Author: onajide

by ONAJIDE SHABAKA

During my first trip to Minnesota in 1997, a rain soaked drive north almost to the Canadian border to Ely from Minneapolis, I asked my friend driving to stop along the roadside so that I could gather a small cup of reddish mud from a pothole. At the time, I thought for sure he would think I had lost my mind. However, upon my return to Miami and subsequent years, it quickly became a material used in my “art play,” resulting in both drawings and sculptures. Since 1997, the idea of dirt as a cultural material has taken off in many directions. I returned to Ely for visits over the next several years to continue my “botanical and geological research,” and began shipping his trove of dirt and found objects back home.

Dirt, from the lithosphere to geophagy to ritual is difficult to define since it can represent the dissolution of everything; the final stop and conclusion to life. It is, however, nature and a salve, brought to life of this iron red oxide material and all of its various ideas for a creative art practice.

“Dirt is not dirt, but only matter in the wrong place.” Variations of this quote have been attributed to William James, Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas, John Ruskin and a host of others, but an 1883 issue of Longman’s Magazine confirms its author was Lord Palmerston. He aired his starched Sunday shirt on a gooseberry bush only to have it flitter into the mud, but he donned it anyway, uttering this now famous line.

After a long conversation with an artist friend about my containers of dirt I thought it would make an intriguing art exhibition and series of readings. The curated exhibition, “Dirt Yuta Suelo Udongo Tè,” points to dirt through various linguistic references: English, Talaandig (Philipines), Spanish, Kiswahili (east Africa), and Kreole (Haiti).

Although initially a very open idea, the exhibition of fourteen artists took on a narrower focus. Although central to an exhibition about dirt, it was not just about the substance as it took on a more metaphorical bend with personal and societal pollutions surfacing as an important idea. And, of course, humor was interjected with various images and sculpture. Most of the included artists were based in Miami, Florida, where the lush landscape tends to overshadow the unpaved terrain, they all took the topic naturally in their own art practices.

Dirt became contemporary art with the Earthworks of the late 1960s, a type of formalism that moved out of the gallery, into the ground and then out to rural spaces. Nature is dirt, after all — a timeless emollient within which many cultures find themselves. We are made of dirt. We return to dirt. Our relationship to dirt is entirely mixed up with cultures and societies.

As I began developing this dirt project more fully my thoughts went in many directions about its significance to both art and science. Works from fourteen artists explore different takes on the subject matter: cleanliness, cycles of destruction and creation, the fleeting nature of time and memory, the sediment of human existence, and our relationship with the environment. It includes sculpture, photography, paintings, drawings, mixed-media works, delicate Raku pottery, and two poems written especially for the exhibition.

Performance artist David Rohn takes a much more literal approach using the substance smeared over his body and hair in a number of staged personages. They each provoke the mind with the fundamental essence of our interior lives in a blatantly external and messy way. Less shock but ultimately thought provoking, Rohn’s pieces are also literal in the sense that humans around the planet play with and eat dirt.

For generations, the eating of clay-rich dirt has been a curious but persistent custom in some rural areas of Mississippi and other Southern states, practiced over the years by poor whites and blacks. But while it is not uncommon these days to find people here who eat dirt, scholars and others who have studied the practice say it is clearly on the wane. [M]any are giving up dirt because of the social stigma attached to it.

Dr. Frate (cited in the NY Times article) said dirt eating is one of the few customs surviving among some Southern blacks that can be directly traced to ancestral origins in West Africa.

SOUTHERN PRACTICE OF EATING DIRT SHOWS SIGNS OF WANING
(February 13, 1984) WILLIAM E. SCHMIDT
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/13/us/southern-practice-of-ea…

Thinking back memories of my own childhood, my grandparents are from Tennessee and South Carolina, and I remember when growing up hearing stories told about women eating dirt. They apparently did this while pregnant because of its nutritional value. It’s called geophagy, and apparently it’s a common occurrence in places in the Caribbean.

The original cache of dirt was scooped up near Ely, MN which is located in the Vermilion Iron Range. There is still iron ore (taconite) mining in Minnesota. If we look at the photographs of Mark Hahn in another mining state, Arizona, we see the scale and depth of copper ore extraction that most people have never seen. The open sore on the landscape it produces is something the people of Boundary Waters Minnesota are fighting to prevent, as are many anti mining initiatives.

Edouard Duval Carrié gives us to view a diptych of two hand painted light boxes. They comprise each a man and woman made up of bacterial transparencies to create the figures, part of his “Tainted” series. This series focuses on human fragility in both a personal and societal way. His art, while often set in a world of Caribbean historical fantasy, reaches beyond the personal and into the political realm. These figures are not icons but very representatives of our failed humanity.

When we look at Ralph Provisero’s sculpture of compacted dirt, we see geologic time in shortened form. Over the course of the exhibition the sculpture’s process will metaphorically become a once living and now decaying object. It starts off moist and seemingly full of life. As it dries out, it cracks and flakes apart just as real world environmental events take place over time. Unless you stand there and watch the sculpture the full length of the exhibition the process will be perceptible only because you know it was pristine and solid when it was formed.

Through my cultural practice I have been investigating dirt in the context of the African Atlantic and Indigenous Mesoamerican diaspora. Dirt is a sacred and secretive material that that I have creatively implemented in a variety of contexts on a variety of media. Additionally, I spent the month of September, 2015, as artist-in-residence in the Everglades National Park. I studied alongside park’s scientists who where monitoring water salinity and soil composition and their importance to healthy ecosystems.

With the help of a few artists I have brought forth a few of the ideas I have been working with since that rainy day in 1997. The exhibition is an opportunity to share some of the explorations of other artists.

“Dirt Yuta Suelo Udongo Tè,” will return at the Ritter Art Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, January 22 – March 5, 2016 with fourteen artists and invited guest authors reading about dirt during a public event on Feb. 11, 2016.