Gathering Shadows: landscape, photography & the ecological gaze

Gathering Shadows: landscape, photography and the ecological gaze

Harry Nankin

School of Choose an item.

College of Choose an item.

RMIT University

9 January 2015

Declaration

I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the thesis/project is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed.

Harry Nankin

9 January 2015


Harry Nankin Doctor of Philosophy

2014

RMIT University

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A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Harry Nankin BTRP (Hons); MA

School of Art College of Design and Social Context

RMIT University Melbourne

September 2014

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Declaration

I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not beeen submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the thesis is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged; and, ethics procedures and guidelines have been followed. Signed,

Harry Nankin Date: 19/9/2014

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Contents Acknowledgements 4 List of Illustrations 5 Abstract 12 Introduction 13 Chapter 1 The thinking eye of ecological gazing: anthropocentrism, landscape and photography 18 Chapter 2 The embodied eye of ecological relations: biosemiotic shadows 43 Chapter 3 The feeling eye of ecological tragedy: invertebrates as metaphor 79 Chapter 4 Gathering Shadows at Lake Tyrrell: Syzygy + The Impossibility + The End 110 Chapter 5 Gathering Shadows at Mount Buffalo: Minds in the Cave + Ekkyklêma 150 Conclusion 189 Addendum 194 Bibliography 197 Appropriate Durable Record 230 Curriculum Vitae 255 Critical Feedback 257 DVD inside cover

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are extended to many people. I gratefully acknowledge Paul Carter, Dr Emily Potter,

Dr Maurizio Toscano, Dr Rachel Webster and David Malin and Mallee residents Narelle and

Rod Barwick, Anthony Finch, Irene and Noel Templeton and Peter Stewart for their

invaluable advice and assistance. I thank dancers Siobhan Murphy and Michaela Pegum,

Murtoa Museum curators Val and Syd Gregory, actors Nikki Shiels, Emily Thomas and

Lachlan Woods, Judy Robertson at Healesville Sanctuary, painter John Wolseley and partner

Jenny Long, for helping facilitate production of the project imagery. I extend thanks to

filmmaker Lucy Paplinska and audio artist Christopher Williams for documenting project

events. I am deeply grateful to Rudolf Frank for his tireless help in designing and building

equipment, in fieldwork and its documentation. I acknowledge the extraordinary

contributions of my project volunteers Namgyal Amdo, Will Belcher, Patrick Byrne, Juan

Carlos Calixto, Sarah Curtis, Samantha Everton, Juan Farrell, Benjamin Green, Adrian

Halliday, Leslie Haworth, Andy Hatton, Robert Hock, Eugene Howard, Kate Lambe, Ian

Lawrence, Ryan Leternou, Viren Mohan, Jasmine Petterson, Lisbeth Grossmann, Mariam

Haji, Harsha Karunarante, Ryan Letourneau, James Masare, Rose Mueller, Linda Sim, Taras

Tarapavola and Glenn Wilson. I greatly appreciate entomologists Dr Pettina Love and Dr

Nicholas Porch for sharing their knowledge, the Department of Sustainability and

Environment for permitting usage of Parks Victoria properties, Peter Cebon for brokering

scanning arrangements, Dr Les Walkling for scanning advice, Museum Victoria staff Ronnie

Fookes, John Broomfield and Sally Rogers-Davidson for facilitating scanning and RMIT

University School of Art staff Dr Shane Hulbert, Andrey Walkling, John Billan and Alan

Roberts for their post-production assistance. I thank Arts Victoria’s Arts Innovation and the

Australia Council for the Arts Inter-Arts programs funding of the work prior to the formal

commencement of the PhD. I thank my second supervisor Dr Lesley Duxbury for her timely

thoughts, and my senior supervisor, Dr Linda Williams for her unerring guidance, advocacy

and incisive advice during the years of research and final exegesis. Finally, I am grateful to

Nicola Stern for her patience, our now-teenage daughter Rachel for her acute visual

judgement (“Dad, that version’s the coolest”), and my partner Annie Hunter for her warmth,

encouragement and inspirational editorial feedback.

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List of Illustrations Introduction

Figure 1. The two research sites. Base map source: Google Earth

Chapter 1

Figure 2. Lascaux Cave, France c17,000 BCE Figure 3. Edwin Hubble: Var! photograph of Andromeda galaxy, 1923

Figure 4. Rosalind Franklin: Photo 51, 1952

Figure 5. Bill Anders: Earthrise, 1968

Figure 6. Ansel Adams: Clearing winter storm, Yosemite valley, California, 1944. Gelatin silver print

Figure 7. Peter Dombrovskis: Morning mist, Rock island bend, Gordon river, Tasmania, 1979. Colour slide Figure 8. Frans Lanting: Wandering albatrosses courting, South Georgia Island c1995

Figure 9. Sebastiao Salgado, Left: The ladder, Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil, 1986. Right: Marine Iguana, Rabida island,

the Galapagos, 2004. Gelatin silver prints

Chapter 2

Figre 10. Giotto: Sermon to the Birds from the Legend of St Francis #15, 1297-99. Fresco, Assisi

Figure 11. Guo Xi: Early Spring, Northern Song Dynasty c1020–c1090 CE. Painting

Figure 12. Emily Kngwarray: Ntange dreaming, 1989

Figure 13. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri: Warlugulong, 1977

Figure 14. Petroglyph at Murujuga (Barrup Peninsula) Western Australia. c200-10,000 BCE

Figure 15. Hans Haacke: Ten turtles set free, July 20, 1970

Figure 16. Alejandro Duran, Nubes, 2011 from the Washed Up series

Figure 17. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints), 2001-2

Figure 18. Cameron Robbins: Wind drawing, Salmon Point South Australia 6 hrs, 2002

Figure 19. John Wolseley: Demoiselle cranes flying above the Himalaya, 2006. Carbonised wood and watercolour on

paper

Figure 20. Alfred Steiglitz: Equivalent, 1926. Gelatin silver print

Figure 21. Paul Caponigro: Running deer, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1967. Gelatin silver print

Figure 22. William Henry Fox Talbot: Lace (Plate XX in The Pencil of Nature) 1844–46. Calotype photogram

Figure 23. Anna Atkins: Cystoseira granulata, c1853. Cyanotype photogram

Figure 24. Adam Fuss: Alphabet from the series Home and the World, 2010. Gelatin silver photogram

Figure 25. Adam Fuss: Birds in Flight from the series My Ghost, 1999. Gelatin silver photogram

Figure 26. Susan Derges: River Taw, 19 January1999. Photogram

Figure 27. Christl Berg: Between phenomena, remnants 1, 2, 3, 2000. Installation of gelatin silver photograms

Figure 28. Harold Edgerton: Cutting the Card, 1964

Figure 29. Eric Hosking: Heraldic Barn Owl, 1948. Gelatin silver print

Figure 30. A victims shadow imprint from the heat of the atom bomb explosion, Nagasaki, Japan, 9/8/1945

Figure 31. Still from the movie The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, 1920

Figure 32. Astrid Klein: Night Matter 1, 1985. Gelatin silver print

Figure 33. Bill Henson: Untitled #122, 2001-2002. Type C print

Figure 34. Left: Plato's Allegory of the cave c400 BCE. Engraving of Jan Saenredam (1565-1607) after a painting of

Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem (1562-1638). Right: Pliny the Elders Corinthian myth 1st c CE. Detail from

The Invention of Drawing, 1830 by Karl Friedrich Schinkle

Figure 35. Andy Goldsworth: Rain Shadow, Saint Abbs, Scotland, 1984

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Figure 36. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Elephant Renee, Toledo Zoo, 1995

Chapter 3

Figure 37. William Holman Hunt: The Scapegoat, 1854-56

Figure 38. George Catlin Ambush for Flamingos 1857

Figure 39. Mark Dion: Tar and feathers, 1996. Tree, wooden base, tar, feathers, taxidermic animals

Figure 40. Betty Beaumont: A night in Alexandria…The Rain Forest...Whose Stories are they anyway? 1989 Figure 41. Debbie Symons: World Species Market, 2009. Digital loop

Figure 42: Left. Arthur Rothstein: Fleeing a dust storm, Great Plains, 1936. Right. Dorothea Lange: Migrant mother,

Florence Owens Thompson, California, 1936. Gelatin silver prints

Figure 43. Robert Glenn Ketchum, Tongass National Forest logging, Alaska c2000

Figure 44. Chris Jordan: Message from the Gyre, 2009 Figure 45. Edward Burtynsky: Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996. Inkjet print

Figure 46. John Pfahl: Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant, Susquehanna River, Pennsylvania, 1982. Ektacolor plus print

Figure 47. David Buckland: Ice Texts, 2005-9. Digitally printed images bonded to glass

Figure 48. Rosemary Laing: Burning Ayer #6, 2003 from the series A dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian

Landscape. Type C print

Figure 49. Marian Drew: Penguin with enamel jug, 2009. Archival pigment on cotton paper

Figure 50. Yao Lu: Passing spring at the ancient dock, 2007

Figure 51. Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir & Mark Wilson: Nanoq Flat Out and Bluesome. A cultural Life of Polar Bears 2001-

2004

Figure 52. Joseph Beuys: Queen Bee III, 1952. Beeswax on wood

Figure 53. Egyptian scarab 1504-1450 BCE. Green glazed steatite

Figure 54. Hokusai Katsushika: Bellflower and dragonfly from series Large Flowers, 1833-4

Figure 55. Ambrosius Bosschaert the Younger: Dead frog with flies c1630

Figure 56. Louise Bourgeise: Maman, 1999. Stainless steel, bronze, marble

Figure 57. Hubert Duprat: Aquatic caddis-fly larvae with cases (detail), 1986-2002

Figure 58. Trent Parke: Outback Queensland, 2003. Gelatin silver print

Figure 59. Cornelia Hesse-Honneger: Heteroptera: crippled wings, missing feelers, Chernobyl, c2007. Watercolour on

paper

Figure 60. Linda Connor: Petroglyphs, Galisteo, New Mexico 1989. Gold toned printing out paper print

Chapter 4

Figure 61. Lake Tyrrell Figure 62. Dancers body prints: Michaela Pegum imprinting footprints using fixer (ammonium thiosulphate) on a

roll of photographic film (series 1) laid on the lakebed. Photo: Siobhan Murphy

Figure 63. Dancers’ body prints: Michaela Pegum making body prints with graphite on architect’s paper (series 2)

on Lake Tyrrell. Photo: Siobhan Murphy

Figure 64. Emu footprints. Attempting to record live Emu footprints on paper with graphite powder.

Photo: Rose Mueller

Figure 65. Dancers’ body prints: processed chemogram of dancer’s feet etched by fixer (ammonium thiosulphate)

on gelatin silver film (series 1) laid on the lakebed; made for Syzygy but used in the Mt Buffalo research project.

Figure 66. Camera photographs. Examples of large format gelatin silver camera negatives of nudes (series 3) and

taxidermied native animals (series 4) made for but not used in the final Syzygy artwork

Figure 67. Work spaces. Left: Studio/darkroom benchtop with lightbox ‘dry side’. Right: Studio/darkroom

chemical processing ‘wet side’

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Figure 68. Work spaces. Left: Suburban studio/darkroom façade. Right: Fabricating MDF template holders in

borrowed workshop at LaTrobe University, Bundoora. Photo: Rudy Frank

Figure 69. Making invertebrate ‘template’ negatives. Top: Collecting ants using a home made motorized vacuum

device. Photo: Rudy Frank. Lower left: Night light insect attractant . Lower right: photograms of live

invertebrates being exposed by flash at night beside the lake. Photo: Viren Mohan.

Figure 70. Generic ground based Lake Tyrrell plein air shadowgram imaging technique

Figure 71. Trimmed invertebrate shadowgram films on lightbox being prepared as star exposure templates

Figure 72. Telescopic glass plates being catalogued and assessed for selection in portable case

Figure 73. ‘Template’ negatives. Left: a life-scale 'photogram' of a live Wolf Spider on Kodak CGP Camera 2000

orthochromatic film created by exposure to flash on site at Lake Tyrrell. Right: the corner of an appropriated ’14

inch square’ glass plate astronomical survey photograph

Figure 74. Star exposure field gear. Left: An open home-made felt-lined MDF star exposure holder. Right:

Custom-made instrument box filled with template holders wrapped in numbered lightproof black envelopes ready

for transport to the field. Figure 75. HP5Plus film processing system. Left: ‘Inglis’ custom-made nitorogen burst film processor (closed and

in use). Top right: Film holding septum in processor (empty and open). Right bottom: Nitrogen tank

Figure 76. Starlight exposure. Left: Pegged guide tape line from vehicle parking area to starlight exposure site.

Photo: Robert Hock. Right: Startrail reflections on template glasses during celestial exposure. Photo: Viren

Mohan Figure 77. Tarpaulin laying in daylight preparatory to nocturnal starlight exposure of the templates, an exercize

repeated thirteen times over the life of the project. Photos: Robert Hock

Figure 78. Starlight exposure method. A simple negative/positive contact printing system.

Figure 79. Starlight exposure. The templates on the lakebed are the dark middleground line. Photo: Glenn

Wilson.

Figure 80. Lake Tyrrell. The main nocturnal imaging site is the cove at the northernmost tip of the lake at the top

centre of the satellite image. Source: Google Earth

Figure 81. Sketch of intial Syzygy schema for a Milky Way film grid mounted on acrylic

Figure 82. Example of first (2010-2011) iteration configured as uprights at Horsham Regional Gallery, 2011:

Syzygy 1/The Cygnus A Triptych, 2010. 3 glass/film objects 337 x 357 x 5mm on base 30 x 80 x 1100mm

Figure 83. Example of first (2010-2011) iteration of the Telescope sub-series configured as a series of uprights at

Horsham Regional Gallery, 2011: Telescope 2, 2011. Eight glass/film objects 335 x 355 x 5mm paired on 4 bases

30 x 80 x 380mm

Figure 84. Processed starlight-exposed HP5Plus films with invertebrate Telescope series imagery during darkroom

post-processing preparatory to mounting on glass in November 2010.

Figure 85. Examples of the second (2011-2012) iteration, altered to upright sandwiches exhibited at Swan Hill

Regional Gallery in 2012. Top: Syzygy 1/Transit Cygnus A, 2011 composed of two glass/film objects 337 x 357 x

5mm, as presented upright on wooden base 30 x 80 x 380mm. Bottom: Installation view of Telescope works

(foreground) and Syzygy diptychs (background)

Figure 86. Example of third (post 2013) iteration as sandwiched backlit horizontally stacked Syzygy diptychs

without supports exhibited at Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, in 2013. Bottom photo: Daniel Armstrong

Figure 87. Example of third (post 2013) iteration of a celestial/terrestrial diptych: Syzygy 4/Transit of Alpha

Centauri, 2011. Top left: celestial HP5Plus film. Top right: terrestrial HP5Plus film. Bottom: overlaid diptych. Two

toned gelatin silver films mounted on a starfire glass pane with screen-printed mask on opposing face, 335 x 355

x 5mm each

Figure 88. August Strindberg: Celestograph, 1894. Gelatin silver plate

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Figure 89. Paul Carter in collaboration with Lab architecture: studio pavement detail of Nearamnew, Federation

Square, Melbourne, 2003

Figure 90. Chris McCaw: Sunburned, 2008. Gelatin silver print

Figure 91. Erika Blumenfeld: still from Moving Light: Spring, 2005. Projected installation, 1:35 minutes

Figure 92. Justine Cooper: Rapt II, 1998. MRI body scans, architectural film with artist

Figure 93. Janet Lawrence: Tarkine (For a World in Need of Wilderness), 2011. Duraclear, acrylic, mirror, stainless

steel wire. Macquarie Bank Foyer, London. Detail

Figure 94. Thomas Ruff: STE 5.01 (16h 30m -500), 1989 from the Sterne series

Figure 95. Locust capturing around Lake Tyrrell. Top left: Driving along the Pier Millan-Chinkapook Road. Top

right: car rooftop net. Bottom left: Hand held net from the car. Bottom right: Live locust storage following net

capture

Figure 96. The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being, 2010. Diptych of toned gelatin silver

fibre paper shadowgram prints each 106 x106 cm. Detail

Figure 97. The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being, 2010 Diptych of toned gelatin silver

fibre paper shadowgram prints each 106 x106 cm. Detail

Figure 98. Simon Perry: Unlimited edition, 2006

Figure 99. Damien Hirst: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991

Figure 100. Middle strip of raw butterfly film file prior to digital post-production image stitching, inversion and

re-colourization

Figure 101. Detail of The End of the Age of Entitlement, 2014. Pigment ink-jet print on cotton paper 1232 x 1053 mm

Chapter 5

Figure 102. Mount Bogong, Victoria from Range Upon Range: The Australian Alps by Harry Nankin, Algona

Publications and Notogaea Press, 1987

Figure 103. Burnt sub-alpine woodland, Mount Buffalo, Victoria in 2012

Figure 104. South East Australian bioregions identified by the ‘Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation’ including

the Australian Alps. Source: NSW DECCW, 2010 in Good & Worboys, 2011

Figure 105. High voltage Buckland River transmission line and easement defining the southern boundary of

Mount Buffalo national park: bogong moth cave on The Horn is the peak at centre

Figure 106. Road sign in pine plantation area along the eastern perimeter of the Mount Buffalo national park

Figure 107. Mount Buffalo. The moth collection cave on The Horn was above the head of the gorge at the

bottom centre of the satellite image. Source: Google Earth

Figure 108. Migration routes and aestivation zones of Bogong Moth Agrotis infusa. Source: McCormick, 2005: 5

from Common 1954

Figure 109. Adult bogong moths Agrotis infusa at Mount Buffalo. Photo: Rudy Frank

Figure 110. Adult bogong moths aestevating in a cave on The Horn, Mount Buffalo

Figure 111. Top: Bogong moth appropriation: Bogong Moth Motel, Mt Beauty Victoria Bottom: Bogong moth celebration; Bogong moth sculpture in Canberra made in 2001 by Jim Williams and

Matthew Harding Figure 112. Granite cliffs of The Horn, Mount Buffalo, with caves from which Bogong Moths were collected Figure 113. Cave entrance with airborne moths and floor carpeted with the dead

Figure 114. Moth gathering. Left: assistant collecting moths. Lower right: artist moth collecting in cave. Top right:

entering the cave. Photo by Eugene Howard

Figure 115. Daylight moth storage. Left: Twenty litre tub with wet blanket for evaporative cooling of captive

moths. Right: pyramidal exposure net wrapped to protect stored moths from heat and light

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Figure 116. Shadowgram flash equipment. Metz 45 portable flash unit (centre), wired trigger (left) and flash meter

(right)

Figure 117. First field trip imaging technique. Moth shadowgram set up at the The Horn using horizontal tray and

perpindicular tripod mounted flash

Figure 118. Vehicle for carrying gear and transporting moths from summit cave to nocturnal forest imaging site

perpindicular tripod mounted flash

Figure 119. Generic, oblique plein air shadowgram imaging technique used on the second and third field trips

Figure 120. Third field trip imaging technique: pyramidal moth imaging apparatus suspended in position on

location preparatory to receiving moths and imaging: sliding trapdoor with clips for holding film at wide end, top;

velcro door patch for entry and egress of moths on opposite side, centre; flash unit at narrow end, bottom

Figure 126. Detail of film scanning protocol test 16 bit @ 2000dpi and 2.2 gamma on Creo at CGP made in

October 2011. From left to right: b&w standard; b&w at maximum dynamic range; RGB greyscale and RGB

greyscale with maximum dynamic range


October 2011 with identical post-scanning highlight/shadow density adjustments applied to each file

Figure 128. Cut down shadowgram films on lightbox preparatory to scanning at Museum Victoria

Figure 129. On-screen digital image file post-production and pairing in the RMIT photography department

laboratory

Figure 130. Printed paper miniatures used for pairing experiments

Figure 131. Printing a Minds in the Cave piece on the RMIT Epson Stylus Pro 9900 machine

Figure 132: Minds in the Cave/Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Diptych of two 111 cm x

111 cm prints

Figure 133. Installation of Minds in the Cave diptychs #13 (left) and #3 (right) in ‘Future Tense’, Stephen

McLaughlin Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014. Photo: Felicity Spear Figure 134. Bogong moth abjection: pest removal business advertisement

Figure 135. Mike and Doug Starn: from the series Attracted to Light, c2004. Collage of gelatin silver prints Figure 136: Minds in the Cave/Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Moth print 111cm x

111cm

Figure 137: Minds in the Cave /Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Detail of moth print

Figure 138: Minds in the Cave /Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Detail of footprint

Figure 139: Minds in the Cave/Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Foot print 111 cm x 111

cm

Figure 140. A 23,000 year old fossil human footprint at Lake Gampung, NSW

Figure 141. A 1.5 million year old hominin footprint, Ileret, Kenya

Figure 142. Buzz Aldrin: Footprint on the Moon, 21 July 1969

Figure 143. Still of Iphigenia considering her fate from the film Iphigenia (1977) directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis

Figure 144. Christl Berg: Installation of laser prints of scanned objects from Maria Island, c2000

Figure 145. Mario Giacomelli: There are no hands to caress my face 1961-63. Gelatin silver print Figure 146. Robert Motherwell: Elegy to the Spanish Republic, #70, 1961. Oil on canvas Figure 147. Olivia Parker: Eggshells, 1977. Selenium toned gelatin silver contact print

Figure 148. Karl Blossfeldt: Haarfarn (Urformen der Kunst), 1928

Figure 149. Experimental segment of Ekkyklêma, 2014: 112 gelatin silver films each mounted on a 5x140x140 mm

glass tile. Arrangement and overall dimensions variable

Figure 150. Experimental segment of Ekkyklêma, 2014: 112 gelatin silver films each mounted on a 5x140x140 mm

glass pane. Arrangement and overall dimensions variable

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Figure 151. Experimental segment of Ekkyklêma, 2014: 112 gelatin silver films each mounted on 5x140x140 mm glass

panes (with glass lens, since excised from concept). Arrangement and overall dimensions variable

Figure 152. Janet Lawrence: Second Exposure from the Periodic Table series, 1992-93. Lead, glass, salt, sulphur,

mercury, X-ray, various substances, lily, fluorescent lights

Figure 153. Christian Boltanski: Monument (Odessa), 1989–2003. Mixed media

Figure 154. Manuel Vilarino: Bestiario, 1981-89. Gelatin silver prints

Conclusion

Figure 155. Left: Bogong moth film shadowgram scan detail. Right: ‘Shadow’ photograph of a single Ytterbium

atom. Source: Streed, 2012

Addendum

Figure 156. Example of a starlight exposure timetable provided by astrophysicist Dr Maurizio Toscano

Figure 157. Top: Screen shot of email from Geoffrey Batchen confirming Claudet’s experiments. Bottom: Screen shot

of email from Dr Kenneth Green confirming energy status of Bogong moths Appropriate Durable Record

Figure 159. Syzygy 2/Transit of Leo A, 2011. Two plates

Figure 160. Syzygy 4/Transit of Alpha Centauri, 2011. Two plates

Figure 161. Syzygy 5/Transit of Cygnus B, 2011. Two plates

Figure 162. Syzygy 6/Transit of Cygnus C, 2011. Two plates

Figure 163. Syzygy 7/Transit of Cassiopeia, 2011. Two plates

Figure 164. Syzygy 11/Transit of Carinae A, 2011. Two plates

Figure 165. Syzygy 12/Transit of Scorpius B, 2011. Two plates

Figure 166. Syzygy 15/Transit of Dorado A, 2011. Two plates

Figure 167. Syzygy 16: Transit of Carinae B, 2011. Two plates

Figure 168. Syzygy 17/Transit of Carinae C, 2011. Two plates

Figure 169. Syzygy 18/Transit of the Heart, 2011. Two plates

Figure 170. Syzygy 19/Transit of Magellan, 2011. Two plates

Figure 171. Syzygy 20/Transit of Leo B, 2011. Two plates

Figure 172. Syzygy 21/Transit of Beta Centauri, 2011. Two plates

Figure 173. Syzygy 22/Transit of Fornax A, 2011. Two plates

Figure 174. Syzygy 23/Transit of Fornax B, 2011. Two plates

Figure 175. Syzygy 24/Transit of Carina Volans, 2011. Two plates

Figure 176. Syzygy 25/Transit of Carinae D, 2011. Two plates

Figure 177. Telescope 1, 2011. Eight plates


Figure 179. Telescope 3, 2011. Six plates

Figure 180. Telescope 4, 2011. Four plates


fibre paper plein air shadowgrams, each print 107cm x 107cm. Float-mounted and framed

Figure 182. The End of the Age of Entitlement, 2014. Pigment ink-jet print on Museo Portfolio rag paper, 123cm x

105 cm image on 136cm x 111cm paper sheet. Unframed.

Figure 183. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 1, 2014



Figure186. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 4, 2014


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Figure 197. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 15, 2014 Figure 198. Ekkyklêma 1, 2014. 40 tiles. Dimensions variable

Figure 199. Ekkyklêma 2, 2014. 39 tiles. Dimensions variable Figure 200. Ekkyklêma 3, 2014. 33 tiles (29 shown). Dimensions variable Figure 201. Making Gathering Shadows DVD, 2014

Figure 202. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation overview


Figure 204. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of light tables

Figure 205. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Part 3 of Ekkyklêma

Figure 206. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of Part 3 of Ekkyklêma



Figure 209. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Overview of part of Syzygy and Telecsope


Figure 211. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of a Syzygy piece

Figure 212. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of a Telecsope piece

Figure 213. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of part of Minds in the Cave Figure 214. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of a Minds in the Cave diptych Figure 215. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of part of Minds in the Cave Figure 216. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of a Minds in the Cave diptych Figure 217. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being

Figure 218. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. The End of the Age of Entitlement

Figure 219. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of video playing documentary loop

Critical Feedback

Figure 220. Scans of pages 154-159 of Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region, 2010 by Paul Carter

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Abstract

The practice-led art research project Gathering Shadows investigates the ‘tragic’ visual

poetics of a speculative ‘ecological gaze’ at a time of ecological crisis. The work

replaces the distancing objectification of lens-based capture with a unique indexical

methodology focussed upon the cameraless outdoor nocturnal photography of live

invertebrates and human artifacts. The work presents a symbolic order of dark and

intimate x-ray like shadows in which insect umwelten operates as an index of

nonhuman selfhood and place and insect abjection alludes to the multiple ‘tragedies’ of

the human and non-human ecological predicament. The subjects of these works are

drawn from two sites. The first, semi-arid Lake Tyrrell in the Victorian Mallee once

informed a sacred reciprocity of sky with country in indigenous culture. The loss of

this reciprocity is memorialized by using starlight falling on the lakebed to contact

print films with the imagery of insects gathered from the lakeshore, imaging one

species en masse on paper and digitally reiterating another. The second site, sub-alpine

Mount Buffalo in the Australian Alps is a region already in decline due to climate

change. Here, cameraless images of the keystone species Bogong Moth (Agrotis infusa)

were gathered from a summit cave and digitally reiterated as detailed inkjet

enlargements. A summary piece comprising cameraless film imagery from both

locations links the two sites. The project confirms the auratic power of the site-

specific indexical analogic methods, establishes the unique revelatory potential of

digital reiteration of cameraless imagery and contributes to the biosemiotic

reimagining and anti-anthropocentric repositioning of invertebrates and ‘landscape’

within photography in ways that aim to legitimize the tragic form as an appropriate

aesthetic frame through which to apprehend our ecological predicament.

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Introduction

Overview

This doctoral research project Gathering Shadows investigates the creation of

photographic art manifesting an “ecological gaze”. The research explores how an

ecopoetics of place resonant of human/nonhuman relations and Tragedy can be

created through cameraless photography. The loci of study were two Victorian

localities: semi arid Lake Tyrrell and sub alpine Mount Buffalo [Fig 1]. The outcome

is a portfolio of unique analogue film and paper artworks and digitally reiterated

paper artworks. Through this original material practice and accompanying exegesis

the research endeavoured to contribute to photography’s renegotiation of ‘landscape’

as ontology, phenomena and affect.

Fig 1. The two research sites. Base map source: Google Earth

This research is driven by the question: In what ways can an eco log i cal gaze be

evoked through cameraless photography? I have addressed this question in three

ways. First, in the ‘thinking eye’ of chapter one I enquire into why and how a

philosophically conceived ecological gaze can inform the making and the

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interpretation of art and photography about place. Second, in the ‘embodied eye’ of

chapter two I consider why and how the privileging of human/nonhuman relations

implied by an ecological gaze can be expressed through a biosemiotic index of

cameraless touch and shadows. Third, in the ‘feeling eye’ of chapter three I discuss

why and how a sense of tragedy intrinsic to ecological gazing could be signified

through abject subjects – principally, in this project – invertebrates. Each of these

lines of enquiry informed the creative material strategies at the heart of the research –

the art – examined in chapters four and five.

Context

The theoretical drivers of Gathering Shadows were eclectic and particular. The ecology

informing the gaze was firmly grounded in science. Its cultural and perceptual

implications however were refracted through Fernand Braudel’s historiography of

the la longue durée (Braudel, 1980), Lorraine Code’s ‘negotiated empiricism’ (Code,

2006) and Val Plumwood’s critique of anthropocentrism (Plumwood, 1993, 2002),

Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotics (von Uexküll 1982, 2010), the pan-biosemiotic

‘thinking like a forest’ of Eduardo Kohn (Kohn, 2013), the pragmatic ethics of

Emma Marris (Marris, 2011) and Aldo Leopold’s ‘ecological aesthetic’ (Leopold,

1987). Neil Evernden’s defense of the Pathetic Fallacy as ecologically rational

(Everdon, 1978) helped tie these disparate threads together. Terry Eagleton’s Sweet

Violence: the idea of the tragic (Eagleton, 2003) first alerted me to the possibility that

nature might be considered the sacrificial scapegoat or tragic pharmakos of modernity,

a speculation deepened by Alfred Whitehead’s essay on secular tragedy (Whitehead,

2011), Kate Rigby’s discussion about Christa Wolf’s essay on Chernobyl (Rigby,

2007), and Garrett Hardin’s parable of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin, 1968).

Julia Kristeva’s conception of the ‘abject’ (Kristeva, 1982) as a characterization of

invertebrates became both the pivotal tragic visual trope in the project and the

affectual glue linking these ideas together. With respect to the aesthetic agenda,

Timothy Morton’s proposal for a ‘dark’ ecological aesthetics (despite his

unacceptable rejection of the idea of Nature) suffused the research vision (Morton,

2010), a stance deepened and clarified by Victor Stoichiţă’s analysis of the shadow

(Stoichiţă, 1997), David Lewis-William’s speculations on the prehistorical origins of

art in darkness (Lewis-Williams, 2002), Roland Barthes’ thoughts on memory and the

‘punctum’ (Barthes, 1981), Geoffrey Batchen’s observations about the nexus between

15

landscape ideals and the invention of photography (Batchen, 1999), Jay Prosser’s

linking of photography and loss (2005) and Susan Ramsenthaler’s (Ramsenthaler,

2003, 2012) interrogation of cameraless photography’s indexical power. This assorted

literature underpins my contention that cameraless imaging not only shares but

extends the dark subtext of camera vision, a subtext eloquently invoked by art

theorist James Elkins when he writes that

Photographs have forced something on us: not only a blurred glimpse of our

own deaths, a sense of memory as photographic grain, a dim look at the

passage of time, or a poignant prick of mortality, but something about the

world’s own deadness, its inert resistance to whatever it is we may hope or

want (Elkins, 2011: xi-xii).

It is by virtue of this ‘resistance to whatever it is we may hope or want’ that the

ecopoetics of abjection and shadows alludes to the tragedy of the two sites under

investigation, that of ecosystems everywhere, and the human condition.

In its site-specific making and outcomes this ecopoetics corresponded to what

cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls an “intimate and subjective geography”

of “thick description” (Geertz, 1973: 3) mediated through “imagination” (Italiano

2008: 3-4) as well as what Paul Carter deems “material thinking” that attempts “to

materialize discourse itself” (Carter, 2004: 9) in ways that subordinate language to the

artist’s instincts and the sensuous immediacy of physical (and in this project,

ecological) phenomena. Unsurprisingly, the link between the writing, the geography

and the art of Gathering Shadows was a messy oscillation between the exposition of the

written word (or theory), the phenomenology of the two sites (and their

invertebrates) and the slow, exhausting, uncomfortable, joyful, erratic, uncertain, yet

enchanting material task of shadow gathering – that is – the diverse practices of

collecting, holding, sifting, making, remaking and re-remaking, required of the art-

creation process.

Gathering Shadows’ practice led research can be situated within four strands of

historical and contemporary image making. First, the project is an instance of what

Ben Tufnell calls ‘environmental art’ (Tufnell, 2006), Malcolm Miles denotes as ‘eco-

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aesthetics’ (Miles, 2014) and Andrew Brown describes as an ecologically ‘engaged

practice’ that aims to “re/view” and/or “re/form” the world (Brown, 2014: 5) and

whose material, conceptual and ethical antecedents can be traced to the ‘land art’

movements of the 1960s. Second, by averring from the unexamined

anthropocentrism and ‘trite epiphanies’ (Solnit, 2007) of the landscape genre to

instead signify the ecology of place and non-human ‘presence’ (Elkins, 2008: 82)

indirectly through touch and shadows, the research presents a critical engagement

with and response to camera-based landscape traditions. Third, the highly detailed

images of live invertebrates distinctive to the project owe much to precedents in long

established traditions of scientific, natural history, wildlife and microscopic

photography. Fourth, although the project’s cameraless methodologies hark back to

the earliest origins of the medium and their interwar modernist resurgence, its most

significant material affinities are with the contemporary cameraless analogue art

practices of Adam Fuss, Christl Berg and Susan Derges. Nevertherless, none of these

artists’ practices has influenced the techniques or contents of Gathering Shadows.

A fifth strand of artistic context is personal. Research for Gathering Shadows builds on

a decade of wilderness photography followed by two decades in which I explored

places with a minimal human presence using cameraless methods. The initial turning

from camera to cameraless practice took place during my 1992-94 MA research for

Cathexis, a project that aimed to overcome the “affectual and physical” separation of

artist, emulsion and ecosystem in order to express a ‘biocentric’ aesthetic (Nankin,

1994; Crombie, 2010: 19-21, 30, 31). The accidental cameraless imaging of a Mallee

beetle in 2003 brought the artistic potential of insects to mind – a potential pursued

fully and for the first time in this project. Whilst some past outdoor work was

undertaken alone or with one assistant, the repeated involvement of teams of

volunteers in the larger projects lent them an air of ritual or performance, a quality

also found in this research.

The doctoral research for Gathering Shadows represents a radical departure both from

my own prior work and that of any other photographic art practitioner in several

ways: from a typical focus on a single locality or none in particular to a close pairing

of two contrasting spatial ecologies; from imagery of weather, stationary outdoor

plants and water or studio subjects to the unpredictability of wild living invertebrates

17

in situ; from treating the analogue originals as artworks to reiterating them

analogically outdoors or digitally in extreme detail; and from presenting the terrestrial

nonhuman records alone (or with text) to incorporating human-made imagery.

Above all, unlike most of my prior work or that of any other shadowgram

practitioner, the ecological gaze of Gathering Shadows privileges biosemiosis and

abjection, the twin foundations of ecological tragedy.

My own life span closely corresponds to what physicist Will Steffan calls “The Great

Acceleration”: the period of historically unprecedented, sudden growth in

ecologically impactful human activities beginning around 1950 (Steffan, 2007: 617).

The Great Acceleration has brought unquestionable cultural and economic benefits

to humanity, but it is the interpretation of its effects on the nonhuman world – the

ecological crisis – that is the major concern of Gathering Shadows.

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Chapter 1

The thinking eye of ecological gazing: anthropocentrism, landscape and photography

Ecological gazing

An ‘ecological gaze’ is a speculative aesthetic stance articulating a self-reflexive

response to ecological knowledge, experiences and phenomena. The word

‘ecological’ refers to the science of ecology and the epistemological, ontological and

ethical ideas orbiting it. Ecology may be a kind of metanarrative but its gaze remains

“incredulous” in the face of absolute claims to meaning (Lyotard and McKeon, 1984:

122). It is an open, multi-sensory poetic engagement with the ecological in general

and the non-human in particular. Ostensibly visual, such a ‘gaze’ emphasizes the

individual psychology of optical perception and the cultural contingencies of both

‘ways of seeing’ (Berger, 2008) and “ways of knowing” (Kohn, 2005: 175). The

meaning of the ‘ecological gaze’ here is far broader than Jane Stadler’s description of

the Tasmanian cinematic baroque (Stadler, 2012) but overlaps with Claude Raffestin’s

characterization of the process-centred proto-environmentalism of George Perkins

Marsh (Crampton and Eldon, 2007:135).

An ecological gaze implies modes of thinking, feeling and making mediated by

ecological phenomona and their affects. Informed by both ‘nature endorsing’

empirical and environmentalist perspectives and cultural constructivist ‘nature

skeptical’ arguments (Soper, 1995: 4) the ecological gaze draws upon a range of

scientific and philosophical considerations of the role of ‘nature’ in modernity. The

neologism, does not have fixed meaning for it implies a dialectic of ecological

apprehension and expression. The ecological is understood ontologically (through

science), philosophically (as cultural critique), ethically (as values), semiotically (as

representation) and phenomenologically (as sense experience), whilst its expression is

an affectual, aesthetic, cognitive and – articulated as art – creative response to this

apprehension. Expressive responses modulate ecological perceptions that in turn

further mediate expression, and so on.

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Ecological thinking

Ecology is the study of the physical and temporal relationship of living things,

including human beings, to their environment. The foundation of ecological

thinking, the science of ecology, is a trans-disciplinary field (Odum and Barrett, 2005:

15-16) built upon Darwinian evolutionary principles of natural selection and

adaptation. Coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1869, the word conjoins the Greek oikos or

“household” with logos or “study” (Odum and Barrett, 2005: 16). The ‘house’ in this

“study of the household” is the entire living earth. The subject of ‘study’ is the

relationship of organisms with their environment (Odum and Barrett, 2005: 2). These

relationships are understood to be self-organised, nested, hierarchical systems of biotic

(living) and abiotic (non-living) interactions ranging from the organism down to the

anatomical, cellular, molecular and atomic and up, from the individual to the

population, community, ecosystem, landscape, biome and the planetary ecosphere as

a whole (Odum and Barrett, 2005: 4-6). Biosystems are conceptualized as cybernetic

(control and regulation) entities exhibiting positive (reinforcing) and negative

(restraining) feedback loops, homeostatic (steady state), homeorhesic (pulsing) and

chaotic behaviour. They are also said to exhibit overarching or “transcending

functions” such as development, diversity, energetics, regulation, integration and

evolution (Odum and Barrett, 2005: 9).

The properties of any higher-level biotic system are “collective” or “emergent” rather

than additive or predictable because larger “functional wholes” interact in ways that

are different from those expected from the mere sum of their constituent lower-

order parts (Odum and Barrett, 2005: 7). Biotic continuities can also be understood

as information flows. To anthropologist Gregory Bateson the aggregate of cybernetic

flows linking individuals, society and the non-human realm fulfills the definition of

mind (Bateson, 1980: 101-104). James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and Lynn Margulis’

earth systems science proposed that the unique geochemical conditions favourable to

life on earth are regulated by life itself: despite Lovelock’s anthropomorphic term, his

claim for the auto-creative capacity of Gaia is presented as emergent, rather than

sentient (Lovelock, 1979: 3).

By providing overwhelming evidence of biophysical processes, ecological insights

underscore the difficulty of finding emotional safe harbour in conventional habits of

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human self-perception and contextual understanding. It is a schism summarized by

Norbert Elias as beginning, historically, with cosmology, in the seismic shift away

from the certainties of the Aristotelian “geocentric” world view to the unsettling

“heliocentric” “world-image” dominant since Copernicus:

The geocentric world-image was an expression of unreflected self-centredness,

an aspect of people’s primary form of experience. For thousands of years,

human beings had experienced the heavenly bodies as moving around

themselves and thus around the earth as the centre of the universe. They

perceived, as a matter of course, the whole world as made for them. Even the

gods did not have much else to do apart from being gods for humans (Elias,

1987: 132-33).

The collapse of the geocentric model of cosmological space was intensified by the

increasing awareness of the unimaginable scale and complexity of the universe (Maor,

1991; Koupelis, 2010; Hoffman, 2011) which was matched by the discovery of the

near-unfathomable breadth of past and potential cosmological time and natural

histories, a perspective assimilated into human history as la longue durée (Braudel,

1980) and environmental history (Griffiths, 2000). Evolutionary theory further

demoted humans from their previously privileged status and undermined the

theological teleology of pre-scientific worldviews. This comparatively recent release

from the “magical-mythical level of experience of ‘nature’” (Elias, 1987: 135) may

never be complete, yet nonetheless continues to erode binary oppositions between

man and nature.

Humans, like all species, are dependent on the planet’s “life support services” and its

feedback loops (Odum and Barrett, 2005: 2). Unlike other species however, modern

humans are the creators of an expanding material culture of resource consumption

and waste so vast and ubiquitous that it is destabilizing the biosphere. Among the

extensive and complex effects of such anthropogenic processes, three stand out as

the most serious and global: biodiversity collapse (Kerr, 1995), ocean acidification

(Orr et al, 2005) and global warming (Hansen, 1998). The scale of anthropogenic

change evident since the early industrial revolution has led some scientists to suggest

the Holocene period has reached an end, and that we have now entered a new

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geological epoch defined by the footprint of humanity: the Anthropocene (Crutzen,

2003). It is a predicament justifiably described by environmental commentators since

the late 1960’s as the ecological crisis (Love, 1970; Bowers, 1993; Plumwood, 2002;

White in Gottlieb, 2004: 192-201; Barry, 2005).

In its broadest sense, ecological thinking encompasses an awareness of extended

cosmological space, geological time, evolutionary descent and ecological

interdependence. Its most unsettling result is a radical decentering of an

anthropocentric perspective forcing us to concede that we have never been either

pivotal to or independent of the broader spatial and temporal scheme of things.

That ecological thinking presents a major challenge to western metanarratives of

human mastery over the non-human world is the subject of considerable

contemporary political and social theorizing. Ecology has such profound

epistemological, ontological and ethical implications it has been called ‘the subversive

science’ (Johnson, 1970: 555). Eco-critical scholar Timothy Morton encapsulates the

unsettling cultural implications of ecological insights and perspectives in the face of

ecological crisis as “the ecological thought” (Morton, 2010). As Lorraine Code

observes:

Much as humanism unsettled the rhetorical and social authority of theism in

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thought, so at the beginning of

the twenty-first century ecological thinking interrogates and endeavours to

unsettle the self-certainties of western capitalism and the epistemologies of

mastery it underwrites (Code, 2006: 3-4)

Unsurprisingly, one reaction has been to downplay the social and political

significance of ecology or its crisis. To the extent it is acknowledged at all, many neo-

classical economic theorists focus on the underpricing of natural capital, a form of

market inefficiency (Stern, 2010). Marxist commentators tend to portray the over-

exploitation of nature as a secondary dialectical contradiction inherent in the

operation of capitalist structures of domination (Kovel, 2008: 103-108; Ruether,

2008: 95-102; Commoner, 1974; Bookchin, 1994) whereas for other ‘green’ Marxists

environmental impacts will be capitalism’s undoing (O’Connor, 1998). Mainstream

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environmentalists on the other hand view environmental degradation to be a result

of scientific ignorance, incompetent leadership and the undue influence of vested

economic interests (Pepper, 1996).

More discerning analysis is offered by eco-critical neo-Marxist, eco-feminist and

post-colonial theorists who locate the cause of the ecological crisis within ethical and

ideological formations intrinsic to modernity. Their preeminent target is the

ideational and affective formation facilitating human mastery over the nonhuman

world. In short, they critique anthropocentrism, a foundational premise of western

humanism that assumes human interests are the loci of all value: a force that

facilitates the devaluing and exploitation of the non-human world at a more

fundamental level than capitalism.

Explanations of how anthropocentrism functions are derived from its two main

components: instrumental reason and dualism. Instrumental reason is the rational

interrogation of the world facilitating the imposition of human will upon it.

Anthropocentric ‘dualism’ is the belief that humans are fundamentally distinct from

and superior to all other living and non-living things, a feature of western culture

since antiquity. As an example, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood draws on

feminist and post-colonial critiques of modernity whilst downplaying Marxist

explanations of nature as incidental victim (Plumwood, 1993, 2002). Plumwood

identifies an entrenched “standpoint of mastery” infecting western culture

responsible for the dualist “hyperseparation” of ourselves as individuals from other

humans and nature. For Plumwood, modernity “subordinates” and “colonizes” the

non-human world as an instrument of control (Plumwood, 2002: 61).

Ecological thinking as a challenge to instrumental reason

Building on the notion first proposed by Max Weber, Frankfurt School theorists Max

Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno contend that modernity replaced pre-modern

‘objective reason’ where things were perceived as “animate and active” (DeLuca,

2001: 313), with ‘instrumental reason’, the reductionist, distancing “enlightenment

thinking” that has de-mystified, de-animated and objectified the world, facilitating its

“rational” exploitation (Merchant, 2008: 18). Herbert Marcuse extended the analysis

by linking the exploitation of people as objects in market economies to the

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transformation of nature into a commodity (Marcuse, 2008: 67-70). Although the

Frankfurt theorists never developed an “ecocentric” critique of modernity their

analysis did represent an attempted “reconciliation with nature” (Eckersley, 2008:

84). The issue was also pursued by phenomenologist Edmund Husserl as a “critique

of naturalism, the beginnings of an understanding of nature, rationality, and

knowledge that would overcome the nihilism of uncritical scientism and instrumental

rationality” (Brown and Toadvine, 2003: xiii). Ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant adds

monotheism’s “god-trick” with its false “visionary promise” of transcendent

omniscience (Code, 2006: 118) as a factor in the rise of scientific rationalism, coupled

with the rise of capitalism, for replacing a sense of nature as animate and alive with

one that is inert and mechanical, leading to the ontological and now imminent “death

of nature” (Merchant, 1980).

These criticisms misrepresent science in three ways. First, they fail to disentangle

instrumental reason from science: instrumental reason is an outlook characterized by

ethical dualism, an ideology of progress and the privileging of ends over means for

which empirical epistemology may be invoked but is not tethered. Ecophilosopher

Val Plumwood understands this when she argues the problem has never been science

itself but its capture by “monological” corporate, bureaucratic, military and state

power as a tool of oppression (Plumwood, 2002: 14), a view that accords with

observations that scientific practices tend to be socially determined (Latour, 1986) or

trapped within the dialectics of the market (Levins, 1985). Plumwood calls this

science’s “double face” (Plumwood, 2002: 38).

Second, these criticisms unfairly caricature actual scientific practice. Thomas Kuhn

identified cultural paradigms (Kuhn, 1970) and Michael Polanyi and others have

uncovered the critical but tacit roles of intuition, aesthetics, emotion and morality in

the conduct of scientific enquiry (Pozzali, 2008). The biological sciences in particular

are neither blindly reductionist nor indifferent to the life-affirming perspectives of

‘objective reason’ (Hayward, 1995: 4-7).

Third, the criticisms ignore the role of science in the formation and maintenance of

ecological thinking. Scientific ecological practice is grounded in empirical method but

many of its framing theories such as ‘flows’, ‘food chains’ and ‘biomes’ are relational

24

metaphors (Fesmire, 2010: 191), many of its environmental goals like ‘conservation’,

‘sustainability’ and ‘biodiversity’ are ill-defined and the bulk of its empirical insights

are contextual and incomplete (Code, 2006: 42). Consequently, unlike its exacting

constituent biological and geophysical disciplines, ecology proffers only “limited

predictive powers” (Merchant, 2008: 19), an attribute indicative of its unique status as

both a “soft” (qualitative, irreducible, descriptive, ‘subjective’) and “hard”

(quantitative, reducible, physical, ‘objective’) science (Code, 2006: 42). These eclectic

scientific credentials and contingent perspectives are not weaknesses because they

induce resistance to crude reductionism and metanarratives of human mastery (Code,

2006: 51). Consequently, although science is often associated with the instrumentalist

‘standpoint of mastery’, it is both pivotal to the production of the very ecological

knowledge that undermines anthropocentrism and offers a unique model for

thinking outside science. As eco-critical philosopher Lorraine Code observes, it

reconfigures relationships all the way down: epistemological, ethical, scientific,

rational, and other relationships between and among living beings and the

inanimate parts of the world. Thus an ecologically derived epistemology is

differently sensitive to the detail and larger patternings of human and

“natural” diversity than the epistemologies of mastery have been: it invokes

criteria and standards of knowing that do in fact seek and respect empirical

evidence, while urging another, arguably better, way of imagining knowledge

and its place in socio-political, geographic structures….With its realist

commitment to reading observational evidence respectfully, while recognizing

that evidence cannot speak for itself, but achieves its status as evidence out of

human-nature encounters (Code, 2006: 47).

Ecology’s better ‘way of imaging knowledge’ has widely influenced philosophy

(Attfield, 1994; Guattari, 2005; Esbjorn-Hargens, 2011), cultural anthropology

(Bateson, 1972; Kohn 2005, 2007, 2013), cognitive theory (Gibson, 1979),

psychology (Mogel, 1984), linguistics (Noth, 1996: 13-15), environmental theory

(Naess, 1973; Devall, 1985; Flader, 1994), jurisprudence (Mylius, 2012), ethics

(Matthews, 2002; Code 2006), political theory (Eckersley, 1992; Plumwood, 1993 and

2002; Hayward, 1995; Mackenzie, 2003; Guattari, 2005; Heise, 2008), the social

sciences (Kelly, 1987; Gozzi, 1999; Fill, 2006; Barton, 2007) and aesthetics (Morton,

25

2007, 2010; Araeen, 2009; Goodbun, 2010; Toadvine, 2011; Davis, 2011). Ecological

terms like carrying capacity, ecosystem services, environment, food chain, habitat,

holism, home range, interdependence, limiting factor, mutualism, niche, recycling,

succession, sustainability, symbiosis and watershed are widely appropriated – and

misappropriated – by business, government and popular culture. Thomas Berry once

predicted the “transformed consciousness” of a coming “Ecozoic” era (Berry, 1992:

48). Fritjof Capra goes so far as to maintain ecological thinking has infiltrated

scholarship and public discourse so thoroughly ecology is the “social paradigm” of

the age (Capra in Merchant, 2008: 366), a rendering of ‘paradigm’ (Kuhn, 1970)

hardly distinguishable from Michel Foucault’s episteme (Foucault, 2002). A more

measured characterization might be that the ecological is increasingly recognised as a

hitherto overlooked fundamental aspect of the human condition and la longue durée of

human history.

Scientific ecology gives rise to the kind of emergent qualities and ontologies that

could, paradoxically, offer routes to the kind of re-enchantment Adorno,

Horkheimer and Merchant grieve for. Many of its methods and insights are

analogous to the intimate environmental observation and geophylic life-world of

animist peoples (Gadgil, 1993; Turner, 2000) prior to the rise of agriculture and

urbanism (Oelschlaeger, 1993: 27-29). As a ‘way of imaging knowledge’, ecological

knowing ‘denaturalizes’ the instrumentalist “instituted imaginary of mastery”

otherwise considered the only “natural way” of “being and knowing” (Code, 2006:

51). As Neil Evernden long ago wrote

Ecology begins as a normal, reductionist science, but to its own surprise it

winds up denying the subject-object relationship upon which science rests.

(Evernden, 1978: 16)

Thus, an ecologically attentive science resists capture by “monological” power whilst

retaining experience and observation as the primary “substance of its deliberations”.

The result is a “creatively interrogative” mode of “human-nature encounter” (Code,

2006: 51) not dissimilar to that suggested by eco-phenomenological theorists wanting

to “establish a middle ground between objectivity and mysticism on the basis of lived

experience” (Glazenbrook, 2005: 507). This ‘middle ground’ emerges, in part, out of

26

a sensitivity to signs indicative of what cultural anthropologist Eduardo Kohn calls the

aliveness, ‘agency’ or ‘self-hood’ of the nonhuman world (Kohn, 2013: 16). We might

call such an experientially and semiotically “negotiated empiricism” (Code, 2006: 100)

ecological reason.

Ecological thinking as a critique of dualism

The other significant dimension of anthropocentrism, instrumental ‘dualism’,

encapsulates two related propositions: first; that humans and non-humans or ‘nature’

are ontologically distinct; and second, that humans are superior to and have a right to

mastery over nature, an attitude sometimes called object/subject dualism. For eco-

feminist Sherrie Ortner the historical domination of nature is an aspect of dualist

phallocentrism; she traces the devaluation of nature to a gendered split in which

femininity is associated with the emotional, bodily and transient, the male with

intellect, culture and spirit, a position encapsulated in her catch phrase “female is to

male as nature is to culture” (Ortner, 1974; 1997: 174). Classical ontological dualism

is exemplified in the Platonic differentiation of human and animal ‘souls’ and the

Cartesian belief that minds and bodies are independent phenomena to the extent that

only humans have minds. Classical ontological dualism is not scientifically validated

but persists in theistic traditions and popular culture. Whereas classical ontological

dualism projects an almost unmitigated object/subject schism, contemporary

ontological dualism (the much-debated human/nonhuman or nature/culture divide)

is a more complex problem for which there may be no solution that does not also

perpetuate object/subject dualism. These complexities are manifest in attempts at

overturning human/nonhuman ontological dualism coming both from science and

cultural theory.

For the ‘natural’ sciences, ‘nature’ refers to the entirety of extant reality open to

impartial empirical enquiry, including humanity and culture. Ecology and its

attendant scientific disciplines affirm the material interrelatedness and

interdependence of all planetary life, including humans: a deep ontological unity

powerfully conveyed by words like ‘biosphere’, ‘ecosphere’, ‘Gaia’ or ‘earth’. Elegant

as this empirical ontological monism appears however, it tells us nothing about how we

should think about, feel about, value-regard or behave towards anything in particular

within it. A simplistic monist ecological ontology cannot say whether Mount

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Kosciuszko is less, of equal or more interesting, beautiful or important than the

Hoover dam, a pod of calving blue whales, the latest model car or a single living,

laughing middle-aged Australian human. Monist ecological ontology does not

distinguish between the anthropogenic ecology of Manhattan Island and the

prehuman ecology of the Okavango Delta. Monist ecological ontology cannot say

whether the growing global wave of extinctions caused by humans is in any sense

more problematic than that following the Chicxulub asteroid impact 65 million year

ago. Simple naturalistic ecological monism ‘naturalizes’ human destruction of the

biosphere by overlooking the special ecological status and role of humans. Ecological

monism is ontologically legitimate but ethically problematic because it hides rather than

challenges anthropocentric nature objectifying thought, feeling, value and action.

Humanist cultural critique presents nature/human dualism precisely the other way

around, as a binary social construct. To such neo-Marxist and social constructivists

‘nature’ is a cultural fabrication naively conceptualized as an objectively knowable

realm lying outside human subjectivity (Latour, 2004). Lacanian Marxist philosopher

Slajov Žižek rejects nature as “man’s fantasy” (Žižek, 2007) whilst ecocritical theorist

Timothy Morton, a social constructivist proponent of this position, dismisses it as “a

transcendental term in a material mask” (Morton, 2007:14). Skepticism towards

science, an epistemological question, is peripheral: what is in contention is the

legitimacy of the idea of ‘nature’.

Because of its intellectual influence, literary verve and pro-ecological sympathies,

Morton’s thesis is particularly pertinent here. For Timothy Morton the idea of

‘nature’ is noun, verb and adjective, the moral axis differentiating normality from

pathology “along the coordinates of the natural and unnatural”, a catch-all

representing just about everything from “fish” to “free markets” (Morton, 2007: 16).

In attempting to dissolve both the claimed ontological falsity of nature/human

dualism and conflicted conceptions of nature at a time of ecological crisis, Morton

calls us to set aside the Romantic fiction of a separate, autonomous, elemental earthly

nature altogether: “ironically, to contemplate deep green ideas deeply...to let go of the

idea of Nature, the one thing that maintains aesthetic distance between us and them,

us and it, us and “over there”” (Morton, 2007: 204). This “ecology without a concept

of the natural” (Morton, 2007, 24) is an open-ended, all-inclusive, tangled rubric he

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dubs the mesh. This “mesh” is akin to the old doctrine of philosophical naturalism

(Moriarty, 2007: 227), albeit unembellished by the palliatives of Enlightenment

hubris, Romanticism, myth or religion. Morton fills the mesh with a neutral

replacement for ‘nature’, “the strange stranger”, which is everything – inert, alive or

of uncertain life status, familiar and unimaginable – approached with a wonder, fear

and inquisitiveness worthy of its connection to us revealed by an ecologically

informed worldview he dubs “the ecological thought” (Morton, 2010).

Morton’s argument for the dissolution of the false binary differentiating man from

nature is rhetorically seductive but overlooks phenomena for which the appellation

‘nature’ as that ‘wholly or largely not-human or human-made’ remains ontologically

valid (Passmore, 1980: 207), a refusal to pry nature from culture that is generative,

paradoxically, of ethical and practical consequences opposite to those he intends. In a

world dominated by the anthropocentric, individuated “closed personality” Elias calls

homo clausus (Williams, 2011: 85) dispensing with the notion of ‘nature’ as ‘other’ can

only further deligitimize environmental valuation and protection. Far from being

reinforced, positive cultural values currently attached to the preservation of the non-

human primarily because of its otherness would be undermined since they would no

longer be immune from legitimate anthropic subjugation and hybridization.

Abandoning a concept of nature or the natural risks generating a flattened ontology

and an affective miasma within which whales and wilderbeast become morally

indistinguishable from human made phenomena including what Morton calls

anthropogenic “hyperobjects” like plutonium and climate change (Morton, 2010:

130).

Retaining a notion of nature ‘outside’ allows differentiated valuations of the ‘other’ to

be precipitated out of the mesh. Nature as it might be most narrowly characterized is

that which is not human or human-made. Despite the difficulty of teasing it out from

anthropic influences like selective breeding, hybridization or genetic modification the

concept ‘nature’ remains ontologically useful as well as emotionally and ethically

indispensable for, although imperfect, it allows us to navigate the ontological and

relational contours of that which is not human or not of human making. To Eileen

Crist, social constructivist deflections of nature/human dualism perpetuate the

“recalcitrance of anthropocentrism” and its unremitting “drive to humanize the

29

earth”; to biologist Michael Soule, constructivist ideology is “as dangerous to the

goals of conservation, preservation, and restoration of natural systems as bulldozers

and chainsaws” (Crist, 2008: 501). As writer Paul Moriarty has observed, valuation of

the non-human, an environmental ethic, requires some kind of nature/culture divide

(Moriarty, 2007: 244). It is a usage that privileges a view common since the 18th

century of ‘nature’ as unspoiled space (Williams in Inglis et al, 2005: 47-62) mixed

with contemporary ecological understanding.

The quintessential case in point is that contested condition of nature, wilderness. There

is no question wilderness is a ‘social contruct’ in that it is a culturally contingent,

myth-laden, “congerie of feelings about man and nature” (Lowenthal, 1962: 19)

burdened by considerable historical baggage. Its cause has been associated with

environmentalist misanthropy, survivalist misogyny, government-sanctioned

genocide, terra nullius, spiritual puritanism, nature mysticism and Romantic fantasy

(Callicot, 2000: 25-28). It is also certain there is now nowhere on the planet’s surface

completely free of anthropogenic impact (Marris, 2011: 2). Presaging Morton,

William Cronon calls wilderness an “illusion” symptomatic of modernity’s alienation

from nature (Cronon, 1996: 88). But ‘wilderness’ does roughly describe the

biogeographical quality of many of the world’s remaining least-modified nonhuman

habitats, some of which are protected legally in land managed as wilderness zones

“where the earth and its community are untramelled by man” (US Congress, 1964).

The exact word is unimportant. Culturally less loaded land use terms like ‘reference

area’ or ‘biodiversity reserve’ have almost identical or – as with ‘national park’ –

partially overlapping meanings in that they refer to large terrestrial spaces dominated by

nonhuman nature (Callicott, 2000: 29). ‘Wilderness’ is just a convenient shorthand: a

normative biogeographical yardstick, the necessary outermost point of that “one pole

of dualism”, nature (Crist, 2007: 518). Without the idea of wilderness (or its neutral

word equivalent) the reality of nonhuman nature has no ‘baseline’; without the idea of

nonhuman nature the possibility of wilderness cannot be comprehended. To press the

argument: far beyond earth, despite satellites, forays to the Moon, ‘Curiosity’ on Mars

and the two ‘Voyagers’ passing out of the Solar System, the incomprehensible

30

vastness of the universe is and will almost certainly remain utterly not human forever.

Understood thus, the universe is celestial ‘wilderness’. Surely, all that is ‘nature’?1

Constructivist analysis of nature/culture dualism is paralleled by what Linda Williams

calls ‘post-anthropocentric’ (Williams, 2009: 44) deconstructions of human/animal

dualism. Donna Harraway critiqued the universalizing and trans-historical

essentialism underpinning western dualist narratives of difference and identity by

arguing for situated knowledges: jettisoning a priori knowledge for condition-specific

understanding obtained through experience, trial and error (Haraway, 1991; 2008).

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari playfully employ the bio-political analogue of the

multi-stemmed, subterranean rhizome to critique the rigidities of ontological dualism

in favour of a proposed state of becoming forever immanent with a multiplicity of

minoritarian “differences” and forms, their rhetorical undoing or deterritorializing of

human uniqueness and subjectivity aims to fog traditional essentialist human/animal

identity boundaries (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). For Jacques Derrida the western

philosophical tradition from Plato to Descartes and beyond has falsely posited the

animal as essentially different from the human in order to help delineate human-ness:

excluding non-human qualities from the idea of the human has obscured our

understanding of both ourselves and the ‘other’, a confused positing of difference

that has profoundly impacted our relationship with the non-human (Derrida and

Mallet 2008). Posthumanist perspectives are paralleled by ‘object oriented ontology’

(‘OOO’) and ‘new materialist’ discourses that attempt to reconcile science with

constructivism by acknowledging the autonomous “agency” of nonhuman objects.

Foremost among these is Karen Barad’s agential realism wherein “the ontological

inseparability of intra-acting agencies” – that is, the identity of phenomena is

understood to emerge through their interactions (Barad in Biagioli 1999: 1-11).

Posthumanist, ‘OOO’ and new materialist softenings of ontological dualism are

seductive; but their preoccupation, respectively, with blurring animal/human

distinctions and relativizing empiricism, blunts relational and ethical criticism of

anthropocentricism. As Eileen Crist contends, presenting the human and nonhuman

as “hybrid” or “co-produced” by a mix of “cultural processes and natural

constraints” (Crist, 2008: 504) – what David Demeritt dubs “constrained

constructivism”– without an ontologically distinct nonhuman, retains the “human- 1 Those who insist on a social constructivist conception of nature seem to remain mired in a pre Copernican geocentric model of cosmological space

31

centred viewpoint” of a “surreptitous” anthropocentrism in which the semantics of

human linguistic, socio-cultural, psychic, technological or economic assignation still

predominate (Crist, 2008: 505). To Gary Steiner such perspectives fail to offer for

humans or animals what any philosophical system worthy of the name should: an

ethics (Steiner 2013: 5). The danger is not merely theoretical: posthumanist discourse

has sought to neutralize resistance to real-world anthropogenic ecological change by

constructing feral invasion as a form of “ecological hybridity” manifesting human

“agency” not “impacts” (Trigger 2010:1061) and continued ecosystem functioning

following major anthropogenic disturbance and species loss as proof of the

“resilience” of natural systems (Gunderson, 2000). In other words, an exploitative

human/nonhuman power relationship more aptly described using postcolonial terms

like ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’ is obscured under a discourse of soporific metaphor

and misrepresented science.

By reducing the ontological validity of the nonhuman, both empirical and cultural

constructivist perspectives inadvertently strengthen anthropocentrism. Consequently,

challenges to anthropocentricism are probably only capable of emerging out of

ontologically differentiated understandings of and responses to the ecological whole,

the most important being that dividing that which is human and human-made from

that which is not. Thus, paradoxically, in order to undermine the crude

anthropocentricism of object/subject relational dualities we need to reframe rather

than reject human/nonhuman ontological dualism. In any case, dualistic thinking

seems hardwired. As cultural anthropologist Eduardo Kohn has written

This dualism is not just a sociocultural product of a particular time or place; it

goes “hand in hand” with being human, given that our propensity for

dualism…our “twoness”…is the product of the distinctive properties of

human symbolic thought… (Kohn, 2013: 223)

Countering the ecologically damaging effects of anthropocentric dualism “requires an

arduous process of decolonizing our thinking” (Kohn, 2013: 234) in which the

‘otherness’ of the nonhuman becomes a subject of conscientious ecological

conceptualization and intimate subject/subject rather than subject/object relations.

Another way of thinking about it is to consider the deeply interdependent

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relationship of terrestrial nature with culture, the entirety of human and nonhuman

interaction as a two-sided, dynamic whole in which we recognise human/nonhuman

dualism to be ontologically problematic but – contrary to Timothy Morton’s call for

its collapse – practically, ethically and existentially necessary and subject/object

dualism to be real but practically, ethically and existentially problematic. Such a

mindset fulfils the definition of what philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once described as

‘dialectical monism’ (Sartre, Sheridan and Ree, 2004: 15), although from an ecological

perspective we may more appropriately (and more accurately than Morton) call it

ecological thinking.

The (ecologically) thinking eye

The idea of an ecologically-informed aesthetics, the visual dimension of an ecological

gaze, may seem at first glance oxymoronic: ecological knowing suggests attachment

to a subject but vision alone can imply cognitive separation. Cultural theorist David

Levin reflects the popular social constructivist prejudice that vision is the most

reifying, objectifying and hegemonic of the senses, the sense most closely associated

with modernity’s will to power (Levin, 1993: 65). Historian Allan Wallach reveals a

similar position when he argues the post-enlightenment invention of the vista and in

particular the panorama in art are psycho-politically charged; The vista is a

“bourgeois vision” akin to Michel Foucault’s panoptical “sovereign gaze” in which

we observe the world from upon high literally or imaginatively because we identify

our security and power with that of the state metaphorically watching over us

(DeLue, 2008: 318). Although the panorama in art did indeed arise in an imperial age

it is also true that nearly all people in every culture enjoy high vantage points for

observation, safety or refuge and for their own sake regardless of real or vicarious

feelings of possession. As philosopher Tim Ingold points out, to

philosophical critics of visualism…to see is to reduce the environment to

objects that are to be grasped and appropriated as representations in the mind.

The irony is that this…[approach]…has its source in the very Cartesian

epistemology that they seek to dethrone. What they offer, then is not an

account of visual practice, but a critique of modernity dressed up as a critique

of the hegemony of vision (Ingold, 2000: 286-287)

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The causal link is thus opposite to social constructivist claims: vision is not

intrinsically reifying, objectifying or hegemonic. Culture steers it so.

In the never-ending nature/nurture debate there is however no doubt hardwiring has

some role. Biologist Edward O. Wilson thinks all humans have “biophilia”, a

subconscious attraction to living things and species-rich environments (Wilson, 1984;

Kellert, 1995). Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen present a “savanna hypothesis”

explaining the apparent cross-cultural liking for open, gently undulating, lightly

wooded landscapes and acacia-like trees with broad canopies and short, branchless

trunks as ancient evolutionary adaptations (Orians, 1992; Orians and Heerwagen,

1995: 557; Adevi and Grahn, 2012: 28). Other researchers speculate that the

common desire for “neat landscapes” (Williams & Carey, 2012: 259) and for “water,

large trees, a focal point, changes in elevation, semi-open space, even ground cover,

distant views to the horizon and moderate degrees of complexity” may be instinctive

(Orians & Heerwagen, 1995: 560). Outside instinct, personal experiences profoundly

influence environmental tastes. Richard Louv has shown how childhood contact with

nature is critical to mental and physical well being including the ability to feel

comfort in and valuation of the nonhuman world (Louv, 2013). Notwithstanding

urban childhoods with little or no experience of the outdoors, other research

indicates people tend to “attach to the type of landscape in which they grew up”

(Adevi and Grahn, 2011: 47): farm life generates appreciation of agricultural

landscapes; lakeside holidays produce a taste for freshwater spaces. The problem is,

there is no necessary correlation between instinct or experience and ecological

judgement: park-like landscapes may be maintained by overgrazing or a pretty lake

may be a dam hiding a drowned forest.

Normative models for an ecologically informed aesthetics have been explored by

many commentators; two outstanding examples are Aldo Leopold’s “land aesthetic”

in which ecological integrity or “health” is considered the measure of “beauty”

(Callicott, 2008:105) and Allen Carlson’s “aesthetic functionalism”, where nested

causal relationships define environmental “value” (Bannon, 2011: 417-18). Taking

aim at the very notion of such an aesthetics however, philosopher Gordon Graham

has argued ecological sensibility renders an aesthetic response “essentially secondary”

because it relies on a “truth” revealed through other modes of understanding such as

34

ecological knowledge: we “may wonder at the far-reaching and impressive balance of

forces that nature exhibits, but it is scientific and not aesthetic judgement that reveals

this to us” (Graham, 2005, 219). Yet this argument fails to acknowledge that just like

taste in art, aesthetic responses to nature are unconsciously as well as consciously

conditioned by knowledge. It is, for instance, well documented that landscape

preferences reflect education and occupation: rural dwellers familiar with the signs of

overgrazing see ecologically healthy landscapes as more attractive than do urbanites

(Williams and Carey, 2002: 267-8). An ecological gaze is of course more than the

expression of internalized knowledge leavened by personal experience: a thinking eye

would also be sensitized to ecological embodiment and feelings – the topics of the

next two chapters.

Art and the (ecologically) thinking eye

The symbolic representation of nature – something indicative of fully modern human

consciousness – has a ubiquitous presence in art history. Wild animals for instance are

the dominant subjects of the oldest surviving parietal art of the Upper Palaeolithic [Fig 2]

and Australian indigenous representations of animals invariably reference dreamtime and

country. From its beginnings in first century Rome, natural history illustration has

reported and/or sought to explain nature’s wonders and workings, whilst ever since its

emergence in twelfth century China and fifteenth century Europe the landscape genre has

articulated changing aesthetic, spiritual and affectual responses to and ideas about the

nonhuman world (Brown, 2014: 9). The emergence of the ‘environmental art’ movement

around 1968 (Tufnell, 200:13) reflected a transition from what art theorist Hal Foster

called a “vertical” idea of art in which value is determined by style, repetition and method

to a “horizontal” approach in which art participates in thematic or cultural discourses,

namely environmental ideas (Foster, 1996: 184). Andrew Brown divides the vast, diverse

and growing corpus of contemporary ecologically “engaged practice” (Brown, 2014: 9)

into a six stream “taxonomy” (Brown, 2014: 15): artists who “re/view” the world by

bearing witness to it; those who “re/form” the material environment through creative re-

making or re-contextualizing; practitioners whose work is an act of “re/search” into

natural phenomena and processes; those who interrogate or “re/use” the culture of

consumption and waste; artists who imagine or “re/create” alternative worlds and those

who actively “re/act” to the world by intervening to change it (Brown, 2014: 5).

Although the materialist “phenomenological or experiential understanding of the site”

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(Kwon, 2002: 3) articulated by most ecological art practitioners ignores recent critical

notions of site as a “social/institutional” space, their work almost always serves what

Miwon Kwon calls a “discursive” purpose that interogates theoretical concerns beyond

the specificity of any particular site, namely ecological questions (Kwon, 2002: 3).

Although all six streams of Brown’s taxonomy point to an ecological gaze with

photographic exemplars and ‘landscape’ references, only the first – ‘re/view’ – does so

preeminently.

Figure 2. Lascaux Cave, France c17,000 BCE www.lascaux.culture.fr/?lng=en#/fr/00.xml

Photography and the (ecologically) thinking eye

The ecological gaze is an art-making concept, a speculative mode of reflection and

creation focused in this project on a single medium, photography; but the link

between ecology and the photograph extends beyond art. Together, the medium of

photography as “art, document, market, and science” (Miller, 1998: 24) suffuses

visual culture so completely that “we are still in the process of absorbing its effects”

(Thomas et al, 1997: 8). Most importantly, the ‘effects’ of photography’s unparalleled

ability to bear witness to or “re/view” the world have contributed to ecological

thinking by virtue of doing what only photography can do: record what the naked eye

sees and see the erstwhile invisible–from the microscopically small and telescopically

distant, the lightning fast and imperceptibly slow, the undetectably faint and

blindingly bright–to objects blocked from view and light emanations at wavelengths

beyond unaided human perception. Whilst naked eye vision is largely the purview of

art, documentary and commercial practice, it is scientific photography–the mainstay

of non-naked eye imaging–that has most profoundly informed our vision of nature.

As Ann Thomas observes, our contemporary world view owes much to the

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extraordinary aspects of the universe revealed by photographs of the sun’s

corona during an eclipse, the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, and

those photographs that capture actions and organisms visible only to the

assisted eye–from sequential movements of a galloping horse to “portraits” of

bacteria, from the structure of distant galaxies to the mysterious secrets of the

composition of matter…(Thomas et al, 1997: 8)

Many scientific images are of what Jeffrey Fraenkel and Frish Brandt call “the

unphotographable” (Fraenkel, 2013); that is, photographs for which the making or

content is revelatory, inexplicable or uncanny. Some of these have had momentous

impact. Edwin Hubble’s astronomical glass plate of the Andromeda galaxy playfully

titled M31 Var! exposed on the night of October 5-6, 1923 at the Mount Wilson

observatory in California [Fig 3] proved the Milky Way was but one galaxy among

many; that space and time were far more vast than previously imagined. It also

suggested that post-Copernican heliocentrism was still naively anthropocentric, for

we lived in a universe without centre (Grula, 2008).

Figure 3. Edwin Hubble: Var! photograph of Andromeda galaxy, 1923

https://obs.carnegiescience.edu/PAST/m31var

A second example was Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography “Photo 51” [Fig 4].

Made in May 1952, it established the double helix geometry of DNA announced the

following year by Francis Crick and James Watson (Maddox, 2012).

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Figure 4. Rosalind Franklin: Photo 51, 1952

http://genomicobservatories.blogspot.com.au

Perhaps the most famous example–albeit one executed during a scientific enterprise

rather than as a scientific investigation in itself–was Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders’

hand-held Hasselblad photograph of the earth taken from moon orbit on 24

December, 1968, the first single natural colour image of the entire planet [Fig 5].

Nicknamed “earthrise”, photographer Galen Rowell described it as “the most

influential environmental photograph ever taken” (Life, 2003), a precursor to the

global ecological imaginary or “overview effect” enabled by high altitude terrestrial

reportage (White, 1998).

Figure 5. Bill Anders: Earthrise, 1968

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise

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The experiments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century ‘proto-

photographers’ that eventually led to the invention of photography were driven

principally by a quest to report nature “in terms of landscape” (Batchen, 1999: 69).

The idea of landscape was conditioned by conventions of ‘the picturesque’, a mode

of seeing and representation described by its chief exponent Reverend William Gilpin

as “expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture” (Batchen,

1999: 72). For proponents of the picturesque, the strategy was to find the best

viewpoints and locales aided by instruments that helped cohere disordered, three

dimensional reality into a pleasing prospect of “simplicity and variety” or a “united

whole” (Batchen, 1999: 73). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries such

instruments included the Claude glass, a portable camera obscura (usually with a lens)

and after 1801, the camera lucida.

Like any genre, landscape is a vague construct that in its extensive and eclectic

practice overlaps with most other genres and subjects. Dissecting this diversity

Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock describe eight themes: artistic genre,

God, fact, symbol, pure form, popular culture, concept and politics and propaganda

(Jussim and Lindquist-Cock, 1985). Robert Adams classifies the subject qualitatively:

every landscape photograph contains the three “verities” of geography,

autobiography and metaphor in varying proportion (Adams, 1981: 14). However

defined, the critical question is how well photography of landscape measures up to

the very distinctive verities of ecological thinking.

The nexus of landscape photography and nature preservation, the birth of

photography as environmental ‘politics and propaganda’ (Jussim and Lindquist-Cock,

1985: 137) can be traced to the protection of Yosemite as far back as 1864 (Solnit,

2003), and the establishment, seven years later, of the world’s first ‘national park’,

Yellowstone (Rosenblum, 1997: 135; Newhall, 1982: 100). This so-called wilderness

tradition is most closely bound up with twentieth century American photographer

Ansel Adams’ masterful monochrome craft and sublime vision, which was

characterized by the absence of people [Fig 6]. The “long shadow” of his

photographic aesthetic, edenic ideals and environmental activism are most obvious in

the popularization of the concept, photography and legitimization of the idea of

wilderness (Wells, 2011: 136, 137).

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Figure 6. Ansel Adams: Clearing winter storm, Yosemite valley, California, 1944. Gelatin silver print

www.pixmule.com/ansel-adams-/

Ever since Eliot Porter’s pioneering use of colour in the post war years made it the

modus operandi of popular landscape craft (Ward, 2008: 30) the art and polemic of the

wilderness style has been sumptuous, popular and global. In Australia among the

sub-genre’s most effective exponents was Peter Dombrovskis, whose large-format

technique, “exaggerated visual effects”, wide angle views, extreme close ups and low-

contrast light (Ennis, 2007: 68) publicized the beauty of endangered Tasmanian

environments targeted for conservationist action over nearly two decades. With an

Australian Federal election looming in 1983, Dombrovskis’ lyrical Morning Mist, Rock

Island Bend, Gordon River, Tasmania 1979 [Fig 7] captioned with “Would you vote for a

Party that would destroy this?” (Bonyhady, 1996: 3) was reproduced in newspaper

ads across the country. A key element of a conservation campaign against the Federal

government that would have permitted the damming of the Gordon River for hydro

electricity, the ad tipped sentiment against the incumbent coalition parties and they

were swept from power. The development was stopped and the region became a

National Park (Ward, 2008: 21). The picture’s singular political efficacy generated a

subtext found in all wilderness photographs: vicarious pleasure tinged with anxiety

that such ‘perfection’ is easily obliterated. In other words, wilderness images insinuate

‘tragic’ violation by the very omission of that violation.

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Figure 7. Peter Dombrovskis: Morning mist, Rock island bend, Gordon river, Tasmania, 1979. Colour slide

www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview/?pi=nla.pic-an24365561

Summarizing its wider cultural impact historian Helen Ennis wrote:

Unlike any previous form of landscape photography, wilderness photography

clearly enunciated a duty of care, that is, an environmental position based on

responsibility for and protection of the natural environment (Ennis, 2007: 68)

Yet wilderness photography is also problematic. First, there is the question of the

artistic worth of its formulaic technique and nostalgic Edenism. Second, there is its

uncertain ecological credibility; by excluding human presence wilderness can appear

misanthropic and paradoxically, ecologically false and idealizing (Franklin: 2006;

Stephenson, 2004). Third, wilderness is accused of being “green pornography” or

“eco-porn” generating desire for touristic or vicarious consumption by objectifying

its subject in the same way that sexual pornography incites lust (Drysdale, 1995).

Martin Walch extends this analogy by dividing profit-driven “hard-core exploitation”

imagery used to market unrelated products from the “soft-core objectification” of

“nature-kitsch” designed to “incite desire for natural environments”. He excludes

artists like Dombrovskis from the accusation but exceptions do not mollify the larger

problems of idealising falsity and commercial objectification (Walch, 2004: 3-6).

Paradoxically, it is partly these very faults that render wilderness an instance par

excellance of Kate Soper’s “provocatively contradictory notion” of “avant-garde

nostalgia”, which is

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a movement of thought that…could here make a contribution by reflecting on

past experience in ways that highlight what is preempted by contemporary

forms of consumption, and thereby stimulate desire for a future that will be at

once less environmentally destructive and more sensually gratifying (Soper,

2011: 23-24).

By cataloguing the look and lives of nonhuman nature, the genre most closely aligned

with both science and the wilderness tradition – natural history photography – aids

ecological thinking by reporting animals in their environment. Wildlife photographers

from Patricio Robles Gil, Xi Zhinong, Art Wolfe and Frans Lanting [Fig 8] to David

Doubilet, Mitsuaki Iwago and Michael Nichols employ image and word to celebrate

their nonhuman quarries individual lives and habitats but also indicate their fragility.

Sabastiao Salgado foregrounds this subtext by engaging in an “ecological pedagogy”

in which by approaching wildlife with the same moral sense he previously

documented the poor (Nair, 2011: 116), he questions “the premises of humanism,

whereby the human is exalted over the nonhuman” (Nair, 2011: 22-23). In other

words, the evident fragility of wild creatures insinuates their vulnerability and their

connectedness to us [Fig 9]. Although natural history photography can tend to

anthropomorphism and, like wilderness, to ecological idealization and soft-core

objectification, it is also at least as effective as the wilderness tradition at indicating

what in the nonhuman world is being ‘preempted by contemporary forms of

consumption’ as the wilderness tradition.

Figure 8. Frans Lanting: Wandering albatrosses courting, South Georgia Island c1995

www.outdoorphotographer.com/blog/news/2013/09/op-columnist-frans-lanting-to-receive-first-honorary-

award-from-national-geographic-magazine-in-the-netherlands.html#.VEcdVd4reJU

42

Figure 9. Sebastiao Salgado, Left: The ladder, Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil, 1986. Right: Marine Iguana, Rabida island,

the Galapagos, 2004. Gelatin silver prints

https://shard4.1stdibs.us.com/archivesE/art/upload/14/1547/salgado_backs_72.jpg

www.theguardian.com/arts/salgado/image/0,15021,1301111,00.html

The imagery of Gathering Shadows reflects and reflects upon the emerging global

phenomenon of environmental psychic distress that Glenn Albrecht terms solastalgia

(Albrecht et al, 2007). It does this by recognising that an oblique index of shadows

rather than direct wilderness or natural history reportage will do what science excels

at – reveal the hitherto invisible – whilst impressing upon us the disturbing sensation

of ‘avant-garde nolstalgia’ for worlds not yet lost (chapter 2). And, the work

acknowledges that reportage of the purportedly unsullied nonhuman world is not

only ecologically informative but potentially unsettling, that is, generative of an

‘avant-garde nostalgia’ at once sentimental and subversive, that has driven the turn

towards wild creatures–principally invertebrates – inferring the tragedy of landscape

(chapter 3) at Lake Tyrrell (chapter 4) and Mount Buffalo (chapter 5).

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Chapter 2

The embodied eye of ecological relations: biosemiotic shadows

Systems of selves

The most significant aspect of the ecological condition revealed by ecological

thinking’s weakening of anthropocentrism is the centrality of relationships within and

our relationship to the non-human world. To Eduardo Kohn, however, “we cannot

think about relations without representation because relational ties are semiotic”

(CSTMS Berkeley, 2013). Semiotics is the discipline “of relation” (Maran, 2007: 270)

concerned with sign codification and processing. A founder of semiotic theory,

Charles Sanders Peirce divided the sensed world into a triad of signs: an icon

referencing an entity’s likeness such as a plant and its drawn portrait; an index

connoting causal connection between a thing and the sign of that thing such as a paw

and its imprint; and, a symbol through which we infer a thing through conventions like

the association between a bee and the spoken word for it (Peirce, 1958: 247-9). Signs

are not things or events or minds but “relational processes” of sign production and

interpretation that, in an ecological context, can be understood as “alive”. As Kohn

muses:

A crashing palm tree–taken as sign––is alive insofar as it can grow. It is alive

insofar as it will come to be interpreted by a subsequent sign in a semiotic

chain that extends into the possible future (Kohn, 2013: 33).

Conventional semiotics are an aspect of cultural studies indifferent to the non-human

world, biosemiotic interpretation of the ecological on the other hand has two

powerful consequences: it reveals meaning from the ostensible point of view of non-

human others and it helps open up the possibility of encountering non-human others

as selves.

The discipline of “biosemiotics” was founded by Thomas Sebeok and Jacob von

Uexküll in the decades between the world wars (von Uexküll, 1940; Favareau, 2010).

Its contemporary applications to culture by theorists such as Wendy Wheeler

44

(Wheeler, 2006) and offshoots ‘ecosemiosis’ (Farina, 2005; Maran, 2007),

‘zoosemiotics’ (Maran, 2011), ‘geosemiotics’ (Baker, 1999) and ‘phytosemiotics’ (Kull,

2000) bypass the linguistic focus of traditional Saussarian anthropogenic signification

in favour of Charles Peirce’s “pansemiotic” interpretation of interactions between

organisms and their environment (Nöth, 1998: 337). With the exception of a cultural

theoretical stream focused on how “various cultures interpret the same natural

phenomena differently”, biosemiotics treats natural processes as semiotic phenomena

in their own right (Maran, 2011: 275). That is, Peirce’s ‘triadic’ (non-arbitary relation

of sign, meaning and its interpreter) rather than Ferdinand Saussure’s simple ‘dyadic’

(arbitary, socially delineated link between sign and its meaning) is the interpretive

frame. As Winfried Nöth explains

Semiosis in this sense is by no means restricted to processes in higher

organisms, to culture and social convention. Any primitive biological organism

already interacts semiotically with its environment when it selects or avoids

energetic or material objects in its environment for the purpose of its own

survival. Such triadic interactions of the organism with its environment

constitutes a semiotic threshold from the nonsemiotic to the semiotic world

(Nöth, 1998: 338; author’s emphasis).

This biosemiotic lowering of the “semiotic threshold” facilitates the interpretation of

individual biological behaviour, morphology and processes as evolutionarily evolved,

symbolically coded systems of communication. Rather than being autonomic objects

(meaning-less non-beings), organisms are understood as sign-making and sign-

sensing subjects (meaning-directed beings) embedded in and responsive to their

peculiar species-specific ecological “perceptual life-world” or umwelt (von Uexküll,

2010: 2). Biosemiotics shifts analytical perspective from the reductionist determinism

of traditional biophysiology to the subjective individuality and intentionality of sign

production and reception at every level of ecological existence. By enlarging our

understanding of ecological processes and the semiotic minutiae of the lives of

nonhuman animals, the discovery of biosemiotic signification opens us to the

possibility of finding meaning in the idiosyncratic life-worlds of non-human others.

45

Biosemiosis explicitly extends the locus of knowing beyond humans. Under a

biosemiotic gaze the distinction between “an objective world, devoid of intrinsic

significance, and humans”, who according to Kohn, are the bearers of culture and

the givers of meaning begins to dissolve because, as he argues, it is apparent that

“aboutness”– representation, intention, and purpose in their most basic forms

– emerges wherever there is life; the biological world is constituted by the

ways in which myriad beings – human and nonhuman–perceive and represent

their surroundings. Significance, then, is not the exclusive province of humans

(Kohn, 2007: 5)

Biosemiotic interpretation opens up ways of encountering non-humans in the

contemporary industrial world consistent with animism. Animism’s eco-semiotic

sense is also phenomenologically coherent. As philosopher Tim Ingold observes,

We might agree that as well as people, birds and trees are alive. But a habit of

thought that leads us to suppose that the world is inhabited by entities that are

already closed in upon themselves prevents us from seeing that life can be

anything other than an interior property of things. Conceived as the creative

potential of a world-in-formation, however, life is not in things; rather, things

are in life, caught up in a current of continual generation. The recognition that

all existence is suspended in such a current underlies the ontological

commitments of many peoples credited, in classical anthropological literature,

with ‘animism’. According to a long-established convention, animism is a

system of beliefs that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert. But

this convention is doubly misleading. For one thing, animism is not a system

of beliefs about the world but a way of being in it, characterized by openness

rather than closure – that is, by sensitivity and responsiveness to an

environment that is always in flux. For another thing, it is not a matter of

putting life into things but of restoring those things to the movements that

gave rise to them (Ingold, 2007: s31)

As an instance of animist outlook, Kohn distinguishes between phenomenological

‘ways of knowing’ and autobiographic ‘experiences of knowing’ among the Avila

46

Runa peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon by pointing out the Runa rarely attempt to

“encapsulate knowledge” in the objective, taxanomically or biologically descriptive

western scientific sense. Rather, their ecological understanding is recounted through

narrative “simulations of the experience of knowing” (Kohn, 2005: 172-3),

simulations predicated on the belief that “all beings, and not just humans, engage

with the world and each other as selves–that is, as beings that have a point of view”

(Kohn, 2007: 4). According to Kohn, the human and non-human world of the Runa

is a vast “ecology of selves” (Kohn, 2007: 4). Resonances of the selfhood recognised

among non-humans articulated by animism and ecosemiosis can be found in the

ancient religious traditions of Buddhism, the twelfth century mystic Christian monk

Saint Francis of Assisi and the twentieth century I-Thou relational theology of Martin

Buber (Friskies, 2001: Buber, 1970). Contemplating the difference between what he

dubbed objectifying I-It and empathic I-Thou relations, Buber wrote

I contemplate a tree. I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of

light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of blue silver ground. I

can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, thriving core, the

sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with

earth and air – and the growing itself in the darkness. I can assign it to a

species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its

way of life. I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I

recognize it only as an expression of the law – those laws according to which a

constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according

to which the elements mix and separate. I can dissolve it into a number, into a

pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it. Throughout all of this the

tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and

condition. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, then as I

contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It.

The power of exclusiveness has seized me. This does not require me to forego

any of the modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in

order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather is

everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number

included and inseparably fused. Whatever belongs to the tree is included: its

form and its mechanics, its colors and its chemistry, its conversation with the

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elements and its conversation with the stars – all this in its entirety. The tree is

no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts

me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it – only differently.

One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.

Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no

experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own

case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the

soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself (Buber, 1970: 57-59).

With this example of a tree, Buber’s I/Thou model presents relations between human

and nonhuman selves as empirical but not objectifying, open but not without

judgement, empathic but not anthropomorphic. By contrast, recent social theory

attempting to include non-human participants in relational entities such as Science

and Technology Studies or Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) are

inadequate ‘material-semiotic’ models precisely because they perpetuate the

anthropocentric errors of failing to distinguish ontologically between non-human

things and beings (Kohn, 2013: 91) or recognise that non-human lives have agency,

that is, they are selves (Kohn, 2007: 5). Defending the legitimacy of a neo-animist

biosemiosis Kohn contends

Selves are signs. Lives are thoughts. Semiosis is alive. And the world is thereby

animate (Kohn, 2013: 99).

In such perceptions of semiotic aliveness, nonhuman selfhood extends beyond

indviduals and even the living. It can include collections of selves as systems of living

and inanimate things arranged in space–that is–places. In considering responses to

place philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy contrasts a primordial sense of “country” which

reflects intimate knowing with the predominantly visual idea of “landscape” in which

land experienced but not intimately known, occupied but not emotionally inhabited.

“The landscape” idea, as distinct from “country” Nancy reasons, “begins with the

notion, however vague or confused, of distancing and of loss of sight, for both the

physical eye and the eye of the mind.” (Nancy, 2005: 151). ‘Country’ describes space

inhabited by pre-modern societies living in an everyday connection to their land, a

“belonging” in which “there is no real except for the earth with all its corners and

48

recesses” where spirituality resides in the “earth itself as an inexhaustible reserve of

presence and presentation” (Nancy, 2005: 151-2). Nancy’s characterization of

“country” parallels meanings attached by indigenous Australians use of the English

term; the traditional Aboriginal relationship to “country” as anthropologist John

Bradley points out, is not as a visual entity but “multivocal” in that people are

indivisibly tied to place and place itself is perceived as responsive, animated, with “a

will and need of its own”. That is, land is literally encountered as “sentient” (Malpas,

2011: 50) or what Kohn would call a “self”.

Landscape may be an objectifying falsehood but to genuinely experience place as

‘country’ is, like magic, God and ghosts, difficult without faith or the suspension of

disbelief. For Timothy Morton, place is “radically indeterminate – it is intrinsically in

question” (Morton, 2007:174) because in a post-animist world undergoing

anthropogenic change and ecological crisis the locational “here” is a thing of chronic

re-evaluative surveillance and unconscious disturbance. The geographer’s bioregion,

the ecologist’s habitat, the bushwalker’s wilderness are ontologically and emotionally

unstable. As Timothy Morton observes, rather than being a phenomenological

absolute we are compelled to confront place as an environment only in “theory”, for

which the sole ontologically or emotionally meaningful riposte probably lies in

answer to the question “what happened here?” (Morton, 2008: 175-180).

One response to such uncertainty is to privilege a subjective ‘felt’ sense of place

arrived at through emotional responsiveness to signs of ecological selfhood. As Neil

Evernden, in a seemingly atavistic turn, remarks:

What does make sense…is something that most in our society could not take

seriously: animism. For once we engage in the extension of the boundary of

the self into the “environment”, then of course we imbue it with life and can

quite properly regard it as animate – it is animate because we are a part of it.

And, following from this, all the metaphorical properties so favored by poets

make perfect sense: the Pathetic Fallacy is a fallacy only to the ego clencher.

Metaphoric language is an indicator of “place” – an indication that the speaker

has a place, feels part of a place. (Evernden, 1978: 19)

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Conceived by 19th century cultural critic John Ruskin, the Pathetic Fallacy refers to

the false attribution of personality or feelings – pathos – to nature. Evernden is not

necessarily asking us to be disingenuous and believe in animism – the pre-modern

sense that places are imbued with person-like agency – but rather that we respond

emotionally to the profundity of our ecological connectedness and interdependence

with the biosphere so completely that we allow ourselves to encounter places,

imaginatively, as if they are imbued with person-like agency. Such an engagement implies the

augmentation or facilitation of emotional attachment to the referent through

imagination, affect akin perhaps to what the romantic artist John Constable called

‘imaginative possession’, a sensibility geographer George Seddon argued is

fed by knowledge, understanding, associations, stories and images, affections

and, finally, incorporation of the environment into the self, until it becomes

part of our sense of personal identity (Seddon, 2005: 118).

Understood this way, indulging the Pathetic Fallacy is no mere metaphorical flourish.

It is a cognitive circuit breaker enabling us to sense the numinous in an environment,

perhaps the closest contemporary equivalent to what Jean Luc Nancy argues typified

the pre-modern, mythopoetic experience of land. Consequently, the answer to

Morton’s ‘what happened here?’ defining place becomes clear: it is the known, felt

and imagined selfhood of country encountered as systems of selves. Thus, even within

modernity we may begin to engage the nonhuman as a subject/subject relationship.

Ecological relations

By embracing the selfhood of nonhuman nature and our codependence with it,

human/nonhuman ethical relations take centre stage. Humanist anthropocentrism

locates humans at the centre of value and ethical consideration; unless afforded value

by people, anything in the nonhuman universe is deemed valueless, that is, outside

ethical consideration. This cultural failure to confront what Edmund Husserl called

“problems of value” (Brown and Toadvine, 2003: 7), the ethical link between

phenomenon and mind, the core of anthropocentric object/subject dualism, can be

addressed in at least four ways.

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The first approach imputes value as an a priori generic attribute. This is what

followers of Edmund Husserl’s theory of intentionality employ as the basis for a

proposed ecological axiological rationality which, distinguished from conventional

value-free instrumental rationality, affirms from the outset “the articulation of

goodness and value within nonhuman nature, leading us to an experiential, if not

ontological, grounding of ecological ethics” (Brown et al, :xiii). In a similar vein but

drawing on Spinozan metaphysics linking substance monism with ethics,

ecophilosopher Freya Matthews intuits the intrinsic unity of and value in everything

in the universe (Matthews, 2002). The downside of these arguments is that they offer

no clear basis for distinguishing value between humans and nonhumans or between

different nonhumans and situations. Like the Buddhist dharma it resembles,

axiological thinking disarms useful judgment: a swarm of native Bogong moths

Agrotis infusa aestivating in a High Country cave and another clustered on the ceiling

of a Canberra hospital ward have equal value simply because they exist. Worse still,

axiological thinking can invite the kind of flattened ethics indifferent to protecting

the nonhuman also found in ontological monism.

A second model of environmental valuation emerges out of the ad hoc chance

peculiarities of ecological knowledge and encounter. Its advantage is its close fit with

participatory democratic values, its passion and personal meaning: most

environmental action and art is a product of care for particular creatures or places. Its

disadvantage, the default setting of global environmental realpolitic, is that it is subject

to fickle personal or public taste–including anthropocentric self-interest

masquerading as idealism or concern–producing outcomes of uncertain and uneven

ecological veracity. In Western Australia for example, the Stirling Ranges are a

National Park but the once vast and exceptionally biodiverse woodlands around

them have been “obliterated” to grow wheat and sheep (Lines, 1991: xvii) and in

Victoria, local ‘NIMBY’ (Not In My Back Yard) movements have opposed both an

energy consumptive desalination plant (King, 2012) and carbon pollution mitigating

wind farms (Devine-Wright, 2005).

A third and explicitly ecological approach is ‘ecocentric egalitarianism’ in which value

is apportioned according to contributions to sustaining systems, that is, to individuals

and species according to their ecological role. Ecocentric egalitarianism widens the

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ambit of ethical consideration to non-humans in vastly extended moral communities.

The pioneering principle, Aldo Leopold’s land ethic first espoused in the 1940s,

proposed an ecologically-centred mode of thought and behaviour in which all aspects

of a landscape, alive and not, are conceived of as “fellow-members” of an “ethical

community” in which the role of humans shifts from “conqueror” to “plain

member” respectful of all its other community members (Leopold, 1968: 204). For

example, recounting the effects of uncontrolled wolf culling in the American

southwest in his seminal essay A Sand County Almanac, Leopold wrote

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does

a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for

while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a

range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many

decades…So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves

does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit

the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have

dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea. (Leopold, 1987: 132).

Such “thinking like a mountain” implies a scientifically cognizant yet empathic

relationship to place similar to the recasting of Kohn’s ‘ecology of selves’ as ‘systems

of selves’. Unfortunately, Leopold’s contention that “Conservation is a state of

harmony between men and land" has limited application outside natural and semi-

natural environments (Leopold, 1987: 207). Drawing on similar principles, the more

recent model of deep ecology formulated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess

(Naess, 2005) employs the language of wholism and entitlement–natural rights

theory–to defend the “self realization” of all living and non-living members of the

ecosphere. Deep ecologists trace their “ecosophy” to the pantheism of Baruch

Spinoza and the ecocentrism of George Santayana, Henry David Thoreau and John

Muir (Sessions in Merchant, 2006: 165-176). Deep ecologists prioritize wilderness

preservation, population control and ecologically sustainable life styles and oppose

mainstream instrumentalist “anthropocentric environmentalism” which privileges

human self-interest. It proclaims itself “deep” because it enquires into ecological

phenomona and our relationship to them as “long-range”, inter-related, dynamic,

evolving empirical and ethical questions. Such ‘long range’ thinking includes moral

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cognizance of the deep future: long term ‘sustainability’ implies a need to conserve

the earth and its bounty for all future human and nonhuman generations, a principle

economists call ‘intergenerational equity’ (Pearce, 1988). The great strength of

ecocentrism is its privileging of ecological systems over individuals and of ‘nature’

over ‘culture’. But it has problems. First, it is difficult to define what the ‘self-

realization’ might be of partially or wholly non-biotic systems like glaciers or rivers or

mountains. Second, it is unrealistically conservative: it does not account for the

inevitable flux and flow of ‘natural’ non-anthropogenic ecological change; it fails to

accommodate the irreversibility of alterations produced by combined biotic and

abiotic anthropogenic impacts, such as feral invasion under conditions of global

warming (Hobbs, 2009: 604); and, it is resistant to the kind of ecologically restorative

intervention increasingly needed to help understand and stave off ecosystem collapse

(Marris, 2011:123). Third, valuing the self-realization of the whole may devalue its

parts–the life-worlds of individuals and species. Most troubling, the preservation of

rare and charismatic megafauna like whales, lions or elephants and the suffering of

undeniably sentient creatures like kangaroos, birds–or people–are afforded no special

moral weight. Finally, even if afforded no special moral weight, it seems the self-

realization of our own species probably includes the overpopulation and

anthropocentrism driving the ecological crisis.

A fourth and normative approach, ‘rights’ philosophy propounded by Peter Singer

and informed by Benthamite utilitarianism effectively seems to address the last

mentioned weakness of ecocentrism by focussing on the interests of nonhumans

(Singer, 1995). Although it widens the ambit of ethical consideration, species welfare

and rights theorists and their activist arms such as ‘animal liberation’ are concerned

exclusively with minimizing the suffering of deserving sentient nonhumans and not

the welfare of lesser nonhumans or ecological systems (Callicott, 1980). The strength

of this approach is its acknowledgement of nonhuman subjectivity – that some

nonhumans are accorded the status of what Eduardo Kohn calls ‘selves’ (Kohn,

2013: 16). However, discerning sentience is also its first weakness since a zoocentric

bias excludes most nonhumans despite evidence suggestive of, for instance,

invertebrate awareness and vegetative responsiveness (Hall, 2011: 157). Just as

importantly, such a limited moral rubric tends to fetishize iconic, farmed or

companion species whilst remaining indifferent to other living things and larger

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ecological consequences. In other words, animal rights ethics are individual – and/or

species-specific not ecological: the debate over feral brumby control in the Australian

Alps between ecologists and animal rights activists is a typical instance (Nimmo,

2007).

Of the four approaches, ‘ecocentric egalitarianism’ comes closest to an ecologically

credible anti-anthropocentric ethics. To help counter its failings it could be a loose

framework into which the idealist universalism of ‘axiological rationality’, the ad hoc

opportunism of environmental realpolitic and the empathic caution of a more inclusive

– that is, extended–nonhuman ‘rights’ philosophy might be woven. Effectively

encompassing all approaches, science writer Emma Marris proffers a seven-point

program: protect the rights of other species; protect charismatic megafuana; slow the

rate of extinctions; protect genetic diversity; define and defend biodiversity;

maximize ecosystem services; and protect the spiritual and aesthetic experience of

nature (Marris, 2011: 153-169). Her message is unequivocal: nonhuman ‘nature’

matters, although

There is no one best goal. Even after we agree to pursue all sorts of goals, we

still have complex compromises to make between ideologies in contested

places and between local and global interests (Marris, 2011: 170).

Expressed impressionistically, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood also

attempted to synthesize systemic and individualistic value systems by arguing for a

nuanced “dialogical form of rationality that allows more sensitivity to the other”

(Plumwood, 2002: 61). It is a ‘perspective made flesh’ by Plumwood after she

survived a crocodile attack at Kakadu by concluding human hubris and power

facilitates the denial of our true nature as prey creatures in the food chain like any

other (Plumwood, 2000: 7). Plumwood’s ‘relational rationality’ incorporating

human/animal difference arises out of human empathy, the hard logic of ecological

knowledge and terrifying experience. This anti-hierarchical focus silmultaneously

distinguishes between and connects what Bruno Latour calls “matters of fact” with

“matters of concern” (Latour, 2004). It is a realist, minimally-anthropocentric

outlook, an ecologically informed, experientially open, compassionate,

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subject/subject relationality. Phenomenologist David Wood captures the ethical

picture succinctly when he submits

The central virtue is the recognition of the constitutive quality of relationality.

Things are what they are by virtue of their relations to other things. What look

like external relations are, if not internal, at least constitutive. Living things eat

each other, breath and drink the elements, live in communities, while

inanimate things have properties that depend on the properties of other

things. Limestone cliffs would not last long in acid rain. Everywhere it is the

interplay of relative forces that produce results, not the absolute forces

themselves. What the ecological perspective teaches us is that things with no

obvious point to their existence play a role in the life-cycles of other beings. It

teaches us that the survival of a particular species may depend on the

preservation of an environment with very specific features. And it teaches us

that the life, death and flourishing of things is tied up with other factors,

conditions and creatures in ways for which we typically do not have a map,

and under variability tolerances we do not know. We can study these things, of

course. But as much as ecology is a science, it is also a counsel of caution,

precisely because it deals with the interaction of widely disparate kinds of

things. (Wood, 2001: 16)

David Wood’s practical caution with respect to ecological uncertainty is paralleled by

Timothy Morton’s moral caution towards high-minded ecological anti-

anthropocenticism masking a self-serving dualism he dubs, borrowing Hegel’s

phrase, beautiful soul syndrome. By this he means the uncritical fusing of “aesthetic and

the moral” qualities (Morton, 2007: 118) of innocent, beautiful Nature (and the ‘self’)

against the immoral depredations of guilty, ugly industrial modernity (the ‘other’).

Beautiful souls seek reconciliation with the natural world on self-serving,

ideologically loaded terms for, far from being truly encountered, Nature remains a

reified disembodied fantasy forever “over there”. Although Morton mistakenly tars

New Age escapists and scholarly ecosophers with the same delusional brush, the

supposed syndrome does capture the moral conundrum of deciding between the

perceived interests or putative ‘rights’ of the individual human or non-human on the

one hand and the natural system of which he, she or it is a part, on the other, a

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dilemma usually ignored by posthumanist theorists. Morton avoids explicit discussion

of anthropocentrism because it begs “the question of what precisely counts as

human” (Morton, 2007: 7) but his observation alerts us to the likelihood that eroding

anthropocentric ideology will never completely delete our self-interested subjectivity.

With this in mind we might have cause instead to aspire towards what philosopher

Bryan Norton calls “weak anthropocentrism” unlike the “strong” anthropocentrism

of traditional individualistic humanism, which is resistant to ecological perspectives,

weak anthropocentrism remains open to revision in light of ecological knowledge

and experience. In accepting the human loci of values, an “adequate environmental

ethic” according to Norton “need not be non-anthropocentric” provided it is both

“weak” and non-individualistic (Norton in Kalof, 2005: 88; Norton, 2008). Such a

gradualist and accommodating approach to ecological relations, a default

anthropocentrism ameliorated by ecologically conditioned reason and dualism, might

appropriately be called embodied relationality.

The (ecologically) embodied relational eye

A pivotal aesthetic conundrum is how we visualize embodied relations applied to

ecological space. The non-human encompasses everything from bacteria to black

holes but it is principally through ecology as site, place or space that the dynamics of

non-human relations and phenomena can be grasped against the background of the

global ecological imaginary. Post-structuralist and neoliberal globalist models of

space tend to deterritorialize, that is, overlook the specificity of ecosystem sited-ness.

(Heise, 2008: 5; Stengers, 2008: 183). By contrast, for Ursula Heise the “eco-

cosmopolitanism” produced by growing knowledge globalization (Hiese, 2008: 205)

presents an opportunity for planet-situated ecological sited-ness or

‘reterritorialization’ (Heise, 210) similar to Edward Casey’s “place-as-region” (Casey,

1997: 305). Her ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ (Heise, 2008: 10) is a useful and ecologically-

informed framework for apprehending the real places – that is, landscapes – about

which the art in this project has been made.

Landscape is not nature (or country) but landscape as art usually signifies the larger

realm. For Roland Barthes landscape is the locus amoenus, the universal “cultural sign

of Nature” (Barthes, 1994: 68). But landscape is also as James Elkins observes “a

desperately confused subject” (DeLue, 2010: 213). The etymology of the English

56

term (land+scape) refers to “physical shaping”; yet its common and artistic usage, as

David Hays notes, has long emphasized the visual (DeLue, 2010: 93). In the

eighteenth century Samuel Johnson dissected two meanings: region and picture

(DeLue, 2010: 20). For Yi-Fu Tuan this dichotomy is a diaphor synthesizing two

incompatible ideas of “domain” (a place, “politics, economics, community”) and

“scenery” (an “aesthetics of space”) (DeLue, 2010: 158). That is, a landscape may be

a physical entity or site, but it is what we do to it materially or perceptually by

imposing “a certain order” on the ground or in our minds that creates that category

of sight we recognise as landscape (Wells, 2011: 2). Elizabeth Helsinger notes the

common conflation of the noun landscape “the physical product (place, space or

representation) of perceiving and making” with our interactions with it as a verb

(designing, touring, painting) (DeLue, 2010: 327). Unlike terms like environment,

space, terrain or “nature”, which, as philosopher TJ Diffey points out, are

abstractions with no “unequivocally identifiable subject of attribution”, the “object-

oriented” concept ‘landscape’ is readily “recognized aesthetically” (Kemal and

Gaskell, 1993: 52). In other words, an aesthetic, which is to say, an a priori condition

of sensual/emotional judgement, is implied in the very idea “landscape” or its

subsidiary notions such as panorama, view and prospect. The result of this is a

concept and word with a “double membership of the language of art and the

aesthetics of nature” (Kemal & Gaskell, 1993: 52).

Landscape can also be understood as ideology. Geographer Denis Cosgrove

describes landscape as a “way of seeing” growing out of a “discourse through which

identifiable social groups…have framed themselves and their relations with the land

and with other human groups” (DeLue, 2010: 20). The emergence of the landscape

genre in the seventeenth century is said to reflect alienation from its subject (the

land) that accompanied the rise of mercantile culture and the commodification of

nature. Tracing the nexus of landscape and power in western history, WJT Mitchell

dismisses it as an instrument of socio-economic reproduction: “the dreamwork of

imperialism” (Mitchell, 2002: 10). Landscape is where we do not belong, where we

feel “estranged, unsettled, uncanny” (Nancy, 2005: 55). As Raymond Williams

observes “the very idea of landscape implies separation and observation” (Williams,

1973: 120). It is what happens when land becomes novel enough and psychically

distant enough to be objectified, idealized, fictionalized, aestheticized. Landscape

57

reflects “a fantasy of not belonging to the totality of life of a terrestrial expanse”

(Kelsey in DeLue, 2010: 205). Landscape is what country becomes after “the gods”

have departed (Nancy, 2005: 160).

In western traditions of visual art, landscape has largely been presented as if seen

from a disembodied eye peering into distance. In contrast, ecological relationality and

semiotic embodiment are two sides of the same ontological definition in which any

subject/subject relationship implies mutual embodiment.

Art and the (ecologically) embodied relational eye

To encounter the nonhuman and country relationally is to manifest it ecomimetically

with an embodied eye without necessary reference to its outward appearance as

‘landscape’. Embodied relational seeing as art can be expressed cognitively through

iconic or symbolic representation or haptically through indexical relations, or both.

Before the modern era, representations of landscape and the nonhuman world in

western art were largely shaped by theistic anthropocentric dualism. Exceptions such

as Giotto’s thirteenth century frescos celebrating St Francis’ loving anti-dualistic

attitude to animals are both few and generally locationally generic [Fig 10].

`

Figre 10. Giotto: Sermon to the Birds from the Legend of St Francis #15, 1297-99. Fresco, Assisi

www.wikiart.org/en/giotto/st-francis-preaching-to-the-birds-1299

58

Two-dimensional art from various sources offer powerful precedents for signifying

place without dependence on naked eye topographical appearances. Jerome

Silbergeld observes that pre-modern Chinese art practice was influenced by Taoist

cosmology emphasizing imagined invisible shanshui or mountain water “essence”, the

“energy that animates the land, the same energy that runs through us all” [Fig 11]

(DeLue, 2010: 281), an art representing unseen forces quite unlike the western

emphasis on surface topography or “land-shape”.

A preeminent concern of traditional and much modern Australian indigenous visual

art is the telling of stories about country: rarely are horizons or prospects visible in

these images for the artists are not primarily concerned with geographical

appearances. Aboriginal traditional art maps sacrament and spirit, past and present,

law and location within the limits circumscribed by clan and custom from the point

of view of the artist (Perkins, 2011; Ross in Tymieniecka, 2011: 666-671). In other

words, both ancient Chinese and indigenous spatial aesthetics are not so much

concerned with what land looks like as with what it means, an approach reminiscent of

the ‘land aesthetic’ of Leopold or the ‘aesthetic functionalism’ of Carlson.

Figure 11. Guo Xi: Early Spring, Northern Song Dynasty c1020–c1090 CE. Painting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Xi

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Figure 12. Emily Kngwarray: Ntange dreaming, 1989

http://cs.nga.gov.au/Detail-LRG.cfm?IRN=119248

In contemporary Australian indigenous art there is typically an absence of linear

perspective as in the paintings of Emily Kngwarreye [Fig 12] often with figures

outlined silhouette-like against a horizon-less ground such as in the stylized hand

stencils and paintings of artist like Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri [Fig 13]. Haptic or

material embodiment of abstract ideas on the other hand is exemplified in relict

Palaeolithic by adaptive responses to the spaces, colourations and textures of location

[Fig 14].

Figure 13. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri: Warlugulong, 1977

http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=167409

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Figure 14. Petroglyph at Murujuga (Barrup Peninsula) Western Australia. c200-10,000 BCE

http://morcomaroundoz.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/karratha-dampier-and-millstream-part-one.html

Modernist and contemporary environmental art articulates what Heike Strelow calls

an “ecological aesthetics” (Strelow, 2004) often signified by an aestheticized material

connection to place (Brady, 2007) unrelated, as Linda Williams points out, to the

twentyfirst century “turn to ‘relationality’ in art” conducted as “an almost exclusively

anthropocentric discourse” between artists, participants and audiences (Williams,

2013/14: 20). It is a movement Andrew Brown situates as “re/form”, “re/search”

and “re/use” streams of ecological art practice (Brown, 2014: 72), exemplified by but

not limited to the ‘land art’ and ‘earth art’ traditions. Among those that most clearly

manifest an ecocentric rationale and two-dimensional focus like that of Gathering

Shadows are the semi-performative “ephemeral art” actions (Brady, 2007: 292) of Ana

Mendieta (Strelow, 2004: 58), Patrick Dougherty, Giuliano Mauri, Hans Haacke [Fig

15], Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Alejandro Duran (Brown, 2014: 160-61) [Fig

7] and Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla (Brown 2014: 150-51) [Fig 16] for

which photographs are often the only enduring record. For some practitioners the

site has physical presence in the art itself either as a haptic collaborator as in the work

of contemporary Australian artist Cameron Robbins [Fig 18]; or as evidential residue

as in the earth rubbings of Michelle Stuart (Casey, 2005: 59-63) and the burnt tree

rubbings and frottage in-situ of British born Australian painter John Wolseley who

sometimes juxtaposes these techniques with watercolour drawings and written

notation [Fig 19]. The results are at once discursive and empirical, autobiographical

and celebratory, analytical and impressionistic environmental studies on paper

“ordered by the ecology of the place” (McLean, 2002, 6).

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Figure 15. Hans Haacke: Ten turtles set free, July 20, 1970

www.uni-hamburg.de/Materialarchiv/arch/tiere.htm

Figure 16. Alejandro Duran, Nubes, 2011 from the Washed Up series

http://blog.enfoco.org/2012/06/16/alejandro-duran-washed-up/

Figure 17. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Land Mark (Foot Prints), 2001-2

http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com.au/2004/04/insurgent-inquiry-art-of-allora.html

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Figure 18. Cameron Robbins: Wind drawing, 10-8-12 W35-65kmh, SW-45-65-kmh MONA, 2012

cameronrobbins.com/wp-content/uploads/10-8-12-W35-65kmh-SW-45-65-kmh-MONA-56-x-76-cm-

unframed.jpg

Figure 19. John Wolseley: Demoiselle cranes flying above the Himalaya, 2006. Carbonised wood and watercolour on

paper www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/1/John_Wolseley/1235/43755/

Photography and the (ecologically) embodied relational eye

Photography is embodied and relational despite its mechanical reputation. To assume

the invention of photography played out a nascent scientific and recognizably

modern agenda is to overlook the fact that, in the view of historian Geoffrey

Batchen, it was “born in a context of the Romantic’s virtual worship of nature”, to a

community of “epistemological positivists and ontological Romantics” (Reese

Jenkins in Batchen, 1999: 138). Despite their considerable technical knowledge, the

pioneer photographers Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre seem to reveal a

mystical sensibility when they repeatedly proclaimed photography to be causeless

“spontaneous reproduction” (Batchen, 1999: 90). And, surely it is significant that the

title and text of the world’s first photographic book, William Henry Fox Talbot’s The

Pencil of Nature published between 1844 and 1846, offered homage not to human

ingenuity but to the power of nature (Talbot, 1969). Although photography was

supported by the technical context of the camera obscura, artificial optics and silver

salts, the inspiration for its development and the interpretation of its early results

63

emerged at least in part out of the peculiarly embodied relational eye of Romantic

metaphysics.

A kind of embodied relationality is privileged in the minority stream of landscape art

known as the equivalent for which the subject of landscape is approached as a ‘symbol’

and/or ‘God’ (Jussim and Lindquist-Cock, 1985). Although modernists ostensibly

rejected the painterly creed of Pictorialism dominant before WWI, some in the

American vanguard never completely broke with its post-Romantic Symbolist claims

of a correspondence between visible and unseen worlds. These claims re-emerged

with equivalency, the idea of the photographic print as the summation of a

photographer’s emotional response to and feeling of union with the subject or scene

before the camera. The most effective exponent of the equivalent, Alfred Steiglitz,

even produced a series of cloud photographs by that name between 1925 and 1934

(Rosenblum, 1997: 297). To critic Andy Grundberg, Steiglitz’s the “Equivalents” [Fig

20]

remain photography’s most radical demonstration of faith in the existence of a

reality behind and beyond that offered by the world of appearances. They are

intended to function evocatively, like music, and they express a desire to leave

behind the physical world, a desire symbolized by the virtual absence of

horizon and scale clues within the frame. Emotion resides solely in form, they

assert, not in the specifics of time and place (Grundberg, 1983).

After WWII the equivalent tradition found new shape in the ideas of Minor White

whose mystical credo presented the camera as a window into the unseen

(Rosenblum, 1997: 519). In common with many other modernists he often

eliminated references to the identity of locales in order to invite interpretations of

“whatever the viewer desires” (Rosenblum, 1997: 519). Influenced by Minor White’s

faith in the medium’s spiritual power and the monochrome craft of Edward Weston

and Ansel Adams, from the mid-1960s a number of photographers began to seek out

environments “that might express their feelings of being at one with nature”

(Rosenblum, 1997: 520). They include Walter Chappell, William Clift (Clift et al,

1987), Wynn Bullock, Frederick Sommer and Sally Mann in the United States, John

64

Blakemore (Blakemore et al, 2011) and Thomas Joshua Cooper in the UK (Cooper,

1988); and John Cato and Ian Lobb in Australia.

Figure 20. Alfred Steiglitz: Equivalent, 1926. Gelatin silver print

http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/fr/collections/objects/13924

The celebrated American photographer Paul Caponigro describes his devotional

meditations on pristine and partially humanized landscapes as “dreams locked in

silver” quietly alerting us to “the landscape behind the landscape” where we might

glimpse “the Unicorn in the wood” (Caponigro, 1985: 10). For him, the experience

of landscape is shaped by the mythology and mystique–although rarely the natural

history–of place. This is how we must read for example the ghostly blur he

experienced as a “gift” in Running Deer, County Wicklow, Ireland created in 1967

(Adams, 1980: 65) [Fig 21]. Caponigro is typical of the many equivalency

practitioners who advocate a nature-oriented Pathetic Fallacy suffused with vague

mystical and environmental sentiment: a strongly relational response to nature

without substantive ecological intent.

65

Figure 21. Paul Caponigro: Running deer, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1967. Gelatin silver print

www.artnet.com/artists/paul-caponigro/running-white-deer-county-wicklow-ireland-

lqeIQDUWxri60EjwreNKUQ2

Quite apart from the medium’s representational function, analogic photographic

processes in general and silver halide images in particular are uniquely physically

embodied. To cultural theorist Roland Barthes silver photographs are “literally an

emanation of the referent”. He muses

[a]nd if Photography belonged to a world with some residual sensitivity to

myth, we should exult over the richness of the symbol: the loved body is

immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver (monument and

luxury); to which we might add the notion that this metal, like all the metals of

Alchemy, is alive (Barthes, 1981: 80-81).

Because it is fundamentally a direct photochemical or indirect photoelectrical

‘emanation of the referent’ image formation, the coming into being of a photograph

is, in a strict physical sense, a sign of a relationship with nonhuman processes and

forces; an instance of phenomenological intersubjectivity. Photography’s distinctive

claim to authority lies in its physical recording, its indexical relationship, with the

world. This response to external reality is normally optically mediated so that a

photograph is almost always understood primarily as a mechanical eyewitness; its

indexical authority is located in the appearance of the image outcome, in iconic

likeness, in representation. The tactile, photochemical or electronic relationship to the

world intrinsic to the act of light capture, the material imprint described by Susan

Sontag as “like a footprint or a death mask” (Sontag, 1973: 154) is backgrounded. To

‘picture’ the world directly by non-ocular means without the intermediary of the

camera or artificial optics foregrounds the physical linkage–the relationality–of the

image with its referent. Since ‘indexicality’ is a function of proximity that “depends

upon association by contiguity, and not upon association by resemblance or upon

intellectual operations” (Peirce, 1958: 306), the unique techniques of cameraless

66

photographic method form a direct causal connection with the referent in ways that

emphasise its heightened semiotic indexicality.

Figure 22. William Henry Fox Talbot: Lace (Plate XX in The Pencil of Nature) 1844–46. Calotype photogram

www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=46340

Figure 23. Anna Atkins: Cystoseira granulata, c1853. Cyanotype photogram

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anna_Atkins_Cystoseira_granulata.jpg

Cameraless photography is as old as the medium itself. In the first half of the

nineteenth century Joseph Niepce, Hippolyte Bayard, Henry Fox Talbot [Fig 22] and

Anna Atkins [Fig 23] exposed objects or cliché-verres placed upon photosensitive

materials. The acceptance of such methodologies as art, however, only emerged

between the two world wars when modernists like Man Ray, Christian Schad and

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Laszlo Moholy-Nagy employed them in Dadaist experimentation and Surrealist

games (Neususs, 1987: 2-6). Cameraless practices re-emerged in the 1970s as one of

what James Elkins calls the ‘anti-optical’ strategies of making images without artificial

optics or light (Elkins, 2008: 81). All three formal aspects of embodied non-literal

representation in art – planar perspective, shadow figuration and material response to

site – are present in cameraless photography. The use of analogic materials and

cameraless methods in which nature is used as haptic collaborator in pursuit of ‘an

equivalent’ to the ecological experience informs the embodied relational photography

of Gathering Shadows.

The embodied eye of Gather ing Shadows : biosemiotic shadows

Among its many meanings, ‘photography’ is described as “writing with light and

shadow” and as Henry Fox Talbot once wrote, as the recorder of shadows,

“shadowgraphy’” (Stoichiţă, 2007: 10). The purest catcher of shadows however is

photography made without optical mediation, photography without a camera.

Gathering Shadows employs a plein air cameraless method that is a generic form

requiring the location and composition of a subject in daylight and placing it on

photosensitive material exposed to a light source at night. The resultant plein air

‘photograms’ or ‘shadowgrams’ record the shape, scatter and refraction of light in

ways that reveal opaque and translucent objects in exquisite detail at life-scale: in

short, they ‘turn the landscape into the camera’. As will be explained in chapters 4

and 5, this is neither an unmediated nor fully choreographed record. Like the off-

camera ‘interventions’ of the staged photographs of Sandy Skoglund, Jeff Wall or

Gregory Crewdson, shadowgram compositions are set-up before exposure. Unlike

them, however, the outcome is never assured, for the behaviour of living subjects,

happenstance and weather is never certain.

Figure 24. Adam Fuss: Alphabet from the series Home and the World, 2010. Gelatin silver photogram

http://artdaily.com/news/42581/New-York-Based-British-Photographer-Adam-Fuss-Exhibits-at-Timothy-

Taylor-Gallery#.VE7kGbYj_Js

68

Contemporary artists such as Pierre Cordier have used chemistry to produce intricate

referent-less images on photographic paper (Cordier, 2007), while others such as

Dieter Roth, Floris Neususs and Garry Fabian Miller (Barnes, 2005) have employed

cameraless methods to record inanimate natural phenomena. Among contemporary

photogrammists, Adam Fuss’s (Parry, 2004) cameraless imaging of living animals are

particularly notable. For instance, his gelatin silver shadowgrams of wriggling snakes

Home and the World [Fig 24] elicits a similar mix of fascination and revulsion to the

creatures in this project whilst the ghostly avian gestures en masse of Birds in Flight [Fig

25] is reminiscent of the much smaller but equally skittish invertebrates. However,

whereas Adam Fuss has consistently imaged living things in the studio, only the

outdoor records of dynamic natural phenomena by British artist Susan Derges

(Derges, 2010) and Tasmanian photogrammist Christl Berg (Berg, 2008) articulate

ecological rationales comparable to those of Gathering Shadows.

Figure 25. Adam Fuss: Birds in Flight from the series My Ghost, 1999. Gelatin silver photogram

www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/16145

Susan Derges seems to have independently developed an outdoor shadowgram

technique similar to mine three years after me although her work is mostly crisp,

formally composed imagery of aqueous subjects (Cotton, 2004: 206) [Fig 26].

Paralleling my own sensibilities, Derges has written that their making is a process “of

immersion, as opposed to conceptualisation" (Hicks, 2003). Christl Berg sees camera-

69

less methods as a means of photographing “in” the land rather than “of” it (Berg,

2003), a way of communicating “the experience of being in the land, rather than

looking at landscape” (Berg, 2008:1). Her alternative approach to the conventions of

pictorialized vision is to replace a “perspectivist mode of looking” with one in which

we “participate” in the landscape “in an imaginative and sometimes physical manner”

(Berg, 2008: 19) [Fig 27]. Berg’s perspective shares a similar approach to the dark

indexical aesthetic of my own research project insofar as my intentions towards the

conventions of landscape photography are at odds with the “disembodied eye” of the

“Cartesian gaze” dominating modernism (Gablik, 1992:126).

Figure 26. Susan Derges: River Taw, 19 January1999. Photogram

www.prixpictet.com/portfolios/water-shortlist/susan-derges/river-taw-19-1-99/

Figure 27. Christl Berg: Between phenomena, remnants 1, 2, 3, 2000. Installation of gelatin silver photograms

www.australianphotographers.org/artists/christl-berg/photos#166

70

As with the work of Fuss, Derges and Berg, the art making process I have developed

necessitates physical contact with imaging materials in ways that refuse to bypass,

suppress or ‘background’ the materiality of the subject common in camera-based,

remote, virtual and digital recording techniques. Ecological shadowgram indexicality

is haptic and biotic as well as photic because planned and serendipitous warping, tearing,

scarification, discolouration and embedding of organic matter invariably shapes the

photochemical image. The haptic and biotic indexicality of these methods, including

in particular the feet chemograms made at Lake Tyrrell [Figs 62, 63 and 65] present

outdoor equivalents to the cameraless, tactile, light and chemical studio experiments

of Marco Breuer (Breuer, 2007; Elkins, 2008: 74-77). In accord with Peirce’s

approach to semiotics, the embodied materiality of gelatin silver emulsions amplifies

the works’ photic indexicality. The restrained colour palette of most pieces can also

be understood as responsive to Roland Barthes’ critique of the conservative subtext

of “middle-brow, popularized-domesticated-practice” in photography “colouring the

world” as “a means of denying it” (Prosser, 2005: 82).

Interestingly, the use of flash for the cameraless exposures in the project has

resonances in exploratory camera-based photography because in both the hitherto

invisible is made visible by a millisecond of artificial light. At its best, imaging by

flash can record what Henri Cartier-Bresson famously called a ‘decisive moment’,

exemplified in the urban nocturnes of Brassai and Alfred Steiglitz, the technical

wizardry of Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopes of flying bullets and bursting liquids

[Fig 28] and the natural history milestones of Eric Hosking’s pictures of hunting

Barn Owls [Fig 29].

Gathering Shadows is pervaded by procedures contradictory to its aim of ecological

embodiment. First, the direct interplay of artist, ecosystem and emulsion sought to

replace the aggressive act of ‘capture’ denoted by the photographer’s expression to

‘shoot’ or ‘take’ with gentler, slower procedures akin to performance or ritual. Whilst

the collection, storage, recording by flash and release of live invertebrates was in

principle consistent with this aspiration, subjects were sometimes stressed, injured or

killed during the imaging process. Second, although the work purports to report wild

nature, in order to produce visually potent pictures subjects were routinely

manipulated and many images underwent significant post-production. Ironically, the

71

suffering of creatures and attenuated reportage reflect the inescapable

anthropocentrism of any intervention into or visual evocation of the nonhuman

world, including the making of environmental art.

Figure 28. Harold Edgerton: Cutting the Card, 1964

http://webs.wichita.edu/depttools/depttoolsmemberfiles/ulrich/Edgerton_King_cutting_sm.jpg

Figure 29. Eric Hosking: Heraldic Barn Owl, 1948. Gelatin silver print

http://motherboard-cdn-assets.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/14433/1407839202010135.jpg,

The semiotics of representation, the connection between the referent, its sign and what

is signified – a relationship already weakened by postmodernism’s uncovering of the

contingency of signification – is further complicated by the simultaneous

unfamiliarity and intimacy of cameraless procedures. On the one hand, the non-

perspectival unfamiliarity of cameraless images defers the referent to the extent that

its signification can be ignored altogether. On the other hand, their evident

indexicality leads us to imagine a material source, reminding us of our own

embodiment in what Lacan calls “the real” (Prosser, 2005: 5). To appreciate the

depth of shadowgram embodiment, their indexical ‘contiguity’ with the world,

Susanne Ramsenthaler argues “one has to distance oneself from the immediate

image, making a straight connection with the ‘absent part’ crucial in its formation.

And this is where its power lies.” (Ramsenthaler, 2003: 9). In this project, it is

72

consciousness of the unseen referent’s source spatial context that also conjures the

sense of another, much larger ‘absent part’: its site of geographical origination.

Gathering Shadows stages three varieties of shadow: first, negative photograms of living

creatures recorded on film and paper under flashlight at both research sites; second,

the imprints of starlight passing through these and astronomical glass plate

photographs onto unexposed emulsion forming the final artworks of the Lake Tyrrell

sub-project Syzygy; and third, the digitally reiterated shadows on paper of the film

enlargements from both sites. The photogram negatives and starlit positives

(although not the digital work) imprinted the world under cover of darkness as

shadows (shadows made in shadow) implicating an eclectic “dark ecology” of

references: Plato’s cave, negation, erasure, inside-out “exscriptive writing” (Lippit,

2005: 55), the “atomic-light” body imprints of Hiroshima and Nagasaki [Fig 30], and

Milton’s “shadow of heaven, and things therein” (Loewenstein, 2004: 660). The

shadows are the anamorphically distorted likenesses of the exterior and frequently

the interior of their unseen referents, rendering the technique one of the

“phenomenologies of the inside” along with “psychoanalysis, X-rays, and cinema”

(Lippitt, 2005: 5).

Figure 30. A victim’s shadow imprint from the heat of the atom bomb explosion, Nagasaki, Japan, 9/8/1945

https://crystaltrulove.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/082.jpg

Gathering Shadows is imbued with the shadow as a poetic ‘agent’. If, as historian Victor

Stoichiţă argues, the “motif” of projection intrinsic to the shadow is a function of its

73

opposite, light, then the visual hermeneutics of the shadow is a ‘light/darkness

dialectic’ (Stoichiţă, 1997: 9) that is more complex and nuanced than the mere

absence of ambient luminance. A reflected or painted image is the “unreal but

corresponding double” (Stoichiţă, 1997: 26) of its referent. A shadow on the other

hand, whether seen or recorded, is an indexical double and semblance of the referent.

Metaphors of light and darkness have roots deep in human prehistory (Lewis-

Williams, 2002: 221) but in language and tradition the shadow has been associated

with everything from memory, danger, evil, illness, death and power (Hendricks,

2005) to the soul, animism, consciousness and the uncanny (Turner and Stoichiţă,

2007: 2-7). The shadow is a ubiquitous metaphor across the arts from photography

and painting to dance, popular music, cinema and literature. In cinema for example,

in Robert Weine’s 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari the

camera becomes a psychological device used “to plug into a person’s mind through

the shadow” (Turner and Stoichiţă, 2007: 9) [Fig 31]; and in PL Travers’ 1952

children’s fantasy Mary Poppins in the Park, shadows have the ability to feel because

they are, according to the ‘Bird Woman’- “the other part of you, the outside of your

inside” (Travers, 1952).

Figure 31. Still from the movie The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, 1920

www.bertelsmann.com/news-and-media/news/post-restoration-the-cabinet-of-dr.-caligari-shines-in-digital-

cinema-quality.jsp

Shadows in camera stills photography are ubiquitous. Shadows delineate the human

body in the work of Martine Franck, Franco Fontana and Ralph Gibson. They are

emblematic of urban space in the oeuvres of Harry Callahan, Jerome Sessini, Peter

Marlow, Raghu Rai and Alex Webb. In conceptual practice, they can be photogram-

like icy voids of unexposed white paper as in the work of Astrid Klein [Fig 32] or,

more commonly, sumptuous darknesses as in Bill Henson’s signature chiascuro

depths [fig 33]. As Stoichiţă reminds us, the shadow is also present in two

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foundational western myths of origin—those of knowledge and art (Turner and

Stoichiţă, 2007: 7).

Figure 32. Astrid Klein: Night Matter 1, 1985. Gelatin silver print

Source: Jeffrey, I (2005) The Photography Book, Phaidon, 246

Figure 33. Bill Henson: Untitled #122, 2001-2002. Type C print

www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/18/Bill_Henson/98/33522/

In Plato’s fourth century BCE parable reported by Socrates, prisoners trapped in a

cave mistake shadows projected on a wall from an unseen fire as reality [Fig 34, left]:

their discovery of the truth, overcoming the naïve belief in appearances, is acquired

gradually and not without resistance outside in the sunlight. Plato’s ‘negative’

symbolism of shadows (Stoichiţă, 1997: 24-25) is a touchstone for this project in that

shadows cast by flash in darkness in and near a mountain cave (Mount Buffalo) and a

lakeshore (Lake Tyrrell) also suggest unknowing – but an unknowing rather more

existential, ecological and tragic than epistemological. Pliny the Elder’s apocryphal

first century CE attribution of two-dimensional representation to the traced outline

of cast shadows of a beloved by his lover, the Maid of Corinth, purports to explain

the historical beginnings of painting [Fig 34, right]. The body and its shadow, its

imagined surrogate, are indexically linked: the shadow’s outline promises to exorcise

the mortal temporality it traces (Stoichiţă, 1997: 16). Yet the shadow’s trace

unavoidably implicates the referent’s absence. Photography, a technological

75

descendent of the celebrated Corinthian trace, is a recorder of shadows but the

cameraless photographs of Gathering Shadows doubly implicate absence. They

evidence the lost referent, the ‘absent part’ of imaged subject matter like the

invertebrates and, as symbols of place and predicament at Lake Tyrrell and Mount

Buffalo, they implicate post-colonial ecological impoverishment in the Mallee and

immanent anthropogenic ecological collapse in the Australian Alps.

Figure 34. Left: Plato's Allegory of the cave c400 BCE. Engraving of Jan Saenredam (1565-1607) after a painting of Cornelis Corneliszoon van Haarlem (1562-1638). Right: Pliny the Elders Corinthian first century CE myth. Detail from The Invention of Drawing, 1830, by Karl Friedrich Schinkle Left: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Platon_Cave_Sanraedam_1604.jpg Right: http://cs.brown.edu/stc/summer/viewing_history/viewing_history_3.html Contra the Plinean myth, anthropologist David Lewis-Williams contends the earliest

known art, Upper Palaeolithic cave painting, was ritually created to aid entry into the

subterranean spirit world. Lewis-Williams argues the parietal surface was seen as a

kind of veil dividing the everyday from the supernatural. In the dark of a cave or

night, the shaman-artist or later viewer used a lamp or torch to highlight and appear

to either coax forth the man-made creature/creations or allow them to hide in the

shadows—to ‘retreat into the realm behind the membrane’ (Lewis-Williams, 2002:

221). Other investigators suggest animation-like, moving-image effects were intended

(Azema, 2012). In Lewis-Williams’ scenario the origins of two-dimensional

representation do not lie in the sober illustration of three-dimensional phenomena

but in substance or trance-induced hallucinatory visions of the spirit world

transcribed directly onto the stone they were seen to inhabit (Lewis-Williams, 2002:

193-4). Such pictures report visions not vision. The Plinean myth may be truer than

we ever thought if we revise the stories, not of the literal shadow of a beloved, but as

a realm of shadows and a dream of the non-human other.

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Figure 35. Andy Goldsworth: Rain Shadow, Saint Abbs, Scotland, 1984

Top: www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk/image/?id=ag_02945&backimg=ag_02946&t=

Bottom: www.goldsworthy.cc.gla.ac.uk/image/?id=ag_02946&backimg=ag_02944&t=

The embodied, relational aesthetic strategies of Gathering Shadows have precedents

beyond shadows and photography. The precisely choreographed photogrammetry

performed in situ at both sites along with plein air starlight exposure procedures over

three years at Lake Tyrrell imbued these events with an atmosphere of faux-scientific

ritual or performance, not unlike the site-specific actions of the ephemeral land art

tradition [Fig 35]. The direct imprinting of living things onto receptive surfaces has a

precedent in the serendipitous marks made by animals in the interactive art of Olly

and Suzi (Baker, 2002: 87). In fact, the captured creatures were effectively unknowing

artistic collaborators whose behaviour was facilitated but not choreographed, a

process comparable to that of conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander

Melamid who engage animal minds by teaching domesticated elephants how to paint

(Melamid, 2000) [Fig 36].

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Figure 36. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Elephant Renee, Toledo Zoo, 1995

http://becoming-animal-becoming-human.animal-studies.org/html/komar_melamid.html

Ambient poetics

Ecocritical philosopher Timothy Morton contends that ecosemiotic embodiment can

most effectively be conceived through ecomimesis, the evocation of the ecological

subject involving a “collapse of aesthetic distance” (Morton, 2007, 164) between

referent and artwork. For Morton this is expressed in “ambient poetics”, a six-part

creative orientation conveying “a sense of circumambient or surrounding

world…something material and physical, though somewhat intangible, as if space

itself had a material aspect…” (Morton, 2007: 33-34). Although the various elements

of Morton’s ‘ambient poetics’ are drawn from a diversity of media overlap in

meaning and are somewhat vague, all have optical equivalence and offer a coherent

means of explaining the affectual qualities of Gathering Shadows.

The first element of ambience, “rendering”, a cinematic idea, defines the “direct”

manifestation of “unconscious processes” productive of “a sense of atmosphere or

world…beyond our understanding”– the overall artistic “telos” of a work (Morton,

2007: 34). Morton’s visual example is Nam June Paik’s “immersive yet humorous”

TV Garden of 1982, which turns television “images of leaping dancers into budding

flowers” (Morton, 2007: 35-36). Conversely, the ‘rendering’ of Gathering Shadows’

emphasizes pathos, both in the liminal depths of transluscent glass and as fragments

on film or paper excised from tangible, once-living, space. The second element, the

“medial”, a music borrowing, involves “foregrounding the medium” by presenting

“contact as content” (Morton, 2007: 36). Morton offers the example of recorded

whale songs that draw our attention to these creatures’ existence and their sounds

despite the meaning of the sounds remaining ‘opaque’ or backgrounded (Morton,

2007: 96). A visual equivalent might be Andy Goldsworthy’s Domo de Argila of 2012,

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a cracked clay dome which backgrounds its handmade qualities and foregrounds its

own earthy muddiness. In Gathering Shadows, the ‘medial’ resides in its indexicality:

film and paper invertebrate shadowgrams and the congealed light of the stars on film

on glass. The third ambient poetic element, the “timbral” refers to the “physicality of

sound”, the tangible association of referent with art object (Morton, 2007: 40).

Morton’s example is Yves Klein’s blue canvasses such as IKB 191 of 1962 which

materially index the very idea of “blue” (Morton, 2007: 41). In Gathering Shadows, the

‘timbral’ is where every mark or absence of a mark evidences the past emanation or

withholding of light. The fourth aspect of ambience, the “aeolian”, references

disembodied sound, enigmatic “processes” maintained without obvious author or

subject (Morton, 2007: 41-42). A visual art example would be Walter De Maria’s

Lightning Field, an array of 400 upright stainless steel poles installed in the New

Mexico desert in 1977, which, under the right weather conditions, continues to live

up to its name long after its creator’s death. In Gathering Shadows, the effects of

invertebrate, feet and celestial film and print juxtaposition and the unpredictable play

of light and parallex movement within the glass palimpsests seem aeolian-like. The

fifth, a music and literary borrowing “tone”, is that material “quality of vibration”,

the calibrated intensity of bodily impact (Morton, 2007: 32-54) exemplified in Kant’s

sublime principle of an unnerving experience that “transports the mind from the

external world to the internal one” (Morton, 2007: 46). A visual example is Damien

Hirst’s tiger shark corpse floating in formaldehyde encased in glass, The Physical

Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) [Fig 99]. In Gathering Shadows

visions of the vast cosmos and numberless insect ‘selves’ on the one hand and

bodyprints like our own on the other, delivers a ‘tone’ that is simultaneously

empirical and distant, personal and tragically embodied. The sixth, drawn from

Jacques Derrida’s discourse on painting, is the “re-mark” or “echo” that

“differentiates between what is inside and outside it’s frame”, the fleeting

anamorphic foregrounding of foreground and then background of something

unfathomably “in between” like awareness of the presence of the artist’s mind giving

meaning to an artwork (Morton, 2007: 49-50). A visual example would be Bridget

Riley’s mesmerizing ‘op art’ painting, Movement in Squares (1961). In Gathering Shadows

the ‘re-mark’ operates through the unseen dancer’s bodies, absent celestial light and

abject once-living creatures, inferred ‘places’ and tragic invocations and, of course,

the arguments of this exegesis.

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Chapter 3

The feeling eye of ecological tragedy: invertebrates as metaphor

Tragedy

An emotional response to ecological thinking and relations would be unrealistic if it

were simply celebratory because ecological relations demonstrate unequivocally that

the ecological domain may be harmonious, wondrous and beautiful, but it is also a

realm of untold conflict, suffering and loss. In the western aesthetic and literary

heritage, conflict, suffering and loss are traditionally conceived as tragic, and this

aesthetic may also be applied to those conditions in the ecological sphere. Yet tragic

art, history and literature is so diverse that literary theorist Terry Eagleton concludes

no theory of tragedy is universal, since the only common denominator is a condition

that can be described as “very sad” (Eagleton, 2003: 2). The sadness of tragedy can

nevertheless be reduced to three forms: first, it is a colloquial descriptor of almost

any significant human misfortune; second, it is a peculiarly western mode of dramatic

fiction with roots in fifth century BCE Athenian theatre; and third, it represents an

approach to thinking and feeling in which real events and experience are interpreted

using the language and sentiments historically associated with Tragic drama.

The first and most common form simply emphasizes the lugubrious character of

familiar events. It is applied to unemployment (BBC, 2009), economic recession

(Peston, 2011), social disfunction (Howarth, 2003), bullying (Heyman, 2005), the

death of a pet (O’Farrell, 2013), infant mortality (Moorhead 2002) and natural

disasters (Tobias, 2011). It is also used sarcastically or affectionately as in ‘he’s a

football tragic’. In fact, tragic description is used so liberally that, as Deborah Cook

observes, “everything is tragic so nothing is” (Cook, 1989:140).

The second dramatic form has a privileged place in western art and culture2. In the

classical tradition, the heart of fictional Tragedy is a plot saturated with pathos,

“knowledge gained through suffering or simply the strange reassurance that what

happened was necessary” (Bushnell, 2009: 52-54). This necessity – or fate – has a

2 Following Trimble (Trimble, 2012) literary or theatrical ‘Tragedy’ is here denoted in upper case, generic, individual or historical ‘tragedy’ in lower case. The phrase ‘tragic form’ encompasses both

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quality of daimon: “a kind of divinity” evident in a protagonist’s life that “becomes

tragic” when resisted (Bushnell, 2009: 54). The process of becoming something other

in Tragedy “evokes a crisis in which everything changes”, a peripeteia or reversal of

circumstances brought on not by evil but by a flaw in character, knowledge or

judgement the Greeks called hamartia (Bushnell, 2009: 57). The most common flaw

or hamartia is arrogance, pride or hubris. The plot climaxes in anagnorisis: a sudden

recognition of tragic reversal. Tragic drama in the west is traceable to the ritual

sacrifice, the ‘scapegoat’ from the Greek “he-goat song” or pharmakos of classical

tradition. The sacrifice is the guilty-innocent, “holy and accursed” creature

imaginatively imbued with all that is negative or unclean within the body politic. It

must be ritually shunned, expelled or destroyed to preserve the psycho-social order

(Eagleton, 2003: 278-279).

Conflicting claims as to the meaning of dramatic Tragedy complicate its readings. For

Aristotle, Tragedy revealed the ethos of moral choices (Jones, 1980: 32) whereas for

Hegel it illustrated the inevitable conflict between the individual and a higher ethics

(Williams, 1966: 33). Nietzsche, on the other hand, regarded Tragedy as the

aestheticization of fate delivered by the opposing forces of Apollonian reason and

Dionysian sensuality, while for Freud Tragedy re-staged archetypal Oedipal guilt

(Brockmann, 2002: 30).

Since antiquity, subsequent forms of Tragedy have strayed far from the classical

structure. The most obvious shift is in the gradual social process of secularization in

which suffering is presented as a consequence of irrationality rather than a

contravention of metaphysical order (Williams, 1966: 30). Hence “the common man”

has replaced the high-born hero (Bushnell, 2009: 104) and tragic narratives no longer

follow the classical trajectory (Bushnell, 2009: 81).

The third form of Tragedy, the tragic sensibility or ‘spirit’ (Brockmann, 2002: 23),

informs both fiction and real world conditions. Tragedy’s potency reputedly lies in

the meaning and dignity proffered by suffering endured (Brockmann, 2002: 25),

underscored by a structure of belief Raymond Williams calls a “sense of order”

(Williams, 1966: 29). To the pre-modern mind this putative order was a preternatural

force “specifically and consciously” operating upon human beings (Williams, 1966:

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29). From the early-nineteenth century this order has been increasingly understood in

psychological, political and evolutionary terms. Nearly a century ago philosopher

Alfred North Whitehead encapsulated the secular position by proclaiming that

the essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity

of the remorseless working of things. This inevitableness of destiny can only

be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve

unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made

evident in the drama. This remorseless inevitableness is what pervades

scientific thought. The laws of physics are the decrees of fate. (Whitehead,

2011: 13)

The demise of Tragedy has been long foretold. For Frederich Nietzsche and George

Steiner, Tragic sensibility was incompatible with the “optimism” and “rationalism” of

monotheistic faith where suffering is morally explicable and the Enlightenment

project where knowledge explains and is ultimately redemptive of suffering

(Brockmann, 2002: 26). Such prognostications seem overstated for two reasons.

First, flowing through all human experience is the likelihood that a sense of Tragedy

is hardwired. Michael Trimble for instance, contends that our tendency to cry when

confronted by the tragic nexus of beauty, another’s suffering or death is symptomatic

of a uniquely human neurological linkage between tears, aesthetic pleasure and

empathic pain (Trimble, 2012: 16). Indeed, this linkage may be an evolutionary

adaptation evolved to help us endure real suffering and the awareness of mortality.

Second, as Rebecca Bushnell points out, tragic thinking will occur as long as there is

human conflict or suffering (Bushnell, 2009: 121). In fact, Enlightenment optimism

may itself be tragic: to Raymond Williams, the yearning for perfectibility manifest in

twentieth century revolutionary ideology has been “inherently tragic in form”

(Bushnell, 119-20) both because of the suffering produced by its failed violence and

the “deep and tragic disorder” underlying the ideas themselves (Williams 2006: 100).

For Michel Foucault madness lies at the core of the tragedy inhabiting modernity

(Cook, 1989: 148) whilst for Marshall Berman, madness has been intrinsic to Tragic

literature ever since Goethe’s Dr Faustus (Berman, 1983). Such a sense of tragedy

equally applies to modernization’s ecological consequences, a predicament

foregrounded in the practice-led research of Gathering Shadows.

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In keeping with Albert Camus’ view that modern tragedy is “collective” (Camus,

2007: 267), the dynamics of ecological tragedy are at once cultural and biological,

about us and all around us. Some tragedy is intrinsic to ecology, that is, like disease,

drought, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions, it is systemic. Other tragedy is historically

or culturally contingent such as that accompanying the ecological crisis; the product

of human action, it is anthropic. Systemic tragedy can be understood as ‘faint’ or ‘weak’

because it is, in general, recurrent, unavoidable and free of moral weight; anthropic

tragedy in contrast is more likely to be felt ‘acutely’ because it involves human will,

responsibility and ethical judgment. Systemic and anthropic tragedy is each one end

of a continuum between which each is in a varying proportion, present. Both forms

of tragedy can be sub-divided in four ways, each of which is associated with a theme

in dramatic tradition: order, sacrifice, fate and pathos culminating in a fifth: catharsis.

Order

Ecological order is a thing of wonder and of terror. Prior to the rise of agriculture

and urbanism, it is likely that local ecological knowledge and animist geophylic

cosmology contributed to a strong behavioural and psychological “embeddedness” in

landscape (Oelschlaeger, 1993: 27-29; Gadgil 1993; Turner 2000; Ingold, 2000;

Caven, 2012). Although hunter-foragers were rarely ecologically neutral and human

predation has been implicated in megafaunal extinctions (Wroe, 2004), theirs was

nonetheless a lifestyle informed by a mythopoetic relationship with the environment.

The passing of Palaeolithic culture gave rise to the so-called “disenchantment of the

world” (Merriam, 1977), a mode of thinking and feeling about nature that:

…no longer grounds human value, so that humanity’s freedom is also its

tragic solitude. The schism which opens between Nature and culture is at once

the source of our dignity and the truth of our alienation. We are still in a sense

grounded in Nature – but only in the ironic sense that the contingent nature

of consciousness is now a material fact, its superfluidity confirmed as

structural. Our divorce from Nature is natural, not just a queasy state of mind

(Eagleton, 2003: 113).

This disenchantment, the core of modern human/nonhuman dualism, has enabled

the objectification of nature in different ways. One of these is the engendering of a

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sense of entrapment. In ascribing modernity’s “metaphysical, aesthetic and

psychological tensions” to the revolutionary impacts of Copernican heliocentrism,

Darwinian evolution and the Freudian unconscious, Miriam Leonard (Big Ideas,

2012) omits an emerging fourth linking them all: ecology. Free from the deistic

teleologies of the past we now understand ourselves to be cosmological bystanders,

evolutionary accidents, egoistic rationalizers – and ecological captives. Our individual

destinies are not fixed but our humanness, our collective ‘nature’ condemns us to an

excruciating awareness of the paradox of our existence: ecologically part of nature

but existentially its castaways. Our sense of alienated entrapment is enabled and

amplified rather than ameliorated by scientific knowledge; our burgeoning

consciousness of ecological processes is simultaneously a triumph of enlightenment

reason and reason to bemoan our predicament. The ecological may be aesthetically

delightful but it is also brimming with ethical confusion and justified existential

terror. Human imaginations may be free, but as Denis Cosgrove laments, each of us

must endure “the suffocating embrace of ecology” (DeLue, 2010: 213). According to

Robin Kelsey, although

unlike animals we do not exist in a state of captivation…it is becoming

increasingly clear that we are nonetheless ecological captives….Belonging to

the earth’s ecosystems may beat gagging on Neptunian methane, but it is far

from ideal. From death to mosquito bites, that belonging imposes limits,

irritations…and risks. Is it any wonder that we prefer fantasies of not taking

part? (DeLue, 2010: 212-213)

The intense tragedy of ecological entrapment turns on chronic resistance to the

inescapable anagnorisis, or ‘recognition’ of the ecological order, the fateful hubris of

wished-for anthropocentric autonomy. These ‘fantasies of not taking part’ help seal

our fate: ecological crisis is the proof.

Sacrifice

Systemic sacrifice is everywhere: no ecosystem sustains without profligate death and

suffering, the collateral price of natural selection. For humans, in addition, ecological

disenchantment plays out in destructive behaviours akin to pharmakos or anthropic

ritual sacrifice. Terry Eagleton considers the industrial proletariat to be the pharmakos

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of techno-industrial globalism (Eagleton, 2003: 296), but it is just as reasonable to

postulate, as ecoliterary scholar Kate Rigby has (Rigby, 2007: 118), that terrestrial

nature is that pharmakos. That is, in what is misunderstood as a zero-sum contest

between human interests and the environment – a perspective encapsulated in the

mantra of ‘jobs versus environment’ (Cooper, 1992; Johnson, 1988) – the biosphere

must be sacrificed. This deeply instrumental reasoning reflects the preeminent place of

the anthropocentric “standpoint of mastery” ably critiqued by eco-critical theorists

like Val Plumwood (Plumwood, 1993, 2002). Yet instrumental reason is also

profoundly irrational. Borrowing the psychoanalytic model of unconscious

repression (Sherratt, 2002: 56-58), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer long ago

theorized that the drive for autonomy and control characteristic of the modern mind

is the deflected expression of repressed animal sensuality within and mimetic

identification with other people and nature, without (Merchant, 2008: 71-80).

Reinterpreting Max Weber, they wrote:

The disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of animism…Myth turns

to enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase

of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power

(Adorno, 1997: 6-9).

In other words, the non-human reminds us of our animal nature, a nature alien to

our post-animist humanity. But the systematic sacrifice of that over which people

have power achieves only a pyrrhic victory or temporary solace; it cannot abate until

the generic other is utterly consumed. Thus the sacrifice of nature is forever

incomplete: an unquenchable drive for new conquests throughout and soon perhaps,

beyond earth.

Fate

Because existence is never self-chosen and suffering and death are unavoidable, the

biography of all living things is fateful. In addition however, anthropocentric culture

burdens people and planet with a fate ecologist Gareth Hardin famously called the

‘tragedy of the commons’. Hardin illustrated it using the scenario of a community of

herders who share a pasture or commons. Being “rational”, each herder wants to

maximize his or her wealth so each independently takes every opportunity to

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progressively add to his or her herd. The individual environmental effect of each

herder’s few added animals is minor but the collective impact over time of

continually added stock from all the herders overgrazes and erodes the commons

until eventually, the pasture is ruined (Hardin, 1968: 1244). It is an acute tragedy,

first, because any single herdsman demonstrably benefits from adding their animals

to the commons but suffers not at all from their personal contribution to the

overgrazing and little from the collective impact of everyone’s overgrazing until the

shared resource approaches destruction. In this way, the profound contemporary ills

of the world commons are understood as unintended and unwanted outcomes of

individually rational behaviour. Second, it is a tragedy because anyone who resists

adding their stock suffers doubly: their failure to benefit from grazing more of their

own animals allows others to do so instead without measurably ameliorating or

postponing the disastrous outcome for all. This partly explains why solutions

appealing to individual conscience are ineffective (Hardin, 1968: 1248), legal coercion

is circumvented (Crowe, 1969: 106) and behavioural controls employing market

levers like resource and pollution pricing – including carbon trading – are resisted.

Hardin explicitly references Whitehead’s conception of tragedy as ‘destiny’ (Hardin,

1968: 1244). Such thinking also fits the trajectory of tragic narrative in which a

gradual anagnorisis or ‘recognition’ of a problem is accompanied by a peripeteia or

‘reversal of circumstances’ as the hubris of mistaken confidence delivers its dire

results. Thus the sum of individual actions produces unintended collective suffering,

the antithesis of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’; it is a model of anthropocentric loss,

the unintended disintegration of the conditions sustaining human material wellbeing.

This is tragedy’s primary meaning in Patricia D’Itri’s analysis of mercury

contamination (D’Itri, 1977), the Love Canal story chronicled by Eckardt Beck

(Beck, 1979), Christopher Lant’s discussion of resource depletion (Lant, 2008),

Jeremy Hance’s report on Hungary’s toxic sludge disaster (Hance, 2010), Stephen

Gardiner’s critique of the failed ethics of climate change (Gardiner, 2011) and

Brittany Edmoundson’s history of defoliant Agent Orange’s effects in the Vietnam

war (Edmoundson, 2012). Knowing that much contemporary ecological tragedy

arises out of the hyper-destructive peculiarities of anthropocentric industrial culture–

something neither truly inevitable nor ‘natural’ – only deepens its fateful sadness.

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Pathos

The pathos of systemic ecological tragedy is ever present in our own ecological

entrapment, unintended sacrifice and unchosen fate. If and when we engage

nonhumans as ‘selves’ we may also, if only faintly, sense their essential predicament,

albeit without hubris, as not unlike our own. We may feel the pathos of their

entrapment in the natural order, their innocent fate, their unwitting sacrifice. But the

pathos of anthropic ecological tragedy is altogether more acute and problematic. The

man-made tragedy of the commons, writ large as ecological crisis, unquestionably

threatens the economic welfare and physical health of almost everyone. Just as

troubling is the phenomenon of human-induced ontological absence. When Rachel

Carson chronicled the ‘tragic’ collapse of bird populations in Silent Spring (Carson,

2002) and when the word ‘tragedy’ is applied to such varied events as the impact of

hydroelectric development (Hudson, 1999), industrial forestry (Devall, 1995),

woodchipping (Flanagan, 2007), the clearing of tropical forests (Bradshaw, 2008),

industrial farming (Kimbrell, 2002), an oil spill (Milman, 2011) and open cut coal

mining (Butler, 2009), the term conveys grief at witnessing the destruction of

something valued, at least in part, because of its otherness. Each act of environmental

transformation eliminates another piece of the ambient conditions within which we

evolved and which, until recently, shaped and defined our humanity. As the scale and

speed of species extinction and ecosystem destruction mounts the entire biosphere

has begun to carry the unmistakable sign of anthropogenic will. Such signs even

include the decline of familiar phenological cycles, such as the season of winter itself

(Big Ideas, 2012; Gopnik, 2012:185, 202-205). This human remodelling of the earth

is so profound it is now argued we have left the Holocene and entered a new

geological epoch defined by human mastery: the Anthropocene (Crutzen et al, 2003). It

is a predicament Thomas Berry bemoans as our “tragic ending” (Berry, 1992: 47), Bill

McKibben describes as the “end of nature” (McKibben, 2006) and Tim Morton

accommodates in his ‘ecology without nature’ (Morton, 2007). This triumphant

remaking of the world in our own image, an emerging anthroposphere without a

mutually constitutive ontological ‘other’, portends an irrevocable unintended

suffering: a pathetic global hybridity nearly empty of nonhuman ‘selves’ that

confronts us with unimaginable ontological aloneness.

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The human remodelling of the earth, an anthropic undoing of nonhuman ‘systems of

selves’ in landscape invokes an especially dark pathos. For an environment to be

considered ‘tragic’, a fixed or essentialist Heideggerian topology of place seems

unworkable; rather, spatial significance must reside in the “ongoing and dynamic”

processes and events that constitute it and occur within it (Casey, 1997: 286). Sites of

great violence memorialized in memory have ancient and extensive pedigrees.

Marathon, Masada and Agincourt, Gettysberg, the Somme, Monte Cassino,

Hiroshima and Auschwitz, Mai Lai and Sarajevo are still encountered as sites of

suffering. To these locales of human-inflicted “trauma” (Tumarkin, 2005) that

Kenneth Foote calls “shadowed ground” (Foote, 2003), a growing list of sites of

environmental infamy have been added, including Minamata (Powell, 1991), Bhopal

(Gladwin, 1987), Love Canal (Beck, 1979), Chernobyl (Medvedev, 1991; Rigby, 2007)

and Fukushima. Yet such notorious cases only hint at what typifies most spatial

ecological tragedy. First, unlike locales of human suffering where space is primarily

symbolic, spatial ecological tragedy is signified indexically by the anthropogenic

transformation of the earth itself. Second, spatial ecological tragedy is often slow to

be recognized for it tends to emerge out of la longue durée of minor, subtle, yet

cumulative changes. These changes are associated with what Rob Nixon has called

the “slow violence” of incremental environmental damage generated by under-

regulated global capitalism the human casualties of which are predominantly the poor

and vulnerable (Nixon, 2011). Third, the boundaries of tragic landscapes tend to be

indeterminate, for their conditions invariably interpenetrate with larger regional and

global cultural and natural systems. Fourth, unlike zones of historical or

contemporary human tragedy, the trajectory of much ecological change can now be

broadly predicted so that the envisioning of what Caitlin deSilvey calls “anticipatory

history” (DeSilvey, 2011), including sites of future ecological tragedy, can be

realistically imagined.

Catharsis

In his seminal treatise on tragedy, Poetics, Aristotle considered catharsis–the purging or

resolution of the twin emotions of pity (eleos) and fear (phobos)–to be definitive of the

tragic experience. The pity and fear is threefold: we feel it for the tragic hero, we

identify it in ourselves and we infer it for humanity as a whole (Rorty, 1992: 13).

Audience catharsis is the telos of tragedy, the putative purpose of its dramatic form

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(Schaper, 1968: 131). The premeditated product of a carefully crafted, formally

coherent, self-contained plot that in turn generates and releases pity and fear,

catharsis is both an aesthetic idea (Schaper, 1968: 141) and a process of emotional

release generated by intellectual reflection (Chaston, 2010: 16). As Amélie Rorty

explains

[t]he issue of whether tragic catharsis is expressed as a resolution of the

incidents of the plot or whether it is expressed in the psychology of the

audience can be set aside. The psychological catharsis of the audience takes

place through, and because of, the catharsis of the dramatic action. A plot that

has been resolved is one whose unity is revealed: the various incidents that

compose it are recognized by the protagonist and by the audience to be

strongly interconnected in a harmonic whole (Rorty, 1992: 14)

Unlike Tragic drama, there can be no cathartic finality to real-world ecological

tragedy. Existing ecological tragedy may possess the tragic elements of order, fate,

sacrifice and pathos but because it is neither transient nor self-contained the pity and

fear marking it as tragedy remain inescapable and thus as formal Tragedy,

incomplete. To properly access the tragic character of the ecological on the one hand

and find momentary solace in the cathartic resolution of its tragedy on the other, a

safe and aesthetically contained, formally structured vicarious allusion to ecological

tragedy is required. This is the role of ritual, theatre, and art.

The (ecologically) tragic eye

What forms art might take, or how tragic ecological perception is represented is

directed by the scope of affectual engagement. Philosopher Norbert Elias claims “the

human capacity for observing nature, for exploring its connections and regularities

for their own sake” through “secondary forms of involvement” like art involves

“detachment” (Elias, 1987. 40-41). The Kantian ‘sublime’ for instance calls for

apprehension of awe and wonder with an attitude of disinterestedness (Graham,

2005, 214) and the ‘picturesque’ seeks to “construe” an approach to landscape

comparable to the attitude to art. That is, according to Gordon Graham, to render it

as “aesthetically appreciable in just the same way that pictures of landscape are, in

terms of harmony of colours, shapes and perspective” (Graham, 2005, 215) because

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“in the end, what is to be appreciated is not the natural landscape itself, but the

painter’s or photographer’s way of looking at it” (Graham, 2005, 215). It is a view

encapsulated by Tim Morton’s remark paraphrasing Walter Benjamin that “the

aesthetic, in its distancing alienates us from the world” (Morton, 2007: 25). Certainly,

formal ‘landscape’ aesthetic templates like the sublime or picturesque involve acute

cognitive objectification. However, such ideals reflect the dominance of

anthropocentric approaches to the representation of nature; it is nonsense to claim

an aesthetic sense requires significant – or any – emotional distancing. Here, once

again, indigenous precedents are instructive.

In the western schema the “aesthetic sense” prefigures art making (Lewis-Williams,

2002: 73). However, traditional indigenous art in Australia, both before and since the

introduction of acrylic painting by Geoffrey Bardon in 1971, was principally the by-

product of story telling and the acting out of ritual responsibilities connected with

country. The art object signified traditional belief or religious ritual to do with land

but had no sacramental significance in-itself. In these traditions human made objects

do not have auratic power for such power resides in the land, speech and ceremony.

Aesthetic judgment in the making or aesthetic perception in the outcome of these

objects was incidental. Rather than being exceptional, it may be that Australian and

other indigenous traditions most closely reflect the pre-historical origins and function

of material art.3 Perhaps, as Lewis-Williams has argued “an aesthetic sense…in the

sense of image-making...was a consequence, not a cause, of art making, a

consequence, moreover, that real people living in specific times, places and social

circumstances constructed” (Lewis-Williams, 2002: 73). Art manifesting ecological

ways of seeing such as Leopold’s ‘land aesthetic’ or Carlson’s ‘aesthetic

functionalism’ can be understood as visualized story telling about country affectually

(but not epistemologically) comparable to those arising out of pre-modern

mythopoetic beliefs.

Ecologically informed affectual encounters with place might also be understood in

terms of Elias’ notion of reflective or “secondary involvement” (Williams, 2011: 84)

which, as Linda Williams points out, is

3 This is a cross-cultural historical speculation not a defense of primitivist dualism or essentialism

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a reflective process that acknowledges that the knowledge processes of

modernity cannot be simply reversed. It is, as it were, a “knowing” type of

involvement at the level of affects, which is particularly susceptible to the kinds

of changes in the nonhuman world that cannot remain ignored. (Williams,

2011: 93)

If we consider Elias’ contention that the content and structure of creative activities

like dancing or visual art are “figurations” (Williams, 2011: 94) unconsciously

mirroring social formations, then it is conceivable ecological thinking and

involvement would be associated with a heightened sensitivity to human-human as

well as human-nonhuman interdependencies. Artistic signification of such

‘intersubjectivity’ might manifest as parallel or alternating foregrounding of the

signifier and that signified in the mind of the artist or the witness to that art. Thus,

for example, ‘construing’ a landscape perceived as ‘systems of selves’ using formal

tools of design like ‘colours, shapes and perspective’ can represent the artist’s feelings

about the subject signified by appearances rather than simply reporting or

reconfiguring appearances.

In giving aesthetic form to what he calls “the ecological thought”, Timothy Morton

argues the appropriate stance to be adopted at a time of ecological crisis is one

attentive to

a dark side embodied not in a hippie aesthetic of life over death, or a sadistic-

sentimental Bambification of sentient beings, but in a “goth” assertion of the

contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world:

dark ecology (Morton 2007, 184-5)

Morton’s “dark ecology” purports to be an original concept that is neither an escape

into sentimentalizing nature nor a romanticizing of crisis but a noir mode of thinking

and art that “preserves the dark, depressive quality of life in the shadow of ecological

catastrophe” (Morton 2007: 187). Yet Morton’s ‘dark ecology’ bears a close affinity

to tragic form. Like tragic drama, dark ecology is infused with “melancholia”

(Morton 2007: 186). In the same way tragic sense summons cosmic order and its

resistance, dark ecology calls forth both ecological embeddedness and alienation: “It

maintains duality, if not dualism” (Morton 2007:186). Dark ecology presents an

aesthetically coherent encapsulation of our ecological predicament using dramatic

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themes unnamed but otherwise similar to those found in tragic fiction. This quasi-

tragic procession is contained within an all-inclusive, tangled “mesh” of ecological

connectivity and dislocation (Morton 2010: 28), an invisible matrix reminiscent of

tragic order. Tragedy points at the other perennial human themes to which dark

ecology faintly alludes: ecological fate, sacrifice and pathos. The tools Morton uses to

evoke dark ecology match those used in Gathering Shadows to indicate ecological

tragedy: using juxtaposition and referencing science, welcoming irony and error in

ways that are not simply an “aesthetic pose” (Morton, 2007: 193) and exploring a

“new organicism” in which the artist is a facilitator who “establishes certain

parameters, and then watches to see what happens” (Morton, 2007: 189-90). Like

tragic ecological gazing, dark ecomimetics involves an attempt to “[lay] aside the

subject-object dualism” (Morton, 2007: 151) of everyday responses. However,

Morton’s model also privileges the self-conscious theatrics of “radical eco kitsch”

(Morton, 2007:144) unlike cautious interrogative strategy of Gathering Shadows which

is designed to elicit pathos and temporary catharsis. Of course, we cannot know

whether any of this adds up to a genuinely ecological ‘way of seeing’. We might

conclude as Timothy Morton has, that it “is still uncertain whether the aesthetic is

something we should shun, in the name of generating a liberating ecological artistic

practice…” (Morton, 2007: 25).

Art and the (ecologically) tragic eye

Figure 37. William Holman Hunt: The Scapegoat, 1854-56

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scapegoat_(painting)

With an ancient pedigree in the western tradition, the tragic form is primarily

concerned with human suffering; sensitivity to nonhuman suffering is limited and

mostly recent. In some pre-modernist practice it may be suspected in hindsight. For

example, the complex correspondences between the pharmakos (φαρμακός) of

Greek Tragedy, the azazel (עֲזָאזֵל) or sacrificial he-goats of early Jewish tradition

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reported in Leviticus and the theological appropriation of that ritual as a symbol of

Christian martyrdom come together in William Holman Hunt’s painting of The

Scapegoat [Fig 37]. Similarly, George Catlin’s Ambush for Flamingos painted around the

same time, is poignant with tension between Romantic enchantment and frontier

bloodlust [Fig 38]. Neither painting could be interpreted as revealing ecological

sensibility but both do appear sympathetic to nonhuman suffering.

Whilst early modernism is notable for the paucity of nonhuman presence, since its

emergence in the late 1960s, ecological art has been replete with tragic nonhuman

references – although the term ‘tragedy’ has been rarely used, or even rejected. For

instance, land artist Robert Smithson’s criticism of the tragic form as a “cheap trick”

and a “classical illusion” seems at odds with his preoccupation with universal entropy

(Smithson, 1996: 301-336), which is unequivocally a form of systemic tragedy.

Figure 38. George Catlin Ambush for Flamingos 1857

www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/catlin.php

Art culture is currently trapped in what Linda Willams claims to be a “postmodern

cul-de-sac” where the idea of art as “an agent of social change” (Williams, 2013/14:

16) is summarily dismissed. Contemporary ecological art stands out against this both

for its tendency to critique anthropocentrism and its social and political conscience.

Whether ecological art is “fast”– public, activist, accessible and didactic – or “slow” –

personal, expressive, poetic and reflective (Williams, 2013/14: 17), tragic sentiment is

implied across all manner of subjects. There is art about extinction where animals are

both subject and ecological index. Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson, for

instance, construct faux museological displays informed by extinction narratives. And

there is art where anthropocentric allegory is inverted: Dion’s Tar and Feathers seems

to allude to an horrific photograph of American race lynchings memorialized in Abel

Meeropol’s 1939 poem ‘Strange fruit’, sung by Billy Holiday [Fig 39]. In contrast,

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politically charged global perspectives are centre stage for artists like American artist

Betty Beaumont and Australian Debbie Symons. In A night in Alexandria, Beaumont

uses the destruction of the ancient library as analogous to her burnt books “throwing

green light on our global destiny” (Grande, 2004: 159) [Fig 40] and Symons utilizes

scientific data in digital displays and drawings to “investigate and interrogate the

inextricable links between environmental degradation and free market capitalism”

[Fig 41] (Symons, 2014).

Figure 39. Mark Dion: Tar and feathers, 1996. Tree, wooden base, tar, feathers, taxidermic animals

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5247/5318177329_7fcce9f0f4.jpg

Figure 40. Betty Beaumont: A night in Alexandria…The Rain Forest...Whose Stories are they anyway? 1989

http://creative-capital.org/content/files/projectsamples/505/large_beaumont3-600W.jpg

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Figure 41. Debbie Symons: World Species Market, 2009. Digital loop

loop www.aasg.org.au/gallery/debbie-symons

Photography and the (ecologically) tragic eye

Loss – tragic or otherwise – is built into the material fabric and worldly practice of

photography. As literary theorist Jay Prosser contends, photography is “a melancholic

object”. More than a mere “aide-memoire”, it is – as Roland Barthes noted – a memento mori,

a reminder of times passing and “the fact of death itself” (Prosser, 2005: 1-3). In their very

nature, all photographs poignantly recall what was once a future that became a present that is

now a past that will never return. Photographs show “not the presence of the past but the

pastness of the present” (Prosser, 2005: 1). The medium also operates as both an instrument

of tragic ecological loss and a supreme communicator of that loss. For instance, aerial

photography can facilitate what Prosser calls environmental “apocalypse” by helping to

determine the path of development. At the same time, such photographs can reveal new

information about ecology and prehistory (Prossser, 2005: 86). This bipolarity of effect and

affect is not just a question of subject matter. Most photographs are essentially what Barthes

calls studium, unremarkable records encountered through casual consciousness (or not). But

according to Barthes, when an image disturbs our casual gaze, because for instance it

reminds us of a loss, that disturbance becomes “that accident which pricks me”, the picture’s

punctum (Barthes, 1981: 26-27).

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Figure 42: Left. Arthur Rothstein: Fleeing a dust storm, Great Plains, 1936. Right. Dorothea Lange: Migrant mother,

Florence Owens Thompson, California, 1936. Gelatin silver prints

Left: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl Right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

Unsurprisingly, the intentional communication of feelings of environmental loss have

their oldest presence in documentary photographs intended or appropriated for

propaganda, the “mission”-based stream Carleton Ward calls “conservation

photography” (Ward 2008: 9) where, the default setting is the dramatic picturing of

destruction. Among the earliest and most celebrated was work made for the Farm

Security Administration, an arm of the US Department of Agriculture, established

under the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal to combat rural poverty in the United

States during the Great Depression. Between 1935 and 1944, thirteen photographers

including Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein (Ward, 2008: 13) [Fig 42] produced

material for the public and the press about rural life and land across America. Little

of the resulting massive corpus of modernist documentation addressed

environmental matters explicitly, but the dire effects of land overexploitation were a

common message. Since the 1970s, self-conscious ‘eco-critical’ photomedia practices

often linked to education or activism have become commonplace. The most well

known include the disturbing reportage of industrial forestry by Robert Glenn

Ketchum in Alaska (Ketchum, 1994) [Fig 43] and Rob Blakers in Tasmania (Blakers,

1984; Mackey, 2010); the documentation of fisheries by Allan Sekula (Cotton, 181;

Balkema and Slager, 1997: 100); Chris Jordan’s environmental collages (Jordan, 2010)

[Fig 44], film and stills studies of dying wildlife on Midway island; Edgar Martins’

forest fire studies (Brown, 2014: 38-39); Steve McCurry’s apocalyptic visions of the

First Gulf War; and James Balog’s ambitious Extreme Ice Survey time-lapse sequences

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of glacial retreat around the world (Balog, 2008; 2009). The social impact of

conservation photography is undeniable. What is less clear is its value as art.

Figure 43. Robert Glenn Ketchum, Tongass National Forest logging, Alaska c2000

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_2aRSJZCKczg/TPluRl46-kI/AAAAAAAAE-Y/gb2KyuzbRps/s1600/705_508_flat_800.jpg

Figure 44. Chris Jordan: Message from the Gyre, 2009

www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018x24 Landscape art encompassing the two streams of the deadpan tradition have particular

relevence to ecological tragedy. In the 1960s, Bernd and Hilla Becher of the

Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany chaperoned a renewal of pre-war new

objectivity (Rosenblum, 1997: 569) known as “deadpan”: the dispassionate,

meticulously crafted, systematic recording of visually related phenomena or

“typologies” in which image design, light quality and camera viewpoint “cast the

everyday in new perspective” (Wells, 2011: 268). A parallel North American

movement made famous by the exhibition ‘New Topographics: Photographs of Man-

Altered Landscape’ (1975) confronted the visual complacency of modernist practice

and the land use distortions at the heart of the popular wilderness tradition, in that

they “implicitly challenged…both the focus on beauty in nature typical of more

traditional landscape work and the concern with people in relation to work and living

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conditions associated with social documentary” (Wells, 2011: 267). Few practitioners

of either country articulated a socially critical agenda but in the context of the nascent

environmental movement of the period, many commentators chose to read the

Americans’ work as reflecting such values (Bolton, 1992: 133).

New Topographers span a gamut from an “apparent lack of emotional engagement

with land and environment” (Wells, 2011: 267) to avowed conservation concern.

Environmental rationale is far from apparent in the cool oeuvres of Kunstakademie

graduates Thomas Struth (Cotton, 2009: 105) and Andreas Gursky (Tunnicliffe,

2007: 71) and original New Topographers exhibitors Lewis Baltz and Stephen Shore.

For others of the formative group such as Robert Adams and later workers such as

Gerhard Stromberg (Cotton, 101), Yoshiko Seino (Cotton, 101), Len Jenshel

(Jenshel, 1992), Peter Elliston (Ennis, 2009: 65), Nadav Kander (Brown, 2014: 24-27)

and Edward Burtynsky (Pauli, 2003) [Fig 45] such sentiment is implied; for a handful

like Robert Dawson, Mark Klett (Aperture, 1990: 56-63), Mitch Epstein (Brown,

2014: 64-67) and Richard Misrach (Aperture, 1990: 34) environmental critique is

overt.

Figure 45. Edward Burtynsky: Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996. Inkjet print

www.edwardburtynsky.com/site_contents/Photographs/Tailings.html

The deadpan mood of much New Topographic practice can also be seen as implicitly

tragic, a sentiment made explicit in August 2010 when Exit Art Gallery in New York

staged Ecoaesthetic, the tragedy of beauty which showcased fine art photographs of

ecological catastrophe (Rosati, 2010; Ecologies, 2010). Crucially, however, the Exit

Art show foregrounded the preference of most photographers for the ‘man-altered

landscape’, forsaking the visual nuances of most spatial ecological tragedy for the less

common, gratuitous spectacle of the apocalyptic sublime. Historian Kelly Dennis

argues that New Topographic photographs “are about the aesthetic discourse of

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landscape photography…that is, they are about American myths of the West,

suburban expansion, the American dream, and the exploitation and destruction of

natural resources” (Dennis, 2005: 4). By appropriating the visual tropes – formality,

format, horizon line, light quality, framing, spatial sense and so on – of their

nineteenth century frontier and twentieth century wilderness predecessors, the New

Topographers introduced irony to the representation of landscape. By photographing

landscape exploitation, their work underscored the falsity of nature and wilderness in

American conceptions of the West, and, because the photographs are perceived as

beautiful despite their content, the flimsy aesthetic prejudices at the heart of the

nature landscape genre fall away (Dennis, 2005: 5).

Figure 46. John Pfahl: Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant, Susquehanna River, Pennsylvania, 1982. Ektacolor plus print

http://bookofthrees.com/three-mile-island-nuclear-plant-susquehanna-river/three-mile-island-nuclear-plant-

susquehanna-river-pennsylvania-from-the-series-power-places-john-pfahl-1982/

The problem with both deadpan movements is the inherent moral ambiguity of

aestheticizing ecological destruction. It is an approach typified by John Pfahl’s colour

panoramics featuring electric power industry infrastructure, including the Three Mile

Island (TMI) nuclear power station [Fig 46]. To critic Deborah Bright

the images collectively express a kind of romantic nostalgia for a modern

Arcadia where power plants, like rock formations and ancient trees, can be

appreciated as objects of a new kind of engineered beauty (or noble ruins,

perhaps, as in the case of the TMI). Pfahl’s photographs elicit other readings

as well: that energy is natural and found in every landscape; that human

exploitation of energy resources is necessary, even in the most remote and

picturesque settings (Bright, 1992b: 137)

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Environmental writer Paul Shepard goes even further in attacking the suspect

semiotics of aestheticizing the anthropogenic “ugly” in photographs by noting that

Such endless fascination with ourselves and our works also educates the eye,

but its perception is that of linear analysis. Ostensibly value-free and

demythologized, it actually is a perverse enchantment, its mythic core the body

of stories of domination that define the West (Shepard, 1999: 114)

The deadpan approach interrogates the aesthetics of land use and its reportage but

not the distancing anthropocentricism informing it. It is not surprising that deadpan’s

historical precurser, European ‘new objectivity’, was similarly criticized for making

what Walter Benjamin then called “human misery” beautiful (Wells, 2011: 271).

Figure 47. David Buckland: Ice Texts, 2005-9. Digitally printed images bonded to glass

www.capefarewell.com/who-we-are/creatives/david-buckland.html

Whilst most landscape art practitioners have tended to either ignore or, like the

deadpan movement, aestheticize evidence of the ecological crisis, a growing number

of photographic artists confront it unequivocally. Many do this by subverting the role

of objective eyewitness completely. For instance, in his Blast series Naoya

Hatakeyama comments on the human impact on nature by recording the spectacle of

limestone quarrying explosions close-up (Brown, 2014: 146-7); in Champs de’Ozone

2007 Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen dramatize the invisible character of urban

pollution by projecting overlays over photographs of Paris colour coded to indicate

the local precisely measured chemical composition of the air (Brown, 2014: 34-5); in

Ice Text David Buckland points to global warming by recording didactic slogans

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projected from a ship onto the sides of a crumbling Arctic glacier (Brown, 2014: 76-

77) [Fig 47]; in Forest 2002 Marjolin Dijkman explored the ubiquitous influence of

humans on the Dutch landscape by photographing natural-looking life-scale

woodland copses she has partly fabricated on location (Brown, 2014: 40-41);

Australian artists Rosemary Laing [Fig 48] and Marian Drew intervene by fabricating,

respectively, outdoor environmental ‘disasters’ and indoor roadkill tableaus [Fig 49];

and Yao Lu critiques the environmental cost of modernization in China by creating

ersatz Song Dynasty landscapes constructed from digitally altered photographs of

landfill and rubble (Brown, 2014: 22-23) [Fig 50]. Such practices suggest,

paradoxically, that ecological tragedy is most poetically articulated when the recorded

world and/or the record itself is judiciously manipulated so that the artist’s hand and

mind are evident, or when loss is revealed iconographically and indirectly. In

Gathering Shadows, I reveal the abjection of invertebrates obliquely, as a constellation

of shadows. This is achieved through the haptic dynamics of the cameraless

technique and interventions in finishing and presentation.

Figure 48. Rosemary Laing: Burning Ayer #6, 2003 from the series A dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian

Landscape. Type C print www.annettelarkin.com/art-detail.asp?idImage=59387

Figure 49. Marian Drew: Penguin with enamel jug, 2009. Archival pigment on cotton paper

http://diannetanzergallery.net.au/Marian-Drew/Birds

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Figure 50. Yao Lu: Passing spring at the ancient dock, 2007

www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/smap/collection_index/yao_lu_new_landscapes.aspx

The tragic eye of Gather ing Shadows : invertebrates as metaphor

The use of animals as ecological metaphors has considerable presence in recent and

contemporary art: for instance, Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson employ

the polar bear as arctic referent [Fig 51] and Joseph Beuys used the “horse, stag, elk,

coyote, fox, swan, goat, bee, hare, and moose” [Fig 52] to represent “the primitive,

prelinguistic forces found in the connected interrelationships of natural ecologies

undisturbed by civilization” (Adams, 1992: 30).

Figure 51. Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir & Mark Wilson: Nanoq Flat Out and Bluesome. A cultural Life of Polar Bears 2001-

2004 http://lmc.gatech.edu/~broglio/animality/polar.html

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Figure 52. Joseph Beuys: Queen Bee III, 1952. Beeswax on wood

http://chaudron.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/beuys-queen-bee.html

In Gathering Shadows, the use of invertebrates as ecological metaphors has a clear

material and semiotic rationale. Invertebrates exemplify ecological complexity and

interdependence, and the biologist EO Wilson extolls them as “the little things that

run the world” (Wilson, 1992: 344). Among the most ancient, numerous and diverse

of creatures, invertebrates account for 99 percent of animal species, hence their

bodies comprise the bulk of global animal biomass and they are the primary food of

most fish, amphibians, birds and many mammals. They are the primary pollinators of

flowering plants and the main consumers and recyclers of vegetation and dead

animals. In short, without invertebrates the biosphere as we know it would not

function (Wilson, 1992: 345). The vitality and diversity of invertebrates are a clear

indication of ecological health. Small bodied, fast-reproducing, short-lived and

biotically specialized, their populations respond readily to weather conditions, food

availability, disease and predation. Rachel Carson’s exposé of the dire unintended

consequences of pesticide use, Silent Spring, alerted the world to the role of

invertebrates as indicators of ecological stability and change (Carson, 1962; 2002).

Morphological and behavioural adaptations circumscribe their distribution and help

distinguish the bio-geographical character of habitats. Invertebrates help define

ecological space, including the two places investigated in this project.

In comparison with the various iconic vertebrates symbolizing place – from Arctic

polar bears and the Himalayan snow leopard, to Andean condors, Madagascan

lemurs, New Zealand kiwis and the Tasmanian devil – invertebrates have scant

cultural presence. Some insects are linked with locations–the tsetse fly of tropical

Africa, locusts in the Sahel, the Jerusalem cricket of California (Dery, 2007), giant

leeches in the Amazon, or New Zealand sandflies and wetas–but the links are

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geographically vague and unequivocally negative. The particular mix of dryland

species from Lake Tyrrell belong to that region above others. The Australian locust

has particular historical association with the wheat-belt including the Mallee, but the

Bogong moth is a special case of locational specificity indicative of the Australian

Alps.

Figure 53. Egyptian scarab, 1504-1450 BCE. Green glazed steatite

Left: http://new.artsmia.org/teaching-the-arts/insects-in-art/a-symbol-of-rebirth/

Right: http://www.artsconnected.org/resource/10748/scarab

Two unequal competing modes of encounter frame the presentation of invertebrates

in Gathering Shadows. The first is a nascent biosemiotic sense of insects as agents or

‘selves’ (discussed in chapter 2) and the second is our default perception of them as

abject creatures. Julia Kristeva’s conception of the abject as that which is so horrible,

unclean or impure as to be ‘radically excluded’ (Kristeva, 1982: 10) from the symbolic

order is an apt description of the dominant status of most invertebrates in western

culture. Of course, the abjection of non-human nature is not limited to insects: of the

six Kingdoms of Life (Starr, 2012: 312) only vertebrates and some plants are not

similarly disparaged. Like these other living things, individual insects are apprehended

as ‘it’ or ‘thing’; rarely a being, a he or she, and never whom. Some may be tasty,

useful, pretty or interesting but all remain, at base, alien and decidedly abject in the

sense that they possess, in Kristeva’s words, “only one quality of the object – that of

being opposed to I” (Kristeva, 1982: 11).

Latent biosemiotic sensibility can be detected in some popular sentiments and

cultural forms of representation. We wonder at the delicate beauty of butterflies,

scarab beetles and dragonflies, or revel in the light of the glow-worm and the

cuteness of ladybugs. We admire the communication skills of bees and the social

organization of ants. We prize the usefulness of the honeybees’ honey and wax, the

silk of the silkworm, the crimson dye called cochineal made from scale insects and

the shellac of the lac bug. Ancient Egyptians revered the scarab beetle [Fig 53], the

Japanese celebrate dragonflies [Fig 54] and the Chinese once valued musical crickets

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(Hogue, 1987: 1). Many pre-modern peoples observed that insect behaviour was

semiotically linked to weather (Costa Neto, 2006). In popular culture we are

entertained by the comic anthropomorphism of Lewis Carrolls’s “hookah-smoking

caterpillar” (Brown, 2006: xv), movie animations like Antz, A Bug’s Life, the French

television invertebrate comedy Miniscule and the powerful sentient ‘ohmu’ of Hayao

Miyazaki’s (1984) Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Figure 54. Hokusai Katsushika: Bellflower and dragonfly from series Large Flowers, 1833-4

www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/25129

Encountering invertebrates biosemiotically as ‘selves’ is possible when we consider

the evidence for insect ‘language’ (Crist, 2004) first discovered in early 20th century

ethology; the complex behaviour of worms revealing intelligence (Crist, 2002: 3); an

insect sense of time (Skorupski, 2006); or the human-like conduct of social species.

Simplistic anthropomorphic inferences are likely to be mistaken (Chittka, 2010) as

Michel de Montaigne long ago warned (Berven, 1995: 304). For example, nineteenth

century poet Henry David Thoreau’s mid-life political pessimism was influenced in

no small part by his distress at observing the “grotesque”, enslaving, “matriarchal,

hierarchical, industrial, expansionist, and anti-democratic society of white ants”

(McGowin in Brown, 2006: 73) at Walden Pond. According to literary scholar Tony

McGowin, contrary to popular belief about his love of the natural world, “Thoreau

found himself both attracted to nature and repelled by it, not for what nature was in

itself but for what it told him about humanity” (McGowin, 2006: 61). At the other

extremity was the twentieth century modelling of Nazi ideology on bee behaviour

with dire human consequences (Raffles, 2007). A biosemiotic understanding can

support reasonable presuppositions by paying respectful attention to the empirical

and subjective conditions of each creature’s umwelt or unique life-world, a form of

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attention also applicable to the indeterminate and increasingly problematic

predicament of our own species (von Uexküll, 2010: 220).

Of all the categories of earthly life, invertebrates present the clearest manifestation of

a non-human ‘otherness’, or alterity. This no doubt is the main reason why

arthropods in general and particularly the sub-group of focus in this work – insects –

are life forms subject to a common sense of human disdain. Despite the evidence for

sympathetic sentiments and traditions, in the collective cultural imagination insects

are largely seen as trivial, lowly, mindless “vectors for disease and psychosis” and

“pestiferousness” (Brown, 2006: x). They seem utterly indifferent to us, yet they

swarm, crawl, fly, nest, infiltrate, colonize and otherwise disturb our world at random

and in untold numbers. The root of “entomology”, the study of insects, is ‘atom”,

the indivisibly small (Brown, 2006: xii). Other than to entomologists their study is

unimportant. Our avoidance may in part be hardwired, an ancient biosemiotic

adaptation to the threat of pain, injury or pathogens inflicted by them. We only have

to think of the economic costs of caterpillars, locusts, fruit flies and termites to

understand their traditional threat to agriculture. Bodily threats are also present in

infestation by worms and maggots, the microbes and toxins transmitted by flies,

fleas, ticks and mosquitos, or the disabling and sometimes fatal sting of ants, wasps,

hornets, spiders and scorpions. Apex predators such as sharks, wolves, tigers and

bears can also be dangerous to humans but they have been celebrated culturally as

well as feared. Perhaps unlike vertebrates, as literary critic Eric Brown observes, the

tiny size of many invertebrates, their segmented bodies, confounding life strategies

and inscrutible behaviours are so “vastly different” from ours that it is difficult to

conceive of them as individuals or imaginatively partake of their worlds (Brown,

2006: xi). Museums and collectors celebrate insects by splaying their dead bodies,

pinned in cabinets (Aloi, 2007). Entomologists routinely kill entire populations in

order to study them. Invertebrates suffer from what Stephen Loo and Undine

Sellbach call a “double otherness” in that although all “animals are other than

human, insects are other than animals” (Loo and Sellback, 2013: 46). Even in

scholarly animal studies, the insect is “a kind of Other…best left underfoot, or as

footnotes” (Brown, 2006: ix).

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Figure 55. Ambrosius Bosschaert the Younger: Dead frog with flies c1630

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Frog_with_Flies#mediaviewer/File:Image_of_the_painting_Dead_Frog_wit

h_Flies.jpg

Art and literature reflect the predominantly abject status of invertebrates. The

metamorphosis of Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa into “horrible vermin” condemns

him to anomie and anonymous death (Kafka, 1915; 2008: 3). The Hollywood horror

B-list traverses a panoply of invertebrate malevolence from gigantism (Them, 1954)

and parasitism (Ticks, 1993) to plague (Arachnophobia, 1990) and Kafkaesque

transformation (The Fly, 1986). Baroque vanitas painting used invertebrates to

symbolise mortality (Connor, 2007; Kleiner, 2009) [Fig 55], something also

discernible in Louis Bunuel’s 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, featuring ants as

well as the work of modernists like Maurits Escher (Sear, 1993) and Salvador Dali

(Berenbaum, 1996: 323) and contemporary practitioners like William Kentridge

(Stewart, 2005: 57), Damien Hirst (Sarsfield, 2006: 36) and Tessa Farmer (Frank,

2007) who fabricates human-insect hybrids. Photographs like Hannah Collins’ live

snails in a bag (Phaidon, 1997: 96) or Trent Parke’s Outback Queensland of 2003

featuring moths silhouetted on a light globe [Fig 58] are unequivocal reminders of

insect abjection.

For other artists, the tone of abjection is lessened by competing metaphors. Louise

Bourgeois’ giant autobiographical spider Maman (1999) [Fig 56] is a confronting and

ambiguous monument to motherhood. Hubert Duprat’s caddis fly ‘collaborations’

(Duprat, 2007) [Fig 57], Maria Fernanda Cardoso’s performing fleas (Cardoso, 2000)

and Sanna Kannisto’s elegant entomological tableaus (Baker, 2011) implicate

invertebrate minds. Curated exhibitions such as Bug-Eyed (Watts, 2004) and

Entomologia (Enemark, 2010) showcase invertebrates across a gamut of media.

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Figure 56. Louise Bourgeise: Maman, 1999. Stainless steel, bronze, marble

http://revueexsituuqam.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/maman-une-oeuvre-icone-du-musee-des-beaux-arts-du-

canada/

Figure 57. Hubert Duprat: Aquatic caddis-fly larvae with cases (detail), 1986-2002

http://cdn.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/hubert-duprat.jpeg

Figure 58. Trent Parke: Outback Queensland, 2003. Gelatin silver print

www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=29YL534U0U0U

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Among all these however, as explicit symbols of place and ecological tragedy, the

closest parallel to Gathering Shadows is Cornelia Hesse-Honneger’s Heteroptera, an

ongoing series of meticulously executed watercolours and drawings of radiation-

deformed insects found around nuclear power installations at Chernobyl, Three Mile

Island and Sellafield begun in 1987 (Hesse-Honneger, 2001; 2007) [Fig 59]. Of

course, invertebrate locational symbolism or biosemiosis is hardly self-evident. Like

Laura Gilpin’s archaeological or Linda Connor’s petroglyph photographs their

specific ecological meaning cannot be understood without prior knowledge [Fig 60].

Figure 59. Cornelia Hesse-Honneger: Heteroptera: crippled wings, missing feelers, Chernobyl, c2007. Watercolour on

paper www.chembiodiv.ch/highlight/Heteroptera3.jpg

Figure 60. Linda Connor: Petroglyphs, Galisteo, New Mexico 1989. Gold toned printing out paper print

www.palaceofthegovernors.org/lens/artists.php?view=detail&last=Connor&first=Linda

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Biosemiotic insights may be helping to ameliorate the general contempt we hold for

insects but can hardly undo their default status as abject creatures. In this research

project, the abjection of insects at Lake tyrrell and Mount Buffalo is reconfigured

from a microcosm of our anthropocentric indifference to the plight of terrestrial

non-human, from insects to habitats, to what might be called (extending Kohn’s idea

of biosemiotic selfhood) an overarching ‘system of selves’ – the biosphere. By so

doing, the work carries forth Pliny’s motto that “Nature is to be found in its entirety

nowhere more than in her smallest creatures” (Gould, 1980: 11-12). In Gathering

Shadows, the intended punctum of photographs of living, abject invertebrates, either

represented alone or juxtaposed with celestial or footprint imagery, is Tragedy and its

catharsis.

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Chapter 4

Gathering Shadows at Lake Tyrrell: Syzygy + The Impossibility + The End

The Site

At first sight Lake Tyrrell in the semi-arid Victorian Mallee is unprepossessing [Fig

61]. Yet, this flat, stark, seasonally water-covered, twenty-eight-square-kilometre salty

depression surrounded by eroding sand hills and grassy plains is associated with a

pre-colonial story evoking a vision apparent only when the land itself is unseen–at

night. Nineteenth century squatter and amateur ethnographer William Edward

Stanbridge reported that the local “Boorong tribe” who knew “more of astronomy

than any others” (Stanbridge, 1861: 301) were specialists in studying the night sky

reflected in the shallow waters of Lake Tyrrell. The Boorong shared the outlook of

most pre-moderns in supposing a correspondence between heaven and earth. The

relative location of stars imitated the arrangement of landscape features. Attributes of

the night sky were emulated in the stories of their terrestrial correlates. This earth-sky

correspondence appears to be conveyed in the lake’s name. According to historian

John Morieson

The name Tyrrell comes from the local word for “sky” and it is not hard

to imagine why. On an occasion when the lake has been replenished, to

be there on a cloudless night when the water is still, every star in the

firmament can be seen reflected. Standing on a point of land jutting out

onto the lake, it is easy to form the impression that one is in space, with

the stars all around, above and below. “Tyrelle” had both meanings; “sky”

and “space” (Morieson, 1996: 6)

According to Paul Carter (Carter, 2003: 7), “explorer Edward John Eyre named the

lake after the Aboriginal word ‘derell’ meaning above, sky or space”, later rendered as

‘tyrille’ by William Edward Stanbridge. For Carter, the tyrille of the Boorong is best

understood as “primordial space” reminiscent of the chora of classical Greek

cosmology: “The tyrille was not a clearing but an opening, a cleaving in which all

things came into being, doubled like reflections in their proper places” (Carter, 2003:

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7). Today, the heavens remain essentially unchanged and, as Paul Carter says, ‘in their

proper places’ but the lake and its environs, cleared of most native habitat in the

twentieth century, is an ecologically impoverished zone. State government reports,

for example, outline the effects of large-scale land clearing and settlement in the

Mallee region including Lake Tyrrell: no more than seven of an original estimated 25

species of small to medium-sized native mammals and marsupials survive in the

region (Land Conservation Council, 1974: 153-173; 219-229; Land Conservation

Council, 1987: 285-328). The heavens are left to mirror the land as it might be

remembered, not as it has become. It is a double, ‘reflected’ loss: the absence of an

intact ecological surface and the undoing of an imagined pairing or reciprocity of

earth with sky.

Figure 61. Lake Tyrrell

I developed three loosely related research projects addressing environmental loss

responding to the Lake Tyrrell site and story: the ambitous multi film artwork Syzygy

and two works on paper, The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living

Being, and The End of the Age of Entitlement.

Lake Tyrrell sub-project 1: Syzygy The Boorong story triggered the idea of re-imagining Lake Tyrrell as an optical

aperture or plane through which its ecology and tragedy might be evoked by the

poetic ‘re-pairing’ of earth and the heavens in photographs created both under the

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night sky on site and by starlight. Such an ersatz re-pairing would be a metaphor for

the “syzygy” to which the title refers: the yoking together of two or more objects or

the alignment of three or more celestial bodies. The chosen method arose following

several false starts: turning the flat salt lake bed into a giant radio telescope receiver;

erecting a huge tent-like fabric-skinned refraction telescope over the lakebed; or

concentrating starlight onto an earth-facing imaging plane suspended over the centre

of a parabolic disk of fresnel mirrors lying on the lakebed. Each of these was

technically feasible but logistically and financially impractical. Syzygy took place over

six years and comprised three overlapping phases. Paul Carter, who in a chance

meeting at Mildura airport in April 2004 told me the Boorong story that inspired

work at the lake, continued an involvement in Syzygy for three years, initially as a

collaborator/informant and later as commentator (Carter, 2010: 155-158) [Fig 204].

Syzygy phase one: image capture

The first phase of Syzygy, spanning the period March 2007 to 2010, involved creating

‘terrestrial’ and finding ‘celestial’ source imagery. The source terrestrial imagery

comprised various recordings on photographic film. The range of subjects was broad

and comprised five series. One set included two women dancers [Figs 62, 63], a man,

a toddler and an Emu’s footprint [Fig 64] recorded in daylight on and near Lake

Tyrrell using sodium thiosulphate ‘fixer’ on the subjects’ skin so that it chemically

dissolved exposed but undeveloped silver halides of the film [Fig 65]. A second set

recorded body imprints of the two dancers, a child’s and an Emu’s feet with graphite

on translucent architects paper. Footprints symbolize connection to place: Emu

prints can be seen everywhere at Lake Tyrrell and human feet recall the ancient

indigenous prints recently uncovered near Lake Mungo, NSW, a site geophysically

similar to Lake Tyrrell. The finely detailed individualized flesh prints resulting from

these two experiments were made during a two-week artists’ camp in April 2007 on

private land at Tyrrell Downs at the southeast corner of the lake. Organised by artist

John Wolseley and Jenny Long, the camp was attended by Paul Carter and his

assistant Dr Emily Potter, the astronomer Maurizio Toscano and his family, sound

artist Christopher Williams, dancers Siobhan Murphy and Michaela Pegum, plus

occasional visitors and me. A third set of images were medium format camera studies

on black and white film of the two dancers performing on the lakebed at Lake

Tyrrell, and large format black and white film camera studies of a male and two

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female nudes taken in a South Melbourne studio the following year [Fig 66]. A fourth

series comprised large format camera gelatin silver film images of taxidermied

animals native to the Mallee held in the collections of Healesville Sanctuary and the

Murtoa Watertower Museum [Fig 66, bottom right]. The fifth series were cameraless

photographic ‘shadowgrams’ executed in darkness using flash on film: metal Mallee

woolshed stencil labels, lakeside vegetation, saline lake waters and, from November

2008, live invertebrates gathered from around the lakeshore. Films and papers from

the first, second and fifth sets were used in phase two but only the last mentioned –

the shadowgrams of live invertebrates – appear in the final Lake Tyrrell artwork. The

dancers’ chemical footprints and the invertebrate shadowgrams had a second life in

work produced about the second research site, Mount Buffalo (Chapter 5). All

analogue photography preparation and processing was undertaken in my suburban

Melbourne darkroom/studio [Figs 67 and 68, left].

Figure 62. Dancers body prints: Michaela Pegum imprinting footprints using fixer (ammonium thiosulphate) on a

roll of photographic film (series 1) laid on the lakebed. Photo: Siobhan Murphy

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Figure 63. Dancers’ body prints: Michaela Pegum making body prints with graphite on architect’s paper (series 2)

on Lake Tyrrell. Photo: Siobhan Murphy

Figure 64. Emu footprints. Attempting to record live Emu footprints on paper with graphite powder.

Photo: Rose Mueller

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Figure 65. Dancers’ body prints: processed chemogram of dancer’s foot etched by fixer (ammonium thiosulphate)

on gelatin silver film (series 1) laid on the lakebed; made for Syzygy but used in the Mt Buffalo research project

Figure 66. Camera photographs. Examples of large format gelatin silver camera negatives of nudes (series 3) and

taxidermied native animals (series 4) made for but not used in the final Syzygy artwork

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Imaging live invertebrates without a camera was a straightforward procedure. First,

live invertebrates were gathered from the lakeshore [Fig 69, top]. Daylight techniques

included collecting individual Meat Ants and other ants in the Rhytidoponera and

Dolichoderinae families by flicking them gently with a soft paintbrush into plastic

receptacles or siphoning them en masse into a sealed container using a hip-mounted

homemade vacuum pump powered by a large portable rechargable battery. Antlions

and millipedes were scooped up with a small trowel. Termites were picked one by

one from their woody nests using a tiny paintbrush and tweezers whilst, butterflies

(Piereidae) and dragonflies were caught on the wing with handheld nets. Funnel Web

Spiders (Mygalomorphae) and Wolf Spiders (Lycosidae) were spotlighted at night to

locate their reflective eyes and levered with cardboard into containers. Nocturnal

flying insects such as Bugs (Hemiptera), Long Horn Beetles (Cerambycidae), Click

Beetles (Elateridae), Scarab Beetles (Melolonthinae), Rove Beetles (Staphylinidae),

Trechitid Ground Beetles, Megacephala australis or Tiger Beetles (Carabidae) and

moths were attracted to an open-topped plastic tray and a white plastic 20-litre barrel

each fitted with battery powered bright UV lamps placed inside [Fig 69, lower left].

Each group of ants and termites from the same colony and each spider and each

other group of captives of the same species were stored in separate sealed containers.

The only live non-invertebrate caught and imaged was a rare brown Peter’s Blind

Snake (Ramphotyphlops bituberculatus) that happened to wander on site one night.

Figure 67. Work spaces. Left: Studio/darkroom benchtop with lightbox ‘dry side’. Right: Studio/darkroom

chemical processing ‘wet side’

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Figure 68. Work spaces. Left: Suburban studio/darkroom façade. Right: Fabricating MDF template holders in

borrowed workshop at LaTrobe University, Bundoora. Photo: Rudy Frank

Cameraless photography was executed in darkness on the lakeshore using a ‘Metz 45’

analogue portable flash unit positioned facing down on a tripod 1.8 meters above

and perpendicular to the centre of the imaging material, contained in a tray on the

ground [Figs 69, bottom right, 70 and 116]. Each sheet of imaging material was 40 x

50 cm low-speed (ISO 20) ‘Kodak CGP Camera 2000’ orthochromatic (green/blue

sensitive) gelatin silver thin base (0.10mm) polyester film, precut in my Melbourne

studio from a 76cm wide roll. Purchased for the project in 2007, Kodak 2000 (now

discontinued) is a fast, high-contrast, high-Dmax, gelatin silver emulsion designed for

half-tone or line work in graphic arts applications, This film was chosen for its speed,

spectral range, physical toughnesss, responsiveness to chemical toning and

intensification, availability in large sizes and relatively low cost compared to ‘normal’

photographic industry gelatin silver products. Early in the project, exhaustive

darkroom tests using standard ‘zone system’ principles of increased exposure and

reduced development imaged through a standard translucent Kodak 7-stop, 21-step

test strip ‘subject’ established the working protocol for producing fully-scaled,

medium-contrast, medium-Dmax, ‘photography-like’ outcomes. Further studio

experiments established the minimum distance between flash and film required for

the cone of light to fall evenly across the rectangular image surface with a tolerance

of no more than a 1/3 stop fall-off at the corners.

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Figure 69. Making invertebrate ‘template’ negatives. Top: Collecting ants using a home made motorized vacuum

device. Photo: Rudy Frank. Lower left: Night light insect attractant. Lower right: photograms of live invertebrates

being exposed by flash at night beside the lake. Photo: Viren Mohan.

Standard procedure involved dropping, pouring or placing the intended subjects onto

the emulsion, carefully observing their behaviour until they configured a satisfactory

arrangement, then exposing them to a single pre-calibrated flash pulse hand-metered

using a Calcu-flash at an EV (exposure value) of 22 (+/– 1) at the film surface. Unlike

the accepted random scatter produced by most creatures, the desired arrangement

for ants was either the visual drama of trail-like lines mimicking natural foraging

behaviour or globular massing connoting stars, star clusters and nebulae. Coralling

the invertebrates with cardboard dividers or plastic cylinders positioned edge-on to

the film aided these outcomes. All images except one set were executed in dry

conditions: in the exceptional case naturalized Small Cabbage White (Pieris rapae)

butterflies were streaked dramatically with rain. After exposure the live subjects were

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gently shaken off the film onto the ground nearby, usually unharmed. Unexposed

and exposed films were stored in separate lightproof envelopes. Dolphin lamps and

LED torches fitted with red ‘safelights’ aided seeing and image composition during

the night imaging process. Twelve ‘phase one’ collecting and imaging events at five

different locations around the lakeshore were executed between December 2008 and

March 2010. Of over 200 terrestrial films created in phase one, almost half were

invertebrate shadowgrams. Most films were cropped to closely match the 367mm x

367mm dimensions of the celestial plates [Fig 71] (see Addendum 1 for technical

details).

Figure 70. Generic ground based Lake Tyrrell plein air shadowgram imaging technique

Early in the project I decided to use the celestial imagery of film transparencies

outputted from thousands of data packages downloaded from the ‘SuperCosmos’

astronomical repository website based at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh,

Scotland. Assisting in this and other scientific aspects of the project, the

astrophysicist, Dr Maurizio Toscano, from the University of Melbourne, was

appointed an astronomical adviser. Just as the digital work was about to commence,

Dr Toscano brokered access to a previously unknown local collection of

astronomical ‘14 inch’ (367mm) square glass plate photographic negatives identical to

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those scanned to create the SuperCosmos digital archive: a northern hemisphere

‘NGS-POSS 1’ series made by the Mount Palomar Schmidt telescope, California,

between 1948 and 1958 and a set of southern sky ‘UKST’ pictures recorded by the

Anglo-Australian Schmidt instrument at Siding Springs, NSW, between 1973 and

2002. Each plate covers a little over 6 degrees of arc (equivalent to a dozen full

moons) with a resolving power about a million times that of the unaided human eye.

These 3000-odd plates comprised part of the world’s first systematic survey of the

entire visible universe. The collection was at that time owned by Dr Rachel Webster, Professor of Physics at

the University of Melbourne. Despite their preciousness, Dr Webster gave carte

blanche permission for their use in the project, and in 2012, Dr Toscano established

that they were the only surviving collection outside Edinburgh in the world. The

plates were at the time stored in cabinets in the basement of the Physics building and

remained uncatalogued prior to the project. Catalogued and assessed by me for

suitability in June and July 2007, some 120 plates were selected for use in the second

phase of the project [Fig 72]. These source images were called ‘templates’ [Fig 73].

Figure 71. Trimmed invertebrate shadowgram films on lightbox being prepared as star exposure templates

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Figure 72. Telescopic glass plates being catalogued and assessed for selection in portable case

Figure 73. ‘Template’ negatives. Left: a life-scale 'photogram' of a live wolf spider on Kodak CGP Camera 2000

orthochromatic film created by exposure to flash on site at Lake Tyrrell. Right: the corner of an appropriated ‘14

inch’ square astronomical survey glass plate photographic negative

Syzygy phase two: starlight exposure Starlight exposure was logistically and technically challenging. The simple principle of

contact printing unexposed fresh gelatin silver photographic material under the

source films and plates was the starting point. The core problem of developing a

reliable, high quality imaging technique had several parts. First, there was the

question of emulsion spectral sensitivity. An orthochromatic or blue/green sensitive

(≈ 350-570nm) emulsion such as the Kodak CGP Camera 2000 could be used under

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red safe lights but would be slow and would be blind to some visible starlight. A

panchromatic emulsion with extended red sensitivity (≈ 350-740nm) such as Ilford

SFX 200 would capture a greater spectrum of starlight than the naked eye but risked

being fogged by the infrared rays of the night vision equipment it was assumed

would be needed.

Second, there was the question of emulsion speed. Slow imaging materials under ISO

50 would not be practical because they would need more than a single night’s

exposure: neither slow fibre-based photographic paper nor slow speed film were

feasible. The alternative of a fast resin coated paper was archivally problematic and

aesthetically undesirable, whilst a very fast emulsion would make precision exposure

difficult and accidental fogging more likely. The solution was a mid-speed

panchromatic (≈ 350-650nm) film. To this end, 400 sheets of 14 inch (367mm)

square Ilford HP5Plus ISO 400 film were custom-cut for the project by the

manufacturer in the UK.

Third, was the question of exposure: camera-based studio tests showed the

achievement of optimal shadow detail required a half-stop reduced speed rating of

ISO 320 rather than 400 for the HP5Plus emulsion. Based on figures for the average

flux of moonless and planet-less, nocturnal light (see Addendum 7) provided by Dr

Toscano, this speed rating suggested an exposure of almost 7 minutes. Further

calculations fully compensating for reciprocity failure – predictable depressed

emulsion reactivity under low light conditions – indicated an exposure of 56 (+/–6)

minutes was needed. This figure, later confirmed by field tests, was used for all

HP5Plus film nightlight exposures on the lakebed.

A fourth problem was that of image quality, an outcome of both exposure and

processing. Initial starlight contact printing tests on small 5x4 inch sheets of HP5Plus

film on site in mid 2007 produced mottled results. Months of experiments

discounted Newton’s rings (light and dark banding patterns produced by light

reflected between two surfaces), chemical fogging or moisture as the cause until,

finally in January 2008 it was found to be uneven pressure between the film/film and

film/astronomical plate surfaces. The solution was a redesigned holder with glass

pressure plates on top of the felt both above and below each starlight-imaging

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sandwich. In February 2008, thirty holders made of MDF with felt lining held

together by velcro straps were fabricated with a volunteer assistant, Mr Rudy Frank,

in a LaTrobe University workshop [Figs 68 right, 74 left]. In respect to processing,

darkroom experiments showed open tray development by hand did not produce

time-efficient, consistent or even film development. Two kinds of tabletop electric

JOBO rotational processor designed for colour paper were also tested with similarly

unacceptable results. The expensive but reliable alternative of a nitrogen-burst ‘dip

and dunk’ film processor, the one-time mainstay of commercial analogue film

laboratories, became unavoidable. In October 2007, the only suitable supplier, Mr

Alistair Inglis of Vancouver, Canada, fabricated a processor and accompanying

archival film washer for the project [Fig 75]. When installed, gas was drawn to the

device from a tank of liquid nitrogen hired from BOC in 10-second bursts controlled

by a Burkert electric solenoid fluid valve. To maximize effective film speed and lend

a subtle blue colour to the emulsion, ‘Ilford Microphen’ film developer was used

exclusively to process the HP5Plus films (see Addendum 2 for technical details).

A fifth challenge was finding a suitable starlight exposure location. This involved

somewhat incompatible criteria: on the one hand the difficulty of accessibility by car

in all weathers and, on the other, a need for a dark-sky site far from any settlement

with minimal chance of artificial light pollution from passing cars or other human

activity. Several reconnaissance trips in daylight and at night to various potential sites

led to the choice of a secluded cove at the very northern tip of the lake [Fig 80].

Figure 74. Star exposure field gear. Left: An open home-made felt-lined MDF star exposure holder. Right:

Custom-made instrument box filled with template holders wrapped in numbered lightproof black envelopes ready

for transport to the field.

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A sixth issue was the problem of safely transporting materials including the

astronomical glass plates: a set of six instrument boxes with handles and interior

padding designed to snugly contain eight MDF star exposure holders were custom-

fabricated by Cases Pty Ltd of Brisbane for the project [Fig 74, right].

Figure 75. HP5Plus film processing system. Left: ‘Inglis’ custom-made nitrogen burst film processor (closed and

in use). Top right: Film holding septum in processor (empty and open). Right bottom: Nitrogen tank

Figure 76. Starlight exposure. Left: Pegged guide tape line from vehicle parking area to starlight exposure site.

Photo: Robert Hock. Right: Startrail reflections on template glasses during celestial exposure. Photo: Viren

Mohan

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A seventh problem was nocturnal navigation: to find the way between vehicles parked

behind the exposure site and the site itself in darkness, a distance of some 250 metres

across steep and broken ground A tape line held in place by tent pegs was installed in

2008 and remained until it was removed on the final site visit in 2011 [Fig 76, left]. In

addition, because the HP5Plus was a medium speed panchromatic emulsion, torches

were banned and red safe lights were unusable when star exposures were underway.

Instead, a ‘Viper’ night vision monocular using infrared light supplemented naked eye

sight. In fact, the light of the clear moonless night sky reflected by the salt white of

the lake provided surprisingly adequate vision for most tasks.

Figure 77. Tarpaulin laying in daylight preparatory to nocturnal starlight exposure of the templates, an exercize

repeated thirteen times over the life of the project. Photos: Robert Hock

The ‘phase two’ imaging procedure was similar each time. Prior to each excursion,

between 16 and 24 MDF film holders each containing one or more clear glass

pressure plates and a source image template sandwiched emulsion to emulsion

against an unexposed HP5Plus film was prepared in total darkness in my Melbourne

darkroom. Every holder was then wrapped in a custom-made lightproof black plastic

bag sealed with Velcro straps. The wrapped holders, all numbered for later

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identification, were packed in the carrying cases, eight to a box [Fig 74, right]. Once

on site the first daytime task was laying out an east to west line of abutting tarpaulins

pegged into the hard brine lake floor, an orientation designed to minimize the

deposition of salt residues carried by prevailing nightime southerlies on any

individual plate [Fig 77]. The tarps protected people and equipment from direct

contact with the ground and guided positioning of and work on the film holders

before and after dark. Around dusk, after the tarps had been set, the instrument

boxes were carried down to the exposure area. Later, in full darkness prior to

exposure commencement, the wrapped holders were taken out of the boxes and laid

in line on the tarps. At the appointed moment each holder was unwrapped one by

one down the line and opened to the light of the night sky [Figs 76, right, 78 and 79].

To ensure identical exposures, when time was up the holders were re-closed and re-

wrapped in the same order they had been opened before being returned to their

respective boxes. The boxes were then carried back to the vehicles for transport

home. Processing of the exposed films was undertaken in my Melbourne darkroom.

Figure 78. Starlight exposure method. A simple negative/positive contact printing system.

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Figure 79. Starlight exposure. The templates on the lakebed are the dark middleground line. Photo: Glenn

Wilson.

Dr Toscano mapped out the times on the 5-6 nights each month free of the reflected

sunlight from the moon and bright planets. This celestial timetable combined with

the exigencies of personal work schedules, volunteer availability and weather meant

field trips to execute starlight exposures were restricted to a few clear, dark nights

every one to three months. On thirteen events between March 2008 and 2010, some

270 films were exposed to the stars.

Sixteen field trips to Lake Tyrrell were undertaken over the four years of phases one

and two of Syzygy. On all but the first three visits, ‘phase one’ image making

preceeded the ‘phase two’ starlight exposures. Up to ten volunteers were present on

each excursion. For comfort and to protect the sensitive photographic materials from

dust, light and heat, the Thisledome Motel in Sea Lake was used as a base. Forays to

the main site 60 km to the north were made daily when conditions were suitable.

Evening meals were had on site around dusk before the nocturnal exposures. Field

activity was physically taxing at any time, but especially so in summer when

temperatures rarely dropped below 300 C and daily sitework schedules often extended

from mid-afternoon one day to dawn the next.

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Figure 80. Lake Tyrrell. The main nocturnal imaging site is the cove at the northernmost tip of the lake at the top

centre of the satellite image. Source: Google Earth.

Syzygy phase three: image post production, remaking and finishing Concepts for the presentation of the Syzygy films evolved considerably during the life of

the project. The initial idea of 2008 was a Milky Way collage showcasing the dark ‘emu in

the sky’ of indigenous tradition;: informed by the minimalist plastic hangings of

German/American artist Eva Hesse it was to be a ceiling-suspended grid of backlit star-

exposed films mounted on clear acrylic [Fig 81]. A year later the galactic display was

dropped as too literal. It was replaced by a plan to face-mount the films on ‘14 inch’

square panes of glass with a screen-printed circular mask on the opposite side, an

arrangement referencing the material, sizing and look of the source astronomical glass

negatives and the dark ring of celestial horizons, respectively. To facilitate this iteration,

all the films were first ‘post processed’ in the darkroom to remove a base ‘fog’ or veil of

opaque density produced by the star exposure process. I then treated them in baths of

selenium solution to intensify their contrast, turn the silver imagery slightly bluer, and

improve the films’ archival stability (see Addendum 6). The films were then sent to

Graphic Art Mount in St Peters, NSW, to be face-mounted using an archival adhesive

film on one side and screen-printed with a 310 mm diameter black circle on the opposite

face.

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The glass/films panes were initially presented as linearly aligned triptychs supported

upright on long hardwood stands [Fig 82]. Five triptychs using this arrangement were

shown at Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Fitzroy in March 2010; and another was selected

for the Tidal Art Prize held at Devonport Regional Gallery, Devonport in Tasmania,

later that year.

Less than a year after the first show, my approach altered again when I began

exploiting the transparency of the films more effectively by overlaying the glass/film

panes into sandwiched pairs and palimpsests rather than in side-by-side alignments

[Fig 83]. By late 2010, an increasing research focus on communicating the abject and

tragic in nature led to the subject of invertebrates supplanting all others [Fig 84]. In

early 2011, another 67 invertebrate and celestial films were post-processed, mounted

on glass and screen printed for presentation. They were divided into two sub-series: a

set of Syzygy star/insect diptychs and a new group of invertebrate palimpsests called

Telescope [Figs 83 and 85, bottom]. These were shown at Horsham Regional Art

Gallery in March 2011, as a shortlisted entry for the William and Winifred Bowness

Photography Prize at the Monash Gallery of Art in September 2011 and at Swan Hill

Regional Art Gallery and Stills Gallery in Paddington NSW in July and September

2012, respectively.

In early 2013, I jettisoned the wooden stands because they were visually clumsy,

distracting and restricted display options. Instead, the multi-piece glass/film artworks

were presented loosely arranged without stands, offset and stacked on top of light

tables [Figs 86 and 87]. This iteration appeared in the SkyLab show held at Latrobe

Regional Art Gallery, Morwell, in July 2013. A year later in the RMIT School of Art

gallery PhD exam exhibition, the stacks were juxtaposed in ‘syzygy’ en masse atop a

line of custom-made light tables [Figs. 208-210]

In 2010, I combined stills, video and audio documentation of the projects early

production phases with a soundtrack supplied by Adelaide-based sound artist

Christopher Williams into the video, Making Syzygy, which was played at the 2011

Horsham and 2012 Swan Hill gallery exhibitions. A modified version comprises the

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first twelve minutes of the new 21’24” mp4 documentary video, Making Gathering

Shadows, accompaning this exegesis and the RMIT exhibition.

Figure 81. Sketch of intial Syzygy schema for a Milky Way film grid mounted on acrylic

Figure 82. Example of first (2010-2011) iteration configured as uprights at Horsham Regional Gallery, 2011:

Syzygy 1/The Cygnus A Triptych, 2010. 3 glass/film objects 337 x 357 x 5mm on base 30 x 80 x 1100mm

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Figure 83. Example of first (2010-2011) iteration of the Telescope sub-series configured as a series of uprights at

Horsham Regional Gallery, 2011: Telescope 2, 2011. Eight glass/film objects 335 x 355 x 5mm paired on 4 bases

30 x 80 x 380mm

Figure 84. Processed starlight-exposed HP5Plus films with invertebrate Telescope series imagery during darkroom

post-processing preparatory to mounting on glass in November 2010.

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Figure 85. Examples of the second (2011-2012) iteration, altered to upright sandwiches exhibited at Swan Hill

Regional Gallery in 2012. Top: Syzygy 1/Transit Cygnus A, 2011 composed of two glass/film objects 337 x 357 x

5mm, as presented upright on wooden base 30 x 80 x 380mm. Bottom: Installation view of Telescope works

(foreground) and Syzygy diptychs (background)

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Figure 86. Example of third (post 2013) iteration as sandwiched backlit horizontally stacked Syzygy diptychs

without supports exhibited at Latrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, in 2013. Bottom photo: Daniel Armstrong

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Figure 87. Example of third (post 2013) iteration of a celestial/terrestrial diptych: Syzygy 4/Transit of Alpha

Centauri, 2011. Top left: celestial HP5Plus film. Top right: terrestrial HP5Plus film. Bottom: overlaid diptych. Two

toned gelatin silver films mounted on a starfire glass pane with screen-printed mask on opposing face, 335 x 355

x 5mm each

Syzygy interpreted

Since first patented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839, exposing and fixing silver

halides was the mainstay of chemical photographic recording and replication. It is a

technology characterized by both a deeply physical, indexical relationship with a

referent and peculiar properties including a proclivity for so-called ‘reciprocity failure’

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– that is, reduced sensitivity in response to low intensity or short duration light. In

Syzygy, the negative/positive re-imaging procedure employing the faint nocturnal

‘light of the universe’ involved extreme reciprocity failure in the silver emulsion that

had to be compensated for by exposures extended to nearly an hour. This partial

decoupling of light from image, this loosened reciprocity, presents an analogy to the

incompletely broken or ‘failed’ reciprocity between earth and sky at Lake Tyrrell.

From the moment of capture (or with Syzygy, the hour of capture), a photograph

indicates that which is past, dead or soon to pass, a process that reminds us of our

own imminent mortality, the punctum of Barthes’ momento mori. Syzygy recorded the

flashlit shadows of ephemeral creatures and celestial imprints reformed through

congealed starlight. There is pathos intrinsic to these images as in all photographs,

but it is a pathos redoubled when we recall that even at the time of exposure the

starry light sources were long dead. Thus, even without alchemy, these images are

enlivened by ancient, fossil light.

Syzygy’s unique shadow ‘emanations’ resist what Walter Benjamin observed was the

draining of ‘aura’ in the reproduced artwork, especially photographs. The films are

‘original’ in that they have been produced directly through the ‘touch’ of their

arthropod referents, the glass plates and cosmic light. Their auratic power is derived

from this ‘originality’ as an index of traces, and also from what Laura Marks (recalling

Deleuze) calls the indexical “fossil” nature of photographs, the physical

transformation caused by contact with the light of the referent remaining “even after

the latter has decayed” (Marks, 2000: 84).

Here, it helps to be mindful of the unique quality and ‘touch’ of light. Quantum

physicists speak of paired photons being ‘entangled’ with each other across space and

time (Barad, 2007: 314-16). Many photons that had congealed in the starlit Syzygy

emulsions were entangled with partner particles elsewhere in the Milky Way–and

beyond. The unexposed zones of the final films shaded from starlight by overlying

negative source imagery are the ‘bright’ zones of translucency, the darkness of celestial

objects and invertebrate fields between congeal the light of long dead stars, giving

rise to a tragic, cosmic aura.

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Syzygy’s indexicality is therefore threefold: firstly, of sense, the bodily and binocular

memories of human participants; secondly, of record, the kinetic ‘touch’ of creatures

and plates imprinting image-holding film surfaces; and thirdly, of photochemical

touch, where ancient cosmic photons energized silver halides.

Although many artists have made photograms by sunlight or moonshine, there is

only one known precedent of contact printing by starlight: daguerreotypist Antoine

Claudet in 1846. In the Salem Gazette of 1 May, 1846 (Volume 65, Number 35), the

“London correspondent of the Boston Atlas, describes a scientific soirée” thus:

What seems to cause the greatest astonishment, is an impression of black lace

upon a daguerreotype plate, by the light of the stars! M. Claudet, in referring

to this phenomenon, observed, that he considered it as proof of the chemical

power of star-light. He said that he had prepared a plate in the usual manner,

covered it with a piece of black lace, and exposed it to the then brightest part

of the sky, the constellation Ursa Major, nearly at the zenith. It was left to the

influence of these, and the surrounding stars, for about fifteen minutes, which

sufficed to impress the black lace upon the plate (Batchen, 2008).

A half century after Claudet, in 1894, Swedish playwright August Strindberg exposed

photopaper ‘celestographs’ to raw starlight (Campany, 2005: 115) producing what he

mistakenly thought were images of the cosmos (Feuk, 2001) [Fig 88].

Figure 88. August Strindberg: Celestograph, 1894. Gelatin silver plate

www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/3/celesographs.php

Syzygy’s preoccupation with celestial light on location also carries a separate and

peculiar meaning. Even the briefest glance at a map or satellite image of the region

triggers an odd recognition: Lake Tyrrell’s shape resembles that of a human infant. In

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an uncanny twist, the very top of the head of that newborn, its fontanelle, is where

most of Syzygy took place [Fig 80]. The fontanelle is the vulnerable ‘soft spot’ where

three cranial bones abut but remain temporarily unknitted and flexible to

accommodate a child’s growing brain. The geosemiosis is anthropomorphic: an

atavistic vision of our own selfhood–open, sensitive, ecological–and the aperture

through which we might come to detect the earth and its sky as other selves. It has

an uncanny precedent: in Joseph Beuys’ drawing, Girl Astronaut of 1957, a woman

“astronaut” takes on the posture of the Graubelle Man, a neolithic corpse found five

years earlier in a Danish peat bog. Like Graubelle Man part of her cranium is missing

to indicate “receptivity to spiritual influences” through “open fontanelle stars” on her

head (Adams, 1992: 31).

Figure 89. Paul Carter in collaboration with Lab architecture: studio pavement detail of Nearamnew, Federation

Square, Melbourne, 2003

Syzygy has multiple artistic associations. The work’s ritual-like creative process and

embodied heavenward gaze took some of its inspiration from James Turrell’s

devotional celestial observatories (Fisher, 2011: 123; Turrell, 1998). More particularly,

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the project responds to the same Lake Tyrrell story that also informed the design of

Paul Carter’s Nearamnew pavement at Federation Square, Melbourne (Carter, 2005)

[Fig 89]. Like Nearamnew, Syzygy’s reaction to a relic of indigenous lore about ancient

astronomy silently implicates the human tragedy of colonial disposession. Far from

being an act of xenocentrism – a preference for another’s culture – art inspired by

the appropriated Boorong story confers mythopoetic voice to country about which

the colonized culture has scant memory and the colonizing culture is largely ignorant.

Before the electric light, all photography not lit by flame was solar. The use of

sunlight as an indexical aesthetic artifact however is a more recent innovation. Linda

Connor uses the sun to print large format film negatives of petroglyphs and star trails

(Conner, 2009) and Chris McCaw produces extraordinary in-camera ultra large

format gelatin silver prints in which the focussed light of the journeying sun literally

burns itself into the photographic paper [Fig 90] (McCaw, 2012). However, the

outstanding example of cameraless celestial images is Erika Blumenfeld’s precisely

timed, multi-day semi-abstract solar and lunar outdoor sequences unmediated except

for an aperture; like Syzygy, Blumenfeld’s method is a nexus of place, natural light and

time (Blumenfeld, 2005) [Fig 91].

Figure 90. Chris McCaw: Sunburned, 2008. Gelatin silver print

http://petapixel.com/2013/05/15/photographer-chris-mccaw-talks-about-how-he-creates-his-sunburned-

photos/

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Figure 91. Erika Blumenfeld: still from Moving Light: Spring, 2005. Projected installation, 1:35 minutes

www.bu.edu/prc/keepingtime/blumenfeld.htm

The formal resolution of the finished Syzygy films, trimmed and face-mounted on

starfire glass panes bordered by a circular black mask screen-printed on the opposing

side, silently infers the glass astronomical survey archive, magnification optics and

zodiacal wheel. In an otherwise degraded landscape, the invertebrates (and one

reptile) gathered from around the lake offer a bounteous and evocative iconography

of locality, fragility, otherness, sociability, competition, threat and mortality.

Imprinted at life-scale, these creatures present a potent terrestrial analogy with the

specks, streaks, wafts and explosions of the night sky, an analogy returned in the

otherwise faint and unseen contents of the heavens massively enlarged for clarity by

telescope. Singular, overlain, counterposed or juxtaposed in syzygy en masse, the

masked photographs draw our gaze to the heart of the ecological idea: our

inescapable entanglement within the planetary evolutionary knot, interdependent

biosphere and unimaginably vast and old universe.

A defining visual strategy of Syzygy has been the use of backlit translucency and

layering as metaphors for time and tragedy. I began using translucency and layering in

my own work in 1998, but such approaches have far older and wider precedents.

Since its inception in the stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals, the beauty and

emotional impact of translucent materials has been exploited in everything from

photographic film transparencies to neon lit advertising displays and of course,

screen-based art. The translucent glass-mounted palimpsest stacks have their closest

parallels in the the digital body scan film hangings of Justine Cooper [Fig 92], the

painted and printed glass and perspex botanical overlays of Janet Lawrence [Fig 93]

and the orthochromatic film collages of Mike and Doug Starn.

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Figure 92. Justine Cooper: Rapt II, 1998. MRI body scans, architectural film with artist.

Reproduced by permission of the artist

Figure 93. Janet Lawrence: Tarkine (For a World in Need of Wilderness), 2011. Duraclear, acrylic, mirror, stainless

steel wire. Macquarie Bank Foyer, London. Detail www.janetlaurence.com/903/

Digital sensing has long superseded analogic astronomical photography, but scans of

all three astronomical plate series produced by the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh,

used in my Lake Tyrrell work are the foundation for Google Sky. They are the primary

data-base for contemporary professional astronomy and are available on-line. Hence,

though now technically redundant, the original plates remain important scientific

artifacts. They are reminders of how magnification optics and scientific photography

have been essential to the emergence and continual refinement of the post-

Copernican world-view, including the development of ecological awareness. The

remediation of the plates in this research project carries peculiar evidential weight.

For instance, the circular form broken by cross bars in the star layer of Syzygy

4/Transit of Alpha Centauri, 2011, is an optical artifact called a “ghost” projected onto

the original photographic glass plate from inside the telescope by the refracted light

of the adjacent bright star in the Crux or Southern Cross group [Fig 87]. Such

photographic ‘imperfections’ tend to be ignored by those studying the original

archive and are invariably excluded from publications; they are reproduced without

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interference in the Syzygy films in deference to their indexical authority and scientific

pedigree.

Figure 94. Thomas Ruff: STE 5.01 (16h 30m -500), 1989 from the Sterne series

www.artnet.com/artists/thomas-ruff/16h-30m-50-ste-501-6seweK4SIS_7BYIH7FP0Aw2

The remediation of early 20th century astronomical methodology in Syzygy has a sole

antecedent in Thomas Ruff’s Sterne (Star) series of 1989-92. In this series, Chilean La

Silla observatory (‘ESO’) plates made between 1974 and 1987 were enlarged using

traditional darkroom techniques [Fig 94]. What critic Hennig Engelke observed

about Ruff’s work is equally pertinent here: these re-presentations of data as art

allude to the “elusive synthesis” described by Alfred Tauber (Engelke, 2005: 13).

They seek to reconcile aesthetics and empiricism to breach the schism between CP

Snow’s “two cultures” of science and the humanities (Engelke, 2005: 1). Unlike its

German precedent in Ruff’s work, however, the ambiguity of authorship inherent in

the act of remediation in Syzygy is not linked to Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” and

modernism’s attack on the fetish of authenticity, but rather perpetuates older habits

of iconic semiosis. Whilst Sterne’s uncompromised reprintings could be seen simply as

“photographs about photography” (Engelke, 2005: 4), Syzygy’s radical

recontextualization militates against such glib readings. Both projects illustrate that

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transforming scientific data into art through remediation might be the only way such

evidence from another age retains or regains cultural relevance.

Lake Tyrrell sub-project 2: The Imposs ibi l i ty o f Knowing the Mind of Another

Kind of Living Being

The summer of 2010/11 was marked by a feared event that recurs periodically in

southeastern Australia: the locust plague. For a short few weeks, locusts swarmed

almost everywhere. Communities reacted with awe, loathing and pesticides. Later,

plague turned to flood following drought-breaking torrential rains. Residents

responded with relief, apprehension and sandbags. Among the most severely affected

areas was the Mallee, including Lake Tyrrell. This transient situation demanded timely

action but rather than simply referencing lost reciprocities of earth and sky with small

sheets of resilient plastic film, I chose a gritty, intimate response on a larger scale

using digestible, soft paper. Planned in October and November 2010 as the

migration advanced, a four-day locust imaging field trip took place in the first week

of December, assisted by a volunteer. Work was based at Thisledome Motel, Sea

Lake. The papers were 108 x 108cm size sheets cut from a roll of ‘Bergger VCCB’

warm tone (chlorobromide) variable contrast fibre stock clipped to rigid flywire

supports stored in lightproof bags. Studio step-wedge tests established that good

image scaling was produced by filtering the flash light with yellow ‘colour correction’

film to reduce the colour temperature from 5600K to 4000K and lower the contrast

response of the variable contrast paper from Grade V to III using an Exposure

Value (EV) of 25 (+/–3), with a personally formulated ‘Ansco 120’ developer.

We developed innovative and ad hoc methods for capturing and imaging the locusts.

Once on site, two days of trying to catch locusts with hand held butterfly nets proved

fruitless due to the grasshoppers’ skittishness and speed. A superior method was

clearly needed and by the third day a wide-mouthed net had been designed,

fabricated and installed facing forward on the roofrack of my now defunct 1995 Ford

Falcon panel van. By driving at 55 kph back and forth along the Pier Millan-

Chinkapook Road north of Lake Tyrrell several hundred locusts were caught in the

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net in an hour then stored in large aerated crates under shade until dark [Fig 95].

Figure 95. Locust capturing around Lake Tyrrell. Top left: Driving along the Pier Millan-Chinkapook Road. Top

right: car rooftop net. Bottom left: Hand held net from the car. Bottom right: Live locust storage following net

capture

Before exposure, the flash was attached to a tripod extended by poles 2.9 metres

above and facing down perpendicular to the centre of the exposure area. This

flash/paper distance was the minimum needed to render even exposure across the

large image area. A sheet of paper attached to a backing flywire screen was then laid

on the ground and the live locusts were poured over it. Torches protected by red

‘safelights’ aided night vision. At the moment a desired configuration occurred,

assisted by manual herding, the flash was fired. Remaining locusts were returned to

the container for re-use and the procedure repeated. Unfortunately, most locusts

refused to fly and after two sheets were exposed the flash failed to work again (see

Addendum 3 for technical details). The resulting diptych recording the massed

crawling of Australian plague locusts Chortoicetes terminifera – and two dragonflies –

became The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being [Figs 96 and

97]. The prints were framed for exhibition in the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert

Photography Award at the Gold Coast City Gallery, Queensland held in 2011. This

framing was retained for the PhD exam exhibition at RMIT in 2014.

I combined stills, video and audio documentation of the project fieldwork into a one-and-a-

half minute segment of the 21’24” mp4 documentary movie, Making Gathering Shadows, which

accompanies this document and my exhibition at RMIT.

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fibre paper shadowgram prints each 106 x 106 cm. Detail

Figure 97. The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being, 2010 Diptych of toned gelatin silver

fibre paper shadowgram prints each 106 x 106 cm. Detail

The Imposs ibi l i ty o f Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being

interpreted

Seen from afar, the cluster and scatter of locust shadows against the dark background

of The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being – the second

project from Lake Tyrrell – suggests the night sky. Yet, unlike the numberless stars,

these insects carry troubled meaning since migratory grasshopper swarms have a

sinister reputation and tragic association. They are one of the plagues of Exodus, a

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literary reference reflecting a global historical and contemporary reality among farm

economies from the Levant and China to the African Sahel. Locust plagues have a

reputation as an unstoppable, almost supernatural force, but like all creatures they are

ecologically explicable. On the one hand, locust swarming appears to be a natural,

semi-cyclical event that plays a significant role in maintaining ecological function

from being food for other animals to redistributing soil nutrient (Save the Locust,

2010). On the other hand, they are not immune to us: for example, in the early

twentieth century the sudden extinction of the once numerous and destructive Rocky

Mountain locust was probably an unintended consequence of agricultural disturbance

of their breeding areas (Lockwood, 2009).

Figure 98. Simon Perry: Locust, unlimited edition, 2006

www.jennyportgallery.com.au/artists/sperry.html

Other than representation by sculptors such as Simon Perry [Fig 98], the locust has

scant artistic presence. The title of my work parodies the infamous shark in

formaldehyde artwork by Damien Hirst [Fig 99] and by so doing alludes to a related

question: not the impossibility of imagining death but the difficulty of imaginatively

entering into the umwelt or life-world of abject creatures such as these. It is hard

enough, as philosopher Thomas Nagel has tried, to know what it is like to be a bat

(Nagel, 1974), let alone a locust. Although we can unravel their ecological role and

explain their behaviour biosemiotically, the locusts’ overwhelming numbers,

seemingly mindless swarming and incessant hunger undermines our ability to

encounter them empathically or as ‘selves’. Hence, the phenomenon reported in this

diptych reflects upon our perenially ambivalent relationship with invertebrates, the

pitiless beauty of this continent and the tragedy of a changing world in which long-

held faith in nature’s resilience and utility is fast unravelling.

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Figure 99. Damien Hirst: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991

www.patheos.com/blogs/cultivare/2012/05/the-scream-a-stuffed-shark-and-the-insecurity-of-culture/

The shape of the prints, slightly trimmed each side to 106 cm to remove ragged

edges, replicate and obliquely reference the square proportions of the astrological

plates and starlight absorbing films of Syzygy. The diptych is a ‘syzygy’, an aligned

juxtaposition. Because they are mounted close together, and side-by-side in the

frame, our attention passes from one to the other in search of similarity and

difference, pattern and change. The passing of time is implied but we cannot know

whether that chronology passes from left to right or the other way around. The

unexposed white marks of the bulldog clips used to attach each sheet of paper to its

flywire support during exposure has been left visible to alert the viewer to the haptic

process of image making.

Lake Tyrrell sub-project 3: The End of the Age o f Enti t l ement

A return visit to Lake Tyrrell to make fresh invertebrate shadowgrams on film for

possible reiteration digitally took place in November 2011. One image of butterflies

captured in daylight with nets records the creatures’ struggle and flutter as they

became sodden by a sudden downpour of rain during their nocturnal flash exposure.

Although initially ignored because of the subjects’ uncertain indigeneity, the sheer

strength of the image led to a decision in November 2012 to have the 367 x 367 mm

sheet scanned by Mr David Kay of CaptureScanPrint, Sydney on a Kodak Creo

Supreme II machine at 8 bit RGB and 2540ppi. The film was digitized in thirds due

to memory limits in the scanner set up and in full colour rather than greyscale so that

subtle colours produced chemically by the rain and insect bodies, were retained [Fig

100]. The files were then digitally stitched together and tonally inverted to positive

before being re-colourized, cropped, spotted, re-scaled and sharpened on-screen

between June 2013 and 2014 using the facilities of RMIT’s art photography

department laboratory (see Addendum 4).

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Figure 100. Middle strip of raw butterfly film file prior to digital post-production image stitching, inversion and

re-colourization

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Figure 101. Detail of The End of the Age of Entitlement, 2014. Pigment ink-jet print on cotton paper 1232 x 1053 mm

Three tonally different versions of The End of the Age of Entitlement were created. Two

were outputted on the RMIT Epson printer and the third by the commercial

laboratory, Image Science, in North Melbourne. This last version was short listed for

the 2014 Bowness Prize exhibition at the Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill

between 4 September and 12 October 2014 [Fig 101].

I combined video and audio documentation of the fieldwork for this artwork into a

one-and-a-half-minute segment of the 21’24” mp4 documentary movie, Making

Gathering Shadows, accompaning this document and the RMIT exhibition.

The End of the Age o f Enti t l ement interpreted

The image title, The End of the Age of Entitlement, quotes a phrase first used in April

2012 by current Australian Federal Treasurer, Joe Hockey, to explain budget policies

of cutting welfare to reduce expenditure and wind back governnment debt (Hockey,

2012). The expression is used in the context of dividing the population into

productive ‘lifters’ and unproductive ‘leaners’ (Garner, 2014), differentiated by their

relative willingness to personally exploit economic opportunities. It is language

designed to demonize welfare dependents (the poor, disabled, students etc) whilst

defending the rest so as to justify inflicting suffering on the less powerful group.

Hockey’s dichotomous social model parallels the popular notion that nature can be

divided into the useless (the deep ocean, deserts, old growth forests etc) and

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productive (fishing grounds, croplands, production forests etc), the aesthetically

admirable (such as charismatic megafauna) and detestable (such as the invertebrates

in this research project). This anti-ecological thinking facilitates exploitation of the

nonhuman world not entitled to flourish because it fails to be adequately useful.

The identity of the Lepidoptera responsible for the shadows could not be ascertained

with any certainty, although entomologist Dr Nicholas Porch suggested they were

most likely Small Cabbage Whites, Pieris rapae, a species accidentally introduced from

the northern hemisphere in the mid twentieth century. The tension between the

intimate pathos of the futile efforts of rain-sodden butterflies trying to become

airborne and our awareness of their uncertain ‘naturalness’ exemplifies the double

tension between our instrumental indifference and empathy towards nonhumans on

the one hand, and the need to embrace ecological hybridity despite the legitimacy of

maintaining ecological integrity – that is, nonhuman ‘nature’ and wildness wherever

possible – on the other. The print’s gaudy, digitally fabricated colours draw attention

to the anthropogenic character of this ostensibly accurate natural history record and

the ecology of the unseen environment it references.

Gather ing Shadows at Lake Tyrrell

The ecological thinking, relations and tragedy informing the three Lake Tyrrell

artworks each differently evoke the meaning of Fernand Braudel’s la longue durée. Of

all the artworks, Syzygy is both the most atavistic and timeless, for the series indexes

relict elements of an anthropogenically impoverished ecosystem using ancient fossil

light, the ‘punctum’ of which is both the referent stars and insects, and the material

art itself. The captive locusts in The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of

Living Being diptych embody the cyclical nature of so much non-anthropogenic ‘faint’

Tragedy and the perenially fraught character of human/nonhuman relations. The

digitally beautified print of struggling butterflies in The End of the Age of Entitlement

entices us to gaze closely at the short lives of individual nonhuman mortals, a quality

of attention critical to biosemiosis. The abject creatures are a tragic metaphor for the

similarly terminal but gradual decline of the place from where they came, that this

project represents.

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Chapter 5

Gathering Shadows at Mount Buffalo: Minds in the Cave + Ekkyklêma

The Site

In 1987 I authored a photographic book celebrating the Australian Alps. Its opening

paragraph read:

Cool, rolling and serene, the High Country…is an assemblage of landforms

and living things unlike any other. This crumpled arc of upland, the

southeastern elbow of the continent . . . contains . . . the only extensive alpine

and sub-alpine environments on the Australian mainland . . . “One climbs . . .

and finds, not revelation, but simply range upon range upon range

stretching…into distance, a single motif repeating itself to infinity…Climax? ...

Calm ... ” (Nankin, 1987: 11)

Figure 102. Mount Bogong, Victoria from Range Upon Range: The Australian Alps by Harry Nankin, Algona

Publications and Notogaea Press, 1987

A quarter century after these words were published the region’s serried topography

remains unchanged but it no longer connotes serenity or calm [Fig 102]. During the

summers of 2003 and 2006-7, bushfires of unprecedented ferocity and scale

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destroyed much of the region’s distinctive old-growth woodlands of sub-alpine

Snowgum, Eucalyptus pauciflora, a species, which unlike lowland eucalypts, recovers

slowly from fire or not at all if conflagrations occur too frequently (Coates et al,

2012) [Fig 103]. It is likely that the rising average temperatures and declining snow

falls of the last few decades and the more recent drought and heatwaves precipitating

these fires were linked to anthropogenic climate change. The impending impact of

global warming is predicted to be more immediate and severe in the High Country

than almost anywhere else in Australia. Climate modelling indicates that the length of

the snow season and the area of sub-alpine and alpine vegetation could be cut to a

quarter of what it is today by mid-century (Slatyer, 2010: 84) [Fig 104].

Figure 103. Burnt sub-alpine woodland, Mount Buffalo, Victoria in 2012

Heat sensitive upland plants such as alpine heath and feldmark, and animals like the

mountain pygmy possum, Burramys parvus, and two Corroboree Frog species,

Pseudophryne corroboree and P. pengilleyi, will face almost certain extinction in the wild

(Slatyer, 2010: 88, 90). Aside from obvious impacts such as reduced water runoff

(Worboys and Good, 2011: 1) and more frequent wild fires, the outstanding

consequence of climate change in the Australian Alps will be a collapse of

biodiversity and landscape character. Its defining archipelago of alpine and sub-alpine

flora, endemic cold climate wildlife and winter snows will be all but a memory. The

country will still be high but no longer alpine.

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Figure 104. Southeast Australian bioregions identified by the ‘Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation’. Source:

Worboys and Good, 2011 http://www.habitatadvocate.com.au/?page_id=6251

Figure 105. High voltage Buckland River transmission line and easement defining the southern boundary of Mount

Buffalo national park: bogong moth cave on The Horn is the peak at centre

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Figure 106. Road sign in pine plantation area along the eastern perimeter of the Mount Buffalo national park

The Australian Alps can be defined as a distinctive region according to science (Land

Conservation Council, 1977 and 1982; Warboys and Good, 2011), history (Johnson,

1974; Flood, 1980) and aesthetics (Nankin, 1983, 1987). Although biogeographically

part of an alpine region, much of which is within the contiguous Australian Alps

National Park and reserve system, the area I selected for my research is Mount

Buffalo in Victoria. The massif is an outlier of the main cordillera and something of a

land use island because it is bounded by a high voltage transmission line to the south

and farmland and pine plantations elsewhere [Figs 105 and 106]. A high granite

plateau bounded by precipitous escarpments, Mount Buffalo’s sides are blanketed in

tall wet eucalypt forests punctuated by rock outcrops and beetling cliffs. Above the

escarpment rim the closed forest gives way to an undulating devils playground of

grey bare granite domes, platforms, tors and boulders and a park-like sub-alpine

assemblage of sedges, grass, heath and snowgum woodland. Initially reserved from

development in 1898, the massif is currently managed as a 310 km2 National Park

[Fig 107]. But it is not pristine. Like the region as a whole, the mountain is impacted

by roads, feral animals and introduced plants, ski tows and tourist facilities, dams and

increasingly frequent bushfires. Its ecological future even without climate change is

not assured: the seductions of boosterism exemplified by recent calls for a chairlift

are ever present (Evans, 2012).

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Figure 107. Mount Buffalo. The moth collection cave on The Horn was above the head of the gorge at the

bottom centre of the satellite image. Source: Google Earth

Bogong Moths

Gathering Shadows at Mount Buffalo evokes the predicament of the Australian Alps

using the index of a single invertebrate species: the native Bogong Moth, Agrotis

infusa. Bogong Moths begin life in winter as cutworms secreted in burrows at the

base of plants far from the Alps on the dry inland lowlands of Victoria, NSW and

southern Queensland [Fig 108]. After the larvae have pupated, the adult moths

emerge in spring in vast numbers where they begin migrating south and east, feeding

on nectar at dusk and flying at night en route to their destination: the caves, rock

overhangs and dark crevices of the highest summits of the Australian Alps (Common

1954). Individual moths are small: an average adult has a wingspan of about three-

and-a half centimetres and weighs a third of a gram [Fig 109] (Green, 2011: 30).

Sheltered in those dark upland recesses, the tawny Lepidoptera spend the summer

aestivating (resting), pressed head under tail against each other like ‘roof tiles’ [Fig

110] (CSIRO, 2011), their bodies covering every suitable rock surface. In autumn, the

proportion that have survived weather, disease and predation over the summer leave

the mountains to make the long return journey to their lowland breeding areas where

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they mate, lay eggs and die. The next generation repeats the cycle. The annual

migration is believed to facilitate escape from the desiccating dry heat of the inland in

summer, a cycle that probably began at the end of the last Ice Age (Flood, 1980: 79).

Figure 108. Migration routes and aestivation zones of Bogong Moth Agrotis infusa. Source: McCormick, 2005: 5

from Common 1954 http://apo.org.au/research/bogong-moths-and-parliament-house

Ecologically, Bogong Moths are a ‘keystone’ species in the high country (Green,

2011: 26). Numbering at least two billion in an average year (Green, 2010b: 93), they

are a major warm-season food for native marsupials (Broome, 2001: 286-7), bats,

birds and fish as well as the introduced fox (Green, 2011: 31). A naturally high

concentration of arsenic harbored in their bodies (Green, 2008; Williams, 2009) does

not appear to adversely affect them or their predators (Lawler, 2011). The annual

contribution of Bogong Moth biomass to the local environment, effectively a net

annual transfer of concentrated nutrient from temperate lowlands to alpine tops is so

large that in terms of usable energy it is probably exceeded only by the sun (Green,

2012).

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Figure 109. Adult Bogong Moths (Agrotis infusa) at Mount Buffalo. Photo: Rudy Frank

Figure 110. Adult Bogong Moths aestivating in a cave on The Horn, Mount Buffalo

The predicted effects of global warming on the Bogong Moth mirror those for the

landscape it seasonally inhabits: as a heat-averse species for which diapause (delayed

development) is essential, suitable aestivation habitat will contract to ever-higher

ground with rising temperatures (Green, 2010b: 103). It is possible that like the

alpine zone itself, by mid-century the Bogong Moth will have retreated from much of

its current range. As the supportable population falls, the survival of many animals

will be jeopardised; species such as Flame Robins, Australian Ravens, Pied

Currawongs and especially the endangered Mountain Pygmy Possum depend almost

wholly on the moths during the summer (Smith 1992; Green, 2010b: 102). The

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moths’ contribution to alpine ecology – such as the nutrient-content of soils and

vegetation – will similarly contract.

Figure 111. Top: Bogong moth appropriation: Bogong Moth Motel, Mt Beauty Victoria Bottom: Bogong moth celebration; Bogong moth sculpture in Canberra made in 2001 by Jim Williams and

Matthew Harding

Top: www.travelvictoria.com.au

Bottom: www.data.act.gov.au/api/views/j746-krni/rows.xml?accessType=DOWNLOAD

For indigenous clans of the pre-colonial high country, Bogong Moths were a

nutritious dietary supplement attracting an annual summer migration from valleys to

mountains. The insects would be smoked out, roasted, winnowed, consumed intact

or mashed into paste (Flood, 1980: 66, 67). These high country ‘moth hunters’ have

inspired contemporary culinary interest (Rigby, 2011). The bogong name has been

adopted by many localities, commodified in product branding and celebrated in

public art (Traill, 2012; Harding, 2012) [Fig 111], recent indigenous art (Somerville et

al, 2009: 45-6) and environmental literature. Recently, the moths were portrayed in

Anna Funder’s semi-fictional historical novel, All That I Am:

...The ceiling is black—it is moulting and velvety ... the bogong moths have

come in on their migration and lined the place. The room shimmers with

brief, misdirected life. I am a vessel of memory in a world of forgetting. I sit under the

canopy of moths. It is deep dark outside. Everything out there.... has vanished.

The world has shrunk to a small area of light from the streetlamp. Lines of

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rain slash through its bright cone. The bogongs are welcome here ... (Funder,

2012: 357)

The Bogong Moth is an ecological index, a bioregional ‘icon’ (New 2007) and in the

contemporary context of ecological crisis and the Anthropocene, a metaphor for

vulnerability, displacement, mortality and loss. In Gathering Shadows two projects

employing Bogong Moths as indices of place and immanent environmental loss

emerged: the paper work, Minds in the Cave, and the film on glass sub-project,

Ekkyklêma.

Mount Buffalo Sub-project 1: Minds in the Cave The sub-project took place in two linked phases.

Minds in the Cave Phase One: Image Capture

The project aim was to record live Bogong Moth morphology and behaviour in the

greatest possible detail, not as photographs but as shadows. In an effort to

foreground the significance of elevation as the defining quality of the region and the

limiting factor in Bogong Moth summer habitat, an accessible and commanding site

was found in a cave right beneath the summit of The Horn (1723 m), one of the

highest points on the Mount Buffalo plateau [Fig 112]. The Horn is not exceptionally

high even by Australian Alps standards, but is nonetheless more elevated than any

other point on the continent outside the region.

Figure 112. Granite cliffs of The Horn, Mount Buffalo, with caves from which Bogong Moths were collected

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Each afternoon during three sustained field trips to the mountain during the summer

of 2011-12, an assistant and I gently dislodged hundreds of live Bogong Moths from

the cave walls with soft brushes. The captured creatures were stored in aerated sealed

containers [Figs 113, 114 and 115, left] that were kept cool and dark under reflective

lightproof tarpaulins until nightfall [Fig 115, right].

Figure 113. Cave entrance with airborne moths and floor carpeted with the dead

Figure 114. Moth gathering. Left: assistant collecting moths. Lower right: artist moth collecting in cave. Top right:

entering the cave. Photo by Eugene Howard

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Figure 115. Daylight moth storage. Left: Twenty litre tub with wet blanket for evaporative cooling of captive moths.

Right: pyramidal exposure net wrapped to protect stored moths from heat and light

Techniques and film sizes varied slightly from those of ‘phase one’ of the preceding

project at Lake Tyrrell. The moth images were executed in darkness using a ‘Metz 45’

analog portable flash unit 1.8 meters distant from and perpendicular to the centre of

the imaging material [Fig 116]. Each sheet of imaging material was 46 x 72 cm low-

speed (ISO 20) ‘Kodak CGP 2000’ orthochromatic (green/blue sensitive) gelatin

silver thin base (0.10mm) polyester film precut in my Melbourne studio from a 76 cm

wide roll. Once they were placed on or in front of the film, the procedure involved

carefully observing the moths behaviour until they configured one of three preferred

arrangements: an aestivation-like head-to-tail linear procession; or clustered en masse

on the film (recording sharp shadows); or flying randomly above the film (and thus

blurred). Their forms were then exposed to a single pre-calibrated flash pulse hand-

metered at an EV (exposure value) of 22 (+/– 1) at the film surface. Studio tests

established the advantages of cutting the rectangular light-emitting face of the flash

head down to a circle using a black plastic mask with a round opening: this shape

ensured that refracted shadows in the imagery were circular and the smaller light

source area generated sharper shadows. After exposure, the live moths were gently

shaken off the film onto the ground nearby or encouraged to fly away, presumably

returning to their rocky habitat. Unexposed and exposed films were stored in

separate lightproof black plastic envelopes. Dolphin lamps and LED torches fitted

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with red ‘safelights’ aided seeing and image composition during the night imaging

process (see Addendum 1 for details).

Figure 116. Shadowgram flash equipment. Metz 45 portable flash unit (centre), wired trigger (left) and flash meter

(right)

Throughout the project, my assistant and I used a caravan park at Porepunkah below

the mountain as a base. Each daily foray to the plateau extended from midday to

after midnight. On the three nights of the first field trip in November 2011, the

imaging setup was installed below the cave in The Horn car park using methods also

used at Lake Tyrrell. That is, the portable flash unit supported on a tripod was

positioned facing down 1.8 meters above and perpendicular to the centre of the

imaging material lying horizontal in a tray on the ground [Fig 117]. On some

occasions, moth positioning was controlled by coralling them together by hand or

under circular metal cooking trays positioned edge-on to the film. On the six nights

of the two subsequent field trips in December 2011 and January 2012, it was so cold

the moths may have become inert, so the image capture process was shifted to the

milder conditions of one of two roadside forest clearings lower down the mountain

[Fig 118]. More importantly, the imaging set up was changed to keep the moths from

escaping the imaging field and to enable the capture of flight as well as crawling and

settling behaviour. On the second trip the film holder and flash were supported on

tripods and set up facing each other horizontally 1.8 metres apart under a large net

strung between trees. After dark, the trapped moths were gently herded into the gap

between the film-holder and flash, a sheet of film was clipped into position and at

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the chosen moment of Lepidoptera performance, the flash was triggered [Fig 119].

Prior to the third trip, a rigid wire-edged pyramidal net with a hole for the flash at

one end and a trapdoor for clipping on the film at the other end 1.8 metres away was

fabricated with the assistance of Mr Rudy Frank using a Latrobe University,

Bundoora workshop. The net concentrated the moths in a small space to ensure they

flew between film and flash, and because it was found the angle of the film affected

their settling behaviour, the device was designed to be pivoted into any position [Figs

120-123]. This system was the only one of the three to successfully record large

numbers of moths in flight [Fig 124]. Between four and eight films were exposed on

each of the nine nights of moth imaging of the project: all up, fifty moth film images

were created. No camera was used, except to document proceedings.

Figure 117. First field trip imaging technique. Moth shadowgram set up at the The Horn using horizontal tray and

perpendicular tripod mounted flash

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Figure 118. Vehicle for carrying gear and transporting moths from summit cave to nocturnal forest imaging site

perpendicular tripod mounted flash

Figure 119. Generic, oblique plein air shadowgram imaging technique used on the second and third field trips

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Figure 120. Third field trip imaging technique: pyramidal moth imaging apparatus suspended in position on

location preparatory to receiving moths and imaging: sliding trapdoor with clips for holding film at wide end, top;

velcro door patch for entry and egress of moths on opposite side, centre; flash unit at narrow end, bottom

Figure 121. Third field trip imaging technique: exterior view of moths in pyrmidal exposure net at night

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Figure 122. Third field trip imaging technique: film plane end of pyramidal exposure net containing live Bogong

Moths prior to film insertion and nocturnal flash exposure. Photo: Rudy Frank

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Figure 123. Third field trip imaging technique: positioning suspended pyramidal net apparatus containing live

Bogong Moths prior to film insertion and flash exposure. Photo: Rudy Frank

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Figure 124. Third field trip imaging technique: view of film from near light source at moment of flash exposure

inside pyramidal net. Photo: Rudy Frank

Minds in the Cave Phase Two: Digitization and Outputting

The processed film images revealed the cast shadows of their subjects as negatives.

The material record of moth wing scales and defensive fluid released by the insects

when they were captured often overlaid the optical image. Far from being crude

silhouettes, perspectival depth was suggested by differential sharpness produced by

the moths’ varying distances from the film. Bodily interiors are revealed where the

flashlight passed, x-ray-like, through thin and translucent parts and the hint of bodily

surfaces is evident in the imprint of secondary reflections bounced between moths

and film. Unlike normal monocular photography, analogic shadowgram resolution is

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not constrained by glass optics or pixel depth but by the microscopic grain of

photographic silver. Consequently, information per unit area exceeds that of most

camera capture or that detectable by the unaided human eye. In my prior

shadowgram projects (including Syzygy) this detail remained unseen because the

original life-scale recordings constituted the final artwork or were analogically

replicated without enlargement. By contrast, these Bogong Moth films were created,

in part, with the intention of digitization and enlargement.

Investigations into digitizing the shadowgrams began in Septeber 2011 before the

moth films were created. To identify the preferred scanning system, a sample

shadowgram film of ants from the Syzygy project was digitized in 8-Bit RGB grey

mode at 2000ppi using a Hasselblad H4D camera owned and operated by Dr Les

Walkling, in conjunction with an Epson V700 flatbed scanner at the Magnascan labs

in Queensland and a Creo iQSmart 2 flatbed scanner at the NGV, Melbourne. The

Creo recorded the finest detail resolution and tonal scale, particularly at the extremes

of subject dynamic range [Fig 125]. In October 2011, I commissioned an Australian

Creo specialist, Mr David Kay of CaptureScanPrint (CSP) in Sydney to undertake

further tests using his Kodak Creo Supreme II machine. Comparison between four

16-bit modes – black and white, black and white with maximum dynamic range,

RGB greyscale standard and RGB greyscale with maximum dynamic range – showed

RGB was slightly better than black and white in revealing highlight subtleties [Fig

126]. However, with the judicious application of highlight/shadow density controls

and smart sharpening I was able to compensate almost entirely for the disadvantages

of monochrome [Fig 127]. In any case, the quantity of film material and the size of

most films’ RGB files (even if 8 bit) would have been prohibitively expensive to scan

and were often unworkably large. Nevertheless, since the majority of films was

effectively monochrome anyway, I decided to scan everything at 16-bit greyscale in

maximum dynamic range mode. Further tests indicated that the use of positive

rendering with a gamma (contrast gradient) of 2.2 was most satisfactory. Determining

the necessary scanning resolution was a simple matter of working back from the

envisaged output quality and scaling: a 5X enlargement printed at the highest quality

conventional print resolution of 360 ppi required scans of at least 1800 ppi; a 6X

expansion of the same output quality would need a 2160 ppi scan; and 7X required

2520 ppi. Over the following month CSP scanned six 367 x 367 mm films from Lake

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Tyrrell as ‘pilot’ files using the highest resolution parameter rounded to 2540 ppi.

The results were superb but regrettably the high cost of the commercial service

forced use of a cheaper alternative: in April 2012, Ms Ronnie Fookes at Museum

Victoria agreed to a ‘contra’ arrangement in which the institution would scan my

films in return for artwork. In July 2012 Sally Rogers-Davidson operating the

Museum Victoria Creo iQSmart 3 digitized 66 segments of various sizes chosen for

reproduction from twenty moth films using the high resolution of 2540 ppi [Fig 128].

Figure 125. Comparative digitizing test of Syzygy ants film made in September 2011. Left: Hasselblad H4D

photograph. Centre: Magnascan Epson scan. Right: NGV Creo scan.


October 2011. From left to right: b&w standard; b&w at maximum dynamic range; RGB greyscale and RGB

greyscale with maximum dynamic range

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October 2011 with identical post-scanning highlight/shadow density adjustments applied to each file

Figure 128. Cut down shadowgram films on lightbox preparatory to scanning at Museum Victoria

Screen-based viewing and manipulation of the moth files was undertaken using the

facilities of the RMIT School of Art fine art photography laboratory (see Addendum

4 for details). Though straightforward in principle, the process was fraught with

formal aesthetic conundrums and technical problems. There were aesthetic

challenges such as whether to retain the ‘dark’ and mysterious mood of the original

films by negative reiteration, or tonally invert them to ‘positives’, that would reveal

more detail and convey a stronger sense of the moths’ fragility. I also had to

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determine whether to retain the extensive incidental detail in the negative space

around the moths or digitally remove it; and whether to render each film file as an

individual print, or stitch two or more together to create composite works. Other

problems included questions such as whether to retain the informational purity of the

subject or superimpose other imagery such as graphics or texts; whether to employ

the optical dynamic range of a gloss finish or the subtlety of a non-reflective paper

surface; whether to articulate each image as a conventional rectangular clean-cut print

or introduce the visual and affectual disturbance of crushing, bending, cutting,

tearing or marking; and whether to treat each individual print as a stand alone object

or juxtapose them with other images. Each of these options was explored repeatedly

between October 2012 and April 2014 before the final decision was made: to output

each moth piece on matt paper as a ‘positive’ (tonally inverted) ‘fragment’ paired with

a same-sized and rescaled positive print of a scanned Lake Tyrrell human footprint

film (see Chapter 4).

I undertook the selection and scanning of the films of dancers’ feet (from Lake

Tyrrell) at RMIT during early May 2014, using the Photography Department’s Epson

Perfection V700 Photo flatbed scanner, Silverfast V6.6.2r4a Universal software and

Apple Power Mac G5 workstation displayed on an Eizo monitor. Since the footprint

images were more gestural and contained less fine detail than the moth films, the

slightly lower quality of an Epson scan compared to a Creo was not an issue. To

ensure scaling and detail resolution proportionate to the moth scans the seventeen

selected 36 cm x 36 cm footprint films were each also scanned at 16 bit greyscale at

2540 dpi.

Technical work on both sets of image files was undertaken in monochrome before

conversion to colour. Technical challenges using the 16 bit greyscale files included

the time-consuming task of digitally stitching together films that had been scanned in

sections; adjusting file density curves to remove informationless highlight and

shadow fog and establish an optimal contrast range; and removing or blending away

unintended distracting content such as hairs, film cuts and edge lines. In the first

period of attempted colourizing of the moth files during December 2012, the

monochrome files were converted to 8-bit RGB in order to minimize file sizes.

Unfortunately, consequent contrast adjustments produced ‘banding’ – steps of

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density difference absent in the original films – into many files. This unsightly digital

artifact of Adobe software was eventually minimized by increasing pixel depth to 16-

bit RGB in Large Document Format (psb) – the platform used therafter despite the

cumbersome file sizes for re-making all images. Colourizing was both subtle and

uniform across all images. Multiple possible colour arrangements were explored

between February 2013 and March 2014 until I decided to mimick the look of a cool-

hued chloride or chlorobromide gelatin silver emulsion intensified and ‘split toned’ at

‘Zone IV1/2’ (a lower mid-tone in the classic ‘Zone System’ of Ansel Adams and

Fred Archer) in selenium. This approach was used for both the moth and footprint

images. Pairing and orientation of the diptychs was determined on-screen [Fig 129]

and by using small prints [Fig 130]. The series of thirty, 111 cmx111 cm image files

paired into 15 moth/footprint diptychs carried the collective title, Minds in the Cave

[Fig 132]. Seven of the pairs were printed in July 2014 using the RMIT Photography

Department’s Epson 9900 machine [Fig 30] (see Addendum 5 for workflow details).

The finished prints were stored flat, sandwiched between Foamcore sheets

preparatory to exhibition.

Figure 129. On-screen digital image file post-production and pairing in the RMIT photography department

laboratory

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Figure 130. Printed paper miniatures used for pairing experiments

Figure 131. Printing a Minds in the Cave piece on the RMIT Epson Stylus Pro 9900 machine

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Figure 132: Minds in the Cave/Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Diptych of two 111 cm x

111 cm prints

Figure 133. Installation of Minds in the Cave diptychs #13 (left) and #3 (right) in ‘Future Tense’, Stephen

McLaughlin Gallery, Melbourne, July 2014. Photo: Felicity Spear

Public exhibition of two unframed Minds in the Cave diptychs took place in the group

show ‘Future Tense’ at Stephen McLaughlin Gallery in Melbourne from 9-26 July,

2014. This was the only display of Mount Buffalo material prior to the PhD

completion show [Fig 133]. The story of the artworks’ creation comprises the last

twelve minutes of the 21’24” mp4 documentary movie, Making Gathering Shadows

which accompanies this thesis and the RMIT exhibition.

Minds in the Cave interpreted

The iconic status of the Bogong Moth resists their default abjection but does not

eliminate it. For example, when migrating Bogong Moths erronously swarm into

brightly lit buildings like Parliament House in Canberra they become targets for

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extermination (McCormick 2005; Rigby 2011) [Fig 134]. The abject insect, including

the Bogong Moth, can be seen as a microcosm of our anthropocentric indifference

to the plight of the terrestrial non-human ‘other’, from organisms to places to the

biosphere itself. Such readings are not unique to this species or the ecological

predicament they represent. Rather, the pictures elicit a range of cultural meanings

connected to the tangled semiotics of insects and shadows.

Figure 134. Bogong Moth abjection: pest removal business advertisement

www.micropest.com/bogong-moths

Whilst the preferred symbols of mortality have been the fly, ant and beetle, writers

such as Vladimir Nabakov (Sarsfield, 2007: 33) and Virginia Woolf (Sarsfield, 2007:

87-111) and artists since ancient Egypt have favoured the butterfly to reference

fragility, beauty and the feminine (Sarsfield, 2007: 37). The other Lepidoptera, moths,

once served as symbols of decay and mortality in Baroque vanitas still life painting,

but are today rarely considered. Alison Turnbull is unusual in including them in her

taxonomical studies (Brown, 2014: 116-117) and Doug and Mike Starn’s collaged

blow-ups of live and dead moths, Attracted to Light, made between 1996 and 2004

(Starn, 2004) are some of few examples in contemporary photomedia art [Fig 135].

Figure 135. Mike and Doug Starn: from the series Attracted to Light, c2004. Collage of gelatin silver prints www.dmstarn.com/attracted_to_light.html

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Each paper reiteration of the digitized Bogong Moth films is presented as an ersatz

parietal wall behind and around which an all-enveloping ecological sense of tragedy

may be re-imagined. The enlargements reveal a hitherto unseen world that is at once

orderly and chaotic, alien and familiar, oppressive and playful, repulsive and

beautiful. Despite their default abjection, as we look at these photographic

enlargements, particularly when viewed up close, our expectations are confounded by

the way the detail reveals the surprising individuality of each creature. We are thus

privy to the ‘interpersonal’ minutiae of antennae meeting antennae, thorax and wing,

hexapodic ambling, exploration, nestling, flutter, hovering and flight [Figs 136 and

137]. Confronted by portrayals of the individual behaviour, communication and

sociality of another species, our empathic imagination is aroused. From a biosemiotic

perspective, these pictures of patently delicate Bogong Moths draw our attention to

their existence and fragility and, by association, to the alpine region for which they

are symbols of the increasingly problematic regimes of human umwelten (von Uexküll

et al, 2010: 220).

Figure 136: Minds in the Cave/Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Moth print 111 x 111 cm

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Figure 137: Minds in the Cave /Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Detail of moth print

The footprints of the feet of women dancer’s that accompany the moths implicate

both human umwelten and what it means to be human – although such meanings are

often split between the sacred and profane. Being the body part closest to the soil,

feet often represent humility of the kind manifest in the barefoot modesty of Islamic

and Hindu worship, the washing of Christian disciples’ feet and the kissing of those

of Christian and Buddhist icons (Brown, 2004). Their spatial lowliness, association

with soil and exposure to contamination confer a “baseness” and abjection (Bataille,

1985: 23) to feet reflected in cultural traditions such as the humiliating supplication

of low cast Indians forced to kiss the feet of the high born (Kohli, 2001: 195).

Indigenous trackers and modern forensics show that unshod footprints are like

handprints unique to each individual (Kennedy, 1996). Thus, the digitally enlarged

footprints are both unequivocal icons of the species and precise indexes of the

individuals who made them [Figs 138 and 139].

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Figure 138: Minds in the Cave /Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Detail of footprint

Feet are our everyday point of contact with the earth and the footprints they leave

are records of our presence and passing. Physiological adaptation of human feet to

upright running has been pivotal in human evolution (Bramble, 2004). Fossil

footprints such as those at Lake Gampung in western New South Wales [Fig 140]

(Webb, 2006) or at Ileret in Kenya [Fig 141] (Bennett, 2009) evidence the Deep Time

and longue durée of human lineage, whilst comparatively fresh prints like those left on

the moon by the crew of Apollo 11 in 1969 flag a celebrated historical moment and

yet another instance of anthropic hubris [Fig 142]. The concept of the ‘footprint’

even more than the human visage is now the metaphor of choice for describing

human impact, from the generic ‘human footprint’ (Rosa, 2010) and ‘ecological

footprint’ (Ewing, 2008) to the particularity of ‘carbon footprint’ (Wiedmann, 2008)

and ‘water footprint’ (Chapagain, 2006).

That the source feet were white, adult and female was semiotically significant. Using

those of indigenous performers would have appeared patronizing and essentialist.

Children’s feet would likely have seemed cloying and sentimental. Adult male feet

may have been overly obvious symbols of domination. Yet, based on appearances

alone, the footprints cannot be gendered. On the one hand, this androgyneity

prevents the prints from becoming targets for what Laura Mulvey calls the ‘male

gaze’, in which images of women become a “display for male viewers’ pleasure”

(Hein, 2008: 4). On the other hand, awareness that women made the prints tars them

with the anthropocentrism the art interrogates, a reading opposite to what

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ecofeminists see as the dominant dualist phallocentrism which associates the female

with nature and the male, culture (Ortner, 1974; 1997: 174). In fact, the gaze here is

neither male nor dualist but human and ecological.

Figure 139: Minds in the Cave/Fragment 13, 2014. Ink jet print on Canson fine art paper. Foot print 111 cm x 111

cm

Figure 140. A 23,000 year old fossil human footprint at Lake Gampung, NSW

www.photography-now.com/institution/artist/atlas-gallery/mario-giacomelli

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Figure 141. A 1.5 million year old hominin footprint, Ileret, Kenya

www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2009/02/26/footprint.jpg

Figure 142. Buzz Aldrin: Footprint on the Moon, 21 July 1969

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11

A name also considered for the series was The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, referencing

Euripides’ tragic play ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’, in which the innocent maiden Iphigenia is

sacrificed by her father King Agamemnon to appease the god Artemis so as to

summon the wind for his warships to sail to Troy. Just as Sophocles’ Oedipus

becomes a figure of agos or “defilement” (Davis 1995: 5), Iphigenia becomes the

pharmakos or scapegoat rendered abject by fate [Fig 143]. In these diptychs,

Iphigenia’s human fate is aligned with that of the nonhuman moths.

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Figure 143. Still of Iphigenia considering her fate from the film Iphigenia (1977) directed by Mihalis Kakogiannis

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXVt8drTo_U

The title, Minds in the Cave, alludes literally to the source of the moths; metaphorically

to Platonic myth; texturally to the title of David Lewis-Williams’ book, The Mind in the

Cave (Lewis-Williams, 2002) on the prehistory of art; and biosemiotically to the umwelt

of creatures whose subjectivity is unfathomable. Regardless of the title, the work

links abject moths with humanity in ways that allude to the emerging human tragedy

of environmental crisis and the pathos of all life, everywhere.

Many artists including Christl Berg scan found natural objects for digital

reproduction [Fig 144]. Unlike the cameraless output of Fuss, Derges or Berg, the

digitally reiterated prints of Minds in the Cave exchange the raw indexicality of their

source plein air materials for the revelations of scale. The subjects’ ‘aura’ embodied in

the original filmwork is supplanted by human artistry, the anthropic hand (and foot)

of the mind in the cave. Yet this auratic loss, a stand-in for anthropocentric

distancing, is exchanged for another equally powerful sensation: like shrinking Alice

in Wonderland, the supernatural enlargements confront us with the uncanny

selfhood and presence of another, smaller species.

Negative emotions are commonly enunciated using dark imagery (as in the shadow)

or mood (like film noir cinema). The paired prints of Minds in the Cave represent these

emotions using an opposite treatment: a predominance of high key negative space.

Although in the West, the colour white is usually aligned with goodness or purity

(Meier, 2004; Sherman, 2009; Douglas, 2013), it is also the traditional colour of

ghosts and sacrificial animals and can represent the cold emptiness of loss, pain or

death as it does in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir (Holland, 2009: 59-60) and

Sylvia Plath (Nedoma, 2009: 10-12). Such is its application here.

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Figure 144. Christl Berg: Installation of laser prints of scanned objects from Maria Island, c2000

Reproduced by permission of the artist

The formal references are eclectic. The graphic chiarascuro of dark moth and foot

subjects against empty rag paper allude both to the gentle humanity of Mario

Giacomelli’s seminary studies of moving black-draped priests [Fig 145] and the

intense muscular grief of abstract expressionist painter Robert Motherwell’s near-

monochromatic meditations on mortality [Fig 146]. The tricolour pallette of claret

shadows, saxe blue midtones and colourless highlights honours and simulates the

split toning in selenium of classic gelatin silver ‘fine print’ photographic craft, a

technique and an aesthetic strongly associated with the late twentieth century

humanist oeuvres of Emmet Gowin, Les Walkling and Olivia Parker [Fig 147].

Figure 145. Mario Giacomelli: There are no hands to caress my face 1961-63. Gelatin silver print

www.photography-now.com/institution/artist/atlas-gallery/mario-giacomelli

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Figure 146. Robert Motherwell: Elegy to the Spanish Republic, #70, 1961. Oil on canvas

www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/65.247

Figure 147. Olivia Parker: Eggshells, 1977. Selenium toned gelatin silver contact print http://edelmangallery.com/exhibitions-and-projects/exhibition-pages/2004/olivia-parker.html

The collection, ordering and grouping of image sets or fragments has antecedents in

the social phototaxonomy of August Sander and, more recently, in pop art; Bernd

and Hilla Becher’s deadpan “typologies”; and David Hockney’s patchwork photo-

collage “joiners”. However, the systematic, semi-microscopic documentation of

living nonhumans in my own work has its most obvious precedent in the extensive

taxonomical archive of botanical camera close-ups by Karl Blossfeldt [Fig 148].

Although the intra-image repetition of subject matter has parallels in the photographs

of Shomei Tomaatsu, Patrick Tosani and Jan Groover, only Olivia Parker’s contact-

printed, gelatin silver still lifes have had any conscious impact upon the tonal scale

and colour palette of of the Minds in the Cave prints.

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Figure 148. Karl Blossfeldt: Haarfarn (Urformen der Kunst), 1928

www.pinterest.com/pin/289215607294527438/

Mount Buffalo Sub-project 2: Ekkyklêma

As the digital files for paper outputting were being prepared in early 2014, I began to

recognize the aesthetic possibilites of the source plein air shadowgram films. Initially

intended as dispensable source data for capturing the indexical immediacy, beauty

and pathos of the moths through digitization and reiteration, this process gradually

led to these studies becoming artworks in their own right. It also became apparent

that like the Minds in the Cave diptychs, mixing Mount Buffalo and Lake Tyrrell

imagery offered more nuanced and striking poetic possibilities than moths alone.

After a year of experimentation I developed the idea of a ‘broken’ grid of multiple

glass-mounted tiles displayed on light tables. In March 2014, 124 films were trimmed

and sent to Perth for face mounting on slim 5x140x140 mm low-iron glass panes

using the archival ‘Diasec’ adhesive process offered by Gallery 360, the sole

Australian supplier of this service. They comprised 52 Bogong Moth pieces from

Mount Buffalo and 30 invertebrate and 42 dancers’ footprint films from the ‘second

set’ of templates made at Lake Tyrrell (see Chapter 4). Prior to delivery the glass

supplier belt wiped the panes by hand to remove sharp edges but unfortunately many

were so badly chipped they had to be omitted from the final assemblage. The final

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arrangement of 112 tiles divided into three groups on light boxes is fluid and variable

[Figs 149 and 150]. The initial plan, now rejected, included old copy camera lenses

atop the panes [Fig 151]. It was unnecessary to include the story of Ekkyklêma in the

video, Making Gathering Shadows, because the artwork comprised the same films

documented in Syzygy, The End of the Age of Entitlement and Minds in the Cave.

Figure 149. Experimental segment of Ekkyklêma, 2014: 112 gelatin silver films each mounted on a 5x140x140 mm glass tile. Arrangement and overall dimensions variable

Figure 150. Experimental segment of Ekkyklêma, 2014: 112 gelatin silver films each mounted on a 5x140x140 mm glass pane. Arrangement and overall dimensions variable

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Figure 151. Experimental segment of Ekkyklêma, 2014: 112 gelatin silver films each mounted on 5x140x140 mm glass panes (with glass lens, since excised from concept). Arrangement and overall dimensions variable

Ekkyklêma interpreted

The second Mount Buffalo artwork Ekkyklêma, is comprised of 112 square glass

panes upon which shadowgram film has been mounted. These tiles are arranged on

light boxes is a meditative tableau with complex associations. Transgressing the

locational containment of other works in Gathering Shadows, Ekkyklêma brings

together invertebrate imagery from both sites juxtaposed with imprints of the human

body originally made as part of Syzygy (see chapter 4). Contaminating upland moths

with semi-desert species infuses each with the shadow of hybridization and

extinction whilst evidence of humanity connotes familiarity and comfort as well as

the tragic hand (or feet) of anthropogenic power. The juxtaposition of human foot

chemograms and invertebrate shadows invokes mutual abjection and the possibility

of shared redemption. The formal presentation of Ekkyklêma has diverse

antecedents. An Ekkyklêma is a wheeled, revolving platform reportedly employed in

ancient Greek tragic and tragi-comic performances to display the hitherto hidden

pharmarkos, the abject body of the victim, to the audience (Storey, 2008: 44). This

project’s Ekkyklêma is a set of rectangular wheel-less light tables but its tragic

ecological rationale is patent. Importantly, the word has recently been used to

characterize the invisible victims of Tasmanian environmental politics (Kanowski,

2011: 28), so its use in ecological discourse has precedent. The broken grid has ample

precedent in art: in terms of materials, scale and indexical content, the closest parallel

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are works by Janet Lawrence [Fig 152] although the most important formal influence

over presentation has come from the melancholy faux memorial assemblages of

Christian Boltanski [Fig 153].

Figure 152. Janet Lawrence: Second Exposure from the Periodic Table series, 1992-93. Lead, glass, salt, sulphur,

mercury, X-ray, various substances, lily, fluorescent lights

www.janetlaurence.com/second-exposure/

Figure 153. Christian Boltanski: Monument (Odessa), 1989–2003. Mixed media

www.artvalue.com/default.aspx?ID=23&ARTISTE_ID=8315&C_C_19=O&force=true&lang=ENG&NB_CO

L=3&PRICEDEV=1&ORDRE=2&cp_checked=0&C_C_19=O

Figure 154. Manuel Vilarino: Bestiario, 1981-89. Gelatin silver prints

http://culturagalega.org/atalaia/obras/bestiario

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Read as a broken but self-contained entity rather than a series of discrete image-

carrying objects, the array of exquisitely detailed translucent, image-carrying tiles

contains multiple photographic references: its translucent glass ‘victims’ emulate

nineteenth century lantern slides, glass wetplates and histology slides; like Jerry

Uelsmann’s multi-negative montages and Oscar Rejlander’s combination prints,

visual meaning emerges from its parts; and, like Manuel Vilarino’s preserved animal

specimens juxtaposed with the tools of their dismemberment, Ekkyklêma presages a

future of anthropogenic violation of the nonhuman (Vilarino, 2008) [Fig 154].

Gather ing Shadows at Mount Buffalo

The artworks interrogate Mount Buffalo’s current semi-wild status on the one hand,

and its impending anthropogenic violation, on the other. The Bogong Moth is an

unequalled symbol of the systemic interdependencies fundamental to ecological

thinking. The shadowy evidence of their presence, especially as enlarged in the prints

of Minds in the Cave, alerts us to their biosemiotic selfhood. Juxtaposing Bogong

Moths with human feet in Minds in the Cave infers both Lepidoptera abjection and

anthropic presence but the mixing in of Mallee invertebrates in Ekkyklêma points to

the loss of ecological distinctiveness feared with climate change: both artworks infer

what Caitlin deSilvey calls an “anticipatory history” (DeSilvey, 2011).

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Conclusion

Answering the question

The scholarly and creative responses to the opening research question ‘In what

ways can an eco log i cal gaze be evoked through cameraless photography?’ were

both unequivocal and open-ended. On the one hand, it is clear cameraless

photography is capable of reporting ecological phenomena vividly and accurately. On

the other hand, cameraless photography’s ability to evoke deeper aspects of an

ecological gaze as defined in the research – the symbolizing of place, the indexing of

nonhuman agency and the proffering of an iconography of nonhuman tragedy – is

less certain. This is largely because perceiving the nuances of an ecological gaze in

stills media almost certainly requires some a priori awareness of ecology and tragic

semiosis. Nonetheless, the visual responses to the research question involved an

original exploration of concepts, material techniques and aesthetic strategies that

resulted in significantly new theoretical, methodological and aesthetic knowledge.

Theoretical findings

This doctoral research has resulted in several key insights concerning an ecological

gaze as concept and as interpreted in art. First, there is the realization that the hope

of completely undoing anthropocentrism is both improbable and probably

ecologically undesirable. That is, whilst anthropocentrism is ontologically

compromised because it fails to acknowledge the human as part of nature, its

undoing would be ethically compromised because it would understate differences

between humans as apex predators and nonhuman others. Art articulating this

insight needs to report differences as much as similarities (as I have argued in

Chapter 1). A second observation, both informing and sought after in the art of

Gathering Shadows, is that imagery of nature can be generative of a pro-ecological

“avant-garde nostalgia” (Soper, 2011: 23-24) which is quite opposed to the soporific

sentimentality with which it is conventionally associated: it is thus a quality the

artworks’ embrace (Chapter 1). A third insight is that if ecological relations are to be

understood biosemiotically as having embodied meanings, art can represent such

relations through indexical, that is embodied, material processes (Chapter 2). A

fourth realization is that the concept of ‘tragedy’ not only applies to the ‘anthropic’

causes of the ecological crisis and the predicament of the two sites investigated in the

190

research, but is also ‘systemic’, insofar as it is intrinsic to the human ecological

condition. Hence, art addressing this idea would express the common pathos of all life

arising out of the condition of mortality, a pathos intensified in the current context

of environmental ruin (Chapter 3). The response to these observations has been to

present live invertebrates as visual vectors for an ‘avant-garde nostalgia’ symbolic of

place and nonhuman otherness, to embody ecological relations using an index of

cameraless photographic touch and shadow, and to attempt to communicate tragedy

through an iconography of abject subjects–principally invertebrates–and formal

visual dissonances.

By revivifying the poetics of analogic methods as an arena for speculative research

and transforming and remediating ecological imagery in a transdisciplinary context,

Gathering Shadows invites further dialogic and artistic responses. For instance, with

respect to theory, further investigations of an ecological gaze could generate other

interpretations of its meaning and application; whilst in regard to practice other

nonhuman phenomena from fungi and microscopic biota to animals and plants

present likely candidates for abject iconography in environmental art (Pouliot, 2013).

New methodological developments

The practice-led aspects of this research involved the development of four distinctive

new methodologies in the field of photographic research. The first of these was the

development of new techniques for the cameraless imaging of live invertebrates. The

works from the site at Lake Tyrrell (discussed in chapter 4) required innovations such

as sucking ants from nests using motorized portable syphons, attracting nocturnal

flying insects into one-way tubs with light lures (Syzygy) and using nets atop a moving

vehicle to catch airborne locusts (The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of

Being). At Mount Buffalo (discussed in chapter 5), Bogong Moths were dislodged

from cave walls to be captured photographically in flight and en masse inside a

purpose designed swivelling pyramidal net. The second methodological innovation

occurred on site at Lake Tyrrell where, for the first time in the history of the

medium, plein air invertebrate shadowgrams on film and borrowed astronomical

images on glass plate were redeployed as negatives for contact printing new films

beneath them using ambient starlight, on site (Syzygy). The third methodological

advance related to the quality of digital reiteration. One of the Lake Tyrrell films (The

191

End of the Age of Entitlement) and a large number of Mount Buffalo films (Minds in the

Cave) were scanned at high resolution for digital enlargement on paper revealing

levels of detail unusual in images derived from cameraless photographs. The fourth

new methodology was the recording of dancing feet on film using fixer exposed plein

air at Lake Tyrrell by sunlight: despite the project’s focus on invertebrates, these

human marks emphasize the ubiquity of human presence everywhere and, by being

re-employed in the Mount Buffalo artworks, linked the two sites in ways that

completed the research. Significantly, the use of simple gelatin silver analogue

photographic materials as the sole system of photographic capture evident in three of

the five final artworks demonstrated the unequalled indexical efficacy and expressive

potential of this purportedly outdated medium.

New forms of aesthetic knowledge

The diversity of new aesthetic material arising out of this research amounts to the

production of new forms of knowledge. Although often formally beautiful, the raw

plein air shadowgrams were treated as information to be reconfigured as art, an

approach resulting in several new aesthetic findings. First, the work illustrated the

affective power of shadow juxtaposition. This ranged from the seamless matching of

‘like’ subjects in the Telescope sub-series of Syzygy and in The Impossibility of Knowing the

Mind of Another Kind of Being, as against the drawing together of ‘unlike’ insects and

stars in Syzygy and insects and footprints in Minds in the Cave and Ekkyklêma. Second,

the layering of images facilitated by backlighting films mounted on glass in the Syzygy

diptychs, Telescope palimpsests and Ekkyklêma mosaics introduced three dimensional

depth and novel subject/subject associations explored but not resolved in any of my

earlier cameraless work. Third, the digital upscaling of images to larger-than-life

proportions in The End of the Age of Entitlement and Minds in the Cave, highlighted the

distinct qualities of nonhuman subjectivity and agency recognizable as fundamental

to the human capacity for both biosemiotic engagement and a sense of abjection.

Fourth, the inversion of the dark shadowgram ‘negatives’ into ‘positives’, produced

analogically on clear film in Syzygy and digitally in Minds in the Cave (where featureless

white paper dominates the imagery), suggests that empty high-key negative space is

as an effective a trope for loss or tragedy as low-key darkness. Fifth, there was the

observation that eliciting biosemiotic readings or nuances of tragedy from the work

would be aided by lyrical titling and visual evidence: hence, the choice of titles, use of

192

descriptions and an accompanying documentary video.

On reflection

Gathering Shadows was art made ‘in the shadow’ of the emerging uber-zeitgeist: global

environmental crisis. The ghostly shadow-world of site-specific invertebrates

captured ritualistically en plein air in darkness and reconfigured as ‘membranes’ of film

and paper suggested ancient shamanic reveries. In this sense, each film and paper

original (and paper reiteration) from the sites recall the parietal surfaces of

palaeological art, through which an all-enveloping ecological world can be re-

imagined. It is landscape photography recast as a membrane of topographic shadows,

like peeling away the skin of the earth.

Figure 155. Left: Bogong moth film shadowgram scan detail. Right: ‘Shadow’ photograph of a single Ytterbium

atom. Source: Streed, 2012 http://cdn.phys.org/newman/gfx/news/hires/2012/firstphotoof.jpg

The predicament of abject insects, of forlorn or endangered places and, above all, of

a warming planet invokes a dark vision symbolised in this project by an oblique

narrative of shadows. Indeed, it is arguable that shadows cast by flash in open desert

air and outside a mountain cave (or in their reiterations by starlight or scanning) offer

more affective renditions of invertebrate biotics than seeing by reflected daylight

could ever elicit. Other shadows lend weight to this claim. The recently announced

first successful ‘photograph’ of an atom was not its direct form but a cast shadow

(Streed, 2012) [Fig 155]. Just as the shadow of an otherwise invisible atom implies

something particular about the structure of the visible world, the hitherto unseen

shadows of diminutive ants, spiders, beetles, locusts, butterflies and Bogong Moths

193

evoke a poetics of something far larger and more tangible. Hence, in a world blinded

by anthropogenic glare the most evocative poetic expression of our tragic ecological

condition may yet be found among the abject and shadows.

194

Addendum

1. Chemical processing for flash-exposed Kodak Camera 2000 films in Lake

Tyrrell and Mount Buffalo invertebrate images

Exposed films were processed individually in open PVC photographic trays in my

Melbourne darkroom using a one minute pre-wash followed by development in Agfa

Rodinal diluted 1:100 at 200c for 73/4 minutes, stop bathed in acetic acid for half a

minute, fixed in sodium thiosulphate solution for three minutes and rinsed in

running filtered tap water for 20 minutes before ambient air drying on hangers.

2. Chemical processing of starlight exposed Ilford HP5Plus films in Lake

Tyrrell sub project Syzygy

Once loaded in total darkness onto the film carrier septum, two films at a time, and

immersed in the tank, standard processing in the device at 200c consisted of a one

minute prewash in filtered water, development in Ilford Microphen diluted 1:3 in

filted water for 171/4 minutes, one minute in Kodak acetic indicator acid stop bath, 4

minutes in Kodak Hypam fixer, a 1 minute rinse in water and 5 minutes in Kodak

Hypoclear before transfer to the archival washer for a half hour of running water

flushing with Kodak Photoflo detergent added just prior to ambient air drying on

hangers.

3. Chemical processing of flash-exposed Bergger paper in Lake Tyrrell sub

project The Imposs ibi l i ty o f Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Creature

The two exposed sheets were hand processed flat in my Melbourne darkroom under

red safelights in an open 1.2 x 1.2 metre PVC tray. Development at 200c consisted of

a one minute pre-soak in water; six minutes of development in a home-made soft-

working ‘Ansco 120’ Metol solution with a benzotriozale restrainer to optically ‘cool’

the print; a one minute indicator stop bath; 3 minutes in Agfa fixer, 10 minutes in

Kodak Hypoclear, a 90 minute wash in running filtered water and an ambient air dry

using the fly screen for support. Post-development toning and intensification for 4

minutes in a 1:19 selenium solution (Kodak selenium plus Hypoclear) at 200c

followed by a full one hour wash completed the work.

195

4. Digital post production for Lake Tyrrell sub project The End of the Age o f

Enti t l ement and Mount Buffalo sub project Minds in the Cave

Digital image processing was conducted at RMIT on an Apple Power Mac G5

workstation using Adobe Photoshop CS5 software displayed on a colour-calibrated

Eizo monitor.

5. Digital printing for Lake Tyrrell sub project The End of the Age o f

Enti t l ement and Mount Buffalo sub project Minds in the Cave

Each Adobe psb image file employed the embedded colour profile ‘SRGBIE61966-

2.1’ visualized on-screen using a ‘D.Cam 3, J. Holmes’ working profile subsequently

subtly Smart Sharpened by 25% at a 25 pixel radius and zero threshold. The

processed image files were outputted on an RMIT School of Art fine art

photography department’s Epson Stylus Pro 9900 inkjet machine during July and

August 2014. Colour Management used ‘Photoshop Managers Colours’, a

‘E990mkCRP_VFA2880NCA_BPSL.icc’ profile and ‘Perceptual’ rendering. They

were outputted as 1110 x 1110 mm works printed at 360ppi from rolls of 1117 mm

wide heavy weight 310gsm Canson Rag ‘Photographique’ matt rag paper stock.

6. Chemical clearing of starlight exposed Ilford HP5Plus films in Lake Tyrrell

sub project Syzygy

The highlights of these films were ‘cleared’ of veiling by brush spotting with and/or

immersion in a solution of ‘Farmer’s reducer’ solution (ferrocyanide and ammonium

thiosulphate diluted in water) for 1-5 minutes at 200c, followed by full refixing, a 5

minute immersion in Hypoclear and rewashing. In addition, all HP5Plus films were

optically intensified and made slightly bluer by a 1-3 minute immersion in a 1:19

solution of ‘selenium toner’ (Kodak selenium plus Hypoclear) at 200c followed by a 5

minute Hypoclear bath and rewashing.

196

7. Starlight exposure timetable for Ilford HP5Plus films in Lake Tyrrell sub

project Syzygy

Figure 156. Example of a starlight exposure timetable provided by astrophysicist Dr Maurizio Toscano

8. Correspondence

Figure 157. Top: Screen shot of email from Geoffrey Batchen confirming Claudet’s experiments. Bottom: Screen shot

of email from Dr Kenneth Green confirming energy status of Bogong moths.

197

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Appropriate Durable Record Syzygy series, 2011 Each piece is comprised of between two and eight overlaid toned gelatin silver films created

by exposure to starlight mounted on a starfire glass pane with screen-printed mask on

opposing face [Figs 158-180]. Each glass/film pane is 335mm x 355mm x 5mm. Six are not

illustrated: three early linear triptychs (Syzygy 3, 9 and 10) were purchased by the Walter and

Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in 2010, a fourth (Syzygy 13) is in a private Adelaide

collection and two diptych palimpsests were acquired by the Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery

(Syzygy 8 and 14) in 2012. Although twenty-three artworks are illustrated here limited gallery

and light box space meant only a dozen were displayed in the RMIT PhD exhibition. At

exhibition the plates were grouped in line atop three, 60 cm x 150 cm low-output LED light

boxes customized for the purpose.

Figure 158. Syzygy 1/Transit of Cygnus A, 2011. Two plates

231

Figure 159. Syzygy 2/Transit of Leo A, 2011. Two plates

Figure 160. Syzygy 4/Transit of Alpha Centauri, 2011. Two plates

Figure 161. Syzygy 5/Transit of Cygnus B, 2011. Two plates

232

Figure 162. Syzygy 6/Transit of Cygnus C, 2011. Two plates

Figure 163. Syzygy 7/Transit of Cassiopeia, 2011. Two plates

Figure 164. Syzygy 11/Transit of Carinae A, 2011. Two plates

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Figure 165. Syzygy 12/Transit of Scorpius B, 2011. Two plates

Figure 166. Syzygy 15/Transit of Dorado A, 2011. Two plates

Figure 167. Syzygy 16: Transit of Carinae B, 2011. Two plates

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Figure 168. Syzygy 17/Transit of Carinae C, 2011. Two plates

Figure 169. Syzygy 18/Transit of the Heart, 2011. Two plates

Figure 170. Syzygy 19/Transit of Magellan, 2011. Two plates

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Figure 171. Syzygy 20/Transit of Leo B, 2011. Two plates

Figure 172. Syzygy 21/Transit of Beta Centauri, 2011. Two plates

Figure 173. Syzygy 22/Transit of Fornax A, 2011. Two plates

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Figure 174. Syzygy 23/Transit of Fornax B, 2011. Two plates

Figure 175. Syzygy 24/Transit of Carina Volans, 2011. Two plates

Figure 176. Syzygy 25/Transit of Carinae D, 2011. Two plates

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Figure 179. Telescope 3, 2011. Six plates

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Figure 180. Telescope 4, 2011. Four plates

The Imposs ib i l i ty o f Knowing the Mind o f Another Kind o f Being , 2011


fibre paper plein air shadowgrams, each print 107cm x 107cm. Float-mounted and framed

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The End o f the Age o f Enti t l ement , 2014

Figure 182. The End of the Age of Entitlement, 2014. Pigment ink-jet print on Museo Portfolio rag paper, 123cm x

105 cm image on 136cm x 111cm paper sheet. Unframed.

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Minds in the Cave series, 2014

Each diptych is a pair of 111cm x 111cm pigment ink-jet prints on Canson

Photographique rag paper. Here, the pairs are illustrated aligned and abutted square

with the moths print on the left and the foot print on the right when in fact at

exhibition some prints were offset against each other, pinned sideways or in reverse.

Facsimiles of fifteen completed Minds in the Cave digital files [Figs 183-197] are

illustrated here but limited gallery space meant only six were printed for and

displayed in the RMIT PhD exhibition. Although illustrated clearly here, at exhibition

low luminance spotlights lit each diptych, which, in an otherwise darkened gallery

encouraged close inspection and the creation of a cave-like atmosphere.



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Ekkyklêma series, 2014

Ekkyklêma is one artwork in three parts [Figs 198-202] of 40, 39 and 33 plein air gelatin silver

shadowgram films adhered with Diasec to 140mm x 140mm x 5mm panes of low-lead glass.

The grids documented here are only indicative since the formal tile arrangements are variable

at exhibition. At installation the three series were grouped in line atop three, 60 cm x 150 cm

low output LED light boxes customized for the purpose.

Figure 198. Ekkyklêma 1, 2014. 40 tiles. Dimensions variable

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Figure 199. Ekkyklêma 2, 2014. 39 tiles. Dimensions variable

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Figure 200. Ekkyklêma 3, 2014. 33 tiles (29 shown). Dimensions variable

Making Gather ing Shadows DVD, 2014

A 21’24” video loop on DVD documenting the making of Gathering Shadows

accompanies the exhibition. It is divided into 4 parts being i) Syzygy (0”–12’28”), ii)

The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Being (12’29”–14’), iii) The End of

The Age of Entitlement (14’01”–15’27”) and, iv) Minds in the Cave (15’28–21’24”).

Figure 201. Making Gathering Shadows DVD, 2014

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PhD exhibition, RMIT School of Art Gallery, October 11-17, 2014



Figure 204. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of light tables

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Figure 205. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Part 3 of Ekkyklêma



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Figure 211. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of a Syzygy piece

Figure 212. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of a Telecsope piece

Figure 213. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of part of Minds in the Cave

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Figure 214. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of a Minds in the Cave diptych

Figure 215. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of part of Minds in the Cave

Figure 216. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of a Minds in the Cave diptych

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Figure 217. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being

Figure 218. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. The End of the Age of Entitlement

Figure 219. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation view of video playing documentary loop

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Curriculum Vitae (2010-2014)

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2012 Syzygy, Stills Gallery, Paddington, NSW

Syzygy, Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Swan Hill, Victoria

2011 Harry Nankin: Syzygy, Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Horsham, Victoria

2010 Syzygy, Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Fitzroy, Victoria

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2014 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2014, Monash Gallery of Art,

Wheelers Hill, Victoria

Future Tense, Stephen McLaughlin Gallery, Melbourne [curated by Felicity Spear]

2013 SkyLab, LaTrobe Regional Gallery, Morwell, Victoria [curated by Felicity Spear

& Fiona West]

2011 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2011, Monash Gallery of Art,

Wheelers Hill, Victoria

Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award, Gold Coast City Gallery, Qld

2010 Tidal Art Prize 2010, Devonport Regional Gallery, Devonport, Tasmania

ACQUISITIONS

2014 Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada, USA [in process]

2013 Collection of Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Swam Hill, Victoria

2012 Collection of Mr Christopher Williams, Adelaide, SA

2010 Collection of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research,

Melbourne

PUBLIC LECTURES

2012 Seminar as part of ‘Re-Imagining the Global: Culture and Climate Change’,

Storey Hall, RMIT University, Melbourne, 31 August 2012

2011 Art and the Communication of Climate Science, Craft Victoria, Melbourne, 20

September 2011

2010 The Ecological Gaze, ‘Stormy Weather Symposium’, National Gallery of Victoria,

Melbourne, 25 September 2010

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CONFERENCE PAPERS PRESENTED

2013 Tragic ecology: landscape and photography at a time of crisis at ‘People and the Planet

2013 Conference’, Storey Hall, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2-4 July 2013

2012 Shadows in the Cave: Insect imagery as metaphors for place in ‘Regarding the Earth:

Ecological Vision in Word and Image’ 4th ASLEC-ANZ Biennial Conference,

Monash University, Caulfield, Victoria, 31 August-2 September 2012

2010 Syzygy: gazing at shadows, darkly in ‘The First International Conference on

Transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections between Art, Science and Culture’,

ArtSpace, Wolloomooloo, NSW, 5-6 November, 2010

CONFERENCE PAPERS PUBLISHED

NANKIN, H. 2013. ‘Minds in the Cave: Insects as Metaphors for Place and Loss’,

Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. V 3, 1-15.

http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/aslec-anz

NANKIN, H. 2010. ‘Syzygy: gazing at shadows, darkly’, The First International Conference on

transdisciplinary Imaging at the Intersections Between Art, Science and Culture, 91-102.

blogs.unsw.edu.au/tiic/files/2011/04/TIICproceedings.pdf

CITATIONS PUBLISHED

SAVAGE, A (edit). 2010. Tidal 2010: City of Devonport Art Award, Devonport Regional

Gallery, Tasmania

CARTER, P. 2010. Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region, UWA Press, 4, 75,

155-158

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Critical Feedback CARTER, P. 2010. Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region, UWA Press, 4, 75,

155-158

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Figure 220. Scans of pages 154-159 of Ground Truthing: Explorations in a Creative Region, 2010 by Paul Carter

Gathering Shadows: landscape, photography & the ecological gaze

Documents

Transcript of Gathering Shadows: landscape, photography & the ecological gaze