Ecovention in Art

Like his predecessors in the Dada and Found Object Art movements, Robert Rauschenberg believed that art could come from the combination of seemingly incongruous and unheard of materials – of anything. For him, this idea manifested itself in his revolutionary Combines paintings and the use of organic materials in his Nature Paintings and Dirt Painting. Rauschenberg channeled this technique into environmental art, still a burgeoning field in its infancy in the 1950s.

Today, Rauschenberg’s Earthday 1970 poster, created for the first Earth Day celebration, can be looked upon as the catalyzing moment in the field of environmental art, inspiring such contemporary artists as Jackie Brookner and Alan Sonfist, whose work, along with Rauschenberg’s famous poster is on display at the Firehouse Gallery as part of the HUMAN=NATURE show.


Rauschenberg said, “I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world.” For Brookner, whose interests focus on water protection, this aesthetic is taken to the next level: her art is the creation of living ecosystems in situ, blending “ecological revitalization with the conceptual, metaphoric and aesthetic capacities of sculpture,” as curator Victoria Anstead writes. Her work’s purpose is to draw community interest in public art projects that, while they please the eye, also serve the greater purpose of environmental remediation and a call for policy change. Her contribution to this show is Utterances, in which a large moss-covered tongue lords over a self-sufficient ecosystem. The suggestion here is that communication between systems creates mutually beneficial cooperation and coexistence.

Like Brookner, Sonfist takes a similar in situ approach. The artist, whose career spans forty years, is perhaps best known for his Time Landscapes, which visually chronicle the changes throughout the restoration of a natural environment within a man-made environment. In this show, the time landscape is a triptych covering the development of a garden/park nestled on the corner of Houston Street and LaGuardia Place in New York City. What’s most shocking to the viewer here is the stark contrast between the grey cityscape and the tiny vibrant piece of green growing in a seemingly dead space. It calls to mind Eliot’s waste land, or the eyes of T.J. Eckleberg looking out upon that waste land in The Great Gatsby. The pessimistic undertones of those references aside, Sonfist’s work communicates something on a more positive note: that engaging forgotten spaces can revive them.




One only has to step into City Hall Park, right next to the Firehouse Gallery, to realize such potentiality – the park has been revitalized from its former destitute status; the old Firehouse itself was also re-discovered by the City and renovated to its former grandeur, this time as a home for arts. As Rauschenberg said, "You begin with the possibilities of the material."