Women and the Land

Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects, by Robert Hobbs, Cambridge and London, MIT Press, 2005; 423 pages, $50.

Mary Miss, texts by Mary Miss, essays by Daniel M. Abramson, Joseph Giovannini, Eleanor Heartney and Sandro Marpillero, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2004; 252 pages, $85.

Art and Survival: Patricia Johanson's Environmental Projects, by Caffyn Kelley, introduction by Lucy R. Lippard, Salt Spring Island, BC, Canada, Islands Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2005; 180 pages, $24.95.

You probably know the work of sculptor Alice Aycock, whose early transient constructions in rural sites evolved into large-scale metal vortices now prevalent in international sculpture collections; she regularly exhibits in galleries and museums. And you may well have appreciated the view across the Hudson in Lower Manhattan from South Cove (1987) designed by Mary Miss, who works with architects on public art projects that enhance our attention to space and nature, yet whose gallery exhibitions--recently of collaged black-and-white photographs of landscapes and architecture--are infrequent. But it is doubtful, unless you are well versed in women artists or ecological art, that you have heard of Patricia Johanson, one of the foremost contemporary artists working, often for international agencies, in the realm of direct restoration of natural environments. Johanson's Web site lists her last exhibition as 1997, in Berlin.

Aycock, Miss and Johanson all came on the scene in the early 1970s, when feminist consciousness was emerging in the art world. Following the all-male earthworks movement, they were among the women artists (Agnes Denes, Nancy Holt and Michelle Stuart are others) who began to build temporary structures in undeveloped or natural environments. Lately, substantial monographs surveying decades of all three artists' works have appeared. As much as the texts themselves, the books' differing formats reveal much about how contemporary art history is written.

These publications are distinct both in the author-subject relationships generating them and in their packaging as books. The artists all made their names with nonsalable, extra-gallery work, yet the volumes' varying designs, hefts and production values indicate just how crucial commercial exposure is to an artist's renown. Aycock's presence in gallery shows, museums and sculpture collections has garnered her the kind of trophy book that every well-recognized mid-career artist deserves: a thorough analysis of her work, contextualized both intellectually and biographically by a respected scholar who is clearly attuned to this art and adds some interpretive nuances of his own. The material is presented in a carefully designed tome published by the major university press attending to new conceptual art forms. Miss, meanwhile, gets a big honorific compendium of descriptive essays and black-and-white photographs in a package that looks conventionally posh but is marred by some careless editing. And Johanson is represented by a moderate-size volume published by an idealistic nonprofit agency. The book includes drawings and documentary photographs that are almost all in full color and a text of loving advocacy.

Caffyn Kelley's Art and Survival: Patricia Johanson's Environmental Projects has been published only in soft cover, and with its roughly 8-by-9-inch size, it can be held easily in one's hands or lap for perusal. This increases the reader's ability to absorb the detailed descriptions of projects and to closely scrutinize the illustrations, many of them intricate drawings. One almost wants to call these glowing pictures "illuminations," because the tenor here is akin to spiritualized reverence--the artist's for nature and the writer's for her subject.

This critical respect is merited, given Johanson's radical innovations in applying an esthetic sensitivity to bio-remediation and the potential of art to "heal the earth." In 1978, in response to her exhibition "Plant Drawings for Projects" at Rosa

Esman Gallery in New York, Johanson was invited to Dallas to transform the biologically dead Fair Park Lagoon into a sculptural recreation area. Working with marine biologist Richard Fullington, head of collections and research at the adjacent Dallas Museum of Natural History, she drained and replenished the once slimy pond and, initialing a practice that became typical of her work, used the twisting shapes of newly planted vegetation for the design of paths, bridges and perches that project just over the water, encouraging an intimate connection with aquatic life. The lagoon, and that part of the city, revived. Since then major projects have been commissioned by governmental agencies in Brazil, Kenya, South Korea and the U.S.

Kelley's approbation undoubtedly also derives in part from an identification with Johanson. An environmental artist herself, Kelley is on the board of the publisher, the Islands Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, which (according to its Web site) "aims to link art and survival through interdisciplinary approaches and to foster creative solutions to environmental and social problems." The Canadian nonprofit organization deserves gratitude for producing a beautifully designed and extensively illustrated book. Art and Survival fills a need for information on Johanson's noncommercial model of being--she says "artists who want to make a difference should keep their goals high and their personal needs at a minimum." That remark suggests an archaic artistic persona worthy of more than just admiring reportage.