It seems an odd subject for a photograph: a brick wall.
Wings took it years ago, in a study of the old Pueblo masonry and architecture that ended up as a photographic series entitled Walls and Windows. And this one was just what you see here: a close-up of the wall, no contrasting background, nothing else.
It has always spoken to me. It has a lot to say.
This was, of course, one of the entries in his one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces. Here’s how he described his vision of the piece placed in the context of the exhibition’s narrative:
BRICKS
Brick and mortar. In the era of the Internet, it’s become shorthand for saying that something exists in the real world.
In my world, this is as real as it gets.
This was taken as part of my Walls and Windows series; it’s a close-up of the exterior wall of a home, built with adobe bricks made by hand in the traditional way and mortared using the same earth. It’s an apt metaphor for our people and our ways: our very existence, built of the earth beneath our feet, shaped carefully by hand and fitted meticulously together. As time passes, chinks and cracks appear in the interstices as the earth returns to dust and falls away — only to be gathered again, mixed with straw and the sacred water that gives us life, reconstituted, reconstructed, recreated. Strong, solid, and resilient, as our people remain.
Signed on white matting; black wooden frame.
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Of course, this is only a fraction of what the image has to say. If you look closely, you can see and hear so much more.
What first attracted me to this photo was the artistry, of course. What’s that, you say? No artistry in a picture of a bunch of plain putty-colored bricks?
Look again.
These are, of course, not ordinary bricks. Which is to say, they are not modern, mass-produced bricks. They’re very old — at hundreds of years in existence, some of them no doubt qualify as ancient. They’re also hand-made — even the bricks made more recently to replace those finally worn beyond repair. Every single one of them is, by its very existence, an homage to tradition, to a much older way of life that is nonetheless in many relevant ways the same today for the people in this place.
Look at them. Uneven, edges slanted, one end higher than the other, notches and chinks worn away at the corners. Nothing perfect, as we as a larger society have become accustomed to expect, with construction materials today made commercially, at high volume, via machine technologies. Instead, utterly human: imperfect, gap-toothed, slightly bent and crooked, a fitting metaphor for the flawed mortals who form the foundations and protective walls of society, micro- and macro- and the communities large and small that it comprises.
Look. You can actually see the hard lumps of clay, the bits of straw, that went into making the bricks individually, by hand. The local clay, red earth, mixed with water and straw and molded into shape, then dried and hand-fotted into ancient grooves and spaces, the mortar troweled between and thumbed into place. The red clay, now washed putty-white by age and sun and wind and light, a trick of the eye and yet an example of real erosion and fading, the way a quick glance at an elder focuses on gray hair and lined skin, obscuring the beauty of the bone structure beneath and the accumulated wisdom looking out from beneath creased eyelids.
Of course, there are all the more modern metaphors involving brick walls, and there’s probably some truth to the notion that that makes the image attractive, too — or at least interesting. I’ve run into more than my share of them in daily life, and sometimes the question is less whether it’s blocking your path than whether there’s a path there at all. Sometimes walls are there to remind us that not everything “out there” is good, or healthy, or safe, or even desirable. Sometimes they’re not boxing us in or barring our way; they’re keeping genuine threats confined, where they cannot do us harm. And so we need to remember that not every wall is an obstacle to be circumvented, but sometimes a blessing in disguise.
And nowhere is the role of fortification more salient than here, in the place where the use of multi-story architecture and perimeter retaining walls were pioneered, lo, these thousand years ago. Other Pueblo peoples, of course, utilized the multi-level dwellings, but few did so so early and with such enduring success. And it is testament to Taos Pueblo’s own enduring existence in this place that its people first built retaining walls around the old village, walls that served many purposes: to keep predators of all kinds and species out; to keep energetic children in, no doubt; to provide a communal place to sit and socialize, or to be watchful; to bound the village for purposes of demarcation, social and spiritual.
And yet, like all walls, whether perimeter or structural, they are subject to the vagaries of wind and weather and time. As in the photo above, the mortar develops chinks and crevices; it creates interstices where perhaps none existed before. The spaces let in sunlight, but they also let in weather and more. Like the openings chiseled into the tightly-knit cultural and spiritual traditions by conquest and forced assimilation, they open the structure to new influences, for good and for ill. Some of the chinks can be repaired with a new coat of mortar at mudding season; blocking out the worst of the effects for most of another year. But some crevices have solidified into permanent fissures, and what’s done is done: There will be no going back; the outside effects are here to stay, and must be dealt with.
Perhaps that’s why I have always found this photo so intriguing, so disquieting, so comforting all simultaneously. As someone who exists perforce in the interstices, seeing the wall survive year after year after year, for centuries, shows that it can be done. Yes, it sometimes requires repair, and sometimes that means incorporating new into old, but the underlying structure endures.
And that is art at its best.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
