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

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

Janet Laurence

The work of Janet Laurence, an Australian site-specific artist, aims to create spaces which cause viewers to contemplate their relationship to the plant life that we are surrounded by. Her work deals with the way in which human activities such as deforestation and soil degradation are destroying landscapes and disconnecting us from the natural environment.
As she described in an interview in Felicity Fenner in Art and Australia magazine in 2010: “The future of many plants is in danger, yet they are central to the earth and existence of all animal life. We are dependent on them for everything from the air we breathe to the food we eat. Plants are organic, not static, objects… Working with living plants you become very aware of their being, their needs and internal processes.” (Janet Laurence, quoted in Art and Australia, Spring 2010, p.64)

In the Shadow, 2000, Sydney, http://www.janetlaurence.com/in-the-shadow/

Janet Laurence uses her artistic practice to draw attention to environmental issues such as climate change and its effect on the plant life that we all depend upon. Laurence’s work highlights both the fragility and the importance of plant life and aims to generate a new respect for the flora that helps to sustain our existence.

Her site-specific piece, In the Shadow, aimed to repair the natural vegetation in Sydney’s Olympic Park in Homebush bay. As well as extensive planting of native plant species, this piece included the installment of twenty-one vertical wands which monitored the chemistry of the river water. By encouraging the growth of native plants in a suburban area of Sydney, In the Shadow, “oxygenates an otherwise quite sterile precinct.”(Felicity Fenner, Art & Australia, p.64)

Laurence believes that “art can bring into public view some confronting environmental issues that without the imprimatur of it being a creative work wouldn’t ordinarily be presented, because so often scientific information is not permitted public access. So, as an artist, the Olympic Park commission was a major opportunity for me – not just to install a work, but to heal an environment.” (Janet Laurence, quoted in Art and Australia, Spring 2010, p.64)
As well as drawing attention to the environmental issues she is engaging with, Laurence’s work is a type of direct action. She uses art as a means to take action to preserve organic landscapes. Part of Laurence’s work includes revitalising plants that are damaged or suffering, such as in Waiting – A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants, which was exhibited at the 2010 Sydney Biennale.

Waiting – A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants, 2010 Sydney Biennale, http://www.janetlaurence.com/waiting-a-medicinal-garden-for-ailing-plants/

This work consisted of a mesh structure containing numerous plant species which were wrapped in soft netting and connected through tubes containing fluids to aid in their regeneration. It was intended to function as a plant hospital – a place not only for viewers to contemplate the effect human activity has on the natural environment, but also a place where unhealthy plants could heal and florish. While this small space worked to physically rejuvenate plant life, the work as a whole symbolises the plight of many endangered plant species in this time of increasing environmental degradation.

Waiting – A Medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants (detail), http://www.janetlaurence.com/waiting-a-medicinal-garden-for-ailing-plants/

“I try to create a space somewhere between evidence and imagination. While my practice is based on deeply held convictions about the environment and our relationship to it – and I want the work to have a politically environmental voice – I think it’s important that viewers make their own journey and experience it as a space of reflection and interpretation.” (Laurence, Art and Australia, p.67)

Here, Laurence defines the place of her work on the spectrum of art and activism. Her work has a strong environmentalist message, but her approach to this is one which encourages viewers to interpret her meaning in their own time. Laurence sees this process of understanding and comprehending the meaning of her work as being a strategy for engaging viewers more deeply in environmental issues than an information-based activist campaign, as, she believes that “art, if it engages, can linger in the mind the way that pure information can’t.” (Laurence, Art and Australia, p.67)

Michelle Gearon

Australian environment and artist Emma Lindsay

According to drastic new research by the CSIRO, by 2070 up to 30% of Australian wildlife may become extinct as a consequence of our rising climate. Mr Michael Dunlop, one of the writers for the research, has explained that Australia and Victoria in particular may be rendered unrecognisable as our environment changes to adapt to the extreme changes in temperature. It is difficult to comprehend that our grandchildren or great-grandchildren will experience a completely different Australia to the one we do now. You can read more on that research here.

Artist Emma Lindsay has similarly experienced this ambivalence towards the changes in our environment. Her feelings first emerged as she visited the Queensland Museum in 2007. Viewing the sections of taxidermy birds, she was struck with the sense of awe and grief, as it ignited her interest in the topic of the loss of distinct or endangered birds in Australia.

Simulacra #39, oil on canvas paper, variable dimensions, 2009.

Her practices in this subject began with her search to find see the last found Night Parrot, a small native Australian bird with no known sightings between 1912-1979 and very rarely ever since. In a nutshell her practice is an interdisciplinary art project including painting and installation. Lindsay explores the connections between nature, culture, history and art. Especially within these shown works, she explores the loss of native animals due to changes in our ecosystem and climate as well loss of species through human consumption.

Simulacra, oil on canvas paper, variable dimensions, 2009.

She describes her process of painting the dead birds as a sort of “memento mori”, a way of remembering life lost. This idea really hits home within this topic, as if we, as the human race, continue to ignore the idea of memento mori, and don’t prepare better for drastic change in the future, we will be setting up our environment for destruction and breakdown, and a very unsustainable – as well as unlivable – future.

Simulacra #29, oil on canvas paper, variable dimensions, 2009.

 

Alex

Leslie Fry- The Wildlife Sculpture Search Project, 2007

In 2007, Environmental Sculptor Leslie Fry created a 6-piece site-specific artwork integrated within a nature trail at Boca Ciega Millennium Park, Florida. Each sculpture in this project was intentionally made out of transient materials- they will eventually biodegrade and become part of the nature that surrounds them. The 7-foot statue Pining (below right), for example, has been formed out of painted plaster and pine cones. Like the environment surrounding it, this sculpture will change shape and deteriorate over time. All six pieces in The Wildlife Sculpture Search Project fit into the natural environment;

“If you’re walking along, looking for the sculptures,” explains Fry, “You’re also looking carefully at everything around you.”

While Fry’s artwork is beautiful to look at, it also makes a statement about how humans lack awareness of the natural environment. These sculptures aim to bring the relationship between humans and the environment closer. Each sculpture harmoniously exists within the location in which Fry has placed them.

 The Wildlife Sculpture Search Project was specifically designed to intensify awareness about the effects of human impact on the natural environment. The fact that the sculptures require people to go into nature and actively look for them adds to the power of this artwork, serving to remind us of the beauty of untouched nature.

Check out more of Leslie Fry’s artwork at www.lesliefry.com !

Amy Jackson 

*With reference to Chris Baskind (2009), “The Amazing, naturalistic art of Lesie Fry”, at http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/the-amazing-naturalistic-art-of-leslie-fry

Glass of Coke… No Ice Thanks…

As I ordered a beverage sans ice, the flippant but oft stated “no ice thanks” took on a new resonance. The Age today reported that according to researchers at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre “the Arctic sea ice, a key indicator of climate change, melted to its lowest level on record this year before beginning its autumnal freeze.”

In a culture obsessed with success and breaking records, one might assume more attention will be paid to the news that “the record was broken on August 26, when the ice shrank below the record set in 2007. After that, it kept melting for three more weeks, bringing the ice extent – defined by NSIDC as the area covered by at least 15 per cent ice – to nearly half of the 1979-2000 average.” This month the ice in the Arctic Ocean reached it’s smallest amount since satellite records began 33 years ago.

Yet despite the mounting tangible evidence of human impact on the planet we all share, it seems we are still unwilling to take notice, to take a stand, to make a change. In light of this, earlier posts of works by Joshua Allen Harris and Nele Azevedo also take on further poignancy and significance.

Harris’ Air Bear, which is animated by the wind from the subway, makes literal the intrinsic interconnectivity of human activity/industrialization and the environment. The inherent fragility of the materials used also draws attention to the fragile balancing act in which our world is engaged. The work intervenes in the space of day-to-day human life, reminding us, at least for a brief moment, that our worlds are interconnected. The plastic bag polar bear is both delightful and tragic, a simple incarnation of the reality of the situation we find ourselves in. In the modern urban world wildlife becomes a pleasant, but subordinate aspect of our lives. For the most part, as when Air Bear lies wounded, inanimate and silent, we are happy to simply walk by and ignore it.

The fact that both these artists, like many others, chose to engage public space, rather than limiting their work to confines of the gallery/museum is important, but perhaps more significant is the use of the new powers provided by the internet and social media to proliferate the documentation of these works. This only further solidifies my belief in the importance of sharing these works as best we can, after all I do believe all art is quite useful and I am rather fond of ice in my drink.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/arctic-ice-cover-shrinks-to-half-the-19792000-average-20120920-267n8.html#ixzz26ybvRO5n

Image Via: http://www.lostateminor.com/joshua-allen-harris/

Jane Diserio.

ClimARTe – Arts for a Safe Climate.

Responding to the current state of global climate, ClimARTe is a non-profit body working broadly in the creative realm to create awareness about our changing climate and inspire changes for the future, helping to manage our carbon footprint. Founded in 2010  by Guy Abrahams, Fiona Armstrong and Deborah Hart, the organisation aims to bring together all of those involved in the creative realm, from the organisers to the artists themselves. They acknowledge and harness the power of the arts as an extremely important tool to communicate and express issues effecting humankind and earth, as they explain “Creative thinking and expression help us to communicate and understand the rich relationships which exist between all things”.

It is important to address (and ClimARTe successfully does so) that climate change is not simply a stagnant issue – we can actively protest against climate change, and action changes to halt its progression, and do so effectively through the world of creative arts. As Guy Abrahams says in the video below “you don’t build movements with bar graphs, you build them in part with art….and with anything that engages with the right brain, or with the heart”. This is an incredibly strong statement made by Abrahams and even more so true. His words truly embody the importance of the arts in society and the future.

ClimARTe aim to create a voice within the world of arts, projecting this voice, as well as the issue of climate change, artistically into general society. They are aiming for immediate and creative action and awareness to ensure a safe and livable future of our earth and climate. Climarte strongly supports and aims for a sustainable earth for future generations to come.  Directly responding to reality, science and statistics,  ClimARTe do incredible work in bringing real issues effecting every human being  into the creative realm,  pushing the issue back into society for change – and needfully so.

 

Alex