From June 2010 through September 2010, I worked for Portuguese artist, Miguel Palma, as his student assistant or liaison. Palma was undertaking a three-month residency at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California with the aim of creating a new artwork that would be shown in August at San Jose State University’s (SJSU) Thompson Gallery. Montalvo and SJSU cosponsored his residency and show, along with the San Jose-based art and technology network, ZERO1.

Miguel Palma at SJSU

Palma produces mostly large-scale mixed media sculpture; the piece that would eventually be exhibited from his time in Saratoga and San Jose was a disk, eight-foot in diameter, that slowly revolved. On this disk, a landscape of different fantastic objects was monitored by a video camera, which Palma perched on the nose of a toy airplane. The imagery from the video camera was then projected onto a wall, creating a looping narrative based on this small spinning world.

As liaison, it was my job to make sure that Palma had everything he needed to create this piece. My responsibilities included helping him get situated when arriving to San Jose from Lisbon, finding art materials, and making connections with people who could solve various technical problems he ran into along the way. Not having a background in construction made it difficult for me to help him in terms of the actual construction of the work, but Palma, unlike some other artists, was very self-sufficient in this regard. He managed to transport the heavy metal tripod which anchored his new work from Lisbon to San Jose. It was a unique piece at a height between three to four feet that looked like it belonged at the site of a lunar landing. Practically from the minute he arrived, Palma began trying to find additional art materials: the local Home Depot and toy soldier store in Los Gatos became his primary sources. Impressively, Palma was able to put the sculpture together without much technical assistance.

That being said, I did have some involvement in the building process. I assembled 12 of 20 small, plastic model apartment buildings that Palma also brought with him from Lisbon; it was rewarding to see my long hours of tedious work integrated into his finished piece.

The Montalvo Arts Center also provides many resources for the artists that they host. For example, their staff was very helpful in providing Palma with a car for local travel. Another added bonus of their residency program was the resident chef, or culinary artist, who prepares dinner for the residents Monday through Friday. Occasionally, I attended those dinners and met the other artists and staff at Montalvo, all of whom were very informative and welcoming.

The most significant part of working with Palma came towards the end of his residency, leading up to the opening of his show at SJSU in tandem with the ZERO1 Biennial.  ZERO1 organizes a large-scale art and technology festival every two years. SJSU participated in the festival by exhibiting Palma’s sculpture in the school’s main art gallery. The first collective challenge was to transport his finished sculpture from Montalvo to the SJSU gallery. I worked with Palma to carefully disassemble and package small pieces of the sculpture. Then, I worked with Montalvo employees Alex Gibson and Joel Slayton to precariously transport the sculpture to the SJSU campus. Once that was accomplished, Palma worked out the placement of the sculpture and projection within the gallery. The school simply did not have the ability to carry out his original composition; however, after careful deliberation and compromise, a solution was reached.

Between SJSU and the downtown hub of the Biennial, ZERO1 installed a satellite component of Palma’s work at the San Jose Convention Center. The component shown at the Convention Center was a projection mirroring the video footage from the SJSU exhibition. The set up required a lot of careful coordination between Palma, SJSU, and the Convention Center.  Juggling many different groups of people, this process was ultimately worthwhile and effectively integrated Palma directly into the festival.

While I worked on arranging the component for the Convention Center, Palma worked with gallery staff to reassemble his sculpture at SJSU. This installation experience turned into a lesson in dealing with building managers. The Convention Center provided a large gray screen leftover from a previous project, which I had to sand down and repaint white. I enlisted the help of many personal friends of mine, who were willing to help another artist succeed. Ostensibly, there was also a projector remaining from the previous project at the Convention Center that ended up at Montalvo. The next hurdle was finding that projector–it remains to this day uncertain if we located that original projector or not. Needless to say, I obtained a projector, a particularly large one that had to be suspended from the ceiling. Luckily, no one disputed who would be liable if it were damaged.

When the exhibition ended and the installations finally came down, Palma sent everything to New York. Off he went on his next adventure, and I was left to go back to being a graduate student at SJSU focusing on my own work. Graduate school itself is a definite learning experience. That said, there is no substitute for working first-hand with an accomplished artist who has years of professional experience. Though challenging, industry experience is an incredible opportunity for learning and growth, both of which are essential to being an artist today.

By Sara Gevurtz

Global climate change and art seem, at first glance, like strange bedfellows. Furthermore, why would a symposium organized around the role of artists in climate change invite a University of Oregon professor, who is not an artist, but rather a professor of environmental philosophy, to be the keynote speaker? The answer presented at the symposium was that artists informed about the environment can, hopefully, play a key role in helping people understand the implications of climate change.

Global Warming Symposium 2010 ZERO1

The argument that Moore summarized from the book Moral Ground is that we need to leave the planet for future generations the way we found it. The book lays out fourteen sections giving the various different reasons why we should save the planet for the future. In her keynote speech, Moore addressed why she was delivering this message to a group composed primarily of artists. Scientists are doing a good job of developing the data behind global warming; however, the collective behavior required to address climate change will require appealing to the moral conscience of society at large.  Addressing society’s moral conscience must be done in more ways than just through presenting graphs and charts to the public. In the essay written by James Garvey, included in Moral Ground, Garvey writes, “Science can give us the facts, but we need something more if we want to act on the basis of those facts. The something more has at least a little to do with what we think is right, with justice, with responsibility, with what we value, with what matters to us.” The problem with scientific facts is that they are easily thrown into a proliferating data pile, to be processed later.

I often consider the question: why should we care about climate change? When I heard the lecture from Dr. Moore, I felt validated. The book argues that saving biodiversity and avoiding environmental tragedies caused by climate change is a moral issue. Are we okay with allowing the wonders of nature to disappear thanks to the lifestyles of those in the developed worlds? Are we okay with allowing those who have barely contributed to the cause of global climate change to bear the brunt of the consequences? These are the questions that the essays in Moral Ground strive to, perhaps not answer, but at least bring up for contemplation.

At the end of the section titled “Yes, because the world is beautiful,” authors discuss art as a way to encourage people to appreciate the beauty in nature. Let artists celebrate the natural beauty of the world: paint sea otters or octopi on garbage bins and blank walls; replace elevator music with broadcasts of whale songs; paint icebergs over advertisements on city buses (as San Francisco has done this to four of their city buses); or, amplify the crooning music of barn owl nests, rather than Frank Sinatra, in the city square.

Pure science alone is not enough of a call to action. This is because science, for many people, is too abstract. They need something more concrete to understand why they need to care. Art can fill that gap. While not the primary focus of Dr. Moore’s book, this is the primary reason why Leonardo asked her to be the keynote speaker at the “Global Warning” symposium.

For many of us, especially those who live in suburbia away from the wonders of nature, it is easy to forget the important role that nature plays in our lives. A sense of wonder about nature must be brought back to our lives. This is difficult to do in a society that puts so much emphasis on consumerism. In developed countries especially, where a majority of the world’s resources are being directed, steps need to be taken to make people more aware of what is at stake so they will try to limit their ecological footprint. In the essay by Vucetich, included in Professor Moore’s book, he says, “Think about knowledge that makes you go ‘Wow!’ Wow, that’s so beautifully complicated…Wow, look how magnificently nuanced…Wow, how astonishingly connected. Wow: to be held in a state of wonder about nature.” This is the sort of response that is needed in order to get people to start thinking about the consequences of global climate change. Artists have often been thought of as being able to spark this “wow” reaction in viewers.

While science makes amazing strides and changes in specialized fields of knowledge, when it comes to translating scientific data into social change, statistics and research articles are not going to cut it. If we continue on the current path, we might be fine for a while. This notion makes it easy for current generations to kick the problem down the road to future generations. I agree with the premise of Moral Ground, that in order to accomplish serious social change, scientists must connect with people’s consciences. This happens oftentimes through religion and sometimes art. Contemporary art has functioned in large part as a cultural critique, and it can remind us of the beauty that we overlook. While art alone will not solve the problem of getting people to change their behavior, artists can help by starting the conversation. As the essays in Moral Ground explain, the conversation must be followed by action.

Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson, eds., Moral Ground, Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2010): 280, 340, and 352.

By Sara Gevurtz

Palma’s work often consists of sculptural pieces and large-scale installations created from mechanized, industrial, and other sundry found objects. The various elements are incorporated into intricate, cyclical and/or self-sustaining systems. Curiosity prevails: What is this? What is it made of? How does it function? There is an implicit resistance to the narrow knowledge specialization of our times. Palma asks for a wider scope.

In Image We Trust is a new work that Palma made while in residence at Montalvo Arts Center in 2010. He built an iron structure to support a large, rotating disc topped/covere with a myriad of items: male and female dolls, militaria, geopolitical maps, vehicles, and tools of all kind.

Miguel Palma

A fighter plane conceals a surveillance camera that records the disc’s steady rotation, which is screened in real time at another location. Watching the footage, it is easy to believe in the recorded image more than in the actual thing. We forget reality easily, but through the image, we believe in the reality Palma created. In Palma’s own words, “I wanted to make a work that would record itself, and the footage would be as important, or even more important than the actual piece. It started with the idea of war, and of our juvenile heroes. It has to do with blindness, and at the same time with an extraordinary capacity of visualization. Although it is a chaotic mess, the work has moments of intense silence and solitude. It has a profuse dimension, that, in the video, turns into an empty one.”

In Image We Trust subsequently traveled to the Nicholas Robinson Gallery where Palma mounted his first solo show in New York. Palma has exhibited worldwide, most recently at the Bloomberg Space and Whitechapel Gallery in London, Prospect 1 in New Orleans, and ZERO1 Biennial in San Jose, California. In April 2011, he will present a major retrospective of his work at the Contemporary Art Museum of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal.

By Luisa Jacinto

I met Beatriz da Costa over the summer of 2010 while she was an artist in residence at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA.  At the time, da Costa was working on finishing up a project creating an iPhone application that would allow users to look at information about the endangered species found in the United Kingdom. She was looking for an assistant to help her track down the immense amount of information required for the application.

The project was to go in conjunction with an installation project she had done at the John Hansard Gallery.  This installation included a number of specimens that were on loan from the Natural History Museum in London and the Horniman Museum that were “regional taxidermed specimens currently being under threat of extinction.” [i]

SG – How would you describe your work?

BdC – I am not tied to any specific medium and the topics I address vary. Over the past five years, I have been very interested in interspecies relations though, and all of my projects have somehow circled around that subject.

SG – One of your latest works deals with making an iPhone application for endangered species. Could you explain how this idea came to be? What do you hope it will accomplish? Do you think it was has been successful?

Endangerd Species Finder - iPhone App

BdC – I was working on an installation project, called “A Memorial for the Still Living,” commissioned by The Arts Catalyst in the United Kingdom (UK). As part of that project, I worked with the collection curators at the Natural History Museum and the Horniman Museum in London to display specimens of endangered species endemic to the UK. I was particularly interested in confronting visitors with the sole remaining mode of relating to these species once they have become extinct–a formal, museological research display that’s no longer an encounter between one living entity with another. However, I wasn’t quite satisfied with just leaving it there. I also wanted to find a way to encourage visitors to go outside and engage the still living counterparts of these specimens. That is were The Endangered Species Finder came in.

The Endangered Species Finder is a smartphone application that, in its initial version, allows users to geo-locate themselves in relation to known habitats of UK-based species under threat. It provides both images and textual information about breeding habits, migratory patterns, and the currently understood reasons for why and how a particular species has become endangered. [Furthermore,] it directs users to known habitats and provides identifying information, since many species are quite widespread and simply navigating a person to an approximate region would not be enough. With The Endangered Species Finder, I am interested in getting users to see for themselves, outside of the context of a museum or gallery, the places where various species struggle to survive.

The application is designed so that it can easily be read while in transport–on a plane, train, bus, car, or subway–and then tested once users arrive at a given location. It can be used in a variety of settings, [whether] people are interested in learning more about the species under threat within their own neighborhood or while on nature trips and family vacations. Whatever the chosen setting, the goal of the project is to help assist in creating encounters between endangered species and humans in the effort to help produce awareness and potential for public action.

At this point, I cannot say that the project has been entirely successful. The main reason being that simply not enough people are using the application yet. However, I received a lot of interest from people in the United States to build a version for the American context (the current one was specifically designed for the UK). In fact, it is a group of researchers from Stanford University who would like to collaborate and develop this next version together. I feel confident that we will get there. The Endangered Species Finder UK was the first release. There are more to come.

SG – Much of your work is interested with environmental and biological issues. Where did this interest originate?

BdC – I was interested in political issues surrounding “new biology.” I worked on a number of projects addressing transgenic organisms and things just developed from there.

da Costa’s work on transgenic organisms led to her exhibit, Invisible Earthlings in 2009, and was a study on the link between humans and microbes­, members of the lived non-human worlds that are not recognized as social actors within their urban environments. The project sought to show the interactions we have, consciously and unconsciously, with the lived world.

Her work is evocative in the way that it addresses environmental issues through art and make the repercussions of human influence more accessible to people. It is at once shocking and inspirational.

www.beatrizdacosta.net

[i] “Beatriz da Costa,” A Memorial for the Still Living, http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/memorial.php (accessed February 21, 2011).

By Sara Gevurtz