Tactical Biopolitics: a review.

“How can we know for sure these days that the truck driver repairing his exhaust at the crossroads in your neighborhood is not a silent conceptual artist engaging you in a thought-through performative experience? ” asks Jens Houser in “Observations on an Art of Growing Interest,” part of the collection of essays in Tactical Biopolitics. An engaging overview of scientists as artists, artists as ethnographers, activists as sociologists, and women who do agility trials with their dogs as philosophers, Tactical Biopolitics presents the words and works of people who profoundly engage their ethics with their craft.

Largely centered around issues of biology and bioethics, the book often wades deep into the waters of scientific jargon and academic word-whirlpools. When it emerges into common reality, however, it does so resonantly. While artist Kathy High gives a factual breakdown of her reasons for working with a group of former lab rats (they were predisposed to have her same health issues), we get caught up in the story of the rodents, their namings and personalities. Donna J. Haraway manages to make us forget agility trials as a means to make dogs literally jump through hoops and see them instead as an exercise in human-animal communication.

The book emerged from a conference on BioArt and the Public Sphere at UC Irvine in 2005. It is, write editors Beatriz de Costa and Kavita Philip, “a hybrid, made possible by two recent histories: the enormously creative practices at the intersection of technoscience, activism, and art; and the explosion of cross-disciplinary conversations following Michel Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics.

We see artists confronted with the ethics of working with living tissue, witness the affect racism has on modern scientific research, and learn of the evolution of activist’s tactics for getting AIDS medicine to patients who need it. We hear artists talking about life in labs, and scientist talking about the craft of ethical living. It’s a smorgasboard of modern ethical thought, of challenges to the definitions of professional fields. It’s fantastic reading for anyone interested in cross-disciplinary work. But largely, it is the story of people using the tools they have at their disposal to positively engage with an increasingly complicated and manipulated world. So while the authors featured in Tactical Biopolitics might not be the truck driver in your neighborhood, they are, like him, attempting to fix what’s broken.

March 1, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Artists, Books, Moe, New Media, Organisms, Politics, Pollution, Theory  No Comments

Genetically Modified Music: Mixed Feelings.

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We’re at that point now. We can talk about growing music. Artist David Benqué’s piece Acoustic Botany is a series of models and diagrams for a genetically engineered music and sound garden. It envisions insects created to chew in rhythm, flower pods designed to explode at certain intervals, and Lily Pads that amplify the death throes of bugs in a vascular speaker structure.

I gotta say this makes me just the slightest bit nauseous, and not for the obvious old-lady-with-a-clipboard reasons (nature is nature! etc). It’s because of the roles and responsibilities of the artist inherent in the work. Here I was all excited about environmental art because it’s such a great example of the logistical application of the aesthetic, of an artist’s capacity to engage and care, a unity of practical and aesthetic reason. Now, again, sing the the memes of art trumping reason, or at least twisting it severely to achieve its goals.

A genetically modified art installation, with no comment to make on genetic modification itself, no analysis really of the human/nature relationship, really just an artistic exploration of the fun and pretty things we could do with plants if given the opportunity to play with their DNA. And I bet it would be stunning.Bugs designed to chew in rhythm! What kind of glorious aesthetic high would visitors to this installation get? Awe and wonder of science, with a little bit of nature, maybe.

Benqué’s vision is far from being realized, but it’s ready to start some serious conversations now.

February 20, 2010  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Artists, Moe, Organisms, Politics  No Comments

Land Art Internet coma.

Thanksgiving long past, and holiday feasts ahead, but I’m already stuffed, thank you, with this years’ steady eco-art diet of Land Art adventures and COP15 coverage. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed with art-nerd-glee. There is such a thing as an information coma, I swear.

The art-and-landscape dishes started churning out of the Nevada Museum of Art kitchen with its LAND/ART symposium way back in June: that event kicked off a summer-into-fall series of lectures, performances, exhibits and tours that made NMA the best excuse to want to go to Nevada since Burning Man. Later in the year Land Arts of the American West, a field program directed by Chris Taylor, took some lucky followers on a tour of renowned site-specific installations and Land Artworks. Unfortunately, some of us had to stay at home with our Winnebagos, experiencing most of the glory over the internet.

This month, while the delegates at COP15 tried to negotiate our way into a non-binding middle ground, Ian Garrett and William Shaw told us what artists were doing to mitigate the damage. There’s great coverage of actions, protests and memes by Shaw on the RSA blog– Garrett did comprehensive exhibition coverage and interviews for CSPA. It seems the artworks that struck the most resonant chord were also political actions: New Life Copenhagen, The Yes Men’s fake press release, actions that addressed COP15’s inaccessibility and ineffectiveness. Comedian Eugene Mirman voiced a couple of unanswered questions. The philosophical culmination is GOOD COP, an alternative Bella Center installed at Gallery Poulsen Contemporary Fine Arts in Copenhagen, where everyone from Daryl Hannah to Bill McKibben got some time on the mic to make their international declarations. If the dialogue keeps running this fierce, I’m not worried. That is to say: Burp.

December 20, 2009  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Artists, Books, Earth, Moe, Preservation, Public Space  No Comments

The Story of Cap and Trade

Free Range Studios recently released the sequel to their viral Story of Stuff video: The Story of Cap and Trade. Just in time for COP15. The premise is that the details of cap and trade need to be examined to ensure they don’t preserve (polluting, exploitative) business as usual.

This is especially timely given the first-day fracas of the climate talks thus far, including a series of emails “covering up” information refuting climate change– now termed ClimateGate– and a leaked “Danish text” which positions solutions in drastic favor of first-world, industrial, polluting countries.With this new video,  Annie Leonard again tackles an emotional, important and complicated subject with straight talk and humor.

December 9, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Humor: Planet Plus Funny., Moe, Politics, Pollution, Video  No Comments

Art Nature Dialogues: a review.

Ideas are a bit like oxygen. The right amount allows us functionality;  too much and we get all high. Such is the feeling you get after a read of Art Nature Dialogues, wherein John K. Grande interviews a series of environmental artists.  There’s a spectacular array of materials and viewpoints, from the manure sculptures of Jerilea Zempel to the interventions of Betty Beaumont. What emerges is not only a concise study of environmental artists and their motivations, but an opportunity to examine the way artists describe their work.

When asked what brought them together as artists, for instance, Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit , known for such works as The Stream Path, reply:

“The face of working as a pair, in situ and outside brings a fundamental social dimension to our work, firstly about ‘minimal ethnic unity,’ . . . Being two, we develop the minimal conditions of collaboration and codependance, of synergy, of respect of the sharing, of conflict and contract . .”

To be blunt: What? Not every artist is quite so over-articulate, but the language of the interviews ranges from the simple and practical to the etheral and other-worldly. I’d love to be able to draw a parallel here between the quality of an artist’s work and the words they use to describe it, but that parallel would be nothing but gaudy bauble-words.

That same lung-opening high you might get from The Stream Path is present in Spin Offs by Patrick Dougherty, or Mario Reis’ river paintings. It’s what makes the artists particularly relevant and exciting (despite, not because of, their habit of comparing themselves to Andy Goldsworthy). These artists have struck a chord, gone beyond the Land Art movement of the 70s (which, they will tell you, was limitied in its true connection to place), and articulated relationships, feelings and memes that speak to where we are now(-ish).

It’s all summed up very well in a quote from Hamish Fulton, an artist of long walks:

Art is essential in a healthy society. As they say, art is like oxygen. Whether we say art is profound, or worth investing in, sexy, or a rip-off and and rubbish, it doesn’t matter, because all those crazy and insulting and wonderful qualities all go to make up what we call contemporary art.

November 7, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Artists, Books, Interviews, Moe  No Comments

Planet Plus Funny: Auto Tune the News.

If you thought Melissa Etheridge was heart-wrenching in An Inconvenient Truth, wait until you hear Katie Couric sing.

Seriously: Auto-Tune the right clip of  Couric, and you’ve got a new song of earth-savery. Or so prove the antics of Auto Tune the News.

Auto-Tune is that glorious software that makes Britney spears sound like a robot Ella Fitzgerald. It uses a phase vocoder to make singers sound more on-key (and futuristic) than they actually are.

The brilliance of Auto Tune the News is applying the technology to news anchors and their stories. It could be a simple prank illustrating how easy it is to sound like a pop star, but the editing of the “songs” actually illustrates how intertwined and interdependent the issues are, from climate change to race to drug regulation. All of the issues blur together in a hilarious top-40 tune.

For a different kind of hilarious reality check,  watch the Keep it Green Girls ride the bus. They do tamer things on Planet Green, but if you ever hunger for some green-meets-concrete, here ya go.

September 17, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Artists, Humor: Planet Plus Funny., Moe, Performance, Video  No Comments

The Culture of Bioremediation: Terry Hazen Interview.

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The signature on an email from Terry Hazen is a paragraph long. It has to be- it lists a multitude of titles.  He’s the Head of the Ecology Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Head of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology. The Lead of Microbial Enhanced Hydrocarbon Recovery at the Energy Biosciences Institute. The list goes on. Hazen is, therefore, the perfect man to talk to about our current attempts to correct massive ecological f-ups, and what that means for artists.

Hazen’s world is inhabited by mircoorganisms, or, as he colloquially refers to them, “bugs.” There are bugs that eat pollution, bugs that chemically reduce uranium, bugs that feed on hydrocarbons. ” I still feel a lot of people are amazed that there’s a bug out there that can degrade just about anything, ” he says. While the idea of the “magic bug” is sometimes helpful to the remediation industries, there is, he cautions, no bug without context.

“It’s so easy to sell bioremediation, ” he says. “It can completely degrade contaminants in laboratory settings, (but) in the environmental settings it may not work as effectively, or make it worse.” He cites the example of arsenic, which actually becomes more soluble– and  likely to contaminate the water table– when reduced.

“Some companies will go for the quick fix, not realizing that in cleaning up one contaminant, they exacerbate three others, ” he laments. “They often don’t look for a complete solution.” Hazen’s work  is dedicated to more of a “complete systems biology” approach. Sometimes, he argues, the best thing for a polluted site is to just leave it alone. You can see one of his excellent and comprehensive lectures here.

While navigating the maze of invisible bug-land, Hazen keeps environmental art within reach. On his office wall hangs a piece of artwork by a 10-year old girl, depicting storks in the Danube river riparian zone. He obtained it while in Serbia for an Environmental Remediation meeting.

“Art that educates or just inspires people to reuse, recyle, reduce, and remediate, to make our land and water less toxic and less toxic for generations to come makes us all better doesn’t it,” says Hazen. He would know: he spends much of his time managing the methods that attempt to clean up our mistakes.

August 18, 2009  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Moe, Pollution, Public Space  No Comments

An overview of eco-art Nings.

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If you haven’t heard of it yet, Ning is a sort of DIY social network platform. You pick a title and a logo and boom, you’ve got your own specially-themed, mini version of facebook. Over the past year quite a few nings have popped up specifically focused on arts and ecology. Here’s the digs on a few of them.

Earth Artists Network

Members:61

Earth Artists is an interdisciplinary network of artists, focused on ecology. The coordinators of the group are based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. “Earth Artists,” as defined by the Ning,  “are dedicated to advocacy for art, sustainable culture, and ecology.” Lots of folks posting photos and info about their eco-artwork.

The Art of Engagement

Members: 476

Also a network of eco-artists, this one with a curated online artist-in-residence. This Ning asks: What role can art play in transforming the current cascade of social and environmental crises? Can we develop a way to create culture, to research, learn and teach with/in ecological systems? Lively discussions and reviews in the forums.

CSPA Connect

Members: 126

The social network of the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts. Created to give CSPA affiliates a place to exchange ideas. Interesting forum discussions, plenty of events postings, also reports from conferences and of course, members posting photos of their artwork.

Art + Environment

Members: 200

Created by the Nevada Museum of Art. Many discussions and postings related to that museums’  LAND/ART symposium. Some cross-postings from the excellent Smudge Studio blog.

SEEDS

Members: 89

A conglomeration of folks interested in Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance and Science, an interdisciplinary summer arts festival. Most recent posts include news of SEEDS t-shirts and footage of performances from the festival.

August 5, 2009   Posted in: Infrastructure, Moe, Web  No Comments

Brent Bucknum of Hyphae Design: a profile.

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We don’t have time to do environmental at that’s not functional.

– Brent Bucknum

In working on a Climate Clock for the San Jose Initiative, designer Brent Bucknam would often get into theoretical debates about the nature of art. His project partner, Brian Howe of greenmeme, would quote Picasso: Art is the lie that reveals the truth. Brent’s response was the quote above.

It’s one of the central questions of the environmental art movement, and one that is integral to Brent’s work with Hyphae Design Laboratory, a company he founded.

How can art save the world?

Artists on greenmuseum.org and elsewhere  are blurring cultural boundaries between art and science, science and activism, volunteerism and performance. Traditional forms hold fast, but functionality remains central to Hyphae’s work. Function: defined by this designer as “interpreting and conveying ecological information or serving otherwise as an ecological tool or system.” Hyphae is currently working on a project in West Oakland, a plan to line the 580 highway on either side with towering stands of bamboo, natural air and particulate filters. On a greenmuseum.org-sponsored panel at the recent Earth Matters on Stage Symposium, he presented a number of other exciting projects, from green roofs to living walls.

The 28-year old designer went to a farming high school. He worked for bioremediation and green roof companies before joining Rana Creek, with which he worked on the California Academy of Sciences’ living roof. He became that company’s first Director of Design before moving on to create Hyphae.  He sees his new company as a catchall, providing services from ecological design and research to consulting for artists interested in environmental projects.

That last aspect is the result of Bucknum’s own experiences making environmental art: he’d like to see artwork that ’s better informed by ecology, not, as he puts it, the “horti-torture” that creates living systems barely able to survive the duration of an exhibition. He’d like the art to be the change it would like to see in the world: smart, sustainable, and thriving.

August 1, 2009   Posted in: Artists, Design, EcoDrama Symposium 2009, Moe, greenmuseum.org  No Comments

No Really Now.

Really. It’s a common blip for the wordpress theme to get all aggressively defaulty, but hopefully now it is fixed. We hope. We are hoping. ‘Cause the blips and farts are really exhausting.

In the meantime, some really awesome stuff has been going on.

In Seattle, artist Mandy Greer has just unveiled the installation Mater Matrix Mother and Medium at Camp Long in Seattle, Washington. It’s a lot of yarn. A lot of yarn in deep dark to bright lights blues, twisting and spazzing and coughing its way through a series of urban trees. Water. On its opening night it danced with performer Zoe Scofield.

Trees are growing sideways in the exhibition Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009, on display at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. They’re part of a massive retrospective of environmental artwork, ranging from Beuys to Smithson to mounds of grass. Trees also paraded through London to celebrate the opening of the exhibit.   William Shaw gives an excellent overview on the RSA Arts & Ecology blog: there’s a video of the exhibition from them below. Monumental, both in the comprehensive gathering of significant artworks, and in the diverse reactions from the critics.

And sadly, the environmental art gallery Collectively Grasp will be closing its San Francisco doors in August. For those of you in the area: they’re having a closing party August 15th. Check it out.

The Bay Area Air is alternately hot, stale, and rich and creamy like ice cream. Here’s RSA Arts and Ecology’s video of Radical Nature. Enjoy.

Radical Nature | Barbican 2009 from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.

July 20, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Artists, Exhibitions, Moe, Textiles, Video  No Comments