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The moving experience of artistic expression, and the immense beauty of the wilderness. Art in Nature,
Wonderlust Tours
I am sitting in a wooden chair on the partly covered porch of a cabin at the historic Miller Farm that is an extension of Bend's High Mountain Desert Museum. I am wearing a pair of wireless headphones so that I can hear pianist Hunter Noack against the backdrop of a thunderstorm. Suddenly, there is a flash of lighting and a crack of thunder. Another flash of lighting followed immediately by thunder and then an onslaught of rain. As I listen to the music through the headphones, I try to remember exactly how many seconds exist between lighting and thunder to determine the storm's closeness. I think about leaving but note that no one else is leaving, so I focus on the music and reflect on a concert in a landscape as a combination of stormy weather, the music coming through the headphones and the landscape of this nineteenth-century farm at the edge of the Cascade Range. I also consider how different the experience at the Miller Farm is from hearing Hunter Noack play on Oregon's State Capital Mall in Salem on a quiet summer evening. On that evening, I walked around and listened to the music through the headphones as I contemplated the green landscape of the mall, the rows of cherry trees and the bronze golden-leaf statue of Oregon's pioneer on top of the Capital building. Contemplating both experiences, I reflect on the communities of people across Oregon who have attended Hunter Noack's IN A LANDSCAPE concert since 2016 in such diverse places as Crater Lake, Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Columbia Gorge, Smith Rock State Park and the farm home of Oregon's legendary writer Ken Kesey. I realize my experience of the landscapes of the Miller Farm and the Capital Mall will now be firmly identified with the sounds of a piano (Figure 10 ).
Bend, Sunriver and the Cascades: From Timber to Creative City
Hunter Noack's life might be described metaphorically as taking place in a landscape of central Oregon combined with the landscape of classical music. Born in 1989, he was raised in Sunriver.
Lord & Schryver gardens are characterized by a formal structure—defined by hedges, fencing, and pathways—planted with flowering trees, shrubs, perennials, biennials, and annuals to achieve an informal charm.
Ruth Roberts
Salem, the state capital of Oregon, sits astride the Willamette River in the north-central part of the Willamette Valley with the Coast Range to the west and the Cascades to the east. The original inhabitants were the Kalapuya people who had lived in the mild climate of Willamette Valley for thousands of years as hunters and gathers who considered “humans, animals and the land as interconnected.” The yearly life of the Kalapuya moved with the seasons. In the spring, they moved across the valley floor harvesting camas and hunting migratory birds. With the heat of summer, they moved to the foothills where men hunted and women picked and preserved wild cherries, elderberries, blueberries and hazelnuts. The coolness of the fall brought on a period of burning the prairie and harvesting of acorns. The cooler temperatures of winter caused them to return to their large cedar bark and plank lodges. As Boag notes, “The Kalapuya's continuous cycle of seasonal movements among various eco-systems of the valley is one indicator of stability in the human environmental relationship.” The landscape was changed following the establishment of a Methodist mission by Jason Lee near the Kalapuyan village of Tchimikiti in 1841. Settlers followed dividing the land into plots and plowed the fields following styles of land use that they had evolved east of the Mississippi. The Kalapuya people were moved in 1855 to the Grande Ronde reservation that is still located between Salem and the coastal community of Lincoln City.
Elizabeth Lord (1887–1976) and Edith Schryver's (1901–1984) joint venture of a landscape architecture business entered into the history of Salem in 1929. Their visual aesthetic was the European influences from their training at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts. In their 40 years of practice, their design style influenced over 200 gardens throughout the Pacific Northwest. They lived and ran their business out of a house on Mission Street in an area referred to as Gaiety Hill which was then and is still today on the edge of Salem's business district.
The introduction to this volume quotes the 2011 James Irvine Foundation published report titled Getting in on the Act. It is included again as the report's observations are fundamental to the changes that have taken place in the arts throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
We are in the midst of a seismic shift in cultural production, moving from a “sit-back-and-be-told culture” to a “making-and-doing-culture.” Active or participatory arts practices are emerging from the fringes of the Western cultural tradition to capture the collective imagination. Many forces have conspired to lead us to this point. The sustained economic downturn that began in 2008, rising ticket prices, the pervasiveness of social media, the proliferation of digital content and rising expectations for self-guided, on-demand, customized experiences have all contributed to a cultural environment primed for active arts practice. This shift calls for a new equilibrium in the arts ecology and a new generation of arts leaders ready to accept, integrate and celebrate all forms of cultural practice. This is, perhaps, the defining challenge of our time for artists, arts organizations and their supporters—to embrace a more holistic view of the cultural ecology and identify new possibilities for Americans to engage with the arts.
Essentially, the Irvine report was documenting the consequence of an intense political engagement in which many visual and performing artists around the globe became committed to creating art that represented the identity and expressed the concerns of a community. In terms of theater, this activist performance form is an extension of the engaged theater of German director and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1893–1956) and the performance methods of Brazilian Augusto Boal (1931–2009), whose performances broke the fourth wall of the proscenium and encouraged the stage as a space of community dialogue. As Cohen-Cruz points out, “theater is not a self-contained entity but rather gains meaning in context, integrated into people's lives.”
This chapter traces Daniel Stone and Tinamarie Ivey's evolution of an approach to theater in Oregon's Willamette Valley that builds on the performance theories of Brecht and Boal that they refer to as “sanctuary theater” or in terms of its company name, Sanctuary Stage. Merriam Webster Dictionary notes that sanctuary is a political concept derived from the Latin sanctuarium with a history primarily associated with worship.
I hope to have shown throughout this book how important the choice of words to end lines is. The sestina form is especially interesting in this regard. In the case of blank verse or free verse, the choice of end words is almost boundless; in the case of rhyming poetry, there is typically a wide choice for each succeeding rhyme; in the case of the sestina, the choice is restricted to the first stanza. After that, the sestina moves inexorably through its various permutations. While different poets may use different patterns of repetition, the repetition is always present. Because of this, the sestina might seem to be the perfect example of how form can come to dictate content and not just to give it a shape. One objection to this idea is that the opposition of form to content is often, if not always, a false dichotomy. Here, I am thinking of a comment made by the America poet Robert Creeley: “content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content.” Creeley’s repeated “never” is rather too emphatic, but it is certainly true that when we think about any art object we should try to think about form and content together. As Kimberly Johnson has recently pointed out, “the work of art must be encountered not as a transparent window onto a narrative (content) nor as a set of denarrativized obstructions (form) but rather as a mechanism that modulates between the two.” With its highly conspicuous form, a form that is further emphasized in the relatively rare rhyming version that is one of my concerns in this chapter, a really successful sestina is especially well equipped to give us the opportunity to consider form and content in close relation.
It has to be admitted that there are more failed sestinas than successful ones, however. Far too many sestinas show signs of the poet’s straining to work within the set form. By contrast, in a successful sestina the poet works the content and the form together: the extent to which the form threatens to overwhelm the content can become the content.
This we know: the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Chief Sealth
Before Oregon was a territory or even a destination on the long trail, it was an idea. And the idea—an Eden where people prospected not for gold but for a better life— became the lifeblood that nurtured the Beaver State until the end of the 20th century.
Ed Madrid
Klamath Falls, Oregon-based environmental writer Emma Marris suggests there is a tendency for Oregonians to mythologize Oregon as having retained its nineteenth-century designation as the Land of Eden. She argues, “We must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us.” As she notes, the romantic view does not take into account our impact on the planet. Ecologist Erle Ellis further describes our impact,
Seven billion people, Two billion more on the way. Intensifying agriculture. Accelerating urbanization. Increasing resource use per person. Atmosphere, climate, and oceans altered by industrial pollution. The ecology of an entire planet transformed by human action. This is the new normal. We live in the Anthropocene, a new period of Earth's history defined by human influences so profound and pervasive that they are written as a new global record in rock.
A corresponding view is held by visual artist Monte Shelton’s Key Element (Figure 23). Influenced by growing up visiting Oregon's diverse landscapes, during summer family adventures, Shelton comments on Oregon's current state through the iconic skeleton key, a symbol of opening. In this case, the opening is the influence of humans in the Anthropocene. Painted during the forest fires that swept Oregon in September of 2020, Shelton explains the painting's symbolism,
Initially, I chose to suspend the Key in the center and create a horizon with a purple violet sky. It was at this stage of the painting that the Willamette Valley was struck with multiple historic wildfires. The sky was an ominous red orange color that darkened the sky in the middle of the afternoon.
When reaching the implementation stage, nuclear decisions are submitted to regulation dynamics. Pre-Brexit, the specific situation of the UK as both a multinational state and a member of the European Union complexified policy implementation. Although national in structure, nuclear power transcends geographical boundaries, as nuclear activities are constrained by both direct and indirect regulation. Direct regulation covers nuclear activities management, while indirect regulation, which has expanded over the past thirty years, is primarily linked to climate change mitigation imperatives. Besides, today's domestic nuclear regulation is mostly impacted by international agreements and arrangements blending soft and rigid legal frameworks. ‘Soft regulation’ involves all forms of non-binding norms; on the other hand, decisions such as domestic regulations and European directives for fall into the hard rules category since they have normative and binding legal force. In that sense, the UK state finds itself grappling with an international system of checks and balances, dealing with supranational authorities overseeing these regulatory frameworks which cannot but alter the very nature of domestic regulatory decisions. UK nuclear policy stands de facto within the several interlocking frameworks of target-setting and regulation at both the supranational and subnational levels.
Beside technical regulation on safety and security matters, UK nuclear activities have come to be symbiotically intertwined with environmental and climate policies, especially since the turn of the 2000s, as encapsulated in the British Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) established in 2008 and dissolved in the 2016 ministerial reshuff le. Tony Blair's second and third terms in particular saw these two global matters converge and become a prime focus of attention on New Labour's agenda. From 2004, the Blair governments more actively engaged with environmental policies, after a first tenure devoted to constitutional, health and education reforms. Blair strove to position the UK as a world leader in the global fight against climate change. To that end, Blair sought to boost relations between the UK and other supranational authorities involved in climate change mitigation, including the UN or the EU.
Articulating nuclear matters with globalisation or Europeanisation dynamics has raised a lot of concerns regarding an alleged weakening of national sovereignty as well of state authority and capacity. In 1989, political scientist David Held had already warned against:
The international of production, finance and other economic resources […] eroding the capacity of the state to control its own economic future.
Carol Hughes, eventually perhaps habituated enough to trust me with a major revelation, one day said her husband David’s mantra was: ‘Not the BBC’. Why, given some of his most important films were made for them and that he had in part been trained by them, and given the general esteem in which the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU) and David Attenborough are held, might he have seen them as a negative principle? To understand the distinctive strengths of Southern African wildlife documentaries, it is useful to extract some of the NHU’s key operating principles as they were at once the source of its distinctive achievements but also point to some of their weaknesses and to the niches in the wildlife ecosphere the Southern Africans tried to fill.
The NHU
The histories of the BBC’s Natural History Unit examined earlier (Bright, Davies, Gouyon, Louson) illustrate the strengths of this institution but also suggest its corollary weaknesses. As I argued earlier, the weakness of the accounts of the NHU is both theoretical and historical in that they try to extract the NHU from the larger competitive broadcasting and production contexts. To try to write the history of the NHU without looking at what other broadcasters were doing or who was winning the ratings wars or industry accolades is to miss the way in which the field (to invoke Bourdieu) was developing and changing.
Let us put aside the greater home audience for most US productions and note that for much of the past half century, the NHU was not even the dominant wildlife broadcaster in the UK. Survival, with a strong component of Southern African material and with a South African born producer Mike Hay, was drawing much larger audiences (Gouyon 2019, 116). Partridge, as Davies pointed out, won the big competition prizes for most of the 1980s. And it didn’t stop there. Ellen Windemuth recalls in 2000 walking to collect the Golden Panda for the Foster brothers’ The Great Dance past rows of shocked BBC figures. If that didn’t happen in 2020 when Craig Foster won for My Octopus Teacher it was only because the event that year was virtual because of the COVID pandemic.
Civic entrepreneurship is the free contribution of time and effort to a project for the greater good of society without expectation of financial benefit. Self-expression, opportunity for creativity and to give back to the community is the motivation; reputation is the reward and social capital is the byproduct.
Henry Etzkowitz
Angus Bowmer (1904–1979), founder of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in his biography As I Remember Adam, describes his years growing up as a member of a musical family engaged in the country newspaper business in which his grandfather started 16 newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest. His grandfather's process as Bowmer describes it was to move into an area with an old press and immediately through the newspaper start advocating for a new road or “some other project which would bring the community together in support of the common good.” Eventually, the newspaper's advocacy became a factor in new businesses starting up as people begin to develop an identity as a community. “The citizenry would take on a feeling of pride in the identity of their community. New folk would move in, houses would be built and there would emerge a new town.” The establishment of a new town was the signal to Bowmer's grandfather to pack up and move on to the next place.
Bowmer learned from his grandfather an approach in which cultural institutions, such as a newspaper, could be the creative force in a community. It was an approach he would use in 1935 to establish the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the small town of Ashland in southern Oregon. The difference between Bowmer and his grandfather is that Bowmer stayed in Ashland and set a public engagement in motion that would create a theater enterprise that in 2021 would cover four acres of Ashland in three theaters with an annual audience of 400,000, employ 675 and have an annual budget of 30 million dollars. His efforts resulted in Ashland, a small community of approximately 21,000, to be the site of one of the largest regional theaters in the United States and the home of the most noted performing arts institution in Oregon. Bowmer's initiative is an example of what business researcher Henry Etzkowitz refers to as civic entrepreneurship in which there is alignment between humanistic, social and commercial entrepreneurship.
This chapter explores why and how African wildlife documentary moved significantly from East to Southern Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s, at a time when southern Africa faced considerable political turmoil: the struggle for independence in South-West Africa/Namibia; the June 1976 upheavals in Soweto; the battle for independence in Mozambique and Angola.
Chapter 4 will examine the importance of the rise of private lodges and a guiding culture in more detail and Chapter 5 outlines, through a critical comparison of Southern African with British productions, and particularly those of the BBC’s NHU, what the distinctive strengths and achievements of Southern African wildlife productions were and are. These chapters thus summarize much of the material that will be covered in more detail in later chapters that take a more historical and chronological approach.
Drawing on the theoretical insights of Bourdieu, Latour and Peters, this chapter examines three major sets of factors, agents and infrastructures: the background of the filmmakers; the legal, economic and political factors enabling the development of a local industry; and the crucial agents and infrastructures that enabled Southern Africans to go beyond relying on outsiders who made films in Africa. These cultural, political, economic and technological factors made it possible for Southern Africa to move from being simply a site for colonial or imperial production to being a place where Southern Africans were, arguably, producing the most interesting work in the genre. Given the difficulties subordinated formerly colonial cultures have in achieving this kind of cultural status, the achievement and the conditions for it matter.
The Filmmakers
Who were the filmmakers producing the major documentaries and what brought them to Southern Africa during this period if they came from other countries? I asked Jen Bartlett why she and her husband Des, both Australian-born, but the first major filmmaking couple in East Africa who had worked with Armand Denis and inspired Alan and Joan Root, had ended up in the Namib and spent the last years of their career in Southern Africa. Her answer succinctly sets out the push and pull factors involved in their eventual settling in Namibia:
I think that programs which are incorporating environmental with science, arts, music, really meshing those together in a big weaving is really what the world is about anyway.
Frank Boyden
Two-and-a-half hours south of Astoria there is a headland formed by the upthrust of underwater volcanic basalt flows with views of the ocean and the Salmon River estuary called Cascade Head. The grassy headland is home to an endangered species of butterfly, the Oregon Silverspot, that only exists in four other locations in the world. The headland prairies are covered with native plant species—paintbrush, goldenrod, blue violet, streambank lupine and two rare wildflowers—the Hairy Checker Mallow and the Cascade Head Catchfly. Cascade Head is also home to elk, deer, coyote, snowshoe hare, bald eagle, great horned owl, red-tail hawk and the peregrine falcon (Figure 20).
Sitting looking out over the landscape, I contemplate that for thousands of years this was the home of the Nechesne a branch of the Tillamook tribe who built permanent log plank villages along the estuary and temporary summer shelters at fishing and berry picking sites. They were outstanding craftsmen who created sea worthy dugout canoes and designed detailed baskets that could be used for a variety of purposes including cooking. The promontory of Cascade Head was also a vigil site for Nechesne who on spirit quests climbed to the top to fast and dream.
Dreaming continues to be an integral part of Cascade Head through the back-to-nature movement that was an fundamental part of Oregon in the 1970s. Artists Frank and Jane Boyden participated in this movement by starting an Oregon Coast summer camp for children. Their initial goal was to teach children how to deeply observe the many faceted environment of the Oregon Coast. Ultimately, they established a community on one acre donated by rancher Mike Lowell where artists and scientists living and creating in a natural environment could be in conversation with each other. The couple's vision to establish what would become the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology overlapped with Mike Lowell's goal to protect the Cascade headland and integrate it with the Cascade Head Experimental Forest that had been established in 1935.
In this final section I turn to a consideration of how recent poets have dealt with the challenges and opportunities afforded by line endings. As I wrote in the introduction, I won’t be concerned with rhyme here, as I don’t feel that contemporary rhyming poems—however distinguished many of them may be—really extend our knowledge of how rhyme can work. Instead, I’ll look at a few examples of what strike me as interesting examples of enjambment and of the sestina. Without having to adhere to conventions governing the number of syllables and of stresses in a line, poets are free to put line endings wherever they want, and thus rather than being predetermined (because the poet has completed a line of iambic pentameter, for instance), line endings are solely the result of a poet’s choice. I would argue that because of this fact, line endings in free verse are more highly marked from the outset than line endings in formal verse. Some poets writing in free verse give the impression of not caring much about lineation, but many use lineation and, especially, enjambment as a way to guide the reader through the poem and to emphasize particular words and phrases.
My first example of enjambment is Lucille Clifton’s “study the masters.” Before I deal with this poem, however, I want to look at W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which is its intertext. Auden’s poem juxtaposes the grand stories that are the ostensible subject of paintings by the great Renaissance painters called the Old Masters with, as he puts it, their “human position” (3). By this, he means the relationship of “the miraculous birth” (6) that is the occasion for the painting to what the picture also shows: children (7-8), dogs (12), a horse (12-13); all living lives independently of the grand narrative that is the painting’s ostensible subject. In the second stanza, Auden becomes specific and names “Breughel’s Icarus” (14), which is located in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Auden draws our attention to “the ploughman” (15) who appears in the foreground of the painting and to “the expensive delicate ship” (19) sailing by what is, as Auden notes, “Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky” (20).