 Welcome everyone to session two today. And today we're going to be engaging in a panel concerning the notion of the environment, whether the natural environment or the designed environment, the human made environment and especially on the relationship between the two. And I'm very pleased to introduce as our first speaker William Schwaller from Temple University who will be addressing the ecologies of art in the 1970s in Argentina. And William will be introduced by his advisor, Dr. Mariola Alvarez, please welcome. Hello, my name is Mariola Alvarez and I'm an assistant professor of art history. And I'm thrilled to introduce my advisor, William Schwaller. He's currently a PhD candidate in the art history department at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, at Temple University in Philadelphia. Schwaller arrived at Temple with a BA from Grinnell College and completed his master degree with us. His dissertation tentatively titled A Transnational Art of the Systemas, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación in Argentina and abroad, 1968 to 1983, studies the pioneering Centro de Arte y Comunicación or Center for Art and Communication known as CAIC and post-war Buenos Aires. A multimedia platform with a focus on advanced technology like using the computer for art production, CAIC launched many prominent Argentine artists and contributed to a thriving local art scene through their program of lectures, readings, film screenings and visits from foreign artists, curators and intellectuals. In the project, Schwaller makes a case for how CAIC was central to the development of an international exchange of information about systems art, computer art and ecological art, therefore considering the circulation of ideas through a consolidated model. Schwaller was the recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Student Program Award and traveled to Buenos Aires to conduct his research in museums, archives and libraries and completed interviews with Argentine artists and scholars. He has also received grants to conduct research at the Getty Research Institute and to visit Argentina and Brazil through the Terra Foundation for American Art. His most recent publication was featured in the Argentine Journal, Tarea, El Anuario del Instituto de Investigaciones sobre el Patrimonio Cultural. He has also presented his research at the most recent CAA and CCAC conferences. I am confident that Schwaller's dissertation on CAIC and its international ecological and new media program will make a significant impact on Latin American and global contemporary art. His talk today is titled The Ecologies of Art in 1970s Argentina. Thanks. Hello, I'm grateful to have been invited to share my work in this symposium. I'd like to thank the organizers at the Barnes, Dr. Katz for your powerful keynote and for moderating this session and to Dr. Alvarez for your kind introduction. Before beginning my paper, I'd like to acknowledge that I am speaking today from Lenape Hoking, part of the ancient homeland and traditional territory of the Lenape people from which they were removed. I'd like to acknowledge that my paper also unfolds on the territories of the Mapuche and the Charua people. The name Mapuche, in their language, Mapun-Dugun, means people of the earth. I pay respect to them, their ancestors, and their continuing presence, given the irony that my presentations focus on burgeoning environmental consciousness developed among Argentine artists in the 1970s, almost exactly 100 years following a genocidal military campaign that killed and displaced those peoples of the earth in an effort to expand and establish the country as a modern, liberal economic state based on extractive capitalism. By the 1970s, amidst an increasing global awareness of the negative impacts of human activity on the world's ecosystems and informed by contemporary discussions of dependency theory, many Argentine artists began to produce works that visualized and critiqued the complex intersections of nature, the built environment, pollution, food systems, and energy. In the early 1960s, Antonio Berni began a series of works depicting a young boy, Juanito Laguna, living in Buenos Aires, Shantytown, constructed with the very waste and detritus of this industrial metropolis. By the end of the decade, Nicolas Garcia Uriburu would produce his iconic series of proto-environmentalist interventions that visualized the antagonisms between the built environment and nature. Carlos Ginsburg used language to intervene in rural and urban landscapes while Luis Benedit brought nature into the gallery within artificial ecosystems to contain and nurture vegetal and animal life. Victor Griepo turned the humble potato into a symbol of the caloric, chemical, and social energy latent within Latin America and its natural resources. While Luis Paso's pop anti-monument to world hunger critiqued the asymmetrical conditions of trade and resources between first and third world countries. These artists represent a portion of a diverse field of early ecological art in Argentina, which paralleled in many ways the varieties of land art, and some aesthetic and art de povera found contemporaneously in numerous international art communities. In their revisionist survey of land art, curators Miwang Kwan and Philip Kaiser addressed the international scope of such practices, which included six artists from Latin America out of about 90 in total, two of which were Brazilian and four Argentines, Ginsburg and Uriburu who I just introduced, Juan Carlos Romero and Horacio Zabala. Kwan and Kaiser argued rightly in their catalog essay that quote, while American deserts are considered the prime sites for land art, deserts in Antarctica, La Sahara, and Israel with entirely different topographical and geopolitical, social, historical, and aesthetic conditions were significant sites of artistic activity, end quote. Yet further analysis of these distinct international conditions that brought about such varied interventions within nature was absent from their catalog, which continued to focus solely on canonical land art from the US and Western Europe. Interestingly, the conditions that would impact the kinds of ecological art that was produced in Argentina had already been addressed by the cultural critic Esther Garcia Kenclini in 1973. He explained quote, neither the demographic explosion nor pollution are a matter of direct interest to Argentina. We are sparsely populated and the tuberculosis of our children is not due to smog, but to misery. Thus, it makes it even more absurd in countries like ours, the flight to nature in search of an uncontaminated space for artistic creativity, end quote. For Kenclini, the socioeconomic condition of misery, which he described in terms of third world dependency, ought to be the concern of truly avant garde artists, even those working within nature and ecology. Since any local version of earthworks in the vein of Robert Smithson or Michael Heiser would simply be relocating autonomous bourgeois art from the white keep of the gallery to the tabula rasa of the unpopulated landscape. And with few exceptions, Kenclini was correct. Few Argentine artists were drawn to the expansive Argentine landscapes of the verdant Pampas Plains, while those that did engage with landscape and bring natural materials into their works did so in direct relation to socio-political concerns. As a result, the ecological works of Argentine artists stand out for their insightful ability to conceive and articulate the intersections of environmental subjects with socio and political issues in a way that preceded any local environmentalist movement and contemporary discussions of environmental justice. In this presentation, I will begin to address the ecocritical significance of several Argentine works by Benedith, Buriburu, Pasos, and Grippo as they offer unique avenues to understand the state of ecological concern among Argentine artists and how they responded to the changing environmental, social, and political conditions of the 1970s. For his 1968 exhibition, Microsu, Benedith exhibited for the first time sculptures and paintings in acrylic that contained habitats for various animals, painted with cartoon-like scenes of nature, like the habitat for a fish seen on the screen. These were playful works with novel forms, but they were also motivated by a fundamentally ecological concern. How might nature endure the continued encroachment of cities and human industry on natural environments? He explained, quote, It is about taking the animal out of its natural habitat and giving it an artificial ecological niche. If the animal can live in it, we are one step closer towards a future experience with human beings. Nature is disappearing. The cities fill up everything. We will have to say goodbye to natural life as best as possible, becoming an artificial nature, end quote. As a result, these were less whimsical new media artworks or artisanal pet habitats for the collector slash pet owner, but rather experimental ecosystems meant to model a future where nature has been supplanted by human-built environments. Benedith's life was uniquely spanned the transformations of Argentina's landscape from the late 1930s when he was born and the country's robust agricultural export economy began to collapse with a transition to industrialization and its accompanying mass migrations of farmers to factories in Buenos Aires. Benedith's training as an architect, no doubt offered him unique insights into the changing built environment as well, which by the 1970s was typified by the related and yet dramatically distinct constructions of modern skyscrapers financed by multinational corporations and the ever-growing regions of Villas Musellias or Shantytowns, constructed by people like the migrant farmers who were the protagonists of, like the protagonist Juanito Laguna and his father. Thus, Benedith's impulse to construct artificial ecosystems for the future survival of organic life was a kind of dystopian response to the progressive industrialization and dramatic growth of the capital city. While Benedith saw his artificial ecological niches as a necessary experiment for survival in the face of civilization's inevitable encroachment on the natural environment, Buriburu produced ephemeral manifestations that, in his words, denounced the antagonism between nature and civilization in order to defend ecology. After producing an environmental exhibition composed of an artificial garden of plexiglass forms in the shape of sheep, cats, bulls, flowers, clouds, and rainbows that you can see on the left, Buriburu was left with the impulse to work with nature itself and embark on his iconic series of colorations that died waterways and fountains in major metropolitan cities of fluorescent chartreuse, which included the Grand Canal of Venice in 1968 that you can see on the right. Yet initially this green dye was not intended to convey an ecological message. It wasn't until after spending a few months living in New York and executing a coloration of the East River that he, according to the French critic and a lifelong friend of his, Pierre Rastani, positioned the ephemeral spectacle of dying an urban river green in terms of an antagonism between nature and civilization. The green stain of his colorations would retrospectively stand for the verdant green of nature. That same year, the artist returned to Buenos Aires and found his growing ecological sensibility manifested in both an aesthetic practice and in his civic life. After witnessing crews digging up several decades old hacaranda trees in the Plaza Grand Bourg to make room for an array of statues dedicated to Argentina's historical military leaders, Buriburu staged a public protest and penned a lengthy op-ed in the prominent newspaper La Nación, both of which you can see on the screen. He commented, quote, it is time in Argentina to become aware of things. It is no longer a country so new that it ignores such elementary things as respect for nature and the elemental good taste of not dirtying the cities with bronzes that have no artistic value, end quote. With this comment, the artist spoke of a need for Argentine citizens to develop a critical sense of environmentalism. Buriburu's position largely reflected the state of environmentalism at that time, which lacked any centralized movement or independent institutions dedicated to the topic, featuring instead highly localized groups that mobilized to denounce specific instances of abuse or devastation. Buriburu's protest of the tree removal was such a localized action. And for time, I'm going to skip over this slide, which is a little bit more historical and to continue in that same year in 1970, Buriburu began a series of monumental paintings of the Latin American landmass that communicated a desire for regional solidarity based on the ecological and geographical unity of the continent. Privileging contiguous geographies over political divisions, the artist represented Latin America as an environmental unit. The titles stenciled on the bottom of these two canvases read on the left, Latin America, natural reserves of the future, united or suppressed. And on the right, Latin America, united by rivers. Referencing a unifying vision of the region's geography and natural resources that act also as metaphors for political unity and echoing iterations of Pan-Americanism that go all the way back to the period of independence and that were communicated by figures like Simone Bolivar. According to art historians Mariana Marchesi and Isabel Plancha, these works reiterate a contemporary and widespread leftist ideology of anti-imperialism and political solidarity among Latin American and other third-world countries. Plancha also points out Urdi-Buru's quotation of Argentina's former president Juan Perón who expressed the urgency of this position while in exile in 1968 saying, quote, the integration of Latin America is indispensable. The year 2000 will find us united or dominated, end quote. As a nationalist populist, Perón vehemently admonished the coercive control that developed nations like the United States held over the economies of the third world, which perpetuated the dependency and underdevelopment of the latter. Julieta Gonzales's recent exhibition in catalog memories of underdevelopment convincingly explained the ideological and discursive use of dependency theory for post-war Latin American artists reflecting on the effects of underdevelopment of poverty, pollution, and exploitation of natural resources. Gonzales notes how for many artists maps were useful in, quote, addressing the problem of dependency from an ideological standpoint, end quote. For Urdi-Buru, the map offered a method to depict a political ecology of Latin America based on environmental sovereignty where Latin Americans could use and preserve their land without foreign pressures. Gonzales also acknowledged artist's attention to land stemmed from an interest in the, quote, asymmetrical relation between poverty in Latin America and its abundance of natural resources in raw material, end quote. This asymmetrical or even paradoxical relation is at the heart of many artists' responses to the issue of hunger, including Victor Griepo and Luis Pasos. In September in 1972, the arts institution, the Centro de Arte y Comunicación, organized its second outdoor exhibition in the Plaza Roberto Art in downtown Buenos Aires. Titled, Arte y Ideología, Caíca la de Libre, or Art and Ideology, Caíca in the Open Air, a diverse range of sculptures, installations, and performances were exhibited outside seeking direct engagement with the everyday public of the city and eschewing the traditional and elite spaces of the art gallery. This downtown Plaza, Luis Pasos, produced a work that aimed to satirize the developing world's patronizing attitudes towards the developing world's hunger problem. Titled, Project for the Solution of the Problem of Hunger in Underdeveloped Nations According to the Largest Powers, Pasos initially envisioned creating a four meter cubed bale of alfalfa with a giant pink bow and a tag that read, Feed the Hungry. We can see variations of this idea on the slide. From the title of the work, we can appreciate Pasos's critical and satirical stance toward powerful developed nations and their ideas for solving the issue of hunger. That global powers could solve this issue by gifting giant bales of alfalfa is certainly a whimsical if not absurd proposition. One might consider also the choice of alfalfa as a solution to hunger given that it is not foodstuff consumed by humans in the form of hay but rather that for livestock. In this way, the work satirizes the very concept of food aid and that the first world nations have patronizing and self-aggrandizing ideas for how to truly help developing nations. Pasos was aware that sections of Argentina were reporting hunger and food insecurity but it was not due to the lack of cereal grains which were sufficient in supply for both domestic and international demand. It was rather due to the effects of developmentalism driven by the demands of foreign global powers which increased urbanization and manufacturing in cities and diminished labor in rural regions which when combined with severe inflation drove everyday goods to cost prohibitive prices. Pasos's anti-monument to hunger thus sought to address the absurdity of this cyclical loop of dependency initiated and perpetuated by the first world. Víctor Gripo's contribution to Caícal Aire Libre addressed the theme of hunger by looking to local resources local sources of resilience. Gripo collaborated with fellow artists Jorge Gamada and a rural worker Eirosi to build a brick and mud wood-fired oven in the center of the plaza. The work treated this object which was common to rural communities in Argentina as a ready-made albeit a ready-made with a practical and social function titled Construction of a Traditional Rural Oven for Making Bread. It was a pedagogical object in the eyes of the artist as it offered the city folk of Buenos Aires with information about the customs from the interior of the country. Displaying these alternative forms of knowledge and communal life offered an alternative to the mass tourism of the metropolitan city as it was a product of developmentalist ambitions to model culture on the first world despite unequal economic conditions. As a reaction to dependency Gripo exemplified how, according to Gonzales again, artists reclaimed local forms of knowledge as well as popular and vernacular expressions recognizing the value of cultural manifestations born out of conditions of material poverty. Gripo's oven presented the urban population with a local alternative to western capitalist consumerism by demonstrating alternative social and ecological relationships while also using the pretext of aesthetics to offer knowledge and solutions related to the issues of hunger and food systems. I'd like to quickly conclude with Gripo's series of works that used the potato as another kind of expression because it speaks to a kind of ecological thinking that as I've been arguing is more explicitly sociopolitical than conservationist albeit here in a poetic key. I will spare you an extended treatise on the amazing qualities in historical and ecological contributions of the potato in which Gripo was steeped. As with his rural oven the potato attracted Gripo as it is a talk-the-ness to the Americas. Having studied chemistry in college he was also aware of its ability to conduct electricity. With this hidden quality of the potato and its often under-recognized indigeneity to the Americas Gripo found an immense wealth of meaning and poetic symbolism. The work here Analogia 1 or Uno Analogy 1 held 40 potatoes placed in individual compartments each pierced by two electrodes all of which were wired into a voltometer that when pressed would read out the combined electrical output of the tubers. The work effectively a large potato battery demonstrated again in a pedagogical mode certain invisible yet literally powerful characteristics of the humble vegetable. Gripo has explained his pedagogical mode in the following way quote art discovers hidden or obscured relationships if one of my work rediscovers the energetic capacity of the potato of such a common food stuff which is ingested almost without being seen because there is never a day without a potato for any inhabitant of the planet it is because I tried to provide a totalizing image that would destroy or debilitate this kind of blindness that has made it nearly impossible to most people for Gripo that blindness is related to consciousness the analogy that is referenced in the works title is that for him the potato is analogous to consciousness Gripo wants you to see and to rediscover the potato because he also wants you to raise your perception like the energy latent within a potato there is a hidden quality of consciousness that is equally transformative when activated and immensely powerful when brought together in community the result of this analogy is itself a metaphor for the collective power that could be attained among Latin Americans either as individuals or in groups finding collective power agency and consciousness to address local issues such as standing up against political violence or repressive military governments which would be an apt illusion at the time that this was made or other obscured relationships like the political and economic manipulations of the first world powers with these examples I hope to have demonstrated some of the varied forms and methods Argentine artists have employed with their ecological subjects and materials they produced works that responded to their environmental, social and political climates by reflecting on their intersectionality on the consequences of developmentalism, dependency and the need to raise consciousness and solidarity thank you great thank you very much William that was an incredibly powerful talk in one of the few times that I've really felt like I got to understand what the Argentine environmental artists were doing at a moment that is remarkably early among the earliest environmental art that at least I know of so thank you very much for that it's a real pleasure to next bring on board Emily Leifer of Bryn Mawr College who will be speaking on environment environmentalism in the work of Maria Nordman's Saddleback Mountain and will be introduced by Homemade King Hello I'm Homemade King professor and Eugenia T. Skylde chair in the humanities in the department of history of art at Bryn Mawr College it's my great pleasure to introduce my student Emily Leifer who is a candidate in the history of art who is currently writing a dissertation entitled light and space Los Angeles installation art and the environment of the 1970s from which her presentation today is derived Emily received her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University followed by a masters from Williams College with a thesis on James Terrell she has delivered talks previously at the Bryn Mawr graduate group Biannual Symposium at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia her published work on contemporary art includes texts on David Evans France and C. Andine Chagoya in the collection Axis Mundo Queer Networks in Chicano LA she has curatorial experience at David's Werner Gallery the AC Institute and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum where she undertook research on Bruce Nauman, Richard Zara of Wheeler. Her talk today is entitled environment and environmentalism in Maria Nordman's Saddleback Mountain thank you. Thank you so much to the Barnes for hosting this Dr. King for that lovely introduction and Dr. Capps for moderating this portion of today's proceedings retrospectively acknowledged as a landmark of the light and space movement artist Maria Nordman created Saddleback Mountain a solo exhibition at the art gallery of the University of California, Irvine this little known artwork from the understudied Los Angeles installation artist was on view from September 25th to October 28th 1973 for this gallery sized work Nordman constructed a narrow hallway to lead viewers from the entrance of the building into a large and empty room almost totally devoid of light as the site specific work has not been recreated since its premiere I hope archival documents and first-hand accounts can help clarify what the work would have looked like a lithograph of a floor drawn by Nordman was included in the opening pages of the catalog that accompanied the exhibition it indicated the layout and dimensions and program of the installation Nordman utilized the four existing walls of the gallery building a floor to ceiling with a long diagonal drywall partition to create an expanding entrance tunnel a mere 22 inches at its start and 5 feet wide at its end at the end of the tunnel Nordman rounded off the corner of the gallery and inserted a long narrow floor to ceiling mirror standing 16 feet high but only 11 inches wide she specified that there be no electric lights installed near the entryway so that sunlight could flow directly from the outdoors into the piece the floor was white concrete while the walls were painted white and gray in order to reflect and concentrate the sunlight as the rays trickled in through the slender corridor the angled mirror directed them into the darkened gallery this reflected light is marked on the floor plan as a deep hypotenuse wall of natural light the sunlight reflected from the entrance of the building created a diffuse array that to viewers formed a faint vertical sheet of light diagonally dividing the gallery in the top installation image we can see the light streaming in through the corridor and hitting the narrow mirror in the corner in the bottom image taken from the opposite angle we can see the edges of what to viewers would have appeared as a luminous wall light reflected off the long narrow mirror and projected across the square room into the opposing corner Nordman's work shares much with that of her fellow Los Angeles installation artists Bruce Nauman and James Terrell Nauman also constructed corridors for viewers to traverse in his 1971 changing light corridor with rooms viewers walked down a claustrophobic hallway rooms built on other side contain flashing lights which projected into the narrow space at differing intervals creating an unsettling perceptual experience James Terrell in his 1974 Wedgework 3 constructed angled walls and installed artificial lights in the gallery to create the illusion of diagonal veils of light dividing the space like Nordman he also manipulated light to create seemingly intangible spatial effects yet Nordman's piece of differs from these in a significant way on the floor plan C specified mirror with reflection of entrance indicating that when viewers turn to exit the gallery they face the reflecting mirror again but from the opposite angle this encounter revealed that not only did the mirror direct sunlight into the gallery but also contained a reflection of the entry portal and the surrounding landscape beyond further highlighting the intrusion of landscape into this abstract sensory illusion a on the floor plan marks both the arrival to the work and the departure from it the departure is described with the words mountain tree sky this photograph shows the view looking out from the installation viewers would have encountered a narrow strip of landscape with grass trees and nebulous mountains in the far background this scene concluded one's experience of the installation the press release for the exhibition made note of this intriguing incorporation of the natural world explaining quote the specially constructed exhibit combines a perceptually dynamic interior space with the mirror reflection of a distant landscape of trees and mountains utilizing the minimal materials the natural effects of her light and space peers such as Bruce Naumann and James Turrell Nordman made the natural landscape part of her artwork prompting the viewer to connect to their sensory experience inside the installation to their experience in the wider environment I claim that Nordman's work hinges on the slippage between two definitions of environment given in the Oxford English dictionary number one quote the area surrounding a place or thing, physical context such as the dark and closed space surrounding the viewer as they experience Nordman's installation and number two quote the natural world or physical surroundings in general especially as affected by human activity such as the bright open landscape into which viewers emerged upon exiting the work I argue that by evoking interdependence between the viewer and their surroundings on three different scales individual perception architectural structure and local landscape Nordman was able to connect to the intimate relationship between the self and its surroundings inside the work demonstrated by the optical illusion of the light wall to the intimate relationship between the self and its surroundings outside the work in one's ecological interdependence on the natural environment I contend that her work foregrounds the inextricability of humanity from the planet Earth coming into focus in the environmentalist movement of the early 1970s Saddleback Mountain drew viewers' attention to their own process of perception by isolating the phenomenon of vision in the sparse installation one was encouraged to recognize the way one's eyes reacted to the ambient light and the way one's brain processed those external cues curator Michael Albing described his experience of the work in the 2011 catalog for phenomenal California light space and surface quote, at the end of the corridor you came into a large dark space as in Nordman's studio pieces your eyes had to adjust when they did you noticed the subtle laser beam like shaft of light coming from the mirror and bisecting the gallery Nordman had in effect created a transparent wall of light where the light came from was never clear to me it simply appeared beginning and gaining intensity until it became almost physical at first the darkened room was disorienting but eventually Albing's pupils expanded and his eyes began to register the small amount of light present in the space this experience must have been like entering a darkened movie theater after plunging into darkness we slowly adjust the lower light levels and eventually find our seats from Albing's account one might deduce the ontological complexity of Nordman's wall of light it does not exist solely in the physical space of the gallery as its appearance is an artifact of the way the human eye and mind process light but neither does the wall exist solely in the mind of the viewer as it is occasioned and co-created by the external presence of a certain level and distribution of light it only exists in the interaction between the viewer's eyes and the light present in the room if only one half of this equation were present either the beam of light or the perceiving participant the effect would not exist this is evident in attempted photographs of the installation although a convincing analog in many ways the camera is not an eye and does not respond in the same way in this installation photograph one can see that when the shaft of sunlight interacted with the camera the illusion of a tangible glowing and dividing wall did not materialize a white line runs up the walls across the floor and ceiling describing the perimeter of a rectangle but not manifesting a wall this image ultimately fails to represent the work because its main content interaction between the eye of the participant and their environment cannot take place the existence of this phenomenon is dependent both on the external presence of light and the viewer's internal reaction to it by manipulating light in this way Nordman isolated an evocative example of interdependent relationship between the perceiving body and its surroundings Saddleback Mountain was constructed like a camera a darkened chamber with a restricted aperture that allowed light to enter however, unlike a camera in Saddleback Mountain light was not used to create a durable fixed image instead light itself was the image we can speculate that if the 16 foot tall mirror used in Saddleback Mountain were scaled down to a matter of inches it may have projected a faint picture of the outside world onto the wall of the gallery installed as it was the image of the exterior world did not resolve but remained an abstract beam of light this beam of light became not an agent of transcription recording information about the world but a synecdoche of the world which stands for the whole in Saddleback Mountain the world disclosed itself not through images but through the material presence of light Alping has reported quote, Nordman later told me the piece was simply about turning the building into a conduit or channel to allow nature in the form of image and light to move through it in this way one might say that light flows through a camera as nature flows through Nordman's installation the outdoors pierced the architectural envelope and sunlight made its way into the art gallery this light did not illuminate other works but simply marked its own presence the permeability of the architectural boundary echoed that of the perceptual self light had to transgress both the membrane of the eye and the architectural confines of the gallery to create the focal illusion of this installation Nordman's installation thus pointed to the inextricability of the inside and outside both on a bodily and architectural scale bringing into question the very notion of separation between a subject and its surroundings by using the pervasive and natural material of sunlight Nordman motioned toward the prevalence of interactions between the body and the environment not only in such special circumstances as the enclosed gallery but in once everyday interactions with the wider world however it was more than the choice of sunlight and its transgression of the interior exterior divide that connected this enclosed installation to the world around it Nordman's incorporations of sounds and images of the landscape encircling the gallery worked in concert with their emphasis on perceptual effect to shift the viewer's sense of interdependence from the individual scale to the ecological scale the surrounding landscape most directly entered the installation via the tall narrow angled mirror at the transition from the entryway to the gallery. Prominent collector of light and space Art Rolinda Warts described her experience of encountering this reflection in a review of the exhibition quote the opening turns out to be a mirror and the viewer is brought into contact with himself in the foreground and a framed image of nature hills and clouds in the background the forced perspective of the environment and the exaggerated verticality of the mirror make distances seem great and the viewer feels small and aware of his relation to the vastness of the universe in the mirror as in the installation more generally the viewer is brought into contact with themselves while in the rest of the piece they have been primed to pay attention to their role as seer in the mirror the viewer confronts themselves as an object of vision surrounding the self-reflection reflection, this encounter of seer and scene was the image of hills and clouds in the background Warts understood these hills to stand for the abstract category of nature facing into the mirror she was confronted with the notion that both the self and the surrounding world exist simultaneously and inextricably on the floor plan we can see that the 51 foot long channel for the entry of one person functioned both as a light lens and a directional microphone this means that instead of blocking out the sound from the surrounding environment Nordman carefully constructed the angles of the entrance passageway to direct external sounds into the gallery and even to amplify them she explained quote the interior is filled with the sounds selected by the entrance channel like a bird a block away a passing jet or tree sounds whatever falls into that range the world was welcomed into Nordman's installation through the sunlight reflected in the mirror the image of hills and clouds as well as in the sounds funneled through the entryway a world replete with birds trees and jets while the viewer focused on the mechanisms of their perception the very basis of their interaction with the world they were primed to remember that they share that world with others finally one must consider saddleback mountain itself Nordman explained to the shows curators that quote when I came out to Irvine to draw up the floor plan I just walked around a lot after a while the building seemed to recede and I began to see new animals plants the unspoiled parts of nature and the saddleback mountain from this quote it is clear that the landscape was not auxiliary to the perceptual environment constructed in the gallery but was in fact Nordman's primary inspiration when saddleback mountain opened in 1973 UC Irvine was a brand new school founded in 1965 and Irvine California was a brand new town incorporated in 1971 in this archival photograph from the early days of the university the influence of saddleback mountain on one's experience of the Irvine site becomes much more evident in an article about the piece Nordman wrote quote, saddleback mountain takes place in a landscape that not so long ago was completely unspoiled this point interests me a lot right now the land and its use the activities that are stored in it the place and its memory bank Nordman was concerned with the landscape with the history of how the land was used and its continued existence through time she continued quote the channel was directed at 65 degrees to aim at this part of the landscape and when the piece is dismantled on October 27th the mountain will remain as a fragment of the event the exhibition was one more entry in the millennial long history of this mountain and its valley even after Nordman's piece has come down the relationship that she illuminated between the human and the landscape persisted from time immemorial and into the future light and space installations such as those constructed by James Sorrell Bruce Nauman and Maria Nordman tried to make the relationship between the viewer and their surrounding environment perceptible when this environment was held totally within the confines of the gallery and seemed to reference nothing but the abstractions of light and space themselves then artists and scholars have taken to the language of philosophy psychology and laboratory experimentation however when this environment is itself porous open to the world outside the gallery and even makes reference to the natural landscape then the relationship between viewer and the surrounding environment might better be described through the language of environment thank you thank you so much Emily it's really quite rare that I encounter not only a body of work I didn't know but even more powerfully a kind of critical perspective on an entire movement light and space that I hadn't even thought about so thank you for that I'd like to now introduce Devon Zimmerman who will be speaking on modernism and recline and talking to us about contemporary furnishings and he will be introduced by his advisor Dr. Steven Mansbach collaborating and advising Devon Zimmerman has been nothing short of exhilarating and even though he defended his doctoral dissertation almost precisely a year ago he and I continue our productive contact as he focuses on publishing his dissertation his doctoral research drew on his dual engagement with modern art and idealist philosophy subjects that had interested him from his undergraduate studies through his graduate career first at the IFA in New York and then for five years at the University of Maryland the dissertation from which today's presentation derives focuses on the little studied but decisive role played by the decorative arts in the genesis and production of classical modern art as we will see and hear Devon reveals how the Dutch the style artists and architects design the furnishings for an emergent new world of social, political and philosophical relationships as well as aesthetic ones please join me in welcoming Dr. Devon Zimmerman we're just having a little bit of technical difficulty and once this is resolved which will be shortly we'll be able to come back just going to take a second to reload and then we'll be up again thank you for your patience can everyone hear me now excellent usual technical difficulties I want to start by thanking the Barnes Foundation as well as Alia who's done a magnificent job organizing this event the technical crew thank you guys very much working behind the scenes I'd like to thank Dr. Steven Monsbach for the really kind introduction and Dr. Katz for both the incredibly arresting keynote lecture last night and for moderating this panel in 1918 the Dutch furniture maker Bert Riedfeldt assembled his assistance for a photograph outside of his newly opened workshop in Utrecht in the image his three teenage assistants pose casually with cigarettes in hand while leaning against the workshop's window rather than standing alongside them Riedfeldt sits casually at the center of the group the chair on which he chose to sit was a brand new design in fact the entire premise for the photograph was to highlight the recently conceived chair the photograph one of the earliest images of Riedfeldt's newly designed chair has been employed by our historians to illustrate a moment of genesis not however of the particular chair upon which Riedfeldt was sitting but the later colored iteration of the chair the now canonical red-blue chair of 1923 since its inclusion in Alfred H. Bar's exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936 Riedfeldt's red-blue chair has consumed modernist discourses on to style furniture design according to this narrative the red-blue chair emerged as a paradigmatic example of modernism's radical rebuke of historical precedence entering the canon as an article of furniture sui generis such anti-historical readings made by scholars have dislodged his practice from a critical discussion of the relationship between the furniture maker's production and the history of the decorative arts more broadly as a result art historians have tended to discuss Riedfeldt's designs in sculptural terms however by moving past such readings and turning towards issues of use and materiality often critical to the study of the decorative arts as will be argued in this presentation new aspects of deciles theorization of furniture can be examined and understood the year after Riedfeldt posed in front of his Utrecht workshop a photograph of his armchair was reproduced in the September issue of the journal de style the vanguard publication was the mouthpiece of a loosely affiliated group of Dutch architects painters and designers who looked to unify the built environment through a single modern aesthetic Riedfeldt likely had little to no knowledge of de style figures prior to 1919 that year the furniture maker was put in contact with the journal's editor and principal animator Theo van Duisburg following their introduction van Duisburg made his enthusiasm for Riedfeldt's furniture evident the de style editor would go on to reproduce four of his designs in the pages of the periodical in less than a year something quite rare for the journal at the time the photographs that van Duisburg received from van Duisburg received from Riedfeldt and chose to publish were Spartan the silence of these images provided van Duisburg the space to explain his underlying attraction to the designs discussing the armchair he wrote through its new form this piece of furniture gives an answer to the question of what place sculpture will occupy in the new interior our chairs, tables, cupboards and other utilitarian objects are the abstract real images in our future interior Riedfeldt who spoke little publicly about his work prior to 1925 wrote a letter to van Duisburg thanking him for his support is most joyful to note there are others who felt and thought the same van Duisburg's brief analysis of Riedfeldt's armchair is noteworthy because in this short passage he explained his conception of Riedfeldt operating dualistically as both sculpture or an object in the round and as image, building or representationally van Duisburg placed Riedfeldt's furniture in an intermediary category that had historically been occupied by ornament ornamentation frequently exists both sculpturally and representationally within or upon a broader supporting structure in describing the armchair as he did van Duisburg also located Riedfeldt's furniture within a shift in the theoretical understanding of the relationship between the decorative object and architecture this conceptual shift which began in the latter half of the 19th century transferred the signifying task of architectural ornament to the objects which inhabited such architectural space thus van Duisburg's choice to give focused attention to Riedfeldt's armchair was strategic so was a selection of a chair as the paradigmatic furnishing of the future interior the chair operates as an object that frequently mimics architectural vocabulary and structure and ornamentation yet exists at the scale of the body the nexus of interaction with the built environment the chair garnered a unique place in the polemics on the form and nature of the modern interior at the opening of the 20th century this was reinforced by the ease and affordability of manufacturing chairs which made it a convenient object in which to invest theoretical capital for the ongoing debates it was precisely for this reason the chair was the preferred site for Riedfeldt's engagement with form in the literature onto style his experimental design for the armchair has been interpreted along two lines the first ontological as the chair can be understood as the pure platonic distillation of the piece of furniture's basic forms as spatial as the chair's transparency becomes a primary concern yet although both interpretations foster compelling readings of the style furniture each ignores the chair's fundamental purpose as an object of use further to date little consideration has been given to the fact that this chair was specifically a reclining armchair by the opening decades of the 20th century the modern reclining chair utilized a number of entrenched social cultural and economic values that were codified over the course of the previous century and a half as Europe's rapidly expanding middle class sought refuge from the speed and strain of a modern industrializing society the reclining chair offered a place of comfort and ease within the boundary of the domestic sphere the form of leisure the reclining chair offered however was decidedly gendered male the prevailing social codes of reception rooms and the characteristic furniture as well as women's restrictive guests assigned to men the privileged use of the reclining chair the adjustable reclining Morris chair intended for wealthy businessmen and merchants address this need directly the popular chair designed by Philip Webb in 1866 spawn numerous derivations well into the 20th century designers before and after World War I reinforced the already masculine nature of the reclining chair through rationalist metaphors of machine aesthetics as was the case with Yosef Hoffman's Sitz machine chair or Marcel Breuer's club chair in addition to acting as a signifier of masculine leisure the rise in popularity of the reclining chair during the 19th century was intrinsically tied to broader concerns about public health the therapeutic associations with the reclined position as a means to advance hygiene and convalescence garnered increased significance in the years following World War I during this time the body and particularly the healthy body received enhanced attention in the traumatic weight of the mass casualties of the war and the devastating effect of the Spanish flu pandemic refelt's arm chair existed within this matrix of signification that had come to develop the reclining chair over the previous hundred years the chair's distilled structure stripped of any upholstery lent to an appearance of medical sterility a sanitary look the chair shared with Hoffman Sitz machine which was initially intended for a sanatorium outside of Vienna in addition refelt's reliance on geometric forms to impart a sense of rational construction long affiliated with masculine nice tropes and interior design reinforced its gendered nature it should be of little surprise then that the chair appealed to refelt's clientele which was mostly comprised of progressive members of Utrecht's upper middle class including manufacturers architects and doctors for example a suite of furniture commissioned by the architect Pete Elling an arm chair upright chair and buffet for his home retained into an extent strengthened the traditional structures of domestic living though shrouding them behind a modernist form it was likely for this reason that van Duisburg would have taken a great interest in refelt's furniture designs and the arm chair and specifically his furniture encapsulated to styles ongoing participation in contemporary discourse on masculinity mechanization and health all of which overlapped in their aim to produce a modern aesthetic environment the immediacy of decorative objects and their centrality to the lived experience to lived experience place them at the center of the styles desire to transform the interior into a transcendent aesthetic space this objective did not derive solely from the form that refelt's chairs took rather it was crucially reliant on the surfaces of these furnishings as well an interaction with the decorative object such as a chair ebbs and flows between the perception of the utilitarian nature and structure of its object body and the sensual consumption of the design and materiality of what can be understood as the chair's surface scape and essential to the group's conception of the surface scape was color the style theorized color not as a material thing to be applied to the surface this they believed was purely the role of paint quote, painting color are two different things van duisburg emphasized paint is a means color an end quote color rather was conceived as a state in which the materiality of an object would be superseded in a process of resurfacing in replacing the material quality of the object with the immateriality of color the style artists sought to eliminate the theoretical divide between object body and surface scape by side stepping the problem of materiality altogether refelt was guided by this motivation as he began to explore the use of color in his furniture his progression towards the recurrent application of color to his furniture developed from a fusion of his own ideas on manufacturing with that of distil aesthetic theories refelt balanced craft ideals while adopting modernized techniques use standardized sizes of milled wood for the slats of the chair this was eventually coupled with the employment of less expensive manufactured materials such as plywood because of its composition of multiple perpendicularly oriented layers of laminations the manufactured wood prevented the warping that occurred with comparably inexpensive softer woods nevertheless this process of mechanization was only partial and each piece of furniture maintained the mark of hand craftsmanship this is evident in an early example of a red blue chair which likely dates to 1923 now in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design the dowels used to connect the chair are octagonal in shape rather than cylindrical because they cannot be machine cut as a result the parts had to be shaped down from a rectilinear piece of wood by hand you can see in the details on the image on the left are the layers of the plywood which comprise the seat and backrest and on the right the octagonally shaped pegs that were essential to the infamous refelt joint that would have had to be carved by his smoking assistants in the image that started this presentation covering these marks and the surface of the red blue chair are shades of primary colors the backrest in light red the seat in dark blue that struts in black and their ends in a cream yellow while heralded by scholars retrospectively as the physical manifestation of a Mondrian painting in three-dimensional form the primary colors of the red blue chair were the art historian paul ovary has discussed not sacred refelt readily provided different colored versions of the arm chair including a pink and sea green chair made for the dutch artist charlie torop a white version of the chair for poet til broekman and a red version now in the collection of the saint lewis museum of art the importance of the introduction of color to his model of chair was not explicitly its compliance with the dogmatic aesthetics laid up by as many distilled members infrequently followed such principles rather refelt's use of color in and of itself was significant primarily because it massed the differing strategies of the chair's production unifying them behind a chromatic surface the dematerialization of the chair's surface scape through the application of color enabled reed felt to market the chair to both middle and upper middle class clients a pricelist in the reed felt shorter archives illustrates this point from arm chair to hanging lamp the priceless illustrated each model of furniture with a simplified abstract forms with simplified abstract forms drawn in colored crayon two versions of the red blue chair offered for sale however each commanding a different price the inexpensive version likely referred to those chairs produced in small batches from less expensive softerwoods in plywood while the finer version of the chair would have referred to made-to-order commissions that would have presumably used more expensive hardwoods yet in spite of these material differences the visual effect between the two chairs was not intended to be noticeably different in fact both chairs are represented by identical drawings consisting of a single slanted red line for the back seat back rest a blue line for the seat and three black lines for the leg and wronglets of the chair in doing so reed felt decoupled appearance from value departing from the attempts during the previous century to make affordable knockoffs in which imitative processes and materials such as electroplating or vulcanized rubber were pivotal reed felt's approach subverted this dynamic by replacing the process of imitation with one of masking this dematerialization of the surface at least in appearance enabled the furniture maker's designs to simultaneously retain their aesthetic form while allowing for such designs to be accessible to multiple echelons of the middle class this paper had argued has argued for the framing of the style ideology strategy and production outside of the modernist predilection for formless readings contextualize the group within the history of the decorative arts by doing so, a more nuanced understanding of the group's projects can emerge addressing the style through this historical framework draws attention to the inherent cultural and gendered undercurrents of the group's furniture designs while also exposing the broader social and economic concerns underpinning their seemingly formless decisions thank you that was a wonderful deep dive into a chair that has long fascinated me and I'm sure plenty of other people I'd like to begin our commentary section by asking questions of each of the speakers and then we'll open it up to the audience and anybody who wants to ask a question please do so I'm going to go in order so William I have a question for you and that is I'm struck really struck by what seems to be an extraordinarily early investment and interest in environmental issues among Argentine artists much earlier than frankly I had anticipated and I'm wondering if there's any relationship between that early environmental interest and the sort of seismic shifts in Argentine economy and culture from the 19th century to the 20th century where in was once a net exporter of food especially to Europe especially of course beef and then of course with the advent of mass manufacturing paradoxically Argentina lost its sort of primary place socioeconomically and became a much poorer country we can't hear you yeah I think you put your finger right on the button it is through it is a kind of effect of the kind of closing of the economy which actually began in the 20th century with Perron through his kind of nationalist populist agenda that began to affect the kind of production of agriculture and to shift more towards manufacturing so there is a certain kind of trickle down effect there that only continues through various shifts in regime changes and efforts to kind of fix the economy the efforts to kind of develop and industrialize do continue so I think in some ways the artists looking to nature looking to the landscape are probably in a way kind of reacting to the kind of over technological over mass consumer experiences of living in Buenos Aires and it's kind of worth pointing out that most of these artists are all living in the major metropolitan city Luis Pasos is I mean several of them are from La Plata which is a little bit it's kind of like a suburb of Buenos Aires it's the capital of the province of Buenos Aires so it itself is an important city but it is on the edge of the Pampas it is a little bit more proximate to the landscape and so in his work he is I think addressing rural life and nature with a little bit more of a perspective of kind of living adjacent to it and trying to bring that into into his work and into his practice whereas the others I think are certainly doing it from a perspective of being urbanite metropolitan artists and a lot of them are architects too so I think there's an interesting amount of their training in architecture and thinking about the urban and built environment as informing the ways that they then look to nature like Benedict himself like constructing these acrylic architectural habitats for animals based on his perception of the relationship between nature and the city and just briefly do you think that there is any any possibility for an argument that in some sense the environmental work is intended to function allegorically which is to say as a means of addressing the conditions of life under military dictatorship with its exploitative authoritarian sort of destruction of what is natural in other words is there a political dimension to this that's more than environmental yeah for sure and it's also important to kind of think about not only the local context of living with two military dictatorships one from 66 to 73 and then one from 76 to 83 also the Vietnam war going on and Argentines as well as most of the world was their eyes were pinned to the actions of the United States and the amount of destruction to nature through the military industrial complex and napalm in Asia was certainly of interest to them but I think the answer is yes the work is very allegorical what I find interesting and I'm trying to tease out in my research is the kind of whether or not the government itself saw an environmental image or an environmental message as threatening or whether or not artists were were using it as you said more allegorically to kind of speak to larger relationships between civilization and governments and nature itself but I think for an example an alternative reading that often gets placed on Victor Griepo's work with the potatoes being pierced by electrodes is that of torture and torture enacted by military governments who like potatoes prodded dissidents with electrodes in methods of torture to extract information the one I offered here today is a little bit more poetic a little bit more positive and optimistic in this idea of releasing consciousness but there is a kind of dark flip side that you can definitely read over that thank you so Emily I was fascinated with your account specifically of the idea of relationality and I wanted to ask you about a choice you made because what you at least from my hearing seem to do is to connect Norman to the light and space movement while differentiating some of her investments and I wanted to know if you would concur with a somewhat stronger position that it is actually a critique of the light and space movement a critique of what could be understood as a sort of woo woo transcendentalism lack of consideration of the social historical particularities and that this is intended to actually elevate a more politicized relationality thank you so this chapter grew out of my master's thesis and my master's thesis had sort of a stronger pinning of Norman as a critique of light and space and having more social engagement and sort of just critiquing the use of total control and manipulation that I would see in the other light and space artists however my larger project is actually to find more of that environmental and more of that relational content in the other light and space artists namely James Terrell and Doug Wheeler I definitely think Maria Norman is the most explicit about environment and relationality and the social a lot of her works were sort of in urban areas and very much involve interactions with the community and like one of them you have to go to the laundromat across the street to get the key to enter the exhibition to enter the installation and Terrell and Wheeler are these much more abstract much more ethereal as you mentioned transcendental artists but I sort of investigate them at an earlier moment before Terrell sort of becomes this art world star earlier in the late 60s and early 70s where there is this moment where they are sort of all being influenced by an environmentalism it is a sort of environmentalism I'm focusing on is not it's the mainstream environmentalism is ignoring a lot of the sort of issues of social justice and equality and things like that and I'm not arguing that these artists these Terrell or Wheeler engage in that but mostly talking about issues of perception and aesthetics and relating to the environment both that way in the installations and some of the environmentalists rhetoric interacting with the natural environment the built environment in those ways as well great thank you and Devin I wanted to ask about what seems to me one of the sort of striking aspects of Refelt's designs which is how in many respects orthodoxy is in a modernist vein in terms of its revelation of structure it stripped down to its elemental parts it's visual logic so you can see everything at once and ask you to help me think through the relationship between that sort of materialist elementalism of the chair and the rhetoric of transcendentalism that often accompanies the style writing and thought they seem to be and this is a tension that I'm working out as I'm moving towards a book manuscript is precisely the the attempt in style design and theory to marry both a kind of 19th century positivist scientific thought with almost a pre-war neo-vitalist critical vitalist impulse that was going throughout Europe both in Mondrian's esoteric philosophies of theosophy but also van Duesburg at the time was a strong reader of Friedrich Nietzsche Henri Bergson and interested in all these proto-phenomenological thinkers and so in the project especially in the early years before they actually begin to kind of face this stark critique by various competing avant-garde movements most poignantly maybe the Hungarian avant-garde which was strongly political, strongly communist and begin to kind of attack van Duesburg after he tries his stint in Weimar in 1923 to join the Bauhaus calling them decorative bourgeois and all these things but in the early years this project to try to find a way to both synthesize what is what needs to be a scientific advancement and technological advancement of modern society but one that can still speak to the anxieties, the psychological demands, the needs spiritual, emotional physical as well which is often left out of the distil discourse together and so this is where you start to see these odd contortions in the distil project be it van Duesburg's datast poetry and and all these contradictions that occur precisely because of this philosophical and ideological tension that motivates the group. Great, that was a perfect answer, thank you. So let me open this up then to our audience and we have a question for Emily from Carl Walsh who says I loved your talk. I wonder if you could also consider how the central aspects of the atmosphere like temperature and the movement of air impacted the experience of the installation. Thank you, excuse me sorry, thank you that's a great question I'm sure things like temperature and especially in California such differing environments throughout the state and mountains to desert to beach lots of different sort of atmospheres and things like that. It would be difficult to make that sort of assessment on the Nordman works just because they either site specific and have not been recreated or the ones that have been recreated the atmosphere is necessarily different in different places so in that way it seems it's not so much about that specifically. In some of my other research I engage with smog a little bit more. So Los Angeles atmosphere and smog both this idea of these intense colorful palpable atmospheres as both this incredibly detrimental like signal of pollution and these very beautiful experiential installations so I do engage with atmosphere in that way and a little bit with thinking about atmosphere in terms of like relationality in terms of what constitutes an environment but not specifically those specifics of temperature and things like that in the installations. Great. Thank you. We have a question from Cindy Kang with regard to Devin can you elaborate on your use of the term surface especially with your discussion of reclining chair as masculine. I wondered if this term was in contrast to the decorative slash feminine. No, I didn't intend to use it in terms that tried to counteract any sort of gendered underpinning with using the idea of a decorative surface or a decorativeness to the chair itself. I use the surface scape and more trying to think about how and this is in a broader discussion that I have in the chapter from which this is extracted is the kind of crisis in the surface that occurred on decorative objects especially during the 19th century that became the focus of so many theorists in architecture, the decorative arts and design this sense that as electroplating the value and both cultural class that began to be confused and made more ambiguous by these more affordable knockoffs or imitation materials kind of also mirrored this broader discourse about decadence and the decline of European culture that occurred towards the latter half of the 19th century and so as I'm trying to kind of just differentiate how the style is trying to articulate the role of color as something not quite imitative or superficial it's still very much decorative and I describe it as decorative in my chapter and don't try to sidestep it just for the case situation, this presentation uses it as a way to kind of think through specifically the surface of these works that is often just discussed as color rather than actually what its function was in the furniture great, thank you so we also have a question from Lisa Salzmann, Will in the mid to late 1960s the post-war German artist Sigmar Polke worked extensively with potatoes creating everything from architecture to experiments, would you care to comment? Oh, I mean I'd have to look into that I guess now that you mentioned it I can picture some of them but I had never combined the two I mean in some, I'm sure these groups of artists who are kind of centered around the center of the art de communication they were very in touch with international art it was really the effort of the director of the institution Jorge Glusberg to both bring international art conceptual art land art practices, body art video art, all of these things to Argentina but also to bring Argentine art that they were producing to Europe and to the United States so I'm sure they were aware of certain trends going along but to my knowledge I don't know if Víctor Griepo was looking to make earlier experiments with Sigmar Polka, I think probably what differentiates Griepo's use of the potato versus any European artist is the indigeneity of the potato to the Americas that it is a food, a crop that is native to the kind of geographical region and as such has a lot more symbolic and poetic weight to him and the kind of messages that he's trying to put forward that to my knowledge probably absent from the work of Sigmar Polka who's probably using it more in a formalist as a formal element, not in terms of formalism, but yeah. Thank you. And Devin, another question do you see a parallel between the material hardness of the chair and the club felt rights and the discourse around De Steele the plywood seems so unyielding compared to other seeding materials that conform to the body. That's a great question. It's interesting in the softwood that Refelt was using actually would bend and the wonderful thing that set me down on this path of re-investigating to style furniture is looking at the fact that they constantly had to repaint these objects because the natural wear and tear would rub against and abrasion would remove the paints from the painted surface. And so in an idealized sense you do get the hardness, these crystalline metaphors that they were also engaged in one of the things unique to De Steele was the sort of ubiquity of stained glass in their practice tail of Unduesburg especially and the crystalline metaphors that coincide with stained glass transcendence and also again his readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and the ability for the aesthetic environment to be the principal conditioning of a new human subjectivity not the political or the social which again led the group to sort of some tense confrontations in the mid-twenties as the political situation changed in Europe so dramatically. And so there is this fitting in though in the way of Unduesburg constructed De Steele in the pages of the journal specifically where most would encounter it by presenting these objects in black and white but as kind of sturdy hard crystalline forms that mimic so much of their environment as well and draw on these rationalist, masculine isotropes of geometric abstraction more broadly. Okay, we don't have more questions from the audience although I'm still accepting them but I did want to ask one further question of Emily if I might. Emily, could you address the question of the relationship more broadly between light and space and other forms of earthworks? What were the social and ideological relationships between the two? So, socially they were sort of in the running in the same circles working with the Avalanche and among this artistic avant-garde of the sixties sort of living in that moment in that era sort of all working together. The Terrell and Wheeler would not really claim any political allegiances or any sort of ideological argument for their work which I mean you can choose to read it otherwise but in terms of I mean a lot of the land artists were also not themselves very environmentalists or political in the way of you know saving the environment and things like that a lot of them were engaged with land in a both in a more aesthetic way in a more formal way so I think they're both thinking about space and relationality in a formal way and on a scale that's very similar. Nordman is sort of an exception in that she is also thinking directly about plants and animals and landscape and resources but I think in terms of relationship to other land artists they're both in conversation at that time and also both very involved with thinking about lived space personally and aesthetically and on larger scales as opposed to maybe so directly environmentalists I hope to sort of intervene to to make the argument that there's some shared metaphors between these types of aesthetic and formal movements and conceptions of the environment at the time. Great I guess just to follow up on that I just wanted to know if you see for example a connection between Heizer's double negative and the move you described Nordman taking as to a question of viewership, location the specificity of relationality. One thing that's interesting about works like Heizer's is you know being out in the desert they're mostly not viewed in person mostly viewed through photographs and sort of that media circulation and Nordman specifically was not interested in her works be experienced in that in that way she was very selective and sort of secretive about documentation and interviews and things like that so I think there is a real difference at least in that case between experiencing these land works you know through magazines and interviews and things like that and Nordman having these works be specifically experienced in person a lot of time she would yeah hold back on descriptions interviews so viewers could come to the installation without expectations so there is a difference there