CHAPTER FIVE

BORDERING THE UBIQUITOUS

The Art of Local and Global Ecologies

Ecological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about “the environment,” although these figure as catalysts among its issues. It is a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and reconfigures theory and practice. It does not reduce to a set of rules or methods; it may play out differently from location to location; but it is sufficiently coherent to be interpreted and enacted across widely diverse situations.

—LORRAINE CODE, ECOLOGICAL THINKING (2006)

There are few human instincts more basic than territoriality.

—GEORGE LAKOFF AND MARK JOHNSON, METAPHORS WE LIVE BY (1980)

ECO ART’S ECOTONES

A wide range of contemporary eco-art practices revolves around issues of borders and boundaries. I have examined the temporal and material hinges between landscape, land art, and eco art, their implications for divisions between nature and culture, the constantly shifting pivots between remote and urban practices, and the play across thresholds of outside and inside in the display and impact of land art and eco art. Ecological and environmental science stresses connectedness and ultimately challenges the imposition of hard boundaries between geographical zones, species, and even the realms of the organic and inorganic, the topic of this chapter’s two case studies. As Sheila Jasanoff writes, “In just a generation, the idea that there is ‘only one Earth’ seems to have lost its sloganeering quality and been accepted as reality by activists and policy makers, the media, and the public.” Her optimism has been borne out by the Paris climate pact (COP21) signed in December 2015, in which 195 countries agreed to an unprecedented climate-change accord. Jasanoff’s celebration of the growing sense of the planet as a unit in 2004, and that of COP21, however, must remain tempered by research on how “the Earth is imaged and imagined in strikingly different ways by different polities around the world.”¹ The world has more lines of demarcation than ever before, many of them biometric or electronic.² Given such divisions, can we conceive of the earth locally, regionally, and globally, or are these perspectives in inevitable tension? On the ground, people more often than not strive to erect and maintain political, economic, and physical boundaries with little regard for the planet. Thinking for the moment only about legislation in countries that have climate-change policies, for example, we see the panoply of national variation in the collected volume edited by Mary E. Pettenger, The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses. Morton’s “ecological thought,” that of interconnectedness, is difficult in a world still largely trying to be “modern” in Latour’s terms by separating nature and culture, the human and nonhuman. The debate between modernity and ecology in part explains ecology’s widespread uptake in contemporary art and specifically why borders, boundaries, and thresholds are frequently at issue in eco art. From the vantages of both environmental science and anthropology, however, there are reasons to think that inveterate boundary making might not be more than a widespread habit.

Environmental-studies scholar Neil Evernden asks, “What do we find in the world when we stop attending to sharp boundaries?” Do we then instead experience the links among beings proposed by ecology?³ Philippe Descola’s anthropological research shows that many peoples do not share a typically Western dualism of human/nature and its related beliefs. He proposes that we think instead of “an ecology of relationships,” which would entail that we “recompose nature and society, humans and non-humans, individuals and collectives, in a new assemblage in which they would no longer present themselves as distributed between substances, processes, and representations, but as the instituted expression of relationships between multiple entities whose ontological status and capacity for action vary according to the positions they occupy in relation to one another.”⁴ To name and traverse this zone of intense questioning, and in keeping with the common purposes of eco art and environmental science, I suggest that we adapt the notion of the “ecotone” used in environmental science to the protocols of eco art history. A full definition is required: “The boundary between adjacent ecosystems is known as an ecotone. For example, the intermediary zone between a grassland and a forest constitutes an ecotone that has characteristics of both ecosystems. The transition between the two ecosystems may be abrupt or, more commonly, gradual. Because of the overlap between ecosystems, an ecotone usually contains a larger variety of species than is to be found in either of the separate ecosystems and often includes species unique to the ecotone. This effect is known as the edge effect. Ecotones may be stable or variable.”⁵ What I have called hinges between landscape and land art, for example, can also be thought of as ecotones in art. So too can the areas of profound activity around museums as they present eco-art exhibits be thought of as “edge effects.” To crystallize some of the many concerns artists find in the ecotone, I compare examples of boundary work in eco art and preceding practices.

Landscape as a genre—and as an idea—is perennially involved with lines of demarcation. The same is true of land art. Pivotal examples in the history of the landscape genre remind us that well before landscape became an independent category in art, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s famous fourteenth-century images of good and bad government divide and map the Tuscan countryside. Often adopting an unexpectedly close viewpoint, Albrecht Dürer’s intimate watercolor studies of local scenes and flora ca. 1500 could be said to mark the verge, those areas and elements in nature to which we typically give scant attention, its “edge effects,” to use the language of the ecotone. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews by Gainsborough (1750) leaves little doubt about the ownership of the demesne, whose neatly bounded fields’ sophisticated cultivation enriches the couple. Physical and corporeal demarcation is the norm in these practices, as it is in many of the grander gestures of American land art, from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence (1972–76), which with its temporary presence both denied and reinforced the usual divisions and uses of the land it crossed, to De Maria’s inscriptions in the desert. As James Nisbet has shown, the concept of the boundary was also important to Jack Burnham’s systems-theory vision of ecology.⁶ That the marking and questioning of boundaries was central to land art is again clear in a host of work focusing on maps, as noted in chapter 3, and in the “art-walking” practices of Long, Fulton, and many others. Long’s boundary making duplicates that which had for millennia divided land into landscape visually and administratively, a pattern repeated and updated in what I read as an homage to and conceptual commentary on Long’s famous Line Made by Walking (1967) by Jeff Wall in his photograph The Crooked Path (1991; fig. 46).

 

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

While the visual analogy between these two photographs suggests their comparison, the types of path and land use shown are significantly different. Long’s performance was solitary, though he recapitulated a common enough phenomenon, the creation of a path in the landscape by people’s habitual movements. By contrast, Wall found, rather than made, not one, but two intersecting paths in a patch of what we might construe as a landscape example of Rem Koolhaas’s urban “junk space,” defined as “what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.”⁷ Much like Smithson’s “monuments” in the industrial wasteland of Passaic, New Jersey, this is a place where there is no “landscape” in the aesthetic sense, just the use of land. The horizontal path in Wall’s photograph appears more or less straight; the other, which viewers standing in front of the image can embark upon imaginatively, gives the photograph its title. There is no clear reason why this path bends. The imperfect “X” made where the two paths cross marks nothing of more formal significance than an off-center focus for our eye. Neither does it signal a place of consequence, a crossroads. What we begin to notice instead are the rich details that Wall’s large photograph presents about this antipicturesque spot, traversed, we assume, mostly as a way to get to the Tom Yee Produce Inc. warehouse and parking lot in the background. But there are also what appear to be working beehives against scrubby underbrush to the left. We do not know where the path that bifurcates the image from left to right leads, but this is evidently a much-used urban or suburban interstice. It is a physical and cultural ecotone in which we witness the dynamic nature of demarcation and passage, the processes of “borderscaping,” a portmanteau that “registers the necessity to investigate borders not as taken-for-granted entities exclusively connected to the territorial limits of nation-states, but as mobile, relational and contested sites.”⁸

Dennis Oppenheim’s work along the United States–Canada border in the winter of 1968 involved maps, the politics of national borders, and environmental concerns in ways that were both irrefragably local and also extrapolable to the work of other artists and regions. To begin with the general, Annual Rings (fig. 47) is typical of early land art in several ways. It functioned outside gallery spaces, at least initially, but, in a pattern codified by Smithson’s site/nonsite paradigm, inevitably returned to the urban, commercial art system to establish dialectics between photographs of the action and their referents and between bounded samples of a site and places in nature. Akin to much land art, too, Oppenheim’s performances were largely ephemeral. The transient needs to be specified exactly if it is to leave a trace: Oppenheim notes the place, the time, the date, and even the temperature of the ambient environment in some versions of this work, but he leaves no monument on site. Several types of photography and levels of formal or institutional legitimation are brought together here: maps, a boundary marker, and a photographic record of the shoveling event that inscribed the rings on the snow-covered ice. Oppenheim’s analogy between the growth of trees and the seasonal shift of climate—two closely connected cycles in nature—is contrasted with what we take to be discretionary, merely our imposition on the world. That element is not the clearing of lines on the ice, which was carefully planned and executed exactly, but the border between a jurisdiction observing daylight savings time and one not. This arbitrary time differential could be taken to underline the ultimate capriciousness of political, as opposed to supposedly natural, boundaries, international borders and time zones versus rivers, the human versus the natural. Whether this argument is persuasive is another question. The schematic rings cleared on the ice are not natural. On the contrary, if we take the bold line of open water that divided them to be the result of the river’s flow and the weather at the time, then what is presented as a human intervention—an international border in the middle of a river—is temporarily marked by natural forces.

 

FIG. 47 Dennis Oppenheim, Annual Rings, 1968. 150 × 200 ft. U.S.-Canadian boundary at Fort Kent, Maine, and Clair, New Brunswick. Schemata of annual rings severed by political boundary. Time: United States, 1:30 P.M.; Canada, 2:30 P.M. Photo: Dennis Oppenheim Estate. © Dennis Oppenheim.

The boundary between the United States and Mexico is a more familiar example of cognate issues; certainly there is a great deal of “border art” that concerns itself with this troubled frontier.⁹ Most of it highlights specifically humanitarian problems such as immigration and labor. In Javier Téllez’s celebrated performance One Flew Over the Void (2005), for instance, an American stuntman is shot from a star-spangled cannon and flies effortlessly into the United States from Mexico at the Tijuana–San Diego border, a crossing that is made harder for others by government regulations and enforcement more than the seemingly porous fence over which we see this human cannonball soar. Looking at Oppenheim’s Time Line and Annual Rings together with this work in mind, we notice that in Rings Oppenheim has chosen a time when the open river temporarily draws the national boundary, which we cannot see in full winter or summer, when the river’s surface is undifferentiated. He marks the border provisionally with a snowmobile in Time Line, making the invisible palpable. As we saw in Directed Seeding—Cancelled Crop in chapter 3 (see fig. 29), Oppenheim made a habit of physically marking—or, in the case of Boundary Split in New Brunswick, assaulting with a chainsaw—what we are meant to view as somehow unnatural systems and limits in nature. He cuts against the grain, against the flow, as it were, to suggest that this is what we typically do as humans, especially at national boundary lines. But there is another theme in play: while Oppenheim shows the border area as largely deserted and thus contrasts the natural with human incursions, and while he underscores a time difference that we by definition cannot see in his photographs, the United States–Canadian border was nonetheless politicized during this period, when tens of thousands of so-called draft dodgers came to Canada to avoid military service in Vietnam. Téllez’s stunt reminds us of this aspect of the political ecology of borders in Oppenheim’s works.

In the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity changes the earth as much as what used to be thought of as independent natural processes, it is anti-ecological to draw a sharp line between the natural and the human. As Rosi Braidotti puts it, a “nature-culture continuum is the shared starting point for [a revised] . . . posthuman theory.”¹⁰ If it would be more realistic and constructive to think of one complex but coextensive entity, the earth or the planet as an entirety, then as several scholars have recently proclaimed, we need to jettison the concept of capital-N nature altogether. As we saw in chapter 1, prominent voices in this chorus include Latour and Morton. In Ecology Without Nature (2007), Morton takes us through the paradoxes of the concept of nature, its impossible mandate to be “both the set and the content of the set,” both the forest and the trees (18). He argues that the idea of “nature ironically impedes a proper relationship with the earth and its life forms” (2). If we are part of nature, we cannot at the same time stand outside it to gain the transcendental perspective suggested by the term. Yet we have to assume that nature has and could again exist without our projections of its characteristics. To return to Oppenheim’s Annual Rings, let us not assume that rings as a sign of a tree’s growth are natural and that, by contrast, a human mark, whether made by shovel, snowmobile, or chainsaw, is not. Perhaps we need not use the terms “natural” and “unnatural” at all.

The same point comes across in Yukinori Yanagi’s Pacific (1995), an elaborate ant farm in which the artist used these creatures’ “migrations” as analogs for both human migrants and natural forces as they transgress putatively artificial borders suggested by the flags of nations bordering the Pacific Ocean that he reproduced in sand. He asserts that “a nation, its border and national flag, has become an imaginary fiction.”¹¹ Yet the human symbolic system of sand flags is a real enough impediment to the ants, suggesting that national borders are all too tangible for many would-be migrants. There is a dilemma if we oppose the natural to the unnatural here, as Yanagi seems to do: if humans are part of nature, why are their products (flags, nations, and indeed works of art) different from the ants’ activities? Would not the ecological thought be that all these elements are somehow linked, as indeed Yanagi inadvertently shows us? Thinking with another sort of ANT, that of Actor Network Theory as espoused by Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, and others, we could say that thinking of nature as a boundary standing behind and ratifying aspects of Oppenheim’s or Yanagi’s works is not useful if we want to understand our relationships with our ambient environment. Thinking instead about how the various “actants” in these works operate and interact as equals will lead us to a more complex analysis, though one that is constantly shifting its ground or frame.

Jarosław Koziara’s Unity Fish (2012; fig. 48) is an example of temporary eco art that links with Oppenheim’s examination of a national border and with both his and Denes’s exposure of the systems of agribusiness under capitalism. Designed for the annual Lublin Land Art Festival in Poland, two immense outlines of fish grew from an elaborate planting scheme to straddle the borderline incised into the landscape between eastern Poland and western Ukraine. One fish swims in each direction, symbolizing the history of free trade and the flow of people in the region. In this example of borderscaping, not only did Koziara’s fish call attention to an international boundary that postdates these traditional interactions and thus seems arbitrary in comparison with local and regional norms, but they also underscored a crucial difference between Poland and Ukraine that impacts agriculture and travel. In his words, “Ukraine is not a part of the Schengen area, [which] is the dividing line for the whole European continent. But artists cannot agree with that—this is how we create ideas that bring to life extraordinary border defying projects.”¹² The Schengen Agreement began with five European Union countries in 1985 and has grown to include twenty-six European nations operating as one for passport control. Also called Fish on the Border, Koziara’s installation makes reference to Ukraine’s bids to become part of the European Union and the Schengen region. Participating in these administrative protocols would partially restore the older connections across this landscape that are currently interrupted by the national border that bisects Koziara’s fish. Lucy Lippard has made two fundamental points that parallel the import of Unity Fish. She argues in her extensive examination of the local in art that “[t]he virtue of temporary and ephemeral works is that both sites and places change,” a process embraced by many local art practices. She also advocates “an updated ‘regionalism’” to counteract what she construes as the “homogeneity of corporate culture” and to enfranchise artists and cultural endeavors that would not be countenanced in these dominant circles.¹³

 

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

Francis Alÿs’s performance The Green Line took place in Jerusalem in 2004. In the video version of the work (2007), we do not know initially where he is, only that he begins prosaically by opening a hole in a can of green paint, then walking with it held and dripping from his extended arm, creating a fine bright-green line on the ground. Alÿs defines the border as “a space of performance rather than a geographical boundary,” at least for a white man from Europe.¹⁴ How it is “green” in an ecological sense is less obvious. Soon after we see the artist begin his walk—inevitably another allusion to the walking art of conceptualism—a map of Jerusalem and the surrounding area appears on screen. Text from Meron Benvenisti’s City of Stone: The Hidden Life of Jerusalem scrolls over the map, providing a history lesson. The green line refers here to the portentous political partition of the city in 1948–49, when Moshe Dayan and Abdullah el-Tell marked the front lines dividing Palestine and Israel with red and green grease pencils on a large-scale map. This was the border until 1967, when Israel expanded its territory following the Six-Day War.¹⁵ Benvenisti writes that “such lines in reality represented strips of land sixty to eighty meters in width. Who owned the ‘width of the line?’” (57). The line divided neighborhoods in Jerusalem just as it divided farms and towns in the region. This border has been moved, but it is remembered and has left physical traces that the artist retraces. Alÿs walked the twenty-four kilometers of the line in Jerusalem, renewing it. Because its reinscription recalls a history particular to this region to make a broader political point, we might expect the reactions of those the artist encounters during the performance to be the heart of the project (as we saw with Martindale’s NATURE [see fig. 31]). But this is largely not the case: in the sixteen-minute video record, Alÿs and his liquid inscription attract only the curiosity of boys along the route; he gets the odd wave as he walks past. As a white male, he proceeds unchallenged through military checkpoints. Part of his point has to be that such freedom is not given to Palestinians, women, or nonwhites. Alÿs’s recordings of a range of opinions about his actions play over the video when it is screened.¹⁶ This articulation of the area suggests that the most important element is the materiality of what he transverses.

While this is one of the most controversial political borders in the world, what one gleans from The Green Line is not so much a commentary on history as an immediate documentation of human adaptation and evolving land use. There are other lines on some of the roads Alÿs walks, those that control traffic.¹⁷ He crosses military checkpoints. Other zones are less official: a disused train track, an area that a text on screen tells us is called “no man’s land.” All the while we hear the everyday sounds of a city: traffic, sirens, music, even a rooster. Goats get in his way on Mount Zion. Numerous shots focus on feet, especially those that cross the new line he draws in the performance. Behavior around lines of demarcation is canvased: a car stops just behind his line, for example, though likely for an off-screen traffic signal. The artist once crosses the street instead of passing a man in uniform on the sidewalk. Such accommodations are arbitrary, in a sense, yet this line and those that superseded it have controlled the lives of millions of people since Israel became a state. Alÿs’s tagline for The Green Line on his website reads, “Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.” He does not mention any connection between green and ecology, and it is certainly not the obvious one, given the predominance of that color on the Palestinian side of his line, notably on flags. It is important to note, however, that Alÿs does not promote any reading of this work over another. Akin to Pierre Huyghe, he points things out. Issues and locales that he highlights frequently feature land use. When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), his acclaimed project near Lima, Peru, was, as we have seen, his “attempt to deromanticize Land art.”¹⁸ A simpler poetic gesture in which he combines a reference to art making with the earth’s geography is the video Watercolor (2010). Using color-coded buckets, he gathers water from both the Red and the Black Seas, then unceremoniously pours the “red” water into the Black Sea. The brief video belies the geographical and cultural distance between these sources. By ignoring the specificities of place while also naming places, this video is also about the earth and our interactions with it, which is a good working definition of eco art.

Alÿs’s work with land suggests that the social, political, and ecological realms are not themselves divided, nor are these areas separate from the earth’s materiality, as I investigate in the case study on “the emotional life of water,” below. Such continuities and imbrications are central to another border work, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s rightly celebrated and much discussed Land Mark (Foot Prints) of 2001–2. One of several activist eco-art incursions titled Land Mark, the footprints marked a weapons testing range operated by the U.S. military, a no-go zone on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Having affixed to their shoes additional soles inscribed with symbols and slogans about the use of this land, the protestors then imprinted the traces of their words into the sand. Land Mark (Foot Prints) is a photographic record of these imprints. In an extensive article that links the duo’s work with historical land art and contemporary activism, Yates McKee writes that “Allora and Calzadilla have said that the Land Mark photographs should be understood in relation to perhaps the most monumental footprints in history: those impressed into the surface of the moon by the astronauts of the Voyager spacecraft in 1969.”¹⁹ Thus, in the terms that Lippard has alerted us to, the work is both insistently local and expansively planetary. It is evanescent, yet its concerns with marking, territory, access, and boundaries, while never timeless, are also extensive both temporally and geographically. Land Mark (Foot Prints) is in these ways ecological.

The confluence of political and ecological borders in recent eco art can again be perceived through a double gesture toward openness around these themes, an approach encapsulated in a recent installation on the United States–Canada border between Washington State and British Columbia. Non-Sign II (2010; fig. 49) changes the discourse about both the border and landscape. It reframes both by avoiding the usual defaults of patriotism or advertising. Its creator was Lead Pencil Studio in Seattle. Designer Daniel Mihalyo says, “Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape . . . this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond.”²⁰ Yet it is impossible to ignore the international border. Striking on this point is the Borderline project by Andreas Rutkauskas, including Chemin de la Frontière, Québec (2013; fig. 50). Documenting the world’s longest shared land boundary photographically, Rutkauskas shows an extensive range of contact points along the 8,891-kilometer boundary between Canada and the United States. This line is marked by a six-meter wide open boundary in forested zones. In areas where a cut line will not work, 5,500 obelisks are used as survey markers to define the border. Rutkauskas describes the variety of signposts along this purportedly undefended border: there is an “unmanned US enclave where visitors need to report via telephone, a peace park with wreckage from the World Trade Center attack, and a cemetery that straddles the cutline.”²¹ An analogous project was independently undertaken from the south side of the border at the same time by the Center for Land Use Interpretation in the United States.²² As in The Green Line, we begin to notice other demarcations and behavioral prompts, including a railway bridge over a river, a “natural” boundary, on which is written “This Is Indian Land.”

 

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

 

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

With this image from his Borderline suite, Rutkauskas reminds us to examine what might be a reflex to think only of familiar international borders when we speak of nations. As Devine’s Battle for the Woodlands shows (see fig. 27), there are other, much older but still potent ways to construe homelands and what links and separates them. In art and scholarship worldwide, there is increasing and long-overdue attention being paid to Indigenous perspectives on land, its uses and representation, and its own boundaries. Eco art history should embrace, without recolonizing, this revisionist project. A powerful example is Alan Michelson’s TwoRow II (2005; fig. 51), a panoramic thirteen-minute, four-channel video that shows both shores of the Grand River in what is now Southern Ontario. It is a waterway that passes through what was once, both before and then via treaty, solely Six Nations land, but it now divides the Six Nations Reserve from non-Indigenous townships. The artist has explained the double colonization and attendant dispossession of this region and the ongoing problems that exclusion from the land presents for Indigenous people:

 

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

 

Separation from the land and the land-based cultural practices fundamentally threatens indigenous health and survival. What is particularly sad and germane in the case of the Grand is the reason for our being there in the first place—the betrayal by our British “allies” in the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War, which illegally transferred our homelands in what is now upstate New York to the United States, and the subsequent compensation for that massive loss of territory, which included the Mohawk River and Valley and much more, by the Haldimand Treaty. So the loss of most of that [Haldimand] territory—“six miles deep from each side of the river beginning at Lake Erie and extending in that proportion to the head of the said river”—represents a second colonial dispossession, an ongoing one that continues to affect the Six Nations in . . . damaging ways because of the careless industrial and agricultural uses of the land and waterways of this area since the eighteenth century.²³

The 1784 Haldimand Treaty set out territorial jurisdictions, but even these have not been honored by governments. What remains as the current reservation along the Grand River is encroached upon by urban expansion. Since 2006 the Caledonia area has seen violent disputes over the expansion of housing development onto treaty land.

Michelson went on a narrated river cruise down the Grand River to film this piece. On the bottom of the two moving bands that we see, he shows the riverbank on the Six Nations Reserve side; on the top, the other bank. Two video channels are tinted purple and stream in opposite directions; they are separated and embraced by white horizontal stripes. Their color and structure recall “the historic Two-Row Wampum Belt or ‘Kashwenta.’ . . . The belt, which featured two rows of purple beads alternating with three rows of white beads, symbolized the relationship between the Haudenosaunee (Iroquoian Peoples) and Europeans as set out in a seventeenth-century treaty of friendship and coexistence.”²⁴ The two bands suggest the spirit of the agreement, that two cultures, like their river craft, were different but could travel in parallel, if independent, directions. The cacophonic sound track that we hear and the opposing directions of the video suggest a different reality at the time of these “agreements” and today. Using four stereo tracks, Michelson recorded both the official tour as narrated on the boat and the voices of elders from the reserve talking about the river. In Michelson’s words,

 

Roger Porter, the first elder to speak in TwoRow II, says: “I don’t think I eat any fish out of the Grand River. It was . . . , you could see to the bottom in my day, and as the years went on, it got dirtier and dirtier.” Alfred Keye, speaking in the Cayuga language in a translation by Amos Keye, says: “When we swam there, we would see who could go the furthest underwater. I remember going underwater and coming back to the surface. When I surfaced, I remember seeing something green-colored floating on the water. I was covered in what looked like fuzzy fur. My friends told me that those things came from Brantford, Ontario, upriver [it was raw sewage]. Cows and horses were allowed to walk and swim in the river at a village called Onondaga. Today that is where the native village of Ohsweken gets drinking water.”²⁵

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

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

 

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

Another set of boundary issues is addressed in Mel Chin’s Landscape (fig. 53), an installation from 1991, the same year in which he began his better-known Revival Field. Beckoned by a small spotlit landscape on the wall opposite the doorway framing Landscape, we enter Chin’s gallery within a gallery. There we find three landscape paintings from “[t]hree traditional nature-loving philosophies, American Emersonian Pantheism, Iranian Zoroastrianism, and Chinese Taoism.” Visitors may be inclined to think that Chin’s triple comparison suggests a universal artistic response to land. It is not this consoling ecumenism that Chin wants us to see, however. He considers this adumbration of a global interest in landscape as “metaphysical” and therefore ultimately blind. Only in the realm of fantasy are these or any national conventions in landscape more than analogous. We are encouraged to look instead at the particulars of what landscape may try to conceal but finally cannot in his fabricated viewing room. Dirt from a local landfill lines the bottom perimeter of the space, the residue and perhaps also the source, in an elemental sense, of the interior museum walls. In Chin’s hands these walls have been made to look as if they have “‘rotted’ to the contours of the 30th parallel, the latitude that sweeps through the United States, Iran, and China.” Landscape, we learn, is always more material and more contemporary in terms of the particulars of its making and viewing than the metaphysical view implies. As Lippard, Michelson, and Niro have shown in different ways, landscape’s circumstances are fundamentally local. Their propinquity in his installation also offers us ways to think of them as mutually incommensurate, as representative of different places and modes of seeing the earth. In a physically economical but conceptually expansive way, then, Landscape connects and compares representations of land in three long pictorial traditions, the materiality of land art around the edges, as it were, and an eco-art insistence on revealing “the volume of one’s impact on nature” so that these concerns are not “neatly trucked away and buried from view.”³⁰

 

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

Chin’s Landscape raises an important methodological issue for eco art history as this field considers representations of the land in the past and present: in what circumstances is it valid to compare “Eastern” and “Western” landscape paintings, for example, given that, on the one hand, there are analogies to be found in what is viewed and, on the other, the cultural practices vary radically over time within these conventions, not to mention between them. In Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, James Elkins explicitly criticizes the intercultural comparisons that too easily elide Eastern and Western painting traditions. He scorns the “brief passing parallels [that] are commonest and the most insidious” (11). The cross-cultural analogizing that allows Liu Haisu (1896–1994) to be dubbed the “Cézanne of China,” for example, and contemporary artist Ai Weiwei or Wang Guangyi to be seen as “China’s Warhol,” is problematic methodologically and culturally because it elides crucial distinctions. In comparisons such as these, as Chin’s Landscape shows, a viewer or reader of art-historical material may be “struck by likening,” that is, make a new and revealing connection. Artists who receive this form of praise may rise in stature and appreciate the acknowledgment, as the French painter Rosa Bonheur did when compared with the British animal painter Edwin Landseer in the mid-nineteenth century. One may also be struck in a pejorative sense: the comparison may be too far-fetched or conflate too many differences. Well beyond the parameters of Landscape into Eco Art, an examination of the workings of these analogies provides a compelling way into the vexed questions of “global” art history as presented in museums and in art history.³¹ Below, I look briefly at four contemporary landscape works, three from China and one from the United States, as a way to consider these issues of disciplinary border control.

In numerous versions of Background Story (Biehou de gushi, 背後的故事) since 2004, such as Background Story: Qiu Shan Xian Yi Tu (2015; fig. 54), Xu Bing creates characteristically “Chinese” landscapes that perform critically in several dimensions. These landscapes evoke paintings but are also clearly three-dimensional. From the front and through opaque glass, we see forms of mountains, rivers, huts, etc., the habitual elements of this landscape tradition. Whether we walk behind these installations (not imaginatively into, according to the fiction of immersion in the landscape found in Diderot’s writings, for example) or, as in the example here, open one of the glass portals made for this purpose, what we see inside is the material with which Xu Bing performs his alchemy, prosaic stuff like hay or wire that magically turns into the expected elements of landscape. These street materials might have come from Robert Morris’s Earthwork sculpture in 1968 or Mel Chin’s sources for the earth in Landscape. The specificity of the transformation is remarkable. As Robert E. Harrist Jr. writes, “What the unsightly arrays of trash behind the glass panes are designed to represent are not simply mountains, water, or buildings, but ink washes, modulated contour lines, and texture strokes that constitute the basic pictorial vocabulary of East Asian painting.”³² Moreover, Xu Bing conjures specific Asian landscape paintings in this way, not just a type. Because his Background Story and Yao Lu’s New Landscapes series (2006; e.g., fig. 55) are enrolled in an international art context that is by definition postnational, both are and are not “Chinese.”

 

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

 

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

The New Landscapes invoke a generalized sense of old Chinese landscape paintings, but when one looks closely, the “mountains and water” of traditional shan shui painting are not what we expect. First, we are looking at photographs of landscapes constructed by the artist. Yao Lu brilliantly uses the common green mesh found at building sites to define and temporarily hide the underlying material of his forms, mounds of garbage. The look of ancient Chinese landscape paintings thus brings us to a contemporary ecological issue, waste. In the artist’s words, “Today, China is developing dramatically and many things are under constant construction. Many things have disappeared and continue to disappear. The rubbish dumps covered with the ‘shield,’ a green netting, are a ubiquitous phenomenon in China.”³³ Both Yao Lu’s and Xu Bing’s new landscapes can be understood to distract us with the look of a brush-and-ink tradition only to question this convention by showing its material, not metaphysical, roots. Xu Bing quotes “a precept in Sunzi’s Art of War: ‘make a noise in the east, attack in the west,’”³⁴ to explain this tactic. The fact that these landscapes are displayed in both the East and West and, in Xu Bing’s case, sometimes make reference to other landscapes from the Asian tradition that were formerly seen in European museums suggests that Background Story and New Landscapes require us to reconsider assumptions about the universality of landscape.

I have claimed that sound is increasingly important in contemporary art generally and in eco art especially. Another pertinent example is The Liquid Borders Project by Samson Young (2012–14), one of a growing number of “ecoacoustic” endeavors.³⁵ Working in areas where Hong Kong abuts the formerly separate People’s Republic of China, such as the bridge at the village of Sha Tau Kok, Young recorded and redeployed the sounds of the area, most notably by attaching microphones to the bridge itself. In addition to the wall and fence that one sees and hears in this video, the border is marked by the Shenzen River, whose sounds are also part of the mix. In contrast with Oppenheim’s St. John River projects (fig. 47), there is no need to make this national boundary more visible. Unlike the fabled “unguarded” border between the United States and Canada that we saw in Rutkauskas’s Borderline (fig. 50), the formerly disputed territory on which Young focuses is still sensitive. He wants us to hear what sight might initially deny, the sounds of the natural setting, however overlaid they are by the vibrations of the bridge and the wire barrier. Young’s description of his aims is specific to this border yet also resonates with the struggles explored by Alÿs and Renwick above:

 

Oftentimes, we think of national and regional borders as definite, clearly defined and stable. At least, it’s the very images represented on maps. When we have boundaries separating Hong Kong and Mainland China so clearly delineated by barbed-wire entanglements, I fear “the need to build a more important ideological and cultural firewall between the two divides” has yet to make its way into public consciousness. . . . This wall, under the duress of circumstances, takes on a new metaphysical significance: marking our frontiers, this old, worn-out wall will keep Hong Kong people safe (and sound) and cushion us against an oppressive urgency for as long as it stands. Border crossings of people between Hong Kong and the Mainland have been an everyday affair since the Chinese civil war, with the only distinction being the convergence of ideologies, cultures and values. Yet I’m overwhelmed with a sense of urgency to make a record of things and people before this wall disappears for good.³⁶

Sound is essential to another example of border art, one that is more overtly ecological in its purpose. Basia Irland’s extensive Gathering of Waters: The Rio Grande, Source to Sea, begun in 1995, includes audio and video recordings as well as both physical and community gatherings along the course of the Rio Grande in the United States, the Rio Bravo, as the river is called, in Mexico. As the artist reports, the project “took five years to complete. Hundreds of participants were invited to put a small amount of river water into a canteen, write in a logbook, and pass these downstream to another person. Connections were made that have been lasting, and groups are working together that never would have met otherwise. In order to participate in this project, one had to physically be at the river and interact with someone else downstream, thereby forming a kind of human river that brings awareness to the plight of this stream that is always asked to give more than it has.”³⁷ The river forms the national boundary between the two countries for a considerable distance. Irland’s project was community based and activist in nature; it involved mapping the river and the exchange of water samples along its course. Because of the arid climate and especially thanks to rampant drainage for irrigation on the U.S. side, there is very little river left as we move further into Mexico. Irland has adeptly extended the visual dimensions of the project in another direction, that of text and reading. “The river hears many languages,” she says in a video narration of the work, while showing clips of many of the denizens of the river speaking their local vernaculars.³⁸ One aspect of the project supplies information about the river and its surrounding contexts: Portable Repository is a backpack in which records of the Pueblo dialects spoken along the river’s course are accessible, for example, as well as different maps of the region.³⁹ Lippard claims that A Gathering of Waters “is a major model for ‘eco-art,’ which differs from the ‘land art’ or ‘earthworks’ made popular in the 1960s and 1970s. . . . The best eco-artists . . . see themselves as caretakers rather than earth movers.”⁴⁰ How best to offer such care is a central concern in eco art today.

 

CASE STUDY 7: THE CRYSTAL INTERFACE

Crystals are material bridges between the human, the living order of nature, and the inanimate. These connections across fundamental but ecologically pliable borders are more than metaphoric, though their metaphoric dimension is important. This case study of crystals in art practices offers one way into considerations of materiality and the post-human that are central to art history as a field today. Crystals have been central to the thinking and practice of many artists, scientists, and geoaesthetic theorists working in the 1960s and after, including Beuys, Burnham, Deleuze and Guattari, Buckminster Fuller, Kepes, Rúrí, and Smithson. As I discuss, these minerals are claimed to have physiological analogues in humans: there is empirical evidence of neural mirroring between crystalline structures in the brain and the perception and appearance of crystals in art. Affect is also involved. According to recent neurological research by Oshin Vartanian and Martin Skov, “viewing paintings engages not only systems involved in visual representation and object recognition, but also structures underlying emotions and internalized cognitions.”⁴¹ “Crystal interface” is an expression that first arose and remains current in the science of crystallography. As a technical term, it describes the contact point between crystal compounds or between a crystal and another substance. J. V. Smith describes the importance of this threshold area: “Consider two perfect crystals, not necessarily of the same type, meeting at an interface. The geometrical misfit between the lattice nodes provides the simplest possible guide to the energy at the interface, and can be used in understanding the textures of polycrystalline metals and of mineral intergrowths.”⁴² On the broadest plane, this dynamic interaction presents an opportunity to understand productive interfaces among the humanities, the sciences and social sciences, and art practice.

Donna Haraway has shown that the crystal and the regular morphologies of crystallography have been guiding metaphors in biological science, in significant measure because crystals are eminently visualizable. In the context of Landscape into Eco Art, the crystal interface is a bordering zone and defines an ecotone. The use of the crystal as form and metaphor is also recurrent in landscape, land art, and eco art. Crystals (and by extension other materials and elements) are central in these genres, not in the Aristotelian sense that they are inert and passive matter to be turned into form, but rather as integral components in a dynamic aggregate that we call the work of art. Alan Sonfist, Robert Smithson, and Joseph Beuys from the 1960s to the 1980s—and more recently Olafur Eliasson, Simon Starling, and others—understand that the crystal simultaneously materializes intimations of purity and transparency and, crucially in the contexts of new materialist theory, magnifies the vitalistic, sensible transformations notably discussed by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter, a topic I return to in the final case study. In Parikka’s terms, then, crystals are geological actants that reveal “the importance of the nonorganic in constructing media before they become media.”⁴³ If we broaden the connotation of the crystal interface to include both an earthly dimension and a transformative metaphoric presence, we may better appreciate the remarkable ways in which crystals stage a zone of exchange between the visual arts, the sciences, and philosophies of the crystal. Before turning to individual examples in the contexts of eco art, it is instructive to look briefly at the roles of the crystal in philosophy, art and architecture generally, science studies, geoaesthetics, and the contemporary visual arts.

Philosophers have used the image of the crystal with remarkable frequency. The solids that Plato described in the Timaeus were crystalline in form, their geometric stability a fitting cognate for the immutable Forms that he believed stand behind everyday appearances. Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the great commentators on Plato, used the crystal as a unique example in his attempt to understand the gradation of nature from the inorganic to humanity. “Every organism represents the Idea of which it is the image or copy,” he wrote in a particularly Platonic moment.⁴⁴ He asserted that “the boundary between the organic and the inorganic is the most sharply drawn in the whole of nature,” yet in explaining the development of our defining “Will” in nature, he returned to the crystal as an anomaly. “In the formation of the crystal we see . . . a tendency to life,” he wrote, but in fact “the crystal has only one manifestation of life, namely its formation.” For Schopenhauer, tempted as he is to credit it with living existence, the crystal is finally only “the corpse of that momentary life.”⁴⁵ Schopenhauer thus previews reasons for the philosophical and aesthetic fascination with the crystal that I explore below. Crystals are compelling because they are indexical of existential questions, poised at the crossing point of life and death. While their perfect forms appear lifeless, they also suggest life because they “grow” and move. Even as “corpses,” they function as physical reminders of life.

 

CRYSTALS IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

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

To explore why this distinction should be of pressing concern today is beyond the scope of this book, but certainly our technological prowess has made the distinction between human and machine one to question. Bio art forces these questions as well. Our sense of what is nature and what is not is of pressing concern today. It is the source of what I would call “natural anxieties,” many of which are worked out in the visual arts. Worldwide, millions flock to art museums to see what we would normally think is external to us and beyond our control, such as Eliasson’s indoor sun in The weather project (see fig. 1). In smaller numbers but with great conviction, art tourists also seek out “natural” experiences in the most contrived, high-tech creations of art working with the earth, such as James Turrell’s unfinished Roden Crater in the Arizona desert, a geological form turned into a colossal eye on the cosmos. What we witness in these pilgrimages is new. More than a symptom of our nostalgia for a benevolent nature or of our fears about the destruction of the environment, it is a sign of confusion about what and where nature is and also, potentially, an indication of revisionary thinking. Part of the fascination and recourse to the crystal as form and metaphor lies in its liminal position on the border between the inanimate and animate, the inorganic and the organic.

 

CRYSTALS IN SCIENCE STUDIES

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

 

CRYSTALS IN THEORIES OF VISUAL CULTURE

A glance at the productive sharing of the crystal among visual theory, art history, and art practice sets the stage for the contemporary use of the crystal in art. Pivotal early twentieth-century aesthetician Wilhelm Worringer’s use of the crystal as a model of “the laws of regularity, [derived] from inanimate matter,” articulated the core of his highly influential theory of the urge to abstraction, published in Abstraction and Empathy (1908; 20). Worringer looked back to Aloïs Riegl, one of the founders of art history, for his elevated view of the crystal, and ahead to artist Paul Klee, who famously characterized himself as a crystal in 1915.⁵² Klee’s painting Fish Magic (1925), for example, is a fantasy of generation and transmutation taking place in a controlled aqueous zone for the growth of crystals, a “solution” for the artist’s organic development toward crystalline complexity and perfection. In our own time, the exchanges made possible by the crystal can be seen vividly in the writing of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Deleuze theorizes the “crystalline” image in film theory and thus reminds us of the powerful organic-inorganic topos invested in the metaphor by Worringer. Before his examination of film, Deleuze’s adoption of the crystal traced back to a nexus of descriptions of mineralogy and geology, topics he developed extensively with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980). Here they use the crystal as an example to explain a powerful “form of organization.”⁵³ For them, crystals do not simply grow and then “die,” which is Schopenhauer’s reading. They claim that “on a crystalline stratum, the amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal must move out to the system’s exterior, where the amorphous medium can crystallize.” For Deleuze and Guattari, then, material existence—could we say “nature”?—is not divided between the inorganic and organic. Crystals have and are “seeds” that endlessly replicate. They investigate the crystal to demonstrate that there are “many intermediaries between the exterior milieu or material and the interior seed: a multiplicity of perfectly discontinuous states of metastability constituting so many hierarchical degrees” (49–50).

Borders, territories, landscape, and the earth: all these concepts are crucial to Deleuze’s concept of “geophilosophy.”⁵⁴ Deleuze and Guattari offer the thought experiment in which all existence is considered as a continuum rather than divided strictly between organic and inorganic matter, with crystals as a prime example again. Their geoaesthetics can be used to understand the prominent use of crystals in the work of earth artists. Smithson also fabricated much of his thinking and art around the crystal. In the 1972 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, he describes early experiments in which he concocted substances and made up scientific names for them, mixing and crossing presumed borders all the while: “I did a series of chemicals,” he elaborates, “there was a tug of war going on between the organic and the crystalline [in which they] . . . met—[and] a kind of dialectic occurred later on, so both areas were resolved” (290).⁵⁵ Smithson discusses the crystal as metaphor and material in numerous contexts, including Judd’s sculpture (6, 20); time (11); grids, networks, systems, and Borges’s stories (54); modernist architecture (64); Wilhelm Worringer (162); and of course his own work, including the sculpture Spiral Jetty (147) and the mapping that is fundamental to his site/nonsite projects. “A crystal can be mapped out,” he reports to Dennis Wheeler, “and in fact I think it was crystallography which led me to mapmaking [and] . . . the Pine Barrens” (244). Smithson had said as much in his 1967 essay “Toward the Development of an Air Terminal Site” and had written on the subject in his 1966 essay “The Crystal Land.” His signature work, Spiral Jetty (1970), is increasingly composed of crystals thanks to its location on the shore of the extremely saline Great Salt Lake. Tacita Dean’s film JG (2013) pays homage to crystals in its extended reflection on Smithson’s film.

We should also recall Joseph Beuys’s project 7000 Oaks (see fig. 5), begun at documenta 7 in 1982, which underlines the question of the organic-inorganic divide or spectrum that I see as the heart of the crystal as scientific phenomenon (actual crystals and the process of crystallization) and metaphor (the analogies with purity, growth, perfection, and stability that I have noted). Beuys wrote: “My point with these seven thousand trees was that each would be a monument, consisting of a living part, the live tree, changing all the time, and a crystalline mass, maintaining its shape, size, and weight. This stone can be transformed only by taking from it, when a piece splinters off, say, never by growing. By placing these two objects side by side, the proportionality of the monument’s two parts will never be the same.”⁵⁶ These precedents inform our understanding of the contemporary life of the crystal in eco-art practice.

 

CRYSTAL INTERFACES IN THE CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS

The literal and metaphoric dimensions of the crystal in art are most often found together, though not always in equal proportions. Noteworthy in this regard is the overwhelmingly successful installation Seizure by British artist Roger Hiorns, seen in London in the fall of 2008 and reopened because of audience demand in the summer of 2009. Hiorns took a ground-floor apartment in a housing development that was slated for demolition, made it watertight, and then filled it with ninety thousand liters of copper sulfate solution. He then left the chemicals to form crystals, drained the space, and encouraged visitors to tour the beautiful yet alien blue interior. In a manner reminiscent of Beuys’s shamanistic side, Hiorns states, “I’m not a scientist. I’m more concerned with starting a natural process which will go on happening by itself. It’s never ending. It won’t stop, whatever you do.” “I try to keep myself out of my work,” he goes on to say. “Seizure is kind of autogenetic—growing by itself.”⁵⁷ His crystals have grown virally (to mix a metaphor), just as they did in J. G. Ballard’s 1966 novel The Crystal World, a book that also informed Smithson’s thinking. In Seizure, their animation is sinister, yet their individual saturated stillness remains seductive. Hiorns establishes audience expectation by issuing rubber boots and gloves in which patrons negotiate the wetness of the site. In this way as well as in the attention paid by the work to a decrepit area, the work is social. But its use of spectacular crystals becomes personal, too, given that many visitors have broken off parts of the work to take away with them.

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

 

ECO ART AND THE CRYSTAL

The long-standing fascination with crystals in Western art provides an opportunity to revisit a question central to this book: that is, to what extent should we think about landscape, land art, and eco art as sufficiently imbricated to be part of one complex tradition that examines the earth? Before the term “ecology” was coined, European and American landscape artists explored the geology of the earth through the basalt formations at sites such as the Giant’s Causeway, in Ireland, and Fingal’s Cave, off the coast of Scotland. Monumental rather than delicate, these formations are nonetheless crystals. I have noted Joseph Beuys’s use of this rock form in his explicitly ecological 7000 Oaks project (see fig. 5). Land-art and eco-art pioneer Alan Sonfist also probed the properties of crystals via the systems ecology of the late 1960s and the 1970s, coordinates I have discussed with reference to Hans Haacke and Jack Burnham in chapter 1 (see fig. 3). Gene Youngblood, one of the most engaging players in the culture of this period, in plotting the crystal’s use in the new media technologies of the time, has thereby suggested why it was so compelling. Describing the frontiers of communication in Expanded Cinema (1970), he begins on the scientific plane that was central to systems theory: “Crystals and circuits consist of logically structured atomic arrays” (26). He predicts the commercial availability of the “‘plasma crystal’ panel, which makes possible billboard or wall-size TV receivers as well as pocket-size TV sets that could be viewed in bright sunlight” (203). He then enthusiastically paraphrases a key scientist working on this new format in ways that once again record the boundary-crossing magic of crystals: “One of the pioneers of this process in the United States was Dr. George Heilmeier of RCA’s David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He describes plasma crystals (sometimes called liquid crystals) as organic compounds whose appearance and mechanical properties are those of a liquid, but whose molecules tend to form into large orderly arrays akin to the crystals of mica, quartz, or diamonds. Unlike luminescent or fluorescing substances, plasma crystals do not emit their own light: they’re read by reflected light, growing brighter as their surroundings grow brighter” (203). Plasma is the fourth state of matter, complementing solid, liquid, and gas.⁶³ It is by far the most common state in the universe, though not on this planet. Plasma crystals “form under certain conditions in a complex (‘dusty’) plasma. There, the electrically charged dust particles arrange in a regular macroscopic crystal lattice.”⁶⁴ Jack Burnham writes in “Real Time Systems” (1969) that “a major illusion of the art system is that art resides in specific objects.”⁶⁵ As we saw in chapter 1 with reference to his thinking on Haacke, Burnham looks instead to systems, whether in institutions or in nature. He sees the evolution of modern sculpture in these terms. Writing about Brancusi, for example, he claims, “There is a biological truth here: within the total regularity of a crystal or organism only an imprecision spurs on further growth or formation; in sculpture as well, a calculated irregularity separates the living from the dead.”⁶⁶

Alan Sonfist has been committed to ecological art since his practice began in the early 1960s. Best known for his Time Landscape in Manhattan—an ambitious, if finally spatially curtailed, project begun in 1965 that replanted New York’s precontact flora—Sonfist also created several sculptural works with the title Crystal Monument (1966–72; fig. 56). The caption to the version illustrated in Art in the Land, which, it should be recalled, was edited by Sonfist and published in 1983, describes a “globe containing crystals that change form and location continually in response to temperature and air currents in the surrounding atmosphere” (53). A conceptual, if not a literal, companion piece to his Microorganism Enclosure (1971), which trapped bacteria and fungi in a closed ecosystem so that viewers could see their patterns of growth and decay, Crystal Monument demonstrated the inanimate side of the line between the earth’s living and nonliving materiality. A description of the “monument” exhibited in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s 1982 exhibit Landscape in Sculpture adds the important observation that Sonfist’s “globe . . . encapsulates a mysterious purple haze” given off by the crystals, “which cling to the sides of the sphere like a swarm of glass insects. The crystals act as tiny prisms, setting the piece aglow with refracted light.”⁶⁷ The description is telling in two ways: a simile portrays the crystals as living insects, and the environment is characterized as a globe, an earthlike microcosm. That Sonfist encourages us to think in planetary terms here is suggested not only by the shape of the monument but also by its indeterminate size in the documentary photograph of it that he used in his book Art in the Land. The image is taken from a low angle, setting the crystal globe against a “sky” and making its size impossible to assess. It is set on what looks like earth. In his essay in the collection devoted to “Alan Sonfist’s public sculptures,” Jonathan Carpenter allows that Sonfist’s “natural crystals rang[ed] in size from microscopic to one foot.”⁶⁸ The version of the monument owned by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art is 57 × 29 × 29 inches (144.78 × 73.66 × 73.66 cm). A sculpture about the scale of a person thus takes on the monumental proportions suggested in Sonfist’s title, both materially and metaphorically.

 

FIG. 56 Alan Sonfist, Crystal Monument, 1966–72. Lucite globe containing crystals. Photo courtesy of the artist. By kind permission of the artist.

The interests of land artists in geology generally and the crystal in particular are more connected to earlier practices in landscape than we might expect. Ironically, the butt of Smithson’s dissatisfaction with the conventional picturesque in his revisionary essay on the ruined industrial monuments of Passaic was, as we have seen, a painting by Samuel Morse. Morse, however, was even more involved with science than was Smithson. He cocreated Morse code and helped to develop single-wire telegraph systems. His interest in electricity stemmed from lectures at Yale by the scientist Benjamin Silliman, whose portrait he painted in 1825. Unlike most of the images of Silliman, Morse’s shows him proudly displaying his mineral collection, including crystals.⁶⁹ Like Pope for his grotto but on a larger and more professional basis, Morse and his colleagues collected crystals and other minerals for study at Yale. In a letter of 1854 describing a new collection, the Yale College Mineralogical Cabinet, and soliciting specimens, we learn from Silliman and a colleague that the “greatest deficiency” of the collection “is in the department of Crystallized American Minerals.”⁷⁰ The passion for crystals was also a link between American and British landscape traditions. Thomas Moran, for example, was a follower of John Ruskin, whose writings are replete with detailed discussions of crystals.

In a sequence too extensive to be more than mentioned here, the collaborative interest in the crystal in landscape depiction and natural philosophy also extends to the German Romantics, for whom these minerals were again mysterious double messengers from the ecotone between the living and inanimate in nature. Carl Gustav Carus, whose Erdlebenbildkunst I discussed in chapter 2, is a case in point, one that allows me to shuttle from landscape to land art and again to recent ecological art. In the top left of his large oil painting The Glacier at Chamonix (1825–27), for example, Carus followed the theories of mountain building espoused by Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert in showing the crystalline forms of granite cliffs.⁷¹ Carus journeyed to the then-famous basalt (crystal) columns at Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa in 1844. For him, the precisely rendered watercolors of this cathedral-like cave evoked the earth’s Christian purpose. They are material yet transcendent. Turner visited the site in 1831 and, as Carus did after him, made works inside the cave. Turner’s geological knowledge led him to detail the crystalline splendor of the site, but in keeping with his propensity to reach for the grand statement in less visually exact terms, his oil painting Staffa: Fingal’s Cave of 1832 is a distant view from the sea showing a steamship (which made access in treacherous waters much easier) moving away from the cave, which is obscured in mist and steam.

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

 

CASE STUDY 8: THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF WATER; MATERIALISM AND AFFECT IN ECO ART

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

I intend “The Emotional Life of Water” to be heard in two ways: first, as an evocation of the emotions we humans feel when thinking about water through eco art (the affective dimension reflected in commonplaces such as “water is life,” which suggest that element’s personal and planetary necessity; such reactions were on full display around Eliasson’s Ice Watch). Second, of equal import but perhaps hard for us to hear, is the sense that water may have its own emotional life. This is of course a massive topic central to aesthetics regarded as the philosophical examination of the sensate and to any account of viewer response in art history. It encompasses our reactions to nature and to art and the neurological coordinates of our feelings.⁷⁹ For example, think of the phrase’s impact when you hear that animal agriculture uses an estimated 55 percent of fresh water in the United States and contributes massively to both global greenhouse-gas loads and water pollution.⁸⁰ It also needs to be said that emotion and affect are not identical and sometimes need to be distinguished in eco-art contexts.⁸¹ While I am not concerned with the intricacies of the disagreements among experts about these differences, I follow Brian Massumi in thinking that affect is a type of registration prior and fundamental to the expression of emotion. Another primary area of concern in the humanities recently is the intersecting investigations of new materialism, thing theory, and object-oriented ontology, all of which emphasize the material realm over that of the human. The less familiar connotation of “the emotional life of water” therefore makes reference to the potential independence of water, to its own material and nonanthropocentric “life,” which I understand as fundamental to the eco art discussed in this case study.

It is important here to flag questions about disciplinary boundaries raised by the types of imagery that convey ecological information about water (or any other planetary element). When are ecological projects “art,” and when they are “science” or perhaps something else, such as activism, design, lobbying, or advertising? To reiterate Braddock’s challenge cited in chapter 1, “What is the art in ecological art, exactly?” I am not suggesting that such categorizations are ontologically based, that they are ultimately more than pragmatic and conventional—subject to use and subject to change—but I do think that we can tell which is which according to context and that we respond differently depending on the category perceived. The field of “information visualization” is highly active around the climate-change file. In a scientific paper, for example, we are likely to glean information from tables and graphs, many of which will require expert facility if they are to be understood. Information sources geared to a broader audience, by contrast, exploit the psychology alluded to in veteran ecological artist Iain Baxter&’s use of a tongue-in-cheek but telling maxim to describe the impact of one of his own ecological works: “A word is worth 1/1,000^th of a picture.”⁸² Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosling make the same point: “Facts are one part; just as guilt does not inspire initiative, people will not act on facts alone. We are inspired to act by emotional and physical experience. Knowledge can tell us what we should do to achieve our goals, but the goals and the urge to act must arise from our emotions.”⁸³

A Guardian newspaper article about the footprint of animal husbandry, “In Pictures: How the West’s Appetite for Beef Is Felling the Amazon,” is long on emotive photographs and, as the section title suggests by substituting the image of a camera for the textual descriptor “In Pictures” in the online version, short on discursive explanation. Below the title of this article, three of the first four images of the clearing of rainforest for grazing purposes are by Daniel Beltrá, an artist working for Greenpeace in this instance, the captions tell us. “The fragility of our ecosystems is a continuous thread throughout my work,” Beltrá states on his own website. “My photographs show the vast scale of transformation our world is under from human-made stresses.”⁸⁴ Beltrá’s photograph Cattle Ranch in Agua Boa, Mato Grosso, Brazil, August 8, 2008—a stark aerial shot of a massive industrial cattle range, purportedly set up on illegally cleared land—is used as the lead image in the Guardian article and found in the “Forests” portfolio on the artist’s website. Do we need to ask when this image is art and when it is science or journalism?

Rather than pursue such distinctions and pretend that science is not part of culture and that imagery is not appropriate in science, it is more productive to think of these perspectives as fully integrated in eco art, which is now frequently deployed in whatever contexts will give it a voice in and beyond the art world. An acknowledgment of the superior affective power of images over words and statistics is increasingly found in scientific publications such as Climate Change: Picturing the Science (2009), which seeks to bring home the specifics of climate science in a more potent way by illustrating the phenomena at issue with images produced by professional documentary photographers. The documentary film Chasing Ice (2012), directed by Jeff Orlowski, follows scientist-turned-photographer James Balog and his team as they document the rapid recession of glaciers in Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland. Few statistics are mentioned; instead, the evidence of glaciers receding, conveyed in stop-action photographs and films, brings climate change into a human time frame with great effect. The U.K. firm Carbon Visuals promotes the same message about the sorts of visual information to deploy. It offers imaging services to clients who wish to get their ecological messages across more effectively through visuals, the basis of which is not simply information but the emotional, affective conveyance of that information. Of course, not all artists seek emotional response to their work; Michael Mandiberg’s CO₂ app for the Firefox browser, for example, sticks to the numbers and graphs, as does Mel Chin’s CLI-Mate app from 2008, which proposed to show its users numerical data regarding the impact of their day-to-day behavior on the planet. Bruce Foltz wrote in 1995 that “either tacitly or explicitly, the character of the environmental crisis is regarded as authoritatively defined by the natural sciences.”⁸⁵ Although the integrative efforts of Cape Farewell and the CLUI, for example, and exhibitions such as Carbon 14 have rendered this authority less conclusive than it was twenty years ago, we should treat this balance of perspectives as an open issue today, one addressed in the water works I discuss.

Another counterexample to the domination of science is the long-standing practice of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The methodological premise of their extensive projects on the land, such as Running Fence (realized in 1976) and The Umbrellas (Japan–United States, 1984–91), is one of consultation and negotiation across disciplines and interests. Christo makes this clear with reference to The Floating Piers, installed to both acclaim and controversy in Italy in 2016, and Over the River, a project proposed in 1992 to “suspend 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels high above the Arkansas River along a 42-mile stretch of the river between Salida and Cañon City in south-central Colorado.”⁸⁶ In a 2013 interview, Christo underlined the purpose of artworks whose genesis is protracted, complex, and crosses multiple boundaries, from the legal to the ecological: “For many years, all the people are thinking how the work will be beautiful, how the work will be awful. Basically, the work is working in the mind of the people before it physically exists. This is probably the biggest satisfaction we have—Jeanne Claude and myself—because this is the only thing artists like to have, . . . to have the people comment and discuss their works.”⁸⁷ Over the River was to be an ecological action revealing systems of land use; even before installation, it triggered often-heated discussions about nature and preservation among local citizens representing a wide range of interests. In January 2017, however, Christo abruptly canceled the project, in part as a protest against the newly elected Trump administration. “[N]ow, the federal government is our landlord,” Christo stated. “They own the land. I can’t do a project that benefits this landlord.”⁸⁸

Ecological art is often motivated by artists’ commitment to act in the face of climate change, whether as protesters, restorers, educators, witnesses, or mourners. But as I asked in chapter 1 when canvasing the range of eco-art practices, what can and should artists, eco art historians, and art do in the face of these pressing planetary problems? Some early examples of ecological art featuring water fall under the heading of “direct action” adumbrated in chapter 1—remediation and reclamation—because they restore threatened habitats: Patricia Johanson’s Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas, Texas (begun in 1981),⁸⁹ Betty Beaumont’s Ocean Landmark (1978–80), and a range of work by Ichi Ikeda in Japan. While I hope to avoid either/or categories, numerous other water works do not fix anything but instead accentuate the emotional, sensate articulation specific to art, whether in contrast to or in conjunction with scientific presentations of climate issues. Such approaches can be part of an aesthetic withdrawal that honors the earth’s separateness, or they may work to more fully “articulate” human and nonhuman relationships with the earth.

I have noted the question of whether artists—and those writing eco art history—should continue to produce, display, and discuss art using the same largely capitalist structures, extracted resources, and attitudes that have generated our current environmental woes. Artist, cultural commentator, and founding editor of Third Text Rasheed Araeen has argued in “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century” of 2009 that artists should “abandon their studios and stop making objects” and instead refocus their imaginations “to enhance not only their own creative potential but also the collective life of the earth’s inhabitants” (684). As Charles Palermo has commented, Araeen was understandably frustrated by the avant-garde’s ineffectualness: “The bourgeois institutions of Western capitalism’s artworld undermine even the best avant-garde projects, but they are also what legitimize them.”⁹⁰ My expectations for art, artists, and art historians differ from Araeen’s. My view is that eco art is most valuable in society when it is heuristic, positioned at an infra-thin remove from practical ameliorative interventions. As I argued in chapter 1 with reference to Adorno’s theories, eco art can most meaningfully speak to our climate predicament when it asserts its noninstrumental, aesthetic identity, when—in the environmental context—its differences from scientific and technological procedures convey a vulnerability or humility in the face of climate disruption. It is in a mode of “articulation” rather than instrumentalist efficacy that eco art can help us think beyond the overemphasized human “nar-ego” against which Araeen rails. Environmentalists assert that what is needed to avert environmental collapse is nothing short of a transformation of our worldview, what Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter calls “green materialism.” If it can influence such changes in opinion, what might eco art’s mechanisms of impact be? To put this question as Stacy Alaimo does in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, what or where is “the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature?” (2). I suggest that such zones or aesthetic ecotones are created by eco art, inasmuch as it can elucidate the ecologies of interconnectedness between matter and our perceptions and emotions. Alaimo calls this extensive web “trans-corporeality.” Nancy Tuana thinks in terms of “eco-cosmopolitanism.”⁹¹

The emotional life of water commonly refers to our responses to water themes in ecological art. This is the humanist default. Whether we think in terms of the phenomenology of reception, about relational aesthetics, or about more contemporary practices, the response paradigm is all about us. This is the view that I quoted Roni Horn expressing in “Saying Water,” for example: “When you’re talking about water, aren’t you really talking about yourself? Isn’t water like the weather that way?”⁹² As I claimed in chapter 2, both Horn’s Library of Water (see fig. 2) and Rúrí’s Archive: Endangered Waters (see fig. 17) are highly emotive laments for what seems to be a lost ecological balance, and both works foreground the materialities of the elements they record and preserve. Can artworks also be understood—perhaps simultaneously—in terms of the independence of water, its own material and nonanthropocentric “life,” and if so, would this shift be valuable? We could reread Rúrí’s and Horn’s installations in this way. To elucidate this fundamental border question, however, I must focus on two additional examples that provide an opportunity to explore this question.

Dark Years Away by Mariele Neudecker (2013; fig. 57) takes undersea exploratory film by oceanographer Dr. Alex Rogers and his colleagues at the University of Oxford—shot at depths of more than three thousand meters in the remote southwest Indian Ocean—and reveals with it the otherwise invisible human impact on the seabed. We see a robotic arm scooping sediment; our eyes are aided by its searchlight, but total darkness would prevail otherwise at this depth. Her title plays both with the notion of remoteness (an inversion of “light years away”) and with relative illumination. To discuss the affective dimensions of Neudecker’s work, we need to attend particularly to the relationships she establishes between sound and image.⁹³ Here she translates machine-made footage from a scientific expedition into a more immediate human register, in part by supplying an emotionally taut soundtrack, Voices of Silence (1991) by the contemporary Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. The plumes of fine deposits thrown up by the excavation we see in progress seem to move gracefully to this soundtrack. Improbably, they become part of our world and describe its beauty. For other videos using Rogers’s visual source material, the soundtracks make more prosaic reference to our telluric existence: we hear clocks, heartbeats, and helicopters. Banal, scientific research data become highly emotional, perhaps in a negative way. A survey of the scientific study of “emotional attention” notes that “[i]n recent years, abundant research has investigated the neural substrates of emotion processing, now allowing us to pinpoint brain circuits implementing specialized mechanisms for ‘emotional attention.’ Our understanding of emotional influences on perception can now also be integrated with recent advances concerning the neural effects of selective attention on sensory systems.”⁹⁴ For Christian Marclay, creator of the masterful sound/image works Telephones (1995) and The Clock (2010), “sound is more powerful than the image and makes the image adhere to it.”⁹⁵ Marclay stitches together thousands of film clips on his stated themes; we are mesmerized visually, but how sound makes or breaks the visual connections is also remarkable in The Clock. Eventually—and against our dominant perceptual instincts—we must listen as much as watch and try to bring these inputs together. Neudecker’s Dark Years Away is simple in structure by comparison with Marclay’s compositions, but its images take on a grace and lyricism hard to imagine without their adherence to Vasks’s music. The work leads us to contemplation and perhaps to an articulation of our connections to nature in distress. Information becomes evocation.

 

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

Paul Walde’s video Requiem for a Glacier (2013; fig. 58) is a forty-minute, two-channel, large-screen version of his sound performance of the same name. Requiem memorializes British Columbia’s Farnham Glacier in the Purcell Mountains, an area that borders a nature conservancy but is now being opened to more tourist development. The piece relies on a potent mix of sound and dramatic landscape vistas to effect a sense of environmental loss. Walking an orchestra, choir, and vocal soloist onto the glacier, Walde establishes a situation in which he can examine the neuroscience of creativity and reception through this four-movement oratorio. His passionate soundscape is an example of “sonic mimicry”—in this case the conversion of temperature records for the area into music notation—a significant strand in contemporary eco art. The libretto is a Latin translation of the British Columbia government’s press release announcing the approval of a year-round resort community at the site. The work sounds liturgical but is decidedly material at its foundation. Its aural tracks are carefully intercalated with the two-channel video images we see. Often Walde’s camera pans the mountain range holding the glacier and traverses the dramatic skyscape above. One video channel is sometimes focused on the orchestra or the vocalist while the other investigates details of the landscape, especially the runoff from the glacier. The most dramatic visual and aural conceit in Requiem for a Glacier is the appearance and relentless expansion of a black rectangle in our field of vision. From a speck akin to a black deposit of the pollution-formed cryoconite that we see on glaciers worldwide now, the form grows quickly and eventually blacks out our panoramic view of the region. Walde thus elicits both the phenomenon of “dark snow”—the increasing amount of soot from incomplete combustion found globally—and the resulting drastically reduced reflectiveness of ice and snow on earth, the decreasing albedo effect that some climate scientists claim is responsible for a significant percentage of global warming. One result of the presence of these particles is cracking in the ice as the dark spots attract heat and melt into the frozen surface, an eventually devastating syndrome that we saw in chapter 2 in Diane Burko’s Elegies series (see fig. 18).

 

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

Artist Tiffany Holmes has theorized the issue of how best to communicate scientific information about climate change. Her process of “eco-visualization,” though not explicitly concerned with the integration of vision and sound as many eco artworks are, investigates and communicates our cultural relationships with natural resources in ways designed to catch our attention through emotional response. Finding inspiration in Hans Haacke’s Rhine Water Purification Plant (see fig. 3) and other early eco art examined in chapter 1, she makes the following claims:

 

· Eco-visualization offers a new way to visualize invisible environmental data.

· Eco-visualization can provide real time visual feedback that can increase conservation behavior or environmental awareness. . . .

· Eco-visualization can encourage good environmental stewardship.⁹⁶

 

Holmes’s work filters, digests, and redeploys abstract information so that audiences may understand and potentially act on given ecological issues. In We Can’t Swim Forever (2011), a kinetic sculpture displayed in a vitrine, Holmes positions miniature polar bears on and among three rotating forms that suggest both icebergs and layer cakes. Playing here on the plight of polar bears no longer able to find sufficient ice to support seal hunting—a predicament brought to worldwide attention in former U.S. vice president Al Gore’s remarks about these bears and retreating Arctic ice in the film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and whose empirical validity has been debated ever since—the work, by being overtly affective, sidesteps scientific disputes about rates of decline in ice and polar bears and about the causal relationships between these statistics. Holmes’s We Can’t Swim Forever, I would suggest, does not so much pull on our heartstrings as has us question that very strategy in eco art.

The anthropologist Philippe Descola has presented an ironic challenge to his discipline that we might adapt to eco art: he claims that anthropology can either “disappear as an exhausted form of humanism or else . . . transform itself by rethinking its domain and its tools in such a way as to include in its object far more than the anthropos.”⁹⁷ If new materialism across several fields challenges us to imagine the humanities as nonanthropocentric—to take “the nonhuman turn”⁹⁸—can and should eco art history move toward this paradoxical end? The goal, I believe, would be to find ways of being on the planet through art that would not focus on the human, the troublemaker of Parikka’s “Anthrobscene,” but rather on the planet and on the relations between these actants. An object-oriented examination of this challenge is promising because eco art is especially tuned to nonlinguistic modes of being and to the materiality of things before we acculturate them as objects and artifacts. Affect studies are another recent preoccupation across the humanities, one characterized, according to Ruth Leys, by “the claim . . . that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances that so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs that we ignore those affective intensities and resonances at our peril.”⁹⁹ While some could find affect theory’s focus on the human antithetical to a new materialist concentration on things, Jane Bennett underlines a possible confluence of these approaches, stating that she interrogates “affect that is not only not fully susceptible to rational analysis or linguistic representation but . . . also not specific to humans, organisms, or even to bodies: the affect of technologies, winds, vegetables, minerals.”¹⁰⁰ Water (or anything else) could have an emotional life. Enacting the radically porous and fluid situations wherein the human and nonhuman, organic and nonorganic elements of eco art combine, Walde’s and Neudecker’s videos allow us some purchase on what Lauren Berlant calls “a materialist context for affect theory” and “the transmission of affect” traced by Teresa Brennan.¹⁰¹

Is there an indication of an emotional life of water before, after, and without us in the Neudecker and Walde works, a suggestion of the perdurance of nature that contrasts with the “earth-death” pictures I examined in chapter 2? Or does water somehow speak through us via ecological art, yielding not only a precognitive experience but also an awareness of what is not human? Thinking with Deleuze, we could say that water in both works has its own vital rhythm that is translated for our ecological perception. If, on one plane, both Dark Years Away and Requiem for a Glacier are eco-visualizations of scientific concerns—of plastics on the sea floor and melting glaciers—the emotive soundtracks to these works could remind us subconsciously of the invisible nature of water, both what we cannot literally see in these videos and what is habitually elided when we think of our human perceptions as central to what art (or water) is. If aesthetics is at root about our senses, we can acknowledge through this portal the existence of other, dissimilar, yet still sensate matter, matter of which we are a part and that flows through us. But what is more human than classical music, via which both works move away from the explicit representation of particular data to underscore emotional impact? Both Neudecker and Walde give a powerful sense that we are experiencing places and phenomena that we do not see fully through their works—Deleuze might label such dimensions as “outside”—but that, on the contrary, we may find even more remote, strange, and separate from our understanding because of their videos. Arguably, these artists move from the human emotional dimension to imagine material and affect without us or, at the minimum, with humans as implicated witnesses to and collaborators with the nonhuman. Both Henri Bergson and Charles Darwin suggested that human culture impoverishes what nature can be by focusing only on our inevitably limited interests. Dark Years Away and Requiem for a Glacier encourage us to dispel this narrow anthropomorphism.

Describing “cruel optimism” as “the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object,” Berlant claims that our current psychological and social state of perceived unceasing crisis, ecological trouble high on the list, leads to a range of cruelly optimistic bonds, such as the fantasy of the “good life” or a commitment to idealistic political projects.¹⁰² In Requiem for a Glacier the planned ski resort reflects this optimism. Berlant tracks “dramas of adjustment to the transformation of what had seemed foundational into those binding kinds of optimistic relation we call ‘cruel’”(3). She eschews trauma theory in her reckonings of such encounters and habits, focusing instead on the quotidian nature of critical situations, on “crisis ordinariness” (10). The cruel optimism in Neudecker’s, Walde’s, and many other examples of eco art, I suggest, is the global reliance on a carbon economy in the Anthropocene, a deleterious habit that more than meets Berlant’s criteria of being “too possible, and toxic” (24) and also satisfies Morton’s benchmarks for “hyperobjects.” As discussed in chapter 3, a hyperobject refers to an only incompletely perceived leviathan such as climate disruption and to interactions we have with such entities. Hyperobjects are both profoundly present and constantly elusive; they withdraw from the human yet affect us and one another profoundly. They therefore call us to consider the limits of the human perceptual field, how we are impacted by forces and conditions in operation far beyond our spatial and temporal range, and how things might interact on their own. Tom Rand supplies an apt example of what Morton is getting at: “Atmospheric chemistry is a thing,” he writes, “and there is a complex causal chain between that thing and us [with] political, economic, and social repercussions.”¹⁰³

Isabelle Hayeur’s photographs and videos bring together explorations of water, borderlines, and affect. In an early artist’s statement she emphasizes her exploration of landscape and land use, especially the exploitation of arable land for suburban expansion in her Model Homes series of 2004–7: “It seems clear that our visions and lifestyles have a much greater impact on the world we occupy than in the past. It thus becomes particularly important that we assume responsibility for the landscapes we create and the worlds we imagine.”¹⁰⁴ The seventy images in her Underworlds series (2008–15) powerfully show the global implications of eco-suicidal habits of the Anthropocene while also dwelling on its material intimacies. Although this series of underwater photographs was taken in navigation canals and ship graveyards in the United States, Underworlds explores threatened individual ecosystems that stand in for the mistreatment of waterways globally. Visually seductive in their rich coloration, Hayeur’s images are also distinctly disorienting for two reasons. Though many of the images were shot in southern Florida, this is not the vacation spot we are used to seeing in advertising, and her images are anything but celebratory. Her technique is also unusual in that she shoots from a partly submerged position, so that we register two horizon lines, that of the water close to us and that between earth and sky in the distance.

“The aquatic landscapes I probe have been considerably altered,” Hayeur writes. “They are sometimes actual deserts where nothing is left to see. The images I capture bear witness to this absence.”¹⁰⁵ As we see in the upper quarter of Substances (2012; fig. 59), the day is bright and the water calm. Houses preside along the shoreline at the right. Commanding most of the image, however, is a close-up view of an underwater plant. Placed front and center as a “portrait” despite its smallness, it is a sickly specimen. Moreover, this marine plant is the only one that manages to stand and grow toward the light. Others wilt on the bottom amidst the silt—one aspect of the “substances” of her title—that makes the water through which Hayeur photographs brown and opaque. The waterline in this series is an uneven and unstable horizon that we nonetheless measure with and against as we see reminders of human domination here, a distant apartment building or ship, as well as the dying aqueous ecosystem in which she immerses us.¹⁰⁶ Conditioned by the stereotypical pictorial celebration of natural beauty in this area and by the normalizing conventions of landscape, we might be confused by Hayeur’s unusual perspective. It does not take long, however, to notice that the human landscape above the waterline, which she always includes, is the source of the destruction in what she calls the “aquatic landscapes” below. Such knowledge colludes with our perplexity to register a strong effect.

 

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

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

 

I had quite specific sounds in mind even though the idea was a bit entangled: I wanted to suggest the material in the images, but also suggest something that isn’t there, or something hidden, or something that was there before, or all those options. In the meantime, I wanted the sound to be abstract enough to leave some space to viewers so they could read the sound and image relationship their own way.

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

Hayeur makes this progression clear in the video, which explores the ships from the surface for roughly its first half. In a transitional sequence, the camera looks at the refineries along the shore of New Jersey’s “Chemical Coast,” then at the landscape and up into the sky; we hear birds and other familiar sounds for a few moments. After visually linking the clouds in the sky with underwater clouds of sediment Hayeur throws up as she films, she then seamlessly conveys herself underwater to focus on the rotting hulls themselves. As in Substances, the ocean floor that we traverse is almost lifeless. The light has trouble penetrating even this shallow water. The final minutes of Castaway are quiet, inviting us to contemplate what we have seen. Where can Hayeur’s camera go now? She films reflections of a wan sun and clouds on the surface of the water, looking down, before fading to black. Complementing Tacita Dean’s intricate conversation with the novelist J. G. Ballard and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in her film JG (2013), though less directly, Hayeur thus recalls both Smithson’s intimate record of the Great Salt Lake’s mineralogy and his cosmic sequence in the film version, the denouement in which he spirals toward the sun “from the center of the Spiral Jetty” in a helicopter while looking down on his sculpture and intoning, “Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water,” as he lists the cardinal coordinates of the earthwork (149). Hayeur is the Smithson of water. Where he famously recorded postindustrial monuments near his home town of Passaic, New Jersey, she reveals what was hidden even to the ever-curious Smithson, the underwater underside of the landscape so close to his birthplace. Its ruins suggest not only the past of specific industries but the physical and ideological decay of modernity presided over by the Anthropocene of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her video looks back to the heyday of generations of ships, but without nostalgia. Instead, Hayeur’s focus is the baleful present in this area and the even less hopeful future of heavily polluted oceans. Her connections to Smithson—and, indirectly, to his land-art contemporaries’ interests in water, Betty Beaumont’s especially—figure in the long chronological sweep I have been establishing in Landscape into Eco Art.

In this context, though certainly not in terms of causation or intent, Hayeur’s underwater pictures can also be productively contrasted with the shipping news central to J. M. W. Turner’s landscapes. Limulus (2014; fig. 60) is an extended horizontal “aquatic landscape.” The photograph was taken on Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico, site of Smithson’s second uprooted tree in 1969. Close-up and underwater, we see the shell of a dead horseshoe crab whose genus lends its Latin name to the title. While there are plants on the seabed, the contrast with the verdant shoreline above the water is striking. This is not the Chemical Coast; we see no signs of habitation nearby, though in the distance and out of focus there are what appear to be large smokestacks. The crab shell is clearly the focus of this large image because it is seen in full detail. It is a still life, nature morte, embedded in a landscape. I want to suggest that Limulus is an image of contemporary history, another “earth-death picture” in the lineage discussed in chapter 2. It stands in sharp contrast to perhaps the only well-known image of a crab of this sort in Western art, Turner’s enduringly controversial painting War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, exhibited in 1842 (fig. 61).

 

FIG. 60 Isabelle Hayeur, Limulus, 2014. Inkjet on photo paper, 18 × 62 in. (47 × 158 cm). By kind permission of the artist.

 

FIG. 61 Joseph Mallord William Turner, War: The Exile and the Rock Limpet, exhibited 1842. Oil on canvas, 794 × 794 mm (support). Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856. Photo © 2015 Tate, London.

Where Hayeur’s crab is commanding, Turner’s is so small as to be missed were it not for the poem he appended to the work when it was exhibited, a stanza in his extensive composition The Fallacies of Hope:

 

Ah! thy tent-formed shell is like

A soldier’s nightly bivouac, alone

Amidst a sea of blood

but you can join your comrades.

John Ruskin quotes these lines in his approving discussion of a painting that was otherwise much lampooned and misunderstood in its time.¹⁰⁸ With characteristic ambition, Turner addressed several historical moments in this work. War was paired with Peace: Burial at Sea, his homage to his friend the painter David Wilkie, who was laid to rest at sea off Gibraltar in 1841. War depicts a disconsolate Napoleon Bonaparte in full uniform, even though he is pictured as a British captive on the island of St. Helena, where he died in 1821. One occasion for this painting was the return of his remains to Paris in 1840, but Turner had already painted famous episodes from the Napoleonic wars, including the death of Nelson, and saw no reason to venerate the military leader.¹⁰⁹ Peace not only memorializes Wilkie’s gentle disposition and laments his loss with its dramatically dark coloration but also contrasts with the belligerent behavior of another contemporary painter, the volatile Benjamin Robert Haydon, as well as that of Napoleon, the ruthless military leader. The Napoleon in War, standing at a watery shoreline and backed by a British guard and an extraordinarily sanguine sunset and its reflection, which was much criticized for its vividness, clearly contemplates the minuscule animal, which—in position if not scale—is comparable to Hayeur’s crab. As we saw in his references to magnetism in Snowstorm (1842) in chapter 2, Turner frequently incorporated his knowledge of natural history in his landscapes. In this case, his interest in the lower reaches of the great chain of being came from an expert on crustaceans, his sometimes-physician, Sir Anthony Carlisle, who was also professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy, where Turner was professor of perspective. Turner’s poetic commentary on War revolves on a reference to the limpet. His lines can be understood to attribute these thoughts to the pensive Bonaparte, who is reminded of his soldiering and of his captivity by the “tent-formed shell.” The “you” of the final line, italicized by Ruskin, has a double meaning. If it refers to the mollusk that is joining its fellows, it is a lament for Napoleon’s lost freedom. If it refers to Napoleon, it suggests that he was never again free and could only join his comrades in death.

Where Turner paints Napoleon’s sublime fall to the status of a prisoner interacting with a mollusk, Hayeur’s aquatic landscape is antisublime and antipicturesque. Her images invert the human/nonhuman hierarchy to deliver what Alexander Pope called bathos, the opposite of the sublime or an example of its failure, but nonetheless a profound and earthly state. Limulus explores the ecosystem we see: it is literally a picture of the earth’s death. If her photograph were to be retitled War: Limulus, the conflict Hayeur presents would be that defined by philosopher of science Michel Serres, who, as noted above, claimed in 1990 that there is a new “world war” that takes the material earth and all its inhabitants as the target of multiple hostilities. Hayeur’s bathetic reversal in Limulus implores us to respond. The challenge for her, as for Neudecker, for Walde, and for us as viewers, is to frame water, landscapes, and nature so that we can see them in their difference from what we already know and project into them, whether this is a set of conventions for representing landscape or another anthropocentric norm. By attending to the range of affective responses to these water works, we can see nature as both connected to and independent from our perceptions, not simply as another landscape for easy assimilation.

 

BORDERLANDS OF ETHICS AND ECO ART

Landscape into Eco Art provides an armature with which central practices and issues in eco art can be understood and assessed. The articulations offered should put us in a position to respond to the question, “What do we, as eco art historians, artists, and people concerned with both ecology and culture, do now?” As the themes of chapters 2 through 5 have suggested, the paradigm of borders—between polities or species, within art practices such as landscape, land art, and eco art—offers considerable purchase for this question and for an assessment of my argument that there is indeed a connection in responses to the earth that proceeds from the landscape genre to land art and to today’s eco art. Instead of summarizing five chapters, eight case studies, and numerous examples, however, I instead conclude by briefly examining two approaches to the question of what to do, and then looking at eco artworks by Simon Starling and Olafur Eliasson that support active contemplation around the issues of planetary climate disruption.

Rasheed Araeen first presented his essay “Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” introduced above, in October 2008 in the “Manifesto Marathon” at London’s Serpentine Gallery. In the face of rapid environmental change and discussions of ecological apocalypse, he hoped that artists would turn to eco-art projects. He sharply criticized both the historical avant-garde for its slide into commercialization and the pioneering land and earth artists of the 1960s, whose work, he claimed, was too individualistic and has been similarly absorbed and blunted by contemporary art institutions. Araeen’s lament for the avant-garde is familiar. As we have seen, too, his critique of the unseeing egoism of American earth artists such as Smithson and Morris was a commonplace by the 1970s. What is unusual about his manifesto is its optimism about what art can accomplish, despite the ecological warning signs to which it often calls attention. While Araeen rails against ego in the realm of art that focuses on nature, he claims that the idea of making land into art in significant ways remains potent. How? Through what he calls “collective work” (683), a radical transformation of human consciousness. Araeen argues that an effectively environmentalist art must change our daily behavior on a large scale. He cites Beuys’s 7000 Oaks project (see fig. 5) as an example of how to make planting trees “part of people’s everyday life” (682). “What the world needs is rivers and lakes of clean water, collective farms and the planting of trees all over the world. An artistic imagination can in fact help achieve all these objectives; and it should . . . lay the foundation for a radical manifesto of art for the twenty-first century” (683).

Many contemporary artists share Araeen’s sense of urgency. They agree that fellow artists should focus on ecological issues, but also caution that this emphasis is not yet sufficiently global. Araeen’s examples of art’s ameliorative effects center on bringing water issues—specifically, more widespread desalination—to the fore. Shai Zakai, a self-described eco artist from Israel whose practice involves water reclamation, wrote in response to the 2003 3rd World Water Forum in Japan, “Every artist should be deeply concerned with regard to the condition of water. The fact that they can reach areas where policy makers can’t, in terms of people and communities is something to acknowledge.”¹¹⁰ Again as we have seen, Basia Irland has similarly underlined the potency of social organization and participation in her many Gathering works. Embedded in these and many other practices is the key to ecological awareness through art that Araeen identifies: reaching people and strata of society not readily addressed by or included in other public and private discussions of the environment. A prime illustration is Vik Muniz’s celebrated Waste Land project and documentary film of 2010, directed by Lucy Walker, in which the Brazilian artist facilitated the creation of large-scale self-portraits in garbage of and by Rio de Janeiro’s catadores, men and women who eke out a living by collecting recyclable materials from massive refuse dumps. We are alerted to the social and human dimensions of climate change by the complex articulations of many other contemporary artists, some of whom were working at the apex of land art. Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison have been working on environmental issues in collaboration with communities for decades. They describe themselves on their webpage as “historians, diplomats, ecologists, investigators, emissaries and art activists.” In the contexts established by Araeen’s manifesto, it is an encouraging development that artists who do not portray themselves necessarily as environmentalists, and whose practices include a wider range of concerns, nonetheless address ecological issues with great acuity.

Araeen insists that artists can and should make a difference in a world beset by environmental emergencies. He shows one way to move in this direction, by collectively implementing artistic ideas. Thinking of his polemic and of the many and various eco-art projects realized in recent years, we could be forgiven for wondering, with Charles Palermo, what kind and how much of a difference in this direction is “enough.”¹¹¹ We do not have to believe that artists can save the earth. At the same time, not knowing exactly what difference a project in water reclamation, for example, will mean globally is not a sufficient excuse for cynicism and passivity. The writer Gretel Ehrlich is a powerful witness to this creed of acting in the aesthetic. In The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold, she meets the despairing sense of impotence in the face of global warming by suggesting that we act individually and collectively to “develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior, . . . then make decisions based on creating biological wealth.” “[L]isten to the truth the land will tell you,” she writes, and “act accordingly” (197). Eco artists present just such perspectives. Pico Iyer relates a revealing story about the Dalai Lama, one that could be applied to environmental concerns. Feeling that even someone in his position could never do enough about human suffering, the Dalai Lama told Iyer “that it was ‘up to us poor humans to make the effort,’ one step at a time,” as the Buddha did. Iyer continues, “Then as we were walking out of the room, he went back and turned off the light. It’s such a small thing, he said, it hardly makes a difference at all. And yet nothing is lost in the doing of it, and maybe a little good can come of it, if more and more people remember this small gesture in more and more rooms.”¹¹² Malcolm Miles makes the point forcefully with regard to art and ecology: “Giving up is as unacceptable as climate change denial.”¹¹³

As I suggested in chapter 1, other ways to proceed in eco art can be derived from philosopher Lorraine Code’s book Ecological Thinking. Akin to Morton’s ecological thought, which encourages us to see connections across familiar boundaries, Code’s “ecological thinking” is a mode of involvement with the world. “Ecological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about ‘the environment,’ although these figure as catalysts among its issues. It is a revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and reconfigures theory and practice. It does not reduce to a set of rules or methods; it may play out differently from location to location; but it is sufficiently coherent to be interpreted and enacted across widely diverse situations” (4). Code’s book enters into debates in philosophical ethics; she does not address aesthetics or art directly, but in keeping with her principles, her position is commensurate with much of the contemporary eco art that we have examined. “An epistemological position whose starting point is in the ecological situations and interconnections of knowers and knowing—be they benign, malign, or merely equivocal—departs radically from inquiry directed toward analyzing discrete, disparate beings, events, and items in the world, only subsequently to propose connections among them or to insert them into ‘contexts’ conceived as separately given” (5). Olafur Eliasson embraces this position and responsibility in his statements and eco artworks: “I believe that one of the major responsibilities of artists—and the idea that artists have responsibilities may come as a surprise to some—is to help people not only get to know and understand something with their minds but also to feel it emotionally and physically. By doing this, art can mitigate the numbing effect created by the glut of information we are faced with today, and motivate people to turn thinking into doing.”¹¹⁴ He composed these words as a 2016 awardee of a Crystal Award, given to “artists whose important contributions are improving the state of the world and who best represent the ‘spirit of Davos,’”¹¹⁵ the annual world economic forum in Switzerland. More than any other eco artist, Eliasson (fittingly, given the name of this award) uses the crystal to achieve these goals. To take such a specific entry point into his expansive work is necessarily partial but also illustrates the interconnectedness of his themes, methods, and materials.

Eliasson’s deployments of crystals began in his early work and is still central to his global practice today. Die organische und kristalline Beschreibung (The organic and crystalline description; 1996), was shown in the ornate and crystal-chandelier-festooned Baroque part of the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, in Graz, Austria. Eliasson used a light projector modified with yellow and blue filters to beam light onto a wave simulator. A standing mirror caught these images and refracted them around the room, aided by that space’s own mirrors and the crystals of the chandeliers. The room thus appeared to be underwater, moving with energy and current in a way directly comparable to the effects Pope achieved in his grotto and Drury with his camera obscuras placed near water. Eliasson made observers’ individual and collective share in processing what they see in such situations more explicit in the many works in which he used mirrors to create kaleidoscopes. An important example is Earth Kaleidoscope (2006), which in a passing reference to the many examples of land art that cut into or buried objects in the earth, was set into the ground. When we looked down, however, our gaze was met by the crystalline mirrors on the sides of this small sunken chamber, which reflected our looking and our environment. Beaming up from the bottom of this earth well were red lights that Eliasson installed in the base. We saw into the earth, back in time in an archaeological sense, but also self-consciously, given that we were ourselves reflected and because it was our technology that made the work possible. Eliasson also reversed this outside-in view. Collaborating with Hens Larson Architects, he designed the facade of Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre (2005–11) to incorporate what he calls glass “bricks” that mirror the symmetry of “the crystalline basalt columns commonly found in Iceland,”¹¹⁶ the same form that engaged Turner, Carus, and Beuys, as we have seen. To cite one more of many possible examples, Your disappearing garden of 2011 presented a room full of volcanic obsidian rock from the interior highlands of Iceland. Since the rock was highly reflective and in a way the opposite of volcanically formed crystals such as basalt—because the cooling of the earth’s crust did not produce any such patterns or disruptions in the smooth, mirrored surfaces—we see ourselves in the installation, as Eliasson emphasizes with this and many other titles that use the pronoun “your” (as we have seen in Your embodied garden [2013; see fig. 35] in chapter 4). Given that Your disappearing garden was exhibited in Manhattan, home of De Maria’s remaining earth room, we might well interpret Eliasson’s admonitory title as a comparison with the apparently cavalier use of land in land art.

Eliasson’s work aligns closely with Code’s “ecological thinking,” an “epistemological position whose starting point is in the ecological situations and interconnections of knowers and knowing.” He is laudably attentive to the differences in our responses to his clear ecological messages. If we are inclined to object that his approach is too anthropocentric, too much about us, as I noted with respect to Roni Horn’s views on water in this chapter, then we might acknowledge the potential recognition of material, extra-human dimensions of both Code’s thinking and Eliasson’s work through Simon Starling’s different approach to eco art.¹¹⁷ Let me conclude with just two examples from his large and complex body of work.

Both Island for Weeds (Prototype) (2003) and One Ton II (2005; fig. 62) focus purposefully on border crossing to make ecological statements. A self-reflexive metawork, the floating garden Island for Weeds animated the eighteenth-century importation to Scotland of rhododendrons as well as the plants’ subsequent takeover of local flora and recategorization as weeds. Mirroring the plants’ original migration from Spain, Starling’s island “transported” them to the Venice Biennale, where the artist represented Scotland in 2003. Importantly to the long view of the landscape tradition as attention to the earth that I have articulated, this plant is an almost architectural element in British landscape gardens of the eighteenth century such as Stourhead. There are analogies to be made with Smithson’s Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island (envisioned in 1970; realized posthumously in 2005) and, perhaps more significantly, with the long-standing impact of species migration because of human exploration and migration. The naturalist Joseph Banks, who accompanied James Cook to the south seas in 1768–71, for example, sought to improve the lot of Indigenous peoples by giving them domesticated animals new to their ecosystems. The ecological impact was horrendous. With happier overtones, Starling’s island raises issues of indigeneity, immigration, and hybridity that are directly analogous to the concerns of contemporary societies.

 

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

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