Thinking with the Harrisons

What is the role of the arts in the global environmental crisis?

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, known as ‘the Harrisons’, dedicated five decades to exploring and demonstrating a new approach to artistic practice, centred on “doing no work that does not attend to the wellbeing of the web of life.” Their collaborative practice pioneered a way of drawing together art and ecology. They closely observed, often with irony and humour, how human intervention disrupts the dynamics of life as a web of interrelationships. The authors of this book ‘think with’ the Harrisons, critically tracing their poetics as a reimaging and reconfiguring of the arts in response to the unfolding planetary crisis. They draw parallels between the artists’ poetics and rethinking in the philosophy of science, particularly drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead.

Thinking with the Harrisons is for anyone concerned with the implications of ecology as part of a reimagining of public life, including through the interaction of art and science. Throughout their joint practice, the Harrisons sought to engage policy makers, governments, ecologists, artists, and inhabitants of specific places, sensitizing us to the crises that emerge from grounded experiences of place and time.

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/

Exhibition ‘Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work’, 19 September 2024 – 19 January 2025, La Jolla Historical Society, San Diego CA

Keynote Lecture ‘Thinking with the Harrisons: Re-imagining the Arts in the Global Environment Crisis’, 19 November, UC San Diego

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: SEEKING A DIFFERENT PLACE FOR THE ARTS IN SURVIVAL

CHAPTER 2: ‘THINKING WITH’ WHITEHEAD, STENGERS AND THE HARRISONS
The Bifurcation of Nature
Nature as emergent
Adventure and/as a ‘leap of the imagination’
What is ‘adventure’ in the Harrisons’ works?
Inhabiting the bifurcation of nature

CHAPTER 3: THE LAGOON CYCLE
The Poem as Visual Essay
Bifurcation of Nature: Collisions between East and West
Bifurcation of Nature: Exploitation
The Leap of the Imagination
Inventing a field
Adventure
Storytelling
In what sense is The Lagoon Cycle an event?
Conclusions

CHAPTER 4: ON IMPROVISATION
What is improvisation?
An instrument in skilled hands
A fine line between communicability and adventure, between certitude and risk
A predicament, not something freely chosen …
Creating a ‘more to life’
Generative metaphor
What does improvisation make matter?

CHAPTER 5: ON THE POETICS AND AESTHETICS OF SYSTEMS 109 Systems: A way of thinking
Artists and systems – Haacke and Ukeles
Burnham’s Proposed ‘Systems Aesthetics’
The Harrisons’ use of ‘systems’
Spoils Pile Reclamation
Reclamation for whose benefit?
Metaphor as organiser

CHAPTER 6: ON THE POLITICAL
Re-finding humanity: Arendt’s context for writing on the political
Kant’s construction of the political in aesthetics
What does it mean to develop politics based in judgement?
The Harrisons and their publics
The Art of Narrative resides in the Ability to condense the Action into an Exemplary Moment (Kristeva 2020, 17)
The Spectator is not Involved in the Act (Arendt 1992, 63)
Mortality, Communicability, Freedom
How does the political as outlined here work with codes of conduct and constitutional forms?
Otherwise the race of devils would destroy themselves (Arendt 1992, 18)
What to do?

CHAPTER 7: ARTISTS ‘THINKING WITH’ ONE ANOTHER
On questions that drive practice
Pedagogy: Curriculum Proposals
Ballengée, Bon, Goto-Collins and Collins, Sprinkle and Stephens, Wallen
A Wider Reimagining of the Role of the Arts

CONCLUSIONS
NOTES
TIMELINE
REFERENCES
INDEX

Anne Douglas

Anne Douglas is a professor emerita, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland, who explores the changing place of the artist in public life. Her research has increasingly focused on art and the environmental crisis from a practice-led perspective. She co-produced the Harrisons’ work ‘On the Deep Wealth of this Nation: Scotland’ (2017) in collaboration with Newton Harrison and the Centre for the Study of the Force Majeure, University of California Santa Cruz.

Chris Fremantle

Chris Fremantle is a researcher and producer of award-winning projects, including the Harrisons’ project ‘Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom’. He is a longstanding member of the international ecoart network and co-editor of ‘Ecoart in Action’, a collection of activities, case studies and provocations drawn from the network. He lectures at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Scotland.