In recent years, it seemed as if artists had broached all possible frontiers. They extended the plane surface of the canvas, took sculpture off its pedestal, used machines, made everything bigger and bigger. However large or awkward the object, museums and galleries managed to accommodate it.
For some artists, all this permissiveness seemed the reverse of a challenge. They declared that they found the wall, the floor, the room, the very idea of making an object, confining. So they have struck out for wilder shores of the imagination, for deserts and plains, mountaintops and ocean floors, claiming all nature as their canvas and every living thing—from molds and yeasts to cows and their own bodies—as their material.
If ecological art—as apt a name as any —sounds eccentric, it is. But it is also demanding. Its practitioners sweat and swim, dig trenches, hack through ice, suffer desert winds or the muscle aches of long climbs—all for the sake of a few photographs and a memory. No one intent merely on economic security would go in for it, since it results in little that can be sold or even framed. But a considerable number of artists, some young, some not so young, have committed themselves to it. So, as Arthur Miller might say, attention must be paid.
Calabash and Flowers. In one sense, ecological art is about what art has always been about: leaving a mark on the world. But left as it frequently is to the whims of nature and viewed rarely by anyone other than the artist, it acknowledges what art has rarely acknowledged before: its own transience. It is a motley movement dominated more by high adventure—and imagination—than by any single name. Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria dug trenches in sun-parched deserts (they are silting over), Christo wrapped a portion of the Australian coastline in polyurethane (the plastic was removed), Britain's Richard Long imposed a geometric pattern on a field of daisies by plucking the blossoms (as any gardener could predict, new blossoms grew).
More than any of the artists involved. Peter Hutchinson, 40, and Dennis Oppenheim, 31, use nature in a metaphorical way to reveal something fundamental about the nature of all things. For Hutchinson, the metaphor is one of change, evolution, growth, a way to demonstrate that life developed from inorganic matter. For Oppenheim, ecological art is a way of interrupting the matrix that he sees shaping both natural and human activities.
Waves of Magenta. Last fall the two artists teamed up to visit the island of Tobago in the British West Indies. The resulting show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was composed of some surprisingly beautiful underwater photographs, and charted new ecological territory. Hutchinson strung out calabash, a local fruit, so that it floated eerily in the sea; he also transferred yellow leguminous flowers from nearby slopes to the ocean floor. Oppenheim, long intrigued by the "incredibly irregular" patterns of U.S. Highway 20 he had observed on maps, decided to transfer the configuration of the highway to water. Using a boat to plow a path in the bay, he dropped deep magenta dye and gasoline in its wake, then set the gas afire to create an astonishing analogy to automobile accidents. In the aftermath, Tobago's Crown Point beaches were washed by purple waves for several hours.