Argentina's Green Man for All Seasons.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Nicolas Uriburu

From startling public events to canvases and installations, Nicolas Uriburu has crusaded against man's destruction of nature

A foliated face with verdant vines emanating from its mouth is an ancient, archetypal image suggesting humanity's oneness with nature. Pagan in origin, the presence of the so-called green man motif nonetheless persisted in countless Christian churches during the Middle Ages as a decorative element symbolizing life itself and the potential for rebirth.

In our own times, at least one living, breathing version of the green man can be said to survive--in the person of Argentine artist and activist Nicolas Garcia Uriburu who, for more than thirty-five years, has waged a courageous battle against deforestation and the pollution of rivers and seas. But instead of vines, Uriburu's powerful message in defense of nature has flowed from his mouth and pen, and especially his brushes. Equally potent have been his inspired acts of artful mischief aimed at fighting apathy and spurring action in support of the land, water, and air upon which all life depends. Recently, he has worked hard to stem the tide of desecration in the Amazon basin; in his homeland, too, this tireless green man has continued to fight urban blight by urging fellow citizens to restore neglected vegetation.

Early on, Uriburu established his reputation as a founding father of the environmental art movement through his colorations, which were acts of protest against aquatic pollution. "In the sixties I was living in Paris with my wife, Blanca," the artist recalls. "I was doing Pop-style paintings and constructions, which I exhibited in leading galleries, but I kept asking myself, what can I do to go farther, to go from the gallery to space itself--space? I thought a lot and said, the Venice Bienale is coming. I shall begin by coloring the waters of the canals because they are polluted. And suddenly it all changed to something ephemeral: no lasting object, just the message and the memory. Instead of painting a landscape on a little canvas, a flat surface, I went to the landscape itself and worked in real scale. In Milan I located a supplier for a nontoxic fluorescent sodium dye of the sort used by astronauts to mark their landing position at sea. It was perfect for my purposes. Just one bucket of the highly concentrated chemical was sufficient to dye bright green a large body of water."

At the time, 1968, Uriburu did not see himself as a pioneer. But in fact his performance and manipulation of a natural setting conformed to a new way of working, called conceptual art, which emphasized information and ideas over the creation of enduring art objects. Christo's first land art project, that of briefly wrapping islands off the coast of Australia, would not happen for another year, and Robert Smithson's spiral-shaped earthwork on a remote shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake still was two years in the offing.

"Those projects required permission from various bureaucracies because they needed considerable time to organize and accomplish their objective. But ours was an unauthorized, guerrilla operation befitting the times! The May Revolution had just occurred in Paris, and fifteen days later Blanca and I were in Venice, where there were more police than people. I was very scared, but my wife, who was going to help, said, `Do it.' So, in a lightning strike--about ten minutes--I dyed the entire length of the Grand Canal a life-affirming green!"

His declared goal, that of "surprising the public in its most vital spaces, by optically changing a fixed, given context" indeed caused considerable consternation. "Initially they didn't understand," explains Uriburu. "They said `What have you done? Is it the end of the world? Is Fellini doing a film?' But then the radio said an artist had done it for the Bienale to protest the pollution of the canals and suddenly they said `How beautiful! It's like the mantle of the Virgin.' Overnight I emerged as a shining knight, and during the rest of our stay in Venice they wouldn't even let me pay our bills at the hotel or restaurants."

Uriburu decided to...