Beyond Green: Towards a Sustainable Art Smart Museum of Art
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Of the established individual artists, perhaps Andrea Zittel best sets the tone for the exhibit. Her wall-label quote reads: “I am not a designer–designers have a social responsibility to provide solutions. Art is more about asking questions.” She’s been asking questions for a while now. In the early 90s Zittel created a brand, “A-Z,” meant to simplify daily living by reducing consumer choices. Her “products” have included one outfit to wear for an entire season, a modular apartment with variable components, and a single food that has all the nutrients needed to sustain life. She’s experimented with these concepts in two studios–first A-Z East in Brooklyn, then A-Z West in California–where she makes items from found objects, recycled paper, and renewable living materials like wood, cotton, and wool. Here, in Raugh Shelving Unit With Fiber Form Bowls and Found Objects From A-Z West, a red carpet on the wall and floor serves as the backdrop for a shelf unit made from a large piece of plywood cut into a keylike shape. As shelves she uses some of the cutout plywood and three boxlike compartments; on the shelves she’s placed felted bowls and scavenged objects, such as a liquor bottle filled with dried flowers, an empty perfume bottle, a broken porcelain swan, and a wooden acorn.
Chicagoan Dan Peterman’s Excerpts From the Universal Lab consists of visually compelling, intellectually engaging junk sculptures. The three “travel pods” here are large, waist-high Plexiglas spheres on metal legs fitted with wheels, making them movable carts. They’re filled with materials from the Universal Lab, an amateur scientists’ building on Chicago’s south side (closed in 2000) that in turn scavenged its materials from the University of Chicago labs. Each sphere is like a sealed time capsule of science and technology. Travel pod three contains old pamphlets from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, slides, lightbulbs, and projectors. Inside the pod a large case holds a Type K-20 camera, made for the military during World War II, and what looks like an old Polaroid. Only bits of the pamphlets can be read, like the headline “Experiments in Death–Soviet scholars bring dead dogs back to life.”
All the artists here blur the boundaries between art, architecture, design, construction, sociology, environmentalism, and activism. Or, perhaps more accurately, they recycle them all into something new. Bono may have made environmental awareness sexy with his Edun clothing line, but this exhibition makes it smart.
