Scans

 

"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance

or of any other past culture. Each age find its own technique."                                                                                                                                                      Jackson Pollock        

Link to SCANS book on blurb.     

Art has seen as much experimentation in the last 150 years as the previous 1500 years. This accelerated rate of change occurred in a period of increased scientific knowledge of nature and parallel social developments. The style of figurative realism that emerged in the Renaissance was challenged by the rebellious era of modern art that started at the Salon des Refusés exhibition in Paris in 1863. During the 20th century three methods of image making: photograms, holography and flat-bed scanners, provide insights into the values of modern art. Although recording images without a camera lens, they all share a similarity to photography. As well as recording objects, they subtly transform their appearance, in different ways that are unique to each method.

Photogram by Man Ray

published in Painting 

Photography Film 

(page 77)

Photograms are cameraless photographs created by placing objects directly onto a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic paper, and exposing the composition to light. Unless reversed by copying, photograms are negatives where exposure to light creates darkness. Because a camera lens is not used, images of objects placed on the film or photographic paper are recorded same size. Photograms are as uncanny as images on a pre-digital radar scope, with potentially recognisable white silhouettes emerging from a dark ground. Photograms are the opposite of picturesque. The brooding darkness of their backgrounds suggests a form of 'technological sublime' (1) that is even more explicit in x-ray pictures.

​Photograms have an ambiguous relationship to the cannon of 'serious' photography as they were often used as an introductory exercise for those learning chemistry-based photography. They were the photographic equivalent of learning scales on a piano, with visible tones instead of musical notes, but they also became associated with modern art. Whereas cameras have been designed to imitate the type of perspective associated with Renaissance painting, the distinctive effects made by photograms aligned with the modernist principle of being "truthful to materials" and the older adage "form follows function".

Anyone who has seen an Anglepoise lamp has experienced these ideas made solid. The car designer George Carwardine invented the iconic desk lamp after researching car suspension systems, creating a functional task lamp that was also attractive in the terms of the Bauhaus-inspired ‘machine aesthetic'. Just as the Anglepoise lamp has a stark beauty arising from the expression of mechanical levers and springs, so a photogram is a rather severe image created by the ability of a photographic emulsion to record the beguiling effects of light passing through translucent objects and around the edges of solids but without the more traditionally pleasing effects of chiaroscuro associated with photographs made with a lens. Objects registered as white shadows are uncanny.

​László Moholy-Nagy included photograms made by himself, and the American photographer Man Ray, in his influential book Painting Photography Film published in 1925 (2) in which he postulated an aesthetic and philosophical revolution called "The New Vision" that would unleash the creative potential of society. He described photograms as "light composition, in which light must be sovereignly handled as a new creative means, like colour in paintings and sound in music." Light could create "a new kinetic space-time rendering". (3) Moholy-Nagy derided the "Ruskin-Morris circle" who he accused of ignoring the need to harness machine production to meet the 'biological' needs of society. The New Vision was to be based on technology.

Solar eclipse on 29th May 1919 

photographed by Arthur Eddington. 

The observed deflection of 

starlight by gravity confirmed 

Einstein's theory of relativity 

and was reported enthusiastically 

worldwide.

Moholy-Nagy speculated that novel optical systems such as prismatic lenses and cameras able to view objects from multiple positions could surpass cubist painting, but new forms of sculpture would acknowledge Einstein's theory of relativity. Whereas the pictures of Futurism showed a superimposition of the object in a sequence of linear movement and Cubism rendered the object as if it were rotated in space, Moholy-Nagy wanted to 'paint' with "flowing, oscillating, prismatic light, in lieu of pigments" to "allow us a better approach to the new conception of space-time." (4) He made light/kinetic sculptures for the 1936 film Things to Come, although they were eventually not included in the finished production.

​A complete 'phase transition' of society suggested by the concept of The New Vision (5) never happened, but in 1949 a photographic process capable of exploring Moholy-Nagy's fascination with space/time was proposed. The physicist and engineer Dennis Gabor calculated that combining light reflected from an object with light sent directly to a photographic emulsion would create interference patterns from which a fully three-dimensional image, a hologram, could be reconstructed.

Older methods of stereoscopic photography

Moholy-Nagy would have been fascinated

by holography. In The New Vision - 

Abstract of an Artist he wrote about 

neoplasticism and how constructivist artists 

had sprayed very thin, iridescent layers of

paint on polished surfaces, metals and

synthetic materials "..to which the reflecting

layer underneath gives an ethereal fluctuating

appearance..,.The surface becomes a part of

the atmosphere, of the atmospheric background;

it sucks up light phenomena produced outside

itself...." (Page 39) His description sounds rather

like the experience of viewing a hologram.

create the impression of depth but lack a sense of the roundness of objects. Confusingly, both stereoscopy and holography are often referred to as "3D" pictures. For holography to work it is necessary to use light of a single wavelength which was not fully available until the invention of the laser.​ After the first laser-based hologram was made in 1964 the medium's status as an art form was questioned. The invention of photography between 1825 and 1850 was followed by a similar period of speculation as to whether it could be considered art. For critics in the 20th century the issue of photography was resolved by modernism which valued characteristics that are unique to specific media. For painting, the qualities of flatness and colour were regarded as essential modernist qualities. Paradoxically, the mechanical aspects of photography (as opposed to eye/hand skills) that caused art critics to doubt that it was an art form in the 19th Century allowed the medium to claim a special position within modernism.

​Surrealism and abstraction were important developments in modernism but the ability of photography to record images outside human imagination was equally significant. Both the blurring of objects caused by motion in long exposures and the ultra-sharpness of high-speed photography exceed human perception. Similarly, holography initially only seemed to be a kind of photographic sculpture, but at the University of Nottingham the 1970s Margaret Benyon undertook a fellowship in fine art in the mechanical engineering department where she was able to establish a holography studio and explore a unique feature of the medium.

​

Margaret Benyon's 'hot air' hologram.
Column of rising air appears dark and
flat among rounded objects.

To make a successful hologram, the photographic emulsion must receive light directly from a laser as well as light reflected from the objects being recorded. As the interference pattern created in the emulsion is a very precise record of the interaction of the wavefront from the laser and the wavefront modified by the shapes of objects, nothing in the arrangement should move by more than a fraction of the wavelength of the light in use. Benyon discovered that movement as slight as the drying of bread would cause a loaf to appear as a flat, dark silhouette. Experiments confirmed that holograms can register time as well as three dimensions in a single image, as Moholy-Nagy desired half a century earlier. Benyon's most intriguing images recorded the movement of hot air from a cup as flat, dark plumes. Time compresses three dimensions into two. (6)

​Holography made little impact on the art world, either in the exclusive collectors' art market or the more socially orientated public art sector. Perhaps the exploitation of the ability to register tiny movements of objects as 'non-holograms' was one of the last throws of the dice for modernism. Many of the creative techniques of modernist photography can be thought of as qualified failures in that they are departures from the norms of Renaissance art. Blurring caused by motion, depth of field rendering backgrounds out of focus, the compression of perspective by telephoto lenses and the near spherical perspective of fish-eye lenses are all photographic tropes that make a virtue out of the unconventional. Depiction of movement as a black silhouette in an otherwise three- dimensional field is a uniquely holographic, and modernist, characteristic.

The set up for Margaret Benyon's hot air hologram.

The expectation that artists should use characteristics that are unique to the nature of a particular medium, creating artwork that is as much an expression of its physical properties as any subject, has not spread to popular culture. From the earliest days of cinema, painted backdrops were a common feature of filmed illusions. A current trend is towards the increasing use of computer-generated images in films. Additionally, postmodernism has produced an 'anything goes' culture which influences all media. For artists there is the challenge of deciding what not to include or generate, so great are the possibilities afforded by digital technology.

​Flatbed scanners are associated with digital editing of images and postmodern expectations. For anyone wanting to scan a photograph the software that enables the scanner to operate with a computer presents a preview image and offers the user an opportunity to adjust brightness, contrast and colour before the subsequent image is created. Further digital manipulation can contribute to the elision between photography and illustration, where any departure from visual accuracy is accepted if it is made with sincere and obvious intention. Maps and pictures made for manuals or textbooks are expected to dispense with surplus detail for the sake of clarity. Similarly, the routine surveillance of the Earth by satellites is increasingly undertaken by thematic mapping projects that concentrate of specific geophysical information such as ice-cover or vegetation types. The Earth rotates under them as they orbit from pole to pole, rather like the action of a flatbed scanner.

​Scanners use LEDs for illumination combined with multiple detectors arranged together on a single moving bar that sweeps the underside of a glass platen on which documents or objects can be placed. Scanners were not designed to record objects, so their traveling perspective produces distortions caused by parallel projections in the resultant image. Depth of field is about one centimetre and unreflected light creates dark backgrounds. The darkness is similar to 'flash falloff' seen in photographs taken by the light of an electronic flashgun. Photograms, holography and scanners record distance as darkness because they project light in a dynamic way without relying on ambient illumination.

​Unlike human vision, the photogram process, holograms and scanners bombard their subjects with photons. The phrase "suffocating darkness" is revealing because light feels like it belongs to the air that we breathe. Looking up at a blue sky, there is no apparent difference between atmosphere and light. When a cloud uncovers the sun, light enters a room like fine dust falling from the air. The disparity between the searchlight of technology and how we see, influences how our attention to nature becomes divided between science and art. 1970s Land Art (originally called Earth Art) came close to reconciling this difference.

Land Art projects, mostly in remote areas of the United States, were 

Double Negative was excavated by Michael
Heizer in 1969. 240,000 tons of rock was
bulldozed from two sides of a valley wall.
The sculpture is a void that demonstrates
the imposition of geometry on the
landscape,and by implication, the whole
of nature.

created in the 1960s and 1970s. The Earth artists individually embarked on a series of diverse sculptural projects, on the scale of civil engineering, using the material of the landscape itself. One of Robert Smithson's early works exhibited mirrors, rock, gravel and sand in an art gallery. The materials were removed from a distant site where mirrors had also been placed and photographed. The methodology resembled a museum exhibit that had resulted from geology fieldwork. Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) almost functions as a science experiment. At a high-altitude site in New Mexico in the United States, De Maria created a one kilometre by one mile array of polished metal poles placed vertically in the ground 67 metres apart. Lightning is said to "sense" the poles when it is within 61 metres of them. (7)

​Land Art seems to have signified an end to the development of landscape art, but it is possible to consider a return of nature to a central position in contemporary art. Imagine a Venn diagram with nature in art at the centre, surrounded by four circles. Firstly, nature that is revealed by science. Secondly, the tradition of landscape art that represents nature as beautiful, sublime or picturesque. Thirdly, climate change, a new mass extinction period and the expansion of the technosphere (the built environment, mining spoil, farming, solar power collectors etc). Fourthly, ambitious plans such as altering plant genomes to enable them to use more atmospheric carbon dioxide, producing 'meat' protein in bioreactors and the duplication of the energy of the sun in thermonuclear power stations. 

(1) Strip mining (2) Contour ploughing (3) The Palm Jumeirah, Dubai - 5.6 square kilometre land reclamation development. 

The expansion of human activity to encompass the majority of the Earth has supported a massive increase in population. This means that there is no simple way back to a pre-industrial world that existed before the Anthropocene. Behind the concept of 'sustainability' lie complicated choices around the degree of artificial management of biological and Earth systems. 

​​The Anthropocene epoch is so called because humans are now a geological force. We cause global climate change, move more material than river erosion, control three quarters of land not under ice and are also influencing the course of evolution. The image of a self-consistent nature depicted in traditional landscape art is not true in the Anthropocene. Some of the Land Art projects of the last century presaged this new situation. A new direction for art as metaphor for the complicated and problematic interface between nature and technology in the 21st century is available. Rather than attempting to create visual equivalents to the complexity of all environmental issues art could be a sensitised surface that provides opportunities for contemplation of artificiality itself.

Wooded Landscape with Figures Walking by a Sandy Bank. 

This painting by Jan Wijnants (active 1643 - 1684)  shows 

the remains of an original coastline resulting from the 

reclamation of land from the sea in Holland. This 

picturesque depiction of one aspect of the technosphere 

may appear to be anachronistic, but the type of cultivated 

landscape familiar from landscape painting is equally 

artificial.

 

(1) Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

​(2) (3) (4) Moholy-Nagy, László, Hans Maria. Wingler, and Janet. Seligman. Painting, Photography, Film. London: Lund Humphries, 1967.

(5) Moholy-Nagy, László The New Vision ; and, Abstract of an Artist. New York: Wittenborn, 1947.

(6) Benthall, Jonathan. Science and Technology in Art Today. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972.

(7) Kastner, Jeffrey., and Brian. Wallis. Land and Environmental Art : Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon, 1998.Page 109.

 

Link to SCANS book on blurb

The Best Photograph I Never Took.

It was probably 1975, or it could have been early 1976. It was probably a Saturday. I was in Stockport walking down Wellington Road South towards the square. I had a camera loaded with black and white film. I was looking for scenes to photograph. A flâneur with a machine for seeing.

 

By coincidence, there was a bride and bridegroom walking up the hill in the opposite direction. They looked as if they had just got married and were heading towards a reception. The bride wore a white dress and the groom a dark suit. I don’t know how they came to be walking there, but behind them a line of disused a coal-staithes extended from the station and stopped short of the main road. These Victorian brick structures were coated in coal dust and the contrast with the bride’s white wedding dress was marked. I thought of taking a photograph, hesitated, and then the moment was lost.­

 

They passed me and carried on up the hill. Even today I think that if I had taken a picture, it could have been one of my ‘best’. The scene was redolent of northern industry. The coal staithes had been built to allow railway wagons to empty their loads into horse-drawn wagons beneath them. They connoted industrialisation, and a huge northern heritage now lost to globalisation. The nearby Christie's hat works is now a museum.

 

The couple were roughly my age. How have they fared in the post-industrial 21^st century? Perhaps he has spent the last twenty years driving around as a ‘white-van man’ and perhaps she works in an office looking at spreadsheets on a computer screen. Factory work was never all that great anyway. Regardless of these clichés, the non-existent photograph of their newly married selves would have gained curiosity value over the years. The coal-staithes would now appear quite archaic and the choice of walking away from a wedding might be seen as prosaic. The staithes were demolished in the 1990s and replaced by a Mc Donald’s.  

 

It is no use regretting the lost opportunity. To get the ‘right’ view I would have needed a telephoto lens, not to avoid confronting the couple, but to change the perspective so that the coal staithes loomed in the background. You have probably seen this compressed perspective effect in numerous National Geographic features. Huge moon setting behind the Eiffel Tower. Huge moon setting behind the Taj Mahal. Huge moon setting behind an oil derrick in the Gulf of Mexico. Huge sun rising behind a launch-gantry at Cape Kennedy. You get the idea.

 

If I had taken the photograph with a telephoto lens, what would the picture have looked like? I imagine that the scene would have been a medium close-up of the couple and the coal-dust encrusted brickwork of the staithes would have largely filled the background. I think that a gust of wind blew the bride’s veil up into the air for a moment, its pristine cleanliness contrasting with the century of grime behind her. Perhaps they would have been looking at each other. Perhaps one of them would have looked at something outside the frame as if contemplating the future. The image could have been read that way, even though he or she might just as easily have been watching a relative cross the road. Some of the most iconic photographs are successful because they invite us to read things into them that are not really there. To get a range of glances and expressions I would have needed a Nikon motor-drive camera to take multiple frames in a few seconds. In those days I didn’t even know such a thing existed. It would have cost more than my motorcycle.

 

The image could have been a minor classic, or not. To believe that such a picture could say anything meaningful about the lives of the people in is to believe in a tradition of documentary photography that seeks to explain life from within 24mm x 36mm frames and instances of 125^th of a second. We partly live our lives through metaphors and the young couple were starting their new lives by literally walking away from their industrial background. The documentary tradition of photography excuses its temporary intrusion in the subject’s time and space by a faintly unctuous appeal to our sense of pathos. Out of the millions of photographs that have been taken a few have come to symbolise things that we care about, even if the people depicted in them are treated as cyphers. We have become used to the industrialisation of our perception but to take a ‘meaningful’ photograph, within the ethos of documentary photography, is rather like wandering round a field of randomly scattered words until a sentence can be read in a line that is seen from one position. We might feel pride in having the wit and perseverance to find that ideal place, but the ‘heroism of vision’ is probably just vanity.

Ideas of Nature

 

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11320118-utopias-11

Ideas of Nature

Travalgen, 1951 Peter Lanyon

From 1948 until his death after a gliding accident in 1964, Peter Lanyon created paintings which attempt to combine the abstract practice of modern art with the history and geology of Cornish landscapes. Contemporary painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko created pictures without perspective but Lanyon's paintings struggle to contain both the transcendence of surface appearance associated with abstraction and an impression of the physicality of actual landscapes. Modernism superseded the distinction between form and content but Lanyon's paintings are like medieval maps that contemplate the essence of places without the topographic precision of modern cartography. His pictures demonstrate the tension that exists between abstract art and the desire for a narrative of nature.

West Penwith, 1949 Peter Lanyon

Continual development became central to 20th century avant-garde art, a process which was already important to science, particularly after the renaissance when it was propelled by sea-borne exploration and the discovery of America. The existence of a previously unknown continent established that knowledge based solely on the study of classical texts was doomed to irrelevance. Theories within science are now expected to be continually refined and surpassed.

Corliss steam engine 

exhibited in 1876.  

From Scientific 

American

The belief that the future would be different from the past also emerged from the industrial revolution. The idea that ways of working could change without there being an end-point prepared  society to understand Darwin's theory of natural selection in 1859. Modern art also started within the new paradigm. The 1863 Salon des Refusés exhibition in Paris subverted the rigid aesthetics of of the Académie des Beaux-Arts by showing paintings rejected by their official annual exhibition, unleashing continual artistic change.

Art and science followed parallel paths in the renaissance when the evolution of perspectival drawing advanced with the development of optics, but there was a gradual divergence over the following centuries. Initially, modern art seemed to promise a renewed relationship with science, with some similarity of methods and interests. Several impressionist artists explored the perception of colour, overlapping with scientists' investigations of light. Art historians have seen links between Einstein's theory of relativity and cubist painting. (1) Art 'movements' such as futurism and surrealism were accompanied by manifestos, prompting expressions of loyalty or scepticism similar to the reactions of scientists to today's cosmological 'M-theories' such as; string theory, 'Brane theory and supersymmetry

In the 20th century science explored subatomic nature as avant-garde art became 

synonymous with abstract, or non-objective art. The ideal of objective reality was left behind as cubism, surrealism and abstraction became the most influential art movements. At the same time, nature seemed to disappear into the laboratory as examination of the processes

Paths of subatomic particles

revealed in a bubble chamber.

Created by collisions after 

acceleration by high-voltage

electricity, their paths are

constrained by intense 

magnetic fields.

behind the material world took place within conditions of vacuum, radioactivity and high-voltage electricity. 

Physics stretched the definition of nature in way that could not be depicted in landscape art. The science journal Nature that started in 1869 was concerned mostly with physics. Norman Lockyer, the first editor of the journal, had previously used spectroscopy to co-discover the gas helium in the sun 27 years before it was known on Earth. In a letter to Lockyer, James Joseph enthused about the title of the new publication: “What a glorious title, Nature - a veritable stroke of genius to have hit upon. It is more than Cosmos, more than Universe. It includes the seen as well as the unseen, the possible as well as the actual. Nature and Nature’s God, mind and matter.." (2) As a mathematician, Joseph knew that nature is more than a landscape. The word 'naturalist' became restricted to those who study animals and plants and became subtly different from 'scientist'.

Two distinct ideas of nature had emerged by the 19th century and we live with the influence of that dichotomy today. Physics showed that while the fundamental forces of nature might be invisible they are everywhere, permeating everyday reality from outer space to the wood in the dining-room table, but it is difficult to relate that level of description of nature to everyday life unless we are thinking about technology. Landscape art remains popular partly because it

Kathmandu, Nepal. 

Surveyed by an ESA

satellite, depicted in

false-colour infra-red.

expresses essentially literary ideas; the picturesque, the Sublime, virtue and providence, concepts which do not require us to attempt counter-intuitive understanding of how nature actually works.

Attempts at reconciling science and art have always been problematic. The issue is not only one of a separation of concerns but also difference of vision. Evolution has provided us with senses that are just good enough for survival. Science has extended our ability to see further into the electromagnetic spectrum; infra-red,  x-rays, radio waves as well as forming images with electrons, but crucially it is through our own senses that we live. It is this aspect of existence that art celebrates.  The uncanny images of nature made by technology can be as unfamiliar as abstract art, which itself has always been on a path away from a simplistic depiction of nature.

Holger Cahill lamented the move away from figurative art in his introduction to the catalogue New Horizons in American Art (3) to the 1936 exhibition of work done under the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration: "Nature was no longer a harmony to be studied. It became something that furnished occasions for the exercise of a technique...Art in other words, had its own harmony, independent of nature. This idea was carried to its final term by the Cubists who declared that art need have no frame of reference in nature at all." Cahill did not claim that landscape art had ever been about 'realistic' observation but he wrote that before modern art "Nature had been had been conceived as a principle underlying the forms and phenomena of the visual world, drawing them into a harmonious and purposive whole, benevolent and somehow friendly to man's interests and ideals." (3)

Golden, Colorado by Eugene 

Trentham. The picture was 

reproduced in black and white in

New Horizons in American Art. 

The book posits a style of 'folk

art' as an alternative to 'European'

abstract art.

Because of the symbolic or allegorical tendency within landscape pictures, combined with selectivity favouring scenes that are beautiful, picturesque or sublime, landscape art reflects more a state of mind than reality. The values inherent in landscape art were eloquently expressed by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 book Waldron - or Life in the Woods.

Thoreau wrote about self-reliance and living in close harmony with nature. He was critical of industrial 'progress'.  For a period of time he chose to live in a hut at Waldron Pond near Concord in Massachusetts, so as to be as close as possible to the flora and fauna of the woods. His observations about the seasonal changes of plants and trees are of interest to climate-change scientists today. For Thoreau, Waldron Pond functioned as a microcosm, a miniature version of an ideal but beleaguered world in which industry and intensive farming were kept at bay.

The Weather Project by

Olafur Eliasson in the 

Turbine Hall at Tate Modern

in 2003. A representation of 

the visible surface of our

sun created by 200 sodium

lights. If the generation of 

electricity by thermonuclear 

power is ever achieved it 

will be in a machine placed

in a facility that would be

very similar to the Turbine 

Hall at the Tate. The device

will effectively be an

artificial sun created by

technology.

The building occupied

by Tate Modern originally

contained the Bankside 

power station and was

designed by Sir Gilbert 

Scott. At the peak of its

output Bankside power

station used 67 tons of

fuel-oil per hour to 

generate 300 MW of

electricity. Thermonuclear

fusion generates 

approximately one million

times as much energy as

chemical combustion.

Sunlight produced by

thermonuclear fusion in

our sun is the source of

energy for all life on Earth.

Sir Gilbert Scott was also

the architect for Liverpool

Anglican Cathedral.

The 21st century will bring to the foreground all the contradictory ideas of nature. Responses to environmental problems will be influenced by culturally determined images of nature from literature and landscape art. Genetically engineering plants to use more carbon dioxide from the air, the possibility of sequestering the gas underground, restoration of carbon sinks and the rewilding of inefficient farmland by intensification of agriculture elsewhere are as much aesthetic questions as ecological ones. The dividing line between nature and technology will be scrutinised. New forms of art are needed to comprehend the shape of the world we are creating, a cultural response that cannot be considered only in scientific terms. 

1) Laporte, Paul M. "Cubism and Science." The Journal of aesthetics and art criticism, 1949, Vol.7 (3), p.243-256

(2) https://www.nature.com/nature/history-of-nature

(3) Cahill, H, and Federal Art Project. New Horizons in American Art.  New York: Published for the M.O M.A. reprinted by Arno, 1969.

https://www.proquest.com/docview/859016746/fulltextPDF/73960000DC3743E9PQ/1?accountid=8018

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11320118-utopias-11

Art Beyond Nature

 

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11259594-art-beyond-nature

From 1826 when the first photograph was made to 1889 when
rolls of celluloid film became available, photography changed
from a medium that required almost as much work to make
one exposure as the creation of a small painting, to a small
portable box that could take multiple pictures, each taking
a fraction of a second to record. The task of attempting to
represent nature in a single picture became unnecessary. 
Photography changed how we see nature.

Throughout the 19th century photography gradually moved away from the aesthetics of painting to become a medium that was about paying attention to fleeting instances of existence. In the 20th century public understanding of nature was increasingly mediated through picture-magazines, documentary film and television. The expectation of seeing the essence of nature depicted in a single monumental painting, as was the ambition of landscape artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, was eclipsed by a multitude of photographs and cine-films depicting the natural world. Despite the tendency of photography to create meaning through the accumulation of images, two photographs attained the monumental status of some landscape paintings. Both the Apollo 8 Earthrise and the Apollo 17 Blue Marble photographs of the Earth have been adopted by the environmental

The Blue Marble photograph of Earth

was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on

the return leg of their mission to the 

Moon in  December 1972. The image 

shows no sign of life that would be

incontrovertible if this were to be a 

picture of an exo-planet. The reception

of the picture by society is framed by

cultural values more often expressed 

by language. The photograph has

acquired the monumental status of some

19th Century landscape paintings. The

picture is sublime in that it is both

beautiful and contains implications that

are terrifying.

movement as emblematic images of our precious biosphere, even though only clouds are visible in them. The pictures are actually enigmatic and the values attached to them are essentially literary ideas inherited from writers such as Henry David Thoreau. His philosophy of simple living in natural surroundings is more influential now than in his own lifetime. His 1854 book Walden; or Life in the Woods insisted that a life lived isolated from nature is not an authentic life. The controversial writer and transcendentalist Laurens van Der Post promoted this idea in the 1950s and, inspired by Carl Jung, proposed that wellbeing could only be attained through access to a universal unconscious that civilisation was diminishing. Avant-Garde art was already exploring this concept as the ideal of pictorial realism became increasingly invested in photography - freeing artists to experiment with non-objective (abstract) pictures. In 20th century European art, two competing ideas of authentic representations of nature coincided; the fashionable Theosophical/Jungian idea that abstract art was pursuing a world of harmony or energy that lay beyond visible reality (Artists as different as Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock were interested in this concept), and the traditional but still popular idea that a realistic depiction of an ideal scene can express the beauty (picturesque or sublime) of nature. 

Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
1937-42      Piet Mondrian 

In 1936 Holger Cahill wrote about modern

art "Art..had its own harmony independent

of nature...(now) art need have no frame of 

reference in nature at all. The relationship 

with nature, which had given the artist a

creative impetus for upward of two hundred

years, thus tended to disappear. "

Modern art, within modernism, became inward looking. The Bauhaus art school had its greatest influence on Architecture, graphic design and product design. The tendency for civilisation to become synonymous with the built environment and social space was legitemised by the 'disappearance' of nature into the laboratory as science explored matter at the level of atoms. Although (like music) fundamental nature has no visible surface, the search for authenticity occurs in modern science. In the age of remote-sensing satellites expeditions are sent out to establish 'ground truth' so as to calibrate instruments in space. In the parallel world of art, Walter Benjamin had a different problem with authenticity. In his 1935 book The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Benjamin argued that the 'aura' of paintings is missing in photographic copies because their uniqueness in a particular time and space is absent. These different aspects of authenticity come together in any consideration of the future of landscape art. The land art pioneer Robert Smithson turned the problem of pictorial authenticity into a creative opportunity when he devised his 'non-site' installations in which sketches, photographs and samples of material from remote landscapes were

Electron orbits of a Uranium atom.

Today the ancient Greek concepts of 

'The Music of the Spheres' and

'platonic shapes' persist in a modified 

form in science. Shells of electrons

orbiting atomic nuclei are reminiscent 

of the concentric crystal spheres,

once believed  to surround the Earth,

and the geometry of molecules

too small for us to see echo the

'Platonic Shapes' of ancient Greek 

philosophers.

Chloroplasts in plant tissue. Genetic

editing could increase their efficiency

by 20%, causing more Carbon 

Dioxide to be extracted from the 

atmosphere.

The outstanding feature of our

relationship with nature in the 21st 

Century will be our ability to change

it at the most basic level of life - DNA.
Because living organisms reproduce,

changes that will be made using 

genetic editing techniques could

become more widespread than our

current onslaught on nature with

mechanical technology. Changes to

ecosystems would be irreversible.

A new ethos of our relationship to

nature will be centred around decisions

about how much of the biosphere 

should be changed. If art is to have

any relevance to this process it will

need to go beyond the type of 

landscape picture that Jaan Wijnants

painted. (Right)Perhaps it wiil take

inspiration from work such as the 

animated data-realisation 

Welcome to the Anthropocene. 

(Below)

Welcome to the Anthropocene

 3minute 38 second video

exhibited in art galleries. Smithson created an aesthetic from the gap between representation of nature and actual landscapes. In the 21st century similar ingenuity will be needed to reflect how the potential use of technologies, such as synthetic biology and the 'reverse-engineering' of the atmosphere by CO2 removal, will bring into focus questions about the authenticity of the heavily managed biosphere. The potential to change nature will be substantially greater than at any time in history. The area between photographic 'realism' and abstract imagining will converge with the evolving boundary between nature and artifice.  

   

     

Wooded Landscape with Figures Walking by a Sandy Bank - Jaan Wijnants  (1635-1684)

Wijnants picture is in the style of most landscape paintings

of that era, but the 'sandy bank' that is depicted is most

unusual. The feature is actually a former cliff-face that was 

left behind by the creation of a polder - land reclaimed from 

the sea. The figures are walking on what would have been a

beach or the sea-floor. This is perhaps the earliest work of

art that can be related to the Anthropocene, our current 

epoch in which humans have become a geological force

that rivals natural Earth systems.

Attempts at reconciling science and art have always been

problematic. The issue is not one of difference of methods

but difference of vision. Evolution has provided us with

senses that are just good enough for survival. Science and

technology have expanded our ability to see into the infra-

red, the x-ray spectrum, radio waves and electrons. 

Crucially it is through our own senses that we live. It is this

aspect of existence that art celebrates. The capacity of

scientific methods to map nature over time is also different

from our lived experience. It was Robert Smithson who

came closest to resolving this conundrum. Along with other

land artists he situated himself firmly within the conceptual

art movement and created a significant bridge between art

and science.