Put Art in Your Arsenal: I began making land art/eco-art and poetry assemblages as a tactic to help local residents prepare to fight fracked-gas pipelines slated to be built in Central Virginia. Learn more about how you can do this kind of project yourself below the gallery. Photographs © Max Johnson.
The Art of Protest: A User Guide
Art can be one of the many tools you use to fight a corporate project that will have negative consequences for the environment and your community. My own #NoPipelines assemblage poetry projects include: Walking Wildwood Trail, Triage, Spooked, Soundings, and The Ties That Bind. They were created in protest of proposed fracked-gas pipelines that would have negative impacts to community health, ecosystems, waterways, and environmental justice.
Do it Yourself
- Location. Get permission from a landowner, business, or public entity to install a piece. The location can be right in the proposed path of the project/pipeline, or in a place with special resonance for you, or both. If you create a “web” of art works the fossil fuel project can’t cross this art “trail” without plowing through one or more of your pieces.
- Bold or Nuanced? Decide whether you are going to make something big and highly-visible to the public (near a roadway?) or something smaller or more camouflaged. If the latter, you can photograph the pieces in situ to publicize the project.
- Choose your materials. If you want the piece to last for a long time choose materials that are impervious to weather such as metal or glass. If you are fine with your art eventually dissolving back into the landscape, over the course of a few seasons, like an Andrew Goldsworthy piece, use biodegradable but weather-resistant materials (wood, bark, beeswax, wool, sisal).
- Choose your medium: Are you going to make 3-D collages, called assemblages? One kind of assemblage is a container of some sort – a box, basket – that is decorated or holds special objects or writing. But you can get creative – use a boot, a baby carriage, an abandoned bird’s nest or a Sunday hat. Or you can go sculptural: tie or fuse found objects together – old plows, sewing machines, pitch-forks; use fiber, make a banner, knit a protective coat for your tree; find materials at a scrap yard or recycling center.
- Just Do It. Make your art. Install it. Photograph it. Film it. Publicize your protest.
- Copyright Registration. Now register your copyright (see the section on this below).
Rooted in the Land
This is the critical part: whatever you make, no matter how simple or elaborate, has to derive its meaning from its location and it must be dug in, tied to, hung from, wrapped around, nestled in…the landscape. If you could just put it in your house or a museum and it would be just as meaningful and just as lovely, then the corporate project/pipeline company could just say “well move it then.” This work has to be as much a part of the landscape as a family graveyard or a piece of historic architecture.
Register Your Copyright
Next, register your copyright with the US Copyright Office. They have an electronic copyright registration process, nicknamed eCO, that allows you to upload photographs of your work. The instructions are user-friendly. It does take many months for your registration to be complete, but in all your letters and comments to the regulatory agencies, the project/pipeline company, the local paper, you can state that you have made a work of outdoor, land-based, installation art and have filed to register the copyright. If it ever comes to using eminent domain lawyers, they can make certain that your art work is taken into account by the project/energy company.
Collaborate
Get in touch with local artists who are eager to stop the proposed pipeline or other destructive project and are willing to collaborate with you to develop a place-based art installation. If you like the assemblage + poetry concept, find a local writer to work with you and the artist(s), developing a concept based on the site, and its human and natural history.
Other Examples
The tactic of using art and poetry to resist environmental destruction and degradation is not new. Here are some examples of how other individuals and communities have used art to save the places they love:
Landowners Put Hope in Art Project to Combat Pipeline. A radio interview with artist Aviva Rahmani about Blued Trees Symphony, a visual art and music project against the Mountain Valley Pipeline. And an online article about the project.
Climate Action Alliance of the Valley in Harrisonburg, VA, worked with sculptors Mark Schwenk and Cheryl Langlais to produce The Defenders, which was exhibited regionally to raise awareness and funds to fight the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Learn more.
Langley Township: Han Shan Poetry Project. Outside of Vancouver a group of writers hung poems in the trees of a threatened forest to save it from being sold to developers. based on the poems of the reclusive Chinese poet Han Shan who left his poems on rocks of the mountains where he lived. Two articles about the project:
McLellan Park Blog
Globe & Mail article
Alberta – Peter von Tiesenhausen’s Fence. This Canadian example demonstrates the point that the physical location and surrounding landscape of these works of land art are integral to their meaning, and these would have be be mitigated by any eminent domain taking. Another piece on the von Tiesenhausen strategy by Jacqueline White.
Stanza Stones is a project in the UK by poet Simon Armitage. Seven stones are inscribed with a one stanza excerpt from Armitage’s poems; the sites are in the Pennine landscape that inspired the poetry.