Ideas of Nature

 

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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 Modernism superseded the distinction between form and content but Lanyon's paintings are like medieval maps that contemplate the essence of places without the topographic precision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. At the same time, nature seemed to disappear into the laboratory as examination of the processes

Paths of subatomic particles

revealed in a bubble chamber.

Created by collisions after 

acceleration by high-voltage

electricity, their paths are

constrained by intense 

magnetic fields.

behind the material world took place within conditions of vacuum, radioactivity and high-voltage electricity. 

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.

The 21st century will bring to the foreground all the contradictory ideas of nature. Responses to environmental problems will be influenced by culturally determined images of nature from literature and landscape art. Genetically engineering plants to use more carbon dioxide from the air, the possibility of sequestering the gas underground, restoration of carbon sinks and the rewilding of inefficient farmland by intensification of agriculture elsewhere are as much aesthetic questions as ecological ones. The dividing line between nature and technology will be scrutinised. New forms of art are needed to comprehend the shape of the world we are creating, a cultural response that cannot be considered only in scientific terms. 

1) Laporte, Paul M. "Cubism and Science." The Journal of aesthetics and art criticism, 1949, Vol.7 (3), p.243-256

(2) https://www.nature.com/nature/history-of-nature

(3) Cahill, H, and Federal Art Project. New Horizons in American Art.  New York: Published for the M.O M.A. reprinted by Arno, 1969.

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Utopias - 6 Landscape In the Anthropocene.

http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/8713591-utopias-6

Alexander von Humboldt has been described as the last scientist

Climatic regions made explicit by isotherms,
now also used to map weather.

who knew everything. After his death in 1859 the volume of knowledge of nature became too great for one person to comprehend. Amongst his many achievements, he invented isothermal lines for climatic maps. Isolines enable us to map aspects of nature that are invisible and extend beyond the horizon or the scope of a landscape picture. Since the time of Humboldt, science has continued to advance and now researchers know more and more about ever narrower fields of study while the scientific account of nature has reached a point that exceeds popular understanding and shared belief.

The industrial revolution made this happen by providing the 
technology and instruments that could interrogate nature. The 

Punched cards used to
record patterns for a
Jacquard loom.

conceptualisation of nature in the west evolved within a circular exchange of ideas between science, technology and culture. Jacquard looms coincided with speculation about the existence of genes. In the 20th century photography made time appear to stand still and pass more quickly or slowly. radio connected distant lands and aeroplanes soared above landscapes that could be read as revealed geology, but then nuclear

Aerial photograph - USAF.

physics and the space race caused this narrative arc to break contact with perceptible nature and ordinary lives.

In this information age computers and gene-editing technology allow simulations of Earth systems and the transformation of

data realisation of Earth systems and gene editing

biology, but art struggles to adapt to our changed relationship to nature. From the 16th century onwards oil paint was the medium that allowed landscape painters to depict the solidity of nature that could be owned as garden, farm, estate or empire. The idea of a tangible nature was so sincerely believed in that the earliest attempt at producing a periodic table of elements included heat and light.

Periodic table of elements

Dimitri Mendeleev's revised periodic table was created in 1869 just

as impressionist painters were starting to explore the ephemeral effects of light. The pictorial dissolution of material certainty that was a feature of modern art presaged Einstein's theories of relativity but, despite a brief dalliance between cubism and relativity, 20th century art ignored new knowledge of nature from science. However, architecture embraced ideas from engineering. Whereas classicism had inspired

The entrance to the front of the

administrative office building in 

the Werkbund Exhibition at 

Cologne 1914 (a)

Strowger electro-mechanical exchange 

monumental constructions, modernist architects saw buildings as structural frames potentially open to light; bridges over inhabited space. (1) The utility of vertical and horizontal planes in modernist architecture reflect the movements of selectors in a 1930s electro-mechanical telephone exchange. 

Whether surrounded by racks of equipment in a telephone exchange or moving between the rollers of a printing press to change the plates, the workers of the 20th century were no longer standing beside machines but were inside them.

Overlapping with the emergence of modern art, the scale and power of industry began to rival that of nature. The move from purely mechanical to electrically powered machinery subtly changed inhabited landscapes by altering the relationship between

The Siedlung of working-class dwellings at 

Dessau. (b)

settlements and sources of energy and water. Although towns and cities established on fall-lines and coalfields still exist, the new places of the 20th century were freed from reliance on nature by electricity and pumped water.

The inexorable logic of the grid that came from latitude and

longitude was applied to the layout of cities such as post Haussmann Paris and New York. In his adopted home

Composition in Yellow, Blue and Red - 

Piet Mondrian - Museum of Modern Art, 

New York.

Piet Mondrian found inspiration in the grid layout of New York and the popular boogie-woogie music that was itself influenced by mechanical player-pianos. The punched-paper rolls that recorded musical notes were a successor to the Jacquard loom controlled by programmed cards. As Mondrian was abstracting nature into blocks of colour the first experimental television cameras were dissecting scenes into lines of light and dark.

Television 1938

Vertical scan yelevision

19th century 'Magic Lantern' slide projections and cinema were the first media to depend on artificial light.  Analogue Televisions glow with their own internal light even when no signal from a camera is present. By substituting a signal from a computer it became possible to create moving images of fictional or simulated events from mathematics in the 1980s. Simulations of Earth systems more ambitious than anything imagined by Alexander von Humboldt are now routinely generated. Susan Sontag's prediction ( towards a new sensibility -  against interpretation 1965 ) that a new cultural form  bridging the divide between science and art is now a distinct possibility, and in the context of the Anthropocene, a necessity.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Motivated by a desire to achieve a universal system of aesthetics Modrian's progression from impressionistic landscape pictures, through increasingly abstracted work, ended with geometric compositions that did not depend on seeing nature at all. (2) Paradoxically, science was already extending vision into the realms of the microscopic and the invisible; x-rays, infra-red, radio(radar) and  sound (sonar).

Cosmic Ray Shower

Mondrian's ambitious attempt at culminating the debate about beauty, that had engaged artists since the time of Plato and Aristotle, emulated scientific reductionism which had promised to unwrap the  complexity of nature. Science replaced mysterious correspondences within alchemy and astrology by the bold assertion that all of nature was a manifestation of just four fundamental forces; gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force.

A deep simplicity underlying the intricate appearances of the world has been an appealing idea since Paleotithic cave paintings of animal-beings and the use of water features in Persian gardens to symbolise the mythical four rivers of creation. The Pharaoh Akhenaten's replacement of polytheism by the worship of the sun god Aten changed the personification of natural forces towards a nascent form of natural philosophy.

The contemporary poem of praise to the sun reveals an intuitive

.

.Above - Akhenaton,Nefertiti,and three daughters

Poem in Praise if the Sun
."When you arise from the horizon the earth grows bright;

You shine as the Aten in the sky and drive away the darkness;

When your rays gleam forth, the whole of Egypt is festive.

People wake up and stand on their feet

For you have lifted them up.

They wash their limbs and take up their clothes and dress;

They raise their arms to you in adoration.

Then the whole of the land does its work;

All cattle enjoy their pastures,

Trees and plants grow green,

Birds fly up from their nests

And raise their wings in praise of their spirit.

Goats frisk on their feet,

And all fluttering and flying things come alive.

Because you shine on them.

Boats sail up and downstream,

All ways are opened because you have appeared.

The fish in the river leap up to you

Your rays are in the deep of the sea."...

understanding of how life temporarily diverts energy that is flowing from a place of concentration. The poem's evocative description of the fecundity of life, emanating from the sun, is ascribed to Aten. Amalgamating the organising powers of previous demoted gods, Aten was an early explanation of what came to be regarded as nature. After echoing through Classical Greek, Roman and Renaissance cultures the imagination of nature evolved via history painting into a commodity with a wider audience than that of portraiture and without reliance on the patronage of the church. In the Dutch Golden Age the merchant class could express their status through a taste for portraits of nature.

Landscape art established a relationship to nature like that of the gardener who tends to specific plants. The landscape painter selected a view of nature that could imply ideas of beauty, grandeur, order, virtue, security or adventure by gathering together images of trees, rivers and mountains into a specific composition.

For landscape art to succeed aesthetically and commercially it was important for these elements garnered from the world to be placed within a recognisable spectrum of taste, from picturesque Arcadia to sublime wilderness.

Wooded landscape 
with figures walking 
Manchester Art Gallery
Polders

A Dutch painting Wooded landscape with figures walking by a sandy bank by Jan Wijnants (1632 -1684) is a picturesque scene featuring a transformed former coastline left behind by the exclusion of the sea from a polder. Wijnants left us with one of the earliest painted records of the Anthropocene, our present epoch in which nature and artifice are interacting to create a world without true wilderness and with                                           new challenges.

Large scale land reclamation from the sea coincided with a new

attitude to nature. Whereas the Greek poet Hesiod had imagined

that a process of decline caused a Golden Age to be lost to a Silver Age and then a Bronze age etc, by the time of the industrial

    The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers' 

    Stone imagines the discovery of phosphorous.

revolution Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) was visualising the optimism of scientific rationalism. Wright used what could now be called film noir lighting in dramatic scenes of experiments 
witnessed by awed onlookers. As well as painting fashionably sublime pictures he created Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers' Stone and An Iron Forge in which sunlight is replaced by the artificial light of phosphorous and incandescent metal. In the 21st century, after the enthusiasm for the 'white heat of technology' has cooled, the Anthropocene has cast a more searching critique of technology and nature to which art is starting to respond.(3)

An Iron Forge 

Joseph Wright paintings at Derby Museuems

(1) (a) (b) GROPIUS, Walter. The New Architecture of the Bauhaus. London: Faber and Faber, 1935. (1965, 1968.)

(2) Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art Vol. 13, No. 4/5, Eleven Europeans in America (1946), pages 35 - 37.

(3) Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments & Epistemologies editor Davis, H, Turpi, E . Open Humanities Press.

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