Frontier Ghosts

A REVIEW OF THE REVENANT

“We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.” ― Ernest Shackleton

There is a surprising amount of water in Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant. The film begins with water and ends with water. Water is the central metaphor for what it is to be human. Humanity and nature can be both fluid and an unstoppable force, soft and hard. The power of The Revenant lies not in its unrelenting fury, but in its subtle grasp of an uncaring universe.

No one and no thing is spared from an unwashed treatment in this film. Nature is as unforgiving as humanity. Native Americans are as brutal as the Europeans and Americans. There is betrayal and compassion in nearly equal measure. The Revenant lays bare, in sweeping cinematic meditations and succinct episodes of violence the experience of the earliest settlement of the American west. It may be hard for us to grasp the unknown rawness that was the Dakota territory in 1823, or for that matter America. In 1820 Maine, yes Maine, became the 23rd state in the Union. After the Missouri Compromise of that same year, declaring state’s rights over Federal dictate, fur trappers and settlers poured into the Missouri river region.

Although filmed in Canada, Montana and South America, The Revenant is based on a story of the fur trapper Hugh Glass whose party, the Henry & Ashley Company (Rocky Mountain Fur Trade Company in the film) was attacked by Arikara (Ree) indians while trapping in the upper Missouri river in South Dakota. Soon after Glass splits off with the remaining party of trappers to travel overland in order to deliver their haul and escape the rath of the Arikara indians. Shortly into the journey, Glass stumbles upon a Grizzly mother who ferociously defends her cubs with Glass ending up the recipient of near-death wounds. The remainder of the film is the harrowing tale of Glass’ determination in the face of punishing odds to find his way back to Fort Henry and the rest of the fur traders. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OfPMJQ3Bpo]

Iñárritu’s film differs substantially from what is known of the real Hugh Glass but that is unimportant to the film or the viewer. What lies at the heart of the original story and The Revenant film is a European ideology that persisted a never ending conquering of all things they deemed savage in the pursuit of wealth and territory. This is the soft underbelly of North American history. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 opened up a great swath of the American plains to settlement and began a relentless exploration that ended with the subjugation and genocide of millions of indians. Iñárritu’s story embellishment of Glass’ lust for revenge (in real life Glass forgave Fitzgerald and Bridger), provides an underpinning of darkness that matches the true story of European destruction of native tribes. Despite Glass’ heroic survival against indians, nature, a bear, the French, and even his own trappers; the lesson Iñárritu wants us to understand is this fundamental lack of European compassion. Glass is the revenant or ghost of European continental oppression. There is nothing redemptive in the history of North America and you will a similar lacking in The Revenant. In the end Iñárritu’s Glass is left trapped between dreams and reality, built on the random consequences of an unpredictable life. 

As cinema, there is little to find fault with in The Revenant. It is everything and more, that The Hateful Eight is not. Iñárritu paints violence with a delicate brush in sharp contrast to Tarrantino’s dull hatchet. Where Tarrantino embraces without question the mindless consumerist cartoon characters of our popular culture, Iñárritu  reaches back into our dark past to show us the true vision of what led us to this point in time, leaving us along in a wilderness of the mind to contemplate our shared history. Leonardo DiCaprio, is uniquely suited for the role of  Hugh Glass. DiCaprio brings a vulnerability in terms of scale that allows a wider audience to identify with him. Indeed all of the acting is at its professional best including an understated standout performance by First Nations actor Duane Howard as the Arikara leader Elk Dog.

The film pays homage to the work of Terrence Malick sans the heavy-handed spirituality, and borrows from Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson, and Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography focuses on earth, water, and sky creating unspoken relationships between humanity and the ultimate arbiter, nature. There are extraordinary moments when crystalline snow clouds rush across tree tops as they crackle with the icy cold, or the hot breath of human or animal cloud the camera lens. The film exquisitely captures the fierce, desolate majesty of the early 19th century Louisiana Territory while avoiding an emphasis on grandeur over reality, or style over substance. Despite some sweeping vistas and breathtaking scenery, one always feels firmly planted in place, in a specific location that is witness to the smallness of humanity.

I worry American audiences inured to fake violence and accustomed to ten second cuts will find the film burdensome and as Anthony Lane of the New Yorker inaccurately stated that “the beauty has a willful air”. Despite its more than two and a half hour length, I never found it overwrought or willful. Although there is a Shackleton-like endurance to the film, it underpins the Revenant’s message of our human desire for incessant domination of nature even at our own expense. Like all great art, The Revenant is more interested in ambiguity than answers. I can’t wait to see it again, and again.

Long Time…

A RETURN TO FORM WITH A REVIEW ON THE HATEFUL EIGHT

It’s a new year and we, meaning the royal we, shall begin with a renewed fury. In 2015 I took time away from this blog to focus on other projects, but now it is time to renew my commitment to this site and the writing. I hope I can continue to provide a unique perspective on American culture, focused on the intersection of our ever diminishing society and the art that it produces.

[Spoiler Alert]

Last Monday (12/28) I went to see the latest film by the supercilious director Quentin Tarantino, The Hateful Eight. My expectations were high having thoroughly enjoyed Django Unchained (2012), Tarantino’s revisionist commentary on slavery in the American south. Although far from a masterpiece (a term that is all too often thrown about along with genius, these days) I felt Django balanced well between pulp operatics, witty repartee, and cartoon violence that has become the signature of Tarantino’s work. When a Tarantino script works, it gives rise to banal conversations that act as trojan horses toward greater tension and hints at the history of film. The violence becomes a counterpoint to the everyday, suggesting rightfully that underneath American life flows a red tinted river of brutality. What made Django Unchained function at a high level, was the clever interplay of elements that Tarantino has refined over the course of seven films.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_UI1GzaWv0&w=560&h=315]

The Hateful Eight breaks the Tarantino arc, destroying all subtlety with rapid, rapacious indignation. Where Kill Bill, Django Unchained, Jackie Brown, and of course Pulp Fiction succeed, The Hateful Eight fails with near spectacular free fall. Most, if not all of the familiar Tarantino dialogue is rendered as louche, simplistic phrases where the characters speak to apparently hear their own voices more than provide artistic expression. Staged character devises used so effectively in the past; the dignified but vengeful black man, the surprisingly resilient and lion-hearted woman, the mysterious foreigner, all become redundant, overused tropes in this film. The characters aside from a few brief exceptions, are cutouts in a store window display, their intent to conjure a memory of character’s past, archetypes of the Tarantino oeuvré, but lacking any real substance. This is so true that it borders on racist stereotypes throughout the film. Tim Roth’s Oswaldo Mobray is the stereotypical effete Londoner with a disdain for all things American. Michael Madsen’s John Gage follows suit as the loner 'cowboy' from the American west, hinting at, but falling far short of his predecessors Clint Eastwood, Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, or even Henry Fonda in My Name is Nobody. It goes on, Walton Goggins, the racist southern rebel; Kurt Russell, the principled bounty hunter; Demián Bichir Nájera, the snarky Mexican; and lest we forget Tarantino’s favorite black actor, Samuel L. Jackson appearing here as Major Marquis Warren, a cartoonish foil for racial indignity surviving slavery and the Civil War to seek fortune as a bounty hunter in the West. There are tidbits that come entirely from the deftness of the mostly gifted cast, that hold back complete catastrophe, most notably Jennifer Jason-Leigh and the legendary Bruce Dern. What makes The Hateful Eight so painful to watch is the lack of substantive dialogue provided to such an outstanding group of actors, leaving perhaps Madsen, Tatum, and Goggins aside. If you’ve had the good fortune to watch Soderbergh’s Che, than you saw a great performance by Demián Bichir as Fidel Castro. In The Hateful Eight, Tarantino gives him nothing but mumbling insouciance.

Where the character archetypes of Tarantino’s past breakdown, so too does the the soundtrack and cinematography. Tarantino’s deep knowledge of the history of cinema, makes the choice of Ennio Morricone the composer for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West an obvious choice. Although on several levels I would say the score for The Hateful Eight is far from Morricone’s best, it is more noticeable in how it is applied in a rip shod way. Bursts of music push through at times in the movie as though they’re ensuring audience alertness more than cinematic verity. The opening Overture in the tradition of movie Roadshows, acted more as a placeholder than a tension builder. It felt repetitive rather than a crescendo, which mirrors the general tone of the film. The uneven use of music throughout the film matched the unusual choice of the resurrected Ultra Panavision 70mm film format. The widest aspect ratio film ever created (2.76:1) Ultra Panavision 70 was only seen a smattering of times between 1957 and 1966. The aspect ratio projected on a huge curved screen begs for sweeping, majestic cinematography that loves sweeping vistas, and awe inspiring landscapes. The last film to be shown in Ultra Panavision 70, Khartoum leverages it beautifully as an introduction to the ancient, exotic aesthetics of Egypt and Sudan. Although The Hateful Eight was shot in the backcountry of Telluride, Colorado little of it is capitalized on during the movie. Early scenes of birds taking flight, panoramic mountain landscapes and the distant shots of a six-horse stage coach pushing through deep snow are the only real glimpses you get of Ultra Panavision 70’s unique quality. Much of the balance of the film is shot indoors (in one room) in a barn, or in white-out conditions. Hardly a qualifier for the majesty of a long lost camera technique. It all inevitably feels like so much hubris instead of art. Tarantino can’t even help himself by providing two segments of awful expository voice over that adds nothing to the film other than enriching his own ego.

Then there is the violence. Layer upon layer of mind-numbing graphic violence. Throughout much of the film I felt witness to the gladiatorial spectacle of a Roman coliseum where human sadism was laid bare for public entertainment. Early on the film disposes with any gentleness when Kurt Russell delivers a crushing elbow to the face of Jennifer Jason-Leigh, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The violence continues to surge forth in wave upon wave of ever greater graphic display—heads blown to jelly, expurgations of sprayed blood, and continuous beatings of the only female character (the others are ghosts brought back in flashback who suffer no better a fate). This theatrical barbarous blood bath leaves you with only two choices; revulsion or mindless celebration. Unfortunately I heard too much celebration in the theater during the showing which begs a deeper commentary on American sadism. At one point there is so much bodily fluid and brain matter scattered about Eli Roth would blush. All of this blood, gore, and guts only serves as a fantastical mask that obscures the fact that this is a terribly written film. My sense is that the snowy setting was only employed to embellish the contrast of blood red against stark white, a weak, didactic ploy at its best.

The Hateful Eight is Hollywood at its worst. It is a film that wallows in the current American desire for more violence built on a culture of fear. I’m sure some critics and academics will argue that The Hateful Eight is a cinematic exposition on our times. I am not one of those. The whiteness of the film’s blizzard is an apt metaphor for the blankness of content. The Hateful Eight comes across as cheap torture porn and lazy filmmaking where a director is out of ideas and only has his own canon to drawn down on again and again, ad infinitum.   

Free Bird

A review of the movie Birdman (2014) - spoiler alert. 

“If I leave here tomorrow   Would you still remember me?”

               ― Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd

In a world encased in irony and cliché the hardest art to produce is that which wades right into that milieu and inverts it, onto itself. The movie Birdman against all odds, does just that. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s wonderful new movie behaves like a stone skipping across the pond of popular culture. With every scrape against the surface, it reveals a deeper, often sadder truth about our culture while simultaneously tearing at the fiber of the system that perpetuates it.

Iñárritu in Birdman has created a macroscopic view of our cultural landscape using the microscopic lens of an 800 seat theater on Broadway in New York and a play by the late poet, playwright and short story writer Raymond Carver. Carver’s play What We Talk About When We Talk About Love serves as the foundation for the move. The production is being staged by Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) an ex-movie superhero named Birdman, whose fame faded with the last of a blockbuster tripartite in the early 90’s. Funding, acting, and directing in Carver’s play is a somewhat last ditch effort by Riggan to regain attention through art rather than pop culture. Riggan’s shame about how he obtained his fame stands directly in contrast to his penetrating desire to be loved as something richer. Against this backdrop Riggan must contend with a cadre of actors replete with a mountain of their own emotional baggage, his daughter’s cold disdain, and his lawyers’ forceable pragmatism. It is a world anyone could empathize with wanting to fly away from and soar above the streets of New York.

What makes Birdman great is its tempo. The soundtrack is simply a drum kit pulsing out Riggan’s life in syncopation. The jazz drummer Antonio Sanchez created a soundtrack that paired with Iñárritu’s direction, creates an unnerving pulse that rises and falls, pounds and runs silent throughout the film, leaving you with an erratic heartbeat for the film. Iñárritu even puts an actual drummer (Nate Smith) playing the soundtrack visible in the film from time to time to reinforce Riggan’s growing delusion. It is a fantastic device not just for its pacing of the movie but because it suggests the beating heart of our own lives and gently nods at the protagonist of Carver’s play, Mel McGinnis who is a heart surgeon.

Beyond the use of an aged drum kit for a background, Iñárritu works against fiction and pop culture clichés that thrust the viewer into a bullfight arena of competing pettiness, comedy and tragedy. As a visual artist what I found most striking was Iñárritu’s wonderful use of visual metaphors. A scene in a liquor store mirror Ralph Ellison’s invisible man captured by the photographer Jeff Wall. A fogged filled stage littered with gauzy actors posing with tree filaments on their heads pokes fun at almost every stage production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A drunk on the street reveals a soliloquy from Macbeth. Even the actors themselves become visual symbols of their own roll in Riggan’s life. Sam (Emma Stone), Riggan’s daughter is bleached out with dark rimmed eye liner making her look like a creepy doll. Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), prances about like a mirror of Riggan’s former self, often barely dressed. In one scene, Shiner is literally the visual metaphor for The Emperor Wears No Clothes. All of these actors and stagings mainly take place in a Broadway theater’s claustrophobic back hallways and rooms, painted in nightclub garishness and faded putrid tones. Riggan’s dressing room resembles more of a prison cell than a lead actor’s sanctuary. Often during the film the chambered back end of the theater becomes the inner chambers of Riggan’s increasingly demented mind where only the stage provides open terrain and safety.

A poignant, keystone scene in the movie leaves Riggan accidentally locked out of the stage door right before the play’s apotheosis. Panicked and left in his tidy-whities (a reference to Breaking Bad?) Riggan awkwardly speed walks around the block, right through Times Square and a crowd of smartphone wielding fans who immediately tweet the experience to over a million followers. On the surface it speaks to the desperation of male middle-age, fading fame, and the cult of personality but what it most beautifully mirrors is Ellison’s Invisible Man;

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

A man whose fame is derived from playing a fictional superhero can stroll through one of the busiest places on earth and yet not really be seen. In this case of Birdman fame replaces race.

There are too many moments in Birdman to recount without spoiling the uncomfortable pleasure of the experience. Few films so eloquently balance comedy with desperation all the while making serious commentary on society, but Birdman succeeds admirably in doing so. The film reminds us of our shared humanity, and our fragility in order to disrupt what seems like an ever increasing reliance on fantasy over reality. Icarus is mentioned in the film but like everything else in Iñárritu’s Birdman, it is not the metaphor it seems. In this case the parable is directed at the viewers not its central character. A society bound to the cult of personality, and superhero movies is indeed flying too close to the proverbial cultural sun and like the Egyptians, Inca’s and Romans before, is destined for destruction. As with Carver’s Mel McGinnis, Riggan’s shame is a grounding force that creates a beautiful destruction in order to reveal a larger truth, “and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.”*

*from Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

Burning Down Byrne

On October 7, 2014, David Byrne the modern day Renaissance man and ex-Talking Heads lead, posted a blog entry on his website “I DON’T CARE ABOUT CONTEMPORARY ART ANYMORE?” The commentary, a seeming impromptu riff on his reaction to the current state of contemporary art, has garnered a lot of attention. Byrne isn’t just a painter and musician, he’s currently partnered with one of the art stars of the 1980’s, Cindy Sherman. His position, therefore, provides him with unusual access from both the point of celebrity and art world insider, to the undercurrent of New York’s art market. So, when Byrne writes about the art world he is writing from a position of art and financial power as well as a practitioner.

A few days later the artist and former gallerist, Ric Kasini Kadour wrote on Hyperallergic a counterpoint screed which attacked Byrne directly; “I Don’t Care About David Byrne Anymore?” A sideline memetic reaction has been taking place on everyone’s favorite social media platform Facebook. Aside from Kadour’s somewhat vitriolic retort (“Boo hoo, fuck off.”), I think both Kadour and Byrne miss the mark in their commentary about the state of contemporary art and strangely find themselves closer in alignment than either might admit.

First of all, contemporary art is not class warfare as many would like to pretend it is. As the late Robert Hughes so eloquently put it, “In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.” Capitalism by nature is predicated on constant progress and consumption, whether perceived or real. Art doesn’t play by those rules, which is exactly what makes it desirable to the 1%. What the extremely wealthy can’t have, they must have. This doesn’t pollute the art world per se, but only becomes more recognizable, more obvious in times of, as Hughes puts it, fluctuating intensity. Right now contemporary art is experiencing a period of low intensity, as is music. There may be a lot of people out there making things but there is no current collective zeitgeist to grab hold of and that makes for a lot recirculation of the old, the average, and the bad. Artists have always and will always pander to rich collectors because money makes the world go round and despite protests to the contrary, being a starving artist sucks. In order for art market to operate as class warfare it would have to persistently deny future Basquiats or present day Sam Falls, but it doesn’t. It may be dictated by tastemakers who see dollar signs but it doesn’t discriminate based on class. For this very reason, it keeps a perpetual flow of young, fresh MFA graduates hungry for success and fully participating in the system that fuels the amusement of the 1%.

Secondly, Byrne and Kadour both use straw man arguments to make their points. It is so easy to pick on the richest artist in the world, Damien Hirst and his For the Love of God (2007) diamond skull. Hirst is an opportunist more than a real artist and the bulk of his production is either a direct or near direct rip-off of other more talented artist’s work. So what. He is one man in a very large pool of makers and one man does not the art market make. Hating on Jeff Koons or Damian Hirst does little to add to the conversation on contemporary art. In equal measure, Kadour’s naive references to what might be termed ‘working class artists’ of various ilk is no better a position against the great art market engine. Just because you make something doesn’t mean you’re adding anything to the collective cultural conversation, especially didactic, playful sculptures of robots. Great art as we all know, penetrates deeply into the collective subconscious and communicates some form of undefinable knowledge that changes how we inhabit the world and bridges race, class and culture. The fact that there is little great art being made now may be lamentable but blaming it on economic conditions, secret gallery cabals or David Byrne himself, seems silly at best.

I understand Byrne’s disappointment as much as I get Kadour’s anger at Byrne and the art world. How many artists were of equal or superior measure to Vermeer or Titian in their time but lacked middle class upbringings or support from the church? Nobody ever said the art market or life was fair. I don’t believe that money pollutes the water of art production, there are just too many examples of great artists who found their power outside of the art market or wealthy patronage to convince me otherwise. Likewise I’m tired of the old 1960’s argument that by virtue of your own wealth or lack there of, you can’t comment on certain cultural conditions because you are either in or out of the “club.” Byrne paid his dues and couldn’t have possibly predicted his rise to wealth by way of an incredibly strange art-rock group that emerged in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Saying he’s rich so therefore he can’t comment on the rich is absurd. If anything, there is potential for him to reveal things that others would not ever have access to. By the same token, Kadour’s middle-class status, or at least non-wealthy status, isn’t an automatic pulpit for criticism either. The answer to contemporary art’s dilemma is not a socialist equalizing one. History teaches us that art often blossoms during conditions of inequality more than its opposite and therefore cannot be constrained or defined by economics or politics alone. Kadour regurgitates a lazy and tired argument that implies that if only less rich people were involved the art market would be more fair, and by association, better. Nothing could be further from reality.

Byrne’s comparison of the Dutch tulip bubble or Tulpenwoede is an apt one that Kadour completely glosses over. As someone who has spent a lot of time in working class artists studios, smaller more provincial galleries (like the Portland, Oregon gallery Kadour mentions—I live in Portland) I can tell you I have yet to see a great hidden, seething mass of talent. Bryne is right that the art market is paralleling the current economic conditions. Art has always been a profitable investment, out earning the stock market with regularity. It’s experiencing a bubble and with bubbles come breaks and then something interesting usually happens.

The real danger we face in the art world is the institutionalization of art production. Every year there are over 1,200 applicants for the MFA program at Yale. Yet, the percentage of employment of arts-related graduates has steadily declined since the 1970’s. The number of students receiving a bachelors degree in fine art in the U.S. has gone up 25% in nine years. In 2010 there were 29,000 graduates in art related fields. That’s 300,000 degreed people calling themselves artists in a ten year span. With tuition having risen at such rapid rates over the past three decades it is no wonder we have such simmering anger amongst young artists. There are simply too many artists who carry too much college debt to ever be equalized by even the most economically balanced art market. Combine this with the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans never set foot during their lifetime in a commercial art gallery, despite millions attending art museums and you begin to see the dilemma. Art production is equated with laziness and frivolity in America and paying for such things is considered the folly of the rich. Why would you ever spend $1,000 for a work of art when you can endlessly listen to the new Beyonce album for a mere $15.99?

Until we change the underlying dynamics of how artists learn to practice their craft, how they form a professional practice while holding down a full time job and how they can create collectively owned gallery spaces that establish themselves in the suburbs and lower income communities, using micro payments and shared economic models, nothing will change in the art market of America and likely little will happen to create the conditions for the next generation of great artists.

Post Desire

The Art of Oblivion

“... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.” ― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

DamNation still

Art has always lived at the edge between structure and entropy, whether metaphysically, psychologically, metaphorically, symbolically or directly. Neolithic cave paintings were ritualistic in their attempt to bolster humanities’ fragility against overwhelming odds. Simple hand prints on cave walls affirmed our raison d’être as we fought in our terribly short lives against the climactic and barbarous conditions omnipresent then. In a geological heartbeat we have returned to a place where similar conditions await on the near time horizon.

As the constructs of civilization began when the Natufians effectively settled some 12,000 years ago in the Levant, the seed was planted that humans would from then on, try to manufacture their environment. The rapid recognition that water could be harnessed to perpetuate an unnatural agricultural cycle led to animal domestication, villages, trade, money, etc. Art evolved slightly beyond being the bridge between terror and safety, to the bridge between the sublime (i.e. offerings to the gods) and domestication (pottery, decoration, etc.) Art served as a metaphor that repressed terror, and enabled us to overcome the elements by creating agriculture, animal husbandry and eventually production. Or so we thought. We wore icons that mimicked Gaia or Mother Earth which suppressed memories of the wild, ultimately leading us to commit matricide. It took us just 10,000 years to subjugate the global environment to the extent that we created an irreversible trend in its systems. There is no artistic symbol or metaphor adequate to unpack the dimensions of our impact on the globe. Perhaps this is why the art world has largely regressed into the tortured space of Wall Street’s Capitalism.

I have always been a believer in the sublime in art. From my early days of artistic formation I was drawn to works that lived outside or beyond the dimensions of humanity. I remember the first time I saw James Rosenquist’s F-111, mesmerized by the bravado of its scale and metaphorical power. Since those high school days I’ve seen many works of art that captivate the imagination with their grasping at the impenetrable void. Not one work in my lifetime has moved me as much as watching a section of glacier the size of Manhattan calving off of Greenland in the movie Chasing Ice.

We don’t really understand scale as human beings. Our neolithic brains have great difficulty rationalizing large scale. How do we assimilate 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing off the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland? That is enough fresh water to provide 3 liters (0.79 gallons) of fresh drinking water to every person on Earth for 348 days. The Great Pyramid of Giza is roughly 2,500,000 cubic meters or 0.0025 cubic kilometers. Therefore, the ice that calved in Chasing Ice represents the equivalent of 2,800 Giza Pyramids. The section that is shown on film breaking free represents a tiny fraction of the endangered remaining ice flows in both Greenland and the Antarctic. How does art act as a bridge now, between the terrors of climate change and humanity? Has art served for too long as an agent provocateur in our understanding of environment?

[vimeo 89928979 w=500 h=281]

A film just released (June 2014) by Patagonia called DamNation reveals the tragedy of the U. S. post-war dam building boom of 1950 to 1970. During that period of time 30,000 dams were built across the United States in a frenzy to harness nature and build a more powerful, prosperous nation. Currently there are 80,000 dams in the U.S., only 2540 of which produce any hydropower at all. Many of these dams counterintuitively destroyed habitat that now, under the current conditions of climate change, only worsen our dilemma. The movie focuses primarily on two regions of the country where hydropower was seen as a necessary and potent way to sustain the nation’s growth, the Pacific Northwest and the Western/Southwest regions of the U.S. One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is the dialogue around what I would consider performance art pieces. These symbolic gestures, first created by Earth First when they rolled a giant piece of black plastic down the front of the Glen Canyon Dam to signify it’s need to be severed, are unintentional art performances with the potential power to speak plainly to the larger symbol, the dam itself. In 1987 Earth First painted a giant crack on the (now removed) Elwha River dam to bring awareness to the destruction of millennial-old salmon spawning grounds blocked by the dam. Watching the movie, it struck me that a possible future for art in the 21st century is not activism per se, but the creation of experiences on human scale that once again bridge the divide between terror and security.

Ed Ayres, founder of WorldWatch Institute has said, “We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that ‘something’ is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that as been sustaining us.” Here is one of art’s fundamental roles, to expose the dimensions of human imagination beyond our everyday experiences. Art is uniquely qualified to contextualize the impending trauma that is already unfolding as a result of the beginnings of the Anthropocene era. What we so desperately need from art now is a parsing of the terrors of the sublime, of climate change, so that we might imagine a way to at the very least, to plug the gushing wound. What we don’t need from art is more pandering to money which is actually pandering to the past, the status quo which inevitably makes it less art and more visual onanism.

Rorate Caeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum (2005–2006)

There is a long standing tradition in arts relationship to environment that focuses on the symbolic and the sublime. Anselm Keifer arguably has taken this to its logical end point with his majestic, allegorical paintings and sculptures that use landscape as a symbolic metaphor to translate the myth and memory of Germany. Keifer’s has combined those elements nascent in Bierstadt, Turner, Cezanne and even Rothko and pushed them into a dimension so heavily laden with teleology they immolate landscape painting as a useful genre altogether. “The real problem—what we might call the Kiefer syndrome—is whether it is possible to take myth seriously on its own terms, and to respect its coherence and complexity, without becoming morally blinded by its poetic power.” Beyond this arose the land art aesthetes, engaging the environment directly. Unfortunately, and as extraordinary this work can be, it is increasingly become a mirror for the hubris of mankind's intersection with the environment rather than an elegy for its enduring and sustaining presence. Didactic attempts to unravel in the aesthetic our place on this blue dot is dead. Art must find a new way forward.

There is no other problem, issue or need, there is only one and in that sense we should take heart that our jobs as artists have actually been radically simplified in terms of focus. If art is a reflection of the now, the state of humanity acting as a mirror unto itself, then the only thing that needs mirroring is our own impending doom. If we cannot see fit to displace short term arrogance of our pitiful achievements in order to maintain what’s left of the wildness of this Earth, then we will surely perish as a species. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” Art has much to learn from people like the late Edward Abbey and I think it comes down to effective strategies. For years I’ve been in awe of those artists whose power resides in poetic scale and what many might describe as machismo. The work of Walter De Maria, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Anselm Kiefer, and Richard Serra have captivated me due to their elegiac form, sense of grandeur and push beyond human scale. I still believe there is a place for works like Lightning Field, Roden Crater or Serra’s great tilted steel forms. I am now coming to believe these works are looking more and more aligned with an age that has passed. The time of humans will only be sustained if we stop imposing ourselves so directly on the environment and begin to deconstruct some of the impositions from our past. This is not to say that humanity and art should embrace some ecotopia, because that is both impossible and equally salacious. Rather there is a middle way—a measured middle ground—and I’m hopeful art will show us the way. There are extant artists in our presence we can look to. The work of Gabriel Orozco, Mel Chin, Hans Haacke, and Diana Lynn Thompson, to name a few, are artists who provide an alternative to the monumental.

Mel Chin & Hans Haacke artworks

My nature is to be optimistic, but the current conditions of the world are making that more challenging each day. There is no real paradigm shift, no terror in people’s eyes over the imminent loss of the Western Ice Shelf of Antarctica, the ever increasing average yearly global surface temperatures of the planet or the desertification of the San Juaquin Valley. In a land of relative comfort and prosperity enamored with corporate consumerism, it is easy to understand why this is so. Films like DamNation, Chasing Ice, and Do The Math can only take us so far. Documentaries, as powerful and emotionally wrenching as they can be, are stunted by their transient, filmic nature. They are also a form of preaching to the choir. A new kind of subtle art might open the door for the middle, the unconvinced and the comfortable classes to see the real terror around us and take action. At least that’s my optimistic hope. There are points of light in the darkness but the real question is will we have the courage to flood the room with light completely before we run out of time. Once again I’ll share Schama’s words as a nod to this hopefulness;

“…it seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrach’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. for within its bag are fruitful gifts—not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though ti may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has round the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalists supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over enervation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.”