SPLEEN
(2011)
Looking at art from over the course of the last several hundred years, from the early Renaissance through to the invention of photography, one sees how depicted scenes of nature become landscapes - actual places, identified in time. Nature, an ideal, becomes landscape, a reality.
Photography is the perfect medium for presenting a landscape. Inherently real, it organizes space and records time.
But once landscape comes to be seen as a construct, nature again emerges as a separate concept. Nature is now the reality, while landscape becomes but a way of representing it.
How does one photograph the reality of nature without the distancing of landscape?
The Gowanus canal is a cut into the urban space dating back to the heyday of Industrialization. In this detritus of modernity it is hard to distinguish between the constructed and the natural, between landscape and nature.
These images try to develop an alternative code of representation of nature, one that does not rely on the usual structuring of landscape. The immediacy of the photograph emphasizes textures, volumes, and lines. These are frontal but not centered compositions. They are not subject-oriented photographs. They avoid temporalities of light and movement, avoid effects of perspective or foreshortening, vanishing points, horizons.
The video LANDSCAPE WITH CALM (AND TRASH) accompanies this work. The title refers to Nicolas Poussin's painting. The film is structured in 13 segments, as in James Benning's film 13 LAKES. Filmed on the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, NY, in the fall of 2011. 34 minutes.