In response to the twin threats of economic and environmental danger, a distinct survivalist subculture emerged. A flurry of exclamatory books and pamphlets professed apocalypse soon. In his newsletter The Survivor, the author Kurt Saxon observed that ‘society is collapsing due to overpopulation, mental cripples, pollution, changing climate, and scarcity of resources’. In 1975, the former Green Beret Robert K Brown began publishing Soldier of Fortune magazine out of an office in Boulder, Colorado. It soon included articles about weapons, skills and products aimed at the militant survivalist community. By this point, Theodore Kaczynski had already moved to rural Montana, becoming a self-taught survivalist before finding infamy as the Unabomber.
The survivalists had a kind of cousin in the community of enthusiasts for sustainable living. This paisley-patterned social movement was catalysed and informed by publications such as the Foxfire books and, most famously, Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog (1968-98). Hundreds of thousands of communards, tool freaks and ‘hippie modernists’ coalesced under their geodesic domes into a spectrum of back-to-the-land experiments by early 1970s. While the political ideologies of commune-dwellers differed from the survivalists, they too shared a distinct preoccupation with self-reliance and readiness.
Well before survival emerged as a dominant theme for the 1970s, a few professional artists were already attuned to existential threats lurking over the horizon. In San Diego, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison reacted to the array of technological, economic and environmental challenges that marked the 1970s, and proposed solutions in response. Over careers that spanned more than five decades, the Harrisons made a series of artworks that functioned both as an early warning system for environmental catastrophe while also offering suggestions for surviving calamitous times.
Born in New York City in 1927 and 1932 respectively, Helen and Newton married in 1953 and arrived at the University of California, San Diego in 1967. Helen had studied education and psychology and worked in the school’s administration. Newton earned degrees in fine art from Yale, before being appointed a professor in the school’s visual arts department. Early in his career, he worked in sculptures and paintings. But the first Earth Day, held in April 1970, prompted the Harrisons to begin shifting into survival mode. ‘I want to know how I will survive,’ Newton said, ‘how we’ll all survive.’ Their growing fascination with local and global ecosystems drove their transition to a new kind of art-making and a new professional identity of working collaboratively as ‘the Harrisons’.