Anthropocence Art

   

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 Modernism superseded the distinction between form and content but Lanyon's paintings are like medieval maps that contemplate the essence of places without the topographic precision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. 

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.

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