David Brooks at MOMA PS1. Photo: New York Times

David Brooks has, it seems, been intrigued by deforestation for some time. The work below was presented in an exhibit entitled “New Perspectives in Contemporary Art” organized jointly by Affirmation Arts and Columbia University. The piece is entitled “Breathtaking Vistas of Deforestation” and the medium described as “60 laser copies laminated and sanded’ (yes, truly).

With the increasing importance being given to deforestation as a contributor to climate change, such work may acquire increased relevance.

“Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline”

He was the first to develop the idea of ‘social sculpture’ – an integration of sculptural work into everyday social activity and – at its extreme – the idea that society as a whole was to be regarded as one giant work of art.

In environmental terms, his best known work is ’7,000 oaks’. Starting with the planting of a single oak tree in Kassel, Germany in 1982, he initiated a project that culminated in the planting of 7,000 oak trees in that city over the following 5 years. This was a substantial artistic and ecological intervention with the goal of changing the living space of the city.

Joseph Beuys's first tree planted in front of the Museum Fridericianum

The project exemplified Beuys’s idea that social sculpture was a participatory process that could, itself, transform our social environment.  The idea of artwork that intervenes and itself becomes part of our landscape or social fabric has since been taken up by a many of today’s conceptual artists.

Beuys’s work was not universally admired.  His passion for social change and his belief in the power of art as the agent of change was described by some as ‘simple-minded utopian drivel‘.

Love him or hate him (and there are plenty of either), Beuys’s lasting influence is undeniable.  in 1988, the Dia Foundation installed 5 oaks in New York City claiming them as a ‘continuation’ of Beuys’s project. British artists Ackroyd and Harvey collected acorns from Beuys’s oaks, re-planted them and exhibited the saplings as part of “Earth: Art of a Changing World” a recent exhibition at the Royal Acedemy, London.  What these works lacks in originality they maybe make up for as a tribute to the impact of Joseph Beuys and his lasting influence on social and environmental art.

A 'continuation' of Joseph Beuys's project in NYC - Dia Foundation.

She describes these as ‘living sculptures…plant based systems that clean polluted water, integrating ecological revitalization with the conceptual, metaphorical and aesthetic capacities of sculpture.”

One such project is called “The Gift of Water”.  The town of Grossenhain, near Dresden in Germany, built a new public swimming complex in which the water used is filtered entirely by wetland plants without the use of chlorine or any other chemical.  Brookner’s sculpture features various mosses on a pair of large cupped hands.  The mosses purify the water of the fountain thereby reproducing the whole technical concept of the swimming complex installation while the sculpture itself represents the precious nature of the water that we use.

The Gift of Water

Some of her sculptures are more directly functional.

The Roosevelt Community Center in San Jose is a LEED gold certified building and re-cycles storm water runoff from the roof.  Two of Brookner’s installations do this filtering. In one of them (below) water is channeled into a basin-like sculpture that aerates the water as it drops into the basin below where it is filtered and re-cycled.

Her second installation in the same site brings to the surface a process that usually happens underground.  An amber glass and stainless steel rock filter system mimics the water filtration that happens naturally in the nearby Coyote Creek watershed.  A map of the creek is etched on to the sculpture.

Jackie Brookner’s work brings to life natural processes that are important to the sustainability of our environment.  Her sculptures no doubt manage to engage viewers in a way that no amount of detailed technical explanation of these processes ever could.

The installation brings to London 10 rain forest tree stumps from a commercially logged, regulated rain forest in Ghana and installs them in Trafalgar Square to make what is doubtless one of the most striking visual statements ever about deforestation.

"Ghost Forest" - computer generated image of installation in Trafalgar Square

All the tree stumps in this installation came from trees that fell naturally due to adverse weather conditions. Seven different tree types are represented, all coming from the Suhuma forest reserve in Western Ghana.

Denya tree being washed prior to shipping

The scale of this installation and the size of the trees will no doubt be impressive.  Some of these trees will have stood as high as Nelson’s column. Lasers will be installed to show how high these trees once stood in their natural spaces.

Tree stumps installed in Trafalgar Square

This video tells the story behind the installation.

In December, the installation will move to Thorvaldsens Plads, Copenhagen, to coincide with the COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Copenhagen.

“Forest Tunes: The Library” is an installation consisting of collected items, photographs, video, text and a book.

The centerpiece of The Library is a collection of items held in over 150 boxes.  Stacked in an installation that mimics a library, each box contains an item, usually a botanic specimen of some sort, from the many that the artist has collected over more than a decade.  Box by box, the collection patiently, and somewhat depressingly, builds a story of inexorable destruction of natural landscape.

A Library Of Nature Destroyed

The artist collects the specimens as part of her daily work. Each box contains a relic of nature destroyed and is accompanied by an explanation, a remembrance if you will, of the events, the damage and destruction, that led to the specimen being collected and stored.

The Library - Detail

Leaves from a banana tree (below) commemorate the cutting down of a banana plantation. Cyclamen bulbs are a testament to the thousands of natural cyclamen habitats destroyed through development and road building.  Here are some of the words that accompany these specimens:

“The Jewish National Fund does not transplant the plants, nor does it organize rescue operations to remove thousands of cyclamen, asphodel, narcissus, and iris bulbs that were found on the path of the road.  If we multiply this by the number of new roads paved over the years, the result is clear.”

Banana Plantation Destroyed

Shai Zakai has built a reliquary of nature destroyed; a memento mori to the seemingly inevitable death of all things natural in the destructive wake of human expansion. When installed in an otherwise empty space, the black shelves, black boxes and black floor create a funereal atmosphere that is the polar opposite of the life, fecundity and color of the nature that was.

Last year, she embarked on HighWaterLine – a conceptual art project exploring the impact of climate change on New York City.  She calculated the high water line following a rise in sea level by 10 inches. Using white chalk paint, she walked round the whole city marking this high water line and, by implication, the parts of New York City that would be submerged. Where she was unable to paint a line, she planted lighted beacons.

The aim of the project was, clearly, to raise awareness of one of the impacts of climate change on New York City. During her 5 month walk across the city she engaged with people on the streets, explained what she was doing and what the issues were, handed out leaflets, ran discussion workshops and embarked on other outreach activities to bring attention to the issues.

As a work of art, HighWaterLine could not be further from the elitist and exclusive world of the art gallery or the museum.  Its aim is to intervene in the daily life of ordinary people:

“High Water Line seeks to engage people on the street, in the neighborhoods where they live, work and play. People will encounter the chalk line and the beacons while going about their daily lives. The work is an intervention in routine – the public’s as well as my own. This aspect of the piece ensures catching the public’s attention, and it provides easy and direct access.”

The completed project showed that meaningful parts of New York City would be submerged if we continue on the current climate change trajectory

Eve Mosher has addressed climate change in other projects.  In one installation, a series of colored strings stretched across a space from one map to the next. They represented the mass displacement of people that will result from the effects of climate change.

Inside the Neukom Vivarium

To me, the Neukom Vivarium is a microcosm our society’s everyday behavior.  As we continue to destroy our natural world, we maintain the illusion of nature by appropriating parts of the natural world and converting them into objects – fetish objects for our amusement.  We change them and then “manage” them at great expense, all the while pretending that they represent “Nature”.  And we call these places National Parks, Wildlife Reserves, City Parks, Gardens – whatever.

The Olympic Sculpture Park itself is one such example of our pathetic attempts at creating the illusion of nature.  Here is how The Seattle Times park guide describes it: “The sculpture park has been planted to form a variety of habitats stretching from Western Avenue to the water. You’ll stroll through archetypal Northwest landscapes, including a grove of quaking aspen, a coniferous forest and meadows of native grasses and wildflowers.“  Yeah, right! Sitting within the park, the Neukom Vivarium acts as a mockery of the park itself and its ludicrous pretentions of re-creating – in a sanitized, sterile, “civilized” way – the ‘habitats’ that the city has, by its very existence, destroyed.

See for yourself just how ‘natural’ is the sculpture park.

Aerial view of the Olympic Scultpture Park and its 'habitats'

The Neukom Vivarium also illustrates to me another of our endless fallacies – that we can replace natural services through technology. The complexity and expense of the technology that maintains life in the Vivarium shows how expensive, difficult and unsustainable it is to try to replace with human technology that which nature does as a matter of course. We don’t worry about the lack of drinking water because we think we can make more of it.  We don’t worry about the depleted fish stocks because we think we can replace them with fish farms.

Here is how Mark Dion describes his Vivarium:

“I think that one of the important things about this work is that it’s really not an intensely positive, back-to-nature kind of experience. In some ways, this project is an abomination. We’re taking a tree that is an ecosystem—a dead tree, but a living system—and we are re-contextualizing it and taking it to another site. We’re putting it in a sort of Sleeping Beauty coffin, a greenhouse we’re building around it. And we’re pumping it up with a life support system—an incredibly complex system of air, humidity, water, and soil enhancement—to keep it going. All those things are substituting what nature does—emphasizing how, once that’s gone, it’s incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate that system—to take this tree and to build the next generation of forests on it. So this piece is in some way perverse. It shows that, despite all of our technology and money, when we destroy a natural system it’s virtually impossible to get it back. In a sense we’re building a failure.“

Watch this short video clip featuring Mark Dion.

The shock waves to the global economy provided a narrow window of opportunity during which, stunned, people questioned for a brief moment the wisdom of our culture of unsustainable excess. But no practical and implementable solutions have been forthcoming.

At Art Basel, Miami Beach in December 2008, Chinese artist Zheng Guogu presented an installation called “Lehman Gate” – a commemoration of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the rapid collapse of the world’s financial system that followed.

A series of images installed as rooms through which you could enter and exit were coupled with a ‘Commemorative Plaque’, to create an installation that made visible the consequences of the arrogance and excesses of unbridled capitalism as epitomized by Wall Street’s institutions and their negligent (and often complicit) regulators.

I remember walking through the hugely popular installation and having the same feeling that one gets when confronted by images of any other major human catastrophe.  The images had a powerful effect when viewed in the immediate aftermath of the economic collapse.

I should have realized then that, just as we move past and easily forget other catastrophes, ignoring their lessons and getting back to our usual ways as quickly as possible, so it would be with this economic collapse.

At the time of writing of this post, the S&P 500 has hit its highest point in a year and the start of an economic recovery is visible.  People’s minds have turned back to how quickly they can get back to their pre-collapse patterns of spending and consumption.  A unique window of opportunity for change is closing.

It also seems ironic that it should be a Chinese artist presented by a Chinese group (Vitamin Creative Space) that should have presented this installation.  Here is an extract from the commemorative plaque:

Slippage Gate  (Who is picking up the tab for the USA )

Lehman Gate (Who is to be rescued with 8500 hundred million US dollars)

“A Violent cure” 
Is the commemorative plaque

In the movement of an accelerated history

Sorry, the medicine’s efficacy is difficult to anticipate

We are no longer brothers

If trust is betrayed