“Legislative Theater” is a style of performance pioneered in Latin America in the 1960s to influence social change. Pedro Reyes is reviving this tradition to demonstrate how legislation on one side of a national border can have dire consequences for those living on the other side. The example that has inspired several of Reyes’ major projects involves the relationship between drug-related violence in his native Mexico, and lenient gun laws in the U.S.
“The Amendment to the Amendment,” for example, is a sculptural/performance artwork that refers to the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution that guarantees the right to bear arms. The numerous murder victims in the border cities of Mexico provide grim evidence that this U.S. Amendment also impacts Mexican citizens. Reyes’appeal to his fellow-Mexicans to relinquish their guns and save lives comes in the form of an enticement, not a threat. He is dismantling a huge stash of guns (6,700!) that a government agency in Mexico confiscated from criminal gangs. Then he is reassembling them into guitars, violins, flutes, and percussion instruments that are played in concerts. This labor-intensive process carries an uplifting social message. Each instrument testifies to the possibility of transforming weapons of conflict into instruments for creating social harmony.
The following is an amusing news story that predicts this un-amusing fate for humans: “At the London Zoo, visitors can talk to the animals – and now some of them talk back.
Caged and barely clothed in a rocky enclosure, eight British men and women were on display beginning Friday behind a sign reading “Warning: Humans in the Natural Environment”. The inhabitants of the Human Zoo exhibition sunned themselves on a rock ledge, wearing fig leaves – pinned to bathing suits. Some played with hula hoops, some waved. A signed informed visitors about the species’ diet, habitat, worldwide distribution and the threats to its survival.” 7
In fact, on May 21, 2012 The Automatic Earth Community delivered a Petition for Listing of the Homo sapiens species as an Endangered Species Pursuant to Federal Regulation of the Endangered Species Act [50 CFR 424.14(b)] stating that, “Upwards of 50% of this species’ range has come under the threat of near-term (within the next 50 years) extinction due to economic growth (and it’s natural collapse), untempered development, severe resource mis-allocation, air/water pollution, ecosystem degradation, energy scarcity, climate change, potential nuclear war and a variety of inter-related factors.”8
The task of addressing today’s environmental challenges is daunting.
– Functional schemes for cycling wastes, renewing resources, conserving energy, and maintaining productivity have not yet been devised;
– Existing means of productivity may not suffice to support escalating populations of humans;
– Non-polluting and non-depleting technologies compete for resources that restore ecosystems beset with the accumulated ravages of past indiscretions.
The works of art that address these challenges are functional. They remediate soils, create habitat, remove litter, cultivate food, produce energy, and conduct a myriad additional environmentally responsible acts.
What special attributes do the artists’ versions of these utilitarian tasks distinguish them as works of art?
The brain typically pays attention to one thing at a time. While this may appear to be a limitation, being able to focus attention is an extraordinary achievement of brain function. Neither houseflies, nor humans, nor any other organism is equipped to process all the data that their sensory receptors collect. Organisms focus on only those bits of data that are essential to their sustenance; otherwise their brains would be
For this reason, survival depends upon eliminating items from consciousness as much as absorbing them.
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Long duration can mean ‘endurance’ = the ability to bear pain and hardships despite fatigue or other adverse conditions
The motive is defiance.
The methodology = accomplishing a feat.
The goal is personal achievement.
(e.g. Marina Abramovic)
Long duration can mean ‘patience’ = quiet attentiveness and steady perseverance
The motive is accord
The methodology = acquiesence
The goal is harmonious relatedness
(e.g. Alan Kaprow, Helen and Newton Harrison, Herbert Bayer, Red Earth, and the many other eco artists who engage with naturally-occurring biological, geological, and meteorological events)
on Wednesday, 26 February, 2014. Posted in
Artists,
BlogPromises and fears are associated with food technologies producing fake meat. One method associated with biotech industries is termed, by the Australian-based artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, “victimless meat”; another is cloned cattle and goats that enter the food chain as a product of medical technology.
In the essay, “Tissue-cultured Meat, Genetically Modified Farm Animals, and Fictions,” Susan McHugh comments, “While outbreaks of viruses like swine and avian flu make headlines, more insidious threats like drug-resistant strains of bacteria quietly grow endemic within meat industries. With little hope of solving these problems through business as usual, proponents of the increasingly centralized and globalized meat-making industries focus
instead on mitigating a still more pervasive sense of discomfort with cross-species intimacies at the site of slaughter. Facing enormous pressures to meet rising consumer demands, producers pin their hopes on technologically reconfiguring meat itself through
tissue culturing, producing “real artificial meat” in vitro, in a Petri dish, rather than in whole-animal form.”
Is tissue-cultured meat (meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal) the solution?
Will fake meat reverse the eco-catastrophes wrought by modern meat industries?
Is laboratory meat-making more humane than conventional meat production?
on Wednesday, 19 February, 2014. Posted in
Artists,
BlogAlan Sonfist‘s efforts to ensure botanical propagation in his renowned artwork entitled “Time Enclosures” are being reinforced in a facility outside of London where scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, are preparing seeds for long-term storage. They have partnered with researchers at 48 institutions in 16 countries to collect seeds and send them to Kew, where the specimens are cleaned, dried, and stored in an underground vault, kept at a chilly -20 degrees Celsius, for perpetuity.
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on Wednesday, 12 February, 2014. Posted in
Artists
An enlightened principle runs through the past forty years of Helen and Newton Harrison’s work like a brilliant current. It can be simply stated: humans must establish new carbon sinks to replace melting glaciers.
The recent retrospective exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in NY showed how the Harrisons applied this principle to Tibet, Laos, India, China, Kashmir, Pakistan, Vietnam, Burma, Tel Aviv, Nevada, Portugal, Holland, Germany, and the Sacramento Valley in California.
This tidy thesis has sprawling implications.
Foremost -it reverses the fatalistic belief that the planet’s systems have been so drastically disrupted that it is no longer possible to restore balance. The artists provide a way of accommodating the changes. If only enough of us would attend to the achievable strategies the Harrisons have not devised. Their proposals are not merely artistic imaginings. The artists are conducting controlled tests to demonstrate the validity of the principles they advocate.
How are these terms applied to art?
To artists, the adjective “environmental” is often associated with a particular manner of displaying sculpture (outdoors), a scale (large), and a time period (1960s-1970s). It does not infer a theme (concern for the well-being of eco systems).
To artists, the prefix “eco” infers a theme (concern for the well-being of eco system conditions, functions, and their inhabitants), and an intention (to remediate, preserve, and vitalize these systems). It does not indicate a particular manner of display, or scale, or time period.
Brandon Ballengee is an example of ecology.
The Beehive Collective is an example of environmentalism.
From the vantage point of ecology, beauty in nature is no longer located in formal cultivated gardens; or untamed wilderness; or picturesque country scenes. This is because gardens impose geometric regularity; wilderness instills fear and awe isolating people from natural systems; and pastoral scenes distract people from pragmatic responsibilities. This is because, the notion of beauty is overhauled to embrace all aspects of the life cycle, and apply the outcomes to all living species now and into the future, it incorporates decay as well as growth and embraces death as well as life!
In this manner, eco artists are updating the concept of beauty so that it becomes resonant with an era beset by environmental blight and ecosystem exhaustion. It is propelled by a desire to ensure the continuity and interdependence apparent in cyclic patterns that comprise core ecological mandates.