Transitory Existence
Dorothy
Cross
An Environmentalist or Humanist-Naturalist?
by
Luchia Meihua Lee-Howell
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Vías túas, Dómine, demónstra míhi: et sémitas túas édoce me.
Glória Pátri, et Fílio, et Spirítui Sáncto. Sicut erat in princípio, et nunc, et semper, et in saécula saeculórum. Amen[1]
“It is extremely likely that human influence
has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth
century…Global Mean Sea Level will continue to rise throughout the 21st
century” - From Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis [2]
Introduction
Ecology is the science of the relationship between the organism and its environments[3] hence human ecology should involve a partnership between human culture and the physical conditions of life. This leads to enunciating contemporary artistic response to observed anthropogenic challenges to the environment. The question remains: can the link between artistic practice and the environment be adumbrated? Is art degenerated or dehumanized in the modern and contemporary era by disengagement from the most advanced consciousness of its time? The current essay is an attempt to address this question.
This essay proceeds by selecting works of Irish artist Dorothy Cross to investigate the pertinence of contemporary art in reaction to nature and the environment. The probe here is not chronological and does not celebrate the beauty of nature or laud the charming or romantic; rather, it investigates self and society, from which environmental awareness must spring. Giannachi writes that Eco-artists have tended to adopt one or more of three strategies: representations, performance environments, and interventions in a delineating the outlines of the practice of Eco-art[4]. Dorothy Cross has pursued representation and performance. She extends her creativity to natural, collaborative, generative, anthropologic and futuristic visions in exploration of the contradictory mechanisms of our environment. Arguably, her art in raising the consciousness of her viewers may participate in mitigation as well.
This research paper investigates this subject by using resources such as artist talks, lectures, seminars, exhibition catalogues, as well as viewing the actual art in museums, current scientific and environmental exhibitions, and the National Irish Visual Art Library archive. Moreover, secondary resources used include historical books on land art, nature, landscape, or Eco-art, digital resource, conversations with museum staff, scientific exhibitions on environment, and the scientific evidence on climate change. Therefore, it is possible to lay a scientific foundation for Eco-art, and discuss the work of Dorothy Cross in terms of environmentalism and naturalism.
Ecological Art and Dorothy Cross
Glassilaun snow peak (2014) is
the view that greets Irish artist Dorothy Cross every morning. Much of her work
material is from the environment presided over by this mountain - dead whales,
wrecked boats, dead birds, fish, and other elements from the ocean. It is an exquisite and sacred scenery which is reflective of Cross’s multifaceted exploration of the interconnection between humans and the natural world. She relocates, refigures and reassembles nature to give new perspectives and meanings.
There is an
opposition between anthropocentrism and eco-centrism.[5]
We acknowledge that art has expanded the discourse from humans as the central
actors of the universe to the importance of all life. As humans, we are
confronted with a transitory existence that is relative to the world when we
arrived. Dorothy Cross uses her personal life experience to explore the
relationship between herself and environment, and furthermore to express her
concerns about the surroundings.
To further
discuss environmental subject and Eco-art presentation, if as Giannachi claimed
this art must have aesthetic, social and political value,[6] is Dorothy Cross an Eco-centric artist? Is
she an Environmentalist[7]
or a humanist-naturalist[8],
or might she inhabit another ambiguous area? To answer these questions,
consider the following grouping of some of her art.1. Visual communication and mobilization, via performance, and site specific works – Chiasm, Poll Na Bpeist, Ghost Ship, and Tea Cup
2. Everlasting and transit: to discuss the shark that Cross uses often and the existence of heart Everest Shark, Shark-Heart Submarine, and Foxglove, digitalis purpurea.
3. Wild to wise-Human consciousness: addressing human awareness in Tabernacle and Currach; Antarctica and Scale.
Visual communication and mobilization in environmental performance
Poll Na Bpeist and Chiasm, Ghost Ship and Teacup
Nigel Stewart and Giannachi claim “nature can only be appropriated by means of performance”[9] or studied in terms of performativity. Diverging from the Land Art[10] imperative to make art work using the earth, in Poll Na Bpeist (2008) and Chiasm (1999), Dorothy Cross followed the geography of nature or a dated human-built. In both works, the performers - Cross herself (Poll Na Bpeist) or the two singers (Chiasm) - changed, but the natural spectacle remained the same. Humans are part of nature’s scenery, of the change of seasons, of oceans moving following the moon.
Poll Na Bpeist (Worm Hole) from 2008 was a recorded action reacting to the spectacular scenery in western Ireland. Cross did not merely photograph it; she jumped into the water and had herself filmed while floating in the Poll Na Bpeist to dramatize human insignificance. In rising tides and stormy weather, sea water thunders dangerously into the pool, eroded from a limestone mass. In viewing this spectacular landscape as a whole, the swimmer is a tiny object within nature, dwarfed by the water, stone, and gigantic surroundings. This piece showcases human limitation. Cross has often expressed her hate of this limitation. [11]
We tend to admit that nature is part of culture, and must be interpreted with the parameters of culture.[12] Cross gives nature a presence in her work, and the connection she established between Poll Na Bpeist and Chiasm aptly demonstrates her contextualization of it in culture. Cross noticed that outdoor Irish handball courts – popular in the 1950s and 60s, but now abandoned and, one might even say, endangered like the shark - have nearly the same dimensions as the Poll Na Bpeist. For Chiasm, she projected footage from Poll Na Bpeist on the floor of each court. This natural image of the surging water and the precipitous drop into the Poll Na Bpeist paradoxically lent an unearthly air to the handball courts. Cross invited two opera singers to join her performance. She placed one singer in each handball court, directing them to move about the court at random while singing. This symbolized both possibility and lack of relationship, since had they arrived simultaneously at the door connecting the two handball courts, they could have met, but in fact the two singers did not meet. [13] The projected waves roll in and out, the singers walking through them, the scene changing at every moment, emphasizing the unpredictability of relationships between people and their surroundings.
Dorothy Cross epitomizes the search for a new vantage on this precarious subject, and focuses on the struggle to redefine, or bring to a more acute awareness, the relationship between humans and nature. Her perspective is not patently political, let alone dogmatic; scientific alarms have been filtered through artistic sensibility to reflect social and aesthetic considerations.
Humans always return to the search for the eternal. While it never exists in the impermanent human material world, we might find some images to be clearer, while others are a jumble of memories from several lives. In Teacup(1997) and Ghost Ship (1999), nature is in mobilization, while one ship is gigantic on a vast ocean, and another miniature landscape in a teacup as daily life.
Ghost Ship dealt with the themes of time and its passage, in a context more personal to the artist. Cross located a ship that her father had photographed. She painted it with phosphorous so that the ship glowed eerily at night. It was a creation of ghost phenomena, and alive in a different way. After a two-week display in Dublin harbor, the ship was junked as originally planned. Only a small model and video projection survive. Ghost Ship appeared and disappeared in a doomed light while painted with a gradually fading phosphorescence, which points up the tenuous and weakening relationship with the past. Also using a nautical theme, Teacup shows a projection into a dainty cup placed on a saucer of a segment from Robert Flaherty’s film ‘Man of Aran.’ The video showed a currach struggling in dangerous water. The film suggested that sharks were still hunted by this means, providing a link to Cross’s other work. This miniature waterscape revisits the relationship between nature and humans. Both these art works on water represent another historical transit. The artist took part in a journey across the sea. The fusion with time, landscape and participants made the works remarkable.
Cross’s complex exploration of the connection between humans and the natural world plays with material, relationship and time, illustrating the artist’s ongoing compulsion to explore new perspectives and points of view, and take part in both historical and literary discourse.
Wild to Wise:
Human consciousness
Everest Shark and Shark-Heart Submarine, Foxglove: digitalis
purpurea and Sapiens
Historical
excavation of ecological or land relevancy uncovers a current that runs through
the 20th and 21st century concept of Eco-art and its presentation
elements. Initially this took the form either of art that harmonized with the
natural environment like Carl Andre’s Stone
Field Sculpture (1977) or
Cross’s Poll Na Bpeist, or presented a stark intrusion into
the land like Richard Serra‘s Schunnemunk
Fork (1991). More recently, it has
involved politically correct art in action to proclaim the danger to the land
and to creatures. [cf Switzerland, Aletsch Glacier, for which Spencer Tunick posed
600 naked models on a Swiss glacier.] Arguably, such polemical events are
ineffective both artistically and politically.
According to
Weintraub, ’Eco art stands out from the din of environmental warnings, policies
and campaigns with its content enriched by artistic imagination and its
strategies.’ Dorothy Cross has edged closest to
this in her various works involving the endangered shark, as best demonstrated
by Everest Shark (2013) and Shark-Heart Submarine (2011). These two artworks recall the
characterization of environmental art as not resembling studio practices and
not necessarily involving art professionals.[14]
Cross’s way of dealing with material from nature by reforming it into an art
work is another way of performance emphasizing immersion and experience, thus
participating in Giannachi’s second and third categories.
Everest Shark was
originally made for an exhibition in Croft Castle, Shropshire. “It’s close to
Darwin country. Excavations nearby showed that the site had once been part of
the ocean floor,” commented the artist. Cross obtained, from a fishmonger, a
two-metre blue shark which she had recast. Cross said of her materials: “The
shore, and the things you find along it, including things washed up, broken and
dead.” Surmounted on the bronze cast of
the shark is a scale model of Mount Everest.
The first sharks evolved approximately 400 million years ago; modern
sharks developed 100 million years ago; and Everest emerged about 60 million
years ago. The back of the shark has been altered to support a range of
mountains, and upon closer inspection we can see the texture and ribs of the
Himalayas. The green of the mountain in Everest
Shark has faded as time has passed. As Cross said: “It is the relationship
of time and earth.” This work also comments
on the relationship between life and the physical geography of the earth.
A striking
and unsettling expression of concept is encapsulated in Shark Heart Submarine. A paint-spattered
19th century easel cradles
the sleek form of a nuclear submarine. She commissioned a model of a submarine,
gilded in white gold, a sleek, seductive but menacing object. There’s a drawer
built into the belly of the craft, and in the drawer is a shark heart – from an
accidental catch off the Irish coast – in a glass specimen jar. It’s a rather
magical, surreal piece: Cross enclosed a message of love for the earth in this
symbol of war. This piece was exhibited at Turner Contemporary amid
paintings by Turner and Constable. Cross views the gallery as another
landscape.
Continuing
the cardiac theme, turn now to Digitalis
purpurea. Extracted from the Foxglove plant, a native of Ireland, digitalis
is used to treat heart disease. But great care is required, since only a slight
increment from a therapeutic dose yields a fatal one. Foxglove: digitalis
purpurea, Cross’s first web-based
art piece, was launched 5 December 2005 on the website of the Dia Foundation. In
it, a child narrates the foxglove story and is supported by images juxtaposing
the flower and the girl’s blue eye – playing on the blue vision caused by
overdoses of digitalis - and a bee flying into the finger-shape flower in quest
of pollen. Cross mines from this intriguing floral subject a nostalgic, exotic,
and mysterious atmosphere.
Sapiens (2011) is rhetoric and expresses the vicissitudes of life or society. Made after her trip to New Ireland, this human skull, cast and mounted on a tripod, is an instrument of discovery, potential, imaging, and death - without indication of gender. While Land art started mainly as male territory, there are female artists in this field, such as Anna Mendiata (1948-85), who engaged with earth or soil or tree in a ritual way to express her concern for mother earth. Fran Cottell’s collaborative performance Passing Through (1987) involved one hundred women on a canal in the East End of London. The fusion with time, landscape and female participants made this work break through the categories. [15]
Another
female artist using found objects is Mierle Laderman Ukeles.[16]
Ukeles, since 1977 Artist in Residence at the New York City Department of
Sanitation, invites us to reconsider indispensable urban systems and the
workers who maintain them. Yet, she
follows a divergent path, since her objects are only rarely and accidentally
taken from nature. Cross occupies the role of nature maintenance artist. Cross intended to bring awareness of the low
cultural status of maintenance work, same tasks that she would perform in her
daily life, including entertaining guests.
To understand
the relation between humanity and nature, one must highlight sustainability,
ecological footprints, and the dichotomy of anthropocentrism vs. eco-centrism
as central tenets. There are numerous art works that intend to create a
permanence of mass industrial production. They participate in anti-Eco-art by consuming
maintenance and energy.
3. Transit Everlasting
Tabernacle and Currach, Antarctica and
Scale
We relentlessly confront the requisites of
art and culture; our society glories in free choice, with more individuality
and less reliance on institutions. Schapiro wrote:
“Diderot
anticipates a dilemma of artists today. They wish to be free creators,
unconfined by any goal external to art, but they wish to participate in the
most advanced consciousness of their society and to influence it by their
work.”[17]
The
consequent question is whether art should or can be separate from society. When
we dismissed the white cube, the rest of the world become endlessly available. [18]
And real life came to provide reference to art materials. Existence regarding
the environment regenerates a parameter of relationship between life and
society.
Dorothy
Cross’s work is a free expression of her nature. Fundamentally, her sources,
materials used in environmental art are only be performed once. Upon returning
from a journey to the South Pacific island of New Ireland, Currach (2013) was developed. It shows an upside down boat and bird
symbolically remapping tribal culture.
In Currach, the placement of an
upside down boat over a flying gannet was a direct death cry, born of the
anxiety of our day. Nature and culture both are being destroyed by humans.
On her trip
to the New Ireland, she found natives living between ocean and forest. A unique
ritual of the islanders is shark calling. They use rattles and
John
William Lindt took an old photograph entitled Mourners and Dead House at Kalo, New
Guinea, 1885.[19]. Cross’s
upside down currach bears some resemblance to the death house of Lindt’s
photograph. An echo of this mourning is found in Currach. Cross has highlighted
the painful process of cultural change consequent upon the inevitable
separation from nature of western “civilization.” (Lindt 1885)
In Cross’s
multi-disciplinary projects, she reinterprets the sense of the term “Tribe” .
Nowadays, the definition has already transformed to apply to a wider group,
defined by ethnicity, national origin, language etc. Her program focuses on
underlining the diversity of life in and fostering interactivity with the
community on environmental subjects.
Cross
supports the goal of environmental movement, and is engaged in and believes in
the philosophy of environmentalism. For she seeks to improve and protect the
natural environment through change of harmful human activities. And she is a
naturalist, by definition, one that advocates or practices naturalism. She
takes action based on natural desires and instincts to make her art work.As with Currach, Cross again pairs installation with video in Tabernacle (2007). The installation in
Tabernacle, is similarly surmounted by a damaged, reversed currach. A bottle of holy water dangles
by a string from the prow of the currach. Tabernacle’s video shows tidal water in a cave. Tabernacles
host something tribal and sacred. The time, sound, and physical presence of people tend to be
subordinate elements to the natural environment. Cross said about this piece, “It’s a place where the
body can reside, I think … The cave and the boat: spaces that preserve and protect life. Also,
perhaps, metaphors for the body itself.”[20]
By questioning the role
of the artist in a world of environmental and cultural change, Cross seeks to
give humans back their place in nature. Her love of botany, zoology and science
led her to conduct new works on New Ireland and in Antarctica. Her bronze
sculpture Conglomerate (2010) functions
as warning signal[21].
Powerful
questions accompany melting icebergs, indicative of dangerous water crises.
Dorothy Cross has found the conditions for art in extreme conditions. Her Antarctica (2005) is the negative of a black-and-white
film showing deep sea divers in the clear waters of Antarctica. It was prepared
for the open submission exhibition Crystalline[22] (Dec 2012 – Jan 2-13), timed to coincide
with the exploration of sub-glacial Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica. (exhibition, Crystalline 1 Dec 2012 - 26 Jan 2013 2013)
In an
exhibition entitled “View”, Cross displayed a new vision, especially in a piece
called Scales (2014). She took the right and left portions
of a skull, and made them into scales, filling them with meteorites. The human
skull was gilded in gold leaf. Cross’s
meaning is that humans came from heaven, and are born to the earth and creation.[23]
“I like the word ‘belief.’ In general when people say ‘I know’ they don’t
know, they believe… to live is to believe; that is my belief, at any rate.”[24] A wonderland only exists
in its own time and space. It might suggest a tranquility of spirit. A fertile
imagination makes a flower grow in the middle of a concrete floor, an ancient
goddess transform to a modern working lady, or pervades a forest with the
metaphysical, purifying the soul and spreading harmony.
Conclusion
Bring a
contemporary art historical viewpoint to comprehend this complex environmental subject,
nowadays a global issue for us all as transitory creatures needing to be aware
of planetary sustainability. To reinterpret
Cross’s core value, we underline her reaction to address mindfulness of nature through
her works so as to pay more
attention to the surrounding crises.
Taken as a
whole, these three groups of artworks elucidate the interconnection between the
mindset, physical body, nature’s landscape, culture diversity and dynamism of
society. Cross takes her place as
practitioner of Eco-centric art to create works that construct a symbolic
journey in language and materials. Thoreau wrote in “The Enchanter” how
immersing oneself in nature is the only way one can answer two simple yet
indispensable questions without the influence of certain aspects of culture:
how much is enough and how do I know what I want? He felt only in nature could
one truly hear one’s own heart, divorced from the influence of cultural voices.
The rituals and ceremonies and symbolic nature of Eco-Art act as a doorway back
into both nature and the natural voice of the individual and group – freed of
the programming of capitalist and consumer culture. From this, is not Dorothy
Cross a humanist-naturalist environmentalist?
Images list
Works by Dorothy Cross:
- Glassilaun Snow Peak
- Chiasm
- Poll Na Bpeist
- Ghost Ship
- Teacup
- Everest Shark
- Shark-Heart Submarine
- Ghost Ship
- Sapiens
- Tabernacle
- Currach
- Antarctica
- Scale
- Conglomerate II
Other reference images:
15. John William Lindt, Mourners and Dead House at Kalo, New Guinea, 1885. 100 x 131 cm
16. Spencer Tunick, Switzerland, Aletsch Glacier (Greenpeace) 2007.
17. Carl Andre, Field Sculpture, 1977, constructed Stone in Hartford, Connecticut,
18. Richard Serra, Schunnemunk Fork, 1990-1991.
19. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980.
20. Fran Cottell, Passing Through, 1987
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[1] From
a video showing stunning pictures of wild animals. Latin translation: “Make
your ways known unto me, O Lord, and teach me your paths. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and
to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world
without end. Amen.” (Introit Antiphons - Traditional
Catholic Latin Mass Hymns 2011)
[2] IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change
2013: the Physical Science Basis written and published by IPCC
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published January 2014. (IPCC 2013)
[4] (G. Giannachi 2012) page 125.
Representation involves visualization and communication. Performance
Environment emphasizes immersion and experience; interventions include
mitigation and behavioral change.
[7] An
environmentalist is a supporter of the goals of the environmental movement,
"a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the
quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful
human activities". An environmentalist is engaged in or believes in the
philosophy of environmentalism. “Environmentalism claims that living things
other than humans, and the natural environment as a whole, are deserving of
consideration in reasoning about the morality of political, economic, and
social policies.” (Elliott 1998)
Environmentalists are sometimes referred to using
informal or derogatory terms such as "greenie" and
"tree-hugger".
[8]
Definition of NATURALISM from Merriam Webster:
1: action, inclination, or thought based only on
natural desires and instincts
2: a theory denying that an event or object has a
supernatural significance; specifically : the doctrine that scientific laws are
adequate to account for all phenomena
3: realism in art or literature; specifically : a
theory or practice in literature emphasizing scientific observation of life
without idealization and often including elements of determinism
[10]
Land Art is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Also known as
Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks. Generally the works on site
specific in the nature environments, and use the materials from earth. The
works temp to be erode when time passed. It centered
on rejection of the commercialization of art-making and enthusiasm with an
emergent ecological movement.
[11] “It’s
about limitation, and we’re all limited. It’s the biggest frustration, in a
way, I feel, being a human being, as well as an artist. As much as you try to
break out of that plane, you are always held within it.” Cross in conversation
with Sarah Glennie, Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Filmed at the
National Gallery of Ireland on 6 February 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmGl4L_N4bY&index=7&list=PLj72-Jqud8Cv82Kz7lSl0MDmYkmhb8XHA,
accessed 7 December 2017.
[12] (Futurenatural: nature/science/culture 2013) p3 Performing
Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts Gabriella Giannachi and Nigel
Stewart, (Editors) 2005 London and New York Peter Lang p 20
A large scale collaborative arts event
the project was part of a residency process of performance workshops, rowing
practice and lunches with local community groups
Image source:
http://www.francottell.com/artwork/passing-through
[16] Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation
Performance, 1979-1980. Citywide performance with 8,500 Sanitation workers
across all 59 New York City Sanitation districts. Courtesy of Ronald
Feldman Fine Arts, photo: Robin Holland.
[18]
Kaprow discussed the line of happening between theory and production, “The line between art and life should be kept
as fluid, and perhaps indistinct.” Allan Kaprow (b 1927.) ‘From
Assemblages, Environments and Happenings.’
(Kaprow 2003)
pp.717-719
[19] In
1885, photographer John William Lindt (1845-1926) accompanied Sir Peter
Scratchley's expedition to the newly-proclaimed Protectorate of British New
Guinea. In 1887 he a book entitled Picturesque New Guinea. An historical
introduction and supplementary chapters on the manners and customs of the
Papuans accompanied fifty full-page autotype illustrations from negatives of
portraits from life and groups and landscapes.
[22] “The
exhibition incorporates pieces submitted through Open Submission and by
invitation, and the work explores the twin themes of scientific endeavour and
the landscape of Antarctica, the latter of which has proved unfalteringly
seductive to artists. Working in various disciplines the artists represented in
Crystalline cover many facets of Antarctic exploration, teasing out aspects of
the barren terrain, seemingly devoid of colour, sound and life, and the
inverted sub-glacial landscape below the surface.” In 1959 the Antarctic
Treaty was signed making the entire continent a science reserve and ensuring
that no one country could claim sovereignty. Antarctica may therefore be
viewed as the world’s largest living laboratory.
https://www.artrabbit.com/events/crystalline
[23]
In the lecture, she talks about parentship being important to her, and this
brings her to searching from the birth to the human body and gender. (First up; Dorothy Cross, Visual Artist 2015)
[24] “Given”
Eric Cameron. p. 6, quoting Marcel
Duchamp in conversation with James Johnson Sweeney.
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