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 7

Utopias-7 on Blurb

On the 25th December 1758 the return of a comet, predicted by

Halley's Comet photographed in 1910

Edmond Halley 53 years earlier, was seen in Germany. News of the arrival was greeted with jubilation in scientific circles around the world

and especially in France where a group of mathematicians had calculated a delay of 618 days, caused by the

gravitational influence of Jupiter. The discovery proved the ability of science not only to describe nature but also to predict the future behaviour of physical systems. If the motion of celestial mechanics could be predicted then the workings of unbuilt machines would also. The industrial revolution would no longer progress by trial and error but would use science to explore nature and the power of steam, electricity and the atom. 

The Plutonium bomb ready

for detonation in July 1945

The test was required as

the 'prompt criticality'

method of detonation was 

less certain than the 'gun-type'

Hiroshima weapon.

Science came to dominate medicine, industry, transport, communication  and warfare. In 1945 when two atomic bombs were detonated in Japan the uranium bomb used to attack Hiroshima had not been tested, such was the confidence of its designers. A test of a plutonium weapon in the United States was deemed necessary three weeks before the attack on Nagasaki. Edmond Haylley knew that 'his' comet would not return in his lifetime. Before the first atomic explosion in July 1945 Hans Bethe calculated that it would not ignite the entire atmosphere of the Earth.

The pursuit of knowledge that had been the essence of the

Enlightenment took a dark turn in 1945 and art had little to reflect this. Although  film, television, literature and journalism were greatly exercised by the atomic age, suggestions of apprehension hinted at in Joseph Wright's 18th century paintings of scientific

Sphere Within Sphere 
Arnaldo Pmodoro

experiments found no expression, in the art of the 20th century, that was equal to the scale of change.                                  

The desire to elicit power from nature motivated the creation of prehistoric cave paintings and was explored by philosophers in classical Greece, but the adjustment from belief in magic to testable theories of nature as physical forces is still not complete. 'Nature' now has layered meanings, one of which has the physical laws of nature operating only in the background to the life and immediate experience of individuals. This idea of nature has evolved  to exclude the seemingly abstruse discoveries of science. It has become a habit of mind that science and the phenomena it describes are distinct from life. The use of atomic bombs reinforced this tendency by associating science with mass destruction. Conflating the misgivings associated with the atomic bombing of cities with the uncanny conversion of matter to energy, a part of popular culture derived a sense of science as being a transgression of nature .  (1)

 Thermonuclear weapons tested from 1952 onwards are one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War. Convection currents from the explosions were so strong they thrust radioactive material into the stratosphere and around the world. By the 1960s even the bones 

of penguins in Antarctica contained detectable amounts of strontium-90. Other radioactive products are now being incorporated into newly-forming rocks. Such a radioactive marker, as well as chemical changes caused by climate change, are cited as a 'golden spike' recording an idetifiable start to the Anthropocene geological era in which humans are the dominant influence on Earth systems. 


As well as global warming, caused by reducing the infra-red transparency of the atmosphere

From Mars and its Canals 
this drawing by Percival 
Lowell is the result of an 
optical illusion. Over years
of telescopic observations
Lowell produced numerous
drawings of 'canals' but the
features have never been 
photographed.Through his 
books Lowell introduced 
the idea of global scale 
engineering to the popular
imagination.

through carbon dioxide and methane emissions, industrial activity now moves as much material as rivers and glaciers. Humans are now a planetary force on a scale imagined by Percival Lowell in his erroneous but influential books about a supposed civilization creating a huge network of irrigation canals on Mars. Our technosphere, the total quantity of material made or relocated by humans, has been estimated to weigh 30 trillion tons. It takes 20 tons of rock to produce a single gold wedding ring.

In his book the American Technological Sublime David Nye claims that between the start of the 'atomic age' in 1945 and the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969 the  impression of  awe once associated with nature, in art and literature, also became attached to technology. However the technological sublime is not part of contemporary art. The transformation of the Earth is more likely to be depicted through the ability of film and video editing to join places and the capacity of aerial photography to convey a landscape undiminished by distance. 


Proliferation of mass media at the start of the 20th century coincided with the abandonment of perspectival representation of three dimensional space by avant garde art, leaving photography to continue the aesthetic of the sublime. Ansel Adams' photographs of the pristine Sierra Nevada were contemporary with Le Corbusier's photographic book celebrating the cultural importance of aircraft. (2) In the 20th century the National Geographic magazine brought these aesthetics to a mass readership in articles and photographs that tacitly assumed an age of agricultural and industrial improvement would continue unabated with the natural world remaining essentially unchanged in the background, like the painted scenic panels in classical Greek theatre that were the origin of landscape art. 

In the tradition of 'sublime' landscape painters such as Albert Bierstandt and Thomas Moran National Geographic developed a style of landscape photography dependent on attaining an ideal viewpoint. The getting of the photograph became part of the story. The Earthrise picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in lunar orbit
on the 24th December 1968 is perhaps the ultimate landscape photograph. The image of the Earth rising over a lifeless Moon is uncanny, revealing the entirety of our planet while conceding nothing of our lived experience of it. Earthrise is beguiling image with a beauty that is hard to define, like a successful abstract picture. 

The Apollo 8 Earthrise  photograph taken on 

24th December 1968.

In the 1950s when Jackson Pollock made his abstract paintings it appeared that art had never been further apart from science but his technique of dripping paint onto canvas prefigured a type of sculpture shaped by material determinants  - gravity, tension, elasticity - like the formation of actual landscapes. In 1968 Robert Smithson proposed 'non-site' exhibitions that emulated science museums by displaying rocks from a remote site in a gallery, with accompanying maps and photographs. In the 1970s process-driven sculpture combined with the concept of non-sites and Michael Foucalt's 'heterotopias' to evolve a art-form known as 'Earthworks'. (3)

Paradoxically Jackson Pollock's dramatic abstract paintings seem to look towards a future dominated by science and also look backwards to ancient times that had mystical beliefs lost  to the rational secular society of 1950s America. Pollock stated in a radio interview that" the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, in the old forms of the Renaissance or any other past culture.” Superficially his most energetic paintings resemble the swirling patters seen in contemporary bubble chambers that revealed the tracks of sub-atomic particles, but he was influenced by native American sand painters, Jungian Psychology, Theosophy and a general feeling articulated by Laurens Van De Post in his book The Lost World of the Kalahari that the 'civilized' world had lost a connection with nature.

Bubble chamber photographs made in the 1950s.

Virginia Dwan purchased a site on the shore of 

Great Salt Lake (Utah) enabling Smithson to built his Spiral Jetty in 1970 using 1400 tons of rock to create a spiral causeway. This iconic construction is part of the canon of Earthworks, paid for by Dwan and later known as Land Art; including Michael Heizer's Double Negative (two trenches bulldozed across a valley) and a precursor to Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (an array of metal poles in a grid pattern). Land Art related to the engineered landscapes of the 1960s. In the 21st century the brute force of diesel-powered excavation is joined by the more subtle and far-reaching ability to edit genes. Photosynthesis might be re-edited In the future so that plants could take more carbon dioxide from the air. Plants or ecosystems could be 'pre-evolved' to survive climate change but their behaviour would not be as predictable as the movement of comets.

(1) Unfinished, Untitled or Not Yet, 1966 by Eva Hesse  Nine dyed net bags, clear polyethylene sheeting, metal weights and string. Eva Hesse was influenced by Jackson Pollock, speaking about a different piece she said " This piece is very ordered. Maybe I'll make it more structured, maybe I'll leave it changeable. When it's completed, its order could be chaos. Chaos can be structured as non-chaos. That we know from Jackson Pollock." 

(2)  Quartered Meteor 1969 by Lynda Benglis follows on from the anti-form process-art that allowed the shape of an artwork to be decided by the physical laws of nature, such as gravity and viscosity. Quartered Meteor was originally made by pouring polyurethane into the corner of a gallery. Later the ephemeral form was cast in lead resulting in a sculpture that resembles cooled lava. The anti-form 'movement' was distinct from abstract forms such as Henri Moore or Barbara Hepworth's sculptures as they determined the final form of their work from their imagination whereas process sculpture was ultimately decided by nature after the artist set up the initial starting conditions of the 'experiment'. 

(3) Texas Overflow - Robert Smithson wanted to make "artificial landscapes without cultural precedent". In 1966 Smithson became the artist-consultant to a firm of architects and engineers competing for he Dallas-Fort Worth Airport project. His brief was to design artworks to occupy the unused areas of land between runways and taxi-ways. Out of necessity they had to be flat. Although unrealised his drawings represented a break from the history of landscape design. Whereas the Paradeisos of the Middle-East and the landscape gardens of European aristocrats implied a purposeful origin to nature and expressed a divinely creative process at work in landscapes the disregarded voids between concrete runways signify nothing. These industrial Tabla Rasa presented Smithson with a blank 'canvas' on which to explore his ambition.

After settling in New York in 1960 Robert Smithson began to socialise with artists such as Michael Heizer and Nancy Holt (who he married in 1963). Smithson became interested in extending Eva Hess's idea of allowing sculptures to find their eventual form, through flow of material, to large scale structures in the landscape. 

From a young age Smithson was interested in dinosaurs and natural history and he combined an interest in geological processes with the emerging Land Art movement. One of his most innovative ideas involved pumping asphalt into a disused limestone pit. The idea of creating a kind of artificial lava field by pumping the liquid in to the centre of the landscape feature and allowing it to flow outwards and solidify is a development of the gallery-based process-art, re-located in the landscape. By allowing physics to determine the final form of process-art it re-connects with nature in a way the traditional landscape art never did. Texas Overflow was realised in a reduced form when Smithson organised a truck-load of asphalt to be tipped into a pit near Rome .

(4) Artists such as Eva Hesse in the 1960s concentrated the attention of the art world on the possibilities offered by new materials. In the previous decade Jackson Pollock occasionally included 'foreign matter' such as cigarette butts and broken glass in his still-wet paintings. Whereas Pollock was probably influenced by alcohol consumption during these particular painting sessions, Eva Hess explored the deliberate use of industrial materials. Her Contingent 1969 piece consisted of cheesecloth set in latex and fiberglass.  Achieving the cover of Artforum magazine, Contingent identifies firmly with the Anthropocene era as does much of Hesse's artwork which consisted of "large expanses or dense coagulations and snarls of matter - of latex, of fibreglass, of cord, of plastic" (4) Robert Smithson took this idea of the expressive quality of matter and applied it on a landscape scale when he built Spiral Jetty in 1970.

Land Art constructions are not necessarily the same as Environmental Art. The 'classic' constructions such as Spiral Jetty were not concerned with modern environmental issues and indeed celebrated our power over nature to some extent. The Palm Islands development  is a commercialised legacy of Spiral Jetty.

In 1990 the Galileo spacecraft flew by the Earth for a gravitational slingshot to accelerate it onward to Jupiter. Carl Sagan recognised the opportunity to see if intelligent life could be detected from space. Although cultivated land was visible in Australia only a broadcast radio signal was deemed to be an unambiguous sign of life. Now contemporary art should feel this similarly ambiguous age of landscape, nature and artifice.

The Challenger space shuttle explosion resulted in the loss of the spacecraft and crew. A subsequent safety review allowed the space shuttle to return to service but it was decided that launching Galileo from the shuttle with a liquid fueled rocket in the cargo bay would be too dangerous. The solution to the problem was to switch the launch an alternative rocket that would not be powerful enough to sent the spacecraft on a simple trajectory to Jupiter but would require a gravitational slingshot flyby of Venus and two from Earth. Carl Sagan realised that the two flybys of Earth would present the opportunity to see what an exoplanet would look like to a probe sent from Earth. Pretending that they had no knowledge of the Earth, experts examined pictures from Galileo as if they were seeing our planet for the first time but were unable to gleen any conclusive photographic evidence of the changes made by humans. In this 'expedition to Earth' only a narrow-band radio signal from an unidentified radio station detected by an antenna on the spacecraft gave an unambiguous indication of technology.  

(1)  From an altitude of about 500,000 kilometers most of Egypt  and the Arabian Peninsula were photographed on December 9, 1992. 

(2) The Simpson Desert in Australia seen from 56,000 kilometer at about 2:30 p.m. PST, Dec. 8, 1990 

(3) Antarctica 

(4) Apart from the 'expedition to Earth' experiment two sets of laser pulses were transmitted to Galileo over a distance of 1.4 million kilometers (870,000 miles) in a communications experiment seen in this long-exposure image made by the spacecraft's imaging system. To register the laser light as points it was necessary to allow the rest of the Earth to become blurred. The image could serve as a metaphor for the Anthropocene in which our artificial world of technology and nature will increasingly compete for our attention in a future where the the artificial and the natural become indistinct.

References

(1) Sontag, S. (1966). The imagination of disaster. In: Against interpretation, and other essays: / Farrar,Strauss & Giroux. New York.

(2)  Le Corbusier (1935) Aircraft: The New Vision / The Studio. London, New York.

(3) Kastner, J. (2005). Land and environmental art / edited by Jeffrey Kastner ; survey by Brian Wallis. London.


(4) Rosalind Krauss in - Hesse, E., Serota, N., Whitechapel Art Gallery, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, & Kestner-Gesellschaft. (1979). Eva Hesse, 1936-1970 : Sculpture / [edited by Nicholas Serota]. London

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Uttopias-7

"...every universe is concentrated in a nucleus, a spore, a dynamized center. And this centre is powerful, because it is an imagined center. One step further into the world of images offered us by Pieyre de Mandiargues, and we see the center that imagines; then we can read the landscape in the glass nucleus. We no longer look at it while looking through it. This nucleizing nucleus is a world in itself. The miniature deploys to the dimensions of a universe. Once more, large is contained in small.”


Gaston Bachelard - Miniature - The Poetics of Space