It’s green. But it isn’t.
Given the general eco-consciousness of contemporary artists, often directly expressed in their art, and given the generally lefty, liberal tendencies in the contemporary art world, you’d think that the art world would be green — or at least trying to get there. Not so.
Take installation art, a still-hot art form that’s been around since the 1970s. Almost without exception, it’s designed to be ephemeral and site-specific. Most installation art is time-consuming to set up, difficult to move from one place to another, and a one-shot, one-time, one-gallery moment. Only the rare installation piece — like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum — manages to find a permanent home.
Even if the artist recycles tons (literally) of plastic, cardboard, wood, cement blocks, styrofoam, bubblewrap, string, tape, and paper into his or her art — crud that might otherwise directly hit the landfills — what happens when that particular exhibit ends? It’s hard to believe that the artist methodically stores all 1,200 plastic bottles, 62,000 feet of string, and two and a half tons of broken concrete for the next (improbable) iteration of that installation.
As for photography — well, we should all be cringing in fear. Digital photography is indeed slowly and methodically killing chemical photography, but chemical photography is not going gently into that good night. There are still thousands of artists, scattered all over the country, who step into the darkrooms carved out of the basement of their homes, casually dipping their prints in and out of trays of chemicals that then get dumped directly into their town sewers.
At first glance, sculptors seem relatively harmless. But unless they’re wood-chippers, the odds are they’re doing something (e.g., grinding some rock-hard substance that results in tiny, harmful particles of that substance being released into the air, or using piles of solvent-soaked rags) that’s not very nice for the planet. Their attitude toward the air around them, and the sink and drain in the corner of their studio, isn’t much different from that of any other artist: Problem? What problem?
Painters? Don’t get me started. Acrylic painters may think they’re off the hook (their paint mixes with water, not turpentine), but they conveniently forget that acrylic is a petroleum product. It’s plastic.
We oil painters are among the worst abusers of the environment. The huge variety of pigments that come in the pretty little squeezable tubes are frequently marked with a tiny “X” — indicating, at the very least, “Don’t eat this.” Even if we don’t use pigments with heavy metals (like flake white or cadmium), we casually toss our used tubes into the trash.
As to the turpentine, mineral spirits, odorless mineral spirits and varnishes? After we’ve sucked in their fumes while creating our masterpieces, many of us allow the pigments to precipitate out of our dirty odorless mineral spirits in order to retrieve cleansed odorless mineral spirits (odorless is actually a terrible invention, since it masks what’s really going on in the air around the painter). Our very act of painting involves releasing terrible things into the air, and what we do inevitably culminates not just in our painting, but in the dirty business of used-up tubes of paint going into the trash and something bad going either down the drain or into the ground.
Just as few meat-eaters have ever been inside a slaughterhouse, and think of meat as a plastic-wrapped blob of red stuff that can be turned into a nice meal, few painters have ever seen the insides of a paint factory, and think of their paints as gooey stuff that can be turned into a nice painting. We don’t even know where the fine-arts pigment factories are located. Most painters know little if anything about the making of pigments — nothing about their history, or how they’re ground, or how the degree of grinding affects their appearance, or how they are suspended in oil, or how the different kinds of oil affect their appearance, or how synthetically made pigments have now, for the most part, taken over pigments derived from natural substances.
In New York alone, there are thousands of artists working in their individual studios. I know of at least five working artists who live on my block. Who knows what all these artists are doing with their waste? When I called the Department of Sanitation to ask about how individuals should recycle substances such as turpentine, I was told (very vaguely) that it was the individual’s responsibility to take the substances to specific locations (far away) set up for the disposal of dangerous substances, and that I could go to the Department of Sanitation Web site to find those locations. (We can guess how many artists are doing that.)
Finally, there’s the hefty carbon footprint of the artists, dealers and critics who continually buzz about the world, zipping from a Biennial in South Africa to an art fair in Basel, always accompanied by heavy crates of art. These trendoids, gathering together at one wine party after another (after a long, hard day’s work of pushing art in their art-fair booths), undoubtedly devote a moment or two, in conversation, to the terrible state of the planet.
No, the art world isn’t green. It’s mud.
Image from Photobucket.com
