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DOES ART WASTE? Assemblage art creates anachronism in juxtaposing technology and nature. This spectrum runs between that using the most technologically separate from nature to that using the least separate.Technology represents being of a time and nature being timeless. What results is often an incredible use of resources for a temporary environmental installation.
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Making apparent; express or manifest. Light focuses our attention to make new visual connections between the manmade high tech lights and reflective surfaces and the purely natural setting. The impossible magnitude of installations involving 600,000 CDs, 70 miles of optical fiber, and thousands of man-hours resets our understanding of the differences between the worlds of man-made and natural materiality.
Doing something again or differently. Disassembly and re-assembly of parts and pieces of primarily old, cast-off objects creates a re-imagined world. Setting the re-imagined world in the desert with its stark openness further alters the experience of the assemblages.
Forming again by interlacing. Weaving tree branches is a large scale re-envisioning of man made structures and patterns to see anew these structures as art. One man’s vision is created working primarily solo. The branches must be purposefully selected for their integrity, flexibility, and location. That nature will retake most of these installations is somewhat reassuring.
REGATHERING Bringing together into one group, collection or place. Collections of man-made objects are made new when put into a new context and configuration. The collections set into nature imbue the objects with an odd animation, stirring thoughts of flocking animals, rather than the technological artifacts of an electrical age .
RESHAPING Forming or shaping something differently. Large scale covering of nature creates a newly envisioned landscape. The sheer magnitude of scale is a monumental undertaking of materials and manpower. The nature of large scale fabric installations and their removal and disposal is the hidden question behind these temporary artworks. The juxtaposition of the grandness of nature, the large scale of the endeavor and the temporality all combine to amaze crowds of people who would never be exposed to environmental art, much less any art. 5
REFINING To improve by making small changes and making more subtle and accurate. The chaos of nature is reordered and reorganized temporarily. The unexpected beauty and fragility of the temporary is overwhelming. When one wouldn’t think nature could be improved upon for its beauty one sees the small and thoughtful rearrangement is strikingly lovely.
Bruce Munro
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Christo / Jeanne-Claude
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Patrick Dougherty
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Rune Guneriussen Noah Purifoy
Andy Goldsworthy
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C H R I S T O Wrapped Trees / Riehen CH / 1997
WASTE
The world around us is filled with charred remnants and scattered filth in too many forms; too diffuse, of every size and shape and smell, ugly and unwieldy, born of every age and temperament. It seeps into every crevice, floats down every grimechoked street, pools and piles and decays in every corner of every home and city and patch of Wilderness. And there is always so much more of it than we can ever hope to study. A beachcomber of the 1990’s might have stumbled upon The Nikes of Queets, washed ashore after the Great Shoe Spill, when entire shipping containers filled with high-priced shoes spilled into the sea before their cargo slowly made its way to the beaches of the Pacific Northwest. Recent hikers of Mt. Everest will find piles of earlier explorers accumulated trash that they are now obligated to bring down with them upon their return, alongside their own equipment and their noble fatigue. There is no human-made object so well traveled, so ambient, as waste. It fills the oceans and the highest peaks. Our waste lays thick blankets of our chemical age across the entire planet, into every rocky outcropping, to the bottom of every seas floor, nestling in the trees and bogs and pools of the world. It’s in the air, in the water, in yard sales brimming with kitsch, in houses stuffed to the rafters with rubbish, in outer space, spreading out in invisible clouds of toxic chemicals, and piling up in immense mountains of garbage stacked in trash-bricks below ground at Fresh Kills or Puente Hills or a thousand other dump sites. The soil itself is part of a new geology, as the beaches have been remade into plastiglomerate, their sands mingled with the pulverized microplastics of our petroleum age. The genes of sea creatures that ingest these incredibly small fragments of our trash are mutating. Geologists have now begun to study “technofossils” and the sedimented debris-layers of our vast compressed cities, so immense and consequential that they now constitute part of the geological and planetary record. With our waste We have reordered space and place, reshaping them in its image the world over. But many of us are fortunate or foolish enough to tend not to feel the world in this way most of the time. In places, the air still seems breathable, trees manage to seem vibrant and green, squirrels appear happy and filled with energy. Even so, if one of humankind’s desires has been to put its stamp on the world, waste is the most compelling and universal way in which it has accomplished its mission. Every landscape is a trashscape. This not only transforms the world into one vast and unevenly distributed trash heap; it changes, in ways that might not even be perceptible to us, our sense of self and humanity in the world. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes, we have colonized it all with our waste and the elaborate processes that produced it, creating human 8
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waste and wasted human lives all along globalization’s dirty path; and now we must consider where these waste products, living and dead, could go next; or what it means for us if there really is nowhere else to go. There is no path past the wastes we’ve made. Reading Bauman reminds you that we have built for ourselves, and the future, an enormous nest made of our own civilizational excrement. If you wanted to consider an object more resistant to capture, you would be hard pressed to find one. Waste challenges our ability to adjust our contemplation of it to the proper scale. Every thought about waste seems much too big or much too small. So the temptation is to want to encompass everything: to name and honor and linger over every bit of crud and driftwood; to let the term spread out and away from us like an oil slick to encompass the wastage of the entire planet, the extermination of entire cultures and peoples, the wastes that make and unmake empires; massive waste and minuscule, visible and invisible, chemical pollutants, decaying food, everything clogging up the gray air and the brown water and the trash-covered land. Among all these scattered objects, I am less interested in the decayed remnants of grandiose ancient monuments than with some of the other classes of waste that have supplanted them in our age: buried video games; the slow leak of decaying plutonium miles below ground; the plastic bag caught in the tree; the accumulated wreckage in our attics, barns, and living rooms; the satellite debris hurling through space. These are the markers laid down on the bet we have made with futurity. In the end the final disposition of our water bottles, our websites, our Happy Meal toys, and our bombs will say as much about time and humanity as the fates of the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall, or the Coliseum will. In Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay writes with deep erudition and affection about the pleasure that classical ruins have given to people for centuries. Exemplified by the sentiments of Diderot and other Romantic admirers of antiquity’s enduring fragments, these types of ruins seem to possess the power to wring powerful emotions and feelings from us: the thrill or desperation or sorrow that attends contemplation of vanished ages, or the shock of situating ourselves within the endless rushing stream of time. We believe we have some emotional attachment to the stories about humanity that the tumbled stones of ancient ruins seem to tell. But I am much more drawn to what Gilda Williams has characterized as the difference between the “ruin” that captivated Diderot and melancholics everywhere and its lowly counterpart, the “derelict.” The ruin is a thing of wonder and Romantic grandeur; it inspires poetry, whereas the derelict seems to 11
cry out for burial or demolition. It is the difference between a majestic crumbling beauty and an eyesore, a hazard, or a nuisance. For my part, I understand the derelict as that immense underclass of things that have much more quickly or surreptitiously fallen outside of visibility and desire in our time: the indifferent, the lost, the wayward, the leaking, the ugly, the truly abject and unwanted–all the meddlesome waste caught in the cracks between the things we’ve built up in our minds as meaningful and majestic. In every new and shiny object of our age, and in every tiny and seemingly insignificant object of attention, I cannot help but see its erasure, or imagine its rusting, splintered, discarded husk decaying somewhere in the near future. I cannot seem to see objects embedded in their present time and space; they always carom off the edges of the present and into the past and the future, constantly, for me, whether I wish to see them this way or not. So this book is not a systematic environmentalist polemic, an academic monograph on the histories of sanitation, or a political manifesto (three of my favorite things). It is instead a meandering ramble through an idiosyncratic handful of the collapsed monsters and enigmatic bits of drift that have caught my eye, as a dirty penny on the street might not interest a hundred people passing by before it finally finds someone who covets it. This book is meant for the flaneurs of filth, those who like to wrestle with the cinders and rummage around in the midden heap haphazardly. For some of us, a lofty ruin does nothing; We are for the ramshackle and the derelict every time. Like the maddening object that Socrates finds and then tosses away, all the derelict objects of our immense object worlds, whether they are busted pianos, sandwich wrappers, egg cartons, unfashionable bathroom tiles, or corrugated coffee-cup sleeves, are likewise the playthings of an endless litigation, tossed between desire and detritus, waste and want. So if waste is this book’s object, its real subjects are desire and time, because the things we call our waste exist in an interzone between two states of mind and two structures of feeling about the glittering, shattered object-worlds we have built around ourselves. These relics float between the poles of desire and discard. More than mere trash or hazard, a better way to think about waste is to think of it as the unsatisfactory and temporary name we give to the affective relationships we have with our unwanted objects. Waste is the expression of expended, transmuted, or suspended desire, and is, therefore, the ur-object. To talk about waste is to talk about every other object that has ever existed or will ever exist. Conversely, to talk about any object at all is to gesture toward its ultimate annihilated state. Waste is every object, plus time. 12
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BRUCE MUNRO
M U N R O Field of Light / Ulur u AU / 2016
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M U N R O CDsea / Long Knoll Wiltshire UK / 2010
INTERVIEW: BRUCE MUNRO
Internationally renowned British artist Bruce Munro will open Light, an exhibition of 10 breathtaking, large-scale outdoor and indoor lighting installations coupled with indoor sculptures, at Nashville’s Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art. The exhibit will include four installations never before seen in the U.S. Using an inventive array of materials and hundreds of miles of glowing optical fiber, Munro will transfor m Cheekwood’s magnificent gardens, manicured grounds and rolling hills into an enchanting, iridescent landscape that emerges organically at nightfall. Aesthetica spoke to Bruce on his latest exhibition and what to look out for in the future.
essence about it and makes it ideal as medium to use to express abstract concepts such as emotion and connection. A: Your work is centred around light installations within natural landscapes and iconic buildings. Where do you draw your inspiration from for such large scale projects?
BM: Working with large scale landscapes and buildings was very much “wishful thinking,” I never imagined that I would get the opportunity to realise many of my ideas. The inspiration, and the ideas that follow, are changing constantly and vary in scale, medium and longevity. For example , Field of Light was inspired during a journey through A: Firstly, your art practice is centred on the Australian Outback; Water towers light, what is it about light that you feel was inspired by a book that I read when I was twenty one and CDsea by a Sundrawn to use as your focal medium? day afternoon sitting on a rocky peninsuBM: It took me a number of years to lar in Sydney Harbour. As I get older I come to this conclusion and once I had am inspired and drawn to simple things. made my decision to work with light I I endeavour to express these experiences stayed with it. Choosing a medium was in the same way. incredibly helpful as it gave me a structure to work within. I have quite a wide A: You work with both light sculpture ranging imagination and this contain- and installations – do these varied mediment has allowed me to retrace my steps ums perform different roles in the narrawhen I have ended up a blind alley! One tive of your work? beautiful quality of light is that it captures the ephemeral. This illusive, seem- BM: I do not have a set approach so I ingly no physical quality has a spiritual would say that all pieces; small and large 20
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are simply inspired by what’s in my mind on a particular day. I don’t see that short term time based pieces are more or less important than more permanent sculptures. But I do have a preference for the large scale installations to have a flavour of a performance; leaving the natural landscape as one found it is always important. A: Your work often focuses on dramatic landscapes. Can you talk about your work as it relates to the broader natural environment? BM: The opportunity to create installations so large that they become dramatic landscapes has been a huge bonus and privilege for me. Although the original inspiration has often come from other times and places, my approach with an existing installation is always dictated to by the space. This helps keep the work fresh. For me, variations on a theme are as interesting as completely new works. Staying with one medium has showed me that exploration is infinite and what you think you know always has hidden surprises.
BM: Appreciating /understanding scale is important and my ambition in the future is to work larger. This is not an ego driven desire but an instinct that in order to convey an idea/emotion it’s necessary to create a situation where the viewer is out of sight of the gallery walls. I like the idea that people can explore an installation in a private way …like going for a walk through the forest or a trip to the sea. It frees people up to make their own judgement about something and normalises “Art” to “art”. I would like people to take away a feeling of having experienced something positive …at its best a lovely smile. A: Your new exhibition Light is opening at Nashville’s Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum on 24 May, can you tell us more about it?
BM: Cheekwood Botanical Gardens is my second large solo exhibition in North America. I am incredibly excited by Cheekwood because it’s truly a veritable jewel of the gardening world in North America. Aside from the beautiful landscape, Cheekwood has a number of beautiful interior gallery spaces, an A: For such large scale installations, the established artist in residence proviewer can become immersed with the gramme and world class collection of work, what do you want the audience to paintings and sculpture. For me it’s both an added bonus and privilege to exhibit take away from it? my work in their Mansion galleries. 21
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M U N R O Field of Light clean-up
stems (solar powered) in the Uluru region. Last year I was invited bythe to urism arm of the Indigenous Land Corporation to visit the area and look at a prospective piece of land. As with all A: The Field of Light has been a contin- these major installations, funding is vital, ual project for you, being recreated in sev- it will happen when it’s meant to! eral locations around the world. Can you tell us more about this specific installation A: And lastly, what future projects have you got coming up? and what your future plans are for it? The exhibition will comprise of seven exterior and two interior installations as well as an exhibition comprising of six sculptures and a film of my work.
BM: Following Cheekwood Botanical Gardens, exhibitions at Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Columbus, Ohio, (September); Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire (UK) (November) and Edinburgh, Scotland February 2014. We are in the midst of finalising exhibitions at a number of Uluru, central Australia is a powerful other exhibition venues 2014-16. In place. It’s a landscape that is best under- addition I have a back log of installastood/appreciated by experience. I just tions I will be bringing to fruition in the felt alive and in addition to these imme- field behind my home in Wiltshire. diate reactions I realised that my understanding of a desert as a dead and barren place was plain wrong. Simply pondering the blooming desert after a rainstorm was proof that there was a unique potency about the place. Field of Light was simply my interpretation and expression of how it made me feel. I have never tried to read anything more into it than that, nor should anyone one else. My goal is to create a temporary installation of a quarter of a million BM: Field of Light is very much my touchstone. The idea was inspired during a trip through the Australian Outback in 1992 at an important juncture in my life. It took me twelve years to realise the installation and was the first piece of work of my present journey.
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3 weeks 70 miles of optical fiber 140 friends 3,200 hours to construct 250,000 lights 600,000 CD’s
M U N R O Field of Light / Edinburgh SCT / 2014
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M U N R O Field of Light / Houston TX / 2015
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E D W A R D B U R T Y N K S Y Tire Pile / Oxford / 1999
RUNE GUNERIUSSEN
G U N E R I U S S E N T he Heirs Motivational Speech / Norway / 2013
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G U N E R I U S S E N A Charged Meado w 01 / Norway / 2009
THROUGH THE EYES OF RUNE GUNERIUSSEN
Conceptual artist Rune Guneriussen transforms the most ordinary of objects into large-scale installations that pepper the dreamlike landscape of his native Norway. Unlike Andy Goldsworthy, who creates installations using elements of the natural world, Guneriussen integrates man-made items into his work. Using books, chairs, electric lamps and other miscellaneous objects, Guneriussen assembles temporary, site-specific sculptures and installations that he photographs. Once the image is taken, he quickly dismantles the work, leaving no trace of it behind. The Norwegian artist creates the most enchanting of worlds, inviting his viewers to weave their own fairy tale to accompany his whimsical creations. “As an artist he believes strongly that art itself should be questioning and bewildering as opposed to patronising and restricting. He does not want to dictate a way to the understanding of his art, but rather indicate a path to understanding a story,” Guneriussen states in the third person on his website. Using books, chairs, electric lamps and other miscellaneous objects, Guneriussen assembles temporary, site-specific sculptures and installations that he photographs. Once the image is taken, he quickly dismantles the work, leaving no trace of it behind. “I would like to say that I am inspired by the objects I am working on, the place or location I am working at, and the specific time everything is made in. My imagination can just as easily be inspired by global events and politics as it can be inspired by looking at a bird flying across the sky. But I also relate back this inspiration to my artistic development and the real time put into making a work like I do.” By placing inanimate objects like lamps, globes, telephones and chairs in untouched landscapes, the artist achieves to combine nature and manmade structures into whimsical installations. Guneriussen is the only witness of the site-specific installations, leaving the audience with nothing but the photograph as tangible proof which documents the brevity of his objects. In this way, he uses the photographs to extend the space of the idea by means of documentation. With their poetic titles the often monumental photographs suggest multiple stories representing a balance between nature and culture.
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G U N E R I U S S E N A Charged Meadow 02 / Norway / 2009
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75 desk lamps 150 phones
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HIS PARALLEL USE OF MATERIAL AND RURAL SPACE UNPICKS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMAN CULTURE AND THE PLANET WE INHABIT.
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G U N E R I U S S E N Untitled Havoc / Norway / 2008
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P U R I F O Y desert str ucture
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P U R I F O Y No Contest / Joshua Tree / 1991
SALVAGE AND SAVIOR
You have to make a journey to visit Noah Purifoy’s Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum in Southern California. Driving from the city to the desert, you feel the shift in terrain, the vast silent space, unforgiving weather, abandoned buildings, and wildlife. With that you get a sense of the community there, the thrift-store culture, and the way people recycle and repurpose every facet of their lives. Embedded within this community, Noah Purifoy built relationships and sourced the unwanted materials that would form his outdoor tour de force. The sculptural amalgam that Purifoy created in Joshua Tree consists of rickety geometries populated by balanced and arranged densities of discarded junk (toilets, tires, bowling balls, shoes, etc.) that absorbs all of the qualities inherent in the desert landscape. The Outdoor Museum also integrates Purifoy’s life previous to his move to the desert in 1989, at the age of 72, including the social injustices of the segregated South, his experience at Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts), the Watts Rebellion, and his years spent working as a social worker, educator, and civil servant.1 Purifoy’s idea of “recording lifetime experiences” is manifested in the social and relational aspects of his cast-off materials, architectural spaces, and transient objects. The works in Purifoy’s open-air museum ricochet off one another. For instance, Shopping Cart (1997), an oversized icon of homelessness, resonates with Shelter (1999), a structure whose interior produces the feeling of abandonment and invisibility. Both works contrast with the large-scale The White House (1990–93), previously titled The Castle, which is the dominant and central structure in Purifoy’s civic space. The constructed analytic geometric space of The White House, associated with bureaucracy and authority, intertwines with the accumulation and neglect associated with the unregulated space of the street. The museum’s overall arrangement seems to follow a broken urban plan, mixing improvisational realities with institutional logic. The sculptures operate both phenomenologically and on an emblematic level. The scale feels human and at the same time like a model of a psychic space. As one meanders inside, outside, and between the structures, the network of sculptures starts to appear as a kind of body, and subjectivity constantly shifts in relation to the constellation. The forms become a stage for the viewer, and one has the feeling of being able to project oneself into the spaces while simultaneously having the sensation of trespassing. In Purifoy’s unique museum, the access, ownership, and 42
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P U R I F O Y From the Point of Vie w of the Little People / Joshua Tree / 1994
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P U R I F O Y Outdoor Museum
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10 acres occupied 15 years to complete
privilege associated with commodity culture exchange positions with abandoned spaces and junk. I first visited Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum in 2006, two years after his death. I took my Art Center class, called “Studio Visits,” on a field trip. We started in Joshua Tree, at Andrea Zittel’s home and studio and the High Desert Test Site (HDTS) headquarters. Zittel took us to visit Purifoy’s museum, which is in close proximity to HDTS both physically and in spirit. I wanted my students to see examples of artists who have forged ways to exist that aren’t fueled by a standard recipe for professionalism or the art market, that are predicated on experimentation, and that privilege the work in situ creating its own context.
P U R I F O Y Outdoor Museum
Purifoy’s museum site and his creative process seem boundless, like embodiments of the idea of the Wild West. Correspondingly, the artist chose to work with the natural elements, rather than perceiving their limitations. I can relate to some aspects of Purifoy’s outdoor situation and the necessity for resourcefulness. I split my time between an urban storefront studio and an abandoned and repurposed solar-powered swimming pool studio in Topanga Canyon. Sunk into the ground, the pool has a deep end, which is leveled with a wood platform, and a shallow end, which is sloped, and it is extended and enclosed with a cobbled together structure of found wood and windows. Birds build nests in the pool, and I just have to share the space with them. Branches, palm fronds and bamboo have often become my materials because they are available. Heat guns and sewing machines pull too much solar power to operate. Structures decay due to the weather. Time slows down and the light slowly changes quality. In an open-air work-space, one becomes aware of the larger timescales found in nature. The outdoors is a place to think and work without the usual distractions. I envision Purifoy having a similar experience in the desert. Perhaps this attitude toward the things one can’t control contributes to his works’ playfulness and humor. I remember one of my students playing with Purifoy’s giant Newton’s Cradle, a line of spheres (bowling balls) suspended from a rod in a row. Once activated, the balls smacked against each other rhythmically in a pendular fashion. Perversely, it became the timekeeper for the space. Of course, the sun-weathered bowling balls also display the trace of actual time, unmeasured and unregimented. There is a sense of promise in the decay and trash.
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E D W A R D B U R T Y N K S Y Shipbreaking / Chitta gong BD / 2000
CH R I STO / J EAN N E-CLAU D E
C H R I S T O Running Fence / Sonoma-Marin Counties CA / 1976
INTERVIEW: THE MAKING OF THE RUNNING FENCE
Eye Level: The Running Fence has multiple stories to tell. What story will be told in the exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum? Christo: The exhibition is about the making of the Running Fence. There were many parts to the project that could not be seen in photos or drawings, such as the public hearings for per mits. Roughly three hundred items went into making the Running Fence. The project was organized by Jeanne-Claude and myself, and we put together the archives [acquired by the Museum in 2008], very important material, to translate the making of the project. That is why the photographs on exhibit will not only show the objects, but also reveal the process of making the project: the landowners, the fabrication, materials, installation of the anchors in the ground, the cables—all these things were an integral part of the creative process. EL: Tell us a little about the archives that you and Jeanne-Claude put together.
ing for the site, using wooden poles in the first drawings and collages, because I was thinking about using wooden poles before working with our own engineer. The exhibition is the entire story of the making of the Running Fence. EL: How did you determine that the Fence would be 24.5 miles long? Christo: In 1972, we started with the idea of doing a project that involved the life of the people related to the ocean from the urban, rural, to the countryside in Califor nia. And this is why the Running Fence is 24.5 miles: Because the Fence crosses from the rural area near the coast to the suburban area at Petaluma and finally crosses the highway, Route 101. In California the highway is very important, and the closest highway ran 24.5 miles from the coast. If the highway had been ten miles from the coast, the Fence would have been only ten miles. The project translates crossing fourteen county roads and small roads until crossing the important Route 101 running north and south from San Diego to the Oregon border. And of course, using the land of the 59 ranchers and public space—all of this exactly reflects how the people in California use the land from rural, suburban, to the urban space.
Christo: Jeanne-Claude and I made a point that because our work is temporary the record of that project needs to be very accurate, because art historians can make all different kinds of interpretations. The exhibition tries to make the point of exactly what the project is. The exhibition also translates the Running EL: Were you considering other spaces Fence chronologically, from the begin- in California? ning when we didn’t have a site, to scout48
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Christo: Yes, of course. The project was to be done in California because of the coastal culture. California’s coastline is much more hospitable than the East Coast, where we have winter. People live much more horizontally in California as opposed to here [in New York City], where people live vertically. JeanneClaude and I scouted California from the north to the south. We recognized three possible locations: one near Petaluma (which we chose), one north of our location, near Eureka and the Oregon border, and one in San Luis Obispo, between San Francisco and Los Angeles. There are two ways JeanneClaude and I do our projects: for the first, we have existing sites like Central Pa rk [ T h e G at e s ] , t h e Re i ch s t a g [Wrapped Reichstag], the Pont Neuf [Pont Neuf, Wrapped, Paris], or the second, where we need to find a site, as we did for Valley Curtain, Umbrellas, Running Fence, and our current project, Over the River. Because we are never sure that we can get permissions for our locations, we need to have at least two to three choices for the project so that we can work out the permit process.
spent time there. Of course, Running Fence is a linear project in its use of the land, so we tried to find topographically rich land. The coastline in the East is very flat, whereas in California the coastline grows dramatically from the beach to the hills and mountains. It was very important to have this land for Running Fence—the highway, the town, and the rural area—to use such dramatic landscape in our project. EL: I’ve heard that people who work on the projects with you and Jeanne-Claude become like members of the family. How did that come about?
Christo: Filmmakers Albert and David Maysles and I met in 1962 and we became very close friends. Albert already started filming our work in 1965. He did the Valley Curtain before the Running Fence. They became like family. Their 1978 film of Running Fence is extremely valuable in grasping how the project came to fruition. They translated the invisible parts, because many people do not know about that—the public hearings, the close cooperation with our very brilliant engineers, the local people such EL: When you and Jeanne-Claude were as surveyors and lawyers we hired to help growing up [she in Paris and Casablanca, realize the project. and Christo in Bulgaria], did California EL: I was thinking of the Robert Frost have a certain appeal or mystique? poem “Mending Wall,” with the line: Christo: Jeanne-Claude and I first dis- ‘good fences make good neighbors’. But covered California in 1969 on the way to the Running Fence didn’t divide the way Australia. We stopped in California and fences do, but brought people together. 49
C H R I S T O Wrapped Car / 1963
Christo: Yes, exactly. We were very eager to design the route of the Fence to cross fourteen roads, so people could see it where it crossed a road. We wanted the entire length of the Fence to run in relation to man-made structures—a house, a farm, a barn, a farmer’s fence. Also, with all our projects we need to find very descriptive titles, again not just for aesthetic reasons but because we try to be extremely descriptive in the title and not mislead people. The Fence wasn’t fencing anything except running to the hills. EL: Once you and Jeanne-Claude began work on Running Fence, did you fall in love with the California landscape? Christo: We fall in love with all the landscapes we use in our projects. We fell in love with the coastline of Australia in 1968-69. We fell in love with the Rocky Mountains with Valley Curtain. Every project is a slice of our lives, a particular moment in our lives, and we’ll never do it again. This is an absolutely unique image, meaning there will be no other Running Fence, no other Gates, no other Valley Curtain, no other Surrounded Islands. Unlike other artists we’re not transporting things around the world. 50
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3 sessions at superior courts 4 years of approvals 15 government agencies 17 public hearings 3,000,000 dollars
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24 miles long 56 km of rope 100 workers 17,000 work hours 95,600 sq. meters of synthetic fabric
C H R I S T O Running Fence / Sonoma-Marin Counties CA / 1976
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NOBODY CAN BUY THE WORK, NOBODY CAN OWN THE WORK, AND NOBODY CAN CHARGE TICKETS FOR THE WORK. 54
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C H R I S T O Running Fence / Sonoma-Marin Counties CA / 1976
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This project is entirely designed for that specific landscape and nothing can be transported. Nobody can buy the work, nobody can own the work, and nobody can charge tickets for the work. We do not own the projects, they are beyond the ownership of the artists because freedom is the enemy of possession, that’s why these projects do not stay. They are absolutely related to artistic and aesthetic freedom. EL: Tell me about the early stages of the Running Fence. Christo: The idea for all our projects, not only Running Fence, starts with sketches. These were very clumsy drawings. [Over time,] the project gets crystallized. For Running Fence, we did several life-size tests to see how it should be built. We built a 200-300-foot fence in Colorado near the Wyoming border, and studied it to determine what kind of steel cable to use, what kind of fabric, how to
sew the fabric. For all our projects we did the same thing. A smaller one-to-one scale model is the only way to finalize and crystallize both aesthetics and engineering: how the project will look, how it will be built. From the earliest sketches [in the first room of the exhibition] with very heavy, clumsy poles to the end with very elegant, aesthetically chosen pole attachments and in-ground anchors and arches when the wind is blowing. This is why we don’t do the drawings in the studio and try to apply our vision cosmetically. The goal is to refine a very long and very important process with myself, Jeanne-Claude, and the engineers. It’s always about aesthetics: finding the right pole, going to the very slim pole from the heavy wooden one. By testing anchors in the ground we could see ribs in the fabric when the wind is blowing; these ribs did not exist in the early drawings. Each panel of 60 feet has two ribs very precisely, held by anchors attached to the ground. In the first panel [we tested] the 56
fabric lays like nothing, with no dynamic. [The final fabric was chosen] because we had a life-size test. The three arches did not come from imagination. EL: You and Jeanne-Claude pride yourselves on recycling, and the Running Fence was the first major art project to include an Environmental Impact Report. Can you explain? Christo: It’s common sense. The material is extremely valuable and it’s only used for two weeks. After two weeks it has a valuable use. For the Running Fence we went with a community, and the landowners were eager to have the poles, the cables, and the fabric for a variety of uses. They used the posts for building their own fences and to build cattle guards. And of course they used the fabric for their barns and the cable.
RESHAPING
C H R I S T O Wrapped Trees / Riehen CH / 1997
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RESHAPING
RE W E AV ING
PATR I C K D OU G H E RTY
D O U G H E R T Y Close Ties / Dingwall SCT / 2006
70 volunteers 2,000 hours
D O U G H E R T Y Shindig / Renwick Galler y DC / 2015
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D O U G H E R T Y Ballroom / Melbour ne AU / 2012
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D O U G H E R T Y Monks’ Cradle / Colle geville MN / 2012
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I MAKE TEMPORARY WORK THAT CHALLENGES OUR TRADITIONAL IDEAS ABOUT SCULPTURE, THAT IT SHOULD LAST FOREVER. 65
Patrick Dougherty is best known for his sculptures that break down over time. You may have seen one of his temporary works without realizing it. Built primarily from tree saplings woven together, each sculptures is approximately a three-week construction project where Dougherty and his group of volunteers carefully create the habitat or environment of this a tangled web of all natural materials. Because the sculptures are made of organic matter they disintegrate, break down and fall apart, becoming part of the landscape once again. Most people see habitats and shelters in his work – which is what many of them are meant to be – but “castles, lairs, nests and coccoons” isn’t what usually comes to mind. In an interview with Dougherty for the New York Times, Penelope Green discusses his only permanent work and the origin of his interest in what is referred to as Stickwork, now available through Princeton Architecture Press. Patrick Dougherty has made over 200 sculptures in the 25 years that he has been creating Stickwork. But his construction work began when he was 28, working for the Air Force in the health and hospital administration. He decided to buy property in North Carolina and build his own house from the materials on the site. Collecting fallen branches, rocks and old timber, Dougherty was able to construct his home, in which he still lives with his wife and son, with a few additions. By 36, Dougherty decided to return to school for sculpture and attended the art program at the
University of North Carolina. His interest in what nature had to offer led him to develop his tangled sculptures. Each sculpture is different and depends greatly on the site. Each project is different and depends on the volunteers that participate and the public that never fails to stop and watch the sculptures being woven together. Just Around the Corner evokes the ancient construction of town dwellings that may have once occupied this site. The five elements resemble huts and are built into the hedge as though they are supporting the weight of trees and are a permanent fixture within this landscape. They closely resemble homes built out of trunks than as tree saplings woven together. The installation exists at right angles to the shops on the adjacent Main Street, creating a sharp contrast between the contemporary town architecture just beyond the hedge and the potentially ancient construction nearby.
D O U G H E R T Y Na Hale ‘Eo Waiawi / Honolulu HI / 2003
RE FIN ING
AN DY G OLD SWORTHY
G O L D S W O R T H Y Woody Creek CO / 2015
ENTWINES NATURE INTO ARTWORKS
Before I meet Andy Goldsworthy, I have a wander round the retrospective of his work being constructed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield. Goldsworthy creates moments of wonder out of local rocks and earth and trees, and this wandering prompts several questions, which I jot down in my notebook: are all farm animals abstract expressionists? Is one dry-stone waller’s work distinguishable from another’s? Just how do you suspend these three oak trees in mid-air below ground in the middle of a field? And, is sheep shit more user-friendly (for smearing on gallery windows) than cow shit? Goldsworthy is 50 and, as these questions suggest, back in his element. Lately, the British countryside’s most engaging propagandist has been pursuing his vision all across the world. He has made unlikely cairns in Des Moines, a monumental Holocaust memorial in New York (for which he planted oak trees in giant boulders). A return to the green, green grass of home feels overdue. He grew up not too far from here, on the Harrogate side of Leeds, in a house edging the green belt. He was a guest artist at this sculpture park way back in 1983, when he was still asking himself whether there might be a career at all in making piles of stones off the beach look like Brancusis or in taking vast Scottish snowballs down to London and observing them melt. In the time since, he has collected a team of craftsmen and labourers who follow him around the globe, humping wood and carving stone. This morning I come across several of them, working in small groups on the various ingenious constructions that Goldsworthy has set in motion. Five men are out in a copse making a circular drystone structure that will obstruct a right of way and offer no entry or exit; a stubborn comment on the Enclosure Act of 1801, among other things. The foreman, Gordon Wilson, is on the phone to Goldsworthy, clarifying whether the copestones of the enclosure will be done in the Yorkshire style, rough and ready, or the Nottinghamshire, curved; another group on a different hill is making a complex sheep pen. Dave’s patience has not been in vain. His crafted pens of quarried rock have at their centre an eight-and-a-half-ton block of sandstone on which visitors will be invited to make ‘rain shadows’; this process will involve waiting for a likely looking rain cloud and then, as the first drops begin to fall, lying full length on the rock and allowing a body-shaped silhouette to form, which the prostrate pilgrim will photograph and contribute to an archive. I imagine a queue of cagoule-clad ramblers gazing at the horizon, invoking drizzle. The perfect English day out. 70
REFINING
The tour across the park - which also takes in ‘paintings’ made in mud on canvas by sheep feeding around a circular trough - is a preamble to the subterranean weirdness that Goldsworthy is creating in the gallery itself. In five large adjacent rooms underground, he is reproducing some of his greatest hits. Almost filling the first room is one of his enormous egg-shaped ‘black holes’ made of mossy, random curved logs, held together only by the artist’s uncanny defiance of gravity and a kind of ancient energy; in the next are an unsettling colony of 11 stepped clay mounds, each with a vacancy at the top, that seem like the extraordinary efforts of avant-garde termites; beside these, in what has the feel of a medieval workshop, art students are mixing clay with sackfuls of human hair diligently collected from nearby salons and slapping it on the walls; as this hirsute plaster dries out it will crack and crumble and be held together by myriad strands of local DNA. The fourth room is waiting for a coppiced dome with a 20ft diameter that I’m told Goldsworthy will knock up in the next few days - I’ve been inside a previous dome he made at the Albion Gallery in London and can still recall the otherworldly claustrophobia of it, like finding yourself in the stomach of a tree. In the final room I come across the artist himself up a stepladder working on a beautiful filamented curtain stretching the full height and width of the gallery that up close turns out to be made from horse-chestnut twigs held together with thorns, each one - more than 10,000 in all - painstakingly jointed by hand. Goldsworthy comes down and, over his umpteenth big custard tart and mug of latte of the day (‘this kind of thing burns up the calories’), tells me what he is up to. He talks with a precise animation, at odds with his Yorkshire vowels, and a constant sense of mischief in his face. ‘They are calling this a retrospective,’ he says, ‘but actually I’m only interested in developing new stuff. Take this,’ he gestures at the horse-chestnut curtain, ‘I discovered this here in 1987 when I picked up a few horse-chestnut stalks and pinned them together with thorns, and I found that holding them up to the light was really beautiful. I wondered if I could span a couple of trees with them, and I was amazed that I could. Now here I am 30 years later making a mesh that spans a room 12m wide. I wanted to put this in to show the way things have grown, the technical things, you know....’ One of Goldsworthy’s talents is to make such intricate stunts look easy. At one point he quotes Whistler’s notion that a work of art is not finished until all signs of the effort of making it have been removed. He likes that idea. I suggest the ‘black hole’, the great cairn of oak branches he has created up the corridor, as a good example of that. 71
He laughs, in the way you might when thinking of the challenges of disciplining a high-spirited child. ‘Stone to some extent has a system to it,’ he says. ‘But with wood every branch is totally different. I always look at the branches laid out on the grass before I begin and I think, “Oh fuck, here we go.” I used to do them in a day. I can throw them up. But I took my time with this one, three days. To start with, you don’t know what character it will take. If the base gets too wide it can be very sort of lumpen.’ What he is trying to bring out, he says, is something like the same quality that existed in the original trees. ‘That effortlessness. A tree is so perfect in its profile but it is underwritten by this enormous daily struggle over years and decades. That is the energy I am aiming for.’ Goldsworthy is a land artist in the tradition of the great American earth-movers like Robert Smithson who created Spiral Jetty at Salt Lake, Utah. Richard Long, who imported that tradition to Britain, is another mentor; like them, he wants to get away from two-dimensional representation of landscape in a frame, and give you the thing itself. That’s the theory. But he is also strongly in the tradition of everyone who has ever had memorable days making dens in parks or sandcastles on beaches. He preserves such ephemeral creations, icicle statues on rocks, brilliant forest dramas made with autumn leaves, in exquisite photographs. Goldsworthy’s books are, reportedly, the biggest-selling art books in the country.
G O L D S W O R T H Y Ro wan Leaves and Hole 72
G O L D S W O R T H Y Japanese Maple Leaves / 1987
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G O L D S W O R T H Y Wood G Line O L/DSan S WFrancisco O R T H YCAwood / 2011 line
WASTESCAPE
Our contemporary fascination with wastescapes is related to a much larger problem of spectacle and visibility, and the political, social, economic, moral, and environmental consequences of our growing reliance on them. Why are contemporary accounts of waste inexorably drawn to capturing it through image and spectacle? Knowledge and language seem important, but incomplete (as when we say, “Pics or it didn’t happen”). And why does waste need to be visible to us as a dangerous object for us to think about waste, and to act? As Max Liboiron at the Discard Studies blog notes, 97 percent of waste is not the municipal solid waste that all of us create and are familiar with, but industrial waste. Liboiron is right to note that a responsible chronicle of the truly meaningful and consequential landscapes of waste would not consist of landfills and garbage cans but of things like oil sands, mines, and decapitated mountains-all of the extractive industrial processes that are ravaging the planet. A society of constantly accelerating production, even in the face of recurring periods of economic crisis and collapse, must do more than continually stimulate consumer desire and expand its credit economies. It must also continually endeavor to obscure the specific nature of its production processes (resource extraction, labor, organization); and it must also do what it can to mitigate or suppress the reality and impacts of its various waste products. If the mass of consumers truly beheld the gruesome nature of production and effluent on either side of the sites of consumption and uses enjoyment, the entire system would collapse. We do not often see or smell or taste the garbage in our air, our soil, our water, and so we keep breathing and drinking, just as we do not see our cargo ships and cars and planes and air-conditioning units directly annihilate the coastline, or eradicate species, or give us cancer. It’s even less common to see firsthand the kind of wastelands that Liboiron describes, for the same reason that it’s so rare for us to see the inner workings of an industrial slaughterhouse or the grim buildings where our phones are made. In the face of the image, language seems like a poor advocate for thinking waste. The image is time-bound. Every photographic image is an artifact at least indirectly obsessed with time, and our natural predisposition toward spectacle, our privileging of the looking eye over the reading eye, draws our gaze instantly to even the tiniest bits of waste. In fact it often seems as if waste and photography were made for each other. It is impossible not to see the coffee cup, the soggy paper, the plastic bird, the cigarette butt, the piles of busted furniture. Our films are littered with litter; our galleries are heaped up with photos and sculptures; and stagings are overrun with trash. But even so, there are good reasons to be sick of the society of the spectacle. 76
UNNATURAL NATURE
It made a certain amount of sense in the previous century, when photography was new and industry, for all its immense as it is now. We should consider the possibility that our longstanding tradition of privileging the image may have outlived some of its usefulness. If we consider that nearly all of what we would call waste is being churned up in places images might not be the smartest thing to be looking for. We can already see the poverty of imagery most forcefully in the ongoing calls to bear witness to climate catastrophe: calving glaciers, drowning polar bears. The decimation of the environment proceeds at a staggering pace and scale, but is generally only registered by onlookers who can gaze upon visual evidence of its impact-and that is actually a huge part of the problem. In the meantime, Ed Burtynsky’s seminal photographic work seems to play on this desire to bear witness to human impacts on the environment. The visual register of Burtynsky’s large-scale photographs of industrial-scale production, mining, energy capture, and waste disposal sites may induce all kinds of emotions in the viewer, but certainly awe would be among them, even if it exists alongside horror, disgust, or sorrow. Their subjects may be on modern industrial practices but the form speaks to something else, almost reverential, in its execution. The aesthetic care and beauty in Burtynsky’s images-the distance and vantage points, but also the color saturation, the unrelenting immensities on which his camera lingers, along with the immense scales of his work-can just as easily have the opposite effect that one might expect good-hearted environmentally minded viewers to adopt. Before these tableaux we are all helpless and infinitesimal in the face of what our own societies are doing to the only planet we have. In Burtynsky: Water, the photos of phosphor tailings ponds in Florida are glorious and gorgeous, as if we were seeing into the pulsating mind of the planet itself, its frenzied ganglia swimming in cerulean fire. So too are the images taken of Bombay Beach, a sewage treatment plant in the California desert. From Burtynsky’s vantage point, the enormous pools of sewage look like nothing less than a gigantic Technicolor paintbox. In Burtynsky: Oil, he devotes significant space to the petroleum industry of Kern County. We see the vast pumpjack fields of Taft, the ground and sky suffused with a dingy brown funk, the Sierra Nevada mountains dimly visible through the haze of carcinogenic smog. This type of waste photography shows us that anything can look like something else or be made to look beautiful, provided you’re looking from a certain vantage point. 77
B U R T Y N K S Y Nickel Tailings / Sudbury ONT / 1996
UNNATURAL NATURE
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UNNATURAL NATURE created and designed by Dillon King, ArtCenter, Los Angeles
Typeface: Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Baskerville
EVERY IMAGE IS AN ARTIFACT AT LEAST INDIRECTLY OBSESSED WITH TIME, AND OUR NATURAL PREDISPOSITION TOWARD SPECTACLE, OUR PRIVILEGING OF THE LOOKING EYE OVER THE READING EYE