Entire industries have developed to design, manufacture, and install sophisticated, technologies that ensure sanitation, efficiency, and safety within urban environments. Despite these efforts, unwelcome environmental phenomena pervade today’s cities. Each intrusion proves that human prowess has failed in its efforts to halt measly pests from breaching its concrete, steel, and glass borders.
Just prior to participating in the “Green Hermeticism” panel organized by Alyce Santoro at the Gasser/Grunert Gallery last Saturday, I attended a soil workshop conducted by Dan Kittredge. It was a technical exploration of bionutrients, soil testing, mineral balancing, etc. The two events proved to be remarkably congruous. The practical information Dan dispensed was infused with insights that invited a Hermetic comparison.
One gorgeous example of natural alchemy is how plants create the conditions, to enable the biology in the soil, to produce the nutrients needed to maintain the plant’s OWN vitality!
In the current issue of Orion Magazine, Charles C. Mann recalls watching Lynn Margulis, show a time-lapse video to students at the University of Massachusetts. It featured Proteus vulgaris, a bacterium that lives in the gastrointestinal tract of humans.
The video showed a small, wobbly P. vulgaris in a shallow, circular glass petri dish. Remarkably, the bacterium is capable of dividing every fifteen minutes!
Mann reports, “The class gasped. The cells in the time-lapse video seemed to shiver and boil, doubling in number every few seconds, colonies exploding out until the mass of bacteria filled the screen.” Margulis stated that in just thirty-six hours this single bacterium could cover the entire planet in a foot-deep layer of single-celled ooze. Twelve hours after that, it would create a living ball of bacteria the size of the earth.
Most of us sleep in a rectangular bed, located in a rectangular room, within a rectangular building, situated on a rectangular grid of streets. Corners that form such rectangles dominate our lives – from crib to coffin. Geometricians may describe a corner simply as the joining of two flat planes. Their appreciation of this form would be enriched by highlighting the multifaceted role of corners in constructing our aesthetic and emotional environment.
Consider this – a corner is the minimum construction needed to produce a three-dimensional space. It is also a minimal spatial relationship affecting our behavior and our mood. Thus, corners introduce such fundamental forms of human awareness as contrast and similarity, such elemental aesthetic conditions as harmony and tension, and such basic emotions as surprise and expectation.
Let us imagine the mounting of an exhibition that might celebrate the 100th anniversary of the renowned ARMORY SHOW, the international exhibition of modern art that rocked the world in 1913. James Panero recently introduced this topic in the pages of The New Criterion, commenting that the exhibition served as “the moment that separates the reactionary past from the more enlightened present.”
Panero quotes Alfred Stieglitz who stated that the Armory successfully cast aside “the dry bones of a dead art.” He then comments, “We should be so lucky if today’s academic thinkers similarly become the footnotes of history, and resurgence in art once again captures the vital spirit of the times.”
Indeed, Mr. Panerno, we ARE so lucky.
In the decades following World War II and the Korean War, European and American cultures split into two contrasting camps: culture and counter culture.
Culture was represented by growth in the industrial sector. It produced unprecedented affluence that was fueled by new technologies, the spurt of investment, and the spread of multinational corporations.
Can you imagine a world without landfills, dumps, or garbage?
Such a world could exist if everything you ever bought, made, or used remained in your life forever: jewelry and artwork as well as broken shoe laces, paperclips, used envelopes, love letters, tissues, bath water, banana skins, burned out light bulbs, spent oil, food wrappings, diplomas, batteries, shoes, your refrigerator, car, computer, and the myriad other material objects with which your form a relationship.
If you were a resident in such a waste-free zone, you would be obliged to manage your material belongings when you were alive. When you die, this entire accumulation would be inherited by your descendents who would bequeath them to their descendents in an ever escalating, multi-generational inheritance. Your tastes and behaviors would determine if your material legacy will be a pleasure or a burden, an asset or a life sentence.
Having just written a 370 page book, I fret as much about sales as lack of sales. Will those who acquire a copy support the judicious reuse of rejected and defunct materials once they no longer have use for this book?
While those who experience art are typically referred to as spectators (‘spec’ = see a work) and audiences (‘audi’ = hear a work), art provides so much more than sensual stimulation. It also functions as thinking and affecting tools. The tool that is particular to eco art is often referred to as ‘living systems thinking’. This means it seeks to accomplish a formidable task – instilling awareness of kinship among all living organisms.
Such art activates the human capacity to find commonalities across vast scales of time and space by imagining ‘systems’ and detecting ‘patterns’.
The search for unity that lies hidden in species diversity is essentially a search for the answer to the following question:
What do all living organisms have in common?
Embedded in the word “question” is the word “quest”. Both words indicate a desire for knowledge, but questioners generally ask others to supply this knowledge, while questers generally seek the knowledge themselves.
Until the advent of eco art, the process of defining one’s artistic mission was typically associated with quests, not questions. However, questions have become prominent among eco artists who are intent on contributing solutions to unresolved environmental problems. They ask such questions as:
“How did you make these selections?” is a question I have been asked frequently since TO LIFE! was published. It refers to the process I conducted to select the 43 artists featured in my new book. I’m pleased to satisfy this curiosity.
The curatorial model I utilize is established by a healthy ecosystem. I cultivate dynamic interconnections and maximize diversity. This process involves ferreting out examples of art works that go beyond being good. They must also serve as case studies. These in-depth examinations of individual instances or events encompass considerations that are broadly applied by other artists.