Enchanted Forests of the 21st Century
Molly Kleiman
Agnes Denes, Forest For Australia, plans and projections. Image courtesy of Agnes Denes.
With their dark corners, swampy valleys and dense thickets, forests harbor unknown, intricate, even invisible ecosystems. Not to mention innumerable Pucks, hobbits, and other sprites, rabbit holes, hidden caves and other portholes. These life- and imagination-sustaining spaces are quickly diminishing to make way for cash crops, office paper. There are other manners of dissent and prevention besides writing another song about "paving paradise" or chaining yourself to the corner oak tree. Below, three artists describe the forests of their creations–a litter of anthropomorphized trees for California, a digitized forest in the center of Marseille, and a geometrically configured tree mountain for Finland.
Planting a Forest
Agnes Denes
What does it mean to plant a forest as a work of art? Well, many things. For one, it means taking art out of the museum or gallery and changing its preciousness and collectibility but not its beauty or meaning. It means creating something borderless and timeless, although the works use four dimensions very clearly defined. Planting a forest is opening up the earth to receive the seeds or seedlings like the canvas is prepared, gessoed and the ground sketch applied. There is no border here, no edge of the canvas, and thus no restrictions. The forest is patterned but spills over its boundaries in time as in space and concept, it means re establishing disturbed and destroyed land, creating roots to hold eroding land and keeping global warming down, photo synthesis up, clean ground water and a million things trees do besides grow and become aesthetics…
Unite the state of the art processes of the mind on the edge of knowledge and let it blend with nature. Don’t be afraid, it won’t disturb either. The hybrid will be a new state of existence, a new form of art. That it is also a gift to the future is added attraction, that it is land reclamation may be a plus, but first of all it is art. The human intellect blending with the majesty of nature.
A huge manmade mountain measuring 420 meters long, 270 meters wide, 28 meters high and elliptical in shape was planted with eleven thousand trees by eleven thousand people from all over the world at the Pinziö gravel pits near Ylöjärvi, Finland, as part of a massive earthwork and land reclamation project by environmental artist Agnes Denes. The project was officially announced by the Finnish government at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on Earth Environment Day, June 5, l992, as Finland’s contribution to help alleviate the world’s ecological stress. Sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment, Tree Mountain is protected land to be maintained for four centuries, eventually creating a virgin forest. The trees are planted in an intricate mathematical pattern derived from a combination of the golden section and the pineapple/sunflower system designed by the artist. Even though infinitely more complex, it is reminiscent of ancient earth patterns.
Tree Mountain is the largest monument on earth that is international in scope, unparalleled in duration, and not dedicated to the human ego, but to benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy. People who planted the trees received certificates acknowledging them as custodians of the trees. The certificate is an inheritable document valid for twenty or more generations in the future. The project is innovative nationally and worldwide–the first such undertaking in human history. This is the very first time in Finland and among the first ones in the world when an artist restores environmental damage with ecological art planned for this and future generations.
Digital Gardens
Miguel Chevalier
I have installed in The Sur-Nature–an interactive virtual reality installation–projected along 1.60 meter high sections on both sides of a 20-meter long passage in an Oslo Subway station (through December 2005). The concept for Sur-Nature is to transform the subway passage into a "virtual garden" in which commuters can discover and interact with virtual plants and flowers that grow and unfold in real time. Although images in the pure sense, these virtual objects are dynamic spatiotemporal representations; they are rendered over time and have a lifecycle of their own. 16 infra-red sensors will be deployed within the passageway. These sensors allow the virtual plants and flowers in the garden to evolve according to random trajectories that respond to the presence of spectators. These virtual flowers and plants incline to the right or left in a gesture of reverence to the spectators as they advance along the passage.
I am currently working on Fractal Cloud (Marseille) 2007–the fruit of a competition won with Charlie Bové (from STOA), Fractal Cloud is a monumental sculpture for the old docks in the port of Marseilles. Measuring 20m x 28m, this work looks like a chaotic external structure made up of an imbroglio of cables in optical fiber, much like giant jackstraws. Metallic by day, at night the cables change colors hourly, giving the sculpture a light, airy and mobile appearance. Truly an astromincal clock of nocturnal colors, the work multiplies itself infinitely in a network and a play on scale that breaks with classical perspective and Euclidean geometry. At night, lit up by different colored projectors, this work will take on immaterial and magical qualities.
Into the Living Woods
Terry Allen
Trees, for the Stuart Collection remarks upon the continual loss of natural environment at UCSD by salvaging three eucalyptus trees from a grove razed to make way for new campus buildings. These trees, preserved and encased in skins of lead, stand like ghosts within a still-thriving eucalyptus grove between the Central Library and the Faculty Club. Although they ostensibly represent displacement or loss, these trees offer a kind of compensation: one emits a series of recorded songs and the other a lively sequence of poems and stories created and arranged specifically for this project.
For the music tree William T. Wiley, known for his paintings filled with literary puns and eccentric maps, sings Ghost Riders in the Sky, accompanying himself on a homemade instrument; West Texas singer Joe Ely sings Mona Lisa Squeeze My Guitar, while the Maines Brothers work pedal steel guitars, a Thai band plays, and filmmaker/musician David Byrne sings a song he composed especially for this project. For the literary tree, Bale Allen delivers his poem about scabs, the poet Philip Levine recites, plus there are Navajo chants, translations of Aztec poems, duck calls, and many other contributions. There are currently about five hours of material on each tree, and Allen and others are at work on future contributions.
The third tree in the installation is near the entrance to the vast geometric library building and remains silent-perhaps another form of the tree knowledge, perhaps a reminder that trees must be cut down to print books and build buildings, perhaps a dance form, or perhaps noting that one can acquire knowledge both through observation of nature and through research. This tree stands out quietly in the rather stark man-made site at the library entrance.
