The ecological eye

Assembling an ecocritical art history

Andrew Patrizio

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526121585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

In the popular imagination, art history remains steeped in outmoded notions of tradition, material value and elitism. How can we awaken, define and orientate an ecological sensibility within the history of art? Building on the latest work in the discipline, this book provides the blueprint for an 'ecocritical art history', one that is prepared to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, climate change and global warming. Without ignoring its own histories, the book looks beyond – at politics, posthumanism, new materialism, feminism, queer theory and critical animal studies – invigorating the art-historical practices of the future.

Part I

Towards an ecocritical art history

1 The evolution of ecocritical art history

‘the miracle of that hesitant immobility’

(Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 1934)

Ecological concerns have traditionally been so little addressed in the art historical canon that even their absence has rarely been noted.¹ One might have imagined that since Enlightenment regimes started to visualise global systems (a project that culminates in ‘whole Earth’ ideologies and ‘blue planet’ photographs from space) more areas within art history might have had something to say about the ecological dimensions – the deep time, even – of such images. Timothy Clark puts it well: ‘This is the planet as the human archive, foundation of all cultural memory, the fragile material matrix of all inscription, self-relation and commemoration.’² From the introductory textbooks to the specialist literatures of art history, chapter headings, indexes and bibliographies weigh heavy with references to a vast range of topics, themes and positions – yet often they are virtually bereft of explicit discussions of the environment, ecology and green thinking. Though normative treatments of ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’ of course have their place in art historical accounts, the practitioners of the discipline have either treated this patently ecological aspect conservatively (as beautiful or picturesque backdrops) or through humanist and anthropocentric ‘social’ filters (as backdrops to human labour). However, selectively myopic art histories obsessing about provenance, symbolism, ownership, neoliberalism or Freud, are now not enough. This chapter picks out some of the practices in what one might call the ‘mandarin mainstream’ of art history that have spoken to the ecological, with greater or lesser force. Such an overview is of course partial, though is amplified and extended in Chapter 2 when more specific art histories of eco-aesthetics, land art and environmental aesthetics take centre stage. Whilst I cannot do justice to all these ‘proto-ecocritical’ histories, this chapter makes manifest the subtle persistence of ecological concepts in art history. (Indeed, I hope it illuminates the principle that anyone with a knowledge of art history’s past could identify their own retrospective ecocritical constructions using entirely different examples from across the globe and back in time.) I seek to suggest something about the power of excavating and repurposing a set of historical projects that, to be frank, many outside art history probably no little about or at best feel are moribund. On the contrary, even the incomplete gathering attempted in this chapter provides enough evidence that the history of art is a discipline that values and nurtures ecologically sympathetic skills ready for future use.

The recent rise of ecocritical approaches in art history follows a period, beginning in the 1980s, when everyone (on all sides) seemed to be ganging up against nature. This saw critiques of bourgeois appropriations of natural tropes (to advertise beer, detergent, makeup, breakfast cereals and cigarettes), a recognition of the simulated, non-natural realities of an emerging postmodernity, and a revulsion towards the anti-historicity of folky spiritualism and land art extravagance as one of the legacies of the 1960s (even if such readings were harsh). Taken as a whole, this created a cultural atmosphere that deprived of oxygen anything approximating a powerful and sophisticated version of nature. The artist-critic Peter Halley, writing in 1983, is emblematic of this melancholic scepticism, noting in his essay ‘Nature and Culture’ that post-industrialism has made ‘obsolete the very concept of nature, giving rise to a critique of the reign of nature in art’.³ The processes of assimilation of diverse ethnicities and legal appropriation of wilderness by the neoliberal right met the ‘pretentious and mandarin’ habits of phenomenology weakened in the face of immaterial and globally distributed media, priestly discussions of the ‘real’, the ‘copy’ and the ‘simulacra’ and the challenge of living in a deconstructed world bounded by ‘language’ and ‘text’ alone.⁴ This toxic position meant that we need not worry about the carbon levels, let alone nature as a whole. That was until now.

If we could only return to Erwin Panofsky’s comforting, conventional wisdom set out in ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’ (1940), as he sat securely in a world of human hierarchies, just above animals and just below God.⁵ Panofsky’s essay offers a way of understanding canonical art historical texts almost against themselves, in generative and surprising directions. In a passage that is really about the disinterested aesthetic gaze, Panofsky prompts new thoughts on what capacities an ecological eye today could have. Firstly, he asserts the Kantian autonomy of aesthetic appreciation in general: ‘It is possible to experience every object, natural or man-made, aesthetically.’⁶ He starts, though, to articulate an array of visual perspectives that can clearly be coopted for the ecological:

When a man [sic] looks at a tree from the point of view of a carpenter, he will associate it with the various uses to which he might put the wood; and when he looks at it from the point of view of an ornithologist he will associate it with the birds that might nest in it. When a man at a horse race watches the animal on which he has put his money, he will associate its performance with his desire that it may win. Only he who simply and wholly abandons himself to the object of his perception will experience it aesthetically.⁷

Rather than imagine, as Panofsky does, the multiple visions of carpenters, birdwatchers and sports lovers as an impure kind of gaze, and aesthetic looking as some kind of properly disembodied abandonment, might the lesson here be to accept, explore and embrace, in nonhierarchical ways, the varieties of looking that anyone, including the art historian, is capable of bringing into action?

To give this further amplification, note a short passage in another, later classic in the discipline, Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972). Baxandall makes passing reference to the highly attuned visual skill of ‘gauging’, required by merchants, and inculcated widely in school, in the eras before nineteenth-century standards of commodity weights and measures were adopted. Before this moment, ‘a container – the barrel, sack or bale – was unique, and calculating its volume quickly and accurately was a condition of business … it is an index of its analytical skills and habits’.⁸ Accurate gauging was a necessary visual skill for the mercantile class, and so was valorised for that very reason. Baxandall’s fifteenth-century Florence is ‘an organic situation’ in the sense that Panofsky evokes when he asserts that ‘intuitive aesthetic re-creation and archaeological research are interconnected so as to form … what we have called an “organic situation” … [that] both mutually qualify and rectify one another’.⁹ We know that certain skills flourish or atrophy over historical time, appropriate to the needs that press upon different cultures. We accept too that today there are environmental imperatives for humans to attend to chemical, digital, temperature-related and physical realities within our environment. So, it is clear that art history, as a history of perception, offers a valuable set of exemplary instances of looking, paying attention and knowing the consequences of doing these well. Mutually shaping variables are much more ecologically attuned to the art history of the future (as we will see in this and the following chapters) and Panofsky and Baxandall inadvertently illuminate the power of such widened visual repertoires.

Prussian naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) often features in ecocritical art histories as a natural scientist who both coined the modern usage of the term ‘ecology’ and underpinned his science with richly illustrated publications, notably Art Forms in Nature (1899–1904) and The Riddle of the Universe (1905). Haeckel drew interest from artists of the time who were ‘receptive to a bleaker evolutionary narrative of competition, struggle, and death’,¹⁰ such as Art Nouveau and Lebensreform painters Edvard Munch, Max Klinger, Franz Stuck, Alfred Kubin and Arnold Böcklin, whose Triton and Nereid (1873–74) ‘captured the imagined instinctual life of prehistoric creatures in locations of geographical and geological cosmological significance’.¹¹ Marsha Morton, an excellent guide to ‘Darwinismus’ in art, says that Kubin and others found in theories of natural selection ‘a message that inspired an art of alienation, ambiguity, and debased instinctual behaviour. Rejecting the progressive optimism of popular science writers and the reassuring monism of many professional scientists, these artists produced images of doubt and disenchantment that twisted the “new aesthetic sense” envisioned by Haeckel … into cautionary warnings about the limits of evolutionary ascent.’¹² Their work provides a hinge between German Romantics’ eco-sublimities and what was to follow in the 1920s through the Surrealists’ twisted natural history (discussed, as we will see by a number of current art historians, most notably Gavin Parkinson).

Rather than repeat or condense the myriad ways in which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural material has been revisited, interpreted and valued, it can simply be noted that this period was one in which a massive resistance to religious storytelling through the new stories provided by natural history was being promulgated by visionary scientists. Such narratives were then assiduously followed and reimagined by artists at the time (and still are). The art historians for whom this kind of work seems important have to be promiscuous in their interests across natural and art histories, certainly if they are to explicate these cultural projects properly. The Darwinian revolution forced a reconception of ideas of change, deep time, environmental conditions and species needs; any artists or art historians engaging similar themes and sharing such enthusiasms are impelled to attend to these very same challenging concepts.

An interest in the most specific area of ‘cultural ecology’ as an extension of art history can be found in the writing of Henri Focillon (1881–1943), particularly in his well-known ‘The Life of Forms in Art’ (1934), which directly bridges aesthetics, art history and evolutionary thinking.¹³ Echoing Darwin, Focillon asserts that ‘[t]he life of forms is not the result of chance’.¹⁴ For Eric Fernie, ‘The Life of Forms in Art’ combined the Hegelian system of Riegl and Wölfflin with the empiricism of Burckhardt to form a single concept of style.¹⁵ Focillon as an exemplar of ecocritical art history only takes us so far, nevertheless his erudition and liberatory rhetoric capture sophistic...