Interspersed with this direct address are field interviews Cardiff recorded in Washington, DC.
[235] Their function as documentary evidence is obscured by their subjects’ semi-anonymity: a man, perhaps a guard, humorously tells Cardiff about the commission of Auguste Rodin’s
Monument to Balzac (1891–1898, cast 1965–1966); a women, purportedly a fifth-generation, DC-resident, talks about her grandfather, an African American laborer listed in a directory of DC property owners; a man, who seems to be a docent, explicates Rodin’s
The Burghers of Calais (1884–1889, cast 1953–1959); another man, apparently a veteran, describes his reaction to the representation of horror on the faces of figures in a new war memorial; a man and woman discuss a third party’s plans to move back to California after struggling to find a job. Each recording loads auditory signals about the speaker’s age, race, and relation to Washington, DC, yet renders them impossible to verify. Personal, narrative fragments surface and fade, leaving the user to decide what, if any, message they deliver about the site.
Words Drawn in Water also includes found or reenacted footage. A rich bass-baritone performance of
Ol’ Man River frames the walk at beginning and end. The solo from the musical
Show Boat, which debuted on Broadway in 1927, is sung with pathos from the perspective of Joe, a formerly-enslaved man now working as a stevedore. Paul Robeson (1898–1976) portrayed this role iconically on stage and in the
1936 film. In
later performances, Robeson subverted
Show Boat’s sentimentalizing racial stereotype and empowered the song as protest. Cardiff’s narrator tells of her mother’s devotion to the star and memories of his concerts. She seems indirectly to reference the performer’s 1940s appearances in Toronto and Windsor, Ontario, in solidarity with Canada’s communist party and Ford Motors strikers.
[236] The walk samples Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream" speech, Jimmy Stewart’s coded anti-Vietnam War monologue as Charlie Anderson in the 1965 Hollywood Western
Shenandoah, a cowboys-and-indians skirmish from the 1960s television series Daniel Boone, and American news commentators circa 2004 discussing the then-ongoing Iraq War. The audio track layers numerous sound effects: applause, rain, water birds, helicopters, Native American drums and chanting, cavalry, fireworks, and bags unzipping for security. Field interviews, found footage, and effects might cohere into a sonic litany of
ecological and
social injustices
figured by the National Mall, meditating on their divergences from purported national ideals, if not presented by so transparently unreliable a narrator.
Cardiff embeds this reality-based material in an imaginative narrative of time travel. The motif of water structures time as fluid and synchronic, while making sumptuous appeals to all five senses. After the opening strains of
Ol’ Man River, Cardiff’s persona brings up James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s (1834–1903) Thames River “Nocturnes” (1870s) and directs the user’s attention to the massive
fountain at the core of the cylindrical Hirshhorn building (1966–1974), remarking:
She leads the user to another fountain in the sunken sculpture garden, up along the Mall where she recalls a visit in pouring rain to the Vietnam Memorial, then into the Smithsonian Castle where, at the
crypt of its patron, she meditates on James Smithson’s bones floating across the ocean and offers the user a drink from the water fountain.
[238] The narrative also leaps forwards in time midway along the walk when Cardiff’s observations seem to time-lapse into a dystopian future.
[239]The climax of the tour begins as Cardiff’s narrator pauses in front of the Freer Gallery. There she remembers having felt disoriented by a small piece of mirror she saw lodged in the sidewalk:
Inside the museum, past another fountain, a formidable
Kongorikishi figure, and
Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Battersea Reach (1870–1875), the walk concludes in Whistler’s
Peacock Room (1876–1877).
[240] Here the sound quality changes altogether, dampened and interiorized through the effect of binaural recording. Time travel seems to materialize as Cardiff’s voice describes the artist at work in the
room’s original location, home of shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland. She keys this description to all the user’s senses—smells of paint and burning coal, a soothing promise of warm tea, and the striking of a match to light a cigarette. She guides the user out an illusory front door into London rain and abruptly bids goodbye.
