Confluence Dreaming
Linda Adele Goodine, Bunker House, 2018.
Excerpt from Confluence Dreaming
Published on the occasion of Linda Adele Goodine: The Blue Jackal Under the Tree
Greenville Museum of Art, Greenville, NC
On view October 18, 2019 - March 14, 2020
“This is the way a communion with the sky and the sea began, the necessity to respond to their desires with a work that would be prayer, a joy to the elements.”
—Cecilia Vicuña
Lullaby starts with barking dogs. Traffic sounds fade in, with the tinkling bells of bicycles foregrounded over waves of car traffic and horns. We hear sounds of human speech, the shouting and organizing of a day in a busy outdoor space. There are many kinds of interactions happening here, in this sonic city. A familiar lullaby sings itself into the fray, as the traffic sounds and shouts intensify. Bells take over, insist, become rhythmic drums accompanying another kind of song, perhaps for marching. And suddenly we are in a soundscape of ritual tradition, the voices of India merging into one another and leading to a religious hymn sung by an unaccompanied choir. Prayer is called over a loudspeaker. The night is being summoned, or is ending; a fast beginning or being broken. Bells lead us to birdcalls and cattle. We seem to have moved from the city to the country, from the night to the day. The lullaby returns, the voice singing of what the cows have brought us. Waves and water crowd the soundscape, obscuring the song, washing it away.
…
Since the early 1980s, Goodine has made photographs that talk about land use and place. Raised in upstate New York, with its vineyard rhythms, Goodine has followed the traditions of harvest across multiple geographies. She writes, “As a spectacle, the harvest is a celebration, recognized by country fairs and bountiful markets. It is also an honored way of life connecting contemporary culture to an earlier agrarian calendar of the seasons.” Between these traditions (which she describes as existing within the various planes of her images—foreground, midground, and background), she finds an undefined middle space, something open to myth and dream. “It is that liminal space that suggests narrative and invites my viewers to question and consider the dialectic of wanting development, yet at the same time yearning to preserve the garden,” she writes. “There remains a palpable connection to the myth of the expulsion from Eden.” In her early constructed set photographs, she would dream entire scenarios and then build them, with props and costumes that referenced the ecological questions and experiences of each place. Her 2005 series Gibson Lemon, New Zealand, for example, integrates the elaborate staging of still lifes—piles of vegetables, fruit, and flowers suggest a natural abundance—with the interactions of sheep, chickens, rabbits, and cows. A young girl appears twice in the photographs, once holding a rabbit, and once with her unclothed back turned to the viewer. A mysterious final photograph depicts a nude woman sleeping on the ground, yellow lemons splayed before her and a duck crossing in front of her pelvis. In Blue Jackal, Goodine enters landscapes new to her, to be sure, but they are consistent with her ongoing exploration of emotional truths. She listens to dreams as she traverses landscapes marked by the sacredness of farming rituals. In this series, then, we follow Goodine’s path, entering into the sounds and whispery visions of her journey as they unfold and overlap around us, traces of familiar songs woven into the fabric of India’s specificities.
For Blue Jackal, she spent substantial periods of time visiting and talking to farmers. “The farmers I met in India were just thrilled that I was looking at them, and that I was asking them about their yields and about this crop over that crop, the quality of the soil, how they get their water, what are the politics behind it—these are the kinds of things I asked,” she says, in her interview with Trista Reis Porter. And yet, the work insistently refuses to answer those questions, was never intended to provide only answers. In Machete, a man dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and dark trousers stands at the edge of a field, just off-center, looking directly at the photographer’s lens. Two thirds of the picture plane are filled with the detritus of harvested sugarcane, the discarded brown and yellow stalks matted to the ground. A few paces behind him, other figures kneel to cut or collect the cane. A man holds the hand of a small child who steps gingerly through the harvested field. In one hand, the central figure holds a machete; in the other, a sugar cane. A field of uncut cane stretches green across the background, obscured by a textile that seems to float in the immediate foreground. The fabric, covered in bright yellow flowers and paisley pattern, billows in the wind. Compositionally, it covers most of the sky, drawing attention to the distance between the central figure and the camera’s eye.
In Suicide, the textile enters the field at a different juncture. Here, among the neatly planted rows of green, a white sheet is covered with a red, white, and black paisley patterned piece of fabric. Below the patterned textile, we might imagine vaguely bodily swells. There are, Goodine says, more than 10 suicides a day in Maharashtra, the region she is visiting. The issue is complex, she says, connecting the high suicide rate to agricultural economies and crop failures. In the background of the image, a figure emerges from black smoke, where the previous year’s sugar cane refuse is being burned.
…
During her time at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Goodine awoke one morning to the construction of a graduation tent outside her window. The workers building it would balance it on bamboo rods, and Goodine was immediately drawn to the space, eventually dancing through it and recording her movements. In the diptychs created in the tent, we see a blur of Goodine, one bare foot the only still part of her body. She moves around a central pole, wrapped in red and white, a trail of flowers marking an orange diagonal across the green field. By her side, another photograph shows a man dressed all in white, using the bamboo rods to hold up the folds of patterned fabric that construct the tent. While he is clearly working, the photograph freezes his movement. Seen alongside one another, the two photographs suggest Goodine’s larger philosophy about research, as an experience of always being in movement. The tent, she says, represents the creative unconscious. To exhibit these photographs, Goodine has printed them on fabric panels that measure 155 inches high and 90 inches wide. Visitors walk through the open corners of the hanging panels, moving toward the central sound installation. The tent becomes an inner sanctum within the exhibition, a site for transcendence and dissonance, just as it did for Goodine when she danced through it. It gently moves with the air currents of the room, responding to the ways that visitors’ movements lightly shift the air’s flow. In 1995, critic Jean Robertson described Goodine’s work as a kind of worldmaking: “…in her best work Goodine’s perspective is always that of the Trickster, wherein she constructs a staged image but is also psychologically immersed in her own fabricated world.”[4]
In a 1988 letter to John H. Lawrence, published in The New Orleans Art Review, Goodine writes about dreams as being the physical and mental structures for the work, especially in her constructed set photographs:
I sometimes dream the structure of my work and then choose a cast of characters to play out the particular scene. This panoramic vision is both familiar and alien to me. It resembles living out a myth: we all carry out personal myths with only brief glimpses of recognition. And in that split second of perception a spark flies up and with it a complete history of emotion, a history centuries old. Yes it is a stage. Yes it is a symbol. Yes it is real.[5]
…
While not only about water, Goodine’s research in India was guided by the movements of water, by its accessibility, its power, its absence and use, the floods that come with monsoon season. The Ganges River is marked by five confluences—sites at which tributaries meet. At each of these confluences, Goodine made a bed on the river bank where she slept. In the video of this sleep-performance, we watch her place the bed and lay down. She drifts into sleep, then wakes up and, each time this happens, she moves the bed closer and closer to the river. “I’m dreaming, literally, in terms of parallel worlds, the veil, thresholds of consciousness. As I move toward the river, which is total unconsciousness, I am disappearing or dying to myself.” Artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña writes of precarity as a kind of prayer, one understood through the elements, through touch, through a kind of musical thinking: “To think was to follow the music, the feeling of the elements,” she writes. It is significant that Goodine never remains still, that movement is her chosen language, that she sleeps in the unsafety of a river’s edge, connecting two bodies of water with her own, precariously.
Across this body of work, waterways and their relationships to growth and survival make associative gestures to the subconscious. To dream at a confluence is, perhaps, also a metaphor for how we connect to other lands and peoples, even across the national and political borders that divide us. What Goodine’s work signals is constant movement, endless shapeshifting, and insistent intuition: to dream is to locate knowledge in processes that defy the logics of language. It is to understand the rhythms of the landscape as part of our own natural rhythms and how we absorb knowledge, even as we drift across place. “How do we travel between the doxa and the neutral, between studium and punctum, between the obvious and the obtuse?” writes Wayne Koestenbaum. “How can we switch from ordinary to sacred time? Recklessly. Don’t signal. Don’t make an announcement. Simply drift, or veer, into the other lane. The crucial tactic is this sliding movement, which Barthes calls ‘drifting.’”[6]
A small stone structure with a corrugated metal roof stands at the summit of a hill, overlooking a valley that twinkles with small gatherings of lights. The blues and pinks of the twilight blend with the azure outlines of distant hills and mountains. A woman stands within the modest structure, her body framed by the doorless entrance. In the foreground of the photograph, a row of painted pink boulders breaks the surface of the grassy hill, underlining the bunker. A bunker house is a temporary protection from the outside, from violence and weather. This human impulse to build protective structures is, of course, hopeless against the endless barrage of storms and conflicts and droughts and yet, like a photograph, it is a gesture toward holding the present. To dream at the confluence is to hold onto something that wants to slip away, it is to connect with the moment right before something washes it out to sea, it is to honor the space between sleep and waking. The lullaby hovers over the city, fades into the sound of waves, and Goodine’s photographs capture the tracings of light—the flash of knowing—at just that exact moment between the dream and our waking.
Laura August
Houston, TX
August 2019
Epigraph from Cecilia Vicuña, New and Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña, (Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 2018), 85.
[1] Jay Murphy, “Linda Adele Goodine’s Traces of Individuation,” 31.
[2] Marcia E. Vetrocq, “New Orleans: Linda Adele Goodine at Res Nova,” Art in America (May 1988), 194.
[3] Donald Kuspit, “Linda Adele Goodine, New Orleans, Louisiana,” ArtPapers (missing remainder of citation).
[4] Jean Robertson, “Studio View, Indianapolis: Jean Robertson on Linda Adele Goodine,” The New Art Examiner (March 1995), 37.
[5] John H. Lawrence, “Correspondence: Linda Adele Goodine,” The New Orleans Art Review 6:3 (March 1988), 11.
[6] Wayne Koestenbaum, “Foreword: In Defense of Nuance,” in Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), xii.