The work of Ellen Rogers brings focus to the question of whether the human is part of, or separate from, “Nature”.

The giraffe sculpture above has the body of a giraffe, human front legs a mechanical replacement for its hind legs and is made of steel. It is an artistic chimera – an image of a hybrid creature made of man-made materials.

Ellen’s sculptures blend the boundaries between the human and the non-human. We live on the land that used to belong to animals (though we don’t live with animals) and, increasingly, they live in spaces we are trying to make out own. In such a world, pondering the distinction between the human and the natural may be irrelevant. We’re all part of one world or, as Ellen’s work suggests, one living organism, one body. When it comes to the Human and the Natural it may no longer be either/or but both/and.

For many people it is difficult to understand, let alone empathize with, technical statements like “loss of habitat”. This advertizing campaign from the charity Born Free aims to bring this issue into the more human terms of ‘homelessness’.

Using images of animals placed in the context of human homelessness, the campaign tries to make clear that ‘loss of habitat’ represents the same type of disenfranchisement seen in people who have lost their homes or have otherwise been rendered homeless.

A clever approach that moves away from the distancing and often incomprehensible techno-speak of the conservation community to frame the issue in human terms and, hopefully, make it more relevant. It would be useful if some information were to be collected on the impact of this creative campaign.

The images in Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow remind us that animals have always had a mystical place in the world of humans.

Started in 1992, Ashes and Snow is a long term project in which photographer and film-maker Gregory Colbert works towards “rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals.” Colbert has created a set of romanticized images of people interacting with wild animals in a largely mystical ambiance.

The whole project – a set of images of people interacting closely with wild animals – has a sense of unreality. Yet it is this very unreality that, in its metaphorical approach, transports us somewhere that generates a strong feeling of human-animal connection.

Looking at these images makes us all feel, at some level, that we would like to be able to interact with these wild animals in this way ourselves; to be able to get close and intimate with these spectacular beings.

But of course, in our cities and suburbs, we have all become remote from animals and, in a modern, techno-scientific world, all mystical connection with animals has been broken. In this way, Colbert’s work harks back to a lost world that, however hard we try, we are likely never able to regain.

Ashes and Snow is a large scale traveling exhibit that has already visited many major cities and has won near-universal acclaim and recognition and many awards.

In a modern world with its ever-increasing distance between the human and the natural, we cannot regain what Gregory Colbert has shown us that we have lost – part of our human soul. The only question is how much more are we willing to lose.

“These industrial environments are so desensitizing in that you, even if you are an animal lover, become complaisantly accepting of the fact that the live beings are only raw materials for mass commodity production. This needs some serious questioning.”

These are some of the thoughts of New York Based artist Miru Kim in relation to her latest series “The Pig That Therefore I Am”. Bringing us face to face with the harsh, inhumane industrial environment of modern, large scale pig farming, Kim explores the experience of coming close to these pigs who are treated as “product”.

Commenting on the physiological closeness between pigs and humans that makes them, for instance, candidates for use in xenotransplantation, Kim explores her ability to get close to these pigs through skin to skin contact. Much like lovers feel an intimate sense of connectedness when lying skin to skin, so Kim tries to explore this experience with pigs – lifting them out of their commodity status in the farm to a position of intimacy. “When two bodies come in contact–each of them touching and being touched at the same time–the souls meet and interweave on the skin, and the subject and the object become one.”

Maybe the pig farm is a mere illustration of our modern relationship with ‘nature’ or all of that which is not human.  The transformation of ‘nature’ to commodity is not limited to farm animals but extends to almost every aspect of the natural world – from national parks and wilderness areas that are products for tourist consumption or for the accumulation of scientific knowledge, to the very commoditization of the word ‘natural’ that comes splattered on every product packaged in a green plastic bottle.

Our relationship with and dependence on nature is there for all to see. But maybe in an industrialized, technological world with an ever growing human population, it is inevitable that nature becomes industrialized. Kim’s work reminds us that sometimes it may be worth spending time exploring any residual deeper connection we might have with the non-human.

Robin Schwartz is a friend. But that’s not why her work is on this blog. It is here because, for many months, I have been looking for work that describes a positive relationship between us and the non-human rather than the ubiquitous work that castigates ad nauseam the damage we are doing to our environment.

Robin’s series, Amelia’s world is one such body of work. It is humanistic and post-humanistic at the same time. It shows Ameila, Robin’s daughter, displaying a comfort and special affinity with a wide variety of animals – companion animals and more exotic ones too.

Last weekend I was at a gathering where some young kids were uncomfortable in the presence of a boisterous young puppy. As we get more and more urbanized,  any meaningful contact with the non-human (or that which is not constructed by humans) is disappearing. In many so-called developed countries – and especially in the United States – over-protective parents bring up kids to be wary of anything that has not been fully processed, sanitized and otherwise rendered synthetic. Dogs should not be touched – they are dirty or dangerous or both. All other animals belong behind bars lest kids have contact with them and possibly receive some minor scratch.

In this culture, Robin’s photographs of a child in happy and relaxed contact with many different animals seem unusual and otherworldly if not altogether a little surreal. What an indictment of where we have got to in our self-centered and self-referential cultural prisons.

Robin is not particularly trying to make a point with these images (though I think she should!). Robin explains: “I am driven to depict relationships with animals but the photographs are not documents; they are evidence of the invented worlds that we explore and the fables we enact together. Photography gives us the opportunity to access our dreams, to discover the extraordinary.”

“The world that my daughter and I explore is one where the line between human and animal overlaps or is blurred.”

What feelings do you personally get when you view these images? I find them simultaneously uplifting and sad - sad because it seems so unreal in today’s world that children can have this sort of relationship with animals. For some they may generate anxiety – maybe imagining their own child so ‘dangerously’ exposed to these beasts.

Will our culture ever be able to regain any sort of affinity with the non-human? In a few years time will these images seem even more surreal than they seem today. Who knows, our self-absorption may go so far that Robin will have to stop making these images for fear of being arrested for exposing her child to the dangers of something that is not yet dead and safely packaged.

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.

Bullfighting has recently been banned in Catalonia (the ban to take effect in 2012) and has been banned in the Canary Islands since 1991.  The above-referenced article was arguing that there are significant cultural differences between Catalonia and the Basque Country making a ban in the latter highly unlikely – however imaginative the protests.  A recent poll suggests that 60% of Spaniards do not care for bullfighting but that 57% do not want to see it banned.

What’s this all got to do with environmental conservation?

My own belief is that it is difficult to build a sustainable conservation effort unless we also manage to change the relationship between man and nature (and here I am including animals as part of nature) to go beyond seeing nature as simply that which is to be exploited for human gain – however small and frivolous that gain. My question is: can reasonably protect species and our natural environment while culturally embracing practices like bullfighting, fighting with dogs, cock fighting, hunting with dogs, and other traditions that reduce the maiming and killing of animals to a mere entertainment for the few? Any and all opinions welcome.

In a final twist, it bears noting that bullfighting proponents have their own conservation argument. If bullfighting were to be abolished, there would be no need to continue to farm the special species of bull that is used for bullfighting and that species would likely become extinct!

In her series named “Domesticated” she examines aspects of today’s human relationship to animals and, by implication, to ‘nature’. Looking at her images, I find myself moving through a whole range of thoughts and emotions.

A deer looks forlorn sitting by the side of a highway with the lights of human habitation in the background.  This simple image a stark illustration of how we have invaded these animals’ living quarters.  Tomorrow will this deer just be road kill?

A coyote howls helplessly at an overbearingly bright street lamp. The coyote looks incongruous and powerless.  His howls ineffectual in terrain that has been appropriated and ‘domesticated’ by humans – two pathetic trees, planted and tied down, the only nod towards the natural landscape that was once here.

"Howl"

The simple image of a brown bear with a white plastic bag over his face evokes all sorts of thoughts of human encroachment, discarded waste and our ability to disable, damage and destroy even the supposedly more powerful of animals through our thoughtlessness.

"Struggle"

Two images in particular lay bare our cultural relationship to animals.  Two boys terrorize and attack a defenseless, terrified raccoon trapped cowering in the corner of a basketball court.  None of us can fail to recognize in this image the way our culture has led us to these behaviors – from young boys pulling the legs off spiders to whole industries abusing animals in factory farms.

Roman Candle

And these boys will no doubt grow up to be brave and fearless he-men.  Like the macho hunk featured in his hunting jacket, safely behind a wire fence as he bravely levels his shotgun and takes aim at……………a turkey!  This caricature of all modern ‘hunting’ is the type of image that makes one laugh with what has been powerfully described as ‘the laugh that makes you cry’ at how pathetic so many of our behaviors have become.

"Backyard"

The last image I will reproduce here is one that, for me, encapsulates the relationship that our urban society now has with ‘nature’. The elderly lady pictured here is enclosed in her artificial, uninspiring, cookie-cutter human habitation.  She keeps caged birds – a pitiful attempt at having some form of contact with the natural world – even as she is reduced to peering out of her own cage to an outside world she doesn’t seem to understand or have any meaningful contact with.

"Window"

Like all imagery, Amy Stein’s work is much more powerful when seen in the flesh than when reproduced on the web (her first solo exhibit in NY has just closed at Clamp Art).  As is always the case, not all images in the series manage to be quite so effective.  A bird caught in a net; a dead rabbit in a wheelbarrow; an elderly lady holding a dead bird.  These images tend towards the ordinary and don’t quite manage to pack the same punch.  But overall, this is a marvelous and highly effective series.

How is it done?  Amy’s images are all constructed tableaux vivants in the cinematographic tradition. The animals shown here are often taxidermy specimens; the human subjects are models or actors and the scenes are constructed – though based on real events. These carefully constructed scenes hover somewhere between fiction and reality – a fact that comes across subliminally in all the images and which no doubt contributes to the strength of their impact.

Because it is a personal interest, I spend a lot of time looking at imagery that focuses on animals and the human-animal relationship.  I cannot remember the last time I was struck by a set of images quite as much as I have been struck by this series.  I hope that Amy will choose to turn her considerable talents to some more of the pressing issues that we all face.  Climate change could be an interesting challenge.