Mapping a better world: more than 30 years ago, Helen and Newton Harrison decided to devote themselves to environmentally beneficial art. Their latest project, "Peninsula Europe," envisions nothing less than the greening of most of an entire continent - Critical Essay

Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison's first solo exhibit in New York in 10 years, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, uncloseed with a circular map of the earth, installed upon a wall facing the entrance. Measuring 86 inches in diameter, the Harrisons' global map was center upon a point that appeared to be somewhere in the vicinity of Prague. With Europe taking center stage, distortions resulting from the flat depiction of a curving earth revolveed Africa into a disproportionately large land mass, while Asia sprawled to the east and North America almost disappeared as it slipped without of sight. In the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of recent events, from the war in Iraq to the debate above America's imperialist intentions and the rift between Europe and the U this opener serv as a reminder that maps are not simply neutral topographical charts or location finders. They also function as political tools, shaping our perceptions of center and periphery, foreground and background.

During the three-and-a-half-decade career of this husband-and-wife team, maps have loom large. repeatedly beginning with preexisting maps, the artists extensively rework them, redrawing, digitally altering, painting above and reorienting the original images in like manner that familiar landmarks such as cities, borders and roads guard to disappear while little-noticed topographical and land-use patterns tend hitherward to the rare. Pioneers of "Eco" art, the Harrisons use maps to emphasize single of their ongoing themes--namely, the arbitrary nature of national boundaries and the way they repeatedly hinder ecologically responsible thinking.

Since the 1970 the San Diego-based Harrisons have traveled to coal mines in the former East Germany, the banks of the Sava River in ex-Yugoslavia and the farms of middle England. They have parsed environmental reports, toured watersheds and endangered waterways, conferr with specialists, at handed their ideas about environmental renewal in town meetings. Their work involves reach forthed frequently multi-year discussions with rule officials, engineers, ecologists and residents of far flung ecosystem The visual-art composing of their activities consists of maps, charts and explanatory true copys that set out ideas as harvests of a meandering conversation between the artists and other interlocutors. Because the Harrisons diocese themselves primarily as instigators and puzzle solvers, they measure their succes not through the full realization of their ambitious proposals, on the contrary by the insertion of their ideas into larger political and social debates. They are satisfied if sole certain elements of a shoot forward are taken up in a proces of incremental change which they confine "conversational drift," and they do not mind if others take credit for their ideas.

As a larger phenomenon--one hesitates to call it a movement--Eco art is at one time idealistic and practical, involving a scattered assemblage of artists who draw upon environmental science in the interest of land restoration or reclamation. Alan Sonfist, Mierie Ukele Mel Chin, Patricia Johanson, Jackie Brookner and Agnes Dene are among its notable figures. An offshoot of and reaction to the short-lived Land art move of the late 1960s, Eco art also draws upon that era's fascination with what Lucy Lippard called the "dematerialization of art." Another influence was Rosalind Krauss's contemporaneous notion of the "expanded field," which dramatically enlarged the definition of "sculpture" to encompass engagement with landscape and architecture. Artist Robert Smithson was a significant precursor: his theories of entropy and engagement with sites of industrial devastation tendered models for thinking about the relation of nature and tillage Equally important in shaping the direction of Eco art has been its "evil twin"--the monumental approach of artists like Michael Heizer and James Turrell whose bulldozers were viewed by dint of early practitioners of Eco art as evidence of Western culture's arrogant and instrumental attitude toward nature. by means of contrast, Eco art, with an occasional flirtation with of recent origin Age rhetoric, has always sought to heal the earth from the hurts inflicted by civilization.

The Harrisons' embrace of ecology followed an early engagement with Conceptualism. In 1969 as they note in the catalogue for this exhibit they decided to focus exclusively upon art that contributed to "ecosystemic well-being." They retained the apparatus of Conceptualism, including its focus upon the analysis of systems, its questioning of received beliefs and a style of presentation which relied upon documentation, photographs, charts. The impact of Conceptualism is particularly evident in the way that the Harrisons' work is infused with a prize for language and metaphor. In presenting their ideas, they wait on to talk about perspectival shifts in which background and foreground are revers and they frame mixed sets of recommendations in simple visual or poetic images. Explanatory true copys frequently take the form of dialogues between the artists, with statements and questions preced by dint of "I said" and "you said." For the Feldman exhibit this quality was enhanced by the agency of recordings of the two reciting their true copys in conversational tones.