The Owl Hives are in Chandler.

On Friday night, March 18, the All AZ Clay Invitational Exhibition opened at the Chandler Center for the Arts, displaying the work of more than 40 clay artists from all over the state of Arizona.  Among them is an installation of artefaux by me, entitled Assemblage: Owl Hives.

>> Assemblage: Owl Hives (photo and piece, A.Shock 2011)

The piece is composed of a variety of related, archeologically-themed elements, and is intended to be viewed on its own æsthetic merits.  But, if you read this blog regularly, parts of the installation will look familiar to you, since I’ve posted bits and pieces of it before, in progress.  Also, in the Assemblage, you may recognize a tie-in to the fictional posts that appear here irregularly: according to the signs, the piece is purported to be on loan from the august but mysterious Ganskopf Foundation.  In addition, the ubiquitous and insinuating Dr. Darius Danneru has graciously provided an excerpt from a recent article, supplying authoritative and scholarly, if prolix, context for the piece.  <<

I hope you can stop by the Chandler Center for the Arts’ Vision Gallery anytime before April 16, when the show closes, to see what the Arizona clay community is up to, including three pieces by Don Reitz, from the CCA’s collection.  More info below, or click on Three Star Owl events.  (Photo E.Shock>>)

Exhibition Dates, Hours, and Location:

March 18 – April 16, 2011
Vision Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 10 am – 5 pm, Saturdays, Noon – 4 pm
at: Chandler Center for the Arts
MAP/Directions
250 North Arizona Avenue
Chandler AZ 85225
For more information call 480-782-2695.

(Remember, for guaranteed fiction, look for the Pseudopod Waltz logo: “You Never Know Which Foot Is When.”)

This is the first installment of a series. The events take place many years before the “Ganskopf Incident”. Click on the link at the bottom of the page to continue to the next installment.

Wayfarer Arrives:

Deep in the Negev Desert, Israel, in the early 1980s.

After the long flights, with the long layovers, first in Chicago then in Hamburg, the long sherut taxi ride from the airport, and the long, jarring jeep ride from the university, Einer Wayfarer stood overlooking a dry, hot, honeycomb of trenches and pits on the top of a dry, hot ridge in a dry, hot, central Negev valley. Her ankles were swollen, and she badly wanted a glass of wine, and a dim bar to sip it in. The glare of the sunlight off the pale soil hurt her eyes, the heat hurt her nostrils, and Wilson A. Rankle’s droning voice hurt her ears. He was saying something she supposed she should be attending to: “…primarily MBIIa to judge by the pottery, the same date as the walls although we haven’t located a glacis or any major fortifications… the early LBI strata are largely absent here at Beit Bat Ya’anah except in Area D…”

Dr. Wayfarer was a philologist first and only secondarily a historian, and she couldn’t understand why archeologists used so many letter-abbreviations that looked like the names of viruses. Furthermore, she knew little of the history of the Bronze Age – or any other Age, frankly – in the Levant, and was really only here at the behest of her colleague and friend Avsa Szeringka, who had somehow herself managed to remain comfortably ensconced at the Institute near cool, gray Oxford. This, too, was a gray landscape but a harsh, scorched gray, not a muffled cloud-gray. Here cobbles and stones lay like bare bleached bones on the dirt surface, excavated unscientifically by the winds.

She turned to the dig director, hoping that watching his lips move would help her comprehend his monotonous jumble of letters and digits, but she only managed to observe that his comb-over had flopped to the wrong side of his scalp in the hot wind. He was pointing with his hat in his hand, and she wished he would replace it on his cranium; he was pink and sweating and Wayfarer believed he required its floppy brim more for shade than for an ineffectually vague indicator. She looked away again, to be safe: at any moment, the comb-over would flop back, or, worse yet, erect itself like a hoopoe’s crest and stay that way. In her sleep- and shower-deprived state, she could not guarantee her decorum if that occurred.

Finally Wilson A. Rankle stopped talking, stopped waving his hat imprecisely, and smoothing the buoyant flange of hair with a self-conscious and practiced gesture he jammed the hat back onto his head saying, “Well, that’s about it, site-wise. So I suppose you’ll want to see the object now.”

Wayfarer detected peevishness in this flat, ungracious offer. She knew the source of the peevishness, and it sunk him even lower in her estimation. Squinting against the glare, her pale blue eyes didn’t meet his, but she said mildly, “Of course. But first, I’d like to unpack, and, if it isn’t too much trouble, perhaps something to drink?”

He waved a hand to indicate they should follow the goat track back down to camp. “Well, it’s almost tea-time,” he said. “Mikka will have put out mits, biscuits and hot water. Oh, there’s coffee too…”

“Marvelous,” Wayfarer said, not impressed with the standard options of reconstituted juice or hot drinks. “Lead the way.” Sliding a bit unsteadily down the unconsolidated trail behind the archeologist, she was already calculating the least amount of time she could possibly spend on this romp.

To be continued…

To read Part 2 “Tea and Announcements”, click here

…and we spent the day near Sedona in the Red Rocks and Wet Beaver Creek visiting Palatki and V-V (a ranch brand pronounced Vee-Bar-Vee), both quite spectacular rock art venues.

These are fairly easily accessible sites maintained by the Forest Service for public viewing, and well worth the trip (around 2 1/2 hours from Phoenix, much less from Flagstaff), if indigenous works of art are your thing.  Palatki is primarily pictographs — images applied to the rock faces with mixtures of charcoal or mineral pigments and natural binders like animal fat.  There’s also a well-preserved “cliff dwelling” perched comfortably in the delightfully red Supai Sandstone formation.  V-V is primarily petroglyphs, figures pecked or incised into the sandstone with hard tools.   Both sites feature an abundance of animal images, anthropomorphic figures including ones referred to as “shamanic”, plus geometric and astronomical symbols.  These two locations have been used successively by a variety of inhabitants, from the Archaic people to Sinagua, Hohokam, Yavapai, Apache, and early Anglo and Hispanic homesteaders: in places the images are many layers thick, representing thousands of years of expression.

Interpretation of parietal art seems largely subjective, and despite folksy presentations by earnest volunteers nothing we were presented with was entirely convincing, so I won’t inflict anyone with any of it here.  But the art is impressive, both in technique and aesthetics, so I’ll satisfy myself with admiration, and leave others to struggle with meaning.

It’s a fascinating struggle, and teeters a little antagonistically between local experts, eddycated archeologists, and Native American Interpreters, all of whom seem to have strong opinions and, often, little tolerance for each other’s views.  Oddly, more than once we heard a little bashing of the two extremes of scholarly and indigenous input, with the hero being the guy who wasn’t an expert — who didn’t have the “in” of either academia or ancestry — figuring it all out.  This left the impression of a tale arising from the Mystery of the Lost Symbols that seems just as rooted in folkloric tradition as the images themselves.

If you’d like to visit these sites, and nearby Honanki, be sure to check out the links above for details, since advanced reservations are necessary for Palatki, and hours are quite limited for V-V.

(Photos: Top, Palatki, “Red House” ruins, A.Shock; middle: black herd, Palatki, A.Shock; bottom: overview of one of the V-V petroglyph panels, possibly a calendar overlaid with clan symbols)

Here are the exciting final steps of Jack’s King Vulture.  (Previous increments can be viewed and read about here.)

This first photo, Increment 3, is a close-up of what the piece looks like after it’s been bisqued (fired the first time) and then glazed. Pretty crappy looking, isn’t it?  That’s because glaze is a chalky-looking liquid suspension made of clay, mineral pigments and oxides, a flux or glassy component to create various levels of gloss after melting, plus water. If Pepto Bismol came in a lot of different icky-pale flavors, they would look like glazes. Because of this, glazing a piece you’ve already spent hours on can be an act of faith, and once the raw glazes are on, it’s often hard to escape the feeling that now you’ve gone and ruined it, which sometimes you have.  Fortunately the more you glaze, the better able you are to predict what the chalky colors will look like after firing, so the more you trust the materials and the process (=faith, for a potter).  It’s only after the final firing that the glaze colors take on any kind of brightness and glassy quality. Here is Increment 4, Jack’s finished King Vulture, Sarcoramphus papa, photographed in the wilds of Scottsdale:

Check out the pale eye, it’s not a mistake: the King Vulture’s iris is white, which to our eyes looks pretty weird.  In Mayan glyphs King Vultures are readily identifiable not only by the fleshy knob or caruncle atop their strong, hooked beak, but also by the bold concentric depiction of the staring white eye.  Below is a plate from Animal Figures in the Maya Codices by A.M. Tozzer and G.M. Allen (1910) that shows a selection of Mayan King Vulture glyphs.  Of course, I’m not an expert, but Tozzer and Allen report that the King Vulture represents Cib, the 13th day of the month.  And, on an ornithological note, figure 4 in the plate below shows a King Vulture entwining necks with an Ocellated turkey, the turkey of the Maya, which puts our Wild Turkey of North America to shame in terms of colorful plumage and warty wattly facial skin, which is saying something.  I photographed the Ocellated turkey below at Chan Chich in Belize, where they inhabit the immediate area along with King Vultures, like the one in a previous post who tried to hide behind a leaf.

By the way, if you live in the Phoenix area, there are two King Vultures on display in a large aviary at the Phoenix Zoo.  You could drop in any time to visit them.  E and I just did, on Valentine’s Day.  I guess we missed Cib by one day!

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)

Birds weren’t the only wonderful things to be seen on a recent trip to the Mexican state of Veracruz: there was clay! The capital city of Xalapa, perched on the volcanic shoulders of the Sierra Madre Oriental, has a world-class archaeological museum, Museo de Antropología de Xalapa (MAX), stuffed full of the cultural treasures of pre-Hispanic people local to the region. For someone who works in clay, these objects are endlessly fascinating and inspirational. Here are some of my favorites. Click on any image to see a larger version. Forgive blurriness; no flash allowed, so all camera work is hand-held in low light conditions, through the glass of display cases.

Surprising to me: nearly life-sized human figures in clay. I’d seen examples in stone (like the big Olmec heads, several of which are on display at MAX), or in bas-relief, but not in clay and modeled in the round. On the right, check out Xipe Totec “the Flayed One”, scary deity of death/rebirth wearing the skin of a human, flaking off him as it decays — a practice shown in Aztec sculpture actually carried out by priests, wearing the skins of sacrificed captives. This sculpture was made in 3 pieces: head, torso/arms, and pelvis/legs, and assembled after firing, saving on kiln space. Looks like ear bobs and head-piece may have been interchangeable, or made of another material that didn’t survive; musical instrument or other item held in hands missing?

Effigy vessels — pots made in the form of animals, human heads or figures, parts of humans (like feet), or plants — are common in many cultures in both the old and new worlds, but are particularly prevalent in Meso-America, and there are many fine examples in the MAX collection. Here is one with a bat, and an excellent Jaguar, complete with furry pelt, made by attaching small flattened balls of clay to the surface in exactly the same way as the flaking skin is represented on Xipe Totec. Note the bat’s “arms” are human arms supporting its wings. More on effigy vessels and Three Star Owl in a later post.

On the left is a green limestone cylinder seal and the impression it leaves in wet clay. Six thousand years ago, it hung around the neck of a Mesopotamian scribe or businessman. Now it’s now in the Louvre and despite a nasty crack you can see lovely stout beeves in a wheat field marching around it, very pastoral and comfy. This kind of seal was used all over the ancient Near East (what we now know as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and other countries in the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia) to authenticate inventories and letters written on clay tablets, clay sealings on rooms, jars and parcels, bricks, and anything else needing a stamp of approval or ownership. A combination of archaic in material and modern in use, cylinder seals were the stone rubber stamp of their day, highly portable and personalized.

Clay’s property of taking detailed impressions when moist hasn’t changed over the millenia and potters, now as then, take advantage of it. Many Three Star Owl pieces, like Beastie Ware, are textured with cylinders I’ve carved in clay and then fired, giving me a way to pattern the clay just as distinct and personal as fingerprints.

The rattlers below get lots of use in making “Crotalus” items, like this oval jar with a roadrunner on the lid.

For etymology enthusiasts: Crotalus, a genus of North American pit vipers including many of our familiar rattlers, is derived from Greek krotalon (το κροταλον), a type of rattle or castanets held in the fingertips. They were used particularly by revelers of Dionysus, making the apt connection with rattlers both for their sound and their cthonic origins. Incidentally, I’ve read that Arizona has more species of rattlesnakes than any other US state.