Art as intervention

When Santa Fe’s water crisis turned dire in the parched summer of 2002, Diane Karp, director of the Santa Fe Art Institute, invited environmental artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, both in their early 70s and both professors emeriti of UC San Diego, to give a lecture and studio workshop on how artists engage issues in the environment.

The Harrisons’ lecture and workshop grew into a residency and opened a dialogue with the local community of ecologists, permaculturists (a discipline that looks at how natural systems function), water conservationists, botanists and engineers who were already involved in the issues affecting Santa Fe’s ecologically troubled watershed. “They got a bunch of us all bugged up and professionally involved,” says Richard Jennings, a water management consultant who became the Harrisons’ project manager as their work in Santa Fe grew from conversations to large-scale proposals for the problems affecting the watershed. The fruits of this residency -- a series of vast maps, brief poetic texts, photographs and videos that lay out the ecology and history of the region -- are the basis of an exhibition, “Santa Fe Watershed: Lessons From the Genius of Place” at the Santa Fe Art Institute through Jan. 22.

Exhibited at LACMA

Often referred to as the “deans of ecological art,” the Harrisons came to prominence in the early 1970s as part of the first generation of earthworks artists. Their initial joint project and one of their best known, “Survival Piece No. 2: Notations on the Ecosystems of the Western Salt Works (With the Inclusion of Brine Shrimp),” was made for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Art and Technology” exhibition in 1971. The piece consisted of shallow ponds of varying degrees of salinity, algae and brine shrimp. As the brine shrimp fed on the algae, the ponds became mutating fields of color. “We decided that all of our work would be about ecological survival,” explains Newton Harrison. “We wanted our work to be non-trivial.”

The Harrisons continue to do moderate-scale site-specific public art projects, such as “California Wash: A Memorial,” a garden and walkway commissioned by the city of Santa Monica at the terminus of Pico Boulevard. However, in the last decade they have embarked on projects, principally in Europe, that are increasingly conceptual and that propose monumental ecological schemes covering vast geographic areas that would take centuries to run their course. “The Green Heart of Holland” (1995), for example, proposed a systemic rethinking of suburban sprawl in the Netherlands. “Peninsula Europe” (2001), reconceived Europe as a single unified drainage basin. Karp calls the Harrisons “transformative cartographers” because they allow people to think differently about a region by creating maps based on different data.

“We translate planning ideas into visuals,” Helen Mayer Harrison says. “We create icons, which allow a new myth of place to emerge. If it’s just a matter of restoration, others can do that. We’re artists and storytellers.”

Landscape of myth, fact

The Harrisons began their work in Santa Fe by asking basic questions, such as: “How big is ‘here’?” “What is happening?” “What are its boundaries?” and “Do we see any patterns?” They look for answers that help define the scope and nature of a place, revealing an iconic image and central mythology from the unique landscape and social context.

What they found when they looked at Santa Fe’s terrain, maps and ecological problems was more than a drought and “more than a dead river, it was a wound in the countryside,” says Newton Harrison of an increasingly invisible watershed. Less than a century ago, the Santa Fe River ran in an 8-foot-wide stream next to the city’s historic cathedral and down the center of what is now oxymoronically named Water Street. Today, although a leafy ditch still runs through the center of town, the river has nearly vanished. To the south of the historic city center, the river has cut a 30-foot canyon through the erosion of its banks. In these sections, what was once a viable river is now at most a trickle except in heavy rain, when it rushes through in a flash flood.

The Harrisons next created their own map of the watershed. Using an enormous 1-to-100,000-scale U.S. Geological Survey map as a background, they drew in the high ground as well as the tributaries and historical flow lines of the watershed that in many cases exist today as dry arroyos. From these marks they extracted an icon -- a map of Santa Fe minus streets and mountains as well as the familiar landmarks of plaza, cathedral and other buildings that residents and visitors have come to use as points on a compass. What remains is a series of blue squiggly lines stretching horizontally and jagging downward in a pattern that looks like the veins and spine of a leaf. This is Santa Fe’s watershed in its ideal form, rendered in the blue of a crystal clear stream. By making this shape visible, the Harrisons hope to bring back into consciousness a watershed that has been overcome by the expanding urbanization of what was once a rural village.

Having defined this image, the Harrisons focused on one of the first projects to greet a visitor to the exhibition. “The Guild in the Arroyo” proposes to “heal” the Santa Fe River by addressing the massive soil erosion at the top of the watershed. “Everybody in Santa Fe is talking about water,” Helen Mayer Harrison says. “But in order to do anything about water you have to begin with the earth.”

In collaboration with local permaculturist Joel Glanzberg of the cooperative Regenesis and the New Mexico Youth Conservation Corps, they built a series of check dams and “guilds,” which the Harrisons refer to as “beneficial ensembles” of native plants, at the source of 87 tributaries that feed the river. In a process that is roughly similar to the agricultural practices of the Anasazi, the ancient Native American people, the guilds stabilize the topsoil and draw moisture deeper into the soil. When it rains, the seeds from these plants are carried downstream, reseeding vegetation and multiplying these effects. The guilds work like “an inoculation,” Glanzberg says. “You can intervene in a system in the smallest possible way to have the greatest impact.”

A companion piece to “The Guild in the Arroyo” is “The Pinon and the Patch,” which recognizes the devastation to the area’s native pinon forests by a drought-induced bark beetle infestation that has left a russet trail of thousands of dead trees. The project proposes to create ephemeral drainage swales in the patches of topsoil beneath the dead trees where native grasses can collect and grow, reseeding the grassland grazed away in the last century by the herds of cattle that arrived with the railroad.

Following the watershed

In the main galleries, the exhibition thematically descends from the top of the watershed to the lower-lying urban areas, dealing with the Santa Fe River and the city that has grown up around it and nearly choked it out of existence. A 68-foot-long aerial photograph shows the topography of the river. Collaged onto the surface are black-and-white photographs taken from the ground. “You see a destroyed river, the gravel mines, cars, a couple of check dams,” Newton Harrison says. On the opposite wall is a topography of urban Santa Fe. On the floor in the center of the room is a 65-foot-long model of “An Occasional Cascade for the Santa Fe River,” the Harrisons’ proposal for restoring the river. Developed with Neil Williams, a Santa Fe civil and environmental engineer, the project calls for raising the bottom of the riverbed by building a series of 400 small dams, or weirs, to catch the runoff of topsoil. Over time, these weirs would be buried under soil and vegetation, generating a profusion of small ponds and tiny ecosystems that would cause the water to run in a series of mini-cascades, rather than the intermittent torrents that now race through the river in heavy rainfall. The slower flow would allow the water to percolate into the soil and stimulate the growth of riparian vegetation, which in turn would stimulate the return of insects, birds and animals.

“The value of raising the river is that you raise the water table,” Newton Harrison says. “Then you give advantage to the ecosystems on the side, and the river can be sinuous again.” Once this happens, the Harrisons propose inserting a quarter-mile-long public sculpture in the riverbed designed in collaboration with Rina Swentzell, author and Santa Clara Pueblo native, and students from the Santa Fe Indian School. It would be a system of weirs above the surface of the water that would tell the story of the river through indigenous Tewa symbols, “celebrating the flow of water from the mountains, clouds, lightening storms, rain.”

A unified vision

In the final gallery, the Harrisons place the Santa Fe watershed in the larger picture of the Rio Grande watershed. They have created a series of three 10-by-8-foot maps. The first looks to be a standard but beautiful topography of the Rio Grande from its source in Colorado, through New Mexico and Texas and Mexico. The Harrisons claim it is the first complete map of the Rio Grande watershed and that others divide the watershed into national and state divisions. By mapping the whole watershed, the Harrisons hope to create a sense of cohesion. “The watershed unifies people because they are part of the same system, and they have to realize that,” Helen Mayer Harrison says. “We are attempting to work with ideas of collaboration.”

A second map, in shades of lavender, green and ochre, divides the main watershed into smaller contiguous watersheds, much the way a state is divided into congressional districts. “This image says the watershed is made up of many watersheds,” Newton Harrison says. A third map deletes every detail except the tributaries of the watershed, leaving the bright blue lines spidering out over the white page. On the wall between the maps are brief texts collected from individuals with different perspectives on the watershed, each of whom was asked: “What is the most important thing you can think of to help the well-being of the Rio Grande?”

The question is the beginning of what the Harrison’s refer to as “conversational drift,” a process by which ideas spread through a community.

Though neither the Harrisons nor the Santa Fe Art Institute say they will try to raise the several million dollars it would take to implement their proposals, they hope their ideas will trickle into the stream of thought in Santa Fe, percolating into the community dialogue, mingling with the water conservation and riparian restoration activities that have long been in place, building a momentum that will stimulate others to carry some of their ideas to fruition.