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We, each of us, keep
what we remember in our hearts.
We, all of us, keep what we remember in museums.
In this way, museums beat inside us.
What we have seen and been fed,
What we we have smelled and then wanted,
What hair we have touched
And what hands have touched our own;
What fires have burned red,
What rifles-fire echoes still,
What blue mountains rise
On the horizon’s orange and gray spine;
What day-moon mornings, what June-beetled evenings,
Simple heat moving, finally, into simple coolness,
A single long drink of good water,
My mother’s yes, your father’s chin.
What we remember,
What we have remembered to keep,
Where we put what we keep:
Sometimes in buildings we find
Pieces of the heart.
Sometimes in a heart we find
The shelter of a building.
Alberto Ríos
I know many poems about things in museums, but few about the museum
itself. This writing, then, is a hopeful act of stark public purpose,
a poem about museums, museums as themselves, these simple houses that
hold and keep our lives, and into whose living rooms we welcome each other.
- Alberto Ríos
Installed permanently on the interior wall of SMoCA, the Scottsdale Museum
of Contemporary Art, 7374 East Second Street
Poem by Alberto Ríos (Chandler, Arizona). Typography and design
by Karla Elling (Paradise Valley, Arizona)
The Museum Heart, an engraved poem, was dedicated by the team of Ríos
and Elling in celebration of the opening of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary
Art Greard L. Cafesjian Pavilion. The opening took place on February 14,
1999
Artwork for the Poems in Public Places project was commissioned through
the Scottsdale Public Art Program on behalf of the City of Scottsdale,
through its one percent art ordinance
Engraving on cold rolled steel
2001
Karla Elling is a graphic artist and a letterpress printer. She is the
proprietor of the Mummy Mountain Press and Paper mill and the Program
Coordinator for the Arizona State University Creative Writing Program.
Alberto Ríos is a regents’ professor and a Katherine C. Tuner
Chair in English at Arizona State University. Born in Nogales, Arizona,
Ríos has written eight books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections
of short stories and a memoir. His honors and awards include the 2002
Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona
Governor’s Art Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation
and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Western States Book Award
for Fiction, and the Walt Whitman Award, among others.
The creative team of Ríos and Elling were asked to create a poem
for the dedication of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art because
of previous contributions of poetry in public art projects. For example,
Alberto Ríos’s poem, with design by Karla Elling entitled
“My Public Library,” appeared in the Artmark bookmark project
for the Scottsdale Public Art Program in 1998. The pair was interested
in continuing to blend and morph written and visual forms and saw the
dedication as an opportunity to continue that exploration.
This interdisciplinary layering was pushed even further as the poem was
incorporated into the physical structure of the building. Architect Will
Bruder’s original sketches became part of Elling’s design,
appearing on the panel as well as the postcards that were handed out as
gifts at the opening. Bruder has stressed that architecture is a marriage
between poetry and pragmatism, and this project strove to concretize that
idea.
The public has been extremely responsive to this piece. Though it is permanently
etched in to the wall of a public building, there is a sense of ownership
and understanding as one reads the deeply personal poem. Ríos and
Elling manipulate and bring to attention ideas about the value of words
in the museum space, the role of museums as both the most private and
public of places, spaces of reflection and refuge. It stirs up feeling
in the viewer, provoking thoughts that this is my memory, my heart, my
room, while it is the same time shared and beyond possession. Ríos’s
poem is a love letter to that strange space, that keeper of creative labor,
that liberator of thoughts. It continues to keep a pulse on SMoCA, celebrating
its birth and contemplating its transformations and futures.
How did you break into the public art field?
It broke into me! I have always felt a hunger for more when I read text
on a wall. It always tries to document the high point of something, a
climax or summary of events. I wanted to create a commemorative piece
that was less about high points and more about stories. I believe that
speaking from and to the everyday is what is truly important and real.
Words in this poem are potent in their visual impact and meaning, not
only as literary devices. How did you navigate that change?
I have never done it differently. I have always expected written words
to have meaning. As a poet you must often say a great deal in a single
line. Poetry is about exposure and epiphany, not summary or dilution.
How do you feel about the museum as a space?
Here, today, we are living in a minimalist phase in history. This is a
cultural phase in which we feel the need to be always on the move. A Burger
King ad comes to mind, something along the lines of “Fast food in
fast times.” Our world feels to us like it is spinning and spinning
and the museum is a place where that spinning can calm or stop. There
is a Japanese folk saying, “Hurrying is a violence to the moment.”
Well, the museum is a place about moment, not necessarily movement. That
old phrase “Stop and smell the flowers,” that was important
in the past and it will be important in the future. Ideas and things that
are valuable stay valuable.
The museum is a “place of moment” that recognizes that things
have happened. It is a place for that recognition and reflection. You
can gain perspective on object, the fact that they belong to complex dimensionalities.
Words try all the time to represent objects, but they can be miserable
little lawyers. By confronting them, we remember that these are actual
objects and they are vessels, moments, worlds.
Can you speak to your poem and the deeply personal nature of museum experience
it describes?
The best public places have room for the personal. In this way we may
carry with us large events, spaces and objects. I can conjure up a fighter
plane I saw as a child, the place, the fascination, the thing itself.
We take for granted that we can think and remember, but what an impossible
task, what a magic trick! Museums can facilitate and inspire that miracle
of imagination. Poetry can extract and influence it.
Do you think your poem’s meaning has changed at all since the museum’s
dedication?
No. It says, it asserts, that we need to spend more time considering the
world. It is contemplative. It is about valuing moments. By that I mean
the most nuanced moments, the 10,000 moments that make up an “event.” It is the 10,000 that matter. The poem is an offering: here are a couple
of those moments.
What was the most interesting part of working on the SMoCA poem project?
I was able to take hold of the idea of the museum itself, and in doing
so rescued the notion of the museum from abstraction. This thinking allowed
me to open ideas and speak to the actual sensibility of the museum. I
was thinking about “museumness” or “museumosity” and that is powerful and challenging because it is not a static space,
but one that continues to change.
For poetry
to blur the boundaries and become 'public art' it must engage with the
discourse of the discipline it wishes to 'become.' The poem, therefore,
is only part of the whole oeuvre - the kernel perhaps - but the visual
impact has to have equivalence to the literary value. By this I mean,
that the poet has to become aware of three-dimensional space, as opposed
simply to the flat surface of the white page. The work needs to have
a visual and conceptual dynamic, a spatial rhythm to echo its poetic
musicality. It needs to grow out of and engage with the space in which
it is to be situated rather than be imposed on it.
Sue Hubbard
UK Poetry Society
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/publicart/bulletin.htm
- For information
about the Artmark: Bookmark project visit
http://www.scottsdalepublicart.org/collection/ArtmarkBookmarkProject.php
- Elling and Ríos collaborated with Harry Reese in the Words
Over Water public art
project, a six mile long line of embellished granite tiles stretching
along Tempe Town
Lake. For information visit http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/abecedario/index.html
- Poetry in Motion is a program of the Poetry Society of America that
uses public transportation as a conduit for the diffusion of poetry.
Its poems can be found in buses and subways and reach an estimated 10
million people per day. Visit http://www.poetrysociety.org/motion/index.php
- Basic bibliographic information found on http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/
and http://www.tempe.gov/arts/PublicArt/Images/Downtown/Words.htm.
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