The 'iconic' building sees itself immediately as an integral part of the definition of place: for architectural or engineering ingenuity; for beauty or for ugliness; for functionality or for tourism. In every case, there is a surrounding narrative  that constructs the iconic status, from conception to unveiling, throughout its existence, and ultimately to its demise. The stories of a site, even the ones that elicit bad PR give it a heartbeat and perpetuate its presence, and later, its legacy.






In July 2013, London-born but Newcastle-based artist Eleanor Wright visited Baku, Azerbaijan to explore these very narratives surrounding the newest icon in the city's landscape: the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center, designed by Zaha Hadid. Soon after its opening in the summer of 2012, it caught fire. Archival footage of this undulating white architectural topography set ablaze creates a horrific and mesmerizing entrancement. It's like watching a car crash happen – captivating until you process the destruction. These images are strangely beautiful.



This footage – poetically edited by Wright – plays throughout the artist's ongoing solo show at Gallery North, Northumbria University. In addition, the north and south windows of the gallery have been coated with two stills from the film, blown up three metres high and five metres wide, and printed onto Contra-Vision vinyl. This material – usually used for adverts on the sides of buses – has a dramatic effect when viewed from the street but is imperceptible once you're inside the gallery. The disappearance of such a statement is a nice parallel to the fiery event itself. The near-tangible presence of the image to the passing pedestrian echoes the experience felt by the residents of Baku in summer 2012. But then it's almost forgotten, wiped away from memory, only subtly suggested by a pattern of dots on the windows. In a similar way, the damage from the fire was completely repaired and  there is now no sign of the dramatic mishap in Baku. But Wright doesn’t want us to forget: hence the looped footage in the lower right-hand corner of a wall tucked in the L of the gallery hall.
 

Our desire to control climate is driving us to realise science-fiction ambitions.

This footage is playing as we file into nearby BALTIC 39 for Tuned Cities, a symposium programmed to accompany the exhibition by Ellie Wright and Sam Watson. All three speakers – Mark Dorrian, Natasha Rosling and Richard Whitby – explore the concept of the 'iconic', its adoption as branding device and its relationship to the utopian/dystopian threads in contemporary architecture.

Dorrian, Professor of Architecture Research at Newcastle University and Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis, draws upon his fascinating article in the current issue of Cabinet Magazine in order to investigate how our desire to control climate is driving us to realise science-fiction ambitions like the construction of a Ski Palace in Dubai. Meanwhile, artist Natasha Rosling presents a disturbing meditation on the journey to a psychological place where her installation was sited, and artist Richard Whitby speaks about his latest endeavor for Focal Point Gallery in Southend on Sea. Whitby has been researching The SS Richard Montgomery, an American ammunition ship that ran aground during World War II. The ship still lies off the coast at Southend, and is constantly monitored to prevent the explosion of the live ammunition that it still carries on board. Whitby's proposal is that Southend on Sea reclaim this catastrophic sculpture that sits in front of the town, barely perceptible from the coast line, and makes proper use of to its 'iconic' potential.







And what of Newcastle itself? Wright points us to the Civic Center. Across from Gallery North, the 1960s modernist block stands proud above the surrounding cathedral spires; its tower capped with a grated airduct-like dome, crowned with a ring of bronze seahorse heads.

In the entrance are two smaller plaster cast seahorses, emulating a kitsch 3D version of the Newcastle coat of arms. Apparently it was placed by a mayor a few generations ago to welcome citizens and pay tribute to the seafaring origins of Newcastle. The haphazard placement has stuck, drawing more importance to the symbolism of the seahorse to Newcastle. Also found on the crest of Newcastle United, the seahorse is incorporated elsewhere in the Civic Center – as crystal pendants on the chandelier, in the carpets, even etched into park benches around the shopping mall.



Wright has made a sculptural reproduction of these kitsch seahorses. But hers are stripped-back objects – plain 3D profile and routed out of ply wood, with one coated in teal and the other in amber paint. They look like oversized chess pieces waiting for the the rest of the set to show up so they can start playing. As formal objects, they are striking and satisfying, whilst, in this context, they also restate Newcastle's relationship with the seahorse whilst simultaneously subjecting it to questioning.
 

Thin Cities is a layered affair, woven with myths and full of memorable visuals.

In previous work, Wright has always been very absorbed by process and the interpretation of form in better understanding materials. Here, she has painstakingly cut two distinct geometric tessellating patterns out of thick PVC. The fifteen metres of material lay in two piles casually placed with one layer slightly overlapping the next to create a new pattern and texture. The thick material releases a strong rubber-like smell and despite the patterns looking ancient or borrowed from an Islamic temple, it comes across as new, fresh – indeed, 'iconic'. The pattern could easily be adapted by the Civic Center to as envelope lining, conference hall wallpaper, or lobby carpet. But Wright has not designed a decorative work; she has edited, and viewers walk carefully around the patterned object, seeing it as a defined undulating pond in the otherwise barren gallery.

At first glance, Thin Cities is an empty and minimal kind of exhibition with an exclusive focus on surface. But it is in fact a layered affair, with complex cuts, woven with myths and full of memorable visuals. We often assume that the iconic is the tallest thing in the skyline. Thin Cities proves otherwise; it is something much more subtle, uncomfortable and potent that defines a place as unique. Like the symposium, Thin Cities acknowledges the potential of the hidden or discreet – an ammunition ship, a roof fire, a seahorse – and encourages the viewer to keep looking to unearth other meanings and to keep questioning.




Thin Cities is at Gallery North, Northumbria University until 17th October 2013.
gn.northumbria.ac.uk



Julia Vogl is an artist whose social sculpture incorporate public engagement, architectural interventions and colour. She is resolved to create experiences and memories for the viewer, prompting discourse, while creating aesthetically rich works.
www.juliavogl.com

 

Expanded Eye is expanding. The multi-disciplinary art duo that is Jade Tomlinson and Kevin James are extending their practice beyond the confines of the human skin and across a whole host of media: from illustration to installation, on wood, books, steel, even salvaged doors. This proliferation of creative outpourings comes together in London this month in the form of their first solo exhibition - the aptly named A Thousand Fibres - at Arch 402 Gallery in Hoxton.

Expanded Eye are perhaps best known for their innovative approach to tattoo design, fusing arcane narrative symbolism with collage, constructivism, hints of Dada, and a playful, occasionally surreal wit. Now, after a triumphant year that has seen Expanded Eye exhibiting their work across Europe, and garnering  widespread acclaim, they're arriving in London with A Thousand Fibres.

Here's a sneak peek of what to expect:






















Expanded Eye - A Thousand Fibres is at Arch 402 from 24th - 29th October 2013, curated by Alexandra Fernandez Diaz of Conqering Rooftops.
www.expandedeye.co.uk

My quest to discover all that was and might be a blast of digi-tech creativity in the iron-age cathedral city of Lincoln began blearily in the capital-age cathedral domes of the newly renovated King's Cross, on a train reaching northwards across the morning hours like a strong black Americano. To say that the biennial Frequency Digital Culture Festival had pinned this once military-industrial stronghold onto my cultural map would be as simpering an understatement as recognising that online shopping has affected Britain’s high streets. Thankfully, I was delighted to discover that the same cyber hand that taketh away old traders’ rights is now giving back left, right and centre on the canvas of the city.
 

The broadest spectrum of digital culture is being broadcast across the city to transformative effect.

“Revolution”, the theme of this year’s Frequency, is more than just an interface offered from left-of-centre survivalists. Premieres from event-tech luminaries like Blast Theory glide politically between Stanza’s social interventions of hoodied youths graff-tagging in binary code [above]. In high street pop-ups, the local Juneau Project spout dour sermons of an imagined post-digital apocalypse. New collaboration, Trope, have transformed the damp basement of an RBS building into a diasynchronic playground of projected light and concrete and chains [below]. Immersive virtual experiences from multidisciplinary performance group Me and The Machine splice issues of social isolation and discrimination against immigrants with haptic disassociation and gaming references. Kurdish artist Jasim Ghafur’s wickedly witty video works stabbed at the heart of revolutionary conflict in the cellars of Lincoln’s Drill Hall. In institutions large, small and religious, the broadest spectrum of digital culture is being broadcast across the city to transformative effect.




Even when the architecture of the city provides more of a challenge to the projects, it only serves to broaden the critical debate around the themes of the festival. That I was unable to access the mobile app that would have brought a flutter of digital connectivity to Paulo Cirio’s Google Earth cut-and-pastes of people on buildings opens the question of access, when art is transposed from traditional venues and into the digital landscape. Meanwhile, Emma Dex Dexter’s holographic sculpture of a globe of scissors and money seems to lack spirit on a shallow video screen shoved in the narthex of a small chapel that, frankly, seems pretty peeved to have been intruded upon. At the time I visit, the lectionary reading had been – coincidentally? – left open at a lamentation that read, “How lonely sits the city / that once was full of people! / How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations!”




Navigating questions of old and new is Curio, a custom-made wooden tricycle and audio-visual digital gallery, created by local collective General Practice [above]. Inspired by 19th century wunderkammers, Curio’s intrigue hinges on the contrast of old-fashioned human-powered mobility and the intimate mundanity of pixelated digital data. A recording has been taken from a microphone attached to one wheel of the tricycle as it travelled around the city. Listening from headphones connected to the tricycle, I'm struck by how sympathetically and buoyantly sonic experience takes to being digitally documented. Digital capture and transmission has enabled those wheel clunks, squeaks and gyrations to take on a personality that wanted to natter away in my ear and tell me all its cobblestone secrets.
 

It's to Frequency’s credit that within the constellation of projects is a smattering of critical dark stars.

The work of American artist Brian House tells a similar tale as part of a high-hitting exhibition about maps for city flagship The Collection Museum. House’s works include Quotidian Record, a vinyl made by recording the artist’s location over an entire year and assigning a musical note to each bit of GPS data. The vinyl sings out across the entire exhibition like an 8-bit orchestra of the peripatetic mind, the harmonious assignments of location data structured rhythmically by the logbook of one year’s life. House’s other works in the exhibition poke more critically at the problems of privacy and truth that come with an abundance of data, a theme also spotted in the work of acclaimed British artists Stanza and Dave Griffiths, among others. It is to Frequency founder-directors Uzma Johal and Barry Hale’s credit that space has been made within the constellation of projects at the festival for a smattering of critical dark stars.




For me, Frequency's twin highlights come from two mind-blowing projects by Chris Levine and Alexis Rago. Levine’s Angel Presence [above] follows on from his previous light installations, such as Now and Light is Love, by harnessing peripheral imaging LEDs to conjure figures in a beam of light when the viewer shakes their head from side to side. Upright and celestial in the chancel of St. Swithin’s Church, Levine’s light work is breathtakingly simple and awesome. What better way can there be to express the concept of an angel than through the pure expression of a mathematical truth, as a light-being that flickers at an invisible frequency, a being that can only be seen by entranced attendees waggling their skulls from side to side?




Rago’s Chaos Contained, meanwhile, is the largest exhibition of a single artist’s work in the festival [above]. Against a backdrop of enlarged pinhole camera images of nature, each image a time-dilated critique of quick-press digital culture, Rago’s microscopically detailed sculptures in clay hark towards a future religious iconography. One piece, “time passes by but things stay the same”, lays hyper-contrasted video projections of natural surfaces like water, leaves and sky over one of the artist’s signature chandelier-esque clay forms that stands precariously on its vertical axis. Where the projection spills out messily over the plinth and onto the floor below, the sculpture stands magisterial, eclipsing the light thrown out from the digital glare, containing the absence of materiality in its shadow.

There is so much more going on at Frequency than I could cover here, and with groundbreaking secret plans already underway for the 2015 edition, there's a pretty good chance that Lincoln, the steeply cobbled East Midlands treasure that motorways forgot, might just become the destination for digital culture in the UK.



Frequency is taking place in Lincoln until 26th October 2013.
frequency.org.uk



Sara Zaltash is a British-Iranian live artist who creates song-based performances about transgression. She is influenced by God, music, corruption and the non-linearity of time. Most recently, Zaltash swam to Bestival while singing a 100-verse ballad about the impossibility of changing fate, which you can read about here on Wild Culture.
www.sarazaltash.com

Blair Drawson worked for many years as an editorial illustrator for some of North America’s finest magazines. Currently his interests revolve around painting and writing and illustrating his own books.
 He lives in Toronto and teaches graphic narrative at the Ontario College of Art and Design and Sheridan College.

'Ometeotl weeps for Kali in the mescaline dreams of night', by Finn Lafcadio O'Hanlon, 2012. Architectural pen on cold-pressed paper, image size 46cm x 66cm (56cm x 76cm overall, unframed).

I spent my early childhood in the southwest of the United States. My mother was part-Cherokee, born and raised in Oklahoma, and my father was an Australian, but we lived for a long time in Los Angeles. We would often drive between the west coast and my mother's family in Tulsa, but we'd take these circuitous routes on unmapped back-roads, adding days and hundreds of miles to a journey that was already fifteen hundred miles long via the direct route on Interstate 40, through desert towns like Barstow and Winslow and Albuquerque. 

They insinuated themselves into what I drew: skulls on snake bodies, '60s neon signs, tattooed women and grinning death-heads.

I still remember the weird roadhouses we stopped at, filled with faux-Native American trinkets, and Mexican candied skulls, as well as petrified tree fragments, fossils and pebbles of polished turquoise. We'd end each day in some rickety, half-dead town in Arizona, New Mexico or Texas, staying in a cheap motel with a swimming pool and a noisy ice-machine. Sometimes, we'd be so close to the Mexican border that it made no difference which side of it you were on – it could just as well have been Mexico but with better air-conditioning – and at this time of the year, the whole place would be overtaken with unsettling (but to a young kid, exciting) syncretic symbols and rituals, part Catholic, part ancient Toltec, part Hopi or Navajo, with black-robed Madonnas, painted skulls and masks, crucifixes and snake skeletons. It was never scary and solemn, only celebratory, not just honouring the dead but inviting them to a party, to spend time among friends and family. The barbecue smoke always smelled of mesquite.

Later, when I became an artist working on large, intricate drawings in ink on paper, the impressions of those road trips insinuated themselves into what I drew: skulls on snake bodies, '60s neon signs, tattooed women and grinning death-heads, the Robert Williams-influenced cars (my parents drove a cherry-red Chevy Impala SuperSport). Even the modern military references were derived from fleeting glimpses of fighters and tanks arrayed on open tracts of desert, at Nellis or Luke air force bases, or Camp Navajo. They seemed as commonplace as the motels, drive-in diners and cheesey girlie bars that littered our route.

— Berlin, 2013

Finn Lafcadio O'Hanlon was born in Brighton, England and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Los Angeles and Tokyo before returning as a teenager to Sydney's northern beaches. Now 22, he first exhibited his intricate drawings at the MiCK Gallery in 2011, and at the same time his photography at Wedge Gallery/Kinokuniya, both in Sydney.

The northern temperate forest gives way to the trees of the boreal forest.

In Northern Ontario the landscape can seem like the left over wreckage of one pre-historic cataclysm after another. Comet impacts, mountain and cliff forming movements of earth, thousands of years of crushing and scraping glaciation, and torrential flooding events when those ice sheets melted, have formed an environment at once brutal and comforting.

The Algoma Central Railway (ACR) rocks and lurches through one such tract of land that is just about as close to wilderness as this planet gets anymore. It leaves Sault Ste. Marie on the St. Mary’s River, between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and heads north by northwest to Agawa Bay on Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes.

Agawa Bay is one of those places that reliably emanates a heighten reality. Like many areas on Superior, it seems to possess a consciousness of its own, a genius loci. Birds can behave fearlessly there, walking down paths in front of you like temple monkeys, dancing in front of you and displaying their fanned tails like miniature peacocks.

The Agawa River mouth, where it quietly flows into the lake, gives little hint of its tumultuous course. A few kilometers away, on rock faces coming right out of the bay, are red petroglyphs that have not been washed off by centuries of waves, sun and winter weather. A horned creature with a dragon-like back and tail seems to be the very spirit of Gitchigoomie, the name of the lake in the Chippewa language.

Agawa River.

The train turns away from the bay and heads up towards the Agawa Canyon on its 296 mile trek to Hearst, Ontario. The canyon is the last refuge of the colourfully deciduous sugar maple. This is the northern edge of the northeastern temperate forest. At its southern edge in the Carolinas and Northern Florida it grows yellow pine, tulip poplar and gum trees. Up here it grows not only sugar maples but white and red pine, jack pine and black oak mixed in with increasing amounts of paper birch, poplar and black spruce.

At the end of line, Hearst is well into the boreal forest, and little notion of the south remains. It is too cold for all pines except some scrawny jack pines, but trembling aspen, poplars, black spruce, balsam fir and tamarack still thrive. Beavers and their dams can be seen everywhere and in the late spring and summer an infinity of insects cloud the air. Small songbirds come from as far away as South America to lay their eggs here and feast on the mosquitoes and black flies.

There would be no more landscape paintings from this country that aped Constable or Corot.

The railroad was finished in 1914 to bring lumber and ore down to the “Soo”, and Sault Ste. Marie still has steel mills and pulp and paper mills that almost miraculously have not relocated to China or Brazil. Right from the beginning the train was also used by people wanting to experience wilderness, and by painters, specifically the Group of Seven, wanting to capture the wild, northern landscape.

The post-impressionist landscape paintings of those artists and the canvases of others at the time, especially Tom Thompson, who died young in 1917, have had a lasting impact on the central Canadian psyche. From this time forward there would be no more landscape paintings from this country that aped Constable or Corot.

Montreal River, scene of The Solemn Land, by J.E.H.MacDonald.

Vibrant colour was now the Canadian birthright and all terrain less than a day’s drive from the populous south would become “cottage country.” Georgian Bay, Muskoka, Haliburton and Kawartha would be the summer places for any child of means, thanks, at least partly, to these painters. Reproductions of their paintings were hung in libraries and high school hallways. They were printed on textbooks, calendars and day planners.

By the late 50’s and 60’s a new generation of artists born at the height of the Northern Landscape craze were set to take over. They viewed all these pine trees very skeptically. They went to live in New York and were witness to Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock. When and if they returned they were not about to take the Algoma Central Railway, and, if they did, certainly not about to take oil paints or brushes.

Among these was Michael Snow who, with his wife, the painter Joyce Wieland, did return to Toronto in the early 70’s. Snow’s “Walking Woman” works were pop-inspired images that he repeated and reworked over and over. He also made films and photographs and exhibited work at the Venice Biennale, Documenta and the Centre Pompidou. Perhaps his most popular piece is a sculpture of a flock of geese that have been unsuccessfully trying to fly out of the Eaton’s Centre, an indoor shopping mall in downtown Toronto, ever since it was built.

At mile 207 it says, “Height of Land – All water from this point northward now flows into James or Hudson Bay far to the north.”

In 1977, Snow produced an exhibition of photographs taken in the Group of Seven room at the National Gallery in Ottawa. This was the old National Gallery. It was a converted office building and the dreary, dysfunctional product of a committee of stymied and tortured imaginations.

Snow made all the photographs blurry. He said he wanted to make the paint fluid again and blend the colours together. He had originally wanted to do this in the Matisse room of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but ended up doing it in Ottawa. Perhaps because of Matisse and the fact that it was first exhibited in France, he called it “Plus Tard.”

It may be too that his intentions were more subconscious and Oedipal. It’s all fine and good to want to blur paint, that long ago dried, but it’s hard not to see a new generation taking the piss out of an older one. For someone born in 1929, these painting had been the altar of high art in this country forever. For a nation whose intelligentsia were constantly trying to come to terms with a collective self-identity, these had finally become real home-grown art. By the ‘70s they were also low hanging fruit for multi-media artists.

Riding on the platform between the passenger and the baggage car on the ACR this September, I unexpectedly found myself thinking about “Plus Tard.” Even though the train only gets up to speeds of about 35 mph (everything on this trip is in miles), the scenery seems to flash by.

Plus Tard, By Michael Snow. From 'The Solemn Land.'

You are given a modest information sheet when you buy your ticket that explains what you will be seeing at various mileposts. If you are looking at it instead of the scenery you will be told, “View at right of Mileage 84 into Batchewana River Valley.” At mile 207 it says, “Height of Land – All water from this point northward now flows into James or Hudson Bay far to the north.”

To take advantage of all the photographic opportunities, it is necessary to ride on the platform between the passenger and the baggage car. There is a sign prohibiting this but luckily it is not enforced and no one seems to mind you holding yourself out as far from the train as you can, intently staring through the viewfinder of your camera.

But the speed of the car still makes most of the pictures blurry in the foreground. Digital cameras are also confused by the movement of the train, not sure what light level to adjust to, or what to focus on. As a result most of my pictures were as experimental looking Michael Snow’s 1977 exhibition. Then I got thinking that maybe Snow had been on that train and that he was simply trying to give the same effect in the exhibition gallery. Or, I thought that maybe he had subconsciously picked up on all those generations that had boarded the train and experienced not only blurred photographs but a blurred visual memory of that terrain. Capturing movement was not something the Group of Seven tried with their painting, but they must have marveled at the rush of scenery at 35 mph back in 1916. I certainly did 97 years later.

Plus Tard, by Michael Snow. From 'West Wind" by Tom Thompson.

GENE THRENDYLE is a professional gardener who has been planning, building and maintaining private and public gardens in Toronto for overr 2 decades. He was a participant, consultant and in charge of maintaining the Artists’ Gardens at Harbourfront from 1998-2008. Gene is also an artist and has exhibited work and been involved in the arts in Toronto for over 20 years. He has featured in solo or group shows in Larh, Germany in 1989, Talinn, Estonia in 1991, St. Petersburg, Russia in 1993, Memorial University, St. Johns in 1992, Santiago, Chile in 2002, Glendon College, York University in 2003, Wade Project, Trinity Bellwoods Park in 2004, and York Quay Gallery, Harbourfront in 2008.

http://genedigs.com

Photographs by Gene Threndyle, ©2013. 

Agawa Bay, north shore of Lake Superior, late September, 2013.

I took a bus from New York to Manchester, New Hampshire to join the Players Theatre of New England. The city was poverty stricken; the textile mills, declining since the turn of the century, were dead by 1969. Two or three restaurants remained on the main street, populated mainly by elderly lesbian mill couples who hadn't worked in 20 years. The theatre company had an entire textile mill — a thousand feet long on the Merrimack River — rent free. We only used one room in the colossus, which we warmed with space heaters. The rest was too cold and dirty to bother with.

I shared an apartment with another new member, a dancer from Bennington named Lisa Nelson who was taking a year off to work in the arts. She had a circle of friends around the Incredible String Band, but she didn't invite me to tag along. One day I answered the apartment door to see an elderly man with a stack of brochures in his hand. He stared at me quizzically for a length of time, then burst into laughter.

"I can't tell if you're a girl or a boy!" he exclaimed.

I bought an air force officer's light blue greatcoat from a surplus store to deal with the weather. My first day wearing it an older man in a business suit stopped me on the street.

"Son, you should be ashamed to wear that coat." he said in a voice of timeless sorrow.

The company was directed by Harvey Grossman who was born in the Bronx but came of age in Europe where he worked as secretary, first to the author and stage designer Edward Gordon Craig, and then to the great French mime Etienne Decreux. Harvey was a guileless man for whom art, religion, and life were practically synonymous terms; he was as oblivious to current fashion or critical style as he was to financial reality. The company was mounting a production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, for which we had bookings in towns across New England. Developed through improvisation, the work would now be called dance-theater; back then it was still called mime. We told the story with our bodies while from time to time a narrator interpreted our action to the audience. We used our voices for sound effects, but there was little dialogue or characterization, and no entrances or exits. Instead, we would coagulate to form a ship, dissolve to form the individuals who disembarked from it, coagulate to form the great oak tree they found on land, dissolve to form the animals grazing underneath, and so on through the play. The result was a kind of ritual evocation of the story of Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman who destroyed him.

He would push me to the point of exhaustion before giving in.

We toured the play from town to town in the backwoods of New England, performing in town halls, churches, schools, lawns, and once or twice in the bottom of an empty swimming pool. I was the youngest member of the company. I'd been selected for my acrobatic talents, and took the parts with the highest physical demands — a somersaulting equestrian, a lunging horse of death, or a mesmerizing medicine-man, to name a few.

The witch doctor's dance had been added a bit improbably to Irving's story to suggest the primitive and barbaric surroundings of the early colonial settlers and the fragility of their hold on civilization. I put on a gruesome mask to perform it and leaped into a circle of settlers grouped in prayer around a fire: dancing wildly, hypnotizing them one by one with my rhythmic and guttural shouts, delivered to the ominous beat of an Indian drum. The actors would resist the assault for as long as they could, but in the end they all succumbed to my frenzy, and the finale of the scene had us whirling about the stage in a kind of mad, leotard-clad, St. Vitus Dance.

This was good theater: the hall would always be silent as a stone when we were through. And there was one occasion, in the little village of Gorham, New Hampshire, just below the Canadian border, when the performance of that dance gave me what must be the greatest gift in theater: the experience of ecstasy.

The twelve members of the chorus gathered on the Greek stage.

Gorham was the kind of town that the Players Theatre did best in: isolated, small, and way behind the times. The entire town and half the countryside turned out for our performance, filling the high school gym with three or four hundred people. The gym itself was a pleasant neo-Georgian brick building with large rounded windows and very high ceilings.

Our performance that evening went routinely through the opening scenes that led to the witch doctor's dance. And the dance itself went well from the beginning. I reveled in the part and gave it all I had, and soon enough had turned the quiet prayer meeting into a cacophonous evocation of Beelzebub. But when I came to mesmerize the last of the settlers, played by an excellent actor named Gary Carkin, something different happened. Gary always put up a strong fight; I could see the wild determination in his eyes contending with fear until his face was washed with sweat. He would answer my commands with defiance, match my gesticulations step for step, and sometimes push me to the point of exhaustion before giving in. And that evening, glaring into the contorted mask on my face, and looking around in horror at his fallen comrades, he held on in utter desperation, as though the spell was really coming over him.

Orchestra conductors have reported the experience, as have actors, dancers, Goethe, Aldous Huxley and Charles Lindbergh. 

Suddenly, without warning, I found myself in the steel rafters at the top of the room. I saw the girders loom up through the shadows, and I was startled to see that my vision had changed when I looked at the spectacle down below. I could see everything in the room   every hair on every head it seemed   simultaneously. I absorbed it all in a single omnipresent glance   hundreds of heads arranged in wavering rows of portable chairs, a half dozen babies sleeping in laps, hair of different colors reflecting the light on stage. My attention shifted to the stage and there we were, in our colored leotards, whirling about in our dance, and there I was, there I was, face to face with Gary Carkin.

I was in two places at the same time. I understood it in a moment. I felt a rush of panic. An instant later I was staring into Carkin's eyes again and felt my feet pounding the floor, my voice shouting, my lungs straining. Until he finally gave in and the scene was over.

I finished the play in a state of exhilarated confusion that was destined to last for weeks. When we came backstage, I asked Gary if he'd noticed anything strange in the witch-doctor's dance. "Well, yes", he replied, "it was a bit intense this time, wasn't it?" Harvey Grossman only noticed that the scene went well. Much to my surprise, I'd had the experience alone. I couldn't even tell how long it had lasted, or how my body had continued to function during the time my mind was in the rafters.

Over the years that followed I learned that out-of-body experiences, while rare, are among the more common paranormal events, and that the conditions of my event were somewhat typical. They tend to occur when a person is exposed to bodily danger, in places like hospitals or during accidents, where people describe it as a movement of the soul or mind to separate itself from an imperiled body. The mind might find itself on the ceiling of a hospital room, for example, watching a team of doctors below declare its body dead. It must then rush back to re-animate its body, or see it carried away and buried. People whose lives are not in mortal danger, but whose spirits have been pressed by so great a physical and emotional exertion that they literally burst their bounds, may also leave their bodies. Orchestra conductors have reported the experience, as have actors and dancers. Goethe, Aldous Huxley, and Charles Lindbergh all experienced the phenomena, and an apparently growing number of people report ecstatic experiences through controlled meditations. Psychologists have taken an interest in these things; an impressive variety of accounts like mine can be found in the works of William James and C. G. Jung, and in books like Out of the Body Experiences by Dr. Celia Green of the Oxford Institute of Psycho-physical Research.

I tend to be suspicious of claims of paranormal phenomena. Yet if one cannot always be responsible for one's experience, one must be responsible to it. People who have had ecstatic experiences are often left with the conviction that their minds have existed apart from their bodies, a conviction that springs from the realm of visceral experience whose validity we tend to accept, regardless of the intellect's concurrence.

The philosophy that matter must include awareness as a constituent element has a very distinguished pedigree.

In trying to make sense of it, I began by asking if the sensation of a conscious existence apart from my own body was accurate or illusory. Could I believe my own eyes, or did it all just happen in my head? Was it a natural phenomenon or a mental aberration? I naturally wanted to believe what seemed to be the evidence of my senses. It would be an alarmingly pathological event if it all took place inside my head, but a glorious transformation of reality if it happened outside of it. Both the vividness of the experience and the omnipresent nature of my vision — which saw everything in the room at once with the eye of a hawk — could seemingly be argued either way. But when I think of things like the rivet pattern in the girders of the ceiling, or the balding spot on the man with the red checked coat in the second row, or a hundred other details that filled my sight in the midst of the event, it seems more reasonable to think it a natural phenomenon rather than a hallucination. No hallucination, it seems to me — drawing only from the information that my mind possessed — could have been so full or accurate in detail.

But what does it mean here, to believe my eyes? My physical eyes, after all, had remained on stage while my identity and its perceptions withdrew to the rafters. How was it possible to perceive without organs of perception, and why did my actual organs of perception stop working when my mind withdrew from my body? What animated my body through the performance when my mind departed it? These, and a host of other difficult questions, make it easy enough to understand why so many scientists shy away from such accounts.

Perhaps time and space were suspended, if only for an instant. If time and space are only forms that the mind produces to organize reality, as Schopenhauer surmised, then an ecstatic experience like mine might be an opening into the wider and greater reality that exists outside the illusory bounds of our normal perception of reality.

I don't believe in supernatural phenomena, and this experience has only strengthened my bias against them. It seems more reasonable to assume that the world is a unified, coherent place in which every event is a natural phenomenon: to relegate an event to the supernatural is to make it in some sense unreal. In seeking to understand it, I think of the various degrees of frenzy in my fellow actors, the desperate pitch to which I had been pushed, the charged and silent concentration of the audience upon my wildly dancing body, and the infinite web of electro-magnetic energy that we are all a part of, which constitutes the ultimate scientific definition of reality. I wonder if there might be times when a man becomes so charged with electrical potential that the normal structures of the mind dissolve for a moment as the charge is released. This sudden, lightening transit would be what the ancient Greeks called ecstasy.

This couldn't happen in a mechanistic world where consciousness is confined to the brain alone. Strictly speaking, it couldn't happen even as an illusion, since illusions are immaterial, and thus unreal. A mechanist can only say that such experiences don't exist.

What are these energetic particles that run through us by the trillions? They're many things: cell phone calls, television shows, and radio programs.

Panpsychism, the philosophy that matter must include awareness (or consciousness) as a constituent element, has a very distinguished pedigree, ranging from Plato to Aristotle, Spinoza, Locke, Newton, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heisenberg, James, and Jung. They came to this conclusion through simple logic: either matter is imbued with consciousness, or reality is divided into two parts, mind and matter. The unity of nature is held to be the more compelling claim.

If matter is suffused with consciousness, then mind and matter are equivalent, and the issue of duality is resolved. If consciousness is a kind of energy, and we know that matter and energy are also equivalent, it's easy to imagine consciousness flowing through energetic fields, beyond its normal locus in the brain, to some magnetic attraction outside the body.

Space seems empty to us, and our bodies seem full. But at a large degree of magnification, it is space that seems full, and our bodies empty. What seems to be empty space is actually an unimaginably active sea of energy: more than four trillion elementary particles course through our bodies every second of the day. And at the level of those particles, our bodies would be diaphanous, almost immaterial, clouds of distant atoms.

What are these energetic particles that run through us by the trillions? They're many things: cell phone calls, television shows, and radio programs — along with cosmic rays, solar radiation, earthly emissions, and many other waves about which we know nothing. The numbers are astounding: if every particle coursing through my body could be turned into a dollar, I could pay the national debt in three seconds. Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist from Trinity College, Cambridge, has suggested in two works, The Presence of the Past and Morphic Resonance, that our memory and intelligence may not reside in our brains at all, but rather in the fields of energy that run through them with which our minds are in correspondence. When we learn something new, we learn it from these morphic fields; when we create something new, we add to them. They might be immaterial forms like gravity, or, electro-magnetic fields of a very subtle nature. From this perspective it's easy to explain an out-of-body experience: my mind simply shifted from its habitual location inside my skull to a point outside in the morphic field that sustains it.

For ten years my experience in Gorham remained a somewhat isolated event in my life, with no simple name like ecstasy to call it by, and no context to put it into. Then one day in 1979 I chanced upon a book at the Library of Congress that established a connection between my experience on stage and the ritual ceremonies of Dionysus, god of theater in ancient Greece. The book was Psyche, Erwin Rohde's great study of primitive Greek religion. Reading his chapter on the "Origins of the Belief in Immortality: The Thracian Worship of Dionysus", I came to a passage describing the worship of the Maenads ("wild ones") of Dionysus, and discovered something utterly different from everything I'd known about Greek religion.

Rohde describes a nighttime ceremony held in the mountains under the flickering light of torches, with cymbals crashing and kettledrums roaring amid "the 'maddening unison' of the deep-toned flute". The chorus of female worshipers, excited by the wild music, dance in whirling circles, singing on the mountaintop of Parnassos. The orgyia continues through the night, the women dancing to the point of exhaustion in the still, high, rocky reaches, illumined by their fires and the moon. Women who were nursing held newborn fawns and wolf cubs to their breasts, waiting for the sign that Dionysus had arrived and entered one of the animals. "In the 'sacred frenzy' they fell upon the beast selected as their victim and tore their captured prey limb from limb. Then with their teeth they seized the bleeding flesh and devoured it raw," thus capturing the spirit of the god from the quivering flesh. Rohde continues:

A strange rapture came over them in which they seemed to themselves and others 'frenzied', 'possessed'... This extreme excitement was the result intended. The violently induced exaltation of the senses had a religious purpose, in that such enlargement and extension of his being was man's only way, as it seemed of entering into union and relationship with the god...

The worshipers [then]... burst the physical barriers of their soul. A magic power takes hold of them; they feel themselves raised high above the level of their everyday existence; they seem to become those spiritual beings who wildly dance in the train of the god... The whole might be called a religious drama.

These extraordinary phenomena transcending all normal experience were explained by saying that the soul of a person thus 'possessed' was no longer 'at home' but 'abroad', having left its body behind. This was the literal and primitive meaning understood by the Greek when he spoke of the 'ekstasis' of the soul in such orgiastic conditions of excitement.

This encounter with Psyche — along with Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, which pointed to the Dionysian cast of ancient theatre — led me to explore the origins of Greek theater. I wanted to see if my experience of ecstasy might have antecedents in its roots. Was it possible that the first tragic actors simply followed the lead of the Maenads in cultivating circumstances that would lead them into states of enthusiasm and ecstasy? Were the religious ceremonies that we now call theater, dedicated to the mad god Dionysus, Lord of the Underworld, founded in part so that actors could be granted the glimpses of the immortality that it was his province to bestow? Although it isn't widely known, the original Greek tragedies were fierce exultant spectacles that made strenuous physical demands on the actors: closer to dance-opera or dance-oratorio than to what we now call drama. Practically every word in them was sung, and every note had a dance step to accompany it. As the ancient Greek grammarian Athenaeus says about the tragic poets:

Thespis, Pratinas, Phrynichus, were called dancers not only because their plays were dependent on the dancing of the chorus but because quite apart from their own poetry they were willing to teach those who wanted to dance.

Phrynichus was said to have invented as many new dances as waves on the sea, and it was said that one could dance the different steps of Thespis all night long. Leo Aylen devotes a chapter to "dance drama" in his ground-breaking work, The Greek Theatre, pointing out that the literary bias of our own culture has obscured the reality of the early tragic performances, which are best thought of as "Gesamtkuntswerk   song, dance, groupings, color, and spectacle together." In contrast to the common image of wooden actors pounding out ponderous verse, the real Greek theater was a passionate exhibition of wild dancing and rhythmic lament.

"All the evidence, visual and verbal, demonstrates that the Greek dramatic choruses were displays of extremely complex, vigorous, and varied dance," Aylen concludes.

To us the stage of the Greek theater is the flat, circular area at the bottom of the seats. For the Greeks this was the orchestra, a word meaning "dancing place." To imagine the performances, think of a group of twelve men, one of them standing to the side to act as commentator while the others sing and dance together to tell the story, let's say, of a king who met some tragic fate: whose ghost had wandered stricken through the streets of Athens in the All Souls' Day of the Anthesteria festival, and, who now receives some compensation for the innocent sacrifice of his life from the dancing bodies and the chanting voices of the men who recall and remember him.

It's easy enough to infer from this that those actors were seekers of enthousiasmos. The state of emotional exhilaration from the sense of a divine infusion of energy is still one of the most powerful attractions of the theater for an actor, even if the words used to describe the experience are no longer the same. When actors talk of a magnetic performance, a charged audience or an electric house, the words they use are literally true. Many an actor's life has been transformed by the concentration of the psychic and electrostatic energy of the audience upon his person.

Dionysus is not only the god of wine and comedy, but also the god of tragedy and Lord of Death.

Now imagine an actor playing Oedipus the King, standing in the orchestra of a Greek theater, a chorus of a dozen men dancing around him in a frenzy to the pounding music, to evoke the unspeakable suffering that he has endured. A spellbound audience of fifteen thousand people watch as Oedipus himself — reeling, dancing, in the center — rips his eyes out with his hands and wails:

O! O! O! They will all come, they will all come out clearly! Light of the sun, let me see no more of you again. In the intensity of such a cry, and its effect upon the shivering nerves of the audience, one can begin to imagine the enthousiasmos of Dionysus, the Lord of Souls.

That this enthousiasmos would be followed from time to time by ecstasy seems reasonable enough. We've seen what the meager resources of the Players Theatre of New England could produce in a basketball gym. Imagine the singing and dancing of the greatest tales of lamentation the world has ever known, acted out before the smoking altars of the Lord of Souls, with 15,000 people riveted on the actors in the circle of the orchestra, the apex of the huge inverted cone of the theater, the spirits of the actors literally pressed from their bodies by the concentration of energy, so that the spirit of Oedipus flies out with his eyes, to hover for a time beyond the bounds of incarnation, and float above the theater, looking down. Did the ancient performers take to the stage in deliberate pursuit of ecstasy, and to what degree was it consciously elicited and controlled?

William Butler Yeats.

This question is of more than historical interest for those who think the theater is still watched and presented for the same purpose that it was in Greek antiquity. This purpose is essentially religious: actors seek transcendence and audiences hope for revelation. It may be, and often is, bad worship, but it is worship nonetheless. It's good to remember that modern theater is the direct descendant of the liturgical church dramas of the middle ages, and that modern opera evolved from attempts to recreate Greek tragedy by musicians of the Renaissance.

If the driving force in theater is its search for spiritual meaning, then it's natural that one of its fruits is spiritual experience. Theater is well suited to such pursuits because it is the one art that can encompass all the others in itself, concentrating the full spectrum of thought and feeling into the power of a unified expression. Every part of life can be included in its spectacle of music, scenery, song, and dance: Dionysus is not only the god of wine and comedy, but also the god of tragedy and Lord of Death. The theater may be tawdry and bankrupt, a stepchild to the movies, a soap box for political scolders and moral libertines, the sanctuary of sofa drama and hysterical therapy, the most boorish and bourgeois of all artistic institutions; but it is also the chosen art form of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Yeats.

Indeed Yeats, like Eliot, put dramatic poetry over lyric poetry in his hierarchy of values, a hierarchy whose necessity he insisted upon. He founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to make a laboratory — or a temple — in which such transcendent experiences might be born. It was there that he saw a performance of Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows, writing afterward about an actor in the play who had "ascended into that tragic ecstasy that is the best that art — perhaps that life — can give... and it was as though we too had touched and felt and seen a disembodied thing."

Is Yeats here describing his subtle perception of a moment of ecstasy on stage? It certainly sounds like it. I think that these phenomena must happen whenever the conditions are ripe for them: whenever we combine the correct proportions of conviction, beauty, and intensity on stage they will arise as if from a chemical reaction. One need only understand the process and assemble the right ingredients, which is what the best people in the theater have always done. The rest is up to nature.

RICHARD SQUIRES  is an American writer, artist, film director, and composer presently living in London. His essays, interviews, and reviews on history and theatre have been published in the numerous magazines and journals. He has worked as an actor, director, playwright, and technician for La Mama Amsterdam, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, American Place Theatre, the Players Theatre of New England, and Brecht West Theatre.

This piece previously appeared in Performance, and Gnosis. It is published here in a slightly revised form.
 

Cover photo.

STILLETOS

by Amy Brundvand

I stopped by at that fancy bakery after work

To buy myself a piece of chocolate cake

With buttercream icing and while I’m waiting

My turn in line there’s a tango playing

On the sound system and all I want

For Christmas is to dance with a milonguero

In polished wingtip shoes, but my stilettos

Are sitting at home in the closet. I’ve aged out

Of being asked to dance, and as they say

It takes two. My little girl was tottering

Around in my high heels the other day

And she said Mom, it’s hard to walk in these things.

Those shoes aren’t made for walking, I told her

But I didn’t explain to her what they are for.

AMY BRUNDVAND is a librarian, part-time nature mystic and monthly contributor to Catalyst Magazine in Salt Lake City, Utah. She lives in the Jordan River watershed at the edge of the Great Basin.

BARNABY RUHE is an American artist, academic and six-time world champion boomeranger. As an artist, Ruhe, a professor at New York University's Gallatin school of individualized study, is best known for his painting marathons, otherwise known as endurance feats.

URSZULA ABOLIK is an entrepreneur activist poet and pedagogist extraordinaire.  She makes it happen. A ruthless conversationalist, the soul is revealed and moved to the next place, shamanically. Thus she has dear friends. She owns the store Amber Connection, with amber and with connection.

Photos and video by Whitney Smith.

“Human society sustains itself by turning nature into garbage.” Mason Cooley

It had started suspiciously when the little old lady’s wheelie bin went missing. In an effort to cope with the situation I suggested sharing ours, but who would know that one elder citizen could produce so much rubbish. One small woman consuming so much in a week that every time I made the malodorous trip downstairs to rid myself of my own crap, I found myself pounding down the already compacted, old lady trash.

The situation was workable until the day I returned home to find the ultra-compressed receptacle un-emptied, with its fetid mouth gaping open on bin day. Why? Why would someone leave the bin in this state, knowing it meant a week of leftover food scraps, and the European Union teabag mountain in my kitchen? Because the lid wasn’t down. That was why: the lid wasn’t down. Collectors, it seemed, didn’t like the collective.

"I’m very sorry, but we’ve been supplying you with a service you shouldn’t have had in the first place," was the council response.

And then, a few days later, the bin disappeared completely. This, clearly, was theft, and had to be reported as such. I was informed by a pre-programmed person on a switchboard that I would need a crime number in order to get it replaced. He then passed me on to another pre-programmed person on a different switchboard, this time that of the police. Could I describe the bin? Certainly: green, with wheels and a hinged lid. What size was the bin? Bin-sized. When did I last see the bin (alive)? It wasn’t something I saw, so much as something that was there – more noticeable by its absence than its presence.

A new bin was duly delivered, but it wasn’t emptied again on two occasions. It turns out that in doing a good deed I had been breaching bin etiquette by not placing my bin out on the pavement. Apparently I had been benefiting from a council arrangement to collect the bins of elderly residents who couldn’t manage to get to the gate. “I’m very sorry, but we’ve been supplying you with a service you shouldn’t have had in the first place,” was the council response. This only served to heighten my obsession and feeling of victimisation. In what was fast becoming a war of attrition, I began to place my bin on the footpath in a selection of creative ways that would make it increasingly more difficult to collect. Insurrection was my chosen weapon in order to fox my enemy.

In retaliation my bin became ever more evasive and I would regularly come home on a Tuesday evening to find it some distance from the front gate. As the next Tuesday came around I found myself on the look out – standing at the front window and staring down the entire road visible from my bay window. Just then, the wagon rounded the corner at the far end.

Oooeee oooeee oooh. Wah wah wah.

Ennio Morricone’s theme music from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly moodily inserted itself into my head. I stared down the good half mile to the end of the road, narrowing my eyes and flexing my fingers around my hip. I imagined the driver doing the same, and waited for him to get close enough to draw. He stopped. He stepped down from the wagon, and took in the view. Slowly, he went over to the nearest wheelie bin, picked it up, and attached it to the rear of the vehicle, from where the contents of the bin were duly tipped inside. Then, the man pushed the bin away in a cursory fashion towards somewhere not even remotely close to where it had come from. And then he got back in.

Revelation came quickly and hard. Perhaps my partner was right: I was not Clint Eastwood, I was being a “bit of a twat”, and the bin-men simply “didn’t give a shit about their job” because nobody cared about them.

This largely unseen world and the hidden care, consideration and skill involved in essentially turning garbage back into nature.

Perhaps a more stealthy approach might yield better results, the kind I could serve to them cold, in a dish. I rang the council and pretended to be an artist (as opposed to a spiteful subscriber), wove them a tale about the bad hand I felt their workers were dealt, and offered to document their work for posterity, or at least until it needed throwing away.

The next week I found myself in the office of a very cheerful and friendly refuse manager who didn’t resemble Blofeld, or even own a white cat. The department offered me a free reign and for the next six months I worked alongside the men – because they were all men – of the refuse collection service. I learned the system hierarchy; with the litter pickers at the bottom of the pile and the bin-men who worked on collections at the top. It turned out that far from being petty and vindictive, like me, most bin-men were simply a bit sloppy from time to time, and not remotely the black-hatted villains I had set myself against. My determination to bring them down from the inside was tempered, then neutered, by the time spent with them. I realised that I’d spent my time trying to majorly inconvenience a non-existent pantomime villain of my own invention.

These people warmly gave me an insight into their working lives – an insight which paved the way for me to get permission to document a working landfill site in the nearby area. Debbie Bragg and I (working in partnership as Henry/Bragg) were then able to spend eighteen months working at the site. Landfills have historically received bad press, and have innate hazards attached to them, but having got to know the staff at the site, we wanted to show this largely unseen world and the hidden care, consideration and skill involved in essentially turning garbage back into nature, or at the very least an illusion of it.

Today, the site is almost full, and we’ve been documenting the process as it slowly transforms back to its former natural glory. It’s located in the middle of the Surrey Hills, which is one of the UK’s 46 areas of outstanding beauty. In the parts of the site that have already been restored, the only tell-tale signs of its previous life are the odd gas pipes sticking out of the ground, capturing the last remains of methane.

The job of restoring these undulating hills belongs to a site operative. An unassuming man, and although not formally trained, he is someone who has a great feel for landscaping and composition. It is his vision that will determine the new Surrey Hills. Armed with topological maps and a natural instinct, he is reshaping the land with his bulldozer.

The politics and environmental implications don’t impinge on his approach, his “it’s just a job” refrain belying the significance of icing this ravaged landscape.

The illusion of nature, replacing nature, with the nature we turned in to garbage.

www.henrybragg.com


 



Private Moon, Leonid Tishkov.

The bewitching magic of silvery moonlight belies the truth that the Moon's surface is as dark as asphalt. Both reflect only an eighth of the light that hits them. Perhaps humanity's lunar aspirations, too, are not shining, but dark.

Apollo 11 astronauts left a plaque in 1969 which said, 'We came in peace for all mankind', but right now, with China's Jade Rabbit rover recently let loose on Mare Imbrium (the lunar Sea of Rains), nations are scrambling to be back and they seem to have resources in mind.

Meanwhile, an international crew of artists have touched down on London's South Bank, and they bring us a timely warning. Calling themselves the Republic of the Moon, they have the most exquisitely eccentric of London's January exhibitions, and some points to make.

She raised and trained eleven geese (named after astronauts) from birth for the job . . .

The artists in residence, We Colonised the Moon, a.k.a. Sue Corke and Hagen Betzwieser, make their point about the Moon's future with a shopping trolley in the middle of their room — souped-up with moon-buggy-like wheels and solar panels, filled with rocks. Behind it, they've written on a blackboard: 'A THEME PARK OR A QUARRY? Well, jWC asked Corke, which is it? 'We think possibly both' she said, 'so we designed a Supermarket Sweep trolley'.

Those rocks, she revealed, were coated with stuff that NASA had deemed similar to the lunar regolith (soil). The real regolith is far higher in Helium-3 than Earth, and since that substance is potentially a miracle ingredient that may enable nuclear fusion and solve all our energy problems, Betzwieser predicts it will attract quarrying — 'probably the Chinese' he reckons. These guys know what they're talking about. A previous proposal to disguise orbiting space junk as asteroids was brilliance itself — as Corke explained, if you're a space tourist 'paying $250,000, with say, Richard Branson, you don't want to see a load of old washing machines'.

To take the orphan in the winter woods. Image by Leonid Tishkov.

This Moon show is not without stars. Liliane Lijn, for example, has been a big name experimental artist since her Poem Machines in the 1960s, on which words rotated on drums and cones. Here, her work moonme inscribes the word SHE across the Moon's face, and whispers it in the dark. The vision is just a simulation — the letters would need to be well over 2,000 km high. Her studio is just not that big, but her message is: she's reclaiming the Moon from men, resonating with its mythological role of feminine renewal, and maybe the menstrual cycle.

A cycle is what Agnes Meyer-Brandis uses instead of a chariot in her project Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Facility. It's all based on a 1638 book by Francis Godwin (regarded by some as the first science fiction writer) about flying to the Moon on goose-power. In 2011, Mayer-Brandis not only raised and trained eleven geese (named after astronauts) from birth for the job, she made a surprisingly fascinating film about it, which with her deadpan Germanic commentary is not unlike a Werner Herzog documentary. There's also stuff like the geese egg shells and a control-room mock-up where the geese are monitored wandering over ersatz craters. The whole thing is a charming one-liner - in space, as any fule kno*, there's nothing for geese to breath and they would explode without spacesuits.

Through a snowy forest, he makes a harvest offering of apples to it as it shines in bed, almost like a lover.

There are other diversions here, such as Katie Paterson's piano playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, despite data loss, after being bounced off the Moon in Morse code, and Joanna Griffin and her Bangalore students response to the Indian space agency ISRO's Chandrayaan Moon shots. There's a fantastic shop of Moon goods, stocking goodies from classic sci-fi paperbacks to NASA training sunglasses, run by East London hipsters super/collider.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis, still from Moon Goose Analogue (2011).

But the Republic's most enchanting element is Leonid Tishkov's exhibition of photos starring his electric shining cresent Moon in various locations, called Private Moon. Tishkov sits with his moon on a Moscow roof, he pulls it through a snowy forest, he makes a harvest offering of apples to it as it shines in bed, almost like a lover. In the Siberian waters of the Yenisei river at Krasnoyarsk, he films it floating. Yet how come the two-metre-long crescent moon that's on show at the Bargehouse isn't waterproof? 'I have many moons', Tishkov confessed, 'ten or twelve'.

He lives in a small Urals town 200 km from Yekaterinaburg, but has a studio on the 25th floor of a Moscow building. This project began in 2003. Once, he hung his crescent in a Moscow tree to enact Magritte's 1955 painting The Sixteenth of September. Tishkov is a romantic, for whom the Moon is the ultimate poetic object. He serenades it by its own light. He declares 'I am against the exploration of the Moon'. So what does he make of Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind in 1969? 'It was the first step to Hell.'

moonme, by Liliane Lijn.

A Moon left pristine from humanity's grubby hands sounds noble, but maybe it needs perspective. Tishkov is on record as a supporter of Greenpeace's brave Arctic 30, the now-free activists arrested trying to mount Gazprom's Arctic drilling platform. But the Moon is not the Arctic: there is no climate change issue here. Nor is there any endangered species or natural habitat. In fact, in what Armstrong described as the 'magnificent desolation' of the lunar surface, there's bugger all except free solar power, minerals and Helium3.

What to do with it all will be the subject of a symposium at the Bargehouse on Global Lunar Day, 1st February, with some serious scientists and policymakers. If we want the human race to survive (well, do we?), a good insurance policy against catastrophe here, at home on Earth, is to spread into space. The Moon could be the key — a stepping stone, a resource, a place only 384,000 km away with which we can communicate in just over a second, while even the nearest planets preclude conversation because of the speed of light.

Shouldn't we go for it, and make the dark side of the Moon also sparkle with cities and industry, and take the artists with us too? After all, something more beautiful than the Moon will wax and wane and serenade them in the lunar sky... the Earth itself.

* Just ask Molesworth.

~

Republic of the Moon is showing at
 Bargehouse
, Oxo Tower Wharf
, South Bank
, London SE1 9PH
. 11am-6pm daily, until 2nd February.


Go here for more images of the show.

Cover image by Leonid Tishkov.

HERBERT WRIGHT is a London-based writer specialising in urbanism, architecture and art. He is Contributing Editor to UK architecture/design magazine Blueprint and contributor to others. Previously, he has written for magazines covering contemporary and twentieth century art, real estate, technology, and music. Recent work includes contributing to architectural encyclopedias for Phaidon, editing the London ICA website, and articles in journals in France, Mexico and Croatia. Herbert is the author of three non-fiction books about skyscrapers and urbanism.
www.herbertwright.co.uk
 

USEFUL ADDITIONAL READING

How to be Topp: A guide to Sukcess for tiny pupils, including all there is to kno about SPACE — Geoffrey Willans (author), Ronald Searle (illustrator), Penguin Classics, ISBN 978-0-141-19169-0. Really good parts: All There Is To Know About Space, Ch 2, p 20; The Space Ship Takes Off
, Ch 5, p 47.

Леонид Тишков: Мальчик и луна. ISBN: 978-5-94282-673-4

A Dali drawing from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Argentinian pop artist The Argentinian pop artist Marta Minujin moved to New York when she was twenty years old. One day she was roller skating down the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, and she passed the St. Regis Hotel just as one of its occupants, Salvador Dali, stepped out.

“Hola!” he cried as she streaked by. Hearing her native tongue, Marta stopped, and they became friends on the spot. She saw him frequently, and one day in 1974 she invited me to tag along to meet him.

Marta is famous in South America for her massive projects. At the pinnacle of the military junta’s tyranny in Argentina, for example, Marta persuaded the country’s largest baker to give her 50,000 loaves of pan dulce — sweet bread — which she tied, loaf by loaf, to a steel frame, donated by an iron works. The frame was a copy of the famous Obelisk in Buenos Aire’s central square, and built right next to it. She called it the Edible Obelisk, and she invited the citizens of city to come and devour it, which they did.

I was staying at the time with Claudio Badal. Claudio was Chilean bohemian, a witty, mercurial, natural aristocrat who spoke four languages fluently and lived rent free in a workroom over a girdle shop on 14th Street at Union Square. He was one of the principal organizers of the Central Park Peace Rallies and Be-Ins that shook New York in the sixties, which made him a familiar in every quarter of the city. And when Salvador Allende was assassinated by a military junta sponsored by the CIA, it was Claudio who organized the defiant tribute to him held in Madison Square Garden. He was an old friend of Marta’s as well.

Claudio taught me how to live without money. His rent was paid by a friend who used the room to paint cheap frames for department store displays, which meant that Claudio had to leave it on weekdays from 10 to 5.  He had a bunk bed, an electric tea pot, a couple of cups and chairs, and a sink. The toilet was down the hall. He’d lived in the building for ten years when I met him. One of his neighbors was the actor/writer Taylor Mead.

A young Marta Minujin, a few years before the time of the story.

Claudio’s only other possessions were some books and a stack of old National Geographic magazines that he’d picked up off the street. I leafed through one of them that morning while Claudio made tea. I paused to study a striking color photo of a young Yugoslavian woman in native dress, holding a bushel basket of freshly picked oranges which she pointed toward the camera. Something made me glance at the cover to check the date: October 1958, fourteen years previous.

We spent the day in Central Park. At Bethesda Fountain, Claudio bought a dollar joint from a street dealer, which struck me as a dubious thing to do. But it smelled great when he lit it.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” he said matter-of-factly, as though it were a new cheese from the deli. We were walking south along the grand allee in the center of the park. I asked him how he ate in New York.  “I go to Max’s Kansas City at happy hour and eat the chicken wings,” he replied.

“Every night?” I said. “What do you do when you’re tired of it?”

“I eat a slice of pizza,” he said.

At the far end of the allee, a half a mile away, we could see a man walking on ten-foot stilts. He’d drawn a circle of spectators around him. As we drew near, Claudio ventured that it might be Peter Schumann, the founder of the Bread and Puppet Theatre. Claudio had worked with him when he began the company in Coney Island, and I had just worked with his draft-resisters’ branch in Paris.

“Hi, Claudio!” Schumann called from the top of his stilts, some sixteen feet high.

“Hi Peter,” he replied and, indicating me, said, “This is Richard. He just came back from Paris. He worked with your group at L’Epee du Bois.”

“No fooling,” Schumann said. “Good show.”  He gave me as much of a wave as he could, while balancing on his stilts. It was an awkward angle for a conversation, though.

“Bye, Claudio,” he said, as he turned and walked away with giant strides through the trees.

“Weren’t you close friends at one time?” I asked, as we continued our walk.

“Yes,” he replied, “very close.”

Peter Schuman strolling down Main Street.

I met Marta at the St. Regis at 6 PM, and we went to the cocktail lounge to ask for Dali’s table. We were taken to a small, round, marble table in the corner, where two young men in blue jeans were already waiting. They were both artists — one a conceptual artist, the other a painter — and both from Pittsburgh. They explained that they had started calling Dali on the phone some six months before, and after five months of it he relented and granted them an audience. Each of them had a green plastic garbage bag on the floor by his chair.

Dali came down after a while, gave Marta a grand embrace and double kiss, and sat down next to her. He was elegantly dressed in gabardine pants, a burgundy smoking jacket, a ruffled shirt and silk kerchief. His famous moustache was waxed to the nines, and he had so much make-up on that it was hard to discern his skin. Marta introduced me as her friend, and he offered me a limp hand with a distracted air. Then he turned to the boys from Pittsburgh and asked them who they were.

They introduced themselves and reminded him that he had told them to come that evening. Dali responded with a marked change in tone.

“Why wouldn’t you stop pestering me on the phone?” he demanded. He turned to Marta. “For six months they called me, night and day, on the telephone!”

“Yes, Mr. Dali, we just didn’t know what else to...”

“You could leave me alone if you want to know what else to do!” Dali interrupted imperiously.

“Yes, Mr. Dali...”

A thirty year-old Salvador in Paris — without the familiar persona that marked his portraits and public appearances later on.

“We just wanted to show you our work,” the other one said, pulling his garbage bag off the floor and into his lap. He pulled a large black artist’s notebook from the bag, about 14 x 20 inches with perhaps a hundred pages, and placed it on the table in front of Dali, who looked upon it as if it were infected. He leafed through a half dozen pages. From where I sat they looked pretty good; neatly rendered pencil thoughts and drawings, in the tradition of Leonardo; the current rage in conceptual art. Dali handed the notebook back.

“You know the garbage strike is over now,” he said. “You can put this out on the sidewalk and they’ll take it away for you.”

The poor man smiled uncomprehendingly at first, then flushed beet red, cast down his head, and fought back tears. Dali threw his head back, widened his eyes, and turned to glare at the painter, who lifted his own garbage bag on the unspoken command. He pulled out a single framed oil painting, and held it on the table to present to Dali. It was an excellently rendered, hyper-realistic image, about 20 x 24 inches, of a smiling, attractive young woman in native Eastern European dress, holding a bushel basket of oranges which she pointed outwards toward the viewer. The oranges were exploding from the basket, propelled by an unseen force.

It was the same picture that I had studied that morning at Claudio Badal’s, exact in every detail, except the oranges were launching toward the viewer from the basket.

Such epiphanies tend to occur in times of idleness and leisure, when attention is diverted from its normal fixation on habitual concerns. 

“Hey, I know that picture!” I blurted out, incredulously. “It was part of a National Geographic article on Yugoslavia from 1958. I just looked at it this morning!”

The man’s face fell, along with all his hopes, at this revelation.

“Yeah,” he said, and that was all.

“That’s amazing!” I said, still giddy.

Dali looked on in haughty, vindicated triumph, as if the exposure was a routine matter. Silence descended on the table. After a minute the painter put the painting in the bag and placed it on the floor. Then Dali turned to Marta and talked to her in Spanish for some time, while the rest of us sat mute. Their conversation was eventually interrupted by the arrival of Gala, Dali’s wife, who squeezed into a sixth chair around a table made for two. Like Dali, she was old, well dressed, and wore so much make-up that it gave her face a lurid countenance. He proudly introduced her to Marta, whom he described in English as “the most intelligent woman in South America.” Then he broke into Spanish again to ask Marta a question, evidently about me, because he then said,

“And this is the artist Richard Squires, her good friend and collaborator.” I shook Gala’s hand as she minced a grimacing smile toward me. Then Dali sat in silence for a moment.

“And these are a couple of flies,” he said, with a wave of the back of his hand toward the two men from Pittsburgh.

I once ran into an acquaintance from Virginia around midnight in Washington Square. She was on her way home to her flat near the Cloisters; I was heading to my place in the Village. The next morning, at the corner of Broadway and Canal, I met her again as she emerged from the subway. Although extraordinary, that event obviously falls in the realm of random coincidence; delightful, mysterious, but not really meaningful, aside from the magic of long odds in numbers.

But the Yugoslavian orange picker strikes me as something more than coincidence. A lot was riding on which of the magazines I picked up from the pile on Claudio’s floor that morning. And a lot was riding on whether I read the story on Yugoslavia in the magazine that I picked. How many fourteen-year-old copies of the National Geographic were even in existence on 14th Street, or in Manhattan, or in New York City that day; and how many people besides me actually saw that picture? I think I must have been the only one. If you plot its probability, it veers sharply toward infinity.

Claudio Badal in his studio.

There’s a Sufi aphorism of The Tapestry that helps me understand it. Men are like individual threads in an enormous tapestry.  They are normally focused on their private, filamental lives, oblivious to all but the threads they happen to directly cross. But on rare occasions they can see the larger pattern. Such epiphanies tend to occur in times of idleness and leisure, when attention is diverted from its normal fixation on habitual concerns. It’s possible then to take such an interest in a photo of a maiden that you check the cover of the magazine for a date. You may not know it, but you’ve glimpsed the tapestry. The shuttle disappears, the completed work emerges, and the correlation of a magazine photo in a workroom and a painting in a cocktail lounge cries out for attention. You’re released for a moment from the loom of time and the vault of space. You experience simultaneity.

I had no desire to play the damning voice of truth for an irritated master like Salvador Dali. Even copied for the most part from a magazine, and closer to Magritte than Dali, it was quite a good painting. But the man defied a universal standard of behavior to gain his audience, and, as a result of doing so, he saddled himself with a karmic burden.

Maybe it’s possible that Dali — great-souled genius that he was — had reached a level of realization from which such karmic debts got paid when rendered. Even if it meant that someone whom he didn’t know would need to see a certain picture in a certain magazine on a specific day, in a room above a girdle shop on the other side of town, for the point to come home.

Salvador Dali on the Ed Sullivan Show.

RICHARD SQUIRES is an American writer, artist, film director, and composer, born and raised in Virginia and presently living in London. His essays, interviews, and reviews on history and theatre have been published in the numerous magazines and journals. He has worked as an actor, director, playwright, and technician for La Mama Amsterdam, the Bread and Puppet Theatre, American Place Theatre, the Players Theatre of New England, and Brecht West Theatre.

be a mountain
with that much presence
be a river
with that much flowing
be a bird
with that much freedom
be a deep dancer
I have no words for that.

Ilse Gudino.

Against Sleep* we called it
not knowing what it meant
to really be awake
to wrestle with inherited demons
especially in the night of one’s unknowing
but this I do know
life is a dance full of stillness
and the appetite of lions.

* A duet dance piece choreographed in 1968 by the author.

Marie Josée Chartier.

we made the women weep
the ones who knew quietly
they cried for all the sadness
the sinking sadness of the world
for all the women working
unsung   unrewarded
for all the dismissed dignity
overt and disguised
they called this dance beautiful
did they know
I meant it as a prayer?

Jasmyn Fyffe.

this is a poem
willing to burn the page it rests on
addressed to those
who have not heard
the sap’s reasons for dancing
dance without boundaries it says
dance for all those frozen bodies
imprisoned in cerebral lives
unlock the planets turning in those who only watch
yes, dance for those who say they cannot.

Zelma Badu.

muscles know work
ligaments dance
glands open to the invisible
where only cosmic rules apply
can I teach this
without erasing dance itself
igniting the carriers
to dance the impermanence
the everlasting impermanence
only the grey crane
knows the answer to this
I am his student now
practicing on borrowed wings
he tells me it all begins
with disappearing.

Holly Bright.

the sad intensity of his language*
clings to the page
fervent, like the earth-reaching feet
of the serious dancer
who would, by her hungry presence
burn away all artificialities
for poetry too can live in thighs and necks
and singing torsos
never telling stories
simply telling truths
sky rockets of red being
only music understands.

* Pablo Neruda.

Susan McPherson.

I read all your poems
and your more poems
celebrated and rewarded
as they are on the pages
of respect and ranking
and I can only think
it’s not literature I love
but words that dance
is that asking too much
of the covers of a book
to contain such a thing?
perhaps I am an imposter
dancing still
asking words to embody
all the sweet music
I still can hear.

Jelani Douglas.

I would shoot an arrow
white twinged
into the heart
of all the noisy arguments about God
leave it in the hands of art
of those who work slowly now
on behalf of immensity
dissolving the complicated stories
we’ve built around the names
like life preservers that never allow
a swimmer down into the depths
leave it to the dancers
the best of whom embody
those mysteries words will never name
who carry light for others
the beacons.

Pulga Muchochoma.

wild cannot be spelled out
put safe in a tidy box
like a dead definition
it can only be lived
what is wild is free
fully bloomed
like a dancer soaring
beyond her training
dangerous and magnetic
it is the night sky full of lightning
unfettered obedient only
to the ancient hara within the elements
wild is a windhorse
the silent seed buried within every moment
released.

Anastasia Shivrina.

when I am only ashes
I will know the wind
for now I treasure my footprints
in the red earth
this is what I know
while I was here I danced
I danced with everything I knew
and everything I was
and when I join the rollicking wind
I will dance again.

Shizuno Nasu.

PATRICIA BEATTY has spent her life as a modern dancer, teacher and choreographer. She is the co-founder of the Toronto Dance Theatre and received the Order of Canada in 2004 for her pioneering work in modern dance. Since retiring from making new dances in 2004 she has turned more to writing poetry. Her book on the art of choreography, Form With Formula: A Concise Guide to the Choreographic Process, published by Coach House Press, is in its fifth edition. These poems come from her second book of poetry entitled Slow Words Dancing. To order a copy ($15 CDN, shipping included), email Wonder Press.

CYLLA VON TIEDEMANN is a German-born photographer working in the fields of dance, theatre, music, visual art and film. Her photogrpahy has been recognized by the National Arts Centre in Canada through a publication of the book "The Dance Photographs of Cylla von Tiedemann." She lives in Toronto.

www.cylla.ca

www.photographymoves.com

Kaunas Correctional Facility: The Wall Job. All photographs, © Vaiva Katinaityte 2014.

The pylons marching along Equipment Street — Technikos Gatvé, in the local language — are big enough to take the wide open spaces on the edge of town in their stride. The town in question is Kaunas, Lithuania's second city. Behind these pylons stretches a high brick wall. A sign by a discrete door says Kaunas Juvenile Remand Prison and Correction House. On 10th April, we were going inside, where spaces are tight. We were going to leave our identities with the guards, we were going to do time.

All prisoners speak the same language.   

But not much time, not like the lads inside. We'd do just enough to see something that transforms not just a place but people, forever - a project called Made Corrections. David Ellis, an interventionist cultural agent with a track record of Lithuanian projects, called it “a world event — because it has opened all prisons for us”. This project started 1640 km away, in London, in a conversation between Ellis and Dean Stalham, an ex-convict turned evangelist for the rehabilitative power of art, and ‘guv'nor’ of an organisation that promotes what he preaches, Art Saves Lives. “All prisoners speak the same language” Stalham had always said. Ellis suggested testing that proposition in Lithuania.
 

Stencilling a fence.

Ellis used contacts, starting with the British Embassy, to get into the Lithuanian prison system. When he and Stalham were sitting with the Kaunas Facility director Markas Tokarevas, Stalham asked “how long have you been looking at those walls?” Markas replied “since Independence”. That's a long time - Lithuania re-emerged from Soviet occupation in 1991. “I want that wall” said Stalham.

It's a project of trust.    

Ellis negotiated with the Facility — they were on. So last year, Stalham met with Olly Walker, street art guru, author and head of creative agency Ollystudio, and they drew up a plan. Walker put it to JR, the French ex-guerilla artist known globally for his rolling Inside Out project, which uses blown-up black-and-white portraits of ordinary people, pasted up big in public spaces for maximum impact, and often with a political edge. JR had relocated to New York and had just finished a huge Times Square project. Nevertheless, Walker reports that the next day, “JR emailed back saying it was perfect”.

All along the watchtower wall. 

They found a local Lithuanian photographer, Donatas Stankevičius. His hero is David Bailey. Last October, 200 inmates were gathered and asked if they wanted to take part. 39 stepped forward. Stankevičius photographed them the same day. “It's a project of trust” he'd say later, and he had just four shots to build it with each young man. They chose their own shot to be printed up and shipped by JR.

That night, 39 faces that couldn't be there looked out on the city.    

In early April, it was time for the Made Corrections crew, lads and facilitators, to do the job. They had the prints from JR, they had stencils from Walker, and another street artist was now in the mix, Ernest 'Zac' Zacharevic. He'd probably dismiss the compliment, but the wit and execution of Zac's international work is a match for Banksy. Photographer Vaiva Katinaityte was there to document as a part of the team. They had four walls in the Kaunas Correctional Facility. What Ellis had painstakingly knitted together was happening, and now he plunged himself into the operation.

Lads in the facility take a break while the pylons march by.

There was another wall, too, in downtown Kaunas, facing the city's grand neo-Byzantine St Michael the Archangel church. On the evening before we'd all be in prison, Made Corrections were plastering those portraits up on an abandoned police station. With Walker up a ladder, Ellis fielding a media interview and Katinaityte snapping away, it took on an air of street theatre. That night, 39 faces that couldn't be there looked out on the city.   

Olly Walker (left) and David Ellis at work on the wall.

The next day, the tenth, was the big one. Out at the Facility, the work would be revealed. We passed through the Facility's small door, handing over mobiles, passports etc before climbing upstairs into surprisingly light institutional corridors, painted lilac and yellow, and a big meeting room. The young offenders come marching, with a slightly swaggering step, all crew cuts, tracksuits and faces way more serious than their portraits. Some break step to stop and earnestly shake hands before we all sit for the speeches.

The concrete walls look like they might have once divided Berlin.      

Outside, the exercise yard must have been a grim place. The concrete walls look like they might have once divided Berlin. A watchtower rises in a corner. But now, facing the main building, the wall smiles — with the 39 portraits, above another photographic strip, of happy eyes. On the side wall, stenciled fencing with body shapes is being cut by Zac's colourful painted characters. And nearby, in the wire net-ceilinged deep security isolation unit, its grim purpose belied by a basketball hoop, a bird of vibrant coloured triangles sits on a backdrop of white flowers. In an adjacent unit, more portraits, eyes and a scratchy face drawing. These spaces are alive!

Street theatre: making corrections out in the city. On the right, David Ellis in an interview; on the left, our irrepressible correspondant.

The Made Corrections crew didn't know what the boys were in for and they didn't ask. Those portraits gave them an identity beyond their past. The work made them trust strangers again, and themselves. Perhaps the strangest thing is how when 39 volunteered to take part, 161 did not. Why? Ellis reckons it was fear.

Ellis will be back in May continuing his engagement with the inmates through drama and improvisation workshops. Walker plans to return too. Stalham's idea that art saves lives won't be leaving any time soon. But the lads in the Facility will leave. Hopefully, they made corrections. In his speech, Ellis looked at those in the crew straight on. “No offence”, he said, “but don't come back”.

And now the bird can sing . . .

RADIO & PODCAST COVERAGE OF THE PROJECT

Dean Stalham is joined by David Ellis, Olly Walker and Vaiva Katinaityte for a live free-form debrief after their recent incursion inside the Kaunas Youth Correctional and Interrogation Facility, Lithuania.

On Resonance 104 FM

Program: CLEAR SPOT

Fri, May 2, 8 pm – 9 pm (Repeated on Monday May 5, 9 am)

Resonance104.4fm / http://resonancefm.com/schedule

HERBERT WRIGHT is a London-based author and journalist specialising in architecture and art, and contributing editor of The Journal of Wild Culture. He studied Physics and Astrophysics at the University of London. He is currently a contributing editor of Blueprint magazine, columnist on the Royal Institute of British Architects Journal, and contributor to le Courier de l'Architecte.

www.herbertwright.co.uk

If you were to judge it only by the size of the big crowd that gathered at Berlin’s small but prestigious Whiteconcepts gallery on Wednesday, 28th May, 22-year-old Australian artist Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon’s first European show was a succes d'éstime. Titled ‘History Puts A Saint In Every Dream’ (derived from the lyric of a Tom Waits song), the show even drew the rare presence of controversial and reclusive German art star, Jonathan Meese, who opened the show with a heartfelt introduction of O’Hanlon and his work.

O’Hanlon’s drawings, in architectural pen on cold-pressed paper, are intricate, multi-layered and demand close study. The drawings transcend mere illustration to merge everything from French fantasy art and early 20th century sailors’ tattoo art with references to medieval religious iconography and syncretic Aztec, Egyptian and Hindu symbolism.

Roman Catholic saints do combat (both with sword and AK-47) with Aztec-like demons.      

From a distance, each of the 16 monochromatic works are as dense as old cartography, but O’Hanlon masterfully controls the stark possibilities of tone and contrast within black and white linework. When viewed against the crisp white walls at the gallery, even the most casual viewer could not resist moving in closer to explore them. The refinement and detail is unexpected in the work of someone so young.

The careless immortal tends her menagerie, architectural pen on cold-pressed paper, 46cm x 66cm, 2014.

These drawings reflect, partly, experiences and observations of a nomadic childhood, wandering with creative parents across the desert south-west of the United States, rural Japan, and the south-east coast of Australia. But underpinning all the works are forms adapted from Romanesque architecture, Renaissance religion art and illuminated manuscripts that the young artist encountered up close for the first time while living in south-west France in 2011.

In these drawings, nothing is sacred. Roman Catholic saints do combat (both with sword and AK-47) with Aztec-like demons, and Aboriginal tribal patterns add texture to excerpts from Buddhist mandalas and decaying drive-in movie signs. Certain pieces, most notably The careless immortal tends her menagerie and Ganesha dances on the cusp of a melancholy doom emulate the classic leaded structure of stained glass windows. Punctuating all the works are snakes and decorated skulls, images derived from Mexico’s Day of the Dead and recalled from yet another childhood road trip.

A keen interest in multi-cultural mythologies and a vivid sense of old-fashioned wonder . . . the artist cites H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle as inspirations.     

The snakes, which suggest both good and evil, depending on your spiritual perspective, recur throughout these drawings. Exquisitely patterned, inextricably tangled with (and within) other elements, they’re metaphoric pathways on a psychogeographic map, hinting at intellectual and actual routes the artist has followed in these early years of his life. They are as unsettling as they are instructive.

Syncretic illusions of a lost crusade, architectural pen on cold-pressed paper, 2013.

Overall, the images not only reveal fragments of O’Hanlon’s own past. They hint at a depth of historical knowledge, a keen interest in multi-cultural mythologies and a vivid sense of old-fashioned wonder. The artist cites H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle as inspirations but the influence of French artist Jean Giraud (Moebius) and even the Gothic illustrators Harry Clarke and Gustave Doré  are unmistakeable.

These drawings are not easy to take in within one viewing. They take time and close-quarters study to decipher and absorb their thought-provoking narratives and meaning. The pure, relentlessly dense  linework create hypnotic puzzles you can’t help but try to unravel.

~

Whiteconcept, Auguststrasse 35, Berlin

OPEN UNTIL 8th June 2014, 11 AM – 5 PM, and by appointment.

ILONA CEROWSKA is an emerging Berlin-based writer with a strong interest in contemporary art and photography.

READ INTERVIEW with Finn Lafcadio O'Hanlon.

From left to right: Nicole Loeser (gallerist at Whiteconcepts, Berlin), Brigitte Meese, Jonathan Meese, Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon.

Kelly Richardson. Leviathan (detail). 2011. Photo by Colin Davidson.

INTRODUCTION

There are many artists doing brilliant work with, in and about nature today. From revisiting the tradition of landscape painting to ritualistic performances, conceptual sound recordings or hi-tech projects involving close collaboration with neuroscientists, the range of the work being produced is dizzying. In a sense it's impossible to try and draw a thread through all of this diverse activity, but on the other hand, it's worth a try.

In August 2013, I was invited to give a talk at Wilderness Festival in which I attempted to place this 'new nature art' within a broader context — one that includes art history, but also philosophy, science, poetry, and an economic context that has seen arts budgets slashed and the 'creative industries' looking elsewhere for sources of revenue. This, modified a little subsequently, is that attempt.

The idea is to examine how some of the most interesting artists are looking closely at what we actually mean by 'nature'— how the concept of what is 'natural' is increasingly complex and tangled up with perception, ethics, technology, language, and a whole host of other issues.

Gordon Cheung. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. 2009.

It is also interesting to touch upon what is 'successful' work in this context, and by extension, why the concept of artistic 'success' might be a good way into an understanding of what the arts can offer that other disciplines cannot.

But let's begin with a few caveats.

Whether all this nature-focused art is increasing — at a time when our relationship with the natural world is at a moment of apparent crisis — or whether this is simply something that I've become increasingly aware of myself, it's hard to say. Clearly humans have been intensely interested in the external world ever since art began (whenever that may have been, but let's not get into that question...). But I do believe that things today are different: because of our changing understanding of what 'nature' means, and because of this apparently widening division between humanity and the natural world — a division which many are seeking to overcome.

Jacques de Vaucanson, Canard Digerateur. 1739.

CONTEXT

If there is a division – and maybe we can return to this question later – then it is one that has instituted itself across many fields of contemporary life. Of course, within each field there is disagreement and discrepancy, but for the sake of clarity, we'll have to simplify. Let's begin with science.

Science, which has replaced religion as the dominant dogma of the modern age, is arguably particularly culpable here. For all the incredible advances of modern science – and it is indisputable that we now understand more about the natural world than ever before – it is still underpinned by a problematic worldview that dates back to Descartes and then the enlightenment.

The mechanistic worldview — that originated with Descartes's view of animals as 'automata'— and has been championed of late by prominent public scientists such as Richard Dawkins — is based on the idea that the world is a simple mechanism, governed by immutable laws. This view, which is still dominant in contemporary science, is incapable of seeing nature as anything other than an object – to be studied, ordered, controlled, dominated.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Garden of Eden. 1530.

To that end, science, for all its apparent modernity, owes much to Christianity. As God instructed Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Thankfully, this element of scientific thinking is facing strong challenges. American novelist, intellectual and activist Wendell Berry has said that “'the time is past, if it ever existed, where a scientist can discover knowledge, release it into the world and assume he has done good.”

Whilst the mechanistic view specifically has come under sustained attack from likes of biologist Rupert Sheldrake and moral philosopher Mary Midgley. As Sheldrake has written “Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical.” but “This view is now undergoing a credibility crunch. The biggest problem of all for materialism is the existence of consciousness.” The consciousness of both humans and animals, and maybe more besides. Sheldrake's book The Science Delusion and Midgley's Science as Salvation are both key texts here.

Derrida once described literature as “the institution that allows one to say everything, in every way.” We might therefore describe art as the institution that allows one to do everything.

Economics has also produced a problematic context — with the last two hundred years or so seeing the West's understanding of nature limited to its value as resource for industry and economic growth. Recent attempts have been made to encourage conservation by placing monetary values on the natural world. UK charity The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, for example, have recently launched a pan-European research project with the extremely clunky name of Quantification of Ecosystem Services for Sustainable Agriculture, which has so far come up with the statistic that ““pollinators alone are worth £430 million per year to British agriculture” Such initiatives are merely following the same logic of accounting and are doomed to failure.

In thrall to the accountants and management consultants, it's hardly surprising that politicians have been unable to do anything about bridging this divide. Politics is limited to four-year cycles and anything that requires long-term shifts in thinking is likely to be perennially pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.

Which is where the arts come in.

David Cameron. "Greenest government."

THE ARGUMENT

Recent years have seen a boom in 'new nature writing' with much celebrated publications by Granta, big sales figures for the dons of the genre such as Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane, and a host of independent publishers like Penned in the Margins, Longbarrow Press and Influx Press exploring place and the environment in a host of innovative and exciting ways.

At the same time, something similar has been happening to the visual arts. A cynical argument might be that, with dramatic cuts to arts funding, artists are increasingly looking to alternative sources of funding. Whilst the Tate remains happy to take money from BP, institutions and individuals with more integrity have been looking elsewhere.

Art Not Oil.

The Wellcome Trust, a biomedical institute primarily, has emerged as a significant source of funds, whilst smaller organisations such as Arts Catalyst, Cape Farewell and Artangel have all championed art that crosses over into environmentalism and science more broadly.

The arts are perhaps uniquely placed for this interdisciplinary approach, and this is a key point I think. As other professions have disappeared down the alleyway of increasingly specialisation, art — which is still a specialised profession — is able to remain more fleet-of-foot and polygamous. Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher who I'm slightly obsessed with, once described literature as “the institution that allows one to say everything, in every way”. We might therefore describe art as the institution that allows one to do everything.

LAND ART

This idea of doing everything or anything informs the work of both Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long, the two big British names of the so-called Land Art movement.

Richard Long. A Line Made by Walking. 1967.

A subsection of the still-nascent conceptual art movement of the late 60s and 1970s, Land Art sought to take art out of the gallery and into the external, often rural, 'natural' environment. Richard Long's most famous work is perhaps A Line Made by Walking of 1967. This saw the then 22 year-old artist walk back and forth along a straight line in the grass in the English countryside, leaving a track that was then photographed in black and white.

A recent book entitled The Art of Walking published by Black Dog Press demonstrates that Long's influence is still a strong one in contemporary art. Likewise, the works of Glasgow-based artist Amy Todman.

Amy Todman. Breathing Views, 1 & 2.

Inspired by the work of John Latham, one of the pioneers of art-science collaborative work and … Todman's  current series Breathing Views entails the artist undetaking a walk through West Lothian and making a single mark for each inhalation and one for each exhalation. Fusing print and performance and poetry, the project examines the idea of the view and changing viewpoints throughout a walk in order to examine, among other things, how it is impossible for humans to understand 'nature' without reference to ourselves – our own eyes and bodies, our conception of time, of interior/exterior, etc.

Back to the 1970s — and similar to Richard Long in terms of active engagement in the environment and an interest in documenting the fragile and the fleeting — is Andy Goldsworthy.

Andy Goldwworthy. Dandelion Flowers Pinned with Thorns, Cumbria. 1985.

His lovely photographic books have been extremely popular in the last decade or so. Goldsworthy, who I'm sure many of you will know, produces beautiful, often ephemeral sculptural works in the natural world – balancing boulders on top of each other or fixing a skin of leaves to a tree branch using nothing but his own saliva and a tonne of patience. Note the formal similarity with Long, and also the title here which depicts the process behind the finished' work. It reminds me of one of those  menus you get in upmarket organic restaurants these days...

But Goldsworthy has also been criticised for a lack of political awareness, a shallow understanding of the relationship between nature and social history, a limited conception of nature, and a lack of intellectual depth. “There is a deep loneliness at the heart of the work” Clare Hurley in World Socialist Web Site

Goldsworthy, say some, is simply a romantic. And, for reasons that we shall come to, there are few words as keenly avoided in the modern nature art/writing world as romantic. The new nature art is an intensely political and socially attuned business.

Edward Burtynsky. Silver Lake Operations # 2, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia. 2007. 

Two increasingly prominent names in contemporary art are Mariele Neudecker, who recently had a pair of big shows down in Brighton and Ed Burtynsky (who incidentally was featured in the first Journal of Wild Culture, when it was a print publication in Toronto and when Burtynsky was a pretty much unknown photographer). Burtynsky, whose huge, sublimely beautiful photographs depict humanity's relationship with nature at its worst – oil spills.

He shows with Flowers in London and recently his works launched the redeveloped Photographers Gallery. His work is pretty amazing, in a rather samey way.

In 2005, he declared his wish that his work might help persuade millions to join a global conversation on sustainability. Can art have this kind of impact?

But as ever with fantasy, it’s a fine line away from ridicule, over which this arguably teeters.       

NATURE RESERVES

This became particularly clear to me in the process of curating Nature Reserves, currently on show in London at a gallery called GV Art, one of the leading proponents of art that engages with science. I don't want to go on too much about my own show — you can simply go and see it, it's on until September 13th! But I'd like to pick out a couple of things.

The first is the sheer number and diversity of artists working in this area. The exhibition's focus was, I thought, fairly narrow — the relationship between humanity and nature with specific reference to knowledge production and systems of archiving. But we held an open call for submissions and I was amazed at the number of people — artists, poets, academic — who submitted work, and work of real quality. It was pretty amazing, and the curatorial process became one of exclusion as much as anything else.

The research process brought to my attention just how much work is going on this area, often in a highly collaborative and mutually supportive way: Alec Finlay, whose current work is The Dukes Wood Project; Amy Todman, who I've already mentioned; Camilla Nelson, a poet and academic whose work examines issues of authorship and authority; painter Paul Smith; Luke Franklin, whose degree show project (Art and Science MA at Central St Martins) involved setting up four bothes in secret, remote locations in the highlands of Scotland — library, studio, study, gallery.

Luke Franklin. Bothe — Library.

Luke Franklin. Bothe — Gallery.

I'd also like to pick out some of the artists in the exhibition itself: Liz Orton, Amy Cutler, Hestia Peppe and Laura Culham. What's interesting here is the idea of re-presentation and mediation, which I'll come back to.

Liz Orton. Splitters and Lumpers. 2012.

Amy Cutler. PINE. 2013.

Hestia Peppe. Microbial Familiars. 2013.

Laura Culham. Dead Grass. 2013.

VENICE

On the international scene, art that engages with nature was an especially strong presence at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Every two years sees a six month-long extravaganza that sees historic sites such as the Arsenale, Giardini and sundry grand palazzos across the slowly sinking city play host to contemporary art from across the globe. This year, art that sought to engage with nature was a strong thread throughout, with some works more successful than others.

Berlinde De Bruyckere. Cripplewood. 2012.

One of the strangest works was in the Belgian pavilion, where JM Coetzee has curated the work of Berlinde De Bruyckere; his introductory text setting the tone for a fantastical intertwining of something resembling mankind with a crippled kind of nature. The work — a colossal sculpture of a fallen tree, its branches intertwined to form a single trunk-limb, patched up and bandaged, pollarded and felled — is especially powerful under a grey, gauzy, slowly waxing gloom. But as ever with fantasy, it’s a fine line away from ridicule, over which this arguably teeters.

Antti Laitinen. It's My Island. 2007.

Similarly ‘rooted’ is Antti Laitinen’s work for the Finland Pavilion. On show is documentation of an old work, The Island, for which the artist constructed an island in the Baltic Sea, one sandbag at a time, as well as the more recent Forest Square series. This involved Laitinen chopping down a 10x10 metre square section of Finnish forest, sorting all the different materials – soil, moss, wood etc – and rebuilding the forest arranged by colour. Outside the pavilion when we visit, he’s busy nailing trees (back) together. Unfortunately, due to the constraints of the pavilion, this seems to me to be less successful than the other Laitinen project with which I'm familiar, It's My Island, 2007 .

Aurelien Froment. Pulmo Marina. 2010.

I also loved Aurelien Froment’s video piece, Pulmo Marina, on show at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac as part of the Victor Pinchuk-funded Future Generation Art Prize. Here, a simple, beautiful video of a jellyfish is presented with a blandly folksy US voiceover that explores our changing conceptions of these strange animals. Historical, mythical, and contemporary scientific understandings of jellyfish are all introduced, before the defining moment — a perfectly judged self-reflexive turn which suddenly jolts you into an awareness that this has not been filmed deep in some fathomless ocean inaccessible to humans, but in a carefully spot-lit tank in an aquarium in Monterey Bay. Jellyfish can’t be tagged (or they’d sink) and can therefore only be observed and studied in artificial environments such as this one. “Jellyfish just don’t fit the categories,” we’re told.

Richard Mosse. The Envlave 3. 2012.

Richard Mosse. The Envlave 1. 2012.

Richard Mosse. The Envlave 2. 2012.

But the major triumph at Venice this year is the work of Richard Mosse in the Ireland pavilion. I was familiar with Mosse’s work from the Gordon Cheung-curated Immortal Nature exhibition at Edel Assanti back in 2012, so I kind of knew what to expect. But I was apprehensive: for me, the strength of his work had been the sense of latent threat within the landscape, and I was worried that the more direct focus on war and political violence would somehow compromise that. But I was completely wrong.

The video installation was completely beautiful and genuinely harrowing. Using now defunct military-grade infrared film to document years of violence in the Eastern Congo, Mosse's work, entitled The Enclave, is one of the best things I've seen in ages. Like all great art, it prompts many thoughts, suggests many purposes – the relationship between documenting subject and documented object; the resistance of the world’s complexities to singular narrative overlay; the overlooked and oppressed; the violence of exclusion. But, in the context of thinking about the environment, it makes us look again at landscape — suddenly, now, a place of both otherworldly beauty and hidden terror. Always able to be rethought anew.

KELLY RICHARDSON

Mediation — that is the difference vs Romanticism, a recognition that all experience is mediated in advance — by language, culture, etc., and that the pure engagement espoused by Coleridge et al was always an illusion. Everything today is touched by man — so much so that the current geological era has been named the anthropocene.


Kelly Richardson. Leviathan. 2011. Photo by Colin Davison.

2012 saw Richardson hold no less than three shows up in the north-east of England, where she lives in Whitley Bay. Her work is unapologetically forward-looking. The biggest piece, which took over the Spanish Dome in Whitley Bay, was Mariner 9, a vast film installation depicting an imagined occupation of Mars — and produced using imagery and technical data borrowed from NASA and put together with a cutting-edge scenery generation software programme called Terragen.

Kelly Richardson. Forest Park. 2007.

Surprisingly, Legion is the first time that Richardson has been able to show multiple works in the same gallery, and the resulting show deftly charts a clear career progression. Like one of her own films, the show takes us in a loop, from recent, large-scale, multi-screen installations, back to earlier works — smaller in scope — and round again to a troubled now. Short, looped works from 2005 to 2006 establish an uneasy relationship with cinema's established tropes: the camping trip, the lone car in a desert, the suburban Gothic. Richardson's childhood home spins on its axis in a bland Canadian suburb; a mosquito net forms a kind of second screen, smearing the sky to violet, orange and cyan; the sound of crackling popcorn encapsulates the discrepancy between cinema foyer and the 'great outdoors'.
 And yet, perhaps the popcorn here is not so much encapsulating the discrepancy as eliding the boundaries. Nature, notes the NGCA wall text, is “always already mediated”; always already in quotation marks. The camping trip is arguably no more authentic than the multiplex. This questioning of authenticity asserts itself through a kind of tricksiness: Leviathan (2011), for example, with its Biblical title, is suggestive of some kind of apocalyptic flood, but is actually of bald cypress trees in Texas. Similarly, in Exiles of the Shattered Star (2006), a Lake District idyll is dominated by falling, flaming meteorites, but they're only overlaid in post-production — they never land, only glide out of view. And in the Great Destroyer (2007-2012), receiving its world première in the NGCA's project space, eight screens of vividly lit forest are periodically interrupted by screeches of urban noise — a car alarm or a chainsaw. Then you read that they're actually caused by the male lyrebird, one of nature's most astounding mimics. What then is natural?



Kelly Richardson. Mariner 9 (Pixel Palace). 2012. 

Critically, Richardson's form of irony-laden questioning is not the sort that plays itself out in a tailspin of postmodern apathy, but forms part of a strategy for rigorous thinking about humanity's relationship with nature. By problematising any simple concept of the 'natural', Richardson actually makes the questions more urgent. The later, larger, slower-moving works are instructive in this sense. The Erudition (2010), for example, sees spectral frost-white trees flickering on and off in the night, whilst Forest Park (2007) maintains a similar feel, with fading halogen lights breathing raggedly in the hot breeze. Crickets rustle in the background. From the three-screen Leviathan, a dark spread of water ripples out across the worn tiling of the NGCA. Forest Park, observes Richardson, is “named after what it replaced, or destroyed”.

IN CLOSING

But is all this work – however 'good'– actually going to achieve anything?

Well, yes and no... Much of the contemporary 'new nature art' or 'new nature writing' scene is concerned with reframing the debate, attempting to help people rethink their relationship with the environment, reimagine their place within it, and reconsider the potential of their own individual and collaborative agency. Is all this focus on the framework within which action or thought takes place actually hindering the ability to carry out meaningful action or thought? Or can these only take place once new paradigms have been established? None of these things can be measured.



Wieland Payer. Lithograph. 2011.

Back in November 2012, I attended an event at Toynbee Studios in East London. Produced by independent publishers Penned in the Margins in association with climate change charity Cape Farewell, the event saw contributions from a number of interesting figures, most prominently perhaps poet Tom Chivers who runs Penned in the Margins, writer and curator Rachel Lichtenstein, and Ruth Little of Cape Farewell. She was discussing some of the successes of their project, which is most notable for organising Arctic voyages for artists, scientists and communicators. Ian McEwan’s novel Solar is probably the most high profile outcome. Is such art compromised by its climate change agenda? How different is Solar to, say, Shane Meadows-directed Somers Town (which was entirely funded by Eurostar)? And what difference does it make?

What marks the truly brilliant work of art in this context is the ability to simultaneously fit within and overrun, to support and undermine.      

Well, to return to Derrida's ideas of freedom and responsibility, we can begin to see how art is so well suited to the interdisciplinary approach, to situate itself not as a bedrock or an overview, but something that flits between discourses, commenting upon them and changing them from both the inside and the outside.

We might also argue that within the freedom instituted by art/literature is a certain ambivalent relationship to that freedom: “the freedom to say everything,” says Derrida, “is a very powerful political weapon, but one which might immediately let itself be neutralised as a fiction.” There is therefore, Derrida suggests, a responsibility, a moral duty towards maintaining irresponsibility: “refusing to reply for one’s thought,” he argues, “or writing to constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of responsibility. To whom, to what?” The question is left open.



Tessa Farmer. Still from The Insectuary. 2007.



But there is a sense in which this ethical responsibility to maintain the openness of irresponsibility is actually threatened when art is subsumed within an agenda (even an ethical one). This is an especially prominent problem in the sphere of art-science collaboration, and art that attempts to convey specific ideas about nature, when it risks become 'merely' a tool for communication and public engagement. Hence the importance of maintaining vigilance, of energetically reacting against the reduction of art to some kind of tool to be used, and of ensuring that ‘quality’ (whatever that might mean) is the primary priority at all times.

 What marks the truly brilliant work of art in this context is the ability to simultaneously fit within and overrun, to support and undermine. One might cite any number of examples from across history, but some of the examples that we've discussed should suffice for a start — Kelly Richardson in particular, but also Laura Culham, Mariele Neudecker, Richard Mosse, and so many others.

In this way, art is not simply involved in the interpretation of nature; it is intimately involved in the very question of what 'nature' might actually be.

Red Earth. CHALK. Wolstonbury Hill performance, 2011.

TOM JEFFREYS is a London-based critic and editor. He is currently the Online Editor at the Institute of Arts & Ideas, and Editor of The Learned Pig. This piece was written in 2013 during his tenure as the Editor of The Journal of Wild Culture.

Rawhide sculptures and film footage may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but sculptor Rosalyn Driscoll and filmmaker Tereza Stehlíková have combined the two mediums to stunning effect in their collaborative new work Generation. Inspired by the myth of Demeter and Persephone, the two artists from Sensory Sites - a collective committed to re-integrating the senses into art – have created a series of beguiling, at times unearthly, video-sculptures.

Using their own experiences of motherhood and (grand-) daughterhood to respond obliquely to the story of the seasons as told in Ancient Greece, (where the daughter of the Goddess of Fertility and Agriculture was abducted by Hades for six months of the year), the sculptor-filmmaker duo have forged a surprisingly fecund and fantastical underworld of their own creation.

Even without the added trauma of kidnap, the mother-daughter relationship is a complex one. From motherhood, when a woman reaches out beyond her own individual life, through the act of separation at birth, to the daughter’s witnessing of the eventual decline of her mother’s sensory perceptiveness in old age, the cyclical nature of life and death is presented here in all its fleeting complexity. The occasional but overpowering smell of dead cow-skin (indistinguishable to my untrained nose from that of a tannery) which wafts from certain sculptures acts as an effective sensory reinforcement that all things must pass.
 

Even without the added trauma of kidnap, the mother-daughter relationship is a complex one.

Mirroring the corresponding order and chaos of world and underworld at street-level the exhibition presents a contained and benign film of fields of haystacks in Bohemia. Cleanly shot and conservatively framed against a plain white wall there is little to hint at the lawlessness that lays in wait beneath.

Just beneath the pavements of Chiltern Street projections of four female generations of Stehlíková’s own family refract through, between and upon Driscoll’s fleshy, intricate, yet solid structures. As a fetus responds to the light that shines through their mother’s abdomen, the sculptures are animated and transformed by the moving images; dead animal skin captures transient glimpses of life in ever more fascinating ways.

Incorporating paper, beeswax and rawhide (procured from the aptly named Hereford, Texas) Driscoll’s maverick screens range from conch-like structures that approximate the folds and layers of intricate internal organs to shallow, circular winnowing baskets. Whether suspended in mid-air or presented on a glass plinth like a freshly abandoned giant chrysalis, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern whether Stehlíková’s ephemeral moving images are metamorphosing the still skin of Driscoll’s strange receptacles, or if the crevices, hue and irregular form of Driscoll’s sculptures are transforming the original content of Stehlíková’s film.

Does the amber-like glow emanate from the filmed footage of bees at work or from the material of the sculpture itself? The synthesis is so complete, the surface and interior so deeply embroiled, that it really does become impossible to tell.



Generation is at GV Art, London until 5th October 2013.
www.gvart.co.uk

Image credit: Stehlikova & Driscoll, Threshold (detail, 1) 2012 - Image courtesy of the artists and GV Art gallery, London



 

If you were to judge it only by the size of the big crowd that gathered at Berlin’s small but prestigious Whiteconcepts gallery on Wednesday, 28th May, 22-year-old Australian artist Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon’s first European show was a succes d'éstime. Titled ‘History Puts A Saint In Every Dream’ (derived from the lyric of a Tom Waits song), the show even drew the rare presence of controversial and reclusive German art star, Jonathan Meese, who opened the show with a heartfelt introduction of O’Hanlon and his work.

O’Hanlon’s drawings, in architectural pen on cold-pressed paper, are intricate, multi-layered and demand close study. The drawings transcend mere illustration to merge everything from French fantasy art and early 20th century sailors’ tattoo art with references to medieval religious iconography and syncretic Aztec, Egyptian and Hindu symbolism.

Roman Catholic saints do combat (both with sword and AK-47) with Aztec-like demons.      

From a distance, each of the 16 monochromatic works are as dense as old cartography, but O’Hanlon masterfully controls the stark possibilities of tone and contrast within black and white linework. When viewed against the crisp white walls at the gallery, even the most casual viewer could not resist moving in closer to explore them. The refinement and detail is unexpected in the work of someone so young.

The careless immortal tends her menagerie, architectural pen on cold-pressed paper, 46cm x 66cm, 2014.

These drawings reflect, partly, experiences and observations of a nomadic childhood, wandering with creative parents across the desert south-west of the United States, rural Japan, and the south-east coast of Australia. But underpinning all the works are forms adapted from Romanesque architecture, Renaissance religion art and illuminated manuscripts that the young artist encountered up close for the first time while living in south-west France in 2011.

In these drawings, nothing is sacred. Roman Catholic saints do combat (both with sword and AK-47) with Aztec-like demons, and Aboriginal tribal patterns add texture to excerpts from Buddhist mandalas and decaying drive-in movie signs. Certain pieces, most notably The careless immortal tends her menagerie and Ganesha dances on the cusp of a melancholy doom emulate the classic leaded structure of stained glass windows. Punctuating all the works are snakes and decorated skulls, images derived from Mexico’s Day of the Dead and recalled from yet another childhood road trip.

A keen interest in multi-cultural mythologies and a vivid sense of old-fashioned wonder . . . the artist cites H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle as inspirations.     

The snakes, which suggest both good and evil, depending on your spiritual perspective, recur throughout these drawings. Exquisitely patterned, inextricably tangled with (and within) other elements, they’re metaphoric pathways on a psychogeographic map, hinting at intellectual and actual routes the artist has followed in these early years of his life. They are as unsettling as they are instructive.

Syncretic illusions of a lost crusade, architectural pen on cold-pressed paper, 2013.

Overall, the images not only reveal fragments of O’Hanlon’s own past. They hint at a depth of historical knowledge, a keen interest in multi-cultural mythologies and a vivid sense of old-fashioned wonder. The artist cites H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle as inspirations but the influence of French artist Jean Giraud (Moebius) and even the Gothic illustrators Harry Clarke and Gustave Doré  are unmistakeable.

These drawings are not easy to take in within one viewing. They take time and close-quarters study to decipher and absorb their thought-provoking narratives and meaning. The pure, relentlessly dense  linework create hypnotic puzzles you can’t help but try to unravel.

~

Whiteconcept, Auguststrasse 35, Berlin

OPEN UNTIL 8th June 2014, 11 AM – 5 PM, and by appointment.

ILONA CEROWSKA is an emerging Berlin-based writer with a strong interest in contemporary art and photography.

READ INTERVIEW with Finn Lafcadio O'Hanlon.

From left to right: Nicole Loeser (gallerist at Whiteconcepts, Berlin), Brigitte Meese, Jonathan Meese, Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon.

Kelly Richardson. Leviathan (detail). 2011. Photo by Colin Davidson.

INTRODUCTION

There are many artists doing brilliant work with, in and about nature today. From revisiting the tradition of landscape painting to ritualistic performances, conceptual sound recordings or hi-tech projects involving close collaboration with neuroscientists, the range of the work being produced is dizzying. In a sense it's impossible to try and draw a thread through all of this diverse activity, but on the other hand, it's worth a try.

In August 2013, I was invited to give a talk at Wilderness Festival in which I attempted to place this 'new nature art' within a broader context — one that includes art history, but also philosophy, science, poetry, and an economic context that has seen arts budgets slashed and the 'creative industries' looking elsewhere for sources of revenue. This, modified a little subsequently, is that attempt.

The idea is to examine how some of the most interesting artists are looking closely at what we actually mean by 'nature'— how the concept of what is 'natural' is increasingly complex and tangled up with perception, ethics, technology, language, and a whole host of other issues.

Gordon Cheung. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. 2009.

It is also interesting to touch upon what is 'successful' work in this context, and by extension, why the concept of artistic 'success' might be a good way into an understanding of what the arts can offer that other disciplines cannot.

But let's begin with a few caveats.

Whether all this nature-focused art is increasing — at a time when our relationship with the natural world is at a moment of apparent crisis — or whether this is simply something that I've become increasingly aware of myself, it's hard to say. Clearly humans have been intensely interested in the external world ever since art began (whenever that may have been, but let's not get into that question...). But I do believe that things today are different: because of our changing understanding of what 'nature' means, and because of this apparently widening division between humanity and the natural world — a division which many are seeking to overcome.

Jacques de Vaucanson, Canard Digerateur. 1739.

CONTEXT

If there is a division – and maybe we can return to this question later – then it is one that has instituted itself across many fields of contemporary life. Of course, within each field there is disagreement and discrepancy, but for the sake of clarity, we'll have to simplify. Let's begin with science.

Science, which has replaced religion as the dominant dogma of the modern age, is arguably particularly culpable here. For all the incredible advances of modern science – and it is indisputable that we now understand more about the natural world than ever before – it is still underpinned by a problematic worldview that dates back to Descartes and then the enlightenment.

The mechanistic worldview — that originated with Descartes's view of animals as 'automata'— and has been championed of late by prominent public scientists such as Richard Dawkins — is based on the idea that the world is a simple mechanism, governed by immutable laws. This view, which is still dominant in contemporary science, is incapable of seeing nature as anything other than an object – to be studied, ordered, controlled, dominated.

Lucas Cranach the Elder. Garden of Eden. 1530.

To that end, science, for all its apparent modernity, owes much to Christianity. As God instructed Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Thankfully, this element of scientific thinking is facing strong challenges. American novelist, intellectual and activist Wendell Berry has said that “'the time is past, if it ever existed, where a scientist can discover knowledge, release it into the world and assume he has done good.”

Whilst the mechanistic view specifically has come under sustained attack from likes of biologist Rupert Sheldrake and moral philosopher Mary Midgley. As Sheldrake has written “Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical.” but “This view is now undergoing a credibility crunch. The biggest problem of all for materialism is the existence of consciousness.” The consciousness of both humans and animals, and maybe more besides. Sheldrake's book The Science Delusion and Midgley's Science as Salvation are both key texts here.

Derrida once described literature as “the institution that allows one to say everything, in every way.” We might therefore describe art as the institution that allows one to do everything.

Economics has also produced a problematic context — with the last two hundred years or so seeing the West's understanding of nature limited to its value as resource for industry and economic growth. Recent attempts have been made to encourage conservation by placing monetary values on the natural world. UK charity The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, for example, have recently launched a pan-European research project with the extremely clunky name of Quantification of Ecosystem Services for Sustainable Agriculture, which has so far come up with the statistic that ““pollinators alone are worth £430 million per year to British agriculture” Such initiatives are merely following the same logic of accounting and are doomed to failure.

In thrall to the accountants and management consultants, it's hardly surprising that politicians have been unable to do anything about bridging this divide. Politics is limited to four-year cycles and anything that requires long-term shifts in thinking is likely to be perennially pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.

Which is where the arts come in.

David Cameron. "Greenest government."

THE ARGUMENT

Recent years have seen a boom in 'new nature writing' with much celebrated publications by Granta, big sales figures for the dons of the genre such as Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane, and a host of independent publishers like Penned in the Margins, Longbarrow Press and Influx Press exploring place and the environment in a host of innovative and exciting ways.

At the same time, something similar has been happening to the visual arts. A cynical argument might be that, with dramatic cuts to arts funding, artists are increasingly looking to alternative sources of funding. Whilst the Tate remains happy to take money from BP, institutions and individuals with more integrity have been looking elsewhere.

Art Not Oil.

The Wellcome Trust, a biomedical institute primarily, has emerged as a significant source of funds, whilst smaller organisations such as Arts Catalyst, Cape Farewell and Artangel have all championed art that crosses over into environmentalism and science more broadly.

The arts are perhaps uniquely placed for this interdisciplinary approach, and this is a key point I think. As other professions have disappeared down the alleyway of increasingly specialisation, art — which is still a specialised profession — is able to remain more fleet-of-foot and polygamous. Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher who I'm slightly obsessed with, once described literature as “the institution that allows one to say everything, in every way”. We might therefore describe art as the institution that allows one to do everything.

LAND ART

This idea of doing everything or anything informs the work of both Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long, the two big British names of the so-called Land Art movement.

Richard Long. A Line Made by Walking. 1967.

A subsection of the still-nascent conceptual art movement of the late 60s and 1970s, Land Art sought to take art out of the gallery and into the external, often rural, 'natural' environment. Richard Long's most famous work is perhaps A Line Made by Walking of 1967. This saw the then 22 year-old artist walk back and forth along a straight line in the grass in the English countryside, leaving a track that was then photographed in black and white.

A recent book entitled The Art of Walking published by Black Dog Press demonstrates that Long's influence is still a strong one in contemporary art. Likewise, the works of Glasgow-based artist Amy Todman.

Amy Todman. Breathing Views, 1 & 2.

Inspired by the work of John Latham, one of the pioneers of art-science collaborative work and … Todman's  current series Breathing Views entails the artist undetaking a walk through West Lothian and making a single mark for each inhalation and one for each exhalation. Fusing print and performance and poetry, the project examines the idea of the view and changing viewpoints throughout a walk in order to examine, among other things, how it is impossible for humans to understand 'nature' without reference to ourselves – our own eyes and bodies, our conception of time, of interior/exterior, etc.

Back to the 1970s — and similar to Richard Long in terms of active engagement in the environment and an interest in documenting the fragile and the fleeting — is Andy Goldsworthy.

Andy Goldwworthy. Dandelion Flowers Pinned with Thorns, Cumbria. 1985.

His lovely photographic books have been extremely popular in the last decade or so. Goldsworthy, who I'm sure many of you will know, produces beautiful, often ephemeral sculptural works in the natural world – balancing boulders on top of each other or fixing a skin of leaves to a tree branch using nothing but his own saliva and a tonne of patience. Note the formal similarity with Long, and also the title here which depicts the process behind the finished' work. It reminds me of one of those  menus you get in upmarket organic restaurants these days...

But Goldsworthy has also been criticised for a lack of political awareness, a shallow understanding of the relationship between nature and social history, a limited conception of nature, and a lack of intellectual depth. “There is a deep loneliness at the heart of the work” Clare Hurley in World Socialist Web Site

Goldsworthy, say some, is simply a romantic. And, for reasons that we shall come to, there are few words as keenly avoided in the modern nature art/writing world as romantic. The new nature art is an intensely political and socially attuned business.

Edward Burtynsky. Silver Lake Operations # 2, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia. 2007. 

Two increasingly prominent names in contemporary art are Mariele Neudecker, who recently had a pair of big shows down in Brighton and Ed Burtynsky (who incidentally was featured in the first Journal of Wild Culture, when it was a print publication in Toronto and when Burtynsky was a pretty much unknown photographer). Burtynsky, whose huge, sublimely beautiful photographs depict humanity's relationship with nature at its worst – oil spills.

He shows with Flowers in London and recently his works launched the redeveloped Photographers Gallery. His work is pretty amazing, in a rather samey way.

In 2005, he declared his wish that his work might help persuade millions to join a global conversation on sustainability. Can art have this kind of impact?

But as ever with fantasy, it’s a fine line away from ridicule, over which this arguably teeters.       

NATURE RESERVES

This became particularly clear to me in the process of curating Nature Reserves, currently on show in London at a gallery called GV Art, one of the leading proponents of art that engages with science. I don't want to go on too much about my own show — you can simply go and see it, it's on until September 13th! But I'd like to pick out a couple of things.

The first is the sheer number and diversity of artists working in this area. The exhibition's focus was, I thought, fairly narrow — the relationship between humanity and nature with specific reference to knowledge production and systems of archiving. But we held an open call for submissions and I was amazed at the number of people — artists, poets, academic — who submitted work, and work of real quality. It was pretty amazing, and the curatorial process became one of exclusion as much as anything else.

The research process brought to my attention just how much work is going on this area, often in a highly collaborative and mutually supportive way: Alec Finlay, whose current work is The Dukes Wood Project; Amy Todman, who I've already mentioned; Camilla Nelson, a poet and academic whose work examines issues of authorship and authority; painter Paul Smith; Luke Franklin, whose degree show project (Art and Science MA at Central St Martins) involved setting up four bothes in secret, remote locations in the highlands of Scotland — library, studio, study, gallery.

Luke Franklin. Bothe — Library.

Luke Franklin. Bothe — Gallery.

I'd also like to pick out some of the artists in the exhibition itself: Liz Orton, Amy Cutler, Hestia Peppe and Laura Culham. What's interesting here is the idea of re-presentation and mediation, which I'll come back to.

Liz Orton. Splitters and Lumpers. 2012.

Amy Cutler. PINE. 2013.

Hestia Peppe. Microbial Familiars. 2013.

Laura Culham. Dead Grass. 2013.

VENICE

On the international scene, art that engages with nature was an especially strong presence at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Every two years sees a six month-long extravaganza that sees historic sites such as the Arsenale, Giardini and sundry grand palazzos across the slowly sinking city play host to contemporary art from across the globe. This year, art that sought to engage with nature was a strong thread throughout, with some works more successful than others.

Berlinde De Bruyckere. Cripplewood. 2012.

One of the strangest works was in the Belgian pavilion, where JM Coetzee has curated the work of Berlinde De Bruyckere; his introductory text setting the tone for a fantastical intertwining of something resembling mankind with a crippled kind of nature. The work — a colossal sculpture of a fallen tree, its branches intertwined to form a single trunk-limb, patched up and bandaged, pollarded and felled — is especially powerful under a grey, gauzy, slowly waxing gloom. But as ever with fantasy, it’s a fine line away from ridicule, over which this arguably teeters.

Antti Laitinen. It's My Island. 2007.

Similarly ‘rooted’ is Antti Laitinen’s work for the Finland Pavilion. On show is documentation of an old work, The Island, for which the artist constructed an island in the Baltic Sea, one sandbag at a time, as well as the more recent Forest Square series. This involved Laitinen chopping down a 10x10 metre square section of Finnish forest, sorting all the different materials – soil, moss, wood etc – and rebuilding the forest arranged by colour. Outside the pavilion when we visit, he’s busy nailing trees (back) together. Unfortunately, due to the constraints of the pavilion, this seems to me to be less successful than the other Laitinen project with which I'm familiar, It's My Island, 2007 .

Aurelien Froment. Pulmo Marina. 2010.

I also loved Aurelien Froment’s video piece, Pulmo Marina, on show at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac as part of the Victor Pinchuk-funded Future Generation Art Prize. Here, a simple, beautiful video of a jellyfish is presented with a blandly folksy US voiceover that explores our changing conceptions of these strange animals. Historical, mythical, and contemporary scientific understandings of jellyfish are all introduced, before the defining moment — a perfectly judged self-reflexive turn which suddenly jolts you into an awareness that this has not been filmed deep in some fathomless ocean inaccessible to humans, but in a carefully spot-lit tank in an aquarium in Monterey Bay. Jellyfish can’t be tagged (or they’d sink) and can therefore only be observed and studied in artificial environments such as this one. “Jellyfish just don’t fit the categories,” we’re told.

Richard Mosse. The Envlave 3. 2012.

Richard Mosse. The Envlave 1. 2012.

Richard Mosse. The Envlave 2. 2012.

But the major triumph at Venice this year is the work of Richard Mosse in the Ireland pavilion. I was familiar with Mosse’s work from the Gordon Cheung-curated Immortal Nature exhibition at Edel Assanti back in 2012, so I kind of knew what to expect. But I was apprehensive: for me, the strength of his work had been the sense of latent threat within the landscape, and I was worried that the more direct focus on war and political violence would somehow compromise that. But I was completely wrong.

The video installation was completely beautiful and genuinely harrowing. Using now defunct military-grade infrared film to document years of violence in the Eastern Congo, Mosse's work, entitled The Enclave, is one of the best things I've seen in ages. Like all great art, it prompts many thoughts, suggests many purposes – the relationship between documenting subject and documented object; the resistance of the world’s complexities to singular narrative overlay; the overlooked and oppressed; the violence of exclusion. But, in the context of thinking about the environment, it makes us look again at landscape — suddenly, now, a place of both otherworldly beauty and hidden terror. Always able to be rethought anew.

KELLY RICHARDSON

Mediation — that is the difference vs Romanticism, a recognition that all experience is mediated in advance — by language, culture, etc., and that the pure engagement espoused by Coleridge et al was always an illusion. Everything today is touched by man — so much so that the current geological era has been named the anthropocene.


Kelly Richardson. Leviathan. 2011. Photo by Colin Davison.

2012 saw Richardson hold no less than three shows up in the north-east of England, where she lives in Whitley Bay. Her work is unapologetically forward-looking. The biggest piece, which took over the Spanish Dome in Whitley Bay, was Mariner 9, a vast film installation depicting an imagined occupation of Mars — and produced using imagery and technical data borrowed from NASA and put together with a cutting-edge scenery generation software programme called Terragen.

Kelly Richardson. Forest Park. 2007.

Surprisingly, Legion is the first time that Richardson has been able to show multiple works in the same gallery, and the resulting show deftly charts a clear career progression. Like one of her own films, the show takes us in a loop, from recent, large-scale, multi-screen installations, back to earlier works — smaller in scope — and round again to a troubled now. Short, looped works from 2005 to 2006 establish an uneasy relationship with cinema's established tropes: the camping trip, the lone car in a desert, the suburban Gothic. Richardson's childhood home spins on its axis in a bland Canadian suburb; a mosquito net forms a kind of second screen, smearing the sky to violet, orange and cyan; the sound of crackling popcorn encapsulates the discrepancy between cinema foyer and the 'great outdoors'.
 And yet, perhaps the popcorn here is not so much encapsulating the discrepancy as eliding the boundaries. Nature, notes the NGCA wall text, is “always already mediated”; always already in quotation marks. The camping trip is arguably no more authentic than the multiplex. This questioning of authenticity asserts itself through a kind of tricksiness: Leviathan (2011), for example, with its Biblical title, is suggestive of some kind of apocalyptic flood, but is actually of bald cypress trees in Texas. Similarly, in Exiles of the Shattered Star (2006), a Lake District idyll is dominated by falling, flaming meteorites, but they're only overlaid in post-production — they never land, only glide out of view. And in the Great Destroyer (2007-2012), receiving its world première in the NGCA's project space, eight screens of vividly lit forest are periodically interrupted by screeches of urban noise — a car alarm or a chainsaw. Then you read that they're actually caused by the male lyrebird, one of nature's most astounding mimics. What then is natural?



Kelly Richardson. Mariner 9 (Pixel Palace). 2012. 

Critically, Richardson's form of irony-laden questioning is not the sort that plays itself out in a tailspin of postmodern apathy, but forms part of a strategy for rigorous thinking about humanity's relationship with nature. By problematising any simple concept of the 'natural', Richardson actually makes the questions more urgent. The later, larger, slower-moving works are instructive in this sense. The Erudition (2010), for example, sees spectral frost-white trees flickering on and off in the night, whilst Forest Park (2007) maintains a similar feel, with fading halogen lights breathing raggedly in the hot breeze. Crickets rustle in the background. From the three-screen Leviathan, a dark spread of water ripples out across the worn tiling of the NGCA. Forest Park, observes Richardson, is “named after what it replaced, or destroyed”.

IN CLOSING

But is all this work – however 'good'– actually going to achieve anything?

Well, yes and no... Much of the contemporary 'new nature art' or 'new nature writing' scene is concerned with reframing the debate, attempting to help people rethink their relationship with the environment, reimagine their place within it, and reconsider the potential of their own individual and collaborative agency. Is all this focus on the framework within which action or thought takes place actually hindering the ability to carry out meaningful action or thought? Or can these only take place once new paradigms have been established? None of these things can be measured.



Wieland Payer. Lithograph. 2011.

Back in November 2012, I attended an event at Toynbee Studios in East London. Produced by independent publishers Penned in the Margins in association with climate change charity Cape Farewell, the event saw contributions from a number of interesting figures, most prominently perhaps poet Tom Chivers who runs Penned in the Margins, writer and curator Rachel Lichtenstein, and Ruth Little of Cape Farewell. She was discussing some of the successes of their project, which is most notable for organising Arctic voyages for artists, scientists and communicators. Ian McEwan’s novel Solar is probably the most high profile outcome. Is such art compromised by its climate change agenda? How different is Solar to, say, Shane Meadows-directed Somers Town (which was entirely funded by Eurostar)? And what difference does it make?

What marks the truly brilliant work of art in this context is the ability to simultaneously fit within and overrun, to support and undermine.      

Well, to return to Derrida's ideas of freedom and responsibility, we can begin to see how art is so well suited to the interdisciplinary approach, to situate itself not as a bedrock or an overview, but something that flits between discourses, commenting upon them and changing them from both the inside and the outside.

We might also argue that within the freedom instituted by art/literature is a certain ambivalent relationship to that freedom: “the freedom to say everything,” says Derrida, “is a very powerful political weapon, but one which might immediately let itself be neutralised as a fiction.” There is therefore, Derrida suggests, a responsibility, a moral duty towards maintaining irresponsibility: “refusing to reply for one’s thought,” he argues, “or writing to constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of responsibility. To whom, to what?” The question is left open.



Tessa Farmer. Still from The Insectuary. 2007.



But there is a sense in which this ethical responsibility to maintain the openness of irresponsibility is actually threatened when art is subsumed within an agenda (even an ethical one). This is an especially prominent problem in the sphere of art-science collaboration, and art that attempts to convey specific ideas about nature, when it risks become 'merely' a tool for communication and public engagement. Hence the importance of maintaining vigilance, of energetically reacting against the reduction of art to some kind of tool to be used, and of ensuring that ‘quality’ (whatever that might mean) is the primary priority at all times.

 What marks the truly brilliant work of art in this context is the ability to simultaneously fit within and overrun, to support and undermine. One might cite any number of examples from across history, but some of the examples that we've discussed should suffice for a start — Kelly Richardson in particular, but also Laura Culham, Mariele Neudecker, Richard Mosse, and so many others.

In this way, art is not simply involved in the interpretation of nature; it is intimately involved in the very question of what 'nature' might actually be.

Red Earth. CHALK. Wolstonbury Hill performance, 2011.

TOM JEFFREYS is a London-based critic and editor. He is currently the Online Editor at the Institute of Arts & Ideas, and Editor of The Learned Pig. This piece was written in 2013 during his tenure as the Editor of The Journal of Wild Culture.

"We can never neatly separate what we see from what we know."— E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950).

‘The relationship between remembering and forgetting is, paradoxically, related to the relationship between memorials and ruins. Novelist Robert Musil published an essay on ‘Monuments’ in 1936, noting how much of his native city of Vienna was crowded with memorials to soldiers, statesmen and illustrious figures, forgotten ever after. ‘There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,’ he wrote. Ruins, by contrast, are a reagent of memory, their incomplete, fractured elements demanding to be visualised or imagined whole again. Ruins invoke empathy and the free play of historical query, where memorials close the lid firmly and decisively on the past. In recent years, the de-historicization of both rural and urban landscapes, as a result of building development and urban renewal, has spontaneously occasioned a return to older practices of informal memorialisation. The roadside shrines commemorating victims of street accidents and other violent deaths, along with the widespread practice of placing commemorative trees, benches, or other markers (including the scattering of cremated remains) at places associated with those remembered, often in view of the sea, clearly suggest that a re-inscription of the landscape, a new counter-reformation, is underway.

Two contributors to the 1968 Earthworks exhibition telegraphed their art dealer: ‘Don’t underestimate dirt.’ 

Such informal modes of reclamation and inscription imply that landscape design needs to articulate site-specific, historical references when it comes to bringing land formerly used for military, industrial or other purposes back into public use. Swiss landscape architect Georges Descombes - who has designed a number of parks and memorial landscapes - has written of the need to restore older landscape structures to the surface again, writing of his approach to the design of a new park on a former industrial site at Lancy in France that it is intended to ‘reveal its energies, the forces which shape it: folds, slopes, streams. Upon this wounded, haggard territory forms are born again, rising up and resisting all levelling down.’ All landscapes are force fields when understood in this way, their latent energies released by sympathetic articulation.

Elsewhere in the world, progress on re-imagining and bringing back former industrial landscapes into public esteem is now advanced – as is a respect for the public memory of the sites concerned. Where landscape students used to travel to Stourhead in Wiltshire, Vaux-le-Vicomte in France, or the Boboli Gardens at Bomarzo in Italy to admire the work of the great masters, today’s more adventurous trainees are encouraged to visit Gasworks Park on the shore of Lake Union in Seattle or the Landschaftspark created on the site of the former steelworks in Duisburg-Nord, close to the Ruhr. In Seattle, visitors clamber over rusting retorts and towers or join fellow picnickers on the undulating green sward covering industrial spoil, looking out to ageing jetties where cargo-boats once docked. In Duisburg, strollers climb the 350 foot narrow, iron-caged ladder to the top of the blast-furnace chimneys or venture along catwalks overlooking the shunting yards. These have been planted as orchards, from where one can watch diving club members descend into the black waters of the former coal bunkers, now flooded.

Horsey Island, Essex, March 2013; © Jason Orton.

These programmes of landscape restoration and design owe much to the land art movement of the 1960s, particularly to the work of American artist Robert Smithson, who was attracted to and energised by the bleak wastes created by suburban sprawl, mineral extraction and rusting industrial machinery. What to others appeared static and ugly, Smithson saw as being in a constant process of entropy — even the new buildings going up he saw as ruins in the making. Land could be shaped in and around the remains of what had gone before to create settings on a more epic, geological scale. Hence his spirited aesthetic credo: the ice age rather than the golden age. Hence, too, the title of the first exhibition he curated in New York in 1968, Earthworks, its name suggested by the title of a novel he had read the previous year by British science fiction writer, Brian W. Aldiss. ‘Don’t underestimate dirt,’ two co-contributors to the 1968 Earthworks exhibition, Michael Heizer and Walter De Maria, telegraphed their art dealer.

This recourse to a different scale of time suggested that art and nature might find a new rapprochement. In 1969 Smithson and his wife Nancy Holt travelled extensively in England and Wales, fascinated by ancient standing stones, barrows and geological findings which they researched and photographed obsessively. During the period of Smithson’s explorations, French historian Ferdinand Braudel was suggesting that history operated within three concurrent orders of time: biological time, social time and geographical time. Biological time was that experienced in an individual lifetime; social time was the longer historical and cultural context in which different generations lived and understood their place in history; geographical time was the slow cyclical time of the geological and natural world. People occupy all three time frames simultaneously. A designed landscape could, if properly conceived, weave all three together. Yet some landscape management practices seek to freeze time, and resist geological change, in the name of a fixed aesthetic. When Yew Tree Tarn in the Lake District began to empty as a result of a geological fault, the National Trust spent heavily repairing the fault, so that the beauty of the tarn would be ‘permanent’.

As for Edmund Burke before him, the sublime was an unnerving admixture of beauty, order and terror, and not for the faint-hearted nor the corporate piazza.

The year before Smithson’s New York exhibition, English artist Richard Long created a work called A Line Made By Walking (1967), in which he walked up and down a suburban field continuously, creating a straight line of flattened grass, which was then photographed. From this he developed the idea of walking as an artistic intervention, annotated or not, as he variously carried pebbles from one side of the country to another, created stone circles in remote places, and in other discreet ways re-energised the force fields of the natural terrain. Long was later to write that ‘my art is always about working in the wide world, wherever on the surface of the earth. My art has the themes of materials, ideas, movement, time. The beauty of objects, thoughts, places and actions.’ While most live in cities today, many of our most prescient imaginings are located in wilder, elemental places, evoking Samuel Beckett’s stage directions for Waiting for Godot: A country road. A tree. Evening . . .

Two British artists in particular have achieved international status in the field of landscape design: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Derek Jarman. For personal reasons Finlay remains special to me because, in 1996, I went to interview him at his isolated house, Little Sparta, in the Scottish borders, for a book I was writing about memorial landscapes. It was an exceptionally cold January afternoon, and many smaller roads were snow-bound. The walk from the hired car took me across several fields, the paths and ditches of which had been obliterated by snow, so much so that I was worried I might lose all sense of orientation in the entirely white landscape, with night coming on. The return walk in total darkness was even worse.

Canvey Wick, Essex, March 2013; © Jason Orton.

In Finlay’s work, word puns, elegant typography, and a print-making technique based on picture-book style images and words create a child-like wonder at the connection between words and things. The tension between pictures and labels, images and text, was also at the heart of linguistic philosophy in the 20th century, and Finlay nearly always described himself as a philosopher-poet rather than an artist. A growing interest in the place of inscription – especially in the landscape, often re-working the motifs embodied in Poussin’s paintings of Et in Arcadia Ego — made him better known in Europe than he was in his own country.

Even before his death, it was recognised that the garden at Little Sparta was his greatest work of art. There are few modern designed landscapes in Europe which have not incorporated elements of Finlay’s vision of a world made new by reference to the old. Formalism, inscription, the melding of the natural with the sculptural and the architectonic, returned to favour, largely owing to the influence of Finlay, controversial though his allusions and apparent allegiances to the iconography of violence and terror — in the midst of classical calm — remained. Finlay was thoughtful, serious and kind on the occasion I met him, though he employed a vocabulary of politics and art that was entirely foreign to me then, less so now. Central to this vocabulary was the notion of piety. For Finlay, as for Edmund Burke before him, the sublime was an unnerving admixture of beauty, order and terror, and not for the faint-hearted nor the corporate piazza. This emphasis on piety reminded me of a claim made by some environmentalists that people only respect landscapes which contain a significant element of danger. Since the English landscape largely lacks these things, other means of inducing a degree of fear and trembling might be needed or sought: melancholy inscription, admonitory messages of life’s brevity. Some find this in churchyards and cemeteries. Et in Arcadia Ego.

Horsey Island, Essex, March 2013. © Jason Orton.

Jarman’s work was altogether different. The garden he created around his cottage on a shingle beach at Dungeness was designed and constructed from an accretion of found materials and indigenous vegetation. All this was achieved in the shadow of a nuclear power station, and in the midst of an idiosyncratic collection of old fishermen’s huts and ageing weekend holiday chalets, previously regarded as inhospitable and ugly terrain. In his diaries he described telling artist Maggi Hambling about the project:

‘I was describing the garden to Maggi Hambling at a gallery opening. And said I intended to write a book about it.
She said: ‘Oh, you’ve finally discovered nature, Derek.’
'I don’t think it’s really quite like that,’ I said, thinking of Constable and Samuel Palmer’s Kent.
‘Ah, I understand completely. You’ve discovered modern nature.’

Modern nature: human settlement, ecology, history and aesthetics in one strange assembly. The garden was not only beautiful but, for Jarman, was a ‘therapy and pharmacopoeia’. He recycled old timber, rusting metal, ropes and other flotsam, studied the flowers and vegetation of the shingle beach for their visual and herbal properties, inscribed a poem on the flank wall of the wooden cottage, and created a magical environment that was both an artwork and an exercise in ecological exegesis and conservation. His notebooks are filled with the names of dozens of plant species, lichen and mosses found on the beach, which he cultivated ornamentally, whilst noting the many different birds which came to the garden. There was a beehive too . . .’

The New English Landscape
By Jason Orton and Ken Worpole
First published by Field Station, London, 2013. Reprinted 2014.
88 pages, 22 full colour photographs, full bibliography.  £15. 

KEN WORPOLE is a writer and social historian. His books include Here Comes the Sun: architecture and public space in 20th century European culture (2001), Last Landscapes: the architecture of the cemetery in the West (2003), Modern Hospice Design: the architecture of palliative care (2009) and Contemporary Library Architecture (2013). He lives in London. Ken's site.

JASON ORTON uses photography to develop an understanding of landscapes. He is interested in what people value within a landscape, the ways in which they connect with the landscapes around them, and in the interrelationship between landscape, history and memory. He lives London. Jason's site.

Ken and Jason have also collaborated on a book exploring the coastal and riparian landscapes of the Thames Estuary and East Anglia, 350 miles: An Essex Journey (2005).

To buy The New English Landscape, or for more details, go here.

Blackboard from quantum physics lab.

I had always been torn between the arts and sciences. Coming out of school at the age of 18, it seemed like the obvious thing to accept my place on a physics degree at Imperial College in London. “You’ll make more money,” people said, or “What job will you get if you follow art?” The urge to make art never really went away, though becoming an active researcher in the field of quantum physics did partially satisfy my creative side. I remember spending all day in the university physics department, fitting pieces of my current puzzle together, then dashing home in the evening to work on an art project into the wee hours.

Science was concerned not only with practical problems, but also with psychological needs . . .’

As I progressed with my science career it was clear that it was suffering from my split focus. One sort of answer came in the form of a new course at Central St. Martins College of Art, MA Art and Science, which seemed like the kind of program that could integrate my two passions. After a year on the course, I am still intrigued about how these two fields can combine, and with luck, fill my needs. To many people the two fields may appear to completely diverge and stand in opposition to each other. For that reason I’d like to explain my thoughts so far about this dual focus.

Building Blocks, by Kumi Yamashita, 1997. Wood, single light source, shadow. Collection of Boise Art Museum, Idaho, USA.

Due to the prevailing scientific view of the universe, in recent times art and science have tended to remain separate. It was Kant who suggested that a human mind could neither confirm, deny, nor scientifically demonstrate the ultimate nature of reality. Since then, reality has been increasingly understood as something external to us — to be examined via physics rather than meta-physics. Quantum physicist David Bohm said science ‘was concerned not only with practical problems of assimilating nature to man’s physical needs, but also with the psychological need to understand the universe.’¹ Science has been developed as our honest partner. In other words, it delivers an objective, operational view of the world, in which abstracted theories are tested by rigorous experiments — and sit outside our personal experience.

Art, on the other hand, continues Bohm, has ‘helped man to assimilate the immediately perceptual aspects of experience into a total structure of harmony and beauty.’ Art is a highly subjective and poetic area of knowledge, which also makes the task of coming up with a definition of beauty, and what now constitutes art, notoriously difficult! And, unlike scientists, artists work with concrete objects made from physical materials that can be observed without instruments. (Indeed, it can be argued that conceptual art removed the need for physical art objects altogether. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll lay that to the side for now.

These contrasts between art and science make for a challenging discussion of the two, yet, while retaining the above differences, both can merge with each other in the artistic or scientific creative process. In his essay, ‘The relationships of Art and Science’, Bohm details how the two subjects are in fact different manifestations of the need for humans to describe the world in a way that is ‘true to itself.’ By this we mean that a true work of art or physical theory has achieved a coherent totality. The overlap between the two disciplines is a creative process that strives to achieve truth through original insights drawn from self-referential levels of order.

NEW STRUCTURES

This process thereby frees itself from referencing and symbolism, and the result is that artists and scientists can produce new ‘structures’ that are self-contained. That is, they reference only themselves yet do not disagree with other existing facts. Einstein's special relativity, for instance, is based upon two postulates, put simply: the speed of light is constant, and the laws of physics are the same everywhere. From those statements alone, you can develop a self-contained theory about relative motion in a non-accelerating frame that gives entirely new insights into Nature.  The theory of special relativity would therefore be a new structure: which is coherent and self-contained, yet agrees with all known existing physical laws.

As such, these new structures are harmonious, elegant and coherent. Bohm writes

It seems remarkable that science, art and mathematics have thus been moving in related directions, toward the development of what is in effect, a mode of experiencing, perceiving and thinking in terms of pure structure and away from the comparative, associative, symbolic method of responding mainly in terms of something similar that was already known earlier in the past.

In order to understand more deeply how both fields strive for coherence and harmony, we need to grasp how different levels of order can be brought together to generate new structures. In physics, a structure takes the form of a universal theory; and we will use this as an initial example. Bold leaps forward in the 20th century revealed the sub-atomic nature of particles. An atom is therefore a composite particle and a higher order of complexity when compared to its constituent parts. As it is known, atoms are the building blocks for all of matter, whether in the gaseous, liquid or solid phases. This matter is then distributed throughout the universe forming planets and stars. Billions of stars are contained in galaxies and there are billions of galaxies within the known sections of the universe.

Each piece is seemingly organic, but also accurately accounted for by the use of precise mathematics.

Here we can see that, quite remarkably, scientists have been able to extrapolate elegant and unified (self-consistent) theories from the smallest constituents of energy and matter that extend out to cosmological scales.

However, it is important to point out that as we construct new levels of order, the level of complexity grows and new properties and behaviours appear. These require new scientific laws and new understanding. For instance, the field of chemistry is not just applied physics, and the field of psychology is not just applied neuroscience: at each new level of complexity, new creative insights are needed to explain these new structures. (Nobel laureate Phillip W. Anderson wrote an essay about it, ‘More is Different.’²)

Some art practices of the 20th century follow a similar pattern, although it is somewhat difficult to assess this as, unlike science, we use direct perception in a way that is more subtle and harder to articulate. In its essence, like a physical theory, a successful work of art should be coherent in itself and not require additional external factors, such as reflection and symbolism, to complete it. In his essay, Bohm mentions a number of artists from the early 20th century that have achieved this feat. My personal interest lies in how contemporary artists are integrating these ideas into their current practices.

Tauba Auerbach's "The new ambidextrous universe III”. 

‘THE NEW AMBIDEXTROUS UNIVERSE'& ‘THE NEW AESTHETIC’

For example, Tauba Auerbach’s meticulous sculptures are governed by order and structure. It is well known that she is inspired by logic, and her pieces in ‘The New Ambidextrous Universe’ at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2014) — an exhibition inspired by the 1964 book of the same name³— certainly demonstrate this through their visual rationale based upon symmetry and mirror images. Her three floor sculptures (one shown above) may to us resemble still water disturbed by a stone, or contours of activity on a brain scan. They are comprised of many adjacent, independent but interlocking wooden pieces. Each piece is seemingly organic, but also accurately accounted for by the use of precise mathematics. The sculptures arrived at the gallery packaged in a rectangular form; Auerbach used her intuition to perform a large-scale exchange of pieces from either side, extending the work out into space as a pool of liquid spreads over a concrete floor. The pieces that form the basic building blocks, which on their own are somewhat meaningless, gather meaning by their relationships to each other and the gallery space.

. . . step back from nostalgia and other symbolism and view this information age for how it really is.     

Another area where the notion of order and structure in the creative process has the potential to be extremely fruitful is in the new so-called ‘avant-garde’ movement of the New Aesthetic. The term — coined by James Bridle on his Tumblr account (entitled “The New Aesthetic”) — deals with ‘an eruption of the digital into the physical’ and involves, among other things: information visualization, satellite views, parametric architecture, surveillance cameras, digital image processing, augments . . . the list goes on. A self-referential approach to the creative process could unify Bridle's Tumblr scrapbook of everyday modern reflections into something genuinely new and coherent.

The call for the New Aesthetics project to extend itself came in what may be thought as the seminal article on the program by Bruce Sterling, in Wired magazine. Sterling suggests that, as it stands, Bridle’s New Aesthetic is merely a ‘heap of eye-catching curiosities’ of an information age, rather than ‘a compelling world view’. ‘The New Aesthetic”, writes Sterling, ‘is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one’. In particular, similar to Bohm, Sterling advocates the collaboration between visual artists and scientists to achieve a genuine new aesthetic that is the new shifting reality we are all experiencing, as opposed to a glimmer of one.

About: James Bridle's New Aesthetic Tumblr page (foreground).

This is a crucial point, and a good one to end on. We are all living in a hyper-connected world where visual imagery and information are being spewed out at us 24-7. Our attention is stretched like an over-inflated balloon to its breaking point. The rate of change of technology, whether in the virtual or physical world, is high to a point almost beyond our comprehension, and the boundary between these worlds is becoming increasingly blurry.

The Internet was created at CERN, and it is (computer) scientists, mathematicians and engineers that understand the deeper working of this immaterial realm. Artists have tended to work with the real, the physical, and the material. So, if we are to make sense of these ever evolving digital winds that are sweeping increasingly faster around the globe — and bringing with them myriad implications — I believe that it will be necessary to embody a creative process similar to the one discussed in this article: one in which we step back from nostalgia and other symbolism and view this information age for how it really is. Only then, from the newly discovered basic building blocks — which may end up being related to the fragmentation of our attention between the virtual and real, or even the complete augmentation of our reality — can we then start to create a truly new visual and scientific description of the world as it is.

NOTES

1. David Bohm, Creativity, Routledge, London. 1998.

2. P. W. Anderson 'More Is Different,’ Science, Vol. 177, No. 4047, 1972.

3. Martin Gardner, The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings. Penguin, 1964.

LIBBY HEANEY has an honours degree in Physics from Imperial College London and a PhD in Quantum Information Science from the University of Leeds. Before enrolling in the MA Art and Science Program at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, she held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore, publishing a variety of papers in international peer-reviewed journals. Libby has recently exhibited her artwork at the Bargehouse and the Old Truman Brewery in London, as well as completing an artist's residency at Point B in Brooklyn, New York.

www.libbyheaney.co.uk