Poetry
Category #2: Laundry Detergent
From The Catalogue of Lost Glimpses
Often, streets with storefronts that greet passersby with a gumball machine in the doorway also happen to be streets which boast a variety of 99c stores, all with multicolored signs which say the same thing: 99c. These stores often decorate their storefronts with systematic presentations of stacked detergent bottles and cleaning liquids. Although most stores that sell cleaning liquids also sell other colorful things (plastic forks, brooms, impractical clay birdhouses, Chinese slippers, jungle underwear three-packs, orange extension chords, plastic stacking bowls, etc.), most often it is cleaning liquids that dominate 99c store windows. Because the street is sometimes unpredictable, the prevalence of neatly-stacked colorful detergent bottles in store windows stand in stark contrast to the seeming randomness of the fragments the eye is forced to assemble on the street. On a purely aesthetic level, in allowing the display of cleaning liquids to pleasantly dominate their vision for a few moments, the passer-by’s eye is given the chance to leave behind the over-stimulation of the street. (The whirl of car wheels that randomly blows torn-off wrappers, broken-off plastic pieces, discarded food fragments to collect in corners and in gutters, for example.) Passersby might register in their minds, even for just a moment, that the most common cleaning liquid color appears to be yellow. This is probably because yellow, unlike orange, reminds passersby of lemons. And lemons, for some reason, represent cleanliness. Passersby might notice that bleach bottles are usually white but are never transparent. This is most likely because bleach, in spite of its whitening properties, actually is a slightly yellowish color, and doesn’t look as if it would very effectively remove a nasty stain from a white shirt. On a more spiritual level, these passing thoughts are marked in the passerby’s mind because of the contrast: in looking down at the street the eye processes fragments; in looking at the order and precision of the detergent display, the eye is comforted by the possibility of a continually recurring pattern. This is the contrast between order and chaos which balances the energy fields of the universe. It is also the energy which the street sustains and the eye processes, triggering the old brain to remember: I am but one part of the pantomime.
Contributor
Kristin PrevalletKristin Prevallet is the author of Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-Text Projects. She lives in Greenpoint. The Catalogue of Lost Glimpses is a Poetry As Public Art Project (PIPA) which is in-process.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
70. (Corner Lispenard & Church Streets, North Tower of the World Trade Center)
By Raphael RubinsteinSEPT 2021 | The Miraculous
Its early on a Tuesday autumn morning and a sixty-two-year-old painter is standing in front of his home conversing with a neighbor and some firemen who have arrived to investigate a reported gas leak on the block. About a mile away a thirty eight-year-old sculptor who was working so late the day before he decided to spend the night in his studio on the ninety-second floor of a skyscraper is probably still asleep.
75. (Pier 18, Hudson River)
By Raphael RubinsteinOCT 2021 | The Miraculous
An artist and her friend are helping install an exhibition of experimental works on an abandoned Lower West Side pier. The women involved in the show are working hard, but the artists whose projects are being shown are all men. Its the early 1970s. Walking home at night through the empty streets of Downtown Manhattan the two friends feel safer making loud noises, singing off-key and generally pretending to be crazy. One night they find themselves improvising bird sounds based on the first name of the organizer of the exhibition. This impromptu performance develops into a sound piece titled Birdcalls where the artist utters the surnames of 28 male artists in a variety of bird-like noises.
Abolition of a Category
By Susette Min and Amy SadaoJUL-AUG 2022 | Editor's Message
Over the last several decades, scholars and curators have written about the historical richness and heterogeneity of Asian American art, yet art made by and about Asian Americans has remained for the most part unnoticed, an afterthought, or an oversight, especially in major thematic museum exhibitions and sweeping art histories.
The Angel and the Mole: On the Struggle for the Atlanta Forest
By Darien AceroJUNE 2023 | Field Notes
Atlanta, Georgia is a city in a forest. The neighborhoods and the woods wind around and through each other like so many rips and eddies in the creeks beneath the streets. In southeast Atlanta, a battle over the forest, the city, and, many contend, the world has been escalating for the past two years. Specifically in dispute is a 420+ acre portion of forest split by Intrenchment Creek, a vein of the South River Watershed.