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.

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.

Clonal Quaking Aspens, Fish Lanke, Utah. 80,000 years old

Rachel Sussman has been taking photographs of the world’s oldest living things.  And some are pretty old.

La Llareta, Atacama Desert, Chile. up to 3,000 years old

As you can imagine, it’s plants that have survived. The only animal life that can survive thousands of years is coral – one of which is included in the project. Apart from that, the oldest living animal was, it seems, a giant clam that was 450 years old before scientists killed it while trying to determine its age.

Jomon Sugi Japanese Cedar. Yaku Shima, Japan. 2,180 - 7,000 years old

I know, this sort of project begs the question as to whether it should be classified as ‘art’ or ‘documentation’. I’m not in the mood for the debate and the images are interesting enough to include I think.

Underground Forest. Pretoria, South Africa. Up to 13,000 years old.

Watch the video below to see Rachel presenting her project at a TED session.

Loehr is a German artist that constructs complex and beautiful structures using natural materials – often seeds or flowers.

These structures are generally small – the one above is 10.5 x 8 x 8 cm but they manage to combine a feeling of immense delicacy with one of stability and even strength.

It is not clear what the artist is trying to communicate with these sculptures – if anything at all. On her web site, she gives us no hints as to her thinking behind this work.  Maybe they are meant simply to be enjoyed and appreciated as an experience with no hidden meaning.

However, when I saw these beautiful works in the flesh, I could not help but think of the delicacy and fragility of the natural world that surrounds us in spite of the fact that so much of it looks so stable, strong and invincible.  I knew that it would take just one swipe with my finger to destroy these beautiful structures – just like it is taking just one swipe of industrialized civilization to wipe out our natural world.

She describes these as ‘living sculptures…plant based systems that clean polluted water, integrating ecological revitalization with the conceptual, metaphorical and aesthetic capacities of sculpture.”

One such project is called “The Gift of Water”.  The town of Grossenhain, near Dresden in Germany, built a new public swimming complex in which the water used is filtered entirely by wetland plants without the use of chlorine or any other chemical.  Brookner’s sculpture features various mosses on a pair of large cupped hands.  The mosses purify the water of the fountain thereby reproducing the whole technical concept of the swimming complex installation while the sculpture itself represents the precious nature of the water that we use.

The Gift of Water

Some of her sculptures are more directly functional.

The Roosevelt Community Center in San Jose is a LEED gold certified building and re-cycles storm water runoff from the roof.  Two of Brookner’s installations do this filtering. In one of them (below) water is channeled into a basin-like sculpture that aerates the water as it drops into the basin below where it is filtered and re-cycled.

Her second installation in the same site brings to the surface a process that usually happens underground.  An amber glass and stainless steel rock filter system mimics the water filtration that happens naturally in the nearby Coyote Creek watershed.  A map of the creek is etched on to the sculpture.

Jackie Brookner’s work brings to life natural processes that are important to the sustainability of our environment.  Her sculptures no doubt manage to engage viewers in a way that no amount of detailed technical explanation of these processes ever could.

“Forest Tunes: The Library” is an installation consisting of collected items, photographs, video, text and a book.

The centerpiece of The Library is a collection of items held in over 150 boxes.  Stacked in an installation that mimics a library, each box contains an item, usually a botanic specimen of some sort, from the many that the artist has collected over more than a decade.  Box by box, the collection patiently, and somewhat depressingly, builds a story of inexorable destruction of natural landscape.

A Library Of Nature Destroyed

The artist collects the specimens as part of her daily work. Each box contains a relic of nature destroyed and is accompanied by an explanation, a remembrance if you will, of the events, the damage and destruction, that led to the specimen being collected and stored.

The Library - Detail

Leaves from a banana tree (below) commemorate the cutting down of a banana plantation. Cyclamen bulbs are a testament to the thousands of natural cyclamen habitats destroyed through development and road building.  Here are some of the words that accompany these specimens:

“The Jewish National Fund does not transplant the plants, nor does it organize rescue operations to remove thousands of cyclamen, asphodel, narcissus, and iris bulbs that were found on the path of the road.  If we multiply this by the number of new roads paved over the years, the result is clear.”

Banana Plantation Destroyed

Shai Zakai has built a reliquary of nature destroyed; a memento mori to the seemingly inevitable death of all things natural in the destructive wake of human expansion. When installed in an otherwise empty space, the black shelves, black boxes and black floor create a funereal atmosphere that is the polar opposite of the life, fecundity and color of the nature that was.