Man on Fire: Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology at WhiteBox

Courtesy of the author.

By STEPHEN ZACKS August 8, 2024

It’s important for Juan Puntes, founder of WhiteBox, to stipulate that the art space, located on Avenue B just above Houston Street, is not a gallery. Despite the name, suggesting a traditional blank-walled exhibition environment, WhiteBox belongs to the “alternative space” tradition, rooted in the artist-run galleries in SoHo and Tribeca in the 1960s and seventies. It’s a not-for-profit organization founded in Chelsea in 1998 and supported by grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council for the Arts, its production costs partly offset by co-curators and collaborators.

In WhiteBox’s current iteration, opened in 2022 after a four-year stint in Harlem, Puntes skinned the walls in unfinished OSB—not even plywood with a nice wood veneer, as if to preclude the misunderstanding of its being a traditional art gallery. The rough environment conveys a sense of being improvised that comports with the spirit of Puntes—and of everything in New York City and the world, frankly. Everything is moving so quickly, transitioning, developing, living and dying. It’s imperfect, and it suits Puntes’s latest effort to stage a little art-world rebellion, one small show at a time.

WhiteBox’s current exhibition, Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology, on view through August 10, pitches itself as “a symbolic space that addresses issues like food sovereignty, rewilding, ecofeminisms, hydrofeminisms, and restorative aesthetics” and “researches, experiments, and builds knowledge around the Democracy of the Air, Earth, and Water.” That sounds like a lot. Yet the method, in the hands of Puntes, is modest, personable, and intellectually engaging. Puntes’s earnest openness, along with staff curator Yohanna Roa, to conversations with everyone who gazes through the window and walks through the door—untutored neighborhood residents and art history PhDs alike—means the level of discourse stays personal, one to one, meeting others where they’re at, even when Puntes is spinning out a dozen references and associations for every idea, as he often does.

Courtesy of the author.

At the street level, the Expanded Narratives show has been appended by a last-minute addition: Noah Fischer’s speculative/humanist newspaper New York 2044, commissioned as a project by More Art, which funds socially engaged public art. Printed as a one-sheet newsprint tabloid at Linco in Long Island City, New York 2044 reports on policy visions for the future of the city, interviewing public figures, policymakers, and activists, drawing from each figure’s personal stories, then extending their ideas into an imagined policy landscape twenty years hence. Each page becomes a split-screen layout in which personal stories are illustrated by Fischer’s comics adjoined with a news story reported in the year 2044.

New rent-regulation legislation is passed, causing multi-family buildings to become unprofitable; the city is then able to purchase and convert the buildings into social housing, as New York 2044 reports “from the imagination of” Miguel Robles Durán, a professor of urbanism at the New School born in Mexico City. Public housing agencies win a lawsuit against Amazon Robotics defending their patent of building maintenance technologies, in a story drawn from the life of Marquis Jenkins, a tenant organizer in the Lower East Side. As a result, agencies are able to improve living conditions and sustain affordable housing in the city.

The future-oriented policies are woven together in news stories that iterate a changed set of conditions. Low-to-middle-income friendly rules join new density regulations to make additional units available to those with the highest demand for housing. Food-delivery drones go haywire and barrage a one-time commercial building in Williamsburg converted for supportive housing. Bad landlords are forced to surrender ownership of their properties, which are turned over to residents to purchase with low-interest loans, in the vision of New York 50th district Assemblymember Emily Gallagher. The newspaper is distributed free in a mockup of a typical news kiosk, installed in WhiteBox’s windows. Five full-color pamphlets, sold for $2 each, expand the stories and policy ideas. Fischer has been sitting at a card table in front of WhiteBox drawing people’s portraits and having conversations as a part of the installation.

Fischer, an activist in the 2010s Occupy Museums group of the Occupy Wall Street movement, calls the project a form of social sculpture, in the manner of Joseph Beuys, who helped establish the Greens as a viable political party in Germany. The idea of “sculpting” a process of social change remains a salient form of political expression in art, raising the stakes of political effectiveness, as opposed to work that merely appears to be virtue-signaling. It’s a crucial aspiration, given how loosely the art field commonly evaluates political gestures. Someone as eminent and widely esteemed as art historian Claire Bishop, who writes extensively on social and political projects, conceded that her evaluation of such work ultimately has to remain limited to the aesthetic domain.

This is where a “project space” operating in the nonprofit sector has the chance to be more potent than the for-sale gallery world and museums that depend on patronage. The art field has glaring blind spots that often make it seem ridiculous to outsiders. While stridently embracing the jargon of inclusionary social movement theory, its constant celebrations of high-achieving artists from groups that have been historically discriminated against sometimes comes off as empty self-congratulation, merely replacing the top of the meritocratic pyramid with a more diverse group of commercially successful elitists. As a reward for embracing a new coteries of art stars, we are subjected to turgid academic doublespeak and repressively doctrinaire declarations of canned group affiliation.

The non-profit world is slightly different, however. The program officers and juries that review public-sector grant proposals tend to have a degree of impatience for overblown rhetoric. A lot of the people showing in Expanded Narratives on Art and Ecology are operating on a deliberately non-commercial level in any case. Curated by Spanish scholar and researcher Blanca de la Torre, past curator of a Basque contemporary art center and Ecuador’s Cuenca Biennial, much of the work for Expanded Narratives was produced in public workshops leading up and after the July 1st opening.

The Blockades, Boulders, Weights sculptures by Mary Mattingly, for instance, are composed of bundles of colorful materials brought by participants to a workshop that Mattingly organized at WhiteBox. The materials are rolled into balls and tied together with string, displayed on low improvised OSB pedestals near the entrance. Like her 2013 performance in which she rolled all of her belongings into a ball and dragged them around with her everywhere she went in New York City, it’s an expressive demonstration of the excessive waste produced by commercial consumption that the artist is committed to reducing. In short, the pieces are an expression of a restorative ethics that de la Torre’s wants to call attention to through the Expanded Narratives show, the sculptures becoming symbols of overconsumption, monuments dedicated to degrowth.

Many of the other works in Expanded Narratives function as symbolic expressions of alternative ideas for humanity’s relation to other species as well as to the earth, air, and water. Rather than concrete political actions or declarative statements, what the show really highlights are explorations of an expanded multispecies and terrestrial thinking, sometimes expressed as full-blown realizations of shared human-and-nonhuman habitats, sometimes expressed as symbolic projects. Juan Zamora, for instance, has made a series of drawing of plants traditionally classified as weeds that grow through cracks in concrete and in untended collections of sediment, which WhiteBox staff collected and emailed photos of for Zamora to create The Undergrowth Story drawings. At different times throughout the exhibition, musicians performed interpretations of the drawings in conjunction with events.

Courtesy of the author.

At its most concrete, the show’s demonstration of restorative ethics takes the form of photographic documentation of fully realized projects like Fair Park Lagoon, a reclaimed lagoon that is now teeming with wildlife in Dallas, Texas. In 1981, Patricia Johanson redesigned the deteriorated pond to help its native plants and ecosystem recover. To control erosion, she installed a series of public paths and bridges, enabling people to coexist with the plants, fish, turtles, and birds that repopulated the area. It’s a symbolic sculptural landscape inspired by natural elements that also spurred a real proliferation of wildlife, including 300 turtles living there today. In the best-case scenario, projects like these become models adopted into policies that have more widespread effects, rewilding the endless terrain being decimated by human activity.

More poetically, Expanded Narratives features a video and installation of Eugenio Ampudia’s 2020 Concert for the Biocene, in which the artist filled the seats of Barcelona’s 1847 Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house with 2,292 plants, orchestrating a string quartet performance of Puccini's Crisantemi (Chrisanthemums) to them. Evoking a future age of mutual support between humans and plants, here the plants are not merely in the service of people but are being performed for by us, inspired by studies indicating that plants are sensitive to sound. The combination of lush green plants with the ornate aesthetics of Juan Oriol Mestres’s modernista architecture and Puccini’s late-Baroque composition makes for a striking expression of a multispecies world that could only have happened during the strange time of the 2020 global pandemic.

Courtesy of the author.

Other evocative works in the show include Juanli Carrion and Rodolfo Kusulas’s PhNYC, created during a workshop in which cotton fabric was exposed to the water from the Gowanus Creek, bottled water, and New York City tap water, resulting in pink, blue, and gray-dyed strips that were used to create a flag symbolizing the city’s water contamination.  Several pieces are more about documenting environmental activism, such as Marta Serna’s Atomic Ladies (Apocalypse UVL), about two ecofeminist activist collectives—W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and Greenham Common—that used creativity and humor to protest the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and Avelino Sala’s The Sinking: Dialogues from the Catastrophe, dealing with the 2002 Prestige oil spill that polluted the coast of Spain and the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in New York state.

Other work in the show includes Cristina Déniz Sosa’s Grayish, about a fire in Canada whose ashes polluted the air of the Canary Islands; Jenny Marketou’s Futuring Waters: A Speculative Manifesto for and from the Water; Elena Lavellés, Roots en Route: An Atlas of Black Gold; MENHIR (Iván Cebrián y Coco Moya)’s 13 Moons and a Blackhole; and Luna Bengoechea Peña’s In Oil We Trust, which are all in some way geared toward furthering of our thinking about human life in relation to plants and animals, or protesting the consequences of not thinking about the water, air, and land on which life on earth depends.

Sometimes, when it’s furthering our thinking or challenging received ideas—and not merely repeating unquestioned ideas stagnating among us for lack of a will to think—artwork can be a form of communication that offers a combination of aesthetic delight, intellectual excitement, and glimpses of hopeful possibilities. Attending these exhibitions can give a sense of community and belonging, and a degree of solace at times when the discourse and functional operation of actual democratic electoral politics seems utterly impossible to influence positively, such as the perpetually frozen conflict in the Middle East. Maybe with a piece like Stefano Cagol’s Far Before and After Us, which captures images of the artist on Norway’s Golta Island, lit as if the craggy rock formations are bubbling out of volcanic lava—the individual human against fire—we can feel a slight primal connection to the time-scales in which that which is sedimentary and seemingly unchangeable is still in a process of creation. WM