Q:
The two major projects that involved intense collaboration are Revival
Field (1990-1993) and "In the Name of the Place," the GALA Committee
project. Let's begin with a discussion of Revival Field, which
is important to see as a working methodological shift, linked to your
first museum exhibition.
MC: Revival
Field became an important research project as well as a sculpture.
The revived ecological system that is created from sculpting away toxins
from millions of tons of polluted earth - that is the "aesthetic product."
Something that has potential for death or injury because of chemical
and industrial practices is brought back to life using something that
is found naturally - that is the sculpture. ts development has to be
traced back to a decision I made after my first museum exhibition in
1989 at the Hirschorn Museum in Washington DC.
I made there an extensive work called "The Operation of the Sun Through
the Cultof the Hand," a study of alchemy from Greek and Chinese sources
linking everything from Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization
in China to texts from ancient Alexandria. I was looking beyond
Duchamp to explore the linking of material, form and linguistics. I
was also trying to expose a relationship between Greek and Chinese thought,
and the process by which transmission of ideas occurs. It was a fundamental
work for me, partly as a reinvestigation of the term alchemy described
as an artistic process, but more as a way of mining and transforming
information. A major factor was that all these were objects made by
hand.
I remember being
in an elevator questioning myself, asking "What do you love more than
anything else Mel?" and a voice said "I love to make things with my
hands," with a mind of course to continue to craft these kinds of unusual
objects. And then another voice said "OK- Stop!!" So I listened, I just
stopped. After spending all this energy on my first museum exhibition,
I really quit making artwork. I felt it was part of the alchemical process
that the exhibition had investigated: when the fire has just started,
you have to initiate something else - a transmutative process.
I did all kinds of jobs at the time - carpentry, art handling or whatever
- it didn't matter. I partly felt I had to do it that way because the
support wasn't there. It made more free time available for research
though. I didn't make work but would just to go to libraries. I stumbled
upon one article that struck me, written by Terence McKenna, a famous
Psilocybe expert, in the Whole Earth Review in the fall
of 1989. He described using the plant Datura as a method of cleaning
heavy metals from the earth. I was struck by the poetic aspects of this
possibility and I started studying Datura and its poperties, but I found
there was no case for it. I became dedicated to finding a scientist
who really knew about this subject.
This turned out to be Dr. Rufus Chaney, a research scientist from
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), whose passion was these specific
plants that can remove toxins from the soil.
Interestingly, he had to put his research aside due to the conservative
political agenda during the 1980s. I mentioned to him McKenna's idea
of cleaning up metals with Datura and he said "that plant will get you
high but it won't pick up any heavy metals, but if you want to pick
up heavy metals I've got the plants." He suggested reading material
for me to better understand the technical language and background of
what are termed "hyperaccumulator" plants which
can pull metals out of the soil into their stems and leaves. Therefore
this idea of cleansing the soil using plants seemed more and more possible
to me. Chaney had explained that for the project to be scientific, a
replicated field test needed to be done at a randomly selected site
with toxic contamination somewhere in the world. The plants have to
prove that they can pull up the metals. So I began to restructure my
concept around these plants, and to create a revival field that would
be able to provide data for the three years required for a field test.
I suggested to Dr. Chaney that since the USDA, the EPA (Environmental
Protection Agency) and the other branches of government that are assigned
to protect the environment are not going to do the testing, perhaps
we can reinvent this piece as a shared field - an art project that would
meet the needs of a scientific experiment.
Revival
Field is a project that clearly involves collaboration although
that word was not available in the scientific field when we began -
we had to call it cooperation. Dr. Chaney was not officially able to
work with me on a collective basis because he could not receive money
and he could not give me money. I would be responsible for finding funding
and a site, which lead to a whole series of operations. It's easy enough
to find a contaminated site, but it took months of negotiations with
lawyers, waste management officials, the polluters themselves and city
governments. I was on the phone everyday for about a year talking to
the EPA, and a lot of routes ended with an absolute '"no." You can tell
people you may have a solution for cleaning up their soil and they will
tell you to your face that you are opening a can of worms. Negotiating:
that was my artwork for many years.
Q:
So Revival Field was not about finding the universal 'green'
cure. In fact, you drew upon ecology as a first experiment towards shaping
your notion of new interrelated fields in art practice-- in the tradition
of alchemy, mixing the fields of science and art.
MC: Well, Revival Field was not just a
technical activity to grow plants, or an idea to save the earth or a
clean-up process for everything. We understand a plant as a living organism
held by primary forces--sun, water, soil--in an easy three-part relationship.
But in the real world there are secondary, tertiary and quaternary relationships
that make up a complex life that is always at the edge of chaos, at
least that's the way it is always described. And in that definition
of the ecology of relationships, life cannot be a two-dimensional mandala,
it has to be extended into a shape that keeps changing, spinning, moving,
stopping, moving backwards, and bottlenecking in time because of many
blocks. An idea floating through this continuum is constantly affected
by changes in the political structure and economic structures, and it
exists in a post-Newtonian space which is curving and moving around.
These attitudes are all part of what it takes to ha ve an idea exist
in the world.
There is also a
generational aspect to time, and importantly, a generational transfer
of ideas. It has been ten years since Revival Field
was first planned. Within the art world perhaps there is an understanding
of the formal structure of an experiment that was done. There has also
been progress in the field of green
remediation (URL), and I am so excited about that. Some day there
may be a landscape that had once been a dangerous place to live, or
could not be farmed because of its contamination, which has been cleaned
and made usable by plants. In that case, who cares whether it is art
or science? It is something that has occurred in the world which makes
it more than it was. And I feel that the so-called "sculpture" will
be completed at that time.
Q:
This aspect of transmission and transformation of information and ideas,
and a time related to generational transfer is clear in your collaborative
project, the GALA Committee's "In the Name of the Place." This was the
first project particularly linking to your work in the field of education,
so that now you register a revival of interest in art, by getting your
participants to work in the 'reality' of mainstream TV media. What were
your parameters, and how did it come about?
MC: The Melrose
Place project "In the Name of the Place," was the first project
I connected with my teaching - which was at that time as a scholar in
residence at the University of California (Cal Arts), and the University
of Georgia. I took an art project that was offered to me and turned
it into a collective project with my students. There is nothing better
than getting out of school to experience the real world with all its
rejections and failures. Working together and trying to make something
happen, you learn about collaboration and that it does not mean sacrificing
some individual impulses towards producing art, but challenging the
creative capacity to adjust and deal with other thoughts that may be
circulating. This experience belongs to the practice necessary to begin
creating new ideas in this world.
GALA Committee conditions
were not just specific to the TV show Melrose Place. The
project was initiated in connection with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary
Art and was obviously related to the art world and its attendant media.
The participants saw art institutions not as fixed, but in constant
flux, depending on the curators or the directorship at the time, or
even the press. If an editor of an art magazine prefers a certain branch
of art, then that is what will be reported. There are linear aspects
to the world of museum collection in terms of trends and friends. You
cannot use that as a gauge to know whether you are successful or accepted
as part of the so-called art world.
The project was
more directly related to the mainstream media, which can corrupt any
kind of 'attitude' and turn it against itself to sell something. In
terms of the project's educational role, it became apparent that one
must be critical and rebel against mainstream ideas because many times
the media´steals the tools it takes to reevaluate oneself. And,
if you want to work with someone else, be it an artist or television
producer, it is the wrong idea to have your agenda set and just do your
thing. You have to develop agreement and empathy while still putting
forth your maximum effort to get your ideas expressed.
Television media
is for now (this will change) a site of profound power that allows for
the generational transfer of ideas. Today as I walked through the streets
of Stuttgart I heard 'Bye Bye American Pie' by Don McLean via Madonna
on MTV doing her new version of a song that was played when I was leaving
High School. Thirty years - a generation has passed - and why is that
song again here? So what happens when we think of ideas not as having
the typical three month life-span in a gallery, but as having a life
span within commercial TV, re-running until you finally 'get it'.
Q:
Revival Field manifested as your first work after you made a
decisive stop on the doorstep to a museum career as you said, working
with your hands. Its title really implies as well a revival of your
interests in art practice, through finding a more suitable environment
for your different interests to be cultivated in one 'field'. Ecology
is clearly present at many levels there, from the direct relation to
the earth, to your own revival of a belief in the transmutative process
of art, in some sense, updating the notion of alchemy to the information/communication
era. This continues into "In the Name of the Place," your first teaching-based
collective project, where the 'transmission and transformation of information'
is certainly embedded. Early in the project's life you produced a drawing
showing the GALA Committee as a complex ecology - why?
MC: In the case
of Revival Field, the work of hundreds
of scientists is involved, but in the case of the GALA Committee, what
about the millions of fans who start to understand that their favorite
show contains some things they never knew? Things which are related
to the characters and the plot, but also to other issues. This is a
concept of an ecology of relationships where elements are constantly
affected by other elements, sending them moving and spiraling in different
directions. So early in the project, I drew a plan of the GALA Committee
project as an ecology, charting the conversion of TV props that viewers
see, into art objects later seen by another audience at a museum exhibition,
then into a kind of TV souvenir/artifact being sold at a Sotheby's auction,
with the proceeds donated to a charity furthering women's college education
(a selection that reflected the viewer demographic of Melrose Place)
. So although I don't know the individual who is being educated by our
resulting scholarship, she has the capacity to also feed back into that
ecology. So the ecology drawing from the beginning indicated the importance
of understanding a whole description of the project's life.
Q:
It also associates 'information, education, entertainment', the original
mandate associated to television media, with a sense of community responsibility.
With commercial television, the acquisition of money through selling
advertising time is linked to 'attracting viewer numbers', via a circulation
of certain beliefs and values, where each adjusts to the other for the
optimum acquisition of money. How did GALA see the work-related conditions
and exchange?
MC: The GALA Committee
didn't accept money from the television's extraordinary amount of wealth.
Being paid for services means having to perform according to certain
rules. By providing the works for free, we could meet the deadlines
and provide the work, but remain able to say 'no' to something asked
for that we hadn't agreed to produce. It was also a strategy to encourage
more of a conversation about the nature and limits of this cooperation
or collaboration - what we really wanted to create out of this, what
we were not willing to give up in the creative medium, and what it would
take. We had to sacrifice something, so in this case, it came down to
the money. We saw the producers as collaborators who gave us the script
in advance to read, and we'd find ideas there. One example we produced
is the set prop "Food for Thought." In the script, one character brings
in Chinese food take-out bags and cartons to share with another. We
thought that this would be an excellent site for an alternative logo
or graphic image from Chinese script. In Chinese restaurants there are
red good luck symbols on the walls which say 'prosperity' and 'double
happiness,' meaning that if you eat there you get good fortune. We felt
that this scene with the Chinese food delivery could offer 'food for
thought'. Our research led to statements by the official press in Beijing
concerning the Tiananmen Square students. The statements used a word
to describe the activities of the students which meant they were not
a pro-democracy movement but were just causing trouble to an extreme
degree. Now if you asked the students they would say they were demonstrating
for human rights and democratic potential. By putting these two sides
together on the take-out bags and cartons, we created an iconic kind
of battle, not 'double happiness' and 'double prosperity' but 'more
trouble' and 'human rights' in opposition.
The agent that carries
an idea may be a television action, or an object of art or a laboratory
result. The key is to bring together all the parts and participants
to make a project happen. So it is not just a subversive activity to
place an idea but it is also establishing the kinds of relationships
and the ecology that need to exist for the idea to continue. People
are always asking me and other GALA Committee members, how successful
was the Melrose project, did it work? Our response largely is
that we are not done yet, it is not over yet; we probably won't know
the answer to that question for another twenty or thirty years.
Q:
Surely unpredictable is the fact that both collaborative projects now
link through Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Revival Field is being
discussed to occur in association with Hohenheim University, with a
shift to the more powerful 'superaccumulator' plants. And since its
opening last year, the haus.0 program has been the beneficiary of the
collector group TwoDo, of the GALA Committee-designed bar from Melrose
Place. We went on to produce a character development media workshop
with German TV scriptwriter Rainer Kirberg, developing a German take
on the American Soap, entitled Melrose Plays, planned to be produced
with the bar as set.
MC: That's something
I did not anticipate of course, nor did anyone in GALA, but when I told
the other members, they were totally encouraged. It is great when I
come and see the bar here, it is as if it has been given another life,
furthering the ecology. It is part of a process of reintegration and
generational transfer. The same is true for Revival
Field occuring here - the experiment they want to conduct uses
superaccumulators, which have a much greater
capacity for metal take-up than the hyperaccumulators we first tested
ten years ago, so a different degree of success is implied. This project
is extremely important; it will determine how the plants can work in
a real field. This is all part of the continuing project.
Q:
Your latest collaborative venture in progress is in Detroit. Overall,
this development of your ventures has demarcated 'land,' mainstream
media,' and now 'urban.' Each is specifically described by an ecology
with complex limits of finances, rules, and and a specific community
of interests: land is linked to soil pollutants by industry, with a
scientific community tests results in mind; the TV mainstream as educational/intellectual
'pollutant' (or not), with art students/TV fans having 'minds', and
the urban sphere - destruction of inner city by economic policies, with
the neighborhood revitalised through a model of self-sustained collective,
represented by the basic investment model of the private, individual
homeowner and freestanding house. What is the Detroit project?
MC: In Detroit I'm
working on "S.P.O.R.E.", Sustainable Production Organizing in Regard
to the Environment. It refers to sustainable economic projects that
re-utilize houses, places, ground, trash or other materials to create
economically sustainable relationships in the inner city of Detroit.
The "Devil's Night" fires that occurred in the 1980s have left damaged
houses in inner-city Detroit. In each case an individual house is transformed
into a self-sustainable ecology. One project, called S.P.A.W.N., will
structurally re-engineer a house damaged by fire from the inside. A
pivot will be inserted into one corner, so that the entire house can
swing away from its foundation. While open, it will reveal worm-growing
bins in the basement. The worms will be used as compost for fields,
and the worm castings and the worms themselveswill be sold for speciality
gardening and for sport fishing in the Great Lakes. These different
projects are all related in some respect to this notion that the artist,
or the mythical status of the artist, may sometimes be the biggest hang-up.
A challenge with these collaborative projects is to avoid claiming them
as your own. In this case, it is better to be a 'submerging' not an
'emerging' artist so that the ideas you really care about can survive
as they are assumed and owned by others. In the process of art and ideas,
there are periods of profound stasis and then there are explosive reconfigurations
of ideas and questions that occur; paradigm shifts in the way of thinking.
I want to be part of that - I want to live in that period of reconfiguration,
and if I cannot live in it, then I want to work to get that period to
happen. So that is why I think about art this way, because it sets up
the conditions for the philosophical conversation that will occur in
the future.