Sculpture Magazine

MARA ADAMITZ SCRUPE

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March 2000 - Vol.19 No. 2

Environment,
Audience, and Public Art in the
New World (Order)
by Mara Adamitz Scrupe

Issues concerning environmental conditions have informed the creative work of many contemporary artists and writers. For some, the effort has been undertaken as a means of suggesting solutions or, at the very least, approaches, to the pressing and critical problems making up what we refer to as "issues of the environment."1 For others, their work makes no claim to world-altering ambitions. Rather, the artworks, which are created as a result of these artists’ environmental concerns, seek to describe and illustrate the issues, informing viewers about them and predicting what certain behaviors might yield in terms of future environmental degradation.

Stacy Levy’s sculptural work addresses the essence of time and the relentless unfolding of biotic processes in nature. In a brochure accompanying one of Levy’s recent exhibitions, critic Penny Balkin Bach writes: "Levy’s studies in sculpture, forestry, environmental science, and landscape architecture, her interest in cartography and geography, as well as her professional involvement in the landscape restoration firm that she founded, conspire to integrate her thinking about the relationship of science, art, and life. She is, indeed, an artist for the 21st century, expanding and often ignoring the boundaries that tend to classify and compartmentalize our thinking as we grapple with the ineffable and try to name it."2

A Month of Tides, created by Levy in 1993, approached the immensity of natural systems, using the conjunction of technology and nature to fuel her presentation. The work, composed of a huge pulley- and cable-driven tubular indicator, 60 feet tall and fabricated from plastic and steel-reinforced sea-blue vinyl fabric, hung in a six-story atrium located on the campus of Miami-Dade Community College. The arrow-like indicator responded to an electronic timer, which raised and lowered the mechanism in correspondence with the rising and falling of nearby Atlantic tides. This simple, visually arresting device exposed and re-created the relentless movements of the sea during a month-long exhibition.

A Month of Tides revealed itself slowly, requiring patience and a prolonged attention span, reminding viewers of physical and metaphysical relationships we share with other life forms and processes. Who among us doesn’t involuntarily respond to the shifting of the tides, the aural experience of the waves corresponding to our breathing as we inhale and exhale? As she reminds us of our participation in the cycles of nature, Levy prods us to revive our ancient memories as animals within nature’s systems.

Through the elegant incorporation of modern technology and respectable craftsmanship with sensory and intellectual references to the urges of our ancient animal past, Levy exhorts her audience to reconsider 21st-century feelings and attitudes toward nature. While clearly acknowledging humanity’s technologized present, hers is an effort to reconnect us with our animal selves, in the hope that we might be brought to understand our rightful place in nature’s community.

Jackie Brookner is a sculptor and installation artist, teacher, and writer whose recent installation, Of Earth and Cotton, traveled to regional museums and public sites across the Southern states. Exhibition curator Susan Harris Edwards writes: "Of Earth and Cotton is designed to invite people from all walks of life to consider their relationship to the source of their survival. By the time of the Great Depression, more people in the South owed their daily existence to cotton than to any other enterprise. The historical photographs of cotton workers [projected as part of the installation] capture the dawn to dusk drudgery of planting, chopping, and picking cotton by hand. Of Earth and Cotton…provides an opportunity to feel and reflect upon the connection each of us has with the earth and each other. At each exhibition site, [the artist] locates former cotton workers and invites them to participate as models and speak about their memories and experiences of working the land. The rich smell of soil, the feeling of these feet upon the earth, and the absorbing quiet trigger a sensory awareness of presence, of the earth underfoot, and of one’s own physical stance."3

The installation explicitly portrays the arduous existence of the rural worker, while implicitly reminding the audience of the ecological impoverishment of urban life, which offers no real physical experience of, or kinship with, the rhythms of nature. As city-dwellers, we are removed from concerns about daily subsistence: we don’t grow our own food or raise animals on land we care for, nor do we keep generational memories of a particular farm or home place. Our overwhelmingly urbanized society has distanced us from the requirements of our animal bodies and thereby from the cycles of nature. Missing the workings of our sensuous selves in nature, we’ve filled the breach with accretions of manmade material possessions.

Brookner’s work is a reminder that artists can foster a keener sense of the physical and psychological links between audience and nature. But, she further reminds us, if we attempt to do so, then we are obliged, by some convincing method, to deal with the obvious and impressive materiality of nature and the power of our own natural physicality to move us in confusing and frightening ways.

On this subject Brookner has noted, "I really want people to understand the installation with their bodies—the smell and weight of the cotton, the density of the dirt, the physical presence of the feet. Matter is so much the issue here, and what we make of it. I guess I want to redeem matter. This is what sculpture can do. We can feel the materials so actively, and they can carry layers of meaning through association."4

Brookner’s art connects with many viewers from all social strata, in part because she brings the work to them, conversing with them through physical and sensory experience. She is not averse to meeting her audience on its own terms, implicitly acknowledging that not all of its members may have a breadth of experience with the often arcane forms and languages of contemporary art. As a writer, Brookner extends herself beyond the social conflicts inherent in hierarchical human cultures to tackle the ancient struggles between humans and the forces of nature. In Unity? Man? Nature? Reality? she states that "reach[ing] across the barriers we have erected between humans and nature, mind and nature, subject and object, male and female involves recognizing that being human means each of us is part of the physical world, embodied—that we are animals."

According to Wendell Berry, conservationist, philosopher, and farmer, "The most characteristically modern behavior, or misbehavior, was made possible by a redefinition of humanity which allowed it to claim, not the sovereignty of its place, neither godly nor beastly, in the order of things, but rather an absolute sovereignty, placing the human will in charge of itself and of the universe…Having placed ourselves in charge of Creation, we begin to mechanize both the Creation itself and our conception of it. We begin to see the whole Creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured paradise."5 In tacit agreement, Brookner writes: "We must control nature, control matter, show who is boss. We must dismiss its power as passive and inert—mere matter, something for us to use or, better yet, possess. In frantic glut we have lost our senses, in fury fled our bodies. Fled into the arms of a consuming Capitalism where what grows is money."6

Writing for the preface of ART AND SURVIVAL, a monographon the work of environmental artist Patricia Johanson, Caffyn Kelly comments: "Johanson’s graceful designs for sewers, parks, and other functional projects not only speak to deep human needs for beauty, culture and historical memory. She also answers to the needs of birds, bugs, fish, animals, and microorganisms. Her art reclaims degraded ecologies and creates conditions that permit endangered species to thrive in the middle of urban centers." Johanson responds: "To me it’s all equally important, the microscopic bacteria and the man who contributes a million dollars to build the project."7

Growing out of an exhibition of her drawings in a New York gallery, Johanson’s design for the Fair Park Lagoon project in Dallas, Texas, transformed an ecologically degraded shoreline containing almost no living creatures into, in her words, "a raw functioning ecology." In tandem with this reinvigorated waterscape, her sculpture allows visitors to physically access this environment, discovering "a marvelous new world."8

Johanson’s plans for the lagoon’s sculptural elements, which provide walkways among its natural features, were based on two plants native to the local environment, the Delta Duck-Potato and the Texas Fern. Both plants play important roles in providing microhabitats for plants, fish, turtles, and birds. To complement the sculpture’s practical function in the water, other plant materials were selected and planted along the shoreline: some afford habitats, others provide food and shelter for visiting birds and other wildlife. Fish were also introduced into the microhabitats best suited to their needs.

In the 13 years since its completion, Fair Parks Lagoon has, by all accounts, been a success, for both the people who find it a friendly and entertaining place to visit and for the insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals who thrive in its environment. The Lagoon’s food chain, once utterly destroyed, has over time been reestablished, and now represents a richness and diversity of biotic life, which has not been seen or experienced in that location in recent memory.

Steven Siegel’s site-specific sculptural installations comment on the state of the environment and the plethora of consumer materials that are produced and discarded at an alarming rate in our capitalist society. Through his temporal, environmentally attuned installations, which have been publicly sited on university campuses, in public parks and private lands, and on the grounds of art museums, Siegel attempts to address these and other ethical and environmental questions. He constructs huge, organically shaped forms from stacked and compressed recycled newspapers, rubbish, and nature’s detritus, which are designed to decompose over the length of an exhibition period, anywhere from two to 15 years, sometimes longer. Through these public works, he makes a small, but worthwhile dent in the actual physical magnitude of these materials, as well in the complacent attitude with which our culture has, until relatively recently, regarded its trash. Over time, the sculptures, which are physically and conceptually integrated with their chosen sites, break down to disappear into and nourish the earth from which they originally emerged.

Lacking the first hint of the cleverness or easy cynicism so popular in much contemporary artwork, the artist seems to say that art can "make a difference" in the wider world to a broader audience, whether or not the art world cognoscenti take it seriously. His installations are almost always built with the assistance of people from the communities within which they are sited, and they often appear in places that are open to public interaction. Made from humble and easily obtainable materials, but nevertheless beautifully and artfully crafted, they attract admiration for the quality of their workmanship and engineering, while they question what makes a thing beautiful and why.

Siegel’s works are convincing examples of what artist David Pye calls the "craftsmanship of risk." Their success is dependent on the artist’s skillful, but not necessarily premeditated, manipulation of material at the service of an idea, in full recognition that the finished sculpture may or may not "work" as originally conceived.9

It is not difficult to respect Siegel’s craftsmanship and his concepts, whether one comes to his work as an educated art historian or as a casual passerby. Moreover, he is a moral artist, delivering a message based on a fully developed ethic, one his audience can trust that he actually believes in. His site works are successful as explanations of the processes of nature, while reminding the viewer that the products of economic and scientific progress do not exist without a price. Apparently unafraid of being taken for a naļf, he asks that the viewer care as much as he does about the issues he explores. Through the pristine presentation of a seemingly ludicrous accretion of trash combined with natural flora, the artist asks us to carefully consider the meaning of a beautiful object made from the castoff accumulations of a disposable society. He places the sculptures in handsome natural settings to remind us, all the more poignantly, of our capitalist ethic of accumulation and disposal, which contributes so tragically to the ongoing destruction of the planet. The ephemeral quality of Siegel’s work serves as a reminder that the products of human ingenuity and indeed the very existence of human beings on earth will ultimately prove to be a relatively brief and inconsequential evolutionary event.

Siegel’s installations, like those of Levy, Brookner, and Johanson, integrate the concept of nature’s time versus human notions of time, as a central conceptual and formal element. Nevertheless, in their efforts to create public displays that effectively reveal, explain, or otherwise treat critical issues in the natural environment, which have been millennia in the making, these artists find themselves addressing a modern world in which there is little time to foster the breadth of understanding necessary for people to fully experience either nature or art.

What is essential in contemporary art? Is the interaction between artwork and audience truly essential? In view of the strategies adopted by many contemporary artists and curators, the casual observer might be led to conclude that the only important interaction between artist, artwork, and audience is one that, in the end, results in the sale of the art, and/or the arrangement of the artist’s participation in the next, even more prestigious, art world event. Pulitzer prize-winning scientist and environmentalist Edward O. Wilson has written, "If a price can be put on something, that something can be devalued, sold, and discarded." Although he is referring to the dilemmas of living in a technologized and biologically impoverished world, he might also be offering a critique of contemporary artists who willingly devalue their own work and potential for service to society by an easy acceptance of the capitalist paradigm as a model for their artmaking endeavors.10 These artists have determined that they will serve up work that meets the media-inspired public taste for the "visual equivalent of the soundbite." So specialized in their work, they focus their efforts on appealing to a very small group of art connoisseurs, who are themselves specialists. Consequently, they’ve prohibited themselves from developing work that conscientiously and responsibly speaks to a more inclusive audience, wherever that audience might be found.

In her inspiring and insightful book The Vocation of the Artist, Deborah J. Haynes proposes that "There are alternatives to the practice of art based on self-promotion and self-aggrandizement. Here I am thinking of the idea that the work of art is a gift rather than a commodity to be sold…In giving a gift the artist is not necessarily anonymous, but the presence of a second person, and a second consciousness, radically transforms the work of art into a full aesthetic and moral event."11

Given the surfeit of factors alienating people from new art, perhaps those of us engaged in creating an earth-based, more physical and sensual form of public art may be presented with a singular opportunity. It seems obvious that in order to present artwork that is viewed seriously by the art-consuming public, as well as by those people who are generally uninvolved with contemporary art, artists must make their work essential to the world in ways that are not currently commonplace. Continuing to create our work in a cultural vacuum, with little concern for the criticisms leveled at it from inside and outside the art world, is a terrible mistake and the reason we are so often dismissed from important, broad-based dialogues regarding the environment and other pressing issues. In view of larger planetary concerns, ego-gratification and self-indulgence as artistic strategies are not only self-serving, but small and petty, bespeaking a convenient and distressing amorality.

The artists presented in this article are representative of a small but growing number who live or create their work in rural settings or in provincial cities, away from art world centers. Traveling their work to local and regional sites, some of which are art venues, but many of which are not, they don’t limit the presentation of their work to urban situations or to overwhelmingly urban, highly educated art consumers, electing instead to expand their opportunities by appealing to a more inclusive audience. Their genuine commitment to individual value systems is evidenced by the ways in which they run their professional and personal lives. Their engagement with environmental ideas, as well as with other issues within their communities and the larger world, is heartfelt, not a promotional tool to further their individual careers. And because they actually encounter, in their daily lives, natural processes and phenomena other than those available in Central Park or at the National Zoo, theirs isn’t a romanticized, ersatz representation of nature. Instead, they attempt to engage viewers of many backgrounds, who have a variety of life experiences, in a dialogue concerning the relationships between people and human-derived technologies and their influences on and interactions with the whole of the biotic community. The lives and creative efforts of these and other artists of similar inclination represent attempts to reach a holistic balance, integrating concern and care for the natural world and for the life of the community with their professional obligations and their vocations as artists.

As early as 1949, acclaimed teacher and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote, "No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions."12 Addressing the need for a change in philosophical values with respect to the existence of conscience and duty beyond self-interest in human relationships with nature, Leopold might also have been speaking directly to contemporary artists regarding their relationships with human and biotic communities. Artists who make work that participates in the environmental discourse, especially public artists, must understand that this engagement requires a level of participation which is more akin to community service than it is to self-service. Because so few of us are privileged to lead lives that put us in daily contact with nature or with the places where our artwork will eventually reside, we must recognize that we enter into an implied contract with these communities and audiences. This contract demands that we respect the people, traditions, rituals, and evidences of nature that already exist there. Perhaps equally important to the success of our proposed projects is the acknowledgment that artists must come as students of the community and the biosphere first, and teachers later.

In The Diversity of Life, Edward O.Wilson makes a plea on behalf of a new environmental ethic. His words might also be read as an appeal to all those who truly care about the place and meaning of art in the new world order: "The stewardship of environment is a domain on the near side of metaphysics where all reflective persons can surely find common ground. For what, in the final analysis, is morality but the command of conscience seasoned by a rational examination of consequences? And what is a fundamental precept but one that serves all generations? An enduring environmental ethic will aim to preserve not only the health and freedom of our species, but access to the world in which the human spirit was born."

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is an artist who is interested in environmental issues. This article is adapted from a paper presented at the Arts Now Conference.

Notes
1 Rachel Carson correctly identified the consequences of our easy acceptance of the pollution of our air, water, and soil, pointing out that the damage will probably not be repaired with scores or even centuries of concerted human effort. See Silent Spring, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994, pp. 4–13.
2 Watercourse, A site-specific installation mapping the rivers and streams of the Delaware River, exhibition brochure, Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, 1996.
3 Susan Harris Edwards, Of Earth and Cotton, exhibition brochure McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina, 1994.
4 Jackie Brookner, Natural Reality: Artistic Positions Between Nature and Culture, exhibition catalogue, Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Germany: 1999.
5 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of American Culture & Agriculture, Sierra Club Books, 1986, pp. 55–56.
6 Brookner, op. cit.
7 See ART AND SURVIVAL/Creative Solutions To Environmental Problems, Gallerie Women Artists’ Monographs, 1992.
8 Patricia Johanson, quoted in ART AND SURVIVAL/Creative Solutions To Environmental Problems, op. cit.
9 See Kathleen Whitney, "Skilled Labor," Sculpture, May 1999, pp. 24–29. Whitney further defines this as "a means of distinguishing processes that bear no risk in terms of the manufacture of something, in comparison to processes where at any minute, the entire object may be ruined because of some mechanical/physical mistake in eye-hand coordination."
10 Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, New York: W.W. Norton, 1993, p. 348.
11 Deborah J. Haynes, The Vocation of the Artist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 89.
12 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949, pp. 209–10.