Two Lines of Sight and An Unexpected Connection: The Art of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison

The work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison consists of deceptively simple solutions to complex ecological problems. Their process is embedded in layers of discourse, poetry, science, politics and passionate concern for human life. Here art historian Arlene Raven, a long-time contributing editor to High Performance, delves into the collective mind of the Harrisons, one layer at a time. —Eds.

What is art in the environment supposed to be or do? Can such art just sit there, surrounded by nature? Or hang in galleries in the art environment and simply refer to ecological issues? Does environmental art have to be ecological? If so, what—in practical terms—does that mean? By what standards should it be said to have accomplished or not accomplished its purpose? And by whom? Art critics, environmentalists, scientists, or the public?

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison make no claims to answer these questions, to fit into any established categories of art and environment, or to fulfill any standards but their own. They insist that their work, at its core, shifts fundamental designs in human perception and calls an observer to participate in recreating a dynamic, healing balance between nature and people. The Harrisons are artists who rediscover and recreate physical, social, philosophical and mythic environments—with artistry, originality, and with exemplary integrity

I.

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison began a conversation in 1970. After 18 years, their discourse continues uninterrupted. Mutual thinking, the basis for all of their collaborations, contextualizes works to such an extent that they titled a recent interview about new projects, "Nobody Told Us When to Stop Thinking." They embark "...when we perceive an anomaly in the environment that is the result of opposing beliefs or contradictory metaphors," they said recently in an artists' statement. "It is the moment when belief has become outrageous that offers opportunity to create new spaces, first for the mind and thereafter in everyday... always compose[d] with left-over spaces and invisible places." [1]

II.

"We did a work for an exhibition called Land Art...at Bard College...we took a look at the coffee pot," they told me in an interview in 1987.

You know, we like good coffee. The inside was so encrusted with salts from the drinking water that the pot was inlaid with gray-green whitish crud. So we developed a work about cleaning water. A still was made which would be situated right there in the gallery. Ironically, the only place on campus where you could get pure water would then be in the art gallery. [2]

The Socratic dialogue that distinguishes the Harrison relationship appears as myth and metaphor in their work The Lagoon Cycle, created over a period of twelve years, opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 18, 1987. It is a poetic meditation of asking questions, and mulling over these questions together as "Lagoonmaker" and "Witness." As Carter Ratcliff observed,

One meets the Witness and the Lagoonmaker in the introductory panel of the Cycle. That is the first of numberless occasions for wondering to what degree the Witness is Helen Mayer Harrison and the Lagoonmaker is Newton Harrison.... From the start the Lagoonmaker and the Witness treat large questions of creation and self-creation, will, and belief and action.... The Witness and the Lagoonmaker have learned to improvise. As they create the Lagoons through which they travel, they accept the "discourse of lagoon life" as a metaphorical guide. Or at least they struggle toward that acceptance. If our culture undertakes the same struggle and accepts the same guide, perhaps we'll find ways to adapt even to ecological disaster. Our adaptation may even be, in the Harrisons' word, "graceful." [3]

But the relationship of Harrison to Harrison is also a concrete comradeship within a marriage that has endured 35 years. Domestic, everyday. And an intriguing aspect of the two personas of The Lagoon Cycle is their clarifying fidelity to aspects of male and female, nature and culture. They weave their colloquy to reconnect these personas and thus initiate a healing that stands against the antagonism of mechanistic culture for unruly nature. As metaphor and example, their collaboration also reconsiders the plunder of world ecology and the fissure between men and women. Their eco-feminism and eco-aesthetics spring from this point of departure.

III.

In light of their unusual approach to artmaking on the one hand, and their commitment to artistic identity on the other, the Harrisons' view of the function of art in contemporary society is complex. For Helen, "The structure underlying our work is different because the assumptions underlying our work are more complicated." [4]

Referring to an historical example, Newton reasoned that "if you go to look at the Parthenon, you see a truly astounding work of art. But those artists were totally at the service of the culture's imperialistic impulses. If I took the Parthenon as a model, I'd say it was the job of the art to glorify that culture."

"Conversely," Helen adds,

earlier art was probably at the service of religious cults or impulses, although we can only theorize what such impulses might be that could lead to such diverse expressions in time and space as fecundity figures like the Venus of Willendorf or delicately carved miniatures like the head of Our Lady of Brassempouy or the Bulland Vulture figures of Catal Hayuk or the covered skull from Jericho with its inlaid cowry shell eyes.

Commenting on modernism, Newton said,

Art, like all aspects of modernism, is fractured, bifurcated and re-bifurcated, in little bits and pieces. We have decorative art, deconstructionists, Duchamp leftovers. Various forms of realism, conceptualism. Our work is influenced by all of them. In truth, we go back to the story of the place's becoming and if we can be part of that story, enhance it. I don't know or care if that is "far out."

In contrast to the current emphasis on product, he explained that,

I don't think about our art as product at all. As a guiding thought, "product" is counter-productive. Every once in a while we will make an array of images. We hope people buy them. But generally we make installations which stand for the place and as meeting ground for discourse, which are models for how to perceive and enact our work. We pack our 'products' in boxes and tubes and hope some day somebody will put them up somewhere. But the most important parts of our work are non-products. In the reshaping of a place, our work exists in bits and pieces of the planning process of the place. In a gallery, those parts are attributed to us. But when enacted in the real environment, we become anonymous. We are both bigger than our plan, and more anonymous.

Helen Harrison underlined that, in contrast to city planners, the two had no vested interest in, nor any sense that they must choose between, loyalty to either art or the environment. "One of the things that happens to people, even the best of the planners, is that they have a vested interest in getting something done." [5]

Rather, the question of conflict "comes up when money is made available," said Newton. "We will take that project over a little better project which is unfunded. And that's the only conflict—when someone else is trying to modify our participation."

The Harrisons have been compared and contrasted in almost every interpretation of their work to earth artists, survivalist artists, conceptual and performance artists, and even the Hudson River School of landscape painters active in the 19th century and earlier 20th century social realists. Musing about Michael Heizer, Helen admired "the vast energy put into those early big cuts and shapes in the desert that are inherently gestural, simply primary structures in another context. They are transactional with museum spaces not with the earth. They are involved primarily with forms."

In "Earth Art: A Study in Ecological Politics" (Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art edited by Alan Sonfist), Michael Auping says of Heizer: "Heizer has often argued that it is naive to criticize his work from an ecological standpoint, given the fact that modern industry is rearranging the landscape on a scale that dwarfs any of his endeavors."

Quipped Newton: "No art is as intrusive as a freeway intersection. I'd love to see Heizer take up 10% of Los Angeles. I'd vote for him."

"Christo's contribution was to re-define how big you can get," added Helen. "His Running Fence didn't do more to the environment than a picnic. The ecological balance can readily restate itself. James Turrell makes a very small move, not taking your now for granted. That's economy of means at a very high level."

IV.

The Harrisons have a new idea for San Diego, where they live and work. Cruciform Tunnel, now in the proposal stage, would extend under Genesee Drive, rejoin two nature reserves (the Torrey Pines Reserve and the UCSD nature reserve), the Penasquitos Lagoon and the Pacific Ocean. Water from the UC San Diego campus would now be channeled to the Penasquitos Lagoon. And a new bicycle path from their campus at UCSD to Sorrento Valley would be created.

Cruciform Tunnel is, indisputably, "ecological art"—art concerned with (improving) the environment. But the Harrisons are not primarily motivated by the need for a bicycle path or even increasing the overall ecological value of the site for Cruciform Tunnel. Nor are they mainly concerned with the aesthetics of the tunnel or the resulting beauty of the landscape, though these might be desirable and even necessary results of their work. Rather: "We go to a place­­anywhere!­­and engage in the story of the place. We make a representation of the story, of its own becoming. We add our story to it. Our work is, as best we can make it, the poetry of the whole."

Newton Harrison's explanation of concerns is headily abstract, and poetic itself. Yet the Harrisons' works have practical applications, require careful research, and have often had a measurable impact on their sites. How do their concerns differentiate their works from standard ecological research? Newton responded:

When did standard ecological research begin with a medical metaphor, turn itself into poetry, turn back into a proposal, shift into a performance, and then begin a process of nagging a city council? Standard ecological researchers made a series of experiments with the canyons of San Diego. We then did a work based on this research, and proposed Cruciform Tunnel. A lot of our work depends on illuminating ecological research by others, which sits in limbo, in an untransformed state.

V.

Newton said:

We have also done standard ecological research. For the second lagoon [Sea Grants, for which an artificial environment for crabs was constructed], we did environmental and habitat studies, as well as observed and concluded through observation that cannibalism [in crabs] reduces itself when the environment is complicated.

Our 1973 Sea Grant crabs laid out experimental grounds [for the development of a commercial aquaculture system for the crab]. Our method is available and can be used. We believe in theoretical research. Although our work points in theoretical directions we haven't engaged in theoretical research,

But
the tank is part of an experiment
and the experiment is a metaphor for a lagoon
if the metaphor works
the experiment will succeed
and the crabs will flourish
after all
this metaphor is only a representation
based on observing a crab in a lagoon
and listening to stones. [6]

However, when it becomes necessary to do original research, we can and have. Nonetheless there is a big difference between original research and a work of art and our focus is on the work of art. But we define
art broadly.

VI.

The fluidity of professional roles and tasks with which the artists are able to move through researching, planning, proposing and carrying out their projects in their own minds has very often become problematic when the process of their work is thrust into the nuts-and-bolts world of sponsors, agencies, sites and workers. When the Harrisons attempted to make earth and plant a meadow on top of 40 acres of rock pile—in their words "a physical act of reclamation" called Spoils Pile and planned for the old refilled canyon quarry that was Artpark—they were forced by Artpark authorities to stop after 20 acres were covered with soil, ostensibly due to the (too large) scope of their project.

Meditations on the Sacramento River, the Delta and the Bays at San Francisco (1977) was based on the same principle of reclamation. Said Newton: "We made a work projected to impact the level of public awareness."

"Our work was an extended argument in many media," added Helen, "from billboards to posters to radio and newspaper spots, to a museum mural. Heads of environmental agencies later quoted our own words in the newspapers without crediting us."

In 1982, they created Thinking About the Mangrove and the Pine (their working title for Barrier Islands Drama), a site-specific work for the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. They considered the pines that were brought in from Australia to Florida and used for decorative reasons. The pines had knocked off the native ecology, and taken up mangrove root and sun space. As the mangroves disappeared the pines took over water's edge. To quote from the text:

Take Longboat Key, for instance
Where
That pushy shallowrooted immigrant
That exotic and graceful pine from Australia
Colonizes behind that manyrooted earthholding mangrove
Colonizes behind that oceanic nursery of mangrove roots
When
Displacing the mangrove
Gaining water's edge
It topples in the wind. [7]

How can their voices be consistently aligned with their values when they are not in complete control of the process by which their projects are realized? In fact, they cannot. Also, as Helen noted, "We cannot really know the consequences of our actions. That is why we really need environmental impact studies, even on creativity."

VII.

The Harrisons' art participates in the "New Age" and in its optimistic belief that transformation of the environment and human consciousness is necessary and possible. [8] With eco-feminists and environmentalists, they reexamine the European scientific revolution and simultaneous rise of our modern market culture. But while utilizing contemporary technology, they question the model of the cosmos as machine rather than as organism, a (machine) model that has for centuries sanctioned, de facto, domination over nature and women. The existence of their work calls for the contributions of the "fathers" of modern science—Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and Isaac Newton—to be reevaluated in light of the mechanistic roots of their modernism. Most important, the Harrisons' work both presents and suggests alternative organismic paradigms that must temper the catastrophic contemporary consequences of the long-running machine age if humans and nature are to survive and thrive. [9]

VIII.

Their particular blend of aesthetics and politics evolved from their working process and their focus on conceptual, artistic, and ethical issues. "An aesthetic" they've said, "exists always in interaction with, and in commentary on, a larger social context...to isolate an aesthetic and attempt to make it unrelated to other things is impossible." [10]

With their connections between their aesthetics and the social context for producing art in mind, it seems natural that they would name as imperialist and unjust the disruption of social intercourse and physical movement as artistic "problems" to be confronted. Their propensity for making and altering maps—appropriately enough, a preoccupation of visual artists during the Renaissance—can also be traced to their aesthetics, from which originates the impulse to restore the relationship between the physical ground and the physical humans inhabiting that ground. They want to create actions that not only stand beside but work to undo the domination and manipulation of nature in the service of man-made hierarchical systems.

The environments for their environmental art are, therefore, the human and societal environments, in a dialogue with physical environments. The Harrisons are never motivated by a sentimental love of trees or animals or unspoiled rivers but of justice, balance, good sense and people. When addressing problems of city planning in San Jose, Atlanta or Baltimore, they observe when basic human activities—in these cases, walking—have been disrupted because urban planning served other needs. They unearth the cultural values embedded in systems of domination that make "other needs" priorities, rather than simply battle in the realm of politics and law.

In the service of their central concern—reestablishing discourse—they proposed a promenade for Baltimore based on their conviction, put forth in their statement for the project, that

a promenade is both an activity and a place, a stage on which people in a community meet and mix.... A promenade is marked by people physically tuning to common movement and rhythm. A promenade is an activity common in all urban ecologies, a basic homeostatic or self-regulating mechanism by which the community as a whole maintains awareness of the well-being of the individuals who comprise it, and by which the sense of community is reaffirmed collectively. [11]

The city's Baltimore Harbor project was already established when the Harrisons took up their analysis. They proposed connecting the Harbor Project to the city's cultural center in one direction, and to a park, which already existed, in the other. As Susan Platt put it,

They visualized this connection by simply pointing out that, by means of two 20-minute promenades, people could move out of the self-contained nucleus of the harbor, surrounded by its eight-lane noose of highways, to the surrounding city. All that the artists suggested was a walk that made use of the city as it already existed—they simply drew a line on a map to mark the walk. The total cost to the city was that of moving one bridge and adding a stoplight, and the result was "Baltimore Promenade/a concept for making Baltimore walkable (again)/a proposal inviting involvement and action...." [12]

And, as Helen Harrison says, "The ideas about redevelopment that we had went into the city plan and are occurring in city time—that is in scores of years—but they are happening."

IX.

If one accepts (and I do) the fully artistic and fully ecological nature of the art of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, then they are legitimately creative resources for identifying the most pressing environmental concerns and suggesting the opening phrases of our communion with our Earthly surroundings. "We have focused a fair amount on water," they said.

Water is a very critical bio-indicator. If water remains pure, and rivers are maintained, then many other good things happen. Pollution into oceans can be reduced, for instance. One can just as well spend time on trees. Or the stork, as we did in Kassel [Germany, for Documenta 8, 1987].

We're really not messianic. We're just two people putting one foot in front of the other, asking for reasonably ethical behavior. We've empowered ourselves through our work. And our greatest concern is establishing models wherein anybody can start anywhere and radiate out change and transformation by engaging the discourse. The most important thing is to begin anywhere, and get cracking.

Notes

1. Statement, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison: New Projects, March 17-April 18, 1987 (New York: Grey Art Gallery), reprinted in "Nobody Told Us When To Stop Thinking," Grey Matters: The Quarterly Bulletin of The Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, (New York: New York University) Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring, 1987). [return]

2. Helen and Newton Harrison, interview with Arlene Raven, October, 1987. Quotations unless otherwise cited are from this interview. [return]

3. Carter Ratcliff, "A Compendium of Possibilities," The Lagoon Cycle, (Ithaca: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art), 1985, p. 13. [return]

4. Helen Harrison, Grey Matters. [return]

5. Helen Harrison, Grey Matters. [return]

6. Text from The Lagoon Cycle by Helen and Newton Harrison. [return]

7. Text from Barrier Islands Drama by Helen and Newton Harrison. [return]

8. See Linda McGreevy, "Improvising the Future: The Eco-aesthetics of Newton and Helen Harrison," Arts, Vol. 62, No. 3, November, 1987, p. 68, for a discussion of "New Age" philosophies and the therapeutic aspect of the Harrisons' work. [return]

9. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, (San Francisco and New York: Harper and Row), 1980. [return]

10. Newton Harrison, interview with Michael Auping, in Common Ground: Five Artists in the Florida Landscape. (Sarasota: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art), 1982. [return]

11. Helen and Newton Harrison, from their statement about Baltimore Promenade. [return]

12. Susan Platt, "Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison: An Urban Discourse," Artweek, Vol. 14, No. 20, May 21, 1983, p. 1. [return]

This essay originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Winter 1987.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002