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MARION WILSON: I'm a respondent, but I also wanted to show you a couple of images because I do live in the area. And part of my response is-- or part of my answer to some of these questions is in the actual teaching, which I define as part of my social practice. I'm a painter in the exhibition, but because we're at Cornell University, which is in a museum, which is an institutional force in itself, I thought I would talk to you a little bit about the possibilities of leveraging our institutional resources in addition to our personal resources as artists.
And I also just want to just really quickly point to two different immediate thoughts. One that Lucy said is we're more dependent on nature than nature is on us, but we decline together. And with the most recent photographs where there was an image that you saw technology in nature and no human presence. And to me, that looked-- that was a very ominous image for the future.
But to refer to what Amy said, that there is this possibility of hope, or this feeling of hope, and for me, that comes very much from working with young people. So real quickly, Lucy Lippard, in Lore of the Locals, says, "Architects create space, whereas artists create place."
Feeling a sense of place in the mindset of a college student would seem to be inherently contradictory. Most students that arrive into a city or a college town, I would think, never give a thought to the issues of that place or think about it again after they leave. An outcome of my teaching with art and architecture students has been to instill a sense of rootedness and Earth and human empathy with an inherently transient population. Also, a recognition of the physical, the spiritual, and the financial parts of being an artist.
Much of my teaching has grown out of my own desire for a sense of rootedness and a sensitivity I feel towards the very harsh upstate New York landscape. A few years back, another faculty member and I declared ourselves artists and residents along the shores of Onondaga Lake and gained entry into 1,400 square feet of the contaminated Solvay waste beds.
And Amy showed those paintings that I'd done. They're actually one inch by one inch paintings on photography glass. While I painted miniature landscapes on recycled photography glass, we also taught a studio art class that took, as its subject matter, Onondaga Lake, at one time declared the dirtiest lake in North America.
Onondaga lake, until recently, was the elephant in the living room. Except for a few pockets of environmental scientists, the city nor the campus did not talk much about the lake. The lake, meanwhile, tells the entire history of the city, its plant and fish population, industrial waste, and sewage, and salt.
In the lake project class, the students used performance of washing in the lake, interviews of pedestrians, fabricated scenic viewing stations to explore through their sensitive senses one of the city's most telling histories. Can you see that? OK.
Upon the success of this project, I was invited to build a project that linked the campus of Syracuse University and the Syracuse city school district. I developed a curriculum named after the concept new directions of social sculpture and I did a project called MLAB Builds, which took as its task to address the lack of space in crumbling city schools with their lack of arts education.
MLAB Builds began with the purchase of a 1984 American Eagle RV. And with a total of $30,000 from two grants, my class of nine students gutted, renovated, and then programmed the used RV into a mobile digital lab, poetry library, and community gallery. With one set of cameras and books and two student teachers, MLAB proceeded to travel to 12 schools a year, offering art and creative writing programs.
In Syracuse with a private university within a relatively depressed city, there is an assumption that one side of the population is privileged, and therefore has the capacity to give, but in turn does not have needs themselves. The other side is poor, and the natural receiver. I would suggest instead a relationship of community and reciprocity, or the Senegalese concept of [NON-ENGLISH], family. We are all equal as humans and therefore need and have skill sets equally, and our community and collaboration begins from this place.
The third and final project I will show you is 601 Tully, the purchase and renovation of an abandoned residence on the west side of Syracuse that had become a local drug haven. Over the course of seven semesters of a design-built studio now in its fourth year of programming, although we just lost all our funding, we designed, built, and programmed this house into Contemporary Arts Project space that linked university, neighbor, and artist with socially and ecologically artists in the co-production of new culture.
Whereas MLAB was about creating a liminal, or threshold space that could always shift, 601 Tully is about being present, being a neighbor, staying in place. All of my classes are taught in the building several miles from campus. Each semester, we invite and engage new eco artists to work in this space, linking neighbor with artists and university partner.
Here's Dan [? Siple, ?] who created a bird line connecting 30 properties along the fence line, emanating out from our building, and Tattfoo Tan, who linked art and nutrition with a local grocer and a bilingual school. That's my presentation.
[APPLAUSE]
JOHANNES LEHMANN: Thank you very much for staging this exciting symposium. My name is Johannes Lehmann. I'm a Professor in the Department of crop and soil sciences. So I'm not an artist, I'm a soil scientist.
I dig in the soil, not dirt. Dirt is what you have on your shoes. We work on soil. And so for me, it's of course, very exciting to be with artists that actually work with soil earth, but then have environmental issues at heart.
I'm teaching environmental sciences colloquium class for the environmental sciences majors at Cornell University, so I hope I can bring some thoughts here. And I'm sure, and I already have brought a lot of thoughts out from here that I go away with.
So I'll start a little bit with a few thoughts about my reactions as a scientist, then become a little bit self-reflexive and then finally end with some forward-looking thoughts. So one thought, the first is, don't we know all of this?
I mean, I know we're a little bit a self-selected group, but even anyone on the street would probably say, I have heard of climate change. I might have different opinions about it, but I don't need to know more about it. I'm just tired of it.
So what can this bring to that person? And it's not easy, because they have to come in. Now the doors are open most days and the doors are well oiled. So you can get actually in. There is no hurdle. There's no entrance fee here. You can just come in and browse through.
But still, I feel where is the novelty in all of this? And where does it convince someone that is not already convinced? And yes, there are information. where's the new information?
I think there are several aspects to that. There is some new information. I think Maya Lin yesterday night has shown there's a lot of information that you can gather. And today, the speakers have shown a few ways of looking at the same thing in different light.
But where I think it's very, very strong, an exhibition such as this one, and the activities and the topics that the artists have shown us, how they tackle it is to overcome the general fatigue in dealing with these enormous problems. That we start not again-- yes, I know climate change exists, or I have heard of it. But I really need to do something about it. And I think that's where it can really work very well.
Having illustrative and engaging narratives, the Gyres by Maarten Van den Enden, now the plastic [INAUDIBLE]. We teach in environmental sciences colloquium. We had one semester where we had the students read-- this year, it's Garbology. So that's a journalist writing about garbage. And the gyres are in here as well.
But it would become so much stronger to have students and the public interact on the level that they can interact with art and artists then through a book, even as well written as this one. And I also like the lighters today in Picasso's Starry Night formation. That also worked very well for me. And I think it would work well for the students and for the public as well, if they can find it.
Bringing unexpected forms, bringing the personality of the artist in the discussion. And that works, of course, very well in a format such as this one, where we can actually see the artist, hear from the artist. That gets, of course, sometimes lost in an exhibition where you don't interact that-- but you see the personal narrative in Yang Yi's photos of the submerged hometown and you feel the distress of that person, the personal story that is not my story, but this is his story or her story. And that touches. Bringing that into the public, but also hopefully into the university.
And Stephanie made a point earlier that there is-- students come in here, students not only from Cornell, but from the whole region are coming in here. And I think there's an opportunity to go out into the public and bring the art out.
Then when Andrea showed me around and Amanda around the exhibition, she made the point that there-- on several artists, how they critique the scientific inquiry. Well, as a scientist, I have to be shocked, of course, that science is untouchable, is objective.
We don't interpret, we measure and we have data, facts. And yeah. But it's actually true. And I don't think I'll spill any great secret if I say that there is a lot of subjectivity and objectivity and what questions we ask to begin with and how we tackle it and what we choose to interpret in which way. There is some subjectivity to it. And I think that's an important message that could come out of this.
Even scientists are climate doubters. I was just privy to an email exchange for a Department of Energy Committee that I serve. And there are faculty that are circulating data that they think we should all debate because they question climate change. So that's really scary, I feel.
So I think I, as a scientist, am stimulated by these discussions, and the presentations, and the exhibition. It's very important for scientists to engage more. We can reach a lot more people. And Maya Lin has shown that also, the wonderful cigarette butt work upstairs shows how we can display data and reach, probably, a lot more people in very unexpected ways.
And I find that very, very compelling. We do these very boring bar charts. And if we feel adventurous, we do pie charts, and we make them in color and pay $500 to have them published in color. But what Maya showed us, and what this exhibition shows us, we can demonstrate and show data in much stronger ways than with our boring pie charts.
And if David Atkinson was here, he would probably very much second that it would be great, a faculty, fellow and board member of the center, to find ways how artists can help a center for sustainability such as the Atkinson Center here at Cornell to get the message across much more effective than us scientists can do that.
I think also students and the public would take the message out I really liked to hear about Patricia Johnson's sewage plant and how that can be part of an outreach program. I think in extension, if we could work with extension, if artists could work with extension. And I really enjoyed the fog catcher in the Atacama and making it-- it's sexy and appealing.
I work with cookstoves and cookstove projects in Africa. And these cookstoves, they work well, but they are not really adopted. And some faculty feel we need to make them nicer. They can't be cheap and cheap looking.
Nobody, if they have the choice of a working, but not really nice car and a Porsche, they'd take the Porsche. And so making these very simple but clever technologies look good, and be desirable, and be cool, I think that would help in adoption of intelligent projects.
I think I would like to go away with something that I can do myself. And we teach the environmental sciences colloquium in the fall. I would very much like to have a discussion how we can bring artists and the museum to the classroom, in addition to bringing the students into the museum. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AMANDA JO GOLDENSTEIN: Hi. I'm Amanda Jo Goldstein. I'm a Professor in the English Department, where I work on one of the periods that is incredibly implicated, I think, by this exhibit. I'm a romanticist.
So I work on the period of literature that's sort of responsible for the idea of a pristine wilderness, for its idealization, also for the idea of the artist as an inspired, creative, autonomous genius whose work is the expression of a personal internal experience and whose artwork ought to function as a kind of autonomous totality, independent of its context, of its materials.
So this is actually one caricature of romanticism. And I'm going to try to put aside my desire to resuscitate romanticism just in order to set the record straight. But I will try to speak to what some of the motives, and responses, and the plurality of romantic attitudes might have to tell us about what artworks that are responding to the crisis of nature are doing right now. And I will just speak as an outsider about what I perceived in this exhibit in particular.
And I should say that when I say the Romantic period, I'm talking about that period that we heard today, as designated as the-- it's not an accident. It's the beginning of the Anthropocene. So 1790, that's an important date and this period of the turn to the 19th century after the French Revolution.
So a period of immense social transformation and political disappointment. Also somewhere when industrialization is beginning to be sort of massively felt, especially in Britain, which is the place that I study most.
One thing that I just sort of wanted to begin with, one thing that I've kind of learned in my research on this period is that this very idea of an opposition between art and science has itself a history. And that in a sense, that history begins, or is catalyzed, or becomes recognizable in the Romantic period.
So when Andrea suggested to us that, look-- our brilliant curator wanted to think about relationships between art and science, and we've seen those played out in so many different ways. She said, is it that art kind of gives us a personal or subjective toehold on the overwhelming quantity of scientific facts, and objective data, and perhaps the kind of overwhelming vastness of forms of crisis that just seem too big to grapple with.
This very understanding that what art would supply would be the subjective angle to a science that's responsible for the objective angle is instead a kind of-- is an outcome of disciplinary wars that were fought out in the 19th century. So I think it's important to remember that it was not always obvious, actually, that art didn't have a very strong claim on realistic natural scientific representation.
And I think the readiest example, I've spoken with some of you about this in corollary conversations already, is just that there was-- and I work on literature. So poetry is the example. It was perfectly normal in the 18th century to communicate scientific information in verse and figural language.
So Charles Darwin's grandfather, who's active in the middle and late 18th century instead of in the middle of the 19th century, when the famous Darwin was, was also incredibly an important scientist and naturalist. Everything that he published, he kind of doubled. He would do his medicine, his zoology, his botany, he would do once in prose and once in verse.
So one thing that I see about these artists whose work is in some sense becoming indistinguishable from forms of scientific practice, the term "ecovention," of learning and then intervening back in the landscape is actually a reclamation of a different attitude that actually saw artistry as a very apt technology for dealing with realistic representations of nature.
That's in part because nature itself was previously understood as productive, as active. Not necessarily alive, but as a great-- not all alive, I mean. Of course, there are living things and nonliving things. But across the board, just a sense that nature was a wonderful repository of figures, and forms, and generative, transformative energies.
That's one thing that I really saw coming back in this show with these artists who are going into a landscape and doing some kind of gesture that actually then invites nonhuman, inhuman forces and species to fill it in. We saw those woven banks today that redirect the course of a river, or Maya-- Lin's work also, which is building an armature, which is then going to be covered over by an energy that isn't hers.
When I walked through this exhibition and I tried to spend a lot of time with it, this is already-- the punch line's been blown because we've already heard about the love motel for insects. For me, the love motel for insects was, in a way, a really fit emblem for this kind of artwork insofar as it seemed to be-- it's a hotel, right?
It's like art is the hospitality industry. So it's a creation of-- we won't take that too far, and don't tell the hoteliers. But just the idea that what is created here is an open structure for inhabitation by something else.
So this recession of the role of the artist as the only one capable of making a form, or of doing a transformation, and a kind of invitation to something else to take up residence in that place. And so in that sense, when Andrea was asked, are the markings there?
Have the insects started mating there? Are they leaving their markings on the surface of this-- I'm sorry, I should say this is-- we saw it earlier, but not all of you are here. So it's a sort of armature.
It's covered in some kind of nylon. There's a light inside that's very attractive to insects. And so the hope is they'll take up residence and breed, and we'll see some traces of this breeding and this activity.
Anyway, the answer was no, not yet. The insects are just coming out. So this is a form that-- this is an artwork that in order to be completed, is awaiting the collaboration of its inhuman inhabitants. And I think we see that multiply throughout the exhibition.
I was also really struck by Matthew Brandt's images of the Great Salt Lake. So this is a situation where it's a picture of the classic earthwork, Spiral Jetty, and it's a large format photograph. But instead of using purified water to develop this image, this very highly salinated water from the Great Salt Lake is used to develop the image.
So in this image, then, the referent, the place talks back so that we have two kinds of realism competing at once. There's a photographic negative that represents something recognizable to us that worked on our scale and frame of reference. That's then covered over by the action, the elemental action of salt, which then creates these beautiful neon, radiant forms that partially obscure and disorient our own access to the image, but are also letting the represented thing in.
I'll try to conclude, because I feel like maybe this has already been a lot. The idea of letting the object, or the other, or the natural in reminded me of a kind of competing idea, a competing romantic idea of objectivity. So this is one outgrowth of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe reception of Kant.
And Kant was someone who was very concerned with our risks of projecting our own subjective human modes of thinking and understanding on the external world. So being an ethical subject for Kant actually meant very carefully policing against our tendencies to project our own wishes, desires, modes of seeing on the external world.
So to be ethical, then, in terms of representation, in terms of interaction with another, is actually to constrain the self very carefully. What Goethe pointed out is that this can be taken too far. It can be taken to a point where actually, only humans are conceived of as agents. And that actually it actually denies power to that which we are afraid of harming. And it simultaneously denies our own vulnerability to harm, or to influence, or to activity by that other thing.
I think that sense that sense of our having somehow obscured our own vulnerability is an environmental problem, because we have trouble believing that actually, we could be erased. We could be erased from this world. And so in some ways, I think-- anyway, granting nature its power to influence back.
And then also its resilience. The fact that it can be pushed, and prodded, and intervened in without going away, these are kind of two aspects of the same coin. And Goethe said-- he said, I want to be an objectively active thinker.
He said, but what objectivity means to me, he said, is that the objects act upon me and I act back upon them until there's so much interpenetration in the act-- in the interaction of producing an artwork or one of his scientific treaties because he did both, that in some ways, those positions-- the moment of experiment in art or in science is the moment when those positions are confused and when the knower's body, the knower's mind has been subject to the influence of objects and transformed by them. So anyway, I'll stop there. Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
RENATE FERRO: Hello. I brought my water, which I might need. I'll just put it right here. I'll put it here. So my name is Renate Ferro, and I'm actually-- I'm a little short, actually.
I should have stayed seated. Oh, well. I'll try. So I was really contemplating on how to react. I was asked to take 10 minutes and just kind of respond not only to the exhibition, but also what's happened today.
And I really felt-- I was trying to decide how to respond. And I just said, I know. I'm going to write you all a letter. And so I've written a letter.
And actually, I started writing it on Wednesday afternoon. And I actually just scribbled the last part of it just a minute ago. So here it goes. And it's relatively short. So just a little bit of background. I'm from the art department, which is right across the street.
So I walk to and from Tjaden Hall, where my studio office resides, past the Johnson Museum 10 to 20 times a day. My gaze inevitably wanders to the exterior of this IM Pei building.
On a lucky day, I entered the building with a desire to slow down the pace of my ordinarily really busy daily schedule. Alone, I wander in a meditative state to look, to seep in the majestic spaces and the aura of the art that is in this building-- of the art that is that this building houses.
On other occasions, I'm accompanied by an alliance of studio students on a mission to spend time asking questions about the work they see, interrogating its context and framework. Today, I propose that we stand at the intersection of contemplation and critique, and move onward.
At the onset of the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a magnificent maze of networked roots excavated by Professor Jack Elliott's human ecology students' Victus, or Vanquished Maple. Elliott and his students meticulously cleaned and burnished out the dirt and the grime in the root system, the physical labor, reminding them of the effects that the reduced sap production brought about by the warmer temperatures of climate change and its effect on the mortality of trees.
I can imagine that nearly 45 years ago, in 1969, when museum director Thomas Leavitt and curator Willoughby Sharp asked a group of artists to conceive and make interventions for the Earth Art Show, that this very site of Elliott's Victus was perhaps a well manicured lawn with living maple trees whose living roots reach deep within the soil underneath.
The magnificent maze of Victus and its lesson of the day provide a forecast of what the visitor is about to witness in considering the broader issues that Beyond Earth Art raises. These issues are particularly vital to me, not only as an artist, but also as a professor of art, students who all believe that they're entitled to make their mark in the realm of the history of art and therefore the institutions of museums and galleries.
So these are some of the questions. How can we support, activate, and engage young artists whose cross-disciplinary research-based practices are invested in asking the right questions? Questions that suspend the boundaries between object and context, disband the differentiation between a call to action, the work of art, and its documentation. And to reconsider that the nature of art, the role of artist and the museum in social, political, and in this case, ecological issues has to be.
Lastly, how can we engage governmental and private funders to help us support these initiatives? This is where it's at. This Victus network of tuberous stems are reminiscent for me of Newton Harrison and Helen Mary Harrison's photograph of lagoon [INAUDIBLE] from their museum show of Lagoon Cycle, exhibited originally in the Johnson here in 1985.
A miniature documentation of this colossal installation actually is exhibited in the gallery on this floor of Beyond Earth Art. And if you haven't seen it, you should really go look at it closely.
I recall visiting the Harrisons. I was in my 20s at the time. I had no affiliation with the University, but I happened to befriend them and I was invited to their installation. And I watched Helen so carefully write out the dialogue between the lagoon maker and the witness.
In fact, she did so kind of up on these large walls. It was mammoth, and they were huge walls. The Lagoon Cycle was a predigital assemblage of oversized images, maps, diagrams, and flags composited as a spectacular installation, but more importantly, a conceptually-driven social, political, and ecological project about the sustainability of life.
Helen wrote the words of the witness. Above all, he said, go to the lagoon at Uppuveli. Go to the first bridge north of the Trincomalee and look for the fishermen's nets hanging there. You will see shallows with pockets of mangroves and even some pools drying up.
The waters of the first lagoon and root systems of the mangroves were installed in the same area that Lucy and Jorge Orta's own work on water is hung in Beyond Earth Art. And that is the truth.
Conceptually, the Harrisons written dialogue recounted the complex and blurred boundaries between nature, culture, self, and world, art, science that this morning's speaker, Susan Becker, so poignantly encouraged us to complicate. The Harrisons, a collaborative team and professors at UC San Diego, for many years based their project on the viability of a man-made environment for the Sri Lankan crab living in the confines of a modernist museum, this actual modernist museum.
A very early metaphor for not only lifelong solution to sustainable survival, but also an example of what happens when a sociologist and a painter pair together to solve world issues of an art museum. And those of you who know the Harrisons know that they bicker back and forth just beautifully.
The Harrisons insisted that imagination would open up possibilities, critical questioning would appropriately disrupt our belief system, and politics presented the expectation that we were to be called into action. So Lucy and Jorge Orta not only raised these questions, but present real life solutions in food, water, life.
And Lucy, whose roots-- I'm doing a little investigation into their life-- came from a family whose father was an impressionist painter, but whose mother had activist goings on. And obviously, she mentioned that she pairs her work with her Argentinean artist husband. And I believe that their collaboration considers both problems of not only a local community, but also a global community, which I think is really important to instill in students.
The work of both collaborative teams, and I've used specifically the Ortas and the Harrisons together, are a call to the arts, a call to acknowledge the world of the anthropocene and to take action to change what is disintegrating. A nudge for cross-disciplinary problem solving and expansion of the notion of what is art, or is it art, some people would say.
The French philosopher of art and aesthetics, among other things, Jacques Ranciere spoke on campus on Tuesday afternoon. Though I'm being quite selective in summarizing his sometimes confusing remarks, I'll quote a couple of sentences from the end of his talk.
And he said, I quote, "art is defining new ways of seeing, new ways of doing. Art must disappear into new forms of life." And no, I disagree with his solution for that. I kind of have my own.
In the 1960s, the Earth artists were being influenced by the intersections of art as material, while culture around them, new forms of [INAUDIBLE] were a site for change. The Harrisons and the Ortas not only establish an aesthetic site, but a site of ethics, politics, and social engagement, with all things having to do with our planet via research-based, cross-disciplinary perspectives.
They implore us as artists, as museum curators, as educators, as supporters of the arts to reconsider the nature of art and the role of the artist in the art museum, in social, political, and in this case, ecological issues. Now I want to just end with Maya.
Maya Lin's work, as she presented it yesterday afternoon to a packed Milstein Hall-- and it was quite an event, if you weren't there-- consists of three aspects, as she explains, almost like a tripod. She didn't talk about the camera on top, but she did talk about the tripod. And she described it as her architecture, her memorial designs, and her art practice.
Audience members were mesmerized. In fact, I heard students go, ah. Ah. By the modern, cool, slick, beautiful designs that she presented. So she lured us in.
But she made this very subtle shift that occurred about 45 minutes into her lecture. This turn in Maya Lin's work, including the piece featured in this show, The Empty Room, insists that the urgency or the politics of extinction must be acted upon. While understated beauty of her aesthetic remains, the message rings true and clear to all.
Become educated. Take action. Get involved. Be a vegetarian. Conserve water. Our life depends on it.
Lin sees the empty room as a call to action to museum professionals, to the arts and the sciences, and I would also say their funders. Especially their funders. And those who inhabit the museums, that excuses for opting out is no longer an option. The disappearance of species from the Earth is a matter of life and death. The installation is related to-- this installation here is related to a complex internet site, and I don't know if you've been able to see it. It's called What Is Missing.
And it houses an archive of videos, astute sound, scientific resources, and ecologically environmentally-related organizations. But it actually-- what I think is most important mission is to call out for participation of internet visitors for anyone who wants to leave memories of extinct forms of life.
Maya Lin is a woman with a mission, and her life's work has morphed into that of a vocal activist with a glimmer of hope. Really pretty astounding and pretty, I think, exciting. So we must do our part to join in, to activate, to participate, to pontificate, and to call to action.
We must follow the Harrisons, the Ortas, and Maya Lin's example, I believe. And as an artist, I try to do that every day. I do my political action and I do my art. And sometimes, they come together.
But I think even importantly, in thinking about these whole questions of research-based critical resources and opportunities, I'm going to point to two. First of all, to give the museum a chance and the funding to do an exhibition like this where it does encourage cross-disciplinary engagements. And I think all of us are kind of here to do that.
But I think that institutionally, one of the things we're doing in the art department is we're setting up a program where students can actually study in five years. But in studying those five years, they come out with two degrees. They come out with an art degree, but they also come out with perhaps a biology degree, a political science degree, a degree in writing or English, a degree in whatever else. And that other degree actually informs and activates their art practice. So it works back and forth together.
So not only the infrastructure of the university, but also its resources, like the museum, and having those two things converge is what encourages me and I think all of us who are artists and faculty members to always think outside the box and to disrupt our ordinary ways of thinking, to push on and to activate. That's it.
[APPLAUSE]
JACK ELLIOT: My name's Jack Elliott. I never introduced myself as an artist, although I do try to create meaningful works of art in some circumstances. I usually introduce myself as an educator, a student as well as a professor.
I'm interested in learning about the world around me and what I can do about this world. My background is in architecture and product design. I have two masters in those. And then previous to that, I have a degree in physics with a minor in sculpture. So I'm all over the place.
When I came to Cornell, I was brought here from Georgia Tech. And I was brought here to introduce curriculum that had to do with sustainable design. It would have been the first curriculum of its kind in the design program I was in. And I had been working on that at Georgia Tech, in product design, and there seemed to be a good fit.
And the question is, what is sustainable? And is it just about maintaining the conditions we have now? I would argue maybe that's not so good. Maybe we should invent, or imagine a future that's actually better than the one now.
So it's not just about protection, perhaps. It's maybe more about regenerative action, where we heal things rather than just try to give the future generations the same kinds of things we have now. In fact, I would argue the things we have now is, in many cases, out of sync.
So through this process of teaching about sustainable design and trying to generate some research programs, I found myself often drawn to the fields of art for inspiration. Works like Goldsworthy, where someone goes to a site without a tool, does something amazingly significant, leaves it, and it returns to the Earth. This ephemeral art.
I thought, wouldn't it be great if we had ephemeral design? Where something could be built, like this building. But if it decided to no longer be, it could be easily taken apart and moved, or reconstituted in some other form. Is that possible with this building?
Absolutely not. It would take a large explosive device to bring this building down. So we have to really change the way we think about how we interact with the world as designers. And I think artists often give us some clues about some of the potentialities of that.
Bergson once said, art is a more direct version of reality. And so I agree with that. And that's why I was so excited that this show was being put together here for my students, because in a distilled way, they could understand, in a new way, some of the issues we've been grappling with.
And as a designer, I find myself in an interesting situation. I'm not necessarily an artist or a scientist, but I bring both of those things together. That is the nature of design.
So you have to deal with real-world issues and problems, but you also have to do that in a creative and imaginative way. And so this polemic between science and art, I don't really pay much attention to it. I go wherever my interests take me. And right now, I'm doing some concrete research. But at the same time, I've got a lab full of sculptural pieces.
So before I start, I'd like to talk a little bit about the piece outside and where that came from. So yeah, let's do that. So I have-- here you can see artworks and design works. I came here starting off doing design works, architecture, interiors, and industrial. I'll show the industrial, because this kind of thing that can fit into buildings like museums.
And in fact, this piece here, which is on the National Mall in Washington, actually was-- its sister was here for an exhibit previously. And so this is really the point in my life where I started working with big tree parts, and what I call "arbortecture."
And I found this amazing kinship between people, trees, and buildings, the history, the archetypal origins of architecture about the temple coming from a tree logic. And then the relationship that we have to trees through our divinities and through historical narratives. And then even in this case, these trees were on Cornell campus in a children's garden, and the educators use these trees to teach the children about cycles of nature.
These were sugar maples also, and they would tap these trees and the children would extract the maple syrup and get all excited. And it was sort of a harbinger of spring. And it was a ritual that they would do. And these trees were taken down, they were perfectly healthy trees, but for a construction project.
And the people who were involved with the early childhood center were devastated. They didn't know that these trees would turn into something else. And when they discovered that they turned into something else, I got these amazing emails from these people about the importance of memorializing, commemorating the role that these trees played in the lives of the children.
And so it started to-- I started to see and feel this resonance with natural forms. And people. And so I started exploring this further.
So I started thinking, well, maybe rather than just doing furniture, benches, tables, things like that, I could actually start looking at bigger things. Initially, I started off quite small. These are my wood crystals, and they're more made for the hand, and they talk about the juxtaposition between the order of geometry and the disorder of nature, or the other order of nature.
But soon, I started doing the bigger stuff. And this is-- I'll just put this up. So this piece was finished last year and it has all these candles.
It's relating to the Lights Out campaign where the Earth hour, everywhere around the world shuts off their power and goes into darkness as a statement about climate change and the role that energy plays in that.
But for me, I was working with this piece. And like all my pieces, I'm delivered a piece of wood. I have no idea what it's going to become. I just work with it.
I prep it, I clean it, and a kind of form emerges. And in this case, I wanted the intervention to be quite minimalist. But it's also reminiscent of some large thing, powerful thing being vanquished. It's bowing down to you as you enter.
It's head is downward. There's this kind of-- you get this sense of this relationship between you and it. It's bigger than you. It's so big, we could not get it in the building. We were trying very hard to get it inside the building.
So this idea of Vanquish brings me to the theme of this exhibition, which is Beyond Earth Art. And I've heard lots of commentary about optimism and hope, and how important that is. And I think it is important.
In our department, we have social scientists who work on developing techniques to engender behavioral change. And this is difficult. It's very difficult. And how can you do it? Information is not enough.
Inspiration is not enough. There are techniques that are more effective than others in precipitating behavioral change. Am I trying to do that? Yes, I'm motivated to make the world a better place. And I'm trying to get my students to then go out as agents of change to make that happen.
But I don't want them to go out there with this wide-eyed sense of we can do anything. I want them to go out there with a kind of skepticism and cynicism in a way so they can apply their efforts in the most appropriate manner.
So when I think about Beyond Earth Art, I think of the first Earth art. And it really was innocent. They were making marks in the ice. They were thinking about sight and they were thinking about Earth as a material, but they weren't thinking about Earth as a planet. They weren't thinking about themselves as at risk.
And this has changed now. And so I think Beyond Earth Art now, you see these themes of all these biological, biophysical problems that we're facing. And it's not a lot of-- it's kind of a downer.
So how do you deal with that? And how do you allow people to dwell in the negativity and then get up and do something? Because my view is you can't shield them from that. That's not the answer.
I think it's important that we realize we're in a situation, and maybe we can't bring it back to the way it was. But we're going to have to figure something out. And this whole idea of resilience is, to me, kind of a breakthrough concept, because it's OK that we-- things are changing. We can't put them back right away, if at all. So what are we going to do about it?
And I think to me, that is one of the major challenges that's facing us as a society, is how can we deal with this negativity. Do we just follow the Kardashians, or do we do something about it?
Do we fold up and just watch football, or do we eat the sushi until the seas are empty? Because if we don't eat the sushi, somebody else will. We have to start thinking about changes in our own lives and the changes that we make.
And it may involve a little different future. But I think students are getting that. They are rising to the challenge, not thinking that they can fix it, but thinking that they can do better than things are now.
And so I think that's one of the major messages of this show that I find that is very important, that people start to understand and face, in a real, visceral way, a meaningful way, some of the problems we're facing, not only as people, but to nonpersons, and the roles that we can play both as artists, scientists, and designers. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER 1: So if there are questions, we have about 10 minutes for questions for the panelists, as well as the speakers, they're willing to make themselves available.
AUDIENCE: I have a question. Johannes, how many feet do you think the sea will rise by midcentury?
[LAUGHING]
I mean, I'm--
JOHANNES LEHMANN: I hope not up to Ithaca. I'm fine. I'm on East Hill.
AUDIENCE: I hear they go between the end of the century and the mid-- three feet. Actually, Newton Harrison told me that he thinks-- he's heard it's going to be up to 15 feet.
JOHANNES LEHMANN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I mean, let's talk about this in relation to optimism.
JOHANNES LEHMANN: Yeah. Jack. Yeah.
JACK ELLIOT: I got over that a long time ago.
JOHANNES LEHMANN: No, but I'll hand it over to Jack in a second. What I, as a scientist, would say, this is really difficult to answer. And if you look at IPCC predictions of anything, and sea level rise is one of the more difficult ones to predict.
Temperature's a little easier, but still almost impossible. How divergent the models that are predicting that. And they're running-- different groups are running different models that make different assumptions and then they're averaging all of those.
And it so happens, if you look at the trend that they predicted a decade ago, it matches with the actual measurements. But these models are so complex that really only the person who developed them can really understand what's going on. And that's a real challenge for scientific discourse that I, as a soil scientist, I cannot evaluate the science of that particular question. Even if I could work myself into it, that's getting so complex, understanding the science behind all of that.
I mean, I can drive a car, but I cannot model the flame geometry in the engine. And that's what some people are doing. It's getting so complex that-- and also it's so difficult for climate scientists to defend their science. And that's why we're getting this wacko public discourse where somebody can just doubt a science finding and thinks they're smarter than these people that have specialized in this part of science. It's getting very, very difficult. Sorry, this wasn't an answer.
AUDIENCE: No. But don't we just dismiss the doubters? I mean, do you really give-- speak to people who don't believe in evolution? I don't think so.
JOHANNES LEHMANN: Oh, no. That's too--
AUDIENCE: So now there's been so many reports that 95%, 97% of all the scientists believe in-- now I've heard you don't call it global warming. You don't call it climate change. You call it climate instability.
I mean, it's happening. It's happening. And so I'll just-- OK, the one comment I want to say, this struck me from the last 24 hours, is you're right to be skeptical. Although I will say, in my neighborhood in Queens, we're not all University people.
And so yes, there are plenty of people who don't know about climate change. There are plenty of people who are not aware. So there is still some awareness to be done. But the gap between what we're doing and what Maya Lin is doing is that she was asking for a bunch of individuals to change our behavior.
All right. We've already swapped out our light bulbs. We already carry our bags to the grocery stores. I drive a hybrid. All right.
But I think what we all need, in addition to these micro changes, it's going to have to come, like what-- I quoted Zadie Smith. What's happening? Why don't we have a global movement? Why don't we have civil rights for the environment?
Now it's going to have to come to a ground up to get our governmental leaders to move. That's what's missing.
JOHANNES LEHMANN: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I'm just wondering if I could flip the question and go back to the art side for a minute. Whether from the 19th century, or Syracuse, or Ithaca, I find myself wondering about the valence of flipped paradigms. And one of the things that I recall specifically, for example, Renate mentioned the Harrison's Lagoon Cycle, is one of the things that their work played with and still plays with. But you can see it if you can look at this piece, is dwelling on the agency of the flipped paradigm.
So what if-- so what if the oceans rise 15 feet, if we can adapt to that with a flipped paradigm. And perhaps the flipping of paradigms is one of the valences of art, and creativity, and research that are coming to you to appreciate. That's kind of a question, or a challenge.
RENATE FERRO: We always ask these kinds of questions. I've had much training, learning how to deal with them. No.
I think that-- Stephanie and I were having a conversation at lunch in this kind of response to the way-- I think each artist has-- I think each artist, each institution, each person in their own realm has their own threshold in how they deal with these situations.
And I'm thinking of Brandon Ballengée's project upstairs. He's trained as both a biologist and an artist. And ever since I've met him and seen his work, he's really-- he's a scientist.
I think he-- even though he's an artist, he has a scientific mind. He responds to things very scientifically. So I guess in response to Tim and his idea for the changed paradigm, I mean, I think we respond differently.
And sometimes, it's through humor, sometimes it's through skepticism, sometimes it's through optimism, sometimes it is through-- I just think we have our own thresholds. And so to flip a paradigm is going to be different, depending on who we are. And so--
AUDIENCE: Can I ask a question first?
RENATE FERRO: I don't know if that's-- I don't know if that's answering your question or not.
AUDIENCE: What do you mean by flipped paradigm. So just accept the fact that the sea will rise and we have measures to be resilient in the face of that?
AUDIENCE: No. One of the things that the Harrisons were doing, for example, is they were reflecting on the erosion of [INAUDIBLE] beds in Sri Lanka and imagining new possibilities for reviving their environments that, on the one hand, are more natural, some of them are artistic, some of them were unnatural [INAUDIBLE], some of which was scientific, some of it which was totally imaginary, but in so doing that imaginary activism then--
RENATE FERRO: So their flipped paradigm was their fantasy, their conceptual. Well, you've been dealing with them.
AUDIENCE: Well, I'm just saying--
RENATE FERRO: You know.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] built environments that activated those flipped paradigms.
RENATE FERRO: Yeah. So by thinking outside the box.
AUDIENCE: I mean, one of my ironies is we're faced with the rising seas, the imaginary-- the sea rise. And let's say three feet in Manhattan and put [INAUDIBLE] Roosevelt Island. That's a paradigm that we [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Well, I won't say too much, but I went to an annual-- a year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy that The New Yorker published-- I mean, organized. And one of the scientists said, just plan on living on your second floor.
That's all. Just plan on living on your second floor. And if you live in a town with the name of heights, you're good.
AMANDA JO GOLDENSTEIN: Survival of the fittest.
AUDIENCE: Oh, wonderful. I live in Jackson Heights. Just plan on living in your second floor. That's the flipped paradigm.
AUDIENCE: So the problem with the flipped paradigm is that you assume only one thing goes haywire [INAUDIBLE] is that the sea rises. The problem is the loss of biodiversity that occurs at the same time
AUDIENCE: Oh, of course. [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Exactly. So it's not unique.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So you're screwed. So it's cute to talk about flipping paradigms and all that stuff, but it's really-- it's a whole system. So Maya and I had a very long, involved conversation about the nature of hope. And I mean, she makes this wonderful point about well, if you don't have hope, what do you have?
And I don't have a lot of hope, because it's-- so it's a very interesting-- I'm really-- it's healthy for me to be around it, because it keeps me [INAUDIBLE]. So it's interesting to think about the notion of a flipped paradigm as kind of a rhetorical device to get us to move out of the box. But--
RENATE FERRO: Well, look at Maya's work, though. I mean, I think that just her presentation was a flipped paradigm. I mean, she started with beauty. She started with this awe in the work that she's done.
And literally 45 minutes into her discussion, she flipped and she became an activist. And she's no longer going to make any memorials. That's her last one. And no longer is she going to-- she's become a radical activist.
And there's still a little beauty in there in those videos in the type. Did you notice the type? It's beautiful. But it's not about beauty. It's about real life kinds of situations. So that's, I think, a kind of flipped paradigm.
AUDIENCE: Can I just make a comment that I don't think it's a paradigm, but it's a realization of the interconnectedness of everything, which is largely absent in science up until the very, very, very present. And it's very absent in the structures of universities and compartmentalizing knowledge without realizing the interconnectedness of everything.
I kind of lose my mind when Renate and I teach engineers, who, some of them never even been in the [INAUDIBLE].
RENATE FERRO: That's true.
AUDIENCE: Or cannot see what they do with robotics as connected to anything in the world of what they're designing. So I think it's back to-- it's creating a new systems theory from a multiplicity of decisions to see all of those connections would be advantageous. And interdisciplinary discourse and collaboration, which is beginning to happen, but not enough.
AUDIENCE: So you think we can institute change through our teaching?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Changing the way we teach what we teach.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
RENATE FERRO: I do. So I agree. And we've-- actually been doing a thing in the summer that-- yeah.
AMANDA JO GOLDENSTEIN: There was one more question.
AUDIENCE: One of the things that did come out of the discussions today and Maya Lin's conversation was that education was a huge piece, even just doing what you're doing, but also sharing and making it applicable to the people who want to experience it and want to participate. And I think that as artists, we have to think less of ourselves as artists and more as interdisciplinary educators.
And when I get around scientists, I found the best scientists are really artists. The best artists are really scientists. So I think we do ourselves a disservice, having art museums and being artists. I think we really have to be just open.
AUDIENCE: One of the things that struck me today was all the research that's gone into all these projects, the ones that you talked about, Bill, and Suzanne, and Lucy's work, and yours, Johannes. And this is something that's not recognized, that artists do research--
RENATE FERRO: And it needs to be supported.
AUDIENCE: That it's real and it needs to be supported. And this is a perception that we need to help change. And I think that's something within the academy that we can work on, because I don't even think artists think they research, necessarily.
RENATE FERRO: Our artists do.
AUDIENCE: I heard that in Europe, colleges are not allowed-- they don't interview artists now who don't have a PhD in art, because there are so many people in Europe getting a research degree. So they can't--
RENATE FERRO: That's a controversy.
AUDIENCE: They can't interview people with just an MFA.
RENATE FERRO: That's a controversy, yeah.
AMANDA JO GOLDENSTEIN: Is it-- just to kind of--
AUDIENCE: This is a more specific question for Bill. I was really interested in your talking about the work, I think you said of the Harrisons in the Owens Valley. Was it the Harrisons in the Owens Valley?
AUDIENCE: Well, it was [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Oh, that's right. OK. I wanted to know, because I'm interested in that part of the world, if you are aware of any artists that are working specifically in the Mono Lake region? You know, at the head of the watershed.
AUDIENCE: I do. I do. I do. Yeah. No.
AUDIENCE: There's an opportunity.
AUDIENCE: Well, there are a lot of photographers who got associated with the friends of Mono Lake and the whole movement to save Mono Lake from being sucked dry by the extinction of the straw up from Bishop. That worked, actually. It stopped that. It stopped that.
AUDIENCE: Sure. But now?
AUDIENCE: But now, there are-- I mean, aside from the fact that aerial photographer Michael White actually lives on the shore of Mono Lake on the North Shore, I actually don't know anyone who's actively working with the lake right now as a subject matter. So that's an interesting question.
AUDIENCE: It would be an interesting condition or involvement for your museum with the Friends of Mono Lake, The Mono Lake Committee, because it's such an evocative landscape and it's such an important part of the watershed for the whole west coast.
AUDIENCE: Yeah. I mean, there are always photographers going through there. Mark Fleck just went through and photographed all of this stuff for the third time. It was done by the-- people are going to go through and deal with that landscape.
AUDIENCE: It's documentary, though. It's not--
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I don't think-- there's nothing interventionist going on and there's nothing that's deeply metaphorical, of which I'm aware currently. Yeah. And I think the reason why is it's not imperiled right now. It's beautiful. It's interesting.
AUDIENCE: Well, it is. Not the way it was in the '70s--
AUDIENCE: Not the way it was, yeah.
AUDIENCE: But sure it is.
AUDIENCE: Mono Lake is stuck, basically, because it's getting-- it's just going to get hotter and drier, and no one's going to stop it.
AUDIENCE: It's imperiled the whole way of the Sierras are imperiled.
AUDIENCE: Yeah. That's right. So, I just don't-- it's just not a place where people are going.
AUDIENCE: Interesting.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it is interesting. So I'll have to think about it now, because you brought it up. I have to flip that paradigm now, yeah.
AUDIENCE: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
JACK ELLIOT: So I think we need to wrap up. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you to all the presenters.
[APPLAUSE]
Panel discussion featuring: Jack Elliott, associate professor, Department of Design and Environmental Analysis; Renate Ferro, visiting assistant professor, Department of Art; Amanda Jo Goldstein, assistant professor, Department of English; Johannes Lehmann, professor, Department of Crop and Soil Sciences; and Marion Wilson, artist on view in "beyond earth art."
Artists, curators, and art historians explored topics found in the Johnson Museum of Art's "beyond earth art" exhibition April 11 during the 2014 Atkinson Symposium.
The symposium was funded by Cornell's Atkinson Forum in American Studies Program and organized by Andrea Inselmann, curator, and the education department of the Johnson Museum of Art.
