Archive Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture

Curator's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Kim Abeles Sandow Birk | Laurie Brown | Elizabeth Bryant The Center for Land Use Interpretation | Wanda Hammerbeck Andreas Hessing | Sant Khalsa | Skeet McAuley Kathryn Miller | Diana Thater | Post-Landscape Home Page Archive - Fall 2001 Home

“…We forget that battlefields are one kind of landscape and that most landscapes are also territories…on the small scale they involve real estate and sense of place, on the large scale they involve nationalisms, war, and the grounds for ethnic identity…(the landscape is) not just where we picnic but also where we live and die. It is where our food, water, fuel, and minerals come from, where our nuclear waste and shit and garbage go to, it is the territory of dreams, somebody’s homeland and somebody’s gold mine.” Rebecca Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art

I.

“Post-Landscape” explored the ways in which contemporary artists in Southern California use landscape to mediate the relationships between nature and culture. The exhibition focused on two interrelated constructs: “landscape” and “nature/culture.” Its artists—Kim Abeles, Sandow Birk, Laurie Brown, Elizabeth Bryant, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wanda Hammerbeck, Andreas Hessing, Sant Khalsa, Skeet McAuley, Kathryn Miller, and Diana Thater—employed installation, painting, photography, and video to examine issues of land use, urbanization, technology, and globalization. By rethinking their personal relationships with nature, the artists also explore the impact of humankind and society on nature and the land. Most of these artists focus on the local environment of the Southern California region—including the urban, exurban, desert, and mountain geographies—as the basis for their investigations.

II.

While I was mulling over the idea of this exhibition—thinking about the meanings of “landscape,” “nature,” and “culture” and how these concepts intersect and interrelate—I took my dogs on a run in the Arroyo Seco. This trail in Altadena that I have used for years is heavily traveled and easily accessible, but at the same time, beautiful and remote. Feeling at one with the “natural” world around me, I was heading home to work on this essay when my dogs ran off the trail. Seconds later they reappeared on the tail of two squealing fawns. At the end of a frenzied chase, one of the fawns was dead.

Here I was, in the “wild landscape” of the lower San Gabriel Mountains, three miles from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with my “domesticated” dogs. The blunt reality of the nature/culture issue had suddenly become concrete, personal, and urgent. What is nature? What is culture? Are these two concepts irreconcilable? What is our role in the local landscape? How do we negotiate and come to terms with these issues?

III.

The exhibition, “Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture,” sought to explore these ideas and concerns. It looked at the meanings of landscape, nature, and culture, and their interrelationships. These are familiar terms, and we think we understand what they mean. But the concepts they represent are incredibly complex and ideologically inscribed.

Scholars, critics, and art historians have debated these issues for years. Landscape aesthetics generally are considered in terms of genres (beautiful, heroic, pastoral, picturesque, sublime), media (painting, photography), as actual physical places for visual contemplation, or, more recently, as representations of cultural and economic practices. In his important study, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson devoted an entire chapter to defining the word “landscape.” He starts with a three-hundred-year-old definition written for artists—“a portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance”—and goes on to offer a new working definition: “a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence.” While remaining partial to the “old-fashioned” definition, Jackson concludes that both have value because they include the “visual experience of our everyday world.”

Throughout the history of art, landscape has evoked experiences ranging from the overwhelming and awe-inspiring to the still and contemplative. The origins of landscape genres can be traced to the 18th century and the Enlightenment notion that nature is controllable, and to the 19th-century Romantics’ belief in its transcendental power. These visions of landscape were more than genres of painting and photography; historically determined, they were a means of cultural expression. Scholar W. J. T. Mitchell succinctly addresses this issue in his essay “Imperial Landscape.” He suggests that elements of landscape and “the historical narratives they generate, are tailor-made for the discourse of imperialism, which conceives itself precisely (and simultaneously) as an expansion of landscape understood as an inevitable, progressive development in history, an expansion of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ into a ‘natural’ space in a progress that is itself narrated as ‘natural.’” So, for example, the 19th-century paintings of the western United States by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran not only brought to Easterners images of a beautiful, wild, untamed nature, but also harnessed, and in essence, subjugated, that nature in the service of the politics of Manifest Destiny.

Scholars likewise continue to examine the nature/culture dichotomy. Philosopher Kate Soper sums up the complexity of this task by looking at two very different, but equally influential, critiques of modernism that bear on the nature/culture issue. In her article Nature/“nature,” Soper contrasts the “ecological” and the “postmodernist” cultural theory approach. The ecological position argues that humans have abused nature and failed to acknowledge our interdependency, while the postmodern argument cites the “cultural policing functions of the appeal to ‘natural’ and its oppressive use to legitimate social and sexual hierarchies and norms of human conduct.” Instead of creating exclusive categories for nature and culture, Soper suggests a broader approach—one that recognizes that what “ecologists loosely refer to as ‘natural’ is indeed a product of culture, both in a physical sense and in the sense that perceptions of its beauties and value are culturally shaped.” She believes that in order to close the gap with nature, we need to be “resensitized to our combined separation from it and dependence upon it.”

Historically, nature has been viewed by patriarchal society as uncontrollable and threatening, as something that exists in opposition to the superiority of the intellect as expressed through culture. The concept of nature has been correlated with the emotional, body-centered attributes commonly associated with the feminine, while the intellect and culture have been linked with male subjectivity and with the rationality and control prized by Western European society. Today the relationships are even more complex. Environmental historian Carolyn Merchant points out that…“as global capitalism spread the market economy throughout the Americas and the colonial empires in the early modern period, and now throughout the rest of the Third World, it has brought nature into a very compromising kind of position. Nature gets transformed from independent subject into object and is used to advance the interests of entrepreneurs and elites at the expense of fulfilling the basic needs for everyone, especially the poor.” Negotiating environmental and land-use concerns in the United States is entirely different from imposing conservation or environmental legislation in Third World countries. The multiple social and political ramifications of the nature/culture issue refuse the simplistic solutions suggested by those who proselytize to “preserve” the land, limit development, designate scenic landscapes, end despoliation, slow global warming, and protect endangered species. While personally embracing these efforts, I know the issue becomes problematic when considering access to and the imbalance of resources available in the United States vs. Third World countries.

IV:

In an attempt to look at these issues in a new way, co-curator Colette Dartnall and I used landscape as a framework to investigate further the relationships between nature and culture. The “post” in “Post-Landscape” referred to more than the dualistic relationship between previous landscape art and the current work in this exhibition; “Post-Landscape” also suggested work that rethinks traditional landscape conventions and posits a new kind of relationship with the land. The artists in “Post-Landscape” questioned the role of art and culture in overtly deterministic views of nature and asked how meaning is conveyed through landscape and images of nature.

Beyond rethinking traditional landscape concepts and imagery, the artists in this exhibition also used the landscape to examine critically a range of ideas, including the social and political implications of land use and the control and commodification of nature. While we have sought out artists who live and work in the Southern California region and whose art demonstrates a commitment to exploring issues of landscape, nature, and the environment, we also became particularly interested in artists and projects that were deeply and personally engaged. All of the artists that were presented here explored the landscape in some fashion, all express concern about the land and environment, and many also participate actively in raising awareness about the region’s pressing ecological issues. “Post-Landscape” was a selective collection of images and ideas—not, by any means, the only ones, but those that resonated most powerfully with us.

While much of these artists’ work fits into more than one category, we have grouped them into subsections for the sake of clarity.

Kim Abeles and Sandow Birk challenge the vernacular and medium of the traditional landscape by appropriating and referencing art historical styles and genres.

For over twenty years, Kim Abeles has lived and worked in the Los Angeles area, making art that addresses environmental, social, and political issues. Abeles has described her earlier mixed-media assemblages as “worlds constructed from lost parts: researched, unearthed, and fabricated.” She is represented here by two bodies of work: the Smog Collector paintings and Public Sitings (All Spaces in Los Angeles County). For the Smog Collector images, she made stencils based on 19th-century American landscape paintings that she then placed in the urban environment for thirty days. The medium of the resulting image, which resembles a traditional painted landscape, is smog. Albert Ryder, Ralph Blakelock, and Asher B. Durand, the 19th-century painters Abeles chose as the source of the imagery, refer to pristine landscapes that invoke the romantic American myth of unsullied nature. For Abeles, the images contradict the medium; they “materialize the reality of the air we breathe” and depict the reality of our contemporary landscape. Public Sitings consists of details from Abeles large-scale 1998 map of L. A. County in which she has labeled the public spaces. Modifying the Thomas Guide and other maps of the area, she has hand-colored each “public” area, and attached a colored wire and poker chip, whose color varies according to the nature of the site (hospital, cemetery, school, etc.). In her trademark idiosyncratic exploration of Los Angeles, Abeles tallies and dismantles the mysteries of land use in the county.

Sandow Birk’s work juxtaposes appropriated styles and conventions of art historical genres with a trenchant and ironic look at current social and political issues in California. The paintings on view here stem from the Prisonation: California in the 21st Century series, in which Birk set out to paint all of the prisons in California. Examining how the romantic styles of 19th- and early 20th-century landscape painters fueled the myth of California as a paradise on Earth, Birk uses the vernacular of these works to question the fulfillment of that imagined past. To explore the contradiction between the myth of the California dream and the reality of the state’s having a higher percentage of its population in prison than any other place in the world, the artist appropriates the lush and dramatic landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. He challenges the historically constructed meanings associated with these landscapes by updating them with prisons and other signs of contemporary life. The contrast between the conventional, almost pastoral, beauty of the paintings and the social reality of prisons creates a pointed commentary on contemporary public policies in California.

Laurie Brown, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Wanda Hammerbeck, Andreas Hessing, and Kathyrn Miller look at the broader social implications of land use, questioning how the world’s lands are “apportioned, utilized, and perceived,” as a CLUI pamphlet states. Laurie Brown, CLUI, and Wanda Hammerbeck use a documentary approach, photographing obscure or overlooked landscapes. Andreas Hessing and Kathyrn Miller deal with the environment in a hands-on fashion, working directly with the earth or with plants.

Photographer Laurie Brown documents the transforming landscape of Southern California. Caught between the man-made and the unmade, her bleak images of land bulldozed and leveled for new tract homes testify eloquently to the irreparable changes taking place in the environment of the American West. Curator Robert Sobieszek writes that by “recording those transitions between the unbuilt and the built, Brown has captured a series of alien and foreboding terrains that are stunningly beautiful in their stark austerity and esoteric geometries—arid lands relentlessly scoured, scraped, modeled, and engineered in preparation for domestication…even more unnerving are her photographs of the eventual consequences of those geometries—the planned, repetitive, sterile, and seemingly endless tracts of suburban homes stretching to the horizon’s haze, the expanse of the American dream taken to its end.” As the record of an observant bystander, her work considers how the landscape has been transformed to meet the needs of our consumer society. Depicting the tensions and dualities that comprise our society’s complex relationship to nature, Brown’s photographs capture that contradiction between the desire to keep landscapes pristine and the need to develop and build upon them.

Founded in 1994, The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a nonprofit, artist-run collective that uses both documentary and ironic, slightly tongue-in-cheek approaches to investigating the social landscape of the United States. CLUI describes itself as “a research organization involved in exploring, examining, and understanding land and landscape issues….and the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth's surface.” Staffed by artists, architects, geologists, scholars, and others, CLUI maintains an archive and database, organizes exhibitions and tours, hosts lectures, and publishes books and a newsletter. Employing conventional research and information-processing methodology as well as nontraditional interpretive tools, CLUI has created an installation for this exhibition based on one of its newest projects—the Desert Research Station in Hinkley, California. Blurring reality and fiction, their interpretive “informational” display matter-of-factly presents obscure information about the desert region in Southern California. The remarkable combination of land-use sites at Hinkley—military test grounds and training camps, the largest open-pit mine in California, cultural sites, prisons, bombing ranges, solar fields—made this project a natural fit for CLUI.

Wanda Hammerbeck likewise employs a topographical approach in her work. Her photographic explorations into the western United States’—particularly Southern California’s—relationship with water as a resource have continued for over twenty years. Since 1975, she has worked with land and water issues to explore notions of site and boundaries, of living on the land, and our role on the Earth. Questioning the prevailing social mythologies that place nature as an object to be viewed, manipulated, commodified, and sold, Hammerbeck sites her work at the juncture of the beauty of nature and the impact of culture. Negotiating environmental and land-use concerns in the United States has always been problematic. It is even more so now, with California’s energy crisis renewing debate about nuclear power, building more power plants, and lowering emissions. Hammerbeck touches on these issues in photographs that ask: What is more important, resources and power, or the environment? Investigating the ways a specific place constructs meaning, she includes text in her work to challenge the conventions of landscape photography and to make the viewer deal with the meaning as well as the look of the land.

Interested in the richness of regional flora and the indigenous Southern California landscape, Andreas Hessing creates site-specific installations that encourage dialogue about the human role in regional ecosystems. He accomplishes this through the reintroduction of native flora upon the existing topography, architecture, debris, and climate of a particular site. As in the Earth art of the 1970s, Hessing challenges notions of traditional landscape art by using and modifying the actual land. But unlike those of the Earth art movement, Hessing’s interests lie in working with actual plants indigenous to the area, attempting to return the land to its original state. For this exhibition, Hessing created in a courtyard outside the Museum’s wall a site-specific installation, or “lesson,” as he calls it, that focused on the endangered habitat of the coastal sage scrub community by using actual plants and other materials found locally.

Like Hessing, Kathryn Miller makes art that moves beyond the confines of the museum and integrates an artistic practice into daily life. Trained as a biologist as well as an artist, Miller would also like to see native plants flourishing again in Southern California. Interested in environmental processes and natural systems, she believes that “we must work with the land rather than just on it.” To address this, her art practice incorporates photography, fieldwork, botany, and whatever else she deems appropriate at the time. For this exhibition, Miller re-created Portable Seed Bombs—compacted egg-shaped balls made of rich soil and seeds native to the Claremont area. The “seed bombs” are designed for landscape re-vegetation purposes and are meant to be thrown into areas that are degraded, physically abused, or in need of vegetation. If the seed bombs “land in the right place, and get enough winter rain, they will produce a beautiful clump of native plants and flowers.” A small scale, unsanctioned intervention in the landscape, the seed bombs link the sanctioned museum space with nature.

Elizabeth Bryant and Diana Thater look at the construction of meaning in nature and the landscape with a more philosophical approach to the control of nature.

Elizabeth Bryant takes kitsch, popular culture images of ideal nature found in calendars, posters, or wallpaper, and cuts silhouettes of Western European or Japanese garden patterns into them. While her work directly addresses the way culture controls and orders nature, other issues resonate here as well. Bryant’s art refers to differing notions of the cultural construction of nature as found in the highly regimented Western European garden plans contrasted with the more organic and asymmetrical Japanese gardens. The often outlandishly idealized images of spectacular natural vistas—snow-covered peaks and verdant green meadows with blooming flowers—show how our culture sees nature as decoration, as a commodity for consumption, and as something to be tamed for our viewing pleasure. Bryant questions the historical traditions that site the modern world in a mechanistic and controlling relationship to nature and the natural world. Art, culture, and nature all became subsumed under a scientific, empirical point of view. By representing the paradigm of domination of the Earth through the controlling oversight of the European or Japanese gardener, Bryant inverts this colonial relationship to the land and opens the discourse of ownership—presenting or preserving scenery does not make it ours.

Video artist Diana Thater’s lush, painterly projections use natural elements and landscapes to “undermine the singularity of time, space, and being.” Hoping to offer an “artistic space where consciousness may be reconstructed,” she confounds the traditional subject/object relationship by moving beyond a single viewpoint to present a multiplicity of perspectives. Thater uses aspects of cultivated and domesticated nature—trained zebras, tame wolves, circus horses—to explore the opposition between the wild and the domesticated, between nature and culture. In The best outside is the inside, Thater considers popular myths about the landscape by inverting how we see a natural site. On two stacked monitors, she presents conflicting imagery filmed at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia. One monitor showed a deliberately stagey forest glade filmed during the day with “night for day” screens, and the other a scene filmed during the night with “day for night” screens. This disjunction is compounded by the artist’s inclusion of the actual footage. Fusing nature, culture, and technology, the resulting work uses landscape to question nostalgia and illusion as strategies for taming or controlling the environment.

Sant Khalsa and Skeet McAuley address ideas of the commodification of nature.

Sant Khalsa has been producing and exhibiting artworks for more than two decades, focusing on the sensitive relationship between the natural world, the constructed human environment, and consumerism. In this exhibition, Khalsa presents two sculptural and conceptual installations. Constructed from salvaged wood of varying sizes, Trees and Seedlings addresses both the fragility and the resilience of nature. Installed against the wall like planks of wood stored and displayed for purchase in a lumberyard, Trees and Seedlings represents the cycle of life and the promise of new growth. Each plank contains a small image held between glass of a burned forest that hints at the memory of a forest of trees. Watershed more specifically addresses the commodification of nature, water as a consumer product, and the tendency to see in nature the qualities we desire. The installation consists of a “warehouse” of corrugated boxes holding bottled water, a “point-of-purchase” display of bottles for sale, and product information. Each box and bottle is labeled with product names—creativity, inspiration, change, balance, integrity, harmony, and grace—that have long been linked with our culture’s image of an idealized nature.

Photographer Skeet McAuley makes work that also questions our culture’s images of an illusory “perfect” nature. McAuley is represented here by work from two photographic series—the Golf Course and the Bonsai—that explore the commodification and control of nature. Critic Dave Hickey notes that McAuley’s “glamorous landscape photographs of glamorously landscaped golf courses very closely approximate the flashiest contemporary manifestations of the tradition of rendering Mother Nature as seductive…in content and format, these images portray the earth as a ‘grand horizontal’ laid out in lascivious purity, inviting violation.” McAuley’s large-scale, panoramic photographs of the golf courses of Southern California invert traditional landscape photography by documenting the ways the land has been manipulated to meet conceptions of a perfect nature laid out for the consumption of golfers. His Bonsai work also inverts paradigms of nature. While bonsai are meant to simulate nature, they are subjected to extreme control and manipulation to conform to idealized notions of nature. By blowing up images of bonsai he photographed at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino, he confounds the normal experience we have with bonsai—making gigantic something precious and miniature.

V:

Colette and I have selected these artists because of the range and diversity of their work, and the models for thought and action they offer. By including artists who explore their personal responses to the local environment with others who work on a more conceptual level, we wanted to show the enormous range of approaches that are the basis of this exhibition. These artists provide a framework within which to revisit, reexamine, and reconstruct traditional understandings of nature and the landscape and our relationships to them.

VI:

In the Arroyo Seco, when my dogs took off after the fawns, I feared they would attack and kill them. According to the U. S. Forest Service ranger I contacted later, young deer instinctively take refuge in a low area when they can’t run away. The fawns had curled up under water. I got to one in time, but the other drowned in the shallow Arroyo, my dog next to it. Considering myself an “environmentalist,” I was profoundly upset by what had happened, but it forced me to reexamine my role in nature. We do not, and cannot, exist in isolation; our relationship, as “culture” with “nature,” is in a state of constant flux. Likewise, the artists in “Post-Landscape” showed us that the relationships between nature and culture, the local and the global, are constantly shifting. By looking at the many “landscapes” of this region, they reiterated Rebecca Solnit’s urge to view the landscape from multiple subjectivities—as “the territory of dreams, somebody’s homeland and somebody’s gold mine”—and Kate Soper’s push to reexamine and close the gap between nature and culture.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator