Born in 1956 in Atlanta (US). Lives and works in Chicago (US)
2015
Installation. 33 vintage coal miner’s canary cages, pet coke molded into the form of human breasts, 1 living canary
Year of Purchase: 2015
Claire Pentecost is an artist-researcher: her creative work is driven by the processes of learning, or to be more exact, deciphering the workings of society and disseminating her research, whether in the form of drawings, installations, photographs, or talks and writings. Her fields of study combine human relationship to nature, transmission of knowledge, economy and relationships of domination, and express her profound political and ecological engagements. Her projects resonate with those of artists like Agnes Denes, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and the collective Critical Art Ensemble, with whom she has collaborated. Her work is also closely aligned with researchers, like Timothy Morton, and activists—Claire Pentecost belongs, among others, to Compass, a group of artists and activists—who aim to raise awareness about the ways we inhabit the world and about the complexity of our relationship to the environment, in order to provoke social change.
The artist examines, in particular, applications of biotechnologies in agriculture, including genetically modified organisms and pesticides. She sees herself as a “public amateur”: she conducts her own investigations, not from the point of view of an expert, but rather as an independent observer who brings questions of public interest to specialized knowledge. Her work is thus part of a process of questioning, and recovery of, knowledge that has been privatized as intellectual property by authorities whose economic interests sideline the associated risks of the use of chemical substances on our health and our environment, as well as their effects in terms of social justice.
Proposal for a New American Agriculture (2006) is a photograph documenting the results of the process of vermicomposting initiated by the artist in the basement of her house. Over several months, thousands of earthworms were feeding on kitchen waste into which the artist added a cotton flag of the United States, which then became transformed into compost. The tattered remnant of the flag could signify the condition of the soil in the United States, deteriorated through industrialized agriculture. The title of the work, however, takes us away from this realization and points us toward a concrete alternative applicable at an individual as well as a collective level: why not (re)appropriate this simple process of transforming household waste into sustainable, nutrient-rich matter that will help restore healthy soil? Pentecost’s work thus becomes a proposal for perpetuating collective know-how about soil accumulated over generations, while the industry seeks to replace natural processes with chemical products that deplete the soil and make us more dependent on those same chemicals, as the artist emphasizes in Notes from Underground published as part of dOCUMENTA 13 (2012).
For the Body Without Organs to Sense (2015) is a mobile made of miner’s bird cages. These objects draw on the practice of miners who would detect the presence of carbon monoxide based on the behavior of a bird capable of sensing the odorless gas. The number of cages evokes the mining disaster in Copiapó (Chili) where thirty-three miners remained trapped underground for over two months in 2010. The work is a reminder about the high-risk working conditions associated with mineral exploitation: has that highly mediatized event had any real impact on mining? The question remains open. Thirty-two of the cages contains a lump of pet coke, composed mainly of carbon, molded into the shape of a human breast, symbolizing both our society’s addiction to oil and the growth of mining corporations at the expense of public health. In 2014, the year the work was created, residents of Chicago, Claire Pentecost’s hometown, protested against dusty piles of petroleum coke polluting areas of the city. Kept in a cage, a canary interrupts this structure: does the bird represent the “body without organs,” a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which theorizes desire as production and translates the power to act, to perceive reality, renew connections between ways of life, environment, and society, and to free oneself from mystifications that get in the way of our understanding of the world?
Émilie Blanc