, London. Until 18 October. Admission 拢8/拢6 concs
Gallery: Radical Nature: Art and architecture for a changing planet
ENTERING a giant space in a 1960s building, you nearly trip over a stuffed wolf on a trailer. Recovering, you spot an upended chunk of rainforest, puzzling trays of crops, a geodesic dome and plastic spheres tethered to the ground and draped with the air-growing plant .
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Without reading the captions or the fat catalogue (recycled, of course), it is hard to construct a clear, coherent narrative out of this strange landscape. But maybe that is the point. Humans have long been caught up in a dark, often incoherent relationship with the natural world. Nature and Culture came to exist only as idealised, dangerously opposed notions: pastoral fantasy versus harsh human progress.
Since the 1960s, we have had our collective environmental consciousness raised by David Attenborough, James Lovelock, Al Gore, Vandana Shiva and others. They and powerfully dystopian films and novels left us expecting the worst from Culture, while theorists such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway hacked away at our ideas about Nature.
Surely the point now should be to offer new answers to the question, what role can art and architecture play in a changing planet? Or are shows like this doomed to end up as beautiful, frustrating and beguiling, and as shot through with contradictions as their subject matter?
鈥淭he point now should be to offer new answers to the question, what role can art play in a changing planet?鈥�
For instance, ironies and politics pile up in Agnes Denes鈥檚 1982 work Wheatfield 鈥� A Confrontation (see image). Denes planted wheat on New York City real estate worth billions. Spot the twin towers in the dense urban fringe 鈥� and note the harvest was fed to New York police horses. Trying to recreate the work on a scrap of forgotten land in industrial east London, however, only underlines the monumental scale Denes worked with 鈥� and the large vision.
Younger artists seem weighed down by our troubled times. Does Argentinian Tomas Saraceno just want to float away altogether in *3x12MW, his utopian vision of flying cells of conjoined cities? What are the French architects who make up R&Sie(n) aiming for with Symbiosishood 2009, a building improbably designed for a former minefield on the border of North and South Korea, and covered with the fast-growing kudzu plant? Invisibility?
Sadly, Robert Smithson鈥檚 amazing 1970 Spiral Jetty 鈥� a 457-metre 鈥渆arthwork鈥� on the Great Salt Lake in Utah colonised by salt crystals 鈥� is now threatened with real invisibility by a minerals company intent on exploitation.
Such ironies would be not be lost on the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Set up in 1994, it draws on scientists, geographers, social historians, artists, writers and lawyers to analyse the ways in which land is used. One result, a sort of 鈥渞esearch as art鈥�, is the oddly beautiful film The Trans-Alaska Pipeline. CLUI also run coach tours (to Smithson鈥檚 Jetty among other sites) where their research is presented in situ.
Perhaps they should run trips to Indonesia, where architect Wolf Hilbertz鈥檚 Autopia, a spiral-shaped island onto which material can accrete, is taking shape. Hilbertz has discovered that his structure can provide coral and other sea life with a new home. Give the man a prize for art 鈥� and saving coral! This is real radical nature.
There are important omissions, though. Buckminster Fuller鈥檚 brand of utopianism has to be reflected in the show, but why no critique of another kind of utopian eco-craziness 鈥� the $22 billion Masdar City in Abu Dhabi? And where鈥檚 the biotech art? Can Day-Glo bunnies and victimless leather really be too radical?
Gallery: Radical Nature: Art and architecture for a changing planet
