Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.

Nature gives nothing but it lends

Why do you abuse the bounteous largesse that Nature gives?

Why do you use such great sums [of resources] and yet you cannot live?

And when you’re gone, what legacy will you leave?

These sentiments are highly relevant today but it seems amazing that Shakespeare would have put them forward them so clearly so long ago – centuries before Aldo Leopold or anyone else had even imagined them.

“Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking – as art – provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded in my work in the most appropriate way for each different idea: a photograph, a map, or a text work. All these forms feed the imagination.”

Long’s work has a strong evocative power. In particular, his ‘textworks’ are often short statements that capture a particular essence of a walk. In their short but powerful form their effect resembles that of haiku verses.

Long engages with the land in a highly personal way. His work is not the type of landscape or nature art that produces generic images that fetishize and romanticize nature while lacking any personal connection. Rather, in Long’s work one can feel the intimate connection that, through his long, solitary walks, the artist has achieved with the landscape. This sort of art creates a strong impact and is more likely to stimulate us to seek our own personal connections and meanings in nature and landscape than are simple, generic images that purport to show “the beauty of nature”.

Even when exhibited in the gallery, Long’s works contain a strong, organic feel that reflect the artist’s connection with the landscapes that provide the raw materials for his gallery works.

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.

“Umhverfing is an Icelandic word for the state between nature and environment” says Pétur Thomsen of his project titled Umhverfing. There is clearly no equivalent word in English but the concept itself is intriguing.

Icelandic photographer Thomsen has spent the last several years documenting the transformation of undeveloped areas around Reykjavic into suburban developments. He calls this process “nature being transformed into environment”.

This distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ is an interesting one. The conservation movement is in the habit of equating ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’.  ‘Environmentally-friendly activities’ are defined as those activities which contribute to preserve some concept of nature. By ‘environment’ Thomsen clearly means something different. He means the human built environment or maybe a better phrasing would be the environment in which people choose to live. For the most part, human beings have become incapable of living in ‘nature’. Rather we have to live in a built environment with all the comforts and services that brings with it. Thomsen documents the process by which a ‘natural’ space is converted into an environment in which people can live.

Thomsen does not explicitly make a value judgement about the events he is documenting. However, many people viewing this and similar work would, today, interpret these developments as being ‘destructive’ of nature and wilderness in the interests of yet more suburban development. This interpretation is, however, a very recent cultural way of looking at development. Until relatively recently (late 19th century), most art portrayed human expansion as a positive event – the taming and civilizing a wild and dangerous wilderness. The painting below epitomizes this perspective as civilization hovers over America moving from the already tamed and civilized East (on the right side of the painting) to the still wild and dangerous West (on the left of the image).

Only recently have we realized that our living environment can only continue to exist within a larger context – the larger environment of a healthy ecosphere. This has resulted in a progressive change from our view of development from ‘civilizing’ to ‘destructive’. Thomsen’s use of a language that contrasts ‘nature’ with an ‘environment’ that we can actually live in brings back the idea of development as a civilizing influence even as his images convey human intrusion and landscape destruction.

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.

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.

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.

Casa Batlo, Barcelona. Photo Sergio Muscat

Gaudi was a spiritual man with a great regard for nature as God’s creation. The newly consecrated Sagrada Familia “strives to compress all of earth and heaven into its structure – endless saints, biblical scenes, symbols, inscriptions, seashells, reptiles, birds, flowers and fruit.” according to Rowan Moore in The Observer. Gaudi even included in his highly decorative (if sometimes pretty ugly) sculptural details, images of the animals that were going to be displaced by the building of the huge church on the then outskirts of Barcelona. Neither are sculptural details reproducing nature limited to the Sagrada Familia – they are widespread across Gaudi’s full range of art-in-building.

Casa Batlo, Barcelona. Photo Sergio Muscat

But Gaudi also realized that nature provided more than mere decoration. His structural forms mimicked those found in nature thereby providing him with both aesthetic and functional benefits.  Columns mirroring trees or human bones, roof structures mirroring leaves, arches mirroring rib cages; all these allowed him to reduce the materials needed to build strong structures because of the supreme functionality gained from reproducing nature’s designs.

The Sagrada Familia column structures gain strength by mirroring nature's architecture

Then, of course, there is the sheer joyfulness, color and blousy expressionism of natural forms that find themselves expressed in Gaudi’s celebration of life.

A celebration of life

Gaudi transformed Barcelona into an art gallery with a celebration of life on every street. His designs were sometimes outrageous – as outrageous as the plants and creatures inhabiting a tropical rain forest. In using natural forms, Gaudi was, maybe, one of the first in what would be today called a sustainable architect. He understood that nature gives us not only beauty, recreation and joie de vivre but also wisdom – something that maybe we could all learn a bit more of today.

David Maisel’s work spans many different project over many years. One of his interests is in documenting through aerial photographs the impact that Man has on the landscape.  The image above is from “The Mining Project” where he explores the effect of mining in “undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.” Like other artists (eg Edward Burtynsky – previously reviewed in this blog), Maisel explores how aesthetic beauty can be created out of destructive and polluting processes.

Examining landscapes from The Great Salt Lake (above) to his project “The Forest” where he examines patterns created by floating logs and clear cut forests (below), Maisel draws us into unknown (and maybe unknowable) landscapes using images that “are charged by both their profane beauty and their ethically questionable nature.”

Below: Image from The Lake Project: “the stuff of California legend: a story of engineers, politicians, and big land owners working together to divert water to the rapidly growing desert city of Los Angeles, generating a thriving agricultural industry and an environmental disaster in the process.”

Fidelman is a rock climber and he describes his series as “A photographic project that captures the essence of the climbing spirit”.  But to me these images speak more broadly than just telling a story about climbing.

To my eyes these images speak of a harmony between Man and Nature in a way that very few images manage to achieve nowadays. So much of our visual imagery is focused on Man’s destructive effect on Nature that we seem to have forgotten that there is also a positive harmony to be enjoyed observed and appreciated.

In most of these images the human figure is dwarfed by the majesty of the raw natural landscape.  Yet both elements have their own aesthetic – a different and contrasting beauty – and Fidelman manages to create a feeling of harmony rather than one of violation.

Fidelman’s images are reminiscent of those Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s ‘self-portraits’ in a natural environment.  However, while Minkkinen’s images create a feeling of human intrusion and molestation, Fidelman’s do not.  Looking through Stone Nudes I am left with a sense of peace and the hopeful feeling that some kind of harmonious relationship with nature is, maybe, possible.

Fidelman does not set out to make a point beyond his celebration of the climbing spirit. Yet, in celebrating both the human form and the natural world in the context of non-damaging human recreation, he has created an inspirational series of images that could show the way for a new visual language for those interested in taking a positive view of environmental issues.