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THE GREAT FLOOD
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Sculptural Installation (In active development)
Proposal developed between 2007 and 2019. A 2020 laboratory exhibit at Sierra Arts in Reno, Nevada displayed prototype assemblages, watercolor renderings, and documentation.
"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
FLOATING AN IDEA
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 a walnut orchard.
As the firefighters and I paddled the swollen Cedar River, an idea started to emerge. I imagined an installation of 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. Assemblages and artifacts would hang at an imaginary water plane just at or just below the head of the viewer. The effect would put the viewer just above the symbolic surface of rising water. The installation would be lit from above to cast shadows on the gallery floor to evoke the shadows cast on a streambed. Though the flood is the primary vehicle for the layers of metaphor in the installation, no actual water would be incorporated.
A HISTORIC RECORD
Little did I 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 I went down to the river to observe the river's condition and joined other citizens checking on 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 I 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 and a shower. 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 less than 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 and the city continues to feel its repercussions.
Most of us that were involved in sandbagging that day believe that this new record will be broken. As the arid western states become more prone to drought and wildfire, the forecast is for the mid-western prairie states to experience wetter, more erratic weather. Climate change likely means more frequent and extreme flood events for the region.
THE GREAT FLOOD
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 of the cataclysmic event. 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 the 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 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. We had Katrina refugees arriving in Northeast Iowa.
A FLOOD OF HUMAN BEINGS
Very early in my thinking, I was aware that my Great Flood not only represented a swollen river but also uncounted possible metaphors. Among the most emergent to me is human migration. In 2007 I participated in a televised roundtable on art and ecology with the anthropologist Mark Grey. This was when Mark made his startling statement about the flood of ecological refugees that are forecast to flee the effects of climate change in the undeveloped southern hemisphere. I had never heard anyone say this in such a penetrating way before. Mark's forceful comment was prescient. Today, over ten years later, there is a great political controversy about the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The thousands of refugees arriving at our border has become political flash-point. The accounts from Europe are even more startling and the profound flood of Middle Eastern and North African refugees has spurred a resurgence of radical right-wing nationalist movements. This human flood will increasingly stress the socio/ecological/economic infrastructures of the wealthy northern nations.
ARTIFACTS AND ASSEMBLAGESS
When I conceptualize this theme as comprehensive installation, I envision it being composed of a large collection of allegorical assemblages and river detritus. The assemblages would specifically reference the cultural metaphors we attach to the idea of "flood," most importantly, those movements of human migration. At least one of the assemblages will reference the socio/ecological metamorphosis of the Pre-Columbian 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.
This sculptural deer skull assembly 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. it is uncertain that the arrival of corn was an entirely healthy phenomenon for the diets of these peoples. Today, corn becomes more controversial with the wide adoption of Round-Up Ready, genetically modified seed licensing of these crop commodities. I collected various ears of corn to utilize in this assemblage, including some ears my farmer-grandfather Clifford Springer grew in Walnut, Iowa.
A more challenging and controversial assemblage will be 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. When I realized the great importance of the refugee migration to the project, the camel skull became a critical component.
I visualized the camel skull marked with Arabic text with the words "Hope" and "Peace." First I consulted my dear friend Tamer Azzazi, an Egyptian-American architect in Minneapolis about the proper forms and meanings of the words. I have known Tamer for many years and as a devout Muslim, he has taught me a lot about his faith. I also got a very helpful second opinion from a Saudi named Saeed Almalki who helped me determine between the noun and verb forms of the script. 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. At first I thought that this was not what I wanted to communicate. However on reflection, I wondered who am I to define what peace means to these refugees? I have never heard that they are required to surrender their faith to win asylum in Finland or the UK. 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 this would be a poignant metaphor for the harrowing open water journeys these refugees take in over-crowded rafts across the Mediterranean Sea.
A KAYAK AND SHOTGUN SHELLS
Among the early artifacts I envisioned for this installation is a seventeen-foot long kayak. It is an old folding kayak that I got in trade for a watercolor in the early 90's. We got good use out of it but it is now beyond repair. The frame is intact and one day, I imagined it covered in colored shotgun shells. I imagined the red, blue, green and yellow shells arranged in geometric patterns and it resembled Native American beadwork on a moccasin.
I set out to gather the shotgun shells. There are two prominent shooting ranges in our county and I started checking them daily. One day I was gathering shells and I could hear shooting nearby. I walked around a berm barrier only to encounter two heavily tattooed men in long-coats. The bigger one was standing with his legs apart and shooting a clearly illegal sawed off shotgun in his outstretched arm like a pistol. I told them I would just look in the bin and move on. Over a period of a couple of weeks I managed to gather a very large number of spent shells that I washed and sorted according to color.
DETRITUS
The Cedar River floods a lot, sometimes two or three times a year. When I am paddling my kayak or hiking along the river, it is common to see human detritus deposited from past floods. I began gathering some of these objects to establish the fact of the flood. 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.
During another hike in the Cedar River's riparian, I came across a giant chunk of Styrofoam that had been deposited by a previous flood. It was an ungainly and awkward item to carry back to the trailhead and tie on top of our truck. At the time, I thought that our friend's kids could use it to build a post-modern Huck Finn raft. This never happened and for ten years, this eccentric object lived in the corner of my shop. Now it is part of the installation.
READINGS
Bill Moyers. Genesis: A Living Conversation.
Knopf Publishing Group. 1997
Cornelia F. Mutel. A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008
University of Iowa Press. 2010
Douglas Brinkley. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
Harper Perennial. 2006
Luis Alberto Urrea. The Devil's Highway.
Little Brown and Company. 2004
John Valliant. The Jaguar's Children.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015
John Steinbeck. The Grapes of Wrath.
The Viking Press. 1939
Various myths and legends from around the globe.
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