Janurary/2007

When I arrived in Australia (about 11 years ago), I developed an interest in compost making. My back yard was very tiny. I could not set up a proper compost bin but I used alternatives: such as milk cartons or small plant pots. I put vegetable scraps in the cartons and placed them in the garden. Those small instant compost bins were good enough to make my small garden full of flowers. I was astonished at how such a little effort could have such a big impact.

‘Composting is, in broadest terms, the biological reduction of organic wastes to humus…’ said Minnich¹. ‘Organic waste’ is vege or fruits scraps that turn into ‘nutritious food for soil’. Like turning rubbish into treasure? I knew my miniature compost bins were not ideal for making proper compost, but at least they enriched the soil, which for a first step was much better than nothing.

Compost making is a slow process. We react easily to something that we see change quickly: the Internet or computer games are good examples. But we don’t take too much notice of something that seems very static, such as an apple in a basket; even though that apple IS changing, at a microscopic level.

In the last 20-30 years, the philosophical, artistic and intellectual framework has drastically changed. It is more about ‘inter-relationships’ or ‘inter-texuality’ now, rather than pure autonomous phenomena. ‘Interdisciplinary’ became a keyword in intellectual institutions. Physicists look into ‘not just bits and pieces of nature but the complex interrelationships that actually make organisms and ecosystems work’². And in the art world, it is now common to explore human society and its functions from a postmodern perspective, rather than following the artistic autonomism that was a central concept in Modernism. So what does that suggest? It is the understanding that all elements, whether atoms, languages or art, are not just individual phenomena, but are much more complex: are like organic matter, because they transform and react in the context of society. As Joseph Beuys stated, society is an organic entity.

So then what is Organic? According to the Longman English dictionary, it is:

1. Of living things or bodily organs
2. Made of parts with related purposes
3. (of food) grown without chemicals

As Beuys suggested, society is not a perfectly completed entity but is always at the point of transformation. That signifies that society is not static, just as an apple is not static. As Capra said, whenever you see life, you see networks. The whole planet is a network of processes involving feedback tubes. The basic pattern of life is always a network. But in our everyday life, we can’t see this network and there is no need to think about it. (Who wants to ponder about an apple or onions, or the relationship between them and bacteria and our bodies?) But I’d like to try. I think that it might suggest something significant. If we try to find a different viewpoint from which to see our life, we may recognize that we are not only living as individual points, but also in relation to others in complex network: like the inside of a compost bin!

Society, like individual human beings, is fully interrelated, like a level of bacteria. If we think about our history, anyway, there were only bacteria and micro-organisms on Earth in the first 2 billion years of the more than 3.5 billion years it has existed. Through that long period, they invented all of the fundamental processes of life. Each of us is an aggregate of some 60 trillion cells. Within each cell, there may be hundreds of organelles, the once-independent bacteria. It is said, ‘each human being – or a dog or a potted plant, for that matter – is not just an individual. Each one of us is actually a community of organisms’³. And ‘the world of bacteria is critical to the details of these feedback processes, because bacteria play a crucial role in the regulation of the whole Gaia system’⁴. That makes me wonder about how my body began from a small piece of protein cells from my parents. And my parents began in the same way, with small pieces of protein from their parents. I think if human beings used be apes, that means we also used be fish, insects, bacteria and micro-organisms ···

And it has been found that the most crucial energy source comes from the process of decay, which is also driven by bacteria. Science for a long time focused on the productivity of ecosystems, such as photosynthesis. Scientists believed that since productivity directly influences the life of living things, it must relate to the available supply of energy. But later, many scientists like Orrie Loucks, found that although energy does influence productivity, ‘the ultimate regulator of ecosystems is decay’⁵. Ecosystems function through processes that release nutrients back into the soil for future production. Decay is more complex than photosynthesis because it involves the co-operation of thousands of species of living organisms, from insects to worms, fungi and bacteria⁶. Amazingly, the total biomass – the weight of living things – of all micro-organisms is greater than the biomass of all other creatures put together, including trees and whales and people⁷.

Isn’t that unbelievable? The primal energy source of our Earth is the activity of decay of organic waste, which is composting. It sounds very interesting, and seems to suggest a very new way of understanding life!

If art is the creation of new value and view points of our life by using human senses and intelligence, isn’t that very similar to compost making? If something invisible like micro organisms are actively replacing our planet, art has potential to recreate inside humans and their society. Something invisible, but working very hard on the microscopic level. It is art and I believe that art will change you and me through our senses.

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1. Jerry Minnich, The Rodale Guide to Composting, Rodale Press Emmaus, PA, 1979 p1
2. David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, Naked Ape to Superspecies, Stoddart Publishing, Toronto, 1999
3. Suzuki and Dressel, Naked Ape to Superspecies, p17
4. Suzuki and Dressel, Naked Ape to Superspecies, p16
5. Suzuki and Dressel, Naked Ape to Superspecies, p22
6. Suzuki and Dressel, Naked Ape to Superspecies, p22
7. Suzuki and Dressel, Naked Ape to Superspecies, p17