The Feral Cosmos of Christine Tarkowski
Chicago Cultural Center
January 29-May 2, 2010
Omigod! best sums up a journey into Captain Tarkowski's
haptic world, as she takes us to the regions beyond our gouty
hypocrisy where acts of consumption are smoothed over by God's
True Will. Whilst God is everywhere to be seen in Tarkowski's work, it
is the not the God depicted in Kentucky's Creation Museum, where
an oversized Jesus sculpture fills in for Santa family photographs
on the off season. Her's is the God with the craggy visage, the One
who will still be standing after humanity has once-and-for-all truly
trashed the planet. He, like sidekick Mother Nature, don't care a fig
if spaceship earth is torn apart or not. It's not their problem: it's going
to happen anyway, humans or no humans. So what's your problem?
And who will you beg to salve your broken dreams?
Tarkowski's journey is more akin to Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket than Melville's Moby Dick: or, the
Whale. The opening stage of the voyage is a visit to her tall-ship, a
tippy cardboard hulk held together with stringy bamboo staves and
shiny aluminum scaffold shackles. One thing is for certain: this thing
is going nowhere, except in our dreams. The sails are patched together
from yards of cardboard, overprinted with circles and squares lifted
from the pavement of Emperor Hadrian's Roman Pantheon: cryptic
maps of an unholy circumnavigation through mists and doldrums.
Fuzzy images of a crumbly Pantheon overarch the spectacle, quarried
from the scrapheap of history, forced into service, and silk screened
onto places where they should not be.
Squirting up from the bowels of the ship is an enormous double
helix, fashioned out of cardboard and held together with oversized
bolts. This ship-to-nowhere has sprung a horrific leak, and the crew
members (that's us) take on that gaunt look of watching a torpedo
running through the water towards them, moments before it pounds
into the beam and all hell breaks loose. To complete the picture, the
ragged spiral-of-hurt topples across the ship's rigging in a spent heap
of cardboard ejaculate.
Goosebumps signal a feeling of uneasy comfort, the same-faux
warmth that a slave feels for his familiar perch on the galley's rowing
bench. In our worst dreams, we have been here before, and dread to
go again.
As we stumble into the next room we find a tessellated concrete
cavern. It has that look about it—as if a 1950's issue of Popular
Mechanicshad washed up on shore and opened to an article show-
ing how to build a Buckminster Fuller Dome. Castaways had followed
the fragmentary instructions using whatever was at hand, building a
leaky, creaky hemi-dome of hardened mud, studded with colored
glass and First World flotsam, embedded in the mix. The whole
makes a ghastly aggregate of our consumptive ways, surrounding us
with the hospitality of detritus.
Decked about the Bucky Fuller dome are exhortations from another
century: broadsides, bill boards and playbills are plastered on the
walls, saying things like WHALE OIL, SLAVE SHIPS AND BURNING
MARTYRS, lists of non-sequiturs dripping with malapropic meaning.
In here we are walking through a post-apocalyptic landscape, grateful
for any shelter from the wind and warned by a crooked finger to never
touch another drop of oil, as if it were a tipple of whiskey.
In a world without light, sleep comes to us all. Winter has its own
beauty: it measures time without the evidence of life and it is dormant
without sign of movement. Nobody lives in winter, save those who
prudently stored up their summer's bounty, or those who slaughter for
the sake of their own stomachs. Dormancy is the penultimate
moment before death, and it is to death that the third chamber
is dedicated. The last chamber is a self-fashioned temple, whose
mantra is beauty, even though the beauty here is charred, scorched,
boiled, etched, and ready for a bath of acid. All the color has been
sucked out of the room; the life force has gone, leaving nothing but a
careful arrangement of artifacts signaling the tragedy of another age.
On the left and right walls of the room is a run of Tarkowski's
etchings depicting the essence of circularity. The etchings include
depictions of the Kaaba at Mecca, satellites careening around the
globe, traffic circumambulating a roundabout, the ring of rocks at
Stonehenge and a mound of tires. The color of the etchings is
Leached Coagulation of Concrete. The shapes are of languid ramps
and stratified decks, justified by the burning of gasoline to shove
lumps of metal and plastic up the unholy concrete mountain. In the
middle of this high-ceilinged temple, dedicated to the memory of
plentiful oil and bright and shiny automobiles, is a long table upon
which are spread cast-iron effigies of parking structures, a dozen of
them laid out for all to see. The effigies are sized no bigger than
plastic floor toys from a big box store, each one rocking and tilted
in a ghastly expression of things having gone badly wrong. On the end
wall of the room is a massive gold, silver and black spiral, twenty-five
feet high, leading up to the heavens in a curl of cast smoke. In here
we meet our maker and it is Prometheus, the God who fashioned
humankind out of mud. Jesus is nowhere to be seen.
What did I do wrong? How could I have stopped this reckless mad-
ness? The voyager nervously fidgets at a dog-eared copy of Dante's
Inferno, feeling for some clue to size with his unhappy predicament.
This room provides no evidence of organized warfare or ranks of mil-
itary order giving the comfort of routine. In here we stand face to face
with an entropic devolution of what we have engineered for ourselves.
There is no place to hide from the onslaught of tomorrow's menu of
torn technology. Its cold and I want to go home. I'm done and dusted.
Ben Nicholson, Christmas and Boxing Day, 2009
