Alexis Rockman

RESEARCH AND INTERPRETATION OF ALEXIS ROCKMAN FROM DOCUMENTS IN CONTEMPORARY ART - NATURE

Documents on Contemporary Art - Nature

Introduction

“Yet thinkers (and makers) in subsequent periods continually sought to reconceive the relationship between humans and nature and the products of each. Ultimately whether constituted as a muse or foil, as contestant or collaborator, nature continues to loom as the elusive, originary Other –  a system we are fundamentally native to, but unavoidably separate from; one that produces us, even as we (physically, conceptually, discursively) produce it; a complex of spaces, structures and organisms inexhaustibly good to think (and work) with.” 14

This summarises some of the reasons why I personally have been always drawn to animals. The variety and uniqueness of the other beings we share this planet with has always fascinated me, and I think in truth has only every been partially celebrated in our culture. Just as we humans construct our own worlds, animals, plants and nature form part of another reality which runs beneath the structures we have built on ourselves, and for me makes a deeper, more tangible truth than any modern human conceptual theme.

“The closing section ‘Cognition and Conscience’ ranges widely over what might be understood as the terrain of perceptual and ethical implications that flow from our ever-growing attention to and knowledge of the natural world and the place we might occupy in relation to it.” 16

The Animal That Therefore I Am – 1997 – Jacques Derrida
 
Talking about concepts of shame and otherness in relation to how he felt when seen naked by his pet cat

 “Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized [revelle a tout concept]. 150

“Being-alongside-it? Being-after-it? Being-after-it in succession or inheritance? In all cases, if I am (following) after it, the animal therefore comes before me, earlier than me fruher is Kant’s word regarding the animal, and Kant will be one of our witnesses to come). The animal is there before me, there next to me, there in front of me – I who am (following) after it. And also, therefore, since it is before me, it is behind me. It surrounds me. And from the vantage of this being-there-before-me it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also – something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself – it can look at me. It has a point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity of the neighbour or of the next(-door) than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.” 151


Alan Sonfist – In Conversation with Robert Rosenblum 1990

Sees himself as a ‘visual archaeologist’ creating archival works inspired by nature and the history of art, yet also puts himself in the perspective of non-human beings with the help of human constructs such as cages. He works in returning aspects of life before human habitation, such as recreating natural forests in the centre of New York out of the once indigenous vegetation there, and retracing the inland boundary line of where the island naturally ended before human expansion.

Sonfist: “I would say that, as humans, we are all part of the environment. That is a primary revelation in my art. The earth artists, for instance, went out into the desert to work: my art is to rediscover my own part in the city. I grew up in New York. The roots of my caged-animal performance are here, especially in my childhood trips to the Bronx Zoo. Sometimes I would sneak into those environments, right into the cages with the animals."

Sonfist: "I visited wolves, antelope and deer. Since I was a child, the animals would walk right up to me. They were very curious. Sometimes I would just jump the fence, go into the trees and play. So the actual past is where my animal fantasies came from. It relates to archaeology, because its almost like I'm unearthing my own childhood experiences. When I grew up in the city, I lived next to one of the last original New York forests in the Bronx, which has since been destroyed." 155

Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman In Conversation - 1991 

Mark Dion: Yet we are both fascinated by this issue of r-selected species [such as weeds, insects or small rodents whose chief defence against unstable environments is rapid reproduction rather than adaptation]. I imagine this is because these animals and plants have a direct relationship to extinction - the focus of both our practices for several years. I'm certain that you share my view that the loss of biodiversity is a critically underestimated ecological issue. For some time now we have known that life is based on complex webs of interrelationships. By destroying elements within those interrelationships we reduce our options for the future and threaten to disrupt the natural processes that keep the life cycle going. Just how many pieces from the puzzle can you remove before you lose the picture? 197

He goes on to talk theoretically about whether perhaps the reasons such prevalent creatures as rats and roaches are so detestable to us in human culture, is that it is the exact set of base values of life which we try to distance ourselves from, our connections the animal. It also reminds us that there are other animals taking advantage of our waste, urbanisation and connection and are able to survive between the crack of our existance.

Mark Dion: These creatures are constant reminders of our part in the biological contract. They remind us that, like all animals, we are implicated in a set of relations with other animals, that we do not benefit from some of those relationships. The modernist cube, which you referred to earlier, is an example of the denial of the biological contract. It is the environment without nature. In the same way our culture does not acknowledge shit, distances itself from the production of food or denies the processes of ageing, these animals remind us that we too are animals - and therefore mortal. [...] I'm interested in a different site for the production of truth - the pedagogical institution of the museum. Since, like you, my main interest is the question of the representation of nature, it is the natural history, ethnographic and history museums as well as zoological and botanical parks - that interest me. They are fascinating institutions because they represent a society's 'official story', all conventions and assumptions of what gets to stand at a particular time for a particular group of people.

Dion then spoke of how art could go beyond the realms of science to grasp and translate concepts due to freedom of 'strategy', a very well worded account which can also be reframed for exactly how art can also be utilized in the themes of my own work surrounding conservation and ecosystem damage.

Mark Dion: Metaphor, irony, humour and self- reflexivity are all strategies outside of their notions of how information should be organised. The exhibition of science imagines its expression existing outside the realms of politics and popular culture. Yet quite recently there have been some encouraging signs of change within the institutional framework. But as artists we have a certain advantage over the conventional methods, because we are not necessarily inclined to accept the notion that scientific discourse should be isolated; also, we are not obliged to produce logical equations that add up in an entirely rational manner. I'm convinced that our method of organizing information can be much more compelling and challenging.

I then went on to research the works of Alexis Rockman further; reminiscent of the works of Josh Keye's in many ways, but from a much more critical contemporary fine art background.

Andrew Ross In Conversation With Mark Dion - 1996

Andrew Ross: Nature, after all, is the consummate people-pleaser - it is serviceable to anyone who wants to speak its name. (viz. the Wise Use movement which borrowed the moniker of early century Conservationsists in order to camouflage their backlash campaigns with Green rhetoric). Nature can always be wheeled in to ventriloquize support for a social claim about environmental matters. It is more difficult to do that within social movements of disenfranchised peoples. They have their own voices, after all, which Nature lacks. This is fundemental problem of Green politics. Nature cannot speak for itself, but everyone else is willing to do the job. Now this perception is often caricatured and sleezily dismissed as a belief that the natural world is entirely socially constructed and doesn't really exist.

[...]

Movements in critical writing have been a point of entry for identity politics on the part of women, queer, postcolonial and minority thinkers. This was accomplished by a certain degree of empowerment and representation in public life. As I said before, Green politics does not necessarily carry this liberatory air. By this criterion, of course, the predominantly white, middle-class stewardship of the ecology movement does not make it a great candidate for the empowerment of marginalized persons or communities, at least, not in the pastoral mode of the perceived stereotype of self-restraint. More often they favour a hermeneutic that uncovers that which is hidden. Liberating the voice of the planet doesnt count in the same way. More attention to urban ecology and environmental justice will change this view.

I think these excerpts from the conversation were of particular importance, also when applied on a more domestic level. Many people are going through their own personal catastrophes, personal, emotional, societal or primarily financial, which makes many ecologically correct choices impossible on a personal level, especially when such a great deal of environmentally harmful bad practice is centred around cutting costs and delivering products at the highest yield for the lowest price.  The ecological argument needs to be opened up to all areas of human society if it is able to succeed, as on a one to one basis people will always gravitate towards the value of human wellbeing over that of the voiceless yet overarching entity which is Nature.

Herman de vries - the world we live in is a revelation - 1993

The passage is informally written, and he goes on to talk of a project where he published a book detailing all the plants he had ingested, focussing on the potentially fatal Datura, and hallucinogens psilocybe mushrooms and peyote cactus, stating how as a child he used to go into the dunes, undress and 'press his body to the earth and feel great joy". He ends it, 
'this and no thing,
here and everywhere,
all'

However there is a particular section near the startwhich interested me;

the world we live in is a revelation that can be 'read', experienced. everything we experience or are able to experience is significant for itself, and for everything, we can find this significance for itself and for everything we can find this significance everywhere around us. but as plastics, cars, computers and ice cream have in the first place significance for our human life and culture, plants, trees, birds flying, earth and the streams of water are of more general significance, because they form part of our primary reality, nature. that many of us do not know anything anymore of this primary reality is dramatic, makes life poor, makes culture poor, but does not change the actuality of it's primarity. 163

I find this interesting, as it is true really. We build associations with so many significant objects which are ultimately useless things outside of the human realities they exist within; the mobile phone which many of us spent half our lives glued to becomes instantly useless in a wilderness without signal. We universally as humans recognize the shape of a circle broken by a short line as the symbol for putting a machine into standby. Yet there are deeper associations that are things we recognize not as humans, but as living creatures on this planet, as part of our 'primal reality', pareidolia for example, causing us to see shapes and patterns, faces and animals in random objects. Focussed naturally on human faces for social interaction, but inevitably also a remnant of a time when a fraction of a second's difference in judgement time would be enough to potentially meet your end at the claws or teeth of some 'primal reality'!

Bonnie Shrek - Crossroads Community: The Farm

It seems that some clues to our possible, positive survival as a species can be found by involving ourselves in the human creative process (art) and be re-examining our place as human creatures in relation to other life forms, and by understanding and communicating those life systems and forms in a more sensitive and conscious way. Very generally, people of our civilization tend to be extremely presumptuous and naive about their relationship to the universe. Some symptoms of this adolescence are racism and sexism; renovating much of the earth with concrete and basing our modern lives of confused computer categories and bureaucratic ballgames; insensitivies to native intelligences of plants, animals and children; mass disregard and disrespect for the uniqueness of induviduals; bias against feeling states; and the overwhelming greed, waste and territorialism of huge numbers of people, corporations and governments. If we are to continue on this planet and grow as conscious beings we must attain a more spiritual and ecological balance within ourselves and among larger groups and nations. 165

The creation of art is akin to the spirit and attitude of the country in it's logic of wholeness and process. Everything found in the country is implicit in the city. Urban environments today, however, in part due to technological excesses, fragment our spaces and lives so that we have difficulty experiencing whole systems. This fragmentation guides us towards disintegration of our personalities and the loss of our identities. As an artist, I have tried to expand our concept of art to include and even be life, and to make visible connections among different aesthetics, styles and systems of knowledge. 165

Robert Morris: Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation - 1979

...Or is art beyond good and evil? It can and does flourish in the worst moral climates. Perhaps because it is amoral, it can deal with all manner of social extremes. It is an enterprise whose nature invites the investigation of extremes. Art erodes whatever seeks to contain it and use it and inevitably seeps into it's most contradictory recesses, touches the most repressed nerve, finds and sustains the contradictory without effort. Art has always been dependent upon and served one set of forces or another with little regard for the morality of those forces (pharoah, pope, nobility, capitalism). It makes little difference what forces make use of art. Art is always propaganda - for someone. 172

This quote really interested me, and I wholeheartedly agree with it. As artists, we are only capable of commenting on issues which we are personally aware of, and typically we choose to highlight and focus on those which hold the greatest importance to us. In this way, just as Morris says, 'art is always propaganda, for someone'.

Mary Mattingly: In Conversation with Shane Danaher - 2010

I think that the spaces in between art are one of the most interesting areas of art today, and they are clear ways for art to intervene in society. While I'm interested in the history of art, I am not interested in repeating history. I know that I am full of contradictions but I like using spaces that are not prepared for art to tell stories about evolution and ideas.177

[...]

But it is true, people in our culture in general spend a lot of time and energy attempting to be different, and our culture encourages that, largely to sell more products. There can be an infinite amount of things to sell if an induviduals are exponentially in the process of differentiating themselves from one another and expressing uniqueness through products instead of ideas. 178

This quote not only speaks of consumerist and capital culture, but also suggests I think, meaning behind our rapid creation of culture itself as a species. Because we all seek to differentiate ourselves through visual cultural markers such as fashion, lifestyle and appearance, this generates culture itself at a more expansive, rapid rate. As such, because of the defining lines between human and animal based on the production of culture, we are in this way only greatening the divide between human and all other living things, by a scale of our own creation.

Utopia, like a boat, is a placeless place and a vestige of our imagination. I am interested in utopias as a concept, and accept that to attempt to create a utopic space is a romantic and nostalgic idea that stems from literature more than reality, because in reality a utopic space cannot be sustained due to human nature. The Waterpod was somewhere between real and imaginary and I imagined it as a constantly changing space, which is maybe the only way to sustain a utopic environment. Although these are interesting concepts, I'm more interestedin the reality of heterotopias, and am much more worried about the fate of humanity than about creating a utopia. I believe we can create some kind of personal-bubble utopias, and the artist-worker is an action that embeds a thread of necessary utopian points of views into society. 179

Brandon Ballengee: In Conversation with Tim Chamberlain

Ballengee: Being an artist allows me to bring the information I find in nature to a wide audience. My belief is that art can contribute to society through inspiration, engagement and direct action. As an artist my practice facilitates activism, amateur biological studies and communication about ecological phenomena to the public. Through this transdisciplinary technique, the model I employ is proactive evironmental stewardship. While conducting primary research biological, laboratory and field studies I utilize scientific methodologies and standards. As activism the involvement of local students and the public in these studies (Eco-actions) is essential. Together we investigate and 'experience' ecosystems - the goal is to inspire people to learn more about their local ecology and play an active role in protecting it. [...] 180

It always pleased me when I hear a phrase I have been using regularly in my writings crop up in a critical art context. To hear Ballangee suggesting how his work encourages 'environmental stewardship' as I have done many times myself, fills me with drive to further my mission when reaffirmed that there are other prominent artists out there engaging with fundementally the same ideas as me.

Though art can teach and deliver messages, being open to interpretation is fundemental. There is a kind of didacticism to my work (intended to increase environmental awareness) but the messages are often pluralistic, open to an induvidual meaning. [...] 181

In feedback sessions I have been warned previously against creating work which is too didactic, (which I think is less problematic for street works or even in general, but is nonetheless something that apparently does not appear to be encouraged in the fine art discursive) which concerned me somewhat as the message and ethos behind my works is of the paramount importance to me. It was reassuring to hear from a prominent artist interested in the same themes as me, that he also benefits from making work pluralistic and open to additional interpretation.

Instead of urban exodus into nature, or the Victorian gaze, I see this as a continued rise in ecological consciousness, post Silent Spring [by Rachel Carson, published 1962]. Though this is not exclusive to urbanites as environmental historian William Cronon and others have alluded to, there is growing awareness that we as human beings have altered the planet and there is an impetus for us to change. These changes are often more visible in cities. Symptomatic of this rise in consciousness is the shifting effort towards valorizing local urban eco-systems. These resistant environments have historically been seen as unnatural. Urban parks, feral areas and brownfrield sites don't easily fit inside our occidental 'wilderness' construct.  181

This 'growing awareness that we have altered the planet' is definitely being felt increasingly with each year that passes. Currently there is widespread growing awareness for single-use plastics and the damages that can be done when these escape into nature, and this is largely spurred by social media and viral culture, allowing immediate sharing of ideas and enlightening content which is able to reach large numbers of people very quickly. As well as this, a sense of comraderie is generated when large numbers of people are informed of environmental crisis through the blame free format of social media; people feel like they can come together to tackle the issue as a team when they are aware that large numbers of others are also becoming motivated alongside them.

Reflective cultural shift is the increasing number of artists currently addressing environmental issues globally. It is a kind of positive feedback loop; artists are generating ecological projects in a global culture more sensitive to environmental issues. Barbara Matilsky, in her book Fragil Ecologies, discussed how artists can implement real world change by increasing popular awareness. Artists can bring environmental issues to the social foreground, making the public aware. This followed by increased popular concern, which can then push for changes in government policies Art is increasingly helping to drive an environmental paradigm shift. 182

Please Dont Feed The Animals - Jesse Ashlock - 2006 

Reffering to an art piece involving bird perches by Natalie Jeremijenko called the Whitney Biennial for Birds. When landed on the perches triggered a supposed 'bird translation' proclaiming useful information about maintaining biodiversity and keeping bird populations healthy, so as to avoid things such as the avian flu pandemic.

"This might seem like an excersize in high concept anthropomorphism, but that's a word Jeremijenko resists. 'Its not a pretence that animals are human,' she insists, "It's an understanding that we're solving similar problems, that we can learn from each other; that we have similar conceptual resources, that our brains are just not that radically different from other brains that exist." 186

'The idea that we don't interact with natural systems is bogus, a consensual hallucination, that nature is out there and we're in here,' she argues. "The way to understand an environment is not as nature out there, but through our political and economic systems." It isn't news that human actions have negative consequences on the environment, but we still often think of those consequences as abstract and remote - in terms of rising sea levels or the vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro. For Jeremijenko, closing the perceptual gap between nature and the city, by recognizing gritty urban wilderness and grubby, un-aestheric urban wildlife as participants in a dynamic and reciprocal natural system with human beings, is a strategy for fostering envrironmental awareness." 187

 Paul Tebbs - Zhao Renhui: The Blind - 2009

Art functions uneasily in this context (the context which is specific to The Blind, and the more general artwork from which it is taken, The Institute of Critical Zoology, should be understood) as a working through and articulation of the difference between animal and human life. There is a paradox within such a function for art: it is the very possibility of art in human existance that partly constitutes humanity's seperation from animal life, yet it is also within the space of art that this difference is manifested as a disturbing proximity. 'Animality' names something of the base condition from which  such art is produced, to which it returns, and which it sometimes transcends.  209

The world's leading ethologists (specialists in animal behaviour) have suggested that a critical point may now have been reached and animals are, for the first time, vengefully fighting back against the cruelty of humans. Significant increases in attacks on humans across a variety of animal species have led some to argue that we are in an unprecedented period of 'human-animal conflict'. 210

Bruno Latour - Will Non-Humans be Saved? An Argument in Ecotheology - 2009

"With Darwin, living entities were at last allowed to subsist and thrive, but only provided they were no longer cultivated, so to speak, in the highly artificial medium of the res  extensa -- and it is not by coincidence either that one of the most daring naturalists, von Uexküll, invented the word Umwelt to describe the alternative medium in which biological organisms were allowed to reproduce, this Umwelt which now envelops the world under the name of 'environment' and environmental crisis. To modernize or to ecologize has also always been a question for biologists. No one can deny the complete sea change that has occurred in the last thirty years; yet the major effect of ecology is not, as I have shown at length, that nature has made a comeback, but that we are finally 'out of nature'(Latour). So where are we? It is not clear, but once we are out of nature we have to realize that we all reside in some Umwelt."

The mention of 'umwelts' relates back to the works by Uexkull I am currently reading. It is interesting to see his writings applied to human situations, and I completely agree with this sentiment. We are all within umwelts of our own construction, build upon memory, connotation and interpretation, and thus all exist within realities of our own, built from a wide selection of fundemental truths built up over time and experience. In this way, although we may define ourselves as a species as 'out of nature', we instead then step into the realms of human nature, and have thus constructed a mythology of our own based on social practice and culture.

"The misdirected critique of fetishism is an old story that starts with the Mosaic division and continues to this day, even in most of the ethno-graphic literature. As we have collectively shown in the exhibit and the book Iconoclash (Latour & Weibel), it is another category mistake which has helped to paralyse the key notion of mediation and the very idea of what it is to make something: the fetishist’s declaration, ‘Yes, divinities are made, and that’s why they are real’; to which the others, the iconoclasts, mistakenly retort:‘If they are made, then they cannot be real’– an image war that explains a large part of the complex history of the West, in science, in religion and in art."

"He credits monotheism with one incredible feat: it has allowed humans to escape from a too close adhesion to the natural world! Without the imposition of the radical Mosaic division, we would be left, accord-ing to Assmann, with a ‘religion of nature’, with what he calls ‘cosmotheism’. Thanks to Moses and his many descendants, we have extracted ourselves from the world, stopped confusing our gods with objects: the price is high, but it was necessary for ‘progress in spiritual life’. What I find fascinating is that a mind as astute as Assmann’s, a scholar so attuned to the historical vagaries of the most cherished modernist notions, still takes, without a hint that it could be as disputable and historically contingent, the idea that without the transcendence of monotheism we would be left with the mere immanence of the natural world. Without the spirit, we would be in the world of mere objects. As if the world were really made of the stuff of res extensa, against which, fortunately,  religious spirituality struck its sword violently enough that another world could at last be seen  through the gaping holes – a sword which, in passing, was also used to cut a few throats ..."

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David Rice

Rice was born in Aspen, Colorado, and grew up on the ski slopes surrounded by the beautiful habitats of the Rocky Mountains. He then moved to Boulder and completed a Bachelors Degree in Studio Art (Fine Art) before being driven by