Cultivation
During the 1970s and early 80s issues of ecology and cultivation were explored in art on a grand scale: from Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks planted in Kassel in 1982, to Agnes Denes’s field of wheat sown two blocks from Wall Street the same year. But in the final section of this paper I want to look at three works in which earth is cultivated in a less spectacular way, in unseen interventions, or the invisible labour of maintenance. In 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles issued her “Maintenance Manifesto,” and details of a proposed exhibition entitled “Care” which was to have three parts: “Personal Maintenance,” “General Maintenance” and “Earth Maintenance.” Explaining in her manifesto that: “maintenance is a drag: it takes all the fucking time,” Ukeles proposed a show that would “zero in on pure maintenance, exhibit it as contemporary art, and yield, by utter opposition, clarity of issues.” While Part One of the exhibition consisted of Ukeles’ personal maintenance tasks as a wife and mother, and Part Two was to be made up of interviews with people from all sectors of society, who “run the gamut of maintenance,” the third section, “Earth maintenance,” is of most interest in this context. For this piece Ukeles proposed:
“Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum: - the contents of one sanitation truck; - a container of polluted air; - a container of polluted Hudson River; - a container of ravaged land. Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced: purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and/or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists. These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition.”
Ukeles’ proposal of a kind of valet service for the earth may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it also highlighted the insurmountable nature of her chosen task: to clean away every piece of garbage, purify every litre of air and water and every metre of ravaged land, really would take “all the fucking time,” while her description of “pseudo-technical” equipment further highlights the necessarily hypothetical nature of her project. By making the laborious, repetitive and impossible labour of maintenance the subject of her work, Ukeles juxtaposes the invisible, day-to-day drudgery of the maintenance worker with the supposedly heroic, extraordinary struggle of the avant-garde artist.
Ukeles’ tactical intervention into the realm of the everyday frames the mundane business of maintenance and holds it up for inspection, calling our attention to that which usually goes unnoticed. The same could be said for Hans Haacke’s 1969 piece, Grass Grows. Invited to participate in “Earth Art,” a 1969 exhibition at the Andrew Dickson White Museum at Cornell University, Haacke selected the brightest space in the gallery and shovelled in a mound of peat and moss, via an adjacent doorway that opened directly onto the museum’s grounds. He seeded the earth with a fast-growing winter grain, which required watering throughout the exhibition. In line with Haacke’s 1965 proposal to “make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is non stable,” Grass Grows utilized the gallery space as its eco-system, responding to the warmth, light and careful tending of the curator. Taking the process-based art of the late 1960s to another level, Haacke’s piece reframed a process that goes on all around us, making it strange in this spotless, spot-lit interior. His laconic title stands in direct contrast to the histrionics of his compatriot, Joseph Beuys. This is no ritualistic or alchemical transmutation – only nature, going about its everyday business.
This tendency towards the incidental, the minute, the fragile and momentary has been a consistent thread in Charles Simonds’ work since the 1970s. Yet in a similar manner to Ana Mendieta, his precarious artworks are situated within a robust mythology of origin and omnipotence constructed by the artist. When Lippard opened a 1974 interview by asking Simonds: “What do you do?” he replied matter-of-factly: “In 1970 I buried myself in the earth and was reborn from it. This exists as a 16mm film and a double series of twenty four time lapse colour photographs.” He continued: “I lie down nude on the earth, cover myself with clay, remodel and transform my body into a landscape with clay, and then build a fantasy dwelling-place on my body on the earth.” Since the 1970s, Simonds has constructed these Dwellings made of clay and earth for an imaginary tribe of inhabitants he calls “little people” on his body, in the derelict lots of New York City and the interstitial spaces of the art museum. For the 1971 series Landscape-Body-Dwelling he used his naked body as a foundation on which to build with clay, the miniature city colonising contours like some parasitic infestation. This ritualistic communion of body and earth indulges in a fantasy of total harmony and integration, which Simonds has described as “a process of transformation of land into body, body into land.” Yet this sense of totality is innately precarious: the tiny, temporary structures doomed to crack and tumble as the body supporting them rises once more. Simonds has explained that even his more permanent dwellings, such as those pressed into the corner of a stairwell at the Whitney Museum of American Art, begin to lose interest for him as soon as the clay starts to harden and fade. It’s the process of manipulating this material that Simonds enjoys, and which gives his Dwellings their peculiar, obsessive, libidinal charge. Challenging the sculptural conventions of solidity, mass and permanence in a manner related to Process art, Simonds nonetheless rejected the exploration of process ‘for its own sake’ in order to construct a personal mythology that sets his work apart from much art of the period.