For documenta 7 (1982) Joseph Beuys had 7,000 basalt blocks piled up in a wedge shape outside the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel and planted the first of 7,000 oaks at its apex. Precisely 25 years later, on 16th March 2007, Eva and Franco Mattes (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG) repeated this action in the virtual world of Second Life, which was created in 2003 by the US firm Linden Lab. Strolling avatars encounter a sea of grey stone blocks on Cosmos, as the Italian artist couple call their personal island within this online game space modelled essentially by users. A notice draws this re-enactment of Joseph Beuys’ »7000 Oaks« to the attention of passers-by and invites them to help clear away the stones by planting an oak coupled with a basalt block somewhere within Second Life.
On 16th March 2007, coinciding with the launch of this virtual reproduction of Beuys’ historic intervention, the Land Art exhibition »Deambulatorios de una jornada, en el principio y el proyecto Tindaya«1 opened on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura. The exhibition gave viewers a chance to watch a real-time 360-degree view of the virtual tree action from the Centro de Arte Juan Ismael thanks to a floor-to-ceiling video projection. The audience could also visit the island of Cosmos as avatars and distribute artificial trees and stones in the digital world. In the show, curated by Nilo Casares, the virtual »7000 Oaks« serves as a bridge role: it mediates between the artistic interventions carried out in the landscape near the Centro de Arte Juan Ismael and the historic part of the exhibition, which documents Land Art by Christo and Jean Claude or Robert Smithson.
This intermediate position seems to make sense because Beuys’ »7000 Oaks« is not so much site-related art, which can only be represented in documentary form in an exhibition space, but is above all a »social sculpture«, which is not necessarily tied to one place but instead gives expression to a notion of art in which life, art, politics and society form a whole and life in general is to be changed for the better. That means that as a Land Art performance with a global vision, the Mattes do not simply view their repetition of »Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks« as a re-enactment like the first three performances in their »Synthetic Performances« series – »Chris Burden’s Shoot«, »Vito Acconci’s Seedbed« and »Valie Export’s Tapp und Tastkino (Touch Cinema)« – instead, it becomes a continuation of Beuys’ project and vision in an artificial world. However, there is one structural catch to the synthetic reactivation: here nature can only ever be artificial, which means that »7,000 Oaks« cannot do justice to its crucial ecological aspect. One could criticise this aspect of the project, which has however attracted great interest among the six million users now registered with Second Life, many of whom are keen to participate.
Since the project was launched on 16th March, the inhabitants of Second Life have planted several hundred trees, and the figure will soon be hitting the 1,000 mark. As with Beuys the performance will officially come to an end as soon as all the virtual stones and trees have been placed in the Second Life universe. If the oak saplings continue to be planted at the current pace, the stone blocks may vanish from the island of Cosmos much faster than in the original action in Kassel, which continued for five years, before being concluded in 1987 at documenta 8.
Beuys’ landscape art stands out nowadays due to its sustainability and the way it improves the quality of urban living through tree planting. The combination of tree and stone is now a seemingly self-evident part of Kassel’s townscape, although the number of trees found throughout the entire city fluctuates: trees that die are not always replaced immediately and others have to make way for construction projects. Generally speaking however, the long-lived oaks can reach ages of up to 700 years. The Beuys trees in Second Life are on the one hand significantly more ephemeral, for they can be readily edited out at any time, at least in public locations, but on the other hand they also offer scope for infinite multiplication. »Our oaks and basalt stones are like conceptual viruses. They spread everywhere in Second Life and are difficult to control, for they can be copied ad infinitum. They crop up in places I have never been before.« Even if the data trees do not soak up CO2, the spread of these »conceptual viruses« nonetheless demonstrates symbolic solidarity with the ecological intention of Beuys’ original action. The only question is how long they will survive.
Translated by Helen Ferguson