Down to Earth

Down to Earth: Art, landscape, language and listening, for climate action and a circular economy

by Alexandra Keiser and William Allen

We have to focus on landing, not on taking off.

Bruno Latour, Down to Earth, 2018

For this year’s Hudson Valley Upstate Art Weekend, the project room at the Lexington House Gallery features a collaboration between installation artist Barbara Westermann, painter Sean Bayliss, word artist William Allen and art historian Alexandra Keiser. Their art and installation begins with ideas found in Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, with its themes of eco-politics, the intersection of art and science, our local and changing economies, an unchecked globalization and its exploitation of the Earth.

These long-time friends live in the Hudson Valley, on East and West sides of the Mahicantuck (Hudson) River, working locally and thinking globally about art and our place in nature. They share a common interest in challenging dominant Western ideologies, including the fossil fuel industry, capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and ‘the end of history.’ Against the backdrop of a pandemic and a worldwide climate crisis, they call for mindfulness and radical change through art practice, conversation and collaboration.

To the migrants who have to cross borders and leave their countries at the price of immense tragedies, we must, from now on, add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries.  

Bruno Latour, Down to Earth, 2018

Latour's vision of a synergistic relationship between human society and nature resonates with our local, physical and mental landscapes. Events such as the recent suffocating smoke from Canadian wildfires, the ice storm of 2022 and events like Hurricanes Irene and Sandy have left lasting impacts on the region, prompting renewed discussion around the human relationship with the natural world.

The project, housed at @lexsartsci in Lexington, NY, offers a thought-provoking exploration of art and science, language, politics and the environment, highlighting the power of art to challenge and inspire renewal and growth. It also acknowledges the original Native American stewards of the land where we live and the power of nature as an agent, no longer to be subject to the degradation of human plundering. The project starts a conversation, both between the artists themselves and with local arts, culture and community in the region.

Barbara Westermann’s site-specific installations play with engineering, architecture and infrastructure, with what lies beneath our buildings and human networks, where traffic and trafficking collide, where freeways and egos intersect. Why not plot structures with an eye to working with and not against nature, which does what it does, including reclaiming what we have taken away with our extractive industries and impulses.

In her work #SustainableInfrastructure, Barbara puts HVAC piping into the rooms of the old Lexington House. What are these PVC pipes connecting? Her sculptures highlight the processes by which we engineer what nature will wear down. What if we built our canals and houses and subways to nature’s specifications? To see nature as a subject and an agent, not a backdrop or object to plunder and warp.

Her sculptures and prints are hopeful, suggesting that 21st century architects and dreamers might build for use in the natural world, not at its expense. Her art here represents the circular economy, where all conduits lead back to the original source (in the case of Lexington, New York, the West Kill and Schoharie Creek).

Barbara addresses invisible systems and structures that underpin our constructed environments, physically and historically. While she nods to the contours of Minimalism, she weaves in her practice as an urban planner, feminist, social and political philosopher and worker bee.

Barbara’s art is social sculpture, embodying connections between individuals at work and play in the natural world. Pointing to sympoietic,[1] systems, structures that transcend space and time, she is connecting the viewer to a place: to the different histories of the house, the human need to build onto nature rather than build with it. Just like plumbing or electrical circuits, narratives are built into our societal infrastructure, yet often hidden under the surface.

How can we plan and construct place for people to work and live without demeaning or demolishing nature? How do we build to nature’s specs? The installation at Lexington House allows viewers to look inside, to see physical connectors in the context of aesthetics and a history of making objects. Through her work, she invites us to move towards an eco-centric system of values, one in which humans are part of the natural world and inextricably linked to its systems.

Latour’s essay Down to Earth calls for a revision of the concept of nature, acknowledging it as an active participant and prompting us to make a collective response to the climate crisis. Latour suggests a way forward by adopting a shared perspective, much like the one envisioned by globalization, but now focused on what he has named “the Terrestrial” (a translation of the French term terroir, meaning the Earth we inhabit).

In what sustainable ways can we alter our work practices, travel modes or exhibition formats? Lexington House was embraced as a venue because of its history and its locale in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, where these three artists have “landed,” and because of its general mission and support of local artists. Moreover, its environment allows a break from the usual conventions of a white-cube gallery space here with an emphasis on a collaborative process, on making connections, while working with available resources (and their limitations). These parameters allowed this exhibition to be conceived as an invitation for “symbiotic seeing.”[2]

------------

[1] A term coined by Beth Dempster, 2000; also used by Donna Haraway.

[2] A term borrowed from the title for the exhibition by Olafur Eliassson at Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland, 2020, which introduced many concepts of Bruno Latour and related schools of thought.

Sean Bayliss paints landscapes and portraits that comment on social and historic events and illustrate (often zany or disjunctive) fragments of human experience. In Trainline, Sean populates a magnificent earth and sky with a schematic line of a moving train traveling West through nature and the mirage of a frontier. The work pays homage to Hudson River School painters who romanticized the beauty of the American landscape, with a symbolic nod to the country's untapped resources, unbridled optimism and promises of prosperity. Although Sean made Trainline in the Hudson Valley, it portrays a utopian landscape created from memory, rather than an actual location. The landscape becomes a placeholder for nature and our experiences and observations within it.

Similarly, That Would Be Fantastic incorporates an idealized landscape. The sky is reminiscent of majestic and colorful sunsets and sunrises that can be observed in the Catskills and neighboring Adirondack Mountains. A striking, androgynous figure looks intently at the viewer. Sean drew inspiration here from his research into art history, particularly how Hudson River school painters, such as Thomas Cole, represented Native Americans during the nineteenth century, often as a small, barely visible figure. In this painting though, the figure is clearly at the center of the canvas, pointing us to the local histories of the land and the people.

The barcode collaged on the figure’s cheeks represents data in a machine-readable format and alludes to face painting in Native American cultures. The symbolism of face paintings was not uniform, but included some broad themes such as war paint. An underlying belief of kinship with nature, with the earth and the animals contributed to the understanding that nature imparted a vital power in the paints that was transferred to the wearer. Materials were derived from animals, plants, or mineral sources. The bar code, however, is a significant deviation, away from nature and towards technology and discussions of privacy, and a society in which individuals are extensively monitored and their personal information is readily accessible to various entities, such as government agencies or corporations.

A striking feature of the portrait is the figure’s blue-green eyes, emphasizing genetic determinants resulting from historical interactions and intermarriage with European colonizers. Bayliss directs attention to narratives of endless economic growth, the exploitation of nature and people as resources for the benefit of a few, and the harmful effects of consumerism.

And let’s not forget the title of the artwork, That Would Be Fantastic, an example of Sean’s use of ‘found objects’ from conversations overheard to create a world of mystery and wonder and humor.

The painter embeds what he hears from people around him at the mall, in school or in the forest to revisit our art historical and cultural myths, without judgement or (explicit) commentary. He alludes to the tales of endless economic growth, the exploitation of nature for the benefit of a few, as well as the harmful effects of consumerism. Road signs and billboards are telling symbols of a changing world of attitudes and allegiances. Rather than opposing the local against the global, Sean suggests, as Latour does, that we find a new, third way that grounds us in the earth.

Sean’s paintings contain multi-layered narratives that align with Latour’s term ‘geo-stories,’ highlighting many agents of action, both human and non-human , and the diversity of stories within stories.[1]

In the seascape I Have A Good Feeling About This, word and image capture the moment when early American settlers arrived, believing that limitless opportunities were within their reach. The painting quietly alerts viewers to a cultural history and practice that contributed to our ecological crises: climate change, environmental racism and species extinction.

Nonetheless, Sean infuses hope into his work, which leads us to think about Latour’s idea of landing – human development has been so often about unchecked progress, extracting the wealth of the land and prioritizing greed. How do we now ‘land’ and care for the world as stewards, not exploiters?

-------------

[1] Bruno Latour, “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene “ Distinguished Lecture, American Association of Anthropologists, Washington, DC, December 2014. (The term is also used by Donna Haraway, Janes Lovelock, and Lynn Margulis.)

William Allen works with ekphrasis, where words and images collide. Through his art, Bill challenges traditional distinctions between science and art, so-called high and low culture, poetry and art, by breaking down their arbitrary walls. In his series Ancient Oceans, Bill paints a poem that refers to history, geography, and geology, playing with words that reference prehistoric glacial lakes, Ordovician oceans, local Catskill orogeny and plate tectonics, where the language of scientific naming collides with the poetry of dreams.

The location of the Lexington House in the Catskills is a good setting for his work, as it once was a low, swampy region bordered by an ancient Devonian sea. Nearby in Cairo and Gilboa, we find fossils of the world’s first trees. We’ve been through flora and fauna extinction and plenty of climate change since then, and Bill reminds us to consider our past in charting out our future.

Through his word paintings, Bill invites viewers to ponder vast events (in terms of time and space) of which we have only seen partial traces, that we cannot fully comprehend and record. Yet he provides an access point, engaging witty, cerebral creativity. His curating of taxonomies from geology, organized in four lines per panel (like a sonnet) creates a form of geo-poetry that tells stories about our interconnectedness with the natural world.

Bill shapes stories with complex webs of possibilities that challenge traditional notions of individuality and autonomy. His work is also sympoietic, meaning it has no self-defined spatial or temporal limitations. Also, the work playfully explores linguistics and acoustics, inviting viewers to interact, reading words out loud and creating an auditory depth to the visual surface.

In light of Bruno Latour’s call for new paradigms for culture and a radical re-thinking of ‘progress,’ Bill’s paintings align with Donna Haraway's insight that stories are not just representations of reality but can also be makers of reality.