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
Gathering Shadows: landscape, photography and the ecological gaze
Harry Nankin Doctor of Philosophy
2014
RMIT University
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Gathering Shadows: landscape, photography and the ecological gaze
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
Figure 127. Detail of film scanning protocol test 16 bit @ 2000dpi and 2.2 gamma on Creo at CGP made in
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 178. Telescope 2, 2011. Eight plates
Figure 179. Telescope 3, 2011. Six plates
Figure 180. Telescope 4, 2011. Four plates
Figure 181. The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being, 2011. Diptych of toned gelatin silver
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
Figure 184. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 2, 2014
Figure 185. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 3, 2014
Figure186. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 4, 2014
Figure 187. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 5, 2014
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Figure 188. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 6, 2014
Figure 189. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 7, 2014
Figure 190. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 8, 2014
Figure 191. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 9, 2014
Figure 192. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 10, 2014
Figure 193. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 11, 2014
Figure 194. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 12, 2014
Figure 195. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 13, 2014
Figure 196. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 14, 2014
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 203. 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 207. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of Part 2 of Ekkyklêma
Figure 208. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of Part 1 of Ekkyklêma
Figure 209. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Overview of part of Syzygy and Telecsope
Figure 210. 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
14
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-
16
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
21
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
22
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
23
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
27
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
28
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
32
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)
33
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”
35
(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
36
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).
37
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
38
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).
39
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.
40
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
41
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).
43
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
47
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)
49
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.
50
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
51
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
52
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
53
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
55
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
59
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
60
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).
61
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
62
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
67
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
74
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.
76
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].
77
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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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 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.
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
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Figure 127. Detail of film scanning protocol test 16 bit @ 2000dpi and 2.2 gamma on Creo at CGP made in
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
176
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
186
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
187
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
188
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).
189
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
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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
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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 177. Telescope 1, 2011. Eight plates
Figure 178. Telescope 2, 2011. Eight plates
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
Figure 181. The Impossibility of Knowing the Mind of Another Kind of Living Being, 2011. Diptych of toned gelatin silver
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.
Figure 183. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 1, 2014
Figure184. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 2, 2014
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Figure 185. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 3, 2014
Figure186. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 4, 2014
Figure 187. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 5, 2014
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Figure 188. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 6, 2014
Figure 189. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 7, 2014
Figure 190. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 8, 2014
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Figure 191. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 9, 2014
Figure 192. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 10, 2014
Figure 193. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 11, 2014
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Figure 194. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 12, 2014
Figure 195. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 13, 2014
Figure 196. Minds in the Cave/Fragment 14, 2014
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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 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 202. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation overview
Figure 203. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Installation overview
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
Figure 206. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of Part 3 of Ekkyklêma
Figure 207. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of Part 2 of Ekkyklêma
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Figure 208. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Detail of Part 1 of Ekkyklêma
Figure 209. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Overview of part of Syzygy and Telecsope
Figure 210. Gathering Shadows RMIT exhibition 2014. Overview of part of Syzygy and Telecsope
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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