Anicka Yi on Message from the Mud, her soil science project for Storm King
Planar “paintings” of fried flowers encased in resin; abstract sculptures made of kombucha leather or kelp; installations that double as habitats for ants: Over the past two decades, Anicka Yi has emerged as the most visible practitioner of bioart, materially incorporating other species into her works rather than simply representing them. This collaboration between artist and nature poses the question of what it means to have agency, artistic or otherwise, highlighting the radical contingency of human and nonhuman actors within complex systems. More recently, her works have proposed technological systems as another type of “other” on which we are likewise interdependent (whether we like it or not), as in the case of her prescient printed paintings of AI-generated images from 2022 (from the series “ÄLñ§ñ”) or the biomorphic floating “aerobe” machines currently patrolling the Hall of Robots in the New Museum’s massive show “New Humans.”
Message from the Mud, which opens to the public on May 17 at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, is Yi’s first large-scale outdoor project—surprisingly, given her extensive collaborations with organic life and materials. The work embellishes the landscape with a new pond set in a faux archaeological site, out of which rise a series of clear columns housing soil ecosystems extracted from the grounds.
—Tina Rivers Ryan
MESSAGE FROM THE MUD is what I call a prehistoric biofiction. It encompasses twenty Winogradsky columns. They’re named after the Russian biochemist Sergei Winogradsky, who invented these columns in the service of soil science. I’ve been experimenting with them since 2019; they encapsulate my interest in the way that most life is conducted on this planet, which is that we’re entangled in multiple spheres—biospheres, technospheres, financial spheres, lots of different spheres. The columns are filled with mud, dirt, and soil from a particular region, and then you add some other chemicals in order to activate them. For these we’re using egg yolks and some carbon in the form of shredded newspapers, and then we add some local pond water—that’s the real nutrient-rich stuff. Then you let it cook. The microbes and the algae tend to flourish under these clamp lights; the optimal temperature for microbes is ninety-five degrees—armpit temperature.
At Storm King, these soil ecosystem columns will be set inside a pond that we constructed on-site outdoors. We created a fictional archaeological dig that has sand-colored poured concrete making a kind of architectural amphitheater, the centerpiece of which is this pond that houses these columns. Within these soil ecosystems, we’re dealing with deep time—geological time, microbial time, algal time—so it felt fitting here to put it within this framework of archaeology, because a lot of archaeology, from my understanding, is really about piecing together different stories, different narratives. Our story as humans is the most recent story, but there are so many other stories of other forms of life on this planet.
This installation is my first time engaging with the natural world outdoors, on its own terms. It responds to the entire sculpture park of Storm King, which predominantly has examples of monumental Minimalist sculpture—elements and traces of the postindustrial world. I thought it would be quite interesting to circumvent that for this particular installation. To my knowledge, there haven’t been many explicitly organic statements in the installations at Storm King, so I wanted to excavate the subterranean underworlds and let these creatures shine, and foreground these metabolisms and all of this flourishing of the natural world.
The natural world is something that is just so compelling; if you go to the Grand Canyon, you’re in awe. Current research tells us that awe is extremely healthy for us to experience, because it not only brings us joy and a kind of peaceful experience, almost similar to meditation, but also connects us to a broader ecosystem that’s much larger than ourselves. In terms of landscape art, who can avoid thinking about the Hudson River School in that region? I think that the beauty of it is very disconcerting—partly because I struggle with beauty as something that’s overwhelming, almost eclipsing the subject that you’re interested in. But then that beauty also becomes implicated and becomes part of the work, as much as the toxic fumes in the hallway of the bathroom of a museum, or something like that. With this landscape, rather than trying to counter its beauty and make it abject, I want it to go deeper: Given we’re dealing with these gorgeous landscapes that inspired countless painters and photographers, what if we went deeper into a beauty that isn’t always visible? I’ve always challenged the primacy and the supremacy of sight in our civilization, especially in the arts, as something directly tied to knowledge, and oftentimes associated with the masculine. That’s something that I would call the biopolitics of the senses—that we attribute these kinds of qualities and assigned values through the biological.
The title of the work refers to nonhuman messaging: the idea that the mud contains so much intelligence, so much rich material for us to learn about ourselves, and that we would want to silence our own voices for a moment to hear it. There’s a concept in Buddhism called a beginner’s mind, where you try to empty yourself of your expertise and all the information and data points that you are arming yourself with as currency; you wipe all that out, and that allows you to be truly open. I entered this project with a beginner’s mind, and throughout the process of developing it over the past two years, it’s allowed me to receive all these messages that I would not normally have been open to. Even though I have a multidisciplinary practice and have robustly engaged with a lot of other experts, at a certain point, you have to really zoom out and just let go of all of that currency, because that’s what data and information are—they’re units of capital, and this soil time is not on capitalist time. That’s another message that I got: that it’s on microbial time, on geological time; it’s not on patriarchal time; it’s not on human time, even. Those are some messages that I’m interpreting and inferring from this process, and I’m always just so fascinated and surprised by the discovery.
—As told to Tina Rivers Ryan
“Anicka Yi: Message from the Mud” opens on May 17 at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York.
