Whittle Gristle is less a “chapbook” than a subset of an ongoing “notebook.” From June 15, 2024 to December 8, 2024, I returned again and again to an exhibit, Necroarchivos de las Americas: An Unrelenting Search for Justice, at University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Check it out online before its digital presence disappears https://jsma.uoregon.edu/art/exhibition/necroarchivos-de-las-americas. The exhibit was funded in part by The University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Our new felon king is dismantling vital DEI work across the United States.
I started writing meditations in Whittle Gristle before I first saw this exhibition. One summer day before the election, yellowjackets harvested chicken gristle from my plate. Their labor was mesmerizing. After lunch, I foraged online to learn about the foraging practices of wasps relative to bees. Suddenly, I was hungry for Virgil a la Christian Bök’s Xentotext’s “Colony Collapse Disorder”—“Subpoena this pair of brawling kingpins… .” Whittling textual gristle wasn’t enough for me to grapple with the U.S. presidential race, so I sought out artists’ work.
In Necroarchivos de las Americas, Carlos Castro Arias’ music box of confiscated knives captivated me first; a museum goer’s body triggers a sensor; then, a barrel impaled by knives clanks-out Spanish and British imperial war tunes. Colonialism’s death march is ever-present. Teresa Margolles makes visible struggles of New York City immigrants by encasing their t-shirts in cement blocks. She also laces a cement bench with the blood of a beloved killed at the border. Her work continues the artistic legacy of Luis Camnitzer who boxed “remains” of his comrades kidnapped and tortured in Uruguay. Elaborate conversations emerge, “questioning U.S. intervention in other countries, authoritarian regimes, gender violence and racism.” The complexity this exhibit is thanks to careful curation by Dr. Adriana Miramontes Olivas.
The exhibit became a safe haven for me as the urgency of impending elections ramped up. Regina José Galindo stands up to a bulldozer. Doris Salcedo’s upturned tables to make a memorial garden. Each artist models resistance to injustices wielded by power brokers. In this public space, viewers navigate the “documentation and denouncement” of violence. As I engaged with these artworks, I switched from silently re-reading Bök to reciting aloud Jordan Abel, Alice Oswald, Daisy Zamora and Mourid Barghouti.
After the grim election, I returned to Necroarchivos to study Rafael Lozano-Hemmer work with face recognition software. He digitally compares viewers’ faces to those of the 43 students missing from the Rural Normal School at Aytzinapa who disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico (drug cartels pay military, municipal and federal police fake a mass grave). Across the gallery, Artist Voluposa Jarpa threads reams of declassified CIA documents through a Donald Judd sculpture to remind viewers of the U.S.’s covert operations. The crimes against humanity exposed in these artworks are overt. My poems are reportage of these past violations, quavering with concern over future injustices.
Now that the felon king and his muskrat are gutting our government and causing suffering across the globe, I ponder the Necroarchivos de las Americas often. The exhibit is no longer in Eugene, but the works help me witness. Valaria Tatera’ “Justice: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2 spirits” stays with me. How can I watch the Sabrina Van Tassel’s documentary Missing from Fire Trail Road, without mentally adding a red ribbon to Tatera’s memorial sculpture. The film honors Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis who went missing in 2020. Necroarchivos’ “DOC/UNDOC: Ars Shamánica Performática” offers an empowering practice. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Felicia Rice, Jennifer González collaborate across mediums (video, artist books, performance art) to show us a way forward. My hope is that my poems invite you to seek out and see work by these artists.
For Lori Anderson Moseman’s recent work, see Quietly Between, a 2022 poetry/photography collaboration available from A Viewing Space. Her recent experimental poetry collections include Darn (Delete Press, 2021) and Y (Operating System, 2019). For her artist book collaboration with Karen Pava Randal, see Full Quiver (Propolis Press, 2015) and Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Her collaborations with Brazilian printmaker Sheila Goloborotko include “Jarring Bits” (Talon Review, 2019), “insistence, teeth” (Dusie.org, 2014), Creation (2012), um daqueles lugares sublimes (2008). See https://loriandersonmoseman.com
