Social Ecologies: Curated by Greg Lindquist, at the Gallery at Industry City

December 10, 2015 to February 21, 2016

A contemporary landscape painter himself, curator Greg Lindquist offers in this important exhibition an array of strategies to address the notion of environment, ranging from simply acknowledging a deep connection with the earth to documenting eco-destruction to making art that ventures remedies to the crisis. “Social Ecologies” comes out of Lindquist’s interest in the “intertwined relationship between humans and the natural world [that has existed] for centuries,” as he put it in an essay in the November 2015 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, stressing that we now face an existential crisis brought on by runaway climate change. In fact, humans have been significantly altering the biosphere since the early hunters wiped out the big fauna and agriculture began its slow degradation of the soil stock of the planet. There is no Garden to go back to; humans must create a balance with nature never before imagined or achieved.

The 1970s saw artists exploring new ideas of their relationship with nature.   Robert Smithson introduced an investigation of art and place – and how each informed and identified the other. He took the work of art out of the gallery and located it in an outdoor setting, and at the same time he put a signifier of the natural site into the gallery, thus demonstrating what he called “non-site”. He located his art not just in a natural setting but in the earth itself, penetrating soil and water.

Charles Simonds is represented by enlarged stills from “Birth,” a film in which he symbolically gives birth to himself out of the earth – specifically, the pit in New Jersey where Simonds has for a long time extracted the clay to make his art. Simonds’ art is about culture from the ground up; the ground is essential for the building of culture.

British-born Rackstraw Downes declared he had no “New World sense of the antithesis between unspoiled nature and human culture; a landscape to me is a place where people live and work.” (Quoted by Stephen Maine in “Rackstraw Downes: Infrastructures”, Art in America Nov. 2010.) His pictures are horizontal scans of a view, including finely-tuned details, that construct pictorial space with curved lines creating a picture that feels distorted compared to traditional landscape painting. We are clearly shown that the human vision of nature is anthropocentric. Downes simultaneously makes a passionate pitch for objective empirical reality as he paradoxically displays its biases by curving space to establish the artist’s viewpoint. An art that successfully combines these “oppositions” pins viewers with a double vision that puts the onus on us to form our own understanding of what is going on.

Mary Miss and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, artists who also started working in the 1970’s, represent the land art movement and feminism, both of which critiqued earlier notions of art making its “mark” on nature and instead took a receptive, integrative stance. Along with a younger artist, Ellie Irons, they put their work at the service of natural topologies and human systems. Laderman Ukeles, since 1977 the artist-in-residence at the NYC Department of Sanitation, is represented by her Sanitation Manifesto, 1984 in which she writes poetically as artist, feminist, wife, mother about the responsibilities of “maintenance.”

Miss has built a long career of public sculpture that marries art, nature and humanity, and working collaboratively, an example of which is the South Cove Project at Battery Park. It’s challenging to conveying Miss’s work in a gallery setting, but the small schematic drawing here of a site in Indianapolis does the job nicely. The project employs mirrors and beams of red light to visually connect inhabitants with their streams and waterways. Miss takes in a work site experiencing its geological features, history and surrounds to create a vision that amplifies and harmonizes with Alexander Pope’s conception of the genius loci. Miss has written that Broadway is the “native American ridgeline” and intrinsically important to the experience of Manhattan.

Irons transformed a corner of the gallery into a “sanctuary for weeds” collected from native Bushwick plants.   A helpful booklet explains Why Weeds?: “Co-evolved with humans, they are well-suited to do the tough work of greening a heavily altered anthropogenic landscape.”

Alyson Vieira’s environmentalism lies in her choice of materials and her historicism. She employs baled post-industrial plastics to build giant forms that suggest archaic ruins. Making art using the industrial vernacular material – recycling the recycled – posits a culture that is constantly being built, decaying and then rebuilt. “Natural resources” are no longer timber and stone but plastics that can never break down – themselves by-products of modernity’s life-blood: carbon in its solid, liquid and gas forms.

Alexis Rockman’s Loam, 2008, is a witty painting that can be read both as a cracked tooth being mined by ants in which seedlings are taking root – and a painting from Morris Louis’s Veil series. This is art about layered ecologies: human host, plant and animal parasites – except, it could be asked, who is the ultimate destructive parasite on the planet if not, ironically, the only one capable of making art?

Soviet period bath building, Tsakltubo, a photograph by Georgian artist Gio Sumbadze, examines the recent past showing a crumbling Soviet building overgrown with new vegetation. Soviet-era architecture in an exhibition with these themes might have us thinking Chernobyl and accounts of driving for days through dead forests.   Yet the hopeful note of verdant wild growth pushing through the crumbling concrete in this photograph offers a post-eco-apocalyptic vision akin to Margaret Atwood’s fiction. One is allowed to imagine a future welcoming back the forest and building on the ruins of the old world in an egalitarian, human culture integrated and interdependent with nature.

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When Jackie Brookner, the pioneering ecological artist, died of cancer earlier this year she was in the middle of The Fargo Project, which had just received an Art America grant for community-designed, “creative place-making” projects. The city of Fargo, ND will now implement the plan Brookner devised in collaboration with over a hundred people during five years.   The 18-acre storm water basin site surrounded by city neighborhoods will function as both restored wetland and neighborhood commons, with “passive” features such as a “listening garden” shaped like an ear; a citizen science lab; and giant, playable marimbas built out of tree logs. In a TEDx talk about the project Jackie said, “And it’s gotta be great in the winter, too, because as we know, it’s Fargo, right?… [New trees will] “shape the snow as the wind blows the snow over the trees.”

Brookner was a sculptor who made her interest in biology, social equality and her commitment to ecology all come together. As she wrote in 2009:

My practice as an ecological artist evolved over time and continues to evolve. I went to college sure I was going to be a biologist, but end up going into art history. Just before writing my PhD dissertation I started sculpting. it took about 20 years and several transformations to realize I could bring everything I loved together, catalyzed by building a cabin in the Adirondack woods (1985) and editing an issue of Art Journal on Art and Ecology (1990-92). Then I knew I needed to create work that would have beneficial ecological functions…I realized my work could be “of “ nature, rather than “about” it.

When I first knew Jackie I asked her to come to my studio. I was a young sculptor and wanted feedback on a body of work I was worrying about from this older, accomplished sculptor whose work I admired. She looked at my human-scale, painted plywood constructions and said, “These are very intelligent and very well-done but there’s something missing in this work. Where are you in this?” I was disappointed with her response. I thought maybe the work wasn’t good or maybe she just didn’t get it. In any case I had gotten no ideas about what to do next. Yet later, when I was beginning a new body of work, I started searching myself in a different way about my decisions. Was I seeking ideas for making Good Art or was I working from something authentic, for better or worse? Where was I in this, and what did that mean?

I continue to ask that question in my studio and in other areas of my life. I was organizing an exhibition of artists that included Jackie when she died. Titled “Climate Contemporary,” the show consisted of art dealing with the theme of climate change. As much as calling attention to the climate crisis the show was intended to examine artists’ varying relationships with content. How do you convey something about this notoriously difficult subject of global warming? What do you believe? What do you understand? “Where are you in this?” is a question of conscience and politics, as well as a question of truth and beauty, of making and ideas.

Jackie and I had several conversations about the show, which took place at the Lake George Arts Project in upstate New York where she and I both have spent summers. She urged me to focus on her more recent projects, Fargo and Veden Taika , saying “I didn’t want to put more stuff into the world” she instead created environmental works that consisted mainly of water, flora and fauna. The latter project (“The Magic of Water” in Finnish) is a decommissioned sewage lagoon surrounded by forest in Saalo for which Jackie mobilized local artists and students to build three floating islands. Constructed as fractal networks of linked triangles, the islands are platforms for plants that clean water and air, as well as provide habitat for nesting birds. When she discovered that animals were eating the eggs and hatchlings, Jackie led a team in building sculptures designed to enable birds to build nests high enough to elude marauders. Eventually the site became an EU bird sanctuary. Visually, the islands and sculptures appear both at home in their natural environment and human-made. They do not impersonate nature like dioramas at a natural history museum. In warm months a mechanism periodically produces a cloud of moisture which stimulates the plants’ microbial action that cleanses pollutants in the water. The effect (which I’ve seen only in photos) is mysterious and beautiful. In her TedX talk Jackie called it as “a misting sculpture”.

Jackie Brookner was the only artist in “Climate Contemporary” whose work actually embodies a solution to the problem it is referencing – not a global one, obviously, but a solution to the local weather event of storm water, one of the phenomena most clearly linked to climate change. She spoke of “the inseparability between our bodies and the habitats that support our lives” and held that sculpture could be mobilized to change people’s minds because it unleashed the power of metaphor. She wrote, “I can think of no task more urgent for our survival as a species because anything we do, any technology we come up with, is dependent on who we think we are”.

I didn’t know Jackie very well but I knew her for a long time. We got together, sometimes by chance, at crucial points in our lives. Toward the end of hers, she wanted to have time to make art in her studio and “enjoy the nature I have worked so hard to protect”. Her courage and personal integrity were evident in the honesty with which she spoke of her condition, and the prospects for her having more time. She could say “how much work our plant friends do for us” and make the words sound true. Many people are very sad not to have Jackie in our neighborhood any more, but we have so much that is important because of her. Myself, I will always have that question.

Memorial info

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We  had a big vegetable garden with all the usual summer fare, our favorites being corn and tomatoes. Chives grew along the driveway and pale yellow and black Tiger Swallowtail butterflies haunted the dill in the herb garden. My father was a great cook and I remember especially his Chinese-style dishes stir-fried in an electric skillet with ingredients he’d brought up from Chinatown in NYC, like elephant ear mushrooms and baby corn.  His other specialities were pea soup with a dollop of sour cream and pancakes in animal shapes.  These same shapes took form inbright red mercurochrome on scrapes on our legs; and in pale orange calamine lotion for our mosquito bites. Tall spokes of asparagus grew between the tea roses and the peonies in the flowerbed. My father was a great forager. When we took hikes in the woods he knew all the plants and could find things to eat everywhere. We often pulled the car over to the side of the road at a certain spot on Finkle brook where he had planted watercress and he would collect some for a salad. After it rained puffballs would bloom in the field (spherical mushrooms sometimes as big as a pancake) and he would harvest them and sauté them in butter. My father had a small rifle (a .22) with which he would hunt, venturing no further than his patio, to shoot pests threatening the garden. It was before my time, but I heard stories from my mother of his presenting Clement Greenberg and other city swells with meat pie made from woodchuck (David knew how to remove the glands that rendered woodchuck inedible) — revealing the provenance of the mystery meat after the fact. My sister Candida and I enjoyed eating frogs’ legs, even though they were probably the same ones we had been chasing around our ponds that day. We had winey, fragrant maple syrups bottled in old green Coke bottles from neighbors and homemade root beer at our neighbors the Neumanns.  For my sister’s August birthday we ritually breakfasted in our nightgowns on the patio on lobster and champagne (really ginger ale, but the small dash of real champagne and the bottle on the table convinced us). When we were babies our parents had the questionable practice of hanging bunches of grapes on nails near our beds so we would have a snack on arising – and keep quiet a little longer in the morning. What was perhaps most exotic for us was the row of glass jars of candy and the banana splits David made for us in fancy glass dishes.   We were very impressed because we knew his expertise came from working as a teenager at a soda fountain in Indiana where he learned such touches as dusting the sundae with malt powder, called “a dusty road”.

CHERRY COBBLER

In the early summer, the apple people at our farmers market in Tribeca have four different varieties of cherry (sour , Bing, yellow Queen Anne, and one more that is inbetween); this cobbler would work with any of them.

Rinse and stem the cherries. Poke the pits out through the little stem hole with the round end of a bobby pin and  throw them in the compost. (We put all our compostable waste in bags in the freezer and take them to the farmers market on Saturdays. It seems like a big deal but it isn’t).

3 cups pitted cherries
¾ cups juice
2 Tbs and 2 teaspoons instant tapioca

Mix and let stand for ½ hour

Add 2/3 cup sugar (less if you are not using tart cherries) and ¼ teaspoon almond essence. Put in a saucepan and heat, stirring gently, till the tapioca softens and becomes transparent. Scrape into a buttered 9” x 9” ceramic or glass baking pan (no metal and no plastic-coated; slight variations in size and shape are fine).

Preheat 450 degrees F and make the following sweet biscuit dough:

1-3/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
A tablespoon sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
6 tablespoons cold butter, cut into chunks

Cut butter into dry ingredients with two knives; or rub with your fingers until the butter is in pea-sized bits; or mix quickly in a food processor.

Add carefully:

3/4 milk or cream

Stir briefly just to mix and turn the dough out on a hard, lightly floured surface.  Roll out to about 1/2″ thickness, remove about 25% of the dough (you can make a big biscuit from the extra but don’t bake it as long).  Spread the cherry mixture in the baking dish and arrange the dough layer on top.  Pierce all over with a sharp fork.  Brush the top with milk, melted butter or granulated sugar.  Bake 15 minutes.

Serve warm with runny yogurt (mango, blackberry or vanilla are good – Ronnybrook is a great brand).

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