Edward Burtynsky. Oxford Tire Pile #2, Westley, California, 1999; chromogenic color print; 40 x 50 in. Courtesy of Tom Thomsen Art Gallery, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada.

In order to sustain a high pitch of awareness, the vast majority of the works present a more literal understanding of environmental exploitation and damage, with photography and styles of realism forming the core of this exhibition; it is a reminder of the crucial role documentary processes have in bearing witness to the devastating consequences of ecological destruction. Edward Burtynsky’s photographic oeuvre of landscapes devastated by the industrial waste of capitalism is represented most powerfully by Oxford Tire Pile #2, Westley, California (1999)—an ominous example of toxic waste and scorched earth hidden in plain sight in small towns across the United States. The claustrophobic pilings deconstruct the language of minimalism and its foundation in repetition into disturbing visual reminders of the expanse and physical reality of human waste. And yet the dramatic scale and overwhelming visual richness of the image still captures something of the terrifying sublime at work in nature and industry. The image is lyrical and seductive despite its proximity to more disturbing works that proclaim the ruinous effects and fatal consequences of human progress. Burtynsky constructs a world in which an uncountable field of discarded tires might have a rightful place in the world, aestheticized and purposeful, asking us as viewers to think hard about the role of art in addressing societal problems. Does aesthetic mediation null the painful truths and harsh realities of environmental issues, and if so, does this speak to art’s powerlessness or the deflation of our ability to be politicized through images?

Guy Harvey. Gulf Life-Brown Pelican (Gulf Oil Spill), 2010; watercolors; 31.625 x 28.625 in. Courtesy of Guy Harvey.

To assemble this exhibition in Louisiana—a southeastern state that lives with the most extreme effects of rising sea levels, rapid coastal degeneration, decreased water availability, extreme heat events and their attendant crop failures, and natural disasters—is a bold, even provocative gesture as the state continues to depend economically and culturally on the oil and gas industries. A stream of recent lawsuits and the announcement by BP Oil this week of their agreement to pay a record environmental fine of $18.7 billion—settling legal actions brought on by the fatal 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which sent 4.2 million barrels of oil into the ocean over 87 days—signal the complex reality of demanding corporate responsibility for ecosystem damage. Judge Carl Barbier, whose oversight of the complicated legal case between BP, the United States government, and several Gulf states, ruled that BP had been “grossly negligent” in its handling of the well, and has demanded $7.1 billion in fines for natural-resource damages and $5.5 billion for Clean Water Act violations.[3] In a statement to the press, BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg stated that “with this agreement we provide a path for closure for BP and the Gulf.” Yet for many Gulf residents, business owners, fishers, and environmentalists, the horrific effects of the spill are far from over as it becomes increasingly evident that marine life and indigenous animal populations have suffered irrevocably in the aftermath of the event.[4] Guy Harvey’s paintings point directly to the massacres of wildlife native to the Gulf coast region, with inky black drips of paint puncturing the finely detailed figures of the animals like bullet holes;, while Kent Ullberg’s memorials in bronze are haunting meditations on the loss of crucial ecological relationships in the aftermath of oil spills past.

As permits continue to be approved for off- and on-shore fracking wells in south Louisiana and the Gulf despite the vocal concerns of community leaders and political authorities, the timing and thematic expanse of this exhibition could not be more relevant to discourses and challenges outside the realm of contemporary art.[5] Calculating the human, animal, and communal costs of climate change, Environmental Impact participates in a new dialogue located within human (and indigenous) rights struggles, Earth law, and political ecology in order to describe a world where aesthetic beauty is no longer the defining feature of representations of our natural world.

Environmental Impact is on view at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum at the University of Louisiana–Lafayette through August 8, 2015.

[1] For a compelling account of the history of American landscape painting and its effect on environmental rhetoric today, see Rachel Ziady DeLue’s book George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[2] Many thanks must go to Dr. David J. Wagner for his kindness in answering all my questions and concerns during the writing of this article.

[3] See Dominic Rushe’s article “BP Set to Pay Largest Environmental Fine in U.S. History for Gulf Oil Spill,” The Guardian, July 2, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/02/bp-will-pay-largest-environmental-fine-in-us-history-for-gulf-oil-spill

[4] Ibid., Rushe.

[5] See Samantha Page’s article “Exploratory Drilling Approved for Louisiana Wetlands,” ThinkProgress, on June 12, 2015. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/06/12/3667630/louisiana-wetlands-fracking/

Any conversation among artists these days is bound to turn to the question of gentrification—the process of urban renewal by private developers that ultimately displaces poor residents in favor of the upwardly mobile. Modernism in art has always accompanied displacement of poor citizens from city centers, from the time of the Impressionists when Georges-Eugène Haussmann refashioned Paris, to the remaking of Manhattan as a banker’s playground under committed arts philanthropist Michael Bloomberg. As the present-day wealth gap spreads and assets are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest Americans, artists and activists find themselves on the front lines of a battle to preserve the characteristics of ethnic and bohemian neighborhoods nationwide from the homogenizing forces of corporate culture.

Activists engaged in political struggles defined along economic, racial, and sociological lines have an established part to play in defending against this onslaught, and a clear justification for their involvement in protest actions and legal challenges. Artists, on the other hand, have a more ambivalent relationship to these trends. They are often implicated as both the perpetrators and the victims of gentrification. Many believe that their role is not to speak out about social issues, but to communicate self-expression. They are experts in neither legal nor civic arenas. Given these truths, how and why should artists engage in the fight to save urban communities from eviction and displacement?

Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. (Jenifer Wofford, Reanne Estrada, Eliza Barrios). Manananggoogle, 2013. Multimedia installation including website and photographs. Commissioned by the San Jose Museum of Art with support from The James Irvine Foundation and MetLife Foundation.

To understand why artists are compelled to participate in these struggles, first consider how gentrification occurs. An area subject to prolonged neglect is often the only affordable location for recent immigrants, the working poor, and other marginalized groups to reside. Their presence fosters further civic neglect, as these are groups with minimal political clout who remain invisible to many politicians and business leaders. Many artists of note have emerged from within these ostracized communities, informed by their vernacular traditions, and inspired to create positive images and messages to counter the symptoms of neglect. In recent history, these have included founders of graffiti art, mural art, performance art, and interventionist art movements that have transformed mainstream art discourse. Other artists move into these areas because they too have limited means, and find not only cheap rents but a sense of safety in community to guard against the hardships of urban poverty. Eventually, the energizing force of artistic creation helps to revive these atrophied regions despite the lack of civic or capital investment, at which point developers take notice and begin to snatch up the remaining inexpensive or abandoned properties. Those newly renovated properties are marketed to the professional class with the vibrant local culture as a major selling point. As upscale residents move in, the creators whose works helped create interest in these areas often find themselves priced out along with their less affluent neighbors.

Despite their involvement in all aspects of this process, artists are generally on the side of the displaced in the gentrification debate. This has been the case in San Francisco, where the long-standing creative denizens of the Mission District are particularly vocal opponents of urban development in its current form. Recently the impending eviction of artists René Yañez and Yolanda Lopez has made headlines, prompting artists around the Bay Area to rally for these two doyens of the Chicano Movement. In an open letter to Yañez distributed via social media networks, internationally-recognized performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña used his considerable influence to draw broader attention to the plight of Latino residents in the Mission and around San Francisco who have of late been subjected to unprecedented numbers of Ellis Act evictions. Outrage is high among the city’s established and visible creators, as articulated by iconic Bay Area author Rebecca Solnit. Nonetheless, the rhetoric coming from developers is that the incoming affluent types are in fact themselves “creative” workers who will contribute to, rather than detract from, the vitality of these remade neighborhoods. The redefinition of “creativity” along corporate lines contributes to the vast cultural divide between the Bay Area’s haves and have-nots.

Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. (Jenifer Wofford, Reanne Estrada, Eliza Barrios). Manananggoogle, 2013. Multimedia installation including website and photographs. Commissioned by the San Jose Museum of Art with support from The James Irvine Foundation and MetLife Foundation.

As the booming tech industry displaces scores of longtime residents, it is tempting to direct ire at the corporations who attract and generate all of this new money. Filipina performance art collective Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. have satirized the winner-take-all mentality of Silicon Valley with Manananggoogle, a work commissioned by the San Jose Museum of Art in which the three portray high-powered female executives in the mode of Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer. “J. Baby Wofford,” “E. Neneng Barrios,” and “R. Immaculata Estrada” performed Divide//Conquer: The Manananggoogle Onboarding Experience as part of The Long Conversation, an exhibition commemorating long-standing alternative art space Southern Exposure’s impending 39^th anniversary. This occasion is made more monumental by the truth of how few spaces founded in that germinating moment of the 1970s are still around and fiscally sustainable. Incorporating found video, text, live performance, and social intervention, M.O.B. applies a mode of cannibalistic appropriation derived from Latin American Modernist precedents to a contemporary milieu in which the primitive and the futuristic are both intertwined and interchangeable.

M.O.B.’s characters are funhouse distortions who give the lie to common multinational rhetoric in which all of the world’s problems are anticipated to be solved by the Westernization and capitalization of women and people of color. The slogan, “Divide Conquer,” applies equally to the neo-colonial aspirations of American tech multinationals as to the manananggal herself, a Filipino folk demon that splits her top half from her human bottom to manifest as a Harpy-like vampire. Wofford, Barrios, and Estrada comically marry the mythos of the manananggal with the team-building management rhetoric of corporate America to demonstrate that it is the system and not the participants who bears the blame for widespread rapacity. That point was driven home at the event hosted by Global Fund for Women, in which audience members were divided by gender. Women were humorously encouraged to take up space and express power while men were mock-trained to be servile and obsequious in a reversal of the traditional gender hierarchy. Despite everyone being in on the joke, it was notable how the tone of the crowd shifted from one of community-art collegiality toward raw competition with just a little encouragement. The result fell somewhere between the Dunder Mifflin Office Olympics and a low-stakes Stanford Prison Experiment. The parody was maintained through hilarious commentary from Wofford (the Bay Area’s Pinay Lucille Ball), Estrada (playing a CEO-cum-dominatrix), and Barrios (in a fright wig nearly as scary as the manananggal). Jokes aside, the point was well-made that neo-colonialism is as much in evidence in the transformation of our own communities as in the actions of multinationals abroad.

Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. (Jenifer Wofford, Reanne Estrada, Eliza Barrios). Manananggoogle, 2013. Multimedia installation including website and photographs. Commissioned by the San Jose Museum of Art with support from The James Irvine Foundation and MetLife Foundation.

Despite such clear objections from artists to the ongoing development of our cities at any cost, it is by no means certain that contemporary art as a culture industry is opposed to gentrification. Property development is the order of the day for any museum wishing to establish itself as worthy of national and international attention. Many boards of art institutions are manned by developers and captains of industry, while affluent and homogenous urban populations are more likely to share the nineteenth-century world views of many high-profile curators (as I have addressed in this space before). Meanwhile, the alternative and community-driven spaces that indigenous and immigrant communities (as well as socially marginalized groups) have historically created to support themselves financially and as proponents of free expression are shuttering at an alarming rate. Gentrification affects not only individuals and families, but cultural institutions as well. Particularly vulnerable are those that came about in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to NEA funding that is no longer available, to serve populations which have since been dispersed. The great tragedy of gentrification which its proponents appear not to recognize is that groups that are displaced can never be reunited in another, more affordable location. Instead, the critical mass that drove cultural innovation and fostered community is lost permanently, and with it, the collective energy that drives our most essential artistic developments.

The Long Conversation is on view at Southern Exposure through October 26, 2013.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Maysey Craddock. "Rupture (ashes and light)." 2011. Gouache and thread on found paper. 38.5 x 51.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Maysey Craddock’s paintings are, without a doubt, immediately engaging.  Her bright, playful use of color in tandem with the distinctive textural quality of the paper she works with catches the eye straightaway. But one cannot genuinely understand the significance of Craddock’s new paintings without considering her surroundings in Memphis.

Located in an old medicine factory in downtown Memphis, Craddock’s studio is situated amidst empty warehouses, vacant parking lots and crumbling, desolate sidewalks. Her paintings nod to the industrial decline of this town, a subject that reflects her continued interest in the ever-evolving use of landscape and the traces of experience that remain in the absence of use. She explains, “[f]or 15 years, my work has referenced objects and spaces that continue their slow transformation after someone turns away…the crumbling structure with flowering vines pushing through, the drape and sway of a fence that separates nothing from nothingness, the silhouette of disuse.”

Maysey Craddock. "Sanctuary." 2011. Gouache and thread on found paper. 38 x 50 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Craddock photographs the decaying industrial landscape of Memphis and uses the resulting images as points of departure for these stunning, delicate paintings. Through meticulous tracing, drawing and layering of gouche, she transforms stark environments into vibrant abstractions that quietly conjure notions of collapse and detritus. She furthers this notion of the forgotten and discarded by using found paper as canvas, namely recycled grocery bags. Craddock diligently sews together these brown paper bags with silk thread, recontextualizing this quintessentially disposable material to highlight tenuous divide between the reclaimed and abandoned in these images.

Maysey Craddock. "Let Me Reword That." 2005. Typewriter, enamel, gouache, wood. 26 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

I was also excited by some of Craddock’s sculptural works from the mid-2000s that present whimsically deconstructed typewriters, reduced and contorted so as to suggest, but also resist evidence of their typical appearance and function. In Let Me Reword That (2005), painted parts of a typewriter are suspended precariously in space, casting abstract, almost floral-like shadows across adjacent walls. Like the collapsing buildings she alludes to in her paintings, these sculptures too suggest memories of the obsolete through their abstraction.

A number of these new paintings are currently on view in Maysey Craddock: Other Spaces at the Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York through October 15^th.