Interpreting Art in the Anthropocene
What does it mean to interpret a work of art in a geological age that is referred to as the Anthropocene, an age in which human activity is perceived as the dominant force in the shaping of the earth’s climate and environment? Not asteroids. Not volcanoes. Us, going about our business. I confess to yearning at times for a simple, clean, unapologetically formalist approach, in which a painting is finally about painting, a photograph finally about photography, art finally about art. “Roughly speaking,” declares Michael Fried in “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” an essay in the reissued Art and Objecthood, “the history of painting from Manet through Synthetic Cubism and Henri Matisse may be characterized in terms of the gradual withdrawal of painting from the task of representing reality—or reality from the power of painting to represent it—in favor of an increasing preoccupation with problems intrinsic to painting itself.” Substitute “Nature” for “reality” in that statement, and you get the idea. Let the world burn while we ponder flatness. But nostalgia for this kind of formalism is like taking codeine for a bad tooth, a brief but gloriously effective respite from the throbbing worry that something in the world outside the museum has gone terribly, irrevocably wrong.
This occurred to me the other day while I was participating in an exercise at art school. My teacher, Jonathan VanDyke, had met us at the Currier Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire and assigned us the task of staring at a painting of our choosing, without interruption, for sixty minutes. I chose John Constable’s Dedham Lock and Mill 1820, probably because I have always been drawn to his rural settings. Something about his handling of light and clouds suggests the presence of a smoldering energy that is held in check—barely— behind all that Arcadian detail, as if a Turner were napping just beneath surface.
FIG 1. John Constable, Dedham Lock Mill, Retrieved from Currier Museum of Art
There are, by my count, only four humans: two in the distance on the left, one in the barge, and one pulling on the lever that controls the lock. They don’t seem to amount too much: they are all tiny, dwarfed by the trees, the clouds, the mill, the church tower. Yet the one pulling on the lever began to bother me. He is by far the most distinct human figure in the painting, and in this version of it—there are actually four—Constable has left a streak of red down the man’s right side, such that he pops out of the picture even when viewed at some distance.
FIG 2. John Constable, Dedham Lock Mill (Detail) , Retrieved from Currier Museum of Art
Granted, all that he is doing is pulling on a lever, which in 1820 certainly seems innocent enough. But, what, after all, is a lock? It is a device that temporarily raises the water level of a river or canal such that it becomes navigable for a boat or a barge that could not otherwise pass. It transforms nature in a way that enables humans to achieve something they could not otherwise achieve—in this case navigate the River Stour. Surrounded by the natural world in all of its seeming immensity, the tiny human figure with the red streak is about to intervene, to allow a boat to go where, if the river had been left to its own designs, it could not have gone, all by simply pulling on a lever. These humans are small, but they punch above their weight. Looking at this painting now, it is hard not to conceive of them as a danger to everything pictured here.
About a century and a half later, Bill McKibben, in The End of Nature, argued that once human beings transform Nature, it is no longer Nature, and that when that transformation becomes so significant that it alters climate, we have witnessed the death of Nature as we once understood it. “We have changed the atmosphere,” he wrote prophetically in 1980, “and thus, we are changing weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it, there is nothing but us.” That is not happening in Constable’s painting, at least not on the scale that McKibben is describing, but it’s not hard to imagine that a single pull on that lever catapults us out of that peaceful landscape and into a world in which humans have learned how to manipulate physics on a much grander scale, such that Nature as we have always understood it, and to some extent as it is pictured here, simply doesn’t exist, or perhaps worse, exists only as an illusion of our own making, becomes a reality, to echo Fried, that has withdrawn itself “from the power of painting to represent it. “
For me this had come to mind a few weeks earlier, when I visited an exhibition of Emmet Gowin’s aerial photographs of the Nevada Test Site at the Pace Gallery in New York. In 1988, Gowin, who at the time was teaching at Princeton University, wrote the United States Department of Energy, asking for permission to photograph, from the air, the Nevada Test Site. He was hoping, with the backing of Princeton, to get permission to do something that had not been done before by a private citizen and artist: photograph from the air a landscape that had between 1951 and 1992 been altered by 928 nuclear detonations. The answer was no, but Gowin persisted, and in 1996 the government relented, allowing him to produce 64 utterly remarkable prints of photographs of the site he took from a helicopter.
Fig 3. Subsidence Craters and the Yucca Fault, Looking North on Yucca Flat, Nevada Test Site 1996
37 ˚ 5’ 56.71” N 116˚ 2’ 49.60” W
pl. 50, Emmet Gowin, Nevada Test Site
What is remarkable about these images—two centuries after Constable made his painting—is that they force us to bear witness to a world that has been transformed by human agency, but on a scale that seems anything but human. They record what looks like a moonscape pockmarked with craters, the surface of a planet transformed by collisions with meteors over millions of years. But that of course is not what we are looking at. It’s the surface of the earth, transformed over slightly more than four decades—a nanosecond in geological time—by 928 nuclear explosions. The “scope and wholeness” of the photograph, to use Gowin’s description of taking pictures from the air, is precisely what it signifies, that human technology can do things on a scale that we don’t normally think of as human and maybe as a result don’t fully comprehend. The magnitude of our ability to destroy can only be viewed from an extraordinarily wide angle, which may account for why we don’t see it—the carbon in the air, its absorption into the ocean and the ocean’s resulting acidification, the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, the melting of Greenland’s permafrost, the disappearance of 2.9 billion birds since 1970, the sixth extinction. There is not a plane that flies high enough to see it all. It’s odd to think that humans can destroy on a scale far, far beyond their ability to comprehend what they are destroying. We know this is true of termites and viruses. The irony here is that, unlike termites, we do have, at our disposal, signs, symbols, the ability to abstract, the ability to reason. In The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert notes, chillingly, “With the capacity to represent the world in signs and symbols comes the capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is also the capacity to destroy it.” The challenge of looking at art in the Anthropocene is trying to persuade ourselves that one does not inevitably lead to the other.
Ned Walthall is a photographer and member of the LHNE Collective. He is currently working toward his MFA at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.
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