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

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