Contemporary Art and the Perceived Self-sufficiency of Urban Life Seventeenth century scientists (Descartes, Bacon, and Newton) made discoveries that brought us scientific method and a vision of secular progress through technological achievement. But in this vision the purpose of knowledge was proposed as utilitarian, - the domination of nature. 1 The world we live in today is based on this vision of technological achievement. As Rebecca Solnit reminds us, it is a world in which everything speaks not of nature and her processes but of its makers in their resistance to those processes. 2 (Also the reason for the environmental problems our planet is facing but this aspect will not be dealt with here.) City life today is lived largely indoors with a lot of involvement in non-physical worlds (television, internet, telephony). Solnit points out that this excess of interiority obliterates our relation to material origins and to our own bodies. 3 The body is no longer experienced as a natural system integrated with other natural systems. For example, our morning coffee is consumed without a thought to the myriad natural processes that go into the making of each cup (where the bean was grown, the weather, the soil, where the milk, sugar, water comes from, and so forth). Our inability to see our life in connection to these processes makes the cup of coffee a potent representation of absent nature. 4 Similarly, Walter de Maria’s Earth Room (1977, earth, Dia Art Foundation, New York) is a reminder that earth is the substance that has been hidden by urbanization and washed away by modern sanitation. 1 Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 20. 2 Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent, 20-24. 3 Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent, 119-120, 161. 4 Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent, 53. Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room Earth, 1977. Long-term installation at 141 Wooster Street, New York City. Photo: John Cliett. Copyright Dia Art Foundation.