Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s 9780271081427

Citation preview

Landscape into Eco Art

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The Pennsylvania State University Press 

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University Park, Pennsylvania

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Landscape into Eco Art Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s

Mark A. Cheetham

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Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Assocation.

MM Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Names: Cheetham, Mark A. (Mark Arthur), 1954– author. Title: Landscape into eco art : articulations of nature since the ’60s / Mark A. Cheetham. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Explores the practices of ecological art, a genre addressing the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. Examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and ’70s, and the historical genre of landscape painting”— Provided by publisher.     Identifiers: LCCN 2017041163 | ISBN 9780271080031 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Ecology in art. | Earthworks (Art) | Landscape painting. Classification: LCC N8217.E28 C49 2018 | DDC 700/.46—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2017041163

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Copyright © 2018 Mark A. Cheetham All rights reserved Printed in Canada Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992. Frontispiece: Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1976 (detail). Great Basin Desert, Utah. Photo: Nancy Holt. Courtesy of the Holt-Smithson Foundation. © 2016 Estate of Nancy Holt / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, New York.

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For Elizabeth, Anthea, and Nicholas

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Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments xiii

chapter one

Manipulated Landscapes  1

chapter two

Beyond Suspicion: Why (Not) Landscape?  49

chapter three Remote Control:

Siting Land Art and Eco Art  90 chapter four Contracted Fields:

“Nature” in the Art Museum  121 chapter five

Bordering the Ubiquitous: The Art of Local and Global Ecologies  157

Notes 209 Bibliography 221 Index 235

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Illustrations

Olafur Eliasson, The weather project, 2003  2 Roni Horn, Water, Selected, from Vatnasafn / Library of Water, 2007  3 Hans Haacke, Rhine Water Purification Plant, 1972  14 Robert Smithson, Upside Down Tree i, 1969  29 Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks, 1982–87  32 Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium, 2007  33 Roy Arden, Pulp Mill Dump (#1) Nanaimo, B.C., 1992  35 Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, December 1969  35 Sam Durant, Upside Down Pastoral Scene, 2002 (detail)  36 Rodney Graham, Millennial Time Machine: A Landau Carriage Converted to a Mobile Camera Obscura, 2003  39 11 Reinhard Reitzenstein, Transformer, 2000  41 12 Tom Ackers and Melanie Gilligan, Deep Time, 2013 (video still)  42 13 Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Right Way, 1983 (video still)  43 14 Pierre Huyghe, Untilled: Alive Entities and Inanimate Things, Made and Not Made, 2011–12 (detail)  46 15 Mark Dion, The Schildbach Xylotheque, 2011–12  56 16 Tacita Dean, Fatigues, 2012 (detail)  57 17 Rúrí, Archive: Endangered Waters, 2003  61 18 Diane Burko, Jakobshavn-Ilulissat Quartet, 2015  68 19 Mariele Neudecker, Over and Over, Again and Again, 2004 (detail)  69 20 Mariele Neudecker, There Is Always Something More Important, 2012  71 21 Kent Monkman, Trappers of Men, 2006  74 22 Kent Monkman, The Fourth World, 2012  78 23 Albert Bierstadt, Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, 1864  79 24 Kent Monkman, The Rise and Fall of Civilization, 2015  80 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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25 Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land, Shaman Coming to Fix, 1991  83 26 Arthur Renwick, Tah-ton-kah-he-yo-ta-kah (Sitting Bull), from Delegates: Chiefs of Earth and Sky, 2004  85 27 Bonnie Devine, Battle for the Woodlands, 2014–15  87 28 N.E. Thing Co., North American Telexed Triangle (No. 1), 1969  95 29 Dennis Oppenheim, Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop, 1969  96 30 John Gerrard, Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) 2009 100 31 Sean Martindale, Curbed Concepts: NATURE, 2009  106 32 Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, 2012.  109 33 Michael Sailstorfer, Forst, 2012  126 34 Sharon Switzer, #crazyweather, 2013 (video still)  127 35 Olafur Eliasson, Your embodied garden, 2013 (video still)  128 36 Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), 1969  133 37 Chris Drury, Double Echo, 2007  135 38 Nancy Holt, Views Through a Sand Dune, 1972  142 39 Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1976  143 40 James Nizam, Hydrangea in Room (Anteroom Series), 2007  145 41 Abelardo Morell, Tent-Camera Image on Ground: El Capitan from Cathedral Beach, Yosemite National Park, 2012  148 42 Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, East Entrance in Gallery #171 with a de Chirico Painting, 2005  151 43 Andrew Wright, Untitled Photograph #3 (Plant), 2013  153 44 Andrew Wright, Tree Correction #2, from Tree Corrections, 2012 (detail)  154 45 Andrew Wright, The Photograph: Suspended Tree, 2016 (detail)  155 46 Jeff Wall, The Crooked Path, 1991  160 47 Dennis Oppenheim, Annual Rings, 1968  161 48 Jarosław Koziara, Unity Fish, 2012  163 49 Lead Pencil Studio, Non-Sign ii, 2010  167 50 Andreas Rutkauskas, Chemin de la Frontière, Québec, 2013  167 51 Alan Michelson, TwoRow ii, 2005 (video still)  169 52 Shelley Niro, Border Series—Treaties, 2008  170 53 Mel Chin, Landscape, 1991  171 54 Xu Bing, Background Story: Qiu Shan Xian Yi Tu (秋山仙逸图), 2015  173 55 Yao Lu, Ancient Springtime Fey, 2006  174 56 Alan Sonfist, Crystal Monument, 1966–72  184 57 Mariele Neudecker, Dark Years Away, 2013 (video still)  192 58 Paul Walde, Requiem for a Glacier, 2013 (production still)  193 59 Isabelle Hayeur, Substances, 2012  198

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I l lu s t r at i o n s

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60 Isabelle Hayeur, Limulus, 2014  201 61 Joseph Mallord William Turner, War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, exhibited 1842. 201 62 Simon Starling, One Ton ii, 2005 207

I l lu s t r at i o n s

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Acknowledgments

It is a singular pleasure to acknowledge the many people and organizations who have enabled my research on this book over many years. Invaluable research support came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Banff Centre for the Arts. A generous subvention came from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund at the College Art Association of America. I am grateful to the editors at the following publishers and publications for permission to extend here my work already in print: the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, the Journal of Visual Culture, Leonardo, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Plastic Blue Marble, nonsite, and Word and Image. Thanks as well to the representatives of artists’ estates, Alamy, ARS, SODRAC, VAGA, and the public and commercial galleries who provided images and permissions. Many of the artists whose work I discuss have been exceptionally accommodating in supplying information, images, and permissions. Special thanks to Diane Burko, Isabelle Hayeur, Sean Martindale, Mariele Neudecker, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Rúrí, Paul Walde, and Andrew Wright. I benefited greatly from opportunities to present work in progress at a number of conferences and institutions. Thanks to the conveners of sessions at College Art Association meetings in 2009, 2014, and 2016, and to my hosts and students at the University of Texas at Austin (Linda D. Henderson, Glenn Peers), Brandeis University (Aida Yuen Wong), the Clark Art Institute (Jordan Bear, Michael Ann Holly, Mark Phillips), the Courtauld Institute (Ayla Lepine), McGill University and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Christine Ross), the McMichael Canadian Collection, Nanjing University (Zhou Xian, Jing Chen), NSCAD University (Bruce Barber), Washington College (Donald McColl), the University of Toronto, Yangzhou University (Maria Ding, Phillip Xue), and York University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies. It has been a pleasure to work with Penn State University Press. My thanks to Laura Reed-Morrisson, managing editor; Hannah Hebert, editorial assistant; Keith xiii

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Monley, copyeditor; and Ellie Goodman, executive editor, whose enthusiasm for this book was a great support. Two anonymous readers were unstintingly helpful with their comments. The outstanding undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Toronto have been enthusiastic and astute interlocutors on landscape and ecological art. Many have since graduated to important positions in academe and the gallery world. My thanks to Nina Amstutz, Julie Boivin, Emily Ducet, Danielle Forest, Corrie Jackson, Adi Louria-Hayon, Julia Lum, and Gwen MacGregor. Jackson Davidow, Alyssa Kuhnert, Katie Lawson, and Devon Smither provided research assistance. I am especially grateful to Michaela Rife, who was an invaluable interlocutor as I completed this book in mid-2016. Central sections of this book examine Indigenous engagements with land and landscape. I wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the HuronWendat, the Seneca, and, most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land. Sincere thanks to Bonnie Devine, Jessica Jacobsen-Konefall, Alan Michelson, Shelley Niro, and Arthur Renwick, from whom I have learned much (but not yet enough) about land and landscape in Indigenous contexts. Colleagues, curators, and patient friends have been supportive of this project in myriad ways. Sincere thanks to Amanda Boetzkes, Tim Barringer, Mary Beebee, Suzaan Boettger, Phillip Burnham, Deepali Dewan, Mitchell Frank, Emily Gilbert, Janice Gurney, Linda D. Henderson, Ted Hiebert, Michael Ann Holly, Ihor Holubizky, Susan Jarosi, Caroline Jones, Greg Levine, Keith Moxey, John O’Brian, Andy Patton, Mark Phillips, Ruth Phillips, Tom Rand, Susana Reisman, Kitty Scott, Ila Sheren, Gary Shapiro, Joy Sleeman, Sarah Stanners, Claire Sykes, Sarah Turner, William Vaughan, and Marilyn Wyatt. My inspiringly brilliant departmental colleagues Jordan Bear, Yi Gu, Elizabeth Harney, Kajri Jain, Louis Kaplan, and SeungJung Kim have my enduring gratitude for conversations about this project. My happiest acknowledgment is to Elizabeth D. Harvey, with whom I had the enduring privilege to visit and discuss many of the artworks pivotal to my thinking in this book, especially Pope’s grotto, Spiral Jetty, and Vatnasafn / Library of Water. Toronto, January 2017

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Acknowled gments

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chaper one

Manipulated Landscapes

One does not have to be a great seer to predict that the relationship between humans and nature will, in all probability, be the most important question of the present century. Philippe Descola, The Ecology of Others (2013)

Rapid climate change and its increasingly serious consequences worldwide encourage many artists and scholars to ask an old question with renewed urgency: what can we do in the face of these pressing planetary problems? As one commentator suggests, “individual action over lightbulbs or transport seems to make no difference contrasted with the new coal fired power station being built weekly in China.”1 “Eco art” engages this conundrum in ways that make it one of the most vibrant aspects of contemporary art. Eco art emerged in North America and Europe in the 1970s. Much augmented in the 1990s, it is now extensively exhibited and discussed.2 A short form for “ecological art,” it embraces a range of contemporary practices that investigate the interconnected environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relationships between human and nonhuman animals as well as inanimate material through the visual arts. My zeal to explore eco art began with Olafur Eliasson’s celebrated installation The weather project (fig. 1). Displayed indoors and in a quintessentially urban setting, the vast space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003, the spectacle attracted over two million visitors in just six months.3 If Eliasson’s overtly artificial indoor sun and atmosphere promised an experience of “nature,” why would so many people come to an art gallery to experience what we commonly think of as out of doors and nonurban? This paradox is one of many addressed by contemporary eco art, which consistently questions our understanding and experience of nature. On a smaller scale but with 1

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Fig. 1  Olafur Eliasson, The weather project, 2003. Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminum, scaffolding, 26.7 × 22.3 × 155.44 m. Tate Modern, London, 2003. Photo: Andrew Dunkley and Marcus Leith. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriernschneider, Berlin; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. © 2003 Olafur Eliasson.

great emotional impact, Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; fig. 2), in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, focuses our attention on the loss of glaciers worldwide. Sited in the institutional space of a transformed former public library, far away from world art centers, Library of Water, like The weather project, solicits local reactions to nature within a “climate-controlled” setting. Horn includes a record of a hundred interviews about the weather conducted with Icelanders in 2005–6. Titled Weather Reports You, this component is available in the reading room adjacent to her installation and as a separate artist’s book. Eco art also expands well beyond these art-world contexts. A notable example is the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), based in Los Angeles, a collaborative research group “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.”4 CLUI’s expeditions and projects question not only land use from the artistic to the military but also the nature of 2

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artistic production and research as they engage human interactions with the earth, past and present. Eco art’s responses to perceived planetary crises are as numerous as the disquiet around climate change is extensive. They are as individual as they are global in implication, and often as material as they are embroiled in both cultural and scientific ideas. The timeliness and complexity of eco art Fig. 2  Roni Horn, Water, Selected, from Vatnasafn / have led to an extensive range of Library of Water. Permanent installation since 2007, exhibitions and publications, many with Stykkishólmur, Iceland. Photo courtesy of Roni Horn. © Roni Horn. rubrics for coming to terms with the variety and priorities of this phenomenon in the art world.5 More than most contemporary art practices, eco art also transcends conventional borders of inquiry. As many examples throughout this book show, it often incorporates scientific and technological evaluations of environmental concerns. A question and response posed in the exhibition Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture (2013) say it all: “What does culture have to do with climate change? Everything.”6 Thus it is no surprise that understanding eco art’s perspectives on these insistent issues is also a growing priority across the humanities and within art history and the study of visual culture, as witnessed by the emergence of “eco art history.” An understanding of these perspectives is central to this book because it is the lens through which a scholarly understanding of contemporary eco art is perceived. As defined in a College Art Association of America session in 2014, eco art history is designed to “bring together art historians from diverse fields to work toward a more earth-conscious mode of analysis.”7 The initiative has been built on a number of precedents in the discipline, especially Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher’s foundational collection A Keener Perception. In his 2009 article “Ecocritical Art History,” Braddock linked ecocriticism in other disciplines with art-historical inquiry: “For art historians, ecocriticism entails a more probing and pointedly ethical integration of visual analysis, cultural interpretation, and environmental history—including aspects of the history of science—than has prevailed in the field” (27). Important too were model discussions in the 1990s, including special issues of the Art Journal and Leonardo.8 It is only in the later 2000s that the imperatives of eco art have been widely noticed. The collection Landscape Theory, based on discussions in 2006, is a prominent case in point. Respondent David Nye records his “surprise at how little the roundtable focused on the ecological sense of landscape. Environmental history M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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and ecology were apparently not much on anyone’s mind” in the mid-2000s.9 Kirsten Swenson presciently asked in 2010 if “recent land- and environmental-based practices that blur disciplinary boundaries demand a new form of art history that similarly blurs distinctions between itself and other disciplines, or between theory and practice.”10 That new form is eco art history. Landscape into Eco Art provides an armature for understanding a wide range of environmentally and ecologically focused art practices in what is now variously called the “Anthropocene”—the controversial term introduced by Paul Crutzen to describe the epoch in which human activity has become a force of nature—the “Capitalocene” (Jason W. Moore), and the “Chthulucene” (Donna Haraway), the last of which underscores the main cause of global warming, industrialization. Jussi Parikka’s memorable neologism, “Anthrobscene,” stresses the obscenity of the wanton disregard for and humiliation of integrity, that of the earth, of humans, of nonhuman animals, and of other organisms and inanimate materials.11 Eco art is not a fashion or style among others: at its best, it is the site of frank engagements with many pressing crises in the Anthropocene, from species depletion to climate disruption to resource shortages,12 issues that entail reassessments of human nature and anthropocentrism in relationship to the planet. Eco art boldly enters into today’s debates on climate science, government policy, and both corporate and individual responsibility. Eco art is not monolithic any more than “science” is; aesthetic experiments and interventions do not promise solutions to climate change, for example, but instead enter into what Bruno Latour optimistically calls the “fruitful cacophony” of discussion.13 I make the case that it is not sufficient to consider eco art only as a phenomenon within contemporary art, as an equally important (or inconsequential) trend among many. Humans have been held responsible not only for the planetary condition called the Anthropocene but also for cognate exploitations witnessed in the older landscape genre. Ian MacLaren calls the picturesque, a default way of seeing in Western societies from the early eighteenth century until the early twentieth, “an almost obscene practice” because of its integral relationships with colonization worldwide.14 The ways of seeing the earth common to landscape depiction were much more than mirrors of societal attitudes. They reinforced, developed, and disseminated these paradigms of the human relationship to the planet. My approach keeps this history current: to understand contemporary eco art as distinctive and significant in the present, but also as crucially connected to long-standing interactions with the earth in the visual arts and art history of the West, I reassess its artistic and theoretical reengagements with both the landscape genre’s venerable representations of the earth and also with land art of the 1960s and 1970s.15 Landscape’s ascent as a genre occurred in collaboration with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century—a favored starting point for the 4

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Anthropocene16—and the imperialisms of the nineteenth century. Earthworks and land art developed at the same time and in the same cultural milieu as mid-twentiethcentury environmentalism in the United States and Europe. Ongoing relationships with eco art also illuminate the landscape genre and land art retrospectively, as, for example, in Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Pigment series, in which the artist often redeploys famous landscape paintings by building up powdered pigment that he then photographs, and his equally self-conscious revision of land art in Spiral Jetty After Robert Smithson, from the series Brooklyn, NY (1997). I present many more examples of this connection in chapter 2. Of course, you may say, do we not already understand these parallels? Yes, and no. Consciously echoing Kenneth Clark’s groundbreaking but frequently criticized Landscape into Art (1949; 2nd ed., 1976),17 but not sharing his pessimism about the ongoing potency of the genre of landscape, Landscape into Eco Art works to complicate and ultimately to justify the linkage of historical landscape as a genre, land art, and eco art and to address in new ways the questions of how “land” comes into eco art.18 One objection to Clark’s account of the landscape genre is that he plots a linear progression through which landscape elements, once simply decorative or stage-setting supplements in religious and historical paintings, achieve independent status in the nineteenth century as “pure” landscape. Accounts of landscape as a genre—and as a more general, fluid response to nature in art—since Clark’s time similarly suggest, with varying degrees of explicitness, that landscape, land art, and then eco art also follow chronologically, dialectically, and in some accounts teleologically one from the other, and that landscape ends as Clark predicted. For example, in his nuanced survey Landscape and Western Art (1999), Malcolm Andrews proceeds from the emergence of landscape as an identifiable subset of European art, through a sophisticated thematic reading of its development up to the early twentieth century, to a concluding chapter titled “Landscape into Land: Earth Works, Art, and Environment.” But land art was not simply the next step in a sequence. These tendencies in the 1960s and 1970s had strong but, I believe, understudied relationships to the landscape genre and to land beyond this aesthetic and art-historical context. While the newer work often saw itself as replacing the purportedly outworn genre of landscape painting, it evolved in a dialectical relationship with it that is still operational, though rarely acknowledged, in eco art today. Robert Smithson’s articulation of an antipicturesque in his 1967 essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” and related visual works is a prime case in point. Aiming to augment rather than to curtail material and intellectual connections, as noted above, Smithson dismisses the landscape painting of the museums as restrictive: “Representing nature once removed in lyric poetry and landscape painting is not the same as direct cultivation of the land,” he writes in his long essay praising Frederick Law Olmsted.19 “I think we all see M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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landscape as coextensive with the gallery,” he claimed in 1968, in what seems like a reference to landscape painting.20 As pioneer land artist Michael Heizer asserted colorfully, looking directly at the land was “more interesting than looking at works in the Louvre or Metropolitan.”21 For many land artists, the new approach disrupted ties to the model of the artist in (typically) his studio, the gallery system, medium-specific formalism, tired monumental sculpture in public spaces, traditional art materials and finish in sculptural work, the urban, and especially the landscape genre. Many art historians and artists have adopted this dismissal of landscape, both as it denotes a genre—a compendium of historical practices—and as an elaboration of “land,” a putatively more fundamental category. In the authoritative Land and Environmental Art, published in 1998, Brian Wallis declares that land art “had virtually nothing to do with such conventional notions of landscape as gardening, open prairies, [or] natural rock formations.”22 Amanda Boetzkes claims that “earth art resists delivering nature as a thematic image, such as a landscape, or a tangible object, such as a specimen in a natural history museum.”23 Calling for an end to traditional landscape conventions in art because they block our access to nature considered more expansively, John E. Thornes also argues that in eco-art contexts “the use of the term landscape is misleading. It implies a static material approach, whereas artists like Constable and Turner, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, painted representations of their total physical and built environment (land, air, water, light, plants, trees, animals, people, buildings).”24 Ginger Strand claims that “[n]o one believes in landscape anymore. As a self-­ contained genre, pretty vistas and sublime scenes seem compromised.”25 Chapters 2 and 3 show that her view is largely correct, but not if construed as a somehow progressive evolution away from historical landscape practices. A pivotal case in point is the powerful landscape imagery of Icelandic artist Georg Guðni (1961– 2011), who stated early in his career that he and his peers believed that “landscape was old-fashioned and uninteresting,”26 but went on to extend the genre to new heights of observation and subtlety. Again promoting the familiar developmental narrative, however, central 1970s eco artists—Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison in the United States and Richard Long in the United Kingdom, for example—reacted to what they perceived as machine-driven interventionist extravagances in American land art of the 1960s and saw their alternative processes as an improvement on the less ecologically refined procedures of much land art. Concerned mostly with land art as an immediate predecessor, however, early eco artists often ignored the nuances of earlier landscape expression and its ongoing import. In echoing but fundamentally revising Clark’s title, then, my aim is to insist that the landscape genre did not simply end, as he predicted, and that it is far from irrelevant today. Landscape does not easily slide “into” eco art, but neither is it a 6

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cast-off remnant of a Hegelian unfolding. Landscape into Eco Art presents a sustained argument for considering continuities between aspects of the landscape tradition in the West, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary ecological art. By attending to a full range of relationships among these modes of engagement with the earth, I recover aspects of the unrecognized history of the landscape genre and also explore the art-historical implications of construing a longer tradition of landscape presentation and representation that includes land art and eco art in an ongoing drama of articulation.

Landscape, Land Art, Eco Art It is ca. 1970, then, that three somewhat distinct modes of engagement with the earth in Western art are designated: the long-standing landscape genre, earthworks and land art, and something new, described with the portmanteau “eco art” and its variants. This description finds clear and influential expression in John Beardsley’s Earthworks and Beyond, first published in 1984 and now in its fourth edition (2006). Linking the landscape tradition to land art, Beardsley claims in his introduction that “[i]n the early 1980s . . . it was clear that landscape was reappearing as one of the most consequential subjects in art—a position it had not enjoyed since the mid-nineteenth century. It was also evident that landscape was emerging in a different guise” (7). Not only does Beardsley imply that earthworks are part of a landscape tradition, but his reference to “beyond” in his title also suggests homologies between land art and eco art now. He has added an afterword called “The Global Landscape” to the latest edition, an account that includes examples of what he calls “environmental art” in an unbroken tradition of Western landscape depiction. While I agree with Beardsley—and in general with Barbara C. Matilsky, in her groundbreaking exhibition Fragile Ecologies (1992)—that landscape as a genre and as a loose description of aesthetic responses to land (and other historical examples of “form building in the landscape” such as earth mounds and gardens) is germane to land art and to eco art, I mean to slow down the progression from and intercalation of one form into the other.27 I reexamine what I call the “hinges” between landscape and land art, between land art and eco art, and also between landscape and eco art, the eco art that is more involved with landscape than with land art. One revisionary implication of this procedure is that the break in artists’ practices between early land art and 1974, to use the subtitle of the 2012 exhibit Ends of the Earth, is not as significant as the exhibit’s cocurators (or, before them, Suzaan Boettger in Earthworks) claim.28 While reasons to link landscape traditions with land art and eco art are manifest, the more common move has been for artists and art historians to suggest a break between such practices. Heizer, Smithson, and Wallis (cited above) are M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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examples; more widely read in academic circles is W. J. T. Mitchell’s examination of the genre of landscape in his influential collection Landscape and Power, first published in 1994 and again in an enlarged edition in 2002. Inaugurating this landmark study of new approaches to the genre,29 the remarkable, even Wittgensteinian, “Theses on Landscape” with which Mitchell provocatively begins his own contribution to the volume, “Imperial Landscape,” have an ironic ring today. Dismissing the object of study that he and his co-authors powerfully revise, Mitchell asserts in thesis 8 that “[l]andscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression” (5). Unlike many land artists, he does not dispute the genre’s past importance, but with them, he is dubious about its present and future if a restrictive, retrograde version of the genre continues to be employed. My point is that continuities and discontinuities cannot be discussed adequately if we decide on principle that the landscape tradition is irrelevant. To forget or dismiss landscape’s history is to cut off resources for and recourse to currently relevant practices and theories. We understand less about both landscape and eco art by considering them separately. Yet there is a strong inclination to sever landscape traditions from land art and contemporary practices, an inclination that follows, in part, from the power of such traditions and later artists’ and art historians’ need to be independent. For example, while Nicholas Alfrey and Joy Sleeman are certainly right to warn against “questionable assumptions about the continuity and adaptability of a British landscape tradition,”30 my contention is that both the connections and differences need to be considered rather than dismissed. I am attempting, not to revive landscape in an earlier form, but to remember it, to avoid what artist Maya Lin—using author Jared Diamond’s phrase—calls “landscape amnesia,”31 whether in the sense of landscape depiction of the earth or conceived as a landscape more materially, the abundance of our planetary environment, the decline of which her work tracks. I argue that the future of artistic engagements with the earth has been and remains tied to the specifics of the past of landscape in two principal ways: First, both land artists and contemporary eco artists interact with the landscape genre more significantly than is commonly allowed. Second, landscape, land art, and eco art mutually inform one another, beyond these documented historical interactions, in a manner that becomes visible with hindsight. Both Patricia Parker and Mieke Bal have theorized the notion of the “preposterous” in ways that can help us think through such temporal relationships. As Parker claims, “Preposterous . . . connotes a reversal of ‘post’ for ‘pre,’ behind for before, back for front, second for first, end or sequel for beginning. . . . the preposterous also disrupts the linear orders of succession and following.” In Bal’s extended usage, it is an activity that yields a preposterous art history, one keenly aware of its own historicality in the present.32 If landscape is best thought of as a medium and as an action (think of landscaping a garden), as Mitchell suggests, then it functions 8

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in this book as another hinge, a pivot point, a mediator. Sometimes the connections between historical and more recent work are causal; in other cases the links are analogical. We could also call this approach “nonlinear” as defined by Manuel De Landa. He suggests that we should not think of human history—in this context, of “landscape”—as “different ‘stages’ . . . that is, progressive developmental steps, each . . . leaving the previous one behind. On the contrary,” he explains, “much as water’s solid, liquid, and gas phases may coexist, so each new human phase simply added itself to the other ones, coexisting and interacting with them without leaving them in the past.”33 The need for nonlinear and nondevelopmental thinking arises, for example, in comprehending the chill we must feel looking at Agnes Denes’s documentation of her rightly famous 1982 Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan. Photographs of this work feature the World Trade Center’s twin towers, symbols in the 1980s of mercantile power and its avoidance of ecological issues, such as the productive use of the vacant land. The destruction of the towers on September 11, 2001, changes Wheatfield retrospectively: because neither the buildings nor her performative earthwork exist now, Denes’s intervention in 1982 seems darkly prophetic, not of a terrorist attack, but of ecological calamity and the excesses of the Anthropocene, in which the exploitative use of land that Denes revealed is seen as a cause of ecological crises today.

Direct Action, Aesthetic Separation and Withdrawal, Articulation Eco art today provides a full spectrum of attitudes toward nature, landscape, and ecology and suggests many responses to questions about its purposes or intended efficacy. These can be construed through three interlocking descriptions of its tendencies: direct action, aesthetic separation and withdrawal, and articulation. While not categorically different, the eco-art practices I now turn to tend to emphasize one of these priorities. What Flint Collins instructively calls “site-reformative” eco art is dominant today.34 Its ethic of direct and ameliorative intervention in environmental problems extends the heritage of earlier land-reclamation projects such as Robert Morris’s 1979 Johnson Pit #30, which relandscaped an open excavation; Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991–93), which extracted toxic heavy metals from soil; and Jackie Brookner’s patented Biosculptures, such as Prima Lingua (1996), which employed plants as water purifiers. On a much larger scale is Viet Ngo’s Devil’s Lake Wastewater Treatment Plant, in North Dakota (1990). Kindred eco-art projects seek to be informative in ways that can change people’s behavior toward the environment.35 A prime example is Subhankar Banerjee’s Arctic Series Photographs (2000–) and his related book Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land (2003), which, by showing this apparently pristine and fragile habitat, M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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spurred U.S. governmental protection of arctic land, species, and Indigenous human populations.36 This positive result echoes the earliest example of collaboration between art forms to sway public and government opinion on the environment, from writings by Thoreau to photographs by Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins to paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, which stood behind the 1864 act in the U.S. Congress to protect the Yosemite Valley. As Sandrine Simon has argued by invoking the emotional register that I examine in chapter 5, “ecological artists have been able to emotionally shake their public, be it society in general or even policy makers, both by portraying the beauty of nature and by expressing their outrage concerning the destruction of the environment. The work of photographers such as Ansel Adams in the Yosemite Valley provided a direct continuity with landscape painting and played an essential role in the creation of the ‘conservation movement’ and national parks in the USA and elsewhere.”37 Though responses to and characterizations of more recent reformative work varies, other examples include the alarming photographs of environmental degradation by Edward Burtynsky or David Maisel and Maya Lin’s What Is Missing?, a multiplatform undertaking, one of whose elements is a melancholic interactive website begun in 2009 that documents what many scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction of life on earth. Prominent eco artist Jackie Brookner (1945–2015) raised a crucial point about reclamation art, however, one that spurs me to see it as one among several compelling practices rather than the necessary goal of eco art. Referring to her own work but in a way that pertains to Chin’s Revival Field and other reclamation projects, she writes: But if the plants are doing the work, why not just grow them in the ground, as in most bioremediation and ecological restoration projects? Why grow them on sculptures? And why do we need art to do what bioremediation and ecological restoration are already doing? The aesthetic, metaphoric and conceptual functions of Biosculptures™ are important because for true ecological restoration, it is not enough to restore the ecosystems. We need to change ourselves. To bring about a future where we can move beyond restoration, beyond an endless cycle of loss and repair where we keep having to bandage new wounds, we need a restoration of human values. We need to revision what we value and undervalue, in the world, in ourselves, and in our identification of ourselves as species. We need to make the restoration processes visible and understandable, and we need to engage the attention, imagination and heart of the public. To affect values, to create desire, to make people care about something, you have to affect hearts, bodies, unconscious dream lives and imaginations. And this is the work art can do so well.38 10

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How do we distinguish reclamation work from green engineering, design, or social activism, and are such distinctions useful? T. J. Demos’s extraordinarily rich book Decolonizing Nature has as a main goal “to further enliven [the] intersection of art and activism” (11). Without diminishing the import of these crossings and priorities in eco art today, I provide a different emphasis, one that articulates distinctions between the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of eco-art practices and more overtly political pursuits and is therefore able to bring eco art’s manifold interactions with land art and landscape to the fore. In Alan C. Braddock’s apt phrasing, “What is the art in ecological art, exactly?”39 For example, Mel Chin has said that the greatest triumph of his Revival Field was its ability to test and prove scientific hypotheses about hyperconductor plants and soil pollution. For him, the question of whether we call this art or science or engineering is not important.40 But is some degree of separation warranted, perhaps even to uphold art’s ability to make a difference precisely through its difference? I agree with Malcolm Miles’s claim that “art interrupts and exposes contradictions; it intervenes to re-inflect the conditions by which it is conditioned; and this dialectical function validates art’s response to climate change, as it also validates political movements, as part of a process of change which is never completed.”41 We can adapt two of Theodore Adorno’s arguments to investigate eco art’s specifically aesthetic dimensions as it confronts climate change, a process I define as “articulation.”42 In Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno holds that if art is to remain connected to momentous societal problems, it must fight for an identity distinguishable (if not fully autonomous) from its ambient culture. As he writes, “All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function . . . are doomed” (1). In his terms, “Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy” (5). On this view, the German artist Herman Prigann’s (1942–2008) many land restorations in Europe, for example, must function as art as well as repair unsightly and toxic strip mines. Art must be identifiable as such if it is to have an effect. There are many possible objections to this stance. Miles claims that eco art “crosses boundaries between art, social research, and environmentalism so that it no longer matters whether it is art or something else.” He suggests, hopefully, that “if the aim is to shift the balance of humanity’s relation to the earth from exploitation to sustenance, this implies a shift in human relations as a point of departure. . . . An ecological aesthetic [can be seen as an] intervention in social conditions, seeing human nature not in a biological sense as beyond history, but as produced in history. . . . Art can intervene in writing the scripts, interrupting the processes of normalization.”43 His prime example is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation (1974–84), a now-legendary project in which the artist, by shaking the hand of every sanitation worker in New York City, drew attention to the urban sanitation systems that we unheedingly depend upon. But his point, while in keeping with the M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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fundamental ecological premise of the interconnectedness of all phenomena, is made precipitously. Granted, what we humans call a given eco-aesthetic project is of no account to nature. But our naming and categorizing practices do matter profoundly to us and to how humans behave toward nonhumans: these attitudes influence, if not determine, what we see and how we act, as the histories of the overdetermined concepts of “art” and “nature” attest. An example was related by author Jack Burnham in 1967: “I can remember when [Hans] Haacke took me to see an example of his first water boxes (spring 1962), then in the rental collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A secretary commented that the museum personnel had been playing with it for days—it seemed to have caused more joyful curiosity than any number of ‘sculptures’—for that reason the museum never thought seriously of buying it as a ‘work of art.’”44 Adorno wrote powerfully on nature and natural history, but my aim is not to engage with these speculations per se but rather to pose a version of his famous challenge to the aesthetic as it operates in the contemporary. According to Adorno, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”45 Brian A. Oard has glossed his argument: “To persist, after Auschwitz, in the production of monuments of the very culture that produced Auschwitz (Adorno might have spoken of Strauss’s Four Last Songs rather than generalized ‘poetry’) is to participate by denial in the perpetuation of that barbaric culture and to participate in the process (reification) that renders fundamental criticism of that culture literally unthinkable.”46 I can specify my stress on the “art” in eco art by asking if it is legitimate to recast Adorno’s pointed question about the authenticity of artistic expression in light of contemporary ecocide. After all, it is the mechanisms of what we might best call the “modernocene”47 that have allowed our contemporary art world to thrive. As Kate Rigby has pointed out, the Holocaust and the effects of climate change differ on many counts, not least in the premeditation of consequences in Nazi Germany versus the large-scale obliviousness in the drift toward climate catastrophe.48 Can we justifiably make art about nature in full cognizance of anthropogenic climate disruption? Can eco art continue in its creation of objects and interventions in the face of humanity’s undeniable acceleration of global climate change? Looking at the question of ecological thinking in the discipline of history, Dipesh Chakrabarty presents both the reasons for and stakes of any suggestion that “business as usual” is viable: “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history and end by returning to the question . . . How does the crisis of climate change appeal to our sense of human universals while challenging . . . our capacity for historical understanding?”49 Should we continue to produce works and to display them using the same largely capitalist structures and attitudes that spawned our current climate problems? I would say yes, if eco art’s effects lie in reflecting and modifying the 12

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long-standing relationships between artistic expression, landscape, and human views of the earth and nature. With Adorno again, it is only from a sometimesnominal remove that defines it as art that eco art can meaningfully speak to our current climate predicament. How should we respond as a species now that we are what Chakrabarty calls a “geological force”? Ways to proceed are offered in philosopher Lorraine Code’s book Ecological Thinking, among them a process she defines as the “study of habitats both physical and social where people endeavor to live well together; of ways of knowing that foster or thwart such living; and thus of the ethos and habitus enacted in the knowledge and actions, customs, social structures, and creative‐regulative principles by which people strive or fail to achieve this multiply realizable end” (26). One way to support living well together, Code elaborates, is to question the largely science-oriented discourses of mastery that are a legacy of the Enlightenment. This eco art does. There is another salient way to consider eco art that refuses to be instrumental, a divergent interpretation of many of the same works of art. In her unfailingly articulate book The Ethics of Earth Art, Amanda Boetzkes challenges the ascendency of art reclamation. She argues that what eco art can best reveal is the earth’s ultimate unavailability to human perception, how the earth exceeds what we can perceive and retracts itself from us in its ineluctable difference. She develops this counterintuitive move away from anthropomorphic intervention—away from practical intercessions—via the recessionary aesthetic of philosophers John Sallis, Luce Irigaray, and Martin Heidegger. Her work also accords with the “object-oriented ontology” of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.50 “The artwork is the threshold at which elementals exceed the limits of perception,” she claims. “In simultaneously making contact with natural phenomena and withholding the drive to unify them in the viewer’s field of vision, the artwork offers itself as a medium on which the earth manifests and asserts its irreducibility to human signification.”51 Thus Boetzkes reads recuperative projects by Betty Beaumont, Rebecca Belmore, Joseph Beuys, Basia Irland, and Aviva Rahmani against these artists’ proclamations of meliorative purpose, accentuating instead the works’ ethics of withdrawal, defined as “a stance of retraction from and receptivity to the earth that foregoes the propensity to actively subsume it within the parameters of our existing logic.” As an alternative, “artists create the conditions of possibility for the earth to appear at the limits of intelligible form.”52 In this way, eco art is respectfully involved with the earth’s otherness. The three paradigms of eco art that I have described—direct action, aesthetic separation and withdrawal, and articulation—can be specified through Collins’s and Boetzkes’s interpretations of Hans Haacke’s pioneering eco work Rhine Water Purification Plant (1972; fig. 3) and Condensation Box (1965). The center of Purification Plant, installed indoors at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, for M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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Fig. 3  Hans Haacke, Rhine Water Purification Plant, 1972. Glass and acrylic containers, pump, polluted Rhine water, tubing, filters, chemicals, goldfish, drainage to garden. Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 2016 Hans Christoph Carl Haacke / SODRAC, Montreal. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

two months in 1972, was a large pond with goldfish swimming in water siphoned from the Rhine River downstream from the local sewage-treatment plant. The storage jars holding this opaque, apparently polluted water from the river were visible, as was Haacke’s didactic photo-and-text work, Krefeld Sewage Triptych (1972). The central photograph in the triptych shows birds swarming over effluent in the river where the plant discharged its supposedly cleansed water. The side panels provide statistics on the contamination entering the river and the names of the area’s major polluters. Haacke thus revealed that one player in the degraded state of the river water that his work filtered was the sewage-treatment facility funded by the same civic authority that supported the gallery. This embarrassing exposé was underlined by the fact that Haacke returned cleansed water from his fish tank to the grounds of the Museum Haus Lange seen through the picture window adjacent to his installation. In his extensive reading of Rhine Water Purification Plant, Collins concludes that the work is an example of the “documentary mode” of site remediation: the “distinctive reconfiguration of site specificity typified by Haacke’s early eco-artwork can be accurately characterized as site reform—action to improve the degraded ecological conditions and situational realities of a particular site-as-ecosystem. Its more precise site-reformative function in regard to the site of Krefeld is to document—provide factual information (evidence, recording, reporting) about, or 14

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show evidence of—the specific anthropogenic ecological problem of water pollution there.” Collins argues persuasively that “eco-art, from its inception, set about reorienting the concept of site specificity toward eco-ethical concerns and responsibilities, in effect redefining site specificity as site reform.”53 But insisting on the corrective function of Haacke’s and cognate works presents only one dimension of their significance and of eco art’s activities. Rhine Water Purification Plant was evidently serviceable. The fish seemed to thrive, and the grass onto which the water ran was green. But Haacke clearly established too that his display was not a version of the dysfunctional Krefeld waste plant. He drew the still-polluted Rhine water downstream from that facility, after it had been treated by the “real” industrial process. He also placed his work in an art gallery, a frame for aesthetic reckoning. For Haacke as for Adorno, I suggest, “the artwork is related to the world by the principle that contrasts it with the world.”54 Haacke’s stated goal with this innovative work was to “articulate something natural.”55 To function as an articulation of what Bruno Latour has called “concerns” that bring human and nonhuman actants—plus scientific, technological, and aesthetic discourses—into contact,56 an artwork must remain distinct from the cultural contexts whose materials and habits it unavoidably employs. While a fine line can be seen to exist between art and nonart activities in general and between eco art and green-technology projects, for example, it is a malleable boundary, an edge in flux for any number of reasons. In terms that I elaborate throughout this book, eco art frequently articulates this border, not to guard it, but rather to monitor what its inevitable shifts imply for humans, other animals, and perhaps, in Boetzkes’s terms, the earth as it recedes from our view. As she emphasizes with reference to Haacke’s 1965 Condensation Box and related works, “Haacke activated natural processes within the gallery space,”57 in this case, the weather-like effect of condensation. Caroline A. Jones reminds us in her masterly article accompanying the re-creation at MIT of Haacke’s 1967 exhibition that the later version of Condensation Box was in fact titled Weather Cube.58 Boetzkes’s interpretation is that “Haacke’s work sensitizes the viewer to the otherwise hidden dimensions of natural activity. . . . His practice invited the unpredictability and fundamental impenetrability of the elemental.” While this is a convincing description, especially given the consistency with which Boetzkes demonstrates her thesis across many otherwise different works of earth and eco art, it is—again—not the whole story about this piece or about eco art. For example, it does not take account of Haacke’s attempt in this and cognate work to create autonomous systems that are as much as possible independent of human input and even observation. Boetzkes claims that Haacke’s ecological work, “rather than presenting the spectator with information (scientific facts about ecosystems or environmental degradation)”—in line with Collins’s reading—instead “requires M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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the spectator to stand, watch, and wait for elementals to reveal themselves.”59 Jones, however, while acknowledging that viewer participation is important to these installations, applies more sustained pressure to Haacke’s will to achieve an Adorno-like autonomy. The artist himself wrote that “in spite of all my environmental . . . thinking I am still fascinated by the nearly magic, self-contained quality of objects. My water levels, waves, and condensation boxes are unthinkable without this physical separation from their surroundings.”60 Jones highlights the ironic tension in “how Haacke struggled to keep the human from impeding the autonomy of these fluid systems, yet recognized the importance of the art in restoring humans’ own equilibrium (via empathetic ‘systems’ he was not acknowledging as part of his concern).” She concludes, “the human could watch; the human might even push a system into motion, but the system’s unfolding was independent of the human in 1967.”61 With Boetzkes, we might conclude that what is definitively independent of the human is the earth, here seen in its difference through eco art. But such a recession is not all we can potentially realize when eco art claims, as Haacke did, to “articulate something natural.” I am not suggesting that Haacke meant more by “articulate” here than two of the OED’s standard definitions specify: “to express distinctly” and “to attach or unite.” The term was clearly significant to him, though, because he brought it up early in a 1971 interview published in Arts Magazine. “[A]rticulate something Natural . . . has an intended double meaning. It refers to ‘nature,’ and it means something self-understood, ordinary, uncontrived, normal.”62 Given that “articulation [was] perhaps one of the most generative concepts in contemporary cultural studies” in the 1980s and 1990s, however, we might extend its theorization at the hands of Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall particularly to think with it in the context of eco art. For Laclau, according to Jennifer Slack, while articulations do link concepts, such relationships are never necessary and do not connect systematically across a system.63 Laclau and Hall after him work against any deterministic system by insisting on the specificities of articulation. Hall posits that the notion of articulation “has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how specific practices articulated around contradictions which do not all arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment, can nevertheless be thought together.”64 Shifting this idea from the contexts in which Hall himself would deploy it—though not from the time frame he shared with Haacke’s work—allows me to build on Hall’s admirably clear and evocative idea. “In England,” he stated in an interview, the term has a nice double meaning because “articulate” means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an “articulated” lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two 16

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parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?65

Thus the association that Boetzkes posits between Haacke’s Condensation Box and a showing-forth of the earth is edifying but—like Collins’s insistence on site reformation as the best ethical response for eco art deserving the name—partial, worthy but not necessary. “Articulation” allows us to perceive Haacke’s environmental work in both ways and to explore contemporary eco art as an aesthetic articulation of evolving environmental and ecological issues.66 With systems theory, Haacke tried to balance the independence of the Krefeld installation with its overtly political purpose: to spark public attention to and outrage over water pollution. Relevant here is anthropologist James Clifford’s development of the concept of articulation to explicate the political claims that attend Indigenous sites, a topic I return to in chapters 2 and 5. Making reference to Stuart Hall and to Antonio Gramsci, he claims, “The notion of articulated sites of indigeneity rejects two claims often made about today’s tribal movements. On the one hand, articulation approaches question the assumption that indigeneity is essentially about primordial, transhistorical attachments (ancestral ‘laws,’ continuous traditions, spirituality, respect for Mother Earth, and the like).” “Articulation,” he extrapolates, “offers a nonreductive way to think about cultural transformation and the apparent coming and going of ‘traditional’ forms,” adding—crucially for the contexts of eco art that I am developing—“in articulation theory, the whole question of authenticity is secondary, and the process of social and cultural persistence is political all the way back. It is assumed that cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade.”67 Articulation as I develop the notion in Landscape into Eco Art—coordinates under which eco art examines the culture of climate change, for example68—maintains this plasticity, this proximity to and aesthetic distance from the earth. “Authentic” eco art can mitigate damaged sites or offer an inkling of the earth’s withdrawal from our merely human cognizance. It can do both or something else entirely. But because it is not defined or confined by these abilities, I suggest throughout this book that efficacy and amelioration are not and should not necessarily describe or measure eco art. Thus eco art can be both political and aesthetic in the manner expounded by Jacques Rancière: “The aesthetic regime of the arts . . . strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule. . . . The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art. . . . It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself.”69 Underlining the boundary work that I M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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make central to my understanding of eco art in chapter 5, he states elsewhere: “Political art is a kind of negotiation, not between politics and art, but between the two politics of aesthetics. This . . . is made possible by continuously playing on the boundary and the absence of boundary between art and non-art.”70

Terminological Borderlands I have introduced the importance of eco art and claimed that in its work of tackling contemporary environmental issues from a humanistic perspective, it articulates pivotal connections to both land art and the landscape tradition. To this point, I have relied on largely shared understandings of terms such as “landscape,” “land,” “ecology,” “environment,” “border,” and “nature.” While many of these terms overlap, their provisional definitions also have direct effects. It is for this reason that discussions of borders are central to this book. As Ila Sheren explains in a visual-studies context, there has been a move to “dematerialize” borders by emphasizing more than their physical, international presence.71 The truly global issues of climate change are a test case for “border theory.” By considering border crossings in the contexts of eco art, I hope to add to the articulation of border theory in the past decades. These and closely related vocabularies have been “manipulated,” whether semiconsciously—to promote a male colonist’s gaze with the idea of wilderness,72 for example—or, as we have briefly seen, in the habits of landscape depiction integral to the supposed innocence of the picturesque view.73 These concepts have also been handled materially, most obviously in landscape gardening and in land art, but also in examples of eco art. My sense of the manipulated collaborates with but should also be distinguished from the idea that landscape is “constructed” by human culture, whether this view is presented almost as common sense by Simon Schama—“even landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out . . . to be its product”—or more extensively argued by Dennis Cosgrove or Neil Evernden.74 For reasons I detail throughout Landscape into Eco Art, it is salutary to resist the idea that landscape (or anything else) is completely made by human hands and minds. The nonhuman and materialist turns common to scholarship in new materialism enriches our sense of and responsibility toward that which is not us,75 as I argue in more detail in chapter 5. I manipulate “landscape” and its relatives yet again to establish rubrics through which to understand eco art today, putting these concepts “in crisis . . . to make sense of change while signposting the necessity for different vocabularies,” in Parikka’s apt words.76 Given their historical development and the flux of contemporary usage, it is neither possible nor desirable to secure fixed meanings for any of these overdetermined ideas. Specifications in usage are best made locally and in context, but some preliminary definitions of the terms that appear frequently in this book are in order. 18

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Landscape’s “Geo” Focus A significant boundary negotiation in this study is that among the central terms I employ, their usages, and their interrelationships. These margins of meaning are productive for analysis because it is at these junctures that decisions are made, where commitments and assumptions are potentially disclosed before they are normalized in new protocols. Demarcation is exactly what is at stake in the term “landscape.” Writing from the perspective of cultural geography, Kenneth R. Olwig has pointed out that “[t]he two meanings inherent in the diaphor of landscape are well expressed in the definition . . . in Dr. Johnson’s classic 1755 dictionary: (1) ‘A region; the prospect of a country’; (2) ‘A picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it.’”77 Eco artists often use the term in precisely these two ways, not least because “landscape” is imbricated with the definition of “eco” as understood by Guattari and many other commentators: “The root ‘eco’ is used here in its original Greek sense of oïkos, that is, ‘house, domestic property, habitat, natural milieu.’”78 Many contemporary artists do not see landscape as tainted by associations with the history of this genre or, again like Mitchell in his “Theses,” inadequate for contemporary practice. For example, one of the most prolific and influential European eco artists, Herman Prigann, claimed regarding his Terra Nova project (1990–2001), which sought to establish “opencast mines” in Germany as wetlands, that “[t]hese landscapes of the 21st century are conceived as sustainable and open to development and will be realised on the foundation of an ecological aesthetic.”79 He means by “landscape” both the parcel of land and his own remedial interventions. Malcolm Andrews has effectively surveyed other early uses of the term that still figure in our conventions. The German word Landschaft specified the area adjacent to a settlement; it was largely a category of land administration and ownership. The Dutch term Landskip specified hills, woods, etc., as ornamental backgrounds—parerga—in paintings and drawings, a meaning that was adopted in England in the early seventeenth century and applied to both independent studies and backgrounds in other works.80 Thus the idea of landscape comes into English with a double dose of the proprietary: jurisdiction of the land around a town and a small framed view that one could also own. Probing these usages, Anne Whiston Spirn insists on the import of the Old English word “landscipe”—as well as its coeval Nordic, Scandinavian, and German cognates—meaning the shaping of the land by people and that specific land’s reciprocal manipulation (as I would put it) of the people. She concludes, “There is a notion, embedded in the original word, of a mutual shaping of people and place: people shape the land, and the land shapes people.”81 Her etymological archaeology finds contemporary resonance in the irrevocable intercalation of the human and material dimensions of landscape, what we could call their coexistence or coextension, that we find in recent theories of landscape. M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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We cannot properly suspend this mutual binding to think about landscape only as a genre in art or solely as an independent slice of “nature,” just “land.” One’s location on land that has a history is crucial. As I recognize more formally in my acknowledgments, I am keenly aware that I am writing about landscape from a city and university now occupying the traditional Indigenous territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit. The place-name “Toronto” stems from the Kanienke’haka word “Tkaronto,” “the place in the water where the trees are standing,” and was a meeting place for many First Nations, including the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Algonquin.82 For a range of reasons, then, we need to be alert to the implications of the widespread adoption of the term “Anthropocene,” as well as “landscape” and “nature,” discussed below. Zoe Todd makes the point forcefully: As a Métis scholar, I have an inherent distrust of this term, the Anthropocene, since terms and theories can act as gentrifiers in their own right, and I frequently have to force myself to engage in good faith with it as heuristic. While it may seem ridiculous to distrust a word, it is precisely because the term has colonized and infiltrated many intellectual contexts throughout the academy at the moment that I view it with caution. . . . I ask myself: “What other story could be told here? What other language is not being heard? Whose space is this, and who is not here?”83

Whether we think of landscape theoretically (as an instance of the boundary making fundamental to art’s appearance), historically (as a genre, medium, or view of nature), or materially (in terms of its nonhuman elements and actants), it is a notion embedded in and adapted to the diverse and often disputatious “anthrop” of the Anthropocene. For humans, landscape is always cultural, especially when that implies that the practice of “landscaping” in its broadest sense articulates border lines with what is not human and between human communities. In mapping, in literature, or in the visual arts, landscape in Western usage—if not, crucially, in some Indigenous contexts—enframes and takes possession of space in some way.84 It is the product of constant manipulation, an ongoing “articulation” that is often explicitly specific to art media, whether digital (where the term “digital manipulation” is a commonplace) or material (land artists often boasted about using earth rather than merely representing it). Manipulation is inevitably also political (peoples are manipulated in the sense of being disenfranchised of their land). In her masterly exploration of Gilles Deleuze’s theories of “territory” and the earth, Elizabeth Grosz unfolds the profound complexity of the Western notion of landscape and adumbrates its connectedness to other pivotal ideas: “This real, the outside, chaos, demarcated through the constitution of a 20

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(finite and provisional) territory, makes possible the more calculable, measurable, and mappable features that characterize a site, the site’s openness to scientific and technical manipulation and control; and the built frame, produced through a regulation and partitioning of orientations in the site, divides and selects that which the territory, now configured as landscape, a view, can directly mark, and illuminate, the inside, the divisions and selections made by groups and communities” (my emphasis). She extends these thoughts to present a theory of art that points beyond painting to eco art’s fundamental relations to the earth: “Painting has been about the visual and plastic image of the invisible forces of the earth, forces that are the combination of universal forces regulating all the cosmos— gravitational forces, magnetic forces, the force of light, and so on—and the historically contingent eruption of life on earth in the particular forms it has taken—forces that are cellular, chromosomal, biological, regulated by impersonal cosmic forces through which evolution operates.”85 Before discussing the term “landscape” in connection with the even more intricate notion of “nature” with which it is frequently associated, let me comment on my emphasis on the earthly, “geo” commitments of eco art in Landscape into Eco Art. My focus is distinct from that of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann in Toward a Geography of Art—influential and admirable as this work certainly is—where he discusses “how issues related to the question of the place of art can be addressed in a variety of contexts involving current questions in the history of art.”86 Without prescribing fast boundaries, where we might say that Kaufmann works with geography in its spatial senses, including mapping, my emphasis is closer to the material of the earth, more geological. Like Kaufmann, I want to examine links to art history in its turn to ecological issues. Encompassing and central as the linked concepts of landscape, land, earth, mapping, etc., are, however, they do not account for all eco art, nor do I wish to delimit future speculation by suggesting that this form is only connected to landscape and the earth. While my focus on the earth implicitly includes all species on the planet and extends to the atmosphere and seas, there is, for example, eco art that is more exclusively geared to human behavior than that which I examine here. Aiming “to uncover outstanding photography applied to confront the most pressing social and environmental challenges of today,” the international photography competition Prix Pictet’s themes are a powerful example.87 Work discussed in the following chapters does touch on the “post-human” in its relationships with nonhuman animals, but these dimensions of eco art are not my main concern. Neither is the growing area of digital eco art as explored by numerous artists and art historians, including Ila Sheren, who “considers [it] environmentally motivated art that uses digital media to recast the human in terms of objects and landscapes, taking into account global inequalities and postcolonial resonances.”88 Without suggesting that there are M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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hard divisions among these modes of engagement, I do claim that there are good reasons for elaborating what Rosi Braidotti calls the “geo-centred turn.” She presents the challenge that I believe many eco artists successfully take up: “we need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within understandable language.”89 Not only is the term “Anthropocene” a geological designation—signifying the epoch that many believe follows the Holocene—but as Parikka reminds us, geology and landscape include much more than the planet’s surfaces.90 Caves, mining, underwater zones, the atmosphere, and the “blue marble” in space are part of one earth.91 The recalibration of the human subject from the perspective of the earth called for by many theorists today—including Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Lorraine Code, Bruno Latour, and McKenzie Wark, all of whom I draw on in the chapters below—is at the same time a broadly political and ethical commitment embraced by many eco artists, because at root, as David Harvey claims, “all political and social projects are ecological, and vice versa.”92 The preponderance of eco art is concerned with the earth from what we can call a geoaesthetic angle. So too was both land art and historical landscape depiction, offering us the opportunity to compare these modes in new ways.

Nature and Art History “Nature” is a notoriously demanding concept. Bolstering Raymond Williams’s much-cited assertion that it is “perhaps the most complex word in the language,” today there is a chorus of calls to suspend its use.93 In Bill McKibben’s formulation, nature in its former connotation of independence and perfection has “ended”: “We will never again be a created being; instead we will be creators.”94 For Timothy Morton, the concept should be abandoned because outworn ideas of the natural— as separate from and mere resources for humanity—impede the adoption of the “ecological thought,” a thoroughgoing belief in interconnectedness in which nature and culture are coextensive. If not always in crisis, the concept of nature has perennially preoccupied and shaped ways of being on earth.95 Peter Coates gives a succinct account of its five main connotations: “as a physical place . . . more or less unmodified by people . . . ; as the collective phenomena of the world or universe; . . . as an essence . . . ; as an inspiration and guide for people and source of authority governing human affairs; and . . . as the conceptual opposite of culture.”96 “Nature isn’t natural,” Noel Castree reminds us. Neil Evernden wrote decades ago that “[w]e are . . . the authors of the system we call Nature” as well as of the dualism that divides nature and culture and, ironically, allows us to discover our roles in “the constitution of reality.”97 These arguments should not sway us to adopt an idealist or poststructuralist position that nature is “constructed” exclusively by us 22

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and that nothing exists beyond our languages. On the contrary, we are a small part of what we call nature: stuff exists and acts on us and on itself, as eons of Indigenous belief hold and as new materialisms and object-oriented ontology argue. In Landscape into Eco Art, I am concerned to trace the import of articulations of “nature” rather than to avoid its use. “Landscape” is readily associated with the first two of Coates’s connotations—nature as a separate physical place and as the collected phenomena of the world—and of course with the quite different category of its depiction in art. As we have seen with reference to the term’s etymology, landscape also implies the manipulation of nature—regularly construed as “land”—to ends not coupled with the aesthetic. Clark’s euphonious title—Landscape into Art—suggests the notion of independent nature coming into art-as-culture, and it alludes to the rise of the landscape genre within the historical hierarchy of the arts. Martin Warnke’s Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature (1994) deftly interlaces these two meanings of landscape with a sense of nature as independent, demonstrating the inevitable imbrications of landscape and nature in the field of art history. The same fluidity and interconnectedness of these terms is to be found in the discourse of land and eco artists themselves, as invaluable resources such as Alan Sonfist’s pioneering Art in the Land (1983) and John K. Grande’s Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (2004) show. Castree suggests that we should be “less interested in what nature is and more in what it’s considered to be, as well as what the effects of this are.”98 I adopt this approach when thinking about relationships between nature and landscape in eco art. I have used the restrictive modifier “Western” with respect to the landscape, land, and eco art discussed in Landscape into Eco Art. It would be consistent to add “Western” concepts of nature, as Coates does in his subtitle. In the discipline of art history, this adjective is a shorthand to alert readers that I do not delve deeply into other art traditions—in this context, most crucially “Eastern” landscape art and historical Indigenous understandings of nature, land, and landscape. Contemporary Indigenous practices, on the other hand, are central to the book. Part disciplinary partitioning, part word-length expediency, but also to acknowledge a genuine lack of expertise on my part—however much we might take on board the notion of Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, to use the title of James Elkins’s inspired book on shaping paradigms in the discipline—this modification should also be seen to acknowledge the endless range of cultural inflection around these concepts. Yet this diversity of discourses on key concepts can be brought together on one methodological point. While I have no doubt that “Eastern” views of shan shui—depictions of mountains and water—diverge from landscape in the Euro-American mold, they also differ from one another. There is no Eastern or Western concept of nature or landscape. There are multiple, manipuM a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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lated conceptions, always. Indigenous understanding of these terms is habitually held to depart from those of settlers who occupied and depicted others’ land globally, usually in the direction of better environmental awareness and stewardship on the part of Indigenes. Again this contrast is telling, but only in its details. There is no one “Indigenous” concept of nature or land. “To assume that even the Hopi and their Navajo neighbors think of, speak of, and treat nature in the same manner is simply wrong,” writes Gary Paul Nabhan. “Yet individuals from two hundred different language groups from three historically and culturally distinct colonizations of the continent are commonly lumped under the catchall terms ‘American Indian’ or ‘Native American.’”99 That said, there are dominant views associated with specific cultures and groups. When nature, landscape, and art are construed in the manner that most European colonizers saw North America— “a landscape untouched by history—nature unmixed with art,” in Leo Marx’s phrase—the results are catastrophic.100

Environment and Ecology Landscape depiction, land art, and eco art are often imbricated not only with one another but also with “ecology” and “environment.” All these ideas intersect in turn with understandings of landscape and nature. None of these terms is used with complete consistency; it is not my aim to secure more stable definitions but rather to follow the vicissitudes of usage when they have implications for the art in focus. Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers underlines the necessary variability of the term: “Ecology understands conflicting interests as being a general rule. Ecological, symbiotic events, the creation of rapport between divergent interests as they diverge, mean novelty, not harmony. From an ecological viewpoint, the questions raised by a creation of rapport are not epistemological, but rather political, pragmatic, and (again) never innocent ones.”101 The complexity of the resulting connotations is magnified by our habit of modifying other areas of inquiry with the term “landscape” or “ecology” in commonplaces such as “media landscape” or “political ecology.”102 For example, Gyorgy Kepes, whose important writings I turn to presently, curated an exhibition in 1951 called The New Landscape in Art. Here and in his 1956 book The New Landscape in Art and Science, he displayed “landscapes” discovered by science that were too small or otherwise obscure to be seen by the human eye. My approach is to work with such difficult terms rather than to suggest that they are “over” or for other reasons need to be expunged from our discourse. Disorienting as these intersections can be, they underscore the importance of these concepts and highlight their many mutual concerns. Their meanings are necessarily entangled. What is at stake in their deployment, however, can be seen more clearly by keeping several specifications in mind. 24

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Both ecology and environment have long histories as parts of scientific fields and as separate concepts. The German naturalist Ernst Haeckel’s 1866 coinage Oecologie combined the Greek roots for “house” and “knowledge.” It built on earlier theories of the interrelationships of life forms and their surroundings.103 While this term clearly subtends Morton’s current understanding that ecology means “that all beings are connected” and that “the ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness,” we should remember that ecology was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and to some extent remains—a scientific discipline.104 Evernden describes how ecology came to be conflated with “environmentalism” in the early 1970s, when land art was at its apogee. “Something happened in the late 1960s—or, rather, something that had been happening for a long time suddenly became highly visible after Earth Day (22 April 1970). Everyone began to pay lip service to the environmental movement. . . . [Today many ecologists are] dismayed at seeing their work lumped together with the pseudo-science of some back-to-the-land advocates or with the sentimental musings of what the media call ‘the ecology movement.’”105 The notion of the “environment” had itself moved from its origins—environs in the sense of surroundings—to a connection with nature, to a protection of nature from threat or despoilment, “environmentalism.” The idiom migrated easily to land art, in which context we find the same conceptual intersection with ecology that was important in the resurgence of eco art in the 1990s—witness Timothy Luke’s essay “Art and the Environmental Crisis: From Commodity Aesthetics to Ecology Aesthetics”—and persists today. Melissa Sue Ragain claims that “[i]t was not until Sonfist’s 1983 survey of environmental art [Art in the Land] that the term was finally mobilized with its full ecological implications.”106 A crucial precursor to Sonfist’s anthology, however, was Kepes’s Arts of the Environment, published in 1972. Both publications suggest that what I and most commentators now call eco art was from the late 1960s often referred to as “environmental art,” meaning either art in the environment (i.e., in nature) or art concerned with ecological problems, or both. Kenneth S. Friedman, a commentator in Sonfist’s all-important collection—which was subtitled A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art—remarked on the problems that ensued, complaining that “a notion of environmental art has been elaborated from theories of art and from notions of an art related to nature, nature being ‘the environment’ in which ‘environmental art’ takes place. Nothing . . . could be more wrong. . . . A closer look . . . will reveal dimensions that are as much cultural as natural.”107 What Friedman presciently warned against was the conflation of “environment” and “ecology” in the narrow sense of relationships in nature; he wanted land art to have more scope, to expand into all types of environments. Remixing all these terms, media theorist Gene Youngblood, writing in 1970, provided the more expansive sense of environmental/ecological art that both Friedman a decade later and some contemporary M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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scholars call for: “For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality.”108 Hans Haacke’s Rhine Water Purification Plant (fig. 3), discussed above, embraces what remained the two major connotations of “environment” in use ca. 1970: embattled nature and, in the parlance of systems theory, a system. Artwork by Haacke, Sonfist, and a few others at this time brought these ideas together. In Etienne Benson’s explication, “This was an understanding of the environment as the set of physical factors influencing human wellbeing, with the ‘natural’ environment often being identified as an ideal away from which humanity had fallen and to which it should, so far as possible, return. This was, in other words, the environment. The other was an understanding of the environment as a system; that is, a set of interrelated objects and processes defined in relationship to a focal individual, community, or population. This was the environment of something or someone.”109 Kepes was pivotal in connecting these strands. He invited Jack Burnham to be a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s new Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), which Kepes founded in 1967. As already mentioned, Burnham exhibited Haacke’s environmental work there.110 Thinking the “ecological thought” in his introductory remarks to Arts of the Environment, Kepes expressed a principle that can guide our interpretations of ecological and environmental art as well as their attendant discourses: “the world is not made of discrete fixed entities. The boundaries that separate and connect them are fluid” (3). He constantly sought a “common denominator between the landscape open to the artist and that which is open to the scientist.”111 Early eco art could create “environments” or could be “environmentalist,” or both. Landscape into Eco Art offers ways to interpret contemporary eco art through its relationships to earlier engagements with the earth in the visual arts, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the genre of landscape depiction that peaked in the nineteenth century. In each chapter I include one or more thematic case studies that explore the main themes of a given section of the book in more detailed and thematically expansive ways. These case studies are paradigms of interpreting eco art in that they exemplify manipulations of landscape and its cognates. Each one articulates crucial relationships with the picturing of land, both in the sense of “making clear” and of “adding to.” Each case study also furnishes paradigms for understanding a given chapter’s themes but also self-consciously rubs against these narratives, 26

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offering an opportunity to think through connections and contrasts across Landscape into Eco Art as a whole. Breaking away from what I hope is the consistency and balance of their respective chapters, however, these dossiers are purposefully individual and thus not symmetrical in detail or methodological approach. The case studies interrupt the impulse to present an inventory of practices and instead invite readers to think of their own parallel or indeed opposing examples. Through the case studies, I think through strategic examples in terms of what is now being called eco art history, which—to recall the 2014 College Art Association panel description noted above—“calls for a reexamination of the history of art history at large as well as a rethinking of key issues in the discipline, with methods and materials that integrate climate, landscape, and natural resources into the interpretative framework.” While these examples consider a wide range of artworks, they are best thought of as an armature for further explorations of the connections and distinctions between landscape, land art, and contemporary eco art.

Case Study 1: Deracinated Trees Specifying how artists deploy deracinated trees over a long time span frames the large question of the relevance of past practices of representing nature—whether in landscape painting or land art—to the understanding of contemporary eco art. The extensive and largely unremarked practice of uprooting, displaying, and otherwise manifestly manipulating trees in landscape, land art, and eco art provides an opportunity to examine such articulations from multiple perspectives and to consider the connections and differences between these practices. Trees have been synecdoches for nature for millennia.112 Without suggesting that pre-Columbian, Chinese, and Norse traditions of depicting the world tree (Yggdrasil in the last case) are the same, for example, their similarities suggest that trees are habitually seen as life giving. Charles Darwin used the image of the tree of life in The Origin of Species (1859) and, more significantly in the context of its visual representation, famously used a diagram of such a tree as the inspiration and illustration for his theories.113 From fantastic anthropomorphized trees by Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder (1759– 1835) to marked, scarred trees that nonetheless survive (as evidenced by the remnants of logging in Emily Carr’s [1871–1945] paintings of forests, and by the placement of a bronze hand into the trunk of a tree in Giuseppe Penone’s It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point [1968], for example), most images of trees suggest vitality and rebirth. More recent examples are found in the ecological artworks of Alfio Bonanno and David Nash. Trees are often stand-ins for us, for our vitality and our frailties. They appear in landscapes that underline the passage of life, such as Jacob van Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery (1655–60), in which a partially uprooted tree and a broken tree dominate the foreground. Amidst sarcophagi, M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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however, a ground-level tree in the right foreground appears to illustrate regeneration. While there are certainly examples of uprooted trees in the European and American landscape depictions, they typically reinforce the tenacity of these organisms or work as memento mori. The Flemish artist Roelandt Savery’s (1576– 1639) Study of a Tree (1606–7) performs both functions: we see an uprooted tree in sufficient detail to note the new shoots that spring from this source. The Uprooted Tree, an American drawing by an unknown artist done more than two centuries later, shows the persistence of this fascination: three artists lean against a similarly uprooted tree. We see them sketching the scene before them, their backs to us. Our visual field is dominated by the exposed root structure of the tree; they may be interested in the conventional “view” before them, but we as viewers of the image focus our attention on the roots of the tree.114 Contemporary artists are also obsessed with abused trees.115 A short list of representative examples would include Agnes Denes’s chained trees (1979); Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs of the arboreal victims of the Gulf War (1991), which are reminiscent of Robert Adams’s Dead Palms Partially Uprooted, Ontario, California (1983); and Henrik Håkansson’s suspended trees, exhibited at the Freiburg Kunstverein in the spring of 2016. Deracinated trees are a defining subset of this wider compulsion. As Anna Widén explains regarding The Lost Woods (2013), “In my installations with uprooted trees, I have pondered . . . human civilization. Throughout history we know that we have treated nature arrogantly, but never with such volume and intensity as today. The destruction of ecosystems continues though we know that the consequences are devastating. It seems that our own so-called ‘progress’ prevents us from taking action.”116 Closely related in its ecological purpose and focus is the elaborate reconstitution of “fallen” trees by contemporary American artists John Grade, Charles Ray, and Maya Lin. Grade’s Middle Fork (Cascades) (2015) was made for Wonder, the reopening exhibit at the Renwick Museum in Washington, D.C. He selected a hemlock tree in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle that is approximately 150 years old—the same age as [the museum]. His team created a full plaster cast of the tree (without harming it), then used the cast as a mold to build a new tree out of a half-million segments of reclaimed cedar. Hundreds of volunteers assisted Grade, hand carving each piece to match the contours of the original tree. After the exhibition [closed], Middle Fork (Cascades) [was to] be carried back to the hemlock’s location and left on the forest floor, where it [would] gradually return to the earth.117

Charles Ray went to equally extreme ends to make Hinoki (2007), a carving that exactly replicates an actual toppled and decomposing California redwood. Ray 28

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describes the process: “Making a wood carving of the log by starting from the inside and working my way out would bring a trajectory of life and intentionality to this great fallen tree. . . . I transported the tree, cut apart by a chainsaw, back to my Los Angeles studio. Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed. This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki).”118 The work now occupies a room at the Art Fig. 4  Robert Smithson, Upside Down Tree i, 1969. Institute of Chicago, a space that had to Alfred, New York. Three original 126 format chromogenic-development transparencies. Collection be built around it. Lin’s video Unchopof the Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of James ping a Tree (2009)—part of her What Is Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai. © 2016 Estate of Robert Smithson / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, Missing? project, noted above— New York. addresses the deforestation of the planet by stating how long it would take to denude famous treed areas such as New York’s Central Park at the current rate of deforestation worldwide (“destroyed in 9 minutes” in this case). The latter part of the piece shows trees felled for timber in reverse motion, standing again in the forest.119 By contrast with this recent work, paradigmatic land artist Robert Smithson forcefully opposed vitalism, organicism, and the instinct to preserve prevalent in the late 1960s. He “executed”—a verb, often used innocently to describe artists’ creative process, that takes on a more pointed tone in this unusual subgenre—his first when he was a visiting artist at the State University of New York at Alfred in 1969.120 Finding an uprooted tree, he trimmed it, then had his students “plant” it in the mud (fig. 4). He repeated this process solo on Captiva Island, Florida, then extended the interest in exposed roots in his Yucatan Mirror Displacements and related works such as Roots & Rocks in the same year. In a departure from the site/ nonsite dialectic he pioneered in 1968, to which I return several times in the chapters that follow, Smithson also displayed an intact uprooted tree titled Dead Tree in an exhibition in Düsseldorf. He made no reference to its place of origin but set mirrors within its crown, as in the Yucatan work. In both cases, the mirrors reflected other parts of the plants that held them and reproduced ambient imagery. British artist Keith Arnatt—who met and worked with Smithson when the latter M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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visited England in 1969—also experimented with mirrors and trees in works such as Mirror Path (1969).121 We respond emotionally to his displaced trees, as we are meant to, a phenomenon I emphasize in my final case study. These specimens are placed in isolation, the first along a side road and away from other trees, the second on a beach near the ocean. Dead Tree could not seem more out of place than in a spartan gallery setting. To uproot and plant a tree upside down or to drag a dead (as opposed to regenerating) specimen into a gallery is “pathetic” in John Ruskin’s sense of the pathetic fallacy. Against Ruskin’s righteous estimation that “the step is very easy” from responding with emportment to a work of art “to a farther opinion, that it does not much matter what the things are in themselves, but only what they are to us,”122 however, I argue in chapter 5 that the affective dimension exploited by Smithson is crucial to current eco-art strategies that acknowledge the material separateness of living and nonliving materials. Smithson also eschewed ecological scruples. Instead, he used uprooted trees to do violence to the landscape tradition. He wrote and worked materially against two commonplace notions: To oppose the selected and favored view that has for centuries been nominated as “picturesque,” he found inspiration in disused, rejected, and often industrial areas. As he emphasized in a 1972 interview, Spiral Jetty “is right near a disused oil drilling operation and the whole northern part of the lake is completely useless” (297). Uninterested in wilderness, he insisted that “we have to develop a dialectic of nature that includes man” (298). That dialectic required what he called “earth works,” whether his own, those of peers such as Dennis Oppenheim and Michael Heizer, or gardens by Olmsted, whom Smithson famously dubbed “America’s first ‘earthwork artist’” (164). Always aiming to augment rather than to curtail material and intellectual connections, Smithson, as I have noted, dismissed the landscape painting of the museums: “Representing nature once removed in lyric poetry and landscape painting is not the same as direct cultivation of the land,” he wrote (164). Landscape betokened the opposites of “land”: the museum, the artist’s studio, the city. While some critics continued to respond to early earth-art exhibits in terms of landscape conventions, their habitual analogies were unable to explain the import of the new art. As Sidney Tillim pointed out in an extensive review of the portentous Earth Works show, seen at the Dwan Gallery in New York in October 1968, Smithson parodied the aesthetics of the picturesque in his article “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” by including the ugliest industrial markers he could find. Yet Tillim nonetheless titled his review “Earthworks and the New Picturesque” (my emphasis). The artist was not providing a revised picturesque but rather a conscious alternative to this mode of framing landscape. Smithson’s tour of anti-monuments begins with his reading, on his way to Passaic, an article in the New York Times in which a conventional “Allegorical Landscape” by the nineteenth-century American 30

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painter Samuel Morse is reproduced under the heading “Art: Themes and the Usual Variations.” The views that Smithson composes with his camera are neither landscapes like this painting nor sanctioned views of nature. There “was no landscape” there, he writes in “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic” (72). If Smithson’s uprooted trees from 1969 are not allied in any but a negative way with landscape conventionally conceived, we might conclude that except as a dialectical foil, the tradition of such depictions is irrelevant to his work and perhaps to land art more generally, precisely because it is depictive rather than material, hopelessly removed from that which it represents. Suspending judgment on this inference for now—and returning to the manipulation of trees—let me look to related questions about the importance of ecology and environmentalism in relation to both land art of the 1960s and 1970s and to more recent eco art. While ecological concerns were topical in Western societies from the early 1960s—Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962; as noted, the first Earth Day, in 1970, marked a decade of growing concerns and activism—expressly ecological artworks are usually seen to have begun only ca. 1970 with Agnes Denes’s Rice/Tree/Burial with Time Capsule (1969–79) and Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison’s survival pieces. Distancing their efforts from Smithson’s and Heizer’s earthworks explicitly, Newton Harrison stated in a 1991 interview: “They used earth as material; we feel that our works were among the first to deal with ecology in the full sense of the term.”123 Joseph Beuys describes his touchstone work 7000 Oaks (whose full English title is Action 7,000 Oaks: Forestation of the City Instead of City Administration) (1982–87; fig. 5) in related terms: “I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness— raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.”124 The emphasis on ecology continues in much contemporary eco art. The popular photographer Sebastião Salgado, for example, inherited a deforested farm in Brazil and reclaimed it; global reforestation is now a policy he promotes through his photography. If Smithson’s deracinated trees are not landscape, however, neither is it easy to think of them as some sort of ecological statement. Writing in 1973 on Olmsted and invoking the landscape architect’s inspiration, the theorist of the picturesque Uvedale Price, Smithson bluntly stated that “some of our present-day ecologists, who still see nature through eyes conditioned by one-sided idealism, should consider [Price’s view that] quarries, gravel pits, etc., which are at first deformities, . . . [can be] converted into picturesqueness” (159).125 The land artist Nancy Holt, Smithson’s partner, recalled in 2013 that it was in England that their mutual interests in landscape depiction and theory solidified: “It was in England that the roots of that kind of thinking began. . . . I always think of Gilpin. So I think that we were going back very much [when we visited England in M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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Fig. 5  Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks, 1982–87. Kassel, Germany. Photo: Uwe Zucc. Courtesy of dpa picture alliance archive / Alamy. Work © Joseph Beuys.

1969], in terms of our roots, our ancestral roots, and also finding out how the English treated their landscape, how the natural—having it fit into the existing landscape—transformed the formal garden.”126 “I like landscapes that suggest prehistory,” says Smithson (298), but by this he does not mean the pristine nature projected by deep ecology. Where Smithson recognized the nascent ecology and environmental movements and made a land-reclamation proposal to industry at about the same time as he expressed reservations about ecology in the Olmsted article, other noted earth artists worked from completely different reference points. At one extreme is Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, which adopts the compass points of minimalist sculpture and a practice of remote siting. At the other end of the spectrum, many artists were motivated by broad notions of ecology as energetic and environmental connectedness, as James Nisbet explores effectively in his 2014 book Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in the Art of the 1960s and 1970s. His prime example is Dennis Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop of 1969 (see fig. 29), where the capitalist marketing system for grain is marked and, for the field worked in the piece, suspended by withholding the crop from market. I discuss both Heizer and Oppenheim in more detail below. Another powerful example of the imbrication of ecology and what I think we can still call land art is a delicate yet polemical work by Joyce Wieland called Water Quilt, made in 1970–71. Sixty-four pillow-like forms supporting botanically accurate images of wildflowers from the 32

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Canadian Arctic are tied together and mounted on canvas. But this is no pastoral meadow. Viewers are invited to read the texts that literally underlie these seemingly innocent images. Each overlay reveals an excerpt from economist James Laxer’s 1970 book The Energy Poker Game, an exposé of American plans to take over Canada’s water resources by rerouting north-flowing rivers toward the thirsty market south of the 49th parallel. The book’s subtitle (The Politics of the Continental Resources Deal) announces the threat that exercised Wieland and many others worried about continental “sharing” of resources well before the North American Free Trade Agreement of the early 1990s. Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium (2007; fig. 6) in Seattle, a more elaborate version of his Vivarium of 2002, is an example of the contemporary inclination to bring nature—here in the form of an uprooted tree harvested from the nearby rainforest—indoors for examination, or to place it on life support in the gallery. Both Smithson and the Harrisons did the same, if for different reasons: I discuss this pattern more fully in chapter 4. One of the most celebrated and widely exhibited eco artists working today, Dion is well aware of the technologized artificiality of the situation and of the repugnance that we might experience in thinking that this is what “nature” has come to. But the work need not be interpreted as a gesture of despair or defeat. Choosing and installing this magnificent tree was a well-documented ritual. In connecting forest and city and in selecting a “nursery tree” from which new life emanates, in strong contrast to Smithson’s Dead Tree especially, Dion underlines the interconnectedness characteristic of ecological thinking. The work is both a lament and a call to awareness. What effect does seeing Dion’s cosseted tree trunk have on our interpretation of Smithson’s Dead Tree or Hanging Garden (2010) by Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, in which a live birch tree supported by an irrigation system grows out of a dead and inverted tree of the same species? Or, most dramatically of all, the ongoing “Uprooted Tree Fig. 6  Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium, 2007. Project,” whereby a group of Dutch Mixed-media installation; greenhouse structure: 80 ft. artists plan to hang a large tree under the long overall. Installation view: Seattle Art Museum, Washington, 2007. Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Sally Eiffel Tower and keep it alive there. Their and William Neukom, American Express Company, rationale? “The contrast and relationship Seattle Garden Club, Mark Torrance Foundation, and Committee of 33, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of between the colossal tower of pure steel the Seattle Art Museum. Photo: Paul Macapia. and the living tree, invites the viewer to Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, wonder and reflect. The tree is hung in New York. Work © Mark Dion. M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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chains under the giant tower, almost surrounded by it. Protected? Captive?”127 The effrontery of Smithson’s earlier work is only increased by comparing it with these purpose-built, life-sustaining environments. The contrast is even starker if we recall Bill Viola’s jarring installation Theater of Memory (1985), in which a deracinated tree is festooned with lanterns (replacing Smithson’s mirrors, barely visible in his Düsseldorf work) that flash discordantly in time with what seems like a perpetual short circuit in the lighting and sound systems. The shock value of Theater of Memory connects Viola’s installation with Smithson’s from 1969. Abstract forms are projected against a screen or wall in Viola’s tree room, silhouetting the branches and providing an evocation of the neural firings of the unconscious in memory. In Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties—published in 2002 and still the most complete reading of the American side of this phenomenon—Suzaan Boettger argues that Smithson’s uprooted trees are part of a long Western tradition of associating trees, distress, and death. Mirroring the violence of his times (though not primarily that of an environmental sort), “the disordered inversions of these trees,” Boettger suggests, “graphically [symbolize] a state of emergency, the sixties’ exuberant boughs of possibility turned topsy-turvy by a distant war gone amok and public insurgencies at home” (222). It is a plausible and even compelling reading of what this work might have meant ca. 1970. It remains the case that in many examples and aesthetic traditions, uprooted trees betoken violent discord. Contemporary Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji’s images of flooding in his homeland and in New York City feature this form, for example. The view that Smithson’s abused trees are protest works is strengthened with reference to two inheritors of Smithson’s arboreal actions. Roy Arden’s photograph Pulp Mill Dump (#1) Nanaimo, B.C. (1992; fig. 7) graphically shows the discarded trees that are the detritus of the pulp and paper industry, mere waste products of a resource economy. Visually quoting Smithson’s famous glue and asphalt pours—one of which (Glue Pour; fig. 8) was performed in the city where Arden works, Vancouver—Arden uses Smithson as inspiration for eco art.128 Smithson’s provocative spills were for him anti-ecological in the sense that they mocked what he thought were the pretensions of short-term ecological thinking as opposed to his long view of entropy. He preferred geological time frames. As he stated poetically in his 1972 essay “Spiral Jetty”: “These fragments of a timeless geology laugh without mirth at the time-filled hopes of ecology” (152). In another context, he was less moderate in his complaints against the ban on his project to cover an island in broken glass. But we need to think of this work not only in its time but in its effects, in this case its more-than-formal reception by Arden. Again using the deracinated-tree motif, in Tree Stump, Nanaimo, B.C. (1991), Arden both quotes Smithson’s replanted stumps from 1969 (fig. 4) and distances himself from them by turning land art to the purposes of ecological commentary. This still-startling image shows a large uprooted stump in 34

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Fig. 7  Roy Arden, Pulp Mill Dump (#1) Nanaimo, B.C., 1992. Cibachrome print on transmount, 104.1 × 139.7 cm. By kind permission of the artist. Fig. 8  Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, December 1969. Vancouver, Canada. Collection of the Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai. © 2016 Estate of Robert Smithson / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, New York.

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Fig. 9  Sam Durant, Upside Down Pastoral Scene, 2002 (detail). Fiberglass, wood, mirror, acrylic paint, audio equipment, twelve pieces 48 × 48 × 58 in. ea. © Sam Durant. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

the foreground, cleared, we assume, to make room and, indirectly, to supply material for the subdivision in the background. Arden frames this photograph in a way that alludes to the conventional structure of a landscape painting, with a coulisse of yet-to-be felled trees providing an interior boundary for the view. Front and center as the subject, however, is the violently displaced tree. Seen this way, echoes of landscape, land art, and eco art reverberate through this powerful image. Smithson’s tree trunks have also been thematically rerouted by the Chicago artist Sam Durant in Upside Down Pastoral Scene (2002; fig. 9). Creating a distressed forest with a dozen of Smithson’s readily recognizable tree trunks, roots, and mirrors—and with his dystopian title alluding to the whitewashing typical of the genre of pastoral within landscape—Durant extends the sense of anxiety and lament to issues “of race in American history and culture.” In Durant’s extensive installation, Smithson’s inverted tree stumps contain speakers emitting music keyed to interracial violence: “the tree reference is steered toward symbolic, historic and cultural meanings. The Billie Holiday song ‘Strange Fruit’ forms the central axis for the soundtrack and positions the tree as a site of unspeakable violence, the site of lynching.” The allusion to the family tree cued by the song “We Are Family” is specified by Durant in the surrounding portrait drawings of 36

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prominent members of the Black Panther Party, which was founded in Smithson’s era, 1966. Durant elaborates: “Each tree contains a loud speaker and is placed on a square mirror. The sound track is digitally controlled, sending music to particular trees and constructing sonic landscapes as it unfolds. Ideas of the family tree, the tree of knowledge, the symbolic significance of the parts of a tree; roots, the trunk and branches are re-oriented as various compositions play out in the tree field. Upside Down: Pastoral Scene implies that African American creativity produced and continues to produce American culture, in spite of the long history of overwhelming forces deployed against it.”129 In a related work from his series Mirror Travels in Neoliberalism, Durant refers to Smithson’s essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” (1969) to commemorate Emory Douglas, the central artist in the Black Panther movement. In the C-print Landscape Art (Emory Douglas), also of 2002 and again deploying the tree stumps with their roots pointing upward, Durant injects carnage into the pastoral and thus animates the political potency of this genre by name. This “landscape” is peopled by four figures carrying protest signs that together read “Landscape art is good only when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree by his mother-fucking neck.” While Smithson’s deracinated—and in two cases decapitated—trees are the acknowledged source for Durant, his images reassign and specify the savagery in Smithson’s otherwise apparently decontextualized practice. Rebecca Solnit suggests in her reading of the military presence in the Arcadian landscapes of northern California that one can never see these surroundings, or indeed a renowned depiction of mortality within a prominent landscape setting such as Nicolas Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (1637–38), innocently again after such violence is registered.130 She brilliantly likens concrete coastline bunkers to Poussin’s monolithic tomb; Smithson’s ripped-out trees remind Durant of lynchings. We see Smithson’s land art and indeed the landscape tradition differently through these revisions of uprooted trees. We need not think of this process as either anachronistic or as extending an unexamined tradition of landscape into the present. Anachronism is difficult, if not impossible, to remove from our experience of the world; thinking instead of Bal’s “preposterous” articulation of time in art—joining and distinguishing temporalities—such a view to the past from our present moment can also allow eco art history to attend to the full spectrum of art practices focusing on the earth, whether these fall under the sometimes maligned heading of landscape, the seemingly past and even anachronistic aspirations of land art, or the panoply of approaches called eco art. Historical and other distinctions are necessary, but if ecology asserts the ineluctable connections between all life forms and thus transcends boundaries of many kinds, including those of disciplines, nations, and living species, then eco art history should think ecologically. M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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Rodney Graham exemplifies the artist-obsessed-with-inverted-trees. He articulates the many implications of this motif through the confluence of the technology of the camera obscura with human perception. Trees (and everything else we see) are at one stage inverted in both picturing techniques. This inversion may be overtly shocking, as in Martin Puryear’s innocently titled Camera Obscura of 1994, an installation in which the artist literally hanged a cherry tree from a gallowslike structure in an outdoor public art exhibit in Denver, Colorado. But the eye’s and camera’s flipping of images is not necessarily violent and can partake in the age-old picturing of the tree as life, as in Graham’s tour de force in this lineage, the Millennial Time Machine: A Landau Carriage Converted to a Mobile Camera Obscura (2003; fig. 10). This expansive installation features a converted nineteenth-century landau carriage positioned in a pristine, vault-like glass pavilion and fitted with a cannonlike lens pointed toward a young sequoia tree across a landscaped garden. While the work makes the idea of “shooting an image” literal, what we witness is instead the vitality of temporal change in several registers. The work was commissioned to mark the millennium in 2000. The restored carriage and its prominent lens are recollections of nineteenth-century technologies—part of the millennium just past—yet they are housed in a contemporary glass-and-cement structure, an inverted and light-filled display of the “darkroom” created inside the carriage, where the camera obscura projects its inverted image onto the round screen between the two seats. The carriage is stationary, as if in amber, even though the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery that commissioned the work has kept the tack for the horses that once drew the carriage. We can only recollect the nineteenth century. Yet it is the camera obscura image that moves and thus underlines the contemporaneity of vision in the real-time growth of the plants captured by the apparatus, the quiet energy of this framed yet dynamic landscape. Graham added a pivotal detail to his time machine, one that filters our interpretation of this work. Around the lens that points toward the tree, he has inscribed the original Latin title of Giambattista della Porta’s Renaissance study of natural phenomena, the Magiae Naturalis (Natural magic), published in 1558. It is through this historical and yet contemporary portal of wonder that the Millennial Time Machine explores what I have deemed the hinges in representations of the earth. It is simultaneously productive of landscape as art in its framing of an image and also of eco art in focusing attention on the optical and cultural processes by which we construe nature. What Graham abjures is a teleological sequence in which landscape is succeeded by eco art. At the millennium, there is a collaboration between past and present. It is one thing to use a camera obscura or to take photographs of trees and invert them for display, as Graham does in pieces such as Ponderosa Pines, Prince­ ton, B.C. (1992) and his Welsh Oaks series of 1998; none of these trees is physically altered. Here Graham partakes of the long-standing fascination with inverted 38

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Fig. 10  Rodney Graham, Millennial Time Machine: A Landau Carriage Converted to a Mobile Camera Obscura, 2003. Landau with camera obscura. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Gift of the artist with support from the Canada Council for the Arts Millennium Fund, the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation, British Columbia 2000 Recognition Plan, and the University of British Columbia, 2003. Photo: Howard Ursuliak.

images of trees exemplified by Thoreau in “The Ponds” section of Walden (1854). It is quite another to hang the tree, as both the late German artist Herman Prigann and contemporary Reinhard Reitzenstein have done. The different affective registers of an image versus those of physically present works suggest that Smithson was right: “Representing nature once removed in . . . landscape painting is not the same as direct cultivation of the land” (164). Prigann makes the meaning of his sculpture Hanging Tree explicit: “This allusion to the destruction of nature in the name of our culture’s creation is a metaphor. The inverted tree (arbor inversa) moves in the wind like a giant pendulum. Below the tree, in a hollow, lies a block of granite. Engraved in it are the cardinal points. The top of the tree is unreachable.”131 Constructed in 1985, the piece was recently moved and is now a permanent memorial. The inversion of trees is also central to Reitzenstein’s work, one pole of his reverence for nature as expressed through trees. Of many examples, his most M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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arresting in this vein is Transformer (2000; fig. 11). The artist vividly describes the inception and effect of this work: Transformer was built for the Sculpture Symposium Cime et Racines, held at La Gabelle Park near Trois Riviers, Quebec, Canada [in 2000]. During the site visit to La Gabelle I was instantly struck by seeing the two abandoned hydro-electric towers at the edge of the escarpment above a hydro dam. . . . I inquired about the possibility of suspending an inverted tree from the two towers. The title Transformer means the same in both French and English and compels the work to be read as a critique of hydro Quebec forestry practices and clear-cut strategies when establishing corridors for their lines. It also references the history of logging and log chutes along the river. The project could be seen hovering on the escarpment from miles away and often lured visitors from the highway to witness the spectacle.132

The white spruce tree remained suspended until the cables gave way in 2003. For Reitzenstein, inversion “arrests your attention . . . , stops you no matter where you are. . . . It is subcutaneous, it is cultural, it is subcranial.” “If there is a plea in my work,” he reports, “that would certainly be to understand more deeply and significantly the symbiosis that is shared between natural systems.”133 Transformer is in many ways opposite to Natalie Jeremijenko’s better-known permanent installation Tree Logic (1999), at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams. There Jeremijenko placed six flame maple trees in large canisters, hung them upside down, and also cultivated them with an irrigation system. The trees responded by growing up toward the light. They thrive as symbols of tenacity and vitality. Reitzenstein’s installation told a darker story. It is worth registering, however, that not everyone shares his urgency about or appreciates his way of articulating the ill-considered removal of trees and the large implications of energy generation and use. Reviewing Displacement/Inversion, in which uprooted trees were suspended upside down above alleyways in Pittsburgh in 2006, for example, Daniel Clark declares that Reitzenstein’s reason for displaying these dead trees . . . is to raise awareness of dead trees. “They’re deliberately disturbing, and some people see them as such,” the artist tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “while others see them as awe-inspiring.”

Well, don’t send in the grief counselors just yet. It’s highly unlikely that the

trees are eliciting the responses he claims they are, at least among the sober. Let’s face it, a person can’t get very far in life if he’s going to be shaken to the core by the sight of moribund plant life. Reitzenstein would understand this, if he ever strayed outside the artsy community long enough to witness that quaint custom of ours known as Christmas.134 40

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Preaching to the converted is a problem common to eco art and eco art history. If raising awareness is the goal of much eco art, even a negative review such as Clark’s suggests that people will be reached, both in galleries and by public art such as Reitzenstein’s. As Transformer shows with its references to power generation and land use, a place’s and people’s ecological history can be told in this way. Are there issues more relevant to our stewardship of our own future than those of ecology and environmental change in the Anthropocene? What can eco art history do, and what would success look like? Deracinated trees figure in three Fig. 11  Reinhard Reitzenstein, Transformer, 2000. other works that I consider because Cime et Racine Symposium, La Gabelle, near Trois these examples employ the moving Rivières, Québec. By kind permission of the artist. image—central to contemporary visual-arts practices in general and to eco art—and because they diverge instructively in the explicitness of their ecological interests, their relationship to landscape, and even in whether we should call them all eco art. The Right Way (Der rechte Weg, 1983) by the Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss is a fifty-two-minute 16 mm film. Deep Time is a thirtyminute two-screen HD video installation by Melanie Gilligan and Tom Ackers, commissioned in 2013 by Cape Farewell, a U.K. and North American not-for-profit organization that sponsors culture programming around issues of climate change. The Nature of Our Looking by Gilbert & George (1970) is an eighteen-minute “video sculpture.” Gilligan and Acker’s video verges on the didactic. In Gilligan’s words, “We look at the problem of climate change through a dual focus: the earth’s exploitation and human exploitation. We look at how capitalism developed out of the appropriation of both natural wealth and human potential, and how it degrades and undermines both of those material bases in which our capitalist cultures subsist. We have also tried to make palpable the immense discrepancies in timescale and complexity that confront one another in the dialectic of nature and these cultures.”135 Deep Time (fig. 12) is replete with contrasts that underscore this message. It opens and concludes with a mystical evocation of both outer and inner space, a cosmic play of highly colored disks that read as both planets and cells as they M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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Fig. 12  Tom Ackers and Melanie Gilligan, Deep Time, 2013 (video still). Two-channel video, 30 min. By kind permission of the artists.

merge, separate, and seem to replicate. The narrative framed by these otherworldly (or innerworldly) events is structured by two predominant story lines, sometimes opposed on the two screens. One captures the mentality and accelerated timeline of capitalist resource extraction, played out by a team of young excavators and their two overseers, who dig “into a history of rotting matter” in an attempt to remove an object from a water-filled hole in a forest.136 This space has been revealed by a large fallen tree whose uncovered roots abut the dig in many shots. Reminiscent of the uprooted trees in earlier landscape depictions, it appears that this tree fell “naturally,” like Dion’s in Neukom Vivarium (fig. 6), exposing what the four workers are after in the earth. A powerful counternarrative is spoken by an animated rock face, an anthropomorphized Mother Nature, or Gaia perhaps, whose cadences are synthetic and androgynous, as if translated into English for our edification. Deep Time alternates between scenes of excavation—increasingly hurried and peppered with personal comments by the team members and their layabout on-site foreman—and a meditative chronicle of the earth’s deep time spoken slowly by the rock face. “Humans,” it says, behave out of competition for resources: they deplete the earth much more quickly than the earth can regenerate. This point is acted out by a female boss doing “field work” by sitting at a desk in a field, dressed for an office in the city. Via phone conversations with the foreman, she pushes the group to get results at whatever cost: get “more for less, more or less,” she instructs. “Trees are jobs,” the foreman responds; her answer: “cut both.” In a sequence in the very middle of the work, she, glib and ruthless, rhymes through increasingly ludicrous “swaps” to increase profit: to expand biodiversity, 42

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Fig. 13  Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Right Way [Der rechte Weg], 1983 (video still). German video with English subtitles, approx. 52 min. © Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

for example, “swap a bee for a tree.” It is a species and interspecies hierarchy that enacts the earth narrator’s point that for humans there is no “genuine collective decision making.” Collaboration versus individual expediency is a theme drawn out by long sequences of a beekeeper and his hive, frames that are topical, given environmentalists’ worries about the decline in bee populations worldwide. That this is a work about the capitalist Anthropocene is also made evident near its beginning, when we see a coin carelessly tossed into a pond and another into an animal burrow. We cannot help but notice that they land heads up. “People grow in that ground,” the very earth that is excavated here, says the rock face, but “they don’t see themselves in it,” either temporally or materially. Deep Time indicts exploitative land use under capitalism and the capitalization of nature. Because it has a strong and at times entertaining plot, we might miss the fact that it is focused on “landscape” as a cipher for nature-as-resource. As a work of art, it is a landscape. The forest in which the digging occurs under the uprooted tree, the fields in which the beekeeper and the manager work, even the galactic scenes that frame the video—all are the stuff of landscape as image, with the deracinated tree as the center of attention. The Right Way (fig. 13), on the other hand, is overt in its landscape references. It takes place in a spectacular and well-explored landscape, the Swiss Alps, where Fischli and Weiss have donned unlikely rat and panda-bear outfits. The two “animals” meet, stroll, tumble, and bicker over and through this terrain. Meandering as their path and commentaries are, they try to find “the right way” in the sense of life’s true path as well as that of a literal direction. The film is an allegory of M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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human hubris. While there are nonhuman animals in the film—a pig that they treat as a pet but then devour, goats, dogs, and a turtle found flipped on its shell, high in the mountains—the absurd anthropomorphization of the journey we follow for almost an hour makes the point that all the views of and about landscape in the film are products of human seeing and culture. Though the closing sequence especially suggests nature worship—with much chanting, dancing, and playing of alpenhorns, improvised from tree branches, against a spectacular alpine sunset— the protagonists are on the whole remarkably unself-aware and arrogant. Setting the marooned turtle back on its feet to find its own path again—and addressing it as “comrade”—for example, they wax on about how they have rescued the creature and how lucky it is that they are there in nature with the freedom to do as they please. Clearly “the right way” is their way, the human way: “we make the rules in the forest,” the English translation of the narrative runs, “we are the highest beings.” An uprooted tree figures importantly at two junctures in the film. When Rat is escorting his new friend around his domain, he shows him an area near his lair where he has gathered various parts of trees for their apparently shamanistic qualities. His prime specimen is an uprooted sapling, roots aloft with the purpose of bringing the sky down to the earth, he claims. Bear is most impressed with this magical device. A little further on, both are washed down a waterfall into a lake. They are rescued by holding on to a hollow log. Bear’s recovery from this adventure in the glacial water is slow, but eventually the pair find their way to another of Rat’s abodes, a hollow under yet another upturned tree. Here Bear sleeps and has a dream of standing beside a perfect miniature tree in full leaf. Deep Time sends a strong ecological message, one that does not depend on our recognition of the video’s affiliations with depictions of uprooted trees in the landscape tradition but is, I believe, deepened by this reference. Landscape undertones suggest attention to the long duration of human interaction with the earth that Gilligan and Ackers’s Mother Earth calls for. The Right Way, on the other hand, thematizes landscape but is not in any obvious sense ecological. Looking back at the film from the twenty-first century, however, its condemnation of anthropocentric understandings of nature chimes with the priorities of critiques of the Anthropocene and of the assumptions made in conventional landscape art. The Nature of Our Looking by Gilbert & George—the title the pair used for both a video and drawings done in 1970—offers a way to understand The Right Way through its analogous critique of the landscape tradition in a deadpan parody of the discourses of landscape and nation, the colonizing “Englishness” of this looking.137 The wordplay on “nature” in this title (the how and the what of looking, we could say), underlines the contemporary relevance of nature, landscape, and the English-­ garden tradition to national and personal identity. As Fischli and Weiss did a decade later, Gilbert & George show that there is no more mediated concept in the 44

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human repertoire than that of “nature.” Dressed in suits that mark them as country gents, those with the property and leisure to contemplate nature in a class-based, gendered, picturesque way prescribed for this elite for centuries,138 Gilbert and George sit or stand motionless in a manicured “natural” setting. Both the video and the charcoal drawings display an adaptation of Norman Gale’s poem “The Country Faith” to remind us of Arcadia: Here in the country’s heart Where the grass is green, Life is the same sweet life As it e’er hath been.139

The works underline the essential connection between thinking about nature and limning landscapes. We watch these gentlemen waiting patiently to catch a glimpse of beauty or the picturesque exactly where they have been conditioned to find it, in English nature. Gilbert & George traced their charcoal drawing from photographic negatives and then distressed the paper to make it look older. The results struck a chord with the public: “We stopped making them because people liked them too much,” they report with bemusement.140 Again it is emotion that holds the key to the landscape tradition. Even in the disappointment Gilbert & George register in the film when nothing happens, we learn that landscape—like talk of the weather, as artist Roni Horn suggests in chapter 3, below—is part of us. Can and should art about the earth avoid such apparent mastery and complacency? A final example in this compendium of deracinated trees—Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled, shown at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012 (fig. 14)—allows us to explore this question in its self-conscious linkages of the landscape garden, versions of land art, and ecology.141 Subtitled Alive Entities and Inanimate Things, Made and Not Made, the work is taken as a prime example of a new materialist turn in its emphasis on the nonanthropocentric, independent life of “things.”142 Untilled was sited in the composting area of the Karlsaue Park that permanently hosts documenta in Kassel, Germany. From a manicured and geometrically controlled Baroque foundation, the park was expanded from 1785 on into the superficially less controlled format of an English garden. Huyghe’s gambit is to relinquish aesthetic control further, or at least to share it with “nature,” whether the abundant flora or the work’s resident dogs, whom he called Human and Señor. In seeming cared for and domesticated, and at the same time appearing to run wild in the grounds that host Untilled, these canines are reminiscent of the dogs that appear randomly in The Right Way. Huyghe’s title reminds us that we see a relatively uncultivated area. He has claimed, “I’m interested in the vitality of the image, in the way an idea, an artifact, leaks into a biological or mineral reality. It is a set of topological operaM a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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Fig. 14  Pierre Huyghe, Untilled: Alive Entities and Inanimate Things, Made and Not Made, 2011–12 (detail). Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA 13 with the support of Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel, A.C., Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; and Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. Photo: Pierre Huyghe. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

tions. It is not displayed for a public, but for a raw witness exposed to these operations.”143 Things just happen without us, Huyghe’s Untilled seems to suggest. In the apt words of one commentator, Huyghe thereby stages “indifference to the participating subject,”144 an expansive ecology of which we are but a small part. If that seems both obvious and banal, we can point out that the stakes are high: the artist short-circuits or at least challenges a Kantian aesthetic based on human judgment as well more recent reception theory and relational aesthetics. We participate here but as biological equals or even inferiors on the margins, not disinterested judges. By contrast, the bees are especially busy, zipping from the flowers to the hive that was seeded on and became the head of a copy of a neoclassical nude sculpture from 1935 by Max Weber. Huyghe says of Untilled, “compost becomes a place where things are left without culture, where they become indifferent to us, metabolizing, allowing the emergence of new forms. These elements and artifacts are markers, found in history; they are also things you usually find in a park: a bench, a statue, an animal, a human.”145 Yet how “untilled” (unmanipulated) can anything be at one of the world’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art? For example, Huyghe placed uprooted oaks and partially sculpted rocks in Untilled in reference and homage to Beuys’s 7000 Oaks, begun at documenta 7 in 1982 (fig. 5). This art-historical and institutional allusion suggests that we can legitimately take Untilled as in part about a generational link between 46

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ecology via Beuys’s environmental plan to green Kassel and the “ecology” of the art world. Huyghe’s purposeful inclusion provides a reason for the eco art historian to extrapolate the meanings of Huyghe’s work to the significance of land art as well as the landscape garden in contemporary iterations of eco art. But Huyghe’s oaks are uprooted and recumbent, whereas Beuys’s thrive vertically. Huyghe’s reference is thus also involved with the long habit of depicting such flora in the landscape genre and with the destruction and recycling of organic matter that are integral to the landscape garden in which Untilled was placed. This case study of deracinated trees demonstrates the connectedness of this imagery and tactic across the categories of landscape, land art, and eco art. In chapter 2, “Beyond Suspicion: Why (Not) Landscape?,” I extend this discussion by examining how and why the landscape genre has been largely ignored in accounts of land and eco art and what we might gain by revisiting a dialogue that was in fact not suspended. In chapter 3, “Remote Control: Siting Land Art and Eco Art,” I investigate the factors that cause land and eco artists to place their work how and where they do. To what extent was the fabled remoteness of much American land art occasioned by a reaction against narrowly defined landscape practices in the museum—not simply the museum as an urban institution—its ideology of separation from the past? In both the United States and Europe, land art involved resistance and relocation, processes that accorded authority to the idea of remoteness. What “control” do these often-reactive procedures maintain over eco art today, whether we think of their classic instantiations in the 1970s or ongoing, remote, and now mythic examples such as Michael Heizer’s City and James Turrell’s Roden Crater, both begun in the 1970s but unfinished and largely inaccessible? One paradigmatic difference between land art in what Rosalind Krauss named the “expanded field” and eco art is that the latter has frequently returned to the museum, as we saw in Dion’s Neukom Vivarium (fig. 6). My focus in chapter 4, “Contracted Fields: ‘Nature’ in the Art Museum,” is on this widespread and in some ways peculiar pattern of bringing “nature” inside the gallery space. Thinking again with examples such as Eliasson’s critically acclaimed and popular installation The weather project, introduced above (fig. 1), I ask if what appears to be a reversal of the movement away from institutions and the urban that motivated land art, whether its remote sites, such as that of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, or the more accessible routes of Hamish Fulton’s walks, is in significant ways also a return to the protocols of landscape as a museum art form. Two pervasive themes course through this book and come into sharp focus in my final chapter: the preoccupation with borders and eco art’s engagements with science. Global warming and water or air pollution show no regard for national borders or the fragile boundary of our human skin; borders of all sorts are questioned and usually transgressed by ecological thinking. In chapter 5, “Bordering the Ubiquitous: The Art of Local and M a n i p u l at e d L a n d s c a p e s

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Global Ecologies,” I examine boundary questions in several examples of eco art and in two concluding cases studies that take us to the nonanthropocentric, material aspects of the earth, what I call “the crystal interface” and “the emotional life of water.” The latter phrase can be heard in two ways: as an evocation of the emotions we humans feel when thinking about water in eco art, and as a reference to the potential independence of water, its own material “life” apart from human perceptions and categorizations. Art concerned with ecology and the environment—with water issues, for example—must reckon with scientific data and its culture to one degree or another. Interactions between art and climate science raise questions about the communication of knowledge, the purpose of eco art in effecting public opinion, and, crucial to the overall arguments of Landscape into Eco Art, the associations of land art and eco art with the landscape tradition, in which science was closely involved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Water has become a recurrent subject in eco-art practices worldwide, many of which seek to harness the interpretive and emotional power of art to effect responses to anthropogenic climate change. How eco art engages us emotionally and intellectually is central to this book as a whole.

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chapter two

Beyond Suspicion: Why (Not) Landscape?

Landscape was not significant in modern art; it has become increasingly significant in the strains of art that aren’t part of modernism. Rebecca Solnit, “Unsettling the West,” in As Eve Said to the Serpent (2001)

Landscape in the Avant-Garde and Land Art There are good reasons for artists and art historians to be suspicious of the genre of landscape. Some scholars want to move away from what they construe as the restrictive aesthetic dimensions of the term “landscape” and toward a fuller consideration of land. The coeditors of both Deterritorialisations . . . : Revisioning Landscapes and Politics and Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics take this position. As the analyses in Landscape into Eco Art set out to establish, my opposing view is that “landscape” as a historical term and set of practices can be seen to include many concerns for the land more broadly. In addition, the aesthetic dimension, as an infra-thin divide from instrumentality, is crucial to our understandings of eco art. As we have seen too, landscape’s offenses within the history of art range from masking profound social inequalities to the extent that it became a vehicle of colonialism to a tedious repetition of stock motifs. “There is no doubt,” W. J. T. Mitchell wrote in “Imperial Landscape,” “that the classical and romantic genres of landscape painting evolved during the great age of European imperialism now seem exhausted, at least for the purposes of serious painting.”1 Who would disagree? Solnit’s snapshot of the demise and reinvigoration of landscape in the twentieth century is also accurate in general. While simply asking “not Cézanne?” or “what about early Cubist landscapes?” or “wasn’t landscape central in Kandinsky’s and Mondrian’s moves to abstraction?” would lead to a more complete version of the use and the eclipse of this 49

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form in early twentieth-century painting, the genre was undoubtedly overshadowed. Her concise history also alludes to, without naming, the auspices under which landscape arguably returned to prominence: postmodernism. It was Rosalind Krauss who first established this connection. In “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” her celebrated article published in the journal October in 1979, Krauss argues that “permission (or pressure) to think the expanded field [of sculpture] was felt by a number of artists . . . between the years 1968 and 1970.” She lists Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, and Bruce Nauman and claims that they “had entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist.” She specifies this “historical rupture” and “structural transformation of the cultural field” with the term “postmodernism,” adding, “There seems no reason not to use it.”2 Krauss also recognizes one of several pivotal “hinges” between the landscape genre and land art: the rejection of a panoply of modernist conventions. In the Klein-group diagrams that she uses to map the new territories of postmodern art, the “landscape” coordinates refer to the land, to what is outside art and now being used as a material and site by many of the artists she cites: [T]he possible combination of landscape and not-landscape began to be explored in the late 1960s. The term marked sites is used to identify work like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), as it also describes some of the work in the seventies by Serra, Morris, Carl Andre, Dennis Oppenheim, Nancy Holt, George Trakis, and many others. But in addition to actual physical manipulations of sites, this term also refers to other forms of marking. These might operate through the application of impermanent marks—Heizer’s Depressions, Oppenheim’s Time Lines, or De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing, for example—or through the use of photography. Smithson’s Mirror Displacements in the Yucatan were probably the first widely known instances of this, but since then the work of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton has focused on the photographic experience of marking. Christo’s Running Fence might be said to be an impermanent, photographic, and political instance of marking a site. (41)

The landscape types rejected by Smithson in “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” by Heizer as he dismissed museum norms, and by Mitchell have indeed been canceled in land art, but significantly, the term survives in Krauss’s influential account. Landscape perdures as a dialectical pole and as a term with ongoing relevance. There is a relatively unexplored commentary that seeks to explain the demise and reinvigoration of landscape in another way and in doing so opens up to conceptual art practices roughly contemporary with Krauss’s essay. The source is 50

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the unlikely investigations of nineteenth-century landscape by the conceptual group Art & Language and the narrative by art historian and Art & Language member Charles Harrison that surrounds it. The hinge here is between landscape and the early twentieth-century avant-garde, important background to my focus in this book. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power includes an article by Harrison called “The Effects of Landscape.” Harrison’s second essay on the topic—“Art & Language Paints a Landscape”—appeared in Critical Inquiry in 1995. Both discuss the so-called Hostages, meta-landscapes painted between 1989 and 1991 by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, then members of Art & Language. These are long and densely written articles and willfully odd landscape paintings. To what are they “hostages”? To the museum, Harrison argues, the site of what he deems “administered culture.”3 Art & Language’s landscapes attempt to escape a certain conception of modernism and the avant-garde allegorized by the museum. Painting landscapes promises a way out of these strictures. “It is only with those Hostages which are paintings of landscapes that the determining presence of the museum seems finally to have been exorcised,” Harrison writes.4 They are paintings of and for the future, as Ramsden and Baldwin made explicit in notes on the project written projectively ca. 1990 (and painted in typeface onto a canvas): What remains of the theme of nature in landscape painting? Pictures of trees, rocks, growing things—paysages—are the vernacular of the amateur or the sentimentalist. The genre has been emptied of its terror; its classical forms are rendered harmless.

We mean to restore the terror.



A work which we shall execute in 1995 is specified as follows: Hostage iii;

Fields Near the Astrop Road.5

Is this claim persuasive? I test it with a contemporary example below. Thinking of the land-art generation, we might well ask, what could be more museum bound than the tradition of landscape painting? But it is here that the argument—one followed in paint and in text, categories that for this conceptualist collective can only be artificially distinguished—takes several compelling turns. Hostage xix plays with time; these landscapes and texts also repay the time we must spend to read them carefully. The painting announces its future self but was also executed at a time that many would categorize as postmodern. It is also as much textual as anything else, reminding us of the group’s mission to weaken the primacy of the visual in modernism. The painting is assertively self-conscious, but not in a high-modernist, self-critical way. Aware instead of its own failure as a properly modernist work of art, it promises a new landscape (Hostage; A Roadsign) and is thus caught between past and future yet not comfortable in the present. It is ironic. B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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Harrison turns that limit to success into another sort of promise. “It may be that the painting in which the genre of landscape is critically continued is one in which traps are set for the unwary,” he writes (my emphasis).6 He argues on the one hand that “[t]he Hostages thus call to mind the last historical moment at which a heightened naturalistic vision could plausibly be made the vehicle for a technically modern art” (my emphases).7 Monet’s or Cézanne’s naturalism is modernist, according to one set of definitions, because it forces viewers to contemplate the surface of the image, the painting, rather than simply see a picture or view through the frame. Some of the Hostages literally make a mess of the Greenbergian primacy of the surface by mounting glass on top of versions of Monet’s poplars while the oil paint remains wet. It is a sticky trap for the visual. “These would be paintings in the genre of landscape and as such would be independent of the figurative image of the museum,” Harrison writes. Again, they would be impossible under the sign of modernism. Yet Harrison resists claiming that landscape’s potential ended in the 1890s. With the following declaration, he envisions a dimension of the future that we now inhabit: “Their putative subjects would be found in the margin of the modern world—the only place where a possibly paintable piece of land might still be found (which is to say a landscape that has not already been so thoroughly aestheticised as to be beyond reclamation for the purposes of a critically significant art).”8 Harrison concludes his essay in Landscape and Power with the following prospect: the legacy of landscape lies “in the precedents that the genre provides for a continued engagement, in the context of the visible, with that which is contingently excluded from the possibility of being seen and represented.”9 My claim is that in restoring the “terror” to landscape, the high stakes that attend this genre, Art & Language previewed the tone, if not the content, of much eco art. John Gibson was a New York art dealer and an early promoter of land art. He opened the exhibit Ecologic Art at his New York gallery in 1969. He said of Oppenheim’s and Heizer’s work, “the appeal for me is they were changing the whole tradition of landscape as we know it—were working with the earth itself—were doing radical thinking.”10 What was the nascent land art of ca. 1970 rejecting in landscape? In extolling their separation from the past, were its practitioners and commentators perhaps protesting too much when they suggested, to cite a characteristic example from 1976, that the new earthworks “are certainly not involved with ‘landscape’ in any pictorial sense”?11 Dennis Oppenheim showed Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant (1968) in the foundational Earth Works exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in the fall of 1968.12 Developed from a proposal he presented at John Gibson Projects, and one of several transplant works Oppenheim constructed to suggest both a separation and connection between gallery and site, his work included a floor-level model and a topographical map on the wall: “This is a reconstruction of the Cotopaxi Volcano in Ecuador, to be realized in Smith Center, 52

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Kansas . . . the geographical center of the United States. The model was executed in Cocoa Mat to simulate a Kansas wheat field.”13 Oppenheim knew that Cotopaxi’s sublimity was memorialized by Hudson River School painter Frederic E. Church in the 1850s. He both tamed Church’s vision and transported it to the United States. Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant was spatial and diagrammatic, avoiding the painterly qualities of nineteenth-century visions of this region. In addition to what he exhibited with Gibson and Dwan, he produced a short-lived version of the work on the ground in swampy terrain in Connecticut. Boettger summarizes this tie between landscape and land art: “As works of art on and in land, Earthworks as a genre rejects landscape painting’s dominant tradition of the pastoral or even sublime beauty of an Arctic shipwreck as painted by Church or Friedrich.”14 Certainly untraditional in its presentation and aloof emotionally, Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant does, on the other hand, go out of its way to advance the terms of a dialogue with past landscape depictions, to incorporate landscape both as land and as genre. Landscape’s earlier norms were profoundly changed by land art, but not through total erasure. This point is crucial if we are to think about Western engagements with the earth in the visual arts over more than the past fifty or so years. In redressing another imbalance—that land art is too much the focus of discussions about art-earth relationships in the 1960s and 1970s, at the expense of equally important reflections on energy and environment—James Nisbet also maneuvers away from a discussion of landscape. In his introduction to Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, he states that “this book will trace a turn from art that addresses artificially confined environments and simplified allegories of the planet to art that increasingly attends . . . [to] hybrid ‘scapes.’” Before these more complex forms evolved in land art, he asserts, “the earth was only seen as landscape” (12). In a book that values and displays historical and conceptual complexity, then, Nisbet assumes that older landscape depiction was confined by multiple physical and institutional frames in a way that land art was not. I argue that the separation was not so tidy and the comparison between these modalities was less hierarchical. An important reckoning with the new land art appeared in Life magazine on April 25, 1969. In “What on Earth!” David Bourdon surveyed experiments on the land—and the phenomenon’s appearances in Earth Art, curated by Willoughby Sharp at the White Museum of Art, Cornell University, February–March 1969, its first U.S. museum exhibit—by both American and European artists, including Jan Dibbets, Michael Heizer, Claes Oldenburg, and others. A classic of 1960s vernacular, Bourdon describes this group as “[g]roundbreakers in an art the ancients dug” (85). He also maintains the connection to landscape: “In form, earth art appears to be a new form of landscape painting, one which dispenses with the canvas” (86). Was Bourdon simply using a familiar vocabulary to try to describe something new B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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to a lay audience—as we saw Tillim do with respect to Smithson’s “new picturesque” in chapter 1—or was he suggesting a lingering relationship? If land art broke away from the specific restrictions of the museum and thus the city, Heizer for one did not baldly oppose landscape’s fetters to another form’s freedom. Instead, Sharp reported in 1970, Heizer “claims that there are just as many esthetic restrictions working in the Mojave Desert as there are in the Dwan Gallery.”15

Landscape and Eco Art Eco artists’ rejections of the excesses and blind spots of land art are well known. Richard Long’s testimony on this point is consistent over his extensive career: “I never identify myself as a ‘land artist.’ To me, this was a term coined by American curators or critics to define an American movement which . . . I saw as American artists . . . using their deserts to make monumental work. . . . They needed a lot of money to make art. . . . It was a very different philosophy from my own work, which was almost invisible, or made only by walking, or used the land in a free way, without the need for possession or permanence.”16 According to Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, in the late 1960s “ecology wasn’t really fashionable. What was fashionable was using the earth as material. . . . [Heizer and Smithson] used earth as material; we . . . were among the first to deal with ecology in the full sense of the term.” In another interview they were even more direct: “Think of the vast energy put into big cuts and shapes in the desert that are inherently gestural. . . . They are transactional with museum space, not with the earth.”17 Thinking in terms of the broad aspirations of eco art history, I am investigating contemporary eco art’s relationships with past pictorial engagements with the earth in the landscape genre and related activities. Although I return to the relationships between eco art and land art in the next chapter, it is useful here to note that Yates McKee describes these links this way: today’s “internally variegated practices constitute neither a rejective break with nor a simple revival of ‘historical’ Land Art.”18 But what about eco art and landscape? Though this topic is not often raised, an extensive interview with artists for the catalogue accompanying the exhibit Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (2006) includes “Landscape and History” as one of the topics to which the participants—both artists and curators—were invited to speak. The expected divergence of responses is polarized. Mark Dion affirms that his work “relates not only to historical conventions of landscape depiction but also to those of wildlife art and illustration. . . . reading the past of landscape and wildlife art is a bit like examining a road map; tracing the route to find out where you are now.” Diana Thater also embraces the landscape tradition, at least initially: “any depiction of landscape is a depiction of the culture that created it. . . . All of my work is based on variant ideas of the landscape that I trace as a 54

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history from the early 1980s to the present.” Tellingly, however, and as if to illustrate Richard Long’s complaints about curators, Brian Wallis corrects her: “‘landscape’ is an outmoded genre,” he retorts, “you are not really updating a historical genre but overturning it completely.” Thater then changes course to agree, adding that “depictions of nature ran out the day Cézanne died.” For her and most of those interviewed, landscape has today become “a significant territory for meaning production,” implying that it was previously innocent.19 As photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin claim in the roundtable, however, we forget landscape at our peril, whether as a tract of land or as its representation, given that the two meanings often meld. Their Forest series (2005) inverts the usual focus of ecological work with this theme by documenting the systematic reforestation of contested land in Israel, specifically “former Palestinian villages that were evacuated and destroyed at various times since 1948” but have been returned to the apparent innocence of idyllic landscape parks. In these photographs the artists “have appropriated conventions used in landscape painting, including the notion of the sublime and the picturesque.”20 Inasmuch as eco art is always political, as agreed by the artists convened for this interview, it seems apposite to recall Art & Language’s mission for the landscapes of the future: “to restore the terror.” The Forest series is one example among many of how trees in art can focus pressing issues about land and landscape in this region. For example, The Benevolent Tree, an exhibit seen at the Umm El Fahem Art Gallery in 2014, brought together seventy-eight Israeli and Palestinian artists to work with images of the olive tree, a unifying and divisive entity in the area. Curator Daniel Kahana writes: “I am using this exhibition to tell the tree’s story as a way of telling the story of survival, since it appears that the tree is a reflection of the stages in the development of settlement in this part of the world all through history. . . . The exhibition [focuses] on the olive tree—uprooted from its physical and symbolic roots, which play an important part in the identity of its various owners, as well as in the interpretation of local art.”21 Landscape remains a reference point in eco art. Whether it is acknowledged or disqualified as passé, productive interactions with this long tradition do continue, frequently with little connection to practices of land art that intervene chronologically between the apex of the landscape genre in the nineteenth century and eco art today. The historical reverberations encapsulated in contemporary art that looks to the past in this way augment not only current work but work of the past that we see anew. Two prominent examples exhibited at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012 introduce my three more detailed case studies. Mark Dion’s Schildbach Xylotheque (fig. 15) is now a permanent display in the Ottoneum, Kassel’s natural history museum. Dion was commissioned by the museum and documenta to reinstall Carl Schildbach’s (1730–1817) remarkable eighteenth-century library of B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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Fig. 15  Mark Dion, The Schildbach Xylotheque, 2011–12. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA 13 with the support of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Galerie Christian Nagel Berlin—Cologne—Antwerp; Galerie Georg Kargl, Vienna; In Situ / Fabienne Leclerc, Paris; the Center for Curating the Archive, Michaelis Art School, University of Cape Town, South Africa; the Visual Arts Department of the Universidad Jorge Tadeo de Bogotá; and Escuela de Artes y Oficios Santo Domingo, Bogota. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Work © Mark Dion. Courtesy of Mark Dion and Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel.

wooden books, 530 volumes designed to illustrate—and made from—the full range of trees known in this German state during the Enlightenment. In an early ecological reckoning of a Linnaean sort, each book has as its cover the bark of a given tree, while opening a volume reveals details about that species’s life cycle, its nuts, flowers, etc. Making reference to Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (fig. 5), Dion constructed of oak a new room within a room in which to display the library. One of the species not known to Schildbach that Dion added was rendered from a Beuys oak that had been damaged by a car. Dion materially examines eighteenth-century scientific renderings of wood culture in both an eco-art and museological frame by arranging his hexagonal walk-in vitrine by continent. Characteristic of his ecological and archaeological passions, he also presents a platform for visitors to query how scientific information about nature has been and is conveyed.22 The Schildbach Xylotheque does not include landscape paintings, but Dion does refer to the genre’s norms as he expands our sense of the elements of this form. On each of the outside faces of the display he has inlaid roundels that picture the earth’s largest tree species: oak, sequoia, and others. Their heroic demeanors are reminders of lone trees in landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich especially (his two versions of Oak 56

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Tree in the Snow, 1827 and 1829, for example), that is, from the early Romantic period, when Shildbach created his xylotheque. Tacita Dean’s chalk drawing installation Fatigues (2012; fig. 16) presents an extensive mountain landscape from the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan in delicate yet boldly contrasting black-and-white forms. The work was installed in a two-story building in Kassel for dOCUMENTA 13. The extent and loftiness of the location allowed Dean to give one the sense of altitude and of narrative, even filmic progression thematized by the work. She had in fact recently filmed in the region but, unsatisfied with the results, returned to the chalkboard as a medium she had used in earlier works.23 The series’ relationship to landscape as genre and place is explicit both visually and in the tiny textual comments that Dean writes across the surface. As commentators have noted, this writing suggests a film storyboard, an active narration and temporal direction. We frequently see a comment such as “next one” accompanied by a directional arrow, or “pan (has to be).” Taken also as “stills,” however—as a panoramic landscape that a viewer moves through, as in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century panorama—the image/text interplay that she sets up reminds us of the nineteenth-century landscape of the sublime. One range of peaks is darkened by dramatic atmospheric conditions reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner’s mountain-vortex paintings and prints after them, such as Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812). Dean’s laconic text reads “snow coming in.” A similar visual fragment carries the comment “antediluvian,” again

Fig. 16  Tacita Dean, Fatigues, 2012 (detail). Chalk on blackboard, six panels: 230 × 1110; 230 × 557; 230 × 744; 230 × 1110; 230 × 557; and 230 × 615 cm. Commissioned and coproduced by dOCUMENTA 13. Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.

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taking us to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of the sublime by Turner or John Martin that refer to biblical floods. If references to landscape conventions are clear here, would we say that Dean’s work is eco art? Taken as a whole, the image she presents is of an extensive watershed. One detail reads “flash floods,” a thematic reference, arguably, to Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison’s current campaign to show the degree to which the entire Asian drainage basin and the millions depending on it are threatened by climate change (Tibet Is the High Ground Part iv: The Force Majeure, 2008–). While Dean is also fascinated by land art, Smithson’s especially in her film JG (2013) and the sound piece Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997), her annotations to postcards of natural (and other) disasters in a suite of twenty black-and-white photogravures with etching called The Russian Ending (2001) are again attached to landscape norms. Vesuvio pictures the famous volcano in full eruption. Dean’s punctilious annotations could be the work of a volcanologist, perhaps Sir William Hamilton, whose scientific observations on the mountain in his lavishly illustrated book Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies (1776) helped to make such accuracy part of the later eighteenth-century language of the sublime. Erinnerung aus dem Weltkrieg pictures a blasted World War I battleground, its trees carefully labeled with Dean’s script. Beautiful Sheffield becomes an icon of eco irony in Dean’s hands: “An Industrial Hell,” she editorializes at the bottom left of an image of silhouetted smoke stacks and their detritus. I add detail to the picture of relationships between landscape and eco art through two case studies. These accounts provide opportunities to think through the validity and efficacy of construing an essentially interconnected tradition of “landscape” in Western art. In the first study—“Earth-Death Pictures”—I return to the early nineteenth century in German art, specifically the increasingly “scientific” landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and his close associate, the amateur painter and acclaimed physician Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), whose theory of Erdlebenbildkunst (earth-life pictures), I argue, in many ways previews contemporary eco art. My second inquiry focuses on the paintings and installations of two artists who critique landscape norms from Indigenous perspectives. Kent Monkman cuttingly and hilariously returns to the grand paintings of the American West by the Hudson River School and others to offer a queerly Indigenous view of the appropriation of land. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s paintings present a striking combination of Dali- and Haida-inspired imagery, the land of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and a powerful ecological message that collaborate to counteract centuries of what W. J. T. Mitchell calls imperial landscape. Before turning to the case studies, let me register two preliminary points regarding the question of whether eco art should also be thought of as part of a landscape tradition. In a detailed study of tradition and its uses in historical writing, Mark Salber Phillips 58

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derives two apposite lessons. First, “any lasting tradition must be in a process of continual reinvention.” If landscape depiction generally was, in typically modernist fashion, cast as hopelessly restricted and conservative from the early twentieth century until ca. 1970 (and by many current commentators, as we have seen), the resurgence of interest in land and eco art was not a recovery or restoration of old modes but very often a transformation. Phillips also concludes that “traditions can be constituted or reconstituted on the basis of acts of rupture as well as of renewal.”24 This is very much the pattern of what I have called land art’s dialectical relationship to landscape, a pattern of negative engagement. This understanding of tradition, cited above, was used by John Gibson: “The appeal for me is [that the earth artists] were changing the whole tradition of landscape as we know it . . . were doing radical thinking.”25 Is it possible to change his implied “or”—“landscape or radical thinking”—to “landscape and radical thinking,” a conjunction that the form certainly maintained from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth? As I have suggested with reference to the notion of a “preposterous” history, it is essential, in rethinking the relationships among the landscape tradition, land art, and eco art, to relinquish our conventional, linear, and usually teleological sense of temporal progression, what is called “time’s arrow.” Explicating Michel Serres’s rethinking of the topological and temporal dimensions of historical thinking, Steven Connor presents an alternative: “Serres’s all-including topology, his time of folding, aims to provide an alternative to this nightmare of homogeneity, in the possibility of invention, novelty and peace. Innovation springs, not from attempting to separate oneself from history, but from maintaining the possibility of rereading historical continuities, of revisiting the uncompleted past and being revisited by it, with new mutations of understanding emerging as the result.”26

Case Study 2: “Earth-Death Pictures” Contemporary eco art can be understood as a revived commitment to presenting the history of the earth in the visual arts. I am aware of the ironies of this claim. When recent and contemporary artists and art historians do think about the landscape genre, which in its prime in the nineteenth century reflected profoundly on the earth, there is a tendency to see its accomplishments as past and otherwise problematic, as we have seen. Though painting was the locus of the triumphs of landscape depiction from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the medium’s reputation waxes and wanes now. Certainly it is only one of many approaches used in art concerned with ecology and the environment today. As we have also seen, eco art is typically thought to have reacted more to land art of the 1960s, which in turn saw itself as replacing the purportedly outworn genre of landscape painting. Landscape emerged late as an independent genre in the West, but it was arguably B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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the most important category in the Western hierarchy by the early nineteenth century. From the vantage point of eco art, landscape can be seen as the aspiring history painting of the nineteenth century in Europe and especially in North and South America. Its renderings of the earth’s phenomena competed with history painting’s default to mythological, political, and religious themes. Depictions of the earth’s physiognomy by Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus, and John Ruskin, for example, of the sea by Turner and of the atmosphere by Constable, demonstrated understandings of the earth’s dynamic history in its interactions with human religious and political machinations. I would go further to suggest—in direct parallel and contact with nineteenth-century landscape models—that eco art today can also productively be thought of as a revived “history painting,” that of the planet in crisis. In Archive: Endangered Waters (2003; fig. 17), the Icelandic artist Rúrí explores the proposition that human behavior is the root of the rapid changes in the climate. She represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2003 with this interactive photo-and-sound installation. More than two hundred thousand people saw the work in the Icelandic pavilion; that number multiplied substantially as the work later toured several cities in Europe and the United States. It is not a work one simply sees, certainly not a landscape of the traditionally framed sort to be viewed from a familiar distance. Nature’s power and unfamiliarity is intact here not least because sound is as important as Archive’s visual and textual dimensions. In this and related performances in her Vocal series, Rúrí is a pioneer in their copresentation. Drawn into the drama of Archive by the sound of falling water emanating from the monolithic cabinet that is its centerpiece, one learns to pull out the sliding mounts that reveal fifty-two images of Icelandic waterfalls that Rúrí presents on transparent film for viewing. While the massive structure remains a silent archive if none of these vertical drawers is engaged, doing so triggers the signature roar of a particular waterfall and gives visitors an image of it that can be seen from both sides of the sliding display. Following Icelandic mythology, Rúrí recognizes the individual voices of the waterfalls. Each is personified. Another, quieter voice that we should attend to is that of her subtitle. “Endangered” commonly modifies “species” in environmental contexts; to draw attention to the threats to water globally and to underline its unparalleled importance in the earth’s ecology, however, Rúrí has migrated its adjectival force to this ubiquitous element. The artist avers that “flowing water is . . . a symbol of time.”27 Archive addresses the history of waterfalls, and water generally, on several temporal planes: the fifty-two images allude to the temporal intervals that humans live by, which—as Ackers and Gilligan have made clear in Deep Time (fig. 12)—are too fast for the planet to adapt to. The contrast between our time and the earth’s is replicated by visitors’ almost always rapid interaction with the sliding drawers, as we see in video footage of the 60

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Fig. 17  Rúrí, Archive: Endangered Waters, 2003. Interactive installation; size variable. Cabinet 234 × 516 × 260 cm with photographs extended. Exhibition view: Icelandic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. By kind permission of the artist.

Venice installation. Archive gives us the past, the present, and the future. Some of the waterfalls no longer exist; many remain endangered, likely to become the “past” of an inevitable future, all because of huge reservoirs created by a controversial Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam and power-generating plant built in Iceland’s interior highlands primarily to supply power for an aluminum smelter. That visitors can in effect turn these waterfalls on and off at will is one poignant dimension of the artist’s lamentation and her warning in the present. Another is the quasi-scientific archiving of the earth’s phenomena in art institutions. As Rúrí speculates in a related context, “it may come to pass that all that will remain as a reminder of the waterfalls will be the works of artists.”28 Rúrí’s attention to our actions in the face of threatened nature leads to areas of concern that together establish this work as a powerful contemporary history B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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picture. She addresses a momentous historical issue, anthropogenic climate change, and thus the viability of naming our epoch the Anthropocene. As I elaborate in my final chapter, she explores and exploits the affective aspects of the work, what I call “the emotional life of water,” as it articulates the earth’s history. The close-ups of waterfalls stowed in the cabinet are complemented by forty-four more contextual documentary photographs in an adjacent area, images that provide empirical, scientific context rather than emotional impact. Finally, the work may be seen in relation to the tradition of history painting that arguably migrated to the landscape genre in the early nineteenth century. As eco art, the installation is a witness to and what Bruno Latour would call an “actant” in the Anthropocene, a work about the interactions between the human, material nature, and the planet’s ecosystems (a term coined only in 1935) that traces back to the beginnings of the industrialization of the globe. By inviting us to manipulate the sounds and images of waterfalls—which are closely identified with Iceland as a pure, natural place29 and which she claims are both central in Icelandic landscape and thought of as individuals, as “people,” for example, in the postcards she used in her installation Passage of Time iii (2000)—Rúrí mimics in microcosm the power humans now have to change landscapes and nature. Giving us “control” that may or may not transfer to the political sphere in which decisions about hydroelectric plants are taken, she makes this overarching effect one of individual responsibility. While Archive records the vitality of waterfalls, however, it is more about their demise than their life. My coinage “earth-death pictures” is intended as a contemporary discordant echo and dystopic mirroring of Carl Gustav Carus’s pleas in the early nineteenth century for “earth-life pictures,” those that are carefully observed based on scientific data and rendered in sufficient detail and clarity to become landscape paintings “of a new and higher kind, which will uplift the viewer into a higher contemplation of nature.”30 A fuller sense of Carus’s Erdlebenbildkunst is required if we are to gauge what his innovation can reveal about contemporary practices and what eco art might in turn let us see in Carus’s work. Carus’s Nine Letters on Landscape Painting (1815–24) is in most ways a conventional account of landscape painting. Carus was proud to be an accomplished amateur in this field. As court physician to the king of Saxony and a famous natural scientist, he came in contact with many of the most important natural philosophers and artists of his day. The book is dedicated to Goethe. Caspar David Friedrich, who became a close friend, is Carus’s model artist; Alexander von Humboldt, who also supported Carus’s ideas, was his exemplary natural scientist.31 Because I am setting this text into a comparison with the fate of landscape in the twentieth century and today, it is important to emphasize that Carus, Friedrich, and many others at this time and earlier saw the need to improve, indeed to rescue, landscape painting. Carus’s letters contribute to 62

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an already-century-long discussion across Europe about the academic status of landscape, an intense period of material and intellectual history that compares with the controversies around the demise of landscape in the 1960s and after. The condemnations of landscape in the 1960s seem like a familiar echo when we read in Letter viii that “it is time to consider the future study of landscape painting, a topic that affords much room for melancholic reflection, since we can hardly speak of its future without reflecting on its dismal present” (123). Carus is original in two ways important to the comparisons I want to make: he called for collaboration between scientific and artistic approaches to understanding the earth, and he developed the potent notion of the earth-life picture as the key to this cooperation.32 Where Carus was positive about renovating the genre, the terms of the debate over landscape were inverted in the 1960s and afterward. Carus laid the blame on art academies, which encouraged the copying of other landscape paintings rather than an educated attention to nature. He believed that artists needed scientific training “to see the necessary connection between the outward forms of mountain ranges and the inner structure of their masses, and the necessity with which that inner structure follows from the history of those mountains. . . . Instruct him in the specific laws of atmospheric phenomena, the variations in the nature of clouds, their formation and dissolution, and also their motion” (126). With such knowledge they could perceive the inner, forming essence and unity of all forms in nature—the “earth life.” The earth-life picture is “a true geognostic landscape,” he elaborates in the next letter (138), that is, a study of the mineral deposits of the earth’s crust.33 Art and science collaborate: “art prepares and promotes the cognitive awareness of nature, which is natural science,” he writes in Letter iii (98). Promoting the earth-life picture as the future of landscape depiction, Carus draws an explicit contrast with the training of history painters, who at this time “at least study anatomy” (138). He followed his own advice in producing visually detailed, accurate depictions of specific mountain ranges and the basalt columns at Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa in the Scottish Hebrides, for example. But his purpose was not simply to convey the surface particularities of landscape but also their interconnectedness. Taken out of its nineteenth-century contexts, Carus’s Nine Letters reads like a late twentieth-century environmentalist statement, thanks to his emphasis on educating not only artists to see and render the earth’s life, but also the museum-going and art-buying public to receive enlightenment through landscape paintings that are truly new. Given the ability to see and show landscape anew, Carus enthusiastically writes, “there will infallibly be earth-life paintings, of a new and higher kind, which will uplift the viewer into a higher contemplation of nature” (131). Carus states explicitly that the earth-life picture is the new history painting, and he does so in a journal to gain circulation for his views. Publishing B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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Letter viii in Ludwig Schorn’s Kunst-Blatt in 1826, he appended a note regarding the genesis of his reflections on landscape: “Over the past decade, numerous reflections on this art, which has as its true task the great object of representing individual scenes . . . of the universal life of nature—and which I would therefore prefer to call nature’s history painting, or earth-life painting—have given rise to a series of nine letters.”34 Carus sought to raise the status of landscape in art academies and among the public because, he held, only this form could convey the all-important divinity and unity of nature. It was frustrating to Carus that his call for earth-life painting as the new history painting received rather few and largely negative reviews in his lifetime. As Oskar Bätschmann has written, “The program of ‘earth-life painting’— to express the structure and history of mountains through their form, and to render the other elements in such a way as to reveal the universal rule of law and demonstrate the harmony between the particular and the universal—was far beyond the capacity of landscape painting” at this time.35 I want to suggest, however, that his ideas have new resonance from the perspective of today’s eco art. The time for Carus’s ideas is now. Carus’s work is of the Anthropocene in the sense that, not unlike his contemporaries Turner and Ruskin, and not unlike Rúrí, he construed human history and the history of the earth as intertwined. It is in this sense that the earth’s history is the most important subject of history painting, one that he prophetically dedicated to the future of the genre. Examples of eco art such as Rúrí’s Archive: Endangered Waters engage the planet’s history in terms of anthropogenic climate disruption. Working at the other end of the Anthropocene, however, Rúrí and others have converted the earth-life picture to earth-death art.36 John Ruskin writes in his Lectures on Landscape, in which are printed lectures delivered at Oxford in 1871, “Landscape painting is the thoughtful and passionate representation of the physical conditions appointed for human existence.” Never one to make a point without repeated emphasis, he adds, “Turner did not paint [his] sea-pieces for the sake of these decorous arrangements; neither did he paint the Scarborough as a professor of physical science, to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshire coast; nor the Indiaman to show you the force of impact in a liquid mass of sea-water of given momentum. He painted this to show you the daily course of quiet human work and happiness, and that, to enable you to conceive something of uttermost human misery—both ordered by the power of the great deep.”37 Ruskin was appalled by the ravages of industrialization on both the landscape and humanity. If not “the first ecologist,”38 he was an early one who, like Carus and many others, saw the interactions of the human and telluric as history. In this approach he was inspired by Alexander von Humboldt. Analogous with Carus’s emphases in his earth-life pictures and Ruskin’s priorities, Turner depicted the interactions of the human and nature. To the bafflement and outright 64

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hostility of most of its early viewers, for example, his renowned Snow Storm— Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842) places us in the roiling sea, from which we precariously view a struggling steamboat firing a distress flare as it fights to make safe harbor during a storm. Whether Turner was lashed to the mast of such a boat to experience and record the elements, as he claimed, is ultimately immaterial. He fully conveys the chaos of the storm: the horizon is dangerously off level, and we cannot distinguish water from sky from spray. Turner’s famed indistinctness of form ensures that there is much we cannot see here. Our senses are overwhelmed and inadequate, suggesting his interest in the sublime and offering an opening for an argument about elementals exceeding our grasp and intimating the presence of the earth’s forces. We can be historically specific on this point. James Hamilton claims that Turner was conveying in the design of the painting the powerful forces of magnetism harbored by the earth, those discovered by Michael Faraday and widely disseminated by the scientist—and Turner’s friend—Mary Somerville.39 We can see the effects of this energy in the vortex, but we cannot see this elemental force itself. My reading would not, however, end with a recognition of what Amanda Boetzkes refers to as elementals, discussed in chapter 1, but would extend to the longer history of the earth’s articulation. While this picture is framed, everything about it breaks free of the landscape genre’s conventions. A person of his time rather than ours—which is to say of the Industrial Revolution, for many the onset of the Anthropocene—Turner, in this and many other works, celebrates and seeks to convey the affective impact of technological innovations while simultaneously witnessing the power of nature. For him, these forces coexist and are too closely interwoven to be conveniently opposed in a narrative of struggle between nature and humanity. Because we are implicated as participants in this drama and in Turner’s other historical landscapes, the earth, or nature, is not presented as an independent force, but always with its human interlocutors. Turner’s landscapes absorb conventional history painting’s predilection for grand human events into a history of the earth. As I show in later chapters, it is only with the post-human interests of some contemporary eco art that this default emphasis is challenged. Understanding Archive: Endangered Waters as a negative correlate of Carus’s earth-life pictures allows historical landscape practices to expand in a more capacious frame, one that addresses the paradox articulated by Rebecca Solnit: “Landscape is visible; too often history is not.”40 Archive makes earth history (and its potentially silent future) visible in ways that the earth-life picture could not two hundred years ago; it is also arguably part of extended attempts to picture the earth and to make its dilemmas visible. Where Carus envisioned an unapologetically anthropocentric “physiognomy” of natural phenomena, however, Rúrí’s waterfalls are displayed in a way that both invites our human response to them and, I believe, B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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suggests their independent material existence. We are maneuvered to lament the loss of these and other phenomena and to attend to the materiality of things before we acculturate them as objects and artifacts, before we call them “landscapes,” for example. Could water have an “emotional life” beyond our understanding? Sound is the trigger for thinking outside anthropocentrism here: because up to five soundtracks of waterfalls can play simultaneously and up to five images can be seen simultaneously, the installation is inevitably cacophonous and confusing, beyond our grasp. Archive enacts what Teresa Brennan has called “the transmission of affect” in the porous and fluid situations wherein the human and nonhuman, organic and nonorganic elements of eco art mix, coalesce, and dissipate. I consider this topic more fully in my concluding chapter. Here, let me reiterate that my case studies and examples are best understood as paradigms of interpretation, in this instance, of the advantages in seeing contemporary eco art in relationship with an innovation in the landscape tradition, Carus’s earth-life pictures. To construe Carus’s theory as negatively realized in Archive: Endangered Waters is, however, “preposterous” in the sense discussed in chapter 1. Rúrí did not overtly intend to revisit the earth-life picture; Carus could not foresee today’s eco art. But traditions—in this case, of landscape depiction—are often articulated in retrospect. In reestablishing a connection between landscape and eco art in this way, my hope is to add to the scholarship of eco art history, to “cast canonical works and figures”— to cite the pioneering collection A Keener Perception again—“in a new light by revealing their previously unnoticed complexity, ambivalence, or even antipathy regarding environmental concerns.”41 Landscape painting is not central in today’s eco-art practices. But Diane Burko’s paintings of the cryosphere, ice-covered regions of the earth, are both a major exception to this pattern and an inheritor of Carus’s earth-life pictures. While cognizant and critical of current climate-change patterns, Burko does not present the earth’s death. Like Carus in his time, she believes in and depicts a scientific understanding of glaciation and other phenomena. “I believe that art can communicate science,” she says. “My obsession with nature at its most awe-­ inspiring naturally leads me to want to preserve and protect it. That’s why I want to show how our environment is being threatened by climate change. My strategy is to seduce with beauty and then subtly insert awareness in the viewer by utilizing visual/scientific prompts I’ve garnered through my interactions with climatologists, my observations in the field and my own research.”42 In one large-scale painting from 2015, for example—Jakobshavn-Ilulissat Quartet (fig. 18)—she depicts, from above, this glaciated area of western Greenland across four large panels. The leftmost painting is of sea ice near the shore; on the far right is an aerial image that shows a considerable amount of open land where the glacier once was. In the center two panels we have also pulled back to the vantage point of a satellite 66

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image, with all the scientific authority that this now-common view suggests. In each of these Burko has set a map of Greenland for orientation. It is the dexter central image that suggests the entire quartet is a contemporary example of Erdlebenbildkunst. Again incorporating scientific information, Burko “quotes the recessional maps used by glaciologists to indicate such change [the rapid melting of glaciers] over time. The one [she] referenced for [her] painting traced change from 1850 to 2012.”43 If Carus in his time was gratified by the response of scientists to the accuracy and potency of his work, we can imagine that Burko shares such a sense of accomplishment in extending a crucial dialogue on climate change beyond the art world. Praising her references to scientific data, the four co-authors of the 2016 article “Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research” state unequivocally: “The prominent red stylized time stamp in the lower right corner is evocative of common scientific images of glaciers. Juxtaposing a clearly ‘painted’ glacier, Burko blurs the lines of authority and science, pushing viewers to consider how glacier narratives are produced, circulated, and given credibility and authority across time and space, and by whom. Her paintings, which utilize up-to-date scientific data such as individual glacier recession rates, inhabit a socially problematic more-than-science position of being simultaneously ‘representationally accurate’ but also ‘representationally artistic.’”44 I would suggest that this work is only “problematic” if the lines and hierarchy between science and eco art are drawn too boldly. As Burko’s work and exhibits such as Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture demonstrate, and as these commentators agree further on in their article, “glacier artwork does teach about glaciology, even if it is not satellite imagery from ‘true’ satellites.” In terms of the large arguments of Landscape into Eco Art, Burko’s landscape paintings suggest that thinking in terms of an extended tradition of artistic engagements with the earth should not be dismissed without a close look at counterexamples. While it is significant that Burko continues a painting tradition to address climate change in much of her practice, a series titled Elegies complicates the uses of medium in ways that were not available to Carus and the Romantics but are characteristic of eco art’s manipulations. With the Elegies, Burko states, “My intention is to provoke an uneasy visual tension in response to these fictional images, where the viewer struggles to make sense of the material as if they are actually seeing photographs of aerial views of melting glaciers.”45 Presented again from a satellite’s viewpoint, each image appears to be a disintegrating glacier or ice field. We see large fissures and cracks and open blue and black areas that read as liquid water. But close inspection reveals that these images are scans of Burko’s painterly experiments with a pigment that cracks easily, magnified to look like more scientific images. We could say that the source imagery here is imaginary in two registers: Burko’s paintings for the series are abstractions based on her knowlB e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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Fig. 18  Diane Burko, Jakobshavn-Ilulissat Quartet, 2015. Oil on canvas, 42 × 228 in. overall. By kind permission of the artist.

edge of how melting areas of ice look. While she often records actual sites both in paintings and in her photography practice, the Elegies—despite their localized, apparently indexical titles—are generalized laments for “melting glaciers and locations all threatened by climate change throughout the world.”46 These images are indivisibly scientific and emotional, a conjunction I investigate further in chapter 5 under the heading “The Emotional Life of Water.” To conclude this case study of earth-life and earth-death pictures, I turn to the work of Mariele Neudecker, a contemporary eco artist whose work explicitly engages German Romantic landscape conventions, and to one piece by Katie Paterson that is as graphic as Rúrí’s Archive in its attention to the earth’s “death” witnessed in Iceland. Neudecker brings together explorations of the landscape genre, of the temporal duration of natural forms, and especially of human interactions with what we call nature. To lay out this acculturation of landscape as a genre, her acclaimed earlier works—especially the so-called “tanks,” such as Over and Over, Again and Again (2004; fig. 19), which magically and instructively revisit Romantic landscape conventions in a three-dimensional format, as if we could see a painting by Friedrich or Johan Christian Dahl as an environment into which we could wander—afford the viewer much more visual and conceptual access to landscape as a process than do the paintings that they quote. We can walk around and peer into this tradition because in these works both landscape’s overt artificiality and its seductive atmospherics are on display. Her quest is to see nature beyond landscape, to reveal a widely held suspicion in our Western culture that these norms mask too much, that they block real experience. More important for our understanding of her purposeful movement “towards a contemporary sublime,” in recent work she interrogates and captures her own motivations for coming to this remote place and the nuances of her emotional responses. “I wanted to come this 68

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Fig. 19  Mariele Neudecker, Over and Over, Again and Again, 2004 (detail). Glass, water, acrylic medium, salt, fiberglass, plastic, each tank 47.6 × 47.6 × 48.2 cm (triptych). Edition of three (+ 1 AP). Commissioned by the Met Office for Elemental Insight. Photo: Woodley and Quick. By kind permission of the artist and Galerie Thumm, Berlin.

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far to find and see a ‘nature,’ beyond landscape,” she confides. “I wanted to see human relationships to the ‘landscape’ and nature. . . . No reception, no grid, no charge. . . . was it really just nature?” Yet with a quick honesty that underscores her understanding of the complexities of this desire, she wonders, “Do I? Did I?”47 Much of Neudecker’s work is based on her belief that our relationships are usually not with nature so much as with images of nature, landscapes. Her later projects insist that our human practices of perception, of questioning, and of emotional reaction are integral to how we formulate landscape and what we hope to discover in some more fundamental form: nature. She constantly seeks effective ways to lay these habits out for us. Neudecker’s artistic propositions are not religious or mystical, as Carus’s ultimately were; she does not imagine a final, cosmic answer to the question “what is Nature?” On the contrary, she is drawn to explore the partiality of our seeing, an inescapable situation that she calls “cropping.” With her, we see how we look at landscape. We can register the selections and emphases that always accompany our looking. The foundational editing of what we see is not so much a shortcoming as it is profoundly human, whether it involves the physiology of our binocular vision or a technological prosthesis. “Somehow the sockets of my eyes suddenly seem to be too small, close, too tight and deep,” she reports from the Arctic in “Lamentations.” “I want to have 360-degree vision. Needless to say: my camera lens frames and crops everything way too small and too tightly.” As it was for Carus, Ruskin, and Turner, it seems that we can only apprehend nature through human nature. 400 Thousand Generations, Neudecker’s much-praised and often-reproduced installation in the London Royal Academy’s exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World of 2009, draws its provocative title from the evolutionary time scientists believe it took to develop the photosensitive tissue crucial to the human eye. We see two large glass eyelike orbs on a table, but these are not models. They are liquid-filled tanks whose shape and doubling inevitably remind us of our own eyes. In addition to reflecting a beholder’s inverted image as she looks at the installation—just as our retinas do with the external world—the wax caps on the top of each sphere allude, in their relative softness, to the tissue behind the eye. These fragile caps seem to hold up the forms of blue mountains in the two containers, forms that connect visually and by analogy to the icebergs in her more recent work, such as a room-filling sculptural cross section of an iceberg titled There Is Always Something More Important (2012; fig. 20). Compellingly out of place though it certainly is, and unnaturally static, the fictive iceberg is nonetheless also familiar. Neudecker does what we cannot readily do “in nature”: she anatomizes the form, cutting it in cross section and installing two eyelike video monitors on the wall behind it, like a human face. We do not see inside the structure through these portals but move again back to the landscape. In this case we see ice flowing from 70

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Fig. 20  Mariele Neudecker, There Is Always Something More Important, 2012. Fiberglass, pigment, plywood; two-channel video on monitors, looped; 65 × 207 × approx. 420 cm. Installation view: ARCTIC, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, 2013–14. Photo: MN. By kind permission of the artist and Galerie Thumm, Berlin.

one “eye” to the other across a one-meter gap. Our eyes and thoughts move, but the iceberg remains uncannily still. We see much less than what we know is there. It is in this meditative gap, this suspension of the practical imperatives of the Anthropocene, perhaps, that we might register her unusual title in an ecological sense. “There is always something more important” than . . . climate change, Neudecker’s words invite us to think. I have claimed that sound is especially important in eco art. This is the case in work by Neudecker and other artists I consider in later chapters, and especially in Katie Paterson’s Vatnajökull (the Sound of) (2007–8). In what could be thought of as an amplified and submerged version of Joseph Beuys’s Erdtelephon (Earth telephone; 1968), in which the listening device is plugged into a clod of turf, Paterson’s gambit was to have people in an art gallery listen to climate change by facilitating aural access to the melting of Europe’s largest glaciers. Paterson provided only a phone number in the gallery; when called, listeners would hear the dripping sounds of the glacier thanks to microphones placed in its depths. The spectacular landscape of this site is heard but not seen, a cipher, perhaps, for the imponderability of the Anthropocene. In the artist’s words, “An underwater microphone [led] into Jökulsárlón lagoon—an outlet glacial lagoon of Vatnajökull, filled with icebergs—connected to an amplifier, and a mobile-phone, which created B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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a live phone line to the glacier.” Her work was not tied to the gallery space: “The number . . . could be called from any telephone in the world, the listener put through to Vatnajökull. A white neon sign of the phone number hung in the gallery space.”48 Paterson pulls no punches about her meaning: “This lagoon is a graveyard of glaciers. . . . In a way there is something heartbreaking about this, knowing that you are listening to something magnificent being destroyed—but it is also very beautiful, a celebration of nature.”49

Case Study 3: Indigenous Landscapes “Land, first to last, has been the currency of exchange between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the Americas,” writes art historian Ruth Phillips.50 Artist Arthur Renwick elaborates: “I don’t like to call [disputes over land] land claims because [Indigenous peoples] are not claiming land. They are trying to make it known that the land has always been theirs and so they are not trying to claim anything. They are just trying to make white people understand that this is ours . . . you took it from us. You claimed it from us, but it has always been ours and we still know we own it.”51 Land was and remains the site of fateful encounters. As described by Damian Skinner, “If land is the central focus of settler colonialism, and relations with the territorially dispossessed are a determining factor in the histories of settler colonies, race is the discourse that binds them together.”52 Indigenous and settler-colonial visions of and conflicts over race, nature, land, and landscape are examined intensely in the contemporary ecological work of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Kent Monkman, Arthur Renwick, Alan Michelson, and Bonnie Devine, among many others.53 In discussing this work in the broad context of Western eco art and landscape traditions, I am cognizant of Loretta Todd’s confession that she, as a Métis filmmaker and writer of some reputation, in her essay on Yuxweluptun, worries “about codifying a Native aesthetic and Native art . . . about what you say, or don’t say being used against the freedom of the artist’s imagination, or for betraying protocols or denigrating the sacred.” She adds a reference to James Luna’s chilling Artifact Piece (1986), where the artist displayed himself as an ethnographic curiosity by lying in a vitrine in the San Diego Museum of Man in a section on the Kumeyaay people: “Aboriginal artists are especially vulnerable to the display case syndrome.”54 As a white male of settler lineage, I should worry even more. Eva Mackey explains what is at stake, especially on the side of settlers: “This longstanding pattern, in which colonizers assume entitlement to claim sovereignty over Indigenous lands, continues to be repeatedly re-enacted post-facto in law as well as in the discourses of [many] people. . . . Colonization and settler nation-building have entailed the repetitive embedding and realizing of settler assertions of certainty and entitlement, and the repeated denial of Indigenous personhood and sovereignty, all of which are 72

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embedded in the interpretation of early moments of colonial/settler assumptions of sovereignty over territory.”55 Given that the work of the Indigenous artists I discuss is publicly offered in part to educate settlers, and that this work self-consciously addresses issues of cultural theft, however, I believe that self-censorship for fear of “appropriating” is even worse than the risk of speaking for others. Landscape into Eco Art is, in the broadest terms, an inquiry into how eco artists mobilize what they perceive as their artistic responsibility to landscape and the earth. Indigenous histories need to be part of this developing account of an eco art history and recognized as independent and in full interaction with settler-colonial histories. My hope is that this case study aligns with the optimistic plea by Taiaiake Alfred: “In order to decolonize, Canadians and Americans have to sever their emotional attachment to their countries and reimagine themselves, not as citizens with the privileges conferred by being descendants of colonizers or newcomers from other parts of the world benefitting from white imperialism, but as human beings in equal and respectful relation to other human beings and the natural environment. This is what radical imagination could look like.”56 My first two examples strike contrasting balances between uses of landscape in painting and environmental commentary. Yuxweluptun’s arresting paintings carry overt ecological messages about the destruction of Northwest Coast ecosystems under the aegis of modernity and capitalism. While Monkman returns to the “golden age” of American landscape painting of the West in the nineteenth century in an ostentatious and sardonic manner for which he is much celebrated, links between this landscape tradition and ecology in his work have not been examined. One reason is clear: there is a lot to see and to discuss in Monkman’s images, including in the two paintings I feature—Trappers of Men (2006; fig. 21) and The Fourth World (2012; fig. 22), both members of his extensive series of “moral landscapes” (2001–). Contemporary issues of race, gender, and land use are on display, not so much in the landscape settings, as Richard Hill has astutely noted,57 but in the bizarre casts of characters acting on these stages. The landscape elements in Trappers of Men closely replicate those of the German-born American artist Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, of 1868. In other landscape borrowings, Monkman mixes and matches his sources, as in Sacred Vows (2001), for example, where the bottom of the image is lifted from Paul Kane and the sky from Jacob van Ruisdael. In Among the Sierra Nevada and Trappers of Men, Bierstadt and Monkman alike essay the sublime majesty of a high alpine lake surrounded by vertiginous peaks and unbelievably precipitous waterfalls. Bierstadt’s scene extends the mythologies of the wilderness to the American West, the locale of divine and untouched Nature with a capital N. In Jonathan D. Katz’s words, “in North America, the Romantic genre itself was all bombastic grandiloquence marshalled to fossilize an image of a virginal land prior to European encounter, the moment before an old B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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Fig. 21  Kent Monkman, Trappers of Men, 2006. Acrylic on canvas, wood frame, 262 × 415 × 9 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Purchase, Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest, anonymous gift, and gift of Dr. Ian Hutchison. Photo courtesy of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. By kind permission of the artist.

world could conquer the new.”58 Giovanna Di Chiro is even more withering: “The discourse that opposes an Edenic or sublime nature to a fallen culture either categorizes people of color as identical with nature, as in the case of indigenous peoples or Third World natives . . . , or classifies them as people who are anti-nature, impure, and even toxic, as in the case of poor communities of color living in contaminated and blighted inner cities or in the surrounding rural wastelands. . . . Wilderness or Eden must be located where these ‘toxic’ or ‘fallen’ people are not.”59 Bierstadt first visited Yosemite in 1863 and was the first painter to extol such locales in the American West, but his articulations of the sublime used a well-known European formula that was widely exported to and developed in settler regions around the world.60 The vocabulary of the sublime wilderness came to be what tourists expected and is arguably what many still expect. It was also lampooned at the time as extreme and more recently as clichéd in Komar and Melamid’s “paint by numbers” series America’s Most Wanted and America’s Least Wanted paintings (1994–97).61 The artists composed the paintings in this large project on the basis of the likes and dislikes of people surveyed in eleven countries. In America’s Most Wanted, as in almost all other national polls, mountainous landscape was what the majority preferred. Here there are historical figures too and, as if they had meandered out of Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada, some deer. Experiencing this creed through the Bierstadt painting, we as viewers take up a position as if approaching the lake, where we seem to disturb a flock of ducks in 74

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the left foreground. A herd of preternaturally healthy deer has waded into shallow water. Our presence has alerted them too: all but one have their heads up, looking for intruders. The primary fiction of this type of painting is thus enacted: we are there, the first humans to view this magnificent spectacle of nature. This myth was trusted by many in the late nineteenth century, causing some visitors to be disappointed by the reduced scale and human inhabitation of the sites Bierstadt and other Hudson River School artists depicted. Bierstadt painted other versions of the Yosemite Valley while in Rome, homeland of the European landscape school.62 He was also fascinated by the region’s first peoples and painted them in works such as Sunset Light, Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains (1861). However much he and others viewed Indigenous peoples as “primitive,” literally part of nature and thus beneath European and American culture, their absence or portrayal as one-dimensional, primitive figures in the works Monkman appropriates is part of Bierstadt’s increasingly compensatory penchant to depict the West as an unpopulated Eden for those of European heritage to discover and claim as their own. The urgency to preserve and display such majesty went hand in hand with mining and other extractive technologies that were literally dismantling mountains (in California especially) as well as with the tourism that such paintings encouraged.63 Monkman takes this persiflage much further in Trappers of Men. The deer and ducks have been replaced by an eclectic array of figures, some contemporary, some of the nineteen hundreds (the trappers of the title), some Indigenous, others mythological. That this is an allegory of artists’ and art history’s ways of looking is suggested by a lakeside struggle between Piet Mondrian—at his easel composing an abstract, neoplastic work while looking at Bierstadt’s lake and mountains—and Jackson Pollock. It is a scene directly comparable with Mark Tansey’s tongue-incheek Action Painting ii (1984), in which a group of “action painters” create pictures of a rocket launch rather than the expected abstractions of Abstract Expressionism. Perhaps Pollock wants more emotion from Mondrian, wants him to respond to nature (a category the Dutch artist so abhorred that he banished green from his palette). Most significant is the inclusion on the left of the photographer Edward S. Curtis,64 via whom Monkman makes reference to the import of nineteenth-­ century landscape and ethnographic photography as well as painting. As Denise Markonish writes in Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, “A brief . . . post–­ Hudson River School lesson [on the genre] might go as follows . . . we had the great nature photographers of the turn of the century . . . then we had the Earth Art movement of the 1960s . . . there were the New Topographics, photographers in the 1970s who turned their backs on the sublime . . . and in the 1990s, Eco Artists collaborated with scientists and environmentalists” (13). Her point, which I support, is that contemporary eco artists are beholden to and part of this history of landscape. Curtis’s tripod camera is set up, and his box of generic “native” headB e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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dresses is at the ready to clothe and stereotype the naked Indigenous men to his left, perhaps for his now infamous twenty-volume book The North American Indian (1907–30), in which he sought to record the purportedly “dying race” of the American West. Bierstadt also experimented with photography and used landscape images made with this increasingly important technology as source material. His brothers were professional photographers, and he worked with better-known practitioners such as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge in a circuit of mutual influence.65 Monkman’s manic iconography supports his powerful inversion of many codifications of gender, race, and landscape. His alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, was inspired by American painter George Catlin’s “Indian Gallery,” which toured in the United States and Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, and modeled on the musician Cher’s “half-breed” act.66 Just as Catlin sometimes included himself in his paintings, so too Monkman creates a double. A “berdashe,” the Indigenous third gender so detested by Curtis and Christian missionaries,67 Miss Chief is Monkman’s compellingly queer disrupter of norms. In the artist’s words, “I . . . wanted to create a strong, powerful, two-spirited person that could represent that alternate point of view. I chose to create Miss Chief as a two-spirited person because the tradition of twospiritedness was present here in Indigenous cultures and communities before contact, but was repressed by the colonial governments and the church. I wanted her to also represent the sexualities and gender variance that was present in Indigenous communities across North America that were traditionally accepted and respected.”68 Monkman is of Cree and Anglo-Irish heritage; not only does he put people and their histories back into the evacuated landscapes of the nineteenth century, but he also questions the notions of both racial purity and hybridity by populating his work with a spectrum of racial collaborations and sexual activities. For him, there is no purity. Neither can the hybrid exist, though, since this very notion depends on the possibility of unmixed entities. Why does Monkman use this landscape tradition so explicitly? Rightly insisting that we examine the interactions of figures with landscape here, Richard Hill writes that Monkman’s “already tangled web of references is intensified in multi-figured large scale works like Trappers of Men (2006) and then taken to its riotous extreme in The Triumph of Mischief (2007). Here, against the backdrop of Albert Bierstadt’s Looking Up the Yosemite Valley (c. 1863–1875), a bacchanalian revel of figures from any imaginable time and place cavort around the figure of Miss Chief, creating a disjunction of temporal references that is, in its own way, as sublimely overwhelming as Bierstadt’s towering mountains.”69 Hill and Katz hold that the figures are the real interest in Monkman’s paintings; they are complex where the landscape is a mere replica and little more than scenography. It is true that Monkman alters his source landscapes very little, but noting what he does 76

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change in them, as well as what we might see in these scenes when we recall Carus’s earth-life pictures, discussed in the previous case study, suggests an ecological interpretation of these works. “In genuine Humboldtian style,” Chunglin Kwa argues, for example, “Church and Bierstadt combined sublime grandiosity with painstaking detail on huge canvasses.”70 Refusing to celebrate the sublime in all its problematic glory yet again, as an exhibit such as Yosemite: Exploring the Incomparable Valley at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2016 clearly did, Monkman brings forward these nineteenth-century priorities so that he can critique their penchant for redoubling the attempted extermination of Indigenous peoples in this region. In The Fourth World (2012; fig. 22), he meticulously mimics Bierstadt’s Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall (1864; fig. 23) and characteristically replaces the group of white “pioneers” and their horses at a campsite with his own anachronistic, outrageous, and hilarious scene. Monkman plays out the disenfranchisements that characterize the notion of the “fourth world,” defined as “[n]ations forcefully incorporated into states which maintain a distinct political culture but are internationally unrecognized.”71 The term applies to one third of the world’s population. Importing Richard Serra’s sculpture Clara-Clara (1983) to form a conduit, Monkman shows a group of long-haired men on horseback driving a small herd of buffalo through this form toward a precipice, in effect creating a “buffalo jump” used for millennia as a hunting technique by Indigenous peoples on the plains of North America. Monkman’s deployment of Serra provides a compelling art-historical perspective on the ownership and placement of art in our time as well as on ancient hunting practices. Manipulating Serra’s massive double-curved piece as Monkman does in this painting is itself a historically nuanced gesture that goes beyond appropriation or citation. Designed for an exhibition at Paris’s Beaubourg in 1983, its weight forced the sculpture outdoors into the museum’s garden. It was subsequently and controversially reinstalled in the Tuileries Garden for the exhibit Monumenta 2008.72 Fourth World thus articulates a thoughtful play of temporalities and customs. Monkman reports, “The Hopi believe that one of the signs that the Fourth World is ending is that many white youth, who wear their hair long like the Hopi, will join the tribal nations to learn their ways and wisdom.”73 Monkman mixes racial semiotics in this painting: the riders appear to be white and have long blond hair. But they ride bareback, unclothed from the waist up, as if in a Western. Their leggings sport camouflage patterns. Suggesting another temporal and cultural gap, Monkman changes the soft, telluric hues of Bierstadt’s landscape to sharp, jarringly defined blue tints. He makes the impressive rock cliffs and waterfalls that we see appear as kitsch, a fake that wants to be identified as such, and in so doing affects yet another separation between us and hackneyed nineteenthcentury views. His landscape is not a timeless backdrop: in both paintings we witness the slow, geological time of mountain erosion, the “earth life” as opposed to B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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Fig. 22  Kent Monkman, The Fourth World, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 in. By kind permission of the artist.

the rush of extermination in the buffalo hunt. We see the earth in different temporalities simultaneously. Though not always with the sparkling precision we see in Bierstadt, many landscape painters in the United States, from the 1820s until the turn of that century, sought to understand and record for our edification the details of the physical world. They combined particularity with grandeur: the ability to see more detail implied a fuller appreciation of God’s creation.74 Although he dismantles this metaphysics, Monkman, in copying Bierstadt and others with a difference, holds on to the long measure of earth time that dwarfs human and animal life. It is possible to understand this aspect of his concern with multiple temporalities as ecological by comparing his work with the conflicting time frames established in the video Deep Time (fig. 12), for example. Monkman makes reference to this way of thinking in the impending slaughter that is the centerpiece of Fourth World, and, even more dramatically, in his installation The Rise and Fall of Civilization (2015; 78

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Fig. 23  Albert Bierstadt, Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, 1864. Oil on canvas, 341/4 × 271/8 in. (87 × 68.9 cm). Timken Museum of Art, Putnam Foundation Collection, San Diego. Photo courtesy of Timken Museum of Art.

fig. 24). This work occupied a large room in Toronto’s Gardiner Museum, a center for the ceramic arts. Buffalo jumps across North America yielded unimaginable quantities of bone, bone essential to the production of ceramics. Entering this walk-in diorama, one can approach the bottom of a nine-foot ersatz cliff over which Miss Chief presides and three life-sized animals are being driven to their deaths. At the base is a bone garden and collection of pottery fragments fabricated by Monkman. Inspection of the “bones” reveals that some are repurposed as imitations of Picasso’s Bull’s Head (1942), which the Spanish artist counterfeited from a bicycle seat and handlebars. Monkman, on four of his imitations, substitutes a ceramic seat on which a cheesy picture of Miss Chief on a rearing horse appears between two grazing bison and a white settler, the latter splayed on the ground in apparent awe. References to Picasso abound in Monkman’s installation, most notably in the frightening face of the largest of the three bison, which looms over us. A version of B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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Fig. 24  Kent Monkman, The Rise and Fall of Civilization, 2015. Mixed-media installation. Gardiner Museum, Toronto. Photo: Jimmy Limit. By kind permission of the artist.

Picasso’s autobiographical Minotaur figure has been stylistically relocated to the artist’s Cubist period, then reattached as the visage of a terrified bison. Viewed from the front, the head is splayed onto one visual plane. As Monkman explains, “I am now inserting cubist figurations by Picasso . . . as a metaphor for how Indigenous cultures got flattened during the last 120 years—the compression of pictorial space as a metaphor for the loss of Indigenous language and culture.”75 From the side, we see that the beast’s entire body is a cubistic patchwork of animal hides, a clear reference to the mass slaughter of bison for this commercially viable commodity. Completing the installation are two-dimensional steel cattle rising from the rubble—an allusion to Picasso’s lithographs titled Bull (1945–46)—and walls painted with bison-like animals reminiscent of prehistoric Amerindian and proto-European cave paintings. Picasso vaunted his own artistic kleptomania, not least of so-called “primitive” work from Africa and Iberia that he saw in the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in Paris. Monkman states that Picasso was “the archetype of European male dominance and aggression. . . . The bull was an extension of his penis.”76 It is in his differentiation from Picasso that we can discern an ecological strain in Monkman’s re-created landscape. Commenting on the grandly allusive title of this piece, he states, “[I]t’s partially the idea of cultures recycling and returning. It’s also . . . an allegory for the cyclical nature of painting and art. For 80

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example, during the Primitivist movement of the early twentieth century, European artists looked at non-European art, then produced pared-down images that were supposed to represent the art of non-European peoples. They were almost like pictographs. . . . to a certain extent, I suppose I’m embracing what came before.”77 He does not embrace Picasso but instead sees him as representative of European hubris. For Monkman and many artists and scholars, Indigenous or not, the expropriation of lands and the aggressive killing of bison to remove Indigenous people’s food source rather than simply to supply meat, not to mention excessive hunting by the U.S. Army, are ecological travesties that pit the long-standing harvesting of bison by Indigenous peoples against the ravenous pace of colonization. The peoples of the plains identified with the bison as ancestors, not distinguishing them from people. It is an unspeakably cruel irony that their oppressors also conflated these beings, though in opposite terms. Colonel Nelson A. Miles, for example, a decorated American career soldier, explained the extermination in these terms: “This might seem like cruelty and wasteful extravagance but the buffalo, like the Indian, stood in the way of civilization and the path of progress.”78 Estimates of the total number of bison on the Plains before this decimation range from 50 to 70 million. At one point there were a mere three hundred left; some of these were killed and preserved for museum collections.79 Are the precontact practices—“traditional ecological knowledge”80—displayed in The Rise and Fall of Civilization to be taken as models in our ecologically stressed present? “Native American environmentalism,” to borrow the title of Joy Porter’s recent book on the subject, remains controversial. In this highly contested terrain,81 Monkman’s landscape suggests that these practices exemplify accord with the planet and its resources, but not through a simple return to the past or an impossible separation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous in the present. The Rise and Fall of Civilization thus resists the offensive nostalgia of Bierstadt’s Last of the Buffalo (1888),82 which portrays a heroic struggle between Indigenous hunters and a noble bison, a fantasy vision of precontact ecological balance painted at the very time when both were threatened with extinction. Where initially Kent Monkman’s redeployment of a Western landscape type is overt but his works’ ecological concerns less evident, this ratio is reversed in the paintings of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Expressed with the images and cosmology of his Coast Salish and Okanagan heritage, as well as that of other visual traditions in the area, Haida especially, his ecological outcries about a stolen and ravaged sacred land could not be clearer. That dramatic paintings such as Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land, Shaman Coming to Fix (1991; fig. 25), Clear Cut to the Last Tree (1993), and Clear Cut to the Last Old-Growth Tree (2013) are landscapes that draw on both Indigenous Pacific Northwest Coast imagery and that of the Surrealists is manifest. Yuxweluptun calls these “history B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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paintings” because, in his words, he is “interested in recording history: residential schools; global warming, deforestation, and pollution.”83 Scorched Earth presents an expansive coastal landscape replete with lamentation. The large forms in the background were mountains but are now hollowed-out tentlike shapes covered in—perhaps even made from—the ovoids, form lines, and vibrant colors of Coast Salish and cognate regional imagery.84 Patchy brown areas suggest industrialized deforestation. A masked blue totem figure in the center distance weeps, as does the sun. In the middle ground, forms melt, reminding us of Dali’s dream landscapes. But Yuxweluptun has not simply borrowed motifs from the Surrealists: he calls his work “visionism” to mark his separation from colonial practices of using Indigenous motifs. A witness to the rapid destruction of land and ancient values, he has said of his work from this period, “my reality was surreal.”85 What we see is Yuxweluptun’s reality and that of still-colonized Indigenous peoples globally. A red shaman in the foreground faces us, despairing of the wanton harvesting that has left stumps at his feet that reveal masklike tree spirits on their scarred surfaces. The coulisse of trees behind him combines a compositional device fundamental to Western landscape—the repoussoir element that frames the view and pushes our eye into the illusionary depth of the landscape—with conifers whose verdant boughs are fashioned from masklike ovoids. The shaman and his ilk are cut off from their land; they can no longer communicate with it or indeed reconstitute it physically or spiritually. They cannot exercise their responsibility to the earth. A related work explores the frustrations of this intransigent situation. In Red Man Watching White Man Trying to Fix Hole in the Sky (1990), Yuxweluptun distinguishes his people’s reality—sky—from the technological colonizer’s ozone layer, much discussed at the time and exemplary of the Anthropocene. The precarious attempt to patch this hole is doomed to fail. “My work is very different from traditional art work,” Yuxweluptun states, referring to both Indigenous and Western traditions. “How do you paint a land claim? You can’t carve a totem pole that has a beer bottle on it. . . . I paint this for what it is—a very toxic land base. This is what my ancestral motherland is becoming. Painting is a form of political activism, a way to exercise my inherent right, my right to authority, my freedom. . . . I can speak out in my paintings even without the recognition of self-government.”86 His use of Surrealist imagery is calibrated to this purpose. The Surrealists were unique colonizers of this region, collecting its masks and other artifacts as catalysts in their own quest to access realms of consciousness more fundamental and significant than those of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. André Breton owned a Kwakwaka’wakw headdress from Alert Bay, British Columbia. Surrealists Kurt Seligmann and Wolfgang Paalen visited the region.87 Aware of these cultural deracinations, Yuxweluptun purposefully borrows in turn from the Surrealist vocabulary of landscape to make what he calls “salvation art.”88 Less 82

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Fig. 25  Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land, Shaman Coming to Fix, 1991. Acrylic on canvas, 195.6 × 275 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 1993. Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Canada.

Christian than Indigenous in its connotations, and despite the degradation of land and culture that he experiences, he is hopeful about the fruits of articulating what he sees on the land. Charlotte Townsend-Gault suggests that Western landscape has been denied here; that is true if one means the grand tradition that Monkman takes up, for example, or much contemporary non-Indigenous landscape painting in this or other regions noted for their natural beauty. But Yuxweluptun’s passion for the Surrealist landscape is too strong to disavow. Again, it is not the look of Surrealism but the disorientation stemming from it that he makes his own and makes productive. He indigenizes it to discuss land, what settlers call land claims, and how we see landscape in terms of now inevitably imbricated cultures. “You don’t have to go to the Amazon to see an aboriginal person standing in a clear-cut. We have some of the largest clear-cuts in the world here in British Columbia. I’ve stood in it and it is mind-boggling.”89 His work seeks dialogue and places of cultural connections: “It’s about an exercise of communicating with the outside world. It is very important to me and I feel that this is where there exists a meeting point. How do you translate from one culture to another?”90 In its particular ways but also in concert with the B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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other work examined in this chapter, Yuxweluptun’s paintings are a potent development of landscape into eco art. This chapter and its case studies demonstrate the enduring links between landscape in many forms, land art, and contemporary ecological art. Two other projects add detail to the range of practices brought forward and transformed as Indigenous landscapes. Bonnie Devine’s installation Battle for the Woodlands contrasts Indigenous and European senses of mapping, territory, land use, and landscape. But I turn first to Arthur Renwick’s photo work Delegates: Chiefs of Earth and Sky (2004; fig. 26), which reconnoiters the troubled relationships between landscape and language from an Indigenous perspective. Each of the eight images making up the full Delegates series employs one of Renwick’s photographs of characteristic land forms from what is now South Dakota, traditional territory of the Sioux confederation, including the Lakota. Each is named for an Indigenous chief from this region, using both his original name and an English translation—Tah-ton-kah-heyo-ta-kah, “Sitting Bull,” in this example. “I was thinking a lot about Dee Brown [author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee] when I did this series, since what he talks about happened where I was shooting this project,” Renwick says. “Most of his book is just quotes from people, and I realized he was giving a voice back to Indian people, and in a way that’s what I wanted to do.”91 Colonial expansion into this area was administered under the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, signed in today’s Wyoming, which promised to leave a significant amount of land to these peoples but was broken after an expeditionary group led by General Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills.92 Renwick is from another region known for mining, or as Jennifer Dales has aptly written, he “comes from two places in northern B.C.—Kitamaat, the ancestral home of the Haisla people, and Kitimat, an Alcan company town, built in the fifties to house the aluminum smelter’s workers.”93 In each of Renwick’s images, the landscape fills the bottom half of the individual “delegate,” an official term used by the U.S. government when they brought chiefs to Washington, D.C., to negotiate the land deals that eventually forced Indigenous peoples onto reservations. The top of each monument, as Renwick calls them, is a polished aluminum “sky” perforated by a Western punctuation mark, a comma in this case. “The punctuation marks are the spaces in between the words, the silences in between,” he claims. “They symbolize the language used in the treaty—English—a language the Lakota couldn’t understand or read, yet they were expected to sign it. I named each artwork after one of the warriors, using their traditional Lakota names.”94 Visible through these lexical marks is a copper backing set deep enough to establish a visible gap in the aluminum. Copper was mined in Renwick’s home area long before the aluminum smelters arrived with industrialization. As we move in front of each human-sized and sculptural “delegate,” the copper glints. We also register the punctuation marks that frame meaning in any written document. They can be likened to the breaths and pauses in oral speech, what 84

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may remain unsaid but has implications. They can suggest continuity, a full stop at a boundary, or indeed an enclosing structure, as we see in the “delegates” that include brackets. Renwick’s punctuation floats free in the sky, out of context, but these marks nonetheless suggest the one-sided lexicon of the treaty negotiations. Photography is another bracket or language, a way of seeing (and often claiming) the land as landscape that may, but often tragically does not, correlate across cultures.95 How is this series ecological as well as a conveyor of notions of landscape into present debates over land? Renwick’s understated photographs of terrain in the bottom halves of the “delegates” in this series often suggest an earlier epoch, perhaps before contact, when the land was less stressed by human habitation and less contentious. In some we see horses grazing on expansive grasslands, but Renwick does not picture a static Eden: we see fences on this land, and in the first “delegate” he made, we can notice a drainage culvert leading into a stream bed alongside animal tracks. Though in Tah-ton-kah-he-yo-ta-kah (Sitting Bull) buffalo have returned from near Fig. 26  Arthur Renwick, Tah-ton-kah-he-yo-ta-kah extinction, their numbers and range are (Sitting Bull), from Delegates: Chiefs of Earth and Sky, 2004. Gelatin silver print, anodized aluminum, tokens of the precontact past. When we copper, 152.4 × 76.2 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist consider the punctuation in Renwick’s and Katzman Contemporary. skies as our collective recent history, our haunted and haunting “landscape,” what Loretta Todd says about Yuxweluptun’s paintings can apply to Delegates as well: “I see many worlds inhabiting the same space, with tragic consequences.”96 This is the land today, bounded in characteristically “settler” manner. Bonnie Devine remaps the contested spaces around the Great Lakes in Battle for the Woodlands (2014–15; fig. 27). She began the project with a colonial map from B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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the 1830s, an orientation centered on what was then called by newcomers Upper and Lower Canada and the Great Lake States of the United States. Wings on adjacent walls depict what became the western United States and Canada to the left and the northeastern United States and Canada’s Maritime provinces to the right. Three anthropomorphic elements stand in front of this array, observing. The lineaments of this map are familiar to most who live in this highly populous area now because it is a prototype of dominant contemporary cartographies of the region. It shows the political boundaries between the United States and Canada that were established through continuous armed conflict among the French, British, American, and Indigenous groups from the 1760s until the second decade of the nineteenth century, a continuation of earlier conflicts to the east and a lamentable preview of strife to the west, as Devine’s installation suggests. Crucially, it is the map and mindset that all children, Indigenous and not, are taught as the truth in school. As we saw in chapter 1, maps are closely related to the acquisitive, territorial aspects of landscape, both etymologically and historically.97 Devine intervenes to map “the opposing view” onto what Eva Mackey pointedly calls this “settled” perspective, what Devine also calls the other “imaginary” of the European colonization of this region, that of Indigenous peoples who continue to experience displacement.98 Looking to the Atlantic seaboard and thus back in time, she suggests that the Micmac welcomed the settlers, saw their needs, and thought, altruistically, “we would share the land [and] live here together.” Battle for the Woodlands is set in a three-dimensional space into which we can walk. Symbolically and physically, it is an open space, not an enclosed box. Taking the map of colonial domination as her baseline, Devine reinscribes Indigenous senses of this place that settlers try to obliterate from the visual and historical record. Her landscape narrative moves us from right to left, from east to west, from the seventeenth century toward the present, and from a Eurocentric view of northeastern North America to a recognition of Indigenous relationships with this land. We see radically changed circumstances as we move. For example, Devine is intent on showing that Indigenous peoples and the region’s animals were relentlessly pushed westward through the process of colonization, a displacement that was ideological as well as physical. Her point is buttressed by Patrick Wolfe’s analysis: “The primary object of settler-colonization is the land itself rather than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labour with it. Though, in practice, Indigenous labour was indispensible to Europeans, settler-colonization is at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement. The logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct—invasion is a structure not an event.”99 One result was what Devine considers “catastrophic habitat loss.” Where Indigenous groups saw the lakes and rivers as living 86

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Fig. 27  Bonnie Devine, Battle for the Woodlands, 2014–15. Maple, red willow, unidentified twigs, paper, and sea grass. Art Gallery of Ontario. By kind permission of the artist.

parts of the earth—Devine tints the major rivers in red to suggest lifeblood—settlers instead saw the waterways as conveyances that made commodity extraction and the spread of farms and industry feasible. “I made them into animals because they aren’t just bodies of water. They are beings who are cohabiting with us in this space right now. They are living. We are in a relationship with them,” she states.100 Devine also marks the boundaries between the newcomers and Indigenous inhabitants with bead lines, indicating treaties signed (and later broken). With inset drawings of skirmishes between Indigenous groups and American and British soldiers in the lower center of the installation view here (fig. 27), just off the colonial map and thus in actively contested territory, Devine shows that the earth has become increasingly militarized. She highlights the need for an awareness of the specificities of language and a critique of Eurocentric treaty texts—which we also witness in Renwick’s Delegates series (fig. 26) and Michelson’s B e yo n d S u s p i c i o n

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TwoRow ii (fig. 51)—by inscribing these battles over texts from A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh, by Allan W. Eckert.101 The combat she shows focuses on the pivotal figure Tecumseh (1768–1813), the Shawnee leader who brought together a large confederacy of Indigenous groups to resist colonial expansion into the regions west of Detroit. Tecumseh sided with the British in the War of 1812 and was killed in battle in 1813, which brought an end to cooperation with the British and Canadians and to Tecumseh’s vision of an independent Indigenous nation in what is now the American Midwest, the area into which the animals in Devine’s installation flee.102 The “desperate reality” that she depicts is both historical and ecological. It uses land and landscape to tell a mournful story about dislocations, clashing values, and ultimately the lamentable history of the earth in this region. That this is an unresolved, ongoing narrative is suggested by the way in which Devine lays an Indigenous vitalism over the Great Lakes on the central map. The map commands the center of her installation. The western edge of this landscape is placed where two walls join, so that Lake Ontario and most of Lake Erie are on the map, but Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior are still in the less colonized and more spacious West for which Tecumseh fought. Again, these lakes are represented as animals, not given colonial names. The Indigenous forms overlap the Western mapping of the land for Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Champlain to the east. Animals rush toward the apparent openness and freedom of the West, but in this part of her spatialized narrative, Devine reminds us of ongoing strife with Objects to Clothe the Warriors, three elaborate jackets honoring the main Indigenous leaders who resisted the expansion of the colonial frontier in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Tecumseh, Pontiac, and Crazy Horse. The centrally placed sculptural group is titled Anishinaabitude in reference to the Anishinaabeg peoples, one of the main groups in this territory and one to which Devine links her Ojibway heritage, and to Frantz Fanon’s notion of “negritude.” Standing on a low platform in front of the colonial map, these humanoid forms are made of interwoven twigs gathered from each group’s traditional homeland, thereby recognizing those who negotiated with and were then displaced by colonial forces. These figures are of the landscape and make reference to weaving techniques important to Indigenous arts. Devine includes the Mississauga, who signed the “Toronto Purchase” in 1787, which the British crown—contrary to Indigenous peoples’ understanding of land—claimed gave the newcomers title to the land on which Battle for the Woodlands stands within the Art Gallery of Ontario. These figures are thus of the past, but they also monitor the installation in the present, surveying it in an Indigenous manner, repudiating mapmaking as division and ownership. Devine’s installation is thus a meta-landscape. It presents the history of this disputed land and encourages us to reflect on the processes of its division, of landscape depiction, and of constructing a visual narrative. Here we see 88

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both landscape’s manipulation and its articulation, its uncovering of erased histories and attempts to relink them to the present of this locale. Devine is concerned to bring both Indigenous and settler concepts of landscape and nature into a contemporary ecological frame. “We’re at a moment right now where [Indigenous artists] have a chance to make some change here. Why? Because the rest of the world is also saying: Save the water! Do something about the Earth! Don’t mess up the air!” Hers is an ecological message of a “very ancient consanguinity, which means having the same blood, it means water that is running [through] lakes and rivers runs in us.”103 I began this chapter with examples of the historical and ongoing suspicion of landscape in land art. The many artworks I have discussed should instruct us to be on the alert for the often self-serving manipulations of the landscape genre in its past and its current redeployments. Robin Kelsey discusses the relationship between landscape depiction as a set of problems and as a mode worthy of ongoing theoretical and artistic endeavors in ways that are significant here. “Ecology is arguably the most promising matrix through which to posit a history of landscape ideology for our time,” he argues. The engagements with earlier forms of landscape examined in this chapter add credence to his point that “it may make sense to shift from an emphasis on landscape as an ideological distance between classes of humans,” which we have seen in both Devine’s and Monkman’s art, for example, “to an emphasis on landscape as an ideological distance between species and habitat,” a gap that Battle for the Woodlands strives to make evident and to narrow. Kelsey’s astute definition of older landscape paradigms as “a fantasy of not belonging to the totality of life of a terrestrial expanse, traditionally taking the form: you belong to us; we do not belong to you,” could instructively be modified in the direction of “consanguinity.”104 If landscape is frequently integral in the articulation of eco art, the category should now be beyond suspicion.

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chapter three

Remote Control Siting Land Art and Eco Art

Nature has nothing to say to us. . . . This snub is particularly rough on people from the city. Tom Sherman, Off-Kilter: Talking to Nature (2002)

One of the boldest contrasts between land art and today’s eco art is where and in what circumstances we typically encounter the work. Since its inception in the 1970s, eco art has often been urban and frequently seen indoors. Land art was regimented by its creed of separation, whether or not this meant a physical removal from art-world centers. By working directly with and on the land, as I have suggested, much of this work famously sought to sever what its advocates thought of as deforming ties to the city—with its gallery system, its model of the heroic artist in the studio, the medium-specific formalism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, its musty monumental sculpture in public spaces, its traditional art materials and finish in sculptural work—and to depart especially from the landscape genre, which, as we have seen, was frequently figured as the Luddite past. In both North America and Europe, land art involved resistance to these older norms and often a physical relocation, practices that accorded authority to remote siting and ephemerality. While simple dichotomies between apparent opposites are rarely accurate in the contexts of land art, relocation away from and resistance to established art-world patterns promised benefits: buying into potent myths of exploration and wilderness, occasionally a connection to early environmentalism, moving outside the museum or gallery and thus (it was claimed) its economic and aesthetic value systems. Michael Heizer stated ca. 1968, “One of the implications of earth art might be to remove completely the commodity-status of a work.”1 Land-art practices were always varied and not always telluric in orienta90

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tion: photo documentation, in galleries and magazines, of otherwise invisible or temporary work was a critical analogue of—not a cipher for—site work, as was Smithson’s film Spiral Jetty. Published artwriting was also central. Willoughby Sharp, curator of the momentous Earth Art exhibition in 1969, said in 2006, “Yes, Avalanche was a publication, a catalogue, a curatorial effort that replicated a show without an exhibition. Avalanche was the exhibition itself. . . . It was a better exhibition than . . . ‘Earth Art.’”2 The term “land art” was first used not just for a TV presentation in Germany in 1969 by Gerry Schum, who had been inspired by the Earth Art exhibit at Cornell, but also as what the producer/curator conceived as a TV gallery (Fernsehgalerie). More clearly in retrospect, what land art largely did (as part of or in concert with other tendencies in art at the time, especially conceptualism and feminism, as a perusal of Lucy Lippard’s touchstone Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 shows) was to complicate and render dialogic—rather than remove—the connections and disconnections between the ostensible poles of landscape and land, city and country, studio and open ground, sculpture and what Rosalind Krauss called the “expanded field.” Even when we refine the “get-out-of-town” stereotypes of land art with counterexamples—Michael Heizer’s Dragged Mass Displacement (1971) and Walter De Maria’s two earth rooms (1968 in Munich, 1977 in New York City) were both urban displays; Earth Works was a gallery show—contemporary eco-art practices operate under different auspices and are frequently sited differently.3 I discuss a number of these departures in turn and then look at pertinent examples more closely in two case studies.

Remoteness, Ephemerality, and the Eco Monument Two qualities of siting common in land art—remoteness and ephemerality—can be compared productively with related strategies in eco art. Where land art was to be situated was a central debate at the inception of the movement in the 1960s and 1970s. The two priorities could be emphasized independently, or in an example such as Walter De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing of 1968 in the Mojave Desert, they could overlap.4 In 2005 Anne Wagner returned to an authoritative discussion of the issue among Heizer, Oppenheim, and Smithson, a conversation that was based on interviews in 1968 and 1969 and originally published in Avalanche magazine’s first issue, fall 1970.5 Oppenheim claimed that his gallery work was separate from what he did outside this setting. Smithson doubted this possibility, stating that “you’re probably always going to come back to the interior in some manner” (243). Insisting on the site-specificity of his work, Heizer seemed uninterested in any relationship with the gallery. My purpose is not to expound the already well-understood relationships between land art and the gallery and the city but Remote Control

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instead to investigate further eco art’s assumptions about and departures from these compass points. Wagner adds statements by Nancy Holt to the original published dialogue and then returns to it “because their testimony [that of Holt, Heizer, Oppenheim, and Smithson] registers the emergence of a set of problems and issues that have not gone away. They speak to the complex new spatialization of art since the ’6os and to the resultant complications of where and what the artwork is” (248). That these points of reference remained significant forty (and now fifty) years after land art’s beginnings is also witnessed by a roundtable discussion published in the same summer 2005 issue of Artforum that published Wagner’s rehearsal. Convener Tim Griffin remarks on the appearance in the 2000s of work purposefully placed in (supposedly) out-of-the-way locales (following a propensity opposite to that with which I began chapter 1, in which landscape is brought indoors). “This development,” he claims, “demands some comparison to work made by previous generations, such as the Land art of Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, on the one hand, and the travels of artists like Bas Jan Ader or Hamish Fulton on the other.”6 As Brian Wallis had done in observing this tendency in his 1998 survey of land art,7 Griffin slants the ensuing conversation among prominent curators and artists by assuming that land art is a historical precedent and the recent work a series of returns. A range of opinions is offered on exemplary examples, including Tacita Dean’s audio piece Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997), Olafur Eliasson’s indoor and outdoor spectacles (fig. 1), Pierre Huyghe’s Antarctica project, and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s initiative called The Land (in which the latter two artists were participants). Claire Bishop and Pamela M. Lee distinguish between land art and some contemporary examples in which remoteness serves as a sign or cause of the art’s “aesthetic” reception and projects with a social purpose. Their illustration of the latter is Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), performed near Lima, Peru. Overseen by Alÿs, hundreds of volunteers with shovels moved a sand dune a small distance. The site was not inaccessible geographically or of great moment aesthetically. Since the purpose was not to remediate the terrain but to create what Alÿs deemed “land art for the landless,”8 the project focused on disenfranchised people and what we could call the inaccessibility of opportunity represented by access to land. Yet it is worth recalling that physically and conceptually, if not in its stated purpose, this performance has a precedent in land art, Richard Long’s comparatively quiet and hermetic Thousand Stones Moved One Step (1976) and cognate works. Extending the conversation, Lee states, “A colleague of mine recently told me about a new genre of literary theory called ‘eco-criticism.’” As we saw in the conversations that form Landscape Theory (2008), eco art had not yet become the focus of discussions in the mid-2000s, however much artists were producing work with this emphasis. Land art’s relationships with eco art are of 92

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course not its only important coordinates. From today’s perspective, however, eco art cannot be fathomed apart from its complex and ongoing interactions with land art, but that does not necessarily make it the “new Land art,” as Lee calls it in the Griffin text, any more than Smithson’s revisions of the landscape conventions were designed to establish a new picturesque, as we saw in chapter 1. Oppenheim acknowledged in the conversation discussed by Wagner (243) that Smithson’s dialectic of site/nonsite is not only central to his work and that of other land artists, it is in addition a paradigm of the relationships between remoteness and ephemerality and even those between eco art and land art. In his usual expansive way, Smithson linked the site/nonsite pairing deployed in the Earth Works exhibition in New York in 1968 with Spiral Jetty. In a lengthy interview conducted in 1972 for the Archives of American Art, he stated, in reference to the inception of his own work in this foundational gallery exhibit, that the physical “landscapes of New Jersey . . . embedded themselves in my consciousness at a very early date.” At the Dwan Gallery, A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey (1968) therefore “reflected the confinement of the gallery space. Although the non-site designates the site, the site itself is open and . . . unconfined. . . . Then the thing was to bring these two things together. . . . To a great extent that culminated in the Spiral Jetty” (295). Overturning the emphases of earlier landscape depiction yet again in the Avalanche text, Smithson claimed that “in a sense the non-site is the center of the system, and the site itself is the fringe or the edge” (249). This temporal and material inversion also parallels the procedures of preposterous art history that I have adopted. In Smithson’s entropic universe, it makes little sense to draw up lists of opposites. Site and nonsite flip, depending on our vantage point. “I began to see things in a more relational way,” he stated in 1972 (296). We could say the same of many other works in the Dwan show. Carl Andre’s documentary wall photos of his work in Aspen, Colorado, from the previous summer insist on a gallery/nongallery relationship yet posit neither as primary. Sol LeWitt’s Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value takes the documentation of ephemerality to an extreme by displaying photographs of his ritualistic burial of a handcrafted sculpture in the Netherlands. As LeWitt said of this object, it “was not visible—but known.”9 These examples might seem to stand in contrast with Robert Morris’s Earthwork (1968), which was a completely, if iconoclastically, present pile of urban detritus placed in the center of the gallery. While the sculpture is not dialectical in Smithson’s manner, it takes on a site/nonsite relationship with Morris’s other work and that of the other artists in the exhibit because he also made secluded pieces with which it can be compared and because it is unitary amidst the various doublings in this exhibition. But what of Smithson’s reference to Spiral Jetty? Constructed in 1970 at Rozel Point in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, it is for most people still inaccessible economiRemote Control

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cally or physically. While Smithson sought out a site distant from the New York and Los Angeles art worlds of Virginia Dwan, his patron, he chose this location in part because of its proximity to the Golden Spike National Historic Site, which commemorated the joining of the western and eastern spans of the transcontinental railway on May 10, 1869. He also valued the traces of industry at this spot, the remnants of now largely inconspicuous but occasionally reenergized oil exploration.10 The work is remote, yet not. Spiral Jetty is, on the one hand, both large and durable: it partakes of geological time. On the other hand, it is famously in flux, partially disappearing under water for decades soon after its completion and, now that it is above water level again, changing in color constantly thanks to the crystallization and microscopic life forms born of the saline conditions of the Great Salt Lake. It is ephemeral in its multiplicity and flux, but not. It also exists as a physical structure, a film, and an essay. As the most discussed example of land art, even though relatively few people have visited the site, it is also constantly present in photographs and art discourse. Spiral Jetty in all its instantiations is thus paradigmatic of the complex dialectic of the remote and ephemeral in land art. Many tactics were used to make land art ephemeral, whether within or beyond the gallery. In contrast to its role in Bonnie Devine’s Battle for the Woodlands, discussed in chapter 2 (fig. 27), mapping can be a vehicle for ephemerality and even invisibility. Iain Baxter founded the N.E. Thing Co. in 1966 in Vancouver (NETCO, as it is also called, was legally incorporated in 1969), which he co-­ administered with Ingrid Baxter until 1978. NETCO produced a plethora of landscape-related conceptual art with a strong ecological inclination, including photographs of piles of lumber and other “natural” products or, in North American Telexed Triangle (No. 1) of 1969 (fig. 28), lines on maps that trace network communications that existed for only the time it took to send and receive messages with a then-important new technology, the telex machine.11 Since 1978 Baxter has produced numerous other works dealing with environmental and consumer issues. In 2005 he changed his legal name to Iain Baxter&, adding the ampersand to his surname to underline the power of “and.” Douglas Huebler, Nancy Holt, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, and Bill Vazan—among others—also produced map works that explored both the conceptual and the telluric dimensions of the earth. If the N.E. Thing Co. example seems only to suggest ephemerality, we should remember that the Baxters were careful to trace the physical existence of telegraph lines between cities, to acknowledge the physical system of cables, poles, etc., that carried the messages. Claes Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument (also called The Hole, 1967) was a performative creation of a negative space, a visible absence presented on a Sunday afternoon in New York’s Central Park, in clear view of Cleopatra’s Needle and the Metropolitan Museum. Suzaan Boettger has noted that Oldenburg’s earthwork was orchestrated as part of an exhibition called Sculpture in 94

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Fig. 28  N.E. Thing Co., North American Telexed Triangle (No. 1), 1969. Collage, 45.5 × 60.9 cm. By kind permission of the artist.

Environment, curated by Sam Green, who had mounted a similar exhibit in Philadelphia.12 Anti-monumentality, negative space, radically simple materials, even a morbid reference to the increasing body count from the war in Vietnam (the excavation clearly resembles a grave)—all were part of this work. Another strategy was to curtail access to work temporally, as at Paul Maenz’s group exhibition 19:45–21:55, seen (briefly) at the Galerie Dorothea Loehr on September 9, 1967. This was an international and communal exhibition that included Jan Dibbets from the Netherlands and Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, and John Johnson from the United Kingdom, alongside German artists Bernhard Höke, Konrad Lueg, Charlotte Posenenske, and Peter Roehr. Dibbets’s contribution invited direct participation as visitors walked through the sawdust that bounded the ephemeral negative space of his installation in the gallery courtyard.13 Some works connected the conceptual and the material, such as Long’s, for which the artist sent twigs by mail and instructions to have local ones gathered and displayed to bring places in England and Germany together. Long was one of the first artists to work ecologically. “In Long’s work,” as Lucy Lippard has stated, “transience and ephemerality are no longer accidental features of a certain type of artmaking but have come to occupy its very core.”14 To extend this discussion of the relationships between eco art and land art through the double lenses of ephemerality and remoteness, I want to circle back to the connections between land, land use, and the proprietary component of landRemote Control

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scape as a genre by considering Dennis Oppenheim’s canonical Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop (1969; fig. 29), Agnes Denes’s equally legendary Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan (1982), and more recent work by John Gerrard that moves the landscape implications of agriculture into new dimensions (fig. 30). Directed Seeding— Cancelled Crop is a composite of photographs that record Oppenheim’s planting and harvesting of a grain crop in a farmer’s field in the Netherlands in 1969. The two works—Directed Seeding and Cancelled Crop—were temporally separate but were also combined by the artist into a third work in this collage and described in the text segment affixed to it. Oppenheim described the careful layout of Directed Seeding in Fig. 29  Dennis Oppenheim, Directed Seeding— Cancelled Crop, 1969. Finsterwolde, Holland. Wheat these terms: “The route from Finsterfield, harvester, 462 × 801 ft. Reduced route wolde (location of wheat field) to Niece configuration from Finsterwolde to Nieuwe Schans Schnapps (location of storage silo) was plotted on a field 154 × 267 m and used to dictate seeding pattern for common wheat (April 1969). The reduced by a factor of 6X and plotted on cultivated media from the two diagonal cuts is isolated a 154 × 267 meter field. The field was from further processing. This raw material is to be packed in 25 lb. bags (September 1969). then seeded following this line.” He adds Photodocumentation, 60 × 40 in. Photo: Dennis this description for Cancelled Crop: “In Oppenheim Estate. © Dennis Oppenheim. September the field was harvested in the form of an X. The grain was isolated in [its] raw state, further processing was withheld. The material is planted and cultivated for the sole purpose of withholding it from a product-oriented system. Isolating this grain from further processing (production of food stuffs) becomes like stopping raw pigment from becoming an illusionistic force on canvas.”15 In 1969 he augmented the all-important concluding simile about painting: “This project poses an interaction upon media during the early stages of processing. Planting and cultivating my own material is like mining one’s own pigment (for paint)—I can direct the later stages of development at will.” The mining metaphor helps to explain Oppenheim’s conceit that short-circuiting the capitalist system of production and marketing by withholding the wheat from 96

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further refinement and sale is analogous to curtailing the development of another primary material, pigment, in a highly refined process, painting. In creating this negative value, his work is comparable to Oldenburg’s Hole and to the experience of invisible sites in Smithson’s coeval work. Oppenheim’s protest is partly about the marketing of studio-made art, the gallery system that so many land artists resisted. He directs his disapproval specifically at what was in the art world, in the aftermath of abstraction’s hegemony, still seen as conventional: illusionism. Whether or not Oppenheim had landscape painting in mind—as Smithson did on his way to his tour of Passaic, discussed in chapter 1, for example—he was clearly offering a three-dimensional and less permanent alternative, one that included an “abstract” X on the physical landscape. His mining metaphor also doubles our attention to his work on the earth, to what Oppenheim calls “terrestrial art” as opposed to that of the city and studio, which he pithily designates “loft art.”16 Looking back from the perspective of eco art and today’s fascinations with “new materialisms,” Jussi Parikka’s theorization of the “geology of media” finds a precedent in Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop. “We need to track the importance of the nonorganic in constructing media before they become media,” Parikka claims, by imagining “the literal deep times and deep places of media in mines and rare earth minerals.”17 As I show at the end of chapter 5, Simon Starling’s One Ton II of 2005 (see fig. 62) does exactly this with regard to traditional photography. Oppenheim’s statement and his photo work expand what landscape could be in the realm of Krauss’s notion of the “marked site.” The patterns on the ground are in the country, though the photo collage is city, gallery, and publication oriented. Ironically, given the scale and temporary presence of the seeding-and-harvesting project, it is this originary work that is ephemeral. In 1969 Oppenheim was aware of what he called this “paradox,” given that critics’ idea of the “timeless object” is “of a solid form of rigid matter that will live through the ages. I think . . . timeless art . . . is gong to be this new seemingly ephemeral, process-oriented work.” Because “they involve outdoor areas,” he elaborates, “they involve an ecological kind of framework which . . . can reiterate almost a constant, never-ending change.”18 An environmental or truly terrestrial art, Oppenheim believes, takes artists “out of the studio . . . widening our boundaries until we’re faced with the fact that we are just a very small speck.”.19 I examine his profound engagement with boundaries and borders further in chapter 5. While part of the effect of Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding and Cancelled Crop in their en plein air, European specificity was to move outside the gallery system, more important historically, I believe, is that these works and their photographic progeny stretched beyond the art world or, if we prefer, forced the art world to think about systems of land use and include such spatial and administrative factors in a new definition of non-object-based and in this case socially minded practice. Remote Control

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Oppenheim is pressed in the 1969 interview to talk about Burnham’s systems theory; unlike Haacke with respect to Rhine Water Purification Plant (see fig. 3), however, he only acknowledges the connection and does not run with it on a theoretical plane. In resisting not only art-world protocols of what counts as art (“loft art”) but also the long-standing tendency to move from land to land ownership to a narrow interpretation of what it means to create value in the definition of landscape in art, however, Oppenheim greatly augments the material and conceptual possibilities of land art. More than most land artists in the 1960s and 1970s, he took a political stance on the environment. Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop and its cognates reveal a capitalist system of exchange through their purposeful resistance. In exposing land use and its consequences in this manner, this work can be seen to engage with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape depictions of agricultural enclosure laws, for example,20 and to anticipate the multifarious landscapes in the United States whose use is recorded and analyzed most notably today by the Center for Land Use Information.21 Agnes Denes evolved her practice of “eco-logic” coincident with the work of Oppenheim and other land artists. Warning of the woes of the Anthropocene decades ago, Denes wrote in 1993, [F]or the first time in human history, the whole earth is becoming one interdependent society with our interests, needs and problems intertwined and interfering. The threads of existence have become so tightly interwoven that one pull in any direction can distort the whole fabric, affecting millions of threads. A new type of analytical attitude is called for, a clear overview or summing up. . . .

Rice/Tree/Burial, first realized in 1968, was a manifesto that announced my

commitment to ecological and environmental issues, human concerns and philosophic thought. It was also the first exercise in Eco-Logic, a complex of site-oriented artworks that brought together philosophical concepts and ecological concerns.22

Nowhere is this principle more graphically displayed than in Wheatfield—A Confrontation. Her description of the complexity of this project is itself a complex iteration of site: Early in the morning on the first of May, 1982, we began to plant a two-acre wheatfield in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty.

The planting consisted of digging 285 furrows by hand, clearing off rocks and

garbage, then placing the seed by hand and covering the furrows with soil. Each furrow took two to three hours. 98

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Since March, over two hundred truckloads of dirty landfill had been dumped

on the site consisting of rubble, dirt, rusty pipes, automobile tires, old clothing, and other garbage. Tractors flattened the area and eighty more truckloads of dirt were dumped and spread to constitute one inch of topsoil needed for planting.

We maintained the field for four months, set up an irrigation system, weeded,

cleared out wheat smut (a disease that had affected the entire field and wheat everywhere in the country). We put down fertilizers, cleared off rocks, boulders, and wires by hand and sprayed against mildew fungus.

More symbolic than conceptual and even more extensive than Oppenheim’s earlier intercession in the capitalist system, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, in the shadow of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, occupied land that was then worth 4.5 billion dollars yet was kept empty by real-estate speculators. Denes concludes in a darkly prophetic way: “After my harvest the two-acre area facing New York harbor was returned to construction to make room for a billion-dollar luxury-complex. Manhattan closed itself once again to become a fortress, corrupt yet vulnerable.”23 Wheatfield—A Confrontation’s “eco-logic” deploys the strategy of ephemerality in several ways. The wheat was tended through a summer season, and the project reverberated for several years after the harvest, but as a monument to so much of what Denes finds wrong, it remained finite. The economic system that she resists is largely invisible but articulated in this work. Like Oppenheim, however, Denes has striven to convert the fleeting to the lasting. Showing symbolically that this land could be used for more than making money, as it was in Manhattan’s past, Denes has since restaged Wheatfield’s planting, harvesting, and attendant community interaction several times. Versions of the project—her challenge “to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns”24—traveled from the heart of world commerce to twenty-eight other cities worldwide from 1987 to 1990, sponsored by the Minnesota Museum of Art’s International Art Show for the End of World Hunger. Beginning with Rice/Tree/Burial in the late 1960s, she has in addition created time capsules as part of her work. She considers her massive Tree Mountain project (1992–96)—commissioned by the Finnish government at the first Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992—to be a “Living Time Capsule.” John Gerrard calls his hypnotically artificial virtual-reality simulations of buildings “portraits,” but they are in “landscape” format and often engage with issues of land use and how land comes into eco art. Given that they exist only as files to be projected in a gallery or viewed on a computer screen, chances are that we will experience them in landscape format too, and likely indoors. Two of Gerrard’s works link provocatively with Oppenheim’s and Denes’s interventions into the agricultural system. Both Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) 2009 (fig. 30) and Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) 2015—to overgeneralize strategically—graphically show what art Remote Control

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Fig. 30  John Gerrard, Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) 2009. Simulation; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Simon Preston Gallery, New York.

does now in the vast spaces of the United States after land art heroically claimed the West. Though we never see a living thing in the panoramic tour around Sow Farm, the five massive buildings that we circumnavigate typify industrial farming today. Fascinated by what takes place in the Oklahoma landscape, Gerrard returned to produce Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma), in which he went to great lengths to picture one of Google’s “data farms.” While he does not announce a political program in the way Denes and Oppenheim did, it is apparent that reflection on mass consumption, industrialization, and digital surveillance informs these simulations. He states, “to me, the landscape—dotted with farms and oil fields—also represents the global trend of unrestrained, mass consumption.”25 Sow Farm shows the flat and largely uninflected landscape of the former Dust Bowl region, a quality of neutrality that is heightened by the suppression of detail in the simulation program used to make the work. The camera circles the equally nondescript buildings we see, moving counterclockwise quite quickly under neutral lighting. We notice linear ranges of telephone poles, suggesting a road near the farm. An unused piece of equipment that looks like a loading ramp enters and leaves our purview. We come to a large open depression in the earth; from a distance, it looks like Michael Heizer’s Munich Depression of 1969, but more regular. Not only does it turn out to be full of water—a waste pond?—but it also functions as an abject reflecting pool for the five apparently identical buildings. There is no sound, no narrative, but life inside is hinted at in details such as the slow 100

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rotation of a fan vent along our path. This is a working farm, the infrastructure behind the seemingly magical appearance of food in urban stores. As N.E. Thing Co. does with their mapped telex triangle (fig. 28), Gerrard reminds us both that the agricultural system is abstract and that it occupies space and uses material resources. The unmodulated pan that Gerrard presents is also comparable with the quietly breathtaking opening sequence in Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary about the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, which presents an eight-minute (though seemingly endless) tracking shot of the inside workings of the enormous Cankun factory in Xiamen City, Fujian, China. Both sequences are remarkably calm, allowing us to take in the massiveness and implications of what we see. This is terrestrial art in the twenty-first century. Where Baichwal’s shot is dramatic, however, Gerrard’s unfolding sequence is relentlessly banal. Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) of 2015 shows similarly monolithic and characterless buildings from the outside. This time, however, the “crop” is data, a resource extracted, cultivated, stored, analyzed, and protected in a Google “server farm.” Accustomed to harvesting images from Google’s various sites at will, Gerrard wanted to visualize the hardware too. He asked, “what does the internet look like?”26 Because Google would not allow the artist access to images of the site, he hired a helicopter and photographer to take the twenty-five hundred photos that were in turn rendered into this simulation. Ephemeral in the extreme, the Internet is at once pervasive and invisible. Gerrard here brings it down to earth by showing us its materiality, how demanding this network is on earthly resources—cooling systems are prominent—and therefore how entwined it has to be with other social and economic systems. Farm encourages us to think about Sow Farm in ways that augment both works. In a data, or server, farm, the livestock in Gerrard’s earlier Oklahoma “landscape” are merely data, information to be manipulated. It was this fiduciary metamorphosis that was lampooned by Gilligan and Ackers in Deep Time (fig. 12) with propositions such as “swap a tree for a bee.” We never see Sow Farm’s animals, and we cannot see data. Just as the term “farm” describes a new form of husbandry, so too “landscape” is repurposed. Yahoo Answers provides a good example: “The result of data farming is a ‘landscape’ of output that can be analyzed for trends, anomalies, and insights in multiple parameter dimensions.”27 The Internet that Gerrard intimates in Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) might be thought of as what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject,” with an emphasis on the object.28 Morton defines his now much-used concept: “The objects we ignored for centuries, the objects we created in the process of ignoring other ones: plutonium, global warming. I call them hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are real objects that are massively distributed in time and space. Good examples would be global warming and nuclear radiation.” It appears that he is invoking the discourse of the sublime so powerful in landscape painting, updating it for transplantation into the Remote Control

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present. But because for Morton the sublime was a bounded discourse both theoretically and in its material presentations—whether linguistic, theatrical in de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon (which can be translated as “image of nature”), or of course in paintings—this is not Morton’s sense of the hyperobjects of today. “Hyperobjects are so vast, so long lasting, that they defy human time and spatial scales,” he asserts. “They wouldn’t fit in a landscape painting.”29 As we saw in chapter 1, Morton sees the tradition of such framing as an attempt to control experience by achieving distance. “No landscape is big enough or long lasting enough to enclose hyperobjects in its frame. Hyperobjects have finally done what decades of avant-garde experimentation have been unable to do,” he continues; “they have broken forever the aesthetic frame separating the viewer from the viewed and producing the aesthetic effect of distance, which Walter Benjamin called aura.” The sublime also errs by remaining stubbornly anthropocentric, whereas hyperobjects “humiliate the human.”30 Morton wants our thinking and artistic practices to move beyond such frames, but I would argue that in his zeal to see the future of hyperobjects, he has underestimated the degree to which the many discourses of landscape in the theories and presentations of the sublime from the eighteenth century to the more recent machinations of Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, have grappled with the closely analogous issue of presenting the unpresentable. It is simplistic to suggest that landscape is simply about distancing and framing as control and that we can easily jettison the concept. We might oppose a good deal of the land art from the later twentieth century to Morton’s polemic. Did not the land artists’ storied flight from the gallery and their direct involvement with materials rather than representations explicitly break “forever the aesthetic frame separating the viewer from the viewed,” to use Morton’s words? He has forgotten or ignored art’s recent history. Morton runs a similar argument about the concept of nature: the idea is both worn out and deleterious to our futures, he argues in Ecology Without Nature. Granting all his concerns, we should be wary of throwing the history out with the ideas of nature and the sublime, which is one likely effect if we abjure such concepts today. Like that of landscape in its various permutations, the discourse of the sublime is not necessarily spent. Given the imponderable scale of what we see in Gerrard’s farm scenes, the sublime is instead a category that we might want to reinvoke and update. Frances Ferguson makes this point forcefully: “The theory of the sublime does not, as is frequently thought, intimate a kind of aesthetic appreciation that would be a substitute for action. Rather, it provides a model of what it’s like to feel that the world is posing a problem to all of the usual ways we have of conceiving of our actions.”31 Gerrard’s animations may lead us to a sense of the sublime as overwhelming magnitude, Kant’s “mathematical” type. For most, however, Sow Farm and Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) and cognate works are too 102

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commonplace in what they show to be thought of as sublime. As in the industries with which they engage, much remains hidden. The tedium of the buildings more likely leads to an experience of bathos, that bottoming out or sense of baseness that is thought to be the antithesis of the sublime. Clearly there is no connection between what we perceive here and the desired moral uplift that was part of the formula for the sublime in nature that Kent Monkman, for example, replicated and parodied by recirculating Bierstadt’s landscapes of Yosemite. Bathos suggests a fall from ideals, a degeneration, but also profundity. It is a venerable category that provides resources for the articulation of eco art now. In a literary tradition initiated by Alexander Pope’s essay “Peri Bathous” in 1727—a rejoinder to “Peri Hypsous,” the ancient text on the sublime attributed to the first-century c.e. author Longinus—bathos is a rhetorical strategy that promises a corrective to the enthusiasms of the sublime by returning to earth in all senses.32 Gerrard’s farm sequences set up an oscillation between the hopes of the sublime and their descent into bathos, one that turns on another connection between the contemporary realities of Gerrard’s Farm and earlier landscape discourses, the notion of the “commons.” The commons were shared land resources, which were systematically privatized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today we hear references to the “digital commons” and the “digital landscape” without making the connection to the privatization of data and communications that Gerrard alludes to in reproducing Google’s server farm. Calling Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) “a postmodern pastoral,” Gerrard claims that he wants the urban, “London public to be more aware of these sites, as it is here [in the city] that we consume their work. In . . . Farm there is a more ambiguous sense as it is not clear if we consume the products of this Farm, or are consumed ourselves.”33 The Internet has, since its inception, been described as a free and open commons resource; this idealistic characterization is put in doubt by Gerrard’s work. In picturing both the infrastructure and the fate of the digital commons, Farm stands in contrast to (but in fruitful conversation with) Cornard Wood (1748), Thomas Gainsborough’s nostalgic portrayal of what remained of the agricultural commons in mid-eighteenth-century rural Suffolk. As Ian Waites explains, parliamentary legislation that forced “the enclosure of operable fields [by private interests] was largely completed before 1700, but many areas of woodland waste [as shown here] remained in common well into the eighteenth century.”34 The locals’ commons prerogatives are on display in Gainsborough: they contentedly gather wood, graze animals, take a drink from a stream, etc. The economy of this landscape is evident too: we may imagine a narrative progression in which laborers take what they have foraged to the town seen in the distance, to their homes and to market. Harmony among peasants, animals, and the land prevails in this painting’s ideal world. Even the large, dark, and empty swampy part of the Remote Control

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landscape shown to the right of the canvas hides no sublime threat, no lurking banditti, as in Salvator Rosa’s seventeenth-century images, for example. The concord presented by Gainsborough is that of a thriving pre-Anthropocene ecosystem, soon to be erased. Without suggesting that Gainsborough, let alone Gerrard, had Pope in mind, the following passage from “Peri Bathous” (in which he describes his contemporaries’ sacking of ancient texts) has a contemporary resonance: “though it is evident that we never made the least attempt or inroad into their territories, but lived contented in our native fens; they have often, not only committed petty larcenies upon our borders, but driven the country, and carried off at once whole cartloads of our manufacture; to reclaim some of which stolen goods is part of the design of this treatise.”35 Farm is superficially anodyne, yet in our post–Edward Snowden times, reminders of the mere extent of personal information housed and tilled in this and many other companies’ and governments’ facilities is chilling to many people. Banality can lead to the sense of defeat characteristic of bathos. Gerrard’s animations are failed landscapes in the sense that Charles Harrison described as impossible under the protocols of modernism that Art & Language’s forays into the landscape genre sought to dismantle: “The promised paintings would be endowed with a kind of superficial complexity and glamour. . . . They would not be realizable as modern paintings suitable for a modern museum—or not, at least, unless modern culture were to be transformed in such a way that bathos and irony became its representative modes, so that the modern was revealed as a mere ruination of its own supposed attachments.”36 How does eco art get to this point, at least when it adopts a nonameliorative stance? Ferguson holds on to a new ethics of the sublime as an explanation: “What climate change criticism presents for us is an ethics in which we take action neither positively nor by not acting. It is a sublime ethics in which we are held by the problem without having any immediate outlet in action.”37 This ethics could as easily be one tinted with bathos, a condition that “may signal not only a degraded consumer world but also an aesthetic that critically reflects it while eschewing the easier consolations of kitsch and pathos.”38 Land artists frequently made their work both phenomenologically present at a remote site and experientially absent, even imperceptible to most viewers. This elusive doubleness sounds like a good description of the concept of nature so closely involved in conceptions of land and landscape held by its artistic interlocutors. Land artists referred to nature constantly. While I am not suggesting that with their frequent recourses to transient, remote, or even imperceptible work, they uniformly intended to emphasize the impossibility of defining, envisioning, or fully grasping nature, I would propose that eco art takes our human relationship to nature as its theme more consistently than its predecessors did and often consciously underlines the impossibility of adequately representing this concept. The 104

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urban versus remote sitings of such work also remain in play. Two pertinent examples are the intervention NATURE (2009; fig. 31) by Sean Martindale and the humorous but telling video Off-Kilter: Talking to Nature (2002) by Tom Sherman. Sherman’s short video is a jewel of perfectly timed commentary about the lack of communication between humans and nature. It says much while appearing to be amateurish and feigning the mutual inscrutability of nature and humans. The opening shot is of a flat landscape with a river, but the screen is soon filled by a spiky wildflower, broken off at the stem and held unsteadily by a human hand. Before the narrator speaks, we hear the sound of a car passing by at speed and notice a tall lamppost in the sky behind the plant. We are in the country, it seems, but not far from the city. Sherman’s deadpan narrative begins at this point. “It’s hard to have a conversation with nature”—the assumed purpose of having the plant on camera—“because nature doesn’t talk back.” “We find we’re just talking to ourselves, or more accurately, we’re talking to each other,” which of course the video does. “Nature has nothing to say to us,” he continues. “This snub is particularly rough on people from the city.” At this point the close-up of the plant’s “head” opens to show that we are in a parking lot. There’s a truck parked and a road, across which Sherman and his prospective interlocutor then walk (as so many land and eco artists have walked). As they cross, watching another car pass, the message shifts from “nature doesn’t care” and “we can’t possibly understand its otherness” to “nature speaks through sign language: once you crack the code, you’ll find that nature has a lot to say.” On cue, a dog chained to a house that they approach starts to growl and bark, wagging its tail as if to demonstrate nature’s puzzling semiotics. Sherman then rests the plant on the hood of a parked car and concludes, “Nature can be frustrating, especially for city people.” About this and his other four “Off-Kilter” videos he writes: These video recordings remind us of how far the world has tumbled out of balance. Our relationship with nature is screwed up, big time. Our excessive use of languages and technologies continues to drive a wedge between us and the wild animals and plants. We look to nature for companionship. We try to talk to nature in nature’s own language, to form new relationships with the animals and the plants and the earth between our toes. We take a wildflower for a walk across the road. We’ve tried all kinds of crazy things, but so far, nature hasn’t talked back.39

Neither urban nor suburban, and certainly not “wild,” Off-Kilter is set in a liminal zone that suggests the inevitable interaction of humanity and what we call nature. Despite its range of placement and presentation across media, land art was beholden to a number of imperatives that partially controlled where it would be seen and the forms it would take. An analogy is the sway held by the categories of Remote Control

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Fig. 31  Sean Martindale, Curbed Concepts: NATURE, 2009. Intervention, Toronto, Ontario. Salvaged cardboard, letters 4 ft. high × 1.5 ft. deep × variable width. By kind permission of the artist.

the sublime and the picturesque in the eighteenth century over later landscape norms. Remoteness, ephemerality, and city/country are three of these parameters in 1970s land art in both Europe and North America. While Smithson’s site/nonsite pairing can always short-circuit simplistic binaries of city versus remoteness and the like, such dichotomies were always prominent. As Wagner points out, they have not gone away. Their recurrence, I believe, registers in interests expressed in land art today by ecologically minded artists. Eco art seems less bound to the main alternatives of the 1970s, though as I claim in the next chapter, its frequent presence in institutions—whether buildings, events, or social systems—that support the breathless global exchange in contemporary art suggests that new paradigms rule. Sean Martindale’s Curbed Concepts: NATURE (2009; fig. 31) is a simple work with extensive ramifications. The artist constructed six large block letters from cardboard. With them he spelled “nature” on the curb of his own residential street on recycling pickup day. He placed them out very early because he did not want to call attention to himself but instead sought to watch people’s unscripted responses to what they encountered on this street during the day. The hidden video camera that he placed across the street picked up an extraordinary range of behavior. When the waste-management collection truck drives by in the early morning light, nature is casting bold shadows. The truck does not stop. Martindale knows its cycle: the crew will not pick up on his street until afternoon. A car goes past the work, then backs up on the one-way street and stops in front of nature. We cannot see the passengers, but they must be interested and are perhaps taking photos. A man carrying shopping bags saunters into the frame. He has to walk on the road to get around the sculpture, and he does so slowly, as if puzzling out the obstacle. Some people come back to look several times during the day. Martindale edited these serendipitous reactions into a video version of the work. 106

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He sees the piece as an experiment in public art, one in which the artist has to let go of expectations. Not unlike Eliasson and Horn in their surveys of local opinion for The weather project and Library of Water, though less formally and on a minimal budget, Martindale asked people what they thought of the piece. One neighbor reported that he saw nature from his apartment that morning and took its presence as an epiphany, since his roommate had been urging him to recycle more conscientiously. And what did the recycling collectors think? Martindale gave them both a reason to leave the sculpture on the curb—it was very well made and slightly over the regulation size for collectible recyclables—and a reason to process it, since cardboard is recycled. We see their reaction close up: they load nature into their truck. In a moment too perfect to script, their machine cannot compact one of the blocky letters and spits it back out onto the street. The men throw it in again and drive off. Martindale’s more vivid description: “after sitting on the curb for just over six hours, [nature] was eventually [picked up], unceremoniously thrown in the back of a city recycling vehicle, and crushed on site.”40 It might seem like the intervention or experiment— Martindale’s descriptors—was over at this point, but the out-of-frame, lingering effects of the piece suggest otherwise. The person who thought the letters were meant expressly for him as a sign to reform his ecological behavior, Martindale later discovered, talked about the experience for weeks. The artist also learned that a woman living nearby, Sara Torrie, an artist whom he had not previously met, documented the work photographically. She took it upon herself to talk with the recycling men about what they were doing. Martindale later invited her to show her flipbook version of the experiment with his video record. If ecology is the scientific and humanistic perspective that studies the interactions between organisms and their environment, then Martindale’s is an ecological artwork purposefully sited in the city. People seemed to intuit that it was ephemeral. It was low-tech, made of recycled materials, and destined by civic ordinances to disappear within a few hours. Nature is not represented or pictured here in the typical mode of a landscape painting. Neither is the impossibility of its representation presented, as in the category of the sublime. The work is postconceptual to the extent that nature is presented as language, as a concept. What Martindale catalyzed was a conversation about nature in the city, at home and on the street. “I presented the word NATURE as something literally constructed, made by human hands and consisting of materials already processed by our machinery,” he claims. “My intent was to elicit contemplation and dialogue around the meaning of NATURE for all who engaged with it.” Watching people construe the meaning of the letters and work, he realized the extremes of the “conversation” that was unfolding. Many people in his neighborhood do not read English; would their understandings of “nature” therefore be different? Speaking of his art practice in Remote Control

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general, he claims, “My continuing goal is to engage around ecological and social issues in the urban environment. Opening, highlighting and interrogating agency within these shared spaces is central to this aim. I look for materials, systems and infrastructures that are misused, underused or wasted. I present possibilities, provisional alternatives.”41 Martindale’s and Sherman’s works suggest that nature is the ultimate global and local concern. They do not make any direct reference to land art and seem unfettered by the questions of where and how to intervene to ameliorate the circumstances they reveal. Their eco-art perspectives exemplify the process I call “articulation.” But what of contemporary practice that makes explicit reference to land art? It is an obvious but overlooked fact that most of the originary land artists are alive and working today or have only stopped making art very recently. Baxter&, Beaumont, Denes, the Harrisons, Patricia Johanson, Sonfist, Ukeles—all are active. Brookner, Holt, and Oppenheim died only in the past few years but had also continued to make work cognate with that they pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s. The exception, Smithson, was born in 1938 but died in a plane crash while surveying his Amarillo Ramp in 1973. While a detailed consideration of the adaptations these artists and others of their generation have made in their work with the earth in the past fifty or so years is beyond the scope of this book, these ongoing practices are axiomatic in a study of how eco art has evolved and underline the point that eco art has not replaced land art in a teleology of approaches. The reference points of remoteness and ephemerality, of relocation and resistance, that I have adumbrated are germane to the two case studies to which I now turn. Heizer’s monumental Levitated Mass (2012; fig. 32) could not be more prominently placed in an urban setting, the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), but I argue that the installation remains governed by an ethos of remote origin and timelessness characteristic of Heizer’s approach to the earth as authority. Roni Horn’s equally ambitious Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; see fig. 2), by contrast, is in a small-town former library in Iceland. In archiving and memorializing even more remote glaciers in that country, as I argue in detail, Horn is not bound to the appeals of distance, whether geographical or temporal. Where Heizer’s monument, like his ongoing City project, is designed to outlive the human species on the planet, her work claims an ecological urgency in the present.

Case Study 4: Generation(s) and the Genre of Land Art in Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass Michael Heizer was born in 1944. Since 1967 he has produced an extensive body of large-scale work that is often remotely sited in the southwestern United States. Some early work was designed to be temporary, but his later predilection is for what he 108

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thinks of as timeless permanence, work that outlasts our human civilization and is a monument to it. However much he eschews the categories “land art” or “earth art” for his work—claiming to be unique in all ways, to the extent that he refused to participate in the most extensive recent reconsideration of land art, Ends of the Earth, seen at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2012–13—as the catalogue to this exhibition amply shows, his projects are habitually and fruitfully discussed in these terms. Levitated Mass arrived at LACMA after an eleven-day journey from the desert in Riverside County, California, a “progress” that turned into a media event. It was officially opened to the public on June 24, 2012. As one report has it, “Heizer had his eye on this giant granite boulder for 20 years and finally acquired the money and technique to have it paraded like a captured beast to the museum. In fact this 105-mile night-by-night journey was a key component of the work. The rock’s transport from a Riverside quarry through Long Beach onwards to the LACMA site on Wilshire’s Miracle Mile near the La Brea Tar Pits constitutes what we might call civic processional art.”42 Relatively remote nature is here extracted from the land and brought to the city, a common pattern now. At 340 tons, the granite boulder in Levitated Mass is reputed to be one of the largest rocks moved in recent times. It is related to his best-known work, Double Negative (1969–70), which is cut into a

Fig. 32  Michael Heizer, Levitated Mass, 2012. Diorite granite and concrete, 35 × 456 × 212/3 ft. (10.67 × 138.98 × 6.6 m), weight 340 tons. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by Jane and Terry Semel; Bobby Kotick; Carole Bayer Sager and Bob Daly; Beth and Joshua Friedman; Steve Tisch Family Foundation; Elaine Wynn; Linda, Bobby, and Brian Daly; Richard Merkin, M.D.; and the Mohn Family Foundation; and dedicated by LACMA to the memory of Nancy Daly. Transportation made possible by Hanjin Shipping Holdings Co., Ltd. (M.2011.35). Photo by Tom Vinetz. © Michael Heizer / Triple Aught Foundation.

Remote Control

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mesa near Overton, Nevada, formally as well as in scale. The boulder of Levitated Mass seems magically poised over a 456-foot-long, 15-foot-wide concrete slot 15 feet deep where the boulder sits. Visitors thus promenade beneath the levitating mass, potentially appreciating both nature’s dimensions and the human technologies that balance the piece for their delectation. Not surprisingly with an artist of such consistent purpose as Heizer, his new work is expressly linked to his land-art past. He had been looking for just the perfect rock since 1968, when he proposed a cognate boulder-suspension work for the 1972 Munich Olympics site. Like other ambitious proposals for this event, including Walter De Maria’s Olympic Mountain Project (1970), the project was not realized. A Heizer sculpture titled Levitated Mass (1982), however, is part of a fountain on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The LACMA project is also related to Complex One of his City development in the Nevada desert in that “it is a reversal of issues; since the earth itself is thought to be stable and obvious as ‘ground,’ I have attempted to subvert or at least question this. To remove and lower the grade around an object made of earth and placed on the earth, would possibly make the remaining earth a pedestal, visually.”43 His search also invokes a much longer history and temporality, not only of geology but also of the long-standing human manipulation of megaliths, in which lineage he sees this project. He has updated this level of ambition with statements such as “As long as you’re going to make a sculpture, why not make one that competes with a 747, or the Empire State Building, or the Golden Gate Bridge?,” which, perhaps because of its memorable bombast, is the tag line on a website devoted to Heizer’s projects.44 LACMA director Michael Govan reminds us in a highly polished video from 2011 previewing the Levitated Mass project that his institution commissioned Heizer’s work to reflect the “ancient tradition . . . of moving monoliths to mark a place.”45 For both artist and museum director, this resonance adds to the appeal of the installation. Heizer is, after all, the son of Olmec archaeologist Robert Heizer. Govan’s presentation begins in a noisy quarry choked with the invasive earth-­ moving equipment that Richard Long and others criticized American land artists for using back in the 1960s. Purposefully or not, this sequence feels like a Hollywood remake of the construction sequences central to the film Spiral Jetty; ironically, the full-length film about the making of Levitated Mass, directed by Doug Pray (2013), largely does not. Stepping out from behind Heizer’s boulder in the quarry, Govan goes on to make a more controversial claim: that there will not be “a single child or a single adult from Los Angeles . . . or near and far who won’t want to experience this beautiful sculpture.” “Experience” is the word; visitors will come not just to see an artwork but to sense the marvel of the giant rock lifting over their heads as they proceed along the ramp under it. Does it become a sculpture where it rests in the quarry, or as it stands ready for transport on the purpose-built rig that carries it to Los Angeles, or only when installed at its new site, suspended in front 110

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of the museum, where, according to Govan, the installation will then mark the multicultural center of Los Angeles? One gets the sense that despite Heizer’s personal reclusiveness and emphasis on secluded work, collective human experience is what christens a piece of earth as a work of art. I do not doubt the popularity of this and comparable works. Many artists stage marvels now by bringing “nature” indoors. I have noted Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2003; see fig. 1), in which he re-created the sun and mist inside to the delight of more than two million visitors. But there is a crucial difference between Eliasson’s and Heizer’s programs. Eliasson’s sun and atmosphere were purposefully and obviously artificial and temporary. They were “constructed” for interaction and supplemented by the artist’s characteristic emphasis on the social nature of the project, which he underlined by placing in London taxis surveys about the weather. Heizer’s is a “real” boulder, a remarkable specimen now absent from the California desert but still outside and still displayed as an element of nature. Levitated Mass moved a mountainous rock to the city but largely sidesteps questions about how and where we understand the concept of nature these days, a concern that is central to Eliasson’s work in general. Dichotomies and connections between isolated forms, remote settings, and public spectacle are common in Heizer’s work. In Isolated Mass of 1968, for example—one of his Nine Nevada Depressions—Heizer incised a trough in a loop to form an “island” in the earth. The sculptural shape that he created is isolated in the way that the entire work is out of the way in the desert. His incendiary Dragged Mass of 1971, on the other hand, saw Heizer’s earth-moving machinery drag a large boulder across a lawn at the Detroit Institute of Arts until it ploughed up a large amount of displaced soil. Like a speeded-up glacial erratic, the boulder was embedded in the site, and indeed in the consciousnesses of outraged visitors, until it was removed soon after. While unintentionally temporary, it was decidedly urban in its locale and in its violence, as was noted at the time. Both works are again what I would call articulations of nature. They stand behind Heizer’s 2012 Levitated Mass by setting parameters for an extracted element’s placement in and relationship to its site. The megalith has been removed—might we say “uprooted” to underscore the violence?—from the quarry and placed outdoors at LACMA, but the site for the artwork has changed from a Detroit lawn to a huge earthen platform. Into this perfectly flat and calm surface, Heizer has cut an equally perfect geometrical depression and finished its concrete surfaces to exacting standards of precision. The edges and shadows are hard and clear. Like its elaborate earthquake-resistant supporting structure, the megalith itself has been carefully cut on the bottom so that it will sit securely on its large supporting feet, which are in turn fixed to the ramp’s walls at their highest point. Nothing is left to chance. Despite its affiliations with Heizer’s other work, Levitated Mass finally seems to refer only to itself and to visitors’ Remote Control

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all-important experiences of it. If you were alone under the rock, you would see the boulder, the sky, the ramp, and perhaps flashes of green foliage at the ends of the incision, period. Govan suggests that you would experience your own emotional levitation as the boulder seemed to float above you. Perhaps. But one might also feel that the boulder has been ripped from its source in a replay of land-art stereotypes from the 1960s and that it remains threateningly precarious. Before I turn to a divergent example of contemporary art’s relationship with the earth, Horn’s Vatnasafn / Library of Water, it is worth discussing briefly a serendipitous event that boldly, if temporarily, disturbed the stillness of Levitated Mass: Pierre Huyghe’s retrospective seen at LACMA in 2014–15. Except for fragments from Untilled, which were installed on an outdoor patio, this was a closely choreographed indoor exhibit. Several of Huyghe’s intriguing aquarium works were included—most significantly, in this context, one that appeared to hold a submerged boulder of considerable size. The piece presented a perfect underwater ecosystem: seen again on the roof of New York’s Metropolitan Museum later in 2015, for example, the habitat supported eels and shrimp. The display was odd because it was small compared to the large faux-lava boulder it housed and because the boulder was suspended, an aquatic version of Magritte’s L’anniversaire (1959), which shows a boulder completely filling a room. Whether by chance or as sly commentary, this tank was placed at LACMA in such a way that one could, from one side, also see the prominent peak of Heizer’s mass levitating outside the gallery window. In a magnificent riposte to Levitated Mass, Huyghe’s rock really does float, suggesting that it is not a rock at all, not a transplanted piece of guaranteed nature. No longer isolated, the twinned boulders became one of many things to be seen, actants in a landscape that included parts of other works by Huyghe, the canine mascot Human parading past with her handler, nearby palm trees, and buildings across from LACMA. Huyghe’s statement about Untilled quoted in chapter 1 is again pertinent, not only to his exhibition but to an understanding of Levitated Mass: “I’m interested in the vitality of the image, in the way an idea, an artifact, leaks into a biological or mineral reality. It is a set of topological operations. It is not displayed for a public, but for a raw witness exposed to these operations.”46 From the perspective of Huyghe’s boulder, Heizer’s theatrical work at LACMA looks like anachronistic land art.

Case Study 5: “Glacial Reveries”; Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn / Library of Water Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; see fig. 2) is a dynamic collaboration of sculptural elements, words, and social interactions sited in a former library in Stykkishólmur, a town of about a thousand people on the west coast of Iceland. The 112

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work’s most visually striking component is titled Water, Samples, twenty-four floor-to-ceiling transparent glass columns that display water taken from Icelandic glaciers. Library of Water was sponsored by the British organization Artangel.47 In a press release celebrating the one-year anniversary of the writers-in-residence program hosted at the Library, it was reported that the ice for Horn’s library columns was gathered from “glacial tongues,” the geological term “glacial tongue” referring to an elongation of a glacier, usually into a body of water, which creates an interface between ice and water. The term mirrors the imbrication of geology and speech in the installation: Horn’s exploration of the liquid and frozen properties of water is intertwined with an extensive attention to language in the installation. As I have noted, interplays between the physical world and language in many forms were a crucial part of land art, whether in the mapping practices of Oppenheim or the theories and drawings of Smithson. The obsession with language in land art is also part of a broader turn at this time that Craig Owens famously construed in 1980, in “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” as definitive of postmodernism. Undergirding this “forest of water,” as Horn has called this zone of water-and-sediment-filled columns to accentuate its particular spatial presence and how we move through it, is a fifteen-hundred-square-foot rubberized floor, into which are inscribed “weather words” in both Icelandic and English. Called You Are the Weather (Iceland), this element of the installation scatters adjectives ranging from the banal to the extreme. “Warm” and “fierce,” for example, describe people and weather equally. She has made several versions of this work, each with a specific place descriptor (You Are the Weather . . . New York, Munich, London). Her titles also purposefully double those of other works that may look quite different, in this case, the hundred-photo sequence You Are the Weather (1994–95), in which the same woman was photographed in different aqueous locales. Crucial to Horn’s art making are these subtle local differences and the extensive experiential and philosophical implications raised in the distinctions between even two elements in one work (Things That Happen Again [1986–91], for example).48 A third component of the installation echoes the building’s original role as a library. Weather Reports You presents seventy-six transcribed interviews with local people about the weather in Iceland. It is housed in a contiguous listening and reading room in which one can also peruse Horn’s many artist’s books. The library is dramatically situated on a promontory over the town, overlooking the sea like a lighthouse. To maximize this setting, Horn enlarged the windows of the original structure to allow a sense of two-way permeability and connection to the weather and to civic affairs. By implication, the words also reach beyond these walls to the outside weather and the human interactions that generated them, sources readily visible through the large windows of the library building.49 Remote Control

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Vatnasafn / Library of Water was conceived as a place for collaboration and ongoing community involvement; it remains a gathering spot in the town. The work’s commitment to collaboration around language is accentuated by a writerin-residence program. The acclaimed poet Anne Carson was the resident in 2009, living in a small apartment directly underneath Horn’s installation. The poem she wrote during that time, in collaboration with her husband, Robert Currie, is titled “Wildly Constant” (2009; the title emerges from her citation of Horn in the poem). A copy of the published poem is deposited in the Library of Water, enclosed in a glass case and thus imitating Horn’s transparent columns. To the extent that ecology is about relationship—the delicate reciprocity among environment, life form, and inanimate material—the collaborations in the Library of Water orchestrate a full artistic ecology. An important dimension of this ecology is the relationship between language and the earth. How should the human understanding of environment express itself? We have witnessed centuries of mastery, exploitation, and commodification. By contrast, an ecological perspective that emphasizes interconnectedness must begin not just with human language as description, classification, and archiving but also with listening. Does the earth have its own language, and if so, how and where does it become audible? If glaciers had tongues, what would they say? To hear this language would necessitate cultivating a different kind of ear, one attuned not just to metaphor and mind but also to its insistent materiality, as we witnessed in Katie Paterson’s Vatnajökull (the Sound of) in chapter 2. If the human mind can contain sediment, as Smithson imagined in “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), or behave as rock and stones do, then the earth’s deposits might themselves fashion a comprehensible language, one that in turn opens new ways of conceiving an ecological and creative relationship to both the earth and the human intellect. In the Library of Water, Horn and Carson hone our senses to listen to the earth’s voice and also to the delicate idiosyncrasies of each other’s language. Vatnasafn / Library of Water offers a powerful meditation on the intersection between weather and the emotional, phenomenological, and psychic aspects of meteorological experience. The improbability of archiving Iceland’s glaciers in a library couples the inexorable changes in the earth’s body with the desire to order, catalogue, and preserve. The library was a repository of books, a house of reading. How do we make sense of Horn’s impulse to translate massive, shifting fields of ice into forms that will render them legible and domesticated, into language both visual and spoken? The display of columns shares with Rúrí’s Archive: Endangered Waters (see fig. 17) a tragic need to document the earth. That the glaciers, recorded in a transmuted state in the luminous columns, melt and are converted into water and sediment, figures their passing. They can no longer move and crack, mutating in what the scientific lexicon calls “disarticulation,” a word that can refer as easily to 114

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detaching chunks of ice as to unjointing language. Given that several of the glaciers that Horn archives have since melted and disappeared, her work, Rúrí’s, and Carson’s are profoundly elegiac. Liquefied remnants are memories of glaciers. “When you’re talking about water, aren’t you really talking about yourself?” Horn asks. “Isn’t water like the weather that way?”50 Libraries and archives offer only the illusion of containment, of understanding. In “Wildly Constant,” Carson imagines a library of “melted books” in which the sentences stream over the floor and “all the punctuation” settles “as a residue.” A vivid image of her own radical dismantling of punctuation and form in her poetry, her vision also speaks to Horn’s artistic method. Horn’s columns are lit from above to highlight the different degrees of transparency and sedimentation that characterize individual glacial samples. Dissolution and reconstitution are at the heart of these women’s work. These techniques are summoned through fragmented figures and voices that haunt their works: for Horn, Robert Smithson and Emily Dickinson; for Carson, classical literature in general and Anna Freud and Marcel Proust in “Wildly Constant.” Dismantled books release knowledge and memory, freeing Horn and Carson to reconfigure them into new forms. Vatnasafn can be understood as “a modern Gesamtkunstwerk relevant to both a local and global audience, comprising a sculptural installation, a community arts centre and an accumulation of oral histories.”51 Mark Godfrey has described the work as “an apt culmination of [Horn’s] books because central to the volumes and to the Library are ideas of becoming and of being placed.”52 In its scope and complexity, the library collects this and many of Horn’s preoccupations, especially her fascination with text. But it is also essential to see Vatnasafn / Library of Water as a generative work: more than a repository, culmination, or an ultimate artistic expression, it is a living archive that magnifies ecological concerns and relationships. One key to the library’s potent expansiveness is what Horn vaunts in Emily Dickinson’s poetry as “mutability of content.”53 Closely tuned reverberations of Carson’s poem extend Horn’s installation to a conception of the encyclopedic, in Godfrey’s apt term, never toward a closed or definitive record. “I’m not interested in the kind of discovery which explains or resolves why things are the way they are,” Horn insists. “It seems to me that the question is the answer, and that’s the space I want to entertain. The work that is most meaningful to me doesn’t attempt to be definitive.”54 Like water in its endless flow, the work “is the extreme opposite of exclusive.”55 Horn underscores this point in her choice of materials, media, and working processes. Roni Horn’s work as a whole enjoys a high level of critical response. Commentators have noticed affinities between her work and Smithson’s. Astute as always, Briony Fer makes a point of downplaying these correspondences and emphasizes instead a less expected but well-documented connection between Remote Control

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Horn’s library and Donald Judd’s extensive work in Marfa, Texas. She also reveals parallels between Horn’s interest in site and Agnes Martin’s preoccupation with the desert.56 Fer argues that these predecessors’ deep and long relationships to the places that inspired their work, like Horn’s bonds with Iceland since 1975, are different in kind from “Smithson’s more hallucinatory musings on passing through . . . landscapes (without stopping there too long).”57 Fer’s is a valid critique of Smithson’s habit of moving impatiently from site to site, though it is important to recall that his peripatetic activities were central to the passage to a “post-studio” art-making practice that he helped to establish in the 1960s.58 To extend Fer’s point, and as Caroline Jones also cautions, we should be wary of the effects of his seductively poetic prose, which deposits metaphor upon metaphor. Yet this habit has purpose too, and there is an argument for lingering with Smithson to form a matrix for interpreting Horn’s work. Fer’s caveats notwithstanding, Smithson’s significance for subsequent artists working with the earth is unparalleled. In Jones’s estimation, for example, “Smithson’s essays constructed meanings for his productions and mapped out the terrain for new work (literally changing what would be seen as art in the world).”59 Horn’s elaborate installation in Stykkishólmur draws deeply on Smithson’s machinations with language and the earth. Smithson coined the phrase “glacial reveries” in his seminal 1968 essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind” in an attempt to evoke what he believed were the alliances between mind and matter over an extended, geological time frame. “One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion” (100), he claimed, a process of entropic change that was for him not one of irrevocable disintegration but rather one of “sedimentation,” of material and ideational deposit and remainder. Smithson relished the paradoxes of apparent binaries and confounded their oppositions: “the earth is built on sedimentation and disruption,” he wrote in what can be described as an extensive prose poem, and there is “cerebral sentiment” (106, 100). As a counterpoise, he projected “a world of non-containment” (102) in which sites and nonsites, materials and minds, twin and repeat one another across a critical, material gap. Doubling here is not about choice between two options but instead refers to extension. The immaterial and telluric, words and images, individuals and sites, not only operate analogously but also interact physically in an endless metamorphic and material spiral. He consolidated these views in his site/nonsite practices such as A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey of 1968, in which neither the rocks taken from the physical site nor their refined display and photographic documentation in an urban, “nonsite” gallery installation take precedence. Crucially in the context of Horn’s installation, the nonsites also contain text. Smithson also developed the principle of collaboration among, rather than division between, media in Spiral Jetty by working across its three mutually constitutive forms: the earthwork in the Great Salt Lake, the film from the same year that records the earthwork’s construction and posits its 116

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relationships to natural history and to the intricacies of editing, “bits and pieces of Utah, out-takes overexposed and underexposed, masses of impenetrable material,” as he described it in the third form, his essay of the same title (1972). If Smithson’s earthworks and words lie beneath or temporally behind Horn’s Library of Water, it equally subtends the dynamics of fragmentation in Carson’s “Wildly Constant.” To examine how Horn and Carson work together in the Library of Water, it is instructive to see their work as an elaboration of Smithson’s “world of non-containment.” His passions in “A Sedimentation of the Mind”—for “mental weather,” the “climate of sight,” “melting, dissolving . . . surfaces” (108–9)—illuminate three crucial dimensions of the Library: first, the centrality of “sedimentation” as a physical and mental process; second, the insistence on the integration and equivalence of land and language (of “words and rocks” in artistic processes, as he puts it here [107], and a collaboration he frequently explored, beginning with the drawing A Heap of Language [1966], where a mountain is formed of synonyms for the word “language,” and the essay “Language to Be Looked at and/or Things to Be Read” [1967]); and third, on the most general plane, the refusal and subversion of binding definitions and boundaries, a practice of dissemblance and dispersion common to Smithson, Horn, and Carson. Smithson calls for a new type of art in the opening paragraph of “A Sedimentation of the Mind”: “A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist,” he muses. “To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched” (100). Horn gives a full reply with Vatnasafn / Library of Water, in what she affords critically and visually through the collaboration of poetry and art installation and, more specifically, by deploying a particular sense of “punctuation.” Again it is Smithson who alerts us to this technique. In “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site” of 1967, an important early publication, he expands on the transformative qualities of conceiving punctuation as topography, of melding language and landscape. Artist Tony Smith is the point of departure, as he is in “A Sedimentation of the Mind”: “Tony Smith writes about ‘a dark pavement’ that is ‘punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights.’” The key word is “punctuated.” In a sense, the “dark pavement” could be considered a “vast sentence,” and the things perceived along it, “punctuation marks”: “. . . tower . . .” = the exclamation mark (!) || “. . . stacks . . .” = the dash (–) || “. . . fumes . . .” = the question mark (?) || “. . . colored lights . . .” = the colon (:). Of course I form these equations on the basis of sense data and not rational data. Punctuation refers to interruptions in “printed matter.” It is used to emphasize and clarify the meaning of specific segments of usage. Sentences, like “skylines,” are made of separate “things” that constitute a whole syntax. Tony Smith also describes his own art in terms of “interruptions” in a “space-grid” (59). Here again is what I call “articulation.” Remote Control

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Library of Water is a place for engaged reverie. James Lingwood, codirector of Artangel, writes, “At the heart of the initial proposal and the realised project was Roni’s idea to renew the building as a place both for quiet observation and reflection [and] for community gatherings of different kinds. She imagined Vatnasafn / Library of Water as ‘a lighthouse in which the viewer becomes the light.’”60 Horn provides a map of the library’s glacial sources, a key that is of special interest to Icelandic visitors, she reports, not least because several of the rivers of ice have literally disappeared since the opening of the installation in 2007. For Horn, as it was for Smithson, a “glacial reverie” can be troubling. Glaciers enact an ever-faster sense of geological change that we cannot normally see, a glimpse of entropy. In preserving remnants of the glaciers, the Library of Water is an elegy for loss and an acknowledgment of the transformative but not exclusively destructive effects of time conceived on a geological scale. It is in You Are the Weather (Iceland), under our feet and in our line of sight as we walk through the installation, that language emerges most emphatically in Vatnasafn. While the columns of glacial water are themselves mute, the words strewn on the floor speak of the flow of what Smithson called “mental weather,” that potent compendium of descriptors of the human and nonhuman. In her poem, Anne Carson pictures the chaos that results from breaking the glass structures: sentences stream over the floor of the library (threatening to leak into her apartment in the basement below, we might imagine). Some visitors will be able to comprehend both the Icelandic and English terms (Horn supplies a glossary in the adjacent reading room); others might experience the inscrutability of a foreign language and extend this sense of intrigue or frustration to the larger context of what Horn might have us ponder in the library. The columns of water can be construed as vertical sentences, but this syntax is unnatural for them. No longer functional, sedimented punctuation marks collect in the bottom of the glass columns. Like the waterfalls in Rúrí’s Archive, glaciers cannot be preserved inside; only a memory of them can be archived. The terms Horn borrows from her witnesses’ remarks on weather and emotion are scattered among the glass columns. Serendipity rules the inevitable comparisons that viewers can make in this space, the many sentences we can construct or fragments beyond our grasp. The weather or a person may be “unpredictable” or “oppressive,” for example. Or the connection might stand in the ironic space between a word and one of the glacial samples, as when we read the word “clear” next to a sedimentary sample that is opaque.61 Both the alterity and the familiarity of the earth’s languages undergird these social or national differences. As Tom Sherman emphasizes in Talking to Nature, it is difficult to fathom nature’s semiotics. It is the situation Horn presents in the library that is “opaque.” As in Carson’s reckoning with the runaway sentences and punctuation, our reactions can be more or less articulate, more or less comprehending. The floor in the Library of 118

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Water can be conceived of as a poem, verse without punctuation. If prose (for Smithson) or poetry (for Carson) is a dynamic enterprise into which the reader also enters, then visitors can supply the punctuation and syntax with their movements through the forest of columns. Horn has captured glaciers within a space and a system in part meant to archive knowledge, savoir. She has done so indoors, in an institution, the library, but importantly not in an art gallery per se. From the plane of medium and technique to that of worldview, Horn typically eschews definitions and leading narratives. This approach again pairs her fruitfully with Robert Smithson. In her collaboration with Carson around Vatnasafn / Library of Water, she broadens his commitment to “a world of non-containment.” By locating her Library of Water in a remote fishing village, she eludes the protocols of big-city museum going. In Iceland and globally, water is political. Asked about environmental issues and Library of Water on the occasion of her retrospective at Tate Modern in 2009, however, Horn initially let James Lingwood respond for her. The project was “never specifically couched in terms of addressing an environmental crisis,” he claims, to which Horn adds, “I was thinking more about Walter Benjamin than I was about global warming.”62 But her verbal footnote is only partly serious; this deflection and her overall subtlety should not be mistaken for a lack of principle. Horn goes on to describe her acute concern for water resources in Iceland, noting that the reserve seems to be so plentiful that Icelanders generally have “difficulty in recognizing” the obvious threats to this bounty as glaciers melt and hydroelectric projects are initiated in the isolated Highlands of central Iceland so important to Rúrí’s Archive (see fig. 17). Horn has spoken out publicly in newspaper editorials about the foolishness of such plans.63 It is not that she is separating her political and aesthetic beliefs and practices but rather that she avoids didacticism in Vatnasafn as much as she proclaims the epistemological value of art in her writings. If expectation is a limitation, she guarantees that visitors to her installation can begin with open minds. Though it preserves the memory of melting glaciers, the Library of Water is not necessarily—or not only—an ecological work. Horn’s is a radical ecology that insists on acknowledging its root sense, oïkos, a multiplex home that we all inhabit. Heizer’s Levitated Mass and Horn’s Library of Water are monumental in divergent ways. Although it presents a magnificent piece of the earth, Heizer’s work has little to do with nature or ecology. The artist has no intention of making an environmental statement. And why should he? As a contemporary earthwork by one of the originators of the genre, Levitated Mass remains consistent with the rhetoric of remoteness that was key to that movement, even if the work is placed in an urban setting. Horn shares ambition with Heizer. Library of Water is a more multifarious and nuanced work, except perhaps in terms of the technology Remote Control

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necessary to install it. Horn’s vantage on land art is that of the next generation. While the connections with Smithson’s theory of site/nonsite and especially of noncontainment are manifest, Horn is little concerned with land art. Her predilection is to look simultaneously to a deep past—glaciers—and to the future. That humanity cannot in any adequate way archive a glacier is one lesson in Vatnasafn / Library of Water. Yet as she implies by likening the library to a lighthouse, the work seeks to be a beacon, a call to act differently toward the planet in the present and future.

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chapter four

Contracted Fields “Nature” in the Art Museum

You’re probably always going to come back to the interior in some manner. Robert Smithson, in “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson” (1970)

My thinking for this book began with what struck me initially as an unusual efflorescence in the 2000s of art that brought “nature” inside in spectacular and challenging ways. Dion’s Neukom Vivarium (2007; see fig. 6) is a potent example; Eliasson’s The weather project (2003; see fig. 1) is another. These and many other artists consciously work with the contrasts and contiguities between inside and outside. Many of these projects purposefully dismantle any easy bifurcation between museum space and public space and ultimately between the human and nonhuman elements of nature—Huyghe’s Untilled (see fig. 14) is a case in point. Where land art was in important respects “controlled” by the priorities of remoteness and ephemerality, so too eco art is increasingly beholden to the museum. There are of course many works of eco art outdoors, and such projects are featured, for example, in art festivals that are largely open-air—for example, the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale in South Korea and Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari Art Field. But is nature here not simply an extension of the institution, a “museumification,” as Thomas McEvilley has called “the making of nature into a museum by the placing of artworks in it”?1 Many significant examinations of land art and eco art have been in museum exhibits, such as Earth Art (Cornell University, 1969) and Fragile Ecologies (New York, 1992). A short list of more recent instances includes The Greenhouse Effect (London, 2000), Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art (Chicago, 2005–6), Earth: Art of a Changing World (London, 2009), Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 (London, 2009), Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles and Munich, 2012–13), Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966—1979 (United 121

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Kingdom, 2013–14), and Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture (Toronto, 2013). The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art (Chicago, 2013–14), though not expressly focused on land or eco art, did claim to be about art concerned with the earth via the archaeological as a practice and trope. Some curators address the paradox of bringing work concerned with the planet’s environment inside. Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon introduce the Ends of the Earth catalogue by stating, “Many people will think that a museum exhibition on Land Art is impossible.”2 The organizers of Beyond Green raise the issue of environmental impact: “Organizing a traveling exhibition that addresses the intersection between sustainable design and contemporary art poses particular challenges: how to be thrifty and environmentally conscious in presenting, interpreting, packing, and shipping works of art.”3 Others underline the educational and informative aspects of their exhibitions, whether they display “a cultural response to the way that human activity is affecting the natural balance and physical cycles of our planet,” in the case of Earth: Art of a Changing World, or “trace the post-war history of artists’ engagement with ecology and environmentalism,” in Radical Nature.4 Conveying nature into the museum today is arguably a peculiar symptom of Western society’s apparent alienation from the nonhuman environment. That there are more and more of these exhibits demonstrates the angst of the Anthropocene and, more hopefully, a widespread will to grapple with its issues in the aesthetic. It also appears to be a return to, not simply a movement away from, the complication of relationships with gallery institutions and the urban that motivated land art. I initially thought that this move indoors was somehow unusual, but that view depends too much on the paradigms of land art. If we think in terms of a longer history, as I have suggested throughout this book, presenting nature indoors has been the norm in the West since well before landscape became a separate genre of art. In ancient Rome, interior frescoes depicted luxurious gardens in zones where the depicted and real were contiguous. Is this not the point of trompe l’oeil depictions of nature? Even many versions of the landscape garden were domesticated, created outdoors but transported inside the frame of the country house in the English-­ garden tradition, for example, not only through the available views from inside, but also through the famous efforts of gardens such as Stourhead to reproduce views from Claude’s landscape paintings from the seventeenth century. Land art was rarely as separate geographically, administratively, and economically from such institutional contexts as some of its rhetoric implied. Oppenheim’s versions of Gallery Transplant (1969)—where he transferred floor plans of galleries to outdoor fields—attest to the complex articulation of this paradigm. James Nisbet has reminded us that De Maria’s so-called Munich Earth Room is only a shorthand for a much longer title: The Land Show: Pure Dirt, Pure Earth, Pure Land.5 The triple reference to purity in this labored title can be thought of as a 122

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reference to Alexander Rodchenko’s famous material farewell to painting in his ultimate statement in that medium, Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color of 1921. “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases,” he wrote in 1921, “red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting.”6 If this connection to pioneering abstraction seems unlikely, recall that De Maria’s contribution to the Dwan Earth Works exhibit in 1968 was a large yellow monochrome called The Statement Series: Yellow Painting [The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth], an explicit reference to the yellow paint that was often used for land-moving equipment, a reference whose bracketed segment is inscribed by De Maria in a small text panel at the center of this painting. Just as art making did not end for Rodchenko, De Maria’s assertion that this was the “last” landscape indoors—whether in reference to sculpture to be walked thorough, as Nisbet suggests, or within the frame of painting, as I am claiming—did not imply that landscape was over but rather that it was radically modified. Landscape depiction and land art oscillate in De Maria’s “earth rooms,” as do the gallery space and the dirt he placed there. Lucy Lippard construed another apparent polarity, that between city and noncity, as a matter of ecology in her rolling exhibition, 557,087 in Seattle (1969), 955,000 in Vancouver (1970), plus its two later instantiations, 2,972,453 in Buenos Aires (1970) and c. 7,500 in Valencia, California (1973–74). These exhibitions are prime examples of the intercalations of land art and conceptualism. Submissions were received as descriptions of works on index cards; Smithson’s Vancouver Glue Pour (see fig. 8) was a parallel, outdoor event. Lippard wrote, “Ecology, the relationship between an organism and its environment, interests some artists as a framework for control and change, others as a means of exploring the ratio of order and lack of order in nature.”7 Does the practice of bringing landscape inside seem odd now? Is the current efflorescence of ecological art indoors an indication that conceptions of nature and of the museum have changed since the 1970s? The museal sites of eco art are arguably not as confined ideologically as those that land artists contested, nor is contemporary eco art in the museum framed in the same ways that a Cézanne landscape in the same collection might be. Nonetheless, eco art is to a significant extent still grappling with the paradigms of conventionally framed landscape and the putative liberation of land art, especially questions of physical and institutional siting. I turn now to a consideration of some of these permutations.

Outside In “Geoaesthetics,” as I use the term, refers to the many speculations on the earth and the human relationship to nature found in the Western philosophical tradition, science and technology studies (STS), and cognate fields, as these intersect with art Contracted Fields

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practices.8 As Gary Shapiro has shown in exemplary detail, it is a long tradition with Nietzsche at its center. “Modern aesthetics is only a relatively brief episode or minor fold in the larger history of thought’s dealing with the earth,”9 he writes, which implies that philosophy is always to some extent geophilosophy and that aesthetics is imbricated with geoaesthetics. My main interest is in thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Michel Serres, who often discuss the visual arts to develop their arguments about the earth and whose positions help us to interpret what’s at stake in eco art. Latour, for example, is closely connected to Eliasson’s installations and is himself a curator as well as the co-author of two plays about climate change, Cosmocoloss: A Global Climate Tragic Comedy (2011) and Gaïa Global Circus (2014). Philosopher of science Michel Serres’s Natural Contract was published in French in 1990. With Guattari’s Three Ecologies, it was a prescient geoaesthetic analysis of the Anthropocene and remains a succinct and profound indictment of what our technological culture has created. For Serres, what we have now is a “world war” that takes the material earth and all its inhabitants as the target of multiple hostilities.10 He is not alone in this view or in expressing it in terms of violent conflict. A more recent iteration of the idea comes from the environmental scholar and activist Vandana Shiva, who wrote in 2010, “When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits—limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration.”11 Rob Nixon’s powerful notion of “slow violence” is also germane, not least because it emphasizes the profoundly differential effects of climate change on differently located peoples across the planet. Slow violence, he claims, is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”12 With these more recent perspectives in mind, I examine Serres’s discussion of the weather and the earth to introduce salient negotiations of inside and outside in the work of eco artists today. Serres makes three key arguments regarding our thinking about the earth. First, Western technological society is obsessed with data and with words. “We busy ourselves only with our own networks,” he claims, to the extent that we have forgotten nature because “the essentials [of our lives] take place indoors and in words, never again outdoors with things.” If this accusation focuses on space, Serres insists that our problems are equally temporal. The “we” of politicians and institutions, including Big Science, think only in the short term, whereas “[t]o safeguard the earth or respect the weather . . . we would have to think toward the long term.” As we have seen, in their “geo” focus, eco art, land art, and landscape contend with these issues in both their spatial and temporal manifestations. 124

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Anticipating the notion of the Anthropocene, Serres writes, “At the very moment when we are acting physically for the first time on the global Earth, and when it in turn is doubtless reacting on global humanity, we are tragically neglecting it.”13 This urgent tragedy brings him to his third charge, that however much industrialization may be responsible for this situation, the problems are of human making. Staying with his main exemplar, the weather, he suggests that there is “also a second pollution, invisible, which puts time in danger, a cultural pollution that we have inflicted on long-term thoughts, those guardians of the Earth, of humanity, and of things themselves.”14 Serres here also anticipates the “material turn” and “speculative realism” in philosophy and visual culture, which I discuss in chapter 5. While his formulation of what soon came to be called the Anthropocene could be criticized as treating all human agents as equally responsible for current climate change, the latent and problematic nature/culture, outside/inside pairings in Serres’s account are revised when put into dialogue with and articulated in terms of eco art that examines cognate issues. An entrance to many of the themes adumbrated by Serres and central to eco art today is found in Michael Sailstorfer’s installation Forst (2012; fig. 33). Walking into a narrow exhibition space through which visitors must first pass to access other parts of the Berlinische Gallerie when this work was shown there, we see five large trees hanging upside down from the high ceiling. They are of different species and have only recently been cut. Each is attached to a mechanism that makes it turn, and each tree hangs from a height that causes it to draw shapes on the floor and drop foliage in circular patterns. The effect is multisensory: we hear the branches move, and we smell the leaves. In line with my investigation of deracinated trees in chapter 1, Sailstorfer avers that the sight is at first “brutal” but suggests that it comes to seem “poetic” and dance-like.15 It would be possible to miss the monitor at the end of the gallery, but the video it displays is integral to Forst. Not unlike Smithson’s site/nonsite relationship or indeed the connections that most of the work in the Earth Works exhibit in 1968 maintained with nongallery contexts, on the monitor Sailstorfer presents Black Forest, a clearing he made in Germany’s region of that name, seen in a live feed from above. He had painted an area six meters square, marking it as different from the “black forest” that surrounded it. Black Forest is thus an abstract painting that inevitably calls to mind Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Black Square, which was first exhibited in the 0.10 show in Petrograd in 1915, billed as the “last” Suprematist exhibition. In a revealing but not unusual reversal, Sailstorfer takes the gallery work into what we think of as nature and brings the trees indoors. While the word Forst is one German cognate of “forest” in English, the homonym “forced,” to ears attuned to both languages, can also be heard and seems appropriate to the extreme manipulations of this work, articulations that effectively carry Serres’s notion of the war on the earth. Contracted Fields

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Sailstorfer exemplified this theme in a series in which he exploded trees (Raketenbaum, 2008). In a way that connects this project to the many eco artworks that concern agriculture as land use and land marking considered in Landscape into Eco Art, however, he explains that this action was not wantonly destructive: “some fruit trees at my father’s farm were planted too close to each other anyway, [so] I Fig. 33  Michael Sailstorfer, Forst, 2012. Installation decided to blow up seven of them.”16 view: Berlinische Galerie, 2012. Photo: Noshe. Courtesy of König Galerie. By kind permission of the We see the modified nature/culture, artist. outside/inside pairings broached by Michel Serres again in Eliasson’s The weather project (2003; see fig. 1). Eliasson’s installation complicates what Serres identifies as the opposition of outside and inside and thus reduces to an oversimplified alternation in which inside is the place of words and information and outside is nature. So spectacularly popular and memorable was Eliasson’s main installation in Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall that it inevitably overshadowed his earnest attempt to break down the dichotomies that Serres deploys. As if to answer Serres directly, Eliasson reverses the weather terms. That visitors streamed into the gallery in a London winter to see the sun plays out a cultural cliché about the English climate noted in the eighteenth century by Pope in Peri Bathous, a text preoccupied with the sun: the weather is dull and the sun is welcome. “Nature” was staged inside, and words circulated beyond the gallery in the form of text panels in taxi cabs, for example, and on the invitation to the exhibit’s opening. On a yellow card reminiscent of the overall golden hue of the installation and placed in London taxis, we read that “73% of London Cab Drivers Discuss the Weather with their Passengers.” The goal was to spark yet more conversations about the weather. In a catalogue text appropriately titled “Museums Are Radical,” Eliasson added complexity to the sense of weather as a social, scientific, and aesthetic phenomenon, one that we often experience in the city: “Every city mediates its own weather. . . . We experience the weather through the ‘city-filter,’ as well as the other way around.” He believes that many are obsessed with the weather because “it has such a strong relationship with time,” especially in northern climates, “where the extreme diversity of weather, its wideranging seasonal variations, its continuous shifts from day to day and hour to hour,” measures time’s passage. Weather forecasting is not only a prime example of a techno-social interface; it also gives us the opportunity to “look at the time ahead of us, organising our expectations” (131–33). 126

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Sharon Switzer’s simple and effective #crazyweather (2013; fig. 34),17 a work presented on Twitter, electronic billboards, and in a gallery setting, encouraged people to comment in “real time” on weather events they found remarkable. As her title implies, most record what are perceived as anomalies, potentially disorienting interruptions Fig. 34  Sharon Switzer, #crazyweather, 2013 (video in our expectations. She reminds us, still). Composited digital video, 10:00. Created for too, that “social” now implies “social Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 2013. By kind permission media” for millions, if not billions, of of the artist. people. The weather both is and is not on one’s phone, dissolving the inside/ outside bifurcation. Though technology in 2003 did not allow Eliasson Switzer’s scale of ramification, his project acted out the interplays of spatial and temporal zones by radicalizing the museum as site. No longer was it a place that, in his words, stood “‘next to’ or ‘outside’ society and somehow reflect[ed] it from there,” as it usually did during the impossible dream of modernism. The museum, like everything else in society, is a complicit conveyance. In all his work, therefore, Eliasson tries to avoid the appearance of neutrality or mastery. “[A]ny chosen ideological strategy,” he writes, “any marketing choice, any architectural detail, must not only be considered as a condition and part of the project, but must also somehow be revealed to visitors.”18 The mechanisms that run his various indoor waterfalls, for example, are clearly evident. In Riverbed (2014) he re-created an Icelandic landscape inside the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Not only was this work obviously contrived, being indoors, in a museum that purposefully diminishes boundaries between its display areas and its coastal setting, but Eliasson also made it difficult to traverse: “I don’t only move the landscape in but also the microconflicts: suddenly we don’t take them for granted. This is what is interesting: the experience, the activities you do, also become exhibited. It’s as much about the interaction as about the actual plateau, the platform, on which people are walking.”19 Eliasson’s The weather project is not only one of his best-known works but also a piece definitive of an emerging eco-art canon. Your embodied garden (2013), a short video (fig. 35), while more contained and not often discussed, also reveals Eliasson’s working procedures as he and collaborators explore relationships between interior, exterior, and landscape in an ancient landscape form, the Chinese garden. Eliasson reports that in 2011 he visited “the Master of Nets Garden [Southern Song Dynasty and later] and the Lion Grove Garden [1342, rebuilt 1918], two Contracted Fields

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Fig. 35  Olafur Eliasson, Your embodied garden, 2013 (video still). HDV 16:9, 9 min., 23 sec. Courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 2013 Olafur Eliasson.

scholar’s gardens in Suzhou, China, with, among others, writer Hu Fang, gallerist Zhang Wei, choreographer Steen Koerner, and a film team. The aim of the journey was to explore the traditional gardens as models for physical movement, for duration, flow, and rhythm.” “What particularly interests me about the scholar’s garden,” he writes, are its various temporal aspects: the creation of the garden, the cycle of changing seasons, but also the visitors’ physical moving-through its convoluted and intricately linked spaces. What I find so inspiring is that these different notions of time passing are taken as explicit co-producers of the garden.

When I went into the scholar’s garden, I saw the garden, but I also saw the limits

of what I could see; I saw the construction of my own way of seeing things.20

Over the short duration of the video, Koerner choreographs both his physical union with the natural forms we see and the garden’s artificiality, what we might call its technologies of emplacement. He bends to conform to the shape of a branch, for example, becoming nature. Yet his complex arm and hand movements do not seem natural from any angle. Especially successful in conveying this double sense of participation at a distance, seeing oneself seeing, as Eliasson describes other work, are images reflecting both the dancer and the garden’s architecture in a mirror, a device he often uses, notably on the ceiling of Tate Modern in The weather project. At times the mirror itself is visible in Your embodied garden; at others we see only what it reflects, the dancer or one of the garden’s portals. The mirror brings 128

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space to the video camera, but that space is prearranged by the norms of Southern Song Dynasty garden design. The soundtrack conveys both birds chirping and passing traffic, elements not necessarily in the garden physically, except for their sounds. We catch glimpses of others viewing the garden and Koerner’s dance performance too, though the sense of the constructed and cultivated nature of this space comes across most in shots of the dancing in which we also see two gardeners pruning a tree. His moves match the gardeners’ articulation of nature spatially and temporally, as the strictly regimented garden itself does, dispelling the cultural pollution, the deleterious attitudes that Serres rails against. Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; see fig. 2) also polled local residents’ views on the weather and archived these testimonials and the all-important “weather words” on the floor and in the reading room of the indoor space. This work can also be understood to react to Serres’s emphases on data, the inside/ outside disconnection, the suspension of time’s long duration, and the tainted attitude our culture has toward climate change and the weather. I have mentioned that Horn’s physical modification of the former library included enlarging the windows to let the weather seem even more proximate at a site that is on a high point in the village and looks out to the ocean. Like all coastal fishing communities, Stykkishólmur is intimately involved with the weather and with rising sea levels. While we may read in Horn’s repurposed library, we do not read words in isolation from the material traces of glaciers, which, as we have seen, can themselves behave linguistically in her installation. The experience of walking through the more sculptural elements of the work—the glass columns—may be quite brief, but we cannot help but reflect on the temporal extension implied by the melting of glaciers formed during the last ice age. Our individual roles in climate change are not as graphically registered here as they are, for example, when we “turn off ” one of Rúrí’s waterfalls in Archive: Endangered Waters (see fig. 17), but the very fact that glaciers, so much a symbol of Iceland and of climate change, are “preserved” in an institutional setting is enough to set in train a reevaluation of our behavior. Like the paradigms of the remote and ephemeral discussed in chapter 3, the outside/inside dyad is both a useful place to start thinking about the relationships between eco art and gallery spaces and also too simple. Pierre Huyghe, a contemporary master of intensively wrought platforms for aesthetic experience, illustrated this point with swiveling doors in his exhibition Celebration Park (2006). We watch as large partitions on tracks traverse a generous gallery space yet never close it off. “They suspend the moment of opening, forever,” says Huyghe. “Usually a door is a fixed object: you’re in or you’re out. You can or cannot gain access to something. Here, the doors are moving, so you don’t even know any more where ‘outside’ is. Who says a door is a threshold that means you are inside or outside something? . . . [I]f the threshold is moving, if the doors are moving, there is no more inside or Contracted Fields

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outside. It’s definitely about boundaries and culture and fluidity. You think you can always be outside, but maybe you are always inside.”21 As in the case of Untilled (see fig. 14) in relation to dOCUMENTA 13, discussed in chapter 1, however, what he fails to mention is that this mobile experience takes place inside the museum as institution and architecture. Visitors have already crossed that threshold. We are always inside some structure, some system, but in his passion to explore the liminal rather than offer institutional critique, Huyghe endlessly questions and occasionally loosens these strictures. His elaborate Journey That Wasn’t (2005) is a case in point. It exists in three parts with the same title or, as the artist says, in three acts. What we can still see is a video based on Huyghe and his team’s voyage to Antarctica in February 2005, which constituted the first “act.” He heard that the melting ice in the region was exposing new islands and that on one there had been sightings of an albino penguin. Huyghe is the opposite of a documentary artist: he is not interested in capturing a reality, then bringing it back. While his voyage of exploration echoes nineteenth-century quests for the South Pole, he readily acknowledges that this work is more like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which also exists in nonidentical triplicate. Huyghe claims that Smithson was the “only” earlier artist to understand that one cannot simply transplant “elsewhere” to the city and museum and have it be authentic.22 The second part of the work was a musical performance staged—and filmed— in New York’s Central Park in October 2005, sponsored by the Public Art Fund of the Whitney Museum. In parallel with most land art, this performance was out of doors physically but inside the gallery structure administratively. Referring to this event’s relationship to the voyage south, the news release states, “Its physical presence will be echoed in musical form: composer Joshua Cody has written an instrumental score based on the sound data derived from the island’s topography.”23 Finally, there is the video, which combines elements of the voyage and the New York performance, including the elusive white penguin in animatronic form. Huyghe states that in A Journey That Wasn’t he was “interested in translation and movement and corruption from one world to another. I have doubts about exoticism, this fascination for bringing an ‘elsewhere’ here, believing that ‘there’ is ‘here.’ Elsewhere always remains a story: to bring it back, you have to create an equivalent.”24 He is not concerned with questions of truth versus fiction but instead initially creates a situation and works through the phases and components that we see here to see how that set of coordinates might emerge. He is disarmingly open about his process and the result: I’m filming the actual journey and a kind of parallel, a translation of this journey in the form of a musical in Central Park. The project happened to be in Antarctica so there’s all this mythology around it. You can think about Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” about all the Antarctic explorers, about the ozone hole. 130

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There are many parameters. I’m just trying to navigate through this crowd of references. It gives a certain tension to the work because each image reminds you of this or that, or that. But for me that’s just background. . . . We don’t know if I even went there—if I saw this island or the albino penguin. Maybe I did. Maybe it’s a special effect. I don’t care.25

Thus, while the spark for A Journey That Wasn’t was global warming’s exposure of new land near Antarctica and the rumor of the unusual penguin sighted there, his work is not ecological in the sense that Huyghe wants to call attention to climate change or save the penguin’s new habitat. The climate situation is an occasion, not a cause or purpose. Though the polar voyage is reminiscent of Cape Farewell’s trips to the Arctic, that organization’s mission in bringing climate scientists and all types of artists together is to raise awareness and incite action. Huyghe, by contrast, sets up a situation to see what happens, “what emotion it gives you,” “what meanings you bring” to the situation, and “how you can connect things.” However, because A Journey That Wasn’t is self-consciously linked to both Robert Smithson’s land art and a central eco-art cause, global warming, the three-part work offers a metareflection on eco art’s relationships with the museum as institution. It is a “play with . . . the given rules of the museum,” Huyghe suggests.26 In an extensive conversation with Mark Godfrey in 2006, Huyghe was happy to have A Journey That Wasn’t affiliated with Smithson’s site/nonsite dialectic. Just how close he and Smithson are in their procedures can be appreciated through a closer analysis of the connection. The “was” and the “wasn’t” of the audience members’ journeys is what most concerns Huyghe. His tripartite expedition spawns either assessment, and potentially both. Those at the New York performance experienced ice in the form of a skating rink and the translation of the island’s topography in sound. A version of the rink was further “translated” indoors to his retrospective at LACMA, discussed with reference to Michael Heizer in chapter 3. But for most in attendance that evening in Central Park, the journey south “wasn’t.” The video is even more compressed, suggesting, as so many contemporary artworks do, that time is a central concern. We are directed to the separate yet imbricated times of the voyage, the event in Central Park, and the video, as well as both the earth’s time, experienced through changes in weather as climate change—what I would call ecological time27—and the strictly personal, inevitably idiosyncratic time of each onlooker, who, as Huyghe says, is reminded of this or that. Did Huyghe and company find an albino penguin? We do not know and that fact does not matter. For most people interested in A Journey That Wasn’t now, only the video remains. Smithson’s endlessly refracted metaphor of site/ nonsite suggests a way to think not only about Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t but also about the relationships between eco art and its museum settings. The dialogue Contracted Fields

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among the instantiations of both Spiral Jetty and A Journey That Wasn’t can be said to grow from the crystalline structure of the site/nonsite, as do the patterns of eco art’s connections to the gallery in many cases. Instead of being outside (nature) or inside (institution), Huyghe’s work suggests that the spatiotemporal axis parallels the one Smithson described as existing between the site and nonsite in the text panel for his 1968 Non-site (Palisades-Edgewater, N.J.): “Between the site and the Nonsite one may lapse into places of little organization and no direction.”28 If Smithson sounds as vague here as Huyghe sometimes does in describing the effects of his work, we should not be misled. Both identify and take us to the indeterminate yet potent spatiotemporal dimension from which we may gain a perspective on eco art. Huyghe and Smithson are linked in their mutual fascination with the oscillation between the poles of site and nonsite. Smithson’s “Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,” a text from 1968, unpublished before its inclusion in the artist’s Collected Writings, can readily function as a description of the transit between the three acts of A Journey That Wasn’t and even of movement between eco art and the museum. “Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that ‘travel’ in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions. Let us say that one goes on a fictitious trip if one decides to go to the site of the Non-Site” (364). He goes on to emphasize that this theory is itself only a fleeting expedient, but more than any other connection between land art and the eco-art practice in focus in this chapter, the site/nonsite twinship persists. The two artists are also connected in their explorations of islands. While the new island that Huyghe researched and even attempted to name was not as magnificent as Atlantis, it was this place of geological speculation that fascinated Smithson.29 He was aware of the lore that the Great Salt Lake was connected to this ancient island. A large reef in the lake is named Atlantis Reef, for example. He created several works that explicitly addressed this and other islands, including Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island (1970, realized only in 2005); Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), a collage from 1969 (fig. 36); Map of Glass (Atlantis) (1969), which was installed both outdoors and inside; and, most significantly, his extensive plans for the unrealized Island of Broken Glass, which was halted over ecological concerns in 1970, just before its installation. Smithson executed several works in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area in late 1969 and early 1970, some in connection with Lippard’s exhibition 955,000, as we have seen, and others that were independent, including the Island of Broken Glass.30 In 1969 Smithson had imagined a project on an island off the west coast of Vancouver that would be an extension of his glass maps. His hypothetical island and continent works of that year “all terminate in this Island of Broken Glass,” he told interviewer 132

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Dennis Wheeler (200). Working with gallery owner Douglas Christmas and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Smithson scouted out sites and secured permission from the provincial government on December 15, 1969, to use Miami Islet, forty kilometers west of Vancouver, for the project. While Smithson needed to work with a gallery and other institutions, his chosen site was quite remote. As Grant Arnold has emphasized, Island of Broken Glass would have been Smithson’s first relatively permanent earthwork, anticipating Spiral Jetty in many ways. The hundred tons of broken glass could have been viewed in its reflecting glory by art enthusiasts if they chose to make the trip, but mostly it would have Fig. 36  Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Clear Glass been seen from passing fishing boats (Atlantis), 1969. Collage, photostat, map, graphite on paper, 163/4 × 14 in. Dia Art Foundation. Gift of Nancy and ferries. Smithson’s plans initially Holt Collection of the Estate of Robert Smithson. received positive press coverage locally, Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York and but conservationists’ opposition grew Shanghai. © 2016 Estate of Robert Smithson / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, New York. steadily. While a letter-writing campaign eventually resulted in the cancellation of permits by the government, the story has yet another chapter. Responding to criticism, Smithson came up with a new proposal for the same site, the Island of the Dismantled Building. As Christmas suggested to the authorities, it was to be a “monument to ecology” by providing shelter for the sea birds and seals that conservation groups believed would have been ill affected by an island covered in glass shards. It seems that the government department in charge had had enough controversy, however, and the revised idea was also rejected. Smithson was furious and made his earlier claims to environmental stewardship seem disingenuous in a text called “Rejoinder to Environmental Critics,” published (appropriately enough) in the journal Collapse: “ecological cowards want to suppress my art because they need a scapegoat. . . . The island is not meant to save anything or anybody but to reveal things as they are. . . . It is not for us to judge the island but for the island to judge us.”31 “Things as they are” suggests both the reality of waste and the entropic return of glass to sand over the millennial time frame belonging to the island but not to human regulations and Contracted Fields

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institutions. Smithson’s materialized theory of the site/nonsite furnishes a legend for Huyghe’s Journey That Wasn’t on several planes. First, it is an acknowledged precedent. Both Island of Broken Glass and Huyghe’s work feature islands, travel, and significant questions about what did and did not take place and where. Brought together, these works provide maps of how to move between the gallery and other landscape sites, maps that are exploratory rather than practical and that, instead of didactically leading us to specific places, reflect “the ways things are.” Chris Drury describes himself as an environmental artist working at the interface of art and science to make “site specific nature based sculpture.”32 His images made in Antarctica offer not only a productive counterpoint to Huyghe’s Journey That Wasn’t but also extend my discussion of the inside/outside pairing in eco art. Drury is also a keen constructor of ecological camera obscuras, a format, as I argue in this chapter’s concluding case study, that is one of art’s most potent and long-serving vehicles for bringing the outside in. Drury’s extensive portfolio is also instructive regarding ongoing relationships between eco artists and the previous generation, in that his practice stems from work he did with noted land artist Hamish Fulton in the 1970s. Sympathetic with Fulton and Long’s principle to “take only photographs and leave only footprints” in the landscape,33 Drury also acknowledges his debt to remotely sited American land art, often criticized in Britain at this time, because it “opened up a field of debate and paved the way for much of what has happened in the landscape subsequently—in particular, the process of removing works from the white space of the museum gallery and allowing them to interact with the world as it is.”34 Using the unusual technique of echograms—aerial “radar images of cross sections through the ice down to the land mass beneath”35—his works in Antarctica could not be more remote from gallery structures, yet they also insist on the imbrication of the human and nature. Produced when he was an artist-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey in 2007, Double Echo and Everything Nothing, for example, map the topography of the earth beneath ice nine hundred thousand years old and four kilometers deep as well as register our affective responses to this landscape. The topographical lines registered in Double Echo (2007; fig. 37) reminded one of the scientists at the research station of echocardiograms. “These are like the heartbeat of the Earth,” he said to Drury. In response, the artist brought “the pilot who made these flights . . . to Central Middlesex hospital where [Drury] was working, to have his heartbeat read. So this echogram from East Antarctica is superimposed with an echocardiogram of the heartbeat of that pilot. Both imaging techniques are very similar; one using radar and the other ultrasound.”36 In Everything Nothing Drury traces out the landscape’s contours with the handwritten words of his title. He inscribes himself in this vast landscape, pays homage to the many land artists who used text, and counters Serres’s complaint, discussed above, that the museum is the 134

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place of text. “Antarctica is the height of nothingness and yet it contains everything, it drives our climate and has our history encoded in the layers of ice,” Drury says of this work.37 “Humans are part of nature,” Drury holds, “and just their act of breathing impacts nature. It is this division between nature and culture [that] is at the root of the environmental problems we face today.”38 The camera obscura is the ideal tool with which to bring nature inside a human structure, to enact the confluence of inside and outside that I have been examining in this chapter. Drury has since 1990 been constructing what he calls cloud chambers, huts that act as Fig. 37  Chris Drury, Double Echo, 2007, from Flight camera obscuras, usually sited in W38. Inkjet print, 1340 × 1140 mm. Edition of four. nemoral surroundings.39 Crucial in the Collection of the artist and Central Middlesex context of eco art’s relationships with Hospital. Photo courtesy of Chris Drury. By kind permission of the artist. gallery spaces is his purpose in these and related projects: “the exploration of what inner and outer nature mean.”40 Drury was invited by the Nirox foundation in 2011 to create a work at the so-called Cradle of Humankind in South Africa, a site of immense geological and anthropological interest. He has developed a proposal “for a permanent site-specific work on the land at [the] Nirox [Foundation], which brings together time, geology and man’s presence in this unique environment.” It features a hut on the site, on whose interior walls would be painted murals with lines that echo the striations of the fossil record nearby. As he explains, “The chamber will also act as a camera obscura by cutting out the light and using just a small aperture in the apex of the ceiling. Images of trees, branches, clouds and the sun would be projected over the murals onto the walls and floor.” He would thereby bring the outside into a compressed record of geological and human time, effectively overlapping our present and the deep past of the species and of the planet. It is a time piece in a new space. As Drury elaborates, “it should place the work in real time, within the cycles of planetary time.” He specifies that “the experience within should be cave-like.”41 Elements of this eco camera obscura relate historically to Alexander Pope’s grotto at Twickenham, discussed below, and to Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976; fig. 39) in Contracted Fields

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the Utah desert and thus further articulate the relationships among landscape, land art, and eco art. They also link back to Drury’s long-standing interests in mining— Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around (2011), for example, which offered a critique of mining practices in Wyoming and was removed from its commissioned site at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, making it the Tilted Arc of eco art42—and to Smithson’s Cinema Cavern project, discussed in my next case study.

Case Study 6: Bringing Nature In; The Camera Obscura in Land and Eco Art In thinking about the camera obscura in eco art, we need to begin at ground level and below, with the bathos as fundament: caves. These natural or constructed formations have acted specifically to bring the landscape inside as an image. I consider the powerful effects of this practice by examining the historical and theoretical connections between caverns, the camera obscura as a technology in art making, and the contemporary possibilities of this sempiternal landscape form. Representations of animals on the walls of caves at Paleolithic sites are often taken as the collective signs of origin for art and art history, signifiers that represent the beginning of cultural consciousness. Compressed into a presumed moment of primal visuality, such likenesses are often used to register how timeless and universal the impulse to make art is; validly or not, they are imagined as a record of an originary moment in human creativity.43 Philosophers can also trace the beginning of their speculations to the cave, specifically to Plato’s vivid allegory of image, shadow, and light in the Republic. Plato’s attempt in book vii to liberate the prisoners from their metaphysical servitude by leading them out of the cave questions the status and source of all imagery. The impulse to escape from the cavern establishes an almost hegemonic hierarchy of the mental (the Forms) over the visual and material (the shadows, or Appearances). The cave thus operates at once as a source for, and a reflexive interrogation of, this process of imagining and imaging. It is an archetype, an element of iconography, and a natural origin. Here I consider it more as a visual and physical trope that is embedded in a series of historical and cultural discourses, including archaeology, literature, art history, medicine, geology, and mining. This figure points to a set of material practices and their epistemological assumptions as well as to a series of theoretical ideas concerning the making of images generally and the inside/outside coordinates important to eco art. The power of image making encoded in the figure of the cave and in its recurrence as a site in the camera obscura also makes it an ideal locus through which to speculate about the theory and practice of eco art history in general. Because the cave functions as a signifier for the artistic imperative, an endorsement 136

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of art history’s place in cultural representation, and also as a mythic beginning point in the Western prioritization of the visual, its figuration carries within it a set of suppositions on which the visual depends but which are rendered subservient or effaced in the genealogy of visualization. Visual culture is not exclusively visual or necessarily visible. The cave as a figure has buried within it a material history and an augmented corporeal or sensory legacy, which militate against the ocularcentric tendency to transcend historical specificity and geological and somatic materiality. As natural formations, human constructions and images, caves are necessarily interior, hidden, obscure, and, paradoxically, also the sites where visuality is created. As I argue using the example of Robert Smithson’s deconstruction of Platonic hierarchies, artists and theorists struggle with this paradoxical legacy, reproducing caves as projections of inspiration or of the mind itself and constantly interrogating the dialectic they encapsulate between interior and exterior, between materiality and transcendence, between the seen and the unseen. Why do caves powerfully embody the notion of beginning and interrogate the nature of images? Their liminal position, the placement between inside and outside, makes them a privileged and dangerous passageway between worlds or systems of representation. The cave was, for example, often a space for the reception of prophetic utterances, as depicted, for example, in the Ear of Dionysius in Syracuse, Sicily, by Jacob Philipp Hackert (1777). Caves are the entrances through which we extract wealth from the earth as well as conduits to its mysteries. Explorations of what we may call “interiority” in the West, whether psychic, anatomical, or geological, frequently take place in a real or projected interior space and recurrently in caves. A central example is the theorization and ubiquitous use of the camera obscura in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The phenomenon was noted by the Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti in the fifth century b.c.e. and , according to many scholars, used extensively by Vermeer, for example.44 Descartes, Locke—with his “dark room” of the understanding, which he describes further as a “closet, wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or some idea of things without”45—and others repeatedly likened the camera obscura to the mind and saw this technology as a model of human perception. If the mind is imaged as a cave, then it would follow that the camera obscura is in fact nothing less than a frequently portable version of Plato’s cavern. There is also a long tradition of fabricating caves or grottoes as “natural” sites of wonder and exhibition within landscape gardens. The synthetic grottoes of Duke Franceso I de’ Medici and Isabella d’Este’s Palazzo Ducale were used for this purpose in the Renaissance. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder calls the “museum” “an artificial imitation of a cave.”46 The cave and grotto are part of the prehistory of the museum. In the 1720s, inspired by the classical literary evocations of caves and grottoes, Alexander Pope—poet, landscape architect, and Contracted Fields

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translator of Homer—extended this tradition by forging his elaborate grotto at Twickenham, upstream from London, into nothing less than an organism for the creation of images. Robert Smithson envisioned a project that both inherited and offered a critical revision of the grotto conventions elaborated by Pope. In his 1971 Cinema Cavern project, Smithson proposed to build an underground movie theater in an excavated cave or mine, a space that would reveal for its captive audience the Platonic assumptions governing the creation of the image. Pope’s grotto forms part of a large garden project at his estate just west of London. The only part of his property at Twickenham still extant, the grotto has been neglected for centuries but is now the focus of a restoration project. Designed as a subterranean passage, the grotto, in the overall scheme, served to link the garden of Pope’s country home with its Thames riverfront, a considerable challenge topographically, given that a roadway intervened. In a drawing of ca. 1725–30, most likely by William Kent, we can discern the entrance to the grotto and even see the Thames beyond, marked by a passing boat. Pope’s first version of the grotto was in part a Wunderkammer—containing various rare rocks and shells, as we know from a contemporary inventory—and in part an inspirational, if nostalgic, escape to a supposed nymphaeum. While Pope’s grotto is not unique in its display of geological findings, it does explicitly combine the literary and philosophical interest in caves with the new science of geology. Rugged though it was, it was a decidedly textual place, a poet’s refuge. Clearly Pope drew inspiration from these surroundings. Two contemporary sketches (attributed to Kent, but perhaps by Dorothy Boyle, Countess of Burlington) show him writing in his cavern. Pope relates that he liked to use the lamp seen in these images in order to enjoy the unusual effects its light made as it glanced off shells and minerals. Related effects, even the image of the Thames, were produced by the mirrors he placed in the ceiling of the main corridor. We see the cave’s outlines in a sketch by Pope himself, dated January 1740. This diagram is as much evidence of ongoing plans for his creation as it is a record of its properties. While it contains a spring, for example, we also see Pope’s questions about its evolution. “What proper for a natural roof?” he scribbled. Pope put these and many other queries to his friend and physician, Dr. William Oliver of Bath. Almost a year after this plan, Pope produced another illustration. It shows the results of visits and discussions with Oliver: a much enlarged grotto that moved away from—or added layers on top of—the earlier product of his literary imagination. Samuel Lewis made a more precise drawing of this version in 1785. A sense of Pope’s new claims for the experience of his grotto can be felt when we relate his own written account to the second plan and to Lewis’s diagram. Most extraordinary, however, is Pope’s vivid likening of his grotto to a camera obscura: “When you shut the Doors of this Grotto,” he wrote in 1725, “it becomes on the 138

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instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera Obscura; on the Walls of which all the objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture in their visible Radiations.”47 What Pope orchestrated and could control for his own pleasure and inspiration, inside his cave and in his mind, was the reduplication of the picturesque effects of landscape. A visitor related the overwhelming effect of Pope’s use of mirrors and the image-making abilities of this camera obscura: “every Object is multiplied, and its Position represented in a surprising Diversity. Cast your Eyes upwards, and you half shudder to see Cataracts of Water precipitating over your head, from impending Stones and Rocks. . . . By a fine Taste and happy Management of Nature, you are presented with an indistinguishable Mixture of Realities and Imagery.”48 What other images may have been imprinted on viewers in this fashion? This question takes us back to Pope’s rebuilding of his caverns in 1740. Simply put, he renovated his classical nymphaeum to resemble a mine. In 1739 and 1740 Pope visited quarries near Bath. At this time he began to discuss the redesign of his grotto with Oliver. Oliver in turn enlisted the help of his relative, the Reverend William Borlase of Cornwall, a geologist and natural philosopher. Borlase and Pope corresponded, and Pope eventually ordered all sorts of materials from Borlase, many tons of Cornish rock, as would be found in local tin mines. These supplies Pope arranged, as Borlase directed, to “make the Place resemble Nature in all her workings.”49 By October 1740 Pope’s Twickenham grotto very much mirrored mines described in Borlase’s later Natural History of Cornwall (1758). Instead of the curiosities he displayed earlier, Pope was now clear that he wanted to see and appreciate authentic minerals, not those foreign to the area or merely impressive to the eye. He made this explicit in orders for materials and in his verse descriptions of his earthwork. In a letter to Bolingbroke in September 1740, he enclosed the following verses: Thou who shalt stop where Thames’ translucent wave Shines a broad mirror thro’ the shadowy cave; Where ling’ring drops from min’ral roofs distil, And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill; Unpolish’d gems no ray on pride bestow, And latent metals innocently glow; Approach. Great Nature studiously behold!50

As Pope’s design evolved, classical allusion and nostalgia were increasingly supplanted by scientific display and the understanding afforded by contemporary viewing—an understanding of how both images and the earth itself are created within a grotto. Contracted Fields

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Is there an unbridgeable gap of time and cultural difference separating Pope’s grotto and Robert Smithson’s vision of a cinema cavern in 1971? Both Pope, with his Augustan world of classical allusions and mining technology, and Smithson were unconcerned with the ecological implications of their environmental meddling. Both dwelled purposefully on how images come to be made with light in the dark. Smithson was also concerned with the movement of images in his grotto. The effects he imagined mixed reality and appearance in thoroughly Platonic terms. He described his sketch for his Cinema Cavern project in these terms: “What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown in the cave. The projection booth would be made out of crude timbers, the screen carved out of a rock wall and painted white, the seats could be boulders. It would be a truly ‘underground’ cinema.” Smithson was an inveterate researcher, always scouting new sites for his planned alterations to and installations in the landscape. For the underground cinema, he visited many mines, including the Britannia Copper Mines in British Columbia when he was preparing Island of Broken Glass, in which mines he imagined making a film. “I remember a horizontal tunnel that bored into the side of a mountain. When one was at the end of the tunnel inside the mine, and looked back at the entrance, only a pinpoint of light was visible. One shot I had in mind was to move slowly from the interior of the tunnel towards the entrance and end outside.” The interior space described here functions as a lateral camera obscura, or a pinhole camera. If Smithson had completed his film of the construction of his cinema, he might have included in it this shot toward the light. One can imagine beginning in near darkness and seeing the light fill more and more of the frame, in effect loosening one’s chains, turning around, and walking right out of Plato’s cave (Plato, of course, would never have had an artist lead anyone out of the metaphysical shadows). Smithson goes on to say that “[i]n the Cayuga Rock Salt Mine under Lake Cayuga in New York State,” site of a project he realized in 1968, “I did manage to get some still shots of mirrors stuck in salt piles” (142). Gary Shapiro has written that “Smithson’s entire Cayuga project can be seen as a parody of the Platonic myth of the cave as well as of Plato’s conception of art as a mirror.”51 These Cayuga mirrors constituted one of Smithson’s signature nonsites, his invention for pointing toward the complex and never exactly corresponding mirror relation between nature and art, the gallery and the remote site, and ultimately the interior and the exterior of our minds, a dialogue at once profoundly abstract and irrefragably material. In this project, mirrors that were normally blind because of the mine’s darkness were balanced by Smithson’s installation of other mirrors on piles of salt in the Cornell gallery space. Here, as in the Yucatan in 1969, he liked the fact that mirrors produce images without human control, yet he also intervened by placing these image machines in nature. Mirrors and nonsites are productive of what he 140

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called “refuse,” that unmanageable Derridean “remainder” between mind and matter or perhaps the spatiotemporal gap between site and nonsite, inside and out. “My work is impure,” he wrote, “it is clogged with matter . . . it is a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter” (194). Pope’s grotto finds a contemporary correlate in the purpose-built camera obscuras of Chris Drury. Drury has completed about a dozen of his “cloud chambers.” He works on commission, occasionally constructing a version for an exhibition but more characteristically making site-specific examples away from urban centers. Three of Drury’s camera obscuras share specific characteristics with Pope’s elaborate precedent. Wave Chamber (1994) was built beside a reservoir in Kielder Water and Forest Park, Northumberland, England. The rock structure and its aperture are designed to transmit the sense of water to the interior: “The rippling surface of the water is projected on to the pale floor of the chamber, which echoes to the sound of the waves.”52 Much as in Pope’s subterranean refuge and indeed in many examples of contemporary eco art, both vision and sound are important to the sought effect. Pope’s cavern was unusual as a camera obscura in that it was underground. Drury has created two works that share this feature: Tyrebagger Cloud Chamber in 1994 and Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky in 2003. The earlier commission was for a forest sculpture trail near Aberdeen, Scotland, a purpose that places this work on the limen between art institutions and “outside.” Drury explains that “local reaction to the proposed scheme was sceptical as people didn’t want their trees messed about with. In view of this I put the work underground, making an ‘invisible’ sculpture.” Pope’s reasons for making his grotto secret were more pressing, given that he was Catholic in an aggressively Protestant state. Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky was similarly purpose built for the “museum park” at the North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh. Partially buried to be unobtrusive, the cavern’s imagery may also be seen in the context of the positive, vitalistic pole of inverting trees, taken up in chapter 1. In Drury’s words, “the image of the surrounding trees [is] projected across the walls and floor upside down. The trees have the look of roots hanging down inside the dark underground chamber.”53 The land artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014) was fascinated with apertures, with finding and framing views of landscape for contemplation. On a poster for her exhibition Outdoors-Indoors (1972) is a photograph of Views Through a Sand Dune (1972; fig. 38), a documentation of a perfectly round hole through a beach dune. We may look at the pipe that forms the hole or through it. In the latter case, it works like a telescope without a lens, framing a circular view of the landscape very much as eighteenth-century aids to landscape composition did, especially the Claude glass and the camera obscura. Looking in one direction, we see a seascape; in the other, a landscape with trees beyond a shoreline. As noted in chapter 1, Holt felt a connection to earlier practices of landscape composition: “It was in England that Contracted Fields

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Fig. 38  Nancy Holt, Views Through a Sand Dune, 1972. Cement-asbestos pipe, sand. Narragansett Beach, Rhode Island. Courtesy of the Holt-Smithson Foundation. © 2016 Estate of Nancy Holt / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, New York.

the roots of that kind of thinking began. . . . I always think of Gilpin. . . . [We] were going back . . . [and] finding out how the English treated their landscape.”54 She was a pioneer in emphasizing land art’s relationship to the human body and human reality, a stance also adopted by many others at the time and since, including Drury. Referring to her Locators of the early 1970s, viewing tubes set at eye level in the environment, she wrote, “eight Locators—a mountain, a tree, a flat plain, a ranch house, etc. Through the work, the place is seen in a different way. The work becomes a human focal point, and in that respect it brings the vast landscape back to human proportion and makes the viewer the center of things.”55 All of these techniques not only suggest but enforce the model of a single viewer framing his or her individualized view, a position that is often adopted in eco art today. As Pamela M. Lee has emphasized, Holt was a systems thinker. She used whatever means were at her “disposal to make the land ‘appear.’ . . . Such an approach highlighted the ecological dimensions of works of art—ecological in the sense that they treated the work of art as an ecosystem.”56 In her best-known work, the Sun Tunnels (1976; fig. 39), she adopts an analogous device by boring holes through each of the four eighteen-foot-long, twenty-two-ton concrete structures, creating oculi “of four different sizes—seven, eight, nine, and ten inches in diameter. Each tunnel has a different configuration of holes, corresponding to stars in four different constellations—Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. The sizes of the holes vary relative to the magnitude of the stars to which they correspond.” She brought the constellations’ shapes into the 142

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tunnels as light. “The panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points,” she claimed. “The view blurs out rather than sharpens. Through the tunnels, parts of the landscape are framed and come into focus.” These massive pipes may also be thought of as caves, relatively dark in the desert sun and sheltering us from the extremes of this locale. Most important in the contexts I am developing in this case study, the Sun Tunnels, though not enclosed, behave as four camera obscuras by bringing outside images into the darkened interiors.57 In the daytime, the cosmic scale of our galaxy is brought into close view as “stars” projected onto the sides of the cave. When we look out from within a tunnel, another camera obscura effect inverts the landscape: “You can see whole mountains hovering over the earth, reflected upside down in the heat.” She produces this same effect using reflections of trees in water in her film Pine Barrens (1975) and experiments with the play of inside/outside in the photographic series Holes of Light (1973), made when she was planning the Sun Tunnels. Whether in the natural form of a cave or the man-made forms of portable boxes and tents so frequently employed in the history of Western art, the camera obscura reliably produces three optical effects: it brings an image of the outside world into the enclosed space, it inverts this image (unless a lens “corrects” this presentation), and it exhibits this “picture” in considerable detail. There is also an important additional effect, that of the camera obscura as a metaphor. I noted one example in chapter 1, Martin Puryear’s Camera Obscura (1994), which is a sculp-

Fig. 39  Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1976. Great Basin Desert, Utah. Photo: Nancy Holt. Courtesy of the HoltSmithson Foundation. © 2016 Estate of Nancy Holt / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, New York.

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tural installation of a cherry tree that has been hanged. The inversion is physical and the source of his title, but it was not created in or by a camera obscura. The detailed replication of an outside form has often been taken to be an advantage of the camera obscura (and its close relative, the camera lucida) in producing landscape views, as we glean from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s tirade against its use in his Discourse xiii, delivered to the students at the London Royal Academy in 1786: “If we suppose a view of nature represented with all the truth of the camera obscura, and the same scene represented by a great Artist, how little and mean will the one appear in comparison of the other, where no superiority is supposed from the choice of the subject.”58 Reynolds extolled the neoclassical view that selection and invention, not replication, was the goal of art. As the epigram to the female personification of Theory on the ceiling of the Royal Academy’s library proclaimed, “Theory is the knowledge of what is truly Nature.” The contrast between Reynolds’s objection to the camera obscura and its extensive adoption in art making underscores Jonathan Crary’s point that “the function of the device or metaphor within an actual social or discursive field has fluctuated decisively.” Reynolds overstates the degree to which the camera obscura was merely mechanical. Artists pointed portable versions at what they chose, and they were free to manipulate what light then registered as an image. Crary argues that the camera obscura was vaunted only in part for its powers of replication in the eighteenth century. More important, he says, “is its relation of the observer to the undemarcated, undifferentiated expanse of the world outside, and how its apparatus makes an orderly cut or delimitation of that field, allowing it to be viewed, without sacrificing the vitality of its being.”59 This is exactly the effect achieved by Holt in the Sun Tunnels. It is this combination of precision and choice—another version of “articulation’—that we see in contemporary redeployments of the technology in the field of eco art. I discussed Rodney Graham’s installation Millennial Time Machine (2003; see fig. 10) in chapter 1 in terms of the inverted trees his device captures, and the converted nineteenth-century carriage as a technology for “shooting” images. The photographs of inverted trees that he has exhibited are, again, metaphors for the inversion effect of the camera obscura and the disorientations that presentation frequently brings. Another common technique is for artists to capture an image in a camera obscura, then “fix” it into permanence with a photographic print of some kind. James Nizam does this brilliantly and disturbingly in his Anteroom Series of 2007. The series as a whole plays with thresholds of time and locale, of inside/ outside and before/after. Nizam does not use a portable camera obscura but instead finds this technology ready-made in soon-to-be-demolished houses in Vancouver neighborhoods. Performing a “creative trespass,” he quickly transforms condemned architecture with garbage bags and tape into an “optical device or photographic apparatus.”60 Taking photographs of camera obscura images freezes the 144

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Fig. 40  James Nizam, Hydrangea in Room (Anteroom Series), 2007. Lightjet print, 30 × 42 in. By kind permission of the artist.

compelling liveliness of the technique, but this effect also seems redolent of the sadness of what we see happening. The houses are largely empty and were being replaced by larger, grander versions of themselves in a hot real-estate market fueled by the run-up to the Winter Olympics in 2010. That lament is only heightened when Nizam uses the camera obscura to bring a lush and vibrantly colored landscape into the drab recesses of the condemned house in Hydrangea in Room (Anteroom Series) (2007; fig. 40). In Cat in Room, for example, having closed off all light except for that entering a small aperture, he graphically displays this encroaching urban development in the form of a Caterpillar excavator demolishing a nearby house. Its yellow “arm” and the surrounding detritus is projected onto the wall of the home Nizam has temporarily occupied, implying its proximate fate. Its tongue-in-cheek title notwithstanding, it is not mere speculation to suggest that Nizam’s image makes a connection with Walter De Maria’s Yellow Painting, noted above, which glorified the machinery of manly earthworks. In general terms, Nizam’s explorations of these former homes is akin to Smithson’s ironic exposition of the picturesque of decrepit industry in New Jersey and the shambled interior of the Hotel Palenque. As I show in chapter 5, Isabelle Hayeur also picks up this concern for today’s ruins, now found underwater. Contracted Fields

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Nizam has explained his work in terms of reoccupying Krauss’s “expanded field,”61 a reference that takes us to land art and its out-of-the-way practices. In Sundial (2013), for example, he took a fragment of salvaged architecture from a ruined home in Vancouver and planted it upright in the Death Valley desert. The result, evident in a stark photograph, is a sculptural though evanescent shadow cast by an almost humanoid piece of wall and roof. Radically impermanent, the work here is the photograph of the shadow more than the three-dimensional form from the ruined house. In contrast with De Maria’s celebration of attacking the earth, then, Nizam’s inversions, by moving this scrap to make Sundial and by bringing the outdoors in in the Anteroom series, emphasize the fragility of the homes and the not-so-slow violence visited on adjacent properties. He critiques unbridled urban growth, real-estate speculation, and consumerism. This we know in part from the deprecatory title of another image in the series, Monster House in Room (Anteroom Series), which, by reflecting the new and “improved” larger version on the nowtemporary wall of the older house, also projects the near future as opportunistic appropriation. There are no people in these homes, and only unwanted belongings are left. Nizam the “housebreaker” leaves no trace of his own presence. Abelardo Morell’s experiments with the camera obscura have yielded a large range of fascinating photographic images that take us to a host of issues central to Landscape into Eco Art. He has us think about landscapes, both outdoors and in museums, about parks and gardens, cityscapes, maps, and about the museum as a place for landscape and nature. Morell has been making camera obscura work since 1991. As Nizam does, he photographs the resulting images to capture “the strange and delightful meeting of the outside world with the room’s interior.”62 He demonstrates a fascination with the camera obscura’s ability to transform rooms. He has said that he inverts the wrapping art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude “by covering the room from the inside.”63 We see this in his homage to Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. In Camera Obscura: Courtyard Building, Lacock Abbey, England, March 16, 2003, he brings a facade of Fox Talbot’s country home, the location of many experiments with early photographic techniques, into a nearby interior space. As we have seen in the case of inverted trees in chapter 1, the strangeness of an upside-down image seems perennially able to catch our attention and to have us focus on the architectural details that we can see in such detail here. The spatial dislocation is odd and captivating, but of equal importance to Morell is a rearticulation of time. “I want my photographs to reflect a time when science, art, philosophy and religion were closer brothers and sisters,” he reports, “as they were in Fox Talbot’s time.”64 The image may indeed take us back to the nineteenth century, but not in a way that suggests loss. “I felt as though I had walked into the past, . . . finding that room where he made some of his famous early pictures,” he has said in interview.65 Morell instead looks to recaptivate us in the 146

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present through photography’s integration of factors he lists. This is especially evident in his works that focus on land and landscape. Morell claims that he “always wanted to make pictures of landscapes,”66 and he has done so in a way that is both art-historically savvy and immediate. Several examples were taken in museums in which he had a sculpture placed in front of a landscape painting, then photographed them together so that the figure became part of the scene, as in Frishmuth, Corot (2009), staged at the Yale University Art Gallery. A related practice is photographing the pages of books that illustrate landscape imagery. Sunlight on a Book of Landscapes (1995), for example, shows two views of the falls at Tivoli, near Rome, a site so important for Claude, Gaspar Dughet, and a host of later Italianate landscape painters that in 1758 the British landscapist Jonathan Skelton called it the “only school” of landscape painting.67 Morell’s reproduction of a painting and an engraving of this destination is not a random landscape view but rather a locale essential to the development of the genre. In addition to suggesting the circulation of this pictorial tradition in books, Morell also plays with what is inside and outside the landscapes he stages. It is the sunlight to which he alludes, not the illumination of the earlier works or indeed of nature on site, that makes this image. Unlike Nizam, however, and with consequences I examine in some detail, Morell expands his choice of imagery by taking his camera obscura and camera on the road to produce what he calls his “tentcamera pictures.” In these images, Morell makes informed choices that follow the famous nineteenth-century landscapists of the American West—for example, in TentCamera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (2011). In this case, the mountain in focus was named for the famous landscape painter Thomas Moran. As usual, Morell places the how before the where in his title, though I suggest that both aspects are of equal importance. How did he make images such as Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Cathedral Rocks from El Capitan Meadow, Yosemite National Park (2012) and Tent-Camera Image on Ground: El Capitan from Cathedral Beach, Yosemite National Park (2012; fig. 41)? Inspired by nineteenth-century prototypes that were themselves designed to be as portable as possible and take the artist’s studio out of doors,68 Morell has perfected “a light proof tent which can project views of the surrounding landscape, via periscope type optics, onto the surface of the ground inside the tent.” As he elaborates, “Inside this space I photograph the sandwich of these two outdoor realities meeting on the ground. Depending on the quality of the surface, these views can take on a variety of painterly effects. The added use of digital technology on my camera lets me record visual moments in a much shorter time frame—for instance I can now get clouds and people to show up in some of the photographs.”69 His punctilious titles emphasize Contracted Fields

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Fig. 41  Abelardo Morell, Tent-Camera Image on Ground: El Capitan from Cathedral Beach, Yosemite National Park, 2012. Archival pigment print, 45 × 60 in. (114.3 × 152.4 cm). Edition of six. By kind permission of the artist.

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that the images we see of the hallowed ground of Yosemite National Park’s muchvenerated natural monuments manifestly register on the particularities of that ground, that spot, at the time each image was made. The photographs of camera obscura images visually combine the textures of what was underfoot where he pitched his photo tent with an instantly recognizable portrait of a landmark— Cathedral Rocks, for example, and their surroundings in the Yosemite Valley. This view had been venerated in paint by Albert Bierstadt and in photographs by Carleton Watkins, as we saw with regard to Kent Monkman’s revisionary recollections of this area. This (and similar nineteenth-century imagery) gives us the stereotypical picture whose familiarity Morell trades on but modifies, almost confuses. While the medium of photography has a long and complex relationship to claims of truthfulness,70 Morell nevertheless does not seek a more truthful image of this place, even with the double imprint of the camera obscura and the camera, and even with the resulting inclusion of ultralocal telluric minutiae. He likes the interplay between painting and photography in these works, allowing that “the tent camera . . . has a painterliness that I’m quite fond of.”71 To say that we have figure-ground tension here is not to make a frivolous reference to well-known issues in modernist painting: we cannot help but acknowledge this rock face as known, but we also have some trouble seeing it clearly because of the screen though which it is presented. These images are in vibrant color. What looks like matted grass in the Cathedral Rocks image thus functions mimetically for the trees and stretch of field that frame the mountain, but the same forms become a screen that obstructs our reading of the mountain as distant and made of rock. Figure 41, Tent-Camera Image on Ground: El Capitan from Cathedral Beach, Yosemite National Park, California (2012), shows an equally famous “visage” at closer range. There is little foreground; the coulisse of dark trees is a conventional compositional device in the long landscape tradition and here serves to emphasize the dominant rock form. The ground on which Morell has pitched his camera obscura tent is gray and fine grained. Its texture reads well as a mountainside. Close looking reveals what appear to be the imprints of shoes, those of Morell and his assistant or perhaps of previous visitors, but these marks do not confuse our recognition of the site. As a tourist site and a place for art making, then, the ground inside the tent and on the resulting images is both personal and common. It is at once a landscape possessed and a landscape in random circulation. In Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Half Dome from Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park (2012), however, the surface selected is strewn with small, sharp, gray stones. In this almost panoramic scene taken from a high vantage point looking across a gorge to another famous mountain, the stones end up in the sky as well as on the peak, flattening what is conventionally a view into depth. All the Contracted Fields

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tent-camera images make it abundantly clear that however we frame landscape, it is made of the earth. Before I consider related work by Morell, a comparison with Chris Drury’s stationary camera obscuras, made at about the same time, allows me to emphasize the specific qualities of the inverted images with which both artists work. A typical example is Sky Mountain Chamber of 2010, made from 150 tons of local limestone and sited in the Trento area of Italy. The materials and beehive shape of the structure pay homage to the Dolomite mountains in this region. An aperture in the side of the camera obscura causes the peaks of these mountains to be projected upside down onto the wall of the interior. In contrast to Morell’s tent-camera photographs of mountains, Drury’s image is “live” in the sense that it shows the movements of surrounding trees and clouds in real time. Both artists effectively bring the landscape indoors: Morell’s technique underscores the telluric qualities of what he shows. Drury emphasizes the ephemeral aspects of the scene. Soon after discovering his camera obscura technique, Morell photographed in New York—his first home in the United States after emigrating from Cuba as a young teenager—to bring dramatic images of the skyline and of Central Park into rooms. Camera Obscura: View of Central Park Looking North—Fall, 2008 is one of four seasonal views of this landscape. “One of the satisfactions I get from making this imagery comes from my seeing the weird and yet natural marriage of the inside and outside,” he writes.72 In this and much of his camera obscura work, Morell enacts the “outside-in” collaboration (or dichotomy) central to both land and eco art. Landscapes are in the mind, in cities, in images, in domestic interiors, and in museums. In his Maps series of the mid 1990s, he crinkled paper maps of areas, let them partially unfold, then photographed their three-dimensional topographies, creating idealized landscapes. In Map of North America, 1996, he filled a large dip in the center of the map with a liquid, which in the resulting photograph looks like a lake replete with islands. Two related tent-camera series explore the history of landscape depiction. He discovers relationships between gardens, light, and representation in Monet’s garden at Giverny. In Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Monet’s Gardens with Flowers on the Ground, Giverny, France (2015), for example, he uses the gravel where the image lands to distribute light and texture evenly across the resulting picture, making a “Monet” that looks pointillist or like a mosaic. He invokes and evokes what inspired Monet and projects these landscape practices into the future. With Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of the Sea from Winslow Homer’s Studio Backyard, Prouts Neck, Maine (2012), he pays homage to the noted land- and seascape painter by again evincing his inspiration, the view one sees here. Crisscrossed with a skein of grass and leaves of weeds, this almost monochromatic image of land’s edge, water, and sky is more tactile than visual. 150

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Fig. 42  Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura Image of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, East Entrance in Gallery #171 with a de Chirico Painting, 2005. Digital chromogenic print, 47.5 × 60 in. (120.7 × 152.4 cm). By kind permission of the artist.

One of Morell’s most complex and compelling photographs is a meta-picture that muses on image making and display in the museum. Camera Obscura Image of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, East Entrance in Gallery #171 with a de Chirico Painting (2005; fig. 42) turns what we see and our expectations inside out as well as upside down. Morell had museum staff move de Chirico’s Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) into one of the museum’s rooms that faced the neo-Grecian east facade of the building. All other paintings on this wall were removed. Repurposing the room as a camera obscura, he brought this bold architecture in, its raking angles overlapping and complimenting the vertiginous architectural setting in the painting. The de Chirico floats proto-surrealistically in the sky that is projected onto its wall support. Against this wall/sky, Morell places a quotidian stepladder, which not only suggests the curatorial work accomplished here but also, in casting a strong shadow on the wall, defines one hard spatial plane for the dramas we see, very much in the way that Georges Braque did with a fictive tack in Violin and Pitcher (1910, Kunstmuseum Basel) and related Cubist pictures. Above this ladder we can just see two picture hangers on the wall (and now in the sky), the hardware for paintings removed to free up this plane of reception. The self-conscious strangeness of the de Contracted Fields

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Chirico is mirrored by Morell as he explores the double sense of art inside and outside the museum. “I’ve always been interested in visual conversations that are not particularly historically correct, but . . . are imaginings or unlikely meetings of things,” he claims.73 His tent-camera images are also unusual spatially, as we have seen, because the all-too-familiar compositional regimes of nineteenth-century landscape photography and painting are disturbed, ironically, by his projection into them of literal images of the earth. Andrew Wright also uses the camera obscura and other photographic means to explore what light can reveal and hold open so that we may access the edges of perception and understanding. While he exploits the potential of photographic technologies both old and new, his work demonstrates a strong conceptual as well as technical component. In When Buildings Take Pictures of Themselves (2013), he, like Morell at the Philadelphia Museum, turns a room into a camera obscura to present the outside of the building for display inside its gallery space. Wright then prints the resulting image to reveal not only this spatial pentimento but also the discrepancies between the time of taking an image and the time of taking it in as a viewer. While not overtly ecological in content, Wright’s work, using other modes of photography, reveals a range of planetary elements, from the atmosphere to vegetation. What he calls “photogenic drawings” present images of clouds made with an iPhone app. Wright likes to turn the tables on our visual expectations. The large-scale Coronae series (2011) presents images of what we might imagine to be interstellar phenomena captured by the Hubble space telescope. We cannot easily decide whether the bursts of light recorded here are large or tiny, very close or immeasurably distant. Their portentous implications contrast sharply with the techniques Wright employed to make them. Instead of looking to the skies, he simply pricked a tiny hole in the case of a roll of photographic film. A retro photochemical technology collaborates with an apparently accidental action that most photographers would avoid to turn a humble film cartridge into a cosmic pinhole camera. Wright explores two very different aspects of photography as it apprehends the world: its ability to hold on to transient or otherwise unseen phenomena so that we may observe them freely, and its attention to more permanent objects in the world that we may nonetheless overlook. In Untitled Photograph #3 (Plant) (2013; fig. 43), for example, we see standing green plants and lichen on a rock face against an impossibly black sky. The plant throws a strong shadow, suggesting that it was photographed at night under artificial light. Scale is again hard to determine, even though we come to realize that we must be close to see the lichen and that the plant must therefore be small. Nonetheless, as in the Coronae photos, we are left with a sense of the cosmic, of our rock in space perhaps. Working again with static objects in the series Tree Corrections (2012; fig. 44), Wright reveals the cultural 152

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Fig. 43  Andrew Wright, Untitled Photograph #3 (Plant), 2013. Chromira lightjet print on Kodak paper, mounted on Dibond, 50 × 67 in. (127 × 178 cm). By kind permission of the artist.

conventions that have made the wind-blown tree an icon in many northern climates. Just as we habitually find inverted images of trees odd, if not always disturbing, and try to “correct” them, as we saw in chapter 1, so too we tend to see trees leaning against the wind as “heroic.” By tilting his viewfinder to photograph such trees as if they were vertical, however, to correct them, Wright instead skews the landscapes that frame them. The horizon lines are now “wrong.” With this simple gesture, our conventional understandings of how landscape should appear and be composed are opened to reconsideration. Prepared for the tenth annual Taehwa River Eco Art Festival in the Republic of Korea in the summer of 2016, The Photograph: Suspended Tree (fig. 45) combines Wright’s expertise with the camera obscura and a viewer’s sense of what is correct in a landscape image with a deracinated tree. Visually stunning, the work reinforces the widespread respect for trees in art. Yet like all inversions accomplished with the camera obscura, the image is also somewhat disconcerting. Displaying uprooted trees is a potent and controversial practice. The highly specific context in which Wright placed this work further articulates this trope. The Photograph: Suspended Tree was temporarily sited near the Hyundai Motors car-assembly plant in Ulsan, South Korea, the largest such factory in the world and adjacent to an Contracted Fields

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Fig. 44  Andrew Wright, Tree Correction #2, from Tree Corrections, 2012 (detail). Eighteen framed chromogenic prints, 24 × 18 in. (61 × 46 cm) each; 78 × 118 in. (198 × 300 cm) overall. By kind permission of the artist.

equally massive container port from which millions of cars are shipped annually. It is an industrial site whose size and complexity make it a hyperobject in Timothy Morton’s terms. Hyundai also manages a forest near the precinct, and it is from here that Wright sourced a large tree that he then suspended upside down from an industrial crane. Close to the tree is a shipping container converted into a camera obscura. Wright supplied a hanging screen inside the container to receive the image of the inverted tree. The outside tree is upside down, “unnatural” in the extreme. Inside the camera obscura, however, it is as if we had journeyed inside our own heads to enjoy a “live” film of a tree that is (impossibly) both suspended and, when we look to the bottom of the interior frame as we naturally do, seems to be growing from the ground in the expected manner. Like Eliasson, Wright is careful to show us how he made the image—the crane is visible both outside and inside— and it is here that some of the visual and conceptual pleasure of the work resides. Wright reports that he wanted “simply to make it work as a conceptual proposi154

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tion—at minimum viewers would note that there was an upside-down/rightsideup reversal, and being able to see the crane in the image became an important reference point to cue people. The artificial horizon inside the container—the bottom edge of the screen—became the de facto reference point.”74 As in the Tree Corrections (fig. 44), conventions of receiving a landscape and nature are uncovered and redeployed in both disconcerting and pleasurable ways. Wright states that “my interest in the camera obscura has to do with witnessing the image always in a state of continual formation—the photograph as endless, ongoing performance, evanescent yet ever present.”75 His work differs fundamentally from that of both Nizam and Morell in that he does not fix the image in the camera obscura. The issue of making an image at least semipermanent was of course fundamental to the advent of photography. William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype method and Louis Daguerre’s eponymous daguerreotype famously solved this problem in different ways ca. 1835–39. One inspiration for The Photograph: Suspended Tree was a visit Wright (like Morell) made to Lacock Abbey, to the room from which Fox Talbot had photographed a large tree and surrounding buildings in early experiments with his technique. Why does Wright instead insist on the experience of the moving image? In manipulating the tree and landscape to fit his

Fig. 45  Andrew Wright, The Photograph: Suspended Tree, 2016 (detail). Shipping container, camera obscura, crane, tree. Installation view: Taehwa River Park, Ulsan, South Korea. Photo courtesy of the artist. By kind permission of the artist.

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photographic device instead of (more typically) using a camera to take a picture of an object or industrial commodity, or even taking a still photograph of the camera obscura’s projection, Wright emphasizes the profound difference between image making as a creative exercise and its much more common commercial deployment. In one, the camera conforms to what it pictures; in the other, the object that generates the image conforms to the technology so that the camera’s activities are emphasized. Put otherwise, just as the container turned camera obscura inverts both image and a viewer’s expectations, so too it constructs a composition inside the box that insists on the conditions of viewing and image making rather than on a result, an image as commodity in the way that cars are products. Wright’s ecological point is to juxtapose the relentlessly practical industrial site with the ephemerality of his image of the tree, to contrast inside with outside and aesthetic expectations with those of industrialization and the commodification of nature. I began this chapter with Michel Serres’s claim that we have forgotten nature because in our culture “the essentials take place indoors and in words, never again outdoors with things.”76 While I believe that the work considered in this chapter suggests that he was wrong with respect to land and eco art, he was right to locate a controversy at the threshold of the museum, and he was prophetic in 1990 to specify an issue that has since that time preoccupied contemporary artists. If we think of ecology as the principle of planetary interconnectedness, then all inside/ outside oppositions are ultimately dissolved. Referring to Mark Dion’s articulation of one such false barrier—“humans do not stand outside nature”—Francesco Manacorda writes in the catalogue to the London Barbican Centre’s 2009 exhibit Radical Nature, “The implications of this assertion bring about the final recognition that there is no inside, just as there is no outside: there is no nature because we are always immersed in it.”77 His point is well taken on a large scale, but humans are habitually prone to setting up provisional boundaries of all sorts, as I show in the next chapter. Outside and inside have been pivotal coordinates in landscape and in land art. In eco art especially, ecological essentials seem to behave like subatomic particles under the laws of quantum physics popularly construed: much of this work truly is in two places at once, or hovers across this liminal zone.

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chapTer five

Bordering the Ubiquitous The Art of Local and Global Ecologies

Ecological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about “the environment,” although these figure as catalysts among its issues. It is a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and reconfigures theory and practice. It does not reduce to a set of rules or methods; it may play out differently from location to location; but it is sufficiently coherent to be interpreted and enacted across widely diverse situations. —Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking (2006) There are few human instincts more basic than territoriality. —George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980)

Eco Art’s Ecotones A wide range of contemporary eco-art practices revolves around issues of borders and boundaries. I have examined the temporal and material hinges between landscape, land art, and eco art, their implications for divisions between nature and culture, the constantly shifting pivots between remote and urban practices, and the play across thresholds of outside and inside in the display and impact of land art and eco art. Ecological and environmental science stresses connectedness and ultimately challenges the imposition of hard boundaries between geographical zones, species, and even the realms of the organic and inorganic, the topic of this chapter’s two case studies. As Sheila Jasanoff writes, “In just a generation, the idea that there is ‘only one Earth’ seems to have lost its sloganeering quality and been accepted as reality by activists and policy makers, the media, and the public.” Her optimism has been borne out by the Paris climate pact (COP21) signed in Decem157

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ber 2015, in which 195 countries agreed to an unprecedented climate-change accord. Jasanoff ’s celebration of the growing sense of the planet as a unit in 2004, and that of COP21, however, must remain tempered by research on how “the Earth is imaged and imagined in strikingly different ways by different polities around the world.”1 The world has more lines of demarcation than ever before, many of them biometric or electronic.2 Given such divisions, can we conceive of the earth locally, regionally, and globally, or are these perspectives in inevitable tension? On the ground, people more often than not strive to erect and maintain political, economic, and physical boundaries with little regard for the planet. Thinking for the moment only about legislation in countries that have climate-change policies, for example, we see the panoply of national variation in the collected volume edited by Mary E. Pettenger, The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses. Morton’s “ecological thought,” that of interconnectedness, is difficult in a world still largely trying to be “modern” in Latour’s terms by separating nature and culture, the human and nonhuman. The debate between modernity and ecology in part explains ecology’s widespread uptake in contemporary art and specifically why borders, boundaries, and thresholds are frequently at issue in eco art. From the vantages of both environmental science and anthropology, however, there are reasons to think that inveterate boundary making might not be more than a widespread habit. Environmental-studies scholar Neil Evernden asks, “What do we find in the world when we stop attending to sharp boundaries?” Do we then instead experience the links among beings proposed by ecology?3 Philippe Descola’s anthropological research shows that many peoples do not share a typically Western dualism of human/nature and its related beliefs. He proposes that we think instead of “an ecology of relationships,” which would entail that we “recompose nature and society, humans and non-humans, individuals and collectives, in a new assemblage in which they would no longer present themselves as distributed between substances, processes, and representations, but as the instituted expression of relationships between multiple entities whose ontological status and capacity for action vary according to the positions they occupy in relation to one another.”4 To name and traverse this zone of intense questioning, and in keeping with the common purposes of eco art and environmental science, I suggest that we adapt the notion of the “ecotone” used in environmental science to the protocols of eco art history. A full definition is required: “The boundary between adjacent ecosystems is known as an ecotone. For example, the intermediary zone between a grassland and a forest constitutes an ecotone that has characteristics of both ecosystems. The transition between the two ecosystems may be abrupt or, more commonly, gradual. Because of the overlap between ecosystems, an ecotone usually contains a larger variety of species than is to be found in either of the separate ecosystems and often includes 158

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species unique to the ecotone. This effect is known as the edge effect. Ecotones may be stable or variable.”5 What I have called hinges between landscape and land art, for example, can also be thought of as ecotones in art. So too can the areas of profound activity around museums as they present eco-art exhibits be thought of as “edge effects.” To crystallize some of the many concerns artists find in the ecotone, I compare examples of boundary work in eco art and preceding practices. Landscape as a genre—and as an idea—is perennially involved with lines of demarcation. The same is true of land art. Pivotal examples in the history of the landscape genre remind us that well before landscape became an independent category in art, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s famous fourteenth-century images of good and bad government divide and map the Tuscan countryside. Often adopting an unexpectedly close viewpoint, Albrecht Dürer’s intimate watercolor studies of local scenes and flora ca. 1500 could be said to mark the verge, those areas and elements in nature to which we typically give scant attention, its “edge effects,” to use the language of the ecotone. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews by Gainsborough (1750) leaves little doubt about the ownership of the demesne, whose neatly bounded fields’ sophisticated cultivation enriches the couple. Physical and corporeal demarcation is the norm in these practices, as it is in many of the grander gestures of American land art, from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence (1972–76), which with its temporary presence both denied and reinforced the usual divisions and uses of the land it crossed, to De Maria’s inscriptions in the desert. As James Nisbet has shown, the concept of the boundary was also important to Jack Burnham’s systems-theory vision of ecology.6 That the marking and questioning of boundaries was central to land art is again clear in a host of work focusing on maps, as noted in chapter 3, and in the “art-walking” practices of Long, Fulton, and many others. Long’s boundary making duplicates that which had for millennia divided land into landscape visually and administratively, a pattern repeated and updated in what I read as an homage to and conceptual commentary on Long’s famous Line Made by Walking (1967) by Jeff Wall in his photograph The Crooked Path (1991; fig. 46). While the visual analogy between these two photographs suggests their comparison, the types of path and land use shown are significantly different. Long’s performance was solitary, though he recapitulated a common enough phenomenon, the creation of a path in the landscape by people’s habitual movements. By contrast, Wall found, rather than made, not one, but two intersecting paths in a patch of what we might construe as a landscape example of Rem Koolhaas’s urban “junk space,” defined as “what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.”7 Much like Smithson’s “monuments” in the industrial wasteland of Passaic, New Jersey, this is a place where there is no “landscape” in the aesthetic sense, just the use of land. The horizontal path in Wall’s photograph appears more or less straight; Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Fig. 46  Jeff Wall, The Crooked Path, 1991. Transparency in lightbox, 119 × 149 cm. By kind permission of the artist.

the other, which viewers standing in front of the image can embark upon imaginatively, gives the photograph its title. There is no clear reason why this path bends. The imperfect “X” made where the two paths cross marks nothing of more formal significance than an off-center focus for our eye. Neither does it signal a place of consequence, a crossroads. What we begin to notice instead are the rich details that Wall’s large photograph presents about this antipicturesque spot, traversed, we assume, mostly as a way to get to the Tom Yee Produce Inc. warehouse and parking lot in the background. But there are also what appear to be working beehives against scrubby underbrush to the left. We do not know where the path that bifurcates the image from left to right leads, but this is evidently a much-used urban or suburban interstice. It is a physical and cultural ecotone in which we witness the dynamic nature of demarcation and passage, the processes of “borderscaping,” a portmanteau that “registers the necessity to investigate borders not as taken-for-granted entities exclusively connected to the territorial limits of nationstates, but as mobile, relational and contested sites.”8 Dennis Oppenheim’s work along the United States–Canada border in the winter of 1968 involved maps, the politics of national borders, and environmental concerns in ways that were both irrefragably local and also extrapolable to the 160

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work of other artists and regions. To begin with the general, Annual Rings (fig. 47) is typical of early land art in several ways. It functioned outside gallery spaces, at least initially, but, in a pattern codified by Smithson’s site/nonsite paradigm, inevitably returned to the urban, commercial art system to establish dialectics between photographs of the action and their referents and between bounded samples of a site and places in nature. Akin to much land art, too, Oppenheim’s performances were largely ephemeral. The transient needs to be specified exactly if it is to leave a trace: Oppenheim notes the place, the time, the date, and even the temperature of the ambient environment in some versions of this work, but he leaves no monument on site. Several types of photography and levels of formal or institutional legitimation are brought together here: maps, a boundary marker, and a photographic record of the shoveling event that inscribed the rings on the snow-covered ice. Oppenheim’s analogy between the growth of trees and the seasonal shift of climate—two closely connected cycles in nature—is contrasted with what we take to be discretionary, merely our imposition on the world. That element is not the clearing of lines on the ice, which was carefully planned and executed exactly, but the border between a jurisdiction observing daylight savings time and one not. This arbitrary time differential could be taken to underline the ultimate capriciousness of political, as opposed to supposedly natural, boundaries, international borders and time zones versus rivers, the human versus the natural. Whether this argument is persuasive is another question. The schematic rings cleared on the ice are not natural. On the contrary, if we take the bold line of open water that divided them to be the result of the river’s flow and the weather at the time, then what is presented as a human intervention—an international border in the middle of a river—is temporarily marked by natural forces. The boundary between the United States and Mexico is a more familiar example of cognate issues; certainly there is a great deal of “border art” that concerns itself with this troubled frontier.9 Most of it highlights specifically humanitarian problems such as immigration and labor. In Javier Téllez’s celebrated performance One Flew Over the Void (2005), for instance, an American stuntman is shot from a Fig. 47  Dennis Oppenheim, Annual Rings, 1968. 150 × star-spangled cannon and flies effort200 ft. U.S.-Canadian boundary at Fort Kent, Maine, and Clair, New Brunswick. Schemata of annual rings lessly into the United States from severed by political boundary. Time: United States, Mexico at the Tijuana–San Diego 1:30 p.m.; Canada, 2:30 p.m. Photo: Dennis Oppenheim border, a crossing that is made harder Estate. © Dennis Oppenheim. Bordering the Ubiquitous

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for others by government regulations and enforcement more than the seemingly porous fence over which we see this human cannonball soar. Looking at Oppenheim’s Time Line and Annual Rings together with this work in mind, we notice that in Rings Oppenheim has chosen a time when the open river temporarily draws the national boundary, which we cannot see in full winter or summer, when the river’s surface is undifferentiated. He marks the border provisionally with a snowmobile in Time Line, making the invisible palpable. As we saw in Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop in chapter 3 (see fig. 29), Oppenheim made a habit of physically marking—or, in the case of Boundary Split in New Brunswick, assaulting with a chainsaw—what we are meant to view as somehow unnatural systems and limits in nature. He cuts against the grain, against the flow, as it were, to suggest that this is what we typically do as humans, especially at national boundary lines. But there is another theme in play: while Oppenheim shows the border area as largely deserted and thus contrasts the natural with human incursions, and while he underscores a time difference that we by definition cannot see in his photographs, the United States–Canadian border was nonetheless politicized during this period, when tens of thousands of so-called draft dodgers came to Canada to avoid military service in Vietnam. Téllez’s stunt reminds us of this aspect of the political ecology of borders in Oppenheim’s works. In the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity changes the earth as much as what used to be thought of as independent natural processes, it is antiecological to draw a sharp line between the natural and the human. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, a “nature-culture continuum is the shared starting point for [a revised] . . . posthuman theory.”10 If it would be more realistic and constructive to think of one complex but coextensive entity, the earth or the planet as an entirety, then as several scholars have recently proclaimed, we need to jettison the concept of capital-N nature altogether. As we saw in chapter 1, prominent voices in this chorus include Latour and Morton. In Ecology Without Nature (2007), Morton takes us through the paradoxes of the concept of nature, its impossible mandate to be “both the set and the content of the set,” both the forest and the trees (18). He argues that the idea of “nature ironically impedes a proper relationship with the earth and its life forms” (2). If we are part of nature, we cannot at the same time stand outside it to gain the transcendental perspective suggested by the term. Yet we have to assume that nature has and could again exist without our projections of its characteristics. To return to Oppenheim’s Annual Rings, let us not assume that rings as a sign of a tree’s growth are natural and that, by contrast, a human mark, whether made by shovel, snowmobile, or chainsaw, is not. Perhaps we need not use the terms “natural” and “unnatural” at all. The same point comes across in Yukinori Yanagi’s Pacific (1995), an elaborate ant farm in which the artist used these creatures’ “migrations” as analogs for both 162

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Fig. 48  Jarosław Koziara, Unity Fish, 2012. Photo: european pressphoto agency b.v. / Alamy (Wojciech Pacewicz). By kind permission of the artist.

human migrants and natural forces as they transgress putatively artificial borders suggested by the flags of nations bordering the Pacific Ocean that he reproduced in sand. He asserts that “a nation, its border and national flag, has become an imaginary fiction.”11 Yet the human symbolic system of sand flags is a real enough impediment to the ants, suggesting that national borders are all too tangible for many would-be migrants. There is a dilemma if we oppose the natural to the unnatural here, as Yanagi seems to do: if humans are part of nature, why are their products (flags, nations, and indeed works of art) different from the ants’ activities? Would not the ecological thought be that all these elements are somehow linked, as indeed Yanagi inadvertently shows us? Thinking with another sort of ANT, that of Actor Network Theory as espoused by Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and others, we could say that thinking of nature as a boundary standing behind and ratifying aspects of Oppenheim’s or Yanagi’s works is not useful if we want to understand our relationships with our ambient environment. Thinking instead about how the various “actants” in these works operate and interact as equals will lead us to a more complex analysis, though one that is constantly shifting its ground or frame. Jarosław Koziara’s Unity Fish (2012; fig. 48) is an example of temporary eco art that links with Oppenheim’s examination of a national border and with both his and Denes’s exposure of the systems of agribusiness under capitalism. Designed for the annual Lublin Land Art Festival in Poland, two immense outlines of fish grew from an elaborate planting scheme to straddle the borderline incised into the landscape between eastern Poland and western Ukraine. One fish swims in each direction, symbolizing the history of free trade and the flow of people in the region. In this example of borderscaping, not only did Koziara’s fish call attention to an Bordering the Ubiquitous

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international boundary that postdates these traditional interactions and thus seems arbitrary in comparison with local and regional norms, but they also underscored a crucial difference between Poland and Ukraine that impacts agriculture and travel. In his words, “Ukraine is not a part of the Schengen area, [which] is the dividing line for the whole European continent. But artists cannot agree with that—this is how we create ideas that bring to life extraordinary border defying projects.”12 The Schengen Agreement began with five European Union countries in 1985 and has grown to include twenty-six European nations operating as one for passport control. Also called Fish on the Border, Koziara’s installation makes reference to Ukraine’s bids to become part of the European Union and the Schengen region. Participating in these administrative protocols would partially restore the older connections across this landscape that are currently interrupted by the national border that bisects Koziara’s fish. Lucy Lippard has made two fundamental points that parallel the import of Unity Fish. She argues in her extensive examination of the local in art that “[t]he virtue of temporary and ephemeral works is that both sites and places change,” a process embraced by many local art practices. She also advocates “an updated ‘regionalism’” to counteract what she construes as the “homogeneity of corporate culture” and to enfranchise artists and cultural endeavors that would not be countenanced in these dominant circles.13 Francis Alÿs’s performance The Green Line took place in Jerusalem in 2004. In the video version of the work (2007), we do not know initially where he is, only that he begins prosaically by opening a hole in a can of green paint, then walking with it held and dripping from his extended arm, creating a fine bright-green line on the ground. Alÿs defines the border as “a space of performance rather than a geographical boundary,” at least for a white man from Europe.14 How it is “green” in an ecological sense is less obvious. Soon after we see the artist begin his walk— inevitably another allusion to the walking art of conceptualism—a map of Jerusalem and the surrounding area appears on screen. Text from Meron Benvenisti’s City of Stone: The Hidden Life of Jerusalem scrolls over the map, providing a history lesson. The green line refers here to the portentous political partition of the city in 1948–49, when Moshe Dayan and Abdullah el-Tell marked the front lines dividing Palestine and Israel with red and green grease pencils on a large-scale map. This was the border until 1967, when Israel expanded its territory following the Six-Day War.15 Benvenisti writes that “such lines in reality represented strips of land sixty to eighty meters in width. Who owned the ‘width of the line?’” (57). The line divided neighborhoods in Jerusalem just as it divided farms and towns in the region. This border has been moved, but it is remembered and has left physical traces that the artist retraces. Alÿs walked the twenty-four kilometers of the line in Jerusalem, renewing it. Because its reinscription recalls a history particular to this region to make a broader political point, we might expect the reactions of those the artist 164

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encounters during the performance to be the heart of the project (as we saw with Martindale’s NATURE [see fig. 31]). But this is largely not the case: in the sixteenminute video record, Alÿs and his liquid inscription attract only the curiosity of boys along the route; he gets the odd wave as he walks past. As a white male, he proceeds unchallenged through military checkpoints. Part of his point has to be that such freedom is not given to Palestinians, women, or nonwhites. Alÿs’s recordings of a range of opinions about his actions play over the video when it is screened.16 This articulation of the area suggests that the most important element is the materiality of what he transverses. While this is one of the most controversial political borders in the world, what one gleans from The Green Line is not so much a commentary on history as an immediate documentation of human adaptation and evolving land use. There are other lines on some of the roads Alÿs walks, those that control traffic.17 He crosses military checkpoints. Other zones are less official: a disused train track, an area that a text on screen tells us is called “no man’s land.” All the while we hear the everyday sounds of a city: traffic, sirens, music, even a rooster. Goats get in his way on Mount Zion. Numerous shots focus on feet, especially those that cross the new line he draws in the performance. Behavior around lines of demarcation is canvased: a car stops just behind his line, for example, though likely for an off-screen traffic signal. The artist once crosses the street instead of passing a man in uniform on the sidewalk. Such accommodations are arbitrary, in a sense, yet this line and those that superseded it have controlled the lives of millions of people since Israel became a state. Alÿs’s tagline for The Green Line on his website reads, “Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.” He does not mention any connection between green and ecology, and it is certainly not the obvious one, given the predominance of that color on the Palestinian side of his line, notably on flags. It is important to note, however, that Alÿs does not promote any reading of this work over another. Akin to Pierre Huyghe, he points things out. Issues and locales that he highlights frequently feature land use. When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), his acclaimed project near Lima, Peru, was, as we have seen, his “attempt to deromanticize Land art.”18 A simpler poetic gesture in which he combines a reference to art making with the earth’s geography is the video Watercolor (2010). Using color-coded buckets, he gathers water from both the Red and the Black Seas, then unceremoniously pours the “red” water into the Black Sea. The brief video belies the geographical and cultural distance between these sources. By ignoring the specificities of place while also naming places, this video is also about the earth and our interactions with it, which is a good working definition of eco art. Alÿs’s work with land suggests that the social, political, and ecological realms are not themselves divided, nor are these areas separate from the earth’s materiality, Bordering the Ubiquitous

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as I investigate in the case study on “the emotional life of water,” below. Such continuities and imbrications are central to another border work, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s rightly celebrated and much discussed Land Mark (Foot Prints) of 2001–2. One of several activist eco-art incursions titled Land Mark, the footprints marked a weapons testing range operated by the U.S. military, a no-go zone on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Having affixed to their shoes additional soles inscribed with symbols and slogans about the use of this land, the protestors then imprinted the traces of their words into the sand. Land Mark (Foot Prints) is a photographic record of these imprints. In an extensive article that links the duo’s work with historical land art and contemporary activism, Yates McKee writes that “Allora and Calzadilla have said that the Land Mark photographs should be understood in relation to perhaps the most monumental footprints in history: those impressed into the surface of the moon by the astronauts of the Voyager spacecraft in 1969.”19 Thus, in the terms that Lippard has alerted us to, the work is both insistently local and expansively planetary. It is evanescent, yet its concerns with marking, territory, access, and boundaries, while never timeless, are also extensive both temporally and geographically. Land Mark (Foot Prints) is in these ways ecological. The confluence of political and ecological borders in recent eco art can again be perceived through a double gesture toward openness around these themes, an approach encapsulated in a recent installation on the United States–Canada border between Washington State and British Columbia. Non-Sign ii (2010; fig. 49) changes the discourse about both the border and landscape. It reframes both by avoiding the usual defaults of patriotism or advertising. Its creator was Lead Pencil Studio in Seattle. Designer Daniel Mihalyo says, “Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape . . . this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond.”20 Yet it is impossible to ignore the international border. Striking on this point is the Borderline project by Andreas Rutkauskas, including Chemin de la Frontière, Québec (2013; fig. 50). Documenting the world’s longest shared land boundary photographically, Rutkauskas shows an extensive range of contact points along the 8,891-kilometer boundary between Canada and the United States. This line is marked by a six-meter wide open boundary in forested zones. In areas where a cut line will not work, 5,500 obelisks are used as survey markers to define the border. Rutkauskas describes the variety of signposts along this purportedly undefended border: there is an “unmanned US enclave where visitors need to report via telephone, a peace park with wreckage from the World Trade Center attack, and a cemetery that straddles the cutline.”21 An analogous project was independently undertaken from the south side of the border at the same time by the Center for Land Use Interpretation in the United 166

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Fig. 49  Lead Pencil Studio, Non-Sign ii, 2010. Washington State–British Columbia border near Blaine, Washington. By kind permission of the artist.

Fig. 50  Andreas Rutkauskas, Chemin de la Frontière, Québec, 2013. Solvent-based inkjet print, 132 × 165 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist. By kind permission of the artist.

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States.22 As in The Green Line, we begin to notice other demarcations and behavioral prompts, including a railway bridge over a river, a “natural” boundary, on which is written “This Is Indian Land.” With this image from his Borderline suite, Rutkauskas reminds us to examine what might be a reflex to think only of familiar international borders when we speak of nations. As Devine’s Battle for the Woodlands shows (see fig. 27), there are other, much older but still potent ways to construe homelands and what links and separates them. In art and scholarship worldwide, there is increasing and longoverdue attention being paid to Indigenous perspectives on land, its uses and representation, and its own boundaries. Eco art history should embrace, without recolonizing, this revisionist project. A powerful example is Alan Michelson’s TwoRow ii (2005; fig. 51), a panoramic thirteen-minute, four-channel video that shows both shores of the Grand River in what is now Southern Ontario. It is a waterway that passes through what was once, both before and then via treaty, solely Six Nations land, but it now divides the Six Nations Reserve from non-Indigenous townships. The artist has explained the double colonization and attendant dispossession of this region and the ongoing problems that exclusion from the land presents for Indigenous people: Separation from the land and the land-based cultural practices fundamentally threatens indigenous health and survival. What is particularly sad and germane in the case of the Grand is the reason for our being there in the first place—the betrayal by our British “allies” in the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War, which illegally transferred our homelands in what is now upstate New York to the United States, and the subsequent compensation for that massive loss of territory, which included the Mohawk River and Valley and much more, by the Haldimand Treaty. So the loss of most of that [Haldimand] territory—“six miles deep from each side of the river beginning at Lake Erie and extending in that proportion to the head of the said river”—represents a second colonial dispossession, an ongoing one that continues to affect the Six Nations in . . . damaging ways because of the careless industrial and agricultural uses of the land and waterways of this area since the eighteenth century.23

The 1784 Haldimand Treaty set out territorial jurisdictions, but even these have not been honored by governments. What remains as the current reservation along the Grand River is encroached upon by urban expansion. Since 2006 the Caledonia area has seen violent disputes over the expansion of housing development onto treaty land. Michelson went on a narrated river cruise down the Grand River to film this piece. On the bottom of the two moving bands that we see, he shows the riverbank 168

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Fig. 51  Alan Michelson, TwoRow ii, 2005 (video stills). Four-channel digital video installation, 13 min., installation dimensions variable. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 2006. Photo courtesy of the artist. By kind permission of the artist.

on the Six Nations Reserve side; on the top, the other bank. Two video channels are tinted purple and stream in opposite directions; they are separated and embraced by white horizontal stripes. Their color and structure recall “the historic Two-Row Wampum Belt or ‘Kashwenta.’ . . . The belt, which featured two rows of purple beads alternating with three rows of white beads, symbolized the relationship between the Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian Peoples) and Europeans as set out in a seventeenth-century treaty of friendship and coexistence.”24 The two bands suggest the spirit of the agreement, that two cultures, like their river craft, were different but could travel in parallel, if independent, directions. The cacophonic sound track that we hear and the opposing directions of the video suggest a different reality at the time of these “agreements” and today. Using four stereo tracks, Michelson recorded both the official tour as narrated on the boat and the voices of elders from the reserve talking about the river. In Michelson’s words, Roger Porter, the first elder to speak in TwoRow ii, says: “I don’t think I eat any fish out of the Grand River. It was . . . , you could see to the bottom in my day, and as the years went on, it got dirtier and dirtier.” Alfred Keye, speaking in the Cayuga language in a translation by Amos Keye, says: “When we swam there, we would see who could go the furthest underwater. I remember going underwater and coming back to the surface. When I surfaced, I remember seeing something green-colored floating on the water. I was covered in what looked like fuzzy fur. My friends told me that those things came from Brantford, Ontario, upriver [it was raw sewage]. Cows and horses were allowed to walk and swim in the river at a village called Onondaga. Today that is where the native village of Ohsweken gets drinking water.”25

Replaying these propinquities and divisions formally and thematically and setting them into visual and aural opposition, his contemplative video reveals what James Clifford calls “disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction.”26 Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Fig. 52  Shelley Niro, Border Series—Treaties, 2008. Digital print, 81.3 × 155.6 cm. Hart House Collection, 2013.02, University of Toronto. Purchased by the Hart House Art Committee with funds from the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program, 2013. Photo courtesy of Justina M. Barknicke Gallery, University of Toronto Art Centre. By kind permission of the artist.

Visual art is not exclusively visual, as the map work, treaties, and other textual and aural material in these examples underscore. Eco art is not only about environmental issues or what we construe as nature. To delimit eco art within these frames is finally anti-ecological. Many artists identify with ecology and present themselves in this way: Basia Irland, discussed below, calls herself an “eco-artist” on her website, but others do not. For example, Shelley Niro presents herself laconically as an “artist.” Longer descriptions elaborate that she “is a multi-disciplinary artist, and a member of the Six Nations Reserve, Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk.”27 It is in this fuller context that several of her recent photographs augment the boundary explorations of Michelson’s TwoRow ii. Her photograph Treaties (2008; fig. 52) also displays the Kashwenta (or Gusweñta) Wampum Belt central to his video. Loretta Todd interprets the parallel line–parallel cultures motif of this wampum belt in a nontraditional way that is pertinent to both works: “I know that a lot of the Six Nations people and the people out here in the East believe in the two-row wampum. The White people are in their canoe and we’re in our canoe and there’s no reason for there to be interaction. I respect that. However, they build pulp mills on our rivers. They build highways through our land.”28 In Niro’s Borders (2008) we see the results of this nonaccord: the contract is replaced by barbed wire; fences impede access to the land. In both cases, land and landscape underlie the outreached arms and hands. Fists have replaced the handshake in Treaties. Niro explains that “the bottom image[s] are of the Grand River just outside of Caledonia. The natural environment mixed with the intrusion of hydro lines stirs conflicted views of what is natural and what is expected.”29 Dialogue about these pressing issues does occur, however, and often in art contexts. For example, Niro’s photographs were part of a group exhibition about border issues called The Imaginary Line, presented at three venues in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 2008. 170

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Another set of boundary issues is addressed in Mel Chin’s Landscape (fig. 53), an installation from 1991, the same year in which he began his better-known Revival Field. Beckoned by a small spotlit landscape on the wall opposite the doorway framing Landscape, we enter Chin’s gallery within a gallery. There we find three landscape paintings from “[t]hree traditional nature-loving philosophies, American Emersonian Pantheism, Iranian Zoroastrianism, and Chinese Taoism.” Visitors may be inclined to think that Chin’s triple comparison suggests a universal artistic response to land. It is not this consoling ecumenism that Chin wants us to see, however. He considers this adumbration of a global interest in landscape as “metaphysical” and therefore ultimately blind. Only in the realm of fantasy are these or any national conventions in landscape more than analogous. We are encouraged to look instead at the particulars of what landscape may try to conceal but finally cannot in his fabricated viewing room. Dirt from a local landfill lines the bottom perimeter of the space, the residue and perhaps also the source, in an elemental sense, of the interior museum walls. In Chin’s hands these walls have been made to look as if they have “‘rotted’ to the contours of the 30th parallel, the latitude that sweeps through the United States, Iran, and China.” Landscape, we

Fig. 53  Mel Chin, Landscape, 1991. Sheetrock cut to topography of 30th parallel, dirt from local landfill, plywood. American landscape painting: oil on linen, wood, plaster, gold and metal leaf. Chinese scroll: ink, pigments, ground malachite and azurite on silk. Persian miniature: paper mounted on wood, watercolor, oxidized silver leaf. By kind permission of the artist.

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learn, is always more material and more contemporary in terms of the particulars of its making and viewing than the metaphysical view implies. As Lippard, Michelson, and Niro have shown in different ways, landscape’s circumstances are fundamentally local. Their propinquity in his installation also offers us ways to think of them as mutually incommensurate, as representative of different places and modes of seeing the earth. In a physically economical but conceptually expansive way, then, Landscape connects and compares representations of land in three long pictorial traditions, the materiality of land art around the edges, as it were, and an eco-art insistence on revealing “the volume of one’s impact on nature” so that these concerns are not “neatly trucked away and buried from view.”30 Chin’s Landscape raises an important methodological issue for eco art history as this field considers representations of the land in the past and present: in what circumstances is it valid to compare “Eastern” and “Western” landscape paintings, for example, given that, on the one hand, there are analogies to be found in what is viewed and, on the other, the cultural practices vary radically over time within these conventions, not to mention between them. In Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, James Elkins explicitly criticizes the intercultural comparisons that too easily elide Eastern and Western painting traditions. He scorns the “brief passing parallels [that] are commonest and the most insidious” (11). The crosscultural analogizing that allows Liu Haisu (1896–1994) to be dubbed the “Cézanne of China,” for example, and contemporary artist Ai Weiwei or Wang Guangyi to be seen as “China’s Warhol,” is problematic methodologically and culturally because it elides crucial distinctions. In comparisons such as these, as Chin’s Landscape shows, a viewer or reader of art-historical material may be “struck by likening,” that is, make a new and revealing connection. Artists who receive this form of praise may rise in stature and appreciate the acknowledgment, as the French painter Rosa Bonheur did when compared with the British animal painter Edwin Landseer in the mid-nineteenth century. One may also be struck in a pejorative sense: the comparison may be too far-fetched or conflate too many differences. Well beyond the parameters of Landscape into Eco Art, an examination of the workings of these analogies provides a compelling way into the vexed questions of “global” art history as presented in museums and in art history.31 Below, I look briefly at four contemporary landscape works, three from China and one from the United States, as a way to consider these issues of disciplinary border control. In numerous versions of Background Story (Biehou de gushi, 背後的故事) since 2004, such as Background Story: Qiu Shan Xian Yi Tu (2015; fig. 54), Xu Bing creates characteristically “Chinese” landscapes that perform critically in several dimensions. These landscapes evoke paintings but are also clearly three-dimensional. From the front and through opaque glass, we see forms of mountains, rivers, huts, etc., the habitual elements of this landscape tradition. Whether we walk behind 172

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Fig. 54  Xu Bing, Background Story: Qiu Shan Xian Yi Tu (秋山仙逸图), 2015. Trash and natural debris attached to frosted glass panels. Exhibited at Three and One Third, Kylin Contemporary Center of Art, Beijing, China. © Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

these installations (not imaginatively into, according to the fiction of immersion in the landscape found in Diderot’s writings, for example) or, as in the example here, open one of the glass portals made for this purpose, what we see inside is the material with which Xu Bing performs his alchemy, prosaic stuff like hay or wire that magically turns into the expected elements of landscape. These street materials might have come from Robert Morris’s Earthwork sculpture in 1968 or Mel Chin’s sources for the earth in Landscape. The specificity of the transformation is remarkable. As Robert E. Harrist Jr. writes, “What the unsightly arrays of trash behind the glass panes are designed to represent are not simply mountains, water, or buildings, but ink washes, modulated contour lines, and texture strokes that constitute the basic pictorial vocabulary of East Asian painting.”32 Moreover, Xu Bing conjures specific Asian landscape paintings in this way, not just a type. Because his Background Story and Yao Lu’s New Landscapes series (2006; e.g., fig. 55) are enrolled in an international art context that is by definition postnational, both are and are not “Chinese.” The New Landscapes invoke a generalized sense of old Chinese landscape paintings, but when one looks closely, the “mountains and water” of traditional shan shui painting are not what we expect. First, we are looking at photographs of landscapes constructed by the artist. Yao Lu brilliantly uses the common green Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Fig. 55  Yao Lu, Ancient Springtime Fey, 2006. Chromogenic print, 471/4 × 471/4 in. Edition of eight. Photo courtesy of the artist. By kind permission of the artist.

mesh found at building sites to define and temporarily hide the underlying material of his forms, mounds of garbage. The look of ancient Chinese landscape paintings thus brings us to a contemporary ecological issue, waste. In the artist’s words, “Today, China is developing dramatically and many things are under constant construction. Many things have disappeared and continue to disappear. The rubbish dumps covered with the ‘shield,’ a green netting, are a ubiquitous phenomenon in China.”33 Both Yao Lu’s and Xu Bing’s new landscapes can be understood to distract us with the look of a brush-and-ink tradition only to question this convention by showing its material, not metaphysical, roots. Xu Bing quotes “a precept in Sunzi’s Art of War: ‘make a noise in the east, attack in the west,’”34 to explain this tactic. The fact that these landscapes are displayed in both the East and West and, in Xu Bing’s case, sometimes make reference to other landscapes from the Asian tradition that were formerly seen in European museums suggests that Background Story and New Landscapes require us to reconsider assumptions about the universality of landscape. I have claimed that sound is increasingly important in contemporary art generally and in eco art especially. Another pertinent example is The Liquid 174

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Borders Project by Samson Young (2012–14), one of a growing number of “ecoacoustic” endeavors.35 Working in areas where Hong Kong abuts the formerly separate People’s Republic of China, such as the bridge at the village of Sha Tau Kok, Young recorded and redeployed the sounds of the area, most notably by attaching microphones to the bridge itself. In addition to the wall and fence that one sees and hears in this video, the border is marked by the Shenzen River, whose sounds are also part of the mix. In contrast with Oppenheim’s St. John River projects (fig. 47), there is no need to make this national boundary more visible. Unlike the fabled “unguarded” border between the United States and Canada that we saw in Rutkauskas’s Borderline (fig. 50), the formerly disputed territory on which Young focuses is still sensitive. He wants us to hear what sight might initially deny, the sounds of the natural setting, however overlaid they are by the vibrations of the bridge and the wire barrier. Young’s description of his aims is specific to this border yet also resonates with the struggles explored by Alÿs and Renwick above: Oftentimes, we think of national and regional borders as definite, clearly defined and stable. At least, it’s the very images represented on maps. When we have boundaries separating Hong Kong and Mainland China so clearly delineated by barbed-wire entanglements, I fear “the need to build a more important ideological and cultural firewall between the two divides” has yet to make its way into public consciousness. . . . This wall, under the duress of circumstances, takes on a new metaphysical significance: marking our frontiers, this old, worn-out wall will keep Hong Kong people safe (and sound) and cushion us against an oppressive urgency for as long as it stands. Border crossings of people between Hong Kong and the Mainland have been an everyday affair since the Chinese civil war, with the only distinction being the convergence of ideologies, cultures and values. Yet I’m overwhelmed with a sense of urgency to make a record of things and people before this wall disappears for good.36

Sound is essential to another example of border art, one that is more overtly ecological in its purpose. Basia Irland’s extensive Gathering of Waters: The Rio Grande, Source to Sea, begun in 1995, includes audio and video recordings as well as both physical and community gatherings along the course of the Rio Grande in the United States, the Rio Bravo, as the river is called, in Mexico. As the artist reports, the project “took five years to complete. Hundreds of participants were invited to put a small amount of river water into a canteen, write in a logbook, and pass these downstream to another person. Connections were made that have been lasting, and groups are working together that never would have met otherwise. In order to participate in this project, one had to physically be at the river and interact with someone else downstream, thereby forming a kind of human river that brings Bordering the Ubiquitous

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awareness to the plight of this stream that is always asked to give more than it has.”37 The river forms the national boundary between the two countries for a considerable distance. Irland’s project was community based and activist in nature; it involved mapping the river and the exchange of water samples along its course. Because of the arid climate and especially thanks to rampant drainage for irrigation on the U.S. side, there is very little river left as we move further into Mexico. Irland has adeptly extended the visual dimensions of the project in another direction, that of text and reading. “The river hears many languages,” she says in a video narration of the work, while showing clips of many of the denizens of the river speaking their local vernaculars.38 One aspect of the project supplies information about the river and its surrounding contexts: Portable Repository is a backpack in which records of the Pueblo dialects spoken along the river’s course are accessible, for example, as well as different maps of the region.39 Lippard claims that A Gathering of Waters “is a major model for ‘eco-art,’ which differs from the ‘land art’ or ‘earthworks’ made popular in the 1960s and 1970s. . . . The best ecoartists . . . see themselves as caretakers rather than earth movers.”40 How best to offer such care is a central concern in eco art today.

Case Study 7: The Crystal Interface Crystals are material bridges between the human, the living order of nature, and the inanimate. These connections across fundamental but ecologically pliable borders are more than metaphoric, though their metaphoric dimension is important. This case study of crystals in art practices offers one way into considerations of materiality and the post-human that are central to art history as a field today. Crystals have been central to the thinking and practice of many artists, scientists, and geoaesthetic theorists working in the 1960s and after, including Beuys, Burnham, Deleuze and Guattari, Buckminster Fuller, Kepes, Rúrí, and Smithson. As I discuss, these minerals are claimed to have physiological analogues in humans: there is empirical evidence of neural mirroring between crystalline structures in the brain and the perception and appearance of crystals in art. Affect is also involved. According to recent neurological research by Oshin Vartanian and Martin Skov, “viewing paintings engages not only systems involved in visual representation and object recognition, but also structures underlying emotions and internalized cognitions.”41 “Crystal interface” is an expression that first arose and remains current in the science of crystallography. As a technical term, it describes the contact point between crystal compounds or between a crystal and another substance. J. V. Smith describes the importance of this threshold area: “Consider two perfect crystals, not necessarily of the same type, meeting at an interface. The geometrical misfit between the lattice nodes provides the simplest 176

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possible guide to the energy at the interface, and can be used in understanding the textures of polycrystalline metals and of mineral intergrowths.”42 On the broadest plane, this dynamic interaction presents an opportunity to understand productive interfaces among the humanities, the sciences and social sciences, and art practice. Donna Haraway has shown that the crystal and the regular morphologies of crystallography have been guiding metaphors in biological science, in significant measure because crystals are eminently visualizable. In the context of Landscape into Eco Art, the crystal interface is a bordering zone and defines an ecotone. The use of the crystal as form and metaphor is also recurrent in landscape, land art, and eco art. Crystals (and by extension other materials and elements) are central in these genres, not in the Aristotelian sense that they are inert and passive matter to be turned into form, but rather as integral components in a dynamic aggregate that we call the work of art. Alan Sonfist, Robert Smithson, and Joseph Beuys from the 1960s to the 1980s—and more recently Olafur Eliasson, Simon Starling, and others—understand that the crystal simultaneously materializes intimations of purity and transparency and, crucially in the contexts of new materialist theory, magnifies the vitalistic, sensible transformations notably discussed by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter, a topic I return to in the final case study. In Parikka’s terms, then, crystals are geological actants that reveal “the importance of the nonorganic in constructing media before they become media.”43 If we broaden the connotation of the crystal interface to include both an earthly dimension and a transformative metaphoric presence, we may better appreciate the remarkable ways in which crystals stage a zone of exchange between the visual arts, the sciences, and philosophies of the crystal. Before turning to individual examples in the contexts of eco art, it is instructive to look briefly at the roles of the crystal in philosophy, art and architecture generally, science studies, geoaesthetics, and the contemporary visual arts. Philosophers have used the image of the crystal with remarkable frequency. The solids that Plato described in the Timaeus were crystalline in form, their geometric stability a fitting cognate for the immutable Forms that he believed stand behind everyday appearances. Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the great commentators on Plato, used the crystal as a unique example in his attempt to understand the gradation of nature from the inorganic to humanity. “Every organism represents the Idea of which it is the image or copy,” he wrote in a particularly Platonic moment.44 He asserted that “the boundary between the organic and the inorganic is the most sharply drawn in the whole of nature,” yet in explaining the development of our defining “Will” in nature, he returned to the crystal as an anomaly. “In the formation of the crystal we see . . . a tendency to life,” he wrote, but in fact “the crystal has only one manifestation of life, namely its formation.” For Schopenhauer, tempted as he is to credit it with living existence, the crystal is finally only “the corpse of that momentary life.”45 Schopenhauer thus previews reasons for the Bordering the Ubiquitous

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philosophical and aesthetic fascination with the crystal that I explore below. Crystals are compelling because they are indexical of existential questions, poised at the crossing point of life and death. While their perfect forms appear lifeless, they also suggest life because they “grow” and move. Even as “corpses,” they function as physical reminders of life.

Crystals in Art and Architecture The use of the crystal as form and metaphor recurs in the plastic arts so commonly that we can think of it as an obsession.46 An orientation to (though not a history of) the attractions of the crystal could begin with Paxton’s Crystal Palace, the gem of the London Great Exhibition of 1851, and bring us to the present in Daniel Libeskind’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (2007). Significant moments along this timeline include early twentiethcentury German Expressionist glass architecture and the concomitant crystal fantasy landscapes of Wenzel Hablik, which he published in a book of etchings, Creative Forces (Schaffende Kräfte, 1909). In these examples, the crystal’s seduction lies in its ability simultaneously to materialize intimations of clarity, of vitalistic transformation, and of a purist refinement and stability. As the Expressionist architect Adolf Behne wrote in a 1915 review of Bruno Taut’s architectural projects, through these plans “[t]he longing for purity and clarity, for glowing lightness, crystalline exactness, for immaterial lightness, and infinite liveliness found in glass a means of its fulfillment—in this most bodiless, most elementary, most flexible, material.”47 While crystals in the form of various geometrical solids appear in the visual arts over many centuries—examples include Jacopo de Barberi’s portrait of Luca Pacioli (ca. 1499) and Dürer’s Melancholia i (1514), both of which represent polyhedra48—they became intensely interesting in the early twentieth century and again in the land art of the 1960s and 1970s. Agnes Denes’s proposed Crystal Fort / Glass Fortress (2001) is a member of this lineage, as are Smithson’s many experiments with crystalline forms. Crystals are prevalent in contemporary art, but not primarily because they are currently thought to be timeless, pure, and stable forms or because they offer references to earlier art practices. Crystals appear so widely and potently in art today primarily because they help us to articulate the line between the animate and the inanimate, as Schopenhauer understood. To explore why this distinction should be of pressing concern today is beyond the scope of this book, but certainly our technological prowess has made the distinction between human and machine one to question. Bio art forces these questions as well. Our sense of what is nature and what is not is of pressing concern today. It is the source of what I would call “natural anxieties,” many of which are worked out in the visual arts. Worldwide, millions flock to art museums to see what 178

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we would normally think is external to us and beyond our control, such as Eliasson’s indoor sun in The weather project (see fig. 1). In smaller numbers but with great conviction, art tourists also seek out “natural” experiences in the most contrived, high-tech creations of art working with the earth, such as James Turrell’s unfinished Roden Crater in the Arizona desert, a geological form turned into a colossal eye on the cosmos. What we witness in these pilgrimages is new. More than a symptom of our nostalgia for a benevolent nature or of our fears about the destruction of the environment, it is a sign of confusion about what and where nature is and also, potentially, an indication of revisionary thinking. Part of the fascination and recourse to the crystal as form and metaphor lies in its liminal position on the border between the inanimate and animate, the inorganic and the organic.

Crystals in Science Studies In chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, physics, and environmental science, a crystal is defined routinely as “a homogeneous regularly shaped solid with flat surfaces (faces) and specific angles between the faces. The crystal form varies from one substance to another, reflecting the atomic, molecular, or ionic structure of the crystal.”49 It is “any three-dimensional solid aggregate in which the plane faces intersect at definite angles and in which there is a regular internal structure of the constituent chemical species.”50 But science not only studies and produces crystals: as Donna Haraway has argued, the crystal is also a potent metaphor in science. Working against what she construes as positivistic science, she contends that in science, as in culture generally, “[t]here is no absolute court of appeal; there are only alternate world views with fertile basic metaphors.” The crystal is one of these enabling metaphors, which is not to say that it is just a metaphor for scientists or for artists. The metaphor of the crystal in part guides what scientists can discover experimentally. Haraway argues that Ross G. Harrison—“who virtually founded the science of experimental embryology in the United States”—deployed the crystal metaphor to understand that “[a]xial differentiation in the embryo could be compared to spatial relations of atom groups in certain carbon compounds,” thus spanning the presumed gap between the organic and inorganic. “Harrison’s use of crystal analogies allowed him to bypass assumptions of the mosaic-mechanistic theories of development about part-whole relations.”51

Crystals in Theories of Visual Culture A glance at the productive sharing of the crystal among visual theory, art history, and art practice sets the stage for the contemporary use of the crystal in art. Pivotal early twentieth-century aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer’s use of the crystal as a Bordering the Ubiquitous

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model of “the laws of regularity, [derived] from inanimate matter,” articulated the core of his highly influential theory of the urge to abstraction, published in Abstraction and Empathy (1908; 20). Worringer looked back to Aloïs Riegl, one of the founders of art history, for his elevated view of the crystal, and ahead to artist Paul Klee, who famously characterized himself as a crystal in 1915.52 Klee’s painting Fish Magic (1925), for example, is a fantasy of generation and transmutation taking place in a controlled aqueous zone for the growth of crystals, a “solution” for the artist’s organic development toward crystalline complexity and perfection. In our own time, the exchanges made possible by the crystal can be seen vividly in the writing of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Deleuze theorizes the “crystalline” image in film theory and thus reminds us of the powerful organicinorganic topos invested in the metaphor by Worringer. Before his examination of film, Deleuze’s adoption of the crystal traced back to a nexus of descriptions of mineralogy and geology, topics he developed extensively with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Here they use the crystal as an example to explain a powerful “form of organization.”53 For them, crystals do not simply grow and then “die,” which is Schopenhauer’s reading. They claim that “on a crystalline stratum, the amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal must move out to the system’s exterior, where the amorphous medium can crystallize.” For Deleuze and Guattari, then, material existence—could we say “nature”?— is not divided between the inorganic and organic. Crystals have and are “seeds” that endlessly replicate. They investigate the crystal to demonstrate that there are “many intermediaries between the exterior milieu or material and the interior seed: a multiplicity of perfectly discontinuous states of metastability constituting so many hierarchical degrees” (49–50). Borders, territories, landscape, and the earth: all these concepts are crucial to Deleuze’s concept of “geophilosophy.”54 Deleuze and Guattari offer the thought experiment in which all existence is considered as a continuum rather than divided strictly between organic and inorganic matter, with crystals as a prime example again. Their geoaesthetics can be used to understand the prominent use of crystals in the work of earth artists. Smithson also fabricated much of his thinking and art around the crystal. In the 1972 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, he describes early experiments in which he concocted substances and made up scientific names for them, mixing and crossing presumed borders all the while: “I did a series of chemicals,” he elaborates, “there was a tug of war going on between the organic and the crystalline [in which they] . . . met—[and] a kind of dialectic occurred later on, so both areas were resolved” (290).55 Smithson discusses the crystal as metaphor and material in numerous contexts, including Judd’s 180

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sculpture (6, 20); time (11); grids, networks, systems, and Borges’s stories (54); modernist architecture (64); Wilhelm Worringer (162); and of course his own work, including the sculpture Spiral Jetty (147) and the mapping that is fundamental to his site/nonsite projects. “A crystal can be mapped out,” he reports to Dennis Wheeler, “and in fact I think it was crystallography which led me to mapmaking [and] . . . the Pine Barrens” (244). Smithson had said as much in his 1967 essay “Toward the Development of an Air Terminal Site” and had written on the subject in his 1966 essay “The Crystal Land.” His signature work, Spiral Jetty (1970), is increasingly composed of crystals thanks to its location on the shore of the extremely saline Great Salt Lake. Tacita Dean’s film JG (2013) pays homage to crystals in its extended reflection on Smithson’s film. We should also recall Joseph Beuys’s project 7000 Oaks (see fig. 5), begun at documenta 7 in 1982, which underlines the question of the organic-inorganic divide or spectrum that I see as the heart of the crystal as scientific phenomenon (actual crystals and the process of crystallization) and metaphor (the analogies with purity, growth, perfection, and stability that I have noted). Beuys wrote: “My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument’s two parts will never be the same.”56 These precedents inform our understanding of the contemporary life of the crystal in eco-art practice.

Crystal Interfaces in the Contemporary Visual Arts The literal and metaphoric dimensions of the crystal in art are most often found together, though not always in equal proportions. Noteworthy in this regard is the overwhelmingly successful installation Seizure by British artist Roger Hiorns, seen in London in the fall of 2008 and reopened because of audience demand in the summer of 2009. Hiorns took a ground-floor apartment in a housing development that was slated for demolition, made it watertight, and then filled it with ninety thousand liters of copper sulfate solution. He then left the chemicals to form crystals, drained the space, and encouraged visitors to tour the beautiful yet alien blue interior. In a manner reminiscent of Beuys’s shamanistic side, Hiorns states, “I’m not a scientist. I’m more concerned with starting a natural process which will go on happening by itself. It’s never ending. It won’t stop, whatever you do.” “I try to keep myself out of my work,” he goes on to say. “Seizure is kind of autogenetic— growing by itself.”57 His crystals have grown virally (to mix a metaphor), just as they did in J. G. Ballard’s 1966 novel The Crystal World, a book that also informed Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Smithson’s thinking. In Seizure, their animation is sinister, yet their individual saturated stillness remains seductive. Hiorns establishes audience expectation by issuing rubber boots and gloves in which patrons negotiate the wetness of the site. In this way as well as in the attention paid by the work to a decrepit area, the work is social. But its use of spectacular crystals becomes personal, too, given that many visitors have broken off parts of the work to take away with them. It is worth asking again why crystals are so popular in and beyond art. What crystallographers and artists find compelling about crystal structures may be causally linked to crystal-like organization in the brain. John Onians’s coinage “neuroarthistory” denotes the study of the neurological bases of perception and meaning production.58 Another pioneer of this approach, Barbara Maria Stafford, has made the connection between the art of the crystal and groundbreaking scientific research: “There appears to be an echoic relationship between the carpentered outer world of edges and our staked-out mind-brain. This hypothesis of congruency is supported by different kinds of research. First, the cortex has long been known to be made up of geometrically defined repetitive units. These cellular ‘crystals’ are now the subject of mathematical investigations into the patterns of connection linking the retina, the striate cortex, and the neuronal circuits in Vi [= Visual Cortex 1].”59 Stafford’s source for this argument—a complex, technical article by Paul C. Bressloff and Jack D. Cowan titled provocatively “The Visual Cortex as a Crystal”—claims that the visual cortex’s structuring crystals are hexagonal or square. Thus not only does the brain respond uniquely to abstract art, as Semir Zeki’s research has shown,60 but parts of the brain also “echo” the structures of geometric abstraction and (so the argument would go) vice versa. What we witness between brain structure and art is what Stafford calls a “psychophysical parallelism”; crystalline abstraction does not exactly reflect nature or science or earlier art but rather establishes an exchange among these cultural discourses. There is not full scientific agreement on the crystalline structure of the visual cortex, or indeed about the relationships between neurological functioning and art. Thus links between brain structure and the crystal in art must remain speculative.61 Onians’s neuroarthistory, however, argues for a profound historical and contemporary connection between the structure of the visual cortex and crystal forms. “Riegl,” Onians claims, “must have believed that the knowledge of the crystalline structure of matter derived only from some sort of empathy, with its roots in the nervous system.”62 Again thinking historically, we might call this the “hopefulness” of the crystal as metaphor, especially given that Worringer’s use of the crystal to describe his ideal abstract mode of expression was in part inspired by Riegl. Something persistent about the crystal in art turns on the optimistic view that mirroring and duplication between mind and world will continue. We have seen examples of this positive valence: the potency 182

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of crystalline generation is felt as Roger Hiorns’s Seizure transforms a condemned apartment into a site of beauty so magnetic that the exhibition’s run had to be extended twice to accommodate the crowds wanting to see it.

Eco Art and the Crystal The long-standing fascination with crystals in Western art provides an opportunity to revisit a question central to this book: that is, to what extent should we think about landscape, land art, and eco art as sufficiently imbricated to be part of one complex tradition that examines the earth? Before the term “ecology” was coined, European and American landscape artists explored the geology of the earth through the basalt formations at sites such as the Giant’s Causeway, in Ireland, and Fingal’s Cave, off the coast of Scotland. Monumental rather than delicate, these formations are nonetheless crystals. I have noted Joseph Beuys’s use of this rock form in his explicitly ecological 7000 Oaks project (see fig. 5). Land-art and eco-art pioneer Alan Sonfist also probed the properties of crystals via the systems ecology of the late 1960s and the 1970s, coordinates I have discussed with reference to Hans Haacke and Jack Burnham in chapter 1 (see fig. 3). Gene Youngblood, one of the most engaging players in the culture of this period, in plotting the crystal’s use in the new media technologies of the time, has thereby suggested why it was so compelling. Describing the frontiers of communication in Expanded Cinema (1970), he begins on the scientific plane that was central to systems theory: “Crystals and circuits consist of logically structured atomic arrays” (26). He predicts the commercial availability of the “‘plasma crystal’ panel, which makes possible billboard or wall-size TV receivers as well as pocket-size TV sets that could be viewed in bright sunlight” (203). He then enthusiastically paraphrases a key scientist working on this new format in ways that once again record the boundarycrossing magic of crystals: “One of the pioneers of this process in the United States was Dr. George Heilmeier of RCA’s David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He describes plasma crystals (sometimes called liquid crystals) as organic compounds whose appearance and mechanical properties are those of a liquid, but whose molecules tend to form into large orderly arrays akin to the crystals of mica, quartz, or diamonds. Unlike luminescent or fluorescing substances, plasma crystals do not emit their own light: they’re read by reflected light, growing brighter as their surroundings grow brighter” (203). Plasma is the fourth state of matter, complementing solid, liquid, and gas.63 It is by far the most common state in the universe, though not on this planet. Plasma crystals “form under certain conditions in a complex (‘dusty’) plasma. There, the electrically charged dust particles arrange in a regular macroscopic crystal lattice.”64 Jack Burnham writes in “Real Time Systems” (1969) that “a major illusion of the art system is that Bordering the Ubiquitous

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art resides in specific objects.”65 As we saw in chapter 1 with reference to his thinking on Haacke, Burnham looks instead to systems, whether in institutions or in nature. He sees the evolution of modern sculpture in these terms. Writing about Brancusi, for example, he claims, “There is a biological truth here: within the total regularity of a crystal or organism only an imprecision spurs on further growth or formation; in sculpture as well, a calculated irregularity separates the living from the dead.”66 Alan Sonfist has been committed to ecological art since his practice began in the early 1960s. Best known for his Fig. 56  Alan Sonfist, Crystal Monument, 1966–72. Time Landscape in Manhattan—an Lucite globe containing crystals. Photo courtesy of the ambitious, if finally spatially curtailed, artist. By kind permission of the artist. project begun in 1965 that replanted New York’s precontact flora—Sonfist also created several sculptural works with the title Crystal Monument (1966–72; fig. 56). The caption to the version illustrated in Art in the Land, which, it should be recalled, was edited by Sonfist and published in 1983, describes a “globe containing crystals that change form and location continually in response to temperature and air currents in the surrounding atmosphere” (53). A conceptual, if not a literal, companion piece to his Microorganism Enclosure (1971), which trapped bacteria and fungi in a closed ecosystem so that viewers could see their patterns of growth and decay, Crystal Monument demonstrated the inanimate side of the line between the earth’s living and nonliving materiality. A description of the “monument” exhibited in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s 1982 exhibit Landscape in Sculpture adds the important observation that Sonfist’s “globe . . . encapsulates a mysterious purple haze” given off by the crystals, “which cling to the sides of the sphere like a swarm of glass insects. The crystals act as tiny prisms, setting the piece aglow with refracted light.”67 The description is telling in two ways: a simile portrays the crystals as living insects, and the environment is characterized as a globe, an earthlike microcosm. That Sonfist encourages us to think in planetary terms here is suggested not only by the shape of the monument but also by its indeterminate size in the documentary photograph of it that he used in his book Art in the Land. The image is taken from a low angle, setting the crystal globe against a “sky” and making its size impossible to assess. It is set on what looks like earth. In his essay in 184

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the collection devoted to “Alan Sonfist’s public sculptures,” Jonathan Carpenter allows that Sonfist’s “natural crystals rang[ed] in size from microscopic to one foot.”68 The version of the monument owned by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art is 57 × 29 × 29 inches (144.78 × 73.66 × 73.66 cm). A sculpture about the scale of a person thus takes on the monumental proportions suggested in Sonfist’s title, both materially and metaphorically. The interests of land artists in geology generally and the crystal in particular are more connected to earlier practices in landscape than we might expect. Ironically, the butt of Smithson’s dissatisfaction with the conventional picturesque in his revisionary essay on the ruined industrial monuments of Passaic was, as we have seen, a painting by Samuel Morse. Morse, however, was even more involved with science than was Smithson. He cocreated Morse code and helped to develop single-wire telegraph systems. His interest in electricity stemmed from lectures at Yale by the scientist Benjamin Silliman, whose portrait he painted in 1825. Unlike most of the images of Silliman, Morse’s shows him proudly displaying his mineral collection, including crystals.69 Like Pope for his grotto but on a larger and more professional basis, Morse and his colleagues collected crystals and other minerals for study at Yale. In a letter of 1854 describing a new collection, the Yale College Mineralogical Cabinet, and soliciting specimens, we learn from Silliman and a colleague that the “greatest deficiency” of the collection “is in the department of Crystallized American Minerals.”70 The passion for crystals was also a link between American and British landscape traditions. Thomas Moran, for example, was a follower of John Ruskin, whose writings are replete with detailed discussions of crystals. In a sequence too extensive to be more than mentioned here, the collaborative interest in the crystal in landscape depiction and natural philosophy also extends to the German Romantics, for whom these minerals were again mysterious double messengers from the ecotone between the living and inanimate in nature. Carl Gustav Carus, whose Erdlebenbildkunst I discussed in chapter 2, is a case in point, one that allows me to shuttle from landscape to land art and again to recent ecological art. In the top left of his large oil painting The Glacier at Chamonix (1825–27), for example, Carus followed the theories of mountain building espoused by Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert in showing the crystalline forms of granite cliffs.71 Carus journeyed to the then-famous basalt (crystal) columns at Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa in 1844. For him, the precisely rendered watercolors of this cathedral-like cave evoked the earth’s Christian purpose. They are material yet transcendent. Turner visited the site in 1831 and, as Carus did after him, made works inside the cave. Turner’s geological knowledge led him to detail the crystalline splendor of the site, but in keeping with his propensity to reach for the grand statement in less visually exact terms, his oil painting Staffa: Fingal’s Cave of 1832 is a distant view from the sea showing a Bordering the Ubiquitous

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steamship (which made access in treacherous waters much easier) moving away from the cave, which is obscured in mist and steam. Standing behind Joseph Beuys’s use of basalt columns in 7000 Oaks (see fig. 5) was his trip to Northern Ireland in 1974, during which he performed Unity in Diversity on the Giant’s Causeway, near Antrim. This geological phenomenon is a massive field mostly of hexagonal columns of crystalline basalt that formed as the earth’s crust cooled. It runs along what is now the ocean shoreline, part of an extensive geological formation also seen at Fingal’s Cave. In his performance, Beuys invoked what he saw as a common cultural heritage across northern Europe, a sense of the earth’s antiquity and energy, and the contrast—which he noted often—between the organic (the artist in this case; the trees in 7000 Oaks) and the relatively unchanging nature of the crystal. His was an inclusive, social ecology. Extrapolating the observation that the rock forms on which he performed in Northern Ireland were similar but not identical, he then promoted “unity in diversity” in the context of divisive local politics during the “Troubles.”72 Beuys also used the crystal much earlier than 1974. In 1969 he sculpted a crystal in wood. “Chaos can have a healing character,” he suggested later, “which channels the warm chaotic order into order or form. Objects like Crystal came before the theory, but now I began to see how structures can be created which relate to every kind of life and work.”73 In an extended conversation with the artist in the late 1970s, talk turns to rock crystals (quartz). “It grows from without,” Beuys remarks. “It has a radical force that passes through everything like a kind of mathematical conception, especially in this mineral.” He preferred the organic aspects of the crystal, as, for instance, in “queen bee cells. They have a completely sack-like character, as well as this crystal structure . . . in the honeycomb.”74 Crystal energy was, for Beuys, creative energy. Working in the (then) West German Green Party, he promoted an activist ecological politics based on energy. He called “for a concept of creativity and culture that truly embraces human beings and makes them aware of how the whole can be conceived. . . . this is a path that will not only bring us energy that doesn’t harm the environment. . . . It will bring us into a new state of power and energy. It is not just a question of conserving nature, but creating nature.”75 Although static basalt columns contrast with growing trees in 7000 Oaks, these rocks show the import of nature’s generative power for Beuys—for example, in another important ecological work, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974).76 His Bog Action of 1971 is a precedent. Bogs are “the liveliest elements in the European landscape. . . . They are essential to the whole eco-system for water regulation, humidity, ground water, and climate in general.”77 They function not only as counterpoises to trees, but also as batteries, very much as the lemon does by fictively lighting the bulb against which it rests in Capri Battery (1985) and the earth in Earth Telephone (1968–71). In both examples, too, human technology 186

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collaborates with natural forces. In Unity in Diversity Beuys the shaman was both part of and distinct from the basalt columns. Long after the oaks of 7000 Oaks are gone, the crystal markers will remain.

Case Study 8: The Emotional Life of Water; Materialism and Affect in Eco Art Basia Irland has been working with the languages of water since 1985, carving wooden books into which she embeds ecologically sensitive materials native to the areas in which she works. We may then read their materiality and place in the local ecosystem, much as we can read the volumes in Mark Dion’s Schildbach Xylotheque (see fig. 15), considered in chapter 2. Her research involves bodies of water as far removed from one another as Puget Sound and the Dominican Republic, but each instance is specific and involves the fullest possible range of local actants, from microbes to people. Irland’s work is striking in its comprehensiveness, its scientific foundations, and its involvement of and appeal among the many people it touches. At the same time, it is akin to the many contemporary artworks that focus on our relationships with water. Some are explicitly environmental in their message, such as Eliasson’s Ice Watch (2015), with its eighty tons of ice blocks sourced from a fjord in Greenland marking the hours in a gigantic and relentlessly melting timepiece. Part of the collective effort to raise awareness about planetary climate disruption called artists4climate, and displayed in the prominent Place du Panthéon, Paris, at the time of the 2015 COP21 negotiations, it literally brought home to an urban context not only the effects of global warming but also the urgency to take collective action in the face of climate change. An earlier “melting” work by Eliasson was pointedly titled Your Waste of Time (2006) and used ice from Vatnajökull, Iceland, the largest glacier in Europe. More broadly focused is John Akomfrah’s film Vertigo Sea (2015), which meditates on the whaling industry, slavery, and human migration. Taiwanese artist Vincent J. F. Huang’s Crossing the Tide, a flooded pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and other ongoing projects bringing attention to the nearly submerged island of Tuvalu in the South Pacific are another powerful case in point.78 The diminishing availability and quality of water as well as the destructive potential of its excess because of climate change explain why it has become a recurrent subject in ecological art practices worldwide. Water is essential to every being on the planet. I intend “The Emotional Life of Water” to be heard in two ways: first, as an evocation of the emotions we humans feel when thinking about water through eco art (the affective dimension reflected in commonplaces such as “water is life,” which suggest that element’s personal and planetary necessity; such reactions were on full display around Eliasson’s Ice Watch). Second, of equal import but perhaps Bordering the Ubiquitous

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hard for us to hear, is the sense that water may have its own emotional life. This is of course a massive topic central to aesthetics regarded as the philosophical examination of the sensate and to any account of viewer response in art history. It encompasses our reactions to nature and to art and the neurological coordinates of our feelings.79 For example, think of the phrase’s impact when you hear that animal agriculture uses an estimated 55 percent of fresh water in the United States and contributes massively to both global greenhouse-gas loads and water pollution.80 It also needs to be said that emotion and affect are not identical and sometimes need to be distinguished in eco-art contexts.81 While I am not concerned with the intricacies of the disagreements among experts about these differences, I follow Brian Massumi in thinking that affect is a type of registration prior and fundamental to the expression of emotion. Another primary area of concern in the humanities recently is the intersecting investigations of new materialism, thing theory, and object-oriented ontology, all of which emphasize the material realm over that of the human. The less familiar connotation of “the emotional life of water” therefore makes reference to the potential independence of water, to its own material and nonanthropocentric “life,” which I understand as fundamental to the eco art discussed in this case study. It is important here to flag questions about disciplinary boundaries raised by the types of imagery that convey ecological information about water (or any other planetary element). When are ecological projects “art,” and when they are “science” or perhaps something else, such as activism, design, lobbying, or advertising? To reiterate Braddock’s challenge cited in chapter 1, “What is the art in ecological art, exactly?” I am not suggesting that such categorizations are ontologically based, that they are ultimately more than pragmatic and conventional—subject to use and subject to change—but I do think that we can tell which is which according to context and that we respond differently depending on the category perceived. The field of “information visualization” is highly active around the climate-change file. In a scientific paper, for example, we are likely to glean information from tables and graphs, many of which will require expert facility if they are to be understood. Information sources geared to a broader audience, by contrast, exploit the psychology alluded to in veteran ecological artist Iain Baxter&’s use of a tongue-in-cheek but telling maxim to describe the impact of one of his own ecological works: “A word is worth 1/1,000th of a picture.”82 Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosling make the same point: “Facts are one part; just as guilt does not inspire initiative, people will not act on facts alone. We are inspired to act by emotional and physical experience. Knowledge can tell us what we should do to achieve our goals, but the goals and the urge to act must arise from our emotions.”83 A Guardian newspaper article about the footprint of animal husbandry, “In Pictures: How the West’s Appetite for Beef Is Felling the Amazon,” is long on 188

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emotive photographs and, as the section title suggests by substituting the image of a camera for the textual descriptor “In Pictures” in the online version, short on discursive explanation. Below the title of this article, three of the first four images of the clearing of rainforest for grazing purposes are by Daniel Beltrá, an artist working for Greenpeace in this instance, the captions tell us. “The fragility of our ecosystems is a continuous thread throughout my work,” Beltrá states on his own website. “My photographs show the vast scale of transformation our world is under from human-made stresses.”84 Beltrá’s photograph Cattle Ranch in Agua Boa, Mato Grosso, Brazil, August 8, 2008—a stark aerial shot of a massive industrial cattle range, purportedly set up on illegally cleared land—is used as the lead image in the Guardian article and found in the “Forests” portfolio on the artist’s website. Do we need to ask when this image is art and when it is science or journalism? Rather than pursue such distinctions and pretend that science is not part of culture and that imagery is not appropriate in science, it is more productive to think of these perspectives as fully integrated in eco art, which is now frequently deployed in whatever contexts will give it a voice in and beyond the art world. An acknowledgment of the superior affective power of images over words and statistics is increasingly found in scientific publications such as Climate Change: Picturing the Science (2009), which seeks to bring home the specifics of climate science in a more potent way by illustrating the phenomena at issue with images produced by professional documentary photographers. The documentary film Chasing Ice (2012), directed by Jeff Orlowski, follows scientist-turned-photographer James Balog and his team as they document the rapid recession of glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland. Few statistics are mentioned; instead, the evidence of glaciers receding, conveyed in stop-action photographs and films, brings climate change into a human time frame with great effect. The U.K. firm Carbon Visuals promotes the same message about the sorts of visual information to deploy. It offers imaging services to clients who wish to get their ecological messages across more effectively through visuals, the basis of which is not simply information but the emotional, affective conveyance of that information. Of course, not all artists seek emotional response to their work; Michael Mandiberg’s CO2 app for the Firefox browser, for example, sticks to the numbers and graphs, as does Mel Chin’s CLI-Mate app from 2008, which proposed to show its users numerical data regarding the impact of their day-to-day behavior on the planet. Bruce Foltz wrote in 1995 that “either tacitly or explicitly, the character of the environmental crisis is regarded as authoritatively defined by the natural sciences.”85 Although the integrative efforts of Cape Farewell and the CLUI, for example, and exhibitions such as Carbon 14 have rendered this authority less conclusive than it was twenty years ago, we should treat this balance of perspectives as an open issue today, one addressed in the water works I discuss. Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Another counterexample to the domination of science is the long-standing practice of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The methodological premise of their extensive projects on the land, such as Running Fence (realized in 1976) and The Umbrellas (Japan–United States, 1984–91), is one of consultation and negotiation across disciplines and interests. Christo makes this clear with reference to The Floating Piers, installed to both acclaim and controversy in Italy in 2016, and Over the River, a project proposed in 1992 to “suspend 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels high above the Arkansas River along a 42-mile stretch of the river between Salida and Cañon City in south-central Colorado.”86 In a 2013 interview, Christo underlined the purpose of artworks whose genesis is protracted, complex, and crosses multiple boundaries, from the legal to the ecological: “For many years, all the people are thinking how the work will be beautiful, how the work will be awful. Basically, the work is working in the mind of the people before it physically exists. This is probably the biggest satisfaction we have—Jeanne Claude and myself— because this is the only thing artists like to have, . . . to have the people comment and discuss their works.”87 Over the River was to be an ecological action revealing systems of land use; even before installation, it triggered often-heated discussions about nature and preservation among local citizens representing a wide range of interests. In January 2017, however, Christo abruptly canceled the project, in part as a protest against the newly elected Trump administration. “[N]ow, the federal government is our landlord,” Christo stated. “They own the land. I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord.”88 Ecological art is often motivated by artists’ commitment to act in the face of climate change, whether as protesters, restorers, educators, witnesses, or mourners. But as I asked in chapter 1 when canvasing the range of eco-art practices, what can and should artists, eco art historians, and art do in the face of these pressing planetary problems? Some early examples of ecological art featuring water fall under the heading of “direct action” adumbrated in chapter 1—remediation and reclamation—because they restore threatened habitats: Patricia Johanson’s Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas, Texas (begun in 1981),89 Betty Beaumont’s Ocean Landmark (1978–80), and a range of work by Ichi Ikeda in Japan. While I hope to avoid either/ or categories, numerous other water works do not fix anything but instead accentuate the emotional, sensate articulation specific to art, whether in contrast to or in conjunction with scientific presentations of climate issues. Such approaches can be part of an aesthetic withdrawal that honors the earth’s separateness, or they may work to more fully “articulate” human and nonhuman relationships with the earth. I have noted the question of whether artists—and those writing eco art history—should continue to produce, display, and discuss art using the same largely capitalist structures, extracted resources, and attitudes that have generated our current environmental woes. Artist, cultural commentator, and founding 190

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editor of Third Text Rasheed Araeen has argued in “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century” of 2009 that artists should “abandon their studios and stop making objects” and instead refocus their imaginations “to enhance not only their own creative potential but also the collective life of the earth’s inhabitants” (684). As Charles Palermo has commented, Araeen was understandably frustrated by the avant-garde’s ineffectualness: “The bourgeois institutions of Western capitalism’s artworld undermine even the best avant-garde projects, but they are also what legitimize them.”90 My expectations for art, artists, and art historians differ from Araeen’s. My view is that eco art is most valuable in society when it is heuristic, positioned at an infra-thin remove from practical ameliorative interventions. As I argued in chapter 1 with reference to Adorno’s theories, eco art can most meaningfully speak to our climate predicament when it asserts its noninstrumental, aesthetic identity, when—in the environmental context—its differences from scientific and technological procedures convey a vulnerability or humility in the face of climate disruption. It is in a mode of “articulation” rather than instrumentalist efficacy that eco art can help us think beyond the overemphasized human “nar-ego” against which Araeen rails. Environmentalists assert that what is needed to avert environmental collapse is nothing short of a transformation of our worldview, what Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter calls “green materialism.” If it can influence such changes in opinion, what might eco art’s mechanisms of impact be? To put this question as Stacy Alaimo does in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, what or where is “the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature?” (2). I suggest that such zones or aesthetic ecotones are created by eco art, inasmuch as it can elucidate the ecologies of interconnectedness between matter and our perceptions and emotions. Alaimo calls this extensive web “trans-corporeality.” Nancy Tuana thinks in terms of “eco-cosmopolitanism.”91 The emotional life of water commonly refers to our responses to water themes in ecological art. This is the humanist default. Whether we think in terms of the phenomenology of reception, about relational aesthetics, or about more contemporary practices, the response paradigm is all about us. This is the view that I quoted Roni Horn expressing in “Saying Water,” for example: “When you’re talking about water, aren’t you really talking about yourself? Isn’t water like the weather that way?”92 As I claimed in chapter 2, both Horn’s Library of Water (see fig. 2) and Rúrí’s Archive: Endangered Waters (see fig. 17) are highly emotive laments for what seems to be a lost ecological balance, and both works foreground the materialities of the elements they record and preserve. Can artworks also be understood—perhaps simultaneously—in terms of the independence of water, its own material and nonanthropocentric “life,” and if so, would this shift be valuable? We could reread Rúrí’s and Horn’s installations in this way. To elucidate this Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Fig. 57  Mariele Neudecker, Dark Years Away, 2013 (video still). One video projection, one monitor, 6 min. loop. By kind permission of the artist and Galerie Thumm, Berlin.

fundamental border question, however, I must focus on two additional examples that provide an opportunity to explore this question. Dark Years Away by Mariele Neudecker (2013; fig. 57) takes undersea exploratory film by oceanographer Dr. Alex Rogers and his colleagues at the University of Oxford—shot at depths of more than three thousand meters in the remote southwest Indian Ocean—and reveals with it the otherwise invisible human impact on the seabed. We see a robotic arm scooping sediment; our eyes are aided by its searchlight, but total darkness would prevail otherwise at this depth. Her title plays both with the notion of remoteness (an inversion of “light years away”) and with relative illumination. To discuss the affective dimensions of Neudecker’s work, we need to attend particularly to the relationships she establishes between sound and image.93 Here she translates machine-made footage from a scientific expedition into a more immediate human register, in part by supplying an emotionally taut soundtrack, Voices of Silence (1991) by the contemporary Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. The plumes of fine deposits thrown up by the excavation we see in progress seem to move gracefully to this soundtrack. Improbably, they become part of our world and describe its beauty. For other videos using Rogers’s visual source material, the soundtracks make more prosaic reference to our telluric existence: we hear clocks, heartbeats, and helicopters. Banal, scientific research data become highly emotional, perhaps in a negative way. A survey of the scientific study of “emotional attention” notes that “[i]n recent years, abundant research has investigated the neural substrates of emotion processing, now allowing us to pinpoint brain circuits implementing specialized mechanisms for ‘emotional attention.’ Our understanding of emotional influences on perception 192

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can now also be integrated with recent advances concerning the neural effects of selective attention on sensory systems.”94 For Christian Marclay, creator of the masterful sound/image works Telephones (1995) and The Clock (2010), “sound is more powerful than the image and makes the image adhere to it.”95 Marclay stitches together thousands of film clips on his stated themes; we are mesmerized visually, but how sound makes or breaks the visual connections is also remarkable in The Clock. Eventually—and against our dominant perceptual instincts—we must listen as much as watch and try to bring these inputs together. Neudecker’s Dark Years Away is simple in structure by comparison with Marclay’s compositions, but its images take on a grace and lyricism hard to imagine without their adherence to Vasks’s music. The work leads us to contemplation and perhaps to an articulation of our connections to nature in distress. Information becomes evocation. Paul Walde’s video Requiem for a Glacier (2013; fig. 58) is a forty-minute, two-channel, large-screen version of his sound performance of the same name. Requiem memorializes British Columbia’s Farnham Glacier in the Purcell Mountains, an area that borders a nature conservancy but is now being opened to more tourist development. The piece relies on a potent mix of sound and dramatic landscape vistas to effect a sense of environmental loss. Walking an orchestra, choir, and vocal soloist onto the glacier, Walde establishes a situation in which he can

Fig. 58  Paul Walde, Requiem for a Glacier, 2013 (production still). 2k panoramic sound and video installation, 39 min. By kind permission of the artist.

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examine the neuroscience of creativity and reception through this four-movement oratorio. His passionate soundscape is an example of “sonic mimicry”—in this case the conversion of temperature records for the area into music notation—a significant strand in contemporary eco art. The libretto is a Latin translation of the British Columbia government’s press release announcing the approval of a year-round resort community at the site. The work sounds liturgical but is decidedly material at its foundation. Its aural tracks are carefully intercalated with the two-channel video images we see. Often Walde’s camera pans the mountain range holding the glacier and traverses the dramatic skyscape above. One video channel is sometimes focused on the orchestra or the vocalist while the other investigates details of the landscape, especially the runoff from the glacier. The most dramatic visual and aural conceit in Requiem for a Glacier is the appearance and relentless expansion of a black rectangle in our field of vision. From a speck akin to a black deposit of the pollution-formed cryoconite that we see on glaciers worldwide now, the form grows quickly and eventually blacks out our panoramic view of the region. Walde thus elicits both the phenomenon of “dark snow”—the increasing amount of soot from incomplete combustion found globally—and the resulting drastically reduced reflectiveness of ice and snow on earth, the decreasing albedo effect that some climate scientists claim is responsible for a significant percentage of global warming. One result of the presence of these particles is cracking in the ice as the dark spots attract heat and melt into the frozen surface, an eventually devastating syndrome that we saw in chapter 2 in Diane Burko’s Elegies series (see fig. 18). Artist Tiffany Holmes has theorized the issue of how best to communicate scientific information about climate change. Her process of “eco-visualization,” though not explicitly concerned with the integration of vision and sound as many eco artworks are, investigates and communicates our cultural relationships with natural resources in ways designed to catch our attention through emotional response. Finding inspiration in Hans Haacke’s Rhine Water Purification Plant (see fig. 3) and other early eco art examined in chapter 1, she makes the following claims: · Eco-visualization offers a new way to visualize invisible environmental data. · Eco-visualization can provide real time visual feedback that can increase conservation behavior or environmental awareness. . . . · Eco-visualization can encourage good environmental stewardship.96

Holmes’s work filters, digests, and redeploys abstract information so that audiences may understand and potentially act on given ecological issues. In We Can’t Swim Forever (2011), a kinetic sculpture displayed in a vitrine, Holmes positions miniature polar bears on and among three rotating forms that suggest both icebergs and layer cakes. Playing here on the plight of polar bears no longer able to find suffi194

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cient ice to support seal hunting—a predicament brought to worldwide attention in former U.S. vice president Al Gore’s remarks about these bears and retreating Arctic ice in the film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and whose empirical validity has been debated ever since—the work, by being overtly affective, sidesteps scientific disputes about rates of decline in ice and polar bears and about the causal relationships between these statistics. Holmes’s We Can’t Swim Forever, I would suggest, does not so much pull on our heartstrings as has us question that very strategy in eco art. The anthropologist Philippe Descola has presented an ironic challenge to his discipline that we might adapt to eco art: he claims that anthropology can either “disappear as an exhausted form of humanism or else . . . transform itself by rethinking its domain and its tools in such a way as to include in its object far more than the anthropos.”97 If new materialism across several fields challenges us to imagine the humanities as nonanthropocentric—to take “the nonhuman turn”98—can and should eco art history move toward this paradoxical end? The goal, I believe, would be to find ways of being on the planet through art that would not focus on the human, the troublemaker of Parikka’s “Anthrobscene,” but rather on the planet and on the relations between these actants. An object-oriented examination of this challenge is promising because eco art is especially tuned to nonlinguistic modes of being and to the materiality of things before we acculturate them as objects and artifacts. Affect studies are another recent preoccupation across the humanities, one characterized, according to Ruth Leys, by “the claim . . . that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances that so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs that we ignore those affective intensities and resonances at our peril.”99 While some could find affect theory’s focus on the human antithetical to a new materialist concentration on things, Jane Bennett underlines a possible confluence of these approaches, stating that she interrogates “affect that is not only not fully susceptible to rational analysis or linguistic representation but . . . also not specific to humans, organisms, or even to bodies: the affect of technologies, winds, vegetables, minerals.”100 Water (or anything else) could have an emotional life. Enacting the radically porous and fluid situations wherein the human and nonhuman, organic and nonorganic elements of eco art combine, Walde’s and Neudecker’s videos allow us some purchase on what Lauren Berlant calls “a materialist context for affect theory” and “the transmission of affect” traced by Teresa Brennan.101 Is there an indication of an emotional life of water before, after, and without us in the Neudecker and Walde works, a suggestion of the perdurance of nature that contrasts with the “earth-death” pictures I examined in chapter 2? Or does water somehow speak through us via ecological art, yielding not only a precognitive experience but also an awareness of what is not human? Thinking with Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Deleuze, we could say that water in both works has its own vital rhythm that is translated for our ecological perception. If, on one plane, both Dark Years Away and Requiem for a Glacier are eco-visualizations of scientific concerns—of plastics on the sea floor and melting glaciers—the emotive soundtracks to these works could remind us subconsciously of the invisible nature of water, both what we cannot literally see in these videos and what is habitually elided when we think of our human perceptions as central to what art (or water) is. If aesthetics is at root about our senses, we can acknowledge through this portal the existence of other, dissimilar, yet still sensate matter, matter of which we are a part and that flows through us. But what is more human than classical music, via which both works move away from the explicit representation of particular data to underscore emotional impact? Both Neudecker and Walde give a powerful sense that we are experiencing places and phenomena that we do not see fully through their works—Deleuze might label such dimensions as “outside”—but that, on the contrary, we may find even more remote, strange, and separate from our understanding because of their videos. Arguably, these artists move from the human emotional dimension to imagine material and affect without us or, at the minimum, with humans as implicated witnesses to and collaborators with the nonhuman. Both Henri Bergson and Charles Darwin suggested that human culture impoverishes what nature can be by focusing only on our inevitably limited interests. Dark Years Away and Requiem for a Glacier encourage us to dispel this narrow anthropomorphism. Describing “cruel optimism” as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object,” Berlant claims that our current psychological and social state of perceived unceasing crisis, ecological trouble high on the list, leads to a range of cruelly optimistic bonds, such as the fantasy of the “good life” or a commitment to idealistic political projects.102 In Requiem for a Glacier the planned ski resort reflects this optimism. Berlant tracks “dramas of adjustment to the transformation of what had seemed foundational into those binding kinds of optimistic relation we call ‘cruel’”(3). She eschews trauma theory in her reckonings of such encounters and habits, focusing instead on the quotidian nature of critical situations, on “crisis ordinariness” (10). The cruel optimism in Neudecker’s, Walde’s, and many other examples of eco art, I suggest, is the global reliance on a carbon economy in the Anthropocene, a deleterious habit that more than meets Berlant’s criteria of being “too possible, and toxic” (24) and also satisfies Morton’s benchmarks for “hyperobjects.” As discussed in chapter 3, a hyperobject refers to an only incompletely perceived leviathan such as climate disruption and to interactions we have with such entities. Hyperobjects are both profoundly present and constantly elusive; they withdraw from the human yet affect us and one another profoundly. They therefore call us to consider the limits of the human 196

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perceptual field, how we are impacted by forces and conditions in operation far beyond our spatial and temporal range, and how things might interact on their own. Tom Rand supplies an apt example of what Morton is getting at: “Atmospheric chemistry is a thing,” he writes, “and there is a complex causal chain between that thing and us [with] political, economic, and social repercussions.”103 Isabelle Hayeur’s photographs and videos bring together explorations of water, borderlines, and affect. In an early artist’s statement she emphasizes her exploration of landscape and land use, especially the exploitation of arable land for suburban expansion in her Model Homes series of 2004–7: “It seems clear that our visions and lifestyles have a much greater impact on the world we occupy than in the past. It thus becomes particularly important that we assume responsibility for the landscapes we create and the worlds we imagine.”104 The seventy images in her Underworlds series (2008–15) powerfully show the global implications of eco-suicidal habits of the Anthropocene while also dwelling on its material intimacies. Although this series of underwater photographs was taken in navigation canals and ship graveyards in the United States, Underworlds explores threatened individual ecosystems that stand in for the mistreatment of waterways globally. Visually seductive in their rich coloration, Hayeur’s images are also distinctly disorienting for two reasons. Though many of the images were shot in southern Florida, this is not the vacation spot we are used to seeing in advertising, and her images are anything but celebratory. Her technique is also unusual in that she shoots from a partly submerged position, so that we register two horizon lines, that of the water close to us and that between earth and sky in the distance. “The aquatic landscapes I probe have been considerably altered,” Hayeur writes. “They are sometimes actual deserts where nothing is left to see. The images I capture bear witness to this absence.”105 As we see in the upper quarter of Substances (2012; fig. 59), the day is bright and the water calm. Houses preside along the shoreline at the right. Commanding most of the image, however, is a close-up view of an underwater plant. Placed front and center as a “portrait” despite its smallness, it is a sickly specimen. Moreover, this marine plant is the only one that manages to stand and grow toward the light. Others wilt on the bottom amidst the silt—one aspect of the “substances” of her title—that makes the water through which Hayeur photographs brown and opaque. The waterline in this series is an uneven and unstable horizon that we nonetheless measure with and against as we see reminders of human domination here, a distant apartment building or ship, as well as the dying aqueous ecosystem in which she immerses us.106 Conditioned by the stereotypical pictorial celebration of natural beauty in this area and by the normalizing conventions of landscape, we might be confused by Hayeur’s unusual perspective. It does not take long, however, to notice that the human landscape above the waterline, which she always includes, is the source of the destruction in Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Fig. 59  Isabelle Hayeur, Substances, 2012. Inkjet on photo paper, 46 × 42 in. (116 × 107 cm). By kind permission of the artist.

what she calls the “aquatic landscapes” below. Such knowledge colludes with our perplexity to register a strong effect. Hayeur multiplies affective responses in still photographs from 2011 of what she deems a “marine cemetery,” the submerged world of Witte’s Marine Salvage, a ship “burial ground” on Staten Island, New York. The collective title of these photographs is Death in Absentia. Again composed from under the limen of the water’s surface so that we see both the sea floor and the looming shapes of rusting hulls, the images are superficially quiet but simultaneously strange and disconcerting. In Castaway (2012), a video shot in this same spot, we are taken on a tour of what amount to underwater ruins. As it was in Dark Years Away and Requiem for a Glacier, sound is crucial to our absorption of this work. Where Neudecker’s and Walde’s music is stirring, however, the sound that we hear in Castaway even before the visuals come into focus, sound artist Nicolas Bernier’s mix of electronic overtones with echoes and clunks, is otherworldly, alien. While these noises seem to emanate from discarded human technologies, from the ships we begin to make out, they are no longer fully human. While some of the sounds seem like the reverberations of working ships in the area, to call them groans comes to seem 198

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anthropocentric; we might think of them ultimately as registrations of nonhuman materials returning to the earth. Bernier describes his soundscape’s inception and goals in detail: I had quite specific sounds in mind even though the idea was a bit entangled: I wanted to suggest the material in the images, but also suggest something that isn’t there, or something hidden, or something that was there before, or all those options. In the meantime, I wanted the sound to be abstract enough to leave some space to viewers so they could read the sound and image relationship their own way.

In the first section, I wanted the sound to give an impression of deepness. In

practical terms (this might break a bit of the poetry of the soundtrack), most of the sounds come from wood, more specifically from a custom machine I have with levers and mechanisms. The sounds are pitch shifted in the low frequencies, and when adding the long reverb, we obtain those cavernous sounds. Around 3:00, the little high-pitched sounds are tiny feedbacks that I generated with some piezo microphones and small amplified speakers. There are also some notes of an instrument . . . in order to balance the noisy aspect of the soundtrack. Those instrumental sounds are tuned with the sound that will appear with the industries at 4:12 (this sound comes from a big compressor truck that I recorded near my studio a while ago, so it was well suiting the industries [in the] images). From there I wanted the sound to become a bit abstract, denser, more musical in my sense. When turning to the sky, the small feedbacks that we’re hearing suddenly take another meaning. Textures of field recordings are layered. Then around 9:00, it is basically layering of noises that are, again, somewhere between that abstraction and narrative, recalling the sound of water.107

Hayeur makes this progression clear in the video, which explores the ships from the surface for roughly its first half. In a transitional sequence, the camera looks at the refineries along the shore of New Jersey’s “Chemical Coast,” then at the landscape and up into the sky; we hear birds and other familiar sounds for a few moments. After visually linking the clouds in the sky with underwater clouds of sediment Hayeur throws up as she films, she then seamlessly conveys herself underwater to focus on the rotting hulls themselves. As in Substances, the ocean floor that we traverse is almost lifeless. The light has trouble penetrating even this shallow water. The final minutes of Castaway are quiet, inviting us to contemplate what we have seen. Where can Hayeur’s camera go now? She films reflections of a wan sun and clouds on the surface of the water, looking down, before fading to black. Complementing Tacita Dean’s intricate conversation with the novelist J. G. Ballard and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in her film JG (2013), though less directly, Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Hayeur thus recalls both Smithson’s intimate record of the Great Salt Lake’s mineralogy and his cosmic sequence in the film version, the denouement in which he spirals toward the sun “from the center of the Spiral Jetty” in a helicopter while looking down on his sculpture and intoning, “Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water,” as he lists the cardinal coordinates of the earthwork (149). Hayeur is the Smithson of water. Where he famously recorded postindustrial monuments near his home town of Passaic, New Jersey, she reveals what was hidden even to the ever-curious Smithson, the underwater underside of the landscape so close to his birthplace. Its ruins suggest not only the past of specific industries but the physical and ideological decay of modernity presided over by the Anthropocene of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her video looks back to the heyday of generations of ships, but without nostalgia. Instead, Hayeur’s focus is the baleful present in this area and the even less hopeful future of heavily polluted oceans. Her connections to Smithson—and, indirectly, to his land-art contemporaries’ interests in water, Betty Beaumont’s especially—figure in the long chronological sweep I have been establishing in Landscape into Eco Art. In this context, though certainly not in terms of causation or intent, Hayeur’s underwater pictures can also be productively contrasted with the shipping news central to J. M. W. Turner’s landscapes. Limulus (2014; fig. 60) is an extended horizontal “aquatic landscape.” The photograph was taken on Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico, site of Smithson’s second uprooted tree in 1969. Close-up and underwater, we see the shell of a dead horseshoe crab whose genus lends its Latin name to the title. While there are plants on the seabed, the contrast with the verdant shoreline above the water is striking. This is not the Chemical Coast; we see no signs of habitation nearby, though in the distance and out of focus there are what appear to be large smokestacks. The crab shell is clearly the focus of this large image because it is seen in full detail. It is a still life, nature morte, embedded in a landscape. I want to suggest that Limulus is an image of contemporary history, another “earth-death picture” in the lineage discussed in chapter 2. It stands in sharp contrast to perhaps the only well-known image of a crab of this sort in Western art, Turner’s enduringly controversial painting War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, exhibited in 1842 (fig. 61). Where Hayeur’s crab is commanding, Turner’s is so small as to be missed were it not for the poem he appended to the work when it was exhibited, a stanza in his extensive composition The Fallacies of Hope: Ah! thy tent-formed shell is like A soldier’s nightly bivouac, alone Amidst a sea of blood but you can join your comrades. 200

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Fig. 60  Isabelle Hayeur, Limulus, 2014. Inkjet on photo paper, 18 × 62 in. (47 × 158 cm). By kind permission of the artist. Fig. 61  Joseph Mallord William Turner, War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, exhibited 1842. Oil on canvas, 794 × 794 mm (support). Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. Photo © 2015 Tate, London.

John Ruskin quotes these lines in his approving discussion of a painting that was otherwise much lampooned and misunderstood in its time.108 With characteristic ambition, Turner addressed several historical moments in this work. War was paired with Peace: Burial at Sea, his homage to his friend the painter David Wilkie, who was laid to rest at sea off Gibraltar in 1841. War depicts a disconsolate Napoleon Bonaparte in full uniform, even though he is pictured as a British captive on the island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821. One occasion for this painting was the return of his remains to Paris in 1840, but Turner had already painted famous episodes from the Napoleonic wars, including the death of Nelson, and saw no reason to venerate the military leader.109 Peace not only memorializes Wilkie’s gentle disposition and laments his loss with its dramatically dark coloration but also contrasts with the Bordering the Ubiquitous

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belligerent behavior of another contemporary painter, the volatile Benjamin Robert Haydon, as well as that of Napoleon, the ruthless military leader. The Napoleon in War, standing at a watery shoreline and backed by a British guard and an extraordinarily sanguine sunset and its reflection, which was much criticized for its vividness, clearly contemplates the minuscule animal, which—in position if not scale—is comparable to Hayeur’s crab. As we saw in his references to magnetism in Snowstorm (1842) in chapter 2, Turner frequently incorporated his knowledge of natural history in his landscapes. In this case, his interest in the lower reaches of the great chain of being came from an expert on crustaceans, his sometimes-physician, Sir Anthony Carlisle, who was also professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy, where Turner was professor of perspective. Turner’s poetic commentary on War revolves on a reference to the limpet. His lines can be understood to attribute these thoughts to the pensive Bonaparte, who is reminded of his soldiering and of his captivity by the “tent-formed shell.” The “you” of the final line, italicized by Ruskin, has a double meaning. If it refers to the mollusk that is joining its fellows, it is a lament for Napoleon’s lost freedom. If it refers to Napoleon, it suggests that he was never again free and could only join his comrades in death. Where Turner paints Napoleon’s sublime fall to the status of a prisoner interacting with a mollusk, Hayeur’s aquatic landscape is antisublime and antipicturesque. Her images invert the human/nonhuman hierarchy to deliver what Alexander Pope called bathos, the opposite of the sublime or an example of its failure, but nonetheless a profound and earthly state. Limulus explores the ecosystem we see: it is literally a picture of the earth’s death. If her photograph were to be retitled War: Limulus, the conflict Hayeur presents would be that defined by philosopher of science Michel Serres, who, as noted above, claimed in 1990 that there is a new “world war” that takes the material earth and all its inhabitants as the target of multiple hostilities. Hayeur’s bathetic reversal in Limulus implores us to respond. The challenge for her, as for Neudecker, for Walde, and for us as viewers, is to frame water, landscapes, and nature so that we can see them in their difference from what we already know and project into them, whether this is a set of conventions for representing landscape or another anthropocentric norm. By attending to the range of affective responses to these water works, we can see nature as both connected to and independent from our perceptions, not simply as another landscape for easy assimilation.

Borderlands of Ethics and Eco Art Landscape into Eco Art provides an armature with which central practices and issues in eco art can be understood and assessed. The articulations offered should put us in a position to respond to the question, “What do we, as eco art historians, 202

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artists, and people concerned with both ecology and culture, do now?” As the themes of chapters 2 through 5 have suggested, the paradigm of borders—between polities or species, within art practices such as landscape, land art, and eco art— offers considerable purchase for this question and for an assessment of my argument that there is indeed a connection in responses to the earth that proceeds from the landscape genre to land art and to today’s eco art. Instead of summarizing five chapters, eight case studies, and numerous examples, however, I instead conclude by briefly examining two approaches to the question of what to do, and then looking at eco artworks by Simon Starling and Olafur Eliasson that support active contemplation around the issues of planetary climate disruption. Rasheed Araeen first presented his essay “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” introduced above, in October 2008 in the “Manifesto Marathon” at London’s Serpentine Gallery. In the face of rapid environmental change and discussions of ecological apocalypse, he hoped that artists would turn to eco-art projects. He sharply criticized both the historical avant-garde for its slide into commercialization and the pioneering land and earth artists of the 1960s, whose work, he claimed, was too individualistic and has been similarly absorbed and blunted by contemporary art institutions. Araeen’s lament for the avant-garde is familiar. As we have seen, too, his critique of the unseeing egoism of American earth artists such as Smithson and Morris was a commonplace by the 1970s. What is unusual about his manifesto is its optimism about what art can accomplish, despite the ecological warning signs to which it often calls attention. While Araeen rails against ego in the realm of art that focuses on nature, he claims that the idea of making land into art in significant ways remains potent. How? Through what he calls “collective work” (683), a radical transformation of human consciousness. Araeen argues that an effectively environmentalist art must change our daily behavior on a large scale. He cites Beuys’s 7000 Oaks project (see fig. 5) as an example of how to make planting trees “part of people’s everyday life” (682). “What the world needs is rivers and lakes of clean water, collective farms and the planting of trees all over the world. An artistic imagination can in fact help achieve all these objectives; and it should . . . lay the foundation for a radical manifesto of art for the twenty-first century” (683). Many contemporary artists share Araeen’s sense of urgency. They agree that fellow artists should focus on ecological issues, but also caution that this emphasis is not yet sufficiently global. Araeen’s examples of art’s ameliorative effects center on bringing water issues—specifically, more widespread desalination—to the fore. Shai Zakai, a self-described eco artist from Israel whose practice involves water reclamation, wrote in response to the 2003 3rd World Water Forum in Japan, “Every artist should be deeply concerned with regard to the condition of water. The fact that they can reach areas where policy makers can’t, in terms of people and Bordering the Ubiquitous

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communities is something to acknowledge.”110 Again as we have seen, Basia Irland has similarly underlined the potency of social organization and participation in her many Gathering works. Embedded in these and many other practices is the key to ecological awareness through art that Araeen identifies: reaching people and strata of society not readily addressed by or included in other public and private discussions of the environment. A prime illustration is Vik Muniz’s celebrated Waste Land project and documentary film of 2010, directed by Lucy Walker, in which the Brazilian artist facilitated the creation of large-scale self-portraits in garbage of and by Rio de Janeiro’s catadores, men and women who eke out a living by collecting recyclable materials from massive refuse dumps. We are alerted to the social and human dimensions of climate change by the complex articulations of many other contemporary artists, some of whom were working at the apex of land art. Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison have been working on environmental issues in collaboration with communities for decades. They describe themselves on their webpage as “historians, diplomats, ecologists, investigators, emissaries and art activists.” In the contexts established by Araeen’s manifesto, it is an encouraging development that artists who do not portray themselves necessarily as environmentalists, and whose practices include a wider range of concerns, nonetheless address ecological issues with great acuity. Araeen insists that artists can and should make a difference in a world beset by environmental emergencies. He shows one way to move in this direction, by collectively implementing artistic ideas. Thinking of his polemic and of the many and various eco-art projects realized in recent years, we could be forgiven for wondering, with Charles Palermo, what kind and how much of a difference in this direction is “enough.”111 We do not have to believe that artists can save the earth. At the same time, not knowing exactly what difference a project in water reclamation, for example, will mean globally is not a sufficient excuse for cynicism and passivity. The writer Gretel Ehrlich is a powerful witness to this creed of acting in the aesthetic. In The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold, she meets the despairing sense of impotence in the face of global warming by suggesting that we act individually and collectively to “develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior, . . . then make decisions based on creating biological wealth.” “[L]isten to the truth the land will tell you,” she writes, and “act accordingly” (197). Eco artists present just such perspectives. Pico Iyer relates a revealing story about the Dalai Lama, one that could be applied to environmental concerns. Feeling that even someone in his position could never do enough about human suffering, the Dalai Lama told Iyer “that it was ‘up to us poor humans to make the effort,’ one step at a time,” as the Buddha did. Iyer continues, “Then as we were walking out of the room, he went back and turned off the light. It’s such a small thing, he said, it hardly makes a difference at all. And yet nothing is lost in the doing of it, and maybe a little good 204

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can come of it, if more and more people remember this small gesture in more and more rooms.”112 Malcolm Miles makes the point forcefully with regard to art and ecology: “Giving up is as unacceptable as climate change denial.”113 As I suggested in chapter 1, other ways to proceed in eco art can be derived from philosopher Lorraine Code’s book Ecological Thinking. Akin to Morton’s ecological thought, which encourages us to see connections across familiar boundaries, Code’s “ecological thinking” is a mode of involvement with the world. “Ecological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about ‘the environment,’ although these figure as catalysts among its issues. It is a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and reconfigures theory and practice. It does not reduce to a set of rules or methods; it may play out differently from location to location; but it is sufficiently coherent to be interpreted and enacted across widely diverse situations” (4). Code’s book enters into debates in philosophical ethics; she does not address aesthetics or art directly, but in keeping with her principles, her position is commensurate with much of the contemporary eco art that we have examined. “An epistemological position whose starting point is in the ecological situations and interconnections of knowers and knowing—be they benign, malign, or merely equivocal—departs radically from inquiry directed toward analyzing discrete, disparate beings, events, and items in the world, only subsequently to propose connections among them or to insert them into ‘contexts’ conceived as separately given” (5). Olafur Eliasson embraces this position and responsibility in his statements and eco artworks: “I believe that one of the major responsibilities of artists— and the idea that artists have responsibilities may come as a surprise to some—is to help people not only get to know and understand something with their minds but also to feel it emotionally and physically. By doing this, art can mitigate the numbing effect created by the glut of information we are faced with today, and motivate people to turn thinking into doing.”114 He composed these words as a 2016 awardee of a Crystal Award, given to “artists whose important contributions are improving the state of the world and who best represent the ‘spirit of Davos,’”115 the annual world economic forum in Switzerland. More than any other eco artist, Eliasson (fittingly, given the name of this award) uses the crystal to achieve these goals. To take such a specific entry point into his expansive work is necessarily partial but also illustrates the interconnectedness of his themes, methods, and materials. Eliasson’s deployments of crystals began in his early work and is still central to his global practice today. Die organische und kristalline Beschreibung (The organic and crystalline description; 1996), was shown in the ornate and crystalchandelier-festooned Baroque part of the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, in Graz, Austria. Eliasson used a light projector modified with yellow and blue filters to beam light onto a wave simulator. A standing mirror caught Bordering the Ubiquitous

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these images and refracted them around the room, aided by that space’s own mirrors and the crystals of the chandeliers. The room thus appeared to be underwater, moving with energy and current in a way directly comparable to the effects Pope achieved in his grotto and Drury with his camera obscuras placed near water. Eliasson made observers’ individual and collective share in processing what they see in such situations more explicit in the many works in which he used mirrors to create kaleidoscopes. An important example is Earth Kaleidoscope (2006), which in a passing reference to the many examples of land art that cut into or buried objects in the earth, was set into the ground. When we looked down, however, our gaze was met by the crystalline mirrors on the sides of this small sunken chamber, which reflected our looking and our environment. Beaming up from the bottom of this earth well were red lights that Eliasson installed in the base. We saw into the earth, back in time in an archaeological sense, but also self-consciously, given that we were ourselves reflected and because it was our technology that made the work possible. Eliasson also reversed this outside-in view. Collaborating with Hens Larson Architects, he designed the facade of Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre (2005–11) to incorporate what he calls glass “bricks” that mirror the symmetry of “the crystalline basalt columns commonly found in Iceland,”116 the same form that engaged Turner, Carus, and Beuys, as we have seen. To cite one more of many possible examples, Your disappearing garden of 2011 presented a room full of volcanic obsidian rock from the interior highlands of Iceland. Since the rock was highly reflective and in a way the opposite of volcanically formed crystals such as basalt—because the cooling of the earth’s crust did not produce any such patterns or disruptions in the smooth, mirrored surfaces—we see ourselves in the installation, as Eliasson emphasizes with this and many other titles that use the pronoun “your” (as we have seen in Your embodied garden [2013; see fig. 35] in chapter 4). Given that Your disappearing garden was exhibited in Manhattan, home of De Maria’s remaining earth room, we might well interpret Eliasson’s admonitory title as a comparison with the apparently cavalier use of land in land art. Eliasson’s work aligns closely with Code’s “ecological thinking,” an “epistemological position whose starting point is in the ecological situations and interconnections of knowers and knowing.” He is laudably attentive to the differences in our responses to his clear ecological messages. If we are inclined to object that his approach is too anthropocentric, too much about us, as I noted with respect to Roni Horn’s views on water in this chapter, then we might acknowledge the potential recognition of material, extra-human dimensions of both Code’s thinking and Eliasson’s work through Simon Starling’s different approach to eco art.117 Let me conclude with just two examples from his large and complex body of work. Both Island for Weeds (Prototype) (2003) and One Ton ii (2005; fig. 62) focus purposefully on border crossing to make ecological statements. A self-reflexive 206

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Fig. 62  Simon Starling, One Ton ii, 2005. Five handmade platinum/palladium prints of the Anglo American Platinum Corporation mine at Potgietersrus, South Africa, produced using as many platinum group metal salts as can be derived from one ton of ore. By kind permission of the artist.

metawork, the floating garden Island for Weeds animated the eighteenth-century importation to Scotland of rhododendrons as well as the plants’ subsequent takeover of local flora and recategorization as weeds. Mirroring the plants’ original migration from Spain, Starling’s island “transported” them to the Venice Biennale, where the artist represented Scotland in 2003. Importantly to the long view of the landscape tradition as attention to the earth that I have articulated, this plant is an almost architectural element in British landscape gardens of the eighteenth century such as Stourhead. There are analogies to be made with Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island (envisioned in 1970; realized posthumously in 2005) and, perhaps more significantly, with the long-standing impact of species migration because of human exploration and migration. The naturalist Joseph Banks, who accompanied James Cook to the south seas in 1768–71, for example, sought to improve the lot of Indigenous peoples by giving them domesticated animals new to their ecosystems. The ecological impact was horrendous. With happier overtones, Starling’s island raises issues of indigeneity, immigration, and hybridity that are directly analogous to the concerns of contemporary societies. Bordering the Ubiquitous

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Starling’s One Ton ii engages such concerns in a more material and less overtly art-historical manner. The title refers to the amount of ore that must be extracted and refined to produce the platinum used in the five images displayed, photographs that simply show the open-pit mine in Africa that was the source. Both telluric and national boundaries are crossed in the making of this and any image—an ecology, made visible by Starling, that is absurdly expensive in terms of the planet’s energy.118 What is the cost to the earth in material and organic terms? Starling poses a similar question in Inventar Nr. 8573 (Man Ray) (2006), a sequential slide projection in which we come closer and closer to a Man Ray photograph until we can see the “geology of its medium,” to paraphrase Parikka, the silver particles that make up the photograph. In chapter 1, I quoted Stuart Hall’s description of the inclusive processes of “articulation”: “An articulation is . . . the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?”119 Starling’s approach to eco art is specifically contextual and material in this way. His method can also stand as a paradigm for the pivotal but also individual and contingent connections that I have argued for in Landscape into Eco Art, those between landscape, land art, and eco art as well as the dialectical interactions between remote and ephemeral siting and the urban environment, between land and the museum as institution, and the many provisional borders that the long tradition of engagement with the earth that I have traced both establishes and holds as an open question.

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Notes

Chapter one 1. Bachmann, “Gatekeeper: A Foreword,” 12. 2. “Eco art” is a common short form for ecological art. As Sam Bower suggests, the term overlaps with several others: “At greenmuseum.org we use ‘environmental art’ as an umbrella term to encompass ‘eco-art’ / ‘ecological art,’ ‘ecoventions,’ ‘land art,’ ‘earth art,’ ‘earthworks,’ ‘art in nature’ and even a few other less-common terms.” Bower, “A Profusion of Terms.” I believe that “environmental art” is the more specific term and use “eco art” as the umbrella designation. Artists, art historians, and theorists began to use both “eco” and “environmental” to describe art practices ca. 1990. In 1989 Félix Guattari used the term “eco-art” to describe the “praxic opening-out” to society and the environmental concerns of the planet that defined ecology for him. In a note to what was then a new term, he adds, “The root ‘eco’ is used here in its original Greek sense of oïkos, that is, ‘house, domestic property, habitat, natural milieu.’” Guattari, Three Ecologies, 53, 91 n. 52. “Eco” also seems now to be the most widely used prefix or modifier, perhaps because “ecology”—in Bower’s straightforward definition, “the interdependence of living organisms in an environment”—underlines planetary interconnectedness, which fits easily with current notions of globalization. An example is “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” (2015), accessed March 30, 2016, http://www.ecomodernism.org /manifesto-english/. An extensive analysis of these terms and commitments from a practitioner’s perspective is Collins et al., “Lyrical Expression.” On the discourses of art and environmentalism from the 1960s on, see also Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, and McKee, “Art and the Ends of Environmentalism.” That these terms do not tolerate close and exclusive definition is suggested by their use in the titles listed in note 5 below. 3. Zarin, “Seeing Things.” Cf. Cheetham, “Natural Anxieties.” 4. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, “About the Center,” accessed April 12, 2016, http://www.clui.org /section/about-center. 5. Eco art proliferates, as do exhibition catalogues and publications, both trade and popular, concerning it and its individual practitioners (including Mark Dion, Olafur Eliasson, Roni Horn, and Richard Long). Land art and landscape have massive bibliographies and discipline-

shaping publications dedicated to their explication, including several on Robert Smithson. Publications on eco art can usefully be thought of in three broad categories: surveys, exhibitions and catalogues, and specialist studies. I cite many more titles in subsequent notes, but a selected list (to mid-2016) comprises the following key works. Surveys: Moyer and Harper, New Earthwork; Brown, Art and Ecology Now; Weintraub, To Life! Exhibitions: Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979, various sites in the United Kingdom, 2013–14; The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2013–14; Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2012–13; Earth: Art of a Changing World, Royal Academy, London, 2009–10; Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2009; Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism, toured by Independent Curators International in 2008–10; Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1992. Specialized studies: Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art; Demos, Decolonizing Nature; Miles, Eco-aesthetics; and Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems. 6. See http://www.capefarewellfoundation.com /carbon14/, accessed April 9, 2016. 7. This double session was convened by Sonja S. Lee and Therese O’Malley. 8. Art Journal 51 (Summer 1992), in which Timothy Luke posed a version of the question with which I open this book: “What is the role of art in today’s ecological crisis?” (72); “Art and Social Consciousness,” special issue, Leonardo 26, no. 5 (1993); and io-magazine (environmental art), Summer 1998. Important in this lineage is the Art Journal issue devoted to a reconsideration of art practices on the land (vol. 69, no. 4, Winter 2010). Other examples of eco art history include Greg Thomas’s “Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France” and Stephen Eisenman’s exhibition catalogue From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism. Suzaan Boettger has pointed out in “Within and Beyond the Art World” that ecocriticism in the visual arts lags behind that in other humanities fields. Given the intersections across the humanities and the influence of

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scholars from one area on those in another, however, that is so only if one draws the disciplinary boundaries quite strictly. 9. David E. Nye, “Response to the Roundtable,” in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 286. 10. Swenson, “Land Use in Contemporary Art,” 15. 11. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”; Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene”; Parikka, Anthrobscene. The wide use of the term “Anthropocene” has led scholars to ask about its precedents (for example, Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 [March 2015]: 59–72). One presage relevant to this study, and rarely recalled, is Thomas Berry’s “Art in the Ecozoic Era,” published in the groundbreaking summer 1992 theme issue of the Art Journal, “Art and Ecology.” Barry wrote: “To reestablish the Earth in a viable situation requires a transition from the terminal Cenozoic era to what might be called the Ecozoic era” (46). I discuss the meaning of and commitments to ecology in the art world later in this chapter. On this topic, cf. Demos, Decolonizing Nature, and McKee, “Art and the Ends of Environmentalism.” 12. The term “climate disruption” has been used by White House science advisor Dr. John P. Holdren for some time. See also Tom Rand’s Waking the Frog, in which the author makes the point that the common term “climate change” embeds the notion that climates always change, thus potentially denying the influence of human industrial activity. “Climate disruption” points to a short circuit in long-term norms and patterns. 13. Latour, “Anti-Zoom,” 122. 14. MacLaren, review of The Imprint of the Picturesque, 111. Cf. Ian McLean’s work on the “colonial picturesque” as backdrop to the negative effects of colonialism and globalization (“On the Edge of Change?,” 293). 15. I adopt the nomenclature used in the important exhibition catalogue Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974: “The terms ‘Land art,’ ‘Earth art,’ and ‘Earthworks’ tend to be used somewhat interchangeably in contemporary art discourse. For us, Land art is the more encompassing term, with Earth art and Earthworks being subsets.” Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the Earth, 17 n. 1. William Malpas comes to similar conclusions in Land Art: A Complete Guide. 16. A full reckoning about this and related terms with respect to contemporary art is found in T. J. Demos’s five-part commentary posted on the Fotomuseum Winterthur website: https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en /search?q=Demos. See also Rigby, “Writing in the Anthropocene.” 17. Steven Adams and Anne Greutzner Robins write in their introduction to Gendering Landscape Art (2000) that Clark’s book was at the turn of the millennium “still a whipping-post of new art history” (5). Noting W. J. T.

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Mitchell’s tough criticism (in Landscape and Power [1994]) of Clark’s assumptions about the unproblematic and evolving relationship between the landscape genre, human activity, and nature, they detail the new art history’s radical turn to an understanding of landscape as social history and ideology in the pioneering publications of Ann Bermingham, John Barrell, and others. 18. Stephen Bann notes the irony that the second edition of Clark’s book (1976), which laments the end of the genre, appeared during a resurgence of interest in nontraditional landscape practices by British artists such as Richard Long. Bann, “The Map as Index of the Real: Land Art and the Authentication of Travel,” in Kastner, Land and Environmental Art, 242. 19. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in Collected Writings, 164. Subsequent references to Smithson’s writings in this and the following chapters are to the Flam edition and appear parenthetically in my text. Andrew Menard notes that “[o]ne of the least appreciated aspects of twentieth-­ century American land art is that it arose as the nation’s nineteenth-century landscape was being rediscovered.” Menard, “Robert Smithson’s Environmental History,” 285. I agree on the importance of this confluence of interests and explore it further in this and the following chapters. Ron Graziani, in Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, discusses Smithson’s relationship with the notions of the picturesque and sublime in detail. 20. Cited in Boettger, Earthworks, 217. 21. Cited in Celant, Michael Heizer, 62. 22. Wallis in Kastner, Land and Environmental Art, 26. 23. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 12. 24. Thornes, “Rough Guide to Environmental Art,” 393. Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir makes the same point about Icelandic landscape painting in “Nature’s Otherness and the Limits of Visual Representations of Nature,” in Sigurjónsdóttir and Jónsson, Art, Ethics, and Environment, 117. 25. Strand, “At the Limits,” 81. 26. Georg Guðni in the documentary film Horizon (2015). 27. Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond, 9. 28. On issues of periodization in this context, see van Toorn, “On Site, out of Sight,” 17–18. 29. Influential in the fields of art history and visual studies, Mitchell’s collection built on studies from the 1980s that reopened the area of landscape to analysis in broadly cultural terms, for example, the work of Barrell and Bermingham in British landscape and of Cosgrove and Yi-Fu Tuan in cultural geography. See also Harris, “Postmodernization of Landscape.” Landscape is of course a focus in several other disciplines, including landscape architecture. For perspectives from this field, see Doherty and Waldheim, Is Landscape . . . ?

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30. Alfrey and Sleeman, “Framing the Outdoors,” 83. 31. “Maya Lin’s Memorial to Vanishing Nature,” June 25, 2012, accessed June 7, 2016, http://e360.yale.edu/feature /maya_lin_a_memorial_to_a_vanishing_natural _world/2545/. 32. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 21; Bal, Quoting Caravaggio. 33. De Landa, Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 15–16. 34. N. Collins, “Site Responsibility.” 35. The book Art in Action: Nature, Creativity, and Our Collective Future (2007) describes the restorative ecological work of dozens of artists under four headings that summarize this art’s relationships to land and nature: “celebrate,” “reflect,” interact,” and “protect.” Brown’s Art and Ecology Now (2014) surveys “site-reformative” eco art in terms of its attempts to “re/view, re/form, re/search, re/ use, re/create, and re/act.” 36. See also Banerjee, Arctic Voices. For a full analysis of this work’s effects on opinion and legislation, see Finis Dunaway, “Reframing the Last Frontier: Subhankar Banerjee and the Visual Politics of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” in Braddock and Irmscher, Keener Perception, and chap. 2 in Demos, Decolonizing Nature. 37. Simon, “Systemic Educational Approaches to Environmental Issues,” 148. 38. Brookner, “Rooting,” 100. 39. Braddock, “Ecological Art After Humanism.” 40. Mel Chin, lecture at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, March 9, 2016. For a full explanation of this work’s relation to science and to art—a controversy addressed in these terms by the National Endowment for the Arts when it granted, pulled, then restored Chin’s funding for the project—see Goto Collins (herself a prominent eco artist), “Ecology and Environmental Art in Public Place,” 31. 41. Miles, introduction to Eco-aesthetics, Kindle ed. 42. Kate Rigby, in “Writing in the Anthropocene,” has also taken up Adorno’s ideas in this context. 43. Miles, “Aesthetics and Engagement,” 202. 44. Jack W. Burnham, “Hans Haacke, Wind and Water Sculpture,” in Sonfist, Art in the Land, 109–10. 45. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 34. For a critique of Adorno’s reluctance to abandon his emphasis on the Anthropos in the direction of materialism, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, chap. 1, sec. 5. 46. Oard, “Poetry After Auschwitz.” 47. As noted, there is considerable controversy over the term “Anthropocene.” In “The Capitalocene, Part i,” Jason Moore construes the phenomenon as a complex of power relationships under capital, one that began in the sixteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution, and should not be judged solely in terms of its environmental effects. Even for those who do largely set the epoch’s beginnings in the eighteenth century, one main objection to the term is that

not all humans have caused anthropocentric climate change but particularly those responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the unabated extraction of resources typical of the time. Donna Haraway has thus specified our epoch the “Capitalocene” to lay the blame where it belongs. As she says, “it’s not a species act.” Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” 259. For a full discussion of these inquiries, see Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? But if one looks to the sorry tale of modernization both in and beyond capitalist societies in the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and then China, in their rush to modernize industry and agriculture, need to be seen as major contributors to current climate woes. The protocols of modernity are the real culprit here. While I have only seen the term “modernocene” in print once (Delaney, “Afterword,” 216), we already have more than enough terms to describe the conditions it captures. 48. Rigby, “Writing in the Anthropocene.” 49. Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 201. 50. A way into this much-discussed and embattled territory is through Timothy Morton’s study Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. See also Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things.” 51. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 21. 52. Ibid., 4. 53. Collins, “Site Responsibility,” 36, 31. 54. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 7. 55. Quoted in Burnham, “Hans Haacke,” 113, and J. Siegel, Artwords, 211. 56. “Matters of concern: An expression invented to contrast with matters of fact and to recall that ecological crises have no bearing on a type of beings (for example, nature or ecosystems) but on the way all beings are manufactured.” Latour, Politics of Nature, 244. 57. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 44. 58. C. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” 11. 59. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 45, 46. 60. Quoted in Burnham, “Hans Haacke,” 120, and C. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” 13. 61. C. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” 14. 62. Haacke, “Systems Aesthetics,” 28. 63. Slack, “Theory and Method of Articulation,” 113, 120. 64. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” (1980), as cited in ibid., 123. 65. Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” 141. 66. Haacke has a worthy successor in the eco-art practice of Tue Greenfort, whose installations in the 2000s sought “to reboot Haacke’s work as a resource for contemporary critical practice.” Skrebowski, “After Hans Haacke,” 120. 67. Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” 472, 478–79. 68. Noted above with reference to the exhibit Carbon 14, 2013, the tag “What does culture have to do with climate change? Everything” belongs to the group Cape Farewell, which sponsored Carbon 14.

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69. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 23. 70. Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” 42. The aesthetic separation that Adorno and Rancière assert here—and that I claim is essential to eco art as art—may be contrasted with Allen Carlson’s claim that intrusive land art such as Smithson’s and Heizer’s is an aesthetic “affront to nature”: “The environmental site is . . . changed from being a part of nature to being a part of an artwork and with this change the aesthetic qualities of nature are altered. Heizer, for example, says: ‘The work is not put in a place, it is that place.’” Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?,” 641. It is the change from “nature” to earthwork that constitutes the wrong for Carlson, who also argues that “different environments of the world at large are as aesthetically rich and rewarding as are works of art,” and that the two realms must be separated both ontologically and aesthetically. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, xv. For this and related perspectives from the philosophically oriented field of “environmental aesthetics,” see Brady, “Environmental Aesthetics.” I argue throughout this book that the boundaries explored and defined by landscape, land art, and eco art—those of nature, land, environment, and genre—are never so clear. 71. Sheren, Portable Borders, 3. 72. See O’Brian and White, Beyond Wilderness, and Solnit, “Unsettling the West,” in As Eve Said to the Serpent. 73. A powerful and subtle reading of this mode is found in Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque.” 74. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 9. See Denis Cosgrove, for whom landscape is, famously, “a way of seeing” (Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, xiv), and Neil Evernden, who examines “the highly cultural content of what is taken to be an objective entity” (Social Creation of Nature, xiii). See also Braun and Castree, Remaking Reality, for affirmative views of constructionism. Other sides of this realist-constructivist debate are offered in Hacking’s Social Construction of What?, Latour’s Reassembling the Social, and, in the eco-art context explicitly, Ivakhiv’s “Toward a Multicultural Ecology,” in which the author asks pointedly: “If nature, wilderness, ecology, and the environment are all socially constructed—ideas about the world rather than the world itself—what is it exactly that environmental protection efforts are fighting to defend and preserve?” (389). 75. The term “new materialism” is used so frequently in the humanities these days that its temporal and aspirational dimensions derive—and are garnering—attention in themselves. See J. Thomas, “Comment: Not Yet Far Enough.” 76. Parikka, “The Anthropocene,” a sec. of chap. 1 in Geology of Media. 77. Kenneth R. Olwig, “The ‘Actual Landscape,’ or Actual Landscapes?,” in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 159. In a review of Olwig’s Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World

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(2002), Tom Mels points to Olwig’s mastery of a terrain that embraces “the relationships between landscape, land, country, polity, place, custom, law, gender, the body, ‘race,’ nature and nation.” Mels, “Landscape Unmasked,” 379. 78. Guattari, Three Ecologies, 91 n. 52. 79. Herman Prigann in Strelow, Ecological Aesthetics, 214. 80. Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, 28–29. I have discussed the Kantian and Derridean contexts of the parergon in Kant, Art, and Art History. Other reconsiderations of landscape in art history and adjacent areas include DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory; J. Malpas, Place of Landscape; Dorrian and Rose, Deterritorialisations; and, most recently, Scott and Swenson, Critical Landscapes. See also Kwa, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention.” 81. Anne Spirn in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 92. 82. DaCosta, “Toronto aka Tkaronto.” 83. Z. Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” 244. 84. On enframing, which in its negative aspects is ultimately a Heideggerian concept, see Braun and Castree, Remaking Reality, 42. For a sharply contrasting view—that “the environment as an aesthetic object differs from a paradigmatic art object because of its frameless character” and that, even if it could be framed, this would disturb nature’s integrity,” see Saito, “Environmental Directions,” 172–73. See also my comments on uses of the word “environment” below. 85. Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 15–16, 101. 86. Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, 6. I employed Kaufmann’s approach in my book Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain (2012). 87. See http://www.prixpictet.com/. 88. E-mail correspondence with the author, March 28, 2016. Laura Coles and Philippe Pasquier define this area as follows: “Contemporary new media artists interacting with nature through the medium of digital technologies in situ continue this exploration [of human-technologynature, called HTN] within the genre referred to as ‘digital eco-art.’” Coles and Pasquier, “Digital Eco-art,” 3. 89. Braidotti, Posthuman, chap. 2. 90. Parikka, Geology of Media, chap. 1, “Materiality.” 91. On caves, see Cheetham and Harvey, “Obscure Imaginings.” On outer space, see Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing.” 92. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism, 237. 93. R. Williams, Keywords, 219. 94. McKibben, End of Nature, 42, 142. 95. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 24; Morton, Ecological Thought, 3; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore. 96. Coates, Nature, 3. 97. Evernden, Social Creation of Nature, 94. 98. Castree, preface to Making Sense of Nature. 99. Nabhan, “Cultural Parallax,” 90. 100. Marx, Machine in the Garden, 36. 101. Stengers, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” 62.

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102. On “political ecology,” see Demos, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology,” and Latour, “To Modernize or to Ecologize?,” as well as Braun and Castree, Remaking Reality. 103. Braddock and Irmscher, Keener Perception, 6–7. On the history and evolution of the term “ecology,” see also Nina-Marie Lister, “Is Landscape Ecology?” in Doherty and Waldheim, Is Landscape . . . ?, 115–37, and Worster, Nature’s Economy. A detailed account of the intercalations of “ecology,” “environment,” and “energy” is found in James Nisbet’s superb introduction to his book Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems. 104. Morton, Ecological Thought, 7. 105. Evernden, Natural Alien, 4–5. 106. Ragain, “‘Homeostasis Is Not Enough,’” 82. See also McKee, “Art and the Ends of Environmentalism,” for a much more detailed account than I can give here of a range of public and institutional attention to the “environmental crisis” in the 1980s and 1990s and up to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, including the pivotal 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. 107. Friedman, “Words on the Environment,” 253–54, 256. 108. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 346. 109. Benson, “Environment Between System and Nature,” 2. 110. On Kepes and Haacke, see Benson, “Environment Between System and Nature,” and C. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967.” For Kepes’s interactions with Smithson, see Martin, “Organicism’s Other.” 111. Cited in Kepes’s obituary in 2002, the MIT News, accessed April 4, 2016, http://news.mit.edu/2002/kepes. 112. See Davies, “Evocative Symbolism of Trees,” and Schama, Landscape and Memory, pt. 1. 113. See http://naturalhistory.si.edu/exhibits/darwin /treeoflife.html, accessed April 10, 2016. 114. This drawing is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://www.mfa.org/collections/object /the-uprooted-tree-172867, accessed April 8, 2016. 115. While overgeneralization is a danger in this context, and while contemporary art is a definitively global phenomenon, my experience presenting some of this material in China in 2015 suggests that cultural differences remain in the depiction of trees. Some students who heard me speak on deracinated trees were quite shocked by the graphic violence of the images and claimed that this approach would not be embraced in China. Yun-Fei Ji’s images of flooding in his homeland would be an exception that proves the rule. In comments on Ai Weiwei’s reconstructed trees, Adrian Locke has noted that, “[i]n China, trees are venerated as important counterparts to the dead on earth, the realm between heaven and the underworld.” Locke, “Introducing Ai Weiwei’s ‘Tree’: Behind the Scenes,” July 15, 2015, https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/ai-weiwei-6.

116. Widén, “Lost Woods.” 117. John Grade, Middle Fork, http://www.americanart .si.edu/exhibitions/online/wonder/grade.cfm, accessed April 12, 2016. 118. Charles Ray, “Artist’s Statement,” accessed April 12, 2016, http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork /189207. 119. See https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=DpuvLDrBPdA, accessed April 13, 2016. 120. Boettger, Earthworks, 222. 121. My thanks to Michaela Rife for pointing out this work by Arnatt. 122. Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy,” in Modern Painters, vol. 3, pt. 4, chap. 12, 362. 123. Cited in Adcock, “Conversational Drift,” 35. 124. Joseph Beuys in “7000 Oaks: Essay by Lynne Cook with Statements by Joseph Beuys,” 1, accessed May 23, 2016, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/cookebeuys.pdf. 125. In a sustained and alternative reading of the Spiral Jetty, however, Boetzkes suggests that the artist did not so much oppose current ecological and environmental thought as sidestep such current issues through a series of manipulations “by which the site’s unrepresentability becomes the subject of the artwork itself,” and through “an attentiveness to the earth as an unfathomable phenomenological event” well beyond the ameliorations of any human science. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 67, 83. 126. Cited in Sleeman, “Nature, Like a Person, Is Not One-Sided,” 211. 127. See http://www.uprootedtree.com/artistic -concept-2/artistic-concept/, accessed April 8, 2016. 128. A further extension and explicitly environmental retake on Smithson’s pour in Vancouver is found in Christos Dikeakos’s visual meditation on the waste produced by the waning apple industry in British Columbia. Apple Spill Dumped Culls (2012), for example, shows discarded apples poured down a small embankment. Dikeakos was the photographer of Smithson’s spill. 129. Durant, “Artist’s Statement.” 130. Solnit, “Concrete in Paradise.” 131. Prigann, “Hanging Tree.” 132. Reitzenstein, “Transformer.” 133. Reitzenstein in Grande, Art Nature Dialogues, 199, 195. 134. Clark, “Tree-Dumb Reigns.” 135. “Melanie Gilligan on Commerce, Climate Change, and More.” The video is available in its entirety via Cape Farewell: http://www.capefarewellfoundation.com /carbon14/deep-time/, accessed April 7, 2016. The title Deep Time echoes with “deep ecology.” According to Carolyn Merchant, deep ecologists “call for a total transformation in science and worldviews that will replace the mechanistic framework of domination with an ecological framework of interconnectedness and reciprocity.” Merchant, Radical Ecology, 11.

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136. Deep Time would have fit well into the exhibition Way of the Shovel, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2014. 137. See Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain. 138. On this history, see David Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 413–37. 139. See http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks /gilbert-george-the-nature-of-our-looking-t03452 /text-catalogue-entry, accessed April 8, 2016. 140. Interview at Tate Modern, April 30, 2007, http:// www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/gilbert_george _artists_talk/default.jsp. 141. In chapter 7 of Decolonizing Nature T. J. Demos gives an extended and largely negative appraisal of dOCUMENTA 13’s proclaimed interests in ecology. His extensive reading does not include Huyghe’s work. 142. See, for example, Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, Speculative Turn. 143. Huyghe in Goodden, “Pierre Huyghe Explains.” 144. Weir, “Myrmecochory Occurs,” 29. 145. Huyghe in Goodden, “Pierre Huyghe Explains.”

Chapter two 1. W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 20. 2. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 41. Of course, legions of commentators and artists found reasons not to use the term “postmodern.” It is difficult to think of a more contentious term in the art discourse of the last forty years. I have approached this topic and its controversies in Remembering Postmodernism. 3. Harrison, “Art & Language Paints a Landscape,” 618. 4. Ibid., 621. 5. Cited in ibid., 621–22. 6. Harrison, “Effects of Landscape,” 234. 7. Harrison, “Art & Language Paints a Landscape,” 630. 8. Ibid., 622. 9. Harrison, “Effects of Landscape,” 234. 10. Cited in Boettger, Earthworks, 122. 11. Baker, “Artworks on the Land,” 75. 12. Boettger discusses this exhibit and specific work in detail in Earthworks, chap. 6. 13. Oppenheim in Boettger, Earthworks, 141. 14. Ibid., 223. 15. Sharp, “Notes Toward an Understanding of Earth Art,” n.p. 16. Cited in Boettger, Earthworks, 172, from her interview with Long in 1996. 17. Adcock, “Conversational Drift,” 35; Glueck, “The Earth Is Their Palette (Helen and Newton Harrison),” 182. 18. McKee, “Land Art in Parallax,” 45. 19. “Ecotopia: A Virtual Roundtable,” in Wallis et al., Ecotopia, 11–12. 20. Ibid., 52, 12.

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21. Kahana, http://ummelfahemgallery.org/?page _id=27021, accessed April 19, 2016. My thanks to Adi Louria-Hayon for alerting me to this exhibit. For a full discussion of this topic, including Dani Karavan’s Uprooted Olive Tree, exhibited in Berlin in 2008, see Bar-Maor, “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” 22. Much has been written about the archaeological imperative in contemporary art and regarding Dion especially. See, for example, Roelstraete, Way of the Shovel. 23. Schwartz, “New York—Tacita Dean.” 24. M. Phillips, “What Is Tradition?,” 5, 7. 25. John Gibson in Boettger, Earthworks, 122. 26. Connor, “Topologies,” 116. 27. Schoen, Rúrí, 38. 28. Cited in ibid. 29. See Gremaud, “Power and Purity.” 30. Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, 131. 31. Chunglin Kwa, in “Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention of the Natural Landscape,” argues convincingly that von Humboldt’s unified, abstract notion of “landscape” was also inspired by landscape painting, especially the naturalistic manner of seventeenth-century Dutch artists and the work of William Hodges, who accompanied James Cook on his second voyage (1772–74). 32. A detailed account of Nine Letters is given by Oskar Bätschmann (“Carl Gustav Carus [1789–1869]”), who also supplies a precise understanding of the debates around the landscape genre from the late seventeenth century to Carus’s time. On natural history and landscape depiction in Germany at this time, see T. Mitchell, Art and Science. On the discipline of geography as it understood landscape in this context, see Tang, Geographic Imagination of Modernity. A compelling new reading of Carus’s significance to Friedrich’s painting is given by Nina Amstutz in “Caspar David Friedrich and the Anatomy of Nature.” 33. The term “geognostic landscape” was coined by the geologist Christian Keferstein. Bätschmann, “Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869),” 40. 34. Cited in ibid., 29–30. 35. Ibid., 43. 36. If “earth-death” seems overly dramatic, I would suggest that it is literal as a description of the environmental enormities described in Donald Worster’s Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance, for example. The phrase also summons up many commentaries on the “death of nature” theme. For Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton, for example, it is the concept of nature that must be jettisoned because it stands in the way of a truly ecological worldview. For others, it is the natural world that is being killed off by humans, an eventuality that has in turn spawned a fascination for “the world without us,” to borrow the title of Alan Weisman’s bestseller on the topic, speculation on the persistence of nature in a future without Homo sapiens.

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37. Excerpt from John Ruskin, Lectures on Landscape: Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin (New York: National Library Association, n.d.), Kindle ed. 38. The title of a lecture by Paul L. Sawyer at Cornell University, September 2012, was “The First Ecologist: John Ruskin and the Futures of Landscape.” 39. Hamilton, Turner, 355. 40. Solnit, “Unsettling the West,” in As Eve Said to the Serpent, 103. 41. Braddock and Irmscher, Keener Perception, 3. 42. Diane Burko in Verchot, “Artist Diane Burko Ties Together Art and Science.” For a full account of Burko’s practice, see the exhibition catalogue Diane Burko: Glacial Shifts, Changing Perspectives. 43. Diane Burko in Orlove, “Marking ‘Traces of Change.’” 44. Carey et al., “Glaciers, Gender, and Science,” 16. 45. Burko in Orlove, “Marking ‘Traces of Change.’” 46. Diane Burko, “Elegy Series,” http://www.dianeburkophotography.com/elegy-series. 47. Neudecker’s text is titled “Lamentations . . . or: The Escape from the ‘Grid’” and functions as a commentary to the work There Is Always Something More Important (2012), seen in the exhibition Im Schein des Unendlichen: Romantik und Gegenwart / In the Limelight of the Infinite: Romanticism and the Present, Altana Kulturstiftung, December 16, 2012–February 24, 2013. “Towards a Contemporary Sublime” is the title of a presentation she gave at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, October 9, 2012. 48. Paterson, “Vatnajökull (the Sound of).” Although the phone link is no longer active (leading to the thought that the glacier has disappeared), Paterson has placed a sound clip of her work on her website. 49. Kennedy, “Callers Take Part in Art.” 50. R. Phillips, “Indigenous Lands / Settler Landscapes,” 92. 51. Cited in Iseke-Barnes and Estrada, “Art This Way,” 13. The examples I discuss are North American, but in analogous ways the tragic clash of views on land and landscape is a global phenomenon, taking place wherever there was colonial expansion. Other central locales of such strife of course include Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. 52. Skinner, “Settler-Colonial Art History,” 136. 53. Indigenous artistic interventions in ecological debates are global in practice and implication. T. J. Demos gives pertinent examples in “Rights of Nature.” For a full account of land and Indigeneity, see especially Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, and Mackey, Unsettled Expectations. 54. L. Todd, “Yuxweluptun,” 344. 55. Mackey, introduction to Unsettled Expectations, Kindle ed. 56. Alfred, “What Is Radical Imagination?,” 6. 57. Hill, “Kent Monkman’s Constitutional Amendments,” 51.

58. Katz, “Miss Chief Is Always Interested,” 17. 59. Di Chiro, “Nature as Community.” 60. On settler colonialism from a comparative angle, see Skinner, “Settler-Colonial Art History.” The exhibition catalogue Picturing the Americas (Brownlee, Piccoli, and Uhlyarik) provides an overview of the exportation of European landscape norms to both South and North America. 61. A web version of this project was developed in 1995: “Komar and Melamid: The Most Wanted Paintings on the Web.” 62. Wilton and Barringer, American Sublime, 236. 63. Chianese, “Avoidance of the Sublime,” 454. 64. Saenz, “Kent Monkman’s Trappers of Men.” 65. Jensen, “Seeing in Stereo.” 66. Tousley, “Change on the Range.” 67. See Porterfield, “History Painting,” and De Blois, “Dancing with the Berdashe.” 68. Kent Monkman in Commanda, “Renown.” 69. Hill, in Thériault, Interpellations, 55. On this complex painting, see Belitz, “Subversion Through Inversion.” 70. Kwa, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention,” 159. 71. Griggs, “Background on the Term ‘Fourth World.’” 72. Rykner, “Illegal Installation of Clara-Clara.” 73. Denver Art Museum, “Significant 2015 Acquisitions.” 74. See DeLue, George Inness, and Bedell, Anatomy of Nature. 75. Nagam and Swanson, “Decolonial Interventions in Performance,” 32–33. 76. Kent Monkman quoted in C. Hampton, “Kent Monkman’s Buffalo Jump.” 77. Singhal, “Bull in a China Shop.” 78. Cited in Hubbard, “Hearts on the Ground,” 24. 79. Ibid., 20. 80. McGregor, “Coming Full Circle,” 385. 81. This is far too large and important a topic to treat here. See the book central to ongoing disputes about whether Indigenous peoples have been and are superior stewards of the earth, Shepard Krech’s skeptical Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999). For rejoinders, including Krech’s, see Harkin and Lewis, Native Americans and the Environment (2007). 82. Chianese, “Avoidance of the Sublime,” 453. 83. Cited in Duffek and Willard, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories, 7. 84. For information on these elements, see Perpetual Salish, “Coast Salish Design Elements.” 85. Townsend-Gault, “Salvation Art of Yuxweluptun,” 5. 86. Cited on the gallery website where this work is held: http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork .php?mkey=42661, accessed April 22, 2016. 87. The exhibition The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art, curated by Dawn Ades in 2011, drew out these connections for the first time.

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88. Townsend-Gault, “Salvation Art of Yuxweluptun,” 6. 89. Jun, “Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.” 90. Yuxweluptun in Milmine, “Art, Identity, and Culture,” 88. 91. Arthur Renwick in Baird, “. . . I Shed no Tears.” 92. Hampton, {Person, Place, Thing}, 34. 93. Dales, “Place Like Home.” 94. Cited in ibid. 95. On the crucial nineteenth-century history of the photograph as a landscape medium for expropriation, see Snyder, “Territorial Photography.” 96. L. Todd, “Yuxweluptun,” 346. 97. On the multiplex relationships between mapping and landscape, see Casey, Earth-Mapping. 98. Devine, “Bonnie Devine’s Woodlands.” Unless otherwise noted, statements by Devine are from this presentation and my interview with the artist in June 2016. My thanks to Bonnie Devine for her generosity and precision in discussing this work. 99. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 163. See also Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, in which the author explicitly develops Wolfe’s analysis. 100. Bonnie Devine in Commanda, “Bonnie Devine’s Battle for the Woodlands.” 101. Artist Christos Dikeakos also makes this critical point effectively by superimposing Indigenous names over sites in contemporary Vancouver in his Sites and Places series (1992). 102. “Chief Tecumseh,” accessed June 16, 2016, http:// www.indigenouspeople.net/tecumseh.htm. 103. Devine in Commanda, “Bonnie Devine’s Battle for the Woodlands.” 104. Kelsey, “Landscape as Not Belonging,” 204.

Chapter three 1. Michael Heizer in “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 247. This conversation was originally published in the all-important first issue of Avalanche, 1970. 2. Willoughby Sharp in Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the Earth, 38. 3. In their superb introductory essay to Ends of the Earth, Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon masterfully identify and debunk these “myths” of land art. My view is that, fictional as such oppositions have always been, they were and remain influential. 4. On De Maria’s complex’s notions of siting work, see McFadden, “Toward Site.” On site-specific work in general, see Kwon, One Place After Another. 5. Wagner, “Being There.” My references are to the full text of the interview Wagner draws on, published in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 242–52. Other references to Smithson’s writings in this edition are made parenthetically in my text.

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6. Griffin et al., “Remote Possibilities,” 288. 7. Brian Wallis, “Survey,” in Kastner, Land and Environmental Art, 23. 8. As cited by Claire Bishop in Griffin et al., “Remote Possibilities,” 290. 9. Sol LeWitt in Boettger, Earthworks, 88. Boettger’s is the fullest reading of this exhibit. 10. On this topic, see Roberts, Mirror-Travels. Scholarship on Smithson is both abundant and of exceptional intellectual quality and scope. See, for example, books by Lynne Cooke, Caroline Jones, Ann Reynolds, Jennifer Roberts, and Gary Shapiro. 11. On this work’s relationship with the information theory of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, see Lauder, “‘Sensitivity Information.’” 12. Boettger, Earthworks, 6–9. 13. Boettger gives a detailed account of this important exhibition in ibid., 9–15. 14. Lippard, “Introduction: Down and Dirty,” 16. 15. Dennis Oppenheim, http://www.dennis-oppenheim .com/works/1969/144 and the next page, accessed April 30, 2016. 16. Oppenheim, interview with Patricia Norvell in 1969 in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 27. 17. Parikka, “An Alternative Media Materialism,” in chap. 1 of Geology of Media. 18. Oppenheim in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 25. 19. Ibid., 28. On this cosmic perspective, see Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing.” 20. See Barrell, Idea of Landscape, and Waites, Common Land in English Painting. 21. As noted, the summer 2010 issue of the Art Journal examines global contemporary art concerned with land. 22. Denes, “Notes on Eco-logic,” 387–88. 23. Denes, “Dream,” 929. 24. Denes, http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/works7 .html, accessed May 1, 2016. 25. Gerrard, “Q and A.” 26. John Gerrard in J. Jones, “Where the Internet Lives.” 27. Wikipedia, “Data Farming,” accessed May 2, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_farming. 28. Morton also discusses Manufactured Landscapes. See Morton, Hyperobjects, 72. 29. Morton, “Zero Landscapes,” 80. 30. Ibid., 83, 84. 31. Ferguson, “Climate Change and Us,” 35. 32. Nicholls and Crangle, “Introduction: On Bathos.” 33. Gerrard, “Interview.” 34. Waites, Common Land in English Painting, 46. 35. Alexander Pope, “Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” in Alexander Pope: The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 197. 36. Harrison, “Art & Language Paints a Landscape,” 622.

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37. Ferguson, “Climate Change and Us,” 37. 38. Nicholls and Crangle, “Introduction: On Bathos,” 5. 39. See http://www.videoartincanada.ca/artist .php%253Fid=13§ion=clip.htm, accessed April 26, 2016. 40. Martindale, “Curbed Concepts,” 23. 41. Ibid., 22, 21, 1. 42. Robert Louis Chianese, “Levitated Mass,” American Scientist 101, no. 4 (July–August 2013): 268. 43. Michael Heizer, “Interview with Julia Brown,” in Kastner, Land and Environmental Art, 228. 44. Double Negative: A Website About Michael Heizer, accessed April 27, 2016, http://doublenegative.tarasen.net /city.html. 45. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Levitated Mass.” A full reading of land art’s relationships with ancient art can be found in Amizlev, “Land Art: Layers of Memory.” 46. Huyghe in Goodden, “Pierre Huyghe Explains.” 47. Artangel maintains an excellent website devoted to the project: http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2007 /vatnasafn_library_of_water. 48. See M. Nixon, “Roni Horn,” and Avgikos, “Events and Relations.” 49. This pattern of extension includes the imaging of the Library in the works of such writers as Rebecca Solnit, who was the second writer-in-residence there and who memorialized her time in The Faraway Nearby (2013). 50. Horn, “Saying Water” (2013), is a reading performance of her reflections. 51. Perry, “Watery Weather,” 185. 52. Godfrey, “Roni Horn’s Icelandic Encyclopedia,” 951. 53. “Roni Horn in Conversation.” 54. Roni Horn in Robert Enright, “Manifold Singularity.” 55. Entry for Water, Selected in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, 165. 56. Fer, “Complete with Missing Parts,” 25, 36. 57. Ibid., 25. 58. See C. Jones, Machine in the Studio. 59. Ibid., 268. 60. See http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks /horn-water-selected-p79355. See also James Lingwood, “Journey to the Library of Water,” accessed August 5, 2017, https://www.artangel.org.uk/library-of-water /journey-to-the-library-of-water/. 61. Jan Avgikos states that such “placement” of works, a strategy often used by Horn, “causes them to become activated and provocative in ways they might not otherwise be.” Avgikos, “Events and Relations,” 97. 62. “Roni Horn in Conversation.” 63. Roni Horn, “The Nothing That Is” (1998–2003), accessed April 28, 2016, http://www.libraryofwater.is /newspaper_01.html.

Chapter four 1. McEvilley, “Art’s Shifting Role,” 27. 2. Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the Earth, 17.

3. Hirschel and Richards, foreword and acknowledgments to S. Smith, Beyond Green, 9. 4. David Buckland, Edith Devaney, and Kathleen Soriano, “Curators’ Foreword,” in Earth: Art of a Changing World, 4; Graham Sheffield and Kate Bush, preface to Manacorda and Yegdar, Radical Nature, 7. 5. Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems, 41. 6. Alexander Rodchenko in Gaiger and Wood, Art of the Twentieth Century, 101. 7. Lucy Lippard, in her untitled introduction to 955,000, in the 2012 facsimile edition of these four exhibitions titled 4,492,040 (the total population of the host cities), n.p. 8. A survey of the inception and usage of this term can be seen in Fox, “Geoaesthetics.” 9. Shapiro, “Territory, Landscape, Garden,” 109. 10. Serres, Natural Contract, 32. 11. Shiva, “Time to End War Against the Earth.” See also Solnit, “Call Climate Change What It Is.” 12. R. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2. 13. Serres, Natural Contract, 29. 14. Ibid., 31. 15. Berlinische Galerie, “Michael Sailstorfer Forst.” 16. Sailstorfer, “Interview.” 17. See https://twitter.com/hashtag/crazyweather. A wide range of contemporary works focusing on weather can be found in Weather Report: Art and Climate Change, the catalogue of an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard in 2007. 18. Eliasson, “Museums Are Radical,” 138. 19. Eliasson in Herbert, “Olafur Eliasson.” 20. Eliasson, “Your Embodied Garden, 2013,” olafureliasson.net. 21. Huyghe, “‘Celebration Park.’” 22. Huyghe, “Artist’s Talk.” 23. Huyghe, “A Journey That Wasn’t.” 24. Huyghe, “Legend of Two Islands,” 1. 25. Huyghe quoted in the Art 21 entry on his video, http://www.pbs.org/art21/images/pierre-huyghe /a-journey-that-wasn%E2%80%99t-2005–0?slideshow=1, accessed May 8, 2016. 26. Huyghe, “Artist’s Talk.” 27. Christine Ross has used the term “ecologization” to describe a different temporal process. In The Past Is the Present (49), she writes, “the depreciation of linear perspective turns unproductiveness into a modality of ‘non-progressive’ connections between beings, objects, and sites that lose in impermeability what they gain in non-forward relationality. These are special connections in which environments are considered not as mere means but also as ends, and in which perception per se (the perception of the spectator or the perception of the performer) is ecological insofar as the subject is made to be perceptually attuned with his or her environment

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instead of being detached from it, in control over it, or propelled away from it towards an unreachable ideal beyond that environment.” 28. Cited in Perrault, “Nonsites in the News,” 46. 29. The pull of this mythology is extended in Elise Rasmussen’s multipart exhibition Fragments of an Imagined Place (2016). 30. See Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver.” 31. Smithson in ibid., 25. 32. Chris Drury, “Artist Statement,” chrisdrury.co.uk. 33. Hamish Fulton cited in Drury, “Life, Death, and Transformation,” 2. 34. Drury, “Life, Death, and Transformation,” 4. 35. Drury, “Antarctica,” chrisdrury.co.uk. 36. Drury, “Double Echo,” chrisdrury.co.uk. 37. Drury, “Everything Nothing,” chrisdrury.co.uk. 38. Drury, “Life, Death, and Transformation,” 4. 39. See Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 124–31. 40. Drury, “Cloud Chambers,” chrisdrury.co.uk. 41. Drury, “Waves of Time.” 42. Rife, “Chris Drury’s Carbon Sink.” 43. Whitney Davis provides a detailed reading of art history’s investments in the prehistoric in Davis, Replications. Margaret Conkey has written about the problems with the term “Paleolithic art.” Conkey, “Making Things Meaningful.” 44. Janson, “Vermeer and the Camera Obscura.” 45. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. ii, chap. xi, sec. 17. For a more detailed reading, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer. 46. Cited in N. Miller, Heavenly Caves, 18. For the custom of decorating caves in the ancient world, see Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture. 47. Pope in Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England, 255. 48. Ibid., 259. 49. Ibid., 259, 262. 50. Pope, “On His Grotto at Twickenham,” in Complete Poetical Works, 163. 51. Shapiro, Earthwards, 95. 52. Drury, “Wave Chamber,” chrisdrury.co.uk. 53. Drury, “Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky,” chrisdrury.co.uk. 54. Cited in Sleeman, “Nature, Like a Person, Is Not One-Sided.” 55. Holt, “Sun Tunnels.” Subsequent references in this section are to this source document. 56. Lee, “Art as a Social System,” 54. 57. Anne M. Wagner writes, “together they form a cumbersome camera, an enormous viewing device to record nothing less than the passage of celestial time.” Wagner, “Being There,” 265. 58. J. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 237. 59. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 29, 34.

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60. Nizam, “Interview with James Nizam.” 61. Dubé, “Metaphorical Spaces,” 18. 62. Morell, “Tent-Camera.” 63. Morell in Martineau, “Conversation with Abelardo Morell,” 156. 64. Morell, “Artist’s Statement,” cited in E. Siegel, “Wonderlands,” 17. 65. Morell in Martineau, “Conversation with Abelardo Morell,” 156. 66. Ibid., 159. 67. Cheetham, “The ‘Only School’ of Landscape Revisited,” 145 n. 3. 68. On this important topic, see Wallace, “Studio of Nature.” For more recent contexts, see C. Jones, Machine in the Studio, on the “post-studio artist.” 69. Morell, “Tent-Camera.” 70. See Bear, Disillusioned. 71. Morell in Martineau, “Conversation with Abelardo Morell,” 159. 72. Morell, “Camera Obscura,” abelardomorell.net. 73. Morell in Martineau, “Conversation with Abelardo Morell,” 158. 74. E-mail from the artist, June 17, 2016. My sincere thanks to Andrew Wright for his generosity in discussing this work. 75. E-mail correspondence with the author, May 28, 2016. 76. Serres, Natural Contract, 29. 77. Manacorda, “There Is No Such Thing as Nature,” 14.

Chapter five 1. Jasanoff, “Heaven and Earth,” 31–32, 33. 2. Krastava, “Spaces, Lines, Borders,” 18. 3. Evernden, Natural Alien, 38. 4. Descola, Ecology of Others, 5. 5. “Ecotone,” in Environmental Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., 1:432. Since writing this paragraph, I have come across a precedent for using the term in this way: Edward S. Casey’s “Edge(s) of Landscape.” 6. Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems, 104. 7. Koolhaas, “Junkspace.” 8. Brambilla et al., introduction to Borderscaping, 2. 9. See Sheren, Portable Borders. 10. Braidotti, introduction to Posthuman. 11. Yukinori Yanagi on the Tate Modern site for this work: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/yanagi-pacific -t07464/text-display-caption, accessed May 17, 2016. 12. Koziara in Pomnichowski, “Artist Jaroslaw Koziara’s Gigantic Fish.” 13. Lippard, Lure of the Local, 288, 282. 14. Sheren, Portable Borders, 3. 15. For a detailed history, see Border Machines, “Performing the Border.” 16. These commentaries are now on his website: http://

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francisalys.com/?s=green+line, accessed May 17, 2016. 17. The artist C. Wells has explored the advent of road marking in his exhibition 1911 (2002). Alÿs has done similar work in Panama in Painting/Retoque (2008). 18. See http://francisalys.com/when-faith-moves -mountains/. 19. McKee, “Wake, Vestige, Survival,” 32. See also Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing.” 20. Cited in Cotter, “Non-Billboard in Washington.” 21. Rutkauskas, “Borderline.” 22. Center for Land Use Interpretation, “United Divide.” Remarkably and without planning, Andreas Rutkauskas reports that he “met Matthew Coolidge from CLUI at the former crossing at Big Beaver, Saskatchewan. I was photographing with my 4x5 camera, and a white truck came over a rise on the U.S. side of the border. I assumed it was Border Patrol until a man exited the vehicle with a Nikon DSLR wearing a polo shirt and jeans. We sat at the abandoned crossing for quite some time exchanging stories, and discussing our respective projects, but neither RCMP nor Border Patrol came to investigate.” E-mail correspondence, June 6, 2016. 23. Alan Michelson, e-mail correspondence with the author, June 10, 2016. I am grateful to Michelson for explaining these issues in detail and for supplying transcriptions and translations of the work’s sound track. 24. Michelson, “TwoRow ii.” A full account of the agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch can be founds at http://www.onondaganation.org/culture /wampum/two-row-wampum-belt-guswenta/, accessed December 12, 2016. 25. Cited in Clifford, Routes, 25. 26. Ibid. 27. National Gallery of Canada entry for Shelley Niro: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/shelley-niro. 28. Todd in Abbott, “Interviews with Loretta Todd, Shelley Niro, and Patricia Deadman,” 341. 29. Explanatory text sent to the author, March 17, 2013. 30. Chin, “Landscape.” 31. Cheetham, “Struck by Likening.” I examine these and related issues in Struck by Likening: The Power & Discontents of Artworld Analogies, an exhibition at the McMaster University Museum of Art, August 19–December 2, 2017. 32. Harrist, “Background Stories,” 38. 33. Yao Lu, “Artist’s Statement.” 34. Harrist, “Background Stories,” 35. 35. Gilmurray, “Ecoacoustics.” 36. Young, “Artist’s Statement.” 37. Basia Irland, http://www.basiairland.com/recent -projects/gatherings.html, accessed January 21, 2013. 38. Irland, Water Library, 88. 39. Gerber, “Nature of Water,” 45. 40. Lippard, “Confluences,” 56.

41. Vartanian and Skov, “Neural Correlates of Viewing Paintings,” 52. 42. J. V. Smith, review of Crystal Lattices. 43. Parikka, Geology of Media, chap. 1, “Materiality.” 44. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 1:146. 45. Ibid., 2:296, 2:297, 1:155. 46. Stone of Light: Crystal Visions in Art, an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2015, bore witness to this ongoing interest. 47. Cited in Haag Bletter, “Interpretation of the Glass Dream,” 34. See also Prange, Kristalline als Kunstsymbol. 48. Calter, Squaring the Circle. 49. Park, “Crystal.” 50. “Crystal,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. 51. Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 7, 64, 92, 93. 52. Influenced by Worringer and Schopenhauer, Wassily Kandinsky also deployed the image of the crystal as a key to his search for essence. For the relationship of this quest to pioneering abstract art, see Cheetham, Rhetoric of Purity. 53. On Deleuze and film, see Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 92. 54. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, chap. 4. 55. On this topic, see Eggebeen, “‘Between Two Worlds.’” 56. Beuys’s statement is cited in “7000 Oaks: Essay by Lynne Cook with Statements by Joseph Beuys,” accessed May 23, 2016, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/cooke beuys.pdf. 57. Benedictus, “Roger Hiorns.” 58. Onians, Neuroarthistory, and Onians, European Art. 59. Stafford, Echo Objects, 109. 60. Zeki, Inner Vision. 61. For a critique of this linkage, see Noë, Strange Tools, chap. 10, in which the author claims that neuroaesthetics is “just another chapter in neuroscience’s attempt to come up with a brain-based theory of everything,” as opposed to attending also to the body and the nonhuman world. 62. Onians, Neuroarthistory, 132. 63. Perspectives on Plasmas, “What Are Plasmas?” 64. Max Plank Institute, “Plasma Crystal Experiment.” 65. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 49. 66. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 32. 67. DeSantis, “Albright Show Offers Unique Perspectives,” 57. 68. Carpenter, “Alan Sonfist’s Public Sculptures,” 152. 69. See Bedell’s Anatomy of Nature, DeLue’s George Inness, and Raab’s Frederic Church for full discussions of the connections among American landscape depiction, geology, and attention to precise depictions of nature in general as inspired by Ruskin and von Humboldt especially in the nineteenth century. 70. James D. Dana and Benjamin Silliman Jr. to Edward

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Hitchcock, June 26, 1854, Collection of Amherst College, accessed May 24, 2016, https://acdc.amherst.edu/explore /asc:53717/asc:53720. 71. T. Mitchell, Art and Science, 173. 72. Walters, “Working ‘in the Opposite Direction.’” 73. Joseph Beuys interview with Caroline Tisdall, 1978, in Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 21. 74. Beuys, What Is Art?, 61, 65. 75. Cited in Antliff, Joseph Beuys, 125. 76. In “Ecological Art After Humanism,” Allan C. Braddock offers an enlightening reading of this performance in terms of species differentiation. 77. Joseph Beuys interview with Caroline Tisdall, 1978, in Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 39. 78. See Demos, Decolonizing Nature, chap. 2, for a full consideration of climate refugees from the Maldives to the Arctic. 79. See Bennett, Practical Aesthetics; Elkins, Pictures and Tears; and Starr, Feeling Beauty. 80. Cowspiracy infographic, accessed May 20, 2016, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/544dc5a1e4b07 e8995e3effa/t/54e4d927e4b0aaf066abfcf0/1424283943008 /Cowspiracy-Infographic-Metric.png. 81. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 88. 82. See https://www.theguardian.com/environment /gallery/2009/may/31/deforestation-amazon-cattle, accessed August 4, 2017. 83. Rosing and Eliasson, “Ice, Art, and Being Human.” 84. Beltrá, “Artist’s Statement.” 85. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, 4. 86. “Over the River,” accessed May 27, 2016, http://www .overtheriverinfo.com/. 87. Christo in Bevins, “Christo Says.” 88. Cited in Dan Duray, “Christo Cancels Over the River Project in Protest Against Trump,” Art Newspaper, January 26, 2017, http://theartnewspaper.com/news/christo -cancels-over-the-river-project-in-protest-against-trump/. 89. On Johanson’s ongoing projects, see her article “Reimagining Infrastructure,” http://www.humansandnature .org/reimagining-infrastructure, and the catalogue Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Remedies. 90. Palermo, response to Mark A. Cheetham. 91. Tuana, “Viscous Porosity.” 92. Horn, “Saying Water.” 93. Collaborations among the “Sister Arts” are considered in detail by Starr in Feeling Beauty. 94. Vuilleumier, “How Brains Beware,” 585.

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95. Cited in Ross, Past Is the Present, 182. 96. Holmes, “Environmental Awareness Through Eco-visualization.” 97. Descola, preface to Beyond Nature and Culture. 98. The bibliography in this area is vast. For an introduction, see Grusin, Nonhuman Turn. As Jessica Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo claim, it is also important to remember forgotten peoples in this context, since “once we take indigenous worldviews into account, the ‘new materialisms’ are no longer new.” Horton and Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror,” 18. 99. Leys, “Turn to Affect,” 456. 100. Jane Bennett, “A Life of Metal,” in Vibrant Matter. 101. Berlant, introduction to Cruel Optimism; Brennan, Transmission of Affect. 102. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24. Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in my text. 103. Rand, “Opinion, Anyone? Scepticism as Intellectual Vice,” in chap. 1 of Waking the Frog. 104. Hayeur, “Artist Statement.” 105. Hayeur, “Underworlds.” 106. Caroline Jones has explored the complex nature and import of horizons in the work of Olafur Eliasson. See Jones, http://arts.mit.edu/excerpt-from-event-horizon -olafur-eliassons-raumexperimente-by-caroline-a-jones/. 107. E-mail communication with the author, May 24, 2016. My sincere thanks to Nicolas Bernier. 108. Cited in Ruskin, Works of John Ruskin, 13:160. 109. The Field of Waterloo, exhibited in 1818, is one example. In J. M. W. Turner and the Subject of History, Leo Costello writes provocatively about this work that “as the bodies sink away into the ground, we seem to witness history painting turning into landscape” (91). 110. Zakai, “Thinking Ecoart.” 111. Palermo, response to Mark A. Cheetham. 112. Iyer, Open Road, 254. 113. Miles, “Expanded Fields,” in chap. 1 of Eco-aesthetics, Kindle ed. 114. Eliasson, “Why Art Has the Power.” 115. M. H. Miller, “Olafur Eliasson.” 116. See http://olafureliasson.net/uncertain. 117. A fuller exposition of Starling’s ecology that examines other works is found in Anker, “Seeing Pink.” 118. James Nisbet, in “On Simon Starling,” draws out this aspect of the work. 119. Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” 141.

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index

Ackers, Tom. See Gilligan, Melanie and Tom Ackers Adams, Ansel, 10 Adorno, Theodore, 11–13, 15–16, 191, 212 n. 70 Akomfrah, John, 187 Alaimo, Stacy, 191 Alfred, Taiaiake, 73 Alfrey, Nicholas, 8 Allora, Jennifer and Guillermo Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints), 166 Alÿs, Francis, When Faith Moves Mountains, 92, 164–65, 175 Ancient Springtime Fey (Yao Lu), 173–74 Andre, Carl, 93 Andrews, Malcolm, 5, 19 Annual Rings (Oppenheim), 161–62, 175 anthrobscene, the, 4, 195 anthropocene, the, anticipations of, 64, 200 capitalism and, 43 critiques of, 4–5, 20, 62 defined, 4–5, 124–25, 162 eco art and, 9, 41, 44, 71, 82, 98, 122, 196–97 Araeen, Rasheed, 191, 203–04 Archive: Endangered Waters (Rúrí), 60–61, 64, 68, 114–15, 118–19, 129 arctic, representations of the, 9–10, 33, 53, 66–70, 131, 195 Arden, Roy, 34–36 Pulp Mill Dump (#1) Nanaimo, B.C., 34–36 Arnold, Grant, 133 Art & Language (group), 51–52 Artangel, 113, 118 articulation, theory of, 11, 16–17 Atlantis, 132 Background Story: Qiu Shan Xian Yi Tu (秋山仙逸图) (Xu Bing), 172–73 Bal, Mieke, 8 Balog, James, 189 Banerjee, Subhankar, 9 bathos, 103–04, 136, 202 Battle for the Woodlands (Devine), 84–87 Beardsley, John, 7 Beltrá, Daniel, 189 Bennett, Jane, 22, 177, 191, 195 Bergson, Henri, 196 Berlant, Lauren, 195–96

Beuys, Joseph, 13, 71, 176–77, 183, 186–87, 206 7000 Oaks, 31, 46, 56, 181, 203 Bierstadt, Albert, 10, 73–78, 81, 103, 149 Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, 77 Boettger, Suzaan, 7, 34, 53, 94, 209 n. 8 Boetzkes, Amanda, 13, 15–17, 65 Border Series—Treaties (Niro), 170 Braddock, Alan, 11, 188 Braddock, Alan and Christoph Irmscher, 3 Braidotti, Rosi, 22, 162 Brennan, Teresa, 66, 195 Brookner, Jackie, 9–10, 108 Broomberg, Adam and Oliver Chanarin, 55 Brown, Dee, 84 Burko, Diane, 66–68, 194 Jakobshavn-Ilulissat Quartet, 66 Burnham, Jack, 12, 26, 98, 159, 176, 183–84 Burtynsky, Edward, 10, 101 Cape Farewell, 41, 131, 189 Calzadilla, Guillermo. See Allora, Jennifer and Guillermo Calzadilla camera obscura, 38–39, 135–56, 206 Camera Obscura Image of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, East Entrance in Gallery #171 with a de Chirico Painting (Morell), 151–152 capitalocene, the, 4 Carbon 14: Climate is Culture (exhibition), 3, 67, 122, 189 Carr, Emily, 27, Carson, Anne, 114–15, 117–19 Carson, Rachel, 31 Carus, Carl Gustav, 58, 60–67, 70, 77, 185, 206 Castree, Noel, 22–23 Center for Land Use Information (CLUI), 2, 98, 189 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 12–13 Chanarin, Oliver. See Broomberg, Adam and Oliver Chanarin Chemin de la Frontière, Québec (Rutkauskas), 166–168 Cher, 76 Chin, Mel, 9, 11, 178 Landscape, 171 Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall (Bierstadt), 77 chthulucene, the, 4, 211 n. 47 Church, Frederic E., 53, 77 Clark, Kenneth, 5 Clifford, James, 17

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climate change, anthropogenic, 12, 41, 48, 62 Coates, Peter, 22, Code, Lorraine, 13, 22, 157 Collins, Flint, 9, 14–15 colonialism, 49, 72 commons, the, 103 Connor, Steven, 59 consanguinity, theory of, 89 Constable, John, 6, 60 Cosgrove, Dennis, 18 Crary, Jonathan, 144 #crazyweather (Swtizer), 127 Crooked Path (Wall), 159–60 Crutzen, Paul, 4 Crystal Monument (Sonfist), 184. Curbed Concepts: NATURE (Martindale), 105–8 Curtis, Edward S., 75–76 Dahl, Johann Christian, 68 Dark Years Away (Neudecker), 192 Darwin, Charles, 27, 196 data farm, 100 Dean, Tacita, 57–58 Fatigues, 57 Deep Time (Ackers, Gilligan), 41–44, 60, 78, 101 De Landa, Manuel, 9 Deleuze, Gilles, 20, 124, 176, 180, 196 De Maria, Walter, 47, 50, 110, 122, 145–46, 159 Earth Room, 91, 123, 206 Demos, T.J., 11 Denes, Agnes, 28, 31, 98–100, 108, 163, 178 Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 9, 96, 98–99 Descola, Philippe, 1, 158, 195 Devine, Bonnie, 72, 84, 85–90, 94, 168 Battle for the Woodlands, 84–87 Dibbets, Jan, 53, 95 Dion, Mark, 54–56,156 Neukom Vivarium, 33, 42, 47, 121 Schildbach Xylotheque, 55, 187 Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop (Oppenheim), 32, 96–97 Double Echo (Drury), 134 Drury, Chris, 134–35, 141–42, 150 Double Echo, 134 Durant, Sam, 36–37 Upside Down Pastoral Scene, 36 Dwan Gallery, 30, 52, 54, 93 Earth Day, 25, 31 earth-death pictures, 58–64, 68, 195, 200, 214 n. 36 earth-life pictures (Erdlebenbildkunst), 58, 62, 67, 185 Earth Room (DeMaria; two versions), 91, 123, 206 eco art descriptions of, 1–5, 209 n. 1

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and eco art history, 3–4, 27, 37, 41, 54, 66, 73, 136, 158, 168, 172, 190, 195 and ecotones, 157–60, 177, 185, 191 Ehrlich, Gretel, 204 Eliasson, Olafur, 1–2, 47, 92, 111, 121, 124, 179, 187–88, 203 and crystals, 177, 205–06 and ethics, 205–206 and technology, 154 The weather project, 2, 107, 126 Your embodied garden, 127–28 Elkins, James, 23, 172 English garden, 44–45, 122 Evernden, Neil, 18, 22, 25, 158 Faraday, Michael, 65 Fatigues (Dean), 57 Fer, Briony, 115 Ferguson, Frances, 102, 104 Fischli, Peter and David Weiss, 41, 43–44 The Right Way, 41–43 Forst (Sailstorfer), 125–126 Fourth World (Monkman) 73, 77–78 Friedrich, Caspar David, 53, 56, 58, 60, 62, 68 Fulton, Hamish, 47, 50, 92, 134, 159 Gainsborough, Thomas, 103–04, 159 geoaesthetics, 22, 123–24, 176–77, 180 Gerrard, John, 96, 99–104 Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma), 99–104 Gibson, John, 52–53, 59 Gilbert & George, 41, 44–45 Gilligan, Melanie and Tom Ackers, 41–44, 60, 101 Deep Time, 41–44, 60, 78, 101 Gilpin, William, 31, 142 glaciers, 2, 66–69, 71–72, 114–15, 118–20, 129, 185, 187, 189, 193–94 Glue Pour (Smithson), 123 Godfrey, Mark, 115, 131 Grade, John, 28, 110 Graham, Rodney, 38–39 Millennial Time Machine, 38–39 Greenberg, Clement, 52, 90 Griffin, Tim, 92–93 Grosz, Elizabeth, 20 Guattari, Félix, 19, 124, 176, 180, 209 n. 2 Haacke, Hans, 12–17, 26, 98, 183–84, 194 Rhine Water Purification Plant, 13–15, 26, 98, 194 Hackert, Jacob Philipp, 137 Haeckel, Ernst, 25 Hall, Stuart, 16–17 Hamilton, William, 58 Haraway, Donna, 4, 177, 179 Harman, Graham, 13, 163 Harrison, Charles, 51–54, 58, 104

index

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Harrison, Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, 6, 31, 33, 54, 58, 108 Harrist, Robert E. Jr., 173 Harvey, David, 22 Hayeur, Isabelle, 145, 197–202 Limulus, 200 Substances, 197–98 Heizer, Michael, 30–32, 47, 90–93, 100, 119, 131 Levitated Mass, 108–112 as pioneering land artist, 6–7, 50 work criticized, 6, 54 Hill, Richard, 73, 76 Hiorns, Roger, 181–183 history painting, 60, 62–64 Holmes, Tiffany, 194 Horn, Roni, 2–3, 45, 107–20, 191 Water, Selected, from Vatnasafn / Library of Water, 2–3, 108, 112–20 Holt, Nancy, 31, 50, 92, 94, 108, 133, 141–44 Sun Tunnels, 135, 142, 144 Views Through a Sand Dune, 141–42 Huang, Vincent J.F., 187 Hudson River School, 53, 58, 75 Humboldt, Alexander von, 62, 64, 77 Huyghe, Pierre, 45–47, 92, 112, 121, 129–34, 165 and Joseph Beuys, 46 A Journey That Wasn’t, 130–132 and Robert Smithson, 132 Untilled: Alive Entities and Inanimate Things, Made and Not Made, 46–47 Hydrangea in Room (Anteroom Series) (Nizam), 144–145 Indigeneity: See land and Indigeneity Irland, Basia, 13, 170, 175–176, 187, 204 Irmscher, Christoph. See Braddock, Alan and Christoph Irmscher Iyer, Pico, 204 Jakobshavn-Ilulissat Quartet (Burko), 66 Jasanoff, Sheila, 157–158 Jeremijenko, Natalie, 40 Johanson, Patricia, 108, 190 Jones, Caroline A., 15–16, 116 A Journey That Wasn’t (Huyghe), 130–32 Kant, Immanuel, 46, 102, 212 n. 80 Katz, Jonathan D., 73 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, 21 Kelsey, Robin, 89 Kepes, Gyorgy, 24–26, 176 Klee, Paul, 180 Kolbe, Carl Wilhelm the Elder, 27 Koziara, Jarosław, 163–164 Unity Fish, 163–164 Krauss, Rosalind, 47, 50, 91, 97, 146 Kwon, Miwon, 122

land geo-centered turn, 22 and Indigeneity, 17, 20, 23, 23–24, 58, 73–77, 81–82, 84–89, 168 reclamation and remediation, 9–11, 13–14, 32, 52, 190, 203–04 land art, critiques of, 54–55 Landscape (Chin), 171 Land Mark (Foot Prints) (Alloora and Calzadilla), 166 Latour, Bruno, 4, 15, 22, 62, 124, 158, 162–163 Lee, Pamela M., 92 Levitated Mass (Heizer), 108–112 LeWitt, Sol, 93 Leys, Ruth, 195 Limulus (Hayeur), 200 Lin, Maya, 8, 10, 28 Lippard, Lucy, 91, 95, 123, 132, 164–166, 172, 176 Long, Richard, 6, 50, 95, 110 Loutherbourg, Philip James de, 102 Luke, Timothy, 25, Luna, James, 72 Mackey, Eva, 72, 86 MacLaren, Ian, 4 Maisel, David, 10, Manacorda, Francesco, 156 Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis) (Smithson), 132-133 mapping, 20–21, 52, 67, 84–88, 94, 159, 160–161, 164, 170, 175–176, 181 Marclay, Christian, 193 Markonish, Denise, 75 Martindale, Sean, 105–108 Curbed Concepts: NATURE, 105–108 Matilsky, Barbara C., 7 McEvilley, Thomas, 121 McKee, Yates, 54, 166 Michelson, Alan, 72, 87, 168–70, 172 Mihalyo, Daniel, 166 Non-Sign II, 166 Miles, Malcolm, 11, 40, 205 Millennial Time Machine (Graham), 38–39 Mitchell, W.J.T., 8, 19, 49–51, 58 modernocene, the, 12 Monkman, Kent, 58, 72–83, 89, 103, 149 The Fourth World, 73, 77–78 The Rise and Fall of Civilization, 78, 80–81 Trappers of Men, 73–76 Moore, Jason W. 4, 211 n. 47 Moran, Thomas, 10, 147, 185 Morell, Abelardo, 146–150, 155 Camera Obscura Image of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, East Entrance in Gallery #171 with a de Chirico Painting, 151–152 Tent-Camera Image on Ground: El Capitan from Cathedral Beach, Yosemite National Park, 147 Morris, Robert, 9, 50, 93, 203

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Morse, Samuel, 3, 185 Morton, Timothy, 13, 22, 25, 101–2, 124, 154, 158, 162, 196–97, 205 Muniz, Vik, 5, 204 Muybridge, Eadweard, 76 Nabhan, Gary Paul, 24 New Topographics, the, 75 Ngo, Viet, 9 Niro, Shelley, 170–72 Border Series—Treaties, 170 Nizam, James, 144–47, 155 Hydrangea in Room (Anteroom Series), 144–45 N.E. Thing Co.; NETCO, 94–95, 101 North American Telexed Triangle (No. 1), 94 Neukom Vivarium (Dion), 33, 42, 47 Neudecker, Mariele, 68–71, 192–98, 202 Dark Years Away, 192 Over and Over, Again and Again, 68 There Is Always Something More Important, 70 Nisbet, James, 32, 53, 122–123, 159 Nixon, Rob, 124 Non-Sign II (Lead Pencil Studio), 166 North American Telexed Triangle (No. 1), (N.E. Thing. Co.), 94 Oldenburg, Claes, 53, 94, 97 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 5, 30–32 Olwig, Kenneth R., 19 One Ton II (Starling), 97, 207–208 Oppenheim, Dennis, 30–33, 50–53, 91–100, 108, 113, 122, 160–163, 173 Annual Rings, 161–162, 175 Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop, 32, 96–97 as pioneering land artist, 30, 52 Over and Over, Again and Again (Neudecker), 68 Owens, Craig, 113 Palermo, Charles, 191, 204 Parker, Patricia, 8 Parikka, Jussi, 4, 18, 22, 97, 177, 195, 208 Paterson, Katie, 68, 71–72, 114 Penone, Giuseppe, 27 Phillips, Mark Salber, 58–59 Phillips, Ruth, 72 The Photograph: Suspended Tree (Wright), 155–156 Picasso, Pablo, 79–81 picturesque, concept of the, 4–5, 18, 30–31, 45, 54–55, 93, 106, 139, 145, 160, 185, 202 Plato, 136–138, 140, 177 Pope, Alexander, 103–04, 126, 135, 137–141, 185, 202, 206 postmodernism, 50, 113 Poussin, Nicolas, 37 Price, Uvedale, 31 Prigann, Herman, 11, 19, 39 Pulp Mill Dump (#1) Nanaimo, B.C (Arden), 34

238

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Puryear, Martin, 38, 143 Ragain, Melissa Sue, 25 Rand, Tom, 197 Ray, Charles, 28 Reitzenstein, Reinhard, 39–41 Transformer, 40–41 Renwick, Arthur, 72, 84–85, 87, 175 Tah-ton-kah-he-yo-ta-kah (Sitting Bull), from Delegates: Chiefs of Earth and Sky, 84–85 Requiem for a Glacier (Walde), 193–196 Reynolds, Joshua, 144 Rhine Water Purification Plant (Haacke), 13–15, 26, 98, 194 The Right Way (Fischli, Weiss), 41–43 Rise and Fall of Civilization (Monkman), 78, 80–81 Rodchenko, Alexander, 123 Ruisdael, Jacob van, 27 Rúrí, 60–66, 68, 176, 191 Archive: Endangered Waters, 60–61, 64, 68, 114–15, 118–19, 129 Ruskin, John, 30, 60, 64, 185, 201–2 Rutkauskas, Andreas, 166–68, 175, 219 n. 22 Chemin de la Frontière, Québec, 166–68 Sailstorfer, Michael, 125–26 Forst, 125–26 Salgado, Sebastiāo, 31 Sallis, John, 13 Savery, Roelandt, 28, Schama, Simon, 18 Schildbach Xylotheque (Dion) 55, 187 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 177–78, 180 Schum, Gerry, 91 Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land, Shaman Coming to Fix (Yuxweluptun), 81–83 7000 Oaks (Beuys), 31, 46, 56, 181, 203 Shapiro, Gary, 124, 140 Sherman, Tom, 90, 105, 108, 118 Serra, Richard, 50, 77 Serres, Michel, 59, 124–126, 129, 134, 156, 202 settlers; settler colonialism, 24, 49, 72 Sharp, Willoughby, 53–54, 91 Sheren, Ila, 18, 21 Shiva, Vandana, 124 Skelton, Jonathan, 147 Skinner, Damian, 72, Slack, Jennifer, 16 Sleeman, Joy, 8 Somerville, Mary, 65 Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) (Gerrard), 99–104 Smithson, Robert, 5–7, 29–39, 54, 58, 91–94, 97, 106, 108, 113–123, 125, 130–138, 140–145, 159, 176–178, 180–182, 185, 199–200, 203, 207 and ecology, 30–31 Glue Pour, 123 Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), 132-133

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site / nonsite, 93, 132, 161 Spiral Jetty, 50, 91, 93–94, 110, 116, 130–133, 188, 199 Upside Down Tree I, 29 Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (Turner), 65 Solnit, Rebecca, 37, 49, 65 Sonfist, Alan, 23, 25–26, 108, 177, 183–185 Crystal Monument, 184 Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 50, 91, 93–94, 110, 116, 130–133, 188, 199 Spirn, Anne Whiston, 19 Stafford, Barbara Maria, 182 Starling, Simon, 97, 177, 203, 206–208 One Ton II, 97, 207–208 Stengers, Isabelle, 24 sublime, concept of the, 6, 53, 55, 57–58, 65, 68, 73–77, 101–104, 106–107, 202 Substances (Hayeur), 197–198 Sun Tunnels (Holt), 135, 142, 144 surrealism, 81–83, 151 Swenson, Kirsten, 4 Switzer, Sharon, 127 #crazyweather, 127 Tah-ton-kah-he-yo-ta-kah (Sitting Bull), from Delegates: Chiefs of Earth and Sky (Renwick), 84–85 Tansey, Mark, 75 Tecumseh, 88 Tent-Camera Image on Ground: El Capitan from Cathedral Beach, Yosemite National Park (Morell), 147 There Is Always Something More Important (Neudecker), 70 Tillim, Sidney, 30, 54 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 92 Todd, Loretta, 72, 85 Todd, Zoe, 20 Townsend-Gault, Charlotte, 83 Transformer (Reitzenstein), 40–41 Trappers of Men (Monkman), 73–76 Tree Correction #2 (Wright), 152 Turner, J.M.W., 6, 57–58, 60, 64–65, 70, 185, 206 Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 65 War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 200–202 Turrell, James, 47, 179 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 11, 108 Unity Fish (Koziara), 163–164 Untilled: Alive Entities and Inanimate Things, Made and Not Made (Huyghe), 130–132

Untitled Photograph #3 (Plant) (Wright), 155–156 Upside Down Pastoral Scene (Durant) 36 Upside Down Tree I (Smithson), 29 Views Through a Sand Dune (Holt), 141–142 Viola, Bill, 34 Wagner, Anne, 91–93, 106 Walde, Paul, 193–96, 198, 202 Requiem for a Glacier, 193–196 Wall, Jeff, 159–160 The Crooked Path, 159–160 Wallis, Brian, 6–7, 55, 92 Wark, McKenzie, 22 War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet (Turner), 200–202 Water, Selected, from Vatnasafn / Library of Water (Horn), 2–3, 108, 112–120 Watkins, Carlton, 10, 76, 149 The weather project (Eliasson), 2, 107, 126 Weiss, David. See Fischli, Peter and David Weiss Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan (Denes), 9, 96, 98–99 When Faith Moves Mountains (Alÿs), 92 Widén, Anna, 28 Wieland, Joyce, 32–33 wilderness, concept of, 18, 30, 73–74, 90 Williams, Raymond, 22 Wolfe, Patrick, 86 Worringer, Wilhelm, 179–182 Wright, Andrew, 152–56 The Photograph: Suspended Tree, 155–56 Tree Correction #2, 152 Untitled Photograph #3 (Plant), 152 Xu Bing, 172–74 Background Story: Qiu Shan Xian Yi Tu (秋山仙逸图), 172–73 Yanagi, Yukinori, 162–163 Yao Lu, 173–74 Ancient Springtime Fey, 173–74 Young, Samson, 175 Youngblood, Gene, 25, 183 Your embodied garden (Eliasson), 127–28 Yuxweluptun, Lawrence Paul, 72–73, 81–85 Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land, Shaman Coming to Fix, 81–83 Zakai, Shai, 203

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Typeset by bessas & ackerman Printed and bound by friesens Composed in minion pro Printed on rolland opaque offset white Bound in arrestox

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