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

Skeet McAuley

My work is an ongoing study of the relationship between today’s consumer-driven cultures and the natural environment. I continuously shift strategies of making work between “real-life” documents on location and “reel-life” records of studio sets. The slippage of culture and environment cannot be effectively addressed from a monocular point of view. Neither can any meaningful conversation between artwork and audience.

In 1990, for a photographic assignment, golf architect Tom Fazio took me around his Champion Hills Golf Club while it was under construction in the mountains of North Carolina. He explained how he had moved a stream from one side of a fairway to the other as a way to make the course more "playable,” while a mountain had been “taken out” so that the new and improved view could include the mountains behind. The product of massive land re-formation became, in the name of sport, an aesthetic consumption of the great outdoors. This experience led to my ongoing interest in the golf course as a fabricated and perfected environment. The resulting artworks are larger-than-life panoramic landscapes inspired by painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church. With the aesthetic devices of color, scale, and light, these artists fabricated a landscape of mythical stature. At the same time, the paintings conveyed a rhetorical expression of a national belief in Manifest Destiny. This may not be far from how contemporary golf architects construct and view their work. Golf architects attempt to create a seamless harmony between the golf course and the surrounding environment.

More recently, I have been photographing bonsai trees from the collection at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino, California. The results are monumental, inspirational, and yet another visual insight into a culture’s needs to perfect or re-create nature. The bonsai is an illusion of a perfect nature that represents the deeper spiritual meaning of life. The object of bonsai is to simulate nature. This simulated natural beauty is intended to remind us of something other than the plant itself: a change in seasons, mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, storms, wind, rain, snow, or frost. The philosophy of bonsai emphasizes a profound significance of leaving things out, or “less is more.” Scale is commonly an important factor in any experience with the natural environment, and the bonsai miniaturizes this experience. The scale of these works gives several clues as to how perfection is achieved. Copper wires are coiled around branches to reshape their natural tendencies into illusions of the effects of age, wind, or both. Bark is stripped, bleached, and sanded to simulate many years of weathering. The results are simple and profound, seductive and tragic.