Man vs. Nature: Nurturing the Divide
Emily Lodish
Anne-Katrin Spiess, A Thinking Box afloat.
"I have a no-shoes apartment," Anne-Katrin Spiess tells me as I walk into her gorgeous West Village home. I tuck away my boots. How tightly controlled she keeps her living space–the carefully constructed open spaces and precisely placed home furnishings serve a fixed, holistic decorating scheme. A self-proclaimed "conceptual land artist," Spiess works mainly in remote, natural areas with the land and environmental materials. She is driven to reconnect with nature–a realm where one unquestionably relinquishes control–here, in her living space, Spiess seems to contradict herself, exerting comprehensive control over her surroundings.
A luscious, canopy of green–intertwining branches belonging to dozens of plants–envelops the entrance to fellow eco-artist, Jackie Brookner’s home in downtown Manhattan. "I like plants," she offers as a coy understatement. Brookner sees the distance humans have placed between himself and nature as destructive. "I believe it is because of our mortality that we are at war with nature," Brookner responds to Spiess, her former pupil, in an interview in Land and Eco Art in the USA. "Nature definitely has the last word. We can not control it, nor the fact of our death, so we dissociated ourselves from it…To prove our superiority…we have pulled ourselves away from the natural world."
Both New York-based eco-artists, Brookner and Spiess, live the fundamental conflict of man/nature, control/chaos. They each explore, reconfigure and nurture the vagueries of this boundary. And by installing their pieces in the public realm, they invite us to do the same.
For Brookner these boundaries are not limits, but opportunities; she urges viewers to experience their bodies "as the porous containers they are." With her Biosculptures ™, Brookner seeks to reconnect people to nature on a "psycho-physical level," covering various stone and concrete formations with mosses and other plants, which vary depending on the site-specific environment. Most of her sculptures take the shape of tongues or hands, parts of the human body that reach out to, investigate, and communicate with the surrounding world–muscles that mediate between mind and body. Noteworthy among these sculptures is her Prima Lingua, a giant, green, growing natural tongue that currently stands over five feet tall in the artist’s studio. Beside the tongue rests a soil chair of the same shape, a sculpture that allows the earth to literally embrace the whole body.
Brookner’s works are overtly solution-based–they do not merely highlight problematic discrepancies and existent contradictions in our relationship with nature. Her moss-covered, living sculptures filter water and air; Brookner bridges the gap between art and functionality, integrating "ecological revitalization with the conceptual, metaphoric and aesthetic capacities of sculpture." Concentrating on relationships that involve people and the environment, on "social ecology," Brookner has most recently turned to community-building, specifically in a commissioned project to help reimagine and reinvigorate the post-industrial city of Mckeesport, Pennsylvania. The project will be situated at the confluence of two main rivers, the Youghiogheny and Monongahela. Brookner is constructing an ecosystem that reaches beyond isolated sculptures. Looking for potential nodal points where needs and problems intersect, she is working to create a job training program that will guide the city’s youth as they participate in the restoring the integral trail system.
Spiess shares Brookner’s "underlying quest" to "reconnect to the essence…of human existence and to the earth," but Spiess achieves this primarily, and ironically, by creating new separations. Spiess embodies the oppositions at the core of her work, and though she claims to "love New York intensely" the city–arguably as out of hand as nature herself–also serves as her blatant antithesis, instigating her lengthy, solitary journeys to remote landscapes. Indulging a frontier instinct that harkens back to a tradition of transcendentalists, like Emerson and Thoreau, with their focus on the individual journey and the reintegration of spirit and matter –the American-ness of which her Swiss accent calls peculiar attention–Spiess embarked on her first journey over a decade ago, taking with her only the bare essentials, and knowing only that in some abstract way she was on a "search for nothingness." Her 1971 vintage air stream trailer doubles as home and studio (complete with dark room), boasting solar panels that allow her to sustain an undisturbed existence in remote areas, like the "distant and solitary prairies of Nebraska, in the heat and the silence of Death Valley, on the borders of the seemingly infinite Lake Michigan."
It was Spiess’ desire to find her "true self" coupled with her fierce drive to merge with nature that led to the creation of her first Thinking Box, essentially a place where she could do nothing anytime. She describes each Thinking Box as "a perfectly white box," constructed out of plywood panels measured to an individual’s physical dimensions. Each has four walls, a tall, skinny door; a removable roof, and movable platforms inside for sitting and writing. Spiess’ Thinking Box stands definitive, severe against the various far-flung natural expanses–all photographed and thoroughly documented. From inside her personal sanctuary, Zen meditation was no longer frustrating, as it had been in the city, but attainable. Spiess "got close to emptying her mind," peering out the open roof and door, simply watching the clouds pass for hours.
Spiess harnesses the naked tensions in her work, seeking to allow a new kind of breathing room within which they may surface elegantly and instantly. Just as her Thinking Boxes serve to center the inhabitant’s mind, many of Spiess’ environmental artworks seek to renew the viewer’s focus in vast space. She uses glass cases to house artifacts found in nature. In a photograph taken in Utah, entitled "Dinosaur Bones/Brown Glass Bottles," Spiess places two identical, square glass boxes side by side. One holds 65 million year-old dinosaur bones while the other houses a pile of glass bottles, washed free of the dirt. She found the bones in the same locale as the trash, why pretend otherwise? The juxtaposition is obvious and without altering the objects physically, though gently reframing the existent contrast, Spiess transforms the way we view them.
Viewing Spiess’ most arresting image, her Thinking Box afloat on Lake Michigan, I imagine what it would be like to be inside. What would be my first thought? What next? The journey in that moment, within oneself, comprises Spiess’ essential art. Like all great Romantics, Spiess values this journey–far-reaching and acutely personal, futile and fulfilling–toward, and not necessarily the finding of, meaning. While Brookner’s works are oriented toward a tangible solution, the imaginative moment plays a crucial role for her as well. Brookner and her team created the fictional 2018 Urban Conservation Excellence Award, allowing the community of McKeesport the psychic possibility of seeing the potential change within their ability to actualize.
