'their owner, the rain'

On November 21, 2021, the artist Gala Porras-Kim wrote a letter to Jane Pickering, director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology: “I am interested in objects suspended from their original function or purpose by being stored and displayed in institutions solely as historical objects,” she began. This could easily describe any number of the millions of objects held by the museum, but Porras-Kim’s focus was on the Peabody’s collection of thousands of artifacts found in a major sinkhole: the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The Maya peoples understood the site as a portal to the spiritual world and deposited jade, ceramic, gold, shell, wood, copal, and textile objects, along with human remains, into the cenote as offerings to Chaac, the Mayan rain god. The vast majority of the Peabody’s collection was dredged from the cenote between 1904 and 1911 by Edward H. Thompson, an American diplomat and self-styled archaeologist who gained access by purchasing surrounding property and then employed various forms of subterfuge to smuggle the artifacts into the United States. In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, a lawsuit during the 1930s and early ’40s to repatriate the collection of cenote objects ultimately proved unsuccessful. For Porras-Kim, however, “human laws” are but one framework for assessing the value of these centuries-old items. As the artist notes, “Their owner, the rain, is still around.”

Martha Buskirk, "The Ethics of Dust." Artforum, March, 2022. 

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Edward H. Thompson, Men working at the cenote at Chichen Itza. Collection of The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

a fine dust

 

Three works of art by Katie Paterson:

Endling, 2021. Mixed media in 100 pigments ground from the pre-solar dust of 5 billion years ago to the ginkgo trees of Hibakujumoku.

Powdered and crushed materials for Requiem, "an urn filled with dust that maps the story of Earth from before its existence to the present day." Includes samples of ancient skeletons, lunar dust, microplastics, and trinitite formed in the first nuclear explosions, among many others.

The Moment, "a timepiece in the shape of a hand-blown (quarter) hourglass, filled with star dust—the fossilised remnants of a time before the Earth and before the Sun reminding us, always and in the moment, of the preciousness of time."

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Earth’s true age was disputed throughout the 19th century—Darwin proposed 300 million years, while the consensus was a more circumspect 100 million—but the startling truth was eventually revealed in a handful of dust. In 1910, Arthur Holmes measured the rate of uranium decay in a sample of Devonian rock and estimated that the Earth was new 1.6 billion years ago. In 1956, the American geologist Clair Patterson (no relation to Katie) extended Holmes’s result, establishing that the Earth is in fact 4.55 billion years old by counting the lead atoms in a meteorite that had fallen in the Arizona desert (he surmised that all bodies in the solar system coalesced at the same time). Timescales like these defy our imaginations. The most common analogy, coined by John McPhee, is with the measure of the old English yard: if the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched finger represented all of Earth’s long life, a single stroke from a nail file would erase the whole of human history.

David Farrier, "The Dust of Ancient Suns: Making Art and Meaning From the Depths of Deep Time." LitHub, 5/6/2022

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pollen

Pollen works by Wolfgang Laib, found here.

His Pollen From Hazelnut is on view at MoMA now. I saw an exhibit of Laib's work at the Hirshhorn a long time ago. I remember the heavy sweetness of beeswax and the color of the massed pollen, so intensely pure it seemed to hover in space. I'm looking forward to going.

dust

“What do you worry about, Mrs. Armitage?”

“Dust,” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Dust. You know? Dust.”

“Oh,” he said, and wrote for a while on a long piece of paper. Then he sat back, folded his hands and said, “Tell me about it.” 

“It’s very simple. Jake is rich. He makes about £50,000 a year, I suppose you’d call that rich. But everything is covered with dust.” 

“Please go on.”

Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater.

Any book that starts like this sounds like a book I need to read.