Aug 13 2024
I write this update as we prepare to remember Tom Linehan who died recently. He was part of a group of friends of friends that changed history for the better.
The only reason i have now an endowed chair for the next 6 years at UTdallas is due to Tom Causality is complex and autopoietic but..
We are organizing an exhibition in tom and his sead beds of friends in November on the UTDCampus.
Bev Kleiber is raking the leaves of memory. Sometimes disremembering overwhelms remembering,
Helen Harrison and Newton Harrison were a working creative couple for 50 years. They left a trace in the minds and lives of numerous people. Their collaboration started in 1970. According to wikipedia their work encompassed the “eco-social well-being of place and community”.
My first interactions with them involved publishing in Leonardo, I was particularly drawn when they brought in transplanetary perspectives, since I was an astronomer. One article was: Harrison Newton, Mayer Harrison Helen, “Shifting Positions Toward the Earth : Art and Environmental Awareness”, Leonardo, Vol.26, n°5, pp.371-377, 1993.
“The authors present their philosophy of a holistic and
interdependent universe, and situate the origins of their work in their concern with the issue of
survival. Following a model of nature as a conversation, their work is composed of visual and textual narratives presenting arguments for ecological preservation and a rethinking of current
uses of technology. An emphasis on the potential of any work to affect this posited
universal whole is related to their projects as proposals for change.”
My interactions with them continued iteratively until today. For instance I wrote an essay in their “The time of the Force Majeure : after 45 years, counterforce is on the horizon.” Kai Reschke (Editor) in 2016, I had to stand back and refocus on the new directions they were taking.
They consistently sought to transfer theory ( art) to practice ( forestry, botany) such as in their project with the santa cruz botanical garden.
https://ias.ucsc.edu/content/2018/harrisons-future-garden-ucsc-arboretum
At the invitation of Janeil Engelstadt they visited Dallas, and we discussed a project they would lead on the banks of the Trinity River, which is a sewer not a river, and the parks are steadily encroached by new new roads.
Janeil heads Making Art with Purpose https://makeartwithpurpose.net/ MAP in collaboration and across disciplines, Make Art with Purpose produces art and design projects that foster equity and inclusion and address social and environmental concerns throughout the world. Their mission statement is a loud echo 50 years of my quote at the start of this text of the Harrisons’ desire as a couple to create “ “eco-social well-being of place and community”.
All I can say is that their way of thinking and doing infected my own life in several ways from my initial encounters in 80s.. At the time I was a scientist and engineer writing technical articles that never deviated from a standard format or content and were rarely trans-disciplinary as was intrinsic to Helen and Newton’s way of being and doing. They were part of the community of practice, a planting force, that advocates the needs to implement ideas using artscience and
other transdisciplinary methods. They certainly founded, in Jonathan Keats words, the field of
eco-art-science https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2018/08/21/helen-newton-harrison-santa-cruz/?sh= 2fba4e057214
The most recent Leonardo article is Harrison, Newton (2019-03-29). “Helen Harrison: 1927–2018”. Leonardo. ISSN 1530-9282.
And I look forward in 2025 to attending the event organised/inseaded by the Harrisons https://lajollahistory.org/exhibitions/helen-and-newton-harrison-california-work/
As I learned that Newton had few days to live, i was collaborating with Thom Kubli in Berlin ( https://thomkubli.net/ ) . Kubli is an artist and composer and experimenter. We have been working together on a book titled “Dis-remembering Gyorgy Kepes’. The project was triggered with Ivaana Muse when we discovered that Kepes had spent two crucial years working in Denton Texas, just down the road from where I now work at UT Dallas. None of his Obituaries or Necrologies mention this. But it was in Texas that he wrote the first of his seminal art science books including the science and values series.
There he met Carlotta Corpron (1901 – 1988) taught photography at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. The Texas Bauhaus was triggered by Kepes’ short presence. http://artsandculturetx.com/the-bauhaus-connection-with-texas/
Most crucial events in in the Newtons’ life will not appear in their obituaries
And I met Kepes when I was an undergraduate student at MIT in 1968. Thom Kubli was there also https://arts.mit.edu/people/thom-kubli/ and worked with Jerome Weisner who had been MIT President when I was a student. I remember several items about Kepes. First during the
1968 student demonstrations he sheltered students, including myself, in the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He also was a founding editorial advisor of the Leonardo Journal for which I now serve as Executive Editor. He was a friend of my father Frank Malina, born in Texas, and I remembering their joking that they both left Texas as soon as possible. So here I am in Texas.
In our weekly meeting Thom Kubli and I discussed the crucial importance of the Harrisons and their pioneering work in eco-social well-being of place and community, we desperately need the Harrisons to re-start their work on the Trinity Sewer (river).
Thom Kubli: :
Looking at their body of work today, I came to the following remarks:
If you don´t jump into the prevailing ideological stream, you can hear, see, and sense the future approaching as it most likely will be.
Follow your path even if it might not seem fashionable at the current moment. In the long run, it might produce the better information about life.
Agitate across borders and disciplines for the thing you believe in. Get everyone involved. Never stop!
And I would add, sometimes married creatives are a million fold more significant than lone geniuses.
Thank you Helen and Newton Harrison and Tom Linehan and Bev Kleiber.