CRITICISM
EXHIBITIONS
Thursday, February 4th, 2016
“A Sanctuary for Weeds”: Social Ecologies at the Gallery at Industry City by Rebecca Smith Social Ecologies: Curated by Greg Lindquist, at the Gallery at Industry City (Rail Curatorial Projects, with support from Industry City and Dedalus Foundation) December 10, 2015 to February 21, 2016 254 36th St, Brooklyn, socialecologies@brooklynrail.org Thursday to Sunday, 126pm and by appointment.
Ellie Irons, Sanctuary for Weedy Species (A Winter Respite for UrbanDwelling Plants and Humans), 2015. Soil, plants collected in or sprouted from Bushwick’s urban soil, didactic material. Dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Taylor Dafoe.
A contemporary landscape painter himself, curator Greg Lindquist offers in this important exhibition an array of strategies to address the notion of environment, ranging from simply acknowledging a deep connection with the earth to documenting ecodestruction to making art that ventures remedies to the crisis. “Social Ecologies” comes out of Lindquist’s interest in the “intertwined relationship between humans and the natural world [that has existed] for centuries,” as he put it in an essay in the November 2015 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, stressing that we now face an existential crisis brought on by runaway climate change. In fact, humans have been significantly altering the biosphere since the early hunters wiped out the big fauna and agriculture began its slow degradation of the soil stock of the planet. There is no Garden to go back to; humans must create a balance with nature never before imagined or achieved. The 1970s saw artists exploring new ideas of their relationship with nature. Robert Smithson introduced an investigation of art and place – and how each informed and identified the other. He took the work of art out of the gallery and located it in an outdoor setting, and at the same time he put a signifier of the natural site into the gallery, thus demonstrating what he called “nonsite”. He located his art not just in a natural setting but in the earth itself, penetrating soil and water. Charles Simonds is represented by enlarged stills from “Birth,” a film in which he symbolically gives birth to himself out of the earth – specifically, the pit in New Jersey where Simonds has for a long time extracted the clay to make his art. Simonds’ art is about culture from the ground up; the ground is essential for the building of culture. Britishborn Rackstraw Downes declared he had no “New World sense of the antithesis between unspoiled nature and human culture; a landscape to me is a place where people live and work.” (Quoted by Stephen Maine in “Rackstraw Downes: Infrastructures”, Art in America Nov. 2010.) His pictures are horizontal scans of a view, including finelytuned details, that construct pictorial space with curved lines creating a picture that feels distorted compared to traditional landscape painting. We are clearly shown that the human vision of nature is anthropocentric. Downes simultaneously makes a passionate pitch for objective empirical reality as he paradoxically displays its biases by curving space to establish the artist’s viewpoint. An art that successfully combines these “oppositions” pins viewers with a double vision that puts the onus on us to form our own understanding of what is going on.