CHAPTER ONE
1. Bachmann, “Gatekeeper: A Foreword,” 12.
2. “Eco art” is a common short form for ecological art. As Sam Bower suggests, the term overlaps with several others: “At greenmuseum.org we use ‘environmental art’ as an umbrella term to encompass ‘eco-art’ / ‘ecological art,’ ‘ecoventions,’ ‘land art,’ ‘earth art,’ ‘earthworks,’ ‘art in nature’ and even a few other less-common terms.” Bower, “A Profusion of Terms.” I believe that “environmental art” is the more specific term and use “eco art” as the umbrella designation. Artists, art historians, and theorists began to use both “eco” and “environmental” to describe art practices ca. 1990. In 1989 Félix Guattari used the term “eco-art” to describe the “praxic opening-out” to society and the environmental concerns of the planet that defined ecology for him. In a note to what was then a new term, he adds, “The root ‘eco’ is used here in its original Greek sense of oïkos, that is, ‘house, domestic property, habitat, natural milieu.’” Guattari, Three Ecologies, 53, 91 n. 52. “Eco” also seems now to be the most widely used prefix or modifier, perhaps because “ecology”—in Bower’s straightforward definition, “the interdependence of living organisms in an environment”—underlines planetary interconnectedness, which fits easily with current notions of globalization. An example is “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” (2015), accessed March 30, 2016, http://www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english/. An extensive analysis of these terms and commitments from a practitioner’s perspective is Collins et al., “Lyrical Expression.” On the discourses of art and environmentalism from the 1960s on, see also Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, and McKee, “Art and the Ends of Environmentalism.” That these terms do not tolerate close and exclusive definition is suggested by their use in the titles listed in note 5 below.
3. Zarin, “Seeing Things.” Cf. Cheetham, “Natural Anxieties.”
4. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, “About the Center,” accessed April 12, 2016, http://www.clui.org/section/about-center.
5. Eco art proliferates, as do exhibition catalogues and publications, both trade and popular, concerning it and its individual practitioners (including Mark Dion, Olafur Eliasson, Roni Horn, and Richard Long). Land art and landscape have massive bibliographies and discipline-shaping publications dedicated to their explication, including several on Robert Smithson. Publications on eco art can usefully be thought of in three broad categories: surveys, exhibitions and catalogues, and specialist studies. I cite many more titles in subsequent notes, but a selected list (to mid-2016) comprises the following key works. Surveys: Moyer and Harper, New Earthwork; Brown, Art and Ecology Now; Weintraub, To Life! Exhibitions: Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979, various sites in the United Kingdom, 2013–14; The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2013–14; Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2012–13; Earth: Art of a Changing World, Royal Academy, London, 2009–10; Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2009; Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism, toured by Independent Curators International in 2008–10; Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1992. Specialized studies: Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art; Demos, Decolonizing Nature; Miles, Eco-aesthetics; and Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems.
6. See http://www.capefarewellfoundation.com/carbon14/, accessed April 9, 2016.
7. This double session was convened by Sonja S. Lee and Therese O’Malley.
8. Art Journal 51 (Summer 1992), in which Timothy Luke posed a version of the question with which I open this book: “What is the role of art in today’s ecological crisis?” (72); “Art and Social Consciousness,” special issue, Leonardo 26, no. 5 (1993); and io-magazine (environmental art), Summer 1998. Important in this lineage is the Art Journal issue devoted to a reconsideration of art practices on the land (vol. 69, no. 4, Winter 2010). Other examples of eco art history include Greg Thomas’s “Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France” and Stephen Eisenman’s exhibition catalogue From Corot to Monet: The Ecology of Impressionism. Suzaan Boettger has pointed out in “Within and Beyond the Art World” that ecocriticism in the visual arts lags behind that in other humanities fields. Given the intersections across the humanities and the influence of scholars from one area on those in another, however, that is so only if one draws the disciplinary boundaries quite strictly.
9. David E. Nye, “Response to the Roundtable,” in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 286.
10. Swenson, “Land Use in Contemporary Art,” 15.
11. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind”; Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene”; Parikka, Anthrobscene. The wide use of the term “Anthropocene” has led scholars to ask about its precedents (for example, Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 [March 2015]: 59–72). One presage relevant to this study, and rarely recalled, is Thomas Berry’s “Art in the Ecozoic Era,” published in the groundbreaking summer 1992 theme issue of the Art Journal, “Art and Ecology.” Barry wrote: “To reestablish the Earth in a viable situation requires a transition from the terminal Cenozoic era to what might be called the Ecozoic era” (46). I discuss the meaning of and commitments to ecology in the art world later in this chapter. On this topic, cf. Demos, Decolonizing Nature, and McKee, “Art and the Ends of Environmentalism.”
12. The term “climate disruption” has been used by White House science advisor Dr. John P. Holdren for some time. See also Tom Rand’s Waking the Frog, in which the author makes the point that the common term “climate change” embeds the notion that climates always change, thus potentially denying the influence of human industrial activity. “Climate disruption” points to a short circuit in long-term norms and patterns.
13. Latour, “Anti-Zoom,” 122.
14. MacLaren, review of The Imprint of the Picturesque, 111. Cf. Ian McLean’s work on the “colonial picturesque” as backdrop to the negative effects of colonialism and globalization (“On the Edge of Change?,” 293).
15. I adopt the nomenclature used in the important exhibition catalogue Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974: “The terms ‘Land art,’ ‘Earth art,’ and ‘Earthworks’ tend to be used somewhat interchangeably in contemporary art discourse. For us, Land art is the more encompassing term, with Earth art and Earthworks being subsets.” Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the Earth, 17 n. 1. William Malpas comes to similar conclusions in Land Art: A Complete Guide.
16. A full reckoning about this and related terms with respect to contemporary art is found in T. J. Demos’s five-part commentary posted on the Fotomuseum Winterthur website: https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/search?q=Demos. See also Rigby, “Writing in the Anthropocene.”
17. Steven Adams and Anne Greutzner Robins write in their introduction to Gendering Landscape Art (2000) that Clark’s book was at the turn of the millennium “still a whipping-post of new art history” (5). Noting W. J. T. Mitchell’s tough criticism (in Landscape and Power [1994]) of Clark’s assumptions about the unproblematic and evolving relationship between the landscape genre, human activity, and nature, they detail the new art history’s radical turn to an understanding of landscape as social history and ideology in the pioneering publications of Ann Bermingham, John Barrell, and others.
18. Stephen Bann notes the irony that the second edition of Clark’s book (1976), which laments the end of the genre, appeared during a resurgence of interest in nontraditional landscape practices by British artists such as Richard Long. Bann, “The Map as Index of the Real: Land Art and the Authentication of Travel,” in Kastner, Land and Environmental Art, 242.
19. Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” in Collected Writings, 164. Subsequent references to Smithson’s writings in this and the following chapters are to the Flam edition and appear parenthetically in my text. Andrew Menard notes that “[o]ne of the least appreciated aspects of twentieth-century American land art is that it arose as the nation’s nineteenth-century landscape was being rediscovered.” Menard, “Robert Smithson’s Environmental History,” 285. I agree on the importance of this confluence of interests and explore it further in this and the following chapters. Ron Graziani, in Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, discusses Smithson’s relationship with the notions of the picturesque and sublime in detail.
20. Cited in Boettger, Earthworks, 217.
21. Cited in Celant, Michael Heizer, 62.
22. Wallis in Kastner, Land and Environmental Art, 26.
23. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 12.
24. Thornes, “Rough Guide to Environmental Art,” 393. Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir makes the same point about Icelandic landscape painting in “Nature’s Otherness and the Limits of Visual Representations of Nature,” in Sigurjónsdóttir and Jónsson, Art, Ethics, and Environment, 117.
25. Strand, “At the Limits,” 81.
26. Georg Guðni in the documentary film Horizon (2015).
27. Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond, 9.
28. On issues of periodization in this context, see van Toorn, “On Site, out of Sight,” 17–18.
29. Influential in the fields of art history and visual studies, Mitchell’s collection built on studies from the 1980s that reopened the area of landscape to analysis in broadly cultural terms, for example, the work of Barrell and Bermingham in British landscape and of Cosgrove and Yi-Fu Tuan in cultural geography. See also Harris, “Postmodernization of Landscape.” Landscape is of course a focus in several other disciplines, including landscape architecture. For perspectives from this field, see Doherty and Waldheim, Is Landscape . . . ?
30. Alfrey and Sleeman, “Framing the Outdoors,” 83.
31. “Maya Lin’s Memorial to Vanishing Nature,” June 25, 2012, accessed June 7, 2016, http://e360.yale.edu/feature/maya_lin_a_memorial_to_a_vanishing_natural_world/2545/.
32. Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 21; Bal, Quoting Caravaggio.
33. De Landa, Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 15–16.
34. N. Collins, “Site Responsibility.”
35. The book Art in Action: Nature, Creativity, and Our Collective Future (2007) describes the restorative ecological work of dozens of artists under four headings that summarize this art’s relationships to land and nature: “celebrate,” “reflect,” interact,” and “protect.” Brown’s Art and Ecology Now (2014) surveys “site-reformative” eco art in terms of its attempts to “re/view, re/form, re/search, re/use, re/create, and re/act.”
36. See also Banerjee, Arctic Voices. For a full analysis of this work’s effects on opinion and legislation, see Finis Dunaway, “Reframing the Last Frontier: Subhankar Banerjee and the Visual Politics of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” in Braddock and Irmscher, Keener Perception, and chap. 2 in Demos, Decolonizing Nature.
37. Simon, “Systemic Educational Approaches to Environmental Issues,” 148.
38. Brookner, “Rooting,” 100.
39. Braddock, “Ecological Art After Humanism.”
40. Mel Chin, lecture at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, Toronto, March 9, 2016. For a full explanation of this work’s relation to science and to art—a controversy addressed in these terms by the National Endowment for the Arts when it granted, pulled, then restored Chin’s funding for the project—see Goto Collins (herself a prominent eco artist), “Ecology and Environmental Art in Public Place,” 31.
41. Miles, introduction to Eco-aesthetics, Kindle ed.
42. Kate Rigby, in “Writing in the Anthropocene,” has also taken up Adorno’s ideas in this context.
43. Miles, “Aesthetics and Engagement,” 202.
44. Jack W. Burnham, “Hans Haacke, Wind and Water Sculpture,” in Sonfist, Art in the Land, 109–10.
45. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 34. For a critique of Adorno’s reluctance to abandon his emphasis on the Anthropos in the direction of materialism, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, chap. 1, sec. 5.
46. Oard, “Poetry After Auschwitz.”
47. As noted, there is considerable controversy over the term “Anthropocene.” In “The Capitalocene, Part I,” Jason Moore construes the phenomenon as a complex of power relationships under capital, one that began in the sixteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution, and should not be judged solely in terms of its environmental effects. Even for those who do largely set the epoch’s beginnings in the eighteenth century, one main objection to the term is that not all humans have caused anthropocentric climate change but particularly those responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the unabated extraction of resources typical of the time. Donna Haraway has thus specified our epoch the “Capitalocene” to lay the blame where it belongs. As she says, “it’s not a species act.” Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” 259. For a full discussion of these inquiries, see Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? But if one looks to the sorry tale of modernization both in and beyond capitalist societies in the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and then China, in their rush to modernize industry and agriculture, need to be seen as major contributors to current climate woes. The protocols of modernity are the real culprit here. While I have only seen the term “modernocene” in print once (Delaney, “Afterword,” 216), we already have more than enough terms to describe the conditions it captures.
48. Rigby, “Writing in the Anthropocene.”
49. Chakrabarty, “Climate of History,” 201.
50. A way into this much-discussed and embattled territory is through Timothy Morton’s study Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. See also Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things.”
51. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 21.
52. Ibid., 4.
53. Collins, “Site Responsibility,” 36, 31.
54. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 7.
55. Quoted in Burnham, “Hans Haacke,” 113, and J. Siegel, Artwords, 211.
56. “Matters of concern: An expression invented to contrast with matters of fact and to recall that ecological crises have no bearing on a type of beings (for example, nature or ecosystems) but on the way all beings are manufactured.” Latour, Politics of Nature, 244.
57. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 44.
58. C. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” 11.
59. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 45, 46.
60. Quoted in Burnham, “Hans Haacke,” 120, and C. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” 13.
61. C. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967,” 14.
62. Haacke, “Systems Aesthetics,” 28.
63. Slack, “Theory and Method of Articulation,” 113, 120.
64. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” (1980), as cited in ibid., 123.
65. Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” 141.
66. Haacke has a worthy successor in the eco-art practice of Tue Greenfort, whose installations in the 2000s sought “to reboot Haacke’s work as a resource for contemporary critical practice.” Skrebowski, “After Hans Haacke,” 120.
67. Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” 472, 478–79.
68. Noted above with reference to the exhibit Carbon 14, 2013, the tag “What does culture have to do with climate change? Everything” belongs to the group Cape Farewell, which sponsored Carbon 14.
69. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 23.
70. Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” 42. The aesthetic separation that Adorno and Rancière assert here—and that I claim is essential to eco art as art—may be contrasted with Allen Carlson’s claim that intrusive land art such as Smithson’s and Heizer’s is an aesthetic “affront to nature”: “The environmental site is . . . changed from being a part of nature to being a part of an artwork and with this change the aesthetic qualities of nature are altered. Heizer, for example, says: ‘The work is not put in a place, it is that place.’” Carlson, “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?,” 641. It is the change from “nature” to earthwork that constitutes the wrong for Carlson, who also argues that “different environments of the world at large are as aesthetically rich and rewarding as are works of art,” and that the two realms must be separated both ontologically and aesthetically. Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment, xv. For this and related perspectives from the philosophically oriented field of “environmental aesthetics,” see Brady, “Environmental Aesthetics.” I argue throughout this book that the boundaries explored and defined by landscape, land art, and eco art—those of nature, land, environment, and genre—are never so clear.
71. Sheren, Portable Borders, 3.
72. See O’Brian and White, Beyond Wilderness, and Solnit, “Unsettling the West,” in As Eve Said to the Serpent.
73. A powerful and subtle reading of this mode is found in Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque.”
74. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 9. See Denis Cosgrove, for whom landscape is, famously, “a way of seeing” (Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, xiv), and Neil Evernden, who examines “the highly cultural content of what is taken to be an objective entity” (Social Creation of Nature, xiii). See also Braun and Castree, Remaking Reality, for affirmative views of constructionism. Other sides of this realist-constructivist debate are offered in Hacking’s Social Construction of What?, Latour’s Reassembling the Social, and, in the eco-art context explicitly, Ivakhiv’s “Toward a Multicultural Ecology,” in which the author asks pointedly: “If nature, wilderness, ecology, and the environment are all socially constructed—ideas about the world rather than the world itself—what is it exactly that environmental protection efforts are fighting to defend and preserve?” (389).
75. The term “new materialism” is used so frequently in the humanities these days that its temporal and aspirational dimensions derive—and are garnering—attention in themselves. See J. Thomas, “Comment: Not Yet Far Enough.”
76. Parikka, “The Anthropocene,” a sec. of chap. 1 in Geology of Media.
77. Kenneth R. Olwig, “The ‘Actual Landscape,’ or Actual Landscapes?,” in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 159. In a review of Olwig’s Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (2002), Tom Mels points to Olwig’s mastery of a terrain that embraces “the relationships between landscape, land, country, polity, place, custom, law, gender, the body, ‘race,’ nature and nation.” Mels, “Landscape Unmasked,” 379.
78. Guattari, Three Ecologies, 91 n. 52.
79. Herman Prigann in Strelow, Ecological Aesthetics, 214.
80. Andrews, Landscape and Western Art, 28–29. I have discussed the Kantian and Derridean contexts of the parergon in Kant, Art, and Art History. Other reconsiderations of landscape in art history and adjacent areas include DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory; J. Malpas, Place of Landscape; Dorrian and Rose, Deterritorialisations; and, most recently, Scott and Swenson, Critical Landscapes. See also Kwa, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention.”
81. Anne Spirn in DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory, 92.
82. DaCosta, “Toronto aka Tkaronto.”
83. Z. Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” 244.
84. On enframing, which in its negative aspects is ultimately a Heideggerian concept, see Braun and Castree, Remaking Reality, 42. For a sharply contrasting view—that “the environment as an aesthetic object differs from a paradigmatic art object because of its frameless character” and that, even if it could be framed, this would disturb nature’s integrity,” see Saito, “Environmental Directions,” 172–73. See also my comments on uses of the word “environment” below.
85. Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 15–16, 101.
86. Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, 6. I employed Kaufmann’s approach in my book Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain (2012).
87. See http://www.prixpictet.com/.
88. E-mail correspondence with the author, March 28, 2016. Laura Coles and Philippe Pasquier define this area as follows: “Contemporary new media artists interacting with nature through the medium of digital technologies in situ continue this exploration [of human-technology-nature, called HTN] within the genre referred to as ‘digital eco-art.’” Coles and Pasquier, “Digital Eco-art,” 3.
89. Braidotti, Posthuman, chap. 2.
90. Parikka, Geology of Media, chap. 1, “Materiality.”
91. On caves, see Cheetham and Harvey, “Obscure Imaginings.” On outer space, see Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing.”
92. Harvey, Cosmopolitanism, 237.
93. R. Williams, Keywords, 219.
94. McKibben, End of Nature, 42, 142.
95. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 24; Morton, Ecological Thought, 3; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore.
96. Coates, Nature, 3.
97. Evernden, Social Creation of Nature, 94.
98. Castree, preface to Making Sense of Nature.
99. Nabhan, “Cultural Parallax,” 90.
100. Marx, Machine in the Garden, 36.
101. Stengers, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern,” 62.
102. On “political ecology,” see Demos, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology,” and Latour, “To Modernize or to Ecologize?,” as well as Braun and Castree, Remaking Reality.
103. Braddock and Irmscher, Keener Perception, 6–7. On the history and evolution of the term “ecology,” see also Nina-Marie Lister, “Is Landscape Ecology?” in Doherty and Waldheim, Is Landscape . . . ?, 115–37, and Worster, Nature’s Economy. A detailed account of the intercalations of “ecology,” “environment,” and “energy” is found in James Nisbet’s superb introduction to his book Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems.
104. Morton, Ecological Thought, 7.
105. Evernden, Natural Alien, 4–5.
106. Ragain, “‘Homeostasis Is Not Enough,’” 82. See also McKee, “Art and the Ends of Environmentalism,” for a much more detailed account than I can give here of a range of public and institutional attention to the “environmental crisis” in the 1980s and 1990s and up to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, including the pivotal 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
107. Friedman, “Words on the Environment,” 253–54, 256.
108. Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 346.
109. Benson, “Environment Between System and Nature,” 2.
110. On Kepes and Haacke, see Benson, “Environment Between System and Nature,” and C. Jones, “Hans Haacke 1967.” For Kepes’s interactions with Smithson, see Martin, “Organicism’s Other.”
111. Cited in Kepes’s obituary in 2002, the MIT News, accessed April 4, 2016, http://news.mit.edu/2002/kepes.
112. See Davies, “Evocative Symbolism of Trees,” and Schama, Landscape and Memory, pt. 1.
113. See http://naturalhistory.si.edu/exhibits/darwin/treeoflife.html, accessed April 10, 2016.
114. This drawing is held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/the-uprooted-tree-172867, accessed April 8, 2016.
115. While overgeneralization is a danger in this context, and while contemporary art is a definitively global phenomenon, my experience presenting some of this material in China in 2015 suggests that cultural differences remain in the depiction of trees. Some students who heard me speak on deracinated trees were quite shocked by the graphic violence of the images and claimed that this approach would not be embraced in China. Yun-Fei Ji’s images of flooding in his homeland would be an exception that proves the rule. In comments on Ai Weiwei’s reconstructed trees, Adrian Locke has noted that, “[i]n China, trees are venerated as important counterparts to the dead on earth, the realm between heaven and the underworld.” Locke, “Introducing Ai Weiwei’s ‘Tree’: Behind the Scenes,” July 15, 2015, https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/ai-weiwei-6.
116. Widén, “Lost Woods.”
117. John Grade, Middle Fork, http://www.americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/wonder/grade.cfm, accessed April 12, 2016.
118. Charles Ray, “Artist’s Statement,” accessed April 12, 2016, http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/189207.
119. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpuvLDrBPdA, accessed April 13, 2016.
120. Boettger, Earthworks, 222.
121. My thanks to Michaela Rife for pointing out this work by Arnatt.
122. Ruskin, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy,” in Modern Painters, vol. 3, pt. 4, chap. 12, 362.
123. Cited in Adcock, “Conversational Drift,” 35.
124. Joseph Beuys in “7000 Oaks: Essay by Lynne Cook with Statements by Joseph Beuys,” 1, accessed May 23, 2016, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/cookebeuys.pdf.
125. In a sustained and alternative reading of the Spiral Jetty, however, Boetzkes suggests that the artist did not so much oppose current ecological and environmental thought as sidestep such current issues through a series of manipulations “by which the site’s unrepresentability becomes the subject of the artwork itself,” and through “an attentiveness to the earth as an unfathomable phenomenological event” well beyond the ameliorations of any human science. Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 67, 83.
126. Cited in Sleeman, “Nature, Like a Person, Is Not One-Sided,” 211.
127. See http://www.uprootedtree.com/artistic-concept-2/artistic-concept/, accessed April 8, 2016.
128. A further extension and explicitly environmental retake on Smithson’s pour in Vancouver is found in Christos Dikeakos’s visual meditation on the waste produced by the waning apple industry in British Columbia. Apple Spill Dumped Culls (2012), for example, shows discarded apples poured down a small embankment. Dikeakos was the photographer of Smithson’s spill.
129. Durant, “Artist’s Statement.”
130. Solnit, “Concrete in Paradise.”
131. Prigann, “Hanging Tree.”
132. Reitzenstein, “Transformer.”
133. Reitzenstein in Grande, Art Nature Dialogues, 199, 195.
134. Clark, “Tree-Dumb Reigns.”
135. “Melanie Gilligan on Commerce, Climate Change, and More.” The video is available in its entirety via Cape Farewell: http://www.capefarewellfoundation.com/carbon14/deep-time/, accessed April 7, 2016. The title Deep Time echoes with “deep ecology.” According to Carolyn Merchant, deep ecologists “call for a total transformation in science and worldviews that will replace the mechanistic framework of domination with an ecological framework of interconnectedness and reciprocity.” Merchant, Radical Ecology, 11.
136. Deep Time would have fit well into the exhibition Way of the Shovel, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2014.
137. See Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain.
138. On this history, see David Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 413–37.
139. See http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gilbert-george-the-nature-of-our-looking-t03452/text-catalogue-entry, accessed April 8, 2016.
140. Interview at Tate Modern, April 30, 2007, http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/gilbert_george_artists_talk/default.jsp.
141. In chapter 7 of Decolonizing Nature T. J. Demos gives an extended and largely negative appraisal of dOCUMENTA 13’s proclaimed interests in ecology. His extensive reading does not include Huyghe’s work.
142. See, for example, Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, Speculative Turn.
143. Huyghe in Goodden, “Pierre Huyghe Explains.”
144. Weir, “Myrmecochory Occurs,” 29.
145. Huyghe in Goodden, “Pierre Huyghe Explains.”
CHAPTER TWO
1. W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 20.
2. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 41. Of course, legions of commentators and artists found reasons not to use the term “postmodern.” It is difficult to think of a more contentious term in the art discourse of the last forty years. I have approached this topic and its controversies in Remembering Postmodernism.
3. Harrison, “Art & Language Paints a Landscape,” 618.
4. Ibid., 621.
5. Cited in ibid., 621–22.
6. Harrison, “Effects of Landscape,” 234.
7. Harrison, “Art & Language Paints a Landscape,” 630.
8. Ibid., 622.
9. Harrison, “Effects of Landscape,” 234.
10. Cited in Boettger, Earthworks, 122.
11. Baker, “Artworks on the Land,” 75.
12. Boettger discusses this exhibit and specific work in detail in Earthworks, chap. 6.
13. Oppenheim in Boettger, Earthworks, 141.
14. Ibid., 223.
15. Sharp, “Notes Toward an Understanding of Earth Art,” n.p.
16. Cited in Boettger, Earthworks, 172, from her interview with Long in 1996.
17. Adcock, “Conversational Drift,” 35; Glueck, “The Earth Is Their Palette (Helen and Newton Harrison),” 182.
18. McKee, “Land Art in Parallax,” 45.
19. “Ecotopia: A Virtual Roundtable,” in Wallis et al., Ecotopia, 11–12.
20. Ibid., 52, 12.
21. Kahana, http://ummelfahemgallery.org/?page_id=27021, accessed April 19, 2016. My thanks to Adi Louria-Hayon for alerting me to this exhibit. For a full discussion of this topic, including Dani Karavan’s Uprooted Olive Tree, exhibited in Berlin in 2008, see Bar-Maor, “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
22. Much has been written about the archaeological imperative in contemporary art and regarding Dion especially. See, for example, Roelstraete, Way of the Shovel.
23. Schwartz, “New York—Tacita Dean.”
24. M. Phillips, “What Is Tradition?,” 5, 7.
25. John Gibson in Boettger, Earthworks, 122.
26. Connor, “Topologies,” 116.
27. Schoen, Rúrí, 38.
28. Cited in ibid.
29. See Gremaud, “Power and Purity.”
30. Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, 131.
31. Chunglin Kwa, in “Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention of the Natural Landscape,” argues convincingly that von Humboldt’s unified, abstract notion of “landscape” was also inspired by landscape painting, especially the naturalistic manner of seventeenth-century Dutch artists and the work of William Hodges, who accompanied James Cook on his second voyage (1772–74).
32. A detailed account of Nine Letters is given by Oskar Bätschmann (“Carl Gustav Carus [1789–1869]”), who also supplies a precise understanding of the debates around the landscape genre from the late seventeenth century to Carus’s time. On natural history and landscape depiction in Germany at this time, see T. Mitchell, Art and Science. On the discipline of geography as it understood landscape in this context, see Tang, Geographic Imagination of Modernity. A compelling new reading of Carus’s significance to Friedrich’s painting is given by Nina Amstutz in “Caspar David Friedrich and the Anatomy of Nature.”
33. The term “geognostic landscape” was coined by the geologist Christian Keferstein. Bätschmann, “Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869),” 40.
34. Cited in ibid., 29–30.
35. Ibid., 43.
36. If “earth-death” seems overly dramatic, I would suggest that it is literal as a description of the environmental enormities described in Donald Worster’s Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance, for example. The phrase also summons up many commentaries on the “death of nature” theme. For Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton, for example, it is the concept of nature that must be jettisoned because it stands in the way of a truly ecological worldview. For others, it is the natural world that is being killed off by humans, an eventuality that has in turn spawned a fascination for “the world without us,” to borrow the title of Alan Weisman’s bestseller on the topic, speculation on the persistence of nature in a future without Homo sapiens.
37. Excerpt from John Ruskin, Lectures on Landscape: Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin (New York: National Library Association, n.d.), Kindle ed.
38. The title of a lecture by Paul L. Sawyer at Cornell University, September 2012, was “The First Ecologist: John Ruskin and the Futures of Landscape.”
39. Hamilton, Turner, 355.
40. Solnit, “Unsettling the West,” in As Eve Said to the Serpent, 103.
41. Braddock and Irmscher, Keener Perception, 3.
42. Diane Burko in Verchot, “Artist Diane Burko Ties Together Art and Science.” For a full account of Burko’s practice, see the exhibition catalogue Diane Burko: Glacial Shifts, Changing Perspectives.
43. Diane Burko in Orlove, “Marking ‘Traces of Change.’”
44. Carey et al., “Glaciers, Gender, and Science,” 16.
45. Burko in Orlove, “Marking ‘Traces of Change.’”
46. Diane Burko, “Elegy Series,” http://www.dianeburkophotography.com/elegy-series.
47. Neudecker’s text is titled “Lamentations . . . or: The Escape from the ‘Grid’” and functions as a commentary to the work There Is Always Something More Important (2012), seen in the exhibition Im Schein des Unendlichen: Romantik und Gegenwart / In the Limelight of the Infinite: Romanticism and the Present, Altana Kulturstiftung, December 16, 2012–February 24, 2013. “Towards a Contemporary Sublime” is the title of a presentation she gave at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, October 9, 2012.
48. Paterson, “Vatnajökull (the Sound of).” Although the phone link is no longer active (leading to the thought that the glacier has disappeared), Paterson has placed a sound clip of her work on her website.
49. Kennedy, “Callers Take Part in Art.”
50. R. Phillips, “Indigenous Lands / Settler Landscapes,” 92.
51. Cited in Iseke-Barnes and Estrada, “Art This Way,” 13. The examples I discuss are North American, but in analogous ways the tragic clash of views on land and landscape is a global phenomenon, taking place wherever there was colonial expansion. Other central locales of such strife of course include Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand.
52. Skinner, “Settler-Colonial Art History,” 136.
53. Indigenous artistic interventions in ecological debates are global in practice and implication. T. J. Demos gives pertinent examples in “Rights of Nature.” For a full account of land and Indigeneity, see especially Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, and Mackey, Unsettled Expectations.
54. L. Todd, “Yuxweluptun,” 344.
55. Mackey, introduction to Unsettled Expectations, Kindle ed.
56. Alfred, “What Is Radical Imagination?,” 6.
57. Hill, “Kent Monkman’s Constitutional Amendments,” 51.
58. Katz, “Miss Chief Is Always Interested,” 17.
59. Di Chiro, “Nature as Community.”
60. On settler colonialism from a comparative angle, see Skinner, “Settler-Colonial Art History.” The exhibition catalogue Picturing the Americas (Brownlee, Piccoli, and Uhlyarik) provides an overview of the exportation of European landscape norms to both South and North America.
61. A web version of this project was developed in 1995: “Komar and Melamid: The Most Wanted Paintings on the Web.”
62. Wilton and Barringer, American Sublime, 236.
63. Chianese, “Avoidance of the Sublime,” 454.
64. Saenz, “Kent Monkman’s Trappers of Men.”
65. Jensen, “Seeing in Stereo.”
66. Tousley, “Change on the Range.”
67. See Porterfield, “History Painting,” and De Blois, “Dancing with the Berdashe.”
68. Kent Monkman in Commanda, “Renown.”
69. Hill, in Thériault, Interpellations, 55. On this complex painting, see Belitz, “Subversion Through Inversion.”
70. Kwa, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Invention,” 159.
71. Griggs, “Background on the Term ‘Fourth World.’”
72. Rykner, “Illegal Installation of Clara-Clara.”
73. Denver Art Museum, “Significant 2015 Acquisitions.”
74. See DeLue, George Inness, and Bedell, Anatomy of Nature.
75. Nagam and Swanson, “Decolonial Interventions in Performance,” 32–33.
76. Kent Monkman quoted in C. Hampton, “Kent Monkman’s Buffalo Jump.”
77. Singhal, “Bull in a China Shop.”
78. Cited in Hubbard, “Hearts on the Ground,” 24.
79. Ibid., 20.
80. McGregor, “Coming Full Circle,” 385.
81. This is far too large and important a topic to treat here. See the book central to ongoing disputes about whether Indigenous peoples have been and are superior stewards of the earth, Shepard Krech’s skeptical Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999). For rejoinders, including Krech’s, see Harkin and Lewis, Native Americans and the Environment (2007).
82. Chianese, “Avoidance of the Sublime,” 453.
83. Cited in Duffek and Willard, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Unceded Territories, 7.
84. For information on these elements, see Perpetual Salish, “Coast Salish Design Elements.”
85. Townsend-Gault, “Salvation Art of Yuxweluptun,” 5.
86. Cited on the gallery website where this work is held: http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=42661, accessed April 22, 2016.
87. The exhibition The Colour of My Dreams: The Surrealist Revolution in Art, curated by Dawn Ades in 2011, drew out these connections for the first time.
88. Townsend-Gault, “Salvation Art of Yuxweluptun,” 6.
89. Jun, “Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.”
90. Yuxweluptun in Milmine, “Art, Identity, and Culture,” 88.
91. Arthur Renwick in Baird, “. . . I Shed no Tears.”
92. Hampton, {Person, Place, Thing}, 34.
93. Dales, “Place Like Home.”
94. Cited in ibid.
95. On the crucial nineteenth-century history of the photograph as a landscape medium for expropriation, see Snyder, “Territorial Photography.”
96. L. Todd, “Yuxweluptun,” 346.
97. On the multiplex relationships between mapping and landscape, see Casey, Earth-Mapping.
98. Devine, “Bonnie Devine’s Woodlands.” Unless otherwise noted, statements by Devine are from this presentation and my interview with the artist in June 2016. My thanks to Bonnie Devine for her generosity and precision in discussing this work.
99. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 163. See also Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, in which the author explicitly develops Wolfe’s analysis.
100. Bonnie Devine in Commanda, “Bonnie Devine’s Battle for the Woodlands.”
101. Artist Christos Dikeakos also makes this critical point effectively by superimposing Indigenous names over sites in contemporary Vancouver in his Sites and Places series (1992).
102. “Chief Tecumseh,” accessed June 16, 2016, http://www.indigenouspeople.net/tecumseh.htm.
103. Devine in Commanda, “Bonnie Devine’s Battle for the Woodlands.”
104. Kelsey, “Landscape as Not Belonging,” 204.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Michael Heizer in “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 247. This conversation was originally published in the all-important first issue of Avalanche, 1970.
2. Willoughby Sharp in Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the Earth, 38.
3. In their superb introductory essay to Ends of the Earth, Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon masterfully identify and debunk these “myths” of land art. My view is that, fictional as such oppositions have always been, they were and remain influential.
4. On De Maria’s complex’s notions of siting work, see McFadden, “Toward Site.” On site-specific work in general, see Kwon, One Place After Another.
5. Wagner, “Being There.” My references are to the full text of the interview Wagner draws on, published in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 242–52. Other references to Smithson’s writings in this edition are made parenthetically in my text.
6. Griffin et al., “Remote Possibilities,” 288.
7. Brian Wallis, “Survey,” in Kastner, Land and Environmental Art, 23.
8. As cited by Claire Bishop in Griffin et al., “Remote Possibilities,” 290.
9. Sol LeWitt in Boettger, Earthworks, 88. Boettger’s is the fullest reading of this exhibit.
10. On this topic, see Roberts, Mirror-Travels. Scholarship on Smithson is both abundant and of exceptional intellectual quality and scope. See, for example, books by Lynne Cooke, Caroline Jones, Ann Reynolds, Jennifer Roberts, and Gary Shapiro.
11. On this work’s relationship with the information theory of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, see Lauder, “‘Sensitivity Information.’”
12. Boettger, Earthworks, 6–9.
13. Boettger gives a detailed account of this important exhibition in ibid., 9–15.
14. Lippard, “Introduction: Down and Dirty,” 16.
15. Dennis Oppenheim, http://www.dennis-oppenheim.com/works/1969/144 and the next page, accessed April 30, 2016.
16. Oppenheim, interview with Patricia Norvell in 1969 in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 27.
17. Parikka, “An Alternative Media Materialism,” in chap. 1 of Geology of Media.
18. Oppenheim in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 25.
19. Ibid., 28. On this cosmic perspective, see Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing.”
20. See Barrell, Idea of Landscape, and Waites, Common Land in English Painting.
21. As noted, the summer 2010 issue of the Art Journal examines global contemporary art concerned with land.
22. Denes, “Notes on Eco-logic,” 387–88.
23. Denes, “Dream,” 929.
24. Denes, http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/works7.html, accessed May 1, 2016.
25. Gerrard, “Q and A.”
26. John Gerrard in J. Jones, “Where the Internet Lives.”
27. Wikipedia, “Data Farming,” accessed May 2, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_farming.
28. Morton also discusses Manufactured Landscapes. See Morton, Hyperobjects, 72.
29. Morton, “Zero Landscapes,” 80.
30. Ibid., 83, 84.
31. Ferguson, “Climate Change and Us,” 35.
32. Nicholls and Crangle, “Introduction: On Bathos.”
33. Gerrard, “Interview.”
34. Waites, Common Land in English Painting, 46.
35. Alexander Pope, “Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” in Alexander Pope: The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 197.
36. Harrison, “Art & Language Paints a Landscape,” 622.
37. Ferguson, “Climate Change and Us,” 37.
38. Nicholls and Crangle, “Introduction: On Bathos,” 5.
39. See http://www.videoartincanada.ca/artist.php%253Fid=13§ion=clip.htm, accessed April 26, 2016.
40. Martindale, “Curbed Concepts,” 23.
41. Ibid., 22, 21, 1.
42. Robert Louis Chianese, “Levitated Mass,” American Scientist 101, no. 4 (July–August 2013): 268.
43. Michael Heizer, “Interview with Julia Brown,” in Kastner, Land and Environmental Art, 228.
44. Double Negative: A Website About Michael Heizer, accessed April 27, 2016, http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/city.html.
45. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Levitated Mass.” A full reading of land art’s relationships with ancient art can be found in Amizlev, “Land Art: Layers of Memory.”
46. Huyghe in Goodden, “Pierre Huyghe Explains.”
47. Artangel maintains an excellent website devoted to the project: http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2007/vatnasafn_library_of_water.
48. See M. Nixon, “Roni Horn,” and Avgikos, “Events and Relations.”
49. This pattern of extension includes the imaging of the Library in the works of such writers as Rebecca Solnit, who was the second writer-in-residence there and who memorialized her time in The Faraway Nearby (2013).
50. Horn, “Saying Water” (2013), is a reading performance of her reflections.
51. Perry, “Watery Weather,” 185.
52. Godfrey, “Roni Horn’s Icelandic Encyclopedia,” 951.
53. “Roni Horn in Conversation.”
54. Roni Horn in Robert Enright, “Manifold Singularity.”
55. Entry for Water, Selected in Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, 165.
56. Fer, “Complete with Missing Parts,” 25, 36.
57. Ibid., 25.
58. See C. Jones, Machine in the Studio.
59. Ibid., 268.
60. See http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/horn-water-selected-p79355. See also James Lingwood, “Journey to the Library of Water,” accessed August 5, 2017, https://www.artangel.org.uk/library-of-water/journey-to-the-library-of-water/.
61. Jan Avgikos states that such “placement” of works, a strategy often used by Horn, “causes them to become activated and provocative in ways they might not otherwise be.” Avgikos, “Events and Relations,” 97.
62. “Roni Horn in Conversation.”
63. Roni Horn, “The Nothing That Is” (1998–2003), accessed April 28, 2016, http://www.libraryofwater.is/newspaper_01.html.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. McEvilley, “Art’s Shifting Role,” 27.
2. Kaiser and Kwon, Ends of the Earth, 17.
3. Hirschel and Richards, foreword and acknowledgments to S. Smith, Beyond Green, 9.
4. David Buckland, Edith Devaney, and Kathleen Soriano, “Curators’ Foreword,” in Earth: Art of a Changing World, 4; Graham Sheffield and Kate Bush, preface to Manacorda and Yegdar, Radical Nature, 7.
5. Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems, 41.
6. Alexander Rodchenko in Gaiger and Wood, Art of the Twentieth Century, 101.
7. Lucy Lippard, in her untitled introduction to 955,000, in the 2012 facsimile edition of these four exhibitions titled 4,492,040 (the total population of the host cities), n.p.
8. A survey of the inception and usage of this term can be seen in Fox, “Geoaesthetics.”
9. Shapiro, “Territory, Landscape, Garden,” 109.
10. Serres, Natural Contract, 32.
11. Shiva, “Time to End War Against the Earth.” See also Solnit, “Call Climate Change What It Is.”
12. R. Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.
13. Serres, Natural Contract, 29.
14. Ibid., 31.
15. Berlinische Galerie, “Michael Sailstorfer Forst.”
16. Sailstorfer, “Interview.”
17. See https://twitter.com/hashtag/crazyweather. A wide range of contemporary works focusing on weather can be found in Weather Report: Art and Climate Change, the catalogue of an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard in 2007.
18. Eliasson, “Museums Are Radical,” 138.
19. Eliasson in Herbert, “Olafur Eliasson.”
20. Eliasson, “Your Embodied Garden, 2013,” olafureliasson.net.
21. Huyghe, “‘Celebration Park.’”
22. Huyghe, “Artist’s Talk.”
23. Huyghe, “A Journey That Wasn’t.”
24. Huyghe, “Legend of Two Islands,” 1.
25. Huyghe quoted in the Art 21 entry on his video, http://www.pbs.org/art21/images/pierre-huyghe/a-journey-that-wasn%E2%80%99t-2005–0?slideshow=1, accessed May 8, 2016.
26. Huyghe, “Artist’s Talk.”
27. Christine Ross has used the term “ecologization” to describe a different temporal process. In The Past Is the Present (49), she writes, “the depreciation of linear perspective turns unproductiveness into a modality of ‘non-progressive’ connections between beings, objects, and sites that lose in impermeability what they gain in non-forward relationality. These are special connections in which environments are considered not as mere means but also as ends, and in which perception per se (the perception of the spectator or the perception of the performer) is ecological insofar as the subject is made to be perceptually attuned with his or her environment instead of being detached from it, in control over it, or propelled away from it towards an unreachable ideal beyond that environment.”
28. Cited in Perrault, “Nonsites in the News,” 46.
29. The pull of this mythology is extended in Elise Rasmussen’s multipart exhibition Fragments of an Imagined Place (2016).
30. See Arnold, “Robert Smithson in Vancouver.”
31. Smithson in ibid., 25.
32. Chris Drury, “Artist Statement,” chrisdrury.co.uk.
33. Hamish Fulton cited in Drury, “Life, Death, and Transformation,” 2.
34. Drury, “Life, Death, and Transformation,” 4.
35. Drury, “Antarctica,” chrisdrury.co.uk.
36. Drury, “Double Echo,” chrisdrury.co.uk.
37. Drury, “Everything Nothing,” chrisdrury.co.uk.
38. Drury, “Life, Death, and Transformation,” 4.
39. See Boetzkes, Ethics of Earth Art, 124–31.
40. Drury, “Cloud Chambers,” chrisdrury.co.uk.
41. Drury, “Waves of Time.”
42. Rife, “Chris Drury’s Carbon Sink.”
43. Whitney Davis provides a detailed reading of art history’s investments in the prehistoric in Davis, Replications. Margaret Conkey has written about the problems with the term “Paleolithic art.” Conkey, “Making Things Meaningful.”
44. Janson, “Vermeer and the Camera Obscura.”
45. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. II, chap. xi, sec. 17. For a more detailed reading, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer.
46. Cited in N. Miller, Heavenly Caves, 18. For the custom of decorating caves in the ancient world, see Carey, Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture.
47. Pope in Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England, 255.
48. Ibid., 259.
49. Ibid., 259, 262.
50. Pope, “On His Grotto at Twickenham,” in Complete Poetical Works, 163.
51. Shapiro, Earthwards, 95.
52. Drury, “Wave Chamber,” chrisdrury.co.uk.
53. Drury, “Cloud Chamber for the Trees and Sky,” chrisdrury.co.uk.
54. Cited in Sleeman, “Nature, Like a Person, Is Not One-Sided.”
55. Holt, “Sun Tunnels.” Subsequent references in this section are to this source document.
56. Lee, “Art as a Social System,” 54.
57. Anne M. Wagner writes, “together they form a cumbersome camera, an enormous viewing device to record nothing less than the passage of celestial time.” Wagner, “Being There,” 265.
58. J. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 237.
59. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 29, 34.
60. Nizam, “Interview with James Nizam.”
61. Dubé, “Metaphorical Spaces,” 18.
62. Morell, “Tent-Camera.”
63. Morell in Martineau, “Conversation with Abelardo Morell,” 156.
64. Morell, “Artist’s Statement,” cited in E. Siegel, “Wonderlands,” 17.
65. Morell in Martineau, “Conversation with Abelardo Morell,” 156.
66. Ibid., 159.
67. Cheetham, “The ‘Only School’ of Landscape Revisited,” 145 n. 3.
68. On this important topic, see Wallace, “Studio of Nature.” For more recent contexts, see C. Jones, Machine in the Studio, on the “post-studio artist.”
69. Morell, “Tent-Camera.”
70. See Bear, Disillusioned.
71. Morell in Martineau, “Conversation with Abelardo Morell,” 159.
72. Morell, “Camera Obscura,” abelardomorell.net.
73. Morell in Martineau, “Conversation with Abelardo Morell,” 158.
74. E-mail from the artist, June 17, 2016. My sincere thanks to Andrew Wright for his generosity in discussing this work.
75. E-mail correspondence with the author, May 28, 2016.
76. Serres, Natural Contract, 29.
77. Manacorda, “There Is No Such Thing as Nature,” 14.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Jasanoff, “Heaven and Earth,” 31–32, 33.
2. Krastava, “Spaces, Lines, Borders,” 18.
3. Evernden, Natural Alien, 38.
4. Descola, Ecology of Others, 5.
5. “Ecotone,” in Environmental Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., 1:432. Since writing this paragraph, I have come across a precedent for using the term in this way: Edward S. Casey’s “Edge(s) of Landscape.”
6. Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems, 104.
7. Koolhaas, “Junkspace.”
8. Brambilla et al., introduction to Borderscaping, 2.
9. See Sheren, Portable Borders.
10. Braidotti, introduction to Posthuman.
11. Yukinori Yanagi on the Tate Modern site for this work: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/yanagi-pacific-t07464/text-display-caption, accessed May 17, 2016.
12. Koziara in Pomnichowski, “Artist Jaroslaw Koziara’s Gigantic Fish.”
13. Lippard, Lure of the Local, 288, 282.
14. Sheren, Portable Borders, 3.
15. For a detailed history, see Border Machines, “Performing the Border.”
16. These commentaries are now on his website: http://francisalys.com/?s=green+line, accessed May 17, 2016.
17. The artist C. Wells has explored the advent of road marking in his exhibition 1911 (2002). Alÿs has done similar work in Panama in Painting/Retoque (2008).
18. See http://francisalys.com/when-faith-moves-mountains/.
19. McKee, “Wake, Vestige, Survival,” 32. See also Sleeman, “Land Art and the Moon Landing.”
20. Cited in Cotter, “Non-Billboard in Washington.”
21. Rutkauskas, “Borderline.”
22. Center for Land Use Interpretation, “United Divide.” Remarkably and without planning, Andreas Rutkauskas reports that he “met Matthew Coolidge from CLUI at the former crossing at Big Beaver, Saskatchewan. I was photographing with my 4x5 camera, and a white truck came over a rise on the U.S. side of the border. I assumed it was Border Patrol until a man exited the vehicle with a Nikon DSLR wearing a polo shirt and jeans. We sat at the abandoned crossing for quite some time exchanging stories, and discussing our respective projects, but neither RCMP nor Border Patrol came to investigate.” E-mail correspondence, June 6, 2016.
23. Alan Michelson, e-mail correspondence with the author, June 10, 2016. I am grateful to Michelson for explaining these issues in detail and for supplying transcriptions and translations of the work’s sound track.
24. Michelson, “TwoRow II.” A full account of the agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch can be founds at http://www.onondaganation.org/culture/wampum/two-row-wampum-belt-guswenta/, accessed December 12, 2016.
25. Cited in Clifford, Routes, 25.
26. Ibid.
27. National Gallery of Canada entry for Shelley Niro: https://www.gallery.ca/collection/artist/shelley-niro.
28. Todd in Abbott, “Interviews with Loretta Todd, Shelley Niro, and Patricia Deadman,” 341.
29. Explanatory text sent to the author, March 17, 2013.
30. Chin, “Landscape.”
31. Cheetham, “Struck by Likening.” I examine these and related issues in Struck by Likening: The Power & Discontents of Artworld Analogies, an exhibition at the McMaster University Museum of Art, August 19–December 2, 2017.
32. Harrist, “Background Stories,” 38.
33. Yao Lu, “Artist’s Statement.”
34. Harrist, “Background Stories,” 35.
35. Gilmurray, “Ecoacoustics.”
36. Young, “Artist’s Statement.”
37. Basia Irland, http://www.basiairland.com/recent-projects/gatherings.html, accessed January 21, 2013.
38. Irland, Water Library, 88.
39. Gerber, “Nature of Water,” 45.
40. Lippard, “Confluences,” 56.
41. Vartanian and Skov, “Neural Correlates of Viewing Paintings,” 52.
42. J. V. Smith, review of Crystal Lattices.
43. Parikka, Geology of Media, chap. 1, “Materiality.”
44. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 1:146.
45. Ibid., 2:296, 2:297, 1:155.
46. Stone of Light: Crystal Visions in Art, an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2015, bore witness to this ongoing interest.
47. Cited in Haag Bletter, “Interpretation of the Glass Dream,” 34. See also Prange, Kristalline als Kunstsymbol.
48. Calter, Squaring the Circle.
49. Park, “Crystal.”
50. “Crystal,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
51. Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, 7, 64, 92, 93.
52. Influenced by Worringer and Schopenhauer, Wassily Kandinsky also deployed the image of the crystal as a key to his search for essence. For the relationship of this quest to pioneering abstract art, see Cheetham, Rhetoric of Purity.
53. On Deleuze and film, see Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 92.
54. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, chap. 4.
55. On this topic, see Eggebeen, “‘Between Two Worlds.’”
56. Beuys’s statement is cited in “7000 Oaks: Essay by Lynne Cook with Statements by Joseph Beuys,” accessed May 23, 2016, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/cookebeuys.pdf.
57. Benedictus, “Roger Hiorns.”
58. Onians, Neuroarthistory, and Onians, European Art.
59. Stafford, Echo Objects, 109.
60. Zeki, Inner Vision.
61. For a critique of this linkage, see Noë, Strange Tools, chap. 10, in which the author claims that neuroaesthetics is “just another chapter in neuroscience’s attempt to come up with a brain-based theory of everything,” as opposed to attending also to the body and the nonhuman world.
62. Onians, Neuroarthistory, 132.
63. Perspectives on Plasmas, “What Are Plasmas?”
64. Max Plank Institute, “Plasma Crystal Experiment.”
65. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 49.
66. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 32.
67. DeSantis, “Albright Show Offers Unique Perspectives,” 57.
68. Carpenter, “Alan Sonfist’s Public Sculptures,” 152.
69. See Bedell’s Anatomy of Nature, DeLue’s George Inness, and Raab’s Frederic Church for full discussions of the connections among American landscape depiction, geology, and attention to precise depictions of nature in general as inspired by Ruskin and von Humboldt especially in the nineteenth century.
70. James D. Dana and Benjamin Silliman Jr. to Edward Hitchcock, June 26, 1854, Collection of Amherst College, accessed May 24, 2016, https://acdc.amherst.edu/explore/asc:53717/asc:53720.
71. T. Mitchell, Art and Science, 173.
72. Walters, “Working ‘in the Opposite Direction.’”
73. Joseph Beuys interview with Caroline Tisdall, 1978, in Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 21.
74. Beuys, What Is Art?, 61, 65.
75. Cited in Antliff, Joseph Beuys, 125.
76. In “Ecological Art After Humanism,” Allan C. Braddock offers an enlightening reading of this performance in terms of species differentiation.
77. Joseph Beuys interview with Caroline Tisdall, 1978, in Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 39.
78. See Demos, Decolonizing Nature, chap. 2, for a full consideration of climate refugees from the Maldives to the Arctic.
79. See Bennett, Practical Aesthetics; Elkins, Pictures and Tears; and Starr, Feeling Beauty.
80. Cowspiracy infographic, accessed May 20, 2016, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/544dc5a1e4b07e8995e3effa/t/54e4d927e4b0aaf066abfcf0/1424283943008/Cowspiracy-Infographic-Metric.png.
81. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 88.
82. See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2009/may/31/deforestation-amazon-cattle, accessed August 4, 2017.
83. Rosing and Eliasson, “Ice, Art, and Being Human.”
84. Beltrá, “Artist’s Statement.”
85. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth, 4.
86. “Over the River,” accessed May 27, 2016, http://www.overtheriverinfo.com/.
87. Christo in Bevins, “Christo Says.”
88. Cited in Dan Duray, “Christo Cancels Over the River Project in Protest Against Trump,” Art Newspaper, January 26, 2017, http://theartnewspaper.com/news/christo-cancels-over-the-river-project-in-protest-against-trump/.
89. On Johanson’s ongoing projects, see her article “Reimagining Infrastructure,” http://www.humansandnature.org/reimagining-infrastructure, and the catalogue Patricia Johanson’s Environmental Remedies.
90. Palermo, response to Mark A. Cheetham.
91. Tuana, “Viscous Porosity.”
92. Horn, “Saying Water.”
93. Collaborations among the “Sister Arts” are considered in detail by Starr in Feeling Beauty.
94. Vuilleumier, “How Brains Beware,” 585.
95. Cited in Ross, Past Is the Present, 182.
96. Holmes, “Environmental Awareness Through Eco-visualization.”
97. Descola, preface to Beyond Nature and Culture.
98. The bibliography in this area is vast. For an introduction, see Grusin, Nonhuman Turn. As Jessica Horton and Janet Catherine Berlo claim, it is also important to remember forgotten peoples in this context, since “once we take indigenous worldviews into account, the ‘new materialisms’ are no longer new.” Horton and Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror,” 18.
99. Leys, “Turn to Affect,” 456.
100. Jane Bennett, “A Life of Metal,” in Vibrant Matter.
101. Berlant, introduction to Cruel Optimism; Brennan, Transmission of Affect.
102. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24. Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in my text.
103. Rand, “Opinion, Anyone? Scepticism as Intellectual Vice,” in chap. 1 of Waking the Frog.
104. Hayeur, “Artist Statement.”
105. Hayeur, “Underworlds.”
106. Caroline Jones has explored the complex nature and import of horizons in the work of Olafur Eliasson. See Jones, http://arts.mit.edu/excerpt-from-event-horizon-olafur-eliassons-raumexperimente-by-caroline-a-jones/.
107. E-mail communication with the author, May 24, 2016. My sincere thanks to Nicolas Bernier.
108. Cited in Ruskin, Works of John Ruskin, 13:160.
109. The Field of Waterloo, exhibited in 1818, is one example. In J. M. W. Turner and the Subject of History, Leo Costello writes provocatively about this work that “as the bodies sink away into the ground, we seem to witness history painting turning into landscape” (91).
110. Zakai, “Thinking Ecoart.”
111. Palermo, response to Mark A. Cheetham.
112. Iyer, Open Road, 254.
113. Miles, “Expanded Fields,” in chap. 1 of Eco-aesthetics, Kindle ed.
114. Eliasson, “Why Art Has the Power.”
115. M. H. Miller, “Olafur Eliasson.”
116. See http://olafureliasson.net/uncertain.
117. A fuller exposition of Starling’s ecology that examines other works is found in Anker, “Seeing Pink.”
118. James Nisbet, in “On Simon Starling,” draws out this aspect of the work.
119. Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation,” 141.
