The poetic “Running Fence”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence, started in 1972, involved 42 months of collaborative efforts, cost approximately 3 million dollars but lasted only 14 days, when it was finally installed in September, 1976.  Due to the involvement of private interests as well as public, Christo and Jeanne-Claude needed 59 ranchers’ participation, 18 public hearings, three sessions in the Superior Courts of California and the drafting of a 450 page environmental impact report to realize their stunning ephemeral Fence.

Drawing attention to the ordinary and under-appreciated rural landscape, the fence inspired and provoked a different relationship with the land, emphasising an unrestrained imagination of possibility rather than the arbitrary nature of political and geographical boundaries, alluded to in its title. The heavy woven nylon fabric had a dramatic and flowing quality, as Christo explains ‘it is the principal material to translate the fragile, nomadic quality of the project…like living objects, the fabric moves.’

Some more statistics for this phenomenal project: ‘At 5.5 meters high and 39 kilometers long, extending east-west near freeway 101, north of San Francisco and dropping down to the Pacific Ocean at Bodega Bay…The white fabric, hung from a steel cable strung between 2,050 steel pole (each 6.5 meters long, 9cm in diameter) embedded 1 meter into the ground and braced laterally with guy wires (145km of steel cable) and 14,000 earth anchors. The top and bottom edges of the 2,050 fabric panels were secured to the upper and lower cables by 350,000 hooks.’  – Land and Environmental Art, 1998

Under Construction

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have a fantastic website and the interview with Christo on their Sydney project “Wrapped Coast” is well worth a look.

Kylie

Bonnie Ora Sherk – “The Farm”

‘The Farm is a social art work. I think of it as a life-scale environmental performance sculpture with a layering of meanings, metaphors, and actual situations. I see it as art…the naming of The Farm as art is perhaps the most perplexing and problematic idea for the establishment to accept, because the involved elements are diffused and to the conventional eye and mind difficult to grasp.’ – Bonnie Ora Sherk

Initial Site beforehand

Site after the establishment of The Farm

The Farm, detail featuring community participants

John Holden quoted in 1976 in “Alternative to Alternative Arts Spaces” says of The Farm; “Whenever I pass …’ I think, “They did it,” and this inspires me also to attempt the impossible. Whenever  I look down the hill and see it sprawling there in the middle of a concrete wasteland, wrapped up in a roaring freeway, I think that, despite the mindless and relentless expansion of money, technology and power that there still is a human spirit and it still has a chance to prevail.’

Currently there is an exhibition on at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Centre, Ohio. Titled Green Acres: Artist Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots, including artists Agnes Denes, Futurefarmers, Patricia Johanson, Bonnie Ora Sherk and many more. It claims to be the first museum exhibition solely devoted to the cultivation and distribution of edible foodstuffs.

Two key components to the exhibition hopes to proclaim are those of “freedom” and “community”. It is stated that ‘community’ is explored through the satellite projects located within the wider community and ‘freedom’ pertains to the choices citizens make as well as the artists capacity to act, achieve their goals and involve others in their vision.

These two values, I argue, are those which Sherk helped establish when she first initiated the concept of her “Farm” back in 1974. For more information on the project and Sherk’s ongoing artistic practice, please click here.

Kylie

Alan Sonfist, socially aware land artist

Time Landscape, Manhattan, 1965-current

“Public monuments traditionally have celebrated events in human history – acts or humans of importance to the whole community. In the twentieth century, as we perceive our dependence on nature, the concept of community expands to include nonhuman elements, and civic monuments should honor and celebrate life and acts of another part of the community: natural phenomena. Within the city, public monuments should recapture and revitalize the history of the environment natural to that location.” – Alan Sonfist

Time Landscape, Manhattan, 1978

“To review the public sculptures of Alan Sonfist since the 1960s is to witness the re-emergence of the socially aware artist. Inherent in each of his artworks are fundamental redefinitions of what sculpture is, who the artist is, and how art should function for its public.”  – Jonathan Carpenter, 1983, P.142

Source: Jonathan Carpenter, “Alan Sonfist’s Public Sculptures” in Alan Sonfist (ed.), ART IN THE LAND – a Critical Anthology of environmental Art,  1983

Michelle Gearon

Health of the great Murray Cod – symbolically woven

Heralded as the biggest fish in the Murray-Darling Basin, the freshwater Cod is prized by traditional, recreational and commercial fishers alike and for this reason is targeted for much illegal poaching. Furthermore, the Cod is credited as the best indicator species for the ecological status of the Basin as a whole. It has been found that populations of the species have declined dramatically since European settlement and are no longer common in many parts. Issues which have contributed to this fact, include habitat degradation, pollution, reduced environmental flows, barriers to migration and as stated previously, fishing. Indigenous artists Yvonne Koolmatrie and Treahna Hamm highlight this plight of the iconic fish through their figurative woven sculptures.

Yvonne Koolmatrie, Pondi (Muray River Cod), 2009

Yvonne is a Ngarrindjeri master weaver, Ngarrindjeri country is located at the mouth of the Murray Rive. Her remarkable skill is demonstrated in Pondi (Muray River Cod,) 2009, pictured above. Made from native sedge rushes, Yvonne was able to repatriate the skills of her ancestors and create a piece of work that matches the legend of the fish.

Acquiring her skills from Yvonne, Treahna Hamm is a Yorta Yorta woman, who grew up in Yarrawonga located on the banks of the River, 95 kilometres west of Albury. Treahna’s sculpture Looking Forward, Looking Back, 2009 is comprised of recycled fishing line, weaving something of value out of discarded and harmful material found along the river banks. Her work attests to the link between responsibility to land and culture; ‘The Elders say…if the river is unhealthy then our people are unhealthy.’

Treahna Hamm, Looking Forward, Looking Back, 2009

Such sentiment is also captured in her earlier work Yabbies, 2006. The large scale sculpture is woven out of the sedge rushes favoured by that of Yvonne. The yabbie is a favoured food source of the Murray River and its prosperity is determined by the health of the river, it will lay in hibernation until the floodwaters breathe life into the river system.

Treahna Hamm, Yabbie, 2006

Connecting the past with the future, both artists have begun a new tradition through the framing of age-old techniques within a contemporary art context and in doing so have brought some much needed attention to the state of Australia’s longest river and its precious marine life.

The two sculpture pieces Pondi (Muray River Cod,) 2009 and Looking Forward, Looking Back, 2009 both featured in the Menagerie Contemporary Indigenous Sculpture touring exhibition in 2010.

For more information on the state of the Murray Cod please see the report conducted by the Applied Ecology Research Group at the University of Canberra. To view the report, please click here.

Kylie

A Message from the Gyre

In the centre of the Northern Pacific Ocean the ocean currents create a slow moving vortex. The waste products of our consumer society are collected by these spiraling waters, creating what has been named the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, or the “Trash Vortex”. As many of the plastics used today are slow to degrade, the debris of capitalism will continue to choke the oceans for many years to come.

“The trash vortex is an area the size of Texas in the North Pacific in which an estimated six kilos of plastic for every kilo of natural plankton, along with other slow degrading garbage, swirls slowly around like a clock, choked with dead fish, marine mammals, and birds who get snared. Some plastics in the gyre will not break down in the lifetimes of the grandchildren of the people who threw them away.” – Greenpeace

Read more: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/

Image by Greenpeace, items collected from the Pacific “Trash Vortex”.

Images from: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/

This floating rubbish dump does not only pollute the ocean, it also takes the lives of sea birds who mistake the toxic flotsam for food. This phenomenon is the subject of a series of very powerful photographs by Chris Jordan titled Midway: Message from the Gyre. The photographs were taken on Midway Atoll, a small group of islands in the northern Pacific Ocean.

“On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean.” – Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2006 – ongoing, http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000911%2010×13

“For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here.” – Chris Jordan

These images expose a powerful truth about the wasteful nature of consumerist culture and Jordan’s starkly honest photographs present viewers with the direct consequences of the actions of our society. As the title suggests, these birds have brought a message from the poisoned ocean. By documenting the deaths of these birds Jordan’s photographs aid in spreading this message.

Chris Jordan, Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2006 – ongoing, http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000911%2010×13

Michelle Gearon

Emily Floyd, Online Sculptures and Organic Activism

Emily Floyd is an Australian sculptor who makes direct links with activism in her work. In pieces such as Our Community Garden (2009) and Organic Practice (2009) Floyd engraves parts of her sculptures with links to websites of environmental activist groups.

Our Community Garden, 2009, Anna Schwartz Gallery Sydney

Our Community Garden, detail

Garden Sculpture, 2009

“My work Garden sculpture is essentially a research map presented in sculptural form. It was made by engraving wooden blocks with the URLs of websites dedicated to online collectivism and environmentalism. I tried to make a work that expresses the aspirations of our time as fluid, organic, connected. I am interested in making objects that could be used to explain complex philosophical ideas. I see cultural studies as a form of play in itself and believe that research and open-ended learning are important political strategies.” (Floyd, Art and Australia magazine, Spring 2010, p.36)

The theme of gardens has conceptual links to online activism as well – the ability for ideas to spread and grow into bigger movements via the internet. These little links allow for the propagation of activism by individuals clicking from one link to another, organically spreading information. Floyd’s work suggests that, perhaps ironically, that the prevention of ecological disaster could be aided by modern technology. Our Community Garden suggests theimportance of a wider online community for stimulating social change.

Floyd’s Organic Practice sculptural piece expands on these ideas.

Organic Practice, 2009

Rachel Kent, Senior Curator at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, points out that Floyd’s work also highlights another irony in the growing trend of farmers markets; “our desire, in a middle-class urban society, to return to nature through farmers’ markets and to sources of production – although the markets end up being fashionable and highly costly and we remain as removed from nature as ever.” (Rachel Kent, Art and Australia magazine, Spring 2010 p.36) Floyd’s work deals with the importance of collectivism in environmental activism, and the role that the internet can play in building social movements.

Michelle Gearon

James Newitt’s Passive Aggressive Art Activism

Landscape, 2009, http://www.jnewitt.com/work/landscape.html

Newitt’s work is an exemplar of the way in which many contemporary artworks exist on the border between art and activism. Passive Aggressive, together with Newitt’s photographic series Landscapes (2009), aim to document the tensions that exist between forestry workers and environmental activists who are protesting against the logging of old-growth forests in South-Western Tasmania. Not only are these forests essential habitat for native wildlife, but the logging of old growth is responsible for large carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. (Read more here: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/conservation/forest-logging-a-big-carbon-culprit-20110523-1f0vv.html). On the other hand, forestry workers find great frustration in the actions of anti-logging protesters who prevent them from working, as a large number of jobs depend on the logging industry.

In Passive Aggressive Newitt creates a tension between loud noise and silence. The aggressive drone of a helicopter which opens the film is juxtaposed in the next scene with tranquil images of the silent forest, a silence which is soon shattered by loud screaming, swearing and smashing glass as forestry workers come into contact with activists who camped out in the forest to prevent logging. The beauty of the wilderness is sharply contrasted by the ugliness of the conflict between these two groups. The variation between volumes creates a dramatic urgency to the piece, which is enhanced by the way the scenes are fragmented and without a clear narrative. Black screens divide shots like the shutter of a camera and the moving images act more like live photographs. This piece goes beyond documenting events – the people in the footage are not individually identified and there is no clear narrative to the piece.  Instead of a documentary about forest activism, this piece is video portrait of the conflict at the intersection between art and activism.

Passive Aggressive, 2009,   http://www.jnewitt.com/work/passive.html

Newitt has said that he does not see his work as activism. In his own words, his “primary aim is to investigate the capacity for visual art to identify, describe and elaborate relationships between people and place. By focusing on relationships that are fragile, subtle, complex or in a state of change I aim to reveal micro-histories and subjective experiences that bind people into communities and to place.” (James Newitt, 2007) Newitt sees his practice as an objective one. He describes his video work Passive Aggressive as “a sort of research document which creates a sense of impending conflict. I was trying to understand the push and pull between industry and activism” (Art and Australia magazine, Spring 2010, p.34).

However his work also has another function. Using the medium of documentary leans the piece towards activism, however Newitt’s intentions and his treatment of the subject matter place the work squarely in the realm of art. Passive Aggressive draws attention to the activist’s struggle to protect the forests, but also documents the experiences of the forestry workers.

Newitt does not see himself as an activist, however pieces such as Passive Aggressive have an activist function as well as an artistic one. Newitt draws attention to the struggle to save the forests and his stunning images of the native flora and fauna reminds viewers of what is at stake. Activism is channeled through Newitt’s objective lense.

Landscape, 2009,    http://www.jnewitt.com/work/landscape.html

Newitt’s work was exhibited as part of the In the balance: Art for a changing world at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2010.

 

Michelle Gearon

RETHINK

RETHINK – Contemporary Art & Climate Change was an exhibition held in Copenhagen in 2009-2010. The exhibition featured works by 26 international artists, the works are aimed at creating new ways for the public to think about and discuss various climate change issues.

Argentinian artist-architect Tomas Saraceno’s Biospheres installation was featured in the Rethink exhibition. The work was inspired by careful scientific studies of the formation of clouds, soap bubbles and the geometric principles behind spider webs. Some of the spheres contain self-regulating plant ecosystems while the largest of the spheres is available for the public to climb inside. On the ground, spheres filled with water stabilise the entire structure.

  

Saraceno imagines a Utopian future where science and nature work together in perfect harmony; but are the Biospheres an optimistic look at a greener future? Or a dim outlook on a tragic future where a world is destroyed by climate change?

In an article in The guardian by Madeleine Bunting in 2009 she discusses her experience climbing into one of the large suspended plastic bubbles; ‘As I step gingerly on to its see-through floor, I can peer down at the gallery 100ft below. When I’m joined by one of the museum staff, I become unsteady. We crawl around this airborne plastic yurt like babies and then, feeling giddy, stop to sit and talk about how our children might end up living in a city of such bubbles, sealed off from a contaminated earth; about who might be lucky enough to have such a refuge; how they might sing their children lullabies of a lost earth. It’s an eerie conversation to have with a stranger, both of us imagining a deeply tragic future that seems highly plausible.’

Discussions such as this are the very point of these works as she later discusses with the artist himself; ‘When I tell Saraceno of my experience in his bubble, he is delighted. “Perfect” he laughs. This, he says, is the role art has to play in tackling climate change. “Art is about trying to rethink the things you take for granted.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/dec/02/climate-change-art-earth-rethink

Below is a video featuring an interview with the artist about the work.

Felicity Burke

John Dahlsen

“Humanity is at a critical point in time, with our planet currently existing in a fragile ecological state, with global warming hastening unheard of changes, all amplifying the fact that we need all the help we can get.”

–  John Dahlsen

Gold Coast (year unknown), made from plastics found on Australian beaches

Creating his artwork out of found objects from the sands of the Australian coastline,  contemporary Artist John Dahlsen beautifully highlights many universal environmental themes using a variety of mediums. He largely uses plastics in his artwork to draw attention to the poor global ecological state of pollution. These plastics and other found objects are each affected by sun, sand and the ocean, their form faded and rounded by the elements.

When discussing his 2003 series of plastic bag artworks, Dahlsen pointed out that the Irish Government has  imposed a 10 cent levy on the use of these bags some years ago, which saw the consumption of this product decrease by approximately 90% within a year- a reduction of billions of plastic bags per year! The message is in the medium; plastics still contribute to a significant amount of pollution on an international scale. We can all find use in other more environmentally friendly materials and with a combined effort we can eliminate using plastics bags and the litter that they create on land and in the sea. Gold Coast (above)  was created entirely from ‘ocean litter’, and Dahlsen realised during his beach searches that ocean litter is a worldwide phenomenon affecting beaches on a global scale. Dahlsen insists on working with these found materials until they tell their story- which includes those “underlying environmental messages inherent in the use of this kind of medium”. Thousands of tonnes of plastics used by humans are being dumped along shorelines around the world every day, killing local animal species and polluting the ocean. “Despite my outrage at this environmental vandalism”, stated Dahlsen, ” I returned to the beach daily to find more pieces for my artist’s palette.”

Our awareness and consciousness about the environment and art can be shifted by viewing Dahlsen’s artwork. Even if it just fractionally, he states that this shift “makes all of his art worthwhile”. The theme of recycling is consistent in almost all of Dahlsen’s work, and the fact that he creates these aesthetically beautiful artworks purely from litter and recycled materials supports his powerful message.

Visit   www.johndahlsen.com/   to see more of Dahlsen’s artworks.

Amy Jackson

Joseph Beuys 7000 Oaks – Symbolic communication with Nature

As an artist, Joseph Beuys explored many different mediums but the ideas behind his art were his defining legacy. Nature was a perpetual theme and through his statement ‘everyone is an artist’, Beuys maintained a universal ideology for living and for greater society to live by.

Beuys creation of the concept “Social Sculpture” was the basis for this ideology of universality and of a natural process; his intention was to ‘widened [the] concept of art in which the whole process of living itself is the creative act.’ His project 7000 Oaks is a reflection of such philosophies.

‘7000 Oaks is a sculpture referring to peoples’ life, to their everyday work. That is my concept of art which I call the extended concept or art of the social sculpture.’  – Joseph Beuys

Inaugurated at the  international art fair Doumenta 7 in Kassel, Germany in 1982, Beuys project involved the planting of seven thousand oaks, each paired with four foot high basalt columns. Beuys planted the first on March 16^th, several months prior to the opening of the exhibition.

The planting continued over the next five years throughout public spaces in the inner city, negotiated through site proposals submitted by residents, councils, schools and other local associations. Beuys wanted to bring the forest into the urban environment. The last tree was planted at the opening of Documenta 8 in June 1987 by his son, Beuys passed away in 1964 at the age of 64.

The project is both small in scale and intimate, as well as highly ambitious and vast in its undertaking. The realized project in Kassel was only the first stage of an ongoing scheme of tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental and social change, an action towards urban renewal. Cities which have furthered the project include Oslo, Sydney and especially in New York where it is supported by the Dia Art Foundation.

‘The planting of seven thousand oak trees is thus only a symbolic beginning. And such a symbolic beginning requires a marker, in this instance a basalt column. The intention of such a tree-planting event is to point up the transformation of all of life, of society, and of the whole ecological system.’

‘I believe that planting these oaks is necessary, not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness – raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.’ – Joseph Beuys, 1982

Beuys aim was to present to the future a change in people’s and their communities’ attitudes towards nature and their environment. Mirrored by the constantly changing relationship between the tree and the stone, symbolically, so to do people’s consciousness and engagement should also change and progress. Whereby projecting an initiative to effect environmental and social change on a global scale.

Beays has been credited for his visionary approach in linking art, social engagement and the natural environment and pioneering work within the field of art and ecology and in the lineage of Land Art practices from the 1960s.

Kassel, Germany

Middlebury College, Vermont, USA

Kylie Bowden

To find out more about the ‘7000 Oaks’ Project, visit the Dia Art Foundation & Arts and Ecology  websites