FIELD GUIDE

FOR THE 21ST

CENTURY

ENVIRONMENTAL

ARTIST

In 2000, Eduardo Kac created “Alba” a genetically engineered rabbit that glowed green. Kac described the project as an effort to make an imaginary animal a

reality. Alba was forced to live in the lab she was born in for the duration of her life, and Kac flew a flag outside his house for her, claiming the lab had

stipped Alba of her liberty.

This essay was assembled by Lee Pivnik in 2016

It is dedicated to Alba - Who existed because of an art project that I haven’t

formed an opinion on yet.

This booklet aims to help artists navigate both the contemporary art world and the Anthropocene. By identifying characteristics of environmental art, and weighing the movement’s successes and shortcomings, I hope to provide a resource for myself and other artists that are using their work to engage with a progressively fragile biosphere.

In order for this work to be successful, it is necessary for artists to constantly analyze and improve the environmental art movement. This booklet serves as a guide for the artist that finds themselves existing the Anthropocene, and will prospectively decide if art can save the world.

“In a time when meaningful global communication and intelligent restructuring of our environment is imperative, art can assume an important role. It can affect intelligent collaboration and the integration of disciplines, and it can offer skillful and benign problem solving. A well-conceived work can motivate people and influence how things are perceived.”

-Agnes Denes

Terms Definitions for phrases that will frequent this paper

• Environmental Art – Art engaging with the natural world in any number of ways. Environmental art can be using nature as a site, as a material or as a subject matter. The environmental art movement is usually considered to have started in the 1960s with land art and earthworks and moving towards larger scale “projects” but it can be argued that landscape painting throughout history is also Environmental Art, going all the way back to Paleolithic cave paintings of humans and animals.

• Ecological Art – or EcoArt, is a subcategory of Environmental Art, following on the heels of the developments of the 1960s. Ecological artists are engaging with larger systems in nature, and the movement encompasses artists, poets, scientists and academics that are working towards changing the way we view our relationship to the environment. This often manifests itself as activist art. The EcoArt movement aims to change the public’s perceptions and actions, through a paradigm shift. It is reliant on a public, rather than an audience, and while it may utilize representational art, it often is more performance based, situational, and social.

• Bio Art – a true development of the collaboration between science and art, this movement utilizes living tissues, bacteria, organisms and life processes to create artworks. The artworks are created in artists’ studios and laboratories alike. • Anthropocene – The era following the Holocene, in which the planet is now being significantly altered by the actions of humans. Recognizable signs of this alteration are Climate Change, rising sea levels, the introduction of pollutants and chemicals to our environment, and the 6th mass extinction of organisms.

• Anthropocentric – A viewpoint taken by humans that people are the most important component of the planet. This may be reinforced by Judeo-Christian religion giving humans superiority over the natural world and making the planet their dominion. The Anthropocentric mindset has justified the reconstruction of the environment as something to work for people rather than all life forms. Anthropocentricism is the main thing Ecological art is rebelling against, and actively trying to change.

• Activist – person working towards changing something they view as bad. Environmental Artists may not be activists, but Ecological Artists often are.

• Pristine – Word used to describe habitats unspoiled by people. They are in their “original condition”. The pristine and the exotic are marketable terms that have been used to describe and romanticize the natural world, as an escape from the banal life of the city.

• Nature – used casually to define seemingly pristine places, but the term has no clear boundaries or limitations. It seems to encompass all things non-human, but humans are evolved beings like the rest of “nature”. Their world should be considered natural as well, as it’s constructed out of earthly materials like everything else. And the universe all seems very “natural” when viewed under that lens too, so there is no clear distinction of what is natural and what isn’t.

Getting going When thinking about making environmental art for the present, we have to answer some questions for ourselves.

Is it irresponsible to be a landscape painter, in an era where the landscape is disappearing?

Should an environmental artist always be an activist? The classical landscape painting, the one that depicts a snowcapped mountain past a wildflower meadow under a tumultuous sky with sunlight peaking through the clouds in just the right way to illuminate the peak. What do we do with this today and how do we view it? These vistas still exist of course, although the snowcap is receding slightly - We still have the view. And these vistas may be restricted to national parks, but that is also okay I guess. But it could be argued that these artworks romanticize the natural world in a way that reinforces our perception of being separate from it.

What is the role of the artist?

Artists make work for many different reasons. Some make work for themselves. Some make work for others. Are we communicating an idea, or working through imagery in a formal way? Are our concerns in subject or execution? Figuring out what we’re trying to say in our work, and if we’re “saying” anything at all, will help us understand how we think about the audience.

Has environmental art been successful in addressing or solving problems?

What kind of change are we looking to accomplish as artists communicating ideas? What is our job in this greater task of fixing our environment? Do we just need to inform, and others will solve and act? What

art mobilizes an audience to take action?

Valley of The YosemiteAlbert Bierstadt

1864

Valley of The Yosemite With Containers Mary Iverson

2009

Yosemite ValleyCarleton Watkins

1865

God Knows Where This Is Ged Quinn

2004

Suppression 1Jake Longstreth

2014

Dismantling Pristinity

New Visions of the Landscape

Mary Iverson takes cues from historical landscape painting, but inserts her signature perspectival depiction of shipping containers into her works. Her inclusion of these brings the consequences of globalization on the environment into conversation. Ged Quinn reimagines historical views of the landscape as well, by inserting symbolic elements into historical compositions. Here he recreates Watkins’ photograph of Yosemite Valley, but charges it with a framed painting of Walt Whitman in the act of his fictional suicide.

Jake Longstreth’s subject matter in his paintings is the landscape but not the transcendent one. He paints views that many of us are familiar with, the mountains beyond the parking lot, the wildfire ravenging the forest. His landscapes are familiar, but striking in that they depict a truth we don’t expect from a painting.

Briefest Summary of the History of

Environmental Art

Environmental Art has as long a history as art in general. Since man starting making marks on surfaces, the subject matter has often been a representation or reflection of the surrounding “natural” world. Through World Landscape painting, the earth became a background for the human subject, as imagined landscapes with mountains, lowlands, forests, deserts and buildings were all placed around a subject taken from a biblical or historical narrative. In time the landscape would become the subject, and movements like the Impressionists and the Hudson River School would move towards painting en plein air. These works would romanticize the natural world in a glowing ethereal light. Then Abstract Expressionist artists still looked to nature as subject, with artists like Joan Mitchell blending trees and her memories within them to create works like her cypress paintings and drawings. Land Art was born in the 70s, and relational aesthetics in the 90s, and now we’re in the present, a world of conceptual art, where art is an opportunity to communicate ideas, issues and solutions. The transition from environmental art to EcoArt and BioArt is aligned with a greater shift in the role of art. In conceptual art, the idea behind the piece is the most important aspect of it, and the goal of this way of working is to communicate that idea. Art has the potential to influence an audience, and artists are taking advantage of that and using it to advance environmentalism now than ever.

27Nils Udo

1999

What are the types of

environmental art being made?

Some environmental art:

Informs and interprets nature and its processes, or educates us about environmental problems

Is concerned with environmental forces and materials, creating artworks affected or powered by wind, water, lightning, even earthquakes

Re-envisions our relationship to nature, proposing new ways for us to co-exist with our environment

Reclaims and remediates damaged environments, restoring ecosystems in artistic and often aesthetic ways

[Taken from the website of The Green Museum - Inspired by a list made by the artist Lynne Hull.]

puppiespuppies performance at 9800 Sepulveda

see Patricia Jonanson’s site remediation for Leonhardt Lagoon

see landscape paintings on previous pages

JOSEPH BEUYS7000 Oaks

Earthships

Science and Art together are stronger than either on its own. Where natural science is restricted to researching and analyzing the natural world, art can analyze the social, political and emotional components of the same discussion. In discussing global environmental degradation, science is too limiting. And art is useless in this situation if it’s not backed up by science to check its facts. So together, they can be more interesting than a scientific paper, and more informative then a landscape painting.

If we can integrate the worlds of science and art, each field will grow from an influx of new information. An artist with a scientific grounding has authority, a scientist with an artistic component has appeal. One doesn’t need to be both, but neither should be afraid of working with someone in another field.

The intersection of Eco Art and

Natural Sciences

While many artists and content producers work in this way, I think the science and art collab approach works best when it’s intended as a tool for mass media communication. Jason Balog is an environmental photographer who also presents the world as it is to his audience. In the film Chasing Ice, we see essentially the same data that a scientific paper would convey, about the rate that glaciers are disappearing, but we get a striking visual component to accompany that data. The film follows a mission to document the rate that ice is melting around the world. The visual component, when paired with the power of cinema (plot, score, watch-ability) lets this information reach and captivate the public.

How Are Artists Handling This?

Short Profiles of Artists working

in

Environmental Art or

Ecological Art or

Bio Art

What are their approaches?Are they successful?

AGNES DENES

Agnes Denes is credited with creating the first Ecological work of public art, with her piece, Rice/Tree/Burial in 1969.

Her most famous work however is Wheatfield (1982) where she planted a 2 acre field of wheat on a landfill in lower Manhattan. By turning land worth 4.5 billion dollars into farmland, she brought agriculture to the city and harvested her wheatfield in the fall of that year collecting 1000 pounds of healthy golden wheat. This was a successful, far reaching public intervention. The harvested wheat travelled to 28 cities on exhibition, and seeds from it were planted globally.

Robert Smithson

Robert Smithson was one of the first artists to work in Land Art, a movement that brought art out of the gallery and museum and often out of the city completely into desolate, isolated spaces. Smithson would work from sites that were already damaged from human disuse. His large scale interventions into these sites engaged with earth’s cycles in a way that they are disappearing over time. Spiral Jetty, like other earthworks, changes as the earth does. The water level of the lake it is in rises and falls as rain patterns fluctuate, changing the appearance of the work. It is currently eroding and will disappear without the intervention of some kind of preservation team.

Mark Dion

Mark Dion’s work provides no solutions to environmental problems, but rather holds a mirror up to society and tries to answer how we got to where we are currently in terms of our relationship to our environment. He often takes on the role of a historical biologist, and utilizes “collecting” as a way of discussing our desire to understand and have dominion over the natural world. Dion is most known for his work that resembles Cabinets of Curiosity. He acknowledges the symbolism that certain animals have to us and claims that his work is for an audience of both critics and the public. He wants to meet an audience half way so that people generally not interested in conceptual art can find interest in what he is presenting.

Dana Sherwood

Dana Sherwood is married to Mark Dion and also makes ecological artwork. While Dion refrains from using live animals in any circumstance that he can, Sherwood is creating work specifically for live animals.

She prepares decadent meals for animal populations that have already become reliant on people for providing them with food. She is often working in places settled by animals and people, and this gesture of presenting “pests” with food is a way to reimagine how humans and animals co-occupy a space. Sherwood revisits the nature that we as humans try to keep apart from us in an attempt to blend these not so separate worlds.

Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke was a pioneer of EcoArt, and found ways to bring science and art together in his projects. His Rhinewater Purification Plant, seems to sit outside the realm of art, but within the larger context of his work makes sense. The Rhinewater Purification plant purified dirty water and introduced a system of Gray water reclamation that is used in many public buildings today.

Why is it art?It was made by an artist, shown in a museum, and was still aware of aesthetics.

Michael Reynolds

(EarthSHips)

Michael Reynolds was trained as an architect, and upon graduating school started trying to build structures from garbage. Earthships are made from tires and earth, and run on solar and wind power. He shares Earthship Biotecture with as many people as he can, through teaching these methods of building at a school he started and also having plans available online. Earthships are being built globally.

“If people don’t see disasters in their horizon, you can’t convince them of that they’re going to have to see them on their own and I’m just making life rafts right and left” -Reynolds

Mel Chin

Mel Chin is similar to Hans Haacke in that he used art and science to conceive a reclamation project. In Revival Field, Chin planted plants that could absorb toxic metals from a superfund site and clean the soil in that process. This once again seems more like science then art, but he viewed the process as something synonymous with sculpting, and funded the project through a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. The grant of 10,000 dollars paid for Revival Field, which was so successful that it created a multimillion dollar industry of bioremediation.

Natalie JeremiJenko

Natalie Jeremijenko has a background in Net.art and her interests in systems encompasses both natural and virtual worlds. Her project OOZ, (zoo backwards) is an effort to create a place for animals to inhabit willingly. These structures have components to provide shelter for animals, as well as food sources and waste management.Additionally, each structure has technologies that animals can use, and an opportunity for human animal interaction.

Jeremijenko claims that she calls herself whatever she needs to, in terms of if she is an artist, scientist or engineer.

Coral Morphologic

Coral Morphologic is a group based in Miami that focuses on producing video work with living coral. Comprised of an electronic musician and a marine biologist, Coral Morphologic produces videos, sculptures and installations that remind Miami of its foundation on coral reefs, as well as its position as a city threatened by rising sea levels. They also work in establishing artificial reefs, and growing coral in their labs. The coral they raise is sold to aquariums to fund their artistic practice, and used in their videos.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Christo and Jeanne-Claude collaborated on large scale installations for decades, creating new visions of familiar landscapes. Their works are environmental in that they are placed outside of the art institution, into the public domain, and are comparable to land art and earthworks in that regard. Christo and Jeanne-Claude claim that their works have no deeper meaning then their initial visual impact. They are formal, not activist. Christo says that the temporary nature of his works is courageous. They disappear after their installation in a way that makes them seem legendary.

Maya Lin

Maya Lin works with both large scale installations, and small scale sculptures. Her work is imbued with an overall quietness but resonates with the viewer because of that. She may be best known for creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but her art practice is equally exciting. Lin’s Wavefield series in particular is of note because of it’s blending of reclamation practices and earthwork. Her Wavefield at Storm King Sculpture Park is 11 acres in size, with the waves of land being at the scale of waves at sea. The viewer experiences a phenomena of being aware that they are in a field, but feeling like they are on the ocean.

Data Garden

Data Garden began as an electronic music label that generates music with the help of living plants. They aim to bring people and plants together by giving plants a way to communicate. They produced an album titled Quartet that was an assembly of electronic music produced by 4 living plants. The album was produced during a live performance, in which people could interact with the plants and create the composition through their action.

Data Garden recently produced The Midi Sprout, which is a device available for sale to the public that allows people to empower their houseplants to produce music.

Paula Hayes

Paula Hayes is a visual artist and designer working with sculpture, drawing, installation art, botany and landscape design. Her work is meant to connect people and the natural environment. Her terrariums and other living sculptures are not just artworks but responsibilities, and when one of her works is acquired by a museum it becomes their responsibility to keep the sculpture alive, or it will effectively be ruined.

Her work “Egg” pictured above, is inspired by the leopard slug, and takes the form of two abstracted slugs mating, and the egg between them is a living terrarium.

Meg Webster

Meg Webster often brings natural materials into the gallery or museum setting. In her work Pool that was installed at MOMA PS1 in 1998 Webster created a koi pond in the building. Pool was bringing the natural world into the built environment, while utilizing technology and infrastructure that didn’t disguise itself.

In other shows, Meg Webster has created large installations of sticks, grasses and mosses in gallery spaces that visitors enter.

“I am a sculptor who makes minimal art with natural materials to be directly perceived by the body. Some works are to be entered. Some works are planted.”-Webster

Nils Udo

Nils Udo engaged in the land in a way similar to Smithson and Heizer and other land artists, but did so in the simplest, most ephemeral ways. His work would be as minimal as picking some flowers and placing them into a small stream where they would be trapped by a branch. He left a very small footprint on the natural world, but the photographs and paintings he would make from his interventions leave a bigger footprint culturally. He found a way to create works without harming the environment, and created a model for sustainable living in doing this.

Olafur Eliasson

Unlike Nils Udo, Olafur Eliasson likes to work in a very very large scale. His New York City Waterfalls project cost 15 million dollars to produce and ended up damaging local trees and plants because of the saltwater sprayed onto them. In 2015 he created Ice Watch, which brought 12 massive blocks of ice from the arctic to Paris for the Paris Climate Conference. The public watched and contributed to the melting of these chunks of glacial ice over three days. The project was criticized for being wasteful, when it should have been just the opposite because of its subject matter. I understand that argument, but will also acknowledge that it got much more attention than any of Nils Udo’s humble work.

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys was part of the German Fluxus movement and was a conceptual artist and a politician. In his iconic work, I like America and America Likes Me, he spent three days in America with a coyote in a room, and then left, having seen nothing else of the country. He, like Dion and others, uses the symbolic nature of certain animals in his work. He also is known for his environmental work, 7000 Oaks, in which he planted 7000 oaks during Documenta 7 in 1982. Beuys was an artist and politician, forming a political party in Germany that claimed to represent people and animals, and became the largest party in the world because every animal was able to be a part of it.

Resolutions

Is it irresponsible to be a landscape painter, in an era where the landscape is disappearing?

It is not irresponsible to be a landscape painter, if you paint the landscape as it is. Mary Iverson, Ged Quinn, Jake Longstreth and others have proven that landscape painting can be a powerful communication tool for bringing up environmental problems. By depicting the landscape as it is, rather than romanticizing it, it functions as a mirror.

Should an environmental artist always be an activist?

An environmental artist doesn’t need to be an activist. They do however, have to be informed and responsible. As content producers, artists are adding something to our collective culture. And at this time, as people existing in the Anthropocene, we can’t contribute anything else to our culture that reinforces flawed notions that humans are separate from nature.

What is the role of the artist?

The artist is a communicator, and creates work that will resonate with an audience, and can influence opinions because of this.

Has environmental art been successful in addressing or solving problems?

Art hasn’t created the kind of instant change we are hoping to see. But art is leading the charge towards a global paradigm shift. People are starting to understand their place in the world as equal to that of the world that supports them, not above it. Art is solving one big problem, slowly but

surely.

“art that can not shape society and therefore also can not penetrate the heart questions of society, [and] in the end inf luence the question of capital, is no art.”

-Jjoseph Bbeuys, 1985

Lee Pivnik2016

www.Leepivnik.com