n a city where water is about as precious as oil, you’d think someone, somewhere, would jump at the chance at almost 240 gallons of it for free. It’s the equivalent of a day’s worth of wet for the average home, or a watered lawn in Las Vegas. But the university, local sustainability groups, council members, farmers’ market participants, even randoms cruising Craigslist all turned it down.
When New York artists Katie Salen and Marina Zurkow initially envisioned One Nature, a daylong public project commissioned by Americans for the Arts to take place on Fremont Street June 1, they pictured erecting a 2,000-pound iceberg Downtown. They imagined “a project that would address issues of waste, consumption and global climate change,” says Zurkow, “but do so with an absurdist front-end.”
But since not a single person in town—not even fellow artists working in ecological contexts for projects Americans for the Arts green-lighted for their annual convention—bit their offer to take the melt, they had to ditch the iceberg.
Salen, an associate professor at Parsons New School for Design and co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, and Zurkow, an instructor for New York University’s Interactive Technology Program whose work has exhibited at all kinds of fancy museums and festivals, both “design systemic approaches to art,” says the latter. Salen does this through game contexts; Zurkow uses cartoon and installation.
Last year the two collaborated with another artist, Nancy Nowacek, on a project called Karaoke Ice. They drove around San Jose in an ice cream truck decked out with neon lights, handing out freeze pops in exchange for a song. Through this economy of exchange, says their mission statement, they were celebrating “the power of music to entice and inflame, as well as the sense of community that can be fostered among strangers trapped in a terrestrial network.”
Salen and Zurkow reframed One Nature using a similar theme of barter and haphazard kinship: A for-real ice sculptor, operating under the conceit that he’s now out of work thanks to the lack of snow in St. Petersburg (global warming ruined Christmas!), will wheel around smaller iceberg sculptures on catering carts. Accompanied by two formal waiters, he will offer passersby the opportunity to pick their “Degree of Commitment” from a deck of customized cards, proclaiming how far they’re personally willing to change their lives to help stop global warming and other environmental damage. Water runoff from the smaller sculptures will be refrozen into rings marking the ceremony.
The thing is, the rings eventually melt, signifying what the artists call our Scheherezadian attitude toward environmental issues: Despite anyone’s pledge to conservation and ecological rehabilitation, we’re living on borrowed time.
With One Nature, says Zurkow, “We were interested to see how difficult it’d be to make a carbon-neutral project—that is, make as little of a carbon emissions footprint as possible.” Through DriveNeutral.org—a grassroots, nonprofit organization that works with the Chicago Climate Exchange, North America’s only, and the world’s first, greenhouse gas emissions registry, reduction and trading system for all six greenhouse gases—they were able to compensate for the damage caused by the fuel used on their plane flights and for the estimated electricity consumed in the refrigeration, carving and transport of the ice. Plus, they printed cheeky informative cards on 80-percent recycled stock and with vegetable inks at a wind-powered printing company.
They recognize that even the most concerted effort to tread lightly is no match for aesthetic needs. “We are both designers,” says Zurkow, “and chose to print the cards on gloss cover stock. That means the paper’s not 100% post-consumer waste, like the matte and silk stocks. It was a choice we made that puts us more in ‘the red,’ in climate terms.”
So who can blame the city of Las Vegas for not wanting dirty post-artist waste?
“While it seems ironic that in a city built in the desert an offer of free water went unaccepted,” says Salen, “I imagine we would have had the same difficulty in other cities as well. Marina and I speculated that it might be because people already think of water as ‘free’ and that our offer didn’t make much sense.”
Anyone paying attention to local news, however, would know that rolling lawns and Lake Bellagio don’t come cheap. In fact, at times it seems water is just about the only thing Las Vegans really care about.
Last month the proposal to construct a pipeline to Las Vegas from six groundwater basins across Eastern Nevada encountered more flak when the Southern Nevada Water Authority received clearance to eventually export as much as 60,000 acre-feet of water a year from a White Pine County valley 250 miles north of Las Vegas. No one’s sure exactly how much water that’ll actually yield; never mind the ethical quandaries of draining someone else’s supply. And with at least $2 billion (according to estimates two years ago) going to one single project, when we’re aching for assistance with homelessness, education, drug abuse, violence and more, the pipeline’s chapping more hides than those left dry out east.
“This same kind of thinking happens in people’s conception of public space, which they think of as free,” says Salen, “when in fact its use usually comes with a number of restrictions. It was an interesting discovery in light of the overall concept for the piece and one we certainly hadn’t anticipated.”