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Earth calls

In the geological era anthropocene, human fingerprints are so far-reaching that the Earth is considered a man-made product. It breaks down what is left of the distinction between nature and culture.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

 

In late summer 2014 I stood in Oslo's most humid basement and watched a strange landscape of grassy peaks. The basement was the small gallery NoPlace, and the landscape was artist Per Kristian Nygård's violent installation Not Red Green Goal. The artist had built a foundation consisting of dome-shaped structures, loosened tons of soil above, and let the grass germinate while the gallery had summer closed. The gallery's task was, in addition to welcoming the audience, to water the artwork several times daily – hence the lighthearted atmosphere. Nature helped art; the grassy gardens had optimal growth conditions during the hottest Norwegian summer of 100 years. But it was temperatures that were caused by man-made climate change.

From the movie Medium Earth (The Otolith Group) from The Anthropocene Project. A Report.
From the movie Medium Earth (The Otolith Group) from The Anthropocene Project. A Report.

A man-made globe. Such interactions between nature and culture have been a pervasive theme in art history. One can see this, for example, in the symbolists, who in the late 1800s painted and drew correspondences between inner soul life and outer landscape. With the recent years' spread of the hypothesis that we are in the man-made geological epoch anthropocene, these currents have gained new relevance. In short, the theory implies that human activity has been so far-reaching that the Earth can now be said to be a man-made product. It is visible in the topography of the earth, but the changes also occur at the microscopic level, for carbon emissions change the chemistry of the atmosphere faster than ever in the history of the planet. If the holistic idea of Gaia was a dream of man's place in a holistic ecosystem, the anthropocene marks this dream's transition to nightmare – everything is still connected to everything, but man has put his fingerprint on every last detail. Next year, The International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body responsible for the geological time scale, will decide whether to ratify the move to the anthropocene. If they do, our current era will Holocene, which begins with the warming of the planet after the last ice age, be traced back to cormorant 11 years. The era before it again, Pleistocene, lasted for comparison for 2588 million years.

To shape the country. The Norwegian geologist Henrik Svensen has written: “The Anthropocene breaks down the fringe dichotomy between culture and nature, between natural and man-made. Man is a force of nature that affects both the biosphere and the earth's crust, the sea and the atmosphere. We cannot escape this fact. " With this daunting realization, we may also be able to look at historical landscape art, where the contradictions between culture and nature have always been blurred, with a fresh look.

For many centuries, it was Christianity that constituted the paradigmatic framework of understanding of nature and the landscape. Medieval man lived in a world where every detail was significant, where God manifested itself in all things, and where all the appearances of nature testified to an elevated order of things. With the emergence of the so-called independent landscape painting, that is, landscapes that did not form the basis of a religious theme, this is changing. One of the earliest examples of Western European art is Albrecht Altdorfers Landscape with bridge from about 1518. The motif is a rustic walkway that extends over what appears to be a dried-up river bed or moat, against an old, mossy tower. It may be an allegorical depiction of the threshold between the primordial state and civilization, or the opposite – the wild, unruly forest that grows and erases the traces of human activity. It is possible that the trench around the tower was once excavated by hand in order to protect the tower from intruders. Maybe it's just a dry river. But why is it dried out? Has it been derived to cultivate arable landscape that you can imagine in a clearing in the background of the painting?
When looking at landscape paintings, we are reminded of the original meaning of the word landscape – as both "the form or nature of the land" and "shaping the land". The Anthropocene theory forces us to rethink how we understand something like a landscape today. The processing of the Earth's surface is now so far-reaching that the conceptual significance of the landscape concept has a clear undertone.
Norwegian Bodil Furu is an artist who has a clear approach to these problems. Her method is documentary, and she allows people who have affiliation and interests in specific areas, whether emotional, financial or ecological, to speak in front of the camera. In doing so, she allows conflicts that have settled in the landscape to emerge. Furus latest project, Minier Code, which was shown at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin earlier this year, examines the consequences of resource extraction from the Earth's interior by filming the crater-like landscape around the copper mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Furus's film illustrates some of the violent topographic changes that result from the raw material extraction redistribution of pulp. "We can understand copper as a talismanic force through which the landscape is about to be transformed," she writes of the film herself.

The green fingers of the time spirit. Since Per Kristian Nygård's grass-covered exhibition last year, we have seen several examples of the flora occupying Norwegian gallery rooms. In the fall, the artist group Svartjord has been able to transform Akershus Art Center into a kind of greenhouse, while the Swedish Christine Ödlund made an installation about Nessler's mutual communication with the Momentum Biennale in Moss. At Gallery LNM in Oslo, Norwegian Monica Winther exhibited a number of small plants placed on white-painted pedestals, which she had cultivated by playing classical music for them – according to a pseudoscientific theory that claims plants are influenced by music (Mozart should be especially growth-promoting!). At Gallery RAM in Oslo, you can currently see Per Christian Brown's video work, paraphrasing the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's poetic materialism in the book The earth and dreams of rest, while both the camera lens and hands cuddle with plants and roots, grazing greedily in the soil.
Several of these exhibitions revolve around the receptivity of organic life and possible communication skills. Other artists need to go even deeper into the earth's crust, seeking correspondences between human consciousness and the inorganic. An example is the movie Medium Earth from 2013 by the London-based artist group Otolith Group, which was part of the interdisciplinary Anthropocene Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. The film consists of a series of slow-sweeping footage of California desert leaves. It alternates between images of rock formations grinded down over millions of years, bursting into the concrete deck of a parking garage, and canyons blast out to construct highways, where the geological strata have been uncovered on the rock sides. While the images contrast with the changes in the landscape, the narrative voice connects various lands to body pain points. These are so-called earthquake-sensitive individuals, who claim to be able to predict volcanic eruptions and earthquakes through migraine attacks, a kind of human seismograph through which tectonic forces communicate.

New sensibilities. You may be able to write off seismic nerve disorders, communicative nettles and music-loving houseplants as responding to an ecological crisis by declining to superstition. Another objection is that they are only prints of the green fingers of the time spirit, artistic pendants of urban parcel gardens and organic vegetable collectives. However, in their empathic desire to somehow penetrate into non-human soul life, they are probably symptoms of a deeper change of consciousness.

The Flora has occupied Norwegian gallery rooms.

French science sociologist Bruno Latour has said that climate and science are facing a new alliance for developing sensibilities: While scientific aesthetics are about creating instruments that are sensitive to what is happening to Earth, artistic aesthetics are about doing US sensitive.
I think all these down-to-earth artistic touches, though never so esoteric, are more or less conscious attempts to articulate and cultivate such sensibilities. As American artist Robert Smithson has written: "Our consciousness and the Earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental streams are wiping down abstract shores, brainwaves are undermining masses of thought, ideas are breaking down into stones of uncertainty."


Helsvig is a visual artist and writer.
sjhelsvig@gmail.com.

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