Public Art Review issue 03 - 1990 (spring/summer)

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BY 'OSCAR' W I N N E R S SUE MARX & PAMELA C O N N Filmed over a 2-year period, this documentary shows the fabrication and installation of 15 commissioned works of art in the 13 stations of the new People Mover in downtown Detroit. Nationally acclaimed artists working in neon, bronze, ceramic tile, Venetian glass mosaic and enamel on metal discuss their work. Original music a d d s energy and excitement to the film which is narrated by Sam Sachs, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

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Public Art Affairs supports artist-and community initiated projects in two categories: R&D Stipends: $800 for research, design and planning of public projects; Public Projects: up to $4,000 for creation of temporary outdoor projects.

Deadline: May 7, 1990, for projects taking place during 1990.

Applications available: F O R E C A S T Public Artworks, 2955 Bloomington Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 5 5 4 0 7 ( 6 1 2 ) 7 2 1 - 4 3 9 4 Free workshop for applicants; year-end catalogue published; free services provided to project participants. Funded in part by Jerome Foundation.

Commission Opportunity

MS&R Meyer Scherer & Rockcastle are pleased to be the Architects for the Devil's Lake Water Facility, and are proud to support this issue of Public Art R e v i e w

The University of Arizona has established a public art program. There are seven major building projects that wil have art work associated with them.

Opportunities exist for existing pieces, the creation of new sitespecific works, and, in s o m e cases, collaborations with architects.

To be considered for commissions, interested artists should submit: • a resume • a representative group of about 10 slides with descriptive information.

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Submissions will constitute the initial basis for consideration of artists through December 31, 1990. For more information contact Peter Bermingham, Director and Chief Curator, University of Arizona M u s e u m of Art, Olive and S p e e d w a y , Tucson, AZ 85721 602-621-7567.

SPECIAL EARTH DAY ISSUE 1870-1990

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Essays

I n t r o d u c t i o n

Public Art for the EnuiTonment April 22 marks Earth Day 1990. As a set of events with organizing potential, writes author Robert Gottlieb in the March/April issue of Tikkun, Earth Day 1990

Public Art and the Environment Restructuring Art: Are Aesthetics and Social Responsibility Compatible?

Dwelling in Nature Public Art and the Environment Restructuring Art: Are Aesthetics and Social Responsibility Compatible?

By Elyn Z i m m e r m a n

8

By Suzi Gablik

By Hafthor Yngvason

By Elyn Z i m m e r m a n

10 2 8

By Suzi Gablik

10

could strengthen the notion of environmental politics as a politics of mobilization

Functional Art

at the local level.

But for the artists and activists chronicled in these pages of Public Art every day is earth day. This third issue of Public Ai r Review

Review,

focuses on "public art

for the environment." Public artists, working on the local level, whether Buster Simpson in the streets of Seattle, or Cathey Billian at New Mexico's Rio C h a m a , are using their personal awareness of our unbalanced relationship to nature to create public art that, they hope, will stimulate citizens to think and act.

Their methods differ. As public artist Elyn Z i m m e r m a n writes in her essay in this issue, some artists focus attention on environmental and political issues through the use of m a s s media and advertising, while other artists are hands-on activists and educators, such as Mierle Ukeles or Viet Ngo, working directly in contaminated environments. Still others attempt to establish for viewers a sense of place.

Editors Cheryl Miller and I, and Project Director Jack Becker, have gathered together profiles written by a national cross-section of writers, describing public artists and projects located in all regions of the country—all relating to the earth, the air, the water. Many of these artists focused their work's attention on our environment before the relatively recent renewal of ecological concern on a massculture level. Through their work, public artists take their place in the larger, national dialogue about our survival on the planet.—Laura

Laura

Weber is a Minneapolis-based

writer, editor and

Weber

historian.

Out of the Trashcan The "garbage art" of Mierle Ukeles A Talk with Barbara Grygutis and Peter Warshall Viet Ngo: Infrastructure as Art

Conversations With the Earth: Profiles of Lee Deffebach, Betsy Damon, and Dominique Mazeaud T o Discover Value; To Value Discovery Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison The Power of the Mississippi Buster Simpson: An Activist Art of Urban Ecology

Rio C h a m a (N.M.) Visitor Center to Challenge Visitors "Eco-art" at Wisconsin's Hirsch Farm The Art Garden of Winifred Lutz Art in the Parks (Mass.): Close to the Bone "Avant-Garde and the Landscape" conference—April 1989

Public Art Review is made possible with support from the Dayton Hudson Foundation, on behalf of Dayton Hudson Department Stores and Target Stores: Horncrest Foundation: Meyer. Scherer & Rockcastle. Ltd.; advertisers, subscribers and FORECAST members.

FORECAST is additionally supported by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, United Arts, Tribune/Cowles Media Company, private foundations, corporations and individuals.

By Margaret Carde

4

By Rebecca Solnit

By Sandra Price

12 14

By Ron Glowen

16

By By By By

6 9 15 17

Cheryl Wagner Craig Johnson Joyce P. Schwartz Marty Carlock

By Bruce N. Wright

21 17

KEEP PACE WITH ART IN PUBLIC SPACE

PUBLIC ARTWORKS

Statements expressed in Public Art Review are those of the authors and not necessarily the views or opinions of FORECAST Public Artworks, its members, or staff. Unsolicited materials cannot he returned without an S.A.S.E.

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f t C . — n e w s briefs

F O R E C A S T

© 1990 FORECAST Public Artworks ISSN: 1040-21IX

By Charlotte Lowe

By Cheryl Miller

Topics

A Publication Of

Co-Editors: Laura Weber and Chery l Miller Design and Production: Shannon Brady Data Entry: Rhonda Teich Project Assistants: Carolyn Zniewski. Peggy Herlache, Project Coordinators: Anthony Desnick, Philip Rickey. Scott Nelson. Kathryn Nobbe Accounting: Stacey Peacock Executive Secretary: Barbara Heyen Marketing Assistants: Joan Olson and Richard Richter P.A.R. Committee: Jack Becker, Jennifer Casey, Fuller Cowles, and John Walley P.A.R. Advisors: Mildred Friedman, Lane Relyea, Peter Boswell, Linda Mack. Thomas Rose, Lenny Dee, Loren Niemi, Stuart Nielsen. Regina Flanagan, and Scott Wende FORECAST Board: Jack Becker, Fuller Cowles, Pixie Martin. Scott F. Nelson, Scott M. Nelson, Fred Harding, Ellen Valde, Mary Sullivan Rickey. Diane Katsiaficas, Ann Gallick, Mariann Johnson, Peter Boswell Printer: Shakopee Valley Printing Acknowlegements: Special thanks to all the contributing editors, writers, artists, photographers and volunteers. Thanks to Fred Harding, Patrick Condon, Mark Valentine, Ross Williams, Dorothy Waltz, Larry Splett. Pixie Martin. Barry Eisenberg. Sculpture Magazine, and Earth Day organizers.

Dedication: to environmentalists everywhere and the globe we call home.

7

Public Artists as Activists

PublicArtReview Project Director: Jack Becker FORECAST Executive Director: John M. Walley

By Cheryl Miller

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SPRING/SUMMER

1990

1

PUBLIC ART REVIEW

SPRING/SUMMER

1990 2

Diane Katsiaficas Housewarming: 4 Common Ground. 1989. Wood and recycled paper. Photo by George Vasquez. Courtesy of De Cordova Museum.

Seated in the midst of an extensive wood in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the De Cordova sculpture garden is within a mile from Walden Pond, where the philosopher/poet Henry David Thoreau lived and wrote the bulk of his famous book, Walden.

When Minneapolis artist Diane Katsiaficas was commissioned to do a temporary, site-specific installation at the Massachusetts sculpture garden last October, she responded to Thoreau and the philosophical legacy of the area as well as its physical attributes. What resulted was a creation of a philosophical site within which to explore our relation to nature.

Conceiving her work as a public art project, Katsiaficas sought to bring the community to an awareness of the natural environment by engaging local residents both in recycling and collecting materials for the structure and working with her on the fabrication. The structure they built consisted of a frame made of sticks from the woods, clothed with handmade paper. Collected at the museum, the local library and schools, the paper which was pulped and then cast at the site, included private and public responses to the area in the form of letters, personal notes, children's drawings, and Katsiaficas' personal copy of Walden, as well as newspaper clippings and catalogues.

The artwork, called House Warming: A Common Ground, was inspired by a section from Walden where Thoreau talks about building a chimney for his house. "The Chimney," says Thoreau, "is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground and rising through the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent." 2 Rising to the heavens, alone and independent, Katsiaficas' simple structure repeats the forms of old chimneys still standing in the wood, like indestructible monuments to plain living. At once a chimney and a shelter—a hearth—the human scale of her construction and the soft light gleaming through the wax-covered paper give it a warm, domestic feeling.

Knowing Katsiaficas' preoccupation with ecology, or, as she has put it more precisely, "with our drift away from basic life patterns: our increasing isolation from nature and each other," we are reminded of Lucy Lippard's etymological remark that "the word, ecology, from the Greek oikos, means "the science of the home."' If we are drifting away from nature, Katsiaficas' project at the De Cordova was to bring us back home, as it were, to our "common dwelling" as Thoreau called Nature (thus fulfilling, perhaps, what Thoreau's friend and neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson required of art, that it "domesticate" us." 4 Literally made up of the community's private and public responses to their environment, the construction is, as its name also indicates, a creation of a common ground, where the terms of our coexistence with nature can be apprehended.

that filled the rooms were not what they seemed. Maxwell used the song of the mockingbird, imitating the calls of other birds in a never repeating pattern, to underscore the irony of the simulation: it may be natural, but one can't be sure.

A chain-link fence surrounding the island fragment further emphasized the artificiality of our relation to nature, or of the limits to our experience of it. Baring the viewer from participation, it functioned like Ewing's Wilderness Screen, and in the reverse of Katsiaficas' hearth, to reveal the extent to which our exile is self-created.

The exploration "of the intangible boundary between man-made things and nature" is an integral concern of Japanese artist Ritsuko Taho in several site-specific projects. An artwork she created at Artpark in upstate New York in 1986 was particularly telling because of the "nature" of the site.

"Artpark is almost an embodiment of the American ambivalence toward nature," as New York Times critic Michael Brenson has noted. Located on the Niagara Gorge, seven miles north of Niagara falls, Brenson continues, "the park has something of the grandeur and romance that drew many artists to the region in the 19th century. As recently as the late 1960s, however, the park was a dumping ground, primarily for highway materials, but also for chemical waste.""

Acknowledging the nature of the site, Taho built several monumental structures out of paper bales prepared for recycling. These monuments—"composed," as Taho has said, "of countless references to our daily lives: i.e. business forms, canceled checks, packages, beer cartons, newspapers, etc.,"—were, along with some smaller elements, laid out over a large area to create a new landscape. As the components of Japanese Gardens, re-creating the elements of nature as symbols of spiritual facts, the elements of the spoils piles were recreated in Taho's constructions as literal imprints of our life-styles. The "addition of new layers of people's lives to the ground," is Taho's own description of her emblematic action.

Exposed to the natural elements, without a shelter on this barren ground, the paper bales soon started their own process, turning dark and wrinkled like a person growing older.

The materials had their own life, and if this life was marked by a decay, it had the naturalness of the fall season to it.

If a moral must be drawn, it is a reminder that however arrogant our stance to nature may be, our lives are inextricably bound up with its forces. But then again, if this is an admonishment it must also be taken, in the light of McKibban's theses and Taho's positive presentation, as a reassurance.

This reassurance of our ultimate place in nature may also be found in a large-scale reclaimation project which Nancy Holt is carrying out in the New Jersey Meadowlands.

Along with a host of landscape architects and engineers, Holt is converting a 57-acre landfill into an artwork. Surrounded by train tracks and the state turnpike, the 100-foot Another work at the De Cordova sculpture garden, Lauren Ewing's The Wilderness Sc reen, draws a striking picture of the rupture in our relationship with nature. Consisting high landfill is possibly the most visible landfill in the country. Holt's effort goes beyond mere beautification as a magnificent act of reclaiming the site for Nature. of a classical Greek colonnade, set against the woods where they meet the cultivated grounds, the sculpture aptly expresses our ambivalence to nature by offering an entryHolt, who has been in the forefront of environmental art for a long time, will bring her way into the woods at the same time it bars entry. Wide steps invite the viewer to well-known iconography to the project. As if to re-orient us by establishing our place in approach the colonnade, but the columns are too close to let the viewer pass. the cosmos, (affirming Thoreau's notion that we need not feel lonely since our planet is in "You are fighting back the Wilderness," is inscribed on the lintel of Ewing's sculpture the Milky Way '), she plans to align every element of the artwork with the celestial bodies The threat is that if this fight is won it is the end of "Nature," or of our relation to it. It is at astronomically significant dates. Eight gravel paths, radiating out from a center point on the top of the landfill, running between small mounds of earth on the edge and down the not so much some unrecognized, distant regions that are at stake here (for every part of the earth's surface has long been conquered), but the "wilderness" of the iptural environ- sides, will be aligned north-south and with the angles of the sunrises and sunsets on solstices and equinoxes—the sun itself being seen on the horizon as if framed by the earth ment around us: the natural laws that are continually being executed "next to us," as mounds and tall steel posts. Two large mounds on the south side of the landfill will be Thoreau puts it. 5 pierced by pipe tunnels aligned with the two brightest stars of the night sky, Sirius and This is a fight that the naturalist and writer Bill McKibban has argued we have Vega, the last time each year they are seen in the sky near the horizon. already won—or, if you look at it from another angle, already lost. Not only have we polluted our environment, we have, he suggests, changed the very meaning of "NaIn a very different setting from the beautiful grounds of De Cordova and on a very ture"—we have deprived it of its independence: different scale from Katsiaficas' simple construction. Holt's project thus embodies some of the"Romantic" concerns with "Nature" that are also found in Katsiaficas' piece. If the forces of "Nature" have been domesticated to a point that they have become, as McKibban We have changed the most basic forces around us.We have changed argued, as artificial as our urban environment. Holt's artwork is an attempt to reverse this the atmosphere, and that is changing the weather. The temperature and the order. Rather than lamenting the loss of authentic experience, she has sought to make rainfall are no longer entirely the work of some uncivilizable force but experience possible by domesticating the human animal—bringing it back, as it were, to instead are in part a product of our habits, our economies, our ways of life.6 an intimate relationship with its natural environment. To the city-dwellers of the neighboring New York, Sky Mound, as the artwork is called, will be a place to re-connect with We may not control nature yet, but we have put our mark on its every manifestation. natural laws obscured by the city lights, laws that may be illustrated but not experienced And if our mark is everywhere visible, Mckibban insists, nature is not "Nature" anywithin the planetarium, the laws of the cosmos. more. Try to enjoy a heat wave in the middle of the fall and you will be constantly reminded that it is "a man-made phenomenon—an amplification of what nature intended, or a total invention. Or it might be a man-made phenomenon, which amounts to Hafthor Yngvason is a Boston-based freelance writer. the same thing." 7 low." especially as Cavell connects these notions Notes Environmental artist William J. Maxwell illustrated the fact of this condition suggeswith Wittgenstein's concepts of "Home." in ' H.D. Thoreau. Walden. in Walden and Civil tively in a recent installation at the experimental gallery I.D.E.A., in Oak Park, Califor"Everydayness as Home." This New Yel UnapDisobedience, ed. Owen Thomas. NY 1966. p. 61. nia. Known for his site-specific environmental projects, Maxwell has been working over proachable America. (Albuquerque 1989). pp. 32 ' Ibid.

1 Lucy R. Lippard. "Gardens: Some Metaphor', for a 40. a span of several years on a series of works dealing with the fragile environment of lakes Public Art," in Art in America, Vol. 69, No. 9 (Nov. ' Thoreau. Op cit., p. 90. and rivers. The installation. Nature Works: Simulation, was the outgrowth of these * McKibban. Bill. "The End of Nature," in The New 1981) p. 138 concerns. It consisted of a multi-media simulation of a natural habitat of a river island, 4 Yorker. Sept. I I , 1989, p. 70.

Emerson. R.W.. "Art," in Essays. First Series, including branches and other natural materials as well as artificially created solar ' Ibid., p. 74.

Boston 1883, p. 337. In thinking about the pictographs, lights, and sound recordings. As one looked at the installation one became " Brenson. Michael. "Sculpture Tests Its Muscles connection of Katsiaficas' project lo the philosophy Outdoors", in The New York Times. Sunday. of Thoreau and Emerson. I have found it helpful to aware that the environment shown was incorrect in small, disturbing ways, such as September 6. 1987. consider Stanley Cavell's interpretation of "what strange groupings of things or unnatural colorations and shapes. And the natural sounds they call the common, the everyday, the near, the

* Thoreau. Ibid., p. 89.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW

SPRING/SUMMER

1990

3

PUBLIC ARTISTS AS ACTIVISTS

Conuersations uilth the Earth A Profile of Three Artists' Work By

M a r g r e t

C a r d e

Lee Deffebach In its heyday as a 19th century mining camp, Tuscarora, Nevada had a population of 10,000 people, including 1,000 Chinese. As the mine declined, so did the population. Some homes were abandoned, some were exchanged informally using quit claim deeds. 1 Today Tuscarora, located on a hill about 50 miles north of Elko, Nevada, is a town out of time. A motley group of sheepherders, writers, potters, painters, miners, hunters, geologists, ranchers, cowboys, school teachers, retirees, tourists and rock hunters call Tuscarora home. There is no gas station, no grocery store; a small post office is the only community building.

Because the drive for supplies is such a long one, residents long ago learned to reuse what was there. Most of the original houses were sided and roofed by cutting up empty five-gallon oil or gasoline cans. Old aluminum lithographic plates nailed with square, forged nails to aging wood walls, help preserve wood and provide insulation against the wind.

It is still possible to read the articles and headlines from yesterday's news. (The plates, at last word, can still be purchased at the counter of the Elko Daily Free Press for 25 cents.)

Inside, old wash tubs are converted into sinks. Weathered signs bearing advertising from a long-ago period of affluence, reenforce sagging layers of wallpaper. On an old stump in Lee Deffebach's back yard, a visitor can play chess with chess pieces custom-made from washers, bolts, rings and nuts no longer needed by abandoned machinery.

Tuscarora is a recycled town. Lee Deffebach, an artist just back from Italy on a Fulbright scholarship, was one of the people to rent and then buy property in the former mining camp. From the beginning, Tuscarora flavored her art. A reviewer describes her 1966 show: "A venerable coffee pot and an oil can of ancient vintage perform a sensitively rehearsed skit from an era not too long forgotten. A lunch tin in sprightly balanced caster wheels suggests an R.F.D. m a i l b o x . " 2 Wintering in Salt Lake City, Utah, Deffebach spent her summers in her studio in Tuscarora. Sometimes she brought back delicate landscapes whose western light is reminiscent of Italy.

Sometimes, as with the "Alph Series," her art flowed like a river, pouring color

across large canvases.

In 1985, Deffebach produced a show called "Painted Tin Wall Pieces." According to Deffebach, "Discarded and rusted tin was all around the countryside this summer when I began to work: this show represents my conversation with the things around me." Unlike the 1966 show, many of these tin pieces were unidentifiable. She explains: "I enjoyed the process, a synthesis, using immediate objects and putting them together with what was at hand—scraps of wood, wire, available hardware. Spray painting seemed to best show the material, highlighting the surface of the tin, its detail and the intricacy of its folds."

The functional wiring, bolting, and joining of decaying, rusting pieces is a metaphor for the way Tuscarora residents have, for years, recycled old, discarded pieces of metal, wood and history for new uses in their current lives. Def-

febach's highlighting with spray paint is a metaphor for the battle Tuscarora now fights.

On August 11, 1989, Horizon Gold Shares of Evergreen, Colorado, filed quiet title against the property owners of Tuscarora. The mining company, under an 1872 Nevada law, has the power to condemn property. Their proposal is to expand an open pit mine, effectively destroying Tuscarora.'

Deffebach and other residents of Tuscarora are fighting the mining company. "Irreplaceable Treasures, in Defense of Tuscarora," (a 1989 show of tin wall pieces held in Las Vegas, Nevada), is Deffebach's way of "highlight-

ing what is there:" a town whose treasure is its history—not some grand moment or battle, but a process of human interaction, over time, with a place. The tin wall pieces, joined with care using bits of "wood, wire and available hardware," contain the delicate nostalgia of a fading object. They are "conversations" between an artist, Lee Deffebach, and a place, Tuscarora, Nevada. But now, as a show, these constructions are conversations between viewers and their own issues with garbage, decay, commercial profit, and memory.

The tin pieces are like the town on a hill. Their former usefulness over, they had been abandoned. Then the people of Tuscarora, finding beauty in a life of dialogue with this place, carefully wired and patched the decaying pieces until there was new life. The tin pieces and the town remind us in the present, of our connection to the past.

As Deffebach says "I can stand on Main Street by the remnants of the old water office in Tuscarora and almost feel the bustle of those thousands of people who lived here at the turn of the century.

I can see their dreams in the tailings' piles on the hillsides, their pride in the carefully built homes, and their sorrows in the old cemetery."

mountain valleys and through deep canyons. Cleansed by air and sun the river renews itself along its journey.

However, by the time the Roaring Fork River joins the Colorado River it is polluted, unfit for drinking, bathing or fishing. In only 55 miles of travel, passing through six towns along the way, the Roaring Fork has changed from cleanser to polluter.

Artist Betsy Damon has been concerned about the fate of water. Her 1985 work, a 250-foot paper casting of a dry river bed in Utah is called A Memory of Clean Water. The paper pulp, made from commercial flax and fibrous plants found in the area was poured into the creek bed.

When the dry mold was pulled from the earth, it had imbedded the scars and worn patterns of sw' f tly flowing water—water which no longer flowed.

"We live in a time when our children may never know the taste of naturally clean water," said Damon. "Already it comes in pipes with chemicals added.

Many people don't even trust city water; they buy their water in bottles from a store." With its earth-tone colors, its "bleached animal bones, fragile bird's feathers, slivers of mica and variegated pebbles," 4 A Memory of Clean Water, is a landscape-sized work which is so beautiful that it inspires us to look beyond the despair of what we have lost — t o remember the beauty of what might still be.

Damon has been invited by David Floria to participate in the Aspen Art Museum's Biennial Sculpture show, opening in June 1990. The Roaring Fork River flowing through Aspen, diverts through the Museum grounds. Damon is constructing six water wheels, made from glass and metal, along this miniRoaring Fork. Each water wheel will represent the location of one of the six towns along the 55-mile course of the river. The water wheels, standing as a symbol of life, will reflect and celebrate the water.

Betsy Damon

Damon is analyzing the water which flows out of each town in order to determine which pollutants are actually added by which town. The symbolic water wheels will bear a list of pollutants.

The entire environment will reveal what has been concealed: that the life force of the cleansing river is being threatened by the death force of pollutants.

The Roaring Fork River begins life tumbling from Longs Peak deep within the Colorado Rocky Mountain National Forest. Clear, cold snowmelt, the water tumbles over rocks, winds its way across

The Aspen Art Museum environment is a running j u m p for Damon's Mississippi River proposal, called, "Keepers of the Waters," to be installed in Minnesota

by April 1991. As Damon says, "Minne-

sota has the most water of any state in this country and contains the headwaters of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi River is the largest basin and water resource in the United States and is notoriously polluted."

Damon proposes a multi-media event involving the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, Concourse Art, politicians, artists, activists and hopefully, the Walker Art Center, to focus on cleaning up the Mississippi River, from its headwaters to Minnesota's borders.

She muses: "Maybe the state of Minnesota will become a model of what can and needs to be done to keep water clean."

Damon's water garden will involve a cast or covered copper mold, taken from a stone riverbed in northern Minnesota.

Water will circulate through the piece, tumbling down the walls and across the floor of the Humphrey Institute on the University of Minnesota campus, which straddles both banks of the Mississippi.

Peep holes in the river will provide glimpses of underground water. The illusion of underground water would be made with mirrors and drawings. A video installation of Damon's video, Only One River will reveal this unseen world of water beneath the earth. Although the video documents the hydraulic cycie of water, (from rain to earth and back again to cloud), it places special emphasis on the animation of underground water.

In addition to the copper riverbed and the Only One River video, the water garden will have water misters and lights to animate the air. The entire work will be a metaphor for the inter-connectedness of all water systems, air, surface, and ground water.

The Humphrey Institute will host workshops on becoming a water activist and on organizing around water issues.

Artists from the Twin Cities will be invited to make pieces addressing water issues. Dance performances by Wendy Morris will take the theme "we come from and are made of water." Damon herself will hold workshops called "Returning to Community: the Artist as Activist." She explains: "I am most interested in artists returning to community and using their visions and unique way of seeing things to assist in finding new solutions."

"Minnesota," says Damon, "has a unique history for preserving common resources. Before European settlers arrived, the Native Americans, people of the plains, from as far as 1,000 miles away, considered the quarry at Pipestone to be valuable. The place was sacred to all.. The tribes agreed not to war over this resource. Rituals were performed for entry and for removal of the stone needed for the sacred pipe. If, while quarrying stone, an Indian encountered an enemy within Pipestone, he would pass in peace.

The value of the natural resource was more important than wars between people."

Dominique Mazeaud When I was growing up the Santa Fe River was full. In the summer you couldn't see across the river to Alameda Street because the trees were so tall and the brush was so thick. In the winter the water would freeze. There was so much water that we used to play ice hockey in the winter. When they put the dam in up there, the river down here died. I think people dump things in the river because they see that it is dead. I guess the city needed the water, but the dam killed the life of the river. —Carlos Cervantes, whose family has lived on the Santa Fe River for 300 years.

"How did I get this idea to clean the river? I spent a day in Taos with a young man, a traditional Navajo, and we had a very open-hearted discussion. He was really sharing his pain about what we'd done to his people. What could I do in front of this very genuine, justified pain and anger? We tried to take a walk by the Rio Grande River, which flows between Santa Fe and Taos. Everywhere there was so much trash on the banks where we should have sat and had a wonderful communion with nature and with each other. And right then and there I had the vision of this project called "The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River.'" 5 Since September 17, 1987, Dominique Mazeaud. armed with large trash bags (provided by the city's Department of Environmental Control called Santa Fe Beautiful), has, once a month, performed her cleansing pilgrimage on the Santa Fe River. Sometimes she has been joined by friends and curious strangers. The pilgrimage begins with a circle of participants. Mazeaud offers a prayer for the river.

water, through you i was horn without you i could not live i pray i remember why you are i pray that i always respect you like the river of my own being 6

environment and the planet itself." * In the two and one-half years that Mazeaud has been performing her monthly river ritual, there has been an evolution. At first there was a clear intention to be political. Mazeaud even recalls an idea to fill pink, heart-shaped trash bags full of river garbage, label them "ART," and leave them on the steps of the city hall.

Even one year into the project, her December 1988, press release carries the language of a missionary: "She hopes that it (The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande) will act as a catalyst for a better awareness of the growing problem that trash represents to our Earth and the necessity for the comeback of serious recycling, the awareness about trash disposal."

But her experience of the river has changed the direction of her own path.

Being in the river has called her to a childlike awareness of play. Recalling that her own childhood was without play, she found that walking among grasses and brushes taller than she was, made her feel like"Alice in Wonderland." A pair of little girl's Mary Jane shoes, a rubber toy lion, and even a goldfish swimming in a small trickle below a thin sheet of ice; each new discovery brought her closer to Nietzsche's description: "The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes." g

With this recognition of relationship to the river, Mazeaud begins by picking up a can from the river and then another, "on and on; it's like a devotee doing rosaries..." 7 There is something surreal about this pilgrimage. First of all, depending on the needs of the city reservoir which withholds the river water, the "river" is often either dry or just a trickle. The farther the riverbed is from the dam, the drier it is.

For practical purposes, the river is dead.

She began in earnest to form a Downstream, the fish and frogs and river dialogue with the river. Instead of picking grass can no longer live since the water the trash clean, she now found that to the left. river, some things were not such an insult Second, Mazeaud calls her performas others. An iron pipe might add minerance, The Great Cleansing of the Rio als, a rug remnant hugging a rock had Grande. The Santa Fe River is a tributary become home to new grass, bugs and of the Rio Grande River, a great river spiders. system which runs all the way from The river began to test her. "I Colorado, through New Mexico, Texas discovered that I needed to prepare and on into Mexico. Instead of beginning myself for going to the river I needed to in the middle of the Rio Grande, Mazeaud sit and ask myself: who am I today and decided to begin at the headwaters of her what person is going to the river? People home river. Her energy and her walking would say, when will you be in the river? is, however, always directed toward the I would say 11:00. And then I wouldn't Rio Grande. be there. I would need more time before I And finally, why would one person was ready, or I would be called to a attempt to clean a river? The task is different place. This was very hard...to impossible. Even Mazeaud admits that her say one thing and then be doing another. activity makes little difference to the But people are not machines. It is not an cleanliness of the river. "It's not that I effective ritual if it is dictated by external claim to be able to clean the whole river. timetables."

Once, out of curiosity, I re-did a section in And then, the unthinkable happened. a very frequented part of a park, and there "For the first time last month my 'prewas as much garbage as the time before." great cleansing' meditation directed me to To explain her ritual, Mazeaud often go and be with my river and NOT do quotes Jose Arguelles: "...art can be a anything. The instructions were clear, form of enlightened behavior that is 'Don't even take one garbage bag.' What constructive, done out of compassion, not did I do then? I spent my time sitting and only for human beings, but also for the rocking by my beloved." 10 (continued on next page)

And so, from political art action to just "being," Dominique Mazeaud has allowed "her" river to lead her. "The path is by walking," she says. "I followed my vision (to clean up the river), but was open to seeing that a large vision must be filtered through an awareness of the present moment. There is an organic quality to the process of discovery. My new vision is to learn to 'be' fully in relationship to my river." She asks: "What is beingness? It's becoming conscious of one's being as a point of love. The river is my beloved, and I am her beloved. Together we dance, we are one.""

Eros and Psyyche Eros is an ancient, spiritual term referring to the process of putting oneself in right relationship with the forces of a larger-than-human universe. In Mazeaud's terms: "It's a feeling of awe that I have for being in this river which is part of the web of the rivers of the world...and at the same time an awareness of the world that just one drop of water contains."

The concept of Eros, in the ancient Greek world, became a god who fell in love with Psyche, (or Soul), a beautiful, human woman. Because of her need to know him beyond the secret darkness of their marriage bed. Psyche lost Eros.

Psyche could not bear the loss of her beloved. Unable to accept her punishment, she committed herself to the search for Eros. Her journey tested her in dangerous places. She was asked to do things which could only be accomplished by surrendering to the help of a larger than human, natural world Her path eventually led her to the underworld. She was to bring the secret beauty hidden in death's darkness up, up, up to Aphrodite, goddess of love and relatedness.

Our culture is peculiar in its denial of death, its abandonment of the things that have died. Many cultures, acknowledging that death is a transition to new life, give symbolic meaning even to grotesque details of the decaying process. For example, in the Middle Ages, people observed what seemed to be the sponta-

Dominique Mazeaud, The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River, art/life performance ongoing each month since September 1987.

Photo by Michel Monteaux.

neous appearance of worms in the intestines of recently dead bodies. They believed from this observation that the soul or life of the dead person had become a worm. Thus the lowly worm became a visual reminder of a human being's spiritual center, the soul.

In turning away from death, we miss the small details that mark the transition between death and new life Lee Deffebach, Betsy Damon, and Dominique Mazeaud are artists who refuse to accept the loss of Eros. They yearn for a right relationship with a larger than human universe, and for this gift, they are willing to look at the full face of death.

I can see Psyche in Lee Deffebach, searching the hills around Tuscarora for abandoned pieces of tin; joining them together, a gift to her town: Eros. I can see Psyche in Betsy Damon, pressing her flax into a dry creek bed; an artist's kiss which yields the memory of clean water, her lost Eros. I can see Psyche in Dominique Mazeaud, returning to the river, month after month, in search of Eros "one drop, that's all I need/to see the

golden play of wind and sun/embracing my river's skin." 12 For Lee Deffebach, Betsy Damon and Dominique Mazeaud, the new journey may lead forward, tyit not until it has gone backward to the past and inward toward the soul. By creating a human dialogue with the resources and history of this planet these artists may well teach us a way of recycling our personal and social garbage. They may just change the direction of our culture and our lives.

Margaret Carde is an artist and writer currently living in Santa Fe. Notes 1 The whole history of property ownership in Tuscarora is incomplete since Elko County lost the 1911 town map sometime after a 1938 WPA survey of the courthouse vaults. See Arnold Schraer, " Battle for Tuscarora," Citizen Alert, Fall 1989.

2 George Dibble, "Whimsy, Wit and Charm Mark Deffebach Show," Salt

Lake Tribune, Sunday, Nov. 6, 1966.

Schraer, op. cit.

4 Elinor Gadon, "Betsy Damon's 'A Memory of Clean Water'," Arts Magazine, Summer 1987.

5 Dominique Mazeaud, "Riveries: Paying Homage to Mother Earth," Design Spirit, Winter 1989, p. 8.

6 Dominique Mazeaud, My Riveries (unpublished manuscript—Mazeaud uses no capital letters in order to emphasize the flow and interconnectedness between words and rivers...and all things.)

'Ibid.

8 Milenko Matanovic, Lightworks, p. 145.

9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, (Penguin Books), p. 55.

10 Dominique Mazeaud, unpublished letter to Suzi Gablik, 1990. " Ibid.

12 Mazeaud, My Riveries.

Rio Chama (N.M.) Visitor Center to challenge visitors By

C h e r y l

W a g n e r

now entitled Piedra Lumbre, after the original land grant on which the Ghost Ranch Living Museum sits. It translates as "rock of light."

She was also invited to participate in a conference on American rivers in Washington, D.C. and became increasingly convinced of the possibilities for creating partnerships within the environmental community which could include creative projects.

A private New York collector contributed funds for Billian to return to New Mexico to experiment with patinas at the Shidoni Foundry in Tesuque, and upon their invitation, she presented studies for the piece to the Ghost Ranch Living Museum Board of Directors at their January, 1989 meeting.

By providing a radically different model for a visitor center, Cathey Billian's Piedra Lumbre has the potential for restructuring our traditional notions of environmental interpretation. The visitor center will be a multi-media, luminous sculptural environment, forming a sequence of visual "events." The 18' x 24' environment will be approached through an adobe-sculpted entry passage at the lobby of the hand-built adobe museum. The interior is composed of iridescent-etched patinated bronzes, sand-blasted glass, native copper, luminous cables, and fragSince the late 1970s Billian's work has explored the ments of translucent minerals indigenous to the area. These interaction of nature and the built environment. She has merge overhead in sequences defined by color-filtered light been fascinated by river canyons and volcanos, creating reflecting off walls patinated with mica. The sculpture will be indoor sculptural installations of metals, minerals, light, Cathey Billian, Material Study for Piedra surrounded by a music composition of natural sound samplings and sound. Her work is concerned with identifying the Lumbre" (Rocks of Light), 1990. of the river's four seasons. power of place and translating it into a vocabulary of form Photo by Michael Tincher. and materials An assistant professor at Pratt Institute in Says Billian, "I'm not interested in recreating a reality. I'm New York, she has been a National Parks Service artist-ininterested in observing and excerpting aspects of that reality and residence on the Colorado River and at the Delaware Water Gap, balancing field work from that, constructing a dense synthesis, a piece of river theater, in a sense." with her studio work in New York City.

Piedra Lumbre represents a widespread collaboration between federal agencies (BLM, USDA Forest Service), the nonprofit conservation sector (GRLM, Audubon The raft trip down the Rio Chama gave Billian a vision of a new kind of visitor center, Society), and the private sector (US Air, Pratt Institute, Shidoni Foundry). Says Lara "not a generic visitor center, but a powerful installation piece, so that as people go out Morrow, Director of the New Mexico Arts Divisoion, "It is not only incredibly imaginative, on the river they have already arrived psychologically at a point of awe and anticipabut it is truly a public work, bringing together people from many areas of work, philosotion." Experiencing the river in this way inspired innovative approaches to environphy and place." mental interpretation and fostered inter-agency cooperation Because of its proximity to the river, the Ghost Ranch Living Museum in Abiquiu was ultimately selected by the group, and accepted the call to accommodate the Rio Chama public information center.

Cheryl Wagner is Director of Colorado's Art in Public Places Program.

Back in New York that fall, Billian did preliminary studies for the Rio Chama project, After a political and bureaucratic struggle that lasted over a decade, New Mexico's Chama River (Rio Chama) became, in 1988, the 119th American river to be designated "wild and scenic." This act protects the unique riparian canyon, which flows between the cities of Santa Fe and Taos.

Officials of the numerous agencies who share management responsibility for the river next had to grapple with the ironic question of how to manage increased visitor traffic to the river due to its new status as "wild." [The agencies are the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service, the Santa Fe and Carson National Forests, and the Ghost Ranch Living Museum (GRLM).]

Artist Cathey Billian was spending that summer of 1988 in Santa Fe. She became involved in this dialogue while visiting the BLM office looking for maps of the area. She left the office with both the maps she came for, and an invitation to join representatives from the environmental agencies on an upcoming raft trip down the Rio Chama as an artist-in-residence.

F U N C T I O N A L ART

Out of the Trashcati By

C h e r y l

M i l l e r

Consider this newspaper. Chances are, once you've finished reading it, you'll leave it on the bench for someone else to read, or circular file-it along with your lunch scraps.

Consider your coffee cup, the contents of your pocketbook, your shoes, the chair you're sitting on. These too, in due time, will enter the great stream of once-cherished, now-discarded objects, stuffed into trashcans, then tossed into huge garbage trucks to be pounded together with broken watches and rotting vegetables, before being buried, acre after acre, in landfills, or burned in enormous incinerators.

We don't often contemplate the fate of our possessions after they leave our hands: with seemingly inexhaustible space to sweep them into, we haven't had to. But now, available space is becoming exhausted. There are tougher environmental standards about what and where we dump, and more states and communities are resisting dumping by outsiders.

Because all this results in prohibitively high costs, garbage disposal can't be taken for granted any longer.

In a place as consumer-intensive as New York City, the flood of garbage has become a critical public issue. Eight million New Yorkers generate 25,(XX) tons of garbage every day. Most of this goes into the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. This landfill, at 4,000 acres, is the world's largest; at 500 feet high, it is one of the highest points on the eastern seaboard. In the next few years, Fresh Kills will reach capacity, and New Yorkers, who are required by law to dispose of their garbage within the city limits, will be face-to-face with their waste and its problems.

No artist has fastened a longer, more penetrating gaze on the relentless flow of garbage and the efforts to contain it than Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In 1969. she issued her "Manifesto of Maintenance Art," a proposal to exhibit her daily sweeping, scrubbing, cooking, and mending as a work of art. Ten years later, she became an unsalaried artist-inresidence in New York City's Department of Sanitation and began to produce public art pieces, primarily about sanitation workers. In Touch Sanitation (1978-1980), she thanked and shook the hands of 8,500 sanitation workers. She followed garbage collection crews, miming their movements, in Follow in Your Footsteps (1978-80). In AH Year Long Worn Out Glove Project (1984), she created a sculptural piece from work gloves used by garbage collectors. City Machine Dance (1985) was a ballet performance by ten garbage trucks.

In a recent interview with Public Art Review, Ukeles explained her motives for working in and through the Sanitation Department as her commitment to a particular strategy for public art. "I wanted to locate myself in an environmental system as close to day-to-day operations as possible. I believe that public art should develop very close to the bone of daily reality and should always have to confront other perceptions of reality."

Everyone who has a stake in New York City's disposal system—citizens, politicians, janitors—pays close attention to her artworks. She finds this wide group of critics invigorating. One janitor took her aside after seeing one of her shows and chided her for leaving out what he considered essential details of toilet cleansing "If you want to talk about this," he told her, "you have to talk about all of it."

Ukeles has recently broadened her investigations from maintenance workers to the waste stream itself and its cultural and ecological consequences. Many of these investigations come together in Flow City, a permanent installation at the newly-constructed 59th Street Marine Transfer Station on the Hudson River.

The transfer station is a way-station for garbage en route to Staten Island. It is the noisy, dangerous heart of the city's solid waste system. Trucks converge here every hour of every day and night to dump tons of garbage into barges bound for Fresh Kills. When completed in 1992, Flow City will serve as a passageway for people to enter the work area for a closeup look, something that distinguishes it from other public art. Says Ukeles: "Flow City is radical artwork in that it is literally a penetration of public art into an operating work facility, not the lobby but the work area itself. In this way. the artwork opens a passage for people to come right into the work area without getting run over or interrupting work."

Three components comprise the piece: a pedestrian rampout to the work area, a glass bridge over it. and a wall of audio-video monitors that will juxtapose the sounds and images of the surroundings with other information about garbage and the wider ecological crisis.

Viewers will enter the work facility through the Passage Ramp, a block-long pedestrian corridor lined with 20-foot alternating panels of crushed glass, newspaper, batteries, and other recyclable materials. Since these materials were themselves reclaimed from the garbage, they seem to signify the "Great Flux" and our immersion in it. A glass wall on one side of the passageway allows the viewer to contrast the continuing usefulness of the recyclables with the tons of nonre-

cyclables being hauled to the landfill.

From the Passage Ramp, viewers will enter the Glass Bridge, a 40-foot x 17-foot platform suspended over the tipping floor. Here trucks disgorge their loads onto waiting barges. Here, too, the idealized city bumps up against its grim reality: the Manhattan skyline—quiet, static, pristine—visible beyond the grimy, relentless tumult below.

At one end of the Glass Bridge will be the Media Flow Wall. Twenty-four audio-video monitors record and interpret the natural and built surroundings. By juxtaposing images of the Hudson River's billows and eddies with the sounds and images of waste disposal (both largescale urban systems like New York's, and private, individual acts each of us could take), Ukeles intends to enlarge our view of maintenance work as integral to the natural functioning of the biosystem.

Cameras at Fresh Kills landfill will show work progressing on a landscaping project there. Viewers can keep tabs on efforts to create beauty and meaning atop the debris.

Mierle Ukeles speaks with urgency and excitement about the garbage crisis in New York. The urgency comes from her belief that it will transform society; the excitement comes from her determination that we meet the crisis with spirit and creativity.

Consider recycling bins. In the past two years, several states and communities have passed mandatory recycling laws.

Soon, millions of recycling bins for glass, paper, plastics, and metal will appear on streets and in homes. These should be more than ugly, dumpster-like manifestations of our lack of interest or grudging acceptance of our environmental responsibilities. Ukeles urges artists to help invent forms and solutions that have the

integrity and beauty of, say. Roman aqueducts.

To Ukeles' mind, solutions to the garbage crisis can only be found if the narrow arguments about the location of disposal sites are expanded to broader cultural discussions about the waste we generate. Out of this belief, she has accepted a request by the Municipal Art Society in New York to curate a series of exhibits and symposia on garbage. Titled "Garbage: A New Era in Public Design," the symposium will run from June to September and is meant to gather janitors, public officials, artists, engineers. package designers, small recycling entrepreneurs, and disposal industry representatives to discuss the full gamut of disposal issues. Three questions will be addressed: (1) can we manage our waste; (2) whose garbage is it anyway; and (3) if we can deal with waste in a responsible way, can we do so with great creativity?

Believing that artists are uniquely qualified, not so much as enhancers as inventors and problem-solvers, Ukeles hopes that the symposia serve to bring public officials and public artists together. "What we create here should be our Arc de Triomphe that professes our determination to turn this crisis around.

Since we've finally come down to this, why not try to resolve it in a great way?

Why not let it be a stimulus for great design?"

More information on the confer-ence can be obtained by writing to Tracy Calvin. Director of Programs, Municipal Art Society, 457 Madison Avenue, New York City 10022.

Cheryl Miller is a St. Paul-based writer and editor with special interests in environmental issues and the arts.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, City Machine Dance. May 15,1985, Rotterdam, Holland. Photo by Jannes Linders. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER

1990 7

ESSAY

Public Art and The Environment The word "environment" describes any portion of the earth: urban, suburban, rural, or primeval.

When we say we want to save the environment, or that we are concerned about the environment, we are actually talking about many things at once: preserving the integrity of wilderness areas and their ecologies; promoting the fertility of the soil as a renewable resource; solving existing problems of air, water and soil pollution; finding alternatives to the exhaustion of natural resources and energy supplies; rehabilitating blighted urban areas; and most important, solving the problem of uncontrolled human population growth.

These are enormous issues, global issues, that defy and intimidate nations, let alone individuals. Nevertheless, it is up to us, collectively and individually, to solve them.

Wendell Berry reminds us that saving the environment is a planetary problem, in that all places are interdependent and that no place can be completely healthy until all places are.

Countless causes are important, even crucial, yet we are too easily overwhelmed if we think only on a global level. How, Berry asks, can a single person do anything to heal a planet?

The question that must be addressed, he suggests, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet's millions of human and natural environments and neighborhoods. In order for each of us to be effective, the desire to preserve the planet has to be reduced to the scale of our competence— to the scale of our caring and personal involvement and to our creativity. 1 In a public arena, the diversity of the forms of public art serve a different and complementary function in regard to environmental problems. There are a number of artists whose works focus attention on environmental and political issues (which are usually inseparable), by using the means of mass media and advertising: billboards, electric signage, video, and all types of printed matter.

Often the intensity and veracity of the message is so powerful it both informs the viewing public, and provokes that public to take concerned action. These didactic works are often complex and multi-layered, using images and text in various combinations. In works of this type, issues such as sex, death, politics, ecology, ethics, and personal experience run into and around one another. The net effect is the very powerful realization that all of these issues are totally intertwined and deal equally with our private as well as public lives.

As powerful and important as these forms of public art are, there are still some counterproductive aspects to them.

Shoving pain, fear, homelessness, ecological disaster, or nuclear threat at the viewer can be intimidating and numbing. And sometimes it is simply exploitative. Another limitation of this form of public art is that if the work tends to look like an ad, or assault the viewer as an ad might, it could be treated like an ad—tuned out, ignored or discounted.

Other artists tackle the environmental and political issues of pollution, land degradation and restoration as activists, in a hands-on way, by working in contaminated or exploited landscapes directly, getting local people involved in their projects and thus making them activists as well. In creating such engaging situations, the works of art

PUBLIC ART REVIEW

Consequently, throughout the '70s and '80s, many public agencies engaged artists to address problem open urban spaces. What was new here was the idea that an artist (alone or working in a collaborative team), would actually create the open space: plazas, courtyards, parks and gardens; or would address major components of larger public sites such as stairways, bridges and gateways. Other urban programs give city dwellers opportunities to enjoy the outdoors through gardening or by participating in games and recreational activities. But it has been the intent and responsibility of public art programs to help transform otherwise inhospitable and anonymous public indifference to the local environment into concern and care for it.

What generates caring? In part it comes from simply experiencing the place—using it, making it familiar. But caring also has a more subtle, spiritual dimension to it which is elicited by the qualities of the place: its properties of imagination, humor, beauty, or strangeness; or its capacity to educate us, or to put us in contact with forces of nature.

These qualities are precisely what the individual creativity of an artist can confer. Whether a work of art is in a museum or in a public space, its expressive properties are what move, amuse or delight people. When these expressive qualities are present in a public work, or inherent in a site, they infuse the space with meaning and content, allowing for a deeper personal experience of the place.

My hope would be that, by changing people's relationship to their immediate surroundings, art might operate on a direct and local basis, to help foster the changes in awareness that will be necessary if we are to come to terms with the larger environmental issues confronting us.

In 1972, Alan Gussow wrote about preserving the environment and about creating a sense of place. Almost twenty years later his thoughts seem especially pertinent in relation to public art and the environment :

educate as well as activate. Making a general public aware of ecological problems and at the same time engaging the specific local population in the restoration of their land is the perfect example of what West Germany's Green Party exhorts: "Think globally, act locally." The works of artist/activists go beyond specific environmental issues by helping people to overcome their sense of powerlessness. They inspire others by their example of helping local communities to care for their environment, emotionally as well as physically.

A third form of contemporary public art is largely urban and also seeks to engage the public directly in a sense of place. The history of this work has its point of departure in the urban renewal efforts of the '50s and '60s that were often homogenizing and formulaic—making one place look and perform like another.

Highway access was brought to town centers, parking lots and structures were added, and for flavor, a few street trees and lamps were put up. What was lost.

SPRING/SUMMER

1990 8

however, when old buildings were torn down to make room for the new parking structures and other anonymous contemporary buildings, was the historical context of the town . Highways and their access ramps cut through and divided towns, causing more than curing urban blight.

A turning point occurred in 1966 when Alexander Calder's sculpture, La Grande Vitesse, was installed in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It had an enormous success and a great impact on the urban renewal efforts of that city. This success was both a blessing and a curse. On the downside, it started the industry that has come to be called 'plop art,' where large, over-blown object sculpture was placed in a plaza or garden, or alongside a highrise building, without much thought to siting, meaning, or use of the space. The good news about the success of Calder's work was that it made clear that an artist's imagination and creativity could transform a space and have a powerful effect on a local population.

"There is a great deal of talk these days about saving the environment. We must, for the environment sustains our bodies. But as humans we also require support for our spirits, and this is what certain kinds of places provide. The catalyst that converts any physical location—any environment, if you will—into a place, is the process of experiencing deeply. A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings. Viewed simply as a life-support system, the earth is an environment.

Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places."2 Since 1979, Elyn Zimmerman has been active in the field of public art. She has realized major commissions in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Miami, and currently is completing projects in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Tampa.

Notes 'Wendell Berry, "The Futility of Global Thinking," Harper's Magazine, September 1989 2 Alan Gussow, A Sense of Place, San Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1972

"ECO-ART" AT WISCONSIN'S HIRSCH FARM By

Craig

J o h n s o n

In the rolling hills of southwestern Wisconsin near Hillsboro, an art experiment is underway on the property of Judith and Howard Hirsch of Glencoe, Illinois. Starting last summer, small groups of artists began visiting the 300-acre farm to explore how they can help preserve the environment through alternative forms of public art.

The property was initially purchased in 1980 "on impulse," says Howard Hirsch, "as a natural work of art in its own right." Although the Hirsches considered collecting windmills or using the farm as a place for Howard to try to create his own artwork, a chance occurence in the mid-1980s brought about the first and only piece of sculpture installed at the farm to date.

Howard Hirsch had commissioned Dan Yarbrough to create a sculpture for his yard in Glencoe, only to discover that it violated local zoning ordinances. Rather than abandoning the project, Hirsch decided to have the 40-foot-high water-jet "rainbow" installed on his Wisconsin property. In 1985 Yarbrough and a group of assistants lived together at the farm while they built the piece on a secluded acre of land. But after its completion, a second unforeseen circumstance once again altered the nature of the farm.

Howard Hirsch explains: "Over a period of time, what was a private piece of art became a public piece because the elm trees in front of the piece died. So all of a sudden in the middle of farm country I had this gorgeous big sculpture that you could see from two miles away in some places.

"As time went on, I realized that the process of making the piece, giving the artists the beautiful countryside to live in, was very refreshing for me, the artists and the community. I started to think about what was appropriate for the area, and I started to ask people what kind of art would be appropriate there."

Hirsch met Russell Panczenko, director of the Elvehjem Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was interested in acquiring a large outdoor sculptural piece for the museum. Panczenko suggested that they discuss their interests with Minneapolis' Walker Art Center director Martin Friedman, and he advised them to sponsor a conference exploring possible solutions to their respective problems. The subsequent two-day symposium of leading art administrators held at the Elvehjem in spring 1989 recommended that Hirsch bring artists to the farm to help determine the best use of the land without requiring them to create art. (The administrators included Mary Beebe, University of San Diego; Jennifer Dowley, Headlands in Sausalito; Patricia Fuller, consultant, North Carolina; David Furchgolt, International Sculpture Center, Washington, D.C.; and Cesar Trasobares, Art in Public Places, Dade County, Florida.)

As a result, the Hirsch Farm Project was initiated in the summer of 1989 with two groups of carefully selected artists visiting the farm for ten days to share in a dialogue aimed at producing ideas for the farm. The first group consisted of photographer Robert Dawson, poet Will Deatherage, sculptor Truman Lowe, environmental artist Karen McCoy and art historian and curator Gerald Nordland, who facilitated. This was followed by a second group that included sculptor Mags Harries, sculptor Anna Valentina Murch, and sculptor Richard Rezac, with Andrew Stevens, curator of prints at the Elvehjem as facilitator. Both groups were oriented to the geography and natural resources of the farm and surrounding area by local experts, then took part in group dialogues as well as informal tours of the area and interactive events with selected members of the surrounding community.

"We wanted to conduct the program as scientifically as possible," says Hirsch. "The second group was not told of the results of the first group; we had artists from the West Coast, East Coast and Midwest, male and female, a variety of artistic disciplines. And the

Panorama of the Hirsch farm, Hillsboro, Wl, site of an "art experiment."

Photo by Robert Dawson.

«** Down on the Hirsch farm: (I to r) Bob Dawson, photographer: Howard Hirsch, farm owner: Judy Hirsch, farm owner; Gerald Nordland, curator; Truman Lowe, artist; Karen McCoy, artist; William Deatherage. writer. Photo by Bob Dawson.

results were surprisingly alike."

The groups emphasized environmental concerns, recommending that the farm set examples of ecological farming practice and allow only temporary art works to be created on the property. They also suggested that artist visits be extended to allow sufficient time to study the environment and respond appropriately to issues of global importance.

Hirsch received their input enthusiastically: "From the artists' comments, I am adjusting use of the farm to accomodate environmental issues, such as reduced grazing, fencing off vulnerable areas, protecting water sources. But how do I make fencing that isn't objectionable? Or how do I fence artistically, or keep cows out of the woods without fences? There are many different ways of doing these things."

These issues will be further addressed this summer in the second year of the decadelong project's focus on both the effects of the farm experience on the artists and the artists' effects on the farm and surrounding community. "This year's efforts will focus substantially on eco-art issues, such as how artists can be used as creative problem solvers," Hirsch said."We also hope to foster interdisciplinary collaborations and exchanges."

While Hirsch hopes that the farm project will act as the seed of a new approach to public art that will spread to other regions and organizations, he emphasized that private funding was critical to the success of the first year's project.

"When we met at the Elvehjem, and I explained what I wanted to do—asking artists to come to the farm without asking them for a specific result, only asking them for their thoughts—they said that no public agency would do that because there's no end product.

"For a long time everyone thought I was nuts because I was doing a program that didn't have any result. But the artists didn't stop talking and working from the time they arrived. I think it probably changed the way they think about and create their art, for it was an activity that got them out of the mainstream for a short term, possibly redirecting their thoughts."

Three artists from last summer—Dawson, McCoy, and Lowe—have already submitted proposals for farm works that are presently under consideration by Hirsch. Up to three more new artists will visit the farm this summer for stays of varying length depending upon their particular interest and needs, with continued emphasis on group dialogues into the nature of public art in the 21st century.

"I think large-scale sculpture as we now know it is going to be a thing of the past," Hirsch asserts. "Public art is going to have a different form. How different it will be, I don't know, but that's what I'm experimenting with. I think the artists are going to show us."

The Hirsch Farm Project is challenging artists to create public art that confronts environmental problems traditionally considered outside the realm of art. Only time will tell how successfully artists will respond to the challenge, but the very fact that Judith and Howard Hirsch are supporting an art process that focuses on ecological issues stands as an admirable demonstration of responsible and innovative art patronage.

Artists, organizations or individuals interested in participating or assisting in the Hirsch Farm Project may contact Laurie Winter at The Hirsch Farm Project, c/o Landmark Management Company, 3375 Commercial Avenue, Northbrook, Illinois 60062, 708-480-2000.

Craig Johnson is a free-lance writer from St. Paul. He is associate curator for the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER

1990

9

heart oift of every experience in contemporary culture.

Nor is art some ancillary p h e n o m e non, struggling to o v e r c o m e these exploitative, instrumental forces; it is heavily implicated in this ideology, and we can no longer ignore our own participation in this jwpjj&s®?^' and practices of the art world are modeled on the same< power and profit that sup main dominant w o r l d ' place anji k e e p th patriarc high capitalism rolling., sucked inN cultural addi^ftprm—-to > oney possessions, | alism the same "business-as-usual" psychology of affluence that is now threatening the ecosystem in which we live with its d y s f u n c tional values and way of life. It is all a single system manipulating the individual into the spiritually empty relationship of the producer to the product.

The mechanism doesn't require that art do m u c h , just reproduce the e c o n o m i c will-to-power of the dominator system.

Nevertheless, the "transaction" mentality is highly skeptical of anyone w h o tries to break out of its credo of success. Start By S u z i G a b l i k being out of touch with the cultural ideals of e c o n o m i c success and competitive striving, start challenging these ingrained perceptions of how we understand our place in the world, and you threaten to break the barriers that keep us locked in denial: at stake is our personal identity in relation to a particular view of life that our culture has m a d e available to us. As I read recently that $127 will bring s o m e o n e wrote m e in a letter recently, one a year's subscription to the New York " O n all fronts I see that dramatic change City Art Gallery Price Watch, a journal is necessary, and that it is happening, but in which readers can learn the prices not without pain. Your ideas challenged being asked by New York galleries and some people at the conference to the find out whose work is selling and point of standing neck veins and skin whose isn't, which artists are getting the blotches." Neck veins and skin blotches best reviews and whose works are likely notwithstanding, I cannot avoid feeling to increase in value. that the aesthetic f r a m e w o r k as it is Last spring, I went to the 10th currently practiced in our culture has run annual Chicago Art Fair at Navy Pier, its course as the ascendant vision, and my first visit ever. It's certainly one of that the cultural f r a m e w o r k for the future those places for testing whose credenbelongs to another vision. What that other tials are in order, by seeing whose vision might be about is the subject of my " a c h i e v e m e n t s " are being "displayed." current book. The Reenchantment of Art. Since I am writing a book about what it Most people are aware that the means to be a " s u c c e s s f u l " artist system isn't working—that it is time to working in the world today, I thought I move on and to revise the destructive should check out this professionally myths that are guiding us. We have been approved scenario for success that has p r o g r a m m e d into a belief-structure that is emerged over the last decade in our losing its feasibility as a social form culture, where each artist is viewed as a because it is destroying the integrity of separate self, equipped with a set of selfthe earth, but we c a n ' t recover without interests, along with the "de-realization" being open to transformation: recovery is of everything else. the willingness to m a k e a systems shift.

Art fairs are self-enclosed, selfYou might even say this change of conreflexive totalities in which art exists sciousness has become the moral without any need of justification, and imperative of our time: dehypnotizing without the irksome question of values ourselves from the way our culture or purpose. If there was any art there directs us to perceive the world, easing that was, shall we say, socially conourselves out of the exaggerated m o d e s cerned, it would be sealed off in that of striving, dominance and mastery that setting and converted instead to the ends have begun to destroy us. of economic individualism, whose go; Acculturation, according to Willis has always been to maximize >n his book, Global Mind never to serve societal ks exactly like hypnosis, the marketplace as centr; ow up in any society have symbol of the buyer ggestions all their lives there was no engagal hypnotized" to audience to speak of•ihie way the culture sellers, and anonymol nences is consensus-trance observers, such as my^l ' jprqgrams much of our behavior. The about individual artists challenge of the next few decades will be careers and individual to overthrow this hypnosis; as Harman w o r k s — t h e kind of "parts states, the real action today is changing which values only objects, while fundamental assumptions, so that we can ignoring the context, or field, around leam to transcend our culture. O n c e we them. become truly conscious of how we have This has b e c o m e the socially condibeen conditioned to follow a certain tioned f o r m of interaction we now have program, we can begin to surrender some with art. Every time we place art into the of these distorted cultural images and role context of the marketplace, we give life models for success. T h e possibility then to that idea as a relational phenomenon. arises for m o d i f y i n g the framework and It represents a relationship with life, in not just being immersed in it. Obviously which success is measured by income, this kind of paradigm-creating, or consumption and brand names. Content context-creating, will not be accomis irrelevant because the market is the plished by individuals w h o are so meaning, defining and determining the attached to the present system of values purpose of the work. T h e same goals of that they may be unable to d o this power and profit which have now w o r k — s i n c e the task involves changing become the formula for global destruco n e ' s mind about almost everything. tion are crucial to our society's notion of What are the implications of such a success—it is a logic that is eating the

Restructuring Art ESSAY •-!

-V

What strip raining is to '

M

nature the art market h a ^ e c o m e to culture.

Robert Hughes*;

Nothing exists outside the marketplace.

Barbaffi

Kruger

I'm questioning the cultural and societal changes in the role of

I'm afraid that if we don't address broader issues in art making we'll be left with an empty bag.

Keith Sonnier

10 PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER

1990

Are Aesthetics and Social Responsibility Compatible?

change in consciousness, then, for art?

One thing is clear: to be able to see our own practice as actively contributing to the most serious problems of our time requires a change of heart. Art which is totally the product of the way of thinking of this society is unlikely to reorient it in any way. Our only hope is to construct a very different sort of integrating mythology. Unless serious efforts are made to reassess our relationship to the present framework and its practices, new patterns won't take hold.

Vested interests, however, will ensure that they are maintained as before.

Until we produce an alternative model, nothing significant will alter. If we want things to change, we will need to evolve new "ground rules" for the future that no longer bear the mark of the imperatives of this culture, where art has become something to fill galleries with, a pretext for putting oneself on display that virtually implies the deletion of all other concerns. So right now, the moral task before us (as I see it) is to identify which approaches to art make sense in today's world, and which are self-defeating or destructive.

The whole framework of aesthetics, as it was constructed by modernism, came out of the objectifying consciousness of the scientific world view; and like scientists in our culture, artists have been encouraged not to worry about the applications or consequences of their activity. I is enough to generate results.

Just as the shortcomings of "objective" science are now becoming apparent, we are also beginning to gercej^sJiajKJhe reductive aspect for art's sake," m ^ T r e r n o v e d art fro any living or social c o n t e x t ^ x ^ n O b a t of " academic art h i s f e f e j system, crippljj influence.

Allan Mc^ rogates, for instanced commentary on what occurs when a guiding truth becomes bankrupt; they exemplify, perhaps better than any other deconstructive work, the paradigmatic inertia of aesthetic codes that have become just another petrified formula for an image-driven society of spectacle.

Mass-produced in assembly-line quantities, they have the "look" of pictures (a surrogate is the reduction of something to its essential characteristics), but there is nothing to see.

By representing the art object in its modal existence as commodity and spectacle, McCollum is simply laying bare the function it fulfills in relation to the culture at large. A crisis of purpose is at stake here, and to quote Jean Baudrillard, "the boil is growing and out of control." Through overproduction and excess the system over-extends itself, accumulates, sprawls, slides into hypertrophy, obliterates its own purposes, leaves behind its own goals and accelerates in a vacuum. "I'm just doing the minimum that is expected of an artist and no more," McCollum has stated. "I'm trying to orchestrate a charade." But even simulations cannot escape the system's ability to integrate everything—because collectors will buy them, dealers will show them and critics will write about them. When art, as Peter Halley puts it, is "reconstituted according to the processes of bourgeois consciousness," the thing that everybody really talks about is how to get a show. Without any socially relevant role to play, the artist has embraced the part as an achievementoriented professional, in avid pursuit of sales and reviews—although these desires, as we know, do not always contain their own fulfillment. McCollum captures it all brilliantly, in a single Gestalt: the intensification of the aesthetic process in a void. In his book The Disenfranchisement of Art, Arthur Danto speaks about the need to emancipate art from its own disenfranchising theories of art. Since what distinguishes aesthetics most precisely is the desire for art free of the pretensions of doing the world any good, we will never arrive at any true as-

sessment of what art can and cannot do, I now believe, until we have deconstructed the assumptions of the aesthetic mode itself.

Exposing the radical autonomy of aesthetics as part of the economic ideology of capitalism as just another tool of patriarchy that helps to perpetuate the dominator system—has been the chief value of the aggressive ground-clearing work of deconstruction. Institutional models based on notions of product development and career achievement merely echo the stereotypic patriarchal ideals and values that have been internalized by our whole culture. The move away from modernism may well be underway, but to truly leave it behind will be possible only when we have evolved another kind of vision than the kind of theoretical vision, premised on mastery, inherited from the Renaissance.

But if the frame is dissolved, then we are released from the reifying tendencies and spectatorial orientation associated with the fixed gaze, and we are in the presence of another vision entirely. Vision premised on empathy rather than on mystery is cognitively spread to the achievement of very different goals.

In September 1967, my friend Dominique Mazeaud, who now lives in Santa Fe, began an art project which she calls The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River. [Editor's note: See "Conversations With the Earth," page 4 .] Once a month, armed with garbage bags donated by the city, she and a few friends who sometimes accompany her, meet to clean pollution out of the river. Part of her work involves keeping a diary, of which the following are some extracts: Nov. 19, 1987. My friend Margret drops me off at Delgado promptly at 9:00 a.m. Because of the snow I was not sure of the conditions I would find but did not doubt a second that I would put in my day. I find a stone warmed by the morning sun which makes a perfect site for my beginning prayer. Yes, I see what I am doing as a way of praying: Picking up a can From the river And then another On and on It's like a devotee Doing countless rosaries.

Nov. 24. Visitors stop by my door and look at a group of objects laid down on a strip of fabric. 'What is this?' they ask.'These are some of the treasures I have collected from the river.' 'You found this little girl's shoes?' 'Yes,' I reply, 'even the two $5 bills...' I really enjoy talking about the river, as if she were my friend.

Mar. 19.

I can't get away from you river In the middle of the night I fee! you on my hack In my throat, in my heart...

We decide to clean the dumping area and set out to work. This is a more delicate operationthan picking up a can, and then another. It's soiled rabbit litters, crates filled with rotting fruit scattered all over, and more. Some of it is encrusted in the ice, some of it has been burnt. As soon as we start stirring, the offensive smell of the decaying fruit hits us and the ashes soil the water...what a mess, but we get to it 'faces down,' so to speak.

July 14. Today I realize that, in fact, it is the first time I am truly alone in the river....I went to the block where, back in November, I not only saw the suffering of the river but also the death of the river.

Just as I could no longer walk on trashed riverbanks without doing something about it, I could no longer be there without transposing my witnessing into some form that people could share. That day I started my 'riveries'...

July 20. Two more huge bags I could hardly carry to the cans. I don't, count anymore....I don't announce my 'art for the earth' in the papers either. I don't report my finds nor my time for the newsletter of Santa Fe Beautiful. All alone in the river, I pray and pick up, pick up and pray.

Who can I really talk to about what I see? I feel the pain quietly, knowing that I, too, must have been unconscious at one time. I have also noticed I stopped collecting the so-called treasures of the river. It was OK at the beginning, but today I feel it was buying into the present system of art that's so much objectoriented. Is it because I am saying that what I am doing is art that I need to produce something?

Nov. 10. I call my river-journal my 'riveries'... Is it too sweet a word for the feelings that my 'river -musings' often bring up in me? Would 'rageries' describe them better? But do I really rage? I have been talking a lot about feeling pain, sadness. Is rage my next step? Would rage affect the way of my work? Would it make me more of an activist than I am?

Would it make me more opened to the community about what it is that I am doing in the river?

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal and called it art, although at the time there wasn't any concept yet in place to explain such an act of transgression.

Today Mazeaud's project is equally startling because it isn't based on a

transgression of the aesthetic codes at all.

The creative relationship is with the internalized feminine rather than the patriarchal aesthetic tradition. It reflects a completely different approach to the world, since it comes from a different integrating myth: compassion. Carlos Castaneda calls it the "path[with a heart."

We have so little experience with making art on this basis that we are unlikely to feel at ease with it. T h i ^ s definitely not art in the fast lane, based on chronic hyperactivity and jockeying for positional importance. It is not just a variation on the old system, but represents a genuine restructuring of the artist's role. The bottom line here is that McCollum's simulations pass more easily as "real" art than Mazeaud's project of picking up the garbage, because McCollum still manages to retain a negative relationship with the tradition of theoretical aesthetics.

The first step in any reframing process is to become conscious of how much the values and dictates of the dominant culture have been internalized.

For once fully conscious of how we have been conditioned to follow a certain program, we can begin to surrender some of these cultural images and role models as personal ideals. The possibility then opens for actually modifying the framework and not just being immersed in it.

As we begin to search for the blueprint that is hidden away in our own work, we shall need to decide whether or not it answers the call. And what is the call? It is, to quote my friend Caroline Casey, "that nothing which is not socially and ecologically responsible make it out of this decade alive." For me, moving away from the competitive modes of institutionalized aesthetics is one way of not perpetuating the "dominator" system—foregoing its rites of production and consumption, its mythology of professionalism and its power archetype of "success." Only then can we begin to evolve a different set of ground rules for the future. But transformation is not just change; the willingness to make this systems shift, as I already said, is the beginning of recovery. It is also the beginning of a socially responsible art. [ E d i t o r ' s Note: Portions of this article appeared in the December 1989 issue of New Art Examiner article by Suzi Gablik "Art beyond the rectangle: A call for "useful" art.")

Suzi Gahlik is a teacher and writer, currently at work on a forthcoming hook, The Reenchantment of Art, to he published hy Thames & Hudson in 1992.

I am glad I am walking slowly...because it allows me to catch great 'pictures.' It's not that I can carve them out and put them in a frame when I get home, but it is that they are such strong images that they quickly fill the screen of my mind. They are called 'soul-imprints' in my river vocabulary.

Dec. 2. Why in all religions is water such a sacred symbol? How much longer is it going to take us to see the trouble of our waters? How many more de d fish floating on the Rhine River...? How many kinds of toxic waste dumpings?

When are we going to t u m o u r malady of separateness around? Most of the glass we find is broken, but even so, the two of us picked up K U O P f l ^ h e . 14 hours of work we p u t der about How ttles the person rt of the down the fer the river or, latei went into bridges, trying this action. Is it that man is inherently violent, is it that there is nothing else to do other than smashing bottles into the river? Is it pure and simple fun?

PUBLIC ART REVIEW

SPRING/SUMMER

1990

11

I said the universe can be understood as a complex, although finite conversation between its parts which results in an infinity of improvisations.

-Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison,

that are a kind of earth art/urban planning—more often than not never realized as proposed. But to describe the Harrisons' tangible work as proposals is, in their scheme of things, to place an inappropriate emphasis on execution.

Their work proposes the conversation not only as primary and universal, but as adequate. In envisioning the world as interplay rather than object, they shift the emphasis from making things to participating in processes, and no act of participation is without fruit (and fruit is not interchangeable with product). Their best-known work.

The Lagoon Cycle, begun in 1972 and more or less completed in 1983, represents well this working approach.

Initially a project about raising crabs, each of its seven phases was an adventure and a lesson: the discovery of the beautifully functional low technology of Sri Lanka where the crabs came from, the creation of artificial environments to raise the crabs in (with increasingly elaborate measures to simulate the natural conditions that the crabs' interactions are keyed to), the development of plans to raise crabs on a larger scale and resultant encounters with technocrats and businesspeople whose involvement is rejected, a hugely ambitious proposal to alter the landscape of the southwest as part of this enlargement of scale and. ultimately, an abandonment of technocratic aspirations in favor of a recognition of the delicate complexity of natural systems.

Originally a research project and then an exhibition, the dialogues and images are mostly accessible now as a book by the same name.

The Lagoon Cycle, then, is a science project whose product is nil but whose fruit is an enriched and complicated understanding of nature and the issues raised by tampering with it. a journey the Harrisons lead their viewers/readers along. The Lagoon Cycle embodies as well as describes ecological philosophy. Its conclusion in favor of contemplation over production is unusual in a culture that measures worth by productivity.

Even environmental artists seldom decide against making their mark in the landscape, though the making of marks is the source of the problems that environmentalism aspires to redress (and Earth Art was absolutely an an of land-marking). To reshape the way people see their landscape is a far more profound and ambitious feat than altering the landscape—and from altered visions emerge new scenarios, the possibility of a positive and collective transformation or protection of those landscapes. Their work with communities could be described in terms of the old pedagogical adage, "Give me fish and I eat for a day; teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime."

The Lagoon Cycle is unusual in the Harrisons' collaborative work, since it was a self-initiated, independent project. Their work more typically begins with an invitation to go somewhere—sometimes the invitation is to investigate a specific situation, sometimes to rethink at large—either way. they create a dialogue and exhibition restating the terms of the place and rethinking its future. Each work is a response to the place, though their way of thinking remains distinct, and their own growing skill as ecologists is evident in the work of the last several years.

In the course of projects in Kassel. West Germany, and Tel Aviv, Israel, they learned about the creation of organic water purification systems. Their work with swamps and reedbeds grew from the demonstration-model scale of a proposed park in Kassel to the gargantuan plan to salvage a thousand miles of Yugoslavia's Save River and its wetlands. Their reliance on invitations means that a conversation is waiting for them to join in when they arrive, and ensures that the ground is prepared for their contributions, whether or not those contributions become landscape modification as well as conversation.

Often the work proposes vast changes in the landscape of the region they have been invited to: sometimes it consists of a scaled-down demonstration model. Helen Mayer described one such project: "We did a work for an exhibition called Land Art that was done up at Bard College and our work began. . . We took a look at the coffee pot. You know, we like good coffee. It was so encrusted with salt from the drinking water you could hardly believe it. So we developed a work about cleaning the water."

Most art remains at the stage of contained metaphor or model of its subject; the Harrisons' is unusual in its telescoping out into the outside world (a telescoping whose final, overblown phase is rejected in The Lagoon Cycle). Even the largest realized projects, however, can be considered as models, in that the concepts they present can be extended to other situations, just as the wetlands purification principles were expanded from a garden to a nation.

Several of their early works of the '70s were called Survival Piece, and dealt with basic issues of survival akin to potable water. The Lagoon Cycle is. among other things, about generating inexpensive sources of protein. One more practical piece in the early '70s involved catfish tanks (and when the catfish were electrocuted, cooked and served in the London gallery where the survival piece was exhibited in, the act caused an uproar). Making soil was one of the earliest survival pieces, and that skill was transferred to 40 acres of barren land at Artpark in upstate New York —and Spoils Pile Reclamation Project, they say, became the first artwork at Artpark to be cancelled on account of scale. Their home in Del Mar, north of San Diego, is Survival Piece #9, with a wall and many fruit trees on its grounds. Ultimately all their work is about survival; these early pieces were more immediate about it.

The Harrisons' work is sometimes criticized because so few projects are realized .

Arroyo Seco Release: A Serpentine for Pasadena (1985) was an exhibition at Cal Tech's Baxter Art Gallery in Pasadena; its photographs, drawings and texts proposed

Alempause fur den Save-Ftuss, 1989

By

R e b e c c a

Let a grand restitution take place Let the process of flood control be separated from the destruction of rivers

S o I n i t

Perhaps all works of art begin as conversation, whether it be the conversation between the millstream and trees before Constable's eyes or the conversation between Thomas Cole and his pupil Albert Bierstadt about the representation of the American landscape. And most works of art end as conversation, the art to the viewers and other artists, the critic to a more scattered audience, the viewers to each other.

But few artists have made conversations the heart of their work as have Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. Married to each other since 1953 and based in San Diego since 1967, their work together has been ongoing since 1972. All their works begin as conversations and end that way, in an elaborate orchestration of interjection and response that disappears into the larger conversation that is the world.

The environment has been the continuing subject of their unmaking since they began working collaboratively, but ecological ideas have also determined the nature of that art. The result is a body of work that consists of a vast collection of documents: the texts of conversations between the Harrisons that generate the work and are also the scores for performances, the photographs and drawings of places, and proposals PUBLIC ART REVIEW

SPRING/SUMMER

1990 12

Imagine every channel in the L.A. Basin covered and land remade green and low-flow streambeds established where the logic and thewill exist The proposals for the Arroyo Seco were not feasible given the state of the dam above, and the project went unrealized; later, however, they were commissioned to rethink the workings of that dam, so their involvement with the Pasadena landscape and community extended beyond the original vision, rather than stopping short of it.

The Harrisons would point out that, whether either or both proposals were implemented. their input into the conversation that is city planning changed that conversation in some way and that whether or not the influence is immediately evident isn't crucial. "The way you know we did something," says Newton Harrison, "is that you should subtract us. If you subtract us from Baltimore, parks don't happen, promenades

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, before Two Meditations. Two Commentaries Eight Questions on the Great Lakes of North America. Photo by Peggy Jarrell Kaplan.

and

don't happen...a lot of things don't happen. If you subtract us from Florida, maybe that Australian pine lives for another six months, maybe two or more mangrove swamps are lost. It could finally be that if you subtract us from Atlanta, maybe there would be 10 more buildings going up with one more tree with barbed wirearoundit. . . 'Finishedness' is a 1950s notion. That's the modernist notion. You had to know the answer before you did it. We don't know the answer before we do it. Discourse is improvisation."

Another Pasadena project was a proposal meant to be rejected. Asked to design a park that would exclude homeless people, they suggested a park with walls that rose up around it at night and a nearby "sleep stack" for displaced homeless people. Preposterous and callous, it clarified the presence of those qualities in the desire to make a public park to serve only the privileged. In their terms, their work lays bare the "guiding metaphors" of the society, particularly those that have become destructive.

"Time is money" is one example they give.

And perhaps this is most centrally what the Harrisons do. As outsiders and nonspecialists, they are able to transcend the terms in which situations—environments, design projects, cities—are described, and in changing the terms, they introduce a new way for the community to look at their habitat and a new scope of possibility for interaction with it.

The function of artists in design projects and public art sometimes seems to be that of the inspired amateur (a word derived from amor, or love, it should be remembered): of the one who notices what the experts and specialists have been schooled to ignore, who can make the leaps and take the risks that reconnect publics to their places. In one piece from the late 1970s, Two Meditations, Two Commentaries and Eight Questions on the Great Lakes of North America, they actually redefined the community, proposing that that region consider itself as an indivisible bioregion rather than two nations and myriad jurisdictions.

Newton Harrison: Thinking about what it means when you can't drink the water and you can't eat the fish thinking about what it would be like if all the people in the watershed area of the Great Lakes seceded from the United States and Canada respectively.

Helen Mayer Harrison: Thinking about the dictatorship of the ecology thinking about the dictatorship of culture— questioning the dictatorship of culture— thinking about what it would be like if people in the watershed area of the Great Lakes seceded from the United States and Canada respectively to start a dictatorship of the ecology "The disease of the modem character is specialization," says poet-farmer Wendell Berry, "a way of institutionalizing, justifying and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility." The environmental crises seem to be rooted in the kind of specialization Berry speaks of, in which planners have narrowed down the art of placemaking to a system of economic regulation, in

which artists are marginalized as expost-facto decorators, in which the normal vocabulary of possibilities is itself central to the problems.

Too, the normal public art process has environmentalists talking to planners talking to art administrators talking to artists, and the Harrisons' work endeavors to override that hand-me-down approach to the modification of place by engaging all the concerned parties in conversations that connect all the disciplines and fall into none of them.

"Planners consulted said it was poetry," said one editorial about the Baltimore Promenade, "Poets said it was planning."

The best effect of many public works of an—Tilted Arc, to take an extreme example—is the dialogue it provokes, and the Harrisons, it could be said, simply bypass the creation of conversation pieces on the way to generating conversation. The dialogue format

itself, the presence of more than one point of view, contains the possibility of more than one possible outcome, of the branching out rather than whittling down that distinguishes the Harrison's work.

The presence of two voices allows for the possibility of many voices, and that possibility intimates a conversation that can continue after its initiators have left the scene.

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison decode of the specialists' languages about place, the jargon of environmentalists and planners, making it possible for the conversation about public and civic places to become a more public conversation. In their project on the Save River in Yugoslavia, they write.

The river is asked to process new information when it hits the alluvial floodplain and the information is biological. A change of state has been created

for the river by the disappearance of the life that once pervaded it which depended on the periodic spread and withdrawal of waters and although an act of compensation has been made through the creation of a nature reserve--for the river it is the shape of catastrophe.

Passages such as this make a poetic sense out of the complexity of ecological analysis.

Then it grows into a kind of philosophical poetry, concluding: There is still time for a new history for the Save since the shape of catastrophe is also the shape of opportunity.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer living in San Francisco.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER

1990

13

PUBLIC ARTISTS AS ACTIVISTS By

S

r i c e

Around the bend of the narrow river a lone swimmer leisurely paddles beneath a canopy of trees. Hour after hour, he swims though dense tamarack forests and marshy backwaters, past occasional farms and weekend retreats. His strokes vary with the current, the weather, and the rare comment from his companions trailing behind in a canoe. Sometimes the man is silent, sometimes he calls out poetry to startled herons resting on the shore.

Sometimes he stops to "blow bubble hum" a tune onto the water surface in hopes of luring river otters to join him.

Billy Curmano is swimming the length of the Mississippi River.

A self-identified performance artist, Curmano has been swimming the river in summer-long segments since 1987. With the aid of volunteer land and water crews he has already swum, sung, created poetry, performed water ballet and danced his way down 600 of the 2,550 river miles. The river inspires his art.

Flowing from narrow wilderness headwaters, the river soon picks up streams and underground springs. After 500 miles, tall bluffs overlook sparkling vistas and small islands appear in its broad reaches. Lush backwaters form spawning grounds for fish and feeding areas for migrating birds. The mighty Mississippi renowned in song and folklore makes its full appearance below the Twin Cities.

More hidden are the changes in the water itself. Chemical and waste runoff from farms mingle with urban sewage.

Outflow pipes drip sinister rust and noxious green liquids into the river.

Commercial barges churn up bottom sediments in their passage, while work crews dredge a deeper channel and deposit the spoil in backwaters. Invisible toxins wash downstream to render fish poisonous for eating and the water unsafe for swimming. These toxins, sewage, and sediments threatening the very life of the river prompted Curmano's swim.

"Just by being alive we have an impact on other creatures on this planet," he said. "I want to justify my existence, by doing what I feel is right." By drawing attention to problems and their solutions he hopes to make the world a little better.

Entertainment is not the crux of what he does, Curmano insists. "Making people think and making myself think is what I'm about."

That most of his audiences as he performs along the river are trees, birds and fish rather than other humans does not daunt him. He has given performances for cows ("I see cows more than I see my neighbors," he said from his rural Houston, Minnesota farm), for the moon, and for trees. Once he was buried alive in PUBLIC ART REVIEW

a special coffin for three days so that he could give a performance for the dead.

Although he has a master's degree in sculpture, Curmano finds limiting himself to one medium too restrictive. He feels the arts interact symbiotically, and his performancesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and documentation of performancesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;incorporate video, acoustic and electronic music, dance, storytelling, song. He rejects specialization.

Rather than asking what the limits of a particular medium or instrument are, he asks, What can I get from it? What can it give me? How can I use it to express my ideas and to communicate that to others?

"Performance is a way of letting people in to see what goes on inside me," he said. Part of what goes on inside him comes from the experience of the swim.

"My knowledge of the river is beyond the intellectual,"he said. "I have an intimate sense of the river. By swimming next to barges, through the currents, and immersed in the pollutants I am aware of the fragility of the human body in the river."

Part researcher, part artist, and part organizer, Curmano brings this sense of connectedness to the river through performances. Sometimes he emerges dripping wet in river towns and tells a story. Sometimes on a museum stage he stands in swim trunks in a child's wading pool, surrounded by tuxedoed musicians who improvise as Curmano recreates his swim performances through video, storytelling, rapping and song.

Pages of technical reports can be succinctly etched in audience consciousness through a single phrase during an extended river rap. As he falls into the tape recorded rhythm of a dipping canoe paddle and augmented by string bass on stage, Curmano intones:

tells that his 1990 swim will pick up one stretch of river skipped last summer because he needed a protective suit to get him through the pollution. That suit should be ready in June, and then he will dive in at Victory, Wisconsin, where the 1989 swim ended.

Curmano first learned about the problems of the river at a festival of the Mississippi River Revival. This 10-yearold organization draws people together to learn about the river, to celebrate it in story and song, and to help clean it up.

The Revival's 1990 summer schedule of 32 festivals and community celebrations along the Upper Mississippi are a strong indication of interest in the river.

Each festival is organized by the local community chapter and reflects its own history and resources. There might be Native American drum singers and story-tellers, Finnish dancers and local history theatre performances, and musicians singing of riverboats and sadly polluted waters.

In addition to entertainment, Mississippi River Revival festivals always include environmental groups and others concerned with problems of the river.

Information on the dangers of acid rain, carcinogens dumped into the river, and the effects of barges on bottom sediments are presented along with ways to clean up the river. Successes are celebrated as well, such as the establishment of new ways to dispose of dredge spoil that protect rather than endanger spawning areas. All-day river cleanups, where tons of trash are collected from river banks and islands, precede most festivals.

"The folk singers can't clean up the river by themselves," said MRR founder and singer-songwriter Larry Long, "but they can draw the people so that those with information about problems and possible solutions have an audience to "...Bottom won't settle talk to."

For two hours In a recent Minneapolis appearance, Because of the barge's folk singer Pete Seeger reflected on his Incredible power..." role as a co-founder and 20-year volunteer Curmano with the Hudson River seldom applies Revival in New York. for grants to do That once-polluted his work. "My river is now a recreaprojects are fition haven. "We must nanced with make connections," credit cards and Seeger said. "In our paid back age specialists have through fundsuch tunnel vision that raisers supported it is up to the artists by a lot of volunand writers to make teers." The Billy the connections." FesCurmano Fan tivals provide the Club keeps opportunities for members updated Top: Billy Curmano near Aiken, MN biologists to talk to on the artist's on the Mississippi River, 1987. economists to talk to current projects.

Photo by Andi Shankle. Above, D.L environmentalists to A recent issue.

Hunt and his trench horn greet talk to city council Volume Seven, Curmano on his arrival at Harriet

SPRING/SUMMER

1990 14

Island, St. Paul, in 1988. Photo by David Heinz.

members. All share an interest in a clean river.

The summer of 1983 marked the first Revival canoe flotilla from the headwaters of the river, connecting river towns in a series of a dozen festivals in three states. A June 3 festival in St. Paul will kick off the summer activities this year.

A 26-foot voyageur canoe will not only lead this year's flotilla, but will also provide a visible symbol of the river's history. The canoe is being built like those of French traders 200 years ago, as they were taught by the Native Americans, the original inhabitants of the river.

The flotilla will depart June 10 from Bemidji, Minnesota, and travel to Bellevue, Iowa, on August 26 with river cleanups and community festivals scheduled in between. Following summers will see the celebrations extend south, eventually reaching Jackson, Mississippi, where a Revival chapter has already been established.

A driving trip along the river from Minnesota to Louisiana led to possibly the largest-scale artistic production to date centered and performed around the river. In 1981 several members of Minneapolis-based Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre traveled to New Orleans for a performance.

"We followed the river the entire way," said Sandra Spieler, the troupe's artistic director. "We saw it as a lifeline, running through the heart of our country." In fact, tributaries of the Mississippi River drain 40 percent of the continental U.S. land in 31 states.

The year before Spieler had attended the Survival Gathering in the Black Hills to protest the federal government's aim to mine uranium for nuclear weapons. Not only would the area sacred to Native Americans be taken, but the mining process itself would destroy the water table.

At the same time a friend from Japan had given her a children's book entitled Give Me Water, a recollection by survivors of the holocaust that followed the bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"The survivors were surrounded by fire and calling out, 'Give me water, give me water.'" Spieler said. "Now we'd come full cycle: here, in this country, water would be taken to create more weapons of destruction!"

These connections prompted the creation of a production focused on water and the river. Researching available music and scripts turned up little on the subject. Twelve volunteers began extensive library research on music, water issues and river towns. A biologist looked at water quality, a historian at the Civil War and the river, another at Native American celebrations of the river. From

this the 28 artists and musicians of the company developed the two-hour production.

The 1983 Circle of Water Circus used music, dance, masks and puppets to tell the story of river in a two-hour production. From finger puppets in oneperson side shows to 15-foot puppets of dancing river boats and giant mosquitoes on stilts, the history, problems, and stories of the river were presented in 23 communities from Brainerd, Minnesota, to New Orleans. The response of audiences was a mixture of silent awe and cheering acceptance.

"The river needed a voice," said Spieler, and Heart of the Beast gave it to them. Now seven years later, the troupe is still contacted for followup performances.

The river also provided a connection that a La Crosse, Wisconsin pediatrician had been seeking. Cameron Gundersen had been at a loss as to how to communicate his concern about the deadly prospects of nuclear war to his patients and their parents. He was not interested in the dollars spent or nuclear strike capability, but in the human toll that would be exacted.

A 1983 radio program first brought to his attention a series of paintings that had been created by the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Following up. he learned of the work of Japanese artists Toshi and Iri Maruki.

They had visited the sites just three days after the bombs struck and for forty years have been painting their reflections of man's inhumanity to man. They heard first-hand the stories of the detonation and saw the rivers full of the dead, many of whom had come to the river in search of water. The Marukis adapted an ancient Japanese custom of the "Bon" festival, in which lighted lanterns are placed on rivers to float out to sea to honor the spirit of dead ancestors. Each year the Maruki's set lighted lanterns upon the sea to commemorate the anniversary of the bombing.

Mississippi River Revival flotilla is greeted by voyageur canoe, 1983.

Pholo by Sandra Price.

"Theatrics seemed more to the point," Gundersen explained, as a way of drawing attention needed to the impact of nuclear destruction. He garnered the support of the local Physicians for Social Responsibility and Mississippi River Revival. Now, the first Saturday of August each year brings people to Riverside Park in La Crosse to make and decorate lanterns in memory of those killed by the bombing. The floating of the lanterns downstream is silent testimony to the impact of intentional killing and can serve as a catalyst to stop future recurrence.

The Mississippi River is more than a geographic landmark to these performers. All of them see the inextricable link from the river's effect on people and people's effect on the river. None separate their work from their politics.

They seek to use the power of performance to influence attitudes and effect change so that the Mississippi River not only becomes a positive symbol but also is restored as a healthy, life-giving force.

For More Information: BILLY C U R M A N O Artworks USA R o u t e 1, B o x 1 1 6 Rushford, MN 55971

HEART OF THE BEAST PUPPET AND MASK THEATRE 1 5 0 0 East L a k e St. Minneapolis, M N 55407

MISSISSIPPI RIVER REVIVAL 1624 Harmon Place #208 Minneapolis, M N 55403

PHYSICIANS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY c/o G u n d e r s e n Clinic 1836 South Avenue La C r o s s e , Wl 54601

Sandra Price is a free-lance arts writer who divides her time between St. Paul and the Queen Charlotte Islands. British Columbia. In 1983 she canoed 700 miles with the Mississippi River Revival.

Billy Curmano lands at Harriet Island. St. Paul, Swimmin' the River. 1988. Photo by David Heinz

The Art Garden of Winifred Lutz / Philadelphia By

Joyce

Pomeroy

Schwartz

Many artists approach the issue of art-as-landscape not necessarily from a design, pictorial or horticultural orientation, but from a poetic one. Site history, original structures and materials, area topography, remembrances of previous inhabitants and function, are aspects of significance for these artists. Imaginative qualities are indispensableâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a distinctive aesthetic, a consummate interest in artisanship and animated spacial relationships are all prerequisites as well. Artists have the capability, as well as the desire, to transform a garden space into an expression of the avant-garde.

Now under construction in Philadelphia is an urban landscape created by an artist for a multi-use residential complex and convention center, Korman Suites at Buttonwood Square. Very often the development of a building site means eradication of the boundaries and features of its former existence, thus inflicting "site amnesia". The Buttonwood site, however, came with an unsuppressible piece of tangible history.

When workers arrived to raze the Preston Retreat in the 1950s, former home of the Preston family, 20 white marble column sections from four massive portal columns were spared from destruction. They were shunted off to the side of the plot, only to be forgotten, left to age, and gather moss. The developers, years later reminded of the existence of the columns, suggested the possibility of their being used by the artist about to be selected under the percent-for-art mandate of the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Philadelphia to create an artwork for the project.

Artist Winifred Lutz was awarded the commission to create an art environment for the complex gardens. Lutz, distinguished by her ability to "transform ordinary space into fantastic, reflective kingdoms through her inventive employment of ordinary elements" welcomed the opportunity to recycle the marble columns and infuse the garden with a sense of place and time.

In her design plan Lutz subtly navigates the visitor, engaging her to explore and remember the architectural and natural histories of the site. The fallen column ele-

ments, a leitfmoif throughout, are engraved with meaningful legend and transformed in function. The garden also includes native stone, indigenous flora and mica schist of the same variety used in the vintage 1800s walls still surrounding the plot.

The artist's concern has been to integrate the various zones of activity within the complex with harmonious and transitional landscaped spaces.

The Entry Circle, in the spirit of early walled gardens of historic Philadelphia, can be viewed by passersby from the street. Surrounded by pleached American Hornbeams, a 25-foot-tall column of stacked marble sections echos the original Preston Mansion columns, becoming a center of memoryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a memorial. Here concentric arcs of radiating Belgian granite pavers form circular patterns repeated elsewhere in the garden.

From the entry point Lutz's meandering pathways first lead visitors to a Japanese-inspired dry stone garden secluded by a stand of cedar trees. Beyond this "most quiet place." one continues on to the main theater, or center court, a classical garden lushly planted. Here the marble sections have been engraved with laconic text, some functioning as seating, others as sculptural markers.

At its farthest point, the garden concludes with a stacked column, reminiscent of the entry. Only here there is a single, young Metasequoia that will be allowed to grow unrestrained beside it. Thus the inspiration for all columns will be compared to one of its derivations.

Lutz's commission encompasses all of the landscape areas for the Korman project. She relied on the horticultural advice of landscapist Richard Vogel to help her locate unusual trees, groundcovers and other plantings. The Martin Organization are the architects-of-record.

Winifred Lutz's model for the urban landscape at Buttonwood Square in Philadelphia, a multi-use residential complex and convention center.

Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz is an independent fine art consultant in New York City, specializing in works of art for public spaces. She is the author of the chapter on public art for the 1989 edition of the AIA Encyclopedia of Architecture.

PUBLIC ARTISTS AS ACTIVISTS

Buster Simpson: On flctiuist Art of Urban Ecology By

Ron

G I o w e n

The street has been the territory and battleground for activist art (and art activism) since the beginning of the 20th century. Italian Futurists, German Dadaists, Russian Constructivists and French Surrealists in turn set forth new programs, raised a ruckus, then carried aloft through the streets their new banner promoting artistic freedom within a (hoped for) liberated new society.

As we enter the last decade of this century, the street has once again become the arena for an art that engages activist strategies and forms. The struggle against complacency has shifted to new ground—rather than the conventional and conservative agendas of the art academies, the contentious issues and structures for activist art today are more broadly social, political, ecological and economic.

Above all, activist art seeks change.

The agendas for activist art are derived, in part, from the positivist goals of public art; that is, to be more sensitive and responsive to larger social needs and requirements. The domain of public art (in both institutional and non-institutional contexts) offers a framework for the artist to call for and/or initiate change within the social system.

Lewis "Buster" Simpson is among the prominent activist artists working within the context of public art today. He has been at it for over two decades, a span of time during which the notion of public art grew from idea to institution.

Buster Simpson is a street artist, or perhaps more accurately, an artist of street culture. That is, the complex, amorphous physical conditions and social organizations of street culture have been the focus and resource for Simpson's activism. In his view, street culture is a kind of micro-ecology as well as a social structure and a physical environment. His art is concerned with the complex interaction of these elements.

Simpson's public stance as an artist is rooted in the social activism of the 1960s. The conditions that inform Simpson's approach to public art were initially raised during that epochal decade—warnings of ecological disaster, environmental and resource mismanagement, the marginalization or suppression of social history. These issues are still pertinent today, even more so than they were twenty years ago. His development as a public artist came about as the consequence of events of the '60s, and he continues to operate in the spirit of engagement and activism that those encounters generated for him.

In 1969 Simpson was part of an artist team hired to create environmental artworks for an arts and music festival in upstate New York. It so happened that the crush of 500,000 people attending the historic event known as "Woodstock" obliterated the artwork and converted its materials into badly needed social and service amenities such as bedding, shelter, firewood, etc. Simpson was stunned by this action—the regrettable and seemingly wanton destruction of artwork forced him to acknowledge that greater human needs existed beyond a presumed desire for artistic experience.

The communalism of the 1960s, of which Woodstock in retrospect was the archetypal moment, had a cathartic effect on the artist. The formal autonomy of art no longer seemed relevant to his thinking. A communal, activist role for art would become his mode and methodology.

Simpson moved to Seattle in 1972, at a time when that city was initiating its highly regarded art-in-public-places programs and whose general art scene there was growing. His arrival coincided PUBLIC ART REVIEW

with a landmark civic and historical preservation decision that also earned accolades for Seattle—a voter referendum to preserve and renovate the Pike Place Market. A farmer's market located in downtown Seattle since 1906, the sevenacre Pike Place area was threatened by high-density speculative office and condominium development. Simpson, who had moved into a nearby inner-city neighborhood, became a leading advocate for the Market's traditional status as a working-class "people's place."

His first encounter with the politics of urban development revolved around the issue of an old, unpruned cherry tree which was removed as part of the Market urban renewal project. Though the tree was no great botanical specimen, it was a well-loved part of the Market's ambience.

Simpson acquired the dead tree and resited it at the Market with his Crow's Nest inserted into its branches—an assemblage of salvaged building materials made into an ad hoc shelter that became a highly visible comment on displacement. Since that time, Simpson has worked with merchant associations and neighborhood action groups to preserve the historic ambience of the Market.

A self-started, collaborative project that later received support from the city of Seattle's Community Development Board involved the implementation of trees and bus benches (consisting of broken quarry stones) along the main thoroughfare leading from the Market. The trees, when fully grown, will identify the various bus zones by the change in foliage color and cover (purple-leaf maples and flowering plums). Simpson still retains a custodial relationship with this "urban arboretum" project.

Another ongoing project that dates from 1977 is based on another seminal encounter, this time with the notorious Love Canal toxic dump. As an artist-inresidence at Artpark in upstate New York (which is itself a reclaimed dump site), Simpson cast an edition of concrete plates modeled on disposable divided paper picnic plates and placed them in front of a sewer outfall that spewed into the Niagara River. He began to locate these "faceplates" (because they looked like the shape of a human face) in front of sewer drainpipes at other sites. The plates proclaim that we foul our environment with effluent from our digestive cycle.

Recent plates cast in vitreous porcelain

SPRING/SUMMER

collect contaminates on their surfaces; Simpson recovers these plates and kilnfires them. The colorful glaze is the result of toxins having accumulated on the plate. At some time, hopefully soon, Simpson's face-plates, when re-fired, will remain pure white—a sign of a cleanedup environment.

Toxins in the runoff water from urban streets and buildings, detected during Simpson's "urban arboretum" projects, resulted in another guerilla ecological work. He hoped to neutralize the acidic water that he channeled into his tree plantings by inserting chunks of limestone into the drainpipes and downspouts. From this, he began to place larger limestone disks into the local watershed to likewise "sweeten" the water supply. His "river Rolaids" gradually dissolve to help purify contaminated rivers and streams. He proposes larger tablets for larger rivers—"the bigger the problem the bigger the pill."

A 1989 installation in the center fountain of the Hirshhom Museum in Washington, D.C., (part of that museum's Works program of temporary siteworks utilizing the building as site), involved a system designed to purify the water in the museum's pool and fountain with limestone tablets. Simpson's complex and multi-layered installation, intended in part to alert Washington bureaucrats about the toxic poisoning of our environment, had an ironic twist that affirmed Simpson's intentions. His proposal to pump Potomac River water through the purifying mechanisms of his installation was denied, on the grounds that river water constituted a health hazard!

The street projects and the interventions into the environment comprise the essential workings of Simpson's esthetic.

In several recent projects the subject of urban, ecological and social "microhistories" have been integrated into the project as a point of reference to locale.

(One might regard this as Simpson's methodology of site-specificity.)

In 1985 the city of Cleveland initiated a plan for street and sidewalk improvements within its historic 40-acre Warehouse District. Local activists pressed the city to include an artist in the design effort, and Simpson was selected in 1986 from a nationwide competition to create the West Sixth Streetscape.

Simpson proposed to his clients that the district's history wasn't housed exclu-

Jack Mackie and Buster Simpson, 1st Avenue bus stop benches and trees.

Seattle; a "linear park and urban arboretum."

1990 16

sively in its mix of 19th century commercial buildings, but that its history was an accumulative layering of urban artifacts.

As a result, call boxes, manhole covers, loading ramps and even the pavement mix itself were designated as historically significant and kept as part of the street improvements. He devised street seating and benches that recall the stockpiling of boxes commonly seen in the warehouses; they were made from sandstone quarry blocks cut into modular sizes that produced no waste material. The seating platforms are anchored in casual configurations like "will call" inventory stacked along the street.

Simpson also discovered the district was one of the first sites in Cleveland to have been surveyed. Using the 1796 field notes of the original surveyor he determined the exact location of survey monuments and "witness trees," so-called by the surveyors because they were landmarks near the survey point. He proposed that these sites be re-planted with new "witness trees" to recover past historical references.

The surveyor is an iconic reference in much of Simpson's sculptural work.

These objects made from salvaged materials are often in the configuration of windvanes that incorporate the plumb bob and surveyor's level. A recently unveiled public artwork by Simpson commissioned for the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle brings together both the image and early occupation of the state's famous namesake, George Washington; and the image and words of Seattle's namesake, Chief Seattle (Sealth).

Seattle George Monument consists of a circular-bladed windvane in the profile of Chief Seattle above an inverted cone on tripod legs resembling a surveyor's device which is placed over an open square trellis. Simpson planted ivy on the trellis that will eventually obscure the image of Chief Seattle. (Ivy is used as greenery along the interstate highway over which the Convention Center was built.) As the windvane turns, the ivy will be continually trimmed by a template of Washington's profile taken from the state seal. Thus, the symbol of white culture will engulf the symbol of native culture.

However, if the ivy does not grow, or it grows, then dies, of ecological neglect, then Chief Seattle will reclaim his image.

The tactics of Simpson's public work is one of dispersion and occurrence rather than formal consolidation and site specificity. There are no monuments to the presence of the artist, though Seattle George Monument comes closest to that normative type. Instead, his art is a retrofit intended as a form of recovery that takes the route of least additional impact. He tries not to expend additional resources in the effort to produce his work or to generate this ecological recovery process. The history of place, which is an essential concept for Simpson's public work, is perhaps the most socially relevant ingredient of his new work. To argue, as critic Donald Kuspit has, that the basic social situation we find ourselves in today is isolation within the "lonely crowd," then one must take steps to give back the feeling of relationship to place within the hectic urban social-scape. Public art must resolve to correct this estrangement, to undertake as its activist platform the problems and solutions of social structures and systems. Simpson's recovery of history, his concern for the future, and his outlook of poetic humor are allied with his street culture activism.

Ron Glowen is a Seattle-based art critic and curator, and contributing editor for Artweek magazine.

Art in the Parks: Close to the Bone By

• Earth Day 1990 is April 22, 1990. To get involved or for more information, contact: Earth Day 1990, Box AA, Stanford University, Sanford, CA 94309, 415-321-1990.

•The National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies (NALAA) is holding its annual convention in San Diego, CA, from June 16-19, 1990, with sessions on June 18 held in Tijuana, Mexico. A major theme of the conference will be public art, with a focus on the role and subsequent impact of the artist in society. Other agenda issues include cultural planning, arts education, cultural equity, arts controversy, and international arts policy.

Public art presentations include (1) the artist as change agent with a review of the social history of public art and with special attention on multi-cultural issues, (2) innovative and creative use of public art funds to expand artist participation to all disciplines and on all levels of project design, (3) the development of public art programs, with an emphasis on planning and inter-departmental cooperation, and (4) discussion of issues relevant to administrators with experience working in public art programs.

The Board of Directors of NALAA is interested is establishing public art as an on-going interest area at each NALAA convention, and as a forum where public art professionals can address issues specific to the field. An important component of the 1990 NALAA Convention is a Public Art Task Force planning meeting scheduled on June 16, from 4:30 to 6 p.m.

For more information Anne Canzonetti

about the conference,

at NALAA at

please

call

202-372-2830.

•"Beyond the Spill/Ground Zero" opened March 20 in Anchorage, AK at the Visual Arts Center of Alaska to coincide with the first anniversary of the Prince William Sound oil spill. "Beyond the Spil," is a national juried show of artists from all over the world working from a broad perspective. It is juxtaposed with "Ground Zero", artistic responses to the Exxon Valdez oil spill by artists from the coastal communities in the Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska directly affected by the spill, including Native artists. The exhibition will serve as a focal point for numerous community and art events addressing issues raised by the nation's largest oil spill.

Contact: John Blaine, Visual Arts Center of Alaska, 713 W. 5th Ave, Ankorage, 99501, 907-274-9641.

•The North American Conference on Religion and Ecology is sponsoring "The Intercontinental Conference on Caring for Creation" May 16-19, 1990, in Washington, D.C. The goal of the conference is to bring environmentalists and inter-faith leaders together for education and dialogue. Art as an "inherent and profound dimension" of the dialogue on spirituality and ecology will be addressed. Programs will be followed by meetings in each bio-cultural region and the celebration of Environmental Sabbath, coordinated by the United Nations. For further information, write to Laura Green, Conference Director, North American Conference on Religion and Ecology, 5 Thomas Circle NW, Washington, D.C. 20005, 202-462-2591.

M a r t y

C a r I o c k

Far out on the pond, a ratt floated. Atop the raft stood a rough-hewn chair and a table. Bird watchers prowling Massachusetts' Bradley Palmer State Park with binoculars could make out other details: atop the table, the frame of a small, houselike structure; in the house another table, tiny, topped with a little lopsided chair.

Hikers and horseback riders, as well as bird watchers—anyone who utilizes the state park north of Boston—have become accustomed to such apparitions. Each autumn for the past three years, the landscape here has magically sprouted works of art.

This particular piece. Life Raft by Sally S. Fine, was one of 17 works created for Art in the Parks, a site-specific sculpture exhibition organized by the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Now jeopardized by the state's precarious fiscal situation. Art in the Parks is the most visible aspect of an arts environment government collaboration, said by its organizers to be unique in the country. In its palmier financial days a few years ago. the Bay State's Department of Environmental Management (DEM) hired an arts coordinator, tapped art consultants, and involved artists in the planning of development and capital construction in state parks. The experiment was initiated by James Gutensohn, then commissioner of the Department of Environmental Management.

In addition to the temporary, autumnal exhibitions in the parks, the DEM has involved artists in the planning and design of a number of capital projects—all of which are still on the drawing board. Among stalled developments is Riverfront Park, new state acreage along the Merrimack River in Lawrence, Mass., for which gates, performance space, a boardwalk and a decorative gazebo were designed by Malcolm Cochran. Jackie Ferrara, James Ford and Mary Ann Unger.

The state's financial problems and resistance to new taxes during the past 18 months haveput arts on pause. In addition, the young and aggressive secretary of environmental affairs, John DeVillars. fired Gutensohn in 1989 for unspecified reasons.

The DEM's new priorities are laudable enough—to pursue environmental scofflaws with a vengeance. But these priorities, combined with fiscal difficulties, have imperiled the art-in-the-environment experiment.

Sally Fine, Life Raft, 1989. Installation on pond at Bradley Palmer State Park, north ot Boston.

Salvaging part of the program with scrambling and make-do is the task of Charlie Gibson, arts coordinator for the DEM. He has the support of his boss. Ellen Rothman, chief of interpretive services, but she warns, "Underwriting the arts with state money when parks are being closed and fire towers can't be staffed—it isn't realistic." Looking at a 30 percent budget cut over two years, the DEM has closed 40 of its 140 state parks and cut 85 people from its payroll.

Budget for the temporary works at Bradley Palmer park has always been miniscule.

Scrounging around the landscape and utilizing components that are already there is something of a tradition. Once an estate. Bradley Palmer State Park offers interesting potential: a cleared field, an abandoned fountain, a pond, a swamp, acres of woodlands. and debris from demolished structures.

Last fall Marty Cain, an artist who is also a dowser, followed energy lines into the woods and found several huge blocks of granite, cut by quarriers. never removed, and partially obscured by woodsy duff. Cain cleared the soil and cut a spiral petroglyph on one stone, a mysterious and enigmatic statement. The previous year Cain took bricks and square brick gateposts which had been dumped in the woods and created a sanctuary of sorts in a hemlock grove.

Sometimes works are so subtle they aren't found unless the viewer knows they're there. Virginia Gunter's Uplifted Floor last fall, for example, was a net stretched between three trees, collecting fall leaves, in effect raising the forest floor and demanding that it be seen. Two seasons ago the park sprouted ten new signs, identical to state park signs, brown-stained, their routed letters painted white. It took park users some time to realize they did not bear official directives but rather environment-oriented ones: "Which of these trees is most like you?", "Inhale." and so forth—all the creative whim of artist Ross Miller.

Each curated by an artist, the DEM exhibitions are a major opportunity for regional artists. "We hope to continue them on some basis. Yet we don't like to ask artists to work for free," says Rothman. Rothman and Gibson are looking for private money to underwrite other ideas and to involve student sculptors. Tentatively scheduled are: • A one-day symposium on art in the environment (costs to be borne by Nemasket Gallery in Fair Haven. Mass.) in conjunction with Earth Day, 1990.

• A short artist-in-residency at Halibut Point State Park, Rockport, where sculptor Dan Blair will work at a small granite quarry on the edge of the Atlantic.

• All in the Parks at Bradley Palmer State Park, seeking private funds for its now-traditional October event.

• Student Art in the Parks, dispersed around the state: Southeastern Massachusetts University exhibiting at Demarest Lloyd State Park on the shore of Buzzards Bay; the mid-state Five-College Consortium at DAR State Park in Goshen. Mass; Holy Cross at Moore State Park, near Worcester.

Although all are economy operations, this year's state park art shows are contingent on raising modest amounts of money. "It's hard for a state agency to compete with private organizations for private money," Rothman points out. "Yet a heck of a lot more people potentially will see this art than will go to galleries."

Marty Carlock is an art architecture writer who contributes to the Boston Globe, Art New England, and is the author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston: from Newburyport to Plymouth.

FUNCTIONAL ART

R Talk with Barbara Grygutis and Peter Marshall

Barbara Grygutis

By

C h

I o t t

Tucson sculptor Barbara Grygutis and naturalist Peter Warshall are standing, overlooking a dry, junk-strewn, milelong portion of the Santa Cruz riverbed— the proposed site for an "Art Park"—their first joint venture as a design team. Their goal is to "reclaim" the strip of land that is bordered to the east by a freeway and downtown Tucson, and on the west by a jogging path and a mixed business/ residential area.

A Tucson resident since 1978, Dr. Warshall consults internationally as a naturalist and has worked on projects in Sweden, Japan and Africa. He wrote the environmental statement on Cristo's Running Fence. Currently, he is a research associate at the Office of Arid Lands Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. From 1974 to 1986 he was an editor at the Co Evolution Quarterly.

Barbara Grygutis is an international award-winning ceramic sculptor who has lived in Tucson since 1964. Among her major accomplishments are the Alene Dunlap Smith sculpture garden, which involved the rehabilitation of a vacant downtown lot into a memorial garden for a local artist. Currently, she is working with the Arizona Department of Transportation on the design of two rest stops on the Interstate Highway system in Northern Arizona.

Public Art Review talked with Grygutis and Warshall about their proposed park.

Grygutis: Here's a little history of this project. Downtown Development Corporation [DDC]—which is a nonprofit, quasi-governmental entity in charge of zoning development in downtown Tucson, has a large, mixed commercial residential project called Rio Nuevo. Initially, they were going to sell it off as parcels for development. I got a brochure in the mail about three and a half years ago showing the parcels, and since I was looking for a place to build a studio, I contacted them. I thought it would be great to have riverfront property for a studio. But as conversations developed it became increasingly clear that what they would have to do to shore up the banks of the river was just amazing. I mean it would have meant massive destruction of the river bank. But their thought process has changed from that time until six or eight months ago when we started this project. As we began to talk, I asked them if there was any way we could do an art park here and that's how the project came into being . . .

I requested that they bring in Peter because he shares my view. Or I share his view. We agree that too much lip service only has been paid to environmental issues.

Warshall: What I want is to bring in the beauty that's here, rather than the kind that's fabricated in a community fashion.

What's happened here—which is a further stage of "Californication"—is that at a certain point the urban mind gets fixated on one species, or sometimes two species, of what nature is. In California, it's the redwood. You go to Marin County and every house has its redwood. And here it's the saguaro [cactus]. The saguaro has been turned into a commodity. Some of them are worth $ 11 .(XX). $ 12,000. As

long as you have one saguaro in front of And so, my first experience of that came from the calenar of the Oodham people your car dealership you are considered to have participated in Tucson and in nature. [formerly known as Papago], which has a series of 10 to 12 moons. Each one is There is that need to play with that defined by a natural event, such as the and try to fight a little bit the sensibility healing moon, or the beautiful moon. that nature becomes the symbol. My That is the moon when all the Palo Verde interest in it is to see if we can create [trees] bloom in yellow. It comes after something that isn't just "here you are the winter and you can suddenly see the Tucson, here's our one saguro, our one land healing itself with flowers. So my bunch of cactus and now let's move on." thought was to see if we could literally Grygutis: Hopefully, [the park] will be an oasis. It will be a desert oasis, though create, all along the river bed, a spring it's not going to be an oasis in that sense of kind of flower walk. The equivalent to the cherry blossom walk, so that people fountains and gushing water. It will be an oasis in a more arid sense of beauty. There would feel the seasonality of walking are incredibly among the yellowness of the beautiful things Palo Verdes. that you can do visually with arid Another project is to landscaping. create an oasis What I think or little grotto we should talk that would about here is this grow plants that concept of design were particuteam which has larly attractive become very, to hummingvery popular in birds, so that the United States you wouldn't right now, and is have the mainbeing heavily tenance funded. I think problem of it's a good idea to feeding them, bring different but by the very disciplines nature of the together. For too plants the birds long, art in this would show up country has been . . . It would be separated or disoriented jointed from the towards where culture. One the sun is percent of the during that population knows period of time about art and the when the other 99 percent hummingbirds knows about come through, The Santa Cruz River, site of the project, in television. It's which is just 1983, during a flood that occurs every 50 fairly amazing starting right years.

Photo by Barbara Grygutis fragmentation. now [February).

But I don't think design teams And so, the should be just the designers. I think that art plants would come into bloom and they can have an understanding of the Universe. would be at different levels and heights in a fake rock grotto. It would shield some What I really enjoy about working with of the sound from the freeway, and create Peter is that he brings significant and a sanctuary from that slice of heavy urban substantial knowledge about this region environment. Except from airplanes. and his is not a designer's viewpoint. As A third idea, is connecting the desert artists we need to look at everything. to the city at night. The desert is very Public Art Review. You mentioned alive at night and we thought of connectearlier that there might be a night blooming the art park to the Chinese restaurant ing garden as part of the art park. When you said that, I immediately thought, "It's at the end of the road here. People would not safe to go there at night." So, I'm won- park, go in and have a Chinese meal.

There would be a sense of human activity dering how does your environment fit in going on at night that then could be with the reality of downtown Tucson?

Grygutis: Well, it gets back to some- connected to a garden that could be closed off, literally, shut off by a fence. thing that Peter said, which is, that you're There wouldn't be that fear that maybe looking at a piece of land that is so fragyou're walking at night in a garden that mented that it's amazing. And that's the might have vagrants sleeping in it, which challenge. Lighting is one of the things is the major concern in Tucson. we're going to have to deal with. How to There is a five or six month period in provide lighting that doesn't pollute the Tucson where you could, by planting sky. Safety is definitely a big concern. particular plants, always have something, We've talked to the neighborhood, we've in bloom at night. Some would open up talked to the DDC and the businesses.

These concerns will be part of the planning for just one night.

This is the first time I've ever tried to process. . . do this. The only other time I've worked Warshall: The first idea actually with public art was with Cristo in comes from my childhood. Which was, in part, in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Botanical California. And there, both the senses of public were very obvious. I mean he went Gardens was really my first contact with plants, and the spring cherry blossom walk public and he was doing public art and that took us three and a half years just to there was something I did. But here there get through the environmental impact is no sense of that changing of seasons. statement.

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER

1990 18

Grygutis: This is a very different situation, in that Cristo pieces are for a short period of time and they do a very different kind of thing. I have some very strong feelings about where art should be going from now on, into the next decades or generations, just because of the sort of used-up quality of the earth. There is just not that much space left to go out there and start doing these huge art projects with land that hasn't been touched by human beings. That makes artists really no different than the developers, and living in Tucson, I know what developers do.. .

What we're doing in Tucson is taking a piece of land that's been trashed by human beings for the last hundred years and we're reclaiming it. It will be comfortable for humans but we'll also invite the hummingbirds back with these projects, or invite the butterflies back to have some sort of interaction with humans.. .

Warshall: It's my theory of Bonsai wilderness. Japan is really the place to look, as with most anything. The wilderness experience is now in the 200- or 300-year-old tree that has been heavily and beautifully and artistically pruned; both the roots, which you can't see, and the visible part, in a little ceramic container which is what you stare at to get your sense of the wilderness experience. That is how wilderness has dropped into the Japanese experience because of the crowdedness. Whether we like it or not, we're headed towards Bonsai wilderness.

We're a long way from there because we have so much more open space, but you can begin to get the feelings of those people. You now have to get the feeling of wilderness in a much smaller space. . .

A concept that has always interested me, is that for Native Americans, there was no word for wilderness. They were just part of it all.

Grygutis: I'm not interested in a McDonalds approach to art, making the same kind of object for different locations. I see my work as creating a sense of place. It's not just space that you gaze at, it's space that your whole body could be in and feel comfortable.

Charlotte Lowe is an arts and features reporter for the Tucson Citizen.

Bay Area environmental art By

R e b e c c a

S o I n i t

Environmental art in the Bay Area spans the continuum from public demonstrations to objects. Earth First!, in its inimitable back-to-the-Pleistocene-manner, regularly drums outside the regional hedaquarters of the U.S. Forest Service. While nothing could be more public or more environmental, its rank as art is rather low. Then there are many installation and photographic artists in the region whose work is profoundly environmental: Bob Dawson and Ellen Manchester's vast Water in the West project, Richard Misrach's many photographs about the U.S. military's devastation of the desert, Meridel Rubenstein's photographic investigation of the ecology and psychology of atomic science, Mark Thompson's installation-performance work with honeybees, Ann Hamilton's work a brilliant probing of natural systems, Hugh Pocock's obsession with earth, soil and excavation, all come to mind.

But few of these projects dealing with issues that are, or ought to be, public concern fall into the category of public art, if public means art that occurs in public places.

Finally, there are many outdoor art objects that interact with some naturally occurring phenomonon—water, wind—or make reference to some local issue—non-native species, for example—but whether making reference to something natural is adequate to qualify as environmentalism is questionable. Such work is more akin to landscape painting in its evocation of lyrical moods and subjective experience than to environmentalism with its probing of thorny issues and revelation of complex underlying systems. Which is not to dismiss landscape painting: environmentalism comes out of attachment to the natural world, and such work makes its contribution to the growth of attachment.

To my mind, an environmental aritst is someone like Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who is profoundly involved with her subject—garbage, in her case—and understands its ramifications—its economics, its social role, the current debate about it—and makes work that participates in those issues in the world. Many atypically public art works fit this category. There is, for example, the beautiful quilt that a collective of environmentalist seamstresses put together and is raffling off to raise money for the Ancient Forests initiative (which would radically reform forestry law in California). Then there's Juana Alicia's crop-dusting mural in San Francisco's Latino Mission District, which isn't avantgarde sitework but is a compelling public depiction of the strafing of crops and workers by pesticide-spraying airplanes.

To some extent the lack of environmental public art is due to the very fragility of the environmentalism of the region: the once-famous Emeryville Mud Flats guerrilla sculpture zone is no more because the flats have been declared an environmentally-sensitive habitat; Patricia Johnson's "Endangered Garden" proposal for a new sewage facility along San Francisco's bay shore was reportedly rejected because vociferous birdwatchers objected that although it would create habitat for endangered indigenous species, it would thereby displace the current flora and fauna of the place.

Many local environmentally-inclined artists have found their public arena outside the Bay Area. Installation artist Reiko Goto, whose work often relates to her care for small animals, will make her first permanent sitework, a frog garden, in Washington state.

Peter Richards has over the last two summers rehabilitated a spring that had once been an important landmark in the terrain that is now Artpark but had been destoyed by landfill. Richards, with Mary Margaret Jones of Hargreaves Associates, Landscape Architects, is working on what will be one of the few environmental public art works in the region, and one whose scale counterbalances its dearth elsewhere in the area.

Byxbee Park is a 140-acre landfill site on the San Francisco Peninsula that is reaching capacity; rather than trying to disguise its former function, Richards and Jones have designed a park that celebrates and draws inspiration from the landfill. The 42 acres they are working with have many strictures: the wind is strong, no trees can be planted (their roots would pierce the clay cap on the landfill), methane builds up underground, the artificial hills are steep. A traditional park, with its gay aura of rusticity, would be difficult as well as inappropriate. Instead, a prominently placed flare burns off excess methane, serving not as a symbolic commemoration of eternal flames in monuments, but as a reminder of the subterranean composting going on. A field of poles mediates the transition from manipulated to natural landscape and provides perches for the many seabirds, and many other such sculptural features explore the potentials of this peculiar landscape. Its amenities don't bely its history, and so the piece seems both celebratory and sobering—celebratory about what can be done, somber about what has been done.

Goto and her husband, Tim Collins, were commissioned by the Athenian School, a private school on the foothills of Mount Diablo, to muster their sitework and community skills for an art day there; the school's science teacher suggested they consider the bluebirds that had become scarce in the area, and they did. The project now includes upwards of a hundred bluebird houses to be placed in the remoter reaches of the campus, with a human-scale structure in the vicinity as a rustic retreat. The students have been researching the subject, and their poems and reflections may be inscribed on the birdhouses.

Most of the impressive projects in the region, in fact, are just being launched, and the coming years for the Bay Area, much as elsewhere, should be auspicious for such projects as a byproduct of increasing environmental awareness and commitment. Rick Lum, an artist who has made his living working for recycling organizations for the last several years, is currently convincing the largest recycler in the region to create an artist-in-residence program in its San Francisco center. He has proposed new ways of enhancing public awareness of the vast system of waste management in the community, and of the impact of our resource consumption—including a civic exhibition, a meetyour-garbageman program and much more. His own work evolved in response to his work so that the job that was once an imposition on his artistic time is now an inspiration and a subject for it.

Lum is also organizaing the symposium "What Have We Got to Lose: Artists and the Environmental Crisis" in West Marin this summer. Events seem to eclipse objects in the creation of a public dialogue about the environment: not only are performances one of the most environmentally viable forms of public art, but objects often seem like an unnecessary way-station on the path toward community awareness. The Headlands Center for the Arts has long endeavored to operate in the territory where environment and art meet, and this spring a special program of lectures teams up respected figures from diverse fields: Wes Jackson of the Land Institute and installation artist Ann Hamilton on "The Tended Earth"; Peter Richards and environmentalist/writer Harold Gilliam on "Water and Weather" and so forth. The San Francisco Art Institute is planning a conference on "the political landscape," and many similar events suggest the possibility of finding a common ground for art and ecology through continuing dialogue.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer living in San

Francisco

PUBLIC ART REVIEW SPRING/SUMMER

1990

19

Uiet Hgo: Infrastructure as Art F U N C T I O N A L ART

By

C h e r y l

M i l l e r

As the snow melts on the northern prairie this spring, work will resume on a massive excavation project. If you happen to fly over Devils Lake, North Dakota, you'll see a new figuration being worked into the landscape. Amid the patchwork of wheat fields and pasture, a giant trough, reminiscent of the Great Snake Mound of the prehistoric Adena cultureis being dug into the earth.

Another resemblance comes to mind: the shape and location of this long canal between a city and lake suggests an intestine, the bowels of some giant animal. If you come down for a landing—the tiny trucks become enormous machinery, the serpentine figure becomes a 60-acre site—you will discover that the intestine metaphor is not entirely inaccurate. What is occurring here is the final construction stage of a wastewater treatment plant based on a unique fusion of art, biology and engineering.

The eye and mind behind this new technology is Viet Ngo (also known as Vietati), a young sculptor/civil engineer living in the Twin Cities. He regards his work here as an important first step in redefining urban design for the 21st century.

Since the 1960s, tougher environmental standards, aimed at stopping the discharge of polluted water into lakes and rivers, have put pressure on communities and industries to find cheaper, more effective alternatives to conventional wastewater treatment. The most promising of these alternatives is natural or built wetlands that filter pollutants from the water, and aquaculture, which uses plants to absorb pollutants and render them harmless. Water hyacinth ponds are a particularly lyrical, but only moderately effective example.

Viet Ngo's contribution to this quest PUBLIC ART REVIEW

for alternative treatment methods is duckweed, a tiny aquatic plant in the genus Lemna that spreads in thick carpets in marshlands throughout the world. Ngo was attracted to duckweed because of its voracious appetite for the same nutrients—nitrogen and phosphorus—that cause excessive algae in lakes and ponds, and because of its ability to convert these pollutants into high-quality food for wildlife.

A $250,000 grant from the Minnesota Legislature enabled him to research the feasibility of using duckweed in water treatment. The results of his research were startling. Duckweed was such a superior competitor for nutrients in water that algae died off immediately. These nutrients fueled extremely rapid reproduction, with the duckweed's biomass doubling in five days. Harmful substances such as dissolved solids and heavy metals were reduced to levels well below EPA requirements. Duckweed, unlike algae, did not produce fetid odors, and unlike water hyacinth, it did not produce a breeding environment for mosquitos.

An equally important discovery was duckweed's value as a food supply. Ngo found that the plant's protein and mineral content was high enough to group it nutritionally with meats, eggs and dairy products rather than with vegetables.

Duckweed looks and tastes like bean sprouts and could be used for human consumption or, if reduced to pellet form, it could be fed to poultry and cattle.

In the mid-1980s, when Ngo calculated that a water treatment system based on duckweed could be constructed and operated for a fraction of the cost of conventional systems (it uses no chemicals and relies on the sun and gravity for energy), he patented his designs and formed Lemna Corporation of Mendota Heights, MN, to market them. The first

SPRING/SUMMER

1990 20

customer was a Del Monte processing plant in Sleepy Eye, MN; his second customer was the City of Devils Lake.

Devils Lake is one of the largest lakes west of the Mississippi, and is renowned among the region's fishermen for the size and quantity of its gamefish.

A series of coulees drains 60 square miles of eastern North Dakota into this lake.

Because it has no outlet, contaminants from farm fields and sewers that flow into the lake stay there, becoming more concentrated as surface water evaporates.

While searching for ways to safeguard the lake and its fishery from excessive pollutants, Bruce Burkett, a biologist and city commissioner from the city of Devils Lake, heard about Ngo's experiments with duckweed. He quickly became enthusiastic about the ideas, in part because of duckweed's potential to attract large flocks of birds and other wildlife into the region. In 1988, the City Commission approved of plans to install the world's first large-scale Lemna system, and design work began.

The Lemna project at Devils Lake is a long canal, compressed serpentine-style into a 60-acre site. The canal is actually four miles long, 200 feet across, and six to 10 feet deep; the excavated earth from the channel has been packed into dikes or jetties that will be landscaped and laid out with road and footpaths. At the bends of the canal, half-moon bays and islands will guide the flow of water and provide nesting areas for waterfowl. The entire water surface will be covered with a floating diamond-shaped grid to prevent the delicate duckweed from blowing away. When the canal is finished and filled with water, and a local variety of duckweed is introduced into its ponds, the plants will quickly spread across the surface. Excess plants will be harvested using an amphibious harvester that can glide over the gridwork and skim off the

duckweed.

Also this spring, two buildings will be constructed to anchor each end of the canal: a small pH testing station at the intake, and a dome-shaped laboratory/ visitor's center at the outtake, where the finished water flows into Devils Lake.

This building, designed by Meyer, Scherer and Rockcastle of Minneapolis, is meant to attract local citizens and tourists to the park and to help them understand the biological process going on around them.

Richard Posner, a public artist, was invited to participate in planning interpretive pieces for the center. Following discussion with Ngo and the architects, Posner developed two proposals. The first is a scale model of the Lemna system on the viewing dock, or promontory of the center, scaled down to 40' x 100'. Visitors will be able to walk the water's labyrinthine route. More intriguing, Posner proposed turning the center's lavatory into a "commode obscura." This last idea was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's camera obscura, in which an image is projected through a small hole into a darkened box or room. As a visitor sits down to contribute waste to the system, the room will darken and she or he will be able to contemplate an image of the duckweed canal projected onto the wall.

Although funding for Posner's proposal remains uncertain. Ngo's intention to include artworks in a waste water facility raises several issues that lead beyond discussions of innovative technology and into questions about urban design. What role should a water treatment plant have in a community and why go to the trouble of beautifying sewer treatment?

Most people don't think much about plumbing or sewers. Most of us don't know and don't really care where water

A Lemna Corporation channel in construction stage at Devils Lake, North Dakota.

comes from when we turn on a faucet, or where it goes after it leaves our drain.

With few exceptions, we confine our interest in treatment systems to whether or not they function. Some people, to be sure, care about how well they work, how precisely they are engineered, how costefficient they are. And a few people care about functions other than a system's ability to deliver and remove water.

(Bruce Burkett's enthusiasm for the Lemna system's ability to attract birds and waterfowl, for example.)

But important or even noble as these concerns are, Ngo would like to enlarge our view. Not only would he like people to know where their water comes from and where it goes, he would like people to be aware of all the dynamic natural and built systems around them. Ngo conceives of a community as a complex organism, with streets and highways its circulation system, its schools the brain, and the water treatment system its kidneys.

Following this thinking, the vitality of a community rests upon the health and interaction of all its institutions and infrastructures. Urban planners should design cities with a comprehensive view of these interactions. They should also design structures in ways that foster the community's awareness and understanding of those interactions and its commitment to maintaining them.

How to foster greater community awareness and responsibility leads to the second issue raised by Ngo's work: the importance of aesthetics in urban planning. Ngo believes that visual design determines the level of consciousness and identification people have for their surroundings. For this reason, he conceives of water treatment facilities as "waterparks" that can add beauty and meaning to a community. Lemna systems are designed not only to take into account natural features—the topography,

climate, weather patterns, and waste stream—of a city, but also its cultural ideas and artifacts. Recently, he produced a set of plans for a Lemna system in Izmir, Turkey, a city on the shores of the Aegean Sea. His designs for the requisite floating grid are patterned after Islamic motifs, and the overall structure of the facility's channels and impoundment pools is modeled on an ancient public bath in the city.

Because Ngo is involved in projects that are meant to last and be used by people well into the 21st century, he is also interested in what qualities determine whether structures survive or are torn down. One imperative is the adaptability of structures to changing needs.

Ngo is convinced that aesthetics also play a decisive role. Visually appealing bridges and buildings become cherished community landmarks and are rallied around when they are threatened with demolition. If urban planners placed greater importance on the aesthetic nature of infrastructures and of their role in giving meaning and shape to community life, they might increase the longevity of those structures.

Because public artists are particularly attuned to the aesthetic possibilities in a community, Ngo believes that they should join working groups of architects, engineers, and other technical experts to design the cities of the next century. With access to technology and the expertise of these work groups, public artists could work on a scale inconceivable to previous generations of artists.

Ngo himself is a case in point. In the late '70s, he studied studio arts while pursuing a degree in engineering, and last year made his gallery debut, with a show of large sculptural pieces in marble, ebony and brass. These works, in their balance of biomorphic and machined forms, bear a remarkable resemblance to the formal ideas expressed in the Devils

Lake project. While a gallery or park is appropriate for viewing the sculpture, the best perspective for his engineering work is the sky. For a civilization moving into its space age. this perspective will be an increasingly important design consideration for all megastructures, be they earthworks or highways, which can and should act as landmarks and emblems.

Viet Ngo. raised in Hue. the ancient capitol of Vietnam, has been described by Posner as "a cross between Thomas Jefferson and Marcel Duchamp." an inventor and visionary with an expansive view of art. Ngo's contribution, besides an extremely useful new technolgy, is in bringing diverse ideas together, thinking

out their implications, and finding ways to express them with, as he says, "simplicity and delight." If he is correct, and infrastructures become a new medium of artistic expression, people may develop an interest and acuity for highways or water treatment plants that they now have for. say. an El Greco painting or Calder mobile. They'll remark sagely to one another as they jet across the continent, "That's a Viet Ngo, I believe, from his early period."

Cheryl Miller is a St.Paul-based writer and editor with special interests in environmental issues and the arts.

PublicArtReview ETHNIC INFLUENCES & MULTI-CULTURALISM The next issue of Public Art Review (vol.2,no.2) will examine the historical precedent for the key role ethnic influences play in shaping our public art, and uncover artists responding to new hybrid forms in our society. Public Art Review m\\ explore festivals, rituals and third world cultural phenomena asserting themselves in America today.

Proposals for Articles due by June 15,1990 Releases and Photos by August 1,1990 Speak out, share and learn about our cultural landscape.

"The Avant-Garde and the Landscape" conference By

Bruce

N.

W r i g h t

Perhaps more was said about the landscape in one place at one time than any time in history at the University of Minnesota in April 1989—but not all of it was comprehensible. The occasion was the national conference "The Avant-Garde and the Landscape: Can They Be Reconciled?", organized by the University of Minnesota College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The conference was attended by more than 160 landscape architects and educators from across the country and Canada.

As to be expected of a gathering of such theoretical nature, much of what was discussed focused on either the broad overview or the close-up, arcane view of the profession. However, two themes surfaced again and again: the importance of Frederick Law Olmsted's thinking and work [designer of New York's Central Park, (1856)], and Bernard Tschumi's plan and thinking for the Pare de la Villette in Paris (1984-1989)—the two became symbolic, if unacknowledged, theoretical bookends to the conference proceedings.

Sprinkled amongst the theoretical discourse were numerous presentations on actual projects, many of which treated the landscape as art. But these were allowed such brief presentation time in comparison to the theoretical work as to seem almost apologetic. Defining the parameters between the art of space making and art as the creation of objects in space, landscape architect Barrie B. Greenbie strode squarely into the thick of the matter when he stated, "Artists of any kind will express personal vision, but environmental designers are of necessity subject to far more aesthetic and physical constraints than object makers, and awareness of such constraints influences the perception not only of what is possible, but of what is desirable." Discussing the recent trend of avant-garde artists to begin treating whole landscapes as art objects, he said, "This poses political as well as aesthetic problems—to say nothing of ecological ones."

The first of three keynote speakers, Galen Cranz of the University of CaliforniaBerkeley, gave a speech on the decision-making style of park planners from Olmsted to Tschumi, concluding with a call for increased cooperation between landscape architects and others held accountable to the land such as planners, architects, citizen groups, and elected officials. According to Cranz, the landscape architect is the only person with the professional interest in nurturing the environment, the only person with the skills to do something about what is happening to the earth. How art fit into this picture was a task left for the audience to discover.

The other two keynote speakers, John Lyle from California Polytechnic Institute-

Pomona, and Peter Jacobs from the University of Montreal, Canada, both found the need to define terms before launching into their challenges to the profession, an activity that was much repeated throughout the conference proceedings. Each struggled with the word avant-garde, and each felt compelled to describe a landscape that, upon closer scrutiny, turned out to be a highly personalized response.

For Lyle, this was expressed by what he labels "deep form," a not unambiguous term that attempts to synthesize the process by which we design, and the larger ecosystem within which we exist. For Jacob the search for beauty while respecting the truth of the times (for example, social reform in the '20s and '30s) could not be reconciled easily. He prescribed a four-point formula that redresses the imbalance we've inherited between society and landscape, and between environment and artifact. However, he stated, in the future "it is unlikely that a single form will emerge which we may use to reform beauty in the landscape."

A panel discussion between the three keynote speakers engendered more questions than answers. One member of the audience saw two paradigms emerging: our human penchant to create diversity, and our apparent need for unity, two seemingly contradictory points of view. How these can be reconciled, or indeed if such a thing is possible, remained a mystery to all at hand. Landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, the much venerated senior member of the conference (noted for his design of Fulton Mall in Fresno, CA), put forth the polarity of the two California cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, as symptomatic of this dichotomy. Nonetheless, he noted. "The world is full of unities and disunities of varying scales. I'm not sure, but in the end we tend to see what we want to see."

Though many more papers and projects were presented, too numerous to review here, there was general consensus that the conference had finally brought together for critical review the important work and ideas being generated by landscape architects and environmental artists today. If there was one thought many came away with, it was that there is great need for more discussions of this nature. Perhaps, at a future conference, we could expect some answers to the questions raised at the first.

For full conference proceedings, write Patrick Condon, 110 Architecture, 89 Church St. SE Minneapolis, MN 55455.

Bruce N. Wright is an architect and design critic, editor of INFORM Design Journal and teaches design theory at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design.

MINNESOTA VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL

Art works. FORECAST can show you how.

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Arts Programming FORECAST plans and presents contemporary visual, performing, and recorded works in public indoor and outdoor spaces. FORECAST clients include municipalities, business organizations like the Saint Paul Downtown Council, and corporations requesting professional assistance: • • • • • •

Evaluating sites Visualizing opportunities Identifying and overcoming Challenges Setting strategic directions Building action plans and timetables Supervising the creation and placement of artworks

Public art projects have ranged from street and plaza festivals, to atrium and storefront promotions, to the design of public spaces.FORECAST enables community revitalization projects to develop public sites functionally and aesthetically. In Ortonville, Minnesota, FORECAST is helping the Downtown Design Committee to revitalize leftover highway lands.

Ask about our Public Space Program Design workshops. Use one to plan your sites.

Exhibition Management FORECAST develops and manages local and national public art exhibitions, and has managed over 50 exhibitions since 1978. Our capabilities include: • • • • • •

Assessing and evaluating available space Designing and producing exhibits Creating and producing catalogues Coordinating installations Repairing, packing, and shipping Managing tours - local, regional, and national

FORECAST currently manages showings for two nationally-touring exhibits. ART OF THE EYE, orginally developed by FORECAST Public Artworks, now enters its fifth year of touring sponsored by Delta Gamma Foundation. PROJECT REMBRANDT, developed and toured by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, will be shown in Minneapolis in June.

Competition Management FORECAST provides management and advisory services for public art competitions. FORECAST assists sponsors: • • • •

Matching formats to needs Promoting and marketing to artists Selecting and recruiting juries Managing communications, judgings and exhibitions

FORECAST is the professional advisor to the Minnesota Vietnam Veterans Memorial national open competition, which is co-sponsored by the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board and the Minnesota Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Inc. The winning design will be erected on the Capitol grounds in Saint Paul.

For More Information about FORECAST'S professional public art services Write or call John M. Walley:

• FORECASTl PUBLIC ARTWORKS 2955 Bloomington Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55407

612/721-4394

The Minnesota Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Inc. and the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board are sponsoring a national open design competition for a memorial to those Minnesotans who died in the Vietnam conflict. It will include the names of those killed and missing in action. The memorial will be built on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul. The goal of the competition is to achieve a memorial that will be reflective in mood rather than make a political statement about the war itself.

Substantial completion of the memorial is scheduled for late 1991. The total budget is approximately $500,000.00.

The design competition poster, available in early January 1990, will be mailed to all interested parties. Registration opens in January 1990, design submittals are due in late April 1990. Registration by interdisciplinary teams is encouraged.

CONTACT: FORECAST Public Artworks, Professional Adviser, The Minnesota Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board, Room B-46, State Capitol, St. Paul, MN. 55155, 612.296.7138

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