It seems somehow unfair that I have to review The Gatherers: Greening our Urban Spheres in 500 words or less. The artists in this exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts certainly were not held to any kind of word count. The Gatherers investigates urban landscapes and food systems in this era of climate change and growing organic consciousness. The exhibition reads like a natural history museum or science fair crammed into a closet. A timeline of ecological events collected by the curators and artists lines the walls, snaking around text heavy documentation of the artists' socio-political interventions. I collected half a dozen newspapers and brochures from the exhibition, in addition to a sack of heirloom potatoes, which were necessary to cultivate any understanding outside the dense installations.

Art is important in political discourse because of its ability to crystalize complex phenomena and obscure philosophies into accessible experiences. It provides context and visuality--embodying ideas that can be hard to express in words. For instance, the act of artistic presentation can transform a dry mortality statistic into an evocative experience of the horrors of war in a single image. The social and political interventions in The Gatherers are valid and necessary artistic practices, which confront some of the most progressive issues of our time. Unfortunately, in this exhibition, the artworks are drowned in a sea of exposition and pedantic documentation which would overwhelm even the most determined visitor. It seems these projects would be better served by a website, or catalog rather than being subjected to presentation in a physical gallery space.

Notable exceptions were Fallen Fruit's Colonial History of Fruit American Family, a mural-sized photo composite of the collective's members personifying their historical fruit documentation project; and Marjetica Potrc's Urban prints of shantytowns. Yerba Buena's press materials create further discord with the gallery presentation. The evocative photographs provided are of works not included in the show, but are of other projects by the same artists. So, for the purposes of this review, the only true documentation that can be provided is an image of the aforementioned potatoes collected from the Little Organic Farms display as a part of Åsa Sonjasdotter's Potato Perspective project.

Tellingly, the most successful piece in the exhibition was the live performance by Antioquia, a musical tribe whose instruments were powered by electricity-generating bicycle sculptures built by the Ginger Ninjas of Rock the Bike. The pedal-power sculptures were ridden by audience members flanking the ecstatically grooving dance floor. This performance embodied everything that the exhibition reached for: the direct participation of the audience in creating a palpable, immediate good without an environmental impact. The audience's joy came not only from the upbeat music, but from the ability to immediately create a public service from nothing other then their bodies. This was a small act of performative environmentalism, unencumbered by the all-too-common guilt and gloom of progressive politics. The Gatherers is at best a missed curatorial opportunity. Our food systems, urban architecture, and land usage are vitally important issues which have recently taken hold in our political dialogue. Artists and activists are creating compelling projects that could fill all of Yerba Buena's exhibition spaces, providing the visual content necessary for an exhibition that engages, as opposed to lectures, its audience.

The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres will be on view at YBCA through Jan 11, 2009. Several more artists talks and events are scheduled during the run of the show that will offer opportunities to engage more fully with the exhibition. Visit the YBCA web site for details.