Jennifer MacGregor
1. For the past few years you�ve been working on a project about the Salton Sea on the opposite end of the continent, it�s a very different topography than the Hudson River. How did the Hudson River pull you in?
After you approached me with the idea of creating an new work in response to the Hudson River, I began researching, I was fascinated by looking at the river "sideways and upside-down" - sideways in terms of looking the watershed - the vast network or vascular system of the river, and upside-down in terms of looking at the floor or benthos of the river....to try to see and better understand the unseeable. This led me to a group of environmental scientists at SUNY Stonybrook who were mapping of the river bottom. Their maps created by multi-beam acoustic profiling are visually lavish, and filled with information about the river. This made me think about ways in which the river has been historically represented visually and metaphorically over the past 150 years. I'm trying to bring part of that historical contingency into this work.
I started thinking about what the philosopher Edward Casey terms, "the fate of place," in relation to the way in which part of the topology of New York State was carved and sculpted by glaciation, and what these patterns have to do with the flow of land and water now. It also made me think about the dredging of the Hudson, and how on smaller scale, it's a similar action. This is sort of a Smithson concept. But of course dredging brings up a whole other set of issues dealing with ecology, politics, and economics. In thinking about the river bottom I started thinking about the dredge channels as "sculpture in reverse," or inverse monuments, which is sort of a perverse thing to do, and harkens back to Heizer's excavations in the land. I decided to focus in on a particular site on the river in Yonkers, quite near Wave Hill, which for me captured all of the above. So I suppose one could say my metaphors are obtuse, but intentionally so.
2. In your work scientific inquiry figures very large. In your experience, how artistic expression and scientific inquiry are similar?
The mutable, triadic relationship between art, science and nature has been the foundation for my investigations over the years. My work reflects upon the ways in which cultures use science and art, as devices or maps to construct belief systems about the natural world. I question the pervasive idea that art and science occupy completely unrelated realms (intuition vs. cognition) and draw attention to areas of overlap and interconnection between artistic exploration and scientific investigation, and to the slippery human subjectivity underlying both processes.
3. How can art speak to environmental responsibility?
Context is important - the fact that this work is sited at Wave Hill, in a mansion overlooking the Hudson means something. Also this institution attracts a specific type of audience - broader in many ways than the audience in many art venues because they are interested in the horticultural as well as the cultural. So I would imagine the audience to be more in tune with environmental awareness. The artist Newton Harrison said something to me once that I'll never forget, "Artists outsee other people." He was talking about the way in which he and his wife/collaborator Helen saw patterns in maps in relation to a watershed that the scientists they were working with did not or could not see. I think it's important to incorporate what we can learn from science, and I hope that scientists can learn to listen to artist�s interpretation of data as well. We also must remember that science is not neutral.
4. What do you hope people will take away after experiencing Sugar Mud?
I want to overwhelm them with the supersaturated "golden glow" of the Hudson; one might say the sugary sweet glow of the fictional pastoral landscape. I also want them to look deeper into patterns beneath the surface, into the secret secretions in the river - from something as innocuous as sugar to as alarming as pcbs and dioxins. The "sugar mud" at the Yonkers site has been dredged and relocated to the "Historical Area Remediation Site" a.k.a. the "Mud Dump Site" in the New York/New Jersey Harbor. I want the audience to consider what these types of displacements of matter mean and the effects they have.
The Yonkers site is a small "project" of the Army Corps of Engineers, consisting of only 80,000 tons of matter. This is a bit of a tangent, but through my research for the Wave Hill project I came upon some interesting information about the many artificial reefs in the ocean. According to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's documents, the Atlantic Beach Reef off the coast of Long Island: covers 413 acres and is made from 30,000 tires, 404 auto bodies, 10 Good Humor trucks, 9 barges, the Tugboat "Fran S", a steel lifeboat, a steel crane and boom, surplus armored vehicles, rock, concrete slabs, pipes, culvert, decking and rubble, and 350,000 tons of rock from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredging project. In my opinion, that bit of information alone is important for people to be aware of, if for nothing else the sheer bizarreness of the fact that the DEC builds these reefs to "enhance marine habitat and provide more accessible fishing grounds for anglers". I intend to do a future piece about this information. So rather than tell my audience what to think about this, I want to simply give them the information and let them come to their own conclusions. I want to shed light on the "invisibles" beneath the surface because the golden glow shines a bit differently with the illumination provided by this knowledge.
6. How does Wave Hill's mission fit with your own artistic mission?
Wave Hill seeks to interpret the relation between human beings and the natural world by examining the ways "people utilize, shape, respond to, interpret and beautify the lands they live on." In my own work I'm interested in these issues, and also in how human beings imagine, transform, reconfigure, extract from, pulverize, desecrate and mythify the land. I think it's important to look at the extreme edges as well as the middle of the map.
7. Can an artist position themselves between nature and culture to produce art that integrates and teaches about the environment?
My work is visual and conceptual, I don't intend it to be pedagogical or instructive or educational, however, I think on some level it is by default. I like to slip into the interstices between what is known and what is unknowable. I hope the visuality of my work entices people to ask themselves questions about their relationship to the environment and how our behaviors and habits affect the natural world.
