The process of seeking environmental INFORMATION more closely resembles the process of forming an OPINION. I was reminded of this in two reports that appeared in this weeks’ news about bee populations. What they reveal is that credible sources of data can support opposing views. Although the book, “TO LIFE!”, attempts to be inclusive of the diverse themes and approaches being explored by contemporary eco artists, it may not have adequately addressed ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’.
Pessimist: Headline: “Mystery Malady Kills More Bees, Heightening Worry on Farms”
Optimist: Headline “Everyone calm down, there is no “bee-pocalypse.“
Pessimist: Quote: Citizens are rallying to support a bill to ban the pesticides believed to be the cause of the bee populations disaster wrote an appearl that states unequivocably, “Recent years have seen a steep and disturbing global decline in bee populations — some bee species are already extinct and some US species are at just 4% of their previous numbers.”
Optimist: The “NASS Honey Production Report”, recently released by the USDA, actually shows that US honey bee colony numbers are stable!!
Forty years ago, Bonnie Sherk launched an ambitious, precedent-setting mission to improve the sustainability and livability of communities sharing the Islais Creek Watershed in San Francisco, California.
Instead of burning out, Sherk’s fervor regarding this urban greening project seems to grow with each passing decade. Perhaps it is fueled by the project’s increasing and accelerating accomplishments. Residents in the eleven neighborhoods of the City that comprise the Islais Creek Watershed, including innumerable school children, have benefited from her efforts. Furthermore, the watershed itself is being improved by her interventions. These accomplishments are widely regarded. Yet there is another facet of her career that seems to merit more attention – Sherk also serves as an inspiring model for artists everywhere who share her commitment to energize their communities and restore their watersheds.
As the author of a book dealing with artists addressing the current state of the Earth, I continually confronted the lack of a vocabulary that is shared and registered in the minds of readers.
How extensive was this challenge? It extended to the naming of the movement itself!
This challenge was the topic of an inquiry from Aviva Rahmani, an accomplished artist who is debating these issues as she writes her dissertation. My response:
I debated the ‘environmental art’ / ‘eco art’ dilemma aince there is no consensus regarding the defining characteristics of each.
In the current issue of Hyperallergic, Maya Lin is being criticized for creating a work entitled, “Disappearing Bodies of Water: Arctic Ice” (2013), a sculpture of an ice flow carved out of pure white Vermont Danby marble. While her Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1980) is still praised for endowing two simple granite walls with sorrowful historic poignancy and healing power, this sculpure is being criticized as too literal and too slick.
“Deskilling” is a term that emerged to describe work is fragmented, as in assembly line factory production, resulting in the loss of integrated skills and comprehensive knowledge that yields pride in workmanship and a sense of accomplishment.
In an application to the arts, Benjamin Buchloh, the esteemed art historian, defines deskilling as artistic endeavors throughout the twentieth century that “are linked in their persistent effort to eliminate artisanal competence and other forms of manual virtuosity from the horizon of both artist competence and aesthetic valuation.”
Some thoughts on ‘deskilling’ and eco-art:
How can we cultivate the mental attitudes essential for alerting people to threats to environment while instilling the mental balance and hope required for taking action against our mounting environmental crises? In her new book, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture, psychologist Mary Pipher insists that it is helplessness, not apathy, that leads to inaction. Most people are stuck in a state of knowing-not/knowing, a form of willful ignorance that prevents the mind-shift that precedes remedial activism. Pipher’s approach to the need for coping mechanisms that lead to reform is summarized in the following paraphrased quotes:
THE CRISIS: “Escapism is possible. Escape is not.”
THE CONDITION: “We have Paleolithic impulses, Neolithic brains, Medieval Institutions, and 21st century technologies. Our coping skills have not evolved.”
THE PROBLEM: “We are in a race between human consciousness and the physics and chemistry of the Earth.”
THE CORRECTION: “Despair must be crucible to growth.”
THE STRATEGY “Moral imagination is imagining conditions from another species point of view.”
There seems to be a perennial desire lodged within the human soul to sever human exclusivity and merge with other living entities. Multiple strategies exist for attaining such a unified world. One approach involves restraint and discipline, taming humanity’s savage and destructive impulses. Another approach fosters release from the inhibiting constraints of socialization. A third seeks unification with non-human forms of life. Terika Haapoja, for example, pursued unification with billions of invisible micro organisms that live within and upon the human organism.
Once again, national pavilions are featured in this year’s Venice Biennale,. While approximately 90 countries are participating in the most prestigious of all international art festivals, many of the artists selected to represent their homelands are dismantling conventional ideas about nationhood and national identity. The contribution by Tavares Strachan from the balmy Bahamas, for example, contains ice collected in the North Pole; Stefanos Tsivopoulos’s contribution to the Greek Pavilion contains footage of an African immigrant pushing a supermarket trolley through the streets of Athens hunting for scrap metal to sell; and at the Pavilion of Chile, Alfredo Jaar has created a scale model of the Giardini (a site at the Venice Biennale)emerging from a large pool of sludgy-green liquid before sinking back into its depths.Nationalism is further tromped by France and Germany because they swapped pavilions. Of the four artists on display in the French Pavilion, only Romuald Karmakar was born in Germany, and he is the son of an Iranian father and a French mother.
I sometimes envy the ease with which Medieval painters and sculptors laid claim to the public’s attention. The only time people in this era encountered images (instead of tangible things) was during Sunday visits to church!
In an era characterized by a relentless barrage of depictions, two-dimensional renderings and sculpted representations are possibly the least optimal forms of artistic communication today. These conventional art genres and mediums are being trounced by imagery emblazoned on surfaces everywhere – commercial products, printed materials, storefronts, T-shirts, overlays on our computer screens, the walls surrounding baseball fields……A supersaturated public is not inclined to seek additional visual experiences.
Thus, every day contemporary artists face the problems that male cicadas confront just once every 17 years – how to make their presence known within the cacophonous din created by frenetic competition.
Many eco artists regain the impact that art enjoyed in Medieval times by offering today’s audiences experiences that are as rare to us as rendered images were 800 years ago. They are greatly expanding the inventory of art strategies to provide the opportunity for sensual and visceral encounters with the vast catalog of actual materials that abound on Earth.
Here is another perplexing potential sculpture that I must to add to my ever-expanding list of eco-art quandries and querries. It involves the development of procedures that enable people to ‘sculpt’ the tiniest ‘flowers’ in the world. This nano-technology could not only introduce a new sculptural medium, scale, and aesthetic into the history of art, it expands the domain of the exertion of artistic (and human) control. In this instance, the territory being occupied engages one of the great mysteries of the material environment – what accounts for nature’s complex and ever-varied shapes?
The process has been explored on the visible and tangible level by Steiner and Lenzlinger.
The tiny flowers in these images are colorized electron microscopic views of ‘nanoflowers’ – shapes that self-assemble. Each flower is approximately 50 micrometers in size, smaller than the width of a human hair. The ‘flowers’ develop in a beaker.