Linking the present to the past is a central task for historians, especially those working in museums. A new exhibition I have curated for the National Portrait Gallery, Dark Realms of the Republic, features photography by Alexander Gardner, a student of Mathew Brady's One of the first to document the horrors of Civil War battlefields. During the heroic and tragic middle years of 19th-century America, it was Gardner's shocking images of the dead that helped usher in our modern world. RELATED CONTENT Alexander Gardner sees himself as an artist, shaping the image of war in all its brutality Why can’t we look away from the absurd and the horror? Vivid images of Civil War casualties inspire a scholar's inner muse

Martha MacDonald, a Philadelphia-based performance artist, has been instrumental in her early works The Lost Garden (2014) and The Crying Drawn to the Victorian ritual of mourning in The Dress (2012), when we asked her to create a piece for the company and expand on the theme of the Gardner exhibition, she readily agreed.

Gardner was responsible for the photographic revolution in art and culture that occurred in the United States and Europe in the mid-19th century. Born in Scotland to a working-class background, Gardner became fascinated by the emerging photographic technology and found work in Brady's studio, where he did portraits of Brady and, crucially, began photographing the battlefields of the Civil War. . His success in photographing himself at the 1862 exhibition "The Dead at Antietam" allowed Gardner to strike out on his own, establishing his own gallery in Washington and continuing to take photographs of the war and later the American West.

A repertoire of past experiences, arts and cultural programs are presented in poetry, dance and performing arts will support the exhibition. MacDonald is currently working on her piece "Hospital Hymn: An Elegy for the Lost Warriors," and she sat down with me to discuss her artistic intent and purpose, as well as her career as a performance artist. The work will be on display at the museum for the first time on October 17.

David Ward: The Portrait Gallery building was used as a troop depot and as a hospital, with Walt Whitman working as a nurse in the building. How much influence does the history of this building have on how you conceive your work? ”

On my first site visit, I was immediately struck by the idea that this gorgeous, stately building was once filled with the sick and dying. I began to wonder Those souls that were still in the building, I thought, this was really fertile ground for me. I came home from that visit and read Whitman's "Sample Day," which was, in a big way. It's about his time as a nurse during the Civil War. Whitman wrote specifically about visiting soldiers at the Patent Office Hospital and seeing all the beds lined up next to the patent model boxes, especially when they were lit at night. How strange it was. It struck me how obsessed and heartbroken Whitman was about the "unknown soldiers"—thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers who died far from home, without family or friends around them. , so many of them were buried in a bunch of unmarked graves, or not buried at all, just left to rot in the woods or on the battlefield

The second thing that struck me was Kei. Terman was fascinated by how nature bears witness to the pain and loss of war. He imagined a soldier wounded in battle crawling into the woods to die, his body missed by the funeral procession that arrived weeks later during the truce. Gone. Whitman writes in the book that the soldier “shattered and disintegrated beyond recognition. "Now I understand from Drew Gilpin Faust's The Republic of Misery that this was not just an imaginary event, but an event that happened to thousands of soldiers in the war. Both "Sample Day" and Whitman's later Civil War poems show that the bodies of these unknown soldiers became the backbone of the nation, and their spirit is now embodied in every blade of grass you intend to take with you. Going to work?

Oh, the smell of the 19th century! I can only imagine the horror of it all! Read Whitman's "Sample Day" and "The Passion of Faust" It definitely gave me the rancid feeling that would pervade Civil War camps, hospitals, and battlefields, but cities were also beautiful places for smelling birds and unstable plant dyes to stain women's bodies. Shower, and the stains stick around for a long time, sometimes long after they've gotten over their grief. The stain removal formulas I found in women's magazines looked terrible, and the main ingredient they used was oxalic acid. This is what you use to clean silverware. I'm not referring to 19th century smells in this post, but I'm interested in other sensory experiences from this period as I walk from one cot to another. My footsteps echoed through the hall as I made my little bed, the rough texture of the felt flowers contrasting with the crispness of the white sheets.

DW: We have very few written documents or portraits of us from before the 20th century. Arguing that the past is a silent record, I think these records reflect our romanticization of the past, like an exhibition behind glass, frozen in silence.

How do you solve this problem? ”

I will be singing some old hymns that were popular during the Civil War era, some taken from the sacred harp tradition of the South, others from Northern folk hymns such as “The Shining Shore.” I recently read [ Hymn] was popular with soldiers during the war, but the song has fallen out of fashion because it reminds veterans of so much war. No wonder its chorus: "Now we stand on the banks of the Jordan/Our friends are passing/Just now." Before the shining shore / we almost found it. "

DW: How do these hymns fit into your performance? "The music I'm going to sing is based on Whitman's recollection of walking into Armory Hospital late one night and hearing a group of nurses singing to the soldiers. . He described the songs as "recited hymns" and "quaint old songs" and listed some lyrics from "Shining Coast" that I'm currently learning. He described the scene: "People were lying on hospital beds (some seriously injured, some unable to get up from the hospital beds), and the beds were hung with white curtains and shadows." They tilted their heads and listened.

He said some people not far away were singing with the nurse. I was surprised when I read that article about singing in hospitals, but then I thought about all the stories I'd read about 19th century families singing for fun in their homes, singing in the beds of critically ill loved ones, and it reminded me How popular music was in the 19th century (or "homemade music," as Whitman titled his piece "The Singing Nurse"). People sing for every occasion.

, as I mentioned earlier, singing provided a way for people to express strong emotions that were too strong for upper class society, such as sadness and loss. I’m a big believer in the healing power of sad songs. When singing a lament song, the singer invites the listener to connect with their own grief. The performance of elegies, or sad hymns, creates a space for people to cry or express emotion in a public setting, which is deeply healing because it allows listeners to express their own personal drama within a group of individuals. , these individuals are dealing with their own grief or experiencing other deep emotions.

DW: You have evolved some work that draws on American history, and as an American historian I have to tinker with that. What draws you to the past? "My work is about creating a dialogue between the past and the present. I feel a deep resonance with the artifacts and folk songs that people used in the 18th and 19th centuries to cope with and express loss and longing. I bring these historical art forms to you performances and installations as a way to express my own loss and longing, and explore presence and absence. I look back and reflect on the present, but I'm certainly not the only American artist to look to our history as a source of inspiration.< /p>

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

My work can be found among a group of contemporary artists who are engaged in historical and folklore research. Contextualized to explore personal narratives and reflect on the current socio-political climate, artists including Dario Robulto, Alison Smith and Duke Riley express them with appropriate folk craftsmanship. Personal narratives, including 19th-century hair work and soldier trench art (Robleto), sailors' note and tattoo art (Riley), and Civil War reenactor costumes (Smith), include "Ancient" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston (2008) Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art" and MASSMoca's "Ahistorical Events: Artists Making History" (2006) illustrate the breadth of this trend.

DW: You are a loyalist Feminists, can you talk about your recovery of women's voices as an aspect of our evolving historical understanding?

I've always been interested in recovering women's voices in my work, whether it's something like. Whether I was looking at female stereotypes in opera, literature and mythology in my earlier work, or exploring the history of women as keepers of memory in my more recent work, being a feminist is an integral part of my artistic practice. .

My work is a performative response to women’s social history, in all its richness, complexity and invisibility. I recently read a really great book called Women and Women . The Material Culture of Death, by Drew Gilpin, is about reclaiming the almost invisible work that women have done over the centuries to honor their lost loved ones and keep the memory of their families, communities, and nations alive. ·Faust also talks in her book about the critical role women played in the nation's recovery after the Civil War

As an artist, I am deeply inspired by these forms of craftsmanship, but I also think. , it is important for people to understand that these crafts are material practices that help society deal with and live with death and loss. Contemporary society lacks these rituals and therefore we are completely detached from our own impermanence. Various issues such as greed, hate crimes, environmental destruction, etc.

I hope my work reminds people about impermanence and thinking about their own lives and how they adapt to these rituals. The loss of life, it's all around them.

DW: Talk about your artistic development or trajectory and how you were first trained.

I generally refer to myself as an interdisciplinary artist. I make installations and objects that I activate in performances to convey narratives. Over the past 10 years, my work has focused on site-specific interventions in historical museums and gardens, where I mapped the place and its story to explore how these public places engage with private histories and associated with emotional states.

My artistic practice has taken a very unconventional trajectory. I started working as a journalist. I'm a newspaper and magazine writer. I also sang in churches and concert halls with professional baroque ensembles. I encountered a highly politicized gay performance art scene in Philadelphia in the mid-1990s, performing in cabarets and nightclubs.

As I sang my Baroque arias in this environment of gay and AIDS activists, I discovered the powerful potential of clothing to convey narrative. In this meta-theatrical environment, I was nurtured by benevolent drag queens and developed performance work titles that utilized baroque operatic techniques and mythical characters to explore gender and power as well as my own personal narrative.

I drew from my journalism background, did a lot of research, and wrote monologues that I spoke to the audience. I wrote an essay about mermaids, sirens, and harps, half women, half beasts unfit for life on land, sea, or air, and my relationship with them. I explore that madman in the opera. I did another big piece looking at the mythical Penelope’s epic labor of weaving and maiden exploring the pain of waiting and acceptance, drawing on my mother’s death. These shows usually include video projections (in which I sing Henry Purcell's Siren Duet with myself), elaborate sets, and sometimes other singers and dancers.

DW: As someone interested in making art, how did you evolve into a performing artist.

After many years of performance work in the theater, I began to feel limited by the flatness of the stage and the distance of the audience sitting passively in a dark theater. Around that time, I was invited by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia to do a piece for their collection of rare books and decorative arts.

I was fascinated by how the Rosenbach brothers used their collection to reinvent themselves: growing up as the sons of middle-class Jewish merchants, they went bankrupt, but as the brothers made their fortunes in the 1920s by selling Rare books amassed a fortune, and they began the lavish lifestyle of English country gentlemen. My performance takes the audience on a tour of the museum, focusing on objects masquerading as Chinese mirrors, Empire furniture, and forged Shakespearean folios as a study of how we use our objects to redefine ourselves.

Producing Rosenbach's show made me realize that I was no longer interested in creating "stage magic" to transport the audience somewhere else. What I really wanted to do was take them on a field trip and uncover their hidden history through a kind of song tour.

Since then, I have taken viewers through an 18th-century botanic garden, a Victorian cemetery (both in Philadelphia), and on a boat ride along a river through downtown Melbourne, Australia. Then drive forward to the 1920s, when Leon Baxter designed a private home theater in the basement of a Baltimore mansion. In all these works my main interest is to evoke in the viewer the experience of being in the field - the smells and tastes of herbs in the kitchen garden, the wind in the trees and the swallows feeding on insects in the cemetery, the huge container ships dwarfing our boats on the river , the angle of the setting sun at dusk also pales in comparison. I started saying less and less in my performances, letting the scene and my objects speak more.

Singing has always been at the core of my artistic practice. This is probably my most basic way of expressing myself. I feel like this allows me to connect with the audience on a deeper level than speaking. It allows for a different kind of emotional engagement. As a listener, I have such strong emotions when I feel the vibrations of a singer's voice, especially up close and within my own body. I know how powerful this is. Singing also allows me to explore and activate the acoustics of these spaces, evoking memories of the people who once lived and worked there. It's like I'm summoning their souls with my song.

When I moved to Australia in 2008, I had incredible opportunities and freedom to experiment with my work, try new things, and leave people behind. I stopped singing baroque music at that time because I wanted to spend more time making objects and costumes and less time maintaining my voice. You have to sing for hours a day, 5-6 days a week, like a professional athlete. When I began working in Australia on Victorian mourning cultures, I reconnected with Appalachian folk music, and I continued to find its haunting melodies and lyrics perfectly suited to expressing longing and loss. I'm also interested in the songs that Anglo-Irish Shiite immigrants brought to America as souvenirs of the homeland they left behind. I'm fascinated by how people use folk songs to connect themselves to the people and places they've lost, to express feelings they can't express or aren't allowed to express in civilized society.

I am interested in taking the viewer on a physical journey through time and space, often by literally walking. But I also hope to take them on an emotional journey through the music and visuals I create, encouraging them to think about their own lives and their own losses.

DW: As a final question, what do you hope to achieve in writing and performing this piece?

I guess I hope to do the following in the performance: I think Create an experience for the audience that awakens them to the site of the Great Hall to experience the stunning acoustics, majestic architecture, and its “hidden” history of being used as a makeshift hospital where soldiers died during the Civil War.

I want viewers to think about the amount of loss during the Civil War 150 years ago, and maybe that has something to do with the escalation of racial violence we have in the Bay Area and that is happening right now across the country.

Finally, I would like to invite the audience to reflect on their own lives and losses and have the opportunity to share in a collective moment of grief and renewal. That might be a big ask for viewers, but that's what I was striving for when developing this project.

On September 18, 2015, the National Portrait Gallery will hold the exhibition "Dark Realms of the Republic of China". Photographs of Alexander Gardner, 1859-1852. "Martha Macdonald's work will debut as part of a performing arts series opening at the National Portrait Gallery on 17 October 2015 at 1pm.

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