Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle
Geoffrey Hendricks, Union Square, New York City, Headstands for Peace, 2007. Image Credit: Sur Rodney (Sur)
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Geoffrey Hendricks is an American artist currently based in New York City and Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was dubbed “Cloudsmith,” by intermedia artist and publisher Dick Higgins, due to his extensive body of cloud and sky paintings, sculptures and installations. Since the 1960’s Hendricks has been active with Fluxus and his work has been exhibited internationally. Hendricks is Professor Emeritus at Mason Gross School of the Art, Rutgers University where he taught from 1956 until 2003. Hendricks is also known for making delicious macrobiotic meals. Elizabeth Stephens (a former Rutgers graduate student), and her collaborator-wife, Annie Sprinkle, conducted this interview by phone with Geoffrey Hendricks on January 7, 2011, while making miso soup.
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The Questions:
1. Do you consider your work to be Fluxus, and, if so, when did you first begin to think of it as such?
2. What other conversations do you see your work engaging in?
3. Do you see your work as gay or queer?
4. Much of your work has been done about and in nature. How does nature/the natural environment influence your work and how has your working in nature influenced your relationship with nature and the natural environment.
5. Could you talk a little about your work with the sky? When did you first become known as Cloudsmith?
6. You have maintained an art kinship system throughout your career. Could you talk a little about the importance of this in terms of your work and in terms of your life? I feel as if I share a lineage with you — as my professor you had a huge impact on how I understand and make art and as a friend I am very moved and inspired by your work and your generosity around your work. Who were you influences and why did you decide to move in the direction of generosity when so many artists seem to have moved in a more commercial direction?
7. Do you view your work as operating within or alongside a gift economy and if so how?
8. Does your work have a spiritual component? If so, when did spirituality begin to enter your practice?
9. What is the significance of your headstands? Are you working with the crown chakra? How do these actions relate to peace?
10. What are your thoughts on performance art “today” — the turn to things like “social practice” or “relational art” that have brought new modes of attention to Fluxus inspired art practices? What do you see as the future of live performance, especially in this electronic-facebook, twitter age; and why is it still important (or is it)?
11. Did teaching influence your work? What was one of the most important things you learned from your students, if indeed you did learn anything from them?
12. You have engaged in collaboration in the past. I’m thinking of your work with Brian Buzak but also your collaborations with folks like Jill Johnstons and Ingrid Nyeboe, and your wonderful performance contributions: wedding boxes and other art presents that you have made for Annie and me for our weddings. Why do you engage in collaboration and what do you get out of this process? Do you find collaboration a productive way to work? Do you think that collaboration creates bigger conversations than you might ordinarily have? And, if you ever had difficulties in collaboration, what did you learn from them?
13. What projects are you working on now? What is important to you about this work?
14. Is there anything you want to say about your upcoming birthday party performance event?
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The Answers:
HENDRICKS
Beth, In your questions I really enjoyed the way you focused right in on various aspects that are central to my work: Fluxus, queerness, nature, and sky. And then getting into this whole kinship network that is the nature of how I approach art and life that’s more in the spirit of commune. What you zeroed in on got me thinking about where I have been and where I’ve traveled and how that intersects with my art practice.
SPRINKLE
So, you’re going to turn 80 this summer?
STEPHENS
How does that feel Geoff?
HENDRICKS
Well it feels like any other age in a funny way, you know, you look ahead to it and seems sort of ominous. I just got an email from this Finnish artist who said she has a residency in Rome, but has been preoccupied with caring for her elderly 83 year-old parents. I thought, elderly? For me 80 seems like just another point in time. As Gertrude Stein says, you always feel like a young adult moving into life some way, right through your life. So there is this feeling that 80 will come and then I will be looking ahead to 90.
STEPHENS
Well. We’re right behind you.
HENDRICKS
Okay good, then you’ll be around and we’ll plan a big super event for my 90th and then something even more spectacular for the 100th I guess.
SPRINKLE
Oh, great!
HENDRICKS
This year we are going to have a big bang-up party. One of my neighbors is a First Nation Micmac woman who is very active politically. We’ve had a couple of conversations at gatherings at peoples’ places, and at one potluck supper she got to talking with me and said, “I’m hearing about this birthday party that you’re having next summer. I better be invited, and if not I’m gonna crash it.”
STEPHENS
Maybe she should bless the land for your birthday.
HENDRICKS
Interesting idea. She is part of the community in Cape Breton.
STEPHENS
Do you know what we’re doing right now Geoff?
HENDRICKS
What?
STEPHENS
We’re making oatmeal and miso soup. I always think of you when we make miso soup. We’ve had some of the most fabulous meals at your house.
SPRINKLE
She’s hoping that you are what you eat and that she’ll turn into a Geoff Hendricks. (Everyone laughs.)
HENDRICKS
Miso is really important for health.
STEPHENS
Well I think love is also one of the best medicines around for health, big doses of love.
HENDRICKS
That’s very important isn’t it? It’s what your weddings and your life are all about.
SPRINKLE
Do you consider yourself a love artist?
HENDRICKS
No, I leave that special territory for you, but you know, it reverberates. You were talking in one of your questions about gifting. The kind of communal feeling, the kinship, and relationship with people that’s there in my work may be something parallel to what you do in yours. It all works in a good collaborative, cooperative way. The Quakerism that I grew up with has a lot of this too: it is about simple living, pacifism, working to resolve problems, and helping people.
STEPHENS
I think that’s an important role that art can play without being an instrument of, or illustrative of, social goody two-shoeism or something.
HENDRICKS
It’s not so much illustrative, but a process, innately there in what’s done and how one works. I find that that’s something central to my work. It grows from what I’m doing, and can take a lot of different forms. Art’s not just a particular object or text or something like that. Once, when we were doing things in Billy Apple’s loft, where I did Body Hair (the shaving piece) as part of my show Relics and Special Events, we were collectively sharing in activities and had a few New Years day gatherings. For one of these we decided to write down our thoughts about what art was. The little text that I put together was about Dream Event, a 48 hour piece where I was fasting, sleeping, and writing down dreams, naked on a mattress, under a sheet, with a pitcher of water to keep me from getting dehydrated and a pot to pee in, and where people could come in to observe at any hour of the day or night. There was one point early on, when I was settling in, that a woman was busy talking in the hallway. Billy Apple went out and said “shhhshhh, there’s a performance going on here!” I wasn’t talking so I couldn’t respond at the time, but in the New Years exchange I said that art wasn’t necessarily a specific object, but somehow the static that had gone on between Billy’s reaction, the woman, my response, and the installation — that art emerged in this kind of intangible area. Which is not to say that it can’t be formalized in a word statement or in a performance or an object or group of objects or a journey or whatever, but it’s about that kind of electricity, the static, that goes on in between all these things.
Geoff Hendricks, Dream Event, 1971. Image Courtesy of the Artist.
Geoff Hendricks, Body/Hair, 1971. Images Courtesy of the Artist.
STEPHENS
I like that definition a lot because it speaks to what I was referring to in the movement towards social practice. Some of the works that are produced in that area seem to me to be trying to create quick solutions to deep serious problems. And I’m not sure if that’s the role of art, I mean it can certainly try to help solve problems, but when art becomes a problem solving tool, I don’t feel that (for me) it speaks as art. Art emerges more strongly for me as the kind of static that you’re describing. Easy fix social practice work doesn’t seem to pay attention to the space in between.
HENDRICKS
One has to look at art as something that emanates out something else. It needs that happening in a way for it to resonate and to have this kind of greater usefulness, insight, impact.
SPRINKLE
Do you do meditation Geoff?
HENDRICKS
I would like to do meditation. I will on occasion just sit. My assistant Ethan is much more regular about doing yoga and meditation and things like that.
SPRINKLE
Has it influenced your artwork?
HENDRICKS
Growing up a Quaker, where the service is sitting in silence… if you had something to say you would get up and say it, but a whole Meeting could go on with no one saying anything and that would be just as powerful as if there were people speaking…
SPRINKLE
Your parents were Quaker…
HENDRICKS
Yeah they were Quakers. My mother went to Earlham, a Quaker college in Indiana. My father grew up Norwegian Methodist (or something like that), but they both helped found the Quaker meeting in Chicago. I’ve also been involved in the Quaker meeting up in Putney, Vermont. But I feel myself as much a Buddhist. I also consider myself a “nothing,” just one who communes with nature and the outdoors. Nye/Bici, my ex-partner, and I were at Tassajara Zen Center in ’68. That was a special and important moment where we sat in a regular way. There were stretches of silence and being involved in that whole discipline, but my life is too free-flowing to get into meditation in a regular way.
STEPHENS
You mentioned silence a few times in what you were just saying. What role does silence play in your work, Geoff? In a free-flowing way of course. (Laughter)
HENDRICKS
Well, the sky itself has its own silence, and there have been performances I’ve done, that have been very much about silence — whether it was Dream Event or Ring Piece. In Ring Piece I was sitting in silence on a mound of dirt for 12 hours in the center of Charlotte Moorman’s Avant Garde Festival in the Armory, in ’71. There were relics from the Flux Divorce underneath the earth and Dick Higgins releasing a white mouse every half hour. In the crowd of people, with the noise and everything, the mice quickly discovered my pile of dirt and made a beeline for it. Suddenly I became conscious of mice crawling up my sleeve, onto my head, and peering out from the jacket of my tails. The piece was immediately a magnet for everybody. On the front page of the next issue of the Village Voice, when it was still a good paper, there was a picture by Fred McDarrah, with me sitting on the pile of dirt with the mice all over me.
STEPHENS
That’s so sweet: the mice felt safe with you.
HENDRICKS
Yes, it’s very special. I’ve used animals like that on other occasions. For instance, in Charlotte’s festival in Grand Central Station I had half a box-car. Stephen Varble, who was my partner at that point, had the other half. I had a chicken and a white mouse that I released from under this pile of branches. And then I came out from under the pile and created a kind of forest across the front of my side with the branches. I had my dreams playing on a tape recorder and read more dreams. I colored myself blue and projected sky slides. I’ve also performed with a goat several times, and a lamb.
SPRINKLE
Did anything in particular, or anyone in particular, influence your interest in nature?
HENDRICKS
No, I would I say they’re all manifestations of that interest rather than being an influence. Another piece, the first project I did with Francesco Conz, was for the summer solstice up on a mountaintop in Norway near Bergen. I had this image of making a circle in the snow as the sun was going down and another as it was rising. I knew I was going to be in Italy a week later in time for a full moon, and wanted to do a companion piece there. These were followed by a piece down by the sea — sort of going from mountain to hill to ocean and from the summer solstice, the sun, to the moon, and then the sun again.
SPRINKLE
But was there a person, as a kid or something you read, that sparked your interest in nature? Like a moment when you were with your family? I’m just curious if your interest in nature was born in you, or if someone guided you, or if there was some inspiration.
HENDRICKS
Well my mother’s name was Flora. When I was growing up we had a farm in Vermont, which has become the campus of Marlboro College (a college that my father started). During my whole childhood I was going from Chicago to Marlboro during the summers, walking in the woods, learning to scythe, helping to bring in the hay, weeding gardens, planting seeds. All kinds of things like that.
STEPHENS
Geoff I should send you writings about my grandmother’s garden, and especially the tomatoes. The trajectory you just described is similar to one I also took as a child, except I wasn’t coming from a large city like Chicago. We were living in a small city, Charleston, West Virginia, near the coalfields, and going to my grandparents’ farm in Virginia. Now I’m tracing those roots back to my ecosexual beginnings.
HENDRICKS
Yeah, it’s an important part of the world, and the killing off of small farms by big agribusiness is destroying so much more of the country than just the farmers, you know? In destroying that source of agriculture, it’s destroying a whole way of looking at the world. It’s destroying our contact with nature.
STEPHENS
In severing our connection to nature it is also destroying a kind of spirituality and understanding of the world that is so important in terms of people empowering themselves through an understanding and lack of fear of nature.
HENDRICKS
Besides the bioengineering, the pesticides, and the killing of the bees, the agribusiness is destroying so much more. I could go on for quite awhile. Anyway, the farm in Vermont was there all through my childhood. And when I was five, I had a sister who died of a mismatched blood transfusion. I had come down with scarlet fever and then she did. She got worse and was taken to the hospital. Those were the early days of blood transfusions, and the doctor took blood from my father without matching it. It was the wrong type, and my father was there and saw his daughter die before his eyes. This was a family trauma from early childhood. I would say it was not the only force that comes into my working with sky and having links with nature, but I would say that this has some connection and impact as to why some of these things resonate with me in a stronger way than they might with someone else. Death becomes something that’s there in the iconography of my work. My father had a death mask made of his mother when she died, and when my father died in ’79 my brother Jon (who’s my kid brother, he’s the youngest) was saying how we really should have a death mask made of father. But Jon wasn’t like, “let me go do it.” He was looking at big brother Geoff, the artist — kind of hint, hint. So, without words said or anything, I took it upon myself to check with George Segal about the plaster to use, and cheesecloth, and gauze bandages, and things I’d need, and how to go about it. And I checked with the sculpture teacher up at Putney School, and she had some mold-making plaster that I could have. So I went down to the funeral home and had a marvelous few hours with the corpse of my father making casts of his face.
STEPHENS
Wow that’s powerful.
HENDRICKS
These turned into art in their own way. I made a number of death masks in clay from the molds and got them fired at Douglass College (Rutgers), with my colleague in ceramics, Hui Ka Kwong, helping me. I gave one in an old valise to my brother Jon. Another, in an old carton packed with newspaper and dry leaves, traveled with an exhibition I had through Scandinavia. It was left in Norway, together with a sky ladder, at the Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter outside Oslo. This is how I put my father’s death mask there in Norway, where his parents came from. So this is a real manifestation of death entering in as metaphor in my work. Death also has the connotation of rebirth. It’s part of the cycle we see every year in nature and the world around us. The death of my late lover, Brian Buczak’s, of AIDS, was the death that hit me the most powerfully. Deep, deep grief. I was talking to Ingrid Nyeboe about her loss of Jill (Johnston) and, how after Brian died, it was a year before I realized the full dimension of the grief. You put it away so that you can keep on functioning, but it sort of goes on simmering with you all the time. Ingrid was saying how she got back to their apartment and would pick up something and burst into tears. And it was exactly the same way with me. There would be something and it would suddenly evoke all these memories. I remember driving up First Avenue and passing NYU Medical Center where Brian died, and not really conscious of were I was, suddenly getting all choked up. But it is part of life. When my mother died, which was around that same time, it was like the seasons changing.
STEPHENS
Grieving is a good healing thing.
HENDRICKS
Yeah it’s important, very important.
SPRINKLE
We want to be able to feel where people don’t feel. The people I worry about are those that just don’t feel. Beth asked me a funny question yesterday, and I’m going to ask you the same question. It’s kind of a strange question. She asked me, “are you happy?” In general, you know, are you happy with your life? Would you say you’re happy with your life?
HENDRICKS
Are you happy with your life is a very different question than are you happy.
SPRINKLE
Oh, OK. Let’s say: are you happy?
HENDRICKS
In a way, “happy” has other contexts in our society, which imply marginalizing the sadness, the struggles, and the hardships, which can have their own beauty and be part of this whole process that’s life. I think, in our society, happy has some of the resonance of “happy new year” — going out, getting drunk, throwing confetti and so forth: “we had a great time, and everyone was so happy.” I would say, more than earlier in my life, now there’s a kind of equilibrium and kind of contentment with how my life is flowing. You two are involved with a certain amount of meditation, with your weddings and life generally, and there’s a kind of inner peace, a sort of radiance and contentment.
STEPHENS
Right, but I think I was asking more the question “are you happy with your life?”
HENDRICKS
Am I happy with my life? Yeah. You know, seeing colleagues and friends and so forth become superstars while you’re doing somewhat parallel things but somehow — in the lay of the cards or whatever — not becoming the known quantity others have become…. There are a lot of people, Carolee Schneemann and Alison Knowles are examples of artists who have struggled with this. All their life making fabulous work and being marginalized. But the thing is you can’t dwell on it. Your center is not there in the perceptions of the world, the culture as a whole, but in your own inner search. And the creation and manifestation of this comes out in what you bring together.
STEPHENS
I’d like you to speak to our questions about collaboration: Why do you engage in collaboration and what do you get out of this process, do you find collaboration a productive way to work? Do you think collaboration creates bigger conversations than you might ordinarily have, and if you ever have had difficulties in collaboration, what did you learn from them?
HENDRICKS
The answers are yes, yes, yes. These are very central questions. Collaboration is a situation where the minds of several people come together in a way feed each other and resonate. It’s like your relationship with each other, or me with Sur, or Jill and Ingrid, and all of this too. What goes on is more than one plus one. One plus one does not equal two, it equals more than two. And it is also not without difficulties. I was reading your question, “if you’ve ever had difficulties in collaboration, what did you learn from them?” and I was thinking of certain fights that I had with Brian when we together. Out at PS1 we did a collaborative piece and some way or another, I may have triggered it, or it may have been Brian’s obstinacy or something that got said, whatever, it was a real kind of fight, but then we came around, and we put together the documentation of the piece, Rulers, Ladders and Buckets. The next weekend we performed again, and it was fine. I suspect you’ve had occasions where you’ve had fights or disagreements.
STEPHENS
Oh yes we have, and they’ve been quite fun and illuminating.
HENDRICKS
Yeah its fun, (laughter). You come out and realize that you can step down from that soap box that you were on for a moment and take a look at what was being confronted and discussed from a slightly different direction and you realize, yeah, that was kind of stupid.
STEPHENS
But that’s also how change happens, I think.
SPRINKLE
That’s true. When we try to think of a title for something, we get into these arguments that ultimately lead to the best title.
HENDRICKS
Collaboration has been something that has definitely worked with me from the get go. I am thinking of Bici and me making Black Thumb Press, of Brian and me making Money for Food Press, and of Sur and me with all the different projects we’re doing. We also talked earlier about a sort of art kinship system…working with others while also working in a kind of genealogy with your teachers and your students. In this there is a passing on of ideas — a taking of knowledge and information from your teachers that you go ahead and reshape and expand and push in other ways, but then your students go ahead and take it and you can be surprised at other directions it goes in. The point here is that I really don’t have a capitalist mindset, which is about proprietary attitudes about what one does with one’s own life and work. Due to my Quaker background I have a sense of sharing and extending out to others that’s always been there with me. And I wouldn’t want it otherwise. I feel that it’s something that leads to a good quality of life. In a certain way, it’s what goes on in this house here in New York. With bringing in Ethan, who just by chance came in because we needed somebody to care for this dying cat when we were going over to Salzburg. Then the cat died, and Ethan, who had been a wonderful student and had participated in the Flux Mass and was into artist books and performance and great with computers, just settled in, in a very natural way. Sur has spoken of us living together as an experiment in intergenerational living.
STEPHENS
Give him our love will you?
HENDRICKS
Oh I shall, absolutely.
SPRINKLE
That’s great he lives there with you full time?
HENDRICKS
Yes, as I said, he was here and it was sort of natural to have him continue as part of the household.
STEPHENS
Geoff the things that you’re describing: collaborations and sharing, you know giving away ideas, are not the qualities that make someone a superstar in the capitalist society.
HENDRICKS
I know, that is my choice and it puts me where I am, as opposed to the capitalist superstar of the world.
STEPHENS
I’m so glad you are where you are, because, at least for me, you’ve been a great example of how to live an art life. You know, I don’t even want to call it an art career, I want to point to an integrated way where life is art — looking towards you and Linda Montano.
HENDRICKS
Right, Linda Montano is another person with a similar kind of energy and spirit…. Right at the beginning you raised the question, “is my work Fluxus?” I was out there at Rutgers, as I describe in Critical Mass, during the very beginnings — with Allan Kaprow and Bob Watts, with the chapel programs, with Cage talking, with Kaprow doing his first Happening in 1958, and getting to know George Brecht. All of this was having an impact with me. But my feeling was that, well, Happenings are Kaprow, Events are Brecht, and Watts was there with Maciunas and the beginnings of Fluxus. It was exciting, but I wanted to find my own voice within this, rather than just being a part of what this circle of artists around me were generating. I was also involved in a heterosexual marriage, and in ’64 we had the birth of our daughter which had some impact in ways that deflected certain creative juices and drives. But I was also feeling connected with it all. Really, from ’63 when the Fluxus people came back from Europe, Bici/Nye and I were involved in doing things of this nature. I guess it was around this time that she asked Bob Watts, “how do you become a member of Fluxus?” and Bob sorta shrugged his shoulders and said “well you either are or you aren’t. It’s nothing you can join.” So we started the Black Thumb Press, and sent out cards, and kept an ongoing journal we called The Friday Book of White Noise where we would write down scores, thoughts, ideas. Then, when Watts and Brecht brought together their Monday Night Letter at the Café au Go-Go, we did a reading of “The Friday Book of White Noise” and Bici/Nye made a script/scroll as a Möbius strip — it was a continuous thing. These were Fluxus-like scores. And then, by ’65, George Maciunas began including us on his mailing list of names and we were taking part in Fluxus Banquets and a paper concert at the Time Life Building. So, sort of by osmosis, in the 60’s we began to be part of Fluxus, but still we were also in a little bit of an outsider role — something that my life has always had. In ’63, when the group of Fluxus artists came back from Europe, Maciunas set up this Flux Shop down on Canal Street in a loft and I was there a few times. The first time I was there, Dick Higgins afterwards took me to the bar downstairs and began to explain to me all the things about George Maciunas that I had to watch out for…about what was going on within Fluxus, and the situation of the Flux-tour, because he had had this big split and fight with George. It was subliminal at that point, certainly not expressed with either of us, but a quiet queer male bonding, unrecognized, unvisualized, was beginning to take place. He was the other queer Fluxus artist. In the late sixties I was also on the Voorhees Assembly Board at the college, putting together a series of programs, and they were asking for new ideas.
STEPHENS
Was this out in New Brunswick?
HENDRICKS
Yes, at Voorhees Chapel at Douglass College. I was on this program committee and they selected me because they felt I would come up with new ideas and I said, “How about a Fluxus concert? They can be fun and lively, and could attract students.” And they said “fine.” So I went and talked to George, and he said “It’s going to be in a chapel? We’ve never had a Flux Mass.” Immediately he began planning it while I got students involved and did all the arranging at the college. This went on to become a big controversy. There was a chaplain there who was really upset and felt that a Flux-Mass was an affront to his proper religiosity. He was like the Christian coalition person that got the David Wojnarowicz tape censored from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. I organized the Flux-Mass that became a big controversy, but I weathered it because I had tenure.
STEPHENS
Tenure is a magical tool isn’t it?
HENDRICKS
It’s unbelievable Beth, and I think both of us have used it to its full advantage. Anyway, next spring Bici and I were in the throws of rethinking our relationship. We both were realizing our gayness/queerness, and we had a 10th anniversary coming up, and it was like “well how do we celebrate it?” We were still living together, and we had these two kids that we both loved dearly. And I thought, well, why don’t we have a Flux Divorce? She was a little hesitant at first but then she became interested and got involved. I went to talk to George and collectively we did the event. Later he asked me to organize his Flux Wedding and be the Flux Minister, so I was very closely involved with George in lots of ways.
STEPHENS
When did you start doing the head stands Geoff?
HENDRICKS
I’m not quite positive, but that’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing at least since adolescence. There is a picture on the mantel of me doing a headstand up in Cape Breton that my daughter Tyche took, probably when she was a teenager in the 70s. At first my performance work had a kind of messiness — working with branches and earth, bringing in other people, transforming my body, often having sky slides projected to create a sort of metamorphosis through rebirth imagery with links to the forest and nature. Then, at a certain point, I was, instead, getting others to do the performing and I just did headstands in the middle of all that was going on around me. Eventually it came to a point where the other stuff seemed irrelevant, so I’d just do a headstand and attach artifacts, commemorative words, grass — whatever was germinal to the particular situation — to my body, between my feet.
STEPHENS
It is very intimate to put your head on the ground like that. Are you doing any other work that you are excited about?
HENDRICKS
Yes, sure. In March, Sur and I are going over to South Africa. We have a residency near Johannesburg. We’re also going to be doing some workshops talking about AIDS. So there will be new things coming up. Then, there’s the work I was doing in Cape Breton on the barn. The carpenter took out old material put it in a big pile, and this past November, when I was there burning all of this, I would come upon a particular board that had a special patina or a latch that was connected with a board or some particular piece of farm machinery — a fragment that seemed special — and I would put them to one side. I have a lot of objects like this: pieces of beams, say 5’ tall and 8”x 8” with holes for pegs and mitered joints where other beams came in, maybe nails on them, or a hook, or a splash of paint. They seemed like totem objects that, with very little addition, could become very interesting pieces. So I took some of these into my studio, and there is a whole wealth of material that will become transformed, like the things I’ve been doing with sky watercolors, and roots and ladders. Also, there are publications and books I want to get done. I was going to do a book with Jill Johnston called 100 Headstands to be a sequel to my 100 Skies, but then she died. It’s something I still want to do. Probably I’d dedicate it to Jill’s memory.
SPRINKLE
I have one more question. Have you worked in any exhibitions or events that have focused on environmental art? And do you feel that you are an environmental art artist?
HENDRICKS
Well yes, a woman from Munich who is writing her doctoral thesis on me organized a show there last summer called “Art Goes Green.” I feel that so much of my work with sky and using earth in performance — doing things like Between Two Points on a mountain top in Norway and a hill in Italy, and working with the sun and the moon — have all been environmental. There is always a strong link to nature and the environment in my work. I guess there are some people who more totally identify themselves as environmental-art artists. Yet it is certainly an aspect of my work, of who I am and what I’ve been doing.
SPRINKLE
Do you feel that art can help environmental activist causes?
STEPHENS
I’m more interested in whether it can help save the Earth.
SPRINKLE
Yeah that’s it. Can art help save the earth?
HENDRICKS
It’s a big job, big ambition there, and it would be nice if there could be a whole kind of collective coming together like the anti-war movement. That really turned DC around and was certainly a factor in the whole Vietnam War coming to an end. The agribusiness, genetically modified food, GMO’s, manipulations of seeds, are all things that absolutely enrage me.
STEPHENS
We feel that our work is headed more and more in the direction of trying to bring more love to the earth.
HENDRICKS
Oh it’s got to be.
SPRINKLE
We’re trying to make the environmental movement more sexy, fun and diverse — that is our environmental mission.
HENDRICKS
You are doing a wonderful job there.