“Egg, Earth, and Essence” and its Peculiar Placement in Smith Reading Room
By Arlo Kremen
There is a point in a given economic and cultural production model defined by excessive consumption where the objects we produce result in things closer to what we are fed. It happened a couple of decades ago. The plastic of mass consumerism leaked into the water supply. The objects of our lives, no matter how organic, pass through our anal glands not as pure gut waste but as something littered with artificialities, and thus, the environmentalist art of today takes a mimetic turn.
Bright Ugochukwu Eke thinks of his eggs like an ecosystem, interconnected by roots and sprouting plants, evoking the historical conflation of fertility, life, the future, and the never-entirely-knowable biological mechanisms needed for growth. Plastic plants and vines, once commonly seen slapped onto the walls of TikTokers across the country, spill out of cracked eggs and sprout from thick tubers, which bind the cumbersome objects into an ecological web. A few plants sport paper blossoms; others hold onto tags from the stores where they were purchased. Debris on the paneled ground—dirt, rocks, wood chips, and branches mingle with the vines. Though it is fair to assume these materials are true to nature, one can never be too sure without touching. We live in a new age of artifice where the real and the fake are growing harder to discern with each passing day—reality is not what it once was.
And this has always been the case. From AI and the internet to the creation of the printing press and urbanization, our realities are in constant flux, and with each next incomparable change, the Earth will change with it, reacting in whatever way it sees fit—even if such reactions beget a climate crisis, which, needless to say, it has. These are the ideas at work in Eke’s Egg, Earth, and Essence. A metaphysical examination of life’s cyclical mechanisms and the disruptions of such by mass production and, thus, global capitalism.
The eggs themselves were built with farming materials: chicken wire to construct the initial forms, then burlap sacks, and finally a ménage of different colored wood chips to constitute crusts or shells. Creases wrap the centers where the two halves can be attached to form the sculptures; the eggs betray their precariousness, signaling the prescience of being taken apart or slashed at. Some eggs are ripped, bleeding dirt and exposing burlap threads and creaked wire. In the two truncated eggs, analog clocks metamorphose into yolks, surrounded by dirt and vines, perhaps standing in for viscous white slime. Frozen in time, the eggs’ embryonic clock is interrupted, eaten up by plastic intrusions or other external interventions—or both, since they are practically identical.
The spread of “forever materials” over the biological is still a horror beyond many American imaginations. The natural world as we know it has begun to collapse, or, to frame it in the language of the piece, to transform. There is no end in sight for plastic production and fossil fuel mining, and immediate consequences have begun for countless animal and plant species, and, of course, human beings. These developments have been ongoing in a dramatic fashion since the 1980s, and art reacted to them even before then. Eke’s work, which tends to have a didactic edge, tends to focus on the importance of water as well as other natural components. In this case, the eggs hone in on Earth itself, reckoning with humanity’s relationship with nature and the social, cultural, and economic forces that mediate such relationships.
For the most part, Eke’s work falls in line with the history of environmentalist art, hardly cleaving any new ground in conceptualizing the humanities’ earthly bond. There can only be so much to say about it. It feels familiar, like I’ve seen it countless times. My first encounter with his artwork was in Los Angeles at The Broad (shockingly, I remember). Along the tall white surface, bottle caps, tin cans, or something in between maneuvered across the wall’s scale in uninterrupted orange. I was twelve or thirteen, I think—pre-Greta Thunberg and the year or year after Trump’s inauguration. I cannot find the artwork now; I very well could be misremembering it, but what I know for sure is how it touched me. It was as if the artwork grabbed my head, vomiting weighted meanings into my mouth like a mother to her unthinking chicklet. Now, as we enter into a second Trump presidency, a work of this kind feels dated, regurgitating a naive belief that art can change the world. At a school like Wesleyan, it’s politically safe at best, and at worst, its partial polemic on late-stage capitalism doesn’t warrant a second consideration, ingratiating itself with the #Resistance liberal politics many Wesleyan students were reared on. It’s so familiar it just reads as another loose hem in a breaking social fabric. I can see it sitting in a reception area for a UN Climate Conference, greeting attendees to an event posing as world-altering regardless of the UN’s ultimate powerlessness.
Its placement in the Olin Reading Room confuses. No student practicing active spatial observation would install a sculpture of that size in that room. The Reading Room is deeply anthropological, combining its intended purpose of studious rigor with the social and sexual peacocking of a large room filled with hormonal students. One does not go to the reading room only to study but, as with most other actions, to perform studying. Eyes shoot to analyze, compare, se/de-duce, and/or intimidate whoever passes through its doors. Choosing the table at which to study is another socially political event, as is how you sit down, how loud or quiet you are, or any other minutia of body language. The reading room is ripe with sexual tension, which either attracts those who enjoy the show or repels students unable to endure the distractions.
Why would an environmentally concerned artwork be shown in a room where its erotic functions appear entirely antithetical to intellectual and emotional contemplation? Probably because, in the eyes of an institution, rooms are simply spaces to fill, and the people who use them are abstract, unable to alter or twist the space’s purpose to their needs. Its placement feels thoughtless and unconcerned. Thus, the sculpture is overcome with institutional flavor—something to be enacted onto the students rather than to engage with us. I do not know the details of how the space was booked, whose decision it was, or why it was placed here. Maybe the artist and professor/curator Nwafor spoke about it at the artist talk or wrote about it in the exhibition guide—I wouldn’t know as I failed to attend the talk (lazy) and haven’t read the guide (forgot to bring it on winter break), but as most students who engage with the work on a day-to-day basis, I find neither failure particularly damning. What I can say is that, alongside other actions on the part of the administration, such aggressive behavior towards the student body is not surprising. Students occupying a North College room were arrested by Middletown Police officers, and new surveillance cameras have appeared around campus to address crime and vandalism, with one (maybe two) conspicuously hovering over where the encampment organized by Students for Justice in Palestine once stood. In a navel-gazing Op-Ed in the Times, President Roth babbles about how he wants a more political campus, but it seems that is not the case, for expanding the security state onto the campus inspires insipid political discourse. He fails to take his students seriously, once boasting, allegedly, in a meeting with a student committee about how he managed to not dox students supporting Palestinian liberation despite his base instincts.
One might wonder what the purpose of installing this sculpture is at Wesleyan, a school that operates in part via a Board of Trustees, many of whom are directly responsible for the climate crisis. Eke and other environmentalist/political artists show in institutions internationally funded by similar means: people responsible for a degrading Earth (private equity investors, bankers, and a McKinsey partner), staggering poverty (CEO/President of the Greystone Slum Lord Corporation), and, often, genocidal freaks (Mark N. Casper—the Uyghur genocide, and John A. Shapiro—the Gazan genocide). What does this say about the functioning politics of Egg, Earth, and Essence? Might it be that the university wanted to bring in an environmentalist artist to deflect from its own political and moral failings? Unfortunately, the work cannot help but feel like a virtue-signaling sleight-of-hand trick by the institution, which has been a common occurrence since October 7th. When handling its complicity in several controversies, whether it be genocide or the sexual harassment of a student by a member of the board, Wesleyan launches a flurry of empty speak to maintain a visage of social acceptability.
This could have been done differently. A temporally inclined environmentalist artwork could have used the library well, even if it couldn’t speak to all the particularities of the Reading Room itself. Students waste countless hours a week studying and writing for classes, which, in the grand scheme of life, will ultimately be entirely negligible; the climate crisis is just as its name states: a crisis. Existential dread has filled the halls of my life. I grew up among forest fires and ashen skies every autumn—the air tastes different every year, unbreathable all the same. Visual artists have been one of the great chroniclers of how it feels to be alive today, and I can say for certain that exploration of the metaphysics and poetics of the Earth is not how I spend my days. I spend them in fear and self-hatred, flailing for quick, decisive action. At the risk of LARPing, it feels as though the only art worth being made of the subject today would have you listed on the FBI’s most wanted.
