Pushing Rocks
Living on the Edges
Art school taught me to think. I am still learning how to apply the lessons I learned there. Sixty years later, on October 30, 2024, I will have a chance to exhibit what I learned, at the Anita Rogers Gallery in New York City.
I attended art school in the mid-sixties, most intensively at The Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. I also went to classes at several other schools, including studying anatomy at the Art Students League, print making at the Museum of Modern Art, and additional life drawing classes at the School of Visual Arts.
What is the Color of Hope?
These are a series of free associations between my experience of artmaking and how policy could change to protect the Earth. My focus is on the working landscape I see of how our world works in ways that end in ecocide. What particularly prompted these reflections has been trying to understand relationships between personal behaviors and public repercussions in the face of ecological disaster.
For several years, I argued with the "hope-ists," writers who extolled this, that or the other new solution to mitigate climate change. I argued that most people conflate sentimental nostalgia for an illusory past with a way forward that will "solve it all". I often wrote that we had to move forward from the wreckage of our past by accepting the devastation of our present.
Is There A Cure?
As I write, President Biden has withdrawn from the Democratic campaign, paving the away for Kamela Harris and perhaps Gavin Newsom. Speculating on future world politics, brings up the question of what the United States considers a head of state should look like? Instead of answering that question, I will explore the implications of appearances and how that inflects something bigger.
The bigger question is that the world has a very serious problem. Powers that be are hurtling us over a cliff of self-destruction whose legal term is ecocide.
At the Intersection of Narcissism and Legal Standing
This week, the Supreme Court of the United States granted the convicted the former President of the United States broad impunity from criminal activity and the consequences of what has looked like treason to many.
At the Blued Trees Intersection
Some years ago, I taught a drawing foundations class in the Art Department at Stonybrook University about how to draw on a surface. The first day, I took my students through a number of art historical slides that illustrated all the ways around the world that we recognize as aesthetic expressions of formal ideas like line, shape and texture. We spanned a range of American, Asian and African tropes from court imagery to animal art (animals that make deliberately creative objects and events we recognize as beautiful).
Ready or not, time's Up?
This past winter, the sea seemed to announce that the time for negotiating in ways we've known, over the consequences of ecocide caused by the effects of fossil fuel use on climate change, was over. During this winter's storms, I watched the waves claw back the land under my neighbor’s wharf, Then the rising sea demolished the pier from which he earned his living as a Maine fisherman. The impact of storm damage on coastal fisheries is enormous but another sector has also been impacted and may be less visible or elicit equal empathy, artists who work along the coast.
I woke from a dream today
Slowly but surely, a culture of impunity is being dismantled as though we might all be waking from a bad dream. This despite every effort on the part of the dominant culture of capitalism and extraction to continue to run rampant.
Notes in Advance of Blued Trees www.bluedtrees.com, an Opera About Ecocide
“The original ecocide proposal is almost 50 years old
The intent to make ecocide an international crime isn't new. The idea was brought up by then-Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme at the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment. In his speech, he warned that rapid industrial progress could deplete natural resources at unsustainable levels. But even before that biologist and bioethicist Arthur Galston used the word "ecocide" at the 1970 Conference on War and National Responsibility in Washington, D.C.”
Ecocide, Genocide and Blued Trees
August 26, 2023, we will debut a premiere of the Blued Trees opera about ecocide at the Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.
The consequences of ecocide have been discussed for decades, particularly in the work of the late Polly Higgins.
Why is this so difficult?
"Hundreds of years ago, pity and piety were synonymous and conflated with obedience."
Consider these three words: pity, compassion, and empathy. Pity has its roots in a religious experience of withness as a communion with divine mercy. Hundreds of years ago, pity and piety were synonymous and conflated with obedience. It is provocative to consider that obedience to the sacred coexisted so intimately with great class disparities, aggressive colonization, and subjugation of the nonwhite world.