FADE IN FROM SCENE ONE, from out of the VISTAS, an arrow on a roadway in Bath, into a different city, a different kind of city, at the doorstep to a rundown row house on the edge of Harlem, a man stakes his turf and strikes a pose, the kind of pose that (Sir) Mick Jagger might predispose himself to: Made in America.

Following Judith Aronson's time as a VISTA volunteer in East Harlem in the Sixties, she worked while in graduate school for the Environmental Protection Administration of New York City, Sanitation Department, and her specialty became garbage. The shot of the New Yorker there at the bottom of the steps was taken as part of a small freelance job for CBS documenting rubbish in New York City. "I did cost-benefit analysis of the trucks dumping in New York City landfills. This work led to my design thesis: a slide show, set to a Sandy Bull banjo record, on the garbage crisis in New York City. I followed some food from a grocery store in the city to someone's apartment, into the pail in the kitchen, out to the pails on the street, into the sanitation trucks, onto the scows, down the Hudson River, and to the Fresh Kills Landfill."

Aronson follows the waste, reclaims the refuse, revives the disposable, gives view to the otherwise unsightly or overlooked: the slums of New York City; the slums of Valparaiso, Chile; high water and rust in Bangkok; artifacts of iron and steel in Italy; electronics in England through the magnifying glass, a twisted trail to who knows where, some dumping ground for the Silicon Fen down by the River Cam. Near where the chartered Thames does flow...

URBAN DECAY | OTHER MATTER:

     Change and decay in all around I see;

     Oh Thou, who changest not, abide with me.

                                                       —Henry Francis Lyte

Or, in Blake's hymn to London:

     I wander through each chartered street,

     Near where the chartered Thames does flow,

     And mark in every face I meet

     Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

     In every cry of every man,

     In every infant's cry of fear,

     In every voice, in every ban,

     The mind-forged manacles I hear.

     How the chimney-sweeper's cry

     Every blackening church appals;

     And the hapless soldier's sigh

     Runs in blood down palace walls.

     But most through midnight streets I hear

     How the youthful harlot's curse

     Blasts the new-born infant's tear,

     And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE, signs to tell us where to go. Down, down, down. From the rooftop of the Prudential building, shot while working for Where's Boston? (the Bicentennial exhibition). Rickshaw drivers in red, all in a row, red runs in blood, in Ahmedabad. Where's Ahmedabad? Gujarat, India. Italian walls. Looking through a twisted tree itself a signpost, a rooted landmark. A peaceful scene in Switzerland, a silver screen, a steel fence, a stone crypt, at the Schaulager storage facility for art-work. A pedaller disappearing into a black hole.

SCHAULAGER SHOWN IN THIS SHOW once, twice, thrice. Seen here at close range a textured take. Cryptic inscriptions. Stone walls and steel bars do not a prison make, necessarily. Tuscan stucco, English shale, Roman chandelier.

HOW MANY REDMILES in TACTILE|MERCANTILE? Count to three. Ready or not, here he comes again, resurrected in Scene Two with a taxidermical turtle. AQUATIC LIFE|AFTER LIFE itself a resurrection, the only suite-title from Scene One with an afterlife. Carp swimming still in Hiroshima, make way for turtles, see them taxi one, two, three, make way for taxidermy, the Mock Turtle's story: TURTILE|MOCKANTILE. But, still, the leaves of Mount Auburn return, too, aquatic, afloat in a cemetery pool. And autumn-leaves alive in yellow and red, and elsewhere fallen dead. Dead as a dodo. But Redmile rides again. Off into Wonderland.

THE GREEN-ROOM where an actor resides when not required on the stage, so called because in practice the walls were painted green, Sir Ralph Richardson, here in his own green room at home, when asked what he does to wind down on his time off, he answered Aronson that he winds his clock. He was known, too, to smoke a pipe and to ride serenely a Norton Dominator well beyond his prime.

Andrew Marvell's thoughts in the Garden

     No white nor red was ever seen
     So amorous as this lovely green.
     Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
     Cut in these trees their mistress' name:
     Little, alas! they know or heed
     How far these beauties hers exceed!
     Fair trees! wheresoe'er your barks I wound,
     No name shall but your own be found.

And

     Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
     Withdraws into its happiness;
     The mind, that ocean where each kind
     Does straight its own resemblance find;
     Yet it creates, transcending these,
     Far other worlds, and other seas;
     Annihilating all that's made
     To a green thought in a green shade.

HE TOO RESURRECTED from Scene One, Ralph Koltai, at work now, hangs suspended from a staging wire that an actor refused to try, an issue of insurances. The stager of The Tempest struggles in the air. Seen through a louvered veil perched above his stage set. A bird in perch on a topmost tree branch seen through a window screen. Fatehpur Sikri, through a patterned stone grill. A chair tipped precariously on a porch, a fence pattern repeated in shadow. Boston reflected in I. M. Pei's John Hancock Tower.

A REM KOOLHAAS IN CHICAGO, a Kyoto rail stop, a Boston parking lot; linens on the steps of Benares, linens hung from poles alongside the flag of Singapore; naked dummies of the Orient, and an array of Italian china behind glass. As the Marcum and Pennington song goes "I'm a three time loser. . . .at the end of the line." The potentiality of a Scene Three notwithstanding, this is the end of the TACTILE|MERCANTILE line, a good time for reflecting. The losers? Might be said to be those who made the cut imprisoned within exhibition walls, fixed like appendages to these assemblages. Allingham, the poet and diarist, wrote, "An Exhibition always troubles my mind—why?—it is heterogeneous and confused, as a whole the very opposite of an artistic thing. A Collection of whatever kind ought itself to be a Work of Art—hard to manage this in a temporary Exhibition, yet even here something might be done" (William Allingham, Diary, 19 September 1866, Southampton Exhibition). True, some of the photographs of TACTILE|MERCANTILE are collected elsewhere. Jonathan Miller in the National Portrait Gallery, along with Ralph Richardson, Robert Stephens, and Keith Simpson. But it might be that in many a mind's eye Miller's upward gaze is forever fixed upon Constantine in stone. But, better than to be stuck in a slide box, no? Like those many images left out of the show. And better than to be hung upside-down, as some of the fertile images accompanying Ralph Richardson nearly were, as well as one aquatic picture, and the rusted structures of Bangkok on reflection were reversed. And, better, even, than to be hung sideways as a Cézanne landscape was hung for thirty-one years in a national gallery, referred to as "Reflexions in Water." But how best to orient a reflection? Which is the right side of the looking glass? Miller met with controversy over his own perspective when 40 years ago he directed his film "Alice in Wonderland" for the BBC. His book, "Subsequent Performances," assesses artistic afterlife, "the peculiar transformation undergone by works of art that outlive the time in which they are made" and his National Gallery exhibition, which toured art centers of the world, is entitled "Mirror Image: Jonathan Miller on Reflection." In interview he said of his exhibit that it is best to "describe what I was trying not to do."

One image that both is and is not of this exhibit, an issue of orientations, is a self-portrait of the artist, naked behind glass, reflecting unselfconsciously upon an unknown icon, best subtitled, perhaps, Pretentious on Purpose, or, better yet, Pornographic on Purpose. Sex Sells is the line, and that is the bottom line for TACTILE|MERCANTILE.