A barometer of our times.

ECOTOPIA: THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

TRIENNIAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

NEW YORK CITY 

SEPTEMBER 14, 2006-JANUARY 7, 2007

ECOTOPIA: THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

TRIENNIAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO (EXHIBITION CATALOG)

NEW YORK: INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY, 2006 380 PP./$40.00 (SB)

The International Center of Photography (ICP) certainly seems to have its finger on the pulse of today's most pressing concerns, at least with respect to its Triennial themes. Inaugurated three years ago, the ICP's first Triennial, organized around the concept of "Strangers," addressed the effects of globalization on identity politics. In this year's Triennial the environmental crisis is opened up for examination with various artworks gathered under the title "Ecotopia." But of what, we might ask, does this ecological utopia actually consist? Certainly, this exhibition makes no effort to acknowledge Ernest Callenbach's 1975 cult classic of the same name. In Callenbach's book, a journalist from New York City is sent to the state of "Ecotopia" (formed twenty years before when Northern California, Oregon, and Washington ceded from the United States) to find that the Ecotopians have developed ingenious ways to live modern lives in harmony with the environment. By contrast, the ICP's use of the word "Ecotopia" is tongue-in-cheek, and the exhibition is often suffused with a melancholic nostalgia for a pristine nature now displaced or despoiled.

At the exhibition's entrance, for example, we find a series of prints by Robert Adams, made as he followed the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-06. Adams's work traces the expedition backward, from the mouth of the Columbia River over the Cascade Mountains and into eastern Oregon. Each expertly modulated print displays stumps of trees dotting a devastated landscape, showing the destruction of this country over the past two hundred years. Here, perhaps for the first time, Adams's high-contrast, black-and-white prints have a historical gravity that transcends their aesthetic conceits. Adams's series is followed immediately by Mitch Epstein's gigantic one-liner, an undeniably powerful and exquisitely glossy color print entitled Biloxi, Mississippi (2005), showing a scene of a queen-sized mattress, sheets, blankets, and insulation perched side-by-side in a tree as a result of Hurricane Katrina. With this pairing, the dialogue of the entire exhibition is introduced--an unspoiled past versus present despoilment, whether induced by natural or human causes.

Within this simple binary framework, the curators (Edward Earle, Christopher Phillips, Carol Squires, and Brian Wallis, along with assistant curator Joanna Lehan) have assembled a remarkably diverse array of reflections on nature and the way we currently experience it. Marine Hugonnier's exquisite film installation, "The Last Tour" (2004), for example, depicts a trip by hot-air balloon to the Matterhorn in Switzerland, a place where access has become increasingly regulated. The trip, meant to be exciting, is oppressively boring--we see a passing wolf, tree branches blowing in the wind, and a running stream. But the installation's pristine setting--a stark white room with cream-colored wool carpet in which the seats vibrate at the close of the film to give the vantage point of passengers in a car driving along the road--makes this film a memorable experience. Equally memorable is a series of photographs taken by Harri Kallio on the island of Mauritius. Kallio stages fabricated male and female dodo birds in what was their native habitat until 1662, when the last sighting in the wild was recorded (nearly two hundred years before the invention of photography). Here Kallio presents us not only with these photographs but also with the models themselves and with a selection of the historical material he used to painstakingly research the appearance of these birds.

The exhibition is marked by other similarly odd couplings. An-My Le's double-screen film, 29 Palms (2005), depicts U.S. soldiers training in Southern California. On the right side we see the awkward faces of young soldiers fidgeting and looking forward as they stand in the blistering sun. On the left is a vast landscape with a string of soldiers running training drills in the distance. Although the current war in Iraq is certainly an environmental disaster, this work reads more like a calm observation of subjects that addresses the uncertain/undirected nature of youth. Very different in tone is Wang Qingsong's triptych, Come! Come! (2005), in which he stages a mock demonstration in China where protestors carry placards from past political campaigns, sporting slogans referring to everything from historical conflicts with the West to socialist propaganda. In an adjoining print, the backs of these signs are shown to carry advertising slogans for products imported into China since the 1980s. A third image shows the debris left by such protests, which includes many of the advertised products. This parody of the protest march serves as a wry political critique of both socialism and consumerism.

Alessandra Sanguinetti's images from the series "On the Sixth Day" (1996-2004) reveal the realities of farm life removed from the public's experience of the consumption of meat. One might call this melancholic activism a simple and sustainable sort of "ecotopia" that respects the rhythms of life and death. Meanwhile, Gilles Mingasson's untitled series of digital slides (2005) documents the very real impacts of global warming on the 591 Inupiat Eskimo inhabitants of Shishmaref, a small coastal village on the Alaskan island of Sarichef. The natives struggle to maintain their traditional life as food becomes more scarce and the weather warmer, making travel increasingly dangerous over increasingly thin ice. It is predicted that this village will have to be evacuated within nine years. Meanwhile, Mary Mattingly's project "The New Mobility of Home (The Nobility of Mobility)" (2004) predicts what this very future may hold. Presenting an earth populated with "nomadic post-consumers" reliant on technology to produce wearable homes, Mattingly combines hallucinatory large-scale photographs with interesting computer supplements.

Many of the photographic works rely on captions to convey meaning. Simon Starling's One Ton, II (2005), for example, is a series of five identical, unassuming, platinum prints of a mining site. In reading the ICP's label the viewer learns that these images comment on environmental, class, and transportation issues by depicting the South African quarry from which one ton of ore was excavated in order to distill the few ounces of platinum required to produce these same prints. Wout Berger's likewise unassuming color print Ruigoord, 2 (2002) depicts wildflowers that have fought their way through loose sand and chalky muck planted in order to prevent erosion until suburban developments can be erected in their place. Shot downward, this point of view excises the horizon, making these images abstract ruminations on survival. Also bordering on abstraction are Yannick Demmerle's sublime Untitled prints from the series "Les Nuits Etranges" (2004) in which a dark stand of tree trunks animate a German forest, weaving in and out of the night. A stark contrast is made between this resurrection of the spirit of Casper David Friedrich and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin's seemingly innocuous photographs of portions of Israeli forests, which are actually records of the site of erased Palestinian villages.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

These are just a few of the many compelling works in this exhibition, but the rationale for exclusion and inclusion remains enigmatic. For example, Francesco Jodice's film Il Caso Montemaggiore (2003) explores the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of five senior citizens in the Italian woods over the course of three years. The film hints at Satanism, witchcraft, and a cult of Angels. Although a lovely piece, it has more to do with the mysteries of the forest than any principles specific to an "ecotopia." One feels compelled to ask, why are these works in the exhibition? Or to put it another way, Why weren't Edward Burtynsky's intricate documents of the extraordinary transformation of the Chinese landscape included in the show, or Neeta Madahar's exquisite "Nature Studies" (2006), or Emmet Gowin's aerial photographs, or Aric Mayer's photographs from Hurricane Katrina, all of them so similar in look or theme to those in the exhibition?

Referring to the catalog is of little help. The first Triennial's exhibition catalog situated the concept of "Strangers" within a range of historical essays accompanied by curatorial statements from each of the four organizers. This gave the exhibition's theme a depth and resonance it may have otherwise lacked. The "Ecotopia" catalog offers only a perfunctory "roundtable" discussion meant to "address contemporary notions of landscape, ecology, and imagery" created from disparate e-mails, conversations, and faxes among the artists included. This format fails to provide a cohesive curatorial statement. In fact, a greater explanation of the theme is found in the three-paragraph introductory wall text and Director Willis E. Hartshorn's Foreword than in the rest of the catalog. According to Hartshorn, the works in the exhibition are responses to the "challenges addressed by rapid environmental change ... evok[ing] the anxiety, hope, and urgency that characterize today's reflections on the global environment." (1)

So what, in the end, does this exhibition say about our current environmental crisis? What does it propose we do about it, other than admire often beautiful works of art? The answer seems to be: not much. The curators themselves were not sufficiently motivated by their theme to offer a model of the ideal sustainable exhibition. True, the catalog is printed on recycled paper, but why not take it a step further and produce a Durabook made from Melcher Media's synthetic paper? This kind of "paper" is made from polypropylene and inorganic fillers and is able to be infinitely recycled back into book pages, unlike wood-based paper whose fibers eventually break down. Additionally, the catalog design is poor and the images often fall over the gutter (perhaps an unconscious despoilment at the level of image reproduction). The installation is similarly over-designed. Covering many of the film and video spaces are sliced-up, banded, or otherwise manipulated strips of Tubolit, a recyclable, petroleum-based insulation material that is, admittedly, much more eco-friendly than many of the other insulation options out there. But again, why not take this a step further and actually reuse a material discarded after being used for its initial purpose? Why not make a point of reusing materials already in the ICP's shop? The introductory wall is similarly covered with material that looks like Design Within Reach Flor tiles made of recycled plastic. Rather than an earthy, grainy feel, today's environmentalism apparently means a "down-cycling" of materials: using masses of energy to recycle one material into a material of lesser quality (such as recycling plastic bottles into carpet).(2) In these ways the exhibition design manages only a halfhearted embrace of eco-principals.

In this sense, the exhibition is a barometer of our times. Everyone acknowledges that our ecology is in crisis, but no one wants to make the hard decisions that might save it. We see an emphasis on the problems rather than the solutions in much mainstream environmental activism, from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006, by Davis Guggenheim) to daily news items documenting global warming, shifting weather patterns, and pollution. It is the same here. Thirty years ago, Callenbach's fictional Ecotopia suggested the possibility of balancing modernity and a sustainable ecology. The ICP's version of Ecotopia continues its founding principle of "concerned photography" but fails to offer a direction forward, either through the inclusion of more activist artwork or through providing a viable and sustainable alternative to current exhibition practices. We have to do better than this. Our survival may depend on it.

SARAH CAYLOR is a doctoral student in Art History at Duke University working as a sustainable building consultant in New York City.

NOTE 1. Ecotopia: The Second International Center of Photography Triennial of Photography and Video (exhibition catalog) (New York: International Center of Photography, 2006), 7. 2. For more on downcycling, upcycling, and sustainable alternatives to common production practices, see William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002) and Paul Hawken, Armory Lovins, and L. Hunter Louins, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (New York: Back Bay Books, 2000).