Tag: Water

Water on the Brain: Irrigation Then and Now

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Scarcity of water brings out the evil propensities in men quicker than anything else.  —Greeley Tribune, July 1, 1874

Center-pivot irrigation in Kansas

The summer of 1874 was a particularly dry year in Colorado, and the drought led to a water war between the fledgling towns of Fort Collins and Greeley. In the previous years, Greeley farmers had built extensive irrigation canals off the Poudre River to irrigate crops and had enjoyed abundant water from spring snowmelt.

Fort Collins, still just a small colony, saw the success of its downstream neighbors and decided to build their own irrigation canals off the Poudre as well. So in the summer of 1874, when the farmers near Fort Collins began heavy draws on the Poudre, the downstream Greeley farmers watched their crops begin to wither and die. They wouldn’t take it lying down.

As the summer advanced and the streams were reduced, the Greeley farmers became desperate for water. They sent men upstream to explore the Fort Collins ditches and concluded that their neighbors were wasting precious water and outright stealing what belonged to them.  After some legal threats, the parties agreed to meet at a schoolhouse in the town of Eaton, halfway between Greeley and Fort Collins. They hoped to find a way forward in a situation where there just wasn’t enough water for the ambitions of the two towns.

Despite lengthy discussions, legal arguments about prior appropriation, and threats, in the words of water historian George Sibley, “the only successful outcome was that no one was shot.”

Meanwhile, in the same summer of 1874, further south in the Arkansas River Valley near what is today the town of Salida, a war broke out between two ranchers fighting over an irrigation ditch. George Harrington and Elijah Gibbs, both ranchers, had been arguing over ditch rights near Gas Creek for several weeks when their arguments turned to violence. On the morning of June 17, 1874, Harrington noticed that one of his outbuildings was set ablaze. He and his wife hurried to put the fire out, and when he left his house, he was shot in the back and killed immediately. Read more »



Monday, June 2, 2014

Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) 2014, Bill Viola. St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

V-005-new-72dpi-srgb[2][4][1][1][1][1]It was a cold wet Bank Holiday Monday as I climbed the steps of St Paul's Cathedral and made my way down the right hand aisle to the four screens of Bill Viola's recently installed video, Martyrs, hoping, in the dank greyness, for a little spiritual nurture. I expected the screens to be bigger, more like those of his famous Nantes Triptych where the viewer is engulfed by the processes of birth and death being enacted out in front of them. Originally conceived to be shown in a 17th century chapel in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nantes in 1992, it employs the triptych form, traditionally used in Western art for religious paintings, to represent through the medium of video, Viola's contemporary spiritual iconography. But the individual videos in St. Paul's, each based on the four fundamental elements and encased side by side in a simple metal frame like a modern altar screen, are much smaller, closer to the size of traditional paintings.

Install-003-72dpi-srgb[4][4][1][1][1]Encountering Bill Viola's images within this bulwark of Anglicanism implies a certain ecumenicalism, as though the church no longer minds much whether art works are ‘traditionally' Christian, so long as they are broadly ‘spiritual'. The canon chancellor of St. Paul's, the Reverend Mark Oakley, describes the piece as “not explicitly Christian… but a Christian looking at it will find resonances”. A crucified man hangs upside down by his feet, as water pours over him, in the far right screen. St. Peter was crucified in this way and lived by water. The scene also suggests full baptismal immersion and subsequent redemption as the hanging figure ascends feet-first, arms outstretched like an angel's wings. For non-Christians the image might elicit darker thoughts of water-boarding and torture. It's a work open to interpretation by those of faith and those of no faith, and asks the prescient question: what is worth dying for?

Viola is one of the artists who must be credited with moving video into the mainstream. Three of this year's Turner prize nominees use the form as their chosen medium. But he has his detractors as well as supporters. One critic savagely described The Passions, shown at The National Gallery in London, as “a master of the overblown…tear-jerking hocus-pocus and religiosity” and, it's true, that he does walk a fragile line between the ineffable and the naffly bathetic. Yet the Nantes Triptych, which simultaneously features a woman in labour, a man submerged in water and an image of the artist's dying mother has rarely been bettered as a visual expression of the cycle of life and death, while in Tiny Deaths, made in 1993 and again on show at Tate Modern, ghostly figures emerge in a darkened space, where light and sound bring about potent moments of drama.

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Monday, March 21, 2011

Divining Water

Posted on by Maniza Naqvi

Jerrycan

By Maniza Naqvi

“Say: Just think: If your water were to dry up in the morning who will bring you water from a fresh, flowing stream?”

A sunflower yellow plastic container caught my attention as my cab weaved its way through morning traffic in DC. Exactly the kind carried every day of the year on the backs of camels, mules, women and children from Addis to Lemo to Jijiga to Woldia to Mekele-and all the places east, south, west and north of them. The kind like a jerry can used for selling cooking oil and recycled by millions to fetch water often over long distances and difficult terrain. I walked back later in the day in search of it. There it sat, just around the corner from the White House gracing the ledge outside a vending kiosk. The yellow color, radiant and hopeful in the sunshine set against the chrome exterior, of the tiny shop. There perhaps, as a memory or a talisman, or an offering. Inside, the kiosk, an Ethiopian woman selling hotdogs and chewing gum– and bottled water from New Zealand to passersby.

Thousands of miles and days later in Addis, my eyes focus on the yellow container strapped to the back of a slow moving woman in the crowd milling about a construction site, my eyes train on her, she is pregnant. Hundreds of dilapidated and messy kiosk sized houses, cafes, businesses have been removed, to find livelihoods elsewhere on the outskirts of attention, to make way for organized, tall and sprawling shiny corporate sized realities. Inside, one such air conditioned conference room, where I sit gazing out the window, the speaker has been talking about climate change—the rising temperatures, more rains, more floods and more droughts: this subject will lead all others from now on, he says, and will be the new theme for attracting financing for those whose business it is to reduce poverty. The answer is charismatic carbon— programs which have the potential to attract financing to support food for the poor through dispensing carbon credit to growth industries.

Someone whispers in my ear: “New theme? Nothing new at all! It seems like hostage taking of the poor by holding their condition up for their own ransom. We won’t create the conditions to allow people to grow their own food—and we won’t stop polluting or thinking only about growth and we’ll keep shoveling food aid at people whose weather risk we’ve increased because of our pollution. We’ll keep thinking of indebting further, credit this and credit that—now can you believe this? Carbon credit! Charismatic carbon! Burning up our planet–drying up our water for greed.!”

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