So there was a switch from environmental artist to environmental designer in this process. After 20 years of work in natural environments and questioning my role in a natural environment and what humans do there, I began to wonder how I could use that knowledge to address community issues, to look at problems in communities from an artist s point of view. I began to develop a sense that the creative process of artists is very special, and different than any of the other professionals. It s not that we have the solutions, sometimes we will, but we have observations, questions, and ideas, and we should be invited to the table to talk about the problems and to help with the problem-solving. That is what is happening in addition to what I was doing before.
Artists have to respond to designs that are already decided.
There is seldom much communication between the landscaper, the architect, the artist, and the public works department. It s really not there. It s within the design, it s within the questioning, it s in the raising of new issues. Isn t one weakness of art as process, even if it deals with architectural structures and space as Gordon Matta-Clark did, that its final goal is to demonstrate an idea. That was part of the problem with Land Art and Minimalism.