David Hockney is undoubtedly one of the most important of contemporary artists; all the more so because, like that other contemporary great, Gerhardt Richter, he hasn’t been seduced into the ever increasingly ridiculous nonsense that goes under the rubric of contemporary ‘conceptual art’.  His latest exhibit at the Royal Academy in London is focused on one of the most traditional of subjects – the landscape.

Since its origins in Rome in the 17th century, landscape painting has both reflected and influenced Man’s relationship with the land. Since the romantic period, not much has changed in landscape painting. The landscape is romanticized and presented as a fetish object to be held in awe – a perspective that later paralleled the rise of the conversion of natural landscape to consumer product through the creation of national parks. Turner was possibly the only landscape painter to provide a different perspective – the landscape as atmosphere rather than object.

The romantic view of the landscape as fetish object continues to be carried through in contemporary nature photography of the type that populates the National Geographic magazine and other similar outlets. John Stezaker’s work comments on this view of nature.

In these days of concern with our environment and the preservation of natural spaces, a fair amount of contemporary art portrays Man as the invader and destroyer of a nature that would remain as this romantically beautiful object if only we would leave it alone.

It is in this context – and the context of landscape painting nowadays being largely seen as a spent art form – that Hockney’s work needs to be judged. And it emerges victorious.

After four centuries of landscape painting, one would have thought that there remains little to say. Yet Hockney manages to give us a totally different feel for the landscape in these images. Here the landscape is presented as a joyful motif. The bright colours (a kind of return to Fauvism – though not quite), the almost naif approach to some of the work, the general atmosphere that is created – all of these generate a sensation of fun and joy. Hockney draws no difference between so-called unspoilt landscape – or wilderness – and agricultural countryside. Both are to be celebrated. Hockney moves away from the trend to excluding any form of human influence from landscape representation – a trend that continues to perpetuate the fiction of a wilderness to be preserved untouched.

In these works the landscape is no longer that remote object to be fetishized and held in awe. Unlike so much of contemporary environmental art, guilt at being human and living our lives is no longer the emotion we are expected to feel when looking at the Hockney landscape. With these images we feel uplifted with sheer delight, enjoyment and a sense of fun – all Hockney trademarks represented with particular exuberance in this body of work. All of this creates a different and more positive human relationship with the landscape – one built on joie de vivre and which may lend itself better to building interest and support for addressing environmental questions.

One final point about this body of work. Some of the ‘paintings’ (including the two shown here) were created on an iPad – rapidly becoming one of Hockney’s favourite tools. In doing so, Hockney combines modern technology with his celebration of nature and the landscape – again a refreshing change from the dichotomous battle between nature and modern progress that is all too often set up by the environmental community.

Slide show of images of the exhibit

One review of the exhibit.

But, of course, not everyone likes this work.

Hermaphrodite Polar Bear

Gary Hume is a successful British artist who does not usually engage with environmental issues. He became involved with Cape Farewell and created some artworks in an attempt to engage with the issues.  As reported in an article in The Guardian, he found this a challenge:

“How do you depict global catastrophe?” he says. “I’m too selfish to describe the world’s dilemma, so I describe my own paltry dilemma of what it’s like to be alive.”

The image above – Hermaphrodite Polar Bear – is intended to bring attention to the significant changes affecting life on Earth as a result of damaging human activity. “The Industrialist” (below) is a lead tracing of smoke coming out of an industrial chimney. He describes it as an epitaph for industrialists.

But Hume is not really convinced by his own work. First of all he is wary of artists’ fascination with death, global catastrophe, etc. Depicting disaster is maybe the easy path to take. But most revealing is his take on the trip to the Arctic with Cape Farewell. Clearly he found the trip beautiful and was no doubt saddened by the prospect of the damage being done by climate change but found it ‘hard to relate to my life’.

So here’s the question: is all the talk of ‘global catastrophe’ making the problem seem so huge and insurmountable that it starts to be feel totally of reach – impossible for people to relate to their life? Is one possible result that people simply shut these issues out of their minds – the only coping mechanism they may have left to get on with their life?

Is it time for a new narrative?

The Natural History Museum in London is making a great attempt at blending an artistic perspective with their main focus of activity – science education. A previously mounted conceptual art exhibit was reviewed in this blog.  The museum has now opened a new gallery entitled Images of Nature focused on showcasing the over half-a-million drawings, illustrations and images of plants and animals in the museum’s collection.

The introductory text states that nature has inspired, and continues to inspire, many artists and describes the long tradition of natural history illustration. The point is made that “for a picture to be useful to a scientist, it must be true to life.” The best natural history illustrators are described as having superb attention to detail and an ability to reproduce what they see – ie. to reproduce faithfully the physical characteristics of the animal, plant or “specimen” they are illustrating.

It is this very attention to reproduction of the physical object that ultimately distinguishes art from science.

The museum’s gallery contains some recent work by Guyanan artist Aubrey Williams. The artist is quoted as saying: “I hope these bird paintings can be viewed as an artist’s visual rendition of how he feels about birds and not as an ornithological treatment as one would have with a field guide.” And here lies the fundamental difference between art and science. Science is concerned with a description of how things are in a physical and material sense. Art, on the other hand, is largely concerned with what we make of things in an emotional, cultural or social sense.  Images that stop at being true to a physical reality are artistic illustration. Art goes much further.

David Buckland: The Great White Sale. These images are made in a short window of time when the power of the video projector matches the light of dawn, when there is both message and ice. This fleeting moment of human excess is so short, two hundred years, but for the glacier it is barely a single breath taken.

Cape Farewell has already organized a number of art exhibitions as a result of the works created during the expeditions. The latest traveling exhibit – u-n-f-o-l-d opens in Chicago on March 16th. According to David Buckland, “We intend to communicate through art works our understanding of the changing climate on a human scale, so that our individual lives can have meaning in what is a global problem.”

This blog has reviewed the work of a number of artists that have collaborated with Cape Farewell. These include Lemn Sissay, Iain McEwan, and Lucy + Jorge Orta. Buckland also curated the highly successful EARTH exhibit at the Royal Academy in 2009.

Adriane Colburn: Forest for the Trees is a meditation on the complex relationship between nature and industry; sustained land vs. commodified land; matter on the surface of the earth vs. the matter below ground; the morphing of the forest into an industrial landscape; and the fine lines between use and exploitation.

Cape Farewell is probably the most important undertaking to date that, in an organized and concerted way, engages the arts in issues of climate change and the environment.

Struggle Between Tiger And Bull

Henri Rousseau’s naif art paintings were mercilessly criticized during his lifetime. He struggled, and failed, to achieve acceptance by the art establishment. Within a couple of decades of this condemnation, his art was hanging in the world’s leading museums.  So much for the establishment.

Rousseau was fascinated by jungles and the environment they produce.  His work has a mesmerizing quality that makes you want to examine every detail. Without being ‘realistic’, these paintings are powerfully evocative of the lush vegetation, bright colors and the vigorous, animated animal life that goes on in these wild places. They are a celebration of the vibrancy of life – that which today has come to be called ‘biodiversity’ – a word that is wonderfully demonstrative of the power of the conservation community to drain any sort of passion and emotion out of life on earth.

Rousseau’s work also raised questions about the relationship between man, culture and nature.

Sleeping Gypsy

A sleeping figure (above) seems perfectly peaceful and in harmony with a wandering lion. The scene is almost pastoral. No threat; no feeling of danger.  The last picture he painted (The Dream, below) shows a female figure lying nude in the jungle, seemingly at one with the wild environment and the animal life surrounding her. What is the dream? A dream of humanity comfortable and as one with the natural world? A breakdown of the almost total separation that we are continuing to build between nature and culture?

The Dream

Rousseau’s paintings were made well before environmentalism was invented yet they have a powerful emotive quality that the conservation community could benefit from.

There are a couple of other reasons why I picked Rousseau’s work for this post.  The first is that he created these paintings without ever having been in the jungle. In fact without ever having left France. He got his main inspiration from visiting the greenhouses at the Jardin de Plantes in Paris. “When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream.” Yet today so many artists feel they cannot possibly create environmentally relevant art without also creating a huge carbon footprint by flying off to exotic locations and trampling through wilderness places before starting to put brush to canvas. I sometimes feel that this sort of behavior is more about creating the image of ‘the artist as intrepid explorer’ than it is about caring for the environment.

The second reason for choosing Rousseau is that tigers seem to feature not infrequently in his work (above and below). 2010 is a Chinese year of the tiger and the occasion is being used to mount an international effort to stop the drastic decline in wild tiger populations.  Some countries like Russia have already made great strides forward over the past few years and there is hope that a concerted effort can be put together to extend that success to other countries. Read about the St Petersburg Summit here.

Tiger in a Tropical Storm, Surprised.

The shock waves to the global economy provided a narrow window of opportunity during which, stunned, people questioned for a brief moment the wisdom of our culture of unsustainable excess. But no practical and implementable solutions have been forthcoming.

At Art Basel, Miami Beach in December 2008, Chinese artist Zheng Guogu presented an installation called “Lehman Gate” – a commemoration of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the rapid collapse of the world’s financial system that followed.

A series of images installed as rooms through which you could enter and exit were coupled with a ‘Commemorative Plaque’, to create an installation that made visible the consequences of the arrogance and excesses of unbridled capitalism as epitomized by Wall Street’s institutions and their negligent (and often complicit) regulators.

I remember walking through the hugely popular installation and having the same feeling that one gets when confronted by images of any other major human catastrophe.  The images had a powerful effect when viewed in the immediate aftermath of the economic collapse.

I should have realized then that, just as we move past and easily forget other catastrophes, ignoring their lessons and getting back to our usual ways as quickly as possible, so it would be with this economic collapse.

At the time of writing of this post, the S&P 500 has hit its highest point in a year and the start of an economic recovery is visible.  People’s minds have turned back to how quickly they can get back to their pre-collapse patterns of spending and consumption.  A unique window of opportunity for change is closing.

It also seems ironic that it should be a Chinese artist presented by a Chinese group (Vitamin Creative Space) that should have presented this installation.  Here is an extract from the commemorative plaque:

Slippage Gate  (Who is picking up the tab for the USA )

Lehman Gate (Who is to be rescued with 8500 hundred million US dollars)

“A Violent cure” 
Is the commemorative plaque

In the movement of an accelerated history

Sorry, the medicine’s efficacy is difficult to anticipate

We are no longer brothers

If trust is betrayed