Two thought experiments emerged in response to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s presentation at OHMA on November 12, 2020. They take the form of a diptych collage titled “Reach for the Moon or The Grass is Always Greener”.
This semester, Columbia’s graduate Oral History Workshop welcomed Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, author and critically-acclaimed artist, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. For Simpson, the notion of home is tightly coupled with a return to the Anishinaabe culture of oral history, and a connection to ancestral lands, language and aesthetics. Home, in this context then, is not a dwelling, nor just a geography; it is an entire natural ecosystem to be recognized and nurtured, one animated by the continuity of its relationships across space and time. Simpson’s home is as much located in a physical place as it is within her own ancestral memory. Simultaneously generative, evocative and thought-provoking, Simpson challenges her audience to question the status quo. At a time when a battle between the status quo and otherness, or “us” vs “them,” is being waged in American homes and at the ballot box over the 2020 US presidential election results, Simpson’s work adds a new dimension to the debate and asks us to consider the connective tissue that links us all, our shared ecosystem.
The artist took the silvergrass photograph and gathered the objects during a camping trip the week before Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's OHMA workshop, a trip compelled by reading and listening to Simpson's work in preparation for the event.
The artist went looking for & found the drawing of the monkey in an envelope of old sketches from a friend, Tom Shannon.
ARTIST STATEMENT
The top image is based on a thought experiment proposed by author and activist Jane Jacobs in her book, The Economy of Cities:
Imagine two primitive tribes. The one on the left has an excess of wheat. The one on the right has an excess of seashells. Both factions must decide how many seashells to trade for wheat. Jacobs argues that each tribe has developed its own cluster of moral principles or ethics she calls a “moral syndrome”. These syndromes operate around different value systems.
What would these two value systems be in your mind for this moment in time?
The bottom image is based on a Simpson-inspired ripple that surfaced after I shifted my thinking from the concept of “us” versus “them”, to the concept of “us” as parts of the same natural ecosystem.
Now imagine being that monkey looking down at earth from the International Space Station. Can you see one earth, one people, “us”, or does your mind insist on looking for “us” versus “them”?
At the best of times, these unseen forces work against each other in a kind of harmony, an equilibrium. Both Simpson and Jacobs elucidate that society has at least two sets of values. Although they may seem conflicting at times, both nourish and sustain different parts of the ecosystem (or home) we share.
—JP
IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS by Carlin Liu Zia, edited by the artist
Top: A comfortable paper-white matte surrounds a 4:3 grayscale photograph of what appears to be silvergrass reaching from the bottom corners into a bright sky. On the right the tallest blades tickle the top of the frame, their dark gray tint tapering razor thin into the medium gray of what must have been an azure blue sky, while on the left the handful of fronds and the denser growth contrast sharply with the smudged fleece cloud backgrounding the bottom two-thirds of the image. It must be fall because the shoots of the tall grass are starting to curl and tangle into helices.
In the bottom left corner, two found sprigs of pine overlay the image, their stems loosely parallel along the borders of the photograph, their needles traversing onto the surrounding matte where they stand out bright green against the white. They frame a wildflower gone to seed but still holding its blunt cone of tawny fluff. The dense, soft and orange, and sand-softened fragments of peach and iridescent white. A blade of green grass threads through the shells and pokes its end into the white matte, out from under the bottom of the coral. A thin brown reed extends into the frame of the photo from the base of the coral, following the angle of the silvergrass printed below it. Just shy of the ear of wild wheat sprouting from the bottom left corner and about the same weight, a pale bivalve hinting pink and yellow and blue sits open and symmetrical on the end of the reed, its shells concave up and spread like the wings of a butterfly.
Bottom: A comfortable paper-white matte surrounds a 1:1 grayscale printout of a pencil sketch, by the artist's friend, Tom Shannon. A furry monkey hangs by its left arm from a slender branch extending across the top of the frame from what appears to be an overhang from the stern of a pirate ship in the top right corner. A found twig overlays the line of the branch, thinner and a shade darker gray than the sketch it follows, loosely parallel but arching over the drawn branch where the monkey holds fast. On either side of the unobscured fist, clusters of green pine needles overlay the twig. Another bivalve butterfly occupies the branch to the left of the monkey and the needles, and as the limb dips and tapers in the whitespace towards the edge of the frame a third thread joins, a bright found fiber shedding wisps so fine they look more like glare than content.
The monkey hangs in the middle column of the frame, its head and prehensile feet tucked close so that its body appears only as long as the arm that suspends it about a third of the way down from the branch at the top. With a distinctly furrowed brow, the monkey peers down at where its right arm reaches fantastically far through the gentlest of gradual shading, toward a pale oblong disc of what appears to be a moon floating horizontal just before the bottom edge of the frame. A few wispy marks form a squat C in the gray haze to the left of the monkey’s right hand as, fingers back, it seems to stroke toward the disc shaped ‘moon’, the ripples of which, follow and indeed outpace the hand across the pale shape. Another few wisps extend back toward the ship in a flat S. In the corner of the ship’s stern, the very top right of the frame, two pine needles border the shield of the International Space Station, possibly as a humorous conceptualization of a ‘space ship’ .
Sources and Resources
Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities. Cape Publications (1970)
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. House of Anansi Press (2020).
For more on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson:
Visit her website: https://www.leannesimpson.ca/
Read her latest book: Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies (House of Anansi Press, September 2020), available here from House Of Anansi Publishing. The book will be available in the US as of February 2021. More information is available through https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/noopiming
Check out her music: https://leannesimpson.bandcamp.com/
For More on Jane Jacobs:
http://www.janejacobswalk.org/about-jane-jacobs-walk/meet-jane-jacobs
Special thanks to NASA for the livestream views of earth from the International Space Station: