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Excerpts from the book Conversations Before The End Of Time by Suzi Gablik:
“Rachel Dutton and her husband, Rob Olds, were visionary sculptors until they decided to give up making art a few years ago from a sense of environmental emergency. Dutton’s work, constructed from hay, mud and papier-mâché shaped around an armature, was like a hallucinatory dream-memory of our atavistic link with the animal world, evoking a pretechnological, more spiritual era when humans could merge their consciousness with animals and harmonize with nature. Olds’s works – I recall seeing a couple of homeless men hovering around a garbage can, all made from a lavalike substance that suggested the ruins of Pompeii – were like terrifying holograms of the coming environmental and social anarchy…
Homesteading in a remote part of New Mexico, they had slowly altered their physical reality by progressively shedding their dependence on twentieth-century technologies, and devoting themselves instead to a simple, circumscribed life, attending to the daily matters of sustaining a desert existence and enjoying their activity as artists.
“Then came the letter. It stated that they were giving up everything, selling their land and studios, and using whatever money they had for a lengthy series of courses, in order to learn tracking and wilderness survival skills from a man called Tom Brown, Jr., in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey…
By the time they had written me, they had already given away or destroyed all their sculptures and drawings, to release the energy bound up in the forms, and had canceled their forthcoming shows…
“When he was a boy, Brown was taught ancient survival practices, like how to make bows, clubs and arrowheads, and how to trap, track and stalk by an old Apache warrior and scout called “Grandfather,” who was born in the 1880s. Brown had started his tracking school in order to instruct people about how to survive without modern technological civilization, because of
the vision of its destruction that Grandfather had received during a vision quest some time during the 1920s – much of which has already become reality. Part of Grandfather’s vision was composed of this message: “Earth is dying. The destruction of man is close, so very close, and we must all work to change that part of destruction.” There would be four warnings, or signs, which if heeded would offer humanity a chance to learn the lessons and, by changing its ways, alter its probable future. The first two warnings are famine and a disease born of monkeys, drugs and sex that will destroy mankind from the inside. The third warning is in the form of holes in the sky that cannot be healed. If at this point the decision to change has not been made, all will be lost. Then will ensue the final vision of destruction: the sky turns blood red, and all is poisoned. During this time, the earth will heal itself and man will die.…
“Rob Olds: We went through a whole series of changes just cleaning up the actual physical living of our life. We turned off our refrigerator two and a half years ago, because refrigerators are monuments to ill-usage of energy on the planet. It’s made out of chemicals that hurt the ozone. It’s designed primarily for products of extractive agriculture; it’s for dairy products, it’s
for meat, it’s for the kind of vegetables that are raised and shipped on trucks. And it’s all quite recent.…
“Rachel Dutton: Living on the prairie, in the context of the larger nature that has nothing to do with culture, we slowly started living life as an art. It’s as if washing dishes, if done with presence, is as much of an art form as painting a picture or making a sculpture.
“Suzi Gablik: Did your desire to make the kind of art objects you had made before simply dwindle, and die out in you?
“RD: It just faded away.
“RO: Actually, when we were first on the Rio Grande, we walked down to the river and when I stopped there, I immediately thought, “I’m never going to carve another piece of sculpture again.”…
“SG: Let’s swing around to my generic question for these conversations, “How do we live, then, in a time of decline, or maybe even collapse, and what role does art have?”
“RD: None.
“RO: None. None.
“RD: For me personally, making art was a powerful act, but it was a powerful act because I had no other access to anything more powerful. I had no access to making a daily life of prayer. If you can live your daily life as a prayer, it is inherently more powerful than going to your studio.…
“RD: We went to a lot of trouble to get rid of toxic things in our environment. We still have a car – that’s a tough one. We got rid of the refrigerator. We got rid of the camera. We gave it away, because we didn’t want to use photochemicals anymore to promote ourselves. That’s the end of
your art career right there, if you have no more camera.…
“RO: The basic plan is to sell the house, and pay off the mortgage; and then we’re going to just live someplace as simply as we can… We’ve also realized that you don’t need all this stuff that we live with today. You don’t need to have a mortgage, to have a house that keeps you warm; you don’t
need to have this infrastructure in order to have food. There is enough food in the wild to feed us if we are able to live with the earth…
“RO: Hunter-gatherers are the apex of human civilization. We need to go back to that point. All else is a bastardization and a plague. We can’t assume what is comfortable for s ociety, pick and choose. You’ve got to do it all the way, or not at all. Or we die.”
Posted by reggie at http://tecblogging.blogspot.com/
4/22/2010
Reference courtesy of Paula Allen Berg
7/2010
