Michael Cox, Graduate Liberal Studies, Simon Fraser University
Images are from the presentation delivered at the 3rd annual Liberal Studies Symposium, held at Stanford in 2009.
download original essay as pdf: cox_hive
Ars brevis vita in periculo. (Short-lived art, life in danger)
–Alexsandra Manczak[1]
Abstract
The artist’s transgression of what is arguably an erroneous split, created in the 17th century, between nature and culture, re-connects that which is undeniably human and intentional with that which is non-human and unintentional. Through human imagination and its expression in the arts a rapprochement is made with the world; we are not alienated observer but rather collaborative partner. The questions I pose are: Can nature be a collaborative agent in a process which is driven by human imagination? Does nature communicate to us, if so, can art interpret that communique?
There is little doubt that the divide exists: most prominently figuring at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution in the rationalist philosophy of Descartes and the method of enquiry promoted by his contemporary Bacon, whose philosophies led to the separation of “us”—humanity (at least, those of the civilized world—there were many cultures excluded) with our reasoned intelligence, oral and written communication, from “them”—plants, animals, and those unfortunate enough to be termed soulless, the “Godless heathens” who were treated as mere mechanisms; nature and “savages” as raw, unconscious material, ours for enquiry and industry.
The reductive methodology employed in dissecting Nature was responsible for much good science and much that was heartless, including unconscionable experimentation on sentient beings; but compassion and empathy were no match for the philosophical underpinnings of the nascent investor-driven capital economies of the west. This utilitarian comprehension of the world created, as Christina Ljungberg writes, “the predicament of modern civilization, …the exploitation of humankind and nature, the destructive split between mind and body and between nature and culture, and the ensuing alienation experienced by modern man.”[2]
Carson, Leopold, Muir
In the mid-19th century Henry Thoreau wrote about the profound effect our attitude toward nature had on both the natural world and humanity; by the mid-20th, John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson made it apparent our rapacious attitude had to change, that we needed to replace a hubristic Cartesian dualism with something that encompassed all life on equal terms. While Carolyn Merchant was writing about the “death of nature,” Michel Serres spoke of a new contractual obligation to live within it. The repercussions of the back-to-the-land movement begun in the late 1960’s spoke to our alienation and yearning for a deeper connection with nature. And in deep ecology, developed at the close of the 20th, we find in Arne Naess, Gary Snyder and others a response that heals a deep wound; their philosophy a holistic approach to Gaia.
Nature in Art
The frequencies and means by which nature communicates are multi-channel and multi-frequency, often beyond the range of human senses. From the ultraviolet reflection of flowers to the infrared detection snakes use to locate prey, or from ultrasonic insect “talk” to subsonic elephant vocalizations and the long-range songs of whales, we are, for the most part, left out of the loop of nature’s conversations.
But humans have nevertheless responded to the natural world, attempting to understand its mysteries, through art, ever since we began making images on cave walls and hillsides (the Uffington white horse, Oxfordshire).
However, for most of art history, creative interpretation of nature was no exception to Cartesian dualism, notably in paintings, where the natural world was depicted variously as: malleable material to be aesthetically arranged in still lifes (Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Teapot[3]); a backdrop to conventional, studio-lit portraits (John Singer Sargent, William Marshall Azalea[4]); as an inventory of ownership, a spreadsheet of property rendered in oil (Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs. Williams[5]); as sublime wilderness to be both admired (Balke, Stetind in Fog[6]) or feared (Turner, Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps[7]); or as the romantic views of rivers, parks and gardens we associate with the Impressionists (Seurat, The Morning Walk[8]).
“Modernist artists do not see themselves as representing the world,” writes Mel Gooding, editor of Artists Land Nature, “but rather as reporting and recording from within it” {my emphasis}. He goes on to point out that art also operates within the same uncertainty principle as science, where “the observer and the observed could not be distinguished.”[9]
Landscape not only informed art, it became art in the formal parks of the 17th through 19th centuries, reaching its apogee in André Le Notre’s design for the Parc de Versailles, which extends the absolute power of the ruling class from their magnificent palaces to encompass the world they owned.
In the 20th century, artists continued to situate the natural world as a disenfranchised object as in, for example, the large-format black and white photographs of Yosemite by Ansel Adams, which represent the undisturbed world; or in the photographs of Edward Burtynsky of a very disturbed world of mines, tailing ponds and other human intrusions.
In 1970 the possibility of nature as a “collaborator” was recognized with Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty , a coiled groin of rock extending into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a monumental sculpture which was (and still is) alternately covered and revealed by changing water levels. Still, we are witnessing art mastering nature, where the terrain is bullied into new forms by the whims of human intervention.
In Arizona, the largest land art project in the world is underway, thirty years in the making: James Turrell’s project to turn an extinct volcano, Roden Crater, into a multi-chambered, naked-eye observatory.
The growing awareness of our interdependence, as the environmental movement became mainstream dogma, provoked, among artists, a response that they should incorporate nature as a partner, and treat the world not merely as landscape but as a living ecosystem. Even in the stylized tapestries of Christo/Jean-Claude[10], where river valleys and entire islands were wrapped in fabric panels, care was taken to restore the location to their natural state.
Artists were now making their mark, but only temporarily. Site specific installations, like the ropey branch constructions of Patrick Dougherty and the mapped walks and lines of Richard Long, were built not to last forever but to be altered by time and weather, dissolved, broken apart, reduced to their constituent elements. “Here we have a human-artist interfering with nature,” writes Alexsandra Manczak; “nature then assumes the artist’s role: by answering in its own language,…it transforms the human’s work.”[11] This approach to nature placed art not only within a specific place but also within time, where the work’s devolution is as much a part of the art as its construction and evolution. This was a movement toward an interaction between nature and artist, where nature was both raw material and co-creator; it was a belated recognition that there was something more to the land than rocks and dirt.
Is it art speak or hubris to claim unconscious nature, a world without intent, can be a collaborative agent in a process driven by the imagination of an individual artist? Or is there something more to the work, a transaction that invents or exposes a dialogue between human and non?
I am prejudiced toward a belief that nature indeed speaks to us, having engaged in an intimate and lifelong “conversation” with it, but I cannot claim its response has always been clear. The frequencies and means by which the natural world communicates fall mostly beyond the range of our human senses, and so it is an imaginative discourse I engage in, a way of comprehending the world when its actions fall beyond my limited grasp of its science.
Perhaps it asks too much of artists and poets to be the conduit we require to engage in a culturally acceptable dialogue with nature (as opposed to hugging trees), but the alternative is, once again, tried and “true” reductive science, which may inform but does not necessarily tell us what we need to hear.
Experiencing art, an exchange of sensory information between creator and observer-participant, is more of an instantaneous gestalt than a dialogue—we respond, at least initially, without the mediation of language. Likewise, the non-human world signals its environment (including us, sometimes) without using language, which requires a fundamental shift in thinking to accept the existence of, much less comprehend, an ecosystem’s semiotics.
In short, the rest of us need to find a way in.
The artist—object—receiver triad is culturally biased toward human goals (selling the art, for one), but it is nevertheless an engagement which, if the art involves nature, has value beyond appreciation of the art itself.
I’ll look at two artists in more detail now, whose works represent a symbiotic relationship between nature and art. We’ll see that just as nature assists Aganetha Dyck, a Canadian artist, in the creation of her work, it acts on or against the sculptures of English artist Andy Goldsworthy. Aganetha Dyck’s bee-built art[12] and Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures[13] are examples of a hybrid nature-art which speaks to our longing to connect with the non-human.
Aganetha Dyck, 2007 recipient of the Governor General’s Award[14], defines the interaction between her and forty thousand honeybees a collaboration: this is the title of her recent (spring, 2009) exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery[15], which comprises scans of hive interiors; a poem in brail (by Di Brandt)[16] mounted on individual panels which were inserted into a hive to be interpreted and accreted by the bees; backlit steel plates with cut-out words which name various roles the bees take within and outside the hive, to which are attached honeycomb fragments; and a series of embroidered canvas and paper drawings which have traces of bee business.
used braille paper, ink, bee wax and marks
Aganetha began working with apis mellifera in 1990 when she was looking for beeswax to seal canning jars, another art project[17]. At the Bee Keeping Co-op in Winnipeg she saw a 15cm high sign crafted in honeycomb, created by a local apiarist. “Seeing this bee work, instantly recognizing that the bees were artists…was a fundamental and immediate shift in my art…” Aganetha writes. “I wanted to collaborate with the honeybees. I had no hesitation that my…ongoing and uncompleted studio work would be discarded.”[18]
removing art from hive
Aganetha’s process begins in the winter, when the hives are dormant. She creates or locates objects that will be inserted into specially constructed hives in the early summer. The hives have enough room to contain the object(s) and allow the bees to build their hexagonal wax storage cells for Aganetha’s project and their own needs. Late in the summer, working with a beekeeper who is also a philosopher, Phil Veldhuis (University of Manitoba), “a generous, knowledgeable guide” with whom she has collaborated for 15 years, she removes the objects from the hives and continues her work in the studio.
She has consulted bee scientists in Canada (Mark Winston, Vancouver) and France (Yves Le Conte, Avignon) to further her understanding of the bees highly ordered lives; in return, the scientists realize, from an artist’s wide-field view, a different insight into their research.
“If there is any one major difference {between artists and scientists} it has to do with the structure of risk taking,” Mark Winston told me recently. He ran the bee lab at SFU and is the author of, among other works, the seminal text The Biology of the Honey Bee. “Scientists tend to diminish the number of qualities that we are examining until there is one thing that we are testing. While our hypotheses may be creative and risk-taking, in the sense of ‘we don’t know the answer’, the way we explore them tends to be more orderly, whereas artists may take similar issues and explore them in a much less-organized fashion. Different kinds of beauty and creativity arise from those processes. When artists and scientists interact successfully…they learn to appreciate each other’s parallel lines of thought.”[19]
It is by interposing an abnormality in the bees’ normal activity that initiates the second stage of AD’s art, after her initial creation of the piece, or her appropriation of an artifact for the specific purpose of creating a piece of art. She calls the bees’ action participation: but have the bees any choice? The artifact inserted into the hive is an intrusion into their (admittedly artificial and constructed) home space, and their choice to do something with it is limited by instinct and intelligence. Yet we cannot deny the beauty and intelligent design (in a non-teleological sense) of their hexagonal wax structures, excreted and shaped onto the surfaces presented to them.
What does a bee know? Social, organized, communicative, bees are the most studied insects, and the most storied, having been linked with humankind since pre-history[20]. Mark Winston says bee brains are “about the size of a large pinhead, yet bees are able to use their brains to behave differently in different contexts,…bees {can} learn,…they have memories, and…individuals make decisions about which job to do depending on the colony’s requirements.”[21]
Aganetha does not claim that bees understand art or even comprehend that the honeycomb they are constructing for her will be removed—if they did, surely they’d move on to more bee-rewarding projects. But there is intelligence at work, and the logic and accuracy of honeycomb construction, or of their well-proven and studied communication[22],[23] by “dance,” says there is more than we yet know to being a bee than its misunderstood “impossibility” of flight[24].
As the artist is driven to create what we perceive, for the most part, as non-functional, decorative or allegorical responses, so the bee is driven to construct and maintain a hive for the practical purpose of raising brood and storing enough honey to last the winter.
He has been called “the handyman—shaman of British art”[25]. Andy Goldsworthy makes art outdoors, using natural materials. His art can be small and practically invisible, set deep in a woods where only the most intrepid might stumble upon it, or it can be monumental, as in the meandering stone wall he built at Storm King, a sculpture park in upper New York state.
An ordinary stone sheep fold in Scotland is subtly altered by the addition, in the middle, of a boulder into which, in a drilled hole, a living tree is inserted.
He begins with materials found in situ: stones, leaves, sticks, ice, mud, moss, clay, water, branches. In a piece called Chestnut Leaves Creased and Folded, Held With Thorns, a rectangular pattern of leaves of alternating colour, arranged in diagonal folds, is plastered against a tree, and begins to lose its shape as the leaves fall away a few hours after its creation. This devolution of art, a process which, in sculptures made of stone or iron would take decades, proceeds often as the piece is being created; many of his most affecting works disappear within minutes of their construction, his photographs the only evidence of their existence. Often, as the surrounding vegetation matures over the seasons, his sculptures become part of the landscape: invisible interventions.
Not all of Goldsworthy’s art is created alone, or left in place to suffer the vicissitudes of weather: he has larger works which require specialists to assist in their construction: machine operators and quarrymen to lift heavy stones for an arch now in front of the Cirque du Soleil building in Montreal (first built at a quarry in Dumfriesshire, Scotland); plasterers to work clay walls in galleries and museums in San Francisco and Digne-les-Bains and elsewhere; he’s enlisted a film crew, during the shooting of the documentary Time and Tide, to carry sheets of ice to help him build an ice cairn before sunrise.[26]
Goldsworthy records his performances (my term, not his), publishing the photographs as handsome art books, which are frowned upon by the art academy as being too populist to be taken seriously, but his works are nevertheless in many museums (including Stanford’s Cantor Center for the Arts). The act itself is not intended for an audience but is part of his respect for nature, almost as if he must atone for culture’s transgression—or his own—by a propitiatory offering. Of one completed work, he writes, “I don’t know what I expected, but nothing prepared me for the intensity of the experience. An artist makes things that become a focus for feelings and emotions—some personal, some public, some intended and some not.”[27]
Whenever the opportunity presents itself, he will create a frost shadow: standing very still on cold, sunny mornings, he tries to “find time between freeze and thaw to…cast a cold shadow that will hold the frost whilst the surrounding area melts”[28], something so ephemeral that only the first passerby may notice it before the work vanishes.
The question confronting the viewer is: “Should we…stop admiring the beauty of a rose and instead admire the poet who admirably sings about it? Would not that be reasonable if the rose in itself is neither beautiful nor ugly?” asks Arne Naess.[29] As much as we admire the rose or the waterfall or the lone tree against the horizon, we do not attribute it to an artist (God, perhaps); what then to think of a work which falls somewhere between man and nature.
Intervention
Many artists find it difficult to articulate why they do what they do, although for promotional purposes they and their curators and critics will usually find something deeper in the work. Andy Goldsworthy has said, “I cannot explain what I am looking for”[30].
It may be a leap to suggest a connection between these two artists, yet I feel that underlying both Dyck’s and Goldsworthy’s work is their response to a muted, but nevertheless present, call from the bees, flowers, ponds, streams, and hilltops, a world discounted and distressed by our ignorance.
Collaboration between artist and nature is perhaps best understood as an illusory but necessary fiction which the artist requires to engage world with man-in-the-world, and we need to comprehend and appreciate their art.
On the surface of it, it seems absurd to imagine a communication between bee and Aganetha Dyck, or between the natural materials with which Andy Goldsworthy works. After all, it is the artist who initiates the “conversation,” although inspiration often comes from external stimuli. Interestingly, both artists claim it is more often nature that decides the outcome. “The bees…dictate when our bee work is complete,”[31] Aganetha told me.
Which begs another question, is art complete when the artist leaves it, or when it is observed? Is a sculpture in the woods anything more than a pile of rocks?
Old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water
–Matsuo Basho[32]
Arne Naess gives the example of three people looking at a tree. P1 has experience E1, and so on. “The tree in the external world confronting P1, P2 and P3 may be the same, and its properties are…most adequately described by modern physics. Consequently…we get as many as four trees, one external and three internal. When nobody looks at the tree, the three internal ones disappear…”[33]. While this is rather obvious, what we must note, Naess says, is that the tree in the mind of the observer does not exist. Not in the brain, “because then it would have been seen long ago by scientists.” The tree as an experience is actually nowhere, a construct, a subjective gestalt: we identify it and give it qualities, such as size, shape, colour, condition, age, which are internal constructs applied to an external object.
Three people walking through the woods near Andy Goldsworthy’s home in Scotland come upon a stone with leaves arranged in a pattern upon it. One is delighted by the playful re-ordering of natural elements; another is disturbed, even annoyed, by the imposition of a man-made rearrangement of an otherwise “random” nature. And did the third person even notice the work?
Confronted by a cairn of sticks or a honeycombed shoe, we are uncertain if this work respects nature, or mocks it. No matter how an artist working in and with the natural world may claim to honour it, he or she imposes an artifice which nature then unmindfully acts upon.
The cold Bay of Fundy waves topples one of AG’s cone-shaped pile of slate stones three times during its construction before it eventually remains standing, as a “finished” work of art, for at least two cycles of high and low tides[34].
Any implication that it is more than chance and the dynamics of natural forces which alter or unbuild one of Goldsworthy’s pieces, or that Aganetha’s bees in any way accede to the importation of a foreign object into the hive, is to risk the charge of anthropomorphism. “Acceptance” and “rejection” is our interpretation of the temporal consequences of the intervention; nothing nature “does” is done with intent. For anyone—artist or environmentalist—to claim a collaborative status with the non-human world necessitates granting nature agency, intent and consciousness.
Realizing this imbalance between provocateur and nature heightens our awareness of how frequently we are at the mercy of the larger world, and thus in some measure corrects the imbalance in favour of nature.
Confronting these works, we experience an intimate form of reverse engineering, where it is nature’s action upon the art, adapting to it or tearing it apart, which we respond to. Both artist and observer are put in the position of realizing that what we do to nature can be done to our works by nature. Through Nature’s undirected, unconscious response, and our awareness of the artificiality of the artwork, our senses are reawakened, our eyesight restored. This is the correspondence we’ve been looking for.
I must admit that I have not found a satisfactory answer to the questions which propelled this paper, “Does nature communicate to us? Specifically, can we find a dialogue between the works of nature-based artists and nature itself, rather than the monologue we have been engaged in since the Scientific Revolution?”
Perhaps further research would reveal the connection. Certainly, the indigenous people of Australia in their interpretation of the songlines, and the powerful representations of Northwest Coast mythology suggest that other people have no problem granting nature agency; for them, the world speaks.
What I did realize was that by interposing art between non-human nature and our limited perceptive faculties, artists like Aganetha Dyck and Andy Goldsworthy have opened one channel among countless others which remain invisible and inaudible to us, namely that restricted band of wavelength we call human vision.
Even if it is only in our imagination that Gaia communicates with us, perhaps that alone is enough to change our attitude toward life on, in and of the earth.
Notes
[1] Aleksandra Manczak. The Ecological Imperative: Elements of Nature in Late Twentieth-Century Art. Leonardo 35, no.2 (2002):131-136
[2] Christina Ljungberg. Wilderness from an ecosemiotic perspective. Sign Systems Studies 29 (2001): 169
[3] Paul Cezanne. Still Life With Teapot. National Gallery, London. http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/cezanne/keyimage_lrg.htm (accessed March 22, 2009)
[4] John Singer Sargent. William Marshall Cazalet. JSS Gallery. http://jssgallery.org/Paintings/WilliamMarshallCazalet.html (accessed 3/22/09)
[5] Thomas Gainsborough. Mr. and Mrs. Williams. https://faculty.rpcs.org/pittengerj/images/ArtofAbsolutism.htm
[6] Peder Balke. Stetind in Fog, 1864. A Mirror of Nature, Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. http://www.artsmia.org/mirror-of-nature/nordic-art-detail.cfm?nor_art_cat=8&lng=0 (accessed 3/22/09)
[7] Joseph Turner. Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps. Web Gallery of Art. http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/t/turner/1/105turne.html
[8] Georges Seurat. The Morning Walk. National Gallery, London. http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/work?workNumber=NG6557 (accessed 3/22/09) 2009)
[9] Mel Gooding. Artists Land Nature. (NY: Abrams, 2002): 10
[10] Christo and his partner Jean-Claude wrap islands as well as buildings in cloth; they have recently covered sections of the Arkansas River in Colorado in blue fabric (2012 completion) http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/otr.shtml (accessed April 1, 2009)
[11] Manczak, The Ecological Imperative, 132
[12] For an introduction to Aganetha Dyck’s work, see: Aganetha Dyck (http://members.shaw.ca/ahtenaga/) or Michael Gibson Gallery (http://www.gibsongallery.com/artists_pages/dyck/dyckindex.html)
[13] For an introduction to Andy Goldsworthy’s work, see: Cass Sculpture Foundation (http://www.sculpture.org.uk/biography/AndyGoldsworthy/) or Artnet (http://www.artnet.com/artist/7145/andy-goldsworthy.html)
[14] The Canada Council. Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.
http://www.canadacouncil.ca/prizes/ggavma/2007/oj128182721784195744.htm
[15] Aganetha Dyck. Collaborations. Burnaby Art Gallery, personal visit (February 3-April 12, 2009).
[16] Di Brandt’s poem, which begins “& then everything goes bee/sun exploding into green” was published in a slightly altered version: Di Brandt. Now You Care (Vancouver: Coach House, 2003).
[17] Aganetha Dyck: The Large Cupboard. Michael Gibson Gallery. (accessed March 19, 2009)
[18] Aganetha Dyck, personal email to M.Cox. March 29, 2009
[19] Mark Winston, personal interview with M.Cox, Simon Fraser University, March 17, 2009.
[20] For a thorough overview of the bee in human history, see Hilda M. Ransome, The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore (New York: Dover, 2004. A fascimile of original pub.1937)
[21] Mark Winston, interview, 2009
[22] A.L. Kroeber. Sign and symbol in bee communications. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 38 no.9 (1952): 753-757
[23] J.R. Riley et al. The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance. Nature (2005): 205-207
[24] The flight of the bee is unusual,but obviously not impossible. Douglas Altshuler et al. Short-amplitude high-frequency wing strokes determine the aerodynamics of honeybee flight. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2005): 18213-18218
[25] Robert Macfarlane. Strange rearranged. (Times Literary Supplement, Feb 11 2005)
[26] Rivers and Tides. DVD, directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer (2001; Germany: Mediopolis Film-und Fernsehproduktion, 2002)
[27] Andy Goldsworthy, Passage. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004): 69
[28] Goldsworthy, Time, 16
[29] Arne Naess. The Ecology of Wisdom. (Berkely: Counterpoint, 2008): damned if I could find the page!
[30] Goldsworthy, Time, 122-24
[31] Dyck, email, 2009.
[32] Matsuo Basho. Trans. Robert Hass. The Old Pond. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-old-pond/ (accessed April 1, 2009)
[33] Arne Naess. The Ecology of Wisdom: 75
[34] Rivers and Tides.
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