Ax dayéen áa yax haan, Face me

I only have one question for all you billionaire industrialists of the world who own the coal fired power plants. How are you going to enjoy your wealth when the world is too ravaged for you to spend it?

Isn't it kind of idiotic to live in a digital age where our so-called intelligent devices are run by coal? Hey Apple Computer and Microsoft, coal is a 19th century technology, right?

Larry McNeil’s Global Climate Crisis Photography

Tee Harbor Jackson interviews Larry McNeil about the Lunacy of the Climate Crisis with his Arts and Humanities Fellowship

From the photo-collage "Winter in Juneau," regarding Global Climate Change. Larry is looking through an ice lens.

Part One, The Creative Process and Global Climate Change

THJ: I see that you’re busy in the midst of making new work, congratulations; you must feel pretty good about it.

LM: (laughs) Don’t congratulate me yet, there are less than eight of them so far. I’m still never sure how the public is going to respond to the work, but I guess we’ll see soon enough with an upcoming exhibition in a couple of weeks in California.

THJ: What exactly are you doing with your new work? Is it a continuation of your Fly by Night Mythology series?

LM: No, it’s about Global Climate Change. I just received an Arts and Humanities Fellowship from Boise State University, where I take the year off from teaching to dedicate to a new body of work. I think the advantage of this new work is that nearly everyone on the planet is aware of the subject, because it has already affected her or him in some manner. I can’t seem to get it out of my head. Some days it makes me either angry, a bit depressed or incredulous at how remarkably stupid we humans can be, especially here and now at the start of the 21^st Century on planet Earth. If a subject is stirring up that many emotions and thoughts, one should definitely make work about it.

THJ: What can you share with us about what you’ve learned so far?

LM: I traveled to quite a few coal fired power plants earlier this summer and realized that it is one thing to read about them, but quite another to be right there with them in all of their immensity. On a very critical level, the problem of coal powered power plants is a simple issue of money. As long as there are billions of dollars to be made from burning coal, it will continue. A simple clarity doesn’t mean solving the problem will be easy however, it just means it is easy to comprehend. It’s kind of like saying if you want to build a pyramid you just have to get millions of truck-sized bricks and place them according to your engineer. It’s a simple concept, but an overwhelming task. It’s the same here; it will be nearly impossible to get an entire industry to give up their multi-billion dollar cash cow (actually it’s more likely a multi-trillion dollar, Euro or Yen industry internationally), which unfortunately, is the burning of coal to make electricity. Easy to say, but nearly impossible to accomplish.

Yei ayaguxdatée, It Will be Stormy

I started this work with only a broad idea of how I wanted it to look, but knew I wanted a white raven to start things off. He is a signifier for being rebellious against corrupt aristocrats. I think that in order to climb out of this global climate melt-down, we have to rebel against the status quo, especially against wealthy industrialists who pollute our Earth with impunity.

THJ: So tell me about the look of these new photographs. Why the gas masks?

LM: It was definitely a visceral response to the coal fired power plants. When I got home from photographing the coal fired plants, I had a nasal irritation that turned into a nasty infection. When I was walking around them, the air definitely felt acidic, like you were breathing something that stung your nasal passages. I was in the thick of it for nearly ten days and like I mentioned, it started irritating my nasal passages. After a week, it was a gross infection and my doctor prescribed a topical antibacterial for my nasal passages. While photographing the coal fired plants I literally wished I had a gas mask and was dreading breathing the air in their vicinity. It was nasty and I felt bad for the people who have to work around them or live nearby. I especially felt bad for the people, plants and animals that had to live on the same planet where hundreds of millions of tons of coal waste go up in the air every year. Very bad indeed, and that is no joke.

"...It will be Stormy" detail. Global Climate Change.

THJ: What can we do if the electricity industry has no incentive to stop burning coal?

LM: To tell the truth, I’m not sure. Becoming informed about how truly nasty it is may be the first step. There are links all over the internet regarding the Climate Crisis, including http://www.climatecrisis.net/ and our own Environmental Protection agency at http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ The irony with the federal EPA is that in reality, they’re just as helpless as the rest of us when it comes to protecting the environment from the harm of these coal fired plants. Unfortunately, that is not a cynical opinion, but rather a stark, hot reality. I think that in order to really solve the problem, we simply stop using the electricity from the coal fired plants and stop the demand. We can’t do that though, because we need our electricity and there is no other viable alternative right now. Believe me, I think about it nearly every time I turn on my lights or watch a program on our big-screen television. So I acknowledge myself as being a part of the problem, because I’m buying the power derived from the burning of coal.

"...It will be Stormy" detail. Global Climate Change.

THJ: How does that make you feel?

LM: It’s one of those demented paradoxes. Here I am making work that has to do with informing what the issue is all about and yet I’m increasing its usage while doing it. It could drive you crazy, but I guess we have to start somewhere. Part of the reality is that burning coal is the easiest and cheapest route for us consumers to take right now. It would be very expensive to try and switch to wind and solar energy right now for our house. If I could make the switch right this moment and pay the same utility bill, I certainly would make the switch. But we can’t, the infrastructure is obviously not there. When we built our house back in 2005, it was prohibitively expensive to install solar panels on our house. We have the ideal setup for it too, with near constant sunlight with a southern exposure in a desert. It’s truly stupid to burn coal when this ideal situation is right here, but we can’t afford to make the switch, especially in this economy. This is the insanity that nearly all of us face. In the meantime, we continue to pump ghastly amounts of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every day around the world. Wouldn’t it be ironic to knowingly kill ourselves in our own wastes? I think that the punk term Sewercide fits perfectly.

"...It will be Stormy" detail. Global Climate Change.

THJ: What about your actual work for the series? Can you tell us what you were thinking about as you started working on it?

LM: Starting new work is kind of like a first date when you’re single. You’re a bit nervous about saying the wrong thing and wonder if you stink, either literally or intellectually. In the end (or the beginning) you just have to get over it and dive in. Because I’ve been working on various projects over the years, certain practices kick in kind of automatically, like getting the creative process humming. For an example, it is generally a good practice to make work that stirs something passionate deep inside you; I believe it’s at the core of the creative process. You should always make work about the passions you have and not ignore them. This is one of my key challenges as an art professor too by the way; that is, to help students get in touch with what is relevant in their lives. It’s always very rewarding to see that proverbial light bulb go on and have them discover the possibilities and potential of their own work.

THJ: Can you talk about the creative process and how you get started with new work? That seems to be a common challenge with artists; how do you approach it?

LM: It seems that at some point, you’re clear about the core idea, like I was with Global Climate Change. It’s not always like that though; sometimes it’s more nebulous, enshrouded in fog, but you know instinctively that there is something good in there to pursue. Sometimes it’s a mix of both. It seems to me that the creative process can be a slippery state of being that sometimes seems to be part subterfuge, part conscious strategy, and part intuitive act, all mixed together to figure out as you go along. As for myself, I get the feeling that part of it comes directly from my personality without much filtering, and yet other parts seem to be gifts from the creator; pure happenstance that I can’t really claim. I suspect that the creative process favors those whom constantly push it, but who knows? It’s that slippery aspect that remains a mystery, which I suppose is likely a good thing, because if we had all the answers, it would likely be a bit predictable and bland, so here is to the creative process (raises coffee mug).

THJ: Can you be more specific? What about advice for young artists trying to figure it out?

LM: I think an essential part of the creative process simply involves rolling up one’s sleeves and getting busy. In my opinion, the magic of the creative process simply lies in the act of doing. It is fairly common knowledge that the brain gets very adept at whatever it does the most. I would put forth the assertion that if you spend enough time learning something and perfecting it, you not only get accomplished at it, but you may also start doing something entirely new and unique that may be altogether your own, especially with a sense of style or visual aesthetic. Lots of artists start to make their own visual vernacular, which is when art becomes very interesting.

THJ: Can you give me an example with your own work?

LM: Maybe. I’ve been working with photography for about thirty years and when I envision a project, sometimes I have a general idea of what I want to say with the work, and how it may look, but the nitty-gritty essence of it only unfolds as I actually do the work. This means that the essence of the art happens more as a journey where one sometimes charts a general course, but a substantial part of it has to do with discovery and being open to what you find along the way. Maybe it means having the ability to notice things that other people don’t pay much attention to and emphasizing it with your work in some manner, but who knows?

This is snapshot of me working on the new print made in January at the Te Tihi artist's gathering in Rotorua, New Zealand, sponsored by Toi Maori Aotearoa. I started the print there, but couldn't finish it because I hadn't made the journey to various coal fired power plants yet. The only part not completed was the power plant, which was a critical component of the print, so the middle was blank for a number of months.

"X’áant xwaanúk Tléil yee ushk’, I'm angry you are bad."

THJ: Can you tell us why the above print looks the way it does?

LM: The new print “X’áant xwaanúk Tléil yee ushk’, I’m angry You are bad” is about Global Climate Change and has a foreboding looking set of smokestacks at the center of the print. Nearly every country in the world has these nasty coal fired power plants spewing their carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, which is what makes them universal. Ravens also appear on nearly every continent (except Antarctica, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were there too), but only our own Northwest Coast people have the legend of a white raven, so far as I know. It’s meant to be kind of satirical with the white raven looking into the empty head of a human wearing a gas mask. To me, this print feels like an old crumbling wall with ancient tribal crests and designs in the background, among other things. The white raven has to do with overcoming evil and being transformed from white to black along the way. It was vital to have the coal fired plant in there, because it is the international problem that hopefully will not be our undoing.

THJ: Does this mean that your work is targeted towards an international audience?

LM: Yes, definitely. One of my very conscious strategies with this work was to make art that has a broad audience, because the work is ultimately about humanity and not any one group. For an example, some of the key layers of meaning with the above print are for all of humanity, not one narrow demographic. We’re all faced with the nastiness of coal fired power plants.

The other element that helps to make the new work universal is my use of photography. In my opinion, photography helps to break down artificial barriers between cultures just because every culture knows what photography is and how to easily navigate it. You could say the same thing about other media too, including painting, sculpture, literature, video and music, which is the value of what the humanities have to offer.

I was looking for a dark, gritty feel with a bit of trepidation and subtle unease on the side. Some ravens are naturally regal and project a real air of aloofness, seemingly above us mere mortals.  I hardly ever have to look very hard for them, it’s the look they project when I’m around.

THJ: What about your specific cultural identity as a Tlingit and Nisgaá person? Doesn’t that influence the content and visual aesthetics of your work?

LM: By all means; this is the part of the discussion where our life’s experiences and historical background enters the fray. One’s interpretation about the meaning(s) of life, if you will. In my opinion, one of the basic truisms with humanity is that you can’t escape the culture in which you were raised; it will always be a part of your character. This is true regardless of whichever culture you are from in the world. I once had an audience member at a museum comment that she wished she had a culture to draw from for her work. I laughed at the silliness of the comment, but assured her that her culture from middle America was just as teeming and vibrant as any other in the world, all it took was acknowledging that it exists and that it has its own quirks, strengths and distinctiveness. By the way, I’m also a fully entrenched member of middle America with all strings attached, especially as a University Professor who helps teach young students how to become better humans via the educational system.

You can try and run away from your background, but it’s like trying to shake the DNA out of your body. In the end, this effort will only make you dizzy, annoyed and maybe indignant, so why deny it? If you’re in touch with the content of your art, you’re generally tapping into your life’s experiences and using them as momentum for your work; it is who you are and it is a rarefied strength to be nurtured and tended to, so that perhaps a bit of wisdom may become an element of what one is producing. I’m pretty sure this is right.

I love how everything kind of blends in together on this thrashed out wall, from our ancient Chilkat designs, to the filthy coal power plant, to the basket designs of Kéet, or Killer Whale teeth.

THJ: How does this apply to artists from other cultures trying to succeed in the world?

LM: I think it just means that you need to be true to yourself and use your natural strengths, experiences and ways of interpreting them, regardless of your demographic background. The key here is the act of interpretation with your work; this is what makes you unique in the universe and you can’t hold back. If you hold back, I think that mediocrity may sneak into the fray. At its best, this becomes a journey of discovery for both yourself and the viewer, where we have the opportunity to learn new things, which is perhaps what humanity is all about; that we do have the ability to better ourselves, whatever that means. This sensibility is essentially what I bring to the art academy as a scholar and artist for young artists.

THJ: I have a lot of questions about your other work too, including a discussion about photography, but it appears we’re out of time.

LM: I’d like to add that this body of work is having its inaugural showing at the C.N. Gorman Museum at UC Davis, where my nephew Da-ka-xeen Mehner and I are having a two person exhibition. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Director of the Museum) and Veronica Passalacqua (Curator) have graciously invited us to exhibit together, Gunalshéesh, thank you.

Arts & Humanities Fellowship sponsored by Boise State University

Exhibition sponsored by C.N. Gorman Museum from September 28 – December 5, 2010

With additional funding from the Evergreen Longhouse via their National Native Creative Development Grant

Part Two: Photography, How Process informs Meaning

All images are Copyright Larry McNeil, 2010, All Rights Reserved. You must have permission of the artist in order to reproduce any of them.

This year I earned a Boise State University Arts and Humanities Fellowship from our enlightened school. Thank you so much, I have a heartfelt gratitude for being granted the year away from teaching to make art. My Fellowship project is about Global Climate Change, as viewed from the Humanities. After a few months of concentrated research on the subject, it’s become ever clearer that a large part of humanity is either in various degrees of denial about climate change, or are cashing in on the things that are bad for the environment at an accelerated pace, which of course is quite insane. But one example are all the new coal fired power plants that America and other countries have been building over the past year, knowing full well the overwhelming negative ramifications of their actions.

The above has also made it clear that this Fellowship is likely going to be significantly more controversial than I’d originally envisioned it. The reality of global climate change seemed to be very plain and uncomplicated, but the cover-up actions of wealthy industrialists has made this stance murky and seemingly questionable. More on this later, but the effect on my work has been to make it more direct and hopefully, enlightening for the viewers.

I’ve been very busy with doing the travel, photography, editing and all of the other creative challenges linked to the Fellowship . For the first time in over a month I have an opportunity to come up for air as they say, and reflect on the work for a moment. This is a critical part of the creative process, because it allows me time to stop and absorb what’s going on with the work, let it soak in and make any changes with how it looks, what it’s saying, and the ever crucial next step.

Ravens have been a part of my visual vocabulary for a long time and I thought I’d lock him out of this work. I find it to be a bit perplexing how I made a conscious creative decision and raven snuck back in, nearly all by himself. Perhaps it is the intuitive part trumping conscious decisions. Blackbirds. They’re everywhere.

Anyway, just one of the prints has a blackbird for now. I call it the leveraging piece that set me free for all the others. It had some of the visual aesthetics I was looking for, including a gritty feel in black and white that I really like for part of the project. I like the reality of grit and the metaphor of black and white, whatever that means. I’m still figuring it out, but keep going back to it.

Desktop sneak preview of new Fellowship work. That sly raven is everywhere; this is a small part of the larger print.

Part of the dialogue has to do with the traditional role that raven has played as a transformer or changeling, and the reality that human beings play the role of transformers quite well too. After all, there is no other animal that has transformed our home planet as much as humans, at least in recent memory. My work retains its focus on changelings, only there is an obvious shift to the two-legged variety.

One of my favorite creative devices is this simple little pocket journal. It’s small enough to just fit in my pocket and as I think of ideas, they go into the notebook. It’s not really a journal, but is literally a finely crafted miniature version, made of splendid Italian leather with heavy archival paper. When one is in the midst of an ongoing project, ideas come in unpredictably sometimes, and it’s good to try and capture them before they fly off to wherever they came from. So in a way, this is my own version of a dreamcatcher. I am also in love with words and wanted a worthy place for them to gather strength prior to powering up my art, if that makes any sense.

This is a miniature version of a finely crafted, handmade journal that I use as a part of my creative process.

I keep thinking about the juxtaposition of human responses to various experiences and why they are either visceral or intellectual. For an example, this morning a friend posted a photo of a large centipede and I related a story of how I instinctively and instantly killed one that was running under our baby’s crib. You can’t get much more visceral than that, especially to an overt threat. In my opinion, we humans are lax with our response to the carbon dioxide emissions that are a key cause for global climate change because we simply can’t see it. It’s invisible, so we don’t have the fast and instinctive response to it as we may have if it were visible. Anyway, this is simply a theory that is already finding a visual manifestation in the Fellowship work.

I’ll post more entries as I progress, including some about process, because it has been accentuated with the work. Some artists just gloss over this aspect, but I find it compelling because process is such an essential element of my visual strategies, and is why the work looks like it does. In the meantime, it’s off to make a pot of sumptuous morning coffee. Pull up a chair and give me your mug, it’s pretty good.

I just got back from a grueling, hot and humid eleven days of shooting new photographs in parts of the American Midwest. One time when I got out of the rent-a-car, my glasses actually steamed up, quite the surprise for this Alaskan boy living in Idaho. Dang. My wife was a great sport about it, as she was my driver and sounding board for various topics.

I am the lucky recipient of an Arts & Humanities Fellowship project on Global Climate Change (from my progressive colleagues Boise State University, thank you). This is another aspect of a broader project that will encompass other parts of our country and America’s role with global climate change. It’s been quite the wake-up call for what I’ve been seeing along the way, and what I’ll be sharing with my photography.

For some reason, I find myself drawn back to a photograph titled “1491″ that I made nearly twenty years ago. It often has me pondering the stars, wondering what would have happened had we Native Americans evolved how we were meant to evolve, in a holistic manner in harmony with the Earth. I found myself simply wondering how humanity would have evolved had the humans indigenous to the Americas imposed their cultural practices onto the European immigrants wanting to live in our country. Imagine that for a moment. Forcing the new European immigrants to learn our languages and cultural practices in order to live here. Can you imagine a world not in the midst of a human induced ecological meltdown?

"1491" by Larry McNeil

From a strategic standpoint, it is very demanding of my time, which is why a year-long Fellowship is perfect for this project, which involves travel to various sites, such as the coal fired power plants at various parts of the country. This is proving to be more challenging than anticipated, by the way. I really love the idea of using photography as a key aspect of this project, because on one level it is very straightforward, but on another level entirely, it has the ability to be mysterious and speak to a very intuitive part of one’s perceptions.

The Coffee Quest

I keep myself amused with a Coffee Quest whenever I travel. It has been a nice diversion when a bit of indulgence is in order, especially since I never drank coffee until I was in my 40’s; I was more of a tea kind of guy. If there was no decent coffee to be had at the hotels off the beaten paths (who wants to stay in a hotel near a coal fired power plant?), my emergency coffee press came out of hiding.

An exquisite cup of coffee from Madison, Wisconsin, at the place next to Ellas Kosher Deli. It was cool how the bubbles looked next to this table, so I put the cup there and fired off a few quick shots on my iPhone camera.

OK, back to work; roll up those sleeves and get that cool infrared film processed and Kodachrome shipped off to Kansas! And sip some coffee.