In 2015 Andrea Büttner (b. 1972) showed Limestone with Moss at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The piece consisted of a local rock placed directly on a gallery floor, coated with local species of lichen, cultivated specifically for the show. The work stood for the four (winter) months January through April, painstakingly cared for by curators and botanists. The mosses were themselves human-scaled; they were quietly living but isolated in a sculptural, ostensibly “abstract” aesthetic, As critics pointed out, the piece recalled Duchamp and Man Ray’s Dust Breeding from 1920, but also minimalist sculpture of Judd or Andre. Moss was theatrical, to be sure, but also engaged a “downness” that Buttner, who won the Turner Prize in 2017, has explored in more unexpected frameworks of institutional critique, inside and outside of “environmental” exhibition rubrics. Rather than “nature” or “sustainability”, Büttner has thought about ecology via modalities of poverty, vagrancy, and shame.

Christopher P. Heuer is Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, where he also teaches in the Graduate Program in Visual Culture. He is the author, most recently, of Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image and Andrea Butttner: Liber Vagatorum. In 2019 he was Bernard Berenson fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence.