Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment
Salem, MA
Who belongs to this place? To whom does this place belong? When does a place belong to you? When do you belong to a place? Belonging—and the word that hides inside in belonging: longing— sit at the heart of American landscape art. And American landscape art, it might fairly be said, lies at the heart of American art, even as the American landscape might be said to lie at the heart of the American experience.
Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment—opening February 2 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, before moving to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas— presents a wide range of American art—from Mark Catesby’s 18th-century paintings of New World flora and fauna to a 2009 photograph of plastic, feathers, and bones on a beach by Chris Jordan; and a 19th-century Tlingit blanket to a contemporary look at a continent in the throes of demographic and climatic upheaval by Salish-kootenai artist Jaune Quick-to-see Smith, reexamining them in light of a relatively new art historical model: ecocriticism.
In their introduction to the exhibition catalog, Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow define ecocriticism, stating that it “considers artifacts of every category as embodying environmental conditions, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions of one sort or another…as a general principle, though, ecocritical inquiry looks beyond conventional humanistic frameworks by exploring neglected but pertinent evidence from environmental history and ecological thought. Instead of focusing narrowly on landscape imagery, which has tended to idealize terrestrial nature as pristinely nonhuman and nonurban, ecocritical art history considers any creative genre and environmental context to be potentially worthy of study, regardless of medium, style, period or location…it also examines the environmental significance of past works—even those created well before the term ‘ecology’ appeared—by attending to historically specific evidence.” When you combine artworks from the past with contemporary works under a common thematic umbrella and subject them to a specific art historical approach, like ecocriticsim, you have to walk a tightrope between intention and interpretation. As an example, when you look at an Albert Bierstadt landscape and attempt to unpack and decode it according to an ecocritical, and you then set that Bierstadt alongside Valerie Hegarty’s overtly political— and ecological—deconstruction, Fallen Bierstadt, the challenge becomes apparent.
George Catlin’s 1832 painting, Dying Buffalo, Shot with an Arrow, is filled, at first, with naive pathos. The death of buffalo meant life for the Native Americans who depended on them. But we know what happened—or almost happened—to the buffalo, and we know what happened to the great Plains peoples who followed them. Pathos becomes a precursor to the tragedy we feel in the anonymous
photograph, Men Standing with Pile of Buffalo Skulls, taken just six decades later.
Alexandre Hogue’s Crucified Land and Isamu Noguchi’s This Tortured Earth each seem to critique humankind’s view of the Earth—and the earth—as something to be used, contorted, shaped by us and for us, without regard for it, or for the future, but their artists’ eyes for formal arrangement get in the way. They make the ugliness they want to depict somehow beautiful, going, in some measure, against the grain of their own intention. Prospecting/bullcreek City, David Gilmour Blythe’s startling Civil War era work, and Alexis Rockman’s 1992 painting, Aviary, deploy humor as their works defy expectations. In Blythe’s painting, a prospector, expecting a wilderness finds a polluted, blasted wasteland, where the bones of an ox—vestige of an agrarian past— mirror the scaffolding of oil derricks and a pall of industrial smog hangs over the land.
Similarly, Rockman’s Aviary is filled with exotic species of birds—many of whom would not be found together in the wild—all perched on an artificial tree and sustained by a man-made drinking fountain. Looking at it closely, the spectacular sunset is a painted zoo backdrop, Peale’s museum come to life.