The Momentary Before Pandemic
Laying in dirt with a dozen people just before a global pandemic.
By Shawn-Laree and Daniel X. O’Neil
Just before the pandemic gripped the United States, we took a trip to Bentonville, Arkansas to visit the Crystal Bridges Museum and its new contemporary art space satellite, The Momentary.
This is what we do— we travel, we see new places, and we experience art. And for every show that we love, we purchase the catalog, carefully place it in a special cabinet for such things, and put it on the list of shows about which we’ll write when we're older.
Now that we live in pandemic we felt compelled to kick off this essay series early. Because there is only now, and we want to see what that now is, and writing about it helps us understand and process it.
Bentonville itself is a lovely, surprising destination. It’s the home of Walmart, with all of the attendant money and internationalism, and there are a remarkable number of good restaurants and cafes arrayed around downtown (notwithstanding the Confederate statue in the town square).
It’s half the size of Green Bay, WI, but outperforms on many fronts. There’s no football team, but there are the Ozarks. And Crystal Bridges, founded with Walton/Walmart money, is a driving force in all of this. It serves as a centerpoint for the culture economy. Nestled in woods a short walk from the courthouse, the museum has sparked development like the 21C Museum Hotel (where we stayed and which has terrific exhibits, including Refuge) and Blake St., a membership club from which we were barred.
By the time of our trip, it was clear that coronavirus was a public health threat. We were scrupulous on hand-washing, wiping all surfaces, hand sanitizer, and not opening doors with bare hands. But we kept the trip, and we were nowhere near lockdown, mentally.
In recent years, as museums have struggled to become or stay relevant, there’s been a move to create far more interactive exhibitions. Some attempts are successful, because they draw you in and make you feel more connected to the art and the artist. Others make you feel like you are in a children's museum, being dragged from one fact to the next with “touch” as the key guide to experience what you’re learning.
We experienced Gardens Speak, a transcendent performance by Tania El Khoury, “a live artist whose work focuses on audience interactivity and is concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters.” Here’s how the artist describes this piece:
Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation containing the oral histories of 10 ordinary people who were buried in these Syrian gardens.
Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories as they themselves may have recounted it. They are compiled with found audio that evidences their final moments.
Gardens Speak is limited to 10 audience members at a time. The performance lasts approximately 45 minutes. Please be prepared to remove your shoes and socks, kneel, and lay down during the performance.
We participated in the very first performance, noon on leap day, in the brand-new museum space. The Momentary was constructed in a decommissioned 63,000-square-foot cheese factory, and it feels like it.
We donned see-through raincoats and goggles, and we followed instructions to lay down and dig through a mixture of dirt and peat moss sourced from Lowe's. Why the docent divulged the source of the moss, and why it wasn’t from Wal-Mart, remain mysteries.
In the context of how our lives— all of our lives— have progressed since leap day 2020, the experience we had there in that dark cool cheese room was astoundingly not allowed. We laid there face-down, leading with the thing we can’t touch, so close to dirt that was designed for a new set of people to breathe and aspirate and handle with their hands. All of this while listening to one of 10 stories broadcast so lightly over speakers buried beneath the peat moss that we had to strain to come closer, closer to hear.
The ten of us were five couples. One of the ten, an older man, was there with his partner (she who volunteers for the museum so get-out-of-her-way). As we entered the exhibit and began to kneel, the man took an immediate and unfortunate head-first dive into one of the wooden headstones, completely destroying that portion of the exhibit within the first three minutes of its public life.
The man was quiet about it, but Dan was there, having been randomly assigned the headstone next to him, and it was amazing to see what happens so fast when people meet art. When creaky knees and age, possibly other underlying conditions, give way to the public experience. In attempting to recover, he inadvertently pulled up the wires that were carefully placed beneath the moss to deliver the stories. Infrastructure fails.
The rest of us dug toward our speaker, and listened with ears to the ground, literally. Each of the stories told of a specific person, extending our fascination with naming in memorials. Since then, discovering the names of the dead, and uplifting them in public spaces, has become a challenge. And the coroners have been so busy naming.
But this was leap day, what seems like decades ago, and the names were appropriately fetishized and their specific stories were fed to our ears.
This was no children's museum. We had to make ourselves uncomfortable in front of strangers— barefoot, lying prone in dirt head-to-toe, less than 6 ft apart. The dirt— that particular springtime smell of domestic yard work, invoking a garden of growth, and a garden of mourning.
They were stories of government-led killings, and surreptitious Syrian garden burials. All of them were rebels, even though they weren't all that rebellious. They were just living.
In the weeks since we laid down on dirt with total strangers mere inches apart, we’ve all seen regulations. Limitations. And we wonder where we’re going.
