Interview with Richard Long, by Mario Codognato, 1997

The following interview was taken directly from the book Mirage, a collection of Richard Long's work published by Phaidon.

Mario Codognato: Your walks in the landscape and the sculptures made along the way, and recorded in photographs, maps or text works, are an essential element in your art. How do you choose your itineraries?

Richard Long: For many different reasons. I may have a precise, pre-planned idea for a road walk. Alternatively, especially on a wilderness walk, I will encounter places and experiences which are new and not predictable, and my ideas could change along the way. I like to use both ways of working. Sometimes I go to familiar places like Dartmoor, specifically using my own experiences and history for the work, and other times I could go to a very unknown (to me) place like Tierra del Fuego. Good places like that usually make good walks. 

I had a particular desire in the seventies to make my circles, and also the straight hundred mile walks, in different types of landscapes around the world. 

MC: Circles in most cultures are the symbolic representation of the fundamental elements of nature, like the sun or the moon, of the divine, of the recurring of time, of infinity. Lines often indicate continuation in space, distance communication, movement. Why have you chosen those forms so often?

RL: I made my first circle in 1966 without thought, although in hindsight I know it is potent for all the reasons you describe. A circle is beautiful, powerful, but also neutral and abstract. I realized it could serve as a constant form always with new content. A circle could carry a different walking idea, or collection of stones, or be in a different place each time.

A circle suits the anonymous but man-made character of my work. My ideas can be expressed better without the artistic clutter of idiosyncratic, invented shapes.

Circles and lines are also practical, they are easy to make. A line can be made just by aligning features in the landscape, and it can point to the horizon, into the distance.

The particular characteristics of each place determine which is most appropriate, a circle or a line. It's always obvious. A circle is more contemplative, focused, like a stopping place, and a line is more like the walk itself. On a twelve day walk in the mountains of Ladakh in 1984 I made a sculpture - marks along the way - literally on the line of the walk and the footpath. Walking within walking.

MC: Quite a few of your works are transient. A line made by walking on the grass disappears after a time. Often your mud works are cancelled at the end of an exhibition. What is your idea of duration and eternity?

RL: On a beach in Cornwall in 1970 I made a spiral of seaweed below the tide line. I liked the idea that my work, lasting only a tide, was interposed between past and future patterns of seaweed of infinite variation, made by natural and lunar forces, repeating for millions of years.

Often the transient is closely related to the eternal in nature.

In an ideal art world, I would prefer some of my mud works, especially the large majestic ones to remain after an exhibition.

MC: For quite a few years, I have been lucky enough to witness the way you install your works in exhibition spaces. You seem to give, almost magically, a sort of order from chaos. The viscosity of mud - the union of water and earth - becomes a vortex of energy which gives birth to the most beautiful wall work. An ordinary pile of stones becomes an amazing sculpture which invites contemplation and meditation. What are the roles of chance and time in the execution of your works?

RL: Particularly with the mud works, time and chance make them, in a way. Because they show the nature of water as well as mud - the wateriness of it - I have to work quickly to make the energy for the splashes. The image is both my actual hand marks but also the chance splashes which are determined by the speed of my hand, the viscosity of the mud, and gravity. There is the scale of the work both as a whole image and also the micro-scale of the splashes with their cosmic variety. I like being able to use and show the nature of chance in this part of my work. 

Time is the fourth dimension in my art. It is often the subject of a walk - time as a measurement of distance, of walking speed, or of terrain, or of fatigue, or of carrying stones, or of one stone to another. 

The sculptures contain the geological time of the stones. 

MC: Global warming and the devastation of many environments is more and more the concern of the general public and our culture. Many people see your work as about ecology as well. How do you define your art, and what is your view about this aspect of it?

RL: My work is just art, not "political" art, but I do believe - now more than years ago - that I have to be responsible, both in my work and in my general life, like anyone.

I first chose landscape so as to use the dimension of distance to make a work of art by walking. That was on Exmoor. I was intuitively attracted to such relatively empty, non-urban landscapes partly because they were the best places to realize my ideas, but also because such places gave me pleasure to be in. They had a spiritual dimension which was also important for the work. So my work comes from a desire to be in a dynamic, creative and engaged harmony with nature, and not actually from any political or ecological motives.

I believe if it is good enough, if a love and respect for nature comes through, if only indirectly, then that is my statement of intent. One of the main themes of my work is water, and water is more important than technology.

(Still waters run deep)

Making art in the type of landscapes which still cover most of our planet gives me quite an optimistic and realistic view of the world. I think my work is almost nothing, it's just about being there - anywhere - being a witness from the point of view of an artist. 

The landscape is a limitless arena where I can engage with those things that have the most meaning and interest for me, like rivers, camping, the weather, measuring countries by my own footsteps, mud, moving a few stones around, and being in places of profound experience. 

Teresa Murak - Bulrush

The following was copied from the website Filmoteka Muzeum, a sub-site of the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. Please follow the above link to see the video referenced below. 

In January 1989, Teresa Murak carried out the performance Bulrush in Chełm. The artist diligently removed slime and grass from the River Uherka, which she later transferred to Gallery 72 at the Museum of the Chełm Region in Chełm. On the walls and floor of the gallery Murak spread an abundance of organic matter, which later died. Slime was sourced from rivers flowing through the city where the exhibition space was located, for example in Warsaw it was taken from a small river Bach in the area of Ursynów.

For the artist, the use of the slimy substance amounted to manifesting the properties of the natural ecosystem, where the forces of life and death clash in microscale: decomposition of dead plants and animals, transformation of grubs, clastic rock production, etc. Swamp is a natural living environment for various micro-organisms, but also a side product of great many natural processes. Teresa Murak’s activities with slime provide a liaison between actions beyond the galery or museum space and organic (therefore subject to metamorphosis) installations exhibited at art institutions. Consequently, they can be classified in Smithson’s terms as: site (real site, particular location on the map, inaccessible for the viewer – world undisturbed by humans), and non-site (“artificial site”, sterile, e. g. gallery or museum hall – “edited” world). The site can be represented in the non-site by means of samples of material (rock, earth, slime, etc.), as well as photographic and film documentation, notes or maps.

Another important term introduced by Robert Smithson, which comes in handy upon interpreting Teresa Murak’s works is displacement, which stands for the journey from the site to the non-site, in this case of slime sourced from the river to the gallery, where stands for the journey from the site to non-site, in this case of slime sourced from the river to the gallery, where it was dispersed on the walls and in the corners of halls. Slime became a conveyor for primitive energy – drying and flaking, the slime paintings “pursued labour”, an ongoing imminent metamorphosis of the organic components of the work. To refer to Smithson’s linguistic metaphors, the slime on the wall is a synecdoche that evokes the real world beyond the gallery walls.

S. Cichocki, Earthworks. Teresa Murak and the Spiritualisation of Silt, in: Teresa Murak. Who Are You Going To, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin 2012.

Year: 1989
Duration: 4'39"
Language: no language
Source: © Teresa Murak

Art and the Environmental Crisis

Art and the Environmental Crisis
From Commodity Aesthetics to Ecology Aesthetics
TIMOTHY W. LUKE

What is the role of art in today's ecological crisis? In many respects it is critical, because the arts have been one of the main engines driving the wasteful ways of modem capitalism. Every year brings a new set of artistically mediated expectations and aesthetically intensified consumer requirements-always predicated upon the waste of more scarce resources, the over consumption of energy, and the misuse of productive talents1. This discussion, then, is an ecological critique of these aesthetic dynamics. It is written not from the perspective of an interventionist artist concerned about ecology, but rather from the vantage of a radical ecologist concerned about art. Telling this story is not easy. It weaves together insights about social ecology, late capitalism, transnational commerce, consumer ideology, and contemporary art in language drawn from critical theory, radical ecology, and art interpretation. Still, hearing the story may be even harder.

To change ecology globally, it is now clear that the inhabitants of each human locality must reconsider the entire range of their ecological interconnections to local, regional, national, and international exchanges of goods and services. Such rethinking immediately raises the issue of the "bioregions" within which all human communities are rooted. As many ecological analyses have suggested, however, modern industrial societies virtually ignore the constraints of bioregion2. Bioregions are the complex sets of social and ecological connections that cultures have to particular lands, waters, plants, animals, peoples, and climates. Being more mindful of local environments, histories, and communities ideally should lead to the development of an ecologically sustainable, self-reliant society. Yet for at least a century, the changing ecology of advanced capitalism has become less and less attentive to environmental concerns. Today, advanced corporate capitalism essentially ignores the boundaries of bioregions, effacing their uniqueness and diversity.

The concept of "ecology" should imply concern for the total pattern of all relations between natural organisms and their environment. However, complex modern economies, with their super-exploitation of eons-old stocks of nature's resources in the lifetimes of only two or three human generations, operate at levels beyond and above the natural balance of the biosphere. These established patterns of economic and ecological relations are excessive in extent and wasteful in quality, while generating immense environmental destruction over much of the Earth. Such ecological dynamics in contemporary capitalism, which function over, beyond, or outside of nature's inherent balance, must be seen as an artificial "hyperecology" of an ultimately unsustainable type.

A successful ecological society, tied sensibly to its bioregional context, ultimately should assume the characteristics of a "permaculture." The bioregional basis of any permaculture would be guided by larger social goals, such as the conservation of energy and its allocation in accessible, democratic forms. Its economic processes would not mine nature with unsustainable forms of agriculture, forestry, industry, or fishery. Rather, it would tend to mind nature in the cultivation of sustainable, low-impact methods of producing the food, fiber, energy, shelter, and material means of ecological communities on a localistic, self-reliant basis.

Unlike modern capitalism, permacultures would not consume huge amounts of energy and resources from all over the planet. They would resist the colonization of other bioregions to produce anti-ecological products for the enjoyment of a few core capitalist sites capable of structuring export flows for their advantage.

Such permacultural ways of life presume the entire reconstruction of the forms of contemporary ideal and material culture3. They directly contradict modern capitalism's "ephermaculture," with its dependence on constantly increasing, wasteful mass consumption out of artificially generated "technoregions." These technoregions ignore almost all concrete cultural ties to local land, water, plants, animals, climate, and peoples in order to respecify social space techno-economically, according to the demands of global capitalist exchange. With little regard to place, tradition, or ecosystem, basically similar kinds of urbanized, suburbanized, or ruralized zones of consumption emerge at many different planetary sites by using varying inputs of energy, natural resources, food, water, and population, drawn from all over the Earth through transnational commodity, energy, and labor markets. Without the arts, ephermaculture could not endlessly refuel its unrelenting production of newer goods, trendier products, and fresher images, inasmuch as the commercial arts guide each individual's recoding of his or her personal aspirations in terms of scientifically designed and organizationally produced material satisfaction5. The destruction of nature begins with the original human desire to control the environment. Yet once this greed for power and possession develops, the commercialization of art in the design salons and artistic studios of every individual imagination mobilized by the market constantly stimulates individuals always to desire more.

Conventionally, consumption is assumed to be the function of humanity's technological relationship to the environment. People supposedly manipulate the environment to create objects and processed materials that will satisfy innate needs for material goods and services. Today, many believe that capitalist corporations are the most appropriate tool for producing these materials. Questions of social ecology, then, are submerged almost from the beginning in the commercial assumptions of political economy. Entrepreneurial capital, for example, as it historically emerged in the modem bourgeois city, transformed the economic and social relations of agrarian economies. As its markets penetrated the people's living place and working place, the city came to invade the countryside, the market to dominate the farm, the mind worker to control the hand worker, and the capitalist metropole to imperialize the precapitalist periphery. Yet this cycle implied its own inherent limits by tying its survival to pushing commercial exchange into new geographic spaces.

In the 1880s and 1890s capitalist entrepreneurs found fewer and fewer precapitalist bioregions to penetrate commercially. Capitalism could no longer expand extensively. It therefore made a decisive shift to intensive expansion. Since the 1880s marketing and manufacturing, in a sense, have responded by inventing new technoregional sites of exchange. They intensified exchange by colonizing everyday socioeconomic processes
in cultural space, through scientific management, industrial design, and professional development. Conjuring these virgin territories out of culture as the new urban consumer society of modernity was a brilliant but essentially anti-ecological solution to the crisis of extensive production6. The encirclement of nature in the closing of the naturally limited bioregional frontiers opened up artificially unlimited technoregional zones of conquest to the building projects of mass consumption-based industrial capitalism.

The geographic codes of entrepreneurial capital, therefore, gradually rewrote the surface of the planet, extending outward from the original Eurocentric orbit of commercial exchange and capturing the inhabitants of numerous non- European zones of terra incognita until every frontier was closed and all unexplored territories were mapped. Every bioregion from the Antarctic to Africa to the Arctic to Asia to the Antipodes soon was catalogued to its fullest extent for any economic utility or ecological possibility. The closing of this world of nature to an extensive mode of production forced capitalists to open innumerable new artificial worlds for an intensive mode of production. Every craft and science rapidly
projected its technical geographies into the new unexplored worlds opened by the intensive expansion of global exchange.

In the postimperial geography of corporate capitalism, transnational topographies and transcultural territoriese merge from the interactions of international communication, travel, commerce, and transportation7. No longer grounded in one planetary place, one ethnonational location, or one environmental site, these image-driven technoregions, semi-imaginary and semi-real, are the real homelands of modern individuals. Their names are taken and passed as metaphors; yet technoregions are, in fact, the common ground of transnational society. Contemporary workers and modern corporations, for example, no longer set out to prosper in "the new world" or "the colonial world." Instead, they labor to make their marks in various technoregions, ranging from the banking world, the scientific world, the art world, the educational world, or the literary world to the financial world, the fashion world, the business world, the music world, or the advertising world, to name only a few.

To keep growing, capitalist exchange generates new hierarchies of mass consumption by developing different "consumption communities" around distinct grades of material objects and services. Concomitantly, this increasingly homogenized object world is invested artistically with rich,
new heterogeneous symbolic and imaginary differentiations, in order to distinguish the various relative grades within these communities of consumption8. Under late capitalism, consciousness management and design industries spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours on the arts carefully to distinguish objects that are artificially defined and symbolically differentiated but essentially identical, in the marketplace.
In the final analysis, aesthetic means of cultivating passive consumption through the controlled emancipation of personal, self-seeking, and sensual fulfillment serve as the material basis of late capitalism's hyperecological cycles of accumulation and reproduction, while this profligate waste of resources is rapidly destroying the Earth's ecological balance. Meanwhile, such hyperecological benefits are largely still reserved for the enjoyment of only a few hundred million people, mainly in Japan, Europe, and North America, while the Earth's other billions live in comparatively-or extremely- squalid poverty.

The closing of the natural frontiers in the 1880s and 1890s, then, simply saw the displacement of the colonizing impulse into new realms of activity, defined by geographies of economic, technological, and social spaces, rather than physical, military, and strategic ones. Defining, developing, and defending these socioeconomic topologies and cultural
geographies has been the central concern driving the ephemeraculture
of corporate capital for over a century. To get corporate capital to decamp from such zones and then to find the means to reclaim human life from the technoregions will be immensely difficult, if not impossible. The raison d'être of advanced technologies and the economic survival of corporate capital are tied to keeping these artificial territories under their sway. If real change is to be attained, everything developed over the last century-all that is commonly called “civilization”, "modernity," "development," or "progress"-will need to be completely rethought. To survive, some means must be created of scaling back ephemeracultural life in the technoregions of late capitalism to the limits of permacultural living in the bioregions of the now-ravaged biosphere.

The revolutionary development of the commercial arts over the past century parallels in lockstep the emergence of corporate hyperecologies. Commercial art and commercialized artists are simply one of the professional-technical expressions of the aestheticized commerce that rests at the core of late capitalism, and that liberates new wants and
mobilizes fresh desires in order to justify corporate capitalism's wasteful consumption of natural resources. Such desires are late capitalism's only truly renewable resource of any importance. Once produced, the sign values of aestheticized consumption continue affirming and concretizing the hyperecological order of late capitalism in the objects and images of the consumer goods themselves.

On the other hand, these manifest and latent meanings in mass consumption also can afford critical, ecologically concerned artists tremendous opportunities to challenge the symbolic essences of late capitalism, questioning both the media and the messages that the hyperecology of late capitalism uses to integrate individuals and society into its reproduction. There are a few precedents, of course, for this sort of revolutionary turn in art. Although they were not ecologically minded, critical challenges against the consumer codes of mass consumption can be found in some currents of Dadaism and Surrealism in Europe prior to 1945. A few artists working in these movements called into doubt, from both progressive and reactionary political positions, established social codes of appropriation, interpretation, and reception of consumer goods, with their radical recasting of mass-mediated images and mass-circulated consumer codes.

Similarly, the Situationists in the 1960s expressed a radical critique of everyday life and capitalist society's cultivation of spectacle as a mechanism of social integration9. In the United States during the heyday of its Pax Americana, before 1973, many different artists, ranging from Robert Rauschenberg, Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud to Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Duane Hanson, James Rosenquist, and Robert Bechtle, played with the material and symbolic codes of American consumer society in their work. Some Earth art and Conceptual art, which continued to advance the dematerialization of the art object that started with Minimalism and performance art in the 1960s and the 1970s, invited audiences to rethink artistic praxis. With their work on desert landscapes, artists in these modes broke the museum-bound carapace of market-driven aesthetic interpretation and valorization10.

More recently, we see some contemporary artists attacking the symbolic codes of consumption head on. In different ways and from various perspectives, their work brackets and questions the hyperecologies of waste, ecocide, and global crisis that are built into contemporary corporate capitalism. In the 1970s and 1980s, the installation artists
Judith Bany, Hans Haacke, and Dana Birnbaum employed multimedia presentations effectively to criticize some of the codes of consumer ideology or the managerial mind-set of corporate power. Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger work with mass-mediated language and slogan signs and use the political rhetoric of advertising to subvert contemporary consumer codes. Tony Cragg's use of "trash and "household waste"
carries a critical ecological subtext, as he refashions plastic fragments and consumer-goods containers into moments of human identity or political protest. Much of Sue Coe's and Roger Brown's work strikes at late capitalism's abuse of nature, the misuse of resources, and the use of corporate power to contain individuals and society in the many mass-mediated traps of consumer culture. Finally, the ecological gleanings of Dominque Mazeaud, garbage performance art of Mierle Ukeles and trash assemblage installations by Ciel Bergman are critical new attempts to recast aesthetic appreciation in ecologically vigilant practice. Most important, like much of the work just discussed, the performance or interventionist quality of their artwork makes it very difficult to commodify and thereby subsume into the tamed circuits of big-time art markets.

Artists concerned about ecology, especially those working in the highly commercialized art fields of advertising, fashion, interior design, product styling, mass media, and the like, must recognize that their labor often has been essential in the destruction of bioregional permacultures, and is still a material foundation of such destructive activity; it is used to redefine the good life of modern consumption in the technoregions of transnational exchange. Without the aestheticization of commerce, life as we know it in late capitalism would be impossible. Those artists willing to
strike away from the academy and gallery culture of high-art aestheticism and to renounce the mindless trends of consumer design can be important instigators of change in response to the ecological crisis. Artists now have at least two major avenues of attack by which to intervene directly in the circuits of late-capitalist reproduction and to create an ecology aesthetic.

First, those artists working immediately within the industrial design and consciousness-management segments of industry might attack from within the codes of consumption, doubting and disparaging the desires they encode in consumer goods for others to need11. These desires have been and still are the essential artifacts of late-capitalist production, and their perpetual aesthetic intensification is required for this industrial regime to continue. Yet only a radical reconstruction of almost everything manufactured that now exists could begin to create a sustainable permacultural mode of production out of that handful of salvageable techniques and artifacts held within the unsustainable ephemeraculture of late capitalism. To do this as well as keep their jobs and continue at their crafts, artists must embrace new
values consonant with a permacultural, ecological way of life. Rather than stimulating individual desires for the flimsy, the superfluous, and the trendy, artists must identify new, environmentally sensible values-durability, utility, and permanence-in their works and designs. By linking
artistic practices with a general cultural awakening to the critical importance of ecological values and by embracing values of ecological sustainability, artists can help to begin revolutionizing the present system from within their vocations and crafts. From the current realities of technoregions and suppressed memories of bioregions, ecological reformers and environmentally aware artists must identify the humane potentialities of technology and the untapped possibilities of nature. Such ecologically aware artists will be important in working out the radical new ecographics for making human artifacts ecologically useful, practicable, and beautiful, rather than environmentally useless, impracticable, and destructive.

Second, artists working outside of the immediate circuits of commodity design might attack the wastefulness of ephemeraculture more critically from without, reappraising the flawed totality of hyperecological late capitalism by creating new images of ecological change. For example, they might continue to subvert the symbolic codes of this ecological
regime's reproduction, challenging its imagined benefits and satisfactions in showing its actual costs and dissatisfactions. Plainly, if these aesthetic challenges succeed, they will run the danger of being immediately tamed and subsumed by the art markets. Yet by raising ecological concerns
in their artistic work, significant new styles of resistance may develop out of this aesthetic imagining of new ecoregions for cultural development, which may, in turn, recenter everyday life within each human community's bioregional context.

Guided by this imagination, practices of permaculture may move more quickly from the realm of the imagined into the practical sphere of everyday experience. Today, too many artists, ironically, are implicated in both the ongoing constitution of the codes of consumption and the infrequent articulation of critiques directed at these same codes. From this contradictory position they have every incentive not to act against the ephemeraculture; still, they also have one of the last chances to imagine how an ecological permaculture could arise from the hyperecology of late capitalism. –

Notes
This paper originally was presented at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University on March 24, 1990, at the Colloquium of Artists concerned about the Environment. A much different version appeared in Art Papers (January-February 1991).
1. For examples of how artists and art collaborate in the rationalization of capitalist commodity production, see Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (New York: Pantheon.1986); Bevis Hiller, The Style of the Century, 1900-1980 (New York: E. P. Dutton.1983); Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Knopf, 1986); Bryan Holme, Advertising:Reflections of a Century (New York: Viking Press, 1982); Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tasjian, The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941, exh. cat. (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1986); and Chester H. Liebs, Mainstreet to Miracle Mile: American Roadside Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown, 19851.

2. See Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land; A Bioregional Vision (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985); Jonathan Poritt, Seeing Green (London: Blackwell, 1984); and, most important, Thomas Berry, The Dream of Nature (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988).

3. See Timothy W. Luke , "Notes for a Deconstructionist Ecology," .Vm Politlcal Science 11(Spring 1983): 21-32.

4. For one comprehensive critical overview of this hyperecological cycle, see Bill McKibhon, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).

5. See Timothy W. Luke, Screens of power: Ideology Domination and Resistance in Informational Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 19891, 19-58. Also see Wolfgang F Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising In Capitalist Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

6. See Siegfried Gideon, Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948); and James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960).

7. As Edward W. Soja suggests, modernity always is composed of "both context and conjuncture. It can be understood as the specificity of being alive, In the world, at a particular time and place; a vital individual and collective sense of contemporaneity. . . . Spatiality, temporality, and social being can be seen as the abstract dimensions whlch together comprise all facets of human existence. More concretely specified, each of the abstract existential dimensions comes to life as a social construct, which shapes empirical reality and is simultaneously shaped by it. Thus, the spatial order of human existence arises from the (social) production of space, the construction of human geographies that both reflect and configure being in the world. . . . The social order of being-in-the-world can be seen as revolving around the constitution of society, the production and reproduction of social relations, institutions, and practices." Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of space in Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 25.

8. See Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic, 1988).

9. See Elisabeth Sussman, ed., On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957-1972 [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

10. See, for a parallel argument, Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986); and Suzi Gablik, Has Modernism Failed? (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984).

11. To change contemporary society, they will have to do more, however, than simply advance the interests of green consumerism or tout environmentally aware products as do such publications as Shopping for a Better World, The Green Comumer. The Environmental Shopping Handbook, or 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. At best, these efforts make minor changes at the margins, but do not do anything radically to transform society in more ecologically rational ways.

____________________________________________________
TIMOTHY W. LUKE teaches political science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg. His most recent book is Shows of Force: Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions (1992).

Art, Ecology, and Community

Creative and Green: Art, Ecology, and Community
by Sarah E. Graddy

Chapter 2: Art in Land and Water Remediation

Remediation is the treatment or cleaning of a contaminated site to mitigate or reverse the damages on the environment and humans, and is generally considered the domain of scientists. Others look at polluted places as physical chances for a paradigm shift in how we deal with our environmental mistakes. The landscape architect Herman Prigann, explaining what he means by "ecological aesthetics," writes that "Destroyed landscapes are activity fields available for creative remodeling" (website). He sees in polluted, exploited, and abandoned sites possibilities for remediation not only scientifically, but also aesthetically. He continues:

Without an aesthetic and visionary starting point for the reshaping of the Destroyed areas, there can be no positive identification with the landscape. The aesthetic reshaping of the landscape is always orientated around the Ecological relationships. (website)

If one looks at these "Destroyed" places as places of ecological engagement, the problem changes from how to make these sites ecologically healthy again to how to make them ecologically healthy again, in a way that is compelling to the public. If citizens are not involved in remediation efforts, it is unlikely that they will either be aware of them or help to prevent such exploitation of local resources in the future. Erzen writes that art can provide "symbolic, metaphoric and aesthetically conceived forms" that comprise a unique and educational way to involve the public in issues of ecological damage and reclamation, rather than only providing a practical solution to ecological problems (24). The best remediative response to polluted sites, then, involves not only science but also art.[8]

Several individuals and organizations are tackling environmental issues with this interdisciplinary approach. One is a nonprofit organization in northern Appalachia that is addressing abandoned coal mines that are leaking toxin-laden water into the watershed. Another is an artist who works with public spaces to create a nexus of public involvement and ecological restoration. A third project, in a small community in the Appalachian Mountains, is also artist-driven, and seeks to address the nebulous relationship that the community has with the natural resources it depends on.[9] These projects profoundly affect their communities, often contributing to not just the restoration of the local environment but also residents' sense of community and place, and they inspire similar projects in other communities. In this way -- by restoring the webs of community that connect us all to each other and the land we inhabit and the water we use -- they function not only as projects about and including ecological systems, but in a sense, as key components in ecological systems themselves.

AMD&ART: Vintondale, Pennsylvania

AMD&ART is a nonprofit organization created by artist and historian T. Allan Comp in 1994 to address the environmental hazard posed by abandoned coal mines. Appalachian communities long dependent on coal are still suffering from the departure of coal companies, which left many areas with weak economies, ravaged ecologies, and abandoned, contaminated mines. AMD stands for Acid Mine Drainage, or the water that picks up minerals exposed during mining as it flows through abandoned coal mines and into other water sources. It is acidic, metals-laden water that inundates "streambeds with orange sediment that kills the bottom of the food chain, leaving streams dead" (http://www.amdandart.org/ ). The toxic drainage has been ubiquitous in Appalachian communities for many years, and many economically depressed former mining communities still live with its presence. Comp sees AMD as a symbol of "dying communities, lost biodiversity, lost opportunity" -- a metaphor for a society destroying itself through the waste of its natural resources (website). Communities in Appalachia are deeply conflicted about their past, Comp says, and therefore AMD&ART is characterized by "trying to do something that people could be proud of, and that [would bring] back a pride in a past that's been kind of denied them" together with attempting to change the legacy left by pre-regulatory coal mining (interview).

Comp has a background in history and historic preservation; when he began a job working in a federal heritage area in Western Pennsylvania, he noticed that a common feature among the economically depressed communities there was that "all of the creeks were orange," as well as completely devoid of life (interview). He began to think about the potential impact of addressing the AMD in the area, and a way to involve the arts -- "not just traditional visual artists, but writers, designers, sculptors, historians, anthropologists and many other unfortunately compartmentalized disciplines" (website) -- in solving environmental problems. He likes to describe the impetus behind AMD&ART as the idea that "science is necessary, but not sufficient."

Comp says that scientists realized in the late 1980s that AMD problems could be ameliorated by "passive treatment," which involves the natural filtration and treatment of polluted waters through wetlands. Looking at all of the different treatment systems that used this principle, Comp realized that they were incredibly pragmatic -- he describes this approach as "there are five or six rectangular ponds stuck on a little piece of land, the water goes in bad, it comes out good, problem solved" -- but failed to involve the public or inspire other projects because "nobody even knew they were there"
(interview).

Comp sees this purely scientific solution as a symptom of societal embarrassment of AMD; AMD&ART deliberately challenges "the belief that treatment systems should be hidden away, just because we as a society are ashamed of the mess we have created" (website). The organization instead promotes the idea that the reclaiming of these spaces and resources is a positive, community-building opportunity to engage all facets of society, and "should be a celebration" of the solution instead of a way to hide it -- drawing attention to, and thus spreading, the technology and the support for addressing the problem (website).

When Comp started AMD&ART, he asked geologists, artists, and hydrogeologists he knew to get involved in brainstorming an interdisciplinary way to clean up AMD sites. He says the project formed very quickly around three different possible sites for remediation; of these sites, only the "fairly small discharge" in Vintondale (a town of fewer than 600 people in Southwestern Pennsylvania) ended up being a feasible project for AMD&ART (interview).[10]

The site in Vintondale was chosen for the project because "it had several distinct advantages," Comp says. The Ghost Town Trail, which, at that time (in the mid-1990s) attracted about 60,000-70,000 recreational users per year (this number is now more like 80,000, according to Comp), runs immediately adjacent to Vintondale. In addition, the site, which is surrounded by the town, was unoccupied, owned by the borough (the municipal unit in Pennsylvania), and fairly flat. Comp says he "basically just walked into the borough council meeting and said, 'Would you be willing to let us see what we can do?'" and promised, if they agreed, to find funding elsewhere, to keep council members informed about the progress of the project, and to never promise more than what he knew he could deliver. While the council readily agreed to his proposal, Comp points out that before the first big public meeting about the project, locals in the bar next door just laughed at him for trying to change anything -- especially with art. The attitude in the community when he began, Comp says, was one of cynicism and low expectations, a common feature of Appalachian coal country.

From the beginning, Comp says, he realized that the organization would be more a model for similar projects than a single entity attempting to solve the problems of many places: "Nobody had ever done anything like [AMD&ART] before at all that we could find," he says, so a model could conceivably have an enormous impact. The organization's motto, "Artfully Transforming Environmental Liabilities Into Community Assets," provides a clear philosophical basis upon which other projects could be based. Comp sees AMD&ART as composed of three parts: The design team (a hydrogeologist, a landscape designer, a sculptor, and a historian) the AmeriCorps staff (one or two a year, and frequently including a landscape architect, a historian, or an environmental studies major), and the community.

The project that the organization has been working on for years is the AMD&ART art park in Vintondale. The park is a 35- acre space along the Ghost Town Trail. It includes a series of large ponds ("My hydrogeologist would prefer to call them treatment cells," Comp says) that "take a discharge from a pH of 2.8 and high in iron and aluminum, to a pH of 6.5 or 7, with almost no metal" (interview); on the pH scale, 7 is neutral, and anything below is acidic.

The cleansed water then flows into seven acres of wetlands that attract birds and other wildlife and which the highway department has purchased, enabling AMD&ART to create a trust fund to maintain the system for fifty years. Next to these water features, AMD&ART has created a native tree arboretum, which the organization calls its "Litmus Garden."

The center of the park is a recreation area for Vintondale residents. Based on the community's needs, this area includes baseball and soccer fields, a volleyball court, picnic tables, and open grassy areas. "Part of public design," Comp says, "is [that] you have to give form to community aspiration." If the community doesn't have a stake in the remediation project, it will not succeed in the long run. Vintondale needed a park for recreational activities, and Comp was determined to make that park a part of the AMD cleanup effort.

Because Comp plans to hand the reins of AMD&ART over to Vintondale to run -- leaving only the funding for one AmeriCorps position, but removing himself and the rest of his staff -- it is imperative that the community be invested in the organization's survival. Vintondale residents are very proud of the park, Comp points out, and call it "our park." "We built it with the community and now the community is ready to step in," Comp says, adding that the nonprofit organization AMD&ART is going to become "Vintondale AMD&ART Park, managed by locals."

Comp says that Vintondale residents are, in general, more aware of environmental issues as a result of AMD&ART, and that there is a measurable connection between the completion of a large project like the art park in Vintondale and a community's confidence in its ability to achieve other projects, let alone attempt them.[11] He points to a photograph of men helping build picnic tables for the park as an example: these men were some of the hecklers in the bar three years earlier. He adds that in order to change attitudes, one has to be persistent and consistent -- in AMD&ART's case, someone from the organization attended every monthly borough council meeting, whether or not he/she had anything to share about the project.

Fig. 4. The creation of AMD&ART treatment ponds. © AMD&ART
Finding funding has always been difficult for AMD&ART, Comp says, in large part because the organization addresses problems in Appalachian coal country, where funds are scarce for environmental projects. To diminish this predicament, Comp decided to hire AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteers (the U.S. government subsidizes these positions). Comp, who directs AMD&ART, does not receive a salary for his work (which he has always done in addition to a regular full-time job). "If this was really a better idea," Comp says he thought when he founded the organization, "then we don't need to go to traditional sources of funding for Acid Mine Drainage treatment first."

These sources were already funding AMD treatment, and Comp saw no need to compete with the scientists who received those monies. AMD&ART initially received a few thousand dollars from the local government program for the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts; the Heinz Endowment funded a planning workshop for local agencies and Comp and his colleagues. At some point in the mid-nineties, Comp recalls, there was a fiscal crisis, and he wrote a letter to the AMD&ART's board and some of his friends that said that the project might have to go on hiatus indefinitely. Within a few months, Comp found out that the EPA's Sustainable Development Program had awarded his organization a grant, and that it was much larger than what he had applied for the previous summer: $250,000 over three years. After that gift, which constituted "a huge gamble" by the EPA, according to Comp, it became much easier for AMD&ART -- which has no development staff -- to raise money from other government agencies and foundations.

Comp says the idea of involving artists and others from the humanities as well as scientists in projects has begun to garner positive attention in the past few years, and that this may be "the most significant consequence" of the work AMD&ART has done, "because it is being picked up on by others far from coal country as something they need to consider as well." These others, Comp says, include the U.S. Forest Service, people working on abandoned mine lands in the Rocky Mountains, and a little watershed, Crowley Creek, in Oregon.[12]

A current project in the middle of the University of Virginia's Wise campus in southwestern Virginia was inspired by AMD&ART (Comp is the co-manager and co-designer); another project that uses AMD&ART as a model for innovative approaches and partnerships is one at Upper Clark Fork in Montana. Comp thinks of AMD&ART as not simply a project or a nonprofit but "a catalogue of ideas," and encourages others to access it in order to create similar -- not necessarily identical -- projects to heal land and communities. Significantly, through his work with AMD&ART, Comp now works for the U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining to work with communities all over Appalachia to clean up watersheds polluted by coal mining. Another measure of AMD&ART's success, Comp says, is that the American Society for Mining and Reclamation has asked him to appear as a plenary speaker for two years. Thus while the nonprofit organization AMD&ART will soon cease to exist in its current form, the idea that spawned AMD&ART continues to spread to communities throughout the United States. The AMD&ART website will then become a permanent archive of the project for anyone to access and use.

Passive treatment employs "native plants and native limestone to neutralize the acid, drop out the metals, and release both clean water and new hope" (website). Comp avers that his approach to AMD remediation differs profoundly from the traditional one:

It's very easy to design a treatment system where all you need to do is fix the water. But if you're going to try to get the 70,000 people riding by on their bicycles to stop and look at it long enough to figure out what it is . . . and realize that maybe getting one of those in their town would be a good idea, too, it's got to be a lot more than just scientifically effective, which is why from the very beginning, this project has always been a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort between the sciences and the arts. (interview)
Rather than seeing waste treatment as a purely scientific function, Comp writes that it can be a part of our culture, too: "gardens, native plant arboretums and places of learning" (website).

The arts open up "avenues for participation that people would not otherwise seek," Comp says, and in this way complement the unintentionally exclusionary, jargon-heavy sciences. The only way to engage members of the public in environmental issues, he continues, is not only to teach them the scientific principles at work in a particular situation, but also to inspire them to care, and this is where the arts and the humanities come in. The arts without scientists, Comp says, just make for "bad science and goofy art"; on the other hand, collaboration spawns both good science and good art, as well as broad public engagement.

Remediation is not the domain of environmentalists, but entire communities. In Comp's view, we all have a stake in our communities, which include the physical places where we reside, and the "natural" features found there (land, water, organisms). When we invest in them, we gain not only what we can get directly from these features (food, drinking water, a place to have a picnic), but also in what we get from each other: a sense of belonging, a sense of investment in the future, an understanding of who we are and where we come from, and places in which we can come together in productive and positive ways.

By helping communities to become empowered, AMD&ART enables them to view themselves in a new way, to look toward the future instead of the past, and to take charge of the ecological health of their own resources. Local citizens become active advocates instead of passive victims, and in turn aid others in their searches for community health -- which AMD&ART wants to help us see that we are all responsible for.

Patricia Johanson: Three Projects

Patricia Johanson is an artist who creates large-scale, permanent projects that incorporate and celebrate ecological systems. She sees her work as a way to frame ecologies so that humans will be drawn into natural systems and become more aware of the organisms that live there and the forces that influence their worlds. Johanson started her career as a painter and sculptor, but gradually became interested in making sculptures that were sited in nature.

Speaking of her first foray into this kind of sculpture, Johanson says that she quickly "became far more interested in the patterns of nature on the work of art [than in the artwork itself] . . . you couldn't just look at the work of art anymore -- you saw how nature was impinging and encroaching on the art" (interview). This sculpture marked a change in the focus of all of Johanson's work: she remarks that she thereafter began making work concerned exclusively with nature. Johanson lives in New York State; she has a master's degree in Art History and a bachelor's degree in architecture. She cites as her inspirations Monet and nineteenth-century artists who explored the western U.S. and who acted as naturalists, recording the flora and fauna of the unfamiliar places they came across, as well as the celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead.

Johanson's first major ecological public art commission [13] was Fair Park Lagoon, located in a city park next to the Dallas Museum of Natural History and the Dallas Museum of Art (which has since moved). Begun in 1981 and completed in 1986, the project is a testament to the creative, holistic, and unconventional perspective that an artist can bring to environmental problems. A few years after seeing an exhibit of Johanson's drawings of hypothetical, plant-based projects in a gallery in New York City, Harry Parker, who was then director of the Dallas Museum of Art, invited Johanson to come up with a plan to restore the lagoon.[14]

Covered in a harmful algae bloom, polluted, and missing key species like aquatic insects and snails, the lagoon ("basically a flood basin," says Johanson) was murky, had a deteriorating shoreline, and lacked a food chain. The body of water was also a hazard to the community that might have enjoyed it -- it created a five-block-long obstacle for people walking through the park. Worse, several children had drowned in it -- two on the morning Johanson came to look at the site at Parker's invitation.

At the time, Johanson writes, "there was neither funding [for] nor community interest" in the project (Art and Survival 14); however, the sesquicentennial of Texas' independence from Mexico was approaching, and Johanson says that Parker saw potential for a lagoon project to be touted as a sesquicentennial project for Dallas, thus practically ensuring funding. According to Johanson, Parker told her, "Do any kind of project you want. This is Dallas -- if they like it, they'll build it." Johanson was given "absolute freedom," she says, to come up with ideas for improving the body of water -- the museum imposed no budgetary or other restrictions on her.

She gave a presentation with drawings and models of her ideas for the lagoon to a group of invited guests at the art museum -- "basically, what [my initial proposal] said was 'I want to use art to bring people into contact with nature and clean up the water,'" she summarizes. Afterward, she was approached by the grants administrator of a local foundation that eventually put up the bulk of the money required for the project. In fact, the project was so popular with the community that organizations offered funding even after it was no longer needed, especially once construction began.

For Fair Park Lagoon, Johanson conducted research on what native animals eat and what local plants would be appropriate to create a proposal that would restore a healthy balance to the lagoon; she asked staff at the Dallas Museum of Natural History to help her create "outdoor educational exhibits" (interview). In addition to proposing the re-introduction of many species of plant and animal, Johanson suggested that the museum remove a non-native species of duck then populating the lagoon, stop.37 fertilizing the grass around the shoreline, and encourage locals to fish for the overabundant sunfish. Johanson writes of the beginning of the project:

I began to develop my own list of concerns, which included creating a functioning ecosystem for a wide variety of plants and animals. I also wanted to control bank erosion, and create paths so that people could cut across the lagoon. I began to do research on what different animals eat, because I knew that the right plants would attract wildlife. The project evolved from many different perspectives at once. I knew that the structures had to not only solve a host of environmental problems, but also had to be acceptable to scientists, engineers and city planners. (Art and Survival 15)

Johanson carefully took all of these perspectives into account in the planning of her artwork, which besides reconstructing the life cycle of the lagoon, involved the creation of "elaborate entangled walkable paths with bridges and arches" that meandered through the lagoon (Spaid 67). Johanson decided to use two native Texas plants as models for the sculptures in the lagoon.

These sculptures, made of terracotta-colored gunite, serve as pathways for visitors and resting places for animals. She designed the Delta Duck Potato-based sculpture's "roots," many of them five-foot-wide paths, to prevent water from eroding the shoreline; the spaces between them "became microhabitats for plants, fish, turtles, and birds" (Art and Survival 15). Thinner roots rise out of the water, inaccessible to humans, and provide perches for birds, while leaves in the middle of the lagoon serve as islands for turtles and other animals. The second sculpture, across the lagoon, is based on a Texas fern, Pteris multifada:

The fern functions as a bridge -- not a direct pathway over the water, but a network of crossovers, islands and stopping-points. Individual leaflets are twisted to create the kinds of spaces I wanted, and the tip of the fern is a causeway surrounded by water lilies and irises.(16)

Johanson wanted people who visit the lagoon to be initially attracted by the sculptures -- she calls her work "big and brassy" -- and then drawn into the life that thrives around it (interview). "Fair Park Lagoon is really a swamp -- a raw, functioning ecology that people are normally afraid of," Johanson writes. "The art project affords people access to this environment, so they find out how wonderful a swamp really is . . . they're discovering a marvelous new world" (16).

Johanson uses art as a way to frame nature, so that people who aren't interested in or cognizant of nature suddenly notice it. She sees this project and the others she has done as inviting the public into relationships with the organisms in a particular ecosystem, which then translates into a general appreciation for the natural world. "There are always people who will do damage," she says, "but I think far less [so] if people get some kind of basic understanding of nature and love for it. And that kind of education naturally takes place in my projects, I believe."

Johanson's methodology for creating large-scale environmental works was perfected during her work on Fair Park Lagoon:

I always come up with designs in the exact same way: I look at the site, and I decide what I want to accomplish on the site, in terms of how people are going to move through it [and] what they're going to see . . . I want a living site -- I want plants and animals living in natural communities. I look at [my work] as
developing a food chain. (interview)

Johanson says that she uses sculpture as a way to move people through the space to give them access to the plants and animals living there. She designs spaces that do not need to be maintained, for two reasons: "Half the time it's not done anyway," she notes, but she also likes her artworks to evolve over time, because they have lives of their own (interview). "The traditional art object is based on the idea of perfection," Johanson writes, but her works grow and change (Art and Survival 10). There may be a point, she says, where her projects begin to disintegrate; at that time, she thinks it is acceptable to intervene, if a community is interested in keeping a particular project, but not before.

Johanson's next major project, Endangered Garden, also resulted from an exhibit of her drawings; this time both the exhibit and the commission were in San Francisco. The circumstances surrounding this project were very different from Fair Park Lagoon, however: the City of San Francisco needed a new transport-storage sewer that would go around Candlestick Cove, but the Public Works Department couldn't come up with a design that the public would approve. The latter had initially proposed "a two-story-high hunk of concrete that blocked the view of San Francisco Bay," Johanson recounts (interview).

Furthermore, the city was about to be sued by the EPA for dumping raw sewage in the bay, so it was in a hurry. Jill Manton, Director of the Public Art Program of the San Francisco Arts Commission, who remembered the exhibit of Johanson's work from a few years before, asked her to get involved. Within a month, Johanson had become co-designer of the facility and produced plans that San Franciscans loved.[15] "I knew right away: bury the sewer, make the roof a bay walk, make it available to the public, so they're getting something for their money," she recalls, adding:

Part of my strategy is always giving back to the public. If the community is happy, the project will be a success. If the community isn't happy, the project won't be a success . . . What happened was, I got huge community buy-in- people started writing letters to the city, saying what a beautiful project this was and how much they wanted [it]. (interview)

Because the public supported her idea so enthusiastically, the city Public Works Department, which was not interested in building her project, had to back down -- and was told by the City Attorney that it had to accept Johanson's proposal. She says that she has always promoted art as an important component in infrastructure projects, and muses that over the years, some of her work might have changed the minds of those who disagreed. In 1987, however, when she designed the project (it was completed three mayors later, in 1996), it was a fairly novel idea to include an artist in the designing of a sewer.[16]

Johanson's design incorporates a huge San Francisco Garter Snake that serves as the unifying element of the park, which is sited on a landfill. Parts of the snake's winding body intersect with the half-mile long bay walk, creating stopping points and the opportunity to appreciate the life found along the trail. The snake's head emerges in a twenty-foot-high earthmound and the neck in another, and some of the snake's scales were designed as huge sculptures.

The sculptures accommodate not only human but also animal traffic. "Cavities, crevices and nesting shelves for bird habitat are incorporated into the structures . . . [and] petroglyph depressions in the Baywalk paving fill with rainwater and become birdbaths" (24). The snake's head mound was seeded with plants that sustain endangered butterflies; the head and neck mounds are sited on a meadow. Both humans and endangered butterflies utilize the windbreak provided by the mounds. Johanson writes that her intention "was to provide cover for small mammals like the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse and larval food plants for endangered and rare butterflies" ("Beyond Choreography" 93).

Like Fair Park Lagoon, Endangered Garden is designed to attract visitors with its sculptural components, but ultimately creates a relationship between the people who visit and the organisms that make the space their home: "Body movement and gardens of unplanned experience turn spectators into participants, ensuring both a creative response and consideration of forces that affect the landscape and their lives," Johanson asserts (98). Her work, in this way, shows that interactions between "nature" and humanity are never passive -- when people are drawn into observation and appreciation of an ecosystem, they become conscientious advocates of its preservation. In Johanson's creations, there is no opportunity to be passive. All those who enter the spaces she creates are implicated in their continued existence and the survival of the organisms that occupy them.

Before Endangered Garden, there was no public access to Candlestick Cove. Now San Franciscans and tourists walk, jog, and bike the pathways on top of the sewer to get access to the intertidal zone, and they use the spaces between to have picnics and fly kites. Most members of the public do not realize that underneath the trails, butterfly meadow, and sculpture, there is a functioning sewer, Johanson says; the city made sure the project had a low profile during its construction to avoid controversy over an artist being co-designer of the project (even though it was built using percent-for-art funds). But Johanson seems to be comfortable with the invisibility of the sewage system: "The idea was simply to take something that was going to be built anyway, and translate it into a public landscape that that people could use and enjoy," she writes (Art and Survival 6). If the city was going to construct the sewer, she figured, it should incorporate art and nature in a way that was meaningful to the people who live in that community.

Even though the community might not remember or be aware of the role the artist had in creating the park, she has still made a difference in their interactions with the environment. Johanson originally saw the project as "a great chance to make people aware of the issue of endangered species," and she seems to have been successful (23).

Johanson says she frequently gets letters about the impact of her work -- people write, among other things, that they became an artist or ecologist because they grew up spending time around her projects. The impact of her work is also more immediate: Endangered Garden is maintained by the San Francisco Youth Conservation Corps (at-risk youth who pick up trash and weed plant beds on the weekend), and when Johanson went to visit the site a few years ago, Corps members applauded her. They told her that they loved the project, and that "it's the best thing in their lives" (interview).

So Endangered Garden not only "fills in ecological gaps with food and habitat, actually making it possible for species that have been wiped out to come back" (Art and Survival 24), but also has opened up a world for humans, allowing them to appreciate native animals and plants up close, while enjoying public space -- all on the roof of a sewer co-designed by an artist in a major U.S. city.

Johanson is currently working on the Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility and Petaluma Wetlands Park, in Petaluma, California. This project, which at the time of this writing is going out to bid (Johanson expects it to cost about $130 million), involves "between four- and six-hundred acres, at least," she says, which will process sewage for the city. The land already features Petaluma River, Ellis Creek, and a brackish marsh, as well as agricultural fields, which provide food for local mammals and migrating wildlife.

Raw sewage will enter the site through a headworks (the initial intake system) and then flow through "densely vegetated treatment wetlands," Johanson says, which will trap sediments and "remove algae, nutrients and heavy metals" (Johanson, "Fecund Landscapes" 28), thus purifying the sewage. After the water flows through the filtering plants in the treatment wetlands, it will enter the polishing wetlands, which are different kinds of ponds that "have zones of plants alternating with open water zones, which are deeper," and include plants and fish, Johanson says. "Microscopic aquatic animals and insects that live on plants" will consume suspended solids in the water and make up the basis of the food chain (28).

In addition, aquatic plants will pump oxygen from the water, "thus supplying microbial decomposers" and providing "food, shelter and nesting materials to" the animals living there (28). Islands will direct the flow of water, circulating it between the ponds. The islands will be covered in trees and shrubs, grass, or oyster shells to provide refuge and nesting habitat for different species of birds and other animals. After the water cycles through the treatment and polishing wetlands, it will flow back up to the recycled water pond as drinkable water.

There will also be stormwater wetlands that take runoff from the nearby highway and parking lot and purify it before it too enters the marsh and river. The facility will produce twenty-five tons of fertilizer from human waste, which would normally go to a landfill. Besides removing highway and parking lot run-off now polluting the water in the area, the Petaluma project will restore formerly degraded habitats. It will also provide habitat for endangered and threatened species, such as the California Red-Legged and Yellow-Legged Frogs and the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, among many others. Johanson has designed many different land and water habitats to accommodate as many native species as possible.

Besides being essentially (in actuality if not name) a wildlife refuge, Johanson points out that the project incorporates "many levels of community involvement" (interview). The entire facility is designed to be a public facility, with about three and half miles of trails winding through the different ecosystems, allowing for recreation and environmental education. Johanson says that a local high school is creating a plant nursery to breed native plants for the project, and another local group, the Petaluma Wetlands Alliance, is planning to give docent tours. Local schools, grades K-12, will use the space as an environmental learning laboratory.

Johanson started out with the California Dogface Butterfly as her working metaphor for the project, but this morphed into images of morning glories and the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse when the city moved the headworks and administrative facilities to the wetlands park site. For Johanson, the image that describes the project is not important in itself -- instead she sees it as a way for visitors "to grasp these very, very large projects" (interview).

"As you walk around [my projects], you have to experience them not just visually, but also with your feet [and] with your other senses . . . and you have to form a mental image or map of what's going on here," she says. By incorporating a familiar image, this sewage treatment facility, like Johanson's other projects, will engage visitors to be active participants in the ecosystems. Those who come for recreation are likely to be drawn into the different spaces, either by the habitats themselves or by the images of the mouse or morning glories, and will learn about the organisms that live there, as well as what is necessary to purify human waste. Johanson is showing that art, infrastructure, public space, and science can peacefully co-exist, to the benefit of all. Jale Erzen summarizes the important role works like this have in the public realm:

Aesthetic qualities which affect our emotions, which make us feel the pleasure of perceiving beauty, would also make us understand the fragility and the gentleness of this beauty, when we perceive it as being alive. As intelligent and intentional agents we then become responsible about the protection of these qualities.(23)

When we encounter spaces like those that Johanson designs, we almost cannot help but be drawn into responsibility for their survival. Johanson's works reach many, many people every day, and one can only hope that they, too, consequently become environmental stewards and activists.

Beneath Land and Water: Elkhorn City, Kentucky

Beneath Land and Water is an ongoing, artist-initiated project in Elkhorn City, Kentucky, a town of fewer than 1,000 people in the eastern Kentucky Mountains. In Spring 2000, Suzanne Lacy, a Los Angeles-based activist/artist with a background in performance and installation work focusing on issues of social justice, was invited to participate in a workshop called "Artists in Community Gathering," which was sponsored by Appalshop, a Kentucky arts and education center, and the American Festival Project, which is housed in Appalshop.

The event matched teams of artists with small communities in the region in an effort to "facilitate the deeper integration of arts into the lives" of these places by creating a structure for community engagement (http://greenarts.net/art/ky/home/home.html ). From this encounter, Lacy began to work with the Elkhorn City Heritage Council to design a project that would meet the community's needs, and she asked two other artists, Susan Leibovitz Steinman and Yutaka Kobayashi, to be involved as well. Steinman, who lives in Oakland, works closely with communities to create ecologically-centered work, and Kobayashi, who is from Japan, makes ecological, site-specific sculpture and other work.

The government of Elkhorn City was looking for a way to economically revitalize the community, which is located in a region devastated by the coal and natural-gas mining industries. It quickly became clear to Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi that residents of the town had an interest in improving Elkhorn City based on its abundant resources, notably Russell River, the woods, and the mountains. Putting it another way, Lacy's website describes the project as focusing "on townspeople's personal experience of their land -- as a site of heritage and as a generator of regional wealth -- and their river -- as an indicator of ecological health and as a moving force that connects them, upstream and down, with the rest of the country"
(http://www.suzannelacy.com/2000selkhorn_overview.htm). Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi wanted to crystallize this experience in public art projects that would reflect it back to residents.

After many community meetings, the project began to take shape; although still evolving, it consists of several facets. One component is a waterfront park that serves as a buffer zone between a bank parking lot and the riverfront. Runoff from streets and parking lots, including pesticides used in residents' yards and other toxins, runs downhill into the river. The park, about 500 feet wide, was designed with plants and gravel to filter some of the runoff before it enters the river.

Project participants planted native plants to serve as habitat and food for butterflies and birds; built benches for visitors, which incorporate text generated by residents with stories about the river; and created signage that highlights features of the park and the river. The park is meant, Steinman says, to focus attention on the river, but also to serve as a model for simple ways to remediate some of the town's resources, to help enable its residents to see them differently.

Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi also created the Blue Line Trail, which links to a hiking and biking trail that locals created to attract ecotourists and recreational users. The Blue Line Trail is, as its name suggests, a sky-blue line painted throughout the town. It is designed to unify the components of Beneath Land and Water, as well as to support a sense of regional identity. Elkhorn City residents hope to eventually connect the Blue Line Trail to the state's Pine Mountain Trail, which would attract hikers to the area and the town, and would provide, Steinman says, an "overt connection of Elkhorn City to regional and national resources." The artists also painted several town features the same shade of blue.

Lacy and Steinman say that residents wanted a mural, so the artists brought tiles to local schools for children to paint and held several Saturday tile-painting events in the middle of town. These tiles eventually became part of a large ceramic mural, placed on the side of a large building visible from the Blue Line Trail. The artists designed the mural so that people using the trail would see it and be drawn to find out more about the area, thus becoming invested in preserving its natural assets.

Lacy and Steinman used the making of the mural as an educational opportunity for the community by bringing photos of native plants and animals and talking with residents about native and invasive species and how local ecosystems work. Tile painters depicted the river and the town's relationship to it, as well as local history.

Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi have been joined in their efforts by college students from Lacy's classes at the California College of the Arts and Otis College of Art and Design, who for three years have used their week-long spring breaks to come to Elkhorn City to contribute to the project and gain practical field experience. The first batch of students, in 2001, helped make the park and taught tile-painting workshops for high school students and senior citizens. Steinman says these students gave local students, many of whom looked forward to getting out of Elkhorn City as soon as possible, a new perspective on what is valuable about their community.

Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi have struggled to keep Beneath Land and Water afloat from the beginning. Although it started with a grant from Appalshop, that organization almost folded after September 11, 2001, and the artists had to look elsewhere for money (Elkhorn City and its Heritage Council have limited budgets). They have not been paid for any of their work -- although they make a point of paying residents who help -- and use their own frequent flyer miles to travel to Elkhorn City, in addition to often paying out of their own pockets for materials needed for the project. The artists did secure a grant from the Creative Capitol Foundation in 2002, which helped to fund parts of the project.

Steinman sees Beneath Land and Water as a "pragmatic education project" (interview). It would be impossible, she says, "to clean the entire river," but by finding out what the people who live in Elkhorn City have and want and figuring out a way in which art can contribute, an artist can create a project that can inspire locals to "become caretakers of the river." So while the remediation scope of the project is relatively small -- mostly because of budget constraints -- Lacy and Steinman hope that it will spawn or inspire other ecologically-minded projects in Elkhorn City and other communities.

To a certain extent, Beneath Land and Water, like AMD&ART, is about a community cultivating a sense of itself in a period of hardship. With the coal companies' departure and the accompanying environmental devastation and economic stagnation, as well as an aging population, many in Elkhorn City find it difficult to invest in the future. But both Lacy and Steinman emphasize the fact that they and Kobayashi have worked closely with residents and community groups to generate project ideas, all of which build on already-present local efforts and interests (interviews). The artists contributed ecological and aesthetic knowledge and experience as well as a creative outlook that enabled them to approach old problems in new ways.

Steinman says that working in a community as an outsider requires sensitivity and openness; Lacy says that a community is very sensitive to how an artist perceives it. Ultimately, Steinman says, "art is about problem-solving." Similarly, Lacy says that art creates an atmosphere where people's perspectives can shift, enabling them to begin to see their communities in new ways. She adds that art is important to ecological activism and education because it "is an incredibly unifying element." Beneath Land and Water, then, does not change the ecology of Elkhorn City, but creates a way for residents to see themselves -- and thus their relationship to the ecology of the place where they live -- differently. Steinman, like Patricia Johanson, sees art as a visual hook. She says that she uses art "as a public service announcement for what ecology is [and] how it is everywhere around you; [that] art is an integrated part of life and we are an integrated part of nature." Beneath Land and Water is an important step toward spreading this perspective.

Conclusion(s)

American society can benefit from including art, artists, and artistic practices in city infrastructure projects, education, community development and placemaking, and environmental cleanup; ecology is an important concern in all of these. For organizations and individuals working in communities to raise public awareness of ecological issues and change behavior, art can be a useful tool. Because art is inherently visual, it attracts attention and can involve members of the public in ecological issues of which they might not be aware or about which they might not care otherwise.

Artistic practices used in unexpected places and ways can frame ecological systems, drawing individuals in and causing them to notice and care about specific elements of those ecologies. Art projects and education can be used to bring different kinds of people together to talk about ecological issues and to inspire public action on these issues. Artistic practices can make ecological issues accessible and interesting in a way that science cannot. Art projects and projects using artistic strategies can serve as a means by which a community can consider and examine its identity. Most of all, art is often a problem-solving practice, and it can provide new perspectives on current concerns such as pollution, waste management, recycling, resource management, sustainable development, and endangered species.

All of the subjects of the case studies in this document bring these issues, usually marginalized at the fringes of public awareness -- because of collective shame, compartmentalized professional practices, neglect, or ignorance -- into the very core of our society; and art is a key component of this shift in perspective. The success of these projects, organizations, and programs depends on the participation of the public and the public's willingness to change its actions.

These case studies show that partnerships with policy makers, local governments, nonprofits, scientists, schools, and businesses are also of paramount importance. They all look at familiar things -- pollution, trash, public space -- in new ways that seem to contradict the conventional wisdom in those fields. By employing a creative perspective and sharing that with the public, they also empower others to see them, enabling radical change and helping to ensure a better future. Art is clearly an important component of an environmentally healthy society, and it is time that we as a society recognize that it should be a central component of any holistic perspective and progressive action. We must change our relationship to the environment before it disappears, and art is a necessary tool in this process.

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Works Cited

Websites

AMD&ART. http://www.amdandart.org/
Art From Scrap. Community Environmental Council. http://www.communityenvironmentalcouncil.org/artfromscrap/.

Kobayashi, Yutaka. Homepage. http://greenarts.net/

Lacy, Suzanne. Homepage. www.suzannelacy.com/

"Municipal Solid Waste." United States Environmental Protection Agency. http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/facts.htm

Prigann, Herman. Homepage. http://www.terranova.ws

SF Recycling & Disposal Artist-in-Residence Program. Norcal Waste Systems, Inc. http:// www.sunsetscavenger.com/artist_in_residence.htm

3 Rivers 2nd Nature. Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts. http://3r2n.cfa.cmu.edu/

Interviews

Collins, Tim. Phone interview. 13 February 2005.
Comp, T. Allan. Phone interview. 24 February 2005.
Fresina, Paul. Phone interview. 9 February 2005.
Johanson, Patricia. Phone interview. 13 February 2005.
Lacy, Suzanne. Personal interview. 23 February 2005.
Leonard, Mark. Phone interview. 11 February 2005.
Sanchez, Cay. Phone interview. 11 February 2005.
Steinman, Susan Leibovitz. Phone interview. 2 March 2005.

Text Sources

Cerny, Charlene. "American Adhocism: Wasting, Saving, and the Aesthetics of Conspicuous Recycling." Recycled Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap. Ed. Charlene Cerny and Suzanne Seriff. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996. 30-45.
Cieri, Marie, and Claire Peeps, eds. Activists Speak Out: Reflections on the Pursuit of Change in America. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

Dissanayake, Ellen. "Very Like Art: Self-Taught Art from an Ethological Perspective." Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Ed. Charles Russell. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2001. 35-46.

------. What is Art For? Seattle: U of Washington P, 1988.

Erzen, Jale. "Ecology, art, ecological aesthetics." Ecological Aesthetics. Strelow 22-25.

Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.

Johanson, Patricia. Art and Survival: Creative Solutions to Environmental Problems.

Ed. Caffyn Kelley. Gallerie: Women Artists' Monographs. March 1992. North Vancouver: Gallerie, 1992.

------. "Beyond Choreography: Shifting Experiences in Uncivilized Gardens." Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion.

Ed. Michel Conan. Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 24. Dumbarton Oaks: Washington, D.C., 2003. 75-102.

------. "Fecund Landscapes: Art and Process in Public Parks." Landscape and Art No. 29 (Summer 2003): 28-29.

Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.

Lippard, Lucy R. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press, 1997.

------. "Looking Around: Where We Are, Where We Could Be." Lacy 114-130.

Lipton, Amy, and Patricia Watts. "Ecoart: ecological art." Ecological Aesthetics. Strelow 90-94..56

Miles, Malcolm. Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Prakash, Madhu Suri, and Hedy Richardson. "From Human Waste to Gift of Soil." Ecological Education in Action: On Weaving Education, Culture, and the Environment. Ed. Gregory A. Smith and Dilafruz R. Williams. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. 65-68.

Spaid, Sue. Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies. Cincinnati: The Contemporary Arts Center, 2002.

Strelow, Heike, ed. Ecological Aesthetics: Art in Environmental Design: Theory and Practice. Trans. Michael Robinson. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser, 2004.

------. "A dialogue with ongoing processes." Ecological Aesthetics. Strelow 10-15.

Footnotes

8 An early effort of this kind was Revival Field, in which the artist Mel Chin, working with the scientist Dr. Rufus Chaney, successfully addressed the pollution in a St. Paul, Minnesota brownfield with plants that can absorb and process large quantities of heavy metals. This project has already been discussed in detail by numerous authors, including Cieri and Peeps, Finkelpearl, Lippard, Miles, and Spaid.
9 3 Rivers 2 nd Nature (3R2N) is an interdisciplinary project too complex to address adequately in this limited format. Initiated by the artists Reiko Goto and Tim Collins, working through the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, 3R2N is an outgrowth of the artists' earlier project Nine Mile Run, and "addresses the meaning, form and function of the three rivers and fifty-three streams of Allegheny County in Western Pennsylvania" (http://3r2n.cfa.cmu.edu/ ). This project deserves a longer examination than what I can give it here, but provides an exciting glimpse of the possibilities in this field. 3R2N and Nine Mile Run are also featured in Spaid and in Strelow.
10AMD&ART began remediation at another site, Dark Shade Creek in Central City, Pennsylvania, but that was taken over by the EPA soon after.
11 Comp bases this claim on the 2002 SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry dissertation of Susan Thering, Documenting the Community Capacity Building Benefits of Participatory Community Design and Planning and Developing Indicators of Community Capacity, for which the AMD&ART project in Vintondale was used as a case study.
12 AMD&ART is not the only organization promoting this idea: Seen&Unseen, a project in England managed by the nonprofit Helix Arts, also seeks to help communities address water pollution using both scientists and artists (http://www.seen-unseen.com/ ). Keepers of the Waters is a nonprofit organization that provides an online network created "to inspire and promote projects that combine art, science and community involvement to restore, preserve and remediate water sources" (http://www.keepersofthewaters.org/ ).
13 Johanson has made numerous large-scale artworks that incorporate sculptural and ecological components in the U.S. and in Africa, South America, and Asia. This is not meant to be an exhaustive study of her work, but a brief examination of three U.S.-sited artworks that are designed for the public use and to restore damaged ecosystems.
14 The lagoon is also called Leonhardt Lagoon after Dorothea Leonhardt, in whose name a foundation made a large gift to the project.
15 Johanson cites numerous public meetings where both members of the public and park rangers vocalized their support for her plans.
16 It was still a controversial idea-again, mostly with the other members of the design team-a few years later in Phoenix, when two artists were made a part of the team designing the Twenty-Seventh Avenue Solid Waste Management Facility and Recycling Center, discussed in Chapter 1.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone I interviewed, universally gracious and generous: Tim Collins, T. Allan Comp, Paul Fresina, Patricia Johanson, Suzanne Lacy, Mark Leonard, Cay Sanchez, and Susan Leibovitz Steinman.

A big thank you to Public Art Studies faculty, students, and alumni who offered endless helpful (and life-saving!) tips on reading, writing, and thinking, as well as lots of much-needed support-especially Anne Bray, Dawn Finley, Jeannie Olander, Kendra Stanifer, Sarah Welch, Holly Willis, and Heidi Zeller.

Thanks to Kenny Berger and Jenn "Goiter" League for great editorial input; to Jud Fine-and to Holly Willis and Anne Bray-for serving on my committee; and to my family and friends for support and love.

Finally, thanks to KCRW-Jason Bentley of "Metropolis" and Raul Campos of "Nocturna," above all-for the rad tunes that so often fueled my writing.

A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES May 2005

Copyright 2005 Sarah E. Graddy (sgraddy@gmail.com)
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Creative and Green: Art, Ecology, and Community

by Sarah E. Graddy

Introduction

This is part of the Toolbox for Communities

This thesis takes a takes a thorough look at several innovative projects in the United States which combine art and ecology in a community context. Creative thinkers, working with organizations or on their own, have created unique programs and artworks that show the potential art has to creatively transform problems into opportunities.

Table of Contents:

Abstract
Introduction
Chapter 1: Art in Waste Management and Recycling Education
Chapter 2: Art in Land and Water Remediation
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Abstract

This thesis explores the role of art in encouraging ecological awareness and activism in members of the public. Art is examined as a problem-solving process that can facilitate a positive shift in the relationship Americans have with ecology; six different case studies (organizations, programs, and long-term projects) are used to illuminate ways in which this change can take place.

Chapter 1: Art in Waste Management and Recycling Education, analyzes SF Recycling & Disposal's Artist-in-Residence Program in San Francisco; the Twenty-Seventh Avenue Solid Waste Management Facility and Recycling Center in Phoenix; and Art From Scrap, a materials reuse center in Santa Barbara.
Chapter 2: Art in Land and Water Remediation, analyzes AMD&ART, a nonprofit organization in Vintondale, Pennsylvania; three artworks by Patricia Johanson; and Beneath Land and Water, a public art project in Elkhorn City, Kentucky.

Introduction

In the catalogue Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies that accompanied an exhibit by the same name at Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center in 2002, Sue Spaid writes that "the term ecovention (ecology + invention) describes an artist-initiated project that employs an inventive strategy to physically transform a local ecology" (1). But simply transforming a local ecology is not enough -- we must work to transform our relationship to ecology. We are accustomed to thinking of (and idealizing or demonizing) nature as separate from us, but we are a part of it. In the United States, and in many other industrialized countries, we live in a society where most of us do not grow our own food, we don't make most of what we wear or use as furniture, and we drop our trash into bins without thinking about where it goes.

Ecology is the science of systems-how natural systems work, how living organisms interact with their environment, how organisms interact in relationship to other organisms. Every organism on the planet is a part of an ecological system, and humans are no exception. We just don't pay attention to how we fit into the larger scheme of things. Sometimes we notice -- perhaps when a ship full of trash is turned away from a port because the people who live there no longer want to accept the burden of other communities' refuse, or in other extreme situations. But mostly, we are content to live without thinking about the real impact of our daily actions. Most of us understand that we are in danger of using up all of our natural resources -- forests, clean air, freshwater, fossil fuels -- but find it difficult to know what to do about it.

In this era of widespread budget shortages, environmental policy regressions, ever-expanding bureaucracy, and special interest influence, it is unlikely that the U.S. government will soon begin to aggressively encourage, promote, or sponsor ecologically forward strategies for new development, building renovations, public space, and waste disposal. Our government is already a disappointment in conservation -- cars are not required to be fuel-efficient due to automobile manufacturers' lobbies; the United States remains the only industrialized nation (besides Australia) to refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which will limit worldwide greenhouse gas emissions; and U.S. national forests are quickly being sold off to paper companies. The planet's climate is changing rapidly and disastrously, and numerous animal and plant species disappear every day.

"It has fallen to local people to protect local places," Lucy Lippard writes (The Lure of the Local 170). Ultimately, the burden of addressing enormous ecological problems has been ceded to our local communities. While local efforts can be limited -- it takes billions of dollars to restructure a car-centric city around public transportation, for example -- they can make inroads to changing citizens' perceptions about the use of space and resources in their communities. As their perceptions change, these residents will begin to incorporate more sustainable practices into their daily lives. We need creative solutions to these problems that implicate us all, solutions that change the way we see the world so that we can understand the impact we have on it.

Art-making has always been a community endeavor -- and it still is, in many societies. Ellen Dissayanake, exploring the "ethology" (the evolution and development of behavior) of art-making, gives context for her work:

The majority of preindustrial societies do not generally have an independent concept of (or word for) art -- even though people in these societies do engage in making and enjoying one or more of the arts and have words that refer to carving, decorating, being playful, singing, imitating. (What is Art For? 35)

That is because what we call "art" is a part of most, if not all, aspects of people's lives all over the world; it is not considered a separate behavior or occupation, whereas, as Amy Lipton and Patricia Watts write, "Western culture has inherited a belief system which places art and the artist in a position of uniqueness, separate from the rest of society" (90). Intricate ceremonies, songs, and decorated objects are closely associated with homemaking, eating, hunting, harvesting, birthing, and marriage. Dissayanake avers that art-making, a uniquely human behavior, comes from the need to "make special," where the everyday is made important, or "what may be called such things as magic or beauty or spiritual power or significance" (92). "Making special" is a way of ascribing meaning and order to the world. Because, from this viewpoint, art is a fundamental and universal human behavior -- like speech and play -- it follows that involving the public in the "making special" of the materials involved in everyday behaviors can be a way to bring unfamiliar concepts to the community. In other words, if it is up to communities to alter their own environmentally destructive habits, art can be a way to help make these changes, by enabling people to see all everyday acts as worthy of special consideration. Lippard puts it another way:

Art itself, as a dematerialized spark, an act of recognition, can be a catalyst in all areas of life once it breaks away from the cultural refinement of the market realm. Redefinition of art and artist can help heal a society that is alienated from its life forces. ("Looking Around" 126)
Recognizing art as a useful and necessary behavior is a way for us to understand humanity's relationship to the rest of the world, and to attempt to restore our role in the cycles that envelop us, unrecognized, all the time.

Certain progressive institutions and individuals have begun this process of incorporating art into their approaches to ecological preservation and restoration. By utilizing art as a problem-solving perspective and process, these nonprofit organizations, city governments, or private companies are helping to instigate an enormous shift in public consciousness about and interaction with the ecological systems of which we are a part. The programs, organizations, and projects discussed here are disparate in their scopes, agendas, sizes, and even sectors but can all be looked to as models for creating a powerful nexus of art, ecology, and community that can change the world -- one acre, institution, family, or city at a time.

The following are the criteria for the subjects of this paper's case studies: 1) If an organization, its primary focus is on creating ecologically-minded activities or space for the general public in which art is an important component (or it has a specific program for this purpose, in which case the program, and not the organization, is examined); 2) If a project, it must be long-term (defined here as several years in duration or longer), and once begun, does not rely on the specific intelligence, input, or creativity of any single individual; 3) Whether an organization, program, or project, it must be designed with the intention of involving the general public in ecological awareness and/or activism in an effort to influence behavior.[1]

We cannot continue living the way we do now indefinitely: drastic change is needed. Art is an effective and powerful way to bring ecological education and awareness to the public. As Heike Strelow asserts, "It is essential for artists and other culturally creative individuals to be drawn into social discussions and design processes if there is to be a theoretical and practical change in the search for a viable future" (13). If creative members of society can participate meaningfully in realms with which art seems to have little to do, we can change our destructive practices and begin to see resources in a new way.

Footnotes

1 A common association of ecology and art is what is commonly called land art, earthworks, or environmental art. This work, created mostly in the 1960s and '70s by such artists as Robert Morris and Robert Smithson, tends to be large-scale, static sculpture; artists such as Christo and Andy Goldsworthy also make what is sometimes termed environmental art. Readers might note that other artists, such as Helen and Newton Harrison, Krzyzstof Wodiczko, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Buster Simpson, Stephen Sonfist, Jo Hanson, and Dominique Mazeaud, make or have made works that touch upon many of the same themes that I explore in my thesis.
This thesis does not include these works for one or more of the following reasons: they tend not to engage with the ecology (the trophic, or solar energy-based life cycles) of a place but instead typically highlight some aspect of the environment, usually largely aesthetic; are traditionally completely dependent on one person's particular vision; do not, in general, encourage or inspire wide-spread ecological awareness and activism; and are often temporary, or exist only hypothetically. Although several artists are included in this document, their work is examined for its larger social and ecological implications, not for its aesthetic qualities.
This document does not look at art as a product to be evaluated, but instead as a process intrinsic to the human perspective, and ultimately one that belongs in all aspects of our lives. Some readers might take issue with what I have chosen to include and exclude; here I would like to point out that I offer this document not as a complete survey, but instead a preliminary exploration of what is possible in ecology and community when art is involved, and what we can hope for -- and work toward -- in the future.
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