At the Clark Art Institute, nature and culture under pressure

Apr 25, 2024

WILLIAMSTOWN – A huge, ragged swath of nubbly gray-brown sags on the wall at the Clark Art Institute, like an enormous patch of skin flayed from an alien beast. That’s not all it does. Come close and you’ll hear the soft whine of a continuous exhale as it slowly, torturously, shrinks before your eyes.

Called “Pulmon #2,” the Spanish word for “lung” the 2023 piece by the artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, is a latex casting of the trunk of a ficus tree in downtown LA near where he grew up. A few times a day, gallery attendants inflate it and leave it to slowly flatten. What it tends to suggest — a long, slow last breath — gives the unmistakable sense of being a witness to death.

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That’s apt. In “Humane Ecology: Eight Positions,” a new exhibition at the Clark, even the lushest piece has an undertone of doom. Pallavi Sen’s “Experimental Greens: Trellis Composition,” a thriving vegetable garden on the institute’s green roof, is producing this wet, hot summer a bounty that includes popular South-Asian vegetables; the gesture, at least in part, confirms that the Berkshires’ climate has warmed enough to be hospitable to their growth.

The food, harvested weekly, is delivered to local food banks, which is surely the most – if not only – humane thing happening here. The show was planned a few years ago, but the summer of 2023 – so far the hottest on record – provides a serendipitously apocalyptic backdrop for an exhibition all but devoid of uplift, for the planet or anything else.

So what about that title, then? At its heart, “Humane Ecology” aspires to better, and an urge to reset. Its concerns are not just environmental, but social, exploring traumas to the planet and its diverse inhabitants. Robert Wiesenberger, the Clark’s curator of contemporary projects, includes eight artists, a sparse cohort for so ambitious a scheme. As a conversation-starter, though, “Humane Ecology” is rich with provocation and deep thought.

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Aparicio’s giant, rubbery lung is a good place to start. The ficus was introduced to Los Angeles in the 1950s as a fast-growing solution cultivated to throw shade in a hurry. The artist plays a sharp coincidence: A decade earlier, the federal government invited a flood of Latin American “guest” workers to address labor shortages, and California’s burgeoning agricultural industries were a main beneficiary.

As hoped, the ficus grew huge, but its roots destroyed sidewalks and roads, leading many to be felled; the workers rooted themselves too, though unofficially, and were deported in large number as anti-immigrant sentiment grew. Aparicio’s pressings of the tree feel like part cultural anthropology, part seance, siphoning what memory remains in their rough, graffiti-strewn trunks. That this one breathes – or really, doesn’t – is heavy with implications of erasure, both of nature and culture at once.

Of course, the shortsighted manipulations of both the natural world and of people are the common currency of the colonial era. It’s no coincidence all the artists here live and work in North America, its proverbial scorched earth. Enslavement is colonialism’s original sin, forced migration and labor producing wealth and trauma in vast and terrifying measure; the displacement and death of untold millions of Indigenous people, pushed aside to claim land and resources to build anew, runs right alongside it.

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Christine Howard Sandoval, an enrolled member of the Chalon Nation in Bakersfield, Calif., weighs in heavily with a suite of works rife with such echoes, the familiar made mournful and strange. Bolts of her handmade paper hang on one wall; on the left, charred matte black, and on the right, a haphazard grid. They are hauntingly gorgeous, born of flame; the grid, a piece titled “Ignition Pattern 1: Density,” 2023, is the product of carefully managed burning, as though drawing with fire.

The art nerd – I’m here for you – might see Modernism writ large: Kazimir Malevich’s spectral black square, Agnes Martin’s rigidly fussy grids. Modernism is a useful touchstone, in art or otherwise; its guiding ethos to wipe away history and start fresh hews closely to colonialism itself. But for Sandoval, the sparse motifs aren’t mere subversion. Her work is an embrace of Indigenous practices like controlled burns to temper natural wildfire; in this smoke-smothered summer, with wildfire haze veiling skies from Los Angeles to Boston, the utility of Indigenous knowledge is both obvious, and obviously long-ignored. “Ignition Pattern 1: Density” also limns the contours of a massive hydroelectric dam imposed on the artist’s ancestral territory, an equal affront to the land and the people whose millennia of stewardship made them best equipped to tend it.

You might be wondering where the “humane” part comes in. Carolina Caycedo whose work occupies a big window-ringed gallery in another building, comes closest; she conveys stories of female environmental activists whose devotion to their causes often put them at deep personal risk. Relying on one-to-one communion with her subjects, her work is a model of engagement.

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There’s no moving forward without looking back. Contemporary economies have been built on extractable resources and on human lives seen as such, whether enslaved labor or the unenumerated toil of generations of women that metrics like GDP leave out. “Humane Ecology” explores the toll on planet and people both.

Two artists look past this ruined earthly plane. Cosmic departure has been a salvation explored by sources as disparate as speculative sci-fi; contemporary cosmologies like Afrofuturism, which imagined liberty beyond the stars; actual science; and too many cults to count. “Fermi Paradox III,” 2019, a gorgeous array of dangling conches, seasponges, and nautilus shells by Juan Antonio Olivares, aspires to liftoff; its title refers to the physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous question: if extraterrestrial life is likely, why have we not discovered it? Within its seashell constellation, Olivares has installed tiny speakers piping big thinkers like Stephen Hawking, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Nina Simone – sounds and ideas we’d take with us, if we had to go. And we might.

The exhibition’s crescendo comes with “Songs for Dying,” 2021, a luxuriously mournful 30-minute video by Korakrit Arunanondchai. Set in Thailand and South Korea, it juxtaposes cruelty and resistance — the Jeju Island massacre; contemporary protest — against the intimate process of burial and grieving. The film sets the death of the artist’s grandfather against the chaos of human experience, and finally, its inconsequence (“everything that is you,” a voice intones, “will be lost to the world.”)

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But the film bursts with extravagant vitality – surges of fish shimmering through bright bands of sunlight, a verdant coastline – and the belief, in Buddhist discipline, that all life flows along a cosmic slipstream, in and out of conscious being, forever (I can’t be sure, but I believe the artist’s grandfather returned as a giant sea turtle). Its themes transcend base impulses of cruelty and despoilment with the belief that there’s always another chance: Death, renewal, rebirth – the cycle restarts, again and again. Now there’s a humane thought. Maybe we’ll get it right one of these times. Though time, clearly, is running out.

HUMANE ECOLOGY: EIGHT PROPOSITIONS

Through Oct. 29. Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown. (413) 458 2303, theclark.edu.

Murray Whyte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.