Alan Sonfist is a member of the Land Art movement and grew up in the concrete desert of the Bronx in the 1960s. He writes:
“[Going to school] I passed smoldering garbage. There were no trees anywhere—the few that had existed were long dead—there were only concrete streets and brick buildings. The streets were divided between local gangs, and each gang controlled a section. Each day my walk to school was a passage through terror and my survival depended on my urban instincts. This was my first experience with nature.”
Sonfist fled urban decay and exchanged roving gangs and wild dogs for massive oaks and nervous deer. At the age of seven his parents gave him a camera, which he used to photograph an oak as thoroughly as possible. The park that he loved as a child was eventually trampled by newcomers and filled in with concrete by the city; “my forest had disappeared” Sonfist lamented.
Sonfist’s most famous work is a park in Manhattan called “Time Landscape,” built in 1978 with the intention that it would interact with the populace, an unusual choice for a member of the Land Art movement. The park lives on and is composed entirely of the native plants that once covered the island. Sonfist is intense about his work; he spent a year in complete isolation on St. Croix, photographing himself and collecting army ants for study. He called the experience “becoming animal.” Working with the Museum Ludwig, he spent time living as a caged animal in a German zoo. When Sonfist offered the Museum of Modern Art his corpse so that they could display it rotting away before the eyes of patrons, the Museum Ludwig extended an offer to house him there. The Museum of Modern Art has not responded to this offer.
Sonfist has become extremely prolific, exhibiting pieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum in New York. In our very own Cooley Gallery, there are many of his photographs, samples of the flaura he collects, and never before seen footage of his larger works, which are displayed on two TVs at the gallery’s center.
The exhibit was curated by Robert Slifkin of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Stephanie Snyder, the curator and director of the gallery, and Allison Tepper, an assistant curator at the Whitney. The work they selected for the exhibition focuses on Sonfist’s art from 1960–1980. The intention is to emphasize the works that took on issues of ecological contextualization, social interaction with art, and installation art in both inter- and extra-museological environments. Sonfist sees his work as infinite in that the natural world has endless possibilities that allow him to find and rebuild his lost forest.
The exhibit “Natural History” by Alan Sonfist will be on display in the Cooley between March 29 and June 12.