artist dreams of Pompeii.
6. Armed stand-off at power-lines.
7. Father contracts bird flu from dying son.
8. Tent city grows outside Ontario Airport.
9. Fields of invasive mustard await spark.