Landscape was not significant in modern art; it has become increasingly significant in the strains of art that aren’t part of modernism.
REBECCA SOLNIT, “UNSETTLING THE WEST,” IN AS EVE SAID TO THE SERPENT (2001)
LANDSCAPE IN THE AVANT-GARDE AND LAND ART
There are good reasons for artists and art historians to be suspicious of the genre of landscape. Some scholars want to move away from what they construe as the restrictive aesthetic dimensions of the term “landscape” and toward a fuller consideration of land. The coeditors of both Deterritorialisations . . . : Revisioning Landscapes and Politics and Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics take this position. As the analyses in Landscape into Eco Art set out to establish, my opposing view is that “landscape” as a historical term and set of practices can be seen to include many concerns for the land more broadly. In addition, the aesthetic dimension, as an infra-thin divide from instrumentality, is crucial to our understandings of eco art. As we have seen too, landscape’s offenses within the history of art range from masking profound social inequalities to the extent that it became a vehicle of colonialism to a tedious repetition of stock motifs. “There is no doubt,” W. J. T. Mitchell wrote in “Imperial Landscape,” “that the classical and romantic genres of landscape painting evolved during the great age of European imperialism now seem exhausted, at least for the purposes of serious painting.”1 Who would disagree? Solnit’s snapshot of the demise and reinvigoration of landscape in the twentieth century is also accurate in general. While simply asking “not Cézanne?” or “what about early Cubist landscapes?” or “wasn’t landscape central in Kandinsky’s and Mondrian’s moves to abstraction?” would lead to a more complete version of the use and the eclipse of this form in early twentieth-century painting, the genre was undoubtedly overshadowed. Her concise history also alludes to, without naming, the auspices under which landscape arguably returned to prominence: postmodernism. It was Rosalind Krauss who first established this connection. In “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” her celebrated article published in the journal October in 1979, Krauss argues that “permission (or pressure) to think the expanded field [of sculpture] was felt by a number of artists . . . between the years 1968 and 1970.” She lists Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, and Bruce Nauman and claims that they “had entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist.” She specifies this “historical rupture” and “structural transformation of the cultural field” with the term “postmodernism,” adding, “There seems no reason not to use it.”2 Krauss also recognizes one of several pivotal “hinges” between the landscape genre and land art: the rejection of a panoply of modernist conventions. In the Klein-group diagrams that she uses to map the new territories of postmodern art, the “landscape” coordinates refer to the land, to what is outside art and now being used as a material and site by many of the artists she cites:
[T]he possible combination of landscape and not-landscape began to be explored in the late 1960s. The term marked sites is used to identify work like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), as it also describes some of the work in the seventies by Serra, Morris, Carl Andre, Dennis Oppenheim, Nancy Holt, George Trakis, and many others. But in addition to actual physical manipulations of sites, this term also refers to other forms of marking. These might operate through the application of impermanent marks—Heizer’s Depressions, Oppenheim’s Time Lines, or De Maria’s Mile Long Drawing, for example—or through the use of photography. Smithson’s Mirror Displacements in the Yucatan were probably the first widely known instances of this, but since then the work of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton has focused on the photographic experience of marking. Christo’s Running Fence might be said to be an impermanent, photographic, and political instance of marking a site. (41)
The landscape types rejected by Smithson in “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” by Heizer as he dismissed museum norms, and by Mitchell have indeed been canceled in land art, but significantly, the term survives in Krauss’s influential account. Landscape perdures as a dialectical pole and as a term with ongoing relevance.
There is a relatively unexplored commentary that seeks to explain the demise and reinvigoration of landscape in another way and in doing so opens up to conceptual art practices roughly contemporary with Krauss’s essay. The source is the unlikely investigations of nineteenth-century landscape by the conceptual group Art & Language and the narrative by art historian and Art & Language member Charles Harrison that surrounds it. The hinge here is between landscape and the early twentieth-century avant-garde, important background to my focus in this book. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power includes an article by Harrison called “The Effects of Landscape.” Harrison’s second essay on the topic—“Art & Language Paints a Landscape”—appeared in Critical Inquiry in 1995. Both discuss the so-called Hostages, meta-landscapes painted between 1989 and 1991 by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, then members of Art & Language. These are long and densely written articles and willfully odd landscape paintings. To what are they “hostages”? To the museum, Harrison argues, the site of what he deems “administered culture.”3 Art & Language’s landscapes attempt to escape a certain conception of modernism and the avant-garde allegorized by the museum. Painting landscapes promises a way out of these strictures. “It is only with those Hostages which are paintings of landscapes that the determining presence of the museum seems finally to have been exorcised,” Harrison writes.4 They are paintings of and for the future, as Ramsden and Baldwin made explicit in notes on the project written projectively ca. 1990 (and painted in typeface onto a canvas):
What remains of the theme of nature in landscape painting? Pictures of trees, rocks, growing things—paysages—are the vernacular of the amateur or the sentimentalist. The genre has been emptied of its terror; its classical forms are rendered harmless.
We mean to restore the terror.
A work which we shall execute in 1995 is specified as follows: Hostage III; Fields Near the Astrop Road.5
Is this claim persuasive? I test it with a contemporary example below. Thinking of the land-art generation, we might well ask, what could be more museum bound than the tradition of landscape painting? But it is here that the argument—one followed in paint and in text, categories that for this conceptualist collective can only be artificially distinguished—takes several compelling turns. Hostage XIX plays with time; these landscapes and texts also repay the time we must spend to read them carefully. The painting announces its future self but was also executed at a time that many would categorize as postmodern. It is also as much textual as anything else, reminding us of the group’s mission to weaken the primacy of the visual in modernism. The painting is assertively self-conscious, but not in a high-modernist, self-critical way. Aware instead of its own failure as a properly modernist work of art, it promises a new landscape (Hostage; A Roadsign) and is thus caught between past and future yet not comfortable in the present. It is ironic. Harrison turns that limit to success into another sort of promise. “It may be that the painting in which the genre of landscape is critically continued is one in which traps are set for the unwary,” he writes (my emphasis).6 He argues on the one hand that “[t]he Hostages thus call to mind the last historical moment at which a heightened naturalistic vision could plausibly be made the vehicle for a technically modern art” (my emphases).7 Monet’s or Cézanne’s naturalism is modernist, according to one set of definitions, because it forces viewers to contemplate the surface of the image, the painting, rather than simply see a picture or view through the frame. Some of the Hostages literally make a mess of the Greenbergian primacy of the surface by mounting glass on top of versions of Monet’s poplars while the oil paint remains wet. It is a sticky trap for the visual. “These would be paintings in the genre of landscape and as such would be independent of the figurative image of the museum,” Harrison writes. Again, they would be impossible under the sign of modernism. Yet Harrison resists claiming that landscape’s potential ended in the 1890s. With the following declaration, he envisions a dimension of the future that we now inhabit: “Their putative subjects would be found in the margin of the modern world—the only place where a possibly paintable piece of land might still be found (which is to say a landscape that has not already been so thoroughly aestheticised as to be beyond reclamation for the purposes of a critically significant art).”8 Harrison concludes his essay in Landscape and Power with the following prospect: the legacy of landscape lies “in the precedents that the genre provides for a continued engagement, in the context of the visible, with that which is contingently excluded from the possibility of being seen and represented.”9 My claim is that in restoring the “terror” to landscape, the high stakes that attend this genre, Art & Language previewed the tone, if not the content, of much eco art.
John Gibson was a New York art dealer and an early promoter of land art. He opened the exhibit Ecologic Art at his New York gallery in 1969. He said of Oppenheim’s and Heizer’s work, “the appeal for me is they were changing the whole tradition of landscape as we know it—were working with the earth itself—were doing radical thinking.”10 What was the nascent land art of ca. 1970 rejecting in landscape? In extolling their separation from the past, were its practitioners and commentators perhaps protesting too much when they suggested, to cite a characteristic example from 1976, that the new earthworks “are certainly not involved with ‘landscape’ in any pictorial sense”?11 Dennis Oppenheim showed Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant (1968) in the foundational Earth Works exhibition at the Dwan Gallery in the fall of 1968.12 Developed from a proposal he presented at John Gibson Projects, and one of several transplant works Oppenheim constructed to suggest both a separation and connection between gallery and site, his work included a floor-level model and a topographical map on the wall: “This is a reconstruction of the Cotopaxi Volcano in Ecuador, to be realized in Smith Center, Kansas . . . the geographical center of the United States. The model was executed in Cocoa Mat to simulate a Kansas wheat field.”13 Oppenheim knew that Cotopaxi’s sublimity was memorialized by Hudson River School painter Frederic E. Church in the 1850s. He both tamed Church’s vision and transported it to the United States. Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant was spatial and diagrammatic, avoiding the painterly qualities of nineteenth-century visions of this region. In addition to what he exhibited with Gibson and Dwan, he produced a short-lived version of the work on the ground in swampy terrain in Connecticut. Boettger summarizes this tie between landscape and land art: “As works of art on and in land, Earthworks as a genre rejects landscape painting’s dominant tradition of the pastoral or even sublime beauty of an Arctic shipwreck as painted by Church or Friedrich.”14 Certainly untraditional in its presentation and aloof emotionally, Mt. Cotopaxi Transplant does, on the other hand, go out of its way to advance the terms of a dialogue with past landscape depictions, to incorporate landscape both as land and as genre. Landscape’s earlier norms were profoundly changed by land art, but not through total erasure. This point is crucial if we are to think about Western engagements with the earth in the visual arts over more than the past fifty or so years. In redressing another imbalance—that land art is too much the focus of discussions about art-earth relationships in the 1960s and 1970s, at the expense of equally important reflections on energy and environment—James Nisbet also maneuvers away from a discussion of landscape. In his introduction to Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, he states that “this book will trace a turn from art that addresses artificially confined environments and simplified allegories of the planet to art that increasingly attends . . . [to] hybrid ‘scapes.’” Before these more complex forms evolved in land art, he asserts, “the earth was only seen as landscape” (12). In a book that values and displays historical and conceptual complexity, then, Nisbet assumes that older landscape depiction was confined by multiple physical and institutional frames in a way that land art was not. I argue that the separation was not so tidy and the comparison between these modalities was less hierarchical.
An important reckoning with the new land art appeared in Life magazine on April 25, 1969. In “What on Earth!” David Bourdon surveyed experiments on the land—and the phenomenon’s appearances in Earth Art, curated by Willoughby Sharp at the White Museum of Art, Cornell University, February–March 1969, its first U.S. museum exhibit—by both American and European artists, including Jan Dibbets, Michael Heizer, Claes Oldenburg, and others. A classic of 1960s vernacular, Bourdon describes this group as “[g]roundbreakers in an art the ancients dug” (85). He also maintains the connection to landscape: “In form, earth art appears to be a new form of landscape painting, one which dispenses with the canvas” (86). Was Bourdon simply using a familiar vocabulary to try to describe something new to a lay audience—as we saw Tillim do with respect to Smithson’s “new picturesque” in chapter 1—or was he suggesting a lingering relationship? If land art broke away from the specific restrictions of the museum and thus the city, Heizer for one did not baldly oppose landscape’s fetters to another form’s freedom. Instead, Sharp reported in 1970, Heizer “claims that there are just as many esthetic restrictions working in the Mojave Desert as there are in the Dwan Gallery.”15
Eco artists’ rejections of the excesses and blind spots of land art are well known. Richard Long’s testimony on this point is consistent over his extensive career: “I never identify myself as a ‘land artist.’ To me, this was a term coined by American curators or critics to define an American movement which . . . I saw as American artists . . . using their deserts to make monumental work. . . . They needed a lot of money to make art. . . . It was a very different philosophy from my own work, which was almost invisible, or made only by walking, or used the land in a free way, without the need for possession or permanence.”16 According to Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, in the late 1960s “ecology wasn’t really fashionable. What was fashionable was using the earth as material. . . . [Heizer and Smithson] used earth as material; we . . . were among the first to deal with ecology in the full sense of the term.” In another interview they were even more direct: “Think of the vast energy put into big cuts and shapes in the desert that are inherently gestural. . . . They are transactional with museum space, not with the earth.”17 Thinking in terms of the broad aspirations of eco art history, I am investigating contemporary eco art’s relationships with past pictorial engagements with the earth in the landscape genre and related activities. Although I return to the relationships between eco art and land art in the next chapter, it is useful here to note that Yates McKee describes these links this way: today’s “internally variegated practices constitute neither a rejective break with nor a simple revival of ‘historical’ Land Art.”18 But what about eco art and landscape? Though this topic is not often raised, an extensive interview with artists for the catalogue accompanying the exhibit Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (2006) includes “Landscape and History” as one of the topics to which the participants—both artists and curators—were invited to speak. The expected divergence of responses is polarized. Mark Dion affirms that his work “relates not only to historical conventions of landscape depiction but also to those of wildlife art and illustration. . . . reading the past of landscape and wildlife art is a bit like examining a road map; tracing the route to find out where you are now.” Diana Thater also embraces the landscape tradition, at least initially: “any depiction of landscape is a depiction of the culture that created it. . . . All of my work is based on variant ideas of the landscape that I trace as a history from the early 1980s to the present.” Tellingly, however, and as if to illustrate Richard Long’s complaints about curators, Brian Wallis corrects her: “‘landscape’ is an outmoded genre,” he retorts, “you are not really updating a historical genre but overturning it completely.” Thater then changes course to agree, adding that “depictions of nature ran out the day Cézanne died.” For her and most of those interviewed, landscape has today become “a significant territory for meaning production,” implying that it was previously innocent.19
As photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin claim in the roundtable, however, we forget landscape at our peril, whether as a tract of land or as its representation, given that the two meanings often meld. Their Forest series (2005) inverts the usual focus of ecological work with this theme by documenting the systematic reforestation of contested land in Israel, specifically “former Palestinian villages that were evacuated and destroyed at various times since 1948” but have been returned to the apparent innocence of idyllic landscape parks. In these photographs the artists “have appropriated conventions used in landscape painting, including the notion of the sublime and the picturesque.”20 Inasmuch as eco art is always political, as agreed by the artists convened for this interview, it seems apposite to recall Art & Language’s mission for the landscapes of the future: “to restore the terror.” The Forest series is one example among many of how trees in art can focus pressing issues about land and landscape in this region. For example, The Benevolent Tree, an exhibit seen at the Umm El Fahem Art Gallery in 2014, brought together seventy-eight Israeli and Palestinian artists to work with images of the olive tree, a unifying and divisive entity in the area. Curator Daniel Kahana writes: “I am using this exhibition to tell the tree’s story as a way of telling the story of survival, since it appears that the tree is a reflection of the stages in the development of settlement in this part of the world all through history. . . . The exhibition [focuses] on the olive tree—uprooted from its physical and symbolic roots, which play an important part in the identity of its various owners, as well as in the interpretation of local art.”21
Landscape remains a reference point in eco art. Whether it is acknowledged or disqualified as passé, productive interactions with this long tradition do continue, frequently with little connection to practices of land art that intervene chronologically between the apex of the landscape genre in the nineteenth century and eco art today. The historical reverberations encapsulated in contemporary art that looks to the past in this way augment not only current work but work of the past that we see anew. Two prominent examples exhibited at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012 introduce my three more detailed case studies. Mark Dion’s Schildbach Xylotheque (fig. 15) is now a permanent display in the Ottoneum, Kassel’s natural history museum. Dion was commissioned by the museum and documenta to reinstall Carl Schildbach’s (1730–1817) remarkable eighteenth-century library of wooden books, 530 volumes designed to illustrate—and made from—the full range of trees known in this German state during the Enlightenment. In an early ecological reckoning of a Linnaean sort, each book has as its cover the bark of a given tree, while opening a volume reveals details about that species’s life cycle, its nuts, flowers, etc. Making reference to Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (fig. 5), Dion constructed of oak a new room within a room in which to display the library. One of the species not known to Schildbach that Dion added was rendered from a Beuys oak that had been damaged by a car. Dion materially examines eighteenth-century scientific renderings of wood culture in both an eco-art and museological frame by arranging his hexagonal walk-in vitrine by continent. Characteristic of his ecological and archaeological passions, he also presents a platform for visitors to query how scientific information about nature has been and is conveyed.22 The Schildbach Xylotheque does not include landscape paintings, but Dion does refer to the genre’s norms as he expands our sense of the elements of this form. On each of the outside faces of the display he has inlaid roundels that picture the earth’s largest tree species: oak, sequoia, and others. Their heroic demeanors are reminders of lone trees in landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich especially (his two versions of Oak Tree in the Snow, 1827 and 1829, for example), that is, from the early Romantic period, when Shildbach created his xylotheque.
FIG. 15 Mark Dion, The Schildbach Xylotheque, 2011–12. Commissioned and produced by dOCUMENTA 13 with the support of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Galerie Christian Nagel Berlin—Cologne—Antwerp; Galerie Georg Kargl, Vienna; In Situ / Fabienne Leclerc, Paris; the Center for Curating the Archive, Michaelis Art School, University of Cape Town, South Africa; the Visual Arts Department of the Universidad Jorge Tadeo de Bogotá; and Escuela de Artes y Oficios Santo Domingo, Bogota. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Work © Mark Dion. Courtesy of Mark Dion and Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel.
Tacita Dean’s chalk drawing installation Fatigues (2012; fig. 16) presents an extensive mountain landscape from the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan in delicate yet boldly contrasting black-and-white forms. The work was installed in a two-story building in Kassel for dOCUMENTA 13. The extent and loftiness of the location allowed Dean to give one the sense of altitude and of narrative, even filmic progression thematized by the work. She had in fact recently filmed in the region but, unsatisfied with the results, returned to the chalkboard as a medium she had used in earlier works.23 The series’ relationship to landscape as genre and place is explicit both visually and in the tiny textual comments that Dean writes across the surface. As commentators have noted, this writing suggests a film storyboard, an active narration and temporal direction. We frequently see a comment such as “next one” accompanied by a directional arrow, or “PAN (has to be).” Taken also as “stills,” however—as a panoramic landscape that a viewer moves through, as in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century panorama—the image/text interplay that she sets up reminds us of the nineteenth-century landscape of the sublime. One range of peaks is darkened by dramatic atmospheric conditions reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner’s mountain-vortex paintings and prints after them, such as Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps (1812). Dean’s laconic text reads “snow coming in.” A similar visual fragment carries the comment “antediluvian,” again taking us to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images of the sublime by Turner or John Martin that refer to biblical floods. If references to landscape conventions are clear here, would we say that Dean’s work is eco art? Taken as a whole, the image she presents is of an extensive watershed. One detail reads “flash floods,” a thematic reference, arguably, to Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison’s current campaign to show the degree to which the entire Asian drainage basin and the millions depending on it are threatened by climate change (Tibet Is the High Ground Part IV: The Force Majeure, 2008–). While Dean is also fascinated by land art, Smithson’s especially in her film JG (2013) and the sound piece Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997), her annotations to postcards of natural (and other) disasters in a suite of twenty black-and-white photogravures with etching called The Russian Ending (2001) are again attached to landscape norms. Vesuvio pictures the famous volcano in full eruption. Dean’s punctilious annotations could be the work of a volcanologist, perhaps Sir William Hamilton, whose scientific observations on the mountain in his lavishly illustrated book Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies (1776) helped to make such accuracy part of the later eighteenth-century language of the sublime. Erinnerung aus dem Weltkrieg pictures a blasted World War I battleground, its trees carefully labeled with Dean’s script. Beautiful Sheffield becomes an icon of eco irony in Dean’s hands: “An Industrial Hell,” she editorializes at the bottom left of an image of silhouetted smoke stacks and their detritus.
FIG. 16 Tacita Dean, Fatigues, 2012 (detail). Chalk on blackboard, six panels: 230 × 1110; 230 × 557; 230 × 744; 230 × 1110; 230 × 557; and 230 × 615 cm. Commissioned and coproduced by dOCUMENTA 13. Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London; and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.
I add detail to the picture of relationships between landscape and eco art through two case studies. These accounts provide opportunities to think through the validity and efficacy of construing an essentially interconnected tradition of “landscape” in Western art. In the first study—“Earth-Death Pictures”—I return to the early nineteenth century in German art, specifically the increasingly “scientific” landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and his close associate, the amateur painter and acclaimed physician Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), whose theory of Erdlebenbildkunst (earth-life pictures), I argue, in many ways previews contemporary eco art. My second inquiry focuses on the paintings and installations of two artists who critique landscape norms from Indigenous perspectives. Kent Monkman cuttingly and hilariously returns to the grand paintings of the American West by the Hudson River School and others to offer a queerly Indigenous view of the appropriation of land. Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s paintings present a striking combination of Dali- and Haida-inspired imagery, the land of the Pacific Northwest Coast, and a powerful ecological message that collaborate to counteract centuries of what W. J. T. Mitchell calls imperial landscape. Before turning to the case studies, let me register two preliminary points regarding the question of whether eco art should also be thought of as part of a landscape tradition. In a detailed study of tradition and its uses in historical writing, Mark Salber Phillips derives two apposite lessons. First, “any lasting tradition must be in a process of continual reinvention.” If landscape depiction generally was, in typically modernist fashion, cast as hopelessly restricted and conservative from the early twentieth century until ca. 1970 (and by many current commentators, as we have seen), the resurgence of interest in land and eco art was not a recovery or restoration of old modes but very often a transformation. Phillips also concludes that “traditions can be constituted or reconstituted on the basis of acts of rupture as well as of renewal.”24 This is very much the pattern of what I have called land art’s dialectical relationship to landscape, a pattern of negative engagement. This understanding of tradition, cited above, was used by John Gibson: “The appeal for me is [that the earth artists] were changing the whole tradition of landscape as we know it . . . were doing radical thinking.”25 Is it possible to change his implied “or”—“landscape or radical thinking”—to “landscape and radical thinking,” a conjunction that the form certainly maintained from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth? As I have suggested with reference to the notion of a “preposterous” history, it is essential, in rethinking the relationships among the landscape tradition, land art, and eco art, to relinquish our conventional, linear, and usually teleological sense of temporal progression, what is called “time’s arrow.” Explicating Michel Serres’s rethinking of the topological and temporal dimensions of historical thinking, Steven Connor presents an alternative: “Serres’s all-including topology, his time of folding, aims to provide an alternative to this nightmare of homogeneity, in the possibility of invention, novelty and peace. Innovation springs, not from attempting to separate oneself from history, but from maintaining the possibility of rereading historical continuities, of revisiting the uncompleted past and being revisited by it, with new mutations of understanding emerging as the result.”26
CASE STUDY 2: “EARTH-DEATH PICTURES”
Contemporary eco art can be understood as a revived commitment to presenting the history of the earth in the visual arts. I am aware of the ironies of this claim. When recent and contemporary artists and art historians do think about the landscape genre, which in its prime in the nineteenth century reflected profoundly on the earth, there is a tendency to see its accomplishments as past and otherwise problematic, as we have seen. Though painting was the locus of the triumphs of landscape depiction from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, the medium’s reputation waxes and wanes now. Certainly it is only one of many approaches used in art concerned with ecology and the environment today. As we have also seen, eco art is typically thought to have reacted more to land art of the 1960s, which in turn saw itself as replacing the purportedly outworn genre of landscape painting. Landscape emerged late as an independent genre in the West, but it was arguably the most important category in the Western hierarchy by the early nineteenth century. From the vantage point of eco art, landscape can be seen as the aspiring history painting of the nineteenth century in Europe and especially in North and South America. Its renderings of the earth’s phenomena competed with history painting’s default to mythological, political, and religious themes. Depictions of the earth’s physiognomy by Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus, and John Ruskin, for example, of the sea by Turner and of the atmosphere by Constable, demonstrated understandings of the earth’s dynamic history in its interactions with human religious and political machinations. I would go further to suggest—in direct parallel and contact with nineteenth-century landscape models—that eco art today can also productively be thought of as a revived “history painting,” that of the planet in crisis.
In Archive: Endangered Waters (2003; fig. 17), the Icelandic artist Rúrí explores the proposition that human behavior is the root of the rapid changes in the climate. She represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2003 with this interactive photo-and-sound installation. More than two hundred thousand people saw the work in the Icelandic pavilion; that number multiplied substantially as the work later toured several cities in Europe and the United States. It is not a work one simply sees, certainly not a landscape of the traditionally framed sort to be viewed from a familiar distance. Nature’s power and unfamiliarity is intact here not least because sound is as important as Archive’s visual and textual dimensions. In this and related performances in her Vocal series, Rúrí is a pioneer in their copresentation. Drawn into the drama of Archive by the sound of falling water emanating from the monolithic cabinet that is its centerpiece, one learns to pull out the sliding mounts that reveal fifty-two images of Icelandic waterfalls that Rúrí presents on transparent film for viewing. While the massive structure remains a silent archive if none of these vertical drawers is engaged, doing so triggers the signature roar of a particular waterfall and gives visitors an image of it that can be seen from both sides of the sliding display. Following Icelandic mythology, Rúrí recognizes the individual voices of the waterfalls. Each is personified. Another, quieter voice that we should attend to is that of her subtitle. “Endangered” commonly modifies “species” in environmental contexts; to draw attention to the threats to water globally and to underline its unparalleled importance in the earth’s ecology, however, Rúrí has migrated its adjectival force to this ubiquitous element. The artist avers that “flowing water is . . . a symbol of time.”27 Archive addresses the history of waterfalls, and water generally, on several temporal planes: the fifty-two images allude to the temporal intervals that humans live by, which—as Ackers and Gilligan have made clear in Deep Time (fig. 12)—are too fast for the planet to adapt to. The contrast between our time and the earth’s is replicated by visitors’ almost always rapid interaction with the sliding drawers, as we see in video footage of the Venice installation. Archive gives us the past, the present, and the future. Some of the waterfalls no longer exist; many remain endangered, likely to become the “past” of an inevitable future, all because of huge reservoirs created by a controversial Kárahnjúkar hydroelectric dam and power-generating plant built in Iceland’s interior highlands primarily to supply power for an aluminum smelter. That visitors can in effect turn these waterfalls on and off at will is one poignant dimension of the artist’s lamentation and her warning in the present. Another is the quasi-scientific archiving of the earth’s phenomena in art institutions. As Rúrí speculates in a related context, “it may come to pass that all that will remain as a reminder of the waterfalls will be the works of artists.”28
FIG. 17 Rúrí, Archive: Endangered Waters, 2003. Interactive installation; size variable. Cabinet 234 × 516 × 260 cm with photographs extended. Exhibition view: Icelandic Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale. By kind permission of the artist.
Rúrí’s attention to our actions in the face of threatened nature leads to areas of concern that together establish this work as a powerful contemporary history picture. She addresses a momentous historical issue, anthropogenic climate change, and thus the viability of naming our epoch the Anthropocene. As I elaborate in my final chapter, she explores and exploits the affective aspects of the work, what I call “the emotional life of water,” as it articulates the earth’s history. The close-ups of waterfalls stowed in the cabinet are complemented by forty-four more contextual documentary photographs in an adjacent area, images that provide empirical, scientific context rather than emotional impact. Finally, the work may be seen in relation to the tradition of history painting that arguably migrated to the landscape genre in the early nineteenth century. As eco art, the installation is a witness to and what Bruno Latour would call an “actant” in the Anthropocene, a work about the interactions between the human, material nature, and the planet’s ecosystems (a term coined only in 1935) that traces back to the beginnings of the industrialization of the globe. By inviting us to manipulate the sounds and images of waterfalls—which are closely identified with Iceland as a pure, natural place29 and which she claims are both central in Icelandic landscape and thought of as individuals, as “people,” for example, in the postcards she used in her installation Passage of Time III (2000)—Rúrí mimics in microcosm the power humans now have to change landscapes and nature. Giving us “control” that may or may not transfer to the political sphere in which decisions about hydroelectric plants are taken, she makes this overarching effect one of individual responsibility. While Archive records the vitality of waterfalls, however, it is more about their demise than their life.
My coinage “earth-death pictures” is intended as a contemporary discordant echo and dystopic mirroring of Carl Gustav Carus’s pleas in the early nineteenth century for “earth-life pictures,” those that are carefully observed based on scientific data and rendered in sufficient detail and clarity to become landscape paintings “of a new and higher kind, which will uplift the viewer into a higher contemplation of nature.”30 A fuller sense of Carus’s Erdlebenbildkunst is required if we are to gauge what his innovation can reveal about contemporary practices and what eco art might in turn let us see in Carus’s work. Carus’s Nine Letters on Landscape Painting (1815–24) is in most ways a conventional account of landscape painting. Carus was proud to be an accomplished amateur in this field. As court physician to the king of Saxony and a famous natural scientist, he came in contact with many of the most important natural philosophers and artists of his day. The book is dedicated to Goethe. Caspar David Friedrich, who became a close friend, is Carus’s model artist; Alexander von Humboldt, who also supported Carus’s ideas, was his exemplary natural scientist.31 Because I am setting this text into a comparison with the fate of landscape in the twentieth century and today, it is important to emphasize that Carus, Friedrich, and many others at this time and earlier saw the need to improve, indeed to rescue, landscape painting. Carus’s letters contribute to an already-century-long discussion across Europe about the academic status of landscape, an intense period of material and intellectual history that compares with the controversies around the demise of landscape in the 1960s and after. The condemnations of landscape in the 1960s seem like a familiar echo when we read in Letter VIII that “it is time to consider the future study of landscape painting, a topic that affords much room for melancholic reflection, since we can hardly speak of its future without reflecting on its dismal present” (123).
Carus is original in two ways important to the comparisons I want to make: he called for collaboration between scientific and artistic approaches to understanding the earth, and he developed the potent notion of the earth-life picture as the key to this cooperation.32 Where Carus was positive about renovating the genre, the terms of the debate over landscape were inverted in the 1960s and afterward. Carus laid the blame on art academies, which encouraged the copying of other landscape paintings rather than an educated attention to nature. He believed that artists needed scientific training “to see the necessary connection between the outward forms of mountain ranges and the inner structure of their masses, and the necessity with which that inner structure follows from the history of those mountains. . . . Instruct him in the specific laws of atmospheric phenomena, the variations in the nature of clouds, their formation and dissolution, and also their motion” (126). With such knowledge they could perceive the inner, forming essence and unity of all forms in nature—the “earth life.” The earth-life picture is “a true geognostic landscape,” he elaborates in the next letter (138), that is, a study of the mineral deposits of the earth’s crust.33
Art and science collaborate: “art prepares and promotes the cognitive awareness of nature, which is natural science,” he writes in Letter III (98). Promoting the earth-life picture as the future of landscape depiction, Carus draws an explicit contrast with the training of history painters, who at this time “at least study anatomy” (138). He followed his own advice in producing visually detailed, accurate depictions of specific mountain ranges and the basalt columns at Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa in the Scottish Hebrides, for example. But his purpose was not simply to convey the surface particularities of landscape but also their interconnectedness. Taken out of its nineteenth-century contexts, Carus’s Nine Letters reads like a late twentieth-century environmentalist statement, thanks to his emphasis on educating not only artists to see and render the earth’s life, but also the museum-going and art-buying public to receive enlightenment through landscape paintings that are truly new. Given the ability to see and show landscape anew, Carus enthusiastically writes, “there will infallibly be earth-life paintings, of a new and higher kind, which will uplift the viewer into a higher contemplation of nature” (131). Carus states explicitly that the earth-life picture is the new history painting, and he does so in a journal to gain circulation for his views. Publishing Letter VIII in Ludwig Schorn’s Kunst-Blatt in 1826, he appended a note regarding the genesis of his reflections on landscape: “Over the past decade, numerous reflections on this art, which has as its true task the great object of representing individual scenes . . . of the universal life of nature—and which I would therefore prefer to call nature’s history painting, or earth-life painting—have given rise to a series of nine letters.”34
Carus sought to raise the status of landscape in art academies and among the public because, he held, only this form could convey the all-important divinity and unity of nature. It was frustrating to Carus that his call for earth-life painting as the new history painting received rather few and largely negative reviews in his lifetime. As Oskar Bätschmann has written, “The program of ‘earth-life painting’—to express the structure and history of mountains through their form, and to render the other elements in such a way as to reveal the universal rule of law and demonstrate the harmony between the particular and the universal—was far beyond the capacity of landscape painting” at this time.35 I want to suggest, however, that his ideas have new resonance from the perspective of today’s eco art. The time for Carus’s ideas is now. Carus’s work is of the Anthropocene in the sense that, not unlike his contemporaries Turner and Ruskin, and not unlike Rúrí, he construed human history and the history of the earth as intertwined. It is in this sense that the earth’s history is the most important subject of history painting, one that he prophetically dedicated to the future of the genre. Examples of eco art such as Rúrí’s Archive: Endangered Waters engage the planet’s history in terms of anthropogenic climate disruption. Working at the other end of the Anthropocene, however, Rúrí and others have converted the earth-life picture to earth-death art.36
John Ruskin writes in his Lectures on Landscape, in which are printed lectures delivered at Oxford in 1871, “Landscape painting is the thoughtful and passionate representation of the physical conditions appointed for human existence.” Never one to make a point without repeated emphasis, he adds, “Turner did not paint [his] sea-pieces for the sake of these decorous arrangements; neither did he paint the Scarborough as a professor of physical science, to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshire coast; nor the Indiaman to show you the force of impact in a liquid mass of sea-water of given momentum. He painted this to show you the daily course of quiet human work and happiness, and that, to enable you to conceive something of uttermost human misery—both ordered by the power of the great deep.”37 Ruskin was appalled by the ravages of industrialization on both the landscape and humanity. If not “the first ecologist,”38 he was an early one who, like Carus and many others, saw the interactions of the human and telluric as history. In this approach he was inspired by Alexander von Humboldt. Analogous with Carus’s emphases in his earth-life pictures and Ruskin’s priorities, Turner depicted the interactions of the human and nature. To the bafflement and outright hostility of most of its early viewers, for example, his renowned Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842) places us in the roiling sea, from which we precariously view a struggling steamboat firing a distress flare as it fights to make safe harbor during a storm. Whether Turner was lashed to the mast of such a boat to experience and record the elements, as he claimed, is ultimately immaterial. He fully conveys the chaos of the storm: the horizon is dangerously off level, and we cannot distinguish water from sky from spray. Turner’s famed indistinctness of form ensures that there is much we cannot see here. Our senses are overwhelmed and inadequate, suggesting his interest in the sublime and offering an opening for an argument about elementals exceeding our grasp and intimating the presence of the earth’s forces. We can be historically specific on this point. James Hamilton claims that Turner was conveying in the design of the painting the powerful forces of magnetism harbored by the earth, those discovered by Michael Faraday and widely disseminated by the scientist—and Turner’s friend—Mary Somerville.39 We can see the effects of this energy in the vortex, but we cannot see this elemental force itself. My reading would not, however, end with a recognition of what Amanda Boetzkes refers to as elementals, discussed in chapter 1, but would extend to the longer history of the earth’s articulation. While this picture is framed, everything about it breaks free of the landscape genre’s conventions. A person of his time rather than ours—which is to say of the Industrial Revolution, for many the onset of the Anthropocene—Turner, in this and many other works, celebrates and seeks to convey the affective impact of technological innovations while simultaneously witnessing the power of nature. For him, these forces coexist and are too closely interwoven to be conveniently opposed in a narrative of struggle between nature and humanity. Because we are implicated as participants in this drama and in Turner’s other historical landscapes, the earth, or nature, is not presented as an independent force, but always with its human interlocutors. Turner’s landscapes absorb conventional history painting’s predilection for grand human events into a history of the earth. As I show in later chapters, it is only with the post-human interests of some contemporary eco art that this default emphasis is challenged.
Understanding Archive: Endangered Waters as a negative correlate of Carus’s earth-life pictures allows historical landscape practices to expand in a more capacious frame, one that addresses the paradox articulated by Rebecca Solnit: “Landscape is visible; too often history is not.”40 Archive makes earth history (and its potentially silent future) visible in ways that the earth-life picture could not two hundred years ago; it is also arguably part of extended attempts to picture the earth and to make its dilemmas visible. Where Carus envisioned an unapologetically anthropocentric “physiognomy” of natural phenomena, however, Rúrí’s waterfalls are displayed in a way that both invites our human response to them and, I believe, suggests their independent material existence. We are maneuvered to lament the loss of these and other phenomena and to attend to the materiality of things before we acculturate them as objects and artifacts, before we call them “landscapes,” for example. Could water have an “emotional life” beyond our understanding? Sound is the trigger for thinking outside anthropocentrism here: because up to five soundtracks of waterfalls can play simultaneously and up to five images can be seen simultaneously, the installation is inevitably cacophonous and confusing, beyond our grasp. Archive enacts what Teresa Brennan has called “the transmission of affect” in the porous and fluid situations wherein the human and nonhuman, organic and nonorganic elements of eco art mix, coalesce, and dissipate. I consider this topic more fully in my concluding chapter. Here, let me reiterate that my case studies and examples are best understood as paradigms of interpretation, in this instance, of the advantages in seeing contemporary eco art in relationship with an innovation in the landscape tradition, Carus’s earth-life pictures. To construe Carus’s theory as negatively realized in Archive: Endangered Waters is, however, “preposterous” in the sense discussed in chapter 1. Rúrí did not overtly intend to revisit the earth-life picture; Carus could not foresee today’s eco art. But traditions—in this case, of landscape depiction—are often articulated in retrospect. In reestablishing a connection between landscape and eco art in this way, my hope is to add to the scholarship of eco art history, to “cast canonical works and figures”—to cite the pioneering collection A Keener Perception again—“in a new light by revealing their previously unnoticed complexity, ambivalence, or even antipathy regarding environmental concerns.”41
Landscape painting is not central in today’s eco-art practices. But Diane Burko’s paintings of the cryosphere, ice-covered regions of the earth, are both a major exception to this pattern and an inheritor of Carus’s earth-life pictures. While cognizant and critical of current climate-change patterns, Burko does not present the earth’s death. Like Carus in his time, she believes in and depicts a scientific understanding of glaciation and other phenomena. “I believe that art can communicate science,” she says. “My obsession with nature at its most awe-inspiring naturally leads me to want to preserve and protect it. That’s why I want to show how our environment is being threatened by climate change. My strategy is to seduce with beauty and then subtly insert awareness in the viewer by utilizing visual/scientific prompts I’ve garnered through my interactions with climatologists, my observations in the field and my own research.”42 In one large-scale painting from 2015, for example—Jakobshavn-Ilulissat Quartet (fig. 18)—she depicts, from above, this glaciated area of western Greenland across four large panels. The leftmost painting is of sea ice near the shore; on the far right is an aerial image that shows a considerable amount of open land where the glacier once was. In the center two panels we have also pulled back to the vantage point of a satellite image, with all the scientific authority that this now-common view suggests. In each of these Burko has set a map of Greenland for orientation. It is the dexter central image that suggests the entire quartet is a contemporary example of Erdlebenbildkunst. Again incorporating scientific information, Burko “quotes the recessional maps used by glaciologists to indicate such change [the rapid melting of glaciers] over time. The one [she] referenced for [her] painting traced change from 1850 to 2012.”43 If Carus in his time was gratified by the response of scientists to the accuracy and potency of his work, we can imagine that Burko shares such a sense of accomplishment in extending a crucial dialogue on climate change beyond the art world. Praising her references to scientific data, the four co-authors of the 2016 article “Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research” state unequivocally: “The prominent red stylized time stamp in the lower right corner is evocative of common scientific images of glaciers. Juxtaposing a clearly ‘painted’ glacier, Burko blurs the lines of authority and science, pushing viewers to consider how glacier narratives are produced, circulated, and given credibility and authority across time and space, and by whom. Her paintings, which utilize up-to-date scientific data such as individual glacier recession rates, inhabit a socially problematic more-than-science position of being simultaneously ‘representationally accurate’ but also ‘representationally artistic.’”44 I would suggest that this work is only “problematic” if the lines and hierarchy between science and eco art are drawn too boldly. As Burko’s work and exhibits such as Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture demonstrate, and as these commentators agree further on in their article, “glacier artwork does teach about glaciology, even if it is not satellite imagery from ‘true’ satellites.” In terms of the large arguments of Landscape into Eco Art, Burko’s landscape paintings suggest that thinking in terms of an extended tradition of artistic engagements with the earth should not be dismissed without a close look at counterexamples.
FIG. 18 Diane Burko, Jakobshavn-Ilulissat Quartet, 2015. Oil on canvas, 42 × 228 in. overall. By kind permission of the artist.
While it is significant that Burko continues a painting tradition to address climate change in much of her practice, a series titled Elegies complicates the uses of medium in ways that were not available to Carus and the Romantics but are characteristic of eco art’s manipulations. With the Elegies, Burko states, “My intention is to provoke an uneasy visual tension in response to these fictional images, where the viewer struggles to make sense of the material as if they are actually seeing photographs of aerial views of melting glaciers.”45 Presented again from a satellite’s viewpoint, each image appears to be a disintegrating glacier or ice field. We see large fissures and cracks and open blue and black areas that read as liquid water. But close inspection reveals that these images are scans of Burko’s painterly experiments with a pigment that cracks easily, magnified to look like more scientific images. We could say that the source imagery here is imaginary in two registers: Burko’s paintings for the series are abstractions based on her knowledge of how melting areas of ice look. While she often records actual sites both in paintings and in her photography practice, the Elegies—despite their localized, apparently indexical titles—are generalized laments for “melting glaciers and locations all threatened by climate change throughout the world.”46 These images are indivisibly scientific and emotional, a conjunction I investigate further in chapter 5 under the heading “The Emotional Life of Water.”
To conclude this case study of earth-life and earth-death pictures, I turn to the work of Mariele Neudecker, a contemporary eco artist whose work explicitly engages German Romantic landscape conventions, and to one piece by Katie Paterson that is as graphic as Rúrí’s Archive in its attention to the earth’s “death” witnessed in Iceland. Neudecker brings together explorations of the landscape genre, of the temporal duration of natural forms, and especially of human interactions with what we call nature. To lay out this acculturation of landscape as a genre, her acclaimed earlier works—especially the so-called “tanks,” such as Over and Over, Again and Again (2004; fig. 19), which magically and instructively revisit Romantic landscape conventions in a three-dimensional format, as if we could see a painting by Friedrich or Johan Christian Dahl as an environment into which we could wander—afford the viewer much more visual and conceptual access to landscape as a process than do the paintings that they quote. We can walk around and peer into this tradition because in these works both landscape’s overt artificiality and its seductive atmospherics are on display. Her quest is to see nature beyond landscape, to reveal a widely held suspicion in our Western culture that these norms mask too much, that they block real experience. More important for our understanding of her purposeful movement “towards a contemporary sublime,” in recent work she interrogates and captures her own motivations for coming to this remote place and the nuances of her emotional responses. “I wanted to come this far to find and see a ‘nature,’ beyond landscape,” she confides. “I wanted to see human relationships to the ‘landscape’ and nature. . . . No reception, no grid, no charge. . . . was it really just nature?” Yet with a quick honesty that underscores her understanding of the complexities of this desire, she wonders, “Do I? Did I?”47
FIG. 19 Mariele Neudecker, Over and Over, Again and Again, 2004 (detail). Glass, water, acrylic medium, salt, fiberglass, plastic, each tank 47.6 × 47.6 × 48.2 cm (triptych). Edition of three (+ 1 AP). Commissioned by the Met Office for Elemental Insight. Photo: Woodley and Quick. By kind permission of the artist and Galerie Thumm, Berlin.
Much of Neudecker’s work is based on her belief that our relationships are usually not with nature so much as with images of nature, landscapes. Her later projects insist that our human practices of perception, of questioning, and of emotional reaction are integral to how we formulate landscape and what we hope to discover in some more fundamental form: nature. She constantly seeks effective ways to lay these habits out for us. Neudecker’s artistic propositions are not religious or mystical, as Carus’s ultimately were; she does not imagine a final, cosmic answer to the question “what is Nature?” On the contrary, she is drawn to explore the partiality of our seeing, an inescapable situation that she calls “cropping.” With her, we see how we look at landscape. We can register the selections and emphases that always accompany our looking. The foundational editing of what we see is not so much a shortcoming as it is profoundly human, whether it involves the physiology of our binocular vision or a technological prosthesis. “Somehow the sockets of my eyes suddenly seem to be too small, close, too tight and deep,” she reports from the Arctic in “Lamentations.” “I want to have 360-degree vision. Needless to say: my camera lens frames and crops everything way too small and too tightly.” As it was for Carus, Ruskin, and Turner, it seems that we can only apprehend nature through human nature.
400 Thousand Generations, Neudecker’s much-praised and often-reproduced installation in the London Royal Academy’s exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World of 2009, draws its provocative title from the evolutionary time scientists believe it took to develop the photosensitive tissue crucial to the human eye. We see two large glass eyelike orbs on a table, but these are not models. They are liquid-filled tanks whose shape and doubling inevitably remind us of our own eyes. In addition to reflecting a beholder’s inverted image as she looks at the installation—just as our retinas do with the external world—the wax caps on the top of each sphere allude, in their relative softness, to the tissue behind the eye. These fragile caps seem to hold up the forms of blue mountains in the two containers, forms that connect visually and by analogy to the icebergs in her more recent work, such as a room-filling sculptural cross section of an iceberg titled There Is Always Something More Important (2012; fig. 20). Compellingly out of place though it certainly is, and unnaturally static, the fictive iceberg is nonetheless also familiar. Neudecker does what we cannot readily do “in nature”: she anatomizes the form, cutting it in cross section and installing two eyelike video monitors on the wall behind it, like a human face. We do not see inside the structure through these portals but move again back to the landscape. In this case we see ice flowing from one “eye” to the other across a one-meter gap. Our eyes and thoughts move, but the iceberg remains uncannily still. We see much less than what we know is there. It is in this meditative gap, this suspension of the practical imperatives of the Anthropocene, perhaps, that we might register her unusual title in an ecological sense. “There is always something more important” than . . . climate change, Neudecker’s words invite us to think.
FIG. 20 Mariele Neudecker, There Is Always Something More Important, 2012. Fiberglass, pigment, plywood; two-channel video on monitors, looped; 65 × 207 × approx. 420 cm. Installation view: ARCTIC, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, 2013–14. Photo: MN. By kind permission of the artist and Galerie Thumm, Berlin.
I have claimed that sound is especially important in eco art. This is the case in work by Neudecker and other artists I consider in later chapters, and especially in Katie Paterson’s Vatnajökull (the Sound of) (2007–8). In what could be thought of as an amplified and submerged version of Joseph Beuys’s Erdtelephon (Earth telephone; 1968), in which the listening device is plugged into a clod of turf, Paterson’s gambit was to have people in an art gallery listen to climate change by facilitating aural access to the melting of Europe’s largest glaciers. Paterson provided only a phone number in the gallery; when called, listeners would hear the dripping sounds of the glacier thanks to microphones placed in its depths. The spectacular landscape of this site is heard but not seen, a cipher, perhaps, for the imponderability of the Anthropocene. In the artist’s words, “An underwater microphone [led] into Jökulsárlón lagoon—an outlet glacial lagoon of Vatnajökull, filled with icebergs—connected to an amplifier, and a mobile-phone, which created a live phone line to the glacier.” Her work was not tied to the gallery space: “The number . . . could be called from any telephone in the world, the listener put through to Vatnajökull. A white neon sign of the phone number hung in the gallery space.”48 Paterson pulls no punches about her meaning: “This lagoon is a graveyard of glaciers. . . . In a way there is something heartbreaking about this, knowing that you are listening to something magnificent being destroyed—but it is also very beautiful, a celebration of nature.”49
CASE STUDY 3: INDIGENOUS LANDSCAPES
“Land, first to last, has been the currency of exchange between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the Americas,” writes art historian Ruth Phillips.50 Artist Arthur Renwick elaborates: “I don’t like to call [disputes over land] land claims because [Indigenous peoples] are not claiming land. They are trying to make it known that the land has always been theirs and so they are not trying to claim anything. They are just trying to make white people understand that this is ours . . . you took it from us. You claimed it from us, but it has always been ours and we still know we own it.”51 Land was and remains the site of fateful encounters. As described by Damian Skinner, “If land is the central focus of settler colonialism, and relations with the territorially dispossessed are a determining factor in the histories of settler colonies, race is the discourse that binds them together.”52 Indigenous and settler-colonial visions of and conflicts over race, nature, land, and landscape are examined intensely in the contemporary ecological work of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Kent Monkman, Arthur Renwick, Alan Michelson, and Bonnie Devine, among many others.53 In discussing this work in the broad context of Western eco art and landscape traditions, I am cognizant of Loretta Todd’s confession that she, as a Métis filmmaker and writer of some reputation, in her essay on Yuxweluptun, worries “about codifying a Native aesthetic and Native art . . . about what you say, or don’t say being used against the freedom of the artist’s imagination, or for betraying protocols or denigrating the sacred.” She adds a reference to James Luna’s chilling Artifact Piece (1986), where the artist displayed himself as an ethnographic curiosity by lying in a vitrine in the San Diego Museum of Man in a section on the Kumeyaay people: “Aboriginal artists are especially vulnerable to the display case syndrome.”54 As a white male of settler lineage, I should worry even more. Eva Mackey explains what is at stake, especially on the side of settlers: “This longstanding pattern, in which colonizers assume entitlement to claim sovereignty over Indigenous lands, continues to be repeatedly re-enacted post-facto in law as well as in the discourses of [many] people. . . . Colonization and settler nation-building have entailed the repetitive embedding and realizing of settler assertions of certainty and entitlement, and the repeated denial of Indigenous personhood and sovereignty, all of which are embedded in the interpretation of early moments of colonial/settler assumptions of sovereignty over territory.”55 Given that the work of the Indigenous artists I discuss is publicly offered in part to educate settlers, and that this work self-consciously addresses issues of cultural theft, however, I believe that self-censorship for fear of “appropriating” is even worse than the risk of speaking for others. Landscape into Eco Art is, in the broadest terms, an inquiry into how eco artists mobilize what they perceive as their artistic responsibility to landscape and the earth. Indigenous histories need to be part of this developing account of an eco art history and recognized as independent and in full interaction with settler-colonial histories. My hope is that this case study aligns with the optimistic plea by Taiaiake Alfred: “In order to decolonize, Canadians and Americans have to sever their emotional attachment to their countries and reimagine themselves, not as citizens with the privileges conferred by being descendants of colonizers or newcomers from other parts of the world benefitting from white imperialism, but as human beings in equal and respectful relation to other human beings and the natural environment. This is what radical imagination could look like.”56
My first two examples strike contrasting balances between uses of landscape in painting and environmental commentary. Yuxweluptun’s arresting paintings carry overt ecological messages about the destruction of Northwest Coast ecosystems under the aegis of modernity and capitalism. While Monkman returns to the “golden age” of American landscape painting of the West in the nineteenth century in an ostentatious and sardonic manner for which he is much celebrated, links between this landscape tradition and ecology in his work have not been examined. One reason is clear: there is a lot to see and to discuss in Monkman’s images, including in the two paintings I feature—Trappers of Men (2006; fig. 21) and The Fourth World (2012; fig. 22), both members of his extensive series of “moral landscapes” (2001–). Contemporary issues of race, gender, and land use are on display, not so much in the landscape settings, as Richard Hill has astutely noted,57 but in the bizarre casts of characters acting on these stages. The landscape elements in Trappers of Men closely replicate those of the German-born American artist Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, of 1868. In other landscape borrowings, Monkman mixes and matches his sources, as in Sacred Vows (2001), for example, where the bottom of the image is lifted from Paul Kane and the sky from Jacob van Ruisdael. In Among the Sierra Nevada and Trappers of Men, Bierstadt and Monkman alike essay the sublime majesty of a high alpine lake surrounded by vertiginous peaks and unbelievably precipitous waterfalls. Bierstadt’s scene extends the mythologies of the wilderness to the American West, the locale of divine and untouched Nature with a capital N. In Jonathan D. Katz’s words, “in North America, the Romantic genre itself was all bombastic grandiloquence marshalled to fossilize an image of a virginal land prior to European encounter, the moment before an old world could conquer the new.”58 Giovanna Di Chiro is even more withering: “The discourse that opposes an Edenic or sublime nature to a fallen culture either categorizes people of color as identical with nature, as in the case of indigenous peoples or Third World natives . . . , or classifies them as people who are anti-nature, impure, and even toxic, as in the case of poor communities of color living in contaminated and blighted inner cities or in the surrounding rural wastelands. . . . Wilderness or Eden must be located where these ‘toxic’ or ‘fallen’ people are not.”59 Bierstadt first visited Yosemite in 1863 and was the first painter to extol such locales in the American West, but his articulations of the sublime used a well-known European formula that was widely exported to and developed in settler regions around the world.60 The vocabulary of the sublime wilderness came to be what tourists expected and is arguably what many still expect. It was also lampooned at the time as extreme and more recently as clichéd in Komar and Melamid’s “paint by numbers” series America’s Most Wanted and America’s Least Wanted paintings (1994–97).61 The artists composed the paintings in this large project on the basis of the likes and dislikes of people surveyed in eleven countries. In America’s Most Wanted, as in almost all other national polls, mountainous landscape was what the majority preferred. Here there are historical figures too and, as if they had meandered out of Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada, some deer.
FIG. 21 Kent Monkman, Trappers of Men, 2006. Acrylic on canvas, wood frame, 262 × 415 × 9 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Purchase, Horsley and Annie Townsend Bequest, anonymous gift, and gift of Dr. Ian Hutchison. Photo courtesy of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. By kind permission of the artist.
Experiencing this creed through the Bierstadt painting, we as viewers take up a position as if approaching the lake, where we seem to disturb a flock of ducks in the left foreground. A herd of preternaturally healthy deer has waded into shallow water. Our presence has alerted them too: all but one have their heads up, looking for intruders. The primary fiction of this type of painting is thus enacted: we are there, the first humans to view this magnificent spectacle of nature. This myth was trusted by many in the late nineteenth century, causing some visitors to be disappointed by the reduced scale and human inhabitation of the sites Bierstadt and other Hudson River School artists depicted. Bierstadt painted other versions of the Yosemite Valley while in Rome, homeland of the European landscape school.62 He was also fascinated by the region’s first peoples and painted them in works such as Sunset Light, Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains (1861). However much he and others viewed Indigenous peoples as “primitive,” literally part of nature and thus beneath European and American culture, their absence or portrayal as one-dimensional, primitive figures in the works Monkman appropriates is part of Bierstadt’s increasingly compensatory penchant to depict the West as an unpopulated Eden for those of European heritage to discover and claim as their own. The urgency to preserve and display such majesty went hand in hand with mining and other extractive technologies that were literally dismantling mountains (in California especially) as well as with the tourism that such paintings encouraged.63
Monkman takes this persiflage much further in Trappers of Men. The deer and ducks have been replaced by an eclectic array of figures, some contemporary, some of the nineteen hundreds (the trappers of the title), some Indigenous, others mythological. That this is an allegory of artists’ and art history’s ways of looking is suggested by a lakeside struggle between Piet Mondrian—at his easel composing an abstract, neoplastic work while looking at Bierstadt’s lake and mountains—and Jackson Pollock. It is a scene directly comparable with Mark Tansey’s tongue-in-cheek Action Painting II (1984), in which a group of “action painters” create pictures of a rocket launch rather than the expected abstractions of Abstract Expressionism. Perhaps Pollock wants more emotion from Mondrian, wants him to respond to nature (a category the Dutch artist so abhorred that he banished green from his palette). Most significant is the inclusion on the left of the photographer Edward S. Curtis,64 via whom Monkman makes reference to the import of nineteenth-century landscape and ethnographic photography as well as painting. As Denise Markonish writes in Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape, “A brief . . . post–Hudson River School lesson [on the genre] might go as follows . . . we had the great nature photographers of the turn of the century . . . then we had the Earth Art movement of the 1960s . . . there were the New Topographics, photographers in the 1970s who turned their backs on the sublime . . . and in the 1990s, Eco Artists collaborated with scientists and environmentalists” (13). Her point, which I support, is that contemporary eco artists are beholden to and part of this history of landscape. Curtis’s tripod camera is set up, and his box of generic “native” headdresses is at the ready to clothe and stereotype the naked Indigenous men to his left, perhaps for his now infamous twenty-volume book The North American Indian (1907–30), in which he sought to record the purportedly “dying race” of the American West. Bierstadt also experimented with photography and used landscape images made with this increasingly important technology as source material. His brothers were professional photographers, and he worked with better-known practitioners such as Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge in a circuit of mutual influence.65
Monkman’s manic iconography supports his powerful inversion of many codifications of gender, race, and landscape. His alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, was inspired by American painter George Catlin’s “Indian Gallery,” which toured in the United States and Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, and modeled on the musician Cher’s “half-breed” act.66 Just as Catlin sometimes included himself in his paintings, so too Monkman creates a double. A “berdashe,” the Indigenous third gender so detested by Curtis and Christian missionaries,67 Miss Chief is Monkman’s compellingly queer disrupter of norms. In the artist’s words, “I . . . wanted to create a strong, powerful, two-spirited person that could represent that alternate point of view. I chose to create Miss Chief as a two-spirited person because the tradition of two-spiritedness was present here in Indigenous cultures and communities before contact, but was repressed by the colonial governments and the church. I wanted her to also represent the sexualities and gender variance that was present in Indigenous communities across North America that were traditionally accepted and respected.”68 Monkman is of Cree and Anglo-Irish heritage; not only does he put people and their histories back into the evacuated landscapes of the nineteenth century, but he also questions the notions of both racial purity and hybridity by populating his work with a spectrum of racial collaborations and sexual activities. For him, there is no purity. Neither can the hybrid exist, though, since this very notion depends on the possibility of unmixed entities.
Why does Monkman use this landscape tradition so explicitly? Rightly insisting that we examine the interactions of figures with landscape here, Richard Hill writes that Monkman’s “already tangled web of references is intensified in multi-figured large scale works like Trappers of Men (2006) and then taken to its riotous extreme in The Triumph of Mischief (2007). Here, against the backdrop of Albert Bierstadt’s Looking Up the Yosemite Valley (c. 1863–1875), a bacchanalian revel of figures from any imaginable time and place cavort around the figure of Miss Chief, creating a disjunction of temporal references that is, in its own way, as sublimely overwhelming as Bierstadt’s towering mountains.”69 Hill and Katz hold that the figures are the real interest in Monkman’s paintings; they are complex where the landscape is a mere replica and little more than scenography. It is true that Monkman alters his source landscapes very little, but noting what he does change in them, as well as what we might see in these scenes when we recall Carus’s earth-life pictures, discussed in the previous case study, suggests an ecological interpretation of these works. “In genuine Humboldtian style,” Chunglin Kwa argues, for example, “Church and Bierstadt combined sublime grandiosity with painstaking detail on huge canvasses.”70 Refusing to celebrate the sublime in all its problematic glory yet again, as an exhibit such as Yosemite: Exploring the Incomparable Valley at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2016 clearly did, Monkman brings forward these nineteenth-century priorities so that he can critique their penchant for redoubling the attempted extermination of Indigenous peoples in this region.
In The Fourth World (2012; fig. 22), he meticulously mimics Bierstadt’s Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall (1864; fig. 23) and characteristically replaces the group of white “pioneers” and their horses at a campsite with his own anachronistic, outrageous, and hilarious scene. Monkman plays out the disenfranchisements that characterize the notion of the “fourth world,” defined as “[n]ations forcefully incorporated into states which maintain a distinct political culture but are internationally unrecognized.”71 The term applies to one third of the world’s population. Importing Richard Serra’s sculpture Clara-Clara (1983) to form a conduit, Monkman shows a group of long-haired men on horseback driving a small herd of buffalo through this form toward a precipice, in effect creating a “buffalo jump” used for millennia as a hunting technique by Indigenous peoples on the plains of North America. Monkman’s deployment of Serra provides a compelling art-historical perspective on the ownership and placement of art in our time as well as on ancient hunting practices. Manipulating Serra’s massive double-curved piece as Monkman does in this painting is itself a historically nuanced gesture that goes beyond appropriation or citation. Designed for an exhibition at Paris’s Beaubourg in 1983, its weight forced the sculpture outdoors into the museum’s garden. It was subsequently and controversially reinstalled in the Tuileries Garden for the exhibit Monumenta 2008.72 Fourth World thus articulates a thoughtful play of temporalities and customs. Monkman reports, “The Hopi believe that one of the signs that the Fourth World is ending is that many white youth, who wear their hair long like the Hopi, will join the tribal nations to learn their ways and wisdom.”73 Monkman mixes racial semiotics in this painting: the riders appear to be white and have long blond hair. But they ride bareback, unclothed from the waist up, as if in a Western. Their leggings sport camouflage patterns. Suggesting another temporal and cultural gap, Monkman changes the soft, telluric hues of Bierstadt’s landscape to sharp, jarringly defined blue tints. He makes the impressive rock cliffs and waterfalls that we see appear as kitsch, a fake that wants to be identified as such, and in so doing affects yet another separation between us and hackneyed nineteenth-century views. His landscape is not a timeless backdrop: in both paintings we witness the slow, geological time of mountain erosion, the “earth life” as opposed to the rush of extermination in the buffalo hunt. We see the earth in different temporalities simultaneously.
FIG. 22 Kent Monkman, The Fourth World, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 in. By kind permission of the artist.
Though not always with the sparkling precision we see in Bierstadt, many landscape painters in the United States, from the 1820s until the turn of that century, sought to understand and record for our edification the details of the physical world. They combined particularity with grandeur: the ability to see more detail implied a fuller appreciation of God’s creation.74 Although he dismantles this metaphysics, Monkman, in copying Bierstadt and others with a difference, holds on to the long measure of earth time that dwarfs human and animal life. It is possible to understand this aspect of his concern with multiple temporalities as ecological by comparing his work with the conflicting time frames established in the video Deep Time (fig. 12), for example. Monkman makes reference to this way of thinking in the impending slaughter that is the centerpiece of Fourth World, and, even more dramatically, in his installation The Rise and Fall of Civilization (2015; fig. 24). This work occupied a large room in Toronto’s Gardiner Museum, a center for the ceramic arts. Buffalo jumps across North America yielded unimaginable quantities of bone, bone essential to the production of ceramics. Entering this walk-in diorama, one can approach the bottom of a nine-foot ersatz cliff over which Miss Chief presides and three life-sized animals are being driven to their deaths. At the base is a bone garden and collection of pottery fragments fabricated by Monkman. Inspection of the “bones” reveals that some are repurposed as imitations of Picasso’s Bull’s Head (1942), which the Spanish artist counterfeited from a bicycle seat and handlebars. Monkman, on four of his imitations, substitutes a ceramic seat on which a cheesy picture of Miss Chief on a rearing horse appears between two grazing bison and a white settler, the latter splayed on the ground in apparent awe.
FIG. 23 Albert Bierstadt, Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, 1864. Oil on canvas, 341/4 × 271/8 in. (87 × 68.9 cm). Timken Museum of Art, Putnam Foundation Collection, San Diego. Photo courtesy of Timken Museum of Art.
References to Picasso abound in Monkman’s installation, most notably in the frightening face of the largest of the three bison, which looms over us. A version of Picasso’s autobiographical Minotaur figure has been stylistically relocated to the artist’s Cubist period, then reattached as the visage of a terrified bison. Viewed from the front, the head is splayed onto one visual plane. As Monkman explains, “I am now inserting cubist figurations by Picasso . . . as a metaphor for how Indigenous cultures got flattened during the last 120 years—the compression of pictorial space as a metaphor for the loss of Indigenous language and culture.”75 From the side, we see that the beast’s entire body is a cubistic patchwork of animal hides, a clear reference to the mass slaughter of bison for this commercially viable commodity. Completing the installation are two-dimensional steel cattle rising from the rubble—an allusion to Picasso’s lithographs titled Bull (1945–46)—and walls painted with bison-like animals reminiscent of prehistoric Amerindian and proto-European cave paintings. Picasso vaunted his own artistic kleptomania, not least of so-called “primitive” work from Africa and Iberia that he saw in the Trocadéro ethnographic museum in Paris. Monkman states that Picasso was “the archetype of European male dominance and aggression. . . . The bull was an extension of his penis.”76
FIG. 24 Kent Monkman, The Rise and Fall of Civilization, 2015. Mixed-media installation. Gardiner Museum, Toronto. Photo: Jimmy Limit. By kind permission of the artist.
It is in his differentiation from Picasso that we can discern an ecological strain in Monkman’s re-created landscape. Commenting on the grandly allusive title of this piece, he states, “[I]t’s partially the idea of cultures recycling and returning. It’s also . . . an allegory for the cyclical nature of painting and art. For example, during the Primitivist movement of the early twentieth century, European artists looked at non-European art, then produced pared-down images that were supposed to represent the art of non-European peoples. They were almost like pictographs. . . . to a certain extent, I suppose I’m embracing what came before.”77 He does not embrace Picasso but instead sees him as representative of European hubris. For Monkman and many artists and scholars, Indigenous or not, the expropriation of lands and the aggressive killing of bison to remove Indigenous people’s food source rather than simply to supply meat, not to mention excessive hunting by the U.S. Army, are ecological travesties that pit the long-standing harvesting of bison by Indigenous peoples against the ravenous pace of colonization. The peoples of the plains identified with the bison as ancestors, not distinguishing them from people. It is an unspeakably cruel irony that their oppressors also conflated these beings, though in opposite terms. Colonel Nelson A. Miles, for example, a decorated American career soldier, explained the extermination in these terms: “This might seem like cruelty and wasteful extravagance but the buffalo, like the Indian, stood in the way of civilization and the path of progress.”78 Estimates of the total number of bison on the Plains before this decimation range from 50 to 70 million. At one point there were a mere three hundred left; some of these were killed and preserved for museum collections.79 Are the precontact practices—“traditional ecological knowledge”80—displayed in The Rise and Fall of Civilization to be taken as models in our ecologically stressed present? “Native American environmentalism,” to borrow the title of Joy Porter’s recent book on the subject, remains controversial. In this highly contested terrain,81 Monkman’s landscape suggests that these practices exemplify accord with the planet and its resources, but not through a simple return to the past or an impossible separation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous in the present. The Rise and Fall of Civilization thus resists the offensive nostalgia of Bierstadt’s Last of the Buffalo (1888),82 which portrays a heroic struggle between Indigenous hunters and a noble bison, a fantasy vision of precontact ecological balance painted at the very time when both were threatened with extinction.
Where initially Kent Monkman’s redeployment of a Western landscape type is overt but his works’ ecological concerns less evident, this ratio is reversed in the paintings of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Expressed with the images and cosmology of his Coast Salish and Okanagan heritage, as well as that of other visual traditions in the area, Haida especially, his ecological outcries about a stolen and ravaged sacred land could not be clearer. That dramatic paintings such as Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land, Shaman Coming to Fix (1991; fig. 25), Clear Cut to the Last Tree (1993), and Clear Cut to the Last Old-Growth Tree (2013) are landscapes that draw on both Indigenous Pacific Northwest Coast imagery and that of the Surrealists is manifest. Yuxweluptun calls these “history paintings” because, in his words, he is “interested in recording history: residential schools; global warming, deforestation, and pollution.”83 Scorched Earth presents an expansive coastal landscape replete with lamentation. The large forms in the background were mountains but are now hollowed-out tentlike shapes covered in—perhaps even made from—the ovoids, form lines, and vibrant colors of Coast Salish and cognate regional imagery.84 Patchy brown areas suggest industrialized deforestation. A masked blue totem figure in the center distance weeps, as does the sun. In the middle ground, forms melt, reminding us of Dali’s dream landscapes. But Yuxweluptun has not simply borrowed motifs from the Surrealists: he calls his work “visionism” to mark his separation from colonial practices of using Indigenous motifs. A witness to the rapid destruction of land and ancient values, he has said of his work from this period, “my reality was surreal.”85 What we see is Yuxweluptun’s reality and that of still-colonized Indigenous peoples globally. A red shaman in the foreground faces us, despairing of the wanton harvesting that has left stumps at his feet that reveal masklike tree spirits on their scarred surfaces. The coulisse of trees behind him combines a compositional device fundamental to Western landscape—the repoussoir element that frames the view and pushes our eye into the illusionary depth of the landscape—with conifers whose verdant boughs are fashioned from masklike ovoids. The shaman and his ilk are cut off from their land; they can no longer communicate with it or indeed reconstitute it physically or spiritually. They cannot exercise their responsibility to the earth. A related work explores the frustrations of this intransigent situation. In Red Man Watching White Man Trying to Fix Hole in the Sky (1990), Yuxweluptun distinguishes his people’s reality—sky—from the technological colonizer’s ozone layer, much discussed at the time and exemplary of the Anthropocene. The precarious attempt to patch this hole is doomed to fail.
FIG. 25 Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Scorched Earth, Clear-Cut Logging on Native Sovereign Land, Shaman Coming to Fix, 1991. Acrylic on canvas, 195.6 × 275 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 1993. Photo courtesy of National Gallery of Canada.
“My work is very different from traditional art work,” Yuxweluptun states, referring to both Indigenous and Western traditions. “How do you paint a land claim? You can’t carve a totem pole that has a beer bottle on it. . . . I paint this for what it is—a very toxic land base. This is what my ancestral motherland is becoming. Painting is a form of political activism, a way to exercise my inherent right, my right to authority, my freedom. . . . I can speak out in my paintings even without the recognition of self-government.”86 His use of Surrealist imagery is calibrated to this purpose. The Surrealists were unique colonizers of this region, collecting its masks and other artifacts as catalysts in their own quest to access realms of consciousness more fundamental and significant than those of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. André Breton owned a Kwakwaka’wakw headdress from Alert Bay, British Columbia. Surrealists Kurt Seligmann and Wolfgang Paalen visited the region.87 Aware of these cultural deracinations, Yuxweluptun purposefully borrows in turn from the Surrealist vocabulary of landscape to make what he calls “salvation art.”88 Less Christian than Indigenous in its connotations, and despite the degradation of land and culture that he experiences, he is hopeful about the fruits of articulating what he sees on the land. Charlotte Townsend-Gault suggests that Western landscape has been denied here; that is true if one means the grand tradition that Monkman takes up, for example, or much contemporary non-Indigenous landscape painting in this or other regions noted for their natural beauty. But Yuxweluptun’s passion for the Surrealist landscape is too strong to disavow. Again, it is not the look of Surrealism but the disorientation stemming from it that he makes his own and makes productive. He indigenizes it to discuss land, what settlers call land claims, and how we see landscape in terms of now inevitably imbricated cultures. “You don’t have to go to the Amazon to see an aboriginal person standing in a clear-cut. We have some of the largest clear-cuts in the world here in British Columbia. I’ve stood in it and it is mind-boggling.”89 His work seeks dialogue and places of cultural connections: “It’s about an exercise of communicating with the outside world. It is very important to me and I feel that this is where there exists a meeting point. How do you translate from one culture to another?”90 In its particular ways but also in concert with the other work examined in this chapter, Yuxweluptun’s paintings are a potent development of landscape into eco art.
This chapter and its case studies demonstrate the enduring links between landscape in many forms, land art, and contemporary ecological art. Two other projects add detail to the range of practices brought forward and transformed as Indigenous landscapes. Bonnie Devine’s installation Battle for the Woodlands contrasts Indigenous and European senses of mapping, territory, land use, and landscape. But I turn first to Arthur Renwick’s photo work Delegates: Chiefs of Earth and Sky (2004; fig. 26), which reconnoiters the troubled relationships between landscape and language from an Indigenous perspective. Each of the eight images making up the full Delegates series employs one of Renwick’s photographs of characteristic land forms from what is now South Dakota, traditional territory of the Sioux confederation, including the Lakota. Each is named for an Indigenous chief from this region, using both his original name and an English translation—Tah-ton-kah-he-yo-ta-kah, “Sitting Bull,” in this example. “I was thinking a lot about Dee Brown [author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee] when I did this series, since what he talks about happened where I was shooting this project,” Renwick says. “Most of his book is just quotes from people, and I realized he was giving a voice back to Indian people, and in a way that’s what I wanted to do.”91 Colonial expansion into this area was administered under the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, signed in today’s Wyoming, which promised to leave a significant amount of land to these peoples but was broken after an expeditionary group led by General Custer discovered gold in the Black Hills.92 Renwick is from another region known for mining, or as Jennifer Dales has aptly written, he “comes from two places in northern B.C.—Kitamaat, the ancestral home of the Haisla people, and Kitimat, an Alcan company town, built in the fifties to house the aluminum smelter’s workers.”93 In each of Renwick’s images, the landscape fills the bottom half of the individual “delegate,” an official term used by the U.S. government when they brought chiefs to Washington, D.C., to negotiate the land deals that eventually forced Indigenous peoples onto reservations. The top of each monument, as Renwick calls them, is a polished aluminum “sky” perforated by a Western punctuation mark, a comma in this case. “The punctuation marks are the spaces in between the words, the silences in between,” he claims. “They symbolize the language used in the treaty—English—a language the Lakota couldn’t understand or read, yet they were expected to sign it. I named each artwork after one of the warriors, using their traditional Lakota names.”94 Visible through these lexical marks is a copper backing set deep enough to establish a visible gap in the aluminum. Copper was mined in Renwick’s home area long before the aluminum smelters arrived with industrialization. As we move in front of each human-sized and sculptural “delegate,” the copper glints. We also register the punctuation marks that frame meaning in any written document. They can be likened to the breaths and pauses in oral speech, what may remain unsaid but has implications. They can suggest continuity, a full stop at a boundary, or indeed an enclosing structure, as we see in the “delegates” that include brackets. Renwick’s punctuation floats free in the sky, out of context, but these marks nonetheless suggest the one-sided lexicon of the treaty negotiations. Photography is another bracket or language, a way of seeing (and often claiming) the land as landscape that may, but often tragically does not, correlate across cultures.95 How is this series ecological as well as a conveyor of notions of landscape into present debates over land? Renwick’s understated photographs of terrain in the bottom halves of the “delegates” in this series often suggest an earlier epoch, perhaps before contact, when the land was less stressed by human habitation and less contentious. In some we see horses grazing on expansive grasslands, but Renwick does not picture a static Eden: we see fences on this land, and in the first “delegate” he made, we can notice a drainage culvert leading into a stream bed alongside animal tracks. Though in Tah-ton-kah-he-yo-ta-kah (Sitting Bull) buffalo have returned from near extinction, their numbers and range are tokens of the precontact past. When we consider the punctuation in Renwick’s skies as our collective recent history, our haunted and haunting “landscape,” what Loretta Todd says about Yuxweluptun’s paintings can apply to Delegates as well: “I see many worlds inhabiting the same space, with tragic consequences.”96 This is the land today, bounded in characteristically “settler” manner.
FIG. 26 Arthur Renwick, Tah-ton-kah-he-yo-ta-kah (Sitting Bull), from Delegates: Chiefs of Earth and Sky, 2004. Gelatin silver print, anodized aluminum, copper, 152.4 × 76.2 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist and Katzman Contemporary.
Bonnie Devine remaps the contested spaces around the Great Lakes in Battle for the Woodlands (2014–15; fig. 27). She began the project with a colonial map from the 1830s, an orientation centered on what was then called by newcomers Upper and Lower Canada and the Great Lake States of the United States. Wings on adjacent walls depict what became the western United States and Canada to the left and the northeastern United States and Canada’s Maritime provinces to the right. Three anthropomorphic elements stand in front of this array, observing. The lineaments of this map are familiar to most who live in this highly populous area now because it is a prototype of dominant contemporary cartographies of the region. It shows the political boundaries between the United States and Canada that were established through continuous armed conflict among the French, British, American, and Indigenous groups from the 1760s until the second decade of the nineteenth century, a continuation of earlier conflicts to the east and a lamentable preview of strife to the west, as Devine’s installation suggests. Crucially, it is the map and mindset that all children, Indigenous and not, are taught as the truth in school. As we saw in chapter 1, maps are closely related to the acquisitive, territorial aspects of landscape, both etymologically and historically.97 Devine intervenes to map “the opposing view” onto what Eva Mackey pointedly calls this “settled” perspective, what Devine also calls the other “imaginary” of the European colonization of this region, that of Indigenous peoples who continue to experience displacement.98 Looking to the Atlantic seaboard and thus back in time, she suggests that the Micmac welcomed the settlers, saw their needs, and thought, altruistically, “we would share the land [and] live here together.”
FIG. 27 Bonnie Devine, Battle for the Woodlands, 2014–15. Maple, red willow, unidentified twigs, paper, and sea grass. Art Gallery of Ontario. By kind permission of the artist.
Battle for the Woodlands is set in a three-dimensional space into which we can walk. Symbolically and physically, it is an open space, not an enclosed box. Taking the map of colonial domination as her baseline, Devine reinscribes Indigenous senses of this place that settlers try to obliterate from the visual and historical record. Her landscape narrative moves us from right to left, from east to west, from the seventeenth century toward the present, and from a Eurocentric view of northeastern North America to a recognition of Indigenous relationships with this land. We see radically changed circumstances as we move. For example, Devine is intent on showing that Indigenous peoples and the region’s animals were relentlessly pushed westward through the process of colonization, a displacement that was ideological as well as physical. Her point is buttressed by Patrick Wolfe’s analysis: “The primary object of settler-colonization is the land itself rather than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labour with it. Though, in practice, Indigenous labour was indispensible to Europeans, settler-colonization is at base a winner-take-all project whose dominant feature is not exploitation but replacement. The logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct—invasion is a structure not an event.”99 One result was what Devine considers “catastrophic habitat loss.” Where Indigenous groups saw the lakes and rivers as living parts of the earth—Devine tints the major rivers in red to suggest lifeblood—settlers instead saw the waterways as conveyances that made commodity extraction and the spread of farms and industry feasible. “I made them into animals because they aren’t just bodies of water. They are beings who are cohabiting with us in this space right now. They are living. We are in a relationship with them,” she states.100 Devine also marks the boundaries between the newcomers and Indigenous inhabitants with bead lines, indicating treaties signed (and later broken).
With inset drawings of skirmishes between Indigenous groups and American and British soldiers in the lower center of the installation view here (fig. 27), just off the colonial map and thus in actively contested territory, Devine shows that the earth has become increasingly militarized. She highlights the need for an awareness of the specificities of language and a critique of Eurocentric treaty texts—which we also witness in Renwick’s Delegates series (fig. 26) and Michelson’s TwoRow II (fig. 51)—by inscribing these battles over texts from A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh, by Allan W. Eckert.101 The combat she shows focuses on the pivotal figure Tecumseh (1768–1813), the Shawnee leader who brought together a large confederacy of Indigenous groups to resist colonial expansion into the regions west of Detroit. Tecumseh sided with the British in the War of 1812 and was killed in battle in 1813, which brought an end to cooperation with the British and Canadians and to Tecumseh’s vision of an independent Indigenous nation in what is now the American Midwest, the area into which the animals in Devine’s installation flee.102 The “desperate reality” that she depicts is both historical and ecological. It uses land and landscape to tell a mournful story about dislocations, clashing values, and ultimately the lamentable history of the earth in this region. That this is an unresolved, ongoing narrative is suggested by the way in which Devine lays an Indigenous vitalism over the Great Lakes on the central map. The map commands the center of her installation. The western edge of this landscape is placed where two walls join, so that Lake Ontario and most of Lake Erie are on the map, but Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior are still in the less colonized and more spacious West for which Tecumseh fought. Again, these lakes are represented as animals, not given colonial names. The Indigenous forms overlap the Western mapping of the land for Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Champlain to the east. Animals rush toward the apparent openness and freedom of the West, but in this part of her spatialized narrative, Devine reminds us of ongoing strife with Objects to Clothe the Warriors, three elaborate jackets honoring the main Indigenous leaders who resisted the expansion of the colonial frontier in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Tecumseh, Pontiac, and Crazy Horse.
The centrally placed sculptural group is titled Anishinaabitude in reference to the Anishinaabeg peoples, one of the main groups in this territory and one to which Devine links her Ojibway heritage, and to Frantz Fanon’s notion of “negritude.” Standing on a low platform in front of the colonial map, these humanoid forms are made of interwoven twigs gathered from each group’s traditional homeland, thereby recognizing those who negotiated with and were then displaced by colonial forces. These figures are of the landscape and make reference to weaving techniques important to Indigenous arts. Devine includes the Mississauga, who signed the “Toronto Purchase” in 1787, which the British crown—contrary to Indigenous peoples’ understanding of land—claimed gave the newcomers title to the land on which Battle for the Woodlands stands within the Art Gallery of Ontario. These figures are thus of the past, but they also monitor the installation in the present, surveying it in an Indigenous manner, repudiating mapmaking as division and ownership. Devine’s installation is thus a meta-landscape. It presents the history of this disputed land and encourages us to reflect on the processes of its division, of landscape depiction, and of constructing a visual narrative. Here we see both landscape’s manipulation and its articulation, its uncovering of erased histories and attempts to relink them to the present of this locale. Devine is concerned to bring both Indigenous and settler concepts of landscape and nature into a contemporary ecological frame. “We’re at a moment right now where [Indigenous artists] have a chance to make some change here. Why? Because the rest of the world is also saying: Save the water! Do something about the Earth! Don’t mess up the air!” Hers is an ecological message of a “very ancient consanguinity, which means having the same blood, it means water that is running [through] lakes and rivers runs in us.”103
I began this chapter with examples of the historical and ongoing suspicion of landscape in land art. The many artworks I have discussed should instruct us to be on the alert for the often self-serving manipulations of the landscape genre in its past and its current redeployments. Robin Kelsey discusses the relationship between landscape depiction as a set of problems and as a mode worthy of ongoing theoretical and artistic endeavors in ways that are significant here. “Ecology is arguably the most promising matrix through which to posit a history of landscape ideology for our time,” he argues. The engagements with earlier forms of landscape examined in this chapter add credence to his point that “it may make sense to shift from an emphasis on landscape as an ideological distance between classes of humans,” which we have seen in both Devine’s and Monkman’s art, for example, “to an emphasis on landscape as an ideological distance between species and habitat,” a gap that Battle for the Woodlands strives to make evident and to narrow. Kelsey’s astute definition of older landscape paradigms as “a fantasy of not belonging to the totality of life of a terrestrial expanse, traditionally taking the form: you belong to us; we do not belong to you,” could instructively be modified in the direction of “consanguinity.”104 If landscape is frequently integral in the articulation of eco art, the category should now be beyond suspicion.