Unnatural Nature

UNNATURAL

NATURE

DOES ART WASTE?
Assemblage art creates anachronism in juxtaposing technology and nature. This
spectrum runs between that using the most technologically separate from nature to
that using the least separate.Technology represents being of a time and nature
being timeless. What results is often an incredible use of resources for a temporary
environmental installation.

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UNNATURAL NATURE
REFLECTING
REDOING
REWEAVING
Making apparent; express or manifest.
Light focuses our attention to make new
visual connections between the manmade
high tech lights and reflective
surfaces and the purely natural setting.
The impossible magnitude of installations
involving 600,000 CDs, 70 miles
of optical fiber, and thousands of
man-hours resets our understanding of
the differences between the worlds of
man-made and natural materiality.
REGATHERING
Bringing together into one group,
collection or place. Collections of
man-made objects are made new when
put into a new context and configuration.
The collections set into nature
imbue the objects with an odd animation,
stirring thoughts of flocking
animals, rather than the technological
artifacts of an electrical age
.
Doing something again or differently.
Disassembly and re-assembly of parts
and pieces of primarily old, cast-off
objects creates a re-imagined world.
Setting the re-imagined world in the
desert with its stark openness further
alters the experience of the
assemblages.
RESHAPING
Forming or shaping something differently.
Large scale covering of nature
creates a newly envisioned landscape.
The sheer magnitude of scale is a
monumental undertaking of materials
and manpower. The nature of large
scale fabric installations and their
removal and disposal is the hidden
question behind these temporary
artworks. The juxtaposition of the
grandness of nature, the large scale of
the endeavor and the temporality all
combine to amaze crowds of people
who would never be exposed to
environmental art, much less any art.
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Forming again by interlacing. Weaving
tree branches is a large scale re-envisioning
of man made structures and
patterns to see anew these structures as
art. One man’s vision is created working
primarily solo. The branches must be
purposefully selected for their integrity,
flexibility, and location. That nature will
retake most of these installations is
somewhat reassuring.
REFINING
To improve by making small changes
and making more subtle and accurate.
The chaos of nature is reordered and
reorganized temporarily. The unexpected
beauty and fragility of the
temporary is overwhelming. When one
wouldn’t think nature could be
improved upon for its beauty one sees
the small and thoughtful rearrangement
is strikingly lovely.

Bruce Munro
Rune Guneriussen
Noah Purifoy
Christo / Jeanne-Claude
Patrick Dougherty
Andy Goldsworthy
REFLECTING
REGATHERING
REDOING
RESHAPING
REWEAVING
REFINING
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60
68
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7
CHRISTO Wrapped Trees / Riehen CH / 1997

WASTE
The world around us is filled with charred remnants and scattered filth in too many
forms; too diffuse, of every size and shape and smell, ugly and unwieldy, born of
every age and temperament. It seeps into every crevice, floats down every grimechoked
street, pools and piles and decays in every corner of every home and city and
patch of Wilderness. And there is always so much more of it than we can ever hope
to study. A beachcomber of the 1990’s might have stumbled upon The Nikes of
Queets, washed ashore after the Great Shoe Spill, when entire shipping containers
filled with high-priced shoes spilled into the sea before their cargo slowly made its
way to the beaches of the Pacific Northwest. Recent hikers of Mt. Everest will find
piles of earlier explorers accumulated trash that they are now obligated to bring
down with them upon their return, alongside their own equipment and their noble
fatigue. There is no human-made object so well traveled, so ambient, as waste. It fills
the oceans and the highest peaks. Our waste lays thick blankets of our chemical age
across the entire planet, into every rocky outcropping, to the bottom of every seas
floor, nestling in the trees and bogs and pools of the world. It’s in the air, in the
water, in yard sales brimming with kitsch, in houses stuffed to the rafters with rubbish,
in outer space, spreading out in invisible clouds of toxic chemicals, and piling
up in immense mountains of garbage stacked in trash-bricks below ground at Fresh
Kills or Puente Hills or a thousand other dump sites. The soil itself is part of a new
geology, as the beaches have been remade into plastiglomerate, their sands mingled
with the pulverized microplastics of our petroleum age. The genes of sea creatures
that ingest these incredibly small fragments of our trash are mutating. Geologists
have now begun to study “technofossils” and the sedimented debris-layers of our
vast compressed cities, so immense and consequential that they now constitute part
of the geological and planetary record. With our waste We have reordered space and
place, reshaping them in its image the world over. But many of us are fortunate or
foolish enough to tend not to feel the world in this way most of the time. In places,
the air still seems breathable, trees manage to seem vibrant and green, squirrels
appear happy and filled with energy. Even so, if one of humankind’s desires has
been to put its stamp on the world, waste is the most compelling and universal way
in which it has accomplished its mission. Every landscape is a trashscape. This not
only transforms the world into one vast and unevenly distributed trash heap; it
changes, in ways that might not even be perceptible to us, our sense of self and
humanity in the world. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes, we have colonized
it all with our waste and the elaborate processes that produced it, creating human
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UNNATURAL NATURE
waste and wasted human lives all along globalization’s dirty path; and now we must
consider where these waste products, living and dead, could go next; or what it
means for us if there really is nowhere else to go. There is no path past the wastes
we’ve made. Reading Bauman reminds you that we have built for ourselves, and the
future, an enormous nest made of our own civilizational excrement.
If you wanted to consider an object more resistant to capture, you would be hard
pressed to find one. Waste challenges our ability to adjust our contemplation of it to
the proper scale. Every thought about waste seems much too big or much too small.
So the temptation is to want to encompass everything: to name and honor and linger
over every bit of crud and driftwood; to let the term spread out and away from us
like an oil slick to encompass the wastage of the entire planet, the extermination of
entire cultures and peoples, the wastes that make and unmake empires; massive
waste and minuscule, visible and invisible, chemical pollutants, decaying food, everything
clogging up the gray air and the brown water and the trash-covered land.
Among all these scattered objects, I am less interested in the decayed remnants of
grandiose ancient monuments than with some of the other classes of waste that have
supplanted them in our age: buried video games; the slow leak of decaying plutonium
miles below ground; the plastic bag caught in the tree; the accumulated wreckage
in our attics, barns, and living rooms; the satellite debris hurling through space.
These are the markers laid down on the bet we have made with futurity. In the end
the final disposition of our water bottles, our websites, our Happy Meal toys, and
our bombs will say as much about time and humanity as the fates of the Statue of
Liberty, the Great Wall, or the Coliseum will. In Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay
writes with deep erudition and affection about the pleasure that classical ruins have
given to people for centuries. Exemplified by the sentiments of Diderot and other
Romantic admirers of antiquity’s enduring fragments, these types of ruins seem to
possess the power to wring powerful emotions and feelings from us: the thrill or
desperation or sorrow that attends contemplation of vanished ages, or the shock of
situating ourselves within the endless rushing stream of time. We believe we have
some emotional attachment to the stories about humanity that the tumbled stones
of ancient ruins seem to tell. But I am much more drawn to what Gilda Williams has
characterized as the difference between the “ruin” that captivated Diderot and melancholics
everywhere and its lowly counterpart, the “derelict.” The ruin is a thing
of wonder and Romantic grandeur; it inspires poetry, whereas the derelict seems to
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cry out for burial or demolition. It is the difference between a majestic crumbling
beauty and an eyesore, a hazard, or a nuisance. For my part, I understand the derelict
as that immense underclass of things that have much more quickly or surreptitiously
fallen outside of visibility and desire in our time: the indifferent, the lost, the
wayward, the leaking, the ugly, the truly abject and unwanted–all the meddlesome
waste caught in the cracks between the things we’ve built up in our minds as meaningful
and majestic. In every new and shiny object of our age, and in every tiny and
seemingly insignificant object of attention, I cannot help but see its erasure, or imagine
its rusting, splintered, discarded husk decaying somewhere in the near future. I
cannot seem to see objects embedded in their present time and space; they always
carom off the edges of the present and into the past and the future, constantly, for
me, whether I wish to see them this way or not. So this book is not a systematic
environmentalist polemic, an academic monograph on the histories of sanitation, or
a political manifesto (three of my favorite things). It is instead a meandering ramble
through an idiosyncratic handful of the collapsed monsters and enigmatic bits of
drift that have caught my eye, as a dirty penny on the street might not interest a
hundred people passing by before it finally finds someone who covets it. This book
is meant for the flaneurs of filth, those who like to wrestle with the cinders and rummage
around in the midden heap haphazardly. For some of us, a lofty ruin does
nothing; We are for the ramshackle and the derelict every time. Like the maddening
object that Socrates finds and then tosses away, all the derelict objects of our
immense object worlds, whether they are busted pianos, sandwich wrappers, egg
cartons, unfashionable bathroom tiles, or corrugated coffee-cup sleeves, are likewise
the playthings of an endless litigation, tossed between desire and detritus, waste and
want. So if waste is this book’s object, its real subjects are desire and time, because
the things we call our waste exist in an interzone between two states of mind and
two structures of feeling about the glittering, shattered object-worlds we have built
around ourselves. These relics float between the poles of desire and discard. More
than mere trash or hazard, a better way to think about waste is to think of it as the
unsatisfactory and temporary name we give to the affective relationships we have
with our unwanted objects. Waste is the expression of expended, transmuted, or
suspended desire, and is, therefore, the ur-object. To talk about waste is to talk about
every other object that has ever existed or will ever exist. Conversely, to talk about
any object at all is to gesture toward its ultimate annihilated state. Waste is every
object, plus time.
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FLECT
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BRUCE
MUNRO
MUNRO Field of Light / Uluru AU / 2016

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REFLECTING
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MUNRO CDsea / Long Knoll Wiltshire UK / 2010

INTERVIEW:
BRUCE MUNRO
Internationally renowned British artist
Bruce Munro will open Light, an exhibition
of 10 breathtaking, large-scale outdoor
and indoor lighting installations
coupled with indoor sculptures, at Nashville’s
Cheekwood Botanical Garden &
Museum of Art. The exhibit will include
four installations never before seen in the
U.S. Using an inventive array of materials
and hundreds of miles of glowing
optical fiber, Munro will transform
Cheekwood’s magnificent gardens, manicured
grounds and rolling hills into an
enchanting, iridescent landscape that
emerges organically at nightfall. Aesthetica
spoke to Bruce on his latest exhibition
and what to look out for in the
future.
A: Firstly, your art practice is centred on
light, what is it about light that you feel
drawn to use as your focal medium?
BM: It took me a number of years to
come to this conclusion and once I had
made my decision to work with light I
stayed with it. Choosing a medium was
incredibly helpful as it gave me a structure
to work within. I have quite a wide
ranging imagination and this containment
has allowed me to retrace my steps
when I have ended up a blind alley! One
beautiful quality of light is that it captures
the ephemeral. This illusive, seemingly
no physical quality has a spiritual
essence about it and makes it ideal as
medium to use to express abstract concepts
such as emotion and connection.
A: Your work is centred around light
installations within natural landscapes
and iconic buildings. Where do you draw
your inspiration from for such large scale
projects?
BM: Working with large scale landscapes
and buildings was very much
“wishful thinking,” I never imagined that
I would get the opportunity to realise
many of my ideas. The inspiration, and
the ideas that follow, are changing constantly
and vary in scale, medium and
longevity. For example , Field of Light
was inspired during a journey through
the Australian Outback; Water towers
was inspired by a book that I read when
I was twenty one and CDsea by a Sunday
afternoon sitting on a rocky peninsular
in Sydney Harbour. As I get older I
am inspired and drawn to simple things.
I endeavour to express these experiences
in the same way.
A: You work with both light sculpture
and installations – do these varied mediums
perform different roles in the narrative
of your work?
BM: I do not have a set approach so I
would say that all pieces; small and large
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REFLECTING
are simply inspired by what’s in my mind
on a particular day. I don’t see that short
term time based pieces are more or less
important than more permanent sculptures.
But I do have a preference for the
large scale installations to have a flavour
of a performance; leaving the natural
landscape as one found it is always
important.
A: Your work often focuses on dramatic
landscapes. Can you talk about your
work as it relates to the broader natural
environment?
BM: The opportunity to create installations
so large that they become dramatic
landscapes has been a huge bonus and
privilege for me. Although the original
inspiration has often come from other
times and places, my approach with an
existing installation is always dictated to
by the space. This helps keep the work
fresh. For me, variations on a theme are
as interesting as completely new works.
Staying with one medium has showed me
that exploration is infinite and what you
think you know always has hidden
surprises.
A: For such large scale installations, the
viewer can become immersed with the
work, what do you want the audience to
take away from it?
BM: Appreciating /understanding scale
is important and my ambition in the
future is to work larger. This is not an
ego driven desire but an instinct that in
order to convey an idea/emotion it’s
necessary to create a situation where the
viewer is out of sight of the gallery walls.
I like the idea that people can explore an
installation in a private way …like going
for a walk through the forest or a trip to
the sea. It frees people up to make their
own judgement about something and
normalises “Art” to “art”. I would like
people to take away a feeling of having
experienced something positive …at its
best a lovely smile.
A: Your new exhibition Light is opening
at Nashville’s Cheekwood Botanical Gardens
and Museum on 24 May, can you
tell us more about it?
BM: Cheekwood Botanical Gardens is
my second large solo exhibition in North
America. I am incredibly excited by
Cheekwood because it’s truly a veritable
jewel of the gardening world in North
America. Aside from the beautiful landscape,
Cheekwood has a number of
beautiful interior gallery spaces, an
established artist in residence programme
and world class collection of
paintings and sculpture. For me it’s both
an added bonus and privilege to exhibit
my work in their Mansion galleries.
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REFLECTING
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MUNRO Field of Light clean-up

The exhibition will comprise of seven
exterior and two interior installations as
well as an exhibition comprising of six
sculptures and a film of my work.
A: The Field of Light has been a continual
project for you, being recreated in several
locations around the world. Can you
tell us more about this specific installation
and what your future plans are for it?
BM: Field of Light is very much my
touchstone. The idea was inspired during
a trip through the Australian Outback in
1992 at an important juncture in my life.
It took me twelve years to realise the
installation and was the first piece of
work of my present journey.
Uluru, central Australia is a powerful
place. It’s a landscape that is best understood/appreciated
by experience. I just
felt alive and in addition to these immediate
reactions I realised that my understanding
of a desert as a dead and
barren place was plain wrong. Simply
pondering the blooming desert after a
rainstorm was proof that there was a
unique potency about the place. Field of
Light was simply my interpretation and
expression of how it made me feel. I
have never tried to read anything more
into it than that, nor should anyone one
else. My goal is to create a temporary
installation of a quarter of a million
stems (solar powered) in the Uluru
region. Last year I was invited bythe to
urism arm of the Indigenous Land Corporation
to visit the area and look at a
prospective piece of land. As with all
these major installations, funding is vital,
it will happen when it’s meant to!
A: And lastly, what future projects have
you got coming up?
BM: Following Cheekwood Botanical
Gardens, exhibitions at Franklin Park
Conservatory and Botanical Gardens,
Columbus, Ohio, (September); Waddesdon
Manor, Buckinghamshire (UK)
(November) and Edinburgh, Scotland
February 2014. We are in the midst of
finalising exhibitions at a number of
other exhibition venues 2014-16. In
addition I have a back log of installations
I will be bringing to fruition in the
field behind my home in Wiltshire.
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3 weeks
70 miles of optical fiber
140 friends
3,200 hours to construct
250,000 lights
600,000 CD’s
MUNRO Field of Light / Edinburgh SCT / 2014
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MUNRO Field of Light / Houston TX / 2015

RE
GA
THER
ING
EDWARD BURTYNKSY Tire Pile / Oxford / 1999

RUNE
GUNERIUSSEN
GUNERIUSSEN The Heirs Motivational Speech / Norway / 2013

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REGATHERING
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GUNERIUSSEN A Charged Meadow 01 / Norway / 2009

THROUGH THE
EYES OF RUNE
GUNERIUSSEN
Conceptual artist Rune Guneriussen transforms the most ordinary of objects into
large-scale installations that pepper the dreamlike landscape of his native Norway.
Unlike Andy Goldsworthy, who creates installations using elements of the natural
world, Guneriussen integrates man-made items into his work. Using books, chairs,
electric lamps and other miscellaneous objects, Guneriussen assembles temporary,
site-specific sculptures and installations that he photographs. Once the image is
taken, he quickly dismantles the work, leaving no trace of it behind.
The Norwegian artist creates the most enchanting of worlds, inviting his viewers to
weave their own fairy tale to accompany his whimsical creations. “As an artist he
believes strongly that art itself should be questioning and bewildering as opposed to
patronising and restricting. He does not want to dictate a way to the understanding
of his art, but rather indicate a path to understanding a story,” Guneriussen states
in the third person on his website.
Using books, chairs, electric lamps and other miscellaneous objects, Guneriussen
assembles temporary, site-specific sculptures and installations that he photographs.
Once the image is taken, he quickly dismantles the work, leaving no trace of it
behind.
“I would like to say that I am inspired by the objects I am working on, the place or
location I am working at, and the specific time everything is made in. My imagination
can just as easily be inspired by global events and politics as it can be inspired
by looking at a bird flying across the sky. But I also relate back this inspiration to my
artistic development and the real time put into making a work like I do.”
By placing inanimate objects like lamps, globes, telephones and chairs in untouched
landscapes, the artist achieves to combine nature and manmade structures into
whimsical installations. Guneriussen is the only witness of the site-specific installations,
leaving the audience with nothing but the photograph as tangible proof which
documents the brevity of his objects. In this way, he uses the photographs to extend
the space of the idea by means of documentation. With their poetic titles the often
monumental photographs suggest multiple stories representing a balance between
nature and culture.
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GUNERIUSSEN A Charged Meadow 02 / Norway / 2009

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75 desk lamps
150 phones
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HIS PARALLEL USE OF MATERIAL
AND RURAL SPACE UNPICKS THE
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMAN
CULTURE AND THE PLANET WE
INHABIT.

REGATHERING
GUNERIUSSEN Untitled Havoc / Norway / 2008

RE
DO
ING

NOAH
PURIFOY
PURIFOY desert structure

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REDOING
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PURIFOY No Contest / Joshua Tree / 1991

SALVAGE
AND
SAVIOR
You have to make a journey to visit Noah Purifoy’s Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum
in Southern California. Driving from the city to the desert, you feel the shift in terrain,
the vast silent space, unforgiving weather, abandoned buildings, and wildlife.
With that you get a sense of the community there, the thrift-store culture, and the
way people recycle and repurpose every facet of their lives. Embedded within this
community, Noah Purifoy built relationships and sourced the unwanted materials
that would form his outdoor tour de force.
The sculptural amalgam that Purifoy created in Joshua Tree consists of rickety
geometries populated by balanced and arranged densities of discarded junk (toilets,
tires, bowling balls, shoes, etc.) that absorbs all of the qualities inherent in the desert
landscape. The Outdoor Museum also integrates Purifoy’s life previous to his move
to the desert in 1989, at the age of 72, including the social injustices of the segregated
South, his experience at Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of
the Arts), the Watts Rebellion, and his years spent working as a social worker, educator,
and civil servant.1 Purifoy’s idea of “recording lifetime experiences” is manifested
in the social and relational aspects of his cast-off materials, architectural
spaces, and transient objects.
The works in Purifoy’s open-air museum ricochet off one another. For instance,
Shopping Cart (1997), an oversized icon of homelessness, resonates with Shelter
(1999), a structure whose interior produces the feeling of abandonment and invisibility.
Both works contrast with the large-scale The White House (1990–93), previously
titled The Castle, which is the dominant and central structure in Purifoy’s civic
space. The constructed analytic geometric space of The White House, associated
with bureaucracy and authority, intertwines with the accumulation and neglect associated
with the unregulated space of the street. The museum’s overall arrangement
seems to follow a broken urban plan, mixing improvisational realities with institutional
logic. The sculptures operate both phenomenologically and on an emblematic
level. The scale feels human and at the same time like a model of a psychic space.
As one meanders inside, outside, and between the structures, the network of sculptures
starts to appear as a kind of body, and subjectivity constantly shifts in relation
to the constellation. The forms become a stage for the viewer, and one has the feeling
of being able to project oneself into the spaces while simultaneously having the
sensation of trespassing. In Purifoy’s unique museum, the access, ownership, and
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REDOING
PURIFOY From the Point of View of the Little People / Joshua Tree / 1994
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PURIFOY Outdoor Museum

REDOING
10 acres occupied
15 years to complete
privilege associated with commodity culture exchange positions with abandoned
spaces and junk.
I first visited Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Museum in 2006, two years after his death. I
took my Art Center class, called “Studio Visits,” on a field trip. We started in Joshua
Tree, at Andrea Zittel’s home and studio and the High Desert Test Site (HDTS)
headquarters. Zittel took us to visit Purifoy’s museum, which is in close proximity to
HDTS both physically and in spirit. I wanted my students to see examples of artists
who have forged ways to exist that aren’t fueled by a standard recipe for professionalism
or the art market, that are predicated on experimentation, and that privilege
the work in situ creating its own context.
PURIFOY Outdoor Museum
Purifoy’s museum site and his creative process seem boundless, like embodiments of
the idea of the Wild West. Correspondingly, the artist chose to work with the natural
elements, rather than perceiving their limitations. I can relate to some aspects of
Purifoy’s outdoor situation and the necessity for resourcefulness. I split my time
between an urban storefront studio and an abandoned and repurposed solar-powered
swimming pool studio in Topanga Canyon. Sunk into the ground, the pool has
a deep end, which is leveled with a wood platform, and a shallow end, which is
sloped, and it is extended and enclosed with a cobbled together structure of found
wood and windows. Birds build nests in the pool, and I just have to share the space
with them. Branches, palm fronds and bamboo have often become my materials
because they are available. Heat guns and sewing machines pull too much solar
power to operate. Structures decay due to the weather. Time slows down and the
light slowly changes quality. In an open-air work-space, one becomes aware of the
larger timescales found in nature. The outdoors is a place to think and work without
the usual distractions. I envision Purifoy having a similar experience in the desert.
Perhaps this attitude toward the things one can’t control contributes to his works’
playfulness and humor. I remember one of my students playing with Purifoy’s giant
Newton’s Cradle, a line of spheres (bowling balls) suspended from a rod in a row.
Once activated, the balls smacked against each other rhythmically in a pendular
fashion. Perversely, it became the timekeeper for the space. Of course, the
sun-weathered bowling balls also display the trace of actual time, unmeasured and
unregimented. There is a sense of promise in the decay and trash.
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RE
SHAP
ING
EDWARD BURTYNKSY Shipbreaking / Chittagong BD / 2000

CHRISTO /
JEANNE-CLAUDE
CHRISTO Running Fence / Sonoma-Marin Counties CA / 1976

INTERVIEW:
THE MAKING OF
THE RUNNING
FENCE
Eye Level: The Running Fence has
multiple stories to tell. What story will be
told in the exhibition at the Smithsonian
American Art Museum?
Christo: The exhibition is about the
making of the Running Fence. There
were many parts to the project that could
not be seen in photos or drawings, such
as the public hearings for permits.
Roughly three hundred items went into
making the Running Fence. The project
was organized by Jeanne-Claude and
myself, and we put together the archives
[acquired by the Museum in 2008], very
important material, to translate the making
of the project. That is why the photographs
on exhibit will not only show
the objects, but also reveal the process of
making the project: the landowners, the
fabrication, materials, installation of the
anchors in the ground, the cables—all
these things were an integral part of the
creative process.
EL: Tell us a little about the archives
that you and Jeanne-Claude put together.
Christo: Jeanne-Claude and I made a
point that because our work is temporary
the record of that project needs to be
very accurate, because art historians can
make all different kinds of interpretations.
The exhibition tries to make the
point of exactly what the project is. The
exhibition also translates the Running
Fence chronologically, from the beginning
when we didn’t have a site, to scouting
for the site, using wooden poles in
the first drawings and collages, because I
was thinking about using wooden poles
before working with our own engineer.
The exhibition is the entire story of the
making of the Running Fence.
EL: How did you determine that the
Fence would be 24.5 miles long?
Christo: In 1972, we started with the
idea of doing a project that involved the
life of the people related to the ocean
from the urban, rural, to the countryside
in California. And this is why the
Running Fence is 24.5 miles: Because the
Fence crosses from the rural area near
the coast to the suburban area at
Petaluma and finally crosses the highway,
Route 101. In California the highway is
very important, and the closest highway
ran 24.5 miles from the coast. If the
highway had been ten miles from the
coast, the Fence would have been only
ten miles. The project translates crossing
fourteen county roads and small roads
until crossing the important Route 101
running north and south from San Diego
to the Oregon border. And of course,
using the land of the 59 ranchers and
public space—all of this exactly reflects
how the people in California use the
land from rural, suburban, to the urban
space.
EL: Were you considering other spaces
in California?
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RESHAPING
Christo: Yes, of course. The project
was to be done in California because of
the coastal culture. California’s coastline
is much more hospitable than the East
Coast, where we have winter. People live
much more horizontally in California as
opposed to here [in New York City],
where people live vertically. Jeanne-
Claude and I scouted California from
the north to the south. We recognized
three possible locations: one near
Petaluma (which we chose), one north of
our location, near Eureka and the
Oregon border, and one in San Luis
Obispo, between San Francisco and Los
Angeles. There are two ways Jeanne-
Claude and I do our projects: for the
first, we have existing sites like Central
Park [The Gates], the Reichstag
[Wrapped Reichstag], the Pont Neuf
[Pont Neuf, Wrapped, Paris], or the second,
where we need to find a site, as we
did for Valley Curtain, Umbrellas,
Running Fence, and our current project,
Over the River. Because we are never
sure that we can get permissions for our
locations, we need to have at least two to
three choices for the project so that we
can work out the permit process.
EL: When you and Jeanne-Claude were
growing up [she in Paris and Casablanca,
and Christo in Bulgaria], did California
have a certain appeal or mystique?
Christo: Jeanne-Claude and I first discovered
California in 1969 on the way to
Australia. We stopped in California and
spent time there. Of course, Running
Fence is a linear project in its use of the
land, so we tried to find topographically
rich land. The coastline in the East is
very flat, whereas in California the coastline
grows dramatically from the beach
to the hills and mountains. It was very
important to have this land for Running
Fence—the highway, the town, and the
rural area—to use such dramatic landscape
in our project.
EL: I’ve heard that people who work on
the projects with you and Jeanne-Claude
become like members of the family. How
did that come about?
Christo: Filmmakers Albert and David
Maysles and I met in 1962 and we
became very close friends. Albert already
started filming our work in 1965. He did
the Valley Curtain before the Running
Fence. They became like family. Their
1978 film of Running Fence is extremely
valuable in grasping how the project
came to fruition. They translated the
invisible parts, because many people do
not know about that—the public hearings,
the close cooperation with our very
brilliant engineers, the local people such
as surveyors and lawyers we hired to help
realize the project.
EL: I was thinking of the Robert Frost
poem “Mending Wall,” with the line:
‘good fences make good neighbors’. But
the Running Fence didn’t divide the way
fences do, but brought people together.
49

CHRISTO Wrapped Car / 1963
Christo: Yes, exactly. We were very
eager to design the route of the Fence to
cross fourteen roads, so people could see
it where it crossed a road. We wanted the
entire length of the Fence to run in relation
to man-made structures—a house, a
farm, a barn, a farmer’s fence. Also, with
all our projects we need to find very
descriptive titles, again not just for aesthetic
reasons but because we try to be
extremely descriptive in the title and not
mislead people. The Fence wasn’t fencing
anything except running to the hills.
EL: Once you and Jeanne-Claude began
work on Running Fence, did you fall in
love with the California landscape?
Christo: We fall in love with all the
landscapes we use in our projects. We fell
in love with the coastline of Australia in
1968-69. We fell in love with the Rocky
Mountains with Valley Curtain. Every
project is a slice of our lives, a particular
moment in our lives, and we’ll never do
it again. This is an absolutely unique
image, meaning there will be no other
Running Fence, no other Gates, no other
Valley Curtain, no other Surrounded
Islands. Unlike other artists we’re not
transporting things around the world.
50

RESHAPING

3 sessions at superior courts
4 years of approvals
15 government agencies
17 public hearings
3,000,000 dollars
52

RESHAPING
24 miles long
56 km of rope
100 workers
17,000 work hours
95,600 sq. meters of synthetic fabric
CHRISTO Running Fence / Sonoma-Marin Counties CA / 1976
53

NOBODY CAN BUY THE WORK, NOBODY CAN OWN THE WORK,
AND NOBODY CAN CHARGE TICKETS FOR THE WORK.
54

RESHAPING
CHRISTO Running Fence / Sonoma-Marin Counties CA / 1976
55

This project is entirely designed for that
specific landscape and nothing can be
transported. Nobody can buy the work,
nobody can own the work, and nobody
can charge tickets for the work. We do
not own the projects, they are beyond the
ownership of the artists because freedom
is the enemy of possession, that’s why
these projects do not stay. They are absolutely
related to artistic and aesthetic
freedom.
EL: Tell me about the early stages of the
Running Fence.
Christo: The idea for all our projects,
not only Running Fence, starts with
sketches. These were very clumsy drawings.
[Over time,] the project gets crystallized.
For Running Fence, we did
several life-size tests to see how it should
be built. We built a 200-300-foot fence in
Colorado near the Wyoming border, and
studied it to determine what kind of steel
cable to use, what kind of fabric, how to
sew the fabric. For all our projects we did
the same thing. A smaller one-to-one
scale model is the only way to finalize
and crystallize both aesthetics and engineering:
how the project will look, how it
will be built. From the earliest sketches
[in the first room of the exhibition] with
very heavy, clumsy poles to the end with
very elegant, aesthetically chosen pole
attachments and in-ground anchors and
arches when the wind is blowing. This is
why we don’t do the drawings in the studio
and try to apply our vision cosmetically.
The goal is to refine a very long
and very important process with myself,
Jeanne-Claude, and the engineers. It’s
always about aesthetics: finding the right
pole, going to the very slim pole from the
heavy wooden one. By testing anchors in
the ground we could see ribs in the fabric
when the wind is blowing; these ribs did
not exist in the early drawings. Each
panel of 60 feet has two ribs very precisely,
held by anchors attached to the
ground. In the first panel [we tested] the
fabric lays like nothing, with no dynamic.
[The final fabric was chosen] because we
had a life-size test. The three arches did
not come from imagination.
EL: You and Jeanne-Claude pride yourselves
on recycling, and the Running
Fence was the first major art project to
include an Environmental Impact
Report. Can you explain?
Christo: It’s common sense. The material
is extremely valuable and it’s only
used for two weeks. After two weeks it
has a valuable use. For the Running
Fence we went with a community, and
the landowners were eager to have the
poles, the cables, and the fabric for a
variety of uses. They used the posts for
building their own fences and to build
cattle guards. And of course they used
the fabric for their barns and the cable.
56

RESHAPING
CHRISTO Wrapped Trees / Riehen CH / 1997
57

RESHAPING

RE
WEAV
ING

PATRICK
DOUGHERTY
DOUGHERTY Close Ties / Dingwall SCT / 2006

70 volunteers
2,000 hours
DOUGHERTY Shindig / Renwick Gallery DC / 2015
62

REWEAVING
DOUGHERTY Ballroom / Melbourne AU / 2012
63

DOUGHERTY Monks’ Cradle / Collegeville MN / 2012
64

REWEAVING
I MAKE TEMPORARY WORK THAT CHALLENGES OUR TRADITIONAL
IDEAS ABOUT SCULPTURE, THAT IT SHOULD LAST FOREVER.
65

Patrick Dougherty is best known for his sculptures that break down over time. You
may have seen one of his temporary works without realizing it. Built primarily from
tree saplings woven together, each sculptures is approximately a three-week construction
project where Dougherty and his group of volunteers carefully create the
habitat or environment of this a tangled web of all natural materials. Because the
sculptures are made of organic matter they disintegrate, break down and fall apart,
becoming part of the landscape once again. Most people see habitats and shelters in
his work – which is what many of them are meant to be – but “castles, lairs, nests
and coccoons” isn’t what usually comes to mind. In an interview with Dougherty for
the New York Times, Penelope Green discusses his only permanent work and the
origin of his interest in what is referred to as Stickwork, now available through
Princeton Architecture Press.
Patrick Dougherty has made over 200 sculptures in the 25 years that he has been
creating Stickwork. But his construction work began when he was 28, working for
the Air Force in the health and hospital administration. He decided to buy property
in North Carolina and build his own house from the materials on the site. Collecting
fallen branches, rocks and old timber, Dougherty was able to construct his home, in
which he still lives with his wife and son, with a few additions. By 36, Dougherty
decided to return to school for sculpture and attended the art program at the

University of North Carolina. His interest in what nature had to offer led him to
develop his tangled sculptures. Each sculpture is different and depends greatly on
the site. Each project is different and depends on the volunteers that participate and
the public that never fails to stop and watch the sculptures being woven together.
Just Around the Corner evokes the ancient construction of town dwellings that may
have once occupied this site. The five elements resemble huts and are built into the
hedge as though they are supporting the weight of trees and are a permanent fixture
within this landscape. They closely resemble homes built out of trunks than as tree
saplings woven together. The installation exists at right angles to the shops on the
adjacent Main Street, creating a sharp contrast between the contemporary town
architecture just beyond the hedge and the potentially ancient construction nearby.
DOUGHERTY Na Hale ‘Eo Waiawi / Honolulu HI / 2003

RE
FIN
ING

ANDY
GOLDSWORTHY
GOLDSWORTHY Woody Creek CO / 2015

ENTWINES
NATURE INTO
ARTWORKS
Before I meet Andy Goldsworthy, I have a wander round the retrospective of his
work being constructed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield.
Goldsworthy creates moments of wonder out of local rocks and earth and trees, and
this wandering prompts several questions, which I jot down in my notebook: are all
farm animals abstract expressionists? Is one dry-stone waller’s work distinguishable
from another’s? Just how do you suspend these three oak trees in mid-air below
ground in the middle of a field? And, is sheep shit more user-friendly (for smearing
on gallery windows) than cow shit?
Goldsworthy is 50 and, as these questions suggest, back in his element. Lately, the
British countryside’s most engaging propagandist has been pursuing his vision all
across the world. He has made unlikely cairns in Des Moines, a monumental
Holocaust memorial in New York (for which he planted oak trees in giant boulders).
A return to the green, green grass of home feels overdue. He grew up not too far
from here, on the Harrogate side of Leeds, in a house edging the green belt. He was
a guest artist at this sculpture park way back in 1983, when he was still asking himself
whether there might be a career at all in making piles of stones off the beach
look like Brancusis or in taking vast Scottish snowballs down to London and observing
them melt.
In the time since, he has collected a team of craftsmen and labourers who follow him
around the globe, humping wood and carving stone. This morning I come across
several of them, working in small groups on the various ingenious constructions that
Goldsworthy has set in motion. Five men are out in a copse making a circular drystone
structure that will obstruct a right of way and offer no entry or exit; a stubborn
comment on the Enclosure Act of 1801, among other things. The foreman, Gordon
Wilson, is on the phone to Goldsworthy, clarifying whether the copestones of the
enclosure will be done in the Yorkshire style, rough and ready, or the
Nottinghamshire, curved; another group on a different hill is making a complex
sheep pen.
Dave’s patience has not been in vain. His crafted pens of quarried rock have at their
centre an eight-and-a-half-ton block of sandstone on which visitors will be invited
to make ‘rain shadows’; this process will involve waiting for a likely looking rain
cloud and then, as the first drops begin to fall, lying full length on the rock and
allowing a body-shaped silhouette to form, which the prostrate pilgrim will photograph
and contribute to an archive. I imagine a queue of cagoule-clad ramblers
gazing at the horizon, invoking drizzle. The perfect English day out.
70

REFINING
The tour across the park - which also takes in ‘paintings’ made in mud on canvas by
sheep feeding around a circular trough - is a preamble to the subterranean weirdness
that Goldsworthy is creating in the gallery itself. In five large adjacent rooms underground,
he is reproducing some of his greatest hits. Almost filling the first room is
one of his enormous egg-shaped ‘black holes’ made of mossy, random curved logs,
held together only by the artist’s uncanny defiance of gravity and a kind of ancient
energy; in the next are an unsettling colony of 11 stepped clay mounds, each with a
vacancy at the top, that seem like the extraordinary efforts of avant-garde termites;
beside these, in what has the feel of a medieval workshop, art students are mixing
clay with sackfuls of human hair diligently collected from nearby salons and slapping
it on the walls; as this hirsute plaster dries out it will crack and crumble and be
held together by myriad strands of local DNA.
The fourth room is waiting for a coppiced dome with a 20ft diameter that I’m told
Goldsworthy will knock up in the next few days - I’ve been inside a previous dome
he made at the Albion Gallery in London and can still recall the otherworldly claustrophobia
of it, like finding yourself in the stomach of a tree. In the final room I
come across the artist himself up a stepladder working on a beautiful filamented
curtain stretching the full height and width of the gallery that up close turns out to
be made from horse-chestnut twigs held together with thorns, each one - more than
10,000 in all - painstakingly jointed by hand. Goldsworthy comes down and, over his
umpteenth big custard tart and mug of latte of the day (‘this kind of thing burns up
the calories’), tells me what he is up to.
He talks with a precise animation, at odds with his Yorkshire vowels, and a constant
sense of mischief in his face. ‘They are calling this a retrospective,’ he says, ‘but
actually I’m only interested in developing new stuff. Take this,’ he gestures at the
horse-chestnut curtain, ‘I discovered this here in 1987 when I picked up a few
horse-chestnut stalks and pinned them together with thorns, and I found that holding
them up to the light was really beautiful. I wondered if I could span a couple of
trees with them, and I was amazed that I could. Now here I am 30 years later making
a mesh that spans a room 12m wide. I wanted to put this in to show the way
things have grown, the technical things, you know....’
One of Goldsworthy’s talents is to make such intricate stunts look easy. At one point
he quotes Whistler’s notion that a work of art is not finished until all signs of the effort
of making it have been removed. He likes that idea. I suggest the ‘black hole’, the
great cairn of oak branches he has created up the corridor, as a good example of that.
71

He laughs, in the way you might when thinking of the challenges of disciplining a
high-spirited child. ‘Stone to some extent has a system to it,’ he says. ‘But with wood
every branch is totally different. I always look at the branches laid out on the grass
before I begin and I think, “Oh fuck, here we go.” I used to do them in a day. I can
throw them up. But I took my time with this one, three days. To start with, you don’t
know what character it will take. If the base gets too wide it can be very sort of
lumpen.’
What he is trying to bring out, he says, is something like the same quality that existed
in the original trees. ‘That effortlessness. A tree is so perfect in its profile but it is
underwritten by this enormous daily struggle over years and decades. That is the
energy I am aiming for.’
Goldsworthy is a land artist in the tradition of the great American earth-movers like
Robert Smithson who created Spiral Jetty at Salt Lake, Utah. Richard Long, who
imported that tradition to Britain, is another mentor; like them, he wants to get
away from two-dimensional representation of landscape in a frame, and give you the
thing itself. That’s the theory. But he is also strongly in the tradition of everyone who
has ever had memorable days making dens in parks or sandcastles on beaches. He
preserves such ephemeral creations, icicle statues on rocks, brilliant forest dramas
made with autumn leaves, in exquisite photographs. Goldsworthy’s books are,
reportedly, the biggest-selling art books in the country.
GOLDSWORTHY Rowan Leaves and Hole
72

GOLDSWORTHY Japanese Maple Leaves / 1987

74

REFINING
75
GOLDSWORTHY Wood GOLDSWORTHY Line / San Francisco CA wood / 2011 line

WASTESCAPE
Our contemporary fascination with wastescapes is related to a much larger problem
of spectacle and visibility, and the political, social, economic, moral, and environmental
consequences of our growing reliance on them. Why are contemporary
accounts of waste inexorably drawn to capturing it through image and spectacle?
Knowledge and language seem important, but incomplete (as when we say, “Pics or
it didn’t happen”). And why does waste need to be visible to us as a dangerous object
for us to think about waste, and to act? As Max Liboiron at the Discard Studies blog
notes, 97 percent of waste is not the municipal solid waste that all of us create and
are familiar with, but industrial waste. Liboiron is right to note that a responsible
chronicle of the truly meaningful and consequential landscapes of waste would not
consist of landfills and garbage cans but of things like oil sands, mines, and decapitated
mountains-all of the extractive industrial processes that are ravaging the
planet. A society of constantly accelerating production, even in the face of recurring
periods of economic crisis and collapse, must do more than continually stimulate
consumer desire and expand its credit economies. It must also continually endeavor
to obscure the specific nature of its production processes (resource extraction, labor,
organization); and it must also do what it can to mitigate or suppress the reality and
impacts of its various waste products. If the mass of consumers truly beheld the
gruesome nature of production and effluent on either side of the sites of consumption
and uses enjoyment, the entire system would collapse. We do not often see or
smell or taste the garbage in our air, our soil, our water, and so we keep breathing
and drinking, just as we do not see our cargo ships and cars and planes and air-conditioning
units directly annihilate the coastline, or eradicate species, or give us cancer.
It’s even less common to see firsthand the kind of wastelands that Liboiron
describes, for the same reason that it’s so rare for us to see the inner workings of an
industrial slaughterhouse or the grim buildings where our phones are made. In the
face of the image, language seems like a poor advocate for thinking waste. The
image is time-bound. Every photographic image is an artifact at least indirectly
obsessed with time, and our natural predisposition toward spectacle, our privileging
of the looking eye over the reading eye, draws our gaze instantly to even the tiniest
bits of waste. In fact it often seems as if waste and photography were made for each
other. It is impossible not to see the coffee cup, the soggy paper, the plastic bird, the
cigarette butt, the piles of busted furniture. Our films are littered with litter; our
galleries are heaped up with photos and sculptures; and stagings are overrun with
trash. But even so, there are good reasons to be sick of the society of the spectacle.
76

UNNATURAL NATURE
It made a certain amount of sense in the previous century, when photography was
new and industry, for all its immense as it is now. We should consider the possibility
that our longstanding tradition of privileging the image may have outlived some of
its usefulness. If we consider that nearly all of what we would call waste is being
churned up in places images might not be the smartest thing to be looking for. We
can already see the poverty of imagery most forcefully in the ongoing calls to bear
witness to climate catastrophe: calving glaciers, drowning polar bears. The decimation
of the environment proceeds at a staggering pace and scale, but is generally
only registered by onlookers who can gaze upon visual evidence of its impact-and
that is actually a huge part of the problem. In the meantime, Ed Burtynsky’s seminal
photographic work seems to play on this desire to bear witness to human impacts on
the environment. The visual register of Burtynsky’s large-scale photographs of
industrial-scale production, mining, energy capture, and waste disposal sites may
induce all kinds of emotions in the viewer, but certainly awe would be among them,
even if it exists alongside horror, disgust, or sorrow. Their subjects may be on modern
industrial practices but the form speaks to something else, almost reverential, in
its execution. The aesthetic care and beauty in Burtynsky’s images-the distance and
vantage points, but also the color saturation, the unrelenting immensities on which
his camera lingers, along with the immense scales of his work-can just as easily have
the opposite effect that one might expect good-hearted environmentally minded
viewers to adopt.
Before these tableaux we are all helpless and infinitesimal in the face of what our
own societies are doing to the only planet we have. In Burtynsky: Water, the photos
of phosphor tailings ponds in Florida are glorious and gorgeous, as if we were seeing
into the pulsating mind of the planet itself, its frenzied ganglia swimming in cerulean
fire. So too are the images taken of Bombay Beach, a sewage treatment plant
in the California desert. From Burtynsky’s vantage point, the enormous pools of
sewage look like nothing less than a gigantic Technicolor paintbox. In Burtynsky:
Oil, he devotes significant space to the petroleum industry of Kern County. We see
the vast pumpjack fields of Taft, the ground and sky suffused with a dingy brown
funk, the Sierra Nevada mountains dimly visible through the haze of carcinogenic
smog. This type of waste photography shows us that anything can look like something
else or be made to look beautiful, provided you’re looking from a certain vantage
point.
77

BURTYNKSY Nickel Tailings / Sudbury ONT / 1996

UNNATURAL NATURE
79

UNNATURAL NATURE
created and designed by Dillon King, ArtCenter,
Los Angeles
Typeface:
Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk
Baskerville
EVERY IMAGE IS AN ARTIFACT AT LEAST INDIRECTLY OBSESSED WITH
TIME, AND OUR NATURAL PREDISPOSITION TOWARD SPECTACLE,
OUR PRIVILEGING OF THE LOOKING EYE OVER THE READING EYE