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Nottinghamshire is the result of gravel extraction that has left behind flooded areas that are now managed by a wildlife conservation charity. In this Anthropocene epoch human activity moves more material than rivers and glaciers. Humans have become a geological force. Climate change means that no corner of the Earth is unaffected. No landscape can be though of as truly 'authentic'. |
We are familiar with the possibility of getting lost in a landscape but the Anthropocene epoch, the present time in which humans have effectively overridden nature, presents a way of being metaphorically lost in the increasingly artificial world that we are creating by our own technological power. Ideas of nature are as much a product of imagination as landscape pictures. While we believe that we have a relationship with an objectively real world, there is a race between the discovery of its hidden intricacies and the rate at which agriculture and industry is transforming it. The defining characteristic of the 21st century will be the relentless replacement of the natural world by the built-environment, agriculture, synthetic biology and waste materials. Humans are responsible for a new mass extinction event. The expansion of agriculture and globalised consumerism is moving the world towards a homogenised biosphere in which the concept of 'invasive species' will no longer be meaningful. Biomass may remain broadly the same as the number of species within it diminishes. Biodiversity is reduced and Earth systems are being pushed to tipping points beyond which they will operate in new and unpredictable ways.
The tradition of western landscape art has been complicit in this process.
Bucolic landscape scenes depicted actual landscapes as constructed
achievements that were a combination of providence and virtuous labour. The picturesque sub-genre of landscape art provides a dream of nature, in which the desire to exploit the landscape operates in harmony with a reduced form of wilderness in the form of woods and distant hills. Within landscape art there is no real difference between agriculture and nature. This still popular aesthetic of the picturesque landscape picture (painted or photographed) suggests that as long as there are a few corners of the world that are still wild, all will be well. Actually, the impact of human activity on Earth systems occurs on a scale that is outside the scope of any single picture. Carbon dioxide emissions are not only increasing global temperatures, they are also acidifying oceans. Methane emissions from cattle also act as a greenhouse gas. It is possible that humans are now driving evolution and creating some new species as well as pushing many more to extinction. Inevitably technology in the 21st century will be used to try to navigate the Anthropocene. Attempts to use genetic engineering to modify not just crops but entire ecosystems to cope with climate change are being considered. The genes that control photosynthesis may be changed so that more carbon dioxide is removed from the air. Machines to capture the gas and store it underground already exist. Nostalgic landscape art is no longer a reflection of life.
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Flatford Mill c 1816 John Constable The son of a wealthy corn merchant, Constable's early paintings exhibit an affection for the area in which he lived. His landscapes belong to an era when commerce was on such a small scale it could operate in sympathy with nature. Today, his paintings are part of a nostalgia 'industry' of which tourism is a very real economic part. Hill farming subsidies in the UK are partly paid to maintain farms in the appearance made familiar by landscape art. The grazing on hill farms keeps the land free from vegetation that would help to reduce flooding and absorb carbon dioxide. |
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Since the iconic Picture 51 x-ray diffraction photograph was made by Rosalind Franklin in 1952 the discovery of the structure of DNA, which the picture enabled, has resulted in the invention of genome editing technology which will alter plants to use more carbon dioxide from the air. Eventually entire ecosystems could be altered, either to help plants cope with climate change or to try to return atmospheric CO2 levels to pre- industrial values. |
The 21st century needs a new genre of art that contemplates the changing distinction between the natural world and technology as well as acknowledging that the 'technological sublime' is now as eloquent as 'sublime nature' was in Edmund Burke's time. The extent to which contemporary art is characterised by detachment, coolness and irony is unhelpful in this direction. The expectation that minimalism can distill the essence of what is significant into a few lines or shapes goes unfulfilled. Visual art could provide a critical context to the exercise of control over nature by creating opportunities for contemplation and reverie and to momentarily step back from the language of institutions, writers and journalists. Landscapes will change as livestock becomes less prominent in agriculture. Opposing practices of permaculture versus intensive agriculture, including industrialised 'vertical farming' and the production of cultured meat in bioreactors, will probably operate at the same time in different places. While permaculture aims to reduce the impact of food production on nature, paradoxically, industrialised farming concentrated in smaller areas opens the possibility of rewilding and the return of farmland to carbon-sink wetland. Wind and solar energy will become
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There is no guarantee that thermonuclear fusion can be used as a source of electricity. If a way of harnessing the heat released by fusing protons together is found it could be the most significant technical innovation since the discovery of how to make fire. Fusion power would not eliminate the need for solar, tidal, geothermal and wind energy, but the surplus capacity could be used to mechanically extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, liquefy it and store it underground. Whoever controlled access to these underground stores would effectively have their hand on the 'global thermostat'. In some distant future the gas could be released to negate the onset of an ice-age. |
more common. Controlled thermonuclear fusion, if it works, will effectively create artificial suns on Earth. The diffusing boundary between naturalness and artifice will be the most important subject for art in the 21st century, creating the impetus for a new aesthetic in art as almost the entire world becomes a kind of walled garden with wilderness confined to ever-decreasing pockets - an exact reversal of the medieval hortus conclusus or ancient paradeisos.
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A winter garden under cover painted by Franz Antoine in 1852. The glass-enclosed space is perhaps the ultimate form of a garden in which the air itself is protected from cold. Before landscape art evolved from narrative driven history painting, walled gardens such as the European Hortus Conclusus and the Paradeisos of Egypt and Persia were culturally important means of maintaining a shared understanding and interpretation of nature. The ordering of space can serve as metaphor for the construction of meaning in general, and the creation of a garden is specifically symbolic of a belief in an underlying order behind nature. A paradox of our age is that although our arrangements of fields, orchards and herb gardens were created to save what we value from harm, it is wilderness that is now in need of protection. Humans now manage 75% of land that is not ice-bound. What was once thought of as threatening is now itself in danger. It can now be understood that although uncultivated nature was once seen as randomness it is in fact composed of dynamic relationships of organisms in complex ecological communities. The future will bring increasing ability to alter nature. Genome editing, synthetic biology and possibly nano-technology that will join atoms together to form new compounds without chemical reactions, will define the 21st century. It is over ambitions to expect art to reflect all of this, but the active border between nature and technology, the actual location of choices, will be a subject as significant as landscape was from the 17th century to the 19th century. Metaphorically, the point of contact between nature and technology will be like a weather front dividing air-masses. This active zone of interaction will give rise to the most interesting art. |
- LOST IN LANDSCAPE
- ISBN
- Hardcover, Dust Jacket: 9798210452474
- Hardcover, ImageWrap: 9798210452467
- Softcover: 9798210452450
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