An Unsettled River:  Hudson River Projects by Eve Andrée Laramée and Brandon Ballengée

Settling, as a term for colonization, is a word that cuts two ways. When Europeans first arrived in substantial numbers at what would become New York, it was not with the idea of establishing a stable agricultural community. At first they sought, unsuccessfully, a trade route to Asia, but soon found natural resources in sufficient abundance to redirect their hopes for commercial success. Those who settled here—who stabilized the land, or tamed it, or compromised it, or who compromised their own expectations—lived along the Hudson River because, as a trade highway, it was the fluid reason for their residence.

An exceptionally broad, long and beautiful river, the Hudson has remained one of the country's premier waterways, but it is still, in many important ways, unsettled. It bears testimony to shifting commercial imperatives, from exploration and transport to tourism. Its landscape served as paradigm for the ideologically fundamental concept of the American frontier and—in the form of the Hudson River School of landscape painting—for a national esthetic, both long since rendered kitsch, and celebrated as such. And the Hudson has suffered massive environmental degradation resulting from the culture that grew around it, as well as showing signs—again, culturally driven—of some reversal of that damage.
This mutability, and the forces that determine change, are central subjects in the installations that Brandon Ballengée and Eve Andrée Laramée have conceived for Hudson River Projects. Both artists have well-established interests in the relationship between science (including ecology, biology, geology, and chemistry) and art. And both take particular pleasure in slipping between professional identities, ranging from artist to scientist, historian, fiction writer, social activist, and back.

Sugar, a crop associated with the antebellum South but, especially after the Civil War, processed mainly in the industrialized North, is the staple around which Laramée has organized her installation at Wave Hill. Called Sugar Mud, the installation’s most prominent feature is a room-filling mound surfaced with crystallized sugar tinted an opulent shade of gold. In near delirious excess, the jewel-bright sugar dune slopes halfway to the ceiling, sweeping over two windowsills and into the fireplace in an elegant, river-facing room of Wave Hill’s Georgian revival Glyndor House. The effect is enhanced by an unearthly golden light (a result of gels covering the windows) that also furthers the room’s evocation of New York's Gilded Age. But there is something brutal about the incursion of this implacable mass of sugar, which appears to have surged into Glyndor House with the force of a mountain-moving glacier. The spectacular, mutually subversive collision of architectural and (seemingly) geological form is a figure for the relationship between culture and nature that is Laramée’s theme.
In addition to this dazzling sugar dune, Laramée is presenting five more sober documentary images, one of which is a photograph of the 150-year-old American Sugar Refining Company's factory on the Hudson at Yonkers, just north of Wave Hill. A caption explains that 80,000 tons of sediment from the river bottom there—sludge called sugar mud—have been dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers and dumped downstream at the “Historic Area Remediation Site” near Sandy Hook, New Jersey, an area also known as Mud Dump Site. At once primitive and meta-industrial, this massive effort to dig up and reposition a small mountain of mud—or, to resettle it—is an undersea ghost of Laramée’s sugar dune. It also echoes, as she points out, Robert Smithson's various reworkings of the landscape and the "inverse monuments" of his early Earthworks peer Michael Heizer. Making monumental sculpture from unseen and interstitial space is of compelling interest to Laramée. But she is no less struck by the rich irony of calling the government’s reburial of sugar mud “remediation,” since the sludge, however sweet, is deadly (it has been shown to contain an extensive array of toxins, including PCBs).

Others of Laramée's images include two Benthic (from benthos, Latin for river bottom) images of the Hudson's floor, prepared by Roger Flood, Associate Professor of Marine Geology at SUNY Stony Brook, and Vicki Lynn Ferrini, a doctoral student there. Made from sonar and ground-penetrating radar readings and digital analysis, these preternaturally vivid topographic maps show the river from underneath, re-envisioned not only spatially but also in terms of color, which ranges among acid greens, yellows, and reds, the colors representing both the floor’s depth and its density. The maps reveal a lunar-like landscape of sharply ridged escarpments, deep clefts, inky depressions, and sandy plains of indeterminate scale. “I became fascinated with looking at the river sideways and upside-down” Laramée says, referring to the Hudson’s watershed (sideways) as well as the river’s floor.
Laramée was on board the research vessel (it is called, memorably, The Sea Wolf) with Flood and Ferrini when the mapping was done, an experience that made clear just how vast a quantity of data they collected. But she is also alert to the subjective decisions that mapmaking—like all forms of science—always entails. “Maps go under the heading of hard text,” she has said, “but there are all kinds of map deceptions that occur. Maps are fluid and changing.” In the installation at Wave Hill, she continues, “I look at the subjectivity in maps.” Further, she has an abiding interest in the drifts and detours, the emotional and perceptual temptations—“what the Situationists termed 'psycho-geography'” —that correspond to cartography's inherent vagaries.

Completing Laramée's portrait-in-fragments of the Hudson are reproductions of a pair of paintings depicting the river at points physically proximate but separated historically by roughly 65 years. One, which dates to around 1850, is an idyllic Hudson River School landscape by the little known (but euphonically named) John Bunyon Bristol. A burst of butter-yellow sunlight emerges beatifically from misty clouds, playing over the river and a handful of sailboats on the water; it was this admittedly saccharine feature that most appealed to Laramée, along with the dune-like palisade on the Jersey shore. The second painting, made in 1915 by the equally obscure Modernist painter Daniel Putnam Brinley, is of the sugar factory at Yonkers. Brinley's jaunty rendering features a bustling train depot and, where sailboats once glided, a vigorously smoking steamship; the bracing atmosphere is marked by the painting’s palette, dominated by a Cezanne-ian cobalt blue. A celebratory image of active industry, Brinley’s anomalous Hudson River painting again suggests how picture-making supports ideology, which in turn changes the very nature of the landscape it depicts.

Brandon Ballengée’s artistic practice is even closer to scientific research than Laramée’s, and has involved him in close studies of aquatic life as it is affected by pollutants in New York (and around the world). For Hudson River Projects, he has brought together maps, images, live specimens of marine fauna, and a computer station to assemble a composite portrait of the river’s fragile wildlife. Citing a different range of artistic predecessors than Laramée—he mentions Hans Haacke’s installation featuring live chicks, Helen and Newton Harrison’s literally groundbreaking projects focusing on river basins, and Joseph Beuys’ introduction of the concept “social sculpture”—Ballengée intends his work as a provocation to active engagement in repairing environmental damage.

Alongside several biologists (his collaborators for the Hudson River project include Stanley K. Sessions, and Peter R. Warny and tank specialist Hong Suk Michael Oh), Ballengée has been studying fish and amphibians native to the Hudson that are now uncommon or certifiably threatened. Producing the digital images shown at Wave Hill involved, in some cases, a painstaking procedure (it took up to eight months per specimen) that includes clearing the animals of body fluids, preserving them in formalin, and injecting them with dyes that stain various internal tissues differentially. Whether preserved or intact, animals were placed directly on a high-resolution scanner bed, from which were generated Lamda prints—some of them vast enlargements—of breathtaking detail and luminosity. Thus a modest sturgeon, cleared and stained, became an aqueous blue wraith, its filigreed skeletal structure, including the ridges of its exterior plating, articulated with the delicacy of a Fabergé egg. A humble inch-long horsehair worm, left intact, was transformed by enlargement into a long, sinuous line fluent as any signature’s final flourish. Most arresting of all is a mammoth enlargement (the overall image size is 60”x48”) of a skate native to New York Harbor but now rare. Cleared and stained, it is an icon of stunning grace and menace, its minutely lined wings incipiently angelic, its mouth, ringed with rows of blood-red teeth, distinctly sinister.

A major component of Ballengée’s Wave Hill installation, the full title of which is Breathing Space for the Hudson: Charting the Biodiversity and Pollutants of the Hudson River, is a trio of custom-made fish tanks stocked with aquatic life representing three different levels of salinity (that is, three different points along the river, at varying distances from the harbor). The tanks’ various support tubes and cables are concealed below, so visitors can walk around them unobstructed; Ballengée intends their contents to seem “shoveled right out of the river” and up into the gallery above. Suspended between the tanks are sectional maps, printed on mylar, of the Hudson from Troy south. Visitors can use the computer station provided in the gallery to access a site with information on industrial polluters and identify them with positions indicated on these maps. It is Ballengée’s hope that further action, in the form of research, education, and protest, will follow.

The emphasis on activism is greater in Ballengée’s work than in Laramée’s; her interest in the intersection of science and fiction is deeper than his. But both like to linger where evolution, culture, and artistic expression cross paths. This inclination is reflected in Ballengée’s participation in studies of frogs whose deformations, including supernumerary rear legs, can be traced to parasites that (arguably) burgeon with pollution, thence to the pressure of humankind (however blindly applied) on the physical shape of other animals. “Many of the malformations found in the wild can be induced through injuries caused by mechanical disruption from parasitic infestation,” Ballengée concluded, exhibiting the disturbing animals he studied in an effort “to inform viewers about the complex growth processes of other living organisms.” In another experiment, he has been breeding frogs back six generations, toward their ‘wild’ form. “You can call the frogs sculpture,” he says. “I’m shaping them.”

Looking at similar intersections from a slanted perspective, Laramée has also previously explored the squishy boundaries between nature and industry. Most closely related to her Wave Hill installation are recent and current projects involving waterways, including one centering on the Salton Sea, and another on radioactive water in New Mexico. She has a longstanding fascination with the rich and tangled history of automata, and, generally, with the susceptibility of seemingly irreducible technology to speculative analysis. In an unpublished 1995 interview with the artist Jordan Crandall, Laramée said, "We think of electricity as being a technological force, and it's a natural force, in the same way that acts of human beings are a natural force." In other words, Laramée and Ballengée both like to twist the disciplines of science and art so their boundaries warp.  And each responded to the invitation to conceive a project about the Hudson by unsettling the river, with great vigor, wit, and sympathy.

Nancy Princenthal