Lucy Lippard on Eco Art and Climate Change

December 6, 2007

Lucy Lippard is curator of Weather Report: Art and Climate Change, her first major exhibition in 20 years. The internationally renowned cultural and art critic, feminist and political activist has written 20 books and curated more than 50 exhibits. For well over a decade she has lived off the grid in rural New Mexico, having left her hometown, New York. Weather Report (September 14 to December 21) is a collaboration between The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and Boulder-based EcoArts. Boulder is ideal for an exhibition on climate change. It is arid, with grasslands and mountains, views of melting glaciers and the effects of drought, so the warming of the earth is very visible. And it is home to a great deal of scientific work on climate change. Marda Kirn, director of EcoArts, approached Lippard with an idea for a modest-sized local show. It mushroomed into 51 national and international projects, 10 of them collaborations, with some 60 artists. “Public works are at the core of this exhibition,” Lippard stressed in the catalog. She has always been opposed to, in her words, “cultural confinement” of works “exhibited in designated spaces”—the neutral white cubes of museums and galleries. Weather Report is displayed in 10 outdoor and five indoor locations. Among the site-specific works are Mary Miss’s "Connecting the Dots: Mapping the High Water, Hazards and History of Boulder Creek," and Eve Andrée Laramée’s “Pretty Vacant,” the title borrowed from a Sex Pistols 1977 single. Miss collaborated with a geologist and a hydrologist to place 300 blue disks marking catastrophic flood levels on trees, buildings, bridges, and pavements in downtown Boulder. “Pretty Vacant,” both site-specific and ephemeral, appeared as a color insert in The Daily Camera, a local newspaper with 100,000 readers. PRETTY is at the top of the nearly 11” x 12” image backed by blue sky and distant mountains, with VACANT at the very bottom over parched and bleached earth that crawls up nearly 2/3 of the way to meet the horizon line, glowing with heat. Weather Report also includes prints, performance, mixed media, furniture, computer driven or mediated work. In my exchange with Lippard, she generously dug into the topics I raised. Eve Andrée Laramée’s “Pretty Vacant”

When Marda asked me to do this exhibition, I fudged because I was trying to finish a (still) endless book and I wasn’t sure I wanted to curate again. But environmental or eco art is one of the few fields that still interest me, this was (supposedly!) a nice small local project, and Marda is infinitely persuasive. So off we went. I didn’t find that much locally, but I’m a pack rat and have a huge file on environmental artists; I thought of a few I knew who had worked on climate change and contacted them for other names. One thing led to another, organically. People heard about it and contacted me. There were a lot more people working on climate change than I first thought. Weather Report is so large because I just couldn’t stop, and I wanted a lot of strategic variety. (I wish I’d had a comic strip, for instance.) Finally the folks at EcoArts and BMoCA made me screech to a halt when we realized how many artists there actually were. It’s a small museum, and we didn’t have a big budget.

Artists Working with Scientists

Marda Kirn’s original idea would be that all the artists would work with scientists. But some of the artists had done their own homework or worked with scientists long before they were involved with this show. And it wasn’t easy to actually collaborate long distance. But almost everyone had some scientific input—from a few conversations to real collaboration—though often in their own areas rather than in Boulder. Earlier experiments with art and technology, such as EAT [Experiments in Art and Technology, begun in 1966, led by Bell Lab scientist Billy Kluver and artist Robert Rauschenberg] were about artists playing with new materials. Content wasn’t the point. Given the extreme importance of climate change, this work is about understanding what we’re up against. Artists, like all the rest of us, have to understand some science to be able to think for themselves on the subject. 29 women, 12 men, 10 collaborations The predominance of women in Weather Report will probably be chalked up to my history of feminist activism, but I didn’t count as I was selecting the artists. There were simply a lot more women working on these issues. The results only reinforced my longstanding view that women are more likely to make more effective public art, to communicate and collaborate with their audiences, and to advocate for what we call “nature” through participatory eco-art. I’ve been saying that for decades. Women are socially conditioned to be better listeners, and we might as well run with it instead of theorizing ourselves into denying it. The cover of the Heresies issue [the feminist art journal] on ecology was Mount St. Helens erupting. It’s still a good metaphor. Most of the women in the show are feminists. I’m a feminist, and it affects everything I do. A feminist consciousness changes your life and you stay changed. That said, I’m not sure I care whether it’s for reasons of nature or nurture that so many eco-art artists are female. Waste or damage control is one of the great issues of the early 21st century. That can be read metaphorically as well as ironically. Years ago I wrote about what I called “the Garbage Girls” like Mierle Laderman Ukeles [a contributor to Weather Report], Christy Rupp, and others. It’s no accident, as Ukeles pointed out in the ‘70s, that it’s primarily women artists who have taken on the tasks of actually handling the waste, maintenance, and cleaning up after civilization. “What the world needs is a good housekeeper,” says Aviva Rahmani [whose work is in Weather Report]. In 30 years since some of us were pretty obsessed by what was then the visible differences between men’s and women’s work, a certain integration has taken place, though hopefully not a co-optation. I’m still looking for more art that collaborates with nature on her own ground. There’s no reason why women should be any better at this than men, but I suspect it will often be women who step up to bat. And I like to think feminism is partly to blame.

Works able to cope with a vast amount of information

I find the layeredness of conceptual art appealing. Sometimes the initial impression or image may be much more downplayed than in painting and sculpture, but when the ideas surface there’s a lot there. Conceptual art isn’t a medium, it’s an armature, so ideas can inhabit all kinds of material. I don’t want to denigrate painting and sculpture because sometimes they are equally effective. We live in such a visually saturated world that sometimes the differentiation of “fine art” is important. But my own taste has always run to a blurring of boundaries between art and life. For instance, Patricia Johanson’s [a contributor to the show] visionary drawings from the 1960s are really important but they are also amplified by the vast public projects she has done since. As I said in the catalogue, we no longer see photography as “truth,” but it still conveys first-hand experience like no other medium. I don’t see the use of images as mere fetishization, as some do. Climate change could give landscape photography a whole new life. One way it’s proved effective is in bringing distant places closer to oblivious audiences. Photographs by Subhankar Banerjee [also a contributor] of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve were used as testimony during Congressional debates about drilling in the refuge. Around the same time they were to be shown at the Smithsonian. Abruptly, the show was kicked downstairs and its explanatory captions were censored. Decontextualized, even the most beautiful pictures lose their teeth. Not the traveling kind Many of the public pieces are specific to Boulder or to the west. Janet Koenig/Greg Sholette’s “sculptures” of and about discarded computers have a global significance but are also place-specific to a university town. Future Farmers did a performance and then conducted discussions on sustainability with local residents. The Colorado and New Mexico artists were not that much more “local” than some of the outsiders, because everybody made it their business to understand where they were. We thought about traveling Weather Report but the logistics would be staggering. The indoor works would have been the same, but we would have encouraged each venue to commission a new group of public works for its area, then document them for the next venue. So the show would keep changing (and getting bigger!). Ultimately, it’s probably better to just have new shows curated in new places so everybody has the chance to educate themselves on the issue and different artists will be drawn into the web. [See Lippard’s 1998 book, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society.] The urgency of climate change When push comes to shove, we have to learn enough to decide who we’re going to listen to, who to believe. An uninformed public will make the wrong decisions or will have no voice in the decisions. That’s where art can help. Some of it will be useless and some will be co-opted [by the art business], but there will always be the visionaries who manage to communicate. I can only hope for the best.

Tags: Media