Location, location, location

The implications of venue, context and intention

The Hague

As in real estate, location is everything in the art world. Location can make the difference between whether even the most powerful art statement is trivialized or has its due impact and on what audience.

Showing your work at MoMA or Gagosian is a world away from a wall at your local restaurant. Conventional paintings are hung on a wall. But if they are on the wall of an "important" collector or in a museum, the venue confers an aura of greater historical significance to and a higher price tag on the artwork than it ever had in the artist's studio. Conventional sculpture can be placed on a plinth or simply left in the grass but certainly on some fixed surface. Legally, a site-specific sculpture oriented to the dawn, however, is not site dependent because there are infinite locations from which to view the dawn and no matter how much the artist declares it site-specific, it can be moved.

Another way to consider location is to direct our focus or to place something in an unfamiliar context. Directing attention can create a "trigger point" for a new awareness, changing our point of view. Installations have more fluid spatial potential and complexity than paintings, flat work or traditional sculpture. An installation can be in a museum, commercial gallery or outdoors. The "where" of an installation can have serious implications to make the message of the art more dramatic, poignant or just absurdist. In the twentieth century, the iconic example of displacement as context was when Marcel Duchamps placed a urinal in a gallery and called it "Fountain". That was a conceptual act of culture jamming. Formally, this displacement comes under the heading of "content." Location is where we place our attention on content for maximum effect. A private or institutional wall or an unstable physical site may or may not gain enough attention to reach a target audience.

I first became interested in the importance of site, location and the work of ecological restoration in 1979. After forty-four years of working through as many aspects of those ideas as I could, I began to shift my attention to core ideas that could effect policy changes. I was looking for root cause of habitat fragmentation and loss.

This article on the relationship between agriculture and wetlands protection explains why I have shifted my focus from direct wetlands restoration to accountability for ecocidal loss and root causes of unchecked habitat extractions.

Much of that thinking was expressed in the Blued Trees project. The Blued Trees Symphony was not just located outdoors, it was in a series of forested locations on privately owned land in the path of proposed natural gas pipelines, about to be seized in the name of eminent domain law. The artwork was anchored not only by individual trees but the rock substrate in which the tree roots held purchase, deep into the local soil and geology, which was fixed.

Location made the project an excellent test case for the Visual Artists Rights Act: could the spirit of art protected by copyright law stand against claims that fossil fuel infrastructure is truly for the "public" good? In a mock trial, it did, and we won an injunction: location did not just reify an artwork, it made a policy claim. My ideal goal was to take the question to the Supreme Cour as a steppingstone to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague. But from 2016, as the Trump administration began a campaign against the rule of law, I began losing hope of finding a path.

Location therefore in Blued Trees, has had a double entendre: it was as much about the permanence of site as it was about a legal theory with international implications for environmental law and Earth rights. As the basis for the injunction from the judge, in a discussion within the artworld it was defined as about art in relation to the non-human natural world. The location of the Cardozo School of Law for a mock trial for The Blued Trees Symphony wasn't the Supreme Court or the ICC. However it inspired my work on Blued Trees, An opera, about ecocide, which has allowed me to clarify my own thinking about the legal ideas.

Thanks to the Brick's traveling show for PST "Life On Earth" Blued Trees is finally going to the bigger courtroom, my original ideal location for Blued Trees: at the seat of the ICC. The next stop for my Blued Trees project in 2025, will be West Dem Haag, at the Hague in the Netherlands. That location is where ICC adjudicates crimes against humanity, such as, ecocide. The Hague, may deliver the traction I have looked for. Blued Trees could add to a public pile of evidence against perpetrators. The Hague is a place where evidence against individuals who have perpetrated ecocide can gain traction, where it could have meaningful impact on an international judicial system just beginning to recognize the crime of ecocide. My greater goal, is to catalyze a deeper discussion about what systems need to change if we are to rescue the world we know from dysfunctional relationships to each other and our planet.

In the October 30, 2024 event; “Blued Trees in NYC: The Sea Will Have the Last Word.” I posited that a dream could be evidentiary and that intimate relationships could mirror ecological patterns of extraction. Arguably, dreams, art and intimacy are interchangeable products of the unconscious mind. They can bear another level of witnessing to the dead forests left behind by individuals guilty of ecocide. They can also point us to sanity. They can go to the Hague.