Lots of of projects are popping up, but I thought it was important to get down some reactions to presentations by Vito Acconci and The Waterpod Project at the Terraform workshop.
Continuing with the theme of the artist navigating cultural relevancy with the conventional disjointed concerns of environmental health and social justice, Vito Acconci based his presentation around a kind of retrospective on the evolution of his work, from video, to installation, to design.
According to the artist, Acconci's early work in the late 60's dealt heavily with a prevalent interest in the time at finding and embracing the individual, trapped beneath the pressures and influences of society.
Acconci's description of his early work reminds me a bit of Adam Curtis' bit on the Esalen institute in Century of the Self. (skip to 4:00 for the point)
Acconci pointed to a moment in the 70s where he felt his work had be come too centered on himself, and less about the interaction itself. The installation (or "design") of spaces such as "Where", pictured below, served as a means for Acconci to remove himself from the intervention.
In a way, this shift in Acconci's work represents a more profound social current in which the cult of the individual gives way to a more broad ecological understanding of ourselves as relational creatures.
I think this sort of gestalt is what Sanford Kwinter means in Notes on the Third Ecology, when he talks about "[a] broader ecological approach will see..the need to find genuinely new forms of social connection and organization - tantamount to new mores, myths, and habits- and the implicit belief that these are evolvable, is mandatory".
Before getting into Acconci's later design work, this idea of new forms of social connection and organization as necessary part of any response to the ecological crisis, makes a good segue to the
Waterpod (tm) project.
A kind of "living arts" experiment, the Waterpod project basically consisted of a a bunch of artists organized by photographer Mary Mattingly and sponsored by various patrons and municipal agencies attempting to live a "self-sufficient" lifestyle on a barge floating around the water ways of NYC.
From everything I've heard and read about the Waterpod project, it looks like a fabulous, inspirational experiment I wish I was involved in. Granted, I'm not completely convinced how much of the technologies they actually successfully implemented - at times it seems like it may have been more of a floating gallery space. However, whether they actually grew 100% of their own food is somewhat besides the point...they tried and I'm convinced it possible.
Beyond the concept of building a self-sufficient floating structure out of reclaimed materials, integrating various alternative technologies and sailing the industrial waterways of NYC, I really like the collaborative way of working. I think its clear that finding these new sorts of social connections and organizations are the future.
The one strange thing about the Waterpod project was the rhetoric around it, which brings us back to the question of the role of the artist in responding to the ecological crisis. In their presentation at the Terraform workshop, and the way they represented themselves in the New York Times showed a clear desire to be taken seriously as "art". They tried hard to distance themselves from anything associated with Burning Man, and, ironically, tried to achieve cultural relevancy by citing performances on the Waterpod of pop music of questionable depth by groups "Yacht".
I'll limit my temptation to defend Burning Man to saying that the entire Waterpod Project, geodesic dome, singularity rhetoric and all, would be right at home on the playa, both conceptually and aesthetically (and probably Yacht, too).
This sort of complex to acquiesce to the standards and norms of the NYC art world was emphasized in the way Ian McDaniel publicly wished Waterpod could have had more of a "high design" aesthetic.
In some ways I concur, since architecturally speaking, a geodesic dome is as much a symbol of allegiance to Buckminster Fuller as a structural system. However, neither he or Mary Mattingly are trained designers, so given their initial vision posted below, I question their vision of what "high design" is, as well as their motivations for achieving it.
Basically, while I imagine they could have teamed up with a more qualified designer once they moved past the early conceptual phase these renders represent, I think their DIY aesthetic of all re-used materials served their concept and aesthetic much better than these rudimentary forms and renders.
Speaking of artists having good ideas but poor design execution, we come back to Vito Acconci's more contemporary architecture work.
I won't post many of them here, but I was surprised at the mediocre quality of his visualizations and lack of refinement in some of his designs. To be sure I think his concepts are great, but it seems as though some of the projects seem to "drop off" after the conceptual stage, which is unfortunate.
Or, on the other hand, am I just getting caught up in the "render wars" of the insular design world?
I guess the question is, how do we as artists and designers, all working interdisciplinarily towards a similar end of redefining social networks and methods of communication, balance the need for legitimacy within our fields with issues of environmental health and social justice (which is where one would hope we draw our cultural relevancy from to begin with)?
