Dario Robleto

Thoughts on the Project from Dario Robleto

Comments in 2005 After First Site Visit:

My site visit was based at the Waterton Glacier International Peace Park in the United States (Montana) and Canada. This was my first selection from the list of sites, and I was thrilled to be able to go. I have had a lifelong interest in geology and, in particular, a fascination with glaciers. There has always been some unspoken connection I have felt to them as an artist. Geological issues of time, materials, and life cycles have always served as rich metaphors in my artistic thinking. Glaciers, though, add a certain tone and mood to those metaphors that have reconnected to my ongoing research and interest in human states of mourning. There is a state of long-term suspension in freezing, but also a precariousness to their potential of melting that for me has always synced up with the stages of mourning and grieving that humans go through on a daily basis: wanting to suspend the pain, but knowing its flow can’t be impeded.

So getting to see a glacier up close was an opportunity I have longed for. The common image we have of glaciers and icebergs are these glowing blue chunks of ice in the most remote regions of the world. What was startling and revealing to me was that, as with most things, it is much more complex than that. I had no idea, for instance, that there are very old glaciers right here on American soil. Also, the difference between a landlocked glacier at the top of a mountain and the more-commonly-thought-of Arctic ones are intriguing. Seeing and coming to an understanding of how these landlocked ones worked turned out to be a crucial point in the development of my ideas, which I will expand on in a moment.

While in the park I took every opportunity I could to meet with and interview as many scientists and other park employees that I could. I interviewed the park botanist about the particular flora of the park, the park geologist about fossil deposits, and Curly Bear Wagner, an elder of the Blackfoot Indians. Of particular note for me were Magi Malone, park librarian; Kate Kendell, park grizzly bear researcher; and I began an e-mail conversation with Dave Walters, park and Montana historian, who had done some amazing research in the park about the little-known conscientious objector program of WWII that the government had set up there in the 1940s. As American warfare and politics are a huge interest in my work, I feel this may develop at some level in my project as well.

But the scientist I would like to focus on most is Dan Fagre, the top U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) glaciologist in the park and probably the country. He was amazingly gracious, thoughtful, and eager to aid in my research. Dan has a bit of an art bug, I found out, and was intrigued by why a young conceptual sculptor would have any interest in his passion. I explained, and we immediately hit it off. What I found so amazing about Dan, and something I am continually amazed by with most scientists, is the direct, almost cold delivery they speak with regarding their work. Scientists operate at a different level of validity and success, which is based on hard fact and unbiased, unemotional evaluation. The budding scientist in me understands and appreciates this immensely, but the artist in me has the luxury and the necessity of becoming highly emotionally invested in a given topic. I mention this because one of my most pressing questions going into my interviews with Dan and Kate was how they managed the particular circumstances they were in when the thing you have devoted your life’s work to will more than likely be gone from the earth in your own lifetime: a unique phenomenon happening more and more to this generation of scientists. How can emotions not be at play when you watch the thing you love vanish due to your own species’ activities? Their responses proved to be highly influential in my own thinking about the project.

I knew going into the project that the decline of the glaciers due to global warming would influence me at some level. Like most Americans, I realize this is happening and understand the consequences will be felt down the road, but what was made startlingly clear to me from Dan was that within our own lifetimes, the glaciers of Waterton Glacier National Park will be totally gone! He mentioned to me that when he first arrived in the park they thought they would be monitoring their retreat rate every ten years or so due to the effort and setup needed to make these measurements. This was then cut to every five years after they realized this wouldn’t be fast enough. Then two years, and now they are beginning to monitor every year, this next year. It is startling what we are about to lose.

As I mentioned earlier, two points during my trip greatly affected my thinking on the glacier/mourning connection I wanted to explore: the way landlocked glaciers function when they melt, and Dan’s response to my questions about his emotional investment in watching the glaciers decline. As Dan, almost Zen-like, pointed out to me, a consequence of a landlocked melting glacier is that the glacial runoff must accumulate at the bottom, producing some of the most stunning lakes in the park. And as a result of this, a whole new biodiversity is springing up and able to sustain itself. I realized as he talked that the idea that humans are destroying the earth is a very shortsighted and even arrogant one. What humans are destroying, ultimately, is themselves. Dan repeatedly reminded me that it is impossible to destroy the earth. It continually adjusts and adapts to the given situation. Dan wasn’t watching the thing he loved die, he was watching the earth, through glacial processes, reaffirm what the scientist in him has always known: life continues at all costs.

This is in no way to downplay or let off the hook the responsibility humans have in changing the environment and doing whatever they can to preserve it. It is simply a reminder that the system is much larger than us and immune to our damage.

This revelation has gone a long way in helping my meditation on what humans have at stake in mourning. When great loss is experienced at a personal level, the grieving and mourning stages are difficult but fairly clear: for example, the process from denial to acceptance. What the glacial experience has taught me is that there is something different going on when the great loss becomes global and the force causing it is beyond scope. There are historical examples to look to: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11. These were global events, but still localized in one country. They were also catastrophes of man’s own making. What we are witnessing now, with the global natural disasters, are huge losses happening concurrently across the globe and the fact that their cause is not clear-cut. We don’t have someone or something to immediately point the finger at. Though, as these natural disasters gain in frequency and destruction, we will be forced to recognize our role in them. This sets up a very conflicted problem in the mourning process: how do we deal with world loss when we know we are part of the reason for it occurring? Can Dan’s point of view here aid in our understanding of the process? Will a better understanding of our own causing of the situation lead to action? Can we get to some level of acceptance and even awe and appreciation of the vastness of the earth and life without it leading to feelings of powerlessness in determining our own fate? In fact, the hugeness of it all seems to cause us to become stuck in denial. These are a few of the questions I want to focus on and believe the glaciers and the park hold some sort of answers.

Although there is always a sadness to loss, it can also be a great motivator to pursuing new avenues of thinking. Mourning is ultimately about the living. It is a necessary step to healing from great loss. Across history and cultures, the mourning process has left behind some remarkably original and novel forms of thinking. There is a creative potential to loss that is distinctly human and a key to understanding humanness itself. Will this unparalleled level of loss propel us as a whole into completely new ways of thinking?

Project Proposal

The main purpose of my residency will be to participate on a glacier measuring expedition. Dan Fagre and his team make this journey every summer, when temperatures allow, monitoring the rate of decline of the glaciers. It will be my goal to observe their procedures and obtain some specific, very old, glacial ice and water samples. I will also be looking for certain flora types. I will be carrying with me an eight-millimeter camera for filming some sequences.

A crucial element in my work is obtaining my materials in the most direct way possible. Often this involves my close participation with certain subcultures such as specific collecting circles, fan groups, or amateur enthusiasts. This trip will be similar in that I will want to totally immerse myself in the scientific glacier world and understand the history, research, and attitudes.

As its core, my work is about belief and systems of faith. I am often asked to take a leap of faith when I enter certain subcultures. This is then passed on to the viewers of my work as they hopefully grapple with the possibility of my works’ truth. I have come to realize that the work’s greatest chance for being believed is that I believe it, too. And this is ultimately tied up with lengths to which I will go to obtain my materials and become invested in the group. So this expedition will be incredibly important to what I hope to do.

The working title for my exhibition is A Homeopathic Treatment for Human Longing. As an object maker, I have an unusual method for designing my works and material selections. I let language and research play a crucial role in the process. So I will often completely work out an exhibition just as language on paper. And this has to be to the level of poetry for me. I will design works before I have any idea of what they will look like or if I can even obtain the materials, purely based on poetic language levels: the flow of syllables, the grinding of consonants. And then I find how those flows and rhythms translate into material form. Also, the overarching topic that fuels any given show will play a key role in those rhythms. The glaciers are supplying a wealth of that.

So, with that said, here is a preliminary poetic sketch of the exhibition:

A Homeopathic Treatment for Human Longing
The Creative Potential of Disease
Our Species Has No Poets
Extinction Gets Ready
I Found the Gene for Loneliness But Decided to Put It Back
A Homeopathic Remedy to Atheism
She Can’t Dream for Us All
Working on a Brain Freed from Knowing Its Own Decay
Everything Has Had the Same Time to Evolve
My Gray Matter Is Always Blue
The Biology of Hope
Eucalyptus Soothes the Apocalyptist
Humans Are Just Things Which Happen from Time to Time
Heaven Is Being a Memory to Others
The Sky, Once Choked with Stars, Will Slowly Darken
The Melancholic Refuses to Surrender
A Homeopathic Cure for Belief

From this list I will more than likely develop six to seven sculptures. I often design shows, not just individual pieces, meaning that all the sculptures will tell a larger story as a whole.

This work will relate to my past work in my ongoing studies of mourning and faith. I know the title piece in particular will continue down the road of some recent works like The Last Lost Shipment of an Untested Life Potion and Balm of a Thousand Foreign Fields. In these works I tried to see if the creative arts could contribute to the various medicinal traditions that have aimed at curing things not traditionally thought curable. There is a bit of a leap of faith in many of these traditions, and really no less so in Western medicine, and I am curious how faith aids or is the sole cause of healing. The park and its glaciers are becoming for me a larger metaphor about an unimaginable loss and how one grapples with knowing they are the cause of that loss: a loss that no one wants, but on an individual level is powerless to stop. This disrupts all normal grieving processes.

The park and glaciers represent change and death and beauty and resurrection. To long is to be human, but wanting to cure it is as well. Somewhere in this paradox lies a deeper understanding of our particular circumstances. Using the very material of the park and its highly loaded symbolism, I will attempt to make an artwork that touches this deep human contradiction.

The aspect that will be a departure for me is the use of film. I have no previous experience with it and will need to learn as I go. I don’t know yet that it will end up as viewable images rather than as a material. I have already begun some experiments and consulted a filmmaker on these points. There is an aspect of film, its preservation of image and time, but also its incredible ephemeral nature, in its decayable material and its reliance on light and shadow that I think will aid me in discussing the park’s own symbolic quality to life. Another area I will explore is large-scale sculpture. I have to date done only a few, as my works tend to be smaller in scale. But there is a dynamic that changes my work when it is brought up in scale that I will have the time and money to pursue further. To reach a state of vastness and smallness at the same time, which the park and glaciers do so successfully, I will need to move up in scale while maintaining a certain kind of tenderness in its parts.

Thoughts on the Project from Dario Robleto

Project Proposal

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