(2 of 3)
"Ecological art began as soon as the sculptor quit thinking about sheet metal and welding and synthetic stuff and began doing something in the ground," Oppenheim says. His studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts and at Stanford, where he got an M.A. in painting, had been formal enough. For a while he made funky inflatable sculptures, then progressed to geometric, steel-beam constructions, finally came to a dead end when he began noticing primary structures all around—in railroad underpinnings, building girders, the shadows of trees. He went through a "site period" when he picked out objects and sites he liked, then got caught up in directly reshaping the landscape.
Since then he has directed the seeding and harvesting of a wheatfield in The
Netherlands, made a clearing in a Louisiana cypress swamp, and taken microscopic pictures of his saliva with the intention of transferring the patterns to the earth.
Oppenheim's most ambitious project, Hay Maze, took place in early March, when he flew out to Wisconsin State University in Whitewater, Wis. He cajoled Farmer Melvin Schrader into allowing him to use his alfalfa field as a site and 1,200 bales of hay from his barn as material, got 25 art students to haul and heave the bales into a geometric maze. Then ten Holstein cows were herded through the maze to eat the corn. The result was one distinctly puzzled farmer ("It may be art and all, but how would I know, art never came up in my life before") and a very tired artist. "My work is a real drag to do," Dennis confesses. But he is firmly convinced that "you can work with the ecosystem as you do with clay."
Peter Hutchinson's involvement with ecology began as a child. Born in 1930 in England, where his family had a market garden, he came to the U.S. in 1953 and enrolled at the University of Illinois, intent on becoming a plant geneticist. Then he switched to art, and began to paint handsome shaped canvases. Two years ago, while summering in Provincetown, his interest in art and nature joined in a sudden impulse. He decided to plant mushrooms and wild phlox onto the ocean floor. This first venture into ecological art nearly ended in disaster when he was carried a mile out to sea by the swift tidal currents off Cape Cod. Undeterred, he has since devoted himself to the new art form. He has made a series of test-tube works, using crystals, yeasts, mosses and ferns. Dealing with living organisms, he admits, has its hazards. He once made a miniature landscape piece for a Manhattan collector only to have a cockroach jump out when he delivered the work to his patron's apartment. Despite Hutchinson's protests that the cockroach proved the work was hospitable to life, the collector rejected it.