INTRODUCTION

WHEN ADDRESSING ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES THROUGH artistic practice, contemporary artists often find themselves in the role of educator, leader and performer. Leading by example, they go out in the world and create works that remediate or revision sites (1), often with a high level of scientific knowledge and an ability to communicate important ecological processes. When the art is not physically visible it translates as a kind of performance. These artists also consider their research and interactions with a community on a specific site an integral part of the art.

In this essay, I review early examples of performative ecological art beginning in 1970 and follow its evolution up to 2008. By no means a definitive examination of the genre, this essay is more a review of important performance based ecoart that illustrates an evolution from the gestural, poetic, or conceptual, towards more practical actions that provide tools for sustainable living.

The pioneers of this work have roots in the Earth Art movement that began in the late 1960s.  However, most Earth or Land artists were either concerned with making their mark on the land, or were simply performing an act of aesthetic exploration with the earth as their medium with no real concern for the principles of ecology. In contrast the performative art works I discuss are rooted in ecological concerns, as demonstrations or ritual acts, and range from solo performances both documented and undocumented, to community art projects with formal engagement between artist and citizens.

I.  FIRST WAVE: HARRISON, UKELES, HANSON

 

ONE OF THE EARLIEST PERFORMANCES OUTSIDE gallery walls was Newton Harrison’s Making Earth from 1970. This was a process of making earth that was documented with photographs. Upon realizing that topsoil was endangered worldwide in the 1960s, Harrison, while living in San Diego CA with his wife and collaborator Helen, decided to “make earth” or “good soil” with sand, clay, sewage sludge, leaf material and chicken/cow/horse manure. These elements were mixed, watered, and then mixed again several times over a four month period until when combined, they gave off a rich forest-floor smell that the artists’ could symbolically taste. The act of mixing the elements was performed without an audience and was intended by the artists as a meditation on taking action, being an active participant in living sustainably, a demonstration of humans working in collaboration nature.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who wrote her Manifesto for Maintenance Art in 1969, is also considered one of the originators of ecological performance art. From 1973-74, for her Maintenance Art Performance Series she performed Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance: Outside in 1973 at Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford CN. For this work she mopped and scrubbed the interior galleries and exterior steps of the museum. Although this work was very much a part of the feminist dialogue of the time, her actions highlighted how housekeeping is an essential and timeless act for being a steward of this planet.

 

 

In 1976, Ukeles was appointed artist-in-residence with the New York City Department of Sanitation, an unsalaried position in which she created multiple pieces for her performative series Touch Sanitation Performance (1978-80). With Handshake Ritual she set out to shake hands with over eight thousand sanitation workers. She faced each worker and said, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” These actions included exchanges with literally thousands of city sanitation workers and have been the inspiration for many ecological interventions in the public sphere over the years.

 

Around this same time in San Francisco, ecological artist Jo Hanson developed a performance-based work that involved a daily sweeping of her residential sidewalk on Buchanan Street. “Evolving into an eco artist couldn’t have been farther from my mind when I went out to clean the 180 feet of my 12-foot wide sidewalk in my windy new neighborhood of San Francisco in 1970 . . . Soon my cleaning extended to the whole block- one to three times daily. City trucks came one to three times daily to haul it away. City workers and I became buddies and collaborators, which led into unanticipated collaborations down the line.” (2)

 

 

This public art practice later became a celebrated citywide anti-litter campaign in which Mayor Dianne Feinstein participated in the sweeping of sidewalks as Art. Hanson taking further inspiration from Mierle Ukeles later proposed an artist-in-residency program to NORCAL Sanitary Fill Company in 1982 that has now offered more than 100 artists’ studio time and stipends since 1990 to create artwork from the waste stream to raise public awareness.  (Editor’s Note: See Sharon Spain’s Recology essay re residency in this WEAD Magazine issue.)

II.  LAND ARTISTS

THE HARRISONS, UKELES, AND HANSON WERE doing this work simultaneously to Land Artists Smithson and Heizer who developed large-scale projects in the desert southwest with no formal engagement of ecological systems. Although, it is interesting to note that Los Angeles art dealer Doug Chrismas insists that Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) was created as a performance piece. The documentation was a film, which the dealer helped fund, with Smithson running the length of the spiral from the outside inward while a helicopter circles above him. Chrismas has stated that Smithson never really anticipated an audience making the pilgrimage to the site forty years later. (3) Also, British artist Richard Long, who spent days in the landscape walking solo, marking the earth’s surface with his feet and then photographing the remaining patterns in the landscape in the late 1960s, was also engaging land as a performance, a kind of meditation on the human connection with or impacts on nature.

 III.  NEXT WAVE:  DENES, SIMPSON, MAZEAUD

BY THE 1980s THE NEXT WAVE OF ONLY A HANDFUL of artists operating almost completely outside the art world carried on. Some performative examples include artists Agnes Denes, Buster Simpson, and dominique mazeaud.

 

 

In 1982 Agnes Denes initiated Wheatfield: A Confrontation with a band of volunteers at the Battery Park Landfill adjacent to the former Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan. She cleared a plot of land, brought in topsoil and planted a field of wheat, which was then harvested and fed to horses stabled by the New York City Police Department. (See WEAD Magazine Issue #2—Denes is Featured Artist)

 

 

The next year Buster Simpson performed his iconic environmental agitprop performances where the artist would toss large circular hand carved limestone tablets into rivers, unauthorized, meant to neutralize acidic levels of the water. Popularly referred as River Rolaids this activity was a solo inquiry, which was documented by the artist with photographs and film.

 

 

The French artist dominique mazeaud (who prefers not to capitalize her name) has lived for decades in Santa Fe NM, where from 1987 to 1994 she created a ritualistic performance, The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande. Each month she informally walked the Santa Fe River bed and banks in her community (this river is a tributary to the Rio Grande). Both a literal and symbolic river cleansing, this work was performed mostly solo and had no formal photographic documentation–only casual photos taken by friends. Mazeaud did keep written documentation of her experiences in a journal she entitled Riveries; it includes a list of items collected during the cleansings.

 IV.  GESTURAL WORKS

BY THE EARLY 1990s THERE WAS A GROWING interest by artists examining issues of native habitat, water quality, and conservation. Art writer Robin Cembalist named it an Ecological Art Explosion in her ARTnews magazine article of the same name. (4)

 

Kathryn Miller and Basia Irland are two such performative artists from this period. In 1992 Kathryn Miller performed Seed Bombing the Landscape in Southern California, throwing handmade soil and seed “balls” in disturbed fields to reintroduce native plants that were destroyed due to real estate development. Thereafter, Basia Irland began a long-term performative series Gathering of Waters in 1995, in which she collected waters from tributaries and rivers flowing from the state of Colorado to the country of Mexico. She continues this work to this day in the form of a library as sculpture.

In 1998 Oakland artist Mark Brest van Kempen set out into the Utah desert to perform Living From the Land, which consisted of thirty days living within a five square mile area of wilderness. The artist did not bring any food with him and relied on plants and animals he foraged and hunted from the site to survive. This action was a solo experience in which the artist decided to put himself into the landscape as an inquiry of survival. He documented his meals with photographs and shot video of bones from the animals he had eaten.

V.  PUBLIC SOCIAL PRACTICE

 

IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM, WITH GREATER RECOGNITION from the larger art world for artists addressing environmental issues, the performative work evolved from being more gestural or conceptual to a more direct engagement with the public, a dialogic or relational aesthetic, social practice. Nature became, once again as it did in the late 1960s, an endangered asset that needed to be managed, interpreted and understood, this time especially “in your own backyard.” Examples of activist based artist collectives in major cities performing ecological services in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles include Temescal Amity Works by Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, LA Urban Rangers, Fallen Fruit, Eve Mosher and Tattfoo Tan (New York City).

Temescal Amity Works (2004-2007) by Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell was a three-year project in a former “orchard suburb” developed in the 1920s in Oakland CA. The artists created a community hub in their own neighborhood as a place to share food resources. They built a pushcart and collected citrus to facilitate an exchange of backyard produce among their neighbors. They also collected stories that were published and circulated as a series of free postcards. Jam making sessions and movie nights were performed through this work.

At this same time, The Los Angeles Urban Rangers were developing a platform for educating urban citizens about public access to beaches and other urban constraints on nature through the guise of a formal State Parks operation. As a collective, the artists took on the personae of Park Rangers, wearing uniforms and hats to look official. After researching and becoming experts on land use and the rights of individual citizens on public lands, they gave formal guided hikes and campfire talks to educate the public.

 

 

For their Malibu Public Beach Safari program the rangers teach the public what a “mean high tide” is and how they can navigate below this line safely and legally without trespassing on the properties of overly entitled landowners. The Rangers also provide information on how to navigate complicated property easements to have access to the beaches and performed Malibu Safari events such as potlucks, hikes and hunts, in these passages, to teach the public how to exercise their right of way.

Dave Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young, who make up the collective Fallen Fruit in Los Angeles, also started out in 2004 with their mapping of “public fruit,” fruit growing in or over public property such as streets or sidewalks, in the neighborhood of Silver Lake. Like the Urban Rangers, Fallen Fruit guides citizens on Nocturnal Fruit Forages to educate about public space and how resources are at our disposal daily that we take for granted whilst being uniformed. They too have worn uniforms to give the personae of authority, a performative aspect to their work, in order to deliver the educational information with a sense of adventure and without being pedantic. They have also done Communal Jam-Making events like Temescal Amity Works and Neighborhood Infusions, as well as Community Fruit Tree Plantings as art.

VI.  PERFORMATIVE  INTERVENTIONS

 

 

AS SCIENTIFICALLY BASED EVIDENCE OF CLIMATE change has become more graphically visualized in the media, especially since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was first presented to the public in 2005, artist Eve Mosher developed a temporary intervention that visualizes sea level rise on the city streets near the shorelines of New York City. In 2007, every weekend from May through October, Mosher performed HighWaterLine in Lower Manhattan to visualize the 10-foot above sea level line for residents. With a baseball diamond marker she outlined the flood zone with blue chalk creating a temporary intervention on city streets and sidewalks near the city’s shorelines. Scientists predict if we cannot reduce our CO2 levels quickly, severe flooding will be brought on by stronger and more frequent storms, which will occur every 19 years on average by 2050. (5) Being in the public eye during this prolonged performance enabled Mosher to engage in conversation with people of all ages in different neighborhoods about the potential impacts if nothing is done to correct this problem.

New York artist Tattfoo Tan has developed an art practice over the last ten years that involves a persona that is part “Boy Scout,” “Ecological Super Hero,” and “Artist.”  The Green Stewardship, which began in 2008, is Tan’s inquiry into how the public can acquire knowledge to master skills for taking care of the planet. For this project he enrolls in various green courses that offer certification, which he proudly flaunts in the form of custom merit badges that he has designed for his coveralls. For his Master Composter badge he redesigned the Caduceus (KA DO SEE US) symbol of divine providence and the embryo of life from a serpent to a red worm and placed the icon of the earth in the background to represent how composting can save the planet. Tan has also become a certified Citizen Pruner, which allows him to prune street trees in New York City legally. In 2010 he began teaching gardening workshops to the public from his S.O.S. Mobile Classroom, a cargo bicycle featuring, tools, a garden and composting bin.

VII.  KAPROW’S DEFINITION

PERFORMATIVE ART, AS DEFINED BY ALLAN KAPROW, is a “non-theatrical” performance. (6) It is a means to perform a task in which an audience may or may not participate or even witness the act. The goal of the work is not necessarily for the audience to simply watch the task being performed. It is the act of performing the task, which is the art itself. The work is typically temporal and can have layers of interaction with an audience. It may include a dialogue with the artist in which the audience might receive some verbal or written information. It could also become a community project where the artist works in collaboration with the audience. And, it can be presented as a workshop, media intervention or eco-visualization, or an encounter with professional businesses.

In summary these examples convey the importance of the poetic or performative elements in artists’ work that engages the land, ecology, and sustainability. With an emphasis on ritual or demonstrations of creative solutions “in action,” the work illustrates the empowerment that can come from doing rather than representing a concept or idea through a static object. Whether the artist is impersonating or representing authority or agency, facilitating educational experiences, and using their visual skills to make the invisible visible, the work disrupts or subverts public space outside the art world to help change existing conditions in the real world.

 

Footnotes:

(1) Remediate: Revision was the title for an exhibition at Wave Hill in the Bronx, Fall 2010. Curated by Jennifer McGregor. http://www.wavehill.org/arts/remediate_revision.html

(2) Jo Hanson quoted from http://weadartists.org/jo-hanson

(3) Douglas Chrismas, Getty talk on Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty film, early 2000s.

(4) Cembalest, Robin. The Ecological Art Explosion. ARTnews vol. 90, no. 6 (summer 1991): 96-105.

(5) Global and Planetary Changes 32 (2002) 61­88. Impacts of sea level rise in the New York City metropolitan area Vivien

Gornitz (a, *), Stephen Couch (b), Ellen K. Hartig (c, 1) (a) Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University and Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Armstrong Hall 2880, Broadway, New York, NY 10025, USA (b) U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District, USA (c) Wildlife Trust, Lamont­Doherty Earth Observatory, USA. Received 2 May 2001; accepted 1 June 2001.

(6) Allan Kaprow. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 163-180.

TURKISH ACTIVIST ECOART:

REPORT on the RELIEF VALVE/SUBAP Exhibit

 

 

EDITOR’S NOTE

In 2010 artists Nanette Yannuzzi and Arzu Ozkal brought ecoart by thirteen contemporary Turkish activist artists to America.  The collaborative exhibit– RELIEF VALVE/SUBAP, was installed in a unique non-art farm venue at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio where Yannuzzi and Ozkal were teaching studio art.  Of special note, Nanette Yanuzzi is Associate Professor of Art at Oberlin College where she teaches a course entitled “Art and the Environment” there.  Ozkal (born in Turkey) was an Oberlin Visiting Professor and now teaches at San Diego State University, CA.  They are the “we” in this essay.

 

PART I:  OHIO

I.  EXHIBIT VENUE

INSTALLED IN THE TWO-STORY STRAW BALE meeting house/office building at Oberlin College’s New Agrarian Center (NAC), the exhibit Relief Valve/Subap featured thirteen Turkish artists who address their country’s contemporary environmental issues.  In a variety of media from photography and video, to performance and installation, the selected art works provided an international perspective into land use, biodiversity and the controversy over genetically modified foods in Turkey today.

 

 

The New Agrarian Center is a 70 acre college & community organic farm and preserve ribboned on the east by Highway 20/10 and on the west by Oberlin College and Conservatory, a private liberal arts college.  The town has a rich history of American Indian and African American contribution and was an important stop on the Underground Railroad.

 

II.  CURATORIAL VISION

WE NAMED THE EXHIBITION RELIEF VALVE/ SUBAP to convey the sense of urgency we as curators feel about the environmental conditions our planet faces.

Our curatorial vision pivoted around notions of exchange and diversity as rudimentary to the discovery of self and other.  We asked ourselves questions like, “What are artists in different countries thinking about relative to increasingly urgent environmental concerns;” and, “How is this being expressed?”

 

 

It was important to us that selected works be exhibited in a site that engaged many of these issues and not just a typical art gallery.  Situating works of art in a relative conceptual context often opens a dialogue that is somewhat different then what would take place in an art gallery or museum.  Our intentions were, among others, to give Oberlin, Ohio audiences–whether farmers, students or passersby, a glimpse into how artists from another country are addressing similar environmental challenges in their own communities.

 

III.  PREPARING THE EXHIBIT SPACE

FOR TWO DAYS WE CLEARED THE STRAW BALE, SOON to be gallery, of a years worth of farm detritus.  Buckets of seeds, shovels, muck boots, dried garlic, old paperwork, tools, spider webs, and dust layered its interior.  The work was physically demanding, and although we realized it would be, we were unprepared for just how important that process would become in deepening our understanding of the exhibition’s intentions.

Hauling seed bags, and water buckets while sweeping away mouse droppings is not something one often associates with mounting an exhibition of artwork.  However, as we swept the un-sweepable rammed earth floors, scrubbed the wooden steps, and cleaned the large windows that opened onto acres of wetlands, what became almost palpable were the meanings created through ‘the unnamable”– as Michel deCerteau articulated in The Practice of Everyday Life (first published in French 1980; English 1984).

 

Irregular clay plastered walls, heavy hewn ceiling beams, gorgeous wooden doors and handrails were works of art themselves.  Open windows and doors, rarely found in art galleries, streamed sunlight framing vistas of cattail and red-winged blackbirds, reminding visitors to take pause between works of art and observe, with the same attention, the living art beyond the thick walls of the straw bale.  Why exhibit sometimes-nuanced works of art in this visual compendium? Had we never read Brian O’Doherty’s seminal text (Inside the White Cube, Artforum, 1976)) on the ideology of the gallery space?

 

IV.  PHILOSOPHY

WEARYING ACCOUNTS OF GLOBAL WARMING, environmental pollution, deforesting, desertification, and the loss of biodiversity increasingly populate our daily digest. Farmlands are continually sacrificed for golf courses; fish farms are polluting our coasts; and species are disappearing from our planet at a dizzying rate.  As individuals it’s easy to become apathetic as seldom are our objections seen or heard in the public realm.  Many worry about their carbon footprint but rarely take an active role in protesting growing ignorance and environmental vandalism.

In his book (published in French 1989; English 2000) The Three Ecologies, philosopher and political activist Félix Guattari states that our “singularity is as endangered as those rare species that are disappearing from the planet everyday.” Guattari’s focus is a theory of “ecosophy” –mainly, three related ecologies of environmental, mental and social worlds and their coalescence into a methodological practice that argues for the broadening of our views to include their interdependence.  By doing so, he argues, we will be able to affect enduring changes in our social, cultural, and natural environments.

Relief Valve/Subap offers the viewer a modest but rich antidote to this post-modern condition by opening a valve of visual discourse and creative exchange in the exploration of these ideas.

 

V.  CONCLUSION ON VENUE 

 

 

WHAT WE DIDN’T REALIZE, AND HADN’T PLANNED FOR, was the impact Oberlin viewers felt when experiencing the Turkish artworks in the farm setting.  Many viewers commented on their excitement at seeing works of art outside a traditional venue. They were able to connect the work from Turkey with Oberlin’s own ecology. Responses included: “I never knew we had such a large wetland,” and, ‘What exactly happens at this farm?’

 

EXHIBITION STATEMENT 

“Relief Valve” serves as a locus for the interrogation and exploration of contemporary ideas about nature, offering a forum for political, aesthetic, and ethical discourse. Situating this exhibit at the New Agrarian Center will draw a diverse set of viewers and will benefit the farm as well as the artists. This merging of art and environment in venturing outside the gallery space is in itself a powerful statement about the potential of dialogue between art and sustainability.”  

Janet Fiskio (Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College & Conservatory)

 

PART II:  TURKEY 

I.  CONTEMPORARY CONDITIONS 

THE ACTIONS MANY POLITICIANS TAKE REGARDING the environment are politically motivated and heavily laced with lobbyist influence.  Much of our government’s environmental policies and actions are ‘sold’ to the public via grandiose media performances aimed at buying votes.  Unfortunately, many Turkish citizens are willing to play along, even when living under extreme conditions.

As the price of natural gas soars worldwide, more and more European cities face air pollution and its consequences due to the use of cheap and illegal energy resources (e.g., bootleg coal, etc.)

During a recent visit to Ankara, Turkey’s capital city and my (i.e. Ozkal) home, the winter air was so polluted that it was reported to have a negative impact on children walking to and from school each day.  The sky was literally gray from the effects of burning cheap coal.

In response to public outcry the citizens of Ankara saw little more than media spectacle.  Politicians sipped polluted tap water in front of the media to ‘prove’ that the Kızılırmak River’s water is safe to drink.  Those antics add to continuing public malaise and feelings of political ineffectiveness.

As disturbing as these occurrences are, and as powerless as we as individuals may feel about changing them, there is much to be learned by becoming aware of how people in other countries are thinking about similar issues.  Our interest in sharing stories, visual or oral, was the impetus behind bringing the work of Turkish artists to a small Mid West town.

 

II.  ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM 

TURKEY IS IN THE MIDST OF EXPERIENCING THE tragic effects of environmental destruction, destruction that has been taking place since the beginning of its modernization process in 1960s.

Today, people living in rural areas observe changes much more vividly than the urban population. Even the subtle shifts in climate have had drastic effects on farmers, livestock breeders, and fishermen.

While stopping environmental destruction may be too ambitious, slowing down the damage is possible and vital for survival.  Reaction against greedy corporations, resistance towards environmental legislation that serves profit-driven organizations is growing rapidly in Turkey thanks to the collective effort of activists, environmentalists, and cultural producers.

For example, lately there have been many efforts to shape public opinion regarding long-term consequences of government energy policies that allow the manipulation of riverbeds (by third-parties) for building hydroelectric turbines.  Through independent media productions and documentaries the public is encouraged to develop a healthy and interrogative resistance towards the policies that limit the distribution of water—as water resources, springs and streams that have flowed freely in Anatolia for millennia have been shrinking in number every day.

Not too long ago in Turkey, clean water was a vast and free resource.  One would come across fountains in public places and could access clean water freely.  Today, free flowing streams are captured into conduits feeding the dams.  Water reservoirs are contaminated due to heavy industrialization.  Clean water supplies and springs are privatized and sold to corporations that produce bottled beverages.  In many areas of the country, not only are public fountains are drying up but also tap water is becoming a health hazard—as it is becoming increasingly more profitable to sell the water instead of sanitizing it for free.

 

 

With this in mind as we curated Relief Valve/Subap, we looked for artists whose work engaged and publicly challenged these issues.

 

ARTISTS Genco Gülan and Ethem Özgüven

Genco Gülan and Ethem Özgüven expose through their artworks recent controversies around the commercialization of natural resources in Turkey.  They use the aesthetics of place and the textures of natural resources, such as water, to evoke a sense of beauty and an equal sense of the everyday gone awry.

 

 

Gülan‘s Shopping Water (2007) is a ten-minute film on the adverse effects of capitalism on global warming.  Here, the audience sees a woman—wearing a red dress with white polka dots and fancy high heels, pushing a shopping cart filled with water bottles.  As she moves between the aisles of a grocery store, the scene changes and we see her walking under water in Myndos, an ancient sunken city.  While she continues to push the shopping cart under water at the same pace as when she was shopping in the aisle of the store, the audience becomes mesmerized in a captivating dream-like scene that blends reality into dystopia.  We are lured into its texture and watery.

Gülan’s work raises an important question about the future of natural resources in Turkey: How can a peninsula that is bordered with such large bodies of water; filled with rich resources of springs, rivers and lakes face a water shortage?

He adds: “If we continue along our current path of consumption, we may all need to learn to live underwater.”

Ethem Özgüven’s Mediterranean is Over  is primarily concerned with the pollution of water.  Özgüven says, “Especially in the last twenty years, all species in the Mediterranean are in danger due to industrial or domestic waste.”

Mediterranean is Over is a series of short animations created by juxtaposing images of various artifacts that come out of the Mediterranean– rusty containers and industrial scraps photomontaged into fish and other sea creatures.

Short facts accompany these dystopian fantastic creatures, such as:

“Although, it is forbidden, it is still common practice to use sonar, radar, dynamite, and harpoon together with light.  With these illegal practices, fish have no chance to escape.”

Özgüven makes us question our inhumane and shortsighted decisions.

 

PART III.  Interview with IZ OZTAT and DIKRAN TAS 

SUBJECT: Genetically Modified Food Legislation

Nanette Yannuzzi: Your collaboration has developed over four years. Can you tell us how you met and why you decided to collaborate?

Iz Oztat: I first met Dikran Tas in 2008 as I was looking for a metalsmith who could make Milagros–small metal devotional objects used for wishes in the tradition of Eastern Orthodox churches.  Dikran showed me some Milagros that his master has made and told that the tradition has died out.  By spending time in their shop I started reflecting more on the relationship between metalsmithing and sacred relics.  This craft [in Turkey] has historically related to the preservation of the sacred.  It was very fruitful for Dikran and me to research examples from our own past and belongings to reinterpret existing sacred relics.

The first object I commissioned Dikran to make was Hacer-ül Esved Protective Cover, a silver case to hold together the Hacer-ül Esved stone in Mekke.  This stone is believed to come from heaven and is touched by all the visitors to Mekke for pilgrimage.  As Dikran was working on this object, Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist who devoted his life to starting a public dialogue between the Ermenians and Turks, was killed.  I commissioned Dikran to make a portrait of Hrant, similar to saint icons made of silver for the church alters.  Dikran’s master has made many portraits for Turkish army and state officials but this was the first portrait that Dikran made.

 

 

This series of works allowed us to research the Muslim and Christian heritage that is available in Istanbul, and reflect on it from a contemporary and critical perspective.  For Dikran it was a way to approach his craft as a metal smith from a more conceptual point of view.  For me, it is crucial to make connections between this historical craft that is dying out and contemporary art and to invent alternatives to make it sustainable.

NY: The sculpture you submitted to Relief Valve/Subap reminded many viewers of some sort of relic.  It was placed under glass, it contained highly crafted silver and blown glass and encased something very special and rare, in this case, a tiny seed.  Can you tell us about this compelling work. What where you thinking about, how did you arrive at the form and what did you hope viewers in the US would take away from it?

IO: Sacred Relic of The Future: GMO-Free Wheat Seed came after these objects and is the first one to be exhibited.  I think it is important to reflect on how these objects meet a public, in which contexts they are exhibited because they have a reference to the sacred, something that has been lost with the rise of secular art venues.

What happens to an object with a claim to the sacred when it enters a secular setting? Sacred Relic of the Future is inspired by a reliquaries made for preserving the hair of Prophet Muhammad, which is exhibited in the Sacred Relics Department of Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.

Since we have been working together for a long time by now, a short visit to the museum was enough to sketch out our version.  I got the seed from an archeologist friend, who found some wheat seeds in an excavation site.  Will this species of wheat survive only if we preserve it like a sacred relic from all the genetically modified breeds that are replacing it?  In terms of the work being shown in another geography, this is a challenge I face every time I work with a local reference.  It is a very thin line between exoticizing your own heritage versus being able to say something relevant through it… With the title, and the careful craft of the object, I hoped the feeling of being a sacred relic could be communicated.  The title is quiet didactic but it was necessary…

NY: The idea that a single seed can, within the context of contemporary society, so easily signify a sense of rarity is still difficult for many of us to wrap our minds around yet eleven years into the new century it’s glaring clear.  What is your experience of genetically modified food and seeds in Turkey, a country that for many years banned the importation of genetically modified foods.

IO: When doing research for this work, I became familiar with resistance movements in Turkey that are trying to resist the laws that allow for more and more genetically modified species to be produced in Turkey.  Big companies like Monsanto are very influential in passing these laws and invading the local market.  In response, there are farmers gathering to exchange seeds for local breeds that have evolved over thousands of years and will disappear if they are not planted and harvested.

I had already done the work when I learnt that the best way to preserve a seed is by planting it.

AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON ART & NATURE

US, Taiwan

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE

From the exhibition catalogue, Going Green, sponsored by the Taipei Cultural Center, New York City, and funded by the Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan. The exhibition opened in New York on July 9, 2010, at Queens Botanical Garden (Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York)

 

 

 

THE INVITATION TO WRITE THIS ESSAY links back to 2004, when I was introduced to Mali Wu, who is included in Going Green: New Environmental Art from Taiwan. Wu later invited me to Taiwan in January 2006, while she was working on a community arts program in Chiayi County—an international public arts residency entitled Arts as Environment: A Cultural Action on Tropic of Cancer (2005-2008). During that visit she introduced me to various museums, artists, scientists and potential sites as research for recommending artists who could participate in the program. At this same time, I became aware of American artist, writer and curator Jane Ingram Allen who was preparing for her curatorial debut of the inaugural Guandu International Outdoor Sculpture Festival at Guandu Nature Park in Taipei (2006-2009).

In 2008, I was invited a second time to Taiwan for the 4th annual Tropic of Cancer event in Chiayi. This time I went to participate in community dialogues and symposia addressing debris fields of acquaculture waste as material for land art and cultural engagement. Also attending were artists as facilitators including British artist David Haley, and local Taiwanese artists Jen-Hung Liang, and Ying-Chieh Tsai. Following these two trips to Taiwan, and after reviewing documentation from the recent outdoor site exhibition curated by Ingram Allen in Chen Long entitled Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project: Children and Artists Celebrate the Wetlands; and from reviewing images of past Guandu International Outdoor Sculpture Festival site works in nature, I was compelled to contribute this essay for a few reasons, which I will explain.

 

 

It is rare to find a nation or government such as Taiwan that supports the artistic process as much to sponsor travel, accommodations and the printing of catalogues associated with a contemporary art movement that is not so easily categorized. In the last seven years some important American artists and curators have been invited to work on projects in Taiwan, and in collaboration with Taiwanese artists, including: Suzanne Lacy, Helen and Newton Harrison, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, David Haley, Anne Douglas, Mary Jane Jacobs, Andrea Polli, Joyce Cutler-Shaw, Karen McCoy, Sam Bower, Sonja Hinrichsen, and Roy Staab. As well as artists from India, Netherlands, Norway, Korea, New Zealand, Indonesia, France, Japan, Philippines, and Hungary.

 

I.  GOING GREEN

Going Green is the first environmental art exhibition to travel to America from a single country, not only from Taiwan, but from anywhere in the world. There have been eco artists represented from Israel, Iran, Germany and England as of recent who have been placed in group exhibitions or had solo shows in galleries in the United States, although nothing on this scale with sixteen artists, including eight artists who will travel to the USA to do site-specific installations this year.

 

In the United States there have been a number of environmental art initiatives in development over the last decade, especially in the southwest where William Gilbert established Land Arts of the American West, an undergraduate program at the University of New Mexico in 2000. The Nevada Museum of Art, in collaboration with William Fox, started a research center and site based program called A+E Center for Art + Environment in 2008. And, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, developed by Matthew Coolidge, has been operating a residency program in Wendover, Nevada since 1997. Although most of the work created for these site-based projects engages in a dialogue of pure aesthetics, it also derives from more pragmatic interests by artists to examine and influence human interactions with nature.

 

Other important outdoor art and ecology or art and nature initiatives happening internationally include (not in any order of priority):  Center for Contemporary Art in the Natural World, The Arts Catalyst, and Yorkshire Sculpture Park (UK); 48c Public Art Ecology (IN); Laumeier Sculpture Park, iPark, and Wave Hill (USA); YATOO International Residence Program and Geumgang Nature Art Biennale (KR); Stanley Park Environmental Art Project (CA); Israeli Forum for Ecological Art; and Environmental Art Festival (IR). And, important museum exhibitions which have also sited works in nature in the last decade include Radical Nature at the Barbican (London, 2009), Weather Report at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado, 2007), ecovention at the CAC (Cinncinati, OH, 2002), and Natural Reality at the Ludwig Forum in Aachen (Germany, 1999).

 

Occidental artists most well known in the art world for exploring an aesthetic relationship with nature, making art in and with nature, such as Andy Goldsworthy (UK), Nils-Udo (DE), Chris Drury (UK), and Roy Staab (USA), represent nature as a medium of expression, beauty, dominion and spectacle. From an Eastern perspective, making art with nature could be understood as a more authentic cultural practice given the desire for balance with nature historically, particulary with landscape painting. These are both broad generalizations and do not convey the reality that there are Western artists who approach their work with restrained simplicity; yet it is also a puritan aesthetic that can be seen in the harmony portrayed in the Asian arts. Each culture reveres nature and each use nature to their own end.

 

II.  GOING GREEN ARTISTS

 

Documentation of past works and proposed site-specific works included in Going Green align with international perspectives of artists working in and with nature in the following ways:

 

Chengho Chen’s site work at the Queens Botanical Garden (Flushing, NY), entitled Quaver, is designed to demonstrate the need for artists to collaborate with nature by replacing wildlife habitat that humans have displaced. Forms from earthen clay in the shape of musical 8th notes will hang from trees, creating nests for birds in an urban environment. American artist Lynn Hull coined this type of work Trans-species Art or habitat sculpture.

 

For Guandu Nature Park in 2009, Chao-chang Lee installed Flavor of the Wetlands, a convening structure in the shape of a bird’s head made from grasses and leaves stuffed inside a patchwork of recycled clothing found wrapped around a forest tree. This interventionist practice of creating architectural structures as venue for dialogue around issues of sustainability is a highly successful strategy that American artist Amy Franceschini and others often employ.

 

 

Chuan-chu Lin’s land art installation in the city of Taipei entitled Rice for Thoughts (2007), where he planted and harvested a field of rice using traditional methods on a parcel scheduled to become a high-rise building is an intervention reminiscent of Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield (1982), a demonstration or transition site that challenges “what is art” for the general public in Taiwan.

 

The proliferation of plastics is on everyone’s mind due to the media coverage of the nurdle soup patches in our oceans called the 5 Gyres. For Accident Gallery (Eureka, California), Ya-chu Kang creates a human skeleton wearing a plastic cape like ‘Superman,’ entitled Hero, made of recycled plastic sheeting filled with non-biodegradable waste collected from the region.

 

Creating a human figure with nuisance material is a common motif for artists concerned with environmental issues, one that California artist Kim Abeles has used in her work for over 30 years. Kang and Abeles both ask their audience to consider “who are our heroes?”

 

 

Julie Chou, who participated in the Art as Environment project in Chiayi while I was in Taiwan in 2008, is interested in projects that involve community participation. In Too Salty (2007), Chou addresses soil salinity in western Australia, a serious problem that threatens the food supply. Local residents were invited to bring overly salty food dishes, potluck style, to encourage dialogue inspired by a sensory experience. This work parallels the performative soil projects of artist Laura Parker (San Francisco), who presents ‘soil tastings’ where participants smell the soil first before eating foods grown in the same soil, entitled Taste of Place.

 

An important project to be presented in Going Green, which was included in the Taipei Biennale in 2008, is Mali Wu’s Taipei Tomorrow as a Lake Again. This highly conceptual art installation presents the possibility of a changing landscape due to climate change with graphic mappings of rising waters in low lying areas in Taipei (which are many). Helen and Newton Harrison creators of Greenhouse Britain, travelled to Taiwan in 2007 to exhibit and lecture about their mappings and proposals that address entire continents. Their work informed Wu’s altered vision of her hometown as a socially relevant artwork that illustrates an unimagined future by its inhabitants.

 

Taiwan has invested a generous amount of creative capitol to develop unique art and nature progams in recent years. Due to economic hardships internationally some have ceased programming for now. These programs have paved the way for a rich cultural exchange that will have a lasting impact on the evolution of an international art and nature movement. Going Green is an extension of this effort which will hopefully inspire more environmental art through this beneficial exchange.

 

 

 

Gongju, South Korea

I. HISTORY

Geumgang Nature Art Biennale WAS FIRST HELD IN 2004 and again in 2006 and 2008. This year, 2010, it is titled Nature and Peace.

Yatoo was founded almost 30 years ago in Gongju, in the Chungnam Province, 150 km south-west of Seoul. Yatoo is the name of the Korean Nature Artists Association that organizes the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale and means “Thrown into the field”. The Korean artists use the term “thrown into field”, because as Koreans, they feel the responsibility for nature is theirs. Why? Korea is a unique country in many ways. A technically advanced society, it lives collectively in respect for ancient culture and nature. It requires individuals to responsibly share their experiences abroad, to learn from other cultures how to honor nature because many countries have this problem. This has resulted in Korea being one of the largest Nature Art centers in the world.

In Nature Art, nature plays the role of co-creator and instigator. This creates a number of consequences for the artists who want to create “in unison with nature”. They need to show humility and a deep understanding of the processes taking place around them in nature. Nature Art, being the art closest to our roots, educates and moralizes us, making us more reflective. This kind of art is usually outside roofed galleries enabling contemplation within the natural world. And so it happens in the case of Geumgang Nature Art Biennale. Installations are shown in the Ecological Park near Jeongancheon stream and the river bank of Geumgang, creating a joint exhibition entitled Where is the Swallow?. This title refers, first to the name of the mountain, Yeonmi, or Swallow Tail, where the park is located. Secondly, these birds were once abundant and nesting close to people in the eaves of roofs. Now due to human activity swallows are very rare in South Korea.

Within the exhibition’s title and the rhetoric of the artworks is a reflection of how people could behave so as not to discourage or disrupt other species, as they have discouraged swallows. How can one live in harmony with the whole of nature? Art gives us advice in finding answers to this tricky question. Trees, water, light, sound and even wind become part of the artists’ installations. They will be standing on site for some time and the site will change its form and structure with help from nature itself. The whole process can be observed in the park and at the Geumgang riverbank throughout the year.

The combined rich and diverse histories of this year’s participants guarantee a high level of quality work. We have 15 artists from 13 different countries: Ghana, Cameroon, India, Poland, USA, Germany, Peru, Philippines, Netherlands, New Zealand, USA, Canada, Hungary, Bulgaria and Japan, and 12 artists from the host country, South Korea. The character of each creator’s piece is shaped by the unique culture, history and geography of his or her country of origin. Each piece is also marked by the artist’s specific relationship to nature. It is not surprising that the installations differ from each other to such an extent.

II. INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITING ARTISTS

KAREN MACHER NESTA, PERU, IS AN ARTIST who believes in specific interaction between Mother Earth and her inhabitants. In the ancient beliefs of her country, the land must be respected. Consequently people offer gifts to nature: fruit, animal blood, cocoa leaves etc, asking her to be more fertile and calm. Earthquakes are also in her nature, and if it comes to this kind of disaster, it means that she is angry.

The artist used rabbits as a symbol of fertility because of their fast-reproducing capability. The rabbit figures were made from clay, and were designed to last for a short period of time only, in order to return to the earth where they came from (some cement has been added to extend this period). The act of making the rabbits was like a fertility ritual, asking the land to never stop providing for us; it is an offering to allow us live together in peace and harmony.

Over thirty larger-than-life rabbits are located around the main path in Ecological Park. The rabbits will eventually disappear and be absorbed into the forest floor.

 

DUTC ARTIST, KARIN CAN DER MOLEN´S SHELL object is part of a series of art works in nature in which she creates an entry to the natural world for people who grew up in an urban, technological society. The Ocean in a Shell is a metaphor for the vastness of the natural world that we are a part of. This shell is too big to hold to your ear. It explores the meaning of being as wide as the ocean itself.

NEREUS PATRICK CHEO, CAMEROON, WAS INSPIRED BY debris ejected onto the beach by the Atlantic ocean to create The Watch Tower Kiosk. He used found plastic water, beer and soft-drink bottles to make an open structure which talks about a worldwide problem: a great majority of the world’s population consumes water and drinks from these bottles but at least half of these bottles have never been recycled.

His project entailed the construction of a Kiosk-like shape 5m high and 3m x 4m wide. The kiosk is a dome-shaped sculpture beautifully created from used bottles woven together with wire combined with bamboo, wood and nails. Utilizing the bottles as an artistic statement, he has given them new life.

The work offers an opportunity for attention, care and open vistas for reflection on how we interact with our environment.

FOR ROGER TIBON, PHILLIPPINES, THE WATCHWORDS “nature and peace” are metaphors for a journey uniquely associated with the boat. This is not surprising considering that the Philippines are comprised of more than seven thousand islands. Many Filipinos have never left this environment, and, within the islands, most people travel by boat.

The boats are more than just a way of movement and communication for them. Filipinos have extremely emotional attitude towards their boats. Boats take us from one destination to another; they can be a journey towards one’s aim or dream in life; they can be journey towards communicating and understanding one another in order to achieve peace; boats can be a spiritual journey. Life itself is a journey; we are all in the same boat navigating through this particular lifetime.

The river of existence is sometimes rough and sometimes pleasant. Individually and collectively, we have the responsibility to harmonize with one another and with nature to keep our balance. We have to understand the ways of nature, ourselves and other people. For, if we don’t, we can easily go astray and into troubled waters of conflict, argument, and confusion. The boat, with three figures on it, has been installed hanging under one of the cities’ bridges enabling many people to cross over this traveling symbol. Of course the real contemplation begins when we reach a beautiful riverbank and silently, listening to the sound of the water, we gaze at the sculpture from a distance.

Roger Tibon is internationally known as a visual and nature artist. At home he is also active as a poet and occasionally as a martial arts and visual arts teacher of younger artists concerned with nature and the Philippine culture.

 

PATTRICK TAGOE-TURKSON, KUMASI, GHANA. TO MAKE people think, Patrick created a holy carpet and performance titled “Holy Ground”. The work is made from found slippers (flipflops) debris and jute sacking. His work reflects on the continuous dilemma of people’s dealings with nature and how to reestablish people’s connection to nature. He hopes to capture the audience’s attention with beautiful colours, and to sustain their attention as they experience the whole work by walking on it and observing its detail. The work gives us much to reflect on: the lifespan of objects (and for that matter, our actions), our mass consumerism, what we accept as being valuable and what we reject as worthless.

The carpet has been installed in front of the main entrance to the Ecological Park, so everyone who wants to contemplate nature in a forest, or just get some exercise, can take off his or her shoes and… “think about thinking”. Thinking about our roots can be the beginning of an adventure with the park. Cleared by their initial intervention with the carpet, visitors become more sensitive to the soul-healing effects of nature.

THE WORK OF PAWEL CHLEBEK ODEBEK, POLAND, REFERS to central values such as family, love, and care. In The New Generation the artist points out the mystery of new life and implies its dependence on our care. Eventually the project will result in the interaction between the carved form and nature’s power (as the growing tree trunk expands). Time is co-creator of this piece.

The art-work is a pine sapling planted in soil between the two large opposing torsos, male and female. The torsos and the tree are both pine from different countries; Chile and Korea. We are similar people under different flags, our needs are alike, and we should all think about shaping a new and healthy world.

Visitors to the Geum Riverbank, will witness this co-creation for a long time to come. Whether the tree and sculpture survive or not is nature’s call. The tree may grow into the torsos and after a few years, tear them apart. The uncertainty of the outcome makes this piece even more interesting.

 

THE TWO WILLOW WATER BUFFALO BY JAPANESE ARTIST EIZO SAKATA are works “in situ”, inspired by the place, with willow from nearby. One Water Buffalo stands in a water installation near the entrance of Yeonmisan Art Park. The other is set up in a portion of the Riverside-Park wetland near Yeonancheong. The willow will root and grow and the branches will return to their life. In fact, owing to a lot of rain during the exhibition period, buds appeared quite soon and green leaves are now growing. In time the buffalo will look like a green-leaved animal. Eizo Sakata´s buffalos have symbolic meaning, representing the hope of new life after a manifold of environmental damages (including war) and an eternal return to the power of nature.

NEW ZEALAND ARTIST, DONALD BUGLASS’ CELL, RELIES ON the beauty of physics to hold itself up. Cut sections of tree trunk support each other and demonstrate a link between the constructive tendencies of humans and the environment. Cell represents the beauty and balance of nature. It represents the cells of plants, the nucleus of an atom or, perhaps, the rising sun. At the same time it portrays a fundamental shape for shelter (in this case, one we are excluded from) and the peace and security that this might otherwise offer us. His work also has underlying references to the ancient graves at Yeonmisan.

AN ALTERNATIVE GARDEN IN A WRECKED CAR IS A symbolic gesture and tells us about our attitudes towards nature. This small garden in a car created by CHINTAN UDAPHYAY, India, says that, confronted with nature, we are very small even though we make big machines. At the same time this car-garden evokes memories and fantasies we have about social, psychological and environmental issues. The artist gave new life to a dead car, and changed its use into a garden of stories: personal, universal, violent, peaceful.

IN A TRENCH WITH SLOPING WALLS NEAR JEONGANCHEON ICHI IKEDA, Japan, created a Green Vessel; a sparse bamboo structure occupies the length of the trench. Bamboo poles placed at 45° present hand-shaped trays holding growing plants. The relationship between Ichi Ikeda’s work and the site expresses the drastic ecological changes and situations surrounding our daily life, most of all, earth’s most precious resource – water.

PEACE TANK, THE WORK OF TONI SCHALLER, GERMANY, is located on the Geum River bank. The shape of a tank is well known around the world. Tanks are used to store many different substances. But this tank is a little different. “Peace tank” is empty and Toni Schaller wants us to understand it as a symbolic storage space for non-material peace. Moreover, if people view it from a particular point they see behind the peace tank, on a rooftop across the street, a real blue water tank. One can compare two images or notions of tanks: the first with the function of storage for the physical and the other, psychological.

SUZY SURECK, USA, MADE A DRAWING IN AND ON THE water using floating, round mirrors of varying diameters (15 – 50 cm). By creating this water-bound drawing in the pond at Jeong-an River, the water becomes a sketch-pad within the expanse of the landscape. Many Lotus plants surround the site. The discs mirror the shape of the lotus leaves and reflect the changing conditions of the sky, placing the viewer in a direct relationship between the skies and the water. The sun, the water and the sky are all collaborators. The scale of the work can be seen intimately at close quarters but, from a distance, the viewer observes a spiral moving downwards into the deeper part of the pond, leading to a direct experience with Nature.

SANDOR VASS, HUNGARY, CREATED PILGRIMAGE FOR PEACE. He decided to sacrifice himself, walking (and bicycling) for peace over 100 km around the Gongju region. Draw a Line and Follow It was a concept of Fluxus in 1960’s and inspired the artist’s work. The form of the route is a symbolic drawing depicting a single-heart double-headed Siamese twin; a symbol of duality which exists in us all and is deeply embedded in the Korean culture through the concept of Yin and Yang. It also symbolizes South and North Korea: two heads, two kinds of political rationale, and one heart of a nation. The heart in this drawing represents Yeonmi Mountain, a symbol of national integrity.

Sandor Vass navigated with the help of a GPS (Geographic Positioning System) the special route generated by the drawing. The virtual drawing has been created by avoiding boulders, trees, houses and other obstacles in the artist‘s way. The drawing is a redefinition of the environment and natural formations around Gongju city.

The project was presented in the gallery as a dynamic video installation in tandem with the drawing, and shows the corresponding recording locations.

III. KOREAN ARTISTS

THE LINES OF WOOD BY KOReAN ARTIST KANG, HEE-JOON lie in strong contrast to the background which is dominated by horizontal lines. He juxtaposed the zigzag lines in reaction to the horizon of a broad, flat field near the Jeongancheon River. Limbs of abandoned trees remind us of air flowing forward, or the leisurely flow of a brook.

WITH SMALL TWIGS, KO, HYUN-HIE, HAS FILLED GAPS between large boulders. An important aspect of her work is the contrast between the old boulders which talk about early earth history and the twigs from just last season.

IN A PERIOD OF FOUR WEEKS A SITE ON THE mountain gradually changed its appearance. KIM, SOO-NIM, sifted and separated the stones, leaves and soil that comprised the earth within a rough circle. She used the stones to construct a wall around the site which became progressively higher as time passed. At the end of this procedure a neat clean place in the forest was formed revealing a matrix of roots and an orderly boundary separating the wild external environment from the altered state of the internal circle.

TWO SEMI-TRADITIONAL WOODEN WATCH GUARDS, normally found at the entrance of Korean villages, are bound together by Kim, Yong-ik. He imagined the two as a pair of lovers, and then densely bound them together with red and blue twine. This symbolizes affection between male and female. Of the totems’ heads, only a small part of their faces remain unbound. Beaded necklaces hang on their chests,another traditional tribute.

THREE LARGE HOLES ARE CUT FROM A HUGE TREE TRUNK. The shape reminds us of natural holes eaten out by worms, but these holes are big enough to be entered into by visitors. Kim, Hae-sim wants to draw our attention to naturally formed shapes in contrast to manmade ones.

 

PARK, BONGI THOUGHT ABOUT THE NEEDS OF OUGHT ABOUT the needs of human beings while climbing Yeonmisan. So he made a bridge to cross a valley. The shape of the bridge was inspired by an old stone bridge at the Seonam Temple in Southern Korea. This is scaled-down model of that bridge.

GONGJU IS THE CITY OF THE BEAR. MANY BEAR SCULPTURES and a shrine remind us of an old story about a bear whose love story with a hunter ended sadly. So RYU SEUNG-GU created a welded tubular steel sculpture looking down from Geumgang River bank that may be waiting for return of the hunter.

 

ANOTHER WORK TALKS ABOUT THE SAD LEGEND OF THE BEAR. HUR KANG embodied the love between a man and an animal with a two dimensional laser-cut steel-plate drawing in space standing below Yeonmisan and overlooking Geumgang River.

FIVE BAMBOO STRUCTURES STAND NEAR JEONGAN RIVER as if they had spouted from the earth. They show different stages of growth and decline, like real plants. RI, EUNG-WOO´s A Sprout – A Great Dream is a metaphor for Gongju´s long history as the cultural centre in Korea. Many talented people who influenced the world came from this ground.

WIND MOVES THE SHARP GEOMETRIC MIRRORED PIECES reflecting surrounding nature. CHO, CHUNG-YEON WANTED TO PRESENT THE CONTRAST between man-made objects and nature. The structures play with the available light and reflect the forest through artificial planes, juxtaposing physical properties and the emotional states of the viewer.

V. CONCLUSION

EACH ARTIST INTERPRETED THE THEME “NATURE AND PEACE” in his or her own way, but they managed to, unintentionally, create a common end. Each goes back to values and basic roots; everyone can see the sense of harmony and balance and this is evident in the work of each artist. As in the story that their art tells, the artists’ speeches and dialogues espouse positive beliefs and emotions. It is not an accident that these people came to the Biennale. The integrity of the artists’ working process reflects their desire to improve the plight of nature through their art and have a positive effect on those who touch or experience it. There is no dissonance between what they say “in the lobby” and what they create in the field. For them, nature and peace are much more than just words.

V. FACTS

Organizer – Korean Nature Artist Association Yatoo (established 1981)

The year of the first Nature Art Biennale – 2004

Term of exhibition – three months, from 16^th September until 15^th November 2010

Participants:
Korean:
Chunchung Kang, Heejoon Kang, Hyunhie Ko, Soonim Kim, Yongik Kim, Haesim Kim, Bongi Park, Seunghoon Byun, Seunggu Ryu, Eungwoo Ri, Chungyeon Cho, Kang Hur

International:
Chintan Upadhyay (India), Donald Buglass (New Zealand), Eizo Sakata (Japan/France), Ichi Ikeda (Japan), Karen Macher Nesta (Peru), Karin van der Molen (Netherlands), Nereus Patrick Cheo (Cameroon), Patrick Tagoe-Turkson (Ghana), Pawel Chlebek Odebek (Poland), Roger Tibon
(Philippines), Ryszard Litwiniuk (Canada/Poland), Suzy Sureck (USA), Toni Schaller (Germany), Sandor Vass (Hungary)

All images were sourced from http://natureartbiennale.org.

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human/nature: ARTISTS RESPOND TO A CHANGING PLANET
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California. April 1, 2009-September 27, 2009

ARTISTS: Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Marcos Ramirez Erre, Rigo 23, Dario Robleto, Diana Thater, Xu Bing.

CAN ARTISTS INSPIRE CONSERVATION? CAN CONSERVATION INSPIRE ARTISTS?

Beginning with this pair of questions, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the international conservation organization Rare commissioned eight contemporary artists to travel to UNESCO-designated World Heritage sites [http://whc.unesco.org/en/list] and create new work informed by their experiences there. The resulting exhibition reveals a diversity of experiences from their encounters with the human, animal and plant inhabitants living within these eight regions around the globe.

Chinese artist Xu Bing visited Mount Kenya National Park in 2005. After discussions with locals about the impact of deforestation in the area, Xu identified trees as the focus for his project. In 2008 he returned to work with ninety schoolchildren to develop contemporary pictographs—image and text integrated artworks inspired by lessons and a book he designed to introduce them to Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Partnering with Kenya’s Departments of Education and Forestry, he created a website to disseminate information about the park and issues related to the forest. His installation incorporates his own work along with the children’s drawings. The children’s drawings are available for purchase on the project’s website, www.forestproject.net. Proceeds go towards reforestation efforts in Kenya. The website will report on the progress of efforts.

Mark Dion, Mobile Ranger Library—Komodo National Park, 2008; mixed media; 96 x 84 ½ x 39 ½ inches; fabricated by William Feeney; installation view, MCASD; courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; photo by Pablo Mason

American East Coast artist Mark Dion traveled to Komoto National Park, Indonesia in 2005, inspired by his childhood fascination with the Komoto Dragon, the largest living species of lizards. However, his project focuses on the labor and self-sacrifice of the park rangers who guided him. He was impressed with their knowledge of the park’s ecosystem and their dedication to their work. Their lack of resources was a concern in his project. In 2007 he returned to design and build a piece that functions as a rolling supply cart for the rangers. It contains wildlife and ecology manuals, first aid supplies, lab equipment, fishing gear, nets and traps, flashlights, batteries, maps, games, notebooks and art supplies. Local craftspeople and the rangers helped to construct the cart and added traditional decorative elements to it. Dion created a replica of the cart for the exhibition.

Mexican artist Maro Ramirez ERRE visited Three Parrallel Rivers of Yunan Protected Province, China in 2005. He toured the region and studied the government’s plans to construct a hydroelectric dam at Tiger Leaping Gorge, which would flood the area. ERRE worked with local Tibetan carpenters to create a sculpture, which represents the wall of a traditional house, twenty feet long and ten feet high, using regional building methods and materials. He installed four plasma screen windows, two on each side. The windows display video footage revealing the everyday domestic lives of the residents and the outdoor landscape where they live. He returned to China in the summer of 2007 and was shocked by the environmental and cultural changes that had taken place in the time between his two visits. His project features additional elements that voice his urgent concern to protect one of the most bio-diverse regions in the world.

Ann Hamilton, Galápagos chorus, 2008; DVD projection, amplified cone gloves with prerecorded animal sounds, iPods, artist’s books with texts by 8th-grade students from El Colegio Nacional Galápagos; installation view, MCASD; courtesy the artist; photo by Pablo Mason


American artist Ann Hamilton traveled to the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador in June 2005, where she observed land iguanas, finches, sea lions, and tortoises. She returned to the Islands in 2008 to produce her piece. After her initial visit she began thinking about concepts of buoyancy and balance in relation to human life and natural landforms. She then created a poetic text that inventories the animals and plants of the Galapagos, cites population figures, and incorporates words from Charles Darwin’s famous texts about the islands. Local elementary schoolchildren recited the words from a boat circling the islands. In the exhibition she installed video footage documenting the children’s performance and images of a wavering horizon line shot from a camera suspended in the water; amplified cone gloves expelling a cacophony of prerecorded animal sounds; and artist books on music stands containing a litany of ecological terms. In wall text at the museum she reflects on the questions raised for her in this project: “The threading of the two experiences is in the thick line that is the rim of water dividing a world of air from a world of water. Perhaps our role as artists is to be the amphibians that inhabit both.”

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Juggernaut, 2008; Super 16mm film digitized to HD video projection; 5:44 video loop; installation view, MCASD; courtesy the artist and Max Protetch, New York; photo by Pablo Mason

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, a Spanish artist now living in Chicago, first journeyed to the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, Mexico (also known as the Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaíno) in February 2005. On that visit he was inspired to create an artwork that depicts the natural beauty and ecological importance of the area in addition to raising awareness of the industrial development that threatens it. He created a multisensory installation featuring a video projection filmed on location at the Mitsubishi saltworks, which is adjacent to the reserve. In 2007, he returned to the region and completed filming, with the assistance of a local camera crew.

A Portuguese artist who lives both in Portugal and San Francisco, Rigo 23 first visited the coastal village of Cananéia and the surrounding forested areas of southeastern Brazil, known as the Atlantic Forests South-East Reserves, in early spring 2005. Between 2006 and 2008 he made four more trips to the site, forming strong connections with three local communities: the Guaraní community of Pindoty, an indigenous community; the Quilombola communities of Ivaporunduva and Sapatú, founded hundreds of years ago by escaped and freed slaves; and the Caiçara Community of Itacuruçá, a fishing village near São Paulo. Rigo worked in collaboration with the artisans of these communities to create two large sculptures filled with an explosion of carved diminutive human figures, small wooden animals and baskets woven using traditional materials and methods. The pieces metaphorically refer to the idea that the developed world often exploits the resources of economically disadvantaged nations to support unsustainable, and often destructive, ways of life. Together, they have built handmade versions of contemporary weapons of mass destruction—a cluster bomb and a nuclear submarine—reclaiming their purpose by turning them into beautiful and poetic celebrations of life.

In 2005, American Southwest artist Dario Robleto visited Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, located on the USA/Canada border, spending much of his time with a glaciologist who was monitoring the park’s melting glaciers. When he returned in 2006 he participated in a glacier-measuring expedition. He made a sound recording of the melting glacier, and also a 8mm film of shooting stars reflected in a pristine lake that was created by the water from the melting glacial ice. His work for the exhibition is a somber series of cabinet and coffin-like memorial sculptures (containing stretched audiotape of last bird recordings and recordings of extinct human languages that were made into replicas of feathers and human hair, bear paws, human hand bones, pieces of widows’ mourning dresses, vials of glacial runoff and human tears, etc.) as well as a film that focuses on the inevitable loss of the glaciers, the mourning we collectively experience as we witness the changing of the earth at our own hands, and the ways in which loss can inspire new ways of thinking.

Diana Thater, RARE, 2008; 16 LCD monitors, DVD player, DVD, existing architecture; 204 x 264 inches; installation view, MCASD; courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York; photo by Pablo Mason

American West Coast artist Diana Thater visited iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa in 2007. Experienced in capturing footage of animals in the wild, Thater located and filmed many of the park’s endangered and threatened species, including rhinoceros, hippopotamuses, giraffes, elephants, crocodiles, warthogs, and several species of birds. She has long been concerned with mitigating the human impact on the relationship of animals to their natural habitats. For this exhibition she edited the film footage to create a dizzying installation of moving and at times blurred images displayed on 16 separate but connected 40-inch LCD monitors.

To read further about the criteria for choosing the 890 sites included in the UNESCO World Heritage List: http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria/

For more information about the exhibition, the eight sites, the artists and their projects: http://artistsrespond.org/about/ and: http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/human_nature