Another Green World

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Betty Beaumont

Betty Beaumont’s images of camouflaged cell phone towers reveal the absurd characteristics of green washing in its most concrete form. Transforming the look of “natural” into an insidious theatrical device, these cloaked towers appear as various forms of trees depending on their region or climate. Turning the Darwinian notion of natural selection on its end, the fake evergreens and palm trees represent a “permanent” state of nature and remain immutable save for the interests of real estate and development. Beaumont’s almost deadpan treatment of the towers, photographed straight on and filling the frame, lend her subjects the quality of portraiture, revealing the hidden identity of the transmitting cells that are masked to make this relatively new technology appear green.

Jennifer Bolande

Jennifer Bolande’s “Sandwich Board” presents an ambiguous relationship between commerce and the natural world. On one side, a black and white line drawing of dying trees is articulated in a spare but expressive style. On the reverse side, a blurred close-up photograph of lush green trees fills the frame. Possibly an acknowledgement of the growth and death cycle of nature, seen in this context the images might refer to their “grow or die” parallel in capitalist enterprise. As the sandwich board functions like a billboard for the pedestrian street, the sign invites the passerby to consider the “added value” of nature, an elastic commodity that can bring benevolent associations to all manner of goods and services.

Vija Celmins

While the depiction of the landscape was once motivated by belief in its divine origins, Vija Celmins post-photographic naturalism exists as an entity unto itself, a handmade interpretation of a mechanical facsimile of the natural world. Once nature could be replicated through technology, the question became not about its creator, but how these phenomena could be more and more precisely described. In a reversal of the assumed progression of “nature into culture,” the tromp l’oeil quality of Celmins work simulates the machine made image, while assuming the inevitable flaws of a hand made artifact. Read from a distance as photographic, but breaking down into intricate detail as one approaches the image, the logic of Vija Celmin’s work asserts no hierarchy between the static nature of a picture made with a camera, and the accumulation of visible marks summoned to replicate it.

Neil Jenney

Neil Jenney’s landscapes invoke an idiosyncratic Americana that negotiates the gap between the 19th century Hudson River School and contemporary art making. With bold lettering that both literally and figuratively frames the images, Jenney’s subjects are made material, while their aggressive horizontality limits the sweeping views of the picturesque tradition. Confronted with close-up details of a larger scene, the planar background sky reveals no larger sense of place. Where the post-enlightenment viewer of a landscape was situated at its center, the viewer of Jenney’s work, unmoored by its disorienting cropping, is instead grounded by the object that delivers the image. While Beirstadt enhanced the illusionist properties of his work by presenting them in dramatic light with curtains on either side, (in a predecessor to the epic and disembodied nature of film), the “stuff” which serves as the vehicle of Jenney’s illusions retains as much significance as the imagery itself. Employing a purposeful craft which leaves traces of the author, the deliberate technique, monument-like frames, and “signage” employed in Jenney’s paintings are at the same time evidence of a kind of classicism that speaks to the perennial need for a civic voice. Constructing an emphatic realism that reshapes the terms of 19th century idealism into a more self-conscious form, the rhetorical devices in Neil Jenney’s work are made transparent, arriving at an unpretentious approach that applies a contemporary self-awareness to the American landscape tradition.

Barbara Ess

The 19th century landscape paintings of the American west often featured broad vistas and sunlit valleys, characteristic of a period of westward expansion. This optimism was revisited in Western films, where sweeping vistas were magnified by the big screen, a genre that some critics associated with the global ambitions of post-war America. As our borders have long become static and international conquests have gone astray, a defensive posture has set in. There are those who feel that our fixed territory must be defended, engendering a more claustrophobic and anxious view of the landscape. Barbara Ess’s screen shots are derived from surveillance cameras along the U.S./Mexico border, set up and posted online by extra-governmental groups intent on “defending” America. Predominately comprised of low contrast, middle grey images, these views of rivers, bridges, and fields describe boundaries potentially traversed as a means of escape or an attempt better one’s conditions. The stark, monochromatic nature of these (re)photographs suggests an unforgiving landscape, while the subtlety of their tonality parallels the seductive nature of voyeurism inherent in “spying” on the land. The omnipotent, bird’s eye view isolated in Ess’s images implicates the viewer in this process, as they’re invited to scrutinize the landscape for potential aliens. The grainy, ill-defined quality of the pictures speak to the furtive and uncertain nature of this process, which seeks to assert control over one’s anxieties through an imagined mastery and possession of the visible terrain.

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson

Filmed in New Jersey’s meadowlands, the 1971 film “Swamp” explores a netherworld between nature and industrial society. As Nancy Holt negotiates the camera through dense thickets of swamp grass, Robert Smithson offers relentless and sometimes aggressive off-camera direction. In an occasionally tense discourse between Holt and Smithson, Holt “becomes” the camera (the eyeball) as Smithson “controls” the view. Enveloped in the vibrating, yellowish brown verticality of the swamp grass, the camera shatters the picture plane as it pushes its way through. Flirting with the sublime beauty of an abstracted landscape made tangible by the repeated knocking of the lens against the “elements,” the perils of exploration are parodied in a low-risk operation that nonetheless produces an ominous sense of dislocation and anxiety, playing out in the terseness of Smithson’s direction and the occasional exasperation evident in Holt’s off-camera voice.

Mathias Kessler

Adopting the Victorian era convention of landscape artist/explorer’s Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, Mathias Kessler’s photographs in Ilulissat, Greenland investigate what could be considered the “end of the earth.” Updating the sublime tradition in landscape that inspires both fear and awe in the viewer, Kessler’s photographs of icebergs describe a reality which may one day exist solely as fiction. Possessing an eerie glow reminiscent of tourist sites from floodlights positioned on either side of the icebergs, the scale in the resulting photographs appears simultaneously monumental and miniature. Aware of his implication in disaster tourism, where the spectacle of “nature in reverse” increasingly draws fascinated crowds, Kessler’s photographs begin with the uncompromised condition of untouched nature, transforming it into a picture of itself. The picturesque landscape tradition encouraged the individual to internalize views of idealized nature, which could then be imposed on existing scenery. In Kessler’s beautiful but ultimately disquieting images, the view of even unspoiled natural setting exists for us as the already discovered. Perhaps a consequence of a century of landscape clichés that began as an attempt to manage the unwieldy character of nature by transforming it into a purely aesthetic phenomenon, the impending loss of “real” nature seems to have created an appetite for its eventual replacement by its reproducible double.

Gerhard Richter

The gestural application of paint in Gerhard Richter’s “Overpainted Photographs” intervenes between the viewer and the photographic evidence of the subject. Covering parts of the image with seemingly random streaks of paint, Richter undercuts the certainty of the photographic image through the element of chance and the unambiguous materiality of paint on a surface. The “invisible hand” of the camera is displaced by Richter’s own, an expression of ambivalence as to the function of authorship in photography. Richter’s tireless exploration of both the affinity and dichotomy of photography and painting has at times exposed the tyranny of resolving this issue with an either/or answer. The artist’s investigation of landscape also explores this ambivalence, flirting with cliché and pastiche that are embedded in the everyday vernacular of a photographic image. In “Grunewald,” this lack of resolution between the photograph as a painting surface or as illusion proves disconcerting. The densely wooded, starkly lit forest is partially obscured by dark gray overpaint, some of which is transparent. The veiled areas of the image only hint at what can’t really be seen, while the closed-in nature of the woods obscures more than it reveals. The discrepancy between the “truth” of the photograph and the subjectivity of the painted gesture seem to resonate with the indecipherable denseness of the depicted forest, providing little space for easy resolution.