Geo-graphing the Unseen: Writing, Reading, and Reimagining Landscapes

By Topozone (Raechel Root & Joseph Sussi)

A few weeks after visiting Common Ground at ANTI-AESTHETIC, we are preparing to plant the seeds we received at the exhibition in a community garden plot. We’ve been working in this plot since May, as a form of research for a project on artist-grown gardens, as a form of reprieve from the barrage of digital headlines and meetings, and, most simply, as a form of self-sustenance. The seed circles from Mika Aono’s piece a segment of a cycle (2020) will be one of many pieces of the soil’s ecology, along with piles of community food waste breaking down into enriching compost, as well as a dusting of fallen ash from this year’s forest fires. While this physical intermingling represents one very real and tangible effect an artistic practice can have on environments and our engagement with them, a spectrum of perceptible and imperceptible results come from work that engages with specific sites.

While site-specificity was initially termed to describe sculptures that were formally designed for, responded to, and were not intended to leave a specific environment, the concept has come to also encompass artworks that take specific communities and discourses (as well as places) as their site. These more recent iterations of site specificity extend notions of landscape, and appreciate the social relations that play into place.¹ The works in Common Ground direct perceptions, facilitate interactions and repurpose tools and tropes in order to reveal the influence of colonial “objectivity,” anthropocentrism and control on landscapes. The exhibition produces a both wondrous and critical viewer of these works and the sites they engage.

The artists collected here, human and otherwise, begin by reimagining what a line can do, be and mean, and the role of human actors in both writing and reading the surface of the earth.² Humans perceive and make many different kinds of lines in landscapes, both real and imagined: fences and borders that exist physically or on a map, horizons and skylines that mark the beginning and end of each day, roads and routes that prioritize efficiency and order in the ways we move through space, neat rows of crops that produce our food, curving or gridded streets that can reveal or conceal a city’s histories.³

However, as the works in Common Ground remind us, humans are not the only inscribing force on a landscape: water, wind, time, insects, animals and plant life all contribute to the making, mapping and marking of places.⁴ Aono’s second piece, Crossing Rivulets_draft (2019), relies on and re-presents the lines formed by beetles in the trunks of trees. Her tracing of their trace, a snapshot of an ongoing environmental transformation, brings to mind the historically close relationship of print media and photography with land art, and the ways those works rely on documentation to make visible that which is too large or small in scale to be easily viewed.⁵

In her wall text, Aono calls these lines the beetles’ “mappings” — a kind of map made up of lines formed by use, multigenerational experience and collective inscription, rather than by militaristic or colonial surveying.⁶ This piece, as well as the other works in the exhibition, takes an often oppressive tool or representational trope (such as mapping) and facilitates the co-optation of it, by the human and nonhuman alike. Aono notes that the beetle lines resemble the forms of flowing rivers, and certainly throughout the exhibition the shapes of cells, microscopic structures of wood, borders of snowfields, and crevices created by the bark beetle take similar organic, winding, blob-like paths through their environments.

Another mapping formed by the nonhuman can be found in Michael Boonstra’s nowhere/ now here (snowfields) (2018), in which the contour lines are formed by the falling, piling and melting of snow atop South Sister mountain. Made by the movement of ice and rain, this map cannot be used to navigate or even represent South Sister beyond the period of time when it was created — its lines are always changing, the settlements and routes of water across its surface ever shifting. Here the technology of mapping does not produce certain and utilitarian spatializations, but instead a fleeting and simplified representation that in its scale and abstracted form provokes wonder in the viewer.  

Wonder is often induced throughout Common Ground — eliciting surprise, awe, curiosity and exploration of the unfamiliar. Wonder has often been found at the intersection of art and science, with each field drawing on the other for inspiration and source material to achieve new perspectives. Richard Holmes identifies this in the Age of Wonder, the late 18th-century moment of cross-pollination between modern scientific thought and inquiry with the arts.

Speculative uses for pre-existing technologies bring forward alternative perspectives such as those of trees, critters, rocks, and more temporal, fluid matter like snow and water. The very paradox of achieving a nonhuman perspective with the assistance of technology may be obvious. However, projects like these stress technology’s potential to sense imperceptible phenomena and opportunities for adaptation, and to further materialize speculative worlds.      

Wonder, like many of the other tools in the exhibition, is subverted and used unexpectedly. While it often creates a transcendental distance between humans and “nature,” especially though landscape painting’s history of vast, awe-inspiring vistas, wonder is instead induced here through closeness: through leaning in to better see the cellular, the textural, the microscopic.⁷

That connection, then, doesn’t end with distance, but offers another point at which to reflect the range and complexity of human and more-than-human entwinement.

Throughout Common Ground, anthropocentric perspectives are questioned and challenged, revealing how the human place in the world is constrained to the body’s physical limitations. We are grounded to our terrestrial being and oriented by our verticality.  However, in narrative collaboration with the more-than-human, anthropocentric viewpoints can be overturned, set aside and inverted. Rather than understanding the world through human perception, sensing through plants, rocks, and critters can bring forth a world where multiple ecosystems overlap and display diverse modes of liveliness. Rock thinking and stratified visualization can deepen appreciation for materials and make tangible the notion of deep-time, or the expansive geologic timeline of the earth, encompassing 4.5 billion years, only one percent of which humans have been present for.⁸ Animals, closest to human’s own bodily orientation and most susceptible to anthropomorphizing, can expand upon what is considered language and technology.⁹

Most of the artists in the exhibition open such critical and reflective portals into nonhuman perception and inscription. Jill R Baker’s work centers the stones that serve as our most basic tools as well as the most advanced forms of the built environment. However, her videos and works on paper explore ways the hand might work in collaboration with, rather than merely using, rocks and pebbles. In the prints, the formal is dictated not by the hand’s manipulation of a brush, but by the edges and weight of rock. These prints contain the trace of interaction, rather than the direct documentation featured in her video work.

In the videos, skin becomes interchangeable with surface. Collaboration with the nonhuman is directly shown in clips where the artist’s hands interact with the rock, making shapes and forms together. The contribution of the hand is sometimes revealed, sometimes concealed. In Dance of the Spines (2017), for example, pebbles and cactus appear to move of their own accord.

In a dream-like sequence during The Rocks Dream of Falling (2017-2019), the viewer is invited to contemplate the needs and desires of rocks. Speculating on the dreamspace of a rock does more than question human uses for stones, namely as materials for shelter and objects to be refined, chipped, softened and blown to resemble ourselves in sculpture. There is a desperation in Baker’s work to find another side of a relationship with rocks that would not entail fashioning its image after humans, at best, and pulverizing it, extracting it, obliterating it, at worst.

Baker brings us close to hands and rocks working with one another, one of the first technologies, and responds by making the viewer understand that this technology has its own life, outside the civilization that deems it secondary to the organic.  

Aono’s work also collaborates with the non-human, recording the inscriptive aesthetics of bark beetles in Crossing Rivulets_draft or facilitating future interactions between hands, soil seeds, and wildflowers in a segment of a cycle. Both pieces direct human attention to processes that likely often escape our notice: the slow boring of lines into bark, or the dispersion, germination and slow growth of wildflower seeds. In both, chronologies intermingle: the past in the pipe so rusted it resembles a log, the present in the urgent drawing of graphite across paper or the feel of the seed circles in our hands, and the future those seeds will blossom into. The collaborations Aono facilitates are rooted in the ongoing-ness of ecosystems, bringing human and nonhuman actors together at one “segment of a cycle,” and asking them to consider their entangled pasts and futures as well. 

For many of the artists in the show, data and technology are a tool for communicating with the non-human. Reading environments through data and vice versa emphasizes the connections between information and material.

Technology is treated as a material amongst other materials.¹⁰ In Leah Wilson’s Consider A Tree, the technologic material of the microscopic is married with the material of the tree itself, by recreating anatomy slides in cut paper. Wilson’s second piece Attention-Devotion (2019) also relies on microscopic imagery of tree cells to scale up the otherwise hidden world of cellular life. These views subvert the perception of trees as “solid” in their strength, by revealing the porousness that allows them to grow to such wonder-inducing heights. Rather than producing an “objective” view of what a tree is, the cellular slide becomes a foothold for wonder, informing Wilson’s subjective and sensory climb through the canopy itself.

As a remote artist-in-residence, Karin Bolender (K-Haw Hart)’s work also seeks to explore and supplement subjective sensing of an environment. Her project PostLibrary (2020, ongoing), a neighborhood library box mounted on a post at the edge of her rural home and workshop, facilitates conversation between the human and the nonhuman.

Bolender calls the landscape of these cultures the “Secrotome,” an ongoing project started in 2017, a hidden macrobiotic world that inhabits and influences the one humans perceive. The Secretome is all around us, yet taken for granted — the smells and tastes we experience are a chemical slurry of microparticles. Our sense impressions are these chemical compositions congealed into our understanding of taste, of smell, and of feeling.  Explorations into “The Secretome” offer potential excursions into how senses are complex assemblages of material objects. Overall, Bolender’s work places humans and their reading and vision-centered epistemological methods second to make room for nonhuman ways of knowing and sensing.

This and the other works in Common Ground stretch and subvert methods and motivations of sensing, knowing and representing a site. By facilitating exchanges between human and nonhuman inscribers, representing environments in a way that prioritizes embodiment and sensation, and deploying wonder as a way to foster empathy and emotional connection, the artists gathered here direct our attention (and subsequently, our devotion) away from the human and onto environments and their non-human inhabitants.

Topozone is a co-operated experimental research collective, exploring all things perceptual within the crosshatching of the ecological, the spatial, and the architectural through practices of collaborative gardening, reading, and writing. Joe Sussi, a PhD student in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon, researches artistic collaborations with the more-than-human and the visual culture of resource extraction, climate devastation and toxicity. Raechel Root is a PhD student in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon, researching contemporary art, architecture and visual culture that addresses issues of site and spatial and environmental justice.

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Last open day for the “Common Ground” exhibition is Friday October 23, 12–5PM. You can find the online component of the programming at antiaesthetic.com/Common-Ground.

Notes

1. Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002) offers a thorough genealogy and analysis of the mutability in site-specificity.
2. “Geography” comes etymologically from geo-graphing, or “earth writing.” This concept has been stretched and explored not only through inscription, as we call it here, but through “geopoetics” — which geographers Sarah de Leeuw and Eric Magrane define as a call to “re-line the world” through creative, radical practices of reimagination and undisciplining of the geographic.
3. Understanding how humans have and continue to inscribe the landscape is of the utmost importance as we live in and near total climate catastrophe. What is often excluded in these conversations are how humans possess in themselves surfaces to be inscribed by their environment. For more on understanding the human body as an inscriptive surface, see Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020).
4. These forces contribute to a broader understanding of inscription. For more information on how inscriptive forces engage with one another and contribute to mega-concepts that impact the environment, see Nate Otjen, “Inscriptive Energetics: climate change, energy, inscription,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 9 (2018), 45-53.
5. Aono’s images consider what Deborah Bright has asked landscape imagery to do, namely, to question the “assumptions about nature and culture” that landscape imagery has reinforced. See Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An inquiry Into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical histories of Photography ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1992).
6. Maps formed in this way have a long history in indigenous communities, a history in which contemporary conceptions of “participatory mapping” have their roots, as Jo Guldi writes in “A History of The Participatory Map,” Public Culture 29 (2017), 79-112. Aono’s beetle rubbings, and her interpretation of them as maps, can be fit into the wider threads of participatory, radical and counter-cartography in contemporary art. A thorough exploration of the history of how maps have been co-opted as a tool of empire, including how to subvert these tools, can be found in Laura Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology & Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2013).
7. For discussions of wonder in intersections of art, nature and landscape, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (Cambridge , Mass: MIT Press, 1998), Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow’s analysis of Subhankar Banerjee’s Caribou Migration I in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press,2018), Paul Schullery’s Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
8. The undermining of anthropocentrism by thinking through such materials is a central tenet of new materialism as well as many longer-lived indigenous cosmologies. Central writing in new materialism can be found in the work of Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Povinelli, Heather Davis, Zoe Todd, Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Elizabeth Grosz, Carolyn Dean, Manuel DeLanda, Rosi Braidotti, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Kathryn Yusoff and Stacy Alaimo, and indigenous cosmologies as exemplified in the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Zoe Todd.
9. See Emily Eliza Scott’s analysis of Allora & Calzadilla’s Raptor’s Rapture (2012), in which she asserts how certain contemporary artists “look to animals as a way to probe other-than-human subjectivities, without the aim of assimilation into clear meanings or empirical facts.” Emily Eliza Scott, “Feeling in the Dark: Ecology at the Edges of History,” American Art (Fall 2014): 14-20.
10. For more on reasserting the materialization of technology, especially in relation to the environment, see Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Shannon Mattern’s Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2015).