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.