Pretty isn't enough; art aims to fix earth: artists leave studios for ecological activism - Cover Story

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 22, 1993 by Michael J. Farrell

Artists leave studios for ecological activism

Artists are people, too. If we watch them closely they may tell us something about life on earth and, occasionally, beyond. Indeed, the careful observer will soon notice now artists are like the rest of us: In a crass, greedy decade like the 1980s, artists wiling to wallow in decadence had little trouble finding 15 minutes of fame, not to mention profit. Conversely, when the world turns grim, as it has done again, followers of a more robust, crusading muse return to the high ground.

From AIDS to ecology, art and activism are mingling again, raising hopes and raising questions.

Although artists by definition defy stereotyping, still the story of Jeam Michel Basquiat offers somber insight into American art's recent roller-coaster past. A Haitian-American, Basquiat was picked up by the trendsetters from the Brooklyn streets where, as "Samo," he specialized in graffiti. In 1980, at the outrsageous age of 19, he had his first major exhibition, in New York. The hype, frame and fortune ebbed and flowed. His art (depending on one's taste, of course) was as good or bad as thousands of others; but in any case, the art was less important than what he wore -- artistic chic -- and the naughty eye he gave photographers from the glossy magazines. He almost survived the decade: In 1988, he died of a heroin overdose at age 27.

In the 1980s, the filthy rich paid huge sums for great art like Van Gogh's, but they also paid handsome sums for trendy junk from the likes of an American in paris appropriately named Condo.

To justify these fun times, critics and gurus gave the goings-on a philosophical veneer. They called most of the past-modernism, a name that gives the game away: By pointing to what it came after, they were able to avoid confronting what it stood for. Its aficionados used obscure terms like "appropriation" and "deconstruction." Mostly it was media-derived, Hollywood-inspired, slick and shallow.

By the end of the '80s, postmodernism had collapsed on its own hollow center, had gone the way of the S&Ls. The art world paused for breath, began looking at new ideas, was shocked into confronting new issues. Douglas Crimp, credited with ushering in postmodernism when he organized an exhibition called "Pictures" in 1977, was editing books about AIDS a decade later.

"This is a period of more questioning, of slowing down, of doubt," said the head of Paris' Pompidou Center, a trendsetter, last year.

"While of course soem artists have always been active in political causes, what is new is the degree of organization that artists are bringing to their activism," writes Robin Cembalest in a recent issue of ARTnews.

"The issues five years ago were money and power," says the director of one alternative gallery. "The shows this year are more sociological -- how culture works, how values change." The ARTnews article explored the international scene, found that museums and artists are again invading political and social territory, awaking to the corruption of governments and society the got out ofhand while their artistic backs were turned.

There is, of course, an old debate about whether art should be about beauty or about changing the world; art as decoration or as catalyst. The activist artist's is, traditionally, the less traveled road and the less prosperous.

Patrons, from medieval church princes to today's corporations, are scarcely looking for performance artists agitating for collapse of the status quo. The art in your local bank is likely to be sophisticated and, espeically, innocuous. Many would say the same about the art in your local church.

At a New York symposium a few years ago, the prevailing view was that "artists react to political and social change, if at all, two years after the rest of society." This sent environmental artist Nancy Ungar into high dudgeon: "We are worthy barometers and we often begin praying before the storm hits." She mustered a surprising amount of history to show that artists are more often prophets than panderers.

But seeing the storm coming doesn't mean artists can prevent it. Ungar goes on: "The art that is seen and the movments that are thereby 'made' asre controlled by the commercial gallery system; the latter, in turn, responds to the purchases of wealthy corporations and collectors. It is a system that, by its nature, supports the status quo; and the status quo recognizes no ills."

Ungar was writing in Art and Artists, a small magazine published by the Foundation for the Community of Artists, late 1988. That particular issue had a supplement on "artists and the homeless." Not surprisingly, the magazine did not survive the 1980s, though we are now finding that the word it spread lives after it.

The environment is an obvious cause for artists, cosmic and down to earth in one broad stroke. Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison are two busy environmental artists. A couple of years ago, they visited Yugoslavia for the European Nature Heritage Fund to study the effects of pollution on one of Europe's last surviving oak forests. This is typical of their artwork for the past two decades, writes ARTnews's Cembalest, "analyzing an environmental problem, devising a solution, and recording the whole process in maps, photographs and poetic texts," and putting in all on exhibition in a New York gallery.