io-magazine (environmental art)

SUMMER 1998

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/index.html [9.7.2001 11:42:42] What is Environmental Art? Stephanie Ross Rooted Art?: Environmental Art and our Attachment to nature Emily Brady Kissing the Mess Aesthetic Engagement with Ideas of Nature Hester Reeve Hans Haacke- Environmental Artist with Sociopolitical Concerns Anita Seppä Environmental Art. A New Sanctification Jale Erzen Highway, Art and Environment Olli Immonen The Highway Number Four Roadside Art Project Antero Toikka Thoughts about "Art in nature" Hermann Prigann

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file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/contents.html [9.7.2001 11:42:44] IO contributors

CONTRIBUTORS

Emily Brady is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Lancaster University, England. Agnes Denes is an American artist of international renown. She also lectures at the universities in U.S and abroad. Jale Erzen is a painter and Secretary-General of the International Association for Aesthetics. Olli Immonen is Secretary of the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics. Hanna Johansson is a Ph.D. student at Helsinki University, Finland. Hermann Prigann is an artist who also teaches in Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany. Hester Reeve is a performance artist who is completing her MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University, England. Stephanie Ross teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Anita Seppä is a Ph.D. student at Helsinki University, Finland.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/contribu.html [9.7.2001 11:42:45] IO bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art, ed. by Sonfist, A. New York: Dutton, 1983. “Art into Nature: Decoration, Incursion, or Revelation?” in P.J. Cormick, ed. The Reasons of Art University of Ottawa Press, 1985, pp. 232-42. Beardsley, John Probing the Earth: Contemporary Land Projects. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977. Carlson, A. “Is Environmental Art and Aesthetic Affront to Nature?”. The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 16, no. 4, December 1996. Cavsey, Andrew "Space and Time in British Land Art", Studio International 2/1977. Crawford, D. “Nature and Art: Some Dialectical Relationships”. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 42, 1983. Endo,Toshikatsu Nordiskt Konstcentrums utställningkatalog nr.3. Pohjoismainen taidekeskus, Helsinki. 1989. Frankenstein, A. “Christo’s ‘ Fence’, Beauty or Betrayal?”. Art in America, vol. 64, 1976. Gablik, Suzi The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Garraud, Colette L’Idee de nature dans l’art contemporain. Flammarion, Paris, 1993. Gussow, A. A Sense of Place: Artists and the American Land. San Francisco: Friends of the Earth, 1972. Haacke, H. Framing and Being Framed. The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York University Press, 1975. Humphrey, P. “The Ethics of Earthworks”. Environmental Ethics, vol. 7, 1985. Irwin, Robert Being and circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art. California: The Lapis Press, 1985. Lippard, Lucy, R. Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. N.Y.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/biblio.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:42:45] IO bibliography 1983. Ross, S. “Gardens, earthworks and environmental art”, in S. Kemal and I. Gaskell, eds., Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Sonfist, A. Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments. Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum, 1978. Trilogi: Kunst - Natur - Videnskab (Trilogy: Art - Nature - Science), ed. Jürgensen, A. ja Sutton, G. K. Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, TICKON. Danmark, 1996. The Writings of Robert Smithson ed. by Holt, N. New York University Press, 1979.

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Instructions for Authors IO – The Internet Magazine of Applied Aesthetics is intended to provide an international forum for discussion on issues in applied aesthetics. Applied aesthetics embraces various disciplines, including philosophy, art theory and practice, etc., and covers a range of subject areas, such as environmental aesthetics, art studies, and cultural and environmental policies. As an on-line publication, the magazine aims to make use of the special possibilities and opportunities of the internet. We encourage authors to explore these opportunities, and to write in a style which is likely to promote discussion. Authors are discouraged from writing in a style that is overly academic or technical. The writers should also bear in mind the requirements of an international readership when making reference to localized places or events. Footnotes, which will appear at the end of the article, should be kept to a minimum. Citations should include author s name, title, publisher, date of publication (for example, for a book: R. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London, G.M. Dent and Sons, 1978), p. 53. For an article, G. Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, vol. 162, 1968, pp. 1243-8.). Contributions should be submitted as follows: one printed copy and one on 3.5 diskette, PC or Macintosh format, Word or Word Perfect preferred. If pictures or graphics are used, authors should indicate if they have a preference for the layout. The editors reserve the right to make final acceptance of submissions and to make alterations which do not involve any change of meaning.

Contributions should be sent to: Editor IO – The Internet Magazine of Applied Aesthetics International Institute of Applied Aesthetics Kannaksenkatu 22 15140 Lahti

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LINKS Philosophy in Cyberspace: Aesthetics Lancaster Environmental pages Aesthetics On-Line

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/links.html [9.7.2001 11:42:47] IO web design

Jonna Iljin Tuukka Savolainen Tommi Tienhaara Institute of design / Lahti Polytechnic

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We are pleased to introduce the first issue of IO, The Internet Magazine of Applied Aesthetics, which has emerged from activities and projects initiated by the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, based in Lahti, Finland. IO is intended to provide an international forum for discussion on issues in applied aesthetics, and it aims to open creative and critical perspectives to the subjects discussed. As an area of research and education, applied aesthetics focuses on issues emerging at the intersection of theoretical aesthetics and various applied disciplines. The disciplines that applied aesthetics embraces include philosophy, art theory and practice, etc., but the questions raised are also often closely connected to a range of special subject areas such as environmental aesthetics, art studies, and cultural and environmental policies. And of course, in connection to these issues the ethical and ideological perspectives become often more than relevant. The title of the magazine was chosen for its relevance to electronic media - I,O referring to the whole conceptual basis of digital information and at the same time to turning on and turning off. And also the title has more complex cultural and even astronomical connotations; IO being one of Jupiter's moons, and playing as well on ancient Greek mythologies. The issue at hand is focused on environmental art. The subject merges the artefactuality of art with natural processes in the nonhuman world. This phenomenon raises complex issues including questions of aesthetic, ethical, ecological, spiritual value, and social and political considerations. The articles, art work and other resources in this issue address these questions from various perspectives - artistic, philosophical, and also more interdisciplinary approaches. The magazine is divided into two main sectors: the articles and the gallery. A short bibliography on environmental art has also been collected from the authors, which can be found through the contents page. We hope you enjoy our first issue - and welcome your comments and discussion. Emily Brady and Anita Seppä, Editors

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Stephanie Ross What is Environmental Art?

Before addressing the aesthetic problems raised by environmental art, we must find a way to delimit the category in question. Just what counts as environmental art? There are a variety of candidates, and they suggest a number of related and overlapping criteria that seem relevant. While I have no interest in seeking a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the category “environmental art”, I shall begin by examining a set of examples, each of which blends in a different manner the notions of art and environment. I should note that except for the case of gardens, my examples will be almost exclusively drawn from the North American artworld. I hope readers will supplement them with examples from other locales and cultures. For a start, we can certainly think of many works of art that are about the environment and responsive to it. Consider the landscapes of the Hudson River school, Cézanne's many portraits of Mont Sainte Victoire, or – in a different medium – Smetana's tone poem The Moldau (about a river) or Moussorgsky's composition Night on Bald Mountain. These are all nuanced and sensitive works of art that are descriptive of the natural environment. Yet we wouldn't classify them as environmental art. The problem is not simply their failure to reside in the environment; exhibiting Cézanne's canvases at the foot of the mountain they portray would not transform them into the sort of art we are seeking. Nor do we consider all works of art that are located in the environment to be environmental art. Many works of art are exhibited outdoors. In the United States, the General Services Administration sponsored an Art in Architecture program beginning in the 1960's. The program set aside a certain fixed per centage of construction costs of federal buildings for the purchase or commission of works of art. As a result, plazas surrounding many new buildings are graced by venturesome pieces of sculpture. We would, however, classify most of these works as public art rather than environmental art. While they are outdoors, and thus available

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ross.html (1 of 7) [9.7.2001 11:42:49] for public viewing (in fact, some people complain because it is impossible not to see them...) they are in an urban environment. And most of them are not about the natural world. A controversial and much discussed example of this type of art is Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, which generated a vigorous debate about work identity when it was removed at the request of workers who loathed the piece itself and the effect it had on the courtyard space they hoped to put to friendlier uses. Consider next the various sculpture parks or sculpture gardens that grace our communities. Some are associated with museums (e.g., the sculpture gardens at New York's Museum of Modern Art or Washington's Hirshhorn Museum), some with corporations (e.g., the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Garden at Pepsico's World Headquarters in Purchase, N.Y.), while others are simply outdoor venues for large scale works of art (e.g., St. Louis' Laumeier Sculpture Park). They differ from the examples of public art canvassed above in inhabiting what is generally a more bucolic setting. Yet the Henry Moore sculpture Two Piece Reclining Figure permanently exhibited on the lawn of the Missouri Botanical Garden is not a piece of environmental art. Reclining Figure is outdoors, unlike the Cézanne landscapes mentioned two paragraphs back, yet it could just as well be exhibited in a museum or gallery. Doing so would not raise questions about work identity. Perhaps one reason Reclining Figure does not need to be exhibited outdoors is that it is not about the outdoors. That is, it does not take the environment as its subject. Suppose we conjoin the two conditions just mentioned. Might it be the case that environmental art consists of precisely those works that are both in the environment and about the environment? This clearly will not do either. It is at once too restrictive and too inclusive. There are certainly genuine instances of environmental art that don't meet this new criterion because they simply aren't about anything at all – that is, they are non representational. There is no reason why environmental works can't be abstract. As such they might be about volume, mass, and rest, or about abstraction and the whole history of Western art, but they certainly aren't about the natural world in the sense of directing our attention to details of the ecosystems that surround them. There is another reason why this last attempt to characterize environmental art is inadequate. It omits a centrally important class of examples, those which are manipulations of the environment. These works take the natural environment as their medium – they involve the modification of some aspect of the external world. And this explains why these particular pieces cannot be moved, let alone exhibited indoors, without destroying their very identity.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ross.html (2 of 7) [9.7.2001 11:42:49] But again, a whole range of examples is possible. Compare Michael Heizer's Double Negative and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty – classic earthworks in which chunks of rock or soil are literally dug or shaped or moved – with the much more delicate, ephemeral creations of Michael Singer and Richard Long. For Double Negative, Heizer used explosives and machinery to remove 240,000 tons of earth and rock from 2 cuts on opposite sides of a deep mesa, while Smithson, in building Spiral Jetty, used ten wheeler dump trucks and Caterpillar truck loaders to place 6,650 tons of basalt, limestone, and earth in a spiral 1500 feet long and 15 feet wide.(1) These projects are vast and disruptive. By contrast, Singer "creates incredibly fragile and transitory works by gently tying, balancing, and bending the natural materials found in the beaver bogs, marshes, ponds, evergreen woods, and bamboo stands where he works," (2) while Long's works have included making a path in a grassy field by walking back and forth for hours, creating and then photographing configurations of stones while taking a walk, and a piece, titled A Ten Mile Walk Done on Nov. 1, consisting of a walk documented by a line drawn on a map. (3)

Environmental Art in Terms of Gestures If we put aside art that is merely about the environment as well as art that is simply in the environment, we can classify the complex relations of art to environment in many of these remaining works by borrowing from Mark Rosenthal. In his article "Some Attitudes of Earth Art: From Competition to Adoration," (4) Rosenthal suggests a taxonomy of recent environmental art in terms of gestures. I have elsewhere built on his suggestion to recognize the following categories: masculine gestures (5), ephemeral gestures, performance works, and landscapes and proto gardens.(6) Let me discuss each of these in turn. Masculine gestures in the environment would comprise many of the massive earthworks done remote sites in the American West in the 1970's: Michael Heizer's Dissipate, Double Negative, Five Conic Displacements, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Walter de Maria's Lightning Field. Gentler gestures include works like Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels (a set of 'locator' tunnels – concrete pipes with perforations keyed to celestial events), Mary Miss' Field Rotation (a pinwheel shaped sunken stucture in an Illinois field; one critic suggests the work's components refer to "such local vernacular structures as corrals and grain elevators" (7), and James Turrell's Roden Crater (a volcanic crater near Flagstaff, AZ, which the artist is subtly reshaping so visitors will experience both geologic time and celestial events).

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ross.html (3 of 7) [9.7.2001 11:42:49] Though I called works like Holt's Sun Tunnels gentler, they don't yet qualify as ephemeral gestures because they are intended to endure in one place. The works of Singer and Long count as ephemeral in my system. Both artists make small alterations to a natural scene and leave them to eventually revert back to their former condition. The British artist Andy Goldsworthy creates similarly subtle and adaptive works. Critic Suzi Gablik reports that "what he makes – lattices of horse chestnut leaves stitched together with grass stalks, fresh green blades of spring grass with white stems placed around the circumference of a hole like a sunburst, yellow dandelions threaded onto grass stalks and laid in a stream, a zigzag trail of bracken fronds on the ground – usually blows away in the wind or rain, sometimes after only a few seconds." (8) Goldsworthy documents his creations with photographs, just as Long photographs his walks. The works of Christo and Jeanne Claude bear certain similarities to both previous categories. Their installations here in the United States – Valley Curtain, Grand Hogback, Rifle, Colorado, 1971 -72, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, CA, 1972-76, Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Fl, 1980-83 – introduce artifical elements (orange curtain, white fence, pink skirts, all constructed from nylon fabic) into the landscape on a grand scale. Yet after a few days the pieces are entirely dismantled and the sites returned to their previous state. Another artist whose works are performances in the environment is Dominique Mazeaud, whose walks along the Rio Grande River in Santa Fe constitute a project she called The Great Cleasing of the Rio Grande River. Mazeaud walks along the river each month on the same day, saying prayers and collecting refuse in garbage bags. he writes accumulates a set of thoughts she calls her "riveries" in a journal. (9) Landscapes and proto gardens constitute yet another category of environmetal art. Alan Sonfist is an artist who has created a number of installations called Time Landscape, each recreating the native flora of the site it now inhabits. Sonfist has also created Pool of Earth, a landscape equivalent to found art, by outlining an area in a chemical waste dump with a circle of stones and declaring the landscape or garden to be anything that happens to sprout in that circular space.

Work of Art and its Site While the set of examples I have accumulated so far indicates some parameters for environmental art, they don't settle all of the issues. For example, how do we rule out cases like the following, which are art, are in

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ross.html (4 of 7) [9.7.2001 11:42:49] the environment, and take aspects of the environment as their medium, yet still don't seem straightforward examples of environmental art: (1) Mt. Rushmore, in South Dakota, carved with the busts of four United States presidents; (2) the project, now underway, to create a topiary version of Seurat's painting La Grande Jatte in Columbus Ohio. Contrast Mt. Rushmore with the other manipulated mountain described above, Turrell's Roden Crater. And compare the Ohio topiary project with any of the great gardens of 17th century France and 18th century Britain, on the one hand, and with Sonfist's landscapes, on the other. These last contrasts suggest an additional aspect that is crucial to environmental art. Whether a work uses its site as medium – digging, sculpting, or otherwise rearranging the environs – or merely responds to, references, or records the particularities of that site – it must have some relationship more intimate than merely being there. (And surely more intimate than the even more distant relationship 'being about'). We can chart the possibilities here with the help of distinctions outlined by the artist Robert Irwin in his essay "Being and Circumstance." (10) There Irwin distinguishes four different relationships a work might have to its site. In order of increasing intimacy, they are: site dominant, site adjusted, site specific, and site conditioned/determined. Site dominant works have no particular ties to their sites (Irwin's example is a Henry Moore sculpture). Site adjusted works make concessions with regard to "scale, appropriateness, placement, etc." Site specific works, though conceived with the site in mind, are still "keyed (referenced) to the oeuvre of the artist;" and finally, site conditioned/determined works "draw all their cues from their surroundings [...] the site determines all the facets of the 'sculptural response.'" Given Irwin's categories, we might consider stipulating that environmental art must be either site specific or site conditioned/determined. This would rule out some of the problem cases above and explicate the special connection that joins the two components of environmental art. Some puzzles remain, however. What are we to say about the genres of environmental art? Is it only the plastic and visual arts that contribute to this category? Why mightn't there be an environmental novel, or an environmental symphony? How are we to classify certain photographic projects, like the works of John Pfahl, who documented nuclear plants throughout the United States in large format overtly beautiful and romantic landscape photographs, or those of David Hanson, whose series Waste Land is comprised of aerial photos of hazardous waste sites? A related question is this, how do we deal with overtly didactic works which aspire to educate us about environmental crises? file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ross.html (5 of 7) [9.7.2001 11:42:49] Exhibitions of the work of Helen and Newton Harrison are often comprised of charts, maps, and tanks of living creatures. Their topics have included acid rain, watersheds, commercial fishing, lagoon ecology. If this is environmental art, then we can imagine quite similar works resulting from vastly different projects. The first might be a series of maps and charts indicating the flow of a river and the draining of a watershed, while the second might be a series of maps and charts indicating a trek taken by another artist through that same watershed, an outing that generated noother physical traces. Although these two displays might prompt very similar aesthetic experiences among gallery goers, their 'denotations' (significance) might be extremely disparate. And it remains possible that only one, or neither, is environmental art. There is one other question we should raise here. Why assume that all environmental art is produced by environmentalists and Greenpeace sympathizers? Why mightn't advocates of clear cutting and strip mining create works of art to support their wilderness ethos – i.e., farm it, plunder it, make it serve...? Many of the massive earthworks of the early 70's had adversarial relationships to the terrain they altered, though they might still count as site specific or site conditioned/determined, in Irwin's taxonomy. Other works have been located in natural sites that have been blighted by mining or industry. Is it appropriate to insist that the category ’environmental art’ carry some fixed political valence?

Gardens My final topic is gardens. It is certainly the case that gardens are naturalistic works of art in the landscape, and that their raw material consists of plants plus the local topography. How then should we demarcate gardens from environmental art? For a start, note that not all gardens are works of art. This follows in part from the fact that beauty is neither necessary norsufficient for the that category. Moreover, not all gardens are site specific or site conditioned/determined. Many famous gardens from the past resisted or overcame their sites. Consider LeNotre's endless struggle to drain the swamps of Versailles while retaining enough water to run its waterworks and fountains, or Capability Brown's practice of damming streams and levelling villages to achieve his signature effects. The enthusiasm of Victorian gardeners for the bedding system and their

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ross.html (6 of 7) [9.7.2001 11:42:49] introduction of exotic species from around the world both evidence a desire to trump local environmental conditions. Finally, many gardens have content, they convey messages to those who stroll through them. The great gardens of the past have offered disquisitions on topics as varied as politics, religion, classical texts, and erotic love. So it is of course possible that some gardens not only inhabit but tell us about the natural world. These are all considerations we must keep in mind in determining whether some gardens count as environmental art.

Notes 1. Much of my account of these and other works is drawn from the very helpful anthology edited by Alan Sonfist, Art and the Land (New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1983). 2. Michael Auping, "Earth Art: A Study in Ecological Politics," in Sonfist, Art in the Land, p. 98. 3. Carol Hall, "Environmental Artists: Sources and Directions" in Sonfist, Art in the Land, pp. 34 35. 4. In Sonfist, Art and the Land, pp. 60 73. 5. I acknowledge the sexism inherent in this term. I believe it reflects sex role stereotypes that are prevalent in our society today. I think we just do classify as male things that are large, bold, energetic, and expansive. 6. Stephanie Ross, "Gardens, earthworks, and environmental art", in S. Kemal and I. Gaskell, Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press). 7. Judith E. Stein,"Making Their Mark" in Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989). 8. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 92. I am grateful to Terry Suhre for pointing out this example to me, as well as the work of Domique Mazeaud. 9. Reported in Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art, pp. 119 122. 10. In Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art (California: The Lapis Press, 1985).

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Emily Brady Rooted Art?: Environmental Art and our Attachment to Nature Aesthetic experience can engender an intimate relationship with the natural environment by engaging us with our surroundings in a particular way. The senses, thought, imagination and emotion are the aesthetic resources which facilitate aesthetic appreciation and the vehicles for developing that potential relationship. For example, through touch we are drawn closer to things we otherwise observe at a distance – we stoop low to the ground to feel the soft sponginess of moss, or lie back in it and gaze into the sky above. Reflections and associations may accompany these sensations, and perhaps a feeling of comfortable exhilaration in taking in the moss’s environment, which has, for the moment, become ours too. Experiences of this kind foster attachments to nature – to particular environments and places, and to species or other things that form these environments. We seek out these places and things time and time again because we value them. In my example, the attachments are developed through direct or immediate experience of the natural world. But our relationship to nature is also developed, aesthetically and non-aesthetically, through artefacts and culture – through spirituality, natural history, art and so on. What I would like to explore here is the extent to which environmental art fosters attachments to nature. Does environmental art engage us with nature in ways which enable us to develop a relationship with it, or does it distance us from nature? Does environmental art foster the kinds of attachments which support an intimate relationship with nature, or does it impose humanity on nature, manipulate nature or in other ways undermine harmonious attachments to nature? What are some of the ways in which these attachments are made? My interest in these questions is not an ethical one; I will not argue here that environmental art ought to encourage a feeling of attachment to nature, or that such art would be better art (although a case could be made for both of these views). I recognize that environmental art varies as much in its intentions as in its styles and production, and my aim is to distinguish between those cases where attachment to nature predominates from those where it does not. file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/brady.html (1 of 8) [9.7.2001 11:42:51] IO - Articles

Our Attachment to Nature Before discussing cases of environmental art in relation to the questions above, we need to have some idea of what constitutes attachment to nature and what the depths and limits of this attachment are. Essential to the concept of attachment is that one thing has a strong connection to another thing in terms of some particular meaning, value or significance. Besides this, attachments vary according to the particular significance involved. My feeling of attachment to a friend is based in care, affection and respect, while my attachment to my bicycle is based, primarily, in its utilitarian significance. Some attachments are very deep, involving intimacy and closeness, while others are more tenuous and distant.

In the context of the natural environment, it is worth noting that attachment overlaps with a sense of place – a sense of place may engender attachments, and existing attachments may engender a sense of place. Attachments related to place are often, although not exclusively, related to familiarity and associations. Many of our attachments to nature evolve through knowing some environment, living in it, or being able to relate to it because it reminds us of other places we know or other things we value. But attachment is a broader notion in that it may not be connected to a place at all. We may be attached to things in nature which are not associated with a particular place or environment, and the kinds of attachments we make may be based in meanings which are unrelated to the idea of place. Attachments to nature are also broader in the sense that they may be based in preferences for things that are strange and unfamiliar. Sometimes we value something and want to develop a connection to it precisely because it is different and distinct from ourselves.

These points illustrate how a feeling of attachment may evolve through both continuity and difference, which is especially important in the context of our relationship with nature. Human beings are part of nature, and in this fact we find a basic source of attachment. We recognize a continuity with nature through the acts of living and inhabiting, flourishing and decomposing. At the same time, however, we recognize difference in the otherness of nature. Nature is also strange and unfamiliar to us and, accordingly, our relationships with it are characterized as much by conflict as by harmony. The otherness of nature reminds us not to take it for granted, to recognize it on its own terms, and in this way to respect it. The sort of necessary distance of respect, however, need not detach us from nature. Like the attachment characterized by friendships, our relationship to nature may involve affection and intimacy based in what is shared, but also the recognition that

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/brady.html (2 of 8) [9.7.2001 11:42:51] IO - Articles the other is a distinct entity with their own particular needs and projects. The ideal kind of attachment to nature involves, in my view, the play between intimacy and respect.

Environmental Art and Attachment Given the concept of attachment I have sketched, what role does it have in our appreciation of environmental art? To answer this question, I consider cases of environmental art which belong to the four categories of environmental art outlined by Stephanie Ross in her article in this issue, ‘What is Environmental Art?’: masculine gestures, ephemeral gestures, performance works, and landscapes and proto-gardens.(1)

Masculine gestures categorize works of environmental art which are fairly permanent, and range from earthworks that involve moving tons of earth or rock (e.g. work by Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer) to softer gestures that are less disruptive to the land (e.g. work by Nancy Holt and Herman Prigann. Smithson’s and Heizer’s work is overtly human and intentional in terms of using nature for art’s sake. Smithson’s earthworks usually make use of forms on a grand scale – jetties, ramps or mounds which stand out in the environment and mark the land through their sheer mass. Heizer’s works cut monumental forms into earth or rock on a grand scale. The sites chosen by both artists tend to be remote and inaccessible, spaces vast enough for massive art works. Their sites are ‘site-specific’ in that the art work is created in some relation to the chosen site, but the art work is the focal point, with the site mainly as backdrop.(2) This is especially true for Heizer whose forms require a background of seemingly endless space, such as a desert.

More than any other environmental art (except perhaps Christo’s), these works have received criticism from both ethical and aesthetic points of view. Some have argued that even when the art works are not ecologically damaging, they are nonetheless unethical, representing an affront to nature.(3) It could be argued, for example, that in the way these works impose human forces on to nature, they strengthen the hierarchical dualisms which have led to the oppression of nature (e.g. human/nature, animal/non-human animal, culture/nature). These artists are primarily interested in art rather than environmental issues, so that they are open to such criticisms comes as little surprise.(4) On aesthetic grounds, they may also constitute an affront, because they ‘forcibly assert their artefactuality over against nature’ and work aesthetically against rather than symbiotically with the aesthetic qualities of their surroundings.(5) I cannot address these criticisms here, but they are relevant to the issue of

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/brady.html (3 of 8) [9.7.2001 11:42:51] IO - Articles attachment, namely, because they identify some obvious ways in which these art works detach and distance us from nature. These works are about art more than nature, so they are less likely to encourage an engagement with nature from which attachments might arise. For example, through a photograph of Heizer’s Double Negative we are drawn to aesthetic features of the work itself, rather than the work pointing to aesthetic features of the surrounding environment. In many cases, these art works represent an aggressive and disruptive relationship with their environments, akin more to power relationships between people than the cooperative harmony of friendships.

Although these works do appear to render attachment to nature difficult, it could also be argued that to some extent Heizer and Smithson are able to bring out the aesthetic qualities of the environment, and in that way create a relationship. The sheer contrast of their forms may perceptually accentuate and therefore bring to our attention particular aesthetic qualities in the surroundings – the sharp horizontal line of a structure makes apparent the variety of pleasing curves of mountains in the background. The contrast between the overt intentionality of masculine gestures might emphasize the otherness of nature; artefacts against a vast natural backdrop point up the feeling that nature is wild and remote in contrast to the controlled character of the art work. The otherness brought out here corresponds to the element of distance essential to friendships, as noted above (or potentially it severs attachments altogether). A final point is that some of Smithson’s sites were chosen because they had already been damaged by human action, such as waste sites and disused quarries. In this respect his works are in some ways congruous with the humanly altered character of the site, thereby drawing attention to human impact on nature (Asphalt Rundown is a case in point). This might have the somewhat ironic effect of inducing concern for nature in the face of destruction.

Compared to other masculine gestures, Holt’s and Prigann’s projects have more interest as environments themselves and for the way they highlight aspects of their surroundings or refer to their sites more explicitly. For example, Holt’s creations can be entered and explored, and at the same time she creates views and vistas out from the work and to the landscape or even the stars through cement pipes or other means (see especially Views Through a Sand Dune, Sun Tunnels and Hydra's Head). Similarly, Prigann’s Yellow Ramp creates connections through art to the local environment and the sun above at a particular time of year.

Although these works are more oriented toward art than nature, they have stronger connections to their natural environments than other masculine gestures, and rest on the border between being site-specific and ‘site-conditioned’(6) (when the art work takes its very direction from the site itself). They are still quite clearly art works in the land, but they are more sensitive to their surroundings. Importantly, unlike the

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/brady.html (4 of 8) [9.7.2001 11:42:51] IO - Articles work of Heizer and Smithson, these works and their accompanying environments can actually be appreciated since they are not so inaccessible. This means that the appreciator can be enticed into the micro-environment created by the art work, an environment which also has significant connections to the environments beyond it. By linking us on earth to the sun and stars above, these works create an especially interesting kind of attachment – they engage us with parts of nature usually quite inaccessible to us. In these various ways these gentler gestures are more likely to engender attachments to the nature connected to these sites.

The next category, ephemeral gestures, includes works by environmental artists such as Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. These art works are site-conditioned and impermanent. The materials used are usually gathered from the site itself and incorporated into the setting. Some last for a few moments – a formation of leaves blown away by the wind; some a few hours – an icicle formed onto rocks melts in the afternoon sun; and others for longer – a path tracked through a field. These works are intentionally sensitive to their natural surroundings; indeed, they evolve so much from their surroundings that one might confuse the artefact for nature itself.(7) The art work is, however, an important force. Natural materials are manipulated to echo or celebrate particular qualities of nature – its complexity, simplicity, delicacy, strength, changeability, varying shapes and textures, and more generally, all its dynamic possibilities.

The sensitivity to nature and veneration of it implicit in these art works encourages the appreciator (usually via a photograph (8)) to appreciate nature more on its terms than the artist’s. The artist’s role is to enable us to become aware of nature’s value by highlighting it in creative and captivating ways. We are encouraged to become immersed in natural environments and to find beauty in nature beyond hackneyed or picturesque sights. For example, Goldsworthy’s Icicle Frozen to a Rock (Cumbria) is penetrating, like the frozen water through which it has formed. It both embodies and expresses the play between the bleak feeling which accompanies the permanence of winter cold and the relief of a quick thaw. While nature can have expressive qualities without the intervention of an artist, Goldsworthy’s creation helps us to find them.

It is easy to see how this work, and others like it, encourage a relationship with nature. We may really hate the winter cold, but in situations where we do not have suffer from it, we are more able to appreciate its aesthetic qualities. Artists like Goldsworthy offer us the opportunity to get to know why there might be positive qualities in nature which are either difficult to appreciate or just go unnoticed because we think we have seen it all before. This kind of ‘aesthetic knowledge’ can form the basis of a strong relationship to nature.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/brady.html (5 of 8) [9.7.2001 11:42:51] IO - Articles However, ephemeral gestures can still be said to manipulate nature for an artistic purpose. Rather than constituting a true interaction with nature (as we shall see in the work of the Sonfist, Harrison or Denes, later in this essay), these works appropriate nature, and convey its qualities through artistic gestures. While this type of artistic mediation can help us to find aesthetic qualities in nature, it fosters attachment involving less interdependence, and thus falls short of the ideal.

Other environmental art works are temporary in nature, like ephemeral gestures, but they have another distinctive feature – they are somehow perfomative. In this third category, performative works, Christo’s art is the prime example. Christo is well known for wrapping things, islands, public buildings, and also for using fabric in the landscape. Running Fence used one hundred and sixty-five thousand yards of nylon to create a soft fence through two counties in California. This piece, like others, drew attention to both the light and sumptuous qualities of its materials and the features of its site. Running Fence internally framed the landscape in which it was built, and in that way brought attention to aesthetic qualities of both the art work and the land.(9)

Although Christo’s work is temporary, its impact and orientation toward art means that it shares features with masculine gestures. In terms of its propensity to engender a relationship with nature, it is a step backward from the more sensitive work of Goldsworthy or Long. While Christo’s work might be taken as a tribute to whatever environment it is situated in, its incongruity with the landscape means that the appreciator’s attention is ultimately on the fabric itself, so that nature, here, serves merely as a backdrop for a brilliant kitsch fantasy.

I turn now to Ross’s final category, landscapes and proto-gardens, which includes the work of Alan Sonfist, Helen and Newton Harrison, and Agnes Denes. Because living and growing materials, cultivated over time, are essential to these art works, these artists are truly interacting with nature. Their projects necessarily span relatively large amounts of time, and are usually permanent, although very changeable. Denes’ Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule, was conceived and produced over fourteen years and involved planting ten thousand trees. Sonfist’s Time Landscape attempted to re-create a pre-colonial forest in the urban environment of New York City. The Harrisons have been involved in marine research, examining the natural cycles of crabs in one of their project.

These works range from being site-specific to site-conditioned, but unlike the other categories, landscapes and proto-gardens involve a direct concern for nature on a more global scale, with a stronger interest in ecological ideas than aesthetic qualities (compared to, e.g., Goldsworthy). For example, Denes’ work embodies the very idea of ecological harmony, aiming to establish a relationship between humans and the natural environment which is based more on nature’s interests than human interests.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/brady.html (6 of 8) [9.7.2001 11:42:51] IO - Articles The social and political statements inherent in these works are more likely to encourage attachments which have at their core a caring or ethical approach to the environment. Importantly, these attachments begin at the level of particularity. Sonfist’s Time Landscape enables urban dwellers to experience a stage in the history of the conflict between culture and nature. And for some people, these projects provide a unique opportunity to understand natural processes.

Conclusion My analysis of environmental art and attachment to nature might be summed up (with important qualifications) by the spectrum below:

This illustrates how, on the whole, environmental art which is more art-centered, more imposing in terms of human intentionality, and less interactive with nature, is less likely to engender attachments to the natural environment which are characterized by care, affection and respect. Art works which are more environment-oriented, more interactive with nature and more ecologically sensitive are more likely to engender both closeness to nature and respect for it.

This spectrum raises a couple of problematic questions. It appears that environmental art which depends significantly on natural processes is more likely to encourage an intimate relationship with the environment. But does this miss the point? After all, the issue here has been to try to determine how we might establish a closer relationship with nature through an artistic experience, and the work of Denes, Sonfist and the Harrisons could be seen as more nature than art. This leads to the second question. Why use art at all? Why should some environmental art aim at establishing the kind of attachment discussed here, when unmediated aesthetic appreciation of the environment provides a more direct opportunity? I think there is one answer to both of these questions. Like friendships, our relationships to nature are developed in many ways and through various routes. Sometimes the direct route is too easy, leading, accordingly, to superficial attachments. The more we have to work at it, the more likely we are to develop deeply rooted and longer lasting attachments.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/brady.html (7 of 8) [9.7.2001 11:42:51] IO - Articles Environmental art can help us to do this by forcing us to engage with nature in demanding ways – whether through art in the land or by giving us creations which challenge the very distinction between art and nature. Notes: (1) Stephanie Ross, “What is Environmental Art?”, IO. Internet Magazine for Applied Aesthetics, Vol. I, Summer 1998. (2) Ibid. (3) Some of these issues are discussed in P. Humphrey’s “The Ethics of Earthworks”, Environmental Ethics, vol. 7, 1985. (4) See M. Auping, “Earth Art: A Study in Environmental Politics” in A. Sonfist, ed., Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art (New York; Dutton, 1983), pp. 92-104. (5) See D. Crawford, “Nature and Art: Some Dialectical Relationships” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 42, 1983, pp. 56-57. (6) Ibid. (7) See M. Rosenthal, “Some Attitudes of Earth Art” in Sonfist, pp.66-67. (8) The very use of photographs creates a distance between appreciator and the art’s environment, and this in turn problematizes the whole idea of attachment through environmental art. I cannot see any way to overcome this, except to note that in these cases the attachments made are less likely to be to the particular places where the works are situated and are more likely to be attachments of a general kind. (9) A. Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?”, The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 16, no. 4, December 1996, p. 648. some links

Subject Matter

Double Negative

Andy Goldsworthy

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Terra Nova “Terra Nova” is one of Herman Prigann’s projects – a programme that is concentrating on the aesthetical and ecological recultivation of destroyed landscapes. It involves staging an artistic coordinate system of sculptural places in the landscape that will form a network stretching over the frontiers of Europe – the “ley lines” of our times. The programme produces an artistic understanding of nature that has developed from analysis of the ecological and aesthetic problems of the present condition of the landscape.

YELLOW RAMP 1993-1995 II. and III. Biennale for land art, lignite mining area, Cottbus/Germany. Material: Earth - granites aprox. 2,5 x 3,0 m stones - concrete slabs, previously used as temporary road at the surface mining. Plantation with broom - two black conifers and yellow flowering plants - St. Johns worts - mulleins - lupines - sun flowers. Lenght 220 m - heighest point of the ramp 15 m - diameter of the observatory 12 m - breadth on the ramp 4 - 6 m

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/terra.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:42:52] IO - Gallery Earthwork - geoglyph - a sign and an observation place. The observatory is constructed according to the rules of the neolithic observatories. The vertical set up of the concrete slabs are marking the four cardinal points. Between the concrete slabs on the east side four small passages are left open, that according to the solstice, the sunshine can cross through and can touch the two stones in the center of the place. The ramp will be grown over with broom and other yellow plants and flowers and they will blossom every year from May till Septemper.

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Herman Prigann views landscape as bearing the stamp of culture, and not that notion, full of romantic projections, that nature is only “the other” – i.e. something that is opposed to culture and urban conditions. He states instead that the beginning and the end of culture is nature, the one immanent in the other. The starting point in Terra Nova -project is first the necessity of making old industrial sites – disused dumps, dying woodland, former open cast mines etc. – part of a developed landscape again. Further, concepts and methods of implementation are required in order to provide initial work and further training for the large numbers of unemployed people. Therefore both aspects, the “discussed areas” that are no longer part of a developed landscape and people who are no longer part of the working process are reintegrated in this project. This process produces areas that are redesigned aesthetically and ecologically, with their waste disposed of, and also to increased awareness in the sense of a humane and ecological approach. In concrete terms, new jobs are produced in the course of work of this kind. The whole programme can be seen as “cultural ecology”. Specialist personnel working on this project on the basis of the various levels of approach to the problem include ecologists, biologists, landscape planners,

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/terra2.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:42:53] IO - Gallery educationalists and sociologists but also specialists in organization, management and PR. Many people from various spheres are drawn into the working and learning processes, according to the size of the various derelict sites and whether work is done on a number at the same time, which should be the aim. Realizing the “Terra Nova” project is overall not just a model, but also a demonstration of how different solutions can be approached in their interdisciplinary interlinking of ecology, art and social design beyond Germany and out into the rest of Europe. Hermann Prigann: Thoughts about "Art in Nature"

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Hermann Prigann Thoughts about “Art in Nature” In Search of Another Comprehension of Nature and Art The search is not new. An elementary aspect of the collective artistic evolution was and is the representation of the dialogue with our inner and outer nature. The aesthetization of this dialogue is art, its object of contemplation and reflection is the nature of humans and their existing and yet manipulable environment. In this oscillating process of our cultural history we are now confronted with a new background of questions: How is the antagonism, nature versus culture, as a specific culturally practiced, collective way of thought to be overcome? How must the aesthetization of our dialogue look, that transforms this antagonism into a collaboration – which would be one of the consequences? Certain romanticized and esoterically interpreted cliches about the meaning of this collaborative are to be avoided here. Only with respect to the background of global ecological crisis can this collaboration be an expression of another concrete, namely ecological behaviour. What would be the artefact of an “ecological aesthetic of nature”? Calling the tree “Brother Tree” and healing the wounds of “Mother Earth” the representation of ritualistic images to purify the ground – is this all an expression of an ecological consciousness? Does it express itself in an art that undertakes such endeavours? Art is concrete and nature is concrete. Concerning the perception of both, the wonderful lies in the factual. To humanize nature through language is a behaviour of consumption, both have their purpose in our antagonistic relation to nature and to ourselves. To quote Ernst Bloch: “culture stands in nature like an army in enemy territory”. The evidence of this condition lies before us. It is the state of the ecosystem earth, bearing the imprint of human’s cultural factor. It is thus the result of a collaborative that is neither prepared nor anticipated, but rather self critical, perhaps to be newly recognized. “If there is a law in one place, there must be laws everywhere” (Lévy Strauss in Structures elementaires de la parente).

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Nature is the Dance of Evolution and Entropy. Culture is One of the Dancers To make the laws of this dance transparent was and is a perspective of art. The culturally defined polarity between art and nature invites us to a dialogue if we contemplate both phenomena on the axis of signs – language – sounds, and imagine this axis as part of a circular movement that encompasses all the communicating aspects of the ecosystem earth. We contemplate our inner and outer world, that surrounds us as one that is accessible and communicating exclusively by and through the signs that rest and evolve in this context. Only in this connection can we speak of a dialogue between art and nature. The interpretation of the signs in this dialogue is the concern of art. Art was and is a seismographic recording and representation of our experience and knowledge of nature. The pictures of its interpretation are codes of a dialogue with the outer realm, nature as an energetic process of change within the matter, and the inner realm, our psychic experience of being in this universal occurrence. In this sense art is the sign language that represents the understanding of our self relating to these contexts. Yet the decisive difference to the present representation of this dialogue – between art and nature – lies in its new determined site. We could say that the classical form of expression was one that represented nature as appearance, and now this dialogue takes place in nature. What follows then is that the ontological and scientific concept of nature in landscape represents itself in the sign language of art either as an object – sculptural site – or as a geoglyph. Otherwise considered, the historicity and materiality of landscape merge with art into a new expression of the perception of nature. Namely that we are an integral part of a permanent metamorphic process. From this experience of being safe in nature, appears in the realizations of this art an aesthetic of free circumstance. That is, these works in their respective actually experienced condition are never finished. In them, the simultaneity of past, present and future can be experienced. Because these works contain as an aesthetic criterion their change in time, we can speak of an ecological aesthetic. The evolution of our knowledge about the contexts of human existence manifests itself on one side, while on the other side the power of entropy presents itself here as changing and aesthetic in appearance. Considered in this perspective, nature and culture are linked symbiotically in art.

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YELLOW RAMP 1993-1995 II. and III. Biennale for land art, lignite mining area, Cottbus/Germany.

Art in the Landscape Sub specie aeternitatis, with respect to eternity, looking upon the landscape, creates the consciousness of space – time. Here past and future, in their present time appearance, join us in the dialogue. This process of experiencing landscape becomes highly relevant, as we consider it from the perspective of flying. Here, from this glance, we can read signs in it. The geoglyphs tell us something of intercourse and understanding of humans with themselves in the landscape space of his history. This sign language bends the bow between neolithic time and today, and illustrates how we have given up the once known universal corporeal measure in relation to space in favour of the pragmatic measure, with which structures in landscape are now drawn, whose cause and sense are clearly determined by a utilitarian and exploitative thinking. An archaic world map would show a few paths that are spanning short distances, many astronomical rock formations, figurative mounts, earth pyramids, vast fissures, that bind themselves with others to form directive fields and figures, and apart from that gigantic space still free from human interaction with the terrain. Every manipulation of landscape had a spiritual, imaginary reference and starting point inside the consciousness of a human being. Today they can protect us from the loss of memory and are indicative of a future, in which the sign language of the devastation of the landscape can be transformed into its opposite. That we, in the present state of the landscape can experience and compare the simultaneity of spiritually and industially set geoglyphs should cause us a moment’s pause. Observed with respect to time, the former remain silent, they are no longer to be read in the sense of those who once put them on face of the earth. What remains is their aesthetic atmosphere, their inner power and fascination, that leads us to the contemplation of our being. We enter the poetic space of our own historicity. This approach is still possible today, as art has, through all the changes of time preserved and further developed Ariadne’s thread of the perception of beauty, as the measure of the human body – physical and psychic – in the space of landscape and nature – seen as the dance of entropy and evolution.

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With the background of this knowledge those terrains get a new meaning, that we have transformed into wasteland while searching for resources for our expanding civilization. They can and should be surrendered to a new formation that creates geoglyphs – signs, landmarks of our epoch. These signs can only find and state art through an intuitive understanding of that archaic sign language, that the powers of nature and the ideas of man about them have set in and on the earth. Signatures of the realization of our being, as integrated creatures of what we call nature. That means, in relation to the concrete object of industrially tuned work in and on it, to give these landscapes back to humans as space. To leave clues in the geoglyphs for following genereations, that we have again resumed the continuation of earth signs and the preservation of living space. In this sense – sub specie aeternitatis – this art continues a dialogue in nature, one which speaks to us from archaic time and points to the future. Nature is neither a thing nor an assembly of things. It is not external or internal, it does not surround us, it is not available, it can neither be destroyed, nor loved. Nature is a word without antonym. It is an all encompassing objectless concept, a condition in movement. Nature as contrary to something else does not exist. Environment that surrounds man is a more exact expression than nature, because nature is the concept that includes humans. Human beings are an aspect, a part of nature, they can influence and destroy the environment, but not nature. Maybe man will step out of history, out of the world’s evolution, but nature remains the same. The currently existing question of survival has apart from the causes determined by industrial development still another cause in the way we understand ourselves in the relationship between nature and humans – one of cultural history, of perception in a broader sense. To perceive the process – the change – the metamorphic in all as beauty is an approach to the development of another – for our culture perhaps new consciousness of ourselves immanent in nature. Nature’s beauty is like all other notions of beauty a result of cultural and social condition and convention. The originality in this sense is pure fiction. What we do in and for landscape – for the space we live in – depends decidedly upon what we perceive of it. One main problem that we have today with landscape is the extensive repression of our own responsibility for its current condition. It has to do with a revision of our understanding of nature and landscape. Because wherever the object of interest is destroyed, the precondition for positive change is eliminated as well.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/prigann.html (4 of 6) [9.7.2001 11:42:54] IO - Articles Structures of landscape that form, deform, animate or constrict and waste the lives of its occupants prove the fact that we are not only entangled in record and history but also in the scenarios of the landscape art, that not solely produces more beautiful appearance but utilizes the destroyed landscape for new space of experience, or portrays through objects and cultural sites in the cultural landscape the dialogue of art and nature. The habitus of landscape, its physiognomy, receives fixed points through sculptural sites around which the surrounding is formed. Thereby a possible position of center in the landscape is developed, this effects an experience of being in the world and initiates a communication with the surroundings. What follows from this is that the realized object must be in a definite relation to the surroundings – then a “sculptural space” emerges, an otherwise arbitrary placement of artwork in landscape. These objects within the configuration of landscape facilitate a perception, that allows us to experience the context of nature and culture. As we constitute art with nature in landscape, we create a new correlation, changing the habitus of landscape.

Here begins our program. It mediates through the sculptural site in landscape nature as a space of sensation and perception, in which a sensibilization of the relationship environment – human beings – culture – nature is made evident. “Metamorphic objects” from sculptural sites linked to nature in the landscape, in the outskirts of the city as well as in the city. The object as the metaphor and artistic theme becomes the intersection of its environment. In certain ways the object changes, with regard to its intentional substance, everything around it. Art that has to do with natural conditions as material as well as with the site of its effects, affects and influences the ecological relationship. This happens in many ways. Certainly first in the material itself, because here the metamorphosis is immanent as a temporal process of decay. Here the ecological relationship takes a part in the aesthetic statement of the work of art, or in such work of art the aesthetic aspect of this effect is shown. “Beauty of Temporality” not only shines in the fire, it also creates in works of art of this type a history of the decay of an object. Thus it becomes the metaphor of life and through the symbolic character of the object, a metaphor of culture. The aesthetic as well as the metaphoric aspect of decay, of metamorphosis, of dissolution has a long history in the history of art, it is the motif of the “Moderne”. Terra Nova project

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Agnes Denes Wheatfield ­ A Confrontation

© Agnes Denes 2 acres of wheat planted harvested, Battery Park landfill, downtown Manhattan, Summer 1992 (with Statue of Liberty across the Hudson)

After months of preparations, in May 1982, a 2-acre wheat field was planted on a landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty.

Two hundred truckloads of dirt were brought in and 285 furrows were dug by hand cleared of rocks and garbage. The seeds were sown by hand and the furrows covered with soil. The field was maintained for four months, cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilized and sprayed against mildew fungus, and an irrigation system set up. The crop was harvested in August 16 and yielded over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat.

Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth 4,5 billion dollars

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/denes.html (1 of 3) [9.7.2001 11:42:55] IO - Gallery created a paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept, it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities.

The harvested grain traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called "The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger", organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (1987-90). The seeds were evetually carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the globe.

Tree Mountain ­ A Living Time Capsule

© Agens Denes 420x270x28 meters, elliptical, 1992-1996, Ylöjärvi, Finland

Eleven thousand people came together from all over the world to plant eleven thousand trees in an intricate mathematical pattern as part of a massive earthwork and land reclamation project in middle Finland. Tree Mountain is a vast monument that is international in scope, unparalleled in duration and not dedicated to the human ego, but to benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy.

The project was officially announced by the Finnish government at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on Earth Environment Day, June 5, 1992, as Finland's contribution to help alleviate the world's ecological stress.

Sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program, the Finnish Ministry of the Environment, and the Strata Commitee, Tree Mountain is protected land file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/denes.html (2 of 3) [9.7.2001 11:42:55] IO - Gallery to be maintained for four centuries, eventually creating a virgin forest. People who planted the trees received certificates acknowledging them as custodians of the trees. It is an inheritable document valid twenty generations into the future. MORE...

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Agnes Denes My Work as an Environmental Artist

The issues touched on in my work range between individual creation and social consciousness. For the past thirty years I have been involved with the creation of a new visual language of communication that allows the flow of information among alien systems and disciplines, eliminating the boundaries of art making new associations and valid analogies possible. My work addresses itself to an age of complexity, when more information assaults us on a daily bases than can be assimilated. Our hard won knowledge accumulates undigested in specializations, blocking meaningful communication between disciplines. Lacking overview and direction, human values tend to decline. A new analytical attitude is called for, a clear overview or a summing up, in which essences carry pure meaning and all things can be considered once more simultaneously. By bringing these new concepts into the art arena, and allowing the flow of information to infiltrate it, art rises above being just another self styled, elitist system busy with its own functions. Art is a specialization that need not feed upon itself, but can unify key elements from other systems into a unique, coherent vision, gaining the power to make statements with universal validity. In this sense I look at art as the integrator of disciplines, and see the role of the artist as developing a new vision for humanity. When art renders into visual form these analytical processess, the hybrid becomes the script in a new language of seeing and knowing, and the powerful tools of artistic vision, image and metaphor become expressions of human values with profound impact on our consciousness and collective destiny. My first eco philosophical site work was Rice/Tree/Burial in 1968, in Sullivan Country, New York, and re enacted for Artpark in 1977-79. In this work I planted rice, chained a forest and buried a time capsule to be opened a thousand years from now. I then lived on the edge of Niagara Falls for eight days, incorporating the force of nature into this triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. This work investigated our relationship to the earth and is considered the first environmental artwork.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/denes2.html (1 of 3) [9.7.2001 11:42:55] Untitled Document Today all my philosophical concepts seem to culminate and come to life in my environmental sculptures and ecological site works, such as Wheatfield – A Confrontation (New York, 1982), North Waterfront Park Masterplan (Berkeley, 1990), and Tree Mountain – A Living Time Capsule (Finland 1992 96). They affirm our commitment to the future well being of the ecological, social and cultural life of the our planet. My latest environmental artwork is taking place in Melbourne, Australia, sponsored by Construction in Process VI, The Bridge. The planting of forests is essential in Australia. This forest will be situated adjacent to a water purification plant outside of Melbourne. Taking the Finnish project as example, these trees will also be nurtured into maturity and maintained for centuries. My concept with these forests is that these works are gifts to benefit future generations, from whom we have been taking so much by using up all the resources of earth. These works are aimed to give back a little. The size of this forest is 400 x 80 meters, comprised of five intersecting spirals. Each spiral is made up of three different tree species of varied height. The tallest trees are planted in the center of each spiral followed by medium size trees, while the smallest trees make up the outer edges of the spirals. Thus each spiral also becomes a step pyramid. The trees are the species Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), She Oak (Allocasuarina verticallata) and Paperbark (Melaleuca helmatororum). The seeds of these trees will also be saved for future use. The planting will take place in March, 1998, while the ground is being prepared and the pegs laid out for the patterning of the trees at this writing. Another work coming up this spring is a cropland to be planted in Caracas, Venezuela. It is being created within the hubbub and congestion of the “city”, thereby calling attention to, among other problems, those we are facing with the growing cities and megacities of the world. I find it important to create these works all over the world as examples of what needs to be done: on destroyed, barren land where resource extraction has taken its toll; in the nervous tension of cities; on deforested soil – to stop erosion, purify the air, protect fresh groundwater, provide home for wildlife and afford people a chance to stay in touch with nature. It is also important that I make my work beautiful. The beauty carries the concept and the philosophy and makes this work different from the average reclamation project. It is art in the purest sense of the word. It is a new visual language of communication that expands the boundaries of art. It speaks to people at all levels of life and reaches out to future generations with a legacy. These works question the status quo, elicit and initiate new thinking processess and offer provocative, meaningful communication.

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Hester Reeve Kissing the Mess. Aesthetic Engagement with Ideas of Nature The complexity of the universe is beyond expression in any possible notation. Lift up your eyes. Not even what you see before you can ever be fully expressed. Close your eyes. Not even what you see now.

Michael Frayn Constructions (1)

Introduction The growing focus in the arts and philosophy alike to re-consider the human relationship with nature relates directly to the realization that there is a crisis. This crisis is not only in the ability of pre-human existence states of nature to maintain themselves alongside the large scale impact of human activity but also in the representations, ideas and practices that we have traditionally employed with regard to the non-human environment. Therefore, as an artist concerned with the human-nature crisis I have a two-fold motivation. Firstly, there is a creative desire to address nature as subject-in-its-own-right and not as an object of representation (as it is in many art works) and, secondly, I have a political desire to communicate to other humans dynamic and non-everyday questions which provoke their own ideas and values about nature. This desire to open up communication possibilities is, for me, very much an integral part of the art-making process. In my opinion, the passion to communicate – or rather the passion to explore just what can be communicated – is far more influential, if present, in extending the existing language forms and meaning-making boundaries of art-practice than the desire to represent something in visual language or create beauty. However, for all the confident assertions about my raison d'être as an artist, the

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (1 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] closer and more earnest I get in consciously considering nature as subject, the messier the issue of “knowing nature” and hence presenting value in it becomes. To take nature not just artistically (i.e. as in making it the object of a painting style or using natural materials instead of paint) but also seriously (as in considering it as an object of human perception and as something which exists in its own right) means facing up to the following paradox: what we approach with our consciousness through the term ’nature’ is a "complexity [...] beyond expression in any possible notation" and yet simultaneously it is "that which we cannot not desire".(2) Surely, if we want to develop new values towards the non-human, it is as important to work with what we claim to know about nature as it is to work with our aesthetic experience of it. Whilst the human relationship to and knowledge of the surrounding world has never been fixed but instead is ever dynamic and developing, it is only at the present point in time, through deconstruction, that we have become self-conscious of the ways in which we know and constitute the “nature of Nature.” This more reflexive stance as “knowers” opens up the conceptual distance for a questioning dialogue with our ideas. Thus also feasible is an experience of an aesthetic engagement with our ideas about nature. An aesthetic engagement with our ideas about nature is not the same as an aesthetic experience of nature as empirical phenomena. Hence the type of aesthetic engagement I am proposing can only be made available to conscious experience through art – which binds together conceptual ideas and physical materials. On my view, an aesthetic engagement with ideas of nature does not deny the existence of a world of nature prior to and independent of our ideas about ‘nature’ and our construction of it. Michael Frayn confirms that not only is our being contingent on there existing a physical world into which we are born but it is just this ambiguous tension between the human construction of reality and a physical reality that gives our knowledge-making and work-doing dimension: "If the physical world ceased to exist, painting and poetry and prose would become meaningless [...]And the glory of writing is its dependence upon the world – the necessity it puts us in of coming back again and again to confront the complexity of what lies before our eyes".(3)

The Mess To ask that one accept that nature is a "complexity [...] beyond expression in any possible notation" is not to stress the universe's geographical vastness but to understand that human experience is defined more by the fact of being human than by the provable facts we claim to have discovered about a non-human nature.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (2 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] Since nature is a category defined as much through human language as it is through sense impressions of empirical data, what we term nature might be appropriately regarded as something of a human artefact. I prefer to see it this way – not to suggest any artificiality but to highlight how, as a category of knowledge and experience, nature is invested with human attention and intention and can not be taken to reflect a mirror-reality of the non-human world. When we take on board such a deconstructionist position, we humbly have to acknowledge that our cognitive understanding can never arrive at an autonomous and true understanding (or, therefore, depiction) of the nature of the universe around us. Indeed, to see knowledge as an instrument neutrally gathering the 'truth' about the world is a fallacious intention since any comprehension, no matter how useful or pleasurable it may be, will always be mediated and constituted through our language structures, our knowledge systems and our sensual organs which screen “data” from the world around us in terms of their particular capacities as much as in terms of the outside world. The de-constructionist perspectives on the nature of nature are disquieting because they remove the traditional assumption that we can read solid and eternal laws as guide posts from the world around us. Yet we are still nonetheless presented with a tidy, self-contained picture of human beings in their world. The confidence in our assumption that humans can achieve total knowledge of the world – that reality in an ultimate sense is commensurate with human knowledge – may have been dethroned but we are still presenting ourselves with a picture of us in control; it may not be 'the true world' that we know but it is none the less “a” world and one which is according to our existence, our choices and so forth. However, it would be arrogant beyond comparison (and limiting to potential human experience and knowledge of the universe) to believe that the only reality is that according to the human experience of being. Therefore, our thoughts must somehow accommodate the paradox that whilst we can only know according to our human faculties, there is “something” (for want of any word that could adequate) outside of the social construct of nature and we humans doing the construction. Since this something must be incommensurate with human knowledge faculties and yet can be posited as a possibility by our knowledge faculties, I'd like to put it that we are conceptually in a “mess”. The word ‘mess’ has derogatory connotations which I wish to dispel in relation to my exploration of nature and artistic communication. The dictionary definition of this term is: lit. mixture. A state of dirt and disorder; a muddle, a state of embarrassment. Since shunning the conceptual incongruities surrounding the nature of nature line of thought can only lead to a conceptual tidying technique (rather like we

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (3 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] regard matter derogatory as dirt rather than soil when it is inside and not outside our homes and literally sweep it under the carpet) it seems necessary to continually confront it. Art has the potential to take the “embarrassment” at the finitude of human knowledge within the “nature of Nature” and look it straight in the face. This is not in order to resolve the ambiguity. Only in surrendering to the notion that there is no one right or absolute way to view and determine value in nature can a clear space for the power of the possible in thought, idea and value be opened. So, to face the mess means not defining or representing nature but dialoguing with the many interconnecting levels of reality and human ideas out of which it has become a tangible thing for us. This leads back to my proposal for the significance of an aesthetic engagement with our ideas of nature. If we wish to involve ourselves with revealing value in the non-human it seems constructive and honest to see our ideas about nature as real and as concrete in terms of the influence they have on our constitution of nature and the experience they offer to our cognitive faculties as the objects of phenomenal nature. Such an aesthetic engagement with our ideas of nature stands in contrast to the systematic study of an objectified nature. Art can be used to explore the mess and embody ideas about nature and the processes by which a category like nature gets constituted by us. This conscious relating to ideas amounts to a reflexivity which would perhaps be better able to present new meaningful suggestions about the world than representative visual language. The aesthetic engagement with ideas of nature may strike the reader as somewhat oblique – even fussy – yet I believe it stands as an appropriate collusion with postmodern perspectives on knowledge, reality and art. Postmodern perspectives on knowledge at the end of the twentieth century realize that we can no longer view knowledge as an end in itself. In our post-industrial era of communication and information knowledge has lost its “use” value under the new goals of “exchange”. The processes by which we claim to know something are rendered transparent to us through deconstruction, opening up the inevitable realization that humans can no longer believe in any absolute location of reality since it is more appropriate to consider that we construct a sense of reality according to our faculties in response to the “world” rather than discover the world in its own right. Hence, rather than a world of subject-object dualism the information age opens up reality as a multi-leveled medium of contact and feedback between subjects and objects, between signs and ideas. This kind of reflexivity poses the perennial questions – what is the world?; what are the ways in which we can approach knowing the world?; and how can human nature change from its dependence on out-moded world views? – more dynamically than perhaps ever before. It also poses such questions more

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (4 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] humbly since a postmodern position accepts that humans are not at the center of any one world and rejects the project of “knowing best”. By offering an experience of an aesthetic engagement with ideas of nature, art can attempt to facilitate in others a relationship and reflexivity within the various ways we perceive and know nature in order to keep nature as a category dynamic, open and celebratory. Such an engagement is further significant as an experience because it suspends the human subject temporarily from being author or controller of knowledge without negating the irreplaceable nature of that knowledge. Whilst the human is at the center of their knowledge producing activity, we can not claim that the human is at any central point of what we refer to through our use of the term nature. Within an aesthetic engagement with ideas of nature the human is no longer in the position of author or possessor of knowledge but in the ecstasy of “knowing knowledge”. An aesthetic engagement with our ideas of nature is rather an extra-ordinary task and not something we can consider in our daily goings on. However, art is in a position to make such an experience tangible. It is also an ambiguous – or messy – task due to the nature of nature. Art again is in a relevant position to activate this situation if one accepts that art's role is not in presenting the truth but in revitalizing experience. Using art as a means of exploring and presenting a site where the “mess” can be faced opens up the space of communication where humans can collectively reflect upon and aesthetically engage with human ideas as an attentive experience. Perhaps performance art in particular has always somewhat consciously aimed at such a process. Maybe this is what Joseph Beuys meant when he was asked: What is your opinion about aesthetics in art? He replied, "Aesthetics is the human being in itself."(4)

The Kiss I have already suggested that an aesthetic engagement with our ideas of nature is analogous to looking in the face what I am terming here as an embarrassment at the finitude of human knowledge. I can extend this metaphor further by positing the importance of kissing the circumstance. To kiss is to welcome. The act of kissing is an almost explicitly human form of expression and communication (5), and hence an apt activity to reference within my proposal that an experience mediated by art (human to human exchange as opposed to an experience of the non-human) can help stimulate people's values about the natural environment. Kissing is also a relevant metaphor because it is such a powerful experience for

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (5 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] humans, involving intense physical contact and communicating all manner of complex ideas, feelings and needs, yet in a word-less and non-literal fashion. The kiss is also a gesture which can be read by observers and as such can be translated as many things. For example, a compulsion to bond physically and share one's physical being, a greeting between familial members or passing down the breath from on high of a worshiped spirit to the human soul. To kiss is to act and to embody an expression and a communication; it is not to describe or to represent an expression or a communication. Kissing is also something that we "cannot not desire". In terms of presenting an art event where one can aesthetically engage with ideas of nature performance art is the medium most analogous to “kissing”. Performance art by definition has no definitive style or intention other than the general desire to revitalize human experience and ideas.(6) Therefore it is uninhibited, and its idea-making is not limited by a prescribed style or site constraint (often performance art is site-specific). The methodology, if there can be said to be any overall one, is about communicating potential meaning-making between human subjects, and upsetting consciousness from its blind assumptions and habitual patterns of being in-the-world. Performance art is communication and physical action combined through the "human being in itself". The artist is not pretending to be someone else nor are they confessing their personal experience. Instead they are presenting themselves as a human being; the human being as language to be read. All facts and knowledge manifested through a performance piece are contextual and directly linked to the human subject's constituting presence. For this reason performance art is usually non-verbal to stress corporeality and to express the engagement of a whole being in a live action; the human is doing as a conscious piece of communication rather than explaining. Performance art is consciously time-based in that the artist performing carries out his or her actions in real time without any pretense or division between the event space and the place from which the audience witnesses. This insistence on the present instance with no thing “staged” is an attempt to work directly with physical reality as opposed to a "let's pretend" fictional level of reality. The communicative emphasis on process above end result arises out of a desire to create situations to effect (and not direct) human experience.

Performance art is action and non-product orientated. The emphasis is placed on presenting living material above fixing meaning or stating truisms. In such a way I would argue that performance art is a hard-core instance of askesis – the classical instance of philosophy philosophizing, "an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought".(7) But with performance art this activity of thought results in an embodiment; it

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (6 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] becomes actualized rather than remaining conceptualized. The thought activity becomes realized in the “now” of the present moment throughout the duration of the performance, leaving no after object other than a fragment of memory in each audience member's mind (i.e. it returns to the thought kingdom). Because the thoughts are embodied in real time and then disappear when the performance ends they can never stand as “representations” or conclusions. The performance artist does not claim and can not be said to be an expert or an authority of knowledge and facts. When an artist places her or his self in front of an audience, it is out of a commitment to their ideas (an accountability if you will) and to the importance of communicating such ideas in the flesh. It is also not because they are skilled performers as could be said of a dancer or an opera singer although, of course, performance artists may chose to dance in their work if their thought process requires it. The site of the event is usually not a legitimated one unlike the instance an opera house, for example, which is authenticated as much by the posters presenting historically acclaimed playwrights as they are by what gets shown on its stage. To return to the notion of an aesthetic engagement with ideas of nature, performance art is, in my opinion, the active embodiment of the metaphor of “kissing the mess”. As a process and as a form of communication performance art can move its attention towards nature without possessing it or representing it yet also without denying the physical involvement of the human subject.

Kissing the Mess

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (7 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] I have shown why I chose to call this piece “Kissing the Mess” and why I desire to kiss the mess as a witnessed action. But what does this communicate? What is the content or does the very notion of content need to change here? I want to suggest that it does. Perhaps desire itself can be regarded as a new type of content especially with regard to our relationship making with nature. For, without desire for a world what world is there for us? The words of Michael Frayn with which I chose to open this paper are not denying the physical actuality of our existence or the human desire to aspire to further knowing the world and making meaning out of it. Nor does his realisation that the complexity of the universe is beyond human expression amount to a defeatist or cynical position. Instead, he is implying a poetic call to action for the sake of action rather than in order to arrive at a definitive location of reality or knowledge. This is not to be precious; this is to celebrate. And perhaps celebration is precisely we’re often missing in our artistic and academic discussions about our relationship to nature. Frayn's thesis in his book Constructions sets a paradoxical challenge – that we can never encapsulate the nature of nature though expression yet we can not want to attempt doing so. As I mention earlier, he feels that art is made necessary and given dimension by the finite quality of human knowledge. Hence he would support artistic endeavours to express knowledge and ideas about the world of nature. However, Frayn would probably want to reject representational knowledge within the arts since it would contradict the ambiguity of the finite nature of our knowledge within the vast unknowable circumstance of the universe. This question can also be connected to Lyotard's postmodern concern that pictorial art in its quest for beauty and representation of phenomenal reality has done much to coerce consciousness into believing in the reality according to us as the only reality rather than freeing thought to think in a less concentric manner, in this way: "...the avant-garde's are perpetually flushing out artifices of presentation which make it possible to subordinate thought to the gaze and turn it away from the unpresentable". (9) But the question at hand is not new. Already the philosophy of Novalis many centuries ago tackled similar complicated issues and called for a re-orientation of vision circumscribed in terms of a "living astronomy". Novalis felt that human visual knowledge was constrained by the logic of verbal language in much the same way that natural phenomena were locked into positions of permanent meaning through the encyclopaedic project taking place in his day. Therefore he especially critiqued written language as a means of expression since it was preoccupied with fixing meaning and the rules of logic.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (8 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] What concerned Novalis was that human language had become content specific and self-sufficient thus curtailing the ability of thought's vision to seek out new correlations between the human being and the world. Novalis also recognised that the world of nature and the world according to human experience and perception were not the same world for all their co-habitation. The human perception of their world reflected our own logical capacities and not the world as it is in its “worldiness”. But this was not to deny the human desire to know or even represent the world but to insist upon a non-intentional approach grounded in the imagination and extended out to the universe rather than one confined by the rational rules of linguistics. He did not want to fix content but keep the boundaries of what constitutes meaning open and questioning. Fittingly, Novalis termed his new paradigm a "poetic theory of the telescope"(10). Novalis clearly believed that there was a reality outside of the human construction of nature but accepted that it lay beyond the faculties of human knowledge. He might have agreed also with my proposal to “kiss the mess” since he felt it was possible to express the complexity outside the construction of nature through the paradox of considering the un-knowable since for him meaning lay in absence rather than presence. Novalis made so bold as to claim that intellectual intuition was the highest form of consciousness because it involves a reflection upon feeling yet remains beyond any attempt at conceptual clarification. But the significance of intellectual intuition can also be seen as the risk it urges us to take with the potential meaning that can get communicated between humans. Novalis was proposing a content that itself asked that content should be kept open – a yearning in the face of accepting that any reflection upon the universe, upon meaning beyond the human world, will always mirror the finitude of human knowledge. This yearning is important because possibly it is the only force capable to take thought beyond reason, and just as performance art can evoke, is a function of our physical and temporal being in the world. Perhaps celebrating the inexpressible is a better journey than arriving at the definable.

You're a cloud, and you rely on me to see a face in you.

Michael Frayn Constructions (11)

Notes

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/reeve.html (9 of 10) [9.7.2001 11:42:58] 1. M. Frayn,Constructions, aphorism no. 1. (London: Wildwood House 1974) 2. G. Spivak, talk (California 1989). Referenced by D. Haraway "Otherworldly Conversations, Terrain, Topics, Local terms", BioPolitics, ed. V. Shiva (Zed books, 1995), p. 69. 3. Frayn, nos. 307-308 4. Jospeh Beuys in dialogue with Kate Horsefield, Energy Plan for the Western Man – Joseph Beuys in America (Four Walls Eight Windows publishing Company, 1993), comp. C. Kuoni. 5. Havelock Ellis has observed and noted manifestations resembling kissing between various animals but has been unable to show this act to be an act of conscious desire as it is in humans. 6. It should be stressed that I am not referring to avant-garde theatre but to “live art”. The best explanation of the difference between the two practices that I have come across is: Theatre is totally disciplined and unconscious whilst performance art is undisciplined and totally conscious. (Thanks: Archer at Grunt Gallery) 7. M. Foucault "Introduction" in The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 8. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 79 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979). 9. Novalis 3:411, referenced by K. Menges, "Moral Astronomy: On a Metaphor in Novalis and its Conceptual Context" in B. Allert, ed., Languages of Visuality: Crossings Between Science, Art, Politics and Literature (Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 124. 10. The thoughts and philosophies feeding my work may not be literally apparent in my performance art because they do not play the role of subject matter. “Feeding” is an appropriate word choice here. These philosophical thoughts give me the faith to follow through my belief that the mess must be kissed [kiss = physical and conceptual desire expressed in an act of giving which is also a greeting and a demand for a response]. That this process is actualised heightens the aesthetic enjoyment of what is done during the performance. Such embodiments of questioning knowledge, experience and ideas should take place and be witnessed (even if they make people feel uncomfortable). 11. Frayn, no. 298.

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Jale Erzen Environmental Art. A New Sanctification Most artistic developements against tradition in the 20th century increasingly removed the “object of art” from focus, or simply deconstucted, dematerialized, or dissolved it, disturbing or changing the habitual relation of the art public with art. With environmental art this process has reached the extreme where the object cannot be singled out or recognized for what it is. One can even say that environmental art objects often have either a plus element (which is the environment under focus) or a minus element (vis à vis conventional art objects) in the eye of the general public, and in fact it is difficult to label them as objects. The difficulty of finding the object of focus is multiple and is often due to the fact that the artistic work is inaccessible or unreacheable. Added to this is the fact that the art work or artistic activity in environmental art is often in constant change and transformation. The conditions of observing it are usually under constant change. Often such works are not made to last, and even if they are, they get transformed under environmental conditions. Sometimes, when they are seen, they are not obvious or do not denote themselves readily as art. What usually happens is that these works are recorded in other media, photos, writing, etc., and are offered to contemplation or enjoyment depending on other representations or symbols. It could be said that they become esoteric, removed, or distant and one may come upon them by surprise. In contrast to traditional works of art, the work of environmental art has no fixed technique, no specific content, no place of its own, common to a taxonomy in art. One can say that even with many avant-garde art such as happenings or performances and installations, the contrasting formal or material qualities single them out as different from their context. In environmental art this difference may be harder to assess. There is no clear artistic approach except for the aesthetic openness and receptivity of its artist. What may happen is that in time the artist may develope his or her choice of

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/erzen.html (1 of 4) [9.7.2001 11:42:59] IO - Articles attention or interest and may work with already set intentions. But this does not guarantee the works to be noticed or immediately seen as a work of art. One can say that the work of environmental art is more like a discovery than a creation. In this sense there is a sanctity about it. This reminds me of an experience I had with a very religious student in one of my Environmental Aesthetics courses. Every time we talked about art and creativity he insisted that there could be only discovery and no creation. Although this annoyed me at that time, I sense now that such an assessment is quite true for most environmental art, if not for all art. The assumption that there is discovery is based on the belief that there is already a message, a value, a “presentation” which is there to be discovered. It also assumes that the symbols conveying such a value, such as forms, orders, events, belong to a language which has constant codes and is credible. Such a contention somehow regards the world as full of meanings that are sacred or that are transmitted through existence. This quality of already containing meaning or value is one of the criteria that give something a sacred aspect. Although most avant-garde environmental artists have not explicitly talked about the aspect of the sacred in their work, or may have generally even had reservations about introducing such dimensions, the constant presence of an “unknown”, constantly to be discovered, deciphered, apprehended and really never exhausted dimension inevitably renders a sacredness to most environmental works. Besides the reasons for this qualitative aspect of environmental art, it is also true that today’s industrialized society, which has been so alienated from nature, also feels such a presentiment when confronted with nature and that environmental works concerning nature or ecology automatically assume a kind of sacred character. A direct or unexpected contact with nature may throw the observer off his or her guard and put him or her into a state of confronting the incognito. This unknown is also the sensuous with the unconscious, and is brought into awareness mostly by art. Such an experience creates a response towards the sacred and may make one apprehend sanctity. It can be classified as a different experience than the sublime, and being based in the sensuous, can pertain to all that is Dionysian, in the way that Nietzsche considers the sensuous. From this point of view, ecological art fulfills a great purpose, that of creating a new relationship between man and nature, as the other. In the words of Martin Buber this can be called a relationship of I and Thou. Because the character of environmental art has an unprescribed and undeterminable aspect to a greater degree than any other art form, there is almost a private, secret communication between the art work and artist and also between the artwork and the observer. We watch it not really knowing how it

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/erzen.html (2 of 4) [9.7.2001 11:42:59] IO - Articles was done, or how it came about. Often meanings that one apprehends or receives from the work cannot be transferred to a discursive medium. From this point of view, environmental art also stays partially outside the scope of criticism. It is marginal not because it is new, but because it is always partly nature, and as Heidegger puts it, there is more of the “concealedness” to it than any other kind of art where “form” comes to the fore. This impenetrable, concealed aspect, this inexhaustable character of environmental art bordering “terra incognita”, crates a new threshold for modern consciousness. It forms an in between zone where culture and nature meet and where human purposiveness which, in the long run, is largely to blame for its misuse of nature, is put to a question. It creates a new frontier where human purpose without measure or limit confronts nature’s cyclical character and the infinity of existence. At this point, time and space converge. The relation to the sacred creating a special focus on nature and on “the other”, outside of human purpose and interest also gives art a new value which had been lost since its schematization in about the 16th century. Increasing secularization removed from art the sense of awe, love, admiration, or the deep apprehension for the other, which almost in a magical way, transmitted to medieval or early renaissance art an existential depth. Althoug such quality was rooted in religious faith, secularization increasingly inpoverished art from all kind of credence, very often ending in a cynicism that robbed the artwork of pulse or profound feeling. In return for this loss, art may have become the spiritual field in itself, as was claimed by most modernists. Yet, as we see it at the close of the millenium, this supposedly spiritual field could easily cater to market values when it no longer had a significant reason for being. Environmental art which has put us in contact again with the unknown dimension that is inexhaustible and that seems to upon into existence, has redeemed for art the quality of the sacred, without needing to depend on religion. Artists working in this field and the public in contact with such art may hopefully appreciate again this most significant aspect of art, namely, it being a medium of access to the sacred. This is important especially in a high technological age where even human purpose seems obsolate against self-perpetuating autonomous force of immense industries which have to grow regardless of all harm to life. Thus, the human whose unconscious relation with other existence had, till the advance of industry, a sense of sanctity about the environment or about existence, was held against their insolent egotism, by this sense of sacred about existence. This was the only protection against blind technology. At this moment art seems to be the only channel through which this feeling can be reinforced without racism or fundamentalism, and without discrimination for the other cultural forms. I will end by reminiscing on an example of what I took to be a work of

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/erzen.html (3 of 4) [9.7.2001 11:42:59] IO - Articles environmental art I had come upon as I was riding a train in the south England. All along the side of the railway, thin vertical bars painted in stripes of sunny colors were placed at varying but measured intervals. Sometimes one saw them in speedy succession, then, they became less frequent, for a while there was none; just when one gave up expecting, there were new ones coming up in different colors; then one would mistake a bush branch for another bar and was checked by the appearence of a new more colourful one. The speed of the train became rhythmic by this sequence; the railway periphery became a treasure land to search for colored bars; the linear strip of movement along the train danced in rhythm, often taking one into memories of childhood when colors were felt so much more intensely; attention was held in constant expectation between now, the past, and the future. And one did not need to ask whether this was art or not.

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Hanna Johansson Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja. Introduction in english Onko taideteos aina ymmärrettävä tietyksi materiaalisen ulkomuodon omaavaksi visuaalis-älylliseksi tai käsitteelliseksi komponentiksi, joka määrittyy objektiksi tai objektien summaksi? Vai olisiko mahdollista, että teos olisikin tilanne, joka astuisi voimaan taiteilijan antaman aineellisen merkin, ympäröivän maisema ja katsojan kohdatessa. Tätä pohditaan seuraavassa kertomuksessa, jossa katsoja – sinä, minä tai kuka tahansa – tekee matkaa kolmelle hylätylle muuntamolle.

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Hanna Johansson Introduction Our own time is often characterized as the epoch of space. In visual art this spatialisation is clearly connected to specific changes in the form and content of the picture. The picture has stepped out of its frame, it has broken the physical boundaries surrounding it to share the common space with the viewer. Following this change it has become increasingly difficult to speak of a work of art using the terminology commonly associated with the definition and appreciation of art. It is clearly necessary to turn our sight elsewhere. In this text it has been turned to where the viewer, the work of art and the common context surrounding them meet and form a joint surface sowed together with an invisible thread. The subject is approached through a specific case. The Transformer-exhibition (1997) was constructed in three no longer used Transformer buildings in East-Helsinki. The buildings were situated a few kilometers from each other. The five artists, who participated in the exhibition built their works of art directly in these spaces. The starting point of the work were the transformer buildings themselves, their spatial, functional and aesthetic characters. The setting of the exhibition and the works of art made in the buildings raised forward the history and changing praxis of exhibition and viewing art. The interior of the transformers can be considered equal to the "white cube", the space of a gallery built solely for art. On the other hand, the traces which remind one of the original purpose of those buildings – totransform and distribute electricity – and the position of the buildings in the suburban landscape, were clearly in paradox with the heritage of the "white cube". The same attitude is strenghened by the fact that the "frames" of the works of the exhibition were difficult to indicate. Rather, the works melted into the surrounding space and landscape. The Transformer-exhibition invited the viewer on a trip; to the suburbs of East-Helsinki and towards the experiencing of art and landscape. During this trip the viewer moved in turn between the closed transformers and the open and functional outdoor space. The spatial alternation as well as the different routes and modes of transport chosen by the viewers influenced their experiences.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna2.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:00] Untitled Document In this article there are two voices: the walker and the writer. Their voices intertwine, walk side by side, part and connect again. They open up viewpoints on exhibiting and receiving art, on walking and experiencing.

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I Hän istuuntuu metron oranssinväriselle penkille. On syksy. Metro suuntaa kohti Helsingin itäisiä lähiöitä. On kulunut paljon aikaa siitä, kun hän on viimeksi matkannut tähän suuntaan, sillä hänen reittinsä viihtyvät nykyisin enemmän keskustassa. Metro pysähtyy, hän kävelee rullaportaisiin ja nousee ylös asemalle. Bussi on puoliksi tyhjä. Matkustajina on joukko juuri kesälomansa lopettaneita koululaisia, muutama äiti lapsineen ja jokunen eläkeläinen. On varhainen iltäpäivä. Bussi kulkee Herttoniemen metroasamalta ympäristön lähiöihin. Matka etenee teollisuushallien ja uuden 1990-lukulaisen merenrantalähiön välistä, sivuuttaen 1800-luvun kartanomaiseman, sen pihamiljöön ja rakennuksien jäänteet. Hän muistaa vuosia sitten käyneensä täällä. Rakennuksia on tullut lisää ja maisemaa rytmittävät joutomaat ovat kutistuneet. Lasinen ikkuna ja moottorin ääni etäännyttää hänet maisemasta, sen nostalgiseksi tarkkailijaksi. Toisaalta maisemaa on seurattava – jotta löytäisi määränpäänsä.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_2.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:00] Hanna Johansson - Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja Hänellä on yksinkertainen kartta kädessään. Bussi kääntyy ja ikkunoista näkyy 1950-luvulla rakennettuja kerrostaloja. Toisella puolella katse tavoittaa pienen punatiilisen tornin, samanikäisen kuin kerrostalot – ja samanäköisen kuin kartan kanteen painetussa kuvassa. Tornimuuntamo. Tultuaan ulos bussista hän huomaa muuntamoita olevankin kaksi. Niiden ovet ovat kiinni, eivätkä ne sijaitse oikeassa paikassa. Hän kulkee katua pitkin, puistomaisen asuinalueen lävitse. Viereisen talon parvekkeella nainen tamppaa mattoja ja siitä aiheutuva tasainen ääni rikkoo hiljaisuuden. Kadun päässä on jälleen punatiilinen tornimuuntamo. Tämän ovi on auki. Hän astuu sisään.

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file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_3.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:01] Hanna Johansson - Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja

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Hän tutkiskelee muuntamon alakerrassa Niran Baibulatin teosta, peliä nimeltä "Kaikki tiet vievät Roomaan", selailee postikortteja ja pysähtyy Kemin keskustasta vuosikymmeniä sitten otetun kuvan kohdalla. Hymy nousee huulille, kun hän tunnistaa kuvasta torin, jossa muistaa vierailleensa joskus lapsuudessaan. Hän jatkaa peliä ja päätyy rakentamaan viivallisista kivistä ja kukka-aiheisista korteista omia kukkareittejään pitkin muuntamon lattiaa.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_4.html [9.7.2001 11:43:01] IO projektikuvaus

summer 1998 in english PROJEKTIKUVAUS

IO. The Internet Magazine of Applied Aesthetics on internetissä toimiva kaksikielinen (englanti ja suomi) verkkolehti, jota julkaisee Kansainvälinen soveltavan estetiikan instituutti. Lehteä ovat tekemässä myös Lahden Muotoiluinsituutin multimediaosasto, Helsingin yliopiston estetiikan laitos sekä yhteistyökumppanit Kööpenhaminan ja Lancasterin yliopistoista. IO on syntynyt osana laajempaa soveltavan estetiikan tietoverkkohanketta, joka on saanut EU:n aluekehitysrahaston (EAKR) 2-ohjelman puitteissa tukea kolmeksi vuodeksi. Soveltavan estetiikan tietoverkoston avulla pyritään rakentamaan suoraa ja nopeaa informaatiofoorumia asiantuntijoiden, oppilaitosten, yritysten, yhteisöjen, instituutioiden ja erilaisten projektien välille sekä profiloimaan soveltavan estetiikan alojen asintuntijuutta työmarkkinoilla. Tietoverkosto toimii aluksi Päijät-Hämeen ja pääkaupunkiseudun alueilla. Tätä tarkoitusta varten projektin puitteissa on perustettu myös erillinen soveltavan estetiikan alojen asiantuntijapalvelu, joka harjoittaa työnvälitystä ja PR-toimintaa käytännön tasolla. Soveltavan estetiikan kokonaisuuteen kuuluu useita eri ammattikuntia: mm. muotoilun, visuaalisen ja graafisen suunnittelun, arkkitehtuurin, multimedian ja eri taidealojen ammattilaiset sekä ympäristön suunnittelun ja ympäristön arvioinnin asiantuntijat. Yhteisesti näitä aloja voitaisiin nimittää myös taiteen, kulttuurin, ympäristön ja estetiikan alojen ammattikunniksi. Kyseessä on siis varsin laaja ja monipuolinen asiantuntijaryhmä, jolla on kuitenkin työmarkkinoilla yhteisiä ongelmia, jotka haittaavat sopivan työn tai tekijän löytymistä. IO:n ensimmäinen numero keskittyy ympäristötaiteen ongelmiin ja ajankohtaisiin kysymyksiin. Lehden seuraava numero käsittelee virtuaalisen estetiikan kysymyksiä. Asiantuntijapalvelua kehittää Petra Hämäläinen ([email protected]), LAMK Muotoiluinstituutti, Kannaksenkatu 22, 15140 Lahti, puh/fax 03-7817858

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/about.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:02] IO projektikuvaus Verkostoon on koottu myös soveltavan estetiikan alan kotisivuja, jotka pyrkivät osaltaan edesauttamaan tiedonvälitystä ja helpottamaan yhteydenottoja. Kansainvälisen soveltavan estetiikan instituutin kotisivut (www.lpt.fi/io/iiaa) Lahden taiteilijaseuran kotisivut (www.lpt.fi/io/artlahti).

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/about.html (2 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:02] IO about

summer 1998

IO. The Internet Magazine of Applied Aesthetics is a bilingual (English and Finnish) network magazine produced by the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics. The LAMK/ Institute of Design ( Multimedia Department ), the University of Helsinki (Department of Aesthetics), and associates From the universities of Copenhagen and Lancaster are also involved in its production. IO was created as part of a wider plan for applied aesthetics Network, the project has been granted assistance for three years from the European Union's Area Development Foundation under the two programme scheme. The aim is to set up a forum for the quick and direct exchange of information between experts, schools, companies, professional societies, institutes and different projects and profile experts in various branches of applied aesthetics. The network will function initially in the Päijät-Häme and Helsinki regions. The first number of IO concentrates on problems of environmental art and current questions about it, while the following issue will discuss questions about virtual aesthetics. The project also runs a service provided by experts on the different areas of applied aesthetics, which functions as an employment agency and also has a public relations function. The area of applied aesthetics covers many different professions, including design, visual and graphic design, architecture, multimedia, the different branches of art, and also environmental design and experts on environmental evaluation. Together these could be called the professional areas of art, culture, the environment and aesthetics. Petra Hämälainen is developing the expert service. More information you contact her at: ( [email protected] ), LAMK Institute of Design, Kannaksenkatu 22, 15140 Lahti, tel/fax +358 3 7817858 The internet has also collected home pages of branches of applied aesthetics, which aim to contribute information and facilitate contact. International Institute of Applied Aesthetics (www.lpt.fi/io/iiaa) The Artists' Association of Lahti (www.lpt.fi/io/artlahti).

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Olli Immonen Highway, Art and Environment (1) suomeksi Sixty-eight Kilometres of Space The construction of Highway Number Four from Lahti to Helsinki started in 1997. The length of the new section will be 68 kilometres, from Järvenpää to Joutjärvi in Lahti. In the same year, 1997, Lahti Art Institute (a department of Lahti Polytechnic) began the education project "Art and Highway Four." The aim was with the help of artworks to emphasise notable points of the landscape, to break the highway up into recognisable sections, and to give a sense of local place to the resting places. The aim was also to develop the readiness of students, as future artists, to participate in planning big environmental works. The demand for this has increased nowadays, especially in connection with the construction of highway environments. The project leader is sculptor Antero Toikka.

Is it Ethical to Participate in the Planning of a Highway? Building major highways has usually had a harmful effect on the environment. Creating artworks for them has been described as glossing over environmental crime with a layer of art It has never been a prerequisite for art that it must be compatible with sustainable development. A work of art can destroy its environment or at least change it; or it can enable a polluted environment to be experienced as beautiful. This does not mean that we should support plans which damage the natural environment. On the contrary, in environmental art in particular, ecological values have usually been given special emphasis. In recent years, at least in Finland, environmental art projects have been a part of plans that have been

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ollie.html (1 of 4) [9.7.2001 11:43:03] Untitled Document strongly orientated towards improving the environment. They have been used to good effect, for example, in the treatment of gravel-pit areas, and the massive coal and infill heaps that are a part of city landscapes have been given a new image. (2) Highways have many adverse effects which are problematical from an environmental point of view. The traffic causes noise, dust, effluents. Highways splinter green areas and forests and cut across the natural routes of animals. The quarrying and transportation of the gravel needed for them damages the environment. Remarkable cultural or natural environments may remain trapped beneath the road area. Moreover, by making road transport easier, highways encourage an increase in the number of vehicles using them. At some point saturation point is reached, and yet another new road has to be built (3).

However, there has not been great opposition to the Lahti highway. The reason is probably that the constructors are in fact merely widening the existing road, which would improve safety – the old Lahti highway was the scene of many serious accidents. Nor are there any significant cultural or natural environments that are threatened by the highway's route. The problems of pollution and other adverse effects still have to be considered, however. The question about the ethics of roadside art is connected in part to general attitudes towards the environment and our actions concerning it. We can work for our environment by opposing damaging projects, using legal or illegal methods. Or we can go along with the projects and try to make them more environmentally friendly. Lahti education project has not taken up any stand on environmental pollution where the new highway is concerned; its building has been accepted as an unchangeable process with both its positive and negative effects. The target of this project has been instead to improve the visual aspects of the highway. It is to be seen not as an eyesore, but as a single 68 kilometres long work of art.

Roadside Art as Environmental Art Environmental art has been seen as “fleeing” from its definition makers and changing with values and social changes; on the other hand, the widening of the concepts involved has also been perceived as harmful. Broadly speaking we tend to picture environmental art in terms of public works of art and monuments. Large-scale works which reshape the environment have become common of late. In its widest sense, environmental art also includes architecture and landscaping. (4) Road art involves all of these. In recent years there have been several roadside artwork projects in Finland.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ollie.html (2 of 4) [9.7.2001 11:43:03] Untitled Document Communities have raised their image and their visibility with the aid of such works. The Finnish Road Administration has used artists to participate in planning highways and improving noise barriers, bridges and underpasses. For example, the environmental art competition "Arriving in Helsinki" was arranged at the beginning of 1998 in connection with European Culture Capital year. Its aim was to find new ideas and works of environmental art which could be used for improving the various routes into Helsinki. For drivers the roadside art works are part of the landscape and they can also be interpreted using the ways of landscape researchers. Applying the ideas of Pauli Tapani Karjalainen it is possible to come up with new viewpoints. The main experiences of a work of art (a picture, or a landscape), no doubt concern its physical form: what we can notice from the car as we go past. But we can also consider the experimental contents of the work of art; what subjective experience or imaginary landscape it conjures up . Not least, we must consider it in linguistic terms, how it is to be described, interpreted and explained. Experimental content and cultural meanings often play an important role in a work of art. In many works confusion is aroused concerning the “real” landscape by changing its traditional meaning within the work of art. Art brings new ideas to the inner human world. In this way environmental art at least creates a possibility for the individual to notice and value the everyday environment. The Lahti road art project is an interesting example of change in art. Traditionally object oriented art has been moving towards environmental art. The aim is no longer the planning of one individual art object destined for one particular place. Now the environment in its entirety, the landscape, can be seen as a place waiting for the cultivation of the artist. The rock cutting, bridge or soil, can be shaped as an artwork. Taking the idea to its furthest, the art work need not even be shaped. It is enough to light it or present in some other way an interesting rock, group of trees or landscape. In the roadside art project the trip from Riihimäki to Lahti has been seen as a total art work of which the elements are at least movement, road, car, and roadside art works. Travelling is a process and experience, sixty eight kilometres of space.

Notes (1) This article is part of the Lahti Art Institute project presentation made by Antero Toikka, Minna Nikola and Annika Tontsi.

(2) Remarkable examples of gravel-pit improvement can be seen in Agnes Denes's work in Ylöjärvi and the work of Nancy Holt in the Nokia region. In Helsinki the environmental art work on the top of Malminkartano earth-hill will

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/ollie.html (3 of 4) [9.7.2001 11:43:03] Untitled Document be ready in summer 1998. (3) For adverse factors and opposition concerning one road project see von Bonsdorff, Pauline (ed.)Ympäristöestetiikan polkuja. (IIAA Series Vol 2. Gummerus. Jyväskylä, 1996) (4) Veikko Kunnas "Huomisen haasteena ympäristötaide". Arkkitehti 4/1994, p. 20; Martti Honkanen (1997). Tien estetiikka ja tietaide in Jani Päivänen, Martti Honkanen, Carita Päivänen and Hilkka Lehtonen eds. Tiekokemus, tierakenteet ja taide. Tielaitoksen selvityksiä 16/1997 (Helsinki 1997), p. 23. See also homepage of Foundation for Environmental Art, www.yts.fi. (4) Pauli Tapani Karjalainen (1996) "Kolme näkökulmaa maisemaan", in Maiseman arvo(s)tus eds. by Maunu Häyrynen and Olli Immonen (Saarijärvi 1996), p. 8 -15; Pauli Tapani Karjalainen, "Mapping places" in Place and Embodiment eds. by Pauli Tapani Karjalainen and Pauline von Bonsdorff. XIII Int. Congress of Aesthetics 1995 Proceedings. Lahti, 1997. There is reason to value the experience of driving, too: the wind, the movement, the rhythm of the road and environment can belong to the aesthetic experience. Martti Honkanen (1997), p. 21, 22; Martti Honkanen "Everyday Values" in Art and Beyond. Finnish Approaches to Aesthetics eds. by Ossi Naukkainen and Olli Immonen (Jyväskylä 1995), p. 170. MAP

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Olli Immonen Tie, taide ja ympäristö. Kuusikymmentäkahdeksan kilometriä tilaa (1)

Lahden ammattikorkeakouluun kuuluva Lahden taideinstituutti aloitti Lahdentien laajentamiseen liittyen koulutushankkeen "Taide ja Valtatie 4" vuonna 1997. Uuden tieosuuden pituus tulee olemaan 68 kilometriä, Järvenpäästä Lahden Joutjärvelle. Tavoitteena oli taideteoksin korostaa merkittäviä maastonkohtia, jaksottaa matkan etenemistä ja pyrkiä luomaan paikallisuuden tuntua pysäköimisalueille. Projekti pyrkii myös kehittämään opiskelijoiden, tulevien kuvataiteilijoiden, valmiuksia osallistua viime aikoina ympäristörakentamisessa ja erityisesti teiden rakentamisessa yleistyneisiin suurimuotoisten ympäristöteosten suunnitteluun. Koulutushanketta johtaa kuvanveistäjä Antero Toikka. Hankkeen ensisijainen tavoite on koulutusprojekti. Joitakin ehdotuksia kuitenkin myös toteutettaneen tierakentamisen yhteydessä.

Onko oikein osallistua moottoriteiden suunnitteluun Suuret tiehankkeet on yleensä koettu ympäristön kannalta vahingollisiksi ja taideteosten suunnittelua niiden yhteyteen on nimitetty ympäristörikoksen kuorruttamiseksi taiteella. Taideteoksen edellytys ei kuitenkaan ole, että se olisi kestävän kehityksen periaatteiden mukainen. Teos voi myös jossain tapauksissa tuhota tai ainakin muuttaa ympäristöään, ja myös saastunut ympäristö voidaan kokea kauniiksi. Tämä ei kuitenkaan tarkoita sitä, että meidän tulisi tukea luontoa vahingoittavia hankkeita. Päinvastoin nimenomaan ympäristötaiteessa ekologiset arvot ovat yleensä korostuneesti esillä.

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Viime vuosina ainakin Suomessa toteutetuissa ympäristötaidehankkeissa on ollut voimakkaasti mukana pyrkimys vahingoittuneen ympäristön parantamiseen. Soranottoalueille on suunniteltu ympäristöä parantavia taideteoksia. Massiivisille hiilivarastoille ja täyttömaille on kaupunkikuvassa annettu ympäristöteosten avulla uusia merkityksiä.(2) Moottoriteillä on monia haittapuolia ja niiden voidaan oikeutetusti katsoa olevan ympäristön kannalta ongelmallisia. Liikenne aihettaa melua, pölyä, päästöjä. Väylät pirstovat viheralueita ja metsiä ja katkaisevat eläinten luonnolliset kulkureitit. Moottoriteiden rakentamiseen tarvitaan soraa ja muuta maa-ainesta, joiden louhiminen ja kuljettaminen ovat vahingollisia ympäristölle. Tiealueen alle saattaa jäädä merkittäviä kulttuuri- ja luonnonympäristöjä. Lisäksi moottoritiet tekevät liikkumisen ajoneuvoilla helpommaksi ja lisäävät näin liikennettä. Teiden kapasiteetti täyttyy jossain vaiheessa ja edessä on jälleen uuden tien rakentaminen.(3) Lahden moottoritien rakentamista ei kuitenkaan ole merkittävästi vastustettu. Tähän on luultavasti ollut syynä se, että kyseessä on vain vanhan tien leventäminen. Tien alle ei ole jäämässä merkittäviä kulttuuriympäristöjä, asutusta tai luonnnonympäristöä. Lahden vanhalla tiellä on ollut useita vaikeita liikenneonnettomuuksia ja moottoritie parantaa liikenneturvallisuutta merkittävästi. Päästöt ja muut haittavaikutukset koskevat kuitenkin myös Lahden moottoritietä. Kysymys tietaiteen oikeutuksesta liittyy osin yleisiin ympäristöasenteisiin ja toimintatapoihin. Ympäristöä voidaan parantaa vastustamalla aktiivisesti – laillisin tai laittomin menetelmin – vahingollisia hankkeita. Toisaalla hankkeisiin voidaan mennä mukaan ja pyrkiä muuttamaan hankkeita ympäristöystävällisemmiksi. Lahden koulutusprojektissa ei ole otettu kantaa ympäristösaasteisiin. Tien rakentaminen on haittoineen ja etuineen otettu itsestäänselvyytenä ja muuttamattomana prosessina. Hankkeen tavoitteena on sen sijaan ollut tien visuaalisen ympäristön parantaminen. Uutta tietä ei ole nähty ympäristöhaittana, vaan 68 kilometriä pitkänä kokonaisvaltaisena ympäristötaideteoksena.

Tietaide ympäristötaiteena Ympäristötaiteen on todettu ”pakenevan” määrittelijöitään ja muuttuvan arvojen ja yhteiskunnallisen muutoksen myötä. Käsitteen laajeneminen on toisaalta nähty myös haitalliseksi. Väljän määrittelyn mukaan ympäristötaiteeseen kuuluvat ainakin taideteokset julkisluonteisessa ympäristössä, ympäristötaide arkkitehtuurin yhteydessä sekä uusimuotoiset ympäristörakenteet ja tilateokset. (4)

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Tietaide niveltyy osaksi kaikkia näitä. Viime vuosina Suomessa on ollut useita tietaidehankkeita. Kunnat ovat kohentaneet imagoaan ja näkyvyyttään taideteoksilla. Tielaitos on ottanut taiteilijat mukaan moottoriteiden rakentamiseen sekä meluesteiden, siltojen ja alikulkujen suunnitteluun. Tietaidetta ovat Suomessa tehneet mm. Anne Eerola, Annukka Korhonen, Ekku Peltomäki, Antero Toikka, Niels Haukeland, Pekka Manner ja Hannu Siren. On järjestetty useita ympäristötaidekilpailuja mm. meluesteiden suunnitteluun liittyen. Muun muassa vuoden 1998 alussa kilpailtiin Euroopan kulttuurikaupunkivuoteen liittyen otsikolla ”Saapuminen Helsinkiin”. Tavoitteena oli löytää uusia ideoita ja ympäristötaideteoksia Helsingin sisääntulomaisemiin. Tiellä liikkujalle tietaideteokset ovat osa maisemaa ja niitä voitaneen myös tulkita maisemantutkijoiden keinoin. Pauli Tapani Karjalaisen maisemajaottelua käyttäen esille voidaan nostaa usempia näkökulmia.(5) Päällimmäisenä taideteoksen kokemisessa ovat epäilemättä taideteoksen (kuvan, maiseman) fyysiset muodot: se mitä havaitsemme ohikiitävästä autosta. Lisäksi voidaan pohtia taideteoksen kokemuksellisia sisältöjä: millainen subjektiivinen kokemus tai mielenmaisema kokemuksesta muodostuu. Lopulta on otettava huomioon taideteoksen kielelliset merkitykset, miten teosta kuvataan, tulkitaan ja selitetään. Kokemuksellinen sisältö ja kulttuuriset merkitykset ovat tärkeä osa monia ympäristötaideteoksia. Useissa teoksissa hämmennetään vakiintunutta maisematekijää muuntamalla taideteoksen avulla sen perinteinen merkityssisältö ja tuomalla ihmisen sisäiseen maailmaan uusia tekijöitä. Näin ympäristöteos luo ainakin mahdollisuuden kehittää ihmisen kykyä havaita ja arvottaa ympäristöä. Lahden tietaideprojekti on kiinnostava esimerkki kuvataiteen murroksesta. Perinteisestä esinekeskeisestä taidekäsityksestä on pyritty siirtymään ympäristön taiteeseen. Tavoitteena ei ole enää suunnitella yksittäistä taideobjektia tiettyyn paikkaan. Nyt määritelty ympäristökokonaisuus nähdään taiteilijan muokkausta odottavana tilana ja myös kallioleikkauksesta, sillasta tai maamassasta voidaan muovata taideteos. Pisimmälle vietynä taideteosta ei enää tarvitse edes muokata. Riittää että valaistaan tai tuodaan muuten esiin kiinnostava kallio, puuryhmä tai maisema. Tietaideprojektissa myös matka Riihimäeltä Lahteen on nähty kokonaistaideteoksena jonka elementtejä ovat ainakin liike, tie, auto ja tietaideteokset. Matka on prosessi ja kokemus, kuusikymmentäkahdeksan kilometriä tilaa.

Viitteet

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/olli.html (3 of 4) [9.7.2001 11:43:04] IO - Gallery (1) Artikkeli on osa Antero Toikan, Minna Nikolan ja Annika Tontsin valmistelemaa Lahden taideinstituutin projektiesittelyä. (2) Soranottoalueiden parantamisesta ovat erinomaisina esimerkkeinä Agnes Denesin teos Ylöjärvellä sekä Nancy Holtin Nokian kunnassa. Helsingissä Hanna Vainion teos Malminkartanon täyttömäen huipulle valmistuu kesällä 1998. (3) Erään tieprojektin haittapuolista ja vastustuksesta ks. von Bonsdorff, Pauline (toim.) Ympäristöestetiikan polkuja (IIAA Series Vol 2. Gummerus. Jyväskylä, 1996). (4) Veikko Kunnas, "Huomisen haasteena ympäristötaide". Arkkitehti 4/1994, s. 20; Martti Honkanen (1997). "Tien estetiikka ja tietaide". Teoksessa J. Päivänen, M. Honkanen, C. Päivänen ja H. Lehtonen, toim. Tiekokemus, tierakenteet ja taide. Tielaitoksen selvityksiä 16/1997. Helsinki 1997, s. 23. Ks. Myös Ympäristötaiteen säätiön kotisivu, www.yts.fi. (5) Pauli Tapani Karjalainen "Kolme näkökulmaa maisemaan". Teoksessa Maunu Häyrynen & Olli Immonen, toim. Maiseman arvo(s)tus (Saarijärvi, 1996), s. 8-15. Ei myöskään voida väheksyä ajamisen kokemusta: tuuli, liike, tien rytmi ja ympäristö voivat olla osa esteettistä kokemusta. Vrt. Martti Honkanen 1997, s. 21-22; Martti Honkanen, "Everyday Values". Teoksessa Ossi Naukkarinen & Olli Immonen eds., Art And Beyond. Finnish Approaches to Aesthetics (Gummerus: Jyväskylä 1995), s. 170.

KARTTA

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Tieprojekti

Antero Toikka Valtatie 4 tietaideprojekti Lahden ammattikorkakoulussa on käynnissä projekti, jonka tavoitteena on saada aikaan visuaalisesti korkeatasoinen tiemiljöö Järvenpäästä Lahteen vuonna 2000. Perusselvityksiä taiteen mahdollisuuksista tietilassa ja sen maisemallisia lähtökohtia on työstetty taideinstituutissa syksystä 1996 lähtien.

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Selvitystyötä, julkaisun tekemistä ja taideteosten sijoittumista alueelle on tehnyt opiskelijoista ja asiantuntijoista koostunut ryhmä, jota olen johtanut. Tietaideprojektin tavoitteena on vahvistaa kuvateiteen, muotoilun ja estetiikan tutkimuksellista ja koulutuksellista tilannetta ja kehittää uudenlaisia yhteistyömahdollisuuksia kuvataiteen, muotoilun, estetiikan, ympäristösuunnittelun ja alueen teollisuuden välille. Kuvataiteilijoiden, arkkitehtien ja maisemasuunnittelijoiden ympäristötaiteeseen suuntautuminen, yhteistyö ja osaaminen on tulevaisuudessakin merkittävä ja siksi kehittämisen arvoinen ala. Seuraavassa vaiheessa tietaideprojektia kehitetään tutkimukselliseen suuntaan luomalla edellytyksiä ajoneuvomuotoilun, taiteen tekemisen, muotoilun ja ympäristöosaamisen integroitumiselle osaksi tien rakentamista. Tämä tapahtuu järjestämällä seminaareja ja koulutustapahtumia, jotka tuottavat tutkimustietoa ympäristöarvoista tien rakentamisen yhteydessä. Tavoitteena on selvittää taustoja, jotka huomioidaan toteutusprosessissa. Projekti tuottaa ympäristöosaamista, koulutusmateriaalia ja julkaisuja tutkimuksen ja hankkeen tuloksista sekä visuaalisesti korkeatasoisen tietilan. Prosessissa on kolme vaihetta: koulutus, tutkimus ja tuotanto. Vaiheet ovat toistensa edellytyksiä ja syy-seuraussuhteessa toisiinsa. Käytännön tasolla projekti etenee vuorovaikutuksessa Kansainvälisen soveltavan estetikkan instituutin, Lahden muotoiluinstituutin, Helsingin yliopiston estetikan laitoksen, Lancasterin yliopiston, Ympäristötaiteen säätiön Tielaitoksen, Nelostie OY:n ja alueen kuntien ja kaupunkien kanssa.

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Tieprojekti

Antero Toikka The Highway Number Four Roadside Art Project The goal of Lahti Polytechnic's roadside art project is to create a visual milieu of high standard along the road from Järvenpää to Lahti by the year 2000. Basic decisions on the art possibilities and their starting points from the

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/toikka.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:06] Untitled Document landscape have been worked on with the Art and Design Institute since Autumn 1996. Analysis of the area, the positioning of art works within it and publication of the project have been done by the group of students and experts which I organized. The aim of the roadside art project is to strengthen the position of art, design and aesthetics with regard to research and education, and to develop new opportunities for co-operation between these areas, environmental planning and local industrial interests. Education in environmental art, and co-operation and know-how among artists, architects and environmental planners will be of significance also in the future, and is therefore worth developing. The next step in the roadside art project will be to direct research forwards by enabling designers, artists and environmental experts to join the project. This will be done by organising seminars and educational events which will point the way to knowledge concerning environmental values. The aim is to explore matters which are noticed during the building process. The project will produce environmental know-how, educational material and publications as well road space of visual high quality. It involves three stages; education, research and production. The stages follow on from each other and are in a cause and effect relationship. On a practical level, the project is functioning as a co-operation project between the IIAA, the Design Institute/Lahti Polytechnic, the University of Helsinki (Department of Aesthetics), Lancaster University, the Foundation for Environmental Art, the Road Institute, Nelostie Ltd and regional communities and towns.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/toikka.html (2 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:06] perälä

Levähdysalueet Levähdysalueiden nykyinen tunnelma on aika kolkko ja identiteetitön; sinne pysähtynyt autoilija ei hahmota missäpäin tietä hän sijaitsee, kun ne kaikki näyttävät aivan samanlaisilta epäystävällisiltä alueilta. VT4-n varrella sijaitsevista levähdysalueista jokaiselle oman ihmista läheisemmän tunnelman luominen olisi mielestäni tärkeä tehtävä. Siiheen vaikuttavat heti jo niillä alueilla käytettyjen peruselementtien kuten valaisimien, istutuksien, WC:n, roskapönttöjen ja istuinten ulkoasu. Valaisu Vaihtamalla korkeat katuvalaisimet matalampiin keltasävyisiin lamppuihin (mitä tarvitaan alueen valaisemisen kannalta enemmän), paikan tun-nelma muuttuu heti ystävällisemmäksi. Sijoitamalla koko alueelle lisää melkein maan tasolla olevia pikkulamppuja siitä tulee Suomen pitkinä pimeinä aikoina aivan erilainen mystinen maisema. Lamppujen valon värin voi vielä laittaa muuttumaan joka 5 minuuttin jälkeen toiseksi; näin koko aluetta voi katsoa omankaltaisena muuttuvana valo-teoksena. Hirsirakennelmat

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/perala.htm (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:07] perälä Massatuotannossa valmistettujen penkkien sijasta jokaisella levähdysaluella voisi olla hirsirakennelma, mikä toimisi istumapaikkana, kiipeilytelineenä lapsille ja abstraktina veistoksena. Eri levähdysalueilla rakennelmat voisivat olla maalattu/petsattu erivärisiksi ja sommiteltu eri lailla, peruselementteinä kuitenkin aina eripituiset hirret.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/perala.htm (2 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:07] tulipyörä

Tulipyörä-veistos

Tien varrelle vähän ennen Lahteen sisääntulo-liittymää haluaisin sijoittaa tuulessa pyörivän metallisen “Tulipyörän” symboloimaan edellämainittua kaupunkia. Lahden vaakunassa näkyy tulipyörä seitsemällä liekillä - siitä johtuen “Tulipyörä” -veistoksessakin olisi seitsemän liekkisiipeä. Tulipyörän keskiosan halkaisija olisi n. 3 m (ilman siipiä) ja koko pyörivä osa sijaitsisi niin korkealla, ettei kukaan voisi satuttaa itseään. Jos taloudellisesti kannattaisi, voisi saman teoksen kautta tuulesta saatavaa energiaa käyttää sen valaisemiseksi yöllä.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/tulipyora.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:07] renkomäki

Renkomäen liittymä

“ruutulippu” teos on suunniteltu Renkonmäen liitymään rytmittämään risteysaluetta.Musta- valkoisella installoinnilla luodaan yhtenäinen ja persoonallinen ilme liittymälle. “ruutulippu” on veistossarja joka muodostuu erikokoisista metalliseinistä jotka on maalattu.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/renkomaki.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:09] joutjärvi Finland, as the origin and the end of the World. Highway, with a beginning and a finish pointed with the unavoidable sign of the Art. Join Art and Life. Prehistoric Art; beginning of the Art. Indefinite end of the Art just like the end of the World. They walk together. Stones and neon lights pointing the start and the finish of the road. The Life.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/joutjarvi.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:10] tuolit.htm

Graniittituolit

Kallioiden huipuille molemmille puolille tietä pystyttäisin graniittisia tuoleja - isoja perusmuotoisia “valtaistuimia” korkealla

selkänojalla. Niiden luo voisi hakata kallioon portaat, mitä pitkin sinne voisi kiivetä nauttimaan maiseman katselusta. Tuolit antaisivat mahdollisuuden päästä tien tasolta ylemmäksi, vapautua sitä kautta tien kiireisestä rytmistä ja melusta, tuntea itsensä “kuninkaalliseksi”, tutustua ympäröiviin maisemiin. Tieltä katsojalle istuimet symbolisoivat myös mahdollisuutta päästä masentavasta rutiinista, olla itsensä valtias. Jossain paikoissa tuolit voisivat olla muustakin materiaalista ja kirkkaanvärisiä. Mahdollisuuden mukaan graniitti-istuimia voisi talvipakkasella sisäältäpäin lämmittää, jotta maiseman katselusta pystyisi nauttimaan kylmälläkin säällä.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/tuolit.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:11] sillat

Sillat VT4-n käyttäjä joutuu ajamaan monen sillan alta. Nykyiset sillat on ulkonäöltään kaikki samankaltaisia betonirakennelmia. Niiden erottaminen toisistaan ja sen mukaan paikan hahmottaminen, missä ollaan, loisi tielle lisää identiteettiä ja rutiinista poikkeavia mielenkiinnon kohteita. Yksinkertaisin, mutta kuitenkin toimiva olisi maalata sillat erivärisiksi. Tien keskimmäinen silta voisi olla maalattu sateenkaaren väreillä raidalliseksi, kun muut sillat olisivat yksivärisiä. Näin siitä syntyisi tavallaan tien keskipaikan merkki, mistä autoilija hahmottaisi sijainnin. Siniselle sillalle voisi sijoittaa taivaantähtien muotoisia heijastimia näin, että ne pimeässä auton valoista syttyisivät ja koko sillan pinta muistuttaisi tähtitaivasta.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/sillat.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:12] aurinko ja kuu AURINKO JA KUU TAIVAALTA HEIJASTUU Materiaalit ja sijainti Teos koostuu kahdesta osasta; auringosta sekä kuusta. Ne sijaitsevat mieluiten tien kummallakin puolella vastakkain tai peräkkäin kallioleikkauksissa. Aurinko muodostuu viidesta litteästä ympyränmuotoisesta tasosta. joista osasta on leikattu pala pois (kuvaa maisemaa leikkaamassa auringon laskua/nousua). Materiaalina käytettäisiin kiillotettua, ruostumatonta terästä. Aurinkoja ei sen kummemin käsitellä. Kuu muodostuu myöskin samoista materiaaleista kuunkiertoa (sirpistä täysikuuhun ja takaisin) toteuttaen, mutta pinta olisi maalattu tummaksi ettei se erottuisi päivisin, mutta pinnassa olisi fosforimaalia tai vastaavaa jotta se hohtaisi öisin.

Sisältö ja ajatus Valtatie on pienoisvaltakunta. Kun istuskelee auton rauhallisessa huminassa, väkisinkin ajatukset harhailevat omia polkujaan valtatietä pitkin. Matkalla ajan ja vauhdin taju hämärtyy. Samalla voisi tapahtua aikahyppy; aurinko vie päivän mukanaan, kuu kierrättää sinua file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/aurinko.htm (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:13] aurinko ja kuu hetkisen omalla radallaan.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/aurinko.htm (2 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:13] the bridge THE BRIDGE The leading idea that I want to express in my project is the contrast between nature and technology. I chose the form of a leaf and transformed it to an other form, a bridge.The structure is important, because is the feature that the two things have in common. The leaf structure is reflected in the bridge and natural form is transformed to a bridge. The work relates to land art because it communicates with the landscape from a built bridge.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/bridge.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:14] fosforisillat

FOSFORISILTA Fosforivärillä maalattu silta loistaa pimeässä ja toimiii samalla signaalina luonnon- ja kulttuuriympäristön rajakohdissa. Fosforisillan väri vaihtelee kuntien mukaan ja auttaa näin pimeässä matkustavia orientoitumaan ympäristöönsä.

VALOJA TAIVAALLA Kirkkaat värilliset valospotit taivaalla valaisevat taivasta ja toimivat, samoin kuin fosforisiltakin, merkkinä taajama- alueelle saapumisesta. Jokaisella kunnalla on omat “ taivaan merkkinsä ” . ( Valo voi olla myös kuviona. )

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/sillat1.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:15] lohikäärme

Kallio-Lohikäärme

Mäntsälän ohikulkutien varrella olevassa kallioleikkauksessa näkyy selvästi vaaleasta kivesta muodostunut kiemurteleva viiva. Jatkamalla luonnon piirtämää kuviota mosaiikkisella tulta sylkevällä päällä siitä muodostuu kokonainen lohikäärme. Mosaiikin materiaalina olisi keraamiset laatat. Tulipyörän ollessa Lahden symboolina sopii tulta syöksevä lohikäärme Lahteen suuntautuvalle tiellekin mainiosti; voi löytää yhtäläisyyksia myös tulisen lohikäärmeen ja moottoritien muodon ja tultasylkevän luonteen välillä. Pimeässä lohikäärme voisi olla valaistu.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/dracon.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:16] siltaportti SILTAPORTTI Värillisistä ja osin läpinäkyvistä osista koostuva akryylimuoviportti johdattaa tiellä kulkijan kaupungista maaseudulle. Portin väri on voimakkain sillan keskiosassa. Reunoille mentäessä portin läpinäkyvyys lisääntyy - ihmisen aikaansaamat värit vaihtuvat vähitellen luonnon kuvaksi.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/silta.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:17] suodattimet Parkkialueen läpinäkyvät kehikot, eli SUODATTIMET Alumiinikehikoiden keskellä voi olla läpinäkyviä maisemaa muuttavia muovilinssejä, värillisiä akryyliseinämiä, hiekalla ja muilla aineilla pinnoitettuja muovi- tai lasiseinämiä. Työn ideana on vaihdettavuus ja läpinäkyvyys. Jokaisesta työstä tulee

enemmän- tai vähemmän läpinäkyvä, jotta katsoja voisi nähdä maiseman uusien suodattimien läpi. Kehikot tekevät tavallisesta parkkialueesta poikkeuksellisen paikan. Parkkialueella vierailevat näkevät saman maiseman kuin aikaisemminkin, mutta läpinäkyvien suodattimien kautta tarkasteltuna tavallinen maisema muuttuukin yllättäen eriskummalliseksi ja visuaalisesti kiintoisaksi. Mottona: Tavallisestakin näkymästä löytyy aina jotain yllättävää, kun vain keskittyy katsomaan.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/suodatin.htm (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:18] suodattimet Seinämä vaihdetaan vähintään kerran vuodessa. Näin tiellä kulkijat voivat taas vaihtaa näkökulmansa toiseen - löytää uusia suodattimia ajatuksilleen.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/suodatin.htm (2 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:18] suuri turismi “Suuri Turismi” Veistos suomalaisesta punaisesta graniitista lopulliselta kooltaan noin 2,5 x1,25 x1m (pit.,lev.,kork.) Ohessa kuva olemassa olevasta pienoismallista (n.1:5), samasta lopullisesta materiaalista. Mahdollinen sijoitus jollekin moottoritiealueen “miehittämättömistä” parkki/levähdysalueista. Veistos on kommentti, autoilun, vapaan liikkuvuuden ihanteesta, maailman ja sen menemisen kuva (Tärkeintä on liike?): Toisinaan kaikki menee hyvin, toisinaan vaan menee...ja? Mikä meitä kaikkia liikuttaa? Ikiliikuttava ikuisessa materiaalissa.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/s.t.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:19] the way to roll on

The way to roll on Rullalle käpertynyt tie on kunnianosoitus tien syntymiselle. Kymmenien kilometrien pituisen tien rakentaminen on valtava ja työläs prosessi jossa mekaaninen “jurassic park” takoo yötä päivää koneiden ja ihmistyövoiman muodossa kohti päämääräänsä. Lähtöpisteet on valittu ja tieteamit löytävät toisensa huipputarkkuudella -tien alkupäät kohtaavat toisensa ja muuttuvat yhtenäiseksi kulkusuunnaksi. Kuitenkin tässä kaikessa realismissa jossa insinöörit ja huipputekniset työryhmät muotouttavat tien - on jotain mytologian omaista : suomalainen ponnistelu jossa alkuvoimalla luodaan abstrakti idea - maailma todeksi - luovuuden ilmentymäksi. Rullattu tie on jätetty tien penkareelle -unohdettu kuin mikä tahansa materiaali josta tiet syntyvät. Se ilmentää osaamisen huippulaatua -meillä tietkin on rullatavaraa. Se on kuin alkemistinen ilmentymä joka voi koska tahansa elävän organismin tavoin suoristaa itsensä ajokaistaksi metafyysiseen maailmaan. Tiehän on aina elävä järjestelmä ja se kuuluu globaaliin verkostoon kuin suoni ihmiskehossa : veren on syöksyttävä järjestelmän paineella , yhtälailla kuin levottomien kyberneettisten yksiköiden on ohjauduttava eteenpäin maailman haasteisiin. Kyberneettinen yksikkö on ihmisen ja koneen muodostama hallintojärjestelmä ja sen tiellä liikkuva sovellutus - auto . Tierulla on merkki - tieverkostot kehittyvät organismin kasvuvoimalla. Se on raaka-aine joka sykliytymänä värähtelee rakennetun tien voimaa ja kertoo siinä asuvista resursseista. Tierulla on kuin egyptiläisen sittiäisen

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/roll.htm (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:20] the way to roll on pyörittämä sykli ajasta jolloin inhimilliset ponnistukset loivat käsitteet mahdottoman

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/roll.htm (2 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:20] hoppa

HOPPA ON TIEN YLI HYPPIVÄ VALOVEISTOS. SE TUKEUTUU MAAHAN KOLMESTA KOHDASTA, ELI LIIKE JATKUU IKÄÄN KUIN MOLEMPIEN KAISTOJEN YMPÄRI. LIIKETTÄ KOROSTAA AUTOMUOTOJEN ASETTELU KAAREN MUOTOISEKSI, SEKÄ NIIDEN YKSI KERRALLAAN SYTTYMINEN JA SAMMUMINEN.

MATERIAALIT: VALON LÄPÄISY ON TÄRKEÄ OSA HOPPAA. SIISPÄ LASI TAI MUOVI TUETTUNA TERÄSRAKENTEILLA VOISI OLLA ERÄS RATKAISU. TEOKSEEN KUULUVA VALAISU TAPAHTUISI SITEN, ETTÄ KAPPALEET LOISTAVAT HETKEN KUIN VALO LÄHTISI NIISTÄ ITSESTÄÄN.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hoppa.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:21] menneen ja tulevan rajaviiva

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/raja.htm [9.7.2001 11:43:22] haacke

Anita Seppä Hans Haacke – Environmental Artist with Sociopolitical Concerns

Environmental art is a large category covering a broad spectrum of ideas and works of art. The category began to develop in the 1960's when many artists – mainly American – started to use natural substances in their work and then gradually moved completely outdoors. Environmental artists have never formed a distinct group nor have they had a common philosophical basis for their work. Still, some common characteristics exist; firstly, all environmental artists have already studied the institutional rules and framework of the art world and the gallery system by the time they start producing their works outside on natural sites. Secondly, all of them have somehow made the traditional concept of a work of art problematic by changing the focus from a solid work of art (or a creator-genius) to a dialogue between the work of art and nature, or the work of art and a specific site. My aim in the following is not to give an overall definition of environmental art but to concentrate on one artist, Hans Haacke, who has been working intensively with nature and the environment since the 1960s but is nowdays perhaps better known for the sociopolitical concerns inherent in his work. Haacke is an artist who has always shown a special interest in systems. This led him first to work with natural systems, such as water and air, and later into examining the economical, political and social systems within which western art exists. Although the focus of Haacke’s art has changed in many ways during last four decades, his work offers interesting perpectives, not only on art in general, but also on environmental art – presuming that we are willing to accept environmental art as a category which includes also some phenomena more complex than just a dialogue between art and nature.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (1 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] haacke Water and Air Constructions Haacke became known during the 1960s as an artist who worked mainly in the realm of nature. His main interest at that time was studying those singular observations that are part of our “natural” everyday life, but of which we are hardly aware in a world which has very little time for authentic sensual involvements. At the beginning of 1960s Haacke’s main subject was water, which he “represented” in different kinds of water boxes made of plexiglas. These constructions all looked quite similar from the outside but were essentially different from each other, with the water inside the boxes existing in different forms and partitionings. Around 1965 Haacke moved on to other flexible natural forces and started to build his “weather events” with air draughts and blower systems both indoors and outdoors. Blue Sail (1965) was one of his indoor installations, consisting of blue chiffon, nylon thread, weights, and an oscillating fan which kept the installation in perpetual motion, as if it were a living organism fluttering fragilely in the air, but kept alive only with the help of the fan. Another wind and air construction, Sky Line, was built outdoors two years later. It consisted of a line of helium-filled balloons which were connected to each other by a nylon string. Like the earlier gallery works in air this one was also a fragile piece of art, not an object in the traditional sense, but more like a system being constantly manipulated – not by the oscillating fan but by natural forces such as wind, rain, temperature etc. Both Haacke’s water and air constructions were based on the ideas represented in kinetic art movement, stressing the importance of essential phenomenalism and elementary sensing. A connecting feature in Haacke’s constructions was an idea of boundlessness and of playing with the spectator and the environment. Like many other kinetic artists, Haacke sought expression mainly through movement and the experience of time. He expressed his early artistic manifesto briefly in the following exhortations: ...make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is nonstable...... make something indeterminate, that always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely...... make something that cannot “perform” without the assistance of its environment...... make something sensitive to light and temperature changes, that is subject to air currents and depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity...... make something the spectator handles, an object to file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (2 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] haacke be played with and thus animated...... make something that lives in time and makes the “spectator” experience time...... articulate something natural... Hans Haacke, Cologne, January 1965.(1) Haacke’s water and air works were processes that attempted to build a dialogue between the spectator and his/her environment. He structured the events but left the rest to the spectator, trying to motivate his/her elementary memory, inviting a new and intimate re-experiencing of those effects the world offers us the moment we first open our eyes – but the existence of which we also tend to forget. As Jack Burnham has noted, Haacke’s interest in the invisible mechanisms of nature is actually “like all meaningful art; it is a revocation of what is always known about existence, but forgotten at one time or another”.(2)

Poetical Imagination and Phenomenological Reduction Haacke’s early interest in nature and the sensing of its elementary systems bears many resemblances to phenomenological and existential philosophy, which similarly understands the work of art as a lived human process rather than as a solid and fixed object to be seen “there”, outside the spectator, or in his contemplating mind. An interesting theoretical similarity to Haacke’s water and air constructions can be found in the work of the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard, who developed the idea of a poetic imagination. Bachelard’s analysis of the imagination is interesting here, because it seems to be able to explain much of what Haacke’s early works are about.

Bachelard divides the poetical imagination into two different categories which work together in our acts of understanding: the material and the dynamic imagination. The material imagination is tied to material elements, for example to those that we usually think of as archetypal: air, fire, water and earth. According to Bachelard, the being of these materials corresponds with the being of the human subject. Bachelard speaks also of the poetic correspondences in which we are not primarily concerned with intellectual abstractions but with the discoveries of ourselves in matter. For this reason the material imagination is able to “find in the very depth of materials all of the symbols of the inner life”.(3) Still, it is not a question of identifying oneself with materials because the

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (3 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] haacke pleasure that the material imagining evokes is that of finding ourselves in material that is paradoxically something other than ourselves. This leads us to the following interpretation: if we think about the pleasure evoked by Haacke’s constructions in terms of Bachelard’s notion of material imagination, we arrive at the conclusion that the pleasure does not rise from the sameness of the material and our our imaginative activity, but instead from an experience of being in some sense ulterior to the work and its material. Bachelard uses also some other archetypes to describe this feeling of ulteriority, and analyses forms such as the shell, the womb, the house, the snake and the labyrinth as axes around which a host of images may conspire to evoke typical human experiences.(4) At the same time these symbols are meant to evoke a feeling of the origin, not an image (a picture in the mind) in the traditional sense. Bachelard’s second class of poetical imagining is that of the dynamic, which works as a counterpart to the material imagination. The dynamic is a force that goads the subject matter continually into motion and keeps the forms in perpetual movement; it makes an arrow fly, a tear drop fall – and Haacke’s water boxes and air constructions move both in time and in space. The dynamic imagination is based on our freedom to imagine and on our free will to fly, fall, make objects live etc. Together these two forms of poetical imagining – material and dynamic – give us the ability to re-create the world that surrounds us; they make us like “demiurges before the kneading-trough: we structure the becoming of the matter”.(5) Another interesting connection between Haacke’s early works of art and phenomenology has been pointed out by Jack Burnham, who pays attention to the similarity between Haacke’s art in the 1960s and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological thinking. Burnham states that Haacke’s works can also be understood in the light of Husserlian “reduction” which tries to take us back to the “things themselves”. According to Burnham, “we see only what we want to see and the hardest thing to see is what is nonliterary in origin, in fact, what is with us from the moment we first open our eyes”. Burnham makes his interpretation clearer by referring to Haacke’s water constructions: “thousands of times I have discharged the contents of a washbasin or have swallowed liquid with the purpose of removing the contents from the cavity of the glass into the cavity created by my digestive system. Rarely have I exerted what Husserl calles “reduction” in isolating either the motions of my body in receiving the water or the actions of the water leaving the glass. This last is what Haacke is about.”(6)

Turning a Natural Marlboro Man into the Political Helmsboro

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (4 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] haacke Country As we have seen, Haacke’s main subject in the 1960s was nature; its basic elements and systems, and the works done during this period bear a close relationship to both kinetic art and phenomenological thinking. In the 1970s Haacke’s art started to take on a more political direction and the focus of his works shifted from the observation of our natural surroundings to the interaction between natural and human systems. He started to show more interest in the fact that the things we regard as “natural” are always modified by different kinds of human interests; institutional, governmental, military, corporate etc. Gradually this led Haacke to work more intensively with different kinds of symbolic systems; he studied the various mechanisms which were used not only in advertising but also in the economical, political and social fields, structures that he saw as affecting both our conceptions of art and the ways we value works of art. Haacke’s interest in the economical and sociopolitical dimensions of art rested also on a reconsideration of the nature of a work of art. Inherent in each of his works were questions like: What is a work of art? and especially: How should art function for its public? Like Pierre Bourdieu – with whom he recorded discussions which were published under the title Libre-Échange (1994) – Haacke wanted to make people more aware of art’s functioning as one form of symbolic power, not as an innocent field of aesthetic disinterestedness, or politically neutral contemplation. According to both Bourdieu and Haacke, symbolic power means an ability to give categories to thinking and feeling; categories that help us to see and classify different kinds of things and events in the world – but which can also easily turn into censorship and restricting doxa. Symbolic power makes us feel as if the things it represents were natural; it gives us view points on the world, but without explicit or critical reflection of its own economical or political basis. One piece of work which demonstrates Haacke’s way of studying critically the conditions of art making and his ability to integrate these notions into his own productions was a work called Helmsboro Country, constructed in 1990. The work gained its inspiration from the acts of Jesse Helms, a senator of North-Carolina whose ideological background is a mixture of fundamental Protestantism and extreme right-wing politics. Jesse Helms is known as a supporter of right-wing governments all over the world. He has also taken an active part in resisting the workers’ movement, women’s and homosexuals’

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (5 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] haacke emancipation, and all kinds of sexual enlightenment (he managed to bring down a bill to promote education about aids in the USA). In 1989 Helms gained a lot of publicity by attacking an exhibition which was arranged in the South Eastern Center for Contemporary Arts (SECCA) in North Carolina. The exhibition presented the work of young artists who had received financial help from the National Endowment of Arts (NEA) foundation. The work of art that motivated Helms to act was made by a Catholic artist Andres Serrano, a photograph of a crucifix covered with yellowish brown gauze. The picture didn’t show clearly what was covering the Christ figure but the title of the work, Piss Christ, left no doubts about it. The work was part of Serrano’s artwork series, in which he represented the fluids of human body, blood, sperm etc. Helms attack was focused on the NEA. Shortly after the Serrano “scandal” another photographer Robert Mapplethorp had received financial support from the NEA. Helms accused Mapplethorp (who had already died of aids by that time) of pornography and of inciting people to homosexuality. In the autumn of the same year, 1990, the USA congress approved a bill which was presented by Helms: the NEA was forbidden to support works of art which they or the National Endowment for the Humanities might regard as indecent. This would include works denoting (for example) sadomasocism, homosexual erotics, the sexual exploitation of children, or people involved in the sexual act.(7) Helms also made it clear in public that people who voted against his new law of censorship would be accused of supporting pornography with the help of public money. Haacke’s answer was a 77 x 203 x 121 cm sculpture which looked like a box of Marlboro cigarettes, but had been through some slight modifications. On both sides of the box Haacke had printed quotations from Frank Saunders’ and George Weissman’s statements concerning art, the opinions of two men who have a big investment in the Philip Morris concern and who seemed to be worried only about the financial and practical advantages to be gained by the Philip Morris company by their “support” of art. The Philip Morris company gave also financial support to senator Jesse Helms. Senator Helms was also represented in Haacke’s sculpture: his photograph was printed on the cigarette box with the text “veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I won). The ”Marlboro” brand name was turned into ”Helmsboro” and “20 cigarettes” on the surface of the box was replaced by “20 bills of rights”. With the latter Haacke referred ironically to an event in which the Philip Morris company distributed Bill of Rights rolls to people, bearing the logos of its three affiliated companies: General Foods, Kraft and Miller Beer. Helmsboro Country was one of Haacke’s works that shows clearly his mastery

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (6 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] haacke in the field of symbolic power. Still, although Haacke fights against patrons and different kinds of economical and political forces, he doesn’t wish to destroy them entirely (for this would also kill art) but wants to keep a critical eye on them, and to make us more aware of the different strategies through which politicians and enterprises try to allure people’s opinions onto their side. In works like Helmsboro Country, Haacke steals these stategies of alluring and reveals them, turning the weapons of symbolic power upon its users. Helmsboro Country is also a good example of Haacke’s political engagement and his reluctance to give in to the forces of symbolic power and money. Neither is he willing to live in an artistic “ivory tower”, which can also be seen as one form of giving up, nor in a baurdillardian “simulacrum”, which tries to ensure that there is no reality at all, but only an endless reflection of mirrors. As Bourdieu comments in his discussions with Haacke, we have a duty to take part into the world of business people, money men, politicians etc.; the more they influence our world the more we have to make their pseudo-philosophies public and force them to discuss them.(8)

Graz Haacke’s works reassert the artist’s role as an active initiator of acts and ideas within society. Rather than making works of art and representing them in a public space, Haacke selectively uses the site and its sociopolitical atmosphere as material in his works. For this reason most of his works – for example Helmsboro Country – could not be moved to any other place without extra explanations and references to its original “site”. Another interesting example of the site-specific nature of Haacke’s works is a sculpture which was constructed in Graz, Austria, in 1988, where an annual exhibition called Steirischer Herbst (funded by the city of Graz, the province of Steiermark and the government of Austria, in Vienna) has been organized since 1968. The exhibition in which Haacke was invited to participate with 15 other artists was focused on the anniversary of Anschluss i.e. the uniting of Austria to Hitler’s dynasty in 1938. The artists were asked to make temporary public art works for places that had been important during the Nazi occupation. Haacke chose Mariensäule, one of the oldest memorials, which had been erected in 1669 in Herrengasse street, in Graz, when the Germans had gained a victory over the Turkish army. In 1938 Hitler chose Graz as a Stadt der Volkserhebung for its merit of being one of the first Nazi forts in Austria. The ceremonies took place on the 25th of June 1938 at the foot of Mariensäule. A few weeks previously the Anschluss Nazis had marched along the

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (7 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] haacke Herrengasse, a swastika had been raised on the balcony of the town hall and windows had been broken in many Jewish shops. The Nazis covered the statue of the Virgin Mary with an obelisk and draped it with a huge red textile on which were the Nazi armorial bearings and the following text (referring to the Nazis’ earlier defeat in Vienna, in 1934): “Und ihr habt doch gesiegt” (You won anyway). Haacke wanted to cover the statue of Virgin Mary again with the Nazi obelisk, and he reconstructed it with the help of old photographs. The only difference between Nazis’ statue and Haacke’s work was a text which was added at the foot of the obelisk: “Those who were beaten in Steiermark: 300 gipsies, killed , 2, 500 Jews, killed, 8, 000 political prisoners, killed or died in prison, 9, 000 civilians, killed during the war, 1, 200 disappeared, 27, 900 soldiers, killed.” A week before the exhibition ended the statue was attacked by a bomb and part of Haacke’s work and also of the statue of the Virgin Mary under it were badly damaged. The bomb attack evoked a lot of discussion in local newspapers. Most of the people who took an active part in these discussions didn’t support the attack, but the biggest newspaper in Austria, Neue Kronen Zeitung, which has also supported Kurt Waldheim, criticised the catholic church for letting Haacke cover the statue of Virgin Mary, and accused politicians of spending the taxpayers’money on Haacke’s shameful project. An artist from Graz, Richard Kriesche, arranged a silent demonstration around the statue on the following Saturday. About one hundred local artists participated and started to discuss Haacke’s work with the passers-by. The next day some left-wing activists, students and private individuals brought flowers to the foot of the obelisk and burned candles around it through the night. Two men – both supporters of the Nazi ideology – were arrested two weeks later and sent to prison. Haacke’s obelisk in Graz took its form and meaning from a direct reference to its environment and the sociopolitical atmosphere that surrounded it. Haacke’s act was provocative in many ways and expressed something highly inflammable about the site where the work was constructed. At the same time it also forced people to rethink some basic conflicting demands and symbolic strategies concerning art that is represented in public environments.

Conclusion As Pierre Bourdieu notes in his conversations with Haacke, the power of Haacke’s expression lies not only in what he has to say, but also in those specific and innovative forms which he uses to express his message. This holds true both of his early works with nature and of the more recent ones that are more focused on sociopolitical concerns.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (8 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] haacke The main aim of Haacke’s works is to make us more aware of our living environments, either natural or more social. Some of his works – such as The Extacy of Baudrichard (1988) – are directed at a small group of specialists, but more often he addressess his art to a larger public. By showing the art world’s connections with various ideologies and money, Haacke poses questions such as; What is our artistic environment? What kind of symbolic powers and value dimensions constitute it? What is the social context of works of art? And in what kind of sociopolitical environment are they born as works of art?

Notes (1) See Art in the Land. A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art, ed. by Alan Sonfist, (New York: Dutton, 1983), p.112-113. (2) J. B urnham, "Hans Haacke - Wind and Water Sculpture" in Sonfist, p. 117. (3) G. Bachelard, L'Eau et les rêves: essai sur l'imagination de la matière (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), p. 202. (4) See also R. Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1993), p.96. (5) G. Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris: Corti, 1948), p. 78. (6) ibid., p. 110 (7) Libre-Échange (Paris: Seuil, 1994) transl. in Finnish as Ajatusten vapaakauppa (Vammala: Vammalan kirjapaino), p. 19-20. (8) ibid., 43.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/seppa.html (9 of 9) [9.7.2001 11:43:24] Hanna Johansson - Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_5.html (1 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:25] Hanna Johansson - Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_5.html (2 of 2) [9.7.2001 11:43:25] Hanna Johansson - Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja

Muuntamot taidenäyttelyn paikkana, eräänlaisena galleriatilana, liittyyvät 1960-luvulta 1990-luvulle jatkuneeseen virtaukseen, jossa painotetaan taiteen esittämisen tiloja milloin keskus/periferia näkökulmista, milloin sosiaalisista, milloin taideinstituutiota vastustavista näkökulmista. Yhteistä tämäntyyppisille näyttelyille on teosten kiinteä suhde niitä ympäröiviin tiloihin. Muuntamo-näyttelyssä kiinnostavaa oli sen tilallisen kontekstin jakaantuminen kahteen hyvin erilaiseen osaan. Ensimmäinen osa rajautui rakennusten fyysisten tiiliseinien sisälle, jossa oli näyttelyn ydin, sen sisin osa. Näyttelyyn osallistuneet viisi taiteilijaa rakensivat teoksensa näihin sisätiloihin ja myös katsojia kehotettiin kiinnittämään huomiota niihin. Näyttelyn toinen osa käsitti muuntamoiden väliset alueet – tai täsmällisemmin vielä ne reitit, joita pitkin katsoja kulki muuntamosta toiseen: kävellen, pyöräillen, autolla tai bussilla. Näyttelyn kaksi osaa ovat moneessa suhteessa toisilleen vastakkaisia, niin tilallisesti, toiminnallisesti kuin myös esityksellisesti. Näin ne muodostavat vastakohtaiset parit ainakin seuraaviin käsitteisiin nähden: suljettu/avoin, liikkuva/pysähtynyt, esitetty tila/tilan esitys. Tilallisen eriytymisen – avoimen ulkotilan ja suljettun sisätilan – vedenjakajina tai merkitsijöinä toimi näyttelyssä muuntamoiden punatiiliset seinät. Katsoja joka kulki muuntamolta toiselle joutui kulkemaan vuoroin suljettuun sisätilaan ja vuoroin avoimeen, toiminnalliseen ulkotilaan. Tämän merkitsijän roolin kautta muuntamot itsessään imeytyivät osaksi kokonaisuutta. Katsoja joutui kohtaamaan kolme muuntamoa – ei ainoastaan sisältäpäin, vaan myös suhteessa niitä ympäröivään maisemaan. Näin tilallisten käytäntöjen ja esityksellisten tilojen välille syntyi vuorovaikutus. Näiden kahden tilaelementin ohella myös näyttelyn varsinaisissa teoksissa korostui kahdenlainen tilaan liittyvä merkityksenanto. Yhtäältä näyttely ja sen teokset muotoutuivat rakennuksiin jääneistä jäljistä tai tilojen akuutista luonteesta. Töiden lähtökohdat olivat muuntamot itsessään. Toisaalta osa teoksista kommentoi rakennusten alkuperäistä, nyt jo väistynyttä käyttöä, sähkön tuottamista, jakamista ja välittämistä, ja tähän liittyvää symboliikkaa. Juuri tämä jälkimmäinen näkökulma yhdisti toistamiseen muuntamorakennukset toisiinsa, näkymättömän energian kuljettamisen ja jakamisen verkostoksi. Näyttelyn teoksia voi yhteisesti nimittää myös paikkasidonnaisiksi, väliaikaisiksi sekä katsojalle tarjotuiksi havaitsemisen tilanteiksi. Symboliseen tai assosiaatioiden tasoon liittyi osaltaan myös rakennusten alkuperäisen

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_6.html (1 of 3) [9.7.2001 11:43:26] Hanna Johansson - Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja toiminnan lakkauttaminen, jonka vuoksi ne tullaan purkamaan. Mutta juuri siksi, että niitä ei enää käytetty sähkön muuntamiseen, ne olivat muuttuneet "käsillä olevista" käyttöesineistä "esillä oleviksi" huomion pisteiksi. Miten nämä rakennukset sitten toimivat uudessa, muuntuneessa funktiossaan? Muuntamoiden asema kaupunkimaisemassa on vailla vertaa. Niitä ei olla rakennettu esteettisiä tai ylipäätään arkkitehtuurisia seikkoja silmälläpitäen (niiltä puuttuu usein myös nimetty suunittelija) vaan enemmänkin käytännön tarpeita, sähkön jakamista, tyydyttämään. Tämän vuoksi ne sijaitsevat omituisissa paikoissa, elävän kaupungin keskellä ja samalla kuitenkin syrjässä. Tämä johtuu tietysti osin siitä, ettei näitä rakennuksia ole tarkoitettu koettavaksi tai elettäväksi, eivätkä ne ole ihmisille vaan sähkölle rakennettuja linnoituksia. Myös niiden paikat ovat määrittyneet, ei ihmisten kulkureittejä vaan ennen kaikkea sähköjohtoja seuraillen. Näin muuntamot ovat tietynlaisia epätiloja, joita on rakennettu sinne missä niitä on tarvittu ja sinne, mistä niille on löytynyt vapaata tilaa. Johtuen siitä, että näitä rakennuksia ei ole tarkoitettu käytettäväksi, niihin ei kiinnitetä myöskään huomiota. Tietoinen katse ohittaa ne ja ne jättävät jälkiä korkeintaan muistoihin, jotka sitten sopivassa tilanteessa nousevat esiin tiedostamattomasta muistivarastosta. Olemmehan me kaikki niitä lopulta kuitenkin nähneet. Myös rakennusten muotokieli on enemmän käytännön kuin innovatiivisen arkkitehtuurikielen ohjailemaa. Tornimainen muoto on seurausta siitä, että avoimet johdot oli sijoitettava ihmiskosketuksen yläpuolelle. Toisaalta ei voida kuitenkaan sanoa, etteikö muuntamoita olisi myös koristeltu. Näidenkin kolmen esimerkin fasadeissa voi havaita pieniä, mutta kuitenkin selvästi harkittuja koristeellisia yksityiskohtia. Edellä esitetty Muuntamo-näyttelyn tilallinen konteksti sisältää jo vihjailevan ajatuksen katsojan keskeisestä roolista, niin tilan käyttäjänä kuin myös taiteen kokijana. Tällainen kokijakeskeinen lähtökohta taiteen tarkastelussa on melko uusi ilmiö ainakin jos tarkastelukenttä määräytyy taidehistorian kautta. Taidehistoriahan on perinteisesti keskittynyt tarkastelemaan taideobjekteja, yhtäältä teosten sisältöä ja toisaalta niiden tekijöitä, taiteilijoita. Viime vuosikymmeninä kuvataiteen tutkimuksessa huomio on kääntynyt kuitenkin yhä enemmän kohti katsojaa ja kiinnostuksen kohteeksi on tullut autonomisten teosten ja niiden valmistajan sijasta teoksen ja katsojan kohtaamisen prosessi, ja lopulta itse havaitsemistapahtuma merkityksiä luovana toimintana. Kiinteiden kohteiden sijasta teokset muistuttavat yhä useammin konstellaatioita, joissa yhteen tai useampaan tilaan sijoitetaan teoksien osia. Vedenjakajan roolin vanhan ja uuden välillä saa vaihdellen minimalismi, joka tiputti veistoksen jalustaltaan todelliseen tilaan; kollaasit, jotka kasvattivat maalauksen ulos pinnasta; ready-madet, jotka pyrkivät murentamaan taideteoksen ja file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_6.html (2 of 3) [9.7.2001 11:43:26] Hanna Johansson - Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja käyttöesineen välistä statuseroa; käsitetaide tai ympäristötaide, joka lopulta vei taiteen ulos instituutioista ja teki siitä paikkaansa sidotun väliaikaisen tilan merkitsijän. Näiden kaikkien yhteenvetona muodostui nykyisin jo yleisesti käytetty installaatioiden luokka.

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_6.html (3 of 3) [9.7.2001 11:43:26] IO - Gallery

Wheatfield - A Confrontation Agnes Denes Tila, reitti, katsoja Hanna Johansson Terra Nova -project Hermann Prigann

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/gallery.html [9.7.2001 11:43:26] Hanna Johansson - Tila, teos, reitti, katsoja

file:///C|/www-site/root/io98/hanna_7.html [9.7.2001 11:43:27]