Art and Nature in the Anthropocene

Planetary Aesthetics

Susan Ballard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000349580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte contemporáneo

This book examines how contemporary artists have engaged with histories of nature, geology, and extinction within the context of the changing planet. Susan Ballard describes how artists challenge the categories of animal, mineral, and vegetable—turning to a multispecies order of relations that opens up a new vision of what it means to live within the Anthropocene. Considering the work of a broad range of artists including Francisco de Goya, J. M. W. Turner, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Yhonnie Scarce, Joyce Campbell, Lisa Reihana, Katie Paterson, Taryn Simon, Susan Norrie, Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, Ken + Julia Yonetani, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Angela Tiatia, and Hito Steyerl and with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this book reveals the emergence of a planetary aesthetics that challenges fixed concepts of nature in the Anthropocene.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, narrative nonfiction, digital and media art, and the environmental humanities.

1 In the Holocene

Rain

Telling the stories of human relationships with nature at the end of the Holocene is one way to understand shifting definitions of the Anthropocene. In the opening pages of The Natural Contract, French philosopher of science Michel Serres writes: “If we judge our actions innocent and we win, we win nothing, history goes on as before, but if we lose, we lose everything, being unprepared for some possible catastrophe.”¹ The problem is, he says, “Those who share power today have forgotten nature, which could be said to be taking its revenge but which, more to the point is reminding us of its existence, we who live in time but never right out in the weather.”² Serres argues that it is necessary to revisit the relationship between humans and the planet, beginning from the discourses of mastery and control that frame everything in terms of war and property. He suggests that without a fundamental rethinking of our “contract” with nature, we will be unprepared for the future. Serres suggests that nature has a particular agency that determines these future relations. Yet, if nature is a human construct, then what exactly will nature win by exacting its revenge? Serres is concerned that humans continue to maintain a definition of themselves that is discrete from nature, and through which nature continues to be defined as nonhuman. In the contexts of rapid environmental change, the bigger question sits with how we define this relationship. Nature’s revenge is bitter-sweet: to recognise humans as part and parcel of nature means that nature as a discrete category may very well become redundant.

Figure 1.1Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Duel with Cudgels, or Fight to the Death with Clubs (1820–1823). Mixed method on mural transferred to canvas, 125 cm × 261 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Serres begins The Natural Contract with an artwork; a reading of Francisco de Goya’s Duel with Cudgels (1820–1823, Figure 1.1). Known as one of Goya’s “black paintings,” it is an image of brutal violence that was painted directly onto the walls of Goya’s house in Madrid.³ Under a heavy winter sky, two men lunge at each other with long wooden clubs held wide in their outstretched arms. Their faces drip blood and their gaze is frozen. Serres introduces a third actor into the image—as they fight, the two figures are sinking slowly into a marsh.

Yet quicksand is swallowing the duelists; the river is threatening the fighter: earth, waters, and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a decor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and manoeuvres. They burst in on our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vague, and cosmetic idea of them; nature.⁴

The duellists are ignoring the very thing over which they are fighting, and into which they are being sucked. In asking us to pay attention to the marsh itself, Serres shifts our attention away from the rules of the Holocene by which humans framed and understood the world, in both image and sense, and into the spaces where the histories of humanity and the histories of nature converge. He suggests dismantling the distinctions surrounding “nature” and the “human.” For Serres, a natural contract describes the fundamental laws for how to live into the future: a future redefined by human relationships with extinction, ecosystems, and communication.

The Holocene was an 11,700-year period characterised by relative planetary stability. By the nineteenth century, relations between humans and nature seemed clear. Nature was separate to humans. Nature was natural, beautiful, untouched. Humans were cultured manipulators of tools and media. These relationships between humans and nature were established in the philosophical, scientific, and industrial revolutions that encompassed Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lead by a dominating belief in development, growth, expansion, and resource consumption, European culture traced its roots to a notion of civilisation founded around 2500 years earlier. Beliefs in universal essentialism and imagined objectivity pervaded definitions of nature. Historian of science, Lorraine Daston explains that “The ‘order of nature,’ like ‘enlightenment,’ was defined largely by what or who was excluded.”⁵ Two hundred years before Goya was working, Dutch philosopher René Descartes had insisted that “there was nothing so strange in nature” that his universalising philosophy of a mechanical universe could not explain.⁶ In this context, holding on to a distinction between the biological and geological made sense. Some things had life and others did not. The European enlightenment created a fixed order of things by classifying all the wonders that could be seen and imagined. Alongside science, art reflected these understandings of humanity’s place in the world and the universe. The rapid accelerations that marked the transformations of the mid nineteenth century, along with ever-increasing climactic uncertainty, now mean Holocene definitions need to be revised. Philosopher Isabelle Stengers describes the shift from Holocene to Anthropocene as one in which nature “has left behind its traditional role and now has the power to question us all.”⁷ Critical understandings of the Anthropocene have emerged from the congruence of humans and geology; humans can no longer be defined as separate to the world around us.⁸

If the Anthropocene has a past, then it is found within the Holocene as it was mapped, structured and described by rational thought. And rational thought defines itself through exclusion.⁹ Although it remains dominant, this way of knowing the world is not the only one. Other modes account for all kinds of messy in-between things; things like phytokarst stalagmites in the Rawhiti Cave in Tasman, New Zealand that don’t fit classifications of vegetable or mineral (being rocks that grow towards the light). Or, the complex performativity of Aboriginal dreamtime narratives in Australia that continually bring the world into being and challenge fixed timescales of creation and the boundaries between humans, animals, and the environment. And there is Namazu, the catfish who lives in the mud under the islands of Japan. If left unguarded, she wakes the earthquakes when she rears her whiskered head. Despite the fact that many humans operate as if they are still within the structural order of the Holocene, the Anthropocene requires a careful attention to these entangled sets of more-than-human relations. New (old) forms of imagining are necessary. If the Anthropocene has a future, then it is necessary to move beyond Holocene frameworks and recognise the other ways of thinking the world that have been here all along. Other categories of matter need to be remembered.

Environmental transformations have changed the definition of nature. Yet, as Carolyn Merchant argues, there never was a freestanding idea of nature to begin with—it was always an illusion.¹⁰ As Merchant explains nature is two things: firstly, a reference to an imagined relationship between humans and the world in a particular moment; and secondly, nature is “characterised by ecological laws and processes described by the laws of thermodynamics and energy exchanges among biotic and abiotic components of an ecosystem.”¹¹ In the extended moment of the scientific revolution that defines the Holocene, the imagined and the material merged creating a particular view of nature: “nature cast in the female gender, … stripped of activity and rendered passive, … dominated by science, technology, and capitalist production.”¹² Nature in the Holocene looked like this, but the material, social, and cultural transformations of the Anthropocene suggest that nature has to become otherwise. The epochal shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene is marked by this moment when nature becomes enmeshed within our understandings of what it is to be human, and the structures of biopower that prevent us from addressing our obligations to each other are dismantled. This is not a fixed date, but a period of time when thinking about the planet changed. The story of nature and the human entwined together goes back a long way, to a time before Holocene thinking was solidified, before the concept of a Holocene was invented.

It is Rome, 1625, and Bernini has once again finished turning stone into living and ecstatic flesh. He has extracted blocks of marble from their geographical site and transformed them into a scene of writhing bodies. In the middle of room four in Rome’s Galleria Borghese, Bernini’s Daphne now stands frozen mid-metamorphosis. Her elongated soft toes droop downwards extending at their tips into drips of marble that become roots. Her legs are in the process of becoming encased in bark, and her fingers, already trapped by locks of her distressed hair, are turning into the intricate tangle of leaves and branches that describe a laurel tree. To become tree gives Daphne the chance to escape from the lecherous clutches of Apollo. A conscious collaborator, the tree offers her a cloak of invisibility. Both tree and body are formed from rock. Distinctions between animal, mineral, vegetable, and human do not make sense for this sculpture in which stone transmutes to body and then to vegetable. Bernini maps the porous line between human, mineral, and vegetable. From a distance, it looks like she might fly.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western philosophers of natural science embarked on a process of enlarging and restructuring their known world. Their desire was to “examine, analyse, count, classify and record everything that exists, and discover the laws that govern these phenomena.”¹³ Their activities shaped all future understandings of Western culture and impacted the planet as everything (and everyone) became remade as resources for exploitation and consumption.¹⁴ Some embarked on voyages of discovery, while others turned to the stones. In The Order of Things, French philosopher Michel Foucault traces the movement from organic vitalism to ordered knowledge, with a description of a fanciful Chinese encyclopaedia invented by Jorge Luis Borges. In Borges’ encyclopaedia animals are classified according to unexpected categories: “(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, … (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”¹⁵ Borges’ taxonomy is of animals, yet minerals and vegetables pervade it. Order, Foucault says, created “the positive basis of knowledge as we find it employed in grammar and philology, in natural history and biology, in the study of wealth and political economy.”¹⁶ Foucault identifies a ...