Petrblt – Peter Eichenberger holds forth no more
Scientia aurea — Knowledge is Golden
Peter Eichenberger died Thanksgiving morning and proved well his enduring unique qualities with the breadth and nature of his mourning. Just one of those qualities was: if you were ready for it, Peter was down with it, and so he made many many friends. They have mourned the loss of his excellent company and all he might have said, but celebrated a life lived full speed and damn the torpedoes, smelling the roses and leaving no stone unturned along the way. Teasing and sarcasm was our way, as with many, and he would hate those cliches, but he was a man worthy hyberbole, since his life consisted of it.
I feel very lucky to have explored Cameron Park’s myriad of alleyways on bike with him this summer, and glad that I shared so many drinks at Sad’s with him, and I hate like the dickens I never got him together with my dad, whose stories of Depression downtown Raleigh and Southern Railroad energized him any time I touched on them. He could ably discurse on innumerable subjects, and he taught me much. He reminded me that Willie York had ditched and piped Pigeon House Branch to build the first shopping center in the Southeast when I was writing about that troubled creek, and he explained to me that the “geodesic” dome I liked so much at the Fairgrounds was actually made of hexagons (instead of pentagrams like Bucky’s). He could write in the Downtowner of dog history and at Metro of Raleigh history and in the Indy of technological history, but I loved to hear him talk of cultural history and the local media history he had lived with all these years. He was a writer, Raleigh’s own Gonzo, but he was rooted in the Earth by what he could do with his hands, which was just about anything if he wanted to.
What he wanted was for the world to be right and what he knew was that the world is very very screwed up. He was right, and when those dark spectres bothered him he would share about the Mayan prophecies or the bombed levees or some other conspiratorial tale that bothered some but seemed clearly to be metaphors: the world is very very screwed up.
Peter also gathered the best kind of vibes and lived in the harmony of many positive energies. Thus was he beloved and is honored by so many in the words that have flowed since his passing. He leaves behind many words of his own, but scattered over the town of Raleigh (and the world wide web) like raucous crows, singing a noisy chant of art, art for life, art against the controlling state and the corporate fascists, art for love. Peter love Peter.
Here are some of the many links for the outpouring online for Peter and links for his own writing:
Peter’s wonderful narrative in the Indy post accident
The Second Battle of New Orleans: notes of a bike repair warrior
remembrance by Indy’s Shirlette Ammons
Peter’s article archive at The Indy
Peter’s articles at Metro magazine
posts by Peter at Goodnight Raleigh
Peter’s articles at New Raleigh
Mark Kuykendall’s remembrance at New Raleigh
New Raleigh’s Memorial post w pics and words from many
NandO news article about Peter’s death
Black Mountain College Continues to Inspire, Fascinate
Black Mountain College and BMC+AC, the Asheville museum and art center devoted to its memory and influence, continue to generate artistic and literary responses that reverberate with the powerful cultural forces that coursed through the college until 1957. An upcoming show at the Asheville center will feature Ray Johnson, whose personal correspondence with me is described on my Black Mountain page. I am looking forward to attending and writing about the show, whose curator, Sebastian Matthews, was so welcoming and enthusiastic at the recent BMC conference. He started a blog just for this show and it’s full of wonderful Ray J images and stories. Much more about Ray Johnson before and after the show in February.
From BMC to NYC: The Tutelary Years of Ray Johnson (1943-1966)
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Jonathan Williams feature by Jeffery Beam and Richard Owens
Jeffery Beam, UNC botanical librarian and Hillsborough poet, has made a major contribution to Black Mountain documentation with his recently posted Jonathan Williams archive, which gathers a wide selection of photography, poetry and essays in order to capture the unique vision of Jonathan Williams. Jeffery and Richard describe the scope of the project below.
The work he produced for more than half a century is such that no one activity or identity takes primacy over any other. He is never only a poet or photographer, an essayist or publisher. What we find instead in the figure of Williams is a continuity that cuts across these practices — something we might call a poetics of gathering. All of his efforts are linked through an unswerving desire to collect and preserve, harvest and distribute.
The project, which resides at Jacket Magazine, includes a photo essay, past essays and new pieces in response to Williams’ death in 2008 or commissioned for this project. More details from Jeffery:
You’ll also discover 26 portraits of Jonathan from the age of about 12 up until 2005 – with other images scattered throughout the essays, 24 photographs by Jonathan – a number of which have never been published, works of art in honor of Jonathan, an unpublished interview with Jonathan by editor Richard Owens, a complete Jargon bibliography by Owens, and a selected Jonathan Williams publications bibliography compiled by me from a forthcoming complete bibliography. Jeffery Beam
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Raleigh has some small claims to fame relative to Black Mountain lore. Long before Glenwood South became known as an art center, Gilliam & Peden Art Gallery on Glenwood Avenue organized a show, curated by Ben Williams, called Black Mountain Connection. It featured Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as many others as seen below. This is my copy of the prospectus for the 1987 show.
(click to enlarge)
The NC Museum of Art hosted a major exhibition of BMC material in 1987. In conjunction with this show, which also traveled to Annandale-on-Hudson and New York City, New York, , MIT Press published a truly sumptuous volume entitled The Arts at Black Mountain College by Mary Emma Harris. The book is wonderful, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t now come now with the checklist of the exhibition which is tucked inside my copy from the show. Looking over it, I recall the intense immediacy evoked by the multitude of so many different kinds of objects in that show. There were architectural models, prints, oils and products of every imaginable drawing device and surface; announcements, bulletins, programs, photographs, glyphs, scores, weavings, calligraphy, letterpress printings and bound books. You got a sense of the interspersing and practical (yet clearly micro-utopian) productivity of this self-contained culture studying culture. The exhibition, The Arts at Black Mountain College 1933-1957 was organized by the Edith C. Blum Art Institute of Bard College and contained 219 items.
NCSU’s Gregg Museum has also done its part for BMC. Anni Albers was featured in a 2007 lecture (links to pdf) by Mary Emma Harris (who had previously lectured there about the architecture of Black Mountain). The NCSU Colleges of Textile and Design offers specialized degrees combining design and technology through the Anni Albers Scholars Program, which “is named for a designer who exemplifies the ideals and goals to which the program aspires: textile designer and artist Anni Albers.”
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- Margret Kentgens-Craig’s book
Yet another local connection to the threads of BMC influence is Margret Kentgens-Craig, part-time Raleigh resident (and fondly remembered stalwart supporter of my Paper Plant bookstore), whose book The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts 1919-1936 delineates the major connections between the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. Walter Gropius, a nine year director of the Bauhaus, lectured at the college, but also “tried continually to secure a teaching position at Harvard for Josef Albers.” Lucky for BMC he didn’t! Albers, according to Kentgens-Craig, “was the first Bauhaus master to acquire a position at an American educational institution, Black Mountain College. His wife Anni, who was Jewish, joined him.” The book describes the enormous impact Bauhaus ideas had on American architecture, and credits Lawrence Kocher, a BMC instructor, with creating opportunities for the dissemination of those ideas.
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A final BMC note: Jeff Davis posted recently at his blog Natures previewing the Charles Olson Centenary Conference, taking place at Simon Fraser University in Briitish Columbia June 4-10, 2010. Jeff will be in Vancouver “to make a presentation on Olson’s curricular projects.”
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Bain Review
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The first and most amazing truth is how the artists found, saw, loved and preserved the incredible piece of found art that was the Bain Water Treatment Plant. The artists, as a group, put aside individual ambitions (though not their individual styles and initiative) and sublimated their work to respond, so powerfully, to what was given. Almost as amazing was the breadth and rich variety of work generated out of this project. The initial glimpses of responses displayed at the Boylan Art Walk, the slide projections, mail art, photographs and paintings shown at the music fundraiser, the shower of documentation and Bain textures created at the preview show, all culminated with a massive but orchestrated symphony of sense experiences presented on site for two weekends. Last and most is how each person that came could build a totally unique, self-selected, more or less socialized experience for themselves to treasure, hopefully over multiple visits with lots of time for some details. That’s what I did, and the Bain Project became such a personal project that I can only review it from partly inside. But that is perfect, because I repeat: the Bain Project brought everybody inside, inside an amazing space inhabitated by the spirits of water, clean industry, and civil structure, evoked and transmutated into very present and highly charged artistic structures, made by the wonderful Bain Project team.
What an amazing challenge for a bunch of artists. The logistics of a small factory. But there was a ringer in the group. Daniel Kelly, who is Thomas Sayre’s right hand man in some fairly spectacular artistic endeavors, was the founder and leader of the Bain Project. He acted as liason with Greg Hatem, the owner and primary sponsor. He coordinated the artist meetings and kept the activities within some broad parameters, but Daniel found a way to really turn the artists loose and let some serious artistic consensus building take place. The project took on a life of its own and everybody breathed it.
The Bain experience started with finding the damn place. Isolated, sequestered, separated by chasym – all these things fit better than tucked away for the Bain site. Yet the crowds were huge each day. The poster said “site specific artwork,” but I don’t think visitors really knew what to expect. The perfectly lovely red brick art decco exterior led to a museum-like art decco lobby, and then after you were wisked into the “registration room,” all bets were off. Perhaps you would wander back to the front lobby, and discover the noxious but vivid chlorine room. More likely, you would head right into the main hall of filtration tanks, which retained a strong sense of functionality, not least because of the beautiful, pristine restoration of one of the control panels by Christian Karkow.
The row of large tanks, whose top openings are level with the floor, were a bit inscrutable. The symmetry and repetitions of the structures in this largest and least decayed room had a very calming effect. You might start discovering side rooms, or perhaps take the narrow central staircase down to the lowest level with huge pipes and valves, and then back all the way up to the small fourth story level with huge wooden cisterns and a nice view of the acres of outside water storage tanks surrounded by Piedmont meadow. Wherever you go, you see various artistic treatments of the unpolished porcelain balls that constituted the largest aggregrate of the Bain facility’s geological filtration system.
The Bain facility used gravity and the simple but effective filter formed by fixed sand to clean water for the City of Raleigh. There were additives, especially chlorine, and many other complicating factors but the fundamental processes of the Bain plant are visibly inherent in the spaces and equipment. Rather than transform these technical elements or even disturb them much, the artists re-inhabited the human spaces in the Bain facility with installations that responded to and co-existed with the strong presence of water – water magnified and empowered by brute human technology. The Bain art project celebrated and brought out the best bits of this amazing system.
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It was a wonderful place to meet and greet, with many spectators and volunteers and also lots of Bain artists on hand at all times, which was part of what made the installation event so unique. By far the most spectacular piece of socializing I did was with my new urban explorer friends, who are going to show me the bowels of Pigeon House Branch underneath Glenwood South. They had been exploring Bain for at least as long as Daniel Kelly had been painting there before starting the project, and a couple of them actually served on the volunteer clean-up crew and also attended the event. They showed me what I had looked for in vain – the passage down to the main pipes leading toward downtown, where an old artist friend told me he had traveled with his spunky teenage daughter. After the event, I contacted the urban explorers and “Snailapple” turned out to be a very gifted and intelligent young man with a unique perspective on our urban landscape.
Above is the hatch that leads to Bain’s darkest recesses, pictured below.
Click on the picture above to see Snailapple’s Bain pics.
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I was so lucky to get involved with the Bain Project as the Raleigh Naturalist, presenting to the artists on a Saturday morning last fall about Walnut Creek, Rocky Branch, and Raleigh’s watersheds. Several of the artists were personal friends, and several more became so during this process. I was asked to help with the final details of the watershed mapping activity, and I may yet help with the in-project documentation process. These ten posts have been a blast to write, and I feel I haven’t had so much artistic fun for years. Yeah, Bain!!
The Raleigh Naturalist presents at Bain
Thanks to Daniel Kelly, Tracy Spencer, the Bain artists and documenters, New Raleigh, Empire Properties and all the other sponsers for a great show!
Bain Music and Media
The Bain Project has garnered its fair share of attention and brought together an amazing array of artistic and journalistic support. It also crossed and melded artistic media in an extraordinary fashion. The installation itself captured sights, sounds, smells and memories in a unique way, and a fitting emblem of this is the Bain Music Project cd, which will certainly stand the test of time as a valuable record of the Bain Project experience and a fascinating album of boundary-pushing music in its own right.
The cd offers short interview excerpts with a former Bain employee, mixed with cuts of local bands recording inside the Bain space. The remaining pieces constitute primary Bain Project work by Lee Moore, whose maternal condition precluded extensive on-site participation. Lee and her husband (and longtime musical partner) David Crawford put together some amazing sets of sounds as Le Machine, and also did me the great honor of building cut # 12 with an old water-based poem of mine. I recorded it with Jen Coon, and then Lee put it over ocean sounds and her newborn baby’s heartbeat! I could never have dreamed that a piece of my writing would have such a stunning setting. Thank you Lee.
I enjoy every track of the cd, especially Crowmeat Bob’s highly Bain-ful sounds and Xopher Thurston’s string interpretation of Dana Raymond’s pipe symphonies, but am totally un-equipped to remark on the local popular music. I just know my 20 year old daughter was thrilled to see me on the same album as the Rosebuds! I also know that the cd cover is masterful and fits so well with the project, thanks to Ladye Jane of New Raleigh fame. New Raleigh published the cd, and was a tremendous support to the Bain Project overall, including provision of the Bain website.
Starting from the website, let’s trace the main branchings of media and online response to the project.
NPR
May 09 “State of Things” interview with Dana Raymond, Marty Baird Sarah Powers and JenCoon
SpokenWord.org archived radio link
New Raleigh
Volunteer call hosted by New Raleigh
January 09 Missing Plaque Mystery
February 09 Music Fundraiser
March 09 David Millsaps essay
May 09 Ladye Jane’s Q & A
May 09 State of Things alert with links to Sarah and Dana
May 09 Toxic Lead Alert with Bain concerns
Independent Weekly
March 09 Music Fundraiser guide
April 09 Indie Blog article
May 09 Calendar listing
May 09 Site and project description by Hobert Thompson
May 09 Indie blog Q & A with organizer Daniel Kelly and others
NandO
May 09 Art to suit city’s fluid identity
NC Museum of Art
May 09 blog interview with Museum staffers Jen Coon & Stacey Kirby
NCSU
DESIGNlife news with listing of the numerous alumni involved
Bain credits
Blog Reactions
30 Threads feature
Raleighwood,NC John & Clydes visit with informative links
Queen of the Pavement – huge and lovely pics
Digital Photo Project with another, and one more – nice photos and text by Kevin Greene
almost two weeks – wonderful blend of Bain and life
a weed is just a flower out of place – just one nice photo but who can resists that title?
Bain poster critique – proof post-Boomers do not read 🙂 actually a nice post
not to mention
youtube Triangle Rock excerpt
353 Flickr results
Mike Legeros’ Firefighting blog listing
The following excerpt from an email sent out by SWCAC Chair Mary Bell Pate for the Caraleigh neighborhood.
The Bain Project, located in the SW CAC area, is all about the E. B. Bain Waterworks/Water Plant that once was the source of water for Raleigh and now is on the Historic Register. What was a beautiful Art Deco building had been ignored since it was “de-commissioned” as our water plant and now needs massive amounts of money for restoration. Empire Properties came to the rescue by buying the Bain and saving it from total destruction. Within the next few years a street will connect South Wilmington and South Saunders Streets (needed for years as an efficient cross-access between the two streets) and will go right by the Bain.
With lots of help from many people the Bain Project will become another outstanding asset for Raleigh and especially for our southwest part of Raleigh. Right now it needs your interest and participation in events designed to create awareness of this beautiful, old building opposite the Eliza Pool Park. From time to time I will be giving updates on Bain Project activities and encouraging your participation.
and last but not least
National Park Service Bain site page
Artists survey pre-installation site
If you’ve made it this far I’ll remind you that here at Raleigh Rambles ALL my work to document and preserve the Bain Project is organized and referenced on my Bain Page. The list above grew out of a reference post on the Bain Project website, which has obviously been a rock for me in this project. We can all thank Daniel Kelly for conceiving of and effecting this project, and I personally appreciated his encouragement as I participated in and documented the project.
In This Mansion Were Many Rooms
The Bain Project encompassed a large industrial space, but there were intimate smaller spaces everywhere. The artists used these beautifully, creating very different moods in each, but all bowing gracefully to the enormous visual inputs of the given space. Bain just as the artists came to it was a vividly textured and quite sun-filled space. The artists not only found ways to highlight the interior details, but noticed Nature coming into the Bain space, and found several ways to represent this organic invasion with materials brought in from the building’s surrounding terrain.
Below is a guided tour of my favorite Bain rooms.
Marty Baird gave me the scoop on the Yellow Room, as she calls it, which had one view of the huge chlorine tank on a scale, and another rear view of an arrangement of paint chips on a floor well lit, and sometimes sundrenched, by the large windows. She explained how people would be so amazed to see the purple wall color that emerged opposite the paint chip area. Many areas of Bain, including Marty’s ball covered floor, benefited from multiple visits in different sunlights.
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Tim Kiernan’s lab room was a big highlight of my second Saturday visit with Clyde. The helpful volunteer in the gold jumpsuit (who frequently banged around on the equipment in his rounds) got Tim to come up and show us around, and he even let me use the piece of Bain lab equipment that helped take the microscope picture above. The circular lense was used by Tim in his video for the lab installation. The lab was a fantasial mix of techology muscle and natural encroachment, with Tim’s vine additions blending perfectly with the vines actually coming in through the windows.
rear of lab
Tim's entwined lab room
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Another favorite room of mine was Jen Coon’s water fountain room. She stated on the Bain radio interview that she hoped the installation, which lacked access to running water, could have at least a token flow of water, and she came through! Simple but profound said it all for this space, which harbored an amazing scratched-away image as well as picturesque water vessels in each corner.
Bain volunteer
The apartment living space recreated so convincingly by Lia Newman was the scene of one of my most interesting verbal exchanges at Bain. The volunteer pictured above explained the apartment room by saying two Bain workers had to be on site at all time, in case of an emergency with the non-automated equipment. On asking Lia about it, she said she knew nothing of that. Was Ty putting on an amazing feat of performance art, or telling the truth – or both? A baneful mystery!
The apartment featured an old tv playing non-fiction videos of water treatment information. Lia had brought the window plant in from the fields outside and asked me to identify it. I have no idea, but it’s pictured below in case someone does.
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Below are a few more Bain spaces that fit with this post. I think with a music/media post to come soon, I’ll be ready to write my final thoughts. What a project! And I’ll still be leaving out great stuff, for which I’m sorry!
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 
