One does not have to be a great seer to predict that the relationship between humans and nature will, in all probability, be the most important question of the present century.
PHILIPPE DESCOLA, THE ECOLOGY OF OTHERS (2013)
Rapid climate change and its increasingly serious consequences worldwide encourage many artists and scholars to ask an old question with renewed urgency: what can we do in the face of these pressing planetary problems? As one commentator suggests, “individual action over lightbulbs or transport seems to make no difference contrasted with the new coal fired power station being built weekly in China.”1 “Eco art” engages this conundrum in ways that make it one of the most vibrant aspects of contemporary art. Eco art emerged in North America and Europe in the 1970s. Much augmented in the 1990s, it is now extensively exhibited and discussed.2 A short form for “ecological art,” it embraces a range of contemporary practices that investigate the interconnected environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relationships between human and nonhuman animals as well as inanimate material through the visual arts. My zeal to explore eco art began with Olafur Eliasson’s celebrated installation The weather project (fig. 1). Displayed indoors and in a quintessentially urban setting, the vast space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003, the spectacle attracted over two million visitors in just six months.3 If Eliasson’s overtly artificial indoor sun and atmosphere promised an experience of “nature,” why would so many people come to an art gallery to experience what we commonly think of as out of doors and nonurban? This paradox is one of many addressed by contemporary eco art, which consistently questions our understanding and experience of nature. On a smaller scale but with great emotional impact, Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; fig. 2), in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, focuses our attention on the loss of glaciers worldwide. Sited in the institutional space of a transformed former public library, far away from world art centers, Library of Water, like The weather project, solicits local reactions to nature within a “climate-controlled” setting. Horn includes a record of a hundred interviews about the weather conducted with Icelanders in 2005–6. Titled Weather Reports You, this component is available in the reading room adjacent to her installation and as a separate artist’s book. Eco art also expands well beyond these art-world contexts. A notable example is the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), based in Los Angeles, a collaborative research group “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.”4 CLUI’s expeditions and projects question not only land use from the artistic to the military but also the nature of artistic production and research as they engage human interactions with the earth, past and present.
FIG. 1 Olafur Eliasson, The weather project, 2003. Monofrequency lights, projection foil, haze machines, mirror foil, aluminum, scaffolding, 26.7 × 22.3 × 155.44 m. Tate Modern, London, 2003. Photo: Andrew Dunkley and Marcus Leith. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriernschneider, Berlin; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. © 2003 Olafur Eliasson.
FIG. 2 Roni Horn, Water, Selected, from Vatnasafn / Library of Water. Permanent installation since 2007, Stykkishólmur, Iceland. Photo courtesy of Roni Horn. © Roni Horn.
Eco art’s responses to perceived planetary crises are as numerous as the disquiet around climate change is extensive. They are as individual as they are global in implication, and often as material as they are embroiled in both cultural and scientific ideas. The timeliness and complexity of eco art have led to an extensive range of exhibitions and publications, many with rubrics for coming to terms with the variety and priorities of this phenomenon in the art world.5 More than most contemporary art practices, eco art also transcends conventional borders of inquiry. As many examples throughout this book show, it often incorporates scientific and technological evaluations of environmental concerns. A question and response posed in the exhibition Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture (2013) say it all: “What does culture have to do with climate change? Everything.”6 Thus it is no surprise that understanding eco art’s perspectives on these insistent issues is also a growing priority across the humanities and within art history and the study of visual culture, as witnessed by the emergence of “eco art history.” An understanding of these perspectives is central to this book because it is the lens through which a scholarly understanding of contemporary eco art is perceived. As defined in a College Art Association of America session in 2014, eco art history is designed to “bring together art historians from diverse fields to work toward a more earth-conscious mode of analysis.”7 The initiative has been built on a number of precedents in the discipline, especially Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher’s foundational collection A Keener Perception. In his 2009 article “Ecocritical Art History,” Braddock linked ecocriticism in other disciplines with art-historical inquiry: “For art historians, ecocriticism entails a more probing and pointedly ethical integration of visual analysis, cultural interpretation, and environmental history—including aspects of the history of science—than has prevailed in the field” (27). Important too were model discussions in the 1990s, including special issues of the Art Journal and Leonardo.8 It is only in the later 2000s that the imperatives of eco art have been widely noticed. The collection Landscape Theory, based on discussions in 2006, is a prominent case in point. Respondent David Nye records his “surprise at how little the roundtable focused on the ecological sense of landscape. Environmental history and ecology were apparently not much on anyone’s mind” in the mid-2000s.9 Kirsten Swenson presciently asked in 2010 if “recent land- and environmental-based practices that blur disciplinary boundaries demand a new form of art history that similarly blurs distinctions between itself and other disciplines, or between theory and practice.”10 That new form is eco art history.
Landscape into Eco Art provides an armature for understanding a wide range of environmentally and ecologically focused art practices in what is now variously called the “Anthropocene”—the controversial term introduced by Paul Crutzen to describe the epoch in which human activity has become a force of nature—the “Capitalocene” (Jason W. Moore), and the “Chthulucene” (Donna Haraway), the last of which underscores the main cause of global warming, industrialization. Jussi Parikka’s memorable neologism, “Anthrobscene,” stresses the obscenity of the wanton disregard for and humiliation of integrity, that of the earth, of humans, of nonhuman animals, and of other organisms and inanimate materials.11 Eco art is not a fashion or style among others: at its best, it is the site of frank engagements with many pressing crises in the Anthropocene, from species depletion to climate disruption to resource shortages,12 issues that entail reassessments of human nature and anthropocentrism in relationship to the planet. Eco art boldly enters into today’s debates on climate science, government policy, and both corporate and individual responsibility. Eco art is not monolithic any more than “science” is; aesthetic experiments and interventions do not promise solutions to climate change, for example, but instead enter into what Bruno Latour optimistically calls the “fruitful cacophony” of discussion.13
I make the case that it is not sufficient to consider eco art only as a phenomenon within contemporary art, as an equally important (or inconsequential) trend among many. Humans have been held responsible not only for the planetary condition called the Anthropocene but also for cognate exploitations witnessed in the older landscape genre. Ian MacLaren calls the picturesque, a default way of seeing in Western societies from the early eighteenth century until the early twentieth, “an almost obscene practice” because of its integral relationships with colonization worldwide.14 The ways of seeing the earth common to landscape depiction were much more than mirrors of societal attitudes. They reinforced, developed, and disseminated these paradigms of the human relationship to the planet. My approach keeps this history current: to understand contemporary eco art as distinctive and significant in the present, but also as crucially connected to long-standing interactions with the earth in the visual arts and art history of the West, I reassess its artistic and theoretical reengagements with both the landscape genre’s venerable representations of the earth and also with land art of the 1960s and 1970s.15 Landscape’s ascent as a genre occurred in collaboration with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century—a favored starting point for the Anthropocene16—and the imperialisms of the nineteenth century. Earthworks and land art developed at the same time and in the same cultural milieu as mid-twentieth-century environmentalism in the United States and Europe. Ongoing relationships with eco art also illuminate the landscape genre and land art retrospectively, as, for example, in Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Pigment series, in which the artist often redeploys famous landscape paintings by building up powdered pigment that he then photographs, and his equally self-conscious revision of land art in Spiral Jetty After Robert Smithson, from the series Brooklyn, NY (1997). I present many more examples of this connection in chapter 2.
Of course, you may say, do we not already understand these parallels? Yes, and no. Consciously echoing Kenneth Clark’s groundbreaking but frequently criticized Landscape into Art (1949; 2nd ed., 1976),17 but not sharing his pessimism about the ongoing potency of the genre of landscape, Landscape into Eco Art works to complicate and ultimately to justify the linkage of historical landscape as a genre, land art, and eco art and to address in new ways the questions of how “land” comes into eco art.18 One objection to Clark’s account of the landscape genre is that he plots a linear progression through which landscape elements, once simply decorative or stage-setting supplements in religious and historical paintings, achieve independent status in the nineteenth century as “pure” landscape. Accounts of landscape as a genre—and as a more general, fluid response to nature in art—since Clark’s time similarly suggest, with varying degrees of explicitness, that landscape, land art, and then eco art also follow chronologically, dialectically, and in some accounts teleologically one from the other, and that landscape ends as Clark predicted. For example, in his nuanced survey Landscape and Western Art (1999), Malcolm Andrews proceeds from the emergence of landscape as an identifiable subset of European art, through a sophisticated thematic reading of its development up to the early twentieth century, to a concluding chapter titled “Landscape into Land: Earth Works, Art, and Environment.” But land art was not simply the next step in a sequence. These tendencies in the 1960s and 1970s had strong but, I believe, understudied relationships to the landscape genre and to land beyond this aesthetic and art-historical context. While the newer work often saw itself as replacing the purportedly outworn genre of landscape painting, it evolved in a dialectical relationship with it that is still operational, though rarely acknowledged, in eco art today. Robert Smithson’s articulation of an antipicturesque in his 1967 essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” and related visual works is a prime case in point. Aiming to augment rather than to curtail material and intellectual connections, as noted above, Smithson dismisses the landscape painting of the museums as restrictive: “Representing nature once removed in lyric poetry and landscape painting is not the same as direct cultivation of the land,” he writes in his long essay praising Frederick Law Olmsted.19 “I think we all see landscape as coextensive with the gallery,” he claimed in 1968, in what seems like a reference to landscape painting.20 As pioneer land artist Michael Heizer asserted colorfully, looking directly at the land was “more interesting than looking at works in the Louvre or Metropolitan.”21 For many land artists, the new approach disrupted ties to the model of the artist in (typically) his studio, the gallery system, medium-specific formalism, tired monumental sculpture in public spaces, traditional art materials and finish in sculptural work, the urban, and especially the landscape genre.
Many art historians and artists have adopted this dismissal of landscape, both as it denotes a genre—a compendium of historical practices—and as an elaboration of “land,” a putatively more fundamental category. In the authoritative Land and Environmental Art, published in 1998, Brian Wallis declares that land art “had virtually nothing to do with such conventional notions of landscape as gardening, open prairies, [or] natural rock formations.”22 Amanda Boetzkes claims that “earth art resists delivering nature as a thematic image, such as a landscape, or a tangible object, such as a specimen in a natural history museum.”23 Calling for an end to traditional landscape conventions in art because they block our access to nature considered more expansively, John E. Thornes also argues that in eco-art contexts “the use of the term landscape is misleading. It implies a static material approach, whereas artists like Constable and Turner, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, painted representations of their total physical and built environment (land, air, water, light, plants, trees, animals, people, buildings).”24 Ginger Strand claims that “[n]o one believes in landscape anymore. As a self-contained genre, pretty vistas and sublime scenes seem compromised.”25 Chapters 2 and 3 show that her view is largely correct, but not if construed as a somehow progressive evolution away from historical landscape practices. A pivotal case in point is the powerful landscape imagery of Icelandic artist Georg Guðni (1961–2011), who stated early in his career that he and his peers believed that “landscape was old-fashioned and uninteresting,”26 but went on to extend the genre to new heights of observation and subtlety. Again promoting the familiar developmental narrative, however, central 1970s eco artists—Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison in the United States and Richard Long in the United Kingdom, for example—reacted to what they perceived as machine-driven interventionist extravagances in American land art of the 1960s and saw their alternative processes as an improvement on the less ecologically refined procedures of much land art. Concerned mostly with land art as an immediate predecessor, however, early eco artists often ignored the nuances of earlier landscape expression and its ongoing import. In echoing but fundamentally revising Clark’s title, then, my aim is to insist that the landscape genre did not simply end, as he predicted, and that it is far from irrelevant today. Landscape does not easily slide “into” eco art, but neither is it a cast-off remnant of a Hegelian unfolding. Landscape into Eco Art presents a sustained argument for considering continuities between aspects of the landscape tradition in the West, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary ecological art. By attending to a full range of relationships among these modes of engagement with the earth, I recover aspects of the unrecognized history of the landscape genre and also explore the art-historical implications of construing a longer tradition of landscape presentation and representation that includes land art and eco art in an ongoing drama of articulation.
LANDSCAPE, LAND ART, ECO ART
It is ca. 1970, then, that three somewhat distinct modes of engagement with the earth in Western art are designated: the long-standing landscape genre, earthworks and land art, and something new, described with the portmanteau “eco art” and its variants. This description finds clear and influential expression in John Beardsley’s Earthworks and Beyond, first published in 1984 and now in its fourth edition (2006). Linking the landscape tradition to land art, Beardsley claims in his introduction that “[i]n the early 1980s . . . it was clear that landscape was reappearing as one of the most consequential subjects in art—a position it had not enjoyed since the mid-nineteenth century. It was also evident that landscape was emerging in a different guise” (7). Not only does Beardsley imply that earthworks are part of a landscape tradition, but his reference to “beyond” in his title also suggests homologies between land art and eco art now. He has added an afterword called “The Global Landscape” to the latest edition, an account that includes examples of what he calls “environmental art” in an unbroken tradition of Western landscape depiction. While I agree with Beardsley—and in general with Barbara C. Matilsky, in her groundbreaking exhibition Fragile Ecologies (1992)—that landscape as a genre and as a loose description of aesthetic responses to land (and other historical examples of “form building in the landscape” such as earth mounds and gardens) is germane to land art and to eco art, I mean to slow down the progression from and intercalation of one form into the other.27 I reexamine what I call the “hinges” between landscape and land art, between land art and eco art, and also between landscape and eco art, the eco art that is more involved with landscape than with land art. One revisionary implication of this procedure is that the break in artists’ practices between early land art and 1974, to use the subtitle of the 2012 exhibit Ends of the Earth, is not as significant as the exhibit’s cocurators (or, before them, Suzaan Boettger in Earthworks) claim.28
While reasons to link landscape traditions with land art and eco art are manifest, the more common move has been for artists and art historians to suggest a break between such practices. Heizer, Smithson, and Wallis (cited above) are examples; more widely read in academic circles is W. J. T. Mitchell’s examination of the genre of landscape in his influential collection Landscape and Power, first published in 1994 and again in an enlarged edition in 2002. Inaugurating this landmark study of new approaches to the genre,29 the remarkable, even Wittgensteinian, “Theses on Landscape” with which Mitchell provocatively begins his own contribution to the volume, “Imperial Landscape,” have an ironic ring today. Dismissing the object of study that he and his co-authors powerfully revise, Mitchell asserts in thesis 8 that “[l]andscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression” (5). Unlike many land artists, he does not dispute the genre’s past importance, but with them, he is dubious about its present and future if a restrictive, retrograde version of the genre continues to be employed. My point is that continuities and discontinuities cannot be discussed adequately if we decide on principle that the landscape tradition is irrelevant. To forget or dismiss landscape’s history is to cut off resources for and recourse to currently relevant practices and theories. We understand less about both landscape and eco art by considering them separately. Yet there is a strong inclination to sever landscape traditions from land art and contemporary practices, an inclination that follows, in part, from the power of such traditions and later artists’ and art historians’ need to be independent. For example, while Nicholas Alfrey and Joy Sleeman are certainly right to warn against “questionable assumptions about the continuity and adaptability of a British landscape tradition,”30 my contention is that both the connections and differences need to be considered rather than dismissed. I am attempting, not to revive landscape in an earlier form, but to remember it, to avoid what artist Maya Lin—using author Jared Diamond’s phrase—calls “landscape amnesia,”31 whether in the sense of landscape depiction of the earth or conceived as a landscape more materially, the abundance of our planetary environment, the decline of which her work tracks. I argue that the future of artistic engagements with the earth has been and remains tied to the specifics of the past of landscape in two principal ways: First, both land artists and contemporary eco artists interact with the landscape genre more significantly than is commonly allowed. Second, landscape, land art, and eco art mutually inform one another, beyond these documented historical interactions, in a manner that becomes visible with hindsight.
Both Patricia Parker and Mieke Bal have theorized the notion of the “preposterous” in ways that can help us think through such temporal relationships. As Parker claims, “Preposterous . . . connotes a reversal of ‘post’ for ‘pre,’ behind for before, back for front, second for first, end or sequel for beginning. . . . the preposterous also disrupts the linear orders of succession and following.” In Bal’s extended usage, it is an activity that yields a preposterous art history, one keenly aware of its own historicality in the present.32 If landscape is best thought of as a medium and as an action (think of landscaping a garden), as Mitchell suggests, then it functions in this book as another hinge, a pivot point, a mediator. Sometimes the connections between historical and more recent work are causal; in other cases the links are analogical. We could also call this approach “nonlinear” as defined by Manuel De Landa. He suggests that we should not think of human history—in this context, of “landscape”—as “different ‘stages’ . . . that is, progressive developmental steps, each . . . leaving the previous one behind. On the contrary,” he explains, “much as water’s solid, liquid, and gas phases may coexist, so each new human phase simply added itself to the other ones, coexisting and interacting with them without leaving them in the past.”33 The need for nonlinear and nondevelopmental thinking arises, for example, in comprehending the chill we must feel looking at Agnes Denes’s documentation of her rightly famous 1982 Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan. Photographs of this work feature the World Trade Center’s twin towers, symbols in the 1980s of mercantile power and its avoidance of ecological issues, such as the productive use of the vacant land. The destruction of the towers on September 11, 2001, changes Wheatfield retrospectively: because neither the buildings nor her performative earthwork exist now, Denes’s intervention in 1982 seems darkly prophetic, not of a terrorist attack, but of ecological calamity and the excesses of the Anthropocene, in which the exploitative use of land that Denes revealed is seen as a cause of ecological crises today.
DIRECT ACTION, AESTHETIC SEPARATION AND WITHDRAWAL, ARTICULATION
Eco art today provides a full spectrum of attitudes toward nature, landscape, and ecology and suggests many responses to questions about its purposes or intended efficacy. These can be construed through three interlocking descriptions of its tendencies: direct action, aesthetic separation and withdrawal, and articulation. While not categorically different, the eco-art practices I now turn to tend to emphasize one of these priorities. What Flint Collins instructively calls “site-reformative” eco art is dominant today.34 Its ethic of direct and ameliorative intervention in environmental problems extends the heritage of earlier land-reclamation projects such as Robert Morris’s 1979 Johnson Pit #30, which relandscaped an open excavation; Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991–93), which extracted toxic heavy metals from soil; and Jackie Brookner’s patented Biosculptures, such as Prima Lingua (1996), which employed plants as water purifiers. On a much larger scale is Viet Ngo’s Devil’s Lake Wastewater Treatment Plant, in North Dakota (1990). Kindred eco-art projects seek to be informative in ways that can change people’s behavior toward the environment.35 A prime example is Subhankar Banerjee’s Arctic Series Photographs (2000–) and his related book Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land (2003), which, by showing this apparently pristine and fragile habitat, spurred U.S. governmental protection of arctic land, species, and Indigenous human populations.36 This positive result echoes the earliest example of collaboration between art forms to sway public and government opinion on the environment, from writings by Thoreau to photographs by Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins to paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, which stood behind the 1864 act in the U.S. Congress to protect the Yosemite Valley. As Sandrine Simon has argued by invoking the emotional register that I examine in chapter 5, “ecological artists have been able to emotionally shake their public, be it society in general or even policy makers, both by portraying the beauty of nature and by expressing their outrage concerning the destruction of the environment. The work of photographers such as Ansel Adams in the Yosemite Valley provided a direct continuity with landscape painting and played an essential role in the creation of the ‘conservation movement’ and national parks in the USA and elsewhere.”37 Though responses to and characterizations of more recent reformative work varies, other examples include the alarming photographs of environmental degradation by Edward Burtynsky or David Maisel and Maya Lin’s What Is Missing?, a multiplatform undertaking, one of whose elements is a melancholic interactive website begun in 2009 that documents what many scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction of life on earth.
Prominent eco artist Jackie Brookner (1945–2015) raised a crucial point about reclamation art, however, one that spurs me to see it as one among several compelling practices rather than the necessary goal of eco art. Referring to her own work but in a way that pertains to Chin’s Revival Field and other reclamation projects, she writes:
But if the plants are doing the work, why not just grow them in the ground, as in most bioremediation and ecological restoration projects? Why grow them on sculptures? And why do we need art to do what bioremediation and ecological restoration are already doing? The aesthetic, metaphoric and conceptual functions of Biosculptures™ are important because for true ecological restoration, it is not enough to restore the ecosystems. We need to change ourselves. To bring about a future where we can move beyond restoration, beyond an endless cycle of loss and repair where we keep having to bandage new wounds, we need a restoration of human values. We need to revision what we value and undervalue, in the world, in ourselves, and in our identification of ourselves as species. We need to make the restoration processes visible and understandable, and we need to engage the attention, imagination and heart of the public. To affect values, to create desire, to make people care about something, you have to affect hearts, bodies, unconscious dream lives and imaginations. And this is the work art can do so well.38
How do we distinguish reclamation work from green engineering, design, or social activism, and are such distinctions useful? T. J. Demos’s extraordinarily rich book Decolonizing Nature has as a main goal “to further enliven [the] intersection of art and activism” (11). Without diminishing the import of these crossings and priorities in eco art today, I provide a different emphasis, one that articulates distinctions between the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of eco-art practices and more overtly political pursuits and is therefore able to bring eco art’s manifold interactions with land art and landscape to the fore. In Alan C. Braddock’s apt phrasing, “What is the art in ecological art, exactly?”39 For example, Mel Chin has said that the greatest triumph of his Revival Field was its ability to test and prove scientific hypotheses about hyperconductor plants and soil pollution. For him, the question of whether we call this art or science or engineering is not important.40 But is some degree of separation warranted, perhaps even to uphold art’s ability to make a difference precisely through its difference? I agree with Malcolm Miles’s claim that “art interrupts and exposes contradictions; it intervenes to re-inflect the conditions by which it is conditioned; and this dialectical function validates art’s response to climate change, as it also validates political movements, as part of a process of change which is never completed.”41 We can adapt two of Theodore Adorno’s arguments to investigate eco art’s specifically aesthetic dimensions as it confronts climate change, a process I define as “articulation.”42 In Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno holds that if art is to remain connected to momentous societal problems, it must fight for an identity distinguishable (if not fully autonomous) from its ambient culture. As he writes, “All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function . . . are doomed” (1). In his terms, “Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy” (5). On this view, the German artist Herman Prigann’s (1942–2008) many land restorations in Europe, for example, must function as art as well as repair unsightly and toxic strip mines. Art must be identifiable as such if it is to have an effect.
There are many possible objections to this stance. Miles claims that eco art “crosses boundaries between art, social research, and environmentalism so that it no longer matters whether it is art or something else.” He suggests, hopefully, that “if the aim is to shift the balance of humanity’s relation to the earth from exploitation to sustenance, this implies a shift in human relations as a point of departure. . . . An ecological aesthetic [can be seen as an] intervention in social conditions, seeing human nature not in a biological sense as beyond history, but as produced in history. . . . Art can intervene in writing the scripts, interrupting the processes of normalization.”43 His prime example is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation (1974–84), a now-legendary project in which the artist, by shaking the hand of every sanitation worker in New York City, drew attention to the urban sanitation systems that we unheedingly depend upon. But his point, while in keeping with the fundamental ecological premise of the interconnectedness of all phenomena, is made precipitously. Granted, what we humans call a given eco-aesthetic project is of no account to nature. But our naming and categorizing practices do matter profoundly to us and to how humans behave toward nonhumans: these attitudes influence, if not determine, what we see and how we act, as the histories of the overdetermined concepts of “art” and “nature” attest. An example was related by author Jack Burnham in 1967: “I can remember when [Hans] Haacke took me to see an example of his first water boxes (spring 1962), then in the rental collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A secretary commented that the museum personnel had been playing with it for days—it seemed to have caused more joyful curiosity than any number of ‘sculptures’—for that reason the museum never thought seriously of buying it as a ‘work of art.’”44
Adorno wrote powerfully on nature and natural history, but my aim is not to engage with these speculations per se but rather to pose a version of his famous challenge to the aesthetic as it operates in the contemporary. According to Adorno, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”45 Brian A. Oard has glossed his argument: “To persist, after Auschwitz, in the production of monuments of the very culture that produced Auschwitz (Adorno might have spoken of Strauss’s Four Last Songs rather than generalized ‘poetry’) is to participate by denial in the perpetuation of that barbaric culture and to participate in the process (reification) that renders fundamental criticism of that culture literally unthinkable.”46 I can specify my stress on the “art” in eco art by asking if it is legitimate to recast Adorno’s pointed question about the authenticity of artistic expression in light of contemporary ecocide. After all, it is the mechanisms of what we might best call the “modernocene”47 that have allowed our contemporary art world to thrive. As Kate Rigby has pointed out, the Holocaust and the effects of climate change differ on many counts, not least in the premeditation of consequences in Nazi Germany versus the large-scale obliviousness in the drift toward climate catastrophe.48 Can we justifiably make art about nature in full cognizance of anthropogenic climate disruption? Can eco art continue in its creation of objects and interventions in the face of humanity’s undeniable acceleration of global climate change? Looking at the question of ecological thinking in the discipline of history, Dipesh Chakrabarty presents both the reasons for and stakes of any suggestion that “business as usual” is viable: “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history and end by returning to the question . . . How does the crisis of climate change appeal to our sense of human universals while challenging . . . our capacity for historical understanding?”49 Should we continue to produce works and to display them using the same largely capitalist structures and attitudes that spawned our current climate problems? I would say yes, if eco art’s effects lie in reflecting and modifying the long-standing relationships between artistic expression, landscape, and human views of the earth and nature. With Adorno again, it is only from a sometimes-nominal remove that defines it as art that eco art can meaningfully speak to our current climate predicament. How should we respond as a species now that we are what Chakrabarty calls a “geological force”? Ways to proceed are offered in philosopher Lorraine Code’s book Ecological Thinking, among them a process she defines as the “study of habitats both physical and social where people endeavor to live well together; of ways of knowing that foster or thwart such living; and thus of the ethos and habitus enacted in the knowledge and actions, customs, social structures, and creative-regulative principles by which people strive or fail to achieve this multiply realizable end” (26). One way to support living well together, Code elaborates, is to question the largely science-oriented discourses of mastery that are a legacy of the Enlightenment. This eco art does.
There is another salient way to consider eco art that refuses to be instrumental, a divergent interpretation of many of the same works of art. In her unfailingly articulate book The Ethics of Earth Art, Amanda Boetzkes challenges the ascendency of art reclamation. She argues that what eco art can best reveal is the earth’s ultimate unavailability to human perception, how the earth exceeds what we can perceive and retracts itself from us in its ineluctable difference. She develops this counterintuitive move away from anthropomorphic intervention—away from practical intercessions—via the recessionary aesthetic of philosophers John Sallis, Luce Irigaray, and Martin Heidegger. Her work also accords with the “object-oriented ontology” of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.50 “The artwork is the threshold at which elementals exceed the limits of perception,” she claims. “In simultaneously making contact with natural phenomena and withholding the drive to unify them in the viewer’s field of vision, the artwork offers itself as a medium on which the earth manifests and asserts its irreducibility to human signification.”51 Thus Boetzkes reads recuperative projects by Betty Beaumont, Rebecca Belmore, Joseph Beuys, Basia Irland, and Aviva Rahmani against these artists’ proclamations of meliorative purpose, accentuating instead the works’ ethics of withdrawal, defined as “a stance of retraction from and receptivity to the earth that foregoes the propensity to actively subsume it within the parameters of our existing logic.” As an alternative, “artists create the conditions of possibility for the earth to appear at the limits of intelligible form.”52 In this way, eco art is respectfully involved with the earth’s otherness.
The three paradigms of eco art that I have described—direct action, aesthetic separation and withdrawal, and articulation—can be specified through Collins’s and Boetzkes’s interpretations of Hans Haacke’s pioneering eco work Rhine Water Purification Plant (1972; fig. 3) and Condensation Box (1965). The center of Purification Plant, installed indoors at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, for two months in 1972, was a large pond with goldfish swimming in water siphoned from the Rhine River downstream from the local sewage-treatment plant. The storage jars holding this opaque, apparently polluted water from the river were visible, as was Haacke’s didactic photo-and-text work, Krefeld Sewage Triptych (1972). The central photograph in the triptych shows birds swarming over effluent in the river where the plant discharged its supposedly cleansed water. The side panels provide statistics on the contamination entering the river and the names of the area’s major polluters. Haacke thus revealed that one player in the degraded state of the river water that his work filtered was the sewage-treatment facility funded by the same civic authority that supported the gallery. This embarrassing exposé was underlined by the fact that Haacke returned cleansed water from his fish tank to the grounds of the Museum Haus Lange seen through the picture window adjacent to his installation.
FIG. 3 Hans Haacke, Rhine Water Purification Plant, 1972. Glass and acrylic containers, pump, polluted Rhine water, tubing, filters, chemicals, goldfish, drainage to garden. Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany. © Hans Haacke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 2016 Hans Christoph Carl Haacke / SODRAC, Montreal. Courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
In his extensive reading of Rhine Water Purification Plant, Collins concludes that the work is an example of the “documentary mode” of site remediation: the “distinctive reconfiguration of site specificity typified by Haacke’s early eco-artwork can be accurately characterized as site reform—action to improve the degraded ecological conditions and situational realities of a particular site-as-ecosystem. Its more precise site-reformative function in regard to the site of Krefeld is to document—provide factual information (evidence, recording, reporting) about, or show evidence of—the specific anthropogenic ecological problem of water pollution there.” Collins argues persuasively that “eco-art, from its inception, set about reorienting the concept of site specificity toward eco-ethical concerns and responsibilities, in effect redefining site specificity as site reform.”53 But insisting on the corrective function of Haacke’s and cognate works presents only one dimension of their significance and of eco art’s activities. Rhine Water Purification Plant was evidently serviceable. The fish seemed to thrive, and the grass onto which the water ran was green. But Haacke clearly established too that his display was not a version of the dysfunctional Krefeld waste plant. He drew the still-polluted Rhine water downstream from that facility, after it had been treated by the “real” industrial process. He also placed his work in an art gallery, a frame for aesthetic reckoning. For Haacke as for Adorno, I suggest, “the artwork is related to the world by the principle that contrasts it with the world.”54 Haacke’s stated goal with this innovative work was to “articulate something natural.”55 To function as an articulation of what Bruno Latour has called “concerns” that bring human and nonhuman actants—plus scientific, technological, and aesthetic discourses—into contact,56 an artwork must remain distinct from the cultural contexts whose materials and habits it unavoidably employs.
While a fine line can be seen to exist between art and nonart activities in general and between eco art and green-technology projects, for example, it is a malleable boundary, an edge in flux for any number of reasons. In terms that I elaborate throughout this book, eco art frequently articulates this border, not to guard it, but rather to monitor what its inevitable shifts imply for humans, other animals, and perhaps, in Boetzkes’s terms, the earth as it recedes from our view. As she emphasizes with reference to Haacke’s 1965 Condensation Box and related works, “Haacke activated natural processes within the gallery space,”57 in this case, the weather-like effect of condensation. Caroline A. Jones reminds us in her masterly article accompanying the re-creation at MIT of Haacke’s 1967 exhibition that the later version of Condensation Box was in fact titled Weather Cube.58 Boetzkes’s interpretation is that “Haacke’s work sensitizes the viewer to the otherwise hidden dimensions of natural activity. . . . His practice invited the unpredictability and fundamental impenetrability of the elemental.” While this is a convincing description, especially given the consistency with which Boetzkes demonstrates her thesis across many otherwise different works of earth and eco art, it is—again—not the whole story about this piece or about eco art. For example, it does not take account of Haacke’s attempt in this and cognate work to create autonomous systems that are as much as possible independent of human input and even observation. Boetzkes claims that Haacke’s ecological work, “rather than presenting the spectator with information (scientific facts about ecosystems or environmental degradation)”—in line with Collins’s reading—instead “requires the spectator to stand, watch, and wait for elementals to reveal themselves.”59 Jones, however, while acknowledging that viewer participation is important to these installations, applies more sustained pressure to Haacke’s will to achieve an Adorno-like autonomy. The artist himself wrote that “in spite of all my environmental . . . thinking I am still fascinated by the nearly magic, self-contained quality of objects. My water levels, waves, and condensation boxes are unthinkable without this physical separation from their surroundings.”60 Jones highlights the ironic tension in “how Haacke struggled to keep the human from impeding the autonomy of these fluid systems, yet recognized the importance of the art in restoring humans’ own equilibrium (via empathetic ‘systems’ he was not acknowledging as part of his concern).” She concludes, “the human could watch; the human might even push a system into motion, but the system’s unfolding was independent of the human in 1967.”61 With Boetzkes, we might conclude that what is definitively independent of the human is the earth, here seen in its difference through eco art. But such a recession is not all we can potentially realize when eco art claims, as Haacke did, to “articulate something natural.”
I am not suggesting that Haacke meant more by “articulate” here than two of the OED’s standard definitions specify: “to express distinctly” and “to attach or unite.” The term was clearly significant to him, though, because he brought it up early in a 1971 interview published in Arts Magazine. “[A]rticulate something Natural . . . has an intended double meaning. It refers to ‘nature,’ and it means something self-understood, ordinary, uncontrived, normal.”62 Given that “articulation [was] perhaps one of the most generative concepts in contemporary cultural studies” in the 1980s and 1990s, however, we might extend its theorization at the hands of Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall particularly to think with it in the context of eco art. For Laclau, according to Jennifer Slack, while articulations do link concepts, such relationships are never necessary and do not connect systematically across a system.63 Laclau and Hall after him work against any deterministic system by insisting on the specificities of articulation. Hall posits that the notion of articulation “has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how specific practices articulated around contradictions which do not all arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment, can nevertheless be thought together.”64 Shifting this idea from the contexts in which Hall himself would deploy it—though not from the time frame he shared with Haacke’s work—allows me to build on Hall’s admirably clear and evocative idea. “In England,” he stated in an interview,
the term has a nice double meaning because “articulate” means to utter, to speak forth, to be articulate. It carries that sense of language-ing, of expressing, etc. But we also speak of an “articulated” lorry (truck): a lorry where the front (cab) and back (trailer) can, but need not necessarily, be connected to one another. The two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?65
Thus the association that Boetzkes posits between Haacke’s Condensation Box and a showing-forth of the earth is edifying but—like Collins’s insistence on site reformation as the best ethical response for eco art deserving the name—partial, worthy but not necessary. “Articulation” allows us to perceive Haacke’s environmental work in both ways and to explore contemporary eco art as an aesthetic articulation of evolving environmental and ecological issues.66
With systems theory, Haacke tried to balance the independence of the Krefeld installation with its overtly political purpose: to spark public attention to and outrage over water pollution. Relevant here is anthropologist James Clifford’s development of the concept of articulation to explicate the political claims that attend Indigenous sites, a topic I return to in chapters 2 and 5. Making reference to Stuart Hall and to Antonio Gramsci, he claims, “The notion of articulated sites of indigeneity rejects two claims often made about today’s tribal movements. On the one hand, articulation approaches question the assumption that indigeneity is essentially about primordial, transhistorical attachments (ancestral ‘laws,’ continuous traditions, spirituality, respect for Mother Earth, and the like).” “Articulation,” he extrapolates, “offers a nonreductive way to think about cultural transformation and the apparent coming and going of ‘traditional’ forms,” adding—crucially for the contexts of eco art that I am developing—“in articulation theory, the whole question of authenticity is secondary, and the process of social and cultural persistence is political all the way back. It is assumed that cultural forms will always be made, unmade, and remade.”67 Articulation as I develop the notion in Landscape into Eco Art—coordinates under which eco art examines the culture of climate change, for example68—maintains this plasticity, this proximity to and aesthetic distance from the earth. “Authentic” eco art can mitigate damaged sites or offer an inkling of the earth’s withdrawal from our merely human cognizance. It can do both or something else entirely. But because it is not defined or confined by these abilities, I suggest throughout this book that efficacy and amelioration are not and should not necessarily describe or measure eco art. Thus eco art can be both political and aesthetic in the manner expounded by Jacques Rancière: “The aesthetic regime of the arts . . . strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule. . . . The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art. . . . It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself.”69 Underlining the boundary work that I make central to my understanding of eco art in chapter 5, he states elsewhere: “Political art is a kind of negotiation, not between politics and art, but between the two politics of aesthetics. This . . . is made possible by continuously playing on the boundary and the absence of boundary between art and non-art.”70
TERMINOLOGICAL BORDERLANDS
I have introduced the importance of eco art and claimed that in its work of tackling contemporary environmental issues from a humanistic perspective, it articulates pivotal connections to both land art and the landscape tradition. To this point, I have relied on largely shared understandings of terms such as “landscape,” “land,” “ecology,” “environment,” “border,” and “nature.” While many of these terms overlap, their provisional definitions also have direct effects. It is for this reason that discussions of borders are central to this book. As Ila Sheren explains in a visual-studies context, there has been a move to “dematerialize” borders by emphasizing more than their physical, international presence.71 The truly global issues of climate change are a test case for “border theory.” By considering border crossings in the contexts of eco art, I hope to add to the articulation of border theory in the past decades. These and closely related vocabularies have been “manipulated,” whether semiconsciously—to promote a male colonist’s gaze with the idea of wilderness,72 for example—or, as we have briefly seen, in the habits of landscape depiction integral to the supposed innocence of the picturesque view.73 These concepts have also been handled materially, most obviously in landscape gardening and in land art, but also in examples of eco art. My sense of the manipulated collaborates with but should also be distinguished from the idea that landscape is “constructed” by human culture, whether this view is presented almost as common sense by Simon Schama—“even landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out . . . to be its product”—or more extensively argued by Dennis Cosgrove or Neil Evernden.74 For reasons I detail throughout Landscape into Eco Art, it is salutary to resist the idea that landscape (or anything else) is completely made by human hands and minds. The nonhuman and materialist turns common to scholarship in new materialism enriches our sense of and responsibility toward that which is not us,75 as I argue in more detail in chapter 5. I manipulate “landscape” and its relatives yet again to establish rubrics through which to understand eco art today, putting these concepts “in crisis . . . to make sense of change while signposting the necessity for different vocabularies,” in Parikka’s apt words.76 Given their historical development and the flux of contemporary usage, it is neither possible nor desirable to secure fixed meanings for any of these overdetermined ideas. Specifications in usage are best made locally and in context, but some preliminary definitions of the terms that appear frequently in this book are in order.
A significant boundary negotiation in this study is that among the central terms I employ, their usages, and their interrelationships. These margins of meaning are productive for analysis because it is at these junctures that decisions are made, where commitments and assumptions are potentially disclosed before they are normalized in new protocols. Demarcation is exactly what is at stake in the term “landscape.” Writing from the perspective of cultural geography, Kenneth R. Olwig has pointed out that “[t]he two meanings inherent in the diaphor of landscape are well expressed in the definition . . . in Dr. Johnson’s classic 1755 dictionary: (1) ‘A region; the prospect of a country’; (2) ‘A picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it.’”77 Eco artists often use the term in precisely these two ways, not least because “landscape” is imbricated with the definition of “eco” as understood by Guattari and many other commentators: “The root ‘eco’ is used here in its original Greek sense of oïkos, that is, ‘house, domestic property, habitat, natural milieu.’”78 Many contemporary artists do not see landscape as tainted by associations with the history of this genre or, again like Mitchell in his “Theses,” inadequate for contemporary practice. For example, one of the most prolific and influential European eco artists, Herman Prigann, claimed regarding his Terra Nova project (1990–2001), which sought to establish “opencast mines” in Germany as wetlands, that “[t]hese landscapes of the 21st century are conceived as sustainable and open to development and will be realised on the foundation of an ecological aesthetic.”79 He means by “landscape” both the parcel of land and his own remedial interventions. Malcolm Andrews has effectively surveyed other early uses of the term that still figure in our conventions. The German word Landschaft specified the area adjacent to a settlement; it was largely a category of land administration and ownership. The Dutch term Landskip specified hills, woods, etc., as ornamental backgrounds—parerga—in paintings and drawings, a meaning that was adopted in England in the early seventeenth century and applied to both independent studies and backgrounds in other works.80 Thus the idea of landscape comes into English with a double dose of the proprietary: jurisdiction of the land around a town and a small framed view that one could also own. Probing these usages, Anne Whiston Spirn insists on the import of the Old English word “landscipe”—as well as its coeval Nordic, Scandinavian, and German cognates—meaning the shaping of the land by people and that specific land’s reciprocal manipulation (as I would put it) of the people. She concludes, “There is a notion, embedded in the original word, of a mutual shaping of people and place: people shape the land, and the land shapes people.”81 Her etymological archaeology finds contemporary resonance in the irrevocable intercalation of the human and material dimensions of landscape, what we could call their coexistence or coextension, that we find in recent theories of landscape.
We cannot properly suspend this mutual binding to think about landscape only as a genre in art or solely as an independent slice of “nature,” just “land.” One’s location on land that has a history is crucial. As I recognize more formally in my acknowledgments, I am keenly aware that I am writing about landscape from a city and university now occupying the traditional Indigenous territory of the Mississaugas of the New Credit. The place-name “Toronto” stems from the Kanienke’haka word “Tkaronto,” “the place in the water where the trees are standing,” and was a meeting place for many First Nations, including the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Anishinaabe, and Algonquin.82 For a range of reasons, then, we need to be alert to the implications of the widespread adoption of the term “Anthropocene,” as well as “landscape” and “nature,” discussed below. Zoe Todd makes the point forcefully:
As a Métis scholar, I have an inherent distrust of this term, the Anthropocene, since terms and theories can act as gentrifiers in their own right, and I frequently have to force myself to engage in good faith with it as heuristic. While it may seem ridiculous to distrust a word, it is precisely because the term has colonized and infiltrated many intellectual contexts throughout the academy at the moment that I view it with caution. . . . I ask myself: “What other story could be told here? What other language is not being heard? Whose space is this, and who is not here?”83
Whether we think of landscape theoretically (as an instance of the boundary making fundamental to art’s appearance), historically (as a genre, medium, or view of nature), or materially (in terms of its nonhuman elements and actants), it is a notion embedded in and adapted to the diverse and often disputatious “anthrop” of the Anthropocene. For humans, landscape is always cultural, especially when that implies that the practice of “landscaping” in its broadest sense articulates border lines with what is not human and between human communities. In mapping, in literature, or in the visual arts, landscape in Western usage—if not, crucially, in some Indigenous contexts—enframes and takes possession of space in some way.84 It is the product of constant manipulation, an ongoing “articulation” that is often explicitly specific to art media, whether digital (where the term “digital manipulation” is a commonplace) or material (land artists often boasted about using earth rather than merely representing it). Manipulation is inevitably also political (peoples are manipulated in the sense of being disenfranchised of their land). In her masterly exploration of Gilles Deleuze’s theories of “territory” and the earth, Elizabeth Grosz unfolds the profound complexity of the Western notion of landscape and adumbrates its connectedness to other pivotal ideas: “This real, the outside, chaos, demarcated through the constitution of a (finite and provisional) territory, makes possible the more calculable, measurable, and mappable features that characterize a site, the site’s openness to scientific and technical manipulation and control; and the built frame, produced through a regulation and partitioning of orientations in the site, divides and selects that which the territory, now configured as landscape, a view, can directly mark, and illuminate, the inside, the divisions and selections made by groups and communities” (my emphasis). She extends these thoughts to present a theory of art that points beyond painting to eco art’s fundamental relations to the earth: “Painting has been about the visual and plastic image of the invisible forces of the earth, forces that are the combination of universal forces regulating all the cosmos—gravitational forces, magnetic forces, the force of light, and so on—and the historically contingent eruption of life on earth in the particular forms it has taken—forces that are cellular, chromosomal, biological, regulated by impersonal cosmic forces through which evolution operates.”85
Before discussing the term “landscape” in connection with the even more intricate notion of “nature” with which it is frequently associated, let me comment on my emphasis on the earthly, “geo” commitments of eco art in Landscape into Eco Art. My focus is distinct from that of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann in Toward a Geography of Art—influential and admirable as this work certainly is—where he discusses “how issues related to the question of the place of art can be addressed in a variety of contexts involving current questions in the history of art.”86 Without prescribing fast boundaries, where we might say that Kaufmann works with geography in its spatial senses, including mapping, my emphasis is closer to the material of the earth, more geological. Like Kaufmann, I want to examine links to art history in its turn to ecological issues. Encompassing and central as the linked concepts of landscape, land, earth, mapping, etc., are, however, they do not account for all eco art, nor do I wish to delimit future speculation by suggesting that this form is only connected to landscape and the earth. While my focus on the earth implicitly includes all species on the planet and extends to the atmosphere and seas, there is, for example, eco art that is more exclusively geared to human behavior than that which I examine here. Aiming “to uncover outstanding photography applied to confront the most pressing social and environmental challenges of today,” the international photography competition Prix Pictet’s themes are a powerful example.87 Work discussed in the following chapters does touch on the “post-human” in its relationships with nonhuman animals, but these dimensions of eco art are not my main concern. Neither is the growing area of digital eco art as explored by numerous artists and art historians, including Ila Sheren, who “considers [it] environmentally motivated art that uses digital media to recast the human in terms of objects and landscapes, taking into account global inequalities and postcolonial resonances.”88 Without suggesting that there are hard divisions among these modes of engagement, I do claim that there are good reasons for elaborating what Rosi Braidotti calls the “geo-centred turn.” She presents the challenge that I believe many eco artists successfully take up: “we need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within understandable language.”89 Not only is the term “Anthropocene” a geological designation—signifying the epoch that many believe follows the Holocene—but as Parikka reminds us, geology and landscape include much more than the planet’s surfaces.90 Caves, mining, underwater zones, the atmosphere, and the “blue marble” in space are part of one earth.91 The recalibration of the human subject from the perspective of the earth called for by many theorists today—including Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Lorraine Code, Bruno Latour, and McKenzie Wark, all of whom I draw on in the chapters below—is at the same time a broadly political and ethical commitment embraced by many eco artists, because at root, as David Harvey claims, “all political and social projects are ecological, and vice versa.”92 The preponderance of eco art is concerned with the earth from what we can call a geoaesthetic angle. So too was both land art and historical landscape depiction, offering us the opportunity to compare these modes in new ways.
NATURE AND ART HISTORY
“Nature” is a notoriously demanding concept. Bolstering Raymond Williams’s much-cited assertion that it is “perhaps the most complex word in the language,” today there is a chorus of calls to suspend its use.93 In Bill McKibben’s formulation, nature in its former connotation of independence and perfection has “ended”: “We will never again be a created being; instead we will be creators.”94 For Timothy Morton, the concept should be abandoned because outworn ideas of the natural—as separate from and mere resources for humanity—impede the adoption of the “ecological thought,” a thoroughgoing belief in interconnectedness in which nature and culture are coextensive. If not always in crisis, the concept of nature has perennially preoccupied and shaped ways of being on earth.95 Peter Coates gives a succinct account of its five main connotations: “as a physical place . . . more or less unmodified by people . . . ; as the collective phenomena of the world or universe; . . . as an essence . . . ; as an inspiration and guide for people and source of authority governing human affairs; and . . . as the conceptual opposite of culture.”96 “Nature isn’t natural,” Noel Castree reminds us. Neil Evernden wrote decades ago that “[w]e are . . . the authors of the system we call Nature” as well as of the dualism that divides nature and culture and, ironically, allows us to discover our roles in “the constitution of reality.”97 These arguments should not sway us to adopt an idealist or poststructuralist position that nature is “constructed” exclusively by us and that nothing exists beyond our languages. On the contrary, we are a small part of what we call nature: stuff exists and acts on us and on itself, as eons of Indigenous belief hold and as new materialisms and object-oriented ontology argue. In Landscape into Eco Art, I am concerned to trace the import of articulations of “nature” rather than to avoid its use.
“Landscape” is readily associated with the first two of Coates’s connotations—nature as a separate physical place and as the collected phenomena of the world—and of course with the quite different category of its depiction in art. As we have seen with reference to the term’s etymology, landscape also implies the manipulation of nature—regularly construed as “land”—to ends not coupled with the aesthetic. Clark’s euphonious title—Landscape into Art—suggests the notion of independent nature coming into art-as-culture, and it alludes to the rise of the landscape genre within the historical hierarchy of the arts. Martin Warnke’s Political Landscape: The Art History of Nature (1994) deftly interlaces these two meanings of landscape with a sense of nature as independent, demonstrating the inevitable imbrications of landscape and nature in the field of art history. The same fluidity and interconnectedness of these terms is to be found in the discourse of land and eco artists themselves, as invaluable resources such as Alan Sonfist’s pioneering Art in the Land (1983) and John K. Grande’s Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (2004) show. Castree suggests that we should be “less interested in what nature is and more in what it’s considered to be, as well as what the effects of this are.”98 I adopt this approach when thinking about relationships between nature and landscape in eco art.
I have used the restrictive modifier “Western” with respect to the landscape, land, and eco art discussed in Landscape into Eco Art. It would be consistent to add “Western” concepts of nature, as Coates does in his subtitle. In the discipline of art history, this adjective is a shorthand to alert readers that I do not delve deeply into other art traditions—in this context, most crucially “Eastern” landscape art and historical Indigenous understandings of nature, land, and landscape. Contemporary Indigenous practices, on the other hand, are central to the book. Part disciplinary partitioning, part word-length expediency, but also to acknowledge a genuine lack of expertise on my part—however much we might take on board the notion of Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, to use the title of James Elkins’s inspired book on shaping paradigms in the discipline—this modification should also be seen to acknowledge the endless range of cultural inflection around these concepts. Yet this diversity of discourses on key concepts can be brought together on one methodological point. While I have no doubt that “Eastern” views of shan shui—depictions of mountains and water—diverge from landscape in the Euro-American mold, they also differ from one another. There is no Eastern or Western concept of nature or landscape. There are multiple, manipulated conceptions, always. Indigenous understanding of these terms is habitually held to depart from those of settlers who occupied and depicted others’ land globally, usually in the direction of better environmental awareness and stewardship on the part of Indigenes. Again this contrast is telling, but only in its details. There is no one “Indigenous” concept of nature or land. “To assume that even the Hopi and their Navajo neighbors think of, speak of, and treat nature in the same manner is simply wrong,” writes Gary Paul Nabhan. “Yet individuals from two hundred different language groups from three historically and culturally distinct colonizations of the continent are commonly lumped under the catchall terms ‘American Indian’ or ‘Native American.’”99 That said, there are dominant views associated with specific cultures and groups. When nature, landscape, and art are construed in the manner that most European colonizers saw North America—“a landscape untouched by history—nature unmixed with art,” in Leo Marx’s phrase—the results are catastrophic.100
ENVIRONMENT AND ECOLOGY
Landscape depiction, land art, and eco art are often imbricated not only with one another but also with “ecology” and “environment.” All these ideas intersect in turn with understandings of landscape and nature. None of these terms is used with complete consistency; it is not my aim to secure more stable definitions but rather to follow the vicissitudes of usage when they have implications for the art in focus. Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers underlines the necessary variability of the term: “Ecology understands conflicting interests as being a general rule. Ecological, symbiotic events, the creation of rapport between divergent interests as they diverge, mean novelty, not harmony. From an ecological viewpoint, the questions raised by a creation of rapport are not epistemological, but rather political, pragmatic, and (again) never innocent ones.”101 The complexity of the resulting connotations is magnified by our habit of modifying other areas of inquiry with the term “landscape” or “ecology” in commonplaces such as “media landscape” or “political ecology.”102 For example, Gyorgy Kepes, whose important writings I turn to presently, curated an exhibition in 1951 called The New Landscape in Art. Here and in his 1956 book The New Landscape in Art and Science, he displayed “landscapes” discovered by science that were too small or otherwise obscure to be seen by the human eye. My approach is to work with such difficult terms rather than to suggest that they are “over” or for other reasons need to be expunged from our discourse. Disorienting as these intersections can be, they underscore the importance of these concepts and highlight their many mutual concerns. Their meanings are necessarily entangled. What is at stake in their deployment, however, can be seen more clearly by keeping several specifications in mind.
Both ecology and environment have long histories as parts of scientific fields and as separate concepts. The German naturalist Ernst Haeckel’s 1866 coinage Oecologie combined the Greek roots for “house” and “knowledge.” It built on earlier theories of the interrelationships of life forms and their surroundings.103 While this term clearly subtends Morton’s current understanding that ecology means “that all beings are connected” and that “the ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness,” we should remember that ecology was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and to some extent remains—a scientific discipline.104 Evernden describes how ecology came to be conflated with “environmentalism” in the early 1970s, when land art was at its apogee. “Something happened in the late 1960s—or, rather, something that had been happening for a long time suddenly became highly visible after Earth Day (22 April 1970). Everyone began to pay lip service to the environmental movement. . . . [Today many ecologists are] dismayed at seeing their work lumped together with the pseudo-science of some back-to-the-land advocates or with the sentimental musings of what the media call ‘the ecology movement.’”105 The notion of the “environment” had itself moved from its origins—environs in the sense of surroundings—to a connection with nature, to a protection of nature from threat or despoilment, “environmentalism.” The idiom migrated easily to land art, in which context we find the same conceptual intersection with ecology that was important in the resurgence of eco art in the 1990s—witness Timothy Luke’s essay “Art and the Environmental Crisis: From Commodity Aesthetics to Ecology Aesthetics”—and persists today. Melissa Sue Ragain claims that “[i]t was not until Sonfist’s 1983 survey of environmental art [Art in the Land] that the term was finally mobilized with its full ecological implications.”106 A crucial precursor to Sonfist’s anthology, however, was Kepes’s Arts of the Environment, published in 1972. Both publications suggest that what I and most commentators now call eco art was from the late 1960s often referred to as “environmental art,” meaning either art in the environment (i.e., in nature) or art concerned with ecological problems, or both. Kenneth S. Friedman, a commentator in Sonfist’s all-important collection—which was subtitled A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art—remarked on the problems that ensued, complaining that “a notion of environmental art has been elaborated from theories of art and from notions of an art related to nature, nature being ‘the environment’ in which ‘environmental art’ takes place. Nothing . . . could be more wrong. . . . A closer look . . . will reveal dimensions that are as much cultural as natural.”107 What Friedman presciently warned against was the conflation of “environment” and “ecology” in the narrow sense of relationships in nature; he wanted land art to have more scope, to expand into all types of environments. Remixing all these terms, media theorist Gene Youngblood, writing in 1970, provided the more expansive sense of environmental/ecological art that both Friedman a decade later and some contemporary scholars call for: “For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relationships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality.”108
Hans Haacke’s Rhine Water Purification Plant (fig. 3), discussed above, embraces what remained the two major connotations of “environment” in use ca. 1970: embattled nature and, in the parlance of systems theory, a system. Artwork by Haacke, Sonfist, and a few others at this time brought these ideas together. In Etienne Benson’s explication, “This was an understanding of the environment as the set of physical factors influencing human wellbeing, with the ‘natural’ environment often being identified as an ideal away from which humanity had fallen and to which it should, so far as possible, return. This was, in other words, the environment. The other was an understanding of the environment as a system; that is, a set of interrelated objects and processes defined in relationship to a focal individual, community, or population. This was the environment of something or someone.”109
Kepes was pivotal in connecting these strands. He invited Jack Burnham to be a fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s new Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), which Kepes founded in 1967. As already mentioned, Burnham exhibited Haacke’s environmental work there.110 Thinking the “ecological thought” in his introductory remarks to Arts of the Environment, Kepes expressed a principle that can guide our interpretations of ecological and environmental art as well as their attendant discourses: “the world is not made of discrete fixed entities. The boundaries that separate and connect them are fluid” (3). He constantly sought a “common denominator between the landscape open to the artist and that which is open to the scientist.”111 Early eco art could create “environments” or could be “environmentalist,” or both.
Landscape into Eco Art offers ways to interpret contemporary eco art through its relationships to earlier engagements with the earth in the visual arts, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the genre of landscape depiction that peaked in the nineteenth century. In each chapter I include one or more thematic case studies that explore the main themes of a given section of the book in more detailed and thematically expansive ways. These case studies are paradigms of interpreting eco art in that they exemplify manipulations of landscape and its cognates. Each one articulates crucial relationships with the picturing of land, both in the sense of “making clear” and of “adding to.” Each case study also furnishes paradigms for understanding a given chapter’s themes but also self-consciously rubs against these narratives, offering an opportunity to think through connections and contrasts across Landscape into Eco Art as a whole. Breaking away from what I hope is the consistency and balance of their respective chapters, however, these dossiers are purposefully individual and thus not symmetrical in detail or methodological approach. The case studies interrupt the impulse to present an inventory of practices and instead invite readers to think of their own parallel or indeed opposing examples. Through the case studies, I think through strategic examples in terms of what is now being called eco art history, which—to recall the 2014 College Art Association panel description noted above—“calls for a reexamination of the history of art history at large as well as a rethinking of key issues in the discipline, with methods and materials that integrate climate, landscape, and natural resources into the interpretative framework.” While these examples consider a wide range of artworks, they are best thought of as an armature for further explorations of the connections and distinctions between landscape, land art, and contemporary eco art.
CASE STUDY 1: DERACINATED TREES
Specifying how artists deploy deracinated trees over a long time span frames the large question of the relevance of past practices of representing nature—whether in landscape painting or land art—to the understanding of contemporary eco art. The extensive and largely unremarked practice of uprooting, displaying, and otherwise manifestly manipulating trees in landscape, land art, and eco art provides an opportunity to examine such articulations from multiple perspectives and to consider the connections and differences between these practices. Trees have been synecdoches for nature for millennia.112 Without suggesting that pre-Columbian, Chinese, and Norse traditions of depicting the world tree (Yggdrasil in the last case) are the same, for example, their similarities suggest that trees are habitually seen as life giving. Charles Darwin used the image of the tree of life in The Origin of Species (1859) and, more significantly in the context of its visual representation, famously used a diagram of such a tree as the inspiration and illustration for his theories.113 From fantastic anthropomorphized trees by Carl Wilhelm Kolbe the Elder (1759–1835) to marked, scarred trees that nonetheless survive (as evidenced by the remnants of logging in Emily Carr’s [1871–1945] paintings of forests, and by the placement of a bronze hand into the trunk of a tree in Giuseppe Penone’s It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point [1968], for example), most images of trees suggest vitality and rebirth. More recent examples are found in the ecological artworks of Alfio Bonanno and David Nash. Trees are often stand-ins for us, for our vitality and our frailties. They appear in landscapes that underline the passage of life, such as Jacob van Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery (1655–60), in which a partially uprooted tree and a broken tree dominate the foreground. Amidst sarcophagi, however, a ground-level tree in the right foreground appears to illustrate regeneration. While there are certainly examples of uprooted trees in the European and American landscape depictions, they typically reinforce the tenacity of these organisms or work as memento mori. The Flemish artist Roelandt Savery’s (1576–1639) Study of a Tree (1606–7) performs both functions: we see an uprooted tree in sufficient detail to note the new shoots that spring from this source. The Uprooted Tree, an American drawing by an unknown artist done more than two centuries later, shows the persistence of this fascination: three artists lean against a similarly uprooted tree. We see them sketching the scene before them, their backs to us. Our visual field is dominated by the exposed root structure of the tree; they may be interested in the conventional “view” before them, but we as viewers of the image focus our attention on the roots of the tree.114 Contemporary artists are also obsessed with abused trees.115 A short list of representative examples would include Agnes Denes’s chained trees (1979); Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs of the arboreal victims of the Gulf War (1991), which are reminiscent of Robert Adams’s Dead Palms Partially Uprooted, Ontario, California (1983); and Henrik Håkansson’s suspended trees, exhibited at the Freiburg Kunstverein in the spring of 2016.
Deracinated trees are a defining subset of this wider compulsion. As Anna Widén explains regarding The Lost Woods (2013), “In my installations with uprooted trees, I have pondered . . . human civilization. Throughout history we know that we have treated nature arrogantly, but never with such volume and intensity as today. The destruction of ecosystems continues though we know that the consequences are devastating. It seems that our own so-called ‘progress’ prevents us from taking action.”116 Closely related in its ecological purpose and focus is the elaborate reconstitution of “fallen” trees by contemporary American artists John Grade, Charles Ray, and Maya Lin. Grade’s Middle Fork (Cascades) (2015) was made for Wonder, the reopening exhibit at the Renwick Museum in Washington, D.C. He
selected a hemlock tree in the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle that is approximately 150 years old—the same age as [the museum]. His team created a full plaster cast of the tree (without harming it), then used the cast as a mold to build a new tree out of a half-million segments of reclaimed cedar. Hundreds of volunteers assisted Grade, hand carving each piece to match the contours of the original tree. After the exhibition [closed], Middle Fork (Cascades) [was to] be carried back to the hemlock’s location and left on the forest floor, where it [would] gradually return to the earth.117
Charles Ray went to equally extreme ends to make Hinoki (2007), a carving that exactly replicates an actual toppled and decomposing California redwood. Ray describes the process: “Making a wood carving of the log by starting from the inside and working my way out would bring a trajectory of life and intentionality to this great fallen tree. . . . I transported the tree, cut apart by a chainsaw, back to my Los Angeles studio. Silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass version of the log was reconstructed. This was sent to Osaka, Japan, where master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved my vision into reality using Japanese cypress (hinoki).”118 The work now occupies a room at the Art Institute of Chicago, a space that had to be built around it. Lin’s video Unchopping a Tree (2009)—part of her What Is Missing? project, noted above—addresses the deforestation of the planet by stating how long it would take to denude famous treed areas such as New York’s Central Park at the current rate of deforestation worldwide (“destroyed in 9 minutes” in this case). The latter part of the piece shows trees felled for timber in reverse motion, standing again in the forest.119
By contrast with this recent work, paradigmatic land artist Robert Smithson forcefully opposed vitalism, organicism, and the instinct to preserve prevalent in the late 1960s. He “executed”—a verb, often used innocently to describe artists’ creative process, that takes on a more pointed tone in this unusual subgenre—his first when he was a visiting artist at the State University of New York at Alfred in 1969.120 Finding an uprooted tree, he trimmed it, then had his students “plant” it in the mud (fig. 4). He repeated this process solo on Captiva Island, Florida, then extended the interest in exposed roots in his Yucatan Mirror Displacements and related works such as Roots & Rocks in the same year. In a departure from the site/nonsite dialectic he pioneered in 1968, to which I return several times in the chapters that follow, Smithson also displayed an intact uprooted tree titled Dead Tree in an exhibition in Düsseldorf. He made no reference to its place of origin but set mirrors within its crown, as in the Yucatan work. In both cases, the mirrors reflected other parts of the plants that held them and reproduced ambient imagery. British artist Keith Arnatt—who met and worked with Smithson when the latter visited England in 1969—also experimented with mirrors and trees in works such as Mirror Path (1969).121 We respond emotionally to his displaced trees, as we are meant to, a phenomenon I emphasize in my final case study. These specimens are placed in isolation, the first along a side road and away from other trees, the second on a beach near the ocean. Dead Tree could not seem more out of place than in a spartan gallery setting. To uproot and plant a tree upside down or to drag a dead (as opposed to regenerating) specimen into a gallery is “pathetic” in John Ruskin’s sense of the pathetic fallacy. Against Ruskin’s righteous estimation that “the step is very easy” from responding with emportment to a work of art “to a farther opinion, that it does not much matter what the things are in themselves, but only what they are to us,”122 however, I argue in chapter 5 that the affective dimension exploited by Smithson is crucial to current eco-art strategies that acknowledge the material separateness of living and nonliving materials.
FIG. 4 Robert Smithson, Upside Down Tree I, 1969. Alfred, New York. Three original 126 format chromogenic-development transparencies. Collection of the Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai. © 2016 Estate of Robert Smithson / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, New York.
Smithson also eschewed ecological scruples. Instead, he used uprooted trees to do violence to the landscape tradition. He wrote and worked materially against two commonplace notions: To oppose the selected and favored view that has for centuries been nominated as “picturesque,” he found inspiration in disused, rejected, and often industrial areas. As he emphasized in a 1972 interview, Spiral Jetty “is right near a disused oil drilling operation and the whole northern part of the lake is completely useless” (297). Uninterested in wilderness, he insisted that “we have to develop a dialectic of nature that includes man” (298). That dialectic required what he called “earth works,” whether his own, those of peers such as Dennis Oppenheim and Michael Heizer, or gardens by Olmsted, whom Smithson famously dubbed “America’s first ‘earthwork artist’” (164). Always aiming to augment rather than to curtail material and intellectual connections, Smithson, as I have noted, dismissed the landscape painting of the museums: “Representing nature once removed in lyric poetry and landscape painting is not the same as direct cultivation of the land,” he wrote (164). Landscape betokened the opposites of “land”: the museum, the artist’s studio, the city. While some critics continued to respond to early earth-art exhibits in terms of landscape conventions, their habitual analogies were unable to explain the import of the new art. As Sidney Tillim pointed out in an extensive review of the portentous Earth Works show, seen at the Dwan Gallery in New York in October 1968, Smithson parodied the aesthetics of the picturesque in his article “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” by including the ugliest industrial markers he could find. Yet Tillim nonetheless titled his review “Earthworks and the New Picturesque” (my emphasis). The artist was not providing a revised picturesque but rather a conscious alternative to this mode of framing landscape. Smithson’s tour of anti-monuments begins with his reading, on his way to Passaic, an article in the New York Times in which a conventional “Allegorical Landscape” by the nineteenth-century American painter Samuel Morse is reproduced under the heading “Art: Themes and the Usual Variations.” The views that Smithson composes with his camera are neither landscapes like this painting nor sanctioned views of nature. There “was no landscape” there, he writes in “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic” (72). If Smithson’s uprooted trees from 1969 are not allied in any but a negative way with landscape conventionally conceived, we might conclude that except as a dialectical foil, the tradition of such depictions is irrelevant to his work and perhaps to land art more generally, precisely because it is depictive rather than material, hopelessly removed from that which it represents. Suspending judgment on this inference for now—and returning to the manipulation of trees—let me look to related questions about the importance of ecology and environmentalism in relation to both land art of the 1960s and 1970s and to more recent eco art.
While ecological concerns were topical in Western societies from the early 1960s—Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962; as noted, the first Earth Day, in 1970, marked a decade of growing concerns and activism—expressly ecological artworks are usually seen to have begun only ca. 1970 with Agnes Denes’s Rice/Tree/Burial with Time Capsule (1969–79) and Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison’s survival pieces. Distancing their efforts from Smithson’s and Heizer’s earthworks explicitly, Newton Harrison stated in a 1991 interview: “They used earth as material; we feel that our works were among the first to deal with ecology in the full sense of the term.”123 Joseph Beuys describes his touchstone work 7000 Oaks (whose full English title is Action 7,000 Oaks: Forestation of the City Instead of City Administration) (1982–87; fig. 5) in related terms: “I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness—raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.”124 The emphasis on ecology continues in much contemporary eco art. The popular photographer Sebastião Salgado, for example, inherited a deforested farm in Brazil and reclaimed it; global reforestation is now a policy he promotes through his photography. If Smithson’s deracinated trees are not landscape, however, neither is it easy to think of them as some sort of ecological statement. Writing in 1973 on Olmsted and invoking the landscape architect’s inspiration, the theorist of the picturesque Uvedale Price, Smithson bluntly stated that “some of our present-day ecologists, who still see nature through eyes conditioned by one-sided idealism, should consider [Price’s view that] quarries, gravel pits, etc., which are at first deformities, . . . [can be] converted into picturesqueness” (159).125 The land artist Nancy Holt, Smithson’s partner, recalled in 2013 that it was in England that their mutual interests in landscape depiction and theory solidified: “It was in England that the roots of that kind of thinking began. . . . I always think of Gilpin. So I think that we were going back very much [when we visited England in 1969], in terms of our roots, our ancestral roots, and also finding out how the English treated their landscape, how the natural—having it fit into the existing landscape—transformed the formal garden.”126 “I like landscapes that suggest prehistory,” says Smithson (298), but by this he does not mean the pristine nature projected by deep ecology.
FIG. 5 Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oaks, 1982–87. Kassel, Germany. Photo: Uwe Zucc. Courtesy of dpa picture alliance archive / Alamy. Work © Joseph Beuys.
Where Smithson recognized the nascent ecology and environmental movements and made a land-reclamation proposal to industry at about the same time as he expressed reservations about ecology in the Olmsted article, other noted earth artists worked from completely different reference points. At one extreme is Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, which adopts the compass points of minimalist sculpture and a practice of remote siting. At the other end of the spectrum, many artists were motivated by broad notions of ecology as energetic and environmental connectedness, as James Nisbet explores effectively in his 2014 book Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in the Art of the 1960s and 1970s. His prime example is Dennis Oppenheim’s Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop of 1969 (see fig. 29), where the capitalist marketing system for grain is marked and, for the field worked in the piece, suspended by withholding the crop from market. I discuss both Heizer and Oppenheim in more detail below. Another powerful example of the imbrication of ecology and what I think we can still call land art is a delicate yet polemical work by Joyce Wieland called Water Quilt, made in 1970–71. Sixty-four pillow-like forms supporting botanically accurate images of wildflowers from the Canadian Arctic are tied together and mounted on canvas. But this is no pastoral meadow. Viewers are invited to read the texts that literally underlie these seemingly innocent images. Each overlay reveals an excerpt from economist James Laxer’s 1970 book The Energy Poker Game, an exposé of American plans to take over Canada’s water resources by rerouting north-flowing rivers toward the thirsty market south of the 49th parallel. The book’s subtitle (The Politics of the Continental Resources Deal) announces the threat that exercised Wieland and many others worried about continental “sharing” of resources well before the North American Free Trade Agreement of the early 1990s.
Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium (2007; fig. 6) in Seattle, a more elaborate version of his Vivarium of 2002, is an example of the contemporary inclination to bring nature—here in the form of an uprooted tree harvested from the nearby rainforest—indoors for examination, or to place it on life support in the gallery. Both Smithson and the Harrisons did the same, if for different reasons: I discuss this pattern more fully in chapter 4. One of the most celebrated and widely exhibited eco artists working today, Dion is well aware of the technologized artificiality of the situation and of the repugnance that we might experience in thinking that this is what “nature” has come to. But the work need not be interpreted as a gesture of despair or defeat. Choosing and installing this magnificent tree was a well-documented ritual. In connecting forest and city and in selecting a “nursery tree” from which new life emanates, in strong contrast to Smithson’s Dead Tree especially, Dion underlines the interconnectedness characteristic of ecological thinking. The work is both a lament and a call to awareness. What effect does seeing Dion’s cosseted tree trunk have on our interpretation of Smithson’s Dead Tree or Hanging Garden (2010) by Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, in which a live birch tree supported by an irrigation system grows out of a dead and inverted tree of the same species? Or, most dramatically of all, the ongoing “Uprooted Tree Project,” whereby a group of Dutch artists plan to hang a large tree under the Eiffel Tower and keep it alive there. Their rationale? “The contrast and relationship between the colossal tower of pure steel and the living tree, invites the viewer to wonder and reflect. The tree is hung in chains under the giant tower, almost surrounded by it. Protected? Captive?”127 The effrontery of Smithson’s earlier work is only increased by comparing it with these purpose-built, life-sustaining environments. The contrast is even starker if we recall Bill Viola’s jarring installation Theater of Memory (1985), in which a deracinated tree is festooned with lanterns (replacing Smithson’s mirrors, barely visible in his Düsseldorf work) that flash discordantly in time with what seems like a perpetual short circuit in the lighting and sound systems. The shock value of Theater of Memory connects Viola’s installation with Smithson’s from 1969. Abstract forms are projected against a screen or wall in Viola’s tree room, silhouetting the branches and providing an evocation of the neural firings of the unconscious in memory.
FIG. 6 Mark Dion, Neukom Vivarium, 2007. Mixed-media installation; greenhouse structure: 80 ft. long overall. Installation view: Seattle Art Museum, Washington, 2007. Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Sally and William Neukom, American Express Company, Seattle Garden Club, Mark Torrance Foundation, and Committee of 33, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum. Photo: Paul Macapia. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Work © Mark Dion.
In Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties—published in 2002 and still the most complete reading of the American side of this phenomenon—Suzaan Boettger argues that Smithson’s uprooted trees are part of a long Western tradition of associating trees, distress, and death. Mirroring the violence of his times (though not primarily that of an environmental sort), “the disordered inversions of these trees,” Boettger suggests, “graphically [symbolize] a state of emergency, the sixties’ exuberant boughs of possibility turned topsy-turvy by a distant war gone amok and public insurgencies at home” (222). It is a plausible and even compelling reading of what this work might have meant ca. 1970. It remains the case that in many examples and aesthetic traditions, uprooted trees betoken violent discord. Contemporary Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji’s images of flooding in his homeland and in New York City feature this form, for example. The view that Smithson’s abused trees are protest works is strengthened with reference to two inheritors of Smithson’s arboreal actions. Roy Arden’s photograph Pulp Mill Dump (#1) Nanaimo, B.C. (1992; fig. 7) graphically shows the discarded trees that are the detritus of the pulp and paper industry, mere waste products of a resource economy. Visually quoting Smithson’s famous glue and asphalt pours—one of which (Glue Pour; fig. 8) was performed in the city where Arden works, Vancouver—Arden uses Smithson as inspiration for eco art.128 Smithson’s provocative spills were for him anti-ecological in the sense that they mocked what he thought were the pretensions of short-term ecological thinking as opposed to his long view of entropy. He preferred geological time frames. As he stated poetically in his 1972 essay “Spiral Jetty”: “These fragments of a timeless geology laugh without mirth at the time-filled hopes of ecology” (152). In another context, he was less moderate in his complaints against the ban on his project to cover an island in broken glass. But we need to think of this work not only in its time but in its effects, in this case its more-than-formal reception by Arden. Again using the deracinated-tree motif, in Tree Stump, Nanaimo, B.C. (1991), Arden both quotes Smithson’s replanted stumps from 1969 (fig. 4) and distances himself from them by turning land art to the purposes of ecological commentary. This still-startling image shows a large uprooted stump in the foreground, cleared, we assume, to make room and, indirectly, to supply material for the subdivision in the background. Arden frames this photograph in a way that alludes to the conventional structure of a landscape painting, with a coulisse of yet-to-be felled trees providing an interior boundary for the view. Front and center as the subject, however, is the violently displaced tree. Seen this way, echoes of landscape, land art, and eco art reverberate through this powerful image.
FIG. 7 Roy Arden, Pulp Mill Dump (#1) Nanaimo, B.C., 1992. Cibachrome print on transmount, 104.1 × 139.7 cm. By kind permission of the artist.
FIG. 8 Robert Smithson, Glue Pour, December 1969. Vancouver, Canada. Collection of the Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai. © 2016 Estate of Robert Smithson / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, New York.
Smithson’s tree trunks have also been thematically rerouted by the Chicago artist Sam Durant in Upside Down Pastoral Scene (2002; fig. 9). Creating a distressed forest with a dozen of Smithson’s readily recognizable tree trunks, roots, and mirrors—and with his dystopian title alluding to the whitewashing typical of the genre of pastoral within landscape—Durant extends the sense of anxiety and lament to issues “of race in American history and culture.” In Durant’s extensive installation, Smithson’s inverted tree stumps contain speakers emitting music keyed to interracial violence: “the tree reference is steered toward symbolic, historic and cultural meanings. The Billie Holiday song ‘Strange Fruit’ forms the central axis for the soundtrack and positions the tree as a site of unspeakable violence, the site of lynching.” The allusion to the family tree cued by the song “We Are Family” is specified by Durant in the surrounding portrait drawings of prominent members of the Black Panther Party, which was founded in Smithson’s era, 1966. Durant elaborates: “Each tree contains a loud speaker and is placed on a square mirror. The sound track is digitally controlled, sending music to particular trees and constructing sonic landscapes as it unfolds. Ideas of the family tree, the tree of knowledge, the symbolic significance of the parts of a tree; roots, the trunk and branches are re-oriented as various compositions play out in the tree field. Upside Down: Pastoral Scene implies that African American creativity produced and continues to produce American culture, in spite of the long history of overwhelming forces deployed against it.”129
FIG. 9 Sam Durant, Upside Down Pastoral Scene, 2002 (detail). Fiberglass, wood, mirror, acrylic paint, audio equipment, twelve pieces 48 × 48 × 58 in. ea. © Sam Durant. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
In a related work from his series Mirror Travels in Neoliberalism, Durant refers to Smithson’s essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” (1969) to commemorate Emory Douglas, the central artist in the Black Panther movement. In the C-print Landscape Art (Emory Douglas), also of 2002 and again deploying the tree stumps with their roots pointing upward, Durant injects carnage into the pastoral and thus animates the political potency of this genre by name. This “landscape” is peopled by four figures carrying protest signs that together read “Landscape art is good only when it shows the oppressor hanging from a tree by his mother-fucking neck.” While Smithson’s deracinated—and in two cases decapitated—trees are the acknowledged source for Durant, his images reassign and specify the savagery in Smithson’s otherwise apparently decontextualized practice. Rebecca Solnit suggests in her reading of the military presence in the Arcadian landscapes of northern California that one can never see these surroundings, or indeed a renowned depiction of mortality within a prominent landscape setting such as Nicolas Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (1637–38), innocently again after such violence is registered.130 She brilliantly likens concrete coastline bunkers to Poussin’s monolithic tomb; Smithson’s ripped-out trees remind Durant of lynchings. We see Smithson’s land art and indeed the landscape tradition differently through these revisions of uprooted trees. We need not think of this process as either anachronistic or as extending an unexamined tradition of landscape into the present. Anachronism is difficult, if not impossible, to remove from our experience of the world; thinking instead of Bal’s “preposterous” articulation of time in art—joining and distinguishing temporalities—such a view to the past from our present moment can also allow eco art history to attend to the full spectrum of art practices focusing on the earth, whether these fall under the sometimes maligned heading of landscape, the seemingly past and even anachronistic aspirations of land art, or the panoply of approaches called eco art. Historical and other distinctions are necessary, but if ecology asserts the ineluctable connections between all life forms and thus transcends boundaries of many kinds, including those of disciplines, nations, and living species, then eco art history should think ecologically.
Rodney Graham exemplifies the artist-obsessed-with-inverted-trees. He articulates the many implications of this motif through the confluence of the technology of the camera obscura with human perception. Trees (and everything else we see) are at one stage inverted in both picturing techniques. This inversion may be overtly shocking, as in Martin Puryear’s innocently titled Camera Obscura of 1994, an installation in which the artist literally hanged a cherry tree from a gallows-like structure in an outdoor public art exhibit in Denver, Colorado. But the eye’s and camera’s flipping of images is not necessarily violent and can partake in the age-old picturing of the tree as life, as in Graham’s tour de force in this lineage, the Millennial Time Machine: A Landau Carriage Converted to a Mobile Camera Obscura (2003; fig. 10). This expansive installation features a converted nineteenth-century landau carriage positioned in a pristine, vault-like glass pavilion and fitted with a cannon-like lens pointed toward a young sequoia tree across a landscaped garden. While the work makes the idea of “shooting an image” literal, what we witness is instead the vitality of temporal change in several registers. The work was commissioned to mark the millennium in 2000. The restored carriage and its prominent lens are recollections of nineteenth-century technologies—part of the millennium just past—yet they are housed in a contemporary glass-and-cement structure, an inverted and light-filled display of the “darkroom” created inside the carriage, where the camera obscura projects its inverted image onto the round screen between the two seats. The carriage is stationary, as if in amber, even though the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery that commissioned the work has kept the tack for the horses that once drew the carriage. We can only recollect the nineteenth century. Yet it is the camera obscura image that moves and thus underlines the contemporaneity of vision in the real-time growth of the plants captured by the apparatus, the quiet energy of this framed yet dynamic landscape. Graham added a pivotal detail to his time machine, one that filters our interpretation of this work. Around the lens that points toward the tree, he has inscribed the original Latin title of Giambattista della Porta’s Renaissance study of natural phenomena, the Magiae Naturalis (Natural magic), published in 1558. It is through this historical and yet contemporary portal of wonder that the Millennial Time Machine explores what I have deemed the hinges in representations of the earth. It is simultaneously productive of landscape as art in its framing of an image and also of eco art in focusing attention on the optical and cultural processes by which we construe nature. What Graham abjures is a teleological sequence in which landscape is succeeded by eco art. At the millennium, there is a collaboration between past and present.
FIG. 10 Rodney Graham, Millennial Time Machine: A Landau Carriage Converted to a Mobile Camera Obscura, 2003. Landau with camera obscura. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Gift of the artist with support from the Canada Council for the Arts Millennium Fund, the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation, British Columbia 2000 Recognition Plan, and the University of British Columbia, 2003. Photo: Howard Ursuliak.
It is one thing to use a camera obscura or to take photographs of trees and invert them for display, as Graham does in pieces such as Ponderosa Pines, Princeton, B.C. (1992) and his Welsh Oaks series of 1998; none of these trees is physically altered. Here Graham partakes of the long-standing fascination with inverted images of trees exemplified by Thoreau in “The Ponds” section of Walden (1854). It is quite another to hang the tree, as both the late German artist Herman Prigann and contemporary Reinhard Reitzenstein have done. The different affective registers of an image versus those of physically present works suggest that Smithson was right: “Representing nature once removed in . . . landscape painting is not the same as direct cultivation of the land” (164). Prigann makes the meaning of his sculpture Hanging Tree explicit: “This allusion to the destruction of nature in the name of our culture’s creation is a metaphor. The inverted tree (arbor inversa) moves in the wind like a giant pendulum. Below the tree, in a hollow, lies a block of granite. Engraved in it are the cardinal points. The top of the tree is unreachable.”131 Constructed in 1985, the piece was recently moved and is now a permanent memorial. The inversion of trees is also central to Reitzenstein’s work, one pole of his reverence for nature as expressed through trees. Of many examples, his most arresting in this vein is Transformer (2000; fig. 11). The artist vividly describes the inception and effect of this work:
FIG. 11 Reinhard Reitzenstein, Transformer, 2000. Cime et Racine Symposium, La Gabelle, near Trois Rivières, Québec. By kind permission of the artist.
Transformer was built for the Sculpture Symposium Cime et Racines, held at La Gabelle Park near Trois Riviers, Quebec, Canada [in 2000]. During the site visit to La Gabelle I was instantly struck by seeing the two abandoned hydro-electric towers at the edge of the escarpment above a hydro dam. . . . I inquired about the possibility of suspending an inverted tree from the two towers. The title Transformer means the same in both French and English and compels the work to be read as a critique of hydro Quebec forestry practices and clear-cut strategies when establishing corridors for their lines. It also references the history of logging and log chutes along the river. The project could be seen hovering on the escarpment from miles away and often lured visitors from the highway to witness the spectacle.132
The white spruce tree remained suspended until the cables gave way in 2003. For Reitzenstein, inversion “arrests your attention . . . , stops you no matter where you are. . . . It is subcutaneous, it is cultural, it is subcranial.” “If there is a plea in my work,” he reports, “that would certainly be to understand more deeply and significantly the symbiosis that is shared between natural systems.”133 Transformer is in many ways opposite to Natalie Jeremijenko’s better-known permanent installation Tree Logic (1999), at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams. There Jeremijenko placed six flame maple trees in large canisters, hung them upside down, and also cultivated them with an irrigation system. The trees responded by growing up toward the light. They thrive as symbols of tenacity and vitality. Reitzenstein’s installation told a darker story. It is worth registering, however, that not everyone shares his urgency about or appreciates his way of articulating the ill-considered removal of trees and the large implications of energy generation and use. Reviewing Displacement/Inversion, in which uprooted trees were suspended upside down above alleyways in Pittsburgh in 2006, for example, Daniel Clark declares that Reitzenstein’s
reason for displaying these dead trees . . . is to raise awareness of dead trees. “They’re deliberately disturbing, and some people see them as such,” the artist tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “while others see them as awe-inspiring.”
Well, don’t send in the grief counselors just yet. It’s highly unlikely that the trees are eliciting the responses he claims they are, at least among the sober. Let’s face it, a person can’t get very far in life if he’s going to be shaken to the core by the sight of moribund plant life. Reitzenstein would understand this, if he ever strayed outside the artsy community long enough to witness that quaint custom of ours known as Christmas.134
Preaching to the converted is a problem common to eco art and eco art history. If raising awareness is the goal of much eco art, even a negative review such as Clark’s suggests that people will be reached, both in galleries and by public art such as Reitzenstein’s. As Transformer shows with its references to power generation and land use, a place’s and people’s ecological history can be told in this way. Are there issues more relevant to our stewardship of our own future than those of ecology and environmental change in the Anthropocene? What can eco art history do, and what would success look like?
Deracinated trees figure in three other works that I consider because these examples employ the moving image—central to contemporary visual-arts practices in general and to eco art—and because they diverge instructively in the explicitness of their ecological interests, their relationship to landscape, and even in whether we should call them all eco art. The Right Way (Der rechte Weg, 1983) by the Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss is a fifty-two-minute 16 mm film. Deep Time is a thirty-minute two-screen HD video installation by Melanie Gilligan and Tom Ackers, commissioned in 2013 by Cape Farewell, a U.K. and North American not-for-profit organization that sponsors culture programming around issues of climate change. The Nature of Our Looking by Gilbert & George (1970) is an eighteen-minute “video sculpture.” Gilligan and Acker’s video verges on the didactic. In Gilligan’s words, “We look at the problem of climate change through a dual focus: the earth’s exploitation and human exploitation. We look at how capitalism developed out of the appropriation of both natural wealth and human potential, and how it degrades and undermines both of those material bases in which our capitalist cultures subsist. We have also tried to make palpable the immense discrepancies in timescale and complexity that confront one another in the dialectic of nature and these cultures.”135
Deep Time (fig. 12) is replete with contrasts that underscore this message. It opens and concludes with a mystical evocation of both outer and inner space, a cosmic play of highly colored disks that read as both planets and cells as they merge, separate, and seem to replicate. The narrative framed by these otherworldly (or innerworldly) events is structured by two predominant story lines, sometimes opposed on the two screens. One captures the mentality and accelerated timeline of capitalist resource extraction, played out by a team of young excavators and their two overseers, who dig “into a history of rotting matter” in an attempt to remove an object from a water-filled hole in a forest.136 This space has been revealed by a large fallen tree whose uncovered roots abut the dig in many shots. Reminiscent of the uprooted trees in earlier landscape depictions, it appears that this tree fell “naturally,” like Dion’s in Neukom Vivarium (fig. 6), exposing what the four workers are after in the earth. A powerful counternarrative is spoken by an animated rock face, an anthropomorphized Mother Nature, or Gaia perhaps, whose cadences are synthetic and androgynous, as if translated into English for our edification. Deep Time alternates between scenes of excavation—increasingly hurried and peppered with personal comments by the team members and their layabout on-site foreman—and a meditative chronicle of the earth’s deep time spoken slowly by the rock face. “Humans,” it says, behave out of competition for resources: they deplete the earth much more quickly than the earth can regenerate. This point is acted out by a female boss doing “field work” by sitting at a desk in a field, dressed for an office in the city. Via phone conversations with the foreman, she pushes the group to get results at whatever cost: get “more for less, more or less,” she instructs. “Trees are jobs,” the foreman responds; her answer: “cut both.” In a sequence in the very middle of the work, she, glib and ruthless, rhymes through increasingly ludicrous “swaps” to increase profit: to expand biodiversity, for example, “swap a bee for a tree.” It is a species and interspecies hierarchy that enacts the earth narrator’s point that for humans there is no “genuine collective decision making.” Collaboration versus individual expediency is a theme drawn out by long sequences of a beekeeper and his hive, frames that are topical, given environmentalists’ worries about the decline in bee populations worldwide. That this is a work about the capitalist Anthropocene is also made evident near its beginning, when we see a coin carelessly tossed into a pond and another into an animal burrow. We cannot help but notice that they land heads up. “People grow in that ground,” the very earth that is excavated here, says the rock face, but “they don’t see themselves in it,” either temporally or materially. Deep Time indicts exploitative land use under capitalism and the capitalization of nature. Because it has a strong and at times entertaining plot, we might miss the fact that it is focused on “landscape” as a cipher for nature-as-resource. As a work of art, it is a landscape. The forest in which the digging occurs under the uprooted tree, the fields in which the beekeeper and the manager work, even the galactic scenes that frame the video—all are the stuff of landscape as image, with the deracinated tree as the center of attention.
FIG. 12 Tom Ackers and Melanie Gilligan, Deep Time, 2013 (video still). Two-channel video, 30 min. By kind permission of the artists.
The Right Way (fig. 13), on the other hand, is overt in its landscape references. It takes place in a spectacular and well-explored landscape, the Swiss Alps, where Fischli and Weiss have donned unlikely rat and panda-bear outfits. The two “animals” meet, stroll, tumble, and bicker over and through this terrain. Meandering as their path and commentaries are, they try to find “the right way” in the sense of life’s true path as well as that of a literal direction. The film is an allegory of human hubris. While there are nonhuman animals in the film—a pig that they treat as a pet but then devour, goats, dogs, and a turtle found flipped on its shell, high in the mountains—the absurd anthropomorphization of the journey we follow for almost an hour makes the point that all the views of and about landscape in the film are products of human seeing and culture. Though the closing sequence especially suggests nature worship—with much chanting, dancing, and playing of alpenhorns, improvised from tree branches, against a spectacular alpine sunset—the protagonists are on the whole remarkably unself-aware and arrogant. Setting the marooned turtle back on its feet to find its own path again—and addressing it as “comrade”—for example, they wax on about how they have rescued the creature and how lucky it is that they are there in nature with the freedom to do as they please. Clearly “the right way” is their way, the human way: “we make the rules in the forest,” the English translation of the narrative runs, “we are the highest beings.” An uprooted tree figures importantly at two junctures in the film. When Rat is escorting his new friend around his domain, he shows him an area near his lair where he has gathered various parts of trees for their apparently shamanistic qualities. His prime specimen is an uprooted sapling, roots aloft with the purpose of bringing the sky down to the earth, he claims. Bear is most impressed with this magical device. A little further on, both are washed down a waterfall into a lake. They are rescued by holding on to a hollow log. Bear’s recovery from this adventure in the glacial water is slow, but eventually the pair find their way to another of Rat’s abodes, a hollow under yet another upturned tree. Here Bear sleeps and has a dream of standing beside a perfect miniature tree in full leaf.
FIG. 13 Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Right Way [Der rechte Weg], 1983 (video still). German video with English subtitles, approx. 52 min. © Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.
Deep Time sends a strong ecological message, one that does not depend on our recognition of the video’s affiliations with depictions of uprooted trees in the landscape tradition but is, I believe, deepened by this reference. Landscape undertones suggest attention to the long duration of human interaction with the earth that Gilligan and Ackers’s Mother Earth calls for. The Right Way, on the other hand, thematizes landscape but is not in any obvious sense ecological. Looking back at the film from the twenty-first century, however, its condemnation of anthropocentric understandings of nature chimes with the priorities of critiques of the Anthropocene and of the assumptions made in conventional landscape art. The Nature of Our Looking by Gilbert & George—the title the pair used for both a video and drawings done in 1970—offers a way to understand The Right Way through its analogous critique of the landscape tradition in a deadpan parody of the discourses of landscape and nation, the colonizing “Englishness” of this looking.137 The wordplay on “nature” in this title (the how and the what of looking, we could say), underlines the contemporary relevance of nature, landscape, and the English-garden tradition to national and personal identity. As Fischli and Weiss did a decade later, Gilbert & George show that there is no more mediated concept in the human repertoire than that of “nature.” Dressed in suits that mark them as country gents, those with the property and leisure to contemplate nature in a class-based, gendered, picturesque way prescribed for this elite for centuries,138 Gilbert and George sit or stand motionless in a manicured “natural” setting. Both the video and the charcoal drawings display an adaptation of Norman Gale’s poem “The Country Faith” to remind us of Arcadia:
Here in the country’s heart
Where the grass is green,
Life is the same sweet life
As it e’er hath been.139
The works underline the essential connection between thinking about nature and limning landscapes. We watch these gentlemen waiting patiently to catch a glimpse of beauty or the picturesque exactly where they have been conditioned to find it, in English nature. Gilbert & George traced their charcoal drawing from photographic negatives and then distressed the paper to make it look older. The results struck a chord with the public: “We stopped making them because people liked them too much,” they report with bemusement.140 Again it is emotion that holds the key to the landscape tradition. Even in the disappointment Gilbert & George register in the film when nothing happens, we learn that landscape—like talk of the weather, as artist Roni Horn suggests in chapter 3, below—is part of us.
Can and should art about the earth avoid such apparent mastery and complacency? A final example in this compendium of deracinated trees—Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled, shown at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012 (fig. 14)—allows us to explore this question in its self-conscious linkages of the landscape garden, versions of land art, and ecology.141 Subtitled Alive Entities and Inanimate Things, Made and Not Made, the work is taken as a prime example of a new materialist turn in its emphasis on the nonanthropocentric, independent life of “things.”142 Untilled was sited in the composting area of the Karlsaue Park that permanently hosts documenta in Kassel, Germany. From a manicured and geometrically controlled Baroque foundation, the park was expanded from 1785 on into the superficially less controlled format of an English garden. Huyghe’s gambit is to relinquish aesthetic control further, or at least to share it with “nature,” whether the abundant flora or the work’s resident dogs, whom he called Human and Señor. In seeming cared for and domesticated, and at the same time appearing to run wild in the grounds that host Untilled, these canines are reminiscent of the dogs that appear randomly in The Right Way. Huyghe’s title reminds us that we see a relatively uncultivated area. He has claimed, “I’m interested in the vitality of the image, in the way an idea, an artifact, leaks into a biological or mineral reality. It is a set of topological operations. It is not displayed for a public, but for a raw witness exposed to these operations.”143 Things just happen without us, Huyghe’s Untilled seems to suggest. In the apt words of one commentator, Huyghe thereby stages “indifference to the participating subject,”144 an expansive ecology of which we are but a small part. If that seems both obvious and banal, we can point out that the stakes are high: the artist short-circuits or at least challenges a Kantian aesthetic based on human judgment as well more recent reception theory and relational aesthetics. We participate here but as biological equals or even inferiors on the margins, not disinterested judges. By contrast, the bees are especially busy, zipping from the flowers to the hive that was seeded on and became the head of a copy of a neoclassical nude sculpture from 1935 by Max Weber. Huyghe says of Untilled, “compost becomes a place where things are left without culture, where they become indifferent to us, metabolizing, allowing the emergence of new forms. These elements and artifacts are markers, found in history; they are also things you usually find in a park: a bench, a statue, an animal, a human.”145 Yet how “untilled” (unmanipulated) can anything be at one of the world’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art? For example, Huyghe placed uprooted oaks and partially sculpted rocks in Untilled in reference and homage to Beuys’s 7000 Oaks, begun at documenta 7 in 1982 (fig. 5). This art-historical and institutional allusion suggests that we can legitimately take Untilled as in part about a generational link between ecology via Beuys’s environmental plan to green Kassel and the “ecology” of the art world. Huyghe’s purposeful inclusion provides a reason for the eco art historian to extrapolate the meanings of Huyghe’s work to the significance of land art as well as the landscape garden in contemporary iterations of eco art. But Huyghe’s oaks are uprooted and recumbent, whereas Beuys’s thrive vertically. Huyghe’s reference is thus also involved with the long habit of depicting such flora in the landscape genre and with the destruction and recycling of organic matter that are integral to the landscape garden in which Untilled was placed.
FIG. 14 Pierre Huyghe, Untilled: Alive Entities and Inanimate Things, Made and Not Made, 2011–12 (detail). Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA 13 with the support of Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel, A.C., Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, Paris; and Ishikawa Collection, Okayama, Japan. Photo: Pierre Huyghe. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
This case study of deracinated trees demonstrates the connectedness of this imagery and tactic across the categories of landscape, land art, and eco art. In chapter 2, “Beyond Suspicion: Why (Not) Landscape?,” I extend this discussion by examining how and why the landscape genre has been largely ignored in accounts of land and eco art and what we might gain by revisiting a dialogue that was in fact not suspended. In chapter 3, “Remote Control: Siting Land Art and Eco Art,” I investigate the factors that cause land and eco artists to place their work how and where they do. To what extent was the fabled remoteness of much American land art occasioned by a reaction against narrowly defined landscape practices in the museum—not simply the museum as an urban institution—its ideology of separation from the past? In both the United States and Europe, land art involved resistance and relocation, processes that accorded authority to the idea of remoteness. What “control” do these often-reactive procedures maintain over eco art today, whether we think of their classic instantiations in the 1970s or ongoing, remote, and now mythic examples such as Michael Heizer’s City and James Turrell’s Roden Crater, both begun in the 1970s but unfinished and largely inaccessible? One paradigmatic difference between land art in what Rosalind Krauss named the “expanded field” and eco art is that the latter has frequently returned to the museum, as we saw in Dion’s Neukom Vivarium (fig. 6). My focus in chapter 4, “Contracted Fields: ‘Nature’ in the Art Museum,” is on this widespread and in some ways peculiar pattern of bringing “nature” inside the gallery space. Thinking again with examples such as Eliasson’s critically acclaimed and popular installation The weather project, introduced above (fig. 1), I ask if what appears to be a reversal of the movement away from institutions and the urban that motivated land art, whether its remote sites, such as that of Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, or the more accessible routes of Hamish Fulton’s walks, is in significant ways also a return to the protocols of landscape as a museum art form. Two pervasive themes course through this book and come into sharp focus in my final chapter: the preoccupation with borders and eco art’s engagements with science. Global warming and water or air pollution show no regard for national borders or the fragile boundary of our human skin; borders of all sorts are questioned and usually transgressed by ecological thinking. In chapter 5, “Bordering the Ubiquitous: The Art of Local and Global Ecologies,” I examine boundary questions in several examples of eco art and in two concluding cases studies that take us to the nonanthropocentric, material aspects of the earth, what I call “the crystal interface” and “the emotional life of water.” The latter phrase can be heard in two ways: as an evocation of the emotions we humans feel when thinking about water in eco art, and as a reference to the potential independence of water, its own material “life” apart from human perceptions and categorizations. Art concerned with ecology and the environment—with water issues, for example—must reckon with scientific data and its culture to one degree or another. Interactions between art and climate science raise questions about the communication of knowledge, the purpose of eco art in effecting public opinion, and, crucial to the overall arguments of Landscape into Eco Art, the associations of land art and eco art with the landscape tradition, in which science was closely involved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Water has become a recurrent subject in eco-art practices worldwide, many of which seek to harness the interpretive and emotional power of art to effect responses to anthropogenic climate change. How eco art engages us emotionally and intellectually is central to this book as a whole.
