Acknowledging Exceptionality

"As glass office and condominium towers have proliferated in the last decade, so, too, have calls to make them less deadly to birds. The San Francisco Planning Commission adopted bird-safety standards for new buildings in July, and this month that city’s Board of Supervisors will vote on making it law. Legislation is pending in Washington that would require many federal buildings to incorporate bird-friendly designs. The United States Green Building Council, a nonprofit industry group that encourages the creation of environmentally conscious buildings, will introduce a bird-safety credit this fall as part of its environmental certification process, called LEED."
- "A City of Glass Towers, and a Hazard for Migratory Birds," New York Times, September 14, 2011

I enjoyed reading "A City of Glass Towers, and a Hazard for Migratory Birds," a recent New York Times article about bird-building collision mortality. Lisa Foderaro's piece is a hopeful account of how a confluence of activism, technology, and regulation can improve the lot of animals, especially in cases where a particular species has been adversely affected by human development.

The comments that follow the article, however, are predominated by doom-and-gloom attitudes. A representative survey follows:

All that matters are people and every little whim. We're a doomed species.
-Karma Every Moment, NY, NY

The people who tell us that evolution and climate change are just unproved theories have no idea how life formed this planet since its inception and no understanding whatsoever of the role of extinction in maintaining the climate within habitable bounds when any one plant or animal breaks the equilibrium. They convinced me long ago that there is no future for my own children.
-Steve Bolger, NY, NY

Yet another example of the consequences of man's selfish and destructive behavior. So sad.
-agetibi, Carrboro, NC

No wonder over 50% of Americans polled by The Nature Conservancy caricatured environmentalists as preachy reactionaries. In the words of the Conservancy's Chief Scientist, Peter Kareiva, most people see members of the environmental movement as "misanthropic, anti-technology, anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive pastoralists." Unsurprisingly, this negative stereotype has led to a dwindling of the movement's ranks.

I consider myself an environmentalist, but I distinguish between preservation and conservation (placing myself in the latter camp) and, more critically, I believe that environmentalism needs to embrace a "can do" attitude. If the majority of my fellow Times readers identify as environmentalists, their comments suggest that they're a well-intentioned pox. Wholesale condemnation of our species is as wrongheaded and malignant as exclusive glorification. In order to decry humanity as a "selfish and destructive" brute, one must stubbornly overlook all the evidence to the contrary. I wrote about such oversight in an essay included in the catalog for "A Live Animal," a group show that Selene Foster and I co-curated at Root Division.

"Although 'deep ecologists' and animal rights activists bemoan conservation approaches that prioritize human interests, the fact remains that human beings are exceptional animals. Skeptics and naysayers need only consider our species' biological and imaginative success to find evidence of our unprecedented faculty. But of all our remarkable features and feats, among the most notable examples of humanity's anomalous nature is our interest in and empathy for other species. Although there is growing scientific agreement that some other species possess self-awareness and even a capacity for empathy -- whales, dolphins, elephants, and our ape relatives are especially interesting in this regard -- humans are the only animal striving to learn about and better the lot of other creatures and environments. It's true that we often prioritize short-term, anthropocentric interests and it's also clear that reckless human activity has contributed to dramatic climate change and the ongoing Holocene extinction (our geological epoch's staggering loss of biodiversity), but conservation efforts and legislation, as well as our burgeoning interest in sustainability, speak to another, more hopeful human impulse; we possess an innate ability to see ourselves in other animals and, in turn, to recognize our capability as their stewards and representatives."

In short, we're not all bad. If you believe that we are, then you're guilty of sapping our species' potential. Christopher Cokinos is excellent on this point. I've quoted his terrific "Consolations of Extinction" essay before; I'll do it again.

"Too much grief for the world means less energy to help it along. [When] you find yourself free of the poisons that too much angst can cultivate, then something marvelous happens. You can sense how very old the planet is, how very old life and death are, and you can keep going on, you can keep doing the work you do in this universe, feeling despair when you feel despair, feeling - amazing - joy when you feel joy."

The Castle Builder

This past December, a co-worker and fellow artist, Adam Ogilvie, turned me on to this terrific 5-minute video. Entitled "Bishop's Castle," the short is a well-edited introduction to Jim Bishop, an under-known contemporary artist.

Working alone on weekends (and four weekdays during the summer), the high school dropout and iron worker has constructed the eponymous Bishop's Castle in the Rocky Mountains, just outside the tiny, central Colorado town of Beulah. He began the project in 1969. At the time, he only intended to build a stone cabin, but, forty years later, that cabin has grown into an incongruous marvel.

In the first two minutes of the video, Jim Bishop seems the very picture of Outsider art heroism. Bishop works for ego and for "the glory of God." He characterizes his efforts as those of an honorable "peon," and his astonishing creation is, as he puts it, a "one-man project, donation box basis." The artist is justifiably proud of his remarkable accomplishment. Bishop's castle is not a funded public art project, yet it's far more impressive than Christo's Central Park "Gates" or Eliasson's "Waterfalls."

Not surprisingly, the castle's construction has been fraught with legal battles (over insurance, material use, and zoning) and even tragedy. In 1988, Bishop's four-year-old son, Roy, was killed at the castle site, apparently crushed by a tree that Bishop felled. One of the castle's towers is named after Roy, and Bishop says that he will inter his son's ashes there.

A rough-worn, charismatic man, Bishop tosses off memorable quips: "Engineering without money is ingenuity."; "I'm building this for myself. Basically, I'm an egotist." Early on in the short, his rugged individualist act is endearing but, as the video advances, a darker side of Bishop is revealed. He begins to rant about our nation's eroding morals and the assault on our civil liberties. Although his convictions are not entirely without merit, his attacks on big government seem increasingly irrational. Near the video's end, he shouts from one of the castle's towers, seemingly possessed by a God-given vitriol. "I'm about to pass out. I'm getting...I'm....I just gotta get the blood in the right place now. Get that camera rolling! I'm doing work! I benefit everybody!...I'm the anti-devil!" Come again?

Still, like Jean Dubuffet, I believe that (with the exception of Sunday painters) those artists wiling away in obscurity, whatever their reasons, are often producing exceptionally exciting work. Bishop is one such outsider, and his astonishing project deserves more attention.

Photo credit: ripped from Milewalker's Flickr photostream

(Note: A slightly different incarnation of this post originally appeared on the blog, Letters From the Inquisition.)

The Crabapple Chapel

This short slide show and audio commentary by Lisa Wolfe documents the Crabapple Chapel. The project was the brainchild of artist/playwright, Dan Evans, and performance artist, LuLu Lolo. Although it began as a whim, the chapel has grown into a very special place. Viewing the slide show and listening to Dan talk about the project, one gets a sense of the chapel's quiet magic.

A Ski Vacation in Dubai

The October 17, 2005 issue of The New Yorker - the annual art/architecture special - includes some interesting articles. In the course of reading "Salesman," Nick Paumgarten's profile on New York dealer Leo Koenig, I was inspired (many times over) to write something reactionary. After allowing the reading to digest, however, I've decided to write very little. The Art World groupie in me enjoyed the elements of voyeurism - peeking in on other artist/dealer relationships is always intriguing - but such superficial thrills are temporal and, in the end, the piece was satisfying only as a guilty pleasure.

More exciting was Ian Parker's report about Dubai's rapid development ("The Mirage"). Parker describes this United Arab Emirates city as "a diagram of hormonally adolescent urban growth." His phrase evokes another, more familiar mess. With regard to thoughtless consumption, expansion and greed, Dubai paragons Las Vegas, Nevada. Passing through this latter city several years ago, my reaction against the town was so visceral that I almost forgave Theodore Kaczynski his transition from Luddite philosopher to terrorist - and, although I have never visited Dubai, photographs of the oil boom development(1) pique me. I suppose that garish displays of wealth or power generally offend my sensibility and when this variety of peacock trumpeting is coupled with a disregard for the environment, I am deeply saddened, even embittered.

Parker provides many examples of this unholy coupling. Reading the selection that follows, keep in mind that Dubai, like it's American sister city, is in the desert, an ecosystem short on water and long on heat.

"While I was in Dubai, I went to an early-evening meeting of the U.A.E.'s recently formed Green Building Council, held in the Grand Hyatt. I pushed open high double doors, and walked into a ballroom with a thirty-foot ceiling and multiple chandeliers, each with a hundred light bulbs. The outdoor temperature was more than a hundred degrees, but the air inside was almost uncomfortably cool. Although the room could easily have held a cocktail party for a thousand people, only twenty or so attended the meeting.

The environmental profligacy of Dubai is today most proudly expressed in the forthcoming indoor ski slope that is the defining feature of the new Mall of the Emirates. Encased inside a broad flattened tube that is visible for miles, it will be twelve hundred feet long: a steep, black diamond run of nine hundred feet, a forty-degree bend, then a gentler slope to the bottom. I went there before the refrigeration had begun: the snow-making machines had not yet been turned on. 'Obviously, it's going to be freezing here and a hundred and a twenty degrees outside, so we're going to be using a fair amount of electricity,' Phil Taylor, the chief executive of Ski Dubai...told me."

If the irresponsible construction craze isn't troubling enough, city officials and U.A.E. leaders are determined to turn Dubai into a disposable economy, one dependent on foreign tourism and stockholder petroleum wealth. (Hamza Mustafa, General Manager of The World, a luxury development being constructed on artificial islands, says of his city, "Dubai is to Europeans like Miami is to New Yorkers.") In order to support such an arrangement while maximizing profits, cheap labor is imported from outside the U.A.E., and these laborers are given second-class rights, poor benefits - if any - and required to depart the country before reaching retirement age.

"The invitation that Dubai sends out to professionals - to British airline pilots and German bankers - is quite different. These favored expatriates buy or rent apartments in the glass-plated towers on Sheikh Zayed Road, or find homes in the generously named developments that Emaar has built in the otherwise featureless desert: the Lakes, the Springs, the Meadows. In these neighborhoods, lawns are perpetually misted by sprinklers, and babies squint into the sun as they are wheeled along brand-new sidewalks by young Sri Lankan nannies. 'We live in Wonderland,' Rola Zaarour, a young Lebanese-Canadian woman, told me. Zaarour, who is single and works in public relations, has a red convertible and describes herself, smilingly, as 'shallow.' She came to Dubai three years ago, and admitted that she had never seen most of the city's old downtown, where the streets narrow to create a souk-like atmosphere, and where Indian and Pakistani workers, on their days off, shop for radios and alarm clocks that they will one day carry home. 'I didn't come to Dubai for anything "real",' she said. 'I've already lived in real places.'"

Rola Zaarour's escapist attitude, one shared by millions of people, risks undermining the now vulnerable supports of democracy and republicanism. Parker alludes to the conflict between the "real" and Zaarour's Wonderland with his article's title, "The Mirage." Too many of us prefer to believe in the illusory; the alternative, accepting that freedom and peace require substantial commitment and effort, was once a mainstream ideal, but today we market leisure in place of hard earned satisfaction. Las Vegas and Dubai are temples to this immoral tide; it pains me to look upon them, whether in photographs or in person.

(1) "In the seventies, oil production rose as global oil prices increased tenfold - to the country's spectacular advantage...Dubai International Airport was expanded on a scale that seemed preposterous at the the time, and, if for nothing else, the city soon became renowned as a glittering duty-free mall stumbled upon during 3 A.M. stopovers between East and West."

Photo credit: OmanVistas.org