Ecoart and the Environmental War
“Echoes of the Islands; an Abstract Wave” granite and crushed glass 2000-2022
I have long believed that ecoart is on the frontlines of a battle for the planet as we know it. Well, alongside phalanxes of environmental scientists, whole battalions of Indigenous peoples practicing Traditional Environmental Knowledge, and platoons of guerilla lawyers defending Earth rights and teenage climate activists.
All summer I’ve shown up for events to market my book, “Divining Chaos”, and taught workshops on my trigger point theory, an approach to intervention in chaotic circumstances with art. But I’ve also been working on a granite sculpture first begun in 2000, aided by the stonecutter Hugh Martin. We’ve been incising lines into the boulders that trace the dynamics of a breaking wave and inserting crushed glass into the lines. Hokusai was one of my inspirations for the wave pattern. He did his historical images of breaking waves to represent the tsunami of European culture overwhelming Japan. I have been thinking about my work as a representation of the tsunami of parallel crises we confront today, from sea level rise to overt fascism and economic instability. The work on the sculpture is a means to think once removed about what must change and how art might effect that change.
8–17–2018 I asked my FaceBook friends, “Will the RNC really passively enable the final solution https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/final-solution- to democracy at the hands of t.-Putin?” Evidently, until Biden and Merritt Garland, the answer was a resonant yes. Question now, as the American midterm elections approach, is who will win this war? If half this country, let alone the world, has succumbed to fascism or not, what will tip the balance?
As the seasons are about to turn and political stunts like DeSantis gleefully and cruelly initiated emerge I am meditating on my capacity as an artist.
This seems to be a very consequential time internationally. Aside from consequential local catastrophes from Puerto Rico to Ukraine, we have this WWIII apocalyptic struggle between authoritarian and democratic aspirational politics. I’m not sure whether artists are really any more sensitive than anyone else to the abundance of horrors from human starvations to species loss to all the other consequences of centuries of neglect of the Others amongst us, our relatives as tribal people might reference them, but I do know it often makes it confusing and frustrating to stay aesthetically focused without digressing into a globalized tantrum or sucking my thumb. Since last night, I’ve been working on designing a trigger point workshop for the University of Maine at Orono Oct. 6, based on the workshops in France with CAMP Fr and here on the island I conducted this summer. I felt gratified when Susan Smith, who invited my mini residency there, said it sounded “transformational.” I routinely negotiate my own self-doubt. This is no exception. I ask, what are the potentials and limits artists have to respond to life, as artists in such consequential times as we all face now? The historian Heather Cox Richardson https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ says that beyond voting, we can make noise. Traditionally that has meant we make posters, graphics, videos. But is there something more? I am thinking deeply about what could emerge from this little workshop experiment. I guess I will have to wait and see.
Most people change slowly. Some people don’t ever change for various reasons. One reason that people don’t change is if they are comfortable in their thinking. Change represents discomfort.
Since the June launch of my book, I’ve been reassembling my thinking about the relationships between ecocide, the fossil fuel hegemonic environmental war and what the essence of ecofeminist art means to me. One consequence has been that I’ve pulled back from blogging on my website and Medium as I’ve been thinking through those relationships. The weekend after Labor Day, after completing a recent proposal for an opportunity for a fellowship with Harvard Radcliffe and partly inspired by the effort to write that proposal, suddenly my thinking gelled and grounded me again in the content of my book, which albeit a work memoir, tried to clarify connections I saw between my own family dynamics and experiences of sexism, historical events and my own artwork.
After my sister read my book, she commented that it took a lot of work. I replied, “just a lifetime.” I took a lifetime to understand that many corporations and even governments were engaged in an environmental war. the conflict was being particularly perniciously prosecuted by fossil fuel hegemonies against the whole Earth. It took even more time for to fully to grasp relationships between white supremacist theocrats, sexist tropes, how that leads directly to ecocide and emerged from my own personal history.
My intention in writing my book was to present trigger point theory as an artwork, turning on the idea of an artists book, which makes a conventional book an effort of art. I did my best to apply competent writing to “Divining Chaos” but I also intended to make the premise of the book, trigger point theory, a standalone work of conceptual ecoart: a complex adaptive model (CAM), trigger point theory as art.
Producing my book was my response to the COVID challenge, imprisoned in a small New York City apartment with nothing else to do except write a book.
Since June, in addition to re-examining my own conclusions, I also had the opportunity to complete a sculpture I had begun twenty-two years ago.
The sculpture is a local public artwork that I’m finally completing. It is called “Echoes of the Islands; An Abstracted Wave,” and like many of my standalone artworks in traditional forms, like painting, my intention is mnemonic.
In 2000, I first placed several boulders at the ferry in two sculptural installations. which I then painted in public in 2002 with the same casein paint I used in my project, “The Blued Trees Symphony” that lasted for many years. The pattern in 2002 represented plant-like forms and was part of a larger project called “Blue Sea Lavender" about losing threatened species.
My intention was to make a subtle statement about what we are facing and losing, even as I reflected on remedies for that loss. The pattern on granite now is not just about losing species, but how climate change is swallowing whole communities. Hokusai’s famous studies of breaking tsunami waves were created during the Edo period of Japanese art, when the island country was influenced by the “blue revolution” movement in Japanese art after the introduction of the pigment Prussian blue.
Along with other forms of Asian art I have long been fascinated by the subculture of Ukiyo-e, centered on the ancient geisha culture, referenced as the “Floating Worlds” of highly educated courtesans whose entire lifestyle was an art. In my project, “Floating Worlds,” (1979–83) about conflicts around childbearing and parenting, I included wave themes, inspired by 1982 studies I did at Scripps Institute of Oceanography for another project as recurrent images in my installations. At the time, the impulse to have a child seemed ss powerful as a tsunami wave in my life. In creating the final pattern for “Echoes,” alongside Hokusai’s work, I referenced the studies I did at Scripps as well as the waves I manifested for “Floating Worlds.”
As we steadily approach the volatile midterms, I have in mind this theme of inexorable change and equally stubborn resistance. The metaphor of crafting a wave in granite appeals to me formally but as a metaphor it also refers to how I see radical right-wing values drowning the United States. I see this occurring both literally with climate change and figuratively in the attacks on democratic values since the trump presidency. That attack is epitomized by gutting voting rights Roe vs Wade protections of women’s reproductive rights. I see this totalitarian offensive as one more aspect of the environmental war.
Art has a long history of defiance. But it is much harder to exhibit art that doesn’t fit conventional galley spaces than traditional forms of artmaking. That is especially true of ecoart which is often realized as a temporary community-based outdoors experience or in another unconventional setting. Ecoart also doesn’t often translate into photographic documentation. These forms of realization become a problem if you want a mainstream audience to consider the ideas about environmental resilience that ecoart can represent.
My particular concern about displaying ecoart is that I think ecoart can change our familiar, entrenched assumptions about how things can work. But the big art shows that I’ve seen in recent years blurred boundaries between environmental art that represents problems and actual solutions to the scale of our crises, which I find critical to advancing the field and identify as ecoart. And that’s just about exhibiting. It doesn’t touch the complex challenge of monetization, which has been exemplified by the commodification of an art practice to allow artists to keep working and living. Andy Warhol pioneered a successful solution to monetizing practice, but his solutions don’t seem translate to ecoart. As long as a disconnect remains between the classic altruism of art and the dynamics of an art mark that rejects a status quo of extractive systems, most ecoartists will live in problematic precarity. This can compromise whether ecoart can deliver solutions or even be credible participants in the global discourse about solving our problems. Ecoart, for example hasn’t made it to the Armory show.
NFTs have theoretically approached solving this problem of venue but to put it mildly, there are still many unresolved questions.
The problem of representing another world system is shared by many artists now. Tania Bruguera’s concept of artivism has addressed the same issue of how an art practice can break out of conventional tropes. Many artists today are trying to come to terms with the limits and potential power of art and how platforms and venues limit or expand opportunities for outreach. What movements like ecoart, artivism or NFTs have in common is that they all represent a discontent with the gauntlet of gatekeepers that winnow out artwork that challenges the status quo. In an art market often tightly controlled by an emergent class of billionaire collectors with political power, there is resistance to experimental forms of art as a challenge to the status quo. This obduracy can only accelerate the miseries of climate change, racism, and sexism.
Newton Harrison, the famed ecoartist who recently passed away, made a real effort to address the problem of support for ecoart, working with his gallery, Various Small Fires this past summer to curate a show there to curate a show there. Two of my own works on paper can be seen in this gallery view, the stacked pieces, second in from the right. Two of my own works on paper can be seen in this gallery view, the stacked pieces, second in from the right.
As artists struggle for financial support to address critical issues, survival of the work and the artist making work is one more reality to deconstruct. Ironic to me, that these thoughts about awareness and survival during an environmental war are evoked on the occasion of the spectacle of the historic passing of the British crown, a corporation which has supported itself with tar sands investments at the expense of Indigenous peoples in Canada . At the same time, the USA is battling over jurisprudence, manifesting as challenges to voting rights, the autonomy of a woman’s body and the impunity to perpetrate international ecocide by hamstringing federal agencies that oversee regulatory controls on business as usual. These are the casualties and collateral damage of this environmental war, a war in which Ukraine is just one of many victims. The noted historian Heather Cox Richardson often says the answer to fascism is to make our voices heard. In the case of ecoart, the task is to surf the tsunami.