Utopias - 9

On the 26th September 1991, a team of four men and four women, watched by international press and television reporters, sealed themselves into what was essentially a huge terrarium called Biosphere 2.  Built over three years at a site in Oracle, Arizona, the project was expected to demonstrate that a working scale-model of the Earth's biosphere could sustain a space colony with not just food but also air and water.  The air-tight environment was built on the scale of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. To emulate the

Biosphere 2. The sealed environment was

divided into sections called 'biomes' and

can be regarded as a research facility to

test the viability of future self- supporting

space colonies and as a conceptual

art project foregrounding the complexity

of our biological and agricultural world.

entirety of the biological world the 1.27 hectare enclosure was covered by a glass and steel space-frame and divided into areas; rain-forest, ocean (with a coral reef), mangrove marsh, savanna, fog desert and an agricultural area. 

Biosphere 2 was the home for the volunteers for two years during which time they had to grow all their own food,  undertake a host of scientific measurements and (paradoxically) maintain the wilderness areas. The atmosphere was monitored every 15 minutes by 2000 sensors and the entire artificial environment was controlled by a computer and a nearby 'mission control'. Periods of rain were programmed and artificial waves created in the 'ocean'. Distinct climatic zones were emulated in different sections by heating, cooling, drying and humidifying the air.

The Bios 3 underground 
research facility in
Krasnoyarsk, Russia
Between 1972 and 1984 three 
people were able to live in
the 315 cubic metre
sealed environment with
25 % of oxygen supplied
by algae and wheat plants.

 The designers of Biosphere 2 attempted to encapsulate as many of the physical aspects of the Earth as possible. It was not the first experiment to use algae or plants to keep humans alive in a closed environment, but it was the first attempt at making a working model of the Earth's biosphere. In 1979 James Lovelock proposed that the totality of Earth systems form a self-regulating whole, which he named Gaia. (1) Although photosynthesising oxygen, Biosphere 2 could not  maintain temperatures as Earth systems do, and so the project used extensive underground air-management systems run by a gas-powered energy unit. 

Biosphere 2 was subsequently criticised for being unscientific because the 'biospherian' crew were not all qualified as scientists. This judgement ignored the fact that the first astronauts were test-pilots. The Skylab solar telescope was operated from 1973 to 1974 for hundreds of hours by astronauts who were not astronomers. It was also suggested that the project pursued a subjective 'new age' agenda. Some biospherians were from a performance background and they had previously worked with the designers of Biosphere 2, businessman and inventor Ed Bass and 'systems ecologist' John P. Allen, at a counter-cultural community known as the Synergia Ranch 

The United States pavilion
at the Expo 67 fair in Quebec.
Buckminster Fuller pioneered
the use of geodesic domes as
efficient structures covering
the greatest volume with the
optimum about of material.

This overlapping of interests came from the zeitgeist of the 1960s. Inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, Ed  Bass and John Allen were influenced by the concept of 'design science exploration' which resists categorisation as either architecture or engineering and emphasizes the application of ingenuity over the marshaling of huge resources. Instead of regarding Biosphere 2 as a single experiment that could succeed or fail, it is more appropriate to understand it as a laboratory for multiple investigations. (2) The project could even fit within the definition of art, as chosen by Susan Sontag.

In her 1965 essay One culture and the new sensibility. Sontag wrote that the function of art was "giving pleasure and educating conscience and sensibility." Biosphere 2 may sit at the end of a spectrum of creations that might be considered art. The situation of its occupants was similar to that of the crew of a submarine as they lived with a fixed volume of air. Their personal effects had to be vetted as soap, shampoo, paint or glue that contained chemicals that could accumulate in the air were not allowed. This issue, along with many others raised by living in a microcosm, commented on life in the real world. Biosphere 2 blurred the distinction between science, engineering and performance art.

1. The Intensive Agriculture Biome in which the 'biospherian' crew produced their food.
2. The display screen on which data from 2000 sensors was displayed.
3. Although the ambition of Biosphere 2 was to emulate the process by which oxygen is replenished in the air by plants, it was necessary to use extensive electrical and mechanical systems to control temperate, create rainfall, control salinity of water bodies, remove algae from the 'rivers' and 'seas', as well as pumping water. The systems were monitored by engineers in
a nearby control centre, but maintained by the isolating crew.
4. The wilderness area was also maintained by the crew, pointing towards the 21st century when even non-cultivated areas may need to be helped to adapt to climate change.

The single greatest achievement of Biosphere 2 was to clarify the relationship between people and the actual biosphere. By attempting to live in a minuscule version of the entirety of Earth systems, the project highlighted problems that we face today. Population growth has changed the ratio of space that is occupied by humans, relative to wilderness, so as to approach that of biosphere 2.  We can no longer assume that waste is diluted by air and water to a level of insignificance. Human influence on Earth systems has increased to such a degree that we are now in a new geological era, the Anthropocene, 

Diamond mining. From the
first creation of ceramics
26,000 years ago, exploitation
of resources has expanded
to such an extent that
 humans can now be regarded
 as a geological force.

Within the limited definition of nature that excludes physics it is evident that economic activity is the main cause of species extinction. Within the wider definition of nature that includes physics; the change to the heat balance of the Earth caused by industrial carbon dioxide and methane

Open cast mine in Bohemia.
Humans move more material
around the Earth than glaciers
and rivers. 

emissions; and the discovery that humans move more material through mining, dredging and construction than the action of glaciers and rivers, means that humans are now a geological force on a planetary scale. During the first two 'missions' of biosphere 2 the crew had to manage every area of the space including the ocean, and the wilderness area. Their situation was similar to ours today.

The extent of environmental transformation and of global warming may require change not only to our modes of industry and agriculture but also the management of what used to be regarded as wilderness. Climate change may occur faster than plant species can migrate. The capacity to move bio-communities by transplanting species will be explored.(3) A more radical option would be to use CRISPR gene editing to adapt plants to new climates, or even increase the efficiency of photosynthesis so as to remove more carbon dioxide from the air. It is possible that we are already creating new species and driving evolution by changing environments. 

An arena will open up between the permaculture ideal of leaving as little trace on the Earth as possible and the technological ethos of genetic editing and geoengineering projects to mitigate climate change. Biosphere 2 presaged today's need for nuanced consideration of the interaction between artifice and nature - art that is not 'moral journalism'. In the 20th century a shared conception of landscape fragmented as nature disappeared into the laboratory and artists ended the distinction between content and style. The cultural baggage of landscape art; the sublime, the picturesque, numinist and symbolist imagery, was largely forgotten.  

TOP: Sub-atomic particles revealed in a bubble-chamber. The paths of the emerging particles are only partially constrained by the magnetic field within the walls of the chamber.

BOTTOM: Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock. His method of applying paint to a horizontal canvas on the floor of his studio created an 'all over' effect suggesting that the pictures are a small window on a greater field, seething with energy. Pollock's 'action' paintings often seem to resent the limiting borders of the canvas.

Since the Renaissance art and science have gradually drifted apart, with a few notable exceptions. For a few years in the period of impressionist painting it appeared that some artists' interests in the perception of colour overlapped with scientists' investigations of light. Some commentators have seen links between Einsteins theory of relativity and cubist art. Art came to concentrate more closely on subjective experiences as physics delved ever deeper into nature at the level of the sub-atomic. The divergence of art and science is illustrated by the Festival Pattern Group which was tasked with using images from x-ray crystallography to inspire work for the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition. The studies that the group made resulted in designs they were used for craft and not art (as defined by contemporary art critics and galleries).

Jackson Pollock's belief that abstract expressionist painting resulted from a relationship between the creative process and fundamental aspects of nature relates to the title of Leo Szilard's paper "On the decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention of intelligent beings". His paintings suggest the emergence of significant forms created from energy. Photographs of sub-atomic particles and Pollock's painting suggest the limitless and therefore sublime aspect of nature.

  

1. Michael Heizer - Double Negative - Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada in 1969-70.

2. Michael Heizer - displaced/replaced mass . Nevada. 1969

3. Michael Heizer - Circular Surface drawing - El Mirage Dry Lake, Mojave Desert, CA (ephemeral tracks created by motorcycle)

Land art constructions in the desert of the United States were a relisation of new directions in art that Susan Sontag described in her 1965 essay one culture and the new sensibility. Deliberately avoiding the emotional and cultural associations of landscape art, the constructions display a cool aloofness associated with conceptual art. Philosophers such as Hegel have argued that the beauty of ideas would eventually replace the need for visual art, but Land Art, while classifiable as conceptual art, escapes from this ideological cage by existing more as photographs and films/videos than pure ideas related by words. Pictures of land art constructions provide an aesthetic pleasure of their own, while the original creations continue to exist. Apart from ephemeral land art, the sites of these works can be regarded as both destinations for a pilgrimage and a touristic visitor attraction, like preserved Hollywood sets that become theme parks.

        

For art historians, the post-modern 'coolness' of the land art movement in the 1970s was full-stop to the genre of landscape art, but  it took place against a background of political turmoil. Robert Smithson produced his project Partially Buried Woodshed at Kent State University in January 1970. Later that year on the campus nine students were shot and four were killed by members of the National Guard during a Vietnam War protest. The emergence of the environmental movement from the Vietnam War protests was stimulated by the use of defoliant chemicals to deny cover for the Vietcong army. The dioxin by-product in the 'agent orange' sprayed by aircraft over huge areas left a toxic, carcinogenic and mutagenic legacy. 

1. Partially buried woodshed - An early land art experiment created at Kent State University by Robert Smithson January 1970.
2. Kent state University 4th May 1970. Four students were killed and nine students were wounded by the Ohio National Guard during a Vietnam War protest.
3. Aircraft spraying 'agent orange' defoliant in Vietnam. 

The unforeseen juxtaposition of Robert Smithson's partially buried woodshed and the shooting of thirteen students at Kent State University in the same year is a painful reminder that art does not operate in a vacuum, isolated from the society that ultimately funds it and provides an audience for it. The land art 'movement' of the 1970s was an implicit elision of landscape art that was associated with conservative values and privilege. Abstract art that occupied the attention of the art world between impressionism and the 1970s was influenced by the idea that aesthetic feelings for non-representational compositions arose from shared psychological processes, not dependent on race or class, that could contribute to 'universal' values that were implicitly socialist in nature. Before the Second World Was several abstract artists including Piet Mondrian and to a lesser extent Jackson Pollock took the idea of the psychological basis of creativity much further by involvement in the the quasi-religion Theosophy. Identifying the dividing line between mysticism and a poetic response to nature will remain a challenge for artists in the 21st century. 

In this century thermonuclear fusion could generate enough electricity to sequester carbon dioxide from the air. On a scale far greater than the defoliation of trees in Vietnam, the project would reverse global warming and allow us to release the gas at the onset of a future ice-age. Having a hand on the world's thermostat, we would be essentially 'flying the planet'. In the 21st century art cannot be limited to the rhetoric of protest movements. It could elucidate what we mean by the word 'nature' in a world shaped by synthetic biology and geoengineering.

BRINGING BIOTECHNOLOGIES TO CONSERVATION

Living robots from skin cells

Artificial life made in a laboratory

1.Chloroplasts are the sites of photosynthesis in plants. They are controlled by genes that may be edited in the future so as to increase the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 20%.

2. Lancelot 'Capability' Brown  championed the practice of creating idealised landscapes within the estates of wealthy landowners. The modification of landscapes to match the ideal of romanticised landscape paintings was eventually extended to great public parks such as Central Park in New York. In the 21st century it may be considered necessary to modify what is currently regarded as natural bio-communities so as to adapt them to climate change and extract more carbon dioxide from the air.

3. In 1952 Stanley Miller created compounds associated with living organisms by passing an electric charge through a flask containing a mixture of gasses created to emulate the atmosphere of the Earth soon after its formation.     

4. After Stanley Miller's experiments created the basic building blocks of life it was briefly thought that life could be created in a 'second genesis' in the laboratory. This has proved to be beyond present capabilities, but radical modifications of existing cells with entirely synthesised genes has been accomplished. Although there is a large gap between Stanley Miller's creation of chemical precursors to life and the modification of existing cells, the cultural significance of the changing distinctions between naturally occurring systems and engineered systems will be a major subject for art in the 21st century. 

Climate engineering

. 

The choices that are to be made in the 21st century around climate change and the Anthropocene are creating a need for an art of nature that moves on from the traditions of landscape art to respond to evolving values around artifice and naturalness. One challenge will be to remain distinct from both new-age mysticism and techno-utopianism. 

References from main text:

(1) Lovelock, James. Gaia : A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. 

(2) Alling, Abigail., Mark. Nelson, and Sally. Silverstone. Life under Glass : The inside Story of Biosphere 2. Oracle, AZ: Biosphere, 1993

(3) https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/07/how-to-plant-the-forests-of-the-future/

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Utopias - 9 on the blurb website

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

Utopias - 2

Even the most cogent definition of nature fails to dispel a sense of ambiguity about our position in relation to naturalness. Alexander von Humboldt established a geographical and scientific view of nature that could be more or less contained within literature and the genre of landscape painting. The revolution in our understanding of nature resulting from 20th century nuclear physics and recent advances in synthetic biology makes it harder to continue a shared definition of nature. The realisation that nature obeys physical laws that are amoral undermines what was once a common reference point in culture.

http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/6669424-utopias-2

Fauxscape

Since its emergence from the domination of history painting in the 16th century, landscape art rose to high fashion in the 19th century and back to such relative obscurity that now the indexes of many art history books do not list it.