16
Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison
Initial sketch, Greenhouse Britain: Where the loss of land due to
ocean rise is first expressed, 2006
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In their recent multimedia installation, Greenhouse
Britain, 2007–09, Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer
Harrison chart the future impact of global warming on
the UK. Using video animation, a large-scale topographical
map of Britain, photographic documentation,
analytical texts and sound elements, their pedagogically
oriented presentation portrays a dark future of
rising waters, storm surges and shrinking coastlines.
Supplementing this ominous forecast, their
project also supplies creative proposals for the construction
of water barriers and the development of
environmentally friendly housing for the scores of
people who will inevitably be displaced as the waters
overtake low-lying areas such as the Norfolk Broads
and the Thames Estuary, owing to the gradual melting
of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets over the
course of the next century and beyond.
Yet while the Harrisons’ art has admirably
addressed global warming since the early 1970s, when
they began their longstanding collaboration and when
climate change was much less discussed, today’s context
of widespread public information campaigns –
from Al Gore’s 2006 educational film An Inconvenient
Truth to popular science books like Tim Flannery’s
The Weather Makers, 2005, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s
Field Notes on a Catastrophe, 2006 – have shifted
the discourse on the environment. This has revealed
new questions about what role art might play now that
consciousness-raising is being accomplished by the
mass media and culture industry, even if still plagued
by governmental inaction.1
As is now widely known –
particularly since the scientific consensus established
by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change), most recently in 2007, which has rendered
those who deny climate-change increasingly scarce
(but, with continued industry funding to wage their
misinformation campaigns, by no means extinct) –
we live in a changing world of anthropogenic global
warming. The IPCC predicts a coming world, half
uninhabitable, of rising seas and temperatures, drought
and water scarcity, and massive species extinction,
which will undoubtedly provoke geopolitical challenges
regarding resource distribution, environmental
justice between developed countries and the global
South, and vast climate migration.2
This future defines
new imperatives for an ethics of living, a politics of
governing, and in turn provokes new challenges for
contemporary artistic practice and art exhibitions –
particularly for those, such as the Barbican’s exhibition,
Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing
Planet 1969–2009, intent on participating in the ethicopolitical
reinvention of life in the face of climate change.
Exhibiting Sustainability?
Given this state of urgency, there has
been, not surprisingly, a slew of recent exhibitions
and research projects worldwide attuned to art and
ecology. The most prominent include: Ecovention:
Current Art to Transform Ecologies, an exhibition at the
Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 2002, which
surveyed practices since the 1960s that endeavour to
ameliorate the effects of environmental degradation;
Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, mounted at
Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in 2006, investigating
design-related approaches to environmental
sustainability; Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook,
a 2006 compilation of texts by ecologists, cultural
theorists, activists and art writers that considers
notions of land, cultural production and the ecological
emergencies of the 20th century; Still Life: Art, Ecology,
and the Politics of Change, the eighth Sharjah Biennial,
2007, addressing social, political and cultural relations
to nature and the environment, including a symposium
that examined ecological practice and everyday life;
and lastly, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change
at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007,
The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology
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which highlighted educational initiatives around
desertification, floods, changing watersheds, renewable
energy and carbon profiling, and partnered artists with
scientists to create dialogues around climate change.3
The growing momentum of such projects
would appear salutary for their contribution to the
focusing of public attention on the environment and
the threats posed by climate change. However, that
achievement should not distract or prevent us from
forming a critical assessment of the aims and accomplishments
of recent projects, as well as evaluating
the ‘promises, perils and perplexities’ – to borrow the
subtitle of yet another recent exhibition, Greenwashing
– that characterise these recent engagements with art
and ecology. One signal peril, indeed, is the tendency
to accept the flattening of representation’s complexity
and to surrender intellectual criticality in the face of the
real urgency of climate change. The danger here is the
public’s passive deferral of responsibility to scientific
expertise and governmental authority, which makes
us vulnerable both to solutions forged by exclusive
social and political interests and to the forces of commercial
exploitation that would use green rhetoric for
the purposes of economic profit. And yet, if artists and
cultural practitioners refuse to surrender their discerning
consideration of scientific dictates, then what do
they do, as Bruno Latour asks, when their methodological
commitment to resisting the self-evidence of ‘truth’
prevents them from accepting the truth of impending
ecological crisis, which potentially allies them with
climate-change sceptics?4
Facing this dilemma, one
must be aware of the fact that whatever we know about
the environment – knowledge that will determine our
future actions and chances of survival – we owe to the
diverse practices and institutions that represent it. As
such, we can perhaps only affirm the need for a critical
realism that both refuses to relinquish the validity
of scientific paradigms and remains dedicated to a
guardedly analytical approach to ecological discourse
as a system of representations forged at the intersection
of power and knowledge.
To this end, it is necessary when considering
the historical formation of environmental art to scrutinise
the diverse meanings of ‘ecology’ and denaturalise the
rhetoric of ‘sustainability’, recognising these buzzwords
as deeply political, contentious and ideological. This
essay aims to accomplish that aim in its examination
of select historical moments of art’s entwinement
with ecology, which, it is hoped, will also provide a
useful historical framework with which to consider the
Barbican’s show, Radical Nature. When confronting
the claims of sustainability, one needs to ask what
sustainability means, whose interests it promotes, and
whose are left out? Consider, for instance, the classic
articulation of ‘sustainable development’, as defined
by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland in the
UN-convened World Commission on Environment
and Development’s 1987 report, Our Common Future,
as: ‘development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs’.5
While the UN’s dedication to
sustainability may appear as a decisive world-historical
development, its formulation of sustainability is vague at
best – for what are these ‘needs’ exactly? Whose needs
count and whose do not? Whereas the definition places
its agenda under an inclusive commonality, implying
a shared responsibility for safeguarding humanity’s
ecological inheritance, the definition of sustainability
in fact situates the environment as valuable largely
from the perspective of economic needs; indeed,
the report goes on to explain that while ‘sustainable
development does imply limits ... technology and social
organisation can be both managed and improved to
make way for a new era of economic growth’, one that
will make ‘development sustainable’.6
This priority has
in fact guided Western governmental mobilisations of
sustainability ever since.7
Conversely, others approach sustainability
only to question its very terminological legitimacy. As
cultural geographer Erik Swyngedouw argues, ‘There
is no such thing as an unsustainable city in general, but
rather there are a series of urban and environmental
processes that negatively affect some social groups
while benefiting others’.8
The problem with ‘sustainable
development’ is that it tends to present ‘a classless
vision of ecological justice made in the USA’, as postcolonialist
theorist Gayatri Spivak puts it, which appears,
falsely, as incontestable – who can oppose sustainability,
after all?9
This green agenda typically prioritises the
needs of developed nations over all others, even while
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the cleaning up of European and North American
environments has come at the cost of transferring their
polluting industries and environmental responsibility
to the global South, which, as is widely acknowledged,
faces the largest negative future impacts of global
warming. It is crucial in this regard to critically challenge
environmental proposals that would justify the
worsening of social inequality, promote authoritarian
governmental directions and further concentrate the
power of decision-making in the hands of multi-national
corporations. If we choose to accept the use of the
term ‘sustainability’, how, we must ask in relation to current
artistic practice, can ecological sustainability meet
the demands of environmental justice? For, ‘a just urban
socio-environmental perspective’, Swyngedouw continues,
‘always needs to consider the question of who
gains and who pays and to ask serious questions about
the multiple power relations ... In other words, environmental
transformations are not independent from class,
gender, ethnicity or other power struggles.’10
In this
regard, there is a growing need to address the global
geopolitics of environmentalism, with greater focus on
initiatives based in places like Sub-Saharan Africa and
South East Asia – such as the Nigerian photographic
collective Depth of Field’s exposure of the degraded
ecologies of Lagos’s mega-slum, the Indian research
group Sarai’s study of ‘emerging urbanism’ in Delhi,
and recent exhibitions outside of the North American
and European context, including 48 Degrees Celsius:
Public.Art.Ecology in Delhi, 2008, which investigated
the ramifications of climate change on the city.11
Finally, one must also confront the troubling
observation that exhibitions dedicated to sustainability
are fundamentally contradictory; for even as they seek
to address climate change and work towards creative
solutions – although certainly not all projects are
equally politically or pedagogically inclined – they
contribute to the very problem of global warming
by virtue of their own carbon footprint, the results
of transporting artworks, maintaining the exhibition
space’s climate control and printing catalogues. One
might conclude that eco-art exhibitions are simply
unviable from an environmental perspective. Yet if this
response is both inadequate and unrealistic – as much
as it would be to insist on immediately discontinuing
all unsustainable technologies, rather than working
gradually towards a state of sustainability – we need at
the very least to consider just what justifies the continuation
of unsustainable art exhibitions committed to the
subject of sustainability.
Fragile Ecologies
Among the first art projects that investigated
the nature of the environment during the 60s and 70s
in the American context were Hans Haacke’s Grass
Grows, 1969; Newton Harrison’s The Slow Birth and
Death of a Lily Cell, 1968; and Alan Sonfist’s Time
Landscape of New York City, proposed in 1965 and
realised in 1978.12
These engagements were soon followed by
the first group shows, including Earth Art at Cornell
University’s gallery in 1969, comprising land art by
Haacke, Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim and
Robert Morris. Surveying these early years, the Queens
Museum of Art’s Fragile Ecologies exhibition in 1992,
curated by Barbara Matilsky, examined the historical
formation of ‘environmental art’, the development of
which, for Matilsky, was due to the ‘political and social
climate during the 60s’, when ‘an increasing number
of people [in the States] began to question traditional
values and governmental policies regarding Vietnam,
racial segregation, women’s status and the environment’.
Spurred on by the publication of signal environmentalist
texts like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962, and
Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, 1968, and propelled
by events such as the inauguration of Earth Day in 1970,
artists ‘turned to nature and began interpreting its lifegenerating
forces to create radically new kinds of art’.13
Most of Fragile Ecologies’ inclusions, as
well as the projects referenced in its catalogue, develop
a model of what we could term ‘restorationist
eco-aesthetics’, referring to art that attempts to repair
damaged habitats or to revive degraded ecosystems.
Sonfist’s Time Landscape of New York City; the
Harrisons’ Portable Orchard, 1972; Haacke’s Rhinewater
Purification Plant, 1972; Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield –
A Confrontation, 1982; Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks,
1982; and Mel Chin’s Revival Field, 1990, each of these
pieces variously attempted to rescue natural environments
from polluted conditions. As such they fulfilled
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Matilsky’s definition of
ecology as ‘the science
of planetary housekeeping’
(deriving from the
Greek oikos, meaning
house or habitat) that
would sustain ‘the interrelationship
of all forms
of life in their diverse en-
vironments’.14
Exemplary
is Sonfist’s stated goal:
‘to elevate disappearing
native landscapes to the
status of historical monuments
and, by extension,
to sensitise people so that
they could view nature
as an important part of their cultural heritage’.15
Despite its apparent ecological ethics,
posed against industrial capitalism’s despoliation of
the environment, there are nonetheless several problems
with Matilsky’s approach, not least of which is the
spiritualist lens through which ‘nature’ is apprehended,
which supplants conceptual rigour. At the root of
the problem is Fragile Ecologies’ tendency to separate
nature from culture. Relegated to a non-cultural zone
of organic purity, and reminiscent of the mythopoeic
realm attributed to the biological environment in
James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ hypothesis – nonetheless another
crucial marker in the development of ecological
discourse – nature ends up objectified as an ontology
divorced from social, political and technological proc-
esses.16
Undermining the seemingly laudable environmentalist
intentions of the exhibition is a dangerous
depoliticisation, which reproduces the very objectification
of nature that has got us into trouble in the first
place. ‘Sundered apart’, Neil Smith observes, ‘nature
and society die in reciprocal conceptual torpor’, for
‘the positing of an external nature rationalises and
justifies the unprecedented exploitation of nature ...
[which is] the “massive racket” that capitalism, historically
and geographically, represents’.17
Matilsky’s definition
of nature committed just such a division, even if
from a perspective critical of capitalism’s treatment of
the environment.
One could
add to Matilsky’s contextual
genealogy of
environmental art the fact
that the period between
1972 and 1992 – roughly
the historical framework
covered in Fragile
Ecologies– marked the
emergence of international
non-governmental
organisations (NGOs),
and inter-governmental
protocols, agreements,
and cooperative accords
for dealing with
environmental concerns,
framed by the 1972 Stockholm UN Conference on the
Human Environment and the 1992 Earth Summit in
Rio (United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development).18
The latter event, moreover, gave rise
to the growing criticism that UN initiatives failed to address
both postcolonial concerns and the inequality between
post-industrial nations and the global South. Yet,
about this wider context and the political calls for global
justice that would challenge a depoliticising Westerncentric
environmentalism, Fragile Ecologieshas nothing
to say, favouring instead an articulation of its New Age
eco-aesthetics that is oblivious to the larger geopolitical
stakes: ‘environmental artists’, Matilsky noted, ‘visualise
the forces, processes and phenomena of nature: organic
growth, light, water, crystals and other elements’, creating
works that ‘respect nature and establish a reverent
relationship between the viewer and the earth’.19
It is not that the artistic projects represented
in Fragile Ecologies commit the same abuse of ‘nature’
as capitalist industry – although neither are they
entirely divorced from that framework, as when they
rely on industrial technology to create their projects
– but rather that the exhibition’s conceptualisation
of nature perpetuates the problematic structure of
objectification relied on by capitalist industry. It is this
very system that makes it possible for the exhibition, for
instance, to celebrate practices that advance bandaid
approaches to devastated landscapes, without
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connecting the repairing of a pond, the preserving of
a historical landscape or the growing of a wheat field
to technological, social and economic ecologies that
equally construct the environment. In this regard, the
minor referencing of Robert Smithson’s conceptual
environmental art in Matilsky’s essay is telling,
particularly where she notes that Smithson rejected
artistic approaches to post-industrial terrains that would
merely ‘cosmetically camouflage the abuse’ committed
by corporations.20
Unfortunately, however, she
misses the opportunity to complicate her discussion
of the exhibition’s inclusions by taking seriously this
scepticism. Nor does she consider the implications
of Smithson’s formulation of his ‘Dialectic of Site and
Non-site’ – by which he theorised the inextricable
relationship between the geographical location of a
work of art (Site) and its sculptural, photographic or
text-based representations (Non-site) – which would
have excluded the very possibility of monumentalising
nature as an autonomous sphere of existence.21
Systems Ecology
While Fragile Ecologies tended to reduce
the complexity of ecology in favour of an idealist conception
of nature, by the mid-1970s other engagements
had in fact already expanded the notion of ecology to
encompass social and technological systems as well
as organic ones. These form an alternative – and more
conceptually ambitious – discourse, informed by the
development of cybernetics (the interdisciplinary
study of regulatory systems, related to systems theory),
which emerged in the second half of the 20th cen-
tury.22
Developed in the work of diverse figures such
as British anthropologist and social scientist Gregory
Bateson, artist-theorist Jack Burnham, Hungarian-born
artist and writer György Kepes and visionary architect
Richard Buckminster Fuller, ‘systems ecology’ provides
a useful conceptual framework for comprehending
the work of artists such as Dan Graham, Robert Barry,
Hans Haacke and Les Levine, who were practising
in the 60s and early 70s.23
As Burnham wrote presciently
in ‘Systems Esthetics’, ‘Increasingly “products”
– either in art or life – become irrelevant and a different
set of needs arise: these revolve around such
concerns as maintaining the biological liveability of
the earth, producing more accurate models of social
interaction, understanding the growing symbiosis in
man-machine relationships, establishing priorities for
the usage and conservation of natural resources, and
defining alternative patterns of education, productivity,
and leisure.’24
The accuracy of Burnham’s predictions
has been borne out by the subsequent development of
artistic practice up until today.
In contrast with Matilsky’s objectification of
nature, Bateson, the author of the 1972 book Steps to an
Ecology of Mind, considered ecology as simultaneously
natural, social and technological, wherein ecological
‘health’ was understood to be dependent on civilisation
and the environment maintaining a sustained and
long-term ‘flexibility ... to create an ongoing complex
system’.25
Defining flexibility as an ‘uncommitted
potentiality for change’, Bateson viewed it as a precious
resource, for ecological ‘imbalance’ carried unpredictable
and potentially catastrophic effects.26
‘Always,
in any living (i.e., ecological) system, ever increasing
imbalance will generate its own limiting factors as side
effects of the increasing imbalance’, Bateson warned in
1972. ‘In the present instance, we begin to know some
of Nature’s ways of correcting the imbalance – smog,
pollution, DDT poisoning, industrial wastes, famine,
atomic fallout and war. But the imbalance has gone so
far that we cannot trust Nature not to over-correct.’27
There certainly appear weak points in Bateson’s view
– including both the absence of any consideration of
greenhouse gases that were already contributing to a
climatic ‘imbalance’ and the problematic implication
that there was once a human civilisation that lived in a
state of ‘balance’ with the environment to which modern
society could return. That said, such a theorisation
of systems ecology was nevertheless capable of opening
up a range of artistic practices dedicated to the
complex interlinking of biological, technological, social
and political ecologies that construct an ‘environment’
that can no longer be considered simply as ‘natural’,
and where any ‘output’, according to the operations of
cybernetic feedback, was simultaneously understood
to affect the working of the system.
Consider, for instance, Haacke’s modelling of
a bio-technological system in Rhinewater Purification
Plant, 1972. Invited to produce a two-month project for
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the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, West Germany,
the artist set up a chemical treatment, charcoal and
sand filtration plant to process polluted water from
the Rhine river. The purified water collected in a large
acrylic basin containing goldfish, which demonstrated
the successful restoration of a life-supporting, albeit
artificial, habitat. Yet this project would not be limited
to the local, cosmetic fix of restorationist aesthetics.
In his related Krefeld Sewage Triptych, 1972, shown
on the same occasion, Haacke recorded the level of
untreated sewage that the city of Krefeld spewed into
the Rhine annually (42 million cubic metres), included
the volume and types of industrial and household
sewage, and provided the names of major contributors.
As Haacke observes in his description of the
piece, because the Museum Haus Lange is a municipal
institution, whose director is a civil servant, his project
generated media reports via regional newspapers
that exposed the city’s role in the creation of the river’s
pollution. The resulting political effects of the technobiological
operation performed in the art gallery could
thus be considered as part of what Haacke termed a
‘real-time social system’, which not only intervened in
a degraded ecosystem but also identified the causes of
its situation and worked towards drawing public attention
to the broader political culture of abuse.28
Nevertheless, Haacke’s demonstration of
‘ecological health’, to use Bateson’s terminology, might
be criticised for its failure to involve the audience more
directly within its feedback loop; rather, it relegated
viewers as mere observers of a system that excluded
their immediate active participation (perhaps the
pedagogical authority of Haacke’s mode of address
corresponded to the project’s technoscientific instrumentalism,
a criticism with which cybernetics has also
had to contend).29
It was left to other artists, such as Dan
Graham, to initiate video-based social experiments
that developed the social possibilities of cybernetics
systems, particularly as it was conceptualised in the
magazine Radical Software.
Running between 1970–74, and published
by the Raindance Corporation, a counter-cultural
media think-tank, the magazine served as a platform
for the articulation of the notion of ‘media ecology’, defined
by theorist Arlo Raymond as ‘the study of a medium
of communication and its affect upon other media/
society’.30
Exploiting the low-cost possibilities of video
technology, artists and activist groups attempted to
construct and mobilise feedback systems from community
cable television (such as Ant Farm, Videofreex
and TVTV) to closed-circuit video installation experiments
(as in the work of Peter Campus, Dan Graham,
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Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman), which would contest
the one-way broadcasting control of media by corporations
and create community-organised systems of
self-representation in their place.31
In projects such as Graham’s TV Camera/
Monitor Performance, 1970, for which he rolled
around on a stage holding a video camera pointed
at a monitor located behind the audience; or his Two
Consciousness Projection(s), 1972, a closed-circuit
video system mediating the spontaneous communication
between two participants and an audience,
Graham created what he termed ‘learning machines’,
in which participants would be able both to observe
themselves and to alter their social system with new
forms of behaviour that would be immediately perceptible
on television monitors.32
Yet whereas Graham
may have developed the implications of ‘media ecology’
as a system that interlinks technology, communication,
sociability and affect, there was a conspicuous
bracketing of biological systems, as developed in
Haacke’s environmental art.33
Indeed, as Raymond
stated in ‘Media Ecology’, ‘In a world of biological,
chemical and physical pollution, it seems to me that we
are overlooking the semantic pollution in our environments,
as we attempt to restore our ecological balance’;
however it was precisely the balance between these
multiple ecologies that was lost in Graham’s focus on
socio-technological systems.34
Forming yet another model of cultural
ecology, György Kepes, founder of the Center for
Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, edited the book Arts
of the Environment in 1972. In his introductory essay,
‘Art and the Ecological Conscience’, Kepes stated that
‘Environmental homeostasis on a global scale is now
necessary to survival. Creative imagination, artistic sensibility,
can [serve] as one of our basic collective, selfregulating
devices that can help us register and reject
what is toxic in our lives’.35
In this text, we also find contributions
by the interdisciplinary group Pulsa, which
straddled the division between socio-technological
and bio-political systems. Self-described as researchers
in programmed environments, Pulsa created projects in
the late 60s and early 70s that interlinked various media
and biological systems, as in their Automation House
installation, 1971, comprised of sound and video installations,
and their Harmony Ranch experiment in communal
living, agricultural self-sufficiency and collaborative
art and musical projects, developed in Oxford,
Connecticut.36
In their essay ‘The City as an Artwork’,
which they contributed to Kepes’ volume, Pulsa argued
that, because conventional urban design ‘is based on an
aesthetic of concealment and a concern for picturesque
facades ... resembling a pre-technological society’, the
result is malfunction and ‘a basic human alienation from
the systems which make life in a given environment
possible’.37
(The same criticism could be waged in relation
to Fragile Ecologies.) Pulsa proposed to repair this
systemic malfunction by ‘creatively expanding the interactive
awareness of local populations through media
that incorporate principles of feedback: environments,
programmed events, cable television, tapes, films’.38
Similarly, at Harmony Ranch, the group enacted experiments
in self-organised, collective organic farming that
would reveal ‘information about long-term growth
rhythms’ and ‘regenerative changes’.39
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Cover of Radical Software, 3, Spring 1971, design by Andy Poyner
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In this regard, Pulsa’s activities resonated with
Kepes’s desire to de-materialise and de-reify the environment
by revealing it as a series of inter-connecting
flows and dynamic energies that would challenge the
socio-political, economic and geographical separations
between, on the one hand, the world of ‘ghettos,
criminal wars, urban violence and inner erosion’, and
on the other, ‘bioengineering, genetic engineering ...
distant sensors, cyborgs and an ever-increasing communications
network’.40
However, the collective’s commitment
to ‘transcending the functional political aspects
of human experience and generating an abstract
aesthetic awareness within an environment’ could be
equally taken to task for its very abstraction. As art historian
Yates McKee argues, ‘the group’s understanding
of urban crisis as primarily a question of organisational
design and ecological maladjustment, to be ameliorated
in part by formal experiments in perception,
failed to address the structured patterns of inequality
of the city that had otherwise become inescapable for
urbanism in the aftermath of the ghetto rebellions and
claims to rights of the mid- and late 60s.’41
That failure
notwithstanding, Pulsa did accomplish important work
geared towards de-idealising nature and disarticulating
the environment to the degree that nature’s separation
from social, political and technological processes
was impossible to maintain, even while its status as an
object of reverential focus would continue uninterrupted
in the work of other artists to come.
Political Ecology
Because early ‘systems ecology’ rarely
joined with environmental activism – at least in the
development of a widely visible artistic formation
– the continued objectification of nature has meant
that even today one could claim that ‘the task of new
environmental art would be to unsettle the selfevidence
of “environment” itself, addressing it as a
contingent assemblage of biological, technological,
economic and governmental concerns whose
boundaries and agencies are perpetually exposed to
conflict’, as argues McKee.42
Views of that assemblage
have indeed shifted since 1970, and today, with
increased integration between environment and
government, political scientists such as Timothy
Luke have argued that the environment has become
the ‘ultimate domain of being’ for the production of
knowledge, power and subjectivity.43
For Luke, this
movement owes to multiple catalysts, including the
oil crises of the 70s and the consequent growing
awareness of the ‘limits to growth’, the incipient
globalisation propelled by the détente between the
US and the Soviet Union and the latter’s eventual
collapse in the early 90s, and the expansion of
international regulatory bodies, such as the UN World
Commission on Environment and Development.44
The result has been the gradual reshaping
of government according to the priorities of ‘envirodiscipline’,
referring to ‘the authority of eco-knowledge,
geo-powered forces to police the fitness of all
biological organisms and the health of their natural
environments’.45
One can understand this envirodiscipline
in terms of the practice of government,
non-governmental and international agencies to
determine our understanding of the ‘health of our
natural environment’ so that ‘sustainable development’
is defined in ways favourable to financial interests,
in opposition to comprehending ecology as a
field of interlinking systems of biodiversity and
technology, social practices and political structures.
This conflicted situation gives rise to the following
question: how can artistic practices, operating at
the juncture of art institutions, activism and nongovernmental
politics, challenge the emergence
of neo-liberal eco-governmentality? How can art
oppose the commercialisation of nature, packaged
as economic resource, or redirect commercial
forces in favour of alternative ways of defining
the environment and sustainability with a focus
on global justice? How might artists, furthermore,
animate an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ – meaning
environmental justice viewed from the perspective
of those who have the least access to resources, job
protection, socio-political and economic equality and
governmental and media representation – to avoid
the exclusivity of ‘environmentalism born of affluence’
in Western capitalist societies?46
Equally it appears
increasingly important to avoid simplistically opposing
Southern global justice with Northern apolitical
eco-activism – each participating in a problematic
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generalising stereotype – as if the politics of ecological
justice does not transcend all geographical divisions.
In fact, some of the most compelling recent
practices and exhibitions develop a political ecology
that not only disarticulates the self-evidence of the
‘environment’ and questions the automatic assumptions
of ‘sustainability’, but also critically considers the
unequal division of the benefits and risks of climate
change’s effects, as well as evaluates the politics of environmentalist
responses to global warming. Consider,
for instance, Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art,
which is amongst the most provocative and sophisticated
of recent exhibitions to introduce a critical regard
toward ‘sustainability’, a term that has come to replace
the earlier concentration during the 70s on ecological
homeostasis and balance, and responds to the emergent
imperatives regarding global warming.47
The
show included artists who practise recycling and community
activism (such as Dan Peterman’s Experimental
Station and Michael Rakowitz’s paraSITE, 1998); those
who research sustainable fuels and alternative land use
(Nils Norman’s Ideal City, Research/Play Sector, 2005,
and The Geocruiser,
2001); artists who address
resource and infrastructural
needs in developing
countries and impoverished
urban communities
(Marjetica Potrcˇ ’s
A Hippo Roller for our
Rural Times, 2005, and
Dry Toilet, 2003); and still
others who deploy creative
activist practices that
investigate the politics
of space, for instance,
challenging the assumed
rights of the US military’s
control of Vieques in
Puerto Rico and thereby
defining a politicalecological
practice in the
Latin American context
(Allora & Calzadilla’s
Landmark, 2001–04).
In general, the show represented a prevalent trend in
art that relates technological systems, economies and
political sociability to biological systems, refusing to
see nature as a separate entity, whether to be commodified
by developers, exploited by industry and agribusiness
or spiritually revered by eco-activists.
For its curator Stephanie Smith, ‘sustainability
involves meeting the needs of the present without sacrificing
the capacity of future generations to meet their
own needs’.48
While this definition mirrors the seminal
1987 formulation of sustainability in Our Common
Future, Smith importantly goes on to register the discrepancies
in the term’s divergent meanings, without
which the mythical community signalled by ‘our common
future’ risks superseding the conflictual geopolitical
stakes of sustainability.49
Following the insights of
eco-designer Tony Fry, she distinguishes between
‘sustainable development’ (the greening of existing
methods of production without changing consumer
habits or altering expectations of capitalist growth and
technological progress) and the ‘development of sustainment’,
meaning ‘redirecting development toward a
T. J. Demos
Marjetica Potrcˇ , Caracas: Dry Toilet (Variation No. 2/4), 2004
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26
very different basis for the creation of economy, society,
and a relation between human beings, the artificial
worlds they create and the biosphere’.50
The distinction
is crucial. But against Fry’s questionable division of
humanity’s ‘artificial worlds’ and the ‘biosphere’, Smith
calls for an explicit formulation of sustainability that
grants ‘equal attention to social and environmental justice’,
which turns sustainability into a political ecology.51
According to Swyngedouw, ‘the recognition of this
political meaning of nature is essential if sustainability
is to be combined with a just and empowering urban
development; an urban development that returns
the city and the city’s environment to its citizens.’52
In
this regard, a just theory of sustainable development
might even comprise a model of ‘development without
growth’, which would aim to improve the quality of
life of the largest number of people without increasing
overall economic production and consumption.53
Corroborating Swyngedouw’s political approach to
ecology, Smith observes that ‘sustainable design posits
that a purely green approach, which considers environmental
questions in isolation from other factors’ – as
was the tendency in Fragile Ecologies—‘is incomplete
and ineffective’.54
In terms of situating current practice, however,
Beyond Green is less helpful. While it reveals
an important strain in contemporary practice, one that
presents ‘objects, structures, and processes/networks
that use aspects of sustainable design to metaphoric,
practical, speculative, ironic, and playful ends’, the
curatorial introduction provides little explanation
for this development towards play and irony, nor
differentiates, moreover, between the practical and
the speculative in recent art.55
Consider, on the one
hand, the project of the Danish collective Superflex,
whose work includes the production of ‘biogas units’
for domestic use (cooking, lighting) in Cambodian
and Tanzanian villages, based on the cultivation of
methane gas from animal manure; Marjetica Potrcˇ ’s
development of water transportation devices, dry toilets
and wind energy technology to provide ‘urgent
architecture’ for ‘informal cities’; and the international
collective Learning Group’s inventive usage of recycling
technologies for community-based architecture
in Monterrey, Mexico.
Each of these projects advances an artistic
lineage that connects with the eco-activism of the 70s
and comes close to a model of pragmatic non-governmental
activity and humanitarian
engagement
in attempting to improve
the everyday conditions
of those living in poverty.
(Indeed, Superflex implemented
its biogas project
in Tanzania, where there
is a shortage of fuel supplies
owing to deforestation
and erosion, in cooperation
with the NGO
SURUDE, or Foundation
for Sustainable Rural
Development.) Such
models demonstrate the
resurgent vitality of collectivist
practice and of
the artistic interdisciplinary
collaboration with
political and scientific
The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology
Superflex, Supergas / Tanzania, 1997
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organisations, which productively destabilises and
reinvents the place and function of art today.
Yet there is, on the other hand, another recent
formation, one expressive of an ironic and subversive
artistic neo-conceptualism, which simultaneously
refuses to sacrifice art’s institutions of autonomy and
criticality to the exclusivity of pragmatic and humanitarian
problem-solving. Consider, for instance,
Henrik Håkansson’s Fallen Forest, 2006, which tips a
lush section of vegetation on its side in the middle of
an art gallery equipped with grow lights, in relation
to the Harrisons’ 1972 Portable Orchard. Whereas the
Harrisons were earnestly
dedicated to the
amelioration of environmental
degradation,
Håkansson’s disorienting
gesture spectacularises
a post-natural artifice
in which an organic
environment has been
thoroughly immersed
within multiple technological,
media and cultural
ecologies. Similarly,
consider Tue Greenfort’s
Diffuse Einträge, for
which the artist arranged
for a fertiliser truck, normally filled with liquid manure,
to shoot a jet of iron chloride into Lake Aa during
Skulptur Projekte Münster, Germany, in 2007, thereby
connecting the environmental source of phosphate
pollution from farm runoff originating in surrounding
Münsterland with the potential chemical treatment that
would alleviate the recurrent algae blooms. Yet unlike
the hopeful glimmer of, say, Haacke’s Rhinewater
Purification Plant, which glimpsed the potential, if
unlikely, success, of its ecological intervention via the
demonstration of the clean goldfish basin, Greenfort’s
criticality resides in his ironic exposure of the ridiculousness
of such cosmetic measures to maintain the
lake’s idyllic appearance.
In these recent projects, irony and playfulness
are not simply made in jest, for the purposes of cultural
entertainment, but rather indicate a deep scepticism
about the motivations, aims and results of pragmatic
environmental art. ‘Artists are now inescapably
inscribed within urban regeneration strategies’,
explains Nils Norman, ‘and in order to start thinking
about this bind critically we need to begin creating
more disruptive and experimental methodologies, not
just “neo-situationist spectacle”.’56
In Norman’s largescale
billboard Ideal City, Research/Play Sector, typical
of the artist’s agit-prop signage, computer-illustrated
design maps out an imaginary playscape and research
park composed of a central adventure playground
surrounded by several geodesic domes. The Ideal City
exemplifies the approach
of recent artists towards
viewing the environment
as formed by a ‘multitude
of ecologies’ – biological,
technological, political,
social – mobilised by
representation invested
with the capacity to
inspire imaginative
alternatives to the reality
of everyday neo-liberal
urbanism with which it
competes.57
In this sense,
Norman’s project points
to the relevance of Félix
Guattari’s theorisation in his book The Three Ecologies,
1989, which argues for a ‘transversal’ approach that
joins subjective, social and environmental registers of
ecology into an ‘ethico-aesthetic’ practice, the renewed
conceptualisation of which is accomplished in the
work of theorists such as Swyngedouw, Luke and
Guha.58
Included in Norman’s drawing is a model of a
‘Solarised Hydrogen Powered Public Space Research
Vehicle’. As the accompanying caption explains: ‘the
reclaimed film production unit has been converted
to hydrogen power creating a zero emissions “clean
energy” vehicle, enabling two researchers/artists to
study and observe public spaces across America’,
including ‘parks, squares, malls, streets and markets.
Onboard sleeping and kitchen areas allow for long
road trips and visits. The work area consists of a library,
archive and study station with remote internet access.
T. J. Demos
Nils Norman, The Geocruiser, 2001
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Filming and recording instruments are stored onboard
as well as a temporary exhibition and film screening
setup. An outer solar skin converts light to electricity,
powering all onboard electrics. There is also a weather
station and viewing/surveillance deck’.
Yet, while Norman’s similarly utopian The
Geocruiser – a refurbished coach running on bio-diesel,
fitted with solar panels and containing a community
library and a greenhouse – was in fact fabricated,
the artist typically disassociates his practice from such
practical realisation: ‘I’m more interested in the ideas
and research rather than the vehicle itself’, Norman
explains. ‘The vehicle is just a framing device through
which to view the content: uses of public space and
the history of US utopian experiments in agriculture,
economies and communal living’.59
Importantly,
insofar as Norman’s work defines simultaneously
a critically realist and creatively utopian practice,
it registers the ultimate limitations of any primarily
pragmatic approach, whether of restorationist ecology
or sustainable aesthetics, and this, finally, is where
the employment of irony and playfulness become
politically important for many of today’s practitioners:
for its conceptual, anti-pragmatist emphasis reveals
an awareness of the ultimate impossibility of a local
sustainable practice within a globally unsustainable
system of ecologies.60
Extrapolating from this last point, even while
exhibitions dedicated to sustainability, such as Beyond
Green, may themselves be unsustainable from the perspective
of global warming, exhibitions focusing on art
and ecology nonetheless remain urgent at this time. To
contribute to the ongoing public engagement with the
politics of sustainability, to advance creative proposals
for alternative forms of life based on environmental
justice in a global framework, and to do so until such
art exhibitions can somehow meet the requirements
of a just sustainability – these are the imperatives for a
contemporary environmental art. For its part, Radical
Nature promises to provide a provocative context
in which we can consider further these challenging
questions concerning art and ecology.
1 Tim Flannery, The Weather
Makers: How Man Is Changing
the Climate and What It Means
for Life on Earth, Atlantic Monthly
Press (New York, 2006); Elizabeth
Kolbert, Field Notes from a
Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and
Climate Change, Bloomsbury
(New York, 2006)
2 On the IPCC and for an account
of the recent science and politics
of climate change, see Robert
Henson, The Rough Guide to
Climate Change, Rough Guides
(London, 2008)
3 Of course, this list is incomplete.
Also of note are the following:
Ecotopia: The Second ICP
Triennial of Photography and
Video, at the International Center
of Photography in New York, 2006;
Greenwashing: Environment,
Perils, Promises, and Perplexities,
Fondazione Sandretto Re
Rebaudengo, Turin, 2008; After
Nature, New Museum, New
York, 2008
4 Bruno Latour, ‘Why has Critique
Run out of Steam? From Matters of
Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical
Inquiry, Winter 2004, pp. 225–48
5 Gro Brundtland, Our Common
Future: World Commission on
Environment and Development,
Oxford University Press (Oxford,
1987), p. 43. Compare the more
bio-centred definition of the
Regional Ecosystem Office in
the US: ‘In an ecological context,
sustainability can be defined as the
ability of an ecosystem to maintain
ecological processes, functions,
biodiversity and productivity into
the future’, REO Information Center
Definitions. Northwest Forest Plan
(NWFP) definition of sustainability
(http://www.reo.gov/general/
definitions_r-s.htm)
6 Gro Brundtland, Our Common
Future, p. 8. For further critical
discussion of the Stockholm
conference, see Green Planet
Blues: Environmental Politics
from Stockholm to Johannesburg,
eds. Ken Conca and Geoffrey D.
Dabelko, Westview Press
(Oxford, 2004)
7 For a discussion and critique
of the economic imperatives of
green government, see Timothy
Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green
Governmentality’, in Discourses of
the Environment, ed. Éric Darier,
Blackwell (Oxford, 1999)
8 Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Circulations
and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures
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and (Cyborg) Cities’, Science as
Culture, 15/2, June 2006, p. 115
9 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Megacity’, Grey
Room, 01, Fall 2000, p. 14; cited
in Emily Apter, ‘The Aesthetics
of Critical Habitats’, October, 99,
Winter 2002, p. 21
10 Erik Swyngedouw, op. cit., p. 115
11 Of course, this handful of references
is only a sampling. For further
consideration of environmental
art and global justice, see Yates
McKee, ‘Art and the Ends of
Environmentalism: From Biosphere
to the Right to Survival’, in
Nongovernmental Politics, ed.
Michel Feher, with Gaëlle Krikorian
and Yates McKee, Zone Books
(New York, 2007)
12 See the very helpful ‘Short History
of Eco-Art Exhibitions’, in Sue
Spaid, Ecovention: Current
Art to Transform Ecologies,
Contemporary Arts Center, et al.,
Corte Madera (California, 2002),
pp. 134–36
13 Barbara Matilsky, ‘Environmental
Art: New Approaches to Nature’,
FragileEcologies,Queens Museum
of Art (New York, 1992), p. 36
14 Ibid., pp. 3–4
15 Cited in Barbara Matilsky, op. cit.,
p. 40
16 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look
at Life on Earth, Oxford University
Press (Oxford, 1979)
17 Neil Smith, ‘Forward’, In the
Nature of Cities: Urban Political
Ecology and the Politics of Urban
Metabolism, ed. Nik Heynen, et al.,
Routledge (London, 2006),
pp. xiii–xiv
18 On this history, see also Green
Planet Blues, op. cit.
19 Barbara Matilsky, op. cit., p. 38
20 Ibid., p. 44. Also mentioned is
Robert Morris’s attack on eco-art
fixes of industrial degradation,
which he addressed at the Seattle
Art Museum in 1979 on the occasion
of the exhibition Earthworks: Land
Reclamation as Sculpture: ‘sites
scarred by mining or poisoned by
chemicals now seem less like the
entropic liabilities of ravenous and
short-sighted industry and more like
long-awaited aesthetic possibilities’,
p. 47
21 As Robert Smithson explains
in a 1972 essay, ‘The range of
convergence between Site and
Non-site consists of a course of
hazards, a double path made up of
signs, photographs and maps that
belong to both sides of the dialectic
at once’, in ‘The Spiral Jetty’, in
Robert Smithson: The Collected
Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University
of California Press (Berkeley, 1996),
note 1, p. 153
22 See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
or Control and Communication
in the Animal and the Machine,
The Technology Press (Cambridge,
1948); and more recently, Steve
Joshua Heims, Constructing a
Social Science for America: The
Cybernetics Group, 1946–53,
MIT Press (Cambridge, 1991)
23 Many of these artists are mentioned
in Jack Burnham, ‘Systems
Esthetics’, Artforum, September
1968. Recently, there has been a
resurgence of interest in this period
of art, ecology, systems aesthetics
and cybernetics in the work of
David Joselit, William Kaizen, Yates
McKee and Luke Skrebowski.
24 Jack Burnham, ‘Systems Esthetics’, in
Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt
Works —Essay on the Meaning
of Post-Formalist Art, George
Braziller (New York, 1974), p. 15
25 Gregory Bateson, ‘Ecology and
Flexibility in Urban Civilization’,
1970, in Steps to an Ecology
of Mind: Collected Essays
in Anthropology, Psychiatry,
Evolution and Epistemology,
University of Chicago Press
(Chicago, 2000), p. 502
26 Ibid., p. 505
27 Gregory Bateson, ‘Awake!’ Radical
Software I, 5, 1972, p. 33
28 See Hans Haacke, Unfinished
Business, ed. Brian Wallis, New
Museum of Contemporary Art
(New York, 1986), p. 106
29 Haacke did, however, address
social ecology in other projects,
specifically his polls, even if
these also proposed a limited
and rudimentary inclusion of
the audience-participant. On
the relation between Haacke’s
early ecological works and his
later systems-aesthetic, see Luke
Skrebowski, ‘All Systems Go:
Recovering Hans Haacke’s
Systems Art’, Grey Room, 30,
Winter 2008, pp. 54–83
30 Arlo Raymond, ‘Media Ecology’,
Radical Software, 1/3, 1971, p. 19;
cited in William Kaizen in ‘Steps
to an Ecology of Communication:
Radical Software, Dan Graham,
and the Legacy of Gregory
Bateson’, Art Journal, Fall 2008,
p. 87
31 See David Joselit, Feedback:
Television Against Democracy,
MIT Press (Cambridge, 2007)
32 Cited in William Kaizen, op. cit.,
p. 100
33 As William Kaizen observes in
ibid., p. 87
34 Arlo Raymond, op. cit., p. 19
35 György Kepes, ‘Art and the
Ecological Conscience’, in Arts
of the Environment, ed. György
Kepes, George Braziller (New
York, 1972), p. 72
36 See Yates McKee, ‘The Public
Sensoriums of Pulsa: Cybernetic
Abstraction and the Biopolitics of
Urban Survival’, Art Journal, Fall
2008. McKee deserves credit for
retrieving Pulsa’s activities from
historical oblivion.
37 Pulsa, ‘The City as an Artwork’,
in Arts of the Environment,
op. cit., p. 212. In the same volume
(pp. 222–232), Robert Smithson
published ‘The Spiral Jetty’.
38 Pulsa, op. cit., p. 217
39 Ibid.
T. J. Demos
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40 György Kepes, ‘Art and the
Ecological Conscience’, in Arts
of the Environment, op. cit., p. 9
41 Pulsa, ‘The City as an Artwork’, in
Arts of the Environment, op. cit.,
p. 221; Yates McKee, ‘The Public
Sensoriums of Pulsa’, op. cit., p. 65
42 Yats McKee, ‘Art and the Ends of
Environmentalism’, op. cit., p. 557
43 Timothy Luke, ‘Environmentality
as Green Governmentality’, op. cit.,
While Luke focuses on the Clinton/
Gore administration in the US
during the 1990s and its conjoining
of environmental initiatives with
strategic economic goals, his reading
of ‘environmental governmentality’
may yet gain a new relevancy,
despite being interrupted during
the intervening Bush years and
its regression towards resource
colonialism in the name of national
security. On American ‘primitive
accumulation’ in the context of
the recent war in Iraq, see Retort,
Iain Boal, T. J. Clark and Joseph
Matthews, Afflicted Powers:
Capital and Spectacle in a New
Age of War,Verso (London, 2005)
44 The best-selling book The Limits
to Growth argued that accelerating
industrialisation, mounting
population growth, growing
malnutrition and the depletion of
natural resources defined a natural
limit to global growth. See The
Limits to Growth: A Report for
the Club of Rome’s Project on
the Predicament of Mankind,
eds. Donella H. Meadows et al.,
Pan (London, 1974); also see Green
Planet Blues, op. cit., pp. 17–22
45 Timothy Luke, op. cit., p. 146
46 Madhav Gadgil and
Ramachandra Guha, ‘Ideologies
of Environmentalism’, in Ecology
and Equity: The Use and Abuse
of Nature in Contemporary
India, Routledge (London, 1995).
McKee discusses Guha’s ‘ecology
of affluence’ in ‘Art and the Ends of
Environmentalism’, op. cit., p. 548
47 Also see: Ecovention, Cincinnati
Contemporary Arts Center, 2002;
Land, Art, RSA, London, 2006;
After Nature, New Museum, New
York, 2008; and Green Museum,
online site.
48 Stephanie Smith, ‘Beyond Green’,
in Beyond Green: Toward a
Sustainable Art, Smart Museum
of Art and Independent Curators
International (Chicago and New
York, 2005), p. 14
49 As Murray Bookchin observes
elsewhere, the danger with such
social constructions is that a ‘mythic
“Humanity” is created — irrespective
of whether we are talking about
oppressed ethnic minorities,
women, Third World people,
or people in the First World – in
which everyone is brought into
complicity with powerful corporate
elites in producing environmental
dislocations.’ See Murray Bookchin,
Remaking Society: Pathways to
a Green Future, South End Press
(Boston, 1990); cited in Green
Planet Blues, op. cit., p. 9
50 Stephanie Smith, ‘Beyond Green’,
op. cit., p. 14. On the ‘biosphere’
see McKee, ‘The Ends of
Environmentalism’, op. cit., p. 547,
and notes 18–20. See also Tony Fry,
Design Futuring: Sustainability,
Ethics, and New Practice, Berg
(Oxford, 2008)
51 For Neil Smith, ‘political ecology
provides a powerful means of
cracking the abstractions of this
discussion about the metabolism
or production of nature. Rooted
in social and political theory
it is also grounded in ecology
and has an international scope.
When complemented by an
environmental justice politics,
which is less internationally focused
and less theoretical but more
politically activist in inspiration,
political ecology becomes a potent
weapon for comprehending
produced natures’, Niel Smith,
‘Foreword’, op.cit., pp. xiii–xiv.
52 Erik Swyngedouw, op. cit., p. 118
53 For such a proposal, see Herman E.
Daly and John B. Cobb Jr., For the
Common Good: Redirecting the
Economy Toward Community,
the Environment, and a
Sustainable Future, Beacon Press
(Boston, 1989)
54 Stephanie Smith, ‘Beyond Green’,
p. 14
55 Ibid., p. 13
56 Nils Norman, interviewed in
Beyond Green, op. cit., p. 91.
Consider as well Joshua Decter’s
reading of Håkansson’s practice:
‘By proposing a new mode of
inter-species socialisation that is
fundamentally constructed, fictive
and imperfect, Håkansson defers
from offering pragmatic solutions, or
the next paradigm model. Instead,
his practice asks to be understood
as an allegory that illuminates the
complex circumstances of species
estrangement in general’. Joshua
Decter, ‘The Return of Dr. Doolittle:
Henrik Håkansson’s Inter-species
Communications’, Siksi, XII, 2, 1997,
p. 73; cited in Ecovention, op. cit.,
p. 80
57 Norman, quoted in Beyond Green,
op. cit., p. 91
58 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies
(orig. publ. 1989), trans. Ian Pindar
and Paul Sutton, The Athlone Press
(London, 2000)
59 Norman, interviewed in Beyond
Green, op. cit., p. 91
60 For more discussion of Norman’s
practice, see T. J. Demos, ‘The Cruel
Dialectic: On the Work of Nils
Norman’, Grey Room, 13, Fall 2003,
pp. 33–50
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