EcoArt Roots: Is EcoArt new? Where did it come from?

EcoArt practice is relatively “new” art historically—about three decades in development and evolving rapidly. But its philosophical roots reach back in the western tradition to Aristotle at least.

The rapidly developing current practice of EcoArt springs from, and combines, aspects of three main contemporary art movements: environmental art, activist art (or protest art) and community engagement or “animation” art, all of which emerged in the US at roughly the same time. EcoArt has found a fertile matrix where these movements overlap; where a progressive art “in the public interest” emerges that stresses community involvement, the elevation of process over product and a vision of art as a path toward participatory democracy.

Relationship between EcoArt and major predecessor art forms/movements. Map: Sam Bower, greenmuseum.org

Environmental art

Environmental art is perceived today by most commentators as an umbrella category, encompassing a wide variety of practices. The practice is worldwide and highly diverse in thematic content and methods. New approaches and genres emerge frequently.

The beginnings of environmental art have been traced to the 1960s’ questioning of all societal forms, especially the norm of exhibiting “art” in an “artistic” venue (commercial gallery or museum).

Primary examples of pioneering environmental art practice that moved out of the “white cube” gallery and museum space would include Robert Smithson’s “earth” or “land” art like Spiral Jetty (1970), located on the Great Salt Lake in Utah and Christo/Jeanne Claude’s  Surrounded Islands (1980-1983),  in Miami’s Biscayne Bay.

Newton and Helen Harrison’s Survival Piece: Portable Orchard (1972) converted indoor art spaces into places where visitors could experience natural plant growth directly, and become aware of how divorced most urban dwellers are from the natural processes of farming that feed us.

Spurred by the stirring call to action of US government marine biologist Rachel Carson’s classic plea for sane environmental policy entitled Silent Spring (1962); the burgeoning environmental activism of such groups as Greenpeace (founded in 1971); the development of philosophical precepts of “social ecology” and “deep ecology”; and their own raised consciousnesses, certain artists began to make works that either demonstrated direct amelioration of a particular environmental degradation problem, sought to publicize it, or both.

Examples include:

Alan Sonfist, Reforestation project in New York City, Time Landscapes, Greenwich Village, NYC (1978)

Patricia Johanson Leonhardt Lagoon (1981-82)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles Flow City (1983-present)

Mel Chin Revival Field (1991)

“Ecovention” and EcoArt

By 2002, co-curators Amy Lipton and Sue Spaid produced the landmark exhibition Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. The curators sought to showcase actions they dubbed ecoventions to distinguish them from Earthworks, man-made incursions on typically-vast land areas largely uninhabited by people; environmental art, nature employed as art’s medium; or works that document or highlight threatened ecosystems.
Ecovention mostly featured recent works, plus Jackie Brookner’s Laughing Brook, which was only recently completed six years after the Ecoventions exhibitions came down. To accompany the exhibition’s current and historical content, twelve artists produced site-specific ecoventions in and around the Cincinnati area. Lipton and Spaid consider collaborative ecoventions indicative of artists’ intentions to curtail man-made obstacles, rather than to discuss or neglect them as past artists have, or to remedy specific problems as scientists must. According to Spaid and Lipton, such artists’ actions resolve ecological situations either by publicizing/ monitoring/rethinking problematic conditions or by engaging direct and/or indirect ameliorable/restorative practices.

Examples of works considered “ecoventions” include:

Jackie Brookner’s biosculptures that utilize certain kinds of particularly hardy mosses and other plants to clean water of heavy metals, phosphorus, nitrogen and other pollutants found in stormwater and agricultural runoff. The biosculpture pictured is one element of an extensive public park renovation-as-EcoArt Project located in West Palm Beach, Florida’s Dreher Park. Other elements, co-designed by Brookner and EcoArtist Angelo Ciotti include reusing “dirty” dirt excavated to create an additional flood-prevention lake in the Park for massive planted earthen mounds reminiscent of native american shell mounds found throughout the Everglades, a “learning garden” of plants and trees either native to the area or naturalized by successive waves of immigrants, many with properties useful for food or other human needs.

AMD & Art After

AMD & Art Before

AMD&Art (Acid Mine Drainage and Art), a nearly decade-long “ecovention” that transformed a closed down coal mining site in Western Pennsylvania where acidic water had, for years, been coating plant life with an orange ooze known as acid-mine drainage. The project, complex in the extreme was a vast collaboration between four principals (an industrial historian, a landscape architect, a sculptor and a hydrologist); fourteen funding partners, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Office of Surface Mining, U.S. Forest Service, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Pennsylvania Rural Arts Alliance; and hundreds of volunteers, including local citizens, Americorps and VISTA volunteers. The work is still evolving with three projects completed, and others in several stages of development.

Activist Art:

EcoArt, as EcoArt SoFla defines it, is “activist” in that it engages the public, primarily outside traditional art venues (but also in them), and often in ways that attract media attention; and seeks to bring the “hidden” sources of environmental degradation out into the open. EcoArt often allies itself with the agendas and programs of environmental advocacy and activist organizations, both directly and indirectly.

EcoArt’s roots in activist art practice have also evolved over time, and can also be traced to the ’60s. Many artists claim the “activist” designation for work ranging from the strongly transgressive that tweaks conventional notions of what “art” is, or whose content is aimed at shocking or stunning viewers; to highly didactic forms used in direct action political events.

Examples of Activist Art include:

Bread and Puppet Theater founded in 1962, and continuing in the present, became a fixture of anti-Vietnam War protests and is an early example of direct action activist art. The more “transgressive” type includes many of the works attacked by the religious right wing during the so-called “Culture Wars” of the early 1990s. The work of the “NEA four” — Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes– are prime examples of “transgressive” activist art. The four performance artists addressed, in a most confrontational manner, harsh subject matter such as violence against women and AIDS, in the late 1980s. Their National Endowment for the Arts funding was canceled in 1990 because of right wing lobbying which resulted in Supreme Court action, and led, unfortunately, to the cancellation of NEA’s individual artist grants.

An important example of activist art that continues to the present is the Guerrilla Girls, the self-described “conscience of the art world.” As the group describes their origins: “In 1985, The Museum of Modern Art in New York opened an exhibition titled An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. It was supposed to be an up-to-the minute summary of the most significant contemporary art in the world. Out of 169 artists, only 13 were women. All the artists were white, either from Europe or the US. That was bad enough, but the curator, Kynaston McShine, said any artist who wasn’t in the show should rethink  ‘his’ career. And that really annoyed a lot of artists because obviously the guy was completely prejudiced. Women demonstrated in front of the museum with the usual placards and picket line. Some of us who attended were irritated that we didn’t make any impression on passersby.” From these beginnings as self-appointed affirmative action-ists for women artists, the GGs have moved on to address all kinds of discrimination and injustice inside and outside the art world with acerbic humor and striking graphics wielded in a “guerrilla format” as well as, now, in infiltration of major art venues such as the Venice Biennale in 2006.

A very central book, still a touchstone in defining activist art practice more than a decade after its publication, is the 1995 anthology edited by pioneering activist artist Suzanne Lacy: Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, which documents and champions a strain of activist art that eschews “rant” and embraces dialogue.

EcoArt draws liberally from this tradition.

Community Engagement or “Animation” Art

As defined by the founders of the Community Arts Network, and primary spokespersons for the field, Linda Burnham and Steven Durland, community arts are practiced across a very broad spectrum, “… from the narrowest view of community art as art for social change (activist art that intends to cure social ills) to the broadest view that includes public art (art installed outdoors that intersects with daily community life) and public arts policy (from arts funding to political involvement).”

EASF would expand on this definition by adding the terms “engagement” and “animation” in order to stress the active participation by the public in all phases of the development and implementation of the strategies EcoArt has borrowed from this movement.

Some examples of pioneering community arts projects developed in the US that emphasized “engagement” and “animation” would include:

• Donna Henes, Flashlights, 1986-87, a grass-roots December celebration of light for rural Rosendale, New York, at the time, one of the many small, rural upstate New York communities suffering from decades-long economic deprivation. Flashlights mobilized youth to make 64 foot-wide snowflakes that were hung across downtown streets with webs composed of 6,000 lights—one for every Rosendale citizen, as a “festival of light during times of dark.” The following year, Rosendale brought Henes back to help develop their “light is hope” celebration in which local citizens, clad in Mylar costumes festooned with flashlights accompanied floats designed around the theme of light, peace and community spirit. The town continues a celebration of lights early each December.

• John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), 1985-present. Los Angeles Poverty Department was founded in 1985 by director, actor, activist, and writer John Malpede. At its inception, LAPD was the first performance group in the nation made up principally of homeless people. LAPD is still, after more than 20 years, dedicated to building community on Skid Row, Los Angeles. Since 1985, the company has offered performance workshops that are free and open to the Skid Row community— partnering with numerous social service and advocacy groups.

• Suzanne Lacy, Auto on the Edge of Time, 1993-1995 Working on the theme of battered women, Lacy engaged her usual modus operandi of inviting those whose experiences are central to the work to help create it, including finding the metaphor that gives the theme its power, in this case, the wrecked car, whose scraped paint, dents and broken glass stand in for the battered woman’s body.

• Rick Lowe, Project Rowhouses, 1993-present. This project, keying off a series of 21 aging “shotgun” type row houses in a historically blue collar African American neighborhood of Houston, Texas, the “Third Ward,” was initially conceived to be a place where African American artists could honor the work of artist John Biggers known for his colorful depictions of this very kind of house. Now entering its 15th year, Project Row Houses has become much more than any of the young artists could have imagined when they got permission to create art in one of the abandoned houses in 1993. According to their website, Project Row Houses, now an official 501-c-3 nonprofit has “renovated the initial site of 2500 Holman Street and the twenty-two shotgun houses that sit upon it. Ten of the twenty-two row houses are dedicated to art, photography, and literary projects, which are installed on a rotating six-month basis.

• Daniel J. Martinez’, Consequences of a Gesture, 1993, was one of the events organized as part of Culture in Action in Chicago an ambitious series of public projects aimed at a radical redefinition of “public art.” One of the Culture in Action events was a parade developed by Martinez and others with the participation of 35 community organizations and 1000 Mexican Americans and African Americans, infants to the elderly. The project took two years to develop. The parade went through several ethnically quite different areas of Chicago, a city known for inter-ethnic rivalries and hostilities; and became a touchstone for Chicago community organizers. For information on more recent Martinez work, see stretcher.org.

The best EcoArt projects are fundamentally community mobilization and animation projects. EcoArt SoFla will strongly emphasize this vital element in all new EcoArt projects in which it is a partner. The important promise of EcoArt cannot be accomplished by raising awareness alone. Building community to steward the environment will be crucial to the deep cultural changes necessary to enhance the chances of the planet’s survival—and our own.