Al río / To the River
Over the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the artist Zoe Leonard on a photographic work called, Al río / To the River.
The finished work, which consists of around 400 photographs by Zoe and a publication in two volumes, a volume of which I edited, has begun to find its way in the world. An exhibition of Zoe’s photographs is currently on view at MUDAM in Luxembourg, another exhibition will follow at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris later in 2022, and the book we made is now available in Europe and will soon be available in North America.
For Al río / To the River, Zoe photographed the Río Bravo / Rio Grande between Ciudad Juarez / El Paso and the mouth of the river at the Gulf of Mexico. Over this stretch, which is roughly half the river's length, the river is made to serve the purpose of being an international boundary and also is subject to a number of restrictions and controls by various interests and jurisdictions. Over this stretch, the river is also used to restrict and control a number of additional flows, north and south, including the movements of people, wildlife, agricultural and manufactured goods.
I hope you’ll purchase a copy of Al río / To the River when it’s available to you. It features a volume of Zoe's work and a volume of contributions by: C.J. Alvarez, Ariella Azoulay, Cecilia Ballí, Carolyn Boyd, Remijio "Primo" Carrasco, Alfredo Corchado, Natalie Diaz, Dolores Dorantes, Darby English, Álvaro Enrigue, Catherine Facerias, Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Josh T. Franco, Esther Gabara, Land Arts of the American West, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, Angela Kocherga, Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Elisabeth Lebovici, José Rabasa, Yuri de la Rosa, Cameron Rowland, Inocencio Lugo Ruiz, Roberto Tejada, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.
I want to thank Suzanne Cotter, formerly of Mudam and now of The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, for her commitment to the work, the book, and everything that went into them; Nicola van Velsen at Hatje Cantz for years of friendship and support on this and many other projects; my beautiful wife and partner, Caitlin Murray, who is a genius; and the Graham Foundation for a generous grant which supported the book's production.
Tim Johnson, April 27, 2022
Passing Clouds
It seems Charles Baudelaire will be my guide in this.
As many people know, the quasi-fictional West Texas Cloud Appreciation Society came to me in a dream in which Baudelaire was present. I was wearing a t-shirt quite similar to the one Phil Cashiola would eventually design with, “West Texas / Cloud / Appreciation / Society” printed on the front and the quote “I want to be a cloud and imagine,” on the back. In the dream, the quote was attributed to Baudelaire and I was embarrassed for him, and for anyone, to see it.
That was the logic of the dream: standing somewhere between membership in the Cloud Society and being afraid that Baudelaire would find out I quoted him.
I’m not quite sure why I was so nervous about Baudelaire finding out. Perhaps it’s because, in my mind, Baudelaire was a highly-critical essayist, poet and flaneur, and not an aimless milquetoast or nebulous dreamer. Baudelaire’s world is a polluted one, pointedly in opposition to the self-deluded naiveté that longs for purity and unspoiled nature.
I didn’t think to much about it for a year or two, but all the while I was sort of lightly-haunted by the specter of Baudelaire’s involvement in the dream and I had a nagging sense that cloud appreciation was mentioned somewhere in Paris Spleen, a late book of prose works by the poet which I had read as a teenager.
I didn’t have a copy of Paris Spleen at home for some reason, but one afternoon I realized the bookstore had one and so I read through it. Sure enough, cloud appreciation appears in a poem called “The Stranger,” right at the beginning of the book.
Among poems, “The Stranger” is, to borrow a term from scientific taxonomy, a species affinis. That is to say, it is a text that resembles but cannot actually be placed among the presently established species of poems because, in truth, it does not belong there. In some ways it can also be said to resemble a species of dramatic writing, or even note-taking, although it lacks the apparatus by which those texts are identified: a list dramatis personae, the image of lined-paper, and so forth. This is partly what gives “The Stranger” so much power: it hovers between things. Quite like a cloud, actually.
To the poem itself:
After a series of impertinent questions concerning the Stranger’s loves and loyalties are raised by an unnamed Questioner and no answers are forthcoming from the nominal Stranger, the exasperated Questioner asks:
“Ok, so what is it that you do love, Stranger?”
”I love clouds. Passing clouds … appearing there … and there… the marvelous clouds.”
Perhaps you are wondering why I’m writing this. Well, the truth is, I don’t really know except to say this seems to me a marvelous place to start over.
Tim Johnson, April 25, 2022