“Material World,” installation view
“Material World,” on display at H&R Block Artspace, is a cohesive foray into ecological art that goes outside the studio to find its ecology. The pieces on display are all made, one or way or another, with items from the “natural world,” turning the gallery into a living network of in-progress installations and open studio spaces. In line with the Artspace’s connection to the Kansas City Art Institute and its social practice program, “Material World” is consistently participatory, a fully enmeshed ecology of theory, action, and worldly beings.
At a basic level, this exhibition lets its materials take the fore. The theory and conceptual purpose are there aplenty — among the artists are a biologist and a practitioner of the Albers’ theory of matière — and there is a good helping of text, including a range of books from the KCAI library, but the materials say it all themselves anyway. For instance, Elaine Buss’s “Lebenswelt” encourages visitors to touch, modify, add to, and take from its roomful of carefully arranged found-and-foraged materials. Other artists like Cydney Ross paint using soils as naturally occurring pigments; Karen McCoy even uses her own body to create a soil-based human figure on paper. The materials say: art exceeds the human.
For many, “Material World” will be an eye-opening introduction to a new way of thinking about, and with, artistic materials. And even if you’ve seen similar practices documented online, it is a different beast to encounter them with your whole body. We are so used to inhaling off-gassing industrial materials in galleries, arms dangling by our sides, that it’s surprising to reach out and touch a leaf, frond, stick, or piece of clay amid the smell of drying plants and soils and fermenting matter (so this is plein air!). That said, these smells are not necessarily better; “nature” has its own noxiousness. The material world is full of struggles and subtleties, ecologies that come with their own artifices and problems.
One of the potential pitfalls of ecologically minded art is preciousness about the natural world — whether in the over-aestheticization of “eco-grief,” “eco-guilt,” and the like; or in a re-enchantment of nature (nature for nature’s sake, we could say, to echo a dictum from the previous century). At any rate, this show mostly avoids that pitfall by allowing “the natural” to become a mode of abstraction, an engine for shape, line, and texture that is easy on the eyes — humane, but also non-human. Dora Agbas’s “Material Concerto in Nine Movements,” for example, combines various materials to create a kind of abstract, rhythmic catalogue of worldly materials, reminiscent of an avant-garde visual score. As part of “The Seedbed,” Rena Detrixhe and Casey Whittier engage in a documentary investigation into the brick, its use in geometrical patterns, and most intriguingly the idea of brick as carpet. And Whittier’s solo piece “Systems for a Second Life,” made of unfired clay and embedded seeds, suggests sacred geometrical patterns but also a new scale of synthetic molecule, invented by the artist rather than a pharmaceutical lab.
One of the reasons this abstraction is possible — in addition to the artists’ own ingenuity — is that “nature” has a ready beauty to humans, even though it isn’t “meant” to be beautiful for us. Plants evolved to signal to pollinators, or to communicate via pheromones with other plants. Rocks and soil are simply there, it seems, via geological processes. Yet we find these things beautiful anyway, and it feels as if our attention could dive so deep into their forms that it would become non-human itself. Can we begin to think of an art that is only barely for us, or that feels as if it is also for other beings? Do non-human species partake of the abstract beauty created by their surrounding environments? And if so, does it take the same forms as ours? Are all these beauty-perceptions, human and otherwise, different patches of the same spectrum — a single universe of possible experiences — or are they radically separate?
For ease of communication, I’ve been using the word “natural,” sheaved in quotation marks, though at this point I’d rather discard it like a ladder we won’t be climbing back down. After all the “natural” itself, as a concept, is shorthand for the troubled attempt to separate human beings and the things they produce from non-human beings and the things they produce — as if any such distinction could ever hold fast. The most compelling ecological art lets that distinction fly loose.
Sean Nash’s installation-in-progress, “Matière: The Surface (Epidermis) of Material,” mixes the “natural” with the “artificial,” effectively blurring their boundaries. Its centerpiece is a jar loaded with mealworms who are slowly eating their way through styrofoam. As a concept, this mealworm jar conveys a certain optimism about working with the natural world to create a post-natural equilibrium that would stave off ecological disaster. I watched one mealworm poke out of a tunnel it had made for itself, wave its head from side to side over the precipice, then turn back to the styrofoam to keep eating. If you lean in closely, you can actually hear a crackling, munching sound. So much of our knowledge of natural processes seems to come to us in non-human timescales, requiring temporal manipulation in order to perceive them — I can watch a plant grow in a time-lapse video, or a hummingbird flap its wings thanks to high-frame-rate cameras — so that it’s surprising, as in this case, when human time is in sync with mealworm-time. It requires a certain artifice to achieve this immediacy; the artist harmonizes our attention with the mealworms’.
“Material World” also gains immediacy by exhibiting all local artists who employ (at least mostly) local materials. In effect, the gallery becomes a partial index for local ecologies as they are right now, on this rapidly changing planet. Of course, the notion of the local is also troubled by its imbrication in planetary networks, and there is no easy, pure dwelling in this landscape that has been the site of so much colonial invasion and dispossession. And the non-human systems that form our landscapes are themselves subject to non-human upheavals — predation, parasitism, even widespread invasions and colonizations of their own. There is no original state in ever-changing natural systems, which means that ecologically informed art must keep changing as well. This at least should help ensure it stays interesting, just as modernity’s ethos of “disruption” has kept both art and — problematically—capitalism churning over the last 100+ years.
In the classical European formulation, art imitates nature; the artist imposes “his” will upon inanimate matter. It’s disconcerting to think of artistic media as composed of little selves, materials that were created beyond human control — to perceive mealworm minds in the gallery, natures imposing themselves upon us. There are many forms that ecologically engaged art can take. I appreciate that “Material World” dials into one particular mode that is so welcoming and engaging, even as it eventually asks us to surrender the boundaries between our bodies and those of other beings.
“Material World” continues at the Kansas City Art Institute’s H&R Block Artspace, 16 E. 43rd St., through Nov. 9. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday. For more information, 816.561.5563 or www.kcai.edu/artspace/.
