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Who paid for this nonsense?

Who paid for this nonsense? (User ID:4085271)



Oh, the bore of the bother! To be in love with everything that is being destroyed! To care is to self-inflict open surgery on one’s soul in public. But to articulate it through art is borderline social suicide. So, how to actualise and interpret caring about the human-nature entanglement through the lens of artistic practice in the contemporary Western canon without resorting to anger, to saturation, to complete boredom?



It's an unnecessary distraction for drivers & should be taken down immediately (User ID: 4105887)



Using a dualistic approach to the issue as a starting point can help to articulate the division between the human-nature conundrum. One enduring concept of opposing pairs is Descartes’ idea of res cogitans and res extensa, which in principle stands for a Cartesian view of the world in which a thinking substance and an extended substance are mutually exclusive. Actualising these theories through the lens of contemporary thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti could offer an alternative approach to binary thinking. In her nomadic thinking theories Braidotti looks beyond mind/body dualism, suggesting that fragmentation, multiplicity and complexity have to be central to the understanding of human-nature entanglement (Braidotti, 2011). If humans’ relationship with nature could be approached without the competitive mindset of the either-or, in which the victorious conquers the loser, the Cartesian representation of human-nature as a victory of mind over matter can be interrogated and dismantled.


Perhaps this complexity can be understood not as an issue of mind conquering matter but as the possibility that extended substance is connected to thinking substance in deep and powerful ways. Taking time to observe and to understand can be humans’ best cartographic tool to map out situated, embodied and embedded complexities in the human-nature relationship. Approaching the binary human-nature (the latter including all non-human animals), not as a matter of either-or, but as an interconnected extension of each other can offer opportunities to link, to add, to trace, to hold together.


I was considering this while closely inspecting Caspar David Friedrich’s series of small drawings The Ages of Man, shown at the Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge in 2024.



Angels in Adoration, 1826, Caspar David Friedrich


In the last of the seven drawings two angels seem to be looking down towards Earth through a curtain of clouds, or rather to the space where the planet should have been, because it is there no more. There is no horizon in this sketch, and any perception of a vanishing point is philosophical rather than visual. Is he suggesting that the dualistic mind-matter chasm can be integrated not through a continuum but through triangulating the discussion by incorporating the spiritual realm? Perhaps moving away from binary positions could open up spaces for diversity of thinking, as increasing sets of dual contradictory ideas tie thinkers in knots that disable the very function of thinking itself (thanks, Leibniz).




If you get distracted by a picture of some brambles, may I suggest you stop driving and take the bus. Jesus wept. (User ID: 5069989)


Extreme binary chasms can be perceived in politics, in every election and referendum, as well as in cultural wars, in each cancellation and each act of self-censoring. The mix of nostalgia, illusion and magical thinking can create a potent elixir that makes one feel one is on the right side of history, if not of reasoning. But when is sufficient reason achieved? Would it be at a point in which care and reason can be exercised hand in hand? And how can one be encouraged to do this in a world vision where impermanence is not accepted and where it is OK to go about everyday life without considering other sentient beings’ suffering? Oh, to care! It is but a bore.


Of course, there is another way, there is always another way if you live in England: to make fun of the situation, to joke so transparently that the complexity is revealed rather than theorised, to focus one’s research towards essential matters without angst.



Billboard, 2024, Scott Poulson



Take the work by artist Scott Poulson, Billboard, which attempts to juggle aesthetically the cult film They Live, Nature magazine and the advertising industry. Installed on a billboard at a roadside in Norwich, this work occupies a space which conventionally would be used to advertise new cars, phone upgrades or foreign holidays. Instead, he short-circuited the promotional norms of desire and consumption by showing a 20ft by 10 ft photograph of brambles. His intention was to illustrate the crossover point calculated to have taken place in the year 2020 (plus/minus 6) where the anthropogenic mass surpassed all global living biomass (Elhacham, E, et al, 2020). As this work communicates a point of saturation, it is psychologically echoed inside me, by meeting my own internal point of saturation. Suddenly it does not feel relevant any longer, not even as an academic, to interrogate whether things are foldings of matter (Giles Deleuze) or nodes of matter (Tim Ingold). I want humans to stop flooding the planet with things and telling one another that we all must consume these things. I just want fewer things to exist. And more brambles. I want those Friedrichian angels to see brambles when they look down on Earth.




Who said that I drive? Dickwad. (User ID: 4105887)


According to the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience, survivors of environmental catastrophes who have lost material possessions speak of how the tragedy can bring about a change of perspective and a moment of realisation over what is essential and what is not. In the recent Los Angeles fires, survivor Lucy Sheriff explains this moment to a BBC interviewer: ‘I told myself, out loud: Only take what you need. And I realised in a moment of clarity, whilst I was frantically scanning all of my favourite clothes, shoes, and jewellery, that I really didn't need any of it. I grabbed my grandmother's ring, passports, birth certificates, and left everything else to burn.’


Perspective is used in painting to represent human understandings and human values. It can be employed in a multiplicity of ways to evidence how understanding is exercised, for example, as canonical perspective is used to represent religious experience, and linear perspective is used to represent experience of space (Tate). Perspective also means point of view, and it can be exercised individually or collectively, making visible positioning and values when it happens. When perspective is lost, one could lose one’s positioning in relation to the world and to each other.


In another one of Friedrich’s works, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, a man dressed in a dark green velvet overcoat stands on a rock and gazes out on a landscape of mountains and valleys covered in fog. It is easy to imagine the man’s positioning in relation to contemplation and communion with nature, as I, the viewer, creep from behind to observe a clear Romantic example of Rückenfigur, rear facing figure, where the face and identity of the character is not revealed. This makes me wonder about the positioning of the viewer. When I look at either the angels or the chap dressed in green velvet, my only option is to position myself behind them, looking at them looking at the space. But where is the viewer in relation to the close up, blown-up brambles? Across the street? Looking sideways from a car in motion?


Interrogating the position of the viewer in relation to an artwork is linked to perspective. Perspective can be a visual, but also a philosophical, historical and a psychological matter, and that includes ethical and emotional considerations. It can be argued that there are as many different perspectives as there are people. This does not mean that individual perspectives should compromise truth, but rather that multiple perspectives can contribute to the creation of social systems that can be perceived as truthful by many. Could art do this?



Personally, I never understand this sort of thing. For example, driving round the ringroad a few weeks ago, they had statues of men in hi viz vests standing around on what should have been the Heartsease roundabout. What was that all about? (User ID: 4104739)



Back in 2017 I took part in the Artistic Research Symposium organised by Nordic University in Ricklundgården, Saxnãs, Sápmi. One of the works presented was a sound piece, consisting of a text that was read to the landscape, and in which participants were an essential component. The participants were the viewers and listeners, but also those who bore witness to the entanglement of landscape, words and meaning. Participants were given instructions where to place themselves and where to look, and they were invited to reflect on their relationship with the landscape. As I took the photograph of them looking, I consciously tried to position my camera in a very Friedrichian perspective. I was looking not at one, or two characters looking out, but at a group of them.






Do not flatter the landscape – Christine Fentz and Ragnhild Freng Dale

Photo Marina Velez Vago, 2017



Actively bearing witness not in solitude but collectively might bring about partial answers to the question as to whether art can offer new perspectives to new complex problems. It could be argued that bearing witness is a passive endeavour, but artist Gustav Metzger dissipated any misunderstanding about that in his 2015 piece Remember Nature. This work was a nationwide invitation for art professionals and students to come together to highlight animal extinction. The day of action was designed to take a stand ‘against the ongoing erasure of species, even when there is little chance of ultimate success.’ (Serpentine, 2015). Being a holocaust survivor himself, Metzger knew about how a toxic combination of rational thinking and lack of ethics can be used to justify the erasure of the other. I am guessing that he also knew that bearing witness might be linked to historic memory.


The power of the practicing artist lies in the freedom to make absolute claims, write bold manifestos, and create action statements. ‘There is no choice but to follow the path of ethics into aesthetics.’ claims Metzger. He did not have to justify or back up his claim. His claim becomes the artwork, which is mapped out together with others in a day long collage-athon of making, using newspaper cuttings to plaster entire walls of Central St Martins and other universities and galleries across the UK (Serpentine, 2015).


As an artist researcher I employ a set of three relevant questions in my investigations: What am I doing?, which teases out descriptions of the work created; How am I doing it?, which addresses the methodologies I employ in the making of the work; and the most difficult one to answer Why am I doing it?, which is equivalent to the So what? question of any academic contribution.


So what? represents the department asking you to justify why they should give you time for your research, the Arts Council requesting a comprehensive list of benefits, social impact and head count for each coin with which they part, and the general public venting their opinion. In fact, the question ‘So what?’ sounds very much like the question of User 4085271 from the comment section in the Norwich Evening News, who candidly asked no-one: Who paid for this nonsense?


So what?, encapsulates a punching, sometimes painful, always meaningful, moment for the artist researcher. Metzger explains why Remember Nature should exist, almost extending the explanation as to why art should exist. ’We live in societies suffocating in waste.’ he says, adding that the artists’ task is ‘to remind people of the richness and complexity in nature; to protect nature as far as we can and by doing so, art will enter new territories that are inherently creative.’


So, if art can propose other ways of understanding, repairing and reimagining human relationship with nature, the real question is, shouldn’t we all be paying for it?





Perhaps a biting satire on the speed of the construction industry in this country? (User ID: 5069989)



Yup. Not enough tits. (User ID: 4080555)










Dr Marina Velez Vago.


Author’s note: All the quotes in bold were taken from the Norwich Evening News online comment section, created between the 20th and the 21st May 2024.



Bibliography


Braidotti, R. 2011. Nomadic Theory. Columbia University Press.


Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press.


Descartes R. 1968. Discourse on method and the meditations. Penguin: London.


Ingold, T. 2010. Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials, Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen


Russell, B. 1992. A critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. London: Routledge.


Theiner, G. 2011, Res cogitans extensa: A Philosophical Defense of the Extended Mind Thesis, European University Studies


Online sources




Elhacham, E, et al. 2020. Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass. Nature 588(7838):1-3 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-3010-5





Images


Angels in Adoration, 1826, Caspar David Friedrich, Fitzwilliam museum catalogue.


Billboard, 2024, Scott Poulson, courtesy of the artist.


Group of participants at NSU Artistic Research Symposium, 2017, Marina Velez Vago.

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