Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
- Isaac Amala -
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Juggernaut, 2008; Super 16mm film digitized to HD video projection; 5:44 video loop; installation view, MCASD; courtesy the artist and Max Protetch, New York; photo by Pablo Mason
Diana Thater, RARE, 2008; 16 LCD monitors, DVD player, DVD, existing architecture; 204 x 264 inches; installation view, MCASD; courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York; photo by Pablo Mason
Art and environmental activism have an uneasy relationship. On the surface, the two are made for each other: each movement reached its contemporary state through an insistent, almost suicidal lust for challenging conservative policy; each has endured mainstream scorn only to influence the popular lexicon a generation later; and both have triumphed by outliving their detractors’ sway. There are, of course, crude differences. It is not difficult to conjure a scenario in which art’s reliance on irony, self-questioning and referential loops is pitted against activism’s unwavering sincerity.
Still, I am justified in wondering aloud: Why, in the wake of the Land Art movement, has this marriage been kept upright through depictions of waste and didactic pleas? And how have artists sought to produce work that either addresses or reaches beyond the aestheticization of man-made horrors? These central questions both haunt and inform the exhibition Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet. The show features established artists with serious, socially conscious portfolios under their belts. Each was given carte blanche to generate work during residencies conducted in UNESCO World Heritage sites of their choosing. The endeavor was conceived as a collaboration between Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), and the decades-old conservation organization Rare. This is Rare’s first time working with artists, and its first partnership with arts institutions. And, should we fail to notice, program literature bills it as the first, most expansive use of “contemporary art to investigate the changing nature of some of the most biodiverse regions on earth and the communities that inhabit those regions.”
Both Diana Thater and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle approached their sites by mining the issues of perspective that inherently complicate their shared discipline: video. As Thater traveled through South Africa’s iSimangaliso Wetland Park, and Manglano-Ovalle through the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in California, each captured deceptively straightforward material—an effort the latter describes as a “gesture to turn the gaze from the natural to the cultural.” This gesture directed Manglano-Ovalle’s lens away from the reserve’s whale mating site to the neighboring salt flats featured in his two videos. While the camera remains motionless in Guerrero Negro as two hands eclipse the landscape with a color chart, in Juggernaut, it pans across brackish waste until the shadow of a seemingly endless mining truck rolls overhead. Its hulk is unknowable, pregnant with infernal weight. Both works bookend the artist’s self-proclaimed interest in conflating overwhelming institutions, linking the enormity of our industrial presence with the vastness of our surroundings and pursuit of comprehension through a medium that renders its subjects “less real.”
For Thater, the taping of RAREx was conducted from the vantage point of a road used by tourists constantly traipsing through the park. Her footage includes the typical trappings of an African vacation: rhinos and elephants, a steady line of safari-goers’ slow-moving vehicles and a camera afflicted with a serious case of the shakes. Through the merciless use of zoom and auto-focus, dizzy viewers are to understand that there is more than just a Brechtian push-and-pull going on here. The final product—displayed in the artist’s signature arrangement of closely hung monitors—acts as a foil to generations of televised nature programs, highlighting, via its wonkiness, the cultural filters that shape our conceptions of the wild.
If there is any corresponding motion sickness in Marcos Ramírez ERRE’s work, it is from the relentless velocity of development occurring in China’s Three Parallel Rivers region, a rural area threatened by the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam. ERRE worked with local carpenters to build an ornate wall, embedded on each side with monitors depicting quiet scenes in and around a local home. The piece clearly represents its point of origin: a lonely, sturdy outpost on the verge of being swallowed by larger forces, unsubtly echoed by the space’s spectrum-red walls. Perhaps it is only natural that the installation, despite its beauty and sincerity, struggles to be more than an oppositional shrine.
Mark Dion, Mobile Ranger Library—Komodo National Park, 2008; mixed media; 96 x 84 ½ x 39 ½ inches; fabricated by William Feeney; installation view, MCASD; courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; photo by Pablo Mason
Ann Hamilton, Galápagos chorus, 2008; DVD projection, amplified cone gloves with prerecorded animal sounds, iPods, artist’s books with texts by 8th-grade students from El Colegio Nacional Galápagos; installation view, MCASD; courtesy the artist; photo by Pablo Mason
Others provide antidotes to this predicament. Like ERRE, Rigo 23 collaborated with locals: the Guaraní, Quilombola and Caiçara communities of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest Reserves. In an interview the artist observes that “the allocation of resources directly relates to the idea of sustainability.” This insight led him to consider enormous drains on our own culture’s resources. Using techniques like wattle and daub, weaving and carving, collaborators built exquisite models of a Lockheed Martin nuclear submarine and cluster bomb. This weaponry is fragile, outfitted with people, animals and a plaited arsenal of baskets. The impact offers devastation through effigy—a cross-cultural Gallant to our Goofus.
Dario Robleto’s vessels are equally moving, and a brief glance at his materials offers clues as to why. A Homeopathic Treatment for Human Longing required ephemera as disparate and poetic as willow, tears, glacial runoff and Sylvia Plath’s voice. These delicate things were inspired both directly and indirectly by Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, where the artist drew a whimsical parallel between the park’s rapidly melting glaciers and his frequent investigations of grief and loss. Here, Robleto gently tweaks the death-obsessed vernacular of Victorian fetishes: braided locks of hair of an Ice Age pachyderm, intricate arrangements of shredded audio tape and silk flowers, commemorative plaques paying tribute to the world’s oldest people and species declared un-extinct. By equating the ecological with the funereal, Robleto imparts a reminder as sobering for conservationists as the rest of us: despite our best efforts, change—like death—is an inevitable process.
The remaining artists sought the highest degree of interaction with their surroundings, and it is worth noting that this facet of the exhibition yields both its strongest and weakest work. Mark Dion, for instance, was built for this show. He has spent years parsing the nature of the scientific method and the extent to which it hinders and expands knowledge. As such, it is entirely fitting that he created a supply cart for the severely underfunded park rangers in Indonesia’s Komodo National Park. Mobile Ranger Library is utilitarian but also a tour de force: the cart neatly answers the rangers’ lack of educational and medical materials, and succinctly offers a thorough look at an entire vocation and way of life through an elegant, categorical display. It subtly challenges our assumptions about how little it takes to achieve and maintain self-sufficiency.
Xu Bing, in contrast, worked with children near Mount Kenya National Park to develop a charity auction system: Westerners purchase the kids’ eco-themed drawings for a pittance, and the proceeds fund the purchase of inexpensive seedlings for a reforestation effort. While Xu’s system is compelling and laudable for its appropriation of an economic model for charitable causes, it is somewhat underwhelming in the context of a world already packed with charities and benefits. Had he developed his concept a little further by examining, say, the mobility and energy of grassroots or micro-loan movements, we might see a project of a more conceptually innovative caliber.
In a similar manner, Ann Hamilton worked with Ecuadoran schoolchildren on the Galápagos Islands to explore the site’s rich ecological, cultural and literary history by way of a vast script (read aloud by Hamilton and her pupils), her trademark sound-emitting cones and video projections. The artist has a great deal to say about her time on the islands, and it is a shame that the work lacks her oeuvre’s usual polish. Still, she was the only artist willing to risk spending her time engaged in a series of conceptual forays regardless of whether they amounted to a coherent product. And Hamilton, like Xu, clearly left her young collaborators with a new means of contemplating their surroundings.
Considering Human/Nature’s enormity and its wealth of unprecedented aspects, BAM/PFA, MCASD and Rare deserve praise for selecting an astute group of artists, and for assuring these artists that their stipends wouldn’t hamper their responses to a “changing planet.” Paradoxically, in the context of Human/Nature, all this generosity and openness performs something of a disservice. The organizers were clear in their desire to harness the potency and permeability of art and conservation. But if this program is ever repeated, organizers would do well to be more explicit about the outcomes they seek beyond mutual inspiration, and whether they could provide this unique residency with the kind of structure that would truly better the work of both disciplines.
Isaac Amala is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.