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Mapping a better world: more than 30 years ago, Helen and Newton Harrison decided to devote themselves to environmentally beneficial art. Their latest project, "Peninsula Europe," envisions nothing less than the greening of most of an entire continent - Critical Essay

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison's first solo show in New York in 10 years, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, opened with a circular map of the earth, installed on a wall facing the entrance. Measuring 86 inches in diameter, the Harrisons' global map was centered on a point that appeared to be somewhere in the vicinity of Prague. With Europe taking center stage, distortions resulting from the flat depiction of a curving earth turned Africa into a disproportionately large land mass, while Asia sprawled to the east and North America almost disappeared as it slipped out of sight. In the context of recent events, from the war in Iraq to the debate over America's imperialist intentions and the rift between Europe and the U.S., this opener served as a reminder that maps are not simply neutral topographical charts or location finders. They also function as political tools, shaping our perceptions of center and periphery, foreground and background.

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During the three-and-a-half-decade career of this husband-and-wife team, maps have loomed large. Often beginning with preexisting maps, the artists extensively rework them, redrawing, digitally altering, painting over and reorienting the original images so that familiar landmarks such as cities, borders and roads tend to disappear while little-noticed topographical and land-use patterns come to the rare. Pioneers of "Eco" art, the Harrisons use maps to emphasize one of their ongoing themes--namely, the arbitrary nature of national boundaries and the way they often hinder ecologically responsible thinking.

Since the 1970s, the San Diego-based Harrisons have traveled to coal mines in the former East Germany, the banks of the Sava River in ex-Yugoslavia and the farms of middle England. They have parsed environmental reports, toured watersheds and endangered waterways, conferred with specialists, presented their ideas about environmental renewal in town meetings. Their work involves extended, frequently multi-year discussions with government officials, engineers, ecologists and residents of far flung ecosystems. The visual-art component of their activities consists of maps, charts and explanatory texts that set out ideas as products of a meandering conversation between the artists and other interlocutors. Because the Harrisons see themselves primarily as instigators and problem solvers, they measure their success not by the full realization of their ambitious proposals, but by the insertion of their ideas into larger political and social debates. They are satisfied if only certain elements of a project are taken up in a process of incremental change which they term "conversational drift," and they do not mind if others take credit for their ideas.

As a larger phenomenon--one hesitates to call it a movement--Eco art is at once idealistic and practical, involving a scattered group of artists who draw on environmental science in the interest of land restoration or reclamation. Alan Sonfist, Mierie Ukeles, Mel Chin, Patricia Johanson, Jackie Brookner and Agnes Denes are among its notable figures. An outgrowth of and reaction to the short-lived Land art movement of the late 1960s, Eco art also draws on that era's fascination with what Lucy Lippard called the "dematerialization of art." Another influence was Rosalind Krauss's contemporaneous notion of the "expanded field," which dramatically enlarged the definition of "sculpture" to encompass engagement with landscape and architecture. Artist Robert Smithson was a significant precursor: his theories of entropy and engagement with sites of industrial devastation offered models for thinking about the relation of nature and culture. Equally important in shaping the direction of Eco art has been its "evil twin"--the monumental approach of artists like Michael Heizer and James Turrell, whose bulldozers were viewed by early practitioners of Eco art as evidence of Western culture's arrogant and instrumental attitude toward nature. By contrast, Eco art, with an occasional flirtation with New Age rhetoric, has always sought to heal the earth from the wounds inflicted by civilization.

The Harrisons' embrace of ecology followed an early engagement with Conceptualism. In 1969, as they note in the catalogue for this show, they decided to focus exclusively on art that contributed to "ecosystemic well-being." They retained the apparatus of Conceptualism, including its focus on the analysis of systems, its questioning of received beliefs and a mode of presentation which relied on documentation, photographs, charts. The impact of Conceptualism is particularly evident in the way that the Harrisons' work is infused with a respect for language and metaphor. In presenting their ideas, they tend to talk about perspectival shifts in which background and foreground are reversed, and they frame complex sets of recommendations in simple visual or poetic images. Explanatory texts frequently take the form of dialogues between the artists, with statements and questions preceded by "I said" and "you said." For the Feldman show, this quality was enhanced by recordings of the two reciting their texts in conversational tones.

Mapping a better world: more than 30 years ago, Helen and Newton Harrison decided to devote themselves to environmentally beneficial art. Their latest project, "Peninsula Europe," envisions nothing less than the greening of most of an entire continent - Critical Essay

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Eleanor Heartney

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