To Make a Sewage Treatment Plant Pretty
Sarah Northmore
Green highways and mystical paths: Johanson?s work in Fair Park Lagoon, Dallas and Park for the Amazon Rainforest
Patricia Johanson doesn’t merely decorate with site specific art–she cultivates and grows the site itself. For twenty years now, her parks, ponds, marshes and labyrinth-like paths have metamorphosed ecological disasters into halcyon refuges. What catalyzes these projects? Often, municipal construction projects like a pump station in San Francisco Bay or, in the case of her current project, a water recycling facility in Petaluma, California. Johanson discusses making art with life and life with art.
Sarah Northmore: Green art, hybrid art, landscaping… from an outsider’s perspective, the nomenclature is confusing. When someone asks what you do, what do you say?
Patricia Johanson: I usually just say I’m an artist because I think that’s what I am. I was actually trained as a painter. I did very large minimal paintings. But the thing is, people never realize that I’m the same person because I’ve done so many different kinds of things. It’s always been an exploration space. I’m not a landscape architect.
SN: You’re not?
PJ: I’m not! I’m not. Despite this huge following I have of landscape architects, I really know nothing formal about landscape architecture. I know a little bit about engineering. My 4th degree is in architecture. So I understand a little bit about how to build things. I did that almost as a desperate move because I was building these large pieces of sculpture and people would tell me that they couldn’t be built and I knew they could. So, I went back to find out how.
SN: When did you become interested in building large-scale environmental projects?
PJ: I had done these little drawings, started talking about this, way back in the 60s but people didn’t really understand them. But now, it’s becoming a codified field. There’s nothing really unusual about what I do anymore. It’s because I’m so old, and because I have this very long history, because I started out as a painter. Even when I was a student, the painters that fascinated me were people like Monet who dealt with light and color in the out of doors. And so I’m still doing that, but not on canvas.
I’ve always been more interested in the kind of work that fits into its surroundings. It often wouldn’t appear that it does. Because [my work] is so large, once you get out onto it, you no longer see it. And so the work becomes a kind of focus for everything around it. The paths are really meant to lead you to find your own connections. It’s not about the beauty of the paths themselves.
SN: Many of your projects incorporate these paths and walkways. They address a sense of journey, how one traverses a natural environment–for people as well as animals. Why?
PJ: Actually this whole idea of paths goes back to my first minimal paintings. Because when I first graduated from Bennington, painting was becoming more and more minimal. Less is more thinking. The paintings I ended up doing was just one line on a canvas. And eventually the canvases got to be 60 feet long. What was happening was this line, even though it was a painted line on a canvas, began to traverse real space.
SN: And force you to walk about of the gallery??
PJ: Well that’s exactly what people did! Eventually what I did after doing some of these paintings was I began doing sculpture out of doors–also lines. And then in 1970, I got a Guggenheim Fellowship: I had some money, I bought lots of materials, and I began working in the woods in the forest near my home. These early projects were also lines but the difference was they were now traversing a real forest. And I began to learn from nature. There’s never been any formal training. As I say, I’m not an ecologist; I’ve only studied things on my own. But I began to see how nature was impinging with a huge influence. For example, if the sculpture went under a pine tree, it would collect pine needles. And leaves would become soil. Pretty soon some animal or insect would move in there. The sculpture was becoming part of the whole environment. And so with Cyrus Field, I actually became a student of nature and what happens when you put something out of doors.
SN:The scope of the projects baffle: some paths are submerged, such as in Fair Lagoon Park. What effect does that create?
PJ: Yes that is actually part of the aesthetic. If you go back to Cyrus Field, one of the things I learned is that once you put things out of doors, it’s very difficult to maintain them in an ideal state. What I’m positing is work that grows and changes. That the art enhances the setting, and that the setting enhances the work.
SN: Your projects have to appeal to so many interests: ecological, industrial, municipal, as well as artistic/aesthetic. How do you possibly address all of these interests? Do you find yourself switching hats?
PJ: No. It’s like solving simultaneous equations. When you get into higher math, you’re not just doing one problem. You’re looking at the whole picture. Sometimes you have a whole bunch of equations and you have to figure out what is "x"! You can’t be, say, a pure studio artist where you design the perfect solution as art and then you’re not willing to let it go. Because, with all my projects there are many versions of them and the one that gets built is never as good as the first one.
SN: How?
PJ: How? Well how because from my point of view they’re not as good aesthetically. But on the other hand, you have to acknowledge that they wouldn’t be putting aesthetics into it at all if they didn’t really need this sewage treatment plant. I think one of the things that public art has done, it has put forth this idea and people are becoming convinced of the fact that it does matter how it looks. And it does matter how it functions. And it does affect lives even if you think it doesn’t. And so why not do it in the best possible way? Because, you’re spending the same dollars.
SN: What makes it possible now for artists to create projects for sites such as water recycling facilities? What has changed to make it so?
PJ: I think we’ve staked out new territory. Once a few of these projects were built, people realized it costs relatively little money to hire an artist to work on these projects. When people are building large projects, they’re always trying to solve a set of problems. I consider that the value of what I bring to any project is allowing me to think about the problem.
Dallas was a big part of that. Dallas actually solved the problems: erosion control, restored their water, it solved the biological problems, you know a dead body of water that people had actually drowned in, and so suddenly they saw that they had an amenity, that they could get publicity, thought well of for doing something. The art of course is a component that allows that to happen. There is always some product they need at the end–a sewage treatment plant for example. You have to be somebody who can work with engineers and can understand that the function is paramount.
SN: The life span of a project seems so important, particularly in situating it in an ecological/ natural setting. How do you choose between natural or synthetic materials to ensure a project’s lifespan?
PJ: It has to do with a number of things. One thing, of course, it budget. In San Francisco, I selected some quite wonderful materials which were never used because the budget was cut and so we ended up using colored concrete. Normally, if I’m doing a project in water, I will use gunnite. I almost always use that in sculpture, especially if it’s free form or in water. If I’m on land, I usually try to find some material that matches the site that would really look good in terms of its colors and its textures. Something that can blend in, nestle in, and not be alien twenty years from now, but will also last.
SN: It seems like the projects you build, because of their scope, you must wait so long for them to realize…
PJ: Yes, but well Central Park took 54 years. I don’t know if you’re aware of that! Actually, Frederick Wallested is my hero. Reading about him and seeing what he went through to realize those parks gives you a whole new perspective. I mean, this man went through hell on a daily basis and his commitment was total to get these parks built. But here they are, and they make such a difference in everybody’s life. No matter what you go through personally it’s important to do it because you have this chance to make a difference in just generations of lives, and I know this is true of some of the projects I’ve done. When you first do them, it’s just a little art project on top of the sewer…
SN: So much of emerging contemporary art incorporates or depends upon technology to manifest its effect or produce meaning. Does working amongst nature require technology?
PJ: Well, I have to say, I’ve always considered myself technically inept. Basically, when I’m designing a project, I’ll work with engineers and we’ll figure out as we go. What sort of structure is required to do the form I want to produce? And then, once we know that, they usually know what is required, in terms of equipment or construction techniques, to produce that. So, I no longer really have to know that. But you definitely need to have a sense of it. You need to know who to go to. I remember one time–I don’t know if you’re aware of this–but Bob Morris was my classmate at Hunter College. And somebody asked him–because he was already a very famous artist–somebody said to him, "Oh, Mister Morris, how do you know everything you know?" Because he always seemed to know a great deal. And he looked him in the eye and he said, "I use the yellow pages."
It’s not as if you have to know every thing in the world… you have to know where to look and who to ask.
SN: If you could build something anywhere without the hindrance of money or permissions, where would you work?
PJ: Oh… well, probably here in New York.
SN: In the city?
PJ: I could work in the city… I think I could do very innovative projects in the city, but I would like, as always, I would like to be able to frame my own project. Because, real estate is so valuable in the city–this is your lot (laughs). And you can’t go out of it. My work is about making the relevant connections… and it isn’t about that isolated site. And of course, this is exactly what’s so important to wildlife–it’s not this vast swath of territory that keeps them alive. It’s that they can get from one place to another, that there are these connecting links… If I did a project in the city I would definitely be thinking of it in terms of networks and connections. But you know, I’ve worked so many places around the world that I don’t need to ever go abroad again. I probably will because for some reason my following is elsewhere. I haven’t found that people are even that interested in my work here. I was just in China for two months; they are doing a book on my work. It was incredible to me that here are people that I’ve never met or thought about, you know, who really value my work to the extent that I’ve never really had a book published about my work in the States. It will be in China, in Chinese. Which seems crazy to me. But, yeah, so I would like to work here (laughs). You won’t hear that very often!
