Next Memory City from Border Crossings

Next Memory City from Border Crossings

TITLE:	NEXT MEMORY CITY
SOURCE:	Border Crossings 21 no4 36-40 N 2002

The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.

    "Next Memory City" is a collaborative project involving architect and curator MICHAEL AWAD, pianist and sound artist EVE EGOYAN and multimedia artist DAVID ROKEBY. Their project was chosen to represent Canada at the 2002 Venice Biennale in Architecture and was on exhibition at the Canadian Pavilion from September 8 to November 3.
    The following forum is a collage of separate responses by the artists to questions that have been removed. It is an exercise in interstitial reduction.
    MICHAEL AWAD: The project was based not only on urban space, but on the lack of architecture. Even though David and I had never met, we were working on exactly the same projects, except that I was working in an analog form and he was working in a digital form. My piece is specific to Toronto: one image of Chinatown, four minutes of activity recorded in the heart of the most densely populated part of the city. But it records without any architecture in the background; it only registers things that happen or change--people, automobiles and movement.
    DAVID ROKEBY: There's a fundamental link between what Michael is after in his photographs and what I've been interested in since the early '80s in tracking, monitoring and translating movement through my video systems. I find the more I look at Chinatown, the richer it gets. What was interesting in retrospect was trying to figure out how to balance a live, moving image and a still image from the perspective of the viewer. And it has something to do with time: Michael's piece requires time to view successfully.
    AWAD: What we really tried to create in our pavilion was a pause. Amongst all these other pavilions with high-powered architecture and an overwhelming focus on buildings, our space was a bit of a quiet, dark oasis where people could actually stop for a while. On many levels we counter-programmed by presenting an installation that focussed attention on urban space devoid of buildings. But I can't imagine the installation without the sound. As soon as the sound came up, it engaged the images so directly. It became integral.
    EVE EGOYAN: The sound definitely seemed to draw the images off the wall and into the space with the people. My work was on the ground and on the ceiling. On the ground I placed the same stones that were used on the Giardini walkways, and that made the floor both visual and auditory. We wanted to create an atmosphere where people, when they were looking at other people, would have a sense of themselves in the space. There were also moments of silence where the images went back to the walls and everyone was left just with themselves. We had eight channels along the ceiling and we had sounds that were really intense--a vaporetto and a streetcar. There were sounds from Venice and Toronto, and I had to work with the combination of them as if they were orchestral. For me, it was a question of thinking about the two cities and what their sounds represent. Toronto sounds are upbeat, they have vivacity, largeness and multi-ethnicity. Venice is slow, quiet, extremely transparent and really lovely to record. If there is such a word, it was autogenic. Collecting sounds was almost like creating a palette, which we then took to the pavilion to see if all the colours were appropriate.
    ROKEBY: Venice is an extraordinary city because there is such a depth-of-field of sound that you're always hearing people around the next corner. We really got into that and made a lot of recordings of a densely populated space like San Marco, and then individual footsteps going down isolated passageways, and everything in between. When we came back to Toronto, it was frustrating because the depth-of-field that was so seductive was gone. Mostly because of the fan noise from the office tower ventilators that are like sound blankets.
    EGOYAN: In Venice people didn't have to raise their voices above the general blur of sound, which is constant in Toronto. On our streets you can have an intimate conversation and some degree of privacy because there is so much sound around. In Venice, because you can hear everything, you can't do that. It can be irritating. We were in an apartment and you could hear everything the neighbours did. And where were the musicians? It would be quite an adjustment to practise there. I couldn't imagine it. But the way the sounds captured the two environments we were dealing with could be quite beautiful. Both of us were using intuition in the editing process about what sounds to use where. It was also a lot of fun because when you put the sound into a computer, it became so malleable, so manoeuvrable.
    AWAD: The pavilion is quite quirky. It's the only structure on the Biennale grounds that doesn't have a 90-degree angle and dealing with it can be a love-hate thing. From what we heard, this may be the first time that the space has been used in a highly sympathetic way. Architecturally speaking, I kept referring to it as a half-doughnut. What we did was fit all 120 feet of "Chinatown" on the outside wall of the pavilion, and then we built two walls in a v-shape on the inside, on which David could project the images he had gathered on San Marco. The sound piece, which was called "Channel," brought the two images together. It worked both spatially and metaphorically. The actual editing was a digital technology that spatialized the sound and moved it back and forth across the channel. We've been calling this place the Inter-city, primarily because it's between both cities while it exists as neither one. At the same time, it focusses attention on the interior of the city, which is something very deliberate. "Interstitial" is a great word for it; something in between that represents both but is neither.
    ROKEBY: When I was thinking about the flow through public space, there was always, in my mind, the notion of water, hence "Channel." And as Eve pointed out when we were standing in the pavilion after the stones were laid down, you did imagine you were in a drained canal. But the rawly expressed Inter-city was not as important to me as the basic notion of public space. What makes public space unique but also universal is that it's formed by people. It's still a socialized space and its very basic human needs, desires, likes and dislikes define how the space works and what happens there.
    AWAD: We're not trying to represent or recreate an urban environment; we're actually showing you things that you couldn't see otherwise, but they are things that are happening in front of you at every moment. It's as if our eyes were programmed differently, or if we were able to remember things differently. We were trying, in a very distilled way, to present qualities of the city that may be allusive.
    EGOYAN: I'm not a composer. I'm more of an interpreter but I think people associate me with being a composer because I play, almost exclusively, the music of my time. And I improvise, too. So it's in the nature of the things I do to find a way to invite people into hearing things without any fear. I work with new music and a lot of people who are familiar with classical music have real problems going to hear stuff they've never really heard before. I try to open people up to the pure act of listening.
    ROKEBY: In my work and in Michael's--in different ways--there is a perceptual displacement. This is a strategy that I've pursued for a long time; looking at the way a banal, familiar or completely readable image is radically renovated by putting it through some fairly straightforward filters. In a lot of my work I'm trying to remove the familiarity of things. This process of perceptual destabilization, especially in relation to very familiar stuff, is connected to my notion of language. It's a very expanded idea of language as any codification, where you stop dealing with raw experience and start replacing it with concepts, ideas and words. We have a tendency to get trapped in the terms and symbols we choose to apply to things. My hope is that destabilization will shake off those symbols, momentarily, and give us a way of re-reading and rejuvenating what is very conventional experience.

This page and facing page: Canadian Pavilion, 8th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 2002, presented by Alphabet City and InterAccess. Photographs countesy Alphabet City and InterAccess.

Source: Border Crossings, November 2002, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p36, 5p
Item: 505021941

Copied from UMaine Folger Library Database on 03.07.17

Chicago Style Citation

2002. "Next Memory City." Border Crossings 21, no. 4: 36-40. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed March 07, 2017).

Stewart Home Interview, Mikkel Bolt

BOLT ON NEOISM FOR PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL WANDERERS EVERYWHERE, OR THE RETURN OF THREE-SIDED FOOTBALL PART IX: MIKKEL BOLT ASKS STEWART HOME ABOUT THE PHENOMENOLGY OF DELIBERATELY FUCKING UP

BOLT: It seems to be a recurrent aspect of your work to disappoint the audience, to frustrate them – making it difficult to know exactly what is going on? It is difficult to know whether you are presenting yourself as an artist, an art historian, an anarchist or underground agitator – it is always difficult to know from what position you are addressing the audience, it always seems as if you are changing positions and thereby making it very difficult to pin down the 'meaning' and intention of the particular project. Your book The Assault on Culture is an example of this – on the one hand it comes of as an attempt to present an 'alternative' avant-garde stretching from the Cobra movement to Neoism and Class War, on the other hand you never miss an opportunity to point out that the book was written in order to make space for Neoism within the traditional history of the avant-garde.

HOME: I think what I’m about is an overflowing of all capitalist canalisation. When Marx first laid out historical materialism in The German Ideology, he wrote about communism enabling one to be a hunter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon and a critical critic at night; of course being a vegetarian, I'd rather be an egotist in the morning (shades of Saint Max here, the main target Marx is tilting against in The German Ideology), a porn star in the afternoon, and a critical critic at night. The point, of course, is that its ridiculous to reduce (wo)man to one thing, to one function, and that this is one facet of the alienation we're struggling against. Life shouldn't be about repeating the same gesture endlessly regardless of whether it is as a factory worker or an 'intellectual'. To regain our humanity, we must live out all the aspects of what it is to be human, intellectual, emotional, physical, and live them as one (this is precisely what the old avant-garde slogan 'poetry must be made by all and not by one' meant, poetry must be made by all the senses and all the people collectively, it should be an overflowing beyond poetry). So one tries to act and create in a revolutionary fashion, and since truth is never one-sided this is dialectical too.

I am not trying to present myself as any one thing, but to be all things as far as possible in an alienated and fragmented world. The disappointment comes from elsewhere, since we all reproduce our own alienation in capitalist societies, it is never possible to overflow unrestrainedly in this bourgeois shitheap. All of anarchism can be found in the idea that it is possible to live differently in this world, and I am most definitely not an anarchist. So The Assault on Culture, can be viewed as a presentation of the post-war 'avant-garde', or an attempt to make space for Neoism within an (anti)-'traditional' her-story of the avant-garde, but it is rather better to view it as both. It is a practical demonstration of how the avant-garde (like the capitalist establishment, but for different reasons and in different ways) manipulates history, and since this is a trait of the avant-garde, doing so as a 'former' 'leading' member of the Neoist Network allows me to claim and make space for Neoism within the avant-garde. There is no real beginning or end to Neoism, it goes on and on… Almost forever…

BOLT: The attempt to frustrate the audience has been a constant feature of the avant-garde since dada. In a certain sense it is through this destruction of the audience that the avant-garde's paradoxical understanding of art becomes evident: art contains a special potential but only insofar as art is realised in everyday life, insofar as art is no longer art. This understanding of art was evident in the situationists group who on the one hand tried to activate the audience in, for example, the exhibition Destruction of RSG-6 in 1963 where the audience was supposed to fire rifles at images of politicians like de Gaulle. Kennedy and Krustjov. On the other hand the situationists always insisted that the 'real' situationist audience was never to be found in a gallery the 'real' (read self-critical) audience was already engaged in revolutionary activities out in the streets. You also have a long and complicated relationship between working-class theoreticians and art, where art is often looked upon as a mere illusion that makes it possible for the bourgeois to present himself as equipped with freedom. How did the Neoist group or how did your version of Neoism try to reconfigure this complicated attitude towards on the one hand art and on the other the audience?

HOME: I think you have to accept that Neoism was no more coherent as a 'movement' than dada, these are names that like fluxus or lettrrism have been pushed and shoved in endless directions. From this perspective the recent Dada exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris was particularly hilarious. One is presented with a range of work that is in no way coherent. To take just the political aspect, Julius Evola is presented as the leading representative of dada in Italy without any mention being made of the fact that he was always a reactionary and went on to become the leading European fascist 'theorist' of the post-war period, the so called 'Marcuse of the (far)-Right', the 'intellectual' Godfather of the 'political soliders' of the Third Position; on the other hand there is a single framed copy of the council communist magazine Die Action among a collection of dada publications, this was a revolutionary journal that bought together the communist left with the Berlin dadaists, who being the most revolutionary members of the movement necessarily made the best 'anti-works'. That said, the bourgeois minds who conceived the Pompidou exhibition have done better than one might expect in presenting the movement, but they baulk at attempting to deal with its politics. For these liberals hacks the dominant cultural history is a snow drift in which all their sacred cows are whiter than white.

Moving on, there is a danger in the way you frame this question of ending up perceiving all avant-gardes as seeking the realisation of art in life, which on the one hand is something that emerges from the theorising of critics such as Peter Berger and on the other, is something that just might be found in the movements he is writing about in Theory of the Avant-Garde, viz dada and surrealism. Berger wrote about a desire to integrate art and life, sections of the situationist movement (those grouped around Debord and Paris after 1962) propagandised for the simultaneous realisation and suppression of art. These varied positions are reflected in the attitudes of different sections of the Neoist movement. Some former Neoists would even claim that Neoism wasn’t an avant-garde movement at all, but then that's also a typically avant-garde manipulation. So I think some Neoists could be viewed as attempting to integrate art and life (Pete Horobin, Istvan Kantor) and others to realise and suppress, or at least suppress it, and the stress should very much be on suppressing art (tentatively a convenience). Other Neoists, and in particular Blaster Al Ackerman (who is an absolutely key figure), weren't so much interested in addressing the status of art in capitalist societies, as meeting sex partners who were 'dirty and under thirty'. It is not for nothing that the Berlin Apartment Festival was redubbed The Syphilis Festival by a number of its participants, who - it is perhaps superfluous to add - all caught the clap. Likewise, when the Neoists said dirty, they meant dirty, since a perversion heavily favoured by a number of them was snot sex, which entailed nose blowing with mucus rubbed all over the body prior to penetrative sex. Because of such interests, The Syphilis Festival was considered a major disaster, the antibiotics used to clear up the clap simultaneously relieved a number of Neoists of their almost permanent colds. It was, undoubtedly, the beginning of the end for Neoism since without mucus lubrication many Neoists found it impossible to rub along with each other.

However, to return to the question immediately in hand, my own position is, of course, that capitalism provides the material conditions for art and German idealism supplies it with its theoretical justification. Drawing on the same philosophical sources, Marx concluded that human activity constitutes reality through its praxis, truth is process, the process of self-development. Since it is shackled by commodification, artistic practice is necessarily a deformation of the sensuous unfolding of the self that will be possible once we’ve attained real human community. The goal of communism is to overcome the reification of human activity into separate realms such as work and play, the aesthetic and the political. Communism will rescue the aesthetic from the prison of art and place it at the centre of life. While art as we know it continues to exist, it would be ridiculous to expect those seeking its abolition not to engage in and with it. However, progressive artists must always keep in sight the fact that their role of specialist non-specialists must be abolished. Therefore their cultural strategy in this transitional period must be to automonise the negative within artistic practice. We must live out the death of the avant-garde not just in theory, but also in practice, just as we will live out the death of politics as a separate sphere. What artists and politicos must seek is the abolition of those things that most engage them, so that a great tidal wave of humanity can fuse together and swamp capitalist canalisation in a revolutionary overflowing. This flood tide will necessarily originate both within and utterly outside the gallery. Since capitalist reification exists everywhere, we can fight it everywhere; we all reproduce our own alienation, including and especially artists. There is no 'outside' to the capitalist world, only the necessity of moving beyond it.

For the Neoists, as they endlessly reinvented what they were and represented, the question of audience really wasn't an issue. At Apartment Festivals and elsewhere, the Neoists themselves provided the audience for each other's work. Performances were meticulously (or sometimes sloppily and carelessly) documented, for if there was to be an audience in terms of passive spectators, then such drones did not yet exist and would be called forth from (and in) the future (but only so that they might be simultaneously transformed into actors on the theatre of the world). The assumption being that anyone present at Neoist events was a participant, someone who joined in (as would those who took an interest in its his and her-story). So even now, in retrospect, it is still possible to actively engage in Neoism, by manipulating its history. In my book The House of Nine Squares, you can see Florian Cramer and me doing this in our exchanges with each other. I think this constant rethinking of Neoism is important, and Florian played a major role in it. I've found his insistence on stressing Neoism's immersion in occult discourse particularly useful.

BOLT: How intentional was the attempt to transform the Neoist activities into an avant-garde? Some critics seems to read your attempt as an ironic gesture whereby the logic and self-understanding of the avant-garde is ridiculed, while other critics read the packaging as a more straightforward attempt to reconstruct a post-modern avant-garde.

HOME: After the fact it didn't much matter what was done with Neoism. As far as I am concerned Neoism was finished by the end of 1986, the 64th Neoist Apartment Festival in Berlin being its last hurrah. What interested me after this was its half-life, which I wanted to use to irradiate culture. So by the time I came to write The Assault on Culture in 1987 (it was first published the following year), Neoism wasn't ripe, it was rotten. I felt its putrid corpse was something that might very well stink up the institution of art, so I wanted to make it simultaneously attractive and repulsive to some of those in positions of cultural power. My intentions were simultaneously ironic and deadly serious. I wanted to see if this wreck could be dragged into the academy as a post-modern Trojan Horse. I also wished to have the pleasure of seeing a certain kind of purist ranting about Neoism in a museum, how disgraceful! By stressing the process of historicisation within my manipulation of Neoism, I hoped to make it harder for the institution of art to assimilate this tendency, precisely by ironising what were previously perhaps almost unspoken aspects of avant-garde activity, to ridicule and destroy the logic and self-understanding of the avant-garde; i.e. to make it live out its own death in practice as well as in the less mordant realm of theory. This was and remains, however, a high risk strategy, since capitalist culture has become so debased that those critics who mistake these clincially administered death spasms as an attempt to reconstruct the avant-garde in post-modern garb (i.e. to revive art by making it somehow 'relevant') are now treated as serious contenders in the race for intellectual credibility. Should they succeed in foisting such interpretations upon the academy, they naturally enough run the risk of being exposed as the theoretical-cum-practical necrophiliacs they undoubtedly are. As Breton might have said had he managed some form of rapprochement with Bataille: 'death will be convulsive or it will not be at all.' The old Neoist slogan 'convulsion, subversion, defection' might almost also be taken as having something to do with this. Art no longer has anything to say, if it ever did (i.e. prior to 1914).

All of this is satirised in my novel Slow Death, which addressed in the form of fiction the historicisation of Neoism before it had really occurred, and was quite consciously intended to make such historicisation more difficult for anyone who wanted to carry it through. In the nineties when I wrote Slow Death, and even recently, I have championed the notion of 'Proletarian Post-Modernism', which was a way of broadening matters out, and drawing in among other things trash film (trash that is, if this is a suitable form of description for productions as diverse as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Persona). So we might rephrase your question in the following terms: can the academy recuperate laughter? Or rather, by providing a means by which those operating within the acadaemy but critical of it, might smuggle something radically humorous (or at least human) into overly rarified institutions, am I not providing them with an opportunity to subvert the academy from within? Or to put it another way, Neoism functions best when it is used to generate questions rather than provide answers.

BOLT: In retrospect the 80s comes over as a period characterised by the return to power of different conservative or neo-liberal political projects like Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl, in a Marxist jargon we could call it a counter-revolutionary move after the experiments of the 60s and 70s: May’68, the different student movements, the feminist movement, punk, Autonomia, etc. Much of the art produced in the 80s seemed very ambivalent towards this historical development: on the one hand you had the return to painting (in different version from Art & Language through the Italian painters to Schnabel in the States) and sculpture (Gormley, etc)), in the middle you had the so-called post-modern appropriation art of Sherman, Prince and Levine and on the other hand you had activities like ACT UP, Group Material and different community based projects that focused on specific political problems. Where does Neoism fit into this picture?

HOME: I don’t entirely agree with your respective characterisations of the sixties and eighties. In many ways what Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl etc, represented was a continuation of the dominant strand of libertarianism within the sixties counterculture. A lot of what passed as leftist in the sixties was in fact extremely right-wing. The yippies, for example, were completely gung ho about going and exploiting people from outside the overdeveloped world, and you only have to read what Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Book has to say about stocking up on American consumer goods to resell in Mexico to realise what exploitative scum these people actually were. What much of the sixties counterculture was about was so called 'free trade' (or more accurately neo-imperialism), which was why 'hipsters' were attracted to so called 'guerilla capitalism' in the form of drug dealing, or in the case of a perhaps not surprisingly large number of 'hippie chicks' prostitution. All of anarchism could be found in their conception of living differently in this world, and while many of those from this milieu tried to disguise their real positions with some incoherent Marxist jargon (most usually of a Maoist, or at least a Bolshevik stripe, so even the source for this rhetoric was counterrevolutionary), they were at base anarcho-capitalists. Thatcherism and Reaganism were a continuation of this, and while the largely rhetorical opposition of many eighties conservatives to a free trade in drugs was blatantly hypocritical, they understood that keeping certain substances illegal was the best way to maximise both profits and their at times deleterious effects on the working class. Likewise if one is to take the feminist movment en bloc, and while remembering that there was much that was useful within it, it remains nevertheless highly ambivalent, with large sections of it caught up in bourgeois puritanism over sex and pornography. Punk, it should go without saying, is even more problematic.
The institution of art is, of course, the cultural arm of the bourgeoisie, so while many artists may want to 'appear' 'critical', the majority feel highly ambivalent about dealing seriously with political issues (and this was as true in the sixties as it was in the eighties) since doing so not only potentially jeopardised their careers if art collectors disliked their political posing, they also ran the risk of further exposing themselves as the reactionary poodles they'd always been. Of course, the understanding of the average artist is so deformed that it is unlikely that they were consciously capable of comprehending or articulating this, but most would have grasped the consequences intuitively. That said, many of those who involved themselves with Neoism were as intellectually confused and challenged as the average gallery artist, but the Neoists taken en bloc were 'genuine' cultural fuck-offs with little to no interest in making money from selling art. This is why there is no real Neoist painting to speak of; although obviously there are odd paintings ranging from the deliberately atrocious and self-consciously worthless garbage produced by Istvan Kantor under the rubric of'‘blood paintings' to Pete Horobin's far more competent, albeit very occasional, canvases. If you look at Neoism prior to my involvement, it was totally divorced from ideas of post-modern appropriation (my notion of plagiarism operated slightly differently, more like 'situationist' detournement), and so up to 1984 it tended to be grounded in classically avant-garde and romantic notions of originality and participation. Something the more infantile of the Neoists stressed, most notably Istvan Kantor, was the need for a total revolution (although very few of us could conflate the terms revolution and tantrum as seamlessly as Kantor). In contrast, while one could feel a certain sympathy for some of the work done by the groups campaigning on single issues, precisely because of their acceptance of such canalisation they needed to overflow the boundaries they'd set up for themselves in order to become revolutionary. The naivety of Neoism, particularly early on, was its strength.
Neoism was a continuation through an almost self-conscious degeneration of the more radical currents that flowed out of fluxus in particular, but filtered through mail art and punk. It was this anarchronistic quality, this absurd belief in the revolutionary potentialities of an underground art, that made Neoism cultural dynamite. The Neoists remained ahead of the pack, avant-garde, a damp squib the world wasn't yet ready for, precisely because they were on the one hand completely anarchronistic, but on the other rushing to embrace newer mediums such as video and computers. Mail art, and in particularly Neoism which emerged from mail art but with a sharper focus, was an important precursor to the web. Likewise it is important to remember that it was the French Canadian Neoists who were the first to make and spread computer viruses on a large scale, Precisely because the Neoists reversed so recklessly into the future, they were able to drag in their wake some otherwise forgotten (in the art world at least) subversive potentialities from the past, including a belief in totality and the dematerialisation of the art object, and even in some cases in the death of art. Neoism doesn't fit into your picture of the eighties art world, it belongs to absolute elsewhere, the utopia of learning about life by fucking death in the gall bladder. It has more in common with the cultural anti-productions of the sixties or even the twenties, than with the eighties art world.

BOLT: What was the connection between the Neoist activities and the Art Strike?

HOME: The Art Strike was a means of articulating some of the more radical aspects of Neoist practice, but at the same time self-consciously articulating aspects of a critique that up to that point had largely remained unspoken; thus it was also a means of negating Neoism. Most of those involved with the Art Strike (for example Steve Perkins, Aaron Noble, Scott McLeod, Tony Lowes) had not been involved with Neoism. The obvious exceptions were me - but I’d broken with Neoism, and announced the Art Strike immediately afterwards – and John Berndt (whose involvement in both Neoism and the Art Strike is more ambiguous). The Art Strike was among other things a means of virally infecting Neoism, it speeded up the death of the movement (and I wanted to kill it so that newer, younger, more radically iconoclastic and ironic pseudo-avant-gardes might emerge in and through its wake; i.e. the avant-garde practice of living out one's own death), while simultaneously ensuring that retrospectively Neoism would be (mis)read through the prism of my own activities. I came to Neoism with an interest in fusing situationist legacies (among other things, but also Auto-Destructive Art) with that of fluxus; prior to this there was little interest in the situationists among the Neoists, the lineage up to my involvement clearly came through mail art and fluxus, from were it flowed back into the avant-gardes of the earlier part of the twentieth-century, most obviously futurism and dada, with a dash of surrealism added for good measure.

BOLT: In the foreword to the Polish edition of The Assault on Culture you mention different projects that could be seen as continuations of the projects that you write about. Looking back what projects and activities would you include if you were to write an 'updated' version of the book?

HOME: I think my problem with that book now is the disjunction between the chapters dealing with the situationists and fluxus. Once could tie these things together more tightly by looking more closely at both the 2nd Situationist International, and dealing extensively with Alex Trocchi's Project Sigma. That said, I am well aware that the former all too often ended up degenerating into anarchism, while Trocchi's cultural activities were ultimately eclipsed by his drug scamming. Today I think I would ignore Class War, a movement that continued to degenerate to the point where its decomposition might be likened to the collapse of time and space inside a black hole, and instead concentrate on some of the projects that emerged in the 90s and which very self-consciously fused different (post) avant-garde practices in a deliberately ironic manner; viz Manchester Area Psychogeographic, Workshop for a Non-Linear Architecture, Luther Blissett Project etc.

BOLT: Could you please explain the different splits that occurred in the Neoist Network and also talk a bit about the Neoist Alliance? In retrospect the Neoist Alliance seems more connected to different 90s projects like AAA, London Psychogeographical Association, Decadent Action, etc than to the Neoism of the 80s? The use of occult references seems more massive in the later projects than in the first round of Neoist activities.

HOME: Different people split at different times from the Neoist Network. For example, Peter Below sometime before me, but all that really happened with him was he fell out with Istvan Kantor. Mostly it wasn't even a case of splits, it was more entropic, people simply drifted apart, gave up, moved on to something else (for example Graf Haufen became a successful businessman in Berlin, running the Videodrome stores that rented and sold cult films). Since I was trying to ironise the avant-garde, my own split was overly self-conscious and ridiculous. So in 1985 I broke with Neoism (or at least Istvan Kantor, I remained on good terms with most of the other Neoists, and worked closely with Pete Horobin and to a lesser extent John Berndt). After 1986 the Neoist Network simply became less active, it just came to a natural end. Some people might place the date for this end a bit later, after all there was a so called Millionth Apartment Festival in New York, covered by C. Carr in the Village Voice. But relations between participants in Neoism loosened of their own accord, or else interactions were less frequently carried out under the rubric of Neoism. Naturally, Istvan Kantor carried on using the name, but there was no longer any real network or sense of community, so whatever half-life Neoism retained as an active current consisted principally of nostalgia. Those who took part in the recent resurrections of the Neoist Apartment Festival in Germany and Hungary were self-evidently old men who have yet to move on from the follies of their youth. It is best to leave 'active' Neoism to these buffoons, since they excel at dragging Neoism through the mud, and while they have a dirty and unfulfilling job, someone has to do it in order to repel the semi-sophisticated breed of art historian, and thereby prevent the 'movement' being misrepresented as some sort of monolith.

The Neoist Alliance by way of contrast was a rather more self-conscious joke, a deliberate choice of name that sounded like the old Neoism but had nothing to do with it. This was when a lot of people were putting together 'groups' in London that only really had one member – which was our way of dealing with the question of organisation within the revolutionary communist movement (something that actually still requires proper, as opposed to this merely humorous, resolution). So everyone would have their own group, and we'd each join in whatever activities the other groups were engaged with if we felt in sympathy with them. We were drawing on the legacy of the occult within the avant-garde (most obviously in surrealism), not only to ironise both 'discourses', but simultaneously to make our activities and those of certain precursors unattractive to academic hacks. Many of those who work in universities, and particularly those (and there are many) who are intellectually and practically incompetent, find the occult intolerable, so putting it to use to banish the avant-garde was our way of creating unacceptable theories, discourses and activities. The Neoist Alliance was simply a project of mine active in the mid to late nineties which sowed discord and spread confusion. Beyond the fact that I was a 'former' Neoist, it had no connection to the old Neoist Network of the eighties.

An email interview for a Danish publication that looks like it was done around 2005 (really I should keep better records).

Above copied from: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/interviews/neosim.htm

Interview with Robert Smithson, Willoughby Sharp

Interview by Willoughby Sharp

Robert Smithson(1): Actually, it was thinking about the airport as a concept, and trying to work more from the ground up rather than attaching an object of art to the building after it was finished--to get more involved with the process. So I finally came up with a proposal for putting large-scale ground systems out on the fringes of the airport. Grids and other configurations that you could see from aircraft either landing or taking off.

Willoughby Sharp: Is that what they wanted you to do?

RS: No, that is not what they wanted me to do, that's what I developed. They didn't know what they wanted me to do.

WS: How come you got the gig, anyway?

RS: Well, I got the job as a result of a talk at a panel at Yale, which was on art in the city.(2) I discussed the city not in terms of an organism but in terms of a crystalline concept. So that my view tended to be anti-Frank Lloyd Wright. I also saw a lot of possibilities in rather ordinary buildings that were scattered out in the suburbs, things of that sort.

WS: What do you mean by possibilities?

RS: Well, working with the landscapes or dealing with areas that are not thought of in terms of artistic places. Areas that are not necessarily picturesque or involved in International Style architecture--actually, the suburbs and the postwar complexes that were built up in these outlying areas, penumbral zones that are pretty much out on the fringes of the city.

Advertisement

The idea of the city as an organic structure never appealed to me too much, and Frank Lloyd Wright's metaphors about the city being diseased didn't interest me too much. Instead of using a biologic metaphor I used a more physical metaphor, and interpreted the city as a crystal structure.

WS: How did you interpret the city as a crystal structure?

RS: Well, instead of taking an organic view, my view tended more toward the inorganic. I did take a lot of trips around that time to surrounding areas, going to quarries. I was interested in crystal structure in my earlier serial works.... I do think that the tendency toward the inorganic is stronger than [the tendency] toward the organic. The organic seems to be part of an idea of nature. I'm more interested in a kind of denaturalizing, or in things more in terms of artifice, rather than in any kind of naturalism. That's why I insist on the notion of art.

WS: Why is that? Because you find the things around you inorganic? Everyday objects? And ideas?

RS: Well, my mind can make them over into that state. My perception tends toward an inorganic idea. The systems arise out of this and they tend to follow a kind of crystalline structure rather than a biomorphic structure. It's just the inclination I have. It's not based on any idea of visceral expressiveness.

WS: There seems to be a lot of anthropomorphism in the fact that these structures, or these nonsites, are extruded rock existing in a man-built box.

RS: But the box doesn't look like a man!

WS: The issue of anthropomorphism is really central to contemporary art.

RS: That goes back to the Greek idea, which I don't think we've gotten over yet. There is still this clinging to the Platonic ideal, and actually I prefer the pre-Platonic view, which seems to be more primitive. It has less to do with an idea of a peopled cosmos. The mechanical and technological structures that we've built up around ourselves have kept us from seeing a more fundamental order.

WS: Would that be a more organic order?

RS: No, it wouldn't be organic, because the earth isn't organic. It's inorganic mineral or sediment or strata.

Americans are basically idealistic because they put so much faith in machinery and technology. If anything, my art is more preoccupied with something that isn't clouded over by all these technological devices and machines, so that in a sense it's probing the phantom nature of matter itself, and it's not really involved in creating distractions. As fine and great as all technology is, you can get hung up on the shenanigans that come from it.

WS: Why do you think that Americans have a need to believe in technology?

RS: Because they're still basing their lives on Greek idealism. That's why I can't really conceive of politics, because politics is based on the same kind of ideal state. I see eventually a depoliticizing taking place.(3) The city, as a polls, really isn't as orderly as we would like to think. It's a closed system and within that system you have all different degrees of disorder, randomness, anarchy.

Advertisement

WS: But don't you realize there's a whole branch of nonelectoral politics which is founded on the idea that anarchy is the most desirable state?

RS: Anarchy is what we have now! Except we continue with our idealist, rational politics. And it will always be that way.

WS: How is that so? I think the system we have today is very controlled, very structured.

RS: Oh no, not really. They're all systems, and they are all hopelessly losing themselves. I don't see any other alternative. What we have to do is recognize the way it is. Maybe that's not possible. Maybe people need the illusion that things are better or worse. For me, there's a constant state of uncertainty, and disorder, and instability.

WS: There's no difference between Humphrey and Nixon?

RS: There's no difference. Because immediately you're putting your hopes on some kind of person.(4)

WS: OK. But we're talking about electoral politics. In nonelectoral politics I was on the steering committee of the Yippies.(5)

And within that kind of political configuration, there was really a desire to have no leaders. Of course there were leaders, because there were some people who were more articulate than others. But there was a real involvement in just destroying the situation ...

RS: You don't have to, because it is already destroyed. Every system has, it seems to me, enormous amounts of disorder within it. In other words, it's always breaking down. Yet the illusion is that somehow this is meaningful.

The whole tendency of the Greek classical political scene is to strive toward some kind of ideal. Whereas I think that if you strive towards some kind of ideal you'll inevitably end up in a terrible mess. And other messes will be developing right along. What I say is that all one can do, unfortunately, is perceive these messes as they take place.

WS: Does that mean you are satisfied with that situation as it is?

RS: I'm not satisfied. It's a kind of mystery to me.

WS: And your involvement is to try to understand it.

RS: I'm trying to understand it at a more fundamental level.

WS: What is that more fundamental level?

RS: That gets into these unpleasant areas.

WS: Like what?

RS: Dread.

WS: Dread?

RS: Yeah. Or chaos. All the ideals seem to collapse. When I say dread, I want to distinguish it from fear. Fear is more a bourgeois sensibility. Dread actually can be almost an ecstatic state. This ecstasy is in terms of a very, very vast sense of physicality--so that also our sense of history must go. Why talk about the last 2,000 years when you can talk about the last 200 million years?

WS: The reason one talks about that is that people believe that there is a difference between Nixon and Humphrey.

RS: I can't even ... I mean, Nixon and Humphrey? In terms of 200 million geologic years?

WS: Most people are not looking at the world on that scale.

RS: But that's the way I look at it!

WS: Well, that's very interesting. And how does your own endeavor relate to that kind of time scale?

Advertisement

RS: Well, I think that's the preoccupation with the earth ... built-up areas of time, vanished areas of time. There's a sensation that somehow lifts you out of the momentary attachment to people, places and things. You're sort of faced with a loss not only of self but also of place, which I think makes you more primitive. They say that primitives don't have much of an ego built up.... I think that's what interests me.

WS: How does your work relate to that? There's a sense of time implicit, because you're so involved intellectually with larger time sequences. So that the rock that is extruded and placed in these containers speaks of time. Not very many people are really aware of that.

RS: In terms of one's perception of the work, you always have to be a viewer. Each viewer is different and is going to bring different experience to the work. I see myself in a sense dealing with limitations and trying to somehow give an indication that isn't dependent upon, oh, some kind of idealism. The nonsite was developed gradually.

WS: You became aware of the possibilities of the nonsite.

RS: My first interest in earthworks came about by going out into large areas and developing large-scale ground systems, which I called "Aerial Art." I have a paper on it.(6) Then I decided that instead of making a piece of art and putting it on a piece of land, I would bring the land back to the piece, so to speak.

WS: But you're just making the piece out of earth. Right?

RS: Yeah, I'm making the piece out of earth but the place itself is being brought into it.

WS: The material is specific to the place that it's from, rather than importing the material to the place.... There is a specific relationship between what's there and what's done there.

RS: That's right. In other words, I don't make a piece here and have it end up on somebody's lawn.(7)

If you go to the site, you'll see all this material that's in a state of dispersal. My idea is to build a closed system and then bring the material back from the outside into the inside, so it's kind of a reversal. Instead of taking the art outside I'm bringing it back inside....

You have to realize that the art is really against you. The art is setting out to annihilate your very moorings, it has a way of pulling the ground out from under you, so to speak. Most artists will build something up in order to create a certainty. Most people respond to art that way: they'll see an object and they can cling to it. They're not too interested in discovery. This gets them through, this gives them a certain pleasure, a certain kind of security, stability. I'm more interested in showing, with seemingly very stable things, the instability, the elusiveness, the sort of mental disasters that can take place within this whole complex.

WS: The earth isn't necessarily any better material than anything else?

RS: If I said, "I'm for earth," that would immediately be my ruination. Any time you assert something, you're always in the position that you'll completely be undermined.

WS: But you have chosen at this particular time to concentrate your artistic energies in the direction of using earth as an artistic material. Why is that?

Advertisement

RS: I guess it is because it hasn't been overly processed. I'm not interested in paint because paint is manufactured.... I'm not interested in new materials. What's so good about taking something refined? I'm interested in something that isn't so refined. I wanted to take things down to the raw level, to get down to the state before the iron is smelted and made into cold rolled steel.

I am using steel [to construct the containers that hold the nonsite works] ... and the contents are the raw materials. In each unit you have this dialectic between the artificiality of the container, where there's no truth to materials at all, and the rawness of the matter or the ore. And these two things set up this ambiance, this dual state....

I see no reason for viewing the landscape as something natural. It could be conceived in terms of an abstract system.... It doesn't necessarily have to be conceived of as an environment. The natural environment to me doesn't exist. I mean the landscape is coextensive with my mind. And each site that I select becomes in a sense an extension of the abstract faculties of my mind, and this is translated into a three-dimensional system ...

WS: ... which is the work.

RS: Which is the work. The work is in a sense logical. If you made a graph, let's say, of the population, the graph wouldn't necessarily look like the population, but in a sense it represents the population. So the work is abstract in that sense.

WS: People tend to criticize you not for the quality of magic in [your work] but for the fact that you've really done nothing except transport a bulk of rocks from one place to another and into a container.

RS: Well, most people are involved in building up things. Take the classical idea of making a piece of sculpture. The idea is to take a block of marble and then chip away until you find this form or structure within there. I'm more interested in the chips, the things that are disposed of.

WS: Why? Are they more real?

RS: In a sense they correspond more to our constant state of disintegration, which I think is more fundamental than any attempt to build up some kind of object.

WS: So that relates to your whole theory of the entropy and the mitigation of energy systems.

RS: It's really a recovery of lost energy. In other words, the energy that went into the grinding of these stones or the breaking of these stones ...

WS: ... is manifest in the work?

RS: That's in a sense manifest in the work. Also, the idea that there's a point on that horizon from where those rocks were taken. Once they're put into this structure that point spreads out to the whole size of the container, so there's a kind of equilibrium.

WS: How is the work then a metaphor for all of these elements--the time element, the process situation?

RS: The container can't really contain those aspects because they're always evading you or getting away from you. In a sense, if you went out to the site itself you wouldn't find anything there. I mean there's no indication that I've even been there, but that's the work too. It does a vanishing act. I'm not going and plunking an object there.

WS: So you don't impose your will on it. It's very anonymous. And that's very appealing.

RS: Yeah, I'm more in contact I think with [the point] where everything collapses, finally, all your notions of built ideals just sort of break apart. I'd like to be precise about that breaking apart, rather than in building up things, I'm interested in observing the cindery aspect of the world.

Advertisement

WS: How would you then categorize the difference between the egoistic artistic involvement of someone who would like to discover something in chipping away rock, and your own involvement, which is to merely present the rock? Why would this be less egocentric?

RS: If you just presented the rock, that would be an attempt to simulate some idea of freedom. And I want to be free from freedom, to get back to the limitation. The limitation is the art.

WS: How's that?

RS: Every rock in a sense has limits. It is what it is. But I'm interested in what it is not. There's a metamorphosis that takes place. I'm not interested in presenting, let's say, a handful of rocks and saying, "Here, they are what they are." I'm interested in carrying out a transformation that goes from, in a sense, an object to a nonobject.

WS: It's not an object, it's a situation.

RS: It's a situation. There's a whole set of factors that develop, both mental and physical. And there's a constant interplay between these two things. It's almost like a game. And this game you can only lose.

WS: You have to lose all games.

RS: Yeah.

WS: So that relates to entropy because you lose energy as you play the game. Everyone, the winner and the loser, always loses the game.

RS: Yeah.

WS: I dig that. So you're a fool even to engage in games--though we always do.

RS: Yeah. In spite of ourselves, we have to do it.

WS: How does your work relate to a game, then? You're accepting your own dialectic. You're playing your own game. And that's both good and bad. I want to know what the benefits are of playing your own game. Because everyone else is going to say what the nonbenefits are.

RS: For one thing, it brings on a consciousness of being in the world, too. And at the same time, of nonbeing as well. There are those moments when you lapse from your being.

WS: Because of the abstract quality of the work?

RS: Yeah.

WS: And that differentiates it to a certain extent from some of the other people who are using earth as process and as nature.

RS: Yeah. I'm interested in process, too, but the process to me is always defeating. If the artist says, "I'm interested in process," the process will ultimately unwind him and completely do him in.

WS: Why is that?

RS: Well, all assertions eventually crush the person who is making the assertion or the declaration. You start from being crushed. It's a game of "how to be crushed."

WS: If you declare that "grass grows," and say nothing more than that, how does that destroy you?

RS: Because people eventually lose interest in that.

WS: But that's their problem, not yours as an artist.

RS: But how long can you go around declaring that before you yourself get somewhat bored with it? It seems to me like a kind of lyrical thing to do; it's all right. I have no grievance against somebody presenting a piece of something and saying, "Isn't this great? It's not very compelling. It's not very engaging. And ...

WS: ... it isn't dialectical enough.

Advertisement

RS: No, it isn't dialectical. It doesn't have any kind of theoretical basis. It's some kind of poetic statement. I think good poetry is always grounded in very rigorous concepts. And when you just sort of express something--"This is a piece of grass"--well, you're smothered with expressions like that day after day.

(1.) This edited interview includes approximately 80 percent of the discussion recorded on tape. Elisions have been made within some of the exchanges. In the near future a full transcript of the tape will be deposited in a publicly accessible archive or library.

(2.) The panel discussion, on the topic "Shaping the Environment: The Artist and the City," took place on June 17, 1966, as part of a symposium held during Yale University's School of Art and Architecture Alumni Day Convocation. It was organized and moderated by Brian O'Doherty; other participants were John Hightower, then executive director of the New York State Council on the Arts, and Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss.

(3.) Here Smithson seems to be rhetorically exaggerating a sense of detachment from contemporary politics. This is a realm in which, Nancy Holt recalls, he had an active interest. His feigned position of disinterest would have sparked fireworks with Sharp, whom Smithson knew to be engaged in radical politics.

(4.) This ambivalence reflected the national sentiment after a dramatically close presidential election, three weeks before, between Republican candidate Richard Nixon and the incumbent Democratic vice president, Hubert Humphrey. As historian David Farber put it, "Nixon won by just half a million votes, and in winning captured fewer votes than he had in losing to John F. Kennedy [in 1960]. Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s, New York, Hill & Wang, 1994, p. 226.

5.) Formed by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the Youth International Party, or Yippies, was a small, loosely organized group that hoped to turn flower children into political activists. Given to theatricalized forms of political protest, its members played a prominent role in the August 1968 demonstrations at the Democratic national convention in Chicago.

Advertisement

(6.) "Aerial Art" was Smithson's original term for the proposed works that he--along with the artists he invited to participate in the project, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris--was designing for the earth between the runways at the future Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Smithson's article about these proposals, "Aerial Art," was published in Studio International, February-April 1969.

(7.) Although he was intrigued by suburbia, Smithson seemed to have a special antipathy for sculpture domesticated in pseudo-pastoral settings. In his "Sedimentation" essay, he referred to an article on Anthony Caro in the September-October 1966 issue of Art in America and ridiculed the installation of "one work, Prima Luce 1966, painted yellow, [which] matches the yellow daffodils peeking out behind it, and it sits on a well cut lawn."

Editorial notes: Suzaan Boettger

Author: Willoughby Sharp founded and published Avalanche, a quarterly which appeared from 1970 to 1973.

interview copied from: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_12_86/ai_53408957/pg_1

Interview with Alan Sonfist, John K. Grande

NATURAL/CULTURAL

Considered a pioneer of public art that celebrates our links to the land, to permaculture, Alan Sonfist is an artist who has sought to bridge the great gap between humanity and nature by making us aware of the ancient, historic and contemporary nature, geology, landforms and living species that are part of "living history". With a reawakening of public awareness of environmental issues and of a need to regenerate our living planet Sonfist brings a much needed awareness of nature's parallel and often unrecorded history and present in contemporary life and art. As early as 1965 Sonfist advocated the building of monuments dedicated to the history of unpolluted air, and suggested the migration of animals should be reported as public events.



Alan Sonfist, "Time Landscape of New York City", outdoor installation, 1965- present.
In an essay published in 1968 titled Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments, Sonfist emancipated public art from focussing exclusively on human history stating: "As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs, and natural outcroppings need to be remembered. Public art can be a reminder that the city was once a forest or a marsh." Alan Sonfist continues to advocate, in his urban and rural artworks, projects that heighten our awareness of the historical geology or terrain of a place, earth cores become a symbol of the deeper history or geology of the land. His art emphasizes the layered and complex intertwining of human and natural history. He has bequeathed his body as an artwork to the Museum of Modern Art. Its decay is seen as an ongoing part of the natural life cycle process.

Sonfist's art has been exhibited internationally at Dokumenta VI (1977), Tickon in Denmark (1993), and in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1975), the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y. (1978), the Los Angeles County Museum (1985), the Osaka World's Fair (1988), Santa Fe Contemporary Art Center (1990), the Museum of Natural History in Dallas, Texas (1994). Best known for his Natural/Cultural Landscape Commissions which began in 1965 with Time Landscape in Greenwich Village, and include Pool of Virgin Earth, Lewiston, N.Y. (1973), Hemlock Forest, Bronx, N.Y. (1978), Ten Acre Project, Wave Hill, N.Y. (1979), Geological Timeline, Duisburg, Germany (1986), the Rising Earth Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. (1990), Natural/Cultural Landscape, Trento, Italy (1993), a 7-mile Sculpture Nature Trail in La Quinta, California (1998), as well as Natural/Cultural Landscapes created for the Curtis Hixon Park in Tampa in Florida (1995) and Aachen, Germany (1999). Sonfist is currently working on a three and a half-mile sculptural nature walk in LaQuinta, California, an Environmental Island outside of Berlin, and The Great Bay Fountain for architect Richard Meier in Islip N.Y..

JG: From the mid-1960s you established a name as one of the first environmental artists who, unlike land artists Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, did not emphasize a minimalist aesthetic in the creation of artworks and monuments. What do you feel brought you to environmental art?

AS: My art began in the street fires of the South Bronx, late 1950�s, when I was a child. Gangs and packs of wild dogs were roaming the streets where I was growing up. The neighborhood was a landscape of concrete, no trees. The Bronx River divided the two major gangs, and the river protected a primal forest. It was my sanctuary as a child. The human violence didn�t enter the forest - it was my magical cathedral. I would skip school to spend every moment I could in this forest and replenish my energy, my life. The forest became my life, and my art.

JG: When you first turned your attention to art making, what inspiration did you draw from the art world? Were there certain artists or teachers who drew you in the direction you wanted or was it self-learning?

AS: It was self-directed. I have always been tuned to collecting and gathering fragments of the forest. Labelling it as "art" or "not art" was never an issue. It was more the uniqueness of these elements that attracted me. Even when I went to school in the mid-west, later, I brought with me some of the seedlings of my Bronx forest after it was destroyed by an intentional fire.

JG: As early as 1965 you produced a work called Time Landscape� involving actual living growth in art. Indigenous animals were reintroduced into an urban setting.

AS: The reconstructed forest was a way of going back into my childhood forest in New York as it would have been, initiated in Greenwich Village. I transplanted living tree species such as beech, oak and maple and over 200 different plant species native to New York, selected from a pre-Colonial contact period in New York. These are still there on site. Besides experiencing the indigenous trees of New York City, Time Landscape� allowed me to experience and interact with foxes, deer, snakes, eagles and this was part of my experience.

JG: "Interactive" is a word that has been appropriated by many artists who are simply working with images on a screen. When you worked on the nature theater as early as 1971, the interactions were real involving nature and sound orchestration in the forest.

AS: The "Nature Theater" idea was to construct a physical fragment of a forest (I have done several including one at Goethe University) and then allowing the nature itself to be the sound, for instance, as opposed to constructing noises of a forest. And allowing the animals themselves to become the performers - the migration of the birds becomes a special event.

JG: And animals for you have souls just like we do?

AS: Exactly. Trees do too. They definitely do communicate with each other and they also communicate with humans if they are willing to listen.

JG: And your photo work is related to this and various other projects. I know your photographic works have inspired other artists. How are they presented in galleries?

AS: I showed photographs in my early exhibits in the 1970s. The photos are more observations of nature, trying to understand how we see and relate to the environment. My first art dealer didn�t; even want to exhibit my photographs because he did not consider them art. Now, there are several artists who have creating works similar to these early photographs. Each photographic event is an exploration of human interaction with nature. For instance, From the Earth to the Sky� and Sky to the Earth� , is more about walks through the forest and how we see the forest, how the movement of the landscape shifts as we relate to it and the light quality. Examining nature�s interaction with urban life was a radical concept at the time.

JG: In a way, every environment is unique. We talk about bio-regionalism and the global culture, for instance. The irony is that quite often there is this idea that elsewhere is exotic and where we live is not. New York City vegetation is actually as exotic as South American.



Alan Sonfist, "Time Landscape of New York City", (detail) outdoor installation, 1965- present.
AS: Exactly. It is always easy for one to look at another environment and say that is special. The clich� goes the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill, instead of looking at one's own environment. I have always been concerned about the particular location I am working with, because each is unique and has fascinating vegetation to be discovered. The forest I witnessed as a child ended up being bulldozed and set in concrete. That was the end of my forest, and the beginning of my art.

JG: The idea of the continuity of time has almost been erased in this culture. Yet there is this ever present physical continuity between the various elements in the environments that surround us. We are not often aware of this. By presenting nature as a presence in your work you are allowing us to see how integration of our culture with nature will become one the keys to development in the 21st century in technology, science and the arts. Technologists will have to develop new forms of transport, products which use less and renewable resources, which emphasize a cyclical resource system rather than an exploitative, one-way non-renewable system. Your work is less that of an ideologist than that of a bio-historian who works with the culture/nature cross-over.

AS: Bio-history, as in the Circles of Time� is the layering of nature in time. Each area of the project represents an unique event in the continuum of Tuscan History. We look at each fragment of time and begin to realize this layering is a continuum. It's not one fixed moment. The photographs I take, for instance, emphasize that it is not an absolute. Within this continuum one can select out different unique events. The Tuscan landscape had been so radically changed over the centuries that the original forest�s history had been virtually erased.

JG: Isn't that one of the problems with parks and nature sites in many cities? Planners bring in so many foreign plant and tree species that are not native to the land in an effort to make their parks and public places exotic. In Oslo, Norway, interestingly, the tree and shrub species replicate the nature that surrounds the city of Oslo. You see large fir trees, nesting places for birds, that mirror the natural landscape of the region in Oslo. There is a kind of relief in that idea that the nature of the city reaffirms the landscape which surrounds the city.

AS: One of the earlier artworks I created for the New York City Parks Department was a landscape with natural flowers and artificial flowers. This was for the first Earth Day at Union Square Park in 1970. The question was which is real and which is artificial. My project in the Mojave Desert is similar to what you mentioned. Most landscapes there use plants taken from lush environments that need continuous watering, such as a grass lawn. One of the issues that came up when I said I was only going to introduce indigenous plants in this desert environment was that some of the local people said, "That's ugly! How could anyone respond to that!" When I started to select out and go back into the historical plants native to the region, people were shocked and amazed how beautiful the spectrum of flowers. There was such a diversity that it became a visual laboratory of understanding of the environment.

JG: Undoubtedly, the work stimulated thought and controversy as well as providing a cathartic living environment for the people who live there. Your Rock Monument of Manhattan (1975-2000) recently exhibited at the Dorsky Gallery (2000) in New York in a group environmental show involves cross-section samples, what we do not see; the hidden landscape the geology under New York City.

AS: These samples were taken from the underlying strata of New York City geology. Over the years, I have created similar artworks throughout the world, but predominantly in Europe and North America. They are cylindrical cross-sections of the Earth, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. I have been commissioned to do similar projects, such as the one for the opening of the Ludwig Museum in Koln.

JG: This idea that there is a permanent culture that exists underneath the man-made culture or environment is an interesting one. It undoubtedly will persist for much of this new millennium and plays an important role in providing us with a sense of permacultural geological time. Understanding this permacultural context can help us to design our urban environments with a sensitivity to the brief history of our civilization vis-a-vis natural history.

AS: Exactly. A key to our understanding of the environment we live in is literally locked into the rock formations under our cities and the evolution of our solar system above us.

JG: I was going to ask you about the less well known crystal works you did in the 1960s and 1970s. These growing crystal projects seem to be fascinating.

AS: I created a series of what I would call Micro-Macro Landscapes. The crystal structures were to illustrate the fact that within everything there are the micro-structures of an element. From a practical point of view, by taking elements that are very unstable, I was able to put them in a vacuum and allow them to inter-exchange so that they transformed from dense solids back to this crystalline form. When exhibited, the viewer could see this interaction occurring within the structures, themselves.

JG: The effect was always constant. You could actually see it occurring?

AS: It was continuous. Again, it was occurring in relationship to the environment. If the sun was hitting the structure it would heat it up and therefore it would create more pressure inside. Therefore the crystals would dissipate and then, as they cooled, they would condense onto the surface. At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1977), I created a window for them which was on display for many years. The window itself would move as the sun moved during the daytime. It would gravitate to the movement of light. This is something that occurs in the natural world, and yet many people have never seen it. My intention was to integrate these things directly into the path of human interaction.

JG: Your Heat Paintings from the late 1960s again involve the volatility of internal structures. As the metal transforms, the alloys change color.

AS: The Heat Paintings parallel the crystalline pieces, so you see the internal molecular structure of the metal.

JG: Heat circles transform the alloy into color variations. The physics of nature actually transforms the artworks, kind of like Andy Goldsworthy's pigment and snow drawings...

AS: This is a real time event. The artwork allows you to see the composition of the material. I created a series of different artworks, decoding the process of the materials.

JG: Your series of micro-macro landscapes titled Elements Selection� from the 1960s to the early 70�s, are structural changes that are part of a natural physical cycle. This natural entropy became a reading of the environment. Did you select the elements that would cause these changes or was it left up to nature to decide the course of these works?

AS: I unrolled the canvas, and as the process began, I selected the elements as exactly as they existed. The canvas was then left in the natural surroundings, so that the twigs and leaves that were selected as well as the canvas would go back to its natural state in nature. I also created a series of paintings, where I selected a series of slices of the earth such as fall leaves, which was titled, Leaves Frozen in Time. These artworks have ended up in numerous museum collections.

JG: The Pool of Virgin Earth created in the early seventies at the Lewiston Art Park, in upstate New York regenerated a section of what was, and still is, a chemical wasteland...

AS: The area was a toxic waste dump for several years before it was given over as an art park. The area was a desert of toxicity. Through the consultation of specialist, I was determined to create a pool of virgin earth that would show the rebirth of the toxic dump. The pool was so successful that eventually they used my method to create the entire site.

JG: The plants would help purify this area of earth?

AS: Yes. The plants were selected to help heal the earth.

JG: Natural/Cultural Landscape created for the Curtis-Hixon Park in Tampa, Florida in 1995 is a more recent cross-over work. I know you have created many commissions through out the world concerning the natural evolution of the land, as you said in your early writings that was published in 1969, that with in Landmark cities that you plan to create "Landmark Nature Monuments." Do you feel your more recent Natural Cultural Landscape project involves a compromise in working with landscape or city architects?

AS: No, all my public projects involve the community. I always have public meetings to discuss my ideas. I invite the local artist as well as architects and landscape architects. They became part of the process of creating the artwork.

JG: Why were four classical columns integrated into your Natural/Cultural Landscape in Tampa, Florida? It seems curious as you are often working with natural, as opposed to human history.

AS: The columns correspond to the human history of the site. The first Europeans there were Spanish, and they built colonnade buildings. The columns represent the human past and were planted with plants that represent the natural history from early human intervention to contemporary landscape.



Alan Sonfist, "Circles of Time", aach ring represents the narrative natural and cultural history of Tuscany, 3 acres, Villa Celle, Tuscany, Italy 1989.
JG: What sort of species of plants and what kind of configuration did you finally arrive at for this living landscape work?

AS: All the plants in the site represented different historical events from human to natural history and how they both intersect. The pathway represents these intersections.

JG: So did it become a kind of community exchange, a point of encounter and learning for the local citizens?

AS: Yes. I think when one involves the community there is a kind of inter exchange of ideas. The park becomes the community. For me that is what determines the ultimate success of a public sculptures. When I create private commissions I am responding to the corporate structure.

JG: There is always this problem of designers moving into an area where they don't know the history of a community. They will place the benches in the wrong place; people don't walk in that area or whatever. Involving a community helps to create a kind of ensouling or consecration of a place.

AS: Exactly. Everything from the seating areas to the walkways will all correspond to community needs.

JG: So the process was quite democratic.

AS: It was democratic, and from my point of view as an artist, it was almost like a palette. In other words, I had a palette maybe several hundred images that could be utilized for the project and had to select out which ones would be most effectively integrated into the project, visually and culturally.

JG: And these pathways you designed going through the grassy landscape are non-linear in shape-like motifs.

AS: The pathways were designed to correspond to the natural history from the ice age to the present.

JG: A kind of histology, a history of nature and culture brought into a living dynamic. There is a patchwork design to it, using colored brickwork and slabs, various grass species and walkways. It becomes a nature/culture quilt that references various eras and epochs.

AS: A quilt where each section is interconnected by its own uniqueness in history. Seen from the air, the leaf structures in the pathways are most evident. If you knew the leaves you would know that each leaf represents a different time frame within the ecology of that region. The pathways are a 21st century view of the land not a typical landscape concept that parks are being created at this time. Walking through the park, the entrance becomes an echo of our understanding of the history of the community. The park progresses to the water where we see a reflection of the ice age.

JG: When you exhibited at Documenta VI in Kassel, Germany (1977) you created a series of photographic essays which were like a composite of a forest, with relics of a forest underneath the photographs. Can you tell me about this.

AS: The photographs became the forest. Each photographic artwork exposed multi layers of the forest. Through each one of these artworks, one viewed a special moment within the forest. Some of the more significant artworks of the 1970�s is where I created 180 and 360 degree "Gene Banks", with real time fragments of the forest.

JG: We are the Gods of our own consumption and we are now eating ourselves. There is also this confusion between technology and experimental science. The two are fusing. You are getting an involvement of new technologies with experimental science. Sometimes the blurring of these two disciplines means there is a further manipulation of science. The technologies are forming the processes whereby the scientists are working. In other words the lenses, the ways that science is evolving are technologically controlled which may not allow more creative solutions to be arrived at. In other words we may not be seeing as much as we think when we involve ourselves in pure science.

AS: There are two levels of reality, we want to create an alternative fuels but the same time we are also consumers of fossil fuel. Through my art, we have to understand our relationship to our community, our world and our universe.

JG: Which would be much better for the environment and for us.

AS: Exactly.

Writer and art critic John Grande's interviews, reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in numerous publications and books. This interview is an excerpt from Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (www.sunypress.edu) by John K. Grande (www.grandescritique.com).

above copied from: http://greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=284