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Earth Summit Original on Display
by David Sassoon - Mar 7th, 2008
When the elevator door opens on the sixth floor of a building on New York's upper east side, there it is right in front of you. A work of art called Last Turn - Your Turn by Robert Rauschenberg -- the official picture of the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. And in the renowned artist's own handwriting, here's what it says in the top left corner:
I pledge to make the Earth a secure and hospitable home for present and future generations.
Written in a child-like manner, it puts a lump in your throat -- and an ache in your heart -- when you think about the 16 long years of opportunities that have passed us by since that idea of sustainability was captured in this iconic work of art.
I went to see the piece thanks to a tip from friend, locavore and cyber-maven Holley Atkinson, hoping to see the artist himself at the opening of a show called Robert Rauschenberg and the Environmental Crisis at the Jacobson Howard gallery.
Alas, he was not well enough to travel from his home in Florida. But on the walls of the sleek little gallery was a selection of Rauschenberg's works providing evidence of his life-long engagement with environmentalism, including the official poster from the first Earth Day in 1970, and another one from 1990. A little catalogue tells the full story of Rauschenberg's activism and describes some of the art not in the gallery.
Including one called Growing Painting (1954) from a series of dirt paintings he did, a six foot vertical box frame into which Rauschenberg combined earth, seeds, tufts of grass and other organic material. He noted about the work that it was
....about looking and caring. Those pieces would literally die if you didn't water them.
At the back of the gallery was a sculptural work, a sonar activated windmill, one of nine he made as part of a series called Echo-Echo. He built them in 1992-1993, in response to a session at the Earth Summit on wind power. The blades of the windmill -- silkscreened by the artist -- begin to spin in the presence of a viewer. Me. You. Anyone.
Although Rauschenberg was not there in person, seated next to the windmill I found his old friend, legendary arbitrator and fellow eco-warrior Theodore Kheel. Kheel was head of the Earth Summit Committee and had convinced Rauschenberg to attend. The sale of an edition of 200 lithographs of Last Turn-Your Turn raised $800,000 which Kheel used to start a non-profit devoted promoting the earth summit pledge.
Kheel has made his reputation resolving labor disputes, and he let me know that the first step in conflict resolution is "getting the facts straight." No kidding, I thought, and I went fishing to see what he would have to say about the straight facts in the IPCC reports, and the active efforts to deny it. No dice. He didn't bite the blogger bait.
Instead, he took the opportunity to tell me about his congestion pricing plan for NYC. He wants to charge twice what the Mayor is proposing, so that the money can be used to provide free mass transit. At that moment, in that room, it seemed like a great, visionary idea.
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