“Activity that is not checked by observation of what follows from it may be temporarily enjoyed. But intellectually it leads nowhere. It does not provide knowledge about the situations in which action occurs nor does it lead to clarification and expansion of ideas”1

One of our aims in establishing the ecoart occasional papers is precisely to address the idea of ‘checking by observation’ as a means to expand our understanding of and insights into art and ecology. We believe that our approach emphasising the multi-vocal approach to ‘checking by observation’ is fundamentally appropriate.

As someone who does not consider themselves an eco artist, but rather as a researcher concerned with public pedagogy and artists’ research, my concern is with what I perceive to be distinctive about some ecoart practices: a concern with learning. Ecoart practices frequently engage individuals and publics in various forms of learning experiences by framing and focusing an issue, engaging bodies and minds in unravelling its complexity. In addition there is the learning that is the practice itself – the way that ecoart practices are formed, articulated, unfold in the public sphere. In other words there is not only the public and private learning and engagement that is a part of the practice, but learning from the practices themselves.

This is most clearly exemplified for me in the following reflection by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. The Harrisons record the experience of their own learning (and realisation) in the context of other people also learning. Their interventions, as exemplified by this comment on Atempause: Breathing Space for the Sava River (1989-1990), have consequences that were not anticipated at the outset. These consequences, consciously grasped, take one to a new place, a new positioning and a new sense of scale of ecology.

They said,

For instance, we were invited to assist in the formation of a nature reserve along the Sava River… Finding this reserve already in a healthy state, though being threatened by the products of the industrialized agriculture along its banks, we chose instead to envision the whole Sava River, from above Ljubljana to its outfall in Beograd into the Danube, as a nature reserve. In so doing, we created a series of images and texts, exhibited often and repeated in diverse languages. They argued for the creation of a new history for the Sava, basically communicating that, while reasonably healthy, the Sava could move to a more pristine state by many small changes. The proposal was accepted by the Croatian Water Department. A young graduate student who was assisting us and working collaboratively with us on the river, after we were forced to leave because of the war, stayed on and then made a similar but far more complex proposal, using our model, for the Sava’s sister river, the Drava. This proposal was also accepted. The first unintended consequence was that the assistant, using our model, would get a second river, quite different from the first, established as a nature reserve. The second unintended consequence was that the Sava and the Drava, collectively, gave the lower Danube almost 50% of its clean water. The third unintended consequence was that these cleaner waters, downriver, helped to partially flush the polluted Danube estuary as it flows into the Black Sea. We the artists chose to call the nature of this set of events “Conversational Drift”, as the original Sava proposal was conversational rather than iconic in nature.2

The metaphor of conversation enables a fluidity of ideas in which the first action, the invitation to assist in the forming of a nature reserve locally, is catalyst to a second, a way of envisioning a complex ecosystem at a much greater scale. This in turn feeds back into a new possibility in the neighbourhood, the Drava, which intensifies and augments the consequences for the whole.

In this example we are witnessing how the artists themselves learn from projecting into the world and reflecting on what it means, thereby refining their methods through insight – “We started to design our work differently”. By articulating this learning, folding it back so to speak into in the public sphere, we too learn as a community of practice.

Among eco-artists in particular there is a sense that learning is a matter of urgency given the scale of the issues (and perhaps a need to avoid reinventing the wheel through unacknowledged copying).

Choreographing learning

Crucial to shared learning, therefore, is the way in which we structure and participate in a learning space. The Working in Public seminar series (2006-8) sought to learn with and from Suzanne Lacy, feminist performance artist and activist, focusing on a particular body of work, the Oakland Projects (1990-2000). We established a space of exchange between artists working in Scotland and their experiences of specific social, cultural and political circumstances as compared with those of the West Coast United States. With Lacy, we identified a set of crucial subjects that framed tensions and contradictions. These included power and representation, aesthetics and ethics and clashing notions of quality in public art practice. Lacy addressed these issues as did the core group of participants in the Seminars. These issues enabled us to move from focusing on the familiar ‘how to do’ type exchange among artists to the emergence of a shared discourse.

Identifying the means and methods of reflective learning

To be able to reflect, we need to revisit, re-search, experience. While technologies of documentation are ubiquitous, these do not tell us what and how to document work in the public sphere. It is noticeable that the artists discussed above carefully construct a feedback loop between what they do and what happens as a result. But how is such artistic knowledge carried through and beyond its unique manifestations in projects, exhibitions and related publications?

For a musician this knowledge is invested in scores as the material means to communicate quite precisely the content of an artwork. Taking a lead from Allan Kaprow, I would like to speculate for a moment on the potential value of scores to reflection and learning.

Allan Kaprow and others challenged orthodoxies of artistic production/artistic genius/single authorship by means of scores. In being open to interpretation, scores engage improvisation and thereby prioritise thinking and being ‘in the moment’. We mined these aspects in our recent work Calendar Variations. Interestingly scores in music emerged historically as a means of capturing part of a performance after the event, rather than in anticipation of it.

If we understand a score, not as a how-to set of instructions, but as a means to access the work in sufficient clarity and depth in order to perform or to develop new works, what does that offer?

How might we ‘score’ an ecological art project such as Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield- a Confrontation, New York (1982), as a past performance? Might such a score move beyond the capturing and historicisation of this 1982 project through iconic images of wheatfield, tractor and skyscraper? Might a score (that remembered not just the image, but also the symbolic distribution of the harvested wheat to 28 further cities around the world) be a means to repeat intelligently, as well as interpret, or develop new related works?

How might such a score draw out underlying critical issues in the way that the framing of issues within Working in Public assisted all members of the group to think through practices, their own and others.

How might a score and subsequent performance of Hans Haacke’s Rhinewater Purification Plant  (1972) 3 critically trace this artwork as simultaneously producing a set of functional protocols around graywater as well as framing the symbolic value of doing so?

Might scores enable us to inhabit these artworks critically and intelligently taking them into our daily experience, setting them to work on the challenges we encounter?

Newton Harrison encourages us to break our icons as a way of moving forward, to participate as interlocutors and critically inhabit the artists’ metaphors, concepts and methods but in our own understanding of the issues on the ground. In doing so, he interrupts the closure that traps art into objects and notions of genius. He draws out the creator in each one of us. In so doing, he and the artists mentioned here, forge a new path and quality of relations between art and experience.

Anne Douglas, May 2011

Notes

1. Dewey, J.  (1938) Experience and Education. Reprinted Touchstone 1997.

2. Harrison, H. M.,and Harrison, N.. (2007)  Public Culture and Sustainable Practices: Peninsula Europe from an ecodiversity perspective, posing questions to Complexity Scientists. University of California, Irvine: Structure and Dynamics, 2 (3).

3. Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, http://greenmuseum.org/c/ecovention/rhine.html