Globalism – Bounty or Invasion?
Globalism is apparent in world music, world cups, world wars, world politics, world premieres, world travelers, and the World Wide Web. It is less apparent in paperclips, shoe laces, peanuts, and combs.How can art portray the Earth as an elaborate, synchronized, self-regulating feedback mechanism? How can artists depict the global impact of local behaviors?
This complex scenario if revealed in a work entitled Herbarium of Origins (2006) by the Danish artist, Tue Greenfort. Greenfort focuses on the global consequences that accompany international trade by pairing an intended benefit (the importation of exotic fruits) with an unintended disadvantage (the introduction of invasive weeds).
Herbarium of Origins combines the stickers found on fruit sold in Rotterdam with dried mountings of the foreign plants found in the city’s harbor. The stickers identify the fruit’s country of origin. The pressed plants, borrowed from the collection of the city’s Natural History Museum, identify the ‘invasive’ plants that were inadvertently introduced when they hitched rides across the continents in shipping containers and became lodged in the soles of the shoes of sailors. Many of these introduced plant species are displacing native plants, decreasing biodiversity, and altering habitat conditions that are detrimental to native botanicals.
This artwork’s moral implications far exceed its minimal physical form. Greenfort neither idealizes the engineered extravagance of international trade that delivers a bounty of out-of-season luxuries to the market, nor bemoans the hazardous conditions that accompany our eating privileges. Through this straight-forward presentation of transit and delivery, viewers encounter the impact of enjoying an international array of exotic fruits. They appear in this installation as the stickers on Tasmanian cherries, Malaysian star fruits, South African avocados, Brazilian mangos, European kiwis, Asian ginger, Australian blueberries. The regrettable by-product takes the form of specimens of the species that accompanied this bounty to market: South Australia Agave americana , North American Ambrosia artemisiifolia, Japanese Berberis thunbergii, tropical American Canna indica, Australian rassula helmsi, Asian Heracleum mantegazzianum, Himalayan balsam, and so forth.
The piece provides unequivocal evidence that global thoroughfares that circulate pleasures and opportunities worldwide also circulate hazards. For viewers of this installation are likely to ponder their complicity in these environmental calamities each time they are tempted to avail themselves of the exotic bounty of the contemporary marketplace.