Wrapping up the Egg

Our student-artist reception is tonight. I'm spending the afternoon finishing my own project, the egg, which means figuring out how to make icing-like trim using spackling paste, a pastry bag, and a metal decorating tip that it took me 3 days to attach properly to the bag (something ridiculously easy once a kind cake decorator shows you how).

I also need to come up with a title for it. Hard to do when I've spent most of my time lately making it happen rather than reflecting on what it means to me. Here's a fairly brief set of reflections on what this artwork is about:

As we began studying Oklahoma City's legendary "Underground Chinatown" what struck me hardest was OKC's apparent preference to acknowledge this immigrant culture and community as the stuff of legends instead of engaging it directly as a real group of people who lived and worked here. When you examine archived issues of the state newspaper, The Daily Oklahoman, you find references to this "hidden" population every few decades or so from the very early 1900s through just last year. And yet most every time it is mentioned it is referred to mostly as a rumor or mystery, as if our public memory about the downtown Chinese immigrants dissolved shortly after every verifiable report of its existence.

Even after Mayor George Shirk, a preservationist and past president of the Oklahoma Historical Society, brought public attention to an underground residence, most people seemed to "forget" about it until last year when Dr. Blackburn contributed a feature story to the newspaper and assisted with an exhibit at the state History Center.

Equally strange and disturbing is the fact that Mayor Shirk co-authorized the urban renewal process that literally buried underground Chinatown, making it utterly inaccessible as an archeological and cultural resource. I keep trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, to appreciate the momentum of the Pei Plan and to believe that somehow among Shirk's posesssions and papers are clues and perhaps evidence of more preservation (artifacts even?) than is currently known. That's now become a research project on my short list. (A project somewhat handily accessible since most of Shirk's papers and memorabilia are enshrined (though uncatalogued . . . perhaps until I sic a research class on it) in our university's Special Collections.

All this was brewing in my heart and mind as I pursued this research and as I began conceiving a found-objects assemblage that would help me piece together what I'm learning and why it matters. Ultimately, what I wanted to achieve through my research and artwork was some sort of statement about what mainstream OKC society has chosen to overlook. To put it another way, my artwork is about selective memory.

To express this, I created an artificial Victorian-style sugar egg--the kind with a peephole and a diorama inside.

The peephole symbolizes the accessibility and inaccessibility of the Underground Chinatown history and the stories of its inhabitants. But the peephole is also intended to imply viewer-responsibility. Looking inside is a choice. And once you look, you bear a responsibility to do something about what you see. I don't mean to argue that every Oklahoman who read the newspaper or strolled by the underground entrances had a moral obligation to meet and greet and assist the people living there. But some positive action, some interpersonal and civic engagement was appropriate, and in the case of Shirk, who most famously led the newspapers into the abandoned habitats, publicity was a positive contribution but not enough given his influence as a leading citizen. So the existence of the peephole in my artwork implicates all of us who learn about the underground today, as well as all of those who glimpsed the place during our city's history. The word "peephole" itself I use advisedly here because I like its unsavory associations, its allusion to voyeurism. So many of us (and yes I'd include myself here) who have become curious about the underground story are surely attracted to its exoticism, its fringe undertones. The most persistent public memories were those about underground opium dens, gambling, and murderous thugs.

This lurid dimension of OKC's public memory is reflected in the color tones and textures of the artwork's interior. I lined the egg with red firecracker paper from the Lunar New Year celebrations in our contemporary (aboveground, thriving, and visible ) Asian District. (I'll briefly discuss the significance of the New Year symbolism in a moment.) In the center of the egg is a red lacquer trunk containing the Mandarin Chinese character for "remember." Within the trunk is a photograph c. 1918 of a Chinese woman who is probably the wife of Faug Kwai, an immigrant who worked in downtown OKC during the early years of the "underground" and may have been a resident and/or merchant there. His mailing address is a Chinese restaurant on Broadway. The other items in the trunk are photocopies of artifacts from Kwai's personal papers in the archives of the Oklahoma History Center. Kwai's box was the only one listed in the History Center's special collection holdings, and it is still labeled as "unprocessed." Its research finding-aid category is "Diversity." I cannot overstate the significance that his is the only Chinese-immigrant collection in the History Center's impressive database. It contains two personal letters, a framed photograph, and two legal deeds regarding a small parcel of property in Waco, Texas.

The exterior of the egg is gray, the color of urban concrete. The "icing" ornamentation is gray-tinted spackling paste, something we use to repair, refinish, and conceal things. I've "sugared" the egg with clear glitter to indicate how this history has been "sugar-coated" through its treatment as an urban myth.

The egg itself, a symbol of renewal, is a significant one from my experience during the class because, as Dr. Arrow taught us, the new year is a time when the Chinese congratulate one another for "waking up alive" when, as tradition holds, the Jade Emperor may have instead opted to eliminate us for our missteps and our misuse of the world. I wanted to incorporate Chinese New Year symbolism because it speaks of survival, both deserved and undeserved. Within my egg is an incomplete memory of people who were known and unknown and whose identity is now stored and exhibited in a place that simultaneously celebrates and ignores it.

To me, the artwork is about the enduring value of a culture and community that many chose to overlook as well as what lessons we might take from this history about, for example, other kinds of communities we choose not to engage fully.

Here's the project I ended up choosing . . .

(This is not my egg; it's the type of egg that inspired my choice of vessel.)


Here's the project-description I ended up posting to our class blog:

. . . My site is underground Chinatown and I've been thinking about various ways to represent its invisibility and to raise the question of what we miss when we choose not to see a community or when we choose not to inquire into one (as seems to have been the case with the Chinese immigrants of that era: the legends persisted for years but clues were ignored or vanished from public memory).

I hate to be too literal or too obvious, but I'm leaning toward using an egg as my vessel and modeling the project roughly after those sugared Victorian-era diorama eggs. To follow this path I'd make a rather large egg--probably balloon size--from papier mache. There'd be a peephole with a door that opens and closes. (Some newspaper accounts of the Chinese underground mention a door (blue or green) marking one entrance to it.) The exterior of the egg would have the appearance of concrete--making it invisible all but for the discrete door.

The interior walls of the egg would be red tissue paper--glued shreds of firecracker paper (remnants of the recent lunar new year celebrations here).

My diorama would be bits of Chinese immigrant culture: photocopied artifacts from the one (ONLY ONE!) box archived at the History Center belonging to a Chinese merchant of that era. I can't confirm whether this man actually occupied one of the storefronts or residences connected to the underground, but then again that's part of what makes this project so revealing to me as I work on it. The artifacts I photocopied were: a photo (probably of his wife), a couple of personal letters, an envelope, and a deed to some land in Texas.

I'm sort of tempted to also include a miniature statue of a Chinese longevity god because it relates to one of the other nearly invisible Chinese immigrant communities reported in the Daily Oklahoman in Luther, OK (the statue was found buried there).

The symbolism of the egg--again, too obvious?--relates to its fragility and stability, also of course its fertility-symbolism (less interesting to me but arguably interesting given the fertile contributions made by Chinese immigrants to Oklahoma. Honestly, what I like best about the egg is a personal connection: as a very little girl I had three or so of those Victorian eggs in my nursery and they were a source of wonder. They seemed like gateways to another world, which is what that doorway to underground Chinatown could have been to more people, and was to some. (For my future project I'd like to research Mayor Shirk's journals to glimpse his inner struggle with the decision to neglect preservation of that area. So, admittedly, one of the people implied by the egg's peephole is Shirk himself.)

As for assembly: I figured a balloon and mod podge would enable me to make the egg. Then I'd need to slice it open discreetly with an exacto-knife to give me access to the interior. Perhaps I'd make a second layer of mod podge after completing the interior in order to re-seal the outside. I could use something like drywall spackle to give the exterior a concrete texture or maybe just spray it with a can of that fleckstone paint in a grayish hue. Not sure how to affix a door. I'd like it to be hinged, though, so when the piece is displayed it can be partially open, giving the viewer the option of ignoring it or looking inside.

Of all of the above I'm perhaps least sure of the diorama. My desire is not to make the interior as literal as it is currently described. I'm still pondering the kinds of images or objects to include there.

. . .

--> Then I revised the concept a bit:

I'm thinking that inside the egg the 'diorama' shouldn't be lots of things but instead maybe just one thing: a simple wooden box, perhaps with an open lid. I might write the Mandarin character for "remember" or "memory" on the front of the box. (I'm a novice student of oriental brush-block painting so the character wouldn't be perfectly shaped but at least I have the tools and the basic knowledge to make it.)

Inside the box I could still place a few of the photocopied objects from the lone archival box belonging to the Chinese merchant. But the viewer could neither see nor access these objects because the peephole would be too small and distant.

This would be a more accurate representation of my perspective, and it would still (to me, anyway) imply both Shirk and the OKC public as viewers of that distant and somewhat inaccessible history.


* * *

Yesterday was our workshop on the piece, under the generous mentorship of assemblage artist Sunni Mercer in her amazing studio. One interesting outcome was that my co-teacher and I had a little clash over whether my project was an appropriate model for the students because it didn't fully realize the criteria in our carefully composed rubric for evaluating the artworks. (I had deliberately hidden my researched artifacts in an inaccessible part of the egg which, obviously, means that anyone viewing my piece would not be able to see evidence of that research in the piece--and the visibility of the research was an important component of our rubric. By ignoring that criterion I was holding myself to a different standard than the students, which was inappropriate and yet I felt my piece needed to keep things hidden because that was the central message of my piece. Clearly Julie was right. And I knew she was right. But I also believed that I was right too! Though my case was not helped any by the fact that throughout our discussion the loftily conceived abstract artwork in question still took the form of a pre-decoupaged football pinata.)

I call it a "clash" only because we both became pretty passionate, and I worried that it sounded like an argument to the class, but it was one of the most important outcomes of the workshop, I think, because it caused us both to confront the fact that we're asking our students to make ART despite the fact that we've tried so hard to treat the artworks as something other than standalone art.

I need to explain this: our vision of the artworks is that they are being produced as a visual demonstration of learning, one that challenges our students to do the same level of research and thinking as they would for a conventional academic paper, but one that additionally challenges them to slow down and operate in an alternative medium that can, ideally, help them incorporate additional dimensions of understanding.

That's a tall order, yes?

But we both passionately believe in it. And we have both committed to plunge into this emergent teaching and learning process with the goal of figuring out how to DO this sort of pedagogy in a way that is fair to our students while also maintaining an appropriate level of intellectual and academic rigor (there's that word again).

I can't speak for Julie, but one of the revelations I experienced during the discussion was my own inadvertent oversimplification of the assessment process: during class the night before I stood at the board rationalized the use of the rubric for evaluating the artwork. Much of the rubric I still feel good about, and I believe it was a valuable process to discuss and co-create that rubric as a whole-class enterprise. But relying solely on the artwork to communicate "research" can result in a bureaucratized artform--an aesthetically unsatisfying pastiche.

Long story short, we're now modifying the assessment to emphasize the oral defense as well as the artwork itself. (We'd planned for an oral defense all along but were continuing to rely on the artwork itself to communicate identifiable research.) We haven't yet modified the rubric to reflect this, but I'm optimistic.




Image source for the Victorian sugar egg w/diorama: ebay

Ruminating

My co-teacher and all my students have completed their project sketch . . . but I am still ruminating. So now I have the daunting task the rest of the class just suffered through: committing to a project concept under the pressure of a deadline. Just like all those colleagues, I must make a decision even though I'd like more time. *Sigh*

So where am I?

Fragmented. Too many thoughts, too many ideas that aren't good enough, feelings of anxiety that I'm not going to be able to do my subject justice. All the same problems the others expressed during class.

What I'd like to do for about 15 minutes here (before I head off to my next meeting) is carve out a little space to reflect on some core questions or issues that I consider worthy of the artwork. In other words, I want to stop pondering clever images and symbols and focus on the more substantial challenge of what this artwork could say.

Here are the persistent questions I find myself pondering:

* What must Mayor Shirk have been struggling with: he was an historian, a preservationist who had to make the decision to demolish downtown buildings in order to proceed with the Pei Plan. As far as I can tell, Shirk was in the middle of the decision to *not* preserve the underground. I don't have time to do primary research among his personal journals and papers but I'd really like, someday, to do that research and compose an artwork and essay exploring that struggle. I've decided *not* to make this the subject of my current artwork because the story is hidden in his papers and in the archives of the history center. This is a story that I *can* research properly. Just not now.

You know what? This is reminding me that what I want the artwork to do is prompt questions in the mind of my audience moreso than even myself. So perhaps it would be better for me to focus on those kinds of questions.

OK, what would I like a viewer to ponder as a result of my artwork?

--> The importance of preserving history--of taking action in the moment when decisions are being made. People forget that history is what is happening NOW. Something could have been done to preserve more of the Chinese immigrants' story and their dwellings. People could have acted to make that story visible. Not enough people took action. So one thing I'd like a viewer to consider is his/her own role as the preserver of history today. I'd like the viewer to consider who is invisible today that could and should be more visible. I'd like the viewer to consider why and how some people become invisible and what actions could/should be taken to intervene when that invisibility may result in an injustice or cultural absence.

Lots of stuff there. Let's see if I can bulletize it better:

* The "invisibility" of underground Chinatown as a reminder of today's invisible communities.
- How that absence prevents us from fully knowing our own communities and cultures
- How that absence leads to injustice

* Ghostliness as a quality of invisibility: how invisible people become ghosts--people feared or exoticized as "others" that can't be understood or engaged as real people.

Experimenting with the Louvre Image

Though I'm still very much drawn to the bricking idea (described on my 2/11 posting) I'm going to indulge in a little visual experimentation with the Louvre image (also from 2/11).

I have to pause for a moment and get pedagogical, though: I sincerely believe that exploring my visual options--even though a lot of it involves simply messing around with iPhoto or Photoshop--is getting me to slow down and think through what I'm trying to say about underground Chinatown, based on what we've been learning about it. Creative scholarship (aka "arts-integrated learning") involves using the process of creative composition to think more deeply and multi-dimensionally about your subject.

For me, this means deciding what image I should place above the Louvre pyramid. The original photograph is a shot taken in the lobby of the Louvre (at least that's my recollection of what that would look like) looking through the Pei pyramid to the Parisian building above it. What I want to do is replace the Parisian building with something from OKC, to give the viewer a sense that s/he is underground looking through a Pei pyramid at OKC. In other words, I'm trying to create an image in which the underground survived as part of a utopian Pei plan for OKC. Make sense?

OK, so choosing the image means doing some additional research about what social/historical/economic influences might have led OKC leaders preserve the "underground Chinatown" area, and why. This is just one way that creative scholarship entails digging more deeply into a subject DURING THE LEARNING PROCESS itself, not just as a groovy flourish at the end.

After writing the above, it's occurring to me that the first thing I'd actually like to try is not the utopian approach but something else: I'm interested in the way the pyramid photo seems to place the viewer belowground, like someone buried there. A ghost of the Chinese underground, perhaps. I remember reading that some believe a burial space was part of the underground. Ghosts figure prominently in much of the Chinese literature I've read, so perhaps this can give me another way into the artwork, another way to transpose the OKC-underground heritage with Chinese heritage.

I must confess I feel way out of my depth in many respects: I'm not a professional scholar of Chinese culture, or even of OKC history for that matter. So I'm a little fearful of creating something that might seem to be too naive or superficial to a better educated audience. But the beautiful thing about this quandary is that it places me squarely among most of my students: we're asking them to take courage, to do the best they can in the time we have together (just 3 weeks!) and to know that we'll consider them successful for generating works that enable them to explore and interpret and especially to pique their own curiosity for future inquiry. I mean that sincerely. So I must find comfort in that myself. I must walk the talk.

Congratulations, You [Sur]vived!

During our discussion with Dr. Arrow Saturday morning she explained that in Mandarin the New Year greeting is not really "Happy New Year" but more like "Congratulations" because the tradition refers to the Jade Emperor's decision to permit humans to continue living--they awake after their merrymaking to discover it wasn't their last night on Earth, after all.

Which makes me think a couple of things. First, that if someone told me, "This is your last night on Earth," I'd probably do pretty much exactly what I'm doing right now: sitting near the fireplace with my very dear dogs, burning Nag Champa incense, sipping two buck Chuck, and listening to Hinduesque instrumentalists while I ponder a new assemblage art project and write about it, sending words into the universe. I'd conclude my Last Evening by reading poetry aloud to the dogs. Gertrude Stein.

Second, Arrow's tale has me thinking about the "last night" of underground Chinatown, which to me is the moment the place was buried, though to the residents it must have occurred decades earlier--the original residents, at any rate. Surely some transients found the place between the 40s and 60s, made it a refuge.

What I find most liberating about the art project for our course is that it enables me to follow a different path than usual. My first inclination would be to approach this scenario solely as a researcher: identify people who might share oral histories to answer my questions. But though research continues to be an important part of the project I'm also free to imagine scenarios that, themselves, might help me better understand and interpret matters.

The underground didn't survive. At least not as a preserved historical site. As someone who has visited lots of historically preserved sites, including a number of them in Asia, I have some sense of what our own site would look like. And I must confess that I find it weirdly satisfying that I'm unable to visit a re-created or re-assembled version of the place. A part of me, at any rate, is intrigued by the opportunity to make something that visually communicates underground chinatown without looking like it.

In my minds eye I see various things that may or may not be this project but that have been bubbling up during my recently begun explorations of OKC's mythologized and abandoned underground:

* a wasp's nest with protruding bones (I can't say why I see this, but it's been a peripheral image for days, now)

* something with firecracker remnants, the red paper I swept off the streets following our weekend's lunar new year celebrations (one thing this might be suggesting is that idea that the underground didn't make it to the new year, but then it sort of did)

* bricks, possibly with that firecracker paper leaking out like mortar

-->This image is heavily influenced by an art installation I saw in Beijing last summer: Archeology of Memory by Qiu Zhijie. The artist painstakingly carves characters into large blocks, makes a single printing with them, then fills each with mortar, stacking one atop the other, sealed forever. I'm reminded of this artwork as I visualize the sealing-up of the underground, its abandonment as a part of our artifactual history--but one done carelessly, the opposite of Qui Zhijie's deliberateness and leaving virtually no trace. So what would be "inside" such a work would be, for example, the single photograph I found at the OK History Center--the portrait of the Chinese worker's wife--but an observer of the artwork would not know she was inside; her portrait would be sealed by rubble, concrete.

* something that satirizes the answer to my question, "What Would Pei Do?" by, for example, featuring a Louvre-like inverted pyramid above the the Robinson/Sheridan area with a tiny glimpse into the remains of an underground opium den and an OKC trolley tour paused nearby for the tourists to gape at the display.

The latter I like least. It's too literal, too easy, and too snarky.

* a final thought, for now, would be a view from inside underground Chinatown--sort of like the view in the photo above.


Image source: @t.

Ellison's *Deep Second* as assemblage?

So here's a thought experiment: What if Ralph Ellison's poem Deep Second were an assemblage?

More specifically, what if I were to attempt to transform that poem into an assemblage that met the criteria for our "Mapping [Sub]Cultures" course's mixed media project?

I'm pondering this question here, rather than on the course blog, because part of me thinks this would be a wonderful approach for one of my student teams to consider--I'm not sure it's the path I should take myself, even though I plan to compose a piece along with my students.

It seems to me that one approach would be to conceptualize the poem itself as a map, one that reflects the boundaries given in Ellison's letter to Albert Murray ("three blocks on East Second Street") as well as his childhood memories of that place, while perhaps transposing that imagery was some of the contextual forces that, for example, made the place a segregated enclave.

In terms of "mapping" this place-memory of Ellison's I could also see a student overlaying Ellison's narrative with an excerpt from The Kite Runner. A vivid image in Ellison's poem regards blue kites dipping and sailing overhead. He was likely about the same age as the Afghani protagonist, so there might be an interesting opportunity for cultural commentary, one that would flex the boundaries of the "map" in intriguing ways.

Another possibility would be to do something with the cartography of jazz culture in Deep Deuce, drawing upon Ellison's reference to the YWCA building (formerly a hospital) "and young girls laugh and glide within the room wherein my father died" as well as his later commentaries on the startling presence of white women in the Deep Deuce music venues where Louis Armstrong and others performed.

Image source: Rob Wallace

Coming Out

After maintaining two anonymous blogs for two years, plus two relatively instrumental (i.e., less colorful) ones with colleagues, I appear to have decided to "open the kimono" and maintain a public blog regarding my [solo] creative work. (Yes, I use the term "solo" guardedly and skeptically for all the reasons anyone curious about a blog titled "material metaphors" would surely already appreciate. I use the word "creative" courageously and optimistically.)

We'll see how long I keep this up, the non-anonymous blogging about material culture and such. Here's the thing: even though I have no real interest in generating an audience for this blog, I'm affected by the virtual public-ness of this space and I'm generally interested in the way my writing evolves when it's done here rather than in one of my written or laptop journals. And, of course, I'm retaining my anonymous blogs for the private stuff. And yes: I see the irony.

OK, so why now? Because this morning's discussion about the incipient "Mapping [Sub]Cultures" course inspired me even moreso than usual. My teaching partner and I met with a gifted assemblage artist who, among other things, used a phrase that resonated with me: "assemblage as poetry." With that phrase so much of my private and professional work fell into place. For many years I've been a community-engagement writing professor with a research background in material rhetoric and a lifetime of experimentation with words and images--not as an "artist" but as someone who collects and cobbles and ponders things. In grad school I found a way to name it--from Erasmus, of all people--it's my copia, my cache of concepts, of things representing parts of things and of things representing other things. It's my cache of synecdoche, of metaphor. Figures of thought.

I have no formal training in the craft of transforming my cache into self-standing works. What I have is experimentation with words, with oriental calligraphy and brush-block painting (Sumi-e, Haiga, this and that), with photography, a little needlework, a little collage, a little poetry, a little gardening, t'ai chi, yoga. I need to include the last three because everything intertwines with everything else. I learned more about Emersonian rhetoric from gardening than from any other form of study. Watching things grow--intentionally, unintentionally, serendipitously--brought me insight and confidence, particularly during a time when much else was falling apart.

And now co-creating this pilot course is similarly encouraging, emboldening even. I'm ready to see what I might make of that generative concept: assemblage as poetry. What is most exciting to me personally is this: when I see the phrase "assemblage as poetry" I also see this one: "poetry as assemblage." That's the phrase that beckoned me. It's the one that gave me a place to go with what I've been wanting to do.

For this I am so grateful.



Image: Avatar by Elif Ayitar