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| The
Nine Mile River team would argue that art is about shifting values.
The artists are interested in the place itself as the object and subject
of inquiry and manipulation. We have the chance to reconsider the
forces that created post-industrial brownfield properties and how
we can better integrate production goals with environmental health
and quality. ...We have the opportunity to reconsider the split between
nature and culture, and public and private. ... New images, symbols
and ideas must be embraced and creative thinking (by both children
and adults) must be welcomed in post-industrial dialogue and community
planning.1
-Tim Collins |
| The
world needs coal and highways, but we do not need the results of strip-mining
or highway trusts. Economics, when abstracted from the world, is blind
to natural processes. Art can become a resource, that mediates between
the ecologist and the industrialist. Ecology and art are not one-way
streets, rather they should be crossroads.2
-Robert Smithson |
As discussed
in the "Introduction," Robert Smithson (1938-1973) was highly
critical of art that sought to reclaim degraded land. He preferred to demonstrate
industry's role in molding new land forms. Due to his untimely death,
he realized only one ecological work of art in an open sand pit in Emmen,
Holland. Even so, his controversial anti-reclamation philosophy continues
to shift people's perceptions and values. Smithson consciously chose
already degraded sites, yet he routinely encountered criticism that his
earth works were environmentally "insensitive." Spiral Jetty (1970)
had lagoon potential but it's in a salt lake adjacent to abandoned oil rigs
that had already polluted the surrounding waters. His Island of the Broken
Glass (1969), for which he wanted to shatter 100 tons of green-tinted glass,
was slated for a "remote, undisturbed, barren rock off Vancouver Island."3
Wanting to protect migratory birds who perch on this rock, environmentalists
put a halt to Smithson's plan to visualize the process of erosion that
naturally shaves glass into sand over centuries.
Smithson
even approached several mining companies with the hope that they might
find his services of interest. He didn't offer to create works that
would rejuvenate the land, since he believed that such works "cosmetically
camouflage the abuse."4
"In accepting the reality of the site, Smithson ensured that the
damage from industry would remain visible."5
Under government and public pressure to "clean up" degraded
lands, mining company executives probably ignored his provocative proposals
for Earthworks because they didn't seem effective enough. As Barbara
Matilsky has observed, Smithson's plan for Bingham Copper Mining
Pit-Utah Reclamation Project (1973) made no attempt to ameliorate the
blight caused by strip mining. Rather, he proposed to add four small curving
lines at the very bottom of the world's largest open-pit mine, in
order to transform a three-mile trench into a gorgeous gorge.6
| Could
one say that art degenerates as it approaches gardening?7
-Robert Smithson |
Floating Island:
To Travel Around Manhattan (1970), an isle of flora on a barge that Smithson
proposed be tugged around New York City, once seemed like just a frivolous
fantasy. It's unknown whether he considered its ecological benefit
to the river, or whether he just wanted to provide additional green space.
Nonetheless, this was the era when floating islands floated into artists'
imaginations. One of Patricia Johanson's 1969 drawings detailed floating
"islands" and "walkways" that extended the land area
of a narrow beach and provide protected swimming.8
Gordon Matta-Clark produced a series of related drawings titled Islands
Parked on the Hudson (1970-1971). To date, large-scale floating islands
have yet to be realized in the United States. Since 1989, Lynne Hull (b.
1944) has placed small-scale floating islands in ponds, marshes, and swimming
pools to sustain ducks, geese, turtles, heron, and aquatic insects. She
wants to install a large-scale Bird Barge/Biodiversity Life Raft at the
confluence of the Ohio River and Cincinnati's Mill Creek.

Smithson
introduced the notion of the "nonsite," natural elements presented
in an unnatural setting like a gallery or museum, as differentiated from
the "site" the actual work. This side bar clarifies how
Smithson distinguished sites from nonsites.
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| [A]n
important criterion of most of my projects is to invite the site's
community to collaborate. If they work on it, ownership resides within
the community, where it belongs. When I begin work in a new community,
it's critical to publicly acknowledge my itinerant nature, seek
permission and invite real participation. This way of working led
to my being hired by the City of Oakland Community and Economic Development
Agency...neighbors told me what they liked and didn't like about
the park. We prioritized desired solutions.10
-Susan Leibovitz Steinman |
In 1989, Susan
Leibovitz Steinman, then a graduate student at Oakland's California
College of Arts and Crafts, enrolled in noted performance artist Suzanne
Lacy's course City Sites. Based on Lacy's lecture series, for
which ten internationally known artists presented their socially engaging
work, City Sites students teamed up with other artists to create site-specific
projects in places like a drug rehabilitation center, an AIDS shelter, and
a recycling plant. Leibovitz Steinman and Roberta Fudim worked in a retirement
home. The rest is history. Leibovitz Steinman, who does have a studio practice
and often exhibits on her own, is best known for facilitating massive public
projects, which have involved her collaborating with a range of folks from
volunteer Caltrans workers to winners of a "What California Means in
Three Words or Less" contest, amateur landscape designers, San Francisco
League of Urban Garderners (SLUG), East Bay Urban Gardeners, professional
landscape architect Laurel Kelly, master gardener Kathi Kinney, West Oakland
Neighbors, artist Janice Clement, Merritt College's Horticultural Landscape
Department, high school students, the Museum of Children's Arts'
after-school program, homeless people already inhabiting sites, seasoned
activists, and unwitting bystanders.
We were
afraid it would look like a pile of junk.- Hugh Lau, Marketing Director
for a neighboring business
(his initial response to Mandela Artscape) |
Leibovitz Steinman's
public works are ecoventions not just because they inspire ownership, assemble
diverse teams, or offer unforeseen economic opportunities, but because she
discovers unexpected resources, tackles unlikely sites, and regularly changes
the function of even an ordinary site, like a pedestrian walkway in Palo
Alto, California. How does she do it? Imagination, persistence and team
building are key ingredients. Who else would describe Caltrans' Oakland
salvage yard as a candy store? Or see the potential in a Caltrans transit
corridor hidden under a freeway overpass? Or seek to alter narrow nothings
like median strips into engaging artscapes? In the spirit of Smithson's
revealing rather than concealing a degraded site, she and artist Andrée
Singer Thompson opted to spend the $5000 it would have cost to break apart
and haul away an ugly blockish cement bench near some Oakland tennis courts
on enlisting area elementary school children to paint tiles on its front
and back.
Under the
auspices of Appalshop Community Gallery, in Whitesburg, Kentucky, Leibovitz
Steinman, Suzanne Lacy, and Yutaka Kobayashi (an artist from Okinawa currently
visiting University of California, Berkeley, and California College of
Arts and Crafts) have been invited to transform Elkhorn City, Kentucky,
a scarred ex-mining town, into an eco-tourist destination for naturalists,
whitewater rafters, and kayakers. Nearby Breaks Interstate Park, which
straddles Kentucky's West Virginia border, contains the 250-million-year-old
Breaks Canyon, considered to be the "Grand Canyon of the South."
The Kentucky side of Breaks Interstate Park is currently under threat
of natural gas drilling, and Elkhorn City's enlightened officials
realize that eco-tourist dollars will benefit their community more than
natural gas drilling, whose income stream is short lived. Their proposal
entails restoring a waterfront; designing an interpretive park with mini-wetlands,
where storm water runoff from a gas station hits the river; creating riverfront
performances in conjunction with a theater artist from Antioch; and collecting
"river and land stories" that will air on Appalshop radio station
and be used in some visual, archival way to preserve the oral history
of the river and land.11

Those unwilling
to mix it up need not explore her public works. Despite the fact that
Mandela Artscape (1998-1999) was originally slated as a temporary visual
gateway to West Oakland, the "Green City," it remains Leibovitz
Steinman's most ambitious and imaginative endeavor to date. Within
a few weeks, a two-acre median strip along the Mandela Parkway, where
42 people died when the Cypress Freeway collapsed during the 1989 Loma
Prieta earthquake, not only memorialized the dead, but reconnected West
Oakland, which was cut off when the freeway sprung up 30 years ago. Caltrans
not only let her select objects from its salvage yard, but it lent cranes,
forklifts, dump trucks, and experienced workers, who moved giant mounds
of soil and heavy pieces of equipment around the site. Metal frames that
typically hold freeway signs became trellises and gorgeous salvaged blue
water pipes lined a native grass patch like a river. Crushed recycled
freeway concrete formed a path that intersected the "river"
midstream, creating a bridge symbolic of the reunification of the neighborhood
since the freeway's demise.
The Mandela
Artscape also infused the community with paid jobs, new skills, and free
training. Leibovitz Steinman patched together four separate environmental
art grants to raise the necessary $32,000. The garden's 3000 plants
(California poppies, redwood and cypress trees, grasses, passion vines,
and morning glories) were maintained by a crew of volunteer gardeners,
who graduated from a free ten-week landscape gardening course offered
by Meritt College's horticulture department. Some graduates went
on to work on other community landscape projects. Once the project ended,
the plants were replanted in other West Oakland parks.
| I think
people compartmentalize their lives. They think apple trees belong
in the country and apples in the store. -Susan Leibovitz Steinman12 |
Several other
of her temporary projects have offered economic, psychological, and social
benefits for community gardeners, proving once again that apples can appear
almost anywhere! In the spirit of the Harrison's Survival Series (1970-1973),
Leibovitz Steinman facilitated Gardens to Go (2001), an organic "demonstration"
garden featuring pumpkins thriving in antique cast iron bathtubs, spinach
sprouting in raised beds, and a dwarf citrus tree growing in a planter made
from old wooden doors and shutters. The West Oakland Neighbors encouraged
her to create this portable garden, which was temporarily located at the
intersection of Peralta, Union, and 32nd Streets, adjacent to the Poplar
Community Recreation Center. By reinvigorating the lead-ridden urban site
with fresh soil protected by inventive, raised planters, this demonstration
garden "shows that anyone can get some containers together and have
a site at home," notes area resident and volunteer gardener, Susanna
DeAngelo.13
The group of neighborhood volunteers, including about 20 local youths who
earned a stipend, planted corn, watermelon, basil, strawberries, Meyer lemons,
and beds of flowers in painted retired tires and outdated toilet tank tops,
for which they exchange their labor. "Leftover food (no one can eat
all of those zucchini alone!) was donated to the center for their free lunch
program."14

In 1994,
Leibovitz Steinman helped to organize Food for Thought: Urban Apple Orchard,
a six-month experiment on a blighted Caltrans lot, at the corner of Octavia
and Market streets, under San Francisco's elevated U.S. 101 freeway.
This mini-orchard featured a dozen trees, representing eight varieties
of "antique" apples, planted in salvaged tires painted in shades
of green. Truly forbidden fruits, "antique" apples are neither
on the City's official tree list nor are they readily available,
since they're not considered commercially viable. Without such projects,
there is a reduction in both the apple gene pool, and the types that can
be tasted by the average urban dweller.15
As San Francisco's
Norcal recycling and waste transfer facility's artist-in-residence,
Leibovitz Steinman worked with 75 San Francisco high school students to
create River of Hopes and Dreams (1992), a 3-acre sculpture garden, whose
mountain of earthquake rubble has since been reclaimed by nature.
| I love
to do art that people might not even recognize as art, but they find
it when they're going to the grocery store or to work.16
-Susan Leibovitz Steinman |
For California
Avenue/California Native (1997), Leibovitz Steinman engraved winning phrases
from the "What California Means" contest, in sets of three,
onto about half of the terra cotta bricks used to form two herringbone-patterned
paths. Native wildflowers and the grasses that local Indians once wove
into baskets were interspersed between the paths. Salvaged Sierra granite
"sitting stones" provide resting spots for musing upon these
philosophical/poetic bits of whimsy. Seven banners containing the names
of species, whose Latin name contains the word "California"
like Lepus Californicus (California Jack Rabbit), rim this Palo Alto median
strip.
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| The
process of restoration, begins with a walkan intimate sensual
experienceseeing the site with the eyes of an artist, a biologist,
or an engineer begins the cultural process of restoration. Restoration
will not occur in any landscape without care.17
-Tim Collins |
One of the now
defunct Nine Mile Run Greenway Project (NMR-GP)(1997-2000) team's stated
cultural goals was to reclaim for public use urban rivers, streams, and
estuaries colonized by private industry during the industrial revolution.18
Like the itinerant teams that Leibovitz Steinman, Ocean Earth, and the Harrison
Studio assemble, three artists (Bob Bingham, Tim Collins (b. 1956), and
Reiko Goto (b.1955)) plus attorney John Stephen directed university and
industry professionals in interdisciplinary research. Building upon the
Harrison Studio's model of conversational drift, the NMR-GP team engaged
the public in meaningful conversations about public opportunities available
at the 100-acre Nine Mile Run Greenway, a remnant stream adjacent to an
abandoned ten-story slag heap in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Though the NMR-GP
team partnered with local government, its members retained autonomy by providing
their own funding.
Like Leibovitz
Steinman's model for community ownership, NMR-GP provided interested
volunteers the training necessary to participate as stakeholders, both
in terms of decision-making and labor skills. Like CLUI, NMR-GP tours
elucidated the site's central features. Unlike CLUI or Ocean Earth,
they didn't aim for amorality (good=consensus), though NMR-GP sought
objective decision-making tools. Like Smithson, they value post-industrial
public spaces that reveal both the legacy of industrialism and the ecological
processes at work.19
As Mel Chin did, NMR-GP relinquished their authorship, and passed the
baton to committed citizen stakeholders.
| Our
audience was a diverse group of municipal officials, artists, architects,
hikers, bikers, dog walkers, botanists, birders, planners, environmentalists,
community representatives and other stakeholders.20 |

After three
years of NMR-GP-initiated workshops, site tours, panel discussions, lectures,
and exhibitions, community participants generated alternative design guidelines
that introduced a socially acceptable solution, that was also economical,
aesthetically rich, and ecologically sound. Opting not to restore the
brownfield to its original condition (where would the slag go?), they
created an integrated ecosystem restoration indicative of nature's
complex goals.21
After careful scrutiny, the artists and biologists realized that slag
heaps offer more biodiversity than typical lawns or city parks! So in
1999, the NMR-GP team started the recuperation process by spraying a mulch
containing a mixture of nutrients and grass seeds to grow grass on the
hard, gray, and otherwise porous slag heap. NMR-GP-related activities
eventually altered everybody's cultural, aesthetic, economic, and
ecological values. "Recognizing that the Greenway serves both the
human and biological communities of the watershed, the Guidelines reflect
the range of functions that the Greenway currently serves or may serve
in the future."22


The outcome
of three years of intense discussion, the adjacent guidelines provide
parameters that safeguard the Nine Mile Run as a natural site, rich in
ecological and cultural benefits. They also demonstrate the community's
heightened awareness of the significance of watersheds and biodiversity.
How did the NMR-GP team achieve this level of social engagement and commitment
to progress? Just as the Harrisons' A Vision for the Green Heart
of Holland touring exhibition contributed to its wider acceptance, NMR-GP's
efforts culminated with Conversations in the Rust Belt: Brownfields into
Greenways (1999), an exhibition in a Pittsburgh gallery. This site served
to facilitate further interest and discussion, as viewers were surrounded
by NMR-GP's community generated solutions. The gallery setting enabled
them to continue the discussion with breakfast briefings, tours, and community
workshops.

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