The Whole Is More than the Sum of its Parts[1]

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Berdey Door The Hyper Sensitive Sponge: A Tale of Berdey’s Existence

Berdey is a 28 year old 2 legged walking female sponge with 5 human senses (perception, touch, hearing, smell and taste) and 2 sponge functions (saturate and squeeze out).

Berdey is studying a Masters in Squeezing Out at the National Sponge Institute.

Everyday Berdey wakes up to the sounds of her alarm clock tuned into National Radio; an accountable news source that bothers to report environmental news with comprehensive national and international coverage. Berdey lies stretching her sponge-limbs, stirring her semiconscious sponge-ness to the sounds of the pre news birdcall.  Attiring her sponge accessories and flattening down her unruly sponglets, Berdey listens to the news: Moratoriums on global warming, commercial/scientific whaling, international trade, the war in Iraq, destruction of Lebanon, China: Pollution capital of world, the Obesity epidemic, Bird Flu, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, sinking islands, the man caught by Australian customs smuggling protected birds eggs in his trousers pretending they were his testicles…the daily absorption had begun.

Berdey lives in a suburb known for its typical “adult-sponge” middle-classed-mindedness. A culture built on the infrastructures of a poorly designed city with a fabricated basis in the consumptive behaviour of present day capitalism. The entire city is couched in ones ability to drive a petrol powered car. Berdey doesn’t: She walks and buses everywhere, occasionally sponging lifts when absolutely necessary.

During the daily commute to the Sponge Institute, Berdey’s perceptions are heightened: Observing with a curious balance of dismay and intrigue the constant motorway developments carving up her local habitat, saturating her senses, clogging her sponge-self with a constantly shifting world of traffic, asphalt, median barriers, steamrollers, cranes and giant rolls of colourful plastic pipes being extruded, replaced and pushed back beneath the earth, then re-smothered and re-sealed in a suffocating tar surface fit for the hundreds of thousands of cars rolling across it everyday.

Every morning Berdey sponges-in this messy habitat, absorbing through her senses and gurgling down into her sponge-gut. Some things get stuck, accumulating in her sponge-self, nesting in her sponge-brain fibres. Berdey compulsively counts the native Bird species scrounging a dwindling existence on the disappearing edges of the ‘Great Northway Busway (motorway) Development’: Pukeko, Kotuku, Torea, and Kahu…. Her eyes trace over the teams of fluro menservants carving out new transit lanes and car parks. Entertaining herself she imagines them huddled together singing in blokey unison “I made it through the wilderness”[2] . Her spongeyes linger on ancient possum eaten Pohutakawa trees being de-installed making room for wider roads and signs: Signs everywhere informing, selling and pointing the way. As if we can’t read the world without them.

The accumulating sogginess breeds in Berdey’s internal spongeconsious, mingling with the stale synthetic smells entrenched in ones nasal spongememory; exhaust, air freshener,, industrial cleaning fluids, fast-food

Like clockwork the dwellings on the streets of Berdey Door’s local proximities expunge their consumptive waste: A colourful birthing of bulging rubbish bags, pink, orange, red…, and a regulated punctuation of the standard issue royal blue wheelie bins with the yellow lids and black wheels, parked ready and waiting to divulge their plastic, tin and glass bellies into the bottomless pit of waste management. Flapping paper bundles sometimes escape their restraints littering the curb side with old news and squashed paper packaging.

At the National Sponge Institute, Berdey practises squeezing out visual interpretations of ideas into space. Berdey draws, expunging concepts from her spongemory, making lists of ideas, developing them, and making them real, inseparable to material and process. Berdey read that Plastic could be thought of as “magical and prosaic”[3] : Suggesting there was more to investigate in the realm of plastic and its function in art. Berdey found this insightful. She experiences plastic everywhere: in shops, on the streets, under the streets, in our bathrooms, kitchens, outside our front doors. It is inescapable this foul mix of depressingly toxic substance and bright cheerful usefulness. Mythologies (Barthes) recognizes the possibilities in unravelling meaning from daily trivia through semiology; exploring how, instead of what things mean. Finding traces of black humour overt in the materials Berdey works with; laughing-crying at their connections to consumption.

Beyond daily existence Berdey remembers the night sky full of stars; birdsong from the beaks of living birds; Kowhai trees in flower; the smell native of native bush, not introduced pines. Those experiences are still found in this world, but they are harder to find, buried under lights, plastic, cities and under the artificial.

After a long day of squeezing, Berdey heads home. The end of day darkness is heavily sprinkled with electric light and glowing signs; the fake stars of a city environment.  The twinkling lights decorate her internal spongemory. Berdey rummages for meanings hidden within this habitat, for a language, to communicate an experience of this world. She often finds herself thinking that others have stopped reading this habitat; she wonders what makes the readings invisible? How do humans look? Are they too busy “living”?

Reading and writing about Art; in relation to my practice, has been one of the most challenging forays into thinking that I have ever encountered. With a nurtured aversion to the thought of “manufacturing meaning”[4] , I navigate towards an experience that unearths the gut essence of my practice. Searching for relevant points hasn’t often brought my inquiries any closer to understanding the significance of how wind blows the leaves of a Harakeke bush, perched on the edge of a motorway, suffocated in the exhaust of commuting cars and busses; or the way my eyes seek the only Kereru in Takapuna returning to feed on Puriri berries. Why force topics over what is a complex language: A critical reading of the local habitat? The act of experiencing the local habitat and reading the signs continues to provide me with a more stimulating and essential diet of information. Multidisciplinary artist Mel Chin is “an intellectual who works from the gut and that in the end is the definition of an artist”[5] This portrait allies itself with the internal sponge-conscious and sponge-gut of Berdey Door; metaphors for an intellectual and critical feed into the thinking “gut” of my art practice.

Listening to others readings of habitat proves useful to my awareness.

E.g. Setting:
In my studio surrounded by inflated pink plastic rubbish bags with ballooning eggy shapes: Plans for a Bird Walk lying across the floor. A fellow student enters.

Narrative:
“This reminds me of the time I was walking with my family on a boardwalk around the park. I noticed something up ahead. I told everyone to “shhhhh” because I could see a White Heron, I was excited and so was my family. We crept slowly and quietly up the walkway trying not to startle the bird. As I crept closer I realized the reality of the situation. I was embarrassed because there, in the long reeds was a white plastic shopping bag moving delicately in the breeze. “Ohhhh Nooo!” I cried, “It’s just a supermarket bag …Sorry (blush)”

Question:
“How did this experience make you feel?” I ask.

Answer:
“I remember feeling funny about it. I was excited to see a White Heron. I felt disappointed that it was, of all things, a plastic bag. This memory reminds me of your work, there’s a hopeful expectation that is failed by its material reality.”

Conclusion:
What interests me most is if the family had known it was a plastic bag, they would have doubtless looked the other way, ignoring it. They didn’t want to see rubbish; they wanted to see a Kotuku. When they didn’t they were forced to think about the plastic bag; what it was doing there and why they never see Kotuku on their walks? Underlying the experience is an active questioning, contemplative optimism and material failure implicit to my practice

In today’s art world the environmental context is propelling into our journals and biennales. Art practitioners are seeing the world and what is happening to it: Posing critical and engaging perspectives on habitat. Artists and art writers are responding to the environmental context. A conference followed by an article on Eco-tistical Art catapults me into a textually inspired direction. "Eco-tistical Art" is the result of Lisa Weintraub’s search “in vain among the 750,000 words that comprise the English language for one that describes humans relating to the nonhuman environment in a harmonious, respectful, and pragmatic manner.” Feeling that this verbal gap is “symptomatic of our cultural disregard for the environment” Weintraub’s search contextualizes the frustration I have experienced searching for pertinent written material. Summing it up when she writes “ecological consciousness is a neglected orphan that is likely to remain unadopted until, at the very least, it is granted its own word.”[6] Eco-tistical art corresponds to the meaning of this adjective, ecological consciousness and new similar words such as “eco-centric” and “cycle-logical”.

“If eco-centric art were compared to a food, it would resemble thick aromatic gravy, not a single food like a carrot or milk. Ecocentric art is an art of merger, subtlety, and richness. It has little in common with simplifying distillations and isolating separations. It is comparable to a symphony, an alloy, a conglomerate. Art conjoins with ecology each time artists synchronize nonhuman organisms, the non-living environment, and human actions” [7]

The thinking around my practice deals with a mixture of human behaviorisms from early childhood development; the way we learn to match colours and shapes; how we learn to investigate and play in our physical world, framed in the habits of daily existence: Mingling unexpected allusions to nature; flora and fauna (non human organisms): Changing the patterning: Transforming the plastic surface and how we commonly read it. The proliferation of things made of plastic in our habitat comprises “the non living environment”. This is my conglomerate of ideas, my symphony of meaning; my gravy. But what does Weintraub mean by “simplifying distillations and isolating separations”? This point was left dangling next to work of Damien Hurst: Vast tanks isolating animal bodies in formal displays, suspended in liquid, separated from life. This cannot be the “simplifying distillations and isolating separations that Weintraub means. I suppose Weintraub is inferring the clinical language of abstraction and minimalism.

How does my clean aesthetic fit into concepts of habitat and “Eco-tistical Art”? Does Damien Hurst have the answer?  Or Dave Burns and Matias Viegener with their crisp leafy green installations of growing corn. Locally I would think of Martin Basher; recently shown at Auckland’s Artspace. His installation of fake pine trees bursting from the illustrated rubble wasteland; bits and pieces of a demolished site amidst the polished brass coated oil drum and piles of newly tinned consumption. Basher’s work clearly illustrates topics of broken ecologies; impacts of our contemporary capitalist culture. The rubble constituting waste emerges in piles on the gallery’s spacious floor; the perky green model-mock pines are healthy and story bookish: A twisted allegory, they are the poisonous survivors in our destructive wake; and the brassy golden drum, some people commented that his installation was “made” by this one immaculate object with its delicate black dribbling spill.

When it’s dark and dirty do people turn away, hiding from repellent visions? Does the mind learn more from things that are presented nicely? Walking down the street, Berdey Door sees people turn away from the homeless. The middle-class-minded population avert their attention from the ugly, repugnant and “too hard basket”. However they return to their dwellings to watch mini versions of the world: Short news bursts, interspaced with jolly commercials; bottoms parked on the couch, relaxing into the night with American crime fiction and “reality” shows. Humans soak up these tidy packages of artificial social interaction and regular singsongy sales; unfortunately learning from the hours spent in front of the TV.  Jerry Saltz recently commented that “Art cannot “help protect the environment” or turn back global warming; it cannot change the world except incrementally or by osmosis”. He states “Art can move thinking along and create new thought structures”. [8] Osmosis is an appropriate term to use. I agree that art can move thinking along. Through osmosis, people can absorb alternative viewpoints.  Sensory osmosis is potentially more effective if viewers are not repulsed and “turn off” their senses. With television, we sit idly entertained; learning how to behave, think, interact and survive. Can Art function in a similar way by engaging the viewers long enough to expose them new ways of seeing through incremental absorption?

Can I make art that aesthetically mocks, parodies and critiques the display of what is observable in our culture? Might I step further and learn from this behaviour, own it, it’s my behaviour too? Putting this habit formed osmotic awareness to use, creating art that combines friendly, clean, soft-edges and playfulness. Observable content containing eco-tistical and eco-centric ideas: enticing viewers “into a sort of allegorical substructure that alludes to or comments on the political context” without being activist work “it’s not the 1980’s up against the barricades political work”[9] . I don’t feel that it is successful to simply blurt out “the world is ‘fucked!’. That doesn’t change anything. To engage viewers with the ironies of our materiality and the impact of our lifestyles, our habits on our habitats, I must tune-in viewers; involve them; to play within the idea. Maybe over time my oddly cheerful ‘topsy-turvy” art can grow in the minds of those who experience it. 

Clean aesthetics and allusions to our habitat can coexist in the art world; Bill Culbert’s glowing plastic bottles; Jae Hoon Lee’s light boxes of luminous sky and earth patterns; the spatially stretched gauzy installations of Ernesto Neto, climaxing as a work when viewers make their way through the giant delicate stretchiness, using the material to make unusual environments to be felt and experienced. More recently Neto pasted pretty puppies onto the internet, sending confused browsers through to nextdaypets.com and qualitydogs.com. Notions of sweetness are epitomized with titles like “sweet little boy” and “tiny size girl”. These ‘pupfections’ are posed on a luxurious velvet backdrop; donning ribbons in their ears and bows on their tails. Sparklingly cute aesthetics are used to increment a darker, dirtier underbelly of internet trading. It is animal trade with sickly sweet similarities to child pornography in some kind of “pet-porn” sale, questioning and parodying the motives and values of our consumptive online environments.

Clean aesthetics don’t compromise environmental integrity. They question the nature of cleanliness. Using ironic aesthetics to appeal to human nature; encouraging viewers to actively observe the artwork’s content. Noted as one of the most significant questions in an Eco-tistical panel discussion was “How best to document and disseminate the work to appropriate audiences and in appealing forms?”[10]

The gagging slogan “A Clean Green New Zealand” hangs around our necks like a strangling fakery. The human population don’t really believe in our clean and green image. Not surprising after polluting the Tarawera River in Kawerau; deforesting 90% of mature rainforest and regularly leaking raw sewage into Auckland’s harbour. We build motorways across wetlands and clear-fell plantation pine: Land of possums and pest species, controlled by the biggest consumptive pest of all; us, clinging to the clean and green perception: At the airport, on buses, in supermarkets, in labelling. It is a habit to describe ourselves, the land and our products like this. Tourism thrives of it; expressing, affirming and selling it. I polish it; showing it up in clean surfaces that also stink of artificiality and toxicity.

Chicho Aoshima recently played a super-flat animation sequence on 5 Sony flat screens; her imagery was fresh, clean and bright. The narrative illustrated something darker and more mysterious, the nature of our cities, the non living landscape came to life; sky-scrapers tipped over burying themselves beneath the earth like foraging worms and caterpillars. The vision was immaculate, ironic and confronting. As a viewer I found it impossible not to be captivated by her mega display, the scale and colour were seductive and hyper-cute. The content hovered over the disturbing edges of our psyche. Berdey Door spent 2 years living in Japan, reading the language of obsessive packaging and consumption; overwhelmed by the cuteness of everything including her “hello-kitty” bank card.  Bringing these readings home Berdey envisions a local wonderland where Possums become a new national epidemic icon. Basically they are already, we just can’t see them hanging out at night chewing the remnants of our forest by the tens of millions, poaching eggs off native fauna. These ideas are not dissimilar to the cultural questioning engaged through Michael Parakowhai’s giant inflatable bunny sculpture recently displayed in Sydney, this super sized best western pest buoyantly bobs unavoidably in the visions of those who see it, what else could it mean in today’s ecological climate, but Pest and associations with Disney.

Plastic comes to us, freshly moulded, its magical transformative qualities of surface and colour. The seductive forms of waste management and infrastructural systems seem geared to glossy up our trash and highlight our artificiality, but it is promptly buried in landfill or hidden beneath the surface of our existence. The general populous behave, immersed in the same ongoing patterns of consumption and waste until somebody comes along, intent on pushing it back into view, exposing its connections to our habits and the habitat and the other life forms that dwell in it.

Berdey’s reading of the environment is very different to reading about the environment or something in it. The first is a direct sensory account. The shear repetitive action of the daily commute gives Berdey Door a birds-eye view from the bus window; she absorbs the prolific activities of digging earth; ancient tree removal; Pukeko families standing at the edge of speeding traffic. This reading provides Berdey Door with a deeper, more sensitive understanding of how the building of a motorway functions in connection with the surrounding habitat.  Reading a book about the motorway; its history, its foundations, design and engineering; doesn’t provide knowledge of the perceptive and sensory experiences involved.

Fuller dares us to ask, “What is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment?”[11] I answer, the environment; it surrounds us; we live on it, off it and in it. “A great majority of conservation biologists agree that we are in the initial stages of a sixth mega-extinction, unlike previous catastrophic extinctions attributed to various geological, astronomical and climatological causes, this one is human-induced”[12] . There is a need to look at the surrounding environment; to read the world around us. It is not difficult to assume that it overrates sports games, Hollywood, new technology and fashion. But it’s not the habit of the masses to consider their surrounding habitats. This is something I cannot understand, so it compels me to find answers by looking closely at world around me: Seeking solutions through expression in art. “I think art has the power to change consciousness and this in turn should help to protect the environment and everything in it”[13]

Brydee Rood Artist Statement 2006