Radical Nature, Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969 - 2009

 In Victory over the Sun, the 1913 constructivist Opera and 1923 series of prints by El Lissitzky, a group of modern men pull the sun down from the sky and lock it away in a concrete box. They no longer have any need for it; they now have the technology to produce their own heat and light. This desire to build our own world around us, to separate ourselves from a seemingly redundant nature is echoed by Philippe Rahm, one of the architects in Radical Nature: “‘God is dead’ announced Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century. ‘Men took his place in designing the planet. Yes, we really became gods, but young gods, teenage gods, sometimes drunk, with a tiny sense of responsibility”.[i]

The Western tradition of holding nature and culture in ‘a binary opposition’ – a separation which has enabled us to revere nature from a distance while taking blindly from its resources – is, in a way, a point of departure for Radical Nature.[ii] This exhibition at the Barbican looks how artists and architects have reconsidered and recuperated an understanding of nature, not as a pure and distant ideal but as something that is inextricably entangled with and altered by the artificial world humans have created.

The exhibition takes the late 1960s as its starting point, both as a decade when people were starting to become more conscious of environmental issues – an awareness that became more widespread with the 1973 oil crisis – and a period when artists were reconsidering art’s relationship to society and ‘environment’ in the widest sense. At the core of the exhibition are the experimental methodologies of artists working in the 1960s and 70s: artists such as Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson and Hans Haacke who were incorporating social action and political activism into their work, working directly with the land, and drawing on new disciplines like cybernetics and systems theory. Hans Haacke’s artificially controlled closed systems, called ‘Real Time Systems’ because they changed in ‘real time’ in front of the viewer’s eyes, were inspired by cybernetics. Present in the exhibition is a series of photographs of these ‘Real Time Systems’, for example Chickens Hatching, 1969, an incubation system in which the controlled environment responded to the activity of the chickens, in turn affecting their behaviour. Haacke’s systems thinking, alongside the other works from this period, set a strong context for how the exhibition seeks to reconsider an idea of nature. Not as a distant and separate entity, but as part of wider system of interconnected natural, social, political and technological processes in which everything has an effect on everything else.

The exhibition, however, is not chronological or categorised: pivotal early works are intermingled with art and architecture from different periods. It reads more as an assemblage of artistic strategies, proposals, ideas and representations than a concise history of environmental art and architecture. On entering, you are drawn into the Barbican gallery’s large, brightly lit central space, distributed with enticingly fresh vegetation and clean looking utopian structures. Simon Starling’s Island for Weeds, 2003, is a raft envisaged as an extra-territorial site on which rhododendrons, now classified in Scotland as a weed, could grow on a Scottish lake without persecution. Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison’s Full Farm, 1972, has a wholesomely vibrant presence, a series of wooden containers filled with fruit and vegetables growing verdantly under florescent lights. Near to Full Farm is Grass Grows, 1969, one of Hans Haacke’s ‘Real Time Systems’, a small mound of grass left to grow throughout the exhibition. With its upper branches reaching over this central concourse is Anya Gallaccio’s one art, 2006, a tree re-constructed from bolted together parts, slowly dying over the duration of the exhibition. Fallen Forest, 2006, by Henrik Håkansson also has an impressive presence, a floor section of rainforest, four meters square and resting on its side, kept alive and lit up like a stage set by brightly glaring lights standing on tripods.

This large central area, staged as an ‘artificial garden’, visually pulls the exhibition together. There appears to be a very knowing artifice to the way it has been curated: abundant plant life grown in containers, under electric light and in controlled conditions; although these artists have brought trees and plants into the artificial space of the gallery for very different purposes. The direct visual parallels between the use of electric light in Harrisons’ Full Farm and Håkansson’s Fallen Forest emphasis the radically differing agendas of these artists from different periods. Early precursors of environmental art, Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison use art as a social tool.  The florescent lights in Full Farm, while being a comment on minimalist art practices of the time, help the vegetables to grow, in a work aimed at teaching themselves and others how to live sustainabley. Håkansson’s Fallen Forest, on the other hand is not an attempt to recover this miniscule portion of rainforest, it could be read as a comment on the futility of this as an artistic endeavour. It does not even pretend to be natural: the lights glaring down upon the tipped over section of rainforest help keep it alive, but as if it is a startled animal in a zoo or an actor on a stage.

In his catalogue essay for Radical Nature the writer T. J. Demos discusses the subtle scepticism in Håkansson’s and many other artists of his generation’s work: “The employment of irony and playfulness becomes politically important for many of today’s practitioners: for its conceptual, anti-pragmatist emphasise reveals an awareness of the ultimate impossibility of a local sustainable practice within a globally unsustainable system of ecologies.”[iii] There is an undeniable realism in this position that Demos identifies in work like Håkansson’s: as we watch the world’s largest economies at summits like the G20 struggle and fail to come to an agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions on a necessarily global scale, progress in part hampered by national economic and political interests. The need for an urgent change to the way we live and use energy, instigated at a global governmental level, especially our high levels of consumption in the West, is becoming recognised on a wider scale. Though this does not reduce the need for action and behaviour change on an individual and local scale. Works like the Harrison’s Full Farm attempt on the other hand propose ways of acting in everyday life: a trajectory of socially active art also strongly represented in the work of Joseph Beuys and Agnes Denes.

Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield – A Confrontation, 1982, is a wheat field originally planted, tended and harvested in a landfill site in the centre of New York. This powerfully symbolic work, surrounded by skyscrapers, not far for the twin towers and the stock exchange, was re-made for the exhibition in Dalston in East London. In terms of finding a meaningful way for art to engage with environmental concerns, what I find exciting and politically valuable about Denes’ work is the way it intersects the boundaries between art and life. It retains a critical distance for being art, an ability to make us look at things from a different perspective: through the profoundly off-kilter aesthetic of a golden yellow wheat field growing in the centre of Manhattan. While simultaneously situated in public space and operating within the realm of social life, it proposes ways of acting in daily life on a local scale. A way of acting that could be seen as futile on its own, but that can be replicated and inspire others. Under represented in the exhibition is work by younger artists that develop this trajectory of socially active art: work that does propose local sustainable practices but with an awareness of unavoidably global context of climate change. 

Denes’ Wheatfield – A Confrontation is one of a number of the works in the exhibition that seem to articulate an idea of nature as plant life and growth in the middle of the city or gallery: as activist intervention, as environment recuperation, as symbolic critique, and maybe most importantly as some kind of artifice. To the exhibition’s advantage, the feeling of being consumed within the city is emphasised by the surrounding concrete jungle of the Barbican estate. All this artificially placed and contained ‘nature’ is overtly familiar and pleasing to be around, especially in the central gallery space, which as a whole brings to mind a conflated experience of the greenery found throughout the urban environment: in shopping centres, city squares, airports, shops, advertising, the rejuvenated popularity of city allotments, and even the simple house plant. Maybe, in part, calling into question the way symbols of ‘nature’ in the urban environment create a false sense of connection with a pure and natural ideal for commercial gain or a patching up kind of ameliorative affect. Though maybe there is also a risk that this mise-en-scène in the central area is too seductive. That many of these works – despite being extremely nuanced and vastly differing in their individual incarnations and representations of nature – still refer back to the ambiguously distant and idealised natural environment that the exhibition is trying to break down.

The works that seem to push the exhibition’s premise furthest, for me, are those that demonstrate how nature is inextricably inseparable from culture, from the human created artificial urban environment and its political and social structures: for example our dependence on finite natural resources to maintain a highly consumptive standard of living. The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s (CLUI) documentary slide show about the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, 2008, visualises poignantly the complex relationship between an oil dependent nation, like the US or the UK, and the natural environment. Built between 1975 and 1977 the Trans-Alaska pipeline is the longest in the US, running 800 miles, mainly over ground, from the oil fields in the very north of Alaska across the state to Valdez. The pipeline stands out because it is over ground and hence visible. It was intended to run underground but the permafrost could not support the heat that needs to be produced for the pipe to function.

The documentary follows the pipeline across Alaska with a slowly paced succession of still images accompanied by matter of fact style captions and a repetitively rhythmic sound track. The work documents the history of pipeline; the towns, pump stations and road that have been built to support it; its own peculiar tourist industry; businesses named after it like the Pipeline Club Restaurant; the employment it creates; attempts to sabotage it; and its physical journey through the landscape. The stark discordance between the vast wilderness and the pipeline snaking through it, for me, says more about our contemporary relationship to nature than any other work in the exhibition. Strangely the natural environment and the industrial extraction of oil, both powerfully symbolised in these images, are as equally remote from most people’s daily lives. In an article about this work Matthew Coolidge from CLUI says, ‘oil defines these times. No other raw material has such a reach into our technologies and the products we consume. How this came to pass should be the story of our age’.[iv] Despite this, oil is on the whole invisible to us, transported underground, present in our daily lives in an abstracted form, through what it powers.    

Another artist in the exhibition who draws a direct chain of affect between the despoliation of the natural environment and daily urban life is Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Her film Waste Flow Video is part of an ongoing and multifaceted project called Touch Sanitation, 1977-1984, which began when Ukeles became artist residency with the New York sanitation department in 1976. The film, made in Ukeles’ own eccentric style, follows household waste on a journey from domestic homes to landfill. A landfill site is the kind of simultaneously natural and un-natural site that we need to be more aware of, as we ship out mounds of waste beyond the horizon of our consciousness to be buried and forgotten in the natural environment. Ukeles’ work is also about people, the essential though marginalised group of people who deal with waste.

Another video work that stands out for its deeply personal content is Luke Fowler’s film Bogman Palmjaguar, 2007. Naming himself after the endangered great cat, Bogman Bluequartz Palmjaguar is a man in the process of legally contesting a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. The film is about his relationship with the natural environment in which he lives in solitude – the Flow Country, a vast and threatened area of bog land in the very north of Scotland – and his deeply troubled relationship with society and other people, who he feels have persecuted him. This in-depth study of one man’s relationship to his immediate and wider social environment indirectly raises questions about whose ‘nature’ is being and needs to be protected. As T.J Demos points out “the cleaning up of European and North American environments has come at the cost of transferring their polluting industries and environmental responsibilities to the global South”.[v] Droughts, floods and other adverse weather conditions are already having a detrimental affect on often the poorest nations, those who are the least responsible for climate change. Demos urges artists to question Western proposals for sustainable development, which although appearing a-political and universal increase existing in-balances between rich and poor:  “How might artists … animate an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ – meaning environmental justice viewed from the perspective of those who have the least access to resources, job protection, socio-political and economic equality and governmental and media representation.”[vi]

Some works do propose – still quite abstract – models for a more egalitarian habitation of the planet. Looking towards an unclear future Ant Farm, Wolf Hilbertz and Tomas Saraceno all propose utopian air-born and oceanic habitats, maybe pre-empting a time when the sea has already swallowed up the land. Drawings of Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy, 1977, show human divers observing dolphins around a part submerged and futuristic looking vessel in the middle of the ocean. The work is a proposal for a floating, self-sufficient embassy for communication and understanding between humans and other species. Another habitat for both humans and sea life is architect Wolf Hilbertz’s spiral shell shaped ocean bed island Autopia, 1975: a metal framework submerged in sea water with an electric current running through it, upon which a natural material Biorock© – as strong as concrete – builds up through a mineral accreditation process. Predicting a more global organisation of the planet Tomas Saraceno’s and Ant Farm’s structures are also extra-territorial. Like an airplane in flight, though static, Saraceno’s Air-Port-City – a project comprising various connected cell like flying cities – is ruled by international law.

A precursor to Saraceno’s air-born cities, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s Project for Floating Cloud Structures (Cloud Nine) ca. 1960 was designed to house mini towns: the 1º rise in temperature of the air within the enclosed sphere making it lighter than the surrounding air and lifting it off the ground. Buckminster Fuller is another early key figure, whose visual language and utopian vision for the future infiltrates the whole exhibition. The geodesic dome, the structure he made famous, is utilised in Heather and Ivan Morison’s tea pavilion, a work inspired by the geodesic domes built in the 1970s utopian communities in West Coast America. Fuller’s Geodesic Dome in the central exhibition space houses a short film, in which he explains the collapsible tetrahedron structure which he uses in much of his work, a form taken from nature. Describing the planet as ‘Spaceship Earth’ Fuller’s vision for man’s future habitation of the earth was on a universal scale, although his proposed technological solutions did not really address social, political and economic tensions and problems.[vii] As well as his more democratic world map, Dymaxion Map of the World, which is present in the exhibition, he also designed an entire world electricity network and a world game to encourage peaceful cohabitation of all humans sharing the earth’s resources.

Fuller used the term ‘ephemeralization’ to explain a move towards “ever-lighter construction and ever-more efficient use of resources” says Michael Wang.[viii] He quotes Fuller saying “architecture may be accomplished tomorrow with electrical field and other utterly invisible environmental controls.”[ix] Philippe Rahm Architects, one of a number of architects in the exhibition, takes this idea much further with architecture that does comprise invisible climatic conditions. For Rahm human induced global warming has made the once natural climate artificial: “What we recognised before as the natural climate is no longer natural. Human activity and CO2 consumption is changing the atmosphere of the planet.”[x] This view informs Rahm’s re-consideration of the role of architecture and questions maybe a very basic delineation between the artificial environment (being inside a building or the city) and the natural environment (being outside a building or the city). One of the main purposes of architecture has been to enclose and warm a space. Now that we are warming the entire planet artificially in a way that could be compared with warming a building, does this change the role of architecture? Rahm asks: “If the atmosphere of the planet is becoming artificial, could the artificial climate of the building and the city become natural? The roles are reversed! Architecture has to generate new nature in this artificial global environment.”[xi] The concrete presence of physical walls maybe distracts from the way architecture does create artificial climates, though Rahm puts this at the forefront, an architecture that acts more directly on the body, rather than through creating a delineated architectural space around it. His architecture imitates natural processes, recreating a particular climatic environment, light, temperature, humidity, for example a particular day in Spring (Eternal Spring, 2005). In doing so crossing the most imperceptible boundaries between natural and artificial, or recognising the lack of boundaries between them, especially in a time of artificially induced global warming.

Rahm’s project for Radical Nature: Pulmonary Space is maybe not the most fitting for the exhibition. The work gives physical matter to sound and air through an octopus like form created when wind instruments are played into it. Another similar architectural practice in the exhibition, which crosses the boundaries between inside and outside, artificial and natural environment is Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s The Blur Building, 2002: a saucer shaped, open lattice metal structure standing above a lake. Responding to climatic conditions, the structure becomes an enclosed form when mist, produced from water pumped up from below, consumes it in a dense and fluid white cloud that drifts off in trails across the lake. The inclusion of these architectural practices pushes the exhibition in an exciting direction in thinking about nature, one that responds more directly to the new and unknown challenges that global warming present. These practices question nature as a site. In the context of artificially induced climate change, in which cause and affect are remote from one another and human produced CO2 emissions are altering natural processes, these architects engage with an idea of nature a continuous and problematically intangible entity, as artificial as it is natural.

Visiting an exhibition about an issue that has become a matter urgency in real life can provoke mixed feelings about the role art can play in relation to something that also requires you to act, to basically stop consuming so much carbon, not just visit exhibitions about it. Though in the end, what struck me most about the exhibition was about art. The way in which art and architecture continually redefines itself and the forms that it takes as it seeks to redefine the culture, environment, planet, atmosphere, or even climate in which it exists: from the experimentations of Robert Smithson and Hans Haacke, to the socially engaged projects of Agnes Denes, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and CLUI, to the architectural vision of Philip Rahm. And to be hopeful about art, that these new forms are able, at their best, to challenge and inspire the changing world around them.  

[i] Philippe Rahm, “Meteorological Architecture” in Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969 - 2009 (exhibition catalogue), Barbican Art Gallery and Koenig Books Ltd, London, 2009, p. 246. Originally written for Icon magazine’s ‘Manifesto Issue’, August, 2007.

[ii] Francesco Manacorda, the curator of Radical Nature, introduces his catalogue essay: “In Western civilisation, nature and culture have traditionally been presented as a binary opposition. On the one hand we have the original, unadulterated conditions of planet; on the other, man’s technological and cultural progress”, “There Is No Such Thing as Nature” in Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969 - 2009 (exhibition catalogue), 2009, p. 9.

[iii] T.J Demos, “The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology” in Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969 – 2009, p. 28.

[iv] Matthew Coolidge, “1000 Words, The Centre for Land Use Interpretation: Matthew Coolidge talks about the Trans-Alaska Pipeline” in Art Forum, November 2008, XLVII, NO 3, p. 299.

[v] Demos, Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969 – 2009, p. 19.

[vi] Demos, p. 24.

[vii] “Describing the earth as a spaceship, Fuller himself come across as something of an alien, unfamiliar with the fact that most terrestrial problems are not fundamentally technical, or cartographic, but political and economical (see recent US energy policy).” Sean Keller, “Navigating Systems” in Art Forum, November 2008, XLVII, NO 3, p. 294.

[viii] Michael Wang, “Ephemeralization” in Art Forum, November 2008, XLVII, NO 3, p. 290.

[ix] Wang, Art Forum, November 2008, XLVII, NO 3, p. 290.

[x] Rahm, Radical Nature – Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969 - 2009 (exhibition catalogue), 2009, p. 246.

[xi] Rahm, p. 246.

Photo Credits (further information)

Full Farm:
Photocredit Lyndon Douglas

Cloud nine:
Courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

Spiral Jetty:
Image courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York
Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York
Photo: Gianfranco Gorgoni