Cultured Magazine

Fall 2015

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CULTURED 179 website, a screen shows a flat map of the world which you can activate, like Alice in Wonderland, by going into a wormhole, through the present, and following a river system, a city, an event—in order to study an inter-related ecological history. You will find conservation successes, like the policies about the ozone hole and CFC's. But there is also cause for alarm, about political fakery, for example. Think of how much oil, gas and coal money has been fueling fake answers to urgent questions. Since when did America stop believing in its science? It's untenable, unconscionable what we're doing. Our generation needs to switch gears, change right now because the planet can't support us. It seems that you're redefining, resignifying, what "memorial" means. You are using the word to activate the memory of stages of loss and to engage responsibility for recovering or at least preserving what we can. Yes. My work is about activating emotion. I believe that art can trigger caring, for example, by reminding people that oysters in New York Harbor were 12 inches in diameter, that Dutch explorers remarked that lobsters were 6 feet long. Skeptical scientists will then say: van der Donk was exaggerating; they were only 5 feet long. Can you imagine a 5-foot-long lobster? That's as big as I am! It's a monster. It would eat me for lunch, right? Think about how oysters used to clean the water, to the point where you could see the water almost foaming like waves, because of the filter feeders. The information is not there to depress you. It's there to make you wake up—the beauty is that nature is incredibly resilient. When you start charting conservation success stories and recovery, you observe that when you set aside a fish nursery or a marine protected zone, within three to five years, it's back! Nature recovers. Look at, for instance, a stone wall. Have you ever seen a tree growing out of a stone wall? Nature—this planet—has a lot of energy, and we're just beating it down. We're not giving it a chance. So, if you take a look at our footprint, adding up our agricultural and livestock footprint, it's 40 percent of carbon emissions. What we eat matters, how much meat we eat and how we're growing our food. I'm trying to get you to see the whole. For instance, I did a series called "Bodies of Water," to reflect on how we look at fresh water rivers and lakes; we hardly ever look below the surface. Another piece called "Ten Degrees North" (to shift our eurocentric map-making perspective) for the Rockefeller Foundation is a cut-stone water fountain that shows the topography of the entire planet above and below sea level. And when water percolates up, it actually forms sea level dynamics. The Rockefeller Foundation was an early adopter of the global Green Revolution. By now the Green Revolution is looking beyond using fertilizer to grow as much as you can, and instead considers how it actually kills the soil. Once you take the life of the soil away, you're locked into an energy-intensive, fertilizer-heavy dead end. If you can bring the life of the soil back you can actually use your agriculture as a huge carbon offset. Do people ever ask you about your intentionality, the practicality or instrumentality of your work? You know, what skeptics like to worry about. Not really. I give talks about these issues though people imagine that I'll talk about my art work. I tell them that "Missing" is my artwork, and then tell them why. For example, if you ask people to imagine that the whole world's population lived at the density of Manhattan proper, how much room would we take up? All 7 billion of us would fit in the space of Colorado. So, disaster is not about space but about resource consumption. Another example I like to share is that the World Economic Forum says it takes $700 billion annually to mitigate climate change. That's less than we spend on cigarettes. Art has the ability to get you to look at spending differently. What we spend on cigarettes worldwide is enough to curb climate change, as I said, but that's also what we spend on weight loss. As for military spending, why can't we consider defense to include defending the planet? This is all part of "Missing;" it is a moral artwork. Article Circle, 2013 PHOTO COURTESY OF PACE GALLERY (52 WAYS TO SEE THE EARTH); PHOTO BY GREGORY LA RICO (ARTICLE CIRCLE), COURTESY OF LEHMANN MAUPIN

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