October 21
– November 20, 2016
Opening October
21, 6-8 pm
 |
| Installation view of Alan Sonfist's exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, Photo Landscapes: Autobiography of Hemlock Forest, June 1978. Courtesy of the artist and Alden Projects™ |
PUBLIC MONUMENTS
traditionally have celebrated events in human history—acts of heroism important
to the human community. Increasingly, as we come to understand our dependence
on nature, the concept of community expands to include non-human elements. Civic
monuments, then, should honor and celebrate the life and acts of the total
community, the human ecosystem, including natural phenomena. Especially within
the city, public monuments should recapture and revitalize the history of the natural
environment at that location. As in war monuments, that record of life and
death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers,
springs, and natural outcroppings needs to be remembered.
Alan Sonfist, “Natural
Phenomena as Public Monuments” (1968)
Alan Sonfist: 50
Years of Time Landscape opens at Alden Projects™ on October 21 (6-8 pm) and runs
through November 20, 2016. The exhibition commemorates the semi-centennial
of New York-based Land Artist Alan Sonfist’s (b. 1946) first germinations of Time
Landscape in 1965, a radical, new model
of art (and life). Time Landscape[1]
(1978 – present), to clarify, is also the eponymous name of his most celebrated public work, which broke ground in
1978 after years of planning, on the corner of LaGuardia Place and
Houston Street: it consists of a nearly 1000
square foot plot of pre-colonial forest fashioned from a palette of native
trees, shrubs, wild grasses, flowers, plants, rocks, and earth. With an eye
towards marking Time Landscape’s living history, Alden Projects™ shines a light
on Sonfist’s signal exhibition of intimately related work that opened at nearly
the same moment in time: the artist’s exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery—also 1978—and sited just two blocks away (at 420 West
Broadway), a gallery-based gambit that also visualized a Time Landscape of the
historical forest of New York.
And
so to commemorate 50 years of Time Landscape, Alden Projects™ re-stages
Sonfist’s signal 1978 exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, consisting of early
conceptual photographs and photo collages (1969 - 75), there titled Photo Landscapes:
Autobiography of a Hemlock Forest. (All
works were also exhibited at Documenta VI, in Kassel the prior year). Alden
Projects’ exhibition is supplemented with 1965 drawings, imagining Time
Landscape not in a single enclosure, but as a proliferation of reclaimed New
York City sites. Considered collectively, works in this exhibition evidence,
structure and encompass the artist’s radical concept of Time Landscape—a softly
spoken sleeper from the canon of Land Art that just may turn out to be the most
urgent and relevant model for young artists today.
In
1965, at age 19, Sonfist inked the first drawings for his concept of Time
Landscape—discrete public enclosures intended to exist in small pockets of recovered
land plots in New York City to be seeded with pre-colonial flora and forests. In
stark contrast to the heroic monumentalism of some fellow Land Artists, Sonfist’s Time Landscape structure proposed a
very different kind of monument (and commemorative impulse): to recover “the
natural environment before Colonial settlement.” Neither a park nor a
wilderness preserve, Sonfist’s unusual hybrid combining both backward and
forward-looking registrations radically re-conceived not only the idea of what
a public monument might be (as a means of historical commemoration), but it
also proposed nothing less than a re-formulated possibility frontier for art
itself, including also man’s historical (and future) relationship to nature.
Demonstrating
how the concept of Time Landscape keeps an eye on both past and the future, Alan
Sonfist’s 8 x 12” installation, New York Gene Bank (1974) grounds the
exhibition at Alden Projects™, consisting of a grid of 35 photographs of a New
York forest juxtaposed with the artist’s wall bound vitrine containing “genetic
element sections that represent the entire forest for future generations to
recreate the forest.” The prescient work is a powerful elegy for the fragility
of New York and our present times, presenting contradictory indices of romantic
loss, but also consequentially, carrying the seeds of renewal that are the
collaborative, mindful, and invitational kernel of the Time Landscape gambit.
“This
collaborative relationship with nature,” scholar Robert Slifkin writes in his
recent, essay, Alan Sonfist: Natural
History, “is crucial to Sonfist’s of
a Hemlock Forest”—six 62 x 27” photo collaged panels from the original series
are present—“combining photographs that document the seasonal changes of a
small section of forest located near the… artist’s
childhood home at the edge of the Bronx with natural specimens taken from that
site and typewritten lists of events from the artist’s biography presented in a
timeline format…The three modes of display used in Autobiography of a Hemlock Forest—timeline, natural relic, and
photograph—each partake in this powerful rhetoric of evidentiary veracity,
transforming fragments of space and time…into an intelligible coherence.”[2]
Also included in this exhibition is the artist’s series of
diminutive photographs, Nature of New
York: Past and Present Photographs (1975), diptychs, each 1 x 1 ½”, juxtaposing
a single image-fragment from the urban streetscape with one image-fragment from
a “natural” landscape; together, the pair partially reflects the then-present,
but also unfixes, perhaps, photography’s peculiar relationship to the
here-and-now by inviting the viewer to time travel back to an imagined past; we
are invited, also perhaps, towards an imagined,
more collaborative—or a post-human?—future.
50
Years of Time Landscape postulates that as another election passes
without any discussion of global warming and the history and the future of
nature, now is as urgent a time as ever to reflect on Alan Sonfist’s genre-defining
concept as when he first proposed it. Can we look forward without looking back?
***
This
is Alan Sonfist’s first one-person exhibition with Alden Projects™. Alan
Sonfist's works are included in many international public collections,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New
York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Notable one-person exhibitions include The
Autobiography of Alan Sonfist, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Alan Sonfist Trees at the Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Time
Landscape received landmark status from the New York City Landmarks
Preservation Commission in 1988.
Alden Projects™ gratefully acknowledges the inspiring vision and
generosity of Stephanie Snyder, Curator and Director of the Douglas F.
Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. Together with Rob Slifkin, Snyder curated
the retrospective, Alan Sonfist: Natural
History, at Reed College in 2016.
© Todd Alden 2016
[1] “Time Landscape” (in italics) refers to
the realized, 1978 project at the corner of LaGuardia Place and Houston Street
while “Time Landscape” (no italics) refers to the concept or genre invented by
Sonfist.
[2] Rob Slifkin in Alan Sonfist, Natural History, Eds. Sonfist, Slifkin, Snyder,
Tepper, (Portland, Oregon: Companion Editions, 2015), p. 38-39.