Polemics and Poetry of Environmental Art
By David Galloway
Aachen,Germany - In an uneven but provocative show at the Ludwig
Forum, trough Oct. 3, 33 participants from nine countries have
documented contemporary art's complex and multifaceted relationship
to the natural world.
The range of media and themes can be vieved as an index of
increased ecological concern, but also as a mirror of fin-desiècle
pluralism in the arts.The idioms range from the lyric reductionism
of the Chinese painter Qui Shi-Hua to the exuberant
landscape-abstractions of the German-born Ulrike Arnold and the
theory-laden environmental sculptures of the New York artist Alan
Sonfist.
The late Robert Smithson and the German guru Joseph Beuys served as
honorary godfathers for the Aachen presentation. The project Beuys
pursued with messianic zeal in the last years of his lif, which
would have transformed a toxic dump in the Hamburg harbor into a
"social sculpure," is represented here in the form of drawings,
photographs and manuscripts. For Smithson, one of the "earth
artists" who closed their ateliers in the 1970s to work directly in
nature, using art to beautify the scarred landscape was a
hypocritical posture. On the contrary, landscape sculpture should
highlight civilization's invasive practices.A modest but dramtic
work by Smithson is placed before the entrance to the Ludwig Forum.
First executed in 1969, "Dead Tree" is a metaphor of the
interaction between nature and civilization that obsessed the
artist.
A later generation of environmental artists has developed a broad
range of stances:introspective or polemical,mystical,activist or
analytical.The late Ana Mendieta burned the silhouette of her body
into the earth, covered it with clay and feathers to merge with the
ground, or reproduced its contours in grass.Such temorary works
expressed the artist's own sense of her marginal existence as both
a Cuban exile and a woman artist. Woman make some of the most
resonant statements in the Aachen survey. "May be," a
mandorla-shaped sculpture by Madeleine Dietz, communicates without
recourse to the theoretical baggage that burdens much of the
show.
Arnold also encourages the viewer'S direct, sensuous reception of
her oeuvre. Since 1980 she has traveled the world,setting up her
temporary atelier in remote, often hazardous locations. There she
pulverizes stones to create pigments that she applies to the canvas
with her hands: layric, gestural reprises that are at once
landscape paintings, travel reports and journal entries. For Aachen
she produced seven spectacular works in the desert of the Amercian
Southwest and northern Mexico.
Such site-specific projects are documented within the exhibition,
which theoretically provides a venue for the confrontation of
artistic postions.But the Ludwig Forum is a problematical
environment, a low-ceilinged, open-plan space where the permanent
collection overlaps unidily with the temorary show. The resulting
visual statics overwhelms many of the works on view.
Forunatly, the show`s most subtle works are installed in one of the
building`s few self-contained areas. Here the near-monochrome
canvases of Qui Shi-Hua unfold their subliminal
messages,counterpointed by the rosenraum (rose room)
created by the Dutch artist Herman de Vries.
Nearby, an installation by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg offers extracts
from the archive of the Vavilov Institute in St. Petersburg, where
more than that 60,00 types of wheat are catalogued. Here, as in all
of her work, Schulz-Dornburg embraces that modernist creed of "less
is more." The credo might have been more effectively applied to
this ambitous but flawed exploration of "Natural Reality."
David Galloway is an art critic and free-lance curator based
in Wuppertal, Germany
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