What Have We Made of the Landscape?Author(s): Rackstraw DownesReviewed work(s):Source: Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 2, Art and Ecology (Summer, 1992), pp. 16-19Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777385 .Accessed: 08/05/2012 15:45

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less real? Its foreignness-that is, its nativeness. But eggs, like beef, are for Europeans an important symbol of abun- dance, of the Good Life, and Americans have been willing to turn over vast resources to the industries that produce such "goods."

Let me continue with this silliness just a bit longer: as Americans become more "health conscious" they eat less beef and fewer eggs. They eat more wheat. Pasta made from wheat is good. Corn cannot possibly be the staff of life, only wheat. While many people now see the nonviability of reduc-

ing entire continents to cattle ranches, the ecological de- struction caused by the overabundance of "amber waves of

grain"-grain that is still too European to be ecologically sound in the "New World"-can be seen as simply a glitch in a system that is "goodness."

The "Americans," the European settlers, have yet to arrive in their "New World." To do so would mean to actually live here, instead of living on imported "goods." That, in turn, would entail looking at the victims in the "wilderness."

It is also dangerous, of course; who knows what poison ivy really looks like? Better to live safely in "new" Jersey, "new" York, or under the protection of the British crown, in

"Virginia," "Carolina," or "Georgia." The American states are political entities. Their boundaries have no geography (except rivers, in some cases). They may be seen on a map only. Without road signs how might you know western Texas from eastern New Mexico? By the governor.

Where are we? We are in the European City. The U.S. is a political/cultural construction against the American conti- nent; the U.S. is an un-American activity. It promotes and enforces its un-Americanness by "appreciation" of America. There has never been a culture that so loved the "outdoors" as does the U. S., nor one that has so insulated itself from nature. The civilized concept of the "wilderness" as land without humans already sets humans apart from "nature." Although one must continue to eat nature, and "inhabit" a part of nature (the body), one may do so guiltily, in expectation of a better world achieved through denial.

If Walt Disney did not exist we would have to invent him. Theme parks are the metaphor for the U.S. Coney Island, the first theme park, is an extension of Brighton Beach, where the old Punch-and-Judy shows brought the beach and the ocean itself into the city. Now mountains may be skied down,

rapids may be rafted down as nature's roller coaster. The wilderness is thrilling. Our gear and our park rangers pro- vide just the right amount of protection to allow bravery into the thrills-just like taking a fast drive on the open road in the Cherokee Chief.

A problem for civilization, however, is that Heisenberg's

principle of uncertainty holds true for any system. How beautiful when something unofficial happens. Remember when you were young and a wild animal strayed into town? It

caused the same shock as would seeing someone walking naked in the city. It is nature where there should be no

nature. I expect it is no longer true, but when I was young towns still had edges, no-man's lands, that were not yet the

surrounding farms. This was where the city's refuse was

casually dumped, so that the edge of town was not a "natural"

place. There lived raccoons, opossums, rats, snakes, bob- cats, skunks, hobos who were in fact outlaws (not homeless street people), families of Afro-Americans and displaced Indians. All of us, shunned by the city, used the city's surplus. I so loved the dumps, where one could find the

products of civilization elegantly, surrealistically juxtaposed with pieces of wood, magic rocks, bones, and wild flowers, that they have remained the metaphor by which I define

myself. The city could not see us, could not admit our existence,

could not control us. We used it. There is a painting by Goya of a proud and princely

young man in his castle with his large mastiff lying behind him. The dog is tied with an iron chain, but he has bitten the chain to pieces and gazes at the man unfaithfully. Do I just imagine that the dog resembles Goya himself?

We know the world and communicate with the world

basically through metaphor. Language is metaphor. Civiliza- tion sells the idea that its truth, its narrative, is literal and real-not metaphoric. Hence it needs to control and deny metaphor. But the metaphors of visual arts are complex and sociable, not controllable. Coyote says, "Aha, this is my natural habitat."

What Have We Made of the Landscape?

RACKSTRAW DOWNES

t is hard now to speak, with awe and confidence as

Shakespeare did, of "great creating nature." Nature is

dirtied, depleted, hemmed in, and everywhere under

siege by people. We exhibit a contempt for the mud from which we sprung, and an astonishing anthropocentrism that

may yet prove suicidal; we are not the measure of all things, but part of them. When Turner painted Rain, Steam, and

Speed he portrayed the Industrial Revolution with profundity, as a force taking its place among the forces of nature. By now it's a runaway force, and our efforts to contain it seem feeble and not honest: in an expanding consumerist economy there cannot be a wholehearted conservation movement.

In the 1960s the Soil Association Journal regretted that

factory farmers were imitating industry. They suggested in- stead that industry emulate farming; that is to say, that

nothing be produced that could not be absorbed without risk back into the biosphere.

When I was growing up, I learned to look at nature more or less through the medium of English romantic poetry, as

SUMMER 1992

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Rackstraw Downes, The Mouth of the Passagassawaukeag at Belfast, Maine, Seen from the Frozen Foods Plant, 1989, oil on canvas, 363/8 x 84%• inches. Courtesy Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York.

something inspirational but apart. Later, I started spending summers in an old Maine farmhouse. When I first arrived there, I measured the water in the well; it was two feet deep, whereas I intended to stay till Labor Day. This was as immediate an encounter with the issue of natural resources as one could wish for. Such immediacy necessarily fosters a collaborative attitude to the environment; it contrasts with the

remote, abstract quality of the city dweller's functional deal-

ings with nature, mediated as they are by the municipal bureaucracy.

In Maine I started painting landscapes, not of the scenic beauties of the coast or mountains, but of dairy and

poultry farming and the woods after they had been cut off-

workaday stuff. The subject was how people live on, and make a living from, the land. I read Rural Rides by William

Cobbett, the farmer turned political activist, who saw the

landscape in terms of its economy and agriculture and from the point of view of farmers and laborers.

An influx of young people soon arrived who wanted to live a "homemade" life and not harm the land. Some got as far as composting their outhouse product; most practiced or-

ganic gardening-good not only for its nutritional value, but because it leaves the soil in as good or better condition than it was to start with: the paradigm for a sustainable agriculture. In their rejection of urbanism and industrialization they found things to learn from the local population, whose lives

preserved some traits of the nineteenth century. For a moment it was hard to tell whether the clock was running backward or forward. One issue of the Soil Association Journal showed on its cover a team of horses plowing, with the caption "The

Shape of Things to Come?" One day in the 1960s I was returning by train from

Philadelphia to New York with the filmmaker Rudy Burck- hardt. We passed through rural south Jersey and entered

industrial Elizabeth, in the Cancer Corridor. "Ah, now the real landscape begins," Rudy said. I answered, "Your aes- thetic and moral senses are divorced from each other." But, while we surely all love a clear-cut moral issue, is there such a thing? The rural life I liked was not in fact so disentangled from urbanism and industrialization; in "environmentalism" one noticed hypocrisy and Greener-than-Thouism; the im-

ages I worked with were mostly rural, but I spent three fourths of the year in the city, whose different values I was not about to give up.

I looked, and did not think of things as good or bad, but as present. Garbage and sewage and industrial effluent are characteristics of a landscape we all help to make. Structures

rusting in the New Jersey Meadowlands are to U.S. industrial

might as the tombs and aqueducts of the Campagna are to the Roman empire. Abandoned land and trashscapes may be the wildest spots we have left, since wild land is all protected.

I see life as mostly polyvalent, and I am most interested in art when it's the same way. I dislike the politicization of issues; it makes them thinner, shriller, polarized, and finally reduces them to the question, "Whose Side Are You On?" This is a good call to action, but not to contemplation. When I work I ask, "What, in terms of the specific situation, Have We Made of the Landscape? What Is Here?" For me a site is to

explore and to learn from; my initial attitude to it is one of brief interest. This is replaced, I hope, by a growing feeling for its subtleties, complexities, contradictions, and incon-

gruities. Paint the thing, modified only by those feelings that

you cannot help or are not aware of. To be 100 percent receptive and observant it is necessary to be agnostic.

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