Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come

Dialogues

From the onset of working on Past Deposits for Waterloo Greenway, Hubbard / Birchler have envisioned to create a public outreach series, Dialogues, as a way to open up expansive conversations about community, place and history. Respondents in the series are invited to contribute their perspectives about site, context and history; art as archeology; objects and objecthood. Their forthcoming contributions will be posted in a staggered schedule here. Confirmed Dialogues participants are: 

Jana La Brasca: Researcher, writer, and PhD candidate in art history specializing in modern and contemporary art, Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin

Lisa Le Feuvre: Curator, writer, editor and Director, Nancy Holt / Robert Smithson Foundation

Dieter Roelstraete: Curator, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago

Zachary Suri: 2022-2023 Austin Youth Poet Laureate and co-host, co-producer, and poet-in-residence for This is Democracy podcast

Andrés Tijerina: Professor of History at Austin Community College, member of Texas State Historical Association and scholar of Tejano history

Javier Wallace: Founder of Black Austin Tours and Postdoctoral Associate in the African and African American Studies Department at Duke University

The wonder of objects
Lisa Le Feuvre
2024

The touch of a hand on a button. The warmth in the palm when a talisman is caressed in the dark pocket. The grip on a bottle of soda. The fingertips on a coin as it moves from hand to hand. The careful placing of a ring on a finger. Touching an object performs a curious alchemy: it brings value. To value something is to establish a set of relations that are at once empirical and emotional. Value formulates currency and sends a charge through the present. Certain objects are made to be tactile. Each touch on this special category of objects—which, when one thinks on it, has no limits—ignites and connects stories.

Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come is a study of the wonder of objects. Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler offer a generous invitation to be immersed in sensations and stories of tactility. This gloriously seductive artwork comprises a collection of objects that flow through space. The Texas Archeological Research Laboratory is the home of all kinds of things that have been touched by humans, and then left behind. There are marbles and buttons; fragments of plates and out-of-shape forks; coins and marbles; earrings and glass beads; hinges and horseshoes; a carved rabbit and a cast frog. Each of these objects are scaled to the human hand: they are made to have a relationship with the body. We become so close to everyday objects like these that they become a part of us: part of our physicality, extensions to our surfaces and limbs, and part of our perceptions. There is a momentary feeling of loss that soon passes after the button from the favorite shirt has unthreaded and fallen somewhere unknown, when the plate tumbles to the floor and breaks, the hair comb slips from the bag to the floor, and the bottle cap becomes useless once the contents have been released and the toying with its edges loses its charm. And yet, somehow, these objects hold memories. Narratives expand with each telling and each listening: they start with fact and experience, then persist with fabulation. If they were returned to the hand that once touched them all that time would collapse and, once again, they would become part of us.

Hubbard and Birchler have brought these past deposits into the present by filming each one, returning them at an architectural scale celebrating our relationships with objects. Each evening, as the daylight falls and the nightlight rises, objects once lost along the Waller Creek of Austin return in a looping half-hour dance, swirling to a soundtrack by the composer Alex Weston. As the choreography unfurls, all these stories that have been held in objects are invited in. And, as the blue and yellow and green and red things made of plastic and wood and ceramic and metal and glass make their glorious turns and tumbles at a size taller than the tallest person you could have ever met, all those gentle touches on the hand on an object return to the mind. You might walk past and seek in your pocket with your fingers that glass bead you found in grass on that special afternoon. With that connection, time collapses, and that little worthless thing becomes the most valuable and wonderful object that could be imagined.

Every Marble is a Planet
Jana La Brasca
2024

Artifact: 
1. An object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes.
2. A spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself.¹ 

The objects in Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come are artifacts in both senses. Bottles, coins, keys, finials, crockery fragments and other objects cascade and twirl, liberated from their natural scale and the dark recesses of their permanent repository in the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory’s (TARL) deep storage.² These objects, unearthed between 2006 and 2008 from fifteen trenches at the site of what is now Waterloo Park and along Waller Creek in Austin, Texas are the multicolored fruits of a series of archaeological investigations undertaken to determine whether there were historically significant contexts that would be disturbed by the excavation of a flood prevention tunnel.

Due to the consistent flooding of the Waller Creek plain, the objects uncovered were neither very old—despite Waller Creek’s millennia of human use and habitation––nor particularly unique. In their reports, researchers concluded the deposits were “out of context,” of “limited integrity,” and only provided “redundant information.”³ Nevertheless, each one bears tiny, runic notations, applied with care in an inconspicuous spot so as not to impede observation of any distinctive feature.⁴ That these objects have been catalogued and archived at all speaks to their status as artifacts of the second type, evidence not of ancient lifeways, but the conditions that have washed them away.

The frieze-like proportions of the video installation, combined with the seamless, monochromatic black background and the operatic drama of the soundtrack, add a sense of both cosmic scale and historical magnitude, literalized by the objects’ rotation. Like planets, marbles and beads tumble and spin weightlessly at different speeds, as if subject to their own individual gravities. A single glass sphere sometimes shares the screen with another that is much smaller, evoking the orbital radius between a celestial body and its moon.⁵ Together, the musical and filmic compositions orchestrate rhythms and rests that emulate the whirlpools and diluvial tides that carried the objects to their resting places. Throughout the video, they freely shift scales, in relation to each other and the overall frame, but they are always magnified, revealing subtleties of texture, color, and form that challenge archaeological redundancy with aesthetic intrigue.

The rainbow palette of a climactic moment in the film, in which an ensemble of objects pirouette across the screen in a lateral ROYGBIV array, suggest not only the colors of the LGBTQ+ pride flag, but also the spectrum of visible light. Like opalescent refractions on the surface of one of the film’s glass bottles, each word in the work’s title shifts in relation to the one directly abutting it. Past (bygone) Deposits (sums or materials placed for projected recovery) from (originating in) a (nonspecific) Future (definite) Yet to Come (indefinite). Together, these words form a spiraling referential ouroboros that, like the looping revolutions of the artifacts’ dance, affirm time’s cyclical nature. Everything we touch, the artists suggest, from the teeth of a comb to a pony bead, embodies pasts, futures, and potentials that are equally open-ended.

¹ Adapted from definitions from the Merriam Webster and Oxford English Dictionaries.
² “TWIRL”: one of few verbal messages, like “LIBERTY” (on a penny) and “AUSTIN, TX,” (on a bottle) that the objects transmit through found text in the otherwise wordless film. A piece of a simple toy or cereal box prize, pockmarked with age, follows an old instruction to “twirl,” generating a little vignette of a cartoon housewife smashing a man’s head with a rolling pin. Hubbard and Birchler’s partnership in art and marriage adds to the gag, but its impact is more than biographical: the “twirl’s” activation of a cyclical bonk evokes how the iterative performance of binary gender roles link interpersonal dynamics with mass culture and its histories. The artists are also interested in “the toy as a specimen of proto-cinema,” and in animating it they give a medium-specific nod to the concept of the “motion picture.”
³ Teresa Hubbard, email to the author, May 3, 2024.
⁴ These characters conform to the standards of the Council of Texas Archeologists and TARL, and they serve to identify, among other things, the object’s find spot. Teresa Hubbard, email to the author, May 3, 2024.
⁵ The theme of spinning also animates recent video work by contemporary Texas-based artists Virginia Lee Montgomery and Tamara Johnson. For more on the former, see my essay “The Moth Effect” in the catalogue for Montgomery’s solo exhibition Eye Moon Cocoon (Austin: Women and Their Work, 2023). Tamara Johnson and Trey Burns’ collaborative Centrifuge debuted in Johnson’s solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum in April 2024.

Deposit: A Penny for These Thoughts
Dieter Roelstraete
2024

I can only assume, somewhat immodestly, that Alexander Birchler and Teresa Hubbard felt compelled to invite me to craft a written response to the spellbinding wonder of their Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come in part because of my proven expertise in theorizing the many connections and convergences between art and archaeology – more specifically, in the curatorial framing of art as archaeology. (For this, on the surface of things, appears to be Past Deposits’ primary thrust.) Indeed, more than ten years after having curated an exhibition titled The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which was accompanied by a catalogue with the subtitle “On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art,” I happily continue to bask, however humbly, in my discreet renown as one of the founding theorists of the “historiographic turn” in contemporary art that Past Deposits partly alludes to. (I’ve often toyed with the notion that some reference to The Way of the Shovel might end up gracing my gravestone – for it is clearly self-evident that I should be buried, returned to the earth, in that “future yet to come”.) What I cannot as readily assume to have spurred Birchler and Hubbard’s invitation, however, is another major intellectual preoccupation that has shaped much of my working life as a curator, namely a now two-decade-long interest in the enigma of thingness and the grounding effort of so-called “thing theory” – yet it is from the perspective of my changing feelings with regards to thingness and thing theory that I now seek to make sense of Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come. (“Deposits” are things first and foremost, and the connectivity between the archaeological optic and the paradigm of thingness is just as self-evident: in thinking about art as archaeology on the one hand and art and thingness on the other hand, I have long been thinking about the same “thing”.)

“Thing theory” emerged in the early 2000s as a subgenre of critical theory concerned with “human-object interactions in literature and culture,” signaling the advent of a deepening desire to reconnect with the material world at a time when both our lives and societies were first starting to buckle under the ever-growing pressures of automation, dematerialization, and digitalization. Thing theory’s leading architect, Bill Brown, famously posited the following in one of the field’s founding texts:

“We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the window gets filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relationship to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture – above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things.”¹

Enter the mystique of the so-called enigmatical-ness of things that has proven so fertile in 21^st century art production (which has witnessed such dramatically increased and/or renewed interest in craft-based modes of manufacturing like ceramics, fiber arts – and good old-fashioned painting): the ineffable aura of thingness – a sexy species of dysfunction – is what sets the work of art apart from mere objecthood. The work of art, in this reading, is figured as the supreme, ultimate thing – das Ding an sich, even: its muteness and “mere” materiality, its opacity and obstinacy a cipher of recalcitrance and resistance in a semantic economy predicated on the frictionless flow of digits and commodities, “content” and “intel”. And some of these notions obviously animate the cosmic ballet of surreally enlarged objets trouvés in Past Deposits (the ludic homage to the timeless waltzing spaceship scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is much appreciated): the hypnotic slowness of their playful little dance routine seems to hint at the essential unknowability and impenetrability of the “order of things” – a scheme in which the work of art is of course posited as the least knowable (comprehensible, legible, sensible) of all things. (A popular archeological fantasy enjoys imagining excavators of the future coming across objects so puzzling and inscrutable that they just end up grouping them under the inherently meaningless rubric of “art”.)

However, my present-day mood is much less tolerant of the various resistances presumably put up by the world of objects and things, the realm of matter and “stuff” (“production”), and that, too, I see allegorized in Birchler and Hubbard’s elegiac paean to the forgotten and overlooked; a work of art that can also be viewed, to be brutally honest, as “just” a mere cataloguing of waste and trash, flotsam and jetsam, of the kinds of things that may cut and gash and possibly infect, for instance, or of pollutants and invasive species and other unhappy relics of the oppressive effects of mankind’s ever-tightening grip on both space and time, the most painfully symbolic trace of which must surely be the seeming immortality and indestructibility of money’s lowest common denominator: the penny.²

¹ Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001), pp. 1-22.
² Money: it’s the other supreme, ultimate thing. (This is a can of worms I must forcefully decline opening at this point in time, though I do wish to send the reader packing with the opening and closing lines of one of the best poems ever written on the subject, by the German littérateur Durs Grünbein: “One thing never left lying around is money. Whenever you see anything / Round and glinting on the pavement, heads or tails, you stoop to conquer. (…) Oh, to be a child again, grubbing in real feces.” In Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 106.

Digging for Our Stories
Javier Wallace
2024

“A home will be a glad place for children to grow up in. It will build up virtue and promote strong family ties. A family who grow up on rented land never feel at home. But let a man have a home, no matter how poor it is, freedom will dwell about the lowliest hut; the sum of heaven will dance about the humblest door; the rains of heaven will fall softly on the poor man’s roof. And as the owner stands in his own door he looks upon the world with a feeling of manly pride; he looks upon his children at play within the limits of his own home, he will rejoice in his heart, and not cross or surly land owner can stop the play of his children, or make the father feel uneasy lest the owner should be offended.” ¹

I dug up this passage from Texas’ first African American newspaper just as I dug through my childhood memories in search of Waterloo Park. Waterloo Park lives as a memory in my mind. The park reminds me of days seeking adventure on field trips, walking from St. Mary’s Cathedral School around the corner of 10th Street and San Jacinto. In those early elementary years, I can still remember the Texas State workers sitting at the park benches eating their lunches and more than likely gossiping.

I still remember racing down the steep outer edges of the park, descending into the crater that lined Waller Creek’s edge. I can see the bricked trail along the creek, which served as the makeshift housing of Austin’s unhoused. This is the Waterloo Park of the 1990s that lives in my mind.

Yet, with all the dirt surrounding me and with natural childhood curiosity, I can’t recall pressing my fingers into the dark brown soil, digging and finding any objects. Maybe the teacher’s warnings about being pricked by used syringes prevented us from exploring beyond the park’s dark-soiled surface. But now, when observing the objects and artifacts unearthed from around the creek, I pause and wonder. What if we had unearthed an object or artifact that could have spoken about who lived or played around this watershed before?

We know much of the 19th-century settling near and on the banks of Waller Creek was done by Black people. Specifically, they were newly emancipated people making decisions in freedom after June 19, 1865. This was a pivotal moment in Austin’s history, especially regarding the city’s racialized residential development. Research has demonstrated that residential patterns around the watershed are a product of engineered environmental racism².

Yet, we can’t solely attempt to understand the area through the lens of white racial capitalism. We must also turn to the folks who were making profound statements in the world, like the excerpt at the start of this essay. We must see them as subjects of their own histories and not mere objects of oppression. We have to imagine. We have to suppose. We wonder, all within reason, about these people. That is one of the few ways to make them come alive again.

I wonder about, suppose, and imagine the hands that touched the artifacts that were unearthed in the early 2000s digs. Did those hands belong to someone who was once forced to toil the vast white seas of blooming cotton? Did those same hands connect to the body and person of someone who left that plantation in Bastrop and tried out their freedom in Austin? Did the hands that stitched buttons to their children’s clothes belong to a parent who held The Freedman’s Press, gazing from their own door as they looked upon their children at play within the limits of their own home?

I think about these things now, realizing that I couldn’t have imagined that I was playing in the park on flood-stained soils where Black families’ homes once stood. I believe the parents of past centuries still stood in their doors, watching me freely play, knowing that one day, today, I would help tell their stories along Waller Creek. Just to let someone know they were there.

¹ The Freedman’s Press. Saturday, August 1, 1868. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth78144/m1/1/: accessed June 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu. The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
² See Katherine Leah Pace, “Forgetting Waller Creek: an environmental history of race, parks, and planning in Downtown Austin, Texas,” Journal of Southern History (2021), pp. 603-644.

Waterloo Park, Austin
A Mexican American Perspective
Andrés Tijerina, Ph.D.
2024

A city park is not a picture. It’s not a painting that you look at. It is interactive and dynamic. You walk in it. You sit in the shade and gaze at the flowing waters. Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler have created a powerful artwork using artifacts from Waterloo Park to force park visitors to think, to ponder, not simply about the artifacts, but about the objects they use daily, and to realize that they, too, are like the artifacts—just marks of time on this earth.  The artists had a quest that also led them to reexamine the overlooked history of the people who left those artifacts on the banks of Waller Creek, and they invited me to write a historical facet to their quest.

I have a Ph.D. in American History, but my mission has been to expose the hidden transcript of American life, of Texas history, and the hidden stories of early life under the shadow of the capitol dome—Waterloo Park.

The hidden transcript is that the most powerful Texas statesmen in the state capitol were only 2 blocks away from the most powerless ex-slaves and the Tejanos—the first Texans who lived in present-day Waterloo Park. Tejano is the way “Texan” was pronounced in Spanish for 150 years before Stephen F. Austin arrived here. Tejanos were the first Texans and the first Mexican Americans to live in Austin.

Living in shanties leaning precariously on the banks of Waller Creek were the Mexican American butchers, the tailors, the maids, and street sweepers of Austin. How close they were to the powerful statesmen who were so blind to them! And, how close they were to today’s visitors of Waterloo Park! Just two or three generations separate us from the people who left the buttons, the medicine bottles, and the belt buckles now displayed as old artifacts in Hubbard / Birchler’s video.

That’s the gift that Hubbard / Birchler’s artwork gives us. They have rendered detailed, colorful images of these everyday historic objects at an enormous scale to catch our attention and make us think.

As a historian, I can point to the Tejano Monument which I helped to design and to erect on the capitol grounds two blocks from Waterloo Park. The Tejano Monument shows how Tejanos gave us the Texas longhorns, the mustangs, the cowboy boots, spurs, and saddles. It’s hard to imagine that the same people who lived in shanties on Waller Creek also gave us our Texas culture, our land laws, our family laws, our Mexican food and vocabulary in Texas.  Tejanos gave us the very culture that Texans brag about. Without Tejanos, Texas would be Ohio or New York.

Mexican Americans were among the first Austinites to live in the present-day Waterloo Park along the banks of Waller Creek. Their modest homes were described in a city report as unsightly “shacks,” so they were moved out to make way for a “Waller Creek Driveway.”  Austin’s Mexican American neighborhoods were continually relocated as their population ebbed and flowed. By the 1850s, Mexican Americans occupied the lower rungs of employment and housing in Austin, and they had little access to schools, voting, and representation. They remained a viable population, however, ultimately gaining equal access to a better life. They continuously celebrated their cultural pride and were able to elect one of their own former residents of the old shacks on Waller Creek to become Austin’s first Mexican American City Council member in 1975.

Mexican Americans were the first to record land in Austin with the 1825 land grant of Santiago del Valle, at the site of his present-day namesake neighborhood. Another South Austin landmark took its name from José Antonio Menchaca, a Tejano Captain in the Republic of Texas Army. However, waves of incoming Anglo-Americans and European immigrants rapidly outnumbered the original Tejanos who were marginalized as laborers on the outskirts of Austin.  Incoming Southerners resented Tejanos who got along well with the enslaved African Americans in town. Indeed, in 1859 a vigilante raid of pro-slavery Austinites burned out the homes of the Tejanos and drove them out of the county. They returned after the Civil War, however, to establish a sizeable population by the 1870s. Although at this time the largest numbers of Mexican Americans lived on surrounding farms as sharecroppers, many of them returned to town, working as maids, butchers, and laborers. They re-established their neighborhoods in Austin along the Colorado River at Congress Avenue and on Waller Creek near present-day Rainey Street.  

By the 1920s, the Mexican American community was an integral part of the growing city.  In 1928, however, a Master Plan of the city dictated that the Mexican American neighborhoods and African Americans should vacate downtown, and be relocated east of East Avenue, now Interstate 35. Although the Mexican American neighborhood or barrio was at that time literally inside the city sanitary waste “dump” on the north bank of the Colorado River, the Master Plan asserted that ethnic minorities should be moved out of that prime downtown real estate. With federal funding in 1937, Austin established the nation’s first housing project as the heart of the newly relocated barrio in East Austin. Although concentrated among the smokestack industries and the coal-burning power plant in the barrio, Austin’s Mexican American community was finally unified in a stable housing district. With city-sanctioned housing and racially segregated schools, Mexican Americans developed all the accouterments of a dynamic community. By the 1940s, the East Austin Mexican American community had teachers, priests, a pharmacist, a community newspaper, La Vanguardia, local labor Unión de Obreros, and the Sociedad Benito Juárez mutual aid social service society.

After WWII, a new cadre of Mexican American veterans and professionals elevated the economic and political standards with doctors, lawyers, CPAs, bankers, and a tonic wind of scholarly support from articulate University of Texas scholars. The newly formed League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the American G.I. Forum successfully led the formal demands for voting rights, integrated schools, and fair housing. Most notable in Austin Mexican American history were the successful labor strike and protests to move the Economy Furniture Company, the Austin Boat Race, and the electric power plant out of the East Austin barrio. Cultural leaders also contributed their Mexican American art, their Tejano music, and their Dieciséis de Septiembre Mexican celebrations in their own Mexican American Cultural Center. By 1975, the people of Austin advanced their own Mexican Americans for Mayor, School Board President, County Commissioner, City Councilor, State Representative, and State Senator.

As with democracy, so liberty and equal rights remain a constant struggle for Austin’s Mexican Americans. They were the first and the last to live in family homes on Waller Creek although ultimately displaced by high-rise, exclusive Rainey Street condominiums. A new demographic has gentrified the East Austin barrio, once again displacing the Mexican American community in a suburban diaspora. Theirs is an American story of struggle, resilience, and contribution. Austin imposed its price, and the Mexican Americans have paid it, leaving the Mexican American community to be exactly like the Austin community—in constant transformation.

In Between the Trees
Zachary Suri
2024

I.
When I think of home I think of oak trees
The way their bark looks like an old book
The way their leaves crumble like old pages
The way they turn inward and rise again

It is sometimes hard to say how old a live oak is
They always seem to be teetering on death
The way that honeysuckle wilts in summer
And tastes bitter, like old age

The city around them is new
It is growing roots as it rises
It can only turn inward in the gaps
On the way to the sky

When I think of home I think of oak trees
And the little hints of water that bring them here

And when I think of oak trees I think of you
I think of the rocks in the creekbed that was once
The bottom of an ocean

I think of the fear in your eyes
When the city seemed almost dead
And we turned inward to rise again


II.
In between the trees are pennies
And shards of old china
And the bottles we drank from
And threw away—to the river gods
To the abyss

And in between the trees are memories
They take the form of trinkets
And they disappear

Who knows what becomes
Of the glass that is broken
Of combs forgotten
Or the button misplaced

Who knows what becomes
Of the smile electric
Of the kiss on the park bench
Or the dirt washed away

Who knows what becomes
And when it stops becoming
What is found again
And what is lost for good

who will live and who will die
who at his time and who before his time
who by water and who by fire


III.
I am reminded when I look at them
Of the old adage about a man’s trash
And how it can be treasure

Of myself on the playground
Digging under the live oaks
Mining for clay and old coins

I am reminded of walks in the same creek bed
Looking for trilobites and clam shells
In the shallow green water, obtuse

You send a hand down
And up again
And hope what you hold
Is gold


IV.
The light is golden under the oak trees
Misty, almost purple
And we are holding hands
And holding bottles
On the banks

One of us says to the other
I think I see the old man of the river
Quick, or he will disappear!

And together we throw
Our bottles at the rocks
And watch them shatter
On the old man’s nose

I lost a button
You lost a comb
I lost a pin

And only these remain


V.
When I think of home I think of oak trees
I think of leaning on their trunks at dusk
I think of all the people who did the same
Who sat and marveled at the setting sun

When I think of home I think of oak trees
I think of dirt, I think of marble pins
I think of broken cups and ancient saucers
I think of shattered plates and talcum tins

When I think of home I think of oak trees
I think of oak trees, and I think of you
I think of all the things that do not matter
And I think of all the things that do