XL Cover Story: Catch the "Green Wave"

Austin public art is riding the crest of an outdoor, ephemeral art movement

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin | Photos by Deborah Cannon
June 23, 2005

• Outdoor art: Three hits, three misses

On an eighth of an acre outside the Austin Police Department East Substation and Robert Martinez Sr. Forensics Science Center on Springdale Road, a labyrinth of metal-clad planters spirals out into the shape of a fingerprint. Filled with plants native to the blackland prairie of East Austin, the labyrinth changes with the season. Prairie coneflowers bloom in summer. Indian blanket and Mexican hat flowers blaze until fall.

This maze of natural plants is "Elevated Prairie," one of the newest projects commissioned by Austin's Art in Public Places program. Dozens of people showed up for the official opening in May. Kids ran squealing through the labyrinth.

Two weeks ago, "Elevated Prairie" was a high point of a tour offered to more than 280 public arts leaders, administrators and artists from around the county who were in Austin to attend the annual Public Art Network conference.

"Green Wave" was on the tour too. The first major project of Austin Green Art, a nonprofit initiative barely a year old that has set out to jump-start temporary, environmentally themed outdoor art exhibits, "Green Wave" sponsored seven large-scale projects around Austin that launched June 10 and will run through Sept. 10, though some nature-based installations may deteriorate — by intention — before then.

It's outdoors, it's green and it's often temporary.

This is the new public art. And its popularity is growing.

Older than the pyramids

Outside art is, of course, nothing new. One could argue it's been around since the Stone Age. Just two weeks ago, archaeologists announced evidence of a network of gigantic monuments buried beneath modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia that date to about 5,000 B.C. — 2,000 years before Stonehenge and the pyramids in Egypt. Then again, the pyramids are, well, still some of the biggest outdoor artworks we have. And through the millennia and around the world, statuary and monuments have honored religious and historical figures or conquests, battles and other important events.

'Elevated Prairie' is a series of planters forming the shape of a fingerprint outside the Austin Police Department East Substation and Robert Martinez Sr. Forensics Science Center.

Large-scale nature-based art isn't exactly new either. Beginning in the 1970s, artists such as Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer made rock spirals in the Great Salt Lake, installed a neat grid of lightning rods across 400 acres in the high plains of New Mexico or dug out holes 1,500 feet wide in the Nevada desert. The thrust behind the so-called Land Art (or Earth Art) movement was a reaction against the art establishment: Forget the formal confines of the museum and the money-obsessed commercial galleries, these artists proclaimed.

But jump ahead a few decades. Just in the past few years, large-scale public art has grabbed popular headlines as never before. In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a new battery of memorial projects emerged. Selecting an artist for the new memorials has occupied a place in the national discussion akin to pop culture. And some of those public projects fit into the definitions of fresh-air, green art that's drawing attention to the environment.

Andy Goldsworthy deserves some credit for this quick evolution. A few years ago, the much-heralded Academy Award-nominated documentary "Rivers and Tides" popularized the British artist's private ventures into nature to make delicate, temporal art from whatever leaves, rocks or twigs he finds. The Metropolitan Museum in New York hosted a solo Goldsworthy show last year that landed the artist on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. In December, the Austin Museum of Art snagged a traveling exhibit of Goldsworthy's photographs that more than 21,000 people poured in to see. And 1,256 of those visitors contributed photos of their own Goldsworthy-inspired art to a communal photo gallery. Collectors Michael and Jeanne Klein, longtime supporters of the Blanton Museum of Art, invited Goldsworthy to their house to install one of his sculptures. While there, he created a temporal piece from cobwebs on the Kleins' Lake Austin dock. Photos of the project took center stage in the AMOA exhibit.

Finally, we can credit Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude. Sure, the Bulgarian and Moroccan artists have been creating temporary site-specific spectacles for years. And "The Gates," which landed in New York's Central Park for 16 days in February, did not break from their progression of building- and bridge-wrapping, island-circling and valley-flagging. But even if you didn't make it to the Big Apple, it was hard to avoid the barrage of gorgeous media images of saffron fabric brilliantly billowing through the barren winter park.

But prehistoric monoliths, pyramids, noble statues, Land Art and Christo aside, savvy observers say that the type of environmentally conscientious, often temporary art that's now percolating represents a step in an entirely new direction.

Architect and artist Murray Legge, one of the creators of "Elevated Prairie," notes, for instance, that green art projects are now more community- and urban-oriented.

"Snake Culvert" — is it art? A culvert? Both? Neither? Discuss.

"Placing outside art in urban neighborhoods means that it's accessible to everyone, not just the art elite with the means to travel to the ends of the Earth for a sublime experience as one would have with many of the more traditional earthworks," he says. "Today's projects are also more socially motivated, with environmental education and restoration as a goal."

Also, much of the new outside art is deliberately ephemeral, or, like "Elevated Prairie," changes with time. Sure, performance and time-related projects have been a regular part of the visual arts since the 1960s. But in the new millennium, visual art events are increasingly staged in a quick-hit manner. Short-term happenings create buzz and drama. They surprise and provoke.

Place an undulating mound of wood poles in a public park along a busy street — as "Green Wave" artist Ryan Henel did with "Range" along Lamar Boulevard in Pease Park — and for the three months it's there, people will talk about it, wonder what it is and probably consider the park along the busy street in a new manner.

Chris Taylor, architect, professor and director of the Land Arts of the American West program in the University of Texas art department, organized a communal fence-building project as part of "Green Wave." He explains the trend toward temporary public art in a more philosophical mode. "By being temporary, it allows the artist to get something done out there in the world immediately and in a way that might never be otherwise," he says.

Public art comes to Austin

How did Austin end up cresting the newest wave in public art?

For the three months that Ryan Henel's 'Range,' above — a reference to New Mexico's desert mountain ranges — is in Pease Park, people will talk about the undulating wood poles and probably consider the park along Lamar Boulevard in a new way.

For starters, Austin was the first city in Texas to mandate works of art to accompany city construction projects. Started in 1985, the Art in Public Places program, by ordinance, commanded that one percent of construction budgets be used to commission or purchase art for public sites such as the airport, convention center, libraries, parks, police stations and recreation centers — even the hazardous waste collection center. In 2002, the allocation was raised to two percent. While two percent doesn't seem like much, many cities around the nation — Tacoma, Wash., Portland, Ore., and Charlotte, N.C., to name a few — still set aside only one percent. To date, the city has commissioned or purchased more than 100 works of art through AIPP worth more than $2 million.

So for the past 20 years, some kind of art has been knit into every municipal capital improvement in Austin. We're used to public art nowadays; it's part of our landscape.

And oh yes — we like landscapes in Austin. In fact, we love the landscape. From the outspoken Save Our Springs movement to Austin Energy's Green Building Program to the legions who spend their leisure time in the great outdoors or on the great hike-and-bike trail, Austinites embrace all things environmental. Indeed, with ozone alert days on the increase and recent national reports of melting polar ice caps, Austin is more green-minded than ever. No wonder we're also starting to embrace green art.

Also, there's a new generation of Austin artists who are making things happen — usually on their own.

Take sculptor Randy Jewart. He started Austin Green Art about a year ago out of frustration with the bureaucratic public art process — and a desire to bring more folks from Austin's established environmental movement into an ongoing conversation with artists. In just a year Jewart staged successful fundraisers, mounted a few small green art enterprises (an Earth Day celebration, for example) and planned and executed the rather ambitious "Green Wave." He's hoping to launch another temporary exhibit this fall, possibly at the same time as the Austin City Limits Festival.

Actually, what Jewart wants is to get everyone talking, and thinking. "I think permanent public art and temporary public art should be a part of every regional arts scene," he says. "But I think too often the bureaucratic nature of most public art programs limits new ways of thinking about what public art can be. We need to keep talking and thinking about new paradigms."

At Austin Museum of Art — Laguna Gloria, Chris Fennell's vast 'Cedar Moth,' right, is constructed from trees cleared locally from about 70 acres. The Birmingham, Ala., artist emphasizes the burden cedar puts on the water table in some ecosystems.

Clearly people agree with Jewart: On a hot Saturday afternoon during the opening weekend of "Green Wave," about 75 showed up at a community discussion on green art.

A similar type of gonzo — though actually very polished — technique is how Heather Johnson started "Cracks in the Pavement: Gifts in the Urban Landscape," a citywide endeavor that invites artists to leave small objects in quotidian places all over town a year ago. The public picked up clues from a Web site (www.cracksinthepave ment.com) and journeyed out to find them. Johnson received no funding for the project: She just did it. Last summer also saw a version launched as part of the London Biennale. Currently in its second Austin incarnation, "Cracks" will this year launch in cities around the U.S., Australia and Israel, among other locations.

Site-specific, temporary and often environmentally based projects trickle out of the University of Texas' art department at a greater rate too. Graduate student Ledia Carroll last year installed a mound of snow in a hot gallery parking lot where it melted over the course of a few days. As her thesis project this spring, she mounted a metal walkway across a fountain on the UT campus for just a week. For the month of May, Mark Schatz, another UT graduate student, placed 1,000 tiny blue flags around the Umlauf Sculpture Garden that visitors could pluck and place in their own treasured space elsewhere. In December in a field just east of town, undergrad Kate Scherer staged "Backhoe Ballet," which had a pair of the heavy machines pivoting and bouncing in choreographed unison.

Nuts, bolts and being bold

Virginia Fleck's 'Laguna Gyre,' a 'Green Wave' project at Laguna Gloria, is a temporary work created with bright plastic shopping bags. Intended to draw attention to the damage caused by the billions of plastic bags discarded around the world each year, the exhibit will be on display through June 30.

Of course, gonzo impulses aside, events such as "Green Wave" wouldn't be possible if Austin's nascent group of arts philanthropists wasn't getting more adventurous with its giving. Early this spring, the Reese Foundation kicked in $15,000 to help launch "Green Wave." An anonymous Austin arts patron donated $25,000 to support the three "Green Wave" projects on the AMOA-Laguna Gloria grounds. Deborah Green, an art collector and longtime AMOA trustee, permitted Birmingham, Ala.-based Chris Fennell to clear cedar trees from about 70 acres of her West Austin property to use for his mammoth sculpture, "Cedar Moth," at Laguna Gloria.

The City of Austin is starting to catch the wave, too. At the last minute, after nudging from City Council member Raul Alvarez, the city kicked in $20,000 from City Manager Toby Futrell's discretionary fund for "Green Wave." And with new leaders filtering onto the AIPP panel, new ideas are starting to percolate.

Taylor, the UT professor, recently joined the AIPP panel and says he hopes to "up the ante on public art" in Austin.

"I think the community could benefit from greater diversity in public art and the way it is conceived and developed," he says. "I'd like to support more temporary and permanent work that takes intellectual and cultural risks and exceeds everyone's expectations."

Might Austin lead the pack when it comes to public art? Certainly larger cities with larger arts budgets will always do things on a larger scale. But as Austin grows more urban, observers say it also needs to be bolder.

As Taylor puts it: "Great cities surprise."

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jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699