Back to Nature

In recent years, it seemed as if artists had broached all possible frontiers. They extended the plane surface of the canvas, took sculpture off its pedestal, used machines, made everything bigger and bigger. However large or awkward the object, museums and galleries managed to accommodate it.

For some artists, all this permissiveness seemed the reverse of a challenge. They declared that they found the wall, the floor, the room, the very idea of making an object, confining. So they have struck out for wilder shores of the imagination, for deserts and plains, mountaintops and ocean floors, claiming all nature as their canvas and every living thing--from molds and yeasts to cows and their own bodies--as their material.

If ecological art--as apt a name as any --sounds eccentric, it is. But it is also demanding. Its practitioners sweat and swim, dig trenches, hack through ice, suffer desert winds or the muscle aches of long climbs--all for the sake of a few photographs and a memory. No one intent merely on economic security would go in for it, since it results in little that can be sold or even framed. But a considerable number of artists, some young, some not so young, have committed themselves to it. So, as Arthur Miller might say, attention must be paid.

Calabash and Flowers. In one sense, ecological art is about what art has always been about: leaving a mark on the world. But left as it frequently is to the whims of nature and viewed rarely by anyone other than the artist, it acknowledges what art has rarely acknowledged before: its own transience. It is a motley movement dominated more by high adventure--and imagination--than by any single name. Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria dug trenches in sun-parched deserts (they are silting over), Christo wrapped a portion of the Australian coastline in polyurethane (the plastic was removed), Britain's Richard Long imposed a geometric pattern on a field of daisies by plucking the blossoms (as any gardener could predict, new blossoms grew).

More than any of the artists involved. Peter Hutchinson, 40, and Dennis Oppenheim, 31, use nature in a metaphorical way to reveal something fundamental about the nature of all things. For Hutchinson, the metaphor is one of change, evolution, growth, a way to demonstrate that life developed from inorganic matter. For Oppenheim, ecological art is a way of interrupting the matrix that he sees shaping both natural and human activities.

Waves of Magenta. Last fall the two artists teamed up to visit the island of Tobago in the British West Indies. The resulting show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was composed of some surprisingly beautiful underwater photographs, and charted new ecological territory. Hutchinson strung out calabash, a local fruit, so that it floated eerily in the sea; he also transferred yellow leguminous flowers from nearby slopes to the ocean floor. Oppenheim, long intrigued by the "incredibly irregular" patterns of U.S. Highway 20 he had observed on maps, decided to transfer the configuration of the highway to water. Using a boat to plow a path in the bay, he dropped deep magenta dye and gasoline in its wake, then set the gas afire to create an astonishing analogy to automobile accidents. In the aftermath, Tobago's Crown Point beaches were washed by purple waves for several hours.

"Ecological art began as soon as the sculptor quit thinking about sheet metal and welding and synthetic stuff and began doing something in the ground," Oppenheim says. His studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts and at Stanford, where he got an M.A. in painting, had been formal enough. For a while he made funky inflatable sculptures, then progressed to geometric, steel-beam constructions, finally came to a dead end when he began noticing primary structures all around--in railroad underpinnings, building girders, the shadows of trees. He went through a "site period" when he picked out objects and sites he liked, then got caught up in directly reshaping the landscape.

Since then he has directed the seeding and harvesting of a wheatfield in The

Netherlands, made a clearing in a Louisiana cypress swamp, and taken microscopic pictures of his saliva with the intention of transferring the patterns to the earth.

Oppenheim's most ambitious project, Hay Maze, took place in early March, when he flew out to Wisconsin State University in Whitewater, Wis. He cajoled Farmer Melvin Schrader into allowing him to use his alfalfa field as a site and 1,200 bales of hay from his barn as material, got 25 art students to haul and heave the bales into a geometric maze. Then ten Holstein cows were herded through the maze to eat the corn. The result was one distinctly puzzled farmer ("It may be art and all, but how would I know, art never came up in my life before") and a very tired artist. "My work is a real drag to do," Dennis confesses. But he is firmly convinced that "you can work with the ecosystem as you do with clay."

Peter Hutchinson's involvement with ecology began as a child. Born in 1930 in England, where his family had a market garden, he came to the U.S. in 1953 and enrolled at the University of Illinois, intent on becoming a plant geneticist. Then he switched to art, and began to paint handsome shaped canvases. Two years ago, while summering in Provincetown, his interest in art and nature joined in a sudden impulse. He decided to plant mushrooms and wild phlox onto the ocean floor. This first venture into ecological art nearly ended in disaster when he was carried a mile out to sea by the swift tidal currents off Cape Cod. Undeterred, he has since devoted himself to the new art form. He has made a series of test-tube works, using crystals, yeasts, mosses and ferns. Dealing with living organisms, he admits, has its hazards. He once made a miniature landscape piece for a Manhattan collector only to have a cockroach jump out when he delivered the work to his patron's apartment. Despite Hutchinson's protests that the cockroach proved the work was hospitable to life, the collector rejected it.

One of Peter's favorite concepts has it that volcanic ages lead to ice ages. To express this in a metaphorical way, he conceived of a two-part project in which he would grow molds in a volcano and on an iceberg. For part one, he chose Mexico's Paricutin volcano. One of the newest volcanoes in the world (an important factor, since there would be few if any living organisms there because of heat and sterile soil), Paricutin burst out of a field in 1943? last erupted in 1952. After a ten-hour bus ride from Mexico City, Hutchinson arrived in a nearby village, where he hired a guide for the six-hour horseback ride and 1,400-ft. climb to the crater's edge. He found the volcano was just what he had hoped for. The ground was still hot, steam seeped from its crevices, and no plants grew. A couple of days later he returned, with a mule train carrying 500 loaves of Bimbo Wonder bread, which he crumbled along the steaming fault lines, then covered with plastic to create a "greenhouse environment." Six days later he returned, delighted to find that the bread had sprouted an effulgence of molds.

What he had succeeded in doing, Hutchinson says, was to juxtapose a microorganism against a macrocosmic landscape, to bring life to an environment that had been virtually sterile, in order to show that the old distinctions between living and dead matter are ambiguous, if not false. "Paricutin was similar to the earliest earth landscapes," he says. "Today, when volcanoes appear from the sea, they are first colonized by bacteria, molds and algae. The conditions of early history are continually duplicated." Next stop: an iceberg in Greenland.

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