Elemental Thinking: New Approaches to Art and Landscape
María Puig de la Bellacasa, Dimitris Papadopoulos and Natasha Myers have recently explored “elemental thought” as a way to think about the elements, meaning both the elements of ancient philosophies of nature – earth, air, fire, water – and the chemical elements of Mendeleev’s periodic table (Reactivating elements, 2021). The elements, they write, “have been brought back in recent years to speak in old and new tongues, in diverse contexts and practices, generating other ways of storying long-standing narratives”. They offer new insights into our social, political, and ecological conditions and invite us to imagine more-than-human narratives about the land.
This session takes “elemental thinking” as a point of reference for exploring artistic engagements with landscapes and environments. It asks how thinking through the elements might generate new ways of approaching land and landscape, both in response to the current environmental crisis and in reflecting upon earlier historical moments.
The persistence and omnipresence of the elements, across diverse ontologies and epistemologies, allows for elemental thinking to cross cultural, geographical and historical boundaries, inviting an expanded understanding of landscape and environment. We welcome proposals on all historical periods, geographical contexts, and artistic media. In addition to papers from art historians, we encourage proposals from artists, curators, and scholars working in disciplines adjacent to art history.
Session Convenors:
Elisabetta Rattalino, Free University of Bozen–Bolzano
Lara Pucci, University of Nottingham
Speakers:
Nicole Gasparini Casari, The Courtauld
Real, Painted, and Performed: Air at the Pavillon de l’Aurore 1671-1715
Situated at the north-east of the park of Sceaux, the Pavillon de l’Aurore was commissioned by Louis XIV’s prime minister to Claude Perrault in 1671. The painted dome by Charles Le Brun depicts the goddess Aurora rising to the zenith to inaugurate the day, which stood for Colbert paving the way for the Sun King. The composition was dramatically resignified when Louise-Bénédicte de Bourbon-Condé, duchesse du Maine, became owner of this property in 1700. At Sceaux, the duchess organised her court and threw lavish parties, which culminated in the Grandes Nuits of 1714–1715. On the fifth night, a representation took place inside the pavilion and saw Louise-Bénédicte impersonating Moon triumphant over Sleep.
To offer the stage for these festivities were also the gardens surrounding the pavilion, where music filled the air and compositions of flowers and fruit trees were especially organised for the occasion. The accounts of these events narrate a multi-sensorial experience, created in this porous setting through the scents and sounds enveloping the guests, while they would contemplate the sky – real, painted and performed. To interpret this experience, this paper foregrounds a scientific early modern understanding of air as a hot and dry element, a fluid filling the space, a substance that could be inhaled, but also a medium for the propagation of sound and enabling of vision. In light of an ever-growing scholarly interest in the archaeology of smells, this paper aims to step back and reflect on air’s interactions with the human body as manifold and operating in unison, mirroring early eighteenth-century approaches to theorising its ungraspable nature.
Dr Ben Pollitt, University College London
Elemental Entanglement in Early Australian Ornithological Images: The Case of the Lyrebird
This paper explores the elemental grounding of the Australian landscape within the European imagination, drawing transhistorical connections between Netherlandish and British images of birds from the Australasian realm to do so. The classical arche, or first principle, described in the opening book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, involves the untangling of chaos, pulling apart the four elements to create cosmic order. Early colonial records of Australia illustrate a similar impulse. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century Netherlandish visual sources defined Terra Australis Incognita, along with America and Africa, as a land of fire and air, elements associated with the imagination, as opposed to the known worlds of Europe and Asia, which were related more to earth and water. The image of the bird-of-paradise was instrumental in establishing this connection, a creature that in contemporary visual sources represented the element of air or fire or both and was believed to be native to the Great Southern Land. The painting of native Australian bird species in the years following the arrival of the first fleet of convicts in 1788 offers important insights into processes of British colonial possession of Terra Australis. This paper will discuss how contending representations of the lyrebird, either as a bird-of-paradise or as a type of pheasant, articulate a transhistorical dialogue between British ornithological artists and earlier Netherlandish painters of natural history. Early portrayals of the lyrebirds can, thus, be read as performances of colonial possession, ones in which we find the persistence of the classical elements in the post-Lavoisier age.
Rebecca Owen-Keats, University of Birmingham
An Unquiet Grave: the implied sonic and elemental sublime in Joseph Wright of Derby’s (1734 –1797) Indian Widow (1785)
The sublime, a crucial aesthetic theory of the eighteenth century, often drew on the elemental power of nature. Capable of inspiring both awe and terror in the observer, the sublime, as noted by the philosopher Edmund Burke, was a multi-sensory affair. Burke highlighted the power and importance of sound when experiencing the sublime, while other eighteenth-century writers and artists also drew attention to the sonic aspects of the theory.
This paper will explore the Indian Widow by Wright, as an example of both the elemental sublime and an implied sublime soundscape. Considering the painting through the lens of implied sound offers new ways of accessing the elemental power captured within the image, encouraging the viewer to think of landscapes and elemental forces as appealing to multiple senses. Depictions of volcanoes as the ultimate encapsulation of the sublime, and what role sound played in this, will be examined, as well as how considering such implied noise can create new meanings within the study of visual culture. For example, what does the suggested silence of the Indian Widow, in the face of such elemental violence, reveal about her character, race and gender? Additionally, reading implied sound into the image increases its emotional power, inspiring feelings of fear, grief and awe, echoing the ability of Burke’s sublime sounds. In examining the importance of implied sound, noise and silence within the elemental sublime, my paper builds on both art history and sound studies to offer a new way of thinking about Wright’s Indian Widow.
Colton Klein, Yale University
Memories Traced in Liquid: Polluted Water and Real Photo Postcards
Despite the recent material turn in photography studies, which has generatively mined the metals and minerals that compose the photographic image, little attention has been paid to the central role of water in the history of photography. In his “Memoire on the Heliograph,” French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce described the role of water as “no less important” than all other steps involved in producing the first photograph in 1827. Yet, as the photographer Jeff Wall lamented in his 1989 essay “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” the technological shift from film to digital displaced the “memory-trace” of water in photography, altering our historical consciousness of the medium. In this paper, I take a water-centric approach to studying two mid- twentieth-century real photo postcards of Clear Lake, a mercury- and pesticide-contaminated lake in Northern California. Printed by local photo studios, both postcards would have been developed, rinsed, fixed, and washed with polluted tap water—pumped from Clear Lake— paradoxically intended to remove latent chemicals. How might thinking with this encounter offer the possibility for a renewed perception of the relationship between photography and ecology? How can recognizing the postcards’ potential for circulation beyond delimited geographies challenge colonial conceptions of the extractive zone as a locally contained and racially devalued sink? This paper follows the memory-traces of water and mercury—classical and chemical elements—in two real photo postcards to resurface submerged perspectives on settler colonial capitalism, extractive industry, and environmental toxicity at Clear Lake.
Xiaoyao Guo, Princeton University
Glacializing Landscape: Ice and the Way out of the Anthropocene
This paper ventures an elemental reading of glacial landscapes featured in the contemporary art scene in response to climate crisis and ecological exigency. It mobilizes the element of ice—as both milieu and matter—to assert as well as complicate the underlying relationality embedded within the representation of landscape, thus envisioning new modes of engaging with the concept beyond the Anthropocene.
Rich in both artistic and scientific representations across time and space, the glacial has long been a prominent topos associated with imperial-colonial discourse and ethnographical-cartographical practice and has re-emerged in recent decades due to its material sensitivity to anthropogenic activities, which reveals the second life of glaciers as unstable and transient object. Representations of glacial landscapes, I argue, become thus the exemplary site to observe the clash between various scales as well as the tensional entanglement between bios and geos in the age of the Anthropocene. Picking up on the recent elemental turn, I treat ice as both milieu and matter through which to displace anthropogenic biases within both conceptual and representational apparatus. Reading artworks by Julian Charrière, Pierre Huyghe, Joachim Koester, among others, I first foreground the fundamental “negativity” of the glacial beyond human category; however, it is through techniques called for by such alterity that the glacial is “mediated” ambivalently into human knowledge and experience.
Hence, glacial(izing) landscape productively reflects upon the nature of landscape as assemblage encompassing various sensibilities and positionalities. To represent landscape, then, demands us to examine the various modes of elemental entanglement, be they collaborative or antagonistic.
Ella Dawn McGeough, School for the Arts, University of Saskatchewan
Quicksilver: Memorial for the Present is the Future of the Past
Mercury’s quicksilver is rising— “It’s hot and it’s getting hotter,” sounds the cry of academics, scientists, and local meteorologists alike. As with social and environmental upheavals of the 1960s and 70s that expanded sculpture beyond the gallery into the landscape, our current period of massive change has initiated a desire for radical refigurings of artistic practice. However, progressive concern for the social, ecological, and decolonial politics of land use has moved artists of my generation to trouble problematics oft associated with Land Art, particularly its emphasis on cultural emptiness.
To reflect both ethical constraints and continuing possibilities of land-based practice, this multi- media presentation applies speculative strategies to conceptualize a large-scale installation intended to endure deep-time scales (10,000+years) across multiple terrains, which communicates both warning-sign and message of radical relationality. While intentionally unrealizable, the project offers a proposal for artistic agency available within the imaginative space of science-fiction, outside the bounds of material reality.
Guided by mercury’s many manifestations, this presentation follows logics of connection and paths of association towards a contingent future still to come. Content combines mythic symbols of Mercury, Roman deity of communication, commerce, and guide to the underworld; ongoing issues of mercury poisoning, which have devastated Indigenous communities like the Asubpeeschoseewagong (Grassy Narrows) First Nation; the pivotal link between the planet Mercury’s eccentric elliptical orbit and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity; the cultural phenomenon of mercury retrograde as a deflection of personal accountability towards astrological events; and, crucially, mercury’s elemental capacity to gauge temperature change.