Sustainable artist Richard Long

                                                           

http://www.richardlong.org/index.html

Art as a formal and holistic description of the real space and experience of landscape and its most elemental materials.

Nature has always been recorded by artists, from pre-historic cave paintings to 20th century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking.

Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary long-distance walkers.

My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going 'nowhere'. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art.  Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking - as art - provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in my work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience.

Walking also enabled me to extend the boundaries of sculpture, which now had the potential to be de-constructed in the space and time of walking long distances. Sculpture could now be about place as well as material and form.

I consider my landscape sculptures inhabit the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making 'monuments' or conversely, of 'leaving only footprints'.

Over the years these sculptures have explored some of the variables of transience, permanence, visibility or recognition. A sculpture may be moved, dispersed, carried.  Stones can be used as markers of time or distance, or exist as parts of a huge, yet anonymous, sculpture.  On a mountain walk a sculpture could be made above the clouds, perhaps in a remote region, bringing an imaginative freedom about how, or where, art can be made in the world.

Art Exposure, LLC

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20100329/ARTICLES/100329664

Hampstead studio opens up possibilities for community

By Amanda Hutcheson

StarNews Correspondent
Wilmington, NC, Star News Newspaper

Published: Monday, March 29, 2010 at 8:58 a.m. 

Last Modified: Monday, March 29, 2010 at 8:58 a.m.

HAMPSTEAD | In a new, bright red barn in Hampstead, one woman is fulfilling a dream of creating an artistic and community center.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” said Ellen Elder, the brain behind Art Exposure and a former art teacher of 30 years. “I’ve always wanted a big art studio where we could promote local artists, something for the community.”

Elder sat on a couch that had once belonged to her grandmother, in the middle of the center modeled after a barn, with large windows shining light on the artwork displayed throughout. Work studios line the edges of the building and a loft at the back has hosted everything from art classes to foster parenting groups. Recently, the loft served as the dance floor for a wedding reception. A small store at the back is packed with art supplies.

The building is home to the Art Exposure Artists Association, a group of fine artists who display and sell their art in the building.

Some rent the studio rooms on either side, and before a new member joins the association, all the members get a say. Elder said she envisioned a place for local artists to meet, work and interact.

“If you build it, they will come,” said B.F. Reed, one of the association members who rents studio in the space, referring to what she calls Ellen’s marvelous vision.

“That’s what I like about having a place like this, a place for people to see,” added Karen Crenshaw, one of the group’s first artists. “I can’t sell my work if it’s sitting in my studio at home. I’m out interacting with the public.”

The group hosts different art shows, with an opening on the second Friday of every month.

The events are open to the public and light refreshments are offered, Elder said. She is also hoping to add the performing arts, including music events and plays.

This summer will likely see a summer camp for children to learn about art. But Elder said she wants the building, located off U.S. 17 just north of Hampstead, to be available to all interests in the community.

She envisions the barn hosting luncheons, birthday parties, family reunions and receptions, as well as community group meetings.

“It’s like any art gallery, it just has some other things going,” said Elder. “We’re really in a rural area here. There’s not much like this, not many places to meet.”

more on sustainable art ("the things we shouldn't ask artists to do")

Following are writings I've run across on the net (low carbon footprint) on the sustainable arts theme. Evolution takes time and we are in the midst of that transition. What and how will the time snapshots of this transition appear. How many years, 10, 25 , 63 will the revolution take? Historically these things do not occur over night. What will a sustainable art look like, speak to and manage itself? Obviously the empowered art clique; the big art schools (the Academe' will not let go of their cherished ecocentres, afterall that's how they got there.), the big supporters (in large part industries rife with environmental failures - ahhh but as adults we must all clean up our own messes, unless of course, we can afford to hire workers to do it for us, or just move to the next town over and allow the slums to incubate.) and the buyers - who will be the leaders in buyng out the promotions of the galleries and other venues? There'll even be a synchronicity of order , looking back, that the critics and historians can debate. But for now we persist in denial, pride, gluttony and other human endeavors that perhaps may be some of the subliminal lead in subjects of artists works to the greater movement. This will be an ongoing topic of writings....

http://ashdenizen.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-low-carbon-arts.html

new low carbon arts

http://ow.ly/1s2FQ

Robert Butler why is art more important than the planet?

http://ow.ly/1s2FQ

they'll do the asking themselves

Robert Butler 

http://ow.ly/1s2FQ

Eco-bling: why the arts sector needs to lead on climate action

Contributed by: Lucy Gibson

http://www.welshartnow.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=593&catid=11:5&Itemid=110

Paul Matosic is an international artist

http://www.fionacassidy.com/files/46_stuff_and_nonsense.pdf

Fiona Cassidy

Top Ten Artists!

The top ten artists from http://www.artcyclopedia.com/mostpopular.html measured by their sale of art posters are:

1	Pablo Picasso	100
2	Vincent van Gogh	81
3	Leonardo da Vinci	80
4	Henri Matisse	63
5	Claude Monet	59
6	Salvador Dali	54
7	Georgia O'Keeffe	53
8	Andy Warhol	44
9	Michelangelo	39
10	Rembrandt	35

What would a living artist say to this? Is this cultural behavior sustainable? Does it show art, or the image of art? Here's a really earthy question, is the yearly profit made from art posters more or less than the yearly sale of art? 

WebGround Series

WeaveGround Series needs a new name; Grid Ground, GridGround, Grid, etc., or not... I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, the name is there.  WebGround! (edited comment 5/10/10 sometimes it takes a few weeks...)

The thing we shouldn’t be asking artists to do

March 26, 2010 by William Shaw
Filed

http://ow.ly/1rlnS

nder: Will

Heart of Darkness by Cornelia Parker, 2004 from Earth: art of a changing world, London 2009

This is Climate Action on Cultural Hertitage week – it’s an initiative championed by Bridget McKenzie as a response to the growing number of individuals and organisations calling for a more clearly defined sense of purpose from the arts and heritage sector.  People like Al Tickell of Julie’s Bicycle ask: “Why do we expect moral leadership to come from corporations and science? Surely the meaningful nature of the arts in society puts it in a position to take a lead on climate action?”

There are two aspects to this. Firstly it’s about how we behave ourselves. Art fairs, say, have become an example of the muscularity of the art industry. As curators/critics Maja and Reuben Fowkes have asked,  is this world of global art jamborees a sustainable one? Gustav Metzger’s Reduce Art Flights was one of the artist’s passionate “appeals”, this time to the art world to reconsider how they had been seduced into transporting themselves and their works around the globe. Furtherfield.org’s We Won’t Fly For Art was equally explicit, asking artists to commit to opting out of the high profile career track that conflates your ability to command air tickets with success.

Industries can change the way they behave. Tickell’s work with the music business has already shown how a cultural industry can transform itself in terms of process.

But there’s also the role of art as a spoke in the wheel of culture. Science itself changes nothing. To become a transitional society requires more than policy. The real change must be cultural. So should climate be the subject matter of art?

Pause for thought: Do we want rock stars enjoining us to change our ways? Please God, no. See? If it doesn’t work for rock music, why should it work for other art forms?

In an article being published next week on the RSA Arts & Ecology website, Madeleine Bunting will be arguing strongly against the urge to push artists into an instrumental role in climate:

“The visual arts offer a myriad of powerful ways to think and feel more deeply about our age and our humanity, but it is almost impossible to trace the causal links of how that may feed through to political engagement or behaviour change,” she cautions.

It is time to accept that artists don’t simply  ”do” climate. Even the most obviously campaigning art is of little value if it is simply reducible to being about climate. They may be inspired to create by the facts of science and economics, as Metzger and Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett of Furtherfield were in those examples above, but if you asked them to make art about climate they’d almost certainly run a mile.

What was interesting about the RA exhibition Earth: art of a changing world was the way that made that explicit. Artists like Cornelia Parker and Keith Tyson were clear in saying their pieces that they weren’t necessarily conceived with climate in mind at all, (though both are passionate about the subject). The decision to include Parker’s Heart of Darkness as an a piece of work to make us ponder the destruction of our planet was a curatorial one.

There’s a kind of separation between church and state needed here; institutions shouldn’t just be looking to their carbon footprints, they should be looking to see how they can contextualise this cultural shift with what they show their audiences – whatever the artform. It is up to the curators, directors and art directors to take on this role. In this coming era, we urgently need events, exhibitions and festivals that make us feel more deeply about the change taking place around us – and we need them to find new audiences for those explorations too.

But what we shouldn’t be doing is asking artists to make art about climate.

entry fees

Just received notification that Rocky Mount has my check for $25 for entry in the 53rd Juried Art Show.