Stream Foraging

MUDLARKING FOR FOUND OBJECTS AND THE GENIUS LOCI

“From everything I’ve extracted the quintessence / you gave me your mud and I have made it into gold.”
—Charles Baudelaire, draft epilogue for the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal

Rivers and streams around the globe have long been held sacred within many of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. The Ganges is revered by Hindus who understand it as a personification of the Goddess Ganga.  In Judaism and Christianity the Jordan River is considered holy. Stretching from Lebanon to the Dead Sea, it is the water that the Jewish people forded into the Promised Land; Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan. The Nile sustained innumerable aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization and it also played a major role in their spirituality. They considered it to be a causeway on which souls flowed into life, death, and the afterlife. In the pre-classical period of the Mediterranean, historians have surmised the existence of various cults based around river gods and goddesses. In the Americas the rivers were no less sacred. Along the banks of the Scioto in Chillicothe, Ohio, are massive earthworks and sites that may have functioned as astronomical calendars; it has been postulated the sites were places of pilgrimage for the Hopewell.
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Rivers and streams are a connection to history, and in their continual flow we are reminded of the movement of time. The stories of the rivers, and the artifacts found along their banks, can connect us to that history, and in turn to the genius loci, or spirit of a place, that may manifest in specific watersheds.
If one is inclined to, a possible way of engaging these rivers and streams in conversation is through the practice of mudlarking, or foraging for lost and forgotten items washed up along the banks. Mudlarking can also be a fun pastime with other beneficial side effects: cleaning up a bit of the mess we’ve left behind in our streams and finding useful materials in ages of scarcity.  

USABLE DEBRIS

Mudlarking is perhaps most closely associated with the River Thames, which is tidal, revealing its deeper recesses and aspects at low tide, when rubber-booted adventurers pluck its hidden treasures from the muck. London has been occupied by humans for a long time, and the materials that have disappeared into the Thames make it ripe for the picking. Everything from its ages—centuries-old pottery, pipes, rings, shoe buckles, and other bits—has found its way into the water, and back out by way of plucky pickers. Yet mudlarking isn’t just for the British, even if they gave us the word for the activity. Mudlarking along the Ohio, Wabash, or Mississippi is not unknown, and foraging along your local river or smaller stream, will also bring rewards if you bring diligence.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a mudlark as “a person who scavenges for usable debris in the mud of a river or harbor.” In the 18th and 19th centuries, people who lived near the Thames were able to scrape together a meager subsistence through the activity. Usable debris is something the denizens of the deindustrial world are going to be on the lookout for. It might not be something you’d quit a day job to pursue full time, but could be a way to supplement alongside other ways of creating a living.

Driftwood can become firewood. Bones from fish and other dead animals can be collected and ground up to use as fertilizer. Old bottles can be gathered and traded or sold to those who brew their own beer and make their own medicines. Washed up old coins may have their own inherent value. Other found metals, when amassed into enough of a pile, could be taken to to a scrap yard and traded for cash. Fishing for metal with a large magnet on a line cast into the water is one way to hunt for sunken metal. Accumulated pieces of water washed glass and broken pottery might be used for tiling projects and transformed into mosaics. If a person mudlarks often enough they may be able to find unique antiques, to be cleaned up, traded and sold on the second hand market.

In one possible deindustrial future I imagine riverside camps or jungles full of rowbows: people who travel from city to city by canoe or kayak, looking for work or adventure. Their shacks get lashed together with stray bits of rope, nails and bolts pulled up out of the mud. Around the fire the rowbows cook their carp based mulligan stews in steel containers scavenged from the shore.

DADA AND FOUND OBJECT ART

Mudlarking the banks of rivers, or beachcombing  around oceans and lakes, also has artistic  applications when found objects get used for the aesthetic enhancement of the environment.

There is something inherently magical about found objects, which have been a staple in the art world (highbrow and low) since the storm of Dada erupted from the aftermath of the horrors of World War I. Part of it has to do with finding random things by chance. Hans Richter, a participant and historian of Dada, noted that the found object emerged like something from a dream, from the unconscious. “Chance appeared to us as a magical procedure by which one could transcend the barriers of causality and of conscious volition, and by which the inner eye and ear became more acute, so that new sequences of thought and experience made their appearances. For us, chance was the ‘unconscious mind’ that Freud had discovered in 1900.” Messages appeared amidst the rubble, caked with meaning as much as grime.

Dadaist and pioneering collage artist Kurt Schwitters noted the effect of the destruction of Europe, and how that helped him to develop his personal artistic concept that he called Merz. “In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready ... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.” As society traverses the downward deindustrial staircase from one breakage to another, the practical toolkit of Dada remains available for those who would make new things out of the fragments.

Schwitters extracted Merz from the German word Commerzbank in a collage using newspapers. He then applied the term as a name for his small periodical, and finally to his work and himself.   

As a movement Dada is forever iconoclastic, contradictory and full of paradoxes that can never be resolved. It was an opening salvo in revolt against pure reason. After WWI many people felt the ideals of the Age of Reason to be empty. Dada embraced the irrational. Those who contemplate its works are rewarded with spontaneous illumination, in a way similar to the Zen student who puzzles over an absurd koan and catches a glimpse into the sublime. And like Zen, Dada had little use for dogma. It wasn’t born from a shared aesthetic vision, but from interconnected nodes of ideas, ethics, and materials; it did not rely on a strict formalism, and this has given art historians no end of trouble when studying what Dada is and what it was not. These very characteristics, if they can be called such, are part of what make the techniques pioneered by those caught up in the Dadaist impulse potentially useful  to the artistic scavengers of the deindustrial world. Looking for random things, whether manmade or natural, is a way to sidestep the passive consumption of images.

If the natural world is alive with its own inherent intelligence, then the rivers of our world are literal streams of consciousness. What messages might their dark and murky waters cough back up, in the form of found objects, from within their polluted interiors? What treasures might they spit back out onto their banks and shallow edges for intuitive mudlarks to discern as forms of communication, linkages in the chain of history?

MUDLARKING WITH Z'EV

When poet and percussionist Z’ev first started mudlarking the Thames in 2010 he had already built an extensive musical praxis around playing found objects. Born to a Jewish family with the given name Stefan Joel Weisser in Los Angeles (February 8, 1951 – December 16, 2017), he adopted the drums early in life, at age eight, and later the name Z’ev as one of his artistic aliases. At age twelve he no longer considered himself a practitioner of Judaism. He had asked a rabbi about the practice of meditation and burning incense he had read about in prayer books. The rabbi told him it was all just metaphors. That answer didn’t sit well with him so he went to the library and started looking for answers. This began his lifelong journey as a seeker, as a student of world religions, and to Western esoteric spirituality and the study of Qabalah.

Z’ev played in a number of rock, jazz and experimental bands around LA from the late sixties until the mid-seventies, even sending demos to Frank Zappa’s Bizarre Records label. These tapes were “too bizarre for Bizarre” however and he eventually left LA for the Bay Area in 1976. Two years later he started using found objects in his percussion set up. Much of the material was stuff he found in junkyards or lying on the side of the road, or scavenged from industrial areas. This was two years before German squatter band Einstürzende Neubauten developed a similar practice in incorporating found materials from construction and destruction sites into their sound. Z’ev used stainless steel, PVC pipes, titanium, anything he could get his hands on if it made a good tone. It was a natural move for Z’ev to pivot from being a seeker of wisdom to being a seeker of physical materials he could transform from the base matter found in salvage yards into the resonating metals of his sonic creations. This practice of looking for free materials to repurpose for art earned him the nickname of “the Finder.”

In the Industrial Culture Handbook he had said, “Z’ev uses these metals, and has to do with the fact that you can go out and build and create your own music – you don’t have to go out to a store and buy the latest musical things. It is on one level anti-consumer technology (‘to be able to do something you have to spend a certain amount of money, get the state-of-the-art this and that’). I’ve always been very committed to low-tech as opposed to high-tech!”
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In this phase of development Z’ev pieced together assemblages he used in a movement-based performance style that was like a form of marionette, with the salvage bits suspended from wires and rope on homebuilt frames. He hit and tapped and hammered these pieces in a dramatic manner he referred to as “wildstyle,” a term originally related to graffiti. It was scrap metal music, performed with verve. The sounds themselves are as expressive as a highly stylized script. Z’ev said, “There's a tremendous amount of calligraphic language in the instruments themselves. If you closed your ears and just watched it, there is a language almost like a puppeteers’.”

As a side note "Wildstyle" is a form of graffiti composed of complicated interlocking letters, arrows, and embellishment” that is “intentionally hard to decipher” (Noah, Josephine: “Street Math in Wildstyle Graffiti Art.” Artcrimes, 1997: www.graffiti.org/faq/streetmath.html). A possible connection is that Z’ev sometimes also stole materials he needed off of industrial lots, making his art in some respects another form of “illegal art” like graffiti. 

Z’ev eschewed the tricks and licks of contemporary rock and jazz drumming, though he was trained in them and more than capable. He favored  a style that harkened back to the way drums have been used as tools for communication and ritual. “There is this language to rhythm where there’s a meta-message occurring, almost a mathematical situation with repetition, refrain, like formulas repeated and transmuted this way and that way.”

A lot of his early shows as Z’ev were at venues such as the punk oasis Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. He ended up traveling the world with his found-object percussive kinetic sculptures, and lived in a variety of places in North America and Europe. By the 2010’s  was in London, where his long habit of scrounging for materials took him into the mud of the river Thames. 

He writes of his first experience mudlarking, and how his projects Effigies and Familiars: Sticks and Stones of Darkness came out of the practice. “on the 26th september 2010 i visited the river thames and spent a few hours there. towards the end of that time i was walking well down to the water line and came upon 3 pieces of wood and 3 of metal. i took them back to anstey road and assembled them into an initial configuration in the garden. … I had constant thoughts about my relationship to the thames with regards to developing a project around the general notion of ‘sticks and stones’ and the specific notion that this project would be a collaboration with tamessa, the ancient Celtic personification of the elemental energies of the river … while the title ‘sticks and stones’ had come into my mind from the very beginning, … it was only in october 2010 that the distinctions of effigies and familiars became associated with, respect[ive]ly, sticks and stones; that is, for the most part, sticks are effigies and stones are familiars and so as far as I’m concerned in clarifying this distinction: effigies are representations of mythic thought-forms, familiars are anthropo/zoo- morphic concretizations of elemental energies. Put another way: effigies are lenses for focusing on/the focusing of mythic powers, familiars are objects of subjective power(s) in-and-of themselves.”

Z’ev communicated his intentions for the project to the river using the techniques he had found as a spiritual seeker.  He committed to gathering what he could find at least once a week during the low tide. He gathered driftwood, stones, and other materials from the detritus of the river and from these created effigies and familiars in concert with Tamessa, entering into a dialogue with the genius loci of the river.

Z’ev noted a specific state of his own consciousness he entered when going on these mudlarking forays. “In the past when I’ve written about my work and its basis in the found-art tradition I’ve generally just used the term finding to describe the process… The reason I’m using gathering in this instance is that it better describes the process specifically. On one hand: the finding mode can be compared to a mental state of wide-band reception, that is, as I don’t know what I’m looking for, by my expectation my sensitivity is heightened, and I’m scanning all frequencies. On the other hand: the gathering mode differs from this in that, as I know what I’m looking for when I’m on the river bed, all of my sensitivities are attuned to the reception of the Tamessa bandwidth  (note: both the terms gather and reception resonate strongly through my Qabalistic work as well). A very interesting phenomenon:  while for over the past 30 years I’ve always made it very clear that my work with acoustic phenomena was based on my relationship with elemental energies, no one ever looked askance at that position, but it seems that now I have severely crossed into the land of delusion by stating that I am actively engaging with a thought form, that is, a personified elemental energy. And my response to that is that this ignores the fact that since at least some 3000 years ago the Celts had recognized their goddess in this river – not in a tree, not in a stone, not in a spring, but in this river, and all I am doing then, is reinvigorating a tradition that has lapsed for, at the very least, well over 1000 years.”

Making sculptures out of stones and driftwood found in the mud in honor of Tamessa has something of a parallel in Hinduism. On the banks of the Kali Gandaki in Nepal, some Hindus collect what are called shaligram stones from the banks. Most of these are fossils of ammonite shells from the Devonian period, over 400 million years ago. whose origins go back some 400 to 66 million years . These fossilized shells are seen as representations of Vishnu because in their natural form they contain symbols associated with him. The story of how they originated is mentioned in many Vedic scriptures.

From sticks, stones, fossils, and other usable debris the consciousness of streams might be glimpsed.

BEACHCOMBING WITH ANGELA HASELTINE POZZI 

Beachcombing is an associated corollary pastime where the intertidal zones of oceans are scoured for flotsam and jetsam. Lakes can also be good places to beachcomb, especially when the water is low or after a flood has receded to reveal treasures or trash, as is happening at the time of this writing with droughts causing a significant drain on Lake Mead and Lake Powell.

Angela Haseltine Pozzi turned to the ocean for comfort after the sudden death of her husband of twenty-four years. She had been a teacher, and came from an artistic family, and her husband Craig had also been an artist. They had both been fond of using found materials scrounged from thrift stores and other places in their work. After his death she relocated from Portland to Bandon, Oregon, so she could be closer to the ocean. She would take walks every day with her dog, stepping over the bits and pieces of trash she saw on the beach. One day she saw a wrack line, or linear pile of marine debris, that contained a huge amount of plastic. She saw people combing the beach for shells and agates, but leaving the plastic behind, and she realized the ocean needed healing just as she needed to heal.

She made a decision then to only use garbage from the beach as her medium. She also wanted her work to be public, so people could see it and get engaged. She decided to make sculptures of things most everyone loves: animals. She tightened her focused further and decided to make sculptures of marine animals whose habitats were at risk from plastic pollution. Then she went to work.

Out of her passion she created the non-profit Washed Ashore in 2010, a group dedicated to picking up trash from beaches. From this garbage they have created an immense body of public art. Over seventy sculptures have been created out of 40,000 pounds of waste, collected by 10,000 volunteers.

Preindustrial artists didn’t have the luxury of going to a supply store in the local university district to buy ink, paints, brushes, clay or other materials. Learning their art required them to know everything from acquiring and stretching canvas, to mixing paint, to sourcing materials for sculpture. As the trend of globalization reverses, the deindustrial artist will face similar limitations. Looking for found objects and recycling plastics into plastic arts may be one of the ways to get a hand on precious materials, and make something beautiful out of the trash flow.

STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

​The things that fall into the river often end up there by chance. Chance again washes them up years, decades, centuries later. A mudlark taps into the stream of consciousness that is the river. By pulling out buttons, shells, bullet casings, coins, pottery, a connection with history is made. What we do with the bits that wash up from these streams of consciousness is our own choice to make. They could become paperweights sitting on desks, a piece of jewelry dangling from a neck or ear, musical instruments, or soaring sculptures. By interacting with rivers and other bodies of water, our own consciousness gets into a state of flow, and can perhaps touch what lies hidden beneath the mud. 

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This essay originally appeared in an issue of New Maps as part of my Cheap Thrills column.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING
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