in-process book and research with Timothy Furstnau as FICTILIS
Genres of Stewardship spotlights art projects and practices with intimate connections to land, often using ecological processes and infrastructures as form through sustained involvement over longer time spans. Such works tend to share these characteristics: they are localized but “site-generic,” attending to issues of scale and replicability; they engage collaborative and multi-stakeholder models of creation, ownership, and management; and they embody the intrinsic intersectionality or “confluence” of ecological and social concerns.
The diverse collection of work these considerations bring into view contrasts sharply with canonical Land Art, and though it bears superficial similarities and shares tendencies with some Ecological or Environmental Art is also distinct from these, resembling traditions of ecosocial stewardship that are both older and utterly contemporary.
Land-based practices are rapidly emerging yet under-recognized—partly by design, as many such projects occur informally alongside more conventional work, not oriented toward art markets or never positioned as art in the first place. Even a single project may be amorphous or shape-shifting, featuring a broad set of practices not readily legible as art. Often it looks more like agroforestry, ecology, landscape architecture and design, planning and policy, education and activism, or conservation and other forms of land management. This presents difficulties for institutions to support, for galleries to show, for patrons to collect, for audiences to visit, and for conservators to maintain and repair. We might begin to see such diverse, hybrid practices as coalescing into genres of stewardship, which despite their different forms, scales, and temporalities, share a politics of place, an ethics of care, and an emphasis on the cultural dimensions of land-based work.
This kind of work will continue to proliferate as climate-induced multispecies migrations inspire local adaptations and changes in land use on a massive scale. Land will increasingly become both form and content.
Artwork will not simply be “about” land; it will act not only upon it or with it but through it.
Our approaches to curating and the infrastructures of exhibition-making, to facilitate this kind of work, and to translate it, share it, and honor it—must also be transformed.
While the work many institutions are now doing to address their impacts and mitigate climate change is vital, especially when it goes beyond a carbon-centric approach with a more holistic ecological understanding that includes biodiversity, sovereignty, and other land-based impacts, our research seeks also to reimagine the site of production, distribution, and consumption of the work of artists, in recognition that the walls of the exhibition space have always been porous, temporary, and contingent.
From the wealth made through extraction and speculation that finances it, to the mixtures of gypsum, lime, and sand that physically comprise its gallery walls, the so-called Art World is always already made of land.