Farewell Newton Harrison

hub print image

Newton Harrison has died, aged 89. With partner Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton was one half of the Harrison Studio. Helen herself died back in 2018. The loss of both Harrisons is a sad moment for eco-artists everywhere. Since the early 1970s when they began co-authoring projects, they were leaders in this field. Ever restless, ever engaged, ever inventing, ever provoking, ever joyful, ever mischievous.

I got to meet Newton twice. Once in 2015, on a family trip to California, I visited him at his home in Santa Cruz and he cooked me a delicious healthy lunch. Helen was still alive at the time, and I met her briefly, but the dementia she experienced in her later years meant she didn’t join us for that meal. The second time I visited their home was in 2018, this time with my collaborator Kim Williams, about a month after Helen had died. Newton welcomed our visit – he said it cheered him up to have us to talk to. We brought gluten free pastries, and sat on the couch drinking tea.

By then Kim and I were in the thick of our project Sugar vs the Reef? which focused on the sugarcane industry of central-northern Queensland and its effects on the Great Barrier Reef. Newton’s interest was piqued as we shared the challenges we were having: working on a project that size; working away from home; trying to bring together multiple stakeholders; and being two small artists up against a massive environmental problem.

One of Newton’s gifts was that he didn’t get bogged down by such minutiae. For us, the 2000km of sugarcane farms and gigantic scale of the adjacent Great Barrier Reef boggled our minds (it was the largest scale we’d ever worked at). But Newton immediately leaped to planetary thinking. What if all the coral reefs of the world were linked through the work? What if they were all mapped and audited and shown to be in peril everywhere?… What if…? (Newton loved talking in “what ifs”). Following this visit with Newton, Kim wrote a blog post about scale and Californian eco-art, including reflections on this encounter.

Of course, we didn’t just go home and carry out Newton’s prescription for the project. We had our own momentum, our own way of working, which was focused on small-scale community interactions in a particular town within the immensity. We worked on a microcosm of the bigger picture. But Newton’s words resonated. During this visit, we were privileged to witness live the Harrisons’ method: when presented with a situation, and when invited to weigh in, he and Helen would actively shift the problem UP in scale, asking the crucial question: How big is here?.

And so while Kim and I worried about the sugar/reef nexus being too big for us, and so far away from our homes, Newton challenged us to reframe our scale of reference, making it even bigger. When we use the word “here”, he asked, where does “here” stop, and where does “there” start? What are the boundaries to “here”? Faced with the onslaught of global heating (which the Harrisons call The Force Majeure – the force that over-rides all other forces), categories like here and there, local and global are all thrown into doubt.

As their career progressed, the Harrisons’ answer to the question how big is here? grew progressively wider until it encompassed oceans, continents, hemispheres, the whole planet and its surrounding atmosphere. It takes a particular kind of imagination to think and talk and make at this scale effectively, to be able to stand and hold the space with governments and corporations and scientists, and the Harrisons had that.

At the end of that 2018 visit, Newton took us over to the Santa Cruz Botanic Gardens, where we got to see the Future Gardens project. Here’s a link to a brief blog post I wrote at the time about that project. This project investigates the survival of native Californian plant species under three possible future heat and rainfall scenarios. It was just about to launch, and the Harrisons had secured a contract with the Botanic Gardens to maintain it for at least 50 years. Once again, our thoughts turned back to scale. How long is now? What if a project needs to run for multiple generations?

Here’s a short video produced by University of California Santa Cruz about the Future Gardens project.

For me, as an artist half their age, the Harrisons’ legacy is continually useful. One of the reasons for this is that they took seriously the work of describing, interpreting, and communicating about their own experiences. They left behind an enormous archive of correspondence, project proposals, critical reflections, and documentation (now housed at Stanford University). Kim and I spent a few days immersed in this around the same time we visited Newton. In that archive, you can dive into a particular project to see how they made it happen. Kim, I remember, spent a long time rummaging around in the Sava River project. Faxes, emails, thousands of phone calls, haggling for invoices to be paid, photographs from site visits, fragments of poems, endless negotiation, manila folders, it’s all in there. It’s striking how seldom a project “progressed smoothly”. The Harrisons had an appetite for difficulty.

Collaborating with councils, governments, scientists and communities takes a lot of admin, which is not just “behind the scenes” stuff: it IS the work. Projects can take years, and they can go nowhere. They can sit dormant for decades and then bubble up and accelerate again. All these records of project management in the archives are material for future art historians to study, if only they could recognise this as central to the work of contemporary art. Bubbling around and through all of this is the spirit of the Harrisons: the inventive leaps of imagination, the metaphors and lateral re-framings of a situation, the judo moves that turn an intractably stuck problem into something thrilling, and with great potential for change. Chris Fremantle’s essay “Making Poetry to Invent Policy” offers some reflections on this.

(NB – Connected to this, and very much in the tradition of the Harrison Studio, is the work of Metabolic Studio in Los Angeles – their Bending the River project is in it for the long haul!)

Helen and Newton were a married couple who collaborated for at least fifty years. Kim and I are friends and colleagues rather than a couple, but something that I learned from the Harrisons was that you can be an artist duo or group and still maintain distinct voices. Their Lagoon Cycle (and many other works) incorporated dialogues which dramatised the social and environmental problems that were an integral part of the project. They did not smooth these problems over with a unified voice which swept disagreement and glitches under the carpet. You can hear them bickering in some of these dialogues (in a thoughtful, poetic way).

Following the Harrisons, at times Kim and I have played around with a similar dialogical format for thinking through the unresolvable dilemmas that characterise socially-engaged art with an environmental focus. It’s liberating to remind ourselves that we don’t always have to agree. In fact, the disagreement can be the thing.

Below is a work we made for the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, entitled The Growing Up Hub“. Click on the image to see it larger and read the dialogue. You can read a reflection on this piece and its connection to the Harrisons here.

plastic free dialogue image

More on the dialogical nature of this kind of art: I remember that we were intrigued when Newton told us about his and Helen’s method of scheduling “Daily Conversations” as an important part of their working process. Kim and I trialled something similar, particularly during intense periods of working on Sugar vs the Reef?. Anxieties: would the crops grow, and would they grow in time, and would a cyclone wipe out the whole project, and would our collaborators quit on us, and would our hosts continue to support us? Adapting the Harrisons’ daily conversational ritual helped us to stay a little more level-headed during stressful times, to face the anxieties that are integral to complex socially engaged artworks, rather than simply wishing them gone.

I want to finish with three valuable principles from Newton and Helen. Once again, these are examples of the “reframing” tactics at which they excelled. All three of these principles continue to challenge me in my ongoing work.

1 Working by invitation.
On page 64 of their Force Majeure book, the Harrisons talk about the moment (in 1976!) when they “invented their fundamental contract”:

We would go to a place only by invitation; we would accept an invitation only if it included some means for networking into a larger community; we would agree only to go for a week or two at first, to think and research. To earn our way we would sing for our supper, so to speak, by speaking or performing. If an idea of consequence to us came forward, we would present it, and if funding and interest arose, we would enact and evolve whatever concept emerged. We took for granted that the work would be eco-political in nature because that is who we were as artists. We also took for granted that simply having the opportunity to make the proposals would not be enough to cause them to be enacted.

2Ecosystem as client.
While the “business name” Harrison Studio, and their way of operating, meant that they presented themselves to the world somehow like a design firm, the Harrisons always maintained that their main client was the ecosystem. This relationality with entities that go beyond the human continued right up until Newton’s death. Towards the end, it seemed to me, things had moved beyond a “client” and “service provider” relationship, towards … something more. I was particularly affected by the dialogue he had with the Mediterranean Sea in this beautiful video. And as recently as July, when Newton posted on facebook about his pancreatic cancer, he published a moving dialogue with the lifeweb.

3The Ennobling Principle.
The Harrisons sometimes described the scale at which they operated as “worldscapes”. When attempting to interact with worldscapes, they urged, any resolution of a problem must be ennobling of both people and place. There is a fundamental ethics here. Big moves are required to face the Force Majeure; and at the same time, solutions cannot ride roughshod over place and people. Means and ends must align:

Worldscapes are problems with global reach that have three properties: They refer to complex systems for which single cause and effect solutions are ineffectual. The problem itself reveals the disciplines required for resolution as well as determining how deeply the people involved must engage these disciplines. Multiple feedback loops are inherently part of the process. Any resolution both ennobles the place in question and the people at work.

Farewell Newton. You and Helen gave the world so much: we have a rich archive of your stories and documents to build from; we have a strong set of working principles to guide and provoke our ongoing work; and we have your voices of encouragement to keep at it.


On Newton’s facebook page you can read hundreds of tributes to him and Helen from community around the world.

CAOS201 – Social Intersections

caos201 flyer 2022

Join us for Social Intersections CAOS201 in Autumn 2022, an “open studio” contemporary arts subject at University of Wollongong.

“Open Studio” means that anyone across the entire university can enrol, as long as you are currently at second or third year undergraduate level.

No prior experience or pre-requisites needed.

TIMETABLE:
Tuesdays 130pm-530pm

About Social Intersections CAOS201
This subject explores how creative practice can engage with social forms and processes. Students participate in activities which playfully draw attention to the “normal” routines of everyday life, and learn about the history of relational and socially engaged art practices.

Plenty of field trips, guest artists and out-of-classroom experiences.

This is a fun subject with a small group of students. The subject is led practicing artists working in this important growing field.

Topics covered:
Art and the Social
Walking as art Mapping social structures
Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and Activities
Mindful/absurd Toothbrushing
Modes of Engagement (Antagonism-vs-Amelioration; “The Artist as…”)
Art and the Everyday
Psychogeography
Art and Play
Creating play spaces
Re-working Work
Observation and Documentation
Modelling the Social (Relational Aesthetics)
Script-Performance-Event
Ethics of Engagement
Collaboration in the creative arts

Assessment Tasks:

Task 1: Activity Exercise – (aka “making things weird”) – experiment with an ordinary activity in the flow of your everyday life. 

Task 2: Walking Exercise -experiment with walking as a performative, embodied, social form of artmaking.

Task 3: Intersections Project – collaborate with 2-3 students on a self-devised project which engages in the public sphere around art and the social. This activity will be accompanied by a collaborative public celebration event. 

Diagrammatic exhibition catalogue (2018)

I’ve uploaded this catalogue as a pdf here.

“Diagrammatic: Works by Lucas Ihlein and Collaborators” Curated by Jasmin Stephens. Deakin University Gallery, Melbourne.

Texts by James Lynch, Jasmin Stephens, Lucas Ihlein.

Featuring works by Lucas Ihlein, Ian Milliss, Big Fag Press, Louise Kate Anderson, Diego Bonetto and Mirra Whale, SquatSpace, Justin Hewitson, Rhonda Murray, Kim Williams, Brogan Bunt, Albie Muller, Nat Thomas, Kylie Wilkinson, Tom Nicholson, Trent Walter, Teo Treloar, Shaun Postie, Fiona MacDonald, Vernon Ah Kee, Marcus Westbury, Clementine Barnes, John Demos and Artist as Family.

Environmental Audit – artists book

Here’s a link to the Environmental Audit artist book.
An artist book drawn from the Environmental Audit project by Lucas Ihlein, at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2010. This artist book was published to coincide with the exhibition “Diagrammatic: Works by Lucas Ihlein and Collaborators”, curated by Jasmin Stephens, Deakin University Art Gallery, 11 April – 18 May 2018, supported by the School of Communications and Creative Arts, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University. Design by Fiona Hudson

Baking Dirt: Soil and the Carbon Economy

gold coast panorama - running girl

The Gold Coast, where Allan Yeomans works, is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise. See this map for a scenario based on a conservative rise of 110cm.

I’ve come from Wollongong to visit Allan Yeomans, the inventor of the Yeomans Carbon Still.

It seems fitting that Allan’s workshop is located here at the Gold Coast, where hundreds of skyscrapers cluster along the beach, perched barely above sea level. What will happen to this place in the near future, when sea levels rise up and flood the streets, and cyclones erode the foundations of the buildings? Will it become an unlivable ghost town?

Across the world, low-lying cities like the Gold Coast are ever more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and Allan Yeomans hopes that his invention can help tackle this global problem.
Continue reading

Blogging as Art: Life Writing Online

A shorter and tighter version of the following text has been included as a chapter in the book Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice, edited by Quinn Eades and Donna Lee Brien. Because my chapter in the book relates to my practices of blogging, I decided to experiment with composing the text here in WordPress. It’s a bit memoir-ish, a bit technology focused… At the time I didn’t publish the blog post, and it’s languished in my draft box ever since!

* * *

typewriter cover

When I finished my undergraduate degree at the University of Western Sydney in 1996, I realised I had been in educational institutions continuously for 16 years. I had in my final years of university developed a very reflexive (and no doubt rather pretentious) “post-conceptual” form of art practice which focused on educational processes and technologies (lectures, seminars, information transmission, assessment etc). Clearly the context within which I spent most of my time had a big impression on the kind of work I was making. It was very dry and “critical”.
Continue reading

Eshya and the farmers

Agricultural
bureaucrats make time for her
and the mute gweilo.

The third member of the Rice Harmony group that I hung out with was Eshya. She’s an environmental scientist by trade, but her job here goes far beyond the usual science and engineering aspects of environmental management. She’s conducting research on the government’s agricultural policies, while spending time with farmers in the village to understand better how their current farming methods mesh with their way of life.

Here we are – me, Eshya and Shu Hao, on our way to the local town in the back of a sort-of-motorised rickshaw:

lucas, eshya, and shu hao

Eshya decided to capitalise on my visit, and dragged me along to a set of meetings with bureaucrats in the local government agriculture offices. She wanted to find out what the government pest control recommendations are for rice farmers. Sometimes it’s difficult for ordinary people to get access to government workers, and Eshya’s hunch was that the spectacle of having a foreigner along for the meetings might be helpful.

And it was! Well, I didn’t actually do anything, but I believe I was a useful prop. All I did was sit there drinking endless cups of tea and smiling serenely, and handing out my university business card to all and sundry, while Eshya had four meetings with Serious and Important Looking Men in charge of agricultural administration.

One of the tips that Eshya got from these meetings was to go visit an agricultural supplies shop in one of the nearby villages. So we went down there. Here she is talking with the proprietor:

eshya talks about agricultural policy in the shop

Her method is a bit like a “mystery shopper” – she presents as a customer, and describes the particular problem she’s having with her rice crop (some sort of bug infestation). She then asks what the government recommends as a response to this problem.

In the above photo, you can see Eshya looking at a piece of paper the shopkeeper has handed her. That paper has the government recommendations in simple terms. Basically, farmers are advised to use this or that pesticide depending on the insect that is bothering them. There aren’t any recommendations about alternative, non-chemical methods of controlling pests.

Eshya told me that this is one of the challenges that she deals with in her job at Rice Harmony. Farmers tend to be very obedient and follow government policy without question. (It’s also significant that the main point of distribution of this policy is in a shop which sells chemical pesticides.)


Eshya sits in the
farmers’ front rooms – sipping tea
and building “guanxi“.

One of the most important things that Eshya does isto spend time with the farmers in the local village. Each night after dinner she checks her list and pays house calls to two or three families. This is a relaxed time of day when the urgency to solve immediate problems is less intense.

I was honoured to be able to accompany Eshya (and Shu Hao) on a few of these visits. (Again this entailed me drinking a lot of tea!). Here she is chatting with some of the farmers who have taken up the challenge of producing rice without harmful pesticides:

eshya with farmers at home

One of her aims in these informal conversations is to try and understand, from the farmers’ perspectives, what constrains them from transitioning to less chemical-intensive methods. In many cases it’s labour. From what I could gather, it’s only been since the 1980s that the government has been recommending pesticide and fertilizer use for rice farming.

These farmers still remember a time before that, when the work that the chemicals now do was performed by human yakka. For example, hauling bulky manure and compost requires more heavy lifting than spraying a concentrated soluble fertiliser. So the advent of chemical farming was something of a relief in what is a very labour-intensive occupation.

On top of this, the current farming generation is ageing. The children of farming families from the village now have the opportunity to travel to the big city to study. There are so many diverse (and better paid) career paths available to them, and so they don’t tend to return to the farm. When their parents retire, they sometimes follow the kids to the city – and so the village starts to empty out.

This is one of the complex problems facing farming in China today. Nobody that I spoke to seemed to have an easy solution. Farming is simply too laborious, and too low-paid, to be attractive to the younger generation. Who will grow the rice in the future? Will China become a net-importer of rice from other, poorer countries?

in the farmers house with shu hao and eshya

In this photo: Aunt Tang, Tang Zeke, Tang Zeping (Tang Zeke and Tang Zeping are brothers). Standing at the back is ShuHao Lin. On the right is your humble author, Lucas Ihlein.

I’m familiar with some of these social problems associated with farming. In Australia, the economics of farming have tended towards fewer farms, much larger farms, and more mechanisation. This can results in social and geographical isolation, and the depopulation of rural centres.

Eshya and I talked about all these problems, and I showed her the work I’d done previously with Ian Milliss on The Yeomans Project, as well as its successor Sugar vs the Reef. We were excited about the crossovers in the work of Rice Harmony and in my creative arts approach. I do hope that we have a chance to share strategies again – perhaps via the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, which is also grappling with very similar issues around regional culture, environmental management, and agriculture.


“Eshya and the Farmers” is one of three blog posts about my visit to Xiangyang Village in Guangdong.

In the first post, I spend time with Linda in the mud of the rice fields. In the second post, I hang out with ShuHao and go looking for bugs and frogs.

This adventure in the rice paddies was brought to you by Guangzhou Delta Haiku.

Shu Hao and the Insects

While I was in the village, Linda’s colleague Shu Hao took me out on a nightwalk. This is his specialty. He’s the Rice Harmony expert on biodiversity, so his job is to keep an eye on all the other (non-human) lives that proliferate alongside the rice.

Tracking biodiversity is a method for gauging the health of the local environment in which the rice is being grown. To put it bluntly: the more toxic chemicals there are, the fewer species will be present.

Night time is when many of these small creatures come out, and so Shu Hao loves to go on a walk with a torch to see what he can discover. Frogs, toads, tadpoles, crickets, grasshoppers, stick insects, moths, fireflies (fireflies!!), caterpillars, ants, spiders, snails, slugs, beetles, bugs: we saw multiple varieties of all of these, and Shu Hao responded with fascination and respect every time. He paid close attention in order to observe the patterns of behaviour of each of these animals.

Here’s a beautiful green stick insect that Shu Hao photographed on my arm:

stick insect

And here is a short audio recording in which you can hear the cacophony of the night in the village:

 

I recently attended a talk by Hildegard Westerkamp, one of the pioneers of “acoustic ecology”. She spoke of the use of audio recording as a method for documenting the biodiversity of a geographical location. The idea is that you return to the same spot at the same time of year, over several years (or decades) and then by comparing the audio mix, you can get a sense of what is changing in the ecosystem.

At this point, the diversity of life forms in the Rice Harmony village seems very strong. In fact, Linda explained to me that one reason why they selected this place to set up their social enterprise – that it was still part of a relatively healthy environment.

Shu Hao never really stops working. The next day we were out on the road having a breather, and he spotted a micro-movement in the grass. He sprung over to take a close-up photograph of an orange butterfly:

shu hao photographing a butterfly

Shu Hao loves insects.
His whole body reaches down
To get nearer them.


“ShuHao and the Insects” is one of three blog posts about my visit to Xiangyang Village in Guangdong.

In the first post, I spend time with Linda in the mud of the rice fields, and in the third and final post, I accompany Eshya to visit some agricultural bureaucrats, and sip tea with some rice farmers.

This adventure in the rice paddies was brought to you by Guangzhou Delta Haiku.

Linda and the mud

One of the highlights of my time in Guangzhou was an opportunity to leave the big city and visit a farm.

Strangely, for an area like the Pearl River Delta that was built on agriculture, it wasn’t easy for me to find a farm. I don’t speak or read Mandarin, and the Great Firewall doesn’t make internet research very easy. Plus it seems that over the last 30 years, massive industrial and housing development has really pushed agriculture out of Guangzhou.

Because of all the other work I’ve been doing on agriculture, I really wanted to feel for myself how farming in southern China is different from Australia, so I kept prodding Hanting (a local Guangzhou artist and our hardworking “fixer”) to “find me a farm!”.

Eventually Hanting’s extensive network came through: her friend Huáng Hé dug up a link to Rice Harmony, and we called them up and arranged a visit.

Here I am at the Guangzhou office of Rice Harmony, where they do their central planning and product distribution. I’m posing with Linda Tan, who is one of the key members of the group:

Linda and Lucas at the Rice Harmony HQ in Guangzhou

Linda invited me to come and visit the village where Rice Harmony is collaborating with a network of local farmers. The day after our exhibition launch at Observation Society, I jumped on a provincial bus for a four-hour journey to the town of Qingyuan, where I experienced two extremely interesting days with some of the Rice Harmony people: Linda, Eshya, and Shu Hao.

I was so happy when my view from the bus window changed from this sort of thing:

industrial highway scene

…to this sort of thing:

view of rice farms from bus window, guangdong

(I know, the comparison between these two pictures isn’t really fair is it? The former image is blurry and with grey skies, and the latter is sharp, with a bright sunny aspect. But there you have it, ya can’t argue with the “aesthetics of nature”!)

Rice Harmony rents a house in a tiny village:

rice harmony house

Notice all those yellow and red sacks? They are full of organic fertilizer.

The Rice Harmony team is a social enterprise. Their method is really interesting.

While I hung out with Linda in the fields, we talked through the challenge that the group has set itself: They are a business. There are about 15 employees. They sell rice on behalf of some of the farmers in the village. Their goal is to transform local farming practices to be less reliant on chemicals (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides).

This is one of the most interesting things that they do: although the Rice Harmony members have no prior experience in growing rice, they are now learning how to do it, with the local farmers as their teachers. They rent a series of un-used rice paddies for this purpose, and Linda has taken on the task with gusto.

linda's rice field

In the above photo, the two lovely looking green carpets are Linda’s early experiments in striking rice seedlings. These will soon be transferred and planted out in the field. (Meet “Mike” the scarecrow on the right hand side of the shot).

In Australia, one of the most common issues farmers have to deal with is water – specifically its scarcity. At the moment, there’s no problems with water supply in northern Guangdong. The river gushes through the village, and concrete culverts divert it alongside each rice paddy:

concrete culvert for watering rice paddies

This water is “free” – there are no debates around rationing or “water rights” here. If a farmer wants to flood her paddy, she’ll just stack some rocks and a clod of grass behind a strategically placed hole in the concrete culvert, and and water will flow in.

Playing with water levels in terraced rice fields is quite fun. Linda and I did the rounds of the paddies she’s in charge of. She’s still getting her head around the topography. Depending on how much water you want, you simply build up, or chip away at, the mud walls of each paddy. The tools are ancient: a long handled hoe, and a shovel.

hoe and shovel, rice farm

When the water reaches the height of the wall, it flows on into the next paddy down, and so on, eventually making its way back into the river.

Here’s Linda trying to get to the bottom of a hydrology problem (note that building in the background – it’s the old village schoolhouse, now empty):

linda in the rice paddy


Each paddy has an
“in” and “out” — Linda maps
water + gravity.

Here’s Linda’s map. The fields with white borders are the ones she is working with. You can see from the annotations that Linda has begun to indicate where the water flows (click the map to view it larger):

linda's map of rice paddy ins and outs

And here are my feet, feeling the lukewarm wet clay mud of the rice paddy:

I found the Rice Harmony social enterprise method inspirational for these reasons:

  • they situate themselves right there within the village (not just fly-in fly-out);
  • they demonstrate their intention to learn, thereby honouring the deep knowledge of the local farmers;
  • they offer an alternative market to the conventional fertilizer-pesticide rice market, for those farmers who are interested to transition to a chemical-free method.

“Linda and the Mud” is one of three blog posts about my visit to Xiangyang Village in Guangdong.

In the next post, I hang out with ShuHao and go looking for bugs and frogs, and in the third and final post, I accompany Eshya to visit some agricultural bureaucrats, and sip tea with some rice farmers.

This adventure in the rice paddies was brought to you by Guangzhou Delta Haiku.