Painting the Wasteland: The Environmental Critique in Contemporary Painting

Essay by Liz Ward, presented as an illustrated lecture at the Open Panel on Painting, College Art Association Annual Meeting, Dallas, Texas, 2008

Much art of recent decades has been characterized by a preoccupation with issues of social justice, identity politics, globalism, feminism, aids, etc. A notable omission from this list is environmentalism. Although it has begun to regain some visibility (ecology was the subject of a 2007 episode of the public television series Art 21, for example), this pressing topic has yet to come to the fore in art, despite its emerging preeminence in the related discipline of architecture, and even popular culture. The relative lack of engagement by visual culture, and painting in particular, with the urgent worldwide environmental crisis and global warming, is a question worthy of further examination.

Last year, 2007, was the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson, the American biologist and science writer credited with initiating the ecology movement through her seminal environmental text of 1962, Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the insidious danger of the pesticide DDT. Carson sparked my own initial interest in ecology; as a sixth grader I chose her as the subject for a research paper, for reasons I do not now recall. In any case, I have lived since then with an awareness of the interdependence and interrelatedness of living organisms and their environment, an awareness that has informed my artistic practice in subtle but increasingly overt ways.

Other artists working today of course share these concerns, however, environmentalism can hardly be described as a cause celèbre of the art world, as are other social or political issues. The magnitude of the environmental crisis is, I believe, well established, and need not be restated here. Suffice it to say that the entire paradigm of the human relationship to nature has been overturned; wilderness is now understood to be a fragile remnant of its formerly terrifying self, in desperate need of human protection. ¹ Simon Schama describes the present global condition as “this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.” ² In a moment when Al Gore receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, architecture goes almost completely green, and Newt Gingrich has a new book out on conservation as a Republican value, the art world seems uncharacteristically sanguine on the topic.

The May 2007 Artforum, for example, features interviews with the curators of Documenta 12 and the 52nd Venice Bienniale, reviews of the summers' major surveys of feminist art: Global Feminisms and WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution, and previews of “50 Shows Worldwide.” In this nearly 400-page issue, a snapshot of the international contemporary art scene, the sole mention of environmentalism is buried in a review of an Agnes Denes exhibition. The reviewer, Brian Sholis, marginalizes Denes' environmentalism as an historical artifact, stating that “the works exhibited here furthered many artistic concerns prevalent in the late '70s - Denes was entirely of her moment. Given that her concern with the environment is one we all share (or ought to), the exhibition left one hoping her art will soon reenter mainstream circulation.” ³

It was in the period of the 1970's (and beginning in the late sixties) that numerous important and influential works with environmentalist content, in addition to that of Agnes Denes, emerged, for in spite of the art world's dispassion for such issues, many artists embraced them, along with other progressive causes of the day. Robert Smithson's photo-illustrated essay The Monuments of Passaic, which appeared in Artforum in (1967), is often cited as one of the first contemporary works to explore the degradation of nature. The essay is an ironic, anti-romantic tour of a bleak New Jersey landscape and its decayed, industrial “monuments” such as sewer pipes, a parking lot, and a pumping derrick. Other early environmental pieces include Alan Sonfist's Time Landscapes (proposed 1965, planted 1978), which recreated a fragment of indigenous forest in the middle of Manhattan. The forefather of environmental activism in 20th-century art is, of course, Joseph Beuys. He was a founding member of the Green Party in Germany in 1979, and in 1983 he ran as the Green Party candidate for the European Parliament. His 1982 “action” for Documenta 7, entitled 7,000 Oaks, in which seven thousand oak trees were planted in the city of Kassel, is a canonical work of ecological art. Another oft-cited significant work of environmental art is Mel Chin's Revival Field (1990-93), a garden designed for a landfill in Minnesota in which toxin-absorbing plants draw heavy metals from the contaminated soil. The 1984 text Earthworks and Beyond by John Beardsley provides a useful survey of works in this environmentalist vein, including Revival Field. It is significant to the topic of this paper that all of the above-mentioned works (and the large majority of work in Earthworks and Beyond) emerge from traditions of sculpture, whereas in the past, painting would have been the obvious arena for investigations of the human relationship to nature.

Landscape painting in particular, since its tentative emergence in the late middle ages, embodied the West's shifting attitudes to nature. In the words of art historian Kenneth Clark, “Landscape painting marks the stages in our conception of nature.” ⁴ The genre developed gradually, with threatening images of impenetrable forests on the edges of medieval paintings. It culminated in the sublime American landscapes of the 19th century, infused with divine messages of manifest destiny, exemplified by Thomas Moran's Mountain of the Holy Cross of 1875. This centuries-old legacy of the landscape painting tradition, in which the relationship of nature to culture was so richly explored, suggests that painting would be a fruitful artistic vehicle for responding to the environmental crisis.

In fact, the history of American landscape painting in particular offers numerous precedents, in the work of Thomas Cole and others, of an early environmentalist sensibility as the pristine American wilderness gave way to the ax of civilization in the 19th century. Cole's paintings and writings contain repeated references to the rapidly disappearing wilderness - a wilderness that was such a vital and distinctive aspect of the American identity. Art historian Barbara Novak observed, “Like no other American Artist, Cole mediated this dilemma of the wilderness.” ⁵ His usual icon of destruction was the tree stump. Novak states “Cole's strong feelings about the axe also found abrupt expression in paintings in which the cut stump suggests a new iconology of progress and destruction.” ⁶ His lament for the loss of the landscapes he loved is apparent in his two views of a river in the Catskills, the first painted in 1837, and the second six years later. In the later version, the foreground has been denuded of trees, and a train, signifying progress, races across the distant hills. ⁷

The elevated position of landscape in visual art, exemplified by Cole and his followers, reached its apogee in the 19th century in Britain and America. It was eventually challenged by the increasing influence and eventual triumph of Modernism in the 20th century. Art's age-old project of copying nature - epitomized by the landscape genre - was gradually discredited in favor of more subjective modes of representation. This stigma against landscape painting, born of the triumph of abstraction and reinforced by the urban sensibility of the art world, is in part responsible for the fact that many painters continue to eschew landscape subjects. And, as stated earlier, landscape had set the precedent in visual art for expressions of environmental concern.

In the present post-modern period, which resists stylistic characterizations, perhaps there is a possibility of revisiting landscape or other painting genres to grapple with the pressing issues of our time. In an introductory essay for Vitamin P, a richly illustrated international survey of contemporary painting first published in 2002, author Barry Schwabski notes the multiplicity of positions available to contemporary painters, from the old-master-style figurative works of John Currin, to the explosive, cosmic abstractions of Matthew Ritchie. Indeed, as Schwabski points out, no single identifying characteristic could distinguish or disqualify a painting as contemporary today. ⁸ Even landscapes are represented in the survey, as well as other works that might suggest an environmentalist critique. However, one searches the text of Vitamin P in vain to locate any mention of ecological concerns (despite a plethora of other socio-political issues). Indeed, writer Alison M. Gingeras begins her introduction to Michael Raedecker's landscapes apologetically: “While landscape painting might seem like an obsolete genre overburdened with art historical baggage ... Michael Raedecker manages to make it the crux of a vital painting practice....” ⁹

Beyond the realm of Vitamin P, other painters whose work suggests, at least in part, an environmentalist reading, are often reluctant to acknowledge its presence in their work. Walton Ford, for example, whose ravishing Audubon-style watercolors of animals include images of extinct birds such as Carolina parakeets, passenger pigeons, and the great auk, denies such concerns. As he states, somewhat defensively, in a recent interview about his work, “sometimes people think it's overly grave, overly political and overly pedantic and precious and worried about the environment.” ¹⁰ Ford's reluctance to reduce his rich and highly complex work to a single issue is understandable, however his disinclination to locate an environmental critique in the work exemplifies prevailing attitudes in the discourse.

I'm suggesting that even when paintings are clearly or subtly environmentalist, this aspect of the work is rarely discussed, sometimes even by the artists themselves. Like an embarrassing fact (or “inconvenient truth?”) that no one wants to mention, environmentalism is a seldom-acknowledged presence in painting, unaccountably absent from the discourse. Is it because this cause, unlike so many others espoused by the art world, is not perceived as fashionable? Is it because it demands changes of all of us, in the choices of how we live our lives? Is it because its historical ties to landscape painting are fraught with “art historical baggage”? Or is it a blind spot inherent in the discourse itself?

The critical theory that informs the current discourse on contemporary art derives from various intellectual influences. As enumerated by Thierry de Duve in his essay When Form has Become Attitude - And Beyond, they are “ linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, structuralism and post-structuralism, in short, 'theory' (or so-called 'French theory'),” which entered art school in the 1970s, and provided a new critical vocabulary and intellectual framework for contemporary art. ¹¹ The discourse on ecology, in contrast, is, rooted in the hard sciences such as biology, oceanography and climatology. Perhaps art's relative inability to address environmentalism is due in part to the estrangement of academic disciplines and their accompanying discourses from one another. In the essay “Reflections on Art and Sustainability,” Victor Margolin, a professor of design history, raises the following related question: “Given that discussions of culture, and especially art, are missing from the ecology and sustainability discourses of large international organizations [such as the UN], and populist ecological movements alike, how does one begin to think about art's relation to sustainability such that a new understanding of artistic practice might result?” ¹² In other words, environmentalism and visual culture are mutually estranged from one another, to the diminishment of both.

In spite of this prevailing divide in the discourses, there are painters who openly admit that environmentalism is an important aspect of their work. In this section of the paper I will discuss four such artists, including myself. I begin with Rackstraw Downes, a “painters' painter” who has always operated outside of the mainstream of contemporary art, yet carved out for himself an important position as one of the best realists working today, known for his panoramic landscapes of violated and forgotten places.

In his autobiographical essay “What the Sixties Meant to Me,” Downes allies himself with “the unofficial artists” of the period, such as Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, and Jane Frielicher, who, as he put it, “took Abstract Expressionist ... brushwork and pitted it against direct observation.” ¹³ He attributes his initial interest in landscape, after an inauspicious debut as an abstract painter, to his desire to rid his work of self-consciousness style and “artiness.” ¹⁴

Downes spent many winters on the Texas coast, where an abundance of contamination amid understated beauty proved to be a fertile source of inspiration for him. He paid homage to its “monuments” much like Smithson did to similar structures in “The Monuments of Passaic.” His 1996 painting Rainwater Ditch with Six Culvert Bridge, Texas City, TX, for example, recalls Smithsons' The Fountain Monument: Bird's Eye View, in its unflinching depiction of the consequences of development.

Downes' working method, once he decides upon a subject, is to paint from life at an easel, returning to the site as many times as necessary to complete the work. Downes quotes Constable, “We see nothing truly till we understand it” ¹⁵ a statement which reveals the inherent environmentalist sensibility in Downes' work, for to carefully observe the landscape over time, as he does, is to comprehend its degradation. The 1990 work In The High Island Oil Field, February, After the Passage of a Cold Front, exemplifies Downes' meticulous approach to a site and its ecological ramifications. The subject of this painting at first glance appears to be an unremarkable though beautifully painted vista of pump jacks in a typical Texas oil patch. Upon closer examination, it reveals itself to be, in Downes' words, a musing on “ decaying industrialization being replaced or reclaimed by the progress of nature.” ¹⁶ We are actually seeing a former railroad embankment, now used to elevate and protect the pumps from storm surges. The cows sharing this higher ground with the pumps are gradually returning fertility to the soil, which therefore is being repopulated with weeds. As Downes explains, “Here the tenses of a landscape imagery which represents what is lost or threatened are reversed; we see decaying industrialization being replaced or reclaimed by the progress of nature. These weeds interest me more than ancient redwoods; they are the vanguard of nature's forces as she wages her war back on us....” ¹⁷

Another artist with similar concerns and working methods is Arkansas painter Kristin Musgnug, who also spent time in Texas, a prime location, it seems, for painting the wasteland. She recalls, “In Texas, I was fascinated by the juxtaposition of junk and industrial detritus with natural places; but I was never able to paint in the really vile places .... They were just too completely foul, and too far from human scale for me to establish an intimate connection with.” ¹⁸ One of Musgnug's early Texas paintings is Point of No Return, a lushly painted yet disconcerting view of discarded car chassis used as erosion control on a state park beach. Her current project deals with the growing menace of invasive plant species. She has written about it as follows:

I am using invasive alien species as a lens through which to examine our attitudes and assumptions towards the natural world. This subject matter is emblematic of the shifting tenor of our contemporary attitudes towards nature in a time when the stability of the natural world can no longer be taken for granted.... While the introduction of alien species is nothing new, the acceleration of the rate of new introductions by global trade and travel, coupled with a rise in the awareness of environmental problems, has propelled this issue into the consciousness of the general public. ¹⁹

The series draws upon stylistic conventions of northern European landscape artists of the 16th and early 17th centuries who, as Musgnug explains, “embedded detailed botanical studies in the foregrounds of larger landscape scenes.” ²⁰ Such influence is apparent in Queen Anne's Lace and Creekbed in April, the latter with invasive plants filling the foreground, and the artist's car in the background.

While Musgnug and Downes employ the visual language of the European landscape genre to represent environmental ills, my own work relies on abstraction, informed by scientific sources, to explore similar terrain. There is a strong tradition of organic abstraction and the abstract sublime in modernism, but abstraction is rarely associated with environmentalism in art. The romanticism inherent in Georgia O'Keeffe's work, for example, is not well suited to the depressing realities of the landscape today.

The following quote from Robert Smithson, who disparages the romantic view, is pertinent to my own investigation of natural systems and cycles through abstraction:

What are the lattices and grids of pure abstraction, if not renderings and representations of a reduced order of nature.... There is no escaping nature through abstract representation; abstraction brings one closer to physical structures within nature itself. But this does not mean a renewed confidence in nature, it simply means that abstraction is no cause for faith. Abstraction can only [continue] to be valid if it accepts nature's dialectic.” ²¹

Smithson defines dialectic in this context as “a way of seeing things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated objects. Nature for the dialectician is indifferent to any formal ideal.” ²²

As Downes' work evolved from abstraction to realism, mine developed in the opposite direction. One of my early paintings, which employs the tree-stump iconography of Thomas Cole, is Ringer, in which realistically painted tree rings are superimposed on a trophy shield. The trophy shape, with its origins in heraldry, mimics the human torso; in this piece the fallen tree and the human body are fused into one image idea.

Eventually the tree ring imagery evolved into more abstract, open-ended line systems such as those in a series of paintings entitled Conversing About Beautiful Mountains and Rivers. I found the title in a newspaper article about the archeological excavations preceding the building of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China. A stele bearing that now poignant phrase - “Conversing About Beautiful Mountains and Rivers” - had recently been unearthed - a phrase which embodied the ideas of personal and environmental loss I envisioned for the series. This idea of lost nature, which it has historically been the job of landscape painting to address, was also the underlying concept for a series of large watercolors, such as Fading Shore, in which the image fades away into invisibility. I consider such pieces to be landscapes that go beyond a traditional human-scaled view of scenery on the earth's surface by using visual information derived from the sciences. Our comprehension of nature, formerly dominated by religion, is now formed by science, which for me provides a fruitful source of imagery. Minor Aquifers, for example, was based on geological maps made by sound waves of the underground sources of water in Texas (which are rapidly diminishing, by the way).

I have also been influenced by the Texas coast and informed by the harsh environmental realities it embodies: rampant overdevelopment, destruction of wetlands, sprawling industrial pollution, and, in spite of it all, abundant wildlife and resilient nature. At present I am working on a project based on the so-called “dead zones” which are large areas in bodies of water such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay that are unable to support marine life due to depleted oxygen levels. Fueled by nitrogen runoff from the Mid-Western farm states into the Mississippi River, the boom in ethanol has caused the Gulf dead zone to swell to the size of New Jersey. I use a color-driven narrative and the inherent fluid qualities of watercolor to describe the abrupt change in water quality occurring in such zones.

The final artist to be discussed in this paper is Alexis Rockman, whose oeuvre abounds with revoltingly polluted land and seascapes, and sweeping murals mapping the spread of humanity's destructive progress across the planet. Rockman's Wonderful World series explores the freakish results of genetic engineering run amuck, from grotesquely deformed farm animals to super-sexed hybrid plants. Firmly grounded in scientific research and even field experience, his work is rich in authenticity and exuberant detail. But unlike scientific illustrators, Rockman privileges imagination over accuracy, depicting what has never been seen, or at least not yet. The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote glowingly of the scientific content of Rockman's work:

...let me illustrate Alexis Rockman's contribution to the dialogue between art and science- his use of artistic fancy to fracture and amalgamate the mental categories employed by scientists and falsely accepted by them as objective identification of nature's real distinctions....Through them [his paintings], I better appreciate the power of art to inform science ..... ²³

Rockman, like Walton Ford, cites the dioramas at The Museum of Natural History in New York as a primary source of inspiration. Rockman, however, is unabashedly outspoken on the environment. In reference to work produced for his Wonderful World exhibition at the Camden Art Centre London in 2003, and his monumental mural for the Brooklyn Museum, Manifest Destiny, he states: “I conceived of these projects as responses to what I consider to be the two most important issues on the planet, which are global warming and the biotech revolution.” ²⁴

Rockman has also employed his art in the service of environmental activism, creating posters for the Riverkeepers organization. Riverkeepers is engaged in protecting and restoring the Hudson River, which brings us full circle to the Hudson River painters that Rockman admires. His most ambitious work to date, the ironically titled Manifest Destiny, emulates the style of Hudson River painters Thomas Cole and Frederick Church. But the real subject of this 8 x 24-foot mural concerns the future, Brooklyn circa 5004, submerged by the high sea levels caused by global warming. Rockman consulted with scientists and architects to compose this dystopian panorama in which strangely evolved sea life swims in an eerie orange sea through the ruins of the metropolis.

Works like Manifest Destiny, as well of those of the other painters discussed above, demonstrate the vast imaginative and formal terrain available to painting, and its capacity to address issues of vital importance. They also help bridge the gap between the discourses of art and science that impedes the visual arts' grappling with the environmental crises, and deprives science of the power of art's advocacy.

Many artists want to engage with the world and its most pressing problems in meaningful ways, and there is no reason why painting should be excluded from the conversation. If green really is the new black, as the fashionistas now assert, then the art world can't be far behind.