| This summer, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam hosted “Photosynthesis,” an overview of ecological art by Danish artist Tue Greenfort. Composed of diverse pieces, with varying mood, medium and subject matter, the exhibition can be viewed as a metaphorical ecosystem. Photosynthesis reveals interconnections between artworks that are at first glance unrelated. By examining highlights from the show, a small part of Greenfort’s labyrinth of meaning will be recreated. |  |
The Greenhouse Effect at the Witte de With – Olga Milogrodzka
This summer, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam hosted “Photosynthesis,” an overview of ecological art by Danish artist Tue Greenfort. Composed of diverse pieces, with varying mood, medium and subject matter, the exhibition can be viewed as a metaphorical ecosystem. Photosynthesis reveals interconnections between artworks that are at first glance unrelated. By examining highlights from the show, a small part of Greenfort’s labyrinth of meaning will be recreated.
Lifeless, a note framed in an entomological box, addresses a straightforward message: we are misled if we think that life on earth is declining. On the contrary, the population and biomass of all we produce is rapidly growing. Life is burgeoning! What is seen as a cascading decrease, instead, is the diversity of what man produces. Taking a careful look at the work, insect debris inside the frame become noticeable. Originally, the box must have been used for the presentation of the Diptera—a true fly—the order of which contains an estimated 200,000 species. Man creates “mono-culture” while nature abounds with diversity.
The same insect comes back in a series of eight black and white photographs (A Fly’s Composition). One by one, they reveal a path of signs left by a fly as it walks on the evaporated surface of a windowpane. Here, Greenfort refers to the theoretical assumptions of the Estonian biologist Jakob van Uexkull, recognized as a founder of biosemiotics. He claimed that every species has its own subjective way of perceiving the surrounding environment. There are as many “subjective universes” (umwelt) as there are living creatures, and each universe is constituted by the set of signs and meanings that each creature produces. There are endless numbers of compositions available. We are misled if we think man’s (mono) culture may dominate over the profusion of nature’s compositions.
The most spectacular installation in the exhibition, Public Flower Pollination, is composed of a glass structure, specifically a green house. Inside, man creates the mono-culture. Greenfort puts the viewer on one side of a glass wall to let him watch a performance on the other. A colony of bumblebees pollinates the public flowers taken from the crossroads of the city of Rotterdam. Three artificial lamps dictate their working hours. Cardboard hives supply them with sugar water since the junction plants are not rich in nectar. Everything seems under control, or is it another illusion? Greenfort reverses the roof-shaped upper part of the glass wall so that it bends over the viewer, almost encasing him. Such a small, unnoticeable shift turns the greenhouse effect directly upon us.
Greenfort does not educate us about the unintended effects our actions have on the Earth, as most ecologists aim to (or, unlike most ecologists, Greenfort does not aim to educate us about unintended effects our actions have on the Earth). He is much more interested in revealing the unrealized mechanisms and attitudes on which these actions lean. Man monopolizes nature and, as a result, is separate from it. We do not concern ourselves with the diversity and complexity of nature and we do not identify ourselves as a part of it. We are on the other side of the glass wall, and we seem to easily overlook this fact. “In setting ourselves up over the nature and against the matter, apart from it and in assuming control over nature, we have become deeply alienated from our own nature. Matter becomes mere matter, something for us to use or, better yet, posses. The great irony of our materialism—how little matter really matters to us” (Jackie Brookner, The Heart of Matter, in: Art Journal, 51:2 (1992), p. 8.).
