Based in a theory of art integrally related to earth, my art practice is a form of transplantation/transplanting. It finds its roots in Minimal Art, or better, in the transplanting of Minimal Art into the installation art form known as earthworks pioneered by the American artist Robert Smithson. Smithson's practice 'uprooted" Minimalism. One might say that he deterritorialised it, taking it out of the art gallery into the outside world. In that gesture, Smithson responded to Marcel Duchamp's famous importation of non-art into the gallery, ostensibly turning non-art into art by the very act of that transplantation. Rather than maintaining the gallery as the locus or on the other hand simply seeking to negate it, Smithson arguably inverts, transplants and re-radicalises Duchamp's gallery, making the earth itself the new gallery of art. In doing so, I would argue, he makes of the field of art - and of his inquiries into and as art - the earth itself. He makes, that is, earth into the field, making himself into what I propose to call a "field artist". My use of the garden (which I see as a practice arriving via the feminine) is reanimated via a link to Smithson's Site/Nonsite concept. The garden also asserts what for me was lost through migration, for a generation the language of the maternal line. The gesture of the Asphalt Rundown by Smithson (after Pollock's 'drips') brought the question of mining to play in the galleries of Manhattan. Likewise with the inclusion of my Boronia project, I want to include another field of neglect. Transplanting represents a process for me, and this is a crucial point. When I use the term transplanting, I mean to subsume within it such processes as change, mutation, metamorphoses, morphing, and so forth. In other words, my art practice, as well as that of Smithson, is a practice of process, the process of transplanting. Smithson was not literally a migrant, but he was a traveller. In making the earth the new space/place of art, Smithson acknowledges both the earth and art, as well as the artist, as creative media. His enterprise opens up several possible models of the relationship of art and the artist to the earth as he reconceptualises the earth as earth, as ground, as field. In line with Heidegger's thought, I propose that art can be considered as ecology and the artist as an ecologist, as the transplantation/transplanter of the creativity of earth into the creativity of art. Here art becomes commensurate with, and faithful to, what earth is. One might appeal at this point to the idea of good husbandry, cultivated by Shakespeare in the figure of the right role of the king: that things should be as they are. Creative endeavour across arts and sciences --becomings, must be fostered. I recognise that art is a form of planting, of boundless productivity, the drawing forth of good produce from the ground. A more complex model of transplanting would see creativity, including of earth, inextricably caught up with not only what takes root but what uproots, deracinates, disperses, disseminates the seed. There is an ecology here too, but not a simple one.
| Date of Award | 2011 |
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| Original language | English |
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