3000 Tulips At The End Of The World

The circumstances had changed. What we had envisioned was a story celebrating Daniele’s work, photographed as an editorial documenting the debut of her tulips. We had planned for months, but the story was cancelled—like everything else—because of COVID-19. It seems strange, now, to consider a timeline of events. Each week feels like an inexorable reality of Fridays and Tuesdays, and Friday again, somehow.

Near the end of March, Daniele emailed me another photo of her project. A thin mound was rising, and it reminded me of a pizza crust. In the background of the photo, the tree branches are bare. The next day, she posted a series of photos on Instagram, beginning with a park bench in the foreground and the tulips in the background. The conditional properties of “Temporary Red Dot” were given a frame. I later tried to understand the geography of the tulips in relation to the rest of Highland Park. The circle can be found East of one shape—the tennis courts—and close to another shape—the baseball diamond.

Accompanying the tulips are two signs that Daniele has built and hand painted. They read: “DO NOT PICK THE TULIPS” and “NO CORTAR LOS TULIPANES.” At my desk in Montreal, I say the words, Veuillez ne pas cueillir les tulipes. This response comes idly, like a familiar tune, like my brain has blown a fuse. While finding focus has become increasingly senseless, “Temporary Red Dot” is a place for my focus not to land but drift towards. I’m aware of the date because of Daniele’s Instagram posts. I experience a week passing because the tulips have grown taller, and because Daniele shares photos of passersby taking selfies with her project, more of whom begin to wear masks. The tulips account for a point in time when time itself has lost its implication.

Daniele’s daily visits function as a visual diary. They are the only thing. I follow along, greedy for the next day’s post. On one occasion, the red is not garish, necessarily, but undreamed-of. She calls it “glitchy.” It’s as if the phone camera is too unqualified to capture this caliber of burning red. That nature could make a phone malfunction is a briefly wondrous thought. I screenshot the image. On another day, Daniele documents the tulips close-up. A whole amphitheatre of red, a short 7-minute walk from her apartment.

Her project cites the work of pioneering visionaries like Agnes Denes and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Denes, whose best known public work, “Wheatfield—A Confrontation” (1982), featuring two acres of wheat harvested in a landfill that would later become Battery Park City, was the subject of a career-spanning exhibit last year at The Shed. Ukeles, Daniele’s personal hero, is an artist known for serving as the artist-in-residence for the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) for almost forty years. Her cumulative, five-decade breadth of work is as abstract as it is literal: sculpture made from trash, recasting the drudgery of repetition into an art practice that is radically committed to hands-on cycles of renewal, maintenance, and everyday life.

On April 3rd, the view from above was still patchy. A disc formation with occasional red. Using a drone camera, Daniele documented the project aerially. “It looks like a smiley face…still waiting for all the flowers to bloom and fill in the circle,” she wrote on Instagram. Daniele tells me she insisted on a circle, though a heart shape was suggested numerous times.

Red dots on a map. The global number of confirmed COVID-19 cases is in the millions. The deaths, in the hundreds of thousands. As I write this, the situation in New York is extremely critical. My group text with my New York friends is quiet and then buzzing. These are the terms of texting now—bursts and stillness. “We’ll be okay, but that stress,” writes one friend. Her text bubble lights up with pink hearts. That same friend later tweets, “We’re all doing it but trust that adaptability is a completely deranged response.” The group text resumes later that night. Someone texts, “This is hell.” The text bubble lights up with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hearts.

If the difference between ritual and routine is the attitude behind the action, “Temporary Red Dot” occupies both meanings. It’s something to do (for Daniele, a walk; for me, life beyond work and dishes) and it’s something ceremonial. The tulips are microcosmic. Both symbolic and unremarkable. They corroborate the day and remain incomplex. “Temporary Red Dot” is a project that realizes the uninvasive, impossible effect of seeming style-free. The tulips convey fleetingness when everything is stalled. Amidst lockdown, they are the outside. As Daniele notes, the tulips represent our united letting go. “I couldn’t control when they bloom,” she writes in an email. “I can’t control how long they’ll be there. And I can’t stop them from coming back again next year.”

Bulbs require a cold period. That’s just one of many facts I learn while talking to Daniele about her process. The cold triggers the bloom, and while the biochemical process necessary for bringing the bulbs to flower is beyond my basic understanding, I think back to December—all those months ago—when Daniele was planting her tulip bulbs. It’s difficult to wrap my head around the near past when each day tolls with more shattering news. The near past—even more recent than December, like February or early March—is a thick fog lost in a soupy part of my memory that’s coated in some sweet simile of reality. Like, what was I doing listening to one song on repeat, over and over, just two months ago? That I was willfully experiencing life on loop when this week’s Monday is exactly like yesterday’s blunted afternoon, and tomorrow morning will become some slow union of lunch and evening bandaged in this paradoxical Spring, and why is it that every day at 3pm feels unclaimed? These circular days: where do we file them?

While the poignancy of “Temporary Red Dot” seems obvious—the proverbial if 3000 tulips bloom and no one is around—what can’t be underestimated is that the tulips’ swell is directly proportional to our collective mourning. We are inside while the tulips prosper. Their congested closeness, like some memory of proximity, of now-lapsed contact. Every day is met with barrelling uncertainty and the incantational effect of one day at a time. We are reminded, once again, that what is revealed in crisis is only revealed to those who were not paying attention.

One morning, I watch a section of Walden, a film by the late, great avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. The project, originally titled Diaries, Notes and Sketches, was shot on a Bolex 16mm camera over the course of four years, in the late sixties. It’s a time capsule of everyday scenes in New York, with intertitles recounting the images:

The depictions are straightforward and spontaneous. Mekas’ friends cooking dinner together, people walking towards and people walking away, Barbara’s hands patting down soil in her balcony flower box. There’s Nico, rowboats in Central Park, reflections on windows. The peacefulness of looking is not passive but bound to the peculiar way the present becomes the past, and how keeping record tempers our interior wildness.

Of his film, Mekas once said, “To me Walden exists throughout the city. You can reduce the city to your own small world which others may never see…In my New York there is a lot of nature. Walden is made up of bits of memories of what I wanted to see.” The bits he speaks of, those small incremental changes, are phenomenal in their anticipation of close or the inevitable, like death. The bits he speaks of are the thing with feathers.

For now, all I see is red, which has come to mean the opposite of seeing red. On April 7th, Daniele posts another aerial view. The drone is way up high. We see the bright red dot, the park’s tree tops, and even the city’s skyline, faraway on the horizon. It’s a remarkable sight, attendant to our current state where red dots and circles, and round red things bring to mind every stock photo we’ve seen of the virus. From this angle, the dot looks somehow soft, like a fuzzy sticker.

On April 8th, Daniele shares a photo of the tulips at night. The camera’s flash suggests the uncanny: red-by-night tulips, silhouetted thin trees, the spooky, Lynchian calm of Nature after dark.

On April 9th, it rains. Droplets on red petals, blue-gray light. Someone comments on Daniele’s Instagram post: “Makes us smile evvvvvery day. Thank you, Daniele!” I am so absorbed by this project that I interpret the repetition of the letter “v” as five open tulips.

Last year, a few months before she died, Agnès Varda gave an interview in which she shared her plans for spending time, following the completion of what would be her final film. “I no longer want to work so hard. I’d like to stay home a little, be calm…At my age, every minute is more or less the last minute. I feel it very strongly. I should enjoy what is here. Even seeing the tulips aging, I love that. The more you wait, they become very bizarre. I love to see things getting to be naturally, vaguely destroyed.”

In October 1969, Varda was in conversation with Mekas for The Village Voice. Their exchange about making art turned tense, with Mekas adopting a snappy, accusatory tone. At one point, the filmmakers talk about cheesecake. “When I made Lions Love,” says Varda, “I didn’t think I was making ‘art.’ When I am making cheesecake, I am making the same kind of art, perhaps. I am as much an artist when I make a cake as when I make a film.”

Varda’s cheesecake and Varda’s tulips, and Daniele’s “Temporary Red Dot,” all belong to that liminal space where invention—the sport and sense of pause gleaned from just looking and letting go—or planting bulbs and waiting, or getting a bird’s eye view, spirit you away. Forget any metaphor for renewal or recovery. At this stage, in crisis, there is only the blur and the extent of a day. Processing time can look a lot like witnessing 3000 tulips come and go, and then come again next spring. With few certainties, arrive some. Like red for beginners. Like next spring—that incoherent, strange hereafter.

Durga Chew-Bose is Managing Editor at SSENSE