Hi Stephanie:

I'd like to ask a follow-up question to Taylor's concern that "the two faces of sustainability---the ecological and the human---take so much effort to unify in the minds of the public."  For me, the most effective---and poetic---object in Beyond Green is Michael Rakowitz's paraSITE inflated igloo for Bill S.  With very little contextural information, the viewer understands immediately that this is an inventive and workable means of supplying shelter for a homeless person, and one can spin from there the possibilities and challenges of public service entities collaborating with commercial building owners, etc., etc.  Far less successful, for me, is Rakowitz's "installation" where he provides a rudimentary shelf for which the exhibition venue must provide boxes of plastic garbage bags, packing tape, and scissors.  I am interested in your views about how conceptual art, at this level, can be effective in conveying a sustainability message. . . I assume that Rakowitz is making a coy historical reference to Duchamp's Fountain, and the subsequent 90+ years of readymades and found art making.  I also assume that Rakowitz is suggesting to the audience that if only a person had garbage bags, packing tape, and scissors---hey look!  You, too, can make a shelter.  Maybe Rakowitz can fashion a shelter out of these materials (although I would like to see it weather an Oregon January), but I fear that most (or at least many) gallery visitors cannot make the leap between these raw materials and the possibilities for real solutions (I might be short-changing the average viewer, but I don't think so).  In this case, the artwork seems cheeky and intended for an "in" audience, which thereby keeps the artwork in the realm of the intellectual and the culturally elite, and not in the world of real life, even though I value and respect conceptual art.  Can you comment?