Back to Home Page
Artists Community Send us Info
Membership Frequently Asked Questions About Us Search
See other Writings

Interview with John Grande


by Karolina Armata

Writer and art critic John K. Grande's reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photography, Espace Culture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art on Paper, The Globe and Mail, Circa (Ireland) and Canadian Forum. The author of Balance: Art & Nature, Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists and Playing with Fire: Armand Vaillancourt: Social Sculptor, John Grande has published numerous catalogue essays on selected artists. His latest book is Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists to be published by SUNY Press, New York in May 2004. I met with him in my home.

K.A.: Could you briefly explain what the term "ecological art" means?

J.G.: Environmental art is a catch phrase that includes land art, earth-sensitive art and artists working with natural materials. Land art is a phenomenon of the '60s and '70s, with artists like Robert Smithson who made his Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Utah, one of those grandiose environmentally insensitive works that transformed the landscape. Earth-sensitive art is smaller in scale, integrating an assemblage or sculpture in a natural setting, and there is art made with natural materials, which is usually exposed indoors.

K.A.: I see the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called your writings in Balance: Art and Nature "an important contribution to the theory of art". How did you develop an interest in this art form?

Author, critic and curator, John Grande.
Author, critic and curator, John Grande.

J.G.: I was always into landscape. The landscape of people in Asia was one thing; the natural landscape in Canada, another. The two often intertwined; you saw Buddhist frescoes on outdoor rocks in Sri Lanka at pilgrimage sights and you also had ice sculptures in Quebec.

I became interested in Ecology before Art. I worked for friends of the Earth in England in the '70s on the Schweppes non-returnable bottle campaign and headed an environmental group at Frensham Heights, the free school I went to in England. I returned to Canada and became more preoccupied with art. I had seen the first generation of land artists and thought that Canada was a place where nature plays a big role in people's lives. Why couldn't works dealing with nature be contemporary in the same way that postModern works from New York, which were so conceptual, could?

K.A.: How different is today's land art from ancient land art?

J.G.: There are many examples of ancient land art, from Peru, the Nazka Indians, North American Indians, the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio and inukshuks in the north which were markers for the Inuit Cultures. So you had land art before there was the terminology. Art is really an 18th century invention and in holistic cultures, art was part of everyday life - you did not call it art. But this phenomenon we now call ecological art is contemporary. It's an outgrowth of minimalism, post-modernism, assembly art, arte povera, so it's locked in a historical paradigm and moves forward into the present as we become more aware of the disappearance of nature and increasing chaos with climactic problems. It enters into a political realm, public art realm, and into creative expression as well.

K.A.: Which artists do you find most inspiring?

J.G.: Actually Frida (referring to my dog). She does paw art. She does that all over Montreal…

K.A.: Is she an ecological artist?

J.G.: Yes, actually, she uses her moist foot print on the earth, and she does it at random. (laughs) But I would say that some artists are more social like Alan Sonfist; his work is very exciting because he challenged the establishment of the museum. He donated his body after his death to the Metropolitan Museum as a decaying work of art. Then there are other artists who are esthetically very interesting; Nils-Udo from Germany is one of them. He's done an installation on the mountainside at Mont-Tremblant. A series of caves with stones in them - very poetic. But I cannot say I have a favorite.

K.A.: What makes a good artist?

J.G.: A good artist communicates well, visually or texturally, or in terms of the medium they are using. Even a video artist. Bruce Nauman is a good video artist because you get the message right away. Andy Goldsworthy is a good design artist, maybe not a great artist in the total scale. I'm not sure. A lot of artists are becoming designers; they're not really artists. We live in an era of graphic and technological evolution. People think that design is more emphatic than a sensitive poetic work. So you have some artists that are more effectively communicating feelings of the human condition, who are not considered as great as the designers, but I personally like artists who work in the field and who may not want to leave permanent traces of the work. They may just want to document it. They may do an assemblage or a performance and there won't be much left except maybe photos after. But you'll notice that when earth artists get older, they'll start to work with permanent material because they're worried about their legacy.

K.A.: What do you like most about your job?

J.G.: You're allowed to step outside of the consumer mentality, the work for money to buy, type of thing, and it gives you freedom to amble through life observing what you like, meeting people and learning about what they are doing. That's the most interesting thing. From that it helps you to grow, your ability to read things and understand their meaning, visually and in terms of social communication the real pro is publishing books. Books, for me are like an exhibition. It's there after the shows are gone, after everything.

K.A.: Speaking of books, I understand that you have a few coming out soon.

J.G.: Playing with Fire: Armand Vaillancourt Social Sculptor and Balance: Art and Nature, distributed by University of Toronto press, have both been republished this year. Balance: Art and Nature raises some classic questions about the relation between art and ecology. It was originally published in 1994. It now has additional chapters on the nuclear industry in Canada, Patrick Dougherty in South Carolina, Keith Haring, who did spray paint art in New York, outdoors in the environment, an eco-art symposium and a piece done for Public Art Review a few years ago called Earth Sensitive. The presursor for this was Art & Environment done with The Friendly Chameleon in Toronto on recycled papaer with vegetal inks. I have a new foundation book for the art and ecology world called Art, Nature, Dialogue, published by Suny press in New York in April. It comprises 20 conversations with artists who work with materials from or in nature. They are from Europe and North America and include David Nash, Hamish Fulton, Nils-Udo, Patrick Dougherty, Betty Beaumont, Bob Verschueren, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Bill Vazan, Egil Kurdol, and herman de vries. These interviews will give readers a direct insight or window into the way each of these artist thinks without the usual monologues that accompany the imagery.

K.A.: What are the most important lessons that you've learned from your experience as an art critic, curator and writer?

J.G.: The most important lessons have always had to do with maintaining your own direction in life and the hardest thing, which is the same problem for artist, is to be commissioned to do work that you don't really like to do. Even though some jobs pay well, they may end up taking four times as long to do because you're just not into it. That's one of the hardest things, to refuse the work. Generally, if one selects what one wants to do one gets further ahead.

K.A.: Tell me a little bit about your childhood.

J.G.: I was extremely free as a kid and I experienced many cultures. We lived three years max in any country because my dad was a diplomat. I was conceived in Greece, born in Canada, lived in Germany, Austria, Sri Lanka, and South Africa, basically moved around a lot. I had a very privileged childhood. I was exposed to many cultural variables. I learned to read cultures very quickly and to communicate, without language at times, and I think it may have been a bit lonely occasionally because all the people you'd been with three years ago had vanished and there was a new set of people every three years. So that was a bit of a drag. I really loved going to Free School in England, it had a very important influence on me. I had always been in private schools before and went to a Frensham Heights Free School like Summerhill, which was a school where the students taught themselves. They had some help from teachers but basically we did our own work.

K.A.: What did you want to do when you were younger?

J.G.: I took a career exam about what I should be when I was in school and the results told me funeral director or jazz musician. But I was always in scholarly environments and so my mentors were always thinkers. The people around me were professors and teachers. I think I always wanted to be a teacher. That's probably subconsciously what I wanted to be. My father wasn't necessarily a practical person. He was a thinker and idea person. He was a diplomat, so I didn't meet people who were necessarily practical either. I met people who were good story tellers, people who had a theatrical side, or people who wrote well or communicated well. Play was always a part of our life. We went from culture to culture and we learnt to adapt. Being able to do work but make it fun. Without plotting, if something is too dull, drop it and perhaps come back to it later, after you're inspired. It's all a matter of arranging your time and your effort well.

K.A.: After all the moving around you ended up back in Montreal. What is the appeal of this city?

J.G.: I returned to Montreal in 1988. My parents grew up in Montreal, and my brother, the actor, was living here. It seemed like the right place to come back to because it had a history and it was sort of European. I found the West coast arts scene was not very international, particularly in Vancouver in the 1970s and early 1980s. Montreal, on the other hand, is a beautiful city where the arts are a central thing as they are in New York and other major world cities.

© 2010 greenmuseum.org