Awash in the sins of the past
Water issues and basic environmental concerns fill Art Gallery of Hamilton as Edward Burtynsky’s work gets a harmonious new context
Edward Burtynsky’s great big photographs ooze uncomfortable truth, though the artist himself, careful not to preach, once took a more ambivalent stance. But at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, where a few dozen of the 76 pictures he recently donated to the museum are now on view, an unintended synergy freights even his earliest images with the unleavened urgency they demand. Terrible beauty, Burtynsky’s esthetic calling card, remains present, never fear. But these days, terror comes first. The Burtynsky show, Witness, is surrounded by
Water Works, an engaging, alarming exhibition that largely concerns itself with the accreting perils of depleting, poisoning or otherwise contaminating our most precious resource. The AGH, for its part, cries coincidence, but, seriously: To get to his pictures, you have to first walk right through it. Taken together, they send alarm bells ringing: Effect, meet cause.
Maybe that’s too literal for this business of art, which for as long as most of us can recall has traded on the oblique and ineffable — a certain kind of agnosticism, lest the offence of taking an actual position disqualify you from the unifying art world ethos
of studied indifference.
Still, I wish they’d take credit. That long-established silo has finally started showing cracks — Canada 150, with its justified pileup of complaints around celebrating colonial havoc, surely helped — and here we are, in a public art gallery, talking about real things happening in the actual world this very minute. Imagine that.
Water Works is surely a place to check old ambivalences at the door. While it meanders gamely into the realm of the ineffable and poetic, a pall — part alert, part lament — pervades. Blue Republic, a Toronto collective, draws words and symbols on the rocky shore of Lake Ontario with water, only to see them dry up and vanish; Ann MacIntosh Duff’s spare, sublime waterscapes are unearthly, minimal to the point of disappearing. Nearby Paterson Ewen’s
Red Sea, a boiling vat of crimson under a blazing sky, does more than suggest the end. It takes us there.
Just a few steps from here, you slip through the double doors and into Witness, where poetic rumination on pending disaster cross over into Burtynsky’s suddenly stark-seeming reality.
Maybe it’s just a sign of the times. With biblical-proportion floods, droughts, hurricanes and whatever else pummelling every part of the planet with increasing regularity, it’s hard to look at such things as the vascular prongs of the Colorado River, parched and retreating from the dessicated Mexican plains in Burtysky’s aerial view, without anxiety rising at the back of your throat.
Witness is billed as a mini-survey spanning every era of Burtynsky’s 30-year career, but a river runs through it, linking nearly every picture of the heavy industry he most often captures to their water-consuming ways: Silvery feathers of oil residue along the surface of a tailing pond in Northern Alberta’s oilsands, the parched forms of dryland farming in Spain, the reflection of oil derricks in Kazakhstan in the mirror-slick pools at their feet.
You can see it as an unofficial primer for The Anthropocene, the ne plus ultra of Burtysky exhibitions so sprawling and comprehensive that its footprint will occupy large swaths of the National Gallery in Ottawa and here the Art Gallery of Ontario at the same time in September. (A further nudge: Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, the filmmakers with whom Burtynsky collaborated on their 2013 film, Watermark, have a chilling video piece included here, of hulking bergs of ice mounded imposingly at the foot of Niagara Falls. They’ve teamed up again for The Anthropocene, a film due out later this year.)
For the uninitiated, the term “anthropocene” refers to nothing less than the accumulated ills human activity has piled up on our hapless planet (biologist Eugene Stoermer coined it in the ’80s to define the epoch in which humanity, and our callous urges for cars, fast food and indoor plumbing, was the primary force shaping planetary dynamics; others began wielding it to refer to the driver of the ballooning crisis of climate change).
That being the case, you could reasonably guess no footprint could be large enough. For now, though, Witness’s nominal ambiguity — sort of, but not really; Burtynsky declared his environmental sensitivities some years ago — bends sharply into critique alongside Water Works’ more explicit complaints.
Push through the next set of doors and into Water Works’ increasingly plaintive protest and you’ll see what I mean. The show may leaven its grievance — Betty Goodwin’s Swimmer, a long drape of paper pinned to the wall in which an ochre, lifeless figure hovers in a hazy swatch of paint (the sickly colour of dried kelp) may not exactly be sunshine and rainbows, but hectoring it’s not — it doesn’t shirk from it either.
Water Works leaves that to the experts: Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge, the local art world’s long-unheeded conscience — they built their art career on tireless advocacy for labour, immigrants and environmental issues while the art world at large clustered in galleries contemplating aphoristic texts pinned to the wall or ambiguous forms, safely insulated from the world out there — make it plain.
In his early career, Burtynsky no doubt felt some of that chill, wilfully positioning his works as neither condemnation nor celebration, leaving them, as he said, “open” for years before publicly choosing a side. Conde and Beveridge do no such equivocation.
Fall of Water, a chaotic photographic mash-up, is a monument to water abuse writ large: Modelled after Dutch Renaiassance master Peter Breughel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels, in which archangel Michael leads his troops against Lucifer’s hordes, Conde and Beveridge recast roles for modern times. Water giants Nestlé and Dasani, the devil’s own, battle poor villagers for the right to something clean to drink. It would be the perfect hyperbolic metaphor for a very real calamity, if it weren’t so close to the actual truth. Ask residents of Guelph about that.
Sitting here next to Ruth Cuthand’s chilling works, ambiguity slips further away. In a vitrine, a clear glass pitcher is encircled by drinking glasses, all of them full. In the transparent fluid, an array of brightly coloured microbes — amoeba, parame- cia, bacteria, gastrointestinal gremlins all — backstroke blithely along.
They’re spectacularly beautiful, luminous and finely made. They’re also the artist’s response to the cascading water-quality disasters at the Attawapiskat First Nation, which has endured years of substandard water infrastructure and the sickness it allows to fester. The piece is called Boil Water Advisory #3, suggesting an open-ended project — a thought depressing enough to spur action, but with the Federal government facing an infrastructure shortfall, so far, not much good.
Nearby, Cuthand, who is Cree from Saskatchewan, is able to highlight it for the perennial dilemma it is: Intri-
It’s an unblinking indictment and a position fully taken. Indeed, if ever there was a moment in the art world here to throw off agnosticism, this would be it
cately beaded panels with names like Giardia and Shigellosis glimmer, gorgeous, each of them a parasite found in drinking water in reserves. They were made just this month.
Across the way, Ed Pien’s shimmering cutout in reflective blue Mylar repeats the theme: Sea Change, he calls it, which seems hopeful at best. In it, human-size parasites and contaminants like mercury and lead tangle in a net with people and sea creatures not-obviously still living. Pien made it in collaboration with author Merrell-Ann S. Phare, the director of the Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources and the author of Denying the Source: The Crisis of First Nations Water Rights (her text, in sparkly rhinestones, adorns the nearby wall).
It’s an unblinking indictment and a position fully taken. Indeed, if ever there was a moment in the art world here to throw off agnosticism, this would be it, and a quick stroll back into Witness is damning validation.
Afloat in the South China Sea, a city-sized encampment of fish farmers stretch off to the horizon, bending the ocean itself to its rapacious will. In Scottsdale, Ariz., a sprawl of cul de sacs dotted with identical homes, some with pools, butt up against an unseen barrier, past which only parched desert lies.
Look back now, to one of Burtynsky’s earliest, most celebrated pictures here, where toxic tailings of arsenic pool in scorched earth near Sudbury’s nickel mines, a hot, glistening orange. Ambiguous? Hardly. The art world finally caught up with him.
He meant it all along.