harrisons 249

Helen and Newton Harrison

interviewed by Meredith Drum, March 13, 2010
with footage from their talk at the Kala Institute, January 30, 2010
video following text

The collaborative team of Helen and Newton Harrison have been making innovative ecologically focused work for forty years. Pioneers of the eco-art movement, their work involves extended, often multi-year discussions with biologists, ecologists, engineers, urban planners and other artists with the intention of uncovering ideas and solutions that support biodiversity and community development. The visual art component takes form as maps, charts and explanatory texts setting out their ambitious proposals. And all of this is part of a vision of investigation and problem solving they term “conversational drift”, or a process of incremental change in which some of their ideas may be incorporated into the larger political and social debates about ecological planning.

Though the work by the Harrisons is unique and impossible to classify, it is possible to trace the roots of Eco Art in general to the 1960’s land art movement and with what Lucy Lippard called the “dematerialization of art.” And there was also the shaping power of what Rosalind Krauss titled “the expanded field” which expanded the idea of sculpture to include landscape and architecture. Specifically, the Harrisons work can be seen as engaging the devices of Conceptualism, regarding their analysis of systems, questioning of received beliefs and use of documentation, maps and charts. Moreover Conceptualism is evident in the importance of language and metaphor in their work as well as their ability to condense complicated information and plans into simple images and terse poems.(1)

I have been a fan of the work of the Harrisons for a number of years. In fact, I selected to attend DANM in part as I was impressed by the possibility that the Harrisons would be involved in the program. And I am pleased to know that they will be leading a Collaborative Research group with the incoming cohort. I have to admit that I am still digesting what I have begun to learn from them, during my two conversations with them at their house as well as two trips to Berkeley to hear them speak in connection with their show at the Kala Art Institute. I am very grateful to them as I feel that my study of their work will save me from falling into a number of pits regarding my own creative production regarding ecological issues.

Yet one thing that has become clear to me regarding their work, is the importance of the force of empathy in any work regarding social and environmental change. As Newton said, empathy needs to bubble through all political and social systems in order to counter the culture of extraction.

(1) Regarding this art historical perspective on the Harrisons I am in debt to an article about them by Eleanor Heartney titled "Mapping a Better World" in Art in America, October 2003

6 min excerpt from a longer piece: