“There is No Nature”—A thesis by Milwaukee artist Peter Beck

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The provocative title seems perfectly rational after hearing MFA thesis graduate Peter Beck talk about the Anthropocene era and the significance of human interference on the natural processes that sustain life on earth. The once commonly held view of nature as separate from humankind and distinguishable from the human-designed material world has been disintegrating for some time now. But there is not yet wide public acceptance of the notion that we have entered an era in which human influence on every aspect of what used to be called nature is so profound that we can no longer tease them apart.

One role of the artist is to be an agent of change, to herald if not affect what is happening all around us. An artist can help disrupt conventional understanding and point to new ways of perceiving the world. In the case of this work by Beck, on display recently at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sullivan Galleries, the implications of humanity’s impact on nature can be visualized.

Tool No. 1, Subject/Object Confusion

Like a dog chasing its tail—then catching and biting it—an ax fashioned from a long, supple limb is bent so that it splits itself in half.

Tool No. 2

The missing spade end of a spanking new shovel reveals the “natural” source from which it is fabricated. The raw, unfinished wood of the stump no longer suggests nature but violence.

There is No Nature

A more subtle but ultimately more profound metaphor is created in the titular piece. For “There is No Nature” Beck painstakingly deconstructed and then remanufactured a tree limb. Suspended from the ceiling with cables, its gracefully arching form mimics “reality.” But because it is literally disconnected from its original context it more closely resembles a prosthetic human limb than one growing from a tree trunk.

In the new reality suggested by this sculpture we can envision a world in which “artificial nature” is not a contradiction but ordinary. It is a world of robotics, genetic manipulation, wildlife management, and climate change.

How to Archive Family Photographs

The exhibit is rounded out with a contrasting piece called “How to Archive Family Photographs." A delicate and faded photo extracted from a family album has been ensconced in an artfully crafted wooden tray embedded in a wall-mounted pedestal.

Although Beck borrowed rather than created this photograph, it connects the sculptures to his earlier work. Peter and I became acquainted when he was hired to replace me at Marquette after I quit teaching. When he invited me to see his thesis exhibit I had expected to see photography, with which I was familiar. His foray into sculpture was a refreshing surprise. I was particularly struck by the meticulous and superb craftsmanship of the work.

There is No Nature (detail)

We discussed craftsmanship. It’s something I personally value but, Peter told me, can be met with skepticism in academic circles--and even sometimes in the art world at large. (Coincidentally, in the July 17, 2016 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Chuck Close was quoted on the subject: "The dirtiest word in art is the c-word. I can't even say 'craft' without feeling dirty.") 

Peter described contrasting reactions among his fellow students. His precision and woodworking skills elicited admiration, but he also found himself defending not only his thesis but also those very skills with buttresses of theory and concept. Rather than being onerous, he said he found it rewarding to do so. The rigorous program and stimulating interactions with faculty and other students, along with diversity, he told me, were among the reasons he chose to pursue his MFA at the School of the Art Institute.

Like the people in the yellowing photograph in its neat wooden tray, we are all captives of a continually evolving culture, insects in the amber of history. Today, though, that history is increasingly being directed, if not completely controlled, by our own species. In more ways than one, nature is what we make of it.

Sneak preview: Distressed Structures – The Weathering of Ecology opens Friday at Jazz Gallery

The Riverwest Artists Association presents an exhibit called Distressed Structures - The Weathering of Ecology at its Jazz Gallery with an opening on Friday, January 23.

This group exhibit has been curated by C. Matthew Luther, MIAD instructor and newly appointed president of the Riverwest Artists Association. I have the honor of being among the five featured artists. My work includes this portrait of Milwaukee Riverkeeper, Cheryl Nenn, who will also be giving a presentation at the gallery (see below).

Here is his description of the show:

Distressed Structures is a transient glimpse at Milwaukee artists who use ecology as a literal or conceptual theme in their work. Artists around the world produce art that questions our consumer culture and ideas of the landscape. This exhibition takes a look at local artists that use nature as a form of dialogue about the human relationship to the physical, temporal, and ephemeral affects of ecology.
            On the one hand, there is certainly no shortage of picturesque landscape paintings and photographs to adorn the walls of country homes. On the other hand,  there is a continual evolution in our understanding of how we view the landscape through the lens of art and what pictures mean. We need to examine the history of nature and the history of the painted, photographed, and sculpted landscape, along with current ecological theory as one continuum. The two have become intertwined. The pictorial landscape must now position itself within not only the history of art and painting, but history itself, land use, the rise of environmentalism, sustainability, and the social value of nature.

Featured artists: Melanie Ariens, Eddee Daniel, Matthew Lee, Nathaniel Stern, Corbett Toomsen. Scroll down to see samples of each artist's work.

The exhibit runs January 23rd to Febrary 15th.

Opening Reception January 23rd, 6-9 pm.

Three community programs will be presented in conjunction with the exhibit:
Milwaukee Riverkeeper, Cheryl Nenn, Presentation Thursday January 29th at 6:30pm
Artist Panel Thursday February 5th at 6:30pm
Milwaukee Water Commons Presentation Thursday February 12th at 6:30pm

All are free and open to the public.

Untitled, Melanie Ariens

Diligent Truth, Matthew Warren Lee

Syncopated, Nathaniel Stern

Yosemite, Corbett Toomsen

Jazz Gallery is at 926 East Center Street in Milwaukee.
Gallery hours: Tue. 6 - 9 and Sat. 12 - 5.
More info at RAA.

Nature and Community: Reviving the Spirit

A Menomonee Valley essay

On a trip through the high Sierras John Muir came upon a particularly lovely glen with a river running through it. He climbed a large boulder in the river, which he likened to an altar. After musing upon the power of spring floods to move boulders he rhapsodized about moss, the clear pool, blossoming lilies and light coming through overarching leaves. “The place seemed Holy,” he concluded, “where one might hope to see God.”¹

Muir was hardly the first to equate nature with holiness. His descriptions of wilderness experiences often bordered on spiritual ecstasy and yet they were paired with keen phenomenological observations and precise taxonomic identification of plants and animals he encountered. Muir clearly was comfortable blending empirical science with personal theology. His rigorously analytical mind was open to mysticism.

I recently picked up a volume of Muir’s writing, thinking it was time for me to revisit his perspective on nature. I’d been asked to talk about the spiritual component of my urban wilderness escapades. It was not the first such request I’d received and, like Muir, I recognize and welcome the spiritual dimension of my own examinations of nature, urban and otherwise.

When I first began to explore the Menomonee River for my book, Urban Wilderness, my impulse was analytical and documentary. My episodic travels would take me nowhere that hadn’t been thoroughly mapped as well as completely altered by hundreds of years of human activity. Nevertheless, in a very real sense it was a journey of discovery. Among the many surprises of that endeavor was the spiritual presence I felt in undeniably compromised remnants of nature.

Please go to Urban Wilderness for the rest of this story and additional photos.


This post is one in a series that relates to my Menomonee Valley Artist in Residency. For more information about the residency and links to previous posts and photographs, go to MV AiR.

Menomonee Valley Artist Residency: Taking a chance on 3 Bridges Park

As familiar as I am with Three Bridges Park I can still be surprised. This time it was neither something recently added to the unfinished landscape nor a flower newly sprouted, our recalcitrant spring being slow to unfold. No, I was surprised and delighted by a new perspective, a way of seeing what has been there all along.

The day was overcast but mild for a change. An unusual number of people were enjoying the park. An intermittent parade of individuals, couples and families cycled or strolled along the trail. Walking west from Mitchell Park the land rolled on ahead towards the 35^th St. Viaduct; the hills still brown and bare, only a hint of green softening their edges.

I imagined how beautiful it will be when the grasses and trees mature.

Just across the fenced park boundary a string of rail cars sat idle on the tracks. I briefly registered a frieze of colorful graffiti, then scanned the debris-strewn slope beyond. The tangle of twisted trees and brush was just beginning to bud. In summer it was a lush screen of vibrant greenery. Now the feral shrubbery hid none of the degradation exacted upon it by years of abuse and neglect. I turned away.

Please go to Urban Wilderness for the rest of this story and additional photos.


This post is one in a series that relates to my Menomonee Valley Artist in Residency. For more information about the residency and links to previous posts and photographs, go to MV AiR.

Art and science at the Urban Ecology Center

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Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective

“The challenge is immense.” The phrase lingers in my mind as I slowly circumnavigate the room, reading stories of environmental restoration and seeing artists’ representations of those stories. The “challenge” refers to what artist Douglas Bosley offers as a “call to arms.” Bosley teamed up with Kingsley Dixon, an ecologist in Australia, via the twenty-first century technology of Skype. In an exhibit label the artist outlined the specific challenge:

“For two decades, a million acres of western Australian land were cleared per year. Kingsley Dixon’s mission is to restore a million of those acres…. The challenge is immense. The land is essentially wasteland. …Nevertheless, Dixon’s group and many others are building the science and the solutions to make this dream possible.”

Bosley’s lithograph of ghostly flowers and a monumental “1M” rising from a barren landscape attempts to express that million acre challenge.

For Yvette Pino, founder of Bench Press Events and organizer of this project, the challenge was to bring together fine artists and ecologists like Bosley and Dixon to stimulate dialogue and collaboration. The success of her effort is displayed along the gallery walls.

The challenge for Bosley, as for each of the 12 artists in the project, was to create an image inspired by conversations and, in some cases, interactions with the collaborating ecologist.

The prosaic title of the exhibit, “Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective,” doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the project that led to these prints hanging on the gallery walls. The theme of ecology is expressed directly in the premise of the project. Pino invited twelve fine art printmakers from around the U.S. to collaborate with twelve ecologists from as far away as Australia and China.

An untitled woodcut by Colorado artist Kim Hindman superimposes terrestrial and aquatic life forms on a map of New York harbor. The spatially ambiguous composition emphasizes the ragged edges of the famous estuary. A text panel identifies restoration of seawalls and the water’s edge as the specialty of ecologist Dr. Marcha Johnson, Hindman’s collaborator.

The colorful, boldly abstract patterning in “Return, Take Over,” a serigraph by Wisconsin artist Katie Garth, might be mistaken as merely decorative. But the conceptual rigor in the work as well as the interdependence of printmaker and ecologist are hinted at in the accompanying narrative. In the artist’s words, “John [Reiger] explained several restoration strategies… each using varying levels of intervention. Mentally, I juxtaposed the initial disturbance…with its subsequent restoration. Both altered the landscape, but with opposite intentions…. ‘Return, Take Over’ depicts the cohabitation of growth and decay in order to represent this duality in human disruption.”

A densely detailed and somber mezzotint of a subtly surreal scene hangs in a far corner of the gallery. Leaves sprout from oddly geometric rocks. Fantastical creatures seemingly made from splinters of wood and stone march like crustaceans—or scorpions—through a hard, crystalline landscape. The mood is dark, foreboding. The title, “LD.4334.1409,” which may refer to scientific enumeration, adds obfuscation to mystery.

The ominous mood comes as a surprise after viewing the rest of the exhibit. While diverse in other ways, the overall tone of the show is bright, upbeat. This is perhaps the greater surprise. Sunny optimism is not necessarily to be expected in an art exhibit about ecology in a time when climate change seems to be trending inexorably towards climate chaos. But while the haunting mezzotint with the enigmatic title may be more consistent with such a vision, don’t come to this exhibit looking for stereotypes.

In fact, don’t go looking for this exhibit in a traditional art gallery. The challenge for the uninitiated is to locate the exhibition space. The flagship branch of the Urban Ecology Center at Riverside Park has had arts programming as one of its missions since its inception. The lower level Community Room of the Center was designed with art exhibitions in mind. The austere white cube of traditional gallery spaces, however, is another stereotype to dismiss here. Viewing the art may involve maneuvering around a room set up for the educational games that regularly bring hundreds of schoolchildren to the center to learn about the natural world.

That those children may enjoy seeing on the walls serious art geared for an adult audience is not a bonus. It’s a deliberate strategy to establish interconnecting experiences. Ecology and a culture of scientific inquiry pervade everything the center does. The positive tone of this exhibit may be a consequence of that kind of sensibility.

Optimism also may be a motivating attitude for the ecologists. All specialize in the forward-thinking field of environmental restoration. The impetus for the project was the 2013 World Conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER), which was held in Madison, WI. All of the ecologists chosen for the project are SER members and the prints were first displayed last year at the Conference in Madison.

Several of the artists went beyond the use of imagery to express ecological principles in their work. For example, artist Heather Buechler teamed up with ecologist Debbie Mauer, who both reside in Illinois. After hiking together in prairie preserves and discussing the balance of nature, they harvested big bluestem and panic grass from one of the sites. Their collaboration continued into the studio where they processed the grasses into handmade paper pulp “to create a paper that is tied to the place that inspired it.” The image Buechler printed on the handmade paper, entitled “Diversity in Small Parcels,” is a complex layering of grass stems, the watershed of the Illinois River, and a silhouette of Lake Michigan.

Several of the prints were even framed in unfinished wood recovered from discarded industrial palettes. The recycling effort is intended to resonate with scientific methodologies; it also takes the concept of the cycle of nature beyond metaphor.

“Visual Reflections: A Printmaker Collective,” is on display through June. The Urban Ecology Center is located at 1500 East Park Place, next to Riverside Park. Hours are on its website.

One final challenge: if you arrive at this unique gallery when no one else is there you may have to grope along the wall to find the light switch. At the Urban Ecology Center no energy is wasted. Creative energy, however, is continually being generated.

An edited version of this review first appeared in Art City.

Hard Ecology: a photo exhibit opening in July

I will have a solo show at the Tamarack Studio & Gallery in Madison, WI during July/August, 2013:

 

Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature in an Abstract Landscape

Tamarack Studio & Gallery is at 849 E. Washington Avenue, Suite 102, in Madison. (Corner of E. Washington and Paterson.)

Opening reception Friday, July 19 from 5:30 to 8:30 pm.

This exhibit features an updated selection from my Synecdoche Series plus two 8-foot long murals. Morning Light (Menomonee Valley), below, is one of those.

Synecdoche refers to a literary device in which the part represents the whole. My work uses the concept as a metaphor; the images are visual examples of synecdoche. My subject is the complex—often paradoxical—relationships I see between nature and architecture/human culture. My approach, using the part to represent the whole, is to symbolize the fragmentation we experience in our everyday environment. 

The title of the exhibit, Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature in an Abstract Landscape, comes from the title of my latest book, which is both a selection from the larger Synecdoche Series and a fine art book in prototype form. The book design is carefully sequenced and the image plates are complemented with graphics and text that are intended to expand on the metaphorical character and content of the images. The book is available to preview and purchase at MagCloud.

The following is excerpted from the text of the book:

We are in a time of reckoning. Understanding our place in the world that we have wrought will be a hard lesson in ecology. We have tamed the wilderness, shaped nature, tried to design it into submission. Nature has been transformed, reduced, and abstracted. Nature is increasingly compromised or redeemed by our own actions. But nature is not—never has been—separate from us, from what is human. We have always been part of nature, inseparable except in our own minds.

Ecology is the study of relationships in the natural world. There can be no complete understanding of ecology without knowing where the human fits into the web of life.

To see more images from the Synecdoche Series, go to my website.

Hard Ecology: A new book in more ways than one!

Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature in an Abstract Landscape represents a new direction for me as far as book design goes. Up to now I've been happy with the books I've done before. These include two fairly traditional books, which include a significant amount of text, as well as several photographic monographs. All of these can be seen on my website. 

Hard Ecology differs because I conceived it as a Fine Art Book. While the themes follow directly from work I've been doing for many years, the book design is a deliberate departure from the earlier books. The new book is now available to preview in its entirety with no obligation to purchase at MagCloud.com.

The following is my introduction (which actually appears at the end of the book.) 

Ours is a time of reckoning. Depending upon your point of view, we have either reached the “end of nature” or we are on the cusp of a new nature, one that reflects our own agency—for good or ill. Once we inhabited nature. Paradoxically, it also inhabited us. But we were always a little uncomfortable wearing nature on the inside—as if it were a disease. Exterior nature we pummeled and paved. We built our palaces on top of it and excreted our effluents into its veins. Our interior natures we psychoanalyzed and medicated. We molded our physical natures with fitness regimens, dietary supplements, liposuction and Botox. We believed all along in our dominion over nature. Some still believe. Solutions to climate change, overpopulation, mass extinction, and other seemingly intractable problems—they claim—are at hand. Salvation will come in the form of genetic modification, nanotechnology, renewable energy…

Emerson (1836): Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man.

McKibben (1989): Since nothing on earth remains unchanged by man, we are at the “end of nature.”

It is a time of reckoning. Understanding our place in the world that we have wrought will be a hard lesson in ecology. We have tamed the wilderness, shaped nature, tried to design it into submission. Nature has been transformed, reduced, and abstracted. Nature is increasingly compromised or redeemed by our own actions. But nature is not—never has been—separate from us, from what is human. We have always been part of nature, inseparable except in our own minds.

Ecology is the study of relationships in the natural world. There can be no complete understanding of ecology without knowing where the human fits into the web of life.

Hard Ecology: Rethinking Nature in an Abstract Landscape is a photo essay that establishes a narrative with no real beginning or end. Instead it poses a closed loop, a sequence of interrelated images derived from an abstract landscape. The locations of the images are identified, but they are irrelevant. They range from the sublime to the banal, from distant places to my home neighborhood. Individually, these photographs are metaphors. They are visual examples of synecdoche, the literary form in which the part represents the whole. They symbolize both the fragmentation we experience in our everyday environment and cultural strategies for reassimilating with nature. Collectively, they create visual and conceptual relationships that are meant to stimulate new understandings about the meaning of nature and our place within it.

Again, if you wish to preview the book - or to order it - go to MagCloud.com.