The Cultures of Entanglement: On Nonhuman Life Forms in Contemporary Art (Image) 3837668053, 9783837668056

Citation preview

Suzanne Anker, Sabine Flach (eds.) The Cultures of Entanglement

Image Volume 233

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the nexus of art and the biological sciences. She is the Chair of the Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Sabine Flach is a Professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Graz, Austria, and Chair of the section Contemporary Art at the Department of Art and Musicology, University of Graz. She is member of the faculty at SVA, School of Visual Arts, NYC and Adjunct Professor at the University of Cincinnati.

Suzanne Anker, Sabine Flach (eds.)

The Cultures of Entanglement On Nonhuman Life Forms in Contemporary Art

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de

© 2024 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Jan Gerbach, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Suzanne Anker, “After Eden (Hybridization in Red)” 2021, digital print on archival paper, 44” x 64” Proofread: Stanley Gans, Lisabeth Haas Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839468050 Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-6805-6 PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-6805-0 ISSN of series: 2365-1806 eISSN of series: 2702-9557 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

The Cultures of Entanglement: On Nonhuman Life Forms in Contemporary Art Suzanne Anker/Sabine Flach ....................................................................9

The Hothouse Archives: Plants, Pods and Panama Red 1. Weeds and the Unrequited The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory A Public Experiment in Collaboration with Seeds, Time, and Weeds http://nextepochseedlibrary.com/lawn/ Ellie Irons ...................................................................................... 15

2. Submergence Saddening the Green: The Politics and Poetics of the South African Lawn Jonathan Cane................................................................................ 25

3. Out of the Garden Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Botanique: Undergoing Nature as a Pedagogy of Resistance to the Anthropocene Kristopher J. Holland .......................................................................... 39 “The flowers, after all, didn’t understand Greek”: Plants, Politics, Poetics Sabine Flach ................................................................................... 51

4. The Social Order of Plants The Potential of Ruderal Societies and Perfectly Provisional Areas in the Works of Lois Weinberger Karoline Walter................................................................................ 67 Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture Mark Harris ....................................................................................79

5. Flora The Blue Rose Suzanne Anker ................................................................................105 After Nature, Coding and Reading Plant Life Mathias Kessler ............................................................................... 121 Not a Rose and the Impossibility to Be a Revolutionary and Not Like Flowers Heide Hatry ...................................................................................125 Trojan Horse Manifesto Heide Hatry ................................................................................... 131

Questioning the Non-Human Other: Political Potentials of Living Beings in Art 6. Animals and the Ethics of Art Human-Animal Studies – Bridging the lacuna between academia and society Gabriela Kompatscher .........................................................................137 Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics Jessica Ullrich ................................................................................149 Heads and/or Tails Gary Sherman.................................................................................165

7. Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic Viscous, Molten, and Phased: Undergoing Nature with Non-Human Aesthetics, Hypo-objects, & Strange Tools Kristopher J. Holland .......................................................................... 177 L’animal que donc je suis – Pierre Huyghe and Jacques Derrida Sabine Flach ..................................................................................195

8. The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance Chonja Lee.................................................................................... 211

9. ‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like Hanne Loreck .................................................................................231 The Art of Gardening in South Africa: Three Cases of Eco-Political Landscaping from the Global South Jonathan Cane............................................................................... 247 Tue Greenfort: Questioning Dichotomies Karoline Walter............................................................................... 267

10. Quasi Objects Questioning the Non-Human Other: Political Potentials of Living Beings in Contemporary Art Mathias Kessler/Arnaud Gerspacher .......................................................... 283 The Invisible Thread: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation Hannes Rickli ................................................................................. 291 Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect Margit Stadlober ............................................................................. 307

11. Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar: A Novel Synthesis from De- and Reconstructing the Living and the Artificial Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl ................................................. 327 Return to Dilmun Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendonck/Hansjörg Petschko/Federico Muffatto ................ 355 Pyrexia Suzanne Anker ................................................................................361 Spearlight Frank Gillette ................................................................................ 365

Appendix Acknowledgments Suzanne Anker/Sabine Flach ..................................................................371 List of Authors .............................................................................. 373

The Cultures of Entanglement: On Nonhuman Life Forms in Contemporary Art Suzanne Anker/Sabine Flach

Currently, states of nature, their eco-systems and inhabitants are urgent questions for humanity. From art, philosophy, science and science studies, literature, anthropology, and art history among others, it is precisely at this breaking point of the Earth’s distress that this publication looks toward non-living others as a co-community. Nature is comprehended both as a concept and material, a living system undergoing cycles of decay and rebirth. What are the historical roots of humankind’s kinship with the natural world? How are such patterns of perception developed and altered over time? How can the relationships between the artificial and natural be understood in terms of the 21st centuries advances in technology? These considerations lead to a secondary focus, which is a sensual access to nature. As postulated by the scientist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, nature is understood by both experience and measurement. Under the sign of a “phenomenology of nature”, a distinction is no longer made between an observed (natural) phenomenon and the observer, but both are understood as part of an overall interdependent system. The process of perception can no more be separated from the ‘how’ of perception than from the structure of what is perceived, of which the perceiver is a part. The Cultures of Entanglement: On Nonhuman Life Forms in Contemporary Art, addresses the concept of “agency” as it pertains to plants and animals co-existing in social, political, and economic environments. In addition to geographical locations, hierarchies and categorizations in nature emphasize the power of humans within this system. Non-theless, 21st century theoretical discourses have been focusing on the non-human other and their integration with humankind: plants, animals, genetically altered species, microbes et al. The interaction between organisms and their environment evolves in several forms. However hierarchical, such living systems are sometimes mutual, at other times they are parasitical or symbiotic. These various arrangements form an ecological matrix confirming the unity. This altered perspective, which is perceptible in contemporary art, confronts us with present moral and ethical questions. For example, what is the cost/benefit of hybridizing flowers with advanced technologies? How does altered pigmentation ef-

10

The Cultures of Entanglement

fect pollinators? Is green a form of ecological expansion or does the color of a lawn have political meaning? The symbolic meaning of plants, their relevance to theological precepts and metaphorical provocations underlines the role of plants of social relations. Such definitions change over time, determined by cultural developments. In the origins of Western thought, nature has been represented as both the embodiment of good and the epitome of evil. In Ovid’s telling of humanity’s golden age, the Earth is an abundant source of nourishment and pleasure, while in Christianity, a snake tempts Eve into biting a forbidden apple which precipitates the fall of humankind. However, such narratives can be told from alternate perspectives. For example, how we perceive Eve as a heroine, trading paradise for knowledge. Such is the dual perspective of nature as entities of healing and living stalks of poison. Such signification of nature became intensified during the Industrial Revolution. In general, religious implications were discarded to favor images of plants and animals as savage entities. For example, the jungle in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness becomes a character of its own that expresses dark and fierce forces in opposition to the concepts of light and order in various European sensibilities. Human nature was characterized as a civilizing force while fauna and flora were seen as the wild and degenerative. In the 21st century, plants and animals are undergoing radical changes due to environmental alterations and laboratory practices. From genetic selections to indoor farming, from foodstuffs and medicinal uses, plants and animals are being re-evaluated as partners in our global eco-system. Some become invasive, threatening the lives of “native” species. Others are considered weeds. Seeds have been genetically recoded to not produce the next season’s crops, rendering them sterile. As sentient creatures, plants protect their own and engage in masquerading their identities. It has been noted that plants are more like animals, only slower. They are sources of nourishment and wonder while at the same time contain healing powers and even psychoactive properties. We cohabitate in an environment that in Darwin’s work is a tangled bank of wondrous forms. Cultures of Entanglement: On Nonhuman Life Forms in Contemporary Art, explores an array of historical, philosophical, social and economic issues that underlie the cultural index of our time.

The Hothouse Archives: Plants, Pods and Panama Red

1. Weeds and the Unrequited

The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory A Public Experiment in Collaboration with Seeds, Time, and Weeds http://nextepochseedlibrary.com/lawn/ Ellie Irons

The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory (Lawn Lab) is an ecosocial art project that explores plant-human solidarity, the aesthetics of cultivated landscapes, and possibilities for undoing lawn monocultures. Lawn Lab is a project of the Next Epoch Seed Library (NESL), an artist-run seed library focused on spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds). We re-imagine the conventional seed vault for a ‘next epoch’ that demands we contend with the massive ecological impacts of capitalism, colonialism, and resource extraction. Lawn Lab takes this ethos to the ubiquitous lawn habitats surrounding us, framing them as disturbed landscapes in need of healing. In dialogue with a rich history of lawndisrupting artistic practices and responding to key concepts in feminist and Indigenous pedagogy and scholarship, the project centers plant agency by turning to seeds lying dormant in the soil for guidance.1 The first season of Lawn Lab took shape in early spring of 2018. NESL invited a range of lawn-wielding institutions and property owners in the postindustrial town of Troy, New York, to donate publicly visible 1 x 1 meter plots of turf. We held a series (re)disturbance workshops, working with students and community members to remove and compost turf in ten locations around the city, from the manicured grounds of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to feral lawns in so-called vacant lots. In each plot, bare soil was left to rewild from seeds lying dormant in the soil. Seeds from some plants can stay dormant

1

This project’s first season was carried out by settler artists on Mohican and Mohawk lands in what is now known as upstate New York. Indigenous cultures around the world have long understood plant agency, upholding reciprocal networks between plants, humans, and the living land. As we celebrate the much needed turn towards vegetal agency across the humanities, it remains essential to credit, amplify and support Indigenous peoples and knowledge systems. For more on these topics, see the writing of Mary Siisip Geniusz, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Natasha Myers, Catriona Sandilands, and Zoe Todd, among many others.

16

Weeds and the Unrequited

for decades, even centuries, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. Our (re)disturbance created those conditions.

Fig. 1: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Participants preparing a plot for Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory as part of a workshop with Community Miracles in Action and The Sanctuary for Independent Media’s NATURE Lab, Cohoes, New York, June 2018.

At first, the plots – which were marked with signage and flagging – looked like minimalist sculptures in the tradition of land art: a series discrete, abstract forms incised in the earth. This appearance of order and control was short lived. Over the summer, the soil seed bank worked its magic, enlivening the minimalist soil squares diverse forms of growth. By late August, the patches housed highly varied eruptions of plant diversity, contrasting with the regularly mowed lawnscapes surrounding them. Throughout, we worked with volunteers to gather small-scale data about the plant communities that emerged, aiming to cultivate plant-human engagement and care. Confronting assumptions around care and control in normative landscape practices like lawn maintenance is one important aspect of Lawn Lab. Plants don’t always sculpt space in ways that fit contemporary, Euro-western notions of tidiness or ecological health. The ten plots provided small doses of unmanicured growth, offering opportunities for sensory repatterning towards the appreciation of vegetal exuberance. Even at this contained scale, they created friction and discomfort, which we found equally generative and challenging.

Ellie Irons: The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory

Fig. 2: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory Plots, Summer 2018; counterclockwise from upper left: Plot 1 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sage Avenue and 9th Street) Plot 4 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Nason Dormitory Lawn) Plot 5 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Detroit Avenue and Georgian Terrace) Plot 8 (Privately owned lot, North Central Troy, Ingalls Avenue and River Street)

17

18

Weeds and the Unrequited

Fig. 3: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory Plots, Summer 2018; counterclockwise from upper left: Plot 1 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sage Avenue and 9th Street) Plot 4 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Nason Dormitory Lawn) Plot 5 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Detroit Avenue and Georgian Terrace) Plot 8 (Privately owned lot, North Central Troy, Ingalls Avenue and River Street)

Ellie Irons: The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory

Fig. 4: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Indoor Soil Seed Bank test planter, Plot #4. Including 8 species: smooth crabgrass (Digitaria ischaemum), white clover (Trifolium repens), prostrate knotweed (Persicaria sp), chickweed (Stellaria sp), raspberry (Rubus sp), broadleaf plantain (Plantago major), wood sorrel (Oxalis sp.), fleabane (Erigeron sp.).

Fig. 5: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory Plot #10 (Private yard, South Troy, Ida Street and 5th Ave). Day of disturbance and 6 weeks post-disturbance, March and May 2018.

19

20

Weeds and the Unrequited

Lawn Lab also addresses well-known ecological phenomena, attempting to make them apparent and accessible while also unsettling their conventional applications. In Western ecological knowledge systems, plants that respond well to disturbance are known as ‘pioneer species’. Their seeds are present in the soil in large numbers, part of what is known as the ‘soil seed bank’. When exposed to light, warmth, and air, they sprout rapidly in bare soil exposed by disturbance events, from floods and landslides to construction projects. They grow quickly, holding and building soil until conditions are tolerable for other slower-growing plants. Often labeled as ‘weedy’ and thus unwanted, these plants are key to the process of ecosystem recovery. Engaging these concepts, Lawn Lab excavates the past while envisioning future disturbances, offering a glimpse of what might arise in their wake. Learning from the plants that emerge, we practice building the kind of plant-human solidarities we will need as we seek ecological justice in the face of climate chaos.

Fig. 6: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory Plot #5, plot establishment as filmed by drone, May 2018. Image credit: Chris Scully.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Participants preparing a plot for Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory as part of a workshop with Community Miracles in Action and The Sanctuary for Independent Media’s NATURE Lab, Cohoes, New York, June 2018. Fig. 2: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory Plots Summer 2018; counterclockwise from upper left: Plot 1 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sage Avenue and 9th Street) Plot 4 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Nason Dormitory Lawn) Plot 5 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Detroit Avenue and Georgian Terrace) Plot 8 (Privately owned lot, North Central Troy, Ingalls Avenue and River Street) Fig. 3: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory Plots, Summer 2018; counterclockwise from upper left: Plot 1 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Sage Avenue and 9th Street)

Ellie Irons: The Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory

Plot 4 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Nason Dormitory Lawn) Plot 5 (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Detroit Avenue and Georgian Terrace) Plot 8 (Privately owned lot, North Central Troy, Ingalls Avenue and River Street) Fig. 4: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Indoor Soil Seed Bank test planter, Plot #4. Including 8 species: smooth crabgrass (Digitaria ischaemum), white clover (Trifolium repens), prostrate knotweed (Persicaria sp), chickweed (Stellaria sp), raspberry (Rubus sp), broadleaf plantain (Plantago major), wood sorrel (Oxalis sp.), fleabane (Erigeron sp.). Fig. 5: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory Plot #10 (Private yard, South Troy, Ida Street and 5th Ave). Day of disturbance and 6 weeks postdisturbance, March and May 2018. Fig. 6: Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library, Lawn (Re)Disturbance Laboratory Plot #5, plot establishment as filmed by drone, May 2018. Image credit: Chris Scully. Image credits: All images Ellie Irons/Next Epoch Seed Library unless otherwise noted.

21

2. Submergence

Saddening the Green: The Politics and Poetics of the South African Lawn Jonathan Cane The May 13th , 2019, international cover of TIME Magazine was a drone photograph of a suburb on the edges of Johannesburg, called Germiston. The aerial image by Johnny Miller from the series Unequal Scenes, shows Pretoria Road cutting through Primrose, the Fire Station followed by Primrose Public Swimming Pool on the left, while on the right, the Makause informal settlement. Seen from above, the grim contrast between a green, ordered and spacious suburb and a cramped, brown slum evokes Frantz Fanon’s critique of a world cut in two: The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedient to the rule of Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers’ town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes and stones. The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers’ town is a town of white people, of foreigners. The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire.1 In this often-quoted passage from The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon sets out a foundational binary of the colonial city: clean/dirty, permanent/temporary. In Moonsongs, Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare opposes the suburb of Ikoyi and the slum Ajegunle by using the lawn 1

Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 38–39.

26

Submergence

as the key site of tension. He writes that in Ikoyi, the moon is a “laundered lawn/ Its grass the softness of infant fluff,” and in Ajegunle, “the moon is a jungle”.2 Osundare’s bipolar postcolonial Lagos is not defined by a tension between greenness and its absence (as is generally the case in South Africa). Rather, cleanness, softness and innocence are set in opposition to the jungle. As a repository of wildness, the ‘jungle’ as a discursive construct draws on colonial imaginaries from Joseph Conrad – “a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence”;3 to André Breton and André Masson’s Vegetal Delirium – “parasitic vegetation … where nature has not been tamed at all”.4 For the colonial mind, the jungle is the constitutive outside, which “threatens to enfold and consume the human scale, in a manner that is simultaneously desired and dreaded, and in a way that was always already going to happen”.5 If the lawn is shorthand for civilisation, then the palm is its antithesis, a symbol of the “interesting and relaxing tropics”.6 Writing about South African game lodges in Blank___Architecture, Apartheid and After (1998), Njabulo Ndebele observes that in the middle of the bush there will be a clearing “signifying civilization. This clearing will have neat green lawns, which contrast with the dense, chaotic bush just beyond their trimmed edge. That clean-cut edge is crucial. It indicates the perimeter of civilization”.7 Contemporary critics have observed the same polarity in the city: “from the window of an airplane it’s all too plain that apartheid has been deeply written into the South African landscape”.8 Lisa Findley writes, “Even the smallest town appears as two distinct towns. One features a spacious grid of tree-lined streets and comfortable houses surrounded by lawns. The other, its shriveled twin, some distance away but connected by a well-travelled road, consists of a much tighter grid of dirt roads lined with shacks. Trees are a rarity, lawns non-existent”.9 Miller’s photograph of Primrose/Makause attempts to marshal the lawn, green and flat, as a visual argument, a lesson in spatial justice. He is not the first to use the lawn in this rhetorical way. Sol Plaatje, writing in 1916 about the dispossession of black South Africans in Native Life in South Africa quotes Oliver Goldsmith’s poem from 1770, The Deserted Village which describes the theft of the commons during Britain’s eighteenth-century land enclosures: Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn; Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen And desolation saddens all thy green.10

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Osundare: Moonsongs, p. 42. Conrad: Heart of Darkness, p. 31. Creed: “Apes and Elephants: In Search of Sensation in the Tropical Imaginary”, p. 157. Cane: Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld, p. 160. Braithwaite: Gardening as Environmentalism: A Wet-Dry Perspective, p. 8. Ndebele: “Game Lodges and Leisure Colonialists”, p. 119. Findley: “Red and Gold: A Tale of Two Apartheid Museums”, n.p. Ibid. Goldsmith: “The Deserted Village”, n.p.

Jonathan Cane: Saddening the Green: The Politics and Poetics of the South African Lawn

Saddening the Green was one of the working titles for my book, published as Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld (2019) which was an attempt to understand the urban environment by thinking closely about the lawn. Urban ecologies – the histories of fruit tree planting, Shot Hole Borer beetles, fynbos fires, fertilizer consumption, subsistence farming, herb gardens – are revealing ways to think about spatial injustice in the post-apartheid city. The lawn, because it is so ubiquitous and commonplace, is an especially fertile terrain for figuring out some of the more ambiguous and contradictory aspects of urban aspirations. Recent calls to decolonize the lawn, calls for #LawnsToFall, for ‘rewilding’ and ‘ungardening’, for veld and indigenous gardening, all align with what has long been an established ecological consensus: the lawn is really very terrible. It’s almost impossible to be ethically for the lawn. It sucks up scarce water, diminishes botanical diversity, requires extensive (often poorly paid) labour, and relies on (often) very poisonous fertilizers and pesticides. On top of that, it seems to perpetuate and legitimize troubling ideas about the racial demonstration of ‘appropriate’ land ownership, and regressive ideas about the relationship between humans and non-human nature. None of this intellectual consensus, however, has or will lead to the 24 golf courses and driving ranges or the 35 bowling greens in Cape Town being redeveloped into mixed-income housing.11 The persistence of the lawn in public planning, and its emotional defence by many ecologically minded gardeners, points to a remarkably stubborn aesthetic convention.

Fig. 1: Lungiswa Gqunta, Lawn 1, 2016. Image courtesy of Lungiswa Gqunta and Whatiftheworld Gallery

Artist Lungiswa Gqunta, over the past few years, has been making surprising ‘gardens’ that help to disrupt some of the more stubborn botanical assumptions which struc-

11

Houston: “Cape Town, Let Me in: Time to Build Houses on Golf Courses and Other Open Spaces”, n.p.

27

28

Submergence

ture our urban landscapes. In Sicily, at the 12th Manifesta Biennial, she filled a greenhouse of the ancient Palermo Botanical Garden with broken bottles filled with petrol. In her earlier installation, Lawn 1 (2016) the petrol-filled broken bottles form the ground plane of what is supposed to be a soft, gentle, homely suburban yard. The lawn in this artwork is no longer the playground for healthy children, nor the relaxing weekend leisure of happy families, nor even the labour of a hardworking garden labourer. It is a bomb – thrown into the suburb.

Fig. 2: Lungiswa Gqunta, Lawn 1 detail, 2016. Image courtesy of Lungiswa Gqunta and Whatiftheworld Gallery

This work ought to be interpreted within the urgency of the political moment of impatience towards racial questions of the land. The upturned bottles, placed onto a 242 x 122mm wooden board, evoke the shards of glass atop many boundary walls in the country. These symbols of suburban anxiety and emphatic statements of property ownership are homemade protections, which in many cases provide the endpoint of the lawn. The wall, which is so familiar and expressive of South African suburbs, is disrupted by Gqunta as she either tips the wall over or flattens and widens it out into the garden floor itself. The wall here has become the lawn; that is, the boundary has become the interior; the structure that provides protection, keeps the outside out, has become instead a dangerous inside. On the other hand, the bottles and petrol must invoke the Molotov cocktail and with it calls for radical land redistribution, an accusation against the violence of white settler occupation and a challenge to the claims of ownership based on the improvement of land. Lawns are seldom the star of the show, they recede into the background and are favoured as backgrounds for the real drama of life. Foregrounding the lawn is a political act of denaturalisation leading to a reversal of the normative figure-ground relationship.

Jonathan Cane: Saddening the Green: The Politics and Poetics of the South African Lawn

In Capturing Nature: Eco-Justice in African Art (2021), Nomusa Makubu offers a reading of Gqunta’s lawn installations. The lawn, she argues, “is untouchable and dangerous – each shard is like a weapon and the petrol smell is dizzying”.12 The lawn is a ‘no go zone’ connoting how broken glass is used atop urban residential fences to keep trespassers out. It is the quintessential privatization of nature. This method of securitizing private property signals the psychosocial paranoia in South Africa that is often aimed at, specifically, black trespassers. Placed on the perimeter of the garden, the broken glass marks the violence of private property entrenched in the politics of land dispossession, inequality and the fear of what the apartheid government referred to as Swart Gevaar (Black Danger) – the perception that criminalized black people as a threat to white people, even as workers in white households.13 Makubu suggests that the lawns in South African black townships are not simply or primarily smaller versions of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden. In Civilising Grass, I believe this is the augment I have made; certainly, I think it holds very well for the lawn in general. For instance, in five lawn landscapes that I will discuss, ranging from 1903 at the end of the Anglo-Boer War, to the present in the post-apartheid dispensation. Take, for instance, the first site in the Pretoria herbarium (c. 1903), set up as the official government botanical station, which received the first samples of kikuyu grass from the East African Protectorate for propagation. Or the second site, the Union Buildings (1910), famously designed by Herbert Baker, was landscaped with the newly ‘discovered’ kikuyu grass, now registered and officially named in Kew Royal Garden, London. The terraced lawns of the newly established government later had in its view the Voortrekker Monument (1949), set within a wild veld grassland and surrounded by a laager of manicured lawn. This apartheid-era monument celebrated mythological Afrikaner domination of and deep connection to nature which are reflected in the decorative origami of the building as well as the landscaping. In 2004, Freedom Park opened on a hill within sight of the Voortrekker Monument. The park’s amphitheatre of lawn and veld suggests a post-apartheid approach to the natural environment, embracing unambiguous the order of the lawn with the ambiguity and emotiveness of the veld. In 2018 the National Heritage Monument presented the exhibition ‘The Long March to Freedom,’ which included 500 life-size bronze statues of important figures from the liberation struggle. The anachronistic, heavy-handed political institution was remarkable for its seemingly apolitical use of landscaping. Makubu argues that, yes, in South African black townships, lawns are ‘very small’. However, she adds that they are “often located in heavily polluted areas near factories and mines, local dumps, mine dumps and open sewers, the maintenance of township lawns is more taxing.”14 From her interview with Gqunta, Makubu quotes: Lawns in the suburbs are everything the lawns in townships are not – green all year round, large and seemingly boundless, well-nurtured and most importantly they are 12 13 14

Makubu: “Capturing Nature: Eco-Justice in African Art”, p. 290. Ibid. Ibid., p. 291.

29

30

Submergence

unoccupied … [they] are markers of wealth as opposed to places of communal gatherings like I know them to be [because] when you don’t have much space and you’re raising a family in your RDP house, a lawn is simply a patch of grass that if not occupied by kids playing, it’s also where your clothes hang.15 These kinds of lawn are contrasted by Gqunta with the “large, even and untouched area behind bulky metal gates and electric fences”16 in suburbs. While I am not sure it is productive to set the township lawn in such direct opposition to the suburban lawn, I do think that the argument Makubu makes – that these two lawns are quite fundamentally different things – might well lead to interesting questions. That the earth in which grass grows in Soweto, for instance, might be profoundly and differently poisoned by forms of racial ecological injustice seems true. That quite specific uses might govern its purpose, and indeed that the lawn in the South African black township might want something very specific from its residents might well be the case. Potentially, the site-specificity of Gqunta’s multiple lawns could lead us to new horizons of analysis. The 2019 show ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin also presented Lawn 1 (2019). Gaupp et al (2020) suggest that Lawn 1, in this instance, was a meditation on the garden on two levels: First, it was a reflection of historical circumstances, specifically the colonial occupation as well as the Apartheid regime, which transformed the garden into a status symbol and a marker of segregation. Second, in the interview sequence printed in the exhibition catalogue, Gqunta argued that her work was a metaphor for “the continuation of colonial fuckery”17 that continued to this day. However, the room where Gqunta’s work was on display was not easily accessible and was therefore placed in a non-privileged position by the curators. ‘Her’ room was restricted to a maximum of ten visitors at once for security reasons connected to the installation’s composition from broken glass fragments. This led to a constant queue in the preceding room. Many visitors hence chose to skip these two rooms.18 Visiting the exhibition in Berlin, I was encouraged to read a number of other works at ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ in dialogue with Lawn 1. Uriel Orlow’s Theatrum Botanicum, which had recently been exhibited in South Africa and drew extensively on research and collaboration in the country, suggests itself as the most clear intersection with Lawn 1. In the preface to Orlow’s monograph (2018), he explains his interest in: The (so-called) red geraniums that adorn Swiss chalets and lakesides, and which I know from growing up in Switzerland, are practically considered a national symbol, but they were in fact first introduced from South Africa into European horticulture by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century and have since been ‘naturalized’ all over the world. Likewise, European settlers in South Africa introduced many plants – for nostalgic or practical reasons – that have turned out to become problems for the 15 16 17 18

Ibid. Ibid. Gaupp/Abramjan/Akinay: “Curatorial Practices of the ‘Global’: Toward a Decolonial Turn in Museums in Berlin and Hamburg?”, pp. 119–120. Ibid.

Jonathan Cane: Saddening the Green: The Politics and Poetics of the South African Lawn

local biodiversity. The subsequent management (or attempts at eradication) of these ‘beautiful, but dangerous’ plants in the name of conservation, both during and since colonial and apartheid rule, is an equally thorny issue. In a place where the politics of land and race are so central, plants were and are of course never simply neutral and passive botanical objects but have always been actors on the stage of history and politics itself. In fact, the entire colonial project in South Africa started with a vegetable garden and fruit orchard (the Company’s Garden).19 Exhibited in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town in 2018, the reception of local audiences was at times inflected by readings concerned with the politics of indigeneity and concerns about the specificity of South African black township gardening. Orlow’s work, when read next to Lawn 1, suggests a complex entanglement of indigenous, exogenous and naturalised plants in which plants-as-agents circulate between the global North and South. The planetary journeys of kikuyu grass I pointed to earlier is a case in point. Having been propagated in Pretoria in 1903, and then in Kew Royal Garden, Cenchrus clandestinus, as it is formally known, is an ‘aggressive invader of pasture, crops and natural areas’ across the planet, on PGA Tour golf courses and residential lawns in Australia and New Zealand. This botanical circulation is a form of the ongoing ‘colonial fuckery’ Gqunta points to. Perhaps the ‘Garden Carpet’ exhibited at Gropius Bau is most obviously complementy to ‘Lawn 1’. The concept of the garden goes back to the ancient Persian term pairidaeza, derived from pairi (around) and daeza (wall). […] The carpet shows such a paradise garden from a bird’s-eye view. Geometrically arranged watercourses give rise to a structure of rectangular beds nurturing an abundance of trees and plants. The carpet repeats a garden form known as Chahar Bagh several times in succession. A Chahar Bagh consists of four streams in a cruciform arrangement that distribute water evenly in the garden. These streams can also be read as a reference to the four rivers of paradise described in the Qur’an. This garden form is therefore both practical and symbolic. There is a close relationship between these gardens and carpets. In summer, the carpets in the garden are a place to sit and rest. In winter, they are taken indoors for their protection and so bring the garden into the interior. In some Chahar Bagh gardens the beds are even sunk into the ground and resemble huge garden carpets themselves. Carpets depicting the Chahar Bagh dating back to the 17th century still exist today.20 (Gropius Bau) The soft, plush walled garden of the Chahar Bagh carpet contrasts with Gqunta’s “alternative take on domesticity, one that is not safe, not a safe return from a chaotic and dangerous world outside. At best, it presents a futile wall, a useless boundary that cannot protect us.”21 One final point worth making is that all the various versions of Gqunta’s lawn are called ‘Lawn 1’. It is not clear what we are to make of this. What is clear is that she knowingly resisted the idea of The Lawn, which is certainly how many rich settlers

19 20 21

Orlow/Sheikh (eds.): Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum, pp. 22–23. Gropius Bau: Exhibition Guide: Garden of Earthly Delights, n.p. Cane: Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld, p. 141.

31

32

Submergence

would depict their gardening success and mastery – the archetype to be emulated. This artwork is emphatically a lawn, one among others, among other possible lawns. Nevertheless, we have yet to see Lawn 2 from the artist and so we have a multiplication of Lawn 1s, a process of repetition, remade in place after place. A key figure of the lawn, one who is often absent, is the gardener. The careful analysis of his (it is almost always a ‘him’) absence from the landscape image is necessary. As is the absence of almost any labour of any kind of landscape art or photography. This is, as many have pointed out before, the key politically troubling aspect of landscapes. J.H. Pierneef is the icon of this kind of natural imaginary evacuated of productive labour. Until recently, it appeared as though the genre of landscape art was all but dead, buried along with other colonial anachronisms. And yet what we are witnessing is a resurgence of interest in pre-1994 landscape art and a recasting of the landscape, post-apartheid, in politically charged ways. Climbing auction prices for even lesser Pierneef woodcuts and the decreased shame of admitting publicly to liking the old white man can be read alongside a recuperation of the oeuvre of painter Moses Tladi. Major shows in Johannesburg and Cape Town in 2017 brought together the utterly original landscapes of an artist who also worked as a full-time gardener. Tladi’s painting of his home ‘Kensington B’ with its genteel lawn, from which he was evicted under forced removals, is hard to see contrasted with the paintings of his employer’s Parktown garden Lokshoek. Recent landscapes by contemporary artists like Dineo Seshee Bopape, Zen Marie, POOL curators Watson and Mika Conradie, Khaya Witbooi, Themba Khumalo, Kemang Wa Lehulere and MADEYOULOOK suggest new politically – and aesthetically – energized ways of looking at the garden. In their multipart exhibition series, ‘Izwe: plant praxis’, MADEYOULOOK team Nare Mokgotho and Molemo Moiloa are putting land ownership, restitution and environmental concerns at the forefront of their gardeningfocused work. In their installation Ejaradini, Mokgotho and Moiloa focus on ‘black urban gardening’ and the recuperative power of close attention to long-ignored township practices. They argue that “there remains very little engagement with the recreational, leisure-based practice – despite the ubiquity of ornamental gardens in black urban yards. Rather, black gardening is largely framed within ideas of alienated labour within the white suburban garden, Bantu Education’s focus on this kind of vocational gardening, or at best, food security and urban farming.”22 By collecting photographic archives, they show how township “gardens have historically become spaces of pleasure and family, of sustenance through growing food, of care and spiritual fulfilment”23 . In Ejaradini: Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums MADEYOULOOK describe the place of the lawn in Soweto: The many manicured lawns, with beds of roses and pelargoniums, reflect European gardening practices – and the skills some have honed in the suburbs of Johannesburg. These gardens are obvious points of pride and neighbourly swagger. Mam’ Susan’s gardening is a labour of love, but also of sustenance. Many of the more manicured gardens of Soweto are ornamental and are therefore, too, a labour of pleasure and aesthetics,

22 23

Cane: “Why the roots of grass go way deep”, p. 8. Gatticchi: “‘Ejaradini’ – a creative look for Wits courtyard”, n.p.

Jonathan Cane: Saddening the Green: The Politics and Poetics of the South African Lawn

yet they are also potential reclamations of an alienated labour of the suburbs to an affective labour for the self. […] In contrast to this desire for paradisiacal reproduction, gardening was also a means for recreating a sense of home in the colonies, made plain by the prevalence of ivy, daisies and English lawns in South African gardens. Manicuring, hedging, pruning, as well as mowing the lawn are all unassuming, everyday forms of control routinely exercised, and are couched within hierarchies of control. The differentiation of plants according to use and the demarcation of garden beds unfolds into the conception of the ‘pleasure garden’, a form of landscaping aimed specifically at pleasure for the land-owning gaze. Here the master, who has dominion over the land, surveys his work and is pleased by what he sees. […] Even in the cases of the more manicured lawns of aspirant gardeners, with roses and paving, as described by Mam’ Simangele, it becomes clear that, while operating in the modality of dominion over nature, these gardens exist in a very different space of symbolic potential. This symbolic potential is one within a genealogy of black aspiration, and is closely connected to the complexities of what it means to make a home within the histories of black urban settlement.24 MADEYOULOOK’s analysis shows the binary at work in the garden, but their study also shows a sophisticated way out of the bind. As they remark above, “Even … the more manicured lawns of aspirant gardeners … exist in a very different space of symbolic potential.”25 The genealogy of black aspiration, they suggest, provides an alternative potentiality for the lawn; a potentiality which cannot, perhaps, simply be read from its form or colour. Jacob Dlamini makes this point in Native Nostalgia (2009), arguing that it “behooves any history worthy of the name”26 to take seriously the differences and distinctions between black dwellings, which could be “as small as the type of lawn one had in one’s yard, the type of furniture in each bedroom, or the kind of fencing one had around the yard – whether it was concrete slabs called ‘stop nonsense’ or … wire mesh fence.”27 Dlamini offers a suggestive anecdote about Mr Chirwa, a resident of Katlehong, who was famous for his ‘immaculate garden’, which boasted the kind of grass planted at Wimbledon, not just ‘common’ kikuyu.28 Dlamini’s recent book Safari Nation: A social history of the Kruger National Park (2020) is an exciting contribution to the debate about plants and police in South Africa. In the book Soweto, Niq Mhlongo highlights the ‘serious competition’ in the township to have a house with “a beautiful lawn and a well-polished stoep”.29 In the collection of short stories, Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree (2018), Mhlongo draws attention to the narrative possibilities of fruit trees and underscores, as some historians have done, the iconicity of these trees in township gardening.

24 25 26 27 28 29

Madeyoulook: “Ejaradini: Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums”, p. 66. Ibid., p. 69. Dlamini: Native Nostalgia, p. 19. Ibid., pp. 19–20. Ibid., p. 53. Mhlongo: “Zwakal’eMsawawa”, p. 12.

33

34

Submergence

The apricot tree in the yard is beginning to shed its leaves as we approach autumn. The sun is shining brightly, and the tender yellowish leaves are rustling in the slight wind. My mother tells me that this tree is sacred and produces only one mysterious rotten apricot annually. […] This apricot tree was planted in 1963. That’s what the apartheid government did when it moved black people into Soweto. They planted fruit trees for almost every matchbox house. A grapevine in front of the house. At the back they planted two fruit trees, a peach and an apricot tree, or a peach and plum tree. We were moved in with this apricot tree. Our peach tree died a few years ago. It used to be over there. She indicates the spot with a nod of her head. Then she looks at me. ‘This apricot tree is as old as this Midway part of Chi Town, a year older than you, my son. This tree has witnessed lots of things.’ ‘But why did they plant fruit trees?’ Siya asks, taking a sip from a can of Castle Lite. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it was to fool us and make us believe that this place was better than where we used to live in Sophiatown, Western and elsewhere. But it was not only fruit trees that they planted. There were also a few tall bluegum trees.’ [...] Uncle Bhodloza’s eyes turn to Siya. ‘You see that branch where the pigeons have just settled? That’s where your father committed suicide.’30 A complex analysis of non-lawn gardening in what, during apartheid, was called the township, will benefit from an escape from the green/brown binary. How, then, are we to read TIME’s Primrose/Makause cover? The didactic work of the photograph is to reinforce a binary, which as have seen has a long intellectual pedigree. The green of Primrose is taken as incontrovertible proof of a profound opposition to the brown of Makause. And yet, it is worth asking what this kind of formulation obscures, what complexities, subtleties and ambiguities it hides. The argument that apartheid was never able to fully totalise lived experience nor to fix the landscape is being more and more forcefully made. The lack of attention that has been paid to the botanical exuberance of townships and informal settlements means that in images like Miller’s drone photograph, the lawn flattens out completely any nuanced debate. It’s part of what the lawn generates: binaries – green/brown, inside/outside, mine/yours, clean/dirty. It is the kind of double-bind that many post-apartheid and postcolonial urban researchers are looking to avoid. Seeking out ambiguous, contradictory and complex spatial knots, researchers and students are examining fewer spectacular examples of urban injustice though which more sophisticated interventions in the city can be made. In my view, the lawn is itself internally conflicted, not always sweet and soft. Often, in fact, the lawn is a petrol bomb ready to be lit.

30

Mhlongo: Soweto, under the Apricot Tree, p. 156.

Jonathan Cane: Saddening the Green: The Politics and Poetics of the South African Lawn

References Braithwaite, Richard: Gardening as Environmentalism: A Wet-Dry Perspective, Darwin (State Library of the Northern Territory) 1993. Cane, Jonathan: Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld, Johannesburg (Wits University Press) 2019. Cane, Jonathan: “Welcome to the Jungle: Tropical Modernism, Decadence, Gardening in Africa”, in: Mehita Iqani/Simidele Dosekun (eds): African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 2019, pp. 155–170. Cane, Jonathan: “Why the roots of grass go way deep”, in: Business Day, August 13, 2019, p. 8. Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, Delaware (Prestwick House) 1902. Creed, Barbara: “Apes and Elephants: In Search of Sensation in the Tropical Imaginary”, in: Etropic, 12 (2013) 2, pp. 157–170. Dlamini, Jacob: Native Nostalgia, Auckland Park, South Africa (Jacana Media) 2009. Dlamini, Jacob: Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park, New African Histories, Athens (Ohio University Press) 2020. Fanon, Fran: The Wretched of the Earth, New York (Grove Weidenfeld) 1963. Findley, Lisa: “Red and Gold: A Tale of Two Apartheid Museums”, in: The Design Observer Group 2012. https://placesjournal.org/article/red-and-gold-a-tale-of-two-apartheid -museums/ Gatticchi, Gemma: “‘Ejaradini’ – a creative look for Wits courtyard”, in: Wits Vuvuzela, May 2, 2019. https://witsvuvuzela.com/2019/05/02/ejaradini-a-creative-look-for-wi ts-courtyard/. Gaupp, Lisa, Anna Abramjan, Frida Mervecan Akinay, et al.: “Curatorial Practices of the ‘Global’: Toward a Decolonial Turn in Museums in Berlin and Hamburg?”, in: Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy/Zeitschrift Für Kulturmanagement und Kulturpolitik, 6 (2020) 2, pp. 107–138. https://doi.org/10.14361/zkmm-2020-0205. Goldsmith, Oliver: “The Deserted Village”, 1770. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe ms/44292/the-deserted-village. Gropius Bau: ‘Exhibition Guide: Garden of Earthly Delights’, n.d. https://www.berlinerf estspiele.de/en/gropiusbau/programm/2019/garten-der-irdischen-freuden/wandt exte.html. Houston, Anthea: “Cape Town, Let Me in: Time to Build Houses on Golf Courses and Other Open Spaces”, in: Daily Maverick, 30 (2019). https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/ article/2019-07-30-cape-town-let-me-in-time-to-build-houses-on-golf-courses-an d-other-open-spaces/. Madeyoulook: “Ejaradini: Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums”, in: Hilton Judin (ed.): Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid, Johannesburg (Wits University Press) 2021, pp. 62–80. Makhubu, Nomusa: “Capturing Nature: Eco-Justice in African Art’”, in: T. J. Demos/ Emily Eliza Scott/Subhankar Banerjee (eds.): The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, New York (Routledge) 2021, pp. 283–294.

35

36

Submergence

Mhlongo, Niq: “Zwakal’eMsawawa”, in: Jhodie Bieber/Niq Mhlongo: Soweto, Johannesburg (Jacana Media) 2010, pp. 11–15. Mhlongo, Niq: Soweto, under the Apricot Tree, first edition, Cape Town, South Africa (Kwela Books) 2018. Ndebele, Njabulo: “Game Lodges and Leisure Colonialists”, in: Hilton Judin/Ivan Vladislavić/ Nederlands Architectuurinstituut (eds.): Blank__: Architecture, Apartheid and After, Rotterdam (New York: NAi; Distributor, D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers) 1998, pp. 119–123. Orlow, Uriel/Shela Sheikh (eds.): Uriel Orlow: Theatrum Botanicum, Berlin (Sternberg Press) 2018. Osundare, Niyi: Moonsongs, Ibadan (Spectrum) 1988. Plaatje, Sol: Native Life in South Africa, London (P S King & Son, Ltd.) 1916.

Acknowledgements An earlier version of this chapter’s argument was published in the South African Business Day, 2019.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Lungiswa Gqunta, Lawn 1, 2016. Image courtesy of Lungiswa Gqunta and Whatiftheworld Gallery Fig. 2: Lungiswa Gqunta, Lawn 1 detail, 2016. Image courtesy of Lungiswa Gqunta and Whatiftheworld Gallery

3. Out of the Garden

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Botanique: Undergoing Nature as a Pedagogy of Resistance to the Anthropocene Kristopher J. Holland

…for I know of no study in the world that suits my natural tastes better than the study of plants.1 -J.J. Rousseau, Confessions

Introduction: Rousseau’s Nature & The Great Transformation The day before Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) died, he was collecting plants. He was ‘searching’, in his estimation, for the ‘virtues’ of society as it related to the experience of nature. He was also exploring his (and all human beings for that matter) ‘natural taste’ for studying plants – undergoing nature, rather than overcoming it. Undergoing refers to the process of experiencing nature, being part of it, rather than overcoming, which views nature as something to conquer or capitalize and sell. To ‘botanize’ for Rousseau was part of being a philosopher which modeled a way one should be with nature, learning about it in its ‘goodness’ and beauty found, rather than produced. Although Rousseau’s ‘beautiful books of pressed specimens’ survive to this day – his ‘herbiers,’ which in a sense are ‘found’ – for him represent a way to reveal nature, or reveal its use as ‘beauty’.2 This ‘botanical’ imperative, love of nature, links to Rousseau’s worry about the effects of society and culture on the natural state of human beings and their relations to nature. He would spend his life trying to advocate for a counter-enlightenment, a way to resist the enlightenment drive to cultivate or conquer nature. If Rousseau was alive today, he would be a stanch resister to the current human conquest of natire – the Anthropocene. We define the Anthropocene as human beings’ total cultivation of the planet – or the idea that nature itself has become part of a society he saw as so corrupt, so dangerous it would ruin its own relathionship with the natural world. Rousseau would want acounter project, a

1 2

Rousseau: Confessions, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, p. 174. Damrosch: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, p. 382.

40

Out of the Garden

pedagogy of resistance to the ideas that led to the overcoming of nature for the goodness of human nature to thrive. After his death his ‘Letters on Botany’ were published (1805) of which Goethe remarked “It’s a true pedagogical model and it complements Émile.”3 Why would Goethe say this? How does Rousseau’s obsession with collecting and pressing plants connect to his philosophy, the pedagogical ideals found in the Counter-Enlightenment, and societal critique the founds his works? When looking at Rousseau’s oeuvre we get the meaning of Goethe’s compliments, and we can ascertain Rousseau’s ‘nature’. First off, Rousseau’s work is a constant critique of the dangers of the oncoming changes to society that we would eventual identify as industrial capitalism. In his day, which was at the very beginnings of the massive industrialization and urbanization in Europe would result in massive changes in society’s organization to: serve the artificial markets of capitalism, fence in ‘the commons’, facilitate the birth of factories, support military-industrial complex’s in most western countries that fed the European wars and colonial expansions etc., etc. This is all connected to what Karl Polanyi referred to as The Great Transformation. This idea highlights how the rise of market ideologies and economic exchange began to run Western society rearranging the priorities of politics and culture which we are still grappling with today.4 Rousseau sensed in his own time that the issues involved with this transformation of Western society into capitalist organizations would produce dangerous affects on human nature and cripple our futures. This essay explores Rousseau’s ‘nature’, connected to his ideas on why the Great Transformation was a huge error in human history, and how these lessons from Rousseau’s work can serve as a resistance and correction to the Anthropocene. His notions of human nature and the inter-connection between botanizing as a philosophical endeavor that models undergoing nature at the birth of Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment, serve as a template for the needed changes in direction of human beings destruction of the earth’s biosphere we can draw upon today. By looking at Rousseau’s ideas, specifically his concepts of human nature, how we should be relating with nature, plants (or botany), his ideas about resisting the ‘instrumentalization’ or ‘over-rationalization’ of the world, of nature, and in turn society comes into view. These all serve as what could be called Rousseau’s ‘nature’, and positions his ideas for the potential use in our context. Rousseau’s nature or botanique then is a metaphor from which we can draw upon to resist the consequences of the Anthropocene and undergo nature.

3 4

Ibid., p. 472. Polanyi: The Great Transformation.

Kristopher J. Holland: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Botanique

Against the Pedagogy of the Enlightenment: Rousseau & Human Nature Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. … How did this transformation come about?5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s scintillating first line of one of his most famous essays The Social Contract (1762) sums up his entire project’s trajectory. Rousseau believed that humans were ‘born free,’ or that human nature in it’s ‘natural state’ was that of goodness. He would begin many works with a similar phrase – it can be said that this is his ‘catch phrase’. For example, he has in other works said: “Men are wicked, yes, but man is good.”6 And in Émile he begins by writing: “Everything is good as it comes form the hands of the Maker of the World but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man.”7 All of these expressions link to his fundamental idea – humans are born good and through culture and society they are corrupted and ‘transformed’ into wicked beings – beings who efface nature, other people, and even themselves. Furthermore, society and culture corrupt us in ways that become so internalized we do not even know we are ‘in chains’. Thus, for Rousseau the pedagogy of the Enlightenment has a double function. First the Lockean ‘rational self-interested individualism’ has defined human nature in the wicked sense, and secondly this notion has served to justify the broken relation between humans, nature, and self.8 Rousseau’s nature was to be suspicious of the Lockean notion of human nature, and build a counter-case for a human nature founded on different principles. For Rousseau, human nature must be based on a goodness inherited in our biology, and counter attempts at the corruption of the self through the selfishness and individualism learned in the modern society of his day – the Enlightenment. This is not to say Rousseau was anti-reason, or positing an irrational philosophy in his eyes. Rousseau is suggesting a counter-path to the use of reason. We should use reason to, as he will say, live within ourselves – which will keep the goodness we are born within our character. This natural character must receive and education to resist the Enlightenment thrust to overcome the self, others and nature – that was in his time being advocated by proponents of the ‘rational self-interested individualism’ of the Enlightenment. This new education results in a different experience with others, ourselves, and the natural world in which we undergo – experience these things in order to receive the goodness found in the beauty of being in the world. He puts forth these arguments in three key essays. First, in Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750) he argues that ‘faith in progress’ needs to be questioned – resulting in the interrogation of the whole project of the Enlightenment as a natural progressive force in which society and culture are rationally transformed for the better.9 We need to think about the flip side of progress and use reason to question 5 6 7 8 9

Rousseau: The Social Contract (1762), p. 2. Rousseau, quoted in Damrosch: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, p. 488. Rousseau: Émile or On Education, p. 37. See Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Rousseau: Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, pp. 43–68.

41

42

Out of the Garden

the role of humans instead of simply following reason applied to nature – or rationalism like a faith. In today’s world this discussion would fit into Heidegger’s questions on technology or even Bruno Latour’s work on modernism.10 In another text, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité 1755) Rousseau sets out to explore the nature of human beings.11 After careful consideration of the current state of society, and his own ideas about what can make human beings live ‘correctly’, Rousseau describes the situation as a distinction between authentic and inauthentic living. Rousseau thinks that ‘natural humans’ should live en lui-même – (within themselves), whereas modern humans live hors de lui, (outside themselves). These are interesting terms, and it is important to understand what Rousseau means by them. To live ‘within oneself’ (en lui-même) is to celebrate the natural goodness we are born with, and to set up a series of relations between oneself and society, oneself and nature, and oneself and oneself as ‘natural’ or ‘good’. Unfortunately, our world is structured to enhance the unnatural ‘wicked’ selves (suggested by the Enlightenment’s ‘rational self-interested individual’) – humans who try to tame and overcome our natural state of goodness – resulting in cruelty and the inequality of societies. This false state of living (hors de lui) is what must be overturned in order to begin to recover societies natural state of goodness. This recovery will result in better relations to each other, themselves, and nature. In a third work, Émile or On Education (Émile ou de l’éducation 1761), Rousseau having established humans are born good and need to live that way in other essays, sets up a ‘pedagogical program’ exemplified by the young man Émile, in order to produce the type of human beings required to counter act the Enlightenment’s propaganda (which results in hors de lui).12 In essence Rousseau asks: if (hu)man is naturally good: how does he stay that way? Emile is an educational treatise on how to avoid the outside forces which have captured the good intentions of humans in the relations between ourselves, with ourselves, and with nature. While the text has its problems, especially as a white male centered Western idea of ‘man’ is centered, the book was one of his most popular in his time in Europe and continued to be after he died. It is even claimed it was the inspiration for the education system of post-revolutionary France. Regardless of the claims for the book’s influence, and its almost exclusively male point of view, it is the important third act here in establishing Rousseau’s program for the resistance to the corruption of the emergent society of the Great Transformation. The Counter-Enlightenment, in contemporary scholarship, is generally traced to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who is also considered the founding father of Romanticism as 10 11 12

See Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), and see also Bruno Latour’s “We Have Never Been Modern” (1993). Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. It should be noted that Rousseau separates males and females in this educational program. This is unfortunate. Sophie, the female counterpart to Emile, is theorized in sexist and patriarchal ways which mirror thoughts of the 18th century male dominated philosophy, and symbolizes on of the many flaws in Rousseau’s character – and his nature! I hope that these are taken into account here, but I would like to look at his work in general terms and move into territory where I think the best in his ideas can be re-applied to human beings, rather than male or female as he framed it in his time.

Kristopher J. Holland: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Botanique

well.13 As a ‘philosophe’ Rousseau applied his mind to many areas of the social world and greatly influenced a next generation of thinkers who were concerned with what we now see as problems with the rise of modernity. His work, especially in the essays reviewed above argue that the sciences and arts, society, and our concept of human nature when framed in the Enlightenment’s view actually corrupts human character. In other words, it is society and civilization that is causing human progress to be stifled and distanced from the natural state of freedom and living (goodness, nature). Given the 21st century context of human-induced climate change, and our default setting of human nature tied to homo-economicus, his thoughts are just as important now as they were then.14

Overcoming Nature: The Great Transformation & The Rise of the Anthropocene What we call land is an element of nature inextricably interwoven with man’s institutions. To isolate it and form a market for it was perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors.15 The fencing of the commons, or ‘isolating land for a market’ to sell it is no weirder than constructing human nature as ‘rational self-interested individual’ a la John Locke. Karl Polanyi’s text, The Great Transformation is about how humans being conspired to change the way we relate to nature, each other, and ourselves or what the author calls the ‘collapse of nineteenth century civilization’ into what we would now recognize as industrial capitalism. This ‘great transformation’ was anticipated by Rousseau in some respects. The ways in which in the 18th century Rousseau critiques the social and cultural corruption of our human nature based on the principles of rationalization of nature, human being-ness, and social relations is accelerated in the 19th century. Karl Marx is obviously the go-to thinker on the 19th century emergence of capitalism, but Polanyi’s text meticulously describes similar phenomena but adds an important discussion of nature in a way Rousseau perhaps would appreciate.16 I would like to now connect Rousseau’s ideas about the corruption of humans at the hands of their own devices (reason, technology,

13

14

15 16

See Garrard: Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes. Furthermore, Graeme Garrard argues the counter-enlightenment was initiated by thinkers like Rousseau who practiced different ‘types’ of philosophy, which Botany might be considered as. The philosophical discourse on the notion of homo-economicus or economic man can be found in Michel Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics, and for a general non-fiction reference in Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing. Polanyi: The Great Transformation, p. 187. Not that Karl Marx doesn’t discuss nature, but Polanyi’s text is perhaps a more direct account about the transformation of the world into our current exploitation of nature.

43

44

Out of the Garden

social organization, etc.) to the rise of the great transformation which precipitated a new epoch of history – the Anthropocene. Let us examine the concept of nature itself in a bit more detail before proceeding into Rousseau’s ideas. The concept of nature itself is another strange construction but one that began well before the 19th century. According to Wolfgang Schadewaldt, the word ‘nature’ is part of a drive we can trace back to the ancient Greeks. In his work, the ancient Greek culture, in order to facilitate the drive to order reality and from thoughts and ideas for everything (logos), has led to our contemporary deployment of the idea of nature via the Roman Latin – Natura – ‘nature already created’.17 To be blunt, the idea of nature (as apposed to culture) was created at the birth of Western culture, and then deployed as fact. In later millennia, Western culture, armed with this notion of ‘nature’ as something already created, but ‘cultivatable’ or ‘transformable’ for the betterment of humans was used to change the surface of the earth (terra-form), transform minerals into human made forms, etc. Moreover this concept was also used to ‘Other’ native cultures during the age of colonization, and position the cultivated (whitemale) as the apex of human being-ness. Nature was used as concepts to alter our relationship with the world, with each other, and ourselves. This trifecta of affects maps onto Rousseau’s worries about the future of humans in his age, and has accelerated in our time. In summation, the creation of nature as a concept, like the idea of ‘land’ above is human made. This is a curious and important point. First it served to separate humans from nature, and second is deemed nature is a thing – separate and in and of itself. Or for Heideggerians one might say a ‘standing reserve’ has been created for us to exploit and use at our will. The Enlightenment taught us that an anthropocentric universe was ‘natural’, and human progress always improves, or cultivates nature (with culture above nature).18 As Schadewaldt states: “For Aristotle and the Greeks, the whole self-movement of nature is not simply effected in the sense of being caused, but ordered or directed in a purposeful manner.”19 Thus ‘nature’ is a material humans use, or overcome, rather than experience, or undergo (more on this later). Thus ‘the Great Transformation’ forever altered the way human beings (and especially the Western world view) related to the world. These ideas accelerated the already nascent idea of nature as ‘usable’ or ‘cultivatable’ below cultural needs. As discussed, the idea of nature itself became a sacrificial ‘property’ or ‘land’ in which human progress would be allowed to proceed without haste in the terraforming of the the planet’s surface and atmosphere. These changes are the result of ideas, and the applied notions of many Euopean minds, of which Jean-Jacques Rousseau worried about. As Schadewaldt states later in the essay “We have taken man out of nature, placed him over and against it, and reduced the consequently profaned nature to a mere object of human knowledge.”20 This would be a description of the our current age, and age in which the notion of nature has itself been overcome by human hubris – this is the Anthropocene.

17 18 19 20

Schadewaldt: “The concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Technique’ according to the Greeks”, pp. 159–171. Martin Heidegger’s Essay on Technology (1954) discusses the concept of ‘standing reserve’. Schadewaldt: “The concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Technique’ according to the Greeks”, p. 162. Ibid., p. 165.

Kristopher J. Holland: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Botanique

Undergoing vs. Overcoming Nature: Dominique Janicaud & Rousseau The Anthropocene is the culmination of the great transformation. The detrimental effects of this era are accelerated by the time and space of the 20th and 21st centuries exploitation of nature – which now includes the entire biosphere. Our era is the also the result of the drive for the overcoming of nature – or the overcoming by human culture of what we have labeled nature through living non-authentically – or as Rousseau posited living hors de lui. I would like to link Rousseau’s 18th century critique with Dominque Janicaud’s (1937–2002) notions of overcoming vs. undergoing from the 20th and early 21st century.21 Dominque Janicaud was a philosopher concerned with human nature and the role discourses on rationality and rationalism have transformed humanity into, as Rousseau might say, a place where we live outside ourselves (hors de lui).22 In other words, we have in our blind pursuit of the rational, transformed the rational itself – inverted it into something that destroys instead of serves human being. Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the over-rationalization of the life-world is a similar idea.23 We must understand that the critique of reason (or instrumental reason) for Janicaud, Habermas, and Rousseau is not arguing for irrationality. They all want to ‘recover reason’ from its use and abuse in the name of ‘rationalizing activities’ that invert reason into a destructive force. An example would be the increased use of artificial intelligence in the bureaucratic functions of the state and corporations. While this seems like a good idea, it can result in Kafkaesque worlds where people and human interactions are reduced to calculations and action without ethical concerns. Perhaps Rousseau was the first to see the potential for reason to implode on itself, but it was in the 20th century and today with the use of reason to build ever more atomic weapons, and our present ages push towards general Artificial Intelligence (AI) which will cause reason to become ‘unreasonable’. In other words, when we reach the point where reason creates the conditions in which there is no ability for reflection, or no place for human input to arrest the actions initiated (of a human creation) then reason, like the Monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the runaway AI of sci-fi dystopias, overcomes human control, or worse human beingness itself. Much in the same way we developed the concept of nature (in the West) and then proceeded to ‘overcome’ it in the ideologies of the Anthropocene, in the current moment we are fast approaching the overcoming humanity itself through global climate change – the possible extinction of human beings on the planet. We have indeed, as Rousseau feared, moved away from the use of reason within ourselves, and instead continue with the use of reason to overcome ourselves. To put it simply, like Rousseau, Janicaud is concerned with why in our contemporary world we are living lives that are leading to the devastation of nature rather than the preservation of it. We have now reached the point where I have explained how Rousseau’s philosophical practice has informed the discussion of a counter-enlightenment which questions the use or overcoming of nature. I would now like to turn to his practice of collecting plants 21 22 23

See Janicaud: On the Human Condition. See Janicaud: Powers of the Rational. See Habermas: Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two.

45

46

Out of the Garden

and undergoing nature. What does Rousseau’s philosophical practices, such as ‘collecting plants’ hold for us today? Rousseau’s botanical practice symbolizes a ‘collection of thinking’ about the vanishing natural world in the face of human modernization, while at the same time marking the need to re-establish our connection to it. He wished to give people cause to celebrate nature, and cultivate an appreciate for the literal plants that populate it. Rousseau’s botany is also an example of how working with plants can connect us to tenets of the Romantic era (remembering that Romanticism favored the communal, agrarian way of life over industrialized capitalism.) In this sense undergoing nature is posed as an alternative to overcoming nature, and Rousseau’s ‘nature’ if you will, was modeled in his botanizing behavior. Rousseau’s Botanique (what I will refer to as his botany practice) is more than simply collecting plants. When taken in the context of Rousseau’s philosophy in relation to human nature, and the exploitation of nature itself as explored in this essay, it symbolizes the way one should live within themselves en lui-même with the contact with nature. Whether nature is a human construction or not, the idea is that one should not ‘overcome’ or allow the corruption of society to treat others, yourself, and nature as a commodity, or piece of land to ‘cultivate’. In that sense we are transforming nature as a concept in order to replace it with an idea of undergoing experiences – which includes ourself, others and the material world (what we have come to label nature). Here we can take Rousseau’s philosophical and botanical examples together, and like in Emile, see his botanical work as a pedagogy for living within yourself and within nature (undergoing). Only in this moment does the fate of the earth and human nature become intertwined, and transformed from the anthropocentric enlightenment influenced ideology, which Rousseau fought in the 18th century, and we need to today.

‘Everywhere’ in Chains: A Pedagogy of Counter-Enlightenment as Rousseau’s Botanique This reduction of nature to what is calculable has, as is plain to see, proven to be extraordinarily successful. It has brought us the most astounding discoveries, and placed in our hands the greatest mean of power – although at the cost of an impoverishment that is hard to estimate.24 It seems that men indeed are wicked. In the field of design there is a notion of ‘wicked problems’.25 A wicked problem is a problem that requires more than one domain of 24 25

Schadewaldt: “The concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Technique’ according to the Greeks”, p. 170. Rittel/Webber: “Dilemmas is a General Theory of Planning”, pp. 155–169.

Kristopher J. Holland: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Botanique

knowledge or single person to solve and is dependent upon interdisciplinary research, theory and practice to attack. There is the chance they are un-solvable. Also know as collective action problems,26 these wicked problems describe perfectly the current state of the problems the Anthropocene poses to humanity today. In the quote above, the impoverishment that is hard to estimate was perhaps, at the time when that was written, abstract. But today as we are on the precipice, much like the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818, by Caspar David Friedrich from the era of Frankenstein, of a new era. If we were to ‘re-paint’ this scene today, instead of showing the valley below as a wilderness un-tamed and ready to be improved by the age of reason, we would be standing over the wastelands of Hollywood dystopias, a Blade Runner type world that is a visual description, if not a revelation, of our baked in hothouse future. Rousseau’s pedagogy of counter-enlightenment, which questions the goals of the arts and sciences to improve the world by harvesting nature and shifting human nature towards rational self-interest individualism is needed now more than ever. What does that look like in practice? What if the wicked problems of climate change (or abrupt climate change) is un-solvable? I contend Rousseau’s ‘botany’ must be viewed as part of his philosophy in practice – just as much as his essays and commentary on human nature. Rousseau’s botanique and other ideas can serve as a model for us today. However, there is a need to contemplate our context and the crisis of our time. Our context is a world with different expectations for humanities’ future are being pined in by our choices as a species – yet with the same latent issues of started in the Enlightenment. Currently we have in neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy, etc., moved away from the ‘rational self-interested individual’ model toward a concept of human nature that reflects the emotional-reasoning, collaborative selves models, with empathetic drives, or in general ‘Philosophy in the Flesh (Lakoff & Johnson).27 Here we have returned to our speices collective problem solving natures, and are beginning to address the wicked problems related to climate change, with some of us living as Rousseau wished – within ourselves. In conclusion, what for Rousseau was collecting plants, was actually a way to live within nature, to live within oneself as connected and experiencing the world – rather than ‘cultivating’ it. Perhaps his once friend transformed into vehement enemy Voltaire was right in that we should each tend our own gardens.28 But we must view that garden as a collaborative project that significantly connects us all together, undergoes nature, and has us live authentically within ourselves, rather than Voltaire’s Enlightenment garden of Candide in which we cultivate and overcome nature. In the Enlightenment the best of all possible worlds was filled with rational self-interest individuals, but if we wish to correct that great transformation for our age – the Anthropocene – we should instead pursue Rousseau’s Botanique.

26 27

28

See Olson Jr.: The Logic of Collective Action. For emotional-reasoning see Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error (1994), for collaborative self see Agustín Fuentes’ The Creative Spark (2017), for empathetic see Jeremy Rifkin the Empathetic Civilization (2009) or for a general critique of Enlightenment notion of human nature and reason see Lakoff & Johnson’s (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh. Voltaire: Candide.

47

48

Out of the Garden

References Damasio, Antonio: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, New York (G.P. Putman Son’s) 1994. Damrosch, Leo: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, New York (Houghton Mifflin Company) 2005. Foucault, Michel: The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, New York (Picador) 2010. Fuentes, Agustín: The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional, New York (Dutton) 2017. Garrard, Graeme: Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes, New York (SUNY Press) 2003. Habermas, Jürgen: Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, translated by Thomas McCarthy, Boston, Mass. (Beacon Press) 1989. Heidegger, Martin: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York (Harper Perennial Modern Classics), Reissue edition, (1954) 2013. Janicaud, Dominique: On the Human Condition, New York (Routledge) 2005. Janicaud, Dominique: Powers of the Rational: Science, Technology, and the Future of Thought, Bloomington (Indiana University Press) 1994. Locke, John (Woolhouse Roger ed.): An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, New York (Penguin Books) 1997. Lakoff, George/Johnson, Mark: Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought, New York (Basic Books) 1999. Latour, Bruno: We Have Never Been Modern, Boston (Harvard University Press) 1993. Olson Jr., Mancur: The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Boston (Harvard University Press) 1965, 2nd ed., 1971. Patel, Raj: The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy, New York (Picador) 2010. Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston (Beacon Press) (1944) 2001. Rifkin, Jeremy: The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, New York (Penguin Group) 2009. Rittel, Horst W. J./Webber, Melvin M.: “Dilemmas is a General Theory of Planning”, in: Policy Sciences, 4 (1973), pp. 155–169. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Émile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, New York (Basic Books) 1979. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, New York (Hackett Publishing) 1992. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Confessions, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 5, Dartmouth College (University Press of New England) 1995. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: “Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts”, in: Susan Dunn (ed.): The Social Contract and The First and Second Discourses, New Haven/London (Yale University Press) 2002.

Kristopher J. Holland: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Botanique

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: The Social Contract, trans. By Maurice Cranston, New York (Penguin Books-Great Ideas) 2006. Schadewaldt, Wolfgang: “The concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Technique’ according to the Greeks”, trans. William Carroll, in: Carl Mitcham/Robert Machey (eds.): Research in Philosophy and Technology 2, Greenwich Conn., London (JAI Press) 1979, pp. 159–171. Voltaire: Candide, trans. Lowell Bair, New York (Bantam Dell) (1759), 1959.

49

“The flowers, after all, didn’t understand Greek”1: Plants, Politics, Poetics Sabine Flach

For how hard it is to understand the landscape as you pass in a train from here to there and mutely it watches you vanish.2 W. G. Sebald There’s really not much danger that the Friesians will wake up one fine morning as Sicilians, or the Scots as Venetians, even if there’s something to such a notion.3 H.M. Enzensberger

“We can only be hunters of objects”4 : Plants, Politics, Poetics “The free use of what is our own is hardest of all”5 , the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin notes in a letter to Casimir Ulrich Karl Böhlendorff on 4 December 1801. Hölderlin’s plea for self-reliance and self-reflection was already “worlds away”6 from the rules and demands of classicism that dominated his period (and especially Weimar

1 2 3 4 5 6

Rajčić: http://www.limmattalerzeitung.ch/kultur/buch-buehne-kunst/das-politische-der-pflanze n-130894995 (accessed March 29, 2017). Sebald: Across the Land and the Water, p. 3. Enzensberger: Europe, Europe, p. 7. Harman: The Third Table, p. 12. Hölderlin: “Letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff”, p. 208. The German text reads: “ Von all dem ist Hölderlin weltenweit entfernt. Was und vor allem wie er schreibt, ist mit den Forderungen der Klassik nicht vereinbar. ” in: Hölderlin: “Die Sprache Hölderlins”. https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/radiowissen/deutsch-und-literatur/ho elderlin-friedrich-dichter-sprache-100.html (accessed April 15, 2017).

52

Out of the Garden

Classicism), that is, from the standards of measure and order, clarity and balance, serenity and tranquility. Hölderlin understands the inverse translation of classical Greek and Hesperian art, respectively, as a form of cultural migration, a substrate that teaches both engagement with the ‘foreign’ and the ‘proper’ (in the sense of what is proper to oneself). Hölderlin’s reminder to Böhlendorff to practice the free use of the proper is placed at the beginning of the documenta X publication. Curated by Catherine David, this documenta continues to be central to art theorization, not only insofar as it was the last documenta held before the turn of the millennium, but also as it went beyond summarizing the relation between politics and art for the twentieth century (one of its central subjects): in line with Catherine David’s concept of the retro-perspective (the gaze ‘turned-around-looking-ahead’), it sought to anticipate this relation. Since this documenta at the latest, political discourse has been a central topic in art again. In the catalog, entitled Politics-Poetics, Catherine David discusses this relation in conversation with Benjamin Buchloh and Jean-Francois Chevrier in a sophisticated and advanced manner. What is striking is how the discussion of political discourse is hooked to certain events and persons. Only on page 643 of the catalog book, we find two indications toward a different approach. Catherine David notes in the conversation alluded to that “The notion of authorship is entirely reworked. What is at stake is the redistribution of authorship, transactions between subjectivities.”7 Benjamin Buchloh responds referring to an exhibition by Gabriel Orozco: “These types of things constantly play between object, process, and sculpture, without ever becoming any one of the three. They place themselves in the interstices…”8 It is this ‘jumping of things’, it is the transactions of art that are central to my reflections on art, nature, its economies and – subversive – political relations and practices. Concretely this means that I am interested in whether it is possible to conceptualize the political potential of art without resting on a subject-, author- or material-centered approach. For the facts that artworks are made by artists and consist of materials is as correct as it is trivial. What happens, however – I would like to posit – if a different question is asked? If one does not argue anthropocentrically, such as from the perspective of the author or in order to sound out art’s symbolic content for human sense-making, but if one focuses on the objects of art themselves. Does this allow for a different kind of political iconography – or perhaps even iconology – to emerge? It would be my hypothesis that it does. If we assume that this is indeed a possibility, we reach the questions that guide my following remarks: What is the political in the plant? And how can the political in the plant be recognized other than in its symbolizations? Politics-Poetics, the documenta X catalog title, refers back to Aristotle’s works, in which the structure of government is negotiated

7

8

Buchloh/David/Chevrier: “1960-1997, The Political Potential of Art Part 2”, pp. 624–647, here p. 643. Catherine David responds: “Many Contemporary practices lay the accent on everything that has to do with movement, energy, dynamics, passages, more so than on real presence. Often these works can appear to be Symptoms […]”, p. 643. Ibid., p. 643.

Sabine Flach: “The flowers, after all, didn’t understand Greek”: Plants, Politics, Poetics

alongside the moral constitution of society. Now, the thesis guiding my text is the following: the plant’s political may be understood if we follow Aristotle’s nature observations of plants. For Aristotle’s treatise is the first botanical text that engages with the relationship between plant and environment and that is hence written as a plant geography and ecology. This area can subsequently be integrated – as Aristotle indeed did – into his political philosophy. In this respect, the reference points for my explications are two aspects of Aristotle’s nature observations: On the one hand, his notion of ousia translated as substance, which is not precisely the same concept – presents a starting point for my investigation into the political in the plant. On the other hand, the hylomorphic tradition founded by Aristotle, in which form and substance – the ousia – are seen to mutually condition one another, in which form is understood as a generative principle and which posits questions concerning the material conditions of formation as such. As Hegel puts it in the Science of Logic: “Hence matter must be informed, and form must materialize itself; it must give itself self-identity or subsistence in matter.”9 Methodologically I will combine Aristotle’s observations concerning substance and form with Graham Harman’s ideas, especially his object-oriented philosophy. For Harman, too, recurs to Aristotle’s notion of substance. In his text The Third Table (published on the occasion of dOCUMENTA 13) he describes objects as “deeper than their appearance to the human mind but also deeper than their relations to one another”.10 This renders possible an observation removed from the producer, oriented on the phenomenon itself. While New Realism, that is, Object-Oriented Philosophy (OOP), does indeed point to fundamentally new approaches circumventing anthropocentrism,11 what is missing is a direct engagement with the possibilities inherent in art theory and practice.12 Harman kindly attests to its capacity of being the ‘third table’. To this extent, of course, I agree with Harman – only that he explains neither the why nor the how. As I argue, only a combination of Harman’s emphasis on object characteristics independent of humans and Aristotle’s nature observation of plants and his reflections on ousia and form renders possible a view on art that can focus in first on the political sub-

9 10 11

12

Hegel: The Science of Logic, p. 393. Harman: The Third Table, p. 4. Malabou: L’avenir de Hegel: plasticité, temporalité, dialectique; id.: La plasticité au soir de l’écriture; id.: Jacques Derrida: La Contre-Allee (Voyager avec Jacques Derrida); id.: Ontologie des Akzidentiellen. Essay zur zerstörerischen Plastizität. Only Dietmar Rübel refers to Malabou with regard to the de-differentiation of sculpture –- but only with regard to the question of form. See: Rübel: “Plasticity: An Art History of the Mutable”, pp. 94–103. Approaches found, for instance, in New Realism’s re-interpretation of affect theory against the backdrop of the critique of epistemic anthropocentrism, in Graham Harman’s conception of art as a ‘third table’ and in his conception of the object, or in Cathérine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. This also in reference to aesthetic questions, e.g. in: Armen: “Form. Singularität, Dynamik, Politik”, pp. 7–21; Armen/Skrebowski: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art; Armen/Hofmann: Raum in den Künsten. Konstruktion – Bewegung – Politik.

53

54

Out of the Garden

stance of art itself and then describe its potential and ascriptions – that is, its symbolic content – for human interactions; not the other way round.

Myth: Home The history of the origination of Europe follows a myth: Zeus, who appears in the form of a white bull, abducts Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, from Phoenicia and takes her to Crete. Historically speaking, the continent of Europe, then, is always already a nomadic figure: Europe, or Europa, is home for others, embodying one’s break with origin.13 Europe, then, is accompanied by a basic tension that can be reinterpreted to form an – always contemporary – political vision, for the continent of Europe does not follow an obligation to geography, but the pseudo-geographical, cultural, political and social union of peoples.14 The idea of home, or the homeland – in German ‘Heimat’ – is closely tied to nature, landscape, geographical space and the peoples therein; it is an ideological, political and emotional term. The entry in the German Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm shows how ‘Heimat’, originally neutral in gender, at this point refers more restrictedly to “the land or even only tract of land where one was born or holds permanent residence”.15 ‘Heimat’, or home, it seems, can be located – which might be difficult on a continent itself nomadic. In the German language, ‘Heimat’ appears as a naturalized myth. According to Roland Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’16 , the great achievement of myth lies in how it gives that which has grown historically – for example the homeland – the appearance of the natural, that which is given, which lies outside the influence of humankind, which is bound to territory and nature. Not at least under the growing influence of the bourgeoisie, the homeland is increasingly understood as the “conditio humana”.17 The myth of the ‘human family’ and its home follows a fixed scheme, as Barthes argues, in a first step, the differences within the human community are emphasized, to be negated, in a second step, by focus on what is shared. Thus, the homeland is sentimentally idealized, endowed with the status of a basic need shared by all humans. In this process, it privileges the few by excluding the great majority of others. By contrast, landscape is – by definition – not merely contemplated nature, but a larger settlement area; or to be more concrete and intricate: “the entirety of the politically agential inhabitants of a country”.18 13 14 15 16 17 18

See Pelz: “Figurierte und defigurierte Europa”, pp. 19–32. Ibid., p. 20. Grimm: Deutsches Wörterbuch, p. 86. Barthes: Mythen des Alltags. Ibid., pp. 226–229. Hilmer: “Landschaft”, p. 618. Generally speaking, it is nonetheless important to consider that a homogenous or homogenising notion of landscape does not exist anymore than one of nature exists; and of course, that the same holds true for culture. Not only must we keep in mind that landscape can be utilised distinctly in geographical terms just as much as in philosophical-cultural terms, and thus implies other concepts, such as subjectivity, perception, space; landscape is also defined

Sabine Flach: “The flowers, after all, didn’t understand Greek”: Plants, Politics, Poetics

By implication, landscapes are always already bound to a historical-political economy, turning into cultural constructs and mental topographies. In this context, art historian Martin Warnke has spoken of the political landscape,19 the landscape that dominates any and all space as much as the persons acting therein.

Fig. 1: RESANITA, Transplant, Travel Project South East Europe, 2013 Photo © RESANITA

19

differently depending on the reference point concerned, be it aesthetic, economic, territorial, political or philosophical. See: Flach/Pakesch: “Concepts of Landscape. A Conversation”, pp. 298–307. Cf. on the term political landscape and its meaning Warnke: Politische Landschaft. Zur Kunstgeschichte der Natur.

55

56

Out of the Garden

Traveling and Crossing Borders

Fig. 2: RESANITA, Transplant, Travel Project South East Europe, 2013 Photo © RESANITA

In 2013, a series of unusual – hidden – border transgressions took place: artists Resa Pernthaller and Anita Fuchs crossed several national borders in their vehicle equipped with all the usual tags and papers confirming it was up-to-date in terms of road safety, confirming the timely payment of tax and hence the reliability of its drivers who, themselves, carried valid passports identifying the artists as legitimate citizens of Austria; quotidian, harmless. Entirely legal. It was not touristic curiosity, however, that prompted the artists’ travels through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia,

Sabine Flach: “The flowers, after all, didn’t understand Greek”: Plants, Politics, Poetics

Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia – eleven South-East-European states in nine days – that is, it was not the temporary appropriation of foreign terrain. Rather, the artistic pair RESANITA traveled carrying with them a special set of passengers: plants – the transport of which into countries to which they are not native is prohibited under penalty. A subversive transfer of plants, then, determines this artistic project, the plant becoming much more than an – exotic – souvenir from a foreign country. With the plants’ entering into non-native countries and their planting into the earth in these countries, they are ‘transplanted’. This apparently simple – but prohibited – process is precarious because, as Aristotle explains in ‘de Partibus’: “The earth and its heat serving them in the place of a stomach.”20 What is experienced as threatening is not the transfer of the seeds or the plants as such, but their planting. For Aristotle shows how this transfer is based on incorporation, and it is precisely this process that is so intricate. Plants are, as it were, incorporated by the earth, and it is precisely this subtle incorporation ‘natural’ to plants that is politically explosive, for what is digested and hence naturalized is the ‘other’. What is more, the plant is marked by a threatening form of dissemination, for – as Aristotle explicates in ‘Parts of Animals’: […] the portions of the divided insect live only for a limited time, whereas the portions of the plant actually attain the perfect form of the whole, so that from one single plant you may obtain two or more.21 In other words, division, far from being an injury to a plant, is a means by which it attains its reproductive purpose. In their migration to countries to which they are not native, the plants in RESANITA’s oeuvre far exceed any symbolism that might be ascribed to them: they become witness and testimony; artistically, a political play is staged. RESANITA’s art explicates social myth – with political urgency and topical relevance.22

The Residence: Free Exchange Free Exchange is the title of a publication documenting a conversation between philosopher Pierre Bourdieu and German-American artist Hans Haacke. In 2000, following a decision made by the German parliament, the Federal Republic of Germany commissioned Haacke, whose work exposes political sub-systems, with the creation of a piece for the German ‘Reichstag’ (the parliament building).

20 21 22

Aristotle: “Parts of Animals”, Book 2, p. 1012. Ibid, Book 4, p. 1065. See also the project OBSERVATION JOUNAL: a project by Sergey Kishchenko and RESANITA in cooperation with Kunst im Öffentlichen Raum Steiermark, 6th MOSCOW BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART (2015), VIENNA CONTEMPORARY – International Art Fair (2016), 12th KRASNOYARSK BIENNALE of Contemporary Art (2017), http://www.resanita.at/projekte.php?ID=102& Typ=PR

57

58

Out of the Garden

Fig. 3: Hans Haacke, DER BEVÖLKERUNG [TO THE POPULATION], 2008. C-print on Alu-Dibond, 91 3/8 x 70 in (232 x 178 cm). © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Haacke’s piece features a box filled with gravel and soil from which various plants grow. In the middle, illuminated from within, we see letters reading “DER BEVÖLKERUNG (To the Population)”. The lettering is visible from all parliament floors. Haacke asked all members of parliament to bring soil from their respective constituency; the plants grow from seeds that coincidentally find their way into the bed of earth. In spite of its rather conceptual character, the work To the Population triggered fierce debate, not only regarding the artwork itself but also regarding the relation between art and politics. While it is possible that Haacke sought an implied reference to Bertolt Brecht’s text Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth from 1935, in which Brecht writes: “Anyone in our times

Sabine Flach: “The flowers, after all, didn’t understand Greek”: Plants, Politics, Poetics

who says population instead of ‘Volk’ and land ownership instead of ‘soil’ is already denying his support to many lies.”23 The text shown explicitly refers to the inscription on the German parliament building, reading “For the German People”. The shift in meaning from the dedication of ‘Volk’ to a population is certainly an interesting aspect warranting further discussion. In this context, however, I would like to focus on the materiality of Haacke’s work. For while soil is a ubiquitous material, the extreme and polemical reactions showed it is not welcome everywhere. This might be explained by soil being considered a lowly material not appropriate for a socially elevated site such as a national parliament. Furthermore, the use of soil would risk ideological contamination in the symbolic registers of any nation. In terms of cultural history, finally, the rejection of soil as a cultural good and artwork is ambivalent insofar as all creation myths have seen soil as the moldable origin of the human body as the most highly developed form. I am interested, however, less in earth-based creation myths and the related anthropocentric ascriptions than in the reference to form and processes of forming, as significant for art and its theorization. In this respect, it is possible, on the one hand, to forge a link to artistic and theoretical forms of production from since the 1960s and, on the other hand, to Aristotle’s ousia, for which the concept of form is substantial.

Fig. 4: Hans Haacke, Grass Grows, 1967–69. Earth and grass. “Hans Haacke: All Connected,” 2019. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

In 1969, Haacke was invited to the now legendary ‘Earth Art Exhibition’ at the Andrew Dickens White Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca. The exhibition presented works by

23

Brecht: “Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth”, p. 149.

59

60

Out of the Garden

19 internationally renowned artists, all of whom worked with the material of soil as then newly discovered for art. Haacke’s contribution was laconically entitled Grass Grows and presented a conical mound of fast-germinating winter wheat, so that form and color continuously changed as the wheat grew. A year earlier, Robert Morris, who also took part in the exhibition, had already shown an earth mound at the ‘Earthworks’ exhibition held at Dwan Gallery, New York. What is of interest to me in relation to these works is that earth is in this case not seen as a material for the intentional creation of the human being, as in the creation myths alluded to, but that intentionality is replaced by processes of plant growth and by – in Morris’ terms – an anti-form determining the artworks. In Haacke’s work from 1969 as much as in his piece for the German parliament, then, a lack of control is at work, a necessarily unsettling dimension, as Haacke emphasizes the heterogeneous make-up of earth as amalgam. And – in analogy to Aristotle’s description – earth as the substance that takes in and reshapes everything.24 Consequently the efficacy of earth lies in its power to reshape, for by contrast to solid materials that can be combined into composites of which the individual parts remain separately visible, an amorphous material like soil undermines territorial unity and belonging: without separating measures put into place, the amorphous tends to mix. Hans Haacke’s ensemble To the Population, then, addresses – by means of form and the process of formation – attempts at national unification and demonstrations of unity.

The Plants’ Political The following is from a speech by Nobel laureate in literature Herta Müller: I don’t know if I was lonely, as I didn’t know this word. Village speak only featured the word alone (‘allein’). And in dialect, it was ‘alleinig’. [The latter] has an extra syllable, it takes slightly more time and sounds sadder than ‘allein’. As I didn’t know the word lonely, the word didn’t know me. I became what the word meant. […] I no longer thought about the village and its people, my feet and head were now in a village of plants. Here in the valley they were the inhabitants. To the evening I immersed myself in the village of plants. I wanted to belong to them, and used them to stage ordinary village life. I spoke to them, picked them, had them lie next to each other, compared them, sampled them to see how they tasted, sorted them according to characteristics. […]. They were lean, fat, naughty or shy, just like people. I had them laugh with each other, argue, or hide. I had them marry when their faces went well together. I observed them grow old and sickly. [I observed how] the shoulder-high milk thistles grew white feathers. On damp days, the feathers became glued together, forming strange veils, like ghosts. Dolls crossed the air on long white threads. And the feather dolls were their souls. […]. At age 15, I began attending grammar school in the city, where the panopticon of nature continued to show itself just as it had before. Weeds sprouted between concrete and tarmac

24

See Wagner: “Ein Mischling für den Bundestag”, p. 23.

Sabine Flach: “The flowers, after all, didn’t understand Greek”: Plants, Politics, Poetics

on the rims of the sidewalks, in the neglected parks. The plants were following me. And it seemed to me that they are aware of what was going on in the city. They know of the crumbling housing blocks, the poverty, the everyday haste, the chronic sadness, the fear of the state. I was so alien here; the weeds were the only thing familiar. No one knew me, I only had plants’ trust I already carried with me.25 Müller is noted for her works depicting the effects of violence, cruelty and terror, usually in the setting of the Socialist Republic of Romania under the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, which she experienced herself. Many of her works are told from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania and are also a depiction of the modern history of the Germans in the Banat and Transylvania. Her much-acclaimed 2009 novel, The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel), portrays the deportation of Romania’s German minority to Soviet Gulags during the Soviet occupation of Romania for use as German forced labor. In 1976, Müller began working as a translator for an engineering factory but was dismissed in 1979 after year of repression for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime’s secret police. Müller’s native language is German; she learned Romanian only in grammar school. On 8 October 2009, the Swedish Academy announced that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing her as a woman “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”.26 What becomes clear is that artworks that engage with the aesthetics of nature in art can be understood as an epistemology of nature.27

25

26 27

The German text reads: “Ich weiß nicht, ob ich einsam war, weil ich das Wort nicht kannte. In der Dorfsprache gab es nur das Wort allein. Und im Dialekt heißt das alleinig. Es hat eine Silbe mehr, nimmt sich ein bisschen mehr Zeit und klingt trauriger als allein. Weil ich das Wort einsam nicht kannte, kannte das Wort mich auch nicht. Ich wurde nicht zu dem, was das Wort bedeutet. […] Ich vergaß das Dorf mit den Menschen, war mit den Füßen und mit dem Kopf jetzt in einem Dorf aus Pflanzen. Hier im Tal waren sie die Bewohner. Ich war bis abends eingeschlossen im Dorf der Pflanzen. Ich wollte zu ihnen gehören und inszenierte mit ihnen ein normales Dorfleben. Ich sprach laut mit ihnen, pflückte sie, legte sie nebeneinander, verglich sie, kostete, wie sie schmecken, sortierte sie nach Eigenschaften. […] Sie waren mager, dick, frech oder scheu wie Menschen. Ich ließ sie miteinander lachen oder streiten, sich verstecken. Ich verheiratete sie, wenn ihre Gesichter zueinanderpassten. Ich sah, wie sie alt und krank wurden. Wie die schulterhohen Milchdisteln weiße Federn kriegten. Und an feuchten Tagen klebten sich die Federn in seltsamen Schleiern aneinander, wie Gespenster. An langen weißen Fäden flogen Puppen durch die Luft. Und die Federpuppen waren ihre Seelen. […] Ich kam mit 15 in die Stadt aufs Gymnasium, und das Panoptikum der Natur zeigte sich wie früher. Zwischen Beton und Asphalt am Rand der Gehsteige, in den verwahrlosten Parks wuchs Unkraut. Die Pflanzen kamen mir nach. Und mir schien, die wissen, was los ist in dieser Stadt. Sie kennen die bröckelnden Wohnblocks, die Armseligkeit, die Hast des Alltags, die chronische Trauer und Angst vor dem Staat. Ich war so fremd hier, das einzige Bekannte war das Unkraut. Niemand kannte mich, ich hatte nur das mitgebrachte Vertrauen der Pflanzen”. In: Müller: “Ein Ausweg nach innen”, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/rede-ein-ausweg-nach-in nen-1.3631956 (accessed August 25, 2017). The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2009/summar y/ (accessed March 20, 2017). See: Flach, “How much Life is in a Still-Life? Art’s Hypernatural Nature”, pp. 31–52.

61

62

Out of the Garden

Art can present processes of assimilation that belong, first of all – as I hope to have been able to show with reference to Aristotle – to plants and the earth as such. Only in a second step do they migrate into forceful symbolic practices. For it is a characteristic conception of Aristotle’s that the life can only prosper if the elements (stoicheia) are placed in a mixture appropriate for the local plants – that is, in an amalgam of earth. Plants prosper best in the case of eucrasia, that is, where elements are mixed favorably. Aristotle considers eucrasia the right medium of elements affecting one another, and the middle – to meson – is part of Aristotle’s ideological conception. It is, namely – whether in aesthetics, ethics, or politics – the best condition. The discussions on substance and form implicate not only of aisthetical and knowledge-theoretical topics and questions, but also a political stake. To add to Graham Harman’s writing in terms of the role of art and hence to fulfill his yet unfulfilled promise for him, one might state, then, that art can interrogate all forms and substances in and as itself.28 Or, to be more precise, as Aristotle’s treatise Eudemian Ethics puts it: “In all cases the mean in relation to us is the best; for this is as knowledge and reason direct us.”29

References Aristotle: “Eudemian Ethics”, in: Jonathan Barnes (ed): Aristotle, and Aristotle. Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 2, Princeton (Princeton University Press) 1985. Aristotle: “On the parts of animals”, in: Jonathan Barnes (ed): Aristotle, and Aristotle. Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 1, Princeton (Princeton University Press) 1984. Armen, Avanessian: “Form. Singularität, Dynamik, Politik”, in: Avanessian Armen/ Franck Hofmann/Susanne Leeb/Hans Stauffacher (eds.): Form. Zwischen Ästhetik und Politik, Zürich/Berlin (Diaphanes Verlag) 2009, pp. 7–21. Armen, Avanessian/Skrebowski, Luke (eds.): Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, Berlin (Sternberg Press) 2011. Armen, Avanessian/Hofmann, Franck (eds.): Raum in den Künsten. Konstruktion – Bewegung – Politik, München (Fink) 2010. Barthes, Roland: Mythen des Alltags, Berlin (Suhrkamp) 2015. Brecht, Bertolt: “Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth”, in: Tom Kuhn/Steve Giles (eds.): Brecht on Art and Politics, London (Methuen Drama) 2003, pp. 141–157. Buchloh, Benjamin/David, Chatherine/Chevrier, Jean-Francois: “1960-1997, The Political Potential of Art Part 2”, in: documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranst. GmbH (ed.): Poleitics (Politics-Poetics: das Buch zur Documenta X), Ostfildern (Cantz-Verlag) 1997, pp. 624–643. Enzenzberger, Hans Magnus: Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent, trans. Martin Chalmers, New York (Pantheon Books), 1989. 28 29

Germer: “Form als Selbstunterlaufung”, pp. 73–76. Aristotle: “Eudemian Ethics”, p. 1932.

Sabine Flach: “The flowers, after all, didn’t understand Greek”: Plants, Politics, Poetics

Flach, Sabine: “How much Life is in a Still-Life? Art’s Hyper-Natural Nature”, in: Suzanne Anker/Sabine Flach (eds.): Naturally Hypernatural I: Concepts of Nature, Bern/Berlin/ New York (Peter Lang) 2016, pp. 31–52. Flach, Sabine/Pakesch, Peter: “Concepts of Landscape. A Conversation”, in: Katrin Bucher Trantow/Katia Huemer/Peter Pakesch (eds.): Landscape. Construction of a Reality, Köln (Walther König) 2015, pp. 298–307. Germer, Stefan: “Form als Selbstunterlaufung”, in: Texte zur Kunst, 27 (1997), pp. 73–76. Grimm, Jacob/Grimm, Wilhelm: Deutsches Wörterbuch, Bd. 10, München (Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag) 1984. Harman, Graham: The Third Table (100 Notes – 100 Thoughts Documenta 13), Ostfildern (Cantz-Verlag) 2012. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: The Science of Logic, transl. by George di Giovanni, New York (Cambridge University Press) 2010. Hilmer, Frank: “Landschaft”, in: Karlheinz Barck [u.a.] (eds.): Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch, Bd. 3, Stuttgart/Weimar (J.B. Metzler) 2001. Hölderlin, Friedrich: “Letter to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff”, in: Charlie Louth/ Jeremy Adler (eds.): Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, London (Penguin Books Limited) 2009. Hölderlin, Friedrich: “Die Sprache Hölderlins”: https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/radiowissen/deutsch-und-literatur/hoelderlin-friedrich-dichter-sprache-100.html (accessed April 15, 2017). Malabou, Cathérine: L’avenir de Hegel: plasticité, temporalité, dialectique, Paris (Vrin) 1996. Malabou, Cathérine: La plasticité au soir de l’écriture, Paris (Scheer) 2005. Malabou, Cathérine/Derrida, Jacques: La Contre-Allée (Voyager avec Jacques Derrida), Paris (Quinzaine Littéraire) 1999. Malabou, Cathérine: Ontologie des Akzidentiellen. Essay zur zerstörerischen Plastizität, morale provisoire #3, Berlin (Merve) 2011. Müller, Herta: “Ein Ausweg nach innen”, https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/rede-einausweg-nach-innen-1.3631956 (accessed August 25, 2017). The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2009/ summary/ (accessed March 20, 2017). Pelz, Annegret: “Figurierte und defigurierte Europa”, in: Eva Lezzi/Monika Ehlers (eds.): Fremdes Begehren. transkulturelle Beziehungen in Literatur, Kunst und Medien, Köln/Wien/ Weimar (Böhlau) 2003, pp. 19–32. Rajčić, Dragica: http://www.limmattalerzeitung.ch/kultur/buch-buehne-kunst/das-pol itische-der-pflanzen-130894995 (accessed March 29, 2017). Rübel, Dietmar: “Plasticity: An Art History of the Mutable”, in: P. Lange-Berndt (ed.): Materiality: Documents of Contemporary Art. London (Whitechapel Gallery) 2015, pp. 94–103. Sebald, W. G.: Across the Land and the Water, London (Hamish Hamilton) 2011. Wagner, Monika: “Ein Mischling für den Bundestag – Erd- und Steingemenge als Symbole politischer Einheit”, in: Michael Diers (ed.): “Der Bevölkerung”. Aufsätze und Dokumente zur Debatte um das Reichstagsprojekt von Hans Haacke, Köln (König) 2000, pp. 22–34.

63

64

Out of the Garden

Warnke, Martin: Politische Landschaft. Zur Kunstgeschichte der Natur, München/Wien (Hanser) 1992.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: RESANITA, Transplant, Travel Project South East Europe, 2013. Photo © RESANITA Fig. 2: RESANITA, Transplant, Travel Project South East Europe, 2013. Photo © RESANITA Fig. 3: Hans Haacke, DER BEVÖLKERUNG [TO THE POPULATION], 2008. C-print on AluDibond, 91 3/8 x 70 in (232 x 178 cm). © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Fig. 4: Hans Haacke, Grass Grows, 1967–69. Earth and grass. “Hans Haacke: All Connected,” 2019. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

4. The Social Order of Plants

The Potential of Ruderal Societies and Perfectly Provisional Areas in the Works of Lois Weinberger Karoline Walter

I don’t sow, I don’t plant anything, I keep the ground open for something new, wherever it comes from – be it the wind, animals, or the earth itself.1

These words from the late Austrian artist Lois Weinberger2 give a first impression of his artistic practice, and at the same time, point at central aspects of his works. He in general focused on ruderals and areas in which they are able to grow without being rooted out or eliminated, like uncultivated land, periphery and detritus – in the words of the artist: “Space / created as a consequence of precise carelessness towards what we generally call nature – RUDERAL SOCIETY.”3 The work Ruderal Society: Excavating a Garden was implemented in the course of the dOCUMENTA 14 in 2017 in Cassel. Figure 1 shows the original state of the art project. As it can be seen, Weinberger excavated a broad stripe in a straight line, exactly 100 meters long, and heaped on a knoll at the end of it in the baroque garden Karlsaue. This way, he created a free space and afterwards abandoned it – without any plantings – corresponding to the introductory statement. This is a ‘Perfectly Provisional Area’ inhabited by a Ruderal Society in the sense of the artist.

1 2 3

Weinberger, cited in Trummer: “Ruderal Society Lois und Franziska Weinberger”. The artist recently died in 2020 at the age of 73. “Lois Weinberger, 1990”, p. 133.

68

The Social Order of Plants

Fig. 1: Lois Weinberger, Ruderal Society: Excavating a Garden, documenta XIV, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Kiel / © Studio Weinberger.

The interesting thing in the context of this specific work is that during the dOCUMENTA 14, a colorful mixture of flowers we usually find in conventional gardens grew on this free ground. Normally Ruderal Society, with mainly green ruderal plants colloquially known as weeds, inhabits the areas Weinberger created. They often include very resistant pioneer plants, which are also comfortable under extremely poor living conditions, and through their growth prepare the ground for later vegetation. Weinberger used foreign plants or transferred certain plants into a different area, intervened in a given situation, and thus created a new, organic, viable, botanical micro culture, which functioned as revitalization in certain places. Quite often the ruderals he planted at the beginning are replaced by different plants. This way a natural process became visible that went on until a final sedentary and competitive resistant society was accomplished. Although Weinberger’s plantings and plant transfers often had a revitalizing or renaturalizing effect, this was not his primary intention. For the artist, the ‘ecological balance’ is actually always given, as we will see later on. In this sense, the artist did not see himself as an environmental activist, and he did not do art as a species protection, but his actions were effective in that sense. The botanical term ruderal derives from the Latin word rudis, which means rough, artless and wild.4 In connection to that, Weinberger preferred the neutral term Ruderal Society because definitions like weed or neophyte are attributions and often include devaluations such as worthlessness and uselessness, reflecting hidden power structures in our society. The term neophyte for example is often attributed by lists from the state, which at the same time recommend the handling of them. In Austria, Switzerland and Germany, action plans and blacklists are meant to curb the threat posed by neophytes. Various videos and pictures from visitors of Lois Weinberger’s work at the dOCUMENTA 14 circulate on the internet. They give an impression of its later state with diverse

4

“Lois Weinberger in conversation with Ulrich and Arrends 2010”, p. 51.

Karoline Walter: The Potential of Ruderal Societies and Perfectly Provisional Areas

blooming flowers. This colorful appearance of the Perfectly Provisional Area is unusual for the works of Lois Weinberger. Especially in comparison to other similar projects, like the one in Cologne in 2015, this interesting fact becomes obvious.5 In Cologne, the artist as well excavated a broad stripe in a straight line and then left, so that the planting happened without him. Some pictures taken later on present a different kind of vegetation with mostly green and inconspicuous ruderals, not a colorful flower meadow. The question is: What happened in Cassel? The answer is quite simple: Many of the plants found on this stripe in Cassel had been planted by visitors. This special interactive aspect developed independently from the artist and was not initially intended. Nevertheless, even if the appearance of this Perfectly Provisional Area is different to Weinberger’s common ones, the underlying concept stays the same.6 Perfectly Provisional Areas can be seen as counterparts to the perfectly organized spaces of our society, where static organization dominates, and every object has its predetermined space. These special, artistically created, realms are distinguished by movement, mobility and dynamism, whereby these areas evade any conventional systems of order.7 It is an indefinite and open area that exists also without human intervention. Due to this concept, openness is a central characteristic of Weinberger’s works. This way every kind of planting is welcome, no matter its origin, as well as any other human leftovers, including waste and discarded objects. The artist concretized his areas once, saying, “They are poetic locations that have reached a point where it’s possible neither to speak of beginning nor of ending or stopping, a realm of possibilities that marks a point of intersection.”8 Weinberger’s artistic strategy centered on the term precise carelessness, which means leaving and not giving attention to his art projects. This correlates with his approach to and his handling of nature. He once stated that nature, in his approach, is “not an arbitrarily fixable metaphor, but a kind of perfect provisional, which is exposed to independent change and from a certain point gets along without me.”9 Due to the non-interference of man, a special freedom evolves, so that natural processes can take over and become visible. In the context of this work series, it turns out that the surrounding ‘nature’ of the park is not as natural as it seemed in the first place. On the contrary, due to Lois Weinberger’s interventions, it becomes obvious that the park is a perfectly organized area, artificially formed and subject to certain rules. The work Ruderal Society: Excavating a Garden refers in some points to a former sitespecific installation from 1997 titled What is Beyond the Plants/ Is at One with Them, implemented also in Cassel in the course of the dOCUMENTA 10. In the course of his explorations for this dOCUMENTA Weinberger came across an abandoned railway track, which reminded him of the tracks of the former concentration camps Auschwitz and Mauthausen. This is what inspired him to create said work in the first place. Weinberger stated: “For the (d)OCUMENTA X, in 1997, I planted a one-hundred-meter-long section

5 6 7 8 9

For more pictures of Lois Weinbergers works please visit his homepage: www.loisweinberger.net The artist and educator Ellie Irons is currently working on similar questions and topics with her very interesting project Lawn (Re)Distrubance Laboratory. Cf. Pohlen: “Ein perfekt provisorisches Gebiet. Lois Weinbergers kreative Strategie”, pp. 12–15. “Lois Weinberger in conversation with Ulrich and Arrends 2010”, p. 56. Weinberger: “In der Zeit liegt die Natur. Ein Gespräch mit Dieter Buchhart”, p. 237.

69

70

The Social Order of Plants

of decommissioned railway track with neophytes – new immigrants – from South and Southeast Europe as a metaphor for the processes of migration of our time.”10 Due to his artistic strategy of leaving and abandoning, after more than 20 years the area of this art project today looks completely different, with wild growth of trees and shrubs, which already completely covered the railway tracks. In contrast to the latest work in Cassel, where he left without plantings, in 1997 he purposely inserted plants from Ukraine, Syria, the Balkan, Spain, and Greece, which came from his first so called Gebiet or Area in Vienna developed in the late 1980s. Over many years, the artist collected wild seeds from Vienna and other cities and countries of the south and southeast, grew and propagated the plants and then planted them again somewhere else – for example on the rail tracks in Cassel. The Area in Vienna in a way can be seen as the initial point that influenced most of his further artistic projects including the following work series, the Portable Gardens. Weinberger developed the central idea for this project in the late 1990s, when many refugees from the Balkan states came to Austria and Europe, often carrying everything they had in this specific checked plastic bags. Hence, they became a symbol for the migration policy of the 1990s. The artist placed these kinds of bags filled with soil, seeds and sometimes plants from the surroundings in different areas and afterwards left them and let natural processes take over – similar to the work series mentioned in the beginning. This way, he again created Perfectly Provisional Areas with free space for a Ruderal Society due to his strategy of precise carelessness. In 2000, in Heverlee/Belgium, the artist placed the bags in the atrium of a monastery and positioned the symbolic figure of a green man in a niche above. At the request of the friars, Weinberger reconstructed the former monastery garden by planting healing, poisonous and useful plants in one of the bags. The rest had been filled with ruderals from the surrounding area. This early realization from 2000 underlines Weinberger’s interest in various approaches to nature, including the religious and folkloristic. Due to the surrounding area, the Christian model of nature control and the Hortus Conclusus, the closed holy garden, appear as central aspects, which is very interesting considering the context of the migration issue included in this work. In the course of the Liverpool Biennale 2004, Weinberger implemented the Portable Gardens in the parking lot of the Liverpool National Wildflower Center, whose aim is to raise awareness about the importance of wildflowers through community projects and encourage people to create new wildflower landscapes wherever it is possible.11 Furthermore, the year 2004 was also declared the Year of the garden, in honor of the foundation of the Royal Horticultural Society 200 years before, which fundamentally promoted the popularity of the garden in England.12 In addition to that, the artist used plants from the

10 11 12

Email correspondence with Lois Weinberger, Oct. 2018. Official Website of the National Wildflower Center Liverpool, n.d., link: https://www.nwc.org.uk/ (accessed Oct. 05, 2018). Cf. SpaceX, Exhibition. Hortus, Botany and Empire, n.d., link: http://spacex.org.uk/exhibitions/h ortusbotany-and-empire/ (accessed Jan. 17, 2017).

Karoline Walter: The Potential of Ruderal Societies and Perfectly Provisional Areas

grounds of the National Garden Festival of 198413 – a vast revitalized area, which closed after the festival so that a wild mixture of plants could evolve.14

Fig. 2: Lois Weinberger, Portable Garden, 1994/2004, Biennale Liverpool 2004. © Studio Weinberger.

The original idea, re-cultivating deserted terrain through landscaping in order to push short-term tourism, derives from Germany15 and was used in 1984 with the aim to give Liverpool a new, multicultural image. The driving force behind the project was the Prime Minister at that time, Margaret Thatcher, who aimed to appease inner-city conflicts resulting from economic and social problems. To celebrate ‘Multiculturalism’, as Tom Trevor writes, they created a park with special vegetation of plants from all over the world. Sadly, the intended leisure park was closed after the festival due to the negative attitude of the population. In 2004, the artist found an inspiring mixture of plants at this place, which he then used for the bags in front of the Liverpool National Wildflower Center.16 In this context, the work allows a critical reflection of the attributions of ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’.

13 14

15 16

Cf. Trevor: “Drei Ökologien”, pp. 231–232. The tradition of the International Garden Festival developed in England in the 1970s aiming to recultivate post-industrial areas allover England. The 1984 Liverpool Festival was a special highlight of this festival series. In only 31 months, 2.5 hectares of land, lakes and forests were created where previously, sanded docks, oil terminals and large amounts of garbage were deposited. Over three million tons of waste had been removed and a quarter of a million trees and shrubs had been planted. In a relatively short time, a whole area was completely transformed – from a landfill site to a leisure and amusement park. C.f. Nicholson-Lord: The Greening of Cities, p. 133. Cf. Johnson: Cultural Capitals, revaluing the arts, remaking urban spaces, p. 100. Cf. Trevor: “Drei Ökologien”, pp. 231–232.

71

72

The Social Order of Plants

Weinberger placed these kind of bags in various surroundings, for example also in a historical palace garden in Innsbruck, Austria, in the middle of a shopping street in Odense, Denmark and in front of the Centre D’Art Contemporain in Bretagne, France.17 While the bags have mostly been removed in the other areas, at this place in Bretagne they were allowed to disintegrate on the spot until only a small pile of earth with special vegetation referred to the former intervention of the artist. The habit of removing the bags gives an impression of the values in our society that also manifests in art institutions. A sharp contrast to the implementation in Bretagne is the structured and sober realization in the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Toyota City, Japan. In consultation with Lois Weinberger, the ‘wild plants’ were specially grown in advance by Japanese gardeners, so that the bags contained the appropriate plants for the opening of the exhibition. Because Weinberger wanted to place the bags in the tiled courtyard of the museum during the planting process, the environment was meticulously covered with plastic wrap so that the surrounding area stayed sober and free from earth and dirt. The smooth, architectural environment of the museum underlines the artistic value of the project, which almost automatically raises questions about the ‘aura’ of the artwork in the museum environment. In addition, the question arises at which point the artwork loses its artistic value. In cooperation with the galerie salle principale, Weinberger positioned the bags also in a less affluent housing area of Paris in 2016. Because of the ephemeral character of the artwork, the Centre Pompidou in Paris purchased the installation to preserve and document it. In this context, the loss of value and disintegration of art moves into focus. Weinberger’s Portable Gardens can be loaded with different contents depending on the location where he positioned them, corresponding to the context of site specificity. Lois Weinberger also emphasized the flexibility of the contents in his statement: The art makes itself the space / the immigrant pockets (‘Portable Gardens’) ... are possible in every imaginable environment – in the urban area (city / small town / village) as well as in the external area of a rural area. The meaning changes and is part of the content. The viewer continues my work in his own way [....].18 The characteristic aspect of a conventional garden has always been its location attachment. Lois Weinberger, on the contrary, mostly titled the bags Portable Gardens or sometimes Mobile Garden. However, the mobility of Weinberger’s Portable Garden is a seeming one, as the bags cannot easily be carried away due to their weight, especially if they start to dissolve. But the inhabitants of his gardens remain mobile – the ruderal plants and neophytes, which are carried on through the natural processes without human or artistic intervention and continue their migration. Similar contents to the work series with the plastic bags can be found in Weinberger’s series with buckets, which developed out of the same original idea in the 1990s. The artist replaced the bags with buckets so that the work became a bit more long-lasting and stable. He first implemented this idea in the course of a bigger project in 2002 in St. Pölten,

17 18

Further images can be found on the artist’s website: www.loisweinberger.net “Lois Weinberger in conversation with Ulrich and Arrends 2010”, p. 72.

Karoline Walter: The Potential of Ruderal Societies and Perfectly Provisional Areas

Austria, and then iterated it several times also in 2017 for the Centre Pompidou in Metz, where he filled 400 white buckets with earth from the area and positioned them in a square. Corresponding to his usual artistic practice, he then left, following his principle: “The best gardeners are the ones who leave the gardens.”19 As a result, many different ruderals settled down in these buckets, which will subsequently fall apart if they are allowed to stay in place. Hence, the plastic pieces will become an inseparable part of the ground. This way the artist visualizes a process that happens mostly unnoticed all over the world – the pollution of the earth with micro plastic. This development is characteristic for our time. It also justifies the discussion of the work in the context of the Anthropocene debate20 – a term that often serves as a concept for the reflection on the condition of today’s world. The Anthropocene has been much discussed since Paul Crutzen at the beginning of this millennium. In general, it refers to an era in which humans have become the strongest geological force in the world. In the course of the debate, humans are called to act in order to avert threatening disaster. Through his works, Weinberger propounds an uncommon solution and suggests the retreat of man, acting in the form of non-action according to his statement: “From intervention to being there.”21 The meaning behind this becomes more obvious in the following quote: “Even if a river is swimming in oil residues, the so-called ecological balance is still there. After all, new life could still emerge from this vision of contamination.”22 A further interesting work series in this context is Ruderal Enclosure, for which the title Wild Cube manifested later on. He first implemented this idea in Innsbruck in the late 1990s and, at that time, it sparked fierce discussions in society about the entity and value of contemporary art. For this work series the artist positioned steel cages in the urban area, sometimes even opening up the ground within the enclosure, and then left them, allowing spontaneous vegetation to spread unhindered inside.23 As already indicated in the oil quotation above, every material can become part of Weinberger’s artistic installations, including garbage and discarded materials. Hence, the original intention of the artist was to leave the inside of the wild cube untouched, no matter what people would throw into them. In this context, the artist states: “Nature has nothing to do with general notions of purity, which is why I see art as constructions of everyday life, as suitable engines of life.”24 After a while, the rubbish accumulated more and more in the Wild Cube of Innsbruck, so the government decided to clean the artwork regularly. At this point Wein-

19 20

21 22 23

24

Weinberger cited in Mellitzer: “Die Naturschönheit mutiert bevor sie faßbar wird”, p. 113. Peter Sloterdijk suggests the terms Eurocene or Technocene due to the leading role of the western countries. Cf. Sloterdijk: “Das Anthropozän – Ein Prozess-Zustand am Rande der Erd-Geschichte?”, p. 25. Weinberger cited in Rollig: “Möglichkeiten von Differenz”, p. 46. “Lois Weinberger in conversation with Ulrich and Arrends 2010”, p. 55. The title reveals the connection to the well-known concept of Brian O’Doherty concerning the White Cube. While art objects such as luxury items are mostly presented in the White Cubes of museums and galleries, Weinberger shows proliferating wild plants and ruderals as prisoners or those in need of protection. “Lois Weinberger in conversation with Ulrich and Arrends 2010”, p. 55.

73

74

The Social Order of Plants

berger’s work forms a silent critique on the common functionalism and materialism of our society, in which unusable things lose their value and are often discarded.25 Through the loss of value, plants, soil and plastic become weeds, dirt and garbage. Crucial here is, amongst others, the location where for example soil appears. Within the flowerbeds, it is a welcomed soil for plants, but in house entrances it appears as unwanted dirt. Similar dynamics can be found in the context of Ruderal Societies – allowed in the peripheries, unwanted in conventional gardens and parks. Because of its central idea of openness, the Perfectly Provisional Area creates space for every unwanted object no matter its origin.

Fig. 3: Lois Weinberger, Wild Cube – Ruderal Enclosure, 1998/1999, New University of Economic and Social Sciences Innsbruck. Photo by Gerbert Weinberger / © Studio Weinberger.

Although Weinberger’s Areas differ from conventional gardens in many aspects, there are connections and similarities. Both places can be seen as Foucault’s heterotopias, just in different variations. Even though the concept of Foucault is in its origin fragmental, which has led to many different interpretations, it is interesting in the context of Lois Weinberger’s works. The concept of heterotopias focuses on counter places to society, other places within a culture, with power structures deviating from the norm. In every tradition, a garden – independent of its appearance – is a demarcated space in which the idea of an ideal world stands in contrast to the reality outside the garden. Weinberger’s ideal world is dominated by freedom, change, and diversity, and due to the natural processes, it destroys borders. As time goes by, the ‘garden’ becomes part of the surrounding area. Not only can every material become part of Weinberger’s artwork, but also every place can become a garden in the sense of a Perfectly Provisional Area – a shopping street, a park, the atrium of a monastery, the public space in front of a university.

25

Mellitzer: “Die Naturschönheit mutiert bevor sie faßbar wird”, p. 134.

Karoline Walter: The Potential of Ruderal Societies and Perfectly Provisional Areas

From the beginning, gardens have been inspired by ideals, like the idyll or paradise, similar to other so called ‘conventional’ artworks. Hence, Lucius Burckhardt once stated: “Gardens are pictures – you often forget this because their representations are on a scale of one to one.”26 Depending on time and context, the garden conveys different concepts of order – divine, feudal, democratic, national or individual – and is therefore also a mythological, theological, psychological, sociological, aesthetic, economic or scientific instrument. In the sense of Foucault’s heterotopias, the garden marks a different place with different laws and order systems – always delimited and often in contrast to the surroundings. Due to his concept it becomes obvious that what is termed and evaluated as ‘norm’ and ‘abnormal’ depends on the respective context. In this sense, Weinberger’s works can also be read as a call to rethink the current categorization and systems of order because they create distance and difference. Leaving his areas, not interfering, not paying attention to them turn out to be the most important elements in the Perfectly Provisional Areas of Lois Weinberger. In this point lies an interesting connection to Foucault, who realized that the behavior of humans can be changed by a possible observation. Conversely, it follows that the unobserved existence also leads people to certain behaviors and thus other dynamics are set in motion. Often, discarded plastic bottles and graffiti illustrate that the places in which they occur are less controlled and organized. The places of non-observance are not subject to the traditional systems of order of society and thus turn out to be heterotopias, places with different rules, or no rules at all. With the absence of order and organization, the Perfectly Provisional Areas become realms of freedom for the unwanted and unnoticed. It is “A PLACE / WHERE THE LIVING SHOWS ITSELF VISIBLY ABOVE THE ORDERING,”27 as Weinberger once stated. Further characteristics of Foucault’s concept, like heterogeneity and a system of openness and closure against the outside world, are also central issues in Weinberger’s installations. By leaving his areas, he stands for the non-interfering of man, the abandonment of nature, whereby natural processes become visible. As a result, it becomes obvious that nature isn’t just a human construct – correspondent to the postmodern approach. It also includes a bundle of processes which evolve independently from humans. This is the point where his works converge to discussions about speculative realism. Already at the end of the 1990s, Lois Weinberger sought new ways and insights independent of the human being by abandoning his areas and, due to this, presented a set of ideas that later formulated the philosophical mindset of speculative realism. In addition to that, a few other terms currently circulate, such as new realism or new materialism. These trends are not synonymous but have in common that they all oppose the centering on man and seek access to the world independent of man. So, this tendency can be seen as a consequence of the ideas formulated in connection to the Anthropocene debate. In other words, this philosophical direction turns against the thinking of postmodernism, which understands the world as a construct of man and always in the context of human perception. The human-independent reality of the material becomes perceptible in Lois Weinberger’s works through the

26 27

Burckhardt: “Gärten sind Bilder (1989)”, p. 156. “Lois Weinberger in conversation with Ulrich and Arrends 2010”, p. 56.

75

76

The Social Order of Plants

processes of decay and growth. In a way, it underlines Daniel Boese’s statement, “Art cannot construct everything because there is a reality of the material.”28 On the one hand, nature is perceived as a construct and idea of man; on the other hand, as an independent process. This way, Weinberger skillfully combines seemingly contradictory aspects of the Anthropocene with speculative realism, showing that, although processes take place independent of humans, they are often influenced by them. Lois Weinberger’s multi-faceted, often inconspicuous and open-minded works are characterized by the fact that, from different sides and under varying contexts, there are always new aspects to be discovered – globalization, mobility, social poverty, change and heterogeneity, alienation, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, transience, entropy, and decay are just a few topics that can be seemingly infinitely expanded. Even contrary theoretical concepts like the Anthropocene and speculative realism can be united in one artistic project. At this point, the special potential of Lois Weinberger’s works becomes visible. Due to art, contemporary discussions in science can be viewed from new angles, revealing new relationships and ideas. Gerald Bast stated: “As alienation, art fulfills a cognitive function; she utters truths that cannot be pronounced in any other language.”29 – This is the special potential inherent in art and especially in the art of Lois Weinberger.

References Bast, Gerald: “Der Mensch im Anthropozän braucht die Erkenntnisfunktion”, in: Gabriele Mackert/Paul Petritsch (eds.): Mensch macht Natur. Landschaft im Anthropozän, Berlin/ Boston (De Gruyter) 2016, pp. 16–19. Boese, Daniel: “Hallo Welt. Spekulativer Realismus für Einsteiger”, online article about the symposium in context of the exhibition Speculations on Anonymous Materials? on Art Magazin, 8.1.2014, http://www.art-magazin.de/szene/6145-rtkl-spekulativer -realismus-fuer-einsteiger-hallo-welt (accessed June 01, 2017). Burckhardt, Lucius: “Gärten sind Bilder (1989)”, in: Lucius Burckhardt: Warum ist Landschaft schön? Die Spaziergangswissenschaft, Berlin (Martin Schmitz Verlag) 2008, pp. 156–166 (translated by Helene Gödl). Johnson, Louise C.: Cultural Capitals, revaluing the arts, remaking urban spaces, Farnham (Routledge) 2009. Mellitzer, Ulrich: “Die Naturschönheit mutiert bevor sie faßbar wird”, in: Rainer Fuchs (ed): Lois Weinberger. Verlauf/Drift, exhibition cataloge Vienna (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) Wien (folio Verlag) 2000, pp. 112–136. Nicholson-Lord, David: The Greening of Cities, London/New York (Routledge & Kegan Paul) 2005. Pohlen, Annelie: “Ein perfekt provisorisches Gebiet. Lois Weinbergers kreative Strategie”, in: Bonner Kunstverein/Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin/Galerie im Taxipalais, 28 29

Boese: “Hallo Welt. Spekulativer Realismus für Einsteiger” link: http://www.art-magazin.de/szen e/6145-rtkl-spekulativer-realismus-fuer-einsteiger-hallo-welt (accessed June 01, 2017). Bast: “Der Mensch im Anthropozän braucht die Erkenntnisfunktion”, p. 18.

Karoline Walter: The Potential of Ruderal Societies and Perfectly Provisional Areas

Innsbruck (eds.): Lois Weinberger, exhibition cataloge Bonn (Bonner Kunstverein) – Dublin (Douglas Hyde Gallery) – Innsbruck (Galerie im Taxispalais), 2002/03 Wien (Triton-Verl.) 2002, pp. 8–16. Rollig, Stella, “Möglichkeiten von Differenz”, in: Rainer Fuchs (ed.): Lois Weinberger. Verlauf/Drift, exhibition cataloge Vienna (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) Wien (folio Verlag) 2000, pp. 38–71. Sloterdijk, Peter: “Das Anthropozän – Ein Prozess-Zustand am Rande der Erd-Geschichte?”, in: Jürgen Renn/ Jürgen Scherer (eds.): Das Anthropozän. Zum Stand der Dinge, Berlin (Matthes & Seitz) 2015, pp. 25–44. Trevor, Tom: “Drei Ökologien”, in: Cauteren, Philippe van (ed.): Lois Weinberger, Ostfildern (Hatje Cantz) 2013, pp. 227–236. Trummer, Thomas D. (n.d.): “Ruderal Society Lois und Franziska Weinberger”. Spiegelfabrik Gars am Kamp, Link: http://www.landesmuseum.net/de/ausstellungen/rueckblick/2010/franziska-lois-weinberger/franziska-lois-weinberger/ Raumtexte_Lois_Weinberger_1.pdf (accessed September 10, 2017). Weinberger, Lois: “In der Zeit liegt die Natur. Ein Gespräch mit Dieter Buchhart”, in: Kunstforum International, 158 (2002), pp. 229–241. Weinberger, Lois: “L. W. 1990”, in: Philippe van Cauteren (ed.): Lois Weinberger, Ostfildern (Hatje Cantz) 2013, p. 133. Weinberger, Lois/Ulrich, Jessica/Arrends, Bergit: “Weinberger in conversation with Jessica Ulrich and Bergit Arrends in 2010”, in: Philippe van Cauteren (ed.): Lois Weinberger, Ostfildern (Hatje Cantz) 2013, pp. 51–60.

Online Resources https://www.nwc.org.uk/ (accessed October 05, 2018). SpaceX, Exhibition. Hortus, Botany and Empire, n.d., Link: http://spacex.org.uk/exhib itions/hortusbotany-and-empire/ (accessed January 17, 2017). www.loisweinberger.net

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Lois Weinberger, Ruderal Society: Excavating a Garden, documenta XIV, 2017. Photo by Benjamin Kiel / © Studio Weinberger. Fig. 2: Lois Weinberger, Portable Garden, 1994/2004, Biennale Liverpool 2004. © Studio Weinberger. Fig. 3: Lois Weinberger, Wild Cube – Ruderal Enclosure, 1998/1999, New University of Economic and Social Sciences Innsbruck. Photo by Gerbert Weinberger / © Studio Weinberger.

77

Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture Mark Harris

The Songs the Plants Taught us names a cassette tape of ayahuasqeros songs compiled by anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna in 1991. Transposing definitions of plant-human relations to evoke pedagogy and popular music isn’t restricted to powerful entheogens. Plant-human entwinings have provoked innumerable songs of work, love, despair, and qualitative comparisons of urban and rural lifestyles. This essay concerns these kinds of songs but draws only from an archive of vinyl records. As an outdated technology now undergoing a revival, vinyl records have a history of broadening access to the production and consumption of sound. Production of vinyl LPs starts with Columbia Records in 1948, and seven-inch singles a year later with RCA. Although manufacturers had experimented with alternative materials including cardboard, cement, plaster of Paris, shellac, and synthetic resins, only vinyl plastic offered the benefits of a lightweight, resilient, and affordable substitute. Considerations of weight and fragility no longer prevented large quantities of records being transported across the world. As manufacturing became cheaper, record presses could be set up for small volume production, most notably in the Caribbean where sound engineer Emory Cook enabled local record shops to acquire their own units for pressing LPs and singles on demand. The increase of production localities and manufacturing affordability greatly broadened participation. Neophyte singers and bands took their chances with 1950s American R&B producers, with 1960s Jamaican reggae studios, and with late-1970s British punk recording facilities. Beyond such commercially validated products were innumerable private-press recordings made by those with enough ardor and self-conviction to shrug off any disinterest. For Piotr Orlov the seven-inch single “can also be credited with never-ending generations of kids in school auditoriums, garages, and bedrooms speaking for themselves and their peers.”1 The global impact of vinyl records on building community and self-esteem is seen in portrait photographs of Malick Sidibé that show young Malians proudly holding up favorite records:

1

Orlov: “Guided By Grooves”, p. 54.

80

The Social Order of Plants

When the colonizers left, the young people of Bamako did not return to traditional music […] They continued to listen to Western music, which now spoke to them. […] Posters and record covers decorated the walls of their bedrooms.2 These global populist responses to the mass circulation of vinyl resist claims that marketed music simply imbricates and imprisons consumers in the spread of capital. The value that records have that is surplus to music’s commodification lies in their use for enhancing social interaction, defining subculture identities, articulating rejections of authority, and, with private press or small label releases, enabling outsider voices to be heard. Discussing Theodor Adorno’s and Jacques Attali’s condemnation of records’ role in the commodification of music, Caleb Kelly rightly highlights their arguments favoring the consumption of live performance. Yet audiences for live performance, especially of classical music, have been a privileged minority compared to those participating in the circulation of music through owning records, hearing them played on the radio, or dancing to a DJ spinning vinyl at a party. There’s also no doubt about the inseparability of the commerce of live music and that of vinyl record consumption, for each promotes participation in the other. As Kelly states, “Recording has arguably had a democratizing effect on music. Put simply, the recording of music has provided access to different kinds of music, to many more people, than otherwise would have been the case.”3

Between city and countryside Driving this discussion of human-plant interactions is the recognition of unique perspectives afforded by single-minded aberrant and outsider musicians whose participation is facilitated by the low cost of materials and recording technologies. One of the strangest, least agreeable records of the late 60s is Ruth White’s interpretation of Charles Baudelaire’s poems. White’s idiosyncratic Moog synthesizer playing brings a startlingly macabre tone to the already melancholic poems. The nine pieces she arranges include Evening Harmony, a rare instance of Baudelaire addressing flowers, although “Now is the time when, throbbing on its stem, each flower sheds its perfume like incense”4 likely personifies his marginal urban subjects. White was a synthesizer pioneer whose youthful interest in new music (she was influenced by Georges Antheil who composed for Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique) turned to disillusionment with its drift into what she felt was purposeless noise. Evening Harmony starts with a somber interlude like a faulty barrel organ melody, eventually giving way to dry brushing tones that introduce White’s recital of the poem as it continues over dull amorphous sounds.

2 3 4

Touré: “Midnight in Bamako”, p. 89. Kelly: Cracked Media, p. 49. White: Flowers of Evil, sleeve notes.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

Now is the time when, throbbing on its stem, each flower sheds its perfume like incense. Sounds and scents spiral in the evening air in a melancholy waltz, a soft and sensual turning.5 Here the Moog is used very sparingly, like a cinematic accompaniment comprising the dusty background to drily echoing vocals, “dehumanized”, as she puts it, to better approach “the transcendental qualities of the poetry through electronic means.”6 So thoroughly filtered and buried are they within the electronics, Baudelaire’s words are hard to make out without the poems in hand. Across the LP White’s sinister timbres evoke a spectral city, effectively summoning up the festering, injurious urban environment that is Baudelaire’s nineteenth-century Paris.

Fig. 1: Ruth White, Flowers of Evil – composed and realized by Ruth White – An electronic setting of the poem of Charles Baudelaire, LP, Chicago (Limelight Records, Mercury Records Production) 1969.

For a book of over a hundred-and-fifty poems titled Flowers of Evil there are few references to plants. Charles Baudelaire’s intent being to “extract beauty from Evil”,7 the eponymous flowers are rather the full range of contemporary, and socially stigmatized instincts, and the prostitutes, murderers, ragpickers, and vampires nurturing them. Corrupting passions conjured into being by modern metropolitan life are anticipated by William Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” from the preface to Milton: A Poem in Two Books that refers to the depredations of the Industrial Revolution, a French term drawing analogies

5 6 7

Ibid. Ibid. Baudelaire: Flowers of Evil, p. xxvi.

81

82

The Social Order of Plants

between their own 1789 uprising and the extreme economic and social changes in Britain during the early 1800s.8

Fig. 2: Morgan Fisher, miniatures: a sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpieces, LP, London (PIPE Records, Licensed through Cherry Red Records), 1980.

Blake’s 1804 poem is best known for its opening lines, “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green,”9 concerning the apocryphal story of a visit by Jesus to Glastonbury. Where Baudelaire copes with the impact of modern life by heroizing those it afflicts, Blake invokes an alternative rural utopia in opposition to the misery of Victorian factories. Hubert Parry’s Jerusalem, a rousing early-twentieth century setting of Blake’s preface to Milton, has become a surrogate English national anthem in spite of his regrets about its initial alignment with the pro-war Fight for Right movement that raised money for Britain’s WWI campaign. To atone for that misappropriation he granted copyright to the

8

9

“Rouse up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental, and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works: believe Christ and His Apostles that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying.” William Blake, Milton: A Poem in Two Books, The William Blake Archive, http://www.blakearchive. org/copy/milton.a?descId=milton.a.illbk.02, (accessed December 20, 2021). In this preface Blake anticipates Saint-Simon and Olinde Rodrigues who in 1825 invited an avant-garde of artists to the Socialist cause: “It is we, artists, that will serve as your avant-garde; the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and the fastest. We have weapons of all sorts: when we want to spread them new ideas among people, we carve them in marble or paint them on canvas.” Calinescu: Five Faces of Modernity, p. 103. Blake, op. cit.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies for their hymn in 1917. The former Mott the Hoople keyboard player, Morgan Fisher, recorded a parodic cacophonous version of Jerusalem on his eccentric 1980 anthology miniatures comprising one-minute tracks by fifty musicians. Fisher’s sound bricolage of found samples destroys the original by accelerating its melody and burying it under increasing noise, until it sounds like an outof-control carousel – “Not a note was played by your editor. All the notes were assembled collage fashion from existing sounds on tape.”10 This sonic assault questions the nostalgia sustaining the hymn’s popularity and, by including snatches of French, also satirizes its patriotism. Fisher suggests that no post-industrial utopia is possible without the racket of the present day. Urban noise overwhelms the green, pleasant, and quiet garden to contest its utopian status.

Fig. 3: The Village Fugs, Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point Of Views, And General Dissatisfaction, LP, New York (Broadside Records), 1965.

Blake’s anti-urban poetry was also sung by counterculture vanguard band The Fugs. Poet Ed Sanders scored Ah! Sunflower, Weary Of Time as a singular moment of unintoxicated clarity for their 1965 debut album The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point of Views, And General Dissatisfaction, whose title enobles an intentionally shambolic celebration of anti-institutional irreverence. Ed Sanders’ bookshop became the venue for their first concert, with fellow poet Tuli Kupferberg co-founding the band. Besides Blake, The Fugs celebrated poets Matthew Arnold, Algernon Charles Swinburne, W.B. Yeats, and Charles Bukowski in their music. A committed New York City band, The Fugs relentlessly attacked all pretentions and abuses of power whether urban or rural. Their version of Ah! Sunflower was likely inspired by William Ginsberg’s story of hearing the

10

Fisher: miniatures, sleeve notes.

83

84

The Social Order of Plants

spirit of Blake chant the poem to him in 1948 in a Spanish Harlem apartment.11 Both Fugs and Ginsberg have no difficulty reconciling Blake’s visionary ruralism with politically engaged urban living. This may account for the ethereal and reverential treatment of this tender folk music version, tentatively accompanied by uneven drumming and sparse guitar and ending on the delicate fading out of a cymbal. As popular manifestations, the potential psychic and social impacts of these anachronistic vinyl artifacts and their music have been passed over for other fascinations and sonic technologies. Yet the symptoms they depict and attempt to alleviate with revolutionary musical images adapt and persist in new forms in the present. The transformative promise of these visions, that advocate an alert and responsive future, recalls Walter Benjamin’s aim to explode the unrealized potential of the nineteenth century in his present, actualizing the latency of arcade architecture and panoramas along with the visions of Baudelaire, Charles Fourier, and J.J. Grandville: “Intimations of this [classless society], deposited in the unconscious of the collective, mingle with the new to produce the utopia that has left its traces in thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to fleeting fashions.”12 Vinyl, an obsolete technology from the twentieth century, is a dispersed, untethered, mass-participatory version of the arcades, grooved into songs already lost or obscure in their own era but now bearing “wish-fulfilling images”13 for our time.

Performance, vinyl records, and audience participation The wish image embedded in the Italian anarchist song Le Quattro Stagioni unfolds from a prisoner’s memory of the seasons that incarceration holds out of reach. On the LP Gli Anarchici 1864/1969 Leoncarlo Settimelli sings Canzoniere Internazionale’s 1973 strippeddown version accompanied only by accordion and mandolin. Settimelli’s plangent voice lays a melancholic tone over a song that draws a stark contrast between the claustrophobic prison and liberating natural world. The flower of life is in April when the air is full of sweet scents I see over there amongst the flowering grass the lovers lost in love I love the warbling birds Around the greenery I love stepping into the midst of These natural creations […] It’s a hot and suffocating summer

11

12 13

“I had the odd sensation of hearing Blake’s voice outside of my own body […] Blake reciting it, or some very ancient voice of the Ancient of Days reciting, ‘Ah Sunflower […]’ So there was some earthen-deep quality that moved me, and then I looked out the window and it seemed like the heavens were endless, or the sky was endless, I should say.” The Allen Ginsberg Project, https:/ /allenginsberg.org/2011/09/william-blakes-ah-sunflower/ (accessed December 20, 2021). Benjamin: “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, p 148. Benjamin, ibid., p. 148.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

for the hard worker in the sweatshop exhausted and dripping with perspiration, trampled on by the middle class14

Fig. 4: Canzoniere Internazionale, Gli Anarchici 1864/1969, LP, Turin (folk, Cetra), 1973.

Canzoniere Internazionale formed in Rome in the mid-60s but were most active in the 70s and early 80s performing the song repertoire of left-wing radical politics while working to widen appreciation for folk music more generally. Their attempt at popularizing the political songbook through vinyl releases and television performances showed how political allegiances could complicate the perception of democratized music. As a journalist for the Communist newspaper Unità, Settimelli’s proselytizing for broader public exposure to music other than pop songs led Canzoniere Internazionale to appear on the populist, and nationally broadcast, Rai TV music show competition called Canzonissima in 1974, much to the dismay of many on the left of Italian cultural politics. A case, perhaps, of folk songs ceasing to be good by association with what was undeniably bad music. Canzoniere Internazionale had been supported by Unità in their TV initiative but were attacked from all sides, particularly by non-aligned leftists, about the impact their participation was having on the authenticity of folk music. The group explained their decision in this way: We spent days and days discussing it and in the end decided to participate. It was decided to use TV as the means of disseminating our music so it would get known. Currently there is a growing interest for folk music; young people buy the records of the singers of Altra Italia, the performance spaces, like Folkstudio of Rome, are

14

Canzoniere Internazionale: Le Quattro Stagioni, Gli Anarchici 1864/1969.

85

86

The Social Order of Plants

always packed. Faced with this, why remain circumscribed by a fixed circuit? Why not broaden the discussion by taking advantage of the television opportunity?15 And so after a fiercely critical Unità reader’s letter – “you have sunk very low. […] The participation in Canzonissima, dear comrades, only discredits” – Settimelli, responding in the same paper, yielded no ground and instead called for the expansion of “Musical discourse (folk, new song, jazz)” to the point where “the mass media […] can no longer close their eyes.”16 Clearly this was just a step too far for folk enthusiasts, who will have known that Canzoniere Internazionale were already releasing records through Cetra, one of the most prolific Italian popular music publishers. Gli Anarchici 1864/1969 was issued on Cetra’s folk subsidiary, shamelessly courting a new, more studious listener by switching out alluring photos of singers for historically relevant illustrations, introductory essays, song lyrics, and footnotes. It was Settimelli’s attempt at dissolving boundaries, and exposing the contradictory positions with which musicians must be reconciled, that threatened this enclave of the well-educated left with contamination beyond that of the vinyl records they already owned. A far more radical dissolution of boundaries was articulated in 1966 by Glenn Gould while defending his withdrawal from public performances in recognition of the greater perfection and inclusivity of vinyl records. The errors occurring in a live concert, the distorting estimation of the virtuoso performer over the music itself, the distraction for the listener of the auspicious performance venue, all favored the creation of the optimal recital by in-studio splicing of different takes before their release on vinyl. Gould would even have extended splicing technologies to the listener so they could construct their preferred version of a recording. Most radically he saw recording as a way to end the professional musician’s career where audiences became artists themselves: “At the center of the technological debate, then, is a new kind of listener – a listener more participant in the musical experience. The emergence of this mid-twentieth-century phenomenon is the greatest achievement of the record industry.”17 By merging pop, psychedelia and roots music, 60s British musicians achieved that reach into mass audiences that eluded Canzoniere Internazionale. Unlike the Italians, they could draw from the well of sentiment of early twentieth-century nationalist ruralism best represented by Percy Grainger’s 1918 Country Gardens that orchestrated a traditional folk song. Citing a formulation of Patrick Wright’s, John Roberts notes the ‘Deep England’ of an imaginary rural landscape evoked by some of the more radical British folk musicians of the late 60s as they connect to “the metaphysical home of all that the city, industrialization, and capital has no care for, or only cares for as a source of cheap labour.”18 For singer-songwriter Donovan, the 1967 double LP A Gift From A Flower To A Garden was an opportunity to embellish the allure of vinyl with a dozen lyric broadsheets whose illustrations resembled Harry Clarke’s Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault or Arthur Rackham’s The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, themselves fantasies of pre-industrial rural retreats. There is

15 16 17 18

Tomatis: Storia Culturale della Canzone Italiana. Unpaginated. Ibid. Gould: “The Prospects of Recording”, p. 121. Roberts: Red Days, p. 42.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

a vegetal irony to the advocacy of a new ruralism through the circulation of industrial products made of oil deposits, themselves formed from millions of years of compressed phytoplankton. Donovan urgently wanted a normalizing, benign influence for these idealizing rural allegories. He was disillusioned with hallucinatory drugs and dismayed as friends drifted into narcotics use: “I call upon every youth to stop the use of all Drugs and banish them into the dark and dismal places. For they are crippling our blessed growth.”19 Flowers are to be the antidote to plant-derived drugs. Donovan imagines himself as one flower giving to many others “pleasant images” of “fairies and elves and pussys and paints, with laughter and song and the gentle influence of Mother Nature.”20 The garden as an allegory of a healthy sustaining social environment is made explicit: “A new born child is a pure and Holy flower and it is possible to tend and water this child-plant with due care and attention that it may blossom and seek the Sun.”21 With allusions to folk traditions this song cycle Gift From A Flower To A Garden encompasses images of rural and coastal fantasy that evoke a particularly British imaginary of the utopian garden as a classless, protective idyllic realm. Voyage into the Golden Screen is one of the more transparently bucolic: In the golden garden Bird of Peace Stands the silver girl the Wild Jewels niece Paints in pretty colours Children’s drawings on the wall Look of Doubt I cast you out begone your ragged call22

Fig. 5: Donovan, A Gift From A Flower To A Garden, LP, New York (Epic Records) 1967.

19 20 21 22

Donovan: A Gift From A Flower To A Garden, sleeve notes. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., song lyric inserts.

87

88

The Social Order of Plants

A more critical formulation of the sentimental orientation of Donovan’s Gift From A Flower To A Garden are the records released by Mike Heron and Robin Williamson of The Incredible String Band in the late 60s which combine references to folk legend (“Witches Hat”23 ), eastern and Christian religions (“Maya,” “Job’s Tears”24 ), and the anti-urban sentiment of “You cover up your emptiness / With brick and noise and rush” (“Mercy I Cry City”25 ), to contrast with the “Deep England” alluded to in “The greatest friend I have in life / Has brought me here to dwell / Awhile among your green green hills / All by the watery well” (“Greatest Friend”26 ).

Fig. 6: The Incredible String Band, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, LP, New York (Elektra) 1968.

The cover of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter shows Heron and Williamson surrounded by children and friends, identified by improvised costumes that signify a pastoral timelessness. Could such celebrated flights from the city and expressions of delight for nature be reimaging the promise of Charles Fourier’s early nineteenth-century utopian phalanstery communities? Fourier’s innovative texts on the organization of large rural communities advocated an early feminism and concern for children but also resembled travel brochure copy as if enticing interest by an extreme contrast with degrading labor and unfulfilling leisure in the cities. When choreographed socializing is integrated with market gardening, it is “as useful as our gatherings in cafes and drawing rooms are sterile.”27 In one fantasy of synchronized horticultural activity Fourier leaves

23 24 25 26 27

The Incredible String Band: “Witches Hat”, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. The Incredible String Band: “Maya” and “Job’s Tears”, Wee Tam & the Big Huge. The Incredible String Band: “Mercy I Cry City”, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. The Incredible String Band: “The Greatest Friend”, Wee Tam & the Big Huge. Beecher and Bienvenu: The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, p. 292.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

Donovan, Heron, and Williamson far behind as massed teams of gardeners are inoculated against encroaching capital by their enthusiastic tending of fruit, flowers, and vegetables. Colors, scents and flavors create the beguiling backdrop and warm glow of a pastoral utopia. If the Series of Cherry-growers, for example, is having a large meeting in its main orchard a quarter of a league from the Phalanstery, it makes arrangements for the following groups to join it during the afternoon session from four to six o’clock: 1. A cohort from the neighboring Phalanx arrives to help the Cherry-growers. 2. A group of lady florists from the district arrives to plant a two-hundred yard row of hollyhocks and dahlias along a near-by road and around a field of vegetables contiguous to the orchard. 3. A group from the Vegetable-growers Series arrives to cultivate the vegetables from the field. 4. A group from the Thousand-flower Series arrives to care for the sect’s altar which is situated between the vegetable field and the cherry orchard. 5. A group of Maiden Strawberry-growers arrives at the end of the session. They have been cultivating a strawberry-ringed glade in the neighboring forest.28

Bringing the country into the city Whatever the merits of their songwriting and countercultural orientations, there is nothing abyssal or alarmingly off-center about Donovan’s or The Incredible String Band’s depictions of gardens and alternative rural life. The musical and lyrical treatments are agreeable and affirmative while their visions of anti-urban idylls match the ideals of tens of thousands of young people disenchanted with the economic and cultural choices that were available in the late 1960s. With Baudelaire, and some Surrealist literature, the characteristics of park and city become interchangeable as a means of accessing an urban miraculousness. The anti-naturalist hothouse display of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant physiognomies, trapped within the surreal and subaqueous qualities of the Passage de l‘Opera through which he moves like a predatory flâneur, suggests a city mutating into a forest of bizarreries. It’s as if these are cadaverous descendants of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil anti-heroes that Aragon resurrects as casualties of capital. In Aragon’s arcade, lit by a somber interior twilight, there is no nature other than the figures he turns into pseudo-plants. The unhealthy husbandry that drives Aragon’s descriptions of the arcade inverts Fourier’s plans for the phalanstery from a hundred years earlier. Aragon intended as much a critique of impractical utopian schemes as of commodities. Fourier modeled the phalanstery, a place of harmony between regulated work, social, and sexual life on the new Paris arcades that cut laterally through blocks of buildings to link one main thoroughfare with another. For Aragon the arcade was the obverse of the phalanstery, a place of redundant, malingering labor, of unwanted, outdated commodities. 28

Ibid., pp. 292–293.

89

90

The Social Order of Plants

Paris Peasant retrieves the nineteenth-century fascination for physiognomies, for Parisian types, and evaluates the residents of the arcade, about to be demolished by the extension of the Boulevard Haussmann, as if they were ailing weeds. Tongue in cheek, he claims to be setting out a “modern mythology” in a godless realm of what he calls “The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation.”29 Noticing the skirt of a handkerchief shop proprietress, he writes: The colour of the garment is a gaudy half-tint that is better left to your imagination: a sort of reddish quetsch, a tone of red-wine vinegar, which bears the same resemblance to living colour as theatre spangles do to diamonds. It inclines towards redcurrant in its death throes, towards pecked cherry, it resembles those ribbons of the Palmes Académiques insignia which turn acid in daylight […] ah I’ve got it, the dress is litmus paper tinted slightly pink by urine.30 This cruel observation (the more so as Aragon’s stories of the arcade were being serialized in La Revue Européenne through 1924–5) is one of numerous images of female plant-humans that maliciously revisit J.J. Grandville’s winsome depictions of anthropomorphized plants in Les Fleurs Animées. They are reminders that Walter Benjamin (who appreciated both writers) thought that Grandville was laser-focused on the phantasmagoria of nineteenth-century commodity fetishism. It’s likely Grandville imagined these alluring human flowers, tended to by insects and animals, as wry allegories of the latest boulevard fashion obsessions. Such a representation gains plausibility in light of the illustration Les Poissons d’Avril from Un Autre Monde, with its mercilessly parodic depiction of the aspiring bourgeoisie. Barely a minute had elapsed since a young goldfish pulled out its line, at the end of which was wriggling a small woman who had already swallowed most of a diamond pin, the treacherous bait she had fallen for. My gaze shifted back to the pool; it was filled with men and women, and the transparent water allowed me to follow all their movements. They rapidly approached the bait they were being offered; medals, epaulettes, gold purses, they swallowed everything with a deplorable voracity.31 If the floral personifications in Les Fleurs Animées were sufficiently alluring to have provoked both Baudelaire’s and Aragon’s inversions, those in the chapters “Une Révolution Végétale,” “Au Jardin des Plantes,” and “La Mort d’une Immortelle” from Grandville’s Un Autre Monde are far less readily classifiable. Obscure plant hierarchies determine these compositions – overweight pears and peaches languish at the feet of healthier blooms, bushes bifurcate into inorganic geometric forms, gangs of vegetables menacingly confront one other, and flowers expire on the riverbanks.

29 30 31

Aragon: Paris Peasant, pp. 27–28. Ibid., p. 100. Grandville: Un Autre Monde, p. 67.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

Fig. 7: J.J. Grandville, “La fête des fleurs”, Un Autre Monde, Paris (H. Fournier, Libraire-Editeur) 1844.

Psychogardens In the work of nineteenth-century socially-critical savants like Fourier and Grandville, and Surrealists like Louis Aragon, humans become phytomorphic as a perverse ecological response to urban excesses. The notion of floral physiognomies of malevolent and benign agency carries over into some of the more peculiar records of the 60s and 70s. There is something of Grandville to Pastor John Rydgren’s plant personifications in “Dark Side Of The Flower”, a track from the LP Silhouette Segments. In the late 60s Rydgren was head of the TV, Radio, and Film Department of the American Lutheran Church. He started his psychedelic Christian radio show, named Silhouette, in 1967 in Minneapolis before moving to New York and then Los Angeles, where he died in 1988. He was the original hip priest with the sexy voice, a Lee Hazlewood for Christians, providing homilies, allegories, and

91

92

The Social Order of Plants

invitations using contemporary hippie vernacular and musical accompaniment of electric guitars, jazz instruments, or sitar to lull young listeners into a renewed commitment to faith. As if Rydgren understood the social forces that sometimes make a community garden or park into a contested symbol for meaningful urban life, his “Dark Side of the Flower” narrative of freely itinerant plants, bruised flowers, and fenced-in land develops a perplexing allegory of lost souls finding one another in a community of flowers that eventually “feel their roots deep in the soil, their roots touching the roots of other flowers.”32 Can love survive without loving in the middle of hate? Yet others come, through the picket fence of other gardens they come One by one, and more And many come from other gardens to become flowers33

Fig. 8: John Rydgren, Silhouette Segments, LP, location unknown (publisher unknown) c.1968.

Apart from its redemptive hopes, Rydgren’s account of flowers, sickened from being led astray in the city, is anticipated by the metaphorical effect of Baudelaire’s poems that imagine the worse urban life becomes, the more Parisians bloom into warped and rebellious dark matter. Enthusiastically taking up this dark pessimism, post-punk records gain in sonic and lyrical complexity through exploring a humorous, if nihilistic, critique of middle-class sensibilities and values. Baudelairean ideas on tranquility in death mark Texas noise band Scratch Acid’s 1984 “Greatest Gift” that visualizes cemetery soil enriched by decaying bodies. Histrionic vocals extract a certain grim pleasure from the concise lyrics: “Garden of buried pleasures / Neatly in a row / Are planted life’s true secrets / In a

32 33

Rydgren: “The Dark Side of the Flower”, Silhouette Segments. Ibid.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

world yet still unknown / Six feet deep down dark / Free from concern / The greatest gift from life itself / Lies the food for the worms.” In 1981 Rudimentary Peni’s Nick Blinko had sung of a similar garden where the singer-gardener anticipated his end in an unthreatening retreat of absolute stasis. Rudimentary Peni continues to be led by Nick Blinko, a bipolar singer and artist whose intensely detailed drawings have illustrated the band’s handful of releases. Blinko’s thinly veiled autobiographical book The Primal Screamer,34 written from his psychiatrist’s point of view, opens with an account of a suicide attempt and expressions of feeling ill-fitted for the ‘wrong’ world. He has spoken of how illness compelled him to plant paintings in the garden to see if they would grow. For a band whose songs like “Alice Crucifies The Paedophiles”, “Cosmic Hearse,” and “Blasphemy Squad” are delivered noisily at speed, the innocuously titled “The Gardener,” 1981, at first feels benign and slow-paced. Here the allegorical drive suggests a condition parallel to, or following, a hurtful life, anticipating a garden of solace. The song builds unsettlingly as Blinko snarls his way towards a final screamed “charm!” In the garden the roses have no thorns. The growth is steady and quite natural. No parasites. No harm, immortal existence, perpetual motion, forever peace and charm. Forever peace and charm. Forever peace and charm. Forever peace and charm.35

Fig. 9: Rudimentary Peni, Rudimentary Peni, seven-inch EP, Abbots Langley (Outer Himalayan Records) 1981.

Rudimentary Peni was one of hundreds of British DIY bands that sprang up rhizomatically in small towns and cities releasing independent records invariably unknown to anyone beyond their immediate community. Kelly’s remarks noted earlier about the

34 35

Blinko: The Primal Screamer. Rudimentary Peni: Rudimentary Peni EP.

93

94

The Social Order of Plants

vinyl records’ democratizing effect on access to music are particularly apt here where musicians felt motivated to record, produce, and design seven-inch singles. In many cases eccentricity and shambolic musicianship were taken as virtues where the goals of making unheard sounds and absurdist lyrics were a more critical local distinction than any kind of conventional success. The Mud Hutters hung around Manchester sharing musicians and studios with the equally marginal Diagram Brothers. “Cultivation” is from their 1981 Factory Farming LP whose cover features old-fashioned black-and-white instructional vignettes of gardening techniques like pruning, sweeping, and shoveling. The angular and jarring music is characterful but uningratiating. “Cultivation” opposes its discordant elements to mainstream culture which is compared in the lyrics to a market garden maintained by the kind of repetitive small adjustments that stifle innovation. Creating the heritage for all of us to live in That’s very nice if you like that type of thing Adding and subtracting Pruning and improving Slice all the vegetables, there’s nothing else to do36

Fig. 10: The Mud Hutters, Factory Farming, LP, Manchester (Defensive Records) 1981.

This is the garden as entropic environment, with Britain a nation of gardeners where gardening is the UK culture. Using a gardening analogy, Raymond Williams explains how the relationship bemoaned by The Mud Hutters might work if that culture were concerned about equality – “The idea of a common culture brings together, in a particular form of social relationship, at once the idea of natural growth and that of its tending. The former alone is a type of romantic individualism; the latter alone a type of authoritarian

36

The Mud Hutters: “Cultivation”, Factory Farming.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

training.”37 But as Margaret Thatcher consolidated power after being elected Prime Minister in 1979, her authoritarian restructuring fractured any possibility of common culture and provoked the DIY music constellation into a non-compliant sonic resistance. These DIY bands became unclassifiable, amateurish and uncooperative, like weeds emerging from cracks in the infrastructure. BBC Radio One DJ John Peel expressed his enthusiasm for this dysfunctionality: “You’d get these stroppy lads from Lincolnshire that you’d have to look up on the map who’d send you records. […] Another thing that I really liked was that a lot of the people were almost entirely without ambition. Once they’d made a record, that’s as far as they wanted to go.”38 Psychogarden imagery runs through recalcitrant music from The Residents’ 1978 “Blue Rosebuds”: “Your lichen-covered corpuscles / Are filthy to my fist / Infection is your finest flower / Mildewed in the mist”; through Robert Wyatt’s 1982 recording of Ivor Cutler’s “Grass”, a paean to sociopathy: “Go and sit upon the grass / And I shall come and sit beside you / And we shall talk / And while we talk I’ll hit your head with a nail to make you understand me”; to the suburban breakdown of The Very Things’ 1984 “The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes”, where fully-sentient plants are punished by a psychotic father figure. The Very Things, whose singer The Shend graduated from a history of punk music mischief with The Cravats, were based in Redditch, a rural enclave south of Birmingham. Their neo-Dadaist horticulture songs like “Wall of Fir” and “The Bushes Scream”, cherish atonality, rhythmical irregularity, and melodramatic vocals that make fun of musical ambition and of English suburban torpor. “The Bushes Scream” could well have been illustrated by Grandville’s “Hawthorn” image from Les Fleurs Animées showing plants threatened by secateurs and hedge clippers.

Fig. 11: The Very Things, The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes, LP, Malvern (Reflex Records) 1984.

37 38

Williams: Culture and Society, pp. 322–323. Reynolds: Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews, pp. 168–169.

95

96

The Social Order of Plants

Pruning, pruning, pruning Daddy walks the lawn the grass is getting long the trees are looking crooked and bushes seem wrong he never noticed until now how untidy it seemed he frowns thinking how his garden looked in dreams. The pale sun flickers through the twitching trees and the wind fills the town with milling leaves. In the shed daddy sharpens up his secateur blades and the wind picks up and the sunlight fades. The bushes scream while my daddy prunes39

Post-colonial gardens Baudelaire’s fierce battle protesting bourgeois implication in depredation and exploitation of the urban poor was given new life by anti-colonial writings, especially those of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant from the French-speaking Caribbean. They revealed the linguistic and cultural snares set by colonial administrators who demanded mimeticism of whiteness from black subjects only to remind them of their perpetual inferiority. Jamaica Kincaid exposes this racism in her forensics of colonial horticulture. The Antigua botanical garden she frequents as a child is filled with specimens imported from other British colonies and she is perceptive about the English affection for exotic plants: “Almost as if ashamed of the revulsion and hostility they have for foreign people, the English make up for it by loving and embracing foreign plants wholesale.”40 In Jamaica, the Rastafari sustain their social withdrawal and diffused rebellion against all those who inherit colonial power by placing cannabis at the center of their spiritual ceremonies and maintaining an Ital culinary practice where only the most natural plant produce is used. In this way, Rastas evade the plight of aspirational colonized islanders to have to bear black skin while adopting white masks, as defined by Fanon.41 One record that shows how steadfast Rastas can be in their unconventional approach to non-cooperation is Junior Murvin’s 1977 “Bad Weed,” that reprises his successful “Police and Thieves” melody to make an analogy between weeds and bad behavior. However, whereas Baudelaire’s plant analogy advocates the rebelliousness of crime and drunkenness, Murvin delivers a negative judgement on illicit acts. Come yah, come yah, come yah, Mek we go reason now Give the thief a long road and then we ketch him These roach and flies are things a man dislike

39 40 41

The Very Things: The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes. Kincaid: My Garden (Book), p. 103. Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

You shut up your mouth and listen to what I am talking about Stealing, stealing to get bigger Too much bad weed is in the garden I and I a go weed them out I and I a go weed them out42

Fig. 12: Junior Murvin, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and friends, LP box set, London (Trojan Records) 1977.

In the 70s the blame placed on Rastafari for much of the violence occurring around Kingston resulted from the prejudice facing the movement at that time in Jamaica. This led to the authorities attributing the violence to ritualistic use of marijuana during “reasonings,” the gatherings where Rasta discuss issues affecting their communities.43 Murvin is playing on at least three senses of weed here – the action of rooting out unwanted plants, the analogy of weeds with criminals, and then the properties of ganja itself by contrasting poor quality cannabis with the better varieties smoked in reasonings. Murvin removes the just Rastafari from the circle of violence pervading Kingston, the kind of events that are brutally depicted in Marlon James’s novel A Brief History of Seven Killings as it explores the background to the 1977 assassination attempt on Bob Marley. The use of good weed in reasonings is productive, for there Rastas discuss how to deal with “These roach and flies”, the “thief”, “hypocrite”, “imposter”, and the unbeliever shorn of his dreadlocks, the “bald head” of the song. Lee Perry’s spectacularly eccentric production technology is more restrained here as if making space for the delicate high tonality of Murvin’s voice. A deliberately economic and soporific rhythm section churns

42 43

Murvin: “Bad Weed”, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and friends. Nettleford: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica.

97

98

The Social Order of Plants

along in the background while Perry drops in scattered low growls and percussive high bell-like tones. With Barrington Levy’s “Black Roses” from 1983 the allegory shifts towards the careful tending of identity as if it were a rare flower. The black rose represents personal qualities and national character, indigenous to Jamaica of course, as a Black identity.

Fig. 13: Barrington Levy, The Best of Barrington Levy, LP, New York (Hit Bound) 1983.

To keep and care it you got to water it I’ve been travelin’ all over this world I’ve never seen no other black rose in no other garden44 The black rose as an imagined native Jamaican flower acquires a latent power in Levy’s song as having the potential for future agency. It reverses the devaluing of native plants by colonial horticulture: “The botanical garden reinforced for me how powerful were the people who had conquered me; they could bring to me the botany of the world they owned.”45 The garden as idyll becomes here the place of strength held in reserve, a kind of force whose black thorns might be needed to ward off intruders. This connotation came to life in the 1990s as a group of Kingston dancehall performers, led by the innovative choreographer Bogle, named themselves Black Roses Crew. Their “corner” on Lincoln Avenue was used for music videos, including Barrington Levy’s “Work”, until the murders between 2001–08 of Bogle and two other members, ended their prominence. The export of Jamaican reggae records to Caribbean diasporic populations demonstrates the significance of this form of commodity for establishing communities and providing them with a sense of identity, as Orlov writes in this essay’s opening paragraphs. 44 45

Levy: “Black Roses”. Kincaid: My Garden (Book), p. 120.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

As the music’s popularity increased in the 1960s record shops opened across the UK catering to local black neighborhoods: by this time every black area in the country had its own specialist record shops, and they were becoming the places to hang out on a Friday. […] you could meet your spars and reaffirm your standing in your own community after a week at work, and you’d hear about much more than music-related events and transactions.46

Conclusion André Breton’s extended 1948 eulogy titled Ode to Charles Fourier imagines the philosopher’s statue, then sited at Place Clichy, leading the city-as-ship “…at the prow of the outer boulevards.” Early one morning in 1937, the hundredth anniversary of Fourier’s death, Breton saw flowers at the base of the statue: “In passing I noticed a very fresh bunch of violets at your feet / It is rare for flowers to be laid on statues in Paris.”47 At the time the bouquet was frequently renewed, but Breton’s tribute was also a lament for Fourier’s absence – “Fourier are you still there” – since the statue had been scrapped by the Nazis in 1941 for armaments material. The long poem closes with the entire “Series of Cherry-growers…” section quoted earlier, as that best exemplified for Breton “the unreasoned belief in the movement towards an Edenic future,”48 the utopian incandescence of the phalanstery being opposed to the darkness, overcrowding, poverty and lack of sanitation of the nineteenth-century city. In its functional lifetime, the arcade experienced a revolutionary reconfiguring in the 1848 and 1871 uprisings when rebels cut longitudinal passages through multiple houses to facilitate rapid escape from gunfire in the open streets. In its way, this was as far as phalanstery principles came to being realized in nineteenth-century Paris, and the same kind of action was taken by late twentieth-century London squatters cutting through buildings to improve their transversal community functionality. The songs in these marginal vinyl records similarly cut transversally across familiar allegories to access obscure and aberrant associations that complicate the ways we think about urban and rural legacies and the plants on which we depend. As attempts to shield their readers from the onset of modernity, Fourier and Baudelaire provided the key to this non-cooperative poetic and sonic resistance. Fourier’s phalanstery proposed a selfsustaining rural community as an alternative to urban blight, while Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil generated miscreant visions that inured readers to the shocks of the modern city. For vinyl records, the thought of plants engenders stranger forms of warped reasoning, romantic pleas, and belief systems, than drugs ever could. Odd songs, emerging as a musical unconscious, bring with them magical and animistic thinking from the remote past. As records, they are tied to the animal world in the first half of the twentieth century by the use of lac bug secretions, and to plants in the second half by oil-derived vinyl. As Grandville and Aragon make plant and human boundaries troublingly porous,

46 47 48

Bradley: Bass Culture, p. 236. Breton: Ode to Charles Fourier, unpaginated. Breton: Ode to Charles Fourier, unpaginated.

99

100

The Social Order of Plants

so the personifications of these outsider records intermingle plant-human identities in startling auditory and lyrical collisions.

References Aragon, Louis: Paris Peasant, London (Picador, Pan Books) 1980. Baudelaire, Charles: Flowers of Evil, Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (eds.), New York (New Directions) 1963. Beecher, Jonathan/Bienvenue, Richard (eds.): The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, Boston (Beacon Press) 1971. Benjamin, Walter, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, in: Walter Benjamin/Peter Demetz (eds.) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, New York (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) 1978, pp. 146–162. Blake, William: “Milton: A Poem in Two Books”, in: Morris Eaves/Robert Essick/Joseph Vicomi (eds.): The William Blake Archive. http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/milton.a ?descId=milton.a.illbk.02 (accessed December 20, 2021). Blinko, Nick: The Primal Screamer, London (Spare Change Books) 1995. Bradley, Lloyd: Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King, London (Penguin Books) 2001. Breton, André: Ode to Charles Fourier, London (Cape Goliard Press) 1969. Calinescu, Matei: Five Faces of Modernity, Duke University Press (Durham) 1987. Canzoniere Internazionale, Gli Anarchici 1864/1969, LP sleeve notes, Turin (folk, Cetra) 1973. Donovan: A Gift From A Flower To A Garden, LP box set, New York (Epic Records) 1967. Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Masks, (1952), New York (Grove Press) 2008. Fisher, Morgan: miniatures: a sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpieces, France (Pipe Records/ Cherry Red Records) 1980. Morgan Fisher, miniatures: a sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpieces, LP sleeve notes, London (PIPE Records, licensed through Cherry Red Records Limited) 1980. Gould, Glenn: “The Prospects of Recording”, in: Christoph Cox/Daniel Warner (eds.): Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, New York (The Continuum International Publishing Group) 2004, pp. 115–126. Grandville, J.J.: Un Autre Monde, Paris (H. Fournier, Libraire-Editeur) 1844. Translation by Mark Harris. Hannoosh, Michele: “The Allegorical artist and the crises of history: Benjamin, Grandville, Baudelaire”, in: Word & Image, Vol. 10, No 1 (Jan-March 1994), Abingdon (Taylor & Francis), pp. 38–54. Kelly, Caleb: Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, Cambridge MA (MIT Press) 2009. Kincaid, Jamaica: My Garden (Book), New York (Farrar Straus Giroux) 1999. The Mud Hutters: Factory Farming, LP sleeve notes, Manchester (Defensive Records) 1981. Nettleford, Rex: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica, New York (William Morrow & Company, Inc.) 1972. Orlov, Piotr: “Guided By Grooves”, in: Trevor Schoonmaker (ed.): The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Durham (Duke University Press) 2010.

Mark Harris: Songs the Plants Taught us: Strange Entanglements of Vinyl Records and Horticulture

Reynolds, Simon: Totally Wired: Post-Punk Interviews and Overviews, London (Faber and Faber Limited) 2009. Roberts, John: Red Days: Popular Music and the English Counterculture 1965–1975, Colchester (Minor Compositions) 2020. Rudimentary Peni, Rudimentary Peni, seven-inch EP sleeve notes, Abbots Langley (Outer Himalayan Records) 1981. The Allen Ginsberg Project: https://allenginsberg.org/2011/09/william-blakes-ah-sunflo wer/, accessed December 20, 2021. Tomatis, Jacopo: Storia Culturale della Canzone Italiana, Milan (Il Saggiatore S.r.l.) 2019. https://books.google.com/books?id=blCFDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT818&lpg=PT818&dq= Leoncarlo+Settimelli&source=bl&ots=kNknesgVka&sig=ACfU3U1UkISwXlHKFdp XSBzzWpekpM9fLA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj53d30xu7pAhXXKM0KHdA9D hMQ6AEwGHoECBkQAQ#v=snippet&q=Leoncarlo%20Settimelli&f=fals (accessed December 20, 2021). Unpaginated. Translations by Mark Harris. Touré, A. Chab: “Midnight in Bamako”, Aperture, 224 (2016), pp. 84–93. Ruth White: Flowers of Evil – composed and realized by Ruth White – An electronic setting of the poem of Charles Baudelaire, LP sleeve notes, Chicago (Limelight Records, Mercury Records Production) 1969. Williams, Raymond: Culture and Society, London (Penguin Books) 1958.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Ruth White, Flowers of Evil – composed and realized by Ruth White – An electronic settting of the poem of Charles Baudelaire, LP, Chicago (Limelight Records, Mercury Records Production) 1969. Fig. 2: Morgan Fisher, miniatures: a sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpieces, LP, London (PIPE Records, Licensed through Cherry Red Records Limited) 1980. Fig. 3: The Village Fugs, Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Point Of Views, And General Dissatisfaction, LP, New York (Broadside Records) 1965. Fig. 4: Canzoniere Internazionale, Gli Anarchici 1864/1969, LP, Turin (folk, Cetra) 1973. Fig. 5: Donovan, A Gift From A Flower To A Garden, LP box set, New York (Epic Records) 1967. Fig. 6: The Incredible String Band, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, LP, New York (Elektra Records) 1968. Fig. 7: J.J. Grandville, “La fête des fleurs”, Un Autre Monde, Paris (H. Fournier, LibraireEditeur) 1844. Fig. 8: John Rydgren, Silhouette Segments, LP, location unknown (publisher unknown) c.1968. Fig. 9: Rudimentary Peni, Rudimentary Peni, seven-inch EP, Abbots Langley (Outer Himalayan Records) 1981. Fig. 10: The Mud Hutters, Factory Farming, LP, Manchester (Defensive Records) 1981. Fig. 11: The Very Things, The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes, LP, Malvern (Reflex Records) 1984.

101

102

The Social Order of Plants

Fig. 12: Junior Murvin, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and friends, LP box set, London (Trojan Records) 1977. Fig. 13: Barrington Levy, The Best of Barrington Levy, LP, New York (Hit Bound) 1983.

5. Flora

The Blue Rose Suzanne Anker Scientific discoveries emerge, in many instances, coupled by cultural equivalents.1 Frequently, scientific and aesthetic discourses generate, migrate and filtrate into a timely intertwined zeitgeist. Such is the nature of the range and sweep within the precincts of current intersections of art, science and technology. Presently, with the rise of tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and genetic analytic programs, a significant number of artists have concentrated their attention on integrating the biological sciences with the visual arts. As an overarching term, Bio Art has become a practice comprised of international participants from many countries worldwide.2 Interested in ways nature can be altered and is being altered, many bio artworks employ plants, bacteria and soil as elements in their practice. Concerned with social outreach, institutional critique and the politics of climate change, these works address the ethics of transforming living entities in the 21st century. Although animal husbandry, horticulture and the use of microorganisms to create fermented foodstuffs have been around for millennia, current practices involve the resetting of time’s arrow to accomplish these plant-based transfigurations. Whereas evolution is a slow process as well as being the result of the catalytic forces of contingency, genetic engineering resets nature’s clock with deliberation and speed. Waiting for nature to sprout a truly blue rose or one that sports a bar code, or one that smells like chocolate, probably will not happen in our lifetimes. But there have been many efforts in those directions.3 1

2

3

From non-Euclidian geometry and the theory of relativity, to the invention of chemically produced synthetic pigments, to the discovery of the unconscious, many modernist art movements were affected by these new materials and concepts: symbolism, surrealism, impressionism, and the rise of abstraction. See Myers: Bio Art: Altered Realities for examples of Bio Art from the UK, Germany, Australia and elsewhere. Also see Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin: The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age. This early text between an artist and sociologist of science highlights the ways in which genetics has entered popular culture and the visual arts and while intersecting with both art history and public policy. Although 21st century scientific papers promise a blue rose by 2005, these predictions have proved false. See “Petal Power: at last scientists make the true-blue breakthrough”. https://www .smh.com.au/national/petal-power-at-last-scientists-make-the-true-blue-rose-breakthrough-20 040524-gdizgq.html Research conducted by scientists concerning the color blue was conducted

106

Flora

Transgenic plants are genetically modified to introduce new aspects, which may even derive from an utterly different species. While horticulturists have traditionally used breeding as a way to achieve a desired trait, the transgene makes it possible to interrupt and redirect nature’s evolutionary processes. The employment of transgenic plants as biotechnologically derived living entities remains a serious and urgent topic of debate concerning environmental safety and for the protection of creatures’ dwelling in their respective ecological niches. Some of the contested issues include human health and disease, crop and insect resistance in addition to access to seeds.4 Recently, The National Academy of Sciences, has confirmed that GMO foods are safe to eat, however, how does the transport of GMO flowers fit into the ecological equation?5 In the 1980’s horticulturists became adventurists, conducting research into the genetic alteration of a flower’s pigmentation. While horticulturists are interested in a flower’s color, morphology and scents, it is essential to note that the glamour associated with breeding ornamentals is not in the least superficial. While we appreciate horticulture through an aesthetic lens, science’s firm position stipulates a thorough knowledge of how plants, especially flowers, continue to exist in the world. The incorporation of new breeding techniques which include molecular genetics and tissue culturing processes are creating sustainable flowers in this time of climate change. PanAmerican Seed has produced a Hybrid Phlox with the capacity for an extended heat tolerance and reduced sensitivity to mildew.6 William Radler has developed roses that are drought tolerant, disease resistant and self-cleaning (meaning when old blossoms die, they drop off of their own accord). Known as ‘Knock Out’ roses, they came to market in 2000 and require no fungicide spraying as do other roses.7 Conversely, what role do flowers perform in sustaining human life? As a source of nectar for many pollinating insects, flowers provide the material matrix under which these cross-species interactions occur. While insect pollinators may at times be looked at as pests, without bees, beetles and butterflies, our human pantry would be sumptuously reduced. Coffee, chocolate, nuts, and fruits are dependent on a host flower’s interaction with insects. Flowers and other plants alike provide oxygen to our atmosphere and produce the basis for medicines such as morphine, quinine, and Saint John’s wort to name a few.

4 5

6 7

by experiments on a corporeal liver. The way drugs are metabolized by the liver led to the discovery that “when a liver enzyme was inserted into a bacterium, the bacteria turned blue”. While much of the findings concerning the genetic engineering of the blue rose appear in the early 2000 range, literature on this matter continues to expand. Lynas: “GMO Safety Debate is Over”. https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2016/05/gmo-sa fety-debate-is-over/ Charles: “GMOs Are Safe, But Don’t Always Deliver On Promises, Top Scientists Say”. https://ww w.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/17/478415310/top-scientists-say-gmos-are-safe-but-dont-alw ays-deliver-on-promises?t=1625570297186 Also see Miller and Silva: “The flower industry gets the genetic engineering blues”, pp. 49–52. Schoellhorn: “Hybrid Phlox: Have a Sunny Future”. https://gpnmag.com/article/hybrid-phlox-ha ve-sunny-future/ Dempsey: “William Radler Develops Hybrids That Are Knockouts”.

Suzanne Anker: The Blue Rose

Peter Meyer and his colleagues at the Max-Planck Institute in Cologne were the first to engage this kind of genetically altered pigment modification in the lab.8 Pigmentation remains a complex botanical process, employing “delphinium in addition to flavanol and acyl groups,” as Florigene’s biotechnologist Tim Holton, has stated.9 What is required is a thorough comprehension of the chemical networks engaged in floral coloration. Although media reports suggest that the holy grail of producing a blue rose teeters on the horizon, the colonization of chemical pathways is quite distant from resolution. The results garnered a blue pigment chemically coded for the primary color; however, the resultant rose was not blue, but lavender, and marketed under the name Applause.10 The blue rose is considered a scientific watershed due to the fact that a plant’s pigment molecules are very sensitive to pH factors. Pigment molecules are chemicals that respond to higher or lower concentrations of hydrogen ions which change the pH of colors. Anthocyanin, the pigment responsible for bright reds, blues and purples in fruit and flowers is easily degraded at a higher pH. (Fig. 3)

Fig. 1: Suzanne Anker, Installation view of Rainbow Loom at V Art Center, M50 Art District, Shanghai, China, (2014). Wooden tables, 366 glass Petri dishes, various items collected in China, 36 x 192 x 36 in (91.4x 487.7 x 91.4 cm). Photo credit: Henry G. Sanchez.

Suzanne Anker’s Rainbow Loom (2014), an installation of Petri dishes containing fruit, seeds, eggs, and manufactured artifacts such as pastels, beads, balloons and other varied objects, was exhibited in Shanghai, China. Intended to reveal the expansive range of color manifested in the world, the materials were thus arranged by chroma. While most of the

8 9 10

Nasto: “My love is like a blue, blue rose”. Ibid. Venton: “World’s First Blue Rose Soon Available in U.S.”. https://www.wired.com/2011/09/blue-r oses-for-sale/

107

108

Flora

examples were not blue, a stunning blue lotus did appear, fresh from the flower market. Although chlorophyll’s soothing green hue is evident in plants as an aid in photosynthesis, other plant pigments include a spectrum of reds, yellows, oranges, pinks, red-violets, purples, blacks and whites. From carotenoids to flavonoids, color is the result of crucial interactions among chemical pathways and pH factors. In 2014, biologists Quattrocchio and Koes discovered that errors in a flower’s cellular pump performance could create blue petals in petunias.11 This discovery has other implications that go beyond the aesthetic, ornamental, and corporate commercial interests. How will pollinators react to new colors? Will they lose their way? Will they reject the unfamiliar? Would they throw an eco-niche system into tilt? Or, on the other hand, will these insects end up in orgiastic bliss? The significance of the cellular pump is that it can be employed instrumentally to siphon toxic metals and salts from the environment12 , in addition to morphing color pigmentation. As a possible clean-up tool for environmentally degraded land masses, a plant’s cellular pump is a significant resource. Pigmentation, or color variation has always intrigued children and adults alike. From Crayola crayons to home decorator’s paint chips, the variety of color hues form a palette of wonder, addressing the vast diversity in the world. From skin color to food color, from dyes and minerals to color TV and magic markers, color is at once subjective and at other times relevant to analytic modes of thought. From the qualitative to the quantitative, color is a marker in science and art as a way to express pH values, perceptional cues and degrees of difference. In 2016, nine-year-old Esme Anker Townsend, enamored by the Snapchat app, created a portrait of herself with a rainbow descending from her open mouth. Such an image is akin to David Lynch’s visualizations where, fantasy and reality intermix to create uncanny auras. Special effects in science, technology and the visual arts are fodder for younger generations’ playtime expressions that continuously reconsider the limits of the rational. As a case in point, artifice is no stranger to creativity bringing forth alternative visions of would-be realities. (While for scientists, novelty is an expression of mathematical coordinates, for children the novel is an expression of the imagination. Whereas the aesthetics of horticulture continue to enchant audiences, color pigmentation in flowers remains far from superficial. Color is the result of particular complex chemical reactions entwined and incorporated into botanical systems. The mechanisms which allow color to change hues can be likened to organic methods of extraction and infusion. What is meant by this process is that particular chemical agents are available to be uploaded into plants through their distinct living apparatuses. As botanical systems are better understood, alternative uses for these operative parts could produce revolutionary ecological results.

11 12

Cell Press: “Roses are red: Why some petunias are blue”. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases /2014/01/140102133223.htm Ibid. Also see Faraco et al.: “Hyperacidification of vacuoles by the combined action of two different P-ATPases in the tonoplast (cytoplasmic membrane surrounding the plant’s vacuole) determines flower color”, pp. 32–43.

Suzanne Anker: The Blue Rose

Fig. 2: Esme Anker Townsend’s work is in the tradition of David Lynch, although she never even heard of him. Her work presented here is a substitution for a still from Lynch’s films which would be too expensive to include in this article. On the other hand, Townsend’s work points to the fact that a kind of hypersurrealism, through technology, is part of a younger generation’s foray into special effects. Photo credit: Esme Anker Townsend.

109

110

Flora

pH Blue Instability takes numerous forms in plant pigmentation processes vis-à-vis chemical pathways. Red cabbage is a case in point. By altering the pH of red cabbage, a variety of colors will produce an assortment of colors that can be employed as dyes for fabrics and inks for silk-screening of printed images on cloth or paper.

Fig. 3: Color palette produced by changing ph factors in red cabbage. Experiment and photo credit realized by Raul Valverde (2016).

Red Cabbage Recipe a) Chop the red cabbage into large pieces. b) Place the cabbage in a 3-quart pot and add 2–3 cups water. Bring to a boil, and then simmer until the cabbage is almost white. c) Strain the cooking water (“cabbage juice”) into the glass jar. Let cool. d) Use a Sharpie to number each of 10 clear plastic cups. e) Place the plastic cups in numerical order on a counter. Pour 4 oz. of water into cups 1 through 9. f) Place a different liquid soap or small piece of solid soap into each cup numbered 2 through 5. Stir to dissolve the soaps. g) Add 1 tablespoon of fruit juice to cup 6. Add 1 tablespoon of a different fruit juice to cup 7, another to cup 8, and another to cup 9. h) Add 1 tablespoon of baking soda to cup 1, and stir until it is dissolved. i) Pour 4 oz. of white vinegar into cup 10. j) Your line up of cups should have baking soda on one end with the soaps, and the vinegar at the other end with the fruit juices. k) Add one teaspoon of red cabbage juice to each cup. Notice the differences and the similarities in colors.13 13

Organic Color Changes with Acids and Bases Do It Yourself: Cabbage http://www.webexhibits.o rg/causesofcolor/7G.html.

Suzanne Anker: The Blue Rose

In this recipe, red cabbage is the progenitor of variously distinct and numerous colors. As an Ur-vegetable pigment source, red cabbage is the technical mechanism of color as a chemical process. While each hue is expressed by differences in chemistry, it becomes obvious that the color spectrum relies on these pathways, which are fostered by the addition and subtraction of competing ions. The colors resulting from this recipe of additives, range in chroma from deep reds, and brilliant oranges, to pale greens and shades of blue.

Fig. 4: Actual blue hydrangea purchased at Citarella market in East Hampton and placed in Suzanne Anker’s East Hampton garden in Long Island, New York. The flower is situated in a glass vase and creates a partially blue aura in the environment. Photo credit: Suzanne Anker.

The hydrangea is a perfect example of a plant that can morph into a set of differing hues. Environmental factors, such as the presence or absence of aluminum ions, affect the way hydrangeas can alter their colors from blue to purple or from pink to blue. The transformative nature of this plant can be seen as a litmus test in itself. Whereas pH is the measure of acidity and alkaline substances, it is in the hydrangea that visible differences can be observed. Such dramatic changes in color are evidence that plants are indicators of chemical compositions in their environments By the addition and subtraction of aluminum ions, color is modified and appears as another hue. Hence, soil conditions, in addition to genetics, are the markers as to how this plant manifests and transforms color. Adding aluminum sulfate to the soil alters the pH factors of the soil and water, and is thus the visual conclusion of the transformation of extant color by way of chemical factors.

111

112

Flora

Defying Mother Nature With the rise of synthetic biology, laboratory scientists are aiming at reconstructing the underlying mechanisms of living entities, allowing them to partake in chemical processes foreign to their nature. Current biochemical techniques for altering genomes have still not provided scientists with the complexity of tools necessary to create that elusive blue rose. In Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Color,14 plant scientist David Lee comments on the infrequency of the color blue in nature: “less than ten percent of the 280,000 species of flowering plants produce blue flowers.” “Plants,” he states, “do not have a direct way of making a blue color.”15 Questions go unanswered: why did the color fail to evolve in plants? Why do they not possess significant mechanisms necessary for producing blue pigmentation? Blueberries possess a dark purple chroma, while the flesh of bluefish are mostly gray. Does the color blue relate to atavistic memories of a bacteria or fungi? Are humans hardwired to be skeptical of blue food believing it may be cause disease? Blue Cheese when ripe harbors the bacteria Penicillum Roqueforti16 in its veins and other cheeses ripen by bacterial means. Ironically, however, when Mars, the company that manufactures M & M’s, wanted to introduce a new flavored color, they conducted a consumer survey. The color of choice turned out to be blue.17

The Blue Rose as Postmodern Icon While art and science emerge from distinct epistemologies, a sense of wonder is inherent in both domains. The Blue Rose is a case in point wherein the cultural imagination is also a reference point for investigating the chemistry of color in the natural world. Although not extant in nature, the blue rose, in literature, film and the arts, has a stunning and significant history. As a complex symbol of infinite longing and unattainable emotional desire, the blue flower first appears in the work Novalis, an early German Romantic poet and philosopher. Novalis’ story Heinrich von Ofterdingen, published posthumously in 1802, was a critique of Enlightenment authority, bringing into focus issues advancing Romanticism and its deeply subjective tenets. The blue flower appears to young Heinrich in a dream as a symbol of love and the infinite: The parents have gone to bed and are asleep, the clock on the stairs ticks monotonously, the windows rattle with the wind, the chamber is lit up now and again with fitful gleams of moonlight. The boy lay tossing on his bed, and thought of the stranger and his talk. ‘It is not the treasures,’ he said to himself, ‘that have stirred in me such an unspeakable 14 15 16 17

Lee: Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Color. Oder: “The science of blue flowers”. https://www.treehugger.com/the-science-of-blue-flowers-4 864085 Meier: “How Blue Cheese is Made”. https://www.thespruceeats.com/how-blue-cheese-is-made591563. accessed May 2, 2020. Also see Button and Dutton: “Cheese Microbes”, pp. R587-R589. “Blue M&Ms”. http://childrenofthenineties.blogspot.com/2009/04/blue-m.html

Suzanne Anker: The Blue Rose

longing; I care not for wealth and riches. But that blue flower I do long to see; it haunts me and I can think and dream of nothing else. I never felt so before; it seems as if my past life had been a dream, or as though I had passed in sleep into another world, for in the world that I used to know who would have troubled himself about a flower? Indeed, I never heard tell of such a strange passion for a flower.18 As an antidote to Enlightenment principles, Romanticism established itself in myriad 19th century discourses. Subjective realities, emotive responses, and the role the self, unfolded in instinctive trends towards knowledge production. Its emergence coincided with the longing to understand the intrinsic nature of sentient being. Blue, as in Novalis’ work, became a symbol of a desiring future, a leap into the divine, both mystical and utterly empirical.

Fig. 5: Dyed blue rose purchased from The Ultimate Rose Company; http://www.theultimaterose.com/index.php/worlds-most-colorful-roses/solid-color-roses.html located in Melbourne, Florida. Photo credit: Raul Valverde.

18

Maulia: “Heinrich von Ofterdingen: The Tale of the Blue Flower”. https://emaulia.wordpress.co m/2013/01/07/heinrich-von-ofterdingen-the-tale-of-the-blue-flower/

113

114

Flora

Later references to the blue rose appear in the work of Penelope Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Philip K. Dick, Walter Benjamin, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick among others. With the rise of transgenic plants, the possibility of designing a blue rose, is currently within reach. Although “blue rose seeds” are available for purchase, they remain items of artifice. These seeds do not in fact, produce blue roses. Amazon.com, sells seeds purporting to sprout blue roses. Reading the customer reviews one can gather that such a pronouncement is utterly false. The reviews emphatically state: “There is no such thing as a rose this color;” “blue roses do not exist;” “this is fake.” However, white roses are often dyed blue by inserting them in water that has been tinted with special blue compounds. Flowers are conspicuous, even promiscuous, and have co-evolved with humans over eons. Cupped inside the plant’s petals, the flower opens wide exposing its delicate sexual attributes. From the stamen to the anther to the stigma and carpel, all is on full view to attract foreign foragers by the numbers. Within such intermingling of casual connections, how can one define plant promiscuity, and what role does this concept play for pollination? Scientist Laura Burkle reports that currently bees are “being more promiscuous in that they are collecting pollen from a variety of plant species. Due to global warming, bees are having a difficult time hooking up with their favorite flowers.”19 Flowers are the subject of numerous significant paintings, photographs, art installations and sculpture, as well as love poems, novels, music and films. Over centuries, flowers have been imbued with symbolic meanings: from desire to gratitude, from innocence to passion, depending on their beauty, fragility, color or scent.

The Elusive Blue Gene In 1991, Australian scientists were able to isolate a “blue gene” from a petunia. Thinking this protocol would likewise work with a rose, they again inserted the blue gene into the genome of the red rose. Surprisingly, the red rose did not turn blue. While the scientists at Suntory Flowers Ltd. fabricated the first purple carnations and attempted to create a blue rose, but they only produced a lavender one.20 Recent forays into developing the blue rose consist of another type of scientific trial, one based on the emerging DIY movement of plant hackers. For this generation of DIYers, do it yourself genetics has mated with synthetic biology. Sebastian Cocioba, a DIY plant biologist, is conducting research which focuses on blue coral’s DNA, which he then splices into tobacco plants in an ef-

19

20

Oatman: “Promiscuous Bees and Vanishing Insects Mean Less Food for Us”. https://www.mot herjones.com/politics/2013/03/promiscuous-bees-mean-less-food-security-humans/ See Burkle; Marlin; Knight: “Plant Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-occurrence and Function”, pp. 1611–1615. See the Suntory Global Research Innovation Center for a history of the research concerning the blue rose: https://www.suntory.com/sic/research/s_bluerose/story/

Suzanne Anker: The Blue Rose

fort to achieve a “proof of concept” which in turn will be used to fabricate a blue rose21 . However, this elusive task goes on to this day. Genetics is a daunting and exquisitely complex phenomenon. While genes often act in concert, the one gene, one trait model, is an oversimplification of genome mapping. What might alter one species of flower will have little or no effect on another. Environmental factors, in botanical research, also emerge as unknown variables in botanical specimens.

Delphinium Blooms Photographer and early pioneer of American modernism, Edward Steichen, was also an avid horticulturist, especially with regard to the delphinium, a flower in the Ranunculacae family whose stalks often reach six feet. His exhibition of flowers at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 was in fact, a spectacular occurrence. The exhibition, which was on display for eight days, included 500 to 1,000 plants that he divided into two sets. The first set displayed were the pure blue hybrids and mist colors which were followed three days later by his elatum series. The exhibition was reviewed in both the art press and gardening magazines. Photo historian and photographer Beaumont Newhall was working at the museum at that time as a librarian. Newhall’s question still resounds today: “many people were wondering what the hell these plants were doing in a museum.”22 As a forerunner to Bio Art, which employs living as an art medium, Steichen’s exhibition invites the question of whether life forms can be considered living art. This issue continues to expand within theoretical discourse as the biological becomes technological. With the expansion of techniques readily available to scientists as well as artists, genes and environmental factors can be altered and to create novel combinations of laboratory produced species. Steichen’s breeding techniques were for the most part traditional in nature. Gardeners have always relied on selecting specimens which express certain sought-after characteristics either in color, size, or leaf shape, among others. He also experimented with the chemical Colchicine. This substance was responsible for doubling the haploid number of chromosomes from two to four, which allowed for an intensified growth cycle. Although

21

22

Hope: “Instead of Computer Code, ‘Plant Hackers’ Tinker With Genetics”. https://www.wsj.com/ar ticles/instead-of-computer-code-plant-hackers-tinker-with-genetics-1453254509 For more information on the production of a blue rose, see “Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tianjin University in China wanted to develop a simple process that could produce a trueblue rose. To achieve this, the team engineered a strain of Agrobacterium tumefaciens that contains the two pigment-producing genes, which originate from a different species of bacteria.”: “World’s first true-blue rose is in the making!”. https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-c urrent-affairs/story/worlds-first-blue-rose-1367309-2018-10-13 Gedrim: “Edward Steichen’s 1936 Exhibition of Delphinium Blooms: An Art of Flower Breeding”, p. 353.

115

116

Flora

this seems like a ready-made solution for increasing growth, it was nevertheless quite a delicate matter in botanists’ circles.23 Horticulture, with its interest in crossbreeding and making “selections,” can be considered an early variant of eugenics. Although such practice on humans is of a different ethical order, its structure is commensurate. Constructing a palette of traits, parameters and standards of beauty, which intermix biology and aesthetics, over time, form a compilation, an anthology of a culture and its collective desires.

The Color Blue Blue maintains a formidable place in modern and contemporary art. While Yves Klein patented the color of International Klein Blue, in Komar and Melamid’s “market research project” blue is proven to be the color of choice for purchasing artworks. In the former, Klein suggested that blue had a metaphysical presence, a color without limits, a transcendental hue. Komar and Melamid on the other hand took an analytic approach by surveying audiences to generate data. Through their research they found that blue paintings or paintings occupying a large range of blue chroma were by far the most sought-after artifacts.24 Moreover, with the discovery of Lapis Lazuli, the semi-precious stone from which blue pigment was extracted, became known as a “divine color,” particularly in the works of Giotto in 1303. Blue became associated with the color of heaven, perhaps suggesting that blue, which is the dominant color of sky, represented early human’s exit from the forests into the plains, an inevitable way to move beyond the tree as habitat.25 Filmmaker David Lynch pointedly references the blue rose in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. A scene progresses with a woman dressed in a fluorescent red/orange outfit sporting a matching artificially colored red wig. Her name is Lil, part punk, part clown. On her dress, a blue rose is physically attached as a corsage. The uncanny and coded visuals continue throughout the film as light turns from red to blue and back again, highlighting the transition of enigmatic prismatic clues. In this psychological thriller, the most difficult and elusive unsolved mysteries are the cases that are considered supernatural. In Lynch’s film, they are referred to by the code words, Blue Rose Cases. Neglectfully, in every review of the film, there is scant mention of Novalis or the origin of the blue rose. Lynch also employs blue chromatic lighting effects in a commercial sponsored by Dior. Set in Shanghai, the viewer is presented with a scene inside a hotel room. The sixteen-minute production in pure Lynch style employs dreamlike special effects which mixes nostalgia with science fiction. The elusive blue rose once again is cited in conjunc-

23 24

25

See Wee-Hiang Eng and Wei-Seng Ho: “Polyploidization using colchicine in horticultural plants: A review”, pp. 604–617. Sutton: “This is America’s Most Wanted Painting”. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorialkomar-melamid-americans-painting-thought-wanted. For other art historical references to the color blue see BBC “History of Art in Three Colors – Blue”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5 OTngEHvq8Q Meyer/Navasky/vanden Heuvel/Wypijewski: “Painting by Numbers: The Search for People’s Art”, pp. 334–348.

Suzanne Anker: The Blue Rose

tion with memory and its flashbacks. It is this longing, this elusive longing to connect, to complete oneself in another, that is symbolized by the blue rose in this advertisement. In Stanley Kubrick’s erotically effusive and final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), prismatic attention to blue creates rhapsodic intrigue. Blue light infiltrates the room as the presence of a force, a symbol of the ethereal. Unlike the red of corporeal reality (blood), blue is a cool ether, a halo embracing the unknown. Excessive attention to detail brings the audience to a scene where the character Sky Dumont is wearing a blue flower on his lapel while dancing and overtly flirting with Alice Harford. What is the blue flower’s significance here? Is it a covert intertextual citing of Novalis? Is it a way to converse with the imagination’s yearning to dream the improbable? As a significant icon in cultural spheres, the blue rose is a phantom, an ether, a spirit. Both Lynch and Kubrick entwine such prismatic symbols in their films, pointing at once to the illusive nature of human desire as a riveting force in human nature. Like deceit, desire moves on autopilot, sometimes obsessively driven or, like plant color, by biochemical pathways.

Towards the Future Is the blue rose finally within our grasp? Whether considered as a figure of the imagination or a manifestation of the empirical, to dream of it is to entertain an initial step in the formidable domain of plant genetics and humankind’s acuteness for scripting the imaginary into the real. Neither a horticultural novelty nor a feat of fancy, the blue rose continues to enchant. The future possibilities of comprehending botanical physiology as the science of pigmentation constantly evolve. While artifice is a characteristic of the transgene, and its chimeric resourcefulness, such technology is enlarging nature’s palette. The blue rose, whether it can exist or not, is a concept that drives conjecture, innovation and invention. Whether the mystery of the blue rose will cease to be a significant trope in the arts and sciences is a question which lingers. Love, desire, the infinite and other aspects of the ethereal continue to support romanticism’s tenants. The quests inherent in scientific discovery are aspects along a continuum of exchange incorporating the intuitive and the rational. Without such a bifurcation, uniqueness, rarity and passion would be fatally exposed to extinction. The employment of symbols in art and science fail to escape history’s unfolding saga replayed and interrupted, delighting and/or terrorizing the depths of consciousness. And it is the blue rose that we embrace, allowing us to reconsider nature’s inventiveness for making, remaking and healing the depths of the perpetually distorted actions of human folly.

117

118

Flora

References Anker, Suzanne/Nelkin, Dorothy: The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, New York (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press) 2004. Burkle, Laura A./Marlin, John C./Knight, Tiffany M.: “Plant Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-occurrence and Function”, in: Science, 339 (2013) 6127, pp. 1611–1615. Button, Julie E./Dutton, Rachel J.: “Cheese Microbes”, in: Current Biology, 22 (2021) 15, pp. R587-R589. Dempsey, Stewart: “William Radler Develops Hybrids That Are Knockouts”, in: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 9 (2006). Eng, Wee-Hiang/Ho, Wei-Seng: “Polyploidization using colchicine in horticultural plants: A review”, in: Scientia Horticulturae, 246 (2019), pp. 604–617. Faraco et al.: “Hyperacidification of vacuoles by the combined action of two different P-ATPases in the tonoplast (cytoplasmic membrane surrounding the plant’s vacuole) determines flower color”, in: Cell Reports, 6 (2014), pp. 32–43. Gedrim, Ronald J.: “Edward Steichen’s 1936 Exhibition of Delphinium Blooms: An Art of Flower Breeding”, in: History of Photography, 17 (1993) 4, p. 353. Lee, David: Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Color, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 2010. Meyer, Peter/Navasky, Victor/vanden Heuvel, Katrina/Wypijewski, JoAnn: “Painting by Numbers: The Search for People’s Art”, in: The Nation, March 14 (1994), pp.334-348. Miller, Henry/Silva, Brenda: “The flower industry gets the genetic engineering blues”, in: GM Crops & Food, Biotechnology in Agriculture and the Food Chain, 9 (2018) 2, pp. 49–52. Published online May 25, 2018. Myers, William: Bio Art: Altered Realities, London (Thames and Hudson) 2015. Nasto, Barbara: “My love is like a blue, blue rose”, in: The Scientist Magazine, February 13 (2003).

Online Resources “Blue M&Ms”, in: Children of the ‘90s, April 27, 2009. http://childrenofthenineties.blogsp ot.com/2009/04/blue-m.html Cell Press: “Roses are red: Why some petunias are blue.”, in: ScienceDaily, 2 January 2014. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140102133223.htm Charles, Dan: “GMOs Are Safe, But Don’t Always Deliver On Promises, Top Scientists Say”, in: NPR, May 17, 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/17/47841 5310/top-scientists-say-gmos-are-safe-but-dont-always-deliver-on-promises?t=16 25570297186 Hope, Bradley: “Instead of Computer Code, ‘Plant Hackers’ Tinker With Genetics”, in: The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 19, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/instead-of-computer -code-plant-hackers-tinker-with-genetics-1453254509 Lynas, Mark: “GMO Safety Debate is Over”, in: Cornell Alliance for Science, May 23, 2016. ht tps://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2016/05/gmo-safety-debate-is-over/

Suzanne Anker: The Blue Rose

Oatman, Maddie: “Promiscuous Bees and Vanishing Insects Mean Less Food for Us”, in: Mother Jones, March 5, 2013. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/promis cuous-bees-mean-less-food-security-humans/ Maulia, Erwida: “Heinrich von Ofterdingen: The Tale of the Blue Flower”, January 7, 2013. https://emaulia.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/heinrich-von-ofterdingen-the-tal e-of-the-blue-flower/ Meier, Jennifer: “How is Blue Cheese Made?”, in: The Spruce Eats, 13 Jan. 2020. https://ww w.thespruceeats.com/how-blue-cheese-is-made-591563 (accessed May 2, 2020). Oder, Tom: “The science of blue flowers”, Mother Nature Network, February 8, 2014. https:/ /www.treehugger.com/the-science-of-blue-flowers-4864085 Organic Color Changes with Acids and Bases Do It Yourself: Cabbage. http://www.webe xhibits.org/causesofcolor/7G.html. “Petal Power: at last scientists make the true blue breakthrough”, in: The Sydney Morning Herald, May 24, 2004. https://www.smh.com.au/national/petal-power-at-last-scien tists-make-the-true-blue-rose-breakthrough-20040524-gdizgq.html Schoellhorn, Rick: “Hybrid Phlox: Have a Sunny Future”, in: Greenhouse Product News, June 2006. https://gpnmag.com/article/hybrid-phlox-have-sunny-future/ Suntory Global Research Innovation Center. https://www.suntory.com/sic/research/s_b luerose/story/ Sutton, Benjamin: “This is America’s Most Wanted Painting” November 5, 2018. https:// www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-komar-melamid-americans-painting-thoug ht-wanted Venton, Danielle: “World’s First Blue Rose Soon Available in U.S.”, in: Wired, 9/14/11. http s://www.wired.com/2011/09/blue-roses-for-sale/ “World’s first true-blue rose is in the making!”, in: India Today, October 18, 2018. https:// www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/worlds-first-blue-ro se-1367309-2018-10-13

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Installation view of Rainbow Loom at V Art Center, M50 Art District, Shanghai, China, (2014). Wooden tables, 366 glass Petri dishes, various items collected in China, 36 x 192 x 36 in (91.4x 487.7 x 91.4 cm). Photo credit: Henry G. Sanchez. Fig. 2: Esme Anker Townsend’s work is in the tradition of David Lynch, although she never even heard of him. Her work presented here is a substitution for a still from Lynch’s films which would be too expensive to include in this article. On the other hand, Townsend’s work points to the fact that a kind of hypersurrealism, through technology, is part of a younger generation’s foray into special effects. Photo credit: Esme Anker Townsend. Fig. 3: Color palette produced by changing pH factors in red cabbage. Experiment and photo credit realized by Raul Valverde (2016). Fig. 4: Actual blue hydrangea purchased at Citarella market in East Hampton and placed in Suzanne Anker’s East Hampton Garden in Long Island, New York. The flower is

119

120

Flora

situated in a glass vase and creates a partially blue aura in the environment. Photo credit: Suzanne Anker. Fig. 5: Dyed blue rose purchased from The Ultimate Rose Company; http://www.theultim aterose.com/index.php/worlds-most-colorful-roses/solid-color-roses.html located in Melbourne, Florida. Photo credit: Raul Valverde.

After Nature, Coding and Reading Plant Life Mathias Kessler

During The Hothouse Archives: Plants, Pods and Panama Red conference, I presented a body of work that utilizes the latest findings of how plants communicate and the technical ways in which we can read plant activity. The project looks to the future of growing food and understanding plant communication.

Fig. 1: Mathias Kessler, Big Botany, 2018, Greenhouse for After Nature, (Coding and Reading Plant Life), in front of Spencer Museum of Art.

After Nature was first presented in 2009 at the Gl. Holtegaard Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, as a collaborative effort between a group of scientists and myself. We intended to develop an environmental sensor that could monitor the health of plants. Our aim was that one day the data from these projects could help discover indicators for when a plant needs water, is under attack from insects or other animals, is too hot, too dry, too wet, and so on. While we managed to develop a sensor with a team of scientists and engineers, we did not have the resources at the time to have botanists and other sci-

122

Flora

entists analyze the data we collected, which could provide further insight into the signals that our plant responses provided us. In 2017, I was asked to re-commission the work for the Spencer Museum of Art, and this time with financial help from the Museum and with the help of various departments at the University of Kansas, we added some playful functions. One of these elements was a voice command based on Stephen Hawking’s digital voice, featuring his computer-voice describing the plants and reading out the numbers from what we call the plant EEG. We added time-lapse imaging processing power to create a visual reference to the data we had collected during various experiments and throughout the exhibition. When visiting the experimental greenhouse, the visitor walks into something I call an experience. Perhaps through this experience, the visitors can develop a new understanding of a plant’s potential, simply by encountering plants that are connected to machines, like a human in an emergency room outputting a stream of data.

Fig. 2: Mathias Kessler, Big Botany, 2018, inside Greenhouse for After Nature, (Coding and Reading Plant Life), in front of Spencer Museum of Art.

Working as an artist who examines the entanglements between art, science, and nature, I have noticed a difference in the way I approach science: its aesthetic, its protocol, and its ethical dimension. As an artist, I am not hampered by scientific protocol, and I have the artistic freedom to create projects that may not adhere to such protocol. This freedom sometimes leads to unexpected results. The future of knowledge lies in collaboration, but this process presents its own challenges. During 2008 and 2009, as we were developing the plant sensor, some obstacles arose between the scientists and the creative team collaborating on the project. While we had the engineering power to develop the sensor, we ran into difficulties working with biologists in the field. Issues of trust, adhering to scientific protocol, and protecting professional reputations often stood in the way. While initially I was greeted with excitement, further on I ran into dead ends when asking to collaborate on the project. Revisiting new

Mathias Kessler: After Nature, Coding and Reading Plant Life

research about this body of work, I came across a plant sensor developed by NASA doing precisely what we intended to do 10 years ago.

Fig. 3: Mathias Kessler, Big Botany, 2018, Greenhouse for After Nature, (Coding and Reading Plant Life), in front of Spencer Museum of Art.

During my presentation at the Hothouse Archives conference, I presented my findings on the aesthetics of scientific processes and how my research as an artist can make use of them. How can we use artistic knowledge production and where can it lead us? Can artistic production and visualization of a scientific process shift views and reveal things that have not been seen or witnessed before? Questions about the ethics, and aesthetic and economic relevance in our society are also at stake, while poetic gestures can create valid critical input for decision making and understanding.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Mathias Kessler, Big Botany, 2018, Greenhouse for After Nature, (Coding and Reading Plant Life), in front of Spencer Museum of Art. Fig. 2: Mathias Kessler, Big Botany, 2018, inside Greenhouse for After Nature, (Coding and Reading Plant Life), in front of Spencer Museum of Art. Fig. 3: Mathias Kessler, Big Botany, 2018, Greenhouse for After Nature, (Coding and Reading Plant Life), in front of Spencer Museum of Art. © Mathias Kessler

123

Not a Rose and the Impossibility to Be a Revolutionary and Not Like Flowers Heide Hatry

I was struck by Camille Henrot’s question, which serves as a sort of prompt for the present conference: Is it possible to be a revolutionary and like flowers? It’s a question that effortlessly raises a host of others as well: Must one put pleasure in abeyance to be a revolutionary? Or must one be a sophisticate, too advanced to take enjoyment in simple flowers? Must one distrust everything, every impulse, every unquestioned inclination? Is pleasure laziness that is unbecoming in the revolutionary, luxury, even fiddling while Rome burns, or worse? Is enjoying the flower the moral or even the intellectual equivalent of sloth?

Fig. 1: Heide Hatry, Aures rubri cuniculorum, capita fetarum musum, palpebrae vaccae, 2013. Silver halide photograph of rabbit ears (dyed with red beet) heads of fetal mice and eyelashes of cows, 30 x 45 cm.

126

Flora

Or is it somehow just simple-minded to like flowers? Is it inane? But then, not to abide joy, not to be enthralled by some sort of pure unreflective passion, undetermined by purpose, by strategy, by mediation, is that not to lose what we would gain by virtue of revolution? Or is this an antiquated perspective? In some way, this is not merely a question about the spiritual nature of the revolutionary or the meaning and purposes of revolution itself, but about the place of beauty, and therefore, perhaps, of art in the revolutionary worldview, a question in some respects with a long and already tortured past. To wit, is beauty, and art itself, merely a bourgeois value or classist preoccupation? Is it a sad substitute for genuine human satisfaction that will fall away or be transformed beyond recognition with the revolutionary ascendency of honest human goals? Or can it, in fact, be subversive, insurrectionist, revolutionary from within a system that injudiciously allows it the freedom to critique? Does it have that latitude much as the royal court conferred it upon the medieval fool, if perhaps also isolating it within this unenviable and precarious position as a consequence? I want to say that for the classical Marxist, the answer is obvious: to recover a pure, unalienated relationship to the things of the world, and to our own desires and loves and interactions with them, is the only point of revolution. You can’t be a revolutionary without liking flowers, whatever form your particular flowers might happen to take, because that’s exactly what you’re fighting for. But then, the revolutionary era is always determined by requisites that may not survive it, or values that must be repressed during its course for the good of the cause. The nature of the new world is locked in the black box of the (very specific, material foundations of the) future, in any case. And let’s not forget that we weren’t yet living in a cultural totality, hyper-reality, or the society of the spectacle back then. The nature of our alienation from the flower is therefore recursive, that is, seemingly inescapable, in a way that Marx had only begun to fathom in his analyses of reification and commodity fetishism. If even our relationship to flowers is a construct, then as far as our ability to engage them is concerned, there is no flower any longer. A rose is not a rose. We can reckon with the symbolism of the rose, recognizing that that has changed over time and in view of changing conditions and has even weathered changing relationships to the putative revolutionary consciousness. We can analyze and deconstruct its unconscious semiotics, identify its implicit and deceptive binaries, but we can never confront it as it is. It isn’t just ever-deceptive appearance that we’re seeing when we look upon the rose, but, mostly invisibly to us, our prejudices, our habits, our expectations, and the expectations that have been imposed upon us by venal, extraneous interests, usually at odds with our own, if only we could recognize them. Some years ago, I did a lengthy and complex collaborative project that began with the question of why we love flowers, why we respond to them so somatically and intensely, or at least why I do. And this became, as things developed, not exactly the question of beauty and how it relates to knowledge (or truth, if you will), but of how the question of beauty in the unredeemed world is simultaneously the question of how we live – and live so comfortably – with ugliness, horror, injustice, and slaughter. It explores how we get our beauty only through exploitation, how inequality, deception, degradation, and death are the conditions of its emergence, and how its purpose, aside from distracting us from

Heide Hatry: Not a Rose and the Impossibility to Be a Revolutionary and Not Like Flowers

these facts, is to make us content, to enable us to accept the trade-off (or the deal to which we may never have actually agreed), to lie to and to live with ourselves with equanimity.

Fig. 2: Heide Hatry, Pinnae caudales can- Fig. 3: Heide Hatry, Penis tauri, 2013. crorum, praeputium penis porci, 2013. Silver Silver halide photograph of a bull penis, halide photo of crayfish tail fins and 45 x 30 cm. foreskin of a pig’s penis, 45 x 30 cm.

I made a series of objects in the form of slightly but not self-evidently, peculiar flowers out of various scraps and leavings of the animal slaughter industries. These included internal and external organs, casings, bits of rejected flesh, etc., what we call offal. I then photographed them in natural contexts to give the appearance of relatively large-scale, well-produced art photographs of exotic plants in bloom. The point was to make them conventionally attractive – for the average art sophisticate no doubt rather banal (and it was instructive to watch the gallery door open during the Thursday-night reception at Stux Gallery in Chelsea: a head pop in, glance about, convinced there was nothing to see here and then turn around again) – but for many, reflexively appealing, and certainly unthreatening, maybe even welcoming specifically because unthreatening (in the way that contemporary art is threatening to some), after the fashion of a particular well-known category of visual experience. The pictures were for everyone, and I didn’t mind if the sophisticates got back to them only later on, if ever. I used their visual expectations to get them in front of the pictures where, with a little bit of focus, they could experience their own inner modulations as the images transmogrified into clumps of Archimboldo-esque tripe, eyeballs, ears, gall bladders, and disembodied sex organs, perhaps more or less unconsciously assisted by the revelatory Latin names they bore, like specimens in a botanical monograph (which invites contemplation in a way a bit different than an art show but is a useful convention for similar purposes). The same pleasant surface toward which they’d flitted like any innocent bird or insect in

127

128

Flora

nature was now staring back at them with the sanguinary, and accusatory, evidence of what their race has done to the world, perhaps asking themselves how and why did these materials got here, and what do they signify? The flower, consistent with its visual and olfactory purpose out there in nature, was a trick, perhaps even a trap.

Fig. 4: Heide Hatry, Becci, digiti gallinarum, 2013. Silver halide photograph of beaks and fingers of chicken, 45 x 30 cm.

Revolution, as every theorist knows, begins with knowledge, or understanding, or at least a change in the way we see, or even feel, things. That we have been successfully indoctrinated to believe that living and working for the mutual good, sharing the bounty of nature, using it judiciously so that it will always be there in the future, and cooperation in its broadest sense, is a solecism against our own nature, an evil and discredited lie. In contrast, constant inimical competition, the exploitation of the planet, of human weakness, and of the imperfections of the law, personal and international relations based

Heide Hatry: Not a Rose and the Impossibility to Be a Revolutionary and Not Like Flowers

on distrust, threat, deception, and aggression, ambition, immediate gratification, unrestrained growth – basically, the entire notion that winning, and defeating others, is the true and noble human way – is an astonishing feat about which we rarely spare a thought in the so-called first world. It is unchallenged dogma and on the basis of which we even imagine that social justice somehow magically comes about.

Fig. 5: Heide Hatry, Linguae suum scrofarum, caudae murium juvenilum, 2013. Silver halide photograph of wild boar tongues and mice tails, 45 x 30 cm.

But that could change with what seems to me to be the most negligible shift in our ordinary perspective, the slightest, even involuntary, blossoming of a question in the face of the enormities that are constantly, if now imperceptibly before our eyes. The small jolt of recognition, the moment when we actually see them, is the potential that the flower always holds out, close as a whisper, over the vast distance of the real world, material, like our own embodiment, and calling it to mind from its long-forgotten

129

130

Flora

exile. The thing we don’t reflexively move to consume or to exploit but in which we take simple joy or comfort, in whose silence we may come briefly to ourselves again, and to the world. In this, the flower holds the possibility of the good life. And our relationship to it a model for both art and revolution.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Heide Hatry, Aures rubri cuniculorum, capita fetarum musum, palpebrae vaccae, 2013. Silver halide photograph of rabbit ears (dyed with red beet) heads of fetal mice and eyelashes of cows, 30 x 45 cm ©Heide Hatry. Fig. 2: Heide Hatry, Pinnae caudales cancrorum, praeputium penis porci, 2013. Silver halide photograph of tail fins of crayfish and foreskin of a pig’s penis, 45 x 30 cm ©Heide Hatry. Fig. 3: Heide Hatry, Penis tauri, 2013. Silver halide photograph of a bull penis, 45 x 30 cm ©Heide Hatry. Fig. 4: Heide Hatry, Becci, digiti gallinarum, 2013. Silver halide photograph of beaks and fingers of chicken, 45 x 30 cm ©Heide Hatry. Fig. 5: Heide Hatry, Linguae suum scrofarum, caudae murium juvenilum, 2013. Silver halide photograph of wild boar tongues and mice tails, 45 x 30 cm, ©Heide Hatry. For the documentation of the whole project see: Hatry, Heide: Not a Rose, Milano/New York, (Charta) 2012.

Trojan Horse Manifesto Heide Hatry

© Heide Hatry

Human beings are creatures who create and respond to meaning. Meaning is what connects us to people, ideas, structures, and things. It comes in the form of abiding emotion, thought, and caring and requires them in order to subsist. Meaning is provoked by awe, dignity, grace, depth, complexity, wonder, horror, despair, grief, etc. The special purpose of the artist is to bring new meaning into the world or to remind us of the meaning that it already contains. Without meaning, the creations of art are mere products, items for a certain type of consumption. All consumption also involves meaning, but at its basic level it is only metabolic, relating to passing needs and desires.

132

Flora

Meaningful art, as Kant already recognized, is unconnected to desire or to pleasure, except incidentally. The more our relationship to art becomes a relationship of mere consumption, the less effect art has in our lives, and the less meaningful our lives become. The more creations mean, the more they are art. But even meaningful art can become part of the cycle of consumption in an era of compromised value. In times when meaning itself is compromised by the leveling forces of perfect commerce, it is the artist’s purpose to restore the relationship of art and society to meaning. The more perfectly the market absorbs the products of art, the more imperative that the artist works outside of or against the market, even if from within it. The Trojan Horse approach has sustained meaning in many periods of history in which value has been compromised. The artifacts it has insinuated into cultural life have kept meaning alive during many bleak times. My art is art of the Trojan Horse. I exploit appearance, commonplace expectation, and cultural truism to enter the mind of my viewer. The mind of the viewer is the field in which I wage war with his ideas, having entered under the false pretenses of his compromised desires. The enemy is debased values that have insinuated themselves into the lives of human beings, creatures who create and respond to meaning. Their relationship to meaning can be restored. The function of art is never lost; it is only forgotten. It can always be recovered.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Heide Hatry, Parvolae partes ventris tauri, linguae anitum, 2007. Silver halide photograph of small pieces of bull stomachs and duck tongues, 89 x 178 cm © Heide Hatry.

Questioning the Non-Human Other: Political Potentials of Living Beings in Art

6. Animals and the Ethics of Art

Human-Animal Studies – Bridging the lacuna between academia and society1 Gabriela Kompatscher

The (Western) Origins Some non-human animals seek contact with human society, but most animals are forced to participate in our society2 , as future meat, as future fur, as future leather; even as pets most of them are forced to live with us, although we call them friends, celebrate their birthday and treat them as family members. Human-animal interactions seldom are equal, in most of the cases they follow a hierarchical system that in our Western society developed from ancient Greek philosophy (Aristotle; Stoics) and was then adopted by Christianity (cf. Thomas Aquinas). Or to quote Randy Malamud, an exponent of Literary Animal Studies: “The relationship between people and nonhuman animals is codified in social culture as hierarchical and fundamentally impermeable: we are in here, they are out there.”3 But even in Antiquity and the medieval ages, there were individuals who refused this mindset. For example, Theophrastus argued that there is a biological relationship, a kinship between humans and animals – an argument supported by the modern sciences4 (– or Plutarch who wrote a plea for vegetarianism (De esu carnium) or Kelsos (second century AD) who declared that animals are intelligent beings with an awareness for ethics and proclaimed that the world is not only made for humans (cf. Origenes, Contra Celsum) – a provocation for the anthropocentric view prevailing at the time, and which prevails even in our times. For the Middle Ages, no theoretical works that claim a new view on human-animal relationships are known. But together with colleagues from Medieval History and Classical Philology I’ve found a large number of texts witnessing a caring attitude towards animals. There are men and women grieving for the loss of their dogs and birds, nuns 1 2 3 4

This article was first published in Animals and their Relations to Gods, Humans and Things in the Ancient World, ed. by R. Mattila/S. Ito/S. Fink. Wiesbaden (Springer) 2019, pp. 11–22. cf. Donaldson/Kymlicka: Zoopolis, A Political Theory of Animal Rights, pp. 7–10. Malamud: Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, p. 3. Cf. the works of Volker Sommer/Kurt Kotrschal/Frans de Waal.

138

Animals and the Ethics of Art

heartbroken about the cruel death of their donkey, monks rescuing and tenderly stroking wild animals, hermits sharing their lives with snakes, knights overcoming dangers and experiencing adventures side by side with their animal partners as dogs or lions, or young maidens caring for rabbits, saints setting free animals, and many more.5 As can be seen, seeking the company of animals is not a modern phenomenon, nor is it a mere Western attitude. In his book In the company of animals, James Serpell supplies a lot of examples of animal care and love, for instance, in former Chinese dynasties or Northern and Southern American tribal societies.6 Therefore we can speak of an anthropological constant probably based on biophilia, an inborn culturally influenced interest for all living beings.7 And so we begin to understand why animals matter to us or to most of us. And this matter is no longer private. This means that, on the one hand, friends of animals do not have to hide their fondness for other species anymore to avoid being laughed at because their relations with animals are even at the center of academic studies. On the other hand human-animal relations become increasingly more controlled in order to make animal exploitation visible.

What are Human-Animal Studies about? The Grande Dame of Human-Animal Studies Margo DeMello defines Human Animal Studies as follows: Human-animal studies (HAS) – sometimes known as anthrozoology or animal studies – is an interdisciplinary field that explores the spaces that animals occupy in human social and cultural worlds and the interactions humans have with them. Central to the field is an exploration of the ways in which animal lives intersect with human societies.8 In practice, this means that scholars and scientists working in the field of Human-Animal Studies explore how humans and animals interact, how animals are used as symbols, characters and figures, how they are categorized as so-called ‘useful animals’, how they are seen as family members, and as participants in our society. Human-Animal Studies can be conducted in a descriptive manner, but for most scholars and scientists this discipline has the task of interacting with society in order to have a positive impact on human-animal interdependences. From this approach for instance Critical Animal Studies has developed, which reject the use of violence towards

5

6 7 8

Kompatscher/Classen/Dinzelbacher: Tiere als Freunde im Mittelalter. Eine Anthologie; Kompatscher/ Römer/Schreiner: Partner, Freunde und Gefährten. Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen der Antike, des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit in lateinischen Texten. Serpell: In the Company of Animals. A Study of Human-Animal Relationships. Cf. Otterstedt/Rosenberger: Gefährten – Konkurrenten – Verwandte. Die Mensch-Tier-Beziehung im wissenschaftlichen Denken, p. 182. DeMello: Animals and Society. An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, p. 4.

Gabriela Kompatscher: Human-Animal Studies – Bridging the lacuna between academia and society

animals (of course, also towards human animals) and the dominion of humans over non-humans. The prerequisites for shifting from traditional science and scholarship to a critical and animal-sensitive academic stance are an idealistic basis, an intrinsic motivation, the capacity to change perspective, and the aim to change society by contrasting the mastery discourse in the field of human-animal relations with a counterdiscourse.9 Biology and Ethology10 show us that we are not the crown of creation, not even of evolution, and that the boundary between humans and animals is man-made and scientific nonsense. To put humans on one side and all other animals, from ants to apes, on the other side, thus drawing a clear dividing line in between, is arbitrary. We also could put meercats or skunks in the place of humans and oppose them to all the other animals, including humans. As early as 1956 the Austrian philosopher Günther Anders11 described this attitude as anthropocentric megalomania. Human-Animal Studies has solved this dilemma by using terms like human and nonhuman animals, but for the sake of clarity in this article I will continue to use the traditional terms ‘humans’ and ‘animals.’ The field of Human-Animal Studies aims to overcome this ‘anthropocentric megalomania’ and to take instead the perspective of the animal – a theocentric view – asking how the animal looks at the world. Human-Animal Studies intends to deconstruct the boundary between humans and animals, for example, by using animal-sensitive language,12 but it doesn’t want to equalize all beings because there are differences (quantitative, but not basically qualitative; or to say it in Darwin’s terms13 : The difference is only gradual and not principal) and these differences should be taken into account. It’s all about inclusion of differences. A side note: Not all cultures draw a boundary between humans and animals or they make the boundary permeable, as perhaps we will see also during this conference.14 Human-Animal Studies aims at drawing attention to the cultural filters lying over animals; it wants to open our eyes to the animal as itself, and not as a social construct, for instance, as a pet or a certain symbol. As a literary scholar, I can give one example from Literary Animal Studies: Animals can influence literature as models for literary figures. Literature, in turn, can influence our behavior and our attitudes towards animals.15 Take the wolf from the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood: For sure, real wolves were the inspiration for the animal protagonist in the early folkore versions of the tale – and how many generations afterwards were influenced by Grimms’ Rotkäppchen, and how many children in German-speaking areas still are confronted with this picture of a cruel and scary monster, even in kindergarten. For those kids the wolf in any case has to die – it’s a really hard work to integrate an animal friendly alternative for the wolf in the story. Thus,

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Milstein: “Human Communication’s Effects on Relationships with Animals”, pp. 1048–1052. Cf. Volker Sommer/Marc Bekoff et al. Anders: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, p. 327. Cf. Heuberger: “Das Tier in der Sprache”, pp. 123–135. Darwin: Die Abstammung des Menschen, p. 160. Cf. DeMello: Animals and Society. An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, pp. 33–36. Cf. Borgards “Tiere in der Literatur. Eine methodische Standortbestimmung”, pp. 87–118.

139

140

Animals and the Ethics of Art

we can see how literature can produce artificial realties, which affect our perception of animals, our thoughts about them and our interaction with them. Human-Animal Studies supply methods to uncover all these social constructions.16 Human-Animal Studies deals not only with subjects from biology, ethology or sociology – there are also influences from philosophy, namely the ethic dimension: Human-Animal Studies considers and respects animals as subjects with agency and as individuals with their own interests and experiences. Human-Animal Studies wants to break up dogmata in order to recognize an intrinsic value in animals, to recognize them as free coexisting beings, as part of our society, developing and shaping our society in conjunction with us, or as members of parallel living societies. And Human-Animal Studies aspires towards sensitizing society to improve human-animal relationships.17 I mean to say: Human-Animal Studies connects species.

Human-Animal Studies and their potential as connectors between academia and society From my description of Human-Animal Studies, it can be concluded that a connection to society is naturally given, when Human-Animal Studies provides more than mere descriptions of human-animal relations. Or to start from the other side: As Margo DeMello18 notes, the relations between humans and animals are becoming increasingly complex and are subject to changes, and animal welfare and animal rights have become increasingly explosive topics in our society. So, for more and more disciplines, the necessity to put a focus on human-animal relations arises. Thus, both academia and society recognize the need to develop new approaches to these challenges, and the best way would be to work hand in hand. To this end, a passable and permeable connection between society and the Ivory Tower is required. Human-Animal Studies are highly suitable for assuming the key role in this process of convergence.

HAS at the University of Innsbruck I became aware of this, when our team in Innsbruck first held its lecture series about Human-Animal Studies in 2012. About one thousand students attended and like our speakers they came from such different disciplines as linguistics, literature, history, philosophy, law, biology, theology, psychology and pedagogy – as can be seen, Human-Animal Studies also connects disciplines. Moreover we consciously invited a non-university public – and numerous interested persons responded to the invitation: teachers, farmers,

16 17

18

Cf. Kompatscher: “Literaturwissenschaft. Die Befreiung der ästhetisierten Tiere”, pp. 137–159. For a more detailed illustration of Human Animal Studies cf. Kompatscher: “Human-Animal Studies”, pp. 316–321, 2018 and Kompatscher/Schachinger/Spannring: Human-Animal Studies. Eine Einführung für Studierende und Lehrende, 2017. DeMello: Animals and Society. An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies.

Gabriela Kompatscher: Human-Animal Studies – Bridging the lacuna between academia and society

secretaries, animal rights activists, school students, artists, bankers, housewives, doctors, businesspeople and many more. We had some really inspiring discussions together and especially the experts from outside the university, teachers, school doctors, nursery teachers provided us with good proposals on how to integrate Human-Animal Studies into society (e.g. via ethical nutrition). It reminded me of the Nokia slogan: Human-Animal Studies – ‘connecting people’. In 2014, we had a conference on Human-Animal Studies, and again a significant part of the audience came from outside the university. This phenomenon continued in our lecture series last year with more than 1,000 academic and non-academic attendants. Even the popular media were interested in our academic activities about Human-Animal Studies and presented the field in easily understandable articles to their non-academic readers. And many of our students, apart from becoming vegetarian or even vegan, brought the Human-Animal Studies message to a wider audience by talking about and discussing the subject with friends and family, and by dedicating their bachelor or master theses to Human-Animal Studies. Subsequently, we were invited to hold lessons and talks in libraries, in schools, at teacher training events, in adult education centers, and so we had and still have the opportunity to get in touch with members of our society interested in academic research results to underpin their empathy for animals.

Outcomes of HAS Human-animal relations were an attractive subject already in ancient cultures. Since then, philosophers, scientifically interested authors and storytellers of every shade were interested in human-animal interaction. Again, the novelty of Human-Animal Studies lies in its approach to the subject. As previously mentioned, human-animal relationships in modern times are explored from different scientific perspectives: biology, philosophy, linguistics, literature, history, law, biology, theology, sociology, gender studies, ethnology and others. The non-academic world is fascinated by the knowledge about human-animal relations gained from academic research by using new animal-friendly approaches. For this reason alone we should strive to transfer knowledge to the public. But the outcomes of Human-Animal Studies can do more than satisfy thirst for knowledge. In order to answer the anthropocentric question, “What can Human-Animal Studies contribute to human society?”, a few examples may be sufficient19 : 1. Human-Animal Studies in connection with psychology can help us understand why we can’t stop eating meat although we have a guilty conscience towards the animals, towards our health, towards our environment. Human-Animal Studies can help us to solve the dilemma.20

19 20

Kompatscher: “Human-Animal Studies”, pp. 316–321. Cf. Joy: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. An Introduction to Carnism: The Belief System That Enables Us to Eat Some Animals and Not Others.

141

142

Animals and the Ethics of Art 2. Human-Animal Studies in connection with philosophy can develop a new code of ethics, including non-human animals.21 3. Human-Animal Studies in biology and comparative psychology demonstrate to us our close relationship to animals and helps us in this way to better understand our ‘animal nature’.22 4. Human-Animal Studies in pedagogy provides not only humane education but also education in general with essential information and knowledge about how to encourage children to assume responsibility, to articulate their feelings about animals, and to preserve the sense of continuity between themselves and animals.23 5. Human-Animal Studies in history show how animals were involved in the historical evolution, for example, as silent workers (“stumme Arbeiter”)24 by attributing them agency, such as the capacity to initiate changes.25 This approach opens many new perspectives on human history. 6. When Gender Studies deals with Human-Animal Studies, it becomes clear that the research about intersectionality must include the discrimination of animals when the roots of the oppression and the discrimination of women have to be found, analyzed and eradicated.26 7. Linguistics demonstrates how our language affects our thinking. For example, in English you can use pregnant for both future human mothers and animal mothers, in German we use schwanger for female humans, but trächtig for female animals. So, for one and the same physical status, we use different words, and thus we divide humans from animals already in our language. Furthermore, a language of this kind can be used to depreciate minorities by comparing them with animals. But also, the English language has problematic implications. For example, by disguising body parts of living beings with terms like “beef” or “pork.”27 8. Sociology: This is a wide and fertile field for Human-Animal Studies, but I will limit this point to referring to one specific research topic: violence. Sociology has discovered the link between abuse of animals and violence against humans;28 and offers knowledge how to stop this vicious circle.

To conclude: I’m sure the topic of this conference will also have an important impact on society by inspiring us to engage in more detailed studies about the issue and to transfer their results to society. With these results we can “help people to think differently about

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Cf. Petrus/Wild (eds.): Animal Minds & Animal Ethics: Connecting Two Separate Fields. Cf. Volker Sommer; Frans de Waal etc. Cf. Spannring: “Bildungswissenschaft. Auf dem Weg zu einer posthumanistischen Pädagogik”, pp. 29–52. Roscher: “Geschichtswissenschaft. Von einer Geschichte mit Tieren zu einer Tiergeschichte”, p. 84. Ibid., p. 86. Cf. also Schachinger: “Gender Studies und Feminismus. Von der Befreiung der Frauen zur Befreiung der Tiere”, pp. 53–74. Cf. Heuberger: “Das Tier in der Sprache”. Human-animal violence link cf. Ascione/Arkow: Child Abuse, Domestic Violence and Animal Abuse. Linking the Circles of Compassion for Prevention and Intervention; Ascione: The International Handbook of Animal Abuse and Cruelty: Theory, Research, and Application.

Gabriela Kompatscher: Human-Animal Studies – Bridging the lacuna between academia and society

animals” – as the title of the summer school in July 2016 at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics reads: “Helping people to think differently about animals”.29 But I have to point out that scientists and scholars of Human-Animal Studies often have to justify their interest in these topics, and so they have to act anthropocentrically by underlining the benefits of their studies for the human society. But most of them are equally interested in bringing a maximum of benefit to animals too. This is the nature of Human-Animal Studies, as for example, we in Innsbruck understand it. In this regard, we are in good company with one of the leading institutions for Human-Animal Studies, the Animal & Society Institute in Michigan, that provides a broad variety of resources, policies and different scholar services, and that works under the significant slogan: “Where knowledge and science meet ethics and compassion.”30

Creating bridges Building bridges – how can this concretely be done? I’ve already mentioned some possibilities, such as opening lectures and congresses to the interested public. One can also offer talks and speeches and other forms of participation in public, semi-public or private spaces and events, for example, in libraries, in youth centers, in animal shelters, at church festivals, at charity events, at fairs. A few months ago I was invited to hold a talk about Human-Animal Studies at a vegan fair. Through these channels, we can best and directly share our research results with the society. Seeking a dialogue, we get in return new inspirations and essential inputs for our academic work. Children and young people, in particular, are interested in human-animal relationships. I have published a few articles and two books with Latin texts presenting positive relations between animals and humans; some mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Teachers have told me that pupils even love to translate such kinds of Latin texts, and that’s understandable. These Latin writings, in many cases, mirror their own experiences with and feelings about animals. The discovery that these are anthropological constants encourages them to defend their sensitivity for the well-being of animals. Considering the impact of teaching Human-Animal Studies, no matter in which discipline, we decided to put a focus on the question how teachers could best inspire their pupils to find and implement solutions for better human-animal relationships in the future. There’s no need here to underline that improvements in this respect will trigger in turn environmental and human health improvements. So last summer term, we held a seminar about Human-Animal Studies in didactic and pedagogic fields like school or adult education. My colleagues Reingard Spannring and Karin Schachinger, and I provided theoretical input about Human-Animal Studies, as well as proposals for practice. Moreover, we invited schoolteachers interested in the subject and teachers for animal welfare to coach our participants. Our students appre-

29 30

http://www.oxfordanimalethics.com/home/ http://www.animalsandsociety.org/

143

144

Animals and the Ethics of Art

ciated this offer and became very engaged in finding child- and adult-oriented methods for teaching Human-Animal Studies. Essential for coming into contact with society is coming out of our Ivory Towers, also by disseminating our knowledge not only in restricted publication forms but, moreover, adapted and shaped accordingly, via open access or via other formats such as blogs or videos or entries in social networks. Of course, in these “secondary publications” (and maybe not only there), we should try to simplify our scientific jargon, which constitutes one of the obstacles between university and society.31 What sort of content is especially suitable for a public audience or readership? Content of all kinds, as long as it is presented in a comprehensible way. As a scholar of classic and mediaeval Latin, I usually start public talks with presenting Latin texts about friendly relationships between humans and animals. I often assume the perspective of the history of mentalities to show that the human desire to interact with non-humans and thoughts about animal welfare and even animal rights are not new. I call attention to the tender attitudes of animal lovers in antiquity and the Middle Ages towards animals and their emotions: empathy, grief, love, and even the desire to embrace them and to stroke them. I have observed that nearly all feelings known by modern animal friends can be identified in these sorts of texts. But even the emotions of animals were described: fear, sorrow, sadness, jealousy, joy, and affection. Attentive medieval authors noticed a wide range of emotions in animals, which in the meantime were confirmed by ethologists. For example, the grief of a cow due to her child’s death: Hoc videns pia mater tristissima effecta est 32 – “When the loving mother saw this, she felt very sad”. Subsequently, I put different questions up for discussion. For example, how can friendship between humans be defined, and can this concept be transferred to animals? This is also a perfect point of contact with biology: Is friendship maybe nothing else than a mere biological necessity? How can the desire of animal lovers to caress animals, even when they are not known personally, be explained? The hormone of wellbeing oxytocin can offer a plausible answer: Stroking an animal causes pleasant feelings – not only within the human body, but also the animal shows an increase in this hormone. Further questions and discussion items can be about how literature and our society use animals; how literature – to quote Tom Regan and Andrew Linzey – can “reconnect us with the world of animals”;33 how literature and its interpretation can shape our perception of animals; how social and cultural attitudes are reflected or contradicted by literature. For instance, 1. how literature can confirm or reject our anthropocentric view, 2. how the human-animal divide has been deepened or dissolved, 3. and what might be the consequences of such insights for us as readers and as citizens, when we first become aware of certain unquestioned convictions – a conviction like the belief that animals belong to an inferior category of beings and were made for humans’ use. 31 32 33

Cf. Glasser/Roy: “The Ivory Trap: Bridging the Gap Between Activism and the Academy”, pp. 96f. Kompatscher: “Literaturwissenschaft. Die Befreiung der ästhetisierten Tiere”, p. 52. Regan/Linzey: Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, p. xviii.

Gabriela Kompatscher: Human-Animal Studies – Bridging the lacuna between academia and society

Appeal Let’s conclude. Steven Best, an exponent of Critical Animal Studies, who like me pleads for cooperation between academia and society, criticizes the activity of scientists and scholars inside their “funhouse of theory” without any endeavor to have an impact outside this “funhouse”. I would like to quote Best: [T]he concrete realities of animal suffering, violence and exploitation, economic crisis and social power, and the rapidly worsening planetary ecological catastrophe are entirely muted and virtually barred from the hermetically-sealed chambers of theory-babble. […] Little different from the television or video game, theory is just another form of distraction in which individuals can immerse themselves, as they detach themselves from the real and pressing issues of society, animals, and the environment.34 As for myself, I have to agree: Concentration on theory is a wonderful opportunity to leave reality behind and the Ivory Tower is the perfect hideaway for this purpose. In earlier years, I deliberately used my classic texts and theories to disconnect me for a while from social problems, such as animal exploitation. I still immerse myself in theories, but now with the intention of benefitting others and maybe of finding some answers to social injustice. Like many other scholars and scientists, I feel a certain social responsibility and the obligation to stand against all forms of discrimination and their symptoms, such as oppression, exploitation, injustice and violence. Thus, I want to interact with society, in order to have a positive influence on human-animal relationships. As scholars and scientists, we are in a privileged position to produce, to evaluate and to spread knowledge which could contribute to the benefit of society.35 With this knowledge, we can help to resolve urgent current problems of our society. Therefore, inspired by Chomsky,36 I think that we as intellectuals are co-responsible for the development of society, and that we have the ethical commitment to involve ourselves, to intervene, to take part, to contribute and to actively shape the future of our society. Thus, one of the aims of Human-Animal Studies is to find out how we can improve the coexistence of human and non-human animals, inter alia, by trying to take from time to time an animal’s point of view.

34 35 36

Best: “The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education”, n.p. Cf. Glasser/Roy: “The Ivory Trap: Bridging the Gap Between Activism and the Academy”, pp. 89–109. Chomsky: Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order.

145

146

Animals and the Ethics of Art

References Anders, Günther: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Vol. I, München (Beck) 1956. Ascione, Frank R./Arkow, Phil (eds.): Child Abuse, Domestic Violence and Animal Abuse. Linking the Circles of Compassion for Prevention and Intervention, West Lafayette (Purdue University Press) 1999. Ascione, Frank R.: The International Handbook of Animal Abuse and Cruelty: Theory, Research, and Application, West Lafayette (Purdue University Press) 2008. Bekoff, Marc (ed.): Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships. A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, 4 Vols., Westport/Conn. (Greenwood Press) 2007. Best, Steven: “The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education”, in: Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 7 (2009) 1, pp. 9–52. Borgards, R.: “Tiere in der Literatur. Eine methodische Standortbestimmung”, in: Herwig Grimm/Carola Otterstedt (eds.): Das Tier an sich. Disziplinenübergreifende Perspektiven für neue Wege im wissenschaftsbasierten Tierschutz, Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2012, pp. 87–118. Chomsky, Noam: Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order, Boston, MA (South End Press) 1996. Darwin, Charles: Die Abstammung des Menschen, Wiesbaden (Fourier) 19663 . (Orig. The Descent of Man, 1871). DeMello, Margo: Animals and Society. An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies, New York (Columbia University Press) 2012. Donaldson, Sue/Kymlicka, Will: Zoopolis, A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Oxford/New York (Oxford University Press) 2011. Glasser, C. L./Roy A.: “The Ivory Trap: Bridging the Gap Between Activism and the Academy”, in: Anthony J. Nocella II et al. (eds.): Defining Critical Animal Studies, New York et al. (Peter Lang Verlag) 2014, pp. 89–109. Heuberger, Reinhard: “Das Tier in der Sprache”, in: Reingard Spannring/Karin Schachinger/Gabriela Kompatscher et al. (eds.): Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, Bielefeld (transcript Verlag) 2015, pp. 123–135. Joy, Melanie: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. An Introduction to Carnism: The Belief System That Enables Us to Eat Some Animals and Not Others, San Francisco (Conari Press) 2010. Kompatscher, Gabriella/Classen, Albrecht/Dinzelbacher, Peter: Tiere als Freunde im Mittelalter. Eine Anthologie, Badenweiler (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Bachmann) 2010. Kompatscher, Gabriella/Römer, Franz/Schreiner, Sonja: Partner, Freunde und Gefährten. Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen der Antike, des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit in lateinischen Texten, Wien (Holzhausen Verlag) 2014. Kompatscher, Gabriela: “Literaturwissenschaft. Die Befreiung der ästhetisierten Tiere”, in: Reingard Spannring/Karin Schachinger/Gabriela Kompatscher et al. (eds.): Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, Bielefeld (transcript Verlag) 2015, pp. 137–159.

Gabriela Kompatscher: Human-Animal Studies – Bridging the lacuna between academia and society

Kompatscher, Gabriela: “Human-Animal Studies”, in: Johann S. Ach/Dagmar Borchers (eds.): Handbuch Tierethik. Grundlagen – Kontexte – Perspektiven, Stuttgart (J. B. Metzler Verlag) 2018, pp. 316–321. Kompatscher, Gabriela/Schachinger, Karin/Spannring, Raingard: Human-Animal Studies. Eine Einführung für Studierende und Lehrende, Münster (Waxmann) 2017. Malamud, Randy: Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, New York (Palgrave) 2003. Milstein, T.: “Human Communication’s Effects on Relationships with Animals”, in: Marc Bekoff/Janette Nystrom (eds.): Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships. A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals, Band 3, Westport/Conn. (Greenwood Press) 2007, pp. 1044–1054. Otterstedt, Carola/Rosenberger, Michael (eds.): Gefährten – Konkurrenten – Verwandte. Die Mensch-Tier-Beziehung im wissenschaftlichen Denken, Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2009. Petrus, Klaus/Wild, Markus (eds.): Animal Minds & Animal Ethics: Connecting Two Separate Fields, Bielefeld (transcript Verlag) 2013. Regan, Tom/Linzey, Andrew: Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature, Waco/Tx. (Baylor University Press) 2010. Roscher, Mieke: “Geschichtswissenschaft. Von einer Geschichte mit Tieren zu einer Tiergeschichte”, in: Reingard Spannring/Karin Schachinger/Gabriela Kompatscher et al. (eds.): Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, Bielefeld (transcript Verlag) 2015, pp. 75–100. Schachinger, Karin: “Gender Studies und Feminismus. Von der Befreiung der Frauen zur Befreiung der Tiere”, in: Reingard Spannring/Karin Schachinger/Gabriela Kompatscher et al. (eds.): Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, Bielefeld (transcript Verlag) 2015, pp. 53–74. Serpell, James: In the Company of Animals. A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (Canto original series), New York (B. Blackwell) 2008 (Erstausg. 1986). Sommer, Volker: Darwinisch denken. Horizonte der Evolutionsbiologie, Stuttgart (Hirzel) 2007. Spannring, Reingard/Schachinger, Karin/Kompatscher, Gabriela et al. (eds.): Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, Bielefeld (transcript Verlag) 2015. Spannring, Raingard: “Bildungswissenschaft. Auf dem Weg zu einer posthumanistischen Pädagogik”, in: Reingard Spannring/Karin Schachinger/Gabriela Kompatscher et al. (eds.): Disziplinierte Tiere? Perspektiven der Human-Animal Studies für die wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, Bielefeld (transcript Verlag) 2015, pp. 29–52. Waal, Frans de: Der Affe in uns. Warum wir sind, wie wir sind, München/Wien (Hanser Verlag) 2006 (orig.: Our Inner Ape, New York 2005).

147

Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics Jessica Ullrich

Animal challenges for traditional aesthetics In the beginning of the 19th century, the famous Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) created a painting for the shogun by drawing a thick blue line on a piece of paper and then dipping the feet of a rooster in red paint and sending him over the sheet. Hokusai titled the resulting image “Tatsuta river with autumn leaves”.1 And indeed, human recipients easily recognized a river represented by the blue line and falling maple leaves represented by the red traces of the rooster’s claws. Hokusai’s method which could be called calculated coincidence was doubtless innovative, but he used the claws of the bird not much different from a brush or other painting material. The traces materialize themselves to be autumn leaves only in the mind of a human audience. This popular anecdote constructs the genius of a human master, not the artistry of his animal tool. 200 years later Steven Kutcher uses bugs as living brushes in a similar way. He also dips the feet of animals in wet paint and lets them crawl over his canvases. As an artist of the 21th century working with non-human animals, other than Hokusai, Kutcher feels obliged to assure that the paint is not toxic and that the bugs are not harmed in the process. He claims: “I have to take good care of them. After all, they are artists!”2 Nevertheless, Kutcher just like Hokusai looks for a certain visual effect that is attained by instrumentalizing animal locomotion. Most certainly both artworks do not mean anything to the animals themselves. But still, by calling the insects artists, Kutcher gives up some of his own artistic agency and attributes artistic agency to non-human animals. What has changed in the notion of art and the notion of agency that now a bug can be called an artist?

1 2

Weston: Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan's Most Influential Men and Women, pp. 117–118. Thomas: “He Lets Creepy-Crawlies Get Their Feet Wet as Painters”, in: http://www.washingt onpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/17/AR2007081700603.html. (accessed February 10, 2020).

150

Animals and the Ethics of Art

In traditional aesthetics non-human animals are generally considered to be artless beings without any urge or capacity to create aesthetic objects. To the contrary, the ability and the need to produce art often is perceived as one of the last thresholds of humanity in an age where most other claims for anthropological difference like tool use, language, consciousness, morals, empathy, culture, etc. have been given up. Homo sapiens clings to his supremacy and now it is allegedly art that makes the human species unique. Art is supposed to heal the narcissistic wound that comes from the growing realization that many other animals share most of the traits that were formerly considered to be exclusively human. Some randomly chosen quotes from different sources can illustrate this. Hans Belting for example said: “The concept of the image can only be taken seriously when we think of it as an anthropological concept.”3 Artist Susan Hiller confirms: “By definition art is an anthropological practice [...].”4 while Emma Dexter writes in a handbook for art students: “To draw is to be human.”5 Also, Alexander Alland states that the “creation and the appreciation of art in its many forms are uniquely human activities.” 6 The popular online dictionary Wikipedia defines art “a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts” and the German online portal for art history Artfocus describes art as “the essential form of expression for human emotions and human thoughts.”7 Looking at art history it becomes clear that the very concept of art is constituted by intellectual negotiation processes that are grounded in notions of human exceptionalism. If an artist is defined by being human or if art is considered to be an attribute of humanity alone, all creative expressions of any other species are excluded from the sphere of art and every possibility of aesthetic practices in non-human animals have to be denied. But there are different discourses as well. In antiquity Democritus argued that animal creativity has been prior to human creativity and that human artists only follow animal models: “In some of the most important skills men have been pupils of animals. Of the spider in weaving and healing, of the swallow in house-building, and of song-birds, swan and nightingale in singing, by imitation.”8 Following Democritus, human beings basically became civilized by imitating the other animals. In a similar way contemporary scholars of evolutionary aesthetics just assume that human art has emerged from nonhuman animal activities: Music is thought to have developed from bird song, architecture from animal dens and other animal constructions, dance from courtship display.9 Historical references for the notion of animal art and animal aesthetics can be found in philosophy as well as in the natural sciences at least since the late 18th century. For example, in the 19th century Charles Darwin famously attested a sense of beauty to an-

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Belting: Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft, p. 11. Hiller: “ohne Titel”, p. 214. Dexter: Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, p. 6. Alland: The Artistic Animal. An Inquiry in the Biological Roots of Art, p. 21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art (accessed February 20, 2020); http://artfocus.com/kunst/ (accessed February 20, 2020). Democritus B 154, p. 247. Dissanayake: What Is Art For?; Menninghaus: Wozu Kunst? Ästhetik nach Darwin; Prum: The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us.

Jessica Ullrich: Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics

imals.10 And more recently Gilles Deleuze read animal traces and the marking of a territory as some kind of expression of artistic agency. He even compares it to the birth of art itself.11 Marking can be a certain posture: sitting, standing, singing, or changing of color of an animal. According to Deleuze all these forms of expression are related and even prior to the essential features of art like line, color, or song. And the current discourse about the culture of non-human animals as it has been put forward by primatologists, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers explicitly allows for the idea of animal aesthetics as well.12 Without building too much on these theories, nonhuman animals and their products experience a boom in visual arts in the last years. In the theoretical framework of posthumanism and animal studies, the difference between humans and other animals is getting more and more blurred. That paves the way towards an easier acceptance of the concept of art by animals. Influential scholars of biosemiotics, philosophy, psychology, biology, and art history like Vinciane Despret, Dominique Lestel, Dario Martinelli, David Rothenberg, Richard Prum, Tristan Garcia or Carol Gigilotti are currently either researching animal art and aesthetics or are at least recognizing the existence of animal art.13 There has even been a lawsuit to decide if a monkey can have the copyright for a photograph he or she took.14 Curators have followed this trend and increasingly include the creative productions of non-human animals in major art shows. Already ten years ago, the SAW Gallery in Ottawa for example dedicated the exhibition Animal House: Works of Art Made by Animals to the aesthetic productions of non-human animals, including paintings by elephants and chimpanzees and scratchings by dogs and turtles and since then art by animals has been included in many exhibitions on the topic of the so-called animal turn.15

10 11 12 13

14

15

Darwin: The Descent of Man in Relation to Sex, p. 359. Deleuze: in: Abécédaire – Gilles Deleuze von A bis Z, DVD 1. Imanishi: A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things; Welsch: “Animal Aesthetics”, (accessed February 20, 2020). Despret: What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?; Lestel: L'Animal singulier; Martinelli: A Critical Companion to Zoosemotics; Rothenberg: Survival of the Beautiful. Art, Science, Evolution; Prum: The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us; Garcia: “Arts. Neither Art nor Works of Art”, Talk at X. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik, Offenbach, 02/17/2018; Gigliotti: “The Creative Lives of Animals”, Talk at Decolonizing Animals NZCHAS 2019, Christchurch 07/27/2019. In 2011, photographer David Slater had set up a camera to stimulate macaques to take pictures. When one of the monkey did take a selfie, the photo not only went viral but the incident also escalated into a court case about the authorship for the image. Stewart: “Wikimedia says when a monkey takes a picture, no one owns it”, https://www.newsweek.com/lawyers-dispute-wikim edias-claims-about-monkey-selfie-copyright-265961 (accessed February 20, 2020). In Germany there were for example sculptures and paintings by animals on display in group shows in art museums and art exhibition halls like Tier-Werden Mensch-Werden (NGBK, Berlin 2009), Tierperspektiven (Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin 2009) We Animals (Meinblau Berlin 2014), Arche Noah. Über Tier und Mensch in der Kunst (Dortmunder U 2015–2015), and #catcontent (Kunstpalais Erlangen 2015), Animal Lovers (NGBK, Berlin 2016), Flügelschlag, Insekten in der zeitgenössischen Kunst (Sinclairhaus Bad Homburg, 2019). This is by no means a complete list and there were many more solo exhibitions by artists who collaborate with animals.

151

152

Animals and the Ethics of Art

Such displays have predecessors in the 1960s when Desmond Morris worked on the first widely received academic analyses of ape painting, The Biology of Art (1962).16 Morris was not only a zoologist and ethologist but a painter himself. He understood his scholarship as a contribution to the search for the origins of human art. In his book he mostly describes his experiences with the chimpanzee Congo. Between the ages of four and six, Congo produced almost 400 paintings and drawings. According to Morris, Congo strove to symmetry, rhythmic variations and flashy color contrasts. He favored fan shaped compositions and made sure to always stay on the sheet of paper he was drawing or painting on. Congo became a world-famous celebrity and his paintings were shown in many exhibitions. Artists like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí were enthusiastic about his works. The hype around Congo is probably owed to the fact that it was the heyday of abstract expressionism and Congo’s paintings were formally very close to some of the celebrated works by human painters of the time. Other than identifying several general compositional characteristics, Morris also observed that Congo tended to destroy the shapes he made by painting over them. This habit made it necessary for Morris to remove the paper once the painting had reached a certain state of perfection or attraction – a practice that has become common for all the following experiments with apes. This patronizing intervention deprives apes of the authority over their own productions and results in a deeply anthropocentric value judgement: The painting is only complete when a human being says so. It never occurred to Morris and his followers, that precisely the painting over and thus the multiple overlapping of shapes and colors might express the artistic agency of the ape. However, Morris concluded from Congo’s eager cooperation that artistic activities were rewarding in themselves. He wrote: “Both man and ape have an inherent need to express themselves aesthetically.”17 But of course, all ape paintings arise from apes in captivity, mostly from apes who are held in a very restrictive laboratory situation. The whole setup of painting experiments is deeply anthropocentric: Apes are provided with painting material that has been designed for humans and they are trained to show a certain behavior that imitates human art making. Also, ape paintings are analyzed by humans with methods that have been invented for human art production (mostly for children’s or so-called ‘primitive’ art). Whereas Morris pointed to the similarities between human art and ape painting, thirty years later French philosopher and art historian Thierry Lenain emphasized the differences. In 1990 he published La peinture des singes: Histoire et esthetique, which has been translated misleadingly into Monkey Painting.18 While Morris assumed that there was some kind of aesthetic order and compositional balance in ape painting, Lenain described ape art as visual destruction. In his view the painting ape tries to trash and fragment the blank sheet of paper in order to work against its very emptiness.

16 17 18

Morris: The Biology of Art. Ibid., p. 151. Lenain almost exclusively looked at paintings by great apes who by definition are not monkeys. Lenain: Monkey Painting.

Jessica Ullrich: Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics

Just recently a new reading of ape drawing has been put forward by Juliet MacDonald.19 She devoted her studies to the chimpanzee Alpha whose life as a research animal in the Yerkes laboratories is very well documented. Based on an empathic and attentive account of Alpha’s living conditions, MacDonald suggests that the crossing lines and the violent scribbling over structures and shapes in Alpha’s drawings could be read as resistance against the oppressive and constricting conditions in which she was forced to live in. Whether one follows this view or not: It seems fair to state that the paintings or drawings of apes are documents of the motoric coordination skills of their authors, their ability to recognize shapes and some kind of pleasure of movement. They are unburdened by art historical knowledge or expertise, but they are expressions of the agency of their creators.

Interspecies Art That made them attractive for artists. In 1979 for example the Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer painted side by side with the chimpanzees Lady and Jimmy in his parallel painting actions in order to reveal the “mystery of art” and to solve the “riddle of artistic sovereignty”.20 Rainer framed the parallel painting actions as a competition and gave the chimps a head start by letting them decide on the motif or theme of the painting. Rainer then tried to imitate the chimps’ movements and brush strokes. He soon abandoned the experiment. One reason he gave was that he never managed to attain the immediacy, intensity of abstraction and directness of his animal partner – in his view attributes of the ideal artist for which he admired the chimps. This project reveals almost nothing about the non-human animal’s artistic agency, but a great deal about Rainer’s view of himself and what an artist is. Even when Rainer claimed that he considered his own capacities to be inferior, he nonetheless deployed artistic categories and methods that were distinctively human. But the project is still an interesting artwork because it challenges the dominant idea of creativity and art as the result of individual inspiration, human (or rather male) genius and intention. The same can be said of the work of the Russian artist couple Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. They initiated a project to teach captive elephants how to paint in the mid-1990s. They developed their method in the Toledo Zoo in Ohio with elephant Rene. In 1998 Komar and Melamid opened their first elephant art academy in Lampang in Thailand and founded the Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project. The Asian elephant is an endangered species in the wild. Asian elephants have been used for the transport of timber for centuries, but with the prohibition of cutting of timber they are now not only unemployed but also useless for their owners. The project of Komar and Melamid gave the mahouts as well as the elephants a new source of income. It was an immediate success. 1999 Komar and Melamid exhibited works by the elephants Juthanam, Phitsamai, 19 20

MacDonald: “Alpha: The Figure in the Cage”, pp. 27–44. Rainer: Schriften. Selbstzeugnisse und ausgewählte Interviews, p. 183.

153

154

Animals and the Ethics of Art

and Nam Chok in the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the following years, they organized big exhibitions in major museums in the USA, Australia, and Asia. Paintings by elephants were sold for high prizes at the big auction houses in New York. Subsequently Komar and Melamid concentrated on the artistic training of the mahouts so that they could be the teachers of their elephants afterwards and they are still keeping the enterprise alive.21 Even as money earning artists the elephants stay the property of the human artists and are under their copyright. However, an elephant who is been given a brush is not solely an instrument or a tool for a human artist. He or she develops with time individual techniques in the handling of the brush and favors certain shapes or colors. To take this into account, all elephant painters are introduced with complete CVs and with a description of their stylistic characteristics on the website of the project. Apart from questionable art historical classifications, there are reasonable accounts of individual preferences of individual elephants. Some seem to enjoy the painting activity while others are easily bored, some are slow workers, others want to get it quickly over with to be able to do other things. Certainly, Komar und Melamid are the initiators and the managers of this project. They are the conceptual authors, they contextualize the paintings, they commission art historical categorizations and they suggest interpretative approaches. One of them might be that art and the art market is a joke after all. With their project Komar and Melamid, just like Rainer, ironize traditional concepts of art and authorship. The whole enterprise can be understood as the attempt to reveal the illusionary character of art. The audience can make of the paintings whatever fits in their worldview. Art historians analyse the painting techniques, collectors consider the monetary value of the works and see them as investments, the well-intentioned public might see a meaningful aid project for an endangered species and people who are sceptic of contemporary art will feel confirmed in their opinion that it takes no skills at all to make abstract art. Whether an object is defined as art has nothing to do with the object itself but with the discourse in which it is embedded. The attempts to include the aesthetics productions of so-called primitive humans, children or mentally ill people into art history have shown that it is always a matter of power and hierarchy to decide about what is art and what is not art.22 One of the main objections against the idea of animal artistic agency is the alleged lack of intention on part of the non-human animal. But the insistence on intention as an essential criterion for artistic agency has long become obsolete. A basic form of agency understood as the ability to make decisions and to implement these decisions in the world is usually not denied to animals anymore. And the extension of the concept of actors to non-human actors in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory easily legitimates animals as potential co-authors of artworks.23 And, as part of the emergence of New Materialism, theorists have developed a similarly open concept of distributive agency

21 22 23

Komar/Melamid: When Elephants Paint. The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand. Leeb: Die Kunst der Anderen. Weltkunst und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne. Latour: Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory.

Jessica Ullrich: Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics

or non-intentional agency in so-called intra-actions.24 Drawing on New Materialist theory, Michael Marder even expands the very idea of art: “Art is what the body does, not only with its hands, vocal cords or feet in obedience to the commands of the mastermind (which is the conscious mind) but also with its cells and tissues, hormonal networks and glands, as well as, more generally, what it does with matter including the materials from which an inanimate body is, strictly speaking crafted.”25 For Marder metabolic processes like decay, entropy, symbiosis, aggregation, or incorporation are not categorically different from aesthetic practices. There are all forms of creating, analyzing, transforming, digesting shared worlds. In his view not only humans and other animals but also the world itself can create works of art “without any intentional human interference.”26 But to stay in the safe realm of animal agency which existence is not doubted anymore by biologists and philosophers, one could claim that if animal agency leads to an aesthetic object that would be considered as art if it had been created by a human being, you could call this capacity animal artistic agency. Doubtlessly, painting apes or elephants develop their own ideas of their task, their own patterns of behavior, novel movements and also resistances. German artist Rosemarie Trockel once commented on one of her installations in which moths were eating cashmere wrapped around a cube: “As actor in this event, the moth can be read as artist who destroys old structures in order to create something new.”27 Taking animal artistic agency seriously in this way not only transforms an art object but also the involved human artist who has to find a new role for him- or herself in the creative act. This is the case in interspecies artworks in which human artists collaborate with animals. Interspecies art was established as a technical term in recognition of the new approaches taken in art by at least five exhibitions taking place roughly around the same time in 2009. These were in the U.S. Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art Exhibition, in the UK Interspecies, in Canada the already mentioned Animal House: Works of Art Made by Animals, and in Germany Tier-Werden Mensch-Werden [Becoming-Animal Becoming-Human] and Tier-Perspektiven [Animal Perspectives]. The degree of change in attitudes becomes evident in the respective exhibition announcements. The curators of Interspecies, for instance, asked: “Can artists work with animals as equals?”, implying a position antagonistic to animals as mere use objects in art. And the curators of Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art Exhibition Tyler Stallings and Rachel Mayeri considered the works in their exhibition as a challenge to “the anthropocentric perspective of the world, placing human perception on par with other animals”.28 In spite of the recent surge, the term interspecies art was coined much earlier – by concept artist, composer and environmental activist Jim Nollman, who has been making music with animals, among them turkeys and whales, since the early 1970s, and who continues to run a website on interspecies music and interspecies art. Furthermore, in

24 25 26 27 28

Barad: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Marder: “On Art as Planetary Metabolism”, n.p. Cf. ibid. Rosemarie Trockel: A la Motte, 1993, Video. Sweeney Art Gallery (2009), “Intelligent Design. Interspecies Art”, p. 1, in: http://www.faculty. ucr.edu/~divola/PDF/PressRelease_Interspecies_Final.pdf (accessed March 10, 2020).

155

156

Animals and the Ethics of Art

2006 the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams hosted an exhibition under the title of Becoming Animal, which brought together various important protagonists of interspecies art, described as such. Also in 2006, American multimediaartist Lisa Jevbratt began teaching a course in “Interspecies Collaboration” at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She continues to run a website of the same name, which constitutes an important resource for the theory and practice of interspecies art.29 Interspecies art is literally art in which members of various species interact with one another. The number of entities involved or the question of which species they belong to, however, is not predetermined, nor is the form the interaction takes. Possible definitions are further complicated by the fact that it is neither really clear how to define art nor how to define species. A provisional attempt at a definition could be that interspecies artworks are relationally intended artworks in which a human artist interacts with a nonhuman animal, so that both play a work-constituting role, and in which a fundamental critique of anthropocentrism is, at minimum, implicit. In interspecies art, the animals involved are given at least a rudimentary agential status – even though, they often still function as muse, motif, material, model or medium. In its ideal form, interspecies art is dialogic and respectful in its engagement with the animal involved and attributes a value of its own to the creativity of the non-human participant. Animals are perceived, or reflected, as the co-creators of art. In this respect, interspecies art contributes to a further fracturing of the boundary between human and animal: in the ludic manner enabled by art as a protected site of experimentation, it questions the notion that phenomena such as aesthetic expression, sensibility or artistic agency are solely human capacities.

Swarm aesthetics and relational art To give examples for interspecies art, I want to briefly mention three artistic partnerships with birds. In 2006, the Dutch artist Semâ Bekirović collaborated with two coots in Amsterdam. The artist presented to the birds personal objects that represented a certain, often sentimental value for her (for example photos of her parents, plastic toys or bank notes), and documented the rendering of the material by the birds. Coots in Amsterdam are synanthropic birds who are adapted to living in the city and who are used to building their nests with plastic and trash that they find in the urban environment. In the popular definition by Sue Donaldson and Wim Kymlicka who distinguish between domesticated animals, wild animals and liminal animals, they can be regarded as liminal animals.30 So according to Donaldson and Kymlicka they should be regarded as denizens not as citizens which means that they should be granted basic rights but not civil rights. So, they could be regarded as guests whom one is supposed to show hospitality which may involve presenting gifts. That is exactly what Bekirović did. In fact, it took her a while to gain the bird’s trust so that they accepted her gifts and thus accepted to be her partners in this 29 30

Jevbratt/Rosebud (2009): “Artistic Interspecies Collaboration. Fieldguide”; n: http://jevbratt.com/ writing/interspecies_field_guide.pdf. (accessed March 10, 2020). Donaldson/Kymlicka: Zoopolis. A Political Theory of Animal Rights.

Jessica Ullrich: Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics

collaboration. Once they did, the birds arranged some of the material to build their nests in an Amsterdam canal and disregarded some of the stuff they did not fancy.

Fig. 1: Semâ Bekirović, Koet, 2006, Videostill © Semâ Bekirović https://www.semabekirovic.nl/43/.

In this respect, the work visualizes the absurdity of categories such as nature and culture, which have long been questioned by scholars like Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour or Philip Descola. Also, the work points to the different preferences of the artist and the coots. Even though they live in a shared world, their worldview is entirely different. And Bekirović’s acceptance of this fact manifests true hospitality. The philosopher Jacques Derrida insists that hospitality cannot be tied to any conditions and that it expresses itself in letting the guest be who s/he is:31 No host should ever force a guest to adapt to the culture of the host. Perhaps such a concept of hospitality could be fruitful to deal with non-human animals in urban spaces in a more polite way. German artist Björn Braun on the other hand collaborates with his companion animals, two male zebra finches. They are not his guests but his non-human family. For a body of sculptural works he relies on them by also letting them do what they would do anyway. In a series with bird nests which are produced since 2009, he provided the birds with different natural and synthetic materials such as plastic strings, flowers, and threads so that they can build their sleeping nests with it. With the selection of materials Braun influences the appearance of the nests but he cannot predict or control the way the birds construct them entirely. In order to present well-made objects, he has to trust on the ability of the feathered builders. Braun does neither alter the natural behavior of the birds with his intervention nor the shape or function of the nests. It is only the material composition respectively the color and tactile sensations that distinguishes the interspecies sculptures from nests in nature.

31

Derrida: De l'hospitalité.

157

158

Animals and the Ethics of Art

Fig. 2: Björn Braun, Untitled (zebra finch nest), 2013, multimedia, 12 x 14 x 15 cm Photo: Nils Klinger, © Björn Braun.

The works of Semâ Bekirović and Björn Braun both refer to one of the best-known examples of animal artistry in nature: Whenever scholars try to prove the aesthetic expressions or the aesthetic sensations of non-human animals, they point to the bower bird.32 Male bowerbirds decorate their complex pergolas with carefully chosen and arranged colorful objects like berries, flowers, snail shells or wings of bugs. They seem to arrange them according to an aesthetic plan, checking it from a distance and changing the composition over and over again. Sometimes they work for weeks or even months on one bower, replacing decayed flowers with new ones. The female bower bird then chooses her mate according to the beauty of his bower, according to her taste. Other birds are talented builders as well. The gold headed cisticolas for example stitches their round nests together with leaves and grass by using spider threads.33 Male and female work together in this task. Bird nests were regarded as artworks as early as 1900. Karl Woermann for example included them, along with other animal-made objects in his three-volume compendium Die Geschichte der Kunst aller Völker und Zeiten (The history of art of all people and of a all times).34 And more recently Wolfgang Welsch called the male bower bird the first object artist.35 Another example of an artistic partnership between birds and humans that does not involve construction but rather destruction is the artist collective CMUK, a collaboration

32

33 34 35

Endler: “Bowerbirds, Art and Aesthetics. Are Bowerbirds Artists and do they have an Aesthetic Sense”, pp. 281–283; Diamond: “Evolution of Bowerbirds’ Bowers: Animal Origins of the Aesthetic Sense”, pp. 99–102. Burke: Nest. Kunstwerke der Natur, p. 66. Woermann: Die Geschichte der Kunst aller Völker und Zeiten. “Die männlichen Laubenvögel sind die ersten Objektkünstler.” Welsch: “Wie kann Kunst der Wirklichkeit nicht gegenüberstehen, sondern in sie verwickelt sein?”, p. 192.

Jessica Ullrich: Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics

of the humans Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger and the grey parrots Clara and Karl.36 From 2014 until the death of Karl in 2018 the four companions shared a large studio space. The birds were allowed to fly freely in the big loft. Hörner/Antlfinger shared their daily lives with them and knew about their interest and needs. They tried to engage in meaningful relations with them and treated them with respect and politeness. The couples did not just live parallel but entangled lives. For (weekly) Hörner/Antlfinger regularly left a magazine to the birds once they had read it. Clara and Karl scratched and bit, made tears and holes in the paper and thus created interesting see-throughs in the shredded journal which opened up surprising insights in the relations of text and images on the various pages. The birds knew nothing of the formal and cognitive appeal of the paper reliefs they created, and they knew nothing about the art historical references to de-collage. But still, the handing over of the paper from human to bird was a treasured ritual in this interspecies household. The nibbling, gnawing, scraping of the pages was a sensual and exciting activity for them. It seemed to be a playful, purposeless and self-rewarding occupation. (Some people would describe art as playful, purposeless and self-rewarding as well.) The parrots decided if and when they wanted to work with the journal and how they wanted to use it. While the birds were working on the paper, Hörner/Antlfinger did not intervene. Another body of work are the cork sculptures that are made by Clara and Karl and arranged by Hörner/Antlfinger. Th human artists offered a big chunk of cork to the birds. The parrots enthusiastically worked on the material, further hollowing it out and dividing it into several parts of different sizes in the course of the creative process. With special care and effort, they devoted themselves to the surface quality and gnawed and nibbled deep furrows, large holes and smooth surfaces that always kept the visible and identifiable traces of the beak. The resulting cork sculptures have extremely attractive structures that can be visually and haptically experienced and have their very own material charm. The objects have no practical function, for example as a nest, but simply bear witness to remarkable nonhuman productivity. The compilation of the individual parts calls reminds the viewer of archaeological excavation sites, prehistoric architectures or long-withered landscapes. But the installation functions as a work of art only in the interplay of different human and non-human assets. Since it is questionable if the birds were interested in the results of their work at all, Hörner/Antlfinger were probably the only ones who discovered an aesthetic quality in their creations. The human artists who were both trained as sculptors are especially impressed by the individual qualities of the traces of the beak of each bird which were easily distinguishable and that reminded them of tool marks in sculptural practice. In their collaboration they do not try to impose their human understanding of art on Clara and Karl for the sake of the work to bite atypical actions. But since the art market is entirely constructed on human agreements, it stayed to Hörner/Antlfinger to decide on how to hand-over the collaborative work to the art scene. In a way they acted as the collectors, archivars, and curators for the exhibitions of the birds’ artworks.

36

Ullrich: “Schwarmästhetik. Distributive Agency in der Interspezieskollaboration CMUK”, n.p.

159

160

Animals and the Ethics of Art

Fig. 3: CMUK, Weekly, since 2014, décollage/photo, 40 × 60 cm Photo: Ute Hörner/Mathias Antlfinger © Hörner/Antlfinger.

Susan McHugh even coined the term “pack aesthetics” for collaborations with dogs in art that exemplify a relational aesthetic.37 Artistic collaborations with birds like the one by Semâ Bekirović, Björn Braun and Hörner/Antlfinger could be called “swarm aesthetics” accordingly. They would not come into being without an animal partner and they would not be possible without social interactions between humans and other animals. Of course, art itself is a deeply social activity. Eduardo de la Fuente for example emphasized: “Art is a social construct and its production and consumption are thoroughly

37

This is how McHugh described the specific quality of William Wegman's videos from the late 1960s and early 1970s that showed him interacting with the Weimaraner dog Man Ray. McHugh: “Video Dog Star: William Wegman, Aesthetic Agency, and the Animal in Art”, pp. 229–251.

Jessica Ullrich: Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics

social in character”38 . And Alfred Gell characterized art as a mobilization of aesthetic principles within social interaction.39 But sadly, in many interspecies artworks animals are always at risk of becoming mere extensions of human agency. Some animals are easily anthropomorphized as willing collaborators even if they are just trained, tamed or manipulated. Then, their involvement in creative processes is often just another form of exploitation. But does not have to be the case. Even if the imbalance of power between humans and other animals stays intact, non-human animals are never completely incapable of acting. Often their agency manifests itself in acts of resistance or destruction. Animal agency not only enables artworks, but it also limits them. If an animal refuses to participate, there might not be an artwork at all or at least the resulting artwork will be very different than when an animal cooperates. When it comes to assess the artistry or the artworthiness of animal productions within the realm of interspecies art, it makes a difference if one gives priority to the intention of the conceptual human author or to the aesthetic experience. It is of course possible to appreciate the aesthetic form of an animal production and to admire an animal-made work for its virtuosity and maybe even for the alien mind behind it. Human beings, however, cannot fully grasp the aesthetic qualities of animal-made objects: Compared to birds for example, human beings only possess a reduced color vision. It may well be that the discussed bird-made objects have artistic dimensions that can only by appreciated by the birds themselves. Considering that there might be other aesthetic aspects to animal art, for example related to smelling, hearing in very high or very low frequencies or other sensing abilities like for examples chemical communication, it becomes clear that humans are not the best art critics for the creative productions of animals after all. But it stays worthwhile to contemplate and enjoy an animal-made object for its capacity to express the specific agency of an individual animal, for its animal artistic agency. Human artists who appreciate the creative productions of non-human animals question the concept of the artist as an autonomous, creative, and all-controlling mastermind and intentional center of art. They challenge conventional notions of authorship and the idea of artworks as products of controlled self-expression. So an extension of the subject matter of art history that includes animal productions would certainly mean that dear and customary aesthetic categories, value systems and beliefs concerning art, artistry and authorship have to be abandoned. A serious engagement with animal-made objects opens up possibilities for an interspecies art where the encounter and the exchange between social individuals of different species is recognized as a productive and creative quality. This could promote the acceptance of the notion of animal agency in other areas as well. A growing visibility of animal art and with it a growing visibility of creative agency of animals could become a political tool that helps to undermine the hierarchical and oppressing notion of human exceptionalism. It does make a difference for the ethical consideration of non-human animals if they are perceived as creatures simply driven by 38 39

De La Fuente: “The ›New Sociology of Art‹: Putting Art back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts”, p. 423. Gell: Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, p. 4.

161

162

Animals and the Ethics of Art

instincts or as creative individuals who take pleasure in making aesthetic objects. Taking into account animal-made objects within an artistic framework may help to comprehend other animals as sensual, cognitive, emotional, creative, and social individuals. Thus, the recognition of artistic agency in animals might be able to challenge the hybris of human superiority.

References Alland, Alexander: The Artistic Animal. An Inquiry in the Biological Roots of Art, New York (Anchor) 1977. Barad, Karen: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, North Carolina (Duke University Press) 2007. Belting, Hans: Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft, München (Fink) 2001. Burke, Janine: Nest. Kunstwerke der Natur, München (oekom Verlag) 2012. Darwin, Charles: The Descent of Man in Relation to Sex, London (John Murray) 1871. De La Fuente, Eduardo: “The ›New Sociology of Art‹: Putting Art back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts”, in: Cultural Sociology, 1 (2007), pp. 409–425. Democritus B 154, in: Laks, André/Most, Glenn W.: Early Greek Philosophy. Vol. 7. Later Ionians an Athenian Thinkers. Part 2. Cambridge (Harvard University Press) 2016. Derrida, Jacques: De l’hospitalité. Paris (Calmann-Levy Editions) 1997. Despret, Vinciane: What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?, Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press) 2016. Dexter, Emma: Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing, London/New York (Phaidon) 2005. Diamond, Jared M.: “Evolution of Bowerbirds’ Bowers: Animal Origins of the Aesthetic Sense”, in: Nature, 297 (1982), pp. 99–102. Dissanayake, Ellen: What Is Art For?, Seattle (University of Washington Press) 1988. Donaldson, Sue/Kymlicka, Will: Zoopolis. A Political Theory of Animal Rights. Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2011. Endler, John A.: “Bowerbirds, Art and Aesthetics. Are Bowerbirds Artists and do they have an Aesthetic Sense?”, in: Communicative and Integrative Biology, 1;5 (2012) 3, pp. 281–283. Gell, Alfred: Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, London (Oxford University Press) 1998. Hiller, Susan: “ohne Titel”, in: Barbara Einzig (ed.): Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, Manchester (Manchester UP), 1996, pp. 204–242. Imanishi, Kinji: A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things, London/New York (Routledge Curzon), 2002. Jevbratt Lisa/Rosebud: Artistic Interspecies Collaboration. Fieldguide, (2009), in: http://jevbr att.com/writing/interspecies_field_guide.pdf. (acessed: March 10, 2020). Komar, Vitaly/Melamid, Alexander: When Elephants Paint. The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand, New York (Harper) 2000. Latour, Bruno: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford/New York (Oxford University Press) 2005.

Jessica Ullrich: Animal Artistic Agency: Contemporary Interspecies Art and Relational Aesthetics

Leeb, Susanne: Die Kunst der Anderen. Weltkunst und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne. Frankfurt/Oder (b-books) 2007. Lenain, Thierry: Monkey Painting, London (Reaktion Books) 1997. Lestel, Dominique: L’ Animal singulier, Paris (Seuil) 2004. MacDonald, Juliet: Alpha: “The Figure in the Cage”, in: Rod Bennison/Alma Massaro/ Ullrich, Jessica (eds.): Relations: Beyond Anthropocentrism (Minding Animals: Part II), Mailand (LED Edizioni Universitarie) 2014, pp. 27–44. McHugh, Susan: “Video Dog Star: William Wegman, Aesthetic Agency, and the Animal in Art”, in: Society and Animals, 9 (2011) 3, pp. 229–251. Marder, Michael: “On Art as Planetary Metabolism”, in: Semâ Bekirović: Reading by Osmosis. Nature interprets us, Rotterdam (Nai010 publishers) 2019, n.p. Martinelli, Dario: A Critical Companion to Zoosemotics. People, Paths, Ideas, Heidelberg/ London/New York (Springer) 2010. Menninghaus, Winfried: Wozu Kunst? Ästhetik nach Darwin, Frankfurt a.M. (Suhrkamp) 2011. Morris, Desmond: The Biology of Art, London/New York (Methuen Knopf) 1962. Prum, Richard O.: The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us, New York (Dubleday) 2017. Rainer, Arnulf: Schriften. Selbstzeugnisse und ausgewählte Interviews. Ostfildern-Ruit (Hatje Cantz) 2010. Rothenberg, David: Survival of the Beautiful. Art, Science, Evolution, New York (Bloomsbury) 2011. Stewart, Louise: “Wikimedia says when a monkey takes a picture, no one owns it”, in: Newsweek: 8/21/2014, https://www.newsweek.com/lawyers-dispute-wikimedias-clai ms-about-monkey-selfie-copyright-265961 (accessed February 20, 2020). Thomas, Nick: “He Lets Creepy-Crawlies Get Their Feet Wet as Painters”, in: The Washington Post, 18.08.2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007 /08/17/AR2007081700603.html (accessed February 10, 2020). Ullrich, Jessica: “Schwarmästhetik. Distributive Agency in der Interspezieskollaboration CMUK”, in: Hörner/Antlfinger und das Interspezies-Kollektiv CMUK (ed.): Die Welt, in der wir leben, Köln (Verlag der Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln) 2016, n.p. Welsch, Wolfgang: Animal Aesthetics, 2004, http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolu me/pages/article.php?articleID=243 (accessed February 20, 2020). Weston, Mark: Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan’s Most Influential Men and Women, New York (Kodansha International) 1999. Woermann, Karl: Die Geschichte der Kunst aller Völker und Zeiten, Wien/Leipzig (Bibliographisches Institut) 1900. Wolfgang Welsch: “Wie kann Kunst der Wirklichkeit nicht gegenüberstehen, sondern in sie verwickelt sein? ”, in: Lotte Everts/Johannes Lang/Michael Lüthy et.al. (eds.): Kunst und Wirklichkeit heute. Affirmation – Kritik – Transformation. Bielefeld (transcript) 2015, pp. 179–200. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art (accessed February 20, 2020); http:// artfocus.com/kunst/ (accessed February 20, 2020).

163

164

Animals and the Ethics of Art

Lectures Garcia, Tristan: Arts. Neither Art nor Works of Art, Talk at X. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik, Offenbach, 02/17/2018. Gigliotti, Carol: The Creative Lives of Animals, Talk at Decolonizing Animals NZCHAS 2019, Christchurch 07/27/2019.

Video Abécédaire – Gilles Deleuze von A bis Z, edited by Weinmann, Martin/Bertoncini, Valeska; Director: Boutang, Pierre-Andre/Pamart, Michel, 3 DVDs, 2009. Trockel, Rosemarie: A la Motte, 1993, Video. Sweeney Art Gallery (2009), Intelligent Design. Interspecies Art, in: http://www.facu lty.ucr.edu/∼divola/PDF/PressRelease_Interspecies_Final.pdf (accessed March 10, 2020), p. 1.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Semâ Bekirović, Koet, 2006, Videostill, © Semâ Bekirović https://www.semabekir ovic.nl/43/. Fig. 2: Björn Braun, Untitled (zebra finch nest), 2013, multimedia, 12 x 14 x 15 cm, Photo: Nils Klinger, © Björn Braun. Fig. 3: CMUK, Weekly, since 2014, décollage/photo, 40 × 60 cm, Photo: Ute Hörner/ Mathias Antlfinger, © Hörner/Antlfinger.

Heads and/or Tails Gary Sherman

You boil it is sawdust; you salt it in glue; You condense it with locusts and tape; Still keeping one principal object in view To preserve its symmetrical shape. Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark; An Agony, in Eight Fits 1

A hypothetical Jubjub bird is tortured into a neat, symmetrical shape; a form resembling an insect pupae. Among schoolboys in Victorian England this sort of gratuitous roughhousing was common. The behavior is immortalized in a poem by Lewis Carroll, a.k.a. Charles Dodgson. Notwithstanding the discordance, Carroll’s satire weds the resplendence of mathematics, a subject he tutored at Oxford’s Christ Church, with a callous act of groupthink. The mummiform object that is snuffed into being conjures a magically-charged fetish; something that our pre-modern ancestors in their allegorical world of alchemy, astrology, magic, sorcery, and phrenology might have venerated, when nature and culture were more inextricably linked and nature was routinely invoked as a harbinger of moral messages, before modernism had bifurcated the human and the nonhuman and “artificially created the scandal of the others.”2 In his appraisal of the modernist project Bruno Latour ascribes the dynamism of Western science and industry to what he terms the modernist Constitution. A fundamental imperative of that constitution is a precept of purification, which separates subject from object to create two entirely different ontological zones; that of humans and that of nonhumans. The paradox, according to Latour, is that in everyday practice, hybrid operations that the Constitution would deem not modern are common; science and society are continually coproduced within a matrix of actor-network interactions that involve reciprocal adjustments of facts, theories, experiments, actors and social relations. Yet, despite this untidy fact, Westerners still do not reference nature in the symbolic manner

1 2

Carroll: “The Beaver’s Lesson”, n.p. Latour: We Have Never Been Modern, p. 104, (accessed June, 2019).

166

Animals and the Ethics of Art

of the pre-moderns, but rather, nature as it is known rationally, through the sciences. Or, as Latour states, “at the heart of the question of relativism we find the question of science.”3 Thus, Carroll’s verse is prescient in that it conflates two conflicting ontologies to describe a consciousness that is synchronously modern and pre-modern. This essay will cite incidents within the historical orbit of Modernism that subscribe to the precept of purification to justify and exploit interspecific or intraspecific biases. The two projects of focus henceforth are realized in heterotopic spaces in which an abject otherness is fabricated on the margin of acceptability, where it is still possible to manage, manipulate and capitalize on difference. In everyday pursuits when a resolution is not forthcoming, it is fairly common to reach a settlement or to arrive at a decision in an objective fashion with a flip of a coin. When the coin comes to rest the outcome is determined, the uncertainty ends, action resumes. One coin, two sides. One side the rational, thought-driven head; the other side – regardless of imagery – the irrational emotion-driven tail. The symbolism of the two-sided coin is as telling about interspecies relationships within the modernist project as is a dialogue from Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. At one point in the story Alice and a fawn are paralyzed when they suddenly encounter each other at a clearing in the “wood where things have no name.” It’s a place that induces amnesia, a place where Alice forgets all nouns, even her own name. ‘Here then! Here then!’ Alice said, as she held out her hand and tried to stroke (it) (the fawn); but it only started back a little, and then stood looking at her again. ‘What do you call yourself?’ the Fawn said at last. …. ‘I wish I knew!’ thought poor Alice. She answered, rather sadly, ‘Nothing, just now.’ ‘Think again,' [it] the fawn said: ‘that won’t do.’ Alice thought, but nothing came of it. ‘Please, would you tell me what YOU call yourself?’ she said timidly. ‘I think that might help a little.’ ‘I’ll tell you, if you’ll come a little further on,’ the Fawn said. ‘I can’t remember here.’ So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arms. ‘I’m a Fawn!’ it cried out in a voice of delight, ‘and, dear me! You’re a human child!’ A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.4 Alice and the fawn’s tête-à-tête exemplifies a position not unlike the status of the nonhuman other in select contemporary cultural practices. Such interspecies interactions are

3 4

Ibid., p. 97, (accessed June, 2019). Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, p. 47, p. 48. (accessed August, 2019).

Gary Sherman: Heads and/or Tails

endemic of ideological dynamics that resonate in modern culture at large. It is a familiar pattern redolent of binaries related to race, ethnicity, spirituality, gender, sexuality, nationalism, tribalism, ideology, and as regards The Looking-Glass and more recently the Anthropocene; speciesism. In a passage from his book regarding scientific and philological objectivity related to the discourse of Orientalism the leading academic of postcolonial studies Edward Said cites an artificial construct related to cultural hierarchies: To be able to sustain a vision that incorporates and holds together life and quasi-living creatures as well as quasi-monstrous, parallel inorganic phenomena is precisely the achievement of the European scientist in his laboratory. He constructs, and the very act of construction is a sign of imperial power over recalcitrant phenomena, as well as a confirmation of the dominating culture and its ‘naturalization.’5 Said’s notion of construction, like Latour’s actor-network matrix, addresses a crucial structural component of the modernist project, whereby the sciences become galvanized by a covert paradigm of collateral interests and interdependencies that oscillate between culture and nature / subject and object. As has been established in postcolonial discourse, otherness is due less to difference than to the point of view of the observer who perceives the other in opposition to self; a self that embodies the norm. Latour again: “Westerners see themselves as completely different from others. …This feature generates a cascade of small differences that will be collected, summarized and amplified by … the great narrative of the West ….”6 A consequence of this inherent subjectivity is that the other is defined by its faults, devalued and marginalized. The machinations of not-otherness and otherness, or subject and object; while central to a discourse on colonialism also implicates an anthropic impasse that has been trending in contemporary culture on myriad fronts. Throughout its brief history popular culture in America has employed kitsch to demonize human and nonhuman otherness, in both real and virtual iterations. Formulaic Hollywood westerns, sci-fi and horror films foreground otherness in the guise of the savage Indian, the extraterrestrial alien invader, or the mutant oppositional force; all subsumed under the umbrella of entertainment. Today there is no lack of malevolent others in the Hollywood coin toss, as exemplified by the predominance of zombie apocalypse scenarios that feature the oxymoronic living dead, or nocturnal horrors replete with bloodsucking vampires, or futuristic dystopias teaming with man-machine cyborgs. How to account for the traction of these imaginary nightmares? And the recurrent vilification of otherness? Is this resurgence of post-apocalyptic narratives indicative of a nostalgia for a Cold War allegorical tradition? Or, is this new struggle-to-survive mythology and salvage mentality a result of the existential angst of climate change? Regardless of the motivation, the moral tenor of othering is consistently adversarial; either black or white, good or bad, heads or tails.

5 6

Said: “Orientalist Structures and Restructures”, pp. 145–146. Latour: We Have Never Been Modern, p. 112.

167

168

Animals and the Ethics of Art

Literary works in many genres, likewise, cast nonhuman others as demons, as surrogate politicians, or as psychological entities. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is actually a reflective narrative about the brutal consequences of othering. Ironically, despite its sensitive portrayal of difference, the novel, and the subsequent film, standardized the physiognomy of today’s endemic, almost-but-not-quite-human, monstrous other. In the fine arts the nonhuman other has not been put into service as the psychodynamic boogeyman preying upon innocent human subjects. Artists of the past century incorporated live animals in their installations primarily as a destabilizing force, a questioning entity, or a surrogate social unit. They functioned as the adverse instinctual tail to the rational human brain. In an essay on the animal locomotion performances of Simone Forti, writer Julia Bryan-Wilson observes that: Animals in art are often cast in a positive light, as a source of primitive energy … or as a stand-in for uninhibited freedom. They can also, however, be shadowed by negative connotations, serving to represent that which is outside dignity and beneath the realm of rights, or to encapsulate a natural order now destroyed, memorialized in a state of perpetual loss.7 For the most part contemporary artists have focused on the positive aspect of BryanWilson’s dyad, usually with fairly benign instances of conscription. In these works, the other is simply the complementary other – the alternate side of the same coin, albeit still subject to the whims of the human master. Unfortunately, in contrast to these relatively anodyne interspecies relations, there are malign examples of conscription that intentionally foreground the negative connotations of Bryan-Wilson’s dyad and deploy the animal other as a mute adjunct to be exploited, abused, or engineered in some fashion, either behaviorally or genetically, merely to enhance its exhibition or political value. An early historical example of this aesthetic ontology is a documentary about a remote mountain village of northern Spain, directed by surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The film titled Land Without Bread premiered in 1932 as a parody of anthropological documentaries. It was intended to expose the hypocrisy of the Spanish ruling class by revealing the misery of people within the country’s boarders. It is presented in the breezy style of a travelogue. The destination is Las Hurdes, a village lost in time. The topography of the region is rugged and barren. Daily life involves a constant struggle with nature. Agriculture is essentially nonexistent. Villagers subsist on what few crops they can cultivate; mainly potatoes, beans and honey. The rocky soil cannot grow grain, hence the title Land Without Bread.8 Villagers portrayed in the film appear not that different than peasants elsewhere, yet many scenes conflate objective visual detail and conflicting subjective commentary to represent them as distinctly backward. A rite-of-passage ceremony involving animal

7 8

Bryan-Wilson: “Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo”, p. 44. Ruoff: “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread”, pp. 45–57, (accessed July, 2019).

Gary Sherman: Heads and/or Tails

sacrifice is characterized as a pagan ritual. A family of dwarfs is presented as evidence of inbreeding. A woman’s disfigurement confirms a dearth of medical care. And children playing outdoors are said to languish in the streets. At no point in the film do the citizens speak for themselves. The documentary has had many detractors that criticize it as a politically motivated fabrication. That assessment is reasonable given Buñuel’s distaste for the urbane ruling class, nonetheless, it is the exploitation of the people of Las Hurdes and the fate of the nonhuman others in the film that is of special interest, especially given the reference to animal sacrifice that Buñuel underscores to index the primitivism of the locals. Two pivotal scenes in Land Without Bread are employed to highlight the inhospitable conditions of the region. The first scene follows two goats as they wander up a steep mountain path in search of what little forage is available. A camera captures one goat as it looses its footing, falls off the rugged path and tumbles down the mountain to its death. In another scene calculated to illustrate the perils of harvesting honey, a stationary camera lingers on a donkey squirming with pain as it is overwhelmed by a swarm of angry, stinging bees that ostensibly emerge from the hives it is transporting from one valley to another. According to the narration, this type of death is not uncommon. A similar fate had befallen several villagers earlier in the pollination season as they transported the hives. Scenes such as these do signify a perilous environment. However, the reality is deceptive. When the first scene was being shot and a goat failed to fall from the peak on its own as was cued by the director, one was helped along with a shot of a gun fired from a nearby ledge; a burst of smoke on the right side of the frame is proof of the assist. Witnesses say that more than one goat was sacrificed to complete the multiple-camera shot. The donkey’s fate as a martyr is likewise assured. The animal was tethered in place, its body smeared with honey and beehives placed beside it just outside of the camera frame were jostled to anger the hives. In both instances an aesthetic alibi can be cited as the most prominent peril, not the inhospitable environment. In his autobiography My Last Sigh Buñuel stated: “The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself.”9 Land Without Bread has been labeled a work of ethnographic surrealism. Traditional anthropological narratives attempt to make the unfamiliar comprehensible. Ethnographic surrealism approaches from another angle; it upends that which is familiar to render it ‘other’ or unexpected.10 At the time of the documentary’s release Buñuel was a storied member of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) and a supporter of a Marxist coalition government. His pseudo-documentary is calibrated to contrast the material poverty of these forgotten villagers with the moral poverty of the bourgeoisie and the chattering classes that control

9 10

Ibid., Epigraph siting My Last Sigh (1984), p. 107. The surrealist movement in poetry, literature and film coincided with the emerging discipline of anthropology in post-World-War-I France. James Clifford coined the term ‘ethnographic surrealism’ to describe, retrospectively, a unity of anthropology and art in Paris at that time. (1988). Clifford: “On Ethnographic Surrealism”, p. 540.

169

170

Animals and the Ethics of Art

Spain’s domestic reality; namely the insensible bureaucracy of the pre-Civil War Republican regime and organized religion. The documentary’s title is a double entendre. Beside the reference to grain production, it also invokes the Christian Eucharistic and the Catholic Church, which Buñuel viewed as the primary factor contributing to the despair of these devout people. In her book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, British art historian Claire Bishop describes two predominant art world procedurals: For one sector of artists, curators and critics, a good project appeases a super egoic injunction to ameliorate society; if social agencies have failed, then art is obliged to step in. In this schema, judgments are based on a humanist ethics, often inspired by Christianity. What counts is to offer ameliorative solutions, however short-term, rather than the exposure of contradictory social truths. For another sector of artists, curators and critics, judgments are based on a sensible response to the artist’s work, both in and beyond its original context. In this schema, ethics are nugatory, because art is understood continually to throw established systems of value into question, including questions of morality; devising new languages with which to represent and question social contradiction is more important.… Either social conscience dominates, or the rights of the individual to question social conscience. Art’s relationship to the social is either underpinned by morality or it is underpinned by freedom.11 Regardless of Buñuel’s social agenda, there is also the aesthetic agenda, which he puts at the service of the social. The purpose of this sidelong preamble is not to sanction a polemic concerning the ethics of contested aesthetic practices vis-à-vis the nonhuman other, although laws have been enacted in other areas of cultural production to do just that. Rather the intention is to underscore the degree to which the dynamic of the human, non-human binary in myriad practices of both popular and elite culture realizes a paradigm that problematizes subject and object as two mutually exclusive ontological realms. One hundred sixty years after Darwin countered religious dogma with his secularizing theory most Westerners acknowledge a biological connection with the animal other, but they remain committed to a classical duality that bifurcates nature and culture. Rather than question human centrality in the world and seek a correspondence with the animal other, this tendency within modernist practice reinforces an oppositional dialectic. Jacques Derrida examines the linguistic edifice by which humans have subjugated the non-human, animal other. He states that: The animal is a word … that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to the living other. … as if they had received it as an inheritance. They have given themselves the word in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single concept: ‘the Animal’ … the word … enables them to speak of the animal with a single voice and to

11

Bishop: “Conclusion”, p. 275, p. 276 (accessed August, 2019).

Gary Sherman: Heads and/or Tails

designate it as the single being that remains without a response, without a word with which to respond.12 There is no animal in the general singular, separated from man by a single indivisible limit. We have to envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity.… Among non- humans and separate from nonhumans there is an immense multiplicity of other living things that cannot in any way be homogenized … within the category of what is called the animal or animality in general.13 Obviously, it is easier to dismiss a collective abstract entity categorically than it is to single out a number of unique living entities. To the extent that the powers and needs of the human subject are thusly realized in opposition to nature, an equitable horizontal relationship between human and non-human is foreclosed, and that foreclosure entrenches an already-existing anthropocentricism. An analogous ontological distance is exemplified in an early twentieth-century zoological display, but in this instance the nonhuman other is not nonhuman, in this instance the other is human and race is foregrounded as the decisive criteria. In 1904 a 23 year old Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga was purchased at an African slave market by a down-on-his-luck American explorer Samuel Phillips Verner for purposes of display at the St. Louis World’s Fair.14 Verner was contracted by the fair’s organizers to provide human specimens that would showcase the superiority of the Caucasian race. Ota Benga is very dark skinned, under five feet tall, his teeth are filed into points, as was the custom of his tribe, and he spoke little English. He is the perfect beastly foil to the civilized Westerner. After being on display at the fairgrounds Benga traveled with Verner and in 1906 lands in New York. With no money for accommodations, Verner calls on his connections to negotiate temporary lodgings for his African minion at an apartment on the grounds of the Bronx Zoo. Originally, Benga is allowed to wander freely about the zoo and help care for the animals. But the Zoo’s director, whose biases were aligned with early concepts of racial purity, considers pygmies as a sub-race, more animal than human. Eventually, Benga is coaxed to relocate his hammock to an enclosure in the Monkey House where he can be displayed as a protohuman interacting with an orangutan. To foreground his savage appeal, a parrot is introduced to the habitat along with an assortment of animal bones to insinuate that Benga is a cannibal. The site is a semiotic riot. The director’s animus, as was evident in the display, goads visitors to mock and taunt this primitive creature, which is touted as the missing link. Because he speaks little English and is not able to express his frustration Benga responds aggressively to his tormentors, as he was encouraged to do by the director – much like a trained animal. His abject behavior is pure spectacle calculated to project the distance from civilized behavior that the Zoo’s director 12 13 14

Derrida: The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), p. 23 and p. 32. (last accessed August 2019). Ibid., p. 47, p. 48. Bradford/Blume: “The Village of the Baschilele”, pp. 97–103.

171

172

Animals and the Ethics of Art

needs to justify Benga’s display as a wild beast. The exhibition is the topic of newspaper stories and gossip, which increases attendance at the zoo. It is terminated weeks later only after a group of African-American clergy lead a campaign condemning the display as racial stereotyping. This is a sad scenario of existential plunder. Prior to his purchase Ota Benga had experienced more hardship than most. His village had been ransacked by a neighboring tribe that marketed humans as slaves for the colonialist enterprise. His family had been slaughtered. Although he isn’t a chattel slave, in his new life he is dehumanized and animalized, his history is relegated to the background so that an exotic Westernized caricature can be projected into the foreground. The result is a spectacle of cultural appropriation pushed beyond the point of parody. In the parlance of anthropological field work accounts of a culture can be provided from either an etic or an emic perspective. In an etic analysis the outside observer may employ alien concepts, categories and rules derived from scientific data to represent the native other. Etic accounts produce scientifically productive theories regardless of how appropriate that data is from the native’s point of view. In emic operations the native culture determines the parameters of presentation. Emic accounts employ concepts that will generate statements that the native accepts are real, meaningful, or appropriate.15 Ideally, a combination of the two approaches provides the most complete overview of a culture, however, if an etic account is presented as emic, or an emic as etic, the account becomes confused and misleading.16 That distinction is critical as a paradigm visà-vis the modernist project, colonial discourse, Ota Benga, the peasants of Las Hurdes, the presentation of otherness in cultural production, and the current wave of global intolerance. I end at the beginning with another winsome reference from Lewis Carroll. In The Looking-glass and what Alice found there is a scene in which Alice attempts to book passage on a train that will transport her through a fantasy landscape to her destination. The train is packed with Looking-glass animals and insects and, as the adjective indicates, they are all anthropomorphic and out of scale to reality. The narrator frames the moment; “All this time the Guard was looking at her (at Alice), first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass. At last he said, ‘You’re travelling the wrong way,’ and shut up the window and went away.”17 The dialog and Alice’s encounter, here and elsewhere, are tailored to upend the centrality of human subjectivity. In the heterotopic space of the looking-glass the observer is also the observed, the other is also ‘I’. The forward/backward axis is reversed – the front is the back – and one has to physically move away from something to get closer to it. Carroll’s protagonist is not a respective ‘other,’ but part of a field. So, heads and/or tails? In this realm, at least, the human subject and the animal other are rejoined.

15 16 17

Harris: Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, p. 32. (From Art and Otherness by Thomas McEvilley, p. 41, p. 42.) McEvilley: Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity, p. 42. Carroll: Chapter III, “Looking-glass insects”, in: Through the Looking-Glass, p. 38 (accessed August, 2019).

Gary Sherman: Heads and/or Tails

References Bishop, Clair: “Conclusion”, in: Clair Bishop: Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London/New York (Verso) 2012, pp. 275–276. https://selforganizedse minar.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/bishop-claire-artificial-hells-participatory-art -and-politics-spectatorship.pdf (accessed August, 2019). Bradford, Phillips Verner/Harvey Blume: Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, New York (St. Martin’s Press) 1992. Bryan-Wilson, Julia: “Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo”, in: October, 152 (2015), pp. 26–52. Carroll, Lewis: “The Beaver’s Lesson”, in: The Hunting of the Snark; An Agony, in Eight Fits, London (Mcmillan and Co.) 1876, p. 56. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29888/298 88-h/29888-h.htm. Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, online publication; ht tp://birrell.org/andrew/alice/lGlass.pdf (accessed August, 2019). Clifford, James: “On Ethnographic Surrealism”, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23 (1981) 4, pp. 539–564. https://www.jstor.org/stable/178393?seq=1. Derrida, Jacques: The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), New York (Fordham University Press) 2008. https://grattoncourses.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/the-an imal-that-therefore-i-am-jacques-derrida-ed-marie-louis-mallet-tr-david-wills.p df (accessed August, 2019). Harris, Marvin: Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, New York (Vintage Books) 1980. Latour, Bruno: We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter ©1993 by Harvester wheatsheaf and the President Fellows of Harvard College, Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1993. https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Latour_Bruno_We_Have_Never_Be en_Modern.pdf. (accessed June, 2019) McEvilley, Thomas: Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity, Documentext, New York, (McPherson & Co Publishers), 1992. Ruoff, Jeffrey: “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread”, in: Visual Anthropology Review, 14 (1998) 1, pp. 45–57. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~jruof f/Articles/EthnographicSurrealist.htm (accessed July, 2019). Said, Edward: Orientalism, New York (Random House, Inc., Vintage Books Edition) 1979. Singh, Mahendra: The Hunting of the Snark blog http://justtheplaceforasnark.blogspot.co m/2009/07/, (accessed July 29, 2009).

173

7. Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Viscous, Molten, and Phased: Undergoing Nature with Non-Human Aesthetics, Hypo-objects, & Strange Tools Kristopher J. Holland

A Tunning…

Fig. 1: Philip Schaefer, Viscous, Molten, and Phased Wasp Nest as Hypoobject, ‘KaufmanHolland Wasp Nest: Series #1’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer.

vis·cous /ˈviskəs/ adjective Having a thick, sticky consistency between solid and liquid; having a high viscosity. ‘viscous lava.’

178

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Or as part of the hyperobject descriptor: “… [hyperobjects] end up ‘contaminating’ everything, if we find ourselves inside them (I call this phenomenon viscosity).”1 Hyperobjects are a descriptive invention of Timothy Morton’s wonderful attempt to name the unnamable, and create a way to glimpse entities unimaginable in scope and complexity. Most importantly these ‘objects’ greatly influence our everyday lives.2 As he sates above, hyperobjects have the property of ‘sticking to beings’. This is a sticky experience as being – an activation of a ‘space beyond space’ that is ungraspable as a thing/s in spacetime. In building our case beyond the human one should begin to say, this stickiness is even beyond Hominin experience, which includes among many other evolutionary cousins such as Homo erectus, the harnesser of fire, inventor of strange tools, and root of our ‘being matrix’; Homo Neanderthal, perhaps the inventor of cave art.3 Following this trajectory, we must continue to think about the worlds and tools made by Homo erectus continue to stick to us; these hominin ways of being are viscous. In that sense, the tools of Homo erectus have stuck to us, their storytelling, their fictions, as well as their utilitarian functions, ideas, uses, ideas of beauty, etc., are all part of what I will suggest are not hyperobjects but hypoobjects.4 To the extent those sticky ‘properties of evolution’ lie below, or are stuck invisibly in time within object tools such as hand axes, (indeed the very concept of axe), arts, music, etc., is the ‘hypo’ property of the ‘object’. Yes, Platonic forms is a way to think about these ‘objects’ as a start, but we must move into the idea that objects are not what we want them to be, but are always already something, somewhere, someone, else. Hypoobjects are sticky, or have ‘viscosity’ like hyperobjects, but unlike those beyonder ‘objects’ hypoobjects, like the ‘honey-being’ of bee hives, and/or the sticky ‘mud-esque’ of wasp architecture, or earth-worm sifting, etc., hypo signifies a different emphasis. For all of these objects contain the evolutionary ‘hypo’ an implicitly that is always underneath and incomplete, sticking to these hypo-things and simultaneously being made of these hypo-things. Hypoobjects are viscous too and made sticky in the never ending transformations of matter. mol·ten /ˈmōlt(ə)n/ adjective Especially of materials with a high melting point, such as metal and glass liquefied by heat. Or materials such as mud, liquified, and molded into and new form from the ‘heat of insects’, enzymes, and movement (in/as time). “… time is something posited, it’s part of aesthetic experience, it’s in front of things, ontologically, not an ocean in which they are floating, but sort of a liquid that pours out of a thing.”5 The temporal quality of 1 2 3 4

5

Morton: All art is Ecological, pp. 63–64. See Morton: Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. See Wragg Sykes: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Hypo – designates the opposite of hyper. Hypo is a way to see ‘underneath’ – the below, an implicit yearning for complexity in meaning and structure of an event we can call an ‘object.’ And yet, this ‘hypoobject’ is in reality a temporary collection of matter that always already is in a state of change – from below – (both atomic) and in the meaning field shifting anything someone names undergoes. Morton: All art is Ecological, p. 62.

Kristopher J. Holland: Viscous, Molten, and Phased

hypoobjects is found in the transformational quality of matter in/as time. This can be exemplified in the ‘mud-esque of the wasp’, which is a way to describe the transformed matter (mud) that pours out of the collective wasps architects and creates forms that are molten, but also, in their hypoobjective status viscous. We can also say that ‘molten’ is also found in the thoughts of Hominins like Homo erectus, who in imagining rocks as a something else thought ‘molten’. The rock was molted into a new thing, it was made strange, different in thought and action. The molten idea poured out of our Hominin ancestors and are always already following our tools, ideas etc. today (viscous). Hypoobjects have this molten property as well. These objects are like liquids pouring ‘out of time’ and into our time. All those invisible histories of tools, ideas, etc., of how to make the shape, or mold the world are a potential melting point contained in all things. This is beneath the surface – hypo. These hypo properties are activated as potential and time. For the Wasp architects, this fact of the world being molten is literally liquefied mud pouring into time as a new thing – thought and action. The Wasp’s nest building is a pouring ‘in and out of time’ the potential of matter – as hypoobjects- in all the ways your meaning field can muster… phased /fāzd/ adjective Carried out in gradual stages; staggered. “a phased withdrawal of troops”. “…hyperobjects come in and out of phase with human nature;…”6 Phases of matter are a spectrum – thus phasing is an action word to describe the oscillation of ‘objects’ between our human experience – in deed experience is phasing in and out of contact with objects – an ‘already-ness’ and alterity. Phasing is not only in and out of human nature, but hominin nature, the ‘animal’ and life itself. The degree to which a rock, a worm, and a human are phases of matter only matters from the perspective of anthropocentric beingness. We, the last hominin standing, are stuck within our world building structures, inherited and found within examination of hypoobjects such as a Wasp nest. Hypoobjects are the meanings made, the decisions, and/or the endings of the occurrence of deconstruction. This examination is the choice to ‘overmine’ or ‘undermine’ an object.7 The notion I am suggesting is that the hypoobject is found within a certain ‘duomining’ (both undermining and overmining) activity, a hauntology of hyperobjects. This is a productive venture on the way to hyperobjects, also in the way objects in general are being thought in the meaning field venture of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) of Graham Harman.8 For thinking within the viscous and molten we decide to move beyond an anthropocentric phase of thinking into new phases, sometimes radical and exotic phases. However, in this movement we have the inconvenient truth that we are ‘anthropocentric beings’

6 7

8

Ibid., pp. 63–64. Here we use Graham Harman’s valuable description of overmining and undermining. When we ‘overmine’ an object we place it in a meaning or structure that determines its manifestation as a thing from its relation to other objects in the system. When we ‘undermine’ we assign invisible or atomic forces that determine an objects manifestation. See Harman: Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.

179

180

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

trying to erase ourselves in the equation of which we are also part. We are thus also phased ‘hypo’, the inability to enter any world of objects without our hominin thinking, haunting us, found deep beneath our epoch of being in the world started outside the current Homo Sapiens phase of matter. This staggering fact of our own world being struck by non-human thinking and being make the levels and phases of types of being with matter today perhaps itself a hyperobject – but only ‘encountered’ by undergoing hypobjects.

Overture: Flowing Matter There is no such thing as unformatted matter, waiting for someone to stamp a form on it.9 Timothy Morton

Fig. 2: Phillip Schaefer, Wasp’s Mud-esque architecture flows, ‘Kaufman-Holland Wasp Nest: Series #4’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer.

Fig. 3: Harriet Kaufman, Wasp’s in control of flowing matter, 2021. © Harriet Kaufman.

Who is that someone? All matter is ‘formatted’? (Or is all matter re-formatted?) Even if the ‘someone’ is ‘other’ matter there is a temporal flow to all matter. At our level in integration, our scale of matter we can experience the great volcan re-formations taking place within the earth and all around us; turning things to dust, turning dust, turning matter. Thus the temporal thrust of matter reformatting matter cannot be stopped – only experiences in a phase. We, our animal make-up, is matter stuck together – a phase of it never ending churn. True, we have our own viscosity, molded from the warm molten sinew of organic nature, and formed into functioning, flowing matter, but we have made our matter matter, given ourselves significance other matter would think mad. We are this ‘mad matter’, the matter that thinks of itself as somematter. As someone is always ‘somematter’, this statement from Morton at the opening of this section is layered with significance that is brought up every time we look at other ‘someone’, at another ‘matter

9

Morton: All art is Ecological, p. 79.

Kristopher J. Holland: Viscous, Molten, and Phased

collection’ that also will eventually, or literally in our time with it melt, stick, and form (phases) new things. So is this flat ontology of matter, and description from our someone’s matter missing ‘something’?

Nature or phýsis It turns out this missing something was generated from a way of thinking that infected our hominin inheritance. Should we blame the Romans for turning phýsis into natura? According to Wolfgang Schadewaldt, yes. The shift from thinking of turning a description of ‘nature’ as a ‘bringing forth’ (as in matter flowing form one thing to something else) into something we go ‘into’ and experience as objects was significant.10 Essentially the Romans and (because of the profound orientations they used to cope with the world (like right angles, concrete, etc.), have turned every event or experience of phasing in and out of matterous moments into objects to ‘rationalize’, label, or freeze into definitions – make into mere formulas – forma – latin for shaping. This reduction of phasing into concrete moments to study, the drying out and hardening of molten events, and the rubbing away of the sticky viscosity of complexity and interconnected movements of matter, leads to objectification of the life-world. These objects as things to be ‘formula’ rather than nonreducible (undermining), or non-additive events (overmining) are not the flows of matter we seek today. Matter flows, and when we prevent that, we prevent phýsis and create nature. In that creation of nature we have a fait de accompli. But we also have the knowledge of its creation and shift in our thinking. Thus the nature of Nature has never been more complex. In order to begin to re-formula nature we need to act and make the notion ‘strange’ in order to rethink the nature of Nature. Ironically, an example of ‘strange’ comes from the scientific reductionist method itself. In physics, not to be conflated with phýsis, we are finding more and more types of exotic phases of matter. It seem this complexity (strangeness) actually reveals the folly of human (anthropomorphically) imposed constrains on our experience of matter. A spectrum of matter is better used to describe the experience we have of the universe from our perspective. Wasps would have a different event of matter, and ‘sense’ them form a different world building trajectory. Neverthe-less we are limited by our hominin evolutionary biological histories and the sensory systems we have developed. Not all is lost, as it was that sensory system also led hominis to develop the ability to imagine other worlds, possibilities and ways of being, and phases of matter that we experience in our matter’s rubbing up against other matter. This will be our way out of the current matter we find ourselves in. Let’s start by examining the current way we think of matter. The matter phase transitions are a spectrum we have settled on as: Plasma, Gas, Liquid, Solid, (+ Exotics).

10

Schadewaldt: “The concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Technique’ according to the Greeks”, pp. 159–171.

181

182

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Fig. 4: Matter ‘Flow’ Chart (Or Anthropocentric diagram of Matter Flow)

The exotics are the strange places the matter still flows out of our formulaic stoppage of nature. While we can make a chart, and pause the flow of matter for our human understanding, we are only imagining this happens. We have made the mistake of making a model of reality and then thinking it is reality. What has really happened is our anthropocentric world view has imposed a structure on a dynamic flowing system other collections of matter (including animals like wasps) would have different experiences of. The exotic liquid/solid or mud-esque of the wasp would be an example of a nonhuman exotic phase of matter in this sense. Do the Wasps have a diagram of matter? Types of matter is phased by the Wasps and made into architecture – freezing the matter, for a time, into the nest and collection of matter that connects to the overall hypoobject (the nest) to a Wasp ontology. Thus, other collections of matter, animals like the Wasps have the function of creating a Nature, a Nature on their terms and with their notions of phases, molten possibilities and viscous properties. So what is an ‘object’ when phase transitions are always already ongoing? The state of matter is neither fixed or final. With matter we have a moving target which should make for exciting investigations by other matter (other animals) configurations and experiences of the universe. There is a Wasp way, a ‘Wasp terraforming program’ in which the aesthetic function and trajectories of the animals, if given the right history, could have formed the Wasp-thropocene instead of the Anthropocene. We can imagine a Wasp dominated Earth with large nests and the total terraforming, molding of the surface of the planet in their image or architecture. But as Hominins won, and still seek to control the total conditions of the Earth through language, discourses, fields of study, science, and positivistic posturing that led to our current milieu – the Anthropocene, this Wasp world will be delayed, but not impossible given the right luck and matter make-up in the future. It is important to note that the Anthropocene is itself not only a Homo Sapiens endeavor. The ‘Anthro’ must include an ever increasing plethora of Hominid species that proceed and include us. As humans, the last Hominid standing, we did not develop things like fire, cooking, or even art. Better to say Hominins are all part of the Anthropocene, and our æffects are the spark for what will be hypoobjects and hyperobject study.11 Hypoobjects

11

Æffect is a word I would like to propose that capture the combination of effect and affect. Affects are in combination with affect theory, in which we attempt to capture the realms of experience and their description as the phases of events and changes in the world ‘in time’,

Kristopher J. Holland: Viscous, Molten, and Phased

include the hybrid hominin non-hominin possibility beneath the surface, and as such must be undergone to propose any hyperobjects.

Introduction: The Control or Reduction of Nature This reduction of nature to what is calculable has, as is plain to see, proven to be extraordinarily successful. It has brough us the most astounding discoveries, and placed in our hands the greatest means of power – although at the cost of an impoverishment that is hard to estimate.12 Wolfgang Schadewaldt

Fig. 5: Phillip Schaefer, Wasp Nest Hulk, ‘KaufmanHolland Wasp Nest: Series #6 / #11’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer.

Fig. 6: Phillip Schaefer, Wasp Nest Foundational Ruins, ‘Kaufman-Holland Wasp Nest: Series #6 / #11’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer.

How do we calculate the hulk of a wasp nest? The chaos and multiple dimensionality of this hypo-object. It is not calculable in terms of energy, heat, transformative power of Wasps, but we still try. This epoch, the Anthropocene, is marked by the control of nature in a metaphorical and literal sense by Hominins. For example, our physicality can be represented by the effects we have had on the planet, such as our technological extensions. For example, things such as the dams and controls of the Mississippi river, which prevent it from changing its course each flood season, thus controlling (for a time) natural processes are effects of our Hominin actions.13 But we must also investigate the affects, the processes that are ‘in the air’ (in both senses of the English connotation of the word atmosphere) and drives

12 13

and effect which is a post examination of such events. Together æffectivness can attempt to maintain the complexity of events, rather than reduce them. Schadewaldt: “The concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Technique’ according to the Greeks”, pp. 159–171. See McPhee’s: The Control of Nature.

183

184

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

our species to control nature. This is the impoverishment which we must estimate if we are to allow matter to flow. The atmosphere is actually a continually æffected hyperobject. It is sublime – we cannot comprehend the size of impact of the atmosphere as a hyperobject, but we will experience the æffects of it. While it is true that in our phase of time, humans have terraformed the planet with a new atmosphere that will destroy our ability to continue to thrive in our ‘matter-ous’ conditions, the sublime qualities of the atmosphere of the planet are not graspable, literally as air, and metaphorically as an idea without hypoobjective interactions or events. Theses hypo-object-events are encountering the changes in the atmosphere via undergoing hypoobjects such as Wasp’s nests. These hypoobjects are beneath the hyperobjects, and are both undermined, overmined -duomined- but are also within their own universe (the Wasp-thropocene) a clue towards the importance of non-human aesthetics, or non-human structures of matter. The incorporation of plastics, and other chemicals from the pollution of the atmosphere are undergone, and made visible in the duominig which cancels the objecthood of the nest, in a sense, but also activates it ‘hypoobjecthood’ and signals a type of knowledge production we are seeking here to transform our being to undergo a better world.

Fig. 7: Phillip Schaefer, ‘Holland Wasp Nest Series # 13’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer.

In this production of knowledge, the reification, or the way our experience of the atmosphere is measured (by the carbon parts per million -ppm) and favored as the best experience of this Earth’s air. But in our current phase of experience our transformation thus far has not affected enough our living, breathing, using the air to change our phase change. It is the human experience of the atmosphere in the past that has stuck, is viscous. This old phase is emphasized and will be the death of our species unless we can

Kristopher J. Holland: Viscous, Molten, and Phased

change our being. One way to spark this change is perhaps to understand other collections of matter are going to enjoy this phase change. Afterall it was ancient bacteria, or collections of matter, the someone’s before Hominins, and the Anthropocene that transformed the atmosphere as well. That phase of the air, which we would not survive breathing, made our planet poisonous to us. But these collections of matter in adding oxygen and combine with our evolutionary trajectories made the current make-up of the earth’s breathable, and what we anthropocentrically refer to as ‘air’. Is not the air then, the atmosphere, also molten, phased, and given our evolutionary history to it viscous (in that is sticks to our lungs, or our lungs are sticky and absorb the atmosphere into our bodied)? Given the æffects of Hominins, and our anthropocentric view of phase changes of the earth, is it not time to flatten our æffective experiences within the story of many species, of other someone, some matters? Only in this can we see the serious nature of our transformation of the atmosphere. This flattening also allows us to understand our place within the phase changes and not the only ones who can do it. Do not wasps control nature as well? Indeed the Wasps, fungi, and other ‘somematters’ control and terraform – create atmosphere’s? The scale is never significant, micro climates, small atmospheres, the atmosphere of the room, of the cave – but all are the same drive in the ‘control’ of nature. Control being the transformation power collections of matter have. What is significant, and this is the argument for proposing hypoobjects as ways to investigate and bring forth this importance of other collections of matter æffectivness in molting the world, is the way we make meaning needs to allow for hypoobjects to present ‘gateways’ to investigating hyperobjects such as atmospheric change. One more point about control of nature. These adaptations of the environment seem to be control mechanisms on the one hand, but also simply part of someone making the world fit their aesthetic choices on the other. Do Wasp’s make their world better? Do they think about aesthetics? Would an alien of such a scale look at Earth today with all of its lines of fields of plants and different ploughed strips like we look at the Wasp nest? Is the Earth a Wasp nest at smaller scale?

Fig. 8: Phillip Schaefer, ‘Holland Wasp Nest Series # 17’, Fig. 9: Public Image of Earth Agricultural Land 2021. use from space. © Phillip Schaefer.

185

186

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

For Timothy Morton the agricultural revolution was the ultimate end and ends from which our story most likely leads to mass extinction number six.14 To avoid this we must not be ecological, for this encloses the sensibilities our Hominin cousins developed and we extended as ‘agrilogistics.’ This false path of controlling something we ourselves already control (as in the terraforming of the Earth), leads us further down that path towards an emptiness in ideas for change. We invented ecology, and as a categories it falls within the wrath of ‘Nature’ (Anthropocentric Nature), which will result in nothing – the nothing for us as a collection of matter. We will create to conditions to phase ourselves out of our matter. If we stick to ecology, there is nothing to transform other than a category of control and measurement. We simply keep measuring, assessing, and trying to geoengineer that which we have already wrecked. We must undergo the phases we have set for our species, not overcome them.

Undergoing/Overcoming Nature You don’t have to be ecological. Because you are ecological.15 Timothy Morton The distinction between ‘undergoing’ and ‘overcoming’ is one that connects to hypoobjects. These hypoobjects are undermined, overmined, duomined, which lead us to contemplate those notions. In this contemplation of ‘mining’ objects, we are also connecting the notion of objecthood to ideas of overcoming vs. undergoing nature. However re-thinking nature is not enough. We need to re-translate and experience the world around us and come up with new ways to communicate, articulate, and disseminate these experiences. Two thinkers that come to mind in this endeavor are Jacques Derrida and Dominque Janicaud. Let us bring forth Janicaud’s ideas relate to how we experience the world first. As mentioned before, to think of a world after ‘Nature’, or the word natura, one has come to the point that the word means the ‘objectification’ of natural world as something we can walk ‘into’, measure, assess, forma, etc., – this is what is meant by the act of ‘overcoming’ it. We overcome the world around as by making them objects to use, measure, and divide. This process is reflected in scientific or rationalization of the lifeworld, which philosophers such as Heidegger and Habermas warned us would lead to the wrath of the Anthropocene. For Janicaud, we must instead seek to undergo the world.16 In this we understand that we are part of a complexity, part of the viscosity of the world, part of its molten and phased transitioning. Rather that reduce or our experiences, we ‘duomine’ them, create poetic connections and make nature a romantic physical endeavor, not a resource to use and abuse. This presents us with a way to convey the world around us

14 15 16

Morton: All art is Ecological, p. 15. Ibid., p. 105. See Janicaud: On the human condition.

Kristopher J. Holland: Viscous, Molten, and Phased

not as objects to eat and transform into use value, but as aesthetic experiences with the potential to change the way we æffectivly move as matter.

The Occurrence of Deconstruction is Already Nature/ Natural In addition to Janicaud we can also look to Jacques Derrida as he presents us with an ally in re-thinking the way we think about experience and Nature. Given the word Nature creates a meaning field so strongly attached to binaries such as culture/nature, human/animal, time/space, etc., the occurrence of deconstruction, the way we can describe his philosophical outlook, gives us a tool to re-understand and enliven some of the aspects of Janicaud’s undergoing idea. For Derrida, we undergo deconstruction, we never overcome it.17 Much like we are saying is needed to think and act in a new radical or exotic ‘ecological’ in Morton’s notion, deconstruction is an ally we should cultivate. For example, we can suggest that our overmining of Nature, by putting it in the function of ‘sous rature’ under erasure, which is a tool to propose the sticky, molten, and phased nature of meaning fields or meaning itself (deconstruction) is why hypoobjects are important to bring forth. If we put Nature (under erasure) we are not just implicating Nature as a failed word, or concept, but explicitly moving the whole system of signification of Nature out of implicit complexity into the light; or suggesting a movement (making it molten) will lead to the meaning field of Nature changing phases, and sticking viscously to a new atmosphere of experience. In this ‘deconstruction’, new æffects are produced like exotic matter from particle accelerators. Deconstruction is a productive activity, and as an undergoing, points to possibilities for hypoobjects and re-thinking our being. In addition, the strong alterity evoked in the occurrence of deconstruction, the idea that knowing an Other is impossible, yet perhaps ‘rub-able’ – or rubs up against Other beings – is an undergoing. This undergoing rather than an overcoming (a labeling, measurement, etc., i.e. science) gives us a radical practice evoked in finding hypoobjects – like Wasp nests. Furthermore, this is the natural way of encountering the world, which we have named Nature, and serves as a strategy for forming new paths into our being ‘ecological’, rather than anthropological.

17

See Derrida: Positions.

187

188

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

All Art is Ecological or ‘The Morton Gambit’ The subscendent nature of art means that ecological art that calls itself as such can’t be about Sierra Club style uplifting poster-type grandeur. It must include ugliness and disgust, and haunting weirdness, and a sense of unreality as much as of reality.18 Timothy Morton

Fig. 10: Phillip Schaefer, ‘Holland Wasp Nest Series # 5’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer.

Haunting ‘weirdness’s’ or Hauntology in general is what hypoobject do. They form the way into modes of thinking that help us shift from overcoming to undergoing mind sets. Hypoobjects, in their reduction of poetic flurry (overmining/undermining) and celebration of the micro workings of cpmplexities give us the chance to see what hyperobjects don’t – our human beingness’s faults and hazards. Our human, or Hominin world buildings structures are both the limitations and futures of out thought horizons. Like the duomining of objects we have in a sense a thought nature consumed by our viscous past as Hominins, but this structure also lays in place the ability to think about a molten and phased future. We can, just as we imagined the stone as an axe, also imaging a way to rethink objects and ecology to fight the future of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, this combination of Janicaud and Derrida relates to Timothy Morton’s mediation on art and ecology being a ‘strange tool’ to re-orientate, or create a phase change in thinking of ex-

18

Morton: All art is Ecological, p. 80.

Kristopher J. Holland: Viscous, Molten, and Phased

periencing the world.19 In Timothy Morton’s All Art is Ecological, a text that seeks to do exactly what Janicaud and Derrida ideas suggest, he offers a gambit to shift the experience with the world into frames of being that can remove the ‘being ecological’ performative we have as a species developed – sort of a bug in the system toward a new phase change. The genius of this nexus of thinkers is that no one is right, no one is wrong, but we are attempting to form a new constellation of philosophical matter that allows for Wasps not only to be makers, but philosophers and artists. This trajectory, once established will lead to non-human aesthetics linked to viscous, molten, and phased as discussed above, but also create a new program for artists.

Non-Human Artists & Hypoobject Hunters OOO offers us a marvelous world in which being a badger, nosing past whatever it is that you, a human being, are looking at thoughtfully, is just as validly accessing that thing as you are.20 Timothy Morton When I mention a program for artists I mean all artists. Artists make ‘works,’ and works, all works of art are made by somebody, somematter, someone. To encounter Art’s planetary meatabolism21 which is rightly evoked by Michael Marder in his essay “On Art As Planetary Metabolism” in Semâ Berkirovic Reading by Osmosis is to encounter the undergoing of nature. The results of this, like the Wasp’s nest and the hypoobject proposed, are signals of a radically ‘alter’ tongue – a signal outside of our human-centered worlds, and into the realm of the planetary; a hyperobject metabolism that is fighting to consume us – in all of time. The lifeworld, the world of molten matter, phased and viscous is not only what surrounds us, but is us as well. We can no longer overcome nature, overcome ecologies, overcome the universe, as we are stuck, shifting, and phased in time within it. We are stuck, viscously in that we adapt and change (molten), and phased, in that we human beings will phase out (like Homo erectus, and the other hominins) – but, and this is important in our new thinking, the art of the planet will continue without us. Wasp’s will most likely continue to make nests, matter will continue to flow.

19

20 21

A strange tool is an idea proposed by Alva Noe. Here the idea is that art, in making the world strange adds a antireductionist program to knowledge production. In making something strange, we in effect are doing not what science does (undermine), but propose the second half of duominning -overmining, is part of the productive capacity ‘objects’ of study can have. Art is a strange tool in that is overmines and also creates complexity that leads to new ways of experiencing the world. Morton: All art is Ecological, p. 10. Berkirovic: Reading by osmosis, p. 36.

189

190

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Fig. 11: Phillip Schaefer, ‘Holland Wasp Nest Series # 18’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer.

More Notes on ‘Hypo-Objects’ A hyperobjects is a thing so vast in both temporal and spatial terms that we can only see slices of it at a time; hyperobjects come in and our of phase with human nature; they end up ‘contaminating’ everything, if we find ourselves inside them (I call this phenomenon viscosity).22 Timothy Morton Let me further a term I have been using since the beginning of the text that I think helps hyperobjects emerge – hypoobjects. Hyperobjects are not necessarily determined by humans – or anthropomorphic systems – they are beyond those. Hypoobjects similarly are also not necessarily human made, but are beyond in a different sense. Hypoobjects appear as ‘the opposite of hyper’, they are overlooked, small, insignificant, etc. These hypoobjects are like fractals and can be bee’s nests, rhizomes, plant roots, soil networks, or dust bunnies. I think we can find both hyper and hypo objects defined by the Harman’s object conjecture as things interacting with the Anthropocentric structures of overmining and undermining as stated before. The duominning that occurs with hypoobjects stick them to the possibility of hyperobject play – or the way hyperobject cannot be defined into a system of rational Hominin world view. Hyperbjects are always beyond in that sense, but hypoobjects create a different possibilities, ones that allows for a way in, an undergoing that transforms our categories of being. 22

Morton: All art is Ecological, pp. 63–64.

Kristopher J. Holland: Viscous, Molten, and Phased

I find the idea of viscosity of being in that sense one that begins to unpack and discover the wonderful world of undergoing. We undergo the contamination of this phasing of humanness – or human nature (Hominin nature) by our science and rationalization (duomining) of everything. We name, cover, kill and violate the ways matter collects and forms outside of our experience. We have sought to destroy the Other-ones, the Other someones who organize and transform matter differently. These ‘objects’ and animals have been dismissed. But in experiencing their hypoobjects we can seek the slices in time they have phased, and see around the corner towards a new future of thought. The Wasp nest is of course but a slice of the vast planetary metabolism, which always already is moving matter – from the molten earth itself to the non-human lifeforms who came before us, such as the cyanobacteria that terraformed the atmosphere. Hypoobjects contain all that undergoing potential of the aesthetic world within their configurations. The Wasp’s nest, build by insects who gather material, transform it, and render the object from their own design, prepared by eons of evolution and technique, is a hypoobject. Subscendence is the opposite of transcendence. If hyperobjects transcend, then hypoobjects ‘subscend.’ “An artwork is subscended by it parts. We’ve already been exploring the concept behind this term quite a bit. Recall what I’ve been arguing already: that wholes are bursting with their parts; in basic but strange-seeming way, wholes are less than the sum of their parts.”23 This subscendence property is what I mean with hypoobjects.

On Being Object Hunters We can only be hunters of objects, and must even be non-lethal hunters, since objects can never be caught.24 Graham Harman This brings us back to the program for artists. Once we include non-human artists we (us and non-humans – clusters of matter, moving other matter) can be the hunters of objects – both hyper and hypo objects. Being an object hunter is being an artist. Wasps seek mud and materials, then ‘mine’ their surroundings, much like we do to terraform the planet. For the fate of luck the Wasp’s (or Wasp like collections of matter) might have been the dominate species on someone else’s planet. As mentioned before, there might be an alternative universe somewhere with a planet consumed by Wasp nest like the cities of Earth. Their inferred heat signature glowing like our electric grids do at night on Earth. For now, in our Anthropocentric time, we find the nests of Wasps in tree canopies, or tucked away in the planetary metabolism. To find and learn from these hypoobjects, we must form an art appreciation for the point of view of non-human – only in this strange endeavor can we being to undergo a new way of seeing and being in the world.

23 24

Ibid., p. 74. Harman: The Third Table, p. 12.

191

192

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Fig. 12: Harriet Kaufman, 2021. © Harriet Kaufman.

When we hunt ‘objects,’ we make hypoobjects in a way. We invent the way matter is flowing, we seek new ways to phase it, mold it, and stick it together. The ‘we’ here no longer means only Hominins, but the vast array of possible object hunters. Other animals, and perhaps even other collections of matter can be object hunters. The important notion is undergoing, rather than overcoming objects results in never successfully hunting and ‘killing’ objects, as stated by Harman above, but for a time the hunter drops into phase with them and, as in deconstruction, lifts an experience of alterity up from the chaos and allows a development in an event for the collection matter involved to be art. This event can be called art or not, what is important is the strangeness is celebrated and sought, rather than captivated and avoided; or worse transformed into a ‘science’. Art isn’t about ‘objects’ (to Harman’s ‘third table’ alludes to) but releasing objects from systems of thought and articulation that mistake those functions of the object for the object itself.25

25

See Harman: The Third Table.

Kristopher J. Holland: Viscous, Molten, and Phased

Strange Tools for a Future Aesthetics Critical Art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes. First, the production of a sensory form of “strangeness”; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness; and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness.26 Jacques Rancière I would like to end on accepting the strangeness of the ideas formed in this essay as an introduction to a new type of aesthetics. One that is productive in the ethic and politics of a radical nature, a radical undergoing of the Other (beyond human), and a radical in ambiguity toward art (nonhuman art as well). As Morton states: “Ethics and politics might not be about tolerating, appreciating or accepting otherness. Ethics and politics might be about tolerating, appreciating or accepting strangeness, which boils down to ambiguity: how things can appear to be oscillating between familiar and strange, for example.”27 This ambiguity is what viscous, molten and phased are all trying to describe. It also points to the strangeness of thinking of nonhuman art making, such as Wasp’s architecture and their way of fixing matter. Even for non-humans art is a strange tool. As Noe remarks: “A work of art is a strange tool, an alien implement. We make strange tools to investigate ourselves.”28 Are these alien implements also made by other matter fixers like Wasps? Can Wasp’s investigate themselves? Is not this evolutionary processes? The Planetary metabolism? In seeing the Wasp’s nest as a hypoobject, we can seek the understory; for this story is the viscous, molten, and phased matter of the matter. For art to be truly strange and fulfill its destiny to change worlds, we must undergo its radical alterity not only with Other humans (hominins) but with non-humans as well.

References Berkirovic, Semâ: Reading by Osmosis, Rotterdam (Nai010 publishers.) 2019. Derrida, Jacques: Positions, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 1982. Harman, Graham: The Third Table, dOCUMENTA (13), Ostfildern (Hatje Cantz) 2012.

26 27 28

Rancière: Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics, p. 150. Morton: All art is Ecological, p. 94. Noë: Strange tools: Art and human nature, p. 30.

193

194

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Harman, Graham: Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, London (Pelican Books) 2018. Morton, Timothy: All art is Ecological, United Kingdom (Penguin Books) 2021. Morton, Timothy: Hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world, Minneapolis, Minn. (Univ. of Minnesota Press) 2013. Janicaud, Dominique: On the human condition, London (Routledge) 2005. McPhee, John: The Control of Nature, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York) 1989. Noë, Alva: Strange tools: Art and human nature, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York) 2015. Rancière, Jacques: Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics, London (Bloomsbury Publishing) 2015. Schadewaldt, Wolfgang: “The concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Technique’ according to the Greeks,” Trans. William Carroll, in: Carl Mitcham and Robert Machey (eds.): Research in Philosophy and Technology, 2 (1979), pp. 159–171. Wragg Sykes, Rebecca: Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, London (Bloomsbury Sigma) 2020.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Philip Schaefer, Viscous, Molten, and Phased Wasp Nest as Hypoobject, ‘Kaufman-Holland Wasp Nest: Series #1’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer. Fig. 2: Phillip Schaefer, Wasp’s Mud-esque architecture flows, ‘Kaufman-Holland Wasp Nest: Series #4’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer. Fig. 3: Harriet Kaufman, Wasp’s in control of flowing matter, 2021. © Harriet Kaufman. Fig. 4: Matter ‘Flow’ Chart (Or Anthropocentric diagram of Matter Flow) Fig. 5: Phillip Schaefer, Wasp Nest Hulk, ‘Kaufman-Holland Wasp Nest: Series #6 / #11’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer. Fig. 6: Phillip Schaefer, Wasp Nest Foundational Ruins, ‘Kaufman-Holland Wasp Nest: Series #6 / #11’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer. Fig. 7: Phillip Schaefer, ‘Holland Wasp Nest Series # 13’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer. Fig. 8: Phillip Schaefer, ‘Holland Wasp Nest Series # 17’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer. Fig. 9: Public Image of Earth Agricultural Land use from space. Fig. 10: Phillip Schaefer, ‘Holland Wasp Nest Series # 5’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer. Fig. 11: Phillip Schaefer, ‘Holland Wasp Nest Series # 18’, 2021. © Phillip Schaefer. Fig. 12: Harriet Kaufman, 2021. © Harriet Kaufman.

L’animal que donc je suis – Pierre Huyghe and Jacques Derrida Sabine Flach

Pour dire les plus longues phrases / Elle n’a pas besoin de mots. (Without the need for any words / It can pronounce the longest phrase.) – Charles Baudelaire1 When I come home late at night from banquets, from scientific receptions, from social gatherings, there sits waiting for me a half-trained little chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day I cannot bear to see her; for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye; no one else sees it, but I do, and I cannot bear it2 writes Franz Kafka in A Report for an Academy. Kafka’s work is populated by dogs (Investigations of a Dog), earth animals (The Burrow), mice (Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk), fleas (Before the Law), crossbreeds of lamb and cat (A Crossbreed), mice finding their end under the guillotine, and, of course, Gregor Samsa, who in Metamorphosis finds himself transformed into a bug, or vermin, upon waking up one morning, as described in the first sentence: “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”3 Kafka is concerned with transformations and states, metamorphoses and border crossings between humans and animals. Often, the place at which the transformation occurs is given central importance; in the case of Gregor Samsa, home becomes a site of the dreadful, and finally, of death.4 In art history, theory and culture, the animal has recurringly been the ‘object’ of representation. Represented as hunting success in the still life, animals work symbolically

1 2 3 4

Baudelaire: “Le Chat”, p. 102; “The Cat”, p. 103. Kafka: “A Report for an Academy”, p. 259. Kafka: “The Metamorphosis”, p. 89. Samsa’s room in the parental flat is the only room granted to him, so that Freud’s concept of the Heimliche is evoked, the German term for the homely that also carries parts of the meaning of the uncanny (das Unheimliche). The implication is that that which protects us is also that which threatens us.

196

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

with the purpose of underlining human characteristics; and when the animal as such is shown, what occurs is frequently a mere projection of the human onto the animal. Conversely, in an unparalleled way, Ovid’s Metamorphoses present the relation between humanity and animals as the great theater of the world. They describe the game of transformations between animals, humans, and gods as the motor of culture. These metamorphoses point to one thing: the proximity – not the distance – of human and animal. Across disciplines and artistic practices, however, whether in the visual arts, philosophy, or literature, the animal as such has remained concealed, its reality hidden behind metaphors, symbols, and ideals projected upon it by humans. That is what we get to see: projections. The animal appears everywhere, in manifold forms, yet remains unrecognized and invisible. The animal – to which Baudelaire has ascribed a form of cognition and language without language, as suggested by the epigraph cited at the beginning,“Without the need for any words / It can pronounce the longest phrase”5 – regularly serves human exclusions and inclusions wherever the human requires the animal and its difference in order to achieve stable self-definition. Giorgio Agamben has shown this in his work L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (The Open. Man and Animal) by exposing the argumentative and practical orders that produce man as distinct from the animal.

L’animal que donc je suis – The Animal that Therefore I am6 “Can one speak of the animal”7 , Jacques Derrida asks in his talk L’animal que donc je suis – The Animal that Therefore I am – first presented at a colloquium dedicated to his work, L’animal autobiographique, at Cerisy-la-Salle. In this talk, Derrida explicates the dichotomy between the human subject possessing reason and a homogenized ‘animal’ lacking the faculty of logos, a dichotomy underlying the human’s logocentric position of dominance. Derrida’s reflections are based on an encounter with his cat in the bathroom. The cat had regarded him “face to face”, which caused the philosopher not only to feel ashamed at being ashamed when the animal is looking at him – “I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment” 8 , he writes –, “and foremost from a truth that would be due, a debt, in truth, that needs to be paid off.”9 In French, the animal that ‘regards’ (from regarder) is also always that which ‘addresses’, ‘concerns’ and renders one ‘responsible’ (all regarder). For the philosopher, the incidental quotidian scene turns into a starting point he continually returns to, and from which he develops his autobiographical narrative, on the one hand a philosophical parable, on the other an eloquent plea for the non-verbal animal.10 5 6 7 8 9 10

Baudelaire: “The Cat”, p. 103. Derrida: “L’animal donc que je suis (à suivre)”, p. 251. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 21. See Ingold: “Der Denker und das Biest”, https://www.recherche-online.net/texte/jacques-derrida -felix-philipp-ingold-der-denker-und-das-biest/ (accessed January 7, 2022)

Sabine Flach: L’animal que donc je suis – Pierre Huyghe and Jacques Derrida

What interests me in Derrida’s remarks is not so much an exegesis of his philosophy of responsibility, nor is it the detailed analysis of the position ascribed to the animal in Derrida’s oeuvre as a whole, although it should at least be mentioned that Derrida already attended to animals in earlier writings, noting, for instance, and with significant insight, on the silkworm, the horse, and the hedgehog. I am, instead, interested in the following aspects: First, in his attempt to develop a philosophy overcoming the conventional human-animal dualism as much as logocentrism, he presents the outline of an animal philosophy not concerned with speaking about the animal (whether as entity or quality) in a way that would subject it to the logos, but from the animal. Secondly, I am interested in the space in which the animal is located, a space eluding the human. The animal’s existence forms itself in a space of its own, a space marking the animal’s singularity. This is a space that the human perceives as alien, even magical, certainly inaccessible, a space that thus intensifies the singularity of the animal’s existence. In short, the basic question is that of the reality of the animal – which is the question this text seeks to address. Is it possible – and if yes, how? – to comprehend the living animal in its own reality? That is, is it possible to newly encounter the animal, separate from the symbolic ascriptions? What happens when the animal is understood neither as metaphor or symbol, nor as medium nor as the material of art? Consequently, I am not interested in simply declaring that the making-visible of the animal in contemporary art cannot be traced back to traditional ordering systems, such as metaphors or symbols, and that the implication of this is that we suffer analytical uncertainties; rather, my thesis is this: contemporary art plays a significant role for the currently important ‘Animal Turn’, because it is explicitly here that we can encounter the animal’s reality. I will demonstrate that with an analysis of the art of Pierre Huyghe. In order to elaborate on this, in what follows I will focus on three aspects: How and in what way the process of rendering-visible is conducted to comprehend the reality of the animal as such. What interplay between space, place and time is necessary to experience nature in Pierre Huyghe’s installations. And how can we describe the animal’s reality. These aspects – a thinking from the animal and a demarcation of the space it inhabits – describes the animal’s position in Pierre Huyghe’s work. It is a positioning distinguishing Huyghe’s art from any and all art histories that presented the animal symbolically, or that assigned or subjected it to the human. In the artworks of Pierre Huyghe that I will discuss, the animal is presented in its inaccessibility and hence in its autonomy from the human. There is a specific absence that is dominant for Pierre Huyghe’s art. Even if his works all display populated spaces there are nearly never humans in Huyghe’s experimental settings. It is exactly this non-anthropocentric attitude that is characteristic. Humans are visitors or observers of scenarios which would remain otherwise inaccessible. Humans exists in Huyghe’s works much more solely as a reference to art history, like the Constantin Brâncuși’s La muse endormie, the sleeping muse, in Zoodram 4 or the sculpture of a female body in Untilled.11

11

See: Finnegan: “The ‘Idea of Natural History’ in the work of Pierre Huyghe”, p. 111.

197

198

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Pierre Huyghe’s Zoodram 4 is an example of ‘autoconstruction’, a term used by the artist himself for the museum installation populated by animals. The occupants of Zoodram 4 live in an ecosystem that is artificial, yet conducive to their well-being. Aquariums are natural microcosms, seemingly independent with ‘entities’ that perform in real life and in real time, but the space is inaccessible for the viewer and not time based.12 It is a timeless, autonomous, floating world behind glass.

Fig.1: Pierre Huyghe, Zoodram 4, 2011, Live Marine Ecosystem. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/ Seoul. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe.

Pierre Huyghe insists on a resistance of classificatory thinking that dominates the human over animals and other living beings. He therefore rejects any taxonomy or biological order.13 And there with the animals in his installations reject fixed identities if they are the result of such classifications. Their identity is much more flexible and fluid.14 The thesis of this paper that it is precisely in his art that, to use Hegel’s terminology, the ‘animal-in-itself’15 may be recognized in its own reality, this thesis paradoxically involves returning to the site previously responsible for the misrecognition of the animal as symbol and metaphor. In order to elaborate on my argument, I will draw on objectoriented philosophy and speculative realism, more explicitly Graham Harman’s perspective.16 I do want to borrow from Harman’s work the definition of the reality of the ‘object’ as fundamentally separate from our formulations of reality. In this view, we can only

12 13 14 15 16

Mooney: “Pierre Huyghe”, in: Art Review. 17. February 2015. https://artreview.com/october-20 13-feature-pierre-huyghe/ (accessed January 7, 2022). See Finnegan: “The ‘Idea of Natural History’ in the work of Pierre Huyghe”, p. 99. See Huyghe: “Pierre Huyghe in conversation”, Interview by Dorothea von Hantelmann, p. 30. Hegel: Lectures on the History of Philosophy, p. 185. I am not in accord with Harman in terms of his emphasizing of the importance of metaphor with recourse to José Ortega y Gasset’s essay on Metaphors (1914).

Sabine Flach: L’animal que donc je suis – Pierre Huyghe and Jacques Derrida

ever indirectly experience reality, objects being autonomous insofar as they are mutually ‘withdrawn’.17 Tying this speculative thinking to the reality of speculative realism, with the aim of recognizing the animal-in-itself, is what my further elaborations will be concerned with. Harman’s ideas on metaphor, however, do not critically question the use of imagery with view to the animal and its epistemology, so that what results is ultimately an anthropocentric position rendering impossible a recognition of the animal-in-itself. For this reason, I would like to think together Harman’s theory of the reality of ‘objects’ with Jean-Lucy Nancy’s image theory from The Ground of the Image, a theorization of the potency of artistic image that Harman was unattuned to. Nancy avoids thinking in terms of dual oppositions such as that between subject and object. In Nancy’s view, artistic images show themselves, yet also entertain an indissoluble relation to what they represent. They are marked by a unique ‘force’ responsible for their ‘energy’ and ‘intimacy’18 . The force inherent in the image generates forms – through which art affects us. The artistic image, then, is not the mimetic reference of the image to the object represented, but rather marked by the paradoxical double of separation and distance on the one hand, and continuation and connection on the other. What results is an excess characterized as ‘methexis’, that is, ‘participation’ or ‘infection’19 through the work of art. In Nancy’s image theory, images are co-actors in the world of bodies (or of ‘objects’ in Harman’s vocabulary). For images remain part of situated environments and are energetically charged in a particular way. To put it differently: under these premises, a layer of images that would form a symbolic order separated from the world of bodies seems inconceivable.20 Rather, the resulting performativity of the image has its original site in the affect-charged spaces between bodies and the events that become possible.21 In Pierre Huyghe’s art a recurring motif is abandoned or inaccessible spaces and places. This gives the artworks a timeless quality, spaces that seem to be fallen out of measurable time that is replaced by an undefined permanence like the space that reminds of an archaeological site in After a Life Ahead or the dystopian place in Untitled (The Human Mask). Strange non-sites and unmeasurable duration are basics for Huyghe’s works for which he is less interested in the meaning of the work but what they do. He describes his method therefore not as process or practice but as compost.22

17 18 19 20 21

22

See Harman: Object-Oriented Ontology, p. 7. Nancy: The Ground of the Image, p. 2. See Felfe: “Nancy, Jean-Luc: Am Grund der Bilder”, in: ArtHist.net, p. 2, 21.03.2007. https://arthist.n et/reviews/152 (accessed January 7, 2022). See ibid., p. 3. Robert Felfe accurately notes on how such an understanding of the performativity of the image is much more than just a sharpening of a fundamentally conventional reception aesthetics in terms of pictorial representation. Mooney: “Pierre Huyghe”, in: Art Review, 17. February 2015. https://artreview.com/october-20 13-feature-pierre-huyghe/ (accessed January 7, 2022).

199

200

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

“Alive entities and inanimate things, made and not made” You don’t display things. You don’t make a mise-en-scéne, you don’t design things, you just drop them. And when someone enters that site, things are in themselves, they don’t have a dependence on the person. They are indifferent to the public. You are in a place of indifference. Each thing, a bee, an ant, a plant, a rock, keeps growing or changing23 describes Pierre Huyghe his work. In rough terrain, in a compost pile at the end of the Karlsaue Park, a pleasure garden, in Kassel, placed Pierre Huyghe his work Untilled for the dOCUMENTA 13. The artwork consists of dropped, built and found entities along with plants, animals and piles. The already existing artworks are an uprooted tree once planted by Joseph Beuys and a bench by the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Pierre Huyghe added to this a sculpture whose head is made of swirling bees. The sculpture is placed exactly in the middle of a non-accessible pile surrounded by poisonous plants which make it impossible to come closer. In addition, there are two dogs, one of which has a pink-colored leg. They emerge out of nowhere, observe the visitors, and disappear. Now and then, we see a gardener, taking care of the plants; in silence. Which concepts of nature are they based on? What kind of beings and spaces does this magical scenario require? “The compost is the place where you throw things that you don’t need or that are dead. I used the same methodology for Untilled, using personally important markers and dropping them within that place.”24 Cultural artefacts and nature are left to transform, to decompose and to compose therewith something new.25 The image is what takes the thing out of its simple presence and brings it to pres-ence, to praes-entia, to being-out-in-front-of-itself, turned toward the outside (in German: coming out of presence-at-hand, Vorhandenheit, and into presence as Gegenwärtigkeit). In the image, or as image, and only in this way, the thing – whether it is an inert thing or a person – is posited as subject26 Nancy writes in The Ground of the Image. These words describe the special role of the artwork for generating the presence of a subject. According to this understanding, ‘Human’, the dog, carries a subject-like presence. It is not present for something or someone else; it does not represent anything; it exists.27 Her identity is fluid, as pink leg presents. It works like a marker, a zone where the artificial and the natural world merge. The pink leg is a marker showing that Human’s world 23 24 25 26 27

Ibid. Mooney: “Pierre Huyghe”, in: Art Review, 17. February 2015. https://artreview.com/october-20 13-feature-pierre-huyghe/ (accessed January 7, 2022). See: Finnegan: “The ‘Idea of Natural History’ in the work of Pierre Huyghe”, p. 103. Nancy: The Ground of the Image, p. 21. See Mönnig: Das übersehene Tier, p. 260.

Sabine Flach: L’animal que donc je suis – Pierre Huyghe and Jacques Derrida

simultaneously forms part of the human world, and not. This, indeed, corresponds to the image conception of art favored by Husserl: an artwork is always part of my world – physically present, graspable – and not. This is precisely the manner the world of animals shows itself in Untilled. And it is in this respect that the correlation between the world of Human, the dog, and the world of art succeeds.

Fig. 2: Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011–12, Living entities and inanimate things, made and not made. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. © VG BildKunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe. THE SCULPTURE ONLY: Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), 2012. Concrete cast on steel armature with beehive, live bee colony, plastic, and wax. Figure: 145 x 45 x 75 cm / 29 1/2 x 57 1/8 x 17 3/4 in. Plinth: 145 x 55 x 30 cm / 11 3/4 x 57 1/8 x 21 5/8 in. Beehive Dimensions Variable. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe.

201

202

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Fig. 3: Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011–12, Living entities and inanimate things, made and not made. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe. THE SCULPTURE ONLY: Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), 2012. Concrete cast on steel armature with beehive, live bee colony, plastic, and wax. Figure: 145 x 45 x 75 cm / 29 1/2 x 57 1/8 x 17 3/4 in. Plinth: 145 x 55 x 30 cm / 11 3/4 x 57 1/8 x 21 5/8 in. Beehive Dimensions Variable. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe.

Sabine Flach: L’animal que donc je suis – Pierre Huyghe and Jacques Derrida

Pierre Huyghe literally shows populated spaces which are only ever present qualitatively, and into which the body moves and merges qua sensuality. After all, “the Umwelt marks the difference between the world such as it exists in itself, and the world of a living being. It is an intermediary reality between the world as it exists for an absolute observer and a purely subjective domain”28 . Only then can a space turn into a qualitative space in which different sensual qualities are accentuated differently in order to be able to occupy and move within such a space. All of this belongs to the discourse on mythical spaces. But these spaces do not become mythical as a result of objective configurations – rather, through the associated processes of signification.29 This creates a certain ambiguity, an uncertainty of what is natural and what is artificial. Or – as Pierre Huyghe puts it: “I don’t invent the narrative, I only create the conditions for its appearance.”30

Epilogue: Ashamed of / at being ashamed “A few years ago, a four-minute clip was posted on YouTube entitled Fuku-chan Monkey in wig, mask, works Restaurant!”31 The video showed the chimpanzee Yat-chan together with Fuku-chan. Both are employed in the restaurant Kayabuki in Northern Tokyo, a traditional Sake house. The both chimpanzee wear clothes in children size, wigs and masks. In a news report on New Tang Dynasty TV from 6 October 2008 entitled Monkey Business: Monkeys as Waiters in Japan, the customer Takayoshi Soeno, says: “The monkeys are better waiters than some really bad human ones.” The animals belong to the owner of the restaurant, Kaoru Otsuka, who explains that they started imitating him at work.32 An uncanny, disturbing 19-minute film, Untitled Human Mask (2014), is Pierre Huyghe’s response to Fuku-chan Monkey in wig, mask, works Restaurant! The YouTube video is the inspiration for Huyghe’s artwork which starts with a scenario of a catastrophe; a drone filmed an abandoned Japanese town devastated by an earthquake, a tsunami and a nuclear plant meltdown. The beginning of the film functions as a prologue33 , that introduces the viewers in a scenario and revelations that create an unsettling atmosphere of desolation, decay and abandonment, like an apocalypse. The camera then moves from the destroyed outside to an inside space. In a gloomy, shadowy room, after a while, you can make out the space of a restaurant, explicitly a kitchen; and different sounds. The spaces are deserted, with the exception of several ‘entities’34 . The population of this abandonment space are a cockroach, larvae, a cat and a creature that is unrecognizable at the beginning. After a while it becomes clear that it is 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Merleau-Ponty/Séglard: The nature, p. 167. See Merleau-Ponty: Das Auge und der Geist. Philosophische Essays. Rafael: Pierre Huyghe. On site, p. 16. Higgie: “One Take: Human Mask”, https://frieze.com/article/one-take-human-mask (accessed January 7, 2022). Ibid. Lewis: Pierre Huyghe. Untitled (Human Mask), p. 27. Entities is one of Pierre Huyghe’s preferred words to describe his artworks.

203

204

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

a macaque dressed in a children-like attire, with a wig, bows and a white, smooth mask. This attire resembles the work-dress of the chimpanzee in the sake house. Alone in this dystopian setting, she carries out duties.35

Fig. 4: Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask), 2014. Film, color, stereo sound, 2 min. 66 sec. Running time: 19 min. Courtesy of the artist; Hauser & Wirth, London; Anna Lena Films, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe

Fig. 5: Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask), 2014. Film, color, stereo sound, 2 min. 66 sec. Running time: 19 min. Courtesy of the artist; Hauser & Wirth, London; Anna Lena Films, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe

“Her mask is immobile [...] made in resin, it was designed by Huyghe, who was inspired by the masks used in traditional Japanese Noh theatre.”36 The parenthetical title 35 36

The Met Museum Website https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/684796 (accessed January 7, 2022). Higgie: “One Take: Human Mask”, https://frieze.com/article/one-take-human-mask (accessed November 15, 2023).

Sabine Flach: L’animal que donc je suis – Pierre Huyghe and Jacques Derrida

of Huyghe’s film – Untitled (Human Mask) – suggests to see a representation of a human face as a mask so that the macaque appears to resemble a human. But there is – as so often – no human in Pierre Huyghe’s artwork. 37 […] in … Noh theatre, the recurring theme of which is a supernatural being transformed into a human hero. Only the main actor in Noh wears a mask, which is meant to show the character in his true light – his essential traits having been distilled into a single expression.38 Other than in the restaurant, where a customer, Miho Takikawa, declares: “We called out for more beer, and she just brought us some. It’s amazing how she seems to understand human words”39 – the macaque in Pierre Hughes film doesn’t need to ‘understand’ humans, because the humans misunderstanding regarding their entire Umwelt in general is much too obvious. The entire scenario of Pierre Huyghe’s artwork is timeless, what it presents is ongoing duration after a catastrophe. Was the apocalypse once the threat of a disaster to come, describes it in Untitled (Human Mask) our contemporary current condition, the manmade reality of permanent exploitation, of the Umwelt40 . The enigmatic scene in Huyghe’s artwork is what Eugene Thacker describes as ‘hiddenness’, that which cannot be shown and is beyond the human ability to imagine. Thacker calls that ‘the-world-in-itself’.41 But what Pierre Huyghe presents is a world without human beings, not any longer for them.42

References Baudelaire, Charles, “Le Chat”; “The Cat”, in: The Flowers of Evil, includes parallel French text, translation by James McGowan, New York (Oxford University Press) 1993, pp. 102–103. Derrida, Jacques: “L’animal donc que je suis (à suivre)”, in: Marie-Louise Mallet (ed.): L’Animal autobiographique: Autour de Jacques Derrida, Paris (Galilée) 1999, pp. 251–301. Felfe, Robert: “Nancy, Jean-Luc: Am Grund der Bilder”, Zürich [u.a.] 2006, in: ArtHist.net, 21.03.2007, https://arthist.net/reviews/152 (accessed January 7, 2022). Finnegan, Paul: “The ‘Idea of Natural History’ in the work of Pierre Huyghe”, in: Giovanni Aloi (ed.): antennae. remaking nature, Iss. 50, Spring 2020, pp. 95–117.

37 38 39 40 41 42

Lewis: Pierre Huyghe. Untitled (Human Mask), p. 12. Higgie: “One Take: Human Mask”, https://frieze.com/article/one-take-human-mask (accessed November 15, 2023). Ibid. Umwelt is also the title of one of Pierre Huyghe’s installations. Thacker: In the Dust of this Planet, p. 8. Mark Lewis: Pierre Huyghe. Untitled (Human Mask), pp. 44–45. Also the references to Thacker can be found here.

205

206

Shifting to Non-Human Aesthetic

Harman, Graham: Object-Oriented Ontology. A New Theory of Everything, St. Ives (Pelican Books) 2018. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Transl. by Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane and Frances H. Simson. Vol. 3., London (Routledge and K. Paul) 1968. Higgie, Jennifer: “One Take: Human Mask”, in: Features (December 17, 2014). https://frie ze.com/article/one-take-human-mask (accessed January 7, 2022). Huyghe, Pierre: “Pierre Huyghe in conversation”, Interview by Dorothea von Hantelmann., in: Dorothea von Hantelmann/Asad Raza (eds.), Décor, Brussels (The Boghossian Foundation) 2016. Ingold, Felix Philipp: “Der Denker und das Biest”, https://www.recherche-online.net/te xte/jacques-derrida-felix-philipp-ingold-der-denker-und-das-biest/ (accessed January 7, 2022). Kafka, Franz: “A Report for an Academy”, in: Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.): Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories, New York (Schocken Books) 1983, pp. 250–259. Kafka, Franz: “The Metamorphosis”, in: Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.): Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories, New York (Schocken Books) 1971, pp. 89–139. Lewis, Mark: Pierre Huyghe. Untitled (Human Mask). London (Afterall Books) 2021. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: Das Auge und der Geist. Philosophische Essays, Hamburg (Meiner Verlag für Philosophie) 2003. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice/Séglard, Dominique: The nature: Course notes from the Collège de France, US (Northwestern University Press) 2003. Mönnig, Mona: Das übersehene Tier. Eine kunstwissenschaftliche Betrachtung, Bielefeld (transcript Verlag) 2018. Mooney, Christopher: “Pierre Huyghe”, in: Art Review, Oktober 2013, http://artreview.co m/features/october_2013_feature_pierre_huyghe/ (accessed January 7, 2022). Nancy, Jean-Luc: The Ground of the Image, New York (Fordham University Press) 2005. Rafael, Marie-France (ed.): Pierre Huyghe. On site, Köln (Walther König) 2013. Thacker, Eugene: In the Dust of this Planet, Winchester (Zero Books), 2011. The Met Museum Website https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/684796 (accessed January 7, 2022).

List of Illustrations Fig.1: Pierre Huyghe, Zoodram 4, 2011, Live Marine Ecosystem. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe. Fig. 2: Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011–12, Living entities and inanimate things, made and not made. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe.

Sabine Flach: L’animal que donc je suis – Pierre Huyghe and Jacques Derrida

Fig. 2 THE SCULPTURE ONLY: Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), 2012. Concrete cast on steel armature with beehive, live bee colony, plastic, and wax. Figure: 145 x 45 x 75 cm / 29 1/2 x 57 1/8 x 17 3/4 in. Plinth: 145 x 55 x 30 cm / 11 3/4 x 57 1/8 x 21 5/8 in. Beehive Dimensions Variable. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe. Fig. 3: Pierre Huyghe , Untilled, 2011–12, Living entities and inanimate things, made and not made. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe. Fig. 3 THE SCULPTURE ONLY: Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt), 2012. Concrete cast on steel armature with beehive, live bee colony, plastic, and wax. Figure: 145 x 45 x 75 cm / 29 1/2 x 57 1/8 x 17 3/4 in. Plinth: 145 x 55 x 30 cm / 11 3/4 x 57 1/8 x 21 5/8 in. Beehive Dimensions Variable. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris; Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA (13) with the support of Colección CIAC AC, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2023. Photo credit © Pierre Huyghe. Fig. 4: Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask), 2014. Film, color, stereo sound, 2 min. 66 sec. Running time: 19 min. Courtesy of the artist; Hauser & Wirth, London; Anna Lena Films, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe. Fig. 5: Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask), 2014. Film, color, stereo sound, 2 min. 66 sec. Running time: 19 min. Courtesy of the artist; Hauser & Wirth, London; Anna Lena Films, Paris. © Pierre Huyghe.

207

8. The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance Chonja Lee

Political Strawberries “Is It Possible to Be a Revolutionary and Like Flowers?”1 Dorothée Thébert and Filippo Filliger asked rhetorically in 2014 in the title of their Genevan dance spectacle inspired by the art and utopia of the Monte Verità. The word ‘revolution’ derives from Latin revolutio, act of revolving, from revolve, roll back. It designates a sudden radical change. We are more acquainted with the evolution, rather than the revolution, of the flowers. Vegetation grows slowly, standing in contradiction to sudden action. And, Flowers are associated with the aesthetic mainstream, kitsch, naiveté and an apolitical attitude. Plants in general, and their political potential in particular, are underestimated. But, flowers are polysemantic and do bear revolutionary potential as a non-human other. Recent studies in the fields of botany, philosophy and art have underlined the explosive political force of the vegetal.2  In this vein, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the director of documenta 13, provoked strong reactions when she put forward a denial of an anthropocentric world view, saying that the question was not “if we should allow dogs and strawberries to vote, but rather how a strawberry can articulate its political intention.”3 By asking this, Christov-Bakargiev imagined a world in which living beings do not have less political importance, simply due to their difference in appearance and communicative abilities. Christov-Bakargiev perceives so-called objects as subjects and imagines that we could “appreciate the knowledges of animate and inanimate makers of the world” 4 . This holistic concept of nature as not just a thing apart from the human, which serves its

1 2

3 4

“Peut-on être révolutionnaire et aimer les fleurs?” This question is also the title of an ikebana installation by the artist Camille Henrot. See e.g. Witzany/Baluška: Biocommunication of Plants (Signaling and Communication in Plants); Chamovitz: What a Plant Knows; Marder: Plant Thinking; Trewavas: Plant Behaviour and Intelligence; Irigaray/Marder: Through Vegetal Being; Coccia: La vie des plantes. Vahland: “Über die politische Intention der Erdbeere”. Christov-Bakargiev: The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and lasted for a long time, p. 5.

212

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

needs, but as a political dimension has become more and more common in the twentyfirst century with the critique of the Anthropocene and the ethical demands of the ecological crisis.5 However, plants, their inner life, and their political dimension had already come under scrutiny at the turn of the last century. Around 1900, artists mixed romantic ideas of ensouled botanical matter with fin de siècle dark visions of a potentially dangerous nonhuman other. With the reform movement and fantasies of originality that were emerging in this moment, nature became a sort of counter ideal to historicism and the eclectic copying of previous art movements. For that reason, art nouveau’s or Jugendstil’s appropriation of natural and especially vegetal form is a gesture of revolution, breaking free from historical canons and pushing toward seemingly unchartered territory. Floral dances are associated with this movement in fine and applied arts. A close reading of sources on the early modern dance around 1900 will reveal that danced flowers can unfold political potential, be it through a feminist reconsideration of the floral motif or an augmented connectedness to nature, proposed in panvitalistic dance theory. As we will see in the performances of Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) and Loië Fuller (1862–1928),human and plant not only get closer but become interrelated. How can humans turn into flowers and vice versa? There are three modes of animist transformations at work that bridge the different bodies, aptitudes and perceptions of humans and plants: Anthro-/and “vegemorphism”, movement and technology. These modes are still at work a century later. In the work Edunia (2009) by Eduardo Kac, a petunia is supposedly genetically crossed with the artist, the red veins of the petals symbolizing human parts – artist and flower morphing into each other through genetic technology. Céleste Boursier-Mougenots also created an interface between plant and technology, thereby addressing the relationships between the human and the nonhuman other in his work transHumUs (2015) at the 56th Venice Biennale. In the piece, mighty pine trees move thanks to motors hidden in their root clusters, controlled by the tree’s sap and communicating with electronic voices. The political dimension of such transgressions shines through, as it does in early modernist films and dances, and is accentuated by Boursier-Mougenot, who presented his conglomerate of works in the French pavilion under the neologism of rêvolutions. Dream and revolution, like revolution and flowers, are not irreconcilable opposites – as the following examples of danced flowers around 1900 will make clear.

Flowers Personified and Persons Florified Popular fairy-play films of around 1900 were studded with dance scenes and floral themes. They were often a recreation of romantic narrative material from literature, opera, ballet, and theater, in which the idea of an animated nature, with thinking, feeling, or speaking animals, flowers, and metals is omnipresent. This is also the case

5

For the later see the interdisciplinary SNSF-Sinergia research project “Mediating the Ecological Imperative”: www.ecological-imperative.ch.

Chonja Lee: Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance

in the French film Les Fleurs animées (1906) by Gaston Velle (1872–1942) and Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929).

Fig. 1: Film stills, Gaston Velle, scenario by Ferdinand Zecca (?), photography and tricks by Segundo de Chomón, Les fleurs animées, 1906, Pathé Frères, No. 1373, bw, tinted and stencil colored, silent, 3‘44‘‘, 105 m, France.

The film title Les Fleurs animées is an obvious direct reference to Jean-Jacques Grandville’s (1803–1847) 1847 book of the same name, and the ballet-inspired illustrations are arguably the most popular depictions of plant people in nineteenth-century Europe.6 The flowers in Grandville’s Les fleurs animées ask the flower fairy to turn them into humans, because they are bored and fed up with serving as metaphors for humans. The revolutionary flowers ask for emancipation and recognition. The stories, which can be located in the genre of physiologies, combine flowers, language and femininity and, despite the floral rebellion, they simultaneously cement conservative gender roles.7 Les Fleurs animées was translated as The Soul of the Flowers and The Flowers Personified, among other titles. The ambiguity of ‘animées’ as moving and ensouled is lost here. We find a catchy variation on this double meaning in the Pathé Frères film, where the flowers are moved and animated by various techniques; not only do they grow in an accelerated plant time before the audience’s eyes, they also are personified in human form, danced, and transformed back into flowers or floral ornaments. The transformation from human to flower in dance, with one adopting the movement patterns of the other was thematically old hat, but the cinematic tricks used for this purpose in Les Fleurs animées were a novelty, combined with effects of multimedia theater, dance, and magic shows. Shortly after 1900, there was an abundance of films of dancing flower fairies and butterfly women, which function as a kind of mise en abyme, illustrating the motion-based medium of film itself.8 But, the supposedly purely decorative motif of the flower has political and sexual associations. Flowers are suited to address things that are difficult to thematize. The packaging of revolutionary material in the form of vegetables and flowers has its origins in Romanticism with its socio-political upheavals. As in Grandville’s version, the flowers resist unfair treatment, being misused as love symbols for courtship in the cinematic adaptation of Fleurs animées, and when this fails, the rage of the spurned ones is vented on them, trampling them. The film shows us the flower-human transformation in both 6 7 8

Grandville: Les fleurs animées. See Kranz: “Blumenseelen: Botanik, Sprache und Weiblichkeit um 1850”, p. 96. See Minguet Batllori: Segundo de Chomón. The Cinema of Fascination, p. 34.

213

214

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

directions: The flowers become dancing women and a lustful man is locked in a pot and weeded as punishment. Evolution and devolution are masterfully staged and, in the process, question whether the human being is the crown of creation. The hidden agency of the plant, its movement and animation are vividly presented to the film audience. The weeded Chinese man in the pot lacks floral ornamentation in contrast to the flower ballerinas, underscoring the strong association of flowers with femininity. In Grandville’s Un autre monde, we also find a flowerless tobacco plant with a man’s head. On an advertising card for fertilizer from 1893, we see this exact depiction of a smoking tobacco with a man’s head. The stereotype of the “male tobacco”9 seems to be attributable to the fact that the stimulant was reserved for men. The tobacco plant is not only different in terms of its gender. In the so-called cinema of attractions and fairy plays, exotic decor was often used. However, the fact that the Chinese are shown as barbaric flower destroyers in Les fleurs animées, is perhaps also connected to the Boxer War, which had happened only five years previously. The Chinese lost this military conflict against the colonial powers of the German Empire, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, AustriaHungary, Russia and the USA. The political enemy is thus denounced in Les Fleurs animées as an ugly harasser of women and a destroyer of nature, who allows himself to be tricked and potted by flower women. In the end, he is imprisoned in the body of the plant, completely forfeits his humanity, which is already in doubt, and degenerates into a plant, a lower state of being in evolutionary theory. The power relationship between man and flower, but also between man and woman, is turned upside down here. Do the flowers that are animated in film and dance have a gender?

Sex and Gender of Flowers Flowers are in fact the reproductive organs of the plant. However, in terms of sexuality, cultural association and biological facts diverge, because the majority of plants are hermaphroditic, that is, they have both female and male sexual organs – ovaries and stamens. Sometimes these are found within a single flower, sometimes female and male flowers are found on the same plant, and finally there are also dioecious plant species with both female and male individuals. Compared to active animal reproduction, plant reproduction occurs passively by wind or pollinators. In early cinema, flowers are doubly linked to human regeneration. First, in direct sexual allusion to botanical and human sexuality, sometimes by means of anthropomorphic insects and flowers, and second, in a euphemistic religious adaptation, as a fairy-tale birthplace. The gendering of the flower is clearly feminine in early film and the visual art of the time. Male flowers, on the other hand, represent an effeminate man; the transformation of men into plants has a political history with defamations of French politicians as vegetal caricatures in the post-revolutionary era. Because of their clear gendering as feminine, flowers were also useful for symbolizing the dissolution of rigid gender roles from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Oscar Wilde, for example was identified with var-

9

See also Reynaert/Elhem: Le cinéma en fumée, pp. 15–16.

Chonja Lee: Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance

ious flowers symbolizing homosexuality like green carnations or sunflowers.10 In ballet, Mikhaïl Fokine’s Le Spectre de la rose, which premiered in Monaco in 1911, challenged the entrenched notion of the flower as a female creature. Vaslav Nijinski danced in a debutante’s dream as the ghost of the rose in a skin-tight pink costume with a hood of rose petals, performing ‘feminine’ arm poses in solos previously reserved for ballerinas.11 Isadora Duncan used the flower metaphor in her 1927 memoire in reference to her libido: First the timid, shrinking, slight body of the young girl that I was and the change to the hardy Amazon. Then the vine-wreathed Bacchante drenched with wine, falling soft and resistless under the leap of the Satyr, and growing, expanding; the swelling and increase of soft, voluptuous flesh, the breasts grown so sensitive to the slightest love emotion as to communicate a rush of pleasure through the whole nervous system; love now grown to a full blown rose whose fleshly petals close with violence on their prey. I live in my body like a spirit in a cloud – a cloud of rose fire and voluptuous response.12 The image of the flower impetuously enclosing the male prey, thus quasi carnivorous, turns the symbol of love into a monstrous voluptuous flower of female sexuality. Duncan, who was considered an icon of the women’s movement because of her self-determined life, had numerous open affairs, made waves with her demands for a liberated love life and for the recognition of out-of-wedlock motherhood, and continued to dance even when she was obviously pregnant. She saw her dance style, which was based on a gender-determined, civilized natural body, as being tailored to women, and accordingly she taught girls almost without exception.13

Becoming a Flower How did dancers ‘become’ flowers, transform into the non-human other? Were they overcoming the boundaries of their bodies through their performances or were they mere anthropomorphic flowers? The costume played an important role as a mediating device between the human and the floral. Sumptuous floral costumes were part of the flower dances in the repertoire of the classical ballet of the nineteenth century, such as Filippo Taglioni’s La Sylphide (1832), the temptations of the flower girls in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) or the flower waltz in Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (1892).14 A photograph shows Duncan circa 1900 in a costume fashioned as the flower-studded robe of the goddess of spring, the allegory of the blossom, in Sandro Botticelli’s painting Primavera (ca. 1482/1487). Isadora Duncan connected her dance to this masterpiece of fine art by us-

10 11 12 13 14

See Syme: A Touch of Blossom, p. 4. See also Boisseau: Panorama des ballets classiques et néo-classiques, pp. 469–477. Duncan: My Life, p. 227. See ibid., p. 53, p. 83. See Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, p. 53.

215

216

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

ing it as a paradigm for the expressive model of free dance.15 She had already performed spring-themed dances in New York in the late 1890s and in London in 1898 under the title Primavera, which remained part of her repertoire until 1909.16 She had spent hours studying the original in the Uffizi until, she recounted, she “actually saw the flowers growing”17 .

Fig. 2: Raymond Duncan, Isadora Duncan as Primavera, photography, 1899, Paris. [in: Duncan, Isadora: Memoiren, Zurich/Leipzig/Vienna (Amalthea) 1928 [1927], p. 115.]

Even as a child, she said, she had looked at a reproduction of Botticelli that hung in her family’s apartment and decided that she would make use of the human body, the greatest instrument, and that its language was movement. Duncan described viewing the painting as an experience of panvitalistic awakening:

15 16 17

See Splatt: Life into Art, p. 36; See Brandstetter: Tanz-Lektüren Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde, pp. 149–159. See Daly: Done into Dance, p. 93; see Schulze: Dancing Bodies Dancing Gender, pp. 55–61; see also Federn: “Introduction”, p. 8. Duncan: My Life, p. 67.

Chonja Lee: Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance

It came to me what a wonderful movement there was in that picture, and how each figure through that movement told the story of its new life. And then as Mother played Menelssohn’s Spring Song, as if by the impulse of a gentle wind, the daisies in the grass would sway and the figures in the picture would move, ...18 Duncan emphasizes an idea of nature stirred by the breath of life, which becomes her model. In the early Renaissance painting, she found “soft and marvelous movements,”19 not only in the dancing gods, but also in the “the soft undulation of the flower-covered earth.”20 Duncan perpetuated an image of femininity that equated women with nature, as beautiful life-givers, and above all with flowers – in their soft wavy lines, the floral veils of her wide-cut costumes served to represent figure and ground, human and landscape, at the same time. Finally, we find the animation of the dress taken to an extreme in the so-called serpentine dances, invented by Loïe Fuller, with the dancer herself disappearing behind the dress as if behind a mask.21 The serpentine style of dance presented a free, unconstrained style of dress, which was also called for by the feminist movement at a time when corsets and long skirts were still worn.22 The undulating cloth thus not only anticipated reforms in health and fashion, but also clearly stood out against the floral stage costumes of the ballet. The silk fabric unfolded flowing volumes in space through movements of the dancer’s arms, extended with aluminum or bamboo rods, and through her upper body under extreme exertion. In the performances, the boundaries of the body blurred; we see a living cloth, the ‘moving accessory’ itself becomes the protagonist. Or as the poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in a flower analogy, the dancers let the “widely stretched fabric bloom.”23 Fuller’s swirling veil dances illustrate the transitory nature of becoming a flower. Isadora Duncan bore witness to the floral analogy: “Before our very eyes she [Loïe Fuller] turned to many coloured, shining orchids, to a wavering, flowing sea flower, and at length to a spiral-like lily, the magic of Merlin, the sorcery of light, colour, flowing form.”24 Loïe Fuller, the inventor of this art form, titled her various pieces of choreography in reference to flowers,25 and especially later, with an increasing degree of abstrac18

19 20 21 22

23

24 25

Earliest existing fragment of Duncan’s writings, this is from a sheet of notes, unpublished, for a lecture in New York, 1898 or 1899, before her first trip to Europe. See Duncan: “Fragments and Thoughts”, p. 129. Duncan: My Life, p. 67. Ibid. See on the relationship between mask and person Olschanski: Maske und Person. Although the first calls for healthier dresses date back to the 1830s, it would almost take another hundred years before the corset was banned from women's fashion. See Peacock: La mode, pp. 9–28, p. 34, p. 42. “Au bain terrible des étoffes se pâme, radieuse, froide la figurante qui illustre maint thème giratoire où tend une trame loin épanouie, pétale et papillon géants, déferlement, tout d’orde net et élémentaire.” Mallarmé: “Autre étude de danse”, p. 174. Duncan: My Life, p. 56. Violet (1892), The Flower (1893), La Danse du Lys (1895), Une Pluie de Fleurs (1898). See Brandstetter: “Loïe Fuller – Mythos einer Tänzerin”, p. 108.

217

218

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

tion, as more general natural phenomena: La rose, La danse des fleurs, Le papillon, La danse du feu, La nuit, La tempête.26 From the beginning, the artist delegated the thematic interpretation of her dance to the viewer; for example, when she invented the serpentine dance in 1891, the public allegedly immediately shouted out, calling the billows of fabric a butterfly and then an orchid.27 The audience’s associations were in the earlier times of this new dance form guided by motifs on Fuller’s clothing such as snakes, flowers, or butterflies. In staging herself as something not clearly situated in the gender dichotomy, at first glance, Fuller seems to elude classical images of women. Nevertheless, female stereotypes of natura naturans and femme fleur are invoked here. The flower, in particular, with its feminine connotations, was employed as an analogy in reviews by French writers. Arsène Alexandre saw in her and her imitators a mimetic representation of the floral, calling them “flower women walking upside down,”28 and Jean Lorrain also pointedly asked “Woman or flower? One does not know”29 and referred to them as “dream flowers”30 .

‘Superhuman Dance’ and Queerness Modern dance thus did not create a new, self-determined image of women completely detached from the gender views of the nineteenth century. Rather, there was a continuity with the dance movements of the nineteenth century – both in the adoption of patriarchal structures and in the continuation of the theme of the flower. In contrast to the numerous fairy-tale-like flower dance films of around 1900, however, in serpentine dance and, also in other modern stage dances the flower motif is now transposed into the new formal language of organic abstraction and is definitely interpreted, in distinction from male behavior, as an ahistorical feminine dialogue with nature. One of Fuller’s most famous dances was Le lys, the Lily.31 In this choreography, often used as a final scene, she turned with her arms raised, forming a calyx in which the dancer disappeared completely, illuminated only by white light.32 Gaston Vuillier described the scene in his compendium of dance, which spanned the centuries, as the culmination of modern dance: “Now the dancer, dressed in the pallor and purity of the lily. The flower of the dream rises and rises ever more, blossoming outsized, almost touching the ceiling friezes.”33 Roger Marx eloquently described the stages of the danced lily, how, starting 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

See Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, p. 60, p. 74; see also Brandstetter: “Loïe Fuller – Mythos einer Tänzerin”, p. 110. See Fuller: Quinze ans de ma vie, p. 26. “Femmes à des fleurs qui marchent la tête en bas“ Alexandre: “Loïe Fuller”, n.p. Roger Marx shared this view of the inverted flower, see Marx: “Choréographie Loïe Fuller”, p. 108. “Femme ou fleur? On ne sait.” Jean Lorrain, cit. after Lista: Loïe Fuller, p. 199. “La fleur de rêve" Lorrain: “Loïe Fuller”, p. 129. Fuller had developed this dance from earlier dances such as La danse blanche and Le lys du Nil, i.e. the lotus flower, and performed it for the first time in the USA and from 1897 on with great success in Paris. See Lista: Loïe Fuller, pp. 232–235, p. 242, pp. 251–252, p. 254. Siehe Ochaim: “Loïe Fuller – Begegnungen mit einer Tänzerin”, p. 37, pp. 57–58. “Après le drame terrifiant du feu, voici la danseuse qui se dresse en une pâleur et en une pureté de lis. La fleur de rêve s’élève et s‘élève encore, s’épanouit démesurément grandie, atteignant presque les frises.” Vuillier: La danse, p. 372.

Chonja Lee: Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance

from Fuller’s body as the pistil, the leaves open in a circle, rising into a moving calyx. He concluded that in this “fantastic passionate plant, a unique symbol, man and nature would stand side by side, the fragile flesh of the flower illuminated by a feminine smile.”34 Human and flower merged into a new life form in the moving fabric, illuminated by spotlights.

Fig. 3: Samuel Joshua Beckett, Loïe Fuller dancing the Lily, ca. 1900, silver gelatin print, 10.1 × 12.5 cm, Great Britain, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1903, Pierre Pasquale emphasized the floral qualities of Fuller’s ‘superhuman’ dance, eventually calling her the ‘soul of flowers’ and of dance in general, highlighting her ability to animate things – even those without a soul: “To quench our thirst for forgetfulness, she humanized the flowers. Happier than her brothers, the lords of creation, she let her work come to life in silence and night, that decor of great things. No human blemish diminished their beauty.”35 The flowers, then, are a superhuman ideal; the dancer herself, indeed the human element, paradoxically disappears in this ‘humanization of flowers’, an abstract wondrous play of color created by colored lighting. Fuller cited Pasquale’s praise of her dance as floral animation in her 1908 memoirs but passed it off as an account of her younger life-partner Gab Sorère36 , who would have written it as a 14-year-old girl.37 Interestingly, in the same memoir, Fuller also enthusiastically described Gab’s movements as similar to those of a boa.38 Flower and 34

35

36 37 38

“… le regard se délecte aux caprices de cette végétation fantastique et passionnelle, qui juxtapose, dans un symbole unique, l’être et la nature, qui illumine du sourire de la femme la chair fragile des fleurs.” Marx: La Loïe Fuller. Estampes modelées de Pierre Roche, pp. 21–22. “Afin d'apaiser notre soif d’oubli, elle humanisa les fleurs. Plus heureuse que ses frères les créateurs, elle fit vivre son œuvre silencieuse et dans la nuit, ce décor des grandes choses. Nulle tache humaine n’amoindrit sa beauté.” Pasquale: “L'Âme de la danse sur Loïe Fuller”, n.p. Actually Gabrielle Bloch. Gab Sorère, cit. after Fuller: Quinze ans de ma vie, pp. 259–260. See Fuller: Quinze ans de ma vie, p. 250.

219

220

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

snake – two important themes of the serpentine dance – thus become reciprocal images of desire in the fictional or actual memory of the couple.39 Fuller herself, as contemporary reception attests, was perceived less as an erotic woman than as an asexual ideal.40 The Folies-Bergère offered an afternoon performance explicitly for mothers and daughters, so the serpentine dance was “suitable for younger viewers.”41 However, this did not prevent the visual artists from strongly sexualizing representations based on the serpentine dance, thus giving it an erotic touch, which, one must conclude from the written tradition, was not actually inherent in the performances. The sexualization and stereotypical depiction of the dancing woman on posters, in drawings and sculptures, served advertising purposes, but was also certainly rooted in the media translation of dance into visual art itself. This was because the undulating cloth, the fascinating moving forms, became devoid of any sensual appeal in the fossilized and immobilized state of visual art – sculptures and paintings had to be equipped with other, namely erotic, attractions. The body of the serpentine dancer becomes interchangeable, as the many imitators of Fuller prove; it disappears and appears only briefly and in fragments in the billowing webs of fabric. The art historian Julius Meier-Graefe complained that Fuller’s rather sturdy body did not correspond to his ideal of beauty and hence tried to concentrate entirely on the cloth: “One no longer wants to see anything human ...”42 Traditional stereotypes of femininity, found in ballet and the roles assigned to women in it, are not perpetuated here.43 Jérôme Doucet also wrote that there “... might very well have been a human of flesh and blood and bone – improbable as it may seem – inhabiting these flames, these mists, these webs of light and color essences of flowers ...”44 The fact that there were no male serpentine dancers indicates the still entrenched gender roles circa 1900. And this, despite the fact that the wielding of the bamboo stick under the ever more extensive layers of fabric required a great deal of strength and, at least in this respect, could have been performed by a man. The serpentine dance, as one can conclude from seeing various caricatures featuring dancing men,45 is a purely female, elegantly graceful entertainment.46 This perception may have resulted from the flowing line, which is perceived as feminine, in addition to the strong association of woman and costume and the feminine connotation of the natural phenomena depicted,

39

40 41 42 43 44 45

46

The term danse serpentine goes back to Fuller’s agent Rudolph Aronson. See Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, p. 75. At first glance, snakes and flowers have little in common, but in the nineteenth century analogies between these creatures were common and the serpentine dancer was conceived not only as a snake but also as a living flower. See Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, p. 82. See Garelick: Electric Salome, p. 33. Meier-Graefe: “Loïe Fuller”, p. 104. See Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, p. 79. Doucet: “Miss Loïe Fuller”, n.p. One parody shows us Leopold Fregoli dressed as a woman, dancing the serpentine. There were also Fuller parodies of the comedian Little Tich in England and Emilienne d’Alençon in France. See Lista: Loïe Fuller, p. 30; see Gordon: Why the french love Jerry Lewis, p. 62. Julius Meier-Graefe e.g. described Fuller’s dance as a feminine stroke of genius. Meier-Graefe: “Loïe Fuller”, p. 101.

Chonja Lee: Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance

such as flowers, butterflies, water, or stars. Even an abstract allegory bears gender implications.47 The serpentine dancer transforms into a flower, but in its organic abstraction, the flower remains a female connotated figure, or form. She defies original gender assignments fixed on the female body, as shown with the eyewitness accounts, but at the same time, she is a clearly feminine gendered ornament. Fuller’s open homosexuality was apparently denounced as part of the censorship of a performance of Oscar Wilde’s version of Salome in London, for which Fuller was responsible.48 However, lesbian sexuality became a real trend in the Belle Époque among the so-called coquettes, the sophisticated ladies such as Valtesse de la Bigne, Liane de Pougny, Sarah Bernhardt, and Emilienne d’Alençon, and was also erotically reinterpreted for men.49 In recent research, a ‘queer aesthetic’ has been recognized in Fuller’s art form; the dancer constructed herself asexually as an “other (insect, snake, butterfly, etc.)” and was thus allegedly withdrawing from the sphere of gender.50 However, this analysis misses the point that the representation of something ‘other’ is a central element of practically all stage performances, that these roles were already erotically interpreted in classical ballet and vaudeville, and that, moreover, the things represented are natural phenomena with strong gender connotations. Rather, Fuller distanced herself from conventional gender roles not through the motifs, but through the style or precisely the abstraction from the motif as an “unrecognizable other”51 .

‘Priestess of Pantheism’ and the ‘Natural Language of the Soul’ With the dancing of inanimate things such as a river, foliage, or flowers, as well as in corresponding turns of phrase that purport that the dancer not only embodies but ‘is’ these things, an animistic or panvitalistic understanding of the world is expressed in the modern dance movements that would later evolve into expressive dance. Fuller and Duncan saw their bodies as the medium to overcome the ‘effects of civilization’, to combine impression and expression, and to create a window into the inner nature of the unconscious – thus explicitly creating a counter-project to ballet, which was perceived as soulless.52 Dancers understood themselves as the ‘soul’ or ‘priestess’ and dance as primal worship.53 In 1903, Duncan predicted that the dance of the future “will have to become again a high religious art, as it was with the Greeks”54 and longed for the dancer of the future like a

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

See Wenk: Henry Moore Large two Forms. See McCarren: Dance Pathologies, p. 152. See Guigon: Les cocottes. Reines du Paris 1900, pp. 134–155. See Townsend: “Alchemic Visions and Technological Advances: Sexual Morphology in Loie Fuller’s Dance”, pp. 83–84. Townsend herself later uses this turn of phrase to describe Mallarmé's reception of Fuller. See ibid., p. 87. See Klein: “La construction du féminin et du masculin dans la danse des modernes”, p. 187; see Vincent: “Impossible Transmission”, p. 197; see Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, p. 55. See also Berger: “Vorstellungen des Abstrakten und Absoluten in Ausdruckstanz und Triadischem Ballett”, p. 231, p. 234. Duncan: Der Tanz der Zukunft, p. 44.

221

222

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

messiah – she herself was later to put the masses in Berlin into a state of ‘religious ecstasy’ and it was rumored that she could heal the sick.55 Fuller was also praised as a “priestess of pantheism”56 in 1907. There was a very strong feminization of dance, which led away from scenes with couples and often featured the solo of a female dancer. Dance was linked to ideas of redemption and liberation, and, had such strong feminine connotations through inherited tropes such as the embodiment of nature, that there was almost no room for ‘male’ interpretations within this dance movement.57 Art critic Ernst Schur equated the dancing woman with the plant: “There may be a male and a female kind of dance. The female kind is plant-like, the gently acting out, the blindly seeking.”58 This “blind seeking” is the ‘circumnutation’ of the vine described by Charles Darwin – Schur contrasted the vegetative groping with the masculine dance: “The masculine kind is animal-like, the grasping-wanting. Where the first one is blissfully abandoned, the other one wants to triumph.”59 The female dancer is thus characterized as a vegetative, blindly inwardly turned, gentle-souled being. Although this assignment of roles according to the contrast of vegetative-passive and animal-active seems sexist to us today, modern dance and its German counterpart, Ausdruckstanz60 , were also considered emancipatory at their time, because the dance’s eroticism oriented towards the male viewer was replaced by a self-reference to the soul.61 The dancer’s ‘ensoulment’ represents a departure from the traditional role binary of the nineteenth century, according to which the man is spirit and the woman, in contrast, body.62 However, a typically feminine attribute, that of eroticism, was thereby replaced with an emotionality likewise considered feminine.63 Misogynous implications were sometimes accompanied by rapturous equations of the dancer and the soul. The young Isadora Duncan also championed the idea of dance as an expression of the soul, claiming “that the movement of the body is the natural language of the soul.”64 She repeatedly lamented the unnatural “sterile”65 and mechanical movements of classical ballet, which were “not worthy of a soul.”66 In 1903, Duncan named the flower as the ideal of future dance: The flowers before me contain the dream of a dance, it could be named ‘The light falling on white flowers’. A dance that would be a subtle translation of the light and the whiteness. So pure, so strong, that the people would say: it is a soul we see moving, a soul that has reached the light and found the 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Duncan: My Life, p. 110. “Elle semble la prêtresse du panthéism … c’est presque, même un culte”. Nozière: Une fée, n.p. See Berger: “Vorstellungen des Abstrakten und Absoluten in Ausdruckstanz und Triadischem Ballett”; see also Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, pp. 230–231. Schur: Der Moderne Tanz, p. 18. Ibid. See Franco: “Ausdruckstanz. Traditions, translations, transmissions”, p. 80. See Klein: “La construction du féminin et du masculin dans la danse des modernes”, p. 189. See Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, pp. 37–38. See Klein: “La construction du féminin et du masculin dans la danse des modernes“, p. 189. Duncan: Der Tanz der Zukunft, p. 44. Ibid., p. 31. Duncan: My Life, p. 76.

Chonja Lee: Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance

whiteness. We are glad it should move so. Through its human medium, we have a satisfying sense of movement, of light and glad things. Through this human medium, the movement of all nature runs also through us, is transmitted to us from the dancer. ... It is a prayer, this dance; each movement reaches in long undulations to the heavens and becomes a part of the eternal rhythm of the spheres.67 In this description, we find Duncan’s characteristic panvitalistic idea of the soul dance of a flower and her conception of a connectedness with nature through ‘wave vibrations, which was a widespread idea in the science and art of the time. Duncan was a great admirer of Ernst Haeckel; she had read various of his writings as well as spent a few days with him in 1904 and danced for him.68 He then compared Duncan’s dance, according to her own notes, “to all the universal truths of nature, and said that it was an expression of monism.” 69 In 1915, she would eventually make an explicit reference to the history of botanical science: In my pamphlet The Dance of the Future I have endeavored to touch on the subject of form and movement in their relation to the Dance. That is the form of an organism and the movement of an organism are one and grow together. The study of this subject is most beautifully illustrated in Charles Darwin’s Movements of Plants – where he shows how the movement and form of the plant are one manifestation.70 Duncan thus proclaimed the plant as the ideal of her dance since form and movement are one in these growing organisms. Indeed, the movement of plants is partly reflected in their form. Darwin described these growth processes and recorded the plant movements directly indexically on coarsened plates. Duncan not only knew the writings of Haeckel and Darwin, but was also well-read in philosophy and poetry, interested in modern trends in the visual arts, and attended Monte Verità and Dada evenings by Hugo Ball and Hans Arp, for example. She liked to stage herself as an ahistorical innovator, a sympathizer of vitalism and the life reform movements. She connected her floral ideal to fine art, poetry, and science. Her autobiographical texts present her dance as a means for enforced connectedness with nature. At the same time, the idea of a directly expressive soul in dance made the modern body into a deliberately primitive, unconscious, mediumistic one. Fuller had developed the serpentine dance in 1891 based on a scene of hypnosis, performed in an Indian silk skirt. In hypnosis, the consciousness of the hypnotized is absent and the body of the subject becomes an ‘object’ that can be controlled, for example, by the hypnotist; the alternating state between animation and de-animation is therefore

67 68 69 70

Duncan: Der Tanz der Zukunft, pp. 32–33. Duncan: My Life, p. 94. Ibid., pp. 94–95. Duncan: “Form and Movement”, in: The Theater Dionysus Notebook, ca. 1915, Mary Fanton Roberts Collection, Collection of Isadora Duncan Materials, Museum of the City of New York, cit. after Daly: Done into Dance, p. 33.

223

224

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

already inherent in the serpentine dance from its legendary genesis. Fuller’s aim to create a sensitive dance of the soul was not recognized by everyone. In 1919, Emile JaquesDalcroze doubted that the cloth dances were spiritual or sensitive.71 As early as 1902, the artist Paul Klee, referring to the multimedia technical character of the serpentine dance, had written contemptuously: “The Fuller purely technical, purely decorative.”72 And in 1926, the art and dance critic John Schikowski also denied that the serpentine dance with its technical chicaneries was the ‘design of spiritual experience’, rather he saw in it base ornamentation: “The dance of Fuller was to the perfected modern art dance as an architectural ornament or a beautiful carpet is to a plastic work of art or a painting. It was craft, not high art.”73 Technology and the soul or spirituality as well as high art are presented as irreconcilable opposites in these reviews. Yet it is precisely the sophisticated technology – whether dance or lighting technology – that mediates between plant and human and creates transitory moments.

Mediating Technology The director Germaine Dulac cited both Duncan and Fuller as inspiration in the 1920s. Both had already implemented organic abstraction between technique and dance at the end of the nineteenth century, which Dulac also strove for in her vision of an integrated cinema modeled on organic movement. And like the two dancers, Dulac celebrated her art as a direct expression of the soul, combining plant expression with the human unconscious in her films.74 Her film theory implied that through the motif of the plant, the technological aspect of the medium was transgressed and reinterpreted into an organic one. In her abstract films, she assembled botanical time-lapse and dance-like movements of man and machine into meandering ornamentation. Although the cinematic sequences appear dreamy, they suggest drastic upheavals and animistic transgressions between species as well as the animate and inanimate things of the world. Dulac recognized a conceptual kinship between Fuller’s dances and botanical timelapse; both were technically complex processes. As with flower blossoming within seconds in time-lapse, the rolling fabric webs of the serpentine dance films show an increased movement within a static frame.75 Here, the plant movements are stylized as impersonal dynamism, and the ornament becomes a mediator between the extremes of figuration and abstraction. Botanical time-lapse films overcame the different temporalities of people and plants by making flowers sprout within seconds. French avant-garde film makers were not the first ones to put the films of sprouting flowers in new contexts, 71 72 73 74

75

See Burkhalter: Vers une kinesthéthique, pp. 159–160. Klee: “diary entry 18.4.1902”, p. 119; see also Burkhalter: Vers une kinesthéthique, p. 9. Schikowski: Geschichte des Tanzes, pp. 129–130; see also Meinzenbach: Neue alte Weiblichkeit, p. 103. In Dulac’s printed text, the direct reference to Duncan and Fuller is missing; by rephrasing it as “a dancer”, it is generalized. However, their names appear in the annotated drafts of the article, which are at the Cinémathèque Française. See Dulac: Du sentiment à la ligne (typescript), p. 1. Film critic Louis Delluc had also compared the blooming flowers of Jean Comandon's films to Loïe Fuller’s flying multicolored skirts. See Amad: Counter-Archive, p. 248.

Chonja Lee: Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance

but botanical time lapse were already popularized with images of anthropomorphic and dancing flowers shortly after their invention in 1898. The numerous didactic short films of the great French film studios, as well as the Weimar advertising film Das Blumenwunder (1923), combine human and plant phenomena and expression in this way. Movement in this period, in its inversion as emotion, its inner agitation, is closely linked to the concept of the soul, which is why it has been interpreted as an indication of an invisible plant soul.76 In the first place, plant movement is not locomotion, but metamorphosis. The plant is characterized, according to Aristotle, by its sedentariness. However, its form, which makes growth processes comprehensible, expresses a kind of proto-cinematic temporality and movement in a single image or a single shot. It is precisely in the movement of to the human eye immobile plants – whether through dance or tricks such as the timelapse technique – that the capabilities and topoi of the medium of film are staged: the animation of things and the expansion of human perception. The arrested movement of plants, the morphogenetical vigour, their Élan vital to speak with Henri Bergson, preserved in their forms, can be animated by the technology of time-lapse photography, as well as by the human body in dance – their seemingly fixed form, is thus brought into flux and growth. Politics assumes common ground. Humans and plants, and their relative power in this world, are very different. The overturning of this imbalance by human plants and vegetable humans around 1900 represents a renaissance of romantic natural philosophy, as has been shown here. But the transgression of the species boundary can also generate images of horror. Thus, in the last third of the nineteenth century, a reinterpretation of the plant as an active, man-eating ‘half-animal’ appears in Charles Darwin’s research on carnivorous plants the vegetable monster, occasionally with aspirations to take over the world,77 is born. The above – mentioned examples of the political strawberry, anthropomorphic flowers, striding trees and dancing flowers show that the question is less about being a plant or being a human and more about transitory processes of perceiving, becoming, and representing. The anima vegetativa is constructed through different media, but despite its various appearances it is always a political matter; it addresses the borders of culture and nature, subject and object, sex and gender, as well as the conception of life, agency, temporality, movement, and latent potentials of the human and the plant.

References Alexandre, Arsène: “Loïe Fuller”, n.d., n.p. in: Press clippings, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Amad, Paula: Counter-Archive. Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète, Colombia (Colombia University Press) 2010. Berger, Renate: “Vorstellungen des Abstrakten und Absoluten in Ausdruckstanz und Triadischem Ballett”, in: Susanne Deicher (ed.): Die weibliche und die männliche Linie. 76 77

See e.g. d’Udine: L'art et le geste, p. VIII. See Franz Oz: Little Shop of Horrors (1986).

225

226

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

Das imaginäre Geschlecht der modernen Kunst von Klimt bis Mondrian, Berlin (Reimer) 1993, pp. 221–255. Boisseau, Rosita: Panorama des ballets classiques et néo-classiques, in collaboration with René Sirvin, Paris (Éditions Textuel) 2010. Brandstetter, Gabriele: “Loïe Fuller – Mythos einer Tänzerin”, in: Gabriele Brandstetter/ Ochaim, Brygida Maria (eds.): Loïe Fuller. Tanz, Licht-Spiel, Art Nouveau, Freiburg im Breisgau (Rombach) 1989, pp. 86–146. Brandstetter, Gabriele: Tanz-Lektüren Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde, Frankfurt a. Main (Fischer Taschenbuch) 1995. Burkhalter, Sarah: Vers une kinesthéthique: Danse moderne, art visuels et perception (1890–1940), unpublished PhD-thesis, University of Geneva, 2012. Chamovitz, Daniel: What a Plant Knows, New York (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 2013. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn: The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and lasted for a long time, Pressemitteilung der documenta 13, Kassel, 2012. Coccia, Emanuele: La vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange, Paris (Éditions Payot & Rivages) 2016. Daly, Ann: Done into Dance. Isadora Duncan in America, Bloomington (Indiana University Press cop.) 1995. Doucet, Jérôme: “Miss Loïe Fuller”, in: La revue illustrée, 22 (1903), n.p. D’Udine, Jean: L’art et le geste, Paris (Félix Alcan) 1910. Dulac, Germaine: Du sentiment à la ligne, anotated typescript (article draft for Schema), n.d., 5 pp., Cinémathèque Française (DULAC408-B26). Duncan, Isadora: Der Tanz der Zukunft (The Dance of the Future). Eine Vorlesung, translated and introduced by Karl Federn, Leipzig (Eugen Diedrichs) 1903. Duncan, Isadora: “Fragments and Thoughts”, in: Duncan Isadora: The Art of the Dance, introd. by Sheldon Cheney/Raymond Duncan et al., New York (Theatre Arts) 1928, pp. 128–129. Duncan, Isadora: My Life, New York (Horace Liveright) 1927. Federn, Karl: “Einleitung”, in: Isadora Duncan: Der Tanz der Zukunft (The Dance of the Future). Eine Vorlesung, translated by Karl Federn, Leipzig (Eugen Diedrichs) 1903, pp. 5–10. Franco, Susanne: “Ausdruckstanz. Traditions, translations, transmissions”, in: Susanne Franco/ Marina Nordera (eds.): Dance Discourses. Keywords in Dance Research, London (Routledge) 2007, pp. 80–98. Fuller, Loïe: Quinze ans de ma vie, Paris (Félix Juven) 1908. Garelick, Rhonda K.: Electric Salome. Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism, Princeton/ Oxford (Princeton University Press) 2007. Gordon, Rae Beth: Why the French love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema, Stanford (Stanford University Press) 2001. Grandville, J. J.: Les fleurs animées, introduction by Alphonse Karr, text by Taxile Delord, Paris (Gabriel de Gonet) 1847. Guigon, Catherine: Les cocottes. Reines du Paris 1900, Paris (Parigramme) 2012. Irigaray, Luce /Marder, Michael: Through Vegetal Being. Two Philosophical Perspectives, New York (Columbia University Press) 2016.

Chonja Lee: Revolutionary Flowers: Sex, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Dance

Klee, Paul: “Diary entry 18.4.1902”, in: Felix Klee (ed.): Tagebücher von Paul Klee 1898–1918, Köln (Dumont/Europaverlag Zürich) 1957, p. 119. Klein, Gabriele: “La construction du féminin et du masculin dans la danse des modernes”, in: Claire Rousier (ed): Histoires de corps. A propos de la formation du danseur, Paris. (Cité de la musique, centre de ressources musique et danse) 1998, pp. 185–194. Kranz, Isabel: “Blumenseelen: Botanik, Sprache und Weiblichkeit um 1850”, in: Ulrike Hanstein/Anika Höppner/Jana Mangold (eds.): Re-Animationen. Szenen des Auf- und Ablebens in Kunst, Literatur und Geschichtsschreibung, Weimar (Böhlau) 2012, pp. 93–114. Lista, Giovanni: Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de la belle époque, Paris (Stock) 1994. Lorrain, Jean (Paul Alexandre Duval): “Loïe Fuller”, in: L’écho de Paris, (4.12.1893), cit. after Lista 1994, pp. 129–130. Mallarmé, Stéphane: “Autre étude de danse. Les fonds dans le ballet, d’après une indication récente”, in: Bertrand Marchal (ed): Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, Paris (Gallimard Paris) 2003, pp. 174–187. Marder, Michael: Plant Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, New York (Columbia University Press) 2013. Marx, Roger: “Choréographie Loïe Fuller”, in: George Moreau (ed.): Revue encyclopédique, Paris (Larousse), 1893, col. 106–109. Marx, Roger: La Loïe Fuller. Estampes modelées de Pierre Roche, s.l. (G. Peignot et fils/Charles Hérissey) 1904. McCarren, Felicia: Dance Pathologies, Stanford (Stanford University Press) 1998. Meier-Graefe, Julius: “Loïe Fuller”, in: Otto Julius Bierbaum (ed): Die Insel. Monatsschrift mit Buchschmuck und Illustrationen, 3 (1900), Frankfurt am Main (Insel Verlag) 1981 [1900], pp. 100–105. Meinzenbach, Sandra: Neue alte Weiblichkeit. Frauenbilder und Kunstkonzepte im Freien Tanz. Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan und Ruth St. Denis zwischen 1891 und 1934, Marburg (TectumVerlag) 2010. Minguet Batllori, Joan M.: Segundo de Chomón. The Cinema of Fascination, Barcelona (Generalitat de Catalunya Institut Catalalà de les Indústries Culturals) 2010. Nozière, Fernand: Une fée. Loïe Fuller à l’Hippodrome, newspaper excerpt, 5.1.1907. Ochaim, Brygida Maria: “Loïe Fuller – Begegnungen mit einer Tänzerin”, in: Gabriele Brandstetter/Brygida Maria Ochaim (eds.): Loïe Fuller. Tanz, Licht-Spiel, Art Nouveau, Freiburg im Breisgau (Rombach) 1989, pp. 13–85. Olschanski, Reinhard: Maske und Person. Zur Wirklichkeit des Darstellens und Verhüllens, Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2001. Peacock, John: La mode. De 1900 à nos jours, Paris (Thames & Hudson) 2007. Pasquale, Pierre: “L’Âme de la danse sur Loïe Fuller”, in: La revue illustrée, 22 (1.11.1903), n.p. Renonciat, Annie: La vie et l’œuvre de J. J. Grandville, Catalogue de l’œuvre par Claude Rebeyrat, Courbevoie (ARC Édition-Vilo) 1985. Reynaert, Philippe/Elhem, Philippe: Le cinéma en fumée, Paris (Contrejour) 1990. Schikowski, John: Geschichte des Tanzes, Berlin (Büchergilde Gutenberg) 1926. Schulze, Janine: Dancing Bodies Dancing Gender. Tanz im 20. Jahrhunderts aus der Perspektive der Gender-Theorie, Dortmund (Ed. Ebersbach) 1999. Schur, Ernst: Der Moderne Tanz, München (Gustav Lammers) 1910.

227

228

The Turning: Soil, Plants and Human Imagination

Splatt, Cynthia: Life into Art. Isadora Duncan and Her World, ed. by Dorée Duncan, Carol Pratl, Cynthia Splatt, New York/London (W. W. Norton & Company) 1993. Syme, Alison: A Touch of Blossom. John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of fin-de-siècle Art, University Park (Pennsylvania State University Press) 2010. Townsend, Julie: “Alchemic Visions and Technological Advances: Sexual Morphology in Loie Fuller’s Dance”, in: Jane Desmond (ed.): Dancing Desires. Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage, Madison (The University of Wisconsin Press) 2001, pp. 73–69. Trewavas, Anthony: Plant Behaviour and Intelligence, Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2014. Vahland, Kia: “Über die politische Intention der Erdbeere”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung (31.5.2012), https://sz.de/1.1370514. Vuillier, Gaston: La danse, Paris (Hachette et Cie.) 1898. Wenk, Silke: Henry Moore Large two Forms. Eine Allegorie des modernen Sozialstaates, Frankfurt am Main (Fischer) 1997. Witzany, Günther/Baluška, František (eds.): Biocommunication of Plants (Signaling and Communication in Plants), Berlin, Heidelberg (Springer-Verlag) 2012.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Film stills, Gaston Velle, scenario by Ferdinand Zecca (?), photography and tricks by Segundo de Chomón, Les fleurs animées, 1906, Pathé Frères, No. 1373, bw, tinted and stencil colored, silent, 3‘44‘‘, 105 m, France. Fig. 2: Raymond Duncan, Isadora Duncan as Primavera, photography, 1899, Paris. In: Duncan, Isadora: Memoiren, Zurich/Leipzig/Vienna (Amalthea) 1928 [1927], p. 115. Fig. 3: Samuel Joshua Beckett, Loïe Fuller dancing the Lily, ca. 1900, silver gelatin print, 10.1 × 12.5 cm, Great Britain, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mrs. Walter Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 2005, inv. No. 2005.100.951. Fuller Metropolitan Museum 1900, n.p./ Samuel Joshua Beckett | [Loie Fuller Dancing] | The Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org)

9. ‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like Hanne Loreck

In art, the political comes in different guises. It may be implied by the subject of a picture, of an installation or the subject of a performance – in terms of a certain message or content. In this case, the political is addressed rather explicitly. With respect to art, the political may as well lie in the art theorist’s choice of the art works to engage with but also in the choice of the theoretical and methodological framework through which he or she engages with the art work. As Donna Haraway never ends to repeat: It greatly matters which sort and set of thoughts we think with. And I would like to add: It greatly matters with which images we imagine and which images animate our cultural and social imaginary. Within this framework two case studies will be performed. Their subjects are works by two women artists of two different generations: Danish artist Gitte Villesen, born in 1965, and Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, 1862–1944. The focus, however, will be on the historical position of the painter Hilma af Klint and her relation to plants as non-human living beings. Hilma af Klint has only recently been discovered and has received much acclaim for her large scale abstract paintings. To the present, the contemporary reception has basically been concerned with two aspects of her artistic production: the main concern has been her spirituality and working in seances. This concern struggles with the cliché of the independency of the true art producer in contrast to af Klint’s deliberately dependent or mediumistic art practice when working from dictation of the so-called ‘Higher Masters’ and, furthermore, not only on her own, but in sisterhoods; the other issue concerns the history of abstraction and the requirement of rewriting art history with respect to the invention of abstraction – Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian or Hilma af Klint after all?

232

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

Hilma af Klint, Notebook #588, Blumen, Moose und Flechten [Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens], 1919/20 For the following considerations, I chose a different point of view, since these bizarre rankings do not interest here. I am in search of the artist’s expression of a certain vitalism, an immaterial force without chemical or physical evidence, yet, as bioromanticists wanted it, shared among all living beings and much discussed among artists of her time. Art historian David Lomas convincingly argued that Hilma af Klint’s work with its recurring floral and tendril forms is firmly rooted in botany.1 In contrast to Lomas, though, I don’t want to confirm the leading role of botany for the change of paradigm from naturalism to non-objectivity around 1900 again. Instead, talking about plants and their representations in early modernity follows Jacques Derrida’s philosophical approach to nonhuman others. It tries to make out “the conceptual possibility of both ethical and communal relationships with non-human beings – a possibility, which […] cannot strictly be separated from material possibilities (such as, for instance, institutional, emotional or cultural possibilities)”2 . Certainly, Hilma af Klint “does not provide us with an environmental ethics or a politics understood as an organized set of specific rules, axioms and guidelines for thought and conduct.”3 But her visual materializations may be seen in terms of an artist’s respons-ability, in Donna Haraway’s sense of the word, towards nonhuman living beings. It is as if Hilma af Klint had anticipated artistic research into the then contemporary idea of ‘Umwelt’ – from the perspective of a painter, a theosophist, and later an anthroposophist. The idea of Umwelt or environment / surrounding world had been brought forward by biologist and biosemiotician (“cybernetics of life”) Jakob Johann von Uexküll (1864–1944) in 1909.4 According to him, these self-centered worlds have to be seen from a non-anthropocentric perspective to get the right understanding of adaption in evolution. The argument’s implication for biology was the end of (Ernst Haeckel’s) ‘Außenwelt’ as a sphere existing separate from life, but the interdependency of all living beings. Contemporary scientific botanical studies were often accompanied by photographic illustrations, if we think of botanist and photographer Anna Atkins’s (1799–1871) work on algae for example. Atkins had become interested in the cyanotype process in the middle of the 19th century producing images through so-called sun-printing, or, as we might call it, through a photogrammatic self-imprint of watery transparency and jellyfish-like presence. Compared to the advanced use of the technical media in contemporary science, Hilma af Klint stayed with the traditional artistic medium of drawing. For her, it was the physical activity to experience her subject as a living organism. The immediacy of her research medium created, as I argue, intersubjectivity, and to anthropomorphize the plant here is not the same as to subject it to the human scale and scientific or economic interests. The contrary is the case: as early as one hundred years ago, it already signals

1 2 3 4

See Lomas: “The Botanical Roots of Hilma af Klint’s Abstraction”, p. 225. Bretz: ‘But Who, We?’: Derrida on Non-Human Others, p. 3; https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2 021 (accessed September 9, 2019). Ibid. von Uexküll: Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere.

Hanne Loreck: Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like

a post-anthropocentric approach. It thus got close to the concept of sympoeisis in the sense of Donna Haraway and her call for the survival of what she names terra. Though not anthropocentric, there is a certain anthropomorphism in Hilma af Klint’s investigations into plants in her now famous notebook #588, Blumen, Moose und Flechten [Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens; title in German in the original] from 1919/20. In political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett’s words: We at first may see only a world in our own image, but what appears next is a swarm of ‘talented’ and vibrant materialities (including the seeing self). A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations. In revealing similarities across categorical divides and lighting up structural parallels between material forms in ‘nature’ and those in ‘culture,’ anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphisms.5

Fig. 1: Hilma af Klint, Notebook #588, Blumen, Moose und Flechten [Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens], 1919/20, entries 6/10-13/1920, pp. 62–63. From: Burgin, Christine (ed.): Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods. Publication in collaboration with the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 2018, pp. 226–227.

But is there any visual evidence of liveliness in Hilma af Klint’s Blumen, Moose und Flechten? In January 1917 the artist had written emphatically: First I will try to understand the flowers of the earth … then I shall study with equal care that which lives in the waters of the world. Following that, the blue ether with all its variety of animal species will become the object of

5

Bennett: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, p. 99.

233

234

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

my study, and finally I shall penetrate the forest and shall study the damp moss, the trees, and the many animals that inhabit the cool, dark woods.6 One of the results of the research, she had announced, is the notebook with a collection of her almost daily plant analysis. Strikingly though, it dismisses any naturalistic depictions of plants. Instead it operates non-figuratively and comparable to diagrams. Annotated in meticulous German and using the scholarly Latin names for the botanic species, af Klint used non-representational modes. Mostly employing an elementary geometric vocabulary of shapes – squares, some of them transected diagonally, a cross, a circle or an ellipse –, she demonstrates their possible characteristics within a bigger processual system. Delicate little arrows indicate transformations, discontinuous circle lines visualize movements, tiny little starbursts cause a form to radiate or slightly blurred edges mark a flow. “To render”, anthropologist Natasha Myers writes, “means to represent in the sense of ‘to recite’, ‘to echo’, and ‘reflect’, but it also means ‘to create.’”7 Accordingly, rendering is “a practice that ‘inflects’ representations […].”8 “It is the action of ‘infusing a quality into a thing’, ‘describing as being of a certain character’, and ‘portraying, or depicting artistically.’”9 The challenge now is to amplify the diagrammatic methods and to realize with which means Hilma af Klint’s rendering of life forms is accomplished. Commonly a diagram is defined as a graphic, mostly two-dimensional, non-figurative design10 . The diagram’s performance is one of indication rather than of representation, and diagramming can be understood as processing and unfolding vital relations. However, methodologically this is not enough. Hilma af Klint’s diagrammatic practice is more comprehensive. It cannot only be found visually in the single art works but consists of a whole range of tools, methods, and scientific paradigms. The artist was well informed about the life-sciences and especially about botany’s and biology’s academic systems of visual knowledge production of her time. Most likely she was in touch with her naval family’s interest in mathematics and fairly acquainted with chemistry – not to forget about her professional art education in traditional portrait and landscape painting at the Academy of Fine Arts of Stockholm as well as her occupation as a draftswoman for the Veterinary Institute at the same place. In 1899, her painter friend and life companion of that time, Anna Cassel, and herself were employed as illustrators to exercise naturalistic drawings with the purpose of curing horse diseases. These drawings will later appear in veterinarian John Vennerholm’s long term reference book on operation techniques of horses.11 Vennerholm

6 7 8 9 10 11

Hilma af Klint, 7.1.1917, HaK 579, pp. 84f., quoted from Burgin (ed.): Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods, chapter Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens, p. 160. Myers: Rendering Life Molecular. Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter, p. 31. Ibid. Ibid., p. 32. It is this appearance that makes af Klint’s art so prone to the notorious debate about who had really been the first abstract artist. Vennerholm: Grunddragen af hastens operative speciella kirurgi [Elements of Special Operative Surgery of the Horse]. The author mentions both af Klint (as the main draftswoman) and Cassel by name in his foreword, but the illustrations’ captions don’t differentiate between the single makers.

Hanne Loreck: Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like

was an early believer in animal rights and convinced of an ethics which would go against the contemporary idea of animals as machines and not as living beings who may suffer from illnesses. But he also knew that only the focus on the working animal and its economic value of benefit would change the insupportable conditions of animal treatment and veterinary medical research in Sweden at that time. As long as the vet had to fight for more advanced facilities, his publications should represent the most recent insights into surgery equipment and techniques. The two draftswomen were supposed to support his research results with compelling visuals. Hilma af Klint’s biographer, Julia Voss, vividly shows the influential confrontation with the horse’s anatomy, bones, muscles, tissue but also with its organs and especially the female and male sexual apparatus.12 Conceivably, biological and microbiological literature was brought to their attention too, since Vennerholm had a deep interest in the then advanced field of Robert Koch’s bacteriological and Rudolf Virchow’s pathological studies. As a tool of their observation of the microorganic breeds, they used the culture dish, a flat cylindrical glass bowl. We find its abstracted, two-dimensional version, the circle, over and over again in Hilma af Klint’s later work and in her plants’ examinations to discuss here, too. Often in the notebook drawings, this plane is filled with little dots which immediately provoke the time-based idea of cellular or molecular processes. It was in this active and vibrant microsphere that the new field of relationality came up. German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, marine biologist, and gifted artist, Ernst Haeckel was internationally discussed. He had discovered, described and named countless new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all organisms, and coined many terms in biology; he is also said to be the first scientist to speak of ‘ecology’ (though in the rather mechanistic sense of the balance in nature (1866)). Not only from an artist’s point of view, the stylized beauty of his Kunstformen der Natur [Art Forms of Nature], published between 1899 and 1904, intrigued its observers as had done his illustrated book on single-cell organism, Die Radiolarien (RHIZOPODA RADIARIA), Berlin 1862, earlier on. The ongoing debate on the emergence of life, on life forms, on the cellular structures of all organisms got theosophical circles to question the development and evolution of the spiritual dimension of life forms. Even though Hilma af Klint’s veterinary anatomical experience remained a one-time job, it may have given her a certain vocabulary at hand and deepened her interest in non-human others. Indeed, the flowers, mosses and lichens of her notebook of twenty years later don’t tell the story of their mastery, not even of their mastery as botanical subjects. This beautiful notebook – and there exist two more notebooks with the same subject – explores plants of different species as non-human others with subject-like sensibilities and abilities. On the one hand, the plants function as a mirror, on the other hand, their singular lives diffract anthropocentric knowledge systems and especially human superiority within them. What is particularly striking, however, is, that the recipient is faced with the scientific botanic information – the flowers’, mosses’s, and lichens’ taxonomic names – together with the non-figurative representations devoid of any optical recognition of nature. Instead, verbal annotations refer to human social, psychic, and behavioral characteristics (we cannot ignore that many of them carry religious moral virtues and tell of rigid discipline). It is exactly here, where the boundary 12

See Voss: Hilma af Klint – »Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen«, p. 186.

235

236

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

between humans and plants melt down and traditional classificatory divisions between them don’t work any longer. Vitalism is at stake. More important, however, seems to be famous anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner’s conviction of 1910 that plants “participate in a spirit that permeates all of nature as well as man.”13 According to Steiner, whose adherent af Klint had been since 1908, trees and other plants cover an important part of the planet’s surface as its sense organs, consequently “the earth and its vegetal integument comprise a single, living organism.”14 Though for Steiner this encompassing conception of plant life originated in the spirit, his statement could pass as Donna Haraway’s, then, of course, with a different ideological background. Seen from today, doing artwork on lichens sounds very much ahead of time. It is as if Hilma af Klint had known about their fundamental biological status. Chinese-American anthropologist at the University of California and Researcher on the Anthropocene at Aarhus University, Denmark, Anna Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilities of Life in Capitalist Ruins and her colleagues famously write in their introduction to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017): Lichens are symbiotic assemblages of species: filamentous fungi and photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria. Lichens are themselves a kind of landscape, enlivened by their ghosts. Many filamentous fungi are potentially immortal. This does not mean they cannot be killed; yet, unlike humans, they do not die just from age. Until cut off by injury, they spread in networks of continually renewed filaments. When we notice their tempo, rather than impose ours, they open us to the possibility of a different kind of livability. And they continue in their introduction: The ghosts of multispecies landscapes disturb our conventional sense of time, where we measure and manage one thing leading to another. Lichens may be alive when we are gone. Lichens are ghosts that haunt us from the past, but they also peer at us from a future without us. These temporal feats alert us that the time of modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters.15 This conception of time somehow relates to Hilma af Klint’s esoteric or religious ideas of the relation between the plant-like and human beings. The inbetween-ness or double nature of the chosen specimen are of interest here. Mosses and lichens are not subject to any binary, imperial, and hierarchical classification, also not with respect to their sexuality. This is expressed explicitly on page 69 of Blumen, Moose, Flechten. Here, the annotation ascribes a resisting force against any binary division of the moss. They are fascinating examples with which to demonstrate the sympoetic synergy so important for eco-feminist thinking today. Hilma af Klint crossed her scientific curiosity and experience with 13 14 15

Lomas: “The Botanical Roots of Hilma af Klint’s Abstraction”, p. 232. Ibid. Tsing/Swanson et al: “Introduction. Haunted Landscapes”, pp. G9-G10.

Hanne Loreck: Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like

her spiritual convictions – all in line with Goethian-Steinerian natural philosophy as an alternative to Enlightenment natural science. At her time, natural science was not only a fashionable and much discussed field. It also feels as if it was af Klint’s mission to realize and teach those features of the living being in support of the concept of interspecies communities and coexistence but also to demonstrate examples of alternative ways of both representation and perception or experience. This is why most of her work looks as if taken from a primer. In my examples, I focused on plants. Af Klint’s research into affinities included the animal world as well as the mineral world but also bacteria. The rather recent insight of the human subject being subjected to microbes and bacteria, was already with af Klint.16 Two years prior to the plant notebooks, in The Atom Series, 1917, the artist had already explored the atom between its physical materiality, the body, and the universe in the sense of an interconnected whole. The then most recent physical studies: British physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) and Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962) had developed atomic models in 1911 and 1913 respectively. In these – again annotated – drawings of the atom, too, she had not depicted qualities but relationships and transformations within the elementary or microscopic world. Hilma af Klint’s plant images differ significantly from the images in natural science of her time. Those experimental drawings were still based on speculation, not on observation. Hers however seem to intersect traditional botanical studies with the ancient idea that the worldly stuff we could see and feel had an unseen ‘inner constitution’; matter, it was thought, was made up of subvisible atoms or particles. […] For centuries scientists in a range of disciplines have expended great effort refining techniques to make matter visible, tangible, and workable at the molecular scale.17 The notebook drawings participate in these efforts, however, they aim at a different message. Theirs is to inform about the ‘inner constitution’ or the psychospiritual component which will remain an effective force which cannot be made visible in terms of matter. Somewhat paradoxical, they want to visualize power, even Higher Powers, and therefore join in the molecular. It is here where the “stuff of life” comes to matter,18 to quote anthropologist Natasha Myers. With respect to Hilma af Klint, Myers’s metaphor is of significance. On the one hand, it shows the huge impact matter has gained within the new materialist thinking today, on the other hand it embodies the general notion of importance, perhaps even of urgency which does not necessarily need matter or material as carrier. In other words, the artist’s research interest is not primarily directed into the “perceptible world of aggregate substances.”19 Although the abstract images carry the botanical names of plants, the images don’t look like plants. The graphical schemes, Hilma af Klint developed and annotated, could rather be seen as models. Their message would then be

16 17 18 19

Of course, working with real bacteria as Suzanne Anker so convincingly does today, wasn’t an option then. But there might be shared ideas and intentions already a century ago. Myers: Rendering Life Molecular. Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter, p. X. Ibid. Ibid., p. XI.

237

238

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

read in rather contemporary terms as a demonstration of life next to the molecular. Myers speaks about “the affectivity of matter” and reports that the scientists and especially the cristallographers she was talking to and whose experiments and visualizations she was watching had come to the insight that protein molecules behave dynamically and even ‘breathe.’20 Visualizing life forms in a way that those properties we associate with life can be seen, probably touched (or even heard) may touch the viewer in turn – even independently from shared religious beliefs. For me, Hilma af Klint’s visual notes resemble scientific models, including among others, two-dimensional diagrams, flow charts, and analogical models. Yet science is not their aim. When Myers states that “[t]he low status of models in the historical and social studies of science literature reflects a general lack of interest in pedagogy and training in science”21 , this is not completely true for Hilma af Klint. With her work, it is quite the contrary. As I have shown elsewhere22 , teaching is a major concern for her. Despite not being a feminist in the sense of sociopolitical action, I’d certainly count the artist among the feminists of her time. Different from Cartesian approaches to objectivity which decline “one’s complicity, feminist objectivity requires accounting for the limits, contingencies, and partiality of what we can and cannot see and know about the world”.23 Thus, the artist may less be regarded as the probable inventor of abstraction, but can be acknowledged as a predecessor of the non-taxonomical but relational understanding of plants and their lively being in the cosmos. The artist obviously wanted to teach her audience something we call awareness today. Her work is about the visual imagination of something rather small, the plant as sympoetic mechanism – supernatural and earthbound at the same time. More implicitly than explicitly, her research into the spiritual dimension of the plant was directed against any scientific taxonomical approach as a goal in itself; instead, the plant’s characteristics aimed at the recognition of the plant as a non-human other, companion, and confederate.

Gitte Villesen, There is an Affinity. (Dioramas, Paludariums, Höch, Francé and Butler), 2019 Gitte Villesen’s video installation There is an Affinity. (Dioramas, Paludariums, Höch, Francé and Butler) from 2019 is my second model for living beings in art, apart one hundred years from the first example. A model is never the thing itself. According to Haraway, it is a work object. There is an Affinity consists of three video-projections and a vitrine representative of displays of Museums of Natural History. The vitrine shows books, a small tree model and a greatly enlarged detail of one of R. H. Francé’s illustrations of microorganisms. The artist works with a mixture of different forms of botanic and artistic representations

20 21 22 23

See ibid., p. 4 and p. 6. Ibid., p. 247, fn. 64. Loreck: “Hilma af Klint, Spiritual Alphabetisation”, pp. 211–226; modified version: Loreck: “Anlässlich von Hilma af Klints Notizbuch #588: Blumen, Moose, Flechten”, pp. 22–33. Myers: Rendering Life Molecular. Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter, p. 15.

Hanne Loreck: Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like

from different times in history. In addition, these representations wander between science and fiction and, to be more precise, between science and science fiction. Villesen’s main source is the Botanical Museum in Berlin, founded as early as in 1679. Her focus is on some of its three dimensional displays of exotic landscapes and of environments in the vicinity. But she also integrates a drawing by the famous Austrian-Hungarian founder of bionic and modern soil biology, R. H. [Raoul Heinrich] Francé (1874–1943)24 . A student of Haeckel’s and, like him, artistically gifted, he illustrated his books with his own drawings. The diagrams in Die Pflanze als Erfinder [The Plant as Inventor], 1920, may well demonstrate how he visually suggested the interdependencies and correlations between the animate elements.

Fig. 2: Gitte Villesen, There is an Affinity. (Dioramas, Paludariums, Höch, Francé and Butler), video installation, Botanisches Museum Berlin, 2019, installation view. Courtesy Gitte Villesen.

Between 1906 and 1910 he edited The Life of Plants in 8 monumental volumes, four of them from his own pen. Rudolf Steiner, whose follower Hilma af Klint later became, had reflected on Francé’s conception of plants, including their life cycles and behavior, and attributed perceptive qualities to them25 – which reminds us of her cosmo-ecological endeavor in her later plant notebooks. Francé also postulated a comparative biology to treat plants and animals as equal which was not yet in accordance with the general scientific conviction. A psychovitalist by self-attribution, Francé was against any mechanical ideas of natural selection and the struggle of the fittest but established the idea of an active and creative energy of the cell plasm, a kind of psychic but also reasonable ability to adopt to the surrounding living beings on non-organic living conditions. This vital force comes 24

25

See the informative article Aescht: “Das verrückte Integral. Auguste Comte und das biozentrische Weltbild Raoul Francés”, pp. 217–253, online published December 14, 2018; http:// journals.openedition.org/cps/1222 (accessed May 9, 2021). Steiner/France [sic]: “Das Sinnesleben der Pflanzen”, pp. 482–487.

239

240

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

as an inner ability, not as a supernatural, metaphysical gift and is grounded in the interdependencies among living organisms. An even more contemporary sounding notion belongs to biocentrism. Life philosopher Ludwig Klages is said to have introduced the ethical concept of biocentrism26 in 1913 and directed it against anthropocentrism as the precondition of human rule, oppression, and exploitation of nature. Francé’s biotechnical repertoire and especially his survey of seven geometrical figures within it – crystal, sphere, plane, column, strip, screw, cone – remind us strongly of Hilma af Klint’s basic vocabulary of research.

Fig. 3: R. H. Francé, Die Pflanze als Erfinder [The Plant as Inventor], Stuttgart 1920; fig. p. 18.

26

See Aescht: “Das verrückte Integral. Auguste Comte und das biozentrische Weltbild Raoul Francés”, p. 233.

Hanne Loreck: Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like

Fig. 4: R. H. Francé, Die Kleinwelt des Waldbodens [The Soil Biota of the Forest], fig. in: Vom deutschen Walde [Of the German Forest], Stuttgart (Franckh) 1927, p. 65, used by Gitte Villesen, There is an Affinity. (Dioramas, Paludariums, Höch, Francé and Butler), video installation, Botanisches Museum Berlin, 2019.

Among the over 60 books he published in his life-time, there was Das Leben im Ackerboden [Life in the Soil], 1922. 27 Francé had even developed a new graphic technique, the Federstich or “feather stich”, which he derived from copper engraving. Organic farming is based on his research into microorganisms living in the soil. These elements are his vital activists which build up the so-called biocenosis – and he succeeded in creating the optical impression of a seething mass even in the static drawing. Francé’s illustration of soil biota which Gitte Villesen uses as a visual quote could well have influenced two of Donna Haraway’s conceptual neologisms: one being the transformation of the human not into the posthuman, instead the Homo should be replaced by humus, the other one is her advice to think and act as compostists. “We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman”28 , she says provocatively and later she repeats, “I am a compostist, not a posthumanist: we are all compost, not posthuman.”29 It is the artist’s choice of materials and her decision of method which engages nonhuman actors in questions of responsibility. Similar to Hilma af Klint, Gitte Villesen, too, operates indirectly with the non-human others, be it plants, be it microorganisms. However, instead of a scientific argument, she chooses two images and different kinds of museum displays and quotes from a novel. Carefully observing the so-called dioramas and paludariums of both exotic and local landscapes, Villesen’s camera gaze blurs the distinction between real nature and its downscaled version in the vitrines. Here they serve to impart botanic knowledge. Though you doubt the nature of the scenarios from the beginning with the visual signs of artificiality of leaves, rocks, skies, and lake surfaces, you 27 28 29

Other books by him are about the forest and about corals. Haraway: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, p. 55. Ibid., pp. 101–102.

241

242

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

are still absorbed by the scenarios. At certain moments, then, you realize the character of the model through the reflections on the glass while what you see is accompanied by the noises of the visitors to the museum. This artistic stratagem immediately situates the knowledge. Part of the 20:45 min video is based on three of Francé’s illustrations of 1913 through 1929 I have already mentioned before. Here, Villesen operates with scale again, this time blowing-up the elements Francé had found in liquid manure and put down in his exemplary drawing. The magnification of the micro dimension of the most vital particles in the decaying sludge all of a sudden creates things which might come out of Octavia Butler’s science fiction trilogy, part one, Dawn, 1987, from which we can read her choice of quotes. Villesen decided on this one image, not on the scientist’s many writings. As early as in 1905, in his astounding Germs of Mind in Plants, Francé had pathetically distanced himself from the system of taxonomy which would transform living beings into dead matter. Meadows, he wrote, would thus become “withered corpses […] collected into the folios of [the ‘true botanist’s’] herbarium, and whose crushed and discolored bodies he described in a thousand minute Latin terms.”30 In her urgent plea for symbiogenesis as the ruling idea of respons-ability in Nature, Haraway states: “It matters which thoughts think thoughts.”31 Or, again in her words, “It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts with.”32 And the Norwegian explorer of biodiversity, Andreas Hejnol, explains in Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking that it is exactly metaphors which have to be rethought to achieve a different understanding of evolution, one from teleology and steady progress in the evolution of complexity to the complexity of evolution. According to him, “new biologies are forcing us to tell very different stories with dramatically different metaphors – ones that challenge long standing notions of hierarchy and complexity and that ultimately reconfigure our own place in the world of living creatures, past and present.”33 Though Gitte Villesen’s work refers to botanical and biological knowledge practices, is not so much about metaphors in terms of nomenclatures. Yet her superimposition of the optical zoom in Francé’s images of the soil with Butler’s science fiction merges animate and inanimate things and thus outlines a different world. The passages chosen show a dialog between a human survivor of the dying and ruined earth and a dweller of a cyborgian spaceship carrying all sorts of tentacular critters. They talk about the interdependencies between the carrier and its animate, writhing, slithering load. Butler’s Dawn is both, a dystopia and a utopia. While Noah’s ark carries couples and stays within conventional ideas of salvation by heterosexual reproduction, gender and sexuality are differently organized by a third gender. I don’t want to go deeper into the gender aspect here. But it shows that one example of Haraway’s SFs or string figures, science fiction, operates with the non-binary or the third. The political potential of both, Gitte Villesen’s There is an Affinity and SF-stories in general, is about the imaginary, about imagining relations differing significantly from the status quo. Previously, I have called

30 31 32 33

Francé: Germs of Mind in Plants, p. 13. Haraway: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, p. 57. Ibid., p. 118. Hejnol: “Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking”, p. G87.

Hanne Loreck: Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like

the spaceship in Butler’s speculative fabulation Dawn a cyborg. Of course, a spaceship insinuates the idea of high-tech and futurism. However, I want to use it in a different way and recall one of Haraway’s many definitions of the cyborg: Cyborgs are not machines in just any sense, nor are they machine-organism hybrids. In fact, they are not hybrids at all. They are, rather, imploded entities, dense material semiotic ‘things’ – articulated string figures of ontologically heterogeneous, historically situated, materially rich, virally proliferating relatings of particular sorts, not all the time everywhere, but here, there, and in between, with consequences. Particular sorts of historically situated machines signaled by the words information and system play their part in cyborg living and dying.34 As the tentacular subject in the dialog states, the spaceship is everything but a machine or a chemical laboratory but contains or, more likely, is even made of mutable living organisms: plants, animals, matters of all kinds, and speaking subjects together guarantee the position of rescue. What role, however, does the differentiation between animate and inanimate matter play with respect to nature and the places and objects of imparting botanical and environmental knowledges here? As quantum field theorist Karen Barad states, even so-called inanimate beings are mortal. In her super-interesting recent essay No Small Matter. Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimematterings from 2017, physicist and feminist author Barad explains the life cycles of particles. “According to QFT, matter is not eternal. Birth and death are not merely the inevitable fate of the animate world; so-called inanimate beings are also mortal. Particles have finite lifetimes, decay times.”35 Though informed by one of the most complex theories there currently is, it quickly becomes clear that any categorical opposition between inanimate and animate beings is of no critical use for the creation of more-than-human histories aiming at the livability of the planet. To sum up, the above elaborations aren’t about living beings, bacteria for example, ‘making’ art or participating in art productions like animals. Instead I discussed examples of models or representations of living beings, models that might affect our imagination of different worlds through blurring the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, between depiction and abstract invention and between science and fiction. The two different points of time – art works a hundred years apart from each other – have several implications: Gitte Villesen doesn’t show any interest in living actors co-producing the aesthetical outcome. Indeed, she presents a critical combination of recent and historical scientific image material and of literature together with a referencing those institutions that stand for the dissemination of knowledge concerning the planet and life on earth. In Hilma af Klint’s time, there was no aesthetic practice with living matter. She had obviously also not been interested in and/or in touch with those art theories in (Western) art history which circled around the idea of art making as an organismic and psychophysical process guaranteed by the artist’s own organic corporeality. As art 34 35

Haraway: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, p. 104. Barad: “No Small Matter. Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimematterings”, p. G112.

243

244

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

historian Friedrich Weltzin compellingly shows the autopoietic version of chemical creation became artistically influential too: substances organizing themselves in structures which, as a result, looked like vibrant matter.36 Hilma af Klint didn’t play on the creator principle; she herself didn’t procreate, but rather investigate principles of operating bodies – bodies of plants and plant-like organisms – beyond the mere organic in a planetary and sympoietic way. Formally, the work we have close-read here, looks non-objective. Yet it gains much more relevance if the artist isn’t placed as the new heading heroin within the art history of early abstraction. Within the more recent debate on non-human nature, these notebooks and drawings might be received through Félix Guattari’s claim that the ecological problem is a matter of culture- and psyche-formation and taking action with concrete measures against environmental pollution alike.37

References Aescht, Erna: “Das verrückte Integral. Auguste Comte und das biozentrische Weltbild Raoul Francés”, in: Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, 35 (2014), pp. 217–253, http:// journals.openedition.org/cps/1222 (accessed May 9, 2021). Barad, Karen: “No Small Matter. Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies of Spacetimematterings”, in: Anna Tsing/Heather Swanson et al (eds.): Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis/London (University of Minnesota Press) 2017, pp. G103-G120. Bennett, Jane: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC (Duke University Press) 2009. Bretz, Thomas Helmut: ‘But Who, We?’: Derrida on Non-Human Others, 2016. Dissertations, 2121, https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2121 (accessed September 9, 2019). Burgin, Christine (ed.): Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods, Publication in collaboration with the Hilma af Klint Foundation, texts by Iris Müller-Westermann and afterword by Johan af Klint, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 2018. Francé, R.H.: Germs of Mind in Plants, trans. A. M. Simons, Chicago (Charles H. Kerr & Company) 1905. Guattari, Félix: The Three Ecologies (orig. 1989), trans. Ian Pindar / Paul Sutton, London (The Athlone Press) 2000. Haraway, Donna: Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham (Duke University Press) 2016. Hejnol, Andreas: “Ladders, Trees, Complexity, and Other Metaphors in Evolutionary Thinking”, in: Anna Tsing/Heather Swanson et al (eds.): Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis/London (University of Minnesota Press) 2017, pp. G87-G102. Lomas, David: “The Botanical Roots of Hilma af Klint’s Abstraction”, in: Iris MüllerWestermann (ed.): Hilma af Klint – A Pioneer of Abstraction, Kat. Moderna Museet, Stockholm u.a., Ostfildern/Ruit (Hatje Cantz) 2013, pp. 223–241. 36 37

See Weltzin: “Zeuge der Zeugung. Biochemische Körperkonzeptionen und das abstrakte Bild als Lebewesen”, pp. 301–319. See Guattari: The Three Ecologies.

Hanne Loreck: Critical Knowledge Practices from the Margins: Plants and the Like

Loreck, Hanne: “Hilma af Klint, Spiritual Alphabetisation”, in: Kurt Almquist/Louise Belfrage (eds.): Hilma af Klint. The Art of Seeing the Invisible, Stockholm (Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation) 2015, pp. 211–226. Loreck, Hanne: “Anlässlich von Hilma af Klints Notizbuch #588: Blumen, Moose, Flechten”, in: Hanne Loreck/Andrea Klier/Sara Lindeborg (eds.): (Mit) Pflanzen kartographieren / Mapping (with) Plants, Hamburg (Material Verlag) 2017, pp. 22–33. Myers, Natasha: Rendering Life Molecular. Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter, Durham (Duke University Press) 2015. Steiner, Rudolf/France, Raoul H. [sic]: “Das Sinnesleben der Pflanzen”, in: Lucifer – Gnosis, 31 (1906), pp. 482–487. Tsing, Anna/Swanson, Heather et al: “Introduction. Haunted Landscapes”, in: Anna Tsing/ Heather Swanson et al (eds.): Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Minneapolis/ London (University of Minnesota Press) 2017, pp. G1-G14. von Uexküll, Jakob: Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, Berlin (Verlag Julius Springer), 1909. Vennerholm, John Georg Heribert: Grunddragen af hastens operative speciella kirurgi [Elements of Special Operative Surgery of the Horse], Stockholm (P. A. Nordstedt & Söner) 1901. Voss, Julia: Hilma af Klint – »Die Menschheit in Erstaunen versetzen«, Frankfurt a. Main (S. Fischer Verlag) 2020. Weltzin, Friedrich: “Zeuge der Zeugung. Biochemische Körperkonzeptionen und das abstrakte Bild als Lebewesen”, in: Olga Moskatova/Sandra Beate Reimann/Kathrin Schönegg (eds.): Jenseits der Repräsentation. Körperlichkeiten der Abstraktion in moderner und zeitgenössischer Kunst, Munich (Wilhelm Fink Verlag) 2013, pp. 301–319.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Hilma af Klint, Notebook #588, Blumen, Moose und Flechten [Flowers, Mosses, and Lichens], 1919/20, entries 6/10-13/1920, pp. 62–63. From: Burgin, Christine (ed.): Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods. Publication in collaboration with the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 2018, pp. 226–227. Fig. 2: Gitte Villesen, There is an Affinity. (Dioramas, Paludariums, Höch, Francé and Butler), video installation, Botanisches Museum Berlin, 2019, installation view. Courtesy Gitte Villesen. Fig. 3: R. H. Francé, Die Pflanze als Erfinder [The Plant as Inventor], Stuttgart 1920; fig. p. 18. Fig. 4: R. H. Francé, Die Kleinwelt des Waldbodens [The Soil Biota of the Forest], fig. in: Vom deutschen Walde [Of the German Forest], Stuttgart (Franckh) 1927, p. 65, used by Gitte Villesen, There is an Affinity. (Dioramas, Paludariums, Höch, Francé and Butler), video installation, Botanisches Museum Berlin, 2019.

245

The Art of Gardening in South Africa: Three Cases of Eco-Political Landscaping from the Global South Jonathan Cane

Introduction This chapter presents three artistic gardening practices that attempt to create, imagine and grow forms of resistance to apartheid and its afterlives in South Africa. The chapter describes the emerging debate in South Africa about radical forms of ‘black gardening’ which attempt to name and support progressive, emancipatory garden practices which are: (1) not primarily determined by alienated, oppressive black garden labour under colonialism and apartheid; (2) not based only on ‘useful’ subsistence or small scale farming; and (3) which engage with spiritual, religious and cosmological practices. It is essential, the chapter argues, to think outside of the dualisms and binaries – indigenous/exogenous, nostalgic/progressive, green/brown, formal/informal, real/imaginary – which characterise the debate on gardening and its forms in South African art history. To rehearse this argument, the present chapter is explicitly triangulated, presenting three landscape practices spanning 1985 through to 2020 which are to be read parallel to each other, simultaneously not chronologically, suggesting opportunities for opening not closing dialogue. The first landscape practice presented is the work (and here it is important upfront to underline the importance of the notion of work; labour is essential for thinking clearly about postcolonial landscapes) by the collective MADEYOULOOK, Nare Mokgotho and Molemo Moiloa. Between 2019 and 2020 this Johannesburg-based duo has been curating a set of land-orientated projects called ‘Ejaradini’ and ‘IZWE: plant praxis’. Incorporating archival research, installations, workshops, publications, screenings and practices of collaboration, MADEYOULOOK have been asking questions about ‘landedness’, ‘relationships to natural life’, and ‘land justice’. They argue that “land holds memory and meaning, and this is increasingly at the forefront of social discourse in South Africa. Issues of land ownership, restitution and even environmental concerns all intersect in the land debate in South Africa.”1 Their work “considers how the South African land debate

1

Madeyoulook: Izwe, n.p.

248

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

might find resonance with similar discussions happening contemporaneously in other contexts, and how South African artists, land activists and practitioners might enter into solidarity with movements across the world.”2 While ‘Izwe: plant praxis’, curated at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg (2019–2020), was engaged in forging Global South solidarities with, for instance, the Bö’u Xavante Association of Marãiwatsédé and Brazilian Paulo Tavares,3 the project ‘Ejaradini’ was emphatically planted in Johannesburg and the specificities of its artistic ecologies and the opportunities of of ‘black gardening’. This practice of what Svetlana Boym might call ‘restorative nostalgia’,4 is followed by an analysis of a photographic triptych, The Night of the Long Knives I, II, III (2013) by South African artist Athi-Patra Ruga. This ‘speculative queer’ landscape is part of the series ‘The Future White Women of Azania’ and is held in the permanent collection at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town. Partly autobiographical, partly speculative, Ruga’s photographs depict a taxidermy zebra and a cast of balloon- and flower-clad characters arranged in a lush tropical tableau. Framed by plastic plants, potted palms and funereal wreaths the ‘Future White Woman’ poses astride her zebra, a pageant queen, a matriarch, a drag artist, she is the ruler of Azania, the mythical Pan-African country imagined by political activists and anti-apartheid thinkers. The mise en scène constructed by Ruga is both silly and deeply serious, a reworking of past myths into a queer landscape for performing the new. As Dudumalingani Mqombothi suggests, this is a “narrative that resuscitates a dead past. And then fucks with it.”5 It is this campy reworking of – or “fucking with” – the colonial conventions of the “imperial conversation piece”6 or the ethnographic portrait that denaturalises the South African landscape. The discussion of queer ecology in the ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ leads to the final section on a dynamic anti-apartheid landscaping phenomenon in 1985 South Africa called the People’s Parks. Also known as ‘Peace Parks’, this popular political gardening movement was short-lived and occurred in the black ‘townships’ located within what was then known as the PWV (Pretoria, Witwatersrand, Vereeniging). In Oukasie, Atteridgeville, Mamelodi, Alexandra, Soweto, Mohlakeng, Tembisa and Kagiso, participatory processes variously attributed to the African National Congress (ANC), the United Democratic Front (UDF), ‘yard committees’, and independent youth-led groups resulted in a multitude of small-scale place-making activities. These radical sites of struggle were called People’s Parks by the activists, photographers and academics who witnessed and documented the grassroots activity. It is through this archive of description, photography, and film – now called the People’s Parks Archive – that we have access to the striking, original and moving places. Many of the parks were brutally destroyed by the apartheid security forces. Bulldozed and burnt, these utopian spaces are currently receiving scholarly and artistic attention after two decades of neglect. Through the project, ‘1985! The People’s Parks, Sites of Struggle and the Politics of Plants’ a collective of museum practitioners, curators and historians are digitising the Archive and reconsidering both the

2 3 4 5 6

Madeyoulook: Izwe, n.p. Tavares: “Trees, Vines, Palms and Other Architectural Monuments”, pp. 188–195. Boym: The Future of Nostalgia, p. 44. Mqombothi: “The Future White Women”, n.p. See Tobin: Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

photographs that make up the bulk of the collection, but also the complex politics of the resistance to oppression. These ‘political and participatory’ landscapes conclude the triad of case studies.

1. MADEYOULOOK: ‘Black gardening’ and restorative nostalgia ‘Ejaradini’ was a multi-sited art project that grew gardens as sites to explore “the potential of black gardening and its histories.”7 The project involved interviews, archival research, participatory processes and site-specific installations at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). The project made what is so far the most explicit attempt to describe what MADEYOULOOK call ‘black gardening’. MADEYOULOOK argues that black gardening is “an existing practice of refiguring a colonial inheritance,”8 referring to “a variety of growing practices undertaken autonomously by gardeners of black African descent” in spaces that were previously designated as black areas.9

Fig. 1: MADEYOULOOK, Ejaradini, Installation. Photographer: RicardoMarcusK. Courtesey of MADEYOULOOK.

The concept allows for the emergence of “political potential” in “social experiences and connections.”10 Black gardening insists on (i) a plurality of stylistic conventions often determined by locale; (ii) not recognising “strict borders between plants used for nutritional, spiritual, medicinal and decorative purposes, choosing instead to cultivate a 7 8 9 10

Madeyoulook: “Ejaradini. Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums”, p. 62. Ibid. Ibid, p. 65. Ibid.

249

250

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

sociality among plants”11 and (iii) demonstrating multiple functions, exhibiting a complex “entanglement with inherited colonial gardening models rather than oppositional to them”, functioning as a “still-emergent model for the formation of new relations to colonial ruins and past oppressive spaces”.12 How, then, is it that black gardening is a still-emergent model for the formation of new relations? Firstly, it is argued that a praxis of self-teaching, unskilled experimentation, small-scale learning, interpersonal connections and knowledge sharing are kinds of ‘unsystematic cultivating’ that are outside of Eurocentric knowledge systems.13 Secondly, black gardening points to the limits on the capacity for control: due to a lack of resources and many environmental factors, attempts at domestication, order, and possible desire for mastery over nature are curtailed in complex ways. And thirdly, black gardening gestures towards a limit of respectability politics: trimmed hedges, European flowers and well-kept lawns are used in “altered form of respectability politics … inclined towards humanising and dignifying practice of the self” rather than towards domination.14 What ‘Ejaradini’ elaborated is a theory of gardening that significantly extends Jill Casid’s notion of ‘landscape trouble’: troubling landscape and landscaping trouble. Rather than landscape as “a settled place or fixed point we instead encounter landscape in the performative, landscaping the relations of ground to figure, the potentials of bodies, and the interrelations of humans, animals, plants, and what we call the ‘environment’.”15 Casid makes a “plea for mucking in the tough terrain of that which resists any easy unification or forced harmonies … mucking around in the pleasures, difficulties, shame, and desires of the differences within and without.”16 This call for muck(ing) is well-attuned to complex questions of failure, persistence, ruination, ecological crisis and colonial debris. The project ‘Izwe: plant praxis’ functioned on a larger scale than ‘Ejaradini’ and was described by MADEYOULOOK as: considering some of the broader questions of landedness; our relationships to natural life as a trigger or spark for undoing our assumed episteme, and reimagining from the perspective of everyday life. Consequently Izwe: plant praxis brings together practitioners working across the majority world to consider complex questions around land justice in its many manifestations. The Anthropocene, the commons, South Africa’s role in relation to the rest of the continent, our embracing of the neo-liberal order, and our relationships to solidarity movements across the world, all lie dormant in the soil.17

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Ibid. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 69. Ibid. Casid: “Epilogue: Landscape in, around, and under the performative”, p. 98. Ibid., p. 99. Madeyoulook: Izwe, n.p.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

MADEYOULOOK suggests that: the land holds memory and meaning, and this is increasingly at the forefront of social discourse in South Africa. Issues of land ownership, restitution and even environmental concerns all intersect in the land debate in South Africa. However, land questions have the potential to spark much wider conversations that extend beyond the framework of the current public discussion.18 ‘Izwe: plant praxis’ was a multipart exhibition series with related public programmes that brought together artists, arts organisations and community projects from across the “majority world engaging with contemporary ecological issues, questions of land justice, indigenous agricultural practices, and concepts of territories and place”. The project was explicitly international and sought to foster Global South dialogue and solidarity in order to consider “how the South African land debate might find resonance with similar discussions happening contemporaneously in other contexts, and how South African artists, land activists and practitioners might enter into solidarity with movements across the world.”19 The word ‘izwe’ in the Nguni languages means something more than land, Motherland, the country where you were born and territory. For instance, the English-isiZulu Dictionary20 offers the following examples: ukubanga izwe (to fight over land); Izwe licwebile (The land is at peace); abomdabu kulelizwe (people born in this country); Kuleyondawo izwe lithé dálala (At that place the land is open and exposed). The word has a strong political valence and is used as a slogan: ‘Izwe lethu’, an interjectional phrase meaning ‘our land’ or ‘the land is ours’. In the 1950s anti-apartheid song, Sikhalel’izwe lakithi the word expresses some of these political dimensions: Sikhalel’izwe lakithi                     We mourn for our land Elathathwa ngabamhlophe        Which was grabbed by the whites The contemporaneous song, Thina sizwe esimnyama articulates a similar sentiment: Sikhalela                                We weep Sikhalela izwe lethu         For our land MADEYOULOOK draws on these rich and multiple etymologies to locate their project in the longer history of the struggle against apartheid and its afterlives. What they suggest is twofold. First, that to understand landscape art in South Africa you have to centre land. Second, they insist on a global reading – a South-South or Majority World reading – of the South African landscape. This was evident in the series of exhibitions included in the ‘Izwe’ programme: ‘Unearthing’ by Namibian artist Isabel Tueumuna Katjavivi was an extension of the 2018 exhibition, ‘They Tried to Bury Us’ at the Namibian National Art Gallery that created a scene of remembrance to those killed in the OvaHerero 18 19 20

Ibid. Ibid. Doke/Vilakazi: English-isiZulu / isiZulu-English Dictionary, pp. 149–180.

251

252

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

and Nama Genocides in Namibia. Using the invocation by James Baldwin, that “All your buried corpses now begin to speak”, Katjavivi incorporated oral histories of descendants “of those who have been removed from their ancestral lands, voicing the complexities of death, belonging and identity that remain within the sand.”21 The photographic basis of her work explores sand and trees as materials that retain memory. The exhibition, ‘Trees, Vines, Palms and Other Architectural Monuments’ by Brazilian Paulo Tavares in collaboration with the Bö’u Xavante Association conducted a forensic analysis of the sites of A’uwe Xavante dispossession, mapping and surveying ancient villages and cemeteries to provide evidence of ancestral possession of territories. What the exhibition shows is that: The sites studied display very similar feature in that a patch of vegetation had grown precisely in the arc-like shape of the ancient village. Made of a combination between medium and large trees, palms and other types of plants and vines, these botanic formations contain certain species that are associates with Xavante traditional occupation and land managing systems.22 The exhibition, ‘Parallel Lives: Reconnecting the Tomorrow Land’ by Sangwoodgoon and Hong Kong Farm shared collective experimented with “arming, agricultural practice and social engagement.” Looking to “create a platform that connects aesthetic portrayals of the land with the physical working of the land” the project sought “to engage audiences with the land, both as a physical site and as a rich terrain of the imagination.”23 Finally, ‘Territorios’ at the Visual Arts Network of South Africa and the Arts Collaboratory network, Más Arte Más Acción in Bogota, Cooperativa Cráter Invertido in Mexico City, Soleil d’Afrique in Bamako, Doul’art in Douala and Art Group 705 in Kyrgyzstan. A key dialogue in this series included a conversation between Moiloa and Mokgotho and South African academic Mvuselelo Ngcoya. In ‘Plant Provocations: Botanical Indigeneity and (De)colonial Imaginations’24 Ngcoya and coauthor Kumarakulasingam argue that everyday black rural subsistence gardening is, contrary to expectations, located outside the field of claims made on indigeneity in contemporary discourse; that is to say, this form of landscaping doesn’t articulate a political or aesthetic connection to and occupation of land. The writers suggest that in South Africa this kind of black gardening can be set in productive tension with what they call ‘indigenous gardening’, a form of landscaping with a long and complex history of white, colonial attempts to foster an authentic though ambiguous locatedness. Ngcoya and Kumarakulasingam argue that postapartheid indigenous gardening is a “specialised field of activity, a metropolitan affair practised by conservationists, botanists, real estate developers, horticulturalists, architects, and enjoyed by mostly white upper-class homeowners for a variety of purposes, especially those associated with conservation.”25 In a sense, in this context indigeneity names a mode of landedness which embodies the anxiety and 21 22 23 24 25

Madeyoulook: Izwe, n.p. Ibid. Ibid. Kumarakulasingam/Ngcoya: “Plant Provocations: Botanical Indigeneity and (De)colonial Imaginations”, pp. 843–864. Ibid., p. 845.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

ambiguity of postapartheid belonging. As we will see in the next section, scholars like Lance Van Sittert26 have been tracing the historical appreciation for indigenous flora amongst white South Africans showing how a “taste for the indigenous” emerges in political contexts. For Ngcoya and Kumarakulasingam, and indeed for MADEYOULOOK, the fashion for local flora is brought into relief through detailed ethnographic research with women gardeners. In ‘Ejaradini’, Soweto-based gardeners Mam’ Susan, Mphathi Motha and Mam’ Simangele Siko share stories of their sustenance, pleasure and also difficulty in often challenging circumstances. For instance, Mam’ Susan utilises the small area around her home, her outside pavement and an area salvaged from the nearby dumpsite in an “unsystematic methodology; planting her two gardens from gifted seeds and cuttings, and whatever else she wishes to experiment with.”27 Her unsystematic and chaoticseeming garden practice stands in contrast to many of the neighbouring gardens in Soweto that have “manicured lawns with roses and pelargonium … imports of European gardening practice” which function as “points of pride and neighbourly swagger.”28 Indeed, Mam’ Susan’s gardens do not always flourish. Rather, MADEYOULOOK argues that gardening is “a way for Mam”29 Susan to connect the past, present and future. The act of growing, “although not her primary motivation, is reason enough to garden even when there are few other gratifications for her labour.”30 This temporal reworking, they argue, is a “radical possession of time”31 attuned to the “slowed rhythms and temporalities of plant life,”32 a connection with what Charis Boke has called “plant time.”33 Similarly, Ngcoya and Kumarakulasingam present the practice of Ms Fakazile Mthethwa (affectionately known as Gogo Qho, or Granny Qho) from the village of KwaBhoboza. On a field trip to the village the authors took a tour of Gogo Qho’s gardens: Instead of neatly tended rows of vegetables, we were presented with what looked to be an overgrown patch of hillside; a tangle of trees, shrubs and climbers grew haphazardly amidst what looked to be strewn about bones, tins, and cut-out plastic bottles. […] We had gathered there after hearing about Gogo Qho’s unique skill and passion for growing a plethora of rare indigenous plants through agro-ecological methods in her fierce quest to eat only what she grows and grow what she eats. ‘Can indigenous plants and knowledges’,

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Van Sittert: “From ‘mere weeds’ and ‘bosjes’ to a Cape Floral Kingdom: the Re-Imagining of Indigenous Flora at the Cape, c. 1890–1939”, pp. 102–126. Madeyoulook: “Ejaradini. Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums”, p. 4. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid. Madeyoulook: “Ejaradini. Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums”, p. 65. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid. Boke: “Plant Time”, pp. 204–214.

253

254

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

what we call botanical indigeneity, ‘enable food autonomy to take root in the arid soil of this former Bantustan?’ we wondered.34 Ngcoya and Kumarakulasingam are particularly interested in Gogo Qho’s relationship with an unassuming indigenous plant group called imifino. Imifino is the collective noun isiZulu speakers in KwaZulu-Natal use when referring to auto-propagating leafy green vegetables that have a penchant for thriving in marginal soil.35 In conversations with Gogo Qho, imifino was situated “within realms of ancestral knowledge, culinary and cultivation practices, as well as familial memories. ” Strikingly absent, note the authors, “were any proprietary claims revolving around autochthony or even nativity, in sharp contrast to an emerging global discourse on indigeneity.”36 The tensions embodied in various and contested forms of ingenuous gardening is rather differently articulated in Athi-Patra Ruga’s vision of Azania, a tropical exotic landscape that revels in falseness and fake foliage.

2. Athi-Patra Ruga: queering the postapartheid landscape If the work by MADEYOULOOK is deeply invested in questions of indigeneity and the political and poetic ecologies of the actually-existing garden, Athi-Patra Ruga’s gardening practice is located in an anachronistic queer somewhere-else, a somewhere-otherwise. Staged on highly artificial sets, revelling in the exotic, the false and the camp, Ruga makes landscapes in a utopian country called ‘Azania’. I was looking for a better world. This came in the word ‘Azania’ which alternatively in Hebrew means ‘God is listening’. But also ‘Azania’ was a word used in apartheid, and during the liberation struggle, to basically denote a world that we are all creating, or rather our parents are creating and that I am challenging and enjoying.37 In the quote above, Ruga explains in his work Azania is a kind of inheritance, a place created by his parents’ generation, those who fought against apartheid, that he now challenges and enjoys as a space of political utopia. It is this simultaneous challenge and enjoyment – a form of critical intimacy38 – that distinguishes Ruga’s depiction of Azania. First used in antiquity, the term Azania, has been deployed in contested and contradictory ways since then. Initially designating an actually-existing region in East Africa, at least since the mid-twentieth century it has described the pan-African ideals of a liberated South Africa. In 1958, Kwame Nkrumah hosted the All-African Peoples Conference at Accra at which the name Azania was proposed as a replacement for the name 34 35 36 37 38

Kumarakulasingam/Ngcoya: “Plant Provocations: Botanical Indigeneity and (De)colonial Imaginations”, p. 844. Ibid. Ibid. Skujins: “The artist creating utopian visions out of glitter and balloons”. Bal: Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

South Africa.39 Subsequently, in the 1960s the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) deployed the name, with its military wing known as the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA). In a sense, Azania is both a dream deferred and an ongoing hope for a differently liberated kind of South Africa. In his 2013 tapestry, The Lands of Azania (2014–2094) Ruga has embroidered a map depicting the Horn of Africa, with new countries invented, and homophobic Uganda is christened “New Sodom.”40 This imaginative geography is quite literally stretched and distorted (in the manner of all Ruga’s tapestries which have the format of a kind of rhombus); as is the temporal frame of this work: stretched from 2014, the year after its exhibition, into the near future, 2094. This playful challenge to Azania’s spatial and temporal cartography is further extended in the triptych The Night of the Long Knives (2013) which forms part of the series ‘The Future White Women of Azania’.

Fig. 2: Athi-Patra Ruga, Night of the Long Knives III, 2013, Archival Inkjet, 150 x 190 cm Photographer Hayden Phipps. Courtesy of Athi-Patra Ruga and WHATIFTHEWORLD.

In the three large-scale images, composed and photographed with the sophistication of a fashion shoot, the stage set of tropical plants, gauche flowers and synthetic fronds frame a taxidermied zebra and the eponymous ‘Future White Woman’ in a cocoon of balloons. The Future White Woman is a drag-influenced character who has been a refrain through Ruga’s oeuvre. She is a performance of queer futurity,41 and she has mostly attracted scholarly attention for her embodied subversion of gender, race and

39 40 41

Hilton: “Peoples of Azania”. O’Toole: “Athi-Patra Ruga”, n.p. See Muñoz: Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.

255

256

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

national history.42 Her relationship to the landscape has attracted less attention, with Bettina Malcomess43 coming closest to an ecological reading of Ruga, and also of FAKA (Fela Gucci and Desire Marea) and Dean Hutton. For their analysis, Malcomess chose another iteration of ‘The Future White Women of Azania’ from 2015 that was photographed in the streets of predominately black residential areas outside the town of Makhanda, which hosted a famously yearly arts festival. Walking through the landscape of “faded greens, the grey-brown gravel and washed-out house paint”, Malcomess argues, the balloons were “almost too bright.”44 The almost-too-bright of the Makhanda photographs is made all-too-bright in the saturated studio photographs under consideration here. On one level, the heightened and unnatural colours gesture to a camp theatricality, to bad taste. On another level, the rejection of a ‘natural’ colour palette is indicative of a much larger ecological ambivalence. This kind of resistance – to the idea of nature as a patriarchal construct – is to be expected from a critical queer artist, however, Ruga goes much further here, interrogating the natural basis of nationalism, too. ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ has as its basis a fake lawn ground plane, a surface generally called astroturf: too green, too monotone, too flat, laid down like an indoor carpet. The fact that the triptych is photographed indoors is never obscured, perhaps shot in an expensive professional photographic studio, perhaps in the corner of the artist’s garage. Nevertheless, this indoor ecology is extended through the plants that occupy the foreground and frame the composition on the left and right through repoussoir. This classical composition draws on the tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch painters working in Brazil, for instance, Frans Post’s landscapes and Albert Eckhout’s portraits. In African woman and African man (1641), Eckhout uses tropical repoussoir to frame his black subjects, a Brazilian wax palm in the former and an African date palm (Phoenix dactylifera [Latin]) in the latter.45 (In the previous section, Ngcoya and Kumarakulasingam encouraged scholars to pay attention to naming of plants and the naturalised use of Latin; this chapter has attempted to offer multiple names and as well as marking the Latin names as non-neutral.) The Dutchman’s colonial paintings are ecologically complex and hybrid, and were part of naturalising Brazilian national identity. This chapter makes a move to think about South African gardening through a Brazilian lens in the hope of opening up further lines of enquiry, only briefly pursued with regard to landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx.46 The Brazilian notion of topicality is especially pertinent here. As I have argued elsewhere, regarding gardens in the Republic of Congo, tropicality is concerned with the critique of constructed or discursive representations of the ‘tropical world’, challenging the ways in

42 43 44 45 46

Hennlich: “‘Touched by an Angel’ (of History) in Athi-Patra Ruga’s The Future White Women of Azania”, pp. 309–331. Malcomess: “Don’t get it twisted: Queer Performativity and the Emptying out of Gesture.”, pp. 193–217. Ibid., p. 210. Brienen: “Albert Eckhout’s African Woman and Child (1641): Ethnographic Portraiture, Slavery, and the New World Subject”, pp. 229–256. Murray: “The Idea of Gardening: Plants, Bewilderment, and Indigenous Identity in South Africa”, pp. 45–65; Kumarakulasingam/Ngcoya: “Plant Provocations: Botanical Indigeneity and (De)colonial Imaginations”, pp. 843–864.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

which western explorers and botanists have “imagined and produced a coherent location – hot, romantic, fertile, uncivilized and uncivilizable, dangerous, vegetal – exemplified in the idea of the ‘jungle.”’47 One essential aspect of the tropical is its ambivalence: On the one hand, the tropics are romantic, abundant and fertile, positively exuberant; on the other, they are pestilential, primitive, diseased, violent and the cause of ‘intemperate’ conduct. The discourse attributes an incredible power to nature (the climate, vegetation, the organic) over the human. It dwarfs the human scale. ‘Natives’ are figured as childlike and feminized, unable to advance or civilize. White colonizers are figured as civilized and active but (generally) unable to definitively establish civilization due to the overwhelming effect of geography. The myth was that of tropical exuberance: that the tropics encapsulated tremendous biological productivity which, when harnessed to the temperate work ethic, would yield unprecedented bounty.48 This critique of tropical myth-making is less well developed in South African landscape scholarship, partly at least because analysis here has tended towards the problems of British whiteliness and the colonial challenge presented by transplanting pastoral English conventions. Thus, work pointing to the limits of greenness has in some ways obscured the lusciousness of some South African landscapes and Ruga’s Azania insists on a reading sensitised to this lusciousness. The palm trees in ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ are arranged alongside mostly exotic plants and shrubs: Delicious Monsters (Monstera deliciosa [Latin]; origin Mexico), philodendrons (Philodendron bipinnatifidum [Latin]; origin Latin America) and Elephant’s Ears (Colocasia esculenta [Latin], Amadumbe [isiZulu]; origin Southeast Asia). In addition, there are two indigenous plants: wild banana (Strelitzia nicolai [Latin], isigude, igceba, inkamanga [isiZulu], Natalse wildepiesang [Afrikaans]; origin eastern South Africa) and common tree ferns (Cyathea dregei [Latin], grasveldboomvaring, gewone boomvaring [Afrikaans], isihihi [isXhosa], isikhomakhoma, umphanga [isiZulu]; origin southern Africa). These large tropical plants are interspersed with a profusion of silk, plastic and paper false flowers. The effect is what critic Mary Corrigall called “Durban on steroids.”49 Durban (eThekwini [isiZulu]), a coastal city in eastern South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, is in fact the location in which Burle Marx had the strongest impact, encouraging the use of indigenous tropical flora, but ironically developing instead a taste for endogenous Brazilian tropical flora.50 Ruga’s landscape, here, displays a remarkable ambivalence towards indigeneity. This is seen clearly in two other works from the series: a stained glass work called Azania (2013), and a later tapestry, Azania in waiting CIRCA 2008–2009 (NIHIL REICH) (2015). Both works depict the same invented Azanian national coat of arms in which a central shield is flanked by a zebra on the left and the balloon-clad Future White Woman on the right. 47 48 49 50

Cane: “Welcome to the Jungle: Tropical Modernism, Decadence, Gardening in Africa”, p. 159. Ibid., p. 160. Corrigall: “When the Party is Over: Athi-Patra Ruga”. Murray: “The Idea of Gardening: Plants, Bewilderment, and Indigenous Identity in South Africa”, pp. 45–65.

257

258

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

The classical motif of the acanthus fills the composition and Delicious Monster leaves fan out to undergird the herald. The political history of botany in South Africa from the early twentieth century runs in a different direction. In order to naturalise domination of colonial lands, indigenous flora were mobilised in numerous ways to assert a kind of rooted belonging. The coat of arms for the newly-incorporated Union of South Africa in 1910, designed by Arthur Holland, included no indigenous fauna, only an imported orange tree. By 1930, an updated design by Kruger Gray included a patch of green grass (unmoved lawn, perhaps, or veld grass), flourishes of acanthus, and two varieties of indigenous protea flowers. The protea was to take on an important symbolic role in South African going forward. Originally considered a weed, Lance Van Sittert51 has shown how a taste for the indigenous was part of re-imagining indigenous flora at the Cape between 1890 and 1939. The coat of arms for the liberated South Africa, designed in 2000 by Iaan Bekke, has the protea as its key botanical element. The King Protea (Protea cynaroides [Latin], Reuse Protea, Koningprotea, Grootsuikerroos, Grootsuikerkan, Bergsuikerkan [Afrikaans], Isiqalaba [isiZulu]), Isiqwane [isiXhosa]), South Africa’s national flower is rendered in sharp graphic form. As a whole, the postapartheid coat of arms is deeply invested in a project of indigenising, particularly one could argue through instrumentalising the indigenous Khoisan language of the ǀXam people and the representation of two San human figures. As a side note, the Republic of Transkei, the unrecognised ‘Bantustan’ state (1976–1994), in which Ruga was born, had the Aloe in its arms. Now part of the Eastern Cape province, the new provincial coat of arms features the indigenous Cape Aloe (Aloe ferox [Latin]; red aloe [English], bitteraalwyn, bergaalwyn [Afrikaans], iNhlaba [isiZulu], iKhala [isiXhosa]). It is certainly not the case that Ruga is here playing naively or carelessly with the issue of national belonging. It is a playfulness that, following Mqombothi’s argument,52 resuscitates a dead past and then fucks with it. This manoeuvre of fucking-around-with is a critical-queer gardening strategy I have highlighted before.53 As a tactic of resistance, ‘fucking’ has a number of aspects: a sexual component – to fuck; a sense of possible failure – to fuck up; a sense of brokenness – to be fucked up, or to be fucked; and the idea of meddling or interfering with – to fuck with. Malcomess argues that this artwork “queers the political promise of the fading mythology of the rainbow nation, deferring this scenario to a future that is trapped in an image of the past, an aspiration attached to the fiction of whiteness and the promise of Azania, the decolonial future utopic state and counter-mythology to South Africa.”54 Ruga’s ambivalent utopianism can be considered alongside the optimism of the no-longer-existing parks, murals and gardens that emerged in resistance to apartheid in 1985.

51 52 53 54

Van Sittert: “From ‘mere weeds’ and ‘bosjes’ to a Cape Floral Kingdom: the Re-Imagining of Indigenous Flora at the Cape, c. 1890–1939”, pp. 102–126. Mqombothi: “The Future White Women”. See Cane: Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld. Malcomess: “Don’t get it twisted: Queer Performativity and the Emptying out of Gesture”, p. 211.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

3. People’s Parks: participatory landscaping against apartheid Two archival photographs capture the optimism and beauty, and eventually the tragedy of the People’s Parks movement from 1985 and early-1986. In the first, a colour photograph captures the bright red and yellow star-shaped sign: ‘TRUE LOVE PROMISSED LAND’ [sic]. Behind the colourful sign are the South African mine dumps and veld, both unusually green and fertile. This location was likely in a ‘buffer zone’ or a so-called green belt which separated residential areas from industrial and indeed, during apartheid, black ‘locations’ from white suburbs. These interstitial zones have been studied elsewhere for their often understudied but vibrant, diverse, dangerous and insistent use contrary to modernist planning intentions.55 Hannah Le Roux has called these apartheid buffer zones “ambivalent spaces.”56

Fig. 3: True Love Promissed Land, Soweto. City Press Archive. Courtesy of Steven Sack and the People’s Parks Archive.

55 56

Cane: Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld. Ibid., p. 299.

259

260

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

Within this ambivalent zone, a dozen boys are digging, organising, watching, supporting, moving, and planting and small garden. They are working on a raised flower bed with indigenous succulents (Crassulaceae [Latin], Vetplant [Afrikaans]) and grass, surrounded by green-painted rocks. A dead tree has been planted in the foreground, held upright by tires filled with earth, and decorated with a rope of chains, a red-and-white boot and a metal bucket. Freshly planted lawn tufts and white gravel form the ground plane. The garden, like many of the other sites documented in the People’s Parks Archive (from here on, the Archive), is unassuming and pieced together with what was found, donated and collected, and involved at least as much cleaning up and rubbish removal as it did building and planting. The second photograph, taken shortly after, captures the same location once the apartheid security police have burned and defaced the park. The blackened tree now leans askew, the tyres have disintegrated, the lawn is burned, and the small wooden sign reading ‘LOVE AND PEACE’ has burnt away damaging the park’s sign. The most well-documented aspects of these parks were provocative cannon sculptures, seen, for instance, in the Crossroads People’s Park, Oukasi, Brits. Documented in Sue Williamson’s study Resistance Art in South Africa,57 the cannon sculpture in Oukasi was constructed of found debris, tyres, wheels, axle shafts, dry grass and stones. This and other installations like it were re-appropriations of militaristic colonial sculptures, and were often pointed tauntingly towards police stations.58 In her interview-based reporting at the time, Georgina Jaffee attempts to go ‘beyond the cannon’59 by locating the People’s Parks in Mamelodi, their symbols, aesthetics and ecology, in a larger context of antiapartheid political resistance, including the controversial People’s Courts. Jaffee argues that the Mamelodi Youth Organisation (MAYO) and ‘street committees’ participated in ‘Operation Clean-Up’ campaigns, beginning in June 1985. After November 1985, ‘cleanup’ came to include garbage collection and the building of parks named after political symbols.60 In addition to cannons, the photographic archive that makes up the Archive collection includes many murals, signage, lawns, flowerbeds, and sculptures made from treetrunks, bicycle parts, bricks, clothes and oddments. Young people organised to clear rubbish and using “tools ‘borrowed’ from the family toolbox, they went about cleansing debris from the streets and open spaces.”61 “Local businessmen used their trucks to haul away rubbish. The children created fences, decorations and constructions to creatively individualise each park. They painted various objects with donated paint.”62 In Soweto, young people went out into the streets with money boxes, collecting small amounts of money to purchase paint and plants. The support of local traders in Mamelodi was sought to obtain truckloads of soil for landscaping. The trucks were also

57 58 59 60 61 62

Williamson: Resistance Art in Allard: Arts and Censorship in Jaffee: “Beyond the Cannon Ibid., p. 5. Williamson: Resistance Art in Allard: Arts and Censorship in

South Africa, p. 89. South Africa: 1948–2000, pp. 33–34. of Mamelodi: Creating Mass Power”, pp. 4–10. South Africa, p. 88. South Africa: 1948–2000, pp. 33–34.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

used to remove rubbish because at the height of the turmoil the municipal services had ceased to function.63 Steven Sack, who was responsible for assembling the Archive, argues that the parks represented not only an act of land reclamation and beautification but “the painted images and slogans played an important didactic function, serving to popularise the historic black leadership. ”64 Eben Lochner argues in his dissertation, The Democratisation of Art (2011), that: parks such as Only Poor Man Feels It communicated social messages about common hardships faced by township residents regarding the effect of apartheid, making it highly political. The work consisted of a sign and found objects, such as a bicycle with a makeshift human figure riding it. Similarly parks like Democratic Park were highly political in promoting democratic spaces in opposition to the totalitarian rule of the apartheid state. This work is simpler, and consists of some plants and a sign, indicating a promise of growth within democracy. The Garden of Peace is an example of the way these parks were established as spaces outside of the apartheid world of violence and oppression; it creates a space using a stained glass window with church iconography and a large sign to demarcate the space as peaceful.65 Sack suggests though the parks movement people “took responsibility for a localised basis for the aesthetic dimension of their social environment” in order to “provide an alternative to the violence that permeated the townships during this traumatic historical period.”66 . Artist Kendell Geers argues that the parks ‘represented an art form whose optimism threatened to undermine the misery and ugliness of the townships. This was contrary to what apartheid had set out to achieve, and so the security forces had to systematically destroy them.”67 The political and aesthetic dimensions of the People’s Parks have dominated what is even a relatively small debate. Of particular interest to South African historians have been competing attributions of agency. It is well established that many young people, so-called ‘youth’, were very actively involved. Sabine Marschall argues that the parks were linked to the ANC’s “operation clean-up” campaign meant to “conscientize” people with the aims of the liberation movement and reclaim public spaces.68 In Alexandra, Karen Jochelson argues it was the “yard committee” who organised regular cleaning and “built a small park.”69 Tom Lodge, in agreement with Sack, locates the parks

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Sack: “‘Garden of Eden or Political Landscape?’ Street Art in Mamelodi and Other Townships”, 1990, pp. 191–210. Sack: “‘Garden of Eden or Political Landscape?’ Street Art in Mamelodi and Other Townships”, p. 201. Lochner: The Democratisation of Art: Cap as an Alternative Art Space in South Africa, p. 87. Sack: “‘Garden of Eden or Political Landscape?’ Street Art in Mamelodi and Other Townships”, p. 205. Allard: Arts and Censorship in South Africa: 1948–2000, pp. 33–34. Marschall: “Pointing to the Dead: Victims, Martyrs and Public Memory in South Africa”, pp. 106–107. Jochelson: “Reform, Repression and Resistance in South Africa: A Case Study of Alexandra Township, 1979–1989”, p. 7.

261

262

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

in the context of the United Democratic Front’s push for “people’s power” and the process whereby “civics and youth organisations assumed administrative, judicial, welfare, and cultural functions within their respective communities.”70 This niche debate has some importance in South African historiography as scholars attempt to understand accurately the factors that led to the demise of apartheid and its persistent afterlives, and to generate plural narratives of the anti-apartheid struggle which might confront nationalist discourses. Interpreted from the present, the parks are open to at least two major novel re-readings. The first relates to an opening of the parks up to a critical ecological analysis which to this point has been non-existent; and the second relates to the re-evaluation of the South African art historical category ‘Resistance Art’ in light of, inter alia, the ecological ideas mentioned above, new approaches to landscapes studies, queer theoretical critiques of ‘youth’ and the notion of ephemera as evidence,71 and the digitisation, management and access of archives. The majority of the literature on the People’s Parks, which this chapter has attempted to gather, describes the phenomenon in distinctly non-ecological ways. Apart from describing the centrality of clean-up activity, brief mentions of some of the plants which composed the basis of the parks, and vague appeals to the notion of ‘the environment’, the People’s Parks are not alive as such, they are not part of an ecological metabolism, neither as a work of human nor of non-human botanical labour. The parks are firstly Resistance Art, attracting scholarly attention to political symbolism, slogans, mural art, paint, non-organic sculptural materials. The result is that we now have almost no idea which plants were part of the movement, where these plants came from, why they were chosen, the forms of taste they are emblematic of, which of them flourished and which didn’t, and how they were watered. Of particular interest would be the role that professional gardeners might have played, how cuttings and plants might have been transplanted and circulated from other parts of the city and region. How would we, then, re-write the history of the anti-apartheid struggle if we were required to include the narratives and influences of non-human and more-than-human actors which grew or failed to flourish alongside human actors? Secondly, insofar as the non-ecological study of the People’s Parks has depleted some of the liveliness of Resistance Art, bracketing the parks within a narrative of struggle and resistance has inoculated them from further theoretical analysis. Here I am thinking of postcolonial and Deleuzoguattarian approaches to the genre of landscape pursued by W.J.T. Mitchell,72 Jill Casid,73 and my own application of the landscapes-as-verb thesis to the South African context.74 Treating the People’s Parks explicitly as landscapes and reckoning with their multiple forms – material spaces, photographs, still-to-be-digitised archive – would be a generative framing, one which could especially account for their vibrant materiality but also their so-called failure. Indeed, the debate about the power that landscapes exercise, or not,75 also takes

70 71 72 73 74 75

Lodge: “The United Democratic Front: Leadership and Ideology”, p. 18. Muñoz: “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts”, pp. 5–16. Mitchell: Landscape & Power. Casid: “Epilogue: Landscape in, around, and under the performative”, pp. 97–116. Cane: Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld. Mitchell: “Preface”, pp. vii-xii.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

into account the failure of postcolonial landscapes to stabilise decay, ruination or flux. In this sense, then, the impermanence of the Peace Parks is proper to landscape as such. What, we might ask, would it mean to think about monumentalisation and heritage as fundamentally fugacious, as temporary, ephemeral and passing? And how can we think of these instances of failure and destruction not as foreclosing options, but rather as another form of becoming? The practice of landscape art and landscape criticism has seen a surprising resurgence in postapartheid South Africa, something this chapter has attempted to sketch out, and if the People’s Parks were to be theorised as landscape this would make a significant contribution to the field in a manner that it has not yet done being considered (only) as Resistance Art. Indeed, thinking about their functioning as landscapes – that is, asking the Deleuzoguattarian question: what do they do? not what they are – might open up the dimensions of resistance. That is to say, it might further qualify definitions of Resistance Art: how were the People’s Parks sites of resistance? And further, how can the Archive become a further site of resistance to the afterlives of apartheid? The ongoing curatorial project ‘1985! The People’s Parks, Sites of Struggle and the Politics of Plants’ is attempting to ask some of these questions. Based at the University of Pretoria, the multidisciplinary team are revisiting and re-theorising modes of popular resistance in the 1980s in an attempt to conceptualise alternatives to the established visual cultures of Resistance Art. Through digitising the Archive the intention is to open the records to democratic engagement and, of course, protecting the fragile collection. The Archive was compiled by Steven Sack, primarily in the 1980s in relation to an exhibition he was involved in curating. The Archive is not large in scope, one archival box, however, some of the photographs are A0 scale as they are the original mounted prints from the aforementioned exhibition. The collection includes film negatives, postcard photographic prints (including duplicates), A0 mounted laser prints (including duplicates of postcard prints), a digital film stored on a hard drive, photostats of photographs, news clippings, copies of academic articles, an extended set of notes towards an article published by Sack and the article itself. These include a written account, entitled the ‘Canon of Mamelodi’, photographs by Cecil Sols and Vuyo Mbali, and documentation from a trip undertaken to Mamelodi at the height of the State of Emergency. There are a significant number of photographs and research projects relating to Oukasie. Sols and Mbali ran the Afrapix darkroom at the Funda Art Centre, Soweto. There are also photographs of the sites by David Goldblatt, Gideon Mendel, Santu Mofokeng, Gille de Vlieg and Stephen Hilton Barber. These unpublished images by leading anti-apartheid photographers intersect in complex ways with the organic and the botanical, and with the ‘unprofessional’ artists and landscapers whose parks no longer exist. This relationship, and indeed the status of the archive are vital to a renewed assessment and theorisation of the late 1980s and the aesthetics of resistance.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to put three kinds of landscape into a new and generative relationship. It has done this following Rachel Zolf’s invitation to “enact a knowledge as-

263

264

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

semblage that brings into apposition (nonhierarchically, not as a mode of comparison or analogy but as a contiguous and interconnected constellation).”76 The assemblage I have suggested is one that tries to avoid the traps of binaries: indigenous/exogenous, nostalgic/progressive, green/brown, formal/informal, real/imaginary. It has also been attentive to the productive tensions of inter-scalar analysis: the specificity of site and location, of a piece of land, the particularity of South African land dispossession and the ongoing instance for redistribution. This attention to to the particularity of apartheid is set in a planetary, Global South dialogue that elucidates the commonalities and solidarities of land and landscape in the Majority World. This spatial analysis takes account of plant life, earth-moving and labour. The spatiality of land and landscape have also been expanded through an attention to the temporality of gardening and landscaping. Through intertemporal and queer-critical approaches to chronology, the present work is concerned with late-apartheid gardening from the here-and-now.

References Allard, Raymond H.: Arts and Censorship in South Africa: 1948–2000, unpublished MA, Durban, South Africa (Technikon Natal) 2000. Bal, Mieke: Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide, Toronto u.a. (University of Toronto Press) 2002. Boaraine, A.: Mamelodi: from Parks to People’s Power: A Survey of Community Organisation in South Africa, 1974–1986, unpublished BA Honours Paper (University of Cape Town) 1987. Boke, Charis: “Plant Time”, in: Matthew Schneider-Mayerson/ Brent Ryan Bellamy (eds.): An Ecotopian Lexicon, Minneapolis/London (University of Minnesota Press) 2019, pp. 204–214. (accessed August 5, 2021) doi:10.5749/j.ctvthhdbm.26. Boym, Svetlana: The Future of Nostalgia, New York (Basic Books) 2001. Brandt, Nicola: Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Performance and Video Art, London/New York (Routledge) 2020. Brienen, Rebecca: “Albert Eckhout’s African Woman and Child (1641): Ethnographic Portraiture, Slavery, and the New World Subject”, in: Agnes Lugo-Ortiz/Angela Rosenthal (eds): Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, New York (Cambridge University Press) 2016, pp. 229–256. Cane, Jonathan: Civilising Grass: The Art of the Lawn on the South African Highveld, Johannesburg (Wits University Press) 2019a. Cane, Jonathan: “Welcome to the Jungle: Tropical Modernism, Decadence, Gardening in Africa”, in: Iqani, M./Dosekun, S. (eds): African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics, Chicago (Intellect, University of Chicago Press), 2019b, pp. 155–170. Casid, Jill: “Epilogue: Landscape in, around, and under the performative”, in: Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 21 (2011) 1, pp. 97–116.

76

Zolf: No one’s Witness: a Monstrous Poetics, p. 4.

Jonathan Cane: The Art of Gardening in South Africa

Corrigall, Mary: “When the Party is Over: Athi-Patra Ruga”, in: Incorrigible Corrigall Blog, 2013. http://corrigall.blogspot.com/2013/12/when-party-is-over-athi-patra-ruga.h tml. Doke, CM/Vilakazi, BW.: English-isiZulu / isiZulu-English Dictionary, Johannesburg (Wits University Press) 2014. Fowkes Tobin, Beth: Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting, Durham (Duke University Press) 1999. Hennlich, Andrew: “‘Touched by an Angel’ (of History) in Athi-Patra Ruga’s The Future White Women of Azania”, in: Catherine Boulle/Jay Pather (eds.): Acts of Transgression Contemporary live art in South Africa, Johanneburg (Wits University Press) 2019, pp. 309–331. Hilton, John: “Peoples of Azania”, in: Electronic Antiquity, 1 (1993) 5, n.p. https://scholar.lib .vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V1N5/hilton.html. Jaffee, Georgina: “Beyond the Cannon of Mamelodi: Creating Mass Power”, in: Work in Progress, 41 (1986), pp. 4–10. Jochelson, Karen: “Reform, Repression and Resistance in South Africa: A Case Study of Alexandra Township, 1979–1989”, in: Journal of Southern African Studies, 16 (1990) 1, pp. 1–32. Kumarakulasingam, Narendran/Ngcoya, Mvuselelo: “Plant Provocations: Botanical Indigeneity and (De)colonial Imaginations”, in: Contexto Internacional, 38 (2016) 3, pp. 843–864. doi: 10.1590/S0102-8529.2016380300006. Le Roux, Hannah: “Designing KwaThema: Cultural Inscriptions in the Model Township”, in: Journal of Southern African Studies, 45 (2019) 2, pp. 273–301. https://doi.org/10.1080 /03057070.2019.1602323. Lochner, Eben: The Democratisation of Art: Cap as an Alternative Art Space in South Africa, unpublished Master of Arts (Rhodes University) 2011. Lodge, Tom: “The United Democratic Front: Leadership and Ideology”, in: African Studies Seminar Paper, African Studies Institute, Witwatersrand (University of the Witwatersrand) 1987, pp. 1–29, online, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/39667948.pdf. Madeyoulook: Izwe, 2020, online, http://www.made-you-look.net/izwe. Madeyoulook: “Ejaradini. Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums”, in: Judin Hilton (ed): Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid, Johannesburg (Wits University Press) 2021, pp. 62–80. Malcomess, Bettina: “Don’t get it twisted: Queer Performativity and the Emptying out of Gesture.”, in: Catherine Boulle/Jay Pather (eds.): Acts of Transgression Contemporary live Art in South Africa, Johannesburg (Wits University Press) 2019, pp. 193–217. Marschall, Sabine: “Pointing to the Dead: Victims, Martyrs and Public Memory in South Africa”, in: South African Historical Journal, 60 (2008) 1, pp. 103–123. doi: 10.1080/02582470802287745. Mitchell, W. J. T.: “Introduction”, in: W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.): Landscape & Power, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 1994, pp. 1–4. Mitchell, W. J. T.: “Preface”, in: W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.): Landscape & Power, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 20022 , pp. vii-xii.

265

266

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

Mqombothi, Dudumalingani: “The Future White Women”, in: Mahala, 2013, n.p., online, http://www.mahala.co.za/art/the-future-white-women/. Muñoz, José Esteban: “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts”, in: Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 8 (1996) 2, pp. 5–16. doi: 10.1080/07407709608571228. Muñoz, José Esteban: Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York/ London (New York University Press) 2009. Murray, Sally-Ann: “The Idea of Gardening: Plants, Bewilderment, and Indigenous Identity in South Africa”, in: English in Africa. 33 (2006) 2, pp. 45–65. O’Toole, S.: “Athi-Patra Ruga”, in: Frieze, 161 (2014), n.p. https://www.frieze.com/article/athi-patra-ruga. Sack, S.: “‘Garden of Eden or Political Landscape?’ Street Art in Mamelodi and Other Townships”, in: Anitra Nettleton/David Hammond-Tooke (eds): African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township, Johannesburg (Ad Donker) 1990, pp. 191–210. Skujins, Angela: “The Artist creating Utopian Visions out of Glitter and Balloons”, in: Dazed & Confused Magazine. 2018, n.p., https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photogra phy/article/42635/1/south-african-lgbtq-artist-athi-patra-ruga-uses-glitter-to-crea te-utopias. Tavares, Paulo: “Trees, Vines, Palms and Other Architectural Monuments”, in: Harvard Design Magazine, 45 (2018), pp. 188–195. Van Sittert, Lance: “From ‘mere weeds’ and ‘bosjes’ to a Cape Floral Kingdom: the Re-Imagining of Indigenous Flora at the Cape, c. 1890–1939”, Kronos, 28 (2002), pp. 102–126. Williamson, Sue: Resistance Art in South Africa, Johannesburg (David Phillips) 1989. Williamson, Sue: “Peace Parks”, in: Sue Williamson: Resistance Art in South Africa, Johannesburg (David Phillips) 1989, pp. 88–89. Zolf, Rachel: No one’s witness: a monstrous poetics, Durham (Duke University Press) 2021.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: MADEYOULOOK, Ejaradini, Installation. Photographer: RicardoMarcusK. Courtesy of MADEYOULOOK. Fig. 2: Athi-Patra Ruga, Night of the Long Knives III, 2013, Archival Inkjet, 150 x 190 cm. Photographer Hayden Phipps. Courtesy of Athi-Patra Ruga and WHATIFTHEWORLD. Fig. 3: True Love Promised Land, Soweto. City Press Archive. Courtesy of Steven Sack and the People’s Parks Archive.

Tue Greenfort: Questioning Dichotomies Karoline Walter

I work mainly around the notion of nature and how we understand this in our culture and how this notion is constantly negotiated. This is the main interest of my practice.1 Tue Greenfort, 2016

Greenfort’s installations focus on the interplay of what is generally understood as nature and culture. They examine diverse understandings and, at the same time, visualize social, political and economic entanglements, thereby questioning traditional thinking in dichotomies in order to present new seminal ways and solutions. In this sense, Greenfort in 2006 stated: I do want to evoke a certain degree of AUFKLÄRUNG (Enlightenment). We live within a set of constituted values that are the product of specific interests and powers. We should not take things for granted and lose belief in change. I hope to raise questions and evoke change through my art without saying what you should believe in, or not.2 Since his artistic approach oscillates between categories and disciplines, it offers a set of historical art references like for example conceptual art, environmental art, eco-art (ecological art), research-based art, site-specific art, and art in the context of institutional critique. Corresponding to his artistic practice in which he dissolves dichotomies and categorization systems, he himself also rejects being put in one single denomination by the art world.3 The special potential of his work lies, on the one hand in its simplicity and, 1 2 3

Tue Greenfort video statement, “BAU talks to Tue Greenfort”. Pagliuca: “It is vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. An interview with Tue Greenfort by Francesca Pagliuca”, p. 240. Cf. Lookofsky: “State of Nature. Uncertainty in Environmental Emergency. A conversation between Sarah Lookofsky and Tue Greenfort”.

268

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

on the other, hand in its complex references and entanglements. In order to measure up to this multilayered potential, the following article will move away from linear, stringent thinking of development and dichotomies to thinking more in terms of relationships and networks. Following Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, I will position the artist in a complex field of references, illustrating that Greenfort’s installations dissolve traditional categorizations and ideas of dichotomies, and therefore emerge as hybrid phenomena, which stand at the center of observation, in the sense of Latour. Corresponding to that, three installations will form the basis for further considerations. Firstly, let us have a look at From Gray to Green, which was implemented in 2006 in Greenfort’s first major solo exhibition entitled “Photosynthesis” in the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. The title refers to his futile efforts to convert the museum’s electrical power supply from ‘gray’ power into an environmentally friendly ‘green’ one for the duration of his exhibition. Therefore, he simply presented the correspondence with the Dutch energy provider ENECO in a brightly lit 100m2 exhibition space. The project was finally implemented invisibly for the visitors the year after in 2007.4 In this context, the artist addresses Netherland’s energy supply, which has been based on oil and gas since 1959,5 by simply illustrating this transaction. Like most of Greenfort’s installations, also From Gray to Green is preceded by detailed in-situ research. In 2006, he described his artistic practice: I work spontaneously and in a non-linear way – I don’t sit with a nice white sheet of paper in front of me and then make perfect sketches for new projects. I don’t believe in the studio as the only production place for art, and artists shouldn’t be defined by these classical terms of artistic production. Artists can work from wherever they are.6 Some of these works, including From Gray to Green, are inextricably linked to the respective location, while others can also be implemented in other places, which then lead to different focal points, so that, depending on the context, the terms site specific and site specificity can be applied to Greenfort’s artworks. This early work visualizes the oscillation of Greenfort’s art in-between traditional categories of art history, like site-specific art, conceptual art, ecological or environmental art and art in the context of institutional critique. Especially in the context of this installation, Lucy Lippard’s term dematerialization, as a characteristic of contemporary art, moves into focus. In the early 1970s, she published Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966–1972, and this way introduced the concept of dematerialization in the discussion of art science, which is still topical in art today. This concept is accompanied by the term of “conceptual art” and the idea of the sublimation of art, in which the concept is more important than a tangible piece itself. In this sense, implementing a piece of artwork can be done by anyone, like for example, by

4 5 6

Cf. Tue Greenfort exhibition description in: Witte de With Contemporary Art. Cf. n.A.: Niederlande: Neue Mühlen braucht das Land. Pagliuca: “It is vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. An interview with Tue Greenfort by Francesca Pagliuca”, p. 223.

Karoline Walter: Tue Greenfort: Questioning Dichotomies

the employees of the energy supplier. The artist’s instructions appear as a central element causing the change from ‘gray’ conventional electricity to ‘green’ energy. From Gray to Green reveals Greenfort’s strong connection to institutional critique. Luke Skrebowski, in 2013, called him an artist from the third generation of institutional critique by linking him to Hans Haacke – a relationship that is also confirmed by the artist himself, who names Haacke an important reference.7 Furthermore, Skrebowski interconnects the theoretical approaches of Andrea Fraser with Greenfort’s works and claims. While Fraser expands the concept of institution in an internal, psychological way, Greenfort opens up the concept externally in terms of an ecological expansion, corresponding to an ecological institutional critique.8 Even though Fraser and Greenfort have different approaches, they are working on the same challenge, which Andrea Fraser formulated in 2005: “Moving from a substantive understanding of the institution as specific places, organizations, and individuals to a conception of it as a social field, the question of what is inside and what is outside becomes much more complex.”9 Corresponding to that idea, Greenfort transfers actual social and ecological critiques and discussions about environmental sustainability into the art institution, and raises questions of personal and institutional responsibility. Let’s have a look at a different installation called AMILKORKIM, which has been implemented in Kornberg, Austria, at the Meierhof in 2014. As mentioned before, a central aspect in Greenfort’s artistic practice is a detailed in-situ research. For AMILKORKIM, which means microclimate in German read backwards, the artist at the beginning investigated the surrounding area and the region enclosed. First, he noticed many huge stables for industrial livestock farming and fields with only a few varieties of forage plants, mostly cultivated in monocultures. He went on and talked to specialists, researchers and local farmers about the agricultural situation of the region and its problems, and as well took a deeper look at the history of the Meierhof, a huge farm which provided food for the nearby castle Kornberg since the 13th century. After World War II, the farm was a seed breeding and research institute, where domestic genetic material of corn, millet and field beans was transformed into particularly high yielding and resistant varieties. These new plant varieties later helped the hungry population in the area. After that, the Meierhof was used as a chicken farm with thousands of cages for 30 years. However, new animal welfare regulations put an end to this, so that the farm was bought back by the former owners and the cultural association Meierhof was born, which led to the installation AMILKORKIM.10 All this information formed the basis of Tue Greenfort’s artistic intervention, which consisted of two installations. The first one was an upside-down information pillar from the surrounding area that was transformed into a hot house, accompanied by a billboard realized in 2014, followed by the experimental greenhouse the year after. It consists of three chambers – open to the public – with different microclimate zones, which could be explored by visitors. The first chamber, open on the top, leads to a changing climate

7 8 9 10

Cf. Sheikh: “Notes on Institutional Critique”, p. 29. Skrebowski: “After Hans Haacke. Tue Greenfort and Eco-Institutional Critique, p. 122. Fraser: “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”. Cf. Kulturverein Meierhof Kornberg: AMILKORKIM 2015. Tue Greenfort.

269

270

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

zone depending on the weather conditions. Here, the artist positioned three seedlings of the so called “truffle trees” pointing at new agricultural solutions for this area.11 Truffle trees are special plants whose roots were inoculated with truffle spore suspension so that the mycorrhiza, the living community between truffle fungus and tree root, is induced under controlled conditions. Especially in this context, the artificiality of nature becomes obvious to the observer.

Fig. 1: Exhibition view Tue Greenfort, AMILKORKIM, 2015, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Institut für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark, Graz, Austria, 2015. Courtesy the artist and KOENIG GALERIE Berlin, London, Tokyo.

The second chamber has a warm and humid climate. Here, Greenfort experiments with Shiitake and dottles in special mixtures on the ground, on the walls and on trunks.12 The third chamber is constantly cooled down by a special hole in the ground, where he stored a beech trunk, which had been inoculated with dottles. The viewer could pull it up to have a look at the development of the mushrooms. Furthermore, Greenfort also transformed the surrounding of the greenhouse by planting trees which refer to an old, traditional form of pomiculture in this area which affects biodiversity.13 Surrounded by industrial livestock farming and monoculture, Greenfort presents new solutions for the future by cultivating and experimenting with mushrooms which can serve as a meat substitute with numerous environmental benefits – following the tradition of artist-based research and site-specific art. In this context, the artist raises questions about sustainability and global nutrition looking at the special potential of mushrooms.

11 12 13

Cf. Kulturverein Meierhof Kornberg: AMILKORKIM 2015. Tue Greenfort. Cf. Vogel: Schauplatz Kornberg, Kunstraum Lakeside, Politische Landschaft. Cf. Kulturverein Meierhof Kornberg: AMILKORKIM 2015. Tue Greenfort.

Karoline Walter: Tue Greenfort: Questioning Dichotomies

Fig. 2: Exhibition view Tue Greenfort, AMILKORKIM, 2015, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Institut für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark, Graz, Austria, 2015. Courtesy the artist and KOENIG GALERIE Berlin, London, Tokyo.

Monoculture, which refers to the constant cultivation of one variety of plant on the same piece of farmland, brings about several problems such as erosion, pest infestation and nutrient depletion. To compensate for these problems, the use of fertilizers and pesticides are introduced to the crop, which furthermore leads to a reduction of biodiversity. In contrast to that, AMILKORKIM can be seen as a permacultural experiment inspired by Sepp Holzer, a well-known Austrian farmer, book author, and expert in permaculture. The term refers to a concept for agriculture and gardening based on natural ecosystems and natural circuits aiming at the development of long-lasting self-sustaining areas. The Cambridge dictionary defines permaculture as “systems for growing crops, plants, etc. that cause little damage to the environment and can therefore continue for a long time”.14 Greenfort created a greenhouse as a laboratory for growing different sorts of mushrooms and planted special trees in the surrounding area to improve biodiversity. However, there is no need for a researcher in his lab; everything happens through natural processes also without the interference of humans. The installation is, on the one hand, closely linked to scientific research and, on the other hand, because of its status as artwork, grants the experiment a special freedom. This way differs from academic disciplines by transcending traditional boundaries. The artist links global and local, past, contemporary, and future forms of agriculture in his installation. Thus, AMILKORKIM can be seen as a critique on globalization and global identical systems like monoculture and industrial livestock farming, which lead to the loss of local, regional and site-specific characteristics.

14

Cf. Cambridge Dictionary, keyword: “permaculture”.

271

272

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

From Gray to Green and also AMILKORKIM allow us to take a look at the ecological perspective of Greenfort’s work.15 Following Ruth Wallen’s definition of ecological art as art that “inspires caring and respect for the world in which we live, stimulates dialogue, sparks imagination and contributes to the socio-cultural transformations, whereby the diversity of life forms found on earth may flourish.”16 , we could call Greenfort an ‘ecoartist’. On the basis of artistic practices of the 1960s, the genre of ‘ecological art’ was originally conceived in the 1990s. Sacha Kagan stated that ecological art, covers a variety of artistic practices which are nonetheless united, as socialecological modes of engagement, by shared principles and characteristics such as: connectivity, reconstruction, ecological ethical responsibility, stewardship of inter-relationships and of commons, non-linear (re)generativity, navigation and dynamic balancing across multiple scales, and varying degrees of exploration of the fabric of life's complexity.17 Because of Greenfort’s special focus on ecological and environmental questions, he of course is connected to this artistic tradition. Nevertheless, his works are much more complex and differentiate from traditional ‘eco-artists’ like, for example, Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. Greenfort reflects upon ideas of the site, our perception of space and local problems, and connecting them with an expanded ecological framework to a more fundamental global perspective.18 In 2012 TJ Demos wrote: “Greenfort’s work successfully demonstrated the connection between economic, ecological and institutional systems’ […]”.19 As already mentioned before, Luke Skrebowski also points at this special connection in Greenfort’s artistic practice that brings together ecological questions with institutional critique. He wrote: In Greenfort’s work institutional critique has to be understood as internal to the ecological crisis brought about by the instrumental rationality that it would challenge. In so doing, his work produces a sophisticated conceptualization of the problems inherent to the critique of institutions, when a clear distinction between the social and the natural can no longer be sustained in such a way as to bracket the art system.20

15

16 17 18 19 20

The understanding of nature as ecology emerged in the late 19th century focusing on the interdependences of organisms and environment. Ernst Haeckel in 1866 prescribed ‘ecology’ as the “science of relationship of the organism to the surrounding external world.” In the 1970s, the concept of ecology became an important factor in dealing with ‘nature’ by focusing on interrelations between the two different poles of the living and inanimate environment and in this course simultaneously often excluding humans to protect ‘natural’ ecosystems. See: Hahn: “Einleitung”, pp. 11–13. Wallen: “Ecological Art: A Call for Visionary Intervention in a time of Crisis”, p. 235. Kagan: The practice of ecological art. Cf. Lookofsky: “State of Nature. Uncertainty in Environmental Emergency. A conversation between Sarah Lookofsky and Tue Greenfort”. Demos: “Art After Nature”, p. 194. Skrebowski: “After Hans Haacke. Tue Greenfort and Eco-Institutional Critique”, p. 129.

Karoline Walter: Tue Greenfort: Questioning Dichotomies

The artist questions institutional systems of different kinds including amongst others the art system and through that, reveals his expanded understanding of the concept of ‘institution’. One further important aspect of AMILKORKIM is the fact that these chambers are free to enter for the visitors so that they can experience different climatic zones on their own body. This way his works open up a phenomenological aspect. Spectators can ‘feel’ nature and the changing climate and maybe start to reflect upon global climate change and how it is connected to vegetation and to our self. Greenfort stated in 2006: “Nature is not something outside of us, something that’s beyond the city of beyond human activity. We are embedded in nature because we are living organisms as well, and each of our actions has an impact on and is part of, so-called nature.”21 Reflecting on these topics, AMILKORKIM clearly indicates the disintegration of dichotomies such as nature and culture, inside and outside, global and local, as well as linear time categories like past, present and the future. The last installation I will discuss in this article emphasizes these central aspects, but in a different way. In 2018, Greenfort participated at the Taipei Biennial titled “PostNature. A Museum as an Ecosystem”. In this sense, the Biennale sought to evolve consciousness and visualized the international and collective responsibility in the context of climate change and scarcity of resources, an important topic in Asia, which has become the ‘world’s factory’ in the last decades. Above all other parts of Asia, Taiwan faces massive environmental problems including rising temperature and dramatic weather patterns that significantly outstrip the global standard.22 So, on the one hand, we have this broader background of the Biennial in Asia, while on the other hand, we have to look at the local installation itself that forms the central contents of Greenfort’s work. In the light-flooded glass atrium of the Taipei Fine Art Museum, between green palms, ferns and other plants, Tue Greenfort installed three huge columns titled Prototaxites and a video installation called Light-vented Bulbul. Moving away from the cold, airconditioned gallery spaces, the visitor steps into an inner “outside” space, originally used by the employees of the museum to eat, rest and socialize. Together with rural Taiwanese mushroom growers, the artist experimented on growing local oyster mushrooms for the employees. A mist of water connects the columns and hydrates the fungi. Thus, the installation enriches the greenery and affects animal and insect life in the atrium.23 The installation of Prototaxites was initially implemented in 2017 in Denmark in the course of the ARoS Triennale The Garden – End of Times, Beginning of Times24 , revealing different but connected contents of his work in Europe and Asia. The title Prototaxites, and also the shape and size of the columns, refer to an organism which had grown on earth from 420 to 350 million years ago, during a time when vegetation just started to evolve. The Prototaxites had a height of more than six meters and topped all other vegetation. That’s why it was first categorized as a tree. This genre attribution and the systematic

21 22 23 24

Pagliuca: “It is vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. An interview with Tue Greenfort by Francesca Pagliuca”, p. 230. Cf. Wu, Mali/Manacorda, Francesco: Post-Nature – A Museum as Ecosystem. Cf. n. A.: Prototaxites, 2017–2018; Light-vented Bulbul, 2018. Cf. n. A.: The Present & The Future, 2017.

273

274

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

classification in our knowledge system was discussed for a long time because its existence is just documented by a few fossil fragments. Finally, chemical analysis revealed a relationship to today’s fungi25 , so that it is currently assigned to this category and not as originally thought to the classes of tree, alga, lichen or moss.26 The reference to this historic organism is an excellent example for demonstrating the boundaries of our traditional knowledge system. In the context of these huge columns, Greenfort again interweaves different concepts of time, combining past, present and future agriculture perspectives. The video installation Light-Vented Bulbul incorporates the technological world into this seemingly ‘natural’ ecosystem of the museum. The title refers to the name of an endemic Taiwanese bird, often kept in captivity as a songbird. Greenfort discovered a small population living in the glass atrium of the museum and documented the birds in their ‘natural’ habitat, the atrium, and their social engagement with the people. The outcome was a short video presented on canvas so that the visitor could watch the birds live and also in close-up on screen.

Fig. 3: Exhibition view Tue Greenfort, Prototaxites, 2017–2018, Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan, 2018. Courtesy the artist and KOENIG GALERIE Berlin, London, Tokyo.

The installations in the atrium illustrate the museum as a hybrid microcosm, which includes artificial and natural entities. The space causes a different physical perception, producing an outside feeling in the inside of the museum and again offers a phenomenological approach. By incorporating the atrium, a leisure room for the employees, into the official exhibition space, the artist reflects upon the social aspect of art institutions including different live forms and their complex conjunctions. In the course of this instal-

25 26

Cf. n. A.: Das Rätsel des Riesenstamms. Das größte Landgewächs im Devon. Cf. Mineralienatlas – Fossilienatlas, keyword: “Prototaxites”.

Karoline Walter: Tue Greenfort: Questioning Dichotomies

lation, Greenfort reveals his expanded understanding of an institution as a social field, so that dichotomies like, for example, inside and outside, become obsolete. He even goes beyond this and puts the institution into an expanded, global ecological frame and hints at current value systems. Corresponding to the title of the Biennial, Greenfort suggests seeing the museum as an ecosystem itself and raises questions like: What is an ecosystem? Which elements make up an ecosystem? What’s the meaning of biodiversity? What does balance in the course of an ecosystem mean? Can a museum be an ecosystem? Greenfort himself stated: “The ecosystem is about balance, about input in relation to output, and about diversity.”27 Corresponding to that, Greenfort finds analogies amongst the concept of an ecosystem and today’s art world.28 The curators of the Biennial, Mali Wu and Francesco Manacorda, stated: “Natural ecosystems exist on the basis of symbiosis, reciprocal working and collaboration, in order to maintain a balance.”29 Today, many definitions of ecosystems exist, visualized in circuits, networks or varying loops depending on the concept. They all have in common their focus on different concepts of relationships and connections that influence regional and foreign systems.30 Greenfort interweaves these current debates in theoretical discussions into his art, illustrating that we can find ecosystems in every surrounding area, also inside a museum. While former theories and ecological approaches often excluded humans from nature in order to guarantee an ‘ecological balance’, current theories overcome this antiquated thinking of nature as something that doesn’t include humans. It’s exactly this shifting point of view which becomes obvious in Greenfort’s works corresponding to his statement: “We cannot stand outside and simply observe the phenomenon we call ‘nature’.”31 This is the point where Greenfort’s works converge with current debates concerning the human-nature relationship, which includes the Anthropocene debate. Corresponding to that, Judith Elisabeth Weiss recently stated: “With Tue Greenfort’s work, the earth can no longer be viewed as a natural ecosystem that is disturbed and changed by humans but as a human system with embedded ecosystems.”32 Finally, we can draw the following conclusions from these considerations: Greenfort’s works can be anchored to a set of art historical references and other disciplines, so that their complex interconnection is revealed. The artist brings together several aspects of ecological art, (ecological) institutional critique, artist-based research, site-specific art, concept and process art which are deeply connected to social and political debates about the environment and sustainability. This way, art institutions and the art world itself can no longer be understood as encapsulated systems. As already mentioned before, next 27 28 29 30 31 32

“Tue Greenfort in an interview with Neville Wakefield”, p. 2. Cf. ibid. Wu, Mali/Manacorda, Francesco: Post-Nature – A Museum as Ecosystem. Cf. Wallen: “Ecological Art: A Call for Visionary Intervention in a time of Crisis”, p. 237. “Tue Greenfort in an interview with Neville Wakefield”, p. 1. Weiss: “Konstruktionen und Dekonstruktionen des Natürlichen. Eine Bestandsaufnahme von Natur in der Kunst nach dem Ende der Natur”, p. 53. Original text: “Mit den Arbeiten von Tue Greenfort lässt sich die Erde nicht länger als ein natürliches Ökosystem betrachten, das vom Menschen gestört und verändert wird, sondern als ein Humansystem mit eingebetteten natürlichen Ökosystemen“.

275

276

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

to Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser is a further important influence for Tue Greenfort. She wrote in this context: It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It's not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It's a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalized, embodied, and performed by individuals, these are the questions that institutional critique demands we ask, above all, of ourselves.33 In this sense, Greenfort’s works criticize institutional systems of various types, not exclusively art institutions, and illustrate their complex entanglements by showing overarching problems and responsibilities. By depicting these connections, he questions dichotomies and categorization systems, and traditional power structures. Shifting the focus from a linear thinking of development to complex networks, fields and processes includes refusing a human centered perspective. Current theorists and artists, like Tue Greenfort, are searching for a new way of thinking independent from humans, discussions that can be subsumed under the term speculative realism. Greenfort suggests changing our perspective from a distanced, outside point of view into an internally integrated prospect by focusing on ‘intra-actions’ like phenomena of multiple connections, relationships, alliances and networks, rather than on ‘interactions’ which presuppose distances, differences, categories and dichotomies. According to Bruno Latour in We have never been modern34 , this segregation of categories is based on ideas of modernity, conveyed by a set of fundamental practices of modernity ‘translation’ and ‘purification’. While the first set creates “mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture”, ‘purification’ practices, on the other hand, establish “two entirely distinct ontological zones” of human and non-human beings – or in other words culture and nature35 , which will again give rise to more hybrid approaches that won’t fit into common classification systems. Shifting the attention may open up new ways, as Latour mentions: “As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change.”36 Hybrids play an important role in Latour’s actor-network theory, as already mentioned at the beginning of this article. They stand in the center of his reflection and, together with other ‘actors’, form complex networks. Instead of defining what is nature and what is culture on the basis of dichotomies and confrontation, he focuses on similarities and entanglements of the concepts of nature and culture. In this sense, concepts of nature and culture don’t form the starting point; rather in fact facets of nature and culture constitute the end result. 33 34 35 36

Fraser: “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”. Original title: Latour: Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Cf. Latour: We have never been modern, pp. 10–12. Ibid., p. 11.

Karoline Walter: Tue Greenfort: Questioning Dichotomies

Latour suggests looking at the network, which includes human and nonhuman actors, as well as institutions, and fictive aspects such as religious ideas and ideologies and discourses and the set of practices mentioned above. This way we can look at the complexity of hybrids, like for example Tue Greenfort’s installations that won’t fit into traditional categories, and prescribe aspects of nature and culture and their complex relationship. On the basis of three examples, nature appeared amongst others as a valuable resource, as a tangible and living entity like plants and mushrooms, as an invisible independent ‘natural’ process, as a changing atmosphere connected to our body, as a basis of agricultural practice, and as a human construct in concepts of sustainability, eco-systems, and biodiversity. These different appearances of ‘nature’ reveal its complex and inseparable entanglements with ‘culture’. Greenfort’s whole body of artistic work focuses on hybrid networks and oscillates between different categories, disciplines and life forms, including animals, human and vegetation, refusing traditional systems and art historical attributions. It is this complexity that requests new terms, methods and instruments for analyses and research. At this point, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory may be a promising theory for handling this special potential of contemporary art. Greenfort once stated: “Art definitely has an important role to play in our culture and it can be an important catalyst for societal changes. I think the very subtle and highly specialized language of contemporary art there can affect some very important changes of perception and understanding that can feedback into behavior.”37 Societal changes requires modifications and rethinking on all levels of our society, from single persons to all kinds of institutions and organizations. Tue Greenfort’s installations may be a seminal starting point since they induce discussions corresponding to his statement: “My aim is to create art that provokes debate about our use of natural resources and questions our understanding of nature. In the end, that’s what it’s all about.”38 Therefore, let’s start discussing these ideas with an open mind, moving away from an antiquated way of thinking in polarities and categorizations, dissolving these dichotomies also in art appreciation, art education and art science to change perspectives in this field, in order to gain new seminal solutions for our future.

References Demos, T.J.: “Art After Nature”, in: Artforum, (2012), pp. 191–197. Fraser, Andrea: “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”, in: Artforum, 55 (2005) 1, http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/ Andrea-Fraser_From-the-Critique-of-Institutions-to-an-Institution-of-Critique.p df (accessed July 20, 2020). Hahn, Daniela: “Einleitung”, in: Daniela Hahn/ Erika Fischer-Lichte (eds.): Ökologie und die Künste, Paderborn (Wilhelm Fink) 2010, pp. 9–27. 37 38

Pagliuca: “It is vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. An interview with Tue Greenfort by Francesca Pagliuca”, p. 236. “Tue Greenfort in an interview with Neville Wakefield”, p. 1.

277

278

‘Theatrum Botanicum’: The Human-Plant Exchanges

Kagan, Sacha Jérôme: The practice of ecological art, 2014, https://www.researchgate.net/pu blication/274719395_The_practice_of_ecological_art (accessed June 09, 2020). Latour, Bruno: Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Essai d’anthropologie symétrique, Paris (Éditions La Découverte) 1991. Latour, Bruno: We have never been modern, (translated by Catherine Porter), Cambridge 1993, pp. 10–12, https://monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Latour_Bruno_We_Have_Neve r_Been_Modern.pdf (accessed September 26, 2020). Pagliuca, Francesca: “It is vain to dream of wildness distant from ourselves. An interview with Tue Greenfort by Francesca Pagliuca”, in: Artbutler, (2006), pp. 220–247. Sheikh, Simon: “Notes on Institutional Critique”, in: Gerald Raunig/ Gene Ray (eds.): Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. Reinventing Institutional Critique, 2009 (London), pp. 29–32. Skrebowski, Luke: “After Hans Haacke. Tue Greenfort and Eco-Institutional Critique”, in: Third Text, 27 (2013) 1, pp. 115–130. Wakefield, Neville: “Tue Greenfort in an interview with Neville Wakefield”, in: Frieze Art Fair Yearbook, 9 (2008), n.p. Wallen, Ruth: “Ecological Art: A Call for Visionary Intervention in a time of Crisis”, in: Leonardo, 45 (2012), pp. 234–242. Weiss, Judith Elisabeth: “Konstruktionen und Dekonstruktionen des Natürlichen. Eine Bestandsaufnahme von Natur in der Kunst nach dem Ende der Natur”, in: Kunstnatur/Naturkunst. Natur in der Kunst nach dem Ende der Natur, Kunstforum International, 258 (2019), pp. 44–85.

Online References Cambridge Dictionary, keyword: “permaculture”, n.d., https://dictionary.cambridge.or g/de/worterbuch/englisch/permaculture (accessed June 08, 2020). Kultuverein Meierhof Kornberg: AMILKORKIM 2015. Tue Greenfort, n.d., https://cargoc ollective.com/schauplatz-kornberg (accessed January 20, 2023) Tue Greenfort video statement, “BAU talks to Tue Greenfort”, in: BAU, 2016, https://ww w.b-a-u.it/tue-greenfort/ (accessed August 30, 2020). Mineralienatlas – Fossilienatlas, keyword: “Prototaxites”, 2019, https://www.mineralienatl as.de/lexikon/index.php/FossilData?fossil=Prototaxites (accessed June 5, 2020). Lookofsky, Sarah: “State of Nature. Uncertainty in Environmental Emergency. A conversation between Sarah Lookofsky and Tue Greenfort”, in: dismagazine, n.d., http://dis magazine.com/blog/68076/state-of-nature-raging-with-uncertainty-in-an-enviro nmental-emergency/ (accessed June 16, 2020). Vogel, Sabine B.: Schauplatz Kornberg, Kunstraum Lakeside, Politische Landschaft, 2015, http: //sabinebvogel.at/schauplatz-kornberg-kunstraum-lakeside-politische-landschaft / (accessed June 10, 2020). Witte de With Contemporary Art, 2006, https://www.wdw.nl/en/our_program/exhibiti ons/tue_greenfort (accessed June 16, 2020). Wu, Mali / Manacorda, Francesco: Post-Nature – A Museum as Ecosystem, 2018, https://ww w.taipeibiennial.org/2018/?lang=en (accessed September 26, 2020).

Karoline Walter: Tue Greenfort: Questioning Dichotomies

N. A.: Prototaxites, 2017–2018; Light-vented Bulbul, 2018, https://www.taipeibiennial.org/20 18/information/93 (accessed September 26, 2020). N. A.: The Present & The Future, 2017, https://en.aros.dk/about-aros/press/2017/the-prese nt-the-future/ (accessed September 12, 2019). N. A.: Das Rätsel des Riesenstamms. Das größte Landgewächs im Devon, 2007, https://www.s cinexx.de/dossierartikel/das-raetsel-des-riesenstamms/ (accessed June 5, 2020). N.A.: Niederlande: Neue Mühlen braucht das Land, 2015, https://www.energiezukunft.eu/politik/niederlande-neue-muehlen-braucht-das-land-gn103774/ (accessed June 06, 2020).

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Exhibition view Tue Greenfort, AMILKORKIM, 2015, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Institut für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark, Graz, Austria, 2015. Courtesy the artist and KOENIG GALERIE Berlin, London, Tokyo. Fig. 2: Exhibition view Tue Greenfort, AMILKORKIM, 2015, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Institut für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark, Graz, Austria, 2015. Courtesy the artist and KOENIG GALERIE Berlin, London, Tokyo. Fig. 3: Exhibition view Tue Greenfort, Prototaxites, 2017–2018, Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan, 2018. Courtesy the artist and KOENIG GALERIE Berlin, London, Tokyo.

279

10. Quasi Objects

Questioning the Non-Human Other: Political Potentials of Living Beings in Contemporary Art Mathias Kessler/Arnaud Gerspacher

Introduction Mathias Kessler Nowhere to Be Found (2010) is a field of tensions: a human skull, onto which corals have been implanted, is submerged and suspended in a saltwater tank. With time, the seawater dissolves the calcium of the head, and the corals feed on its minerals, enabling life. This work stands within the tradition of vanitas, building on the sentiments of memento mori and carpe diem. Yet, unlike most other vanitas representations, Nowhere to Be Found is more than just a symbol of the brevity of life. In this sculpture, a natural transformation process has been artificially initiated. With this work, I wanted to capture humanity’s impact on natural processes, a question so tightly embedded in my practice. For me, Nature is this all-encompassing ultimate creative macrocosm. It is the origin where creation and destruction coexist, generating multiple forms of life while simultaneously revealing itself as an archive of human intervention and destruction.

Stuff we know but don’t see – Pollution and sea life This work illustrates an ecosystem at work; we define systems by their boundaries, structures, and purpose. Systems are like many of us, limited by time and influenced by their environment. But most importantly, a system is a relationship; it is an interaction between a group of things that facilitate life (in this case). For a system to thrive, a balance must be achieved. Balance is a constant struggle because entropy governs physical life, and entropy disorganizes, transforms. And so is the cycle of life. Life ends, life begins, like an eternal dance or balancing a diamond on a blade of grass. Life is destruction, and what is born out of that.

284

Quasi Objects

Fig. 1: Matthias Kessler, Nowhere to Be Found, 2012, Site-specific installation, Marian Boesky Gallery, New York, USA, Aquarium tank, human skull, various live corals, LED light with UV spectrum, saltwater filter, pump, plumbing, and wooden pedestal, 48 cm x 44 cm x 175 cm, Edition of 5.

Stuff we know but don’t see – Destructive forces of capital and production Ecopolitics of aquatic life, coral reefs, fish, plankton. Unbeknownst to the great majority of us, our oceans are collapsing at alarming rates. Rising seawater temperatures stress corals who respond by expelling the algae living within, terminating their endosymbiotic relationship, and obliterating their capacity for survival. A process that renders them white bleaching their life and entire colorful ecosystems away. If the reefs die, we will finally feel an impact we have failed to see, one ecosystem taking the next in an unstoppable ripple effect. Perhaps after the collapse, our bones will

Mathias Kessler/Arnaud Gerspacher: Questioning the Non-Human Other

collectively feed the oceans of the future. There is something pleasing about the idea of our bodies being consumed and transformed into coral reefs. Death births life, right? What kind of life will rise out of industrial waste, burned forests, and microplastics? As we probably won’t see it, we probably should not care... Nowhere to Be Found is a work that demands ecological maintenance, where water cannot be ignored. It is both natural and poetic. It beckons us to look at and care for the invisible systems that govern our lives. How can we think about art, society, ecology, and economy, or how can art impact us? Can we make the invisible visible? The irreparable damage that lies hidden in the depths of our oceans, can art pay its due there? Nowhere to Be Found is a see-able liquid microcosm for a liquid macrocosm that we don’t ever experience in its complex totality (the oceans). This might reveal to us a fascinating insight about artistic practice: how art harbors in its visuality a capacity to inform, translate, generate and communicate information. Visual practices inform by eliciting. One of the biggest problems we now face as a society is the challenges scientific research faces in its trajectory to the masses. It is both an issue of language and visuality. Can artists serve as translators of climate models? Can we document and share the invisible? Perhaps what we need is supplementation, a new system between art and scientific knowledge, illustrating and translating climate models, i.e., oceanographic probabilities that hope to encompass the problem in mathematizing abstract terms. This does not mean that artistic work is simply a supplement, ad hoc, or secondary. On the contrary, art’s visuality presents itself as an idoneous medium to captivate and to inform. Art can expand abstract scientific models, resulting in more visceral, affective, and poetic experiences, closing the gap between data and the mind, bringing people closer to knowledge.

Gerspacher / Dialectic of Entitlement and the Ecopolitics of Debt In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer decry the destructive eventualities of technological modernity, uncovering its cold and calculating underbelly. They show how enlightenment thinking, having offered potent immunological supplements to certain geo-specific humans, nonetheless holds the potential for self-detonation in autoimmunity. Here I propose an alliterative shift: the dialectic of entitlement. This shift traces a much longer history – maybe the very history of our species. Anthropologists might think of the ways human entitlement has shaped the course of this planet. We are entitled to survival, land, harnessing the bodies of other animals, and symbolic powers, all the way up to rights, scientific discovery, and an Earth rife with endless provisions. This is a history that connects knowledge and power with self-pampering – and it has been very good to at least some of us. To be born human today is to be entitled to certain liberties and protections (if often only in theory). And yet… …it is easy to see how our entitlements have also cost us. Dipesh Chakrabarty is right when he says that “most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive.”1 Here he speaks of the literal fossil-fuel variety. I refer to energy in a more sociological or psychoanalytic sense, human drives and desires that fuel our freedoms and privileges – free1

Chakrabarty: “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, p. 208.

285

286

Quasi Objects

doms and liberties that now scarf too profusely on dangerous things like fossil fuels. In this way, entitled self-pampering has a way of eating its own tail in a manner similar to enlightenment thinking in self-detonation. On the one hand, collective human ingenuity has laudably cleared the way for affirmative entitlements – precarious privileges that afford living free from unnecessary violence and suffering per the emotional and cognitive capacities of our species-being (again, heretofore in selective planetary distribution). On the other hand, these affirmative entitlements can and have led to some humans with too much time on their hands. This can be good – our artmaking, for one – but also bad: anxiety, boredom, increasing demands for intense experiences, fetishizing our capacities, reintroducing artificial competitive scenarios, allowing for highly imbalanced intra-human power relations, and so on. When this happens, affirmative entitlements turn detrimental and radiate the very harms they had hoped to keep at bay. The logic is once more immunity turning autoimmune. More glibly, it represents the long historical contest between human needs and demands, with the latter now thoroughly dominating the former. Global warming is the foreseeable culmination of a certain set of our species hellbent on mastering and profiting from the more-than-human world, which now finds itself self-consumed by a bloated pleasure-principle long spiraling out of control. It is a product of detrimental entitlement scaled up to monstrous degrees. The fight should not only be to force corporate divestment – above all from fossil fuels and animal agriculture – but also from our more personal, albeit comparatively minuscule, points of complicity. We have to negotiate the murky borders of affirmative and detrimental privileges, of the immune and autoimmune, and of need and demand. This dialectic of entitlement plays out nearly everywhere: the need for essential work and the demand for two-day shipping; the need for vaccines and the demand for their patents; the need for feeling safe and the misogynist demand for power and pleasure; the need for nutrition and food justice and the demand for plant, water, and energy-intensive animal products; the need for clean water and the demand for a tar sands pipeline; the need to recognize minoritarian racial and ethnic groups and the demand for a mythically autochthonic great-again ethnostate; the need to live free from poverty and the demand to facilitate wealth hoarding. This dialectical list of viable and venial entitlements could expand nearly endlessly… I see much of this captured in your harrowing Disasters of War (After Goya) series from 2020: burning crosses, police cars, and buildings all foregrounded by various needs and demands that are relentlessly contested on a daily basis in the United States by competing conceptions of freedom. Above all, this series reflects the painful struggle between the need for racial and environmental justice and the demand for warped privileges and anti-social investments. I also find this dialectical tension at work in your Nowhere to Be Found. For the skull is not only a symbol of death, as you rightly point out, but also of immunity. It is the hard, cranial enclosure that protects our brains – call it the evolutionary privilege of accreted mindedness that we share with innumerable vertebrates. But now, this bony armor facilitates its own demise. It is at a loss to protect itself from becoming parasitical feed to the corals, which will ultimately consume it completely. In this interpretation, Nowhere to Be Found should be placed within the revenge-of-nature tradition where human ‘civilization’, represented by the skull, is eroded by natural forces, represented by the water and coral. Think of Thomas Cole’s painting cycle The Course of Empire,

Mathias Kessler/Arnaud Gerspacher: Questioning the Non-Human Other

1833–6, especially its final panel, Desolation, 1836. A pellucid moon sits nearly in the dead center of a calm sky, reflecting on the calm water of the sea inlet below. On the banks, classical marble ruins have been overrun by natural processes, most notably vegetation and the easily missable blackbird in her nest built on top of the isolated Corinthian column in the foreground. The whole scene is devoid of human life, and one gets the sense humans have long since vanished. This painting is about Roman decadence, which Cole extrapolated to a US context, but today we can extrapolate it to a planetary ‘after Man’ context – though in our case, we are leaving behind strip malls and skyscrapers.

Fig. 2: Matthias Kessler, Nowhere to Be Found, 2020, Site-specific installation, Dom Museum, Vienna, Austria, Aquarium tank, human skull, various live corals, LED light with UV spectrum, saltwater filter, pump, plumbing, and wooden pedestal, 48 cm x 44 cm x 175 cm, Edition of 5.

Our bones, craniums and all, share in the very inorganic mineral being of the Roman ruins pictured in Cole’s Desolation: calcium carbonate in the case of the marble architecture (as is the case with corals, which secrete the same to form their skeletons); calcium phosphate in the case of our skulls. But here is where we meet the limits of these revenge-of-nature fantasies in which human activity is finally quieted down to zero. No – there is no civilization on one side and nature on the other (this reads like a critical cliché at this point, but it is no less accurate). Unlike Cole’s romanticism, we are not dealing with nature as a separate reality or entity. Instead, we are immanent within this reality – leaching and being leached, parasitical and parasited, taking up and losing space. Nor through this seemingly isolated skull are we dealing with the autonomous seat of intelligence, that myth of western Humanism – see Caravaggio’s incredible Saint Jerome Writing c. 1605–6 with the saint’s glowing forehead echoing the mandible-less skull sitting on an

287

288

Quasi Objects

open book just in front of him, yes, like memento mori, but also as an object of reflection on the subject of reflection itself (albeit brain anatomy was only just getting off the ground at this point in history). This is to say that your Nowhere to Be Found ecologizes the brain and mindedness. The skull is not picked clean in isolation. It is a porous host to all sorts of internal and external processes. In systems theory, this is called autopoiesis or sympoiesis, which dictates that some things have to come in while others have to come out. We cannot be open to the world without also being closed to it. So, on the one hand, we have hard and fastened foreheads, while on the other, soft and open eye sockets; solid and protective teeth that can clench and close, soft and vulnerable throats and tongues that can relax and take in; dense and protective craniums protecting tender and moist brain matter, which necessarily need to remain open at their base for access to the spinal column, the gut-brain axis, blood and oxygen, and so much else. Bone composition itself is both rigid (calcium phosphate) and soft (collagen). Such is creaturely existence… Incidentally, should this need pointing out, there is more than one animal in this tank. Without skin and other facial cues, I cannot tell if your skull is laughing or screaming. At this point, screaming is somewhat likely. If laughing, it could be maniacal laughter in realizing its own situated irony. In the ‘wild’, it is coral that is being bleached white due to anthropogenic global warming and ocean acidification – as you say, a phenomenon caused by its stressed-out expulsion of nutritive algae due to sudden environmental changes. In Nowhere to be found, all this is reversed: it is the human skull that secretes calcium nutrients into the water, which in turn provides nutrients for the corals. This, then, gets us to a different interpretation, one that has more to do with the logic of the unconditional gift… Who is the parasite, and who is the host? Is it not embarrassingly evident that the dialectic of pampered entitlement has been driven by an increasing inability to make (nonviolent) sacrifices and to let go of frivolous or indecent privileges? When Greta Thunberg excoriated UN world leaders as myopically obsessed with economic growth in 2019, she was critiquing this dialectic of entitlement: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”2 Thunberg rightly points towards the rampant cynicism that keeps detrimental though narcotically addictive systems going – gloomy realpolitik economic theories and commitments to capitalism that cannot imagine a different engagement with the world. And so, we currently find the obscenely wealth buying islands and plots in New Zealand in escapist preparation for global warming and civilizational breakdown. This reflects a narcissistically cynical economy of opulent survival rather than a communal investment that might help others. I imagine these prosperous cynics feel deserving of the terrestrial grace that global capitalism has provided 2

Twitter message, 23. September 2019.

Mathias Kessler/Arnaud Gerspacher: Questioning the Non-Human Other

them. They probably even think the world and all its purportedly lesser humans owe them something…

Fig. 3: Matthias Kessler, Jarrells Cemetery, N37°53.96’ W81°34.71’, Eunice Mountain, West Virginia, 2012 Rauminstallation / Spatial installation, Kirchner Museum Davos UV-Druck auf Vliestapete und Digitaldruck auf Vinyl / UV print on nonwoven wallpaper and digital print on vinyl.

But why not think of being indebted to the Earth and the more-than-human world instead of human institutions like banks or national mandates? Why not think in terms of geological and evolutionary debt, wherein what is of utmost value is the planet and our position on the continuum of animality? These are, after all, the base existential features that have allowed us to thrive and may offer a way out of this vicious circle of entitlement. Being indebted to the planet outside market logics would mean sacrificing and giving back without necessarily expecting anything in return, or being ok with the losses incurred. Nowhere to Be Found enacts such a debt: the skull slowly offers itself up to the coral with no expectation of return – and rather than burdening the coral with debt or resentment, we might instead see it as bearing witness to all the creatures, like corals, and ‘natural’ processes, like the ocean, without which we would perish. This is a scene of natural growth and exchange rather than financial growth and exchange. In this interpretation, the skull is no longer providing the means for its destruction (as it did in the first interpretation) but gives itself toward the bettering of nonhuman life – in this case, corals, and we can extrapolate this to any form of nonviolent sacrifice for nonhuman lives and ecologies, which would, in turn, benefit humankind. A gift without return; a debt without repayment or interest. Of course, this would necessitate human societies sacrificing certain luxuries, not expecting all investments to be repaid, and finally recognizing our non-fiduciary debts to immanent nature. It would

289

290

Quasi Objects

mean allowing other species to thrive without farming certain animals in dismal, mass breeding programs that simultaneously drive others into extinction. It would mean allowing for reforestation, decarbonization, and disinvestment. It would mean making nonviolent sacrifices that might force the vicious dialectic of entitlement to falter. In these ways, repayment would no longer fall under the financial paradigm of debt. Instead, we would be repaid in far more priceless ways: not in lifeless equity, but in more equitable and livable ecosystems!

References Chakrabarty, Dipesh: “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, in: Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009) 2, pp. 197–222.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Matthias Kessler, Nowhere to Be Found, 2012, Site-specific installation, Marian Boesky Gallery, New York, USA, Aquarium tank, human skull, various live corals, LED light with UV spectrum, saltwater filter, pump, plumbing, and wooden pedestal, 48 cm x 44 cm x 175 cm, Edition of 5. Fig. 2: Matthias Kessler, Nowhere to Be Found, 2020, Site-specific installation, Dom Museum, Vienna, Austria, Aquarium tank, human skull, various live corals, LED light with UV spectrum, saltwater filter, pump, plumbing, and wooden pedestal, 48 cm x 44 cm x 175 cm, Edition of 5. Fig. 3: Matthias Kessler, Jarrells Cemetery, N37°53.96’ W81°34.71’, Eunice Mountain, West Virginia, 2012 Rauminstallation / Spatial installation, Kirchner Museum Davos UV-Druck auf Vliestapete und Digitaldruck auf Vinyl / UV print on non-woven wallpaper and digital print on vinyl.   All images © Mathias Kessler

The Invisible Thread1: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation Hannes Rickli

While performing research on the development phase of an experimental system designed to investigate the flight control of the common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) at the Institute for Bioengineering and Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich in 2008, I came across several series of high-speed video recordings of fruit flies in free flight by Steven N. Fry. They had been saved on the project server in 2006 as series of single frame grayscale images in a folder labeled first tests. The video sequences, each of them just a few seconds long, show laterally photographed insect flights that showed a recurring pattern: it looked as if the animals were practicing a certain maneuver. In each image, a single animal appears in the left half of the horizontally extended field of view and flies first from left to right. After flapping its wings a few times, is then guided back to the center of the image by an invisible force. Upon reaching the center, it immediately accelerates again and flies out of the right edge of the frame. The formal properties of the image – the wide CinemaScope format, the neutral background marked with various traces and smudges, and somewhat lighter in the middle, the irregular extension of the top and bottom of the image frames, and the trend of the object’s movement from left to right – are reminiscent of chronophotographic documentations by the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey in the late 19th century. Marey directed an assistant to lead domestic and farm animals on a line past his camera in a certain direction, and measured their gait and movement patterns in the recordings. In both projects, the visual products represented merely the raw material of knowledge production, not the scientific objective. Both for Marey in Paris and for behavioral biologist Steven N. Fry, the scientific goal was to subsequently abstract robust mathematical information from the image data.

1

This text appears here as a revised version of an article that was first published in German in: Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung ZMK 7/2, Hamburg 2016, pp. 137–154 and supplemented with further figures in: Marcus Maeder (ed.): Kunst – Wissenschaft – Natur. Zur Ästhetik und Epistemologie der künstlerisch-wissenschaftlichen Naturbeobachtung, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2017. Translation: Susan N. Richter, Berlin.

292

Quasi Objects

Observing today these remnants and tracks of scientific groundwork from my perspective as an artist, I am interested in various aspects that have something to do with aesthetics. Here, I use the word “aesthetics” to mean the issue of the sensory perceptibility of actions, spaces, and temporality in the processes of animal observation, as well as the materiality of the media and technological infrastructures involved in cognitive processes. How do human–animal–media–space relations transform in the transition from analog to digital research practices, and how are they composed materially? What forces and energies control these relations? How do media, infrastructures and material, whether in the form of electricity, storms, or bioactivity, participate in knowledge production? How does electricity, as a plastic medium of both nature and the sciences, shape the horizon of what we can know about ‘natural systems’, and how does this energy, in turn, limit the potential knowledge horizon? I address these questions in empirical investigations that began in the early 1990s and have proceeded systematically in the context of artistic research projects since 2007. The questions and topics acquired contours only gradually, however, in the course of visits to laboratories, and in explorative experiments with videographic raw materials from three working groups in the biological sciences. The carriers of their research interests are fish and insects, on the one hand, and, on the other, the apparatuses of their experimental systems with which the questions they pose to the animals can be materialized.2 In the course of many years of cooperation with the biologist Philipp Fischer in Heligoland,3 Hans Hofmann in Austin, Texas,4 and Steven N. Fry in Zurich,5 I was able to follow the development of their research questions and experimental systems. The three groups’ fields of research and the most important methods with which they work are molecular biology and neurosciences coupled with bioinformatics (Hofmann), the fish ecology of the coast of Spitsbergen by means of remote sensing (Fischer), and biomechanics with 3D-Trackit systems (Fry). The dynamics of their technology-based research can be described as a kind of pendulum movement in which the “technical object”6 for processing the “epistemic 2 3

4 5 6

“They are not simply experimental devices that generate answers; experimental systems are vehicles for materializing questions.” Rheinberger: Toward a History of Epistemic Things, p. 28. Biological Institute Heligoland, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, https://www.awi.de/ueber-uns/organisation/mitarbeiter/philipp-fischer.html, (accessed October 1, 2023). C ooperation since 2005. Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, https://cichlid.biosci.utexas.edu, (accessed October 1, 2023). Cooperation since 1994. Institute for Biomechanics and Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, ht tps://services.ini.uzh.ch/people/steven, (accessed October 1, 2023). Cooperation 1999–2011. “It is through [technical objects] that the objects of investigation become entrenched and articulate themselves in a wider field of epistemic practices and material cultures, including instruments, inscription devices, model organisms, and the floating theorems or boundary concepts attached to them. It is through these technical conditions that the institutional context passes down to the bench work in terms of local measuring facilities, supply of materials, laboratory animals, research traditions, and accumulated skills carried on by long-term technical personnel. […] The experimental conditions ‘contain’ the scientific objects in the double sense of this expression: they embed them, and through that very embracement, they restrict and constrain them.” Rheinberger: Toward a History of Epistemic Things, p. 29.

Hannes Rickli: The Invisible Thread: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation

[biological] thing”7 becomes an epistemic (technological) thing itself, and so on. The constantly developing technologies permeate the biological questions posed, requiring that they be fit to the technical systems. What do the line and the assistant in the recordings of donkeys passing by the camera have in common with the invisible force exerted on the flight path of the Drosophila in the wind tunnel? Although they are substantially different in nature and separated by more than one hundred years, the two cases are, in their own specific ways, motifs with similar effects and a similar status in the process of knowledge production, which guide and control the interaction between human and non-human actors. Both of them arrange relations within an experimental system. Michel Serres would probably designate such objects or things that enable, shape, and also demarcate human, animal, and technological components within a collective as “quasi-objects.” He describes their nature and mode of action as changeable and not always clearly recognizable: “There are objects to do so, quasi-objects, quasi-subjects; we don’t know whether they are beings or relations, tatters of beings or end of relations.”8 A quasi-object, he continues, is “there only to be circulated. It is rigorously the transsubstantiation of being into relation.”9 The quasi-object “makes” the collective,10 it brings it forth and organizes it. Yet it is “blank”11 and “tends toward zero, tends toward absence, in a black collective.”12 In the context of my artistic laboratory studies, I use the term “infrastructure” for these special instruments of organization. Infrastructure normally lies below our perception threshold and “is considered to be a hidden substrate – the binding medium or current between objects of positive consequence, shape, and law,” as the architect and city planner Keller Easterling elaborates.13 Even when they are invisible and constitute a mere triviality in the focus of scientific work, infrastructures tie up large amounts of resources in research enterprises. Since 2012, the interdisciplinary research cooperation Computer Signals, which I initiated as an artist, has been investigating aspects of the production and processing of data in the biological sciences. Its members include not only biologists and artists, but also experienced scholars of science studies.14 Taken together, the multiple project phases15 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

“They are material entities or processes – physical structures, chemical reactions, biological functions – that constitute the objects of inquiry. As epistemic objects, they present themselves in a characteristic, irreducible vagueness.” Ibid., p. 28. See Serres: “Theory of the Quasi-Object”, here p. 227. Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., p. 234. Easterling: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, p. 11. Members of the Computer Signals research partnership see https://computersignale.zhdk.ch/e n/about (accessed October 1, 2023). Spillover. Videograms of Experimentation (2007–2009) https://www.zhdk.ch/forschungsprojekt/4 26832; Computer Signals. Art and Biology in the Age of Digital Experimentation (2012–2015) h ttps://www.zhdk.ch/forschungsprojekt/426508 and the follow-up project Computer Signals II (2017–2021) https://www.zhdk.ch/en/researchproject/544365 (all projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF) (accessed October 1, 2023).

293

294

Quasi Objects

have yielded a long-term study on the transition from analog to digital research practices, based on the example of the above mentioned three working groups on Heligoland, in Austin, Texas, and in Zurich. In the first project, Videograms of Experimentation, analog video recordings from the 1990s were used to identify and examine retrospectively the configuration relations between human, animal, and technical actors, as well as the role of media as an agent.16 The Computer Signals: Art and Biology in the Age of Digital Experimentation project examined the production of artistic, technical and theoretical approaches to the observation of digital data work in laboratories. In the following sections, the material and conceptional transformations of quasiobjects of bioscience research are described over five stations. They have various manifestations: Marey’s fixed line, diaphanous and immaterial objects in the forms of a transparent nylon thread and a virtual reality environment, a submarine cable and a network of oil and natural gas pipelines, cooling water pipes and internet lines. While the quasiobjects vanish ever further from our physical perception, their massivity is increasing as they connect research with landscapes, politics, and economies.

The Line

Fig. 1: Etienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demenÿ: “Âne, Marche”, Station physiologique, Paris 1893. Screenshot

Around 1890, Étienne-Jules Marey had a series of animals pass by a camera in his Paris institute, Station physiologique, in order to study their gait. The passages took place in front of a wall about ten meters long, which appears in the photograph as neutral gray; white and black strips in the foreground mark one meter intervals. His series of three experiments was entitled Âne, Marche (Walk, Donkey) and dated to the year 1893. In the first sequence, composed of 26 individual images, a donkey on a loose line is led by an assistant from left to right through the elongated image format. The second round portrays the donkey trotting. For the third series, a clock with a second hand was installed in front of the wall, which starts running as soon as the donkey galloping is to be recorded. This time the test animal balks; after a strong tug on the line by the assistant, it breaks out 16

See Rickli (ed.): Videograms.

Hannes Rickli: The Invisible Thread: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation

toward the camera. The assistant struggles to steer the animal past the camera. Whether the animal’s lack of motivation was triggered by a disturbance in its surroundings or simply conformed to the proverbial character of the donkey cannot be determined from the photographic record. The recordings appear to be the distant echo of a setting that has hardly any similarity to contemporary, technology-based research. In their raw, elementary state, they do, however, contain essential elements and patterns upon which certain forms of animal observation and measurement are based even today. The series of images demonstrate an experimental system that consists of a batch of human and non-human components in spatiotemporal arrangements. The arena, the animal, the assistant, the line, the measuring scale, the clock, the camera, and last but not least, the tracks of the experimental actions recorded on the photographic plates, are all motifs that have become differentiated over the course of time. The line in Marey’s experiment points to a fundamental principle of technologically based behavioral research, which consists in constant reconciliation – a mutual adaptation and adjustment of the actors – in order to register behavior as “natural” as possible under laboratory conditions.17 In my laboratory examples around the turn of the millennium, the donkey’s line is refined into the form of photoelectric barriers and a transparent thread, which dematerialize in a virtual environment in which the experimental animals orient themselves.

The Nylon Thread From 1995 to 1998, Steven N. Fry investigated goal navigation in the honeybee (Apis mellifera). He set up an experimental system consisting of a round marquee made of white gauze and a video system that was oriented vertically on the base of the tent. The honeybees from the vicinity of the university entered the arena one by one, after having learned how to find a feeding solution. As they passed through a tube, they triggered a photoelectric beam which started the video system. Arriving on an elevated platform in the tent, they oriented themselves using the cylindrical field markers placed in the wider surroundings of a bowl of sugar water sunk into the ground. In order to measure the bees’ visual orientation on the basis of the erected markers and to rule out the olfactory influence of the sugar, Fry covered the entrance hole to the bowl with a small acrylic glass plate. The bee flew between the cylinders to determine the presumed position of the solution. At the moment it found the bowl, Fry, positioned outside of the tent and connected with the interior via the image on the camera monitor, pulled on a transparent nylon thread to remove the plate covering the bowl so that the insect was able to slip into the exit tube where it picked up its reward. Here it passed through a second photoelectric beam to conclude the analog video recording. From 1997 onwards, toward the end of his series of experiments, the experimenter deployed an invention of his own, known as a Trackit camera, which used the contrast ratios in the frame of view to zoom in on the darker body of the bee and follow its flight against the lighter background. From the camera motion, 17

On this, see also Hoffmann: “Beings with lifeworlds of their own in scientific experiments”, pp. 17–22.

295

296

Quasi Objects

the program calculated the data of the path covered as well as the orientations of the body axis and rendered this path graphically. The half-automated experimental system collected a plethora of statistically relevant flight data. Initially, the data were analyzed manually, and then digital programming began taking over. Subsequently, image media were increasingly deployed as optical sensors, which converted signals into numerical data. These data were then used to control the recording systems while simultaneously monitoring the movements of the animals, without any observer having to view the visual recordings afterward and process the images frame by frame. Delegating to the computer the control of the relationship between animals and the recording media had the effect of dematerializing the observer-object relation. An additional effect of automation was that the physical presence of the experimenter at the location of the system was no longer necessary.

The Virtual Environment

Fig. 2: Drosophila in a wind tunnel, high-speed recording, 2006. Bitmap image: Steven N. Fry.

To investigate neuronal processes in the motion control of fruit flies, in 2005 Steven N. Fry set up a wind tunnel in which individual insects, lured by the smell of vinegar, were able to fly freely. By means of an optical 3D-Trackit system, as well as a graphical pattern projected on to the side walls of the tunnel, the animal was led to a point in the middle of the flight space. The basis for positioning the fly was the observation that the insect attempts to maintain a preferred flight speed. This speed is monitored by the fly’s optical perception. The Trackit system consisted of two movable cameras arranged vertically, which captured the animal and conveyed its current position to the computer in real time so that the visual environment could be controlled. The pattern was presented at flexible speeds in order to direct the fly to the center of the wind tunnel. Once it reached this point, for one second, a test pattern was presented that gave rise to the impression that the flight speed had changed. The flight maneuver executed in reaction to this impression was measured by a high-speed camera that laterally recorded 1000 images per second of the orientations of the body axis and the wings. The real-time performance of the Trackit system, with the synchronous presentation of a virtual environment and simultaneous measuring of changes in the body and its position, was realized, in the interest of proce-

Hannes Rickli: The Invisible Thread: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation

dural economy, by selecting only those small fields of the high-speed images relevant for the study and passing them on to the computer as numeric values. The system deleted the image data immediately afterward to prevent any transmission delays caused by the saving of the voluminous visual data. The videograms of the Drosophila found in the archive are the remnants of the system calibration. They document the final phase of preparatory work to adjust the individual media components. The recordings of the flies were preceded by numerous Trackit experiments with small objects fluttering in the wind, which the camera was to fix in the center of the image. After around two years, the setup was able to present ‘natural’ surroundings to the experimental animals. Only after the technological processes had been stabilized and aligned with the animal behavior was it possible to tackle the measurements.18 Considered from the cultural and societal perspectives, the visual recordings, and even more so, their being dropped from the process and disappearing, demonstrate aspects of a dematerialization of digital research work. On the one hand, many of the processes take place in black boxes, whose interior processes elude perception – we may well physically perceive parts of the materiality of these devices, such as their exhaust heat and the ventilators that discharge it. On the other hand, filter algorithms enabled in the software during the recording process select those signals with scientific relevance, which are then set aside for further processing. The program deletes unanticipated signals in the same step. By dispensing with the recordings of scientifically irrelevant materials, it dispenses with the tracks of the work process. But precisely these neglected remnants are what artistic methods can flip turn around retrospectively so that they show the aesthetic and material conditions of knowledge production in the experiment, be it the individual animal, the experimenter’s gestures, the calibration of media and animals, concrete space, objects, and lighting conditions. They provide insight into the organization and interactions of the ‘collective’ in the experimental system and make discernible how its elements configure themselves. As an essential aspect, these tracks also present the temporality of their emergence. For the layman, the disappearance of this material is linked with the loss of possibilities of a glimpse into contemporary research practices.19 The gap – the demonstration of the process rather than the presentation of results – can be filled neither by the researcher nor by scientific communication. The question as to the nature of work in the sciences is pursued by science studies scholar Christoph Hoffmann, who establishes that, in a “scientized” society, we are supposed to “behave” in a certain way toward the sciences, even though we often have too little knowledge of and insight into their statements or results.20 18 19

20

On the research questions and experimental setups, see the “Experimental Systems” chapter in: Rickli (ed.) Videograms, pp. 155ff. In a sense, the possibility to keep the recordings reversible is also lost. In Fry’s setup it is not possible to get from the stored data back to the fly in the wind tunnel, to see how it twitches its wings at any given moment: the Latour’s chain of translations can be traced back only in part. See Latour: Pandora’s Hope, p. 62, p. 69; pp. 183–185 (I am indebted to Christoph Hoffmann for alerting me to this essential difference between digital and analog practices). Hoffmann: Die Arbeit der Wissenschaften, p. 45.

297

298

Quasi Objects

In the mid-1980s, French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard occupied himself with the changing materialities in the light of new communication media. At the Centre Pompidou in Paris, he thus launched the 1985 exhibition on philosophy and art, Les Immatériaux, which consisted in large part of discussions and ephemeral manifestations. The purpose was “to awaken sensibility toward the emergence of new materialities, and especially telecommunications technologies, like, for instance, France’s online teletext service Minitel.”21 Today’s art, according to Lyotard, “consists in exploring things unsayable and things invisible. Strange machines are assembled, where what we didn’t have the idea of saying or the matter to feel can make itself heard and experienced.”22 To investigate the materiality of measurement instruments and research infrastructures, the Computer Signals art project installed a “strange machine” at the underwater observatory of Philipp Fischer’s research group on the coast of the Arctic Sea off Spitsbergen. This artistic machine consists of parasitical placed sensors that monitor not the natural surroundings, but the electrical and electronic emissions of the measurement equipment used, like the power supply, camera, on-board computer, and so on. It transmits the recorded signals over the internet via Heligoland and Bremerhaven to Zurich as audio data. In the form of technical participant observation,23 the project explores the possibilities, materialities and infrastructures of activities in research processes that cannot be perceived with the human senses and attempts to document the physical tracks of research work. Such explorations show how biological knowledge production entails not only posing conceptual questions, but how the media employed and the technological standards promoted by industry are also involved, binding resources and thus, in a sense, co-determining the outcome of research. It further raises the question of the role of material as an agent whose various forms of energy play a significant role in the process of acquiring knowledge.

The Submarine Cable I encountered the underwater observatory RemOs1 (Remote Optical System) for the first time in the Lake Constance in 2005, where it was installed to photograph the hiding places of young perches. In the meantime it has migrated to Heligoland in the North Sea with the working group of the fish ecologist Philipp Fischer, for which it was retooled for deployment in saltwater. For some time now it has been working in the Arctic off Spitsbergen, about a thousand kilometers from the North Pole. For long-term collection of data on environmental changes in the habitats of marine organisms, the RemOs1 was lowered near the coast, where it takes a pair of stereometric images every half hour to measure how the flora and fauna develop which populate the substructure of a pier protruding into the Kongsfjord near Ny Ålesund. Once the images

21 22 23

Hui: “Einige Fragen, das Verhältnis von Materie und Relation betreffend”, pp. 165–170. Lyotard: “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation”, p. 190. See Gisler: “Artistic research as ‘participant perception’”, pp. 175–191.

Hannes Rickli: The Invisible Thread: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation

are transmitted to Heligoland, the organisms they contain are counted and their size registered.24 As a visual artist, I investigate the electrical and digital work of the media and infrastructures in climate impact research. How can this work be observed if it is not only withdrawn from visibility underwater, but also takes place in the black box of digital measurement devices, switches and virtual machines? What roles do electricity and its availability play in remote areas of the world? What is the design potential of electricity, which enables research on the one hand, but limits it on the other? In order to bring the work processes of the underwater station into the area of human perception, my colleague Valentina Vuksic, artist and computational scientist, along with electronics engineer Peter Meyer, equipped the device with audio sensors in the workshop of AWI in Heligoland before it was shipped to Spitsbergen in March 2012. Similar to monitoring processes within organs with a stethoscope, with induction coils we detected neuralgic points where the electronic activity of the devices produces electromagnetic fields. Corresponding converters transmit the oscillations as acoustic signals. To record the power consumption, we used a bypass in the device cabling soldered especially for this purpose. The electromagnetic fields of the digital processes and the fluctuations in the power supply caused by the load make idling routines perceptible as states of finely structured noise. From these noises of year-round activity, occurring even during the polar winter, those moments can be distinguished when the stereometric camera is released, as well as the subsequent uploading of the images via the on-board computer to the AWI on Heligoland. In addition, a contact microphone transmits the mechanical vibrations of the housing and beats of the waves against the floats. The total of five audio signals are recorded by via soundcards in an autonomous minicomputer (Gumstix), which sends the data along with the images to a server for the art project in Zurich. Listening to the electrical and electronic activities of devices and infrastructures in the form of their physical emissions means looking at the work of data collection and distribution from the perspective of the devices themselves. At focus is not the semantics of intended logical operations or an algorithm, but the generally unheard micro-temporalities of the electrical signal in processors as they execute operations. The sonic experience refers to the material processes of digital data work and makes them perceptible. Artist and media scholar Shintaro Miyazaki has coined a word for such physical and temporal qualities of the electronic world: algorhythmics.25 The physical emissions that appear unintentionally in the “side channels” are called “traces” in computer engineering and play a role primarily for security services and in cybercrime. For the Computer Signals art project, they present an opportunity to further pursue the concept of the trace, which was developed using analog video recordings in order to render the material contexts and configuration relations of experimentation further into the digital realm.

24

25

The prototype of the RemOs1 data platform is part of the large-scale European project COSYNA (Coastal Observing System for Northern and Arctic Seas), an observation system under construction for the recording, forecasting and scientific analysis of the current state and the development of the coasts of the North and Arctic Seas; see https://www.hereon.de/institut es/carbon_cycles/cosyna/index.php.en (accessed October 1, 2023). See Miyazaki: Algorhythmisiert.

299

300

Quasi Objects

In June 2012, RemOs1 was lowered to a remotely varied water depth between one and twelve meters off the west coast of Spitsbergen and connected with the land station by a permanently installed electric and fiber optic cable. After a test phase, it was reworked and then put back in the water on 15 September 2012. Since then, the art project has been saving around 30 gigabytes of audio and image data per day. The series of scientific stereometric images, archived since image production was started up until today, exhibits black gaps, which result from slight shifts in the synchronization of the two stereometric cameras with the flash or through medium-and long-term interruptions in the supply of electric power or in data transmission. These gaps testify to the precarious technical conditions and environmental conditions under which the research takes place. The variations in the brightness of the images are caused by the sea swell, or by the “marine snow” it stirs up (miniscule organic particles in the water and potentially also microplastics), which has a brighter reflection than the seawater. Also visible are images that were taken in the workshop during repairs or for calibration purposes.26 On the one hand, electricity makes it possible to perform ecological research that is based on pairs of images recorded every half hour over an entire year; on the other hand, the provision of electrical power is constantly endangered by environmental processes. Corrosion, for example, caused by saltwater when combined with electricity, results in short circuits in the breakout box anchored to the ocean floor or in the equipment whose housings spring leaks due to the impact of their extreme environment. Besides environmental influences like storms27 and icebergs, the production of images is also subject to other biological activities: Before long, algae and other organisms settle on the viewing window of the cameras or the flash, causing discolorations and clouding in the photographs. These effects interfere with the scientific collection of data and generate uncertainty in the series of measurements. Regarded as a track of the production process of data work, they nevertheless emphasize the material context in which such work takes place. The material that itself becomes ‘active’ both in the environment and in the scientific measurement apparatus is, in the words of Karen Barad, “[…] substance in its intraactive becoming – not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. Material is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of step-by-step intra-activity.”28 Matter is an integral component of scientific practice and inseparably interwoven with its apparatuses. Once the capsule is installed in the fjord, this artificial structure is given a new form by different organisms that settle on the observatory. First, a film of bacterial lawn and microalgae forms on the housings, which use even smooth surfaces (like metals) as an adhesive substrate. This film attracts “grazers,” animals that feed on the film. For example, bristle worms that build tubes out of lime for protection, which are cemented to the undersurface. This creates enough roughness on the previously smooth surface for additional plants and animals to settle there. This kind of settlement is called succession, and

26 27

28

See also audio and further image documents: https://computersignale.zhdk.ch/en/data/remo s1 (accessed October 13, 2023). In the perspective of a political ecology, Jane Bennett looks at the vitality of material and things like consumption goods or storms, which allow these “to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.” Bennett: Vibrant Matter, p. VIII. Barad: Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 151.

Hannes Rickli: The Invisible Thread: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation

studying which organisms settle when, where, and in what order provides insight into the interdependencies among the organisms and how a food web is structured. The method of remote sensing in the climate impact research on Spitsbergen is internet-based; the data circulate in fiber optic cables laid below ground and underwater. In May 2015, a special submarine cable connected Kings Bay international research center in Ny Ålesund, run by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries, where the long term coast observation takes place, to the capital of the archipelago, Longyearbyen, where it was linked to the global network. The cable has eliminated the ecologically critical consumption of 8000 liters of diesel fuel for operating a radio station, which previously sent the data to Longyearbyen via satellite.29 However, as a real-time monitoring element of the research infrastructure, it is also a fixed component of the internet, whose infrastructure, in turn, is dependent on a deeper level from fuels, most of them from fossil resources, which provide the energy for producing computers, cooling server farms, and transporting material and maintenance personnel to the infrastructures. Here nature is not only a resource but also the technical medium of its own observation, namely, as a carrier of distribution structures like pipelines, electrical and fiber optic cables, making it an element of the scientific apparatus. Seen in this way, nature itself becomes the “ultimate infrastructure.”30 The findings and experiences acquired in the technical participant observation of RemOs1 in the Arctic Ocean led to investigations of the materiality of the research on bioinformatics performed in the Hans Hofmann Lab at University of Texas at Austin. While the energy supply and its technical challenges are precarious in the Arctic, these aspects are quite different at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Pipeline The research off the coast of Spitsbergen and that in Austin are spatially distributed and bridge distances via the internet and local networks, but in very different ways. Philipp Fischer’s workplace is located 3,000 kilometers away from his research object. He is connected with it via a submarine cable, over which he monitors and controls the underwater observatory, and picks up the recorded data. The research in Austin has a point of reference in Kigoma on Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, where the investigated model organism, the African cichlid (Astatotilapia burtoni) originates. The working group conducts field research there every few years in order to check the laboratory data. On the basis of the cichlid and other animal species, the Hofmann Lab investigates the hormonal and genetic mechanisms that underlie social behavior and its evolution. The ‘Fish Facility,’ which contains aquaria where such phenomena as the behavior of the female in mate selection are observed, is located in the basement of

29

30

According to Uninett, a non-profit organization of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, which laid the cable in cooperation with the British company Global Marine. See Uninett: Arctic Optical Network, https://globalmarine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/unine ttcasestudy.pdf (accessed October 1, 2023). Starosielski: “Fixed Flow”, p. 54.

301

302

Quasi Objects

the J. T. Patterson Labs Building (PAT). The third floor of this building houses laboratories where the molecular biological preparations of the brain samples of female cichlids take place, as well as their storage in a freezer at a temperature of -80 ºC. These areas belong to the ‘wet lab.’ From here on out, the work moves to the ‘dry lab’ of bioinformatics. Parts of the samples are sequenced using a DNA/RNA scanner, located at the Genomic Sequencing and Analysis Facility (GSAF) across the street, which is run jointly by several research groups. The large amounts of digital raw data generated are transferred via the internal network to a server at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (CCBB) on the ground floor of the PAT. The CCBB develops analysis programs in the Gates Dell Complex (GDC) near the laboratory building. These programs process the raw data in multiple processing sessions on the ‘Stampede’ supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) on the J. J. Pickle Research Campus outside of town.31 All of this equipment depends on massive infrastructures. The university campus features five ‘chilling stations’ – multi-story architectures developed as cooling units. A permanent closed loop pumps water into the top floor, where it is released as rain while ventilators successively extract the heat. This procedure is repeated until the water reaches 6 ºC, and then the water is fed into the network of cooling pipes. The cooling of the electronic devices, which work at approximately 14 ºC, presents one of the greatest challenges to these energy resources in the Austin climate, where the average yearly temperature is around 25 ºC, and can rise far above 40 ºC in the summer. There is a 140-megawatt cogeneration facility on campus, the Carl J Eckert Heating and Power Complex, which produces all of the electricity for the operation and the cooling of the machines of the various hard science projects of the university, making the campus independent from public electricity network. It is operated with natural gas, some of which is produced on the oil fields in northwest Texas that belong to the University of Texas system, and then transported the 600 kilometers to Austin via an extensive pipeline network.32 The material context of the bioinformatics in Austin also includes (not always obvious) connections to business, and in particular, to the computer industry. For instance, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, donated together with his wife Melinda in 2013 the building The Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex on campus which houses the CCBB. Dell Computer, a company founded by Austin Michael Dell, a UT alumnus, supplies the components from which the Stampede supercomputer is built. In August 2014, the Computer Signals art project investigated the materiality of the devices and infrastructures with which the Hofmann Lab works, yielding the work Cichlid #3, Soundscape Texas. We listened to the acoustic and electromagnetic waves of an aquarium, of the Panasonic -80 ºC freezer, of the Illumina HiSeq 2500 DNA/RNA scanner, the CCBB server’s hard drives, the Stampede supercomputer’s processors, the rain

31 32

Sounds and maps of infrastructures used by the Hofmann Lab see https://computersignale. zhdk.ch/en/data/cichlid (accessed October 1, 2023). See https://universitylands.utsystem.edu/Resources/Maps (accessed November 11, 2023). In 2014, led by Texas, the US has become the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas on the basis of the ecologically controversial fracking method. Due to the fall in oil and gas prices, production in Texas has since fallen to a deeper level.

Hannes Rickli: The Invisible Thread: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation

and pumping plant at the Chilling Station 6, the power plant generator, and a fracking tower in Crane County near Odessa, Texas. The emissions of the eight stations were recorded synchronously with a mobile internet-based recording system over a 24-hour period. The audio and video data condense one working day of these apparatuses and their infrastructures into a panorama that can be experienced sensorially.33

Fig. 3: University of Texas Lands, Rig #641, fracking tower in Crane County near Odessa, Texas. Recording situation for acoustic microphones, on 20 August 2014. Photo: Hannes Rickli

Conclusion On the basis of various forms of animal observation, I have attempted to portray how infrastructure is combined ever more strongly with a spatial separation from sites of observation and work. At the same time, infrastructure provides possibilities to be present at the ‘other place’ in real time and to control and monitor virtually the collective of participating actors. These secondary, generally invisible structures of scientific undertakings rematerialize themselves in increased energy consumption. This is also the case in Austin, where the research facilities are located close to each other yet linked to distant natural gas fields. The Computer Signals art project follows the tracks of the energy, the matter and the materials participating in knowledge production. It makes them partially experienceable and asks whether, besides the existing ecological, economic and political energy debates, a new epistemic energy discourse should be conducted, which illuminates

33

See the exhibition documentation African Cichlid #3, Soundscape Texas, https://computersignal e.zhdk.ch/en/about/exhibitions/african-cichlid-3 (accessed May 24, 2021).

303

304

Quasi Objects

the possibilities and limitations of knowledge horizons under the conditions of technology-based, data-driven research.

References Barad, Karen: Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham/London (Duke University Press) 2007. Bennett, Jane: Vibrant Matter, Durham/London (Duke University Press) 2010. Esterling, Keller: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, London/New York (Verso) 2014. Gisler, Priska: “Artistic research as ‘participant perception’: Reflecting the project Computer Signals from an arts-inspired STS-perspective,” in: Paolo De Assis, Lucia D’Errico (eds.): Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion, London (Rowman & Littlefield) 2019, pp. 175–191. Hoffmann, Christoph: Die Arbeit der Wissenschaften, Zurich/Berlin (Diaphanes) 2013. Hoffmann, Christoph: “Beings with lifeworlds of their own in scientific experiments”, in: Hannes Rickli (ed.): Videograms: The Pictorial Worlds of Biological Experimentation as an Object of Art and Theory, Zurich (Scheidegger & Spiess) 2011, pp. 17–22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6330789. Hui, Yuk: “Einige Fragen, das Verhältnis von Materie und Relation betreffend,” in: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 12 (2015) 1, pp. 165–170. Hui Yuk/Broeckmann, Andreas (eds.): 30 Years after Les Immatériaux, Lüneburg (meson press) 2015. Latour, Bruno: Pandora’s Hope, Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1999. Lyotard, Jean-François: “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity,” in: Andrew E. Benjamin (ed): The Lyotard Reader, Oxford, UK (Blackwell) 1989, pp. 181–195. Miyazaki, Shintaro: Algorhythmisiert: Eine Medienarchäologie digitaler Signale und (un)erhörter Zeiteffekte, Berlin (Kadmos) 2013. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg: Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford, CA (Stanford University Press) 1997. Rickli, Hannes (ed.): Videograms: The Pictorial Worlds of Biological Experimentation as an Object of Art and Theory, Zurich (Scheidegger & Spiess) 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.528 1/zenodo.6330789. Serres, Michel: The Parasite, transl. Lawrence R. Schehr, Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press) 1982. Serres, Michael: “Theory of the Quasi-Object”, in: Michael Serres: The Parasite, transl. Lawrence R. Schehr, Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press) 1982, pp. 224–234. Starosielski, Nicole: “Fixed Flow. Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructures,” in: Lisa Parks/Nicole Starosielski (eds.): Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, Chicago (University of Illinois Press) 2015, pp. 53–70.

Hannes Rickli: The Invisible Thread: The Materiality and Infrastructures of Digital Animal Observation

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Etienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demenÿ, “Âne, Marche”, Station physiologique, Paris 1893. Screenshot. Fig. 2: Drosophila in a wind tunnel, high-speed recording, 2006. Bitmap image: Steven N. Fry Fig. 3: University of Texas Lands, Rig #641, fracking tower in Crane County near Odessa, Texas. Recording situation for acoustic microphones, on 20 August 2014. Photo: Hannes Rickli

305

Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect Margit Stadlober

The Genesis of the impressionist Comma in Structurism Masterpieces of Regensburg book painting, such as those produced by Berthold Furtmeyr in the latter half of the 15th century, and their ground-breaking innovative depiction of nature has attracted much attention in current research. Landscape paintings became progressively more naturalistic and further evolved by illustrating rain, hail and other weather phenomena with white comma-strokes1 . This new method allows for accents of light to be scattered across the image and to create reflections in water and vegetation. Cumulatively, these brushstrokes form a linear structural web that emerges as a pictorial element in its own right. Several transalpine artists of the Axial Age between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance incorporated this structure in their work and further transformed into a stylistic tool. It is this observation that underpins my classification of the Danube School as Structurism.2 For the first time in visual arts, form does not follow function3 , rather the function of form reveals itself through a multitude of microelements. In this sense, the function determining form now dissolves the same; the static of objects is replaced by the movement of perception. What emerges is a new, abstract force field that evokes emotion, and which might be inspired by a certain natural form. The following will trace and shine a light on this evolution. The scholar Max Friedländer closely studied the early period of the Danube School and was the first to locate the stylistic origin of Structurism, as mentioned above. His findings contradicted the traditional view that Altdorfer follows in Dürer’s footsteps, as established by Johann Dominik Fiorillo in his Geschichte der zeichnenden Künste in Deutschland und den vereinigten Niederlanden, and further argued by Franz Kugler and Anton

1 2 3

Hofmann: Grundlagen der Modernen Kunst, p. 184. Stadlober: Der Wald in der Malerei und der Graphik des Donaustils, pp. 35ff. “Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling workhorse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing nun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.” Sullivan: “The tall office building artistically considered”, p. 408.

308

Quasi Objects

Springer.4 Friedländer based his argument against comparing Altdorfer with Dürer on the typology of his landscapes. He sees the origins of Altdorfer’s style in the book paintings of the Regensburg-based miniaturist Berthold Furtmeyr, but his conclusions are not always convincing, as noted by Alfred Stange in 1964: “He may well have contributed to the Danube School with his technique of short and dabbing brushstrokes, but that is all. He was a routinier, not a creative pioneer.”5 Scholars long tended to undervalue Furtmeyr’s oeuvre in favour of elevating Altdorfer’s importance. Only Achim Hubels presented a counterview.6 He acknowledged and praised the miniaturist’s ornamental touch and sophisticated use of colour. Hubels also recognises Furtmeyr’s striking use of highlights in his landscape details as the precursor for Altdorfer’s accentuated lines.

Fig. 1: Berthold Furtmeyr, Die Sintflut, 1465–1470, Munich, BSB Cgm 8010a, fol. 13 vb. © München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00045292/image_31.

4 5 6

Cf.: Resch: Albrecht Altdorfers Landschaftsmalerei-Rezeptionsgeschichte und neue Forschungsansätze, pp. 7f. Stange: Malerei der Donauschule, p. 40. [own translation] Hubel: “Furtmeyr und die Regensburger Buchmalerei des ausgehenden Mittelalters”, pp. 111–118.

Margit Stadlober: Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect

Fig. 2: Albrecht Dürer, recto: ‘St. Jerome in the Wilderness’, verso: ‘Heavenly scene’, around 1497, oil on pear wood, 23.1 x 17.4 cm, London, The National Gallery, inv. no. 6563. © Von Albrecht Dürer – 1. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202. 2./3. National Gallery, London.

Illustrative examples relevant for this discussion include Berthold Furtmeyr’s book paintings: Die Sintflut, Munich, BSB Cgm 8010a, fol. 13 vb.7 ; Der Hagel, Munich, BSB Cgm 8010a, fol, 53 r.8 ; and Die Taufe Christi, Salzburg missal, Munich, Clm 15710, fol. 31 v.9 Ultimately, Altdorfer’s and Dürer’s paths do cross in the evolution of Structurism, with Dürer ushering it into the Alpine regions of ‘Old-Austria’ and ‘Old-Germany’. The Consolidation of Structurism in Dürer’s Work on the Example of his early painting, St. Jerome in the Wilderness.

7

8

9

Berthold Furtmeyr, Die Sintflut, 1465–1470, Munich, BSB Cgm 8010a, fol. 13 vb. Wagner/Unger (eds.): Berthold Furtmeyr: Meisterwerke der Buchmalerei und die Regensburger Kunst in Spätgotik und Renaissance, panel 11h. Berthold Furtmeyr, Der Hagel, 1465–1470, Munich, BSB Cgm 8010a, fol. 53r. Wagner/Unger (eds.): Berthold Furtmeyr: Meisterwerke der Buchmalerei und die Regensburger Kunst in Spätgotik und Renaissance, p. 149. Berthold Furtmeyr, Die Taufe Christi, Salzburger Missale, 1482–1489, approx. 350 x 250 mm, Munich, BSB Clm 15710, fol. 31 v.Ibid., p. 397.

309

310

Quasi Objects

Following on from Furtmeyr, Albrecht Dürer further expands Structurism. His miniature painting of St. Jerome10 (A 14) from ca. 1497 displays a detailed and evocative landscape that sympathetically11 underlines the subject. Further, Dürer’s style builds on Furtmeyr’s early phase of Structurism.12 This makes him an early pioneer of activated landscapes, in content and form, in the visual arts. David Carrit, who attributed this key work to Dürer, notes: “Nothing quite like this exists among Dürer’s paintings; in none does the landscape play such an important role.”13 The figure and the surrounding landscape morph together, creating a complex whole.

An iconological Discursion: St. Jerome In the 14th century, the image of St. Jerome in penance became an important symbol and model for the mendicant and eremitical orders and their penitential rites. Thomas Noll extensively investigates how this image of the atoning saint influenced the Medieval notion of piety and points to the Jeromian example of imitatio Christi, humilitas in the meditation on suffering, and compassio with Christ crucified “as the quintessence of an accessible ideal of piety not reserved for the ecclesiastical classes [...]”14 . Similar to devotional paintings, the image of St. Jerome evokes emotions and advocates a new humancentred attitude to faith not determined by conventions. This shift also garnered interest from Italian humanists, as documented by a plethora of images produced in the 15th century. These represented and became characteristic for an intellectual devoutness, often in connection with portraits of scholars. Dutch artists only began to work with the subject of St. Jerome towards the end of the 15th century, to a limited extent. Both regional artistic traditions placed less value on landscape painting pre-Dürer, although this slowly gained more significance. Many details in the depiction of nature are based on historical texts and hold symbolic meaning, but still fulfil a more attributive function. Dürer’s choice to paint an atoning St. Jerome in the wilderness as the subject for his new approach to landscape painting carries particular weight. St. Jerome was considered a prophet of nature in the Middle Ages of the 4th century. Jacobus de Voragine traces the etymology of the name Jerome in his Legenda Aurea: “Jerome (Hieronymus in Latin) comes from gerar, holy, and nemus, a grove – hence

10

11

12 13 14

Albrecht Dürer, recto: St. Jerome in the Wilderness, verso: Heavenly scene, around 1497, oil on pear wood, 23.1 x 17.4 cm, London, The National Gallery (purchased with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Art Collections Fund and Sir Paul Getty Jr. through the American Friends of the National Gallery, 1996), inv. no. 6563; two copies in Cologne, one in Munich, Sommerfeld. Anzelewsky: Dürer. Das malerische Werk, pp. 127–129. Here, sympathetic refers to the natural correlation between multiple things, as translated from Greek. Cf.: Pochat: Figur und Landschaft. Eine historische Interpretation der Landschaftsmalerei von der Antike bis zur Renaissance, pp. 104–109, p. 244, pp. 342–374, p. 435, p. 446, p. 457, pp. 469–470. Stadlober: Der Wald in der Malerei und der Graphik des Donaustils, pp. 35 ff. Carrit: “Dürer’s ‘St. Jerome in the Wilderness’”, p. 364. Further sources: Schilling: “Dürers Täfelchen mit dem heiligen Hieronymus”, pp. 175–184. Noll: Albrecht Altdorfer in seiner Zeit. Religiöse und profane Themen in der Kunst um 1500, p. 99. [own translation]

Margit Stadlober: Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect

a holy grove – or noma, a law.”15 He is thought to be the author of a ‘liber locorum’ on holy places. Motifs contained therein, for example that of the sacred mountain, are already referenced in a 12th century document, the ‘Descriptio’.16 Dürer’s landscapes, however, go far beyond the imagery described in the Golden Legend. The Legenda Aurea was published in the 13th century, and its literary and thematic influence is still evident in the 15th century. The text partially cites a letter St. Jerome wrote to Eustochium in 384 AD, describing the setting of his four years of penance with only little detail. A few descriptors such as “sun-scorched abode”17 , or “company [...] was scorpions and wild beasts”18 paint the picture of a hostile environment. The letter to Eustochium also mentions a rock to crush one’s sins, like beating a stone against one’s chest. The rock symbolises Christ.19 The location referred to in the text is the desert of Chalcis near Antioch20 . The transformation of this place of penance into a forest landscape already occurred in the Old Saxon Bible epos Heliand.21 Here, Sinweldi denotes a vast, infinite forest22 and is subsequently referred to as a wasteland. The description of this forest does not rely on sensory perception and is entirely based on topos. Dürer combines this literary topos with the classical topos in the locus amoenus and enriches both with observations of nature, infusing them with emotion through his artistic style.

Analysis: Dürer’s St. Jerome in the Wilderness Dürer renders the elderly saint with naturalistic features but also adds a softness of innocence. He is depicted in the centre of the foreground, facing left and kneeling on lush green grass at the edge of a stream. The flora and fauna are rendered with great naturalistic detail. According to Leon Battista Alberti, images of springs and water have a stimulating effect on a psychological level: “Aquarum spectare fontes pictos et rivulos maiorem in modum febricitantibus conferet.” Looking at painted illustrations of spring water and small streams is beneficial in alleviating a fever.23 The picturesque landscape resembles the locus amoenus in ancient literature. It allegorises paradise awaiting those that live ascetically. It also expresses the trials and tribulations of this journey with the same starkness as the Legenda Aurea: “My misshapen limbs shuddered in their sackcloth, my squalid skin had taken on the blackness of an Ethiopian’s flesh. Tears all day, groans

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Die Legenda aurea des Jacobus de Voragine, p. 756. Cf.: Schama: Landscape and Memory, pp. 414–415. Legenda aurea, p. 758. Ibid., “scorpionum tantum socuus” (Ep. 22,7). Wright (ed.): Jerome Select Letters, p. 66. Cf.: Zöllner: Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519, pp. 49–50. Wright (ed.): Jerome Select Letters, p. 66. Behaghel (ed.): Heliand und Genesis, p. 46. Translation: Simrock: Heliand. Christi Leben und Lehre. From Old Saxon, p. 53. Sehrt: Vollständiges Wörterbuch zum Heliand und zur altsächsischen Genesis, p. 466. Alberti: De re aedificatoria, cited according to Landschaftsmalerei, p. 64. [own translation]

311

312

Quasi Objects

all day […].”24 St. Jerome’s meditative gaze is directed upwards beyond the small crucifix stuck into a birch trunk in the bottom left corner. Dürer captures the moment St. Jerome’s eyes glimpse the angels in heaven after many tears have been shed in desperate penance.25 The left knee is pointed forward at an acute angle, making his posture look unstable. His right arm is thus stretched out to balance himself on the Bible placed on the ground. With the left hand, he is beating a stone against his chest. The white beard with glimmering strands and the light blue of the open shirt revealing his chest reflect the nuanced colours of the sky, which in turn reflects the muted red of his cardinal garments discarded on the ground. A narrow path leads from the secluded, emotive foreground to the middle ground, framed by a rugged rock face and earth pyramids that resemble the topography of Northern Italy26 to the right and a forested hill with a tower to the left. Dark silhouettes of partly bare trees rise into the sky. Tiny houses are scattered across the background. The horizon is defined by a gleaming mountain range covered in snow. The dark sulphurous yellow of the sky and the sombre clouds moving in create an apocalyptic atmosphere. The tension between the youthful energy of growth and the dimming strength of old age that is inherent in the infinite flow of the universe palpably envelops humanity and nature. “Yet Dürer has organized this multiplicity of detail into a landscape of cosmic breath.”27 A landscape that is deeply sympathetic and structurally connected. The brushstrokes of the grass, the figure’s hair, the lion’s mane, the tree trunk, the rock face, and the towering clouds converge in parallels. The highlights Dürer places transcend individual shapes.

Albrecht Altdorfer’s Structurism Albrecht Altdorfer is known as the most noted representative of Structurism and is considered the founder of German landscape painting and the tradition of pure landscape painting.28 He sets a further pivotal milestone with his painting of the Beheading of St. Catherine29 . The work is unsigned and undated, but art historians have established its provenance. “This is without doubt Altdorfer’s earliest surviving painting, which he probably painted before 1506.”30 According to Robert Stiassny, it was Bayersdorfer who credited the painting to him.31 Altdorfer revisits the same subject in a chiaroscuro drawing 24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31

Legenda aurea, p. 758. “Sedebam solus, quia amaritudine repletus eram. Horrebam sacco membra deformis, squalida cutis situm Aethiopicae carnis adduxerat. Cotidie lacrimae,” (Ep. 22,7). Wright (ed.): Jerome Select Letters, p. 66. “post multas lacrimas, post caelo oculas inhaerentes nonnumquam videbar mihi interesse agminibus angelorum [...]” Ibid., p. 68. These earth pyramids are located in what today is Northern Italy, e.g. Trentino, an area Dürer visited on his first journey to Italy in the 15th century. D. Carrit: “Dürer’s ‘St. Jerome in the Wilderness’”, p. 364. Cf.: Schneider: Geschichte Landschaftsmalerei, p. 75. Albrecht Altdorfer, Beheading of St. Catherine, unsigned and undated, slightly cropped at the top, oil on limewood, 55.3 x 35.2 cm, from Wilten abbey near Innsbruck, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, gallery no. 1766, inv. no. 6426. Winzinger: Altdorfer. Die Gemälde, pp. 71–72. Ibid., p. 71. [own translation] Cf.: Stiassny: “Die Pacher-Schule. Ein Nachwort zur Kunsthistorischen Ausstellung”, p. 21.

Margit Stadlober: Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect

dated 1509. It also reappeared in a further drawing that was subsequently lost, but a replica dated 1513 has survived. Until 1921, the miniature portrait remained at Wilten abbey near Innsbruck, which suggests that it was commissioned in Old Austria. Additionally, the subject itself points to Viennese humanist circles. In 1923, the painting of St. Catherine was transferred to the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna by the English art dealer Douglas Langton.

An iconological Discursion: St. Catherine The Legenda Aurea by Jacobus de Voragine serves as the textual source for the legend of Saint Catherine.32 She is described as the beautiful, pure, and wise daughter of King Costus. She is said to have converted to Christianity fifty scholars, the empress, and the captain of the guard, Porphyrius, including his two hundred soldiers during the tyrannical reign of Maxentius, a pagan, (ca. 310 AD) by refusing to commit idolatry. She endured being tortured with scorpions and being incarcerated without food for twelve days. She was sentenced to death by breaking wheel, but an angel came to her rescue and destroyed the four wheels, along with killing 4000 pagans. In the end, she was beheaded. Before her execution, she prayed to God, asking him to help all those who silently suffer in their devotion. The Legenda Aurea depicts St. Catherine as a highly educated woman. Philosophia, theorica, practica, ethica, oeconomica, politica and logica are all associated with her. Thus, the painting can also be interpreted from a reformatory perspective as well as in defence of the freedom of science. Humanist and Neoplatonic scholars declared her patron saint of the faculty of arts.33 As such, she is the female counterpart to the male image of scholarship as represented by St. Jerome (described above).

Analysis: Beheading of St. Catherine Altdorfer illustrates the exact moment of Saint Catherine’s execution directly in the foreground of the painting to the left. Befitting the gruesome nature of her martyrdom, the scene takes place in the hostile environment of a deserted valley in the woods. “This realm of nature is still, as it was in the Middle Ages, perceived as a terrifying, dangerous wilderness, desert, ‘no-man’s-land’, a world inhabited by werewolves and other frightening sylvan creatures of mythology.”34 Altdorfer also references the events that preceded her beheading. The executioner, clad in a yellow and red striped landsknecht costume complete with Fugger hat, raises the sword above his head, feet apart, ready to strike with force. Saint Catherine kneels in front of him, facing right and holding her hands in prayer. Her opulent red dress, as was the fashion of the time, takes on symbolic meaning through the association of the colour red with martyrdom. The dark arrow on a shield lying on

32 33 34

Cf.: Legenda aurea, pp. 917–927. Cf.: Winzinger: Altdorfer. Die Gemälde, p. 71. Schneider: Geschichte Landschaftsmalerei, p. 75. [own translation]

313

314

Quasi Objects

the ground points menacingly towards her. The combination of the anticipated trajectory of the sword and the counterpositioned arrow creates a formal composition within which Saint Catherine is framed. Directly behind her, three of the four thousand pagans are thrown to the ground by a seraph. The wheel intended for her torture is torn to shreds. Emperor Maxentius, who sentenced her to death, ducks in fear of the apparition in the sky and pulls his coat over his head. Altdorfer skews the proportions of the figure such that the head adorned with a diadem and a crown of feathers appears to be directly attached to the chest. This further heightens, probably unintentionally, the dramatic scene in a bizarre manner. The ground is covered in hailstones, which have also fallen next to the wheel that was set alight by the seraph’s bolts of lightning. The treetop of a conifer has crashed to the ground in front of the wheel, which sits on an exposed plateau of a tree-topped cliff. The lightning and flying sparks are reflected in the green of the dense forest.35 Altdorfer combines several successive acts in one painting, thus creating a single image of a pluricentric narrative.36 Movement and change are means of dramatic expression. The principal tension of the scene is realised in the composition of directional movement, as embodied in the bent figure of the executioner on the far left. The sword raised in readiness to deal a mortal blow is poised to hit the almost white neck of the kneeling figure; the cold stare of the executioner is steely trained on its target. The trajectory of the anticipated swing of the sword will slice through the picture plane and graze the eyes of the viewer before striking down the martyr in direct line of the compositional angle. This flow of movement within the depicted figures also extends into the landscape, which sympathetically shows signs of destruction. Reflections of light trace every landscape detail and culminate in the spotlight of the protagonists, whose form is softened. With that, Altdorfer pursues a structural interconnection that is even more pronounced than in Dürer’s work. The different visual planes flow towards another. Softening and distorting elements have an exaggerating effect. No detail exists in isolation. The landscape constitutes a second level of meaning in addition to the pictorial narrative and already presents a complex force field in content and form. Altdorfer paints across the characteristic boundaries of genera, rather defining them structurally and thus translating them into a linear system of symbols assimilating light and colour. This cumulative effect of abstraction results in a homogeneous landscape of a straggly blur of plants. The vegetal conglomerate covers the entire picture plane and becomes the dominant formal principle. The results are interactive images of the essence extrapolated from individual core elements. Altdorfer does not correctly depict and differentiate the different plant genera correctly in this early work. He paints peculiar drooping shapes of trees growing on the rocky slope37 , so-called ‘tree fountains’,

35 36 37

For a detailed analysis and literature review: Winzinger: Altdorfer. Die Gemälde, p. 71. Cf.: Varga: “Visuelle Argumentation und visuelle Narrativität”, pp. 360–365. The genus of the trees cannot be clearly identified based on the painted foliage and branches. They resemble weeping willows, however, these do not grow in forests on barren sandy slopes, as depicted by Altdorfer. Wilting birch trees can have a similar shape. “A botanist will, of course, refrain from suggesting genera that inspired some of the other frond-like vegetation.” [own translation] Küster: “Bäume und Baumkronen in Altdorfers Kunst”, p. 408.

Margit Stadlober: Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect

which he borrows from Dürer. He also follows Dürer in the anthropomorphisation of individual trees but does so in a significantly more dramatic manner. The tree bending over the executioner, the drooping branches breaking off, and the tree trunk underneath pointing towards the wild eyes of the figure all allude to the gruesome execution. The trees reflect God’s light in their barks and foliage. The vegetation with its multitudinous forces also dissolves the shape of the destroyed wheel representing a failed attempt of torture and instead transforms it into an object that grows upwards and conforms to the structure. Karl Möseneder has already extensively analysed and described these compositional means Altdorfers employs: “A detailed, almost ornamental structure that does not arise from the plasticity of objects but is added through dotted or short linear brushstrokes of white or gold highlights on top of the coloured ground produces a unifying tension and tangible concreteness across the painting that only emerges in the top layer.”38

The absolute Structurism of the Master of the Historia Dürer is a steppingstone towards the pinnacle of Structurism, which culminates in the oeuvre of the Master of the Historia. The Master’s graphic style bears such resemblance to that of Altdorfer that the signature characteristics in his most famous work, the Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, are barely distinguishable from the Regensburg masterpainter, which has led to some confusion among scholars39 . A detailed differentiation between the two certainly distinct artists is necessary and has been extensively researched, but such observations lie beyond the scope of this paper. The conflation of both painters’ works primarily stems from the misunderstanding of the Master of the Historia as a less talented student of Altdorfer. Similar to the misunderstanding of the relationship between Altdorfer and Dürer, except that the Master of the Historia is older and rooted within the Franconian art tradition pre-Dürer.40 Based on the pen and ink drawing (dated 1514–1516) illustrating the Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, written by Joseph Grünpeck for Maximilian I, art historians have ascribed a collection of works

38 39

40

Cf.: Möseneder: “Gestaltungsmittel Albrecht Altdorfers und ihre ikonologische Entsprechung”, p. 139. [own translation] In the exhibition catalogue, Albrecht Altdorfer. Zeichnungen, Deckfarbenmalereien, Druckgraphik. pp. 68 ff. Hans Mielke proposes to reattribute the watercoloured pen and ink drawings in the Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, preserved at the Austrian States Archive in Vienna, back to Albrecht Altdorfer. These works have previously been convincingly distinguished from Altdorfer and acknowledged as having been produced by a different, unaffiliated artist through meticulous research. Mielke’s reattribution also disregards the extensive oeuvre of the Master of the Historia as collated and identified in scholarship. In light of this, but also considering the comprehensive relevant literature on the subject, this suggestion bears little merit. Cf.: Benesch/Auer: Die Historia Friderici et Maximiliani. Stadlober: “Eine Marien-Johannes-Gruppe vom Bildschnitzer des Pulkauer Altares in der Alten Galerie”, pp. 113–129; Stadlober: “Das Fühwerk Lucas Cranachs d. Ä. und Österreich – Ein Entwicklungsweg”, pp. 414–423; Stadlober: “Die Vision des Heiligen Bernhard vom Meister der Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, ein Werk der frühen Donauschule”, pp. 365–379.

315

316

Quasi Objects

to the anonymous artist, which has been met with dispute.41 The principal work in this collection is the impressive high altarpiece at the Holy Blood Church in Pulkau,42 dated around 1515. This altarpiece constitutes a Gesamtkunstwerk synthesising painting, sculpture and shrine architecture presenting a complex programme of content, and which is almost completely preserved at its designated and original location.43 The small predella panels display a structural web that becomes a feature in and of itself, visibly inspired by contemporary graphics and even more pronounced than in Altdorfer’s work.44 This structure is interwoven throughout the depicted figures and scenery and creates astounding homogeneity across the entire pictorial space with its bold perspective. Altdorfer himself struggles to achieve such advanced spatial composition. “The young Altdorfer’s spatial imagination remains underdeveloped until around 1510.”45 Of further and particular interest is the narrative in the two outer edges of the predella illustrating the local host desecration that triggered an atrocious pogrom in 1338, predating the altarpiece by around 175 years, thus parenthesising the Passion scene and providing a visualised meta level.46 Mitchell Merback categorises both sceneries as fantasia47 due to the lack of topographic detail in comparison to the landscapes depicted in the Passion. I already had to disagree with Merback on this matter.48 However, his description of the two festoons as topothesia49 is highly relevant. These trail canopy-like across the two scenes in bizarre opulence. Two naked putti, one holding a bow in his lowered hand, climb on the garland above the host-desecration scene. Another two putti overlook the scene of the host being thrown into a stream with one figure touching the other’s mouth. These gestures are made in reference to the unfolding scenes. It also paints the misdeed purportedly committed by Jews as a heathenish act. The formal inspiration for this motif

41 42

43

44 45 46 47 48 49

Cf.: Benesch/Auer: Die Historia Friderici et Maximiliani. Designated for and located in the Holy Blood Church in Pulkau, the altarpiece displays a comprehensive iconographic programme realised in wood sculptures and paintings. It includes a Man of Sorrows as a central figure surrounded by Mary and several patron saints, as well as the Passion and the host-miracle legend. The Passion begins in the outer left predella panel, the main part of the narrative continues across the shrine (Outer panel: Mount of Olives bottom left, Christ’s arrest top right, Christ before Pontius Pilate top left, scourging of Christ bottom right. Inner panel: Ecce homo bottom left, washing of hands top right, Christ carrying the Cross top left, Crucifixion bottom right) and ends in the inner right predella panel. The host-miracle is depicted in the margins on the outer edges of the predella in reference to the local legend. The altar is 10 m in height and 3 m in width with the wings closed. The panels are made of spruce wood and measure 162 x 124 cm (shrine) and 151 x 58, 157 x 51, and 105 x 48.5cm (predella). Further analysis: Stadlober: Hochaltar Heiligblutkirche; Stadlober: “Der Hochaltar der Heiligblutkirche zu Pulkau”, pp. 235–237. Reich: Pulkau und seine Kirchen und seine Geschichte; Puschnik: Geschichts-, Kunst- und Kirchenführer; Puschnik: Pulkau. Stadtgeschichte, Kunst, Kultur; Stadlober: “Strukturismus – Ein Vorschlag zur Neubenennung des Donaustils”, pp. 55–65. Stadlober: Der Wald in der Malerei und der Graphik des Donaustils, pp. 35ff. Voß: Der Ursprung des Donaustiles, pp. 121f. [own translation] Merback: Pilgrimage and Pogrom, pp. 101ff.; Stadlober: “Review: Mitchel B. Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom”. Merback: Pilgrimage and Pogrom, p. 118. Stadlober: “Review: Mitchel B. Merback, Pilgrimage and Pogrom”. Merback: Pilgrimage and Pogrom, pp. 118ff.

Margit Stadlober: Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect

originates from the ‘Bacchanalia’ woodcut in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which depicts a number of small putti climbing up a vine arbour.

Fig. 3: Master of the Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, ‘Desecration of the Host’, oil on spruce wood, 105 x 48.5 cm, Pulkau, Heiligblutkirche. © imago/Volker Preußler.

The fantastic hollow in the woods where the ‘host desecration’ takes place50 , illustrated on the righthand predella, creates a wild and morbid atmosphere through structural exaggeration. As such it can be classed as a representative example of the height of Structurism and its sympathetic landscapes. The vegetation is overgrown with mouldy, phosphorescent lichens51 . On the precipice to the left, the rotten wood of once tall trees crumbles. The structure is dominated by descending lines. The host is thrown into this maelstrom of decay. A natural landscape in the grips of chaos further underlines the horror of the sacrilegious act. Those committing it appear like anthropomorphic protuberances of this harsh landscape.52 It is important to note that the panel paintings of the high altar of Pulkau bear close resemblance to the work of Lucas Cranach the Elder. The predella paintings, which are

50 51

52

Master of the Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, Desecration of the Host, oil on spruce wood, 105 x 48.5 cm, Pulkau, Heiligblutkirche. Lichen are plants with a dual nature, they are a symbiosis of fungi and algae. They only thrive in places with excellent air quality and have been used as a food source. Nowadays, they have completely disappeared from areas with high pollution. Merback: Pilgrimage and Pogrom, pp. 101ff.

317

318

Quasi Objects

stylistically distinct from the shrine panels, demonstrate a great similarity with the figures in the pen and ink drawings by Lucas Cranach the Elder illustrating the calendar of Filocalus. This suggests that the Master of the Historia and Cranach met during his visit to Vienna. A comparative analysis of form reveals commonalities in facial details such as the prominent outline of the eyes, the curvature of the mouths,53 and the bulbous shape of the noses.54 Further similarities can be located in the thick necks and chins, the voluminous periwigs, the small hands with short fingers,55 the swollen limbs, the wide stance of the legs, as well as the overall and consistent line, figural, and spatial dynamics. It has long been established in scholarship56 that the scene at the Mount of Olives depicted in the shrine was modelled after an early woodcut by Cranach.57 However, there are no further documented conclusions regarding the complete work. The overlap between the Master of the Historia and Cranach is equally as problematic as the clear connection to Altdorfer. All three artists have to be individually distinguished from another.58 Again, the Master of the Historia does not follow in Cranach’s footsteps, rather, he is a contemporary influence and also employed by the Master. It is possible that Cranach contributed to the design of the Pulkau altar, since the parish of Pulkau was under the authority of the Scots Abbey in Vienna, which already commissioned a small painting of the Crucifixion from Cranach. The fact that he was summoned to Wittenberg in 1504, thus leaving Vienna and, in all probability, all associated commitments, explains why there are no more traces of his signature in the subsequent works by the Master of the Historia. However, he would have left behind a legacy of reference material. With regard to the structural interconnectedness, the Master of the Historia displays particular boldness in the forest landscape depicted in the Pulkau predella scenes. Expansive structural lines flow across figures and scenery alike, establishing a connection between all and every detail. The gnomish-looking people with spherical bodies and wild strands of hair are linked with the phosphorescent tree stumps and beard lichens. Etymologically, the German word for wood Wald (Middle High German: Wald, Old High

53

54

55 56 57 58

The Pulkau predella paintings, and in particular that of the Last Supper with the characterised disciples, exhibit a graphic outline of facial details. Particularly prominent are the eyes and mouth with their dark contour lines. The eyelids have a particularly round and pronounced arch. The eyebrows are painted with short and high lines. The contours of the lips show a similarly energetic curvature. It is exactly these lively brushstrokes that resemble Cranach’s lines in the faces of his Labours of the Months, e.g. comparing the January illustration with the disciple standing to the left of Jesus. The bulbous noses are particularly characteristic of Cranach. It was this unique signature that allowed Winkler to ascribe the Labours of the Months illustrations in the ‘Filocalus’ calendar early on to Cranach. The profile in the June illustration is also reflected in the disciples’ faces in the Pulkau predella as well as Christ’s face in the Mount of Olives scene in the shrine. The woodcut of the Mount of Olives by Cranach, which served as a reference, shows different facial contours. This suggest that the Master of the Historia had a much deeper insight into Cranach’s work. Here the positioning of the fingers holding small objects between the index finger and the thumb is particularly noticeable. For comparison: January, May and Pulkau Last Supper. Cf.: Benesch/Auer: Die Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, p. 63. Unicum, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cf. Stadlober: “Das Frühwerk Lucas d. Ä. und Österreich – Ein Entwicklungsweg”, p. 421, fn. 52.

Margit Stadlober: Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect

German: Wald, Germanic: walÞu-) traces back to the Germanic root meaning tussock or foliage, twigs.59 In non-Germanic languages, the term is semantically similar to the Airoran folt (falt) meaning mane of hair, foliage.60 This activated landscape not only emanates sympathetic qualities but defies all boundaries and limitations of its kind. Finally, a natural form emerges that could have provided the inspiration for the Structurist web of light and lines. Never before in the fine arts have lichens, such as those enveloping the old weather-worn spruce, been placed directly into focus for the viewer. Do they also allow for a symbolic interpretation? Dürer already declares himself a Germanicus with his famous copper engraving Adam and Eve61 (B 1), in which he illustrates the transalpine forest with great detail and transposes the majesty of the Hercynian Forest. Amidst this alpine wilderness he positions a Germanic Adam,62 who comments on the Fall of Man with the awareness of his time. The salvific death of Christ on the Cross (symbolised by Adam’s arm posture) is put in contrast to the imminently impending act of sin, which Dürer references through the gendered (male and female) behaviour of cat and mouse, a reference which is particular to him. Thus, locating the progenitors at the moment just before the Fall in a German forest constitutes an intentional choice and a personal commentary, also in terms of religious attitude. It constitutes a political positioning for German art and reflects an emerging trend in German humanism. The lichens on the transalpine spruce trees could point to their old age, creating a resemblance with genealogical trees and transporting them to the origin of humankind. The depiction of what is taxonomically known as fungi, which are one of the longest-living organisms on earth and a symbiotic microecosystem,63 is a first at this stage of the evolution of Structurism. These depictions are formally interlinked through the traces of light scattered across the painting. They can be understood as a form-finding process64 in terms of form and content as well as an interdisciplinary bridge with natural sciences as a precursor to the current BioArt movement in a similar vein to Biodesign. The personal and distinctive brushstroke of the artist is being released from its confines and grows into its own self-determined and supra-individual construct, akin to sprawling lifeforms of nature. It sheds its individuality and achieves autonomy. This also allows for it to be replicated and disseminated, and to become an influential force of style.

59 60 61

62

63 64

Stadlober: Der Wald in der Malerei und der Graphik des Donaustils, pp. 107ff. Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, p. 774. Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, copper engraving, on the plate with ring attached to the mountain ash: inscription with monogram and date 1504, 25.1 x 19 cm, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, St. Nbg. 2067, loan from the City of Nuremberg. For another print example of a German Adam see also Hans Schäufelein’s woodcut Klag der wilden Holtzeleüt, ca. 1530, 26.2 x 39.5 cm, London, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings. The depiction of The Wild Man, who increasingly appears – in a cleaned-up version – as a representation of the Germanic progenitors, shows a clear analogy to Dürer’s Adam in covering his modesty with a branch of his staff. Cf. also including quotes from historical texts: Schama: Der Traum von der Wildnis. Natur als Imagination, pp. 114f. Kastrun: Flechten im Zwiespalt, https://news.uni-graz.at/de/detail/article/flechten-im-zwiespalt/, p. 1 [21. 09. 2019]. Reichle: “Biodesign. Formfindungsprozesse in Natur, Architektur und Design”, pp. 207–216.

319

320

Quasi Objects

The Structure(ing) of Nature today As a final thought, I propose that there is an additional interdisciplinary layer to the above discussion, a further link between art and nature, which I will discuss in reference to a recent study in plant sciences carried out at the University of Graz. The majestic and evocative spruce trees characteristic of the Danube School are now on the precipice of extinction at the hands of anthropogenic climate change driven by human greed. “The delicate root system of spruce trees has already been significantly damaged, many trees have already been lost.”65 Is it not equally nonsensical to think that we can save our forests by planting heat-resistant tree species? Are lichens next on the list of endangered plants? For over 150 years, lichens were thought to be a symbiotic organism arising from the mutualistic relationship between fungi and algae. This – apparently – definitive definition has formed the basis for all hypotheses on the systematics, reproduction, and ecology of lichens. In recent years, however, this assumption has been newly put under the microscope. “Now, lichens are no longer regarded as a simple symbiosis of two organisms but rather as a microecosystem that also includes bacteria as well as other species of fungi,”66 as Mag. Philipp Resl at the Institute for Plant Sciences at the University of Graz explains. He examined whether specialisation of the substrate they grow on can force lichens to abandon symbiosis. The results were published in 2017, and his dissertation on The evolution of substrate affinity in trapelioid lichen-forming fungi: evidence from phylogeneric and genomic analyses was awarded the Mason Hale Award by the International Association for Lichenology (IAL). His promising work was further recognised by the Theodor Körner Fund, awarding him the prize for medicine, natural sciences, and technology. Resl’s research examines lichens under the premise that the strict substrate specificity of fungi greatly impacts species variation and may even affect the loss of symbiotic relationships. I will show that lichen symbioses are much more adaptable than previously thought, which means that symbiotic relationships can be disbanded, even if they have been successful over millions of years. My results will not only expand the definition of fungi symbioses but contribute to a better understanding of different fungi lifeforms and their interdependencies.67 The tools of art history may be modest, and the presented documents may belong to a different era over 500 years ago, but I believe that they offer a bridge between the past and the present. It is my hope that this bridge can aid us in bringing more awareness to the urgency of the threat our natural environment faces.

65 66 67

Haase: “Schaufenster in den Klimawandel”, pp. 30–31. [own translation] Kastrun: Flechten [21. 09. 2019]. [own translation] Ibid., [21. 09. 2019]. [own translation]

Margit Stadlober: Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect

References Anzelewsky, Fedja: Dürer. Das malerische Werk, vol. 2, newly edited edition, Berlin (Dt. Verl. für Kunstwiss.) 1991. Behaghel, Otto (ed.): Heliand und Genesis, 10th, newly edited edition by Burkhard Taeger, Tübingen (De Gruyter) 1996. Benesch, Otto/Auer, Erwin: Die Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, Berlin (Dt. Verein für Kunstwiss.) 1957. Carrit, David: “Dürer’s ‘St. Jerome in the Wilderness ’”, in: Burlington Magazine, 99 (1957), pp. 363–367. Haase, Claudia: “Schaufenster in den Klimawandel”, in: Kleine Zeitung, Graz, 20.07.2019, pp. 30–31. [own translation] Hofmann, Werner: Grundlagen der Modernen Kunst. Eine Einführung in ihre symbolischen Formen, 4th enlarged edition, Stuttgart (Kröner) 2003. Hubel, Achim: “Berthold Furtmeyr und die Regensburger Buchmalerei des ausgehenden Mittelalters”, in: Florentine Mütherich/Karl Dachs (eds.): Regensburger Buchmalerei. Von frühkarolingischer Zeit bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, exhibition catalogues of the Bavarian State Library (BSB), München (Prestel-Verlag) 1987, pp. 111–123. Jacobus, Genua: Die Legenda aurea des Jacobus de Voragine, translated from Latin by Richard Benz, Gerlingen (Schneider) 1997. Kastrun, Gerhild: Flechten im Zwiespalt, https://news.uni-graz.at/de/detail/article/flecht en-im-zwiespalt/, p. 1 [21. 09. 2019]. Kluge, Friedrich: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 22. revised edtion, Berlin/ New York (de Gruyter) 1989. Küster, Ernst: “Bäume und Baumkronen in Altdorfers Kunst”, in: Forschungen und Fortschritte, 14 (1938) 35, 36, pp. 408–409. McCarter, Robert: Frank Lloyd Wright. Ein Leben für die Architektur, translated from English by Cornelius Brand, München (Deutsche Verlagsanstalt) 2010. Merback, Mitchell B.: Pilgrimage and Pogrom. Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the HostMiracle Shrines of Germany and Austria, Chicago/London (Univ. of Chicago Press) 2012. Mielke, Hans: Albrecht Altdorfer. Zeichnungen, Deckfarbenmalereien, Druckgraphik. Ausstellung zum 450. Todestag von Albrecht Altdorfer, Berlin (Reimer) 1988. Möseneder, Karl: “Gestaltungsmittel Albrecht Altdorfers und ihre ikonologische Entsprechung”, in: Karl Möseneder/Andreas Prater (eds.): Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte. Festschrift für Hermann Bauer zum 60. Geburtstag, Hildesheim/Zurich/New York (Olms) 1991, pp. 137–149. Noll, Thomas: Albrecht Altdorfer in seiner Zeit. Religiöse und profane Themen in der Kunst um 1500, Berlin (Deutscher Kunstverl.) 2004. Pochat, Götz: Figur und Landschaft. Eine historische Interpretation der Landschaftsmalerei von der Antike bis zur Renaissance, Berlin/New York (de Gruyter) 1973. Puschnik, Herbert: Geschichts-, Kunst- und Kirchenführer, Pulkau 1984. Puschnik, Herbert/Puschnik, Herta: Pulkau. Stadtgeschichte, Kunst, Kultur, Pulkau (Fremdenverkehrsverein d. Stadt Pulkau u. Umgebung) 1998. Reich, Anton: Pulkau, seine Kirchen und seine Geschichte, Vienna (Bergland-Verl.) 1963.

321

322

Quasi Objects

Reichle, Ingeborg: “Biodesign. Formfindungsprozesse in Natur, Architektur und Design”, in: Hermann Parzinger/Stefan Auer/Günter Stock (eds.): ArteFakte: Wissen ist Kunst – Kunst ist Wissen. Reflexionen und Praktiken wissenschaftlich-künstlerischer Begegnungen, Bielefeld (transcript Verl.) 2014, pp. 207–216. Resch, Susanne: Albrecht Altdorfers Landschaftsmalerei-Rezeptionsgeschichte und neue Forschungsansätze, diploma thesis Regensburg 1999. Resl, Philipp: The evolution of substrate affinity in trapelioid lichen-forming fungi: evidence from phylogeneric and genomic analyses, Dissertation, Karl-Franzens University of Graz, 2017. Schama, Simon: Landscape and Memory, New York (Knopf) 1995. Schilling, E.: “Dürers Täfelchen mit dem heiligen Hieronymus”, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstwissenschaft, 11 (1957), pp. 175–184. Schneider, Norbert: Geschichte der Landschaftsmalerei. Vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Romantik, Darmstadt (Wiss. Buchgesellschaft) 1999. Sehrt, Edward H.: Vollständiges Wörterbuch zum Heliand und zur altsächsischen Genesis, 2. revised edition, Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 1966. Simrock, Karl: Heliand. Christi Leben und Lehre. From Old Saxon, introduction Gotthold Klee, Leipzig (Max Hesse) 1907. Simrock, Karl: Heliand. Christi Leben und Lehre. From Old Saxon, Ebersfeld (Friederichs Verlag) 1856. Stadlober, Margit: “Das Frühwerk Lucas d. Ä. und Österreich – Ein Entwicklungsweg”, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege, 52 (1998) 2, pp. 414–423. Stadlober, Margit: “Der Hochaltar der Heiligblutkirche zu Pulkau”, in: Das Münster, 37 (1984) 3, pp. 235–237. Stadlober, Margit: Der Wald in der Malerei und der Graphik des Donaustils, Wien/Köln/ Weimar (Böhlau) 2006. Stadlober, Margit: “Die Vision des Heiligen Bernhard vom Meister der Historia Friderici et Maximiliani, ein Werk der frühen Donauschule”, in: Günter Brucher et al. (eds.): Orient und Okzident im Spiegel der Kunst, Festschrift Heinrich Gerhard Franz zum 70. Geburtstag, Graz (Akadem. Druck- und Verlagsanstalt) 1986, pp. 365–379. Stadlober, Margit: “Eine Marien-Johannes-Gruppe vom Bildschnitzer des Pulkauer Altares in der Alten Galerie”, in: Landesmuseum Joanneum Graz Jahresbericht 1997, N.S. 27 (1998), pp. 113–129. Stadlober, Margit: Hochaltar Heiligblutkirche, Dissertation, Karl-Franzens University of Graz, 1982. Stadlober, Margit: “Online Review: Mitchel B. Merback Pilgrimage and Pogrom. Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria”, Chicago/London (Univ. of Chicago Press) 2013, https://static.unigraz.at/fil eadmin/gewiinstitute/Kunstgeschichte/Forschungsstelle_Kuge/Aktuelle_Forschun g/Rezensionen/Rezension_Merback_dt.pdf (accessed August, 2019). Stadlober, Margit: “Strukturismus – Ein Vorschlag zur Neubenennung des Donaustils”, in: Jiri Fajt/Susanne Jaeger (eds.): Das Expressive in der Kunst 1500–1550. Albrecht Altdorfer und seine Zeitgenossen, Berlin (Deutscher Kunstverlag) 2018, pp. 55–65. Stange, Alfred: Malerei der Donauschule, 2nd edited and enlarged edition, München (Bruckmann) 1971.

Margit Stadlober: Tiny Plants (?) with Big Effect

Stauffer, Marianne: Der Wald: zur Darstellung und Deutung der Natur im Mittelalter, Bern (Francke) 1959. Stiassny, Robert: “Die Pacher-Schule. Ein Nachwort zur Kunsthistorischen Ausstellung in Innsbruck”, in: Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, 26 (1903), pp. 20–32. Sullivan, Louis H.: “The tall office building artistically considered”, in: Lippincott´s Magazine, April (1896), p. 403–409, https://archive.org/details/tallofficebuildi00sull/page/ n1/mode/2up [15. 2. 202]. Varga, Aron Kibédi: “Visuelle Argumentation und visuelle Narrativität”, in: Wolfgang Harms (ed.): Text und Bild, Bild und Text. DFG-Symposion 1988, Stuttgart (Metzler) 1990, pp. 360–365. Voß, Hermann: Der Ursprung des Donaustiles. Ein Stück Entwicklungsgeschichte der deutschen Malerei, Leipzig (K.W. Hiersemann Verlag) 1907. Wagner, Christoph/Unger, Klemens (eds.): Berthold Furtmeyr: Meisterwerke der Buchmalerei und die Regensburger Kunst in Spätgotik und Renaissance, Regensburg (Schnell und Steiner) 2010. Winzinger, Franz (ed.): Altdorfer. Die Gemälde. Tafelbilder, Miniaturen, Wandbilder, Bildhauerarbeiten, Werkstatt und Umkreis, Munich/Zürich (Hirmer) 1975. Wright, F. A.(ed.): Select letters of St. Jerome, ed., Cambridge, MA/London (Harvard Univ. Press) 1999. Zöllner, Frank: Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519. Sämtliche Gemälde und Zeichnungen, Köln et al. (Taschen) 2003.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Berthold Furtmeyr, Die Sintflut, 1465–1470, Munich, BSB Cgm 8010a, fol. 13 vb. ©: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb0 0045292/image_31 . Fig. 2: Albrecht Dürer, recto: ‘St. Jerome in the Wilderness’, verso: ‘Heavenly scene’, around 1497, oil on pear wood, 23.1 x 17.4 cm, London, The National Gallery (purchased with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Art Collections Fund and Sir Paul Getty Jr. through the American Friends of the National Gallery, 1996), inv. no. 6563. ©: Von Albrecht Dürer – 1. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202. 2./3. National Gallery, London, Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedi a.org/w/index.php?curid=150400 Fig. 3: Master of the Historia Friderici et Maximiliani,‘Desecration of the Host’, oil on spruce wood, 105 x 48.5 cm, Pulkau, Heiligblutkirche. ©: imago/Volker Preußler

323

11. Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar: A Novel Synthesis from De- and Reconstructing the Living and the Artificial Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl1

ABSTRACT Worldwide, ecosystems are on the brink of collapse, species loss is on the rise, and most environmental stressors can be attributed to human activities. We propose a novel paradigm of constructing an ecologically effective agent as a method of intervening in ecologically stressed environments. Designing biohybrid artefacts from living building blocks towards given functional objectives might enable us to bring ecosystems back to a stable region in their state space after they have already surpassed critical tipping points or are approaching them. Contingency measures against ecological collapse that require applying external forces to push the system back towards its original states are not sustainable solutions, as they would only alleviate the symptoms but not the cause. A more sustainable solution can be shifting the tipping points of the systems themselves, a process which requires a fundamental reconstructing of these stressed ecosystems. Such a contingency measure can be a strategic combination of smart technology and living agents applied to affect important ecosystem parameters. Researching such technologies and designs must start now on a global scale, in order to have still a chance of success. In conclusion, a biohybrid reconstructivist approach may stabilise decaying ecosystems that are crucial providers for society all over the world.

THE COLLAPSE Human activities threaten ecosystems worldwide, from modern agricultural techniques (e.g., deforestation, monocultures and agrochemicals) to increasingly high greenhouse gas emissions, which are the leading forces of climate change.2 Within the next decades up to one million species are predicted to face extinction due to the numerous stressors human activities impose on their environment. The rate at which species go extinct has been accelerating to levels far beyond the average of the last 10 million years – by 10 to

1 2

The three authors work at the Artificial Life Lab of the Institute of Biology, University of Graz, Austria. Corresponding author: [email protected] Edenhofer et al.: “Mitigation of Climate Change”.

328

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

100 times – and is still increasing.3 With each lost species the biodiversity decreases further, what is destabilising their whole ecosystem4 until, in the worst case, the ecosystem’s decay cannot be stopped or reversed anymore.5 Such an abrupt change in a system after a perturbation is marked by so-called ‘tipping points’, e.g., when a certain threshold of an environmental factor is reached. On a global scale we are approaching biosphere tipping points that could lead to irreversible changes in a variety of ecosystems, leading to a cascade that triggers even more tipping points to be surpassed by the system. This is predicted to induce an even more drastic climate change that would make the earth less habitable, and the time for intervention might have already run out.6 We are thus in dire need of a sustainable contingency measure to mitigate the ecosystem decay, and one strategy could be reconstructing affected ecosystems. The conventional understanding of ecosystem reconstruction or restoration is resetting damaged ecosystems to a former state through species and/or habitat restoration and reconstruction. While this approach is feasible for species that were removed, e.g., by overharvesting, it might not work if the underlying causes for species loss are rather systemic, e.g., caused by hardly reversible or in-principle irreversible environmental changes. Ecosystems are generally characterised by the flow of energy and substances through the communities of organisms via intraspecific and interspecific interactions. These flows usually start within the layer of ‘primary producers’, who exploit nutrients and energy (mostly from the sun) to build up complex and larger organic chemical structures.7 These chemical compounds then flow throughout several layers of ‘consumers’, which accumulate these nutrients and this way chemically store these consumed amounts of energy. Ultimately, the energy is freed again by the ‘decomposers’, which feed the nutrients back into the cyclic flows. These interactions between the organisms are usually characterised by reciprocal mutualism (i.e., ‘symbiosis’), parasitism, predation and competition, all of which generate feedback loops of interactions between species. These feedback loops are crucial for the stability of the ecosystem the interacting species reside in.8 A key problem of today’s ecosystem collapse, that might lead us into the already ongoing 6th mass extinction,9 is that with every species that goes extinct or that is significantly decimated, the stability and resilience of ecosystems is further decreasing. This, in turn, can reduce the damping of oscillations and fluctuations induced by external disturbances and environmentally induced random noise. In consequence, this drives even more species to the edge of extinction. Ultimately, a vicious cycle can emerge which can culminate in an ecological collapse. In ecological processes, species that participate in many stabilising interactions with other species have a particularly stabilising role. Logically, losing these species is more harmful to the ecosystem’s stability than losing other species. In analogy to the 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Diaz et al.: “Global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services”. Hautier: “Anthropogenic environmental changes affect ecosystem stability via biodiversity”; Loreau et al.: “Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning”. Hooper et al.: “Effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning”. Lenton et al.: “Climate tipping points – too risky to bet against”. Lieth/Whittaker: Primary productivity of the biosphere. Abram/Dyke: “Structural loop analysis of complex ecological systems”. Ceballos et al.: “Biological Annihilation via the Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction”; Ceballos et al.: “Accelerated Modern Human–induced Species Losses”.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

architectural art of setting the final stone (the ‘keystone’) into the archway dome of a medieval cathedral, which gives the whole cathedral its stability, these species are called ‘keystone species’, to stress their importance for their ecosystem’s stability.10 Promising approaches to ecosystem stabilisation might thus consider especially such keystone species, for example eusocial insect colonies.

COLONY Many eusocial insect species have such a role as a keystone species within their respective ecosystems. For example, honeybees are important pollinators of primary producers11 and compete with other insects for resources,12 while wasps can act as pollinators13 and also as predators that keep the population of their prey species under population control.14 Ants can promote seed dispersal,15 thus they support primary producers, but they are also effectively promoting the decomposition of organic material,16 which termites do in a similar way by growing fungus on collected organic material.17 There is one striking communality across all organism groups: All these eusocial insect species build sophisticated nests, not only precisely serving their own basic housing needs, but also supporting the very different physical material demands of massive sugar storing in honeybees, ventilation systems for millions of workers in termite colonies, arch-based agricultural facilities for fungal gardening in ants and termites, and rapid but precise build-up of hexagonal cell walls for rearing larvae, that would otherwise cannibalise each other, in wasps. Observing these precise nest buildings being crafted from wax, from paper, from mud or being excavated from the soil makes us wonder how these creatures are able to construct such buildings together in a parallelised process and, even more remarkably, how they can extend and reconstruct these buildings while they are already using them to the full extent. In respect to the body size of these animals which created them, these buildings are gigantic, just like a medieval cathedral or a modern skyscraper is in comparison to us. This makes us wonder: Who or what is the keystone actor in the process of building and adaptation of these nests in such a flexible and dynamic, but also in such a precise way? How do these animals work together in order to be capable of achieving such a dynamic and efficient building process collectively? In some sense, the asynchronous and decentralised collaboration in social insects can remind an observer of the typical ‘grassroot movements’ of today – in politics, in opensource software development or in the (bio-)hacker communities. Given these similarities, it’s worth investigating how these human decentralised cooperation regimes operate internally and how they might build significant ‘cathedralic’ results in their respective 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Power et al.: “Challenges in the Quest for Keystones”. Klein et al.: “Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops”. Xie et al.: “The potential influence of bumble bee visitation”. Sühs et al.: “Pollen vector wasps (Hymenoptera, Vespidae)”. Southon et al.: “Social wasps are effective biocontrol agents of key lepidopteran crop pests”. McMahon et al.: “Harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex spp.)”. Weber: “Fungus-growing ants”. da Costa et al.: “Symbiotic plant biomass decomposition in fungus-growing termites”.

329

330

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

domains. Looking at these cultural and societal processes may reveal new interpretation opportunities concerning the interaction principles that govern other natural societies and communities, from ecosystems over biocoenosis to animal societies.

THE EUSOCIAL CATHEDRAL In his seminal essay The cathedral and the bazaar,18 Eric S. Raymond followed exactly such an analogy, when he contrasted two extreme paradigms of building software architectures for digital computer systems in analogy to the construction processes of large-scale buildings in architecture: He compared the top-down approach of building a large cathedral, which has to be centrally pre-planned by a small group of experts for decades in advance, to the rather decentralised bottom-up process of growth in which a messy bazaar emerges over time within a living city. Such bottom-up growth operates rather by reflecting a series of ad-hoc situations in a reactive way, without longer-lasting pre-planning and centralised expertise. For Raymond the cathedral approach is similar to the longterm software development paradigms applied by large corporations in the first decades of the computer industry, while he associates the bazaar method with the open-source community process, which was rather novel to a broader public in those days. In some sense these two extremes seem to reside on two opposing ends of an axis, that has planning and order on one side and chaos and emergence on the other side. However, successful open-source development not only requires flexible and dynamic bottom-up processes, but also elements of order and organisation within the stakeholder communities. For example, Linus Torvalds is said, similar to other leading figures who employ such a mix of methods in open-source development communities, to act as a ‘benevolent dictator’ in the Linux kernel development,19 a picture that is somehow similar to what was described as ‘authorian leadership’20 in the context of developing and maintaining the knowledge content on Wikipedia21 in an open-access form. Today, we can observe more communities having adopted such procedures of working together, such as the emerging ‘maker’ and ‘(bio)hacker’ communities, although currently these communities seem to lean a bit more towards the bazaar than towards the cathedral side, compared to today’s open software community.22 Interestingly, when Christopher Langton and Norman Packard, at the onset of Artificial Life research, characterised the key properties of life in general, they described life to be a dynamical system residing ‘on the edge of chaos’, meaning system regimes that place the system between the realms of order and of chaos.23 This characterisation was later picked up by many researchers from biology, physics, chemistry, system science, mathematics, complexity science and is rather widely accepted to be a key property of

18 19 20 21 22 23

Raimond: “The cathedral and the bazaar”. Ljungberg: “Open source movements as a model for organising”. Ibid.; Reagle: “Do as I do: Authorial leadership in Wikipedia”. Wikipedia: “Wikipedia”. Lande et al.: “Defining makers making”. Lewin: Complexity: Life at the edge of chaos.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

the processes that are associated with the phenomenon of ‘life’: Living systems reside at a delicate balance between mechanisms that create and maintain order through topdown regulation or through bottom-up self-organisation, and the effects of environmental noise & error, often amplified and potentiated through complexity and non-linearity of system interactions. In an analogy to the cathedral and the bazaar, life may be described, for example, to reside between the orderliness observed in crystallisation and the randomness observed in a heated gas or a turbulent fluid. Both classes of systems we discussed so far, open-source development24 and living systems,25 are described to be two cases within the set of ‘complex adaptive systems’ (CAS), as such systems were summarised and named by Murray Gell-Mann,26 also describing the evolution of various physiological, ecological, social, economic and political systems.27 In contrast to their colonies, which are residing at the edge of chaos, there is a high degree of perfection and complexity in the ‘cathedrals’ of these animal societies: For example in the impressive and monumental architectures of termite mounds,28 but also in the precisely crafted network of chambers and tunnels in ant nests,29 in the architecture behind the spatial organisation of honeybee combs and in the filigran and delicate architectures of paper wasp nests.30 Every aspect within these architectures looks rather like a cathedral than a bazaar, rather like a beautiful crystal or snowflake than a product of chaos and error. In contrast to the buildings they create, the ‘makers’ of these complex natural artefacts often seem very fuzzy in their behaviour, they buzz, they swarm, they often seem to just flow through their architectures like a fluid or to swarm out of them like the molecules of a gas. How can such a ‘mess’ create such precisely tailored and functional architectures? Where are the ‘benevolent dictators’ in these systems? Figure 1 brings this into perspective: Cathedrals and bazaars characterise iconically the extremes of an axis spanning from top-down to bottom-up design. Most architectures reside on intermediate positions on this axis, as they are built with blended methodologies (Fig. 1, top row). Ranking these structures on a second axis, spanning from full order to full chaos (Fig. 1, bottom row) yields a similarly ordered sequence of these architectures. These states of order can be illustrated with physical states of matter serving as a metaphor for these architectures: Cathedrals, and monumental buildings like skyscrapers, have a high degree of structural order, comparable to snowflakes, just achieved with top-down design principles in this case. In contrast to that, bazaars and century-grown metropoles appear chaotic, imprecise and also highly dynamically changing, as they adapt constantly in a bottom-up way. Mapping the macroscopic patterns – the buildings – and the microscopic mechanisms – the behaviours of social insects – to these two axes yields another interesting result (Fig. 1, centre rows). These 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Muffato/Faldani: “Open source as a complex adaptive system”. Levin: “Ecosystems and the biosphere as complex adaptive systems”. Gell-Mann: “Complex adaptive systems”. Miller/Page: Complex adaptive systems. Korb: “Thermoregulation and ventilation of termite mounds”. Cassill et al.: “Nest complexity, group size and brood rearing in the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta”; Braun et al.: “The giant nests of the African stink ant Paltothyreus tarsatus”. Camazine: “Self-organizing pattern formation on the combs of honey bee colonies”; Narumi et al.: “Self-organization at the first stage of honeycomb construction”.

331

332

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

natural buildings lean more to the ordered and top-down governed side, while the builders themselves lean rather to the chaotic and bottom-up side. The mesoscopic mechanisms that operate between these two system layers are not acting on a simple 1:1 regime. For example, ants show highly ordered motion on their pheromone trails while the ant hills they build show a low degree of order and precision, compared to the patterning of honeybee combs, to the architectures of wasp nests or even to the cathedrals of the animal realm, the termite mounds.

Fig. 1: Levels of order and design methodology in natural structures and human buildings.

AUTHORIAN STIGMERGY The question of how fuzzy and decentralised communities like eusocial insects can build complexly and precisely shaped buildings, was an unsolved mystery for centuries until Gassé described the principle of ‘stigmergy’ for the way termites construct their precisely crafted moulds collectively.31 The term itself was artificially crafted on purpose from the greek ‘stigma’ (mark) and ‘ergon’ (work, action). Stigmergy basically is defined as a behaviour constituted from a set of actions by which agents, usually collectively, change the environment in a physical way. These altered environments are then perceived as a novel cue or signal that triggers the performance of other behaviours or that modulate the previously executed behaviours in the future. So in principle, based on initially rather random interaction patterns, the building crystallises over time more and more sharply from the initial fuzzy actions. The more it takes shape, the more it dominates over the future behaviour of the workers who build it, exhibiting again a core feature of self-organised processes: Over time, order overcomes chaos and enforces a sort of dominance over the self-organisational processes, a principle described by Haken in 1987 for the key process of order-generation in self-organising systems in general, an insight he achieved 31

Grassé: “Essai d'interprétation du comportement des termites constructeurs”.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

by observing the properties of laser beams.32 Consequently, from the 1990s on, the principles described by Gassé and Haken were found in the collective construction and nest building of many eusocial insects, as well as in the self-regulation of their collective behaviours within those nests, e.g., in paper wasps,33 ant foraging trails34 and honeybees,35 indicating them as a common core regulation system.36 Later, stigmergic processes were also found to play a significant role in the collective processes observed in the construction and regulation of microbiological life forms.37 Based on these findings one could see the ‘benevolent dictator’ in the building that emerges and starts to dominate over the animal system. However, this perspective would only be superficially scratching the surface of this obvious ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem, as the building emerges from the diverse actions of thousands of animals. To understand the driving force that shapes the buildings created by these organisms, one must dig deeper in order to understand how the building can start its dictatorship over the agency of the organisms that have built it. How the self-organising process can create order from seemingly chaotic interactions and how stigmergic principles allow to shape this into cascades of building processes, is explained mainly through behavioural feedback loops that govern the agents’ collective dynamics by modulating their individual behaviours.38 These feedback loops can be shaped (a) with receptor characteristics like stimulus-response dependencies, which determine the perceptions of the physical buildings by the living agents, (b) with the internal processing of the sensory input through their nervous and hormonal systems, and (c) with the ways how body-actuators are capable of affecting the subsequent alteration of the environment, what ultimately determines the next step in the construction process. These three layers of behavioural regulation, namely perception, computation and actuation, are all subject to the current environmental configuration, to the previous life experiences of the agents through learning and life-time adaptation and to the previous adaptation of genetic information through natural selection over their evolutionary history, which is ultimately determining the physiology and the morphology of the workers.

THE COMPLEXITY OF LIFE Coming back to the metaphor of the cathedral and the bazaar, we can thus finally identify the collective self-regulation of eusocial super-organisms, and especially their collective

32 33 34 35

36 37 38

Haken: “Synergetics”. Karsai/Pénzes: “Comb building in social wasps”; Karsai/Schmickl: “Regulation of task partitioning by a ‘common stomach’”; Karsai/Balazsi: “Organization of work via a natural substance”. Deneubourg et al.: “The self-organizing exploratory pattern of the argentine ant”. Camazine: “Self-organizing pattern formation on the combs of honey bee colonies”; Schmickl/Karsai: “Resilience of honeybee colonies via common stomach”; Schmickl/Karsai: “How regulation based on a common stomach leads to economic optimization”. Schmickl/Karsai: “Integral feedback control is at the core of task allocation and resilience”; Bonabeau et al.: “Self-organization in social insects”. Gloag et al.: “Stigmergy: a key driver of self-organization in bacterial biofilms”. Camazine et al.: Self-organization in biological systems.

333

334

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

building process, as a bazaar-type bottom-up process that creates its own ‘benevolent dictator’ in the form of an emergent cathedral, which has its root causation not only in the present but also in the history of the bazaar. The reason for the dominance that the building unfolds on its own creators is not due to any agency of the building itself, but rather due to the reception that the actors exhibit towards it, shaped by their past evolution. So the benevolent dictator is actually no dictator at all that rules by any force, it is rather the acceptance of the agents that empowers it to serve them in an ‘authorian leadership’ role. This way, nature is showing us that it is not a cathedral or a bazaar but rather a cathedral and a bazaar at the same time, indicating a sophisticated bionic work principle that might point us in a future of inclusive and respectful architecture that reconciles the demands of the many who created it in the present by also including the rich sets of information they have accumulated throughout their past. Consequently, we can learn from nature the core principles of how nests of social insects can be built in a way that is highly complex in terms of local differentiation. These nest features emerge from interactions between individuals without a priori design intent. Yet, they are top-down ordered on the one hand via structuring elements of queen’s dominance via her pheromones, via her brood production and sometimes even via her aggression. On the other hand, they are in parallel bottom-up ordered via mechanisms of materialistic dominance in their dynamically shaped stigmergic environments. Meanwhile, web based social networks like Wikipedia or open-source communities lack similarly strong influential modes of dictatorship in their development, although sometimes also there, several variants of social dominance play a role. A lack thereof is mostly evident in today’s hacker and maker communities. The knowledge and inventions are locally created and effectively distributed via the internet and events within and across these communities. However, some sorts of ‘authorian’ frameworks which can accommodate virtual traces of useful and constructive findings might bolster the needed pertinence of those knowledge and inventions to real-world applications. Maybe this requires some kind of ‘virtual stigmergy’. Thus we infer, in analogy to life itself, which only operates well at the edge between chaos and order, that large-scale and collaborative building of architectures need to be similar in order to build houses, transportation networks, software systems, or knowledge databases. These processes need to reside not only at the edge between chaos and order, but also at the edges between individualism and leadership, between exploration and exploitation, between searching and finding, and between a loud noise and a clear signal. A dynamic mixture of a top-down and a bottom-up organisation of work can provide these crucial aspects of effective, but not always necessarily efficient, cooperation. Only then, individuals are able to perform towards a larger and functional complex, without eliciting harm to their environments. We then discussed the other side of the spectrum, where the design and construction of architecture generally operate from a topdown paradigm in which design intent frames specification.39 Thus, instead of an ‘authorian’ leadership, a rather centralised and top-down ‘dictatorship’ is governing the building process, originating from cultural and individual design objectives. In such cases, the decisions on the type of construction methods and material resources are stylistically 39

Ilgun/Ayres: “Self-Organised Embellishment of 3D Printed Scaffolds”.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

driven, as opposed to the collaborative decision-making efforts of social insects which are intrinsically ecological and altruistic. These make the construction industry one of the primary consumers of the environmental mostly non-renewable resources. Such a centralised ‘dictatorship’ contrasts sustainable practices like local production with locally available raw materials, and strategic adoption of globally available fabrication technologies. Here, we present an alternative to the established state-of-the art in architecture and design: A hybrid construction method that aims to establish a mechanism by which elements of highly bottom-up processes and orderly top-down processes are coupled. This mechanism is a living artefact designed to house honeybees, built by living units, and is a novel, open framework for honeybee – human coevolution in urban environments.

TO DECONSTRUCT Any system of which we feel or observe the consequences, is composed of connected, interacting elements and subsystems that determine the system’s overall effect. Ecological systems exhibit great effectiveness, but not necessarily a great perfection from the perspective of arts and humanities, as ‘perfection’ relates to completion, aesthetic ideasation or certainty in these domains. As it can be interpreted from Handa’s contemplation of humans’ affinity for the obviously imperfect architectural ruins,40 perfection might promote efficiency but not effectiveness. In architecture, effect is the relationship between some object and its function or meaning that renders the object effective or not – thus the design being good or not.41 Ecological systems are composed of adaptive parts, of which an attribute change affects the system as well as those parts whose attributes are changed by the behaviour of the system.42 Ecology, as a science, tries to understand the motives that induce this effectiveness of complex living systems. The copious attributes of living parts as well as the dynamic interactions make the scientific work around ecological systems a complex task of deconstruction and representation. In the meantime, conventions of architecture and design seek for creations of new relationships between the forms of objects and their functions – or meanings. Disturbance, which is ubiquitous in nature, is a key aspect in ecology. It brings living organisms and their interactions with their environments into a dynamic state where they redesign their environment, opening possibilities for reformation of effective assemblages. In contrast to how Humanists employ disturbance in their terminology, in referring to damages or harms mostly caused by humans, ecological disturbances may be caused by both abiotic (floods, fires) and biotic (humans, other living things) incidents. In this sense, disturbance is not just an erratic series of events that harms or even destroys an existing structure, but rather a promoter and driver of transformation. This transformation starts when an organism learns or evolves the ability to restructure, in some sense to re-engineer, its own living environment which, ultimately, yields a restructuring 40 41 42

Handa: “Learning from the Ruins”. Eisenmann: “The Affects of Singularity”, p. 23. Hall/Fagen: “Definition of System”, p. 20.

335

336

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

of the ecosystem it is embedded in.43 So, if organisms learn to develop and remember behavioural mechanisms to cope with disturbances, can a deliberately placed disturbance in their environment provoke novelty in their reconstructive abilities? Analogous to Derrida’s deconstructivist approach to literary analysis,44 deconstruction of living systems is always an on-going process since the environment of any living system is always changing, making no final interpretation of complex relationships in nature maintainable. Since the late 18th century, industrialised societies performed both scientific and design-led practices through technological innovations which can bring the human society to a wealthier, healthier and more intellectual state of living. The technology of steelframe construction brought in by the school of Chicago45 can be considered as a powerful game changer for architects. The factory pre-fabrication of large dimensions and numbers of building components cracked a giant opening in crafts and architecture fellowship. Architects’ crafts activities, from idea generation to building construction processes, were cut back to remote activities such as drawing representations instead of physical engagement with what is built. On the one hand, the problem is the ecologically devastating management of certain technologies, not the technologies themselves. On the other hand, there is the deep-rooted dichotomy between worlds, one being designed and the other being self-organised. What we know as technology is plausibly a human product yet may be a natural phenomenon. Working with nature is not a new thing. What is new is the technological means of engaging with nature, not only representing it.

TO RECONSTRUCT Biological systems, as opposed to architectural or mechanical ones, are made of animate components that organise themselves into complex adaptive systems. The origin of living complex systems is the spontaneous microscopic self-organising of components that are able to generate interesting behaviour on the macroscopic level such as adaptation, selfhealing, and metabolization. Natural phenomena and most prominently biological phenomena do not always fall into the same categories, as in Herbert’s comparison of forest and farm, a plowed corn field is not (much) more natural than an asphalt is.46 The only difference between them is the purposeful compilation of living parts to create a system focused on the gains of humans. Biohybrid designs aim for direct coupling of biological and artificial subsystems, with an emphasis on the mutualistic interactions between their system components, in an interface layer consisting of both living and non-living components. This can be facilitated by enabling these interactions via hierarchical design principles which act upon

43 44 45 46

Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 160; Jones et al.: “Organisms as ecosystem engineers”. Derrida: “Of Grammatology”. Cruickshank: “From the archive: 100 years of steel in architecture”. Simon: “The Sciences of the Artificial”, p. 3.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

system components’ molecular structure, morphologies or construction-level processes (or on all of these simultaneously). Alternatively, they can also be just grown in a bottom-up way exploiting the population’s multitude of variants and then be just ‘bred’ for the desired features. Or the designer might apply a blended design principle that resides between these two extreme approaches. Biological complexity emerges from an unceasing entanglement of living components with each other and their environment. Therefore, informed decision-making processes are crucial when pulling the biological entities away from a possibly sensitive entanglement with their surroundings. Synthetic biology uses science and engineering in order to take the analytical modes of deconstruction and representation to applications in other mediums via reconstruction. Synthetic biology looks at these exact decisionmaking processes of systematic characterisation and re-organisation of biological elements using engineering methods. The question of representation is significant when it comes to art and design activities. Architecture, the discipline with varied emphasis on artistic, engineering and/or scientific methods, has a plausible partnership of deconstruction and representation procedures of both, cultural and natural systems. Like all design activities, biohybrid architectures begin with human intention and goals, but are however soon conducted by their living components. The idea that designing or making an artwork is just creating something of acoustic or aesthetic value remains inadequate; the originality can easily grow out from what already exists in the outside world. The newly available modes of “imaging the intricate and the very small, of computational simulations of evolution, morphogenesis and behaviour”47 frame the current paradigm of biohybrid architectures.

“I HAVE A DESIRE FOR… THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT… TO ALLOW ME TO DO… MY OWN THING” This poetically formulated statement summarises one of the first architectural visions of Archigram,48 An Experimental Bottery, L.A.W.U.N. #1. L.A.W.U.N. stands for Locally Available World Unseen Networks and describes the striving after basic objectives, to experience an uninterrupted, freeing, and offering kind of built environment.49 One can define the primary measure of architecture as the wellbeing of its occupants and these occupants primarily as human beings. Driving from Greene’s perspective on wellbeing, likely as an uninterrupted but still ‘serviced’ way of living, the question is: How can we create spaces that promote wellbeing for many species living alongside us humans? Is the new currency of architecture the activity around subtle correction of the environment that offers a freeing space?

47 48

49

Brownell/Swackhamer: Hypernatural, p. 17. Archigram was an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s in England. To the degree it can be reduced, their agenda was the domestication of technology by selective appropriation and cultivation of an architecture attuned to the swinging sixties subjects. Chalk et al.: Archigram The Book, p. 230.

337

338

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

How does architecture relate to ecology and what separates classical architecture from nature’s most ingenious architects? Human architects have been assigned to the task of worldmaking50 due to their inherent habits of imagining livable and captivating spaces for their fellow human beings without aiming their design around the viability of the overall ecosystem. Tied to a cultural agenda for modernising and growing our societies, architects commonly allow only human protagonists into their stories regardless of their settings.51 In our architectural scenario, we investigate other ways of worldmaking and other worldmaking protagonists than humans. Our setting is an ecocentric image of contemporary and future L.A.W.U.N.s during the epoch of climate crisis and needed end of human – nature disparity in fields of architecture, design, science and technology. In parallel, ecologists have long recognised that the physical structure of a habitat influences the population biology developing within it.52 In order to spread and prosper in their habitats, social insects rely on a working social homeostasis within their colonies – a collective and ongoing effort, driven mostly by positive feedback mechanisms to maintain healthy living conditions – to regulate both their individual metabolisms and their hive climate. Honeybees exhibit the highest level of active self-regulation of the colony, as they are able to endure even long and harsh winters in an active colony state. Unlike ants or termites which have to fully rely on their adaptive nest structures, honeybees can actively regulate the hive climate.53 Honeybees can use their bodies to build adaptive and regulatory nest structures by dynamically rearranging their spatial distribution inside the hollow spaces, simultaneously adjusting their behaviour. For example, in summer and warm spring or fall days, respiratory gas exchange takes place both passively, through the entrance opening when heavy, carbon dioxide rich and highly humid air flows out, and actively when individuals are recruited to fan air out near the entrance. While in winter, the bees insulate against temperature losses while actively heating the core of their winter cluster with actively produced physiological warmth.

FUNGI Other ecologically significant organism groups are fungi, myxomycetes and a variety of microbial organisms. Biofilms and complex microbial communities can be found everywhere in nature and their activities have always been crucial for the development, evolution and sustenance of life on Earth. Microbes sustain the vitality and wellbeing along with death and decomposition of living matter. Only recently we employed our molecular methods54 and began unveiling the roles of microorganisms in ecosystem sustenance especially by understanding the functional pathways between them and other lifeforms like plants and animals. Microbial exposure is integral to the health of the whole biosphere.

50 51 52 53 54

In 1978, Nelson Goodman suggested the term “worldmaking” and that many other worlds can exist besides the world as we perceive. Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 160. McCoy/Bell: “Habitat structure”. Turner: Extended Organism. Weaver: “Molecular Biology: Origin of the Term”.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

Most prominently, fungi are the primary microbial decomposers, and insects have coevolved a wide array of functional interactions with them over the past 400 million years. Social insects are part of this coevolution and fungi have been an intimate symbiont for them also in their nests.55 Fungi are impressive wordmakers especially considering that the largest organism on earth is a fungal mycelium.56 Microscopic fungal cells branch into entangled macroscopic tissues – mycelia – by consuming organic debris. Hyphae are formed in a fluid-like manner in species specific environmental conditions, during their hunt for carbon-based nutrients. Given this fact, via limiting fungal cells’ nutrition reach and/or controlling the physio-chemical properties of their growth environment, their mycelia can be formed into virtually any shape. On top of these variables, the current estimation of 5 million fungal species on Earth,57 yields virtually infinite possibilities of guiding mycelial hyphae towards functional designs. Natural nesting cavities found in trees undoubtedly differentiate with their microbial associates from the current human made beehives. It is similar to architecture for humans. The construction materials and architectural concepts do not often deal with the associated microbial communities that compose, emerge on, or cause their decay, in other words that live with them. The consolidation of microbial organisms, their communities and their “theatre of activity” is called the microbiome.58 Microbiome research led to the acknowledgement of the significance of microbial symbionts in life’s maintenance and development. One example is the recent ‘holobiont theory’ which states all organisms harbour co-evolved microbiomes.59 Microbiomes are confined in reasonably well-defined biomes, or habitats, with distinct bio-physio-chemical properties, which in turn interact with and affect the microbiome structure. Human built environments embody such microbiomes, and also interact with them and affect their structure. Our hybrid construction method treats the habitat structure as a component of the microbiome structure, as our building units live and coexist in symbiotic relationships that organisms evolved and that make nature more resilient and potentially generate new relationships in favour of our ecosystem health. As opposed to a pure functionalist approach to the beehive design, we aim for the mutualism of the habitat structure with its living active agents (fungal cells forming filamentous hyphae) and the honeybee superorganism. In their original wild form of living, the western honeybee colonies choose natural cavities, like hollow tree trunks, to found their colonies. A swarm of bees will not just inhabit any cavity in its environment, the bees collectively decide on the best available option in a complex collective decision-making process. It depends on a number of scout bees that find and inspect a possible nesting site, and then advertise their candidate nest to the rest of the swarm by dancing in a competitive process, with dances that communicate the candidate nest’s location. Other bees may then inspect the candidate nesting site, return and also start advertising until only one option – the best out of many – re-

55 56 57 58 59

Biederman et al.: “Ecology and Evolution of Insect–Fungus Mutualisms”. Ferguson et al.: “Coarse-scale population structure of pathogenic Armillaria species”. Hawksworth/Lücking: “Fungal Diversity Revisited: 2.2 to 3.8 Million Species”. Berg et al.: “Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges”. Madhusoodanan: “Do hosts and their microbes evolve as a unit?”.

339

340

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

mains and the swarm takes off to inhabit its new home.60 But what are the scouts looking for when inspecting possible new nesting sites, what deems a hollow tree as suitable for the colony? For once, as the tree cavity cannot be expanded, the volume must be of sufficient size to house up to 60,000 individuals in summer, the brood as well as the pollen and the honey storage. While natural nests show a high variability in cavity volume, most nest volumes could be found between 20 to 100 L (litres), while experiments showed that bees preferred 40 L cavities over 10 and 100 L.61 The bees further prefer elevated positions above ground for the nest, the entrance at the bottom of the cavity and an opening that is not too big.62 A settled colony creates its own unique colony micro-environment – “a complex and dynamic arrangement of biotic and abiotic interactions has evolved to protect future generations [of worker bees] and preserve and process nutrients”.63 The substances which are produced (wax, honey), composed (bee bread, royal jelly) and collected (nectar, pollen, propolis, water) have tremendous effects on the microbial communities in the hive that aid the colony in nutrition and defend it against pathogens.64 These functions of the specific microbiomes depend significantly on specific temperature, humidity, pH and moisture levels in the hive, a combination of which is often referred to as “the hive climate”.65

BEEHIVES OF THE FUTURE A man-made beehive has to take into account all these dimensional, material and behavioural aspects as the bees will not thrive in, or not accept it at all. Managed honeybee colonies are usually housed in modular and mostly cubical containers (boxes). Such manmade designs mostly reflect the utility of the structure towards human needs and benefits such as honey extraction, storage and transportation, or brood inspection. Designing homes for bees does not necessarily involve thought lines that adopt the production of an efficient factory. It is rather an activity of a sensitive, ecological deconstruction followed by an ecologically effective design solution for an artefact within which the superorganism (honeybee colony) is the supreme conductor. In this artefact, the honeybee colony works directly together with other living entities for their mutual benefit. In our project we focus on specific bioactive and structurally stable periods of fungal life, with a special emphasis on fungi’s biological activities that favour the creation of useful and sustainable novel bee housings. These are: structural stability, robustness, resilience, flexibility, scalability, thermal properties, gas-exchange properties and, if possible, antimicrobial properties. Fungal cells feed on organic matter and grow into branching filamentous structures called hyphae in relatively dark – most common

60 61 62 63 64 65

Seeley/Visscher: “Group decision making in nest-site selection by honey bees”. Seeley: “Measurement of nest cavity volume by the honey bee (Apis mellifera)”; Seeley/Morse: “Nest site selection by the honey bee, Apis mellifera”. Ibid. Anderson et al.: “An emerging paradigm of colony health”. Douglas: “Nutritional interactions in insect-microbial symbioses”. Evans/Schwarz: “Bees brought to their knees”.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

fungal communities reside in soil66 – and highly humid environments. Hyphal fusion produces the lattice-like structure of mycelium. This morphological formation of mycelium has become interesting for many stakeholders outside the scientific field of microbiology, such as material science, product design and architecture. Several aspects of the mycelium formation process, one of which is the self-healing ability, are targeted during the mycelium material making. Mycelium responds to local mechanical damages to its overall network structure by reconnecting to neighbouring branches of hyphae. These reinforcements make the whole mycelial network even more robust and denser than it was before.67 Another interesting cause for fungi’s role in living material research is their metabolic activity. In their alive state, but not necessarily during their growing, fungal cells dynamically alter their local biophysical environment. Depending on the selected fungal strain and growth variables, such as air temperature, relative humidity, and nutrition type, they release bioactive secondary metabolites which play important ecological and physiological roles crucial for a fungi’s survival. This also has a significant biotechnological role in human medicine,68 for example, white rot fungi can detoxify substrates containing toxic aromatic compounds.69 The cell walls of hyphen are mainly composed of chitin, a fibrous molecular substance which is also found in rigid exoskeletons of arthropods, and other natural polymers such as cellulose, proteins and peptides, etc.70 Amongst these, chitin is very important in the context of mycelium materials, particularly for its strengthening properties. The ratios between chitin and other polysaccharides may differ, depending on the fungal species and the contents of their preferred nutritional substrates. A lower chitin to polysaccharide ratio leads to more water uptake, lower Young’s Modulus (less strength) and higher elasticity.71 In our project, we explore three different fungus species, all being white-rotting basidiomycetes species. Here we describe certain findings for the species Trametes versicolor (L.) Lloyd (‘turkey tail’). Although early log or straw hives, which date as far back as to 2450 BCE in ancient Egypt,72 did already well meet the bees’ living requirements, the combs had to be destroyed to harvest the honey. Modern ‘box’-shaped hives, top bar and frame hives, allow the easy removal of single combs without damaging the structure of the nest and facilitates honey harvesting. Modularity is key for a hive’s usability, as it not only allows easier harvest, but also allows for inspection and other maintenance activities that require access to the insides of the colony. However, it was shown that, compared to the tree hollows, modern hives have higher rates of heat loss through their bigger entrance sizes and 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Aleklett et al.: “Fungal foraging behaviour and hyphal space exploration in micro-structured Soil Chips” Elsacker et al.: “A comprehensive framework for the production of mycelium-based lignocellulosic composites”. Hoeksma et al.: “A new perspective on fungal metabolites”. Stamets: Mycelium Running, pp. 58–68. Haneef et al.: “Advanced Materials From Fungal Mycelium”. Manan et al.: “Synthesis and applications of fungal mycelium-based advanced functional materials”. Kritsky: “Beekeeping from antiquity through the Middle Ages”; Crane: “The world’s beekeeping-past and present”.

341

342

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

due to weaker insulation properties of the hive materials. This also causes a decrease in humidity levels within the hive, which is a favourable condition for parasitic organisms.73 Material Logic: Functionality of non-woven fibre structures is devised by their order-lessness. For example, felt is a bunch of entangled fibres in different lengths, and can organise a fabric with architecturally applicable mechanical and acoustic properties. Very early phases of our material exploration involved wet needle felting, which was an endeavour of handcraft to observe material behaviour emerging from the changes in parameters of making. When it comes to automated, fast and precise production though, a 3D printer head can replace the hands of a human and computer numerical control of it opens up an expanded set of potentials for the qualitative aspects of the end product. This aids in extending the multiplicity of interrelations between fabrication process and material evidence in varying architectural scales. We explored thermoplastic and paste extrusion techniques where the fabrication of form is an extreme manifestation of the systematic feedback loop between designer and deployment of computation both as representation and fabrication tools. Filamentous materiality of these extruded materials is then merged with living mycelia to create a responsive, self-repairing structure with lifelike behaviour, emerging from geometries (form) instead of from matter (substance). Machine Crafting: A subcaste of the 3D printing family, the fused deposition modelling (FDM) technology, permits the production of highly porous yet robust artefacts to be constructed from organically driven materials. The promise of 3D printing in our case is a form of “digital craft”,74 an algorithm-based model that assumes the logic of continuous material deposition and bespoke G-code (geometrical code) generation. Our experiments and results, in the context of 3D filament printing, establish a method of extending the control of deposition parameters, from the scale of the object to that of the toolpath. Deposition parameters, such as the movement speed of the extruder, the rate of material intake or printing temperature, are commonly prescribed through proprietary software. Our design setup grants a more explicit information feedback from material evidence to machine parameters and to digital geometries, thus a freedom of interplay between drawing and physical model. We can then also change the surface and interior porosity of the object, locally informed by performance criteria related to thermal and humidity regulation.75

73 74 75

Mitchell: “Ratios of colony mass to thermal conductance of tree and man-made nest enclosures”. Oxman: “Digital Craft: Fabrication-Based Design in the Age of Digital Production”. Ilgun/Ayres: “Self-Organised Embellishment of 3D Printed Scaffolds”.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

Fig. 2: Incremental bio-composite design process. a) i. Change in extrusion thickness achieved by gradual change of printhead movement speed. ii. Change in porosity achieved by a gradual change in the height of the extruder. b) Set-up for visualising hyphae with the deposited material. i. Extrusion path (red) to be printed on the specific glass microscope slide. ii. 3D print with two materials: Left: Growlay™, composed of wood particles + backbone polymer + PVA (water soluble polymer), right: Extrudr™, 30% Lignin (hydrophobic and structural polymer found on plant cell walls) + PLA (corn-starch driven polylactic acid) iii. Grow mycelial hyphae of T. versicolor on both materials. iv. Autofluorescence of fungal hyphae (white) was captured with confocal laser-scanning microscopy and used for visualising the virtual slices of material. c. Pattern exploration with our direct fabrication modelling technique.

343

344

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

Hyphae biotemplating: What are the parameters and variables that can be fed into a certain design model to promote an intended biological diversity within and around the object? 3D printing parameters, when varied regarding the height or movement speed while extruding, yield continuous gradation in porosity levels. This is achieved even though the toolpath pattern itself is not locally varied in order to create this density change. The continuity indicates the unidirectional change at the scale of individual extrusions resulting in a more linear gradation, as opposed to stepwise gradation. The selected 3D printing materials, or raw paste substances, combined with our method of fabrication design yield an increased porosity and thus an increased surface area for mycelium coverage, which is an important measure for the strength of hive material.76 The growth of mycelium is dependent on oxygen which makes it limited to the material surface. Given the rapid growth of mycelia and rapid prototyping, we had an exploratory phase of testing several fabrication and geometry defining parameters which affect the critical properties needed for mycelial growth. For example, a change in the print head’s movement speed and/or distance from the previous printed layer, during continuous deposition, yields a thickness change of the extruded line, which plays a big role in fungal hyphae penetration (Figure 2a). Material composition of the 3D printing filaments is another substantial factor for hyphae’s degradation adeptness. In Figure 2b, we demonstrated our observation of Trametes versicolor hyphae growth on two 3D printing materials using a microscopic scanning technology. As foreseen, hyphae could grow across the printed material (Figure 2b, left column), which remains with microcapillaries after removal of the water-soluble polymer. Two Paradigms of Scalability: We gained insights on the scalability question in two realms. First is the potential of the digital design set-up to be enlarged or organised in order to accommodate larger data. Our digital patterns (Figure 2c) are formed only with geometrical primitives (lines and points) and they define the one-to-one extrusion topology. Therefore, when they permeate across larger macro-scale scaffolding components, the computation can become very slow. The second scalability issue is physical, meaning that the effects and performance of the 3D printed structure, after both the extrusion process and the biological integration, would remain predictable. Figure 3a demonstrates the current extrusion pattern -continuous weaving on hexagonal grid- with which we 3D print the walls of our hives. The second scalability question comes into play especially during the integration of fungi inoculated waste substances in/around the printed scaffolds. This means changing the length and time scales of the forming process itself, via increasing the size of the specimens from petri-dish scale to a fully functioning on-site beehive structure (Figure3c). As mentioned earlier, the important foci of our biohybrid design approach, targeting an ecologically effective beehive artefact, are two material properties. One of these material properties needed for our beehive is a combination of structural robustness and lightweightness of these extruded and grown components compared to their marketed competitives, such as styrofoam. Therefore, it is necessary to determine and to minimise the mechanically active areas in which more material is needed per unit volume, which is part of our computational design model. 76

Yang et al.: “Physical and mechanical properties of fungal mycelium-based biofoam”.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

The second material property we aim to score is related to the mycelium’s biological activities, primarily the immune-boosting and antimicrobial compounds it might release into the colony inhabited hive (Figure 3b). We improve our design -latest design is illustrated in Figure 3d- via continuous adjustments of the computational, physical and biological process variables.

Fig. 3: From component level to full beehive artefact. a. A drape-like effect emerges on the naked edges of the object as a result of twisty movements on the edges (variety of the pattern) that the extruder throws materi-als on at convenient speeds; also causing entryways for air into the structure. b. Two honeybees are exploring the inside of the hive. c. Hive’s wall structure (left) and the lowermost part of the hive, on-site. d. Exploded axo-nometric drawing of the current beehive design with dimensions in millimetres.

THE IMPACT Bees play a crucial part in their ecosystems and a novel hive design can enhance their pollination service there. This can be promoted by providing the bees with optimal rearing conditions for their brood, ultimately leading to more foragers and thus more pollination flights. Aspects that have an influence on brood production, thus, must be considered in the hive design process are thermal properties, as the brood requires a stable thermal en-

345

346

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

vironment for its optimal development.77 Complementarily, a proper air circulation/ventilation in the inner cavity to promote the required humidity78 must be considered. Regarding the bees circulation in the hive, it is necessary to take the path connectivity, i.e. how long it takes an average bee to get from A to B within the nest, into account in order to optimise brood care, storage efficiency and interaction amongst bee groups. Architects’ worldmaking habits include various means of representation and physical construction methods which all can be considered as symbolic descriptions of their imagined inhabitable worlds. Since the computational thinking, sensing and making entered the world of architectural design, a large community of practitioners and theoreticians has been intrigued by computers’ ability to represent abstract fragments of geometrical, spatial or material design processes via symbolic manipulations.79 In the context of computation and fabrication, architectural drawing has been continuously shifting its fixed paradigm from being purely a representation to actual instruction for a robotic workforce.80 The iterative power of computers made it possible to model manually impossible inputs like high-resolution models inclusive of physical properties of materials used, in suitable form for feeding directly in the final production line (detailed construction drawings, geometrical codes for digital fabrication machines like 3D printers, CNC routers). As computation begins to change how we articulate our design intentions and challenges the established notion of control mechanisms, it also allows us to construct models informed by and communicate more than one intent. Our computational model probes into the parameters and variables that can be fed into a certain design model to promote an intended biological diversity within and around the object. In our case, the object is an ecologically effective bee habitat. This model is challenged by highly unconventional design-related variables and functional performance criteria. The resulting challenge can be dealt with by combining generative design to finite-element methods to create a more persistent model, to be able to overcome the limitations of scientific control from the very start of the hive making. The relationship between the model (architectural representation) and the object (architectural artefact) is not finite but adaptive and ever-changing.

TO RETHINK The design of the ‘beehive of the future’ in the EU-FET project HIVEOPOLIS81 is our first case study to test a variety of organisation principles of functional spaces and a variety of effects of fungus-grown nest building materials on its inhabitants concerning their wellbeing. In the case of artificial honeybee habitats (i.e., beehives), the practical modularity of units where the bees build their comb cells is an important design criterion. The 77 78 79 80 81

Jones et al.: “The effects of rearing temperature on developmental stability and learning and memory”; Kronenberg/Heller: “Colonial thermoregulation in honey bees (Apis mellifera)”. Doull: “The effects of different humidities on the hatching of the eggs of honeybees”; Kraus/Velthuis: “High humidity in the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) brood nest”. Ayres: “Adopting an Adaptive Architecture”. Bailey: “Digital Construction”. Project HIVEOPOLIS: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/824069

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

methodology described above tackles the design criteria given by the project HIVEOPOLIS, which is the technological augmentation of honeybee habitats, primarily with biological technologies like mushroom mycelium networks as structural, thermal and sensing elements, minimising the need for hardware and electronics. The core element of our methodology is its foundation on a feedback loop composed of computational, physical and biological processes. Material-aware computational design requires the premeditation and a deep understanding of the selected production methods and raw materials. Our algorithm-based parametric flow is based on fused deposition manufacturing and allows us to rapidly produce and test varied scales of prototypes. This digital methodology combines continuous fibre deposition logic and computer-numerical control and makes it possible to print large objects faster and with less raw material input compared to other pre-set software. However, currently, the fixed topology of the geometry-defining components in our setup does not support a wider solution space for alternative hive forms that may potentially perform better. This is caused by many constraints already given in our design brief such as the honeybees’ living requirements and the intended states of mycelial life within the hive. Nevertheless, as our expertise in the digital design methodologies grows constantly, we will improve or alter the morphogenetic algorithms to combine the crafted logics of drawing with the adaptive, natural formation processes of the fibrous structures around which our design principles are built in our future work. In order to be sustainable, we need designs that also consider natural ‘disassembly’ procedures of our biohybrid creations. Additive manufacturing is a suitable materialisation method for such a design query, especially with the current advancements in machine technologies and processes that use real bio-compostable materials, such as agriculture waste. By doing so, we can not only drastically decrease the environmental footprint of the construction industry, but we can also build in-situ, by using multiple moving robotic printers that lay the material found in-situ, which can be locally available, maybe even regrowing resources. In our reconstructive design model, living organisms are utilised as additive bio-manufacturers which further decrease the need for ecologically destructive raw material extraction processes. As opposed to engineered, thus predictably behaving materials, organic and living materials are hard to predict. This makes the material-awareness of a digital model one step more complex. Saving the world by rescuing and repairing the world’s breaking ecosystems may be a challenging goal and maybe has a utopian touch. However, it is a goal we will have to meet if humanity should survive another century,82 and it might require a full-fledged set of utopian measures to counteract the dystopian perspective of a 6th mass annihilation83 that we have brought onto ourselves. A key to repairing our broken ecosystems may well lay in using a deconstructivist approach for their reconstruction, in a way that can cope with the damages that were already made, as we have laid out above. Before we can do so, we have to create wide-spread acceptance for such bold moves and to develop the technology required to do this in a safe way. Society, communities and markets will have to accept and apply these technologies and abandon the traditional technologies that have 82 83

Bologna/Aquino: “Deforestation and world population sustainability”. Ceballos et al.: “Biological Annihilation via the Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction”.

347

348

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

proven to be harmful to nature. In order to have an impact on an ecosystem-level, or even on a global level, such technologies have to become the new state-of-the-art, the classics of tomorrow. Aesthetics, design, usability, functionality and (production) cost efficiency are key aspects to make a societal impact. Having and using a ‘grown’ instead of a ‘made’ piece of technology must become a status symbol for future generations. We are just at the beginning of this road. The research to pursue this track may take decades to yield the necessary progress and large-scale applicability that will be needed to succeed. Sticking to classical approaches, just because they are claimed to have been ‘working well’ so far, whatever ‘working well’ means for nature and humanity, will only bring us further down into the dystopian future we are already heading towards. Therefore, it is urgent to start these strains of explorations now, as we seem to be at the very end in a window of opportunity that is rapidly closing. We need to start today to rethink technology in itself and to reinterpret it from the perspective of a growing, organic and living system that achieves the desired functionalities that we seek, in a sustainable, resilient, and adaptive way. The ‘beehives of the future’, which we are currently developing in this project, are a first step into this variant of a future, affecting an ecological keystone species, an industry and a user society at once.

Acknowledgements: The authors thank the Mycology Lab of the Institute of Biology at the University of Graz and the Institute of Environmental Biotechnology at the Technical University of Graz. This work was supported by the Field of Excellence ‘Complexity of Life in Basic Research and Innovation’ (COLIBRI) at the University of Graz and the EU H2020 FET-Proactive project ‘HIVEOPOLIS’ (no. 824069).

References Abram, Joseph J./Dyke, James G.: “Structural loop analysis of complex ecological systems”, in: Ecological Economics, 154 (2018), pp. 333–342. Aleklett, Kristin et al.: “Fungal foraging behaviour and hyphal space exploration in microstructured Soil Chips”, in: The ISME Journal, (2021), pp. 1–12. Anderson, Kirk et al.: “An emerging paradigm of colony health: Microbial balance of the honey bee and hive (Apis mellifera)”, in: Insectes Sociaux, 58 (2011), pp. 431–444. Armour, Gordon C./Buffa, Elwood S.: “A heuristic algorithm and simulation approach to relative location of facilities” in: Management Science, 9 (1963) 2, pp. 294–309. Ayres, Phil: Adopting an Adaptive Architecture: enlisting digital technologies for the aquisition of local specificity over time, PhD diss. Arkitektskolen Aarhus, 2009. Bailey, Jon: “Digital Construction: An Integrated Digital Approach to Architectural Processes” archimorph.com. September 4, 2013. https://archimorph.com/2013/09/04/di gital-construction/ Berg, Gabriele et al.: “Microbiome definition re-visited: old concepts and new challenges”, in: Microbiome, 8 (2020) 1, pp. 1–22.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

Biedermann, Peter H. W./Vega, Fernando E.: “Ecology and evolution of insect–fungus mutualisms”, in: Annual Review of Entomology, 65 (2020), pp. 431–455. Bologna, Mauro/Aquino, Gerardo: “Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis”, in: Scientific Reports, 10 (2020) 1, pp. 1–9. Bonabeau, Eric et al.: “Self-organization in social insects”, in: Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 12 (1997) 5, pp. 188–193. Braun, Ulrich/Peeters, Christian/Holldobler, Bert: “The giant nests of the African stink ant Paltothyreus tarsatus (Formicidae, Ponerinae)”, in: Biotropica, 26 (1994) 3, pp. 308–311. Camazine, Scott: “Self-organizing pattern formation on the combs of honey bee colonies”, in: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 28 (1991) 1, pp. 61–76. Camazine, Scott et al.: Self-organization in biological systems, Princeton, NJ (Princeton University Press) 2001. Cassill, Deby/Tschinkel, Walter R./Vinson, S. Bradleigh: “Nest complexity, group size and brood rearing in the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta”, in: Insectes Sociaux, 49 (2002) 2, pp. 158–163. Ceballos, Gerardo et al.: “Biological Annihilation via the Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Signaled by Vertebrate Population Losses and Declines”, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (2017) 30, E6089-E6096. Ceballos, Gerardo et al.: “Accelerated Modern Human–induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction”, in: Science Advances, 1 (2015) 5, e1400253. Chalk, Warren at al.: Archigram The Book, London (Circa Press) 2018, pp. 230 -233. Crane, Eva: “The world’s beekeeping – past and present”, in: R. A. Grout (ed.): The Hive and the Honey Bee, Hamilton, IL (Dadant & Sons) 1992, pp. 1–22. Cruickshank, Dan: “From the archive: 100 years of steel in architecture”, in: architectsjournal.co.uk, April 5, 2016. https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/practice/culture/ from-the-archive-100-years-of-steel-in-architecture Deneubourg, Jean-Louis et al.: “The self-organizing exploratory pattern of the argentine ant”, in: Journal of Insect Behavior, 3 (1990) 2, pp. 159–168. Derrida, Jacques: Of Grammatology, Paris (Les Éditions de Minuit) 1976. Díaz, Sandra et al.: “Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services”, in: Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019). da Costa, Rafael R. et al.: “Symbiotic plant biomass decomposition in fungus-growing termites”, in: Insects, 10 (2019) 4, p. 87. Douglas, Angela: “Nutritional interactions in insect-microbial symbioses: aphids and their symbiotic bacteria Buchnera”, in: Annual Review of Entomology, 43 (1998) 1, pp. 17–37. Doull, Keith M.: “The effects of different humidities on the hatching of the eggs of honeybees”, in: Apidologie, 7 (1976) 1, pp. 61–66. Edenhofer, Ottmar et al.: “IPCC, 2014: Summary for policymakers, in climate change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change”, in: Contribution of Working Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2014).

349

350

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

Eisenman, Peter: “The Affects of Singularity”, in: Andreas C Papadakis (ed): Theory + Experimentation. Architectural ideas for today and tomorrow, AD Profiles 100, AD 62, 11/12 London (Academy ed.) 1992, pp. 42–45. Elsacker, Elise et al.: “A comprehensive framework for the production of mycelium-based lignocellulosic composites”, in: Science of The Total Environment, 725 (2020), 138431. Evans, Jay D./Schwarz, Ryan S.: “Bees Brought to Their Knees: Microbes Affecting Honey Bee Health”, in: Trends in Microbiology, 19 (2011) 12, pp. 614–620. Ferguson, B. A. et al: “Coarse-scale population structure of pathogenic Armillaria species in a mixed-conifer forest in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon”, in: Canadian Journal of Forest Research, 33 (2003) 4, pp. 612–623. Gell-Mann, Murray: “Complex adaptive systems”, in: G. Cowan/D. Pines/D. Meltzer (eds.): SFI Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings XIX, Reading (Addison-Wesley) 1994, pp. 17–45. Gloag, Erin S. et al.: “Stigmergy: a key driver of self-organization in bacterial biofilms”, in: Communicative & Integrative Biology, 6 (2013) 6, pp. 11541–6. Grassé, Pierre-Paul: “La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations interindividuelles chez Bellicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes sp. la théorie de la stigmergie: Essai d’interprétation du comportement des termites constructeurs”, in: Insectes Sociaux, 6 (1959) 1, pp. 41–80. Haken, Hermann: “Synergetics”, in: Self-Organizing Systems, Boston, MA (Springer) 1987, pp. 417–434. Hall, A. D./Fagen, R. E.: “Definition of System”, in: General systems, the yearbook of the society for advancement of general systems theory, Vol. 1, Ann Arbor, MI (The Society) 1956, pp. 18–28. Handa, Rumiko: “Learning from the Ruins: Theorizing the Performance of the Incomplete, Imperfect, and Impermanent”, in: Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Symposium (ACS4), (2012). Haneef, Muhammad et al.: “Advanced Materials From Fungal Mycelium: Fabrication and Tuning of Physical Properties”, in: Scientific Reports, 7 (2017) 1, pp. 1–11. Hautier, Yann et al.: “Anthropogenic environmental changes affect ecosystem stability via biodiversity.”, in: Science, 348 (2015) 6232, pp. 336–340. Hawksworth David/Lücking Robert: “Fungal Diversity Revisited: 2.2 to 3.8 Million Species”, in: Heitman J., Howlett B., Crous P., Stukenbrock E., James T., Gow N. (eds.): The Fungal Kingdom, Washington, DC (ASM Press), 2017, pp. 79–95. Hoeksma, Jelmer et al: “A new perspective on fungal metabolites: identification of bioactive compounds from fungi using zebrafish embryogenesis as read-out”, in: Scientific Reports, 9 (2019) 1, pp. 1–16. Hooper, David U. et al.: “Effects of biodiversity on ecosystem functioning: a consensus of current knowledge”, in: Ecological monographs, 75 (2005) 1, pp. 3–35. Ilgun, Asya/Ayres, Phil: “Self-Organised Embellishment of 3D Printed Scaffolds for the Production of Co-occupied Architectural Boundaries”, in: 2016 IEEE 1st International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS-W 2016), 12–16 September 2016, Augsburg, 2016, pp. 143–144. Jones, Clive/Lawton, John/Shachak, Moshe: “Organisms as ecosystems engineers”, in: Oikos, 69 (1994) 3, pp. 373–386.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

Jones, Julia C. et al.: “The effects of rearing temperature on developmental stability and learning and memory in the honey bee, Apis mellifera”, in: Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 191 (2005) 12, pp. 1121–1129. Karsai, Istvan/Balazsi, Gábor: “Organization of work via a natural substance: regulation of nest construction in social wasps”, in: Journal of Theoretical Biology, 218 (2002) 4, pp. 549–565. Karsai, Istvan/Pénzes, Zsolt: “Comb building in social wasps: self-organization and stigmergic script”, in: Journal of Theoretical Biology, 161 (1993) 4, pp. 505–525. Karsai, Istvan/Schmickl, Thomas: “Regulation of task partitioning by a ‘common stomach’: a model of nest construction in social wasps”, in: Behavioral Ecology, 22 (2011) 4, pp. 819–830. Korb, Judith: “Thermoregulation and ventilation of termite mounds”, in: Naturwissenschaften, 90 (2003) 5, pp. 212–219. Klein, Alexandra-Maria et al.: “Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops”, in: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 274 (2007) 1608, pp. 303–313. Kraus, B./Velthuis, H. H. W.: “High humidity in the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) brood nest limits reproduction of the parasitic mite Varroa jacobsoni Oud”, in: Naturwissenschaften, 84 (1997), pp. 217–218. Kritsky, Gene: “Beekeeping from antiquity through the Middle Ages”, in: Annual Review of Entomology, 62 (2017), pp. 249–264. Kronenberg, Fredi/Heller, H. Craig: “Colonial thermoregulation in honey bees (Apis mellifera)”, in: Journal of Comparative Physiology, 148 (1982) 1, pp. 65–76. Lande, Micah/Jordan, Shawn/Nelson, James: “Defining makers making: Emergent practice and emergent meanings”, in: Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition, 2013, Atlanta, GA (2013). Lenton, Timothy M. et al.: “Climate tipping points – too risky to bet against”, in: Nature, 575 (2019) 7784, pp. 592–595. Levin, Simon A.: “Ecosystems and the biosphere as complex adaptive systems”, in: Ecosystems, 1 (1998) 5, pp. 431–436. Lewin, Roger: Complexity: Life at the edge of chaos, Chicago (University of Chicago Press) 1999. Lieth, Helmut/Whittaker, Robert H. (eds.): Primary productivity of the biosphere, New York (Springer) 1975. Ljungberg, Jan: “Open source movements as a model for organising”, in: European Journal of Information Systems, 9 (2000) 4, pp. 208–216. Loreau, Michel/Naeem, Shahid/Inchausti, Pablo: “Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: the emergence of a synthetic ecological framework”, in: Michel Loreau, Shahid Naeem, Pablo Inchausti (eds.): Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: synthesis and perspectives, Oxford (Oxford University Press on Demand) 2002, pp. 3–11. Madhusoodanan, Jyoti: “Do hosts and their microbes evolve as a unit?”, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116 (2019) 29, pp. 14391–14394. McCoy Earl D./Bell Susan S.: “Habitat structure: The evolution and diversification of a complex topic”, in: Bell, S.S., Mc Coy, E.D., Mushinsky H.R. (eds.): Habitat Structure. Population and Community Biology Series, vol 8., Dordrecht (Springer) 1991, pp. 3–27.

351

352

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

MacMahon, James A./Mull, John F./Crist, Thomas O.: “Harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex spp.): their community and ecosystem influences”, in: Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 31 (2000) 1, pp. 265–291. Manan, Sehrish et al.: “Synthesis and Applications of Fungal Mycelium-based Advanced Functional Materials”, in: Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts, 6 (2021) 1, pp. 1–10. Miller, John H. & Page, Scott E.: Complex adaptive systems: An introduction to computational models of social life, Princeton (Princeton University Press) 2009. Mitchell, Derek: “Ratios of colony mass to thermal conductance of tree and man-made nest enclosures of Apis mellifera: implications for survival, clustering, humidity regulation and Varroa destructor”, in: International Journal of Biometeorology, 60 (2016) 5, pp. 629–638. Muffatto, Moreno/Faldani, Matteo: “Open source as a complex adaptive system”, in: Emergence, 5 (2003) 3, pp. 83–100. Narumi, Takayuki et al.: “Self-organization at the first stage of honeycomb construction: Analysis of an attachment-excavation model”, in: PloS one, 13 (2018) 10, e0205353. Oxman, Neri: “Digital Craft Fabrication-Based Design in the Age of Digital Production”, in: Workshop Proceedings for Ubicomp 2007: International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, (2007), pp. 534–538. Power, Mary E. et al.: “Challenges in the Quest for Keystones: Identifying Keystone Species Is Difficult – but Essential to Understanding How Loss of Species Will Affect Ecosystems”, in: BioScience, 46 (1996) 8, pp. 609–620. Raymond, Eric: “The cathedral and the bazaar”, in: Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 12 (1999) 3, pp. 23–49. Reagle Jr, Joseph M.: “Do as I do: Authorial leadership in Wikipedia” in: Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis, (2007), pp. 143–156. Schmickl, Thomas/Karsai, Istvan: “How regulation based on a common stomach leads to economic optimization of honeybee foraging”, in: Journal of Theoretical Biology, 389 (2016), pp. 274–286. Schmickl, Thomas/Karsai, Istvan: “Resilience of honeybee colonies via common stomach: A model of self-regulation of foraging”, in: PloS one, 12 (2017) 11, e0188004. Schmickl, Thomas/Karsai, Istvan: “Integral feedback control is at the core of task allocation and resilience of insect societies”, in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (2018) 52, pp. 13180–13185. Seeley, Thomas: “Measurement of nest cavity volume by the honey bee (Apis mellifera)”, in: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2 (1977) 2, pp. 201–227. Seeley, Thomas D./Morse, Roger A.: “Nest site selection by the honey bee, Apis mellifera”, in: Insectes Sociaux, 25 (1978) 4, pp. 323–337. Seeley, Thomas D./Visscher, P. Kirk: “Group decision making in nest-site selection by honey bees”, in: Apidologie, 35 (2004) 2, pp. 101–116. Simon, Herbert A./Laird, John E.: Sciences of the Artificial, Reissue Of The Third Edition With A New Introduction By John Laird, Cambridge (MIT Press) 2019. Southon, Robin J. et al.: “Social wasps are effective biocontrol agents of key lepidopteran crop pests”, in: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 286 (2019) 1914, 20191676. Stamets, Paul: Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, (Ten Speed Press) 2005.

Asya Ilgün/Martina Szopek/Thomas Schmickl: The Eusocial Cathedral and the Buzzaar

Sühs, Rafael B. et al.: “Pollen vector wasps (Hymenoptera, Vespidae) of Schinus terebinthifolius Raddi (Anacardiaceae), Santa Cruz do Sul, RS, Brazil”, in: Revista Brasileira de Biociências, 7 (2009) 2, pp. 138–143. Tsing, Anna: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton (Princeton University Press) 2015. Turner, J. Scott: The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures, Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 2000. Weaver, Warren: “Molecular Biology: Origin of the Term”, in: Science, 170 (1970), pp. 581–582. Weber, Neal. A.: “Fungus-growing ants”, in: Science, 153 (1966) 3736, pp. 587–604. Brownell, Blaine/Swackhamer, Marc: Hypernatural: Architecture’s New Relationship to Nature, Princeton (Princeton Architectural Press) 2015. Xie, Zhenghua et al: “The potential influence of bumble bee visitation on foraging behaviors and assemblages of honey bees on squash flowers in highland agricultural ecosystems”, in: PloS one, 11 (2016) 1, e0144590. Yang, Zhaohui et al.: “Physical and mechanical properties of fungal mycelium-based biofoam”, in: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering, 29 (2017) 7, 04017030.

Online source Wikipedia: “Wikipedia”. wikipedia.org. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia (accessed March 23, 2021)

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Levels of order and design methodology in natural structures and human buildings. Fig. 2: Incremental bio-composite design process. a) i. Change in extrusion thickness achieved by gradual change of print-head movement speed. ii. Change in porosity achieved by a gradual change in the height of the extruder. b) Set-up for visualising hyphae with the deposited material. i. Extrusion path (red) to be printed on the specific glass microscope slide. ii. 3D print with two materials: Left: Growlay™, composed of wood particles + backbone polymer + PVA (water soluble polymer), right: Extrudr™, 30% Lignin (hydrophobic and structural polymer found on plant cell walls) + PLA (corn-starch driven polylactic acid) iii. Grow mycelial hyphae of T. versicolor on both materials. iv. Autofluorescence of fungal hyphae (white) was captured with confocal laser-scanning microscopy and used for visualising the virtual slices of material. c. Pattern exploration with our direct fabrication modelling technique. Fig. 3: From component level to full beehive artefact. a. A drape-like effect emerges on the naked edges of the object as a result of twisty

353

354

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

movements on the edges (variety of the pattern) that the extruder throws materials on at convenient speeds; also causing entryways for air into the structure. b. Two honeybees are exploring the inside of the hive. c. Hive’s wall structure (left) and the lowermost part of the hive, on-site. d. Exploded axo-nometric drawing of the current beehive design with dimensions in millimetres.

Return to Dilmun Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendonck/Hansjörg Petschko/Federico Muffatto

Polycinease Artistically and formally the Polycinease series in general and Return to Dilmun in particular are centering around problems of symbolic representation, both in art and in science. The initial point is always a pictogram with a symbolic representation, ie. a semantic form, which is subsequently translated into a syntactic form, namely into a DNA molecule. The image as a molecule becomes accessible to physical and physiological processes, were it can be modified on a molecular level and later re-translated into an image again.

Return to Dilmun A digital image is translated into synthetic DNA, using a special method. The picture information stored as biochemical molecules allows image retouching using the CRISPR/ Cas method. The CRISPR/Cas system is a prokaryotic immune system, that provides adaptive (acquired) immunity against foreign genetic elements, such as bacteriophage genome injection. In the life sciences this system has been modified for efficient genome editing. In two types of in vitro experiments we performed image manipulation at the level of molecules. In one we made experiments aiming on efficient on-target cleavage with full length guide RNAs (sgRNA), consisting of 20 nucleotides. In the off-target experiments we decreased the efficiency using sgRNAs with 15 and 12 nucleotides, making indel mutations visible. The original template shows a bull head with empty eye sockets. After translation into a DNA molecule a pair of eyes was inserted using CRISPR/Cas9 and fusion pcr. The bull is a representation of a corn spirit1 (Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1922) and was highly meaningful for early agrarian societies, particularly in the Fertile Crescent one of

1

Frazer: The Golden Bough, 1922.

356

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

the regions of origin of the Neolithic Revolution, which was shaped by crop cultivation and animal husbandry.

Fig. 1: Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendock/Hansjörg Petschko/Frederico Muffatto, Return to Dilmun: Original Template, 2017. Courtesy: Günter Seyfried.

Fig. 2: Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendock/ Hansjörg Petschko/Frederico Muffatto, Return to Dilmun: Desired output, 2017. Courtesy: Günter Seyfried.

Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendonck/Hansjörg Petschko/Federico Muffatto: Return to Dilmun

At the beginning of great civilisations a major cut-off from nature happens or rather an alienation from nomadic biorhythms and transforming the relation between humans and other forms of life drastically. Expelled from the Garden of Eden – Dilmun. It may well be that humanity undertakes a further cut-off from nature by the possibilities which will be offered by the progress in applying gene editing tools like CRISPR which again alters the relation between humans and all the other forms of life, again drastically. Dilmun, as a real and as a mythical place of the Sumerian civilisation, shaped by an exceptional biodiversity sunken in the Schatt al-Arab after deglaciation marking the beginning of the Holocene. Conceptions of immortality (ie. longevity), like captured in the Gilgamesh epos, fictions of a carefree existence without maladies, becoming perfect humans embedded in a perfect environment are being reinvigorated in the advent of CRISPR and the transformation of biology into a creative (in eine schöpferische Wissenschaft) science. The solution to all problems of humanity like climate change, environmental pollution, health, food-production, species extinction, energy production, etc., is expected in the engineering of the living.2 Life as information, life as material, life as resource and life as an invention to build the living, tailored to serve a task. Increasingly evident becomes what Heidegger formulated in his understanding of the essence of technology, which is the conversion of everything into resources (“standing reserve” – Bestand). Thus if everything becomes a resource, life in general and humans in particular will no longer be seen as having fixed identities or essences. In an interview in 1969 when asked to explain his thoughts on the dangers of technology he says among other thoughts: […] What I do is I try to understand the essence of technology. When you quote this thought..the danger of the atomic bomb and the even greater danger of the technology....what I mean by this is: what is today developed as biophysics: that we may soon have the possibility to create the human, that is ...regarding his organic nature...to construct him just as we need him to be. Skilled and unskilled, clever and stupid... this is going to happen. […]3 The experiments of He Jiankui illustrate that thought, regardless of whether the modification of the C-C chemokine receptor type 5 aimed at HIV resistance or at neuronal plasticity, learning and memory, as speculated in several news publications. Apart from the fact that the role of intelligence in human interaction, especially on a communal level, is largely overestimated. This postgenomic biological determinism opens up a possibility to integrate human qualities into an activation paradigm. Along this line discrimination and social exclusion can be legitimised.

2 3

Röllig: Das Gilgamesch-Epos. Wisser: Richard Wisser Interview with Martin Heidegger (1969) http://intelart.blogspot.com/2017/05 /richard-wisser-interview-with-martin.html (accessed Oktober 3, 2019).

357

358

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

Fig. 3: Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendock/Hansjörg Petschko/Frederico Muffatto, Return to Dilmun: Actual output on-target, 2017. Courtesy: Günter Seyfried.

Fig. 4: Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendock/ Hansjörg Petschko/Frederico Muffatto, Return to Dilmun: Actual output off-target, 2017. Courtesy: Günter Seyfried.

On the background of the illusive idea of DNA as a code, waiting to be cracked, a problem emerges, concerning not only the representational model of the DNA but also our understanding of life itself.

Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendonck/Hansjörg Petschko/Federico Muffatto: Return to Dilmun

References Röllig, Wolfgang: Das Gilgamesch-Epos, Stuttgart (Reclam) 2009. Bibby, Phillips/Geoffrey, Carl: Looking for Dilmun, Midpoint Trade Books 1961. Frazer, James George: The Golden Bough, (1922). (accessed August 25, 2018). Cleuziou, Serge/Tosi, Maurizio/Zarins, Juris: Essays on the late prehistory of the Arabian peninsula, Rom (Istituto italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente) 2002. Wisser, Richard: Richard Wisser Interview with Martin Heidegger (1969) (accessed Oktober 3, 2019). Dreyfus, Hubert L./Spinosa, Charles: “Highway bridges and feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on how to affirm technology”, in: Man and World, 30 (1997), pp. 159–177.

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendock/Hansjörg Petschko/Frederico Muffatto, Return to Dilmun: Original Template, Image retouche with CRISPR/Cas9 of a digitally encoded image translated into DNA, using the Polycinease method, 2017. Courtesy: Günter Seyfried. Fig. 2: Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendock/Hansjörg Petschko/Frederico Muffatto, Return to Dilmun: Desired output, Image retouche with CRISPR/Cas9 of a digitally encoded image translated into DNA, using the Polycinease method, 2017. Courtesy: Günter Seyfried. Fig. 3: Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendock/Hansjörg Petschko/Frederico Muffatto, Return to Dilmun: Actual output on-target, Image retouche with CRISPR/Cas9 of a digitally encoded image translated into DNA, using the Polycinease method, 2017. Courtesy: Günter Seyfried. Fig. 4: Günter Seyfried/Roland van Dierendock/Hansjörg Petschko/Frederico Muffatto, Return to Dilmun: Actual output off-target, Image retouche with CRISPR/Cas9 of a digitally encoded image translated into DNA, using the Polycinease method, 2017. Courtesy: Günter Seyfried.

359

Pyrexia Suzanne Anker

Elevated temperatures and fevers are signs of illness in humans, and such is the same for our current terrestrial realm. Climate mutations continue to ravage stable conditions of our planet’s elements: Air, Water, Earth and Fire. We are witnessing dire changes in our environment. As temperatures continue to rise, they point to drastic earth fevers causing the waters to warm, forests to burn, and plants and animals to become extinct. Climate is more than a theatrical background to all living creatures. It is the dynamic breadth of environmental health. Yet, such temperatures are being ignored as “climate” becomes a political issue. In After Eden, climate is manifest through the flora of seasonal change. However, the seasons are out-of-sync. Summer flowers bloom in the snow, ice melds with springtime blossoms, mycelium splits into metastatic forms while meteorologic conditions collide. We are now experiencing monoseasons. As days turn into night, and evenings make way for their nocturnal creatures, the waters in California and Oregon have reached a point where Chinook Salmon can no longer spawn their eggs. The melting of permafrost in Greenland has opened still another carbon corridor, where farming strawberries has become a new industry. Wildfires in Canada have poisoned the air beyond its own borders. How can we mend habitat destruction, fossil fuel burning, and the weakening of genetic resistance, as species rapidly run towards extinction. With temperatures registering at above average levels, the remediation of the environment is key to coevolution, if we are to bypass annihilation.

List of Illustrations Figure 1: After Eden Series, Geothermal Greenhouse, 2022 Figure 2: After Eden Series, Arctic Garden, 2022 Figure 3: After Eden Series, Pyrexia, 2023 Figure 4: After Eden Series, Sun Dial, 2023   All images © Suzanne Anker

362

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

Figure 1: After Eden Series, Geothermal Greenhouse, 2022

Figure 2: After Eden Series, Arctic Garden, 2022

Suzanne Anker: Pyrexia

Figure 3: After Eden Series, Pyrexia, 2023

Figure 4: After Eden Series, Sun Dial, 2023

363

Spearlight Frank Gillette 

Spearlight (2020) is a three channel video installation by Frank Gillette. Employing art historical genres such as landscape and still life, Spearlight also investigates the role of disruptive symbolism reflecting the current state of the natural domain. Each channel is dedicated to visualizing the temporality intrinsic to nature’s flux. It is a non-narrative structure… no beginning, no past… but an eternal present. A fourth element, consists of an original soundtrack composing an audio aspect of natural events. Each channel is staggered, not synchronized in time: channel 1 is 19:52 in duration, while the other channels are 20:44 and 23:01 minutes respectively, allowing the installation to never repeat itself. The work is published in an edition of 3 with 2 A/P’s

Fig.1: Spearlight 2020, Three Channel HD Video Projection (color, sound)

366

Beyond Nature: Artistic Transmutation

Fig. 2: Still Photo from Channel One

Fig. 3: Still Photo from Channel Two

Frank Gillette : Spearlight

Fig. 4: Still Photo from Channel Three

List of Illustrations Fig.1: Spearlight 2020, Three Channel HD Video Projection (color, sound) Fig. 2: Still Photo from Channel One Fig. 3: Still Photo from Channel Two Fig. 4: Still Photo from Channel Three   All images © Frank Gillette

367

Appendix

Acknowledgments Suzanne Anker/Sabine Flach

Endeavors such as the two conferences Naturally Hypernatural IV: The Hothouse Archives: Plants, Pods and Panama Red and Naturally Hypernatural V: Questioning the Non-Human Other. Political Potentials of Living Beings in Art are not possible without the confidence of institutional support. Our special acknowledgements go to the University of Graz, the School of Visual Arts, SVA in New York City, the Kuwi Graz, the Government of Styria, the Graz Tourismus, the City of Graz, the U.S. Embassy Vienna and to the Embassy of Switzerland in Austria, who generously supported the conferences. We are indebted to all of our colleagues who generously supported the preparation and realization of the conferences with enthusiasm, ardor and reliability. We are enormously thankful for the vast help given by Stanley Gans and Lisabeth Haas and their priceless skills in editing and proofreading the texts and references with carefulness, accuracy, and sensitivity to language as well as to the themes in every chapter. Likewise, we thank very much Heike Schweiger and Ursula Winkler for their editing and proofreading. We are extremely grateful to Lisa Jeschke, for her support and accuracy for the translation. A special courtesy indeed goes to all the contributors to the conferences and this publication. Without their engagement and participation, such critical and vivid discussions and enthusiastic debates would not have been possible. We are indebted to those artists, scholars and institutions who have graciously granted permission to use the images that accompany the essays. The editors gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The editors apologiz for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

List of Authors

Jonathan Cane holds a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand and is an Assistant Professor of History of Art at the University of Warwick. Arnaud Gerspacher is an environmental art historian and critical animal studies scholar whose research focuses on animals in modern and contemporary art and culture. Frank Gillette, merging a rich visual sensibility with an almost scientific engagement with taxonomy and eco-logical systems, is a video art pioneer whose multi-channel installations and tapes focus on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Mark Harris is an artist and writer based in Cincinnati and London. He is researching the African plant diaspora, exhibiting and publishing in America and Europe. Heide Hatry is a NYC-based German artist, curator, and editor. Her work is often bodyrelated or employs animal parts or other discarded, disdained, or “taboo” materials. Kristopher J. Holland is an Associate Professor of Art & Design Education at the College of Design, Architecture, Art, & Planning at the University of Cincinnati. Asya Ilgün, Master of Arts (MA), is a designer and researcher who focuses on material design to create experimental structures that challenge architectural boundaries and promote human-nonhuman cohabitation. Ellie Irons is an artist, educator, and feral plant enthusiast based in current-day Troy, New York, USA, where the Mahicannituck and Mohawk Rivers converge. Mathias Kessler engages our collective idea of nature by staging natural processes that are then scrutinized under the lens of art history, philosophy, and eco-political debate.

374

Appendix

Gabriela Kompatscher is Associate Professor at the Department of Classical Philology and Neo-Latin Studies at Innsbruck University. Main research interests: Medieval Latin Philology, Human-Animal Studies, Ethical Literary Animal Studies. Chonja Lee is an art historian and currently teaches provenance research at the LMU Munich. She wrote her transdisciplinary PhD on images of the plant soul. Hanne Loreck, Dr. phil., studied visual communication, art theory, philosophy, and German studies and has been Professor of art and cultural studies at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts since 2004. Hannes Rickli is a visual artist and professor at the Zurich University of the Arts. His teaching and research focus on the instrumental use of media and space as well as media ecology. Thomas Schmickl, Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.rer.nat, studies swarm-intelligence in honeybees, robot swarms and bio-inspired algorithms. He creates complex adaptive biohybrid systems by merging these components in a hopefully useful way. Günter Seyfried is an Austrian artist, who bridges arts and science. He teaches at NDU in St. Pölten and works as a researcher for Biofaction Vienna. Gary Sherman is an artist,represented by The Phatory LLC in New York City. His installations consist of sculptures, videos and drawings that are thematically connected to contemporary political/social issues the most recent being a heterotopic space concerning the destabilization of American political discourse. Recent and past performative works have addressed cultural assumptions related to gender, sexuality, and social contracts. Margit Stadlober studies art history and German at the universities of Graz and Vienna. 1983–2021 contract lecturer at the Institute for Art History at the University of Graz. 2023 lecturer on fine arts and technology at the University of Graz. 2004 habilitation. Since 2012 member of the State Historical Commission for Styria, further member of the advisory board of the Federal Monuments Office in Vienna. EU project Tracing the Art of the Straub Family, other projects on art history in Styria and monument preservation. Publications on the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Danube School, 19th century and modern times. Martina Szopek, Dr.rer.nat., studied Zoology at the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz. Her main research areas are swarm-intelligent behavior of honey bees and bio-hybrid societies. Jessica Ullrich, PhD., is Professor of aesthetics and art history at the University of the Arts Münster, Germany and editor of the academic journal Tierstudien (Neofelis Berlin).

List of Authors

Karoline Walter, MA BA BA, studied Art History and European Ethnology at KarlFranzens-University in Graz and is writing her dissertation about living plants in contemporary art projects.

375