Deborah Fisher

The Final Environmental Solution

There's something facist about environmentalism as it's being spun.

The World Without Us is an interesting thought experiment, and has a lot of really interesting imagery. But the gestalt is basically anti-human. The idea is purity.

Slate's daily podcast a few days ago (I can't figure out how to get a link to a podcast here...) was about environmentalist novels that imagine a postapocalyptic world with fewer people, so that we can all go back to this one essential, true way of being. With women cooking and men hunting or whatever. Everybody's on horseback. Sweet!

It's that romance--that clinging to the idea that there is a correct way to do things and that we have been wrong--that's the problem with the way we look at environmentalism. It's comforting, but it's not true. Native Americans wrought environmental devastation. They threw their garbage off cliffs, too. Civilizations have been going extinct for environmental reasons for a long time.

We are not especially bad.

Environmentalism is a matter of necessity, not virtue. And so we need not imagine a cleansing apocalypse--a Final Environmental Solution--as much as we need to harness the human tendencies that wrought all this mess in a different direction.

Love buildings. Love cities. Love your garbage and love your computer and all the other people around you. Love plastic. Love everything that got us here, every mistake. Love the industrial revolution and the green revolution and the revolutions of your tires because these things actually make the earth something we can grasp as a whole entity.

This morning I feel certain that every mistake we have made brings us closer to something better. And I believe that all the power we have created over the earth--our ability to move over it quickly; build perpendicular to it; shelter ourselves and find and use all the things inside the earth that we can't see--this is what it means to be human.

We are explorer-builders. And we have something new--a grand environmental resistance--to explore and build against.

Altmejd At Rosen Kicks Serious Ass

David Altmejd is in no way facile.

There's an immediate stupidness to what he does, and a laboriousness to the way he overcomes that initial stupidness. He's the anti-Sibony. He not only refuses to cling to what is sculpturally correct, he addresses and overcomes each Sculpture I cliche. That Liz Craft-style fight against tradition is what makes his work complex and tender. The latest effort at Rosen is no exception--it is simultaneously grand and humble. Laugh-out-loud funny because it is as serious as a heart attack.

If only I had a camera, I could have taken good closeups of the huge man made almost entirely out of crystal-clutching plaster hands! If you've ever taught sculpture, you've seen whole shops full of them! The way he dives into hammy tropes like this--The Giant Everyman, the Alginate Project, the Smithson Crystal, the Broken Mirror--and then actively wrestles each of these groaners into meaningfulness using diligence and sensitivity! This is an appropriate response to a world in which you are small and everything's been done before!

No, She Didn't...

But her Chief Strategist did.

Now that we have all admitted, even to the Superdelegates, that "electable" is code for "white," now maybe we can get working on the general election! The Clinton campaign's willingness to apply racism is disgraceful. Geoff Garin's logic is more than merely illogical--it's hateful. Divisive.

Thank god Garin's spin is, at least, so absurd, so naked and so deeply wrong that it will surely be met with head-scratching, polite coughs, blank stares and cocked heads. Right?

Nodding My Head In Agreement With David Brooks?

Today it's aBrooks column that is not just insightful, but slightly inspiring. But what's next? A monsoon of frogs? Cease fires in Africa?

Another Pleasant Day In Soho

Yesterday I passed by Team on my way to see Standard Operating Procedure. So today, even though I don't really like McGinley's work, and even though I expected much more from Morris on this one, I can't get the way these images work together out of my head:

I don't know what to conclude, except that this is what it looks like when you put naked people in novel situations and make them do things so that you can take pictures.

Chins Up, People!

I have been battling the urge to write a windy post about the campaign soap-opera... and it turns out that I don't have to. Andrew Sullivan has made more sense of this madness than I ever could.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming--this is an art blog, right?

Big elephant-sized thanks to Timothy Buckwalter for letting me be part of his series on process today! Go check it out!

New Page: Monuments To Vanishing Cities

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been working to place bronze-and-steel monuments in a number of cities that will either vanish or face radical geographical change because of rising sea levels, hurricanes and other complications arising out of civilization. The first of these monuments, New Orleans Elegy, will be at Socrates Sculpture Park until the middle of May, and then must find a (relatively) permanent home in New Orleans.

In addition to placing Elegy in New Orleans, I am working on getting new, larger bronze monuments to loss placed in Galveston, Miami, Brooklyn, Venice and Amsterdam. In the present, these self-destructing maps are a potent reminder of our own fragility and the dynamic relationship between the earth and the built world. Over eons, they will become archival bronze artifacts--as permanent a record as possible of what each city once was.

To track the progress of this project, I have created a page on this blog called Monuments To Vanishing Cities. If you know any city planners, mayors or percent-for-art administrators to pass the URL along to, I would be much obliged.

Colson Whitehead Is A Prince Among Men...

...but He Only Got There Because He's Black.

The "People Like You On The Street" Problem

I got a lot of good advice in graduate school. But the critique with the longest shelf life came from Steve Fagin, who watched about a third of a videotape of me doing bad performance art and, visibly agitated, kinda shouted that I should stop the tape. That he had watched enough. That "people have better things to do than deal with people like you on the street!"

That was it.

More useful words have never been spoken to me in a one-on-one context by anyone. Ever. I refer to this critique all the time. It reveals so much truth about how context works, and how arrogant artists are being when they think they can pole-vault over context. I don't just mean artists like you and me. I mean everybody. Serra is a god, but that doesn't change the fact that people had better things to do than deal with Tilted Arc.

I am interested in public art because this criticism infected me--because it is more deeply true than anything anyone else has ever said to me about public art. It wastes no effort on the idea that everyone should want art or that art is inherently good. It firmly declares that the artist hasn't any business acting like a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness.

An artist in public, then, is an artist that engages the street on the street's terms--or the campus on the terms of the campus itself, or the sculpture park as a park and not as a grassy gallery. The best public artists understand and trade on this relationship and actively deploy context.

Of course a painting goes unappreciated on a street

! A painting on the street is an obstacle!

Spring Is In The Air

Kim Dorland, from North at Freight+Volume

And I got a chance to walk through Chelsea yesterday. In a t-shirt, with an iced drink in my hand!

Would that the art was as spectacular as the weather, or even the volume of new construction taking place in Chelsea. I liked the grace of Bryan Savitz at RARE. And Kim Dorland at Freight+Volume needs to be seen in person--this is not jpeg work.

But most of what I saw fell into that same worn groove that Peter Coffin is shuffling balloons around. That Tamy Ben-Tor is still nattering herself into. When will art stop being so small? When will we stop settling?