To Simulate or to Salvage

John Haber
in New York City

Nature: The 2019 Cooper Hewitt Triennial

Figuring the Floral at Wave Hill

For Protagoras in ancient Greece, as for the Renaissance artists he inspired, "man is the measure of all things." Not for the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. At the Smithsonian's design museum, "nature is the ultimate guide."

"Nature," in conjunction with the Cube design museum in the Netherlands, comes just as a Republican president does his best to dismantle environmental regulation and the clock for slowing climate change is running out. Its seven sections could read as a single imperative: "understand, remediate, simulate, salvage, nurture, augment, and facilitate." They have a way of running together, though, and they already suggest why the contributors may raise as many problems as they solve. Are human beings the problem or its remediation, and just what is recovered and what is real? On the plus side, one could ask much the same about art.

At Wave Hill, Cecile Chong occupies a privileged enclave within a privileged enclave. Detour down a steep, grassy knoll to a path beneath the trees, and you will find a colorful circle within a stone circle. Chong's comically clumsy columns never quite make it to knee height, but then neither did gold dust for the Forty Niners, and she names her El Dorado for them. She also alludes, she says, to the 49 percent of New York households with a language other than English. Could they also speak the language of flowers? "Figuring the Floral" sees art and flora alike as a multicultural reserve.

Laboratory or garden museum?

For its 2019 triennial, the Cooper Hewitt becomes both a laboratory and a garden museum. It begins outside in the garden, with a work that would not seem out of place at the Noguchi Museum in Queens. Ensemble Studio channels its forty-foot Petrified River along a mammoth simulated rock set between a pond and a hill. A tree blossoming with forty fruit, by Sam Van Aken, pushes grafting to its colorful limits. Inside, a tabletop model by VTN in Vietnam recalls Brutalism in architecture, but also the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—one of seven wonders of the ancient world. The confluence of art and science, including natural histories, has been around a long time.

The Renaissance placed humanity in the context of higher things all along, and its humanity included more than men. Leonardo da Vinci saw himself as also scientist and engineer, to the point of abandoning painting, but then so did Frederick Kiesler in Modernism. Yet he could see nature's terrors in studies of age, anatomy, and torrential waters, to the point that not even he could take its measure. Now and then a design here, too, faces death and disability. A burial suit from Jae Rhim Lee and funerary urns from Nienke Hoogvliet treat human remains as biodegradable, with an assist from natural additives. Soft robots from the Harvard Biodesign Lab, like jet black boxing gloves but with a better grip on things, target the needs of stroke victims, while Adam E. Jakus and Ramille Shah use 3D printing for "hyperelastic bone."

Other encounters are more unsettling, like a Northern white rhino from Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. The last of its kind, it survives only in digital recreation. Christina Agapakis, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, and Sissel Tolaas engineer the smell of an extinct flower. You may decline Festo's offer of robotics to create an oversized "bionic ant." Faced with Josiah Zayner's bacterial DIY CRISPR kit to manipulate the DNA of E. coli, you may flee the next Andromeda strain. Their science fiction has crossed over into science.

Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler go so far as to kill a few specimens—or at least to watch them die. Moths and other creatures flutter in a Curiosity Cloud of glass bulbs, except when they no longer do. The designers intend a cautionary tale of nature's fragility. Still, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr see the risks as coming with art. They display all sorts of things under glass, as a lesson in how museums "fetishize" natural and unnatural objects. Their title, Biomess, could apply to much else as well.

Still, the triennial is relentlessly upbeat. It amounts to one long, soothing display of greenery, interspersed with might serve as a costume institute. And its imposing explanatory labels bear promises, not warnings. The curators speak of "new research" and "innovative streams of data" in the interests of a better future. They point to the "wonders of nature" to "reestablish a reverence for natural systems." They can even hope for "natural plastics."

They think of nature, after all, not as a measure but as a wiser companion, a guide. For a show on the interface of design and engineering, its contributors seem oddly resistant to measurement. Their reverence can also get comic or even dangerous. Thomas Thwaites took a "holiday from being human" to live in rural England as a goat. Tracy Fullerton invites you to Walden Pond, but as a video game. Did Henry David Thoreau leave after two years of his own accord, or was he voted off the non-island?

They also look to the past—or more precisely a distantly remembered or imagined past. Note the re in reestablish. The smell of the extinct flower comes in Resurrecting the Sublime, as in the Romantic sublime for Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich. The shapely curves of Curiosity Cloud look right out of the 1960s. If they make you think of lava lamps, the Chilean team of gt2P (or "great things to People") fashions wall-mounted lights from volcanic lava. Modernism here is out of the question.

Biology, waste, and human purposes

Not that looking back is always a bad thing. For a design museum, it is a mission. Along with the triennial, the Cooper Hewitt also displays items from its collection, as "Nature by Design," the very concept of a show of "Broken Nature" at MoMA. Its textiles move easily between Indian shawls and peacocks on kimonos to the early factories of Lyon and Manchester. Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering gets a room for further selections. The elegant bent wood and rattan of a nineteenth-century chair gets to count as inspired engineering.

Nor is it altogether silly season at the triennial. The artists are well aware of gene splicing, electron micrographs, and quantum vibrations. Sure, they can get some mileage from low-tech processes. Aliki van der Kruijs allows rain to leave its prints on silk, while Alexandra Kehayoglou allows the Santa Cruz River to deposit its own landscape painting on carpet. Xu Tiantian weaves an open-air theater from stalks of bamboo in rural China, much as Judith Malina sixty years ago called a pioneering experimental theater company in New York the Living Theater. Still, the show also takes aim at solutions.

The simplest amount to catalogs of what lies all around. Several focus on novel data visualization—including the "cosmic web" for Kim Albrecht and Barabási Lab at Northwestern University. Giorgia Lupi and Accurat present a "musical map" of the "data we don't see," with music by Kaki King. Stella Mutegi hopes to preserve a cave in Kenya as an Anthropocene Museum. Some settle for modest engineering gains, like a Michelin tire. The Warka water tower looks suspiciously like a nuclear power plant.

More often, they are turning biology and industrial waste alike to human purposes. Sea slugs for David Mooney can supply bandages, silk-protein hybrids for Living Materials hopes for reconstructive surgery. Auto exhaust for Anirudh Sharma can become ink, jellyfish DNA for AnotherFarm in Japan the color of luminescent clothing. Recycled plastic for Shahar Levine and microorganisms in sand for Ginger Krieg Dosier can become bricks. Algae for Marcos Cruz, Richard Beckett, and Javier Ruiz and skin collagens for Modern Meadows can become wall panels. Mangroves for Reef Design Labs can bolster shoreline defenses for the next Hurricane Sandy.

How soon is all this practical? Relish its creativity and ingenuity, but do not hold your breath. Michael Strano and Sheila Kennedy apply nanobiology to potential home lighting, although it requires nutrients. (There is no such thing as a free lunch.) Neri Oxman turns shrimp cells and fallen leaves into the shape of a tree trunk, while its tracery recalls blood vessels in the human eye. Still, it amounts to a gorgeous exercise in design.

Yet the design triennial falls shortest in just that, design. Its objects, including women's dresses, are all but uniformly pale and forgettable compared to those of Huguette Caland (or the real thing). It also gets silliest as it gets closest to nature—like a forest garden as therapy for Ulrika K. Stigsdotter. But then the entire show can sound like a self-help guru telling sufferers from mental disorder to breathe deeply, eat right, and get some exercise. Long before them all, Edmond in King Lear declared that "thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law my services are bound." You know how that turned out.

Botany and diversity

Wave Hill is itself a privileged enclave within a privileged enclave—nestled between the luxury homes of Riverdale, in the Bronx, and the Hudson, with a glorious view of the Palisades beyond. (The irony of Chong's 49 percent and her roots in Ecuador should be obvious.) Home to gardens and a greenhouse, it leans to floral and land art, as with the Wave Hill Project for Jackie Ferrara in 2008 and Elisabeth Condon in 2017.—or "This Place We Once Remembered" in 2023. Yet it also favors political themes like "Water Scarcity," and the artists here are more global and feminist than ever. Are they still summer blooms?

Flowers and politics may sound doubly colorful or a double recipe for disaster, just as with a savvy show of "Re:Growth." Next thing you know, political art will take up dog pictures. Yet here the colors enrich and ultimately outshine the messages and even the flowers. Often as not, you may have to look hard for both or simply take them on faith. When Bundith Phunsombatlert asks immigrants to name a plant that has made a difference in their lives, you can expect long stories and botanical precision. More often, though, the results are anything but clinical (and I shall not revisit here the artists of Central Booking gallery in a show on some of the same themes at the Humanities gallery of Long Island University in Brooklyn, but you would be crazy to miss it).

At the Queens Museum just this summer, Alexandria Smith evokes a neighborhood church and an African American burial ground. Here her painting merely places a splayed body in an off-kilter interior, leaving it to you to determine its sexuality or the identity of white growths leading to its crotch. More legs hang amid a cane, tools, and a stuffed parrot from Abigail DeVille—who sees her assemblages as "detritus" of the Great Migration north. Any number of other body parts and flowers peer out from collage for Nicole Awai, Christian Ruiz Berman, Sanford Biggers, Max Colby, and William Villalongo. They take some looking. David Rios Ferreira plays on the line between dogma and diversity in his title, Do Things My Own Way, Darling.

Their very politics may demand stepping over lines, between American and immigrant identity or between genders. Christopher K. Ho and Kevin Zucker adapt heraldry to prints and dried flowers, but of whose lineage? Derrick Adams lends his male profile a flowered shirt, but is he any less macho? Saya Woolfalk gives her women elaborate headdresses. But are they matriarchs, goddesses, or participants in a carnival? An ominous black cord and hair clip for Diana Lozano puns on flowers and hidden meanings with her title as well, SubRosa.

Can flowers, then, convey human values? Valerie Hegarty brings a reminder of historical suffering, by bringing them close to death. Just as often, the lessons of politics and botany lie precisely in their diversity. Bahar Behbahani recalls traditional Islamic art in gentle figure painting, Natalia Nakazawa in patterned architecture. Katherine Toukhy alludes to Coptic art, while Nakazawa, Biggers, and Lina Puerta adapt textiles and tapestry. Colors run wild, like deep blue and gilding for Lina Iris Viktor, and outgrow their frame.

For the one break with color, Simonette Quamina sticks to graphite on staggered horizontals for images of buds and water. When I caught it, Kate Bae and Riad Miah had the sunroom for yellow flowers and blue-green hangings, through September 2. They were not part of "Figuring the Floral," but they fit just fine with a show that so often goes with the flow. In its most poignant moment amid the surfeit of easy pleasures, it even lets in an intrusion from the leaves outside. Opaque glass hands by Ebony G. Patterson hold fading flowers. And then a green tendril slips in through a closed window.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Nature" ran at the Cooper Hewitt through January 20, 2020, "Figuring the Floral" at Wave Hill's Glyndor Gallery through December 1, 2019.