State of the art for the art of "Blued Trees"

Judy Eddy http://www.radio2women.com interviewed Linda Leeds, of Frackbusters and myself about Blued Trees for the live Radio2Women show. It aired on Tuesday, July 28 between 4-5: PM on WBCR-lp Great Barrington: 

http://audiblecafe.com/2015/07/blued-trees-creative-resistance-makes-waves/

The five minute film on Blued Trees, will have a world and European premiere in 'Gaia: Resonant Visions,' an exclusive one day event at The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, alongside screenings of films by Ursula Biemann, Oliver Ressler, and Basia Irland. Curated by James Brady. The public is invited to view the Blued Trees launch on line: 

https://vimeo.com/135290635

In discussing the moral legal questions this project addresses on Judy Eddy's show, I touched on how fossil fuel industries violate the ideas of ecofeminist pioneers like Donna Haraway, author of Primate Visions, that point to parallels between the oppression of women and the exploitation of other species to our global detriment. 

The Blued Trees conceptual symphony and site-specific ecological art is filing for copyright protection against eminent domain takings by fossil fuel corporations in Peekskill, NY. Crowd-sourcing has begun to assert this protection in the Supreme Court, which may take six years and cost six million dollars. Additional participants are invited to continue to “make waves,” by joining the Greek Chorus. Paint a tree; make waves in the woods!  

In their own words, "In February 2015, a team of New York State residents, angered by the abuse of eminent domain in service to fossil fuel corporations and frustrated by the lack of success using prescribed methods, were inspired to use art and copyright law to counter this abuse. They enlisted eco-artist Aviva Rahmani who created the Blued Trees Symphony- installation. Rahmani is an internationally known, exhibited and published ecological artist and an Affiliate with the Institute for Alpine and Arctic Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado."

The Summer Solstice Blued Trees launched June 21, 2015 as an overture to a public symphonic opera and a site-specific installation. The proposed pipeline corridors were seen as possible lines of music and opportunities to compose music for those lines. 

The Blued Trees launch took place within view of a public road in Peekskill, New York, on private land, along a 1/3 mile measure of 50 woodland acres in the path of the proposed high-pressure Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) pipeline expansion. AIM’s expansion would transport volatile fracked gas within one hundred five feet of the Indian Point nuclear facility. The full symphony will be performed September 23, 2015.

Approximately twenty trees were painted along the AIM corridor over the course of two days for the launch. About twenty-six participants included local children and elderly residents, and others who joined from as far away as Switzerland, as well as members of the Earth Guardians. After the painting, participants performed a chorale as they passed through the woodland. When the human performers left, the installation remained with the trees as a permanent work of art. A Greek Chorus launched in simultaneous international locations, including Lisbon, Portugal and Seattle, Washington. It included works by composer Maile Colbert, Deanna Pindell and Jesse Etelson.

Blued Trees asserts the language of the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), for the moral rights of the art over condemnation of private land. In Peekskill, pipeline construction would threaten the rights of Blued Trees. The art cannot be destroyed by moving, or otherwise destroying the trees with which it was created, without infringing on VARA. Protecting Blued Trees as a work of art will test corporate eminent domain takings in the name of “public good” in the judicial system. If that copyright suit is successful, it could impede the proposed AIM expansion. Blued Trees initiated a conversation about public good and morality, earth rights and environmental justice.

Help Us Make Waves!

Any willing landowner may join the “Greek Chorus,” as part of the Blued Trees Symphony, by painting a wave “note” on ONE tree or more, preferably roadside for visibility. Send a photo of your “blued” tree with GPS coordinates to Rahmani, who will continue -- throughout 2015 -- to gather and map our Blued Trees.

Preview comments for Blued Trees overture film:

“It is powerful and beautiful.” –Betsy Damon, ecological artist

“Blued Trees is a brave and consequential work. It’s remarkable and compelling in this juxtaposition of luscious aesthetics and desperate ecological threats.” -Carolee Schneemann, media artist

“We need nature - now nature needs us.” – Nancy Vann, property owner

“How exciting to see you walking down the woodland path in defense of a bunch of trees!” -Alison Knowles, Fluxus artist

“The images are beautiful, the camera work excellent, the idea great!” -Anthony Ramos, videographer and painter

“… good and slow enough to get the point without the emotionalism that has sparse content. Simple, common sense. Fast and speedy is what got us into this mess.” R. Eugene Turner, ecological scientist

“Very cool. Such a soothing artistic video for such an in your face bold type of problem/issue.” –Crystal Day, film student

“In Latin, conspire means to "breathe together," which is what we're doing when we work, organize as a team in harmony. The notes of Blued Trees also require an in-breath to sing which is what we all did at the June 21st launch.” Gusti Bogok, performer in Blued Trees overture

“Love the soundtrack. Elegiac and ominous. Good editing. Film was informative and moved at a good pace. Thought the map was very important. Need it to visualize how close the pipeline will come to Indian Point. Seems incredible.” –Marcia Annenberg, ecological artist

Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Joseph Pilates and trigger point theory

Me in a tree, on the right in a skirt: the early California years.
Photography by Fred Lonidier at Pauline Oliveros' wedding.

"Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism" is the title of my dissertation with the Zurich Node (Z-Node) of the Planetary Collegium at the University of Plymouth, UK. In a series of five chapters, I describe a holistic approach to understanding the space of environmental degradation and resilient restoration with an original theory I've written briefly about elsewhere. Understanding how to embody an experience of space is an integral to that theory as systems theory or Geographic Information Systems science (GISc). I plan is to develop that thesis into a book as soon as I can put the PhD behind me. Meanwhile, from time to time, scraps of my past remind me where my ideas came from, as Steve Paxton's recent appearance at MOMA:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/19/arts/dance/steve-paxtons-satisfyin-lover-and-state-at-moma.html?nl=nyregion&emc=edit_ur_20121019

I first met Steve Paxton in person, in 1970 in a workshop he did at Ace Galley in LA with Alex Hay. Steve & I were close that summer and I loved his work, esp when I saw it for the first time in 1966 in the Armory "9 Evenings," as part of EAT. Steve Paxton brought a deliberate appreciation of athleticism into the dance world.because he had once taught gym classes in high school. He was part of developing contact improv movement, no doubt inspired by football and basketball, which Simone Forti then sought to develop even further, as what she once described during rehearsal at UCSD I was part of, as a virtuosity of that technique. In Simone's approach, she was recapitulating the historical trajectory of how ballet developed from fencing in the seventeenth century. These two approaches were mirrored in what Joseph Pilates called, "controlology," based on watching animals and doing yoga. 

The New Dance movement at Judson Church in the sixties, fostered by the late Rev. William Moody was not just a series of performances, it was an expression of a zeitgeist of those times as much as Fluxus and Happenings. As individuals, Judson was a group I began to know personally just before leaving NYC for California in 1968 and then early in my career in So Calif: including Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Steve Paxton, Alex Hay, Simone Forti, briefly Rauschenberg, etc. 

"Joe," as he was known to his many students, was not at all interested in what has popularly evolved as a set of calisthenics. He was interested in creating a system of movement, highly sensitized to the environment of movement, which therapeutically reshaped the body's learned distortions, as from conventional sports training and ballet.

What I've spoken about briefly to colleagues and occasional interviewers at various times, is how some of my performance ideas for how to understand the space of a site that has been degraded, are grounded in dance. I trained in ballet and did dressage from childhood. 

My own experiences observing animals and doing dressage opened me to Joe's ideas during my six years of work with him when he was alive. It also gave me a unique perspective on Jill Johnston's brilliant writing for the Village Voice, which I devoured every week for her expression of the relationship between dance and experience of the city as a Happening in those years. I was lucky to experience all that simultaneously.  New Dance was very connected to  Joseph Pilates' thru the sixties, and what I gleaned was later realized for me in my performance group, the American Ritual Theatre (1969-1971). Those ideas are still integrated into my practice.

It was around that time that I also also met & became close to Allan Kaprow and many of the other Fluxus folks, as, Peter Van Riper and Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, etc. I would TA for Allan Kaprow @ Cal Arts in the early seventies and went thru many years of arguments as I hashed out where their ideas began and ended in my thinking. But what I absorbed, has stuck with me and grown over all these years, has been a relaxed but highly sensitized relationship to space in the broadest possible sense. 

To my regret, I didn't hear about Steve presenting his work @MOMA until yesterday and because I fly out tonight to present at the Restore Americas Estuaries National conference:

https://www.estuaries.org/conference/

I will also miss Steve's video this evening but highly recommend it to any of my readers. 

So if anyone else out there can get to MOMA tonight, enjoy for me too!