Photo:Hans Silvester               Andy Goldsworthy              Photo: Hans Silvester

    The Omo of Ethiopia               Live and Dead Leaves           The Omo of Ethiopia

I  believe Andy Goldsworthy’s art epitomizes the particular kind of beauty. It affirms the alien-status of contemporary (sub)urbanites.

While humans appear on all accountings of life on planet Earth, Goldsworthy’s constructions and photographs challenge the popular notion that we humans belong to nature as much as nematodes and antelopes. It seems to me there is more to belonging to nature than being products of the multi-millennia evolutionary forces, and surviving into adulthood to bear and raise our young.

Extolling Goldsworthy’s site-specific work reveals a delight in beauty based upon abstract principles, not intimate actualities. It serves an audience that satisfies its survival needs through elaborate technological, mediated, global interventions. Its relationship to the habitats it occupies is so remote; this audience typically behaves like tourists in their own homeland.

Today I discovered photographs of artistry by the Omo people of Ethiopia. Their version of beauty is penetrating and in-dwelling. 

Consider the differences:

- Whereas Goldsworthy’s art is derived from brief visit to a site by a lone individual, the Omo people’s art emerges from an entire culture inhabiting land that they have supported, and that has supported them, for generations.

- Goldsworthy initiates each work by undertaking a process of exploration and discovery. He must search for material opportunities for color, form, texture, and scale, and assess light, moisture, wind, and temperature conditions. In contrast, lifelong familiarity is core to the Omo’s creative process. The materials, tools, and conditions they extract from their site also supply their nourishment, protection, fiber, fuel, and shelter, as well as their stories, rituals, and belief systems.They are already skilled, knowledgeable, and confident.

- Goldsworthy seems to initiate each work with the intention of accomplishing a remarkable feat. This entails overcoming obstacles such as rising tides or defying limitations to his artistic intentions such as gravity, wilting, melting, etc.  Familiarity gained by life-long practice and cultural tradition permits the Omo people to be comfortably and exuberantly spontaneous.  

The beauty of the Omo proclaims their connections to the vastness of the living Earth’s genealogies and lineages as much as Goldsworthy’s beauty proclaims his and our alienation from them.They are both cultural reflections worthy of consideration.

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Two oversized flat feet, attached to two undersized legs, sticking out of a scruffy orb of fluffy down, supporting a great paddle beak that projects far out from its darting black eyes – - may I introduce you to Thunder, or perhaps I should call him Rolling Thunder since this three ounce baby goose rushes in gusts of fearless activity. In the two days since his hatching he has had ample opportunity to earn a power name like Thunder.  He had already accumulated a life-time's adventures.

We adopted this tiny morsel of a critter from a friend who got it from a friend at church. She saw it and its sibling crossing a road. No parent goose was in sight. The sibling made it safely to the other side, where it was promptly devoured by a neighbor’s dog. The survivor provides the occasion for this essay.

We arrived home with our new ward still debating if we should introduce our baby wild goose to our flock of adult domestic geese. (Would he be threatened or protected?)

Or should we place him in the nursery with our six baby ducks? (Would he be ostracized or develop an identity complex?).

Or should we isolate him? (He would be safe but lonely.) 

In the end, we tried all three approaches with comical lack of success.

The instant we set Thunder down in the midst of the adult geese, he emitted faint but exuberant  peeps and rushed into the flock with the gusto of a long-awaited home-coming. Just as quickly, the mass of adults raised their heads, opened their throats, and let out bellowing honks and squawks as they ran in terror from this pipsqueak barely large enough to cast a shadow. His little legs shifted into high gear as he chased the fleeing grown-ups. Mayhem erupted. Each time he gained on them he got clobbered with a huge webbed foot only to rise again and continue the pursuit. This might have gone on forever if we hadn’t felt the fear that Thunder never felt for himself. We carted him off to the baby duck pen.

The mother duck immediately removed herself from the scene and perched high where she monitored the anticipated drama from an overview position. What she observed was a scene that was dramatically innocuous. Thunder preened himself, oblivious of the potential companions and playmates in his midst. He merely acted annoyed at the interruption of his grooming routine. The ducks nuzzled him with their beaks testing if this foreign entity was a treat or a threat. They soon tired of their exploration and settled down for a nap. Some ingrained monitor told these two breeds of fowl that they were as remote as minnows and giraffes.  The air grew chilly as the sun set. Thunder would find no warmth among the ducks.

A wire cage was produced and outfitted with grain and water and one intrepid infant goose. It was placed in the mechanical room where we hoped fatigue would ease his lonely state. We bid him goodnight, walked down the long hallway, up five stairs, past a small indoor goldfish pond in the entry way of the house, continued up another five stairs for a long-delayed dinner.  As I was serving a “plop”, more unfamiliar than loud, coming from the entry way called my attention. There was Rolling Thunder, floating among the fish, happy as a goose in water!

There must be is a moral to this tale. 

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Sex is not the topic of this entry. It is an hourly occurrence between the chickens, ducks, turkeys, and geese on my homestead this time of year. They mount shamelessly on land and water, rushing from courtship to consummation.  

Procreation is the newsworthy event. This is because so many generations of domesticated fowl  were bred, with determined exclusivity, for tender meat and reliable egg production. As a result, most have lost their nurturing instincts. Stacked in my refrigerator are dozens of fertilized eggs that were abandoned by their moms immediately after they were laid. They squawk or cluck and quickly rejoin the flock.  

That is why, when a gorgeous white turkey named Antonia settled down in the empty planter on the side of the garage and didn’t budge for three days, we began to anticipate a rare occurence - home-hatched baby turkeys! The impulse to perform the rites of turkey maternity may not have been lost after all. 

Antonia’s ill-chosen site subjected her, alternately, to rain and glaring sun. She endured the discomfort and rarely left her nest for even a drink. Only once was I able to beat her hasty return to the nest and catch a glimpse at her clutch – six speckled turkey eggs and one beige chicken egg!

It takes turkey eggs a week longer to mature than chicken eggs.  Antonia was about to confront a dilemma.  Was her body clock, timed to the transition from setting to tending, set for 21 days when the chicken hatched, or 28 when her own babies emerged? As we debated these alternatives, she invented her own solution. It was both discerning and brutal. On the 21st day I discovered a cracked beige chicken egg on the ground near the nest, a victim of Antonia’s powerful mothering impulse. Somehow she recognized the foreign, ill-timed intruder and managed to nudge it up and over the lip of the planter, banished and left to die.

Romanticized views of nurturing instincts were shattered on the 28th day as well. One by one the eggs vanished. I could hear faint baby “cheeps”, catch a glimpse of a cracked egg, then it would disappear without a trace. I watched the clutch diminish – five, three, only one.  Then I caught a glimpse of her flying higher and faster than ever before with a white object in her beak. I followed her trail and discovered a cracked shell. It contained the last baby, perfectly formed but still curled tight with its head tucked into its little belly and its feet drawn up, expelled, abandoned, dead.

The climax of this sorry tale came today. The murderous mother spent this entire day sitting on her empty nest. She appeared to be oblivious of her deeds and their consequences.

Antonia was hatched in an incubator, warmed by electric heat , and fed factory mash. Perhaps the mral of this sorry tale is that there are no surrogates for real mothers. They teach their babies how to grow up to be tender, tending adults.   

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Can fine art be functional?

-       Is function too down-to-earth to support the lofty insights they expect from art?

-       Is function too matter-of-fact to permit poetry, nuance sentiment, sensuality, and emotional expression?

Much to my surprise, this question was recently raised by two established eco artists. They each admitted that, despite believing that innovation and change are inherent to art, they could not make pragmatism fit their cherished concepts of ‘art’.

Their confusion was startling since one artist’s practice consists of removing toxins from soil and the other creates sculptures that conserve grey water. Both admitted that their work is often challenged as being functional, and therefore not artistic. They admitted that they generally responded to such inquiries by squirming uncomfortably and quickly changing the subject.

I welcome art's marriage to function, pragmatism, and expediency. I am convinced they are essential components of contemporary art practice - the new norms not the new aberrations. I challenge the challenge of the doubters.

The crucial words in the explanation are "here" and "now". It is HERE and NOW that function and art are integral, compatible, mutual, and harmonious. 

Living artists are devoting their creativity and ingenuity to problem-solving because problem-solving is a key activity differentiating human behavior from preceeding periods in history. This is because today, humans are confronting jeopardies that are both Earth-wide and urgent. Today's environmental predicaments are nothing less than life-threatening for the entire planet. Problem-solving artists are demonstrating that humanity cannot afford the luxury of squandering its creativity - not even artistic creativity - when the future of life on Earth will be determined by our ability to solve the dangerous accumulation of humanity's short-sighted indiscretions.

At specific times in the past artists helped usher souls into the afterlife, or elevate the power of State, or promote the supremacy of the machine, or visualize the content of the subconscious, and so forth. These missions coincided with each era's most crucial issues. The current era has introduced another set of themes, motives, materials, and processes. They derive from the threat of environmental collapse.

Artists creating functional art are perpetuating the only tradition that seems to apply to art throughout the ages – it is in synch with a shifting cultural context with a specific time and place.

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I walked through the woods this cold March morning in search of new life remerging in Spring. It may seem odd, but I found it in the most inert of Earth substances – stones.  Along the southern slope the surface rocks and bedrock outcroppings were shedding their brownish-gray winter coats and donning their pale green springtime frocks. The stones were teeming with populations of bacteria, algae, and lichen.  These miniscule populations are not mere surface decorations. They are marauders, attacking these invincible stones with an insistence that may not even be matched by the force of jackhammers, dynamite, and atomic explosions.  

Microorganisms that colonize the surfaces of stone mine and sort the mineral wealth that is then banked in the living tissues of organisms that eat vegetables. It is transferred to the organisms that eat the vegetables and to those that eat the vegetarians.

Let us celebrate Spring and the renewal of life by honoring stone’s role in infusing life with life.

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