The artist Martha MacDonald told us about a divided country.

Linking the present with the past is the central task of historians, especially those who work in museums. I planned a new exhibition for the National Portrait Gallery called "Dark Areas of China", which showed the photographic works of alexander gardner, a student from Mathew Brady, who was one of the first people to record the horrors of the civil war battlefield. In the middle of the tragic19th century, it was Gardner's shocking image of the dead that helped us create the modern world.

Alexander Gardner thinks himself an artist, and uses all his barbaric methods to create the image of war. Why can't we take our eyes off the absurdity and terror? The vivid images of civil war casualties inspired the scholar's inner muse Martha McDonald, a Philadelphia performing artist who was attracted by the Victorian mourning ceremonies in her early works Lost Garden (20 14) and Weeping Skirt (20 12). When we asked her to create a work for the company to expand the theme of Gardner's exhibition, she readily agreed.

Gardner is an artistic and cultural photography revolution that took place in the United States and Europe in the middle of19th century. Gardner was born in Scotland and came from the working class. He was fascinated by the emerging photography technology and found a job in Brady's studio. He took portraits of Brady, and most importantly, he began to photograph the battlefield of the Civil War. He successfully photographed himself in the exhibition "The Dead in Antioch" in 1862, which enabled Gardner to set up his own gallery in Washington and continue to photograph the war and later the American West.

Poetry shows all the contents of the past experience, and art and cultural festivals, dances and performing arts will support this exhibition. MacDonald is writing her work "Hospital Hymn: Elegy of the Dead". She and I sat down to discuss her artistic intention and purpose, and her career as a performing artist. This work will be exhibited in the museum for the first time on June 65438+1October 65438+July.

David Ward: The building of portrait gallery was used as a military warehouse and hospital, and walt whitman worked as a nurse in the building. How much influence does the history of this building have on your works? "

During my first site visit, I was immediately shocked by the idea that this magnificent building was once crowded with sick and dying people. I began to think about the soul that still exists in the building. I think this is really fertile ground for me. After that visit, I went home and read Whitman's Sample Day, which mainly tells about his experience as a nurse during the Civil War. Whitman wrote a story about visiting soldiers in the patent office hospital. It's strange to see the beds next to the patent mold box lined up, especially when the lights are on at night. What shocked me was how infatuated and heartbroken Whitman was as an "unknown soldier"-thousands of federal and allied soldiers died far from home, with no family or friends around, and so many of them were buried in unmarked graves, or not buried at all, but rotted in the Woods or on the battlefield.

The second thing that impressed me was Whitman's fascination with how nature witnessed the pain and loss of war. He imagined a soldier injured in the battle climbing into the Woods and dying. A few weeks later, the truce funeral procession missed his body. Whitman wrote in the book that the soldier was "crumbling, wiped out and unrecognizable." Now I know from Drew gilpin Faust's Suffering and the Republic that this is not just an imaginary event, but an event that happened to thousands of soldiers in the war. Both "Like the Sun" and Whitman's later civil war poems show that the bodies of these unknown soldiers have become the pillars of the country, and their spirit has now been embodied in every grass. Will you bring these to your work?

Oh,19th century flavor! I can only imagine the horror of all this! Reading Whitman's "Like a Day" and "The Suffering Country of Faust" undoubtedly gave me a rotten feeling. This smell will pervade the camps, hospitals and battlefields in the civil war, but the city is also a beautiful place to smell birds. Unstable plant dyes dyed a woman's body. People seldom take a bath, and their stains will stay around for a long time, sometimes long after they come out of their sadness. The formula for removing spots I found in women's magazines looks terrible. The main ingredient they use is oxalic acid, which you use to clean silverware. I didn't mention the smell of19th century in this article, but I am interested in other sensory experiences in this period. When I walked from one small bed to another, my footsteps echoed in the hall, and the rough texture of felt flowers contrasted with the crisp white sheets.

DW: Before the 20th century, few of us thought the past was a silent record through written documents or portraits. I think these records reflect our romanticization of the past, just like an exhibition behind a glass, frozen in silence. How do you solve this problem? "

I will sing some ancient hymns popular during the Civil War, some from the sacred harp tradition in the south and some from the north, such as Glorious Coast. Recently, I saw that [hymn] was very popular with soldiers during the war, but this song is out of date because it reminds veterans of too many wars. No wonder its chorus: "Now we are standing on the Jordan River/our friends are passing by/in front of the shining coast/we have almost found it."

DW: How do these hymns fit into your performance? The music I want to sing is based on Whitman's memory. Walking into the armory hospital late one night, I heard a group of nurses singing for soldiers. He described these songs as "recited hymns" and "quaint old songs" and listed some lyrics of Glorious Coast that I am learning now. He described the scene at that time: "People were lying in the hospital bed, lying in the hospital bed (some people were seriously injured, some people couldn't get up from the hospital bed), and white curtains and shadows hung on the hospital bed." . They cocked their heads to listen.

He said that someone was singing with the nurses not far away. I was surprised when I read the article about singing in the hospital, but then I remembered all the stories I saw in the19th century about families singing at home and singing in the bed of dying relatives, which reminded me of the pop music (or "homemade music", and Whitman named his work "singing nurse") in the19th century. People sing for every occasion.

As mentioned earlier, singing provides a way to express strong emotions, which are too strong for the upper class, such as sadness and loss. I really believe in the healing power of sad songs. When singing a sad song, the singer invites the audience to associate with their sadness. The performance of lamentations or sad hymns creates a space for people to cry or express their feelings in public, which is a way of deep healing, because it allows listeners to express their personal dramas among a group of individuals who are dealing with their own sadness or experiencing other deep emotions.

Deutsche Welle: You have developed some works that draw lessons from American history. As an American historian, I must mend them. What attracted you in the past? My job is to have a dialogue between the past and the present. I had a profound influence on the handicrafts and folk songs that people used in the 18 and 19 centuries to cope with and express their loss and longing. I regard these historical art forms, your performances and installations as a way to express my own loss and desire and explore existence and non-existence. I look back on the past and reflect on the present, but I am certainly not the only American artist who regards our history as a source of inspiration.

Deutsche Welle: I feel that contemporary artists are not very interested in American history. Am I wrong?

My works can be placed among a group of contemporary artists who are engaged in the study of history and folklore, so as to explore personal narrative and reflect on the current social and political climate. These artists include Dario Rob, Allison Smith and Duke Riley. These artists use appropriate folk techniques to express their personal narratives, including19th century hair works and soldiers' trench art (Robleto), sailors' notes and tattoos (Riley) and costumes of civil war reenacters (Smith), including "Ancient and Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art" by Houston Museum of Contemporary Art (2008) and "Non-historical Events" by MASSMoca.

Walker: You are a loyal feminist. Can you talk about how you restore women's voices to one side of us? Historical understanding in development.

I've always been interested in restoring women's voices in my works, whether it's my treatment of female stereotypes in opera, literature and mythology in my early works or my exploration of the history of women as guardians of memory in my recent works. Being a feminist is an indispensable part of my artistic practice.

My work is a expressive response to women's social history, in terms of its richness, complexity and concealment. Recently, I read a great book called "Women and the Material Culture of Death", which is about how to retrieve the almost invisible work that women have done for centuries to commemorate their dead relatives and keep their memories of family, community and country. In her book, Drew gilpin Faust also talked about the key role played by women in national reconstruction after the civil war.

As an artist, I am deeply inspired by these craft forms, but I also think it is very important for people to understand that these crafts are material practices to help society solve and live in death and loss. Contemporary society lacks these rituals. We deny death and aging. So we are completely out of our impermanence, which leads to all kinds of problems, such as greed, hate crimes, environmental damage and so on.

I hope my works remind people of impermanence, think about their own lives, and how they adapt to these rituals to face the loss of life, all of which are around them.

Deutsche Welle: Talk about your artistic development or track, and how you were trained in the first place.

I usually call myself an interdisciplinary artist. I make installations and objects, and activate them in the performance to convey the narrative. In the past 10 years, my work focused on the intervention of specific places in history museums and gardens, where I drew places and their stories to explore how these public places are related to private history and emotional state.

My artistic practice has experienced a very unconventional development track. I started to be a journalist. I am a newspaper and magazine writer. I also sang with professional baroque bands in churches and concert halls. In the mid-1990s, I met a highly politicized gay performing arts circle in Philadelphia, performing in dance halls and nightclubs.

When I sang my Baroque Aria in this environment composed of gay and AIDS activists, I found the powerful potential of clothing to convey narrative. In this super dramatic environment, influenced by the kind drag queen, I used baroque opera skills and mythical characters to explore gender, and developed the title and strength of my performance and my own personal narrative.

I learned from my news background, did a lot of research and wrote my monologue to the audience. I wrote an article about Mermaids, Sai Ren and Harp. They are half women and half beasts. They are not suitable for living on land, at sea or in the air. I explored the madman in the opera. I made another great work, watching Penelope's epic labor weaving and the exploration of waiting and accepting pain before marriage, and drawing lessons from her mother's death. These programs usually include video projection (I sang henry purcell's whistle duet with myself in the video), elaborate scenery, and sometimes other singers and dancers.

Deutsche Welle: As a person interested in artistic creation, how did you become a performing artist?

After performing in the theater for many years, I began to feel that the flatness of the stage and the distance between the audience and the dark theater limited me. About that time, I was invited by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia to make a work for their rare books and decorative arts.

I am fascinated by how the Rosenbach brothers used their collections to reinvent themselves: they grew up to be the sons of middle-class Jewish businessmen, and they went bankrupt, but because the two brothers accumulated a lot of wealth by selling rare books in the 1920s, they started the luxurious lifestyle of English country gentlemen. My performance led the audience to visit the museum, focusing on things disguised as China mirrors and royal furniture, and forged folio of Shakespeare to study how we can redefine ourselves by using our objects.

Making Rosenbach's program made me realize that I was no longer interested in creating "stage magic" to move the audience to other places. What I really want to do is to take them on a field trip and uncover their hidden history through a song tour.

After that, I led the audience through the18th century botanical garden, a Victorian cemetery (all in Philadelphia), took a boat along a river that ran through the center of Melbourne, Australia, and then drove into the 1920s. Leon Baxter designed a private home theater in the basement of a mansion in Baltimore. In all these works, my main interest is to awaken the audience to experience the smell and taste of Chinese herbal medicines in the kitchen garden, the wind on the trees and the smell of swallows eating insects in the cemetery. The huge container ship dwarfs our ships on the river, and the angle of sunset at dusk is also dwarfed. I began to talk less and less during the performance, so that the scene and my belongings could talk more.

Singing has always been the core of my artistic practice. This is probably my most basic expression. I think it can make me communicate with the audience more deeply than a speech. It allows a different kind of emotional contact. As a listener, when I feel the vibration of the singer's voice, I will feel such strong emotions, especially when I am in my own body at close range. I know how powerful this is. Singing also allows me to explore and activate the acoustic effects of these spaces and arouse the memories of people who have lived and worked there. It's like I'm calling their souls with a song.

When I moved to Australia in 2008, I had incredible opportunities and freedom to try my job, try new things and abandon others. At that time, I stopped singing baroque music because I wanted to spend more time making things and clothes, and I didn't want to spend too much time raising my voice. You must sing songs for several hours every day, 5-6 days a week, just like a professional athlete. When I began to study Victorian mourning culture in Australia, I came into contact with Appalachian folk music again, and I constantly found that its lingering melody and lyrics were very suitable for expressing my thoughts and frustrations. I am also interested in the fact that Anglo-Irish Shia immigrants brought these songs to America as souvenirs of their homeland. I am fascinated by how people use folk songs to connect themselves with lost people and places and express their feelings that they cannot or are not allowed to express in civilized society.

I'm interested in leading the audience on a physical journey in time and space, usually through actual walking. But I also hope that through my music and visual images, I can take them on an emotional journey and encourage them to think about their lives and their losses.

Deutsche Welle: As the last question, what achievements do you hope to achieve in writing and playing this piece?

I think I want to do the following in the performance: I want to create an experience for the audience, wake them up, come to the seat of the Great Hall, and feel the amazing sound effects, magnificent buildings and the "hidden" history of it being used as a temporary hospital for soldiers' death during the Civil War.

I want the audience to think about the losses during the civil war 150 years ago. Perhaps this has something to do with the escalating racial violence in the Gulf region, and it is happening all over the country.

Finally, I want to ask the audience to think about their own lives and losses, and have the opportunity to share a moment of collective grief and rejuvenation. This may be a big request for the audience, but this is exactly what I tried to do when developing this project.

2065438+September, 2005 18, the National Portrait Museum will hold the exhibition "The Dark Zone of the Republic of China". Alexander gardner photo, 1859- 1852. "Martha MacDonald's works will make their debut as part of the performing arts series, which will open at the National Portrait Gallery on the afternoon of October 7th/20 15 1."