Carl Cheng Makes Art for the Anthropocene
The meeting of environment and technology is front and centre in the Californian artist’s retrospective at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
February 25, 2025
On the last March weekend of 1988, visitors to Santa Monica State Beach witnessed something peculiar: a 14-tonne concrete roller, Carl Cheng’s Santa Monica Art Tool (1988), embossing the sand with an aerial view of a Los Angeles-inspired metropolis. Titled Walk on L.A., the topography teemed with cars, motorways, buildings and handprints (a tongue-in-cheek gesture, since Cheng’s artmaking ‘tools’, which yoke his industrial-design acumen to conceptual projects, minimize evidence of his hand). As beachgoers realized the work’s titular directive, the cityscape dissolved back into sand. Periodically activated until 2007, Cheng’s project challenged the prevailing vision of public art – and land art – as permanent, static and monumental. Its ephemerality – an allusion to the precarity of California’s coastal infrastructure amid anthropogenic climate change – feels particularly poignant today, as Los Angeles grapples with the aftermath of devastating wildfires.
Documentation of this piece overtakes a wall in Cheng’s first major traveling survey, currently showing at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. (The Californian artist, now in his 80s, will also participate in the Hammer Museum’s ‘Made in L.A.’ biennial this autumn.) While the works on view take forms as varied as moulded-plastic photographs, coin-operated dioramas, video installations and a greenhouse, they consistently convey certain bedrock principles: nature is dynamic; natural processes are technologies; technologies are part of nature; and, as the show’s title asserts, ‘Nature Never Loses’.