Inverted Landscapes
Candice Hopkins and Lucía Sanromán
Art is the art of affect more than representation, a system of
dynamized and impacting forces rather than a system of unique
images that function under the regime of signs.1
–Elizabeth Grosz
The earliest known landscape painting was recently rediscovered. It is a large color mural
that was painted on a clay wall some 8,600 years ago in a settlement in central Turkey.
While abstract—at least to our eyes—the land represented in the mural is clearly
demarcated into separate plots carved out of the fertile soil at the base of an active
volcano.2 This early image of subdivided land suggests even earlier origins for the
complex relations between land, landscape, territory, and trade.
For the current exhibition, the landscape of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is our starting
point. New Mexico has a layered past; it was first, and remains, Native American land,
before becoming a Spanish kingdom, a Mexican province, and a territory of the United
States––all before statehood. These identities do not form a linear historical trajectory;
they are rife with the contradictions, ambiguities, and brief moments of clarity that
emerge from the unequal bond between time and history. But history is always written
1
Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Cosmos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 3.
2
See Axel K. Schmitt, Martin Danišík, Erkan Aydar, Erdai Şen, İnan Ulusoy, and Oscar M.
Lovera,“Identifying the Volcanic Eruption Depicted in a Neolithic Painting at Çatalhöyük,
Central Anatolia, Turkey,” PLOS ONE online, January 8, 2014.
1
from a dominant perspective. Along with forging open understandings of landscape, in
this project we seek to make room for lesser-known narratives, and to complicate easy
associations between place, perception, and the development of knowledge.
Social and economic relations, as well as relationships to power, permeate both
land and landscape. Landscape is not a neutral phenomenon, but a device framed by the
particular perspective from which it is seen. There is nothing stable about this familiar
subject, and there is a difference between the spaces we inhabit and the natural
environment, and a difference between the experience of the land that constitutes a place
and “place” as a site of memory and affection.
Art historian James Elkins describes the failure of Western philosophical and
theoretical traditions to represent an embodied experience; these traditions have
historically separated the self from engagement with its own perceptions in order to
support the vexed notion of objectivity and critical distance. In this essay, we are not
interested in disputing methodologies or discussing the troubled estrangement of the
Western gaze. Instead, we wish to address how landscape is used as an alibi to cover up a
culturally specific ways of seeing. This alibi, in our view, is built on the systematic
degradation, dispossession, and dissolution of the land and of the self that is endemic to
the West and to European culture. Many of the artists in Unsettled Landscapes present a
different view, making clear the subjective nature of picturing the land, while at the same
time, bringing forward other perceptions of it that emerge from an art history where
landscape has never functioned as an alibi—within Inuit art for example—or deliberately
disrupt this idea in order to reveal its mechanics.
2
The “Othering” of the land and those directly associated with it—including
indigenous people, indentured farm workers, and other agricultural laborers—is
fundamental to this process. The Western worldview creates a type of selfhood that is
primarily invested in the desubjectification of experience in order to facilitate the
management of (seemingly) inert, passive bodies that support the processes of production
and consumption prevalent in late capitalism. With this in mind, our question is not what
is landscape, but rather, how is landscape used to support particular social values, values
that prioritize certain kinds of experiences and forms of knowledge over others? In other
words, how does landscape function as a device or a social apparatus?
In revealing how landscape acts as a social apparatus, the works in Unsettled
Landscapes show how the act of picturing gives form and shapes to specific
subjectivities.3 A number of artists in the exhibition deconstruct the genre of landscape
painting to work within the cracks and fissures that result. For a few of the artists in this
exhibition, these fissures offer the opportunity to put forward decolonial perspectives that
redress history and give voice to the indigenous people of the Americas. Sometimes
deploying politically involved and even activist strategies, these artists are conscious of
the ecological toll paid by national and multinational economies that use the wholesale
trade of land as a form of capital. Others, however, do not foreground a political position,
utilizing observation itself as a strategy for the creation of their work as well as its
presentation. The audience, now witness, views the slow drip of a gradually melting
The process of representation or “picturing” historically has been associated with an indexical
relationship between the object and its image; in addition, representation and picturing have been
used as forms of communication. However, in this essay, we take the view that “picturing” gives
form to subjectivities in a very direct way, both capturing and influencing worldviews that are
culturally specific and invested equally in image as in power.
3
3
Chilean glacier, for example, or the plant and animal life of the Amazonian jungle
overtake a failed American rubber-processing plant.
Landscape as Genre
1. Landscape is not a genre of art but a medium.4
–W. J. T. Mitchell
Our early thinking around this exhibition was indebted to W. J. T. Mitchell’s important
book Landscape and Power, a critical account of assumptions regarding landscape
painting within European art history. Mitchell argues that the genre, rather than marking
the emergence of a “new way of seeing” in the West as posited by earlier theorists and
historians, instead responds to and gives form to imperialist impulses.5 Mitchell’s
disarticulation of landscape as proof of a specific and “new” form of detached, objective
European subjectivity, and his positioning of landscape as a cipher of imperialistic desire
and projection on the land, has informed our exhibition. The European landscape genre
is, therefore, invested in a specific cultural inscription that positions the Western gaze as
conforming that which it confronts—by counting and describing the natural resources
See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape” (1994), Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5.
5
Mitchell questions the following assumptions: first, the genre of landscape is a modern
phenomenon; second, it emerged in Northern Europe in the seventeenth century and reached its
peak in the nineteenth century; and third, the emergence of the genre of landscape painting that
both marks and responds to a “new way of seeing.” He argues that Chinese landscape painting
preceded European examples, and connects the landscape “way of seeing” to an imperial
agenda also present in the European model. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 170.
4
4
available in a specific parcel, for example—and that by definition reorganizes nature to
transform it into a resource.
Several artists in Unsettled Landscapes unfold and dismantle the visual
conventions of European landscape painting to uncover its biases and pictorial systems.
Yishai Jusidman’s series Astronomer, 1990–95, explores the relationship between sight,
the construction of three-dimensional space, and Albertian perspective. He aptly turns the
device of seeing—the eye—onto itself by wrapping the two-dimensional picture plane
around a sphere, quoting historical paintings by the Mexican José Maria Velasco, the
Briton John Constable, and the Frenchman Claude Monet. Jusidman literally reshapes
these quotations to reveal the contrived historical construction of the gaze.
Bending, doubling, and mirroring are also employed by Daniel Joseph Martinez,
who inserts distorted images into the imagined space of painting in work that, at the same
time, recuperates the temporal and gestural structures of 1960s mail art. His installation
She could See Russia from Her House, Those who wish for peace should prepare for
war!—Old Sasquatch Proverb (In search of the Tribe Called Sasquatch, or who really
built the Alaskan Oil Pipeline) 16 Communiqués and found photographs from traveling
the length and breath of Alaska during the month of August, 2009, 2010, includes sixteen
postcards he gathered during a month-long residency in Alaska, where he followed the
route of a pipeline. His interests are not simply to address the gaze of art history––
Martinez also deftly exposes the interests and pressures of oil and water industries in
Alaska and the far north.
5
Mitchell has provocatively recast landscape as a “medium of cultural expression
in which cultural values are encoded.”6 While he sees the genre as primarily expressing
imperial desire, for artists working today landscape is a site of agency; they challenge the
idea of land and nature as objects to parcel and commodify. Artworks like those by
Leandro Katz and Kent Monkman emphasize the process of decolonization, particularly
as it relates to the Americas—the creation and circulation of images that reveal more of
the ideologies of their makers than the land and people they represent. Katz and
Monkman expose the false hierarchy situating European over other aesthetic practices in
the development of modernism, and reject a comparable hierarchy regarding race and
culture perpetuated in early anthropological studies.
By foregrounding phenomenological experiences and situational approaches in
the knowledge of land and place, some artists also challenge capitalist paradigms.
Shuvinai Ashoona makes obsessively attentive drawings of the place she inhabits in the
Canadian Arctic: Cape Dorset, Nunavut. Disorienting in their detail, her drawings
provide both a highly subjective cartography and an external mapping of a terrain.
Likewise, Irene Kopelman takes on the conventions of art making and the categorization
of nature through scientific observation in a series of nine drawings she made during a
research trip to Antarctica. Kopelman documented what she was able to draw in the
minutes before her hands were incapacitated by extreme cold.7 Perception is taken in a
different direction by Florence Miller Pierce, whose elegant spatial abstractions capture
ephemeral moments of half-seeing, as if through fog or snow.
6
7
Mitchell,“Imperial Landscape,” 14.
Kopelman spent a total of twenty-six days drawing and painting in this environment.
6
Together, these works perform a double function: some make evident the device
of painting and forms of framing, paying particular attention to how painting has
structured the experience of nature in the past; for others, the medium itself is a means of
expressing embodied knowledge, highly attuned to the body’s movement, limitations,
and apprehensions.
Landscape as Territory
Territories seem to exist at all times and in all geographical
contexts: there is no sense of a history of the concept.8
–Stuart Elden
How landscape functions as an alibi is perhaps nowhere more evident than in relation to
territory. Territory as an idea is formed at the moment when the land as commons—that
is, something that belongs not to an individual but to the collective—is replaced with the
idea of land as a commodity—something that is owned. As an “area controlled by a
certain kind of power,” territory is both a juridico-political and geographical notion.9
With the conceptual shift from land to territory, space becomes bounded and controlled.
Like geography, which “grew up in the shadow of the military,” territory has a dark
cast.10
8
Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 5.
Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” trans. Colin Gordon, in Jeremy Crampton and
Stuart Elden, eds., Space, Knowledge and Power (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007), 176.
9
10
Ibid.
7
In tracing the origins of inequality in Western European society, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau outlines a generative association between the emergence of civil society and
the concept of private property:
The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land [enclosé un terrain],
thought of saying this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe
him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars,
murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been
spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch,
had shouted to his kind: beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost
if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the Earth [la
Terre] belongs to no one.11
In this statement, the contradictions of civil society are evident: for Rousseau, all the
miseries and horrors of humankind spill out from the initial act of fencing off a plot of
land and convincing others that it is “owned.”
Once borders are drawn, they are often maintained by conflict and force. The
Arctic, one of the most remote and least populated places on Earth, is the subject of a
simmering territorial dispute that some have called the “Warm War,” a struggle between
circumpolar nations over mineral and oil resources and the control of shipping routes,
which will soon be open year-round because of melting sea ice and warmer temperatures.
Kevin Schmidt’s A Sign in the Northwest Passage, 2010, is literally what its title
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality,” in The
Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), ii.
11
8
suggests: a large wooden sign on which the artist carved apocalyptic statements from the
Book of Revelations. He then set his construction afloat in the cold waters of the
Northwest Passage, where it floats like a marker of dark times to come.
Despite the presence of the military and its technologies, the Arctic has “little if
no history of active combat.”12 Nevertheless, a process of militarization began during the
Cold War, a period when the Canadian Forces Station Alert in Alert, Nunavut, played a
critical role in surveillance efforts. In the 1950s, Alert, the most northern continually
inhabited settlement on Earth, was transformed from a weather station into a spy base.
Charles Stankievech’s installation The Soniferous Aether: The Land Beyond the Land
Beyond, 2013, is filmed at Alert, a place so remote that it extends beyond Inuit traditional
territories. In the film, Stankievech mimics the sound and aesthetics of science-fiction
films to create a document that oscillates between the real and the future imaginary.13
Formed in 1999, Nunavut is the newest territory in Canada. Its population hovers
just over 30,000 people, who occupy a landmass equivalent to Mexico. Advising the
indigenous territorial government of Nunavut is a council of eleven Elders, whose role is
to incorporate Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, that is, Inuit culture and traditional knowledge,
into decisions at a political and governmental level. Nunavut is the only territory or
province in Canada to do so. Like Bolivia and Ecuador, its governance model is informed
12
Charles Stankievech, Magnetic Norths, exh. cat. (Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery,
Concordia University, 2010), n.p. .
13
Charles Stankievech explains, “The important twist however with The Soniferous Æther is that
it is NOT science fiction, as all the elements within the work are documentary elements: the
images are of real locations and buildings, the sounds of real military broadcasts, the
astrophotography of a real starry sky, and so on. Most people don’t realize how much art
direction in sci-fi comes from contemporary military architecture and epic primary industry, e.g.,
polar outposts and the Tar Sands, respectively.” Charles Stankievech, interviewed by Ola Wlusek,
“The Embedded Landscape: Unearthing the Duality of
Site,” stankievech.net/projects/aether/critical/ottawa, accessed April 8, 2014.
9
by the ideologies of indigenous people, reflecting decolonial thinking that foregrounds
care for the land as well as human culture in the development of legal frameworks and
policy decisions related to resource and economic development.14
A video by Gianfranco Foschino, No Man’s Land, 2014, was made on a group of
islands just off the southernmost tip of Chile, at the point where the mountains enter the
sea. This area, like the Arctic, is also militarized. Only the sound on the video—the loud
and pervasive hum of a big boat motor—suggests that something is amiss. Filmed from a
fixed position off of the hull of the boat, this perspective recreates that of early explorers
encountering these lands from their ships. We see life in the form of vegetation and trees,
a few birds, but no signs of human habitation. Early images of the Americas perpetuated
the idea of a utopian, empty landscape waiting for, almost wanting, settlement. The
absence of people in Foschino’s video is uncanny. The video, focused as it is on the
present, does not reveal how these lands were depopulated: in the 1880s, Chilean and
Argentinean ranchers, with the government’s consent, slaughtered all the Native
Selk’nam (Ona) people, lending new meaning to the word unsettled.15
When land becomes a commodity, economic value is added to a place that may
already be permeated with social relations and cultural beliefs. While this shift obscures
these existing conditions, it does not conceal them altogether. Edward Poitras’s and
As Walter Mignolo notes: “Both Ecuador and Bolivia have recently introduced radically new
constitutions, in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Central to the Bolivian document is the
proclamation of its status as ‘a social unitary state of pluri-national and communal law, free,
independent, sovereign, democratic, intercultural, decentralised and with autonomies.’ . . . It is,
undoubtedly, both a recognition of the political clout that indigenous movements have acquired,
and a recognition of the differences that colonial domination and the independent state created in
its wake have not managed to erase.” Walter Mignolo, “The Communal and the Decolonial,”
published online in Turbulence: Ideas for Movement 5, accessed February 20, 2014.
15
Corporate interests also played a role in the genocide, with companies reportedly paying up to
one pound sterling for each Selk’nam person killed, with the death proven by an ear, a pair of
hands, or a skull.
14
10
Patrick Nagatani’s photographs serve as a reminder, as do Matthew Buckingham’s textand-image installation and Ohotaq Mikkigak’s landscape drawings focused on prior use
and indigenous knowledge of the land.
In 1988, Poitras staged an intervention called Offensive/Defensive, exchanging a
piece of the grounds of the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with land on
which his home is located on the nearby George Gordon First Nation, an Indian
reservation (in Canada called a reserve). Cutting a rectangular strip of sod from each site,
Poitras replanted the urban lawn of the museum in the void left by the wild prairie grass
of the reserve, and vice versa. Prior to laying the sod, at each site Poitras buried texts in
cast lead reading, at one, the word “offensive,” and, at the other, the word “defensive.”
The words reference the positions of the historical actors involved in the relinquishing of
Native land to military forces in the formation of the province of Saskatchewan. Lead, the
material of bullets, evokes the land’s violent past. In what was possibly an unanticipated
outcome, but one that poignantly reveals the false hierarchy governing nature and culture,
the carefully cultivated domestic grass from the gallery’s lawn withered and died on the
reserve; the wild grass, meanwhile, thrived in its new home. Patrick Nagatani’s series
Nuclear Enchantment relies on a different transposition. He overlays representations of
land contaminated by radiation and uranium mining on picturesque vistas in the state of
New Mexico and on Pueblo communities and the Navajo Nation, ensuring that the
contradictions inherent in this place, marketed as the Land of Enchantment, are known.
Matthew Buckingham’s installation Paha Sapa digs into the history of another
site, the Black Hills, home to Mount Rushmore. A text recounts that the Black Hills were
illegally obtained from the Sioux, themselves pushed into the region to escape the
11
genocidal Indian Wars displacing the Kiowa, and uncovers another inconvenient truth:
Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor responsible for this grand monument to democracy, was a
former high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan. Ohotaq Mikkigak, meanwhile,
carefully renders the landscapes of his home community in Cape Dorset. Inscribed along
the bottom of his images are syllabics in the Inuktitut language that inform viewers of the
use and significance of the sites. These projects counter the historical amnesia that
characterizes the Americas, disrupting the process by which dominant narratives become
“truth” and neatly obscure other histories and other knowledge along the way.
Landscape as Trade
Where gifts link things to persons and embed the flow of things in
the flow of social relations, commodities are held to represent the
drive—largely free of moral or cultural constraints—of goods for
one another, a drive mediated by money and not by sociality.16
–Arjun Appadurai
The third thread of Unsettled Landscapes concerns the movement of goods, people, and
currencies as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and technologies. Trade is the
earliest indigenous economy in the Americas, while transit, exchange, and labor are all
fundamental to our current global economic system. Trade requires an infrastructure on
the land to support, suppress, or control the exchange of goods, and to enable the
movement of labor forces. Meanwhile, unencumbered passage across the land also forms
16
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11–12.
12
a kind of umbilical cord that links people and places over wide distances, both now and
in the past.
Looking more deeply into the implications of travel, artists emphasize the
uncertainties, negotiations, translations, and mistranslations that arise in moving across a
continent where multiple histories, languages, and geographies collide or coexist. Juan
Downey’s multichannel installation Video Trans Americas, 1973–76, intervenes in the
culturally specific structures of knowledge invested in a distinctly Western conception of
the “Other.” The installation provides a subjective portrait of the Americas the artist
made on a road trip through North, Central, and South America from 1973 to 1976, using
video to describe his experience of place. With this and other works, Downey casts doubt
on the purported reliability of video documentation, particularly in relation to
anthropology, which attempts to both capture and define another culture, often
indigenous and under a state of permanent observation. His subjective remapping of our
hemisphere parallels the postcolonial, feminist re-readings of the American continent by
Anna Bella Geiger, who, in her O Pão Nosso de cada dia (Our Daily Bread), 1978, uses
cartography and the body to make a political attack on rigid power hierarchies.
Travel and its narratives inform the work of Liz Cohen, Gilda Mantilla, Raimond
Chaves, and Allan Sekula, while Marcos Ramírez ERRE and David Taylor in their
ongoing project De/Limitations retrace and memorialize the border between Mexico and
the United States as it existed in 1821, before Mexico lost most of its northern provinces
to the United States. In each of these examples, art contests narratives of place, territory,
and social identity that are inflected by the fallout from globalizing economic policies
13
bent on territorial expansion and trade. Thinking about territorial expansion and trade
from in terms of protective limits rather than engaged social relations is also, as we know,
a particularly Western construct that is opposed to indigenous social and political
organization and the barter-based economies that once supported them.
There is loss in the ideal of land as commodity: Andrea Bowers’s video The
United States vs. Tim DeChristopher, 2010, hinges on a legal case that highlights the
precise moment when a piece of untouched, remote land becomes a parcel for sale.
Threaded through the video is an interview with the American climate activist Tim
DeChristopher, who stood trial in 2009 on two felony counts for violation of the Federal
Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act. The year before, DeChristopher had engaged
in an act of civil disobedience in protest of the sale of 116 parcels of public land in Utah’s
protected Red Rock country, successfully bidding on 22,500 acres (14 parcels) he had no
intention of buying.
Bowers directs her activist and artistic practices toward increasing the visibility
and influence of the causes she supports. In this video, she assumes the role of outside
observer, or witness, a recurrent and much-theorized element in the landscape genre since
the nineteenth century. Placing herself within rather than outside the picture frame, she
integrates her body into her artistic-activist agenda. Apparently uninhabited and
untouched, the cold vistas are disturbed only by her figure walking toward the camera,
carrying a clipboard on which she writes the number of the parcel on which
DeChristopher, at the cost of his incarceration, made a successful bid.
14
Working in a different context, Johanna Calle calls attention to the way
agricultural reform, law, and agrarian rules have bestowed value on the land and its
resources in conjunction with ownership. She draws trees using words carefully typed
onto old accounting ledgers. Legislative systems also inform the work of Iñigo
Manglano-Ovalle, who installed a working well on a permaculture farm in Santa Clara
Pueblo and a locked well on the grounds of SITE Santa Fe (while the SITE Santa Fe well
is intended to tap into the aquifer below, the fact that it is locked adds another layer to the
complexities surrounding water rights in the desert). The installation articulates both the
real water shortage in New Mexico and the need to abide by the laws of water
conservation and land use in the state.
Studies of Exhaustion III: The Mill of Blood, The Drop of Flesh by Antonio Vega
Macotela further dissolves the boundaries of what can be objectified, owned, and
discarded. The piece addresses the historical use of human labor in the milling of gold
coins for trade in Spanish colonies. During the colonial period, there were three “blood
mills” in the Americas associated with mining, one in Mexico, one in Peru, and one, still
extant but not operational, in Bolivia. This last mill has the doubtful distinction of having
used human—rather than animal—labor to generate energy. The Mill of Blood on view
in the current exhibition is a miniature silver replica, precious and jewel-like, of the
massive, antique machine used for the Bolivian mines. Its mechanical workings are a
perverse reminder of the transmutation of soil into coins through the brutalizing of flesh
in an economy that depended on the physical work of enslaved indigenous peoples of the
high Andes.
15
Conclusion
Landscape, again, is a device that is always framed by the perspective from which it is
seen. It is transactional, relative––a medium, an alibi. As a subject and genre of art, it is a
form of representation that is linked to power, to emergent economies, and to a desire for
what is not yet owned. Artists represented in Unsettled Landscapes relieve the genre of
its historical burden of identification with Western forms of imaging and seeing. They
deconstruct, upend, and challenge the very mechanism of the genre, setting it against
itself and pointing to gaps and evasions in the relationship between image, subjectivity,
and subject.
Through the exhibition we show how the traditional understanding of land as
ownerless, as a site for human interchange and livelihood, has been replaced by the
concept of land as a commodity. This process not only empties land of its identity as a
commons but also of its distinctive ecological, geological, and natural characteristics. The
commodification of land through the social apparatus implied in its territorialization
represents a complete exchange. In this exchange, ephemeral, social, performative,
emotional, and even mythical values associated with place are traded for the abstract yet
absolute value of economic currency in the global market. Artists participating in the
exhibition reject this totalizing narrative to alert us that land is not just an image, the
victim of a culture’s desire for objects of exchange, but rather a place with qualities that
are mysterious and difficult to measure––born of the memory of events and emotions that
have been hidden but can be made visible––with a future that is more enduring and
meaningful than any commodity.
16