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

This is a variant of the question I’ve been exploring for a while, but for the first time I had a sense of people coming to grips with it in a way that offers real possibilities for effectiveness.

There was a strong common thread among the representatives of the several organizations on the panel: Not only does eco-art promote understanding and appreciation of  the environment and inspire social action, but it can actually affect the environment through collaboration and interaction with other disciplines.

For me, the most encouraging speaker was Shai Zakai, of the Israel Forum for Ecological Art, who talked about artists working with engineers in ways that would integrate both perspectives.   “Artists have been stuck in the aesthetic level,” Zakai said, “and lose all the other levels.  I want to be able to use the vocabulary of engineers and other disciplines, but also encourage them to use mine. Artists need to become part of public agencies so they can show the agencies how best to use them.”

How can artists have more effect on public policy?  All the participants agreed that artists should work with cities, agencies, engineers, and other non-artists, intervening early in the development of built environments and not restricting themselves to the creation of “public art.” Tricia Watts of ecoartspace, for instance, commented that by visualizing the effects of a project, artists can help people understand its implications and consequences.  Susan Schwartzenberg of the Exploratorium emphasized that the way artists ask questions can completely “shift the realm,” and have an influence on the environment that is created.

Susan Leibovitz Steinman of WEAD (Women Environmental Artists Directory) and Sam Brower of greenmuseum.org both commented that the intersection of art and ecology is evolving.  Traditional types of infrastructure that kept things separate–a traditional museum that kept art in a “box,” for example–are dissolving, Brower said.  And again, there was general agreement that artists must be engaged at every level.  But engagement, said Amy Balkin, an artist working on a new project with the Exploratorium, can take various forms–some are ameliorative, others are what she called homeopathic, engaging by being combative.  In any case, “the more we can make it experiential, the more headway we can make,” said Steinman.

Unfortunately, there was no time for the panel participants to show visuals of their projects, but you can see many of them by following the links in this post.  I’ll just mention a couple that I found particularly heartening.

“Conceptual-humanist artist” Betsy Damon is director of Keepers of the Water, whose mission is “to inspire and promote projects that combine art, science and community involvement to restore, preserve and remediate water sources.” Betsy was the visionary behind one of the organization’s most impressive projects, the Living Water Garden in Chengdu, China. The park is “a fully functioning water treatment plant, a giant sculpture in the shape of a fish (symbol of regeneration in Chinese culture), a living environmental education center, a refuge for wildlife and plants, and a wonderful place for people.”

Living Water Garden (© 2001 Keepers of the Waters )

Betsy was also part of the design team for the Olympic Forest Park. Part of the renovations done in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, the park “will clean the water to a level suitable for significant human contact and will become the ecological economic model for parks of the future as well as places of recreational activity.”

In her 2002  Concrete Creek project, Shai Zakai worked with hydrologists, botanists, ecologists, artists, quarry owners, engineers, and cement truck drivers to reclaim a polluted stream by making it into an artwork.

Cleaning: Quarry workers, artist, scientists, foreign workers from Bulgaria & Romania, Palestinians ( before the Intifada ).

Of the process, Zakai wrote: “The. . . reclamation incorporated a local reference to a global problem – unawareness of environmental issues and ongoing pollution of streams in Israel and the world. The reclamation plan did not strive a-priori to reconvert nature to its original state; rather, it was aimed at observing the eyesore, resolving the ecological problem by means of art, and leaving traces of the eyesore for the wide public to see, so they would continue to explore the field and take responsibility.”

The Last Supper Table - waste collected from the stream for three years, indicate the source for damaging the stream.

“If people see things through the eyes of the ecological artist,” Zakai says, “it could bring about a real engagement for all.”

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)

Albuquerque described herself as interested in “a different kind of ecology…a greater connection to the cosmos, the interrelatedness of earth to the sky and the stars.” Stellar Axis grew out of Albuquerque’s long-time vision of linking the stars above the South Pole to the stars above the North Pole by columns of light through the earth. She spent many years working with astronomers to plot the positions of the stars above each pole and how they would align at a specific point in time, and planned an installation in each location.

In 1996 Albuquerque was invited by the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers Program to create the first part of her installation. She was not permitted to go to the exact geographical South Pole, but worked on the Ross Ice Shelf near McMurdo Station. On December 11,2006, she and her five-person team–an astronomer, three photographers, and a filmaker–began preparing the vast space that would be the base of the installation. They then placed 99 blue spheres ranging from 10 inches to 4 feet in diameter into a pattern that would correspond to the position of the stars above that exact spot on the Southern Hemisphere’s summer solstice, December 22.

Placing the Stars (Photo by Jean de Pomereu)

On the day of the solstice, Albuquerque directed volunteers from the research station in a performance, spiraling through the installation in a star map that mirrored the sky above.

Albuquerque’s website includes a fascinating video of her thinking that informed the project as well as some of the work that went into creating it. The final installation and performance were filmed from a helicopter, and Albuquerque is currently working on making the film into whole-room projections, with added soundscapes, that will travel the world.

Stellar Axis:Antarctica is Phase I of a two-part project that will trace the alignment of the stars above both poles. Albuquerque sees this as “a picture not just of a planet floating in space, but a planet surrounded by a vast circulatory system of stars of which we are a part.. . . It is about our place in the cosmos, and our need to do something about our place.” A very wide view indeed, and truly spectacular.

However, I think it’s fair to ask whether this very wide view ignores the consequences of such projects on the narrower space where it takes place. Antarctica is an extremely fragile environment; what will be the impact on it of this disruption? My question was not entirely answered, but I was pleased to hear Albuquerque say that she and her team followed extremely strict requirements for how to behave while they were on site and, when they left, they took with them every piece of material that they had brought in. Working in the earth’s most extreme environment, she explained, she became acutely aware of the ecology of Antarctica and of her footprint, not only there but everywhere–what she called “the ecology of understanding your responsibility for everything you do–the connection of everyone to everyone and everything else for survival.”

The first was part of 2008 Park(ing) Day, which I’ve written about before:

Paper Moon Park

Unfortunately I was able to see only a few of this year’s parking place parks, but I would certainly rate Paper Moon Park, the giant moon swing by Aguamala, DPW, and RPD, high on the list of all the parks I’ve seen from this and other years. Not only was it a wonderfully fanciful contrast to all the sedate civic buildings nearby, but it drew people in, encouraged interaction and communication, and made everyone smile. A perfect use of public space!

I found a very different view of the moon in the mosaic tile pieces that ornament the gates of a parking lot on Mission and Fifth Streets:

I dream as I walk through the moon

I can hear the animals go wild

The girl that came from the sun

These mosaics were done in the 1990s as part of ArtSpan‘s South of Market Youth Project. Youth mainly 12 to 17 years old from the West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Corporation/South of Market Teen Center worked with lead artist Johanna Poethig to create poetry as well as ceramic tiles for the project, and the craftsmanship of both is excellent. I’ve seen them many times as I’ve walked by over the years, and I’ve always found them very poignant. In a gritty part of the city that has seen pretty much everything, and coming from families that have experienced poverty and displacement, the young artists have expressed their visions of an environment that contains magic, beauty, and peace. The lines at the bottom of the “I walk through the moon” piece read: “My hood is so quiet I can hear the ants talk 2 each other.”

On a very different scale is the current exhibit at the Robert Koch Gallery— Joel Meyerowitz’s series of photographs “The Elements: Air/Water Part I”:

Joel Meyerowitz, Air/Water Number 2 (Koch Gallery)

The genesis of the series was a video of Olympic divers Meyerowitz was directing from an underwater viewing room. But the photographs go far beyond a representation of Olympic divers.

Joel Meyerowitz, Air/Water Number 14 (Koch Gallery)

As Meyerowitz said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, “I want to look at the stuff the world is made of, the pure stuff, the purity of air, water, fire and earth.” The pieces are powerful and entrancing, because they do show us the stuff the world is made of and, in part because of their large format, bring us right into the midst of it. For me they were an echo of Bill Viola’s spectacular 2004–2005 video installation “Five Angels for the Millenium“:

Departing Angel from Five Angels for the Millennium, Bill Viola (still/detail), 2001 video installation Photo: Kira Perov © Bill Viola

even more so because Meyerowitz has also done a wonderful, hypnotic video of Air/Water, which can be seen on the Koch Gallery website (but is of course infinitely better at the gallery). In addition to these underwater images, the show includes a number of more representational photographs of the elements:

Joel Meyerowitz, Dusk (Koch Gallery)

The Paper Moon Park was ephemeral, as views of the moon are, but if you’re in San Francisco you can see the Meyerowitz show through November 1. (A Selection from “The Elements: Air/Water, Part I” will also be at the Lobby Gallery, 449 Park Avenue, New York City through October 7.) The Youth Project mosaics will hopefully be in place for some time to reflect and enhance the urban environment.

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?

Consider “Cupid’s Span,” the 60-foot-high painted fiberglass and stainless steel sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen on San Francisco’s waterfront:

When the sculpture first went up in 2002, I hated it.  I thought it was too massive and out of scale for its location and detracted from the beauty of the waterfront.  Messed up the environment, in other words.  But over the years, as I walked by it frequently, I gradually began to look at it differently and now I really like it.  One of the things that changed my mind was that I looked at it from a different angle:

Photo by Elizabeth Mangelsdorf, SF Chronicle

I saw it as an echo of the Bay Bridge, fitting wonderfully in its space.  It is still the same piece in the same environment, but it forced me to look at it, to think about it, to see my environment differently.

This, to me, is the main responsibility of art in public spaces.  Public space is at a premium in most cities, and it is important that we use it well, that we use it for public benefit.  But what defines public benefit?  Public art is inevitably controversial, and we can’t expect it to please everyone.  If we are going to make art part of our environment, we should make it a positive part.  Not positive in the sense of pretty or feel-good, but positive in the sense of giving us something we didn’t have before and thereby enriching the environment. Ideally, it will complement the other parts of the environment, but even if it doesn’t it can be an enrichment in that it makes us look and makes us think.  We and the environment will both benefit from that.

There is a significant difference between work that tells you what to think, and work that makes you think, but the line between the two isn’t sharp.

The Cool Globes are certainly in the first category.

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

And the message of each is reinforced by a plaque explaining what principle it is illustrating—the need for public transportation, recycling, etc.

At the other end of the continuum I would place El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist who weaves spectacular tapestries out of such things as discarded bottle tops and labels.The first time I saw one of El Anatsui’s pieces at San Francisco’s De Young Museum, it left me breathless. It wasn’t a piece with a “Message,” but it demanded that I look at it more and more closely. And when I realized that it was made of bottle caps, I couldn’t help thinking about all the discarded stuff in the world.

El Anatsui, Emerging Fault Lines

Brandon Ballengee, an artist who has been collaborating with research scientists and creating work that highlights the loss of biodiversity, seems to fall somewhere between the two extremes. Ballengee’s works are images of natural organisms under some environmental threat. Some make this point quite dramatically;

Cleared and Stained Multi-limbed Pacific Tree frog Aptos, California.

others could be easily mistaken for abstract art.

Brandon Ballengée, The Spiny Diatom Chaetoceros affine collected along the Turkish coast of the Red Sea, 2001

And what about Ichi Ikeda’s 2006 Moving Water Days, in which people backpacked water “to the future while going back and forth between upper streams of the [Kedogawa] river and the mouth of the river”?

Ichi Ikeda, Moving Water Days

Which, if any, of these works is most likely to inspire some environmental action? The globes are clever, engaging, and creative. They’re not profound, and only a few invite an aesthetic exploration beyond the immediate surface message. But they do convey their message quite effectively. Once viewers leave the exhibit, however, will they have been moved enough to remember the message and do something active?

Is work that makes you think, rather than telling you what to think, more likely to make you act? The works by El Anatusi and Ikeda, and some of Ballengee’s, moved me considerably, and have left me with some enduring emotional imprint. Will that translate into action?

So what’s the upshot of all this rumination? I seem to have more questions than when I started, but that’s not a bad thing. All these questions are important for both artists and environmentalists, and help us make our way in a threatened environment. I’d be very interested to hear any one else’s thoughts on these issues.

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!

Public art interpretations of a theme are not new–Chicago filled the city with cows in 1999, and San Francisco did hearts beginning in 2004–and they often benefit charities. In fact, many of the Cool Globes are being auctioned off to benefit environmental education organizations. So it’s possible to feel a little jaded about the globes. But what seems special about Cool Globes is the emphasis on both educating the public and prompting action.

Each globe illustrates one aspect of global warming and things that can be done to combat it–Take Simple Steps, Use Public Transportation, Residential Recycling, Encourage Green Government, etc. In addition, people are encouraged to pledge to take specific steps to reduce their own carbon footprint. When I visited the globes a GGNRA park ranger was getting people to sign the pledge and passing out information about how to agree to specific actions on line. In addition, the Cool Globes website lists “Top Tips” and “Activities for Families.”

I was pretty skeptical about the pledge idea. Even if people signed, how many of them will actually take the next steps? But ultimately, this is all about education. People are looking at the globes, reading the informational plaques with them, laughing at the funny ones, and talking to their companions about them. Even if someone doesn’t take an immediate step, looking at the globes, seeing and hearing that there are specific actions to take, can change the way people see their place on the globe, and their responsibility for it.

Cathryn Henry-Colcer and Dan Colcer, “Green Office”

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.)

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?

This question has interested me for a long time, and especially as I’ve been writing this blog and seeing more and more work that calls itself “environmental.”  To quote the show catalog, “The question still remains as to what constitutes environmental art in the twenty-first century.  How do artists tackle ecological art when we seem oblivious to the urgency of ecological implosion….”

Does the fact that an art work depicts some aspect of the environment make it “environmental art”?  Does the artist have to work with actual environmental materials, or in the living environment? Is it enough that the artist cares about the state of the environment and tries to express that caring in the work?  And is “environmental” synonymous with “environmentally responsible”?

Comparing this show to some earlier works of Land Art, Cecilia Nuin writes that there is a difference in that the approach of these artists “is one of responsibility for the kind of materials that they use.  This…allows artists to create inspiring works; not only because the materials serve as a medium, but they are also the end in itself.”

I’ve been struggling to understand what it means that the materials are the end in itself.  I can see how that is the case with the works made from reclaimed materials (old milk cartons, scrap fabric).  But others, such as the video and light box pieces, use an intermediary.  And an intermediary that is in fact fairly energy-dependent so, although they are inspiring, can we say they are absolutely environmentally responsible?

Still, if art makes us see things in a new way, then perhaps it’s enough that the works inspire such a reaction.The stress on “mental” in the show’s title (EnvironMENTAL Paradigm) is significant: the way a work influences our thinking is what can make it more than simply a depiction of an environmental scene.  And the materials—whether they are part of the actual environment or a representation of it or reference to it in some form—are a vital part of what stirs our thought.

But another question remains: Is it part of the definition of environmental art that it should inspire the viewer to take action for change? Mina, Cecilia, and I all agreed that we worry about what will happen when green is no longer trendy.  “Doing a show about the environment isn’t enough,” Cecilia said. She wants to inspire people to think and talk about the art, so  they will conclude that they have a responsibility that no other generation has had; otherwise there will be no more art. Mina told me that her 10-year-old son, looking at Hrafnhildur Sigurdardottir’s piece Greener Pastures

Hrafnhildur Sigurdardottir, Greener Pastures, Layered fabric materials

commented that maybe it showed all that would be left of green spaces in the future.  Hopefully, now that he’s seen that image, he’ll want to help keep that possibility from coming true.

Photographer Subhankar Banerjee focuses his attention on indigenous human rights and land conservation issues in the Arctic, and his work has been instrumental in efforts to preserve the threatened Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Banerjee’s solo show, Resource Wars, is at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Beverly Hills through August 17 and will travel to Hong Kong at a future date. His work will also be included in a number of group shows, including Impact:Living in the Age of Climate Change, a major exhibition that will debut in Copenhagen in 2009, coinciding with the U.N. Climate Change Convention there.

It’s hard to categorize Andrea Polli. She is on the faculty of the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College. Her work ranges from sound and video installations to the Queensbridge Wind Power Project, which investigates how clean, renewable windpower could be integrated into New York’s landmark Queensboro Bridge.

The Queensbridge project is included in this summer’s CUNY Sustainable Cities exhibition. But Polli has been busy with many other projects as well. Just to name a few: Her composition “Round Mountain” is included on Audible Geography, a recently released CD on which eleven sound artists “consider the scope of geography today”; she will do a presentation at the Summer 2008 International Symposium of Electronic Art in Singapore; and she will participate in the projectsoundwave series hosted by MED’1.ATE Network in San Francisco on August 17.

Lucy + Jorge Orta are the two Paris-based artists at the heart of Studio-Orta, a larger team that “investigates crucial themes of the world today: the community and the social link, dwelling and habitat, nomadism and mobility, sustainable development, ecology and recycling.” Their Antarctica show  at the Galleria Continua in Le Moulin, France (through October 2008), includes the Antarctic Village based on their 2007 trip to Antarctica

as well as earlier works “dealing with themes relating to the environment, global warming, society, human rights, humanitarian intervention and the mobility and migration of peoples.”  The Ortas’ interest in movement also figures in the Poeziezomer Watou 2008 show in Watou, Belgium, and, most intriguingly to me, Carried Away: Procession in Art, in Arnheim, Holland (both running into September).

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.

REBAR will have two projects at the Biennale, which takes place between September 14 and November 24. PARK(ing) Day will be included in the “Out There: Architecture Beyond Building” exhibition in the Italian Pavilion. Representing the United States in “Into the Open: Positioning Practice” in the American Pavilion will be Panhandle Bandshell. The Bandshell, constructed by REBAR, the Finch Mob, and CMG Landscape Architecture, was originally located in the panhandle of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.