CHAPTER FOUR

CONTRACTED FIELDS

“Nature” in the Art Museum

You’re probably always going to come back to the interior in some manner.

ROBERT SMITHSON, IN “DISCUSSIONS WITH HEIZER, OPPENHEIM, SMITHSON” (1970)

My thinking for this book began with what struck me initially as an unusual efflorescence in the 2000s of art that brought “nature” inside in spectacular and challenging ways. Dion’s Neukom Vivarium (2007; see fig. 6) is a potent example; Eliasson’s The weather project (2003; see fig. 1) is another. These and many other artists consciously work with the contrasts and contiguities between inside and outside. Many of these projects purposefully dismantle any easy bifurcation between museum space and public space and ultimately between the human and nonhuman elements of nature—Huyghe’s Untilled (see fig. 14) is a case in point. Where land art was in important respects “controlled” by the priorities of remoteness and ephemerality, so too eco art is increasingly beholden to the museum. There are of course many works of eco art outdoors, and such projects are featured, for example, in art festivals that are largely open-air—for example, the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale in South Korea and Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari Art Field. But is nature here not simply an extension of the institution, a “museumification,” as Thomas McEvilley has called “the making of nature into a museum by the placing of artworks in it”?¹ Many significant examinations of land art and eco art have been in museum exhibits, such as Earth Art (Cornell University, 1969) and Fragile Ecologies (New York, 1992). A short list of more recent instances includes The Greenhouse Effect (London, 2000), Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art (Chicago, 2005–6), Earth: Art of a Changing World (London, 2009), Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 (London, 2009), Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles and Munich, 2012–13), Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966—1979 (United Kingdom, 2013–14), and Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture (Toronto, 2013). The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art (Chicago, 2013–14), though not expressly focused on land or eco art, did claim to be about art concerned with the earth via the archaeological as a practice and trope. Some curators address the paradox of bringing work concerned with the planet’s environment inside. Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon introduce the Ends of the Earth catalogue by stating, “Many people will think that a museum exhibition on Land Art is impossible.”² The organizers of Beyond Green raise the issue of environmental impact: “Organizing a traveling exhibition that addresses the intersection between sustainable design and contemporary art poses particular challenges: how to be thrifty and environmentally conscious in presenting, interpreting, packing, and shipping works of art.”³ Others underline the educational and informative aspects of their exhibitions, whether they display “a cultural response to the way that human activity is affecting the natural balance and physical cycles of our planet,” in the case of Earth: Art of a Changing World, or “trace the post-war history of artists’ engagement with ecology and environmentalism,” in Radical Nature.⁴

Conveying nature into the museum today is arguably a peculiar symptom of Western society’s apparent alienation from the nonhuman environment. That there are more and more of these exhibits demonstrates the angst of the Anthropocene and, more hopefully, a widespread will to grapple with its issues in the aesthetic. It also appears to be a return to, not simply a movement away from, the complication of relationships with gallery institutions and the urban that motivated land art. I initially thought that this move indoors was somehow unusual, but that view depends too much on the paradigms of land art. If we think in terms of a longer history, as I have suggested throughout this book, presenting nature indoors has been the norm in the West since well before landscape became a separate genre of art. In ancient Rome, interior frescoes depicted luxurious gardens in zones where the depicted and real were contiguous. Is this not the point of trompe l’oeil depictions of nature? Even many versions of the landscape garden were domesticated, created outdoors but transported inside the frame of the country house in the English-garden tradition, for example, not only through the available views from inside, but also through the famous efforts of gardens such as Stourhead to reproduce views from Claude’s landscape paintings from the seventeenth century.

Land art was rarely as separate geographically, administratively, and economically from such institutional contexts as some of its rhetoric implied. Oppenheim’s versions of Gallery Transplant (1969)—where he transferred floor plans of galleries to outdoor fields—attest to the complex articulation of this paradigm. James Nisbet has reminded us that De Maria’s so-called Munich Earth Room is only a shorthand for a much longer title: The Land Show: Pure Dirt, Pure Earth, Pure Land.⁵ The triple reference to purity in this labored title can be thought of as a reference to Alexander Rodchenko’s famous material farewell to painting in his ultimate statement in that medium, Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, and Pure Yellow Color of 1921. “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases,” he wrote in 1921, “red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: this is the end of painting.”⁶ If this connection to pioneering abstraction seems unlikely, recall that De Maria’s contribution to the Dwan Earth Works exhibit in 1968 was a large yellow monochrome called The Statement Series: Yellow Painting [The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth], an explicit reference to the yellow paint that was often used for land-moving equipment, a reference whose bracketed segment is inscribed by De Maria in a small text panel at the center of this painting. Just as art making did not end for Rodchenko, De Maria’s assertion that this was the “last” landscape indoors—whether in reference to sculpture to be walked thorough, as Nisbet suggests, or within the frame of painting, as I am claiming—did not imply that landscape was over but rather that it was radically modified. Landscape depiction and land art oscillate in De Maria’s “earth rooms,” as do the gallery space and the dirt he placed there.

Lucy Lippard construed another apparent polarity, that between city and noncity, as a matter of ecology in her rolling exhibition, 557,087 in Seattle (1969), 955,000 in Vancouver (1970), plus its two later instantiations, 2,972,453 in Buenos Aires (1970) and c. 7,500 in Valencia, California (1973–74). These exhibitions are prime examples of the intercalations of land art and conceptualism. Submissions were received as descriptions of works on index cards; Smithson’s Vancouver Glue Pour (see fig. 8) was a parallel, outdoor event. Lippard wrote, “Ecology, the relationship between an organism and its environment, interests some artists as a framework for control and change, others as a means of exploring the ratio of order and lack of order in nature.”⁷ Does the practice of bringing landscape inside seem odd now? Is the current efflorescence of ecological art indoors an indication that conceptions of nature and of the museum have changed since the 1970s? The museal sites of eco art are arguably not as confined ideologically as those that land artists contested, nor is contemporary eco art in the museum framed in the same ways that a Cézanne landscape in the same collection might be. Nonetheless, eco art is to a significant extent still grappling with the paradigms of conventionally framed landscape and the putative liberation of land art, especially questions of physical and institutional siting. I turn now to a consideration of some of these permutations.

 

OUTSIDE IN

“Geoaesthetics,” as I use the term, refers to the many speculations on the earth and the human relationship to nature found in the Western philosophical tradition, science and technology studies (STS), and cognate fields, as these intersect with art practices.⁸ As Gary Shapiro has shown in exemplary detail, it is a long tradition with Nietzsche at its center. “Modern aesthetics is only a relatively brief episode or minor fold in the larger history of thought’s dealing with the earth,”⁹ he writes, which implies that philosophy is always to some extent geophilosophy and that aesthetics is imbricated with geoaesthetics. My main interest is in thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, and Michel Serres, who often discuss the visual arts to develop their arguments about the earth and whose positions help us to interpret what’s at stake in eco art. Latour, for example, is closely connected to Eliasson’s installations and is himself a curator as well as the co-author of two plays about climate change, Cosmocoloss: A Global Climate Tragic Comedy (2011) and Gaïa Global Circus (2014). Philosopher of science Michel Serres’s Natural Contract was published in French in 1990. With Guattari’s Three Ecologies, it was a prescient geoaesthetic analysis of the Anthropocene and remains a succinct and profound indictment of what our technological culture has created. For Serres, what we have now is a “world war” that takes the material earth and all its inhabitants as the target of multiple hostilities.¹⁰ He is not alone in this view or in expressing it in terms of violent conflict. A more recent iteration of the idea comes from the environmental scholar and activist Vandana Shiva, who wrote in 2010, “When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits—limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration.”¹¹ Rob Nixon’s powerful notion of “slow violence” is also germane, not least because it emphasizes the profoundly differential effects of climate change on differently located peoples across the planet. Slow violence, he claims, is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”¹² With these more recent perspectives in mind, I examine Serres’s discussion of the weather and the earth to introduce salient negotiations of inside and outside in the work of eco artists today.

Serres makes three key arguments regarding our thinking about the earth. First, Western technological society is obsessed with data and with words. “We busy ourselves only with our own networks,” he claims, to the extent that we have forgotten nature because “the essentials [of our lives] take place indoors and in words, never again outdoors with things.” If this accusation focuses on space, Serres insists that our problems are equally temporal. The “we” of politicians and institutions, including Big Science, think only in the short term, whereas “[t]o safeguard the earth or respect the weather . . . we would have to think toward the long term.” As we have seen, in their “geo” focus, eco art, land art, and landscape contend with these issues in both their spatial and temporal manifestations. Anticipating the notion of the Anthropocene, Serres writes, “At the very moment when we are acting physically for the first time on the global Earth, and when it in turn is doubtless reacting on global humanity, we are tragically neglecting it.”¹³ This urgent tragedy brings him to his third charge, that however much industrialization may be responsible for this situation, the problems are of human making. Staying with his main exemplar, the weather, he suggests that there is “also a second pollution, invisible, which puts time in danger, a cultural pollution that we have inflicted on long-term thoughts, those guardians of the Earth, of humanity, and of things themselves.”¹⁴ Serres here also anticipates the “material turn” and “speculative realism” in philosophy and visual culture, which I discuss in chapter 5. While his formulation of what soon came to be called the Anthropocene could be criticized as treating all human agents as equally responsible for current climate change, the latent and problematic nature/culture, outside/inside pairings in Serres’s account are revised when put into dialogue with and articulated in terms of eco art that examines cognate issues.

An entrance to many of the themes adumbrated by Serres and central to eco art today is found in Michael Sailstorfer’s installation Forst (2012; fig. 33). Walking into a narrow exhibition space through which visitors must first pass to access other parts of the Berlinische Gallerie when this work was shown there, we see five large trees hanging upside down from the high ceiling. They are of different species and have only recently been cut. Each is attached to a mechanism that makes it turn, and each tree hangs from a height that causes it to draw shapes on the floor and drop foliage in circular patterns. The effect is multisensory: we hear the branches move, and we smell the leaves. In line with my investigation of deracinated trees in chapter 1, Sailstorfer avers that the sight is at first “brutal” but suggests that it comes to seem “poetic” and dance-like.¹⁵ It would be possible to miss the monitor at the end of the gallery, but the video it displays is integral to Forst. Not unlike Smithson’s site/nonsite relationship or indeed the connections that most of the work in the Earth Works exhibit in 1968 maintained with nongallery contexts, on the monitor Sailstorfer presents Black Forest, a clearing he made in Germany’s region of that name, seen in a live feed from above. He had painted an area six meters square, marking it as different from the “black forest” that surrounded it. Black Forest is thus an abstract painting that inevitably calls to mind Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Black Square, which was first exhibited in the 0.10 show in Petrograd in 1915, billed as the “last” Suprematist exhibition. In a revealing but not unusual reversal, Sailstorfer takes the gallery work into what we think of as nature and brings the trees indoors. While the word Forst is one German cognate of “forest” in English, the homonym “forced,” to ears attuned to both languages, can also be heard and seems appropriate to the extreme manipulations of this work, articulations that effectively carry Serres’s notion of the war on the earth. Sailstorfer exemplified this theme in a series in which he exploded trees (Raketenbaum, 2008). In a way that connects this project to the many eco artworks that concern agriculture as land use and land marking considered in Landscape into Eco Art, however, he explains that this action was not wantonly destructive: “some fruit trees at my father’s farm were planted too close to each other anyway, [so] I decided to blow up seven of them.”¹⁶

 

FIG. 33 Michael Sailstorfer, Forst, 2012. Installation view: Berlinische Galerie, 2012. Photo: Noshe. Courtesy of König Galerie. By kind permission of the artist.

We see the modified nature/culture, outside/inside pairings broached by Michel Serres again in Eliasson’s The weather project (2003; see fig. 1). Eliasson’s installation complicates what Serres identifies as the opposition of outside and inside and thus reduces to an oversimplified alternation in which inside is the place of words and information and outside is nature. So spectacularly popular and memorable was Eliasson’s main installation in Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall that it inevitably overshadowed his earnest attempt to break down the dichotomies that Serres deploys. As if to answer Serres directly, Eliasson reverses the weather terms. That visitors streamed into the gallery in a London winter to see the sun plays out a cultural cliché about the English climate noted in the eighteenth century by Pope in Peri Bathous, a text preoccupied with the sun: the weather is dull and the sun is welcome. “Nature” was staged inside, and words circulated beyond the gallery in the form of text panels in taxi cabs, for example, and on the invitation to the exhibit’s opening. On a yellow card reminiscent of the overall golden hue of the installation and placed in London taxis, we read that “73% of London Cab Drivers Discuss the Weather with their Passengers.” The goal was to spark yet more conversations about the weather. In a catalogue text appropriately titled “Museums Are Radical,” Eliasson added complexity to the sense of weather as a social, scientific, and aesthetic phenomenon, one that we often experience in the city: “Every city mediates its own weather. . . . We experience the weather through the ‘city-filter,’ as well as the other way around.” He believes that many are obsessed with the weather because “it has such a strong relationship with time,” especially in northern climates, “where the extreme diversity of weather, its wide-ranging seasonal variations, its continuous shifts from day to day and hour to hour,” measures time’s passage. Weather forecasting is not only a prime example of a techno-social interface; it also gives us the opportunity to “look at the time ahead of us, organising our expectations” (131–33).

Sharon Switzer’s simple and effective #crazyweather (2013; fig. 34),¹⁷ a work presented on Twitter, electronic billboards, and in a gallery setting, encouraged people to comment in “real time” on weather events they found remarkable. As her title implies, most record what are perceived as anomalies, potentially disorienting interruptions in our expectations. She reminds us, too, that “social” now implies “social media” for millions, if not billions, of people. The weather both is and is not on one’s phone, dissolving the inside/outside bifurcation. Though technology in 2003 did not allow Eliasson Switzer’s scale of ramification, his project acted out the interplays of spatial and temporal zones by radicalizing the museum as site. No longer was it a place that, in his words, stood “‘next to’ or ‘outside’ society and somehow reflect[ed] it from there,” as it usually did during the impossible dream of modernism. The museum, like everything else in society, is a complicit conveyance. In all his work, therefore, Eliasson tries to avoid the appearance of neutrality or mastery. “[A]ny chosen ideological strategy,” he writes, “any marketing choice, any architectural detail, must not only be considered as a condition and part of the project, but must also somehow be revealed to visitors.”¹⁸ The mechanisms that run his various indoor waterfalls, for example, are clearly evident. In Riverbed (2014) he re-created an Icelandic landscape inside the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Not only was this work obviously contrived, being indoors, in a museum that purposefully diminishes boundaries between its display areas and its coastal setting, but Eliasson also made it difficult to traverse: “I don’t only move the landscape in but also the microconflicts: suddenly we don’t take them for granted. This is what is interesting: the experience, the activities you do, also become exhibited. It’s as much about the interaction as about the actual plateau, the platform, on which people are walking.”¹⁹

 

FIG. 34 Sharon Switzer, #crazyweather, 2013 (video still). Composited digital video, 10:00. Created for Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 2013. By kind permission of the artist.

Eliasson’s The weather project is not only one of his best-known works but also a piece definitive of an emerging eco-art canon. Your embodied garden (2013), a short video (fig. 35), while more contained and not often discussed, also reveals Eliasson’s working procedures as he and collaborators explore relationships between interior, exterior, and landscape in an ancient landscape form, the Chinese garden. Eliasson reports that in 2011 he visited “the Master of Nets Garden [Southern Song Dynasty and later] and the Lion Grove Garden [1342, rebuilt 1918], two scholar’s gardens in Suzhou, China, with, among others, writer Hu Fang, gallerist Zhang Wei, choreographer Steen Koerner, and a film team. The aim of the journey was to explore the traditional gardens as models for physical movement, for duration, flow, and rhythm.” “What particularly interests me about the scholar’s garden,” he writes,

 

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

 

are its various temporal aspects: the creation of the garden, the cycle of changing seasons, but also the visitors’ physical moving-through its convoluted and intricately linked spaces. What I find so inspiring is that these different notions of time passing are taken as explicit co-producers of the garden.

When I went into the scholar’s garden, I saw the garden, but I also saw the limits of what I could see; I saw the construction of my own way of seeing things.²⁰

Over the short duration of the video, Koerner choreographs both his physical union with the natural forms we see and the garden’s artificiality, what we might call its technologies of emplacement. He bends to conform to the shape of a branch, for example, becoming nature. Yet his complex arm and hand movements do not seem natural from any angle. Especially successful in conveying this double sense of participation at a distance, seeing oneself seeing, as Eliasson describes other work, are images reflecting both the dancer and the garden’s architecture in a mirror, a device he often uses, notably on the ceiling of Tate Modern in The weather project. At times the mirror itself is visible in Your embodied garden; at others we see only what it reflects, the dancer or one of the garden’s portals. The mirror brings space to the video camera, but that space is prearranged by the norms of Southern Song Dynasty garden design. The soundtrack conveys both birds chirping and passing traffic, elements not necessarily in the garden physically, except for their sounds. We catch glimpses of others viewing the garden and Koerner’s dance performance too, though the sense of the constructed and cultivated nature of this space comes across most in shots of the dancing in which we also see two gardeners pruning a tree. His moves match the gardeners’ articulation of nature spatially and temporally, as the strictly regimented garden itself does, dispelling the cultural pollution, the deleterious attitudes that Serres rails against.

Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; see fig. 2) also polled local residents’ views on the weather and archived these testimonials and the all-important “weather words” on the floor and in the reading room of the indoor space. This work can also be understood to react to Serres’s emphases on data, the inside/outside disconnection, the suspension of time’s long duration, and the tainted attitude our culture has toward climate change and the weather. I have mentioned that Horn’s physical modification of the former library included enlarging the windows to let the weather seem even more proximate at a site that is on a high point in the village and looks out to the ocean. Like all coastal fishing communities, Stykkishólmur is intimately involved with the weather and with rising sea levels. While we may read in Horn’s repurposed library, we do not read words in isolation from the material traces of glaciers, which, as we have seen, can themselves behave linguistically in her installation. The experience of walking through the more sculptural elements of the work—the glass columns—may be quite brief, but we cannot help but reflect on the temporal extension implied by the melting of glaciers formed during the last ice age. Our individual roles in climate change are not as graphically registered here as they are, for example, when we “turn off” one of Rúrí’s waterfalls in Archive: Endangered Waters (see fig. 17), but the very fact that glaciers, so much a symbol of Iceland and of climate change, are “preserved” in an institutional setting is enough to set in train a reevaluation of our behavior.

Like the paradigms of the remote and ephemeral discussed in chapter 3, the outside/inside dyad is both a useful place to start thinking about the relationships between eco art and gallery spaces and also too simple. Pierre Huyghe, a contemporary master of intensively wrought platforms for aesthetic experience, illustrated this point with swiveling doors in his exhibition Celebration Park (2006). We watch as large partitions on tracks traverse a generous gallery space yet never close it off. “They suspend the moment of opening, forever,” says Huyghe. “Usually a door is a fixed object: you’re in or you’re out. You can or cannot gain access to something. Here, the doors are moving, so you don’t even know any more where ‘outside’ is. Who says a door is a threshold that means you are inside or outside something? . . . [I]f the threshold is moving, if the doors are moving, there is no more inside or outside. It’s definitely about boundaries and culture and fluidity. You think you can always be outside, but maybe you are always inside.”²¹ As in the case of Untilled (see fig. 14) in relation to dOCUMENTA 13, discussed in chapter 1, however, what he fails to mention is that this mobile experience takes place inside the museum as institution and architecture. Visitors have already crossed that threshold. We are always inside some structure, some system, but in his passion to explore the liminal rather than offer institutional critique, Huyghe endlessly questions and occasionally loosens these strictures. His elaborate Journey That Wasn’t (2005) is a case in point. It exists in three parts with the same title or, as the artist says, in three acts. What we can still see is a video based on Huyghe and his team’s voyage to Antarctica in February 2005, which constituted the first “act.” He heard that the melting ice in the region was exposing new islands and that on one there had been sightings of an albino penguin. Huyghe is the opposite of a documentary artist: he is not interested in capturing a reality, then bringing it back. While his voyage of exploration echoes nineteenth-century quests for the South Pole, he readily acknowledges that this work is more like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which also exists in nonidentical triplicate. Huyghe claims that Smithson was the “only” earlier artist to understand that one cannot simply transplant “elsewhere” to the city and museum and have it be authentic.²² The second part of the work was a musical performance staged—and filmed—in New York’s Central Park in October 2005, sponsored by the Public Art Fund of the Whitney Museum. In parallel with most land art, this performance was out of doors physically but inside the gallery structure administratively. Referring to this event’s relationship to the voyage south, the news release states, “Its physical presence will be echoed in musical form: composer Joshua Cody has written an instrumental score based on the sound data derived from the island’s topography.”²³ Finally, there is the video, which combines elements of the voyage and the New York performance, including the elusive white penguin in animatronic form.

Huyghe states that in A Journey That Wasn’t he was “interested in translation and movement and corruption from one world to another. I have doubts about exoticism, this fascination for bringing an ‘elsewhere’ here, believing that ‘there’ is ‘here.’ Elsewhere always remains a story: to bring it back, you have to create an equivalent.”²⁴ He is not concerned with questions of truth versus fiction but instead initially creates a situation and works through the phases and components that we see here to see how that set of coordinates might emerge. He is disarmingly open about his process and the result:

 

I’m filming the actual journey and a kind of parallel, a translation of this journey in the form of a musical in Central Park. The project happened to be in Antarctica so there’s all this mythology around it. You can think about Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” about all the Antarctic explorers, about the ozone hole. There are many parameters. I’m just trying to navigate through this crowd of references. It gives a certain tension to the work because each image reminds you of this or that, or that. But for me that’s just background. . . . We don’t know if I even went there—if I saw this island or the albino penguin. Maybe I did. Maybe it’s a special effect. I don’t care.²⁵

Thus, while the spark for A Journey That Wasn’t was global warming’s exposure of new land near Antarctica and the rumor of the unusual penguin sighted there, his work is not ecological in the sense that Huyghe wants to call attention to climate change or save the penguin’s new habitat. The climate situation is an occasion, not a cause or purpose. Though the polar voyage is reminiscent of Cape Farewell’s trips to the Arctic, that organization’s mission in bringing climate scientists and all types of artists together is to raise awareness and incite action. Huyghe, by contrast, sets up a situation to see what happens, “what emotion it gives you,” “what meanings you bring” to the situation, and “how you can connect things.” However, because A Journey That Wasn’t is self-consciously linked to both Robert Smithson’s land art and a central eco-art cause, global warming, the three-part work offers a meta-reflection on eco art’s relationships with the museum as institution. It is a “play with . . . the given rules of the museum,” Huyghe suggests.²⁶

In an extensive conversation with Mark Godfrey in 2006, Huyghe was happy to have A Journey That Wasn’t affiliated with Smithson’s site/nonsite dialectic. Just how close he and Smithson are in their procedures can be appreciated through a closer analysis of the connection. The “was” and the “wasn’t” of the audience members’ journeys is what most concerns Huyghe. His tripartite expedition spawns either assessment, and potentially both. Those at the New York performance experienced ice in the form of a skating rink and the translation of the island’s topography in sound. A version of the rink was further “translated” indoors to his retrospective at LACMA, discussed with reference to Michael Heizer in chapter 3. But for most in attendance that evening in Central Park, the journey south “wasn’t.” The video is even more compressed, suggesting, as so many contemporary artworks do, that time is a central concern. We are directed to the separate yet imbricated times of the voyage, the event in Central Park, and the video, as well as both the earth’s time, experienced through changes in weather as climate change—what I would call ecological time²⁷—and the strictly personal, inevitably idiosyncratic time of each onlooker, who, as Huyghe says, is reminded of this or that. Did Huyghe and company find an albino penguin? We do not know and that fact does not matter. For most people interested in A Journey That Wasn’t now, only the video remains. Smithson’s endlessly refracted metaphor of site/nonsite suggests a way to think not only about Huyghe’s A Journey That Wasn’t but also about the relationships between eco art and its museum settings. The dialogue among the instantiations of both Spiral Jetty and A Journey That Wasn’t can be said to grow from the crystalline structure of the site/nonsite, as do the patterns of eco art’s connections to the gallery in many cases. Instead of being outside (nature) or inside (institution), Huyghe’s work suggests that the spatiotemporal axis parallels the one Smithson described as existing between the site and nonsite in the text panel for his 1968 Non-site (Palisades-Edgewater, N.J.): “Between the site and the Nonsite one may lapse into places of little organization and no direction.”²⁸ If Smithson sounds as vague here as Huyghe sometimes does in describing the effects of his work, we should not be misled. Both identify and take us to the indeterminate yet potent spatiotemporal dimension from which we may gain a perspective on eco art. Huyghe and Smithson are linked in their mutual fascination with the oscillation between the poles of site and nonsite. Smithson’s “Provisional Theory of Non-Sites,” a text from 1968, unpublished before its inclusion in the artist’s Collected Writings, can readily function as a description of the transit between the three acts of A Journey That Wasn’t and even of movement between eco art and the museum. “Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Non-Site itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that ‘travel’ in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions. Let us say that one goes on a fictitious trip if one decides to go to the site of the Non-Site” (364). He goes on to emphasize that this theory is itself only a fleeting expedient, but more than any other connection between land art and the eco-art practice in focus in this chapter, the site/nonsite twinship persists.

The two artists are also connected in their explorations of islands. While the new island that Huyghe researched and even attempted to name was not as magnificent as Atlantis, it was this place of geological speculation that fascinated Smithson.²⁹ He was aware of the lore that the Great Salt Lake was connected to this ancient island. A large reef in the lake is named Atlantis Reef, for example. He created several works that explicitly addressed this and other islands, including Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island (1970, realized only in 2005); Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), a collage from 1969 (fig. 36); Map of Glass (Atlantis) (1969), which was installed both outdoors and inside; and, most significantly, his extensive plans for the unrealized Island of Broken Glass, which was halted over ecological concerns in 1970, just before its installation. Smithson executed several works in the Vancouver, British Columbia, area in late 1969 and early 1970, some in connection with Lippard’s exhibition 955,000, as we have seen, and others that were independent, including the Island of Broken Glass.³⁰ In 1969 Smithson had imagined a project on an island off the west coast of Vancouver that would be an extension of his glass maps. His hypothetical island and continent works of that year “all terminate in this Island of Broken Glass,” he told interviewer Dennis Wheeler (200). Working with gallery owner Douglas Christmas and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Smithson scouted out sites and secured permission from the provincial government on December 15, 1969, to use Miami Islet, forty kilometers west of Vancouver, for the project.

 

FIG. 36 Robert Smithson, Map of Broken Clear Glass (Atlantis), 1969. Collage, photostat, map, graphite on paper, 163/4 × 14 in. Dia Art Foundation. Gift of Nancy Holt Collection of the Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai. © 2016 Estate of Robert Smithson / SODRAC, Montreal / VAGA, New York.

While Smithson needed to work with a gallery and other institutions, his chosen site was quite remote. As Grant Arnold has emphasized, Island of Broken Glass would have been Smithson’s first relatively permanent earthwork, anticipating Spiral Jetty in many ways. The hundred tons of broken glass could have been viewed in its reflecting glory by art enthusiasts if they chose to make the trip, but mostly it would have been seen from passing fishing boats and ferries. Smithson’s plans initially received positive press coverage locally, but conservationists’ opposition grew steadily. While a letter-writing campaign eventually resulted in the cancellation of permits by the government, the story has yet another chapter. Responding to criticism, Smithson came up with a new proposal for the same site, the Island of the Dismantled Building. As Christmas suggested to the authorities, it was to be a “monument to ecology” by providing shelter for the sea birds and seals that conservation groups believed would have been ill affected by an island covered in glass shards. It seems that the government department in charge had had enough controversy, however, and the revised idea was also rejected. Smithson was furious and made his earlier claims to environmental stewardship seem disingenuous in a text called “Rejoinder to Environmental Critics,” published (appropriately enough) in the journal Collapse: “ecological cowards want to suppress my art because they need a scapegoat. . . . The island is not meant to save anything or anybody but to reveal things as they are. . . . It is not for us to judge the island but for the island to judge us.”³¹ “Things as they are” suggests both the reality of waste and the entropic return of glass to sand over the millennial time frame belonging to the island but not to human regulations and institutions. Smithson’s materialized theory of the site/nonsite furnishes a legend for Huyghe’s Journey That Wasn’t on several planes. First, it is an acknowledged precedent. Both Island of Broken Glass and Huyghe’s work feature islands, travel, and significant questions about what did and did not take place and where. Brought together, these works provide maps of how to move between the gallery and other landscape sites, maps that are exploratory rather than practical and that, instead of didactically leading us to specific places, reflect “the ways things are.”

Chris Drury describes himself as an environmental artist working at the interface of art and science to make “site specific nature based sculpture.”³² His images made in Antarctica offer not only a productive counterpoint to Huyghe’s Journey That Wasn’t but also extend my discussion of the inside/outside pairing in eco art. Drury is also a keen constructor of ecological camera obscuras, a format, as I argue in this chapter’s concluding case study, that is one of art’s most potent and long-serving vehicles for bringing the outside in. Drury’s extensive portfolio is also instructive regarding ongoing relationships between eco artists and the previous generation, in that his practice stems from work he did with noted land artist Hamish Fulton in the 1970s. Sympathetic with Fulton and Long’s principle to “take only photographs and leave only footprints” in the landscape,³³ Drury also acknowledges his debt to remotely sited American land art, often criticized in Britain at this time, because it “opened up a field of debate and paved the way for much of what has happened in the landscape subsequently—in particular, the process of removing works from the white space of the museum gallery and allowing them to interact with the world as it is.”³⁴

Using the unusual technique of echograms—aerial “radar images of cross sections through the ice down to the land mass beneath”³⁵—his works in Antarctica could not be more remote from gallery structures, yet they also insist on the imbrication of the human and nature. Produced when he was an artist-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey in 2007, Double Echo and Everything Nothing, for example, map the topography of the earth beneath ice nine hundred thousand years old and four kilometers deep as well as register our affective responses to this landscape. The topographical lines registered in Double Echo (2007; fig. 37) reminded one of the scientists at the research station of echocardiograms. “These are like the heartbeat of the Earth,” he said to Drury. In response, the artist brought “the pilot who made these flights . . . to Central Middlesex hospital where [Drury] was working, to have his heartbeat read. So this echogram from East Antarctica is superimposed with an echocardiogram of the heartbeat of that pilot. Both imaging techniques are very similar; one using radar and the other ultrasound.”³⁶ In Everything Nothing Drury traces out the landscape’s contours with the handwritten words of his title. He inscribes himself in this vast landscape, pays homage to the many land artists who used text, and counters Serres’s complaint, discussed above, that the museum is the place of text. “Antarctica is the height of nothingness and yet it contains everything, it drives our climate and has our history encoded in the layers of ice,” Drury says of this work.³⁷

 

FIG. 37 Chris Drury, Double Echo, 2007, from Flight W38. Inkjet print, 1340 × 1140 mm. Edition of four. Collection of the artist and Central Middlesex Hospital. Photo courtesy of Chris Drury. By kind permission of the artist.

“Humans are part of nature,” Drury holds, “and just their act of breathing impacts nature. It is this division between nature and culture [that] is at the root of the environmental problems we face today.”³⁸ The camera obscura is the ideal tool with which to bring nature inside a human structure, to enact the confluence of inside and outside that I have been examining in this chapter. Drury has since 1990 been constructing what he calls cloud chambers, huts that act as camera obscuras, usually sited in nemoral surroundings.³⁹ Crucial in the context of eco art’s relationships with gallery spaces is his purpose in these and related projects: “the exploration of what inner and outer nature mean.”⁴⁰ Drury was invited by the Nirox foundation in 2011 to create a work at the so-called Cradle of Humankind in South Africa, a site of immense geological and anthropological interest. He has developed a proposal “for a permanent site-specific work on the land at [the] Nirox [Foundation], which brings together time, geology and man’s presence in this unique environment.” It features a hut on the site, on whose interior walls would be painted murals with lines that echo the striations of the fossil record nearby. As he explains, “The chamber will also act as a camera obscura by cutting out the light and using just a small aperture in the apex of the ceiling. Images of trees, branches, clouds and the sun would be projected over the murals onto the walls and floor.” He would thereby bring the outside into a compressed record of geological and human time, effectively overlapping our present and the deep past of the species and of the planet. It is a time piece in a new space. As Drury elaborates, “it should place the work in real time, within the cycles of planetary time.” He specifies that “the experience within should be cave-like.”⁴¹ Elements of this eco camera obscura relate historically to Alexander Pope’s grotto at Twickenham, discussed below, and to Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976; fig. 39) in the Utah desert and thus further articulate the relationships among landscape, land art, and eco art. They also link back to Drury’s long-standing interests in mining—Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around (2011), for example, which offered a critique of mining practices in Wyoming and was removed from its commissioned site at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, making it the Tilted Arc of eco art⁴²—and to Smithson’s Cinema Cavern project, discussed in my next case study.

 

CASE STUDY 6: BRINGING NATURE IN; THE CAMERA OBSCURA IN LAND AND ECO ART

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

The power of image making encoded in the figure of the cave and in its recurrence as a site in the camera obscura also makes it an ideal locus through which to speculate about the theory and practice of eco art history in general. Because the cave functions as a signifier for the artistic imperative, an endorsement of art history’s place in cultural representation, and also as a mythic beginning point in the Western prioritization of the visual, its figuration carries within it a set of suppositions on which the visual depends but which are rendered subservient or effaced in the genealogy of visualization. Visual culture is not exclusively visual or necessarily visible. The cave as a figure has buried within it a material history and an augmented corporeal or sensory legacy, which militate against the ocularcentric tendency to transcend historical specificity and geological and somatic materiality. As natural formations, human constructions and images, caves are necessarily interior, hidden, obscure, and, paradoxically, also the sites where visuality is created. As I argue using the example of Robert Smithson’s deconstruction of Platonic hierarchies, artists and theorists struggle with this paradoxical legacy, reproducing caves as projections of inspiration or of the mind itself and constantly interrogating the dialectic they encapsulate between interior and exterior, between materiality and transcendence, between the seen and the unseen.

Why do caves powerfully embody the notion of beginning and interrogate the nature of images? Their liminal position, the placement between inside and outside, makes them a privileged and dangerous passageway between worlds or systems of representation. The cave was, for example, often a space for the reception of prophetic utterances, as depicted, for example, in the Ear of Dionysius in Syracuse, Sicily, by Jacob Philipp Hackert (1777). Caves are the entrances through which we extract wealth from the earth as well as conduits to its mysteries. Explorations of what we may call “interiority” in the West, whether psychic, anatomical, or geological, frequently take place in a real or projected interior space and recurrently in caves. A central example is the theorization and ubiquitous use of the camera obscura in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The phenomenon was noted by the Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti in the fifth century B.C.E. and , according to many scholars, used extensively by Vermeer, for example.⁴⁴ Descartes, Locke—with his “dark room” of the understanding, which he describes further as a “closet, wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or some idea of things without”⁴⁵—and others repeatedly likened the camera obscura to the mind and saw this technology as a model of human perception. If the mind is imaged as a cave, then it would follow that the camera obscura is in fact nothing less than a frequently portable version of Plato’s cavern. There is also a long tradition of fabricating caves or grottoes as “natural” sites of wonder and exhibition within landscape gardens. The synthetic grottoes of Duke Franceso I de’ Medici and Isabella d’Este’s Palazzo Ducale were used for this purpose in the Renaissance. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder calls the “museum” “an artificial imitation of a cave.”⁴⁶ The cave and grotto are part of the prehistory of the museum. In the 1720s, inspired by the classical literary evocations of caves and grottoes, Alexander Pope—poet, landscape architect, and translator of Homer—extended this tradition by forging his elaborate grotto at Twickenham, upstream from London, into nothing less than an organism for the creation of images. Robert Smithson envisioned a project that both inherited and offered a critical revision of the grotto conventions elaborated by Pope. In his 1971 Cinema Cavern project, Smithson proposed to build an underground movie theater in an excavated cave or mine, a space that would reveal for its captive audience the Platonic assumptions governing the creation of the image.

Pope’s grotto forms part of a large garden project at his estate just west of London. The only part of his property at Twickenham still extant, the grotto has been neglected for centuries but is now the focus of a restoration project. Designed as a subterranean passage, the grotto, in the overall scheme, served to link the garden of Pope’s country home with its Thames riverfront, a considerable challenge topographically, given that a roadway intervened. In a drawing of ca. 1725–30, most likely by William Kent, we can discern the entrance to the grotto and even see the Thames beyond, marked by a passing boat. Pope’s first version of the grotto was in part a Wunderkammer—containing various rare rocks and shells, as we know from a contemporary inventory—and in part an inspirational, if nostalgic, escape to a supposed nymphaeum. While Pope’s grotto is not unique in its display of geological findings, it does explicitly combine the literary and philosophical interest in caves with the new science of geology. Rugged though it was, it was a decidedly textual place, a poet’s refuge. Clearly Pope drew inspiration from these surroundings. Two contemporary sketches (attributed to Kent, but perhaps by Dorothy Boyle, Countess of Burlington) show him writing in his cavern. Pope relates that he liked to use the lamp seen in these images in order to enjoy the unusual effects its light made as it glanced off shells and minerals. Related effects, even the image of the Thames, were produced by the mirrors he placed in the ceiling of the main corridor. We see the cave’s outlines in a sketch by Pope himself, dated January 1740. This diagram is as much evidence of ongoing plans for his creation as it is a record of its properties. While it contains a spring, for example, we also see Pope’s questions about its evolution. “What proper for a natural roof?” he scribbled. Pope put these and many other queries to his friend and physician, Dr. William Oliver of Bath. Almost a year after this plan, Pope produced another illustration. It shows the results of visits and discussions with Oliver: a much enlarged grotto that moved away from—or added layers on top of—the earlier product of his literary imagination. Samuel Lewis made a more precise drawing of this version in 1785.

A sense of Pope’s new claims for the experience of his grotto can be felt when we relate his own written account to the second plan and to Lewis’s diagram. Most extraordinary, however, is Pope’s vivid likening of his grotto to a camera obscura: “When you shut the Doors of this Grotto,” he wrote in 1725, “it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera Obscura; on the Walls of which all the objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture in their visible Radiations.”⁴⁷ What Pope orchestrated and could control for his own pleasure and inspiration, inside his cave and in his mind, was the reduplication of the picturesque effects of landscape. A visitor related the overwhelming effect of Pope’s use of mirrors and the image-making abilities of this camera obscura: “every Object is multiplied, and its Position represented in a surprising Diversity. Cast your Eyes upwards, and you half shudder to see Cataracts of Water precipitating over your head, from impending Stones and Rocks. . . . By a fine Taste and happy Management of Nature, you are presented with an indistinguishable Mixture of Realities and Imagery.”⁴⁸

What other images may have been imprinted on viewers in this fashion? This question takes us back to Pope’s rebuilding of his caverns in 1740. Simply put, he renovated his classical nymphaeum to resemble a mine. In 1739 and 1740 Pope visited quarries near Bath. At this time he began to discuss the redesign of his grotto with Oliver. Oliver in turn enlisted the help of his relative, the Reverend William Borlase of Cornwall, a geologist and natural philosopher. Borlase and Pope corresponded, and Pope eventually ordered all sorts of materials from Borlase, many tons of Cornish rock, as would be found in local tin mines. These supplies Pope arranged, as Borlase directed, to “make the Place resemble Nature in all her workings.”⁴⁹ By October 1740 Pope’s Twickenham grotto very much mirrored mines described in Borlase’s later Natural History of Cornwall (1758). Instead of the curiosities he displayed earlier, Pope was now clear that he wanted to see and appreciate authentic minerals, not those foreign to the area or merely impressive to the eye. He made this explicit in orders for materials and in his verse descriptions of his earthwork. In a letter to Bolingbroke in September 1740, he enclosed the following verses:

 

Thou who shalt stop where Thames’ translucent wave

Shines a broad mirror thro’ the shadowy cave;

Where ling’ring drops from min’ral roofs distil,

And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill;

Unpolish’d gems no ray on pride bestow,

And latent metals innocently glow;

Approach. Great Nature studiously behold!⁵⁰

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

Is there an unbridgeable gap of time and cultural difference separating Pope’s grotto and Robert Smithson’s vision of a cinema cavern in 1971? Both Pope, with his Augustan world of classical allusions and mining technology, and Smithson were unconcerned with the ecological implications of their environmental meddling. Both dwelled purposefully on how images come to be made with light in the dark. Smithson was also concerned with the movement of images in his grotto. The effects he imagined mixed reality and appearance in thoroughly Platonic terms. He described his sketch for his Cinema Cavern project in these terms: “What I would like to do is build a cinema in a cave or an abandoned mine, and film the process of its construction. That film would be the only film shown in the cave. The projection booth would be made out of crude timbers, the screen carved out of a rock wall and painted white, the seats could be boulders. It would be a truly ‘underground’ cinema.” Smithson was an inveterate researcher, always scouting new sites for his planned alterations to and installations in the landscape. For the underground cinema, he visited many mines, including the Britannia Copper Mines in British Columbia when he was preparing Island of Broken Glass, in which mines he imagined making a film. “I remember a horizontal tunnel that bored into the side of a mountain. When one was at the end of the tunnel inside the mine, and looked back at the entrance, only a pinpoint of light was visible. One shot I had in mind was to move slowly from the interior of the tunnel towards the entrance and end outside.” The interior space described here functions as a lateral camera obscura, or a pinhole camera. If Smithson had completed his film of the construction of his cinema, he might have included in it this shot toward the light. One can imagine beginning in near darkness and seeing the light fill more and more of the frame, in effect loosening one’s chains, turning around, and walking right out of Plato’s cave (Plato, of course, would never have had an artist lead anyone out of the metaphysical shadows). Smithson goes on to say that “[i]n the Cayuga Rock Salt Mine under Lake Cayuga in New York State,” site of a project he realized in 1968, “I did manage to get some still shots of mirrors stuck in salt piles” (142). Gary Shapiro has written that “Smithson’s entire Cayuga project can be seen as a parody of the Platonic myth of the cave as well as of Plato’s conception of art as a mirror.”⁵¹ These Cayuga mirrors constituted one of Smithson’s signature nonsites, his invention for pointing toward the complex and never exactly corresponding mirror relation between nature and art, the gallery and the remote site, and ultimately the interior and the exterior of our minds, a dialogue at once profoundly abstract and irrefragably material. In this project, mirrors that were normally blind because of the mine’s darkness were balanced by Smithson’s installation of other mirrors on piles of salt in the Cornell gallery space. Here, as in the Yucatan in 1969, he liked the fact that mirrors produce images without human control, yet he also intervened by placing these image machines in nature. Mirrors and nonsites are productive of what he called “refuse,” that unmanageable Derridean “remainder” between mind and matter or perhaps the spatiotemporal gap between site and nonsite, inside and out. “My work is impure,” he wrote, “it is clogged with matter . . . it is a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter” (194).

Pope’s grotto finds a contemporary correlate in the purpose-built camera obscuras of Chris Drury. Drury has completed about a dozen of his “cloud chambers.” He works on commission, occasionally constructing a version for an exhibition but more characteristically making site-specific examples away from urban centers. Three of Drury’s camera obscuras share specific characteristics with Pope’s elaborate precedent. Wave Chamber (1994) was built beside a reservoir in Kielder Water and Forest Park, Northumberland, England. The rock structure and its aperture are designed to transmit the sense of water to the interior: “The rippling surface of the water is projected on to the pale floor of the chamber, which echoes to the sound of the waves.”⁵² Much as in Pope’s subterranean refuge and indeed in many examples of contemporary eco art, both vision and sound are important to the sought effect. Pope’s cavern was unusual as a camera obscura in that it was underground. Drury has created two works that share this feature: Tyrebagger Cloud Chamber in 1994 and Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky in 2003. The earlier commission was for a forest sculpture trail near Aberdeen, Scotland, a purpose that places this work on the limen between art institutions and “outside.” Drury explains that “local reaction to the proposed scheme was sceptical as people didn’t want their trees messed about with. In view of this I put the work underground, making an ‘invisible’ sculpture.” Pope’s reasons for making his grotto secret were more pressing, given that he was Catholic in an aggressively Protestant state. Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky was similarly purpose built for the “museum park” at the North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh. Partially buried to be unobtrusive, the cavern’s imagery may also be seen in the context of the positive, vitalistic pole of inverting trees, taken up in chapter 1. In Drury’s words, “the image of the surrounding trees [is] projected across the walls and floor upside down. The trees have the look of roots hanging down inside the dark underground chamber.”⁵³

The land artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014) was fascinated with apertures, with finding and framing views of landscape for contemplation. On a poster for her exhibition Outdoors-Indoors (1972) is a photograph of Views Through a Sand Dune (1972; fig. 38), a documentation of a perfectly round hole through a beach dune. We may look at the pipe that forms the hole or through it. In the latter case, it works like a telescope without a lens, framing a circular view of the landscape very much as eighteenth-century aids to landscape composition did, especially the Claude glass and the camera obscura. Looking in one direction, we see a seascape; in the other, a landscape with trees beyond a shoreline. As noted in chapter 1, Holt felt a connection to earlier practices of landscape composition: “It was in England that the roots of that kind of thinking began. . . . I always think of Gilpin. . . . [We] were going back . . . [and] finding out how the English treated their landscape.”⁵⁴ She was a pioneer in emphasizing land art’s relationship to the human body and human reality, a stance also adopted by many others at the time and since, including Drury. Referring to her Locators of the early 1970s, viewing tubes set at eye level in the environment, she wrote, “eight Locators—a mountain, a tree, a flat plain, a ranch house, etc. Through the work, the place is seen in a different way. The work becomes a human focal point, and in that respect it brings the vast landscape back to human proportion and makes the viewer the center of things.”⁵⁵ All of these techniques not only suggest but enforce the model of a single viewer framing his or her individualized view, a position that is often adopted in eco art today. As Pamela M. Lee has emphasized, Holt was a systems thinker. She used whatever means were at her “disposal to make the land ‘appear.’ . . . Such an approach highlighted the ecological dimensions of works of art—ecological in the sense that they treated the work of art as an ecosystem.”⁵⁶

 

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

In her best-known work, the Sun Tunnels (1976; fig. 39), she adopts an analogous device by boring holes through each of the four eighteen-foot-long, twenty-two-ton concrete structures, creating oculi “of four different sizes—seven, eight, nine, and ten inches in diameter. Each tunnel has a different configuration of holes, corresponding to stars in four different constellations—Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. The sizes of the holes vary relative to the magnitude of the stars to which they correspond.” She brought the constellations’ shapes into the tunnels as light. “The panoramic view of the landscape is too overwhelming to take in without visual reference points,” she claimed. “The view blurs out rather than sharpens. Through the tunnels, parts of the landscape are framed and come into focus.” These massive pipes may also be thought of as caves, relatively dark in the desert sun and sheltering us from the extremes of this locale. Most important in the contexts I am developing in this case study, the Sun Tunnels, though not enclosed, behave as four camera obscuras by bringing outside images into the darkened interiors.⁵⁷ In the daytime, the cosmic scale of our galaxy is brought into close view as “stars” projected onto the sides of the cave. When we look out from within a tunnel, another camera obscura effect inverts the landscape: “You can see whole mountains hovering over the earth, reflected upside down in the heat.” She produces this same effect using reflections of trees in water in her film Pine Barrens (1975) and experiments with the play of inside/outside in the photographic series Holes of Light (1973), made when she was planning the Sun Tunnels.

 

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

Whether in the natural form of a cave or the man-made forms of portable boxes and tents so frequently employed in the history of Western art, the camera obscura reliably produces three optical effects: it brings an image of the outside world into the enclosed space, it inverts this image (unless a lens “corrects” this presentation), and it exhibits this “picture” in considerable detail. There is also an important additional effect, that of the camera obscura as a metaphor. I noted one example in chapter 1, Martin Puryear’s Camera Obscura (1994), which is a sculptural installation of a cherry tree that has been hanged. The inversion is physical and the source of his title, but it was not created in or by a camera obscura. The detailed replication of an outside form has often been taken to be an advantage of the camera obscura (and its close relative, the camera lucida) in producing landscape views, as we glean from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s tirade against its use in his Discourse XIII, delivered to the students at the London Royal Academy in 1786: “If we suppose a view of nature represented with all the truth of the camera obscura, and the same scene represented by a great Artist, how little and mean will the one appear in comparison of the other, where no superiority is supposed from the choice of the subject.”⁵⁸ Reynolds extolled the neoclassical view that selection and invention, not replication, was the goal of art. As the epigram to the female personification of Theory on the ceiling of the Royal Academy’s library proclaimed, “Theory is the knowledge of what is truly Nature.” The contrast between Reynolds’s objection to the camera obscura and its extensive adoption in art making underscores Jonathan Crary’s point that “the function of the device or metaphor within an actual social or discursive field has fluctuated decisively.” Reynolds overstates the degree to which the camera obscura was merely mechanical. Artists pointed portable versions at what they chose, and they were free to manipulate what light then registered as an image. Crary argues that the camera obscura was vaunted only in part for its powers of replication in the eighteenth century. More important, he says, “is its relation of the observer to the undemarcated, undifferentiated expanse of the world outside, and how its apparatus makes an orderly cut or delimitation of that field, allowing it to be viewed, without sacrificing the vitality of its being.”⁵⁹ This is exactly the effect achieved by Holt in the Sun Tunnels. It is this combination of precision and choice—another version of “articulation’—that we see in contemporary redeployments of the technology in the field of eco art.

I discussed Rodney Graham’s installation Millennial Time Machine (2003; see fig. 10) in chapter 1 in terms of the inverted trees his device captures, and the converted nineteenth-century carriage as a technology for “shooting” images. The photographs of inverted trees that he has exhibited are, again, metaphors for the inversion effect of the camera obscura and the disorientations that presentation frequently brings. Another common technique is for artists to capture an image in a camera obscura, then “fix” it into permanence with a photographic print of some kind. James Nizam does this brilliantly and disturbingly in his Anteroom Series of 2007. The series as a whole plays with thresholds of time and locale, of inside/outside and before/after. Nizam does not use a portable camera obscura but instead finds this technology ready-made in soon-to-be-demolished houses in Vancouver neighborhoods. Performing a “creative trespass,” he quickly transforms condemned architecture with garbage bags and tape into an “optical device or photographic apparatus.”⁶⁰ Taking photographs of camera obscura images freezes the compelling liveliness of the technique, but this effect also seems redolent of the sadness of what we see happening. The houses are largely empty and were being replaced by larger, grander versions of themselves in a hot real-estate market fueled by the run-up to the Winter Olympics in 2010. That lament is only heightened when Nizam uses the camera obscura to bring a lush and vibrantly colored landscape into the drab recesses of the condemned house in Hydrangea in Room (Anteroom Series) (2007; fig. 40). In Cat in Room, for example, having closed off all light except for that entering a small aperture, he graphically displays this encroaching urban development in the form of a Caterpillar excavator demolishing a nearby house. Its yellow “arm” and the surrounding detritus is projected onto the wall of the home Nizam has temporarily occupied, implying its proximate fate. Its tongue-in-cheek title notwithstanding, it is not mere speculation to suggest that Nizam’s image makes a connection with Walter De Maria’s Yellow Painting, noted above, which glorified the machinery of manly earthworks. In general terms, Nizam’s explorations of these former homes is akin to Smithson’s ironic exposition of the picturesque of decrepit industry in New Jersey and the shambled interior of the Hotel Palenque. As I show in chapter 5, Isabelle Hayeur also picks up this concern for today’s ruins, now found underwater.

 

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

Nizam has explained his work in terms of reoccupying Krauss’s “expanded field,”⁶¹ a reference that takes us to land art and its out-of-the-way practices. In Sundial (2013), for example, he took a fragment of salvaged architecture from a ruined home in Vancouver and planted it upright in the Death Valley desert. The result, evident in a stark photograph, is a sculptural though evanescent shadow cast by an almost humanoid piece of wall and roof. Radically impermanent, the work here is the photograph of the shadow more than the three-dimensional form from the ruined house. In contrast with De Maria’s celebration of attacking the earth, then, Nizam’s inversions, by moving this scrap to make Sundial and by bringing the outdoors in in the Anteroom series, emphasize the fragility of the homes and the not-so-slow violence visited on adjacent properties. He critiques unbridled urban growth, real-estate speculation, and consumerism. This we know in part from the deprecatory title of another image in the series, Monster House in Room (Anteroom Series), which, by reflecting the new and “improved” larger version on the now-temporary wall of the older house, also projects the near future as opportunistic appropriation. There are no people in these homes, and only unwanted belongings are left. Nizam the “housebreaker” leaves no trace of his own presence.

Abelardo Morell’s experiments with the camera obscura have yielded a large range of fascinating photographic images that take us to a host of issues central to Landscape into Eco Art. He has us think about landscapes, both outdoors and in museums, about parks and gardens, cityscapes, maps, and about the museum as a place for landscape and nature. Morell has been making camera obscura work since 1991. As Nizam does, he photographs the resulting images to capture “the strange and delightful meeting of the outside world with the room’s interior.”⁶² He demonstrates a fascination with the camera obscura’s ability to transform rooms. He has said that he inverts the wrapping art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude “by covering the room from the inside.”⁶³ We see this in his homage to Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. In Camera Obscura: Courtyard Building, Lacock Abbey, England, March 16, 2003, he brings a facade of Fox Talbot’s country home, the location of many experiments with early photographic techniques, into a nearby interior space. As we have seen in the case of inverted trees in chapter 1, the strangeness of an upside-down image seems perennially able to catch our attention and to have us focus on the architectural details that we can see in such detail here. The spatial dislocation is odd and captivating, but of equal importance to Morell is a rearticulation of time. “I want my photographs to reflect a time when science, art, philosophy and religion were closer brothers and sisters,” he reports, “as they were in Fox Talbot’s time.”⁶⁴ The image may indeed take us back to the nineteenth century, but not in a way that suggests loss. “I felt as though I had walked into the past, . . . finding that room where he made some of his famous early pictures,” he has said in interview.⁶⁵ Morell instead looks to recaptivate us in the present through photography’s integration of factors he lists. This is especially evident in his works that focus on land and landscape.

Morell claims that he “always wanted to make pictures of landscapes,”⁶⁶ and he has done so in a way that is both art-historically savvy and immediate. Several examples were taken in museums in which he had a sculpture placed in front of a landscape painting, then photographed them together so that the figure became part of the scene, as in Frishmuth, Corot (2009), staged at the Yale University Art Gallery. A related practice is photographing the pages of books that illustrate landscape imagery. Sunlight on a Book of Landscapes (1995), for example, shows two views of the falls at Tivoli, near Rome, a site so important for Claude, Gaspar Dughet, and a host of later Italianate landscape painters that in 1758 the British landscapist Jonathan Skelton called it the “only school” of landscape painting.⁶⁷ Morell’s reproduction of a painting and an engraving of this destination is not a random landscape view but rather a locale essential to the development of the genre. In addition to suggesting the circulation of this pictorial tradition in books, Morell also plays with what is inside and outside the landscapes he stages. It is the sunlight to which he alludes, not the illumination of the earlier works or indeed of nature on site, that makes this image. Unlike Nizam, however, and with consequences I examine in some detail, Morell expands his choice of imagery by taking his camera obscura and camera on the road to produce what he calls his “tent-camera pictures.”

In these images, Morell makes informed choices that follow the famous nineteenth-century landscapists of the American West—for example, in Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (2011). In this case, the mountain in focus was named for the famous landscape painter Thomas Moran. As usual, Morell places the how before the where in his title, though I suggest that both aspects are of equal importance. How did he make images such as Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Cathedral Rocks from El Capitan Meadow, Yosemite National Park (2012) and Tent-Camera Image on Ground: El Capitan from Cathedral Beach, Yosemite National Park (2012; fig. 41)? Inspired by nineteenth-century prototypes that were themselves designed to be as portable as possible and take the artist’s studio out of doors,⁶⁸ Morell has perfected “a light proof tent which can project views of the surrounding landscape, via periscope type optics, onto the surface of the ground inside the tent.” As he elaborates, “Inside this space I photograph the sandwich of these two outdoor realities meeting on the ground. Depending on the quality of the surface, these views can take on a variety of painterly effects. The added use of digital technology on my camera lets me record visual moments in a much shorter time frame—for instance I can now get clouds and people to show up in some of the photographs.”⁶⁹ His punctilious titles emphasize that the images we see of the hallowed ground of Yosemite National Park’s much-venerated natural monuments manifestly register on the particularities of that ground, that spot, at the time each image was made. The photographs of camera obscura images visually combine the textures of what was underfoot where he pitched his photo tent with an instantly recognizable portrait of a landmark—Cathedral Rocks, for example, and their surroundings in the Yosemite Valley. This view had been venerated in paint by Albert Bierstadt and in photographs by Carleton Watkins, as we saw with regard to Kent Monkman’s revisionary recollections of this area.

 

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

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

Before I consider related work by Morell, a comparison with Chris Drury’s stationary camera obscuras, made at about the same time, allows me to emphasize the specific qualities of the inverted images with which both artists work. A typical example is Sky Mountain Chamber of 2010, made from 150 tons of local limestone and sited in the Trento area of Italy. The materials and beehive shape of the structure pay homage to the Dolomite mountains in this region. An aperture in the side of the camera obscura causes the peaks of these mountains to be projected upside down onto the wall of the interior. In contrast to Morell’s tent-camera photographs of mountains, Drury’s image is “live” in the sense that it shows the movements of surrounding trees and clouds in real time. Both artists effectively bring the landscape indoors: Morell’s technique underscores the telluric qualities of what he shows. Drury emphasizes the ephemeral aspects of the scene.

Soon after discovering his camera obscura technique, Morell photographed in New York—his first home in the United States after emigrating from Cuba as a young teenager—to bring dramatic images of the skyline and of Central Park into rooms. Camera Obscura: View of Central Park Looking North—Fall, 2008 is one of four seasonal views of this landscape. “One of the satisfactions I get from making this imagery comes from my seeing the weird and yet natural marriage of the inside and outside,” he writes.⁷² In this and much of his camera obscura work, Morell enacts the “outside-in” collaboration (or dichotomy) central to both land and eco art. Landscapes are in the mind, in cities, in images, in domestic interiors, and in museums. In his Maps series of the mid 1990s, he crinkled paper maps of areas, let them partially unfold, then photographed their three-dimensional topographies, creating idealized landscapes. In Map of North America, 1996, he filled a large dip in the center of the map with a liquid, which in the resulting photograph looks like a lake replete with islands. Two related tent-camera series explore the history of landscape depiction. He discovers relationships between gardens, light, and representation in Monet’s garden at Giverny. In Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Monet’s Gardens with Flowers on the Ground, Giverny, France (2015), for example, he uses the gravel where the image lands to distribute light and texture evenly across the resulting picture, making a “Monet” that looks pointillist or like a mosaic. He invokes and evokes what inspired Monet and projects these landscape practices into the future. With Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of the Sea from Winslow Homer’s Studio Backyard, Prouts Neck, Maine (2012), he pays homage to the noted land- and seascape painter by again evincing his inspiration, the view one sees here. Crisscrossed with a skein of grass and leaves of weeds, this almost monochromatic image of land’s edge, water, and sky is more tactile than visual.

One of Morell’s most complex and compelling photographs is a meta-picture that muses on image making and display in the museum. Camera Obscura Image of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, East Entrance in Gallery #171 with a de Chirico Painting (2005; fig. 42) turns what we see and our expectations inside out as well as upside down. Morell had museum staff move de Chirico’s Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913) into one of the museum’s rooms that faced the neo-Grecian east facade of the building. All other paintings on this wall were removed. Repurposing the room as a camera obscura, he brought this bold architecture in, its raking angles overlapping and complimenting the vertiginous architectural setting in the painting. The de Chirico floats proto-surrealistically in the sky that is projected onto its wall support. Against this wall/sky, Morell places a quotidian stepladder, which not only suggests the curatorial work accomplished here but also, in casting a strong shadow on the wall, defines one hard spatial plane for the dramas we see, very much in the way that Georges Braque did with a fictive tack in Violin and Pitcher (1910, Kunstmuseum Basel) and related Cubist pictures. Above this ladder we can just see two picture hangers on the wall (and now in the sky), the hardware for paintings removed to free up this plane of reception. The self-conscious strangeness of the de Chirico is mirrored by Morell as he explores the double sense of art inside and outside the museum. “I’ve always been interested in visual conversations that are not particularly historically correct, but . . . are imaginings or unlikely meetings of things,” he claims.⁷³ His tent-camera images are also unusual spatially, as we have seen, because the all-too-familiar compositional regimes of nineteenth-century landscape photography and painting are disturbed, ironically, by his projection into them of literal images of the earth.

 

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

Andrew Wright also uses the camera obscura and other photographic means to explore what light can reveal and hold open so that we may access the edges of perception and understanding. While he exploits the potential of photographic technologies both old and new, his work demonstrates a strong conceptual as well as technical component. In When Buildings Take Pictures of Themselves (2013), he, like Morell at the Philadelphia Museum, turns a room into a camera obscura to present the outside of the building for display inside its gallery space. Wright then prints the resulting image to reveal not only this spatial pentimento but also the discrepancies between the time of taking an image and the time of taking it in as a viewer. While not overtly ecological in content, Wright’s work, using other modes of photography, reveals a range of planetary elements, from the atmosphere to vegetation. What he calls “photogenic drawings” present images of clouds made with an iPhone app. Wright likes to turn the tables on our visual expectations. The large-scale Coronae series (2011) presents images of what we might imagine to be interstellar phenomena captured by the Hubble space telescope. We cannot easily decide whether the bursts of light recorded here are large or tiny, very close or immeasurably distant. Their portentous implications contrast sharply with the techniques Wright employed to make them. Instead of looking to the skies, he simply pricked a tiny hole in the case of a roll of photographic film. A retro photochemical technology collaborates with an apparently accidental action that most photographers would avoid to turn a humble film cartridge into a cosmic pinhole camera.

Wright explores two very different aspects of photography as it apprehends the world: its ability to hold on to transient or otherwise unseen phenomena so that we may observe them freely, and its attention to more permanent objects in the world that we may nonetheless overlook. In Untitled Photograph #3 (Plant) (2013; fig. 43), for example, we see standing green plants and lichen on a rock face against an impossibly black sky. The plant throws a strong shadow, suggesting that it was photographed at night under artificial light. Scale is again hard to determine, even though we come to realize that we must be close to see the lichen and that the plant must therefore be small. Nonetheless, as in the Coronae photos, we are left with a sense of the cosmic, of our rock in space perhaps. Working again with static objects in the series Tree Corrections (2012; fig. 44), Wright reveals the cultural conventions that have made the wind-blown tree an icon in many northern climates. Just as we habitually find inverted images of trees odd, if not always disturbing, and try to “correct” them, as we saw in chapter 1, so too we tend to see trees leaning against the wind as “heroic.” By tilting his viewfinder to photograph such trees as if they were vertical, however, to correct them, Wright instead skews the landscapes that frame them. The horizon lines are now “wrong.” With this simple gesture, our conventional understandings of how landscape should appear and be composed are opened to reconsideration.

 

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

 

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

Prepared for the tenth annual Taehwa River Eco Art Festival in the Republic of Korea in the summer of 2016, The Photograph: Suspended Tree (fig. 45) combines Wright’s expertise with the camera obscura and a viewer’s sense of what is correct in a landscape image with a deracinated tree. Visually stunning, the work reinforces the widespread respect for trees in art. Yet like all inversions accomplished with the camera obscura, the image is also somewhat disconcerting. Displaying uprooted trees is a potent and controversial practice. The highly specific context in which Wright placed this work further articulates this trope. The Photograph: Suspended Tree was temporarily sited near the Hyundai Motors car-assembly plant in Ulsan, South Korea, the largest such factory in the world and adjacent to an equally massive container port from which millions of cars are shipped annually. It is an industrial site whose size and complexity make it a hyperobject in Timothy Morton’s terms. Hyundai also manages a forest near the precinct, and it is from here that Wright sourced a large tree that he then suspended upside down from an industrial crane. Close to the tree is a shipping container converted into a camera obscura. Wright supplied a hanging screen inside the container to receive the image of the inverted tree. The outside tree is upside down, “unnatural” in the extreme. Inside the camera obscura, however, it is as if we had journeyed inside our own heads to enjoy a “live” film of a tree that is (impossibly) both suspended and, when we look to the bottom of the interior frame as we naturally do, seems to be growing from the ground in the expected manner. Like Eliasson, Wright is careful to show us how he made the image—the crane is visible both outside and inside—and it is here that some of the visual and conceptual pleasure of the work resides. Wright reports that he wanted “simply to make it work as a conceptual proposition—at minimum viewers would note that there was an upside-down/rightside-up reversal, and being able to see the crane in the image became an important reference point to cue people. The artificial horizon inside the container—the bottom edge of the screen—became the de facto reference point.”⁷⁴ As in the Tree Corrections (fig. 44), conventions of receiving a landscape and nature are uncovered and redeployed in both disconcerting and pleasurable ways.

 

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

Wright states that “my interest in the camera obscura has to do with witnessing the image always in a state of continual formation—the photograph as endless, ongoing performance, evanescent yet ever present.”⁷⁵ His work differs fundamentally from that of both Nizam and Morell in that he does not fix the image in the camera obscura. The issue of making an image at least semipermanent was of course fundamental to the advent of photography. William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype method and Louis Daguerre’s eponymous daguerreotype famously solved this problem in different ways ca. 1835–39. One inspiration for The Photograph: Suspended Tree was a visit Wright (like Morell) made to Lacock Abbey, to the room from which Fox Talbot had photographed a large tree and surrounding buildings in early experiments with his technique. Why does Wright instead insist on the experience of the moving image? In manipulating the tree and landscape to fit his photographic device instead of (more typically) using a camera to take a picture of an object or industrial commodity, or even taking a still photograph of the camera obscura’s projection, Wright emphasizes the profound difference between image making as a creative exercise and its much more common commercial deployment. In one, the camera conforms to what it pictures; in the other, the object that generates the image conforms to the technology so that the camera’s activities are emphasized. Put otherwise, just as the container turned camera obscura inverts both image and a viewer’s expectations, so too it constructs a composition inside the box that insists on the conditions of viewing and image making rather than on a result, an image as commodity in the way that cars are products. Wright’s ecological point is to juxtapose the relentlessly practical industrial site with the ephemerality of his image of the tree, to contrast inside with outside and aesthetic expectations with those of industrialization and the commodification of nature.

I began this chapter with Michel Serres’s claim that we have forgotten nature because in our culture “the essentials take place indoors and in words, never again outdoors with things.”⁷⁶ While I believe that the work considered in this chapter suggests that he was wrong with respect to land and eco art, he was right to locate a controversy at the threshold of the museum, and he was prophetic in 1990 to specify an issue that has since that time preoccupied contemporary artists. If we think of ecology as the principle of planetary interconnectedness, then all inside/outside oppositions are ultimately dissolved. Referring to Mark Dion’s articulation of one such false barrier—“humans do not stand outside nature”—Francesco Manacorda writes in the catalogue to the London Barbican Centre’s 2009 exhibit Radical Nature, “The implications of this assertion bring about the final recognition that there is no inside, just as there is no outside: there is no nature because we are always immersed in it.”⁷⁷ His point is well taken on a large scale, but humans are habitually prone to setting up provisional boundaries of all sorts, as I show in the next chapter. Outside and inside have been pivotal coordinates in landscape and in land art. In eco art especially, ecological essentials seem to behave like subatomic particles under the laws of quantum physics popularly construed: much of this work truly is in two places at once, or hovers across this liminal zone.