25 Notes on Mud
25 Notes on Mud
Published in the Core Yearbook
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
April 2018
1. In his 2017 exhibition at Trama, Edgar Calel includes a new body of work, all marked by red mud. The work derives from his recent travels along the border between Paraguay and Brazil. While there, Calel offers his hosts seeds of maize and squash from his home in Comalapa. In return, members of the guaraní kaiowa community in Brazil offer him a gift: standing barefoot in the area's reddish soil, they step on page after page of Calel's notebook, leaving their footprints for him to carry home. He exhibits these pages unaltered; i.e. his exhibition is the remaining evidence (a video, these prints on paper) from an affectionate exchange between a group of people and an artist.[1]
2. "Mud is viscous and lugubrious. Smacking of excrement--of excess and expenditure--it is a base material, one of life's raw essences... Not always so politically overt, dirt is packed with demonstrations of clay's incipient power to usurp, or at least mess with establishments."[2]
3. "Please wear a mask if you are smelling anything weird in your neighborhood and especially when cleaning or doing demolition. DO NOT let your children play in any of the silt or mud left over from the flood. Wash your hands and clothes thoroughly if in contact with silt, mud, sludge, or any standing water. These things still contain high levels of bacteria and possible pathogens that can cause serious illness."[3]
4. In 2010, Richard Long publishes a modest little book with Ivory Press. On page after page, he prints an impression of a reddish mud-like surface marked by lines, perhaps formed by water running through the dust. On the pages of the book each pattern is intricately unique, a record of the unpredictability of disintegration, the effects of time, velocity, and inertia on the atoms of ground and river as they mingle. The book is called Gravity, and readers might read the tracks as running from "top" to "bottom," of being pulled downward by the force the planet, as water might run down the sides of a wall or vertical surface. On the last page, Long has written an acronym: Ground, Rivers, Atoms, Velocity, Inertia, Time, Yield. The words offer a recipe for making mud.[4]
5. Right before the Misfit shoots them, the family in Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," turns down a red clay road. "They turned onto the dirt road and the car raced roughly along in a swirl of pink dust... The dirt road was hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments. All at once they would be on a hill, looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next minute, they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them." For O'Connor, the red Georgia clay foreshadows the bloody climax of the story. But also, significantly, the grandmother is sitting in the dirt when she has her first glimmer of doubt about her faith. The Misfit sees her hesitation and immediately recognizes it as a powerful reckoning. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." [5]
6. At the residency Yvonne in Guatemala City, I suggest a model for convivencia: the idea is to live and work together, to embrace certain discomforts with the aim of making new work in conversation with each other and with the specificities of that city. Oscar Cornejo, an artist in residence, tells me that the muddiness of the proposition--the lack of clarity between our roles as friends and as professional colleagues--leaves him feeling unmoored and disoriented. He returns over and over to the word mud to describe this blurry overlap between work and life. Convivencia is also about discomfort, miscommunication, and alienation, we learn together. Afterward, I think that as they often uncritically invoke a rhetoric of community, artist residency programs might be better served by considering dissonances, fissures, tensions, jealousies, and misunderstandings that occur in shared space. We are often at a loss for words to address this swampy muck of bad affect; given how many words there are for mud, this is a sad irony.[6]
7. "Might our fascination with quicksand reflect some more singular preoccupation—a broad cultural reckoning, even—with ambivalence and instability?" writes Daniel Engber, in his study of quicksand in U.S. film. The American obsession with the sucking goo in film paralleled its metaphorical use to describe U.S. military intervention in the world, especially in Vietnam. And in the mid-1980s, as quicksand was becoming less common in film, Artax, the horse companion of The Neverending Story's main character, sinks into a bog called the Swamp of Sadness. In this instance, the muddy slurry is affective: heavy feelings pull insistently downward, eventually killing the depressive steed.
8. "Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood," says The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., about his dream.[7]
9. A furious Eminem imagines the current President of the United States consumed by quicksand: "That's why he keeps screaming drain the swamp, cause he's in Quicksand."
10. Like English, Spanish has many words for mud. These include barro, lodazo, lodo, and fango. Lodo might be translated to sludge. "Tras las fuertes lluvias, los campos estaban cubiertos de lodo" is the sample sentence Linguee provides in its definition: "After the heavy rains, the fields were covered in sludge."[8] In October 2015, a mudslide covers the town of El Cambray Dos in Santa Catarina Pinula, ten miles to the east of Guatemala City. The mud covers the village under 50 feet of debris, and kills at least 280 people. "'People say Guatemala is insecure because of the violence, but it's nature, too," Carlos Alberto Avalaz Ortiz, tells a New York Times reporter, "You never know when something like that can happen." Marta Alicia Gutiérrez Martínez says her family had scrambled clear as they heard the hillside giving way. "I thought the world was ending," she recounts.[9]
11. Environmental disasters and their aftermath are often inextricably linked to political decisions.
12. Calel gathers mud from an area near Comalapa that is plagued by mudslides. With his family, he balls the mud into small bodoques, or pellets. "With my two hands covered in mud, I rub until you take shape, I spit in your face and give you life," he writes. "Now you are ready to step back a few centimeters to gather momentum and travel in the air, to divide the body and the soul of any living thing. Action: clay point in movement. Exhibition: Static clay point. Each point of clay is a center. Each point of clay is a point of reference."[10]
13. Mud can mean a slimy mixture of dirt and water or it can mean an abusive or malicious series of remarks. In this second case, the metaphor of slinging mud is often used to describe the action of ugly speech, intended to hurt.
14. Calel intends to take the mud balls to national government buildings in Guatemala City and hurl them at the structures. The thought of these small pellets pinging and exploding off the colonial buildings takes mud-slinging at its word, activating a physical manifestation of criticism.
15. "Guidelines issued by the World Health Organization note that living or working in a place after a flood is associated with respiratory symptoms, allergies, asthma, and immunological reactions. The document cites a wide array of 'inflammatory and toxic responses after exposure to microorganisms isolated from damp buildings, including their spores, metabolites, and components,' as well as evidence that mold exposure can increase risks of rare conditions like hypersensitivity pneumonitis, allergic alveolitis, and chronic sinusitis."[11] A survey is passed around on various social media outlets. How many of us are sick after the hurricane? Everyone I know.
16. It seems less than coincidental, then, that the health care and health insurance systems in the U.S. are being gutted at the same moment that widespread environmental disasters are making many communities sick.
17. "The truths which intelligence grasps directly in the open light of day have something less profound, less necessary about them than those which life has communicated to us in spite of ourselves in an impression, a material impression because it has reached us through our senses."[12]
18. After Harvey, artist Edith Shreeve asks me to join her in a walk through her gutted home. She has lived there for 37 years, and now must decide what to do. She is told by the city government that her home is too low to the ground to face the storms that are sure to return, and soon. This is a new normal, they suggest, as they pressure her to move. She believes walking through the muddy bones of the house, it will speak to her about what she should do. We talk about allowing a loved one to die, about sitting with a loved one as she passes away, of holding the house's hand, in a manner of speaking, as it transitions from its former life. We bring the house flowers and incense that smells of tears.
19. Writing about metaphor in art, Charles Gaines defines the way in which comparing unlike things might produce meaning: "To recap, we can say now that a metaphor is a relation, in linguistics, between two words (signs) that are members of two different conceptual domains (meaning that they are completely unrelated) but are structurally or schematically similar, allowing a person to conceptualize one thing in terms of another. Schematic similarity means that there are points in one sign (the source) that can correspond to points in the other sign (the target). The metaphor is formed when qualities in the source sign is transferred or mapped on to the target sign because of correspondences between the signs. These correspondences are not based on meaning but they produce meaning."[13]
20. If mud as metaphor is the subject of criticism, what meaning is being produced?
21. Gaines also writes, paraphrasing Roland Barthes, "Criticality is essentially a way of understanding the world."[14]
22. Jorge de León paints a series of new works on moldy old strips of canvas. Called In the prosperous days, the images take their name from Guatemala's national anthem, and they include scenes of extraordinary absurdity and violence. De León begins with images from Guatemala's yellow press, and then extends the series to include images from around the world. His painting of Houston's Memorial Day flood from 2014 shows the freeways filled with water, the city skyline in the distance. I am trapped in Dallas during Hurricane Harvey, installing an exhibition which includes a selection from In the prosperous days. I return over and over to the image of Houston, underwater, at the same moment that the international media is showing Houston drowning, again, in 2017.
22. Art historian Krista Thompson asks me: what if two seemingly unconnected geographies share a relationship to physical matter, to mud, for example?
23. On the windows of Trama, Calel paints the words Kit kit kit kit over and over in red mud on the glass. The words replicate what he has painted on the street-side wall of his studio in Comalapa, a space he named Kit kit for the birdsong his grandmother would make as she walked in the garden. To paint with clay, Calel says, is to allow for ephemerality, and to embrace changes over time as part of the work. In Comalapa, the words will gradually fade, washed away by rain and wind and time. In the city, of course, they are already gone.
24. "This text recognizes the waters which one day might wash over this little patch of land. This text will accompany the waters of the future upon the land. This text should accompany the flood. This text doesn't want to stand in the way of progress. This text doesn't believe in progress. This text wants to be a flotation device when the water rises. When the water comes, this text will drown alongside you, but only to accompany you if you drown," writes Houston-based poet and translator John Pluecker, in his Accompanying Text.[15] To accompany is also to convivir.
25. Mud is the breakdown of rocks and organic matter into dirt, mixed with water. Its potent metaphorical associations have lent it to creation myths across cultures for millennia. I write a criticism of mud in the Barthesian or Borgesian sense: Borges reminds us that criticism is an imaginative genre of literature, Barthes that it is about a life. Mud can be a metaphor for ugly speech, can suggest depressed feelings. Mud can be paint, can be poison. Mud can be the blurred boundaries between us, between artist and writer, between here and there. Mud can be an intimacy. That is, by allowing dissolution in the relationships between us, between our works and our lives, between our national politics and natural environments, between disparate places and experiences of loss, we leave meaning ephemeral, not undefined, but subject to change and to disappearance. What does it mean to write an art criticism around mud? It means to muddle and mix in order to dissolve binaries that define political and artistic and personal discourse in the United States of 2017. We are underwater, our feet sink into this earthy wetness. We are aware that it might be toxic, that it will move and change and stink, and, yet, here we are.
Laura A. L. Wellen, PhD
December 2017
[1] Trama Gallery is an artist-run space in Zone 1 of Guatemala City. It shares a space with the Taller Experimental de Gráfica de Guatemala, and is organized by artist Mario Santizo.
[2] Ingrid Schaffner and Jenelle Porter, Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2009), 26, 30.
[3] Posted on the Facebook account of the Houston Rescue Clinic in the weeks after Hurricane Harvey. The Rescue Clinic, which in part was organized by artist Paul Middendorf, describes itself as a group of volunteer medical professionals and relief workers during and after Hurricane Harvey.
[4] Richard Long, Gravity (London: Ivorypress, 2010).
[5] Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works (Boone, IA: Library of America, 1988), 153.
[6] Much work in affect and literary theory has engaged with bad feelings, such as those I describe here. Among numerous other examples, see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009).
[7] Daniel Engber, "Terra Inferma: the rise and fall of quicksand," Slate, August 23, 2010, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/08/terra_infirma.html.
[8] Linguee, "Lodo," http://www.linguee.com/spanish-english/translation/lodo.html.
[9] Nic Wertz and Elizabeth Malking, "Hundreds Missing in Guatemala as Landslide Cleanup Begins," The New York Times, October 4, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/world/americas/guatemala-landslide-cleanup-begins-as-hundreds-are-missing.html?_r=0.
[10] Edgar Calel, correspondence with the author, 2 September 2017. Translation to English by the author. "Con mis dos manos enlodados te frote hasta darte forma escupí tu rostro y te di vida Ahora tú estás listo para retroceder unos cuantos centímetros para tomar impulso y viajar en el aire para separar el cuerpo y el alma a cualquier ser vivo. Acción Punto de barro en aire. Exposición Punto de barro estático. Cada punto de barro es un centro, Cada punto de barro es un punto de referencia."
[11] James Hamblin, "The Looming Consequences of Breathing Mold: Flooding means health issues that will unfold for years," The Atlantic, August 30, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/mold-city/538224/.
[12] Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964), 161.
[13] Charles Gaines, "Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Image," (unpublished draft, used with permission), 8.
[14] Ibid., 1.
[15] John Pluecker, "An Accompanying Text," (Houston: She Works Flexible, 2015), 10.