Inverted Landscapes
Candice Hopkins and Lucía Sanromán
Art is the art of affect more than representation, a system of dynamized and impacting forces rather than a system of unique images that function under the regime of signs.[1]
–Elizabeth Grosz
The earliest known landscape painting was recently rediscovered. It is a large color mural that was painted on a clay wall some 8,600 years ago in a settlement in central Turkey. While abstract—at least to our eyes—the land represented in the mural is clearly demarcated into separate plots carved out of the fertile soil at the base of an active volcano.[2] This early image of subdivided landsuggests even earlier origins for the complex relations between land, landscape, territory, and trade.
For the current exhibition, the landscape of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is our starting point. New Mexico has a layered past; it was first, and remains, Native American land, before becoming a Spanish kingdom, a Mexican province, and a territory of the United States––all before statehood. These identitiesdo not form a linear historical trajectory; they are rife with the contradictions, ambiguities, and brief moments of clarity that emerge from the unequal bond between time and history. But history is always written from a dominant perspective. Along with forging open understandings of landscape, in this project we seek to make room for lesser-known narratives, and to complicate easy associations between place, perception, and the development of knowledge.
Social and economic relations, as well as relationships to power, permeate both land and landscape. Landscape is not a neutral phenomenon, but a device framed by the particular perspective from which it is seen. There is nothing stable about this familiar subject, and there is a difference between the spaces we inhabit and the natural environment, and a difference between the experience of the land that constitutes a place and “place” as a site of memory and affection.
Art historian James Elkins describes the failure of Western philosophical and theoretical traditions to represent an embodied experience; these traditions have historically separated the self from engagement withits own perceptions in order to support the vexed notion of objectivity and critical distance. In this essay, we are not interested in disputing methodologiesor discussing the troubled estrangement of the Western gaze. Instead, we wish to address how landscape is used as an alibi to coverup a culturallyspecific ways of seeing. This alibi, in our view, is built on the systematic degradation, dispossession, and dissolution of the land and of the self that isendemic to the West and to European culture.Many of the artists in Unsettled Landscapes present a different view, making clear the subjective nature of picturing the land, while at the same time, bringing forward other perceptions of it that emerge from an art history where landscape has never functioned as an alibi—within Inuit art for example—or deliberately disrupt this idea in order to reveal its mechanics.
The “Othering” of theland and those directly associated with it—including indigenous people, indentured farmworkers, and other agricultural laborers—is fundamental to this process. The Western worldviewcreates a type of selfhood that is primarily invested in the desubjectification of experience in order to facilitate the management of (seemingly) inert, passive bodies that support the processes of production and consumption prevalent in late capitalism. With this in mind, our question is not what is landscape, but rather, how is landscape used to support particular social values, values that prioritize certain kinds of experiences and forms of knowledge over others? In other words, how does landscape function as a device or a social apparatus?
In revealinghow landscape acts as a social apparatus, the works in Unsettled Landscapesshowhow the act of picturing gives form and shapesto specificsubjectivities.[3]A number of artists in the exhibition deconstruct the genre of landscape painting to work within the cracks and fissures that result. For a few of the artists in this exhibition, these fissures offer the opportunity toput forward decolonial perspectives that redress history and give voice to theindigenous people of the Americas. Sometimes deploying politically involved and even activist strategies, these artists are conscious of the ecological toll paid by national and multinational economies that use the wholesale trade of land as a form of capital. Others, however, do not foreground a political position, utilizing observation itself as a strategy for the creation of their work as well as its presentation. The audience, now witness, views the slow drip of a gradually melting Chilean glacier, for example, or the plant and animal life of the Amazonian jungle overtake a failed American rubber-processing plant.
Landscape as Genre
1. Landscape is not a genre of art but a medium.[4]
–W. J. T. Mitchell
Our early thinking around this exhibition was indebted to W. J. T. Mitchell’s important book Landscape and Power, a critical account of assumptions regarding landscape painting within European art history. Mitchell argues that the genre, rather than marking the emergence of a “new way of seeing” in the West as posited by earlier theorists and historians, instead responds to and gives form to imperialist impulses.[5]Mitchell’s disarticulation of landscape as proof of a specific and “new” form of detached, objective European subjectivity, and his positioning of landscape as a cipher of imperialistic desire and projection on the land, has informed our exhibition. The European landscape genre is, therefore, invested in a specific cultural inscription that positions the Western gaze as conforming that which it confronts—bycounting and describing the natural resources available in a specific parcel, for example—and that by definition reorganizesnature to transform it into a resource.
Several artists in Unsettled Landscapes unfold and dismantle the visual conventions of European landscape painting to uncover its biases and pictorial systems. Yishai Jusidman’s series Astronomer, 1990–95,explores the relationship between sight, the construction of three-dimensional space, and Albertian perspective. He aptly turns the device of seeing—the eye—onto itself by wrapping the two-dimensional picture plane around a sphere, quoting historical paintings by the Mexican José Maria Velasco, the Briton John Constable, and the FrenchmanClaude Monet. Jusidman literally reshapes these quotations to reveal the contrived historical construction of the gaze.
Bending, doubling, and mirroring are also employed by Daniel Joseph Martinez, who inserts distorted images into the imagined space of painting in work that, at the same time, recuperates the temporal and gestural structures of 1960s mail art. His installationShe could See Russia from Her House, Those who wish for peace should prepare for war!—Old Sasquatch Proverb (In search of the Tribe Called Sasquatch, or who really built the Alaskan Oil Pipeline) 16 Communiqués and found photographs from traveling the length and breath of Alaska during the month of August, 2009, 2010,includes sixteen postcards he gathered during a month-long residency in Alaska, where he followed the route of a pipeline. His interests are not simply to address the gaze of art history––Martinez also deftly exposes the interests and pressures of oil and water industries in Alaska and the far north.
Mitchell has provocatively recast landscape as a “medium of cultural expression in which cultural values are encoded.”[6] While hesees the genre as primarily expressing imperial desire, for artists working today landscape is a site of agency; they challenge the idea of land and nature as objects to parcel and commodify. Artworks like those by Leandro Katz and Kent Monkman emphasizethe process of decolonization, particularly as it relates to the Americas—the creation and circulation of images that reveal more of the ideologies of their makers than the land and people they represent. Katz and Monkmanexposethefalse hierarchysituating European over other aesthetic practices in the development of modernism, and reject acomparable hierarchy regarding race and culture perpetuated in early anthropological studies.
By foregrounding phenomenological experiences and situational approaches inthe knowledge of land and place, some artists also challengecapitalist paradigms. Shuvinai Ashoona makes obsessively attentive drawings of the place she inhabits in the Canadian Arctic: Cape Dorset, Nunavut. Disorienting in their detail, her drawings provide both a highly subjective cartography and an external mapping of a terrain. Likewise, Irene Kopelman takes on the conventions of art making and the categorization of nature through scientific observation in a series of nine drawings she made during a research trip to Antarctica. Kopelmandocumented what she was able to draw in the minutes before her hands were incapacitated by extreme cold.[7] Perception is taken in a different direction by Florence Miller Pierce, whose elegant spatial abstractions capture ephemeral moments of half-seeing, as if through fog or snow.
Together, these works perform a double function: some make evident the device of painting and forms of framing, paying particular attention to how painting has structured the experience of nature in the past; for others, the medium itself is a means of expressing embodied knowledge, highly attuned to the body’s movement, limitations, and apprehensions.
Landscape as Territory
Territories seem to exist at all times and in all geographical contexts: there is no sense of a history of the concept.[8]
–Stuart Elden
How landscape functions as an alibi is perhaps nowhere more evident than in relation to territory. Territory as an idea is formed at the moment when the land as commons—that is, something that belongs not to an individual but to the collective—is replaced with the idea of land as a commodity—something that is owned. As an “area controlled by a certain kind of power,” territory is both a juridico-political and geographical notion.[9] With the conceptual shift from land to territory, space becomes bounded and controlled. Like geography, which “grew up in the shadow of the military,” territory hasa dark cast.[10]
In tracing the origins of inequality in WesternEuropean society, Jean-Jacques Rousseau outlines a generative association between the emergence of civil society and the concept of private property:
The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land [enclosé un terrain], thought of saying this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his kind: beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the Earth [la Terre] belongs to no one.[11]
In this statement, the contradictions of civil society are evident: for Rousseau, all the miseries and horrors of humankind spill out from the initial act of fencingoff a plot of land and convincing others that it is “owned.”
Once borders are drawn, they are often maintained by conflict and force. The Arctic, one of the most remote and least populated places on Earth, is the subject of a simmering territorial dispute that some have called the “Warm War,” a struggle between circumpolar nations over mineral and oil resources and the control of shipping routes, which will soon be open year-round because of melting sea ice and warmer temperatures. Kevin Schmidt’s A Sign in the Northwest Passage[LF1], 2010,is literally what its title suggests: a large wooden sign on which the artist carved apocalyptic statements from the Book of Revelations. He then set his construction afloat in the cold waters of the Northwest Passage, where it floats like a marker of dark times to come.
Despite the presence of the military and its technologies, the Arctic has “little if no history of active combat.”[12]Nevertheless, a process of militarization began during the Cold War, a period whenthe Canadian Forces Station Alert in Alert, Nunavut, played a critical role in surveillance efforts. In the 1950s, Alert, the most northern continually inhabited settlement on Earth, was transformed from a weather station into a spy base. Charles Stankievech’s installation The Soniferous Aether: The Land Beyond the Land Beyond, 2013, is filmed at Alert, a place so remote that it extends beyond Inuit traditional territories. In the film, Stankievechmimics the sound and aesthetics of science-fiction films to create a document that oscillates between the real and the future imaginary.[13]
Formed in 1999,Nunavutis the newest territory in Canada. Its population hovers just over 30,000 people,who occupya landmass equivalent to Mexico. Advising theindigenous territorial government of Nunavut is a council of eleven Elders, whose role is to incorporate Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, that is, Inuit culture and traditional knowledge, into decisions at a political and governmental level. Nunavut is the only territory or province in Canada to do so. Like Bolivia and Ecuador, itsgovernance modelis informed by the ideologies of indigenous people, reflecting decolonial thinking that foregrounds care for the land as well as human culture in the development oflegal frameworks and policy decisions related to resource and economic development.[14]
A video by Gianfranco Foschino,No Man’s Land[LF2], 2014, was made on a group ofislands just off the southernmost tip of Chile, at the point where the mountains enter the sea. This area, like the Arctic, is also militarized. Only the sound onthe video—the loud and pervasive hum of a big boat motor—suggests that something is amiss. Filmed from a fixed position off of the hull of the boat, this perspective recreates that of early explorers encountering these lands from their ships. We see life in the form of vegetation and trees, a few birds, but no signs of human habitation. Early images of the Americas perpetuated the idea of a utopian, empty landscape waiting for, almost wanting, settlement. The absence of people in Foschino’s video is uncanny. The video, focused as it is on the present, does not reveal how these lands were depopulated: in the 1880s, Chilean and Argentinean ranchers, with the government’s consent, slaughtered all the Native Selk’nam (Ona) people, lending new meaning to the word unsettled.[15]
When land becomes a commodity, economic value is added to a place that may already be permeated with social relations and cultural beliefs. While this shift obscures these existingconditions, it does not conceal them altogether. Edward Poitras’sand Patrick Nagatani’s photographsserve as a reminder, as do Matthew Buckingham’s text-and-image installation and Ohotaq Mikkigak’s landscape drawings focused on prior use and indigenous knowledge of the land.
In 1988, Poitras staged an intervention called Offensive/Defensive[LF3], exchanging a piece of the grounds of the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with land on which his home is located on the nearby George Gordon First Nation, an Indian reservation (in Canada called a reserve).Cutting a rectangular strip of sod from each site, Poitras replanted the urban lawn of the museum in the voidleft by the wild prairie grass of the reserve, and vice versa. Prior to laying the sod, at each site Poitras buried texts in castlead reading, at one, the word “offensive,” and, at the other, the word “defensive.” The words reference thepositions of the historical actors involved in therelinquishing of Native land to military forces in the formation of the province of Saskatchewan. Lead, the material of bullets, evokesthe land’s violent past. In what was possibly an unanticipated outcome, but one that poignantly reveals the false hierarchy governing nature and culture, the carefully cultivated domestic grass from the gallery’s lawn withered and died on the reserve; the wild grass, meanwhile, thrived in its new home. Patrick Nagatani’s series Nuclear Enchantment[LF4] relies on a different transposition. He overlays representations of land contaminated by radiation and uranium mining on picturesque vistas in the state of New Mexico and onPueblo communities and theNavajo Nation, ensuring that the contradictions inherent in this place, marketed as the Land of Enchantment, are known.
Matthew Buckingham’s installation Paha Sapa[LF5]digs into the history of another site, the Black Hills, home to Mount Rushmore. A text recounts that the Black Hills were illegally obtained from the Sioux, themselves pushed into the region to escape the genocidal Indian Wars displacing the Kiowa, anduncovers another inconvenient truth: Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor responsible for this grand monument to democracy, was a former high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan. Ohotaq Mikkigak, meanwhile, carefully renders the landscapes of his home community in Cape Dorset. Inscribed along the bottom of his images are syllabics in the Inuktitut language that inform viewers of the use and significance of the sites. These projects counter the historical amnesia that characterizes the Americas, disrupting the process by which dominant narratives become “truth” and neatly obscure other histories and other knowledge along the way.
Landscape as Trade
Where gifts link things to persons and embed the flow of things in the flow of social relations, commodities are held to represent the drive—largely free of moral or cultural constraints—of goods for one another, a drive mediated by money and not by sociality.[16]