Art, Environment, Action!

In the fall of 2012, I organized Art, Environment, Action! (AEA!), a creative teaching laboratory and environmental “artshop,” at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Over the course of its run, artists, designers, architects, dancers, chefs, and scientists working at the intersections of art, pedagogy, and ecology created participatory frameworks to activate the gallery. The exclamatory call to action stemmed from the proposition that the crises of our planet are better served by actions born of the ingenuity still available in our hands and minds than by actions born of fear or virtue. It also harked back to the time in all our lives when an entire universe could be conjured into being by a few props and a lot of imagination. This conjuring wand lives on in theater, film, and literature, and it is that directorial abracadabra—lights, camera, action!—that inspired the title and design of AEA!

When asked to create an environment that felt like a cross between a playroom and a sound stage—a “toybox” of possibilities—exhibition designer Manuel Miranda rose to the challenge. He designed a set of boxes, painted in brilliant hues, to create a vivid focal point in the center of the gallery. Each box housed the resources for workshops—sawhorses, tabletops, corkboards, art supplies, brown paper, and even a small refrigerator—while also providing a surface for a sit-down exchange. Part bleacher, part prop shop, “artshoppers” could use these materials to create their own sets and stages.

I invited artists to pursue issues of ongoing concern to them, suggesting that the format and duration of the activity were open for discussion, and asking only that something might be left behind in the gallery to seed the next conversation. In addition to those whose reflections are represented in the pages that follow—The Cotard Syndicate (Stefani Bardin, Toby Heys, and Siddharth Ramakrishnan), Beehive Design Collective, ecoarttech, Futurefarmers, OPENrestaurant, Jill Sigman—were Michael Mandiberg, Jennifer Monson and Kate Cahill, Beverly Naidus, Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS), Red76, Stephanie Rothenberg, Tattfoo Tan, Trade School, and the late Beatriz da Costa.

Propositions and ideas flooded in: Can we cook in the gallery? Can we be in residence for two weeks to research, teach, and build? Can we start with a walk at dawn? Can we hold a workshop at an off-site secret location to which participants are transported by boat? Can you order frozen synsepalum dulcificum for our workshop on (mis)perception? Can you collect enough plastic recyclables to build a hut? The fifteen artists/collectives filled almost every day of the fall calendar, including some weekends, with interactive exercises: walks; talks and discussions; building and mapping; workshops; cooking and dinners; barter for instruction, field trips to seed banks, libraries, old growth forests in Upper Manhattan, streets in the Bronx, diners in Greenpoint, factories and supermarkets in Brooklyn; and other experiences. Into the gallery came a large helium balloon as the hoist for DIY-aerial imaging, along with a tent, complete with twitter feed and interactive logs, to make a basecamp for hikes in the urban wilderness, and more temporarily but still educationally, a dog and a pair of chickens.

The topics and modes of engagement drew from the various artistic practices. They ranged from graphics and illustration, mobile apps and augmented reality, Wikipedia entries, storytelling, radio, dance, grassroots mapping and walking, cooking, anticancer gardening and farming to address a spectrum of issues from energy, urban renewal, ethnobotany and human ecologies to data visualization, digital eco-data, and sensory perception to recycling, shelter, reclaiming definitions of space and territory, to death and survival. There were no viewers or spectators; visitors participated by signing up for free artshops.

If the so-called educational turn in the arts has encouraged more exploration of process and conversations in galleries and museums, the model is still often the schoolroom. How might we use galleries as spaces with which to think, as performative sites for transformation, rather than as venues for display? AEA! was an attempt to catalyze a teaching and learning environment that was...