Art and action: a more comprehensive view

A few days ago I went to the Bay Area Arts & Ecology Summit, held at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.  There was a panel of people working in the eco-art field, and an audience composed largely of people also involved in eco-art.  And just what is eco-art?

Lynne Hull, Raptor Roost L-2, a safe roosting sculpture for hawks and eagles, with perching hawk (WEAD)

A very wide view

I’ve been thinking and writing lately about environments of different scales and temporalities, but I hadn’t thought beyond the confines of our planet and its atmosphere. Should I be looking farther out, to the whole cosmos? Lita Albuquerque is.

At a talk that was part of the University of California/Berkeley Extension’s Art of Sustainability series, Albuquerque–described as a pioneering member of the first generation of Earth artists–spoke about the large-scale art she has been creating for decades and about her current project, Stellar Axis: Antarctica.

Stellar Axis:Antarctica (Photo by Jean de Pomereu)

Three different perspectives

As I was out and about the city recently, I saw three works that addressed the environment from very different perspectives, but all three really touched me.

The responsibility of art in public spaces

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle got me thinking about art in public spaces. The article was about the design collective Rebar, and their now-annual event Park(ing) Day, which this year happens on September 19.  Readers of my earlier post about the event will recall that it essentially takes over parking spaces with artful micro-parks. One of Rebar’s members, John Bela, was quoted as saying: “It’s not just about parks, it’s about rethinking streets and how we use urban lands—a much broader idea….”

In popular usage the word environment has come to connote the natural world.  But if we take the broader view, the environment includes everything around us; etymologically  the word in fact derives from “round about.”  In an urban setting that includes a lot of non-natural things. When it exists in a public space, art automatically becomes part of the environment.  What is the effect of that, both on the environment and on the people who live in it?  How should we use our urban lands?

Some persistent questions about art and action

While I was on vacation over the last couple of weeks, I had time to think over some of the questions that came up in my last few posts and the comments they elicited–what is environmental art, how do art and the environment influence each other, should art inspire environmental action. Whether or not art should inspire action, I would like to think that it can and will, that it is one force that can help bring about some change. Which led me to the question of how that kind of inspiration occurs.

Cool Globes

With the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay as a backdrop, 35 seven-foot-tall globes decorated with varying degrees of whimsy remind passers-by that global warming is not so cool.

Bernard Williams, "The World Globe"

Peter Mars, "Mr. Polar Bear Goes to Washington"

The San Francisco exhibit (which also includes a number of globes in other parts of the city and runs through October 12) is part of Cool Globes:Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet. The exhibit originated in Chicago in 2007; currently it is having a reprise at the Field Museum, which is also the final stop of Natural World Museum’s Melting Ice/Hot Topic exhibition. Washington, D.C. is also hosting a cluster of globes, and they will appear in San Diego in late 2008 and in London in early 2009. Each city’s exhibit features local, national, and international artists, some professional and others newly minted to respond to the subject. Children and community groups have been major participants.

Emily Abrams and Michelle Korta Leccia, "Kids Care"

Faheem Majed and Gary Corner Youth Center, "The Corner Connection (Plastics, Metals, and Cell Phones OH MY!

Silly Globe, Serious Message

Artistic reminders that our globe is stressed out have been springing up around San Francisco recently. I’ll write about the Cool Globes in a separate post, but I did want to briefly acknowledge William Wiley’s wonderful Only One Earth “punball” machine, a great combination of the silly and the serious.

Wiley’s machine, based on the classic 1964 Gottlieb North Star pinball machine, is fully playable and lots of fun even for a complete pinball klutz like me. It’s also marked by Wiley’s characteristic kooky style and kitschy characters, and environmental puns (“The Eye-Scabs are melting”)–all in all a great way to keep you chuckling while getting across a serious message. Wiley created five multiples of the machine with the Electric Works Gallery, where it was originally shown along with accompanying Only One Earth watercolors. That show has closed, but the punball machine will be part of the Wiley retrospective opening at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in October 2009. (For those who’d like to see Wiley’s contraption in the company of fellow game machines, it will be at the Pacific Pinball Exposition in October.)

Environmental Art: Going Beyond the Trend

“I hesitated about doing this show because I don’t want to be trendy, and I don’t like the fact that green is trendy now.”  So said Mina Dresden when I spoke to her at her gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District a few days ago.  Despite her misgivings, or perhaps because of them, the Mina Dresden Gallery is currently presenting (through August 22) a wonderful show called The EnvironMENTAL Paradigm.  Curated by independent curator and writer Cecilia Nuin, the show includes pieces in various media by eight artists of various nationalities.

Maria Adela Diaz, Blossom, Video performance. Courtesy of MIna Dresden Gallery.

Jessica Resmond, Grass Billboard, Digital print. Courtesy of Mina Dresden Gallery.

Ana Labastida, Kun Li: Light sinks into the earth and is veiled, nonetheless it shines forth. I Ching 36. Photography, light box. Courtesy of Mina Dresden Gallery.

But as interesting as the works themselves is a question at the heart of this exhibit: What is environmental art?

What are they doing now?

Natural World Museum’s current exhibition, Moving Towards a Balanced Earth: Kick the (Carbon) Habit, features 31 international artists. Many other artists have participated in NWM’s earlier exhibitions, and I thought it would be interesting to see what a few of them—Subhankar Banerjee, Andrea Polli, and Lucy + Jorge Orta—have been up to lately. Since the NWM artist list is quite extensive, this sampling is not intended to be representative;  I’ll try to follow other NWM artists from time to time in future posts.

Putting the PARK Back into Parking

What if you tried to pull your car into a parking space and there was a park in it?

Photo by ekai

Zen garden made from reclaimed materials

If REBAR, a San Francisco-based art collective, has anything to say about it, that should be a frequent occurrence. Beginning in 2005, the group has been organizing and promoting PARK(ing) Day, an annual “one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into PARK(ing) spaces: temporary public parks.” Ready to see something more than rows of cars lining your own city’s streets? You, too, can create a PARK for PARK(ing) Day 2008, September 19, which, like last year’s event, is cosponsored by the Trust for Public Land.

All in all, 2008 promises to be an especially big year for REBAR, as it has been invited to participate in the eleventh Venice Architecture Biennale.