The Art of Nature: Fusing Conservation and Contemporary Art
Photographer Jason Houston recently went to the opening of “Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet,” a program co-sponsored by Rare along with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, Calif. The opening was held in San Diego on Aug. 17, and gathered a wide range of contemporary artists and conservationists all pondering: Can contemporary art inspire conservation? Read Jason’s insights on the event and the Human/Nature project (formally titled “Rare Art”).
view more photos from the exhibit!
I was first introduced to Rare in 2004 when Brett Jenks, Rare President & CEO, called , the magazine where I work as picture editor, to talk about a new program: “Rare Art”. He had big ideas of sending a group of contemporary artists around the world to experience some of the most interesting, biologically important, and critically threatened environments. They would be inspired by the people and places they visit and they would make art. This art would become a traveling exhibition hosted at prestigious contemporary arts museums across the country, bringing the emotional, visceral impact of art to conversations about conservation, and bringing the issue of conservation to new and different audiences.
Rare President and CEO Brett Jenks speaks to contemporary artist Dario Robleto at the project’s opening in San Diego.
He sounded crazy. Not only was the scope and scale of such a project huge for a non-arts organization, but this sort of proactive, collaborative residency program and its related practical agendas is an unusual arrangement in the art world at odds with the independent spirits and conceptually inquisitive approaches of most contemporary artists.
But here we are now, four years after it’s inception, at the opening of “Rare Art,” which has become “Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet.” Eight of today’s leading contemporary artists visited eight UNESCO world heritage sites, bringing back inspiration and creating work born of their individual experiences. This group show opened Sunday August 17th, 2008 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
The artists (and places) featured in this show are Mark Dion (Komodo National Park, Indonesia), Ann Hamilton (Galápagos National Park, Ecuador), Iñigo Mnglano-Ovalle (El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve, Mexico), Marcos Ramirez ERRE (Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Areas, China), Rigo 23 (Atlantic Forest Southeast Reserves, Brazil), Dario Robleto (Glacier/Waterton International Peace Park, United States and Canada), Diana Thater (iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa), and Xu Bing (Mount Kenya National Park, Kenya). The art ranges from performance and installation to sculpture, drawing, and video.
Some of the work is directly responsive to conservation subjects and issues, while other pieces are more broadly conceptual, related to the artists’ impressions and their personally developed sense of the places they visited. The result is a diverse collection of work exploring value and loss; awe and appreciation; concern and collaboration; and, in all cases, personal and creative connections to the forests, salt flats, glaciers, oceans, and their cultures that many of us have come to know in one way or another in much more literal and traditional ways.
A question posed in the statement accompanying the show is, “Can art inspire conservation? Can conservation inspire art?” The answer to the second part is obviously ‘yes’. The first part has yet to be answered. These works are not, as participating artist Dario Robleto put it, the typical public service announcement style of environmental art. They are focused more deeply on the bigger pictures, and related more tangentially as values-based inquiries that explore the quality of the relationships we have with the natural world. None of the works present explicit calls to action—that would defeat the point. But all present a challenge to the viewer to consider themselves and the natural world in which we live, and to reflect on the complex and interdependent nature of that relationship.
Human/Nature is open at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego until February, when it then travels on to the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, Calif. Click here for a slide show of the preparations and opening events.
