"We live in a world of pollution with heavy metals
saturating the soil, where there is no solution to that.
If that (pollution) could be carved away, and life could
return to that soil, then a diverse and ecologically balanced
life, then that is a wonderful sculpture."
"You have to create a condition for an idea to survive.
It’s like creating an economy to make it worthwhile
to promote. I had to see the big picture of things."
"...The art can mutate into a science project dedicated
to providing the world this information, good or bad."
It was funny stumbling on the
idea. It was in the "Whole Earth Review," it was
written by a psilocybine expert, Terrence McKenna, who has
his own cult following and has written interesting things
on ethnobiology. He was writing about the possible cleaning
of toxic ground with the plant datura. It was like in the
film "The Graduate," you know the guy—not Dustin
Hoffman—but I was the guy telling Dustin Hoffman, "Plastics,
it’s plastics, it’s the future!" I ran to see
my wife, or girlfriend then, and just told her, I said, "It’s
plants. The future is plants. The new sculpture is plants."
Most of my friends thought I was a little bit insane because
number one, you quit, you had a show and you’re going,
your career is starting, and now, you quit and you’re
now talking about plants? And I saw the poetic nature of this.
I said, "It is a sculpture. It could be a sculpture of
carving away."
And put it this way: I say that it’s the traditional
sculpture that I’m interested in. Michelangelo has his
Carrara marble, he has an idea, an image. And he goes with
his chisels and he creates "David" and we all ‘ooh’
and ‘ah’ over it, and whatever we do in front of
it. That’s it. Now I’m in a world where I open up
the paper, I read these articles. We live in a world of pollution
with heavy metals saturating the soil, where there is no solution
to that. If that (pollution) could be carved away, and life
could return to that soil, then a diverse and ecologically
balanced life, then that is a wonderful sculpture. I think
there is a profound aesthetic
in there and it’s really simple. But we have to create
the chisels and we have to create the tools and we have to
isolate the problem: where the block pollution is, so we can
carve it away. It became very clear to me that ("Revival
Field") would be a sculptural project worth engaging
in. And I set upon to finding out more, whether datura or
could do this...jimsonweed is common.
ART:21:
Datura is jimsonweed?
CHIN:
Yeah. And so I’d gone through
all the conceptual
workings of this, now I just needed to take the poetry of
this idea and turn it responsibly and pragmatically into reality.
I found this landfill expert at Texas A&M, who said, "Well
I have no knowledge of datura ever doing that, but I heard
a paper by a guy named Rufus L. Chaney. And he’s in Beltsville,
Maryland; he’s a research scientist who gave a paper
about plants and accumulation, and we’re talking about
hyperaccumulation." Hyperaccumulation is this notion
that the plants can suck up so much metal—and we’re
talking about heavy metals, not everything—that the plant
itself was twenty to forty percent heavy metal when you ashed
it, so you could sell it as an ore and pay for this process.
Because it’s not just enough to pull it up, you have
to think about the whole machinery, a reality.
You have to create a condition for an idea to survive. It’s
like creating an economy to make it worthwhile to promote.
I had to see the big picture of things. If you say, "Okay,
this has to be completed after I’m dead," then what
do you need to do to make it work? It has to be self-sustaining.
It has to prove itself to be self-sustaining. So I called
Dr. Chaney up and here’s Dr. Chaney saying "Well,
datura will get you high, but if you want to suck up heavy
metals, you’ve called the right person." He said,
"Everything I’m doing is on the shelf. There is
no support within our government at this time, a conservative
government at the time, to go into this kind of research.
I’m back working on sewage sludge." But his passion
was, he said, this thing I really care about (clearing heavy
metals from soil). And I said, "Well, what if I have
this idea, and you have this idea, let me learn about the
science behind it and maybe we could work together so we can
do what you need." And he said "What I really need
is a replicated field test. If you can do this, then we’ll
be able to make science, because science is in the lab."
We had to make the artwork create the science.
ART:21:
What is a "replicated field?"
CHIN:
It’s going somewhere in
the world outside the lab, like throwing a dart on the board,
to do an experiment that you did in the lab that shows that
there is heavy metal transfer into a plant, and then go randomly
to a hostile climate, in the field, do the planting, and show
there’s results that match what’s in the lab. So
it’s replicated by a control. So I felt like "Why
not?" And then the art can mutate into a science project
dedicated to providing the world this information, good or
bad. And I was already projecting that the physical structure
was not important, that you know this physical manifestation
of the field and all this is also evolutionary, it’s
a temporary thing. It’s more about this field being transformed
by the science and living again, or creating an idea that
survives in the world. So all this was conceived and understood,
and I went about doing the very difficult negotiations where
every day I would be on the phone, borrowing money if I had
to, to pay the phone bill, or writing letters or do whatever,
doing anything necessary to get this artwork together.
And it’s funny—when people are used to see you making
sculpture or creating drawings and they come in and you’re
on the phone constantly, and they say, "Well aren’t
you going to make any art today?" And I would say, "I
am making art—this is it." Because I was driven
by that, and meeting tremendous obstacles that were not just
about the science and not just about the art. There were legal
obstacles that occurred where people said, "Well, we
don’t want to talk about it anyway, because it’s
about financial responsibilities for the pollution and we
have got to say we didn’t do it." So all these things
I learned about the politics. Why? You know it doesn’t
make sense, I said, "Why are we living in a ground like
Love Canal? Why are we living in areas that are...are toxic?
And why are people allowed to be there? And why isn’t
there someone who’s responsible?" And obviously
there’s political corruption where money is just wasted
and there are things that just don’t make any sense.
I learned that they do make sense in a way that is about the
terrible aspects of human nature, and that’s the truth.
