As an art and environment conversation, I would like to begin to address this question from the perspective of creative practices: How can creative practices be approached in a way that allows nature to lead OR recognises that nature must lead? A sub-question to this would be: How do we do this without being prescriptive? While it is always possible, desirable, for art to elicit a shift in consciousness - Mark Dion - or an emotional turmoil - Louise Bourgeois or a reminder of a lost nerve - Berlinde de Bruyckere these affects are given in ways that are non-prescriptive. They invite us to look and feel, and then...something happens. As Gilles Deleuze has said, famously citing Paul Klee, art creates sensations, not representations. Sensations cannot be didactic but they can be more powerful than this: they can compel us to move.
How to open up this place in creative practice, where nature's voice is loud and clear, has been a question that has confounded me, not without glimmers of insight, for a long time. For me it has been a question of how one can be in control without taking control, or how to allow the forces that drive creative activity, forces that are generated through the natural world, to rise up. How to avoid cliche. In some ways, this is not so much a question of the interface of nature and culture, but re-igniting the nature that is inherent to the impulse to create.
I would love to know your thoughts on this: How can nature be "first" in creative practices?
What huge lovely questions-a little overwhelming to respond to, but here goes. When you talk about "forces to direct creative activity, forces that are generated through the natural world" I am reminded of the attempts of the early modernists at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century to make a new kind of art based on underlying natural structures. Louis Sullivan's famous dictum 'form follows function as it does in nature' later often shortened to leave off the reference to nature, was what the early modernists were following, taking natural processes as the underlying forces to direct their creative activity, along with what they saw as fundamental design principles based on natural proportions. They looked to science for validation of their more rational approach to art and for the articulation of those natural processes - I think Sullivan's mid-19th century allegiance was to evolutionary processes. And this is not then, in so many ways. There were of course no environmental scientists then, but many of the early modernists were what could be called the first environmentalists. Such as the Burley Griffins about whom there is so much information at present, in this centenary of their radical plan for Canberra.
ReplyDeleteEarly modernists looked to science, and they also frequently incorporated some of the ideas of theosophy to imbue their artworks with spirituality. Early theosophical ideas are very interesting and surprisingly 21st century in their aims to study the cross-overs between science, philosophy and the basis of (all) religions;(I think)later theosophical ideas in practice much less so.
In terms of the ideas we are discussing here, modernist art seem to have gone in the same direction, from trying to prioritise natural processes, to not. Movements, ideas, attempts also go through processes, not always in a good direction (in fairness maybe not always in a bad direction, either).
So that brings me to the value of beginnings-good beginnings. If in our creative activity we can somehow repeat the good and useful beginnings, but still bring each work to some maturity, without losing our track along the way, then... and strangely perhaps by 'losing track' I mean taking too much conscious control. The track, staying on the track, surely means being intuitive. Or if losing the capacity to be intuitive, then beginning again, until you know the track well enough to stay on it without overthinking it. Okay, this is where I've lost it...till next time
I love the unravelling - and re-ravelling - of these ideas. Let me just see if I have got it clearly: the modernists drew on nature in a sort of Platonic sense, a classical rendering of form through the underlying geometries of nature. In other words, nature was analysed as a system, as containing marvellous patterns that could provide a model for aesthetic questions. But the modernists moved away from such thinking. Question is, how did nature re-emerge in the next wave and how is it discussed in post-modern contexts. I think in the case of the latter, nature has become politicised. If it was poetic in the 18th and 19th centuries, scientific in the early 20th century, then surely now, it comes with a political arrow. This, clearly is one way in which nature can be brought into art practice. In fact, the crisis of the environment appears to be so acute, it is hard to argue for a return to the poetic. But none the less I do. and I see it at work in some powerful and unforgettable work. Now, I am thinking of Anna Mendieta. But also Eva Hesse; even though she did not use natural materials, she worked as if inhabited by forces of nature.
DeleteBut I would like just to pick up on one point you made, curator, and that is the connections made between religion and nature at the turn of the (20th) century. Here is a suggestion that an art that addresses nature must come from humans who acknowledge a spiritual dimension to being. FOr me, spiritual and philosophical are the same - one is transcendental, one is immanent, but all acknowledge that there is a certain mystery to being and that this mystery will never become clearer, as long as we try to understand ourselves, without considering the natural world. We are not separated from it.
So, perhaps I could propose that, in relation to the question - how can nature be first in artistic practice? - we must acknowledge a spiritual - which is not so removed from a phenomenological - core to our humanity. This means externally imposed systems, representations, isms are problematic in this context. Nature is inventive but slow. The worst of human culture is repetitive, and fast...But nature is also sudden and catastrophic. In some ways, it is this "catastrophe" - and, again, Deleuze talks about this in his treatise on Francis Bacon - that is most poignant in putting nature first: Acknowledging the destructive forces of nature, the down right catastrophic. That leads back to the ephemeral. THe creative and destructive forces are at play here. So, is ephemeral central to putting nature first?