my 2010 calendar

For the last couple of years, my wall calendar of choice has been the Environmental Art calendars from greenmuseum.org . Unless environmental art is your expertise, there are many relatively unknown artworks highlighted (one per month). Greenmuseum.org is also a wonderful museum site featuring the work of many. (Of note, Greenmuseum.org does indeed exist only online.)

Environmental art is more than Andy Goldsworthy, Robert Smithson, and Christo, and a lot of the work is much more complex. Some of the pieces featured in the 2010 calendar hit on an immediate and seemingly uncomplicated level: for example, Nicole Dextras' Yucca Prom Dress (2005) and Ilkka Halso's Rollercoaster (2004) (which, for the record, I find fascinating).

My favorite work in the 2010 calendar is multi-layered, ie: hits on the "immediate" level but also has numerous other concepts, statements, and implications within the work. Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit's The Greenhouse and the Shed (2002) is March's art of choice, but I couldn't wait until March to post about it, as I sit here in January in New York and dream about springtime and walking in a green great outdoors.

I'm including the text included in the calendar; as you'll see, there's a lot of information about the art in the calendar in addition to the provocative artworks and photography. If you like to intepret art without any commentary whatsoever, stop reading now and avoid the spoilers....

The Greenhouse and the Shed
Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit, dead Picea abies cones, boughts and branches, Corylus avellana branches, wire, stones, horticultural protective netting, Val di Sella forest, Italy, 2002.

For nearly twenty years, French artists Gilles Bruni and Marc Babarit have collaborated on experimental outdoor installations, combining agriculture, ecology, architecture and photography. A fallen Norway spruce tree on a slop of the Val di Sella forest in Italy provided them with an unexpected temporary world to explore and transform.

"We are 'sentenced' to share with the plants, the ladybug, the rat, the cloud that passes by, the night that falls, the cold, the rain," the artists say. "Thus we think that we have to find the ways toward a renegotiation of our relationships to the world, and that this renegotiation can, in particular, be done through art: we never actually work in neutral places, we have to take into account a third party with whom we must compromise."

On this Italian forest hillside, death created a space for rebirth, allowing the artists to propose a new order: "casting a net over the summit to protect the planting, protecting the cones to fertilize the compost."

Once the planting and protective structures were almost complete, "after waiting for clouds to appear, on a heavy but clear day in the valley," they took this final photograph, giving the tree another way to live on beyond the forest.

Plymouth, Montserrat

I first heard of Montserrat while reading CREEM magazine. Montserrat was the home of AIR Studios, where the English bougeoisie "rock" musicians went to record albums in the 1980s. (The Police, Paul McCartney, and Elton John all recorded there.) Plymouth is the capital of Montserrat and was the only port entry. I missed the news in 1997 when a volcano covered 80% of the city with over 4 feet of lava.

Plymouth is a future archaeological site, although it seems that it would be so cost-prohibitive that the city will most likely never be dug out. It could be a great above-ground urban exploration site, but it is fenced off, due to possible danger of further volcanic action.

Ed brought Plymouth, Montserrat to my attention, so thanks to him for most of the links.

For basic info, start at the Wikipedia entry.

A few photos of the destruction can be seen here.

This page is encouraging tourists to now-safe Montserrat. It provides a nice contrast to the previous photos.

This is a first-person testimonial to vacationing in Montserrat (two different photos of the destruction available). (I like the claim that if one drinks the water of Montserrat, he or she will return to the island.)

Here's a nice Flickr shot of the landscape, taken from the Caribbean sea.

Here's the entire collection of the tagged "Plymouth Montserrat" Flickr photos. This is a great look-through.

Image is of postcard created and photographed by Qule Pejorian and available to share and remix via the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Sound the Alarm

Wave Hill was moderately crowded today with visitors wanting to get away from the urban jungle for a short commune with nature. Here are a couple of photos of plants that I particularly enjoyed (the cacti greenhouse is surprisingly extensive):



It was good timing that I was able to see the current exhibition up in the Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery, Sound the Alarm: Landscapes in Distress (up through June 1). Featuring the work of eight artists, the exhibition "calls attention to the indelible impact of human activity on the environment from the Arctic to the Equator," according to the show's curators. Most of the work is interesting, although I only knew Edward Burtynsky's work by name beforehand. Travis Roozee tells a partial story of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town I've wanted to visit for years now. (He also did a series called Rooftop Brooklyn that I remember, because it's about birds...Bushwick pigeons, to be specific.) Gilles Minasson's photo of teens ice hopping was simultaneously playful and sinister. Sergio Vega's images were interesting, factually, but there wasn't enough of it to be cohesive enough, and the inkjet print quality of his image "Jose Dias Soares Farm at Rochedo (field)" (2007) was distracting.

The find of the exhibition was the discovery of Sasha Bezzubov's Things Fall Apart series. Bezzubov documents the ruins of natural disasters. (Although this article states, too simplistically and mistakenly, that the natural disasters he documents are actually the result of man.) Bezzubov brings his vision to disaster photography, traveling to India (after the 2001 earthquake), Indonesia (after the 2005 tsunami), and California (after a 2003 wildfire). (He's also traveled to Missouri and Floria after hurricanes and to Utah after a wildfire, as seen on his website.)


at the Sound the Alarm exhibition: Sasha Bezzubov's "Wildfire #4, California" (2003) from the series Things Fall Apart.


not at the exhibition: Bezzubov's "Earthquake #1, India" (2001), also from the series Things Fall Apart.

The quality of Bezzubov's images are stunning, similar in style, but not subject matter, to Burtynsky's work. The brochure accompanying the exhibit states that there is an upcoming monograph for the series, and I anticipate it being appropriately breathtaking. (NOTE: If you spend time on Bezzubov's website, click on images twice to view the largest image size available, as the work definitely benefits from being viewed as large as possible.) It is also of note that although Bezzubov is working on a newer series, Things Fall Apart is still an active series of work. I wonder if he is currently in China or planning a trip in the immediate future to document the recent earthquake's after effects.

Passenger series. California; December 27, 2007; 6:42:55 p.m.

vacation photos

Abandoned locations are of interest during my travels (even if I don't enter them), and sometimes they show up when they're least expected.

In December, I traveled to Arizona for the holidays. Usually, Ed and I climb Squaw Peak's Summit Trail (now Piestewa Peak's Summit Trail) when we visit, but this year we went to South Mountain Park . At the base of the road to Gila Valley Lookout, there were two empty dwellings. Below are photos of one of them; the other was quite kitschy and not as interesting. Although this is a touristy-y site, it was a nice fifteen-minute detour. There wasn't any information available anywhere at the site (or online), so I'm sorry to say that I don't know what kind of dwelling this replicates, what its purpose is, etc.







Downtown Phoenix itself has changed incredibly since I frequented the area to attend alternative art events. I was dismayed to see a "For Lease" sign on the Icehouse - I thought that it had closed - but happy to find out that it indeed continues on as an art space. I saw the best art at The Icehouse in the early-to-mid-1990s, and its work lives on. The second photo taken at the Icehouse is (part of) the area at which I saw Survival Research Laboratories' event A Million Inconsiderate Experiments right before moving to New York City in 1996. Memories...

for the Oscars tonight

Photo by David Byrne, taken on July 4, 2006 and accessed at http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2006/07/7406.html.

CNN.com ran a story this week about Marfa, Texas and how two films nominated for Oscars this year were filmed in Marfa: No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.

I haven't seen either movie yet, but I've noted that Marfa keeps getting great press, mostly for its connections to minimalist art and its Prada store, and now for being a thinly-populated town aesthetically friendly to film shoots.

Marfa's on my list of places in the United States to visit, but there are several places ahead of it on the list, including:

Yellowstone National Park - I think this would be a great family vacation, especially if we saw a geyser.

Walter De Mairia's The Lightning Field - I had the opportunity to visit The Lightning Field when I was in art school, and I blew it!

Coyote Buttes North - The Wave - I wonder how old a child needs to be to complete the hike to The Wave....

Applalachian Trail - I'd like to take a day trip to the Trail via the New York Metro-North stop.

The Everglades - I took the Shark Valley tram tour during the dry season, but I'd love to return during the wet season and do a lot of bike riding and spend quality time in the 'Glades.

I went for the abandoned buildings, and I got Iceland and community as well.

I'm a fan of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós' music - I own a few CDs but have never seen them in concert - but ever since hearing raves about Heima, I've been waiting for the opportunity to see the film on the big screen.

First, I heard that Heima was a great rock doc, and then I read the following sentence in press materials for last night's screening at Scandinavia House: They played in deserted fish factories, outsider art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves, and the huge, horseshoe-shaped Ásbyrgi Canyon (formed, legend has it, by the hoofprint of Odin's six-legged horse Sleipnir). Wow! Since I've also been daydreaming about visiting Iceland, well, that's a lot of reasons to see one movie, right?

Heima was astoundingly beautiful and wonderful. The film documents Sigur Rós playing two weeks of gigs across its country. Each show is incredibly different: the concert in Reykjavík is a large, crowded outdoor event; the band plays at a community center in Kirkjubaejarklaustar at a Thorablod meal (extreme foodies take note!); a protest against a dam is the site of another show; etc.

The music was wonderful, and the movie does provide an overall context for the band's sound. At one point, one of the band members talks about the Icelandic need for "space", and SR's music definitely conveys Space (not the extraterrestrial kind, but the one of topological space, distance, area, and volume).

But moving past the music...the two sites featured in Heima most relevant for this blog are the abandoned fish factory in Djupavik and an artist's former home in Selardalur.

The band's tour journal describes the visit to the abandoned fish factory moderately well, and I'm sure that many of this blog's readers can appreciate the desire to crawl through the pipe leading to the site. (Is this how the audience entered the space?)

A detailed excerpt from the tour journal brings some intimate details:

the pipe is too small for the guitar amp to fit through into the tank and it stands outside in the grass pointing towards jonsi some metres distant. occasionally the gulls and arctic terns wheeling overhead outside are audible through an open square in the roof and these will probably be evident on the finished recording being captured by ken and biggi on the other end of the pipe.

once this is over, the band move to the factory for the first time, where they discover their gear is too tightly arranged between decaying and anomalous american automobiles in the dark concrete skeleton of dead building.

The fish factory looks like a hip nightclub in some shots, and the song's churchlike sound ends with a cacophonic burst of energy.


Performing in the abandoned fish factory. (movie still)

An internet search provides little information about the site in Selardalur, except that it is indeed a tourist destination in the West fjords area of Iceland. The concert segment is filmed at an artist named Samuel's former farmhouse. Looking at the site, I can't help but wonder how much longer that farmhouse is going to stand upright, hence GO VISIT SELARDALUR NOW!


This shot was on the screen for about two seconds, and there was no information about where it was located. (movie still)

Besides these two locations, I enjoyed two other things about the movie: the nature and audience shots. The audience at most of the shows was pretty diverse, age-wise. Senior citizens, infants, adolescents, teenagers, young adults...you name it. Everyone looks beautiful while listening to music. These concerts were community get-togethers.

The following notes reflect the nature seen in this film: strong sense of narration with the sea, waterfalls, fields, mountains, birds in caves, birds in sky, iceberg floating in water, footprints drying in the sand, landscapes of houses/boats/communities, fog & mist moving across mountains, stones, a man who makes instruments from rhubarb.

The trailer for the movie can be seen here.

These Sigur Rós videos were screened before the start of the movie:

Hoppipolla; Glósóli; Svefn-g-englar; Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa; Untitled #1 (aka Vaka).

Passenger series. Lake George, New York; February 18, 2008; 09:32:31 a.m.

Passenger series. Canyon Lake, Arizona; December 20, 2006; 12:49:22 p.m.

"Abandon"

"The most beautiful thing in the abandoned hospital was the peeling paint." This sentence starts Rebecca Solnit's "Abandon" essay in her 2005 book A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

In the early 1980's, Solnit spent six months in an abandoned hospital near San Francisco, accompanying her then-boyfriend as he shot a Super 8 film on location. She was a punk rocker then, something that she sometimes refers to in her writings. After her fascination with ruins, she returned to (a more straightforward) nature, and lately she's been more into activism and politics.

The abandoned hospital is just a tool for Solnit to make the small leap to discussing Demeter, Persephone, and Hades; she then takes a bigger leap when discussing the beauty and "abandon" of her deceased friend Marine. Solnit is one of America's preeminent contemporary nature philosophy writers, but to hear Solnit discuss abandoned ruins for just a few pages is nourishing.

"Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, in this truly bring it to life," she writes. Much later in the essay, she talks about the area of New York City (it seems that she lived in NYC for a while, or at least visits frequently) that is now the sports complex called Chelsea Piers. She briefly looks back to the years when the Chelsea Piers was a "temporary autonomous zone" at which gays cruised and groped each other. Peter Hujar and David Wojnariowicz are mentioned, and the description of the ruins of Chelsea Piers are described so beautifully that I wish I were there. ("Paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked pieces of furniture"..."this kind of place, one that was ruinous, bleak, but somehow still imbued wtih a romantic outlaw sense of possibility, of freedom, even the freedom to be idealistic...") Earlier, she described the "new" Chelsea Piers, and says "although it may yet yield to ruin again". Oh, that would be great, but I hope I don't have to wait for the apolocalypse for it to happen.

Solnit seems to be a bit of a hippy, or perhaps I'm confusing the term "hippy" with "idealist." (It should be noted for the record that the word "hippy" has a personal positive connotation in my world.) I was intrigued when I stumbled upon her artistic link to Mark Klett, and it makes me warm inside to know that she's explored ruins as well, although she tends to hint at "the golden age of ruins" having passed. Also, has she wandered into ruins recently, as she has matured 20 years into her life? (I ask this somewhat rhetorically; I think I know the answer, but I'd love to hear what she has to say on the topic.)

"We are now at the beginning of an era whose constructions are far scarier than ruins. In the time of which I write, the new silicon-based life forms were sneaking into every interstice without setting off alarms that all would be utterly changed in a way far more insidious than nuclear war, that they would bring a new wealth that would erase the ruins."

To start the essay with such beauty and end it with such despair is heartbreaking. But Solnit is an idealist. But is she an optimist? I'm hoping that delving further into her work will answer my question.

Open House New York | Sunday, October 7

I spent the second day of my Open House New York (OHNY) weekend in an area about 1/2 square mile large, maybe even smaller.

First, I worked my volunteer shift from 10-2 at Brooklyn Lyceum. I'd been there last year for a haunted house, which means that my perception of the place was completely different this time: for example, I wasn't getting buried alive or in completely dark, claustrophobic spaces (which is, indeed, what I do sometimes for fun).

The Brooklyn Lyceum is a former bathhouse turned community arts center. The amount of activity that happens at the Lyceum is amazing. During OHNY, about 40 people showed up to rehearse an opera that was going to be performed onsite that Wednesday; dads and sons were showing up to use the batting cage upstairs; and Fiona Apple and Yo La Tengo had performed there the night before as part of The New Yorker Festival.

Owner Eric Richmond gave an incredibly fascinating tour; he has conducted extensive research on the building and the neighborhood's history. I told him a couple of times to put some of these stories down on paper, because they'd make a great book. (Think disease & death, the mafia, and gentrification.) I spent the majority of my time telling people to sign the OHNY guest book and talking to Eric's sister, Laura, who was very nice. The Lyceum is a great example of a private individual restoring a landmark building and turning it into something positive for a "marginal" neighborhood.




After the Lyceum, I headed to the Gowanus Canal to sign up for a self-guided canoe tour with the Gowanus Dredgers. The wait was about two hours long, but another lone OHNY attendee convinced me to to visit sculptor Tom Otterness' studio while I waited. His tours were completely booked, but everybody present at the start time was invited in, so we lucked out. If you're from NYC, you probably recognize his work from the A, C, and E subway stop at 14th Street & 8th Avenue, my neighborhood stop for 8 years when Ed and I lived on 14th Street.

Otterness' work is very playful yet politically challenging. His cartoon-like metal works make the crankiest New Yorkers smile. Beyond a glance, though, his work is anti-establishment. After several questions about his technical process, I asked about the political aspect of his work and how his style helped make the medicine go down, so to speak. He reminded us that the story of Humpty Dumpty worked the same way and that he had contemplated the idea the previous evening while watching a Richard Pryor video. Otterness also said that the MTA has only restricted his work on one occasion, when he created rats wearing police uniforms. One of the rats is permanently on view at Max Fish, a Lower East Side bar that one of his friends runs.


Children and adults can climb into the head of this sculpture and have a moment to themselves.


Otterness with a work that he is giving to his child's public school.


Otterness' studio was full of warm vibes, but it was time to get back to the Gowanus Canal for my canoe tour. News earlier in the week of the Canal having gonorrhea did nothing to dissuade hundreds of people from wanting to paddle in the Canal's waters.

I was by myself, so I was grouped with two others for the trip. Since I had talked about kayaking, I was put into the steering position of the canoe. Although it took me a few minutes to get the hang of it, it was fun being the steerer. (I would not have wanted to sit in the middle, and I'm sure that my forceful paddling would've irritated anybody else in a steering position.)

The last several times I was in a kayak or rowboat (which seems to be happening almost frequently now), I was surrounded by nature. In Newfoundland, there were Bald Headed Eagles above us; and, yes, City Island looks like a national park compared to the Gowanus Canal. But being surrounded by industrial ruins while canoeing was almost just as enjoyable as being surrounded by natural beauty. Too bad our tours were only 15-20 minutes long; I could've stayed out there for a while.

Passenger series. The Viking Trail, Newfoundland; August 22, 2006; 11:12:20 a.m.

Happy 8th wedding anniversary to the driver!

The Mannahatta Project in this week's New Yorker

Lots of good reading in this week's New Yorker, including Nick Paumgarten's eight-page article "The Mannahatta Project."

I've done a bit of research on my neighborhood, Woodlawn in the Bronx, but my starting point is in the late 1800s. The street was less crowded; my lot of land was four times as big (it was divided into four lots later on); the neighborhood wasn't as built up. But The Mannahatta Project, spearheaded by Wildlife Conservation Society landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson, takes New York City back to 1609, the year of a New York-based jacht ride by Henry Hudson and crew.

In 1609, everything was nature (and nature was everything). A four-mile beach ran from the Battery to West 33rd Street; lots more hills populated the city, before they were levelled; Manhattan was narrower; and there were 54 "ecological communities" in all.

Sanderson, whose office is at the Bronx Zoo and lives on City Island, is using 3-D pictures and the Muir web to determine what the City looked like before the humans invaded.

The Mannahatta Project aspires to minute verisimilitude, down to the varieties of moss, and will facilitate a kind of naturalist's version of George-Washington-slept-here. Eventually, Sanderson would like to put up plaques around town calling attention to this or that bygone pond or dune, or even to post recreations of 1609 vistas on the city's next generation of bus shelters. A visitor to Times Square, standing alongside the Naked Cowboy on the traffic island at Forty-fifth Street and Broadway, might be encouraged to see a convergence, under what is now the Marriott Marquis, of two freshwater creeks, one flowing out of a marsh beneath the headquarters of the New York Post, and the other from under the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School. The creeks were dammed by beavers to create a red-maple swamp, frequented by wood ducks and elk. The idea of all this, of course, is to get us to appreciate the remnants of the natural world, even in this degraded place, and then to work harder to preserve them, here and everywhere else. Still, although Sanderson might not admit it, such visions also have a way of helping us to savor our particular range of degradations. We've made a fine mess.

Harry N. Abrams is going to publish the book, though no publication date is mentioned. One of the more anecdotal portions of the article sees Paumgarten visit Inwood with Sanderson and Mannahatta project helper Markley Boyer. ("This is one of the few parts of Manhattan where you can get around successfully with a 1782 map," says Sanderson.)

The short paragraph about the human response to knowing this type of history was fascinating:

The attempt to strip one layer from the other, and to see where they match up, seems to simulate some as yet undiscovered cerebral nodes devoted to before-and-after visualization. The fantasy of depopulation, whether retroactive or futuristic, appeals to our sense of vanity and self-loathing. It may help explain the success of the book "The World Without Us," in which the author, Alan Weisman, describes what would happen to the earth if humans were no longer around. (In short, it would both bounce back and go to hell, in interesting ways.) It's Mannahatta in reverse. Weisman devotes a few pages to Sanderson's project, surmising that its findings will give us a clue as to what Manhattan would become in our absence. But, of course, the Manhattan of 1609 is lost. The city is far more than a flesh wound.

I think that the human response to most things is completely self-centered, even by the most enlightened people. My first photography criticism professor, Bill Jenkins at Arizona State University, once asked our small class why the nude was the most-photographed subject. "Narcissism" was my immediate response, although I couldn't explain why. Jenkins told me at the next class meeting that he'd thought about my reply and understood. I'm not sure which of these characteristics - narcissim, vanity, self-loathing - are inherent to the group of human beings (ie: a group trait) and which are individual.

The World Without Us is now on my reading list. Looking at the book's website timeline (sparingly done to maintain interest in the book), The World Without Us is about the beginning of decay and the return to nature. The concepts of decay and birth are definitely linked, to what extent I have yet to decide; do they have the same relationship as birth and death?

The article isn't online in its entirety, but The New Yorker's website has an accompanying slide show.

NOTE: Since writing this post, I was informed that that this book will be published in 2009, coinciding with the quadricentennial of the explorations of Henry Hudson and Samuel de Champlain in 1609, as well as the 200th anniversary of Robert Fulton's first steamship voyage along the Hudson River.

Passenger series. Indiana Sand Dunes; July 2, 2007; 11:49 a.m.