'Greenwood Pond: Double Site'

 

Supplement to “Conserving Modern Art”

[On 11 December 2018, I published "Conserving Modern Art" on Rick On Theater (Rick On Theater: Conserving Modern Art).  It was a post about the conservation and preservation of modern artworks made of experimental and non-traditional materials and in innovative styles that don’t age well or lend themselves easily to cleaning.

[Last month, the New York Times published an article about Mary Miss’s environmental installation in Iowa, Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989-96), that's going to be dismantled because it’s deteriorating and the museum that owns it doesn’t have the money to repair it.  The culprit is “Iowa’s extreme climate,” says the Times, exacerbated by climate change.

[I'm reposting the Times report as a kind of follow-up to "Conserving Modern Art," but I’m going to supplement it with some thoughts of my own, with reference to that 2018 post, as well as several others on related topics that overlap with the circumstances in Iowa.  Those previous posts are: “Books in Print,” 14 July 2010 (Rick On Theater: Books in Print); “We Get Letters,” 7 April 2015 (Rick On Theater: We Get Letters); and “‘The Future of the Past’” by Evan Moffitt (T: The New York Times Style Magazine), 26 October 2023 (Rick On Theater: "The Future of the Past").

[Each of those reports touches on some aspect of preserving and retrieving precarious but precious work of human hands and minds, largely because they were made of or relied on either materials that were innately ephemeral, such as computer-based or video art and electronic and digital documents, or materials that just didn’t stand up to the contemporary environment.]

“HARSH WEATHER AND ECONOMICS IMPERIL LAND ART”
by Julia Halperin 

[Halpern’s report on the potential loss of Mary Miss’s site-specific environmental sculptural installation ran in the “Arts” section (sec. C) of the New York Times on 23 January 2024.  It was posted on the paper’s website on 22 January as “A Leading Land Art Installation Is Imperiled. By Its Patron” (Leading Land Art Work by Mary Miss Is Imperiled by Its Patron - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).

[Biography of Mary Miss, excerpted from Wikipedia, updated on 24 January 2024:

Mary Miss (born May 27, 1944) is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.

Early life and education

Miss was born May 27, 1944, in New York City, but she spent her youth moving every year while living primarily in the western United States.

Miss studied art and received a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966. Miss later received an M.F.A. from the Rhinehart School of Sculpture of Maryland Institute College of Art in 1968.

Influence in public art

As a public artist, Miss is considered a pioneer in environmental art and site-specific art, as well a leading sculptor during the feminist movement of the 1970s. She was a founding member of the journal Heresies. From her earliest work, she has been interested in bringing the specific attributes of a site into focus along with and audience engagement within public space. Miss’ work crosses boundaries between landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, and graphic communication. Her work creates situations that emphasize a site's history, ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed. She has been particularly interested in redefining the role of the artist in the public domain.

In her influential 1979 essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, art critic Rosalind Krauss opens with a description of Mary Miss's, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys. Krauss uses Miss's work to support her examination of sculpture's interdisciplinary nature between architecture and landscape. South Cove (1988), a permanent public project in Battery Park, is a seminal project in Miss' career as it signified new possibilities for artists working in the public realm. The project, located on a three-acre site at the base of the riverfront Esplande, was made in collaboration with architect Stanton Eckstut and landscape designer Susan Child. "South Cove brings the public more intimately in contact with the water than any other component of Battery park City or, indeed, any other Manhattan riverside park."

Miss has worked on the development of the project City as Living Laboratory, which, according to the project's description, collaborates with artists, environmental designers and scientists to focus on and explore sustainability in cities.

Exhibitions

Miss was included in the exhibition Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists at the Aldrich Museum in 1971. Lucy Lippard was the curator, and other artists included Alice Aycock and Jackie Winsor. She was also included in the exhibition Four Young Americans alongside the artists Ann McCoy, Ree Morton, and Jackie Winsor, curated by Ellen H. Johnson and Athena Tacha at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Along with others, Miss's work has been included in the exhibitions Decoys, Complexes and Triggers at the Sculpture Center in New York, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change organized by Lucy Lippard at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 1970s at the Rose Art Museum, and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern.

Miss has also been the subject of exhibitions at the Harvard University Art Museum, Brown University Gallery, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Architectural Association in London, Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and the Des Moines Art Center.

Awards and honors

Miss received the New York City American Society of Landscape Architects President's Award in 2010, the American Academy in Rome's Centennial Medal in 2001, and a Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects in 1990. She received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1986. She was awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, 1975, and 1974. She was named as a distinguished alumni of UC Santa Barbara in 1985.

Personal life

Miss married sculptor Bruce Colvin in 1967, but later divorced in 1986. She is currently married to George Peck, a New York-based artist. They live together in Tribeca where Miss also has her studio.

[Here’s Miss’s own description of Greenwood Pond: Double Site, from her website (GREENWOOD POND: DOUBLE SITE | Mary Miss):

Initiated by the Des Moines Art Center as one of a series of artist¹s installations in the Museum park, the project was developed over a seven year period. Given the number of organizations interested in the park, I decided to collaborate with various local groups to make a place which would operate on several levels: a site which could be layered onto another site and which would have multiple readings. The importance of the park to the immediate neighborhood is made apparent by invoking and building upon layers of associations and memories which have collected over time. Walking around the pond, shifting between overviews and cut-outs within the water surface, the individual visitor is able to trace an intimate view of the place while putting together a new understanding of how it operates visually and physically. Additionally, the makeup and processes of a Midwestern wetlands become clearer as one understands their role in the immediate environment.

Paths lead the viewer to multiple ways of seeing this place. A walkway overhanging the edge of the pond makes it possible to move out over the water. Proceeding around the water’s edge a ramp disappears into the water after getting the visitor down to the level of the pond. The line of this ramp extends in a long arc across the pond marked first by wood pilings and then by a concrete-lined trough cut into the water. Adjacent to this arc, on the land the walkway continues around the edge of the pond past a series of structures, including a pavilion, a mound and a curving wood trellis to form the other side of the ellipse. A large leaf shaped space is outlined by these structures affirming and making palpable the connection between the land and water. The covered pavilion with a seating area inside is built up against the curving mound, which rises almost to the height of the pavilion and seems to wrap it into the landscape.  Continuing around the edge of the pond a small bridge pavilion allows the viewer to descend to the water once again in an area filled with water lilies.  Proceeding further there is an entrance down into a concrete trough where one is able to sit at eye level with the surface of the water; having been kept to the edge, at a distance, the visitor is able to actually enter the pond.  One feels the protection of the concrete walls holding back the pressure of the surrounding water.   Above the trough, on the other side of the path, is a series of stone terraces, on a hillside filled with prairie grass. Movement is key to the experience of the project; the visitor constructs an understanding of the site through the experience the multiple elements and the relationship created between them.

[Let me define some pertinent terms for readers who aren’t up on art jargon.  Site-specific art, for instance, is artwork created for an explicit place.  Habitually, the artist plans and creates the artwork with the exact location in mind.  Site-specific art can include sculpture, graffiti, rock balancing, and other art forms, as well as combinations of forms and materials.  Installations can be in cities, remote natural settings (like Miss’s Greenwood Pond), or even underwater. 

[Site-specific installations can be intended for permanent installation or temporary display, like the wrapping projects of Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009).  The setting of a site-specific artwork is so vital that, as sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1938) said of it: “To move the work is to destroy the work.”

[Environmental art is work that’s planned to surround or involve the participation of spectators in a three-dimensional space to enclose them and involve them in a whole range of sensory experiences—visual, auditory, kinetic, tactile, and sometimes even olfactory.  In other words, the artist creates an environment into which the viewer enters.

[Environmental art often evokes ecological concerns—especially in the era of climate change—but isn’t always so.  The artists are inspired by nature and often use natural materials such as leaves, flowers, branches, ice, soil, sand, stone, and water as the basis of their artwork.  Furthermore, by situating their work in particular places—that is to say, making it site-specific—environmental art often seeks to both transform the way that the site is viewed, while also revealing what was already there.

[Closely allied to environmental art, land art, also known as earth art, means artworks created within the natural environment—but more than that, they’re created from the environment.  It’s art that’s made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in the landscape using natural materials such as sand, earth, rocks, twigs, and water found on site.

[Greenwood Pond isn’t so much land art as environmental art because Miss brought in construction materials, principally lumber, that wasn’t earthen or indigenous to the location.  A more precise example of land art is Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson (1938-73) on the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, Utah, or City (1970-2022) by Michael Heizer (b. 1944) in rural Lincoln County, Nevada.  The sites of land art are often distant from populated areas and therefore fairly inaccessible.  Photo documentation is commonly displayed in urban art galleries and often sold to support the work itself.]

An Iowa museum says it will dismantle a celebrated work because it lacks the money to repair it.

The American land artist and designer Mary Miss was traveling in Europe in October when she received the kind of news that no one in her line of work wants to hear. One of her most significant artworks, owned by an Iowa museum, would need to be closed to the public because it had fallen into disrepair and parts of it were at risk of collapsing.

Six weeks later, Miss heard from the Des Moines Art Center that her environmental installation would be dismantled entirely. The word came from the art center’s new director, Kelly Baum, who said it would cost $2.7 million to repair the project, leaving the museum no choice.

Created between 1989 and 1996, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” is one of the very few environmental installations in the collection of any American museum and is considered to be the first urban wetland project in the country. Its imminent demolition has angered landscape architecture advocates and upset Miss, who is part of a generation of pioneering female land artists receiving renewed scholarly attention.

“The things that have become so important in my later work — engagement of communities, collaboration with scientists, being able to take on something like climate change as an artist and have a seat at the table with politicians and educators — it started there,” Miss, 79, said by phone from her home in Manhattan. With its wooden boardwalk and concrete walkways that curve along the edge of the water and its cantilevered bridges, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” invites passers-by to explore the landscape; viewers can climb up a tower to see the water from above or descend into a sunken structure to experience it at eye level.

The debate over the work’s fate has highlighted the difficulty of preserving public artworks, especially in environments with increasingly extreme weather. A wave of ambitious outdoor projects commissioned in the 1980s and ’90s have, over the past 15 years, required extensive maintenance or repair, according to Leigh Arnold, curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, who included Miss in the celebrated recent exhibition “Groundswell: Women of Land Art” [Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, 23 September 2023-7 January 2024]. The case of “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” is “symptomatic of this greater problem around site-specific installations in that there is this kind of ‘set it and forget it’ attitude,” Arnold said.

In the late ’80s when artists were rethinking what sculpture could look like outside the white-cube gallery space, the Des Moines Art Center invited Miss, along with the sculptors Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, to develop site-specific works for the city-owned park where the museum is situated. Miss chose a derelict pond. Over the course of seven years, she worked with Indigenous communities, a botanist from Iowa State University, and other groups to restore the area to its original wetland state. In its contract with Miss, in 1994, under the former director Michael Danoff, the museum pledged to “reasonably protect and maintain the project against the ravages of time, vandalism, and the elements.”

The museum says that “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” has been “consistently maintained” since its opening. In consultation with the artist, the museum completed extensive repairs in 2014 and 2015, according to Amy Day, its director of external affairs. But the use of residential deck wood, which has a life span of around a decade, was no match for Iowa’s extreme climate.

“We understand very well the desire to re-engineer and rebuild the work,” Day said. “However, Art Center does not have these resources.”

Miss noted that an outdoor project she made with the same materials in St. Louis has been incrementally upgraded over time, just as one might replace floorboards on a porch, and remains in good shape. She led the effort to repair another one of her installations, in South Cove, a public park in Battery Park City [Lower Manhattan, New York City], in 2019.

Much of Miss’s work focuses on making city residents more aware of their surroundings and their connection to the natural world. For South Cove, Miss, along with the landscape architect Susan Child and the architect Stanton Eckstut, transformed a concrete platform above a landfill into a wild seacoast framed by subtle architectural interventions. Writing in The New York Times in 1990, Tony Hiss likened South Cove to New York fixtures like Central Park and Carnegie Hall for its ability to “stretch our understanding of our connections to one another and to the world the city serves.” In 2008, Miss founded City as Living Laboratory, a nonprofit that brings together artists, scientists and urban residents to tackle sustainability issues.

“It is ironic that other examples of Mary’s really ambitious public art projects aren’t in collections of art museums, yet they are cared for in a way that ensures they will continue to be a part of the public landscape,” Arnold, the Nasher curator, said.

The museum said that its agreement with the city of Des Moines to “remedy and/or remove any unsafe conditions related to artwork in Greenwood Park” takes precedence over its agreement with the artist. Ben Page, Des Moines’s director of parks and recreation, said that the city did not demand the work’s removal but supports the museum’s decision.

The treatment of Miss’s installation is symbolic of the art world’s tendency to undervalue environmental art, said Charles Birnbaum, the director of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy group. The organization helped rally support for “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” in 2014 and is leading the opposition to its destruction. “Landscape architecture is treated as a second- or third-class citizen,” Birnbaum said. “Sometimes it comes from a lack of institutional memory — cultural amnesia for what they had.”

Miss said she was “shocked” by the museum’s estimate that it would cost $2.7 million to salvage “Greenwood Pond: Double Site.” She wondered if the work could be repaired in stages, rather than all at once, using a less expensive wood that could, in the future, be replaced at more regular intervals.

Birnbaum suggested that the museum consult the Des Moines Founders Garden Club or other patrons who might have an interest in funding the work’s preservation. (Baum, the director, told Miss she had had “numerous conversations” with the trustees, the city and individuals who helped fund the work’s rehabilitation in 2014.) In a letter sent to Miss on Jan. 17, the museum’s board wrote that any avenue that called for replacing the materials “is not financially feasible and does not comprise reasonable maintenance.” The museum’s operating budget in 2023 was $7.7 million.

For Miss, the decision feels especially ironic given her prominent position in recent exhibitions revisiting women whose contributions had been minimized by mainstream art history. Her work was included in “52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone,” a restaging of a 1971 exhibition organized by the critic Lucy Lippard at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut [6 June 2022-8 January 2023], as well as “Groundswell” at the Nasher. “Having this acknowledgment begin to surface a bit again and then again be erased — again? Really?” Miss said. “It’s just really hard.”

[In November 2007, I went to an exhibit of the work of painter Morris Louis (1912-62) at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (see my report on ROT on 15 February 2010).  Tacked on to the Louis show was an exhibit intended to offer “insights into the Hirshhorn’s groundbreaking conservation techniques developed to preserve and restore poured-paint canvases by various artists.”  This was the origin of my report “Conserving Modern Art.”

[In that post, I recounted this occurrence in my own small art collection:

I had a serious problem . . . with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo (1958) by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of what the issue here is.  The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, . . . is one of the most cherished pieces I have—because I love the painting for itself, because it’s the first piece of art I ever owned, and because it was a specially selected present from my parents . . . . 

In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now known simply as The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building . . ., the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in downtown D.C.  I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did . . . .  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration. . . .   To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.

[I’m currently working on a collection of letters exchanged between my future parents during World War II.  Today, as I suggest in “We Get Letters,” all their correspondence would be by e-mail or text, and none of it would have survived. 

[Both my parents-to-be saved the letters they received, however, and shortly after they were married, my dad mounted and bound them.  Now, 79 years after they were written, 29 years after my father died and nine years after my mother’s death, I can simply read them! 

[Now, though, I’m confronted with another, related dilemma.  My transcription of the letters and my commentary, all 180-plus pages of it, exists only on my hard disk and, eventually, on my blog.  Both of those are innately evanescent media and require specific technology to retrieve. 

[I’ve been working on the letters project since 2016—that’s eight years of work on and off at a very personally meaningful venture and I would like to preserve it.  I read, appraised, paraphrased or transcribed, interpreted, fact-checked, and commented on 182 pieces of correspondence, and I’m already 77 years old, so I won’t be around a lot longer to pass along this effort unless I can put into some form that’ll last.

[I’ve been considering ways of preserving the eventual post, with my commentary and notes, permanently.  One possibility is a self-published book—though I haven't made any definite decisions yet.  Ironically, that method reverts to an old “technology” that electronic publication is supposed to have supplanted.  (In “Books in Print,” I write about the pleasures of printed books, confessing that “there’s something about a book . . . that makes me resist the idea of e-versions.”)

[How does this all relate to Mary Miss and her Greenwood Pond?  Her environmental installation, my Carton, and the discussion of my parents’ 79-year-old correspondence are all points on a continuum of perishable human artistic and intellectual accomplishment that could—or will—soon be lost forever.

[My letters project is dependent on technology not just for its creation, but for its preservation and retrievability.  I’m only in minimal control of that.  I pointed out in “We Get Letters”: “E-mail”—as well as other forms of electronic writing—"is basically ephemeral . . . .  What’s more, they can’t easily be passed along later to repositories like libraries” or later family members and friends after we’re gone. 

[As investor, public speaker, and writer John Coleman (b. 1981) expressed it in a 2004 Harvard Business Report, “Email is ‘permanent’ in its own way; our electronic messages are easy to keep and search in huge volumes.  But they aren’t tangible and enduring in the same way those old notes are.”

[(In 2015, I came across a cache of letters my father sent to my mother while they were apart for a month in 1962, when my dad was in Germany before my mother joined him.  I transcribed them and posted them as “Home Alone” on 12. 15, and 18 June 2015.  If e-mail or texting had existed 62 years ago, would I have even found those messages?)

[As for the Carton and Greenwood Pond, they are both vulnerable because of the materials from which they’re made.  Norman Carton’s painting wasn’t made with experimental pigments; the oil paint he used was the same as that used by artists for decades.  What was new was the way he applied it to the canvas: thickly, just as it came out of the tube.  Artists had only just begun to use that technique, so no one knew how it would perform over time.

[I doubt it was something anyone—artists, collectors, gallerists, curators—was concerned about when Carton and his contemporaries starting experimenting with impasto.  How could they know that 30 years after Intermezzo was painted, 25 years after my parents gave it to me for my 14th birthday, and 5 years after the artist died, trouble would start to appear.

[Mary Miss didn’t use particularly new-fangled materials or innovative techniques to build Greenwood Pond: Second Site.  In fact, she used basic materials—treated lumber, metal mesh, steel, stone, and concrete, all easily repaired or replaced.  What she and the curators and directors of the Des Moines Art Center didn’t reckon on was the effects on an outdoor installation of Iowa’s harsh winter climate, particularly with the added battering of climate change.  On an annual budget of $7.7 million, the museum says it can’t afford the $2.7 million to repair Greenwood Pond.

[The DMAC announced last October that “public access” to the work has been “temporarily suspended” while it undergoes a “complete structural review.”  Soon after that, however, with no substantial consultation with Miss, the museum notified the artist of the decision to demolish Greenwood Pond.  Miss said she’s “shocked that this decision has been reached so quickly on the future of Greenwood Pond: Double Site.”

[The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a non-profit that “educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards,” suggests the DMAC has not fulfilled its contractual obligation to “reasonably protect and maintain” the work.

[TCLF is calling for the DMAC to reverse its demolition decision and, instead, to engage in meaningful consultations with Miss and others to find a solution that restores the artwork and develops a long-term, ongoing maintenance plan.  The organization has raised many questions regarding the DMAC’s decision, laid out on its website at Acclaimed Artist Mary Miss’ Renowned Land Art Installation "Greenwood Pond: Double Site" to be Torn Down by Des Moines Art Center | TCLF.  Among these are: what are the DMAC’s maintenance conservation protocols concerning permanent works in its collection and how were they applied to this artwork? and how and why did the DMAC permit Greenwood Pond: Double Site to deteriorate to the point where demolition was thought to be the only option?

[Julia Halperin is a freelance arts and culture journalist, writing monthly column for the Art Newspaper, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Financial Times.  After working her way up through the ranks at the Art Newspaper to museums editor, Halperin was appointed executive editor of Artnet News in 2017.  She co-founded the Burns Halperin Report in 2020, which has become an influential indicator of inclusivity in the art world.]