In his winning entry for this year’s Turner Prize, Martin Boyce brings an autumnal park indoors and re-interprets it in classical modernist/constructivist terms.

A large room, re-designed in every detail. White columns from which flows a designed ceiling of white shapes – “trees” with “leaves” and branches. The centrepiece is a table covered in graffiti and with a hanging mobile gently swaying.  All in stark geometric shapes yet oozing a certain romanticism. On the floor lie brown leaves made out of cut paper. The ‘park’ is complete with garbage cans re-designed into unusual modernist shapes.

This installation has its supporters and its critics. It is a space that is clearly inspired by “Nature” yet re-interpreted in classical modernist language. Boyce’s skill is in taking the brutish language of constructivist art and creating something that, through angular shapes created in synthetic, man-made materials, still manages to reproduce the softness and emotional engagement that is felt when we are in contact with ‘real nature’ (whatever that might be).

Boyce is quick to point out that his work is not political but largely driven by his emotion (see video below) but I wonder where this sort of work can take us in terms of thinking about the relationship between nature and the modern world. If Boyce can reproduce the gentleness and serenity of nature in an indoor installation made out of angular, modern materials, is the conflict between nature and the modern world real or is it something that we have created in our minds? Do we have to keep presenting nature and our modern development as enemies or can work like that of Martin Boyce inspire us to break out of our entrenched positions and see more complementarity? Are we even able to consider thinking differently?

I recently visited an exhibition of the work of Sanna Kannisto and bought the recently published book about her work. The work of this young Finnish artist is fascinating. It questions how, in order to understand and describe, science has to simplify and can never hope to capture the true complexity of life.

The body of work that Sanna has accumulated reproduces the methods of field scientists. She takes items – birds, plants, other animals – out of where they normally live and uses a makeshift field studio to photograph them. Her photographs are designed to emphasize the fact that these creatures have been isolated, their existence simplified, so that we can observe and study them – and attempt to understand something about them.

In Sanna’s images, the artificiality of the setting in which these animals and plants are “studied” is striking.  It serves to highlight the artificiality that we construct when studying nature. Even as science pretends that it is transmitting some form of reality, these images highlight that science, like all else we do, is a human-constructed, cultural framework that simply represents one way of seeing the world.

Simple additions like a ruler or some other human method of observation and measurement serve to highlight the objectification of these creatures as objects of scientific study.

The images avoid, in many cases, any attempt to be aesthetically pleasing – they are supposed to be “scientific” examinations not romantic imagery. Many of the images are then simply labeled with the scientific names of the animal or plant that is photographed – a statement that seems to stamp the supposed scientific authority of “truth” and “knowledge” on to the image. It is as though, in clearly labeling a natural object with a scientific name, someone is saying, with the force of an authority that cannot be challenged, “this is what this is – we understand it and know everything about it”.

Images of her field studio further highlight the artifice of the method of “study”.

Contrasting these images of simplified (and maybe simplistic) artifice, are some images (below) that attempt to show the impenetrable complexity of the tropical rain forest. The messy, confusing, incomprehensible nature of the “immense disorder” of whole forest is juxtaposed with the clinical, artificial simplification of the individual studied objects.

Steve Baker in his essay introducing the monograph of Kannisto’s work summarizes the project as being intended  “..to represent – and, simultaneously, to acknowledge the impossibility of representing in any conventional manner – the baffling complexity of the tropical rainforest”.

It is clear from this work, that it is not only science which has to simplify in an attempt to comprehend. We end up much more drawn to clean simplicity of the images of the isolated bird or plant than the chaotic image of the unadulterated forest. Imagery – and all the arts – also simplify in an attempt to allow us to comprehend. The complexity of nature that is all around us is impossible for us humans to understand. We need to chop it up, simplify it and create limited, artificial models and languages of description in an attempt to gain some sort of comprehension. We create limited, though useful, ways of seeing.  The danger comes when the scientist, the artist, the economist, the anthropologist, the historian or anyone else starts to believe that his particular way of seeing represents the unassailable “truth”. Sanna Kannisto’s work gives the lie to any such self-delusion.

WHAT IS MISSING?

What Is Missing? is the title of what has been labeled as Maya Lin’s last memorial. The aim is to draw attention to the environmental issues that are facing us all today – from global warming to the sixth mass extinction of species that is currently ongoing.

The Listening Cone. California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

In trying to bring attention to environmental issues, Lin is also re-defining the meaning of ‘Monument’.  Rather than a single structure in a single place, Lin is re-defining a monument to be a series of permanent or ephemeral structures or installations spanning the globe and linked by a common mission and a common message.

The Listening Cone (above) was one of the first installations.  A giant cone allows visitors to look into the wide end and see a series of looped videos accompanied by sounds of the marine environment – the natural sounds of the oceans.  It allows me “to create a scene that makes people realize how loud the ocean is for any sonar-dependent marine animal,” says Lin.

The Empty Room is a traveling installation that allows visitors to catch and hold projected images in their hands, each image saying something about endangered species and environmental degradation. 

Lin is planning many projects using many different media in different locations – and even virtual installations.  Future projects include ‘a sound-only sculpture’, video billboards, a peeking wall that allows us to peek through holes at video installations and even virtual media that can be downloaded onto mobile devices. To get an overview of this ambitious project visit the project’s web site.

Maya Lin has embarked on a large and ambitious vision intended to bring environmental issues to as many people as possible using modern media and formats that capture our imagination while constituting a call to action.  What Is Missing? is a work of contemporary art that, in true post-modern tradition, challenges established norms while working to change our outlook.

Let us hope that it is only some of her installations that prove ephemeral  rather than the species and ecosystems that she is trying to help protect.

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.

Amazonia is an exhibit of work commissioned by the museum and shown as part of the Year of Biodiversity – 2010. The artists, Lucy + Jorge Orta have put together an eclectic collection of work based on a trip to the Amazon organized by Cape Farewell.  The exhibit contains sculpture, photography, video and installation.

For me, the most interesting pieces were some of the sculptures and the video.  The sculptures used bones and an extinct ‘elephant bird’ egg to prepare casts in iridescent aluminium (above) and Limoges porcelain (below). Viewing the decorated porcelain sculptures in particular, I wondered what they might say about our relationship with nature.  Is this a reflection of natural beauty cast in a material that we also consider culturally beautiful?  Or do they highlight our ‘use’ of nature – our appreciation of nature only in so much as we can turn it into a fetish object, a mere decoration or amusement? Do we appreciate nature for its own sake or only for its utility – one utility being its transformation into to a beautiful cultural artifact?

The twin, large scale video screens were also mesmerizing. The videos themselves were atmospheric, a feeling enhanced by the poetic narrative of Mario Petrucci (see short extract of the video here). It’s a shame that the video could not seem to avoid lapsing occasionally into spewing facts and figures and into the idolization of science.

The exhibit was an ambitious project.  It’s breadth was such that it is would put strain on any one pair of artists to deliver the expected span of content across many media. In my opinion, this strain started to show in some of the pieces. The photographs of amazonian plants, were well executed and brought a glossy juxtaposition to the coarser feel generated by the plant ‘sculptures’ rendered in sewn cloth. But the photographs did not really bring us an approach that we have not seen before in many, many photographs of exotic plants. The Madre de Dios ark (below) was, for my taste, a little too obvious. A Noah’s Ark of animals with life preservers piled underneath does not leave much to the imagination. The use of plastic animal models in the ark tended to give it all a bit of a down market, toy-like feel. But maybe my reaction was conditioned by comparison to some work by Félix Reyes that I have recently seen and that, while also using the idea of massed figures, had a quality of execution that left you breathless.

Madre de Dios

Amazonia is an ambitious project well-executed.  The artists successfully managed to produce a large scale exhibit that spanned many media and that brought to life the varied wonders of the amazon. They did so in an eclectic form that is far from usual and that represents a refreshing change from yet another nature documentary (yawn). The museum must be congratulated on commissioning this work and on having the vision to create a contemporary arts programme to sit alongside its more didactic, scientific work. I hope that other museums of natural history might take a lead from this programme and start something similar – though I suspect that we may have to wait for improved economic conditions to see that happening.

Harri Kallio has tried to give us an insight into this lost-forever part of our world with his series “The Dodo and Mauritius Island”

Harri Kallio - Image 1

Kallio undertook extensive research into the dodo, what it looked like, its likely habits and its habitats. He then built two life-size models of the bird and traveled to Mauritius – the only island where the dodo is known to have existed.  There he set up tableaux and photographed his birds in what would have been their natural settings.

Harri Kallio - Image 2

Kallio’s image bring back a world that we have destroyed. European explorers arrived in Mauritius in the 16th century. They brought with them dogs, pigs, rats and other animals that plundered the dodo’s nests. Combined with forest destruction that destroyed the bird’s habitat, the dodo became extinct within 200 years.  This pattern of destruction and extinction continues today – only at a much accelerated rate. The list of threatened and endangered species continues to grow in the face of human destruction.

Harri Kallio’s work makes me wonder how many more animal models we our children have to build in the future to recreate that which we are happily destroying.

Harri Kallio - Image 3

In a unique activist, social work of art, The Ultimate Holding Company, a co-operative based in Manchester, England, has just completed a project entitled ext Inked.  They created a set of drawings individually illustrating one hundred of the most endangered species in the British Isles.  They then asked for for 100 volunteers each to have one of these drawings tattooed on their skin thereby becoming ‘permanent ambassadors’ of that species.

Ink Drawn Images of 100 Endangered Species

It turns out that the organizers received large numbers of applications from volunteers of which they could only select 100. Many of these applications contained heartfelt messages expressing a wish to get involved in a lifelong conservation campaign.

The selected volunteers were all tattooed in November this year – the bicentennial year of Charles Darwin’s birthday.

Volunteer being tattoed

Not only was this a bold and highly ambitious undertaking but some may be surprised by the large number of volunteers who demonstrated a passion for conserving the biodiversity of their country.  For many, the extinction of species and the inexorable destruction of biodiversity are abstract concepts of little relevance in their everyday lives. This successful experiment shows that there are many who care about this issue with a lifelong passion.

A 'Permanent Ambassador' is created

The Ultimate Holding Company describes itself as “a co-operative exploring the modern city through critical cross disciplinary art and design practice. We specialise in turning artist-led concepts into ethical design solutions, exclusively for organisations driven by their values not their profits.” They have undertaken a significant number of projects with many clients and partners.