TCS 152: Environmental Art

TCS 152:New Trends in Art and Technology

Book LinK: Syllabus     Links     Notes     Course Forum: Arthropods and Mammals

Oct. 17:Environmental Art and Eco-Action
Eco Art and approaches to ecologies

Roots of ecology as a word: Ernst Haeckl: Literally it means the logos, refleCtion of, or study of the OIKOS, or HOUSEHOLD. Planet is a household or an ecology: the issue is a domestic one.

1960s, gallery artists (particularly some who worked in NYC) began to examine the boundaries of the gallery itself and investigate ways to talk about spaces and processes that defy traditional forms of representation, such as ecological and geological processes

1960s there were also new writers who were looking critically at environmental consequences of industrialization:


Zeke is a little bawling baby

RESOURCES

Ecological Footprint Quiz
Online calculators for measuring the impact of your resource use on the world's available resources.

Reading Agarwal & the notion of Personal Ecology:
extending the problem of how humans can live together and negotiate survival demands while not destroying substrates we depend on for life: water, social relations/fabric, food production, other species. His quest for personal ecology asks questions of how to integrate problems with social ones. Human behavior is something engineers dont classically take into account.

Precursors (60s) to Ecological and Environmental Art.              
* Hans Haacke: Condensation Cube * Hans Haacke: "Rhine-Water Purification Plant" (filtering polluted Rhine water into a tank of goldfish and back into the ground)* Dennis Oppenheim: Cobalt Vectors
* Robert Smithson: Wandering Canal (EArthworks) Joseph Beuys: 7000 Oaks * Joseph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me: shamanic investigations of materials, animals, presence and politics
Contemporary Environmental Work. See also Green Museum and Ecovention Book

 
* Mel Chin: Revival Field * using hyperaccumulating plants to extract heavy metals from contaminated soil
     

Hans Haacke: Condensation Cube- taking the cube, the minimalist object par excellence, to demonstrate the working of a system Readymade and Marcel Duchamp (1917) "Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "Readymades aided" and also works of assemblage."( Duchamp in 1961 on the readymade)

This is a mass-produced object he purchased in a store. How does it contest the already accepted idea of what is art?

How does it introduce the machine into an earlier conception of how art is used to represent the world?

 

 

Phil Ross: mycology and bio-engineering as sculpture

    "Many of the artworks that I make are created through the design and construction of controlled environmental spaces. In these environments I nurture and transform a variety of living species into sculptural artifacts, much as one might train the growth of a Bonsai tree. My desire is that a person encountering this living artwork will consider biological phenomena and entities within a frame of social and historic contexts."

    How does he make this transition seem natural?

    How does he reveal or conceal a connection between discovery (pure science and wonder) and commerce through applications of technology?

Institutional Critique- Hans Haacke : MetroMobiltan, Shapolsky Real Estate et al
Hans Haacke has worked for thirty-five years on a body of work that examines the relationship between power, art, and money, and explores the responsibilities of individuals in a democratic society.

what exactly is the machine?

what technologies are involved in the kind of coverup he exposes by showing signs of relationships between the museum exhibition and its funding sources?

• communication techs

• weapons (over time...)

• petroleum (over time..)

• transportation technologies (over space and time..)