Above: Hope Sandrow, Tracking the Geodesic Rotation of the Earth, commencing 3:00PM, May 21, 2005, Public reading of "Eureka: A Prose Poem" and performance in Mt. Vernon Park Dimensions variable, Color Pigment Print, 2005 Observational Findings Mt Vernon Park
A study realized as a live public reading of Eureka: A Prose Poem, and performance in Mt Vernon Park, (May 21, 2005) installation, and exhibition by Hope Sandrow, commissioned by Director, Thom Collins, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD
Detail from above: Hope Sandrow, Tracking the Geodesic Rotation of the Earth, commencing 3:00PM, May 21, 2005, Public reading of Eureka: A Prose Poem, and performance in Mt. Vernon Park, Baltimore, MD Dimensions variable, Color Pigment Print, 2005
May 21, 2005, John Astin, Actor, Director, Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins, reading from Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose Poem.
OBSERVATIONAL FINDINGS, Mt Vernon Park, Baltimore, MD -- Saturday, 3:00-6:30 p.m. Baltimore poets Clarinda Harris, Reginald Harris, Moira Egan, Chezia Thompson-Cager, and David Bergman deliver a public reading of Edgar Allen Poe's 1848 poem "Eureka." New York artist Hope Sandrow will document the event on audio and video for her exhibit "Person of the Crowd," which opens at the museum in October. Organized by the Contemporary Museum. Mount Vernon Park, Charles Street and Mount Royal Avenue, Baltimore. Free.
Observational Findings, Mt. Vernon Park investigates the relationship in current practice to Poe's story and Baudelaire's essay written at the dawn of the photographic process. As part of my series, spacetime, the intent is to create works representing the natural history of everyday life to further dialogue on notions of nature, culture, and identity. A primary focus is how technologies such as the telescope and camera have altered descriptions of the physical world from pictorial representations made through our sense of vision. Thom's invitation to create an onsite project in relation to Poe's Observer appeared providential. Similarly, my point of view informed the perspective of Observational Findings: a celebration that incorporates the past - life and death struggle - with the present.
Poe likely strolled the paths of Mt. Vernon Park, climbing 228 steps to the top of the George Washington Monument - as I did for the panoramic views. Standing in the shadow of this monument amongst Baltimoreans who share my interests and those passing by, the still photographs were made sequentially with a digital camera mounted on a motorized geodesic telescope tripod. Composed as a panorama, the stills record the changing view from our place on earth during the 3-1/2 hour reading and commentary heard in the streaming real-time audio tracks. A vivid personal portrait emerges of the people, dogs, birds, cars, lights, and sounds of this information-laden urban landscape, reminiscent of each American city, as it unfolded in front of my cameras.
Hope Sandrow, May 21, 2005
I propose to take such a survey of the Universe that the mind may be able to receive and to perceive an individual impression…
He who from the top of Aetna casts his eyes leisurely around, is affected chiefly by the extent and diversity of the scene.
Only by a rapid whirling on his heel could he hope to comprehend the panorama in the sublimity of its oneness .. By the term "Universe"… I mean in most cases to designate the utmost conceivable expanse of space, with all things, spiritual and material, that can be imagined to exist within the compass of that expanse.
Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem, 1848
In 1840, Baltimore's Edgar Allan Poe published the seminal short story The Man of the Crowd. In it, he introduced a character that would become one of the central tropes of literary and artistic modernism: the flaneur (stroller), who is the participant observer of the Industrial Revolution. This character takes to the streets, wandering far and wide, gathering clues to the essence of the modern city by observing its physical fabric, its inhabitants, and their public activities. Poe's Man of the Crowd was the inspiration for Charles Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life (Constantin Guys) the essay that heralded the arrival of the quintessential artist-flaneurs: the French Impressionists.
For her study Observational Findings, Mt. Vernon Park, Hope Sandrow staged and documented the first-ever public reading of Edgar Allan Poe's infamous 1848 cosmogenic poem Eureka in historic Mt. Vernon Park. Baltimoreans and poets John Astin, Chezia Thompson Cager, Moira Egan, Clarinda Harriss, and Reginald Harris performed the public reading of this important poem which Poe considered the culmination of his career: Sandrow's role in this event was that of a provocateur. Through the project, she elicited conversations around the subject of "seeing and believing", the social interactions around the public reading. The poem is a visionary meditation on the origins of the universe one-hundred years before the formulation of the Big Bang Theory.
A core group of guests invited by Sandrow drawn from the Baltimore area -- John Astin, Actor, Director, Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins; Dr. Ava Bittner, Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins; Jim Backlin, Legislative Director, Christian Coalition (no show); Cedric Harmon, Religious Outreach Director, Americans United for Separation of Church and State; David Little, Director Adult and Academic Programs, MoMA; Former Councilwoman and Mayoral candidate Catherine Pugh; Dr. Alex Storrs, Asst. Professor Physics, Astronomy and Geosciences, Towson University; Don Wharton, Director, Washington Area Secular Humanists - participated in the informal conversation amongst and with the public enjoying an afternoon in the park.
Thom Collins, Director, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD, 2005-2006
Drawings and watercolors by Constantin Guys. Left to right: The Conversation; Proclamation at Town Hall; Don Juan and His Statue
The sun, which, some hours ago, was shattering everything with its harsh white light will soon be flooding the western horizon with multifarious colors. In the restless sport of this dying sun certain poetic spirits will discover new delights. And the sunset will in fact seem to them, like a wonderful allegory of some life-charged soul dipping below the horizon with magnificent profusion of thought and dreams .. Stifled as Poe was by the atmosphere of America, he wrote in the epigraph of Eureka:" I offer this Book to those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities." He thus himself acted as an admirable protest; he was it and made it in his own way.
Charles Baudelaire, Further Notes on Edgar Poe, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, 1857
Detail from above: Hope Sandrow, Tracking the Geodesic Rotation of the Earth, commencing 3:00PM, May 21, 2005, Public reading of Eureka: A Prose Poem, and performance in Mt. Vernon Park Dimensions variable, Color Pigment Print, 2005
A dialogue 150 years ago paralleling many now provides a contemporary context for my study: Baudelaire defended Poe from malicious attacks by American conservatives outraged that Eureka was based on an Artist's observations rather than Christian beliefs. Still, Poe wrote of his prose poem, "I have no desire to live since I have done Eureka. I could accomplish nothing more". The telescope found on his writing desk provides insight into the expansive references for Poe's literary works, and inspiration for cosmologists who continue Poe's threads of thought:
The spacetime of special relativity has been called a canvas, a canvas on which are painted the points and lines showing all that has happened, is happening, and will happen .... Do acts of observership ... have anything to do with bringing about that which appears before us. Nothing is more mysterious .... than the role of the observer in the scheme of things.
John A. Wheeler, 1968
Hope Sandrow Digital Video Grabs, Views 228 steps atop the George Washington Monument, Mt. Vernon Park
Digital Video and Audio: 3 Hour 30 Minute Time Compression to 1 Hour Loop, 2005
Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow window of the Coffee-House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui, moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing…
Edgar Allan Poe, Man of the Crowd, 1845
Under the direction of nature and tyranny of circumstance, Monsieur G. (Constantin Guys) has pursued an altogether different path. He began by being an observer of life, and only later set himself the task of acquiring the means of expressing it .... For most of us the fantastic reality of life has become singularly diluted. Monsieur G. never ceases to drink it in; his eyes and his memory are full of it. He attaches enormous importance to his backgrounds, which, whether slight or vigorous, are always appropriate in nature and quality to the figures ... able to express at once the attitude and the gesture of living beings and their luminous explosion in space.
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, Le Figaro, 1863
Detail from above: Hope Sandrow, Tracking the Geodesic Rotation of the Earth, commencing 3:00PM, May 21, 2005, Public reading of Eureka: A Prose Poem and performance in Mt. Vernon Park Dimensions variable, Color Pigment Print, 2005