Back to Nature

Let me preface this entry with a bit of my own background on the matter of environmentalism. I grew up in Chicago and had never heard of compost until I was 21. Still though, I was a vegetarian for almost a decade, and attempted to connect with progressive movements whenever I could. My husband sat in trees to avoid them being logged. We lived in the middle of nowhere for a long time, in that back-to-the-land kinda way. I have lived in houses with people that devoted their lives to primitive skills education. I also lived in a house with an FBI informant responsible for sending a dozen people to jail for serious sentences for eco-activism, activism that he was originally a strong proponent of. One of the people he helped convict committed suicide after his capture. Another ex-roommate lost his mind in the miasma of extreme leftist politics. A lot of ruined lives, and the environment and socio-economic class structure is still fucked. What I am looking for now is compromise, and preferably compromise that I don't feel really guilty about.

That said, I couldn't really get my head around Rachel Dutton and Rob Olds motivations for this secondary, deeper severance of themselves from culture. They seem to be valuing their experience as part of Nature as the ultimate state of being, but I am not sure how it makes sense as a reaction to this sudden sense of impending doom. They felt that their scaled back existence as artists living rurally was not active enough in the face of the looming catastrophe, but I still get a hint that they feel a greater social obligation and I do not understand how learning tracking skills supports the greater society. It seems almost like a performance piece done without an audience.

I found Christopher Manes' interview, Making Art About Centipedes, much more aligned with my own beliefs. There should be a reintegrating of Man into a more egalitarian framework in relation to each other, other species and the environment, but we should also enjoy the time we have. Regardless of humanities presence, the climate shifts: it is its nature. But right now we do have it good and we should enjoy what we can, make the most of our thumbs and brains and maybe stop actively decimating nature for profit at every turn. It becomes a question of where to draw the line.

As for Colin Ives work, I found it very visually striking and quite often a nice commentary. (I thought the Clearing was especially accessible and poignant.) Unfortunately, I was dissatisfied with his response about reconciliation of the use of technology for project regarding environmentalism. I wanted him to have an answer that was not beholden to middleclasswhiteguilt, I wanted an out, and I was hoping he'd have one- especially because I liked his work so much. I am not sure if there will ever be a solution to this: a true compromise. The reality is if you're using iPods to project salmon on a sidewalk, there are a host of ecological and socio-economic implications, conversely I think the world is better for him having done that. I am glad at least to be having the discussion.

***Above is the work of my friend Joey Malone. He is a talented artist, curmudgeonly punk bastard, and total plant geek. I love him dearly. The drawing is of the tree more commonly known as chinkapin. 

The end is nigh… well maybe.

In Conversations Before the End of Time, throughout the introduction and subsequent discussion with Ellen Dissanayake, Suzi Gablik  is wrestling with the definition and purpose of art as we face a significant shift in our culture. For quite some time, the western idea of “Artist” has been played by a role outside of mainstream society. Whether we are the documentors or the commentators, as artists we are outside. Perhaps as an outsider, it leaves us most poised to notice when the cultural train is about to run out of track. While I feel the previous statement is true, I find myself somewhat frustrated with the calamitous outcry at what appears to be our decline of culture. Maybe because I do consider myself to occupy a space slightly outside of the dominant ideal,  I cannot bring myself to mourn it’s demise. I have faith in not only our Earth’s ability to rebound from cataclysmic events, but for humanity to do so as well. Throughout history, cultures have died while humanity has continued.
And philosophically speaking, if humanity doesn’t continue, I don’t really care.

I feel this relates to the idea of individualism (read: selfishness) in Modernism; because we do not want to lose control, we generate these artificially selfless ideas of how to save our culture. In the introduction, Gablik discusses a couple that are abandoning art to go “back to the land”. (pg 24) This appears to be considered a noble approach, when I can only bring myself to view it as selfish and ineffective. Let me make a point here: I do not care if anyone wants to be either of those things, but I recoil at the idea of imbuing such actions with any sense of nobility. I believe that is it is naive to pretend that we do not live in a time of turmoil, misery and chaos (and have lived in such a time ever since we first stood up on the savanna to get a better view), it is just whether or not we as individuals experience this trauma: whether or not it is our own personal paradigm that is crumbling. Conversely, we also live in a time of inconceivable bounty for some people. What remains true is that across cultural and socio-economic boundaries people feel the need to create. Dissanayake believes this is because art, or “making special” is a biological imperative. I am inclined to agree with Ms. Dissanayake. I feel that there is a inherent drive towards making our surroundings more aesthetically pleasing. Through modernism, we have broken away from this inclination, and begin to focus more on meaning, and then eventually the lack of meaning. I still feel that most of this is driven by that need to create, to set apart, it’s just that the intellectualizing of art has taken us to a place where either A) you can defend an alternative sense of aesthetic, or B) you can tell aesthetics to go fuck themselves.

As for the work of Ty Warren, I believe she has taken that impending sense of catastrophe discussed earlier, but has turned it inward and made it more personal. In general, I like this approach to art, not everyone will get everything you do, but it matters more when they do.  I found the transcription of her food/ activity diary especially intriguing because, despite my complete lack of athleticism, it is something I can relate to. Our society has created ways for us to control calories and climate, the two things that necessitated our banding together in hunter-gatherer tribes in the first place, and just how unnatural of an end can we take that to? That control is what has allowed our species to flourish, but how dangerous can it be? I guess my skepticism regarding the merit of that control is what allows me, in some ways, to welcome the decline of our culture. We don’t know where we’re going, but that may be a good thing.



*** The picture at the top is a collage I made 10 years ago from two photographs I took. One is a picture of one of Chicago's million daily commuters walking between El trains, but his destination has been replaced by a picture of my cat in the fridge (my idea, not the cat's). At the bottom I tore out some newsprint that reads "very precarious", which is definitely how I viewed commuting back in those days. This collage reminded me of this conversation because it was meant to speak to the uncertainty of the direction in which we're heading. I also thought it was pretty funny to stick my cat in the fridge.