Natural Anxieties

Eliasson takes chances with our assumptions about nature’s fragility. In his Green river project (begun in 1998), the artist infused the non-toxic but vibrantly hued dye uranin into waterways in Stockholm and Los Angeles, and in four other prominent rivers, turning them partially or completely green. His analysis exploits the ways in which the associations of “green” and “nature” disclose people’s responses to what appears to be flagrant pollution. By tinting the Los Angeles River in this way, however, Eliasson set up a different set of critical reactions. Not only does this man-made concrete structure resemble a superhighway more than a river but, as author Michael Speaks suggests, the usual connection of green with nature is reversed: “Though uranin appears toxic, it is actually less toxic than the river water into which it is introduced.... Artificial (non-toxic) dye commingles with natural (polluted) river water to form a new, hyperreal, ‘green river’ teeming with life.” Despite its resonances with “uranium,” then, uranin can appear as a positive, if not natural, infiltration.

Working in transformed urban spaces, Eliasson seeks to blur the boundaries between inside and outside, and to show how easily we can move from one to the other without using the categories of nature and culture to define where we are or how we are supposed to behave. Our perceptual and emotional experience serve as guides. We structure provisional communities with our peers as we go. Ultimately, he sees these journeys as experiments in a new democracy. Asked about his relationship to nature, he is disarming: “I don’t find anything out there...I find my own relation to the spaces.... We see nature with our cultivated eyes. Again, there is no true nature, there is only your and my construct.” What both Latour and Eliasson want as a basis for living in the twenty-first century is not the security of indisputable natural law but rather communal experience and discussion. The politics they seek to promote is informal, flexible, and participatory.

This is exactly what was achieved at the Tate’s Turbine Hall, in São Paulo, and with the green rivers. Eliasson’s Your sun machine of 1997, an ancestor of the Tate installation, is the progenitor for this move from art through nature to a new definition of political community. We enter an empty gallery space illuminated through windows on one side and a round hole cut in the ceiling by the artist. This modification allows a beam of light to project a mobile “sun” onto the floor. Most people will sense that the light moves, but the artist reminds us that “the spot of light didn’t move...the gallery moves,” because the earth, not the sun, is in motion. Eliasson uses “representation” in a sense that is notably different from other currently popular presentations of nature. The sun is represented in art; science is represented as he captures the movement of the earth; and representation in the parliamentary sense is invoked as we discuss our responses to this phenomenon.

T?he fascination with Eliasson’s visual experiments contrasts with the lingering attachment to the majestic if now nostalgic shrines to nature typical of 1970s land art. Even Eliasson’s larger constructions are simple compared with American light artist James Turrell’s celestial observatory, Roden Crater. Since the visionary Turrell purchased this extinct volcano and its surrounds in 1979, bulldozers have sculpted it into a telluric eye socket pointing toward the heavens. Inside, he has created an astronomically precise series of tunnels and chambers, a largely hidden mechanical eye that permits visitors to see and marvel at natural curiosities such as the light from specific planets captured in a room. Like much of earlier monumental land art—Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field, and Michael Heizer’s City, in the middle of the Nevada desert all come to mind—the crater is a remote, colossally expensive, and highly contrived device for the production of natural phenomena. Visiting the site early on, one critic wrote, “Intimacy receded and vastness arrived” at the crater. “I was altered—emptied out and shaken open. I had come out the other side, wordless.” Roden Crater speaks of the sublime, an earlier paradigm of nature that is, despite this testimonial, slipping from our repertoire.

Eliasson and Turrell offer different patterns of nature: urban versus remote; relatively small versus extremely large; communal versus individual; readable versus illusionistic; quotidian versus a site for almost religious pilgrimage. Turrell orchestrates a mute response to the sublime. Eliasson, on the other hand, facilitates a critical conversation about what the natural and cultural might be in the moment, a conversation so cacophonous that even art world officials find it disturbing. Turrell offers quasi-spiritual adulation of nature, while Eliasson promises quasi-parliamentary consultation.

If Turrell takes us back to the aesthetics of the sublime, and ultimately to a moving vision of nature as an external, possibly divine, force, and if Eliasson instead asks us to replace nature with a form of democratic experimentation, what should we make of the magnetic attraction of Toronto photographer Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes? Burtynsky’s large, brightly coloured, and sedulously achieved photographs show us nature in distress. We see the rebarbative effects of mining in his series of quarries and also in his “urban mines,” which pile before our eyes the detritus of our consumption. Most spectacular is his prescient record of the Three Gorges Dam project in China, shot in 2002 before the flooding that forced 1.2 million people to abandon eleven cities along the Yangtze River.

The scale of industrialization in China is almost unimaginable, yet Burtynsky’s meticulous vision of destruction of the past and the transition to a new reality is rendered through the minute detail of his images. Human scavengers implausibly pick through the rubble by hand, scouring what is by now the floor of the reservoir that feeds one of the largest technological projects in history. These gleaners have since disappeared, perhaps, if they are lucky, into a future at the huge factories Burtynsky has been portraying more recently, sites that suck up the gargantuan capacity of the hydro-electric dam. The cities and their histories have vanished. What about nature?

Burtynsky is notoriously cagey on the topic, especially given that he pictures the devastation of natural environ-ments in a manner that many find com-pellingly beautiful. “These images are meant as metaphors [of] the dilemma of our modern existence,” he writes. “They search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire—a chance at good living—yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success....For me,” he continues, “these images function as reflecting pools of our times.” Burtynsky’s photographs mirror our anxieties about nature, yet his statements evoke both Eliasson and Turrell. What he calls “our dependence on nature” links him to that older model of external facts, resources, and potentially, a sublime if revenging scourge. But the photos also imply a search for a more intimate and contested form of dialogue.

If we think about these images in the terms suggested by Latour and in Eliasson’s work, what we see is that people assemble around nature as central to the complex web of things they care about, their prime matters of “concern.” Burtynsky initially tried to remain neutral in the face of what he shows, to say no more than “think about it.” His landscapes are at once oracular and ambiguous. He does not preach an environmentalist’s creed. If these reflecting pools of our times lead us away from the idea that nature is something instrumental, a resource to be abused and, maybe, rescued, to a glimpse of an integrated and continuous set of material concerns, then perhaps we can begin to form clear ideas of the successor to nature that philosophers like Latour and DeLanda envision. Burtynsky seems to be moving in this direction: “I no longer see my world as delineated by countries, with borders, or language, but as 6.5 billion humans living off a precariously balanced, finite planet.”

The claim is not that art has magically revealed what science could not see nor that art shows the way to a sustainable future where science leads us to a cul de sac. There can be no conjuring, only conversation. The reconfiguring of the idea of nature encouraged by Burtynsky, Eliasson, Latour, and others is not a panacea. But given what we all know about the politics of ecology to date, new ways of thinking and looking are not just worth a try—they are urgent.