Utopias - 6 Landscape In the Anthropocene.

http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/8713591-utopias-6

Alexander von Humboldt has been described as the last scientist

Climatic regions made explicit by isotherms,
now also used to map weather.

who knew everything. After his death in 1859 the volume of knowledge of nature became too great for one person to comprehend. Amongst his many achievements, he invented isothermal lines for climatic maps. Isolines enable us to map aspects of nature that are invisible and extend beyond the horizon or the scope of a landscape picture. Since the time of Humboldt, science has continued to advance and now researchers know more and more about ever narrower fields of study while the scientific account of nature has reached a point that exceeds popular understanding and shared belief.

The industrial revolution made this happen by providing the 
technology and instruments that could interrogate nature. The 

Punched cards used to
record patterns for a
Jacquard loom.

conceptualisation of nature in the west evolved within a circular exchange of ideas between science, technology and culture. Jacquard looms coincided with speculation about the existence of genes. In the 20th century photography made time appear to stand still and pass more quickly or slowly. radio connected distant lands and aeroplanes soared above landscapes that could be read as revealed geology, but then nuclear

Aerial photograph - USAF.

physics and the space race caused this narrative arc to break contact with perceptible nature and ordinary lives.

In this information age computers and gene-editing technology allow simulations of Earth systems and the transformation of

data realisation of Earth systems and gene editing

biology, but art struggles to adapt to our changed relationship to nature. From the 16th century onwards oil paint was the medium that allowed landscape painters to depict the solidity of nature that could be owned as garden, farm, estate or empire. The idea of a tangible nature was so sincerely believed in that the earliest attempt at producing a periodic table of elements included heat and light.

Periodic table of elements

Dimitri Mendeleev's revised periodic table was created in 1869 just

as impressionist painters were starting to explore the ephemeral effects of light. The pictorial dissolution of material certainty that was a feature of modern art presaged Einstein's theories of relativity but, despite a brief dalliance between cubism and relativity, 20th century art ignored new knowledge of nature from science. However, architecture embraced ideas from engineering. Whereas classicism had inspired

The entrance to the front of the

administrative office building in 

the Werkbund Exhibition at 

Cologne 1914 (a)

Strowger electro-mechanical exchange 

monumental constructions, modernist architects saw buildings as structural frames potentially open to light; bridges over inhabited space. (1) The utility of vertical and horizontal planes in modernist architecture reflect the movements of selectors in a 1930s electro-mechanical telephone exchange. 

Whether surrounded by racks of equipment in a telephone exchange or moving between the rollers of a printing press to change the plates, the workers of the 20th century were no longer standing beside machines but were inside them.

Overlapping with the emergence of modern art, the scale and power of industry began to rival that of nature. The move from purely mechanical to electrically powered machinery subtly changed inhabited landscapes by altering the relationship between

The Siedlung of working-class dwellings at 

Dessau. (b)

settlements and sources of energy and water. Although towns and cities established on fall-lines and coalfields still exist, the new places of the 20th century were freed from reliance on nature by electricity and pumped water.

The inexorable logic of the grid that came from latitude and

longitude was applied to the layout of cities such as post Haussmann Paris and New York. In his adopted home

Composition in Yellow, Blue and Red - 

Piet Mondrian - Museum of Modern Art, 

New York.

Piet Mondrian found inspiration in the grid layout of New York and the popular boogie-woogie music that was itself influenced by mechanical player-pianos. The punched-paper rolls that recorded musical notes were a successor to the Jacquard loom controlled by programmed cards. As Mondrian was abstracting nature into blocks of colour the first experimental television cameras were dissecting scenes into lines of light and dark.

Television 1938

Vertical scan yelevision

19th century 'Magic Lantern' slide projections and cinema were the first media to depend on artificial light.  Analogue Televisions glow with their own internal light even when no signal from a camera is present. By substituting a signal from a computer it became possible to create moving images of fictional or simulated events from mathematics in the 1980s. Simulations of Earth systems more ambitious than anything imagined by Alexander von Humboldt are now routinely generated. Susan Sontag's prediction ( towards a new sensibility -  against interpretation 1965 ) that a new cultural form  bridging the divide between science and art is now a distinct possibility, and in the context of the Anthropocene, a necessity.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Motivated by a desire to achieve a universal system of aesthetics Modrian's progression from impressionistic landscape pictures, through increasingly abstracted work, ended with geometric compositions that did not depend on seeing nature at all. (2) Paradoxically, science was already extending vision into the realms of the microscopic and the invisible; x-rays, infra-red, radio(radar) and  sound (sonar).

Cosmic Ray Shower

Mondrian's ambitious attempt at culminating the debate about beauty, that had engaged artists since the time of Plato and Aristotle, emulated scientific reductionism which had promised to unwrap the  complexity of nature. Science replaced mysterious correspondences within alchemy and astrology by the bold assertion that all of nature was a manifestation of just four fundamental forces; gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.

A deep simplicity underlying the intricate appearances of the world has been an appealing idea since Paleotithic cave paintings of animal-beings and the use of water features in Persian gardens to symbolise the mythical four rivers of creation. The Pharaoh Akhenaten's replacement of polytheism by the worship of the sun god Aten changed the personification of natural forces towards a nascent form of natural philosophy.

The contemporary poem of praise to the sun reveals an intuitive

.

.Above - Akhenaton,Nefertiti,and three daughters

Poem in Praise if the Sun
."When you arise from the horizon the earth grows bright;

You shine as the Aten in the sky and drive away the darkness;

When your rays gleam forth, the whole of Egypt is festive.

People wake up and stand on their feet

For you have lifted them up.

They wash their limbs and take up their clothes and dress;

They raise their arms to you in adoration.

Then the whole of the land does its work;

All cattle enjoy their pastures,

Trees and plants grow green,

Birds fly up from their nests

And raise their wings in praise of their spirit.

Goats frisk on their feet,

And all fluttering and flying things come alive.

Because you shine on them.

Boats sail up and downstream,

All ways are opened because you have appeared.

The fish in the river leap up to you

Your rays are in the deep of the sea."...

understanding of how life temporarily diverts energy that is flowing from a place of concentration. The poem's evocative description of the fecundity of life, emanating from the sun, is ascribed to Aten. Amalgamating the organising powers of previous demoted gods, Aten was an early explanation of what came to be regarded as nature. After echoing through Classical Greek, Roman and Renaissance cultures the imagination of nature evolved via history painting into a commodity with a wider audience than that of portraiture and without reliance on the patronage of the church. In the Dutch Golden Age the merchant class could express their status through a taste for portraits of nature.

Landscape art established a relationship to nature like that of the gardener who tends to specific plants. The landscape painter selected a view of nature that could imply ideas of beauty, grandeur, order, virtue, security or adventure by gathering together images of trees, rivers and mountains into a specific composition.

For landscape art to succeed aesthetically and commercially it was important for these elements garnered from the world to be placed within a recognisable spectrum of taste, from picturesque Arcadia to sublime wilderness.

Wooded landscape 
with figures walking 
Manchester Art Gallery
Polders

A Dutch painting Wooded landscape with figures walking by a sandy bank by Jan Wijnants (1632 -1684) is a picturesque scene featuring a transformed former coastline left behind by the exclusion of the sea from a polder. Wijnants left us with one of the earliest painted records of the Anthropocene, our present epoch in which nature and artifice are interacting to create a world without true wilderness and with                                           new challenges.

Large scale land reclamation from the sea coincided with a new

attitude to nature. Whereas the Greek poet Hesiod had imagined

that a process of decline caused a Golden Age to be lost to a Silver Age and then a Bronze age etc, by the time of the industrial

    The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers' 

    Stone imagines the discovery of phosphorous.

revolution Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) was visualising the optimism of scientific rationalism. Wright used what could now be called film noir lighting in dramatic scenes of experiments 
witnessed by awed onlookers. As well as painting fashionably sublime pictures he created Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers' Stone and An Iron Forge in which sunlight is replaced by the artificial light of phosphorous and incandescent metal. In the 21st century, after the enthusiasm for the 'white heat of technology' has cooled, the Anthropocene has cast a more searching critique of technology and nature to which art is starting to respond.(3)

An Iron Forge 

Joseph Wright paintings at Derby Museuems

(1) (a) (b) GROPIUS, Walter. The New Architecture of the Bauhaus. London: Faber and Faber, 1935. (1965, 1968.)

(2) Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art Vol. 13, No. 4/5, Eleven Europeans in America (1946), pages 35 - 37.

(3) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments & Epistemologies editor Davis, H, Turpi, E . Open Humanities Press.

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