Dear Friends and Family, (2016)
Robert C. Beck and Sarah Max Beck
Video
45 seconds

Hydrostatic Shock


Foreword

The previous post, entitled Ready-made, touched on how the Dada art movement and Marcel Duchamp’s work was almost certainly commentary on the turbulent political state of the world and how strangely similar our current social climate and global perceptions are to those of a century ago.

Much like Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), our work here at Hydrostatic transforms a urinal into art by changing our perception of a ready-made utilitarian object.


It’s nine pm and the air is quite still on the roof deck. The temperature is cool, around sixty degrees, and an electric, royal blue light emanates from inside the greenhouse. It dances through bubbles rising from an air stone in one of the holding tanks. Two American Flag fish dart around the tank while a Mexican dwarf crawfish hides behind a clump of aquatic plants. The larger system is burping and gurgling in the background as we prepare to add these specimens into the main grow tray.

This is part of an effort to increase the biodiversity within the main growing system of the greenhouse where we have been raising edible plants over the winter. Blizzards raged, howled, and battered the little plastic walls while we grew kale, beets, collards, cabbage, strawberries, and overwintered figs, a stand of dwarf bananas and about five hundred lady beetles.

Wrapped in reflective foil insulation, bright orange five gallon buckets house bio-filtration media while a tiny air pump pushes water and oxygen throughout the network of pipes connecting the main parts of the system. This was built within the rooftop greenhouse last spring to convert our urine from all the coffee, beer and wine we drank into valuable hydroponic fertilizer for the purpose of growing food while establishing some baseline data for this coming season.

This process has become in many ways indistinguishable from and integral to our creative processes.

By orchestrating a simple arrangement of commonplace items and recycled materials, we have been able to illustrate the direct correlation between our biological relationship with Earth and its role within the cyclical filtration dynamic of the planet. The experience of growing food from our own waste has evidenced the undeniable fact that we are a powerful and direct influence on the Earth’s ecosystems and have a choice as to how we affect them.

This collaboration has been developing for over five years now. Back in Florida, we both realized that growing food and living a more ecologically balanced lifestyle was intensely driving the direction of our artwork.

We wanted to adapt our process, which at that time was manifesting itself in the form of urine-charged earthworks under food forest installations in the front yard, aquaculture in the courtyard and composting any and all eligible organic material we could fit into our little hybrid electric car.  Thousands of bananas poured into our lives along with more and more inspiration.

While we both have a firm knowledge of traditional artistic materials and techniques, living organic matter is not static whereas the former usually is. This material characteristic has forced us to question how we embrace making art objects that are informed through the process of life cycles. This shift has been an interesting experience on many levels. Since art is a direct extension of one’s experience with life and materials, the process of adapting from the more traditional techniques to cultivating living organic matter has been a great challenge.

Reflecting on the absurd notion of how a material that is fleeting (as life is) could ever be considered a fine art form serves as a reminder that the importance of art has become more dependent upon how it makes one feel (both viewer and artist) rather than the material quality it possesses. It also reminds us that art is art because its maker deemed it so. We can speculate that Dada and Duchamp’s Fountain were inspired by these ideas, which opened the floodgates to shock value art and the indelible mark it has made on art history.

Back on top of the roof, handblown glass vessels jostle in with plastic jugs and glisten against their reflections in the water, bubbles swim to the surface from subaquatic roots, lady beetles charge about sucking aphids dry just as if they are so many little juice pouches, and an occasional bumblebee visits with a sunflower pressed against the greenhouse walls. The individual parts we have assembled and constructed are oddly beautiful in their own right and together they hiss and hum with the vibration of life.

This is our inspiration for people to remember that although we are human, we are part of a super organism that relies on the delicate balance of life and biodiversity on this planet. Duchamp drew people’s perceptions of art out from what they would normally expect. We find ourselves following in the footsteps of all other pioneers as we ask ourselves how we can shift, which almost always requires operating outside of the norm. While shock is not an intent, it does come with the new territory as we shift away from the misguided and apathetic perceptions about global biodiversity, food, water, the environmental state of affairs, and the tyrannical use of biotechnology. Don’t be shocked if we invite you over for a salad.

Itsah Wishing Machine (2016)
Robert C. Beck and Sarah Max Beck
Salvaged lumber, water, urine, post consumer plastics, air pump, glass, electronics
16 x 48 x 36 inches