Conversations at the Edge of the Brink
Embracing The Precarity of Uncertain Dots to Survive These Times
“Connecting Dots,” fresh water met salt water for the first time in 100 years at the Ghost Nets Site 1997. Photograph by Aviva Rahmani
Tomorrow, I will join island colleagues heading for the mainland for another protest against this administration. This may be the worst possible time of the week to post something but it took me this long to put my thoughts together and I wanted to share them before I leave early tomorrow morning to catch the boat.
It has been a long time since I posted an essay in this series. Of all the essays in this series, this has been the hardest to write. It has felt like I am trying to see clearly in the fog of war. War is the ultimate state of uncertainty. In fact, I think we are deep into an asymmetrical war. We are in a war fought with false narratives and even falser information, a cyber war that is taking no prisoners and devastating untold lives.
How do we survive the radical uncertainty of war? In the United States, we seem to be teetering on the edge of tyranny, capitulating under the thumb of a vindictive Vladimir Putin, a war managed by angry white men. Everything from women's rights to managing ocean ecosystems, is up for uncertain grabs to the highest bidder, floating free of logic, wisdom or compassion, while the world, as they say, goes to hell in a handbasket.
In these times of maximum change, daily life is imbued with precarity and uncertainty, with serious danger at every turn, and complete collapse an imminent threat. Trigger point theory was an effort to understand adaptation to collapse and change that would allow for resilient biodiversity. It developed from two sources: 1. My experiences restoring the collapsed ecosystem of a former town dump site, which became the Ghost Nets project (1990-2000) and subsequent experiments and research about other sites of collapsed ecosystems for potential remediation (Cities and Oceans of If -2000- 2015) and 2. Contemplating the nature of a complex adaptive model (CAM), as part of my dissertation research for "Trigger Point Theory As aesthetic Activism." A CAM describes relationships between disparate agents. I think of these relationships as conversations. As in any relationship, negotiating differences are what determine outcomes, but the outcomes are fluid and unpredictable and dependent. The interactions, not the agents, maintain the system’s survival.
The idea for a CAM emerged from complexity theory and quantum mechanics. In my book, "Divining Chaos, the Autobiography of An Idea " my premise was that the same dynamics that allow healing from PTSD, could be applied to a collapsed ecosystem. In PTSD, a system sustains such a violent injury, that it can no longer maintain stability. Any experience can randomly trigger a chaotic response that collapses the psychological system.
In these essays, I have explored the possibility that we live in a narcissistic culture. Narcissism is both the cause and the effect of trauma. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, he explores the idea that any war is an experience of traumatic chaos with no rational goal, executed in a state of collapse and denial. For some years, including in my book, I have presumed that we are in an environmental war, in which a hegemonic few have become grotesquely wealthy at the expense of the entire Earth. In Tolstoy's novel, a small community of aristocrats survives the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, who barely regard the consequences, particularly to the women in their families, and their own PTSD. Tolstoy never uses the word narcissism, but his world is certainly driven by narcissistic ideals and suffers from the casual cruelties and dearth of compassion characteristic of a narcissistic system.
Uncertainty, cruelty, violence and disaffection are not comfortable. Humans, in fact most life, prefers a measure of environmental stability. In fact, all community depends on and tends towards compassion rather than cruelty. However, that preference may be delusional, insofar as very little stability between fixed agents guarantees any certainty. Adaptation, even a state of constant adaptation, despite threat, may be a measure of the kind of resilience that permits survival. That is an idea that scientists have given serious thought to, particularly over adaptation to climate change. Internationally, the history of what has become known as ecoart, is a story of conversations between art movements and the Earth.
Mid-last century, an international cadre of artists became increasingly interested in exploring how systems thinking, including CAMs, applies to artmaking. This interest in systems thinking reflected changing attitudes towards previously siloed disciplines, manifesting as artmaking in several ways, from an embrace of academic research to reflections on large landscapes and policy matters. Over the past half century, the nucleus of practitioners has gradually shifted from a local to an international focus, now encompassing thousands of practitioners from every corner of the world, whose work spans everything from sonified mindfulness exercises to plastic assemblages. These artists often conceive of their practices as intercontinental projects. That approach parallels longstanding trends in the environmental sciences that conceives of contiguous habitat across geographies, rather than limited by national borders.
That approach to continental scale dynamics was first expressed mid-last century, by artists based in the United States, such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Michael Heizer and Agnes Denes, who identified as Earth or Land artists. These artists created large site-specific artworks, often directly with the Earth, spanning vast stretches of land in the United States. In some cases, as Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" and Heizer's "Double Negative," the support of dealer and patron Virginia Dwan made the work possible. The critique that has emerged of some of these works, however, was that they colonized and disrupted endemic habitat in service to largely male egos, making paeans to patriarchal, even narcissistic symbols and in opposition to the rise of ecofeminist art. Nonetheless, they did envision a far larger canvas for art making than most previous artists had imagined.
They gave rise to another generation of artists, many still living, often inspired by or working within the culture of Indigenous peoples or transdisciplinary philosophers, as Edgar Morin. They began regarding the Earth as a disrupted system to be healed.
Post WW II, thinkers such as Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner had initiated thinking that led to collaborations with institutions to provide direct healing from PTSD for War Veterans. That inception of what became art therapy was part of a wider perception that systems were both liable to trauma and capable of healing. These marriages of art and science included the idea that people should and could protect fragile systems was also expressed in seed banking projects, such as the Norwegian Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as part of what has become the interdisciplinary norm in many fields.
Paralleling these movements, another, larger group of artists, characterized by a broad diversity of origin, representation and means became referred to as environmental artists. These artists commented powerfully on nature without interfering with what they witnessed. In the UK, this movement included Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long, whose work attracted vast audiences to appreciate natural physical forces. In Israel, Shai Zakai documented the ecological devastation of war. This group included Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, Chris Drury, and the team of Christo and Jean-Claude, coming from Bulgaria and Europe. Many of these artists were influenced by the transcontinental mapping of large mosaiced landscapes from the new science of ecological restoration.
One of the most successful centers for this activity became Khoj International, now under the direction of Pooja Sood in New Delhi, India. Khoj has become a locus for Southeast Asian eoartists, hosting colleagues from across the planet. Throughout the nineties, the International Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) also brought artists and scientists together to foster collaborative research and initiate collaborations, particularly with Indigenous practitioners of Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK). Dennis Martinez organized a series of TEK seminars with peoples from across the planet in a series of SER's international conferences, introducing these groups to each other.
In Germany, many of the artists striking out in new directions were represented by cultura21. In the United States, Alan Sonfist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and the team of Helen and Newton Harrison. were artists who thought and worked internationally, often with aspirations to effect policy change. They inspired a younger generation who identified as ecoartists or ecological artists, often collaborating with scientists, as did Helen and Newton Harrison or Betsy Damon, or became scientists themselves, as Brandon Ballangee. Sacha Kagan wrote of these emerging international movements in his book, "Art and Sustainability (pub 2011 Columbia University Press)."
Following the example of Joseph Beuys, who described his work as social sculpture, and founded the Green Party in Germany, many of these artists became activists and incorporated their activism into their practice, as, Beuys's student and collaborator, Shelley Sacks, the South African artist who established hubs for social sculpture in China, India, Holland, Brazil and the UK.
The establishment of the National Parks provides a model for how complex the history of environmental policies can be as various agents came in conflict without adequate conversation. Yosemite was established for public access. However, it excluded Native Americans who had caretaked the land for millennia. That conflict highlights the history of tensions between TEK Indigenous science and Western attitudes to environmental complications.
Civilization, from my point of view, now seems poised on the terrifying edge of a precipice, staring down the brink at the crashing waves of climate change, the proliferation of mindless autocracies and religious fanaticism, that might lead to systemic collapse. It would seem to be a propitious time for a conversation before, like bison herded by ancient Native Americans, we fall to our deaths or rocks below us to be consumed by predators, such as tyrants. Where do we start that conversation now, before it's too late?
Any conversation is about connecting dots, between people, communities and data. In an ideal world, all life on Earth communicates for a sustainably balanced ecosystem for the common good. But the caveat is the tragedy of the commons: there will always be those willing to disrupt those connections, for their own selfish purposes, to establish their dominance as agents immune to community relationships. Tolstoy's opinion was that that was a self-aggrandizing delusion. In fact, he believed the forces that destroy lives are never driven by individuals, even if human nature appears to be in control. They are driven by an atavistic avarice for power and glory.
We know from the Center for Climate Change Communication that a die-hard climate change denier can't be persuaded by fact-based arguments, but they will buy a cheaper light. That argument could be start a civil conversation.
All life is a conversation. All art is a conversation: with the self, with the history of cultural traditions, with one's audience, no matter how small. A good deal of what creates community is conversation. Even the process of our survival is a conversation with our bodies, our environments, even with the spirit that animates us each. Conversation is an exercise in listening and hearing.
The vision of a tyrant, any narcissist, is the opposite of a back-and-forth conversational exchange. The goal is to squash conversation. Neither listening nor hearing has a role. Nothing that contradicts their vision can be countenanced. Opposition must be silenced, crushed, deported, banished, murdered. The ironic tragedy I see, is that the malefactor is so scared of an empathetic connection, so pathetically determined to hide from any human contact, to avoid conversation, that they must suffer in their own isolated stew of bitter resentments no amount of cruel retribution can heal.
What we see in the Trump administration are terrified children determined to destroy the world, to vent their frustrations, real or imagined in the cruelest terms possible, as we witness in the tragedy of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia who is being destroyed before our eyes because this administration cannot admit any failure. The spectacle of sadism with impunity seems to be the goal, to normalize public torture of innocents. Even Hitler didn't do that. Hitler hid his depravities because he was capable of shame. In the United States, we see libraries, Universities and museums, the places where important conversations and research take place, decimated, shamed, shuttered and shut down to serve bruised egos.
That assault on education was the recent topic of a "Gulf to Gulf" episode. This seems to be the beginning of our Cultural Revolution as a tool to establish absolute tyranny, deeply grounded in patriarchal misogyny.
For now, despite these assaults on higher education, such as Harvard, prominent intellectuals born in this country seem physically safe. But the political winds are being driven by young male influencers, residents of the "manosphere." Instead of targeting the elites to benefit the workers, as Mao and other twentieth century tyrants touted, the targets of this administration are those educated and trained people who have protected the poorest and most disadvantaged and the people they have tried to protect, to allow the richest and least socially competent to plunder and extract what remains of the Earth to hoard wealth.
In my work, I have tried to be in conversation- with other artists across time and geographies, with science, law and the trajectories of aesthetic histories. For my Masters, I presented an entire installation with research and performance, of my relationship to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." Political pundits who aren't in thrall to this administration’s master race narrative argue that the answer is in resistance. We shall see how durable that relationship will be and whether it can prevail.
Now I as I continue my engagement with Tolstoy in my series, "Tolstoy & I", trying to understand Russia's Orientalist point of view and how Putin's predecessors determined his views of the West and made the template for Putin going back to Peter The Great, I consider the historical role of the "great (strong) man.” Beethoven and Tolstoy were both great artists and remain powerful male figures. Were either narcissists? Would it matter? The book I am cannibalizing was my mother's. The face I see gazing back at me from the torn pages of "War and Peace," rarely looks even marginally happy, even though much of Tolstoy‘s text is warm and even endearing. Tolstoy wrote of the casualties of elite incompetence, shallow values and general fecklessness. His characters seem the avatars and predecessors of what we see in power today. I am trying to discern my future in these populated conversations with the past.
Despite Tolstoy's hatred of Napolean, Napolean's legal ideas have endured across history and are intrinsic to my continuing interest in copyright law. Copyright law in Europe, is about acknowledging the idea that art has a spirit, worthy of protection and subject to valuation. In a narcissistic culture, however, value accrues to what can be possessed, controlled and monetized. Can even the greatest art supersede that valuation? In our mock trial for Blued Trees,
the determining factor for the judge rendering am injunctive verdict was recognition of standing in the prevailing art conversation, attested by arts writer Ben Davis.
Living back on Vinalhaven Island, Maine, after several months away, I am engaged in another kind of conversation, listening to the encroaching seas at our edges every time we have a high tide and the considering the diminution of our freshwater resources in the center of the island, Hog Swamp, a critical recharge site for our sole source aquifer, as that land is sold off for development. We know ecosystems collapse from the edges because it becomes harder and harder to protect the critical center. But when the center and edges are both assaulted, survival becomes even more precarious. It gives me pause to wonder when the island might succumb to that double stress and how witnessing that possible collapse might inform my thinking now about how to adapt to the multiple layers of today's uncertainties.
When I restored the degraded wetlands site that was core to my Ghost Nets project here, I described the moment when salt and fresh water met for the first time again in 100 years, as the restoration of the "Ultimate Cunt," because wetlands, like women, including Tolstoy's women, have often been abused, destroyed and buried alive in male grandiosity, seen as tools for or obstacles to imperial ambitions, rather than recognized and revered for their fecundity.
Now, this island is in perilous conversation between sea and fresh water. But that is true of the entire world. As glaciers melt, sea level rises and rivers run dry, fresh water steadily vanishes. It is a paradigm for an international conversation occurring with or without us, between access to clear fresh water and the sea and the conversations between systems. And, "The Sea Will Have The Last Word," as my opera installation October 30, 2024 at the Anita Rogers Gallery in New York City asserted.
In recent years, my conversations have greatly expanded across the globe, with events and exhibitions in China, South Korea, France and other far-flung venues. Soon, I will leave for Japan and continue these conversations and my own process of witnessing, on another far larger island, for the time I am there, I will be free of tyranny, with other colleagues than I am in touch with now. One of my tasks will be to observe Japanese waters, as a witness to their ecosystem and to study in their art, as a researcher, to inform how I represent the waves in my own work, my own life. The conversations we need to have as we teeter on the edge of our precipice must be at this global, international scale and include all the players.
Can we only value the monetized material artifacts any artist leaves behind as residue of a lifetime practice (in most cases) of commitment and precarity or do we put a value on what Napoleonic copyright law called, "the spirit of art"? Tolstoy eschewed the term "novel" for what he accomplished in this book but it isn't clear to me how he regarded his accomplishment. A polemic couched in art? "War and Peace," inspired Ghandhi, another example of how art creates conversations whose ripple effects may advance agendas the tyrants of the world cannot even imagine, even less, perhaps can the artists who start those conversations foresee those outcomes. Could we put a value on Tolstoy's ideas? Can we locate the spirit of Tolstoy's art? How do we track the trajectory of influence in communities that span centuries of conversation? Can we engage with the sea before it swallows us whole? Will we be here to hear the answer?
Meanwhile, I will show up tomorrow to resist this administration.
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