3: Art and Ecology
Dear Art and Ecology Cohort,
Speculating on what the Art and Ecology program could entail has already become a generative and rewarding process. It has been helpful to organize some of the central themes that emerge for me in the interstices of these two capacious categories. I’ve formulated a collection of open-ended questions that I hope will help reveal a location and disposition in a discourse. From there I will endeavor to concisely sketch out a project proposal for my time at Goldsmiths and conclude with a short story.
Questions in relation to the Art and Ecology MA at Goldsmiths:
Do researched-based, open-ended, discursive and often archive-oriented projects belong to a nascent ecological turn? Even when they remain constrained to primarily anthropocentric concerns? E.g. Kate Crawford and Vladen Joler’s Anatomy of an AI, Taryn Simons philosophical and lyrical ethnographies, The Atlas Group, Jill Magid’s Proposal, The Archive of Modern Conflict, James Bridle’s New Aesthetic, etc.
What degree do we include technology in our conception of ecology (constitutively and analytically), as data driven scientism becomes the dominant epistemological mode of neoliberal capitalism?
How do we evaluate the compelling ecologically-themed work of artists like Pierre Huyghe, Adrián Villar Rojas, Anicka Yi, and Trevor Paglen while considering the constructedness of the discrete artist by market forces and the inextricable connectedness of the expansive bodies of work they co-determine? Are individual or discrete artists and works even compatible with an ecological art?
How do we respond to the excesses of allegedly virtuous art (as critically outlined by Claire Bishop in Artificial Hells) that flood the cultural spheres? How do we bring into sharper focus and critically engage remarkable works and constellative horizons that evolve the discourse and canon?
Can the juridical imperative of evaluation and the very idea of a canon be separated from a situatedness in the unfolding western colonization process?
What are the aesthetic dimensions that emerge in support and resistance to massive infrastructural projects like the sinocentric Belt and Road initiative, state surveillance networks like Skynet, or the neoliberal proliferation of Special Economic Zones?
How are archives like Arte Útil expanding to include less anthropocentric categories of oppressed life?
How do we navigate the divergent turns of cultural studies (e.g. Stuart Hall), with ecological deanthropocentrizing (e.g. OOO and posthumanities) from the well worn path of Marxian economic determinism (e.g. David Harvey).
Do we approach something like the ecology-as-intersectionality T.J Demos theorizes?
How do we consider and reproduce politically applied aesthetics from interdisciplinary collectives like Forensic Architecture?
What place remains for art that exists beyond the ideological criterion of socioecological efficacy in the context of planetary civil war and mass extinction?
Does a platform like e-flux signal a nascent cosmopolitanism shaped by aestheticoethical relations embedded in and working against the markets that sustain it?
To what classes does cosmopolitanism belong and how do we reconcile the utopianism of biennielization with the ecological implications of its production and distribution? What are we to make of the co-option of concepts like Glissant’s mondialité to account for a spectrum of differentiated and often questionable, spectacularized exhibition-making?
How do we meaningfully address and intervene in the privatization of Space and the technophilic libertarian hubris that underwrites it? (e.g. SpaceX and Blue Origin) What do we make of the proliferation of ideologically divergent brain trusts at work on planetary scale anthropogenic technological mitigation efforts (e.g. Terraforming at the Strelka Institute)?
Program Prospects:
I’m interested in developing and rehearsing what I’m provisionally calling transmedial contemplative zones. Immersive spaces of audio-visual-somatic-textual co-consideration with performance elements and adjacent discursive containers.
I’m interested in researching and compiling an audiovisual archive of interspecies kinship and poetic relation. This will consist of images, lectures, sounds, compositions and texts pulled from the flattening ontology of digital media and remediated / performed extemporaneously in multi channel audiovisual environments in relation to objects and subjects. Perhaps in the grey zone between the black box and the white cube or in less traditional venues like community centers, churches, vacant commercial spaces and pavilions.
I’m interested in being in London and participating in the Goldsmiths community and its greater ecology. The material and temporal resources that the program provides will give me the opportunity to compile and rehearse the archive. I’m thrilled by the prospect of being in dialogue with a cohort of companions engaged in mutual concerns.
Short Story:
There once was a person who lived in a Tuff Shed, in a national park, in a failed state. A Tuff Shed is a prefabricated container that is procured in the Storage and Organization section of The Home Depot. An artist and retired botanist had let them live on their land in a Tuff Shed for a tenable exchange. The land was located in a desirable place near the ocean and the prospect of great financial wealth. The person in the Tuff Shed was unconvinced of their personhood, the systems that created it, and believed it was ok to live in a small shed with an abundance of time and the ability to choose how to use it. They used their time in relation to their daughter and other people they loved. They used the library to borrow books that they found interesting. They looked and listened to sounds and images using the computer and the Internet. They tried to get into the ocean on most days. They enjoyed walking in trees and looking at the sky. They liked to follow ineffable feelings towards unplanned occasions. They liked going to outdoor markets where people offered things they helped produce and collect. In the Tuff Shed were a few small, beautiful objects. Stones and shells imprinted with previous incarnations of life. Small bowls thrown from clay earth. Slices of wood, copper vessels and beeswax candles. It smelled softly of sage, eucalyptus, salt water and fermented bread. There was a large, well-used, sonorous bowl, often filled with chicories.
One day the person brought home an air plant from the farmers market and put it in the Tuff Shed. They didn’t really see a need to put plants in their home because there were already so many around. The air plant vendor promised it needed almost nothing to keep its life and beauty. Once in the Tuff Shed the plant became sad, so the person put it outside to see if it would be happier. A few days later they went to gather up the plant and with the slightest intention it came undone, like a pollinating dandelion through their digits.
Dear Pawel,
These winds! I have felt unmoored and aimless, though unusually productive. It’s 4:33 in the morning. The spectacle of inauguration awaits with all the manifold threats of violence.
I’m writing because at some point, which I can no longer locate, I began to realize I was at work on an exhibition I affectionately refer to as Peter, Pawel, Paul and Mary. Bodhisattva Peter from the cooperative, your mythology, a sculptor I never knowingly met that passed away a few years ago and Mary with the greenhouse on the Mesa who grows orchids.
Peter writes and maintains trails, a leukocyte of sorts, not so busy at work on estimating an ideal value between 0 and 1 for whatever is at hand. He is a connoisseur of public transportation, redwood groves and Miyazaki films. He shares his insights generously in lyrical epistles, casual asides, children’s blocks and window displays made with props he finds in the plaza. He likes to claim he only keeps one song in him at a time, and I’m not sure that’s true. I have the impression that he patiently waits for what he needs to arrive at his oceans door. Of course these are simply my observations.
I’ve always loved your work and how it lives and changes, taking on new shades and valances. I can never quite remember the details. There is a theme of repetition with variation, which is the theme of life, no? I seem to remember that after a long stay at a European artist residency, an incensed administration demanded to know what you produced, and you offered that you may or may not have erased one of the lines on a Sol LeWitt drawing. I seem to remember some great feats of athleticism. Swimming to Alcatraz accompanied by a brass band playing in a boat. Something with Marina Abramovic, Michael Jordan, and a basketball hoop in a Church. An historic event you recreated that involved shooting a gun on a roof on a certain time of a certain day. A hotel room in Cairo and something to do with James Lee Byers. Muscular youthful works and how we tend to subdue and diffuse over time. I hear coyotes howling as I write this. I loved your staging of a Tadeusz Kantor happening with Stephen conducting the ocean and some other significant correlates; boys on motorbikes, girls on horseback, newspaper planting, a recreation of a famous painting made with driftwood, family and a skinny greyhound. You asked me to read something into a bullhorn, it was windy, I can’t recall what it said. I still have the postcard you sent me afterwards, it’s somewhere framed in storage. I remember going to the farmstand and seeing a neat horizon of drawings made from single hairs from your daughter’s head. The titles repeating with slight variations, a music stand with someone’s poem on it.
After Paul died I started hearing his name. I went to the library to print out a draft of something and each time Jane tried to print it for me, a picture of Paul would come out in its place. I began acquainting myself with his work. Big playful things that made me feel like a child in their presence. I helped his wife prepare some pieces to go to a storage in New Mexico. His studio was beautiful and I wanted to turn it into an unusual kind of museum. I remember tender drawings of the young men he shared rooms with on a military ship. I remember these great voluminous hanging sculptures. I remember the feeling that a force from beyond the language I have to articulate it was at work, intervening in my rhythms. I remember this funny realization that leaving a body doesn’t mean enlightenment and as though it’s from the thralls and inertias of so many fleeting desires that we emerge.
Every year Mary opens her greenhouse once or twice. These occasions are always wonderful, with a softly lit stream of familiar faces, the hum of voice, the warmth of life given in conditions of fascination and attention. Is art not the insistence on the conditions for its flourishing? In and against what Susan Howe describes as the immense indifference of history and the crushing hold of memories abiding present. I’d like to invite Suzanne to give a concert on her Buchla. Perhaps she could compose something over a season with the plants and Mary. I imagine an afternoon concert, all of us there with our kin.
I suppose we could call this [plants, proteins, leukocytes, trails, asides, synthesizers, driftwood, music stands, greyhounds, follicles, rhythms, winds] Peter, Pawel, Paul and Mary (Suzanne, Susan, Miyazaki, Lucrecia, Tadeusz, Buchla, Sol and Perry, et al., et al.)
I’ll write these names in one space so that it gradually forms a gradation of darkness. Lucrecia Martel thinks this is a better epistemological metaphor than light, so that we can grope our way without the smugness of those that see.
Dear Agnes,
I’m writing to you from the desert where I’ve come to see your uncle Aidan. He’s doing good after some difficult years. We’ve been having a great time together. Walks through plazas, talking with people, eating slowly, looking for treasures, collecting thoughts and images. There are so many rocks here in the desert, lol. I didn’t used to give much attention to interesting rocks but now because of you, I do. You are very seriously into rocks right now and I’m going to use this letter film essay thing as a time capsule for you. Since time washes away memory and erases what came before I’ll preserve this little eddie for you to visit and reflect on. You and Julie just shaved your heads. You did it in solidarity with her and also because you like the way it looks. Your both are very into rocks and studying them with a new age bent I find mostly endearing and benign. This magic flavored geological turn in you pleases me and seems like an appropriate preoccupation for the anthropocene. Yes, lets figure out ways to re-enchant the planet...
I remember an earlier open letter I wrote to you where I expressed gratitude for you helping me see heat again. More specifically, the waves of heat that come off objects. I had stopped seeing this beautiful phenomenon through the blunting attrition of adulthood and the visual pollution of capitalist realism. I suppose something similar happened with rocks. There are sometimes days, at home, when I like to comb the beach, maybe after a storm or on a muted overcast afternoon. I love smooth stones with thin lines running through them like tributaries. I also, for whatever reason, find comfort in sorting through a large volume of objects and finding a few that I think are beautiful.
Here in the desert there’s a great appreciation for rocks and people love them in different ways. The first rock shop I went into was called God’s Art and the owner and his daughter tolerated me FaceTiming you while we gushed over the collection. There is something awesome in facing such an amazing display of deep time. These words ‘awesome’ and ‘amazing’ seem cheap now because they’re used so often. I was wearing a t-shirt with a small rip in the neck and the shopkeeper told me my bra strap was showing. I offhandedly asked him some questions about carbon dating. There was one rock that I thought was very beautiful and he wouldn’t sell it to me. He said it had come in the first collection of rocks that he bought and I inferred it meant a lot to him. They got a look of you and Julie with your shaved heads asking for terminated rainbow fluorite wands and told me they were closing up for the day. I left with your wand. A few days later I found another rock shop after missing a GPS direction and following a hand painted sign down a long unpaved road to a huge sprawling outdoor spread of stones. The shopkeeper was the same tone as the mountains and wearing a t-shirt that read ‘science doesn’t care what you believe.’ He had a terrific old golden cat who talked a lot and I filled a large flat rate shipping box with unpolished geodes and other things that quickened my heart. Afterwards he gave us directions to a local swimming hole.
In this desert there are people who keep surprising me. Their familiar, decorated exteriors belying beautiful interiority. There is something about these split open geodes that makes the world feel precious and unknowable. It also brings up in me a kind of obsessive feeling that feels important to constrain. A small feeling that I imagine if left unchecked, could develop into serious imbalances. There was a night when Aidan and I slept out under a large sky on top of a plateau. I had been sorting through stones all day and I began combing the expansive desert. Aidan started laughing realizing I’d become caught in a kind of sisyphean loop. I found a shard of pottery showing the intention of someone’s hand and a few stones that beautifully miniaturized their surroundings, little eonic slow lives. The following morning the shard of poetry leapt out of my hand. I felt an acute sense that these objects might want to remain here. It came over me strongly and I returned the pieces of earth. This release felt like good practice. And also somehow sharpened both the significance of the moment and the memory. It was a feeling memory to release, rather than an object memory to possess. Like giving a sweater to a naked man having a psychotic episode in a violent city. It occurs to me that I’m inscribing these thoughts with devices that violently reconfigure rare earths.
In this desert there are little towns around plazas and big arcades where groups of people show their conception of aestheticized value. Little stalls like shifting installations, cosmologies. I like the word cosmology here, even though it might be a stretch. Its etymology is kosmos ‘world’ and logia ‘study’ or ‘discourse’. This is what I love most about looking at old things, the world-study of it. The material relational discursivity one could say, or maybe the protest against forgetting. My friend Shao said of my writing that it’s like the way people arrange fruits and vegetables on a blanket in the market, or the way a child arranges all their toys to share with a friend. This might be the nicest response that I’ve ever received.
We stop and chat with people, telling jokes and stories. I get the sense that people who collect things and arrange them in meaningful configurations are doing it for many different and unknowable reasons. We help a young couple with a baby swaddled to their chest carry a telescope and plinth to their car. We meet an older couple with a dog who is a mix of border collie and heeler like Fidel. I showed them pictures and we exchanged numbers to keep In touch and maybe visit again. The outdoor swap meet happens at a place called Peddlers Pass—which I declare an imaginary Johnny Cash song and made up lyrics for throughout the day. I wish I could have made it an imaginary Roy Orbison song, but can’t pull off his inimitable vibe. It’s a dizzying crossroads of people sharing ideas and objects against the reverberating violence of the unfolding settler colonial project. The land seems soaked in blood and radiating with uranium. People cautiously gather in the scaffolds of this fleeting market baring their prejudices, their weapons and the objects that they imbue with value. Veterans and their therapy birds.
Small ensembles perform tribal rituals to mixed results. Sandy tells me Larimar takes on the patterns of the waters that surround them in the Caribbean. And her ex boyfriend is a meteorite dealer. She shows me a cut of meteorite with thick shiny veins of silvery metal running through it. She also showed me the circular bits of earth that harden into glass when a meteorite strikes. When it’s windy the pieces are long and when it’s windless they’re circular. I found a couple photographs nearby and a stone tool with a beautiful lichen etching. The collector describes it as desert varnish. I appreciated it but it didn’t feel right for me to take. Aidan is living with a kind, retired school teacher in a home filled with plants and interesting objects. The road back to his house from Peddlers Pass is blighted with carcinogenic structures and coarse language. Cracker Barrel and Dick’s, Reverse Mortgages and Flags Galore. In a fleet of roaring, air conditioned cars, the language runs over my bare legs like calloused hands.
I’m not optimistic, but I steel myself like some half deluded Bodhisattva attempting to midwife quotidian moments of beauty, humor, and kindness. I’m so thankful for you and so curious to see where your interests lead you. I try not to intervene too much in your process and when I do, I temper it with uncertainty. A couple months into your study of rocks you called me to say you had something important to tell me. Through small screens we looked at each other and you demanded my complete attention. You had discovered your spirit guide and it was my mother, Pat, who died before you were born. You said you have been speaking with her and that she has been helping you. That she is protecting you and that she is very funny. That you had seen her dancing in your dreams and had made pictures of it. Through your fascination with stones you found Pat, who is already a part of both of us. I’m so excited to see you and see what comes next. I love you all the way.
