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Mary Mattingly, Artist - New York, NY

Tricia Fitzpatrick, Head of Science, Cawthra Park Secondary School; ART21 Educator - Mississauga, Ontario

Based on the eco-urban work of artist Mary Mattingly, this experiment involved an in-depth consideration of consumption and waste. Each participant brought an object that was eulogized, and all of the items were bundled together and buried ceremoniously in Central Park. Exploring ideas of environmental loss and ritual with relation to physical objects, this experiment investigated which items we value and those we discard without a thought.

" Performing Objects: Future Archaeologies examined forms of environmental loss through personal objects. From land to water, animals, and a human social fabric, everything and everyone is affected by mining, production, and distribution... In order to examine our own rituals associated with consumption and discard, we planned to donate an object to the workshop, write about the object's pathway, package all of our objects together, and perform a burial in Central Park, a short walk from the Armory Building.

During the months leading up to Creative Chemistries, Tricia Fitzpatrick and I outlined a research plan, performance, and shared website with information on garbology that our group could access long after the day of the event. In advance, I tasked myself with mapping detailed walks to potential burial sites in Central Park and sending Tricia images of possible pathways. Our group would write and share eulogies for specific objects, bundle them together, and then walk to Central Park where we would ceremonially bury them. The walk would include our own tour of New York City's supply and waste stream.

The day of the event, a handful of intrepid participants braved the snow and cold weather, and sacrificed an object for a communal burial. Dandelion tea, a funeral cake, and hand-written prayer cards outlining our objects entry into and exit from our lives led up to our procession. No one from the Parks Department stopped us or even noticed as we held a formal burial on a Central Park hilltop. On the walk back to the Armory for the closure of Creative Chemistries it was raining, the streets were filled with garbage, and we all felt unsettled, but moved."

- Mary Mattingly

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Performing Objects: Future Archaeologies | ART21

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Mary Mattingly , Artist - New York, NY Tricia Fitzpatrick, Head of Science, Cawthra Park Secondary School; ART21 Educator - Mississauga, Ontario Based on the eco-urban work of artist Mary Mattingly, this experiment involved an in-depth consideration of consumption and waste.

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Other ART21 artists looking at Consumption and Sustainability

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Other ART21 artists looking at Consumption and Sustainability

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Andrea Zittel, Season 1, "Consumption"

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From her experimental home and clothing projects to her artificial Pocket Property island off the coast of Denmark, Andrea Zittel is an artist who truly "lives" art. "We're obsessed with perfection, we're obsessed with innovation and moving forwards. But what we really want is the hope of some sort of a new and improved or better tomorrow."

Filmed in Zittel's Brooklyn home and studio, which serves as her artful business A-Z Administrative Services, the artist takes the viewer on a tour of her specially designed bathroom, furniture, and wardrobe-a whimsical blend of the artist's Southern California roots and 20th Century Modernist design philosophy.

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Andrea Zittel transforms everything necessary for life-such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and socializing-into artful experiments in living. Zittel's A-Z West, a thirty-five acre residential and studio complex in the California high desert, is a testing ground for the artist's innovative sculptures, installations, and design projects.

"We're obsessed with perfection, we're obsessed with innovation and moving forwards. But what we really want is the hope of some sort of a new and improved or better tomorrow."

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Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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More on sustainability and consumption...

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Environment & Society | Worldwatch Institute

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This 20-minute video explore the environmental and economic impacts of the pathway from extraction to production to consumption of our everyday products.

The site has other great videos and teacher resources.

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The Story of Stuff, originally released in December 2007, is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world.

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A great resource for mapping the sources of the components of our everyday products.

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Supply chain mapping software that enables companies to trace products to the source - tracking social, financial, and environmental risks every step of the way

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OEC - Bangladesh (BGD) Exports, Imports, and Trade Partners

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An online resource for international trade data and economic complexity indicators available through interactive visualizations of countries and products.

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Use this video in your class and connect it with Lesson #2 from "Buy, Use, Toss?"

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Do objects come with responsibility? In this film, Mary Mattingly transforms personal belongings into sculptural forms that she later incorporates into photographs and performative actions. Experimenting with living in her Greenpoint studio space, Mattingly is determined to live with just the bare essentials.

Over several months, she undertakes a process of recording every object she owns and tracing the history of each of her belongings-how it came into her life, its distribution via complex global supply chains, as well as where the raw materials for its manufacture was sourced-before uploading a digital version of each object to her website OWN-IT.US for others to access. Throughout this process, she takes stock of the environmental and societal impact of her personal consumption, wondering if "maybe we need art more today because we're in a world with so many mass produced things."

Mattingly aggregates all of her personal belongings into boulder-like sculptural bundles, held together with rope, so that she is able to roll and drag them. She's photographed walking the sculpture Fill (Obstruct) (2013) across the Bayonne Bridge, from Staten Island to New Jersey, and to the Port of New York New Jersey-symbolically returning her personal belongings to the place where they entered the East Coast. "It's kind of really incredibly Sisyphean in a way," says Mattingly about her actions, eventually attracting the attention of the Port Authority Police and Homeland Security who surveil the port.

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Also featuring the works Kart (2008); Floating a Boulder (2012); Pile-High (2012); The Furies (Titian, again) (2013); The Damned (Titian, again) (2013); and Life of Objects (2013).

Credits

Art21 New York Close Up Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Producer & Editor: Rafael Salazar & Ava Wiland. Cinematography: Wesley Miller, Rafael Salazar & Ava Wiland. Sound: Ava Wiland. Associate Producer: Ian Forster. Design & Graphics: Crux Studio & Open. Artwork: Mary Mattingly. Music: Darren Will. Thanks: El Bandido Loco (Cat), Greg Lindquist, Nina Lucey, Robert Mann Gallery, Papaya (Cat), Lauren Slowik & David Smith. An Art21 Workshop Production. © Art21, Inc. 2013. All rights reserved.

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Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

Mary Mattingly was born in 1978 in Rockville, Connecticut, and lives and works in New York. Combining a visual-art practice with environmental activism and education, Mattingly wrote a manifesto that opens with the statement, "Art can transform people's perceptions about value, and collective art forms can reframe predominant ideologies." Mattingly's determination to create alternative means of survival in the face of a dystopian future has resulted in various projects, from wearable cocoons that can store water and solar power to alternative urban infrastructure.

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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ART21 video: "Mary Mattingly's Waterfront Development"

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ART21 video: "Mary Mattingly's Waterfront Development"

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What's the latest trend in New York City real estate? Over the course of the summer and fall of 2013, artist Mary Mattingly constructs and occupies Triple Island (2013), an outdoor sculpture overlooking the East River. Situated in the newly developed Pier 42 public park-a waterfront area flooded by Hurricane Sandy in 2012-the sculpture rests on buoyant 55 gallon drums, which allow it to float in the event of rising sea levels.

Mattingly and friends build Triple Island out of a mix of recycled, donated, and custom-made materials. The three main structures-a living space, greenhouse, and community garden-together form a system for living off the grid in the densely-populated Lower East Side. A self-described apocalyptic thinker, Mattingly views the project as an experimental model for an imagined future where environmental degradation and collapsed economies render current ways of living in urban areas untenable.

"I think Triple Island has a very specific aesthetic intention," says Mattingly, "and it is to imagine a world with leftover materials and how you would build and what it would look like." Through summer heat and winter cold, the artist and several intrepid volunteers live in the sculpture, collecting rain for water, harnessing solar energy for power, and harvesting a garden for food. Residents' motives for participating vary widely; for artist Ivan Gilbert, Triple Island offers a chance to gain "a few more degrees of relative freedom from giant inhuman institutions." Partnering with a coalition of advocacy organizations, such as the Hester Street Collaborative and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Mattingly's project is less an experiment in individualistic self-sufficiency as it is in the communal sharing of local resources.

Featuring the works Triple Island (2013) and Flock House Project (2012-13) with music by Chris Zabriskie.

More information and credits

Credits

Art21 New York Close Up Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Producer & Editor: Rafael Salazar & Ava Wiland. Cinematography: Nick Ravich, Rafael Salazar & Ava Wiland. Sound: Wesley Miller, Nick Ravich & Ava Wiland. Associate Producer: Ian Forster. Design & Graphics: Crux Studio & Open. Artwork: Mary Mattingly. Music: Chris Zabriskie. Thanks: Hannah Black, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, Ian Daniel, Esteban Gaspar Silva, Ivan Gilbert, Good Old Lower East Side, Hester Street Collaborative, Chuck Lin, Greg Lindquist, Kelly Loudenberg, Lower East Side Ecology Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Nina Lucey, Rey Mendoza, Nancy Nowacek, Jess Segall, Mike Shuwerk, Lauren Slowick, Daija Solano, Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, Rand Weeks, Darren Will & Moira Williams. An Art21 Workshop Production. © Art21, Inc. 2014. All rights reserved.

Art21 New York Close Up is supported, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Lambent Foundation; Toby Devan Lewis; the Dedalus Foundation, Inc., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and by individual contributors.

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Licensing

Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

Mary Mattingly was born in 1978 in Rockville, Connecticut, and lives and works in New York. Combining a visual-art practice with environmental activism and education, Mattingly wrote a manifesto that opens with the statement, "Art can transform people's perceptions about value, and collective art forms can reframe predominant ideologies." Mattingly's determination to create alternative means of survival in the face of a dystopian future has resulted in various projects, from wearable cocoons that can store water and solar power to alternative urban infrastructure.

Art21 is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization; all donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

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Mary Mattingly's Waterfront Development - Art21

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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Global sustainability curriculum resources from the makers of "The Story of Stuff" and facingthefuture.org (Many more free curriculum guides on the website)

I highly recommend Lesson #2: "Mapping the Impact" in which student trace the origins of the components of a product and look at the environmental impacts associated with everyday items.