“Outside the Work: A Tasting of Hydrocarbons and Geologic Time” dinner. This recent headline in the Houston Chronicle announced that Marina Zurkow served approximately 50 guests a seven-course dinner hosted by the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University.
The Gulf Coast location provided most of the ingredients. It included jellyfish and Japanese knotweed, both invasive nuisances that are known to contain health properties.
Zurkow commented,”It’s a trope in foodie culture: Eat your enemies, the invasive species, to get rid of them.”
Each of the seven courses (prepared for the event by Lucullan Foods) was served on a different reusable placemat. Dishes from previous courses were piled onto a centerpiece sculpture of Styrofoam packing materials. With each course, diners peeled off layers of reusable place mats that doubled as a geology lesson.
Zurkow explains, “I’m not blaming anybody but looking at the role of petroleum usage in anthropogenic changes.”
“I tied water in plastic bags to create the impression of rain drops. From afar you begin to see it as rain falling, but you sense this scary image, because I added some substance. Initially I used aluminum chloride, the dry cell batteries.” Bright Ugochukwu Eke filled over 6000 bags with water fouled by battery acid, bound them with string, and hung them at different lengths to create a major installation entitled “Acid Rain”.
The cluster of polluted water packets, each resembling an (acid)raindrop, assumed the shape of a single, large water droplet. The bags were visually alluring and thematically terrifying. Their color varied from clear, to grey,to black, indicating the ominous reality it was revealing – the water in the installation, like the water falling as rain in the delta region of Nigeria, and all other locations where massive oil exploration is taking place, contained the carbon dust that is choking the inhabitants.
While contemporary art is being invigorated and reinvented by throngs of eco artists worldwide, distinguished art professionals like the chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston remain oblivious of their contributions. Helen Molesworth revealed her myopic assessment of contemporary art in an analysis of this year’s Whitney Biennial that appears in the current issue of ARTFORUM. She wrote “…in today’s hypermediated art scene, no one actually expects to be bowled over by anything “new.” This makes a kind of sour sense, since the new as a value was pretty thoroughly debunked in the twentieth century and, well, here we are in the twenty-first.”
It is only fair to note that Molesworth has earned her esteem within contemporary art circles by looking backward to the 1960s and the 1980s, not forward. She is acclaimed for curating “Dance/Draw,” which traced the origins of today’s performance art in the intersection between dancing and drawing since the ’60s, and “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s.” Molesworth confirmed her historic orientation in a talk at the ICA where she announced, “I’m not known in the field for being the discoverer of new talent.”
Nonetheless, Molesworth is misrepresenting and belittling contemporary art accomplishments. Because her opinions are supported by impeccable credentials, they carry the weight of authority. Readers are likely to agree with her assessment of contemporary art as a paltry version of reruns, and not challenge her blatant disregard for the bold explorations of contemporary eco artists that are authentically ‘new’.
While contemporary art is being invigorated and reinvented by throngs of eco artists worldwide, distinguished art professionals like the chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston remain oblivious of their contributions. Helen Molesworth revealed her myopic assessment of contemporary art in an analysis of this year’s Whitney Biennial that appears in the current issue of ARTFORUM. She wrote “…in today’s hypermediated art scene, no one actually expects to be bowled over by anything “new.” This makes a kind of sour sense, since the new as a value was pretty thoroughly debunked in the twentieth century and, well, here we are in the twenty-first.”
It is only fair to note that Molesworth has earned her esteem within contemporary art circles by looking backward to the 1960s and the 1980s, not forward.
She even admitted, when speaking at the ICA, “I’m not known in the field for being the discoverer of new talent.”
INTRODUCTION: Recorded history is typically charted through the deeds of great individuals. Complex narratives of conquests, revolutions, discoveries, and accomplishments are encapsulated in the biographies of prominent personages: Atilla the Hun, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, Dante, Leonardo, Goethe, Ben Franklin, Pablo Picasso, Florence Nightingale, Genghis Kahn, and so forth.
While exceptional individuals dominate humanity’s historic annals, ‘individualism’ is a modern concept that is largely absent from ancient and medieval civilizations. It is not until the early nineteenth century that asserting one’s independence and uniqueness, as opposed to contributing to the common good or the collective interests, was introduced.
Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1859), the French political historian, described the emergence of ‘individualism’ by stating, “Our fathers did not have the word ‘individualism’, which we have coined for our own use, because in their time there was indeed no individual who did not belong to a group and who could be considered as absolutely alone.”
Today I posted a new essay entitled “A DEFENSE of FUNCTIONALITY and DIDACTICISM in CONTEMPORARY ECO ART”. This defense was necessitated because contemporary eco artists, unlike those celebrated by the star-studded ‘artworld’, are inventing new definitions of progress, health, success, and productivity. Such values necessitate including factors that have long been alien to fine art values – functionality and didacticis.This essay is offered to loosen grips upon the cultural ideals that comprise the status quo.
INTRODUCTION
If society was envisioned as a living organism, artists would serve as its sensory receptors (gathering inputs issuing from their surroundings) and its brain (bringing key concerns into consciousness and filtering out extraneous data). That is how the history of art came to be a rich repository of cultures as they evolved through the history of civilization. This ongoing account reveals if people, at a particular time and place, were captivated by the afterlife, or a new technology, or social inequity, etc.
Tomas Saraceno creates inflatable airborne biospheres. These futuristic models for human survival may become essential if current environmental jeopardies continue to mount. The alternative ways of living he invents are adaptations of the morphology of soap bubbles, spider webs, neural networks, and cloud formations.
The complex geometries and interconnectivity that these habitations display seem neither to be art, architecture, technology, nor science. Perhaps even the nature of his art practice is futuristic. On December 9th of 2014, his “Museo Aero Solar” landed in Toulouse as part of a symposium on the new “Anthropocene” era.
Saraceno proposed it as an Anthropocene Monument. The solar sculpture flies by capturing the short waves of the sun during the day, and infrared waves from the Earth at night. This lighter-than-air monument is capable of riding thermals, vortices and convection currents. As it responds to these atmospheric forces, the structure actually takes the “shape” of the atmosphere.
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It was always the intention of SUPERFLEX to maximize the distribution of their artworks, rather than conform to the old fine art adage that values is a product of ‘uniqueness’ and ‘rarity’. Their project “SUPERGAS” seems to be heading in precisely this direction. Malmo Sweden recently announced that its organic waste will now be turned into biogas. It anticipates that 66% of the fuel for the city bus system (and lots of fertilizer) will be produced in this manner. The goal is to achieve 100% which became possible when separating waste became mandatory this year. Signage on buses announce that personal waste = civic fuel. Malmo is also converting waste to energy for the district heating that serves most of the city.
Meanwhile, if you can be in Brooklyn on the weekend of April 26th-27th,you could take a biogas workshop with David House, the author of The Complete Biogas Handbook
While bio-techno-wizardry supplies the reason Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr typically receive acclaim in the contemporary art arena, they might also be celebrated for assuaging humanity’s psychological dilemmas. Sources of guilt and insecurity are the ostensible reasons for culturing leather and meat. They also explain a 2006 work entitled “DIY DVK”: “Do It Yourself De-victimizer Kit.” In each of these instances the artists seek to provide their fellow humans with an easy escape from feelings of shame.
DIY DVK m1 was undertaken to allay the guilt many people feel when they consume parts of dead animals, either by eating them, or using them for clothing, or applying them to some functional purpose. This guilt may also arise when someone causes the accidental death of an animal. This may be the result of a car accident or a lawnmower running over an animal.
Tissue Culture & Art’s kit reduces the resulting guilt by maintaining the life of parts of the deceased animals’ bodies. These body parts can remain ‘alive’ until the grieving period is complete and the guilt recedes.
Anyone can participate. Tissue Culture & Art’s DIY DVK utilizes off-the-shelf items to construct a basic tissue culture facility. The only other component that is needed is nutrients to keep the cells alive. The artists admit that the inclusion of other animal-derived materials in the nutrients is difficult to avoid, which may, ironically, exacerbate the guilt for sacrificing the life of an animal for human benefit.
Reverend Billy concludes each performance and correspondence with the same exclamation: Earthalujah! The word rouses visions of glory and gratitude and celebration. This spring, he and the Stop Shopping Choir will bring their joyful version of environmental and political activism to Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York. They can be seen there on the outside and inside stages on Sunday afternoons through May and June. That is when we call all shout with glee “Earthalujah!”
Joy may be exchanged for indignation in the second event the Reverend is planning. This “HoneyBeeLujah campaign” will conduct “bee-swarmings” with the “Bee-stinger-singers” in and around the property of Monsanto, Bayer, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland. They will infiltrate big big box stores where bee-killing chemicals are sold to domestic gardeners. THey also plan to follow the “executives of the abominable monoculture” into whatever public spaces they travel – lobbies, parking lots, restaurants, etc. Billy is clear about his subversive intentions to save the honeybee populations from global collapse, “The workers in these hedge funds and chemical companies must be gently exposed to the truth about their pesticide poisons.
Bonnie Sherk‘s A Living Library has become an international movement. Recently she visited India to establish unique, place-based, Branch Living Library & Think Parks in Rajisthan and Udaipur. These projects are being organized in conjunction with the Big Medicine Charitable Trust, and with the Center of Environment Education (CEE) based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. These interpretation centers would link students throughout India with her existing school programs in San Francisco and New York City. In each location A Living Library cultivates human and ecological gardens.
