ECOPOLITICS AND AESTHETICS: THE ART OF HELEN MAYER HARRISON AND NEWTON HARRISON*

A MANIFESTO FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY We, of the Harrison Studio, believe As do others, although differently That a series of events have come into being Beginning in the time of Gilgamesh and before Beginning with agriculture and the first genetic manipulation Beginning with culture of animals and ongoing genetic manipulation Beginning with globalization six thousand years ago with the Salt Route A little later, the Silk Route And later and later ... Especially with science informed by Descartes' clock And with modernity recreating the cultural landscape And deconstructing nature thereby From the Industrial Revolution to the present Until all at once a new force has become apparent We reframe a legal meaning ecologically And name it the Force Majeure We, of the Harrison Studio assert As do others somewhat differently That the Force Majeure, framed ecologically Enacts in physical terms outcomes on the ground Everything we have created in the global landscape Bringing together the conditions that have accelerated global warming Acting in concert With the massive industrial processes of extraction, production and consumption That have subtracted forests and depleted top soil Profoundly reduced ocean productivity While creating a vast chemical outpouring into the atmosphere Onto the lands and within the waters That altogether comprise the Force Majeure. (Harrison and Harrison 2009) Helen Mayer Harrison's quiet, melodic reading of this text has a calming, Dylan Thomas--like cadence that contrasts sharply with the content of her narrative: a recounting of massive human activity, ominous environmental impact, social upheaval, and grand visions of a reordering of the world. (1) Texts like these are a common element of the art she produces with her husband and longtime collaborator, Newton Harrison. Their gallery exhibitions, informed by rigorous attention to the work of geographers, historians, urban planners, ecologists, climatologists, hydrologists, and other scientists, as well as by conversations with residents, workers, community leaders, and other inhabitants of a place, consist of wall-sized maps and photographs of landscapes, videos, walk-on art pieces, narrative text, and recordings. Emerging from the maps, texts, images and sounds are stories of landscapes. Many of these images and texts relate information about past and current landscapes. Others present stories of possible futures: reinvented shorelines, redrawn political boundaries, reconnected city neighborhoods, reforested highlands. Texts contain narratives, often in dialogue form, of how the two artists came to learn about a place, how they understand its dynamics informed by cultural tradition, modernization, climate change, politics, and other forces that animate a landscape and give rise to particular environmental challenges. Not content with reflection and envisioning, the artworks build toward creative responses to problems. The Harrisons do not constrict their visions with current legal impositions, judicial structures, and political will. As well, they tackle problems on the scales at which they perceive them to exist, often daring to imagine what we might do, as people unified by a dedication to environmental justice and ecological sustainability. Over the span of their career they have taken on landscapes as particular as a downtown Baltimore neighborhood and as expansive as worldwide sea-level rise, in each case working to frame a place in terms of relationships between humans and nonhtunans that animate and sustain. Political ecologists, critical cartographers, and physical geographers, among others, will recognize many geographical themes in the Harrisons' work. Their art is grounded in a powerful and multidisciplinary engagement with the biophysical structure and flows of landscape--the pounds of carbon sequestered by an acre of forest, the water-holding capacity of a forested landscape versus a deforested one, the amount of land needed to house 600,000 people, the traditional role of the water buffalo in providing labor for people in Sri Lanka. …