Essay- Art in Environmental Reactions

Art in Environmental Reactions

  Luchia Meihua Lee

“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century…Global Mean Sea Level will continue to rise throughout the 21st century”[1] - From Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis

Ecology is the science of the relationship between the organism and its environments; hence there should be a partnership between human culture and the physical conditions of life. This leads to enunciating contemporary artistic response to observed anthropogenic challenges to the environment. The question remains: can the link between artistic practice and the environment be adumbrated? Raising the Temperature is an attempt to address this question. In this essay, I underline the art community in reaction, addressing both in words and through art practice this environmental subject.

I have chosen the words Raising the Temperature as a metaphor for this issue which is the urgent responsibility of us all. In art and life, no one is external to the social and cultural framework in which we live. Each of us has assisted in Earth’s degeneration. This is the result of decades of commitment to the priority of material value and economic centralization, to the exclusion of artistic expression, intellectual culture change, or sustainability. As Knox wrote, “…the cultural agnosticism of industrial capitalism has been widely rejected.”[2] Jameson claimed that this void had been filled with a “post-modern ‘hyperspace’ … to accommodate the multinational global space for advanced capitalism.”[3] However, optimism demands a reconfiguration of lifestyle in the context of contemporary plurality and a re-estimation of global core values in Eco-preference. In other words, I mean to suggest some condition leading to a new order, and redrawn conceptual boundary in environmental theorization and art creations.

Raising the Temperature comprises nine artists who challenge this urgent and critical subject matter. Artist working in various media hew tight to the broad eco-bio-social theme. These artists provide creative expression of the search for a new vantage on this precarious subject, and focus on the struggle to adapt in a time of societal change. The perspective is both critical and aesthetic; the "reactions" are not a manifesto, or aggressively political and are not thematically dogmatic. Scientific alarms have been filtered through artistic sensibilities to reflect social and aesthetic considerations. The works presented here comment on our changing relationship to the world we inhabit, or discuss the conditions of our urban life and its toll on the planet.

Historical excavation of ecological relevancy uncovers a current that runs through the 20th century concept of art and its presentation elements. Initially this took the form either of art that harmonized with the natural environment or presented a stark intrusion into it. More recently, it has involved politically correct art in action to proclaim the danger to the land. There is a great deal of public site-specific art. Exceptionally well calculated it manifests the artist’s vision in material, form, and placement. The 1977 Stone Field Sculpture (Fig 1) from Carl Andre [4] is in some sense a Japanese garden design. Some of Richard Serra’s invasive large scale iron sculpture (Fig 2) has been the occasion of several controversial debates on art in public places[5]. A similar example is The Gates by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in New York’s Central Park in February 2005 (Fig 3). These are art for art’s sake, not instances of environmental consciousness.

I would like to divert the discourse away from the Earthwork movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its exponents such as Robert Smithson (Fig 4), and Walter De Maria (Fig 5) towards contemporary relations between man and his environment and the conversation about manmade global warming, where new paradigms and deeper analysis is needed.

Art as action and message is well exemplified by Switzerland, Aletsch Glacier 1 (Greenpeace), 2007 by Spencer Tunick. He uses human bodies as a medium; for this photograph, 600 naked people lined up on an Alpine glacier[6] in a campaign to raise awareness of global warming, (Fig 6). There is a distinction between land or nature art and environmentally related actions.

More interactive was Taiwanese artist Yang Chin Chih’s 2009 project entitled Burning Ice (Fig 7) in Union Square in which spectators sat on a block of ice to experience the melting of global warming. Many of his performances and actions in the public space are aggressively trying to raise awareness of the crisis in physical and living conditions for humans. In 2013, Lin Shih Pao collected recycled materials such as plastic bottles and drink containers and gathered Flushing community members to fashion them into a Christmas tree. In an ongoing piece he collects used cellular phones for future projects. While artists who stage actions might have been included, I consciously address this issue in a different fashion –whether more cerebral or coolly calculated. The framework of this essay is not all-inclusive. These interactive and community activists might in the future be the subject of my attention.

Nor shall I discuss the revision of art history according to the postmodern critique. Raising the Temperature does not celebrate direct realistic representation of disappearing forests, shrinking glaciers, or other imminent threats; it is not about to fall into the error that French writer Jean Baudrillard describes as Hyper-Realism.[7]

I arrange the artists in the Raising the Temperature: Art in Environmental Reactions exhibition in two trajectories in order to organize our discussion and aid the appreciation of these creations. The first strand is concerned with technological changes in our society that reinforce behaviors contributing to the environmental crisis. Artists like Jeremiah Teipen, Pey Chwen Lin, Xi Fei, and Hai Zhang, are followed in transition by Todd Gavin with a wall piece constructed from earth materials. While expressing quite different sensibilities, Marlene Tseng Yu, Sarah Walko, Miya Ando and Kay Lin share a more romantic or intimate approach in my second strand.

To quote Cuthbert, “Castells (1989) uses the term informational capitalism to replace industrial capitalism, since the new economy is in a very real sense both virtual and symbolic, with the exchange value of information now challenging that of commodity production.” [8] By now, this transformation has of course been accomplished. The impact on the culture and concept of art, on the medium and methods of art presentation has been profound. For instance, Jeremiah Teipen picks his messages and images from the digital world. The information abused in cyber space is transplanted to rectangular panels installed on a wall. The result mimics the busy city we now inhabit. As Teipen points out, computers require air conditioning which contributes to global warming; further, the toxic elements used in computers exacerbate waste disposal problems.

While Teipen delves deep into the digital world to come up with his critique, Pey Chwen Lin stands her distance while using the Eve Clone series to criticize the dehumanizing effects of technology. Pursuing this theme but taking a more systemic view, Xi Fei comments on the survival imperative in Manhattan which is constructed according to Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest. Pursuit of fame and wealth has already surpassed virtue and morals as an ideal in Xi’s paintings. He indicts not technology itself but the political system that fails to evaluate fully its consequences. Jameson[9] forecast that postmodernism would end the unique and personal, and even distinctive individual brushstrokes; Xi follows suit by repurposing many masterpieces from different eras to symbolize the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction and capitalism. Hai Zhang, at least in one of his contributions to this exhibit, also focuses attention on urban areas. Documenting Chinese constructions sites in the series Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost, his photographs underline the anarchic and unplanned quality of this fevered building boom. The natural result, of course, is an utter disregard for the environment. Particularly startling is an untitled image from the fourth month into the demolition of Gangxia West Village in Shenzhen, China, 2009. These photographs reveal an unstoppable development exercised upon expendable cities across China, and a bureaucratic pollution.

Treating not the artists but the art, start with Todd Gavin’s mixed media wall-mounted piece, various materials such as coal, charcoal, and oil on cement mortar have been commingled. The resultant images are abstract and rich with undirected expression. They suggest the past, present, and future; they are black and white, organic, rich, and nutritious. They intimate new civilizations, evolution, newly formed societies, and new cities. Most pertinently, his piece has a fundament indicative of the essential role that carbon plays in all known life on Earth, but it breaks up into discordant patches of scored material that hint at the pernicious way in which carbon dioxide affects Earth. This mixed media painting is exceptionally dyspeptic, commingling as it does different representations of carbon.

In this discussion, I have no ambition to line up contemporary artists to participate in the propaganda of climate change. Instead, I assert the primacy of insights into societal considerations and exquisite reflections that engage the environmental topic. The challenge in organizing this exhibition is to articulate my motives for selecting this work, and not fall into relationships entrained by certain historical genres. Here, art stands on its own, not as a signifier of broad styles or movements to a critical desire for high technology or intervention in society.

Marlene Tseng Yu responds to nature in a more romantic way (Fig 9). Marlene reacted to the sight of melting glaciers in her series Ice Cracking with layered black and white abstract paintings in acrylic that recall in technique both traditional Asian brush ink landscape and western Impressionism. Yu has increasingly employed gigantic paintings to encapsulate and absorb the spectator into an element of the landscape, introducing an added dimensionality, and emphasizing human frailty and the permanency of the landscape. While in response to this urgent global warming matter, Sarah Walko reassembles materials from multiple sources to create shamanistic, prickly, superbly-crafted assemblages populating installations, films, and literature From her perspective as gatherer and thinker (Fig 10) she comments on the intersection of nature and technology with her compositions or organic and inorganic components. Her art suggests that we have succeeded in trapping, controlling and processing the sources of energy that first sparked life. We have behaved like commanders of the biosphere.

Miya Ando’s creations participate in the romantic camp because she is entranced by spirit more than physical objects; she largely focuses on the sublime beauty of treated metal surfaces. Light and energy are subtly revealed in her phosphorescent. Her Shimenawa Sora [Sky] Study repurposes an ancient Japanese practice of roping off sacred objects. The piece suggests that part of our current difficulty is that we have lost the ability to value nature.

Obon, originally sited on a Puerto Rican pond, symbolizes a traditional Japanese memorial of the ancestors. Viewed as a pair, Shimenawa Sora [Sky] Study and Obon pay reverence to animals and ancestors. To some extent, this reflects a broadening of balance in nature and acknowledgment of its power, as well as a release of kindness.

Kay Lin’s contribution is deliciously bicursal. On the one hand, in Sun, Air, Water – Bridge, she acknowledges the threat posed by rising sea level and its effect on urban areas. A tension arises between the forest on one side and a drowned city on the other. On the other, she maintains this duality in Sun, Air, Water – Balloon, where she refers both to restraint and to the awareness and solidarity that will lift us to a better land. She extols our ability to repair relations with the environment, and restore ourselves to harmony with our surroundings. This three-dimensional installation extends her poetic paintings that combine abstract expressionism and impressionism while drawing on Asian tradition.

These different trajectories reveal the complex intersection of the old and new, of continuity and rupture in the culture of these categories.

Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis, issued by the International Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], (Fig 11) describes the role that human activity is playing in increasing global temperatures through burning of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. The impacts of this warming are already being seen through increases in extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts and unprecedented floods. The report warns that “This represents a substantial multi-century climate change commitment created by past, present, and future emissions of carbon dioxide.” Many groups engage in actions to raise the awareness of the global warming issue. In one example[10] , the crew of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise constructed a 'heart' with the flags of the 193 members of the United Nations in an appeal for united global action to protect the Arctic (Fig 12). Haunting but realistic images of glaciers melting can be found at http://extremeicesurvey.org; also, the Nova episode Extreme Ice directed by Noel Dockstader covered this topic and was broadcast by PBS on December 18, 2013. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/extreme-ice.html

While it is clearly impossible to stop glacial melting under the current societal priorities, we need to keep as a goal that sea level rise be reversed, and the normal ebb and flow of the tides continue as regularly as sunrise and sunset. It is to be wished that our descendants can continue to inhabit this earth. Environmental citizenship is the responsibility of us all. With Linda Weintraub, “…environmental consciousness is becoming an increasingly powerful determinant…. infiltrating political stances, manufacturing protocols, lifestyle patterns, and cultural expressions…Art is participating in this paradigm shift. By embracing human and non-human forms of life, artists are urging egocentric behaviors into eco-centric alignment with environmental directives. In this manner they are contributing to the overhaul of cultural values.” [11] By considering eco-centric themes, artists inject fundamental assumptions and their challenging implications into the public debate.

These responses and subjectivities are mediated through textual and image aspects of art in environment presentation. A neo-liberal economics and environmentalism has crossed the globe with dizzying rapidity, as fast as glaciers melt, forests disappear, sea level rises, and islands shrink. Reluctant concern about this urgency will proliferate internationally and universally. Consequent environmental gestures accentuate the nationally specific enactments that may be possible and even meaningful. On another scale, it is crucial to address the kinds of violence imposed by transnationals. The apparent gulf between the microcosm of art and the macrocosm of the Earth may thereby be bridged. We hope that this exhibit offers insight into an understanding of the environmental crisis.

You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one

I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one–John Lennon “Imagine” 

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Notes

[1]IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis written and published by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ) published January 2014 Source: http://www.climatechange2013.org/

[2]Paul L. Knox, “Design Professions and the Built Environment in a Postmodern Epoch“ in Designing Cities: Critical Readings in Urban Design. edited by Alexander R. Cuthbert, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003 p. 358  “..also recognizes a ‘postmodern’ condition in the world ‘s core economies, wherein  the economic rationality and cultural agnosticism of industrial capitalism has been widely rejected”

[3] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or the cultural logic of capitalism, New Left Review, 146, pp. 53-92

[4]In 1977, Hartford commissioned an installation by the minimalist artist. Carl Andre The resulting Stone Field Sculpture is composed of 36 boulders arranged in eight unequal rows on a plot of land adjacent to the Ancient Burying Ground, a historic landmark that dates to the 1600s.

[5]T. Finkelpearl , “Interview: Douglas Crimp on Tilted Arc,” in Dialogues in Public Art, Cambridge, The MIT Press 2000, pp. 61-71

[6]On August 18, 2007, Spencer Tunick,  Switzerland, Aletsch Glacier 1 (Greenpeace) 2007.

Tunick posed naked volunteers on Aletsch Glacier as part of a campaign to draw attention to melting Alpine glaciers.   Fabrice Coffrini/AFP - Getty Images source: http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2007/08/19/4353126-?pc=25&sp=50

The Aletsch Glacier, which is some 23 km long, lost around 115 meters of its total length between 2005 and 2006 alone. August 18, 2007. Source:  http://www.cipra.org/en/alpmedia/news-en/2755

[7]  [Jean Baudrillard’s] “concept of ‘Hyper-Realism’ designates an experience of the contemporary world which is radically ‘unoriginal’, in the sense that it is an experience of signs and simulations taken for real.” Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul, ed. Art in Theory 1900-2000. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p. 1015

[8] Manuel Castells The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford-Blackwell 1996, p. 3

[9] Frederick Jameson ‘The Deconstruction of Expression’ in Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul, ed. Art in Theory 1900-2000. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p. 1051

[10]Such as Greenpeace’s Heart Made From Flags in the Arctic and many others. Source: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/multimedia/photos/Heart-Made-From-Flags-In-The-Arctic/

[11] Weintraub. Linda with Schuckmann, Skip. Ecocentric Topics. Rhinebeck, New York: Artnow publications, 2006, p. 12

Essay figures

Fig 1 Carl Andre’s (1935- ) Stone Field Sculpture is 36 boulders arranged on a triangular plot of land adjacent to the Ancient Burying Ground, in Harford, CT.

Fig 2 Richard Serra (1939- ), Schunnemunk Fork, 1991. Steel, 8 ft. high x 34 ft. to 54 ft. long x .25 ft. deep, Mountainville, NY.

Fig 3 Christo (1935 - ) and Jeanne-Claude (1935 – 2009) , The Gates by in New York’s Central Park in February 2005.

Fig 4 Robert Smithson (1938 - 1973), Spiral Jetty, 1970 Great Salt Lake, Utah.

Fig 5 The Lightening Field , Walter De Maria (1935-2013), , Stainless steel poles, 1 mile x 1 km, 1977. New Mexico.

Fig 6  Spencer Tunick (1967 - ) photograph on August 18, 2007. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP - Getty Images the Swiss glacier Aletsch.

Fig 7 Yang Chin Chih (1955- ) Melting Ice at Union Square, New York City, NY 2009.

Fig 9 Hai Zhang (1976 - ) Untitled from the series Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost 2009.

Fig 10 Marlene Tseng Yu (1937 - ) Disappearing Glacier 10 ft x 20 ft, Rainforest Art Foundation, Long Island City, NY, 2007.

Fig 11 Sarah Walko (1978 - ) film still from You and I Do Not Come Lightly to the Bland Page, Brooklyn, New York City, 2013.

Fig 12 Cover image of the 2013 draft of IPPC report on Climate Change 2013: The physical Science Basis.

Fig 13 A Greenpeace action in 2012 http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/multimedia/photos/Heart-Made-From-Flags-In-The-Arctic/.