Phoenix (2008-10) is the newest project in New York by the Chinese artist Xu Bing, who previously lived in the city for 18 years before returning to China in 2008. Installed in the nave of Saint John the Divine’s Gothic Revival cathedral, two monumental sculptures, in the form of mythical birds, soar 18 feet above the floor. They are composed entirely of materials and tools from construction sites around Beijing. Xu has explained, in various print and video interviews, that he hit upon the idea after he was commissioned to create a sculpture for the glass atrium of a building in Beijing’s central business district. During his visit to the construction site he witnessed firsthand the harsh working conditions of the migrant laborers and decided to use salvaged building materials to bring attention to them. The developers requested making the sculptures more aesthetically pleasing by encasing them in crystal, but the artist refused. As a result, he lost the commission. Barry Lam, the president of a major computer company in Taiwan, eventually purchased the artworks. Before coming to Saint John the Divine, Phoenix was displayed in the Today Art Museum in Beijing, the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and MassMoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts last year.

At first sight, the massive scale of the two sculptures strikes the viewer with awe, just like the shiny new buildings cropping up around Beijing (and New York). Further examination of Phoenix leads to the discovery that the creatures have been brought to life through dirty, rusty, commonplace items, wielded by laborers toiling in an environment far from shiny or new. As creatures born, according to legend, from the ashes of fire, Xu’s phoenixes stand in for those grand examples of Beijing architecture, and succeed in packing a powerful punch in terms of conveying its message, one of Xu’s strongest political statements to date.

Phoenix is best understood within the theme of metamorphosis, which preoccupied Xu after moving to New York in 1990. In 1997, he invented a new writing system by fusing elements of the English and Chinese languages. Although his words look like Chinese characters, they are comprised of English letters. His audience was invited to learn this “unified” language in an environment resembling a traditional calligraphy classroom, complete with manuals, writing tools and desks. The whole project was entitled New English Square Word Calligraphy. Xu’s Living Word installations (2001-2002), including one exhibited in Washington, D.C., visualized the word “bird” taking flight from floor to ceiling. Each element was either a modern Chinese character, an ancient pictogram, an animal form, or Xu’s own square-word calligraphy. Viewed as a whole, the sculptures evoked the process of morphing from one form to the next. Closest in concept to Phoenix is the artist’s Background Story, an ongoing series begun in 2004. Approaching frosted glass panes, the viewer first sees reprisals of famous classical landscape paintings. Upon coming closer and looking at the verso, one realizes how the brushstrokes are composed of debris both natural and manmade, such as leaves, branches and discarded paper. Background Story masterfully translates, in literal terms, the classical conception of the brushstroke as a representation of the energy and essence of nature and the Universe.

Like Background Story, Phoenix seeks to reveal the humble yet profound origins of creativity, but it does not have Background Story’s transitional stage, facilitated in the latter by the viewer’s movement from the front to the back of the glass panes. The idea of metamorphosis is also not as clear in Phoenix as it was in Living Word. The white lights lining the birds unify the composition, but emphasize stasis. Xu’s idea to imbue his majestic creatures with an element of ugliness is brilliant, and he could have pushed this further. Unfortunately, the choice to install Phoenix within Saint John the Divine further diminishes the impact of its original message by tipping the balance in favor of beauty and grandeur. It also encourages the impression that the sculpted birds are divine. This might induce the viewer to forget about those migrant workers toiling on the ground.

Ultimately, the original site would have been the best place for these sculptures, as they would have reminded visitors of the building’s genesis. On the other hand, temporarily nesting in locations not quite suited to them aptly reflects the plight of Chinese migrant workers, who are forced by poverty to leave the comfort of home for work. Phoenix certainly offers substantial food for thought to make the pilgrimage to Saint John the Divine worthwhile.

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The Berkeley Art Museum’s “Human/Nature” show offers the results of a UNESCO-funded project in which eight artists were matched with an imperiled region of their choice. Thus by design, the show is a revealing jumble, expressing something of what it has come to mean to respond to a place (or site, region, niche), and something of what it can no longer mean. Conspicuously absent are two of the great historical exemplars of response to place: that monument of the long labor of the locals, like Wordsworth’s Michael and his unfinished Sheep-fold; and the more recently prominent model of artistic self-effacement in ecological art, where place is all, and artists put themselves in the service of vivifying or restoring a site, while covering the traces of their own activity. Here most of the works are in the artists’ signature styles, conveying the sense that these are just the most recent products of long artistic mid-careers. The surprising commonality here is the prominence of pedagogy, the artists passing on the knowledge gained in their hithering and thithering from home to region to museum.

The work that initially seems closest to the Romantic evocation of place is that of Marcos Ramirez Erre, who has installed a version of a building, part home,  part shrine, from the Yunnan region of southwestern China. There are two video monitors on each long side of the building; one shows in real time the interior activities of cooking, playing, and eating, the other the construction of a building. An evocation of place? Well, yes, but the experience is aversive: the building seems crammed into its space, hunched just below the ceiling, its dark wood somehow foreboding in the underlit gallery. Its few decorative tiles, on the other hand, are seen as if from too close, which gives their floral patterns, which ought to be highlights, an apotropaic quality. This is a romanticism stripped of the fantasy that the representation of alien places is in the service of the viewer’s psychic integration. One is instead confronted with something unrecoverably alien, and that is unconcerned with what you think of it.

The unadorned pedagogical impulse is apparent in Mark Dion’s Mobile Ranger Library, a moveable kiosk displaying the books and maps you’ll need to make the most of your trip to Komodo National Park in Indonesia. Rigo 23’s works from the Atlantic Forest Southwest Reserve in Brazil are crowd-pleasers, and he recruited the labor of crowds of indigenous makers into them. The threats of habitat-loss and environmental destruction are seen through the now oddly atavistic metaphor of atomic weaponry. In Cry For Help, statuettes and maquettes seem to cascade from a large basket suspended over the gallery, or “Struggle For Life” to populate a nuclear submarine that has the low-tech appeal of a vacation cruise on a working trawler. Of the show’s works of pedagogical recruitment, Xu Bing’s is the nerviest and most unsettling: He taught an art class to children in Kenya and gave them the project of calligrammatic rendering the local trees with combined pictorial and linguistic devices. He then copied the results in Chinese ink-and-brush style into a single composition. Across the top, in half presented and half hidden in an English inscription in Xu’s invented quasi-ideogrammatic script, he proclaims that he has “copied the work of the children just as if I were copying from a book of old masters.” The children, he adds, are part of nature, like trees. “You must respect them.”

The two most artistically achieve works take something like Xu Bing’s achievement as given, and then take one more step. Ann Hamilton’s step is forwards: she evokes the symbiosis of humans and nature in the Galapagos through mixed sound recordings of birds cries and children’s chants..In her installation’s niche she circulates just below the ceiling images from a camera whose lens is centered on a water’s surface. The work regains something of the intensity of the Romantic evocation of place with its disillusioned inclusion of the artist’s movements and bare technological bits included among the constituents of place.

Diana Thater, forges another of her signature video installations from her trip to a South African wetlands preserve, probing animal consciousness in images presented across a skewed grid of monitors. The work earns its central placement in the show by recruiting the viewer’s movement down the museum’s central walkway into the piece.  The shifting viewing height and distance intensifies the splintered grid’s suggestion of the only ever partial and ephemeral glimpse we have of animals. But Thater’s step beyond Xu’s achievement is a step back: she renounces concern for a human/nature symbiosis, and instead launches herself with quixotic ferocity towards an unknowable other. Like the great autistic animal researcher Temple Grandin, she treats the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s answer to the question “What is it like to be a bat?”—Nagel thinks we cannot so much as imagine a coherent answer—as a provocation. One might expect that the project of an American artist evoking a bioregion in Africa would allude to Peter Kubelka’s heavily ironic and self-ironizing  experimental film classic “Unsere Afrikareise”, wherein German bwanas and their wives mingle with the natives and gun down a rhino or two; but Thater is post-irony. Her work perhaps best fulfills at least one hope motivating such a project, that the work will be a plunge into otherness, and one where the artist takes the viewer along.

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