Summer 2013
Global warming, pollution, invasive species and many other human-induced problems are imperiling the Earth’s ecosystems, and artists around the world are responding. Linda Weintraub’s new book, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press; 2012) is a call to action. Conceived as a textbook with eco art genres, strategies, issues, and approaches carefully schematized and indexed, To Life! will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary art and saving the Earth.
Several introductory essays are followed by case studies of 47 artists, whose materials and methodologies are as multifarious as the planet’s ecosystems, be they tissue cultures, microbes, meteorological instruments, soil, sewage plants, naked bodies, tree trunks, or meetings with municipal sanitation workers. The tone of their work is alternately impassioned, playful, absurd, scientific, and urgent. They include a few art-world stars, such as Andy Goldsworthy and Maya Lin, as well as pioneers from the 1960s and 1970s who defined the new ecological imperatives and resultant forms and materials of eco art in bold new ways, such as Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, and Allan Kaprow. Many of the artists are likely unfamiliar, working in locales as diverse as New Orleans, the Niger River Valley, and Helsinki. Their work, as succinctly described and analyzed by Weintraub, opens up new worlds of imagination, process, and scientific and community engagement.
Rooted in the vanguard art and nascent environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, eco art is more than innovative; it is a response to the most significant issues of our time, writes Weintraub. Just as the invention of perspective in Renaissance art was a reaction to scientific discoveries and signified a new view of man’s position in the universe, so eco art is correlated with the scientific and technological advances of our time and represents a major shift in consciousness, from an anthropomorphic to an ecocentric worldview. Such a viewpoint “honors life’s sanctity, augments its diversity, protests its neglect, and optimizes its vitality,” Weintraub writes in one of the introductory essays.
These values pose a challenge to the status quo. In contrast to the vanguard art movements of the later 20th century, which affirmed the cultural values of the mainstream, eco art has a “renegade character,” she writes. Warhol’s silkscreens of repetitive images celebrated the machine and industrial production, whereas “ecocentric productivity is a measure of life,” she notes. On Kawara’s conceptual paintings of latitude and longitude readings are dissociated from nature, emblematic of manmade systems of navigation and contemplative, like traditional landscape paintings, whereas ecocentric art is concerned with the components of ecosystems and embodies their holistic character, according to Weintraub.
Eco art’s practitioners roughly consist of two types: artists who follow the scientific method of ecology or those who serve as environmental advocates, critics, and protestors. They seek to solve the problems of pollution, resource depletion, climate change, escalating population and other environmental ills either by harnessing the healing powers of nature herself or utilizing technology, and often engage the community. The themes of eco art relate to habitat preservation, sustainable communities, renewable energy, and biodiversity, just to name a few, and a visceral connection with materials replaces the traditional aesthetic visual appeal of art. “Eco artists replace art store supplies with living plants and microbes, mud and feathers, electronic transmissions and digital imagery, temperature and wind, debris and contaminants,” Weintraub writes. “The finale is that eco art is defined as a mission, not a style. For all these reasons, eco artists can be viewed as either defectors from art or as pioneers inaugurating a new art movement.”
In contrast to the static art object, the work is often complex and unpredictable, perhaps even temporal, by incorporating natural forces, such as the movement of the sun or the flow of the tides. One example included in the book is the time-lapse photos of the sun by Argentinian Tomas Saraceno, which he achieves by attaching a tiny camera to a sunflower; the camera is fueled by the sun and the wind determines the exposure, framing, and shutter speed. U.S. artist Brandon Ballengee turned the breeding imperative on its head when he reverse-bred frogs from pet stores in an attempt to restore a species; by selecting characteristics of the frogs’ ancestor, a frog indigenous to the Congo that has disappeared from its native habitat, Ballengee undid years of interbreeding over the course of four years of experimentation.
Bright Ugochukwu Eke created a product that recycled a waste item and focused attention on the serious water issues plaguing his country of Nigeria. He fashioned rain gear out of the plastic water bags that have proliferated in Nigeria since the freshwater ecosystem of the Niger River delta has been fouled by the oil industry. The utilitarian umbrellas and hooded rain coats provide protection from acid rain, recycle a prolific source of litter, and draw attention to the exploitations of the petroleum industry, whose negligence not only caused the need for the packaged water in the first place but which also manufactures the bag from its product, petroleum, thereby intensifying the problem.
In response to the threats to shepherds caused by industrialization and changes in land use, Spaniard Fernando Garcia-Dory launched a school for shepherds. The ancient profession is updated with new tools, such as GPS and an electronic replacement for the traditional bell. The initiative is designed not just to save an endangered way of life and pastoral landscape, but also to promote a sustainable means of food production. In her piece Succession, Finnish artist Terike Haapoja made a video magnifying and depicting the life and death of bacteria harvested from her own face, which revealed the physical self as a multiplicity of microscopic species, a terrain as ripe for discovery as the moon. (The artist noted that the video’s resemblance to an old NASA film was no coincidence.)
Maya Lin, creator of the famed Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., is now creating a different kind of memorial—DVDs, websites and other media chronicling a huge, ambitious research project tracking the disappearance of species and the subsequent diminishment of our experience of the natural world. One DVD, which was projected as a billboard in Times Square, asked the question What Is Missing? while projecting images of stingrays, elk, giant cranes, songbirds, and other creatures as well as dammed rivers, blown-off mountaintops, and smog-infested skies. These are just of the few examples described in the book.
Weintraub concludes To Life!, whose title is a tribute to her own embrace of sustainable farming and living in the mid Hudson Valley, by noting that the culture of consumerism and material wealth is not ultimately beneficial to humans either, as evidenced by the obesity epidemic, disease-causing conditions among the poor and much overwork and unhappiness among the affluent. With the world’s population expected to surge to 9 billion by 2050, a third more than the 6 billion in 2000, conditions threaten to get worse, unless aggressive action to stem the destruction is taken. The seemingly miraculous calibrations of temperature, atmosphere, water and sunlight that make life possible on Earth inspire wonder, which should be just as much of the motivation behind “humanity’s search for its proper niche” as well as the horrors that are unfolding. Eco artists are rallying an environmental crusade, a movement that is just beginning to gain speed—and should get a big boost by To Life.