St. Ann’s
Press, Los Angeles
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BELONGING: From Los Alamos to Vietnam
Photoworks and Installations
We are tethered to it by way of family, culture, myth, personal stories, biorhythms,
land. These are some of the tenuous threads that bind us to our home. These
strands can be broken by war, cultural displacement, divorce, natural disaster.
As an artist I try to reweave these sticky broken threads.
BELONGING appears at a critical moment in time, when our connection to place
is threatened. Ever since Meridel Rubenstein began her professional career
in the early 1980s, evolving from photographer of single palladium prints
to multi-media artist of large-scale installations juxtaposing unlikely ideas
and highly charged materials, her artmaking has argued for an awareness of
how we are connected to place. It strives to bridge ideological distances
that alienate us. The dislocation fostered by the tragic events of September
11, 2001, prompted the publication of this thought-provoking book about belonging.
According to art and environmental writer Rebecca Solnit, the artist’s
role is to expose the familiar in other ways in order “to startle us,
wake us up.” Rubenstein, who is the Harnish Visiting Artist at Smith
College, and maintains studios in Vermont and New Mexico, does exactly that.
Her social consciousness was triggered when, as a student at Sarah Lawrence
College in the late 60s, the Vietnam War raged and her desire for everlasting
peace found expression, eventually through the medium of photography. Moving
to New Mexico for graduate studies she became immersed in a community of experimental
artists as well as in a landscape and in cultures inseparable from their past.
The earth-shattering impact of Los Alamos, New Mexico, next to Pueblo Indian
land, where the first atomic bomb was devised and tested at the Trinity Test
Site, inspired CRITICAL MASS, a collaborative photo/video/text installation
with Ellen Zweig. CRITICAL MASS premiered at the New Mexico Museum of Fine
Arts and traveled to other museums in the country, notably Massachusetts Institute
of Technology’s List Visual Arts Center.
Meridel Rubenstein’s powerful images, which are often handcrafted from
precious materials like tree-bark paper and gold and silver mica, remind us,
as environmental writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams writes, “that
how we perceive the world is how we engage with it. If we fail to see the
world whole in all its majesty and terror, we will be relegated to the place
of statues standing in the public plaza eventually worn down by weather.”
In addition to CRITICAL MASS, BELONGING is composed of eight distinct and
inter-relating sections, each representing an important series or installation
that has at its core issues of culture and place. THE LOW RIDERS explores
a Hispanic subculture of New Mexico whose cars are designed to reflect their
social, spiritual, and esthetic beliefs. LABYRINTHS AND CONSTELLATIONS takes
on the locus of myth as place for establishing identity. OPPENHEIMER’S
CHAIR is a meditation on nature and the shedding of defensive postures. And
the works JOAN’S ARC/VIETNAM, MILLENNIAL FOREST, and TREES AT SEA all
refer to Vietnam and to the issues of uprooting and replanting as a result
of the war.
According to photography historian James Crump, “Perhaps in JOAN’S
ARC/VIETNAM we find the greatest articulation of Meridel’s esthetic
ideology, an exuberant gesture concerning the collective healing of the ravaged
spirit and the reconciliation of opposites, the collapse of distances that
alienate us and allow us to give meaning to place, home, and belonging. .
. . This is the passion of Meridel Rubenstein.”
BELONGING is a moving tribute to the multifaceted, provocative, and ever-timely
artworks of Meridel Rubenstein. These elegant, light-filled images underscore
her profound empathy with and investigation of the often disrupted connection
between body and place.
Illuminating Meridel Rubenstein’s images and texts are essays by James
Crump, Lucy Lippard, Elaine Scarry, Rebecca Solnit, and Terry Tempest Williams.:
James Crump was founding director of Arena Editions, a publisher
of fine art photography books. Among his numerous essays and books are works
about the photographers F. Holland Day and George Platt Lynes.
Cultural critic Lucy R. Lippard has written countless books,
articles, essays, and critiques on the subjects of art, feminism, politics,
and place. Among her recent book publications is On the Beaten Track: Tourism,
Art, and Place.
Elaine Scarry teaches in the English department at Harvard
University. She has written many books, among them The Body in Pain and On
Beauty and Being Just, as well as numerous articles on war and the social
contract.
Terry Tempest Williams is the author of Refuge, Leap, Red
and, most recently, The Open Space of Democracy. Among other honors, she is
the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award in creative non-fiction.
Rebecca Solnit’s book, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge
and the Technological Wild West, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle
Award. Her latest publication is Hope in the Dark:Untold Histories,Wild Possibilities.
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