Leaf 5

Five in the War Zone

[Ali Cherri, The Watchman; John McCracken, Transmitting Through Me;  Hira Nabi, “All That Perishes at the Edge of the Land; Karla Knight, Cold War Code;  Ted Chiang, Looking Glasses ; all at The New Mexico Military Museum]

“For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.” [Tich Nhat Hanh]

I sat alone in the large auditorium at the Bataan Memorial Museum [the Old Santa Fe Armory]—that modest,  rarely and unfairly unvisited,  Institution.  It houses artefacts from the Death March  in the Philippines to  the  New Mexican Civil War,  work from veteran and non-veteran artists old and new, and  memorabilia from the National Guard in Iraq, with historical albums and heroes  surfacing in between. I was there on a recent Saturday afternoon, not to visit the regular holdings, but the Site Santa Fe offerings squirrelled away among the exhibits.

For me, the most gripping work was Ali Cherri’s 2023 unrelieved video, The Watchman, focused on a single soldier’s  intense perception of the  1974 Cypriot/Turkish War.  Shot in the nearly -abandoned village of Louroujna , Cyprus [still abandoned today], it  

tangibly seizes  the  stark panorama of  hollowed ruins  and rubbled town.   Sand, shattered plaster,  and parched landscape  create  the severe backdrop for the lone skeletal watchtower. Psychologically,  the film creates the anxiety of  living in confined space and learning to  exist  in  the maddening  condition of “I don’t know.” The atmosphere is one of perpetual sadness.

Seargent Bulut’s  only companions are a   sputtering short wave radio,  that he unavailingly calls, and an armoured truck carrying an occasional, invisible relief replacement. No word is spoken.  Cherri concentrates the camera on the sapper’s  motionless  head and glazed eyes: staring, without pupil or iris, dreaming, or tenderly watching the final twitches of a robbin that hit his slit of viewing glass. There are  tiny telling touches: closeup of beads of sweat running down his neck, the wail of a muzzadin from an unseen mosque, a crooked admonishment: “Soldiers open your eyes,” chalked above the dirty window. “No such thing as a good war,” says the single inhabitant when offering a cup of coffee to the aimlessly wandering Bulut, recounting how she named  her son after a boy martyr. Geometric and chromatic abstraction order the townscape: vertical sandstone and blued plaster striping divide the walls,  broken rectangles frame  defunct houses.

One  night, Bulut  spots an eerie flashing on the distant border. Its uncanny pulsing repeats  under a waxing moon and indigo sky on following nights. Central Command is unreachable. Even though no military activity has occurred for years, this climactic event begins with the sound of marching to reveal, in a  search light, columns of helmeted, pale,   closed-eye soldiers descending the zigzag road that disappears into the mountains.  One man steps forward from the column and Bulut, stunned, asks: “Do you want me to follow?”  ““Will I come back?”  With a hideous smile,  the spectre turns his back and  all vanish.

Cherri’s inquiry into the thin line separating now from the afterlife by dint of  forcible attentiveness becomes an investigation into visual discrimination  in a small gallery on the second floor.  John McCracken, an early member of the California Light and Space Movement, offers not Cherri’s eroding geometry of death but a  Minimalist distillation of form and monochromatic color. Both artists,  however,  conjure the most with the least. A sonar operator with the Navy in the North Pacific, McCracken’s restrained volumes benefited from this physical acquaintance with shipboard resin and   spic and span industrial surfaces that show up later  in his highly-reflective sculpture and smooth paintings. From a reduced inky pyramid to  schematic drawings of ritual slabs, pillars, discs,  crosses [from the 1960’s and 1970’s], these intermedia allude to early architectural history and enact  the universal  “erective.” 

Drawn to Buddhism, Hinduism,  and  Carl Jung he was also  fascinated by the Cold War interest in “alien presence”   which he believed discernible through the intuitive process of visualization. Three hypnotic Mandelas  speak to his search for transcendant universal patterns -- “mainly visual things” that are not the result of intellectual processes but  are  “transmitting through me” to elevate the material plane of existence.

Aptly adjacent, Karla Knight’s  large paintings continue the Cold War motif of how and what, exactly, is  being transmitted. Using the candy colors of the 1950’s, she, like McCracken, is drawn to the minimal: diagrams containing codes arranged like a throw of dice, Black orbs rising shaped to fit  sounding  trumpets, energetic ciphers and tiny typescript lifting  from “slime” and climbing upward into the undecipherable. Being surrounded by meanings that do not mean, but will to mean, oddly connect with Cherri’s  enigmatic radio transmissions that sputter but do not illuminate reality.

Ted Chiang’s, Earth Shift, makes a purely allusive and textual appearance as the guru of this gallery. A famous Santa Fe science-fiction writer, his aliens as well are  coming to the United States. In fact, not unlike Karla Knight’s code-riddled paintings, they bring a futuristic  non-linear  “heptapod” language  and an alternative universe where time is experienced simultaneously.  Urgent watchers gaze  through prescient “looking glasses” into indefinable realms. 

Hira Nabi’s 2019 digital video:  All That Perishes at the Edge of the Land  examines the salvaging of metals in Pakistan from international fleets of sunken vessels hoisted to the Gadoni-Ship-Breaking Yard. A flowing trilogy, it is dominated by  a vocal duet. In a feminine voice-over,  the “Ocean Master” reminisces about real and fictional  voyages on the high seas. This plangent tale is interrupted by contemporary Pakistani shipyard workers who complain about their pay, living conditions, and precarious life. 

But for me the most potent beings are the ships as memorable characters. Joan Jonas has spoken of the authority of objects and gestures. These derelicts and wrecks avoid vocal didacticism as they muse about their adventures, and  the fragility in  all things that collapse, fold, fail, and drown,  whether in war or peace.  Unlike the workers, they are objects with no power to protest what is being done to them. Nabi frames in beautiful stills the arduous process of  transmuting the structure  of a vessel  into elegant geometries. He frames the deconstructed fragments as triangular prow, rectangular door, port hole, polygonal  voids,  diminishing  horizontals and verticals. The scratched and rusted hulls  become a glowing sunset canvas  or a square vista of  eroding  hills. After years of sailing and hard use,  their end is transmutation: the reconfiguration into eternal abstraction.

Self-taught Imagist Joseph E. Yoakum’s  opaque color pencil   drawings on manila paper are divergent meditations on the life and times of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century travel.  His Luisitania drawing [1918]  presents  an undeliberate alternative to  shimmering or glittering Minimalism. Instead of abstraction,  there is Grandma Moses’ punctiliousness and archaic perspectival systems.  Rather than conceptually dismembering a ship [Nabi], Yoakum    densely builds up  the imaginary  look of a specific sailing tragedy. Unlike the other artists, he dwells on experiences he has often not had.  In this,  he weirdly resembles Ted Chiang  who dangles a fictionsl future he is currently fashioning.