ISSUE 11
Gowanus Canal
The Gowanus Canal—home to a substance referred to as black mayonnaise, to syphilis and gonorrhea, to a mysterious white goo, immune to disease—is so polluted that it’s been designated a Superfund site. That pollution, though, swirls its surface such that it’s earned the lovely nickname Lavender Lake. Animals like a shark, a whale, and a seal named Gowanda have passed through it, items like birdcages have been pulled from it; read on to see what’s been imagined into it.
This print a re-strike of original linoleum block carvings by Clement Hurd, illustrator of Goodnight Moon. The original linoleum blocks were carved as illustrations for the Children’s book The Mother Whale written by Edith Thacher Hurd 1973. The blocks were rediscovered by their grandson Nicholas Hurd who has reprinted the blocks in the form of a larger print.
Phillip Lopate describes the shape of Manhattan Island as ‘a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere’. This feeling of being tethered to the land, unable to get to sea, was a feature of New York life for much of the twentieth century. New York was an island without a coast. The West Side piers that once welcomed the Lusitania spent most of the twentieth century crumbling or behind barbed wire, while the East Side’s coves and points were cut off from pedestrians by six lanes of the Robert Moses-designed Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive. It wasn’t much easier to reach the shores of Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx, either: with a few exceptions, they were largely reserved for municipal or industrial use, and easiest to see from the Staten Island Ferry (en route to the borough with the most beaches). Now, slowly, the city is reclaiming its shoreline, with some spectacular results.
Drown the bird for luck, she tells me. It will keep him alive.
All right, I say.
The bird is small and yellow and white and grey, a songbird. When she puts it in my hands, I can feel its pulse shuddering against my palm. Tiny thing, I could crush it just as easily.
I call out that I’ve found a bone, a spinal vertebra perhaps, and I begin to pull away the seaweed and sand crabs from where the marrow once was. The friend I've brought here appears at my side and I hand him the horse bone. He turns it over in his hand; it looks more like wood than bone from years of being tossed and aged in the bay. We keep pawing through the broken bottles and tinker toys littering the shore and find a very bone looking bone: long and thin in the middle and bulbous on the ends, like a dog toy or a bone you’d see in a cartoon. We are preoccupied with this carnal treasure hunt. We have done the remarkable: we have found a certain joy in death.
In the 1950s, US Navy submarines heard a strange underwater noise near Hawaii and southern California. A coiled chirping sound that sprang to a rapid crescendo, and then fell just as quickly. No one knew what it was. The sound became known as a “boing.” Scientists later guessed it was a whale, but it wasn’t until nearly half a century later, in the winter of 2002, when a boatload of researchers in the Hawaiian Islands finally heard a boing and spotted a whale at the same time. The boing remained a mystery for so long in part because its source is one of the smallest of the whales, one that doesn’t make a big spout and doesn’t surface for long: a minke whale.
New York is a city of nooks and crannies, discovered and undiscovered, above and below the waterline.
Well then down you go. Spiraling into darkness with the regulator hissing and the funk of the Hudson clinging to your suit like rime, the spotlight held at arm’s length and advancing its bad joke into a slurry of black mud and pollution, the bubbles racing from your mouth toward a theoretical surface as you penetrate deeper into that living darkness which cinctures the earth and makes a mockery of your personal ephemera, of the husband you no longer recognize, of the advanced degrees that belie your fecklessness, of the psychotropic prescriptions that mediate your pain, of her empty crib with its bone-white spindles, of the lewd smile of the young man at the dive shop, of the dappled morning sunlight outside your bedroom window and the ferocious joy it has occasionally instilled, of your fear of spiders and your fear of bridges and your fear of stained glass cathedrals—the darkness making a mockery of love.
“Except for waist-bands, forehead-bands, necklets, and armlets, and a conventional pubic tassel, shell, or, in the case of the women, a small apron, the Central Australian native is naked. The pubic tassel is a diminutive structure, about the size of a five-shilling piece, made of a few short strands of fur-strings flattened out into a fan-shape and attached to the pubic hair. As the string, especially at corrobboree times, is covered with white kaolin or gypsum, it serves as a decoration rather than a covering. Among the Arunta and Luritcha the women usually wear nothing, but further north, a small apron is made and worn.”
— W. Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, “The Native Tribes of Central Australia,” 1899
Through exploring human attachment to material objects, my work investigates the appreciation and gradual depreciation of the objects that we possess. I am interested in the material objects, which we discard or neglect, searching for places where discarded or outdated objects become resident in natural landscapes.
Kate was scouting the pan-Asian buffets when she first saw the magician. A few chirpy women were clustered around him, and Kate watched from a distance while he rendered them boneless. They gripped each other’s elbows. They tittered and yelped. She moved to the edge of their circle and watched while the magician folded the nine of hearts into a triangle, stabbed it through with one woman’s lapel pin, an emerald dove, then vanished both from his hand. The card reappeared, unwrinkled, unpoked, in the liner pocket of another woman’s jacket.
My mother collected antique birdcages. Nature abhors a vacuum
so we filled the cages, first with budgerigars and canaries. They died
and we filled the cages again, with exotic finches that my father chose
and a pair of lovebirds (that detested one another). They died
and we filled the cages again with a grey-cheeked parakeet and a long-
tailed beauty (that didn’t live a year and had the solemnity of a widow).
My father vacuumed the floor beneath the cages and the parakeet
shrieked, shrieked, shrieked: “Abhor! Abhor! Abhor!” My father died
and we didn’t fill the cages again. We moved, we put the cages
in storage, we moved, we put the cages in the basement.
It was poker night at the Gowanus Social Club and Jake didn’t want to be there.
He didn’t want to be in the room, which was like a rec room basement, with walls like strips of brown tar, and men with mouths like that, too. He didn’t want to sit at the chipped Formica table, staring at the tits on a ripped St. Pauli Girl poster and the dented dartboard, flipping through a greasy deck of cards and drinking flat beer.
Yesterday morning while I read Montaigne
a man drove his car into the Gowanus canal.
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle
than myself, Montaigne wrote in the late 16th century.
It was a bright day.
The sun forgave no one.
Not even the firefighter who first saw
the car taken by the water while he was praying,
lighting a cigarette, remembering his lover’s face—
what was he doing, what did he think of before diving in?
Alexis Neider created this artwork for an event in collaboration with Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool at Recess. See pictures and read more about it here.
Alexis Neider created this artwork for an event in collaboration with Marie Lorenz's Flow Pool at Recess. See pictures and read more about it here.