Discovery of America (installation detail ) 2012
flash acrylic on Tyvek, 15 x 65 feet
Gallery Review
by Leila Nadir for ecoartspace
There’s
no such thing as nature.
For
some, this fact is commonplace: there is virtually no place on earth untouched
by human beings, especially if climate change is considered. For others, this
fact inspires deep anxiety: What exactly do nature skeptics think trees and
glaciers are if not natural? These dichotomous responses to the current
environmental condition of our planet usually causes conversation to stalemate.
It is rare when a piece of writing or a work of art breaks through this divisive
questioning to initiate a genuine dialogue about the complicated relationship
of the human species to its physical environment—ecologically, historically,
and perceptually.
Adam
Cvijanovic’s recent solo exhibition, Natural
History, at Postmasters Gallery, which ran from September 8–October 13, exposes
the elaborate artifice behind what we call “Nature.” However, his paintings do
not adopt a simple, “nothing-is-natural”
stance. Rather, they suggest that nature may in fact exist but that humanity’s
access to it is filtered by the accumulation of cultural data settled into our
minds, shaping how we think, see, and imagine. Whether through advanced
communications media or the seemingly isolated movement of a painting brush,
anytime we reference or depict “nature,” Cvijanovic suggests, we are circling
it, containing it, trying to capture it with our net of compulsive human
misunderstanding.
The centerpiece of the show is the sixty-five-foot Discovery of
America, which Cvijanovic painted on Tyvek and adhered directly to the
gallery walls. The painting involves a collision of three scenes. An artist who
has vacated her/his studio is in the process of creating a landscape painting
of the western North American coast during the Pleistocene era. The pristine
nature in the painting is inspired by dioramas at the Museum of Natural
History. Armadillos, saber-tooth tigers, mammoths, and many other prehistoric
species roam the mountains and the plains, most of whom disappeared quickly
after the arrival of homo sapiens on the continent. Shop lights, 2x4s, a
ladder, and a pizza delivery box are scattered about a grey floor, a floor that
merges with Postmasters’ own concrete floor, melding artwork and gallery,
creating for a feeling of displacement for the viewer—as if we can’t trust our
own senses, as if any perception of nature is framed by unstable categories.
Crashing into the pristine nature of Discovery
of America’s Pleistocene landscape is a scene of men dashing through the
plains on horses, based on a photograph of the Oklahoma Land Rush in 1889.
Rendered in black-and-white, the cowboys appear to be riding through an old
Hollywood Western film, and they cause the canvas to shred and tear, smashing
its frame into smithereens. The destroyed continuity of the painting suggests
the inability to depict what exactly happened when humanity arrived in North
America, or when European settlers pushed aside indigenous inhabitants—as if
there were a chronological or geographical gap in our representational
abilities. How do we cognitively imagine what life on earth was like before the
destruction wrought by our species? The painting’s wooden structure spills out
onto the studio floor, where the artist has left quite a few empty bottles of
beer. The painting shows that this rupture is momentous, cinematic, but also
mundane, the aftermath of which we are all living in today, in a
human-dominated planet earth. What more can we do than go have a drink?
 |
|
|
White Tailed Deer 2012
flash acrylic on Tyvek
99 x 144 inches (8.25 x 12 ft)
Cvijanovic’s other paintings cite
far-ranging sources of our contemporary visions of nature, including the
romantic Hudson River School painters Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt, the mythical
fantasy of unicorns, and perhaps most relevant to our times, media culture. White
Tailed Deer offers a colorful, fall-time forest with an elegant lake in the
background. The trees and leaves are nearly realistic, but they contain a hint
of the high-contrast colors associated with animated film and video games. Standing
in the foreground and framed by bright red leaves is a truly animated character,
Bambi, surrounded by his skunk and rabbit friends from the 1942 Walt Disney
film. The animals have huge, wide, glowing eyes—the sort
that make humans say “Ah, how cute” before bending down to pet the wild animals
who, in a real forest, would have no interest in them. Although White Tailed Deer’s collision of traditional
landscape painting with a film animation of wildlife is not as stark or as
violent as that in Discovery of America, we are reminded of the vast
distance between nature and the ways in which our culture and media shape the
way we see understand this concept. How many of us have had a friendly, fun
Bambi (or Dumbo, Simba, Thumper, or Sebastian) lurking in our unconscious?
In Osborne Caribou, a caribou
stands tall and proud atop a pile of bloody, skinned carcasses. That the
caribou are gutted with the clean lines of a knife indicates a hunters’ work,
suggesting yet another way in which humans relate to the natural world, as food
to be eaten. The standing caribou looks hyperreal; the outline of his body is
too vivid and smooth, as if Cvijanovic were adopting a photoshop aesthetic in
his painting. The caribou looks as though it might move at any
moment. The painting raises the question as to whether our encounters with
animals have become so dominated by media representations that we expect
animals to act like animations.
Osborne Caribou
2012
flash acrylic on Tyvek
99 x 144 inches (8.25 x 12 ft)
Natural
History is not a clever riff on the American Museum of
Natural History nor a nonstop vortex of signifiers nor a self-referential
painting about painting, as previous critics have claimed. Those elements may
be present, but Natural History goes
beyond them to initiate an artistic meditation on the labor and subjectivity
behind what we call science and nature, behind the supposed objectivity of the
museum. Nature is not a perfect origin or an untouched state in Cvijanovic’s
work. It loses that aura of timelessness. Instead, the viewer becomes aware of
nature as an elusive quality that is always in a state of becoming and
unbecoming, subject to whims, to moods, to the media we have consumed or the beers
we have imbibed. Does Discovery of
America really depict what the Late Pleistocene Era looked like? Does the Museum of Natural
History do better? Or are our understandings of natural history the product of
a painter who just ate too much pizza? Cvijanovic’s work asks, are we, as human
beings, imprisoned by our own natural concepts, illusions, and designs? Nature might exist but it can
only be understood through our limited and malleable human imagination.
Leila Nadir earned her PhD from Columbia University and works as a post-disciplinary artist, scholar, critic and creative writer. She is co-founder of the ecoarttech collective and teaches in the Sustainability and Digital Media Studies programs at the University of Rochester. For more info, please visit http://www.ecoarttech.org
