Schultz, Robert and Binh Danh. War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal (Poetry and Visual Art Exhibition) [review]

Robert Schultz and Binh Danh. War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal. Poetry and Visual Art Exhibition, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia. February 7-May 23, 2015; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, August 21-October 16, 2016.In Part 6 of "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman suddenly perceives the grass to be the "uttering tongues" of all those whose dying feeds the living. While the phrase "uttering tongues" alludes to speech, it gestures more broadly to the communicative impulse at the heart of words and images. After all, Whitman does name the grass a "uniform hieroglyph." Though Whitman's visual poetics and interest in the visual arts predate, or, more accurately perhaps, foreshadow, widespread Modernist poetic interest in the visual arts and verbal-visual collaboration, one hundred and sixty years after the initial publication of Leaves of Grass, a twenty-first-century poet and a visual artist have collaborated with Whitman to produce War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal, a word and image exhibition that opened in February 2015 at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia. By commingling their verbal and visual arts through collaboration and appropriation of materials past and present, photographer Binh Danh and poet Robert Schultz have produced in War Memoranda a variety of texts, ranging from broadsides to artists' books to the gallery installation, that both memorialize and interrogate the process by which we create shared meaning and memory. As memoranda, these texts proclaim themselves to be notes for the future, gathering for us "uttering tongues" of the past, including Whitman's own Memoranda During the War, into a collective present.From August 21 through October 16, 2016, War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal will show at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. Gallery exhibitions are not often read as texts, but in this review, I want to consider how the literal space of the gallery, which is filled with original poetry and art as well as appropriations of historical poetry and art, can be read as a cohesive text in order to offer a conceptual understanding of the project as a whole. In order to do so, I will describe broadly the space of the gallery exhibition while delving into several individual pairings of poetry and visual art to offer insight into the collaborative impulse at the center of the exhibition.A verbal-visual collaboration such as War Memoranda resists the neat categories into which word and image, author and artist, past and present, are often divided. By insisting on the continuum, Danh (a California-based artist whose work is exhibited in galleries across the country) and Schultz (author of three books of poetry and John P Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College) not only argue for the need to discover Whitman's "interior history" of war, which he posits in Memoranda During the War is so often obscured by the impulse to record "facts," but also for a recursive, interpenetrating approach to enacting that discovery. They extend their collaboration beyond themselves to join with the seemingly long dead-both Whitman and the many named and unnamed men and women who appear in the Library of Congress's Liljenquist collection of Civil War photography, leafprints of which anchor War Memoranda. They use the flesh of leaves, whose living veins connect the gossamer human story, as both medium and message; photographs from the present and past are reproduced on actual leaves using a chlorophyll printing process, while the trope of leaves weaves through Schultz's poetry. Whitman quotations are placed strategically along the gallery walls, and through the combined effect of this gathering, leaves become a metaphor not only for the cycles of human life, but for the recording of that life.War Memoranda is the work of the body rendering the invisible visible. The artifacts in this exhibition remind viewers that the past is always the material of our present. …