University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Nature is as nature does: recent sustainable artists and the practice of local ecology

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Nature is as nature does: recent sustainable artists and the practice of local ecology

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NATURE IS AS NATURE DOES:
RECENT SUSTAINABLE ARTISTS AND THE PRACTICE OF LOCAL ECOLOGY

by

Katharine Dunham Bachler

____________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2010

Katharine Dunham Bachler
Copyright 2010

ii

EPIGRAPH

“We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We
want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce
directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it
concrete art.”
—Hans Arp

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A special thanks, a squash, and walks in nature for: Christina, Anne, Matthew, Luke,
Ramona, Maryam, 3 years of MPAS wonders, all the magical people in Amsterdam in
the garden, and everything that grows.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph ii
Acknowledgments iii
List of Figures v
Abstract vi
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: From the Picturesque to the Process (of the Earth) 7
Chapter 2: Educating From Within: Ecological Libraries of Bonnie Sherk 16
Chapter 3: Fritz Haeg’s Attack on the Lawn as Nature 25
Chapter 4: Marjetica Potrc and the Power of Roots 35
Chapter 5: Mark Dion and the Museum as Process 47
Conclusion 56
Bibliography 60

v
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, 1836 1

Figure 2: Thoreau’s Cabin, Walden Pond 7
Figure 3: Micheal Heizer, Double Negative, 1969/70 9
Figure 4: Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970 10
Figure 5: Adrian Piper, Food For The Spirit, 1971 12
Figure 6: Bonnie Sherk, The Farm, 1970 17
Figure 7: Bonnie Sherk, A Living Library, 2004 20
Figure 8: Bonnie Sherk, The Farm, 1974 24

Figure 9: Fritz Haeg, Edible Estate, Lakewood, CA, 2006 25
Figure 10: Fritz Haeg, Animal Estates, New York City, 2007 26
Figure 11: Fritz Haeg, Edible Estate, Lakewood, CA, 2006 27
Figure 12: Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates, Chelsea, NYC, 2009 32
Figure 13: Tilling the Soil in the Nieuw West (CFWN), 2009
1
34
Figure 14: Gerda with Lettuce Harvest, 2009 (CFWN) 35
Figure 15: Ayse and Costa in the Kitchen, 2009 (CFWN) 36
Figure 16: In the Kitchen in the Nieuw West, 2009 (CFWN) 38
Figure 17: Marjetica Potrc’s Paintings on the wall of the kitchen (CFWN) 39
Figure 18: Women in the Garden, 2009 (CFWN) 43
Figure 19: Mark Dion, Wildlife Observation Unit, Madison Square Park, 2002 46
Figure 20: Mark Dion, Field Guide to the Wildlife of Madison Square Park, 2002 47

1
The Cook, The Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor

vi
ABSTRACT

Through a theoretical and historical exploration of the contemporary
environmental works of Marjetica Potrc, Fritz Haeg, Bonnie Sherk, and Mark Dion, I will
consider these artists’ role in an ecology movement that positions humans and nature as a
part of the same system in which the only way to change the world is to understand it.
These works inhabit a site-specific environmentalism, a connection to the local, and a
manifestation in situations that do not require the artist’s presence. As prototypes that can
be reproduced anywhere, the works are not about art objects, but about ways of relating
through objects. In engaging with these works, we become participants in creating and
perpetuating a knowledge system about nature and the environment.

vii
PREFACE
Outside of the bustling canal city of Amsterdam, right before the urban blends into
the pastoral, there is a small garden run by a community living in social housing. I spent
the summer working in this garden, a project by the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc, in
an immigrant neighborhood in Amsterdam that is slowly being gentrified. The project
was set up as a model community garden that residents could use indefinitely for a
nominal fee of one euro per square meter. By referring to the piece of land as a garden, its
signification changed. The amount of time spent on the land and the ways the land was
engaged increased. By the end of the summer the residents had claimed the space of the
garden as their own and developed their own way of speaking about it. This experience
led me to reconsider the role of art as a tool of the environmental movement. If people
understand and feel connected to their environment, they will be more likely to protect it.
The outcome of this project was a shift in the way the residents related to their
neighborhood; not only did they participate in a project, they took it over and questioned
the hegemony of land development. Why would anyone build on top of productive land?

1
INTRODUCTION

Figure 1. Thomas Cole, The Oxbow, 1836.
Historically, art has been used to respond to and inform the public about
environmental issues. During industrialization in the mid 1800s with the rise of the
factory city, the landscapes of the Hudson River School (see fig. 1) transported urbanites
to a picturesque elsewhere where humans and nature co-existed peacefully. Paintings are
characterized by stunning uses of light to illuminate mountains side by side with pastoral
farming landscapes. This aesthetic consilience of humans and nature assuaged fears about
the loss of the wilderness. This period has been criticized by scholars for alienating
people from the “real” nature of the time by idealizing the human-nature relationship in
the face of extreme environmental destruction.
2

A number of artists are important figures in the transition from the Romantic Period
of the mid 19
th
century with its picturesque landscapes to the integrative environmental

2
Rochelle L. Johnson, Passions for Nature: Nineteenth Century America’s Aesthetics of
Alienation (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

2
practice I am concerned with. Artists that are interested in exploring the space outside of
the gallery and move towards an increasingly participatory practice include Robert
Smithson, Michael Heizer, Adrian Piper, and Suzanne Lacy.
The Land Artists of the 1960s and 1970s rejected the passive picturesque, the static
landscape painting, and the writings of the transcendental naturalists. This period
engaged with a nascent environmentalism that criticized the human destruction of land.
The Land Artists Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer viewed nature as a process and
literally engaged with the land, blasting a canyon in the desert or building a spiral of rock
in the Great Salt Lake. This period came to define the idea of site-based work extending
past a physical location and into the human mind in a dialog about environmental issues.
Artists of this movement rejected the passive object-based space of the gallery and the
non-confrontational picturesque artists.
In the 1980s, a framework of public art called New Genre Public Art emerged as a
way to describe an increased level of engagement between artist and community.
Members of often-impoverished communities were instrumentalized by Suzanne Lacy to
illustrate social inequalities. Suzanne Lacy is a transitional figure that redefined the idea
of authorship. Here we have a case of artist-curated cultural resistance that does not
ultimately question the engine that powers class and race relationships. New Genre
Public Art pieces are curated by the artist according to a specific narrative, perpetuating a
dichotomy between artist and other. These pieces are important because the community
generates them. However, ultimately, society does not change; empowerment occurs, but
only for the duration of the piece, and life continues after as usual.

3
Today, we are in a period where the processes and knowledge of how to live
sustainable lives are ever more important to humankind, the earth, and our interconnected
survival. Artists are creating prototypes for how to relate differently to the world in
process-based works that require a new level of engagement from the viewer. Art has
pushed far out of the gallery, far from institutional critique, or from referencing an
institution at all, and into the space of creating engines for society to reconsider
environmental relationships.
Four recent artists’ practices—Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates, Mark Dion’s Madison
Square Park Wildlife Observation Unit, Bonnie Sherk’s A Living Library, and Marjetica
Potrc’s The Cook, The Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor—are examples of a new
depth of participation defined by a level of engagement with the earth itself as well as by
providing a space for participant-generated knowledge to emerge. I have worked with
both Haeg and Potrc and experienced this shift away from objects and towards systems.
All of these works are about the treatment of people and nature; the artists are not
changing or scripting the communities they work with, but creating tools with which to
reconsider and reveal what is already there.
Representing an extended art-practice, inclusive of an earnestness and social
awareness, these artists’ works delve into ideas of process, growth and community, and
are able to function outside of the defined art world. I have worked with two of these
artists and witnessed the shifting conceptualization of human participants and the framing
of the natural environment. Because of the participatory and ecological nature of these
projects, a critical art-theoretic discourse does not yet exist to describe them, so I have

4
compiled ideas from other fields. I will consider theoretical frameworks found in analytic
aesthetics, deep ecology
3
, science studies, and transcendental philosophy to further
explore the implications of these projects.
The ideas that begin to frame this new paradigm are not those of modernist,
aesthetic gardens; they are educational tools that tap into ideas about science, sociology,
natural history, and education. The artists I will discuss re-contextualize nature,
community, food production, and history, in ways that pre-existing paradigms did not.
Mark Dion stresses the idea that nature is both an essence and construction, both
the asphalt under our feet and a set of linguistic terms.
4
He makes complex the common
and taken for granted term, nature, then simplifies with a useful, familiar field guide as a
metaphor and a physical object: a lens for reconsidering the city. Marjetica Potrc uses
nature as a metaphor for bottom-up ways of building communities. Bonnie Sherk uses
nature and ecosystems as a way to explore specific environments. Fritz Haeg’s
relationship with nature reveals what humans value in this day and age in relation to food.
They all create art not to act upon the city or change the city, but as processes that
intertwine, affect, and are affected by the city.

3
Term coined by Arne Naess in 1972, "For Arne Næss, ecological science, concerned with facts
and logic alone, cannot answer ethical questions about how we should live. For this we need
ecological wisdom. Deep ecology seeks to develop this by focusing on deep experience, deep
questioning and deep commitment. These constitute an interconnected system. Each gives rise to
and supports the other, whilst the entire system is, what Næss would call, an ecosophy: an
evolving but consistent philosophy of being, thinking and acting in the world, that embodies
ecological wisdom and harmony." Stephan Harding, What is Deep Ecology (Devon, UK:
Schumacher College, 2006).

4
Richard Klein, Mark Dion: Drawings, Journals, Photographs, Souveneirs and Trophies 1990-
2003 (Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Museum, 2003), 38.

5
Bonnie Sherk originally created The Farm, as an actual farm under the freeway in
San Francisco; this later developed into a way of relating to human ecosystems called the
Living Library that can be translated to any environment. Sherk sets up a Living Library
in a natural area in a city, equipping a community to use her educational ecology tools
and lessons to continue educating and relating to the environment.
Marjetica Potrc spends extended periods of time with communities she works
with, forming a new, site-specific language as she builds relationships. Her work focuses
on ideas of self-representation and practical solutions, with the artist playing a catalyzing
but not dominant role in the project. She has explored the urban farm as a mechanism for
growth and production. Most recently she worked with a community of immigrants in a
rapidly developing neighborhood of Amsterdam to set up a community garden and
kitchen, which are now being completely run by the inhabitants of the neighborhood.
Potrc’s work considers the model of the garden as a way to comment more deeply on
societal structures emphasizing the need to engage with the community’s roots.
Fritz Haeg plants Edible Estates, or vegetable gardens, in place of front lawns all
over the world. He researches the climate of each bio-region he works in, as well as the
cultural history. The garden becomes a site-specific metaphor for what is possible if we
change the way we consider private land. His medium is the lawn and its re-
configuration. Having worked with Fritz for a number of years, I came to realize his work
comments on trends in human movement; the lawn reveals what we value as nature. The
ecological function of Haeg’s work is a re-framing of 20th century human values.

6
Mark Dion refers to himself an “artist who works with ideas about nature.”
5
His
practice involves creating visually familiar structures, like ranger stations and field
guides, in areas not traditionally labeled natural or historical, to comment upon cultural
constructions of a binary of nature and the city. He is a deep ecologist, believing that
everything that exists is a part of nature, who asks us to consider our frames and
assumptions about the living world.

5
Klein, 38.

7
CHAPTER 1
FROM THE PICTURESQUE TO THE PROCESS (OF THE EARTH)

Art about the environment is not a new concept. Robert Smithson is famous for
carting truckloads of dirt into galleries and creating earthworks in remote contested
locations. He redefines nature in relation to the non-site through a critique of the human-
centric construction of nature. His moving away from the space of the gallery addresses
disconnect between art and natural processes as well as the failures of representation.
“Art is supposed to be on some eternal plane, free from the experiences of the world… I
am more interested in those experiences.”
6
To Smithson, experience means being a part
of nature as it is destroyed, as well as an awareness of red algae living in the Great Salt
Lake. Destruction and creation are co-existent in his non-sites, where he chooses to create
earthworks.

Figure 2. Thoreau’s Cabin at Walden Pond

6
Bruce Kurtz, “Conversation with Robert Smithson (1972)” in Robert Smithson: The Collected
Writings, ed. Jack D. Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 262.

8
Smithson criticized the philosophies of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau
(see fig. 2) for creating a myth about nature as a spiritual venture. However, Thoreau was
interested in similar environmental issues as the land artists but the mid 19th century was
not the right period for such a physical intervention in the landscape. Thoreau responded
to industrialization by slowing down to assess nature, taking a libertarian stance on
government, and recommending a return to a simpler life.
7
Nature writing of the late
1800s responded to similar issues as the land artists, and even more so the ecological
artists at the core of this paper. Both Thoreau and Smithson create a new language with
which to critique the world. Thoreau is gentler than the land artists of the 1970s,
suggesting a framework for resisting urbanization through relocating to the woods. In
Thoreau’s time there was no environmental movement to be an active part of, so his
attempts to create a better life for himself became a personal environmental movement of
sorts.
The landscape painters of the mid 1800s are transparent with their intentions,
literally painting the harmonious relationship between humans and the landscape to quell
fears about the burgeoning overcrowded city. Contrastingly, Michael Heizer in the 1960s

7
“In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably
mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it,-- dining with the
Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending
sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this,
when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly
related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is
equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland
walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand
and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do
not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be
sane a part of every day.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 131.

9
and 70s, responds to the industrialization of nature, not by assuaging the human socio-
political mind with a creation of a utopian natural ideal. Instead he reproduces a
destructive act through an aesthetic lens, creating such works as Double Negative
1969/70 (see fig. 3), viewable both on-site and through photographs at museums.

Figure 3. Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969/70.
Smithson pushes towards relationships that exist outside of an object between
humans and constructed environments. His critique of the urban condition and natural
resource destruction brings an aesthetic awareness to these non-sites. “I was really
looking for a dematerialization rather than built up scenic beauty.”
8
The outdoor sites
created by Smithson are meant to illicit a response outside of the aesthetic realm of the
gallery-valued object-as-whole, and, “can be visited only, and have no objects imposed

8
Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp, “Discussion With Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson (1970),” in
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack D. Flam (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996), 244.

10
on them.”
9
Smithson’s most well known earthwork, Spiral Jetty (fig. 4) is hours from
civilization and is meant to be understood in relation to the salt that crystallizes on it. It is
meant to be experienced, not consumed.

Figure 4. Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.
The geological and geographic ontologies of the sites where he worked were not
of significant interest to Smithson; he named certain physical locations non-sites, and
believed that through this deconstruction, there was “no reason to refer to nature
anymore.”
10
Grappling with nature and the economically-fueled art object led Smithson
to an epistemology of the non-site, a concept that exists somewhere in between the two.
Smithson’s relation to the land and nature involved a complex rejection and re-building
of an idea about site that he claimed as his own. The idea of the non-site is wrapped up
with authorship, as the term itself is tied to Smithson. Spiral Jetty is an object, with a

9
ibid.

10
Béar and Sharp, 252.

11
creator. It changes as salt collects in crystallographic patterns, but remains as its title calls
it, and an object reproduced in books and galleries.
Smithson wished to de-mystify nature as a transcendent or spiritual experience; he
considered it all present in the idea of the non-site, that nature itself may not exist at all
outside of its use value to humans, whether that be in a national park wilderness, or in the
titanium alloy mined to create skyscrapers.
Smithson uses the geologic sciences to augment his earthworks as process works;
glaciation and sedimentation over millions of year is analogous to salt crystals forming
on the Spiral Jetty. In his writings, there is a sense of rejection of all that is institutional,
from the gallery to the sciences. However, these ‘earth artists,’ who claim to be interested
in dirt and space, are still a part of the gallery world and its linguistic edges and fall back
on a sense of aesthetics. Using the rhetoric of science in art was new at this time.
Smithson and Heizer were fond of maps and exact locations, as well as the idea
that an exact location in a blighted mine region is ostensibly nowhere at all. Smithson
frames the non-site as linked to natural processes and inserted in geologic time, but is not
ultimately interested in understanding these processes. Heizer, too, is quite critical of
science: “Scientific theories could just as well be magic as far as I am concerned. I don’t
agree with any of them.”
11
Smithson sees science as fiction, “a shack in the lava flow of
ideas.”
12
There is a strong sense of the object telling the whole story, Spiral Jetty with its
crystallized salt is a relic of time and speaks for itself.

11
ibid, 248.

12
ibid, 249.

12
Smithson’s work ultimately is still about the object, whether that be a spiral of
rocks in the middle of the Great Salt Lake, or sand on a mirror in a museum. The object
serves his ideologies. Inhabitants of the town closest to the Spiral Jetty are not aware of
its significance; the site was instrumentalized for a specific purpose. Smithson takes from
the site, uses its resources, re-sites and re-names.
Artists working in the public sphere often act in this way; they shift the language
of the site to fit their needs. This connection with the natural world is scripted by the
artist and still in the context of the gallery, but exposes a disconnect between our urban
spaces and nature. Smithson demands that viewers notice and come to a certain
conclusion about mining and other land destruction, but does not necessarily implicate
them or encourage their participation in changing the situation.

Figure 5. Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971.
Adrian Piper, a feminist artist, had a vested interest in process, similar to the land
artists. She was interested in breaking down the art object into an amalgam of processes
and wrote extensive pieces that are applicable to the likes of Smithson. She criticizes the
gallery system for ignoring the time-based elements of artwork. “The work is a product,

13
or a final part of the process, rather than an embodiment of the process.”
13
Piper writes of
a holistic art experience that exposes the viewer to deeper processes that insinuate the
self. For her piece, Food for the Spirit, 1971(see fig. 5), she read all of Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason in private and documented it, exploring the breakdown of artist and other.

“The work examines how a private, autobiographical experience asserts visibility and
relates to the broader political issue of acknowledging the other’s presence.”
14
The
gallery space constructs a relationship to art, and builds a passive viewing subject without
a sense of space as participatory. “When an artificial environment is created, the viewer
relinquishes his role as essentially passive substance on which the catalytic agent works
in order to become part of the catalytic agent.”
15

Robert Smithson and even Suzanne Lacy have already decided what is important
to be remembered by the viewing-body-public; the aesthetic is one of political need, it is
radical in the moment, but fails to escape the art context and form a hybrid post-
performance art that comes up with its own rules. This making visible and making
important of the larger processes at play in an art piece are parallel to breaking down our
constructions of the city and nature. They can only be understood as processes.
Adrian Piper critiques the aesthetics of works of art where “the final work only
exists at the end of that activity continuum. Each of its previous states (points on the

13
Adrian Piper, “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object,” in Out of
Order, Out of Sight Volume I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999),
33.

14
Audrey Nicoll, “Invisible Truths: The Photographic Work of Clara Gutsche, Adrian Piper, and
Allyson Clay,” http://www.msvuart.ca/index.php?menid=06/04&mtyp=2&article_id=14
(accessed February 24, 2010)

15
Piper, 34.

14
continuum) no longer exist, and there are no cues in the final product that necessarily
point to those particular previous states.”
16
One trap of art is the myth of representing one
idea as able to be gleaned from the aesthetic object; the idea of the complete experience
as visual only, not as a manifold sensory experience built through time, should be
questioned. We are asked to suspend our disbelief, to believe in an object that has no
history or future.
Piper argues that the knowledge of the process of artwork enhances its
meaningfulness, its way of sticking with and perhaps transforming the viewer. The works
of Sherk, Haeg, Potrc, and Dion gesture towards that which is not art and exist as larger
processes: historicity, nature, and survival. As opposed to representations of gardens, or
performances about the problematic of museum taxonomizing systems, these works
literally make interactive environments based on these ideas; the only way to experience
is to participate. They works are not dependent on an art-historical lineage; they are just
as likely science experiments or productive vegetable gardens. Adrian Piper is useful in
theorizing the works of Sherk, Haeg, Potrc and Dion as process works that include the
viewer and the environment in that process.
Early Land Art was an entropic force, a pushing out of and away from the city,
messing up the landscape, carting around the landscape, twisting the landscape, and
forcing our attentions to destruction of nature going on outside of the city. We are today
confronted with an environmental crisis in cities and a burgeoning green capitalist

16
ibid, 36.

15
movement. A solution to the environmental crisis and to the issue of inaccessible art is a
human-centric, smaller-scale land-based art that permeates the boundaries of art practice.
The practices explained in the following sections affect and are affected by ideas
outside of the historical art world. Pushing art into new discourses strengthens art practice
by tapping into alternative histories and creating more situation-specific languages. These
projects push into new realms; they function as gardens, as new ways of engaging with
land, as naturalist lairs, and as ecosystems, whether or not art as signifier is applied; they
are metaphors for gardens and nature, but also gardens themselves.

16

CHAPTER 2

EDUCATING FROM WITHIN: THE LIBRARIES OF BONNIE SHERK

Reconstituting natures, then, is a complex work, involving
others (but not, it should be emphasized, suffocating otherness).
In this there is to be sure more than one nature. Natures are
multiple. But this is not a statement of perspectival politics.
Multi-naturalism is not relativism but relationism.
– Bruno Latour, The Pasteurisation of France

Bonnie Sherk’s work ebbs and flows in and out of art and environmental
situations. She began as a performance artist in San Francisco in the 1960s, responding to
the dichotomy between humans and nature in sites like the zoo and self-created parks.
She encourages the viewer to position her work in relation to broader social constructions
and assumed norms. She refers to her work as life-frames, or “site or situation specific
environments designed to bring to life the local resources of an area and enable onlookers
to experience it as fully as possible.”
17

In one of her earlier pieces, Public Lunch (1970), she sat in a cage at the zoo
eating her lunch surrounded by other animals in cages, a comment upon the human
construction of animal identities in the zoo. Animal ethicist Dale Jamieson illustrates her
point about what we value: “Zoos teach us a false sense of place in the natural order. The
means of confinement mark a difference between humans and animals.”
18
Sherk’s work
brings awareness to other ways of experiencing systems seemingly inherent to society

17
Terri Cohn, “Re-envisioning Our Urban Ecology: Bonnie Sherk’s Rural Enclaves,” Artweek 31,
no. 12 (2000). http://www.alivinglibrary.org/artweek.htm (accessed March 23, 2010).

18
Dale Jamieson, “Against Zoos” in Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental
Philosophy, ed. Dale Jamieson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 280.

17
with a deep ecological stance. To understand this work is to re-evaluate ones own place
in the world. The art is the human connectivity, the broadening of the social organism.
Sherk created small portable parks replete with vegetable plants and animals
around the city of San Francisco. She worked with what was already there; underneath
asphalt and sidewalks productive nature returned. Her parks connect humans as living,
growing organisms to systems outside of those constructed by urban planners and
politicians. A former freeway underpass was transformed by Sherk and friends into The
Farm (see fig. 6), a place where “you would be likely to encounter such scenes as: people
of all ages and races tending vegetables flowers and small fruit trees; ducks and geese
and chickens performing in the Raw Egg Animal Theatre.”
19
The area became a site for
education about other possible realities, different ways of relating to the space of the city.
This intervention turned seemingly unusable zones into a productive landscape.

Figure 6. Bonnie Sherk, The Farm, 1974

19
Will Bradley, “Let It Grow,” Frieze, no. 94 (October 2005).
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/let_it_grow (accessed March 23, 2010).

18
The wonder of such an environmental work is in its simplicity. To Bonnie Sherk “
art was not primarily about aesthetic experience… [it] represented a condition to aspire
to, an unrealized but essentially ethical sphere wholly unrelated to existing institutions of
art; an outside that didn’t just mean life in the woods but could be manifest anywhere.”
20

The motto of the parks was for humans and other animals. Here, like her Public Lunch
piece, she is breaking down a dichotomy between humans and animals.
Her parks bring to light ways we view ourselves in the city as separate from
certain processes and ways of relating to time. These little parks interrupt the sidewalk as
a passive space, and encourage “self conscious participation in the ongoing theatre of
society.”
21
We can consider Thoreau’s rejection of the city as an early environmentalist
mentality, “life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest.”
22
He calls for a
preservation of the wild as a preservation of the human mind. In order to want to preserve
the wild, however, one must have an understanding of it in relation to the city. Sherk, in
turn, brings forth opportunities for this to grow amid the day-to-day.
Sherk describes her work not as art, but as a wholly integrated system. In her
words, it is “approximately an embodied ideology in microcosm, either of an existing
situation or of one orchestrated by the artist and using, on occasion, art as a tool to create
a whole.”
23
Here she explains that systems need not be exposed solely through artwork,

20
ibid.

21
ibid.

22
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 56 (June 1862): 657-674.

23
Bradley.

19
but simply through a shift in spatial practice. There is a shift in values, from a human-
movement based concrete freeway system—a means to an end—to an eco-system
defined by the idea of the life frame. Art frames not only the immediate experience, but
all experiences. Her politics is not one of just resisting the dominant way of ordering
space, but providing an alternative.
Sherk often slept on The Farm, lived inside her work, and encouraged people to
come learn about nature. This is a utopian gesture, but not in the sense of a utopia being
its literal definition of no place. Instead, Sherk provides what Bruno Latour might call a
“meticulous triage of possible worlds, of the cosmograms, always to be begun anew.
Irreversibility has changed direction: it no longer finds itself in the abolished past, but in
the future to be recommended.”
24
Bruno Latour, a philosopher known for his criticisms
of scientific knowledge, considers the model of the scientific experiment as a way to
explain an emergence of multi-naturalism
25
, or a site-specific sense of ecology. The Farm
is a trial, and exists on a learning curve in a collective experimentation.
Sherk’s work also addresses environmental ethics; she not only rejects the
construction of the urban environment, but the systematic human-centric understanding
of place. “It takes ethical courage to go on, to move past a hedonistic, humanistic logic to
a bio-logic… let us orient ourselves by extending logical, propositional, cognitive and

24
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004), 195.

25
ibid, 2.

20
normative categories into biology.”
26
To fully experience a work or life-frame like
Sherk’s, one must let go of the role of art in constructing an experience and embrace an
understanding rooted in historical biological systems. “We are not dealing with another
individual defending its solitary life, but with an individual having situated fitness in an
ecosystem.”
27
Sherk deconstructs a human-centric reality, and reveals the space below
the freeway as a bio-diverse system. The Farm is an entire system, a human scale
relationship-shift.
The site-specific Farm developed into the Living Library, an idea that could be
reproduced anywhere. Sherk defines a Living Library as “a comprehensive metaphor
inclusive of everything on the planet, ranging from people, birds, seeds and water to all
the things we create: artwork, parks, gardens, schools, curricula and communities, Living
Libraries provide a conceptual and aesthetic framework for linking culture and
technology to nature.”
28
The Living Library framework de-centralizes the human as that
which decides what is valuable in nature and gestures towards a robust interconnectivity.
Living Libraries are now in a number of schoolyards in the San Francisco area (see fig.
7).

26
Holmes Rolston, “Environmental Ethics: Values and Duties in the Natural World,” in
Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy, Dale Jamieson, ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994), 70.

27
ibid, 71.

28
Cohn, 4.

21

Figure 7. A Living Library, 2004
Integrating a sense of local ecology is a practical solution to the crisis of
globalization. “The goal of Life Frames, Inc., her nonprofit organization, is to develop
cultural, site-sensitive branch Living Libraries in different locales that can be linked
electronically at http://www.alivinglibrary.org.”
29
Sherk began as a performance artist
and considers the Living Library an extended performance, one with the widest audience
and self-generated material. Sherk believes in the power of nature, "I am completely
inspired about the great opportunities available to us as human creatures to heal and
transform environments and people. By understanding and using the potent and magical
powers of nature, which art embodies, we can make a difference!"
30

The breaking down of the human-to-nature hierarchy present in the Living
Library is an important distinction in the philosophy of environmental ethics where the
question of whether preservation is for the sake of human enjoyment or for the sake of an
ecosystem itself. For example, in the injunction “Please leave the flowers for others to
enjoy,” the flowers are passive. For a life-frame or environmental ethic which values all

29
ibid.

30
Arts and Healing Connection Center, “2001 AHN Award Winner: Bonnie Ora Sherk,”
http://www.artheals.org/ahn_award/2001ahn_award.html (accessed January 13, 2010).

22
species for their own sake and for their relationship to an ecosystem, an injunction might
read, “let the flowers live!”
31
The participatory art in Sherk’s work is this realization and
participation with this site-specific ecosystem knowledge.
Participatory art is considered radical by art critics in its ability to break down the
idea of a passive art object. Art critic Grant Kester argues in Conversation Pieces,
“‘discursive or dialogic art necessitates a shift in our understanding of what art is—away
from the visual and sensory,’ which are individual experiences and toward ‘discursive
exchange and negotiation.’”
32
He writes about artists who are not as interested in
authorship as in creating progressive social situations and contexts where new
relationships emerge. He is criticized by the art critic Claire Bishop for valuing the
process of the collaboration over the aesthetic outcome of the project; “it works on the
level of social intervention but founders on the level of art,”
33
laments Bishop. Bishop is
criticizing using a definition of art based on technicality and aesthetics. She is using
criteria from the past to critique contemporary artists who are defining their own terms.
The ‘aesthetic’ missing from Grant Kester’s dialogical art is an environmental
aesthetic, a prototype for living. He focuses on the social realm exclusively. A counter-
position to the arguments of both Bishop and Kester can be found in the work of the artist
and educator Joseph Beuys. In I am Searching for a Field Character, Joseph Beuys
writes that insight “is needed into objective connections,” for the social organism to fully

31
Rolston, 71.

32
Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum 46, no. 6
(February 2006): 181.

33
ibid.

23
form. He argues for an artwork that will “dismantle an order to build A SOCIAL
ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.”
34

Joseph Beuys demonstrated a similar relationship to ecosystems in expanding out
of the art world, as Sherk, with his role in the creation of the green movement in
Germany and his philosophies on teacher-artist practices. Referring to his piece, 7000
Oaks, inaugurated at Documenta 7 in Germany in 1982 he said, “I believe that planting
these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of
matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness—raise it
increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.”
35

To become socially realized is to connect to the earth “flowing in the direction that is
shaping the content of the world right through into the future.”
36
Beuys created new
content with his works in the planting of oak trees that constantly grew.
Bonnie Sherk began collecting seeds and running a nursery in the mid-1970s. The
creation of The Farm and portable parks not only shifted society’s values and structures
as a whole, but her own sense of herself as an artist. She moved away from the notion of
the temporary object as an ecological work of art and began to live in the environment
she created. The alternate ways of ecologically existing became central to her well being
as a human. Sherk’s Farm (see fig. 8) developed as an attempt to “cultivate the

34
Joseph Beuys, “I am Searching for Field Character” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop,
(Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2006), 125.

35
Johannes Stüttgen, Beschreibung eines Kunstwerkes (Düsseldorf: Free International University,
1982). http://www.diaart.org/sites/page/51/1295 (accessed March 23, 2010).

36
Beuys, 125.

24
intersection between activism and the local political reality.”
37
She herself became the
connective tissue between the two, building a performance art piece that attracted
individuals to participate.

Figure 8. The Farm, Bonnie Sherk, 1974.
This political activism and community engagement became the driving force of The
Farm and allowed it to grow into a series of Living Libraries. This project involves
working with city officials to create viable ecological educational sites in cities all over
the country. Sherk’s Farm transcended an art context and developed to become a part of
the fabric of the city of San Francisco. The project, whose initial aim was “to establish a
social model in explicit opposition to the prevailing conditions,”
38
was absorbed and re-
contextualized as a non-profit organization.

37
Bradley, 4.

38
ibid.

25
CHAPTER 3
FRITZ HAEG AND THE ATTACK OF THE LAWN AS NATURE

Nature knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which
sprouts into forests, and festoons the globe with a garland of grasses
and vines. -Emerson

Figure 9. Edible Estate, Lakewood, CA, 2006.
The Edible Estates gardens (see fig. 9) of architect Fritz Haeg replace front lawns
with productive edible landscapes. These ostensible cultivated lands are built with the
hands of many, including mine, on the fabric of historical cities and towns. Locations
range geographically from Lakewood, California to London, England, including an
iteration in the geographic center of the United States, Salina, Kansas. Fritz’s interest in
the garden is an extension of the human relationship to food and industrialism. Fritz does
not want to be labeled a contemporary artist; his work spans genres and locations, and
reflects a shift in language surrounding the production of pieces of art. The idea is that
everyone can make an Edible Estate: each iteration is accompanied by a how-to-guide for
distinct climate regions. Following in the footsteps of Buckminster Fuller, Fritz is

26
interested in the prototype. His art is embodied in the idea that an Edible Estate can
replace any front lawn.
Edible Estates signals the end of a certain modernism found in traditional gardens
of rows and sections. When Fritz plants a wild garden in a suburban neighborhood, the
entire neighborhood takes on a new meaning. The garden is the manifestation of a
shifting relational practice. The projects are not so much about landscape design, but
about relationships and history. "I actually moved to projects that are more diffuse which
manifest themselves as... gardens... video... dance,"
39
says Fritz.

Figure 10. Animal Estates, Whitney Museum, 2008
An extension of Edible Estates that includes faunal elements is Animal Estates.
Creatures like the Bald Eagle, a former inhabitant of New York City, are a bridge to the
natural history of the region. Instead of the artwork presenting itself as an object, we are
shown a new way of looking at the city; an actual sized eagle nest on the roof of the

39
Fritz Haeg, “On Animal Estates and Edible Estates,” Artforum 47, no. 3 (November 2008):
286.

27
Whitney Museum (see fig. 10) reveals past relationships between creatures and the
landscape. Fritz Haeg is "attracted to these two extremes—abstract universal thought and
focused hyperlocalization."
40
The idea of “going green” is all around us, but not
specifically about any one action. With works like Animal Estates, Haeg localizes and
makes transparent actions of the contemporary environmental movement. "Focusing on
these animals in the human city is partly ridiculous but also quite serious... tragic or
utopian depending on how you look at it."
41

Figure 11. Edible Estate in Lakewood, CA, 2006.
Haeg’s work is based around specific localizations, "each incantation is different,
based on the needs of the city.”
42
Each work cannot be manifest until a certain amount of

40
ibid.

41
ibid.

42
ibid.

28
time is spent building roots (see fig. 11) and relationships with a physical location, its
peoples and natural histories. Haeg opens us to the city, its multiplicities, its land value,
its inhabitants and flows outside of the dominant human-centric, urban-centric city. There
is no specific way he wants the viewer to react; he aims to educate but not with a set
lesson.
In an Artforum interview, Fritz states that his practice is not about him as the
artist, but about situations that his work invites. While working with him, I came to know
the rich and strange history of lawn culture, and the simplicity of change. We spent two
days roto-tilling up a lawn in Lakewood, CA, planting local varieties of produce and
building trellises. Haeg tends his large, and often wild garden behind his geodesic dome
in Los Angeles. He much inspiration from the geodesic dome creator, Buckminster
Fuller, who often stated that he was not a category.
43
Fritz hopes for the Edible Estates
prototype garden to resonate throughout the entire country, conjuring and stimulating
bodily participation as well as the use of greener lawns.
This is not a solution, a "critical response that purports to save the world," but
instead a commentary on "who we are and how we operate."
44
In the viewing of a
verdant vegetable garden, our senses return to the “sheer notion of pleasure,”
45
a way of
spatial navigation more grounded in the realm of the senses than in the traditional art

43
“I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am
not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the
universe.” Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to be a Verb (New York: Bantam, 1970).

44
Haeg, Artforum: 286.

45
ibid.

29
object. The writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson assume a notion of the natural sublime: “In
all animal and vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no
mechanics, can account for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must be
assumed.”
46
This mystery today surrounds the construction of the city itself. Haeg’s
projects point to a return to the city as the environment, to be acted upon, as histories,
webs, that which is already there in a space, not the need to gesture towards something
new or better with a separate aesthetic object.
Another way to frame the scope of Haeg’s work is through an extension of the
field of environmental ethics called land ethics. Aldo Leopold’s seminal work, The Land
Ethic, reconsidered an idea of ethics that included more than just human interdependence.
Nature was not a passive space to be conquered, but part and parcel of human existence.
“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundary of the community to include soils, waters,
plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”
47
Haeg is interested in biodiversity and
sees humans as citizens and members of the land, not conquerors of it. Haeg uses his art
practice as a way to illustrate this relationship between land and self. When we affect the
environment, we are affecting ourselves, and once we experience that, we can embrace a
participatory relationship with the land rather than view it as a passive other. The
resulting “feeling makes the objects correspond to the imagination, without imposing

46
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Method of Nature: An Oration delivered before the Society of the
Adelphi in Waterville College,” in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 1 (New York:
Fireside Editions, 1909)
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1831&chapter=104
287&layout=html&Itemid=27 (accessed March 23, 2009).

47
Aldo Leopold, “[From] The Land Ethic,” in Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental
Philosophy, Dale Jamieson ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 27.

30
intellectual or affective mediation.”
48
A tended and understood quarter-acre garden will
produce enough food to feed a family, vital to human survival.
Edible Estates infuses the urban landscape with a richness of biodiversity, “each
yard will be a unique expression of its location and of the inhabitants desires.”
49
The
human participant, the person whose lawn is acted upon becomes a part of the
biodiversity of the city, a connection to the process of eating becomes apparent. This
nature is not necessarily the beets and carrots themselves, but a system bigger and more
complex is revealed, what Emerson might call “a mysterious principle of life… which not
only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ.”
50
The shifting use of the land outside a
suburban home, created through “the natural magic of the imagination,” instills a
“profound feeling and intimate participation.”
51

Much writing has been done recently surrounding the contemporary notion of
participation and participatory art, notably with the text Participation, edited by the critic
Claire Bishop. She defines this type of work as that which “emphasizes collaboration and
the collective dimension of social experience.”
52
The Edible Estates of Fritz Haeg expand
the idea of participation laid out by Bishop as inclusive of not only humans collaborating,
but a collaboration with and about specific bio-regions and their natural histories.

48
Emerson.

49
Fritz Haeg, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn! (New York: Metropolis, 2007), 12.

50
Emerson.

51
ibid.

52
Claire Bishop, Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 12.

31
Bishop judges the success of participatory artwork based on its role in the
production relations of the times: “the more consumers it is able to turn into producers—
the more readers or spectators into collaborators.”
53
Outside of the author, the “work
emerges from and produces a more positive and non-hierarchical social model.”
54

Participation, in the Bishop sense, is about human-art relations, and does not attempt an
extension into the broader idea of the community within nature in the way Aldo Leopold
describes it.
How would a street in Lakewood, CA read if it was considered as a garden?
“Perhaps the threats evoked by this wild intrusion into the neighborhood will eventually
be a catalyst for questions…we are all at the receiving end of dung and corpses
decomposing,”
55
writes Fritz in the opening manifesto of the Edible Estates book. He
describes the Edible Estate as “providing social rather than formal or phenomenological
frameworks.”
56
The critique is the social action. An Edible Estate bisecting the sameness
of a suburban neighborhood can be considered an environmental action—the agricultural
landscape is juxtaposed with the order of a modern suburb.
Participation exists in the relationship between the viewer and the piece with the
idea that she too can plant a garden in her front lawn. Emphasis on the Edible Estates
garden is removed from the idea of Fritz himself as spectacular artist and landscape

53
ibid.

54
ibid.

55
Haeg, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, 7.

56
Haeg, “On Animal Estates and Edible Estates,” 286.

32
architect and instead revolves around the “causal relationship between the individual
work of art and individual/collective agency.”
57
Emerson again is useful in an expanded
idea of an artwork. As a nature writer, he was aware of a profound interconnectivity of all
of nature, “Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a
correlative of every other…”
58

Emerson’s romantic notions are what Smithson rejected with his opaque language
surrounding the space of nature in the mind. The Edible Estate encourages a return to a
complex reading of site; through an understanding of the site of suburbia, one can be
freed of it. The lawn is not a permanent structure and the Edible Estate literally reveals
this layer beneath. In the Edible Estate recently planted outside of housing project in
Chelsea (see fig. 12), the layer revealed is the native plants of the Lenape people, the first
inhabitants of Manhattan.

Figure 12. Lenape Edible Estate, 2009.

57
Bishop, Participation, 12.

58
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York, Penguin: 1983), 289.

33
Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates considers a new relationship to the passage of time for
the artist. The piece continues after the artist leaves; families are still cultivating food
from their Edible Estates. Fritz often does not return to the sites—they are documented in
films and lectures and travel the world through their mythologies, but remain for the
community. This idea of the artist releasing a project is rather unexplored in the discourse
surrounding post-studio practice. New Genre Public Art is often seen as dealing with the
public and communities, but only for a bracketed period of time.
In New Genre Public Art, the idea of the “parachute artist” emerges, or a fear that
an artist will instrumentalize a community for his or her own ends and then leave. There
is still a specific time frame for Suzanne Lacy’s projects and a desired outcome that
frame the project. The sculpture or form in the case of community-based public art is still
decided by the artist. She choreographs the community, therefore pre-determining the
story that will be told. The name of the artist and a final exhibition often trump the social
relationships that may form in this ostensibly more public form of art making.
Intersubjective relations are not an end in themselves, but “rather served to unfold a more
complex knot of concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement and the conventions of
social interaction.
59
”
Edible Estates reveals a complexity of how we today order knowledge, landscape
aesthetics, trades, and wilderness. The viewer exists in an interstitial realm of
understanding the city as a power structure, a vessel for holding individuals and
knowledge, as well as simply just a material mess of concrete and metal. The power of

59
Bishop, “The Social Turn,” 9.

34
this work is its ability to exist in a simultaneous way in all of these realms, without being
explicit about any of them, and its ability to be reproduced anywhere.

35
CHAPTER 4

MARJETICA POTRC AND THE IMPORTANCE OF ROOTS

Here, the existence of an individual is understood easily as
co-existence. Being always means ‘being with,’ and ‘I’ does
not take precedence over ‘we.’
– Jean-Luc Nancy

Figure 13. Tilling the Soil in the Nieuw West, 2009.
Marjetica Potrc is a Slovenian artist who works with communities to produce
sustainable and creative solutions for social problems. Potrc was trained as an architect.
Material-based structuring of human behavior led her to realizations about other possible
solutions to assuage social problems. She thrives on the notion of the bottom-up social
solution, a system that supports itself because it was created from within the community.
Potrc was one of the first architects to explore urban vernacular architecture—“her work
develops inside the multiple frontier…as an aesthetic space…trying to produce neither
real objects or real projects but rather to construct a real space that at the same time tries
to unveil the thickness of those mental barriers.”
60

60
Francesco Careri, “The Frontiers of Shantytown,” in Marjetica Potrc (Valencia: Institut
Valenciá d’Art Modern, 2003), 44.

36
Potrc is a true utopian, perhaps stemming from her upbringing in the former
Soviet Union. She is not so much interested in how a project is interpreted in the art
world, but with members of the community who work on the project. The shared
experience and stories that stem from it speak for themselves; Marjetica says, the
people’s words are all we need.
61
She calls her method social architecture. Her ideas
about time and community, as well as her connections to institutional art funding, define
her practice as embracing a hybrid community and environmentally-based practice.

Figure 14. Gerda in the Garden, 2009.
I spent the summer of 2009 on a community garden-based project called The
Cook, The Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor (CFWN) in Amsterdam (see fig. 14)
working with Marjetica Potrc. “A grant from the Netherlands Architecture Fund allows
us to present the community garden and kitchen as a case study in a publication that re-
imagines the role of green spaces in the Dutch garden city, a modernist planning model

61
Marjetica Potrc, interview by author, Lbjujana, Slovenia, August 17, 2009.

37
developed in the postwar years.”
62
CFWN pushes ideas of self-representation through a
re-configuring of nature as well shifting the way viewers experience the neighborhood.
This project, which continues today, is a garden and a kitchen where produce from the
garden can be prepared. The kitchen is open three days a week and is now run by
residents of the neighborhood.
These two structures, the garden and the kitchen, familiar in the domestic and
often rural context, emerge as a social and political micro-space of change (see fig. 15)
when combined with the historical geo-political region of west Amsterdam. A new
resident-based, informal economy fuels the formerly aesthetic “green” land. This is more
than a community-based art project: the community is powering the engine that is the
project. Marjetica Potrc “fills the role of participant-observer who, conscious of the fact
that reality is modified as it is observed, is capable of carrying out ulterior steps and of
bringing speed to the dynamics of self organization.”
63

Figure 15. Ayse and Costa making soup, 2009.

62
Marjetica Potrc, interview by author, Lbjujana, Slovenia, August 17, 2009.

63
Careri, 48.

38

This project is in the Nieuw West neighborhood of Amsterdam, one of the most
quickly gentrifying areas of the Netherlands. Construction cranes and half-completed
glass structures with glass balconies stand next to peeling Gerrit Reitveld apartment
buildings and unused fenced off green space, a part of the modern-planning of post
World War Two. The neighborhood literally rubs up against farmland and polders.
Many immigrants from Morocco, Turkey, and Surinam moved to Nieuw West, in
the 1970s when construction of social housing began and new laws allowed immigration
from former Dutch colonies. I spent two months at this shared kitchen and garden space,
learning about the spiciest peppers and okra from Surinam, collecting recipes, building
roots and patterned languages to relate to the residents and their land, digging deeper
furrows and planting radish seeds closer together than I ever did in the United States.
Two older women whom I befriended were drawing up plans for a green house—they
wanted the garden to be year-round.
Prior to breaking ground for the garden, Marjetica spent a month living in the
neighborhood in a chilly apartment, learning about the residents and their take on the
rapidly developing neighborhood. CFWN is an example of both “redirective practice,
where people from various disciplines and backgrounds come together to forge new
knowledge, and participatory design, in which the people who are most directly affected
– the residents of Nieuw West – are themselves involved at all stages of the project’s
development.”
64
The project would not have been possible without the residents. Roy, a
Surinamese man with a love of open space, became the paid garden manager. Women

64
Marjetica Potrc, interview by author, Lbjujana, Slovenia, August 17, 2009.

39
from the neighborhood sat in the kitchen in the afternoons, offering coffee, cookies and
conversation.
The garden is the catalyst, to use Marjetica’s term, and meeting point for human
relationships to emerge. The garden is real, but also a metaphor of extensive growth and
breaking down of social categories, “both the garden and the community kitchen create
bonds within the community (residents give the kitchen half of their produce from the
garden) and become a catalyst for transforming not only the public space but also the
community itself.”
65

Figure 16. In the kitchen, 2009.
A hybridization of artists, curators, developers, residents and the general public
occurs through the development of the garden (see fig. 16). A curator from the Van Abbe
Museum finds himself transplanting tomatoes; the developers from Koers Nieuw West,
the group responsible for most of the new building, claim a plot and laugh about their
meager harvest. The shared experience of growing food creates a bond between
otherwise unrelated groups of people. In the end, “the project redefines urban and rural

65
ibid.

40
knowledge.”
66
It puts into question our modes of production and appeals to our modern
day hunter-gatherer minds.

Figure 17. Marjetica Potrc’s Paintings on the wall of the kitchen, 2009.
The roots of the residents—their stories, artifacts, families left behind, and
political struggles—became both a metaphor and a physical manifestation in CFWN (Fig.
17). Potrc uses the term artist-catalyst to describe her role; the goal is to make sense of
the local situation as specific, as a complexity with unknown outcomes. She does not
position herself as a savior-artist, but as a part of the same natural history that created the
housing land situation in Amsterdam. Potrc does not criticize what exists in a community
before a project, she “reads what the city reveals on its fringes”
67
and uses that
knowledge in her work. “It falls on the artist to make the grounds of play emerge so the

66
Marjetica Potrc, interview by author, Lbjujana, Slovenia, August 17, 2009.

67
Careri, 12.

41
forces interact and to invent or inspire the device or means of interaction according to the
context in which he or she acts,”
68
to exist in a space of uncertainties without a goal and
exhibit “a knowledge of reality and its transformation [and] project the project into
unknown and shared directions.”
69
The garden and kitchen are based on an idea of
scaffolding from the outside, providing a trellis for social relations to reveal themselves.
To Potrc, the city is not a solid concept, not a series of buildings, but a “structure
of constant evolution….where citizens will adapt to their ever-changing surroundings.”
70

Her work is based on the idea that there are many cities within any geo-political region
called “a city,” a multitude of invisible cities, where under the aesthetic of the grid, a
multiplicity of methods of survival exist. She relates to a site as a scientist, because
“scientists use their imaginations to envision the things that they study… bio-fuel cells
and fuel cells exist on the border between imagination and reality.”
71
She is deeply
invested in finding the language of a place and watching it reveal itself. This is her
environmentalism, a strong sense of community-generated solutions.
In The Cook, The Farmer, His Wife, and Their Neighbor, the inhabitants of a
specific neighborhood are using a local solution to address global problems. Bruno
Latour in The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, writes of a
slowing down of political ecological systems to allow specific solutions to emerge. He

68
Careri, 48.

69
ibid.

70
Max Protetch and Stuart Krimko, “Marjetica Potrc: Urban Conceptualist” in Marjetica Potrc
(Valencia: Institut Valenciá d’Art Modern, 2003), 36.

71
ibid.

42
looks more deeply into the usefulness of the trope “think global, act local,” as a way to
order political activity. Latour considers a reframing of the individual in a political
situation: “to think in truly ‘global’ fashion, they needed to begin by discovering the
institutions thanks to which globalism is constructed one step at a time. And nature, as we
shall see, could hardly lend itself any less effectively to the process.”
72
Potrc’s garden
project directly engages with the nature of a global neighborhood; we are confronted with
migration patterns and issues of class and race. Latour’s political ecology requires “made
to order garb.” We cannot have a global understanding of political ecology unless we
consider what Latour would call multi-naturalism, or imbuing politics with a sense of the
local. Each political situation, like the gentrification of the Nieuw West, requires its own
language and solution.
Similarly, Latour points to the global environmental crisis and posits that we can
only rely on local solutions that work with nature. A break occurs between “an
impossibility of continuing to imagine politics on one side and on the other a nature that
would serve politics simultaneously as a standard.”
73
It is no longer possible “to leave
the entire set of non-humans captive under the exclusive auspices of nature as such,”
there is a need to reconcile the human and non-human worlds and build a manifold
ecological system. “The more realities there are, the more arguments there are,”
74
and
more possible solutions can emerge.

72
Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.

73
ibid, 58.

74
ibid, 63.

43
Potrc is interested in uncovering these self-generated systems with utopic
elements that exist inside and outside of the physical and rhetorical space of the city. The
French philosopher Jacques Ranciere might describe this as a new realm of the sensible,
“a system of self-evident facts of sense-perception that simultaneously discloses the
existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts
and positions within it... something in common lends itself to participation and in what
way various individuals have a part in this distribution.”
75
The only solution to global
problems comes from local action, which must emerge from the individuals who are
going to ensure its longevity.
The notion of the site-specific in the garden of CFWN in Amsterdam goes much
deeper than site as geography. Site is a conflation of a multitude of individual identities
and histories. We must question the way community has existed in relation to the larger
hegemonic system of the city. According to Jean Luc Nancy, “distinct from society
(which is a simple association and division of forces and needs) and opposed to empire
(which dissolves community by submitting its people to its arms and its glory),
community is not only an intimate communication between its members, but also its
organic communion with its own essence.”
76
The garden is a new way of expressing all
things that make up the community in the Nieuw West.
To create an existence through art, with its aesthetic roots and visionary methods,
breaks down boundaries between human and nature, revealing the multiplicities of human

75
Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2009), 12.

76
Jean Luc Nancy, “The Inoperative Community,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 60.

44
existence and self-perpetuating growth systems in all of space and time, a “process of
self-representation of its own multiple identity.”
77
Citizenship is a global phenomenon,
the “redefining of the social contract” by those engaged. Each individual in a community
contributes to the creative process, and takes with them a sense of pride and
accomplishment.
Marjetica introduced me to the writings of German sociologist Helmuth Berking
as a way to think about knowledge, systems and power. Berking puts forward the
importance of finding and developing a language; a community project is successful
when the community takes it over as its own and begins to define the terms of the project.
There are hierarchies of knowledge, “certain spaces and places do not only contain
distinctive stocks of cultural knowledge; they also limit the scope of what might be
perceived as legitimate knowing.”
78
The example of the two women proposing a green
house illustrates both that the women understand how the garden is benefitting them, and
how to improve it for the community.

77
Careri, 48.

78
Helmuth Berking, “Contested Places and the Politics of Space,” in Negotiating Urban Conflicts
(Picsatawny, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 31.

45

Figure 18. Women in the garden in the Nieuw West, 2009.
The solution for an urban problem is not always a building; sometimes it is a
garden (see fig. 18). The situation reveals its solution. A form is less important than what
it provides to a group of people. A garden becomes a social engine, a way of relating, a
politic of participation.
As some individuals spent more time in the community kitchen they felt a sense
of ownership and agency over the space and disagreements arose. But because of the
larger community ethic and the autonomy of the project, these negotiations were woven
into broader discussions held by the community about the space and its future. The Cook,
The Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor is not just a garden and a kitchen in a former
butcher shop, but a space for relationships to emerge and knowledge to build. As the
Situationists once said, “Architecture must advance as emotionally moving situations,
more than emotionally moving forms as the material it works with.”
79
The garden in the

79
Guy Debord, “Towards a Situationist International,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 98.

46
Nieuw West began as a structure and now continues as progressive political action taken
at the local level, contributing to the solution of both local and global problems.

47
CHAPTER 5

MARK DION AND THE MUSEUM AS PROCESS

A herbarium is better than any illustration; every botanist
should make one. – Carolus Linneas, Philosophia Botanica
Mark Dion constructs physical and linguistic ways of re-ordering our views of
science and nature and asks for a re-building of the signifier and signified, both of a
specific geographic location and the objects within it. Dion deals with constructions of
knowledge and constructions of nature. Dion has said that he is “not interested in nature
itself, but ideas about nature.”
80
His work is informed by a manifesto he wrote for artists
working with and about nature. Their role is manifold: they have the duty of being
informed naturalists as well as artists able to affect in aesthetically compelling work.
Dion’s Urban Wildlife Observation Unit in Madison Square Park (see fig. 18) in
New York City reframes a public urban park through the simple tools of a small shack
with information about local flora and fauna and a site-specific field guide. The shack is
open to the public; printed field guides are available and free lunchtime talks, as well as
programming for junior high school students, are offered by local historians and
biologists. An introductory essay in the field guide frames the project:

The plants and animals of Madison Square Park might be
considered so common they scarcely warrant a second look.
But their mere existence should be a cause for marvel. They
have adapted to life in a challenging and dangerous habitat, a
six acre island of dirt, grass, plants and trees cut off from
intensely crowded avenues and streets. And natural histories
of the flora and fauna that survive here - the pigeon, the

80
Richard Klein, ed. Mark Dion: Drawings, Journals, Photographs, Souvenirs and Trophies
1990-2003 (Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Museum, 2003), 8.

48
squirrel, the elm tree and the rat - are fascinating,
complicated, and ever evolving.
81

Figure 19. Field Shack in Madison Square Park
Madison Square Park, historically a green or natural space in the hectic modern city
and a highly manicured landscape, is one of the many New York City parks built in the
Olmstead era in the late 1800s. This park represents a pastoral and picturesque landscape,
an extension of the modern city as a unique ecosystem full of life forms and bio-diversity,
including the human being and her waste products.
Mark Dion treats the idea of the park as a representation of nature, as opposed to
nature that occurs naturally. He wants the viewer to understand that a park is both a
signifier of a historical framing of natural and urban elements as separate, but also to see
the ecosystem of the park as existing on a continuum with the rest of the city. His work
reveals the day-to-day naturalness of the park, which he defines as nature. We are shown
visuals in a tiny field guide (see fig. 19) of different types of local birdlife as well as “foot
traffic,” or “nannies from the adjacent neighborhood of Gramercy Park push children in

81
Susan K. Freedman and Tom Eccles, “Nature Preserves: An Introduction to Mark Dion’s Urban
Wildlife Observation Unit,” in Field Guide to the Wildlife of Madison Square Park. (New York:
Public Art Fund, 2002), 28.

49
strollers, business people sit on benches eating lunch, as messengers, joggers and dog
walkers pass by.”
82
Dion includes everything that comes in contact with the park as a part
of nature, not just the manicured plants; the dog poop is just as natural as the trimmed
rosebush.

Figure 20. Field Guide to Madison Square Park
The idea of participation is central to the work of Dion; a participation not just in
the environment itself, but in the process of a creation of knowledge surrounding nature,
including the mechanisms of power. He is particularly interested in the relationship
between human and animal and deconstructs this using the hunting shack; the human
hunter literally takes an animal out of its habitat and culturally constructs it into food or a
taxidermied trophy. There are stuffed squirrels from Madison Square Park on view in the
shack.
The field of analytic philosophy called nature aesthetics is useful in considering
what Dion is attempting to deconstruct and reconstruct with his Madison Square Park

82
ibid.

50
field shack and field guide (see fig. 20). Allen Carlson writes about nature appreciation,
and favors a sense of aesthetics based on a scientific understanding.
Carlson argues that visible representations of nature are “inappropriate given the
nature of the natural environment.”
83
Because of the centrality of language as
representation, when “we conceptualize the natural environment as ‘nature,’ I think we
are tempted to think of it as an object.”
84
We are more often confronted with
representations, on the walls of offices in landscape paintings or on screen savers, than
with a geologic explanation of a mountain. Carlson considers scientific knowledge about
nature to be a part of nature: “we must have knowledge of the different environments of
nature and the systems and elements within those environments”
85
in order to fully
experience nature.
Dion initially treats Madison Square Park like a landscape painting, which
“indicates a specific prospect—usually a grand prospect—seen from a specific standpoint
and distance... emphasis is on the representation of the object and its represented
features... visual qualities related to line, color, and overall design.”
86
Then Dion gives
the viewer the tools to understand the park in the way Carlson believes one must
experience nature to understand nature.

83
Allen Carlson, “Appreciation of the Natural Environment,” in The Aesthetics of Natural
Environments, eds. Allen Carlson and Arnold Berleant (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press,
2004), 69.

84
ibid, 70.

85
ibid, 72.

86
ibid, 67.

51
Carlson uses John Dewey’s educational pedagogy of experience, which emphasizes
experiential learning over textbook learning, and posits an understanding of the natural
environment not as "an unobtrusive background, but as obtrusive foreground."
87
Mark
Dion critiques the taxonomic systems that have come to order our perceptions of the
natural world. He destabilizes nature as human-made and reveals a sensory approach to
understanding. Dion calls for the human to act like Dewey’s animal, "fully present, all
there in all of its actions: in its wary actions, its sharp sniffing, its abrupt cocking of
ears."
88
The viewer must participate in an understanding of the environment, spend time
in it and ask questions about it, then the viewer will come to appreciate that nature is not
passive or restricted to areas outside of the urban environment. An aesthetic appreciation
is limited by our preconceived ideas about what makes real nature, but once we
understand that everything can be experienced as nature we, as humans, become
indistinguishable from the whole.
When we consider a successful work of art, we often think about design, pattern
and form. This becomes a controversial set of ideas when coming to the definition of
appreciating and understanding "nature." When considering the form of nature, “we can
only understand a part of nature"
89
in the way that it relates to our visual experience.
Carlson describes this as the arousal model of understanding; we understand nature as the
way it makes us feel. We do not see the trash and pigeons of New York City as part of

87
ibid, 70.

88
ibid.

89
ibid, 72.

52
nature. Dion is trying to point to something greater than a park in his nature pieces, and
greater than the easily recognizable objects he uses in his work. They gesture toward a
larger understanding of a constructed world. His works can be appreciated as aesthetic
pieces—attractive stuffed birds and maps on the walls of a cabin-like structure—as well
as deep critiques of taxonomies of knowledge.
This work is a hybrid of the artist as critic and the artist as visionary; Dion presents
us with a language with which to understand a specific landscape - here a park in New
York City - and the idea that a metaphorical field guide can be used to re-examine our
seeming comfort with an urban existence. One does not need an academic understanding
of a post-modern art paradigm to appreciate the art. "Physiologically speaking, all
aesthetic judgments of art, whether they are subjective or objective require that we locate
the perceived, non-aesthetic properties in some category."
90

The idea of art coming from outside of the art world is not new, whereas the idea
of art exposing a complex scientific system itself by creating tools for engagement is less
explored and riskier. As art becomes more like life, the art object becomes less and less
traceable. The small field guide becomes a tool to examine all environments; it becomes
disassociated from the artist and therefore has a lasting use true to the artist’s intention.
Mark Dion writes in a manifesto entitled some notes toward a manifesto for artists
working with, or about the living world:
Our work reveals complex contradictions between science and
art, between empiricism and the ideal, between nature and
technology and between aesthetic conventions novel form of
visualization…some may wish to dissolve the contradictions in

90
Noel Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in The
Aesthetics of Natural Environments, eds. Carlson, Alan and Berleant, Arnold (Orchard Park, NY:
Broadview Press, 2004), 98.

53
our social relations to the natural world, others may be
interested in analyzing or highlighting them.
91

Dion is writing the theory on his practice, engaging in rhetoric of a new paradigm.
Alan Carlson puts forward ideas about natural history as integral to an understanding of
nature. Dion’s work also critiques and engages a history of knowledge and value. Dion
considers himself an “artist working with or about nature,” but this work can also be
considered a part of a robust lineage of natural history: Aristotle classified animals and
plants; Carolus Linneas created binomial nomenclature; the earliest physical museums, or
wunderkammer, were filled with specimen from all over the world. According to Dion,
the wunderkammer represented colonialism and hierarchies of knowledge that he
deconstructs by creating a field guide for a man-made park.
92
Madison Square Park now
exists in an expanded art context that includes the history of natural history.
Dion’s philosophy mirrors the deep ecologists, "humans do not stand outside of
nature; we too are animals and are part of the very thing we have tried to control.”
93
In
the study of natural history the question is posed, "what responsibilities does our
knowledge confer upon us?" This question was only raised once nature was taxonomized
and known. As natural historians began to understand nature, they found themselves
inspired to protect it. Dion uses a knowledge-sharing form of art to create an
environmentalism for the built environment at an extremely local level.

91
Klein, 38.

92
Lisa Graziose Corrin, “Mark Dion’s Project: A Natural History of Wonder and a Wonderful
History of Nature,” in Mark Dion, eds. Lisa Graziose Corrin, Miwon Kwon, Norman Bryson, and
John Berger (London: Phaidon, 1997).

93
Klein, 38.

54
Dion in his manifesto states, "knowledge and poetry are not separate."
94
Guy
Debord, of the Situationist International, would agree: emotive language and psycho-
geography can propel us out of our assumptions of movement in space. The intention of
the artist is to catalyze a process by creating a situation allowing for any potential
reaction. Like the notion of social architecture introduced by Marjetica Potrc, Dion and
Debord let go of their aesthetic autonomy, revealing processes inherent to living species.
Dion and the Situationists recognize that they “must try to construct situations, i.e.
collective environments, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a
moment,"
95
but that "there is no more curious and uncanny topic than the biodiversity
which surrounds us."
96
Dion creates a new situation inside of a city park, not by adding a
sculpture or a performance, but by augmenting the knowledge about the place, favoring
many individual emotional connections to nature over connections to his work. When we
are noticing maple trees and carrots growing, we also enter a classless society—these
experiences are not tied to the creative, artistic class, but are accessible to all. When it is
revealed that everything has a history, knowledge systems become ubiquitous. According
to Debord, “in a classless society, it might be said that there will be no more painters,
only situationists who among other things, make paintings."
97

Mark Dion builds an environmentalism based on a holistic specific nature. Nature
is composed of all living and non-living things and their interactions. Dion creates spaces

94
Klein, 39.

95
Guy Debord, “Towards a Situationist International,” in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 98.

96
ibid.

97
ibid, 99.

55
from which to re-observe notions of nature and space itself. He does not ask us to travel
or to transcend. Dion’s aesthetic of nature begins with a re-evaluation of man-made
natural landscapes, the geese in the park and the stocked carp pond, as well as the cocker-
spaniel and the mothers with strollers, and reveals the self as part of this newly
discovered natural context. He uses art and art history to include the viewer in nature as
he sees it, making space for an environmental awareness that includes all environments.

56
CONCLUSION

The authentic artist cannot turn his back on the contradictions
that inhabit our landscapes… -Robert Smithson
Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal, entitled Fountain, in the Armory show in
New York City in 1919, disrupting an art historical lineage based solely on works created
by artists. This was the first readymade, or object taken from an everyday context and
raised to the status of art. “Fountain brings us into contact with an original that is still an
original but that also exists in an altered philosophical and metaphysical state. It is a
manifestation of the Kantian sublime: A work of art that transcends a form but that is also
intelligible, an object that strikes down an idea while allowing it to spring up stronger.”
98

The works of the artists explored in this paper present simple practical solutions to
environmental problems as art in the same way that Fountain reframed the public’s
relationship to the art object and its function. By creating situations that require
participation, these artists reframe the artist-viewer relationship as well as the relationship
between the artist and their artwork. This new paradigm’s success is measured not only in
the aesthetic of the work, but in its viability as an environmental and socio-political
solution.
The art in these works is the presentation of sustainable, socially-driven systems.
The aesthetic is the sustainability of the practice. Allen Carlson, referenced earlier in
relation to Mark Dion, recently came up with a new set of criteria for appreciating
agricultural landscapes emphasizing sustainable practices as a part of the aesthetics. This

98
Jerry Saltz, “Idol Thoughts: The glory of Fountain, Marcel Duchamp's ground-breaking
‘moneybags piss pot,’” Village Voice, Feb. 21, 2006.

57
model brings together these practices as nature pieces and garden pieces, and must be
based on empirical questions, “the expressed life values of agricultural landscapes depend
on their productivity and sustainability.”
99
Sustainability is a part of the criteria for
judging these works of art. Artists are taking on the cause of creating sustainable social
models that benefit communities.
In the projects described in this paper, sharing knowledge about nature turns the
viewer into a participant. What ties these projects together is a sense of social and
ecological sustainability granted through the vision of an artist. People and nature are a
part of the same system and must function together. What links the work of Dion, Sherk,
Haeg, and Potrc is this very concept, a breaking apart of a dualism of nature and the city,
revealing complex processes of engagement. These artists believe in the potential of the
land; planting a garden or engaging with the history of flora and fauna provide a new
framework for engaging with the city; viewers can actually participate in plucking three
squash from the vine and enjoying a bit of arugula, and take this experience away from
the site.
The experience of time is an important factor that sets these works apart from their
predecessors. Historically it takes time to create an artwork, however this process remains
invisible. In these works there is a continual sense of creation dependent on participation.
The sustainability of these projects is in their ability to grow long after their initial
creation. Viewers learn about a specific environment, and the works give them the tools
to see and engage with the world in new ways. For example, Sherk, Haeg, and Dion use

99
Allen Carlson, Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Ethics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), 98.

58
literature to augment their work: viewers can return home with a how-to guide, extending
the life span of the works indefinitely.
Aristotle calls all of the arts productive forms of knowledge in his Metaphysics:
“they are originative sources of change in another thing.”
100
Marjectica Potrc seems to
agree and refers to the artist as an enzyme, capable of bringing through her art an
awareness of processes outside of our semi-rational notions of city space and wilderness
space, of art and life, of modernism and disorder.
Bonnie Sherk designs and builds ecological systems that include humans and
nature. In each of the works of the aforementioned artists, processes of sustainability are
embodied in the product, which in this case continues to be a process. The works
discussed here can only be appreciated by viewing the whole system. All who encounter
these artworks, whether first or second hand, are affected because of the ubiquity of the
environmental solutions.
Art has long worked with and about nature, from embracing and representing
nature as transcendental “other”, to an obsession with entropy in natural processes in land
art, to dragging literal pieces of nature into the gallery, and finally to gardens in
Manhattan and field guides about city parks.
These works present a broad sense of environmentalism and present a language
for looking at that which we think is already known and stable. “People react to an
obvious but uninterpreted (as art) presence, rather than such a well-defined artificial

100
Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1968),
1098b.

59
environment or theatrical action…letting art lurk in the midst of things.”
101
Art gestures
towards a past and a future. Fritz Haeg uses the timeless garden to comment on a
sustainable present; he inserts an idea by way of vegetables. Bonnie Sherk creates living
libraries as tools to explore the idea of any site. Mark Dion uses the structure of a nature
guide to comment on the interrelationships in New York City. Marjetica Potrc frames
politics on a grassroots level through a functional vegetable garden. Products of these
works include: a spaghetti squash and a chart outlying how to grow it, the weeds, a list of
the birds in a city park, the body reframed as a tool for growing food.
If what today’s crisis-ridden-society needs to expand the environmental
movement is a robust sense of localism (and not a green product), accessible public art
can accelerate this change. These four contemporary artists gesture towards larger
structures that order life processes by creating works that include humans and the
environment in works that synthesize the seeming alienation of city living and a natural
ideal. They shift the focus of the transcendental as attainable through an aesthetic, to an
internal, always-occurring process gleaned through participation. Life Science, including
biology and zoology, become tools for painting a landscape, and gardening becomes
institutional critique and a political act. If we study and engage local environments, an
intuitive and individualistic sense of what must be done emerges, and the world begins to
change.

101
Adrian Piper, “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object,” in Out of
Order, Out of Sight: Vol. 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), 36.

60

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Through a theoretical and historical exploration of the contemporary environmental works of Marjetica Potrc, Fritz Haeg, Bonnie Sherk, and Mark Dion, I will consider these artists’ role in an ecology movement that positions humans and nature as a part of the same system in which the only way to change the world is to understand it. These works inhabit a site-specific environmentalism, a connection to the local, and a manifestation in situations that do not require the artist’s presence. As prototypes that can be reproduced anywhere, the works are not about art objects, but about ways of relating through objects. In engaging with these works, we become participants in creating and perpetuating a knowledge system about nature and the environment.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Bachler, Katharine Dunham (author)

Core Title Nature is as nature does: recent sustainable artists and the practice of local ecology

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/09/2010

Defense Date 05/14/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aesthetics,Ecology,environmentalism,Nature,OAI-PMH Harvest,social practice

Place Name Amsterdam (city or populated place), California (states), Lakewood (city or populated place), Netherlands (countries), New York (states), New York City (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anastas, Rhea (committee chair), Bray, Anne (committee member), Ulke, Christina (committee member)

Creator Email bachler@usc.edu,katiebachler@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3057

Unique identifier UC1162279

Identifier etd-Bachler-3704 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-331404 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3057 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Bachler-3704.pdf

Dmrecord 331404

Document Type Thesis

Rights Bachler, Katharine Dunham

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu