Natural-Historical, Natural-Artificial, Natural-Cultural.... (beginnings)

There's a process that is being undertaken by reading a lot of philosophy, from entering into philosophy, within the philosophical. And as the categories and concepts that philosophy refers to are being interrogated - clarified, so it seems are the fundamental elements of life and living.

I'm thinking about images again.

I'm also thinking about nature, second nature and the dialectical dissolution of the difference between first and second nature.

I'm going to be writing my thesis on Adorno and nature and his concept of 'natural-history'. Adorno uses the idea of first and second nature to account for the way that we naturalise cultural phenomenon dialectically, which also accounts for how we can move through the one concept to the other - that by moving through the artificial (as second nature) we can reach the natural (as first nature). That's not merely that there is a hidden authentic natural behind our world, but that natural and artificial are always mutually constitutive, and the natural is found as much in our actions as is the artificial - in the moving itself.

These images came to mind as I was thinking about this. When I took them (in Bodmin 2009) I was thinking about shared shapes and processes by us and by nature, which seems at this point to concur with my recent reading of Adorno. If Adorno is right, or at least if he offers a viable means to get beyond the limitations of the artificial-natural distinction, then the act of photography would enter into its claim to naturalism as well as the chosen subject matter. I find that quite exciting.

London and its Deep Topography

This is the only excerpt I could find of 'London' by Patrick Keiller (1992) on youtube. I didn't want to focus on the political element of the film, but as I said, it's the only bit I could find. The film is WONDERFUL and well well worth a watch for it's ideas, beautiful shots, interesting composition... A narrative is spoken by Paul Scofield of his journey through London with Robinson, his companion who is conducting some sort of research into the city and whereupon is able to cite historical and literary and other art related snippets in - what could be called - a 'deep topographical' manner.

It's funny that I've ended up with the most political part of the film. After watching it I realised that my co-viewer wasn't very impressed by this overtly leftwing rant. Perhaps I was trying to justify the politics within the 'art' of the film, but it felt to me that the pessimism à la 1992 Tory victory was merely a further reference to the Frankfurt school as Walter Benjamin seems to be only just about acknowledged source of much of the idea content of the film. I appreciate the presence of the political, but do suspect that 'the political' is necessarily transformed somehow by being relegated to the status of a device within the wider artness of the film. Or is it.

This is from the sequel 'Robinson In Space':

Loved this one too, and feel I should say that it is less political - is it? More focus on structures - big, industrial structures in the landscape.

And to finish, I'm listening to Ventures and Adventures in Topography which is where I get 'deep topography' from. They also are on to Patrick Keiller and Walter Benjamin (episode 1). Thanks to Some Landscapes for the pointer.

Cornish Landscape V

This will be the last installment of posts from my trip to Cornwall in December. I welcome the distance that a bit of time passing grants me when selecting images - I felt in December after taking the photos the immediate rush of quantity and possibility, now I'm more -er- discerning.

The first two images continue a formal interest of mine - using the photograph's rectangle shape to draw in different elements around a central composite of accidental things. That sounds a bit abstract, what I mean is the hope that the object(s) of the photograph are photographed in a way that their interrelatedness with the things around them and their setting are apparent - empirically and aesthetically.

I have spoken as clumsily about related thinking in writing form here, and the lower of these images is a favourite of mine that I think is the most obvious example of this aggregation thinking.

I'm not sure yet if I'm succeeding at an aggregation, conglomeration thing... These two images (above) do have a centralising orientation where the different bits are already organised around each other, but what is interesting to me is the accidental nature of this conglomeration - the bits of rubbish sit within their own damp halo or frame, an emphasis that I hope questions their status as things, raising it perhaps. Other images of mine that are dealing with these issues are more constructed (and on an aside, I see that 'construction' has nearly risen to the top of my tags tower on the right - interesting...).

The bottom two are just views from Cornwall. After tinkering with images from Egypt it is apparent how grey Cornwall is! UK winter is dark compared to the golden bright light of Egyptian winter.

Congratulations to Egypt - what an inspiration you are!

In this amazing moment that Egypt has created for all of us, I'll slip in some more photos from Egypt, winter 2008/9.

Alexandria

 

(The Mediterranean)

Abu Simbel

 

Aswan

Luxor

The Nile

Cornish Landscape IV

I've been meaning to continue this small project I set myself in December, to blog a series on my thoughts and experiences of (the) Cornish landscape after a trip I made there. I've had the following post in mind for over a month, and inevitably it has now changed as what seems interesting to me enough to post has changed with the subsequent delay.

The previous posts were made with the landscape still very much fresh in mind. I had been grappling with different ideas of what contemporary landscape is, and how different places present it as art. The Peter Lanyon retrospective at Tate St. Ives was fantastic and felt by far the most stimulating to me personally, out of all the art I saw there.

I'll just put down the notes that I took at the time as I think trying to render it a smooth essay would fail to retain the freshness of my response at the time.

Constructionist? Of landscape - of perceptions of landscape? History of construction. 
"impurities" -> localisation
reference
development
breakthrough
abstraction


How to integrate references (D. Dalwood)
Thought shapes - Ben Nicholson - psychology of perception


Danger and potential of abstraction


"to create complex weathered surfaces." Wall text 1952-1955
          experience of moving through a landscape - phenomenological.


Mine as the social world, sociality, monuments
"shame" in/on the landscape
Social markers within the paintings


A [symbol]? gesture/abstracted can share meanings.
The social - death, loss, shares meaning with wind, waves.
J. of anger too.


Linking the ancient throughout.
Boundaries between painting, collage and construction.
Red signs like map route-ing on top.
Integrating objects - hosepipe.
Modern materials - melted polystyrene.

It's funny putting it in italics - such an old device to indicate a different voice, a handwritten personal voice. Anyway it's appropriate here, and helps to mark the passing of time.

Looking at the notes, I see my interest in integrating a practice of art with sociality - the lives of people, their experiences, and where that crosses into a politics and practice towards flourishing lives. Lanyon painted with these issues in mind. His use of abstraction wasn't allowed to become divorced from the landscape - the abstraction was materialist, and within that landscape he directly invoked the lives of the people who inhabited and sculpted it - most obviously by painting the old tin mines of Cornwall. The black mark of this scar on the landscape was said by Lanyon to retain some of the shame of the horrors of the tin mining industry and the lives lost underground and undersea.

I don't know if painting can be said to affect sociality but it lends itself well to a kind of tacit exploration of that experience.

 

(Apologies for the poor quality, I lifted the image from the internet. Source: the arts desk)

In Solidarity With Egypt

These photos are from my two months in Egypt over the winter of 2008-2009. My heart goes out to this beautiful country.

An Anonymous Comment

Want to post a brief THANKS to everyone who has left a comment over the last few weeks - I am intending to respond and every comment is a thrill to receive. Not quite sure though if you are one person responding many times or many people responding once...
...ta very much.

Cornish Landscape III

When I left Newlyn Art Gallery I wondered down to the Harbour. With all my questions buzzing around, I found myself trying to square up the act of framing shots and finding interest and/or satisfaction in creating images, with this problematic of art as politics, art as social activator. Do pretty pictures affirm the status quo? Can I make images that can contribute to a green politics?

Mostly, the images need to lead themselves. I can worry over the larger paradigm that will show itself positively or negatively anyway. The framing I'm always drawn to is the composite of shapes and elements... Struggling to articulate what those composites are attempting to do...

And it is clear to me as I walk down the pier, that it is not any old landscape that makes me want to photograph it. I am drawn to the places where industry provides its clear and decisive objects, where industry and human activity have fallen into a state of disrepair, where the natural is breaking it down.

 

 

 In this way, there is a material, social aspect to the work.

 

 Smells: sea, shell fish, oil, cold. Sounds: gulls crying and wheezing, chugging of small boat motors, cars in the distance, some welding further up the quay, two men chatting as they head on to one of the boats.

Cornish Landscape II

Went to see three exhibitions over the last two days, all in the Penwith Peninsular of Cornwall: Richard Cook at The Exchange, Penzance; Unfold at Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn; and Peter Lanyon at Tate St. Ives, St.Ives. The three exhibitions are jostling about in my mind as I try to make sense of them, physically framed by my extraneous wanderings in the Cornish landscape and the clever use of windows and scenic viewing points by the galleries to reframe the outside view as inside. All three exhibitions use landscape and nature as subject matter, two of them solo painters and the other a group show.

It seems a monumental task to tie all my thoughts on the past two days into a coherent whole. Landscape is the ultimate frame, but there is a meandering problematic residing within this broad term as I grapple with it in my own experience, thinking and photography. I am going to post a small series of photographs and writing on this thematic.

I felt most troubled by the Newlyn exhibition, troubled in a way that marks an uncomfortable boundary to what I want from my own work. The full title of the show is 'Unfold - A Cape Farewell art exhibition, A cultural response to climate change'. It is a gathering of responses to an expedition that a group of artists, musicians and poets made to the icy north to reflect upon the changing status of our natural world. The impetus to the show is indeed laudable and I was quite excited to see it. I want art works that engage with the political issues of the day, especially when it's about the natural world. I want art works that help. But, despite liking several of the works on show, I was left feeling all my usual doubts about the success of such works to fulfil this extra-aesthetic role. I say extra-aesthetic because the political element to the show's purpose throws an uneasy extra criteria to our judgements: how does this work help us slow down climate change? And what happens to the aesthetic element of works when they are utilised for such a purpose?

On the train on the way down to Penzance I noticed that there were trees on the edge of some fields that had a shape like giant weeds, and I remembered how easy it is for us to justify felling trees accordingly, that the cultural associations and linguistic signs that we use are crucial to treating the planet better. It is in this that art and artists are crucial.

There is the post 'institutional critique' reading of art that gives us works that expose the social and material relations operative to works' realisation within their setting, gallery, landscape. This thinking criticises the aesthetic object for keeping up a facade of ideological illusion of art's autonomy for the bourgeois' claim on taste and political hegemony. I am impressed by this but mourn a means to make art that can retain an element of that spiritual rapture we get from great beauty.

Though how often do we encounter that? And how often is beauty genuinely beauty and not another kind of bewitching?

I sat after looking at the art works in 'the studio' to peruse the various materials that has been put there for our research (on eco art, the exhibition, the expedition etc). All text based, a computer, some books, some written comments on the wall. As I read I wondered how much this show was supposed to be a pedagogic experience, (which I find a little patronising), and how much the format lent on a design orientated aesthetic. Did I come here for information, in what feels like an ever encroachment of the administrative? Am I a purist to wish for my art to be art? (Maybe I am turning into a traditionalist). 

It is an interesting question - where is the aesthetic in a specific art sense here? Or maybe it should be, what is the aesthetic here? 

As I was leaving I noted that Frieze is doing a religious issue.

This is Daro Montag's, Leafcutter Ant Drawing, Amazon rainforest, Carbon and oil on pre-used paper, 2009. It was created with the feet of tens of ants navigating the two stripes "painting" made by Montag with a carbon-oil solution. The film accompanying the piece was very interesting. Where does the aesthetic reside in this? Perhaps in the visual as a composite of all the different material and social elements that go together to make an art object and to give that art object, externally, internally, meaning - firmly, integrally, immanently to its, the, landscape.

Beachy Birds

Just went for a walk along the seafront in Penzance, Cornwall. Saw many Pied Wagtails for the first time,

as well as the Rock Pipit  

and the Turnstone.

All very exciting for me as these birds don't visit London.

Bitter Cold, Grey Park...

...look at the little feet!

Bird Watching, Wondering

Still on the natural trip. Just watched the first three episodes of the series Birds Britannia - a really excellent historical and cultural overview of the UKs relationship with birds.

It lead me to research Jeremy Mynott and his book Birdscapes. I haven't read it, but am intrigued to after listening to this podcast (on Podularity - wasn't sure who in particular to credit). The crossovers between birds (as cultural symbol) and philosophy seems potentially very interesting. At this point I am wondering how it would be possible to interrogate philosophy, or use philosophical tools towards a meaningful or productive end, to interrogate meaningfully and productively our understanding of the natural world.

Dusk

Extracts

I have a habit of underlining bits of text as I read that feel particularly resonant to me in some way. Usually the resonance comes from an argument suddenly opening into another element or avenue (plane) that therefore connects up areas I hadn't before seen the linkage between. I thought I would extract these bits of text and see what they collate into as a collection of such openings.

"...the autonomy of the art object is something which is produced out of the social relations which constitute the institution of art itself." 1

"By defending a form of autonomy which is constituted through the negation of tradition, the irreconcilability of art is coextensive with the irreconcilability of the subject's consciousness of being-in-the-world." 2

"While it is a critical convention ... that people were exhorted to turn from the fascination of the world in order to attain eternal life, the situation is not as simple as this easy distinction between the sacred and the profane. It is the very point of the garden of love to show how the separation of the world, life, and love, into sacred and profane ... is a misprision; that the rift between sensation and understanding (between Eve and Adam) is an illusion..." 3

"The continual production of difference - that is, of uniqueness and particularity - is implicit in the singularity of things." 4

"...connection not renunciation..." 5

"...a continual benediction of emergence conceived as erotica and amoenita..." 6

"...a transformation 'of nature into culture to such an extent that the origin of love ... remains ambiguous' (Cherchi xiv)." 7

"For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole." 8

"...art sanctions the primacy of reality." 9

"Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants." 10

"That artworks as windowless monads "represent" what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it." 11

"...and while this is the nominalist dilemma of all art after the readymade, we can only comprehend the distinctions we make through the frames of mind we do or do not have in common." 12

"The contemporary question of style must be pondered alongside this current "production" of subjectivity, whether emphasis is on regularized forms of self-fashioning or on the singular and less controllable aspects of becoming." 13

"...style may be seen as a key component of media apparatuses that are not just presentational frames but also social machines that integrate human minds and bodies as part of their functioning." 14

"Style is the man when the man himself is a stylus - as in geomancy, when one's body becomes a seismic needle for registering, in ink or sand or some other substance, the signals of the cosmos." 15

1,2 John Roberts, 'After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique', Historical Materialism 7 (Winter 2000)
3-7 Rod Barnett, 'Serpent of Pleasure: Emergence and Difference in the Medieval Garden of Love', Landscape Journal 28:2-09
8-11 Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans Hullot-Kentor, 1970
12 Michelle Kuo, 'Forms and Functions (Editor's Letter)', Art Forum, September 2010
13, 14 Ina Blom, 'Questions of Style', Art Forum, September 2010
15 Alexander Nagel, 'Questions of Style', Art Forum, September 2010

Green Ideology

Been on a bit of an environmentalist one recently. Just watched this, a film shown on UK Channel 4 about unorthodox views from within the environmentalist movement. It was difficult to watch - one 'green taboo' after another was demolished, advocates arguing for the use of nuclear power and GM food.

Made me think of Žižek's bit in An Examined Life:



The connection between the two is that they both identify ideology as the cause of an obscuration that prevents real insight into the problems that the planet faces and finding prompt ways to act. In the first film it is a residual hippy activist movement that is blind to the science that can treat the problems now. In Žižek, it is conservatism and secular religion lurking beneath our beloved Gaia. They both call for more technology: "We should become more alienated!"