Chapter 5—Nour Mobarak, Sphere Studies and Subterranean Bounce , October 4 – November 8, 2020


And so, when the knock came, I assumed it was the microloan kids. I opened the door to find a determined and messy-haired woman with intense grey eyes. Behind her a lanky guy smiled. “Are you here about the microloans?” I asked.

“Well…” she said, “Astrantia said we could dig. She said you had a lot of dirt.”

“It’s a little late for digging, isn’t it?” It was eight at night.

“This is when we dig,” she explained defiantly.

“We have a lantern,” the tall one added.

I showed them the back—my patch of wilderness, an arid hill standing over a grassy little deceit I was frantically trying to keep alive. They dug up there for hours and returned the next night. The purpose of all of this was soon made clear: they were burying speakers. When accomplished, they delivered the spheres. Her spheres. She was the artist—Nour Mobarak—he was her digger. As I came to understand, these were the elements of an art exhibition she intended to stage in my backyard, and she wanted me there during “gallery hours,” to greet and guide, should anyone stop by. I said yes, I’d like to try this role, and besides, I remembered what Astrantia had said: the gallerist gets half. I learned about the work, its private and public meanings, how it was all made. She showed me how to guide a tangle of cords out of the ground and into a mixer hidden in a tree hollow, and to plug that, in turn, into a laptop (hidden in a different tree hollow) upon which I would set the soundtrack going.

One day in the middle of the run of Nour’s show, having gone out back to take in some sun, I was immediately struck by the feeling that something was amiss. With a sudden sense of panic, I spotted the aberration: there were only five spheres at the top of the hill. Could I have left one behind that morning when—as every morning—I carried the spheres, one at a time, up the hill and reinstalled the show as best I could remember (trying to place and orient the objects according to the dictates of the artist and then turning on the sound)? Yeah, it was possible—I had a lot on my mind. It was also possible, it seemed to me, that an animal had come and carried it away. Or maybe thrashed it. The spheres, after all, were—are—composed of organic matter: mycelium, mushrooms, pulverized wood. Surely there is an animal out there who would find something like that delicious or threatening or both.

But no, neither Nature, red in tooth and claw, nor the absentminded home-gallerist were at fault. Because there it was. I saw it, gasped, and cautiously made my way to the stray sphere, lying at the foot of the hill. I inspected it and amazingly it seemed to be undamaged by the sixty-foot journey down craggy terrain, like a senile old man who’s wandered through traffic in undies, blithely indifferent to the peril. I knew perfectly well how fragile the spheres were from my daily ritual: they were light, pulpy to the touch, and they left a fine powder on the fingers as if slowly disintegrating with each trip up and down the hill. Apart from the small miracle of its surviving unscathed, what struck me, as I returned the sphere to its perch, was how the incident captured the essentially off-kilter quality of the exhibition as a whole: the play of the seen and the unseen which resulted in asymmetry, out-of-syncness, displacement.

The spheres sat in the dirt, beneath which was buried a sound installation, Subterranean Bounce, built from recordings of spheres of various sizes, densities, and materials, rolling around and crashing into stuff. This created a kind of ventriloquism: the sometimes-frenetic sound of balls in motion—certain passages you could feel the rumbling more than you could hear them—coming from under and around the inert spheres. It stuck me in that moment, as I adjusted the retrieved sphere, that a parallel to the installation’s disconnecting effect could be seen with some of Nour’s earlier work in music, her intense vocalization exercises that probed the gap between voice and meaning. Now the simple trick of throwing the voice came with a simple mis-mapping: there were, as I’ve said, six spheres, but underground only five speakers. It always made me feel a little wobbly. And it brought to mind that other work of five-channel ventriloquism:***Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge*, in which a choirboy’s song fragments into sonic quanta tossed about in an electronic frenzy. The text of Stockhausen’s thing comes from the Book of Daniel: it’s the story of the three youths tossed into the furnace by Nebuchadnezzar, but they’re fine and they sing praises to the Lord. Here, I guess, they were buried alive. But when I took in Nour’s scene, I was always struck by the dirt itself, the medium between the sound and the spheres. There were mounds and crags and roughly dug craters, and it all looked like it couldn’t decide if it was coming or going—at once a burial site and an excavation.

“Hello there!” A voice called from below. I squinted at the silhouetted figure entering the yard and gave a tentative wave.

Even as I did I was drawn back into memory, to conversations I’d had with Nour when I’d visit her studio. She told me about mycelium, her medium, whose material possibilities she was experimenting with. It was versatile and malleable, would do whatever you wanted, she said, but only if you really understood it. She cultivated her sculptures in plastic molds, a wiffle ball inserted to aerate the innards. Mushrooms sprouted where she drilled holes in the molds, making drawings on the surfaces of the hollow orbs. Some so-called experts had said to her that she wouldn’t be able to make one eighteen inches in diameter. She’d proved them wrong, of course, inserting it the cavity a contraption of several wiffle balls affixed to a perforated plastic cup. But mycelium was more than a material to her. Growing through a substrate in a rhizomatic system of hyphae, it has its own kind of intelligence. She spoke of a personal relationship with the stuff, saw the spheres as subjects, yes, but also as her studio assistants—they did most work—and it was not without sadness that she had, finally, to kill them, so that they could become sculptures.

“I’ve come to inspect the globes,” the man said as he climbed the hill. He was attired in the latest streetwear and carried himself rather stiffly. “Your one o’clock,” he offered with a note of impatience; I must have had a puzzled expression.

Of course! My one o’clock. How could I have forgotten? He was an agent of Eli Broad, a man of vast wealth and discriminating taste, whose private museum was only a few miles from here. Another small miracle, I thought, that he hadn’t arrived just a few minutes earlier and that I stepped out when I did and found that runaway sphere. With this sense of relief and sudden recognition, I threw open my arms to welcome the man, which seemed to startle him. Though there was a lull, it was nevertheless COVID times, and I think he thought I meant to hug him. “Welcome,” I said simply, and brought my hands tightly together, as if in prayer, and backed away to give him some space. 

I watched as he paced among the spheres, stooping to investigate the surfaces. He would put his face right up to them. Once or twice I thought I saw him sniff them. Then, he put his ear to the ground. Well, I thought, he is thorough. When he’d gotten up, I asked, “How is Mr. Broad doing?”

“Eli wishes he could be here,” he said. “But he is weak. Eli is very, very weak.”

I said I was sorry too that he couldn’t come. “But,” I queried, maybe a little awkwardly, “you are his representative?”

For the first time, he took his attention from the spheres. “I am authorized to act on his behalf.” I nodded. I could feel the checkbook throbbing in his pants. He resumed his little tour.

After another long silence, I mused, “It’s funny you should call them globes, as you did just now. A lot of people are reminded of planets, a whole solar system. They come by and they say, planet of the mushrooms.” I did this last bit in a funny trailer voice. But then suddenly grave, I went on, “Of course, there is something to it. Fungi are super important to our ecosystem. The largest terrestrial organism is a fungus. Fungi have a symbiotic relationship with microorganisms and they help trees communicate with each other. I like to think of mushrooms as the thought bubbles of the networked intelligence of mycelium.” He seemed to take this in and turn it over in his mind. Fifty percent, I thought. That’s my cut.

“No,” he finally said. “I don’t see them as planets, and neither would Eli.”

“Of course not,” I blurted out, though I don’t think it registered.

“I’m actually reminded of a string of pearls.” And he waved his hand, tracing the not-quite-circle of the spheres’ arrangement. And I told the man that it was widely thought—not by everyone, mind you—that the word baroque came from the Portuguese meaning an uneven or imperfect pearl, and that struck me, yes, a pretty apt description.

Again I watched him ruminate for what could only be described as a very long time. He closed his eyes, opened them, and asked, “You are familiar with José Antonio Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque?”

“Yes.”

“A time of conflict and economic crisis. A sense of madness and contingency. The world diseased. The world upside-down. This, he says, was the great topos of the age.”

“Right.”

“Do you remember this passage? Maravall says, ‘But the widespread practices, especially in art, of ‘deceiving the eye’ had no pretense of making us believe that what we saw prepared by an artist's skillful manipulation was the true reality of things, but of moving us to accept that the world we took to be real was no less apparent. By means of these procedures, the politician as much as the moralist and the artist judged it easier to obtain acceptance for or submission to the Church, the monarchy, the social order (with its distinctions of regimented groups), the power of the rich, and those other discriminations supporting the stability of the system. In other words, they showed people that in relations with the world one must adhere to a game ruled by knowledge and prudence; they told them that, regardless, this world, however apparent it may be, is what confronts one and what must be dealt with; and they reminded them that, precisely because of its condition as illusory appearance, one must wholly enter into the game in terms of whatever becomes present to us.’”

“Yeah,” I nodded, “I think I remember that part.” With smiles all around, we settled into untroubled equipoise, as if supported by all these unseen things.

“But,” he abruptly went on, “Ms. Mobarak’s manipulation of nature entails a different sort of illusion. The objects, on the one hand, appear to be defined by their sphericity—the shape of self-containment, the thought that thinks itself. But their spectacular skins keep you there.” With this, his eyes grew wide and he moved his fingers frantically as his hands swept upward. “Away from volume or depth. They play form against surface.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be like that,” I protested, but I think I knew in that moment I’d lost him.

“They come to us from a place still deeper in the bowels of memory: These decorated round hollow bodies: what are they but the painted vessels of antiquity? Look again and we see, no, these scarred surfaces with their primitive markings are cave paintings on inside-out caves.” He stared at me with a severe but inscrutable look. “She would have us go back.”

I tried to tempt him with a few other topics, but he wouldn’t bite. Then he said it was time to go.

“You have my email,” I called out to him as he descended the hill. “Just write me if you have any questions.”

But I guess he didn’t have any.