Collaborative Practices in Environmental Art.pdf

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Collaborative Practices inEnvironmental Art

by Grant Kester

Collaborative Practices in Environmental Art — www.green... http://www.readability.com/articles/uq9sftds

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Part of the Toolbox of Working Methods.

What is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is;if someone asks me, I no longer know.-- St. Augustine

As Augustine suggests in his Confessions, the moment that passesbetween posing a question and receiving a reply is marked by both riskand possibility: the risk of doubt and uncertainty, and the possibility ofan opening out to the other. Collaborative and participatory artpractices move along this same trajectory, from self-assurance to thevulnerability of intersubjective exchange. The certitude of expressivemodels of art making, the material mastery and tour de force gesturesof the exemplary object, are replaced by processes that are contingent,ephemeral, and improvisational. Collaborative practices operate onmultiple registers.

At the most basic level are what might be termed technicalcollaborations, either between two artists (e.g., Gilbert and George orLinda Montano and Teching Hsieh) or between an artist and aprintmaker or foundry. These interactions begin to erode the romanticimage of the artist as solitary genius, positing instead a guild-likecommunity of co-creators.


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Ala Plastica in collaboration with the Austrian group "cartografia", propose apublic exercise with the communities of Rio Santiago basin, Argentina.

We also find collaborations that break the 'fourth wall' of artisticcreativity, transforming spectators into participants. These includespaces organized by the artist (Rirkrit Tiravanija's gallery-basedlounges) as well as more direct forms of participation in planning,implementation and data collection (Basia Irland's A Gathering ofWaters, for example, or Mark Dion's Urban Ecology Action Group).

A third area of collaborative practice involves an even more extremedisavowal of the "ego imperialism" of artistic identity, through theartist's long-term involvement in a given site or community. Artist andorganizer Ian Hunter describes these as "immersive" practices, leadingat their extreme edge to the "disappearance" of the artist asconventionally understood (cf. John Latham's notion of the artist as an"Incidental Person"). Here the sublation of art and life is sought notthrough the introduction of quotidian material into the sanctified fieldof the art object, but through the dismantling of the artistic personalityitself in a splay of mediatory practices and exchanges. Deprived of thevenerating mantle of the gallery and the museum, the artist is renderedless majestic, but also more accessible, better able to reveal creativeinsight as a shared human capacity rather than a divine gift.

Contemporary collaborative environmental art draws on a traditionthat extends back to the 1960s: the "social sculpture" of Joseph Beuys,Alan Kaprow's Happenings, Stephen Willat's "feedback" systems and


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John Latham's concept of the artists' "placement". While some artists ofthis generation viewed the landscape simply as a large canvas, ofinterest primarily for the formal possibilities of scale and material itopened up, others began to approach nature as a complex gestalt ofbiological, political, economic and cultural forces. Hans Haacke's RhineWater Purification Plant (1972) created a literal linkage between thespace of the museum and the surrounding environment, using a systemof pools and filtration units in the gallery to reveal and then cleanse thepollutants in the nearby Rhine river. The innovative ecologicalproposals of Helen and Newton Harrison, generated through freeflowing conversations among scientists, activists and policy makers, areone of the most important touchstones for contemporaryenvironmental art practice. Over the past four decades their projectshave embodied a relationship to nature not as something to bemastered, transformed, or turned to our advantage, but as aninterlocutor and agent speaking to us in a language we are not alwaysprepared to understand. There is, one might argue, an underlyingsynchronicity between their collaborative approach (in which the workof art is less an a priori construct than an open-ended process) and theethical relationship to the land implicit in their work.


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Buster Simpson, Public Space Artist in collaboration with Marcie Krieble, ForestGrove High (11th grade), Nick O'Connor, Science Park (11th), KateylnToth-Fejel, Wilson High (12th), Lynn Yarne (12th), "Global Warming Shirts",2002

Younger practitioners, working both nationally and internationally,have built on this legacy. Artists and collectives such as Ala Plastica,Littoral Arts, Dan Peterman, Platform, Temporary Services, BusterSimpson, and Superflex, among many others, have developed projectsranging from portable biogas generators designed for rural Africanvillages, to proposals to uncover long-hidden rivers in the heart ofLondon, to recycling centers on Chicago's South Side.

In the face of a recrudescent Social Darwinism, exemplified by thewinner-takes-all individualism of Survivor and The Apprentice,progressive models of collective action are thin on the ground. In placeof the grand recits of past political movements, which figured thecollective as a universalizing abstraction, contemporary groups presentpragmatic, localized strategies that provide alternative models ofcollective and collaborative agency based on affinity, friendship andshared commitment. Critical and theoretical engagement with thiswork has been constrained by a number of factors.

First, many historians and critics remain wedded to definitions ofartistic practice that are considerably less radical than those embodiedby the artists themselves. This is evident in the tendency of mainstreamscholarship to focus primarily on collaborations among and between"artists" rather than those collaborative projects that challenge thefixity of artistic identity per se. It is also not uncommon for critics todismiss overtly activist art as politically naive or abject because it isseen as adopting an insufficiently reflexive relationship to political


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categories and identities. This dismissal operates through a kind ofhermeneutic displacement in which a criticism of the work's perceivedpolitical failure is offered as a justification for challenging its status asart.


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Basia Irland, Gathering of Waters, portable river repository sculpture beingcaried along the Rio Grande, 1999. This project involved hundreds of artists,government agencies, private water users, farmers, ranchers, Native Americanleaders, and ordinary people.

A second factor that has limited theoretical insight is the now canonicalstatus accorded to a particular set of conceptual oppositions derivedfrom continental philosophy (and associated with the work of Derrida,Deleuze and other thinkers operating within the poststructuralisttradition). Art theory informed by this tradition carries a strong biasagainst collective forms of experience and action, which are seen asintrinsically totalitarian. Thus, while the spread of poststructuralismhas precipitated a flowering of thought around the constitution of theindividual subject, and modes of transgression appropriate to thissubject (from Foucault's "biopower" to the Deleuzean "body withoutorgans"), it has done little to advance our understanding of the positiveor emancipatory potential of collective action.

A second, and related, bias stems from the privileging of language and


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text in the poststructuralist tradition at the expense of a deeperunderstanding of speech and action. From Saussure's bracketing ofparole through Derrida's attack on "phonocentrism," actual humandialogue has been deemed politically suspect and unworthy ofsubstantive theoretical engagement. As a result we have few usefultheoretical accounts of the cognitive and haptic density of human socialinteraction, and the specific forms of knowledge catalyzed by it. Forcritics writing about art projects predicated on collective orcollaborative experience and various forms of physical and verbalexchange, this absence is particularly challenging. A functional theoryof collaborative art must move in two directions. First, it needs toprovide a substantive account of the specific effects of collective labor,and the relationship between shared labor and cognitive orepistemological insight. Second, it needs to account for the complexsymbolic and practical status of alternative models of collective action,as staged in contemporary art practice. Why have they become socentral, especially to a younger generation of artists? What is thepolitical "event horizon" for collective practices in the absence of aviable alternative to the spread of capitalism as a form of social as wellas economic organization?

The most promising direction for new critical research intocollaborative art will come from scholars less invested in the routinizedapplication of unexamined theoretical tropes, and willing to begin theirinvestigations from an open and searching investigation of the specificconditions of a practice that operates across the boundaries ofphenomenology and social theory, cognitive and somatic knowledge,and aesthetics and ethics.

Grant Kester © University of California, San Diego

Original URL:http://www.greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=208


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Collaborative Practices in Environmental Art.pdf