The Overview Effect
Views on art and nature
“Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man”
James Irwin (cited in Anderson 2001:15)
The above quotation describes James Irwin’s first experience of seeing the earth from space during his time as lunar-module pilot on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. Described as being profoundly transformative, the effect of seeing our home planet from the isolation of space has been termed “The Overview Effect”. Coined by space philosopher and writer Frank White in a book of the same name, “The Overview Effect” marks a perspectival shift in the way that we view the world and our relationship to it:
“…national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide us become less important and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this ‘pale blue dot’ becomes both obvious and imperative” (Overview Group 2008: www.overviewinstitute.org/declaration.htm).
Nostalgia for Utopia aside, the qualities of seeing in the instance described above bring to mind two salient points. Firstly, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first Century, the natural environment is no longer one that we perceive as having endless resources; and secondly, seeing is not necessarily transformative, requiring that ‘something else’, that ‘gap’ in which a shift in perspective can take place.
Although the image of earth from space is one that is iconic of the achievements of science, it remains a representation: belonging to the domain that, since the time of Plato, has been designated as art (Danto 1986:4). In our current era of immediate information transfer; images dominate most forms of media. While high-resolution imagery and footage may take the viewer on an imaginary journey to beyond our atmosphere, they have been absorbed into the multitude of other images that we are bombarded with everyday to the extent that they are, in effect, invisible amongst others. In the case of Irwin, one can argue that the 'gap' is one of context, an experiential node in which the image seen through glass focused his attention, 'creat[ing] a relationship between his own being, his cultural and social background and the reality of things beyond himself in the world at large[1]' (Gooding 2002:39).
Art has long been perceived as a space for reflection, a lens, as Gooding (2002:6) puts it, ‘…to enhance our awareness of the true nature of things.’ In this respect, it can be seen as space that simultaneously mirrors and frames elements of our existence in such a way as to make the invisible, visible and that, which has been overlooked, the focus of our attention. In many ways, art can be seen, as offering a structure in which, awareness and at least the beginnings of such transformative experiences, are possible. This begs the question: how effective is art in changing people’s perceptions?
This is a question that is difficult to approach, not least of all due to the relative nature of perception. Danto follows the history of philosophical engagement with art and in what he terms a 'neutralizing move', notes that from the time of Plato, art has been relegated to that which is outside of life and is, as such, unable to affect change (1986:4).
This text does not seek argue the merits of such a position, but takes it as the beginning point of an exploration into some of the various treatments of the natural environment in art. Informed by and indeed informing a practice that aims to express my connections to the environment: this text aims to find a 'gap', that lacuna in the experience of life and art, where perspectival shifts can occur.
Everything is melting: nature at its end; art at its start
'If bees disappeared from the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.
No more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man'
Albert Einstein (cited in Benjamin & McCallum 2008[2])
'I know that all the verse I wrote, all the positions I took
in the 30's did not save a single Jew.'
(Auden cited in Danto 1986:2)
Fagone (1996:11) posits that, 'to assign the dimension of all the great constants...to the concept of nature' is one of western thought's most 'deeply-rooted cultural habits'. Those aspects of life, frozen in time, impervious to change. It is against these constants that culture and its ever-expanding field of creative communication is measured. The timeless, feminised, 'otherness' associated with nature has been critiqued by Cazeaux (2000:492) and others from many angles since the 1960's with the emergence of feminism and its numerous applications to cultural practice. This has perhaps corresponded with an increasingly entropic[3] view of the category of nature and the environment: depleting and disappearing.
Indeed, “global warming” and “climate change” (itself a paradoxical phrase when viewed in terms of the perceived stasis of nature) have become topical issues as their effects are felt around the world. Einstein's warning to the world has the ringing of prophesy as bees, predominantly in the United States and Europe began disappearing without a trace or significant clue as to the cause in 2006 (Johnson 2008:9). It is undeniable that this sense of loss is compounded by the awareness that “global warming” is to a large extent, a result of our own doing.
Joseph Beuys, an artist who contributed significantly towards the rethinking of art practice during his lifetime, has been noted in saying:
'Our relationship with nature has now become a destructive relationship from beginning to end. It threatens the total destruction of the natural foundation on which we live. We are taking the path most likely to annihilate this foundation while we employ a scientific system that is based on the unrestricted impoverishment of this natural foundation.'
(Fagone 1996:19)
Altering the trajectory of change would require a significant restructuring, not only of scientific working, but also of our base economy and the day-to-day habits of everyone in the globalised world. The denial of this reflects a nihilistic denial of the reality of the world and an embracing of entropic thinking.
Michael (2006:12) argues:
'...one of the psychological effects of embracing the concept of entropy is not a world view per se, but rather and implosion of a world view that posits a stable, lasting, predictable world.'
The uncertainty of an imploded worldview contrasts vividly with that of Irwin's quite encompassing view of the world. But, from quite a literal stance, his vantage point was as tenuous and unstable. In the isolation of space, should any aspect of the highly calculated mission go wrong, his image of the world might have disappeared from view altogether. Perhaps, it is then isolation from the insecurities of the world that allows for transformative experience. As mentioned before, the structure of art could be considered a potential option.
In the first chapter of The Disenfranchisement of Art, Danto outlines a tendency amongst philosophers of the past to describe art in apophatic terms. Art is not life. Art is not useful. In his denial of the application of art to life, Plato, writes Danto (1986:5), 'identified the practice of art with the creation of appearances, twice removed from the reality that philosophers address.' As such, being of no more consequence than a shadow or a reflection of life. He posits the world of philosophers as being outside the realm of appearances. This is contiguous with a Kantian approach to the work of art in that for judgement to be universal, it would have to be approached with a sense of detachment or 'disinterest' (Danto 1986:9). This can be seen as exemplary in the 'art for arts sake' approach and formal preoccupation of Greenbergian aesthetics.
Challenging this position has been one of the aims of numerous avant-garde movements of the 20th Century. Quite notably beginning with Marcel Duchamp's (1887-1968) iconoclastic Fountain (1917). This inclusion of a piece of ordinary plumbing signed R.Mutt 1917, into an exhibition of fine art did much to make visible, some of the structures of self-isolation imposed on art and maintained by art institutions[4]. However, each attempt (and I will elaborate in further sections) to integrate the tropes of art and everyday life, I would argue, have answered the proverbial question: 'but is it art?' with a resounding 'it is because it is recognised as such.'
This places any work, recognised as art, as immediately separate from life. Michael argues that this is necessarily so (Michael 2006:43). Using an analogy based on the principles of thermodynamics, Michael argues that it is precisely the separation and designation of art as a category separate from life that allows for artworks to exist. Conversely, it is precisely the fact that works are recognised as art that allows for them to be visible as anything but the everyday (Michael 2006:43).
He (2006:43) illustrates:
'Objects such as paintings and other media that have become expected in art contexts, maintain...a certain temperature within art. I will nominate ten degrees Celsius as the temperature of art. Beyond the gallery doors is the rest of the world from which art draw materials that are cooled to ten degrees Celsius. Beyond the gallery doors, the everyday has a temperature of say one hundred degrees Celsius. It is the differential between the two that allows art to distinguish itself from everything that is not art...'
'...with art, this is a necessary thing; there must never be a total identification of art and the everyday. If there were such an identification, this would imply that the differences in temperature between what is art and what is not have become zero...a state at which it is impossible for work to take place.'
The problem lies in that in identification as art, the work is immediately aesthetisized by the same mechanics that govern the gallery space. If one were to follow the arguments propounded by Plato and annexed as the basis of Modernist[5] aesthetics, this necessarily relegates it to, '...a kind of ontological vacation place from the concerns of being human, and with respect to which accordingly “make nothing happen”' (Danto 1986:9).
Invariably, to make a case for the complete vacancy of any effect of art on life would be impossible. Danto (1986:4) points out that, ‘the history of art is the history of suppression of art.’ Why would freedom of expression be held onto so dearly and be suppressed so vehemently whenever a totalitarian government comes into power? If it is impotent to have effect, surely it cannot be considered dangerous. Indeed, there is definitely a circle of causation between life and art. However, if I were to extend the logical tenets of Michael’s thermodynamic analogy: the difference in temperature between outside the gallery[6] and inside the gallery is such that, although its boundaries may be semi-permeable, there is a tendency for movement to go from the outside in and not the other way round.
Lailach sees this movement as a loss of vitality or even a form of rapid entropy. He (2005:25) states, ‘a work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.’ This leads one to question whether bringing nature into art or art into nature has any different effect? For surely the world cannot be truly disengaged from the world. In other words, when it comes to the subject of the natural world: it’s state, effect on and implications for all who live in it; is it possible for art to create another space, one that bears the framing and concentrated contemplation of art, yet non of its disinterested detachment?
Finding the curve
‘How does one make art which takes as its subject the human experience of the natural world, yet without celebrating the human experience of the human domination of the natural world?’
Reason (1996:43)
'The painting of landscapes marks the turning points in our conception of nature.'
Kenneth Clarke (cited in Fagone 1996:15)
Art has a long history of representing the natural world. The earliest examples of what we would consider art, inscribed on the walls of caves and rocks, depict, not only human figures, but also animals and other elements from the environment (Skotnes 2002:47). These elements of the environment have always provided stimulus for the creative and spiritual output of mankind, however the western perception of 'landscape' has its roots in the pastoral poetry of ancient Greece (Lailach 2007:7).
In describing the mountains in rural Acadia, Virgil connects them not only with the ‘wild’ terrain, represented by Pan but also includes the beginnings of human intrusion into the wilderness by pastoral farming.
‘Maenalus ever keeps its sounding woods and whispering pines, it ever hears the loves of shepherds; it hears too Pan, who first forbade the reeds to remain idle.’ (Virgil cited in Jenkyns 1989:28)
The idea of nature in this context is one that is mediated and represented in terms of mankind’s innocence in nature. Still hearing the call of Pan, the mountains are also privy to the loves and lives of the shepherds as they tend their flocks. Maenalus is the ever constant around which the pines continue their conversations and the reeds that do Pan’s bidding. Gooding maintains that the idea of ‘pastoral’[7], set up in the poetry of ancient Greece, denotes a space of rustic bliss: away from the pressures of urban growth, it is the domain of Pan and nymphs that might beguile the shepherds out in the pasture (Gooding 2002:46).
This idea of Arcadia was developed and introduced into painting, drawings and prints during the fourteenth century. Hans Leu’s (1490-1513) rendition of Orpheus and the Animals (1519) depicts the beloved son of Apollo, entertaining wild animals with his musical prowess (Room 1999: 806). The subject of the painting foregrounds a pastoral landscape sitting at the foot of a mountain. Behind, clouds loom, pregnant with oncoming rain. Landscape, in this instance and much of Renaissance painting, provides merely a setting for its subjects: a mimetic background for the playing out of the drama of its characters. In The Judgment of Paris (1529) by Cranach (1472-1553), the landscape provides a similar function. A setting for the unfolding scene[8], it sets its subjects spatially apart, not only from the city in the background but also the unchanging mountains further on. In both examples, the pastoral is evoked as a metaphoric ‘middle ground’ between the two.
The application of perspectival space, developed during this period, reflects the humanist tradition of placing the viewer as central to the image. In this sense, the viewers’ relationship to the landscape represented is one that serves to reinforce their concrete centrality to the scene: the certainty of their existence. Cosgrove (1985:45) states that, ‘landscape was a “way of seeing” that was bourgeois, individualist and related to the exercise of power over space.’
Fagone (1996:19) posits, 'the old concept of “dominion” which, was founded as much in the sense of “natural forces” acting on the everyday environment of man as it was on the idea of man the “master” of nature'. In this way the anthropocentric view of the world, presented by the landscape, contained within itself its own antithesis. Nature not only presented to the viewer that over which he had power, but it also set the limits to that control. Nature in its untamed state, replaced God as its spiritual figurehead. ‘Dominion’ over this aspect was accomplished pictorially through two strategies: appropriation of the wilderness and submission to its indescribable immensity. This is represented by the ideas of the picturesque and the sublime respectively.
Andrews (1999:129) asserts that, ‘the picturesque view of nature is one that appreciates landscape in so far as it resembles known works of art.’ Privileging nature in its wild and untouched state, picturesque painting that arose in Britain in the late eighteenth century was based on models of landscape beauty from earlier periods. As such, by absorbing and reproducing its own favourite material, the wild and unfamiliar territories of nature are gradually familiarized and commodified (Andrews 1999:129). The framing and re-framing of nature in art tamed its uncertainties and colonized it aesthetically.
Counter to this strategy, representation of a sublime nature sought to describe, ‘the ineffable nature of experience’ (Andrews 1999:142). Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) is most typically known for his allegorical landscapes with silhouetted figures, contemplating the vast expanse of nature ahead of them. His Traveller looking over the Sea of Fog (1818) stands as iconic in terms of Romantic painting’s treatment of the Sublime. It depicts a man standing on a peak, surveying the countryside ahead and below: the valleys of which are filled with mist and fog. Borsh-Supan (1990:116) maintains that, ‘he symbolizes the man who has reached the ultimate goal of his life. The mountain peaks he sees jutting out of the fog are symbols of God.’
In contrast to the forces at work in picturesque painting and the perspectival reassurance of Renaissance landscapes, the fog-filled landscape opens out from the figure (reputed to be Herr von Brincken) and envelops him. Andrews states that it is precisely this opening out and boundlessness that prevents it from being appropriated into a comfortable description (Andrews 1999:142). Because there are no definite boundaries, the subject (and the viewer) is urged to ‘surrender to a superior power’ and in doing so we (or as Andrews puts it, ‘the parts of [ourselves] that is constituted by language’) dissolve and become part of von Brincken’s experience (Andrews 1999:142).
This experience of the sublime is most closely related to Irwin’s description of the earth from space: surrounded by an infinite emptiness, the earth becomes the rock onto which he can pin all his sense of identity and belonging. In images representative of the sublime, this identification takes one step further. It is at this point that we can, as von Brincken does, take that conquering step and face the immensity of nature (God) and delight in overcoming our insignificance, reaffirming our centrality and anthropocentric view of the skyline.
The ‘conquering spirit of the individual’ with which landscapes tend to be viewed was further enhanced in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This time not using the technologies of appropriation associated with economy or that of the spirit, but that of science. Panorama entertainments enhanced the visual field such that the eye could survey and thus ‘master’ so much more (Charlesworth 2008:1). Associated with the fields of surveying and map-making the Panorama belongs to Baudrillard’s second phase of the image in that it masks the ideological project of appropriation that map-making entails (Baudrillard 1994:6).
In many ways the invention of the panorama mirrors, in effect, another invention of the same time: Jeremy Bentham’s model prison, the Panopticon (Charlesworth 2008:12). The Panopticon was laid out such that a central watchtower could view each and every prison cell that was arranged in a circle around it. The premise relies on the inmates not knowing whether they are being watched and so therefore always perceive themselves as being in the guards’ line of sight. They accordingly then modify their own behaviour (Charlesworth 2008:12).
In both cases, power is applied by and implied to the viewer. The Panopticon proposes a demonstrative use of power, the prisoners are always aware of their lack of agency, whereas the panoramic view implies a covert power in that the inhabitants of the landscape are not aware of a surveying presence. Charlesworth (2008:12) clarifies that in the case of its application in the military[9], ‘gathering intelligence about the land around…is all the more valuable if the inhabitants do not know they are being observed.
The surveying of one’s horizon can be seen as the metaphoric limit to the horizon of knowledge about nature until the latter part of the nineteenth century. New technologies however, and the new ‘scientific religion’ marked a new turning point in the perception of nature and proliferation of newly treated landscape paintings (Fagone 1996:15).
Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) Impression Sunrise (1872) is emblematic of the movement that was coined from its title in two ways. Firstly, its loose style, use of colour and textured brushstroke denote the play of light as its principle preoccupation. This shift from what is seen to how it is seen and represented alludes to the temporal flow of a rapidly industrialising Paris and it is this that is the second observation. Impression sunrise takes as its subject matter the industrial port of Le Havre: Impressionism embraced the modern urban flow and its surrounds as well as its progressive values in a way that painting had not done before (Rubin 2008:2).
This chapter has outlined a brief history of western thought’s relationship to the environment as it has been represented in art up until the beginning of the twentieth century. More specifically, it has attempted to explore the idea of ‘the landscape’ as an entity that does not reflect ‘one of the great constants’, but indeed does change as our relationship to the environment changes. The rustic charm of Arcadia shifted from a space that was integrated with the domain of Pan, to that which set up definite boundaries between the cultures of man and the spaces that were natural. These spaces have been progressively overcome as man, in his economic, intellectual and technological capacities, has appropriated the landscape through image and action.
Rubin (2008:2) argues that, ‘Impressionism gave birth to the modern landscape in art.’ A landscape of progress, of the new, one that conveyed, ‘a confidence that humanity could improve and even remake the world according to its desires’ (Rubin 2008:2). It is this landscape that we have inherited today: one that, like an Impressionist painting, contains the visible marks of modernity whilst from a distance (as Irwin and his ilk can affirm), it becomes a play of light and colours, dissolving into one another to form a perfect picture.
Looking through the Void
‘Can art get down from its pedestal and rise to street level’
Daniel Buren (1975:125)
The reflection of changing social and economic paradigms and indeed, a reflection of man’s changing attitudes toward the natural environment can be seen in changes in art production. In the previous chapter, we explored the idea of ‘the landscape’ as the ontological counterpoint to culture. By this, man, and contiguously art, has progressively appropriated the image of the land to reflect his own triumphs over nature. In as much as Rubin maintains that Impressionist painting ushered in the era of the modern landscape, it also significantly shifted the paradigm of art from that valorising the values of the social elite to one engaged with the emergent values of modern society (Rubin 2008:2).
It was also at this point that art production entered into a self-conscious conversation as to the definition of art and purposefully sought to critique the structures that underlie the visual appropriation inherent in art’s presentation and viewing. The introduction of readymades to the gallery, such as Duchamp’s Bottle Rack (1914) did much to awaken the art-viewing public to their own expectations when viewing art. By placing an everyday, functional object in a context in which that function is largely removed and replaced with art’s function of aesthetic enjoyment, an inversion takes place. We are not looking at an artwork that is created through the mastery of the artist/genius; we are in fact looking at our altered relationship to an object that is mediated by the gallery.
In a historical context, the strategy of taking objects from everyday life and using them to make the network of relationships at work in the gallery, visible to the viewer was revolutionary. It cleaved a space between the audiences’ expectations of work and their experience of it and it is this space that, I would argue, contains within it the seeds of transformation.
As can be seen with the negative reception of the Salon des Independents’ first showing of Impressionist painters, and indeed with their later refusal to show the Fountain by ‘R. Mutt’, the space of disjuncture between expectation and experience can provoke a sense of frustration or boredom. Using John Cage’s conceptual composition 4’33’’(1952)[10], Michael (2006: 41) examines this point in relation to the audience’s lack of preparation to cope with the experience of unexpected art. He (Michael 2006:42) writes:
‘So called boring or frustrating works like Cage’s are characterized as such on first viewing because there exists in the viewer, a rigid structure of expectation, the destabilization of which leads to a vacuum of uncertainty, which matures into frustration (and sometimes anger if the variance between the expectation and what is presented is large enough)’
These moments of boredom, frustration or anger accompany the introduction of much of what we now recognize as modern art. It is significant to note however, that as the central tenets of the works’ propositions are engaged and brought under the rubric of art, the transformative possibilities of the work enter into and become solely concerned with art’s conversation about itself. Bottle Rack and Fountain (of which both of the originals were accidentally thrown away) were recommissioned to be placed in a museum or gallery context. Seeing these objects, one does not react, as their first viewers did, to their re-contextualization or even to the context that they are currently placed, but instead, see them as autonomous objects made by an important artist. They are in effect ‘cooled to the ten degrees Celsius of the gallery’ and have become an art objects, related to the histories of other art objects
Recognition of the overarching ability of Art to appropriate and dilute even those works that aimed at critiquing its structures led to proliferation of new approaches to art-making from about the 1960’s. These art movements were not only concerned with challenging the structure of Art, which was seen as reflecting an overwhelmingly patriarchal culture, but also aimed at confronting society’s perceptions and expectations in the public realm.
Art in the public sphere, as Ware (2008:2) points out, ‘is unavoidably political’. New strategies employed in performance, site-specific installations as well as in city interventions sought to implicate the viewer and activate the public consciousness creatively and politically. Views of the environment also changed and ‘the landscape’ shifted out of the gallery and back into nature.
Environmental art has its roots in this period. As a general term it numerous different approaches to enacting work that deals with the environmental, either on a formal level or dealing with the social, political or economic implications of ecology. It is used here to denote a range of artistic movements, including Land Art, Earthworks, Arte Povera and the more recent Art in Nature. This is because a number of artists that use the environment as their primary context or subject matter have a range of working methods that have associated them with more than one group.
Land Art is primarily associated with what Rosalind Krause (cited in Lailach 2007:8) termed, ‘sculpture in the expanded field.’ Existing as sculptures made from and with the landscape, it effectively compromised the commodity-hungry sphere of art in that these sculptures are radically site specific and are intangible as portable objects.
De Maria’s Lightning Field (1977) can be alternatively described as both minimal and sublime. It consists of 400 steel rods, arranged in a regular grid over a space of just over one square kilometre on the flat plains of the New Mexico Desert (Lailach 2007:38). As a formal arrangement of protruding spikes with their tips at exactly the same height, it is simple yet evocative of a sense of the eerie. Man’s obvious hand in an area that lacks any other obvious sign of man’s presence: it speaks of a lack and desertedness. These spikes, however, act as lightning conductors so that lightning bolts, from the area’s numerous electrical, storms create an overwhelming show of the power of nature.
De Maria (cited in Lailach 2007: 38) maintains that, ‘Isolation is the essence of Land Art.’ Although images are widely available De Maria insists that it is necessary to experience it on location (Lailach 2007:38). So, a journey is evoked: a literal and metaphoric pilgrimage to a point of isolation in order to experience the profound.
Journeying to spaces that are remote is not essential to land art, however, it is often evoked. From James Turrell’s (1943-) Rodan Crater[11] (1974) to Wolgang Laib’s (1950-) For Another Body[12] (1994-), works are remote enough that should one wish to experience them (as opposed to merely seeing or imagining) one has to make a concerted effort over difficult terrain in order to achieve this. As such, they represent a type of heterotopia.
Foucault (1986: 24) uses the term to describe counter-sites: ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.’ The remote sites enacted in much land art are outside of all spaces and yet have a real and specific existence. In many ways, the image of the earth from space can be likened to a heterotopia par excellence. For a vast majority, our experience of these places is mediated through image and description, we are aware of them through publications, digital information or through ‘official’ photographs in galleries that stand as indexes of the event. Our relationship to the work becomes an imagining: the dream to which Plato referred as art, the dream that ‘makes nothing happen.’
It is an interesting aside to note that the term ‘Land Art’ was made popular in a made-for-television film of the same name in 1969. In this experimental exhibition, conceptualized by Gerry Schum, twelve artists (including De Maria and Smithson) were invited to create work specifically for the television screen. This allowed for artists who otherwise did not work outside of the gallery system to work in remote locations, away from a potential audience (Lailach 2007:6).
Although the reduction of architectural scale works in remote places viewed in a new form of portable gallery space works against a number of the tenets ascribed to by artists who participate in Land Art, it does, nevertheless demonstrate some of the points that have been alluded to throughout this text.
Despite working to specifically subvert the system of visual appropriation represented by the gallery, it has, nevertheless, found its way, in varying forms into that system. Whether mediated through photographic representations, indexical of an imagined journey, or in discourses placing it in relation to other art, these works become part of a process that, like the idea of the picturesque, tames its emotive content and becomes something aesthetic.
On the other hand, the first hand experience of such pieces can provoke that sense of disjuncture that has been described above in relation to the art of Duchamp. By way of anecdote, it is possible to perceive that this ‘lack of preparation’ to see an unexpected work of art need not be met by boredom or frustration, but one on wonder, containing within it the seed of a transformative experience.
Whilst travelling with a group of friends between East London to Knysna, the most unusual sight appeared quite suddenly on the skyline. It seemed as if an enormous straight line had been drawn on the landscape. As we approached, it became evident that a row of red flags had been erected on the landscape, over the undulating hills and pointing in the direction of Grahamstown. It is for this reason that we chose to take a break in Grahamstown and later found out that the flags on the landscape were part of a Land Art piece by Strydom van der Merwe to mark the annual National Arts Festival. This surprise sight and our resultant unplanned stop significantly changed my relationship to a landscape that I had always perceived as the dull road before reaching the coast. I have subsequently spent much time in the Eastern Cape and my love for and deep connection to the people and their concerns can be significantly attributed to that moment, ‘that gap’
The view from above: An overview effect
‘Deep ecological awareness recognises the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of life’
Fritjof Capra (cited in Anderson 2001:19)
After the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are more aware than ever before that our current living habits are not sustainable. With this in mind we have looked at the ways of seeing art and asked the question: how can art meaningfully contribute to the perceptual transformations necessary to alter the trajectory of our current entropic attitude. If as Irwin (cited in Anderson 2001:15) puts it, ‘seeing that should surely change a man’, in what ways does art allow for us to view nature.
Beginning with the philosophical preposition that art and life are separate and diametrically opposed spheres of experience (much like nature and culture), we have explored two parallel fields of enquiry. The relationship that art bears with nature and the structural ‘ways of seeing’ that art implies.
Using art history’s treatment of nature as it manifests as representations of the landscape, we have seen that the structure of art is constructed around a continual appropriation of imagery. This is seen to be in effect, not only when artworks are compliant to the system but also when the intention of the artist is to expose or challenge its structure.
As soon as something is recognised as art, it immediately begins to engage with the history of art and looses much of the evocative nature of its content. However, there is that moment before it is recognised as art that an experiential node takes primacy over the image and we are moved by a force that is emotive. It is this space that holds within it the seed to perceptual transformation.
It is in an attempt to find this space that this text is concerned with. Informing a practice and indeed informed by a practice that hopes, in small ways, to effect perceptual shifts in the way that we see the world around us.
This document is by no means exhaustive, through omission and selective engagement I have attempted to describe aspects of art and nature that move me. Although there is an awareness of the contemporary strategies of community engagement, public participation and social upliftment to engage with the social, political and economic aspects of Environmental art that are very successful, it is in the gap between art and life, culture and art that I find the world to be fragile yet powerful place.
[1] Gooding describes this experience as likened to our relationship to Acadia. Historically a province of Greece, Arcadia served as an idyllic place in the pastoral poetry of Virgil. Later as the title of Sydney's romance (1590), it was absorbed into Romantic thought as a place of rustic bliss. (Room 1999:46). Gooding (2002:39) posits that Arcadia is not a real space but one of the mind's, for contemplation. This is always connected to our relationship to the natural environment in terms of loss where, 'nature is the Arcadia where once we were, the garden from which we have been expelled' (Gooding 2002:44).
[2] Available online: Daily Mail (25 June). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1028560/As-mystery-plague-threatens-wipe-bees-scientist-reveal-survival-depends-them.html [2009, 21 February]
[3] The concept of entropy has its history rooted in the field of thermodynamics. Coined by Classius it is defined as 'the measure of the mechanical unavailability of energy' (O'Neill cited in Michael 2006:7). In this, energy, as it is converted from one form to another, loses heat leaving less energy available for mechanical work. It has subsequently entered into numerous fields including literature and philosophy amongst others and can be phrased as an inevitable death of conceptual energy and loss of certainty (Michael 2006:7-15)
[4] Duchamp submitted Fountain for an exhibition by the ‘Salon des Independents’ and, despite their maintaining that all submissions would be showed, Fountain was excluded from the exhibition. This exclusion from what was already a challenge to the institution of bourgeois art and the discourse that arose from this has led to Fountain to be described by many to be one of the most influential artworks of the twentieth century.
[5] These, despite the numerous ways in which they have been challenged are still largely in place and any attempt to disrupt these tenets invert and continue the modernist monologue of 'art for arts sake'.
[6] By this I would argue is true for all works that are recognized as art and become so at the moment that they are recognized as such.
[7] Symbolized by Arcadia
[8] This scene represents Paris, son of the king of Troy, choosing the most beautiful goddess in a contest between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. He chooses Aphrodite, who rewards him with the love of the most beautiful woman in the world. This leads later to the advent of the Trojan War (Room 1999: 43).
[9] It is often the case that maps are originally commissioned for military or some other nationalist purpose of expansion
[10] At its premier at a recital for contemporary piano music in New York, David Tudor, sat in front of the piano, made ready to begin playing and then closed the piano lid. He opened it again after a time to mark the end of the first movement. This was repeated three times such that the length of the ‘silent piece’ was four minutes and thirty-three seconds as the title suggests. Cage maintains that the silence ‘was not an absence of sound’ but filled with the unintended noises of the auditorium and a growing frustration amongst its viewers (Cage 1990: Online [Available]: http://www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.html)
[11] In 1974, Turrell bought an area of land in the Arizona Desert containing and extinct volcano known as the Rodin Crater. To this he added a system of rooms and tunnels with strategic openings to the sky above that function as a type of observatory or on the principle of the camera obscura. In this way, light from the sun, moon and stars project light into the interior of the volcano and appears as projected images at the ends of the passageways (Lailach (2007:94)
[12] This is an ongoing project in which Laib is building a room entirely of wax deep in the Pyrenees Mountains (Avrilla 1994: 92). Laib’s work is characterized by his use of natural materials (most notably wax, pollen and milk) to evoke meditative spaces and experiences. This he does through his own meditative process of collecting materials (his minimalist floor pieces of pollen are created with material that he has painstakingly collected by hand over periods of six months or longer); or compelling the viewer into a ritualistic action as in his Milkstones (these are stone bowls, filled with milk that have to be refilled everyday (Semin 1994:75). Avrilla (1994:93) maintains that For Another Body, ‘makes possible a kind of storage of energy’, ‘a museumistic elsewhere that is beyond its own walls.’
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