Pandemic Elegy: Basia Irland

Basia Irland

Pandemic Elegy

(Digitally enlarged painted images, wheat passted on truck)

2020

Overview:  A panel truck is covered on its sides with digitally-enlarged painted images of ocean, above which are seen canoes or boats sprouting wings flying through the sky. Small white shapes are visible in the background. The truck's rear has many images of blue elongated shapes, inspired by the bamboo leaves on which the flying boat motifs were originally painted.  Below the driver's window is written the caption, "To honor those who have died from COVID 19."

 

From Axle Contemporary Gallery site:    Basia Irland, professor emerita at University of New Mexico’s department of art and art history, has been engaged in an ongoing artistic exploration of our relationship to water for more than four decades. An activist, installation artist, sculptor, poet, and author, she uses creative mediums to call attention to issues such as water’s ecological importance, water rights, and the well-being of communities. In Pandemic Elegy, a series of paintings on the exterior of Axle’s mobile art van, water and winged boats are prominent motifs. The work was created to honor those who died from the coronavirus. Pandemic Elegy is round one of Broadsides, a series of coronavirus-safe exhibitions on the outside of the mobile art space that can be seen while walking, driving, or viewed on Axle’s website. 

Irland works with communities to explore imaginative ways to increase our understanding of water as the crucial resource on the planet. Her poetic writing conveys political awareness and pointed information about our human impact on water. 

Pamela Allara: As Susan Platt notes, Irland’s work addresses issues of water, the element crucial to life that is threatened by climate change and pollution. The painting she has created on the Axle van is initially a pleasant one: a pedestrian seeing it pass by would notice a body of water surmounted by winged boats: an altogether lyrical image. In the prologue to Irland’s book Water Library, she notes that “The bibliography inflates to form a kayak, drifting on an unnamed river at dusk, accompanied by a constellation of fireflies.”  [1] Without too much thought, said pedestrian might simply conclude that nature breezes along with us, a source of beauty and pleasure.

But those winged kayaks, surrounded by stars/fireflies, could also be understood as fleeing or escaping something. Their sprouted wings indicate a hybrid growth born of desperation, creating the irreconcilable contradiction of a boat that is flying in mid-air. Having left their watery domain for an unknown habitat, they have attached themselves to a motorized vehicle spouting pollution out of its exhaust. They may hope to flee, but there is no escape.

While this lyrical image honors those who have died of Covid-19, it also is a reminder of unavoidable ecological disaster.

Footnote 1: Basia Irland, Water Library 2007. University of New Mexico Press, Quoted in Susan Noyes Platt, Art and Politics Now: Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis 2010. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 289.

Mark Auslander; An elegy is a rhythmic poem to the Dead, which in classical times was sometimes thought to help move the soul of the deceased through spiritual trajectories from this world into the afterlife.  Here, the winged canoes flying over a turbulent sea may be reminiscent of Charon's boat, ferrying the souls of the newly dead to the underworld domain of Hades in ancient Greek mythology. The artist may also allude to the practice of burying the dead in aerial canoes, atop special elevated mounts, by many native peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Similarly, in other cultures around the world mortal remains or their symbolic equivalents are set afloat on water as the deceaed embark on the ultimate journey.

Whatever the precise referents, we almost hear the beating sound of the wings, rising and falling, akin to the repeated couplets of a poetic elegy. How appropriate that this poignant image of traveling vehicles is wrapped around a mobile vehicle itself, a truck that makes repeated stops as it moves from place to place on its sad pilgrimage.  We may read the wraparound painting as a kind of winged prayer; like a recited classical elegy, may this journeying image help guide our lost souls, so many of them victims to ignorance and greed at the highest governmental levels, to a place of rest, above a great sea,  imbued with the Oceanic feeling of primal unity that bridges the Alpha and the Omega. 

Viewed from a distance, the small white shapes floating in the background might be read as seagulls or stars rising above the ocean's horizon line at dusk. Upon closer examination, they appear to share the ominous spiked shape of the novel coronavirus itself. The ubiquitous presence of SARS-Cov-2 is thus quietly affirmed, in the face of the orchestrated wave of anti science rhetoric that plunges us each day ever deeper into the abyss. The viruses, for better or worse, form the constellations arcing over our present sea of sorrows, across which the living and the dead now set sail.

As I write these words, so many Americans have taken to the roads again, many in wholesale denial of the vastness of the continuing, deepening pandemic. 250,000 unmasked  motorcycle riders are expected to descend shortly on Sturgis, S.D., in a likely super-spreader event of unfathomable proportions, as if the noise and exuberance of a high octane rally can drown out the insidious power of the virus.  At such a benighted moment in our history, Irland's poignant small truck, making its determined, quiet way along the roads and highways, from one safe viewing spot to another, is a necessary antidote, a painfully honest occasion of sorrow and honest recognition of the unfolding reality around us.  Step by step, walking pensively around the truck's circumference, imaginatively entering into its solemn seascape and its rhythmic waves and beating wings, we each take on the heavy burden of memorializing the Dead, beneath a vast sky of uncertain portents. 

 

Ellen Schattschneider: Contemplating Basia Irland’s “Pandemic Elegy,” I find myself thinking of a very different water-based process of memorialization.  In my book Immortal Wishes (2003) I describe the Dragon Princess Ceremony conducted each winter at Akakura Mountain Shrine near Hirosaki,  in northeastern Japan’s Tsugaru region.  (Basia has undertake public art projects related to Kyoto’s central river, so perhaps the following Japanese comparison is not entirely off base).

Akakura Yama Jinja (Akakura Mountain Shrine) is a hybrid Shinto-Buddhist institution founded by a charismatic woman spirit medium in the 1920s; for decades, women have been the principal ascetics based at the shrine, climbing the rugged mountainscape to perform austerities dedicated to the mountain’s divinities (kami) and associated Buddhist bodhisattvas, oriented to a sacred waterfall and other special features on the mountain, shaped by flows of lava, wind and water across the eons.

Each February, in the depth of winter, worshipers trudge up the snow-covered lower slopes to  the shrine to help transact sacred water that has flowed from the sacred mountain’s peaks down to a special shrine outbuilding dedicated to the foundress. They form a human chain from an icy stream, transferring buckets of water to the ‘bathtub’ (ofuro) in the building, in front of a statue of the late foundress Kudо̄ Mura. The accumulated water throughout the coming year will serve as medicine to ascetics, spirit mediums, and lay members who undertake in subsequent ceremonies to conduct kuyо̄ (Buddhist memorialization), on behalf of their deceased relations, helping to guide them towards Buddhahood and ancestral status.

The line of worshipers recalls  foundress Kudо̄ Mura's’ revelatory dream-vision of a great dragon flying from the mountain’s summit to her farm house, summoning her to climb the mountain and serve its resident divinities.  In the dream, the dragon pierced the dreamer’s farmhouse roof and landed on her pillow, moving rapidly from macrocosmic to microcosmic scales. The founding dream is concretized in a beautiful votive painting installed in the inner shrine, showing the dragon’s nocturnal flight in front of a full moon, above the sacred mountain (a detail of the painting is reproduced on my book's cover, seen above).

The mountain itself functions as a cosmic womb, binding together members of the congregation and rebirthing them, in renewed alignment with their beloved deceased relatives, in a collective burst of healing energy that unites the Living and the Dead, the visible and the invisible. Each human being dies alone, but this complex process of kuyo memorialization depends on the united hearts and minds of all the living congregants, guiding the dead through the cycles of creation that lead to full awareness and Buddhahood. This process is aided by the practice of votive painting by persons who have undertaken ascetic discipline (shugyо̄) on the rugged mountainscape and been granted revelatory dream-visions of the mountain divinities and the honored dead: gazing at these painted images helps in turn to guide subsequent generations of worshipers in their efforts to move their deceased relations and themselves towards Buddhist salvation.  These paintings are, significantly, referred to as “offerings,” special gifts into which the painter has projected a part of herself, establishing a kind of tangible bridge between the visible world and the invisible domain of the divinities and the dead.

I wonder if something comparable might be going on in Irland’s haunting work, which can also be read as a kind of revelatory dreamscape traversing the domains of the Living and the Dead.  The Covid-19 pandemic has certainly had peculiarly individuating aspects; so many of those lost to the disease, one might argue, especially in minority and Native communities, have been betrayed by the national government and the current administration, which failed to mount an effective response to the crisis.  The administration has of course been in active denial about the true toll of the pandemic and there has been nothing approaching collective processes of grief and mourning. Instead it has fallen to individual families to mourn, often in isolation from loved ones, given social distancing restrictions. Or, it falls to artists, such as Basia Irland, to offer their own loving acts of vision and mourning.

Might this truck and the great ocean it depicts, I wonder, be a bit akin to the cosmic womb of the sacred mountain of Akakura? Arising from the waves are the winged canoes, rather like flying fish, each presumably honoring a lost soul.  Each person may have died alone, ultimately abandoned by the national leadership, but in this poignant image they are restored to some sort of collectivity, condensing as it were the essence of the ocean that has rebirthed them. In such a way, perhaps, the many thousands souls lost to Covid-19 are moved in concert from isolation and neglect towards a kind of unity with one another and with other souls of the universe. 

Perhaps in time, the dead even reappear as the twinkling stars above the sea, beacons of the eternal. Each act of viewing the wraparound painting, as it speeds by on the highway or is parked in an outdoor lot, may be conceived of as an act witnessing and solidarity, that helps to move the lost ones along a pathway beyond our ken.  In this sense, Irland’s mobile painted elegy may function as a kind of votive painting, a concretized dreamscape,  transitioning those who may have died alone under tragic circumstances into a great collective reservoir of spirit, spanning the gulf between the encircling world ocean and the vault of the star-filled sky.



References

Ellen Schattschneider. 2003. Immortal Wishes: Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain. Duke University Press. 

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For Further Reading about Basia Irland:

2018 “Reading the River.” By Richard Bright. Interalia Magazine, September.
https://www.interaliamag.org/interviews/basia-irland/

 2017 Reading the River: The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland. Edited by Museum
De Domijnen and Basia Irland. Sittard, the Netherlands: Museum De
Domijnen. 230 pages, full color, ISBN 978-9075883558.

2007 Water Library. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press. 234
pages, full color, ISBN 978-0826336750.