Shock & awe
Sprawling Anthropocene project shows humanity’s enormous impact on the planet
The camera sweeps slowly, right to left, along a towering ridge of ochre stone. The sense is of the monumental — the kind of majesty and scale that only the primal force of violent nature, operating at planetary scale, could yield.
Then you see it, and the world turns suddenly sideways: An enormous, churning machine enters the frame, like some kind of apocalyptic ferris wheel, carving grooves into the cliffside with its set of jagged claws. That towering bluff of dusty earth seems to shrink before your eyes as it yields to the clanking monstrosity gnawing at its hide.
But it’s not the only thing taking a hit here. That built-in sense of feeling tiny and insignificant in the face of nature’s grandeur has been turned thoroughly upside-down. As the scene makes clear, the dominant force shaping the planet at is most colossal scale is now us.
That’s the shorthand version of the thesis for Anthropocene, a film and a set of sprawling exhibitions — one at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the other at the Na- tional Gallery of Canada — that opened simultaneously this weekend. Taken together, they’re a full-blooded collaboration from photographer Edward Burtynsky and the filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, which, while not a new partnership for any of them, is the most seamless one yet.
That scene, from the film, shows exactly why: With its disorienting scale and meditative pan culminating in a disarming slow reveal, it’s as close to a mindmeld between the three artists as you’ll find. For some 30 years, Burtynsky’s images of the ravages of industry, taken from afar, have highlighted the dizzying disconnect of our industrious species’ ability to transform things far beyond our own scale, like a colony of ants gnawing an ancient tree to dust.
Set in motion, his pictures would surely look something like the film the three have made together: Contemplative, experiential, more evocative than provocative, letting the enormity of simply
what is right in front of you speak for itself.
Even so, things can get pretty grim.
Burtynsky’s pictures have always held a terrible beauty. His compositions veer close to the abstract in their capturing of horrendous damage: the shimmering purple-blue of an oil-slicked tailing pond, pooled in the golden earth of an Arizona mine, or the silvery plume of phosphor tailings ballooning into bronze-coloured water in Florida. They’re gorgeous first, horrendous later, and that’s surely the point.
In motion, the balance can fall the other way.
“Someone called us the three horsemen of the apocalypse,” said de Pencier, a little glumly. “I really hope that’s not the case. But we can’t claim neutrality anymore. We used to say this is not a polemic, and you can draw your own conclusions—”
“It’s still not a polemic,” says Baichwal, interrupting, maybe a little defensive. Baichwal and de Pencier had made a first film about Burtynsky, not with him, in 2006. It was called Manufactured Landscapes, after the artist’s National Gallery show, and it adopted his ambivalent approach.
“Because (the film) was so non-didactic and experiential, it had this enormous impact around the world — it surprised all of us. We realized that experiential approach had a place — especially in an environmentalist’s world which is often polemic and preaches to a choir.”
Burtynsky, of course, has spent his whole career negotiating that very fine line.
“Show-don’t-tell is the thing we think about a lot,” he says, matter-of-factly. “If you put a polemic to it, you really remove the flow point where you can address the subject in different ways. How can we offer a contemplation of these places — which are so important to be able to see, and to know —without alienating people? That’s always the challenge.”
That first film led to a second, Watermark, in which Burtynsky was enlisted as a co-director. It flowed, however slowly, into the next: Anthropocene, where the boundaries between filmmaker and photographer blurred even more.
Baichwal had worried that Watermark had been overly broad, so Anthropocene took its title from something specific: a group of geological scientists working to validate what the film depicts in broad, poetic visual strokes. They posit what appears to be a simple truth: We are now i n an epoch of geological time — think in the millions of years, not decades or centuries — where, many milennia hence, excavated strata will show this to be the era where humans were the most powerful force altering the landscape. For Burtynsky, who has worked along thematic lines tied to specific industries — railway lines carved into the landscape; mines; farming; urban sprawl — Anthropocene presents as an unintended catch-all term for his entire career. At the AGO, most of his pictures are recent — a grid of opaque aquamarine tailing pools at a lithium mine; an angular network of roadways carved into salt flats in Chile for a brine well; white rooftops of greenhouses that look like a deck of cards scattered across a mountain range in Spain — but it’s not hard to see how they connect to a life’s work. Here, like in all of his work, human activity infiltrates landscape like a virus, leaving outsize scars as they go. This is no mere show of pictures, though, as the group has done its best to build new experiences. Some, like the brief, atmospheric interludes of film nestled in with the photos, animate their ethos and imbue them with quiet force. The photographs tend to be ravishing but impersonal, heightening the chasm between human experience and the unimaginable scale of industrial ambition. The film elements zero in up close: To scavengers in city-sized garbage dumps in Africa, or to an enormous pile of burning elephant tusks in Kenya, where seized poachers’ bounties become a spectacle, to discourage the carnage.
Together, they work, and knit nicely to the film. A little less close-knit, at least to my eye, are a pair of augmented reality pieces that gobble up square footage in one of the show’s two rooms. In each, an iPad provides a virtual window into an absent thing. One of those tusk piles plays a starring role, appearing through the screen, in a stilted way, to be in the room in front of you; the other, in which a white rhinoceros — functionally extinct, with only two females left alive in a Kenyan national park, under armed guard — materializes through your viewer, twitching animatronically.
The tusks I can get — they’re eerie in their stillness, the uncanny aspect of their disembodied presence working if not fluidly then at least unforcedly with the awful serenity of the still images. The rhino, though, is a bit of a cringe — unnatural to an awkward fault, a zombiefied version of a now-dead creature (it’s the last male, who died in March) maybe better left to rest.
It’s one of those things where the story — and likely a simple photograph, or film — would have evoked more than this simulation possibly could. You can reach and say the imperfect resurrection serves as a metaphor for our unnatural moment, and philosophically, I suppose, it fits. I’ll give them points for trying — dismissing new technology out of hand is a shortcut to irrelevance, so better to make a bold attempt and learn something than not try at all — but it jars the aesthetic and puts things off kilter more than it does support the theme.
That said, Anthropocene is about nothing so much as being off-kilter — a world out of balance, as Godfrey Reggio, the director of Koyaanisqatsi, which seems a clear reference point here, might have said. Far away and up close, we’re leaving our mark, most of them wounds likely never to heal. To fix the problem, you first need to know what the problem is. Anthropocene leaves you little choice but to open your eyes wide, and more importantly, invites you inside.
Anthropocene continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario until Jan. 6, 2019 and the National Gallery of Canada until Feb. 24, 2019. The film is currently playing at theatres nationwide.
Murray Whyte is the Star’s art critic based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @untitledtoronto