TALES FROM THE SUSTAINABLE UNDERGROUND -A Wild Journey with People Who Care More about the Planet than the Law- New Society Publishers- 2011

By Stephen Hren 

ART Chapter Excerpt:

For nearly two decades now I’ve known the artist Matt Bua. I was first introduced to Matt through the sometimes rock star and general shape-shifting poet Ryan Adams. Fresh out of high school in the early 90’s, Ryan and I  lived together in a crumbling five bedroom house on the west-side of Raleigh, North Carolina; the whole house no bigger than a modern home’s living room. Late one night, on an impromptu caffeine-fueled jaunt, we headed down the dark highway towards eastern North Carolina and ended up in Matt’s college town of Greenville (home of Eastern Carolina University) in the wee hours of the night. As Ryan had previously met Matt through the pre-internet underground web of alternative music, art, and literature that survived mainly through late 20th century zines like Matt’s xeroxed rag (with Eric Hinson), Larks Tongue In Fluke Juice , We decided to rouse Matt from his bed. There was no light on at Matt’s place, but figuring they’d traveled so far, Ryan threw rocks at Matt’s window until they finally saw his head poke through under the sash. Regardless of the hour, he was happy to see his old friend Ryan, and invited us in. It didn’t take long to realize that, coincidentally, I had recently submitted a poem to Matt’s zine, and our friendship took off from there. From then on, I would trek down to ECU whenever Matt had an art happening, until Matt wrapped up his art studies in Greenville and made the move to New York City to make his way as an artist.

Matt’s art has, since that first night, been expanding my understanding of what art is and what it is for. I had a fairly traditional education when it came to art, usually taking the word as just a shorter way of saying “painting.” So once every year or so, I’d have my mind blown when I’d make it up to the big apple to see an opening and see what Matt (often working with his collaborators Jesse Bercowetz,) was up to. A re-creation of the Mir space station built using found objects (and inhabited for days at a time by the artists-led); drawings made by attaching a pencil to a U-haul moving truck and driving it back and forth (with Jesse and Ward Shelley); a long-term  commitment to beef-up lifting weights and then performing a coordinated exercise routine in freaked-out jumpsuits for crowds of onlookers. Those are just a few of the many projects that Matt and Jesse had going on. Other contemporary work in their circle of friends included an artist living inside the walls of the art gallery for a month, or focusing on “transmission art” such as radio wave manipulation and attempts at free energy through Tesla coils. It seems like wherever humans have built or created something, artists are right behind them manipulating, rearranging, and interpreting.

After a dozen years in the city, Matt broadened his focus. Purchasing property in the Catskills near Hudson, NY, he starting setting up a place for art to interact with its surrounding ecology through small buildings, a project he calls “b-home”; Buildings and the environment, these are things that are right up our alley, and we were both happy to pitch in some time and help get him started. And we didn’t have to spend too much time up there before we starting getting our mind blown again, not just from the “loose” structures Matt was throwing up, but also by the buildings his collaborators were putting up, and then by the multifarious dimensions of other “eco-art’ being creating all over the world.

On my latest trip up north we detrained in nearby Hudson, N.Y. at 2 am. Outside the station, I saw Matt’s ancient but mostly intact Ford F1-150, easily capable of squeezing at least four people in the front seat, come rolling down the hill through the dark fog. I  jumped inside and rambled through the winding hills to b-home.

 Awaking the next morning in a structure called the Owl’s Den to brilliant September sunshine, the sugar maples just starting to show a hint of vermillion and the forest floor covered with protruding mushrooms, some of which I knew would make their way into the night’s supper. b-home is located on the western side of Vedder Mountain, and is split in two by a power-line cut. From the road, it’s entered from a small ridge and slopes quickly down to a modest brook, around which most of the current activity focuses. Coming down the slope, it doesn’t take long to realize that the normal world of rectangular buildings and organized grassy lawns has long since been abandoned for a different paradigm. Immediately at the bottom of the hill, a large metal storage container leans northward, its contents spilling outward down the hill towards a plexiglas-roofed structure that looks like it barely survived a Japanese earthquake.

This marks the beginning of a long alley lined with the discards of American civilization, from piles of rough-cut lumber, storefront totem poles, and rolls of plastic tubing to homeless art projects like a giant barbed-wire teddy bear and a functioning corn liquor still. Beyond these piles, what appear at first glance to be crudely built hobbit dwellings turn out on closer inspection to be intricate structures of indeterminate use, their organic geometry comprising an unexpected wholeness. In many of these small buildings, natural elements like multitudes of branches wrapped together, earth plasters, and living trees are integrated with manufactured items such as randomly-cut sheets of metal and plastic, children’s action figures, and old windows. The immediate impression is of the work of a flock of giant bower-birds that raided the remains of Fresh Kills landfill and then headed north into the mountains to build their empire.

This is a retreat from the confines of everyday civilization, but not the kind where you get to lounge around pool-side in the sun. With the goal of changing how the world conceives of its relationship with the natural world through the medium of the built environment, the work at b-home is never-ending. Since there isn’t actually any flock of giant bower-birds, the hard work gets done by Matt and the migrating rotation of artists and builders that come through.

The majority of my work this time centered around building a human-scale solar oven to keep Matt warm in the brutal winter months. Using six posts that Matt had sunk deep into the ground on a south-facing hill and secured using a packed-rubble footing, we created a triangular building of perhaps 100 square feet, the broad side opening towards the winter sun. A solar oven works by creating a small, black, well-insulated space that can be dramatically heated up using reflectors to capture the energy of the sun. The goal of our building was not to cook the contents, of course, but rather bring the wintertime temperature up from sub zero to a living temperature of around 60 or 70F.

As backup heat storage and as a means of supplemental heat, we worked hard building a high-thermal mass rocket stove. A rocket stove is a unique kind of masonry stove. The basic principle of both is to create an extremely hot fire capable of combusting almost all of the smoke, making for a very efficient and clean burn. Instead of this heat immediately warming its surroundings, the heat is stored in a substantial amount of masonry such as stone or brick. The heat then percolates out into the surrounding room over a period of 12 to 24 hours. What is unique about a rocket stove is the design of the burn chamber. Instead of a traditional fire box, wood is burned vertically from the bottom. The heat and smoke are then captured momentarily in an insulated truncated chimney covered by a metal barrel, where the temperature rises high enough (upwards of 1,200F) to complete the final combustion of smoke and other particulates. The heat from this chamber then winds through masonry before exiting the building. In our human solar oven design, we planned on the rocket stove heating a bed made out of cob, to keep its inhabitants warm through the long, cold northern nights. The usual daily routine at b-home involves many of the ecologically- minded activities we’re used to at our own home: putting a dinner dish in the solar oven, hunting in the woods for goodies like Cinnabar Chantarelles and Chicken-Fat Suillus, emptying out the humanure buckets into the compost, and checking the meter on the PV system. The art itself is not just ecologically-minded, but the process of its creation is as well.

It’s all part of a reinvigorated movement to interpret our myriad ecological dilemmas through the kaleidoscopic lens of art. It is the duty of the artist to act as both mirror to society and as thought- provoking visionary of what might be. With recognition of our inability to maintain our civilization in its current guise, it’s not surprising that many artists today are incorporating ideas of ecology and sustainability into their work. Always on the margin and underpaid for work whose value might not be recognized for years or decades (if ever), artists like Matt who are embracing ecological issues, or Eco-Artists, are nevertheless remarkable in the contemporary art world for the almost universal unmarketability of their creations.

About the Author

Stephen Hren is a restoration carpenter, builder and teacher who specializes in sustainable design and solar heating technologies. He is the co-author of The Carbon-Free Home and A Solar Buyer’s Guide for the Home and Office.