The environmental artist and activist Jenny Kendler favors a gentle form of persuasion when introducing ideas around climate change.
“I aim to seduce people through beauty,” Kendler said in a recent phone interview.
In Fort Jay, the 18th-century bunker on Governors Island, Kendler, 43, has installed nine sculptures about endangered marine life and ecosystems with ingredients from the ocean itself — seawater, found whale parts and recordings of humpback song.
The centerpiece is “Other of Pearl,” Kendler’s serial work comprising rainbow-lipped oysters in 12 half shells. Oysters filter our coastal waters and help protect against flooding. Pollution and dredging have destroyed many of their habitats. A Governors Island initiative is hurrying to restore oyster reefs to the New York harbor.
Kendler displays each shell shiny side up in a bell jar. Lean in close, and buried within their iridescent linings you’ll find astonishing, human-made intrusions: minuscule copies, each the size of a bracelet charm, of the Artemision Bronze, the Crouching Venus and other Greek and Roman antiquities.
Kendler 3D-printed the figures in environmentally friendly bio-based nylon. With the help of a pearl farm, and years of trial, she fed her models to the bivalves, letting their calcium gradually engulf the foreign objects like blankets.
By collaborating with these living creatures, Kendler, a sometime member of the environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion Chicago, wants to embrace “the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans,” she said.
Like vanitas works, Kendler’s oysters are vaguely terrifying denials of human supremacy. And yet they are exquisite and covetable objects. I spent a long time looking at them. “I aim to connect with people through beauty and subtlety, and all of the logic that good art can bring,” Kendler explained. “I knew that wasn’t going to happen by slapping people upside the head with didacticism.”
Climate art has been prominent this summer in a number of exhibitions driving home notes of protest. Of the works I saw this season, many have been heavy-handed and full of protest. But there are two artists who approach climate art with more complicated feelings. Kendler is one of two artists whose works carry a multiplicity of visual meanings — thrillingly and even uncomfortably — without a clear lesson. The other is the sculptor Michael Wang, on view downtown until September, who shapes uranium into visually pleasing sculptures that also provoke disgust.
Kendler and Wang appreciate ambiguity even as they allude to crisis.
One recently closed show that saw no ambiguity was the multimedia “Coal + Ice” at the Asia Society. Documentary photos and footage of the coal industry’s horrors — spanning 100 years and over 30 artists and photographers — were projected throughout rooms of back-to-back screens. Blackened miners, barren landscapes, flooded towns, displaced people. No end in sight. It was one of the most effective “immersive” rooms I’ve seen.
But it left nothing to interpret. The show’s finale, a two-chambered room called “New York, 2050: A Possible Future,” by the Ingka Group, overpowered you with a screen of the city ablaze in bright red flame. Speakers played crackling sounds. A scent machine blew artificial smoke. Pass through a door, and the next screen revealed the desired alternative: a computer-generated version of New York overflowing with greenery, wind mills and food stands selling vegan hot dogs and plant balls.
Is this art or instruction? I recalled Andrea Bowers’s Times Square-size neon sign — announcing “Climate Change is Real” — in the front room of the The Campus, the multi-gallery exhibition space upstate that opened this summer in Claverack, N.Y. The neon made an ill-fitting and pandering preface to the many artworks inside, among them canvases by Raymond Saunders and Eamon Ore-Giron that had nothing to do with climate activism.
Michael Wang, by contrast, packs his critiques of climate and the art world into unassuming displays that seem to exploit our attraction to clean and efficient forms. “Yellow Earth” at Bienvenu Steinberg & C. in TriBeCa through Aug. 31 is, at first glance, an exhibition of 16 metal sculptures in the pristine tradition of Donald Judd.
Two aluminum hemispheres the size of basketballs command the show. One is lodged with a yellow glass yolk. The other is topped with an aluminum dome. Sleek and pleasing, they almost ask to be caressed, until you learn they are replicas of the demon core, the plutonium core intended for a potential third bomb to be dropped on Japan during World War II. After Japan’s surrender, the core fatally poisoned two scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Like Kendler, Wang, also 43, insists that his objects remain aesthetic, even as they alarm. “You see something in the form, and maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” Wang, who speaks quickly and studiously, he said by phone. “But if you want, you can go deeper and understand where it comes from.”
Wang’s glass throughout the show is colored with uranium, a method of staining that was common until the Manhattan Project diverted supplies. That surge for uranium polluted the earth and groundwater near the mines where the ore was extracted — a problem recently renewed as trucks from the Pinion Plain mine, one of America’s first new uranium mines, transport ore across Navajo lands in Arizona.
The reveal of materials in “Yellow Earth” — Wang also displays symbolically charged polyhedrons and glass marble runs — gave me a small moral shock. Much like another of Kendler’s works on Governors Island, “Body Burden,” a pure, slightly sparkly snowball made of compacted sea salt, swaddled in pink velvet and dramatically spotlighted in a dark alcove of Fort Jay. It takes a turn when you learn that it is a replica of the eyeball of the blue whale — an endangered species currently filling with microplastics — mixed with the artist’s own tears.
Wang targets the art world a little more pointedly. On the floor of his show lie 14 aluminum tubes containing potentially contaminated earth from sites across New Mexico, the endcaps engraved with their respective coordinates. Earth in a room recalls, of course, the Earth Room, the 140-ton plot of soil that since 1977 has occupied a SoHo walk-up. It’s creator, the conceptual land artist Walter De Maria, gets numerous quotes throughout “Yellow Earth.” Several of these metal works mimic the signature floor-bound brass bars of De Maria’s other installations. The gallery sits across Walker Street from De Maria’s former studio.
“Land art expressed a particular relationship to the earth,” Wang said of his fixation upon De Maria, who died in 2013, “and we’re living in a moment when the full impact of those relationships is better understood. Terms like ‘Anthropocene’ or ‘Capitalocene’ have popular currency for a reason,” Wang explained, using words coined to describe a new geological era in which human activity, for the first time, is the primary shaper of the environment. “So I think artists have to change to figure out how they will reveal that.”
The “Lightning Field” (1977), De Maria’s cluster of steel poles that conduct lightning in the New Mexico desert, overwhelms its viewers by the “aesthetic of unseen energy or violence,” Wang says.
“But I felt there was another level to that,” Wang continued, “that was connecting it to things like environmental danger, or the violence done to Indigenous people through the mining process.” Wang sourced his earth samples along the Grant’s Mineral Belt in New Mexico, near the site of what is considered the largest radioactive spill in American history. Due south is the “Lightning Field,” a proximity that implies both mining and art-making share some spirit of extraction.
Wang is not the only artist with mining on his conscience. At Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo through Aug. 31, Imani Jacqueline Brown is displaying a dissertation’s worth of books, scholarly reports and maps documenting the ravages of Gulf Oil upon her native Louisiana. Brown’s spatially inventive arrangements of this material — such as a chronological wall collage of news articles requiring a footstool to read — are meant to wake us up, perhaps, to the speed of coastal land disappearance. It feels like a pop-up library.
Rather than conveying information — an essentially public service — Wang and Kendler create objects that feel confusing and private. “What does it mean,” Kendler asked me, referring to the small scale of her Fort Jay sculptures, “to create something that’s intimate, that can be seen by one person at a time, so there’s a direct relationship to the body?”
The theme of Los Angeles’s art jamboree PST ART this fall — “Art & Science Collide” — promises numerous shows about the realities of climate change. Knowledge is power. But as environmental art continues to draw our attention to facts, it is to be hoped that artists also embrace the messiness of aesthetic experience, from revulsion to attraction.
That mess, it seems to me, captures something of the conflict between our private selves and our collective responsibilities. And there lies action. “I don’t think I can replicate the beauty of the natural world,” Kendler put it, “but I can remind people what it feels like to be connected and to belong.”
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