Seeing More Artworks with an Environmental Eye

Plenty of art in MoMA’s collection directly addresses the changing environment, pollution, and sustainability, whether through a documentary, utopian, or dystopian lens. But what happens when we revisit familiar favorites or unusual design objects that aren’t directly about the environment, and discover new ways of thinking about their materials, their fields of color, and their relationship to the planet? (Even the shimmering effect of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies has recently been linked to pollution in France.) For our ongoing series for Earth Month, Matthew Wagstaffe, research assistant in the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment, has written five ecologically minded wall labels for art in our galleries—a challenge for us all to continue to see our world anew.

Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1962

In the early 1960s, the Campbell Soup Company was one of the major investors in the expansion of the California Institute of Technology’s so-called “phytotron,” a computer-controlled, air-conditioned plant laboratory that the company hoped could be used to discover a means for growing the same type of tomato in different climatic conditions (thereby greatly increasing Campbell’s productive capacities¹). In this light, Andy Warhol’s famous soup cans do not just reflect a moment in which the language of modern advertising produced packaging that is recognizable in its repetition and sameness; it also recalls an instance of corporate deployment of scientific advances to render the otherwise diverse products of the natural environment uniform.

Sven Wingquist. Self-Aligning Ball Bearing. 1907

Packages delivered with the click of a button, cars rolling off the production line in under 24 hours, jet aircrafts hurtling their countless cargoes across the planet—it seems, at times, that modern technologies have enabled people and goods to circulate the globe with nary a disruption. If one were compelled to locate the origins of this hyper-productive age, one could do worse than to point to the humble ball bearing, a tool for reducing axial friction that made possible the vast gains in mechanical efficiency undergirding industrial production and high-speed travel. Ironically, however, this friction-reducing machine has produced friction at an existential scale: in having enabled much of modern industrial technology, the ball bearing in turn shares indirect responsibility for the pollutants that have brought our world to the brink of climate collapse. Given that the gears of human civilization are grinding to a halt, perhaps the ball bearing’s smooth efficiency was only ever an illusion.

Gunnar Aagaard Andersen. Armchair. 1964

Labeled an “anti-object” by MoMA curator Arthur Drexler when it first entered the collection, Andersen’s innovative 1964 armchair—which the designer created by pouring layers of self-curing polyurethane atop one another—jettisons the geometric lines of modernist furniture for a dribbly formal freedom. Looked at positively, it expresses a sense of experimental spontaneity, while viewed more negatively it evokes disgust, appearing to be frozen amid an ongoing process of decay. In sustaining this tension, Anderson’s work brilliantly evokes the dual nature of its medium. All plastic objects, per Roland Barthes, evince “the magical operation par excellence: the transmutation of matter”; however, as petroleum-based products, this “miraculous … transformation of nature”² is only possible via the rapid destruction of the Earth’s energy reserves.

On Kawara. I Got Up…. 1970

This Conceptual work by On Kawara takes the form of a series of postcards to the curator and gallerist Seth Siegelaub, printed with the simple message “I GOT UP AT” and the time of the artist’s awakening. In so reducing the account of his life to this single moment in his sleep cycle, Kawara highlights the energetic needs of the human being: like all creatures, we require rest and rejuvenation to exist. The back sides of these postcards feature images of Kawara’s current location, typically in the form of a photograph of a cityscape or an urban park, thereby inviting the viewer to imagine the artist’s bodily routines occurring at the urban scale. After all, what are metropolises if not vast energy systems, with their own circadian rhythms of bustling daily activity and quiet nights, enacted, like those of individual organisms, in response to the rotating of our planet around the sun?

Francois Morellet. Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory, 50% Blue, 50% Red. 1960

To make this work, Francois Morellet deployed a simple code—equating even numbers with blue and odds with red—to translate the numbers of the phone book into a massive grid whose squares chaotically alternate between each color. The idea that the functional can easily transform into the useless has a long history, stretching back at least to the 19th century, when Lord Kelvin, studying steam engines, noticed that a certain remainder of mechanical energy was lost as heat was transformed into work, and in response formulated the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that, over time, entropy overtakes order in a closed system.³ During the Cold War, the computer scientist Norbert Wiener would posit information technologies as a means of combating this tendency, but—echoing the nuclear anxieties of his age—he similarly worried that, despite our best efforts, perhaps “the whole universe” is doomed for an entropic “heat death.” Morellet’s abstract painting, hovering on the edge of meaninglessness, expresses similar doubts about humankind’s ability to give order to our world.