Is there not something odd about going to an art gallery to bask in the light of an artificial sun? Jokes about the need to escape the English weather aside, how do we explain this attendance record at a presentation of nature indoors? Nor was Eliasson’s remarkable project unique in attracting crowds. In Ottawa, Toronto, and New York City, art and nature lovers have been queuing to see Toronto-based photographer Edward Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes, images that seduce us with the accidental beauty of environmental destruction around the globe. We see strip mines, shipbreaking, and mammoth industrial projects, again from within the security and comfort of a museum.
Worldwide, millions flock to art museums to see what we would normally think of as wholly beyond our control. In smaller numbers, but with great conviction, hardcore art viewers also seek out natural experiences in the most contrived, high-tech creations of recent “land art,” such as James Turrell’s majestic Roden Crater in the Arizona desert. But what we see in the reactions to Eliasson and Burtynsky is new. It is more than a symptom of our nostalgia for a benevolent nature and of our fears about the destruction of the environment. It is a sign of confusion about what and where nature is. With Eliasson and Burtynsky, we are keenly aware of the extent to which humans make or break nature. We are no longer entirely at the mercy of the forces of nature; nature is governed and sustained by our values and actions. We revel in the details, and what we see yields anxiety, yet the popularity of these exhibitions suggests more than group self-flagellation. Rather than dwell on its calamities, we hope to make nature an integral part of contemporary experience.
The Olafur Eliasson of contemporary thought, Bruno Latour, is a colourful and often controversial French philosopher of nature who has come to prominence by challenging the certainties and sway of science in the West. He doesn’t mind being outrageous to get our attention. We should live without the nature/culture dichotomy, he proposes, not because external reality is an illusion, but because the assumption that nature is an independent realm of immutable scientific facts and laws undermines the creation of the kind of engaged, democratic societies on which the future of our planet depends. Latour is a pioneer in science studies, an interdisciplinary terrain that deploys tools from both the human and social sciences to fathom how technology and science function in society. In Politics of Nature, he argues that nature is inside us, that it is thoroughly mediated by human technologies. Take the weather, as Eliasson did. Our understanding of its phenomena is achieved largely through a complex relay of satellite data, images, and the personality at the weather desk. However destructive and beyond our control it may be, what we think of as the weather is no simple fact, nor is it solely what happens outside.
Latour wants to shift us from our everyday experiences of nature to a new plane of coexistence. “As we get closer to matters of fact,” he holds, “they become matters of concern.” That is, nature’s truths are arrived at in human communities and in human terms, which render nature largely artificial. The certainties of an earlier view of nature, and the fact that knowledge of those truths tends to concentrate among a small, elite group of experts, foreclose real public discussion. How can one argue with or about a natural law? As a matter of common concern, however, nature brings us inside disputes and allows us to become active participants. We can and should find a successor to our relationship to nature as it has evolved as a human concept since the scientific revolution.
Latour is not alone in his plea to change our conception of the natural world. Columbia University professor Manuel DeLanda suggests that we think in terms of continuously changing assemblages of facts, sensations, and ideas, and that we replace the familiar dichotomy between nature and culture with a more fluid, unstable, symbiotic process. For DeLanda, what we commonly call nature has never existed in clean separation from human purposes. It has both a history with us and a life independ-ent of our perceptions or attempts at manipulation. Assemblages are the points of connection critical to any change in our view of nature, and these shifting constellations are constant and autonomous only in their vitality. The more specific, personal, and material these concerns are, the more effectively we can address them. Matters of concern conveyed in art have just this specificity and functionality.
The philosophers help us to grasp issues around nature addressed more specifically by Eliasson and others, but we might retreat to more familiar ground to catch their drift. In his 1988 protest song “If a Tree Falls,” Bruce Cockburn implores us to wake up to environmental degradation, to practices that can “take out wildlife at a rate of [a] species every single day.” His cry for our attention is strongest in the refrain: “If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?” Cockburn means “does anybody care?” But his familiar allusion to the tree in the forest should remind us of a conundrum made famous by George Berkeley almost 300 years ago. For Berkeley, to be is to be perceived: if no one hears the tree fall, there is no sound.
Eliasson’s work asks us to puzzle over this sort of question. For him, phenomena are never simply “out there” as natural facts. There is “only your and my construct,” he repeats, suggesting that we “produce our surroundings.” His art pulls us inside the gallery to reinvent and reinvigorate our connection with what is outside. What we learn is that nature is in trouble as an idea. His constructed landscapes reveal not a confusion about nature but a movement away from the category altogether.
Eliasson has a lighthearted way of moving our thinking in new directions. The very large ice floor, presented at the xxiv Bienal de São Paulo in 1998, was simply an extensive ice surface placed where few people experience what is for northerners as common as tap water. Naturally, those attending this famous international art event let their hair down by skidding on the rink, making body imprints, and generally not behaving like proper, serious art cognoscenti. The work precipitated so much noise and activity that the Bienal’s organizers threatened to close it. More important than the controversy, however, was the chance to feel the ice, not just know it is cold; to look at the rarefied art world from outside, not just know it is a separate realm. The very large ice floor created a volatile, fluctuating space in which nature, culture, and sensation are irreducibly intertwined. For Eliasson, the critical evaluation of nature is part of experience, not a secondary activity.
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