Thinking with the Harrisons.

Douglas, Anne; Fremantle, Chris

Abstract

This book asks a fundamental question around the place of the arts in the global environmental crises. In arguing that the arts have an important role, we are also suggesting that the arts need to be rethought, reimagined and reconfigured through new forms of practice that generate new qualities of relation between humans and the more than human, and in our imagining of the living world (Ghosh 2016, Latour 2020). The book focuses on the practice of Helen Mayer Harrison (1929-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022), known as "the Harrisons", because their work is widely recognised as pioneering in bringing together art and ecology. It has been included in significant group exhibitions of environmental art (e.g. Fragile Ecologies 1992; Ecovention 2002; Ground Works 2005; Weather Report 2007; Radical Nature 2009; Ecovention Europe 2017; Taipei Biennale Post-Nature 2019). We draw on extensive interviews and discussion with Newton Harrison, undertaken predominantly over the past three years, as well as working with both Helen and Newton on projects over more than 15 years. Our overarching approach to "thinking with" draws on philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, and her approach to thinking with the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who pioneered ways of questioning that are now recognised as foundational to ecology. Stengers draws on Whitehead's work because she is in search of a different science, a slow science, that critiques the current co-option of the sciences into serving capitalism/neoliberalism without taking into account environmental impacts. This resonates with the Harrisons' search - through over fifty years of experimentation - for a different way to be artists; one that, throughout their highly successful careers, has challenged the institution of art to take on 'non-art' questions. They had been intensely aware since the 1960s of the escalating environmental crises. In bringing together art and ecology, their practice frames the problem of what it now means to re-build a world in common. Of particular interest to us as authors and artist-researchers is the process, or poetics, the Harrisons evolved throughout their lives. They started out with a series of quasi-scientific experiments known as The Survival Pieces (1971-74, Chapter 1). The significance of these works is the way they reveal contradictions that raise new questions. These questions make visible hidden assumptions and became generative of new work. In this way the Harrisons developed the situated practice for which they are pre-eminently known, going on to create works that focus on watersheds and bioregions. Their seminal work, The Lagoon Cycle (1975-85, Chapter 2) marks a step change, in which their study of a particular life form, the crab Scylla Serrata, in its habitat Sri Lanka, provokes an experiment in the potential for industrial scale farming, one that exposes them to real life ecological problems in particular places along with the problematic nature of industrialised thinking. They recognise that life is fundamentally improvisatory and explore this as a counterpoint to industrial thinking, imagining the energy within living systems. Improvisation in everyday life and as a particular form of arts practice (Chapter 3) is foundational to the Harrisons' approach; a dynamic that connects the human and more than human within a shared state of being. Improvisation and the ecosystemic emerge as profoundly interrelated in their thinking. Chapter 4 traces how an understanding of the aesthetics within systems - first mooted by Jack Burnham - draws attention to their self-generating, creative potential, a potential that the Harrisons consciously seek to harness and affect through proposing changes to guiding metaphors (e.g. development is replaced by settlement) and by policy proposals for ecological security systems in parallel with social security systems. This in turn raises political questions of how to imagine the world from multiple perspectives, not just within humankind but in human relations with their environments (Chapter 5). The political arises out of their inquiry into different experiences of living and learning to survive. It is always in the context of an understanding of the dynamics of the web of life, which they acknowledge to be subject to limits. They refer to these with irony as 'dictates of the environment', imagining a quality of relationship within living systems as always in the making, simultaneously subject to constraints and open to creativity. We draw on Hannah Arendt and her positioning of the political as an aesthetic concern where individuals are free to judge for themselves and are critical to forming a world in common through encountering a plurality (or diversity) of experiences and perspectives, enlarging their limitations through imagination. Arendt's insights into the political throw into sharp relief the Harrisons' incorporation of multiple voices articulating contradictory positions. Discourse affords the making of meaning in common working with contradictions and becomes the form of the work. Chapter 6 returns to the question of how the current environmental crises provoke the arts and their need to be rethought, reimagined and reconfigured through new forms of practice that generate new qualities of relation between humans and more than humans (Ghosh 2016, Latour 2020). We explore this question further by tracing influence in two directions that have shaped the Harrisons' thought, e.g. Giotto in relation to The Lagoon Cycle, prompting them to reflect critically on the absence of shared guiding narratives in the present as a species. We explore the Harrisons' influence on current artists through interviews that mine different aspects of their approach in the work of: Lauren Bon, founder-director of Metabolic Studio in Los Angeles; Tim Collins and Reiko Goto-Collins, ecology artists practising in Scotland; Cathy Fitzgerald in Ireland, founder of Haumea and The Hollywood Forest Story in Ireland; and Brandon Ballangée, artist and environmental activist, Florida USA. The Harrisons' poetics situate art between the art institution and lived experience, challenging both to face the pressures of environmental change. They frame questions, undertake experimentation that exposes rather than conceals the issues, and create vivid artworks that construct a process of learning that draws us into the discourse as active citizens. The questioning of their practice and knowledge domains offers us the imaginative potential to meet the future with hope.

Citation

DOUGLAS, A. and FREMANTLE, C. [2024]. Thinking with the Harrisons. Leuven: Leuven University Press. (Forthcoming)

• Book Type: Monograph
• Acceptance Date: Sep 21, 2023
• Deposit Date: Oct 10, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 13, 2023
• Publisher: Leuven University Press
• Keywords: Ecological art; Art and the environment; Art activism; Environmental activism
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/2107174
• Additional Information: The file for this record consists of a representative chapter from the author's submitted manuscript.