Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei has mounted 1200 bicycles in a magnificent floor to ceiling installation as part of a solo exhibition in Taipei.

The artist likely has no environmental statement to make with this installation, but these days it is hard to look at so many bicycles without being put in mind of the energy and transport questions that so many people are working to resolve. Can we really build a successful energy policy on a huge installation of renewables just like this huge installation of bicycles? Or is the mountain to high to climb and talk about moving to a solely renewable energy policy simply the pipe dream of impractical idealists?

Ai Weiwei has gained global fame for his dissident attitude to Chinese authorities. This has earned him persecution by the authorities, destruction of his studios, charges of owing multimillion dollars to the Chinese tax authorities and recurrent arrests and periods of disappearance. The bicycle installation led me to look for any of the artist’s works that addressed environmental issues directly.

An installation entitled “Trees” & “Rocks” (image below) has been interpreted by some to be an allusion to the environmental damage being caused by China’s rapid rate of development. Others, have interpreted the work as the simple recreation of a meditative space.

In his winning entry for this year’s Turner Prize, Martin Boyce brings an autumnal park indoors and re-interprets it in classical modernist/constructivist terms.

A large room, re-designed in every detail. White columns from which flows a designed ceiling of white shapes – “trees” with “leaves” and branches. The centrepiece is a table covered in graffiti and with a hanging mobile gently swaying.  All in stark geometric shapes yet oozing a certain romanticism. On the floor lie brown leaves made out of cut paper. The ‘park’ is complete with garbage cans re-designed into unusual modernist shapes.

This installation has its supporters and its critics. It is a space that is clearly inspired by “Nature” yet re-interpreted in classical modernist language. Boyce’s skill is in taking the brutish language of constructivist art and creating something that, through angular shapes created in synthetic, man-made materials, still manages to reproduce the softness and emotional engagement that is felt when we are in contact with ‘real nature’ (whatever that might be).

Boyce is quick to point out that his work is not political but largely driven by his emotion (see video below) but I wonder where this sort of work can take us in terms of thinking about the relationship between nature and the modern world. If Boyce can reproduce the gentleness and serenity of nature in an indoor installation made out of angular, modern materials, is the conflict between nature and the modern world real or is it something that we have created in our minds? Do we have to keep presenting nature and our modern development as enemies or can work like that of Martin Boyce inspire us to break out of our entrenched positions and see more complementarity? Are we even able to consider thinking differently?

“Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking – as art – provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded in my work in the most appropriate way for each different idea: a photograph, a map, or a text work. All these forms feed the imagination.”

Long’s work has a strong evocative power. In particular, his ‘textworks’ are often short statements that capture a particular essence of a walk. In their short but powerful form their effect resembles that of haiku verses.

Long engages with the land in a highly personal way. His work is not the type of landscape or nature art that produces generic images that fetishize and romanticize nature while lacking any personal connection. Rather, in Long’s work one can feel the intimate connection that, through his long, solitary walks, the artist has achieved with the landscape. This sort of art creates a strong impact and is more likely to stimulate us to seek our own personal connections and meanings in nature and landscape than are simple, generic images that purport to show “the beauty of nature”.

Even when exhibited in the gallery, Long’s works contain a strong, organic feel that reflect the artist’s connection with the landscapes that provide the raw materials for his gallery works.

I spent my days enjoying some wonderful art, being astonished by art that was bland or crass – or both – and looking for art that engaged in the issues related to our environment. There was none that I could find. In this major art event where contemporary artists engage with the issues of the day, art engaged with environmental issues simply did not exist. Why?

Maybe we should just face the facts – we are being supremely unsuccessful in getting people engaged in environmental issues beyond the level where they politely acknowledge that there seems to be an issue and then swiftly move on to what, for them, are more pressing issues. All research confirms that environmental issues are low down on the list of people’s concerns and shrinking in relevance.

The most impressive installation in the Biennale was, by far, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Crystal of Resistance for the Swiss pavilion. The artist has created a web site about the installation.  If you are so inclined (and, in my desperation, I was), you can interpret part of Hirschhorn’s installation as containing an environmental message.

For the pavilion, the artist created a massive and almost overwhelming installation. Masses of discarded objects – TV sets, mobile telephones, plastic chairs, and so forth were covered in masking tape and assembled, seemingly haphazardly, throughout the pavilion. Other spaces contained other paraphernalia of modern life – magazines, car tyres, mannequins, discarded drinks cans and so forth.  There were even  taxidermied animals seemingly surrounded by the detritus of modern living.

Finally, there were arrays of photographs of what we may call ‘modern life’. Among these some of the most shocking images of war, oppression and human devastation.

The installation was tightly packed and visually overwhelming. One had to carefully walk through for fear of knocking something over. The experience felt similar to being in an overstocked and totally disorganized junk shop with no clues or guidance as to how one should proceed, what to look at in what order and what to make of it all.

This is the cleverness of the installation. Hirschhorn’s idea is that we are, today, surrounded by visual, auditory and material stimuli that are almost overwhelming. What do we actually ‘see’ when we go about our daily business? Maybe all we see is that which confirms our own world view. We ignore or act as mere spectators for most of what goes on around us – including the pictures of horror that the artist strung up in his installation and which most people looked at, no doubt found disturbing to various degrees but then just moved on to the next visual stimulus and got on with their lives.

For me, desperate to find some semblance of environmental engagement in the whole of the Biennale experience, Hirshhorn’s installation made powerful statements about our consumption, our unsustainable way of life, even the threat to other forms of life. But I saw all that because I wanted to. I was looking for it and therefore I saw it. The artist did not show it to me.

Of the millions who visited the installation, how many saw and took away an environmental message? How many even noticed or lingered next to the taxidermied marmot or eagle? If the research about environmental concerns is right, then it will be very, very few. There are many things that one can see and read into Hirschhorn’s installation and the reality is that very few people are attuned to seeing an environmental message. And even for those who did, they no doubt reflected briefly and then moved on to the nearest, chic Venetian restaurant where they ordered the deliciously grilled fish of the day – most likely a highly endangered species.

“These industrial environments are so desensitizing in that you, even if you are an animal lover, become complaisantly accepting of the fact that the live beings are only raw materials for mass commodity production. This needs some serious questioning.”

These are some of the thoughts of New York Based artist Miru Kim in relation to her latest series “The Pig That Therefore I Am”. Bringing us face to face with the harsh, inhumane industrial environment of modern, large scale pig farming, Kim explores the experience of coming close to these pigs who are treated as “product”.

Commenting on the physiological closeness between pigs and humans that makes them, for instance, candidates for use in xenotransplantation, Kim explores her ability to get close to these pigs through skin to skin contact. Much like lovers feel an intimate sense of connectedness when lying skin to skin, so Kim tries to explore this experience with pigs – lifting them out of their commodity status in the farm to a position of intimacy. “When two bodies come in contact–each of them touching and being touched at the same time–the souls meet and interweave on the skin, and the subject and the object become one.”

Maybe the pig farm is a mere illustration of our modern relationship with ‘nature’ or all of that which is not human.  The transformation of ‘nature’ to commodity is not limited to farm animals but extends to almost every aspect of the natural world – from national parks and wilderness areas that are products for tourist consumption or for the accumulation of scientific knowledge, to the very commoditization of the word ‘natural’ that comes splattered on every product packaged in a green plastic bottle.

Our relationship with and dependence on nature is there for all to see. But maybe in an industrialized, technological world with an ever growing human population, it is inevitable that nature becomes industrialized. Kim’s work reminds us that sometimes it may be worth spending time exploring any residual deeper connection we might have with the non-human.

I recently visited an exhibition of the work of Sanna Kannisto and bought the recently published book about her work. The work of this young Finnish artist is fascinating. It questions how, in order to understand and describe, science has to simplify and can never hope to capture the true complexity of life.

The body of work that Sanna has accumulated reproduces the methods of field scientists. She takes items – birds, plants, other animals – out of where they normally live and uses a makeshift field studio to photograph them. Her photographs are designed to emphasize the fact that these creatures have been isolated, their existence simplified, so that we can observe and study them – and attempt to understand something about them.

In Sanna’s images, the artificiality of the setting in which these animals and plants are “studied” is striking.  It serves to highlight the artificiality that we construct when studying nature. Even as science pretends that it is transmitting some form of reality, these images highlight that science, like all else we do, is a human-constructed, cultural framework that simply represents one way of seeing the world.

Simple additions like a ruler or some other human method of observation and measurement serve to highlight the objectification of these creatures as objects of scientific study.

The images avoid, in many cases, any attempt to be aesthetically pleasing – they are supposed to be “scientific” examinations not romantic imagery. Many of the images are then simply labeled with the scientific names of the animal or plant that is photographed – a statement that seems to stamp the supposed scientific authority of “truth” and “knowledge” on to the image. It is as though, in clearly labeling a natural object with a scientific name, someone is saying, with the force of an authority that cannot be challenged, “this is what this is – we understand it and know everything about it”.

Images of her field studio further highlight the artifice of the method of “study”.

Contrasting these images of simplified (and maybe simplistic) artifice, are some images (below) that attempt to show the impenetrable complexity of the tropical rain forest. The messy, confusing, incomprehensible nature of the “immense disorder” of whole forest is juxtaposed with the clinical, artificial simplification of the individual studied objects.

Steve Baker in his essay introducing the monograph of Kannisto’s work summarizes the project as being intended  “..to represent – and, simultaneously, to acknowledge the impossibility of representing in any conventional manner – the baffling complexity of the tropical rainforest”.

It is clear from this work, that it is not only science which has to simplify in an attempt to comprehend. We end up much more drawn to clean simplicity of the images of the isolated bird or plant than the chaotic image of the unadulterated forest. Imagery – and all the arts – also simplify in an attempt to allow us to comprehend. The complexity of nature that is all around us is impossible for us humans to understand. We need to chop it up, simplify it and create limited, artificial models and languages of description in an attempt to gain some sort of comprehension. We create limited, though useful, ways of seeing.  The danger comes when the scientist, the artist, the economist, the anthropologist, the historian or anyone else starts to believe that his particular way of seeing represents the unassailable “truth”. Sanna Kannisto’s work gives the lie to any such self-delusion.

David Buckland: The Great White Sale. These images are made in a short window of time when the power of the video projector matches the light of dawn, when there is both message and ice. This fleeting moment of human excess is so short, two hundred years, but for the glacier it is barely a single breath taken.

Cape Farewell has already organized a number of art exhibitions as a result of the works created during the expeditions. The latest traveling exhibit – u-n-f-o-l-d opens in Chicago on March 16th. According to David Buckland, “We intend to communicate through art works our understanding of the changing climate on a human scale, so that our individual lives can have meaning in what is a global problem.”

This blog has reviewed the work of a number of artists that have collaborated with Cape Farewell. These include Lemn Sissay, Iain McEwan, and Lucy + Jorge Orta. Buckland also curated the highly successful EARTH exhibit at the Royal Academy in 2009.

Adriane Colburn: Forest for the Trees is a meditation on the complex relationship between nature and industry; sustained land vs. commodified land; matter on the surface of the earth vs. the matter below ground; the morphing of the forest into an industrial landscape; and the fine lines between use and exploitation.

Cape Farewell is probably the most important undertaking to date that, in an organized and concerted way, engages the arts in issues of climate change and the environment.

WHAT IS MISSING?

What Is Missing? is the title of what has been labeled as Maya Lin’s last memorial. The aim is to draw attention to the environmental issues that are facing us all today – from global warming to the sixth mass extinction of species that is currently ongoing.

The Listening Cone. California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

In trying to bring attention to environmental issues, Lin is also re-defining the meaning of ‘Monument’.  Rather than a single structure in a single place, Lin is re-defining a monument to be a series of permanent or ephemeral structures or installations spanning the globe and linked by a common mission and a common message.

The Listening Cone (above) was one of the first installations.  A giant cone allows visitors to look into the wide end and see a series of looped videos accompanied by sounds of the marine environment – the natural sounds of the oceans.  It allows me “to create a scene that makes people realize how loud the ocean is for any sonar-dependent marine animal,” says Lin.

The Empty Room is a traveling installation that allows visitors to catch and hold projected images in their hands, each image saying something about endangered species and environmental degradation. 

Lin is planning many projects using many different media in different locations – and even virtual installations.  Future projects include ‘a sound-only sculpture’, video billboards, a peeking wall that allows us to peek through holes at video installations and even virtual media that can be downloaded onto mobile devices. To get an overview of this ambitious project visit the project’s web site.

Maya Lin has embarked on a large and ambitious vision intended to bring environmental issues to as many people as possible using modern media and formats that capture our imagination while constituting a call to action.  What Is Missing? is a work of contemporary art that, in true post-modern tradition, challenges established norms while working to change our outlook.

Let us hope that it is only some of her installations that prove ephemeral  rather than the species and ecosystems that she is trying to help protect.

What’s with the picture of a man with a forest for a head?

This is the work of Kyle Zeto, a young artist just completing his art school studies.  The aim of his work is to cast “Nature” in a different light, to confuse us as to how we should and can think about “Nature”.

He rightly points out that human views of Nature have changed through the ages.  In times past, Nature was a source of awe, threat and fear.  Roman soldiers were reputedly terrified when marching through the Black Forest in Germany and, in different circumstances a forest can, today, give us either an uplifting or a terrifying experience.

Kyle Zeto is still in the early stages of developing his work but his ideas are compelling.  He points out that our interaction with Nature and the place that Nature plays in human culture is ambiguous and variable over time, from culture to culture and from person to person.

His use of masked figures, such as the mask in the shape of a bee-hive shown below, enhances this ambiguity and jolts us out of what may be our complacent view that the only way to view Nature is as a thing of beauty that is to be preserved and conserved in its current state.

Images in different settings and with different masked figures create a sense of threat; a sense of the isolation of Man from the natural world.

Kyle Zeto’s work is interesting and useful because it breaks out of what has become the standard ideology that drives art that promotes an environmental agenda. His work questions what may have become glib and embedded assumptions about what Nature is and how we relate to it.  Assumptions that may be simplistic and blinkered except in the sheltered world of environmentalists speaking one to the other.

All images in this post are Copyright of Kyle Zeto.  All Rights Reserved.

Barbara Kruger asserts that her art may not be social commentary but simply ‘observation’.  Intentional or not, it comes across as commentary to most people – and pretty pointed commentary at that.

The artist has, over the years, addressed many issues including women’s reproductive rights, how development squeezes out lower income people, etc., etc.  Our culture of consumerism and excess consumption has, however, occupied a central role in her work. The “I shop therefore I am’ image (above) is from the 1980s, but the theme is continued and expanded in her exhibit entitled “Plenty”, currently showing in East Hampton, NY.

“You want it/You need it/You buy it/You forget it.” are the words plastered on the ceiling in large, squeezed letters.  On the walls “Money makes money and a rich man’s jokes are always funny.”

As this review in the New York Times points out, it is difficult to see this exhibit as anything other than cutting criticism of the very audience likely to be visiting this exhibit in The Hamptons.

But perhaps the best commentary on our unsustainable consumer lifestyle emerged by accident; an artwork that was not an artwork at all but can hold its own with the best of Barbara Kruger’s work.  Her exhibit “Plenty” came to an end (as exhibits do) after running in LA.  I came across the announcement below on an LA culture web site.  Maybe our age of plenty has indeed come to an end and we haven’t yet noticed.