Art Review nr. 2 [August]
Art Review Ltd, 2006, 154 pages, £4.90, ISSN 0004-4091

ENVIRO 
MENTAL:
CAN ART SAVE THE PLANET? And one might add, if not art, then what can save the planet? Science, maybe? The scientist, James Lovelock, has for long made clear the limited power of any human to influence the self-regulating entity that is Gaia - and has worryingly suggested, more recently, only with the use of nuclear energy. James Martin,  scientist/futurologist, sees hope for the future, detailed in his  book The Meaning of the 21st Century, through mind-bogglingly  complex technological intervention, but places his optimism in the  precarious hands of what he calls the “transition generation” - in  other words, today’s teenagers. Environmentalists write encouragingly  - the triumph of hope over expectation, perhaps? In Heat: How to  Stop the Planet Burning, George Monbiot writes “with optimism” yet  concedes that we may already have passed the critical threshold but  concludes, reassuringly, that “it is possible to save the biosphere”  even if it will require a 90% cut in UK carbon emissions (when Kyoto  envisages only 5.2% by 2012).

What role might literature play? Novelists offer little hope if, Jonathan Franzen’s current memoir is anything to go by. The  Discomfort Zone recounts the personal and collective guilt of an  over-indulgent, pleasure-seeking generation for whom there is no  future, where global warming is a done deal, whose catch-phrase might  well be “Deprive myself of an available pleasure! Why?” and, for whom, in Franzen’s case, salvation lies in bird-watching. More  directly relevant to the question would be the novelist Ian McEwan’s  observation, in an essay published last year, that “We know in our  hearts that the very best art is entirely and splendidly useless”.

So what do the contributors to the magazine Art Review have to say on  the subject? Can we find solace in contemporary art practice and give  the lie to McEwan’s categorical pessimism. The curator, Janet Owen  Driggs, sets a bullish tone in her robust introduction, harnessing  the Busan Biennale, 2006 and, among other culturally diverse factors,  The Yes Men (“Changing the world one prank at a time”), to power the  “green tide” of artists and cultural producers who believe we need  “to take deliberate steps in order to protect the natural world”.  [She goes too far in attempting to recruit Jonathan Swift to the cause. His pamphlet A modest Proposal, in which he urged the Irish  to eat their own children to ward off the evils of both  overpopulation and starvation, might well be seen as an early  eighteenth century environmental tract, but it was scarcely an  attempt, as she claims, to solve the problem of the Irish Potato Famine of 1846.]  Her review of the works of environmental or eco- artists shows them all resonating with good intentions, from Beuyss’s  7000 Oaks, through Smithson and the Land Art movement of the 60’s and  70’s, to the ongoing “Reclamation Artmovement” with its emphasis on  collaborative, community- driven reclamation projects and site  transformation.

Daniel Kunitz flies the flag for the photographers and video makers, choosing the title Ecotopia for this year’s exhibition at the International Centre for Photography in New York - on till January 7th, 2007 - because, he says, of the surprising emphasis on anxiety  about the physical state of the world and on the previously debased  genre of landscape photography  - though, he confesses, most “tread  the political dirt” softly.

Network member, founder and editor of the Fourth Door Review, Oliver  Lowenstein, writes on the British Land Art movement, looking for the  next generation of artists to take up the baton from Long (born  1942), Nash (1945), and Goldsworthy (1956), to reconnect art with  nature and with ecological issues, in the face of a metropolitan art  scene that eschews relevance and social responsibility because it’s  not “hip enough”. His catalogue of contemporary artistic output by  younger artists that is informed by ecological concerns is  reassuring, from Brighton’s Red Earth performance art to the Beuysian  influenced Platform and Shelley Sachs - about whom he writes at  greater length in Resurgence nr.231, 2005. His inclusion of the recent work of Chris Drury (1948), who shows no sign of “age catching up with him”, indicates a clear generational overlap. One of Drury’s most ambitious works is ‘Heart of Reeds’ in Lewes, East Sussex,  completed in 2004. It functions ecologically, its reed bed purifying the water and providing a healthy habitat for a diversity of birds, plants and insects. Lowenstein makes clear that art and nature are not ignored by the academic community with his references to the Social Sculpture M.A. at Oxford Brookes University and to the green art activities at Dartington College. He does not mention RANE at Falmouth, reported on in L&A Online nr. 38.

Interspersed between the main articles are the comments of individual artists and other creative professionals like Village Voice Senior Art Critic, Jerry Saltz, who, whilst listing the many ways in which art can cast its spell over the human condition admits, somewhat  contradictorily, “However, art cannot ‘help protect the environment’  or turn back global warming; it cannot change the world except  incrementally and by osmosis.”

On a more practical level, the artist Evan Holloway concentrates on the need for artists to act like all good citizens in striving to ensure that their art practice is as carbon neutral as possible.  Don’t use toxic materials or overdo the advertising and exhibit locally and regionally. “We shouldn’t ignore the things directly within our power.” Perhaps this personal response should be taken up collectively by the artistic and cultural community, with a  commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) by gallerists,  artists and arts’ funding bodies.

The American novelist, Siri Hustvedt struck a cautionary note on the power of art. “When I was very young I worried a lot about the fact that art is useless. I hoped that it could be harnessed to change the world”. Art has the power to change people’s perceptions, but a response to a work of art is “an intimate experience, not a universal  or global one”.[See, for example, Simon Schama’s vainglorious ‘Simon  Schama’s Power of Art’.]

Despite the effectiveness of Driggs’ introduction as an encouraging and unifying clarion call for action, there is no overarching thesis, no attempt to formulate criteria for a principled set of responses by  artists to the global crisis; no discussion of the role of the artist  or of what reasonable expectations one might have of artists in terms  of their responses to contemporary issues.

Of course, the function of the artist is to produce good art, not save the planet; and yet, perhaps, we do and should expect more. In a different context, Adrian Searle began a recent review of the USA  Today exhibition, on now at the Royal Academy, with the question  “After Iraq, Katrina and Abu Ghraib, what should we expect from US  artists?” And Lowenstein in his essay quotes the environmental writer, Bill McKibbon .“What the warming world needs now is art,  sweet art...” - a Scheherezade for the life of Gaia?

Terry Fairman

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GROUNDBREAKING. The artist in the changing landscape
edited by Iwan Bala

Bridgend: Seren  in collaboration with Cywaith Cymru / Artworks Wales, 2005, pbk., 159pp., illus., £19.99, ISBN  1-85411-341-0

Seren has published a variety of interesting books from and about Wales, and this one follows suit. It marks the quarter-century of Cywaith Cymru / Artworks Wales and its precursor the Welsh Sculpture Trust. Artist Iwan Bala sets the scene for eight contributors, who, in their several ways, review some of the recent events in public art in the country, and some of the artists’ experiences.

   Cywaith Cymru’s director, Tamara Krikorian, sketches the history, from the first large outdoor exhibition of sculpture in Wales, in Margam Country Park in 1981, to the exhibits, installations and performances at recent Eisteddfodau. The ‘art’ ranges from the established permanence of Moores and Hepburns to Catrin Williams’s distribution of the traditional fruit-bread bara brith at Eisteddfod Bro Conwy. “The only thing that’s new about public art”, Krikorian begins, “is the art.”

   In a substantial essay, Hugh Adams wonders what public art is, and whether it is a thing different from ’art’. The term was “initially employed for bureaucratic convenience.” And as Bala puts it, public artists work to briefs that are not their own. Adams touches on several important issues, such as the extent to which public art should be ‘discrete’, the ‘anything anywhere’ approach, the folly of journalists who dig for a ”juicy ‘art row’”, and the ongoing debate on the value of public art in urban [and indeed rural] social, cultural, and economic renewal. Although only pointed to, these are quite well set in a national and historical context.

   Shelagh Hourahane, in chatty but informative mode, takes the reader on a Sites Revisited tour, fleshing out and adding footnotes to the history. Impressed by early Grizedale, she sought something similar in Wales as an aid to cultural development. She discusses Margam, Glynllifon,  Cofeb Hywel Dda at Whitland, Caerphilly, Ebbw Vale Garden Festival, the Slate Valleys Initiative and Waunfawr, both in Gwynedd, and several other projects. Her trip north reminds her that art can – whatever else – help people realise their own creativity and communities explore their ‘sense of place’. She, too, points to issues and questions: the question of “identity through public art”, for instance – central to the messages coming from subsequent contributors to the book. A comment all [public] artists might make a note of – or might have heeded – is that works intended to be permanent are, with the fading of their creators’ intentions to “make a statement, to share a vision or a memory”, likely to be “misunderstood, disfavoured or plain forgotten.” The landscape has already accumulated several.

   Before John Gingell’s chapter, take fresh air: the title – Public art as vision, praxis, civitas – signals the coming linguistic struggle. I admit to admiring “There is a large Third World in every large city.” “That which can be ‘imagined’ can be created and made.” swings me between clarity and doubt. But.. “The spirit of the city – civitas – is distilled and defined in the universities and is the legacy of the argument for knowledge and its application.”... surely a sterner editorial stance was needed – throughout. Gingell’s lengthy essay falls in two parts. The first elaborates his statement, which many will agree with, that “the realm of action is now the urban”. The second is a very first-person survey of some of his work, including the Baglan ‘Lightpoint’.

  The Good King Hywel Dda made the first code of Welsh law in the tenth century. In 1982, proposals for a memorial in Whitland were invited. Peter Lord won what quickly became “the commission from Hell”. Cofeb Hywel Dda was begun – in a constituency with a Plaid Cymru M.P.. Its national[ist] connotations caused consternation in the rival party – Labour. Lord describes his work, and the enthusiastic trashing of it. A sad experience: but... once bitten¸twice bitten! His Narrative continues with the political machinations over Parc Glynllifon, and the vandalising of part of the ‘Celebration of the Writers of Gwynedd’ series of installations there. Clearly, [public] art prompts some strong reactions in Wales. Lord’s conclusion is worth quoting from. He guesses that the damage to Gwerin y Graith, a work inspired by writings about [as the Gwynedd council’s website has it] “the exploitation and oppression [the local] communities suffered at the hands of an alien class, church and culture” – and which was made mainly by “social and geographical outsiders”, was done by members of the local, strongly Welsh, community. “To those few who know what has been lost ... perhaps the ruins of Gwerin y Graith retain the power to move the emotions. Indeed, it may be that for some the site has more power than if it had been maintained as it was conceived.” Little remains to tell what has been lost; and it is curious that, apart from bland references on the park owner’s – the County Council’s – website and a few items in Welsh [which I can’t read], googling yields nothing of this story. However, “as at Whitland, [this] destruction reinforces the argument that narrative content gives the artwork immediate life and, through the dialogue generated, however disagreeable its form, the potential for subsequent incorporation into new narratives of our history.”

   Not intended to be so, Gwerin y Graith was apparently confrontational. Robin Campbell suspects that the most-visited Welsh public artwork is in the pavement at Swansea station, where the words ‘Ambition is critical’ seek “to cleanse the well-known malediction of Swansea being ‘the graveyard of ambition’.” Swansea was the 1995 ‘City of Literature’. Campbell [of ‘apART’] briefly looks at still more agony – a rage in the local press; one street sculpture surviving just 28 hours; etc. – between artist and community, as part of the celebration.

   Stephen West’s interest is focused on artists and rural communities. He looks at a variety of projects and residencies, including the Slate Valleys Initiative, Deborah Jones and Pippa Taylor in the Coed y Brenin forest, and Trudi Entwistle on Ynys Enlli [a.k.a. Bardsey Island]. These cases are dealt with enthusiastically. Doubtless there are some hidden problems, but the positive conclusion is that “fresh, truthful and unpredictable” outcomes are here easier to foster than in an urban context.

   Simon Fenhoulhet’s essay illustrates a range of scales of work, including a garden roller from the 1988 Powis Castle ‘Stoneworks’ to the land-art scale of Richard Harris’s ‘Walking with the Sea’ for the Llanelli Millennium Coastal Path. “Some have argued”, he says, “that public art has helped to rehabilitate the artist in the public psyche since the post was separation of fine art from other areas of design.” He favours the view that public art, although now generally accepted, is subject to ‘filtering’ by funders and authorities, and that this tends to lead to ‘middle ground’ products. This final, upbeat, essay explores collaboration as part of the public art process, in particular as shown by the ‘Dyfi Millennium Bridge project at Machynlleth. Fenhoulhet seeks a balance between artist and other professionals, where ‘poetry and pragmatism’ can be shared. Jon Mills’s experience at Machynlleth seems of a different nature to Lord’s or Gingell’s...! And he wants this involvement of the artist not for mere decorating of outside spaces but for the fostering of diversity, visionary qualities, and originality.

   In spite of the unease – and anger – seen on the way, optimism and enthusiasm finally resurface. There is, though, a feeling that the eight contributions remain separate, and need to be melled into a more coherent story – perhaps by a Conclusions chapter by the editor. The book feels a little ‘raw’ as it is. Nonetheless, it is an interesting, enlightening, and in its way provocative, contribution to the discussion of outdoors art in public. And it is an invitation to visit some fair art in some fascinating places.

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SIX NAMES OF BEAUTY     Crispin Sartwell

N.Y. & London: Routledge, 2004
hbk., xiii+167pp., £14.99, 0-415-96558-6
eBook, £14.99, 0-203-49668-X

No colour; a few grey, thumbnail, illustrations; text in short sections; A5-size pages: this is a relaxed, charming book, written straightforwardly.... Sartwell muses and enthuses on words from six quite different languages, each bearing a sense of what English-speakers call ‘beauty’, but between them showing the wide, and ite fuzzy, hinterland of our word.

   He has chosen Hebrew yapha – glow, bloom, Sanskrit sundara – wholeness, holiness, Greek to kalon – idea, ideal, Japanese wabi-sabi – humility, imperfection, and Navajo hozho – health, harmony, as well as English beauty – the object of longing. Rather than give a detailed description – let alone a critical review – I have selected a few short extracts which might indicate something of that hinterland. They will, I hope, also indicate the relevance of the book for at least some who are involved with ‘environmental art’.

   In the eyes of the late world teacher Krishnamurti, “beauty has no opposite” [and, he adds, “nor has love”]. In Sartwell’s musing, he wonders “whether it is a sensible assertion that the universe is beautiful; and, if it is sensible, ... whether it is true. … we cannot quite say that every single thing in the universe is beautiful, without ‘beauty’ losing whatever meaning it had.” In the language of the Navajo, some “terms are ‘bipolar’: a word may have a meaning obvious in a particlar context, and in anotther setting the opposite. … So ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ could be conceived as opposites that lend one another meaning, as in Western traditions; they are perhaps aspects of a single experience, or even a center in which opposites ... emerge into harmony.”

   In the worldview and aesthetics of the Yoruba of Nigeria, “a key phrase is ‘iwa l’ewa’, which might be translated as ‘the nature of each thing is its beauty.’ From this follows, among other things, an entire practice of the arts, according to which the task of the work is to locate, understand, and express the essential nature of what it concerns or depicts: insofar as it does this, the work will be beautiful. It is very iportant to see, however, that there is room for the interruption of beauty in beauty itself, because even terrifying, evil, and conventonally ugly things have ‘ase’ [the life force emitted by the god Oludumaare] and hence ‘ewa’, so that they can be taken up into human aesthetic experience and also be beautiful.”  

   In the Navajo perspective, “beauty is one thing: everything.” In their tradition [where most members are what we call ‘artists’], “beauty is not ... an aesthetic concept: it’s not primarily about the way things appear – though it includes appearance as an aspect of what things are. It refers equally to a state of human beings, a state of the objects around them, and a state of the universe as a whole. It is usually translated into English as ‘beauty’, though also as ‘health’ or ‘balance’, ‘harmony’, ‘goodness’. … It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing …. It is a word for the oneness of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state. …” Moreover, Sartwell points ot, most art, Western or otherwise, has been made for ‘spiritual’ purposes. This all looks like a good starter for an interesting discussion somewhere in the Network.

    “An object”, comments Sartwell, on Japanese veneration of age, “is its history. ... To hold an object in your hand and knów it’s old is to have a different experience than to hold a similar new object; it unites us to a history of things and persons....” Wang Yang-ming [1472-1529] wrrote that “one must interact with [something] in every modality …. Then one will know it.” Sartwell comments: “The primary epistemological principle [understanding of what ‘knowledge’ is] in Wang’s philosophy is love, fueled by empathy, so that by knowing what one has in common with persons, animals, plants, and even inanimate objects, one comes to know and love them in the same act. The way we come to know the world is by loving devotion to the world that issues in action, and this loving devotion connects all things to ourselves, or rather displays and makes conscious the connections that already exist. The idea that love can connect us to everything, or show us the connections we already have to everything, opens up the possibility of a world of beauty, a world in which we can long literally for each thing because we are connected to each thing, share the principle of each thing, a world characterized above all by its connections in love.” Artists can be rather good at showing connections.

Martin Spray

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A review of http://greenmuseum.org 

We are defined by our memories. Even in the nature versus nurture debate, no-one would seriously question the value of memory in shaping our responses to the world. Those events that we can recall directly give us a generational fix. For example, if you can remember the first time you saw a computer, and, if it was the size of an elephant and more than filled an average-sized room, you will, in all probability, belong to the Saga generation and have a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards the technology associated with computing and the world-wide-web.

I remember my first sight of the elephant in the room - and thinking that it was unlikely to impinge significantly on either my professional or my personal life. And now... I still find the PC little short of miraculous. The computer makes everything too easy. It offends against the Protestant work ethic – ‘no pain, no gain!’ Things that come too easily might be taken for granted or not taken (in) at all. Research should be done in libraries not curled up on a sofa....

So, is a lap-top the place to find out about art in nature? If it means typing in www.greenmuseum.org then the answer may well be yes. Presbyterian prejudices are soon put aside. With a modicum of mouse skills, the elephant in the box reveals its extraordinary capacity for retaining and making more-or-less readily available a vast amount of material. It is encouraging, too, to find that The Greenmuseum regards itself as no more than a first step, an introduction to the world of environmental art. It is, after all, only a virtual museum “a traditional museum turned inside out...directing our visitors out and into the world to visit outdoor environmental artworks first hand”.

I first googled Greenmuseum in 2003 in search of artists for a proposed European edition of the Network’s journal. With self-effacing modesty, the site offered only a very tentative answer to the question ‘What is environmental art?’ suggesting little more than that it was art that “helps improve our relationship with the natural world” but that the definition was “ a work in progress.” Three years on and the definition offered is the same but a simple link to the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World reveals the Network’s very own Clive Adams elaborating on the question and placing it in its historical context. 

Adams also offers an accurate definition of the e-museum as “a web-based source of information on both established and emerging artists, linked to a network of like-minded organisations around the world.” It is perhaps the networking aspect of the site that is of particular value. It may be California based but its reach extends as far as www. implies. The calendar for last November provides details of events in London, Paris and Cumbria as well as Oakland and other US venues and, whilst its catalogue of over one hundred “eco-artists” – an A to Z from Allan to Zakai - may show a West Coast bias, with a curatorial board made up of a South Korean, a (North) American and two Europeans, including Clive Adams, there is no reason why this current imbalance should persist.

Click on “Community - Events and Opportunities”  and there is an even clearer bias towards the USA, though “Community- Links” shows a much broader awareness of events world wide, including, encouragingly, the activities of L&AN, AiNIN and the RSA.

Educational material comes mostly from US sources, too, but there is much in the “Educators’ Toolbox - Case Studies” to stimulate teachers on this side of the Atlantic - see, for example, “Artists Respond to Global Warming, Reach Across Generations” - if you can find it!

Navigating the site can prove a little problematic, though here my own lack of experience in these matters is probably a factor. I stumbled over “Artists Respond...” and could not retrieve it easily, whilst the Home Page seemed accessible only from the initial google. A pity, since it directs you straight to an excellent article by Martin Spray on an issue raised recently on the landartnet.org Forum website on the fate of the polar bear.[ “Whatever Happened to the Polar Bears” morphs into “Can Art Save the Polar Bear?”] Clearly, the overall architecture of greenmuseum.org is beyond my ken.

Ease of operation and access are the keys to a successful website. Seen as either a memory bank or as a virtual museum, the Greenmuseum site must of necessity grow. Already it carries so much material and so many links that, labyrinth-like, it can catch out the unwary and the inexperienced. As it grows, so will the need for an increasingly effective system of categorisation and retrieval. Just as the current world-wide-web has outgrown itself, according to its inventor Tim Berners-Lee, so too has greenmuseum.org in terms of its ability to provide navigation tools that make exploration a pleasurable experience - a matter of site-aesthetics as much as technology.

Where greenmuseum.org is effective is in creating an on-line environment that positively encourages interaction between the site and its visitors. “Send Us Info” - about events, opportunities or articles or other pieces of writing or your own details as an artist - could not be simpler to use, whilst comments can be made and discussion joined through either the Wiki page or the Forum, the latter, a successful operation that has attracted over 1300 postings.

Like all good websites it fulfills the public access role of the internet, which is an essentially democratic force in a media context, open and inclusive, an accessible source of information, an inexpensive method of communication. Unlike the Network’s website, all of its content is available to everyone who happens to drop or surf by. There is no membership fee, but, as a not-for-profit organisation, it needs direct funding and will suggest you sign up and give them some money.

To keep bang up-to-date, get onto the monthly mailing list. The October email from Sam Bower echoed my sentiments. “It's a busy time of year for many (at least around here) but with luck this online information will inspire you to all to get outside and connect with the unpixelated world as well.  As an online museum, we see ourselves as a resource to link people and ideas and to facilitate the creation of new work. To really serve our communities and ecosystems, art eventually needs to change things on the ground somehow. So, please enjoy these Fall offerings both virtual and out-in-the-world physical.  There's much to be grateful for and much to do.”

Terry Fairman

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that view is illuminated by a continuing interest in science: the de vries’ home is “animated by intense curiosity”. there are influences from buddhism, daoism, and wittgenstein on his work, which he sees as part of the ‘natural world’. eschewing symbolism, he presents things – an array of leaves, a collection of stones – just as “the things themselves”. gooding stresses his continuing “childlike immediacy” of response to the world. like the scientific naturalist, he collects: over 7,000 samples of soil, for example, from around the world. many of his works are collections – of soils, or leaves, foods, shells. ‘collected mahé, seychelles [august 1970]’, 24 seashells in rows, represents a revelation – that they were all different while all being the same. this he calls the first of his ‘real works’. it “inaugurates an extraordinary ... artistic-philosophic project of great significance...”, says gooding. one might, of course, argue that the 24 shells are all of one species as described by science, but that molluscs themselves don’t necessarily stick to the boundaries set by taxonomists [or artists].

earlier, de vries seems to have been fascinated by order, chaos, randomness, and geometric figures. This interest is shown in, for example, the series of ‘random objectivation’ drawings. the importance of chance later manifests in a different way. “the world is my chance / it changes me every day / my change is my poetry”: perhaps one can see later de vries work as becoming increasingly ‘poetic’. he has a place in the tradition of das grosse rasenstück [dürer 1503], presenting glimpses – slices – of real vegetation; then later he presents whole living communities – as in ‘the meadow’, a patch undergoing transition from grass to young woodland [die wiese 1987 on]. gooding subtitles this section “nature, politics and the ecopoetic, signalling a maturing of thought. by the nineties, de vries was concerned with building ‘sanctuaries’.

the sanctuaria are “not for humans to escape to but within which nature... might renew itself, and... present the reality and the image of its cycles and successions”. the first was an 11m. diameter fenced piece of urban roadside; more famous is the 14m. diameter, 3m. tall brick wall enclosure [1997],which after four years was sprouting saplings. gooding explains: the “re-introduction of the idea of natural sanctuary and reverence for all kinds of life, utterly free of all convention and dogma, is central to de vries’s whole artistic and philosophic project”. in the last few pages of the book he takes us through the gateway to le bois sacré and le sanctuaire de la nature de roche-rousse [2003]. here, de vries minimises the intrusion of ‘art’, marking his concern for renewed sanctity and reverence by using inscriptions on the rocks: ambulo ergo sum – i walk, therefore i am; quoi / pourquoi /d’où / vers où – what / why / whence / whither; natura numquam errat – nature never makes a mistake; etc....

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Prigann, Strelow and David

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Art Nature Dialogues – interviews with environmental artists
John K Grande         

With a thoughtful foreword by Edward Lucie-Smith, this book offers intriguing insights into the work of twenty two contemporary ‘environmental artists’, hailing from North America and across Europe – some very well known and well documented elsewhere, for example, David Nash, Chris Drury , Hamish Fulton and Alan Sonfist, and others likely to be new to the reader- at least this reader. Only three are women.

The form of the book is a series of interviews with the artists. Accompanying each interview there are a few black and white photos, sampling each artist’s work. In a sense it is reminiscent of Suzi Gablik’s Conversations before the end of time, except that Gablik’s Conversations have a more expansive, spacious, highly readable feel, whereas Grande’s Dialogues are denser, more specialised and focused on specific environmental works by each artist, and the ideas and motivations behind these works.

For at least one artist, Alfio Bonanno, it is quite a simple, straight-forward relationship, but none the less powerful for that:

’I gave a lecture in Copenhagen to some art students and younger artists a few years back.        They were interested and asked, “Do you really mean that you create sculpture because you respect nature and your environment? Is that it? Is that all?” And I said, “Well, isn’t that enough?”…… My sculptures don’t carry or display signage, the artist’s name and title. I am against that. They’re almost anonymous, just there like everything else. I don’t want to manipulate things, just show what they are. It is a form of expression that reaches out to a very broad and growing public audience…. Here we have a basis for a true and much needed natural dialogue. I feel it is a silent but determined revolution.’

John Grande responds out of his own deeply felt sense of frustration:

’Why is the art establishment so reluctant to embrace nature art? In science our understanding of nature’s endemic place and relation to human health and well-being are recognised, Why is the art world incapable of recognising the profound human changes humanity is wreaking on ourselves and this planet, and the sacred importance of nature to our own survival?’

And there we have at least part of Grande’s motivation for compiling these dialogues: “the urgent need for contemporary art to embrace the nature phenomenon as an ongoing part of the dialogue on humanity’s place in nature.” Yet, as Bonanno comments - but a little more tactfully put - why be so hung up on the art world? The need is a lot broader than just the art world, and not solely concerned with art making either.

A thought -provoking and informative book, which may lead on to further exploration of particular artists’ work, or on to other environmental action.

State University of New York Press, Albany, 2004, pbk., 251pp., $24.95,

ISBN 0 7914 6194 7

Jane Spray  

[Landscape & Arts nr 33, 2005]

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ART WORKS  -  PLACE    Tacita Dean & Jeremy Millar

I had not realised that Aristotle had struggled with the meaning of ‘place’. How little some things change! ‘Place’ remains nebulous, fluid in both location and size, and in time. A place contains places, which contain places. Your place may not be mine – though it is the same place. Our actions, perhaps merely our presence, help make a place, and our use of particular places, perhaps for a mere passing-through, contributes to making us.

‘Art Works’ is a series of enquires into important topical questions and issues in art. Aristotle might have been intrigued and puzzled by this one. It is organised as though an exhibition in eight rooms that open from an ‘entrance’ essay that tries to help us grasp this curiously difficult concept.

The first room is ‘urban’, because this is backdrop to most of us; the second is ‘nature’ because it is a construct of our culture. These are followed by rooms for ‘fantastic’ places that fire the imagination, places of ‘myth/history’, and of ‘politics/control’, ‘territories’, ‘itinerancy’, and ‘heterotopias and ‘non-places’. Each room is full of words from and about, and images of the work of, a variety of artists – five dozen in all. Their works and the images come in bewildering variety. Liz Arnold’s romantic Island with disconcertingly coloured sky; Adam Chodzko’s Better Scenery, which is notices erected in, for example, Grizedale Forest and a factory in Turin, each detailing how to get to the other; Jeremy Deller and Howard Giles’s film re-enacting the Battle of Orgreave during the 1984  strike against pit closures; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s film Plages, exploring the “felt experience of time” in a city; Joachim Koester’s photos of Poland’s wildwood relic, Bialowieza Forest; Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s photos of planes waiting in airports.

  This last, in the Heterotopias & No-places room, exemplifies the difficulties of the subject and our ability to be clear and articulate about it. The photos “at first appear perfectly banal”, yet are “absolutely worthy of a second look”, for their “formal beauty and … compositional balance”. They look [to me] like banal photos of planes in airports, that by themselves say nothing clear or articulate about ‘place’. A conversation with the photographers is probably necessary to understand them.

  There is in fact a ninth room, in which the two authors, Joseph Koerner, and Simon Schama are talking. It is worth listening in – if only because it brings us back to the frustrating nature of the enterprise. For instance, for Schama, “beaches aren’t places. Beaches are non-places”. They are peripheries; but a few seconds later, “for me… the shore… is a place because of my endless re-experiencing of my childhood memory of playing there.…” The conversation had just toyed with the thought that “place doesn’t exist without memory”.

Perhaps that is what [some] artists are doing: making places by doing something in them, to define them, and [as it were] impose memories on them. [Art does seem to be activity: perhaps taking a photo isn’t in itself art.] A problem with this, of course – and it applies to much besides art – is that memory is personal. ‘Collective memory’ probably should have a different noun. We truly share places only to the extent that we share memories of them. In Room 9, they’ve just said as much.

Thames & Hudson, London, 2005, 298pp., pbk., 273 illus.,
£14.95, ISBN 0-500-93007-4.

Martin Spray

[Landscape & Arts nr 34-35, 2005]

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THE SNOW SHOW

Lance Fung

Carpet, paint, paper, … wood, stone… glass…. The contents list of a recent interior designers’ guide* shows the range of materials available for our use for walls, floors, and decoration. Not quite the whole range: you won’t, for instance, find ice, or snow!

Frozen water has come back into fashion as an art medium: icicles-and-spit, monumental sculptures, mazes, and dinner-table decorations show some of the potential for cold creativity. Alas, as southern Britain drifts, climatologically, down towards the Med, we here are losing the opportunity to sledge, build snowmen [snowpersons?], or dig cars out of drifts.  For those with really insatiable longings for ice, the British Antarctic Survey, with the British Council, supports an Artists & Writers programme, hosting two visitors each year. For lesser longings, there is Finland. Snow show is a record of what 17 artists, each partnered by one or more architects, did to enjoy the remote north in 2004.

The teams were established by curator Lance Fung, for whom the collaboration was as interesting as the materials. Three forms of solid H₂O were used: compacted snow [most of it formed in shuttering, like concrete], ice blocks cut from a lake, and ice made in situ. The products of collaboration included mazes cut in the ground snow, ice boxes, cylinders and panels, lighting behind or embedded in the ice, a cascade of burning vodka, and some impressive translucent walling. Cold , hard work– but fun!

A few examples: Kiki Smith and Lebbeus Woods placed lights beneath circles of metal embedded in the ice of a pond – “painting with light”. Lothar Hempel and Studio Granada put traffic lights and chained bike in a steaming pond to [it says] get us thinking about definitions of architecture and urban space. Yoko Ono and Arata Isozaki made one of sevral ice block roofless buildings – theirs containing a “mentally disorienting enigma” or maze. The [large!] ‘Iced Time Tunnel’ by Tatso Miyajima and Tadao Ando, with strings of lights, wasto prompt thoughts of timelessness and spirituality. A ‘sociological statement’ was made by John Roloff’s team, by freezing 81 brands of bottled water in 81 shallow excavations in sea-ice. Anish Kapoor and Future Systems added a somewhat whale-shaped structure, coated in bright red ice.

More experimental than such other ice-art celebrations as the Sapporo Festival in Japan, ‘getting you thinking’ was a main intention of several of the teams in the Snow Show. The actual show probably worked well at this. Frontiers of ice and snow art were certainly probed. However, I suspect the book is considerably second-best. After an introduction - less than thorough -  and short synopses of the teams and their creations, each work in turn is presented in photos. Separately, following this, each has a few paragraphs of explanation of its ‘process’. This three-phase structure makes for a bittiness; and also makes a more substantial overview desirable. There is a cool and misty tone to the book. The text is laid over a graded icy blue, which helps feign the context, but doesn’t help the reader’s eyesight. By nature, shapes and structures made of frozen water aren’t the most flamboyant things to photograph. ‘Subtle’ comes to mind - and ‘bland’. One really needs to be there, in the sustaining cold [down to about -55°C].**

Thames & Hudson, London, 2005, hbk., 208pp., 233 illus.,
£14.95, ISBN 0-500-23819-7   

* Cat Martin [2005] The surface texture book, T&H, wire-bound hbk., 256pp., 800 illus., £16.95, ISBN 0-500-51161-6.

  ** A new Snow Show, of five projects, is to be staged at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy. See www.thesnowshow.net 

Martin Spray

[Landscape & Arts nr 33, 2005]

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ELEMENTAL INSIGHT: fire, air, water, earth, ether
Catalogue with introduction by Alex Murdin, & essay by Tracy Warr

Founded in 1854, the British Metrology - or, simply, Met - Office has recently removed its headquarters from Bracknell to Exeter, and in so doing has sponsored a celebration of its longevity. Twenty-seven artists from the English South West contributed to an exhibition,*  taking their inspiration from all things climatologic. This brings into play a subject as old as the hills: the relationship between science and art. Most collaborations and commissions attempting to build bridges between these two ‘worlds’ have left either the scientists or artists unsatisfied, even chastened. One set moaned about inaccuracies or plain obscurities; the other about a lack of imagination.

   In one continuing response to two fundamentals of artistic modernism, process and means, American artists led others out of the museum - not into city streets, but the desert spaces of Utah and Arizona. Here process and means were explored on an industrial scale, to produce Smithson's ‘Spiral Jetty’ and De Maria's huge 'field' of lightning conductors. The creation of such distant pieces ­ few see them with their own eyes - made artists aware again of nature not as something to be imitated but as a life force whose cycles might reinvigorate the blood of modernism after the salesrooms of the 1970s had threatened to commodify it

   "I don't want to imitate Nature but to work like her” .is approximately what painter Paul Klee (died 1944) said. It might almost be a motto for later earth artists. But, Nature as experienced in the mono-climate of an American desert? Western Europeans, above all the British, have to contend with a chameleon climate; here, forecasting has something of the race course about it. But our weather’s unevenness lends itself beautifully to the effects which inspired those great masterpieces lumped together as the Romantic Movement.. "He paints with tinted steam," said John Constable about a landscape by his contemporary Turner. Which is what you might expect to meet at any moment somewhere in these islands….

   The modern re-connection of art with nature may look back to Romanticism; but, as Klee indicated, art need no longer merely record nature: Technology does that better. The fascination today is in isolating qualities of experience - not just of tinted steam, but to create metaphors; process and means. The artists and curators of ‘Art and The Met Office’ have taken up from where the science data end, going beyond the record - of the passage of sunlight or warm front, the cyclical and the arbitrary, predictable and chance occurrence - to try to find a material equivalence in stone, wood, metal or paint.

   While all the artist craftsmen here employ elements derived from natural materials or observation, few work directly from ‘the thing seen’. Only four show paintings. Moreover, there are some novel works made by hi-tech means; ink jet prints or embossed paper. The craft aspect predominates, but in its more sculptural manifestation. Only one of the four ceramicists makes a contribution that one might plausibly describe as a pot. Alex Murdin draws out the inspirational threads in the work well in his introduction to the catalogue.

   On the other hand, a good deal of what is shown here seems to owe at least as much to late 20th century art as it does to original experience or exploration. The apparatus of modernism shows through in places only too obviously. One only has to glance back to the work of English artist Paul Nash (died 1946) to find an example of a convincing individual amalgam of the modern and the ancient.

   Tracy Warr’s excellent essay ‘Weathering’, reproduced as an end piece, has a far greater scope than the exhibition; hers is the big earth art of Smithsonian dimensions, and correspondingly reaches more deeply in to the philosophic realm.

   Mere decoration for the new offices? Why not? In taking this step The Met Office risked something. It is said that one recent New Labour minister placed a modernist painting on her office wall so as to better read the character of those who came to see her. Those who enthused about its qualities she judged as ‘bullshitters’. No doubt there are some who feel the entire ‘Insight’ effort owes more to good PR or easing staff misgivings about moving base than to either art or meteorology. However, we are uundoubtedly facing some very nasty weather facts: even the Ministry of Defence is taking global warming seriously as a possible trigger of future world tension. Perhaps the money might have been better spent? On the contrary: one might argue - fervently hope - climate change is an imperative which must energize the minds and imaginations of the great and the good. To do so it must arise as an issue in all our national and international fora, both scientific and artistic.

The Met Office 2004, pbk., 72 pp, 56 illus., unpriced, no ISBN.
Available from the Devon Guild of Craftsmen <elemental.insight@crafts.org.uk>.

* Exhibition curated by Alex Murdin, 2004.

Barry Larking

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A FIELD GUIDE TO SPRAWL

Dolores Hayden with aerial photos by Jim Wark

Zooming alligators! this is a handy introduction to some curious ways of using the land. It begins with a short, sensible, introductory essay, and ends with an extensive, largely American, biography. In between are about fifty aerial photos of types of urban sprawl to be found splattered across the landscapes of the U.S.A., each briefly explained. It is like a catalogue of gargantuan works by some megalomaniac land-artist. If you want to see how pretty patterns on a developer’s plan translate into soulless ticky-tacky on the ground, or how brutal the rape of the land can be, or how well the project to tarmac from New York to Los Angeles [or, indeed, John o’ Groats to Land’s End] is going, this Field guide is worth a browse. Keep it on the coffee-table to frighten visiting C.P.R.E. or National Trust members…. They will find ‘big boxes’, for instance, which are up to 250,000 square metres of commerce on one level under one roof, ‘lulus’, the sort of locally unwanted land uses that nimbies, bananas [build absolutely nothing anywhere near] and nopes [not on planet Earth] can’t stand, and ‘zoomburbs’ that splurge over the land even faster than ‘boomburbs’.

  Arizona’s zoomburbing Sun City - like a whirling disc spilling out fragments as great as itself - ends the book’s selection. It begins with two ‘alligators’, or prospective developments that weren’t actually realised. One exists as bulldozed dirt roads strung along the contours of  Colorado hillsides; the other is a seemingly endless rectilinear grid of roads scraped across New Mexico drylands. Wildness has lost again….

   But… The thought is dangerous, but seeing some of these aerial views -  or, indeed, those in many of the recent spate of  ‘views from above’ books - is to see some remarkable, intriguing, and often beautiful, patterns we have drawn on the land. They may destroy naturally beautiful landscapes, mock the notion of ‘sustainability’, and make it almost impossible to establish the ‘community’ for which they are intended, but some of these developments - at a distance, from above, experienced only as pictures - surely  outdo much so-called land-art! Not just in terms of scale. I’m not pretending there is usually any such artistic intention behind what is built [I guess there sometimes is, and it would be interesting to hear about them]: they are criticised because they are sprawls, commonly heartless, usually eco-disastrous, and - on the ground, when you remember they are real - so often ugly from either grotesqueness or tediousness..

   And they are saddening: and one feels so angry at the rape. However, we should not pretend that here is something that happens only within the American Dream, or that it happens only in ‘advanced’ civilisations. Think [say] of the scale of the ancient scrapings that make up the ‘Nasca lines’ and drawings in the Andean desert which ‘read’ to us only in aerial view. And then note the comment of  Sir Tipene O’Regan, one of New Zealand’s Maori leaders, which probably has worldwide echoes: “I shudder to think what my … ancestors would have done, had they bulldozers.”!

[This is a modification of a review for Ecos - a review of conservation, journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists. Some of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s publications of splendid aerial photos were noted in Landscape & Art nr. 30 p  24. For Nasca/Nazca, see e.g. www.crystalinks.com/nasca.html  . What might the Nasca ‘artists’ - or, indeed, the Moundbuilders [see T&H Roundup]  - have done, had bulldozers been to hand?]

W.W. Norton, N.Y. & London, 2004

hbk, 128pp, $24.95, 0-393-73125-1..

  Martin Spray

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Earthworks ­ Art and the Landscape of the Sixties 

Suzaan Boettger

Land Art has been described as the most exciting art activity of the last third of the 20th century. Critic Jonathan Jones recently described “the seemingly inexhaustible epic of American art” as ending in the 1970s with the work of Robert Smithson. Boettger’s book provides a broad historical context in which to test these views. It is an epic in itself, a life-and-times approach to not just Smithson - as dominant a presence in the book as in the sixties - but of all Earthworks artists. Among the book’s dust jacket assertions are that it offers a comprehensive history of the Earthworks movement in the U.S.A.; that it corrects popular misconceptions about the relationship between land artists and the ecology movement; and that it is scrupulously researched.

As an effective, broad and in-depth history from the mid-sixties to 1973 it more than lives up to its claim. The opening chapter focuses on the seminal importance of Oldenburg¹s Central Park Hole but also gives prominence to the work in Europe of Jan Dibbets at St Martins, Long in Bristol, and to the Arte Povera exhibition in Genoa. As well as this geographic range there is a cultural breadth and a powerful political dimension. Boettger places the art of 1962 in the context of Carson’s Silent Spring, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Dylan¹s A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall. Vietnam, the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations and the Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil serve as the backcloth for 1968. The Hole becomes a foxhole in Vietnam, an anti-war symbol, whilst the art is Smithson’s shell in the socio-economic ocean of the sixties.

On the matter of environmental misconceptions, notwithstanding the contemporaneous relationship of the Earthworks with the growth of a popular environmental movement, Boettger rejects any notion of teleological connection whilst conceding that “it was easy to construe Earthworks as the art world’s answer to the ‘back to nature’ movement”. Despite Smithson’s observation that “Earth Art could become a visual resource that mediates between ecology and industry”, Boettger makes clear that he was not an environmentalist. Smithson himself admitted that he took art out of the gallery “without any appeal to nature”. Earthworks were “the antithesis of nature, the essence of the artificial” according to the critic Elizabeth Baker in 1976. Boettger also has little time for the idea that by pushing the envelope of the gallery Land Artists subverted the market economy of the commercial art world, pointing out that dealers and galleries simply “went along with the displacement of art to the environment”.

The book is not without error, especially when it strays beyond familiar American shores; but Boettger’s research, and her refusal to rely on secondary sources, is impressive. Her visit to the Zijlstra family, for example, allows her to set the record straight with regard to the selection of the site of Broken Circle / Spiral Hill, and the nature of the site itself - a working quarry and not a site of industrial degradation as usually claimed.

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TUSCANY - ARTISTS - GARDENS

Maria Sgaravatti, photos Mario Ciampi

Thames & Hudson, London 2004

hardback, 240 pages, £40, ISBN 0 500 51195 0

Turning the pages of this well-illustrated book, I daydreamed - of blue-sky, rain-free summer afternoons disturbed only by the occasional bark of a dog across the valley. Not necessarily in Tuscany… but here is another sample of fine gardens to grace the coffee-table, and to be browsed for inspiration or daydreams. It consists of  30 cameos of gardens designed or modified by  “some of the most renowned contemporary artists in the world” who have lingered or settled in the region. Each is represented by several photos, and a short essay, and there is a useful, brief biography for each artist. There is also a one-page introduction. 

 We are occasionally reminded that gardens “are for people” - but these ones [as so often in garden books] appear to be for the plants, sculptures, and of course the camera…  but not a human in sight. I find such Marie Celeste landscapes disconcerting. These gardens are stages, and need actors to animate them. Each is, as it were, for a different play: about the personal history, character, and memories of the person[s] who made or modified it, and their individual reactions to the landscape and traditions of Tuscany. It is the book’s purpose to display and explain the unique places that result.  

It succeeds in part, mainly through the 230 photos. The translated text is sometimes a little awkward, and generally rather ‘flat’; moreover, the essays tend to be bland, saying little about the motivations and inspirations of the artists - or of other people’s reactions to their creations. It would be very interesting to know….

The artists, a third Italian, include Niki de Saint Phalle, whose 22 glittering giant tarot card figures enliven [or intimidate] their woodland setting; Frances Lansing, painter and intaglio printer, who tried to “Do no harm to the landscape” in making her tufa-block walled ‘hortus conclusus’; land-artist Alan Sonfist, who planted concentric tree and bush circles to echo a traditional planting form; and painter Maro Gorky, whose estate-scale garden displays husband Matthew Spender’s terracotta figures. Beverley Pepper has reshaped a glassy slope into a theatre. Ian Hamilton Finlay has “scattered bronze objects amid the trees.” “No other artist can claim to have investigated Nature so thoroughly…” is surely hyperbolic! What does he make of Daniel Spoerri’s belief that “all men fear nature, and do their best to tame, prune and uproot it”? One of Spoerri’s works is ‘Chambre no.13 de l’Hotel Carcassonne Paris’ in bronze. Meanwhile, Marcello Guasti’s ‘Poetry in Little Things’ is an engaging, anarchic, collection of planters, sculptures, pots, and… just ‘things’. It is a pity the text leaves so much to be surmised.

Martin Spray

Reproduced with permission from Garden Design Journal nr. 37 February 2005, published for the Society of Garden Designers by the Landscape Design Trust, www.landscape.co.uk

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