Ecological art springs from a long tradition--one that, in the United States at least, dates back to the 19th century. Landscape painters from the Hudson River School were among the first to warn of the danger of "the wilderness passing away and the necessity of saving and perpetuating its features," as Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School expressed it. Their panoramic vistas romantically documented the wilderness they sought to preserve and occasionally contained foreboding images of industrial encroachment as well. In Andrew Melrose's "Westward the Star of the Empire Takes its Way," the blinding glare of a train's searchlight shines out against the darkening evening sky with prophetic implications. However obscured by the self-referential painterly traditions which culminated in Abstract Expressionism and Post Expressionism, both impulses of the Hudson River School--the celebration of nature and the depiction of technology's encroachment--have lived on through Ryder, Homer, and Hopper, to name just a few, well into our times.
In the late '60s, just as environmentalism was taking shape as a mass movement, a group of minimalist sculptors again turned to nature--this time as both inspiration and medium. Two leading lights, Robert Smithson of "Spiral Jetty" fame and Michael Heizer, whose "Double Negative" consisted of twin trenches cut into a high-desert mesa, built massive earthworks out of soil and stone, and "environmental art" was born. This early land art, however, was constructed with little regard for environmental consequence. Smithson and Heizer bulldozed and scarred the earth's surface, damaging the "wilderness" they so ambiguously elegize. Today's ecological artists, in contrast, pursue gentler, more collaborative strategies.
Because ecological art takes different forms and continues to evolve, it's difficult to categorize. For convenience's sake we will talk about Reclamations, Reawakenings, Recyclings, Dramatizations, and Rituals/Performances. Bear in mind, however, that these categories overlap, and many artists shift across modalities.
RECLAMATIONS
Reclamation art seeks to repair damaged nature in ways that are somehow beautiful and meaningful. One of the most interesting reclamation projects now underway is the Nine Mile Run project out of Carnegie Mellon featuring artists Bob Bingham, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto. The 230 acre Nine Mile Run site in Pittsburgh is a "brownfield," a dumping ground for slag from surrounding steel mills. A river runs through it, choked with pollution from municipal waste. Working with an interdisciplinary team, Bingham, Collins, and Goto see in Nine Mile Run an opportunity for studying nature's resilience.Their project--still in its beginning stages--treats the site not as a brownfield, but as a complex ecosystem with enormous potential for renewal. They ask: What plants exist there now? Over 144 species! How are these related to other living things? Which plants attract butterflies, for instance? How can the soil be reclaimed? The watershed made pure?
Goto collects samples of the site's vegetation and plants these in carefully calibrated mixtures of soil and slag. In an installation called " Equation," ((gallery-art) + greenhouse = reclamation) spectators are drawn to the site by the promise of "art." Containers of slag line the walls of a near-empty gallery. Look carefully and you see moss is beginning to grow. From the gallery, one proceeds to a greenhouse and garden teeming with new life: sunflowers, lilacs and black-eyed susans, sparrows and mourning doves, crickets and caterpillars; then on out to Nine Mile Run which, in the context of this "narrative" journey, can be experienced in new ways; as exciting, as possible. In the act of reclamation, explain Goto and Collins, lies the creation of aesthetic experience.
In Mel Chin's "Revival Fields," which use living organisms to "cure" polluted sites, human participation seems eerily absent. Located at Pig's Eye Landfill, St. Paul, Chin's first "Revival Field" was planted with hyperaccumulator plants capable of absorbing heavy metal toxins from tainted soil. The field was laid out with formal exactitude--a cross inside a circle inside a square. Chain link fencing outlined the circle and square. The inner green circle--the locus for "revival"--contrasted starkly with the rubble between circle and square which was been left unplanted as a control site. The cross was formed by intersecting paths which traversed the field. Spectators were "fenced out," as though from a site where warnings were posted. From overhead, the field appears as though through the crosshairs of a gun aimed at a dangerous presence on the ground.
Like Michelangelo, who chipped away at blocks of marble to free the forms imprisoned within, Chin is a sculptor--or so he explains--who "reduces" his materials. In Chin's case what is reduced is "unseen" and the artist's tool is biochemistry rather than the chisel. As with Michelangelo, the end result is a kind of "liberation."
If Chin's work leaves one feeling excluded from a "danger zone," Patricia Johanssen's landworks invite the community inside. Johanssen designs public gardens with planted paths shaped like macrocosmic projections of tiny organisms--bacteria, lichens. In Dallas, Johanssen created a park around a lagoon that had been depleted due to algal growth caused by chemical seepage. To reclaim the lagoon biologically, the artist reintroduced native plants, fish, turtles and shrimp. A series of curving sculptural paths extends from either end of the lagoon in the shape of two of the introduced plant species.
Species and watershed preservation is also the milieu of San Diego artists Newton and Helen Harrison, who travel around the world analyzing environmental problems and devising solutions. In the Sava River Valley, for example, the Harrisons were invited to study the effects of chemical contamination on one of Europe's last great oak forests. Traveling up and downriver they talked to farmers and foresters, factory workers and bureaucrats. They consulted botanists, ornithologists, civic historians. After synthesizing reams of data, the artists came up with a proposal to create a nature corridor of unpolluted land along the entire length of the Sava: wetland plants introduced to adjacent swamps would absorb pollutants naturally; organic farming would eliminate run-off from chemical fertilizers. (The Harrisons even suggested raising warm water fish in streams released for cooling from a nuclear power facility nearby.)
An integral part of the Harrison's work are the exhibits which complement their proposals. Combining transcribed texts and photographic documentation with poetry, sculpture and performance art, these form complex experiences which reconfigure the "landscape" of our collective cultural imagination: how we think about waterways, about forests, about the natural world.
Reclamation art takes many forms. Lynn Hull creates sculptural habitat structures for wildlife... Agnes Denes builds "Tree Mountain--A Living Time Capsule," a man-made mountain in Finland on which 10,000 trees are planted by 10,000 people from around the world... St. Paul artist Viet Ngo developed a patented process using duckweed to clean wastewater. Through his Lemna Corporation, Ngo has built more than a dozen "water parks"--actually water-processing plants--in shapes evocative of prehistoric sites... In a project of global proportions, "Ocean Earth," artist Peter Fend collaborates with naval architects, engineers and marine biologists on plans to restore the earth's coastline and harvest algae as a non-greenhouse gas-producing fuel.
REAWAKENINGS
Reawakeners create works that restore our sense of connection to the earth and renew our awareness of the beauty and delicate balance, intricacy and splendor inherent in nature.For over 19 years, Andy Goldsworthy has worked almost exclusively with natural objects, creating on-site sculptures of twigs, pebbles, dandelions, ice, snow. In essence such work is ephemeral. A many pointed star formed out of icicles melts and leaves no trace. A screen of delicate twigs is blown over by the wind and reenters the ecosystem. Only photographs remain. Yet the fact that we can see the work only through documentation actually heightens its power to stir up a wrenching sense of the fragility, as well as the astonishing beauty, of the natural world.
Like Goldsworthy, G. Augustine Lynas sculpts natural materials into "ephemera," building giant sand sculptures on the beaches of Fire Island, New York. They are fantastical: princesses and ogres, mermaids and moats. Altered and finally reclaimed by the tide, Lynas' work recalls the sand castles of childhood, awakening us to delight and to an awareness of natural flow. "An arm goes," writes Lynas. "A city is washed away. The demise...is gradual, haphazard, sometimes violent, always surprising and fresh. You are reminded that everything is change, that it is the natural order of things."
Reviving nature-consciousness is also the concern of Alan Sonfist, an artist who introduces lost historical landscapes into urban centers. "Time Landscape," located on West Broadway in New York City, consists of a fenced-off area filled with vegetation from Manhattan's precolonial forest. The piece divides into three areas: a field of flowers and grass, and two forests--one of birch cedars, one of oak. While symbolically restorative, "Time Landscape's" real impact lies in its evocation of a buried heritage, its poignant demonstration that parks or no parks, something original and important has been lost.
Other Reawakeners concentrate our attention on particular elements of nature. Walter DeMaria made "The New York Earth Room" out of tons of soil piled onto the floor of a posh Soho gallery. Peter Richards uses the waves and tides of San Francisco Bay to produce the resonant sounds of his "Wave Organ." James Turrell draws our attention to light and sky. In works like Pennine Skyspace in Nottingham, England, the sky is seen through a framing aperture. We experience the way it changes across weather conditions and time of day with heightened awareness. Turrell's magnum opus, the Roden crater project, slated to open in three years, will be a massive complex of chambers and passageways aligned with astronomical events, all built within the crater of an extinct volcano in Arizona. A tunnel will lead the visitor to the exact center of the crater. Overhead, the sky will appear as an inverted bowl, perfectly aligned with the crater's rim--a true "celestial vault."
RECYCLINGS
Recycling as art is nothing new--think Duchamp's urinal as fountain, think Karl Schwitters' merz pieces--whole environments constructed from rags and junk. Art by definition always involves recycling, the resynthesis of materials and imagery into new aesthetic forms. Certain contemporary artists, with or without an environmentalist agenda, work entirely with "found" objects--bottlecaps, newspapers, buttons, poptops, iron from scrap heaps, discarded TV sets--and in this way celebrate recycling as a creative process.Following in a long tradition of Outsider Art, many Recyclers exist beyond the established circuit. Clarence and Grace Woolsey in Iowa created "Caparena," an environment of over 400 bottle-cap constructions--little figurines, animals, a full-size bicycle, a wishing well. Ray Cyrek, a retiree in Florida, used thousands of aluminum poptops to construct lawn ornaments in the form of snowmen, windmills, angels and butterflies, covering the entire property in front of his trailer. Chinese refugees who arrived illegally in the United States in 1994 and were detained in federal prison, created American Eagle "freedom birds" out of woven magazine paper and toilet paper machŽ during their incarceration.
Others use the recycling process more self-consciously. Italian sculptor Enrico Prometti turns junk into jewelry/sculpture pieces which resemble artifacts from ancient Egypt. Topy Labrys, also Italian, creates art objects--jewelry, hats, purses, and strangely formed "lily pads"--out of recycled plastic, as part of a megaproject, "Stone Relics from the Year 3000." And Ken Butler, an artist/musician living in New York, has made hundreds of musical instruments out of objects found on the street--chair backs, brooms, screwdrivers, washboards and bicycle wheels. Butler plays the instruments which exist also as sculptures evocative of Picasso and Bracque's guitar collages. In 1996 he performed a multimedia opera, "Insects and Other Anxious Objects," at The Kitchen, New York's avant garde performance art center. Slide projections displayed fantastical insects with wings growing out of screwdriver, scissor and wrench "bodies" mutating into one another; the libretto was a series of poetical musings on insect life.
DRAMATIZATIONS
Other ecological artists create works which comment dramatically on critical environmental problems. Their art, often in the form of installations, communicates with striking visual imagery: allusion, metonymy, metaphor and visual puns.Exemplary in the field is Betty Beaumont, installation artist extraordinaire. Her pieces are densely evocative, containing single images or an overlay of images which resonate poetically. One responds emotionally, and therein lies the artist's power. "Toxic Imaging" (1987) was born from investigations Beaumont began after a visit to Love Canal. Subsequent years of exhaustive research into chemical contamination inform the large installation: a rotating drum covered with pale yellow tickertape on which stand black and white TV sets turned away from the viewer...(hidden information)...a metal screen across which move stock market quotations...oil barrels topped with bound volumes of news clippings about dioxin spillage, leakage from waste dumps, Bhopal, Chernobyl--ten years worth of meticulously documented disasters...projections of boarded-up houses from Love Canal...TV sets used as light projectors for x-rays of damaged lungs...news reports of the disasters played simultaneously in a jumbled cacophony of sound: all fuse in a piece that is strangely terrifying. Reality has become surreal. Information overwhelms.
Another installation by Beaumont, "A Night In Alexandria...The Rain Forest...Whose Histories Are They Anyway?" (1990) forms a kind of poetic elegy to the destruction of the rainforests. "I didn't want to depict the subject matter literally," says Beaumont. Instead she created an installation containing shelves of burned books made, of course, from trees. The piece alludes to the great classical library destroyed by fire at Alexandria, and interprets the rainforest as an irreplaceable library of genetic information.
Beaumont's counterparts around the world make kindred dramatic statements. In Britain, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger has painted a series of riveting watercolors depicting mutant insects affected by fallout from Chernobyl... After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, New York artist Nicholas Arbatsky traveled to Alaska and used canvas as a blotter to absorb oil from contaminated beaches... As part of his ongoing series, "When the Tide is Out the Table is Set," Portland's Buster Simpson inserted giant porcelain plates into sewage outfalls. The pollutants the plates absorbed over the course of a year created a vividly colored glaze when Simpson fired them... Dutch artist Anne Mieke Backer's series "Living Houses," in which hedges grow up shaped as TV sets, tables, refrigerators and beds, comments on uncontrolled urban development in Flevoland.
RITUALS/PERFORMANCES
Finally, there are those artists who use ritual and performance to explore new ways of relating to nature either individually or collectively.Joseph Beuys, often seen as the progenitor of ecological art, staged many quasi-ritual "actions" in the late '70s and early '80s. A founding member of the German Green Party, Beuys tried to expand the role of the artist in society: "We have a restricted idea of culture which debases everything," he wrote. Artists must go out of the world of museums into the "real world" and deal with a range of issues including "problems of nature." For Beuys, performance and ritual become a means to invoke and re-embody the idea of artist as shaman or communal healer.
In "Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me" (1974) he staged an "action" that began when he landed on American soil. Wrapped in felt, he was picked up at the airport by an ambulance and carried on a stretcher to a downtown Manhattan gallery where he lived for three days shut up in a cage with a coyote--"in total communication and dialogue." The gallery floor was strewn with crumpled up copies of the Wall Street Journal on which the coyote urinated when "nature" called. Top that!
Some ritual and performance events are communal, and relate to ancient agrarian mythology and practices. Once a year, over Labor Day weekend, thousands of postmodern "pilgrims" swarm to "Burning Man," a contemporary mystery rite where a giant effigy, reminiscent of the Green Man sacrificed during Medieval midsummer rituals, burns day and night. Spectators are encouraged to participate in any way they want--wild outfits, spontaneous performances. The desert is celebrated as a locus for creative renewal and communal cross-fertilization.
Minimalist British sculptor Richard Long is also a kind of pilgrim, traversing the earth, mapping its contours with his crossings and recrossings. Since 1967, Long has walked across English countryside and Scottish hills, the deserts of North Africa, the Himalayas and the Andes, leaving little trace of his presence behind. A small pile of rocks, a line of sticks. For a 1967 "path piece," Long walked back and forth across a grassy field until his shoeprints merged into a single indistinguishable line cut in the sod. Walking, the artist dramatizes a way of "being in nature," of passing through both the natural world and life itself, which is both open and gentle.
Countless fistfights have broken out over the question: Does art matter? Was Auden right that "poetry makes nothing happen"? In this era of electronic communication and global economy, it's debatable whether the product of one person's hand can be said to cause change in civilization. What is indisputable, however, is that art retains its power to provoke emotion in the hearts and minds of its viewers, and in the provocation of that emotion, perhaps, lies hope for the preservation of the natural world.
Katherine Kormendi is an actor and free-lance writer in New York City. Check out her website at http://www.libertytree.org/News/kormendi.html.
©1998 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1998
Volume 8, Number 2
Art and Ecology