Three Tornados

Scenes from The Wizard of Oz, 1939

1.

I’ve never seen or experienced a tornado yet the image of a twisting funnel cloud is a vivid and frequent inhabitant of my imagination.  At the risk of cliché, it must have begun with a very famous cinematic tornado. I am certainly not the only one of my generation for whom The Wizard of Oz made an extraordinary impression. Dorothy was my first love, I was obsessed with how someone seemingly so fragile could have such a powerful singing voice. Not to mention she looked a lot like my mom.  I also suffered my first heartbreak when around 12 years old I realized that Dorothy was not forever the delicate heroine that I yearned for every year but was in fact a messed up middle-aged woman named Judy Garland.

Based on the children’s book by L. Frank Baum, the author named his protagonist Dorothy Gale after reading a newspaper account of a young girl with that name found dead face down in a ditch, killed by a tornado.  The film was broadcast once a year and watching it was like taking a pilgrimage to a holy land.   I loved all the characters especially the mayor of Munchkin land, the Scarecrow, Glinda, the Witch of the North, even the flying monkeys.  Since we had a black and white television, the film’s transition to color was lost on me.  The story begins in the peaceable and homely landscape of the Midwest.  A sudden tornado lifts Dorothy and the house she is cowering in and drops her amidst the wonders and terrors of Oz.  At the end of the film she clicks her Ruby Slippers only to return to the banality of Kansas, a decision I found unsupportable.   Each year’s viewing found me silently praying that this time, somehow she would not click those slippers and remain in Oz with Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Lion.

The concept of ‘special effects’ was not something I was aware of.  I did not wonder how the Wicked Witch appeared and disappeared in a puff of smoke or how the apple trees could have arms with which to throw their own apples, I accepted every image in the film as true to its own world.  So the twister’s swirling, slithering darkness was as real to me as the gnarly elm trees outside my own bedroom window.

As there was no such thing as computer generated graphics for film in 1939, a model tornado had to be constructed. After multiple failures the funnel cloud was formed by a kind of large windsock made of wire-reinforced muslin.  To create the snaking movement of a tornado two mechanical arms, one at the top and one at the bottom moved independently of one another across a miniature landscape, while off camera wind machines and stage hands threw dust and debris.  Mounted in front of the camera and slightly out of focus were two large pieces of glass covered in gray cotton balls shimmying back and forth, mimicking puffy mammatus clouds.  It is a remarkable bit of cinematic fantasy, visceral and sublime.

This chaotic scene fused two things for me, the terrifying unpredictability of the world and Dorothy’s quivering desire to escape the oppression of adults.  I intuitively understood Dorothy’s dilemma, she had to leave childhood to free herself but at the cost of losing the comforts of the familiar.  I too yearned to be lifted over the rainbow where I might hold Dorothy’s hand and together we would seek the solace to be found in the transitory love, beauty and friendship encountered on our great adventure.

 

Detail, On the Origins of Poetry, photographic emulsion on white cotton, 1991

 

2.

Perhaps it was not coincidence that I eventually moved to the land of Dorothy lovers – San Francisco. There were many early mornings stepping outside into faint traces of night blooming jasmine that I thought to myself ‘We are not in Kansas anymore’.  In San Francisco I began to have recurring dreams of tornados. The usual scenario involved emotional tumult with friends or lovers. While struggling bodies writhed in fraught interactions, a funnel cloud would appear. In one particularly vivid dream a miniature tornado spun on a bare torso, creating a dark vortex twirling like an infernal shadow.

In my artwork at the time, I was both unmasking and obfuscating the effects of my Roman Catholic upbringing.  Having been an altar boy, I was especially drawn to the relationship between image and ceremony, body and ritual. In Catholicism the body interacts with images and objects, we bow before them; light candles beneath them, and on feast days parade them through the streets.  Our bodies are not our own, we willingly become servants to our idols.  In the case of Catholicism’s ruling icon, the image of the crucified or dead Christ; we submit to the mortified body, and in the Catholic Mass we consume the body and blood in the alchemical hope of eternal life.

Hoping to achieve similar effects in my installations, I employed darkened walls, spotlights, large and small images, symbolically loaded objects unanchored from their cultural contexts, and language in various forms. I think back on some of those environments as a church of madness, and not in a good way.  While there may have been strong individual images, my work was a confusion of signs and gestures in which symbols for fascism, guilt, the gothic, and less-than-subtle hints of the loss of innocence, mixed together in theatrical indulgence.  I vaguely defended my melodramatic tendencies as a counter to the emptiness of the post-minimalism of my art school professors of the late 1970s. I desired ‘content’ with a capital ‘C’ and Catholicism and the history of the 20th century provided plenty of that to choose from.

Detail, On the Origins of Poetry, press-type on silver gelatin print, 1991

In 1991, my friend and colleague, Maria Porges, invited me to participate in an exhibition she was curating called Image, Object, Place: Photography and Installation.  Given a gallery room in which to work, I wanted to create an environment that employed less obvious religious imagery but still implied an inscrutable ritual.  I was also becoming increasingly aware of my problematic dependence on loaded imagery and references.  I had developed a kind of parasitic relationship to content, as if to imply that because the issue was important, by association my work must therefore be important as well.  It almost goes without saying that my work suffered from a profound lack of humor.

I purchased an old photograph in a second-hand store of what appeared to be an early 20th c. European intellectual complete with high collar, goatee and pince-nez perched on the bridge of his nose.   To me he represented the cultural ideals of a vanquished order.  Maybe I could make fun of him.  I printed 26 versions of the man with his mouth scratched off the negative, creating a ragged hole over which floated one of the letters of the alphabet in gold gothic font.  Wanting an American image to oppose my European intellectual, I toyed with various icons from Betty Boop to Elvis.  The recurring tornado dreams were back in full force and while terrifying in my dreams, the image of the funnel cloud tearing up cornfields and menacing spindly farmhouses was in a way classic Americana.

At the time I was experimenting with a product called ‘Liquid Light’ which is a photographic emulsion that one can apply to various materials in order to print images onto cloth, wood, or metal.  I tested printing an image of a funnel cloud on a white cotton handkerchief.  The image was absorbed into the tooth of the fabric like a stain.  The simple purity of a handkerchief is soiled by human excretion.  We wipe the drip of our noses, the dirt off our hands, the sweat from our brow, and dry the tears of joy or anguish. The handkerchief is a collector of residue, proof of our physical exertions.  It also made me think of Veronica’s Veil, that original (and mythical) first relic of Christ’s torment.

Hans Memling, Saint Veronica, Oil on Panel, 1475

I constructed my piece around these two opposing images; the formal, controlled culture of the European man versus the chaotic and unpredictable power of nature as manifested in the funnel cloud.  I titled the installation On the Origins of Poetry and provided a faux-curatorial statement which contained these two questions:

What is an image if not a trace? What is a memory if not a stain?

Although I meant the title to be understood as a satire on the pretensions of art and academia, I was also proposing the ersatz Freudian idea that art was born of the struggle between the repression of culture and the inchoate forces of our psyche. Seeking to suggest that the installation was not merely a symbolic representation of ritual but an active site of activity; like an elementary school punishment, I scribbled on the gray wall ‘My fluids remain conflicted, mama’ over and over again, erasing, and re-inscribing the words so that chalk dust gathered like a phantom cloud on the floor of the gallery.

On the Origins of Poetry, Installation View, 1991

 

3.

Although tornados occur on every continent except Antarctica, it is in the states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota, where warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with the cool dry air from Canada and the Rocky Mountains to form ‘tornado alley’.  Early in American history the tornado gathered a singular and mythic force in the cultural imagination.  Not simply as a sign of the power of nature but as a symbol of volatile divinity.  Increase Mather, the Puritan overseer of the Salem Witch Trials, believed that God’s displeasure with his human creations was manifest in everyday life via a variety of misfortunes.  In 1690 he wrote:

A tornado seems to be not a cloud but some sort of inconceivable created structure — one that reaches up from the ground to the heavens as though extending from this world to the next….You can’t help but see it as essentially supernatural.

First photograph of a tornado, August 26, 1884

There is disagreement over the first photograph of a tornado. But the above image from August 28, 1884, taken in either Howard, South Dakota or in Kansas is one of the earliest.  Most sources list the photographer as unknown; some attribute the image to F.N. Robinson.  The photograph is clearly doctored, as the photographic materials of that time could not have rendered the dramatic tonal variations between the demonic tendrils of the funnel cloud snaking toward the earth and the malevolent meringue frothing in the heavens.  It is also unlikely that F.N. Robinson’s cumbersome large format camera would have had a shutter speed fast enough to capture the rapidly transforming formations of the unholy trinity of three funnel clouds simultaneously.

I googled F.N. Robinson to ascertain something about the photographer but could only find information on a Harvard University professor who was a scholar of medieval literature.  Chaucer, poet of the late 14th century, father of the English language, was his specialty.  For a moment I fancied the photographer and the professor might be the same person.  He could be my man in On the Origins of Poetry.  Robinson would have to have been 17 years old and a long way from home to make the photograph.  I was charmed with the conceit that F.N. Robinson was a Medievalist with a secret identity as a storm chaser.  Like an American version of Hugo Cabret, a character like that would make a good subject for young adult fiction or a graphic novel.

Common as it was to understand tornados as God’s judgment upon a sinful world; in the 19th century there were other interpretations that instead inveighed against man’s intervention upon the nature.  Large-scale deforestation to make way for farmland and cattle grazing was seen as one possible cause of the unleashing of such destructive forces. While others claimed that the new and intimidating contraption crossing the plains of the Midwest, the locomotive, might be the cause of the climate’s unrest.  The fact that a tornado sounded like ‘a thousand trains’ passing contributed to the paranoia that somehow the sound, smoke and vibrations emanating from these giant engines were sparking nature’s antagonism.

The two opposing explanations of the 19th century, God’s opprobrium or environmental disturbance, are two sides of the same coin with echoes in contemporary arguments about global climate change.  There is no direct scientific link between climate change and the power and frequency of tornados. In fact, some argue that because tornado formation requires the clash of warm and cold air, a warming atmosphere would diminish the frequency.  No matter the cause of devastating storms, these two views, the supernatural versus the ecological, imply that humans deserve their punishment.  Both causes can be addressed and maybe remedied, either by living according to some minister’s version of God’s law or by stopping the dumping of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.  Which do you think is easier to implement?

It is hard to resist the metaphor of the funnel cloud as the capricious finger of God, randomly flicking off humans.  But symbols only exist if we understand them as such. The tornado is the ultimate tumult, an arbitrary and skittish apocalypse.   Americans are offended by the arbitrary.  The word itself has its roots in the concept of the arbiter, one who decides according to personal whims, usually a monarch of some sort.  Randomness is fundamentally undemocratic. We explain violent crimes through human intentions gone awry.  But what of God’s will especially when it appears malevolent and without reason?  Where do we turn?  We cannot stand that kind of loneliness.

 

Coda

Ariel views of devastation, homes shattered and scattered like a million toothpicks, fuel trucks overturned in corn fields, clothing hangs from splintered trees like sad pennants, people in t-shirts and jeans pick through the rubble, lifting bits of architecture in search of their cats, dogs, their previous lives; these are the familiar images of the aftermath of a tornado.  The power of a tornado is measured by its F-force; F-1 being scary but not very dangerous to F-5, which means you and everything around you is fucked.  The F in the F–scale refers to the University of Chicago scientist named Tetsuya Fujita who developed the system.  Fujita was born in Japan in 1920 and living in Kokura when, because of thick cloud cover, the atomic bomb meant for his city was re-directed to Nagasaki instead.  Studying the aftermath of atomic blasts in Japan led him to his research in sudden and destructive microbursts in the atmosphere in America, i.e., tornados.

Voracious and indiscriminate, the funnel cloud sucks everything from its context and spits it out elsewhere. Sometimes an object is put down almost delicately, unharmed a few feet away, other items are thrown into the next county.  After family, friends and pets are found, people often search the debris for family photographs.  It is common to think of photographs and memories as synonymous. To lose family photographs is to lose evidence of one’s personal history, which after death itself, is the worst thing that can happen.  Paper is particularly vulnerable to extensive airborne relocation.  Imagine a twister full of flotsam, dirt, stones, glass, fragments of a picket fence and thousands of photographs.  In that sense Dorothy’s experience seeing her family and friends pass by the window while she is inside the funnel cloud is metaphorically accurate.

 

With social media it has become possible to re-unite orphaned photographs that were literally scattered to the wind, with their owners.  The Facebook page Oklahoma Tornado Recovery and the website Lost Photos of Joplin for example are hosted by people who recover, clean, post and return lost photographs. Scrolling through the dozens of pages on the Joplin site, it is hard not be moved and stunned by that paradox of humanity, sameness and individuality.  All those baby pictures, all those graduations, marriages, parties, sunsets and vacations at the lake. Among the stained, abraded and torn images, one picture on the Joplin site really seized me. Taken three days before Christmas in 2010, it shows us a beautiful young Goth boy wearing a Doors t-shirt with his arm around a woman who appears to be ravaged with cancer and/or chemo. She is bald, unsmiling, almost yellow, sexless, transformed by disease into a medical experiment.  Her eyes avert the camera, while he looks straight at it and by extension at us.  His eyes are full of hope, light, and future.   The photo is distressed by its passage through storm, in places the emulsion appears to be lifting off the paper.  The photograph is not simply a transparent window to a frozen moment forever preserved; like weathered skin, the scars on its surface bear witness to experience in time.

Once again we are reminded of the role of photography in the quotidian.  Taking pictures of ourselves can be thoughtless habit, a narcissistic twitch.  But we seem to need the momentary assurance that a photographic image can provide; that we are here, here now, that we belong with these people, these friends, this family, tribe, clan.   The Joplin tornado of May 22, 2011 was categorized in excess of F-5 and killed at least 160 people. Its force redistributed thousands of photographs across miles of Missouri landscape. In this random sampling of middle-American photographic activity, you can see many unconscious esthetic gestures exploited and refined by photographers as diverse as Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston and Cindy Sherman.  But normal people are not artists; they are not taking pictures with the history of representation in mind. They are not trying to point out ugliness, fear, banality, or injustice.   They are not trying to change the world with their ‘vision’.  They take pictures as a kind of minor celebration, a humble homage to the moment, in which this person, this place, this thing is important, crucial, irreplaceable.  It is a momentary refutation of the inevitable dispersal of all things.