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The GREAT FLOOD
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2007 - 2027
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Sculptural Installation ((Evolving and ongoing)
Camel skull, India Ink, Canoe Paddle, Beach Plastic, Electrical Wire, Metal Rod, Willow, Deer skull, Acrylic Paint, Turtle Shell, Indian Corn, Red Cedar, Coyote Skull, Plastic Water Bottles, Lightening Rod, Kayak Frame, Childs Wagon, Black tiling Pipe. River Wood, Wood, Detritus and Storytelling.
"You guys have not seen anything yet. You have no idea. Climate change will bring waves of environmental refugees from the southern hemisphere flooding into the wealthy northern nations."
Mark Grey, Anthropologist, 2007
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FLOATING AN IDEA
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On June 8, 2007 I went kayaking on the Cedar River with a couple of Waterloo, Iowa firefighters. The river was in flood stage and allowed us to paddle into and through the riparian trees into a Heron Rookery. As usual during a big flood, there was a large amount of snags and other detritus being carried downriver. This was far from the first time I had paddled in flood conditions. Years earlier in Northern California, Phil Johnson and I canoed the flooded Sacramento River and paddled through perfectly straight rows of trees in walnut orchards.
As the firefighters and I paddled the swollen Cedar River, an idea started to emerge. I imagined an installation of assemblages and artifacts hanging from the ceiling of a gallery to emulate detritus floating on the surface of an imaginary river current, an allegory of a global river system. The imagined the installation being lit from above to cast shadows on the gallery floor, evoking the shadows cast on a streambed.
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A HISTORIC RECORD
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I did not realize that a year later, I would experience a profound flood event. On July 10, 2008 our college town of Cedar Falls, Iowa woke up to the predictions of a record flood on the Cedar River. That morning some of us went down to the river to observe the river's condition and a threatened railroad bridge. Authorities had parked railroad cars full of rock across the full length of the bridge to anchor and stabilize it. By the time we got there, the river was over the railroad tracks. It was then that we noticed our City Councilman Kamyar Enshayan looking at a floodwall with some city staffers. We joined them to see half-inch diameter spouts of water shooting out of a section of the wall. It was clear that the wall was in danger of breaching.
In no time at all, Bulldozers arrived with their buckets full of sand. My friends and I started sandbagging as many volunteers began arriving. We sandbagged until 3:00pm when we took a break for a late lunch. When we returned to the downtown riverfront, one of the firefighters asked me to accompany him by kayak to protect belongings in a family barn. State troopers took one look at the Kayaks on top of our car and turned us back.
We got back to the riverfront at 6:00pm. Even in my years as a wild-land firefighter, I had never witnessed such a mobilized community. I was in a line of people including grandparents and any child strong enough to pass a sandbag. Younger children wandered up and down the line offering water and snacks.
We sandbagged until 1:30am when the officials announced that the river had crested. I went to look at an earthen floodwall that had been built after the last record flood in 1999. We had buttressed this floodwall with an additional four feet in height with sandbags. I observed the cresting river coursing about a foot below the top of the sandbags. I turned around and saw that with the exception of a few restless stragglers, the intersection of First Street and Main, that only a short while earlier had been a hive of frenzied activity, was now mostly deserted.
Thankfully, we managed to save downtown Cedar Falls. However, there was a gnawing awareness that we were sending the problem down-river. A few days later, the entire nation witnessed the devastation to downtown Cedar Rapids. They suffered eight feet of water in their downtown storefronts and there remain entire neighborhoods that may never be rebuilt. This was Iowa's Katrina.
Most of us believe that this new record will be broken. We are experiencing climate change in real time. As the arid western states become more prone to drought and wildfire, the mid-western prairie states are experiencing wetter, more erratic weather. Climate change means more extreme weather such as hail, tornados and likely flood events.
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THE RIVER AS METAPHOR
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The idea of a conceptual river in my imagination became "The Great Flood." I realized my arrangement of artifacts would be an exploration of the cultural and allegorical implications. I went to my bookshelf and dove into my collections of ecology and global myths and legends. The stories come from every corner of the Globe. In North America, the Hopi, Caddo and Menominee have prehistoric accounts of a great flood. The ancient Sumerians recount a great flood in the epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2,100BC. John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" reaches a climax with his protagonists seeking refuge from a catastrophic flood.
I bought a copy of Bill Moyer's "Genesis." This book is a transcript of roundtable conversations between theologians and cultural scholars, moderated by Moyers. In a chapter titled "Apocalypse," there is a challenging discussion about Noah and the flood. In this account, what I remembered from Sunday school as a pastoral, almost cheerful gathering of animals became a dark, emotionally complicated tale of vengeance, ecological havoc and damaged souls.
The scholars discussed at length how angry God had become at humankind and aggressively punished their behavior with an ecological apocalypse. I could not help thinking that the language loosely paralleled some of the warnings that the scientific community uses to alert us to climate change in our time. In these alarms, the Earth is at times attributed with an anthropogenic sense of being "angry at human behavior."
In describing Noah, the scholar Carol Gilligan said, "These are the behaviors of somebody who has been pushed beyond the limits of his humanness." In our time, the entire world witnessed this in the famines of Sudan. Yet there are also acts of compassion in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. It has been estimated that in Katrina's wake, over one million American citizens where displaced from their homes and scattered throughout a broad region of the North American continent. Katrina refugees arrived in Northeast Iowa.
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A FLOOD OF HUMAN BEINGS
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Very early in my thinking, I was aware that my Great Flood not only represented a swollen river but also other possible metaphors. Among the most emergent was human migration. In 2007 I participated in a televised roundtable on art and ecology. This was when the anthropologist Mark Grey made his startling comment. It has come to pass and we have seen a human river flooding the borders of America and Europe. This human flood has no doubt increasingly stressed the socio/ecological infrastructures of the wealthy northern nations. It has become a shock to our collective compassion and conscience and should challenge the moral compass of all faith communities. Instead, too often, the thousands of refugees arriving at our border has spurred a resurgence of radical right-wing nationalist movements. Yet, these human beings only flee the homeland where their ancestors are buried because the altered ecosystem offers no future for them or their children. Mark's forceful comment was prescient.
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A CAMEL SKULL
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Among the most challenging sculptural assemblages is a metaphor for the great waves of Middle Eastern and North African refugees flooding Europe. The nucleus of this assemblage is a Camel skull that was a gift from a stranger that had visited my 2007 Bison exhibit. This person found the skull on a trek through the desert of Saudi Arabia and thought I might be able to use it. When I realized the great importance of the refugee migration to the Great Flood project, the camel skull became a critical component.
I marked the camel skull in Arabic text with the words "Hope" and "Peace." I consulted my Egyptian-American architect friend Tamer Azzazi, about the proper forms and meanings of the words. Tamer is a devout Muslim and he has taught me a lot about his faith. Tamer suggested that I should be clear about the word, "peace." He said that a devout Muslim would believe that "peace" was only attainable by a complete submission to Allah. I wondered if this was too sensitive. Yet, on reflection, I reasoned that no westerner can define what peace means to these refugees? I have never heard that they are required to surrender their faith to win asylum in Finland. Doesn't their faith offer them a measure of hope and peace in the new life that has been forced upon them? I decided that it was important to use that word in that context.
To complete this assemblage, I remembered that my old friend Matt Auvinen had been collecting plastic detritus from a beach in Italy where he had been living. It occurred to me that these items along with a broken canoe paddle would be poignant metaphors for the harrowing open water journeys these refugees take in over-crowded rafts across the Mediterranean Sea.
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DEER, CORN AND COYOTE
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At least one of the assemblages will reference the socio/ecological metamorphosis of the new world. I was given a deer skull that I have painted with the geometric patterns derived from a Meskwaki textile. The Meskwaki are an Algonquian speaking people that originated somewhere in the region between Detroit, Michigan and Illinois. As the pressure from American settlement pushed eastern tribes westward, the Meskwaki were forced across the Mississippi River into Eastern Iowa. In 1857, the Iowa legislature authorized them to purchase a privately owned settlement on the Iowa River near Tama.
The sculptural deer skull assembly also references the arrival in North America of Maize. Maize or corn, originated in the Oaxaca region of Mexico and flooded North America around the first century BC. The arrival and adoption of Corn profoundly altered the socio/ecology of North America and facilitated the development of agrarian settlements like Cahokia. I am not sure what it means that today's corn has become controversial with the wide adoption of Round-Up Ready, genetically modified seed licensing.
There was a low-hanging-fruit metaphor. We hear a lot about the "Coyotes," the human traffickers that exploit the refugees that cross America's southern border. I bought a coyote skull on eBay and painted it with flames. I am using it with a piece of Honduras Rosewood and crushed, soiled plastic water bottles.
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A CHILDS WAGON
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The Cedar River floods a lot, sometimes two or three times a year. When I paddle my kayak or hike along the river, it is common to find human detritus deposited from past floods. On the backside of Morris Island, I was aware of a very old children's wagon. It has rusted red paint and decomposing wooden sidewalls. I walked past it for a few years until I realized I wanted it for my project. It was early spring when I hiked in to retrieve it but it was still trapped in a frozen crust of remnant ice. I could not free it without destroying it and I was concerned that I might be lost in the next flood. I had some cord in my bag and tied the wagon to a tree. In fact the next event was the historic 2008 flood. At the earliest opportunity, I hiked in to find the cord broken but the wagon lying only a short distance away. I think this wagon evokes a loss of innocence.
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