Mapping a better world: more than 30 years ago, Helen and Newton Harrison decided to devote themselves to environmentally beneficial art. Their latest project, "Peninsula Europe," envisions nothing less than the greening of most of an entire continent - Critical Essay

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

By contrast, "The Best of Places" was a map-and-text installation devoted to the Sava River, which runs through the former Yugoslavia. The Harrisons propose to restore the river, which has been injured but not destroyed by industrial fanning, by enlarging an extant nature corridor and setting up a series of ponds to create a reed-bed purification system. Photographs taken along the edges of the Sava River map revealed the amazing diversity of its existing ecosystems.

Also on view, in the back gallery, was documentation of "Casting a Green Net: Can it Be We are Seeing a Dragon?" (1998), a proposed project in Britain which would connect Liverpool and Leeds. As with "Green Heart," this work deals with alternatives to unplanned urban development. Following the old Roman roads still discernible in this region, and marking the estuaries, the Harrisons discovered a shape on the map that took on the outlines of a dragon, with a small lake for an eye and a pair of extended wings. The dragon metaphor appealed to the artists because it recalled ancient myths of the dragon as the spirit of nature banished from the land by the rise of civilization. Here, they proposed that the existing meadows and woodlands within the dragon's outlines be allowed to spread and intermingle with farms and pastures, which would be worked organically. This, they argue, would eventually restore eroded topsoil, increasing the productivity of the land.

The Harrisons' work raises a number of interesting questions. One that they repeatedly encounter has to do with the definition of their activity: why should what they do be considered art and not science, environmentalism or land development? In response, the Harrisons point out that, generally, their projects are initiated at the invitation of arts groups hoping to play a role in larger planning issues. They maintain that their position as artists allows them to cut through red tape, ignore professional territorialism and present ideas in a form that general audiences can understand.

This last point leads to the second set of questions, having to do with presentation. How does one dramatize complex ecological proposals? How can such ideas be presented without bogging down in incomprehensible details? The Harrisons have struggled for years with this issue, and here they came up with one of the most lucid presentations of their proposals to date. Texts were pared down from far more voluminous explanations available in accompanying catalogues, and the maps were allowed to tell a great deal of the story. Listening pads and walk-on floor elements acted as lures to literally bring viewers into the works.

But if the presentation was simple and direct, the underlying problems of bringing these projects to fruition are monumentally complex, leading to another set of questions. How feasible are the changes advocated by the Harrisons? Is it reasonable to expect governments to purchase land to create nature reserves, to plant forests to hold water, to replace stopgap flood control methods currently in place in heavily urbanized areas with natural methods which will require displacement of citizens, to abandon ecologically damaging job opportunities for more beneficent ones? Isn't it utopian to expect bureaucrats to put aside political and territorial boundaries? In a world in which jobs, especially political jobs, seem increasingly short-term, is long-term thinking a practical possibility?