Gabriel Sacco
Preface
When working on any project I always ask the question, is this useful? This question frames a way of being that I imagine is both self-aware and spatially-aware. When awareness becomes a reflection of community, what one believes to be conceptually useful connects to others. I do not mean “useful” solely as conceptual or formal utility. For example, when the ergonomics of clippers specifically meant to prune hydrangea or other deciduous shrubs are lost, become unsharp, or give blisters, we are unsure how their purpose might be fulfilled. Maybe they are “lost in translation,” or disembodied from use (or detached from a human body’s use). One can choose to frame the use of any object—the garden for instance—by how they use it or how it gets used by others, socially through my family, peers, and colleagues, or those who more casually rub off on us. Here, the idea of a garden plays in my art making, my writing and living in the northeastern United States, my emotional internal clock riding the waves of the seasons. It is summer. I am currently photographing the gardens in bloom at my home. I planted tomatoes this year which are slow to start, so I will get some fall fruit.
My practice is involved in a network connecting my own psychoanalytic development of personhood. First, a practice of recognizing social influences, including family inheritances like gardening, cooking, sewing, and photography. Second, much of my practice formalizes in mnemonic devices to remember new-to-me or less-accepted theoretical ideas of social or time-based constructs. And finally, my practice is invested in cognition, especially memory, language, embodiment, and considering that embodiment is conditioned by memory and language. My work attempts to make connections with what I find is a critical disconnect between learned thought processes and embodiment.
Gabriel Sacco, To do #005 (Light Cones), 2023, Digital scan of drawing, Image courtesy of the artist.
These three categories of social inheritances, theory, and memory formalize to produce the autoethnographic approach you read in this essay. A general definition: ‘Autoethnography is a research method that uses personal experience (“auto”) to describe and interpret (“graphy”) cultural texts, experiences, beliefs, and practices (“ethno”).’[1] This continually reflexive action is what keeps my practice in motion.
Two authors and artists that shift their lived experience into fiction and myth and whose work I consider now are Derek Jarman, whose diaristic Modern Nature (1991) opened my eyes to connecting the garden to art and culture; and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose novel Dictée (1982) bends concepts of poetry that tells the story of several women. I read Cha to remind myself that myth making is inherently human and possible. I start with diary entries, epistles, and to-do lists to inform my visual work. Autoethnography is the way I analyze and interpret my lived experience as a contribution to a greater network of social, conceptual, political, and cultural meanings. It is the way that I can story-tell while relearning how to speak without taking on another’s voice. I locate desires and wishes for my own being and look to theory to expand my ways of being.
I am working on a series of notes and drawings using light cones as an organizational model. A light cone diagram is a theoretical experience of time and space that is more universally realistic than the linear felt time we know through our visual and auditory experience. I organize my poetry and to do lists in this way, so the work can take on multiple readings and meanings. This writing is linked with my practice of rendering light in photographs. I am taking pictures of my garden and surrounding land using pinhole cameras to explore a simplified method of light drawn on paper or film. I look to artists like visual artist and social researcher Mark Lombardi to learn formal ways to map the inner workings of social and physical constructs of time and space, for instance how we have learned to organize time.
***
Contemporary Nature, 2023
The garden as a praxis and environment of care comes in and out of my life in many ways. The garden scaffolds my ways of being. In childhood, my father and I gardened vegetables through his initiative in a thirty square-foot-fenced-in patch in the sunniest yet most unobtrusive place in our central New Jersey yard. Vegetable gardening is passed down through my grandparents’ resourcefulness gardening in Hoboken and Secaucus in the mid 1900s. Before them, a generation lost gardening to migration. Before that generation, Sacco family gardens thrived outside Foggia, Italy.
Now, I garden perennial flowering plants, trees, shrubs, and tomatoes. I inherit this practice and as I shift and respond to its needs. As an ecosystem the garden is a common site that queers. Gardening is the purposeful refusal and healing of homogeneous thinking leading into accepting change. I use the word “homogeneous” to describe progress-based thinking, or thinking only one way. As a starting point and impetus for the essay, I turn to anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s “second nature,”[2] as a way to describe capitalist transformations of the environment. To hash it out: “first nature” means “ecological relations,” “second nature” refers to capitalist transformations of the environment, like monopolizing food production. Finally, “third nature,” as Tsing describes, is what still lives despite capitalism. Tsing notes that we must relinquish the idea of a singular, progress-based timeline we have learned within which we are included. This is one-path thinking. My imagination of living outside anthropocentrism considers multiple futures and if it is even possible outside of human sensation. This essay seeks to use capitalist transformations as its starting point and return to something I have been made to forget; I wonder how a “third nature” can be extended into ways of being. How can my actions live outside anthropocentric capitalist ruins to relive, revisit, or imagine a new “first nature” relationship.[3] Below, I look into my practice of gardening, sculpture building, and photography for ques to inform these thoughts.
Gabriel Sacco, Pinhole Image #005(My Father’s Garden), 2021, Photo image. Image courtesy of the artist.
Gardening has become my most useful exploration into my desire to be shifting and responsive through the gardens’ needs as a whole ecosystem. Alongside the refusal of homogeneity, gardening requires (very imperfect) human participation in the processual and careful work that it requires to thrive (with the caveat that, of course, nature can do its own thing, and thrive without gardens). Gardening is human participation. It is dialectic, existing in its own world and also existing in ours. It is a slow return to learning how non-humans and humans can interact. I look to my garden to tell me ways to change, to experience uncomfortability, to participate in counteractions, to break through, be new, with care to not produce hierarchy. Through scholars and artists I understand how practicing gardening refuses anthropocentrism. For example I allocate a portion of my money (my personal capitalist accumulation) to non-humans and refuse only doing or being one thing to evoke openness to all possibilities as plants flower one year and not the next.
We are able to charge ourselves with potential, as you might charge a camera; live polyphonically through rhizomatic inheritance learned from marks made and seen in gardens; become physically socialized once again; reject definiteness in an unfinished and processual cycle of theorize-action-reaction-theorize.
***
Living polyphonically
We came to a new understanding of who we were going to be together.
Dan Savage on Polyamory, Chosen Family and Better Sex. The Ezra Klein Show. Podcast Audio. Jan 10, 2023.
As I awake from a nap I lie in bed with my eyes closed. I have not seen anything yet. My body temperature is still low and I daydream two hundred feet below the foundation of my home. I am wrapped within a blanket of cool soil and roots. Those jumping worms that are ravaging my grasses and flowers are now caressing my body, chewing my body hairs. My toe touches something slimy. I think about my mother. I think about my boyfriend. My eyes flicker open and I remember I am not at home. I awake in the bed of another man, another daydream. The pillowcase smells of mildew. It is true: I am cold. The ceiling fan faces its jet stream directly onto my solar plexus. Why? It cannot be past March. I crack my eyelids and view a loose capped bottle of poppers next to a glass of water. I keep my sticky mouth shut.
After, for the entire evening, I stayed alone. No one speaks to me and I do not speak with my mouth even to myself. I provide myself self-conscious mental checks to confirm the latest action I make. Without a human semblance around or a reflection to look after, I do not know how to act. I finally caught the reflection that I was looking for in the window, but there is always a side I cannot see. I say hello to no one. It has been hours; there is a frog in my throat and I do not even recognize my own sounds. My body is anxious and my mind is eerie.
Finally, at about 11:30 PM my boyfriend comes home from work. I hug him and we smooch. I am comforted for the first realtime today and we laugh. He and I know what it is like to be us again. My self awareness thrives off of other living things. This thought strikes me and I repeat: My self awareness thrives off of other living things. And with that I start to act like this person I slept with earlier in the day. Not completely, but there is this extremely adorable head tilt that he does… that he did. He swiveled his head down and made his eyes all watery while looking up at me. His lips are half smiling in the middle, and like a two-year-old hiding the smile at the corners of his mouth with a frown. I test it out. It gets me another kiss.
For me, mimicking is a product of attempting to vocalize. I relate the knowledge and learning of these cute and queer social changes, ways of changing how we flip our hair every ten years or so, to our desire to create polyphony in ourselves and in our environments. Tsing’s 2015 book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins explains what seems unrelated in nature to a trained human eye comes together to create polyphonic assemblages.[4] (I am interested in this phrase, polyphonic assemblages, to be hashed out below.) All beings interact in entangled ways, each beating to a different rhythm and contributing to each other’s well-being.
Gabriel Sacco, Film Still from Revealer #4, 2023, Digital video. Image courtesy of the artist.
When I consider people, I envision polyphonic assemblages are ones who transfer thoughts and ways of being, like carbohydrates, through body language to the other beings. Three players can work in different temporal rhythms, long and short term, and bring to the other parties things that we do not have, one with lust and ego, and another with reflection, renewed care and concern for growing the relationship outside of ego-based notions. When we return to the place we came from we are ourselves more solidly.
In retrospect I am reacting to a social situation in my environment and work within this ecology of sexual queerness to give myself a reference point. I can listen to each individual in the assemblage and provide tools to uplift what may be starved, just as a fungal mycelia feeds a beech sapling through the transfer of carbohydrates from the larger trees that make up the canopy and cover the sapling. The beech sapling in my wood thrives in low light, grows up, becomes the canopy, weaving its roots as new saplings pop up. When we chop the nematode-eaten beech down within the next four years, a slime mold will climb up and out through the stump, making a visible home for reproduction and feasting on not-lost carbohydrates.
In the January 10, 2023, episode of The Ezra Klein Show, writer and LGBTQ+ activist Dan Savage and journalist Ezra Klein speak about individuals in and out of relationships who shape-shift through life. We have ideas about who we are to ourselves and others and constantly need to define and recalibrate these relationships.
We ask for help from others in ephemeral ways as a means to solidify the self. Attending to the way I shared above, Savage says ‘by leaping into that fantasy, role play, or experience, it almost affirms and solidifies who you are the rest of the time…How do you [we] put those things into harness to serve the relationship instead of tear those relationships apart, is a real varsity level high degree of difficulty thing to do honestly, to incorporate honestly into a relationship…’[5] As I shapeshift, continuing as an adult, I am responsible for feeding my drive for polyphony. Could it be that the more we embody, the more we are able to live in difference? At the “varsity level,” we can learn how to act in polyphony with ourselves and others by working in and listening to the garden and embodying these ways. It will be a long process of continuing realizations, but we can regift this knowledge to ourselves over time.
Within a system that salvages capital from across the globe and forces participation in inequitable labor, we are not conditioned to act in ways that we are called to engage with the land: garden and become social polyphonists. We must fight for it and garden polyphonically as an act of refusal against individual ego-based inclinations.
Gabriel Sacco, Pinhole Image #015, 2021, Photo image. Image courtesy of the artist.
***
Gardening is the purposeful refusal and healing of homogeneous thinking leading into accepting change.
On the top of a small rock cliff in Shelton, Connecticut we named Longfellow Gardens the place where my partner and I live and forge a lineage of gardening. The home in which we live is a 1970s-built raised-ranch. Our outdoor garden extends as part of our living space and we work to produce mechanisms to trap moisture by planting low brush, trees, shrubs, mulching with oak, maple, birch, beech leaves, and dead wood. We encourage pollinators to join us by planting perennial flowering plants. I am starting a field of milkweed this year. They provide shallow and healthy root systems in the soil that act as scaffolding to slow down erosion. Outside of plantings, re-erected fallen trees with a found stone quartz amulet positioned on top sign towards, protection, memorial, or monuments for lost loved ones.
Longfellow is a sculpture garden, where sculptures never last very long. I am excited about collaborative sculpture-building with non-human peoples, shapeshifter beings who refuse stasis. We host native flowers: the blue flag iris, columbine, milkweed, aster, jack-in-the-pulpit, tiger lily, various coneflowers. Trees and shrubs join us: eastern hemlocks, American beeches, black birches with sweet sap, azalea and rhododendron varieties, and our neighborhood namesake: the white oak. We do not resist non-invasive imported varieties like torch lilies, crocus, crocosmia, the imported rhododendrons and azaleas, and my beloved hyacinth and daffodil. We do try to resist planting invasive species.
Gabriel Sacco, North Garden in 2021, 2021, Photo image. Image courtesy of the artist.
I recognize all carbon-based beings as people of the world. I go back in time to explore the garden and our land as a necessary societal forethought that we can return to. At Longfellow Gardens, my partner and I care through non-verbal discourse enacted by our hands’ capacities to facilitate connection between plants, under the earth, outside of our mouths, ears, and eyes. During a time when capitalism reigns, we participate in these interactions to re-learn how to be together, that contributions to the world come from every source of being.
This is advice I follow from Tsing as encouragement to participate in the social practice of collaborating with non-human people. Tsing enters into a deeper understanding of the culture surrounding matsutake mushrooms and ways in which systems they live within are able to show us a path towards socialization and different types of economies (considering what is left after capitalism). I am most interested in the research where Tsing finds individuals and structures that can be framed as indeterminate and polyphonic. Indeterminacy, ‘the unplanned nature of time’[6] in our social system is frightening for many. I was taught to learn, decide, and be in the world as a sure thing, an end point. In progress-based time, every object and action needs a description and every describing sentence needs a period. Tsing asks, ‘What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek?’[7] I am upended in considering the potential of collaborative survival: where humans and non-humans are bound to each other in reciprocal relationships. Accepting space-taking and gifts from others. Tsing argues that our anthropocentrism blocks our attention to multiple temporalities and recognizing and participating in multi-species assemblages.[8]
Indeterminacy is a quality of queer sculpture-building in contemporary art that I see in the works of Gordon Hall’s concrete sculptures, Constantina Zavitsanos’s L&D Motel, from Participant Gallery, 2019, and Hugh Hayden’s anthropomorphic or anti-ergonomic wood sculptures. These artists play with perception, social politics, and their specific bodies to explore the human body’s indeterminate or precarious relationship to the world. These contemporary references resonate with Tsing’s affinity for indeterminacy in sound art, composition, specifically for John Cage’s work and his continuous play with the theme of indeterminacy in his career. For example, when Cage performed his work 4’33”, he stayed silent sitting at his piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds leaving the sound composition up to the audience’s shuffling, grumbling, throat clearing, and sometimes booing. The work is indeterminate because Cage cannot expect how different audiences will contribute to the composition. By leaving openness for collaboration the work becomes iterative and processual.
The image of writer, filmmaker, and painter Derek Jarman’s cottage at Dungeness comes to my mind when gardening waxes into art and art wanes into gardening. On first thought, I think of his film Wittgenstein, 1993. In it, Jarman uses the term “queer” to describe meaning in words as ‘mysterious, hidden from view.’[9] It is elaborative that Wittgensttein is depicted as gay, or queer in his sexual, bodied being, in this film. I am interested in how the word “queer” can flow from one meaning to another easily as an example of indeterminacy.
I want to pin down that indeterminacy is coined when elements of the assemblage are contaminated and become unstable, one is unable to determine the future and timeframe. It becomes less structured as one individual loses control to the group. Indeterminacy may be when a boy is no longer determined as the traditionally-religious individual his grandmother thought he would be. Indeterminacy is an individual living among an assemblage of intersections. ‘Assemblages are defined by the strength of what they gather as much as their always possible dissipation.’[10] This is a secure quality of indeterminacy. Strength comes from change and if we live as indeterminate beings, part of us will always be leaving while we take on a new personhood.
Through my love for Jarman and love for film, I more so desire to frame the garden as temporal ephemera: their “living” lasts only for a finite amount of time, existing briefly, death is coming, memory is looming. The duration of films and gardens barely lasts through a season: films live on in the memories that start right after a final frame is projected as a garden does in autumn after the sedum dries. We experience winter when we are not viewing the film. Words, sounds and sights stick with us. Maybe we remember a scene when we are not watching, like wintergreen keeping hardy through the cold. Watch the film again and you are back in summer, blooming with a clear sensation as the sun falls upon your skin even if only for a short time. This processual and ephemeral interaction of film and the garden, the garden as sculpture, and temporal sculpture as a people participating in non-verbal discourse and performance denies the finality of my first conception of gardens as market-driven production and progress-based time. Through viewing the garden’s temporal frame of film and non-human discourse, the garden transforms into a queer site for processual sculpture building.
***
The garden and nature through a camera’s pinhole
The issue is metaphysical not empirical.
(Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein, 9:05)
Gabriel Sacco, Longfellow Property Line, 2020, Photo image. Image courtesy of the artist.
I move inside and outside of property lines to define actionable navigation to the garden and its boundaries and what is given and felt from the commons. This is a feeling derived from contemporary mythical oral histories and learned gardening behaviors. A true sensation of emotion from calm, peace, anxiety, and depression as a human retreating into the commons outside a consciously conceived property line.
The property line demarcates what is ours and what is not from our view. I think of the difference between nature and the garden as an example of the widest, deepest metaphysical boundary that describes human experience is fleshed out by physicist and philosopher Eugene Thacker. Thacker’s preface for In The Dust of This Planet, Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 regards philosophical pessimism and notions of an unknowable world. Thacker’s book expands on philosophical horror (not touched upon in this essay); and, in a couple of paragraphs he grounds the world in human perception. This becomes a concise mechanism to explore a context of the garden in relation to the world outside of our bodies. It sounds a bit like Tsing exploring ecology as ‘first nature,” or ‘ecological relations.’[11] Thacker goes further to un-include humans:
Let us call the world in which we live the world-for-us. This is the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human. But this world-for-us is not, of course, totally within the ambit of human wants and desires; the world often “bites back,” resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us. Let us call this the world-in-itself. This is the world in some inaccessible, already-given state, which we then turn into the world-for-us. The world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us. A significant part of this paradoxical world-in-itself is grounded by scientific inquiry – both the production of scientific knowledge of the world and the technical means of acting on and intervening in the world.[12]
A garden exists solely in Thacker’s world-for-us. We work the land to produce the garden. Our cultivation and agriculture is widely thought to have started approximately ten thousand years ago during a Neolithic period. As materials corrode in time, actually the only noticeable proof of agriculture is from ten thousand years ago, making this statement unsure.
I will speculate on the notion that humans or an older version of us (quite possibly the recently discovered Homo Naledi), took ten rooted ancestral pine tree saplings, planted them in a line, and harvested their sap for medicinal syrup, glue, or moisturizer for wounds. Ten thousand years is enough time to ingrain this as a granted process; however, I would like to give our ancestors another hundred thousand years or so of credit. With this thought, I apply the garden as a tribute to our time as sculptural cultural bearing humans.
Since human perception has translated nature into a world-for-us, I wonder: how can I think of a world-in-itself actionably to exceed a world-for-us without claiming that nature garden’s itself?
My garden and my camera have become inseparably linked when I think about existence beyond anthropocentrism. The quality of images that is iconically anthropocentric is fortified by philosopher and writer of images Vilém Flusser’s (1920–1991) warning to us of the destructive nature of technical images.
The difference between traditional and technical images, then, would be this: the first are observations of objects, the second computations of concepts. The first arise though depiction, the second through a peculiar hallucinatory power that has lost its faith in rules.[13]
I continue to feel groundless walking into this thought-situation. As Flusser describes ‘the absence of a point of reference’[14] is a Platonic utopian and “heavenly” concept that we can consider as opposite alongside ‘turning circles.’[15] In the current moment, producing cyclical images, collecting images, and reproducing images as a mode of cultural production creates a technical fascistic society.
Gabriel Sacco, Film Still from Revealer #1, 2023, Digital video. Image courtesy of the artist.
In his essay, “To Scatter” (2011), Flusser writes that technical images are both movers of revolutions and destructors of traditional social groups.
The society, spread apart by the magnetic fascination of technical images, is indeed structured, and an analysis of the media can bring this structure to light. Media form bundles that radiate from the centers, the senders. Bundles in Latin is fasces. The structure of a society governed by technical images is therefore fascist, not for an ideological reason but for technical reasons.[16]
In the aftermath of the latter, new members of society
…belong to no family and identify with neither nationality nor class. From a nonideological, that is, phenomenological perspective, it is possible to recognize the appearance of the new social connective tissue. It is possible to to recognize the threads that bind these new people to the senders of technical images. It becomes clear that we are dealing not with an asocial person but with one who is very profoundly socialized, although in a new sense. [Through images.] In fact, we are dealing with people who are so completely socialized that we justifiably fear for their individuality, despite their apparent isolation.[17]
We want to live outside of fascism, but non-anthropocentric images are few and far between because the whole mechanism is human made. And with that I am craving in using the photographic or filmic moment to be indecisive, with multiple readings, unattainable, and processual, making-in-time. Quite possibly this is a camera that acts outside of anthropocentrism.
Thinking of an autonomous camera enables me to get a little closer to understanding how property lines and boundaries structure our world organization, determining what is within our human perception and what is not. The camera as an autonomous being is a vessel for us to think of a world-in-itself. I am interested in viewing this demarcation between nature and gardens, possibly a property line or boundary line without human processing of the record.
We can think of cameras and gardens having this same autonomy. I use a thought experiment to understand the boundary between nature and garden, anthropocentrism and ecocentrism; an attempt to render Thacker’s world-without-us[18]: An empty camera is pointed onto the world from space. Specifically a handmade or homemade pinhole, simple camera obscura, no contraptions for film holders or lens for light refracting and condensing. The camera is painted black inside with a half-inch hole in the front fitted with one-thirty-second of an inch thickness gold film pressed with a pin and sanded for imperfections. The cigar-box is closed light tight, hinges pegged into the top and bottom with a button/hole latch secured. Additionally, it is epoxied shut so that the only opening is the pin hole with no ability to get inside, to see inside, or for film processing—it is not for us or for photography. The camera witnesses and projects, as our nervous system does, on the black back wood board to be determined sans film or photographic paper.
Without a conscious brain, and an image still existing, the camera witnesses outside of human perception. A witnessing non-person. Without an archive (the film) to stand in as a conscious brain, what’s witnessed becomes a spirit of potential, or a view of what remains in our capitalist ruins: we will no longer be dominant, no longer anthropocentric. I imagine what it is like to live in a world-with-us. Everything is in the future, happening there. Without human actions, the camera still witnesses with its “eye.” Because of this the camera has a potential ecology in itself with the world to reproduce and represent images, even when the film goes undeveloped, is ruined, or is non-existent to begin with.
A dormant garden is the camera-in-itself and the picture is the summer garden, signaling existence, here-ness, and space-taking in time. I also bring the camera as an example of a ready-to-burst garden to produce the possibility for a speculative calibration of the future and to ask ourselves to leave room for myth and unknowing in a time of programmed capitalist facism.
Know springtime well like Persephone’s dreams and leave room to be surprised when we learn to shift and change. Leave room for frost, heat, and jumping invasive worms that feast on all organic material, a chipmunk family who live under the white oaks above your garden and dig up your crocuses. The weeds and the pollinator attractors grow and change each year and I must trust that Garden’s will, as the will of the potential image. The empty camera has its own expectations and outcomes outside of consciously prescribed human systems.
I imagine that if there is film in the back of the pinhole, it is now black as a vacuum in space and overexposed to our human eyes. If we print it to see what it sees, we might possibly witness a more inclusive breath and might even notice a spark that created our universe. This image is not a technical one, it is the proceeding processual one.
Gardens do not exist in nature. Gardens signal human existence. Gardens are material for art and culture. Gardens are of particular interest as gateways into exceeding capitalist and fascist transformations lifting us one step closer into ecocentrism. Gardens manifest as ephemeral place markers for movers and models of socialist and sustainable ways of being. Gardens as images can give us a modest inkling of insight to seeing ways of living outside of a world-for-us. The garden is a social ecology of resistance during the physical beatdown of systemic seasoning. This season we may not bloom, but deep a diverse mixture of bulbs, rhizomes, and seeds are percolating, and the image is building up.
Gabriel Sacco, Pinhole Image #010, 2021, Photo image. Image courtesy of the artist.
***
A story of meaningful organization to be read aloud.
For this moment, take yourself to an imaginary coastal Maine if you have not been, or the real one if you have. You are walking on a well outlined and used path that might take you from the ocean up to a cliff through the wood. The path is covered in pine needles making the trek squishy and soft. It is probably high summer so the days will be long. It smells of dry wood in the afternoons and wet wood in the mornings. The sun is mid-way through cresting the trees at the top of the cliff and already at a forty-five-degree azamuth where your grandmother’s house sits next to the shore. You have not walked the path alone before, only with family and summertime friends who distract you from your surroundings. This time you are looking deeply through the natural forest to focus on something in the distance, but nothing in particular. You are just looking to see how far you can see, squinting at the distance as vertical tree trunks shift. Something moves, you stop, focus in. A brown squirrel and brown fox face off. A bear stumbles around, it wants to play with you, but five times larger than your body with giant claws, you run. Antlers, like sticks, swivel on a neck to face you. But none of this is here now. A second or three after stopping you realize it is you that was moving horizontally. You noticed for a split second a fallen tree at forty-five degree angle caressing in death another living tree. It is a trick of perception. You walk on and inevitably as sight acts, it happens again. You participate in your animal instinct and swivel your neck to look, to see, and protect yourself, with the anticipation of witnessing something authentic and natural to the forest. This time it is not movement in the distance or clash among low branches. There is a gap in the trees. A perfectly lined path, it looks unused, with extremely thick conifers like cathedral pillars leading to an altar. The gap makes the ground here dry first when the sun shone upon it, a mist rises off pine needles through the beams of light as if to make way for you.
Amongst “naturally growing” three hundred year old woods left to what seems to be their own devices, there is a one hundred and fifty year old grove of White Pines you are in. As you walk down the nave, you look to the right, gasp, and to the left, gasp again. Looking in these directions, one tree becomes two, four, eight across. You realize it is not two parallel lines, but a grid, a map, a compass. A tool for mapping and organizing and wayfinding our world. Each cultivated “corner” of the rectangle faces generally North, South, East, West. You will not be lost here again, it says to you.
A faint bell rings and a cracking voice calls your name quietly from down below. You remember who and where you are. A Homo Sapian living in 1987. Animal no longer and still tragically hopeful of something magical to happen, you respond trained to the bell and the call of your name by rushing down excitedly from your newest discovery: The Pine Tree Grove in the Middle of Nowhere.
You recount this story any number of times through the years by starting at, “For this moment take yourself to an imaginary Maine…” However, this first time you can hardly get the words out to your grandmother who has breakfast or supper ready for you as you rush into a cabin set up on stilts four feet high. You tell her about the Pine Tree Grove in the Middle of Nowhere and she says, “Yes, I know. It’s a grove planted in rows by your great great grandfather, my grandfather.” And unlike when the magic of Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny becomes poisoned and embalmed, you are reminded of the power of cultivation, agriculture, timber production, architecture, and art. The power is invigorated by you and you commit yourself for life.
Bibliography
Adams, T.E., C. and Jones, S.H. Autoethnography. In the International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods. Eds J. Matthes, C.S. Davis and R.F. Potter, (2017), p. 1. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011
Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images (University of Minnesota Press, 2011; Original publication: European Photography, Andreas Müller-Pohle, 1985), pp. 3, 10, 61-64, 141.
Jarman, Derek. Wittgenstein. Film. 1993. 34:00.
Klein, Ezra. ‘Dan Savage on Polyamory, Chosen Family and Better Sex.’ The Ezra Klein Show. Podcast Audio. Jan 10, 2023. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-savage-on-polyamory-chosen-family-and-better-sex/id1548604447?i=1000593427667
Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet [Horror of Philosophy vol. 1] (Zero Books, John Hunt Publishing Ltd., 2011), pp. 4-5.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. VIII, 20, 43, 150.
[1] Adams, T.E., C. and Jones, S.H. Autoethnography. In the International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, eds J. Matthes, C.S. Davis and R.F. Potter (2017), 1. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011
[2] From Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
[5] Klein, Ezra. ‘Dan Savage on Polyamory, Chosen Family and Better Sex.’ The Ezra Klein Show. Podcast Audio. Jan 10, 2023. 39.00m. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-savage-on-polyamory-chosen-family-and-better-sex/id1548604447?i=1000593427667
[9] Jarman, Derek. Wittgenstein, 1993, Film, 34:00.
[12] Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet [Horror of Philosophy vol. 1] (Zero Books, John Hunt Publishing Ltd., 2011), 4-5.
[13] Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images (University of Minnesota Press, 2011; Original publication: European Photography, Andreas Müller-Pohle, 1985), 10.
Gabriel Sacco is an interdisciplinary artist who performs for video, sound, images and writing. Gabriel is from New Jersey and graduated Fairfield University with a BA in International Studies and Politics. He lives in Shelton, CT and holds an MFA in Visual Art from the Rutgers Mason Gross School of The Arts. He studied at the International Center of Photography. His work has been shown at Westbeth Gallery in NYC; the Zimmerli Museum in New Brunswick, NJ; and the Mason Gross Galleries in New Brunswick, NJ. He is an educator and learner who develops ideas surrounding social responsibility and the role of usefulness in art making, inclusive and processual pedagogy, and generative and sustainable production models for artists. Gardening influences Gabriel’s practice as the inheritance of the deceased and as essential social tasks that can help us see new futures.