Documentation from a six-hour site-specific installation:
An unannounced arts intervention that, in Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s words, ‘refuses the call to order’, If A Tree Falls In The Forest…Is it Art? visually draws inspiration from the rhetorical questions the title points to*.
First presented on the exterior walls of the Julia Morgan-designed Mills Art Museum over the course of six hours, this installation focuses on nature and environmental cycles, including those generated through human interference, to comment on the nature of institutionalism. Situated on a private women’s college campus, the surrounding lands of the museum, once redwood forest habitats, have increasingly been subject to human land development such as highways, housing, shopping areas. The college, in turn, also faced extinction.
*if a tree falls in the forest when no one is around, does it make a sound? and is it art if no one sees it?