Let us compare two works of art that both consist of large chunks of ice transported from the Arctic across continents and oceans to become viewable to a distant public. Coincidentally, both were created in 2006. Tavares Strachan’s version is entitled, “The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want”. The other was created by Olaffur Eliasson; its title is “Your Waste of Time”. The latter is part of ‘EXPO I’ that is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 in New York.
Both works use solar power to maintain the frigid temperatures that keep the ice from melting in the alien environments to which they have been sent.
Strachan’s ice is a rectangular chunk. It is preserved in a glass-sided freezer just large enough to contain it.
Eliasson’s ice consists of irregular chunks installed in a gallery; the thermostat of the entire room is set to freezing temperatures.
Eliasson
Strachan
Can either justify the environmental costs of accomplishing these feats of transport and maintenance?
Increasing knowledge of animal behaviors has been eroding confidence in the uniqueness of the human species. While we excel in our capacity for cognitive flexibility, innovation, and imitation, other categories of specialness are being discredited. We are not the only species that can make and use tools, nor the only animal with consciousness, with language, with emotions, etc.
But there are two factors that are securely unique to humans. One is that we are the only species that has domesticated fire. The other is that no other species on Earth REDUCE birth rates when food supplies INCREASE! This biologically baffling condition is purely voluntary. No governmental edicts are needed to produce a psychological switch regarding a couple’s desire for offspring. They happen automatically when standards of living improve.
Lower births rates across the globe have followed the course of prosperity from North America to Latin America, then to Asia, and most recently to Africa. In each location, increases in income and education resulted in fewer births and lower infant mortality. Unlike the material desires of the newly prosperous, when it come to the desires for children, ‘more’ is is not better!
on Sunday, 2 June, 2013. Posted in
BlogSome artists are intent on representing or reflecting upon the actuality of everyday lives. Other artists are inspired by the need to create experiences that are missing from their lives. Their route to fulfillment tends to take the form of idealistic fantasies. Richard Jochum is a wishful artist.
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The Pleistocene era lasted 2.588 million years and ended approximately 12,000 years ago. It was succeeded by the Holocene era. Now, a new geological era has been added to the history of our planet. It is called the “Anthropocene” or “The Age of Mankind”.
This trailblazing scientific concept popularized by Nobel Prize winner Paul J. Crutzen, delves into a foreboding question: If nature is created by, shaped by, and controlled by humans, how do we differentiate “artificial” from “natural”? What are the ethical and ecological implications of the dissolution of this difference?
The following quote comes from an interview by Andrew Pendakis with the artist, Ursula Biemann who is contributing to the Maldives Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Both articulate the profound culture-shifting and potentially world-shattering impacts of two basic fluids: oil and water. I hope you will read it. The text brims with consciousness and conscienciousness.
“Oil and water, though not quite opposites, are anecdotally understood as chemically incompatible (‘they don’t mix’). This incompatibility mirrors a very strong associative or symbolic antagonism.
A new biography of Joseph Beuys has just been published. Unlike most texts, this one does not focus on Beuys as the hero of contemporary art and a radical political visionary. Instead, the author Hans Peter Riegel dispels the mythic idolization of Beuys by providing evidence that the man behind the myth was no saint.
Most curious about these revelations is the disclosure of the connection between Germany’s environmentalist Green Party and the Third Reich The biography reveals that Beuys volunteered for German military service in WWII. During the turbulent years following the war, his partners in promoting environmentalist causes were high-ranking Nazis.
Sublime beauty is not the only reason why the wilderness inspired Thomas Cole’s most esteemed paintings. He also revered wilderness because it embodied the wondrous workings of nature and the sacred mysteries of God. Cole watched with consternation as the Hudson Valley’s rugged wildness was leveled by railroads, paved by roads, rechanneled by mills, deforested by tanning industries, and tamed by farms. His romanticized nostalgia epitomizes the art of the region, known as the Hudson River School of painting, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
Pedro Reyes can literally use the term ‘disarming’ to describe his ambitious projects to reduce the number of guns in circulation. He focuses on the Mexican territories where gun violence is an essential component of its drug-trafficking economy. The urgency of this initiative has been demonstrated in other sites since 2007 when he undertook “Palas por Pistolas”. Reyes comments that gun sales soared across the United States after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed twenty children and six adults. “It is a sadly familiar response … After each massacre, whether a mass shooting in a Colorado movie theater or the attempted assassination of an Arizona congresswoman that killed several bystanders, Americans have bought guns at a higher pace than they did before the rampage.”
With these proofs of the importance of his efforts, he undertook another project, appropriately titled “Disarm”.
Despite the surge of initiatives among environmentalists to establish locally scaled endeavors such as local currencies, community gardens, neighborhood recycling facilities, district-based material exchanges, and regional trading partners, contemporary cultural norms still cluster around the glamorous images evoked by being a jet-setting globe trotter. Globalism is apparent in world music, world cups, world wars, world politics, world premieres, the World Wide Web, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. It is less apparent, but equally present, in paper clips, shoelaces, peanut butter, and combs. In all these ways globalism evokes the inspiring vision of melding “the ends of the earth” and its “four corners” into a unified sphere.
‘Manifestos assert a call to action to overthrow the status quo and install a radical alternative. For this reason, I have written the following text in the form of a manifesto.
Artists’ commit to examining all by-products of their material manipulations:
GOOD: Reduce energy consumption and waste production during art production
BETTER: Reduce energy consumption and waste production during transportation, packaging, and display of art, as well as art production.
BEST: Eliminate energy consumption and waste production during transportation, packaging, and display of art, as well as art production.
Artists accept responsibility for the environmental costs of maintaining their works of art after they leave the studio:
GOOD: The art work minimizes environmentally costly investments in climate control, archival papers, and storage.
BETTER: The art work eliminates environmentally costly investments in climate control, archival papers, and storage.
BEST: The artwork is either biodegradable or it is non-biodegradable but recyclable