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Art & Ecology


Art & Ecology:

Photoessays: Art and the Earth



Changing Views About Art and the Earth

by Don Krug and Jennifer Siegenthaler

Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)

German artist Joseph Beuys was a pioneer of conceptual and ecological art. He graduated from the Dusseldorf Academy of Art where he studied the interdependency of art and life. Beuys believe all people are artists. In the 60s, Beuys joined the Fluxus group and later founded a series of political activist organizations that spearheaded solving ecological issues, e.g., recycling and ground water contamination. Earth Piano was conceived by Beuys in 1962, as a way to reconnect human culture with the land. Many of his projects were staged "actions" as a way to address significant community issues about urban ecology. Overcome Party Dictatorship Now (1971), was a deforestation protest, and Bog Action (1973) was an action to protect a wetland along the Zuider Zee.

Beuys is probably best known for his 7000 Oaks (1982-1987) urban revitalization project, in Kassel, Germany. He enlisted the help of university students to plant oak tree saplings with community donations. Beuys said, "small oak trees grow and life continues." In 1974, after the Vietnam War ended, Beuys traveled to the Rene Block Gallery in New York to perform I Like America and America Likes Me. Beuys spent a week living with a coyote caged in the gallery and protected by felt and a cane. Eventually, the coyote and Beuys learned to co-exist in the same space. The action was Beuys way of signifying, on one level at least, that human beings need to take a closer look at the dynamic interactions of nature (coyote) and culture (Beuys). Understanding the complexities of interdependency is one of the first steps toward ecological sustainability.






domique gw mazeaud

The ritual performance artist domique gw mazeaud was born in Paris, but moved to New York in 1967 and later to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1986. Her art is based in everyday social activities that seek to "find the spiritual in art in our time." (mazeaud in Lacy, 1995) Many of mazeaud's early performances were inspired by Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and Allan Kaprow and were private work. In 1993, the artist traveled throughout North Carolina meeting with local environmentalists. She recorded and exhibited their untold stories, photographs, mud handprints, and water and soil from their community in a work that affirmed grassroot "netweaving" or the importance of communication.

domique gw mazeaud is probably best known for her long term project The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande, (1987 - continuing). The "great cleansing" ritual performance is repeated on the seventeenth day of each month along a small section of the Santa Fe river, a tributary of the Rio Grande. The artist records her actions in a journal, along with ideas about the the various meanings and values associated with urban waste, pollution, and picking up all kinds of trash. She penned, "All rivers are connected; I have learned that frequently my river. . . . people function in the same way. One way to activate these currents is through ritual. Rituals are icons of connections, they are the art of our lives." (mazeaud in Lacy, 1995, p. 263) The artist sees her art as a political catalyst to activate present and future environmental awareness and action.






Hans Haacke

In 1969, when other artists were building monuments to ideas about minimal art, the conceptual West-German born artist, Hans Haacke, focused his attention on the interdependency of biological systems and nature. Haacke was one of the first contemporary artists, along with Joseph Beuys, Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison, and Alan Sonfist, to examine social ecological issues through art in the United States. Grass Grows was exhibited at a Manhattan Gallery in 1966 and again at the Cornell University museum in 1969. Grass Grows highlighted physical and biological processes of change, renewal, and decay. Haacke planted and grew green sod on bare dirt in the exhibition space. He believed art had become linked to "mythical time," a concept that separated art from real life events. He was determined to create art that existed in "real time," with life-centered issues, e.g., politics, economic systems, ecology, industry, and other everyday life experiences and activities.






Ana Mendieta (1948-1985)

The Cuban born artist Ana Mendieta was only thirty-six when she died. She emigrated to New York with her sister in 1961, but grew up in foster homes and orphanages, displaced from her family at an early age. She studied art at the University of Iowa in the 1970s. In Arbol de la Vida, number 294 (Tree of Life/Silhouettes series 1973-1980), photographic documentation records the artist standing still against a tree trunk at Old Man's Creek, her unclothed body completely covered with Iowa mud. In her words, she was creating "a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on the silhouette)." Mendieta attempted to reconceptulalize issues of gender and patriarchy through her art. She believed the female form was an iconographic source that needed to be reconnected to early goddess mythology. Judith Stein and Ann Sargent Wooster (1989) writethat "according to Greek myth the first artist was a woman, Dibutade, and the first image, a silhouette." (p. 107)

Mendieta's work explored contemporary issues about ecology and feminism. Her work predates and parallels the writing of significant ecofeminist authors such as, Carolyn Merchant, Freya Mathews, Val Plumwood, Robyn Eckersly, Ariel Kay Salleh, Patsy Hallen. In the 1990s, there are several women ecological artists examining ideas about art, environment, and social category systems such as age, ability, gender, race, social status, sexuality, etc., (e.g. Juana Alicia, Jerri Allyn, Alice Aycock, Helene Aylon, Judy Baca, Deborah Butterfield, Betsy Damon, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Cheri Gaulke, the Guerrilla Girls, Ann Halprin, Ann Hamilton, Margaret Harrison, Donna Henes, Jenny Holzer, Patricia Johanson, Marie Johnson-Calloway, Barbara Kruger, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Yoland Lopez, Adrian Piper, Rachel Rosenthal, Juane Quick-To-See-Smith, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, to name a few). Mendieta's art was instrumental in this movement to critique social issues in relationship to the environment and the multiple meanings associated with gender, patriarchy, power, and authority.

References

Eckersley, R. (1992). Environmentalism and political theorty: Toward and eco-centric approach. Albany, New York: State university of New York press.

Hallen, P. (1987). Making peace with the environement. The Trumpeter. 4 (3). 3-14.

Lacy, S. (ed.) (1995). Mapping the terrain: New genre public art. Seattle, Washington: Bay Press.

Mathews, F. (1991). The ecological self. London: Routledge.

Merchant, C. (1996). Earthcare: Women and the environement. London: Routledge.

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. London: Routledge.

Rosen, R. (1989). Making their mark: Women artists move into the mainstream. 1970-1985. New York: Abbeville Press.

Salleh, A. (1984). "Deeper than deep ecology: The Eco-Feminist connection." Environmental Ethics. 6(4). 339-45.






Robert Rauschenberg

In the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg experimented with using new media that included everyday objects and materials in his art work. Earth Paintings were indoor wall hangings composed of soil and grass. His "combines" extended the conception of painting as a flat two-dimensional space off the wall into the three dimensional space of the viewers. Mud-Muse (1968-1971) was an installation created in collaboration with engineers at Teledyne Inc. that recirculated ordinary soil through a system of mechanical apparatuses. In the 1960s he featured the interdisciplinarity of his ideas in collage-like montages. Earth Day was a poster commissioned by the American Environment Foundation and commemorates the first Earth Day. These early forms of environmental art explored ideas of the artist's relationship to society, and society's interconnectedness to nature.










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