Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North

Climate Change and Nature in Art

Gry Hedin, Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud, Gry Hedin, Ann-Sofie N. Gremaud

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315311876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In the era of the Anthropocene, artists and scientists are facing a new paradigm in their attempts to represent nature. Seven chapters, which focus on art from 1780 to the present that engages with Nordic landscapes, argue that a number of artists in this period work in the intersection between art, science, and media technologies to examine the human impact on these landscapes and question the blurred boundaries between nature and the human. Canadian artists such as Lawren Harris and Geronimo Inutiq are considered alongside artists from Scandinavia and Iceland such as J.C. Dahl, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Toril Johannessen, and Björk.

Part I

Interaction between Art and Science

1Anthropocene Beginnings

Entanglements of Art and Science in Danish Art and Archaeology 1780–1840

Gry Hedin

In 1784, two important events took place: Traces of primitive man appeared in a Danish landscape painting, and the steam engine was patented as a general-purpose machine. Two very different events and – so it seems – two events without an obvious connection. Yet, interest in early human history is entangled with the beginning of industrialization – at least, in a Danish context. After 1784, Danish artists and archaeologists were attentive to the way humans had shaped the Danish landscape since the first settlements in ancient times; and, as they tried to decipher the heavy stone structures left by the early settlers, they began exploring two important Anthropocene themes: the question of the entanglement of man and nature, and the question of the position of man in an extended, deep timescale.

Looking into this, this chapter examines the beginnings of both archaeology and landscape painting in Denmark and proposes that Danish archaeology was influenced by developments in art in the pioneering archaeological thesis that a primitive people with tools of stone were the first inhabitants of Danish land. This thesis was expressed in Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s “three-age” system, which is acknowledged as one of the defining theories of the modern discipline of archaeology.¹ I argue that artists closely followed the findings of archaeology and, at times, even anticipated its development. Knowledge about early man was based on the interpretation of indistinct signs in the landscape, and imagination was from the start an important tool for reconstructing the past in both art and archaeology.² Traces of early man were found in the way the country’s early inhabitants had shaped and affected nature on a small scale with the creation of flint weapons and the construction of dolmens, and on a larger scale with deforestation and the clearance of fields for agriculture. Concurrently, scientists imagined how nature had looked before humans had an impact on it and how nature had an impact on and “created” man. A questioning of the human-nature divide and an awareness of a deep timescale were a recurring theme in art after 1780. Artists and scientists exchanged ideas, and artistic visualizations influenced the field of archaeology just as the findings of archaeology influenced art.

Today, the notion of the vast scale of the humanization of nature defines the Anthropocene thesis, and the concept of the Anthropocene has profoundly changed our reading of the ecological impact of humans. Although the human-nature divide was questioned as early as 1780 by certain artists and scholars, ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ were primarily understood until a few decades ago as that which surrounds us and as the place where humans went to extract resources and deposit waste, a place that could be left virgin.³ Although the scale at which humans have impacted nature has only become clear in recent years, the basic notion of human impact is not new; and, from 1780, questions were being raised about the extent to which humans had shaped nature and from what time. While piling up boulders into dolmens may not be far-reaching enough to be characterized as an ‘Anthropocene’ human impact, dolmens were envisaged as markers of the early humanization of the landscape and as signaling the rough and uncivilized character of the country’s early inhabitants.⁴

Among the proposed starting points of the Anthropocene era are the start of industrialization around 1780⁵ and the Neolithic agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago,⁶ and these starting points are interesting to discuss in relation to the perception of prehistory from around 1780.⁷ By examining Danish landscape paintings by well-known artists such as Nicolai Abildgaard and Johan Christian Dahl and lesser-known artists such as Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein Stub, Johan Ludvig Lund and Jens Møller, I investigate the intermingling of these two proposed starting points by focusing on renditions of dolmens. It is a curious coincidence that a nuanced understanding of prehistory developed during the same decades that an increasing industrialization of the landscape occurred. Dolmens are obvious targets in this regard as they are, to a certain extent, humanized nature, consisting of two or more vertical boulders supporting a large, flat, horizontal capstone, a structure often surrounded by a ring of raised boulders placed on a mound. As very early signs of human impact on the landscape, dolmens were viewed as having significance already in medieval times;⁸ and, even before the coining of the terms ‘Stone Age’ and ‘Anthropocene,’ they were regarded as markers of the complex and interwoven history of man and nature – not as symbols per se of early civilization but as markers of an entangled and complex relationship between the human and nature.

The Danish material is interesting in this regard because Danish archaeologists were pioneers in the field with respect to introducing a deep timescale.⁹ This was not only due to competent scholars of diverse backgrounds but also to the character of the archaeological finds. Other countries focused on their Roman remains, but the Danish material (located north of Roman territory) seemed more homogeneous.¹⁰ Agricultural reforms in the late eighteenth century threatened the ancient stone monuments in the countryside, and a royal decree in 1807 established a Royal Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities (Den Kongelige Kommission til Oldsagers Opbevaring). One of the tasks of the Commission was to collect and dispatch movable finds to the Royal Museum of Nordic Antiquities (Det Kongelige Museum for Nordiske Oldsager). This made available a rich and hitherto unclassified material for Christian Jürgensen Thomsen when, in 1816, he was appointed Secretary of the Commission and began to prepare a public display of the collection.¹¹ He developed the ‘three-age system’ while arranging finds brought to the museum from excavation sites. He believed that these finds were the only way to comprehend the origin and way of life of an ancient people who he supposed resembled savages.¹² Thomsen came from a commercial background rather than academia and was also a collector and curator. Both are important for his development of the ‘three-age system,’ and he is indeed part of a rich history of interaction between art and science in Denmark.¹³

I shall use the Anthropocene as a prism for discussing renditions of dolmens in art and science to analyze the intermingling of the two proposed Anthropocene beginnings mentioned above. The Anthropocene dimension of nineteenth-century art and archaeology is a broad and complex topic, too dense to unpick in a single chapter. However, by focusing on one type of ancient monument – dolmens – in a single national context, it is possible to compare art and archaeology in a way that may be useful for discussing similar issues in other national contexts. The Anthropocene is not an accepted term. However, as the Professor of English,Timothy Morton, uses it to point out key issues about the human-nature divide, the term may function as a tool to discuss an early questioning of this divide. In the Anthropocene, human and nature are one, and the human understanding of landscape and nature is jeopardized since humans are embedded in the substances and processes that they try to understand. This Anthropocene awareness provides us with an ability to transcend two other ways of analyzing landscape, summarized by the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour. He proposes that, as a notion, the Anthropocene can make us look, first, beyond an understanding of the landscape as separable from humans and, second, beyond the notion that landscape is a “social construction of nature.”¹⁴ Drawing on the Anthropocene notion of the entanglement of human and nature, I shall discuss the entangled historical layers of the interaction of humans with nature in Danish art and archaeology.

Some scientists argue that the Anthropocene started with industrialization. The industrial mode of production and organization had severe consequences for cultivation and, thus, landscape. This starting point is considered to be 1784 with the invention of the steam engine;¹⁵ and it was precisely in 1784 that a dolmen appeared in a Danish painting representing early human impact on the landscape [see Plate 1]. Artists dealt with the motif of the dolmen in two ways: Some depicted landscapes shaped by agriculture and other recent human impact and included dolmens to produce an awareness of the past, while others included dolmens in their visualization of events in early Danish history. In both types of painting, dolmens are set in landscapes that are humanized in different degrees; and, in both, dolmens function as a sign of early human impact on nature.

In Denmark, the growing attention paid to these early signs of human impact was spurred even more by the destruction of large numbers of dolmens as land was cleared to expand agricultural industry and roads. Interest in dolmens rose just as there was an increase in human impact on the landscape due to factors that were later deemed as indicating a starting point of the Anthropocene era. The entangled human influence on nature also becomes clear in regard to dolmens in another way. Their rough and heavy structure is humanized nature, as they are created of largely uncut boulders placed in a formation on mounds; but, despite their massive structure, many of them have sunk back into nature. As partially ruined stone heaps covered with moss, they make a fluent transition between man-made objects and natural landscapes.¹⁶ Thus, they highlight the problem of agency in the Anthropocene: That human agency is always part of larger cultural and material flows, exchanges, and interactions and that, even though human agency may be equivalent to a geological force with a vast impact on the displacement of geological material, the sum of countless human activities lacks the characteristics of a coordinated collective action.¹⁷ An analysis of the interaction of art and archaeology can be a way of deciphering and understanding these entangled layers of the human with nature and the impossibility of discerning them as separate entities.

It is new in research to analyze the relationship between depictions of dolmens in art and interpretations of them in the formative years of archaeology.¹⁸ Important insights can be gained from such an analysis. We can reach a deeper understanding of the beginnings of the Anthropocene and the early questioning of the human-nature divide. An examination of dolmens through both art and archaeology has never been attempted on Danish material even though both Thomsen and Danish art at this time – often termed ‘Golden Age painting’ – are well researched. Neither has the Anthropocene dimension of Danish art and archaeology of this time been discussed.¹⁹ Danish art historians have only sporadically touched on the meaning of dolmens and have not paid attention to their complex and shifting meanings. It seems to go unnoticed that, at least until 1836, dolmens were often regarded as altars related to worshippers of the Nordic gods, not as grave monuments of a primitive people. Art historians rarely discuss the presence of dolmens in paintings of early Danish history, but the inclusion of dolmens in such paintings is important for an understanding...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Color Plates
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North: Climate Change and Nature in Art
• Part I Interaction between Art and Science
• Part II Changing Narratives of the Anthropocene and the North
• Part III Media and Blurred Boundaries between Nature and the Human
• Bibliography
• Index