Best of Technology Writing 2007 (3 of 124)

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COPYRIGHT
Best of Technology Writing 2007 by Steven Levy (Ed.). Copyright 2007 by the University of Michigan.
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KEVIN BERGER: THE ARTIST AS MAD SCIENTIST (CONT'D)

Jeremijenko spliced into the controversy in 1999 with her project One Trees. When daily news about decoding the human genome had us all fearing we were programmed by DNA, she and a California nursery produced hundreds of clones of a walnut tree from its stem-cell-like tissue. She placed the tiny sprouts in individually sealed cups and displayed them at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The various shapes into which the plantlets sprouted in uniform environments underscored that genes alone don't sit in nature's director chair but are one of many biological processes. Later, she planted 20 pairs of the trees in various places in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now she gave urban reality its turn in the spotlight by demonstrating how social conditions--the trees were planted in poor and wealthy neighborhoods--caused the genetically identical trees to blossom into a bounty of sizes, some rising into the open sun with vigor, others drooping under the industrial shade.

"One Trees is one of the landmarks so far in art and science," says Wilson. "A lot of artists just sit back and comment on the world. Natalie actually went out and employed the science. It was very powerful, more powerful than just sitting back and commenting."

Jeremijenko lives her work like few artists. She even tries to involve her three kids, much to the chagrin of Conley, who laments that family vacations to Costa Rica and Australia turn into fact-finding missions for her ongoing project about manufacturing, "How Stuff Is Made." Finding the woman behind the artist, though, can be exhausting. Ask her what's personal about her art and she will say, "My thesis is nothing can't be autobiographical. The idea that there is a rational truth out there that is not embodied in a person's politics is something I can't understand or subscribe to."

But ask Conley and he will tell you her "work is very personal, which doesn't always come through because she presents a scientific front. But the initial spark is always personal." Spend enough time with Jeremijenko and the woman in her art does come into view. You see an artist with a frightening drive, dark, passionate, and joyful motivations. It's just that, like her art, she requires translation.

People are beginning to fill up the Whitney Museum on a Saturday morning. Some trickle down to the gift store on the lower floor, where Jeremijenko cuts a path through them and rolls aside a bookshelf on wheels. Behind the shelf, she retrieves the laptop that controls her installation, For the Birds, created with Phil Taylor and her artist collective, Bureau of Inverse Technology, set up on a patio outside the store. Museumgoers are not sure what Jeremijenko--wearing a long silver coat, black knee boots, and straw cowboy hat--is up to. But she pays them little mind. She is focused on showing me how For the Birds works. As I can see, there are translucent bird perches affixed to the outdoor patio walls. When real birds land on them, they set off prerecorded voices that warn museumgoers about the encroachment of avian flu. Next to the perches are miniature reproductions of some of the paintings inside the museum.
"It's the Whitney Biennial for the birds," Jeremijenko says with a short laugh.

Before she goes into detail about For the Birds, a companion to her buoys for the Hudson River, Jeremijenko regales me with the philosophy behind them. She calls both projects "Hudson River School 2.0," a reference to the nineteenth-century painters who lushly rendered the eastern countryside a pastoral Eden. "The Hudson River School romanticized the American landscape for the first time," she says. "It showed it as beautiful vistas of great green expanses with great shimmering blue skies and lots of water. It was a view of nature as something out there, something pretty, something apart from people." Although the Hudson River School may have enchanted people for generations, drawing them closer to nature, its views are now quaint and counterproductive. The American landscape after two centuries of human development is not a pretty picture.
It's time for environmentalists to stop seeing nature as scenery that should be preserved like a painting in a museum, Jeremijenko says, and more like a dying body that needs to be nourished back to health.

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