CHRIS FREMANTLE

I was invited to the celebration of 10 years of the Fruit Routes project at the University of Loughborough. Anne-Marie Culhane, artist, and Marsha Meskimmon, Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough, invited me to contribute a short presentation. The morning was spent discussing Fruit Routes, its development and its future. The afternoon was spent visiting the orchards and in more informal conversations. The event was the launch of the Fruit Routes Charter, the basis for it going on.

I was keen to travel and participate because this is one of several durational artist-led projects concerning orchards and foraging. Others include the current The Far Orchard project at The Barn in Aberdeenshire, Dundee Urban Orchard developed by Jonathan Baxter and Sarah Gittins, the work of Common Ground’s Save our Orchards, and Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s Portable Orchard Survival Piece #5 originally made in 1972 and remade several times since. This is by no means a comprehensive list of artists projects related to orchards, fruit and foraging.

The Fruit Routes Charter, launched at the event, is focused on setting out the basis for the continuation of Fruit Routes, moving beyond being a project. It highlights the permaculture principles underpinning Anne-Marie Culhane’s approach. Through highlighting patterns of events (principally planting and harvesting) and approaches to organising (ensuring a warm welcome for inhabitants of Loughborough as well as students whose first language might not be English). It highlights principles for foraging as well as for publicising. The Charter is intended to inform the steering committee responsible for the ongoing development of Fruit Routes. It might inform a lot of thinking about the relationship of art to life.

My presentation follows:

My colleague Anne Douglas and I are currently working on a book on the early works of the pioneering artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. Helen died in 2018 and Newton carries on. We are showing his work, On The Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland at the World Congress of Soil Science this summer, hopefully including a work that they started doing in 1970 and have made again several times.

This work is called Making Earth. According to Newton Harrison it takes 8-12 weeks and involves sewage, river loam, worms, and garden waste. Newton is clear that the reason for doing this work, and the reason they’ve done the work several times for different exhibitions, is that it is incredibly easy to destroy soil and very hard work to make it.

As we know our lives are dependent on soil – I expect you all read George Monbiot’s article on the secret world beneath our feet in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago – if not it is worth checking out.

So my title for today comes from an article by David Antin – he said in a review in 1970,

The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world.

ANTIN, D., 1970. Art + Ecology. ArtNews.

In terms of art practices that are concerned with ecology there are several common characteristics

• a focus on systems, rather than objects (Brian Eno “Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience”),
• learning through experience and in particular sensory place based experience,
• collaboration, participation and interdisciplinarity.

I find Gert Biesta’s phrase really valuable too.

…in the world without occupying the centre of the world.

BIESTA, G., 2017. Letting Art Teach: Art Education ‘After’ Joseph Beuys. Arnhem: ArtEZ Press.

But Antin’s articulation focusing on dependencies is a useful heuristic. I like his ‘its own condition for existence’ ie that the work’s very existence reveals dependencies, or that the work reveals dependencies in the world.

We might be more used to hearing the word ‘interdependency’ and I’m not offering dependency as an alternative – Isabelle Stengers, the Belgian philosopher of science and colleague of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, usefully says

Nor should the intertwining interdependencies be confused with a network of interlinking dependences. It is easy to understand why, without water or light, a plant dies. This fits the definition of ‘dependence’. But interdependence implies a way of being sensitive that is a form of venture.

STENGERS, I., 2020. The Earth Won’t Let Itself Be Watched. In: B. LATOUR and P. WEIBEL, eds. Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. pp. 228–235.

Interdependence implies a way of being sensitive. But dependence is dependence for life. The writing Anne Douglas and I are doing on the Harrisons focuses on how they developed a practice and ‘committed to doing no work that did not attend to the wellbeing of the lifeweb’.

David Antin was a colleague of their at the University of California San Diego.

Antin’s articulation is useful because it means that we can see Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work in the Sanitation Department of New York City is clearly an ecological art. Her first project as artist in residence in the Sanitation Department was called Touch Sanitation. Over a period of about 11 months she travelled across NY City meeting all 8500 sanitation workers saying to each of them “Thank you for keeping New York City alive”

Her Manifesto of Maintenance Art asks

After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?

UKELES, M.L., KWON, M. and MOLESWORTH, H., 1997. Maintenance Art Activity (1973) Artist Project: Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Documents, 10, pp. 5–22.

I almost don’t need to highlight how Fruit Routes articulates dependency as well as interdependence, how its own condition for existence or those of the world.

I’m currently working with Prof Dee Heddon on one of the Research projects with the Future of UK Treescapes programme and amongst other things we are developing a set of case studies around artists working with treescapes (forests, woods, trees). One of the things that Dee has highlighted as becoming apparent is the importance of maintenance arrangements – for example Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks in Kassel, Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain in Finland. These works have lifespans beyond the human and certainly beyond the artist – they exist as art but also as forestry (urban and otherwise).

The projects are dependent on care and maintenance, replacement of dead trees, etc, as well as in the case of orchards, use – we are dependent on them, and they are dependent on us in varying ways.

But the orchards also evidence the dependencies of the world. I work at a campus University and we still have swathes of mown grass. We are University as golf course. Our campus doesn’t remind us of the ongoing processes of life. It doesn’t attract insects and it isn’t made untidy by fruit dropping to the ground. Infact it is always tidy.

I want to end by reading a meditation by TJ Shin I found recently. It’s published in a magazine devoted euphemistically to those things we call ‘facilities’ otherwise known as toilets.

Notes from the event

The Fruit Routes initiative is built on principles of women’s leadership and indigenous ways of knowing. A number of key thinkers were cited including Rachel Carson, Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, Greta Gaard, Felix Guattari and Lorraine Code. Although Loughborough might be described as focused on technology, Fruit Routes is not a top down initiative, and it recognises that the challenges we face at a planetary scale require local action. Fruit Routes is focused by place, identity, materiality and history, and thinks in multi-scalar terms – it is specific in its place and relates to other edible locality (city, town, campus, etc) as well as addressing national, continental and global challenges of food and justice. It seeks to address what Amitav Ghosh calls the ‘crisis of the imagination’ in his key book The Great Derangement.

Fruit Routes was described in terms of ‘thinking the land’, recognising that trees have been in the landscape of Loughborough for much longer than the University. Fruit Routes also provides a different time-cycle to the academic. The Harvest Festival happens in the autumn. It acts as a focus for Architecture School’s Summer School providing a brief for an apple store. Planting happens in the winter and spring.

Fruit Routes has had a documented impact on the mental health of students, and has an alumni community of its own. It creates connections between the University and the Town, particularly with the annual Harvest festival, as well as engaging teams within the University such as Gardening and Security.

Fruit Routes has had to find space within the Campus and it has focused on ‘edge’ spaces so as to ensure it didn’t conflict with developments. It has addressed a number of University strategies and priorities including Biodiversity for Business, creating a place to meet between disciplines, offering challenges and also sharing. It enables intergenerational learning.