Art and Future: Energy, Climate, Cultures 1527504107, 9781527504103

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Art and Future

Art and Future: Energy, Climate, Cultures Edited by

Peter Stupples

Art and Future: Energy, Climate, Cultures Edited by Peter Stupples This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Peter Stupples and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0410-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0410-3

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Peter Stupples Chapter One ................................................................................................. 7 UNOVIS and the Future of Art Peter Stupples Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17 Ecological Imperialism: Michael Shepherd’s Images of a Changing New Zealand Landscape Elizabeth Rankin Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 29 Questions of Culture, Natural Environment and Ecology Evelyn A. Armstrong Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 55 Nice Background: Two Perspectives Mark Bolland and Bridie Lonie Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 65 Scientific Reification David Green Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 81 Immanence and its Distortions: Metaphysics of an Art/Science Collaboration Ashley M. Holmes

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Contents

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 99 Resonating Estuary: Transitions from Site to Art Jan Hogan Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 115 The Water Project Margaret Feeney Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 133 Civic Experiments: Tactics for Praxis Frances Whitehead Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 145 Exhaustion Algorithm Luke Munn Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 161 Knowing Climate Change through Art Bridie Lonie Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 173 Pnjkeko and Butter Papers: Reflections on an Environmental Art Practice Catharine Salmon Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 191 Rocks By The Sea: An Artist’s Notes on his Growing Awareness of Climate Change and the Need for Cultural Reappraisal Nigel Brown Contributors ............................................................................................. 207

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1-1. Section of Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich exhibited at the 0.10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 1915. This image is in the Public Domain. Fig. 1-2. Posed photo of Malevich with students and their “cosmic” work in Vitebsk, 1920. This image is in the Public Domain. Fig. 2-1. Michael Shepherd, The Advance on Rangiriri, 1990, triptych, oil on hardboard, installed size: 210 x 304 x 3. Private Collection. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photo: Glenn Frei. Fig. 2-2. Michael Shepherd, Mural Design for a Holocaust Museum, 2009, oil on board, 150 x 250. Artist’s collection. Photo: Kellan MacCleod. Fig. 2-3. Michael Shepherd, The Invoice Spoken for Anathoth: Tree, 2012, acrylic on board, 35.6 x 60. Private collection. Photo: Kellan MacCleod. Fig. 2-4. Michael Shepherd, Commonwealth, 2012, acrylic on board. Artist’s collection. Courtesy of Two Rooms, Auckland. Fig. 2-5. Michael Shepherd. The Great Piece of Turf (AD), 2016, polymer and organic materials on handmade Hahnemühle paper, sheet: 58 x 76.2 x .5. Artist’s collection. Courtesy of Milford Galleries, Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei. Fig. 2-6. Michael Shepherd. The Promised Land, 2016, polymer and organic materials on handmade Hahnemühle paper, sheet: 58.2 x 76.3 x .3. Artist’s collection. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei. Fig. 3-1. Evelyn Armstrong, A Visual Transmutation of Forms, photo: Evelyn Armstrong © Fig, 3-2. Evelyn Armstrong, Cut Blocks of Ice, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong © Fig, 3-3. Evelyn Armstrong, Homage to Ana Mendieta, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong © Fig, 3-4. Evelyn Armstrong, The Life-Giving Cycle of Water, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong © Fig. 3-5. Evelyn Armstrong, A Well’s Spring, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong © Fig. 3-6. Evelyn Armstrong, A Hotel in Mazatlan, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong ©

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List of Illustrations

Fig. 4-1. Mark Bolland, Destination Wedding, Tekapo, 2015, colour digital photograph. Fig. 4-2. Mark Bolland, Disused Railway Tunnel, Manuka Gorge, 2012, colour digital photograph. Fig. 4-3. Mark Bolland, Wires Through Tree, Lower Hutt, 2010, colour digital photograph. Fig. 5-1. Artist’s documentation of Embodied Earth, an installation shown as part of the Art and Light Exhibition held in the H.D. Skinner Annex, Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, August 2015. Fig. 5-2. Artist’s documentation of Embodied Earth, an installation shown as part of the Art and Light Exhibition held in the H.D. Skinner Annex, Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, August 2015. Fig. 5-3. The Fuller Projection Map is a trademarked design of the Buckminster Fuller Institute. ©1938, 1967 & 1992. All rights reserved, reproduced with permission, www.bfi.org. Fig. 6-1. Ashley M. Holmes, still frame capture from Indeterminate Gestures of Stones, digital movie, 0:33, 2013. Fig. 6-2. Ashley M. Holmes and Ruby Holmes, still frame capture from Immanence and its Distortions, single channel HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, 4:33, 2015. Fig. 6-3. Ashley M. Holmes and Ruby Holmes, still frame capture from Immanence and its Distortions, single channel HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, 4:33, 2015. Fig. 7-1. Work in progress, Hinsby Beach, Tasmania, 2016, photo: Jan Hogan. Fig. 7-2. Acoustic image produced by V. Lucieer, supported by the Marine Biodiversity Hub funded by the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme. Fig. 7-3. Acoustic image produced by V. Lucieer, supported by the Marine Biodiversity Hub funded by the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme. Fig. 8-1. Margaret Feeney, Robotic Water Gatherers: Family Group, 2017, mixed media, 35 x 78 x 18.6. Fig. 8-2. Margaret Feeney, Confused Water System, 2016, ink and paint on heavily gessoed paper, 121 x 80. Fig. 8-3. Margaret Feeney, Test Diagram, 2016, 29.8 x 20.8. Fig. 11-1. Jenna Packer, Bread and Circuses, 2013-14, acrylic on canvas, 120.5 x 160.1. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Fig. 11-2. Michele Beevors, Emu, 2017, wool, construction materials and wooden found objects, 200 x 80 x 60. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 12-1. Catharine Salmon, Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl I, 2013, installation detail. Fig. 12-2. Catharine Salmon, Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl II, 2014, installation view. Fig. 12-3. Catharine Salmon, Bubble, 2016, installation view. Fig. 13-1. Nigel Brown, A Discussion Paper Written on Western Art, 2011, oil and acrylic on board, 165.1 x 124.8 x 5.5. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photo: Glenn Frei. Fig. 13-2. Nigel Brown, I Wandered Lonely, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 165.1 x 124.7 x 5.4. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei. Fig. 13-3. Nigel Brown, World Government, 2012/13, acrylic and oil on board, 252.8 x 127 x 5.4. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei. Fig. 13-4. Nigel Brown, Society is about Trust? 2011, acrylic with oil on board, 165.1 x 124.7 x 5.4. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is a selection of papers given at the Art and Future: Energy, Climate, Cultures Symposium at the Dunedin School of Art over the two days 14-15 October 2016. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of all those who gave papers and took part in discussions on a great variety of subjects related to the symposium theme, from all parts of New Zealand, from Australia, Canada and the United States of America. I would like to thank the head of the Dunedin School of Art at the Otago Polytechnic/Te Kura Matatini ki Otago, Professor Leoni Schmidt, for her enthusiastic support and financial patronage of this event. In particular for assisting the funding of our Keynote Speaker, Professor Frances Whitehead, Professor of Sculpture and Architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, funding further embellished by the Dunedin City Council, which was able to utilise Professor Whitehead’s expertise in local projects and planning. I would like to thank the Otago Community Trust for their financial support for this, as for most other symposia over the last few years, that has enabled the organisers to keep up the standard of these events. The symposium steering committee—Dr Jenny Rock, Bridie Lonie, Dr Caroline Orchiston, with Dr Louisa Baillie a frequent guest, offered support and sound advice during the usual vicissitudes of planning as the symposium came together. During the editing process I have asked a lot of our contributors and of all those who offered their images and permission to publish their work. In particular I was delighted that Margaret Feeney gave permission to use her image of Robotic Water Carriers: Family Group (2017) on the cover. I would like to thank my friend Dr Ashley M. Holmes, of the Central Queensland University, for his editorial advice that has helped me to assemble this unique collection of contributions. As curator of the exhibition I would also like to acknowledge the contributions made by Pam McKinlay, Emily Davidson and the many other helpers at critical stages of the hanging and promotion campaigns. Thanks also to Stephen Higginson, of the Milford House Gallery on Dowling Street, Dunedin, who kindly hosted an event that brought those attending the symposium together with the artist Michael Shepherd about whom Professor Elizabeth Rankin had spoken so eloquently the previous day. Peter Stupples

INTRODUCTION PETER STUPPLES

From the vantage of the present, whatever present that might be, the future is totally unknown. We may extrapolate from the past and the current present the shape, both form and content, that our future may assume but we cannot know it until it is no longer “future.” We may be apprehensive, probably wisely so, soberly prudential, so preparing ourselves for the eventualities our imaginations envisage. The past is familiar, through the histories we have composed for ourselves out of the facts, the myths, the prejudices of our specific cultures, but the future, it seems to many, is scarcely a “promised land,” but full of dystopic political, social and environmental disasters, failures, nightmares that make for a heaviness, rather than a lightness of being. Steven Shapin, reviewing Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future, summarised Harari’s monstrous vision when, through what he calls a “technological upgrade,” a few will morph into more machine-like, algorithmic informationprocessing systems with a de-coupling of intelligence from consciousness. They will rule the world. What will the superfluous mere humans (the lumpen residuum) do with themselves? “Will they discover the joys of art? Probably not: it’s more likely that ‘the useless masses’ will find whatever satisfaction they can in shopping, drugs, computer games and the thrills of virtual reality, which will ‘provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside’.”1 When a few of us in Dunedin began to conceive a symposium directed towards the idea of “future,” each of us had a different agenda in mind. There was a desire to avoid both the rhetoric, on the one hand, of despair, and on the other, of wishful euphoria—the stuff of dystopian and utopian fiction. There was instead a determination to look the practicalities of our own near future firmly in the face—to face up to the realities of climate change, environmental despoliation and the growth-fixated juggernaut of neo-liberal capitalism. Yet we had to keep reminding ourselves that this was an art-based symposium. What was, would be, the role of art in the coming future? Had it anything to show us by way of warning, explanation, ideas for action or contemplation, an agency even? To engage

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Introduction

all these threads of motives for a symposium, to address our remarks and images to a specific set of agendas we agreed to add three words of explanation, limitation, directional pointers, to the title, which became Art and Future: Energy, Climate, Cultures. Within this set of parameters I am certain we still all entertained different visions, different communities of interests, retained our various agendas, but that is true for any title serving to bring some focus to a symposium bringing together people with something to say that has significance specific to them within the compass of a discourse set by others. What we did succeed in doing was to keep that focus on art and artists. The cover for the catalogue for exhibition, that was held in association with the symposium, reproduced one of two large digital prints by Marzena Wasikowska showing a distant cityscape from the vantage of a viewer braving breaking billows in the middle of an ocean, as the crests surged towards a threatened coastal city. The title of the print neutrally announced Earth’s Self-Correcting Systems, Gold Coast, suggesting that Nature, inevitably, inexorably, would “correct” in the future the errors human kind had committed in the past—and not necessarily to human advantage. Art was not so much warning and stating the fact, a fact that boded ill, but underscored an almost certain future. This was true of many images at the exhibition—the “taking of coal” by Marion Wassenaar, the consequences of rising sea levels in Bridie Lonie (and others’) Living Map of the Dunedin city and harbour, the watercolours of Rebecca John showing the effects of environmental changes on the flora and fauna of Aotearoa New Zealand, Mark Bolland’s and Nigel Brown’s biting images of neo-liberalism’s indifference to the fate of the planet. These images followed the dystopian despair that is so commonly the field art explores in our own present—showing the errors of our ways and our own indifference to them, indeed our political determination to turn away our minds and energies from action and redirect our gaze at “the promised land” of more goods and more waste accumulating in ever more polluted oceans and cities as well as within the fast contracting pockets of pastoral paradise. These images of desolation, despoliation, a sadly accepted despair, was also the theme of the paintings by Michael Shepherd, about whom Elizabeth Rankin writes her chapter, and documented from the work of a host of artists from many cultures by Evelyn Armstrong, demonstrating over and over that we haven’t paid enough attention to the warnings, which have been placed before our eyes by two generations of painters, photographers and sculptors with, at best, the “theme of hope for a good outcome for the Planet Earth.” Dramatically, in the exhibition, Pam McKinlay and Jesse-James Pickery displayed the effects of atmospheric

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pollution on birds (Sweeping up the Sparrows) and human beings (Foreseen. Forsaken) denied a sight of the sun in North China. Yet our political masters still pay no heed. So has art, despite this frantic agonising, failed to exert agency? Perhaps, it has heightened awareness, a change, at best, in attitude, rather than brought about action, and this through the agency of empathy, feeling with and for the planet, as acted out by Jan Hogan on the Derwent estuary in Tasmania, expressed by Margaret Feeney’s notion of kindness, echoed in different language by others, or by Luke Munn, looking at “the entanglements of humans with wider ecologies,” such as listening to the deep hum of the earth “generated by the accumulations of deep time” in the geologic strata beneath which we play at environmental predation. Yet there were other responses, (Louisa Baillie’s quizzical “Can art help to clarify?”) modest in their way, yet, in the face of that neo-liberal juggernaut, perhaps that is the agency of art—to suggest small, practical steps that we can make towards a better future, even one where rising sea levels are a reality. The bravest and most quixotic artwork was Stuart Griffiths’s concept drawing of the South Dunedin Ark, a steamer stranded on the mud of St Kilda in South Dunedin after its inundation by the sea, modified into a museum and archive of the place it once was, or the other side of Nigel Brown’s visual and verbal rhetoric, the pleas for trust and conservation of the remaining environmental estate, and the positive artistic claim of Elizabeth Coats, in paint and in words, for seeing “Our Link with the Past in Continuous Re-formation.” Similarly positive as a response both to visual thinking and to practical action is Margaret Feeney’s Water Project in response to the climate change experienced on the Hokianga in the North Island of New Zealand. The boldest voice and proof of direct action came from Frances Whitehead, advocating the enmeshment of artists with city planners and developers to recreate sites abandoned though past pollution into positive sites of recreation in the future—indeed during the symposium itself it was her advocacy of positive action that raised its voice above the ever-present cries of the despairing. Both Ashley Holmes and I offered a different reading of the present, and hence a more detached view of the future. That the cosmos has its “laws” is common sense in science. Indeed it is the task of scientists to seek them out in order to understand better the “real” present. This seems to imply a sane fatalism—we can do what we like, think what we like but we are in the hands of inexorable forces of nature that will, whether we wish it or no, do with us as these vital forces will. Hence the “energy” in the title of the symposium—the vital force of the universe, Bergson’s élan

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Introduction

vital. We seek continuity through our rearrangement of the past, the histories we write and rewrite as we resift the evidence, but are buffeted by the discontinuities offered by our own actions and growing knowledge of the way the universe seems to work. These metaphysical notions are part of natural evolution. Our present is simply the way we work through that evolution, seeking both to understand it and find a means to direct it. The process of understanding seems clearer and clearer but the directing of it may be wishful. Perhaps there is no way in which human control of the macro-future makes any sense in “the scheme of things” (such a useful trope—assuming there is a scheme, because if there isn’t—and most likely there isn’t, then we are simply micro-objects flying through space without a future that we can in any way “direct.”) Is what happens actually “created” or does it simply “happen”? Does art have any role in all this? Some of the chapters in this book offer modest accounts of axiological preferences—better planning rather than floods and droughts, better ways of living with each other and the natural world (of which we are part? Or are we truly “unnatural”?) Energy must be fuelled, so destroys in order to consume and act. For Malevich the chaos of the present is the destruction of the past to create a future. Human beings are energised by thoughts of the future—desire, will, creativity: artists are creative when they think beyond the present to create a cosmic future for themselves: artists are both thinkers and actors, making the present, visualising the direction of the future, exploring, sketching out axiologies of intrinsic value, fuelling the energy of being. Artists are the vital avant-garde. Not with images of the promised land, false prophets, but hand in hand with scientists and political activists, delivering an immanent future, based on argued-for values. If there is no chance of “directing” our future, we can, in the meantime, don the garb of Homo Deus and try for miracles. At least the writers assembled here are thinking about the state of things on the planet. Few are as wildly ambitious as Malevich, many are modestly suggesting different ways of creating energy—both social and political that suit a more positive set of values. All feel that art has a place, even a vital place, perhaps simply as critics of base human actions or heralds of the disasters that await our indifference. Here, at any rate, is fuel for thought, spurs to action focussed on the multivalent images of art that are so seldom simply one thing, are anything but reductive. Art, after all, may opens doors that its creators never had in mind, as creativity is indeed—whether some like it or not— part of our cosmic evolution. 28 July 2017

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Notes 1

Steven Shapin, “The Superhuman Upgrade,” a review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Vintage: 2016) in The London Review of Books, 39:14, 13 July 2017, 30.

CHAPTER ONE UNOVIS AND THE FUTURE OF ART PETER STUPPLES

Imagine the first lecture given by a newly appointed member of staff. The students are gathered in the body of the auditorium. The teachers form a semi-circle on the platform around the lectern at which the newcomer will display the gifts he brings. Loud talking becomes quieter chatter. At a mystical moment everyone closes their mouth, looks around the better to experience the collective silence. All eyes swivel to the front, to the door at the top of the stairs from which the semi-legendary newcomer—his reputation having swept before him into the town, into the building, into their very volatile consciousnesses—will emerge. The door at the top of the stairs is flung wide. The students fix their avid gaze. Suddenly, a thickset man, his hair flying to either side of his head, like angel’s wings or devil’s horns, comes at a run down to the rostrum, his arms cutting arcs in the air, like the propellers of a Sikorsky S-16. The newcomer, Kazimir Malevich, says nothing. He stands there, his arms revving for take off. He exuded energy. He gives a display of “Suprematist motion.” His message is action, not words. Art would never be the same again—or so he hoped.1 This was Malevich’s first appearance as a teacher, in early November 1919, at the Free State Artists’ Studios in Vitebsk, near the front line in the civil war between the Imperialist Whites and the Bolshevik Reds in Russia. White and red were two of Malevich’s colours—the white of space and the red of action. But it is a third colour with which his name is synonymous, the black of the Black Quadrilateral—the Black Square, the image that appeared in at least three versions at the unveiling of Suprematism at the Latest (or was it the Last?) 2 Futurist Exhibition of Pictures 0.10 in Petrograd, almost exactly three years before.

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Fig. 1-1. Section of Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich exhibited at the 0.10 Exhibition, Petrograd, 1915. This image is in the Public Domain.

For Malevich the Black Square was both a representation and not a representation. It was not a representation of a black square; it was a black square in actuality. Yet it was also a representation, a symbol for the foundation of the New Art. “To reproduce beloved objects and little corners of nature is just like a thief being enraptured by his legs in irons.”3 Black was not the colour of mourning. The end of the art of the past was nothing to weep over. Rather let’s welcome “the first stage of pure creativity in art,”4 the first icon of Suprematism, his most recent artistic and philosophical transformation. Malevich had never stood still, either artistically or philosophically. He had been an Impressionist, a Symbolist, a Cubist, a Cubo-Futurist, an Alogist. But these were all way stations on the mainline of his autodidactic quest for something that only began to gel into Suprematism in 1915, a clearer comprehension of the world in which he found himself, the world of war and revolution. The Latest (or was it the Last?) Futurist Exhibition was followed twelve months later by the collapse of the Russian Empire and a few months after that by the Bolshevik revolution. It was as if Malevich’s prophetic intuition was vindicated. The future was now and he was the Moses of the Promised Land with the tablets of Suprematism already written. And he was in Vitebsk swinging his arms, the champion of the art of the future, not related to a Futurism that was past. In any case Russian Futurism, budetlianstvo, was something altogether different from the Italian; it was a What-will-be-ism, rooted in the absurd, mocking all convention, making a travesty of established conceptions of logic and rational thinking, clearing a space for new ideas and acting in the present with the future as yet unconstrained by preconceptions.

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The Latest and Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures. Pictures indeed! As if we need pictures: “when the habit of our mind to see in pictures representations of nooks of nature, madonnas and shameless Venuses will disappear, only then will we catch sight of purely pictorial works (products)…of utilitarian reason.”5 No more pictures. Turn to the present. Use your mind. Think about the way art can be useful for the actual future of a world in turmoil. It was with these credentials that Malevich left Moscow at the beginning of the winter of 1919-1920, the lowest point in the Russian Civil War, when there was no food or fuel, when the Whites were breaking through, supported by Western capitalism, when he joined the Free State Artists’ Studios in Vitebsk. Within a few weeks he had become a hero among the local students. At first his acolytes called themselves The Group of Young Cubists, then suddenly conscious of the archaic thinking entrenched in this title, they metamorphosed into Molposnovis [Ɇɨɥɨɞɵɟ ɩɨɫɥɟɞɨɜɚɬɟɥɢ ɧɨɜɨɝɨ ɢɫɤɭɫɫɬɜɚ (Young Followers of the New Art)]. They were joined by older members of staff, so “Young” was erased from the acronym. Molposnovis became Posnovis [ɉɨɫɥɟɞɨɜɚɬɟɥɢ ɧɨɜɨɝɨ ɢɫɤɭɫɫɬɜɚ (Followers of the New Art)]—the art of pure forms advocated under the banner of Suprematism. In less than three weeks “Followers” was thrown out as too submissive. They were not followers—they were practitioners of new art itself. They now called themselves UNOVIS [ɍɬɜɟɪɞɢɬɟɥɢ ɧɨɜɨɝɨ ɢɫɤɭɫɫɬɜɚ (Affirmers of the New Art)]. In Russian this has a positive ring. It was also an affirmation of Malevich’s pedagogy—students and teachers are one: they are a collective, learning by working together. They constantly create and recreate their own curriculum. There is no canon. There is no history. There are no rules. Our art will change. It should change ahead of, in advance of circumstances, growing out of current social phenomena, changing them in the process. Art is action for change. The process is incomprehensible. It will make its own history, a history that has no value. At the same instant as establishing a new group to create a new art, a new pedagogy, a new environment for making art, Malevich formed a political arm, also called UNOVIS, described as a Suprematist-Economist Party in Art. 6 No group of avant-garde artists in Europe had before advocated, let alone organised, a political wing. “Economy” has a special meaning for Malevich—it has to do with pure, direct, undecorated, the most fundamental, the swiftest, the easiest, the result of undiluted, undiverted energy—colour, lines, form without the enervating distraction of representation. But the Party is “in Art.” It is not in the conflict of the political revolution and civil war taking place all around Vitebsk, or

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Chapter One

having to do with the splits and counter-splits that fragmented the political parties vying for power. The Suprematist-Economist Party would have nothing to do with old scripts, old fights, old ideas, where there were always winners and losers. The Suprematist-Economist Party advocated not only the forms of the new but also the roles the new would play within any society that might emerge from the mess of the present. It would already be in place to lead and to serve. Malevich had no doubts. To celebrate the Week of the Battle Front, on 6 February 1919, UNOVIS put on a performance of works to promulgate its ideas, reusing material Malevich had brought with him—the script of Europe’s most avant-garde opera, Victory over the Sun, a tragi-comedy performed for the first time in the Luna Park in St Petersburg in December 1913, six years before. Within the seemingly incomprehensible action on stage, the sun, representing the past, the enemy of art, is torn down from the sky and locked in a concrete box. The habit we had of seeing the world through the overlordship of light is at an end, laid to rest by the Strong Men of the Future. The opera was followed by a Suprematist ballet, in which “dancers,” carrying black squares and other Suprematist symbols, created ever-changing formations on the stage.7 The evening was described as a meeting-performance. The theatre was an interactive space: the performances a form of embodied social thought. The citizens of Vitebsk, soldiers, workers and peasants, were invited free of charge. Students and staff at the Free Studios, as well as members of the general public, were encouraged to take part as performers, stage hands, costume makers, musicians, dancers, and at the same time engage in sit-in discussions about these works as an example of the type of action/intervention epitomising the New Art. One of the attractions for Malevich of working in Vitebsk was the existence of a lithographic stone and press on a site that was not yet under the eye of any civic or military authority. It could be used to produce and distribute a series of broadsheets to propagate the ideas of the New Art, the thinking that developed within both the art and political wings of UNOVIS. UNOVIS also adopted a seal, a badge, sometimes a red square, sometimes black, worn on the lapel, the sleeve, lithographed on publications. “Wear the Black Square as a Sign of the Economy of the World.”8 These ritualistic insignia distinguished the radical artists, the struggle of the new “in art” to materialise out of the old. The development of UNOVIS would run parallel to the political struggle, interact with it, become its philosophical vanguard, its conceptual antennae feeling its way into the unknown.

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“Wear the Black Square as a Sign of the Economy of the World.” What does Malevich mean by “economy?” Malevich wrote essay after essay in Vitebsk. In “The Question of Imitative Art” (Smolensk, 1920) Malevich stressed that “Every form is the result of the movement of energy on a trajectory from an economic foundation.” By economic Malevich means what works best naturally, with the least possible friction, with no waste of energy and time. It is also the essence, as he understands it, of the fifth dimension—length, breadth, depth, time/space and then the fundamental energy driving the Universe and its creative, functioning principles.9 This fundamental principle of economy he also applies to images. For example those that “convey in a single plane the force of the static or of evident dynamic repose,”10 or “introduce the 5th dimension in art” are regarded as the most economic.11 But Malevich went further, beyond art, to apply this principle of economy to society as a whole, including rights and politics. Our rights are preserved by the utilisation of the best means to regulate society, a society that works well—needs and wants satisfied equally, a communist state, that is not so much Bolshevik, Menshevik, of partisan factions, but “of the commune,” the community as a whole working collectively. “A person receiving rights and freedom cannot act independently…The economic principle leads us along its trajectory and collects all the lives that have been scattered in the chaos of nature, separate and isolated, uniting them in its path; thus every person, every individual, formerly isolated, is now incorporated in the system of united action.”12 Thus for Malevich action—energy in motion, based upon economy of means, achieves social goals through collective endeavour. Art participates in this endeavour through experimentation, through creative construction, through political commitment to social equality and collective rights and freedoms. “New art is no longer organised under the flag of aesthetic taste, but is moving into party organisation; ‘Unovis’ is now a party based on the notion of economy. Thus art aims towards unity with the communism of the economic wellbeing of mankind.”13 Malevich clearly advocated a utopian collectivism, the collective ownership of property, the collective freedom he practiced in the studios in Vitebsk, where the students and staff were equal—certainly equally impoverished and malnourished, but also equally inspired by the new social realities.

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Fig. 1-2. Posed photo of Malevich with students and their “cosmic” work in Vitebsk, 1920. This image is in the Public Domain.

How did idealism translate to practice? The art students, as we have seen, gave performances. They decorated the streets of the city with banners, painting the sidewalks, designed Suprematist decorations for tramcars, speakers’ platforms, signage, posters, ration cards, books, textiles, theatre curtains, gave talks in schools: propaganda was art-work, as all the left artists working in Russia agreed. But UNOVIS was also passionate about designing cities of the future, working within the creative language of architectonic, even cosmic Suprematism. From the very first Malevich had seen Suprematism as a form of theoretical philosophy and cosmology— exploring conceptually the way objects move in space and through time, including Outer Space.14 He was interested in flight, in aerial photography, in seeing the earth from space, in space travel. His students at Vitebsk designed rockets, cosmic habitats. One of them, Gavriil Iudin, aged only 14 in 1920, wrote about interplanetary travel and corresponded with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian rocket science. 15 In Suprematism: 34 Drawings Malevich speculated about the building of a space satellite (which he called a “sputnik”) that would move in its own orbit between the earth and the moon: “movement on a straight line towards any planet cannot be achieved other than by the circular

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movement of intermediate Suprematist satellites which create a straight line of circles from one satellite to another.” 16 These sputniks, like all Suprematist forms, would have nothing in common with the technologies of the earth, “but will be equipped with their own sense of reason and will operate [live] according to their own rules.” The UNOVIS collective elaborated a complete range of collage-reliefs depicting cosmic architecture, such as the work by Lazar Khidekel’.17 Malevich abandoned painting for drawing and writing, creating and thinking, making prototypes, discarding them, developing new ideas and strategies, the endless tasks of collective artistic imagining. Of course he and his young acolytes were mad, living in a city between warring armies, short of fuel and food. Giving up painting was no effort when there was no paint. Printing was possible only on the single lithographic stone. Yet a few photos show studios filled with drawings, students eagerly busy on their projects. Life was a buzz. Excitement filled every hungry body and mind. Feet on the ground but heads in the air—the cold and wet air of Vitebsk, but also the air of outer space, of rockets and satellites, but not just any rocket or satellite. Malevich did not imagine them propelled, as he put it, “by means of engines, nor the conquest of space by clumsy petrol-powered machines of wholly catastrophic construction, but by the smooth harnessing of form into a purely natural functioning, by magnetic interrelationships within a single form, made up from all the elements of naturally interrelated forces, and therefore with no need for engines, wings, wheels, petrol…‘The Suprematist apparatus’… will be a single unit, whole, without any joins.”18 Malevich might have used the word “sustainable” to characterise his bio-organic 19 satellite if that current concept had been available to him. Art, even creative construction, is always embedded in its own historical present, or as John Searle would put it, in contingent practice based upon contingent capacities, social, cultural and material. 20 The energy sources available to the workshops in Vitebsk were wood and coal for the stoves and oil for the lamps. Large-scale public utilities were things of the future for Russian provincial cities. Climate change was not on anyone’s mind as the Russian Civil War raged across vast territories and engaged all minds and bodies with the bitter fight to the death between capital and labour. The political leaders, and UNOVIS too, were intolerant of what we might call the foundation stones of “cultures”—traditions and customs, class, gender, ethnicity, language, religious faith and practice. In the realities of Vitebsk the Polish-speaking, Ukrainian-born, Russian thinking and writing Malevich was a total stranger surrounded by Yiddishspeaking Jewish students. UNOVIS and the Bolsheviks were engaged in

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an international revolution to uproot all “old ways of thinking,” ways of life that were culture-bound. It was a rootless time and Malevich a rootless cosmopolitan. But rootlessness makes it a lot simpler to be uprooted from contingent practices. To change the metaphor, the Future was an open book of blank pages. Writing on it would only bring about division— arguments about what words meant, who owned the ideas, who owned the press. In a collective enterprise the Future must always be a white canvas. It was the task of art to keep it that way. Yet. And yet. From our perspective, from our contingent economic and social practice, Suprematism was supremely naïve, simply the latest, but not the last, manifesto in the competitive practice of the historical avantgarde. The UNOVIS project was at best a heroic failure, with nothing to offer the proletariat of Vitebsk. From the point of view of Lenin’s Bolsheviks it was simply foolish posturing, when what was needed was Western industrialisation, electricity in the countryside, tractors and the latest technology, with no regard for the future of the planet. From the point of view of science cosmic Suprematism was a joke. From our point of view Suprematism simply could not see the future of a resourcedepleted world, an ever-increasing population with ever-increasing aspirations for goods, for power, for entertainment. Of course not. It was not in the contingent cultural, scientific or economic capacities of anyone only a hundred years ago to do so. Art had no idea that it might be called upon to respond to such a planetary crisis as our own. How does art respond? I was struck by the earnestness of the European consortium for the study of energy use and the art project conducted through the Royal College of Art in London that was part of this study in 2015.21 Members of the public at various exhibition sites were asked to draw energy, to explore their perceptions of that as-it-were invisible subject. The resulting drawings were whimsical, colourful, entertaining to look at. Yet they were totally lacking in any contingent capacities to think about energy use. There was no sense of action for change, no context of social revolution. Suprematism is still ahead of the game. The tasks we set for art are more mundane than Malevich set his students in Vitebsk. The propaganda is no more effective despite the much-vaulted means at our disposal to create it. Perhaps we still need to set our minds to the creative construction of naturally fuelled spirals of satellites to take us to the moon and beyond, to make a new life in space whilst we set the planet Earth to rights. We have made no advance in terms of getting ourselves to think and work collectively, on the basis of the equality of all men and women. The creative construction of a world for mutual wellbeing has always seemed alien to our combative, violent, tribal natures, with or without the

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assistance of art. The problems facing us are different from those in Vitebsk in 1920, but our background capacities, as Searle would call them, are no more advanced. Perhaps art, a New Art, of a Suprematist ambition, can help us if nothing else can.

Notes The notes are based upon Troels Andersen’s edited translation K.S. Malevich: Essays on Art, vol. 1 (Rapp and Whiting: Copenhagen, 1968), but my translations are based upon the Russian texts in Aleksandra Shatskikh (ed.), Kazimir Malevich: Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 1995). 1

Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007) 67-8. 2 The Russian word poslednii can mean both “last” and “latest.” 3 Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting,” (Moscow, 1916) in K.S. Malevich, Essays on Art 1915-1933, Troels Andersen (ed.) (Rapp and Whiting: Copenhagen, 1968) 1:19. 4 Ibid., 38. 5 Ibid., 19. 6 The Party was first “affirmed” by Malevich in a letter to Matiushin dated 20 January 1920. The party would share the name of UNOVIS. See Aleksandra Shatskikh, Vitebsk: The Life of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007) 93. This book was originally published in Russian in 2001. 7 Ibid., 94-107. 8 Ibid., 111. In her note to this slogan Shatskikh comments, somewhat brusquely and uninformatively— “‘Economy’ in this context does not refer to economics in the narrow sense but to the concept of efficient order.” Ibid., 338 n.10. 9 Whilst for many this is often seen as a “mysterious” aspect of Suprematism, if not completely crazy, Malevich held that we simply do not know what these principles are, yet there is a sense in which there can only be creative freedom in conformity with natural laws, not the social laws and history that are the dominants in human affairs. 10 Near the opening of Malevich’s essay Suprematism. 34 Drawings (Vitebsk, 1920) (Andersen: 1968) 123 11 The relationship of artistic creativity with the fifth dimension is laid out in Malevich’s Resolution “A” in Art (a postscript, dated Vitebsk 15 November 1919, to his earlier, and first major philosophical essay, On New Systems in Art, dated Nemchinovka 15 July 1919). Andersen: 1998, 117-18. Nemchinovka was a village, now a suburb, lying to the west of Moscow, where Malevich lived at various times in his life. 12 In Malevich’s essay “The Question of Imitative Art” (Smolensk, 1920) Andersen: 1968, 167 13 Ibid., 173

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14 This is expounded in no uncertain terms in the essay Suprematism; 34 Drawings (Vitebsk, 1920). Andersen: 1968, 123-8. 15 Shatskikh: 2007, 195. 16 Andersen: 1968, 124. 17 Illustrated in Shatskikh: 2007, 209, fig.173. 18 Andersen: 1968, 123-4. 19 See Shatskikh: 2007, 204 and Aleksandr Romm’s review of the 1922 Unovis exhibition, where he talks of the “bio-natural foundation” of Suprematist cosmic architecture. Shatskikh: 2007, 207-08. 20 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1992) 185. 21 Flora Bowden, Dan Lockton, Rama Gheerawo and Clare Brass, Drawing Energy: Exploring Perceptions of the Visible (London: The Royal College of Art, 2015).

References Andersen, Troels (ed.), K.S. Malevich: Essays on Art, vol. 1, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (Rapp and Whiting: Copenhagen, 1968). Bowden, Flora, Dan Lockton, Rama Gheerawo and Clare Brass, Drawing Energy: Exploring Perceptions of the Visible (London: The Royal College of Art, 2015). Searle, John, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1992). Shatskikh, Aleksandra (ed.), Kazimir Malevich: Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gileia, 1995). —. Vitebsk: The Life of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

CHAPTER TWO ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM: MICHAEL SHEPHERD’S IMAGES OF A CHANGING NEW ZEALAND LANDSCAPE ELIZABETH RANKIN

Like many New Zealand artists, Michael Shepherd was drawn to landscape as a genre, but felt puzzled and somewhat alienated by the way it was depicted in so many twentieth-century artworks. The most admired New Zealand landscape paintings, by such artists as Rita Angus, Colin McCahon or Don Binney, invariably show pristine panoramas. Their deep colours and strong contours bring horizons into sharp focus, and have sparked endless art historical discussions about the influence of New Zealand’s clear hard light. It is a pervasive trope and the concept has been perpetuated at a popular level in tourist campaigns for 100% Pure New Zealand, even though nay-sayers have questioned the truth of the claim. But, growing up in Ngaruawahia in the Waikato, Michael Shepherd was aware of different vistas, the tangled presence of bush and the dampness of marshy wetlands. Some of his earliest landscape paintings from around 1985, such as Portland Road Swamp, capture the watery lushness of such swampy terrain. Relatively formless shape-shifters, offering a close-up, almost myopic vision, these images deny the clarity and purity of customary New Zealand landscapes. It may have been because of the dominance of the harsh-light theory of New Zealand landscape paintings that Shepherd initially avoided landscape as a subject, although his tiny, much admired early still life paintings could be read as miniature landscapes, with their long shadows and low horizons. But a series of larger-scale works made in 1987, after the death of his father, introduced natural material into still life, and added a very personal note. Coming to terms with his loss, Shepherd revisited the Waikato where he spent his boyhood, involuntarily plucking weeds from the verges of road and river. Invariably imports that arrived accidentally

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but spread rrapidly, the weeeds that came to overrun tthe native biota signify the altered ecology of post-settler p New Zealand, concomitant with the spread of Euuropeans them mselves. Unex xpectedly dispplayed in form mal white vases in thesse paintings, the t pathos of the t insignificaant weeds seem ms a kind of “memento mori,” not only o for his faather, but alsoo for the chang ging New Zealand envvironment. These stuudies were to form part of an ambitiouss six-metre wo ork, Time is a River without Bankks, Time is a Dark Still L Life at Ngarruawahia, painted in 1988, where thhe weeds are depicted d amonngst other fam miliar still life objects representing PƗkeha settlerr culture, andd offset againsst objects representingg the indigenoous culture off the Tainui ppeople. Starvin ng and in dire straits aafter World War W I and the Spanish S flu thaat followed, th he Tainui of Mangataawhiri had been b led by y Princess T Te Puea to settle at Ngaruawahiia in 1921, where they built the im mportant maraae called Turangawaeewae—meaninng a place to stand. s The twoo extended stiill lifes in Shepherd’s painting flankk a central pan nel of the Waaikato River. While W the juxtaposed aartefacts of PƗƗkeha and Taiinui in the woork sets up a bicultural b binary, sugggesting the coohabitation yeet disjunction of the two cu ultures of New Zealannd, it also reveeals their muttual dependennce on the riveer around which their stories are inttertwined—a shared s historyy in a shared laand.

Fig. 2-1. Michael Shepherdd, The Advancce on Rangirirri, 1990, triptych, oil on P Collecti tion. Courtesy of o Milford hardboard, innstalled size: 2110 x 304 x 3. Private Galleries Dunnedin. Photo: Glenn G Frei.

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Shepherd has long been conscious of thorny issues about the ownership of land, wittily evoked in his fake 1840 Handbill painted in 1996, proclaiming “Why-Hiahia” by The Colonial Land Company. He often portrayed places that had historical significance, such as Te Namu Pa near Opunake, Taranaki (1985), and sites where New Zealand battles had scarred the land, such as Rangiriri, the subject of a series related to the sesquicentennial of 1990 entitled Looking for Mercer (Our Country—Our Year). Shepherd was aware how Rangiriri redoubt with its ramparts and ditches had reshaped the natural landscape, basing his work, painted in sepia tones to suggest past records, on a wood engraving from the London Illustrated News of 1864. The newspaper illustration had been intended to be an authentic record based on a contemporary photograph, which the engraver acknowledged by including a camera, shown prominently next to a seated soldier in the central field of the painting. In the largest work in the series, The Advance on Rangiriri (Fig. 1), Shepherd added to the sepia depiction an image in colour, apparently projected by the camera, which showed how nature in turn had covered and masked the redoubt’s distinctive form. The projected image was another of his paintings, Self and Rangiriri, an unusual self-portrait made after he had visited the site and tried to take up the position of the seated soldier, one of the original military figures in the nineteenth-century engraving. Shepherd thus not only collapses historical and contemporary time, but inserts himself into the process. As he once remarked, he did it “… because I saw myself, like everybody else, as complicit in these histories—I’ve never seen myself outside it.”1 In a related series, Lamenting Mangatawhiri Pa—Pakeha Dreams at Mercer, Shepherd simulates a photo album about the rural town named after Henry Mercer, a British captain who was fatally wounded at Rangiriri. He explained in an interview, that he “tried to compress time backwards, so if I go through the process of distressing my paintings with faux means, what I’m always trying to do is close the gap up between historical narrative and contemporary painting action.”2 But while collapsing history past and present, Shepherd also records change, faded sepia photographs played off against new images based on a set of colour photographs made in 1990, and both painted as though taped onto dark grounds like pages in a photograph album. The rambling commentary that the fictive owner inscribed in the album ponders how images can be poor vessels of memory: “I have taken these snaps but they’re not much use. Mercer never seems to change but the photos don’t seem to have the past in them. The land does, but I don’t recognise much of the present.”

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Settler enterprise changed the face of New Zealand, not only through historical events, however, but also through the so-called development of the land. Throughout rural New Zealand, forests were felled and wetlands drained to accommodate crops and herds. Land was also cleared for the founding of towns and related industries, bringing other changes, such as the quarry Shepherd depicted in 1985 that eroded and finally annihilated the distinctive volcanic cone of Maungatakitaki Mountain. Nineteenthcentury artists like Charles Heaphy had seen the development of logging, farmland, and towns and ports for trade as a cause for celebration. But over time these developments have critically disturbed the complacent fiction of 100% Pure New Zealand. Native bush and wetlands have been the victims of human need and economic ambition. Michael Shepherd’s long-standing awareness of the underlying modification of the landscape was given impetus when he read Alfred Crosby’s remarkable Ecological Imperialism, first published in 1986, a title I borrow for this chapter.3 He traced how colonists introduced their accustomed way of life to far-distant lands, creating what Crosby calls “Neo-Europes.” As he remarked, the settlers’ “plants, animals and pathogens…[changed New Zealand] year by year into a land in which the pakeha increasingly felt more at home….”4 Intentionally in some cases, accidentally in others, the biota of New Zealand was gradually changed in the cause of progress. Shepherd’s work makes us aware of this, not with anger but with melancholy, which he relates to the mood of Geoff Park’s evocative publication, Nga Uruora.5 While Shepherd wants to increase awareness of the changed biota of the land, he is not an ecological activist futilely seeking to restore the past. He is all too aware, as Herbert GuthrieSmith eloquently put it in his 1921 Tutira, the Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, that A virgin countryside cannot be restocked; the vicissitudes of its pioneers cannot be re-enacted; its invasion by alien plants, animals and birds cannot be repeated; its ancient vegetation cannot be resuscitated—the words terra incognita have been expunged from the map of little New Zealand.6

The irreversible changes depressed and saddened Shepherd. He recalls a visit to the Kauri Museum in Matakohe, where the story of the great kauri tree is explored and celebrated. Yet the distressing irony is that the surrounding countryside is entirely denuded of its forests; ecologically it is ruined land. And the belatedly protected ancient trees that survive further north are succumbing to kauri dieback disease, the fatal spores probably spread by admiring tourists. The museum seemed to him like a mausoleum for the dead, a site of environmental holocaust, and he pondered what kind

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of image he would create if he were to paint a mural there. His monumental oil painting of 2009, Mural Design for a Holocaust Museum (Fig. 2), shows the silent desolation of kauri logs trapped in a dam, waiting, corpse-like, to be transported to mills and ports.

Fig. 2-2. Michael Shepherd, Mural Design for a Holocaust Museum, 2009, oil on board, 150 x 250. Artist’s collection. Photo: Kellan MacCleod.

Shepherd points out that the regional style of painted New Zealand landscapes rarely considers economic factors, although they have been so potent in the modification of the land, whether logging, or the draining of wetland and clearing of bush for profitable crops and herds. Because they were perceived as unproductive wasteland, wetlands have been reduced to less than a tenth of what they were two-hundred years ago. Native forest cover has been reduced by nearly 75%, while planted pastureland doubled between 1840 and 1980, increasing exponentially after refrigeration made the export of meat possible in 1882. A dead end to Shepherd’s path into the forest, The Road In (2005), suggests that there must ultimately be an end to exploiting the land, which has been severely overextended. This inevitability is also suggested by his 2005 depiction of a dead copse of pine trees destroyed by drifting dunes: entitled The Pines of Home (2005), it creates a small parody of Respighi’s symphonic poem, The Pines of Rome, now like a requiem. Cleared areas unsuitable for farming continue to be planted with profitable fast-growing pines, which Shepherd dubs economic trees not eco-trees. Hence his ironic facsimile of Carter’s company logo “Your Building Partners” in the foreground of the seemingly idyllic painting of Kaingaroa Clearing (Un sous-bois pour Seurat) of 2003-4. Yet Shepherd acknowledges that New Zealand’s Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society have found that pine forests can

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become restorative sites for undergrowth, insects and birds, particularly since companies like Carters have begun avoiding felling trees during nesting seasons. A dedicated tramper, Shepherd is always on the lookout for rare plants, as well as archaeological traces, both in their different ways records of New Zealand’s past. In 2005, he painted a series of small works featuring endemic divaricating shrubs, delighting in their distinctive interlaced forms and small-leaf foliage. Many are named according to the plants they depict, but in some of his titles, such as Coprosma hiding from moa and Baby Pokaka still hiding from moa, he gently pokes fun at theories that explain the plants’ idiosyncratic forms as protection against the herbivorous giant moa, still maintained although moa died out some six hundred years ago. An interest in native plants was also taken up in practical terms, when Shepherd built a home in Onehunga and developed what he called a scrub garden, with indigenous species, a number of them near extinction. The biodiversity of the planting encouraged bird and insect life dear to Shepherd, and it is no coincidence that the garden’s muted tones and textures are reminiscent of his paintings. Shepherd’s distress at the ruin of New Zealand’s native biota was expressed in a painting series with a Biblical reference, The Invoice Bespoke for Anathoth, painted from 2011 to 2013. He had in mind the prophet Jeremiah’s steadfast belief that his beloved homeland would be restored to the Jewish people, even as it was being overrun by Nebuchadnezzar’s armies. Sharing the psalmist’s plaintive question “How can we sing a song in an alien land?”, Jeremiah demonstrated his faith in the future by paying seventeen silver shekels for a field in his birthplace, Anathoth, once fertile but now desolate and already conquered territory. To Shepherd, New Zealand was, like Anathoth, a palimpsest of overwritten histories—cultivated and devastated, fought over, loved and hated. The series is painted on boards that are perforated like pages in an invoice book, suggesting a promissory note for the future. The images are understated and spare, as when the harm caused by the timber industry is represented by a single pitiful toppling Tree (Fig. 3). The countryside is violated by the ever-encroaching trash of urban development, captured by Shepherd in scenes with desolate heaps of plastic rubbish bags, or abandoned parts of vehicles. The works also show how modern farming has bequeathed New Zealand a legacy of ravaged acres, with ploughed fields dug over mechanically and tainted with chemicals, and pastures cleared for dairy herds now awash with effluent. The wet and soggy land is captured in the fluidity of his loose application of the acrylic paint that he adopted for this series. Shepherd insistently reveals how so-called

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progress in New Zealand has critically disturbed the trope of an inspiring, untouched landscape that has been seminal in the country’s image of itself—and its art history.

Fig. 2-3. Michael Shepherd, The Invoice Spoken for Anathoth: Tree, 2012, acrylic on board, 35.6 x 60. Private collection. Photo: Kellan MacCleod.

The modification of ecosystems has become a recurrent theme in Shepherd’s recent work. In a large 2012 painting, Commonwealth (Fig. 4), a mechanical sprayer soaks the already inundated soil with toxic insecticides. The irony of the title, which suggests the distribution of wealth throughout the countries historically linked to Great Britain, is captured in the abandoned railway tracks in the foreground which suggest a collapsing economy, despite the reforms of the 1980s intended to redress the losses suffered by New Zealand after Britain joined the European Economic Community. It seemed that intensive farming had ruined the land to little economic advantage. (With the hindsight of Brexit, might we expect a reversal?) Shepherd added a further layer of meaning in another painting made around this time, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (2011), by inviting comparison with Pieter Bruegel’s sixteenth-century painting. The orderly tilling of the soil by Bruegel’s ploughman gives way to devastating mechanised ploughing which has churned the land into a waterlogged mire, so that the fall of Icarus, already given scant attention in the Breugel, is marked by no more than a spattering of mud. To capture the seeping mud, Shepherd had abandoned the precision achieved through the painstaking layering of glazes in his earlier works, relishing the freedom of

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acrylic paint that he had begun exploring in Anathoth. The more spontaneous application connotes rather than represents the effects of erosion.

Fig. 2-4. Michael Shepherd, Commonwealth, 2012, acrylic on board. Artist’s collection. Courtesy of Two Rooms, Auckland.

Despite their pessimistic message, there is beauty in these works where, as in some Dutch paintings, watery wastelands create a tangible atmosphere filled with refracted light that makes it possible to believe that they are a Thin Place (2011), as Shepherd titles one work; it alludes to the Celtic belief that there are places where barriers between earth and eternity collapse, revealing a divine presence. There is a similar evocation of spirituality in the night sky of The Milky Way (2013), although here Shepherd is commenting on the dependence of New Zealand’s economy on milk products, which has led to overdevelopment of dairy farms, with more and more land converted to pasture, polluting soil and rivers.

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Fig. 2-5. Michael Shepherd. The Great Piece of Turf (AD), 2016, polymer and organic materials on handmade Hahnemühle paper, sheet: 58 x 76.2 x .5. Artist’s collection. Courtesy of Milford Galleries, Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei.

These themes are developed in a new suite of works carried out from 2015 to 2016. In these, Shepherd has traced human interaction with the tussock grasslands of the South Island, where ancient hunters once tracked giant moa, burning off vegetation to assist in their quest, and ultimately hunting the unique birds to extinction. But far more invasive interference was still to come. Offering vast areas of relatively level land, the Canterbury and Otago grasslands were an attractive prospect for European settlers determined to make New Zealand the bread basket of Britain. The land was worked to make fields at least four-fold productive, humorously referenced in Fhearghuis in Otago (4 Field—4 Fold) (2015) in the Scottish tartan which doubles as green fields below a watery sky, with the lines of the woven design mimicking the division of the land. Paddocks also cover ancient middens, suggested in the cross-section of the land painted in Grass Roots (2016), the farming developments destroying history as well as the natural ecosystem. In these works, Shepherd has created intense impastos of paint, with sand and clay, grass and straw, seeds and cereals worked into dense polymer surfaces. As though himself a land worker, Shepherd has used natural materials and made paintings on

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the ground, vigorously handled and trodden over—a complete contrast to his earlier oil glazes, painstakingly created in the techniques of the Old Masters. Yet, in paying homage to Albrecht Dürer in The Great Piece of Turf (AD) (Fig. 5), Shepherd shows that he has not lost his eye for detail. But the sod that he paints records that only a miniscule amount of the original biota has survived, as pre-European grasslands have been converted into European pastures, and imported grasses and weeds have thrived. Shepherd’s grain-embedded works evoke the riches of the plains and agricultural productivity but are also metaphors of ecological disruption, with conservationists powerless to turn back the invasive gorse and other exotics. The endemic insects that were part of the life cycle of the native grasslands, like the tiny Brachaspis novalis grasshopper in the corner of Parable (2016), are close to extinction because their accustomed biota is destroyed. Yet introduced insects and mammals thrive and threaten crops. Now there are futile attempts to eliminate them with trapping devices like the one Shepherd depicts in a painting ironically called Ark (2016), although the purpose of the traps is to eliminate species not conserve them as Noah is said to have done in his ark. Domestic animals too have also done untold damage, not only through their grazing and waste, but through farmers developing land as pasture to accommodate ever-increasing herds. Shepherd points out that New Zealand’s ubiquitous sheep were less harmful than the now favoured cattle, thanks to sheep’s readily recycled droppings, which he depicts in the foreground of a work titled McKenzies Theft—Long Awnet Seed Flown (2015), named for the infamous nineteenth-century sheep thief and folk hero who gave his name to Mackenzie country. The knuckle bones of departed sheep in the painting suggest that the development of the land is a game of chance, where there are losses as well as gains. The alluring Fonterra bubble seems to have burst, for example, with falling prices and the shrinking Chinese market for dairy products represented by Shepherd in a forlorn milk carton under a sky that seeps milky fluid in Spilt Milk/ Blessed Thistle Tea (2015). And New Zealand is left with overstocked herds and polluted paddocks. Significantly in these works Shepherd takes issue with the received aesthetic of New Zealand landscapes, their ever-present horizons and clear contours of hills blurred by a maelstrom of dust and spores. This is not an innocent divergence resulting from his subject matter, but a knowing one that takes issue with aesthetic as well as agricultural history. It is overtly seen when Shepherd inverts McCahon’s hovering angel in his 1948 Hail Mary. He makes her a creature of the earth in his painting, The Promised Land of 2016 (Fig. 6), a title which mimics John Caselberg’s early essay

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on McCahon, “Towards a Promised Land.”7 But the supine female form in Shepherd’s work suffocates, submerged in a sea of grain, suggesting perhaps the demise of the earth goddess, whether MƗori Papa or European Gaia. For her place has surely been taken by a new deity supporting “progress” through mechanisation—Ishtar (2016) the goddess of war as well as fertility—depicted by Shepherd as an engine carburettor commandingly poised on a food pyramid.

Fig. 2-6. Michael Shepherd. The Promised Land, 2016, polymer and organic materials on handmade Hahnemühle paper, sheet: 58.2 x 76.3 x .3. Artist’s collection. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei.

The moa and later bone hunters are gone. Shepherd provides an unusual form of commentary in Moa Hunter (2016). If you invert the work, something readily done when painting on the floor, it appears that the moa returns, as the departing trouser leg of the hunter reads as the long neck of a moa intruding into the picture plane. Perhaps this avian ghost is on the hunt for the terrain that it once knew, as Shepherd himself is when he seeks out remnants of native New Zealand biota, lovingly reproducing the fragile webs of Nursery Web Spiders (2013) suspended amongst the grasses, or a vulnerable patch of surviving wetland discovered near Opotoki, which is the subject of Wetland (2014). He affords them extended life by memorialising them in his painting, even as they are threatened in the real world. Amidst Shepherd’s scenes of ecological devastation we find the constant presence of an unexpected luminous beauty, suggesting that landscape, even threatened landscape, can be a site of birth and beginnings as well as apocalypse.

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Notes 1

Claire Finlayson, This Thing in the Mirror: Self-portraits by New Zealand Artists (Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing, 2004), 82-3. 2 Ibid., 83. 3 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, second edition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4 Ibid., 234. 5 Geoff Park, Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life—Ecology & History in a New Zealand Landscape (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1995). 6 H. Guthrie-Smith, quoted in Cosby:2004, 217. 7 John Caselberg, “Towards a Promised Land,” Art New Zealand 8, Summer 1977-8 .

References Caselberg, John, “Towards a Promised Land,” Art New Zealand 8, Summer 1977-8 . Crosby, Alfred, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, second edition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Finlayson, Claire, This Thing in the Mirror: Self-portraits by New Zealand Artist. (Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing, 2004). Park, Geoff, Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life—Ecology & History in a New Zealand Landscape (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1995).

CHAPTER THREE QUESTIONS OF CULTURE, NATURAL ENVIRONMENT AND ECOLOGY EVELYN A. ARMSTRONG

Fig. 3-1. A Visual Transmutation of Forms, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong ©

Introduction I’ve lived much of my life in one place, and it has been as an

artist/teacher—in a unique “outreach” studio art program—that I have had an extraordinary opportunity to travel extensively around my home

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province of British Columbia, Canada. I have spent time in isolated villages and remote towns. I have had an opportunity to hear cultural stories and first person accounts of lived experiences. I have listened to writers, artists and photographers talk about ways to communicate uneven impacts of climate change through art. In between assignments, I have travelled for study and to search out and view many of the works that I present here. Taken together, I have had a chance to understand from experience some of the ways that culture and social values tie diverse communities to the ecological whole: the future of which is in our hands (Fig. 3-1). My own artistic practice has grown from a printerly tradition in lithography and intaglio to installation art. In keeping up with changing technology, I have turned to digital photography. Using photomontage and the time honoured transformative power of the artistic strategy of juxtaposition, I seek ways to bring new meaning to disparate objects. My thoughts on human/world/nature interconnections have been influenced by the ethico-aesthetic tradition that appeals to subjectivity, spiritual beliefs and cultural values. Following Gestalt theory, I think that art making is circulatory, that images and ideas are constantly in motion— reshaped, repeated, recycled, and reclaimed. Thereby through representation, images can stand for something else. Hence, in the context of environmental activism art can present a radical critique of economic and industrial development. I champion works of art that are witty, embodied, emotional, critical, political, ethical, and aesthetic in scope. Although I direct readers to printed sources for images that I discuss here, the works mentioned can also be viewed online at any number of public art-websites. As with the turn toward interdisciplinary studies and multidisciplinary combinations, the cultural and intellectual role of feminisms in the arts has also been influenced by pluralistic developments associated with postmodern diversity. The emergence of eco-feminist thought and ecofeminist art denotes a turn toward an ecological vision of our relationship to nature. Aided by the spread of systems theory, books on environmental philosophies, popular nature television, and widespread images of our living Blue Planet, we entered an age of ecology. Taken together to champion unity and beauty of nature, to measure ecological integrity, to raise public awareness of climate change and global warming, the final part of my chapter places the focus on the contemporary eco-art movement, which is local, national, and international. The artists and works that I discuss here use art to engage

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with nature, culture and ecology in numerous ways that I think offer hope for the future of art and a good outcome for Planet Earth.

Part I: To Carry the Past into the Future Through sustained personal experiences in nature, artists claim a personal relationship with nature, creating an artistic visual field in art and a balance between self and the environmental landscape. In the early 1900s, Canada’s most exalted artist, Emily Carr (18711945), was also well known for her stubbornness and tenacious rejection of the strict Victorian cultural practices unequivocally upheld by the patrilineal tradition under which she felt controlled. Upon the death of her beloved father and, at almost age sixteen, she managed to get permission to go away to art school. Emily Carr not only managed to travel to near and faraway places for her education, but she did so on her own; this, an almost unheard of achievement for a young girl living in Victorian times.1 Of her resolve to go away to art school Carr recounts: I was the disturbing element in our family…I marched to the dignified, musty office of the old Scotch gentleman whom my father had appointed as our guardian…I want to go away from home [to] an art school in San Francisco.2

Through her moving memoir, Carr writes of her experiences in Paris, London, and Toronto—where she met with members of the famous Canadian “Group of Seven” landscape painters. After five years abroad in Europe and the U.K., Emily Carr returned home to Canada. In her journals she recalls leaving the Canadian Pacific Railway train at Ashcroft, British Columbia, to travel north, to visit a friend at One Hundred and Fifty Mile House. In the early 1900s this was a two-day journey up the Cariboo Road by horse drawn coach. 3 As the coach pressed on through the Cariboo country Carr reports feeling: happier and happier, [in the countryside that]…was fresh and new and yet it contained the breath and westernness that was born in me.4

Having experienced illness, sadness, and disappointment in the “Old World,” Carr now wrote of feeling alive in the vast landscape of the Cariboo and of exploring the countryside:

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Chapter Three riding an old horse…astride, loping over the whole country, riding, riding to nowhere [and to] an Indian settlement a mile or two away. I used to ride there to barter my clothing for the Indians’ beautiful baskets.5

Throughout the 1930s and on, Carr developed a prestigious body of work based on the theme of the living forest. What is striking about this work is her unabashed emotional devotion to Nature. Acknowledging her deep-seated belief that nature and life are interconnected, she often wrote of feeling, “the liveness in growing things” and of knowing endearing “felt” sensations in nature. 6 She wrote of experiencing a personal subjective contact with the living earth and, in 1935, she wrote of feeling the energy of the forest and of seeing: the next generation of pines, cedars, hemlocks: up-rooted tree roots as high as a house, the earth clinging to them still, young trees and bushes growing among them and the hole of the tree left filled now with vigorous green…You can sit on the [forest] path and look down on the snarl of green. It is lovely. Suddenly, its life envelops you, living, moving, surging with being, palpitating with overpowering, terrific life, life, life.7

Carr not only brought her vision of the liveness of nature to her paintings of forests, but from solitary travels to isolated indigenous villages along Canada’s west coast and Alaska she expressed profound and first-hand experiences of First Nations people and their cultures; and, she painted numerous scenic views of indigenous villages. Although some of this work has been criticized, in the past, from the point of cultural appropriation, 8 Emily Carr truly honoured the cultural and spiritual values held by First Nations communities. In a recent exhibition mounted at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK., titled “From the Forest to the Sea,” Carr’s ambitious drive to “express her vision” comes across in work that pays homage to “the [First Nations] cultures she recognized as original to the place she called home.”9 Emily Carr’s own written accounts underline her passion for nature; of being one with nature and of knowing and feeling an embodied connection to nature. It is by taking this into account that her work has been placed within the framework of an eco-feminist view of ecology. For example, Carr’s complex approach to nature has been described by the writer and critic Sarah Milroy, as being both the search for “freedom from social constraints” and a “maternal embrace” that is suggestive of nature standing as “…a symbol of the female body.”10 Although much of the political-social writings of the Second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s sought to “remove women from the

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category of nature,” the emergence of an eco-feminist view of nature wanted to “acknowledge and value the biological and cultural diversity that sustains life.”11 New and innovative artistic practices sought to own the bodily sensations and to acknowledge the value of “the lived connections between reason and emotion, thought and experience.” 12 Seeking the removal of the “androcentric and anthropocentric biases of Western Civilization,” the eco-feminist movement offers a damning critique of the “dualities between culture and nature, reason and emotion” as it opened the realm of ritual and nature in art; thus, to permit explorations into “new images…[and] to create highly charged signs that transmit this energy to contemporary women.”13

Feminist Art In the 1970s, writer and critic Lucy Lippard championed the role of feminist activities in the arts. Lippard suggested that: Artists can help change the dominant culture’s view of women by changing the context in which the deeply engrained connection between women and nature is perceived. Examination of prehistoric matriarchal religions can help place the symbolic content of contemporary artists’ work in critical relation to its general social framework.14

Citing the work of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, Lippard observed a “longing for a connection with an anthropomorphised Earth Mother in these artists’ works.”15 The Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, a forerunner of feminist art, was particularly interested in reclaiming the female body as form. 16 Notwithstanding the many complexities involved in analysing Mendieta’s seminal works, her resolve to claim her own cultural origins provided a focus on culture, myth, and ritual. In addition to this, she explored the feminine principle within the relationship between nature and culture. Seeking ways to draw attention to her own culture, she researched the cultural traditions of the “Taínan people, the native inhabitants of the prehispanic Antilles.” And to conjoin her explorations with the phenomenon of culture and nature with research into the goddess myth, she named the Rupestrian Sculptures for Taínan goddesses, their shapes evolved from her own performances and sculptures. The female form had been the focus of her work since the early 1970s when she was a graduate student at the University of Iowa. Her performances of 1973 through 1974 often involved the ritualistic use of blood and her body, and by the late

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For Mendieta the use of photographs to document her ephemeral site specific works of art in the natural environment became “an essential part of her work.”18 Accompanying psychological ideas about the transition of psyche awareness into spiritual dimensions, Mendieta’s images suggest a life force or spirit directed toward creating a seamless connection between nature and culture. In view of the environmental crisis, eco-feminist scientists, such as Carolyn Merchant and Val Plumwood, contest Western categories responsible for the split between nature and culture. Arguing for cultural change directed toward earth care and partnership models, they sought ways to get beyond nature culture dualism. For Plumwood, we ought to engage in Developing an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the non-human sphere and our dependency on it, and is able to make good decisions about how we live…[involves] a deep, wide and multi-levelled cultural challenge…a systematic resolution of the nature/culture and reason/nature dualisms that split mind from body, reason from emotion, across their many domains of cultural influence.19

Along with the second generation of feminism, American artist Barbara Kruger emerged in the 1980s to bring critical commentary on contemporary lifestyles to the arts. Coming to the art scene from the popular media, Kruger combined typical advertising technique with troublesome images, thus bringing a feminist perspective into focus. From the desire to work in the public realm, she addressed the culture/nature split in large billboard-style installation art.20 Using the artistic strategy of juxtaposition, Kruger intended her work to “undermine the media with its own devices” but she also sought “to break myths” that are long associated with the dualistic epistemology of the Western worldview.21 As Kruger proclaimed the rejection of “woman’s patriarchically assigned subsidiary roles,” her iconic billboard We won’t play nature to your culture marks her work as an acceptance/acknowledgement of lived experience within those dualistic parameters.22 Using the artistic strategy of installation art—the evolution of which has become the dominant form of cultural production in the twenty-first century—Judy Chicago’s massive, and controversial, collaborative work,

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The Dinner Party (1974-9), literally brought “women…to the table of history.”23 Even as the installation stands as a critical monument to the achievements of women, a backlash against “essentialist” art exists within feminist art theory. Chicago’s explicitly “central core” content continues to draw negative commentary. 24 Eventually, and despite the pall of postmodern nihilism, The Dinner Party shows that art/art activism has the capacity to raise awareness of the past as it contributes toward meaningful contributions to the future of art.25 Along with art activism, performance art emerged to engage artists in interventionist activities directed toward proclaiming the complexity of the site of art as a prominent consideration. For instance, Mierle Laderman Ukeles created a performance piece that she called “maintenance art.”26 Drawing attention to troubling social issues around maintenance and the disposal of the growing mountains of urban garbage, Ukeles established the idea that caring for the Earth through work, fits with eco-feminist thinking.

LandArt Over the summer of 1979 through to 1980 Ukeles enacted a piece called Touch Sanitation in which she walked alongside, and personally thanked, each and every one of New York City’s more than eight thousand sanitary workers. Ukeles also had mirrors installed on a garbage truck; thus, The Social Mirror directs attention to viewers that they too have a part in dealing with the growing issue of urban garbage. The Land Art movement also marks a critical turning point in the way artists engage with the site of art and the natural environment. The concept of using the land as a site for artistic activities provides an artistic escape from the “cultural framework defined by the institutions of art.”27 That said, Gilles A. Tiberghien has stated that the term Land Art is ambiguous to the point that it is unclear as to just what it covers.28 To add to the confusion, early Land Art works are not necessarily ecologically sensitive. For instance, Surround Island by Jean-Claude and Christo drew criticism, at first, from environmental groups; Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Pour conflicts with ecological elements of the earth; and, Michael Heizer’s scarring cuts into the desert floor have raised questions of earth ethics. In contrast to this, Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-6), located in a remote spot near Wendover, Utah, marks a radical turn away from the idea of “displacement” and the physical removal of tons and tons of earth. Holt’s seminal work is considerably less invasive. Her work tends more toward a sensitive ecological engagement with Earth’s systems. 29 For

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example, made simply by drilling holes into the walls of large concrete pipes and then having the pipes placed on the land, the Sun Tunnels line up with the solstices and with several celestial constellations. To quote Gilles Tiberghien: Sun Tunnels is a way of placing the earth back on its axis, of giving it a new direction in a place that is distinctly lacking direction, something no human convention can give. At the site, one has a feeling of being on the earth in the exact scale that the earth is understood in relation to the stars. One perceives the earth in its totality. It is certainly possible to section and frame the landscape through the pipes, but this landscape has no meaning except in relation to the axis of the sun and movement of the planets. It is a stellar landscape, with the desert providing its image.30

Four concrete pipes are set so that the sun is “visible through the pipes for 10 days before and after the summer and winter solstices.”31 In the sense that Smithson, and artists such as Nancy Holt, Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer, sought ways to subvert the controlling influences of the established exhibition and gallery system, the move away from the enclosed gallery space to work directly in the landscape opened new and exciting excursions into the natural terrain that went far and beyond marking and moving the material of the earth. Aside from raising troubling ecological and environmental issues associated with site-specific art and project-based art, the move to the landscape as site also introduced the language of mapping the earth and of walking the land.32 Within the context of walking the land, in the later part of the 1960s, British artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton claimed “walking as a principal form of artistic activity.” 33 Leaving little other than their footprints as marks, and using photographs to document their actions, “they led the way forward and back, into the English landscape.” 34 Using the walk to champion the vastness of nature, heralded by the Romantics, these innovative artistic actions not only reintroduced the aesthetic of the landscape tradition to the viewing public, but significantly, following Malcolm Andrews, they promoted a step toward art that, “would have us pulled in to the reshaped natural site, dissolving the distance between viewer and art object, provoking new perceptual experiences.”35 Well known for his fleeting site-specific installations, British artist Andy Goldsworthy also followed the tradition of walking and working in the landscape; this, not so much in regard to the landscape tradition, but rather to “[see] the land itself, its substance, the things that live in it, and what happens to it.”36

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I first became aware of Goldsworthy’s environmental work c.1989 through a much-celebrated work titled Touching North that he created, not in his native Yorkshire, but in the Canadian north. In anticipation of his travel to Canada, he wrote: I will spend one month working in the Northwest Territories of Canada…I will go in winter when the snow is hard-packed and good for making snow houses. It will be an apprenticeship to the cold—learning from the Inuit not only ways of working with snow and ice but, I hope, something of a 37 way of life that celebrated cold weather in a frozen landscape.

Goldsworthy’s use of frozen water, as an expression of his outdoor experiences, has become symbolic of his concern about change and movement in nature. Over the winter of 1988-9 Goldsworthy made eighteen huge rolled snowballs. For the eventual exhibition, held in Glasgow, he wrote: Snow and ice is on a journey—it falls from the sky, forming drifts, thawing into the earth or grinding its way through a valley in the form of a glacier. Movement is a part of nature. Working with snow and ice is 38 touching a force that has shaped the land.

Above all, Goldsworthy notes that from his time spent in the Canadian north and his treks to the high places of Scotland—“where there is snow almost all year round”—came the opportunity to express feelings toward, “qualities of time, space, movement, noise, colour and texture.”39 Placing this within human understanding of change, Goldsworthy claims his works within geology and the “glacial ecology of one’s homeland.”40

My Artistic Practice I live in a place where freezing is a constant effect of winter. I only need to step foot from my front door to find winter conditions that speak to me of enormous forces of nature and sometimes to climate change. Admittedly, my own environmental artistic practice has been influenced, to some extent, by Andy Goldsworthy but, in addition, I would like to present the cultural landscape of my own geological place.

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Fig, 3-2. Cut Blocks of Ice, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong ©

Over into the winter months of 1995-6, I created a site-specific work titled FLOW. I began this work by recording the sounds of Nicola Lake (near my home). As the weather changed and the water began to freeze, I was able to walk out onto the frozen surface of the lake. I often worked at night to record the sound that the ice makes under conditions of temperature change. As the ice moves, it sends sharp cracking sounds that rebound back and forth across the vast frozen surface of the lake. I also took photographs of the huge ice ridges formed by the pressure of movement. I would often walk out to a rocky point, no little distance from the house, where I could record the sound of the ice pushing up against the shore. When the conditions were just right, I made deep cuts into the icy surface and pulled up large blocks of ice (Fig 2). I purposefully created an open body of water in the shape of a silhouette; this, in homage to Ana Mendieta (Fig. 3). My intent throughout is to claim emotionally embodied “felt” expressions of lived experiences in nature as I draw attention to ecology and climate change.

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Fig, 3-3. Homage to Ana Mendieta, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong ©

In my environmental artistic practice I continue to record changing climatic conditions with photographs and audio-visual recordings. Eventually I was able to use huge blocks of ice in gallery installations of FLOW. There I purposefully control the lighting to emphasise a cool atmosphere and to keep the ice from melting too soon. Eventually the ice does begin to melt and, along with the sound of the dripping melt-water, one can hear the pre-recorded playback of the ice moving in nature. In one sense this is all to highlight the shift between passive energy and active energy, but taken together, my intent is to create a visual/audio atmosphere that is meant to draw attention to an experience of looking and feeling. In addition, I want to emphasise the life-giving cycle of water and to do this, I place huge blocks of ice outside the gallery space to allow the water to seep directly into the ground (Fig. 4).

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Fig, 3-4. The Life-Giving Cycle of Water, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong ©

Over the decades since, I have moved from installation art to explore the possibilities of photomontage, using digital technology; this, in part, to keep up with changing technologies and, in part, to use photography to draw public attention to local symptoms of global conditions (Fig. 5). I also want to exemplify the changing landscape and the uneven impacts of climate change that are being experienced in different localities (Fig. 6). Finally, by highlighting aspects of ecological crises, melting ice and drowning landscape, I hope to broaden public discussion on climate change.41

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Fig. 3-5. A Well’s Spring, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong ©

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Fig. 3-6. A Hotel in Mazatlan, photo: Evelyn A. Armstrong ©

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Part II. Elements of Art, Culture and Nature. Highlighting cultural identity and social engagements within the greater ecological whole, the land and earth art movements set precedent for contemporary environmental artists. It is well known that the move from the gallery space to the outdoors underscores “a crucial moment in modern sculpture.”42 Over the passing years, significant critical and nature-focused art began to appear more often. For instance, an early “earthwork” by Herman de Vries, in collaboration with his wife Susan, exemplifies physical facts of natural diversity and human intervention. They purchased a farm field that had been well cultivated, but they left it alone to claim the rejuvenation process as art: this, under the category of nature’s art. Similarly, the Canadian artist Peter Von Tiesenhausen considers the land as his material source. As a point of mediation he draws inspiration from the land. He develops site-specific pieces in the physical landscape. As an aside, Von Tiesenhausen holds legal artistic copyright over his land. From here on, I want to focus on a postcolonial project, artistic practices that direct political commentary on “big” industry, and I discuss artists that provide art as a backdrop to address industrial and economic development, and issues of management and mismanagement of the environment. Vancouver artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent, expresses ideas about colonialism and the on-going struggle for Indigenous rights to lands and resources.43 Bringing a hardhitting commentary on the major issues facing Indigenous communities today, Lawrence Paul “has almost 30 years of art making to his credit.”44 As a cultural activist, the First Nations artist Rebecca Bellmore has taken her audio/performance piece, Speaking to Their Mother, to various communities in support of environmental justice and Indigenous actions taken against unchecked and unsustainable energy extraction.45 Edward Burtynsky’s images bring an implied narrative concerning the use and misuse of land. In large-scale photographic works, such as Highland Valley Open Pit Mine, Burtynsky comments on the enormous impact that industrial development has on nature. With Pivot Irrigation No. 11 High Plains Texas Panhandle he comments on industrial farming and the unsustainable stress on the Ogallala Aquifer. With Oil Derricks, Belridge, California, dotting the landscape as far the eye can see, Burtynsky offers a view of the industrial landscape that is awesome, dramatic, and disconcerting, all at the same time.46

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With advances in technology, Edward Burtynsky’s documentary film, Watermark, is readily available for viewing online. Shot in high-definition video and from soaring heights, the film opens with a horrific sound and what appears to be a dust cloud. This is actually water and the force needed to clear the silt build-up behind the Xiaolangdi Dam on the Yellow River.47 Burtynsky’s photograph of the Three Gorges Dam offers an opposite view of the stillness of water, which falls very much in line with the “picturesque view” of nature: yet here too, Burtynsky comments on the broader implications of China’s insatiable need for power. He writes that: anywhere from 10 million to 60 million people will be displaced their livelihood lost, the fertile agriculture lands flooded, and important cultural /historical sites will soon be under water.48

Part III. Art, Ecology and Climate Change From travel and experiences I have had an opportunity to hear first person responses to the uneven impacts of climate change. I have listened to writers, artists, photographers talk about communicating emerging changes through art; and, I have had an opportunity to view some of the following works discussed here. For instance, at the 2007 Venice Biennale I attended a presentation by the New Zealand artists Brett Graham and Rachel Rakena of their installation Aniwaniwa (To Light A Fire).49 Their ultra-technical use of video imaging installed along the ceiling in a running line of glass domes contains a disturbing commentary on what it means to have the private, personal, physical space of a generational community totally destroyed by the drive for economic development; this, through the raising of waters from a hydroelectric dam development on the river. Over several months, in the fall of 2009, I joined a Simon Fraser University cultural study tour to India. While in New Delhi, I attended an international arts symposium, held at the Khǀj artist workshop in the Khirkee extension. Part of the programme included a presentation by the Zariyen Art Intervention Collective. Members of the collective had been working with mountain villagers gathering statements and photographs to document the flooding of their 200-year old village of Tehri Garhwal.50 The audio/video presentation described how the “relocated” residents had lost their village, their ancestral place, and their fishing industry, their means of survival. Through public viewing, this documentary has become

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a significant way to open conversation about concerns of people living in the remote areas of the Indian Himalaya Mountains.51 A few years later, I spent a month in Nepal. At the City Museum, Kathmandu, I viewed Krishna Gopal Ranjit’s paintings titled Nature in Flux. Characterized by bursts of light, Ranjit often depicts images of Buddha and other gods in central positions; this to bring certain stillness to his abstract paintings of nature’s chaotic energies. In a written text the 85year old Ranjit comments on environmental problems that are “political… tied with the loss of Indigenous cultures and with the constant threat of earthquakes, floods, and landslides.”52 Cultural values that I wish to connect tie artistic practices within the global artistic conversation that is going on now. The growing global Ecoart movement brings a decidedly ethico-aesthetic vision of human-world connections to issues of climate change, land use, and sustainability. Many Eco-art projects are witty, embodied, emotional, critical, and political and are available for viewing online at any number of public artwebsites. For example, the work of Canadian artists Marcus Bowcott and Charles Stankievech; collaborations by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Rhonda Neufeld and Rodney Konopaki; video work by the Rio de Janeiro-based artist Thiago Rocha; and, American artists Michael Cataldi and Maya Lin. Among artists that are searching for solutions to ecological issues, Amy Balkin’s Public Smog installation falls in line with artists, like Barbara Kruger, who want to work within the public realm. By addressing “particular environmental challenges” in a public and political context, Balkin brings the role of the social to climate change.53 The Canadian poet, artist, and environmentalist, Marlene Creates, lives in a world of nature, on a forested property in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland & Labrador. Through her activities in nature she brings fleeting moments of interaction with the land to her art. Highlighting the idea of touching and being touched by nature, Creates says, “[this] creates a lasting relationship between human experiences, the land, and the impact on each other.”54 The Swedish artist Erik Johansson bills himself as a contemporary “retouch” artist. Using digital technology to “toy” with the language of the landscape, he creates stark contrasts between cultural, and traditional, photographic views of the countryside.55 In works that seek to resolve environmental problems, some artists have turned to small interventions, such as those that focus on the theme of the garden. For example, the Canadian artist, Nicole Dextras, offers her Mobile Dress Garden (2011) as an authentic experience of art, self, and

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nature. “We are not separate from the natural world,” she says, “there is beauty in all of life’s cycles.”56 In reference to the biblical Manna for nourishment, Lauren Berkowitz uses the theme of the garden “to evoke the passage of time and the cycles of life and death.”57 Making use of reusable plastic containers to address the degradation of the natural environment and to question the loss of indigenous food plants, Berkowitz critiques “intensive agricultural practices that have been destroying the fragile Australian continent since colonization.”58 Food Forest (2012) is a collaborative work by an Australian group, known as The Artist as Family. Their public garden of edible plants is an attempt to blur the line between art and nature [as] it champions biodiversity and demonstrates that art can be a generative resource rather than just an extractor or exploiter of resources.59

In 2014, I spent a few days in Madrid. At the contemporary exhibition space, Centrocentro, the huge entrance hall was taken up by a clothesline installation, Touching The Sky. It spoke to me of comfort and protection like the open arms of a Misericordia. The cloth landscape, made entirely of second-hand clothing, points toward stories of the past and, according to the Finnish artist, Kaarina Kaikkonen, it offers an extension of the [life] of the past wearer.60 With his ephemeral beach work, San Francisco landscape artist Andres Amador claims his “mission” is to find “outlets for creative expression into life and the experience of living it.” In a recent collaborative work in New Zealand, the Maori artist Lloyd James Morgan provided the pattern design for the 2016 beach work at Wainui New Zealand.61 I end with The Weather, Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 installation that was created for the great Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, in London. Marcella Beccaria, a curator at the museum, has stated that the exhibition drew a record-breaking number of viewers. Noting that the viewing public all but ignored the obvious technical components—the back lighting, mirrors along the wall, and the evaporating mist—Beccaria said, that people appeared to be responding to the dramatic artistic illusion of the sun and that they actually seemed to be engaged in an emotional, embodied, experiential relationship with the ancient symbol of life.62

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Epilogue The idea of a self-contained unity or limited whole is a fundamental instinctive concept. We see parts of things. We intuit whole things. We assume the continuity of time and space. This intuitive extension of our claim to knowledge has inspired the reflection of many philosophers. Hume, who was sceptical about universal tendencies, was prepared to say that some of our cherished unities, the self, the material object, were illusions fostered by the imagination, by association of ideas, by “habit and custom.” The concept of “art object” or “work of art” has a force which goes far beyond what we usually think of as “art.” The urge to prove that where we intuit unity there really is unity is a deep, emotional emotive to philosophy, to art, to thinking itself. (See Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics As A Guide to Morals). In summary, far from suggesting that we remain loyal to cultural dualisms that can be traced back through time in Western thought, this chapter focusses on the arts as an interventional tool in challenging fixed cultural positions. A feminist and eco-feminist interdisciplinary setting provides a common ground for my inquiry into artistic activities that challenge binary relationships that culture itself organizes. I’m also suggesting that as an ethico-aesthetic paradigm considers subjectivity and the “aesthetic power of feeling” paramount to the expression of individual authenticity in art it ought to be able to help in dismantling fixed “ideological superstructures.” 63 In addition to the call for respect, sentiment, imagination, and creative expression, the ethico-aesthetic tradition calls for getting involved in practical activities that have a future. I have based this chapter on research, literature, and artistic endeavours that draw attention to a truly sensory appreciation of the lived-experiences. I value teaching, travel, and lived experience as ways to enrich cultural understanding; this, especially so in the artistic search for unity/wholeness in a world of change. Taken together to champion unity and beauty through nature, to measure ecological integrity, to raise public awareness of climate change and global warming, the artists and works that I discuss here are complementary to a reading of the contemporary and global Ecoart movement, which is local, national, and international. I champion artistic activities that engage with nature, culture, and ecology in ways that hold hope for the future of art and a good outcome for Planet Earth.

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Notes 1 Rosemary Neering, Emily Carr and the Heart of a Peacock (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005) 1-9. 2 Emily Carr. Growing Pains: An Autobiography (Toronto: Irwin, 1946). There is also a Centennial Edition, 1971. 3 For accounts of Carr’s Cariboo experiences see Emily Carr, Growing Pains: An Autobiography (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1971). 4 Carr: 1971, 197. 5 Ibid. 6 Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1966) 241. 7 Carr: 1966, 199. 8 See for example, Robert Fulford, “The Trouble with Emily: How Canada’s Greatest Woman Painter Ended Up on the Wrong Side of the Political Correctness Debate,” Canadian Art, 10:4 (1993) 32-9. 9 Quoted in a review by Robin Laurence, “ Emily Carr: Dulwich Celebrates A Pioneer,” Canadian Art, Spring 2015, 7. To view images from the exhibition go to and follow the links to Emily Carr (first accessed May 2015). 10 Laurence: 2015, 74. 11 Irene Diamond, and Gloria Feman Orenstein (eds), Reweaving The World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990) ix. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid,, 282. 14 Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon, 1983) 45. 15 Ibid., 46. 16 To view works by Ana Mendieta see Lippard: 1983; Bonnie Clearwater (ed)., Ana Mendieta A Book of Works (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1993): Ana Mendieta: Earth Body Sculpture and Performance 1972-85. (first accessed December 2014). 17 Clearwater: 1993, 16. 18 Ibid., 11. 19 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002) 3-4. 20 For images see Stokstad: 1995; also, Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (eds), The Power Of Feminist Art The American Movement Of The 1970s: History And Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). 21 Judith E. Stein, “Collaboration” in Broude and Garrad: 1994, 243. 22 Ibid. 23 Broude and Garrad: 1994, 16. 24 Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan (eds), Art and Feminism (London: Phaidon, 2006) 37.

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25 For images see Maura Reilly (ed.), Global Feminisms New Directions In Contemporary Art (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007) and Reckitt and Phelan: 2006). I was fortunate to view The Dinner Party in Calgary, one of only a few stops made in Canada on its landmark exhibition tour. This important installation is now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum and installed there permanently in its own gallery space. 26 Diamond and Orenstein: 1990, 284. 27 Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Location Identity (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004) 130. 28 Gilles Tiberghien, Land Art (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) 13. 29 To view images of Sun Tunnels go to (first accessed 18 September 18 2016). Located near the town of Wendover, Utah, USA, Sun Tunnels offers the visitor a cool shaded atmosphere to view tiny spots of light made by holes drilled into the walls of the pipes that mark the configuration of Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn See John Beardsley, Earth Works and Beyond: Contemporary Art In The Landscape (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989) 34. 30 Tiberghien: 1995, 147. 31 Beardsley: 1989, 34. 32 Tiberghien: 1995, 174. 33 Beardsley: 1989, 41. For images and an account of the turn away from so called Land Art to Earth Art, see Beardsley:1989. 34 Ibid. 35 Andrews: 1999, 221. 36 Strickland-Constable in Andy Goldsworthy and Terry Friedman (eds.) Hand To Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976-1990 (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1990) 11. 37 Goldsworthy and Friedman: 1990, 75. 38 Goldsworthy and Friedman: 1990, 116. For exhibition highlights and images see Snowballs In Summer quoted in Andy Goldsworthy and Terry Friedman (eds)., Hand To Earth Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976 – 1990 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993). 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Copyright Evelyn A. Armstrong images Fig. 1 through 6. 42 Tiberghien: 1995, 14. 43 Images may be viewed in INDIGENA, the catalogue from a group exhibition created especially for the Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1992 (Hull: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992); and also Canadian Art, winter 2014 or go to and follow the links. 44 Christina Ritchie, “Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Stands his Ground on a Good Day,” Canadian Art, Winter 2014, 120. 45 To view images go to (first accessed January 2012). Also see interview with Rebecca Belmore on http://vimeo.com/99999913. 46 Burtynsky: 2013, 51-65. For Edward Burtynsky images go to

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(first accessed 14 February 2014). In his text, Burtynsky points out that each pivot is attached to a well in the Ogallala Aquifer. With dropping water levels, it will take over 6,000 years to refill this precious source of ground water. I was able to view this work the Vancouver Art Gallery in March of 2014. 47 Ibid. 48 Burtynsky: 2013, 55. From an interview with Edward Burtynsky in The Walrus (first accessed October 2013). 49 For images of Aniwaniwa go to (first accessed September 2007). 50 I viewed this exhibition at the Khǀj Workshop, Khirkee Extension, New Delhi, India. For information on the artist workshop, go to (first accessed December 2008). 51 Go online to see images and information on the highly controversial Bhagirathi River hydroelectric project located in the Indian Himalayan foothills. 52 Ranjit considers “an ecologically rational society will be difficult to achieve.” For images of K.G. Ranjit’s paintings go to (first accessed December 2014). 53 Amy Balkin quoted in Andrew Brown, Art & Ecology Now (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2014) 228. For online images go to (first accessed 10 September 2016). 54 From a review at (first accessed June 2014). 55 To view images (first accessed June 2014). 56 Brown: 2014, 198-9. Mobile Garden Dress, 2011, Nicola Dextras, Vancouver, B.C. can be viewed on line at (first accessed June 2016). 57 An excerpt from the exhibition catalogue for the show Three Degrees of Change, LUMA’s Art and Sustainability Project at La Trobe University Museum of Art Melbourne, 2009. Text by Dr Alana O’Brien at (first accessed 15 September 2016). For images see also Brown: 2014, 239. 58 Brown: 2014, 239 59 Brown: 2014, 242. 60 I viewed this work in situ at the Centrocentro, Madrid, Spain, over the spring of 2014. For more information about the artist and to view images go to (first accessed September 2016). 61 Quoted from an interview in Artnews,com, 28 May 2016: . and for further images go to (first accessed September 2016). 62 For images of The Weather go to (first accessed 10 February 2014).

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Félix Guattari Chaosmosis an Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995) 100-1.

References Andrews, Malcolm, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford UP., 1999). Armstrong, Evelyn, “When Plants Become Precious: Art, Culture, and Environmental Crises,” in Plants for People, People for Plants: 7th Planta Europa Conference Book of Proceeding (Chania, Crete: Horizon Research Publishing, 2014) 60-75. Beardsley, John, Earth Works and Beyond: Contemporary Art In The Landscape (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989). Brown, Andrew, Art & Ecology Now (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2014). Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard (eds.), The Power Of Feminist Art: The American Movement Of The 1970s, History And Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). Carr, Emily, Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of Emily Carr (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1966). —. Growing Pains: An Autobiography (Toronto: Irwin, 1946). Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (Greenwich: Fawcett Books, 1962). Clarke, Kenneth, The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic versus Classic Art (London: Omega, 1976). Clearwater, Bonnie (ed.), Ana Mendieta: A Book of Works (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1993). Diamond, Irene and Gloria Feman Orenstein (eds.), Reweaving The World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990). Eisler, Raine, “The Gaia Tradition And The Partnership Future: An Ecofeminist Manifesto,” in Diamond and Orenstein: 1990. Fulford, Robert, “The Trouble with Emily: How Canada’s Greatest Woman Painter Ended Up on the Wrong Side of the Political Correctness Debate,” Canadian Art, 10:4 (1993) Gablik, Suzi, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991). Gimbutas, Marija, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe 6500-3500 BC: Myths and Cult Images (Berkeley: UP California, 1982). Goldsworthy, Andy and Terry Friedman (eds), Hand To Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976-1990 (New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1990).

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Gordon, Terrence, Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Corte Madera: Ginko Press, 2003). Guattari, Félix, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Chaosmosis an Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana UP., 1995). Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood (eds), Art In Theory 1900-2000 An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden: Blackwell, 2006). Kheel, Marti, Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective (Toronto: Roman & Littlefield, 2008). Kwon, Miwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Location Identity (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004). Lippard, Lucy, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon, 1983). —. “Time Capsule” in Will Bradley and Charles Esche (eds), Art and Social Change A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publishing, 2007). McMaster, Gerald and Lee-Ann Martin (eds), INDIGENA; Contemporary Native Perspective (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992). Merchant, Carolyn, Earthcare: Women And The Environment (New York: Routledge 1996). Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Books, 1993). Neering, Rosemary, Emily Carr and the Heart of a Peacock (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005). Nussbaum, Martha, Love’s Knowledge Essays On Philosophy And Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990). Plumwood, Val, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002). Pollock, Griselda (ed.), Conceptual Odysseys Passages to Cultural Analysis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). Reckitt, Helena and Peggy Phelan (eds.), Art And Feminism (New York: Phaidon 2006). Reilly, Maura and Linda Nochlin (eds.), Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007). Ritchie, Christina, “Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Stands his Ground on a Good Day,” Canadian Art, Winter 2014. Shadbolt, Doris, Emily Carr (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery Publication, 1971). Stokstad, Marilyn, Volume Two: Art History (New York: Prentice Hall and Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1995). Tiberghien, Gilles A., Land Art (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995). Tippett, Maria, Emily Carr (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).

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Vance Jonathan F., A History Of Canadian Culture (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009). Warren, Karen J., Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What it is and Why it Matters (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

CHAPTER FOUR NICE BACKGROUND: TWO PERSPECTIVES MARK BOLLAND AND BRIDIE LONIE

1. Mark Bolland, Nice Background Nice Background is a series of photographs about image culture, climate change and the changing landscape of Aotearoa me te Waipounamu/New Zealand. 1 It is about how our experiences of this place are mediated through images, and how these landscapes, their histories, and our experiences of them, are commodified. It seems hard to imagine that nature and commodity culture—the globalized, deregulated twenty-first century economy—could be more at odds than they are at the moment. Yet beyond the obvious frontlines of this war, which in New Zealand means coal, cows and cars—a curious paradox exists: commerce now emulates the picturesque, and vice versa. In Aotearoa me te Waipounamu/New Zealand we protect the remnants of ecosystems—in fact, we are very good at it—but we are also commodifying them and consuming them in the way we consume everything else. We use our ecosystems by turning them into resources or utilizing their services, but we also market and consume them as experiences. In Western and Westernised cultures we have constantly defined nature as the opposite of our industrialised, urbanised, modernity to such an extent that is it not uncommon to characterise our modernisation like Naomi Klein when she wrote: “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”2 In the war against nature we simultaneously ransack the planet’s resources and market what remains as the antidote to our modern problems. These remains are packaged and commodified, using the conventions of the picturesque, to be experienced like a trip to the supermarket or ride at Disneyworld. Or, more accurately, like at a museum; a spectacle and a display where remnant ecosystems and sublime landscapes can both entrance us and devastate us as we

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simultaneously experience them as beautiful and as signifiers of an absence or passing. In developed countries, like Aotearoa me te Waipounamu/New Zealand, we might experience nature as something mournful, belonging to the past, to a vanished arcadia, where ecosystems flourished and where we project our fantasies. Or else, nature is reduced to various forms of the most common fantasy in the commodity version of the picturesque (picture books, postcards, adverts, etc.) wherein the natural world before the Anthropocene still exists, without our interventions and activities, without anyone, in fact, and magically conforms to the rules of the picturesque: where pink sunsets are perpetual and lakes always perfectly reflect the mountains behind them. We are able to have this commodity version of the picturesque, because of the fundamental fact that what we are experiencing is so reduced that it can be packaged and experienced in a whistlestop tour: the forest and wilderness, which were previously vast and unknowable, now mapped, divided, conquered. We also experience this reduced nature like a picture, from the outside via cars, coaches, tracks or designated viewing areas. These views are the epitome of our picturesque version of the natural—arranged, sanitised, staged and composed—nature seen from a distance without jeopardy or reciprocity. Like many New Zealanders, I am an outsider, but not a tourist. I live here and am invested in this place. I delight in it and am sometimes horrified by it. I am intrigued by the variety and uniqueness (to borrow the language of commodity fetishism) of New Zealand’s topography and ecosystems, and frightened by the recklessness of those who treat it as an inexhaustible resource for continuing exploitation. Such “extractivist” attitudes, of course, exist almost everywhere and are easily justified by the main myths of our culture—our superiority over nature and the need for continuing growth and progress. Perhaps because of the fragility of our island ecosystems, and perhaps because of the sheer speed of their exploitation, it is particularly easy to see the habitation of these islands as a history of successive exploitations by different peoples: the moa were the first to be exploited, then the forests, then whales and seals, then gold and the forests again on a bigger scale, coalmining, and latterly the rapid development of industrial dairy farming and with it the spread of desertification. These kinds of successive exploitations have happened in many places, but the situation seems particularly acute in Aotearoa me te Waipounamu/New Zealand where the contrasts are so stark and the timescale so short, and where so much is made of the picturesque and the sublime—a whole tourism industry, for example, largely constructed not around cultural histories, but around an already mostly vanished Eden. In a

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wonderfully Baudrillardian inversion, 3 this country is now synonymous with a Hollywoodised version of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is itself the setting for a battle between insane industrialised resource-exploiting extractivists and those who seek simplicity, harmony and balance with nature. Except, of course, that here and now, the orcs are winning. Much pleasure can be had in our carefully protected remnants of ecosystems. But this experience is tempered by the fact that these wild places are small islands in a vast sea of industrialised and impoverished environments, and by the fact that they must, for the most part, necessarily be experienced as a walk in a botanic garden, or else as a tour of real estate agents’ adverts, where the sublime and the picturesque are the most valuable commodities and we are invited not just to admire the view, but also to consume it. It is a twenty-first century tragedy that impoverished nature can now only be experienced as a mere shadow of its former self, its delights tempered by melancholy and mourning. Joseph Banks seems, perhaps inadvertently, to have anticipated this situation perfectly when he pressed his botanical specimens collected around the coast of New Zealand in a volume that was a commentary on Milton’s Paradise Lost.4 But almost equally tragic is the fact that our experiences of what is left of the natural world and the landscape are packaged, marketed and commodified. Our encounters are predetermined for us: anticipated, pre-empted and mythologized in a range of gratuitous and grotesque visual clichés. The photographs in the Nice Background series fall loosely into three categories: those that depict specific, metonymic, instances of our encounters with an already pre-packaged experience of the New Zealand landscape, where we are spectators, contemplating the world from afar, but entangled and implicated in its simultaneous aestheticisation and ruination. The second set of pictures has been made in forest “islands” around the country, particularly te Waipounamu, the South Island. These remnants are places of refuge, historical sites representing the world before it was taken over by modernity, and counterpoints to both the urban milieu and the manicured, but weed infested, countryside. The third part consists of images of the artificial sublime, focusing on the mediated, constructed and already re-presented landscape in a world of images, a world where everything is digitally altered and enhanced, as if nature— always the model of beauty and complexity in art—is no longer sufficient. These photographs are a reaction to the commercial picturesque and the grotesque depictions of nature in our consumer society. They are specific instances of the here and now that attempt a small redress to the tsunami

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of generic images of both nature and its ruination that plague our culture at a time when both are equally useless.

2. Bridie Lonie, Boxed in Nice Background explores the ways that the idea of nature plays out in the regulated spaces of Aotearoa me te Waipounamu/New Zealand. Mark Bolland moves between allegory and documentation as he negotiates his subject matter, the way the background we used to call nature is reconstructed by our interpositions. As we move through the images we gain an almost claustrophobic sense of the detritus of human intervention in the green worlds of the bush and wilderness. Indeed Bolland opens with an entirely enclosed image, that of an empty indoor swimming pool. The pool’s architecture is curiously boat-like. The careful construction of what swimmers experience as an almost seamless marriage of water and light resembles instead an Ark in preparation. Bolland has shot this image through a window frame with proportions reminiscent of the Golden Mean, and the orthogonals of the floor weirdly suggest the measured precision of an early Renaissance fresco. This is reinforced by the splash of golden light, and the way the roof structure above resembles a range of snowy peaks. As its preface, the image sets up the work’s focus on the ways that what we see is always framed by where we stand. It also foregrounds the relationship between human pleasure and industrialised processes. Concrete has a heavy carbon footprint and with the waters rising we may need an Ark, but not this one. The series is structured as a travelogue, but we are never allowed to forget that this is a directed journey. The car’s logic takes us through the countryside, viewing points are provided. A vast industry tidies this up. We see the little irritants that deny the sense that the walker in the bush has no impact on it. We dare not ask what kinds of woods or preservatives have been used in the framings, path edgings and viewing points that prevent us from walking into the spaces of the Remnants. Just getting to the wild seems to be wrong, to imply fossil fuels. And when we get there we are never left alone; there are tourist weddings, devices that ensure that we recognize what a “good view” is, and glossy panels that instruct us. It seems that what we are looking at is running away from us as fast as we move toward it. Nor is the natural world easy to define. Disused Railway Tunnel in Manuka Gorge looks onto the invading sycamore forest that has replaced the indigenous vegetation, and is typical of railway sidings throughout Western Europe as well as this country, as if the industry brought its own vegetation of choice. But sycamores carry lanterns of blossom

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Fig. 4-1. Mark Bolland, Destination Wedding, Tekapo, 2015, colour digital photograph.

Fig. 4-2. Mark Bolland, Disused Railway Tunnel, Manuka Gorge, 2012, colour digital photograph.

that feed moths and by implication birds. Are they weeds? Is their presence “natural”? Whose call is it?

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Bolland’s ironic eye conveys the ways that the “natural” has become both literally and metaphorically boxed in. When something is overdetermined it is stuck, it cannot move, because too many factors both block it in and lead to, or determine it, and then prevent its escape. Humans tend to value nature as both distant and autonomous yet this capacity has also infuriated us, as every gardener knows. The human decision to edit the growth of the tree, to manage the paths, to position the planting, operates as much in the world that is characterised as the wild as it does in the garden. Bolland works between an ironic documentation and its transformation into allegory. The situation is ironic. In general, in an ironic statement one states the opposite of what one means, as when one damns with faint praise. In that sense, irony is intentional. On the other hand, the dramatic arts use irony to show the viewer what the protagonist doesn’t know: for instance, that the killer for whom Oedipus is searching is himself. Anthropogenic climate change is an instance of a situation that produces the opposite of what its machinery intended. And we are both knowing and unknowing participants, deliberate and inadvertent. Bolland’s litany of interventions documents a world that has been called the posthuman and the Anthropocene, because it is irreversibly mediated by the presence of the human. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coined the term Anthropocene in the year 2000 (with its millennial tendencies) for a new geological age in which human production of greenhouse gases has destabilized the equable climate of the Holocene era. The Anthropocene began, they argue, in 1784 with the first use of coal-fired manufacturing techniques. Later Crutzen added a second starting point that he called “The Great Acceleration” when, after World War II, industrialised production replaced primary produce as the foundation for the economic systems of the developed world. We who live in Aotearoa me te Waipounamu/New Zealand are particularly aware of the impact of industrialisation upon the landscape, because we can still see, or think we can see, the way it was before it was modified for industry. Indeed from the point of view of the arts New Zealand was quickly framed in literary history as a kind of control experiment for Europe’s industrialisation. In 1840 the writer Thomas Macaulay posited a stranger, fresh from what he imagined to be the wise paradise of New Zealand, coming to a dystopian future London covered in weeds and ruins. This allegory was a cliché by the time Samuel Butler brought Darwinian theory to bear on industrialisation in Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872), set in Aotearoa New Zealand, with its technophobic

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community who feared that machines, like humans, might reproduce, if not evolve.

Fig. 4-3. Mark Bolland, Wires Through Tree, Lower Hutt, 2010, colour digital photograph.

In 1988 the photographer Jeff Wall stated that “a tree standing selfconsciously alone in the city would, better than any other monument or form of propaganda, invoke the environmental tragedy which indicts our economy, our culture of cities, our social order.”5 Bolland cites this in a text that also argues that Wall’s depiction of the fragility of the natural environment “perfectly allegorises our relationship to nature: both appear harmonious and ‘natural’ but look long enough and this harmony becomes uncomfortable and may eventually be exposed as illusory.” 6 Nice Background highlights the details that undo the illusion, undercutting the self-determination that goes with the idea of the natural. Things have gone further in the thirty years since Wall wrote. For instance, Wires Through a Tree documents a tree whose crown has been cut out in order to let telephone wires through. It has been deprived of its crown and subordinated to the hum of the grid’s aerial trajectories, yet retained for the beautification of the neighbourhood and for its capacity to act as a lung. The street is a pleasant one, yet the aspiration for the standard of living and human comfort it suggests has led to climate change. The act of

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dividing this tree is a feeble gesture to the idea that the tree’s growth forms have an integrity that is “natural” and therefore worthy. This tree has been disabled and it is complaining. Photography is chronologically, and perhaps instrumentally, tied to industrialisation and, from its inception, documentation of the grandeurs of nature included an increasing genre of works mourning their destruction. More recently, photographers have deliberately used their medium’s dual role as conveyer and producer of politicised information to participate in environmental debate. The American group Centre for Land Use Interpretation, as their name suggests, regards documentary photography as an essential tool in the developing understanding of environmental change.7 Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky conveys the scale of industrial depredation in massive and beautifully produced images that record rubbish tips, polluted landscapes and the wrecks of ships left for dead on retreating seas. His grand images look at the end-points of human activity through the aesthetic lenses of the sublime, yet these dystopian images also inform us.8 Others show us the invisible. For example, the group HeHe in Nuage Vert, Ivry (2010) use a thermographic video camera that draws a flickering fluorescent ring around particulates emerging from a smokestack. 9 Because of its legacy of indexicality, even digital photographs suggest that the photographer was there, somewhere, in the real world. Despite challenges to the potential for veracity of any created image, photography retains the sense that evidence has been provided. Bolland records evidence that he is irritated and obsessed by. But he also plays with photography’s possibilities, moving between documentation, photomontage and collage. There is a flurry of rage in the final sequence, where a rhetorical gesture is needed and allegory returns with the translation of document into argument. In these photographs Bolland uses the machinery of the digital, overlaying images, modifying colour and form. In the Anthropocene human activity has mediated the activity of the whole biosphere, as it becomes at once change agent and an agent whose life is changed. Conveying the impact of this broader understanding, Bolland leaves the apparent objectivity of the set scene, the tableau, and presents the clashing space of a world in which what was distanced has become close, and what seemed autonomous has become dependent. The final slash of greenwash that replaces the sky above Green Screen’s typical landscape view brings us back to the mechanisms of tourist promotion. Simultaneously, Bolland reminds us of what painters working with the tropes of expressionism came to understand. The repetition of a once spontaneous gesture moves it from expression to rhetoric, and through repetition the once deeply felt

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gesture becomes inadequate and insulting. Yet in this image the trees, the mountain, remain as desirable as ever in the impossible, ironic way that we now live no.10 

Notes 1

The full series of photographs can be seen at . 2 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Penguin, 2014) 21 3 Baudrillard famously wrote that “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest [of America] is real.” Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1983) 25. 4 I am indebted to Kristin O’Sullivan Peren for this information and for many inspirational conversations on this and other related subjects. 5 Jeff Wall, “Into the Forest: Two Sketches for Studies of Rodney Graham’s Work” in Rodney Graham: Works 1976-88 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988) 9-37. 6 Mark Bolland, “Jeff Wall; the Wood and the Trees,” PA Magazine, 1, 2008. 7 See . 8 See . 9 See . 10 Timothy Morton’s account of the double bind that climate change offers humanity’s view of itself has informed this essay. See: Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

References Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1983). Bolland, Mark, “Jeff Wall: Patrick Faigenbaum” in Cristina Bechtler, (ed.), PA Magazine, 1, 2008. Graham, Rodney et al., Rodney Graham: Works 1976-88 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988). Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Penguin, 2014). Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

CHAPTER FIVE SCIENTIFIC REIFICATION DAVID GREEN

Fig. 5-1. Artist’s documentation of Embodied Earth, an installation shown as part of the Art and Light Exhibition held in the H.D. Skinner Annex, Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, August 2015.

Introduction In the Embodied Earth installation the viewer sensorially experiences lightning strikes in synchronicity with actual terrestrial lightning events occurring over a large swathe of the Earth’s surface via a live data stream. Viewers face a large projection screen on which they can see themselves in silhouette. My design intends the viewer to don a haptic jacket and move freely, as a live data stream, translated into animated lightning flashes, tracks the viewer’s screen position, appearing to strike the

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wearer’s upper body. In association with the visual cue, the viewer would feel a strong vibration at the point of apparent lightning contact, concurrent with a synchronized subwoofer signal that pulsates their body with a short burst of low-frequency sound.

Embodied Cognition The idea behind the installation emerged from a series of lectures and discussions about neuro-evolution and neuro-ethics led by Associate Professor Mike Paulin (Department of Zoology, University of Otago) and Professor Grant Gillett (Division of Health Sciences, University of Otago) that began in February 2013. These talks often referenced the concept of “embodied cognition.” According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Many features of cognition are embodied in that they are deeply dependent upon characteristics of the physical body of an agent, such that the agent’s beyond-the-brain body plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in that agent’s cognitive processing.”1 During the Cambrian Period—about 541 million years ago—neural networks exploded onto the Earthly scene and suddenly, from a small variety of relatively neuron-free biota, there emerged the brain-mediated world of the hunter and the hunted. From their genesis our neural networks evolved synergistically and in concert with the whole of our physical apparatus, fully in tune with specific physical environments. The result is that our ways of knowing are fully interwoven into our whole bodies; our whole bodies are fully interwoven into the whole material world. Embodied neural networks reconfirm our boundaries of self and maintain bodily homeostasis through multiple sensory inputs, analysis and response strategies: oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, blood pressure, heart rate, metabolic rate, salt balance, immunity, pupil diameter, thermoregulation, proprioception, hunger, thirst, sleep, smell, taste, feeling, hearing, sight … Beyond these complex functions, experiments revealing the existence of other phenomena—such as blindsight—indicate that our neural networks also collect volumes of subliminal information at any given moment. Through diverse receptors, we experience far more of the world around us than is readily apparent to the conscious processes of our brain—in more parts of the electromagnetic spectrum than is simply accounted for by audible sound or visible light. This expanded net informs intuitive feelings that affect our responses to a given situation and help determine which way we will jump at a critical moment. In this way, we call upon an extended array of neural resources to preserve ourselves, as

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generations before us have done, under unpredictable and dynamic Earthly conditions. I am interested in exploring more fully embodied approaches to reading and intuiting data, making use of mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors and chemoreceptors. If one can feel, taste, and/or smell complex datasets, perhaps a more integrated and invested response would emerge from the readings taken. These sensory tools and their complex neural pathways enabled generation upon generation of our human forebears to survive long enough to reproduce, despite relentless environmental predicaments. Like all biomechanical systems, they demand an energy budget to operate and maintain; as they have not been discarded in the process of evolution we, as terrestrial creatures, underutilise these assets at our own risk. The installation Embodied Earth is intended as a small step towards the development of such an expanded reading. While scientific visualisation and sonification are well-established ways of making complex datasets accessible, a new rubric seems necessary to describe this concept. The word “reify” means to embody, to make palpable something which we otherwise cannot sense. It is a term called upon to perform a number of tasks within diverse disciplines. Notably, “reification” has been used in Marxist theory to denote modernist economies that objectify, quantify and concretise social, economic, political and material relationships. I would like here to appropriate and reposition the “thingification” word (in German: Verdinglichung), when used in association with the term “scientific,” to mean a technologically mediated affordance created from a complex dataset. Made “sense-able” in at least three ways (eye, ears, plus), it would bring our more intimate experiences of proximal stimuli (feel, taste, smell, movement and propriosense) into cognitive play with our presently over-mediated and generally more distal stimuli reception (vision/hearing), in order for us to better intuit dynamic and complex systems. This is the meaning I intend for the descriptor “scientific reification.” In “Scientific Misprision,”2 I put forward the argument that when art engages with science the outcome should transcend a straight illustration of a scientific concept (the task of science communication), but instead offer a creative repositioning of the ideas presented. Rather than reiterating an accepted paradigm, the artist offers the possibility of a new thinking tool. I am interested in encouraging the development and practical application of the “scientific reification” of a number of correlated datasets, working in conjunction with scientific visualisation and sonification, to facilitate an intuitive, more fully embodied engagement with the Earth that we increasingly deconstruct and reconfigure.3 Perhaps

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Fig. 5-2. Artist’s documentation of Embodied Earth, an installation shown as part of the Art and Light Exhibition held in the HD Skinner Annex, Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, August 2015.

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such mediations will help cultivate the cognitive development of a new generation of systems practitioners who might learn to operate more delicately and responsively in a space between positivism and intuition.

A Flash Of Lightning Writing in 2014 in the online journal LiveScience,4 Becky Oskin reported that radio waves, created by lightning strikes over large regions of the Earth (as distant from New Zealand as Alaska), travel along Earth’s magnetic fields and have been found to pass through Dunedin, New Zealand, as the magnetosphere re-enters the planet. In Dunedin, the strikes are recorded within a VLF (Very Low Frequency) signal in real time by Craig Rodger’s team at the Physics Department, University of Otago, and shared with an international research consortium, the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN). Lightning is a spectacular dynamic that all of life on Earth has evolved around, if not through. It is an elemental force that is still not entirely understood, particularly in its close association with volcanic eruptions. In an example of remarkable mid-twentieth-century thinking, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey hypothesised that lightning strikes, mixed with the basic chemistry of a young Earth, may have kick-started life on our planet.5 Their famous experiment attempted to create a laboratory model of the basic conditions of Earth’s early atmosphere by heating and electrocuting water, hydrogen, ammonia and methane over a number of days. An updated version of their experiment, reconfigured by their former students to include additional gases expected from volcanic eruptions, resulted in the spontaneous creation of 22 different amino acids, 20 of which form basic components of complex proteins found in all living things. I wanted to build an artwork that would feature an embodied experience using a live-streamed realtime dataset. With its strong local connections, the WWLLN became the prompt.

Embodied Earth What if we could extend our nerve endings and neural processes to include the whole Earth? What if our experience of the Earth could span geological time? If we experienced our planet as an extension of our body, might we treat it differently? Craig Rodger’s lightning datastream was the first essential ingredient of this project. I contacted him and James Brundell through Dr Ruth Napper (Department of Anatomy, University of Otago) who, along with Peter Stupples (Art History and Theory, Dunedin

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School of Art), was responsible for organising the Art and Light Exhibition in 2015. Following our discussion, Steven Mills, of the Computer Science Department, University of Otago, and I talked over the basic viewer/haptics/screen interaction I was hoping to achieve. Steven immediately identified the Kinect sensor as the appropriate mapping device for the viewer’s position, and began to write software to work in conjunction with the VLF signal and the sensor. I wanted viewers to experience global lightning strikes in real time and, in a larger sense, to intuitively identify with the Earth, if only for a moment. For this purpose I wanted them to see a projected image of each VLF-derived strike hitting their arms and upper torso while at the same time experiencing a specific haptic sensation at the place of visual impact. I briefly explored the idea of using static electricity, but it proved to be too complicated and, for some viewers, potentially unsafe. I then considered Arduino-driven cell phone vibrators, which I had seen Mike Paulin use in conjunction with his bristlebot project.6 At this point in its development, the proximal sensory aspect of the project hinged on the controller-driven haptic interface. I was eventually directed to Peter Brook, who teaches embedded systems at Otago Polytechnic. He was interested in the project, but wasn’t sure about completing a prototype within the time frame given. I continued to explore and consider other opportunities for engaging the viewer’s mechanoreceptors, deciding that the simplest backup would be a subwoofer linked to the VLF feed. At a minimum, this would safely and effectively pulsate the viewer’s body in sync with the real-time lightning animation, creating a rudimentary haptic interface. Ben Watson, a second-year student at the Dunedin School of Art, in conjunction with Steve Mills, worked through a number of technical issues in order to identify a workable signal for the subwoofer. A commercial audiovisual company, Strawberry Sound of Dunedin, generously allowed Ben to experiment at their workshop, and provided us with an amplifier and subwoofer for the duration of the exhibition. At the time of publication, the haptic jacket has yet to be brought into sync with the streaming data that drives the visuals. This aspect of “proof of concept” has yet to be completed. However, the subwoofer pulsation, sound and body-tracked lightning strike visuals all operate in sync and work convincingly in themselves. The haptic jacket prototype tests, working in near-sync, were successful enough to make us feel confident that, once connectivity to the streaming data is achieved, this deeper experiential engagement in real time will only gain resonance.

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Fig. 5-3. The Fuller Projection Map is a trademarked design of the Buckminster Fuller Institute. ©1938, 1967 & 1992. All rights reserved, reproduced with permission, www.bfi.org.

Back To The Future Like a tsunami, the clearest view of a new technology or medium seems to occur as it looms up on the horizon and just before it hits. Once the new medium truly engulfs a culture and settles into more predictable currents, production generally falls into a series of locked and repetitive steps. (This is clearly illustrated in the early history of the cinema.) Neglected opportunities may be explored later, as one medium falls out of relevance and all heads turn in unison to the next. (For a recent example, note the explosion of the complex long-form narrative on television coinciding with the rise of the Internet.) Similarly, new media can rejuvenate old media—for example, radio has become a teaser and a navigational tool for directing viewers to deeper explorations on the Internet. This both illustrates and adds resonance to McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”7 Processes of media integration and succession accelerated dramatically from the mid-1990s. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, computers were steadily completing the transition from human to machine, from science fiction fantasy to the quotidian. At the same time, the seismic wave of broadcast television was still breaking over the global social infrastructure. In the midst of these technological revolutions, “systems art” emerged within the conceptual art movements that had started in the early 1960s. In his seminal book Beyond Modern Sculpture,8 Jack Burnham suggests that artistic expression is limited only by the technology of a particular period

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and its conceptual paradigms. In the financial and industrial boom that followed the Second World War, new frameworks of thinking and new media technologies suddenly made it possible for artists to experiment with different sorts of materiality to produce and present artworks in novel ways. Beginning with Rachel Carson,9 who instigated the broader environmental discussion in 1962 with her book Silent Spring, this postwar, pre-home-computer period produced a number of prescient and cautionary voices, each of whom sought to find new ways of helping humans process and respond to post-modernity’s looming challenges. Either obliquely or directly, these prophetic voices described fully embodied technological mediations developed in order to respond dynamically to larger environmental changes. One such voice was R. Buckminster Fuller. Polymath, environmentalist and thinker, he was responsible for a number of dynamic and innovative ideas, perhaps most famously the geodesic dome. He also began to popularise the “Spaceship Earth” concept from the mid-1960s.10 The “Dymaxion” map (see Fig. 2), designed in 1938, is an early example of one of his global thinking tools used in association with his “World Game” concept.11 The map creates one continuous path out of the Earth’s landmasses and cleverly folds into a 20-faced polyhedron. According to Fuller: Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.12

From the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller feverishly sought out media pulpits to augur imminent disaster as the price of ignoring humanity’s responsibility to care for the Earth. He reframed our planet as a fragile and unique life-affording bubble, making its way alone in an indifferent universe. Arts and media writers such as György Kepes, Jack Burnham and Marshall McLuhan were simultaneously disseminating concepts of ecological (and political) salvation through technological remediation. Responding to these ideas were interdisciplinary arts/technology collectives including Pulsa, USCO and the Ant Farm.13 Unfortunately, Fuller’s inability to pause between thoughts seriously impeded his message from being disseminated to the masses during the early years of television. He gained little television airtime from the major networks. On

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the other hand, Marshall McLuhan received a good deal of network airtime in the 1960s and early 1970s. He understood more about the new medium of television than his academic colleagues or its practitioners. Although constantly pressed by interviewers, he diligently refused to make any value judgments whatsoever. More importantly, he stopped talking to accommodate commercial breaks. As he put it: Our new electric technology that extends our senses and nerves in a global embrace has large implications for the future of language. Electric technology does not need words any more than the digital computer needs numbers. Electricity points the way to an extension of the process of consciousness itself, on a world scale, and without any verbalization whatsoever.14

Jack Burnham believed that systems art would surpass the raw materiality of objective sculpture, ushering in a new epoch, particularly when applied in combination with the limitless possibilities afforded by the emergent computer: The downfall of the sculpted object will represent one of many climactic symbols for our civilization—among them a realization that the old formshaping approaches are no longer sufficient. By rendering the invisible visible through systems consciousness, we are beginning to accept responsibility for the well-being and continued existence of life upon the Earth.15

At the same time, artists and art collectives were taking to the streets and back roads. Pulsa—an artists’ collective made up of engineering, music and art students at Yale University—described, and tried to create, installations built on the explicit idea of an extended sensorium.16 Remarkably, in concert with the media theorists, they seemed to perceive clearly a wide-reaching affordance nested within nascent computer technology. Unfortunately, these contemporaneous visionaries rarely seemed to get hold of the tools they needed to accomplish what they could so clearly envision. In 1968, Pulsa made an untitled work “propositionising”17 an autonomic system for balancing the health of a city (in this case Boston). They intended to do this by gathering data from its entropic boundaries and bringing them back to its more responsive centre. They would then display this data abstractly through patterns of light and sound in order to maintain a sort of urban “environmental homeostasis.” (This was the particular battle cry of artist György Kepes, former student of Moholy-Nagy and founder of the Centre for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, who

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vociferously advocated sustainability through technologically attuned artwork). Pulsa’s design for accomplishing their aims for the city was part postmodern and part magical thinking. It involved miles of electrical wire joined to complex homemade circuitry firing a data-addled array of underwater strobe lights in conjunction with a matrix of land-based speakers. Although the urban planning problem they identified was real, judging from surviving documentation the installation was highly stimulating if impossible to read. Although their “system” concept offered a vatic view of the theoretical space unfolding before them, they were at least half a century ahead of a workable technology. The recurrent problem with systems art, particularly at the time, was that it often didn’t quite function as propositionised—often to the confusion and dismay of its patrons, promoters and the viewing public. At the same time as the Art and Light Exhibition was being shown in Dunedin, London’s Tate Britain invited four visitors at a time to experience a fully embodied art installation entitled Tate Sensorium, “an immersive display featuring four paintings from the Tate collection. You can experience sounds, smells, tastes and physical forms inspired by the artworks, and record and review your physiological responses through sophisticated measurement devices.”18 For this installation, Tom Pursey, Tim Partridge and Peter Law, co-founders of the creative agency Flying Object, chose four works by painters Francis Bacon, David Bomberg, John Latham and Richard Hamilton to explore sensually with viewers by designing a variety of embodied experiences, including the use of a new form of haptic technology that involve interacting with ultrasonic interference patterns in mid-air.19 Environmental and ecoart practitioners are extending the discourses of anthropocentrism and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in cooperation with the Max Planck Gesellschaft, Deutsches Museum, the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies sponsored two years of interdisciplinary “situations for engagement” called the Anthropocene Project,20 which was based in Berlin. Ideas of “virtual” second nature and island analogue logistics emerged notably as themes. Embodied Earth engages with a discourse closely related to other contemporary artworks and practices, such as the work of Queenslandbased new media artist Keith Armstrong.21 Armstrong is very attentive to embodiment issues, using haptic feedback and proprioception to devise interactive works that operate with similar environmental ends in mind, but using quite different means. He focuses on the remediation and repair

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of our lost social and environmental fabric through artworks and interventions that try to identify and reinvigorate former connections. I agree with Armstrong’s view that identifying and reinforcing relevant contemporary practices offers the best way to reinstate traditional modes of connectivity. However, I am also inclined to agree with McLuhan in the sense that our technologically enhanced, ever-extending nervous system promotes an ongoing generational reconfiguring of young neural networks through engagement with new media during normal periods of brain development (“firing and wiring”). This process is described by Mark B.N. Hansen as “human technogenesis.”22 The dynamic plasticity of our brains moves us ever onward. New connective modalities are required. While I agree with Armstrong that reawakening our fully embodied faculties of engagement and connectedness is critical, I believe that the only direction for our subspecies is forward. Looking back, it is clear that the glue of traditional tribal connectedness relies too heavily on a tight control of information, a certain maintenance of ignorance, and the culture of bullying that this dichotomy enables. Looking further back, our highly successful primeval environmental strategy of moving on to the next pristine territory—after having stripped the former one bare—in large part explains why we find ourselves in our current position. We now know far more about our Earthly predicament than ever before. Returning to Buckminster Fuller: the infinite expands elsewhere; we inhabit a small closed loop.

Mind Trap In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes how each new technologically mediated affordance acts as an extension of the human sensory apparatus —for example, radio reception extends the ear, while television reception extends both ear and eye. In so doing, he stressed the idea that the specific type of messaging each new medium enables dramatically alters our neural balance and loading—the shape of human perception. As a direct result, our experience of the world, as beings in the world, changes dramatically, particularly within the generation whose developing brains are “firing and wiring” to newly mediated data streams. However, as Buckminster Fuller reminds us, human beings have always experienced the world through a multiplicity of senses—not just through sight and sound. As human beings, our evolutionary success is in large part due to the fact that we have such highly adaptive neural networks. But this can also be a vulnerability; a very simple idea can utterly transform us.

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Over the last 350 years of European colonisation, the “liberated” world has been systematically influenced by what is now commonly regarded as the Cartesian fallacy of mind–body dualism. Residual evidence of this invasive concept remains embedded in the sphere of Western influence, despite centuries of robust philosophical criticism and decades of glaring empirical evidence to the contrary. By broadly and loosely adopting this particular thinking tool we, as a subspecies, have disembodied our “selves” and have thereby undermined our own platform for living. Operating within its conventions, we obsessively accumulate mountains of material “wealth” through massive global interventions, all the while maintaining a magical belief in the mind’s transcendent non-materiality: a highly toxic combination. By detaching our “selves” from the rules that govern the material world, we lose the opportunity to make an integrated response to proximal and distal evidence of incremental ecological disaster. According to Antonio Damasio, “the mind exists in and for an integrated organism; our minds would not be the way they are if it were not for the interplay of body and brain during evolution, during individual development, and at the current moment. The mind had to be first about the body, or it could not have been.”23 Neuroscience opposes the Cartesian mind–body division. As Damasio points out, our neural networks evolve in direct conjunction with more apparent biomechanical (and tool-enabling) developments, alongside, and in response to, other agents within the changing boundaries of specific biomes. Up until now our embodied neural networks, by necessity, have reaffirmed tight boundaries of self. Our subspecies’ survival has also relied on the fact that we experience far more of the world than will ever meet our consciousness. This is expressed in unconscious (“black box”) processes that can directly determine how we respond to complex and dynamic situations. In this way we have managed to preserve our subspecies, both individually and as collaborative groups, on a day-to-day basis. It is worth noting that in Plato’s allegory of the cave, people are chained to the floor, their experiencing bodies withheld from the world they witness only as a projection of flickering shadow and light. If we accept McLuhan’s caveats about the mediated extensions of man, we will understand that our mediated experience of the world can also be distorted into a dangerous sort of tunnel vision. In 1968, Jack Burnham wrote, “Scientists and technicians are not converted into ‘artists,’ rather the artist becomes a symptom of the schism between art and technics. Progressively the need to make ultrasensitive judgements as to the uses of technology and scientific information becomes ‘art’ in the most literal sense.”24

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Having irrevocably transformed the planet, it is probable that surviving our success will require that we dramatically retool our neural networks. Fifty years of further development in computer processing, sensory/haptic technologies and the promise of smart fabrics have certainly brought the systems concepts promoted by Fuller, McLuhan, Kepes and Burnham more within reach than they have ever been before. Ongoing collaborative interdisciplinary projects by artists and scientists may help us devise the fully embodied, technologically mediated extensions necessary to cultivate and enable more environmentally relevant neural configurations in the next generation of data-readers and problem-solvers. We will require a new generation of enabled decision-makers in order to realise Kepes’ dream of environmental homeostasis, if such a thing is still possible.

Notes 1. Robert A. Wilson and Lucia Foglia, “Embodied Cognition,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N Zalta, Fall 2011 ed., (accessed 8 September 2015). 2. David Green, “Scientific Misprision,” Scope: Contemporary Research Topics, Art & Design 9 (November 2014), (accessed 15 September 2015). 3. H-DV. Boehm and F. Siegert, “Ecological Impact of the One Million Hectare Rice Project in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, Using Remote Sensing and GIS,” paper presented at the 22nd Asian Conference on Remote Sensing, 5-9 November 2001, Singapore,

(accessed 15 September 2015). 4. Becky Oskin, “‘Whistling’ Volcanic Lightning Heard Halfway around the World,” LiveScience, 24 July 2014, (accessed 8 Sept 2015). 5. Phil Berardelli, “Did Volcanos Spark Life on Earth?”

(accessed 21 October 2015). 6. Bristlebots are inexpensively produced miniature robots designed to move via controlled bristle vibration. “Bristelbotics Ltd aims to increase the number of schools offering robotics programmes while supporting and enhancing those that already do. We offer inexpensive robotics options and use open source software, encouraging modification of our materials and programmes and sharing between students and schools,” (accessed 11 November 2015). 7. M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 8. 8. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Technology and

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Science on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: Braziller, 1968). 9. Rachel Carson (1907-64), a marine biologist turned environmentalist, responded courageously to first-hand evidence of the long-term and far-reaching destructive effects of the large-scale use of synthetic chemical pesticides in the United States following the Second World War. Her book Silent Spring led directly to a national ban on DDT and other pesticides, despite strenuous opposition from the chemical industry. 10. Richard Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, ILL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). 11. The Fuller Projection Map (Dymaxion) was devised by R. Buckminster Fuller as a thinking tool for use in solving global humanitarian and environmental crises. See (accessed 11 November 2015). It is also referred to as the “great logistics game” or “world peace game,” Fuller proposed it as an inclusive and egalitarian platform for creating and exploring systems designed to resolve emergent world problems in a holistic way. 12. Robert Kahn and Peter Wagschal (eds), R. Buckminster Fuller on Education, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979) 130. 13. Yates McKee, “The Public Sensoriums of Pulsa: Cybernetic Abstraction and the Biopolitics of Urban Survival,” Art Journal, 67:3 (Fall 2008) 46-67. 14. McLuhan: 1966, 80. 15. Burnham: 1968, 370. 16. “Sensorium: The totality of those parts of the brain that receive, process and interpret sensory stimuli. The sensorium is the supposed seat of sensation, the place to which impressions from the external world are conveyed and perceived. The sensorium also refers to the entire sensory apparatus of the body,” (accessed 8 September 2015). 17. “[John Hughlings Jackson] argues that higher mental functions make use of ‘propositionising’ to articulate complex actions in the social and interpersonal sphere where such actions are attuned to a ‘third thing’—the focus of shared attention—in triadic relations where communication occurs about what is being dealt with and how to respond.” G. Gillett and E. Franz, “Evolutionary Neurology, Responsive Equilibrium, and the Moral Brain,” Consciousness and Cognition, 22 October 2014, 1053-8100. (See also R. Saxe, “Uniquely Human Social Cognition,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 16: 2006, 235-9). Coined in the late nineteenth century, this term is useful in describing the intentionality behind contemporary art-making. 18. IK Prize 2015: Tate Sensorium, (accessed 15 September 2015). 19. Ibid. 20.See (accessed 8 September 2015). 21. Keith M. Armstrong, “‘Grounded Media:’ Expanding the Scope of Ecological Art Practices within New Media Arts Culture,” in Andrew Hutchinson (ed.), Proceedings PerthDAC 2007: The 7th International Digital Arts and Culture

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Conference: ‘Future of Digital Media Culture’ (Perth: Curtin University of Technology, 2007) 21-31,

(accessed 15 September 2015). 22. Mark B.N. Hansen, “Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society, 23:2-3 (2006), 297-306. 23. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994), xvi. 24. Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum, 7:1 (September 1968), 30-35.

References Armstrong, Keith M., “‘Grounded Media:’ Expanding the Scope of Ecological Art Practices within New Media Arts Culture,” in Andrew Hutchinson (ed.), Proceedings PerthDAC 2007: The 7th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference: ‘Future of Digital Media Culture’ (Perth: Curtin University of Technology, 2007) Berardelli, Phil, “Did Volcanos Spark Life on Earth?” Boehm, H-DV, and F. Siegert, “Ecological Impact of the One Million Hectare Rice Project in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, Using Remote Sensing and GIS,” paper presented at the 22nd Asian Conference on Remote Sensing, 5-9 November 2001, Singapore,

Buckminster Fuller, Richard, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale, ILL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). Burnham, Jack, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Technology and Science on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: Braziller, 1968). —. “Systems Esthetics,” Artforum, 7:1 (September 1968). Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994). Gillett, G. and E. Franz, “Evolutionary Neurology, Responsive Equilibrium, and the Moral Brain,” Consciousness and Cognition, 22 October 2014, 1053-8100. Green, David, “Scientific Misprision,” Scope: Contemporary Research Topics, Art & Design 9 (November 2014), . Hansen, Mark B.N. , “Media Theory,” Theory, Culture & Society, 23:2-3 (2006) Kahn, Robert and Peter Wagschal (eds), R. Buckminster Fuller on

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Education, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979) McLuhan, M., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). Oskin, Becky, “‘Whistling’ Volcanic Lightning Heard Halfway around the World,” LiveScience, 24 July 2014, . Saxe, R., “Uniquely Human Social Cognition,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 16: 2006 Wilson, Robert A. and Lucia Foglia, “Embodied Cognition,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N Zalta, Fall 2011 ed., .

CHAPTER SIX IMMANENCE AND ITS DISTORTIONS: METAPHYSICS OF AN ART/SCIENCE COLLABORATION ASHLEY M. HOLMES

the culminating fact of conscious, rational life refuses to conceive itself as a transient enjoyment, transiently useful. —Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality1

Perfect Democratic Storm Let me put to you a disturbing proposition: at this moment in history a future world without human civilization is more readily imagined than a world where humans have achieved the enormous task of refashioning politics, economics and institutions such that the anthropic demands on Earth’s resources are balanced with the planet’s capability to renew! As author Brian G. Henning says, the commonplace conception of “sustainability” is unlikely to be sufficient for the task of bringing about the radical societal changes required to avert disaster because it is anthropocentric (in that it limits all value to humans), uncritically technophilic (in that it reduces ethics to a form of resource management), and empty of any particular moral content.2

In a pragmatic attempt to envision a global society capable of reigning in its voracious appetite for resources and the “excretory activity that is ecologically out of bounds,” Bruce Jennings, editor of the journal Minding Nature, proposes that the continuing viability of the “proud and hard-won” liberal tradition “is in serious question.” He advises that we need a new social contract for a “degrowth society” and that this is likely to require, if not the abandonment of capitalism, then at least some transformation of it.

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Three varieties of “ecological governance” are envisaged by Jennings as alternative possibilities: ecological authoritarianism, ecological discursive democracy, ecological constitutionalism. Jennings admits that the challenges will be formidable and that, “while we do not know what form the transition to a new structure of governance will take, that transition will be necessary and inevitable.”3 There may be phases of transition where different types of government are implemented or even combinations implemented simultaneously in separate institutions. The key tenets will be movements toward: x a new form of identity—the ecological self rather than the extractive self, individuality rather than individualism; x a new form of freedom—relational liberty rather than possessive negative liberty; x a new form of governance—deliberation as distinct from bargaining; x a new form of reason—dialogic judgment as distinct from monologic assessment of interests; x a new form of living—practicing trusteeship instead of practicing consumerism.4 Some of us might share Jennings’s alarm at the apparent incapacity of contemporary democratic governments to act (or to facilitate the ability of citizens to effectively act individually or collectively) to remedy society’s excesses. Jennings urges action because he believes that if the contemporary liberal democratic scenario is considered “normal” political economics then we have a perfect democratic storm: humanity is exceeding the safe operating margins of planetary systems at precisely the historical moment when the political economy of the world makes it least likely that democratic governance, especially discursive democratic governance, will be able to respond.5

This points to the need for a philosophy, or a moral code that, as Henning puts it in Riders in the Storm, instills the “fundamental interdependence and interconnection with everyone and everything in the cosmos.”6

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Affect and Effect I am not a political economist. I am an academic and a practicing artist. Reading and thinking about what I’m reading backgrounds and informs the art I make, and vice versa. As media theorist Brian Massumi so ably puts it: Thinking art is not about imposing a general overlay on its practice. The last thing it should be about is forcing art to fit into another discipline’s categories, and holding it to them. It’s about putting art and philosophy, theory and practice, on the same creative plane, in the same ripple pool. Thinking-feeling art philosophically can intensify art’s speculative edge. It’s totally unnecessary to put theory and practice at odds with each other.7

For some years now I have been intellectually and artistically engaging with concepts from the texts of English mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) who published during the early to mid-20th century. His output was prolific. Possibly the most celebrated of his publications is based on a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh during 1927 and 1928 called, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. These lectures were delivered after his reputation as a philosopher had gained him a position as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University in 1924. The significance of Whitehead’s thought has been undergoing somewhat of a revival largely because of his metaphysical account of universal processes, which he called the philosophy of organism. I suggest that Whitehead meant “organism” as an explanatory mechanism for universal inter-relationships. Whitehead’s writing style is dense. His approach to working through explanations in his texts is characterized by unique adaptions of terminology. His method involves iteratively emergent development and correction of concepts throughout more than a dozen volumes. To properly explain Whitehead’s process philosophy in a short article like this, to those who may be coming at him afresh, is impossible—but I will try to convey here some principle tenets relevant to my task. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says: Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the diverse intuitions found in human experience (such as religious, scientific, and aesthetic) into a coherent holistic scheme.8

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Despite the fact that the term process philosophy was coined in 1949 and that Whitehead himself never used it9 this description does appropriately summarise Whitehead’s broadly interdisciplinary achievement. On this basis, other philosophers discussed in this article are also considered to be process philosophers: Henri Bergson and, to a certain degree, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Whitehead was contemporaneous with Einstein and knew of his work. He proposed an alternative concept of time and relativity claimed to be compatible with “relativistic quantum field theory,” even though details of the latter were published after his retirement.10 Whitehead’s theory development was also contemporaneous with “much of the development of the ‘Copenhagen’ quantum formalism.” Indeed, “the decoherence-based interpretations of quantum mechanics…are seen as fundamental physical exemplification of…Whitehead’s cosmological scheme” such that physicist Michael Epperson is able to detail “specific phase-by-phase, and concept by concept correlation” of the two schemas.11 Perhaps this compatibility with post-mechanistic physics is one reason why, even though Whitehead’s work involves a high degree of metaphysical speculation, it is widely respected by contemporary philosophers and has been championed by scientists such as Epperson.12 In what I am about to convey regarding Whitehead’s ideas, one may see similarities with some oriental philosophy, but his reasoning was wholly within the Western tradition of philosophical and scientific ideas. He acknowledges two important conceptual difficulties for Western thinking and tries to overcome them. He calls one, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This concerns the limits of models and metaphors. Drawing conclusions from a limited set of scientific or philosophical parameters to suit a certain ideological model without necessarily considering extensive and heterogeneous relationality is a common mistake. Such reification becomes problematic if the abstraction or idea is treated as if it is the real situation. The other is known by Whitehead and others as the bifurcation of nature. A simply understood aspect of this false dichotomy is that sciences and humanities tend to understand the world in different ways, about which he says, “one is the conjecture and one is the dream.”13 There are many more divisions involved in Whitehead’s critique of delusions such as: mind vs matter; public vs private; process vs substance; perception vs emotion; cause vs purpose; fact vs value; nature vs reason. In a claim that establishes his empirical and relational bases Whitehead says his “sole task is to exhibit in one system the characters and interrelations of all that is observed.”14 In part his solution is to find sensation, awareness and knowledge in processes that are both transcendent and

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immanent, although ultimately immanent.15 My atheism leads me to agree with Keith Robinson’s interpretation: Whitehead means that “Nothing is beyond immanence, not even God.”16 The inherent creativity of the cosmos is explained using Whitehead’s process theory. In fact, in espousing the details, he coined the term creativity!17 He encourages us to experience the ordinary, everyday, cosmic process that is going on right now in each of us and all around us by considering that all things (actual entities) should also be thought of as events (actual occasions). Throughout the spatial universe entities are continually involved as events, the outcome of which becomes data for future events. Time is a result of the purpose renewed in the intentional actualisation (concrescence) of each event. Understanding this idea relies very much on accepting that entities/occasions are connected in an affective sense. Each communicates accumulated antecedent (prior) experience in the moment that its own experience peaks and then becomes part of the ongoing cycle of events. As Whitehead says, actual occasions are the “final real things of which the world is made up”—they are “drops of experience, complex and interdependent.”18 Following this principle, creativity does not appear suddenly at a certain level of complexity. “Novelty, self-realisation and a flicker of freedom are present all the way down, even in a nearly negligible form below the threshold of relevance.”19 In other words, there are levels of depth of awareness for all associations of kinds of matter. Celebrated Whiteheadians, Charles Birch and John B. Cobb explain how process relational philosophy (event thinking) departs from classical substance thinking and Newtonian mechanical science—world views that explain existence in terms of forms and categories. They say event thinking recognises the existence of relatively enduring “substantial objects” and undertakes “to explain them in terms of patterns of interconnectedness amongst events.”20 As a digital media artist, the idea that things are also events, and that all participants in an occasion bring experience and interact in the emergent moments in a manner that each can “experience” interests me. This has ramifications for how we think about affect (and effect) through works of art, especially time-based works. I am also particularly inspired by Whitehead’s analysis of a human’s experience compared to that of a stone: Our habitual experience is a complex of failure and success in the enterprise of interpretation: if we desire a record of uninterrupted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography.21

This captures the idea that knowledge enveloped in the events of the universe exists in many forms. For example, Fig.1 shows a still from a

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movie of stones apparently interacting with the gestural technology of a tablet screen. Each event is a local and, coincidentally, an epochal phenomenon with evidence recorded in the material database of time. By entwining existence and knowledge this philosophy makes nonsense of the solipsistic question as to whether the world exists outside of thought. It also addresses another question: what happens to human knowledge once we are extinct as a species, especially since so much knowledge is stored digitally (and is arguably immaterial)? There is a frank and unflattering response: who will care? And there is a utopian response, which renders that latter question not only rhetorical but also redundant: Mark Hansen’s reading of Whitehead in Feed Forward theorises the “complex entanglement of humans within networks of media technologies that operate predominantly, if not almost entirely, outside the scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention, sense perception, etc.)”22 Justified through a subversion of common readings of Whitehead’s material with respect to perishing or not of the subject in concrescence— too complex and suffuse to review here—Hansen claims his argument “puts the very meaning of the human into question.”23

Fig. 6-1. Ashley M. Holmes, still frame capture from Indeterminate Gestures of Stones, digital movie, 0:33, 2013.24

The technical media, that in the Anthropocene ubiquitously sense us and our environment, only make sensible data appear to us “because they themselves are already on the side of and are already immanent to sensibility.”25 In other words, the technological sensorium that we have

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developed not only collects data but interpolates it in ways that are more coherent to the universe at large than to us because: 1. the mode of operation is beyond the “speed” of human perception and 2. the raw data concerns aspects of reality that are not available to “historically privileged modes of perception and conscious access!”26 For me, one of the most profound implications of accepting Hansen’s arguments is that all technologies and the artefacts produced thereby, and especially including those of the post-phenomenological era of data accumulation, are part of the superjectual continuum—all data is universal knowledge. Data which is actualised by technology has cosmic potential!

Whitehead and Ethical Ecology Whitehead’s concept of the cosmos, and the way such thinking enables the de-centering of human activity by placing all events on the same plane, has influenced significant authors contributing to ethical ecology. For example, Carol Merchant, in her 1992 book, Radical Ecology writes: Process thought is consistent with an ecological attitude in two senses: (1) its proponents recognize the interconnections among things, specifically between organisms and their total environments, and (2) it implies respect or even reverence for, and perhaps a feeling of kinship with, the other creatures.27

In a recent article Brian Henning investigates the impact of Whitehead on significant environmental ethics writers dating back to the late 1940s.28 He points to the 1976 thesis of animal rights activist Susan Armstrong-Buck, The Rights of Nonhuman Beings: A Whiteheadian Study, as evidence. In a 1986 article Armstrong-Buck picks up on the same aspect of Whitehead that I have emphasised above with respect to sensation and experience. She highlights: “every actual occasion experiences its self-creation, whether it is part of a living or of a non-living entity.” She says that Whitehead’s use of experience in this broad sense allows him to assert that every thing has intrinsic value. Intrinsic value resides in the fact that all actual occasions enjoy their own self-creation, no one quality or property is arbitrarily singled out to provide intrinsic value, such as rationality, self-consciousness, sentience and so forth.29

Barbara Muraca traces how other analysts have interpreted Whitehead’s notions of value. She agrees that although Whitehead never touches on the

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topic of ecology as such his “metaphysic can provide a coherent and adequate theoretical support for a hard-core ecological worldview” that is challenging in scientific, ethical and spiritual aspects.30 Where Whitehead applies the term value he does not necessarily denote human-centered values. Indeed, he says, “Value is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event.”31 Further, he defines three, inter-related, kinds of value: “the value of the individual for itself; the value of the diverse individuals of the world for each other; and the value of the objective world.” The latter is a “community derivative from the interrelations of its component individuals, and also necessary for the existence of each of these individuals.”32 The first value is intrinsic—the experience of an actual occasion. The data accumulating in actual occasions is shared and becomes extrinsic value—value for all things.

Coral Spawning: Metaphor for Awesome Interrelatedness Mass spawning events of certain coral species are anticipated annually by human observers and many other species besides. The simultaneously ejaculated egg parcels and sperm and resulting planulae or larvae provide a rare delicacy for carnivore inhabitants of reef environments. From a human perspective, because these events are understood to be interdependent with complex factors—including moon-phase, daylight, tide, water quality and temperature—they wondrously, and for some, mystically symbolise the awe-inspiring interrelatedness and synchrony of natural processes. Overall, coral genera are fascinating because they are highly adaptive and can procreate in various modes—sexual and asexual. They can be hermaphrodite and separately sexed.33 The success of many coral species is significantly reliant on symbiosis and their vibrant colouration results from the zooxanthellae co-habiting within the coral. These microflorae provide an in-house photosynthetic cleansing service along with other nutritional benefits. They convert carbon dioxide waste products from the host’s cellular respiration to carbon and in the process release oxygen.34 Environmental factors contribute to the sustainability of this symbiotic relationship. The zooxanthellae are susceptible to sustained higher water temperatures and turbidity. When their populations diminish, the coral becomes unhealthy and appears ghostly white. When many corals are affected the mass die-back is referred to as a coral bleaching event. If these events happen with regularity the sustainability of a colony comes under threat. The contribution of anthropogenic climate change35 to threats to the resilience of coral colonies is being observed and quantified longitudinally

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with mixed outcomes regarding attributing causality. The carbon-related factors are hard to distinguish from increased turbidity and fresh water incursion from storm activity and the impacts of waterborne sediments from coastal and hinterland region development. Due to a complex of causes, the global frequency and severity of bleaching events is undoubtedly increasing.36 The socio-cultural and economic consequences attributed to elevated CO2 levels continue to be quantified and qualified.37

An Art/Science Collaboration A preliminary meeting in mid-2015 at the Australian Institute of Marine Science to discuss the possibility of an art/science collaboration was most productive. Advance arrangements were made for access to the National Sea Simulator facility38 to film during the October-November coral spawning season. However, this was implicitly conditional on the artist being sensitive to the nervousness of most Australian research organisations regarding their ongoing funding in the face of a rampantly climate-changedenying government. On election in 2013, Tony Abbott’s government had “immediately moved to dismantle Australia’s limited carbon reduction systems, scrapping its fledgling carbon trading scheme, disbanding a climate advisory body and lowering its renewable energy target.”39 There should be no unqualified overt reference to anthropomorphic climate change, thank you. I was reminded of Michel de Certeau’s scenario where institutional strategy and ordinary everyday individual creative tactics are counterposed: “Political, economic and scientific rationality has been constructed on [the] strategic model.”40 The concern of the institute’s minder was moot. I had no intention of making such a blatant assertion, nor even allusion, to anthropomorphic climate change. My preoccupation was with the mystique of the relatively rare, natural, coral-spawning event. I’d attempt to portray its significance from heterogeneous perspectives. I anticipated that the coral’s orgy of procreativity could symbolise Whitehead’s vision of a cosmic organic process; similarly, Henri Bergson’s idea of élan vital (vital impetus). I envisaged compositing a macro video of coral releasing eggs and sperm bundles into a sequence within a model shrine decorated with gaudy, 3D printed, coral polyp motifs in the manner of Mexican assemblage. The artwork would be an audiovisual speculation about time, creation and spontaneous change, related also to evolution, and not only in the biological sense. It would call attention to cultural values (Fig. 2).

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Fig. 6-2. Ashley M. Holmes and Ruby Holmes, still frame capture from Immanence and its Distortions, single channel HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, 4:33, 2015.41

Adding a microphotographic time lapse sequence of coral planulae seeking places to settle (Fig. 3) not only counterpoises a recording captured for scientific purpose with the material produced with artistic intent, it conveys that events evolve their own teleology or purpose. For the philosophers that influenced this artwork the processes of creativity are part of cosmic temporal emergence. There are no external causes; there is no preeminence. Rather, there is immanence.

Immanence and its Distortions The term immanence commonly means “existing or remaining within.” However, in philosophy, immanence has accumulated many descriptions and yet apparently still eludes a simple explanation. French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari at one moment liken immanence to thought that is “the absolute ground of philosophy…the foundation on which it creates its concepts.”42 At another Deleuze describes it as “complete power, complete bliss” and says that “immanence is not immanent to substance; rather, substance and modes are in immanence.”43

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Fig. 6-3. Ashley M. Holmes and Ruby Holmes, still frame capture from Immanence and its Distortions, single channel HD video, 16:9, colour, sound, 4:33, 2015.44

In What is Philosophy a whole chapter is devoted to a metaphorical evocation of various versions of what constitutes the plane of immanence. It has “two facets as Thought and as Nature.”45 And, according to a writer on Deleuze and deep ecology, Edward P. Butler, “the plane of immanence has complex relationships with other planes of formation such as the artistic ‘plane of composition’ and the scientific ‘plane of reference’.”46 Immanence also has connotations of spiritual purity. In their own way, each of the philosophers featured above agree that neither the rigorous facts of science, nor the expressions of artists, nor the interpretations of philosophers, nor the transcendent religions can wholly convey the immanent reality of existence. As in Eastern tradition, to grasp something is to lose it. Every attempt results in a distortion. This is what I have tried to convey in the title of the digital movie resulting from the art/science collaboration discussed herein and presented in the exhibition associated with the symposium Art and Future: Energy, Climate, Culture.47 The work alludes to the idea that attempts to understand the cosmos—whether scientific, artistic or religious always distort its immanence.

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Conclusion The elusiveness of immanence should not dissuade us and does not prevent us from applying holistic values to the problems that confront contemporary civilization. Félix Guattari’s proposition for an “ethicoaesthetic paradigm” was translated from the French to English in 1995. In the following passage from that text—like Henning, and Jennings who were cited at the outset this chapter—Guattari clearly stresses that the way forward involves reinvention of socio-political institutions. With a strong sense of pathos, he talks of responsibility. In addition, in a manner reminiscent of Whitehead, he associates the arts with the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos: The ecological crisis can be traced to a more general crisis of the social, political and existential. The problem involves a type of revolution of mentalities whereby they cease investing in a certain kind of development, based on productivism that has lost all human finality. Thus the issue returns with insistence: how do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos?48

While there is urgent concern to bring about societal change, I prefer to avoid didacticism. In my opinion it is not a suitable approach for artists. I acknowledge that the immanent plane of existence is distorted through attempts to frame it. However, by imaginatively celebrating the sublime, the awe-inspiring, the wondrous, or even accessibly interpreting the horrific, artists can constructively contribute to the development of a culture grounded in deep ecological ethics.

Notes 1

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected Edition, ed. D. Griffin and D. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978) 340. 2 Brian G. Henning, Riders in the Storm: Ethics in an Age of Climate Change (Anselm Academic, 2015) 113. 3 Bruce Jennings, “Governance in a Post-Growth Society: An Inquiry into the Democratic Prospect,” Minding Nature, 6.2, 2013, 9-10. 4 Ibid, 16.

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Ibid, 15-16. Henning: 2015, 16. 7 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 2011) 83. 8 J. R. Hustwit, “Process Philosophy” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, . (n.d.). 9 Michel Weber, “Vision of Existence and Knowledge of Being” in Yvanka B. Raynova, Vesselin Petrov (eds), Being and Knowledge in Postmetaphysical Context (Wien: Institute für Axiologische Forschugen (IAF): 2008) 20. 10 Henry P. Stapp, “Whitehead, James, and the Ontology of Quantum Theory.” Mind & Matter, 5:1, 2007, 84. 11 Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Fordham, 2004) 16. 12 Notwithstanding that contemporary philosophy is apparently derided by a few celebrity physicists. See Matthew Segall, Physics and the World-Soul: The Relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology (original online essay version, 2010), 5-6. . 13 Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920) 30. 14 Ibid, 185. 15 “The notion of God...is that of an actual entity immanent in the actual world, but transcending any finite cosmic epoch—a being at once actual, eternal, immanent, and transcendent. The transcendence of God is not peculiar to him. Every actual entity, in virtue of its novelty, transcends its universe, God included.” Whitehead: 1978, 93-4. 16 Keith Robinson, “Deleuze, Whitehead and the Reversal of Platonism” in Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 207. 17 Steven Meyer, “Whitehead Now, Introduction,” Configurations 13.1, 2005. Also, Michael Halewood, A. N. Whitehead and Social Theory: Tracing a Culture of Thought (London, New York: Anthem Press, 2011). 18 Whitehead: 1978, 27. 19 Barbara Muraca, “Ecology Between Natural Science and Environmental Ethics,” Michel Weber (ed.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought (Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos, 2008) 33-50. 20 Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community (New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 86. 21 Whitehead: 1978, 14-15. 22 Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed Forward: on the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015) 5. 23 Ibid, 18. For a summary of Hansen’s arguments see 28. 24 See movie at . 25 Ibid, 269 (emphasis in original). 26 Op.cit. 6

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27 Carol Merchant, Radical Ecology (New York, Oxon: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2005) 134. 28 Brian G. Henning, “Unearthing the Process Roots of Environmental Ethics: Whitehead, Leopold, and the Land Ethic,” Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 8, 1, 2016, 3-12. 29 Susan Armstrong-Buck, “Whitehead's Metaphysical System as a Foundation for Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Ethics, Fall 8:3, 1986, 241-59. 30 Muraca: 2008, 33. 31 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967) 93. 32 Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 48. 33 J. E. N. Vernon, (n.d.) . 34 Similarly to the symbiotic gut bacteria in humans and other species. 35 J. Cook, et al., “Consensus on Consensus: A Synthesis of Consensus Estimates on Human-caused Global Warming,” Environmental Research Letters, 11:4, 13 April 2016, 6. DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002 . 36 C. Mark Eakin et.al., “Global Coral Bleaching 2014-2017: Status and an Appeal for Observations,” Reef Encounter, 31:1, International Society for Reef Studies, April 2016.

37 L. Pendleton, A. Comte, C. Langdon , J.A. Ekstrom, S.R. Cooley, L. Suatoni, et al., “Coral Reefs and People in a High-CO2 World: Where Can Science Make a Difference to People?” PLoS ONE, 11:11, 2016. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0164699 38 See . 39 Michael Slezak, “Australian PM Bans Renewable Energy Body from Investing in Wind,” New Scientist, 16 July 2015. 40 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 19. 41 See . This video artwork was one of eight commissioned from various artists by La Luna Youth Arts in Townsville, North Queensland, Australia, in 2015, for an exhibition entitled Emergence. Curated by Michelle Hall, each of the artworks was made in collaboration between an artist and a scientist. The collected works toured North Queensland regional centres: Cairns, Townsville and Mackay, during the first half of 2016. Access to scientifically controlled experimental conditions for documenting a spawning coral colony at the Australian Sea Simulator were gained with the assistance of my scientific collaborator, Ruby Holmes, who was studying marine biology and was also a volunteer with the Australian Institute of Marine Science at the time. Most of the collaborative pairs consisted of an emerging artist and a senior scientist. Our collaboration was the obverse: a junior scientist teamed with a senior artist. In addition to her scientific knowledge, enthusiasm and exuberance Ruby provided

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imagery useful for the conceptual development and facilitated provision of lab data used in the final product. 42 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 1994) 41. 43 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Urzone, 2001) 26-7. 44 Time-lapse microphotography: Gerard Ricardo, 2014. For the research context see: R. Jones, G.F. Ricardo, A.P. Negri, “Effects of Sediments on the Reproductive Cycle of Corals,” Marine Pollution Bulletin, 100:1, 2015, 13-33. 45 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: 1994, 38. 46 Edward P. Butler, “Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology” in Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.), An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environments with Deleuze/Guattari (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) 139-158, 141. 47 Dunedin School of Art Gallery 10-21 October 2016. 48 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995) 119.

References Armstrong-Buck, S., “Whitehead’s Metaphysical System as a Foundation for Environmental Ethic,” Environmental Ethics, Fall 1986, 8:3. Birch, C., and J. B. Cobb. The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community (New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Butler, E., P., “Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzian Humanism and Deep Ecology,” in Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.), An[Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environments with Deleuze/Guattari (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). de Certeau, M., The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Cook, J. et al., “Consensus on Consensus: A Synthesis of Consensus Estimates on Human-caused Global Warming,” Environmental Research Letters, 11:4, 2016. DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002 . Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 1991). Deleuze, G., Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Urzone, 2001).

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Eakin, C. M. et.al., “Global Coral Bleaching 2014-2017: Status and an Appeal for Observations,” Reef Encounter 31:1. International Society for Reef Studies. April 2016. . Epperson, M., Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Fordham, 2004). Guattari, F., Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). Halewood, M., A. N. Whitehead and Social Theory: Tracing a Culture of Thought (London, New York: Anthem Press, 2011). Hansen, M. B. N., Feed Forward: on the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Henning, B. G., Riders in the Storm: Ethics in an Age of Climate Change (Winona MN: Anselm Academic, 2015). —. “Unearthing the Process Roots of Environmental Ethics: Whitehead, Leopold, and the Land Ethic,” Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 8:1, 2016. Hustwit, J. R. n.d., “Process Philosophy,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, . Jennings, B., “Governance in a Post-Growth Society: An Inquiry into the Democratic Prospect,” Minding Nature, 6.2 (2013) 8-17. Massumi, B., Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MS., London: MIT Press, 2011). Merchant, C., Radical Ecology (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall Inc, 1992). Meyer, S., “Whitehead Now, Introduction,” Configurations, 13.1, 2005. Muraca, B., “Ecology Between Natural Science and Environmental Ethics” in Michel Weber (ed.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, (Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos, 2008). Pendleton L., A. Comte, C. Langdon, J.A. Ekstrom, S.R. Cooley, L. Suatoni, et al., “Coral Reefs and People in a High-CO2 World: Where Can Science Make a Difference to People?” PLoS ONE, 11:11, 2016. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0164699 Robinson, K., “Deleuze, Whitehead and the Reversal of Platonism” in Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Slezak, M., “Australian PM Bans Renewable Energy Body from Investing in Wind,” New Scientist, 17 September 2013.

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Stapp, H. P., “Whitehead, James, and the Ontology of Quantum Theory,” Mind & Matter, 5:1, 200783-109. Vernon, J. E. N., n.d. Australian Institute of Marine Science. . Weber, M., “Vision of Existence and Knowledge of Being” in Yvanka B. Raynova and Vesselin Petrov (eds), Being and Knowledge in Postmetaphysical Context, (Wien: Institute für Axiologische Forschugen (IAF), 2008). Whitehead, A. N., The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). —. Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967). —. Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978). —. Religion in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).



CHAPTER SEVEN RESONATING ESTUARY: TRANSITIONS FROM SITE TO ART JAN HOGAN

Fig. 7-1. Work in progress, Hinsby Beach, Tasmania, 2016, photo: Jan Hogan.



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Introduction In the intertidal zone of the Derwent Estuary foreshore in southern Tasmania I unfurl a roll of French imported paper (Fig. 1). Its stark homogenous white surface marks a line across the beach, overwriting the natural environment. Over the period of a year I bring this paper back to the site, immersing it in the river and laying washes of ink across its surface. The tradition of drawing is tested to develop a nuanced and sensitive evocation of the place where I live. My aim is to acknowledge the role Western landscape and cartographical traditions had in taking possession of the land, overwriting Indigenous cultures, to allow the stains and shadows of colonialism to be present in order to find new processes of art that enter into dialogue with the flow of the land and all its inhabitants. The bark painting tradition of the Yolngu from Northern Australia has been a founding provocation for this project, as I am dealing with the confluence of freshwater and saltwater. Whilst living in Darwin for several years in the 1990s I worked alongside artists from Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land. The working processes and relationships between marks and country, image and song, nature and culture mesmerised and inspired me. In watching a bark painting develop, broad strokes of colour are applied marking specific sites in the land and then are painstakingly painted over with fine white lines, crosshatched across the surface, obscuring but hinting at the content below. These crosshatched marks are called rarrk and the effect they develop is called birr’yun or shining brightly. 1 This shimmering quality is highly valued as it both signifies and attests to the presence of ancestral power from the time of creation. It is also a visual form that is affective across cultures, being appreciated by Western viewers who do not know the content within the work. The anthropologist Howard Morphy, who has worked closely with the Yolngu, argues that underlying formal structures and semantics in Yolngu art is one of the more general human capacities to discriminate between forms and the neurophysiological effects that particular forms have on the human mind and body. It is this universal component that allows art to be interpreted cross-culturally and to be used to communicate ideas and emotions across time and space.2

The art of the Yolngu has been developed to communicate, negotiate and assert their rights to country to the rest of the world. Writing in a catalogue of works on bark, Djmabawa Marawili explains:



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So if we are living in the way of reconciliation, this is how we should live. …you must learn about Native Title and Sea Rights…About the homelands, the paintings, the floodwaters, the hunting grounds, the everlasting old dwelling places, the sovereignty, the places, the shades, the shelters. You will learn of these. Both sides, Yolngu and Balanda [nonAboriginal] knowledge.3

The undulating forms of the bark they paint on has been brought to the negotiating table to find common ground with the flood of settlers that have come to their land. My work aims to be a reply, an experimental testing of possibilities, where indigenous and non-indigenous can meet, acknowledge the past, the difficult terrain we have covered together, and find poetic, political and ethical futures together. Across Australia there are many artists replying to the propositions seen in the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. They have begun the work that is required for an ethical future. This dialogical movement was briefly recognized by art historian Rex Butler in a parenthical remark at the end of his essay on what Aboriginal Art can bring to the West’s reading of abstract expressionism. He writes: there could be no more pressing a task, which has only partially been attempted, than writing a history not of the art-historical but of the artistic responses to Aboriginal art in Australia.4

His essay reverses the way Aboriginal Art is often interpreted through Western Modernism, instead suggesting that Aboriginal art reignites our understanding and appreciation of works that the viewer acknowledges have meaning and intention and are affected by, but cannot readily access, through language. Through an understanding of the meaning inherent in the processes and materials of making art, I believe it is possible for artists to reply to the interactions and understandings of place conveyed in Aboriginal Art. Through reflection of cultural and discipline training and recognition that the ground, the place where these exchanges occur, is uneven and folded with historical, geomorphological and political grounds, the work of sharing the responsibility for the environment may occur. Paul Carter suggests that as we come to the negotiating table with indigenous people “we need to have to hand a different conception of the land and our relationship to it.”5 In this chapter I discuss the process in which I engage that allows me to develop new relationships to place, inspired by Yolngu bark paintings and



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in response to the place in which I live. Indigenous writer Vanessa Watts defines Place-Thought as the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-Thought is based upon the premise that the land is alive and thinking and that humans and nonhumans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.6

As I do not have the depth of knowledge of the Derwent estuary that the original Mouheneener people would have, I enter into a direct haptic- and time-based dialogue with the matter and systems of a site and begin to understand the concept of “place-thought.”

Resonating Estuary Beneath the shimmering surface of the Derwent River there is the land, the sloping edges, cliff faces and channels that directs its flow and structures its identity. It bears the traces of the millennia of the earth’s forces, its geomorphology being intervened recently with the dams that control flooding and the dredging to allow ships safe passage. As I ponder the surface of the water I realise I do not know what lies beneath. I can only respond to the visual signs of waves crashing on rocks and ripples revealing the flow of currents and tides. Through contacts at the University I became acquainted with the work of Dr Vanessa Lucieer who has carried out sonar mapping of much of the surrounding coastal waters of Tasmania. To my astonishment, the black and white images developed from the sonar work look like ink drawings and shimmer through their shifting tonal values. These “acoustic images” are developed from the language of the sea, where sound dominates over sight in navigating the environment.7 To understand the river system I will need to use all my senses to enter into a place-dialogue. When living in Darwin I remember sitting alongside Djalu Gurruwiwi, a Yolngu artist, watching him paint. He attempted to make me understand what he was doing despite our language difficulties. He had already painted the broad flat forms of rocks, river and waterhole and was starting on the fine rarrk layer. As the crosshatching shifted form he explained that the flow of the water changed at this site and the noise was different. Djalu is a much-respected yidaki (didgeridoo) player and to explain the marks. He played the yidaki and pointed to the corresponding space in the painting as the sound he was singing. He then noticed his son had leaped up to dance and explained that this was the dance that accompanied this place, and continued to play whilst his son danced around the painting,



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leaping towards a rock or a waterhole at the corresponding moment of the song. Over thousands of lifetimes, the Yolngu have entered into an intimate relationship with their country so that songs and languages from beneath the surface bubbled up, were expressed and exchanged. I believe it is important that this way of knowing the world is not lost and that nonindigenous cultures innovate and adapt to gain a more intimate understanding of the environment. Hinsby Beach is the section of the Derwent River with which I enter into dialogue. Whilst initially just walking and drawing at the site I decided I need to enter the cold Antarctic currents and immerse myself in the site. Floating on the river surface my body rises and falls with the swell. The rocks below appearing to breathe as they come in and out of vision as I turn to each side for a gasp of air. The rhythm of swimming suspends me in the environment and allows me to go below the surface of the water. I leave my vertical stance in the world that privileges the gaze and become horizontal skimming above barely discerned rock habitats, admiring the patterns in the river floor and the myriad collection of seaweeds. The fluttering of large stingrays as they float gracefully below reminds me of my vulnerability in this environment. My training as an artist, that relies on observation, visual analysis and a tactile sensitivity, is dulled in this liquid environment where sound is the dominant sense. The liquid atmosphere distorts sight but transmits sonar so that sound becomes the language below the surface of the sea. Sound becomes as physical as touch in the water; it is a profound sensitivity in the life forms that reside there. I am deaf in this environment, groping my way around, slowly learning the hazards and ecologies of this small section of country. Though colonisation and industry, pollution and over-fishing have had a detrimental effect on the area, yet it still presents itself in picturesque form. Hobart is considered a place with close access to untouched wilderness where the air is clean and there is escape from the dire consequences of global warming. And yet below the surface lie heavy metals that make the Derwent River one of the most polluted in the world. The pristine appearance belies the pollution and contamination from industry that restricts eating any of the marine life. Heavy metals— particularly zinc, cadmium, lead and mercury—are a severe and persistent problem, with concentrations in water, sediments and shellfish among the highest in Australia.8 My view of the Derwent River, from an expanse of water whose surface is contained by the borders of geology, was shifted through swimming. I became sensitive to the rocks and sediments below the surface with a unique ecology of different habitats and life forms. The



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philosopher Michel Serres notes that in the West we have unlearned how to think according to the earth’s “rhythms and range.”9 He discusses how farmers and people living off the sea used to know and live by the seasons but we now mostly live in cities, working in offices and want the land contained and obedient for our convenience. In order to understand the environment and its systems better the West has become innovative in its development of scientific equipment. Whilst most of the world’s land mass has been mapped and photographed in minute detail, little is known about the range of land beneath the sea. Dr Vanessa Lucieer has been involved in developing imagery of the surface beneath the sea. She refers to it as “pulling back the blue curtain.”10 In order to do this, scientists have developed technology appropriate to the language of the sea. The images I responded to were formed from data collected by an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), which was launched into the waters of Tasmania allowing the sea floor to be “swathmapped” by sonar. As a marine spatial analyst, Lucieer used the data to draw seafloor landscapes, often revealing the contours and structure of a seafloor for the first time. The patterns of seafloor shapes and textures reveal information about the habitats and life forms they embrace. Sonar pulses are sent out by the underwater vehicle and collected by a ship tracking above it. The lines in the image track the path of the ship as it crosses back and forth on a section of the coast of Tasmania. The sound is unable to be heard by humans but would be the equivalent to a jackhammer to the sound sensitive creatures beneath. The image becomes an abstraction of data, re-presenting and translating ideas linking the material and immaterial, seen and unseen. Line is a key element within image making, it is a universal visual language and signifier, employed globally, and yet with cultural and discipline specific conventions. Whilst fascinating, it needs to be acknowledged that scientific imaging and calculations are a particular point of view, among many others that are possible, about geographic reality.11 Fig. 2 is an “acoustic image” of the seafloor off the East Coast of Tasmania following the passage of the ship as it tracks back and forth along the coast receiving the signals from the AUV travelling below. The ship rises and falls from the sea swell complicating the calculations required to translate the aural information to visual. Fig. 3, showing a section of the southern coast of Tasmania, further reveals the blurred boundary of each track that acknowledges the loss of data and multitude of variables inherent in the process.



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Fig. 7-2. Acoustic image produced by V. Lucieer, supported by the Marine Biodiversity Hub funded by the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme.

Scientists develop these images in response to specific questions, but as an artist, these blurred, seeping lines of tonal variations resonate with the content of the sea floor. Philip Rawson, in his writing on drawing, asserts that “the ultimate iconography of a work of art—its true topic, in fact— does not lie in the merely given ‘subject.’ It lies far more deeply implicit in how that subject is developed.”12 Whilst they may not be considered works of art, the images are the results of creativity and experimentation seeking knowledge about our environment. It is fitting that these images are developed through sonar, in the language of the sea, as the translation maintains the fluidity of the environment they belong to. The acoustic drawings create relationships between the sonar processes and the mathematical configurations, revealing systems of connection between the environment and the scientific investigation.



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‹‰Ǥ ͹Ǧ͵Ǥ Acoustic image produced by V. Lucieer supported by the Marine Biodiversity Hub funded by the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Programme.

Saltwater Freshwater The relationship to the sea and rivers is different for the Yolngu, as their survival has been linked so closely to the environment and they have learned to see subtle variations, to monitor the depth, looking for the presence of fish or other animals. Howard Morphy provides anecdotal evidence after accompanying Yolngu on sea voyages mapping coastal Arnhem Land, observing that “they are able to interpret the way that characteristics of the deep are reflected in subtle variations of surface form. They know what is below the surface and are educated to look for its signs.”13 Paintings play an important role in transmitting this knowledge. Morphy elaborates: the intention of a Yolngu painting is not to create an illusionistic representation of reality. In painting the sea the Yolngu do not concentrate on reproducing that subtle modulation of colour by which they identify the hidden reef and distinguish it from the faint shadow of a cloud on the water.14



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Yolngu paintings of saltwater country reveal it in “many states, showing qualities of depth, surface and the mix which shroud the secrets: the sacred and often dangerous land just below the surface, the totemic life forms that inhabit these waters and the profound fonts in the deepest waters.”15 The shimmering quality of the rarrk, the final layer in the bark paintings, indicates the ancestral presence in the land and maintains an active surface that maintains the connection and the presence of energy in the paintings themselves. Many layers of knowledge are contained within the works depending on the level of initiation of the artist. Science, art, politics, daily life are all intertwined in ever growing complexity, as artists gets further into their obligations and responsibilities. The work I discuss in this section is by Djambawa Marawili, a senior Madarrpa elder and artist, who has rights by kinship to paint sacred clan designs. He is a ceremonial leader, and a land and sea rights activist, leading a successful sea rights claim in 2008. In the bark painting Baraltja, Mundukul, the Lightning Snake, is shown sending lightning over Madarrpa clan salt waters. Fresh water pouring into the creek at Baraltja makes the Snake stand up and communicate with relations over the salt waters of Blue Mud Bay. In a catalogue entry from the touring exhibition Saltwater, the iconography is explained, This painting by Djambawa is primarily of the waters of Baraltja. They run from the bottom of the painting at the flood plains, past a sacred manifestation of the serpent, then past the shore line and over a sand bar (Burrut’tji) before being taken by the tide right out to sea. The horizon is lined with small clouds on either side of the looming mother figure of Wanjupini, the yothu (child) Getkit or tern is shown flying way out there. The miny’tji (cross-hatched pattern) is the sacred clan design for these waters imbued by Madarrpa law and soul. It is saltwater imbued with the sanctity of Baraltja that will return to these shores via tidal surge or as rain carried by the Wajupini.16

Djambawa’s work is a contemporary adaptation of a cultural tradition. He has developed a signature diamond design that respects but innovates on tradition. The intention in the artwork is not to create an illusionistic representation of reality, but rather express extremely complex relationships between things—for example between social groups, and in the seasonal cycle between fresh water and salt water, fire and water, between life and death, and male and female—and underlying all is the template of the ancestral past. The artist has used a miny’tji (sacred clan design) that refers to the saltwater, Bäru the crocodile and the ancestral fire that embodies the waters at Yathikpa.



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The design is multivalent. It refers to the fire created by Baru the crocodile, and also to the pattern that sits on his back. The ancestral crocodile had a fire on his back that he rushed to quench by submerging in the waters. The fire is still present and can be seen in the “waving banks of sea grass and in the swirling waters of the wet season that rush into the bay and sometimes form a boiling whirlpool.”17 In this way, the site on which this event occurred, the waters around it and the crocodile and clans people related to the site, are all interwoven through this pattern. It asserts rights and responsibilities but also tells of the depths of the water, the seasonal intermixing of freshwater and saltwater, the arrival of storms and food sources. For the Yolngu there is an inherent link between person, sea and land, there is no separation of the three. This informs the everyday life and political realities of the Yolngu, as Djambawa states: “our intellectual knowledge exists in the fresh water and becomes one in the salt water.”18 Thousands of years of knowledge about the land are passed down through stories, songs and ceremonies. Art plays a central role, being completely entwined with scientific, philosophical, ethical, emotional and environmental imperatives. It is also used to engage with the world and to educate it. As Djambawa Marawili explains: “somehow the world doesn’t know about the patterns and paints that come from the land. There is not even an emerging understanding of the patterns and designs underlying Sea Rights or Native Title.” 19 In response to incursions and desecrations of their country, the Yolngu replied with generosity and inclusion through artworks and education. On encountering the bark of Djambawa Marawili I was transfixed by the vibrating patterns painstakingly painted with fine cross-hatching. These lines in their multiplicity and shifting orientation cause a shimmer that activates the surface of the bark. The rarrk is sectioned into horizontal, even sedimentary layers, by a white outline that separates the shift in patterns. These bands appear to be layered in a vertical view to be read from top to bottom. However, this vertical view is challenged on closer inspection by its horizontal construction. The fine lines of ochre sit on top of each other on the horizontal, recording the artist’s engagement with the materials and the undulating surface of the bark. Marawili sits crosslegged bending over the bark, in contact with the country. The rippling, pulsing surface attests to the artist’s engagement and skill with the process. The warp, intrinsic to the nature of the bark, is accentuated by the direction of the lines. This is not a design being imposed on a surface but rather a work being developed in an understanding of the materials and support and what they contribute to meaning. In being able to engage with



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the mode of construction, the complexity of the shifts between ground and surface are more easily understood. The physical, material nature of the ochres makes them sit on the surface of the bark; they are of, and from, the land.

Litmus Test Over the year that I take the roll of paper to Hinsby Beach it begins to change. Its homogenous white surface has gone and, as it is gently rolled out along the beach, it no longer has a clear demarcation zone. Over the year, the paper has been taken back to the site, re-immersed in the River and stained with ink and charcoal. The inks are developed from a concoction of seaweeds left to ferment in a pot in the backyard, developing over time from a golden yellow to a brackish hue. The edges have become ragged; tears have appeared, allowing rocks and sand to peek through, seaweed has dried and adhered to the surface in patterns similar to the broader beach environment. Paper is traditionally considered the support for a drawing, a surface to have meaning placed on it through a sequence of mark making, but it is also a material with meaning and agency. Its soft absorbent nature allows marks to be placed on both sides; lying on the beach, the paper absorbs light and carbon and salts, drawing them into its fibre much like a plant. 20 The paper “draws” itself and becomes creative in dialogue with the environment acting as a membrane gradually revealing forces and materials in the land. In Hyperobject, the philosopher Timothy Morton reflects that the world now contains thin layers of material placed there by the actions of humans. The first layer was carbon from coal-fired industries that were “deposited worldwide, including in the Arctic, thanks to the invention of the steam engine by James Watt” and also a thin layer of radioactive materials deposited since 1945. 21 The membrane of paper that I lay on the land accumulates this data. It could be taken away and tested forensically for what it reveals of the health of the environment. As I handle the paper over the year it acquires depths of meanings. On each visit I gently lay the paper out on the beach running my hands over its surface contemplating the transformation of materials that I thought I knew so well having worked closely with them for decades. The paper reveals new behaviours as inks separated and congealed, stains formed, washed out and re-emerged and fibres collapsed. Sand infiltrated everything, its coarseness revealing the harshness of the saltwater environment. The paper acts as a mnemonic device as I follow the layers and trails of marks on the surface. I can see the water drops from rainy



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days, the strong blacks that were quickly absorbed during the occasional hot dry conditions and the variety of seaweeds that the tides dislodged and deposited on the beach after a storm. I feel an intimate connection to this drawing, even though many of the marks were achieved through chance and the specifics of the environment. Philip Rawson conveys some of this sentiment. A drawing, which is a conjunction and transformation of crude materials, shows us to ourselves as it were in a mirror at the heart of our own world of truth—truth not of abstract concepts but of visual conviction. Such a work is also an image of our own subjective experience of what it means to exist, an image taken not just at one moment but gathered together from long stretches of time into a sum which is outside any individual time, and becomes mythical time.22

I do not consider the materials I work with as “crude,” as they have their own properties that continue to delight and amaze me, continuously teaching me about the invisible forces in the world. However, I do feel that drawing invites me into this “mythical time,” its processes entwining me with the environment so that, when I look at the work, I cannot see what was mine and what came from the land. I laid down specific conditions that maintained a certain level of control but the intention was to enter into a dialogue and this was achieved. The paper has become like an ancient material, part animal skin, and part plant fibre that surprises me each time I handle it. This tactility, I realised, was a central meaning of the drawing. The work needed to be encountered in an intimate way that revealed the two sides of the surface and how the saltwater, sumi ink, seaweed ink, charcoal and paper, combined to pulsate with an energy that was both creative and destructive. In its rolled form the drawing was becoming too fragile and so I made the decision to shift its structure into a large book format, as if it was a collection of large sea charts. Handling the book reveals the strength of nature and the cycle of decay so prevalent on the edges of the beach. The dialogue with the intertidal zone continues in the waves of pages being turned. The past becomes present in the moment of reading and looks towards the future. The process of art began a connection and a responsibility to a site. The beauty, strength and fragility of cultural forms were communicated through a time-based and site responsive project. The paper reveals that matter does not sit on a surface, it infiltrates it, goes above, below and around. To spend a year taking the paper back to the environment is to listen, quietly to absorb its rhythms and allow its matter to have a say. To



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watch ink dry on a beach on saltwater paper reveals new patterns and behaviours. I cannot see what is below, I cannot grasp all the meaning at one time but art can resonate with its presence and disturb and challenge the Western traditions of dominating the world. Michel Serres asserts our cultural responsibility in The Natural Contract, arguing that whilst there is “material, technological, and industrial pollution” there is also “a second, invisible pollution that endangers time: cultural pollution.”23 The role of the artist is to address this second pollution, to assist communities to conceive the world in different ways. In Australia the Aboriginal Art movement has provided provocations to settler and migrant Australians that the land we share is vibrant and that we are part of its systems. In developing a work, the scale and choice of materials are intrinsic to the meaning, the slow accrual of knowledge. The porous boundary of my drawing, as it rolls and unrolls, breaks and tears and folds onto itself when developed into book form, offers the possibility of intersections between cultures and disciplines, between the stuff of matter, the stuff of nature and the creation of art. In viewing the book developed on Hinsby Beach, the viewer’s body must come into close contact with matter, two hands are need to lift and turn the page and the smells of seaweed, salt and paper are released. The viewer cannot remain separate from the work, but becomes infused with content. Through interaction with other disciplines, other places and other cultures my own discipline of drawing grows and becomes more sensitive to other possibilities. Thinking and drawing through place provides an ethical practice that allows porosity and decentering. The borders between land and sea, nature and culture, when viewed closely enough, become ever more heterogeneous: where does one end and the other begin? To question these boundaries becomes a tool in decolonising our thinking and imagining a different future. 

Notes 1

Morphy, Howard, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008). 2 Morphy: 2008, 91-2. 3 Djambawa Marawili, Saltwater: Yirrkala Bark Paintings Of Sea Country: Recognising Indigenous Sea Rights (Neutral Bay, N.S.W.: Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre in association with Jennifer Isaacs Publishing, 1999) 15. 4 Rex Butler, “What was Abstract Expressionism? Abstract Expressionism after Aboriginal Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 14:1 (2014), 89. 5 Paul Carter, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) 365.



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6

Watts Vanessa, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans And Non-Humans (First Woman And Sky Woman Go On A European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2:1, 2013, 21. 7 Lucieer, V., et al., “Do Marine Substrates ‘Look’ and ‘Sound’ the Same? Supervised Classification of Multibeam Acoustic Data Using Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Images,” Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science (2012), . 8 , accessed 25 February 2017. The Derwent Estuary Program was set up to monitor the state of the river and releases reports summarizing the data collected. 9 Michel Serres, and Felecia McCarren, “The Natural Contract,” Critical Inquiry, 19:1 (Autumn, 1992) 3. 10 Private correspondence between Lucieer and author, 2016. 11 E. Lawrence, K.R Hayes, V.L. Lucieer, S.L. Nichol, J.M. Dambacher, N.A. Hill, et al., “Mapping Habitats and Developing Baselines in Offshore Marine Reserves with Little Prior Knowledge: A Critical Evaluation of a New Approach,” PLoS ONE, 10:10, e0141051. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141051 (2015). 12 Phillip Rawson, Drawing: The Appreciation of the Arts/3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) 6. 13 Morphy: 2008, 89. 14 Ibid. 15 Saltwater: 1999, 8. 16 Ibid., 34 17 Morphy: 2008, 91. 18 Saltwater: 1999, 15. 19 Ibid., 14. 20 In a footnote to a passage in Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze, and the Framing of the Earth, Elisabeth Grosz comments: “In a quite stunning passage, Deleuze and Guattari affirm, along with Bergson and Darwin himself, the remarkable inventiveness—freedom—of even the most apparently dormant of life forms. Plant-becomings are evident everywhere for Bergson, and plants retain for him an incipient consciousness, a kind of elementary freedom linked to their possibilities of movement. Deleuze and Guattari, however, suggest that plants are contemplative, they have passions, they contract to produce sensations: ‘The plant contemplates by contracting the elements from which it originates—light, carbon, and the salts—and it fills itself with colours and odours that in each case qualify its variety, its composition: it is sensation in itself. It is as if flowers smell themselves smelling what composes them, first attempts of vision or of sense of smell, before being perceived or even smelled by an agent with a nervous system and a brain’.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 210 21 Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 2013) 12. 22 Rawson: 1969: 6. 23 Serres and McCarren: 1992, 5.



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References Butler, Rex, “What was Abstract Expressionism? Abstract Expressionism after Aboriginal Art,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 14:1, 2014 Carter, Paul, The Lie Of The Land (London; Boston : Faber and Faber, 1996). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Grosz, E. A., Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze And The Framing Of The Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, kindle edition, c2008). Lawrence, E., K.R. Hayes, V.L. Lucieer, S.L. Nichol, J.M. Dambacher, N.A. Hill, et al., “Mapping Habitats and Developing Baselines in Offshore Marine Reserves with Little Prior Knowledge: A Critical Evaluation of a New Approach,” PLoS ONE 10:10: e0141051. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141051 (2015). Lucieer, V.L. et al., “Do Marine Substrates ‘Look’ and ‘Sound’ the Same? Supervised Classification of Multibeam Acoustic Data Using Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Images,” Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science (2012), . Morphy, Howard, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2008). Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; 2013). Rawson, Phillip, Drawing: The Appreciation of the Arts/3 (Oxford University Press, London, 1969). Saltwater: Yirrkala Bark Paintings Of Sea Country: Recognising Indigenous Sea Rights (Neutral Bay, N.S.W.: Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre in association with Jennifer Isaacs Publishing 1999). Serres, Michel and Felicia McCarren, “The Natural Contract,” Critical Inquiry, 19:1 (Autumn 1992). Watts, Vanessa, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans And Non-Humans (First Woman And Sky Woman Go On A European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2:1, 2013.





CHAPTER EIGHT THE WATER PROJECT MARGARET FEENEY

A Note on Changing Minds The Water Project is a plan to make water systems for humans, livestock and wild animals living with drought. I came into the Art and Future: Energy, Culture, Climate symposium dragging the reluctant belief that interdisciplinary practice was both the future for art and the method by which I could develop this project. Being used to doing entirely what I want in the studio, the idea seemed dreary to me in practice but appeared the only course that offered any chance of efficacy. But then I met Kazimir Malevich as a rock at the beginning of the trajectory of the symposium’s path.1 A rock for subsequent ideas to be cracked on and to slither off from. Malevich believed that the making and reception of art was “divorced from any notions of political, utilitarian or social purposes.” 2 And that “utility robbed art of its very essence.”3 Art as itself had great efficacy! In the light of Malevich’s conviction, it seems Postmodernist art had deemed itself insufficient; it needs language, history and popular culture. In recent decades, it appears that art needs yet more fields, and turns particularly to science, and to the organs of business and local and central government as vehicles to develop interdisciplinary practices. By the end of the symposium I felt that art had lost its own shape and had become a ghost, trying to flesh itself out by animating itself through the hegemonic structures of forces that had long lost interest in it. Interdisciplinary practice is meant to hijack economic and information systems, but perhaps by suffusing itself into these infrastructures it has only changed the colour of the blood. As Malevich says people are “used to recognizing milk by the bottle.”4 Malevich communicated his ideas directly to a small group of marginalised people in a disintegrating society, but the influence of his ideas has been immense. Somehow, paradoxically, once information enters a formal system the information loses its integrity, and becomes an item of



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the system by which it is selected and filtered. Had we moved from Malevich’s zero of form to coloured water?5 On further reflection I see that interdisciplinary practices are, of course, valuable, and will provide the essential social system upgrades of the future. But they do not make art as I understand it. Art is a separate technology from politics and language and doesn’t survive sleeping with the enemy. This might be a good thing. Artists can have a two-pronged fork in the fire: interdisciplinary practice and fine art. I have both under the rubric of art for this chapter. The experience of the symposium has freed me from making the Water Project fit my art practice, which is a detached space that wants to stay that way. I now have two separate pursuits: my art practice, and secondly, an interdisciplinary practice that engages with the social world. The Water Project is my duty, not my art. I love the natural world and am going to try to get fresh water to birds and insects by working with whoever wants to help. And I will stop trying to deform the project by forcing it into art pants which will just end up down around its ankles and tripping it up.

Fig. 8-1. Margaret Feeney, Robotic Water Gatherers: Family Group, 2017, mixed media, 35 x 78 x 18.6.



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The Water Project I recently lived in Hokianga and experienced drought conditions over two summers—surviving on tank water! I saw worried people, distressed stock and heard of kiwi coming into people’s yards in broad daylight looking for water. And for the last three years I have watched wild ducks and their land-bound ducklings try to survive rainless months in the paved-over remains of the great Auckland isthmus. The Water Project is an evolving plan. So far it has been like Piranesi’s drawings, or Malevich’s Arkhitektons, in that it is a succession of great daunting designs that will never be realised. But I want to help more people notice and think about animals, in order to step outside the radical anthropocentrism in which our culture is trapped. Our rain is coming less often and in greater amounts at a time, so we need cheap, autonomous systems to keep the water clean for when it is needed. I plan to look at small but essential animals and bring back the birdbath. Except it needs to be an insect bath as well and it won’t look like its predecessors. Water is critical for bees and other small animals yet many of our urban, suburban and rural waterways are either covered or dirty, so we need water systems in every farm, public space, backyard and apartment balcony. The Water Project aims to use recycled, non-toxic materials that won’t hurt the animals or the environment. The construction would be guided by a set of basic ideas to keep water in motion and clean, including perhaps capillary action, the Archimedes principle, the Leidenfrost effect, native oxygen weeds and impluvium systems. Domestic water systems would ideally be a downloadable set of instructions that could be 3D printed from repurposed household waste, or at least cobbled together from common, household objects. Regional systems could use the capabilities of local natural landforms, such as the linked caverns in porous limestone rock, or subterranean water in dried creek beds. Discarded human structures such as old mines and disused pumice quarries could also be repurposed to build aquifers. The central kaupapa6 of The Water Project is inclusion and invention; everyone’s ideas and contributions are welcomed. In this chapter I discuss the ideas that drive the project. I aim to prove the case for kindness as the first principle of thought in human invention. I want to make the case for kindness as a new intelligence. I look at the balance of agency between the market economy, science, and art, and how artists are responding to this. I discuss colonialism and the new sites of neo-colonialism, as I see them, and where the over-riding influence of this brutal, old mode of thought can be seen in operation now. Finally I will



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look at three things that may provide solutions: kindness, flat structures and a practice-based fine art methodology.

Fig. 8-2, Margaret Feeney, Confused Water System, 2016, ink and paint on heavily gessoed paper, 121 x 80.



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Problems There is a vein of work in the modern art tradition, shared with popular culture, which views the future with sardonic humour. To differing degrees it uses distancing tactics such as arrogance and sarcasm, with shades of self-deprecation and the ridiculous. Examples include Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Lisa Yuskavage, Daniel Buren, Fischli and Weiss, Daniel Malone, Dan Arps, and many others. This view is clear sighted and we must look at it, as the future is a gravel path we have made ourselves, rushing up to meet us as we fall. However, this attitudinal stance makes a plan of action difficult because this fury can express itself as disgust, and embraces abdication. (As Lisa Yuskavage says of her work “I offer no solution. I don’t believe there is one.”7 ) And fair enough, there is plenty be angry about and frightened of. The market economy is the dominant cultural force of our world; it has hijacked science and is holding democracy to ransom. Especially since the industrial revolution, the economy and science have worked furiously together to keep their heels at the nape of nature’s neck, its face in the (same) gravel path. As philosopher of technology Carl Mitcham notes, “the test for scientific knowledge is success in manipulation and control of nature.”8 And in the meantime art has been left a screaming brat at the bedside of science and this economy, as they are busy fucking each other, and the rest of us. But I believe art can recover itself and can work with science in a better partnership than the one science is currently in with the market economy. Of course there are plenty of green scientists, thinking and working really hard but do they have the agency of big Pharma, the power companies or the industrial farming sector? In this sense, artists and green scientists share frustrations. We are not invited to the ball, but a gang of rotten pumpkins is, and we need to worm our way in. How did this happen?

Colonialism Our world is still closely defined by its imperatives. We are still “on the take.” Moreover, the last time art and science enjoyed equal status was when they were both in the service of colonialism. Art and science worked together to make a series of ball gowns from their fashion house The House of Enlightenment to clothe what was in essence a brutal commercial enterprise.



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Our separation from nature started a long time ago but the powerful disjunction between nature and ourselves today is a direct descendent of what Nicholas Thomas calls an inherent contradiction, and conflict, between circumstance and rhetoric. 9 Thomas was referring to the way radical racism allowed settlers to idolise the purity of the Aboriginal’s preEden environment, at the same time as they chopped it down. Thomas says “On one hand an Aboriginal presence was real, and it had to be reckoned with; on the other hand, it had to be imagined away.”10 The same weird disjunction can be seen in our relationship with industrial animals. We drink from cartons of milk with comical, happy cows on them, cows whose milk we are drinking is available because we have literally taken a hammer to their babies. As my son said when he was little, with widening eyes, looking up from his meal in the highchair, “Is this chicken, chicken?” So on the one hand we have Chicken Little, and on the other we have chicken meat. Only one is capitalised. Children are trained in Doublethink: that the chickens are the same animal, at the same time as being different animals. New Zealand is a colonial abattoir with accepted farming practices forming an undercurrent of abuse and violence in our society that can only hurt us as well. Animals are stock, made into parts, packed and sold; at best they are “live” stock. Radio New Zealand’s Country Life reports the unspeakable in robust, chirpy tones. Even the regular RNZ commentators, who are ordinarily thoughtful people, have enjoyed cracking the odd joke about animals escaping abattoirs to be shot.11 There is a ceaseless stream of stories in the media of institutionalised and personal violence towards animals, and some acts are fine, and others are declared abhorrent. I don’t need to go into further detail on the odd lack of empathy and the poor state of our thinking when it is so well demonstrated by our everyday actions and by our most serious media site. And I am sure that no one wants to hear more about farming practices, and we don’t need to because we know them. We only meet wild animals through screens and natural disasters are reported in terms of human life and property. We are ethically compromised and we are lying to ourselves about it. We overestimate our own species and underestimate every other species. This radical anthropocentrism is the old voice of colonialism.

Solutions Let’s start with agency. As long as art depends on a patron system its efficacy will be compromised. But why can’t art assume the lead? Other disciplines do, and as physicist Erwin Schrödinger says, science is just



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another cultural discipline. 12 All fields are cultural disciplines, and who ever thought that accountants would rule the world? That has got to make anything possible. But we can assume the lead using tactics that are antithetical to the tactics of the modern market system that has landed us in this pickle, and where the very idea of leading is usurped and we call a ceasefire on the war on nature. These tactics are kindness, flat structures, and a practice-based fine art methodology.

Fig. 8-3. Margaret Feeney, Test Diagram, 2016, 29.8 x 20.8.



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Kindness Peter Singer’s theory of the Expanding Circle says that evolution bequeathed us with a sense of empathy that has expanded over time from families to tribes to other ethnicities. Singer argues for the incorporation of other species if they can pass tests that prove they share human characteristics. He hopes this inclusion may form steps for us to reach animals more genetically distant from us.13 An order of existence, then, is still imposed on the non-human animals, based on wobbly ideas from current human culture about consciousness and the capacity for pain and pleasure. Life is being graded again, and graded according to us. We have an expanding circle of sorts in operation in our world but it has closer ties, I think, to colonialism than to empathy. Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas talks about the obvious association between colonialism and sexual conquest.14 This can be seen in the way “virgin” tracts of land were opened up as sites of proliferation for industry and human population. The resources of new lands fuelled more and more making. The way we make objects is like a weird prosthetic reproductive strategy. We’ve just about filled the world and are now looking at micro and macro sites, such as genomic DNA and the bodies of outer space, to occupy and populate with our ideas, our objects and with ourselves. And people themselves are collectively a new site, with each individual made into a data collection point and a point of transit for trade and exchange in information space. Neocolonialism is generally thought of as basically the corporation taking over from where the nation state left off, but these are the real sites of Neocolonialism. And there is a strange coldness and unkindness here, not the usual warmth you associate with procreation. Let’s consider the case for kindness, not as a virtue, because it isn’t one, but as a principle of thought. We need to stay with Singer’s circle and expand it: to all people, species, and all landforms, of all scales. And we need to expand it for the purpose of comprehension not for taking and using. There are precedents for this view. Jainism is the one of the most ancient living religions. The Jains practice non-violence and believe all life forms have a quality of mind. Panpsychism, an ancient Greek idea, goes further. The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy describes Panpsychism as “the doctrine that mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe.” 15 All matter has some quality of mind. We invent wild, synthetic systems that we think we can control while degrading the existing organic ones that we could at least grow to understand. Most importantly ™‡ …ƒ Ž‘‘ –‘ MƗtauranga MƗori16 for an understanding of our whakapapa (interconnectedness) with Te Ao



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MƗrama—the natural world around us. MƗtauranga MƗori is currently providing the structured thinking behind solutions and statutory change in Aotearoa New Zealand concerning the environment. Kaitiakitanga 17 provides a principled and sustainable model of practice for interaction with the environment based on this knowledge. The MƗori worldview sees all matter, alive or inanimate, as possessing mauri—a life force or essence.18 Why do we invent wild, synthetic systems we think we can control while degrading the existing organic ones that we could at least grow to understand, and have clear models of thought to approach? We need MƗtauranga MƗori to negotiate the irreparable fusion of the Human Built World with the Natural World. Why is the notion that we could take care greater care with animals and environments so wrong, or so impractical? I would have thought refiguring the world climate into a volatile and hostile force that we can’t predict was pretty impractical. And when did the idea of taking care, and the idea of caring, become ridiculous and a bit embarrassing? In modern times kindness has become a property, perhaps, of the counter-culture movements of the last century. And in an assault on reasonableness, the peace and democracy movement’s mostly worthy ideas have been stuffed into the same basket as drugs, chem trails and Area 51. We need to install kindness as the first principle of living and thinking.

The Flat Structure Companies that use a flat structure, rather than the traditional hierarchy, are more innovative and successful; they are the new fashion in corporate structure.19 However a lot of families, small not-for-profits and community organisations have long used flat structures naturally and successfully. Can we bridge the gap between large companies and the smallest units of society and encourage the groups between them to adopt this thinking? Further, we can look to the “flatter” associative structure of our own creative minds as a model. Scott Barry Kaufman points out that scientists now apply computational network tools to look at the semantic memory network of creative people.20 As artists know, he goes on, referencing the work of theorist Melissa Schilling, “insight can be viewed as the emergence of clarity among a tangled web of thoughts and ideas,” “cognitive insight occurs when an atypical association is made,” and the flatter associative structure greatly increases the chances of atypical connections.21 Schilling concludes, according to Kaufman, that



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Chapter Eight insight affects the organization of the entire network, causing a decrease in path length, a new perspective on the entire network, and a cascade of other connections to come online.22

This is the kind of thinking we need to find solutions to the pressing problems the symposium addresses. Can our social systems adopt a flat structure tangentially to connect people of great diversity to allow for greater intellectual surface area? I include the economy and industry, perhaps hopefully, in the term social systems. A lot of people feel uneasy about the techno-economic project but they don’t think their feelings matter. Philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett says natural selection is a mindless, mechanical and algorithmic process.23 So if the machinery of the state and big business feels heartless and mindless this could be because it is. Bearing in mind that Darwin refers to the fittest for the environment, and we have allowed a hard, destructive social environment to evolve. We are the continuous experiment in the testing and implementation of new technologies, social and scientific. Does technology shape us or do we shape technology? Philosopher Andrew Feenberg says we need to democratise technology.24 And as the living experiment, we are expert and need to have greater input in its direction. A flat structure would place humans on the same plane as other life forms and geological forms. Prejudice, whether based on gender, race, class or orthodox capability, is just a crude, arbitrary tool to facilitate the flow of money upward from the many to the few. And we practice extreme prejudice on nature. But when I refer to we and us—who is “us” actually? Certainly not everybody in society. I work at MƗpura Studios, an outsider art studio for people living with diversity and disability. The barriers to inclusion for our artists are vast, the key barrier being money. Our artists are low value in the economic system, therefore they are considered low value overall and are denied agency. That’s who we are. But I see art as holding key elements of high order thinking that are antithetical to the ideologue of the extreme theory that is the market economy, which can flatten the structure and ameliorate the prejudice and the alienation. The Water Project began as model for a flat structure where public and private sectors work together with local farmers, students, and unemployed youth on an equal footing. I thought of it when I lived in Hokianga and it is based on what was at hand. Hokianga is full of beauty and wonderful people but it is economically depressed and suffers from drought. At the time I taught at a satellite campus of North Tec Tai Tokerau WƗnanga in Rawene where there were great schools for applied art, horticulture and



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carpentry, and I thought perhaps they could work together to provide solutions. The aim was to design and build shelters for pastoral farming animals living under increasingly challenging weather conditions. The shelters were to be made of local recycled materials and local weeds, and were to be double-walled, providing a nursery between the walls for trees and shrubs to grow unmolested by the animals. The shelters would be ephemeral, only needing to last until the trees and shrubs were high and strong enough to operate as the permanent shelter for the animals. The permanent shelter would be a combination of edible and inedible plants to provide both variation for the animal’s diet and shade during drought. Once the superstructure was established its frame could be repurposed to support a water delivery system. I saw the project operating as a bridge year for the graduates before entering the work force, with Polytechnic, Ministry of Social Development and industry support. A team of students from each discipline would travel around New Zealand farms to work with the local community to identify local pest plants and sources of recyclable materials. At each site the students work with local unemployed youth, who become part of the scheme for that area. The project would be conducted on different sites and through different seasons throughout the year, adapting the basic goal to suit a series of unique requirements. Together the group performs each step of the project: design, the gathering of construction materials, planting and building. By embracing the kaupapa of inclusion and invention, problems become solutions: novice graduates gain experience, unemployed youth learn a range of skills and their horizons are broadened, waste is recycled, weeds are controlled and stressed animals gain shelter. People, labour, materials, and ideas are all on a flat structure so initiative isn’t held prisoner by authority, orthodoxy or poverty. And animals come to the notice of people other than those who raise them and kill them.

Practice Based Fine Art Methodology Early economics was so theoretical that it did not reckon on people’s behaviour in its calculations. It was all about the numbers. The emergence theory has since given the economy the tools to watch behaviour but the economy has become so powerful and so apart from people that even its own theorists are lost, and on a meta scale, they cannot control or even predict outcomes. As Schrödinger says



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Chapter Eight A great part of the mysticism and superstition of educated men consists of knowledge which has broken loose from its historical moorings.25

Practice based research is the antithesis of the ideologue of extreme theory. A fine art methodology embraces accidents, risk, failure, intuition and the ridiculous alongside academic responses. We need to claim words back from the financial sector such as risk and investment. Duchamp wanted “to reduce the idea of aesthetic consideration to the choice of the mind, not to the ability or cleverness of the hand.”26 This idea is still dragging its chain through mainstream galleries across the world. It is the old Cartesian separation of mind and body that has allowed us to become so separated from nature, and that has led to such extreme hierarchical thinking. We need to unify theory with practice but not be ruled by it. Science historian John Henry says that the demands of the Renaissance expansion of overseas exploration, trade and colonisation resulted in the status of navigators, geographers and elite craftsmen being elevated and “emphasized the importance of experience in the foundation of knowledge” and the experimental method.27 We are powerful now, wielding the theory extrapolated from the subsequent centuries of innovation and research. The knowledge we have, however, doesn’t appear to be finding solutions to our current problems. It was born perhaps to an expansionist mind-set and can’t reset itself to look around and see the situation as it is now, or, that knowledge has become so theoretical that it has forgotten the world it was born in. We need to enter a period of new innovation with a return to practice-based research to counter the bloated ideologues that have cut people and our world adrift, yet still dominate science and the market economy. Art can lead the way with this method. Artists in our age of compulsory innovation are expert at starting their research from the ground up with each initial concept. Rather than throw a stone at the target and march toward it, crushing options underfoot, a sound fine art methodology takes note of each step on the way to the target idea, ready to change direction at any moment, as new, better ideas appear. This emphasis of process over product forms the core of a practice-based methodology and keeps the thinker alert to the living project of discovery. It can act as an antidote to the utilitarian bent of much current research by weakening the bonds that hold science in service to industry and the economy, where they, in fact, should be in the service of science, as it helps us solve this mess. Drawing is an essential practical tool for skills-based/concept-led development. Another iteration of The Water Project was for town planning, engineering and architecture students. This programme was



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aimed at contributing to the development of fast, flexible thinkers who can respond quickly to unpredictable geographic and climatic events; people who can adapt the resources at hand to meet need and find solutions for unprecedented conditions. Observational and conceptual drawing was the base for all stages of the project, as the discipline of drawing is uniquely placed to develop the following qualities of mind: concentration, discipline, courage, decision-making, invention, experimentation and heightened awareness. Drawing is a great research tool as it connects the mind to the body and allows it to reify thought in the shape of the drawing.

Listen Up Democracy is held to be in the service of the greater good. The “greater good” is a broad-brush stroke theory of benefit, but results can be seen in the smallest good as well. Postmodern theory sees truth and knowledge as constructed and contextual. But at the practical level any living thing grows well under favourable conditions and poorly under unfavourable conditions. That is not contingent on historical narrative or any other intellectual frame of reference. Can we think not in terms of greater good but just in terms of good? As global citizenry we don’t have a worldview; we have a shopping list for the rich and powerful. Our thinking is scraped off the wall of a centrifuge chamber that spins the mind from the body, leaving a lump of base materialism on the floor, where the heart of our thinking should be. So let’s not play. In contrast to the swift and powerful tactics of the market economy the tactics of my art practice are slow and inquiring, and embrace risk, accident and failure. I’m here to think not be pushed around. Art can make change through both fine art and through interdisciplinary practices. Both approaches are trying to achieve the same thing in different, but overlapping, ways; they both make portals to new ways of seeing. Interdisciplinary artists see through the designated function and purpose of assets and resources, to how they can be re-appropriated to fulfill the new idea. They reach through the social idea of the resource to pull out a function particular to the artist’s intention.28 Object-based fine art has a different method. The artist makes 2D work as a portal for the viewer to travel through to reach the idea, and 3D work is when the artist themselves reach into the portal to pull the idea out into this world. Interdisciplinary practice transforms human systems to speak for the artist whereas the object-based artist appeals to systems that lie outside human calculation. Malevich says



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Chapter Eight the sign expressing a sensation is not an image of a sensation. The button letting the current go through is not the current. A painting is not a depiction of a face because there is no such face. 29

Malevich again: “A work of the highest art is written in the absence of reason.” 30 But for art to have agency the other fields have to listen! Art gives us an awareness of the unknown, that things can lie outside our comprehension yet exist. The Romantics perhaps started the process of the fetishisation of awe in their struggle to preserve a relationship with nature, with their conceited portraits of mighty nature witnessed by tiny man, who nonetheless held dominion. And now our diminishing and increasingly manipulated sense of awe continues to be manufactured but can only be provoked by calamity and destruction: tsunami, earthquakes, epidemics and drought. But lately awe seems to be swiveling on its Hollywood head and fixing on reality, as the disaster movie meets climate change, a new kind of romance. Better a healthy respect for the forces of nature while we still have a hope of containing them, than terror in the face of its forces jumping out of the canvas/screen and meeting us in the real. Art has the authority to return us to a contemplative, comprehensive sense of awe, unprocessed and undiminished by fetishisation and detachment. In the fight to contain climate change, art can lead the way in the practice of kindness through interdisciplinary arts, the use of flat structures, and practice-based methodology. Kindness will orientate thinking towards inclusion and the collective good. A flat structure will uncloud our eyes and we’ll see ideas for what they are, not where they come from. And a fine art method will extend the intellectual playground of these ideas to form a more broad research base from which to develop technologies. 

Notes 1

Peter Stupples, “UNOVIS and the Future of Art,” paper presented at the Art and Future: Energy, Climate, Culture symposium, Otago Polytechnic and the University of Otago, Dunedin, 14-15 October, 2016. “UNOVIS and the Future of Art” was the first paper of the symposium and is the first chapter in this book. 2 Amy Dempsey, Styles, Schools and Movements (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010) 103. 3 Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, forward to The World as Objectlessness, by Kazimir Malevich, ed. Britta Tanja Dümpelman, trans. Antonina W. Bouis et al., (Basel: Hatje Cante Verlag, 2014) 7. 4 Malevich: 2014, 189.



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5 In Bürgi’s forward he claims that the Suprematist goal was to “rule out all similarity with visible things,” to achieve “the zero form with which the clocks were to be reset at zero.” Malevich: 2014, 7. 6 Kaupapa is a MƗori term for “principle.” 7 Jarrett Earnest, “In The Studio: Lisa Yuskavage,” Art in America, 1 October 2015. . 8 Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek, Introduction to “Technology and the Life World” in Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (eds), Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: an Anthology (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2003) 488. 9 Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999) 38. 10 Thomas: 1999, 38. 11 RNZ, National. URLs: , . Scharff, C Robert and Val Dusek. Intro. to “Technology and the Life World” in Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (eds), Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition: an Anthology (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Schrödinger, E., “Are There Quantum Jumps? Part One,” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3:10, August 1952. Seager, William and Sean Allen-Hermanson, “Panpsychism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, . Singer, Peter. “Personhood Beyond the Human” keynote address at the Who is a person? A Non-Speciesist Answer conference, Yale University, Connecticut, 6 December 2013. . Stupples, Peter, “UNOVIS and the Future of Art,” see chapter 1 of this book. Taylor, Brandon, Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995). Thomas, Nicholas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 



CHAPTER NINE CIVIC EXPERIMENTS: TACTICS FOR PRAXIS FRANCES WHITEHEAD

Situating Cultural Knowledge Artists today are seeking greater social engagement, moving beyond entrenched roles circumscribed by the culture industry, towards the compelling issues of our time. Some are evolving knowledge-based platforms for public practice, operating in the larger society to re-imagine knowledge, to create new futures. We began our journey fifteen years ago, encountering the charismatic theorist Tony Fry with his focus on the semiosphere, 1 the intangible realm of values and meanings. We understood this as a direct challenge to artists and the culture at large. Our work since then has been driven by these core questions and a search for creative answers. x x x x

What is Sustainability? What is the role of Culture? What is the role of the Artist? Where is Agency to effect change?

We came to articulate two interconnected cultural hypotheses, which form the basis for subsequent experiments. Firstly, sustainability is a cultural problem and requires a whole-system cultural framework that accounts for intangibles to succeed. Secondly, particular expertise can be of great value to trans-disciplinary teams due to largely unexamined skills that contemporary artists deploy. In this way, a new model of cultural praxis has emerged: private questions led to strategies, strategies to initiatives, initiatives to engagements, widening out towards the public realm—the civic experiment. Animating this meta-project is the rhetorical

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question, “What Do Artists Know?”2 which has, over time, become both method and message. Although academia addresses art practice within research culture, questions of knowledge and innovation have a different order of urgency for the civic sector, including rust-belt American cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, where we have found considerable appetite for new ideas. The paradigm shift from industrial to post-industrial, underway in the late 1990s, catapulted urban discourse into a liminal zone of new possibility and urgency. Contested theories of sustainability were emerging from “design thinking” but not “arts thinking.” Within this theory, a postenlightenment, meta-typology of cultural practice, “artefacture,”3 locates the environmental crisis firmly within artifice, in a non-hierarchical zone of cultural production, art, design, philosophy, science, etc. This focus outside specialisation challenges the significance of isolating purely symbolic strategies and has brought the symbolic back into conversation with the practical, offering the potential, as Janeil Engelstad has said, to “make art with purpose.”4 The autonomy of individualistic art practice is augmented, not refuted, creating a space where meaning and purpose coexist, are equally valorised, offering expanded agency to artists and refocusing design practice on ethics and signification. For artists interested in art’s relationship to both the built and natural world, this is a space full of possibility, capturing the imagination, where all disciplines collaboratively constitute an emergent “trans-disciplinary.” During this same period, the art world has seen a contentious polemic concerning the movement known as social practice. Organized around Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics,5 parties argue the potential of blending the political, the social, and the aesthetic. This discourse is focused primarily on social justice, seeing ecological concerns as a dimension of the “social.” Embracing event-based, collective action, critique, and resistance, or as we could say, “Act UP, Point OUT, Opt OUT,” the “social turn”6 continues to grow, even as it is challenged for its “largely symbolic commitment to politics.” 7 As artists with a systemic (systems theory) view, we have inverted these conventional activist art strategies by “opting” IN not OUT, deferring, at least temporarily, the question of “art,” which can limit our ability to re-conceive possibilities. Here we follow the advice of American philosopher John Dewey, who exhorts: In order to understand the meaning of artistic products, we have to forget them for a time, to turn aside from them and have recourse to the ordinary

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forces and conditions of experience that we do not usually regard as aesthetic.8

Performing the Tropological Transdisciplinary Through OPTing IN, we have learned to speak the languages of other disciplines, both nomenclature and attitude, reflecting multiple intents and values. Cultural geographer Mrill Ingram has called this the “diplomacy of art,” 9 a symbolic handshake, reaching outside art practice towards the work of others, to become value-added. This diplomacy sometimes disrupts these practices by operating within their sphere differently. Some would claim “generosity,”10 a joining in, dot connecting. This also disrupts “art.” Thus, when describing the formulation of recent projects, we often communicate in distinct voices, which inform both the verbal and visual delivery of information, a kind of durational speech act. Here we might utilise an exacting, descriptive, expository voice, especially used for technical details from other disciplines, which we perform factually, faithfully. Also present is a rhetorical, persuasive voice, a voice that makes claims, pronouncements, delivers statements of implication, signification, intention, and aspiration. This is a crucial voice for the cultural, for herein lies the debate concerning ideas, actions, and their meanings. Lastly, we employ a poetic voice, a figurative, metaphoric voice sometimes spoken, sometimes purposefully withheld, sometimes represented visually but not paired with verbal equivalents. This is the voice of the trope, the double meaning, ambiguity, the voice of the cultural outside the paradigm of knowledge production, outside certainty. For whatever is said, something else is not said; something else is always meant. This is the underlying logic of these projects even where it is not articulated. This tropological transdisciplinary forms the basis of the Tactics for Praxis.

Practicing in Public—(we know we don't know) In each project that follows, there has been an explicit aim and outcome. But in each case, additional unforeseen outcomes have also arrived, which are carried on as a reflexive working method. We are practicing in public—we know we don't know. From 2005 to 2007, another artist and I became deeply embedded in the planning process for a new trail and greenway in Cleveland, Ohio, that ran beside the historic steel mill. The explicit outcomes were a systemic sustainability plan for the trail, and a process for including artists in such

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projects. The sustainability plan included an ambitious technical proposal to change the steel mill, saving CO2 by granulating steel slag, piled up, barely used. This technical possibility grew from the recognition that the slag pile is cultural heritage, not waste, and from understanding it as an underutilised asset available for revaluation. Here we did not invent a new technology. Rather, acting as free agents, not as paid consultants, we ignored the advice of the engineers and did the research required to identify an available technology, maintaining autonomy even in collaboration—artist as a new kind of problems solver. Over a two-year period, the planners began to note things they perceived we artists knew and why it was valuable, unintentionally producing a Knowledge Claim for artists. The document articulates the tacit and methodological knowledge deployed by contemporary artists. The most important claims are for a radical lateral-ness and special cultural literacies that arise from being both producers and critics of culture. Additional important aspects deal with the ability to manoeuvre in multiple economies, transferring and transforming value. With this Knowledge Claim, we were able to engage directly with Fry’s well known “change strategy,” Redirective Practice, which challenges each discipline to redirect from within. The ambition of redirective practice is to…gather a multiplicity of practices, including, but beyond, design, to start to redesign/redirect the structural and cultural condition that designs our mode of being-in-theworld…Redirection does not mean total rupture; rather it means, modifying, remaking or reframing.11

A systemic look at my own art and life revealed three sectors for redirection—personal, pedagogical, and professional—and produced three redirective projects. Almost immediately, intentions, means and methods began to transgress the borders, circulating ideas across situations, generating more provocative projects, and unexpected agency. Eventually this transliteration jumped the borders of art practice into architecture and, from there, into the civic arena. Pedagogically, we imported our professional questions as participatory curriculum, creating the Knowledge Lab. We simultaneously exported pedagogy. Next, The Greenhouse Chicago was initially conceived to redirect our private home/studio. However, during construction, we became radicalised about the possibilities and transformed the project, taking creative control away from the architect, adding features immoderately, testing the limits, turning it into a demonstration project, BOTH architecture AND art. The studio moved from the site of production to the object produced—the

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studio became the art. Duchamp in reverse. The other outcomes were more surprising and harder to claim. Though not our intention, our commitment to the actualization of this encyclopaedic project challenged architecture. The house became not only the art, but also the classroom, as architects and urbanists came in for tours, creating opportunities for dialogue and future engagement. We were no longer redirecting from within, we had OCCUPIED architecture, performed architectural redirection, a RUPTURE, reversing and up-ending traditional hierarchies and roles. We were simultaneously solving problems and creating them. Artists interested in these new modalities of practice use their disciplinary skills very strategically, deploying another type of knowledge known to the Greeks as metis. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau describes metis as: [knowledge that is immersed in practice, combining] flair, sagacity, foresight, intellectual flexibility, deception, resourcefulness…diverse sorts of cleverness.12

In the professional realm, complex work is now performed by multidisciplinary teams. What happens when you add an artist into this system as professional transgressor? Important here is Sacha Kagan’s, notion of “Double Entrepreneurship in Conventions.” To “play on the rules rather than in the rules.” 13 Here, the artist is a double agent, putting the transgressive dimension of contemporary art to practical use. Thus, through metis, artists and other cultural border hoppers are a kind of irreverent cross pollinator, punching holes in disciplinary walls. Operating both inside and outside art, both inside and outside civic and public structures, a kind of double change agency. Again leveraging the Knowledge Claim we launched the last of the redirective projects, the Embedded Artist Project. Sponsored by Chicago’s Department of Innovation, the program ran between 2008-2012. Here artists are embedded in city workgroups to bring new perspectives to the daily work of the city. A decade after its inception, the legibility and value of this strategy has begun to increase, as other cities in the USA, UK, and New Zealand are adopting embedded artist programs influenced by this model.14

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Civic Experiments–(Praxis) SLOW Cleanup—Sites of Public Learning Working as Embedded Artists with the Chicago Department of Environment, we developed Slow Cleanup, a net benefits model for Chicago’s 400+ abandoned gasoline stations, a legacy of American automobile culture. A very informed Commissioner of Environment embraced the proposal to use Jon Hawkes’ Four Pillar15 model as a schema for a new approach to brownfields, using phyto or plant-based remediation. Modelled on the Slow Food movement, the program rejects the “Fast Cheap Easy” paradigm of conventional “dig and dump” clean up. Technically, petroleum remediation is performed by soil microbes attracted to phenols, sugar-like substances exuded by some plant roots but not others. Surprisingly, very few plants have been tested, including the prairie forbs native to Chicago. Additional plant remediators would allow the re-imagining of the postcarbon landscape and the revaluing of these degraded properties. The program is constructed as a series of interim approaches that model time in relation to investments, benefits, and complexity. We also evolved an in situ soil prep method for keeping all soils on site, repurposing a roadbuilding tool. A typical corner site hosts the field trials for the program and was designed for legibility and function. Students from four communities of practice, art, soil science, horticulture, STEM learners— have been involved in the project, paralleling Hawkes’ Four Pillars. Because the Commissioner was very adventurous, the explicit aims of the project largely matched my professional intentions: to extend the plant palette and create more value(s) through remediation and simultaneously to conduct “Civic Experiments” as public research, involving many learners and creating capacity. The purely disciplinary ambition critically to extend the sculptural genre of the “earthwork” remained tacit. Working with soil scientist Dr A.P. Schwab, 16 we have identified twelve new species of native ornamental petroleum remediators. Schwab has worked contractually like an artist, which is to say, for free. Conversations over time with Schwab have made clear that the intellectual merits and significance of the work were compelling enough that Schwab was willing to work outside the conventional research paradigm of hard science and to enter the non-compensation, symbolic economy of art, where participants often work completely “in kind.”17

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DIASPORE /dƯƍԥ-spôrƍ/ In botany, a seed or spore, plus any additional elements that assist dispersal. The pan-Atlantic exchange of plants and people that began in 1533 with the European encounter with the Peruvian potato is extended through reciprocity to all sites where food production and cultural production are intertwined. We were introduced to the City of Lima, Peru, through CIP, the Centro Internacional de la Papa, which holds over 4000 varieties of Andean potatoes, the cultural heritage of ten thousand years of hybridisation by indigenous growers. I had been in conversation with the Director concerning the cultural nature of food ways and the Four Pillar model, and how these ideas might enrich the new urban agriculture program underway in Lima, with which she was involved. We assembled a team of Chicago artists, designers, and preservationists to provide creative support to the City of Lima in their efforts to integrate architectural conservation for the historic centre and food planning. A crumbling but magnificent UNESCO World Heritage Site, founded in 1535, the historic centre of Lima, now houses the urban poor, who also have inadequate nutrition and food security. Similar to other quickly urbanised areas in South America, the city edge is extended by informal settlements of a growing population. Lima has a host of challenges beyond population. Due to the prevalence of the Spanish-style courtyard house, most of the open space is interior and private, not public. The diminishing glacier-fed water supply, visible in the dry beds of local rivers, also creates a challenge for this desert city. Slowly we became aware that all programs in Lima must be evaluated against the underlying pragmatic dilemma of sustaining a city that is in the wrong place—a perpetual colonial legacy— an unsustainable settlement pattern. Lastly, many of the adobe brick Spanish colonial buildings are mere shells with no extant interior. These are remarkably common. These contradictory conditions informed our strategies in Lima as we sought symbolic and practical solutions to enhance democratic participation, food security, and heritage conservation. During our work in Lima, a hex pattern emerged as a motif for many of these investigations, moving from a metaphor for participation at City Hall, the Civic Hive, to a space-saving spatial configuration for roof gardens, to a motif for a mobile orchard, reversing the private courtyard and the spatial interiority18 of the city. While design tropes such as the hex shape allowed us to navigate between the symbolic and the practical, everyone understood that urban agriculture in Lima was a short term proposition, raising as many questions as it answered.

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THE 606 Returning to Chicago, from 2012 to 2016, I was the Lead Artist on the Design Team for a 3-mile long rail adaptation project, The 606, which opened to the public in June 2015. The 606 is a civic experiment in every way, a public/private partnership with great ambitions. For me, the project has also been an opportunity to actualise the ideas that we had been developing at a more speculative scale. The private partner, The Trust for Public Land, established public engagement as the ethos of the project. Working rhetorically with the values of participation and engagement, the arts became the organizational framework for the project, shifting the multidisciplinary team structure towards the more collaborative (but more contested) trans-disciplinary model. Sustainable “best practices” were used throughout the project, but there was no time for a philosophic discussion concerning cultural aims. Tacitly we transformed the Four Pillars into a set of cultural values— Expression, Participation, Innovation, and Sustainability—shifting the focus from cultural heritage to cultural futures. There are many features along the 3-mile project, including an observatory at the west end and a multi-functional skate park/performance venue at the east end. However, my main interest is a planted line that runs the full length, forming what came to be called an embedded artwork, a landscape intervention, achievable only by proclaiming it “art.” Environmental Sentinel is a climate-monitoring artwork, a planted line of 453 native, flowering trees, Amelanchier x grandiflora (Apple Serviceberry). The five-day bloom spread of this flowering line will visualise Chicago’s famous Lake Effect in spring and fall. The proposal was based on a climatological study, which reveals how large bodies of water, like Lake Michigan, affect local temperature patterns. Modelled after the Japanese cherry blossom festival whose transient blooming has attracted audiences for centuries, this phenologic spectacle will become living data visualisation in time and space. Phenology—from the Greek “to come into view”—is the practice of observing natural events like bloom time, and it is undergoing a revival because living indicators provide integrated data and can tell us more about climate than isolated instrumentation. Japanese court records of exact bloom-date extend back 1200 years, producing the oldest and most important phenologic data set worldwide. Unlike contemporary approaches, this data set was generated culturally, by the appreciation of beauty; it was not generated by science, nor by social responsibility. As a form of speculative artistic activism, Environmental Sentinel explores the potential of the cherry blossom

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festival to be replicated elsewhere. Is it a “transferable model”? Will this work in Chicago with native plants? Can beauty be catalytic and educational? A participatory observation program links academic and citizen scientists, deliberately “sensing the anthropocene,”19 but most encounters will be informal, by regular trail users who engage this Slow Spectacle in other ways. This synthetic approach blends new participatory art practices, climatology, and the expressive potential of public infrastructure to create what we are calling, a bit provocatively, “pink infrastructure.” 20

Tactics for Praxis Collectively, these projects extend and explore the cultural dimension of sustainability and model new cultural strategies for creating change. The projects interrogate and reflect on contested models of sustainability and develop the radical strategy of “opting IN.” Several tactics for new cultural praxis have emerged from this work, including: x Transliteration—the moving of parts across sectoral borders x Re-valuation—the identification of underutilised assets x Performativity—the adoption of the means of other professions for translation, redirection, disruption, diplomacy, solidarity—valueadded x and the use of multivalent intentions to deploy the ambiguity of the cultural voice to open space for new questions. Here, the important dynamics are not binary, between, say, autonomy and agency, but rather transactional, free agency, and multivalent double agency. Each of these tactics contains some degree of transgression. Even when diplomatic, change agents don't always play by the rules. And lastly, there is much to learn about the relation of the symbolic to the practical— the useful, the purposeful, the utilitarian, and the instrumentalised—as art and culture re-negotiate their relationship to other forms of knowledge towards sustainability.

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Notes 1

Fry attributes this model to himself, in combination with Ezio Manzini and Felix Guatari, confirmed in email 11 April 2010. 2 Frances Whitehead, 2006. Available in original from at 1 April 2015. 3 Clive Dilnot, Solidarity Through Artefacture? from “The Fear of Acknowledging Making,” drafted c.1989, unpublished. 4 MAP with Janeil Engelstad, derived in conversation with Frances Whitehead. 5 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Les Presses du reel, 1998). 6 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum 44: 6 (February 2006) 179-85. 7 Ben Davis, book review of Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum 2006), . Accessed 31 March 2015. 8 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch and Co., 1934) 4 (my emphasis). 9 Mrill Ingram, The Diplomacy of Art: What Ecological Artists Offer Environmental Politics, Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society, London, England, 31 August-2 September 2012. . 10 Ted Purves (ed.), What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange In Recent Art [SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture] (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). 11 Tony Fry, Redirective Practice, An Elaboration, , vol. 1 (2007). 12 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984) 81-2. De Certeau is quoting from Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, Les Ruses de l’Intelligence: La Métis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). 13 Sacha Kagan, “Art Effectuating Social Change: Double Entrepreneurship in Conventions,” 4. . Accessed 5 April 2015. 14 Frances Whitehead, “Planting a Creative Community Lab Orchard in Gary, Indiana,” A Blade of Grass Report, 25 January 2017. . 15 Jon Hawkes, The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning (Melbourne, Australia: Common Ground Publishing, in association with the Cultural Development Network (Victoria), 2001). 16 . 17 See Margaret Feeney’s notion of kindness in chapter 8 of this book.

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18

Jörg Plöger, “The emergence of a ‘City of Cages’ in Lima: Neighbourhood Appropriation in the Context of Rising Insecurities,” European Journal of Geography, 5 June 2007. 19 Deborah Dixon, Professor of Geography, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, Scotland, email correspondence, 6 November 2014. 20 References and redirects the well-known ecological urbanism concept of turning “grey infrastructure” into “green infrastructure.”

References Bishop, Claire, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum 44: 6 (February 2006). Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Les Presses du reel, 1998). Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). Davis, Ben, book review of Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (Continuum 2006), . Dewey, John, Art as Experience (1934), reprinted as Jo Ann Boydston (ed,), John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 10 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987). Hawkes, Jon, The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning (Melbourne, Australia: Common Ground Publishing, in association with the Cultural Development Network (Victoria), 2001). Ingram, Mrill, The Diplomacy of Art: What Ecological Artists Offer Environmental Politics, Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society, London, England, 31 August-2 September 2012. . Plöger, Jörg, “The Emergence of a ‘City of Cages’ in Lima: Neighbourhood Appropriation in the Context of Rising Insecurities,” European Journal of Geography, 5 June 2007. Purves, Ted (ed.), What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange In Recent Art, SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). Whitehead, Frances, “What Do Artists Know?” The Embedded Artists Project, 2006 .

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—. “Planting a Creative Community Lab Orchard in Gary, Indiana,” A Blade of Grass Report, 25 January 2017, .

CHAPTER TEN EXHAUSTION ALGORITHM LUKE MUNN

If the Anthropocene was distilled down to an algorithm, how might it work? In a sentence, the Anthropocene designates a geologic age in which the human is the primary planetary force. The term was originally introduced in 2002 by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen.1 The intention of this paper is not to debate whether or not the term is adequate (others such as Capitolocene and Chthulucene have been suggested).2 Nor is it to argue the validity of this age as a replacement for previous epochs. As Heather Turpin explains, the uniqueness of anthropogenic activity and its effects must be debated: the rise of agriculture and attendant deforestation; the extraction of coal, oil, and gas, and their atmospheric consequences; the combustion of carbon-based fuels and emissions; coral reef loss; ocean acidification; soil degradation; a rate of life-form extinction occurring at thousands of times higher than throughout most of the last half-billion years.3

However Turpin’s tragic litany does pose a compelling question. How were these destructions made operational? In other words, what kind of logics and performativities were employed in this assault on life? Computer scientist Robert Kowalski once defined the algorithm as “logic + control.”4 Logic comprises the assumptions and the goals of any programme—for example, to find a path. Control defines the routines and techniques used to carry it out—for example, how the path is found. For Kowalski, this twinned approach allowed the programmer to focus on the optimisation of any algorithm—maintaining the logic while finding faster and more accurate methods of control. But while the paper was intended for a computer science audience, his definition provides an interesting broader model. It allows us to think distinctly about ontologies and actions, about worldview and world-making, about politics and performance. Benjamin Bratton has stated that the “basic algorithm for our

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age is one in which the world is given for us and created in our image.”5 If the Anthropocene is an algorithm, then, it seems to be one characterised by a logic of exceptionalism and performed by a routine of exhaustion.

Exceptionalism Exceptionalism has traditionally been defined as the belief which sets the human apart from other species. But exceptionalism is both broader and narrower than this. Broader, because along with animals, the human has long asserted that it is set apart from a wide array of other matter: plant and virus, atmosphere and earth, architecture and urban fabric. Narrower, because exceptionalism inscribes a series of internal demarcations in the human, defining the nature of the exceptional human, the practices proper to them, and the matter which is duly theirs. This “positive” construction of the human simultaneously produces its “negative” obverse: the lessthan-human entities and activities which are partitioned off and excluded. In drawing a line, the figure and ground are created in the same moment. On a basic level, exceptionalism establishes a series of boundaries— boundaries which distinguish the acknowledged from the ignored. Historically of course, particular shades of skin were exceptional, others were not. The work of particular genders was accounted for, other were not. The life processes in particular territories were acknowledged, others were not. In our language of the algorithm, exceptionalism constructs a kind of ontology, coding what gets to be—what forms of life are counted and consequently what must be accounted for. The events, entities and relationships which can exist, are coded into language, reporting mechanisms, governance structures, accounting practices, and so on. These material assemblages are forms of embodied decision-making, constantly reaffirming the boundary distinguishing the internal known from the external unknown. That which is intrinsic must be answered for, cared for and above all, paid for. On the other hand, that which is extrinsic is regarded as an economic externality, ignored and excluded. Jason Moore has explored how fundamental this logic was for capitalism during the “long” sixteenth century (1450-1640). For Moore, the ontology I’ve sketched out was nothing less than a new worldview, a new “organizing technics.”6 It established a series of divisions, delineating between a “narrow sphere” of exploited but paid labour and “a much more expansive sphere of appropriation” of unpaid work—the free gifts of “natural” productivities.7 Of course the “natural” here was strategically defined and constantly redefined. Flora and fauna, earth and environment and even particular races of the human were encapsulated under the term.

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The ferocious expansion of capital both financially and territorially during this period was only possible through this constant process of “identifying, coding, and rationalising cheap natures.”8 As Moore explains, the colonial hamlets such as the reducciones in the Andes and the aldeias in Brazil enabled spectacularly unprecedented profitabilities, but only through a meticulous parsing—the zone of life and its attendant mortalities was carefully pried away from the zone of labour productivity, “the only zone that capital cares about.”9 The body of a labourer was like a body of water, a natural and external asset to be appropriated and then discarded. Of course history is full of these overt binaries: the master from the slave, the sentient being from the dumb animal, the realm of human from the realm of nature—as well as more complex internal boundaries between peoples, races and genders. By clearly delineating the internal from the external, exceptionalism ring fences culpability, opening up the possibility for extraction to the point of exhaustion. The Anthropocene appears to follow this pattern. By establishing particular forms of the human as exceptional, the energies from other forms of life (both human and nonhuman) may be aggressively exhausted. The text now turns to examine how this exhaustion operates.

Exhaustion What does it mean to exhaust something? One common definition is to simply “use up” some material or substance. But Foucault spoke about “exhaustion, rather than use.”10 The difference between these two terms appears to be not merely a semantic distinction but an operational one. Use is manipulation, and manipulation is done through touching, holding, handling. Use implies that something is taken in-hand in order to address some objective. The hammer must be picked up and wielded, the key touched and turned, the mine entered into and extracted from. Even with the supposedly immaterial object of software, the “user” is one who clicks and taps on the affordances offered. Use establishes a close-knit connection between user and used—even if temporary or asymmetric—an affiliation with touch and tangibility as its precedent. At the same time this “taking up” assumes some kind of right to do so. The user has ownership of the used and conversely, the used belongs in some way to the user. The slave is used by the slave-owner, the plantation by the plantation-owner. Ownership is a relationship which comes with rights but also requirements. Practical obligations must be met in order for an object to continue to provide use value. The slave must be fed, the knife must be sharpened. Legal obligations may be kept or thwarted, but this

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does not negate them. Our juridico-political systems still maintain these requirements, even when an owner fails to perform them. Use then establishes both proximity and responsibility, an interdependent relationship with at least nominal forms of accountability. Exhaustion, on the other hand, seems to operate in a different way. The etymology of the word suggests a draining out or away, particularly of water.11 Rather than taking something wholly up in order to manipulate it, exhaustion implies a more articulated removal, a siphoning off of some desired substance to somewhere else. Instead of the commitment to taking up a totality, exhaustion operates through the withdrawal of a privileged partiality. This was perhaps what Foucault was suggesting when he spoke of the extraction of productive forces and available moments.12 If these forces can be withdrawn and instrumentalised, why commit to the closer relationship—and its attendant vulnerabilities and responsibilities— implied by use? The result is a kind of decoupling of exhauster and exhausted. A particular subset of energies and activities are drawn away while maintaining a distinct gap which discards the interdependencies of the tool in-hand and the obligations of ownership. As a brief example, this is precisely how the sharing economy operates. By dispensing with the ownership of vehicles, a corporation like Uber can tout itself as a technology, not a transport company. Indeed this decoupling goes further, transforming the rights and responsibilities upheld in the notion of employee to that of a “partner"—an (ostensibly) autonomous freelancer to whom the obligations of minimum wage, established hours, health benefits, and so on no longer apply. The partner is responsible for maintaining her car, for managing her expenses, for regulating her own behaviour, while Uber extracts a highly specific subset of this totality known as capital. What are the conditions necessary for this exhaustion to take place? If exhaustion connotes a draining, then a vessel must be created, a field which surrounds and encompasses, a grid which infiltrates and overlays, providing the ability to draw upon particular forces. This permeation seeks to exhaust in the sense of “exhaustive”—to know completely, to pervade comprehensively. Jeffrey Nealon describes this as a kind of “smearing or saturation of effects over a wide field.”13 But the challenge is to perform this exhaustion while maintaining lightness and distance, never resorting to the commitments of ownership, the crudities of violence, the expensive operations of the corporeal. For Foucault, this has always been the trajectory of power, a progression from the costly to the economic. Discipline and Punish highlighted a section of this trend, an evolution from the violent

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punishments enacted directly on the body and the brick-and-mortar incarceration of the flesh towards a much lighter and efficient regime, embodied for him at that time in Bentham’s designs for the panoptic prison. For Nealon, the notion of intensification in Foucault’s work describes this progression—both the goal of power and the logic by which it evolves over time in order to achieve that goal. New embodiments within this trajectory move incrementally towards a more effective performance which can be attained more economically. In doing so, intensity aims to arrive at a power which is lighter and more diffused, ubiquitous but meticulous. In Nealon’s words, intensity is a “state that strives to be complete and exhaustive.”14 Of course, this process is asymptotic, incessantly striving towards efficacies and totalities which are never reached. But it is precisely this gap between the ideal and the realisable which provides the impetus to adopt and evolve.

Exhausting Space How are these efficiencies achieved? How, for example, is space appropriated, managed and exhaustively instrumentalised, without the costly insertion of the human body? The short answer is computation. But computation here shouldn’t be mistaken with the constrained version running on our current processing chips, nor with the fairly recent introduction of the personal computer. Instead, computation along with its twin operation, digitisation, must be understood as part of a much older and broader genealogy concerned with making matter discrete in order to extract productive forces. The digital here is about differentiating 1 from 0, but also finger (“digit”) from finger, hand from hand, body from body. That distinction, in turn, becomes a new hinge about which power might be calculated, extended and amplified. Mapping technologies such as the Cartesian grid are nothing less than a recalculation, compressing space into forms which optimize its management. A rectilinear array of coordinates is laid over the vagaries of isles and inlets, providing a rationalized system by which space might be indexed and ordered, surveyed and supervised. 1890 marked the year in which the US Census was tabulated by machine for the first time. Designed by Herman Hollerith, these machines were electrical, consisting of punched holes which altered the signal flow. But the real digitisation was embodied in the tabulation system itself, marks delineating male from female, black from white, soldier from civilian, each “bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard.”15 Computation in this way performed a drastic removal of space: race is reduced to a mark, an individual to a punch card, a population to a stack of

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cards. This is not to assert that the census was an immaterial affair. Of course it relied on the participation of citizens, the communication infrastructure of roads, the labouring bodies of government workers, and so on. But computation extended and amplified those energies, allowing for vast tracts of space (and the millions of inhabitants therein) to be captured and managed. From east to west coast, from country to city, the space accorded to the sovereign was exhaustively analysed via this new formalisation and implementation of computation. After it was tabulated and totalled in record time, the 1890 census was released with a number of findings. One, however, was particularly significant. It officially announced that the frontier no longer existed.16 Where, then, is the frontier today? It is no longer accessed laterally via the surface of the earth, but vertically, through interior penetration or atmospheric colonization. Practices such as fracking demonstrate the increasingly violent methods required to maintain the same rates of energy extraction from an exhausted space—deeper wells, harsher environments, more risks, less chance of reward. The results are inordinate financial costs and often unpredictable engineering complications. This was precisely the case with Deep Water Horizon, touted by BP as the deepest offshoredrilling platform ever created before becoming an environmental and public relations nightmare. As for the latter stratospheric frontier, there are companies like Planetary Resources, recently founded but with significant investment, which seek to exploit new agreements to commercialise space, mining the low hanging fruit of asteroids for valuable metals and minerals. As Michael Klare outlines in his book The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, the logic of depletion is unyielding. Every fresh advance…leads to the exploitation of hard-to-reach reserves, until those deposits, too, are exhausted—and then the cycle of exploration and production begins anew in even more demanding circumstances.17

Exhausting Time In the early 20th century, the “time and motion” studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor analysed the movements of factory workers in order to streamline manufacturing and increase efficiencies. Like Hollerith’s punch cards, Taylor’s system broke down the organic and ad-hoc movements of workers into a discrete sequence, a digital procedure. Each gesture became a unit which could be optimised or enhanced, reduced or removed, or even broken down further into smaller micro-gestures. Time was no longer something linear, in which more can be achieved by stretching it out to a

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longer shift. Nor was it a simple layer, in which productivities could only be multiplied by scheduling workers simultaneously. Instead, time becomes a kind of three dimensional but incredibly flexible resource. Time gets dug into, excavated. The hour-long routine is broken into minutes, the minutes into seconds. Every gesture plays out over time, and time is money. Each movement is scrutinized and schematized. The “bestpractice” sequence for any labour task is incessantly reviewed and reconfigured. These practices mirror Foucault’s statement that power continually seeks an “ever-growing using of time” accomplished through the extraction of “ever-more available moments.”18 Each iteration seeks to come closer to the perfect performance-in-time, a sequence in which time is exhaustively exhausted, comprehensively drained of productive potential. But these Fordist optimisations were nevertheless limited, always constrained to the duration of the shift. Clock on, clock off. Today, however, capital increasingly penetrates past the crumbled borders of work/life, nine-to-five, billed time in order to excavate value from untapped temporal zones. A key strategy for exhausting time is thus increasing the total time available. Of course, this tactic has a long history. In Chapter 10 of Capital, “The Working Day,” Marx outlined the ploys used by managers to bypass the restrictions on children’s work hours.19 Today capital continually seeks the expansion of labour time, attempting to diffuse the work day more completely across the total day. But it must do so without touching the legislation of labour contracts. The result often employs the language of flexibility and freedom in order to shift from a managerial mandate to a self-initiated practice driven by a savvy entrepreneur. Microsoft’s #GetItDone day perfectly captures this trend, framing its digital products as liberating pieces of technology which allow “workers to get things done anywhere, from sunrise to sunset.”20 Whether working during children’s activities or utilising the “second screen” of a laptop or mobile device while watching television, the campaign encapsulates the “life as work” leitmotif, even listing the bathroom and the bed as potential work sites. In the wake of the successive capturing of each waking minute as one which produces value, it’s unforgivable that any chunk of “down time” remains. A second strategy is the conversion of ostensibly unproductive to productive time. Social media platforms exemplify this exhaustion, coding the previously “useless” time spent of social and relational work as a commodifiable package on-sold to advertisers. Social capital produced by the user is converted to economic capital: the wasted time of chatting on Snapchat becomes a revenue stream; the dead time of flirting on Tinder is made lucrative; the freely given time of sharing on Facebook is turned to

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monetary gain. The more time spent on the platform, the more value generated. In this process, time—formerly fleeting and finite—is converted into the paradoxically more permanent matter of data. An online profile performs a double duty, remaining available for both the user while simultaneously being accessible to a range of third parties.

Entanglement What was the output of this algorithm, the result of this exceptionalism executed to exhaustion? A warming climate, rising sea levels, unprecedented levels of organism extinctions, the red-lining of our socalled planetary boundaries. For writers like Elizabeth Kolbert, the resulting output is a planet verging into a sixth great extinction in which the human is the new meteor.21 Terms like “tipping point” and “runaway warming” signal an undermining of human dominance. The control component of this basic algorithm can no longer be assumed. The logic component, however, is still fully in effect. How might art practices reconfigure or intervene within this logic? A reimagining of this algorithm might begin by asserting the entanglement, not the exceptionalism, of the human and elevating the agency of the socalled nonhuman, whether animal or artificial, material or technical. For Benjamin Bratton, the setting out of the Anthropocene era provides a kind of design brief for future-oriented practices, one which calls us to move past vestigial humanism that would predicate speculation upon and design of the post-Anthropocene Era as the maximization of human beings as the privileged unit of analysis and agency, and (2) to do so by naming, indexing, building, projecting and developing upon more genuinely post-humanist agency/authorship platforms that are much smaller than the Vitruvian scale, and/or much larger, more diagonal, more hybridized, more alien, more cyborgian, more fleshly, more cerebral, more animalian, more vegetable, and more mineral.22

At the same time, however, we need to consider carefully the ways in which art is used, and be wary of how it can be abused. Recently governments and city councils have become aware of the importance of place-making. Art is instrumentalised in the form of commissions or residencies, deployed to highlight the uniqueness of a particular space in an increasingly globalized, homogenous world. At the same time, the arts have suffered significant cuts in funding. In 2012, for example, the Netherlands slashed their culture budget by 25%, forcing many institutions to close their doors.23 In 2016, NZ arts and community groups received

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$26 million dollars less from lottery funding.24 The result is an environment in which “art for art’s sake” is a dirty phrase. Art must always pay its way, it must be a means towards an end, it must act as a tool for someone else. Art in the context of the Anthropocene can often fall into this trap. As Kayla Anderson notes, exhibitions like Reboot the Planet or Yes Naturally: How Art Saves the World pose an infinitely complex issue as a simple problem-solution scenario. Perhaps just as damaging, however, they posit art as a kind of eco-engineering, only valuable if it acts in overtly practical or political ways to help “save the planet.” As Anderson asserts, “frankly, the planet doesn’t need us to save it, we need us to save us from ourselves.”25 Rather than problem-solving, we need art which can provoke and problematise. Rather than solutionism, we need art which is speculative. Rather than instrumentalisation, we need art which commits to “mere” aesthetics.

Aesthetics Aesthetics, in this sense, is not about an elitist delineation of high culture, but a “different mode of philosophising, one that produces ideas with things and events rather than just with words”26 and might be contrasted with purely abstracted theory. As Kitty Zijlmans points out, rather than theorizing about matter, art is an attempt at “thinking through matter.”27 Aesthetics is not eye candy or spurious decoration. Rather, every art work embodies a unique logic and simultaneously carries it out. The surfaces and sinuous curves of a sculpture enact a specific statement; the swathes of oil pigment and colour washes of a painting make particular claims; the sonic and tonalities of a piece of sound art perform a position. Indeed, art is a strange object which often performs its own self-critique, taking up aesthetics from the world and subjecting them to self-scrutiny. As Zijlmans concludes, “art is a way to make matter think by itself.”28 Aesthetics, like exceptionalism, forms its own ontology, making decisions about the forms of life which count and those which do not. The life which matters is mattered—whether in a representational way using line, form, colour, pattern or by taking less tangible forms: timbre and tone, spoken word and performative gesture. Other forms of life are left “un-aestheticized”—their forms are left un-depicted, their agency unexplored, their voices unheard. Aesthetics, as Jacques Rancière has posited, is a distribution of the sensible, “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience,”29 and just as importantly, what does not. Aesthetics are actually embodied forms of

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decision-making, delineating the known from the unknown, the visible from the invisible, the accepted from the excluded. In this way, aesthetics are never merely about subjective tastes or beautiful experiences. Instead, they are highly political, not in the sense of parties and parliament, but in the more fundamental meaning of power relationships. As Rancière reminds us, at its core, politics “revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”30 To be clear, the politics of aesthetics does not derive from any overt “political” content. Indeed, this can often fall prey to caricature, becoming a cartoonish illustration of a complex historical and social phenomenon. Rather aesthetics performs this politics through the arrangement of forms, the ordering of space, the leading of the eye, the structuring of text, and so on. As Rancière explains, the aesthetics of artworks “obey their own proper logic,” one which often simultaneously “disturbs the clear-cut rules” of logic found in preceding thought traditions.31 Katherine Hayles follows on from this thought, extending aesthetics explicitly to nonhuman forms of life. Aesthetics for Hayles is not about some traditional notion of beauty, but a more fundamental programme of ensuring that some things are made visible, voiceable, knowable. Thus, she claims aesthetics as an endeavour which recognizes “that every real object possesses—or even more strongly, has a right to—its own experience of the world, including biological, animate, and inanimate objects.”32 Of course, connections between the human and the non-human, between nature and culture, between the Anthro and the earth already exist. As Bratton notes, “Everything is talking to everything else constantly.”33 But these connections are often overlooked or invisible; they play out silently and imperceptibly; they take place at glacial speeds or microsecond bursts; they occur at planetary or nanoscales. Aesthetics then, is one possible way of thickening these lines of interdependence and materializing the agency emanating from their endpoints until they become more obvious, more apparent. This said, aesthetics is not inherently physical. It is not about rendering processes into stable and sterile forms. Nor is it a simple materialization of some aspect of “the other” into a tangible object. Rather, in the context of art in the Anthropocene, aesthetics might operate in a similar way to affective labour—a performance designed to elicit a particular emotional response. It might take the form of the “purely” experiential which—in Hayles words—conveys another’s “experience of the world.” This experience must be sense-able but its optimal presentation might lie in the

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subcutaneous, the subsonic, the subliminal. The success of aesthetics here lies more in empathy than in visibility.

Art for the Post-Anthropocene? To close I’ll look at a trio of art projects which seem to operate as a different kind of algorithm, asserting entanglement and performing it through aesthetics. In Ecosystems of Excess, Pinar Yoldas imagines a new form of biological nonhuman, an organism which lives off the residue of a perhaps extinct human civilization, floating through the Pacific Ocean and consuming our long forgotten plastic detritus. As Yoldas notes, the project was inspired by the Pacific Trash Vortex, an island of trash floating through the ocean.34 The Vortex itself is a kind of grotesque 20th century sculpture which asserts entanglement: a multi-national territory produced by everyone and belong to no one; a “natural” landmass formed by the meticulously designed packaging endemic to late capitalist consumption. In the same project, a collection of sculpted eggs speculate about what occurs when the Pantone™colors used in industrially printed plastics become literally embedded in the lifecycle of organisms. Easy binaries distinguishing nature and culture begin to break down. Clear delineations between the organic and the synthetic become highly blurred. The project thus erodes the hard barriers established by exceptionalism, making it extremely difficult to say where the human ends and the nonhuman begins. As Ben Dibley states, the Anthropocene demonstrates unequivocally that these spheres were never exclusive, but rather collapsed into one another, accomplishing “the folding of the human into the air, into the sea, the soil and DNA.”35 In turn, the exhaustions of mineral extraction, toxic waste, and throwaway culture which were meant to be ring-fenced leak outward, moving up and down the food chain, dispersing through the oceans, and ultimately returning to haunt the so-called domain of the human. Shing Tat Chung focuses on a more technical nonhuman in Superstitious Fund, a software-based “bot” for the stock market. Rather than a mere software “script,” Chung allows this nonhuman to operate autonomously on the stock market for an entire year using real money. Rather than just technology as tool, highly focused on the (very human) goal of making more money, the Fund has its own ideas and objectives. As Chung explains, the bot is highly superstitious. The algorithm uses logic based on numerology and lunar phases, for example, “it has the fear of the number 13 and a full moon.”36 These apparently “illogical”’ anxieties are used to inform its decisions about which companies to invest in, the financial amounts to risk, which stocks to offload, and so on. The result is

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a series of unexpected moves which undermine the predictability of “mutually selfish agents” in game theory. Chung’s work demonstrates that in order to assert entanglement between any two things, they must be acknowledged as things in the first place. In other words, the human must recognize the other entity not just as inert object or mere tool, but as a thing with distinct capacities and performativities. By moving from software to self-trading bot, from logic to illogic, Chung highlights the ability of this nonhuman to make unanticipated and significant decisions. In doing so, he asserts the agency of this thing and our increasing dependence on things like it. Every day the human places its faith and financial capital in the hands of technical nonhumans—financial software and high frequency trading algorithms that conduct millions of dollars worth of transactions on dozens of stock exchanges. Finally Marguerite Humeau investigates the entanglements between human and non-human temporal scales in The Opera of Prehistoric Creatures. In her project, Humeau recreates the vocal tracts of three prehistoric animals: Entelodont “Hell Pig”, Ambulocetus “Walking Whale,” and Australopithecus Afarensis “Lucy,” ranging in age from 50 million to the more recent 5 million years. Using 3D printed forms and electronic pumps, the artworks force air through these synthetic mouths, performing an approximation of ancient animal cries. Today the innovation narratives endemic to Silicon Valley enact a kind of technohegelianism, a revision of history which posits the current moment as the inevitable high point of humankind. Their promise of the new offers a highly compelling vision of the future. But it is also a highly constrained vision, often limited to the six-month time window of the next product cycle, the next release. The result is a kind of historical amnesia, in which the rapidly mounting pile of failed digital dreams (and their attendant mountains of e-waste) is completely forgotten about. In contrast, as Dibley reminds us, one aspect which the Anthropocene foregrounds is the “folding of geological time and the time of capital.”37 On the one hand, Humeau’s beasts are resuscitations of organisms from prehistory, reanimations which conjure up the immensity of deep-time. On the other, they tap into future technologies and their remaking of life: biotechnology, genetic engineering, cloning and so on. As an artwork, the Opera brings these disparate temporalities together into an embodiment in the present. Humeau’s project thus demonstrates the entanglement between the time of microelectronics and that of the Mesozoic, between the Anthropocene and other ‘cenes.’ These works push against the fantasy of exceptionalism, undermining easy delineations and asserting the entanglement of the human with non-

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human materialities, temporalities and spatialities. At the same time, they move beyond anthropocentrism to elevate the agency of the formerly inert— exploring the liveliness, creativity, cognition and alienness of things much slower and much smaller, more archaic or anarchic, more machinic or more somatic. If the Anthropocene was an unsustainable algorithm, then we vitally need new models of logic and control for what is to come. Art has a unique ability to both take a position and perform it. In doing so, art offers ways to critique and reflect on our ongoing crisis as well as prototype alternative possibilities for a post-Anthropocene.

Notes 1

Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature, 415:23, 3 January 2002. doi:10.1038/415023a. 2 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities, 6:1, 2015. doi:10.1215/220119193615934. 3 Etienne Turpin and Heather Davis, “Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (S.l: Open Humanities Press, 2015) 4. 4 Robert Kowalski, “Algorithm—logic + control,” Communications of the ACM 22:7, 1979, 424. doi:10.1145/359131.359136. 5 Benjamin Bratton, “The Post-Anthropocene,” YouTube, 18 August 2015, . 6 Jason Moore, “Beyond the ‘Exploitation of Nature’? A World-Ecological Alternative,” last modified 25 April 2014 . 7 Moore: 14 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Book, 1995) 154. 11 Past participle of exhaurire “draw off, take away, use up, empty,” Douglas Harper, "exhaust," Online Etymology Dictionary. (accessed 16 December 2016). 12 Foucault: 1995 154. 13 Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) 34 14 Op.cit. 15 Herman Hollerith, “Patent US395782—Art of Compiling Statistics,” Google Patents, last modified 8 June 1889. .

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Robert Porter, Henry Gannett, and William Hunt, Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 1 (Bureau of the Census, 1895). 17 Michael T. Klare, The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012) 30. 18 Foucault: 1995, 154 19 Karl Marx, “The Working Day,” in Capital (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1955). 20 Microsoft, “Get It Done Day and Office 365 Help Balance Life’s Demands,” News Center. Last modified 7 November 2013. . 21 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (London: A & C Black, 2014). 22 Benjamin Bratton, “Rubbing the Clinamen Raw,” YouTube, 8 October 2015, . 23 Siobhán Dowling, “European Arts Cuts: Dutch Dance Loses out As Netherlands Slashes Funding,” The Guardian. Last modified 2 August 2012, . 24 Radio New Zealand, “Lotto Funding Plummets $25m,” Radio New Zealand. Last modified 1 April 2016. . 25 Kayla Anderson, “Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art And Design Face the Anthropocene,” MU. Last modified 7 September 2015. . 26 Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2014) 14. 27 Kitty Zijlmans, “Knight’s Move: The Idiosyncrasies of Artistic Research,” in Janneke Wesseling (ed.), See It Again, Say It Again: The Artist As Researcher, (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2011) 182. 28 Zijlmans: 2011, 182. 29 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2006) 13. 30 Rancière: 2006, 13. 31 Ibid., 15. 32 Katherine Hayles, “Speculative Aesthetics and Object-oriented Inquiry,” in Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century (New York, NY: Punctum Books, 2014) 178 33 Benjamin Bratton, “The Stack and the Post-human User: an Interview with 34 Benjamin Bratton,” Garden of Machines, curated by Klaus Kuitenbrouwer. Last modified 29 February 2015, . 34 D.J. Pangburn, “Pinar Yoldas Imagines Future Life Inside the Pacific Trash Vortex,” The Creators Project. Last modified 21 January 2014,

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. 35 Ben Dibley, “’The Shape of Things to Come:’ Seven Theses on the Anthropocene and Attachment,” Ecological Humanities, 52, May 2012. . 36 Shing Tat Chung, “A Superstitious Fund,” A Superstitious Fund. Last modified 1 July 2012, . 37 Dibley: 2012.

References Anderson, Kayla, “Ethics, Ecology, And The Future: Art And Design Face The Anthropocene,” MU. Last modified 7 September 2015. . Bratton, Benjamin, “The Stack and the Post-human User: an Interview with Benjamin Bratton,” Garden of Machines, curated by Klaus Kuitenbrouwer. Last modified 29 February 2015. . Crutzen, Paul J., “Geology of Mankind,” Nature, 415:23, 3 January 2002, doi:10.1038/415023a. Dibley, Ben, “‘The Shape of Things to Come:’ Seven Theses on the Anthropocene and Attachment,” Ecological Humanities, 52, May 2012. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May2012/dibley.html. Dowling, Siobhán, “European Arts Cuts: Dutch Dance Loses out As Netherlands Slashes Funding,” The Guardian. Last modified 2 August 2012. . Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Book, 1995). Haraway, Donna, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities, 6:1, 2015, 159-65. doi:10.1215/22011919-3615934. Harper, Douglas, “exhaust,” Online Etymology Dictionary.(). http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=exhaust, (accessed 16 December 2016).

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Hollerith, Herman, “Patent US395782—Art of Compiling Statistics,” Google Patents. Last modified 8 June 1889. . Klare, Michael T., The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012). Kolbert, Elizabeth, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (London: A & C Black, 2014). Marx, Karl, “The Working Day,” in Capital (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1955). Microsoft, “Get It Done Day and Office 365 Help Balance Life’s Demands,” News Center. Last modified 7 November 2013. . Pangburn, D.J., “Pinar Yoldas Imagines Future Life Inside the Pacific Trash Vortex,” The Creators Project. Last modified 21 January 2014. . Radio New Zealand, “Lotto Funding Plummets $25m,” Radio New Zealand. Last modified 1 April, 2016. . Rancière, Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: Continuum, 2006). Porter, Robert, Henry Gannett and William Hunt, Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 1 (Bureau of the Census, 1895). Tat Chung, Shing, “A Superstitious Fund,” A Superstitious Fund. Last modified 1 July 2012. . Turpin, Etienne, and Heather Davis, “Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (S.l: Open Humanities Press, 2015). Zijlmans, Kitty, “Knight’s Move: The Idiosyncrasies of Artistic Research,” in Janneke Wesseling (ed.), See It Again, Say It Again: The Artist As Researcher (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2011).



CHAPTER ELEVEN KNOWING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH ART BRIDIE LONIE

Weather is unpredictable but climate change is certain. Notions of human progress are undercut by the probability of weather bombs, fires, flooding, and oil and water wars. A non-compliant planetary partner challenges individual expectations of happiness and generational prosperity. Our companion species are suffering and dying. What is climate change? How can we know it and how can we operate within it? This chapter considers some aspects of the ways that the treatment of climate change in art has developed during this century. In so doing, it also considers the usefulness of the term The Anthropocene. The arts play the same role in human negotiation of climate change as they have done in such previous forms of societal change as struggles over iconoclastic or iconophiliac representations of spirituality, the relevance of realism to the nineteenth century search for social justice, the role of perspective in imperialism and colonialism, the usefulness of abstraction in early revolutionary Russia, the importance of documentary photography for social justice in the early twentieth century and the significance of conceptual art in institutional critique in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Some artists document, some adopt an instrumental role, some seek to explore the new understandings that the paradigm entails, while others comfort, reassure, and play out the on-going socialisation of transformational events. Some tell truth to power while some support it. Art lies within climate change, as a societal and institutional framework. As Jason W. Moore points out within the discourses of green socialism, climate change is the product of the exponential use of fossil fuels in generating profit through the industrialised production of food, consumer and military goods.1 The arts are primarily possible only within a societal framework that allows for unalienated labour, wherever the human may be placed in the social continuum. The artist uses products that have been made within the context of industrialised production that



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generally require on-going access to power sources. Exhibitions and artists travel across the planet. Even local initiatives use fuel. On an ideological level, the experience of engaging with art conveys value upon the subjectivity of the individual even in the context of relational situations. The individual’s rights to a good quality of life are entailed in the notion of art as a technology of the self. Art is both symbolic and a synecdoche of the privileging of the human over the non-human that is endemic in the depletion of the planet’s resources. This complicity with its attendant irony is the substrate of the changing understanding of humanity that today’s artists must negotiate. In seeking to draw a historical framework for art that engages with climate change the following generalizations appear to hold water. The environmental arts movements of the 1960s and 70s segued gradually into the production of works that demonstrated such characteristics as habitat loss and the environmental degradation produced by the ruthless destruction of environments in the industrialisation of fossil fuel production and agricultural monocropping. Artworks that spoke of singular or typical events became at the same time indicators of climate change. When Lucy Lippard curated Weather Report, Art and Climate Change in 2007 she drew on many artworks that had been designed originally as responses to earlier issues. 2 Among these were Kim Abeles’ ceramic plates that commemorated the smog days recorded during each United States Presidency since 1896, and now a measure of the exponential increase in fossil fuel emissions that contribute to climate change. In the same way, Patricia Johansen’s sustainable housing projects of the late 1960s were not made in the context of climate change but are relevant now. Particular art practices play roles appropriate to their genealogy. A new form of history painting visualizes new worlds, as in the apocalyptic paintings of Alex Rockman, paralleled here in Dunedin by those of Jenna Packer. New sculptural monuments are produced. Inigo Manglano Ovalle’s Iceberg R1ii011 Beyond the Irish Sea is a rapid prototype model of an iceberg placed on a white shipping container; that is, the figure of the iceberg standing on a plinth made of the carbon-heavy footprint of the trade that lies at the roots of climate change. Conceptual art’s slide toward visual culture enabled many didactic works that demonstrate the science of climate change or considered the sustainability of the products we use every day. Photographers produced documentation; Edward Burtynsky’s images of the scale of oil production and Chris Jordan’s images of mass consumption are well known, while here in Aotearoa artists like Jane Zusters and Fiona Clark critique the increasing industrialization of agriculture



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Fig. 11-1. Jenna Packer, Bread and Circuses, 2013-14, acrylic on canvas, 120.5 x 160.1. Collection of artist. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin.

and the petro-chemical industry’s destruction of habitat. Kristin O’Sullivan Peren’s Rubbishlegium revisits Joseph Banks’s Florilegium in blurred colourful images of the miasma produced by domestic waste. Communities of textile artists make patchwork quilts as a form of societal cohesion. Crochet forms demonstrate the connective tissue of ecological communities. Artists document with differing degrees of commentary the Polar regions, those places that photographer Anne Noble calls “the subconscious of climate change.”3 Digital artists such as the Australians Joyce Hinterding and David Haines make visible the electro-magnetic field of power pylons; Australia’s Carbon Arts and Keith Deverell’s project Building Run places on the front of a building a large digital screen of a runner whose speed records the building’s consumption of power. Carbon Arts and Climarte in Melbourne hold regular exhibitions and symposia. Community artists made community gardens. Conceptual artists such as Marjetica Potrþ work with communities to envisage new forms of social cohesion and governance. Some artists conveyed the concept of climate change through the production of new symbols or assemblages that drew together the complex parts and operations of climate change. Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s work, in its juxtaposition of cause and effect, performs this role.



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It is easy to consider particular aspects of climate change. They include melting ice, sea-level rise, methane release, scarce food resources and weather bombs. However it is harder to convey the wicked nature of the problematic of climate change. Only in understanding its wicked nature can we recognise that we are within it. While we are all aware that we make too much rubbish and can only control with difficulty our use of plastic, the political and participatory aspect of climate change is frustratingly hard to frame and is therefore often elided. Nomenclature plays an important role. Timothy Morton rejects the term climate change because it is ineffective and inaccurate, preferring to use the term global warming.4 Morton argues that the phenomenon requires a new ontology and posits climate change as a hyperobject, vastly extended in space and time but still a singularity. But ascribing singular agency to climate change might imply that we can remove agency from the humans who produce it and embrace it, retaining somehow our sense of self-worth, as Morton’s more recent Dark Ecology suggests.5 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change decided to use the term climate change rather than global warming, because global warming produces the climate change that impacts human and non-human life. Running alongside this debate was the development of the term Anthropocene. In 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed the Anthropocene, a term that was already informally in use, to indicate a new geological era.6 Their in-house interdisciplinary suggestion was published as a peer reviewed proposal in the journal Nature in 2002 and in 2016 the Stratigraphic Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy agreed to move toward a final ratification. 7 Between 2000 and 2016, the term gained acceptance in the more popular press as a focal point for the developing discourse around climate change. It moved quickly from being a way to describe a human-produced change from the relatively stable climatic system of the Holocene to the more unpredictable weather pattern of a hotter planet, to the political hot potato it is now. The problem is that any stratigraphic record for climate change is in its infancy. During the next two years, material will be gathered for the final ratification of the Anthropocene by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and this will probably be on the basis of a golden spike that recognizes the presence of “plastic, aluminium, and concrete particles, artificial radionuclides, changes to carbon and nitrogen isotype patterns, fly ash particles and a variety of fossilisable biological remains.”8 Despite the term’s inception in the recognition of global warming, the broader changes of the Anthropocene answer the stratigraphers’ requirements better than the stochastic qualities of climate change.



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Anticipating this decision, the Smithsonian Museum’s exhibition Art and the Anthropocene presented a set of images that, the curator Joanna Marsh argued, offered nine characteristics of the Anthropocene.9 Joanna Marsh, senior curator of contemporary interpretation at the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., notes: There are many artists thinking crucially about our human impact on the environment, which is what the Anthropocene is all about…They are responding to a much more heightened attention to biodiversity loss and the physical transformation of our landscape. It’s one trend in contemporary art. It’s reflective of a larger rise in environmental consciousness at all levels of life. 

Marsh drew on the existing archive of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History to do so and named nine categories. The first was “Devastating Beauty,” represented by a large drawing by Robert Longo of the first Chinese nuclear explosion in 1967. The work is from his series The Sickness of Reason (2003), which also featured drawings of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, perhaps not owned by the Smithsonian. She followed these with “A Prophetic Vision” exemplified by the dystopian Manifest Destiny, Alexis Rockman’s painting of a flooded Bronx Zoo. Two works pointed to the destructive power of the oil industry: “A Thirst for Resources,” Edward Burtynsky’s Oil Fields #2 Belridge, California, USA (2003) and “An Overreach Situation,” his Oil Spill #10 Oil Slick at Rip Tide, Gulf of Mexico, June 24, 2010. The Sixth Extinction was signaled by the title “The Finality of Extinction” with a small and ironic monument, named Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Passenger Pigeon, Laurel Roth Hope’s crocheted jacket on a hand-carved form of the extinct species the carrier pigeon. The one possible solution was an image of “Alternative Energy,” Mitch Epstein’s documentary photographs of local wind farms throughout mid-America. “Sustaining Wildness” was illustrated by Joann Brennan’s gentle image of two hands holding an egg with its troubling title Mallard Egg Research Testing Potential Chemical Contraceptives Designed to Manage Overabundant Canada Goose Populations, National Wildlife Research Centre, Fort Collins, Colorado (2000). The next category was “Human Imprint,“ Mark Dion’s New Bedford Cabinet (2001), one of his collections from the archaeological digs that demonstrate the increasing legacy of human consumption; and finally came the category “Mass Consumption” with Chris Jordan’s accumulation of cell phones, Cell phones #2, Atlanta (2005) from his series “Intolerable Beauty.” Marsh’s comment that the images are “reflective of a higher rise in environmental consciousness at



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all levels of Life,” cited earlier, indicates the dilution of thinking about climate change as such that appears to come with science’s notion of the Anthropocene. One feels that Marsh is in a hard place, where she can use artists to imply censure but cannot offer a political commentary. The exhibition broadly matches the attributes of the Anthropocene that the stratigraphers acknowledge to be the issues debated in the public understanding of the Anthropocene, reflected in such publications as the Economist. 10 These are the Sixth Extinction levels of plastic, levels of soot, changes in the environmental make-up of the planet and deposits of nitrogen in the soil.11 Marsh’s model retains the use of synecdoche but rejected the too familiar iceberg. In order to understand climate change and its implications its systemic nature must be appreciated. The debates around the term Anthropocene enabled this. Challenges to the term included the Capitalocene, the Necrocene, the Technocene, the Plantationocene and the Chthulucene. The dates for the inception of climate change varied according to the argument, as some saw its inception in the beginnings of industrialised agriculture in the Mesopotamian area, others argued for the long sixteenth century, the equally long nineteenth century with its initial year of 1784 and the use of the spinning jenny; the return to industrialised capitalism across the northern hemisphere in the years after World War II, a period now known as the great acceleration. Jason W. Moore’s argument for the term Capitalocene agrees with others who point out that not all humans have produced nor should take responsibility for the acceleration in the use of fossil fuels in capitalism’s drive for profit.12 Moore argues that capitalism has consistently depended on the four cheaps: labour, food, energy and raw materials—all involve unpaid for components and these will all be in jeopardy.13 The argument for the Plantationocene returns to the idea of the industrialisation of food production and the use of slavery. The Necrocene places the Sixth Extinction at its core. Advocates for the Technocene argue that human use of technology is the most defining quality and must be better understood. The word Anthropocene, then, while it began with the interdisciplinary thinking of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, has become an inflammatory term, appearing to be anthropocentric, placing humanity at the centre of the transformation of the planet’s systems. The question is then of humanity’s place within the planet’s systems. The debate around humanity’s place within the planet’s systems is coterminous with debates about the idea of an autonomous nature that provides a helpful background against which the human stands as a distinct figure, separate in her capacity to manage and organize human



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society. As with environmental art, artists’ focus on notions of nature segues into concerns around climate change. Here a thread emerges that runs from the ways that conceptual artists theorised nature to the use of conceptual art to explore systems themselves. One of the first artworks to engage with climate change, Newton Harrison’s San Diego as the Centre of the World (1974), led to The Harrison Studio’s apprentice piece “The Lagoon Cycle” that synthesised a ten-year set of projects around food production in estuarial areas around the Western Hemisphere, and in so doing debated the question of food production after the projected sea level rises produced by climate change.14 The Harrison Studio did not challenge explicitly the use of the fossil fuels that were causing climate change but set up a scenario in which the haves and the have-nots of the projected order finally came to the realization that they were going to have to consider one another when the oceans rose: “Will you feed me, when…” their protagonists ask each other.15 The Harrison Studio developed their practice to become an advisory project group contracted by organisations of all kinds across the planet to add to future planning the kinds of overarching metaphors that might mitigate the competitive nature of national boundaries and competition. They quickly understood climate change as a problem of systems, drawing on Jack Burnham’s proposal that artists should engage with systems rather than produce discrete objects.16 A recent project, Peninsular Europe, presents Europe in the geographical form it will have when the oceans rise and the glaciers melt. The two-year, and now on-going, Anthropocene Project of the Haus der Kunst der Welt in Berlin, 2013-14, placed systems thinking at the centre.17 During this project academics and theorists from the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities debated the ontology and epistemology of the Anthropocene using the device of a “Curriculum for the Anthropocene.” The following is an incomplete list of seminar titles up to October 2016: algorithmic intermediation and smartness; feral technologies; coevolutionary perspectives on the technosphere; sensing the insensible; scale; socio-ecological design; complexity: monitoring; earthly ethics; agency; participatory governance, and model. Each term entails systems thinking, that is, thinking across disciplines and discourses. Comparing this with Joanna Marsh’s synecdoches of the Anthropocene, we can see that the HKW’s epistemological approach asks for far more than the appalled recognition of what has happened and the offer of alternative energy sources, though these remain an aspect of the Anthropocene Project. Passivity is an ever-present danger. The artist Hayden Fowler has represented the Anthropocene as a round dais on which a very clean



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Fig. 11-2. Michele Beevors, Emu, 2017, wool, construction materials and wooden found objects. 200 x 80 x 60. Courtesy of the artist.



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caucasian human hatches from a nest of eggs into agricultural grass, and proceeds to feed and wash himself, ironising the notion that the human is inoffensive.18 Similarly paratactic projects present episodes in the life of the human as he, and occasionally she, blunder through different scenarios seeking shelter and accepting the winds of technological change without urgency or regret. Fowler’s works present the idiocies that have brought us to climate change. It is important to recognise these in order to move forward. But art’s roles in this context are many. To use the analogy of figure/ground thinking, if climate change is the figure from which the human emerges, the human must re-integrate herself into that field’s other constituent elements, as Donna Haraway argues in her model of the Anthropocene, the Chthulucene. Haraway proposes for this context, as she has done for others, that we rethink ourselves not as figure and ground but as entangled within a sympoetic system where previous distinctions between nature and culture fall apart.19 The images Haraway chooses to illustrate her model are Medusa-like, tentacular, and often crocheted. Haraway argues that we must “stay with the trouble;” we have no option. Michele Beevors offers local, unglamourized examples in her meditation on species loss in the form of the patient construction of anatomically correct skeletons covered with knitting that answers to the bone’s form. Beevors performs the emotional commitment that Haraway seeks, making the connections that Dipesh Chakrabarty argues constitute the era of climate change: the deep history that produces anatomical form, and the human history that consumes ihe planet’s resources. Beevors’s emu stands upon a painter’s palette along with Newton’s apple and tools symbolic of the sciences of the Enlightenment. Negotiating mourning through the nurturing warmth of wood, Beevors undercuts modernity’s characteristic separation between the human and other species; in her next exhibition two children will be included, anticipating a broader set of extinctions. The concept of The Anthropocene tests epistemological frameworks and limits as we negotiate what is simultaneously a new geological era, a new episteme and a new subjectivity. Its breadth enables artists to think through the period’s systemic complexity. Yet within that complexity climate change remains the most urgent problem. How much do we have to understand in order to act?





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Notes 1

Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2015). 2 Lucy Lippard, in Kirsten Gerdes (ed.), Weather Report: Art and Climate Change (Boulder, Colorado: Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007). 3 Reproduced in Gerdes: 2007. 4 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Posthumanities series, ed. Cary Wolfe, 27 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2013). 5 Jan Zalasciewicz and Colin Waters, “’The Anthropocene’” Environmental Science,” Oxford Research Encyclopaedias, 2015 accessed May 2017. Jan Zalasciewicz, Will Steffan, Reinhold Leinfelder, Mark Williams and Colin Waters, “Petrifying Earth Processes: The Stratigraphic Imprint of Key Earth System Parameters in the Anthropocene,” Theory, Culture and Society, 34 (2-3) (2017) 83-104 Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) University of Leicester . Jan Zalasciewicz, Colin Waters and Martin J. Head “Anthropocene: Its Stratigraphic Basis,” Nature, 541 (19 January 2017). Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Politics of Climate Change is More than the Politics of Capitalism,” Theory, Culture & Society, 34 (2-3) (2017) 25-37. 6 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter, 41 (2000) 17-18. 7 Jan Zalasiewicz, “Working Group on the Anthropocene," Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. . 8 Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) University of Leicester . 9 . 10 24 May 2011. 11 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015) 159-65. 12 Jason W. Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2016). 13 . 14 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, “The Lagoon Cycle,” catalogue, Cornell University Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca NY: New York Office of University Publications, Cornell University, 1985). 15 “The Seventh Lagoon, the Ring of Fire, the Ring of Water,” in Harrison and Harrison:1985.



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16

Jack Burnham, “Systems Aesthetics,” in Melissa Ragain (ed.), Dissolve into Comprehension, Writings and Interviews 1964-2004 (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2015). 17 Haus der Kulturen der Welt, “Anthropocene Project,” . 18 . 19 Donna Haraway, “Staying with the Trouble,” in Moore: 2016.

References Burnham, Jack, “Systems Aesthetics,” in Melissa Ragain (ed.), Dissolve into Comprehension, Writings and Interviews 1964-2004 (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2015). Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter, 41 (2000). Gerdes, Kirsten (ed.), Weather Report: Art and Climate Change (Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with EcoArts Boulder, Colorado: Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007). Harrison, Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, “The Lagoon Cycle,” catalogue Cornell University Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca NY: New York Office of University Publications, Cornell University, 1985). Haus der Kulturen der Welt, "Anthropocene Project," . Lippard, Lucy, in Gerdes: 2007. Moore, Jason W., Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2015). —. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, California: PM Press, 2016). Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects, Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Posthumanities series, ed. Cary Wolfe, 27 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2013). Zalasiewicz, Jan, “Working Group on the 'Anthropocene’,” Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy .



CHAPTER TWELVE PNjKEKO AND BUTTER PAPERS: REFLECTIONS ON AN ENVIRONMENTAL ART PRACTICE CATHARINE SALMON

On the road I travel every day, the pnjkeko (Porphyrio porphyrio melanotus), wander back and forth, flashing their bright red bills and forehead shields. Locals move slowly and watch out for them, but other drivers, unfamiliar with the swamphen’s tendency to dart across the road unexpectedly, drive at the usual speed. Mostly the pnjkeko make it, but sometimes they don’t. Being birds, preoccupied with what they are doing, and with a limited capacity to calculate risk, this scenario is unsurprising. What is surprising is that we, who can evaluate risk, are not dissimilar to the meandering pnjkeko in that we often fail to do so. Consider two points of view: “We need to be reminded of the nightmare ahead...We’re heading towards a ruined planet,” and “I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare.”1 Both statements were written by environmental advocates, referencing the words of Martin Luther King to highlight the critical environmental problems we face. But there the similarity ends, because with the first, James Gustave Speth argues that only by being confronted by our environmental risks will we be mobilised to act, and with the second, Nic Marks contends that in perceiving the environmental risks as nightmare scenarios, we become so frightened we manifest the “freeze and flight” syndrome and cannot act.2 What they do agree on is that King’s “I have a dream” speech conveys hope, values and vision. Where they diverge is that Gustave Speth believes our only hope is to provoke the population to act through exposure to a challenging vision of the future, whereas Marks proposes community engagement and mobilisation through a hopeful vision and solution-focused actions.

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Chapter Twelve We tack between inside and outside. Full of purpose one minute, the next a small, crumpled stillness, invisible to the naked sky.3

As an artist making work about environmental issues, the question of what approach to take is equally salient. Should the emphasis be on hope or alarm? Clearly, there are multiple environmental problems. Water, land and the atmosphere are all under pressure and changing in ways that are detrimental to human needs and the survival of the biosphere.4 Clearly, we have to do something about it, or, more precisely, change what we do. However, buffered by our reasonably comfortable lives and feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues and the apparent impossibility of making a real difference, many of us feel stuck. We do little things of course, remembering the eco-bags for our groceries, installing energy efficient light bulbs, recycling our household detritus as per public authority instructions and turning off the running tap while cleaning our teeth. These all help somewhat but they merely skim the surface. Scientists writing about critical environmental problems see them as arising from institutions, that is, established norms and rules which guide our actions and understanding, and which are relatively durable. Some institutions shape behaviour voluntarily, in that people desire to comply with accepted social norms; while other institutional processes, such as environmental regulations, are bolstered by legal enforceability. Yet institutions do change with time, reflecting shifts in values and social learnings.5 And institutional change can also lead to, or involve, legislative and policy change: for example, a curbing of pre-existing rights to destroy biodiversity or to discharge global warming gases (through mechanisms like carbon pricing). These processes of institutional change are contingent on public engagement with issues or perspectives first raised by historical events, such as the 2012 Hurricane Sandy’s flooding of New York, or by influential thought leaders, educators and communicators. Alongside such things as education and the media, the creative arts are one mode of stimulating engagement with environmental discourse. Sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall once described culture as a set of practices or processes, “a series of exchanges of meaning.”6 He likened these exchanges to a dialogue through which we make sense of our world and proposed that it is through our daily engagement with one another and “things” that meaning is generated. Further to this, art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto noted that the practice of art provided a rich site for engagement with “the issues that affect us most closely in our humanity.”7 With its capacity for material and conceptual provocations, art

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can provide a valuable means through which we can see, feel, perceive, know and respond in fresh ways. As an artist, I too am involved in a dialogue of “making sense” of this world and connecting with others. My intertextual interventions are part whimsical and part serious—a series of exchanges with the “resonance of things.” In these interventions, I work with the poetics of beauty (and the aversive), playfulness (formal and actual) and “the familiar.” Making work about environmental matters has been a significant strand in my art practice for more than twenty years, partly stimulated by Josephs Beuys’ view of art as a “spiritual good” which “could help transform society,” and yet retain, and deepen, its mythic and material resonances.8 And, like most artists, my practice springboards from what personally compels. In this chapter I will discuss four series: Heat (2010-2011); Portrait of a (Milk) Jug (2000); Nature Morte (2013-2015); and Bubble (2016). To situate these exhibitions in a broader context, I will consider them in relation to the writings and art of others, some personal reflections and the response of those who engaged with the works. Developments in two arenas—climate change science, and intensification of land use in Aotearoa/New Zealand—have informed these exhibitions but equally they reflect my childhood growing up in the paddocks, tree groves and creeks of a farm. I realized the importance of this experience as I became aware of my tendency, in fact my deep satisfaction, for gathering and sorting. I have also come to recognize that the repetitive tasks of the farm, the abundance and resonance of multiples (of cultivated produce) and the rural “helping” ethos have all influenced my art practice. In quite another way, my childhood play in the farm network of springs and creeks—the Awarua, famous for its crystal clear waters—has profoundly impacted on my concerns about the current pollution of New Zealand’s waterways by agribusiness.9 And more lyrically, some reverberations of the climate— vivid blue skies, lenticular clouds, chill mornings, frozen puddles and the sensation of irrigation-pipe cold metal in the intense summer heat—stay with me still.

Heat This childhood experience of searing heat reverberated, albeit tangentially, in the 2010 installation titled Heat, a collaborative work with the poet Lynn Davidson. In this work, Heat was metonymic (alluding to rising global temperatures due to climate change) and literal (referring to the temperature inside the gallery). The site was a gallery 10 by 5 metres with 3-metre floor to ceiling window-walls facing north, directly into the sun.

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In the high temperatures of late summer, when the concrete quad in front of the gallery and the polished concrete floor within it had absorbed the radiant heat of weeks the closed exhibition space became intensely hot. For the exhibition, the temperature and atmosphere were maintained by choosing the optimum time of the year for these conditions and keeping every opening, except for a brief entry and exit moment, shut. Through the day, the heat of the space became increasingly oppressive and was magnified by playing a recording of the intense, incessant clicking sounds of cicadas (Amphipsalta zelandica). In the gallery, constructed of glass and hard composite surfaces, the audio echoed and so seemed louder and more staccato than usual. It would also penetrate far into the adjacent public library. Although redolent of summer, the audio’s unceasingly shrill quality in the usually quiet library was unsettling. In the gallery interior, natural materials with associations of late summer sparsely populated the space: cicada exoskeletons, sunflower petals and akeake (Dodonaea viscosa) seedpods with their thin, flat, papery “wing.” On the walls, the cicada shells were pinned like specimens—meandering down to the floor in a random fashion or swarming dangerously like bees. Thronging and earthbound trajectories are the opposite of cicadas’ normal behaviour and the “encounterers”10 who knew about these insects, as many do, having gathered them as children or observed them in their gardens, found this “alarming,” “creepy” and “really disturbing,” concluding that “it’s too hot even for the [heat adapted] cicadas.” The configuration of exoskeletons had a formal appeal nonetheless and was described by one viewer who stopped outside the window as like “an enchanting constellation” and another as a “crazy, mad collector’s collection.” On the windows, hundreds of akeake flowers, glued with dissolvable gum, stippled that surface in rising thermo-rhythm as if fuelled by the interior heat. During the daylight hours, the sun made flame-like shadow patterns with the akeake on the floor. On one wall near the corner furthest from the entrance door there was one square Corbusier-like window with a deep sill that framed a tree outside. Here, the akeake smothered the glass. Directly below the floor radiated vibrant colour: the intense yellow-orange of drying sunflower petals. These sunflowers inspired the poem that Lynn Davidson wrote and recorded as an integral part of the work. Playing softly in the gallery, this reading of the poem sometimes penetrated the rise and fall of the cicada sound, but to hear it clearly, fully, a listener had to sit on the sun-silvered wooden chair placed under the speaker.

Pnjkeko and Butter Papers: Reflections on an Environmental Art Practice 177 All over the earth Sunflowers like summery girls Stand in the field With their flimsy little green bags packed. Surely they are too young to go? Where are their mothers?11

In my initial gatherings of the sunflowers, Lynn and I journeyed together. While I gathered petals, she had gathered essences, sensations and imaginings. The procedure for collecting the petals was quite precise—a gentle pulling away of the petals, leaving the head of the flower, pollen heavy for the bees, in situ. As with all gathering of natural materials, the process took many weeks. First, an abundant source of flowers had to be located (a large field and a generous farmer), followed by exploration of collection methods that ensured the protection of the ecosystem (observing and protecting the bees’ pollen collection patterns), and finally collecting and preparing for presentation (spreading and drying). In Heat, and only on a few days, late in the afternoon when there was no dusk haze and the arc of the sun was just so, the sun’s rays reached across the gallery floor for a short time and illuminated the vivid cadmium yellow deep hue of the desiccated sunflower petals. When this illumination event occurred, it prompted me to recall Tacita Deans’ Green Ray (2001) project, when she captured on film the phenomena of light observed by the eye at sunset.12 It was not Deans’ film, however, but a composition that was both a painting and a sculpture, by her contemporary Anya Gallaccio, that had been influential.13 “Preserve Beauty” (1991) was composed of 800 red gerbera (Gerbera jamesonii) pressed between the gallery’s front window and another pane of glass. Flattened live flowers that withered, decayed and even speckled the floor with detritus, made allusion to Vanitas painting, a still life trope that particularly intrigued. In the 1990s, some of my environmental investigations conflated still life, diorama and landscape tropes, but the material vocabulary was always the luminosity of oil paint. Gallaccio’s choice of materials, scale of installation and the temporal nature of her work drew me back to reflect more deeply on the practices of Joseph Beuys, Ann Hamilton and Cornelia Parker. Their penchant for “working the floor,” the light and unexpected spaces in a site, and often using materials that transmuted, decayed and sometimes smelt during a show, was inspiring. Many of these artists’ pieces were horizontal floor works that changed over time. According to critic Leo Steinberg, “the horizontal is to making

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as the vertical of the Renaissance picture plain is to seeing.”14 A work on the floor involves a more active involvement; we walk along it, take care not to walk on it or chose to do so. We become more aware of the body and actions of the artist, their choice of intercessions in handling and placement. To engage with it fully we have to get very close, which is the equivalent of leaning into an image on a wall, but far more intimate. In bending over or crouching we are somehow implicated within the work, especially if our olfactory senses are also roused. With Heat, those who returned over the course of the exhibition noted the sunflower petals had shrivelled and revealed slithers of grey concrete. Moreover, as they crouched, they smelt the aroma that, over the weeks, altered from sour to sweet, described variously as like “compost,” “tobacco” and “death.” Heat was my first major aesthetic exploration using natural materials and there were distinct differences in the way I moulded each of them in the space.15 The akeake were installed in a random patterning, whereas it was an “entomologist turn” for the cicada pinning and a gestural action for the petals. Although “gestural” carries an art historical resonance, and the sunflower petals were conceived as a “sweep” of colour, the gesture was more akin to a toss of barley for hens in the farmyard or the wind clumping fallen petals together in the paddock. Despite their success in a shadow-creating role, the akeake seed heads were the least resolved part of the work. Days were spent gluing them in one layout before deciding to remove them and installing them in another. Perhaps because the akeake traversed a large “framing” expanse of glass, by default an “image effect” was generated. This is not so surprising considering previous engagement with painting formats. More significantly it reveals a deeper resonance; the reverberations of the painterly image permeating an installation practice.

Milk Jugs: Still Lives in a Landscape The genres of landscape and still life have always been a fascination. Perhaps it is because as a farm kid I made things for the local agricultural show, such as flower arrangements, displays of produce and decorated eggs. Or that my hobbies as a child were orientated around natural history collecting and collating, in particular flora, rocks and moths. Perhaps it is because all the paintings in my childhood home were either “landscape” or “still life.” And that every day we looked and walked across a striking terrain and everyone spoke of it as “the landscape.” Closer observation and eventual academic study in the visual arts revealed the formulaic and cliché renderings of much landscape and still life painting. Nevertheless, it was apparent that many painters continued to

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produce such works and delighted in their production. Contemporary artists, if they considered them at all, approached these tropes with an ironic edge. In 1993, the artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid used questionnaires and opinion polls to survey Americans and ascertain what kind of art people would prefer. Later they followed up in Russia, France, Scandinavia and Kenya and the outcome was the same. The “The Most Wanted Painting” was a peopled landscape with some animals and blue skies.16 It was apparent that if the landscape genre engaged the public, then it could be a useful means for communicating ideas about environmental issues. My initial genre interventions took the form of a painting series of jugs set in New Zealand rural landscapes—Buller, Pomahaka Valley, Waikato, Takaka, Southland, McKenzie Basin.17 In these locales, dairy farming was expanding exponentially, yet the impacts were not being accounted for or mitigated. Diorama-like, these painted landscapes seemed staged, as if a backdrop for the jug “as an artefact” that had successfully survived the collapse of its habitat. In the bottom right corner, instead of an artist’s signature there was an exactly lettered word in formal (British Museum) Baskerville font, labelling the “source” of the image: Nitrate, Phosphate, Methane, Nitrous Oxide, Giardia and Cryptosporidium. Exploration of the worked rural landscape painted on very large loose canvases followed. These were somewhat like romanticised vistas that although initially visually seductive, slowly revealed their prickly environmental problems. This stratagem to beguile, then undo the mood and reveal the disjunctions, elicited complaints of “I thought I was looking at a lovely painting of hills and a river and then it made me think of a skin disease.” And, “why have you put those ugly words on this beautiful jug painting?” Drawing the viewer into a beguiling scenario and then revealing its problematic issues began to evolve as a strategy for communicating environmental concerns and prompting questions. My gradual shift from working within the painting format to working in a space had its origins in experiencing the works of Felix GonzalesTorres and Ann Hamilton at the 1996 Sydney Biennale. Felix GonzalesTorres’ Untitled (Placebo Landscape for Roni) was composed of 1,200 lbs of candies wrapped in gold cellophane that, like a luminous carpet, covered the entire floor of the gallery except for an outer, walkable border. Visitors were encouraged by gallery staff to open the wrapper and eat the contents. In the opening process a silver “inner” was revealed. The chromatic transformation as this giant “rectangle” of gold, increasingly freckled with silver wrappers, was enchanting. Equally stirring was Hamilton’s Bearings, consisting of two floor to ceiling curtains on giant

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hoops, like skirts, that slowly rotated and enabled “a form that is both a space that can be occupied and a thing.”18 The “extraordinary sensory awareness and materiality in this work,” “the transformation of place” and evocations of “remembrance and transience,” common to Hamilton and Gonzales-Torres, reverberated long after.19 Their work stimulated my own development of an installation practice working with assisted readymades (manufactured multiples), found objects (which at times included my own, earlier, paintings) and natural forms. These explorations with the resonances of things naturally led to a reengagement with the still life genre. Norman Bryson, in the foreword for his work Four Essays on Still Life Painting, while recognising that still life painting is “the genre historically constructed as the lowest category of picture making,” emphasised its universal presence across cultures and time.20 While acknowledging conceptual and ideological divergences, Bryson identified the shared connections of art around a “culture of artefacts.”21 In his essay “Abundance,” Bryson discussed the materiality and semantic resonances of still life painting in the Netherlands of the seventeenth century. The iconography of this period and place reveals the domestic indulgences and imperial appetites of the times. Exquisitely rendered dead game birds, finely crafted culinary items and sumptuous feasts were common subjects. Equally palpable were symbols of the impermanence of life, allegories of vice and virtue and collected elements that reveal a profound curiosity about the natural world.

Nature Morte Under the rubric of my Nature Morte series, these tropes and redolent signifiers provided important stimuli in the development of a series of four installations. The title, Nature Morte, the French expression for still life (literally dead nature), seemed an apt metaphor for the environmental impacts of our agricultural production. More tellingly, the wings of dead birds featured in three iterations. Two of the works also included butter papers that emitted a discernible, albeit subtle, rancid odour. The first of the Nature Morte series were entirely wall-nailed bird wings enclosed or fleeing empty gilt picture frames. Similar in proportions to those used for still life paintings hanging in domestic settings, these gold painted frames communicated “precious.” What were truly “precious” were the birds that had been accidentally killed and left to be pummelled into flatness. Sadly, few drivers stopped and moved them off the road. Salvaged from the asphalt and presented as intact wings, they drew admiring exclamations

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such as “I never realised how iridescent kingfisher wings are.” However, the seduction of beauty equally gave way to mournful observations such as “It’s tragic so many (“hawks,” “finches,” “native birds”) are killed on our roads.” The series’ title, and my parodic allusion to the Dutch seventeenth century renderings of game birds, also reflected my reading of Mark Doty’s essay Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy.22 For Doty, the potency of still life lies in the capacity of “the object to carry meaning,” and the work in its entirety to inspire “a principle of attention.” “To think through things: that is the still life painter’s work—and the poet’s.” Although he was discussing painting, Doty’s “faith in the capacity of the object to carry meaning,” enriched my musings about the currency of still life as a conceptual and aesthetic mode for connection.23

Fig. 12-1. Catharine Salmon, Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl II, 2013, installation detail

In the second of the Nature Morte series, the pnjkeko featured alone. As previously, in taxidermy mode, the pnjkeko’s black wings were tenderly prepared and the carcasses buried, although this time, the legs were also kept. These legs, the wings, the lids of plastic milk bottles, a kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides) bread board “shelf” and a readymade—a small white jug—became the material elements in Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl.24 It was a “still life vocabulary,” but in the expanded field of

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installation practice. Now activating a specific site—the white walled gallery with wooden floor and directional lighting, these elements conjured a very different tableau.25 In this site, every element in the space, and the space between the elements, and the total space the work occupied, became a still life unpacked. Even before entering the gallery, a horizontal line of pnjkeko wings, paired, as if frozen in flight were visible high up on the wall. These four “flying” pairs and one solitary wing were playful in their “dance” and beautiful in their shiny blackness and fluorescing indigo blue accents. However, for many encounterers, this ambience was undone. They perceived “dark” and “menacing” allusions and reacted to the “abrasiveness” of their road kill origin.26 On the adjacent wall was a shelf constructed from a round breadboard, painted white then halved for the top and quartered for the rightangled supporting strut underneath. The final quarter, placed carefully in the corner below, cleared the floor on 6mm nail “legs.” These oversized tacks, with their forged square edges and piercing points made a wry reference to the trompe-l’oeil nails of still life and other far more ferocious painting iconographies. On the shelf was a jug from which pnjkeko feet protruded. When glanced at from a distance, the pnjkeko legs looked like “flax flowers” or a “pretty foliage still life,” but on closer scrutiny they revealed their disturbing actuality. At the other end of the space, on the floor 15cm out from the wall, was a long, straight line of ninety-three green-top milk bottle lids. En masse, the lids exuded an alternative fluorescence to the wings, their vivid 375 Pantone-green signaled “healthy-eating-choice.” It was definitely not “green for environment” considering the “megatons of wastes….dumped in…rivers” and its plastic artificiality (along with the disappearing pukeko legs) was more “post nature” than reminiscent of vivid “spring-green grass growth.” 27 In the third iteration of Nature Morte, installed in exactly the same gallery, the solitary, unpaired pnjkeko wing had returned. Isolated, it appeared to plummet. The shelf was back too, although it was empty, the white jug had disappeared. But, on the wall adjacent was a “found” painting with a tabletop at exactly the same height. Sitting on it was a painted jug and below it the signature Nitrate. Near the painting, half on the wall and half on the floor, was an oblique rectangle constructed from forty butter papers, silver inners up. The folded-out butter papers, with their epicurean evocations and associations with the gridding of paddocks on the land, severely contrasted with the realities of the mega production of low-value commodity milk solids. The green bottle tops had reappeared and now echoed the nitrate-fertilised grass colour in the painting. However, the tops had doubled in number and prompted an email that ended with

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“the [plastic bottle cap] line quite close to the wall don’t allow getting to the other side and if you do step over you just collide with the wall…the spoiling of land…these liquids milk and water—the contamination of one to produce the other...we are all so implicated.” Another visitor lamented, “This all feels so unbalanced and unstable. I want to fix it but it’s really about us not fixing the dairy pollution isn’t?”

Fig. 12-2. Catharine Salmon, Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl II, 2014, installation view.

Bubble This play of the conceptual and formal instabilities of the Nature Morte butter paper “oblique” and green top multiples have informed the most recent exhibition, Bubble (2016).28 In the gallery space, three hundred and fifty plastic green bottle tops protruded from the walls, floor and ceiling of the gallery in a formal perspectival layout. Changing viewpoints caused an optical morphing: the rows bent, the circle configuration folded and the subtle (intentional) misalignments disrupted any aspiration for perfection. Playful on first view, the recognition of the quantity of green tops begins to pall, prompting the question— “I wonder how much we consume?” In an adjacent, adjoining space hung a painting, a blurred jug in which poetics and emetics, memory and tract collided. And there was a supplement,

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information sheets from the Ministry of the Environment and the Fonterra Dairy Company about the correlations between dairying and greenhouse gases. The installation might have been optically playful, the painting suitably enigmatic (or inscrutable) but it was not possible for a reader to avoid the implications of the text. From curiosity about personal, domestic consumption, conversation broadened to “This means our six litres of milk produces ‘x’ emissions every week!” and “NZ’s dependence on dairying is a huge problem for our rivers, but the greenhouse gases are a problem for our planet.” Like the afterimage from the green bottle tops, the disquieting facts reverberated.

Fig. 12-3. Catharine Salmon, Bubble, 2016, installation view.

Strategy, Register and Resonance Working with the “resonances” of things involves the production or collection of objects. I choose to minimize the use of further resources by working with elements that already exist and able to be readily gathered. Akeake grow abundantly on the coast where I live, pnjkeko roam across the paddocks and roads close by and cicada deposit their exoskeletons on our trees every summer. The plastic green trim-milk lids were accumulated at home over many years while certain things, like the jug, breadboard (yet to be assisted to realize its final form) and the sunflowers were deliberately

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sought out. The jug is a readymade in that there are multiples of the same, but it was a wry play on the found object too, in that I reached into the back of the cupboard and found it there. And it is that relationship with the hand, and the “creaturely acts of eating and drinking” common to all humanity, that extends its resonance beyond the remembrance of childhood farmkitchen cups of tea.29 But it is that memory too, of course. In contrast, the hundreds of sunflowers were located and collected for their colour and summer poetics yet equally they intertextually stretched towards Van Gogh. His painterly representations of sunflowers are so haptic, so imbued with materiality that they reach back to the real thing. And those gathered sunflowers petals also carried an “introduced to New Zealand” status. This characteristic paralleled the prevalence of exotic flowers in the seventeenth century Dutch still life, which reflected human propensity for global dispersal of flora (and fauna).30 Today, it is all about the dispersal of weeds and sediment in the waterways and compounding greenhouse gases. But what strategy and register is best for engaging with such complexity? Should it be confronting or seducing, overt or implicit, concrete or metaphoric? In Heat, for example, the parched seed heads, desiccated petals, insect shells and empty chair (with absent table) alluded to memento mori, whereas in the Nature Morte series the interventions opened up what was not there—the lives of birds, cow shit and greenhouse gases. What was present was us, the consumer, with our “exuberant enjoyment of plenty” in the context of a commodified nature.31 We are all complicit, but we cannot be like the preoccupied pnjkeko and not recognise the risks of our environmental predicament. We have to keep looking and talking and thinking and making. That is, making visible, so we are moved to act. Or, as Mark Doty put it, to be attentive to the particular resonance of “things” can open up a space whereby they can become “advocates of intimacy…embodiments of paradox…witnesses to earth, here, this moment, now.”32

Notes 1

James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2008) 231-2. Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index|TED Talk, TED.com. Accessed 3 September 2016. . 2 Marks: 2010.

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Lynn Davidson, poem excerpt in Lynn Davidson and Catharine Hodson, Heat II, installation, Nelson: g_space Gallery, 2011. 4 Speth: 2008, XX –XXI. IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (AR4), IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. . 5 Arild Vatn, Institutions and the Environment (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2005) and Guy Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science: the New Institutionalism, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum Books, 2012). 6 Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publication, 1997) 28-9. 7 Arthur Danto, “Hegel, Biedermeir and the Intractably Avante-garde” in Linda Weintraub (ed.), Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society (Litchfield, CT: Art Insights, Inc, 2009) 16. 8 Mark Rosenthal, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments; Published. on the Occasion of the Exhibition (London: Tate Modern Publishers, 2008) 36 and 200. 9 Cawthron No. 61. "The Ecology of Spring Creek—Awarua." Home— Marlborough District Council. . Accessed 7 January 2017. “The State of New Zealand’s Environment 1997,” Ministry for the Environment, 259-310. “Environment New Zealand 2007,” Ministry for the Environment. . Accessed 7 January 2017. 10 Danto: 2009 (“Encounter”—the term word coined by the American art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto to denote engagement with agency, not a detached, distanced viewer) 16. 11 Lynn Davidson, poem excerpt in Lynn Davidson and Catharine Hodson, Heat I, installation, Fishbowl Gallery: 2010. 12 Tacita Dean et al., Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006) 20-21. 13 Anya Gallaccio, Anya Gallaccio: Chasing Rainbows (Glasgow: Tramway, 1999) 10-12, 40-41. 14 Leo Steinberg, “The Flatbed Picture Plane from Other Criteria,” MIT— Massachusetts Institute of Technology. . Accessed 6 January 2017. 15 Rosenthal, Mark, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments (London: Tate Publ., 2005) 42. 1616 Danto: 2009, 13-14. 17 Hodson, Catharine. Portrait of a Milk Jug, Series of six oil paintings, Nelson: The Fishbowl Gallery, 1998.

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Joan Simon and Ann Hamilton, Ann Hamilton (New York: Gregory R Miller & Co., 2006) 151. 19 Natalie King, Natalie. “10th Biennale of Sydney Text Page.” MADA. Accessed 10 January 2017. “Felix Gonzalez-Torres—Roni Horn—Sammlung Goetz.” . Accessed 10 January 2017 20 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 2012) 9. 21 Bryson: 2012, 13. 22 Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002) 5-70. 23 Doty: 2002, 9. 24 Catharine Salmon, Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl I, installation, Nelson: Refinery Artspace, 2013. 25 Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins: A Critical Theory of Postmodernism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993) 154. 26 Arthur Danto, “Beauty for Ashes” in Benezra, Neal et al. (eds), Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum, 1999) 184. 27 Barbara Kingsolver cited by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010) 50-51. Nicholas Haig, “There, There. There. Catharine Salmon's Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl,” in Pigeon (October 2013) 6-9. “Managing Farm Nitrogen,” Waikato Regional Council, 2016. . Accessed 6 January 2017. 28 Bubble details. 29 Bryson: 2012, 13. 30 Bryson: 2012, 104. 31 Bryson: 2012, 15. 32 Doty: 2002, 70.

References Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Benezra, Neal, Olga M. Viso, Arthur C. Danto, Chris Gilbert, and MarieLouise Marquis (eds), Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century (Ostfildern: Smithsonian Institution, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1999).

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Bryson, Norman, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 2012). Crimp, Douglas, On the Museum's Ruins: A Critical Theory of Postmodernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). Danto, Arthur, “Hegel, Biedermeir and the Intractably Avante-garde” in Linda Weintraub (ed.), Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970s-1990s (Litchfield, CT: Art Insights, Inc., 2009). Davidson, Lynn and Catharine Hodson, Heat I, installation, Nelson: The Fishbowl Gallery, 2010. Davidson, Lynn and Catharine Hodson, Heat II, installation, Nelson: g_space Gallery, 2011. Dean, Tacita, Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner and Germaine Greer, Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006). Doty, Mark, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). “Felix Gonzalez-Torres—Roni Hor —Sammlung Goetz.” . Accessed 10 January 2017. Gallaccio, Anya, Anya Gallaccio: Chasing Rainbows (Glasgow: Tramway, 1999). Haig, Nicholas, “There, There. There. Catharine Salmon's Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl,” Pigeon, October 2013, 6-9. Hall, Stuart, “The Work of Representation” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publication, 1997). Catharine Hodson, Portrait of a Milk Jug, series of six oil paintings, Nelson: The Fishbowl Gallery, 1998. “IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007 (AR4),” IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. n.d. . King, Natalie, “10th Biennale of Sydney Text Page,” MADA. Last modified 1996. . Marks, Nic, “The Happy Planet Index| TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript| TED.com.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, 2010. . Peters, B. Guy, Institutional Theory in Political Science: The New Institutionalism, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2012).

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Rosenthal, Mark, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments; Published. on the Occasion of the Exhibition, “Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments,” Presented at The Menil Collection, Houston, 8 October, 2004–2 January 2005; Tate Modern, London, 4 February-2 May 2005 (London: Tate Publ., 2005). Salmon, Catharine, Bubble, installation, Nelson: Refinery Artspace, 2016. Salmon, Catharine, Nature Morte: Milk Jug and Waterfowl I and II, installation, Nelson: Refinery Artspace, 2013 and 2014. Simon, Joan, and Ann Hamilton, Ann Hamilton (New York: Gregory R Miller & Co, 2006). Speth, James Gustave, and David Zinn, The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Steinberg, Leo, “The Flatbed Picture Plane from Other Criteria,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. . Accessed 6 January 2017. Vatn, Arild, Institutions and the Environment (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2006). Waikato Regional Council, “Managing Farm Nitrogen,” 2016. Accessed 6 January 2017. .

CHAPTER THIRTEEN ROCKS BY THE SEA: AN ARTIST’S NOTES ON HIS GROWING AWARENESS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NEED FOR CULTURAL REAPPRAISAL NIGEL BROWN

Fig. 13-1. Nigel Brown, A Discussion Paper Written on Western Art, 2011, oil and acrylic on board, 165.1 x 124.8 x 5.5. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photo: Glenn Frei.

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Introduction Awareness of climate change has crept up on some of us slowly. Today New Zealand’s media seems almost fixated on the weather, but a lot less on coastal erosion. Though the drama and wreckage of “extreme weather events” (as we’ve come to know storms) are covered by newsmakers with almost ghoulish glee, only infrequently do we hear this connected to the underlying truth of what we face, in common with the rest of the world: extreme weather will inevitably become more frequent, more destructive, as a result of greenhouse gases that human beings pump into the atmosphere. While climate change requires global awareness and action, nothing has greater impact on our consciousness than that which happens in our own backyard. I’m talking of course, from my position as a New Zealander— my pivot of awareness, my experiences living in various places in this country, my locational bias. In New Zealand now, we can see and feel climate change. We can see it in the eroded cliffs and sand dunes when we drive to our childhood beaches. It’s in the severity of slips and landslides that take out entire roads when there’s been a storm; the long hot spells of unseasonal dry weather that make the farmers anxious and end up being discussed in serious tones on National Radio. At some point this becomes a communal anxiety or a neurosis. For me personally it has lurked in the background for some time, affecting how I view art—my own work as well as that of others, and artists from past eras. Is there such a thing as a “typical New Zealander”? If there is, I don’t suppose I’m it. I’ve spent my life searching for meaning in my work, dabbing away day after day with a paintbrush, reflecting on the world, but carrying old heroes as influential baggage and reference points. Heroes like my father, the poet R.F. Brown, and the painters Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch. If these people have something in common it might be a certain gloomy view of society or maybe simply a serious, suspicious outlook.

Part One I’d like to think I also have a more stoical and humorous side to my nature, influenced by a mother, who lived to sixty despite muscular dystrophy and the birth of three children. My mother had little time for defeatism or indulgence, and always encouraged us to appreciate the smaller things in life.

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I see myself as a child of the 1960s and 70s. In an early photo I wore my father’s Air Force officer cap with infant delight—but I was somehow also indoctrinated against war. This was not due so much to my upbringing, but was more the result of outside influences such as seeing the atmospheric reflection of an American nuclear test on Johnston Atoll, the Peter Watkins film The War Game, as well as the inspiration of politicians such as David Lange and Norman Kirk and a whole wave of anti-nuclear sentiment that lead me to cofound VAANA [Visual Artists Against Nuclear Arms]—as well as the whole hippie revolution which touched so many of us in lifestyle, fashion and politics. Those days are perhaps best embodied in the music of Bob Dylan— though the bulk of pop music from that era was simply about rebellion and fun. You could contrast Dylan’s Masters of War with the Beatles singing Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. At this point I should warn the reader—in recognition of that wilful “otherness,” I’m going to interrupt my more earnest pontificating with some crude musicality of sorts. These stylistic punctuations are a small homage to my father who would break off his serious poetry writing to bash out western ballads on his guitar. The rest of the family would roll their eyes—which you might do—but trivial pursuits distract us all from the weightier issues. We humans need a bit of levity to sustain us through the toil. Simple fun; the ridiculous. Silly, seemingly inane pleasures—we turn to these. They raise our spirits, lighten the load. When our ancestors danced and cavorted and rolled with laughter, was this ability as crucial to survival as throwing a spear or nurturing crops? A way to soften the awareness of unrelenting winters, meagre food, the uncertainties of harvests, disease, tribal conflict? A psychological tool to make the unbearable bearable? Early in my career I wondered, as an artist, about humans in relation to the land. I was aware that New Zealand had been largely cleared of its native vegetation. In the 1970s I painted land and family relationships. I dwelt on the axeman. I was hyper-aware of the cuts we make in the land, our impositions and invasions. I was also aware of vestiges of nature, especially on the clay wedding cake of property I found myself on. Stumps, arks, escape rockets and steep driveways in my paintings added to the mix. Slips provided lessons on instability. In 1990 I painted my Ozone Panels, which were concerned with the ozone hole—something that I felt could be explored symbolically. At the time, the environmental aspect was overlooked and critics focused on the quality of the works as art. However, I felt that the environmental issue was intrinsic to the work. In this period there were sudden shifts in my work—from a certain McCahon-esque simplification with text, back to a

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semi-pictorial stage show. This may have been confusing to the onlooker but to me was entirely natural in the intuitive searching, back and forth, that I was undergoing at the time.

Fig. 13-2. Nigel Brown, I Wandered Lonely, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 165.1 x 124.7 x 5.4. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei.

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In the 1980s I often focused on the anti-nuclear issue, peace and nonviolence, plus the male psyche. I became labelled a “social issues” artist, concerned with peace. I connected to the land, and the issues around peace forced me to question both the male role and male sexuality. My ideas on couples and families had at times a kind of fractured, bedrock quality. The result was precarious icons of shifting questions and belief. A big issue for my consciousness as an artist, both then and now, is being a displaced European by lineage, being part of a “money as measure” society and even wondering at times if I have a culture at all. My forebears sluiced for gold, blasting the land away in Central Otago. I was raised on small citrus orchards locked in by shelterbelts—which is about as artificial a nature as any. Sprays kept the pests at bay. In such respects my art feels compensatory. MƗori and Aboriginal attitudes to the land have been an inspiration in my work; my debt to those immense energies cannot be verbalised adequately. In indigenous cultures time and the future are not arranged as in the Western model. The connection with nature was fundamental. In the 1970s and 80s involvement with the women’s movement, and being part of a men’s group, helped me to crystallise my ideas about the land and humans’ relationship to it. Both those movements emphasised the body, alongside fearless historical and social awareness. At times feminism has raised such painful questions that I have really struggled, but the imagination has provided a way through. Standing with a group of men was a powerful counter to despair and alienation.

Part Two We are all part of larger and overwhelming questions, as well as the immediacy of the domestic. With the fading of these movements I feel a loss of focus and power in the drive for a new future. There feels to be no clear vanguard we can fall in behind, to create the collectivism necessary for change. And through inaction, by default we risk being pawns of consumerist and monetarist agendas, rather than agents for the future. The questions and challenges we faced then were no less multi-faceted and tangled as those we examine today. But as a singular issue to galvanise people into action, climate change is vastly different from the causes that we protested for in my early years of political awareness. The peril of the nuclear arms race could be neutralised by treaties and political will on two sides. Feminism fought on specific frontlines—media, reproductive rights, access to employment and education. Apartheid was a matter of policy change in one country. None of these felt like easy battles

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at the time, but compared to the enormous complexity of climate change they were probably simpler.

Fig. 13-3. Nigel Brown, World Government, 2012/13, acrylic and oil on board, 252.8 x 127 x 5.4. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei.

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There are pinpricks of a wider consciousness, but it struggles to take root. On a global stage, while David Attenborough revealed the natural world to us, species reduction and pollution skyrocketed. While Al Gore made a splash with An Inconvenient Truth little concrete progress seemed to result—and that title today sounds more ironic than ever. Climate change is a scientific subject. It’s conveyed through facts and measurements: through niche disciplines like glaciology and meteorology —painstaking research and analysis. But however meticulous the data gathering has been, and however loud the consensus, world co-operation has been frustratingly slow. Our reluctance to deal with the problem, even belatedly, is hampered by limitations, possibly in our very own human nature. It is hard and uncomfortable to confront these big questions. So, the difficult stuff gets subsumed in daily distractions. No rock-and-roller wants to get down to a knotty ballad seeking cures for humanity’s crisis; no shiny advertising dollars want to zoom in on a vision of imperilled cities—so let’s drown it out! Let’s have a party of sorts! At this point a bit of light relief… BEE BOP A LOO LAH, WHAT’S GLOBAL WARMING TO YAH? YEAH YEAH YEAH…

Part Three When I worked in factories and wineries as a young art school graduate, we contended with hazards that were largely unseen—there were gases and chemicals, as well as machinery that could inflict nasty injuries should you catch your overalls in the wrong bit of equipment. But as a worker I remember feeling a bit dazed by the sheer repetition of the job. The dayto-day routine of just plodding on, to get through the work day and get home, gave rise to a certain recklessness and disregard for safety. Not through bravado, but numbness. I see parallels with the way we regard climate change. For many of us, particularly in a lush green land like New Zealand, it’s not overly high on our radar. It’s abstract and theoretical, a hum in the background—unless we happen to find ourselves suddenly at the “pointy end” and are personally impacted. If we see our stock weakened and dying through drought, or we see the wild sea nibbling away the edges of our coastal communities. Suddenly we feel the abrupt tug, the panic, of our overalls caught in the machine. But how do we oppose and challenge something so inexorable, so long-term?

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There are so many climate “enemies” and so many different fronts to take action on. Is it the complacent, disingenuous politicians reluctant to enact good policy lest it lose them short-term votes? Is it the large corporations—big oil, big automotive, mining—who play down the danger and plough on with earth-destroying consumption in the drive to push up shareholder value? Is it the small band of deluded, loud-mouthed climate sceptics? Is it all of us? Is it how we choose to live, consume, travel? Is it capitalism itself? Humanity itself? Is it me? BEE BOP A LOO LAH! MAYBE WE SHOULD BLAME CLIMATE CHANGE ON INDUSTRIALISATION OR EVEN WESTERN CIVILSATION? YEAH, YEAH, YEAH! OR ELVIS? OR MICK JAGGER? Even mention of climate change as a topic can be so terrifying and allencompassing, so unfathomable, we tend to avoid it, block it out, put our fingers in our ears and hope for the best. It signals the ultimate defeat of the human race, the end of progress, the triumph of chaos. No creative person, no mother, no builder wants to hear this. For the majority of us—city dwellers anyway—it’s happening in vague areas in remote places, like the two icy poles of the earth, coastal mega-cities in Asia, or fragile Pacific atolls. Major storm events and crazy temperature anomalies get subdued with an attitude of “well, these things have always happened.” Which is true. We remember exceptional weather and there’s always been exceptional weather, phenomena that feels so extraordinary we remark upon it. But our human memory is short, and flawed; we are unreliable barometers of planetary change. To understand how, when, why this change is happening and what it could mean for us, we need more delicate instruments than our own selfcentred consciousness. We turn to science. Scientists must be our bellringers, our source of truth, but they’re not always the most compelling storytellers. Their figures highlight the obvious, but for many of us, it’s still sterile numbers.

Part Four Art or songs about climate change are not appearing in profusion. Literature may be doing a better job of voicing our collective concern— I’ve heard there’s now a genre of fiction known as ‘cli-sci’—dystopian fiction set in a changed world. But, by drawing on imminent turmoil as a setting, is it a call to arms or just a passive acceptance of the inevitable?

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Fig. 13-4. Nigel Brown, Society is about Trust? 2011, acrylic with oil on board, 165.1 x 124.7 x 5.4. Courtesy of Milford Galleries Dunedin. Photography: Glenn Frei.

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We’re tempted to take solace in logic. We think, if it’s that bad, the sensible, serious people who run things will sort it out. They have the information and the means. But our logic is not to be relied upon. If logic governed our actions, there’d be no cigarette smokers, no infomercials, no superstition. There’d almost certainly be no wars. Humans have a long track record of making stupid choices just when the stakes are high. History is thick with the smoke that proves it. Some believe technology will be our saviour. We think: humans have always invented their way out of a crisis, we’ll do it again. Look at the wheel, at agriculture, at space travel. We’re amazing when we put our mind to it. Tending to be an old paintbrush person I possibly disqualify myself in this sphere, except to feel technology can help only by reducing carbon emissions—perhaps too little too late. I don’t want to dismiss technological solutions—it’s good that some have the drive to invent and innovate. And collapsing into a sort of defeatism, or denial and indifference, certainly doesn’t bring hope or answers. At this point a bit of ENTERTAINMENT, SPORT OR GREAT FOOD! BEE BOP A LOO LAH WHAT’S GLOBAL WARMING TO YAH? YEAH YEAH YEAH… Anxiety exists in art in socially deprived places or societies in turmoil. It also exists right in the middle of smug complacency. Art, after all, is only the product of individuals, and is as unpredictable as they are. There have always been anxious artists or writers who can harness their worries and tensions to give their art power. A successful artist combines their concerns with hope and balance. I doubt that a terrified person would have the emotional ability to create. Some turmoil may help a creative person find their voice, but too much crushes it. Hope is important for art. Being scared for humans is not a new thing; people once lived in fear of crop failure, invasion and death, much more than we do in the present day. Art was not for art’s sake then but a tool for the community or tribe to gird its loins against hostile forces. The power of much wrongly labelled primitive art is its strength in looking out, even glaring, at the world and challenging the enemies beyond. By contrast I feel much art now lacks depth or engagement with the human condition. There’s almost a cynical unwillingness to try to find a universal truth or even to attempt to address the tougher questions. It’s often ironic or sarcastic. In the techno culture of “now,” nature is relegated to second place, if it’s considered at all, and in art spaces a kind of distancing often goes on, having its roots in minimalism and indirectness. Is this current penchant for cool distance a deliberate disavowal of the sometimes earnest, principle-driven art scene that accompanied the

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movements of the 70s and 80s? Maybe that’s not surprising—reading this, I realise I’m starting to sound like a preacher or some self-proclaimed pompous expert! I am neither. Just an artist, who has spent half a lifetime on his own painting in his studio with too much time to think. BEE BOP A LOO LAH, NUCLEAR FREE, NUCLEAR FREE—DID THAT THREAT EVER GO AWAY? YEAH, YEAH, YEAH AND THE BOMBS STILL EXIST! WHAT GOOD WAS THAT THEN, EH?

Part Five Though we may feel insulated from the world’s crises here in cosy little New Zealand, in reality we’re far from it. We are part of the planetary ecosystem; when patterns and currents shift on our earth, we are displaced too, even if the downstream ripples may seem smaller when they reach us. In thinking about the impacts of climate change, I’m acutely aware of our place as a Pacific nation. Our largest city is, by population, also the largest Polynesian city. Many of us are originally are from Pacific homelands— and when the small nations of the Pacific, our neighbours like Niue, Tuvalu, Tokelau, bear the brunt of sea level rise and decimating cyclones, will we be equipped to shelter those seeking refuge? How will we wear our mantle as safe haven? And to our south rests that silent, majestic mass of Antarctica. A bellweather of climate change, as well as potentially a massive catalyst for sea level rise. Warmer ocean currents are melting these ancient ice sheets from beneath, outpacing the scientists’ predictions. Where can we hide from the ocean? In 1998 I went to Antarctica. Working briefly around glaciologists, I learned they were funded to study global warming. Flying in a helicopter above the Trans-Antarctic Mountains I saw the strata of past warm periods. That was a great way to absorb how huge these world changes can be. Antarctica impresses on you that our human presence has only tentative holds there, and perhaps on the whole planet also. We may have had a huge effect on the earth, but that does not mean our place on it is secure. Again in Antarctica, even with the ever-present legacy of heroes such as Shackleton and Hillary, I felt a certain clumsy human (and largely male) drive pushing against a female earth. Against something vulnerable, and doomed not to be listened to. I’m grateful to friends and colleagues who have helped me expand my awareness and understanding of climate change. They include Michael Tobias, the American writer, filmmaker and activist who organised

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gatherings of conservationists, scientists and artists on Rakiura in the 2000s; and Denys Trussell, the poet, writer, musician, activist and author of The Arts and Planetary Survival. In terms of wider environmental consciousness I’m also indebted to New Zealand artists such as Colin McCahon, the potter Barry Brickell and the musician Richard Nunns, as well as poets as varied as Fairburn, Blake and Coleridge, as well as my earnest astute wife Sue. BEE BOP A LOO LAH. SING ME A SONG. SING FOR THE CLIMATE IS A-CHANGING. DANCE DANCE, DANCE TO ITS TUNE. A HARD DAY’S COMING. YES FOR YOU AND YOU MY FRIEND!

Part Six From a global perspective I imagine we can repent environmentally and be saved from the “progress at any cost” model. I imagine we can move to a sustainable society in every respect, balancing nature and ourselves. I imagine we can finally learn from indigenous cultures. A green and promised land seems possible, at least in art if not in reality. Climate change urges us to think again, quickly. In my own local experience, I feel personally affected by the changes occurring to our land, seas and eco-systems. For around twenty years Sue and I lived at Cosy Nook in Southland. We loved a beach called Rattle Stone Bay, just down the road. There were cliffs where farmers tossed over old fencing, rubbish and dead lambs. But the major problems began when a creek was bulldozed and diverted, which broke away the creek mouth. The sea started to eat away there, and slowly over ten years the cliffs were eroded, covering our beloved stones and leaving the road teetering on an edge. The damage was profound, but wasn’t deemed important enough to spur the district and regional councils to take action. Eventually when the situation became dire, a poorly planned sea wall was erected. There were promises to monitor it. Expert advice confirmed our intuition that the project was poorly conceived and would likely have a devastating effect on the coast. We fought it, but were lone voices. It was stressful and isolating. We found the lack of care and thought for the land or for the long-term effects, frightening. Even dealing with people whose role was stewardship of natural resources, there was a “so what?” attitude, an absence of consideration for the mess left for future generations.

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This is a small personal anecdote, but indicative I think of the larger issues at play nationally and globally. Climate change, like all historical episodes, can be broken down into a collection of many individual stories that tell different parts of the whole. If we live in a New Zealand that has become less about people and more about constant growth and consumerism, then no one is going to care. Social awareness is suppressed. When the powers that be don’t give a damn, how can we respond? As a civilisation we’re out of tune with nature—and maybe that’s inevitable when most of us aren’t looking to the seasons and the friendly elements to help put food on our table every day. It sometimes seems to me that, as animals, our primary connection to nature is our preoccupation with the signals (verbal and non-verbal) we get from other members of our own species. Which, ironically, we send and receive more by screen than any other medium. Climate change, in its cumulative effects, can only be understood via a worldview that is available to us in the physical world, but vanishes when we flick into cyberspace. There are people who argue (using that great human trait, logic) that New Zealand is so tiny, so infinitesimal in terms of our greenhouse gas emissions, that it’s pointless trying to reduce them. Even if we make gargantuan efforts—cut out fossil fuels, eradicate methane from our landfills and emissions from our farms—the effect won’t even register on a global scale. In terms of numbers they’re right. Just compare our carbon output to China or India and we look ridiculous. But this argument ignores the phenomenal power of ideas. When we light a flame, act with courage and do the right thing, it can give rise to a whole chain reaction. It can inspire, and lead to who knows what? Have we forgotten how the world listened and cheered when New Zealand declared itself nuclear free? How proud we were to punch above our weight then! It seemed that people were falling over themselves to take credit. You don’t necessarily need the numbers or the scale to ignite positive change, but you can’t do it without imagination. We may be small fry in the global eco-system, but the notion that we can have no impact in the global ecosystem of ideas is a fallacy. Which brings me back to my central concern. How can and should an artist respond to climate change? We’re not scientists or policy-makers or financiers. We’re not inventors. In my chosen medium, perhaps now an anachronistic one, I’m acutely aware that I’m likely to reach a smaller audience than say a film-maker or popular musician. Paintings see the light of day in exhibitions briefly and, unless they end up in a public collection, they’re tucked away on someone’s private wall. When we’re hit

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by a disaster—be it the Christchurch earthquake or South Dunedin’s floods—we’re unlikely to turn to paintings for solace and support. In my small niche as an artist, climate change challenges me to get my ideas sorted. Creating paintings is a relatively slow and isolated process and the dealer system is not well suited to social issues or social change. However, my skill is with a paintbrush. I do like words though. Sometimes I want my message to be signposted, the questions to be emblazoned. Perhaps it’s me thumbing my nose at the art I see today which I feel is bland, self-conscious, just decoration or lacking in expression. Art has become very smart at being art for art’s sake, but it’s so boring! I feel we need to return to a symbolism about our bedrock selves and our relationship with nature. There are talented people doing this, but not the wave that’s needed to start seeding these ideas of change, to challenge our complacency and remake society. Maybe art can only be a witness—but sure as hell, it shouldn’t be an accomplice to the climate change juggernaut that has a hundred faces— be it big business, big agriculture, big oil, the media manipulators, the advertising industry that urges us to keep consuming…and so on and so on. Surely, right now, there’s no bigger question? Artists can imagine. We can have vision. As artists we can’t halt climate change but it should influence our thinking and stretch what we say in our work. It might give us some urgency and purpose. And what is the alternative? Do we deliberately ignore it? To turn away is denial, apathy or even depression. We may achieve commercial success while distracting people from the issues facing humanity. But I believe the art world can do better than that. If New Zealand can claim a place in the global eco-system of ideas, artists have a vital place in the eco-system of thinkers, creators, debaters, change-makers. No matter how tech-savvy or how antiquated our medium of choice, art helps shape our thoughts and identities through a trickledown—or maybe a ripple—effect. It generates new concepts—and with social media these can spread so quickly, exponentially, like a virus. Can’t find an audience for your painting? Print a poster, write a poem. Dance. Do something. At its best, art expands awareness. It’s bigger than any restraints—and it communicates. It shouldn’t be obscure and elitist. BEE BOP A LOO LAH WE ARE NOT THE GREAT PRETENDERS. HOLD EACH OTHER TIGHT. BEE BOP A LOO LAH PUT THE WORLD TO RIGHT! OH YEAH. OH YEAH. OH YEAH.

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Conclusion There will be those who cry “give me a break, will you? It’s all too much!” We all do that. It keeps us sane. Maybe you’re doing it right now; but that’s exactly the problem. It’s too immense, too intractable. Vast and frightening. Too seemingly unsolvable. So as artists, let’s take that on. Maybe the best service we can provide in this time is to examine that disempowering, that hopelessness, to prod it and say, “what’s this then? Get over it!” And then again, global warming could be cleverer than all of us. That wouldn’t be hard. You yawn and turn away…Turn away. A wind has come up and the sea is roaring. Watch your back. Gather your children. BEE BOP A LOO LAH WHAT’S GLOBAL WARMING TO YAH? YEAH, YEAH, OH BLOODY YEAH!

CONTRIBUTORS

Armstrong, Evelyn, MFA, MALS, PhD, private scholar, British Columbia, Canada. Armstrong has a keen interest in the Eco-art movement which translates into her own artistic practice addressing issues of climate change and culture. Bolland, Mark, is Studio Co-ordinator for Photography and Electronic Arts at Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in London in 2004, he has divided his time between, teaching, writing and his art practice. He has written essays for exhibition catalogues, many articles for journals and magazines, and exhibited photographs in both the UK and New Zealand. Brown, Nigel, ONZM, was born in Invercargill and gained a BFA from the Elam School of Arts in 1971. He began his full time career as an artist in 1972. Since then he has exhibited extensively in public and private galleries throughout New Zealand. Brown has established a reputation as one the most important figurative artists working in New Zealand and is acknowledged as New Zealand’s leading narrative artist. For forty years, Brown has used his art to address social, political, and environmental issues. His numerous awards, commissions and residencies include the Order of New Zealand Merit for Services to painting and printmaking (2004). Feeney, Margaret, BA(Vic), MFA(RMIT), is an artist and studio coordinator at MƗpura Studios, Auckland. Green, David, is a filmmaker, special effects artist and motion control specialist. After working for two decades in the corporate media sector in North America and then New Zealand, David shifted his focus to video and conceptual arts, on which he currently lectures at the Dunedin School of Art in the department of Photography and Electronic Arts. His years of experience in feature film and television now inform an art practice in the field of expanded cinema. Over the last seven years David has often made artwork in collaboration with scientists from a variety of disciplines. His essays have been published in Junctures: The Journal for Thematic

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Contributors

Dialogue, The South African Journal of Art History, and Scope: Contemporary Research Topics. Hogan, Jan, PhD, is Studio Coordinator, Printmaking and Drawing, Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania. Holmes, Ashley, PhD is a digital artist whose practice spans Internet art, interactive multimedia, lens-based media and public space design consultancy. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Bachelor of Digital Media program at CQ University, Australia, based in Mackay, Queensland, and, as an academic, publishes regularly on topics concerning creative practice. Lonie, Bridie, Emeritus Member of Otago Polytechnic, Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Dunedin School of Art, and PhD candidate at the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago. Munn, Luke, uses the body and code, objects and performances to activate relationships and responses. His projects have featured in the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Fold Gallery London, Causey Contemporary Brooklyn and the Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, with commissions from Aotearoa Digital Arts, Creative New Zealand and TERMINAL and performances in Paris, Dublin, Chicago, Berlin, Auckland, and New York. He is a studio supervisor at Whitecliffe College of Art & Design and a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University. Rankin, Elizabeth, PhD. Professor Emeritus, University of Auckland. As Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland from 1998, and previously at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, she has many publications on the art of New Zealand and South Africa, both of which she continues to research in her retirement. She has also curated a number of exhibitions in both countries, and was the inaugural coordinator of the Postgraduate Programme in Museums and Cultural Heritage at the University of Auckland. Salmon, Catharine, MFA, is a senior academic in the Department of Arts, Media and Digital Technology at Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, with an extensive art practice. She often works with siteorientated and relational modes. Connection with community and environmental concerns are at the centre of her practice. Among many other exhibitions, she held a solo show at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Art and Future: Energy, Climate, Cultures

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Stupples, Peter, is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory, Dunedin School of Art and formerly, Associate Professor of Art History and Theory, University of Otago. He has written widely on the social history of art and the work of the Russian Avant-Garde. Whitehead, Frances, Professor of Sculpture, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (aka SAIC). Whitehead is a civic practice artist bringing the methods, mindsets, and strategies of contemporary art practice to the process of shaping the future city. Connecting emerging art practices, the discourses around culturally informed sustainability, and new concepts of heritage and remediation, she develops strategies to deploy the knowledge of artists as change agents, asking, “What do Artists Know?”