Cornelia Hesse-Honegger and Amy Franceschini: Conflict and Action

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger and Amy Franceschini: 

Action in the face of the conflict between human beings and the environment

My priority for a comparative analysis of the work of contemporary artists in digital media was to find a relationship between two women artists, highlight green/sustainable/DIY culture, and, if possible, to relate it to my own work as an activist artist looking at the response of other artists through time to atomic technologies.

Amy Franceschini is the kind of artist who is so complex, so multi-layered/multi-media/interdisciplinary, so focused on  community and collaboration and empowerment that she is almost difficult to behold.  Born in 1970 in Patterson, California, she is listed as part of the Net art and Eco art movements (Wikipedia).

In 1995, she founded Futurefarmers, an artists’ collective.  In 2004, she founded Free Soil, a collective of artists, researchers, activists, and gardeners (Lippard, 2007). 

If what Aaron Koblin said in his TED Talk (2011) is true; “…A wise media theorist once tweeted that …The culture of the 21^st century will be defined by the interface,” well, Amy Franceschini had a jump start on that idea.

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, in contrast, is now an elder artist, born in 1944 in Zurich, Switzerland.  Her website states that, “For 24 years she worked as a scientific illustrator for the scientific department of the Natural History Museum at the University of Zurich.  Since 1969 she has collected and painted leaf bugs, Heteroptera.”  (Wissenskunst) 

This may be the first comparison between the two women that is relevant:  they both know how to collaborate well with researchers.  Franceschini collaborates with other artists and intellectuals, and Hesse-Honegger with the scientists and curators at the Natural History Museum where she worked as an illustrator.  More recently, she has collaborated with designers to fund her travel and research.

 

In 1987 she took her first trip to Chernobyl and began to research and document the creatures most at risk for the genetic mutations near sites of nuclear radiation, including normally functioning nuclear power plants, sites of nuclear accidents, and sites where nuclear bombs were tested.  Her findings contribute significantly to our ability to visualize these subtle mutations in heretoptera.

Her work is not predominately digital;  however, the dissemination of it is resoundingly so.  She works with traditional drawing and painting media, but she publishes via the internet on a website that is refined and elegant in its simplicity and directness.

Both women are working under the umbrella of ideas about environmental justice.  Francheschini’s collaborations use digital media to document and disseminate work.  Because she is so prolific, what emerges relevant to this comparison are three of her works;

The Unfinished Journey of Carl Linnaeus with Micheal Swain , 2007—an installation made for an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard in Boulder, Colorado titled Weather Report:  Art and Climate Change (Lippard 2007).

Victory Gardens 2007+ a history of Victory Gardens and a ‘subsidized garden initiative’ in San Francisco pointing out that “The World War II Home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. History” (Franceschini 2008).

And third, I feel that I’d be remiss without mentioning her most recent work since it received the first ever Artists/Writers/Environments grant from the Nevada Museum of Art (NMA) Center for Art+Environment, This is Not a Trojan Horse “…concern[ing] rural regeneration in the Abruzzo region of Italy, where globalization has had a significant impact on traditional modes of farming and agriculture.” (A+E Conference schedule, 2011).

Hesse-Honegger’s completed studies are broken into four major geographies:   Chernobyl, Nuclear  power plants in Switzerland, Radiation-contaminated areas in Europe, and Contaminated areas U.S.  (Hesse-Honegger Completed Studies).  For the purposes of this comparison, I focused on the documentation related to Chernobyl, Switzerland and the U.S., which encompass accidents, ‘normally’ functioning nuclear power plants and, in the American landscape, both of those categories as well as the testing and manufacturing sites for atomic weapons production at Hanford and at the Trinity Test Site.

Some of the contrasts between these two women have been alluded to:  they are from two very different generations, Franceschini is very comfortable as a ‘digital native’ who uses the web, digital graphic design, flash animation, and digital documentation inside a very fluid style of collaboration with others—to generate her considerable output. 

Hesse-Honegger is a traditional illustrator whose ‘digital immigration’ has brought a much larger audience to her work.  Her complexity is not limited just to a substantial body of drawings and her bibliography, however, as she does discuss funding her work by printing her illustrations on silk fabric used by major couture designers:

                 

"1986 begins the work with the silk manufacturer ' fabric Frontline' Zürich, for whom I created 80 designs which were very successful and with which I could pay all my research. With the help of the silk I tried to create a positive utopia in contrary to the devastating findings among leaf bugs and around the nuclear power plants. My designs were use by Yves Saint Laurent, Balmain, Jil Sander as well as Vivienne Westwood. "                                                                                                                                    (American  Pest Control)

Both women are Utopians in some sense as Franceschini, in ‘Linneaus’ puts people in a replica of part of a research vessel in Boulder Colorado and told a fairy tale they are asked to finish:  “The fairy tale is that three people escape to a remote location to solve the world’s problems.  They drop out of the current carbon-dependent system to write their life’s work and a ‘plan’ to save humanity…” including “both sustainable systems and open source policy” (Lippard 2007).  But there is a progression as a mature artists towards utopia even as there is a critical balance.  Reading the carefully wrought graphic design for the Victory Garden 2007+, she has written “Victory = less CO2 emissions, neighborhood organizing, seed saving + independence from corporate food systems”…a utopian description for some of us, for sure! (Franceschini 2008).  

Both artists are facile collaborators with specialists and researchers from other disciplines.  Both focus their work with an eye towards Genius Loci, literally ‘Spirit of Place’. Both are international in that their work spans continents, addresses globalization, and requires funding for travel.  Both are concerned with the interaction of human beings and the environment—and while Franceschini’s bio states that “An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature” (Futurefarmers),  Hesse-Honegger’s biography says that “Her work is an interface between art and science; it plays witness to a beautiful but endangered nature.” (Wissenskunst). 

Both women teach as well:  Franceschini holds an MFA from Stanford and is currently a visiting artist at California College of the Arts and Stanford University.   Hesse-Honegger’s extensive teaching was documented in a short article written for the American Pest Control website: 

                 

"Teaching at different Institutes as 'The peoples University' Zürich 1970 – 1992. 1976 –1991 Art teacher in a School for Gymnastics teachers, in Zürich. 1992 – 1995 teacher at the Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. I was named to create a postgraduate study in scientific illustration for biologists and artists. Teaching at the Art School in Vienna, Hamburg and Hanes Art School University Chapel Hill USA. 2000 – 2001 University in Bern Switzerland and since 2001 teacher at the virtual media art school F+F in Zürich. Private courses in Art and Collage." (08.03.2010)

So while both artists are interdisciplinary, concerned with environmental justice, and are teachers and researchers, the comparison is strongest when the idea that they are also activists comes into play.  Franceschini recruited “artists, researchers, activists, and gardeners” when she co-founded Free Soil in 2004 (Lippard 2007).  Something about working with a collective of artists prior to that (Futurefarmers) was suddenly opened up to a broader spectrum of specialists.  The Victory Gardens 2007+ project would not have been as rich had there not been the extent of collaboration evidenced in the considerable research and development done to model and re-invigorate the third greening of San Francisco’s open space (there were the original WW-era Victory Gardens, a wave of a second era in the 1970’s Community Gardening movement, and her project in 2007+).  In her book she depicts a rich history of Victory Gardens in the U.S. during WWII, but she also makes the tools and materials that generate new Victory Gardens in open spaces that would not otherwise have been producing food in San Francisco:  so its not just about art or objects, but about activism. 

Hesse-Honegger also knows her subject matter intimately and has become an activist in her own right.  She literally illustrated leaf-cutter bugs at the National History Museum in Zurich for years before the accident in Chernobyl in 1986 caused her to visit there in 1987 to collect them herself around the sites where nuclear radiation has been leaked or where atomic weapons have been used or manufactured to illustrate the deformities in these creatures.  She has wants us to see the potential for our own destruction in the genetic altering of these vulnerable leaf-eating bugs.  She has become an activist in the face of a disturbing set of findings that only an artist could visualize with such clarity.  Part of her activism came in the face of a resounding critique after publishing her first drawings: “Swiss scientists…expressed criticism of her research, insisting that the fallout in Western Europe from the Chernobyl accident was too small to cause morphological disturbances in insects.” (Wissenskunst).  Rather than give up, she went to Swiss nuclear power plants to see if radiation leaks in those places would find the insects there also deformed. 

Without digital technologies, the scale of access to these artists would be reduced to very 19^th century ways of knowing:  we might have access to their books and perhaps to a gallery exhibiting their work, but we would not be able to have access their work in our own homes or studios.  We might see an article in print regarding their activism, but their research would not be models for new ways of seeing the interactions between human beings and their environments—at least not with the global immediacy they hold online.  But more than that, without digital printing technologies, Hesse-Honegger’s silk fabrics and Franceschini’s books and artifacts would at least be much more difficult (and more expensive) to manufacture.

It is, however, important to point out that digital technologies are part of Franceschini’s process and not just the access points into her work.  This is a significant difference between the two artists, and in the most recent video interview available with Franceschini from the Headlands Institute on March 3^rd of this year, she talks about the contexts in which she works and they are about Sense of Place (and not the tools/technologies she’s using to bridge these places) stretching from an abandoned building in Philadelphia to a major museum in New York City, and on the campus at UCBerkeley.  She does says “I’m a member of a collective…” which presumably means that she is collaborating to do these projects, although she is still very much at the center of the work she does.  

There is something very significant about the level of collaboration and collective production that these women herald for this century:  I would add to the idea that the 21^st Century will be noted for our ability to interface with collaboration and specifically collective action. We no longer need the ‘auteur’ to guide factory-like production.  We need smart people who see the interrelationships of their own strengths to best practices that can then guide us towards a future that is not only sustainable but that is organic, pristine, renewable, healthy, and without technologies that threaten our very survival.

American Pest Control Artist of interest: Spotlight on artist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger

    < http://ampest.typepad.com/american-pest-control/2010/08/
    artist-of-interest-spotlight-on-artist-cornelia-hessehonegger.html> . Web. 04 July 2011

“Amy Franceschini at the Headlands Center for the Arts” video by Daniel Tucker     <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWGc6GBxCyU>.Web.05 July 2011

"Amy Franceschini." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. 
    <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Franceschini>.

   Web. 04 July 2011

Center for Art+Environment Conference Schedule, 2011. Nevada Museum of Art. <http://www.nevadaart.org/conference2011/schedule.html>.

 Web.04 July 2011

Futurefarmers Amy Franceschini.  <http://futurefarmers.com/about/> .Web.04 July 2011

Hesse-Honegger, Cornelia, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger: Art on Silk, 1986

Hesse-Honegger, Cornelia; Heretopia, 1982

Aaron Koblin:  Artfully visualizing our humanity.  TED Talks, February 2011, Long Beach, California  <http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/aaron_koblin.html> Web. 04 July 2011

Lippard, Lucy, Weather Report:  Art & Climate Change.  Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art,
   Boulder, Colorado, 2007

Lippard, Lucy, introduction for Victory Gardens 2007+ Gallery 16 Editions, San Francisco, 2008

Wissenskunst, Corneilia Hesse-Honegger. 

    Biography. <http://www.wissenskunst.ch/en/biographie.htm> .Web.04 July 2011

    Completed Studies. <http://www.wissenskunst.ch/en/usa_6.htm>.Web.04 July 2011

    <http://www.wissenskunst.ch/en/biographie_2.htm>. Web.05 July 2011