Vaughn Bell: The project at MASS MoCA is called Village Green, and it is a collection of “Personal Biospheres.” Each one is a miniature landscape of plants native to the Berkshires suspended in a clear “biosphere” that participants can place their heads inside. The outer forms of the pieces evoke the New England architectural motifs and local hills that are visible behind the piece, out the window of the gallery. I wanted the piece to turn architecture and landscape inside out.

AG: The Berkshires are hyper-idyllic, a very fitting place for the installation. Tourists swarm western Massachusetts in the summer and really revel in the utopian, Old World-like beauty. The irony is that the local early industrial sites, just like the buildings housing MASS MoCA, are environmental catastrophes. When I lived in Williamstown (one town away from North Adams, where MASS MoCA is located) I weathered a loud, dirty summer while the local electric company oversaw the clean up of my backyard, the former site of a manufactured gas plant. And I drove by a Superfund site, an old tannery, on my way to work each day.

VB: Our vision of the idyllic landscape doesn’t match up with the real environment, and for me the piece is dealing with this environment in a cross-section of ways. The idea of the natural world as something contained within these little spaces, being preserved in an artificial way, is both frightening and sad. At the same time, I do think the work fits within the prevailing landscape traditions. The landscape, typically painted and contained in a frame “out there,” is presented in front of your face as a living system with plants and moss and little insects. As a culture, we are further than ever from the image in that painting, but Village Green. confronts us with that landscape in an intimate, physical way, and standing within it, we are also confronted with our role and potential impact.

AG: How does Village Green fit into what you are working on, your ongoing practice?

VB: I really began making this definitive body of work out of graduate school about five years ago. Beginning with a broad question – how do we humans relate to our environment? – I have been honing and developing many different aspects of the inquiry. Language is very important to the creative process for me. I look at a word like landscape, and the seemingly simple definition of it reveals all kinds of history. There is a huge depth of theory that can be explored just in examining this one word and what it means for art history, design, planning and policy.

AG: While you are tackling words like landscape, the rest of the country is buzzing with the catchphrases of this transitional political season: infrastructure, sustainability, climate change, etc. Have you given these terms (and all that you could interpret them to mean) a place in any of your projects?

VB: Absolutely. I am always thinking about these issues, and this is precisely why the word landscape is so important. It binds up our historical and evolving assumptions about how we relate to the environment. Our notions of how we fit in the environment, as embodied in the landscape painting tradition, for example, or in more recent land art activities, are seemingly inadequate to deal with the reality of climate change and the imperative of sustainability. The sense of calamity present in discussions of crumbling infrastructure, rising sea level, catastrophic storms, can recall a sense of the sublime, the wild power of nature. But the difference is that it’s not about “nature” anymore—it’s about us and our behavior.

AG: Do you consider yourself an environmental activist?

VB: I do consider myself to be an environmental activist on a personal level, but I don’t necessarily feel that my work is activist in a really direct way. I think that one of my primary concerns in my work is asking questions, and so in that sense I don’t think of the work as having a definitive message to convey or a position to promote. For example, as part of my ongoing project, Land for Adoption, I wander the streets with a cartful of land, the Cultivation Utility Vehicle (CUV), and people can adopt some if they are willing to go through the paperwork and commit to caring for it. In this scenario, my audience is the random people I encounter, and I guess this is my ideal audience because I like the openness of it. People in this situation don’t approach the work expecting anything – they don’t necessarily call it art – and thus more surprising and exciting things can happen. I like to create work that operates under the radar, in a way, work that sneaks in and asks questions and presents ideas without too much announcement.

AG: It may be useful for some of our policymakers to observe your adoption procedures, to see how a random cross-section of people responds to a situation that tenders both real and symbolic responsibility. Has an adopted parent of a landscape admitted to either sloppy or failed upkeep?

VB: Yes, I have heard some of them have dried up, died, although I think most people don’t admit it when they fail to preserve the biosphere. People often ask me this when they adopt—what if it dies? I usually say that all they can do is take on the responsibility for the biosphere with a clear intention. But we can’t control everything, and we often fail, so they have to be prepared that they may fail. It becomes a really funny philosophical conversation about how we have to proceed in spite of the fear of failure.

AG: The situation is interesting because of the all meaning that goes with identifying biospheres distributed via the CUV as landscapes. I have let a few potted plants, house plants, die on my watch, and it was sad to varying degrees, but house plants, kitchen gardens, these sorts of closed ecosystems, come and go in a way that an ecosystem comprising an entire continent cannot. Going back to your comments on language, I agree that identifying a tiny, adopted land parcel as a landscape gives it unique emotional currency.

VB: Yes, deliberately confusing the macro and the micro can lead to some interesting situations. A transformation can occur in terms of how we relate to something, simply based on how it is named.