ARTMAKING IN A GLOBAL CLIMATE CRISIS

Unrest
When I had my first son and finally woke up from the collective art-career-psychosis, I realised, that I had grown tired of working with art the way I did. It did not correlate with my values. Breaking my body and health on huge projects that forced all my creative energy into production, pitching my project over and over again until all passion had fizzled away, spending more than I earned on storing installations. Travelling all the time and saying goodnight to my kid on the phone. Driving my artworks to the landfill and watching all my thinking basically being burned.

It could be a beautiful analogy for the artwork as a sand mandala; there for a moment, swept away. Except it wasn’t at all.

In 2015 I moved out of Copenhagen to Roskilde with my family and the next 4 years I spend insatiably getting to know everything about plants and permaculture. As the founder Bill Mollison coined the permaculture core values: Earth care, People care, Fair share; it wasn’t such a stretch from my feminist, postcolonial, antiracist, left-wing, anti-speciesism beliefs. Just immensely different approaches and schooling. I kept asking myself: where does the outcome of artistic creation in general belong on the sliding scale between being a consumer and being constructive? When I see artworks with live plants in ecosystem-like installations, complete with grow-light and water tanks, crammed into white cube galleries like they were illegal hashfarms, it strikes me how sad and amputated it looks to try to fit all kinds of art into 1980s white cube shopping windows.

At the academy, we had a notion of “closed circuit” artworks: pieces that were bulletproof and wrapped around themselves conceptually in a nice bowtie and ready to ship – to a collector or an exhibition. Of course, it is nice to make fine things and to be readily accepted – we have all done that and everybody needs bread and butter, especially an artist. But how sad it is, when art stops to be a necessary negotiation or exploration of the very boundaries of our accepted realities and just become a perfect product of its current time. Especially today with images and artists everywhere, it is not too much to ask: is this artwork a necessary manifestation in the world?

Skye Jin, The Meadow, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

Skye Jin, The Meadow, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

In our household we sort our trash, eat plants instead of meat, save up for an electrical car. But one unanswered question keeps bugging me: what do artists do in a climate crisis? When we look at facts, the world is well beyond the sustainability issue. Greenwashing aside, we need to regenerate and rebuild ressources on every level and our profession needs to take action too. Poisonous materials, luxury market objects? Goodbye. Artworks and exhibitions with ethical labelling? Hello!

Skye Jin’s 3 Pocket Philosophy Rules for Healthy Artmaking:

1. Work with materials that feel alive in your hands.

2. Create things that has a purpose in this world.

3. Create something that keeps you excited

How did I become someone who makes and enjoys art?
If you are not physically secure, seen for who you are or emotionally attached as a child something in you will always have open ends. When we do our markings in the world, we basically say: “I was here!”. Some of us, with more fuzzy outlines, have to do this action over and over again. Initially, you might think it is because you want to be loved, seen or understood by everyone. Art making is basically risk taking. You can’t make art without trying out things you cannot fully control. When I realised this, I stopped caring about critics and prestige. You do this, to exist in a space with the other risk takers, other artists. To inspire, refine and surprise each other in a common and necessary fascination of the risk taking in itself.

Skye Jin, Violet Visions, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

Skye Jin, Violet Visions, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

I sadly end up watching most exhibitions online. I prefer museum exhibitions with long exhibition periods or permanent artworks. I need time to digest them. Go over and over details and to be honest, most new artworks could use more time as well. Nothing is great the first time it is installed. It needs time to marinate in its new surroundings, time for the artist to sleep and sit in the space, spy on visitors and decide on alterations. It is terrible to de-install after two months. Funeral time, I call it. You have carefully build this space, this idiosyncratic wavelength to take flight and then, when you get what it was all about, its pulverised to trash.

When I go to see an exhibition of a colleague and it is taken down after one month, I feel like someone died. Seriously!? Years of thought went into this and for the work to truly speak, it has to unfold over just as many years as semi-permanent. A place. To be sensed though different seasons, crowded or lonely moments, to contain sadness, despair, plain boredom or curiosity. I want to be able to go multiple times and find comfort, unrest or to meditate. Slowly digested. Both by the audience and as compost in an ecosystem, as all materials are supposed to. Why do artworks have to be set in concrete and weather proof plastic paints out of necessity? Horribly polluting, dead materials from the building industry. To me, it makes no sense anymore to stick to these either-or formats. They ruin the artists and the works.

Skye Jin, The Meadow, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

Skye Jin, The Meadow, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

Skye Jin, The Meadow, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

Skye Jin, The Meadow, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

Skye Jin, The Meadow, 2017. Photo: Asbjørn Sand.

A Solution that puts the Artist and the Artwork first:
We should let more installations become semi-permanent artworks for a short period of years. Have even more formats for public artworks and in that process, let the municipalities hire the artist for at least a year. That’s what it takes to make good art, including the thinking and conceptualisation.

We need to develop a new way of both producing and seeing art. Make programs with performative projects that justify them as events and think them financially like theatre productions. Museums and big artspaces should hire artists for long residencies to develop lengthy projects.

Artists should also be hired more as curators or leaders of art institutions. We need optimal frameworks for art and artists, to claim many of the jobs and finances that surround the arts. We, the artists, have for too long been quickly transported in and out of institutions like day-workers on laughable honorariums or candleholders from the museum gift shops.

Let us be able to have families, do-able deadlines and work locally. Not squeeze, bend and cut ourselves to pieces, to fit into funding logics and market mechanisms like fast-fashion strategies.

Skye Jin, Slow Liquid, 2021. Photo: Skye Jin.

Skye Jin, Slow Liquid, 2021. Photo: Skye Jin.

Skye Jin, Slow Liquid, 2021. Photo: Skye Jin.

Corona
In February 2021, corona kept our exhibition Postsecular Reflections II at C4 Projects in Copenhagen closed. Instead, weeks of winter weather and record breaking minus degrees covered the landscape in shimmering snow crystals, like a gigantic public, white cube. Perfect conditions! I could work from my private sphere, install temporarily outside and give public access through the internet. All materials were from my household and went back there, to be used, digested or composted; glassware, parts from previous art projects, kombucha and seaweed. Nothing to drive to the landfill. Nothing to sell. Nothing to put in storage. Stuff in motion, things in use. Organisms ordered. Thoughts that could peek out and bounce off of others.

When I had my first son, I took a DNA test. Since I am adopted, I wanted to know for sure what I would pass on. It showed I was primarily of korean descent with a high percentage japanese. Knowing Koreas bloody past with Japan, it wasn’t joy at first sight. When I had visited wooden buddhist temples, signs always said “..burned down by the japanese, restored in..”. Every cultural trait had been attempted wiped out in a massive, colonial wave of violence. And this violence was right there, present in my body. Of course, the landscape, the oceans and even the gut itself don’t mind these emotional, collective wounds, they bleed into new territories like slow liquid.

Somewhere, in the past, among those islands that would become Japan, an enzyme from a marine bacteria called Zobellia galactanivorans found its way into the genome of the human stomach bacteria B. plebeius. An enzyme that had a profound ability to derive nutrients from red algae, also known as nori seaweed. As if the ocean had crawled right into the human gut, it is also said that people in the past used to study the whales; when they gave birth, they would eat great amounts of seaweed to nurse their calves. In Korea that led to the traditional seaweed soup miyeok-guk, a dish always made for new mothers. Also known as healing soup.

Recipe
dried wakame seaweed soy sauce
minced garlic
sesame oil

Soak. Rinse. Fry. Soak. Stir. Season.

Skye Jin, Slow Liquid, 2021. Photo: Skye Jin.

Skye Jin, Slow Liquid, 2021. Photo: Skye Jin.

Skye Jin, Slow Liquid, 2021. Photo: Skye Jin.

Nutritious Artmaking
My partner, an engineer at DTU Risø Wind energy and his colleague and friend, a french senior scientist with many ideas and a passion for new hobbies, went into the world of fermentation some years ago. At some point it went a little over the top and our friends wife complained about the amount of equipment taking up the whole living room together with boxes of live grasshoppers for a sustainable protein project.

I had worked with the printable sun cell research company InfinityPV and noticed how scientists worked and thought in much the same way as artists (minus the aesthetic analysis training) and, as a bonus, obviously had cutting-edge ideas about sustainable solutions and technology. All these experiences shaped an idea through many conversations:

To make a non-profit collective called ART+SCIENCE+PERMACULTURE.

It is not a soup that will taste good if one ingredient dominates. Also, it cannot take flight if too many definitions and buzzwords kill it even before it is served. It is what it is and will slowly grow from the nutrition of innate, everyday passion, misanthropic horror, ideas we get and initiatives thrown up in the air and catched.

If all goes well, we will have activities with Art Hub Copenhagen in 2021 and continue setting up a space/office/basecamp in Roskilde or at DTU Risø.

Thanks to Stefan, Trine, Jane, Anna, Mikkel, Pierre-Elouan, Luise and Marie for crossfertilisation of ideas, thinking and experience.

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In 2021, idoart.dk has received funding through Viden, dialog og debat by Statens Kunstfond. Throughout the year, the funding will go to the production of articles with a special focus on making space for nuances and new voices. The article you’ve just read has been realized thanks to this grant.

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