Inside our DNA we carry genetic markers that prove that we share the same ancestors and are one human family. For one thing, the Antarctic materials and production site bring to mind recent reports of polar ice melt associated with global warming. It has passed the point of no return. This may seem like a lot for one small painting to address, but Astrid does so at multiple registers.
It creatively conjures the aerial maps and satellite images that scientists such as Rignot use to represent the increasingly unstable environment of Antarctica—a continent whose glacial disintegration has global consequences. Viewed in terms of materiality instead of metaphor or representation, Astrid functions as a token or specimen of a place undergoing irrevocable change wrought by human actions elsewhere—especially actions associated with Western modernity since the Industrial Revolution.
As the artist informed us:. With the ice paintings, I wanted to melt the very ice that threatened to melt and drown my city [Miami]. The work, beautiful and serene, would be a precursor of horrors to come. I melted the ice on paper to create the works, adding paint and sediment.
The works were made in Antarctica, about Antarctica, using Antarctica as the medium provided to me by the very researchers who inform us about Antarctica. With its expressive abstraction, Astrid recalls the heroic dynamism of American art about , at the apogee of U. This interpretation takes on added significance in light of the growing scientific consensus that Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, distinguished from the preceding Holocene by the fact that humans since the nineteenth century have become the primary drivers of environmental change on a planetary scale.
As Haeckel explained:. By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature—the investigation of the total relations of the animal both to its organic and inorganic environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes directly or indirectly into contact—in a word, ecology is the study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.
Although Haeckel embraced Eurocentric beliefs about racial hierarchy that were common in his day, he also affirmed and popularized Darwinian ideas about the evolution of human beings within a broader ecological web of life.
Whereas Baudelaire celebrated change as an opportunity for artistic renewal and originality, Marsh saw a disturbing trend toward depletion and destruction wrought by humankind.
As he wrote in the preface to Man and Nature :. The object of the present volume is: to indicate the character and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world; to suggest the possibility and the importance of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of waste and exhausted regions.
Modern ambition aspires to yet grander achievements in the conquest of physical nature, and projects are meditated which quite eclipse the boldest enterprises hitherto undertaken for the modification of geographical surface. The objects are residue. They are symbolic: shoes represent people and flags represent allegiances and identity. In Native Flags , I used a green flag to reclaim the frozen sea ice at the North Pole and encouraged others to reclaim nature at home by planting greenhouse gas-reducing trees.
More than any other concept, this idea of reclamation has been the centerpiece in my art throughout the years. XC: I thought long and hard about this while traveling. It was remarkable how quickly and comfortably I reached both poles just generations after many suffered and died trying to get there.
That same industrious fervor that brought me there builds the machines and processes that unsafely spews carbon into our atmosphere, melting our glaciers and raising our seas. But, alarmed by the climate science, I focused exclusively on the ice instead. Ice in time, ice in transition, ice collapsing. Ice as weapon, master. I made paintings melting it. I ate it. I stabbed it with flags. Is Xavier Cortada Cuban?
How old is Xavier Cortada? Why is Miami Freedom Tower important? What does the Freedom Tower stand for? How much does it cost to visit the Freedom Tower? Is the One World Observatory worth it? Who owns the Twin Towers? How much does it cost to go to the top of Freedom Tower? American Crocodile attacks are extremely rare; wildlife biologists say the animals are reclusive and do not strike humans unless provoked.
State wildlife officials were compelled to remove Poncho from the area because they believed he had bitten two people who had jumped into a canal early one morning after attending a party at a waterfront home. The wildlife agents noted that he was distressed, and assume he died due to "capture stress," according to Lindsey Hord, a biologist who coordinates the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission 's Crocodile Response team. Several agents knew the animal and were "very upset" by his death, she added.
The U. Fish and Wildlife Services classifies the American Crocodile as "threatened" in Florida and "endangered" elsewhere. Neighborhood residents differed in their opinions. Some were relieved to have the crocodile gone, since he had eaten several pets over the years. But others said they had admired him and blamed the people who jumped in the water.
Learn what's in your own back yard and then you're not afraid of it. Cortada revisited the theme of DNA at the end of the celebration of Poncho's life. After leading a procession of mourners singing "Shall We Gather at the River," he waded into the waters of Biscayne Bay at dusk, clad in black jeans and a weathered pair of leather shoes.
As he shook a dust of ashes into the sea, he reminded the audience that the nucleotides that coded for the creation of Poncho were the same as those that code for all life on earth. Unless we begin to problem solve, we will suffer.
The Eulogy.
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