Meghan Moe Beitiks researches, discusses, analyzes, critiques, questions
and creates environmental art. She is the eco-arts columnist for inhabitat.com, a popular green design blog with over 100,000 unique daily visitors. She founded greenmuseum.blog, a place for the exploration of issues and themes in eco-art. She's a regular contributor to the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts' quarterly journal and blog. She was an Art Culture Nature fellow at the Earth Matters on Stage Symposium in 2009 and a Fulbright Scholar to Latvia in Theater in 2001/2.
On this blog there’s been some debate as to the preservation of environmental art and its merits. When does a work that is meant to decay become not-an-artwork, that is, just another rotting thing?
Curators in Venezuela are determined to never let it get that far– at least, not with traditional works of art. Paintings, tapestries and wooden objects in warm climes are prone to attack from fungi, insects, and bacteria. The curators have amassed for the 4th Cultural Heritage Conservation Forum in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.
Of the tools used to combat art decay, one is bacillus thuringiensis, pictured above. It produces toxin crystals , when ingested by offending insects, causes a swelling that leads to a fatal rupture. Yeah, it makes bugs blow up. It’s also used as a pesticide in agriculture. One website describes the effect as “dying after indigestion.†The bacterium has also been spliced into genetically modified crops, creating, of course, controversy.
Whether the use of Bt to preserve works of art is a step towards ecological balance or yet-another example of our industrial-agriculturalized society (wah wah waaaaah), it at least highlights an important factor: that no artwork, whether designed to decay or not, is impervious to ravages of little hungry needling organisms.
Returning from a lengthy hiatus involving holidays with families, demanding festivals, and organizational retstructuring, we thought it best to begin with Herman Josef Hack’s guilt-inducing Climate Refugee Camp.
The artist created 400 mini-tents and filled two public squares in Berlin with them in order to draw attention to the plight of populations displaced by climate change. Visitors to Alexanderplatz and Brandenberger Tor could walk amongst teeny barren rooftops like carbon-devouring Godzillas. Grrrrr.
If you’re looking for great writing about eco-art on the web, check out RSA Arts and Ecology’s online magazine. They recently published an interview with artist Alan Sonfist that is not only a great overview of the evolution of environmental art, it’s a fabulous breakdown of the blurring of cultural lines that comes with the work. Also, the last line of the interview contains one of the best quotes on the topic I’ve read.
Within the 21st century we have to redefine the role of the artist as an individual who is actively seeking solutions to improve our world.
Dystopia: super motivating, right? Part of why we’re all so excited about green living and moving and breathing is that constant potential for utter global collapse. Ooooh. Potential ecological apocalypse. I gotta get me one of them CFLs.
Artist Petko Dourmana creates this eerie potential future. In Global Warming Survival Kit, he realizes this generation’s “nuclear winter†by setting up a station for a watchman of a border between land and the North Sea. The border lies on an ash-covered future landscape, images of which can only be seen with night-vision goggles. Perhaps the best way to prevent an apocalypse is to change our perspective.
The piece is on display as part of Brand_Dourmana at the Edith Russ Site for New Media Art in Oldenberg, Germany. It was recently nominated for the 2009 transmediale award.
Now this is just beautiful. Xavier Cortada has helped to instigate waves of tree plantings and land restoration with his piece The Reclamation Project. He begins with legions of mangrove seedlings, artfully arranged in clear plastic cups. The seedlings can be adopted by individual donors or businesses. When they are ready, the teeny trees are then transplanted into areas where they will naturally thrive. In this way each plant begins its life as part of an art piece and matures as an act of restoration.
Begun in 2006 as a program partnered with the Miami Science Museum, the program expanded the following year to included native Florida trees on land. This season mangrove seedlings were adopted by several Florida schools and a host of local businesses. Growing, sprouting, planting as art. Beautiful.
Here it is: sustainable technology as performance. As device for interrupting habit. As spectacle. As crazy pedaling fun.
It’s the Buscycle, a 15-passenger van converted into a zero-emission pedal powerhouse. Constructed by an all-volunteer crew, which included an MIT professor, a machinist, a robot enthusiast, some artists, a pastry chef, and leagues of bonafide sustainability nerds, the vehicle is made up of mostly recycled bike and auto parts. It requires the participation of 14 energetic passengers.
This set of sustainable wheels completed a cross-country tour in 2006. Tales from the road seem mostly to involve spontateous pedaling communities and a lot of looks from passers-by. But then, that’s the point: part of the idea for the project was to shake the top-down dictum of alternative energy and making it visible and accessible to everyone, even Joe six-pack.
As an online museum, we take form largely in 1’s and 0’s. We’ve even dissolved our office so we’re all working from home now. The artworks and the people making them and experiencing them firsthand are all around the world. At best, those are the physical manifestations of greenmuseum.org. The gatherings we announce, the places we consult with, the artists and organizations we interlink. It’s all going on largely independent of us of course anyway. Butterfly wings and all that… But does this website have a physical impact on the world through the million+ people who have visited the site? Artists and parks and curators tell us we’ve help ed make projects possible. We also have a Calendar that comes out every year (please buy one, enjoy the art for a full year and help support our work – we earn a small percentage of sales).
The most grounded we get, perhaps, is when we collaborate with a museum or gallery space to curate a physical exhibition. So with that, we’re proud to announce Overlap in Green, a one night exhibition in San Francisco on November 8th, 2008. Please come by if you’re in the area. For those who live far away, we’ll use the exhibition as a start for an online version to share with everyone. Spreading the seeds online, may they find root in fertile soil to generate new iterations of sustainable somethingorothers. Hope the worms notice and smile.
Joyous of all Environmental Aesthetic Nerdfests. While the dust of the Dow settling has sent some scrambling, and the rest of the world plugs on with their day to day, The Nevada Museum of Art has taken it upon themselves to host a gathering of minds in order to analyze the sustainable future of Art and the Environment– and it’s happening this weekend.
Speakers include Fritz Haeg of Edible Estates, Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG and Crimson Rose of Burning Man. We’re looking forward to hearing some of the outcomes of this creative meeting and total green geekout.
A grainy image for a grainy practice. Driving along Interstate 80 through Utah and the white-snowy-sparkled salt flats, you see blur after blur of rock-words: names, hearts, peace symbols, smiley faces. Couples, questions, signs. Some messages have dispersed into shattered versions of themselves.
The other day I was at a party talking about greenmuseum.org, and a woman asked me if the stacked straw-people on a highway corner in Stanford could be considered to be environmental art. They were big hay-bale people, with shields, and straw for fingers, like scarecrow warriors. It’s a question that’s continually floating around the greenmuseum.org “officeâ€, as well. Is it enough to make something with found or natural materials? Or must it answer the essential Sam Bower question: do the worms care?
