Making Do

Tue Greenfort is an artist and environmentalist who drives a bus fuelled by vegetable oil and makes sculptures from recycled materials

Over the last few years, Greenfort’s art has addressed all kinds of environmental issues in practical, impractical and absurd ways. He has collected rainwater from a gallery roof for the duration of an exhibition, helped art institutions save on their energy costs and satirized global marketing and production practices. In a number of interviews, Greenfort has pointed out that his environmentalism is not a fad, nor is it new to him. His parents tried organic farming, he watched naturalist Jacques Cousteau on television in the 1980s, he grew up near a lake that he watched gradually become unfit for swimming, and he was a member of various environmentalist groups and a lover of birds and butterflies long before he enrolled at art school. He first became known for his near-to-nature photographic series, ‘Daimlerstrasse 38’ (2001), which depicts suburban foxes being lured by sausages towards a hidden camera. He has since made other photographic works along the same lines, such as ‘Out of Site’ (2002), an exhibition including an installation of a camera hidden in a birdhouse triggered by the slightest weight on a branch, and ‘Partitur einer Fliege’ (A Fly’s Composition, 2004), capturing fly tracks on windowpane condensation. The latter were inspired by the writings of Jakob von Uexküll, a biologist who developed theories on the subjective Umwelt (environment) of all organisms, however lowly, and their interlinked place in Nature’s grand design.

Amongst his most recent and effective works are those that, by making only imperceptible local changes, constitute hard-hitting statements on the issue of electricity consumption. The best example is his project Exceeding 2 Degrees (2007) for this year’s Sharjah Biennial 8. Greenfort negotiated to adjust the host museum’s air-conditioning thermostat to allow the building to remain slightly warmer than usual. The artist arrived at a temperature increment of two degrees from the 2006 Stern Report, which concluded that if no action is taken on carbon emissions then there is a more than a 75 percent chance of global temperatures rising between two and three degrees Celsius over the next 50 years. Gaining permission for the intervention was no simple task, however, as conservation experts were concerned about the potential harm that changes in temperature and humidity might make to the ruling Sheik’s collection of Western Orientalist painting. The artist wants the money the museum saved on running costs donated to the forest-focused environmentalist organization Nepenthes, which buys rainforest for preservation in Ecuador, at the frighteningly cheap price of around 30 pence per square metre. In the museum, Greenfort placed polythene over the entrance to the space so the pressure of the air conditioning vent created a balloon. On a table in another room he positioned a clockwork thermohygrograph, which uses strands of human hair as a receptor: Greenfort used locks shaved from his own head. In a similar work for a group exhibition in the Frankfurter Kunstverein, ‘Fresh and Upcoming’, the artist installed Schalter (Switch, 2002) on a street lamp, enabling people to turn it on or off. His 2006 exhibition ‘Photosynthesis’, at Witte de With in Rotterdam, included the work From Gray to Green (2006), in which the institution was to change to an environmentally friendly electricity provider for the duration of the exhibition. However, following discussions with the energy company, it turned out that this wouldn’t be possible until 2007, and then only for a minimum contractual period of a year. In response, Greenfort left one of the exhibition spaces empty except for printouts of the relevant correspondence. He also left the lights blazing provocatively. Here, as in Sharjah, Greenfort has put his faith in the institution’s organizers, in the hope that they will follow up on his project after he has gone – or live with their bad consciences if they don’t. Hopefully the Witte de With work will eventually be realized in the future without anyone really knowing and while other exhibitions are taking place.

From the invisible to the rendered visible: for his contribution to this year’s Munster Sculpture Project, Greenfort plans to make a fountain using a truck and a pump that adds ferric chloride to Muenster’s picturesque artificial Lake Aasee. The truck will be parked near a romantic spot where lovers, not chemicals, usually meet. In the last decade or more the lake has suffered from eutrophication due to intensive meat farming in the district. Excess phosphates in the water that runs off the treated fields result in a proliferation of toxic algal blooms growing in the local waterways. The chemical additive Greenfort plans to introduce to the water binds with the polluting phosphates making them sink. Greenfort’s fountain simply renders the purification process, which normally occurs anyhow out of sight, visible.

The big question that crops up around Greenfort’s endeavours, like a nagging friend, is whether or not art can change the world. Is the artist playing at being a green Don Quixote who would rather erect windmills than fight them? Greenfort isn’t pessimistic about the role and potential of art to effect gradual, though not revolutionary, change. He has noted: ‘Art has the ability to elaborate and open up discourses without being labelled and categorized as this or that political faction. It can draw on a more complex system of references and the interdisciplinary than a purely politically defined activity.’

That said, it’s hard to get around the fact that most art just isn’t particularly ecologically friendly. Of course, in principle, everyone could start making art using only a pencil, or by recycling old rubbish, or to pursue an environmentally sound, non-resource-consuming idea. But we don’t. (Although it could be argued that an aversion for material excess was one of the factors behind the development of ‘found objects’, Arte Povera, Conceptual and performance art.) And what difference would it make anyway? Big money and the omnipolluting mega-corporations would be quite happy to see system-critical contemporary artists argue themselves out of existence so they could landfill contemporary art spaces with flash marketing events instead. Perhaps his work Happy Meal (2005), a frank visualization of the phrase ‘Eat Shit’, nicely satirizes the situation. It consists of blown eggshells dotted with white tic tacs – like a model of a virus or a molecule – topped with a plastic spoon holding a portion of grey papier-mâché faeces, which to date has remained unsold.

Dominic Eichler is a contributing editor of frieze.

Dominic Eichler