Utopias - 8 Artifice and nature

Utopias - 8 on Blurb

On Saturday 17th March 2001 two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Independent carried two different but equally remarkable photographs on their front pages. Over the Guardian headline " The news from Ground Zero: foot and mouth is

winning." a photograph of dead cattle on a pyre presents an almost apocalyptic vision of the efforts to cull and dispose of cattle that were either diseased or at risk of infection from the foot and mouth virus. The dead animals are piled upside down and their burnt hides seen in the compressed telephoto perspective would resemble a volcanic landscape if it were not for protruding legs and hooves silhouetted against smoke, coloured orange by the glowing fire. Tongues of flame curl upwards between the blackened carcasses.

The Independent newspaper also had a front page story about the foot and mouth epidemic  but above the headline there is a photograph of the newly opened Eden Project education centre and 'eco-park'. Situated in a former open-cast china clay pit at Bodelva near St Austell in Cornwall, eight geodesic domes  are visible nestled in the transformed industrial site. The photo-caption calls the project a 'Man-made Eden' and the expectant image contrasts with the gloom of the foot and mouth epidemic.

Although highly infectious, the FMD virus does not kill most of the cattle it infects but it does inflict painful sores, reduced weight and milk yield, as if to sabotage the work of farmers. The modern long-distance transportation of animals helps the disease to spread. Coming after the BSE crisis, caused by feeding animal protein to herbivorous cattle, the two farming emergencies suggest transgression on the part of humans, like 'The Fall' reputed to have occurred in the legendary Garden of Eden. 


The two photographs are very different from the vision of nature and agriculture in the tradition of landscape art. The piles of incinerated animals suggest a breach of an implicit contract between humans and nature. (1) The aesthetics of landscape art often suggested a relationship between farmers and the providence of the natural world. In the Independent photograph of the Eden Project the site looks like a futuristic moon-base translocated to a misty Cornish landscape. Inside the domes, that conform to the undulating ground like bubbles, flora from all of the world thrive. The Eden Project addresses the separation of consumers from nature and displays it in a global context, which was never within the scope of landscape artists who only ever depicted localised views, whether picturesque or sublime.

The artist Robert Smithson wanted to use industrially disrupted landscapes, like the china clay pit at Bodelva, to make site-specific projects. Although originally called Earth Art, early Land Art was not synonymous with ecology. Smithson tried to create art without cultural precedent, but Land Art was part of a 20th century ambition of artists to supersede views of nature. . When Piet Modrian wrote "by means of abstraction art has interiorized form and colour" (2) he implied that art should no longer be constrained by nature. 


In the 1950s Jackson Pollock made this idea explicit when he created abstract paintings that he believed to be expressions of psychological states.  By placing canvases on his studio floor Pollock adopted a paint-dripping technique, producing an 'all over' effect that resembles the contemporary photographs of the paths of sub-atomic particles in bubble-chamber experiments.

 Other artists made abstract paintings on a scale that could barely fit in a gallery. In the 1970s Land Art continued this development by leaving the gallery altogether and used the landscape itself as a medium for sculpture. Smithson's early experiments in Land Art were 'non-sites' that twinned a chosen remote location with a gallery exhibiting photographs, drawings and samples of material from the site. 

Michael Heizer’s 

Circular Surface, 

Planar DIsplacement 

Drawing in 

El Mirage Dry Lake.

Starting with small interventions in the landscape (incisions, pouringof tar and inserting poles) Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson andWalter De Maria went on to make varied projects that were united by an insistent bravura that challenged the process by which art objects are legitimised, the art gallery and the collector. These constructions, excavations and installations were made at desert locations so remote that, realisticaly, the main audience for these pieces would only ever see them in photographs. The photographic documentation of the constructions became an integral part of the artwork, one of the features of conceptual art from which Land Art emerged and supposedly set it apart from the landscaping of aristocrat's estates in 18th century Europe.

The relationship between the designs of country estates and their depiction in paintings as well as the broader genre of landscape art is comparable to that of 20th century Land Art and photography. As land artists saw each others art-making through photographs, so landscaped gardens and landscape paintings enjoyed a circular exchange of influences. Aristocrat's estates and landscape painting were a tangible or visible form of the idea of virtue, the quality of order and a feeling of purpose behind nature. Landscape art turned the natural world  into a persuasive idea of 'nature' that evoked feelings of wonder when it was picturesque and awe when it was sublime.

'Capability' Brown's

design for an improved

landscape

By using their wealth to fabricate actual landscapes based on the aesthetics of landscape pictures aristocrats associated their own social position with the concept of natural order. By owning landscape paintings the middle class could buy into this vision and state their place on the social ladder. In the industrial age primary wealth moved away from the landed gentry and in the 20th century became concentrated in corporations. Land Art was a reaction against the cultural heritage of landscape art as the Vietnam War escalated, civil rights protests grew and NASA explored the airless deserts of the moon.

Although still dependent on wealthy individuals such as Robert Scull and Virginia Dwan, Land Art gave young artists a place to experiment with conceptual art, unaccountable to national art institutions and the 'military industrial complex'. In the context of social turmoil in the 1960s the deserts of the western United States promised a 'tabula rasa' in which a new ethos could be explored. From 1969-1970 Michael Heizer used a bulldozer to excavate two parallel cuts in the side of Mormon Mesa near Overton in Nevada to make Double Negative. 240,000 tons of rock was moved to make the converging channels, parallel to the valley side, extended towards each other by ramps formed from excavated spoil.

Unlike 18th century country estates, the Land Art projects display an absurdist aspect. In 1970, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty parodied the sense of purpose inherent in an actual jetty. 6,650 tons of rock were dumped into Salt Lake, Utah to form a line that spirals in on itself. Heizer's and Smithson's projects look like relics from lost civilizations. Walter De Maria's 1977 Lightning Field (a grid of vertical poles in an oblong one mile by one kilometre) looks like a survey for a vast building. These projects are concepts, like Gustav Holst's The Planets which explores themes of beauty, grandeur and the sublime, while omitting the Earth from the symphony.

Whereas Land Art took art from the gallery, in 1991 the Biosphere 2 project tried to emulate the world in a sealed environment. Eventually it failed to make enough oxygen for its human 'crew'. (3) The designers of Biosphere 2 struggled with the complexity of biological nature, like the hapless creators of the 1930s Oklahoma dust-bowls. Through places like Biosphere 2 and the Eden Project we learn that we are reliant on the biosphere in ways we may not always fully understand.. To reflect our new place in nature, art has to create a visual equivalent to the poetry of Kathleen Jamie, who fluently combines the cosmic and the geological with the personal.

The first experiments with land art took place against a background of unprecedented rate of social change and significant political turmoil. Robert Smithson produced his early project partially buried woodshed at Kent State university in January 1970. By a tragic co-incidence in the summer of that year nine students were shot and four were killed on the campus, by members of the National Guard, during a Vietnam War protest. While the art world, at the level of major institutions and collectors, remained aloof from the social conflicts and the exigencies of those caught up in them it had its own internal battles to fight. What was referred to in the 1930s as "the crisis of figuration" (abstraction) in art came to a head with the rise to fame of Jackson Pollock. By 1949 Life magazine was asking " Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" 

From a 21st century post-modern perspective the controversy surrounding Pollock may seem trivial, but when he completed his Number 31 painting in 1950 he asked his wife Lee Krasner "Is this even a painting?" Being at the centre of the 'culture war' between the Avant- Garde and the conservative ideal of art may have accelerated Pollock's mental and physical destruction. Perhaps art did not end Pollock's life, but like individuals who carry a desperation within them that causes them to seek out civil wars and to volunteer to fight for one side, he was drawn to the cause.

 Although once at odds with a conservative ideal of art, most of the abstract expressionist artists have now been absorbed by the corporate world and their pictures have sold for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. It is not possible to look at the photographs of the Degenerate Art exhibition organised by the Nazi party in 1937, so at to mock the products of the avant-garde, and not imagine the pictures gracing the walls of millionaires today. The Hollywood dramatisation of the life of Vincent van Goch Lust for Life marks the time when the idea of the 'tortured artistic genius' became lodged within the public imagination. The film was released in 1956, the same year as Jackson Pollock's early death in a road accident. It is this association of the avant-garde with the unique collectability of the work of exceptional individuals that commends it to the commercial world, and the investment portfolios of the wealthy. 

Artists have never changed the world as much as the ant-Vietnam War movement. The protests created a mass awareness of environmental issues that inform the politics of today. The exact point of contact between the two protest movements could be defined by the use of defoliant chemicals in Vietnam. The tactic of denying cover for the Vietcong army left a toxic, carcinogenic and mutogenic legacy caused by the dioxin by-product in the 'agent orange' sprayed by aircraft over huge areas to remove leaves from trees in zones of infiltration. 

In the midst of the turmoil of the last century landscape art became marginalised and its aesthetics associated with reactionary elites. In the 1960s landscape art became as irrelevant to a new socially engaged art as it was to the 'high end' art sought after by the wealthy collectors. In the 21st century we have come full circle. An engagement with landscape and the wider awareness of the environment and Earth systems is the most important challenge for art. This circularity of change mirrors the change in the appearance of science in society. In the 20th century science became associated with nuclear weapons and industrial pollution. In the 21st century it is the turn of right-wing politicians to deny the evidence of climate change provided by science. 

The moon-race was another kind of proxy-war between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. The objective of the race, the airless and lifeless surface of the moon seemed to personify what was wrong with science for many people.  The 1966 Daily Mail headline " The picture of the century" over the Lunar Orbiter oblique photograph of the crater Copernicus on the moon could not have been more wrong.  It is either the Apollo 8 Earthrise picture or the Apollo 17 Blue Marble picture of the Earth that captured the imagination of the world.

1. Apollo 8 - 24th December 1968  Earthrise                       Apollo 17 - 7th December 1972 Blue Marble

In the melee of competing aspirations in 20th century art, landscape all but disappeared. Traditional landscape paintings became deeply unfashionable, the cubist, surreal and abstract expressionist movements became collectable and out of the anti-war, CND and feminist movements a socially committed idea of public art evolved that concentrates of the idea of individual fulfillment and identity. In the 21st century the challenge is to produce forms of art that encourage contemplation of artifice and nature as well as choices around genetic editing and geoengineering that must be made in the Anthropocene, without falling into the trap of being only protests.
Utopias-8 on BLURB