Mother Earth’s Stretch Marks
Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene
Cantor Arts Center
Ongoing – August 3
Todd Gray, Cosmic Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler). Four archival pigment prints.
Los Angeles-born Gray overlaps images from Western and Southern African
with English gardens, echoing the resource extraction of colonialism.*
*N.B.: The descriptions of many of the photos are quite lengthy. These captions are not commentary by SLAA or this author. The words are from the artists themselves, the Cantor curators, and/or the critics and scholars who study the works of the individual artists. The information is presented here for context (and the commentary is offset by a different color).
Let me start by warning that the description of this exhibition is not for the faint-of-heart. It is about the urgent need to act on climate change.
Yet, just as Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Felix González-Torres and David Wojnarowicz documented the AIDS crisis in their artworks, and we found beauty in those works, particularly after we moved through the crisis into the “management” phase; so too the works at the Cantor Arts Center may someday serve as a testament to indomitable hope of (and – with a bit of luck – ingenuity in) the human spirit, if we can once again meet a seemingly catastrophic challenge – Climate Change.
In the Jurassic period, dinosaurs ruled. What Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg didn’t tell us is: Did the dinosaurs understand their impact of the environment and did they know their time when they were in control was limited? The behemoths did not leave us any records regarding their sentient awareness, at least not any records that we have interpreted.
So, maybe that makes humans unique. We are aware of the impact we have on our environment. Aware, but not necessarily working towards positive change. (There’s an old Bill Maher joke: If Americans were told they could end global warming if they just gave up their remote controls, Americans would give up the remotes. Then they would watch one channel forever, rather than get up to change the channels on their TV. – At least he’s optimistic enough to believe we’d give up the remotes!)
Of course, that was in 2008, before the Paris Accords started to show their semantic relationship to the accordion. Commitment to the hard work on climate change blows in and out, just like the musical instrument.
This exhibition is an attempt by artists from around the globe to insure greater awareness than the dinosaurs had. It shows us the impact we have on the planet and urges us to do something about it.
Sherry, Valley of the Gods II, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah, (detail).
Sherry creates monochrome depictions of national monuments targeted by the Trump administration for the exploitation of their natural resources.
The Precis
Just over 20 years ago, scientists introduced the term Anthropocene to denote a new geological epoch marked by human activity. The Anthropocene Epoch is the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
Comprised of 44 photo-based artists, from six continents, working in a variety of artistic methods from studios and sites across the globe, Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene explores the complexities of this proposed new age: vanishing ice, rising waters, and increasing resource extraction, as well as the deeply rooted and painful legacies of colonialism, forced climate migration, and socio-environmental trauma.
Since its emergence, the term “Anthropocene” has entered the common lexicon and has been adopted by disciplines outside of the sciences including philosophy, economics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, effectively linking the Anthropocene to nearly every aspect of post-industrial life. Organized around four thematic sections, “Reconfiguring Nature,” “Toxic Sublime,” “Inhumane Geographies,” and “Envisioning Tomorrow,” the exhibition proposes that the Anthropocene is not one singular narrative, but rather a diverse and complex web of relationships between and among humanity, industry, and ecology – the depths and effects of which are continually being discovered.
The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) refuses to accept that we are in the Anthropocene Epoch (although the USGS recognizes it). The IUGS, rather, declares Anthropocene a “geological event” or a “time/rock” and not an Epoch. The detractors claim it gives too much agency to humans. As the images of Iranian photographer Gohar Dashti suggest, plants are sentient beings as well. While I accept that celery can feel pain – as in, it reacts to stimuli – when it is harvested, nonetheless, I don’t notice that okra is organizing itself to move into the floodplains to stave off increasing severe deluges. So, I return to my earlier point that humans are uniquely suited to recognize our effects on the planet.
Dashti, Untitled #2
With the obsession with terminology, are we rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? Will it really matter when we are faced with the fact that Anthropocene necessarily puts Death front and center, asking: How long can humanity survive in a world that is changing so much we are leaving a record of our actions behind in the rock layer?
The Sublime Beauty of Human-Made Scars
As Southern Californians are still reeling with the devastating impacts of wildfires, and a new federal administration is eschewing the kind of international cooperation necessary to stem the most pernicious impacts of climate change, the Cantor Arts Center, is busy adapting this show to depict the environmental crisis. The images in this exhibition demonstrate the many ways our planet is suffering: rising waters, vanishing ice, extraction of natural resources, the scars of colonization and the reality of climate migration.
Yet, this is art; it is meant to uplift and inspire. So, the installation is also a narrative of hope and, ironically, beauty. Take, one example: Laura McPhee’s artworks of 40 acres of burned forest in Idaho. These works are somber, yet hopeful and beautiful.
Examples of McPhee's Photos of Idaho Forest Fire
“McPhee’s work speaks to the way plants and trees have adapted to survive or even thrive in wildfire scenarios,” Curator Maggie Dethloff said. “And it reminds me of how many of our California Indigenous communities have for a long time practiced anthropogenic fires.” (Anthropogenic fires are controlled burns, long practiced by Indigenous Californians. Do not conflate that with anthropocentric fires, such as the out-of-control wildfires that have plagued The West for decades.)
According to Dethloff, while there is the danger of compassion fatigue setting in with traditional news gathering, a beautiful image will evoke the viewer’s emotions and can trick people into paying attention again. The tension between the aesthetic beauty of the images – and the overt destruction they’re depicting – underscores photography’s capabilities and seduction.
Burtynsky, Lithium Mines #1, Salt Flats, Atacama Desert, Chile
Lithium Mines #1 by the celebrated landscape photographer offers a gorgeous view of the installation high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a hotspot for extracting the lithium that makes possible so many contemporary technologies (including many “green” ones). Burtynsky’s photo shows an array of enormous evaporation pools, each a slightly different shade of blue, green or yellow, indicating its stage of evaporation. As with so many of Burtynsky’s other works, it makes the extractive practices crucial to human manipulation of the environment look utterly beautiful, putting a viewer into a confusing and useful state of contradiction.
This photo is a focus of the section "Toxic Sublime."
Equally taxing, for curator Marshall N Price, was overcoming just how commonplace images of human devastation of the biosphere have become. “You get inoculated to images of trauma and devastation in ways that make it difficult to take action.” In organizing the show, Price sought to find images that could move audiences as much as the iconic Blue Marble image of the Earth, which transformed the minds of people around the globe in 1972 when it became one of the most widely viewed photos ever taken, and a clarion call for the environmental movement. He wanted things that would really stand out: “We had conversations early on that we did not want the show to be replete with Nat Geo images,” he said.
Apollo 17, Blue Marble
The challenge facing Dethloff, Price and their fellow curators was the struggle to represent the many tightly knotted, diverse phenomena that combine in exceedingly complex ways for the Anthropocene: “You can’t separate capitalism from resource extraction, can’t separate it from exploitative employment practices, a history of colonialism, the nature of consumerism, the production of waste … all these things that are inseparable that are creating the Anthropocene.”
Dethloff polled her friends on Instagram to see what they knew about the concept “Anthropocene”: “They essentially told me that they equated it with ‘humans ruin everything.’” “[Y]ou … risk aestheticizing a terrible situation and it not being taken seriously.” According to Dethloff, the artists in the exhibition do a good job of skirting that line.
It is essential to not leave audiences with a sense of futility. “Throughout there are hints and suggestions of where we can look for ways to move forward.
There’s the role of technology in creating solutions, (researchers at the recently founded Doerr School of Sustainable Studies at Stanford use fluid dynamics to try and predict the pathways of wildfires),
Schools of thought like feminism with its eco-feminism theory,
Indigenous knowledge systems, or
Even looking to the Earth itself for models of how to move on from the Anthropocene.”
For the Geeks & Nerds
All I Know [About Geology] I Learned in Kindergarten
Since the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, there have been 37 recognized geological epochs. Geologists agree that seven of those epochs have occurred since the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. They differ on whether we have entered a new “Epoch” of Anthropocene – in which human activity is a primary driving force of geological change, or if our current situation is rather a “geological event” or a “time/rock,” (which is identified by all rocks/sediments formed during a specific interval of geological time). Indisputably, human activities have left distinct and lasting signals in the geological record, with the presence of plastics, radionuclides from nuclear tests, and a sharp rise in CO2 levels.
IUGS rejected the idea that our current age is an epoch due to disagreements over when exactly it would have started:
1945, marking the unlocking of nuclear power;
1610, which may be the first time human activity affected the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere;
1950-1964, when the so-called Great Acceleration began (the rapid and widespread increase in human activity and its impact on Earth's natural systems), or
Some other date altogether?
Left to Right
Pablo López Luz’s Vista Aérea de la Ciudad de México, XIII (Aerial View of Mexico City, XIII).
The photo is striking for the sharp diagonals that offer a sense of freefall through the sky, as well as for how it makes the rows and rows of dwellings seem to stretch on indefinitely, for countless miles. An example of the Great Acceleration, this photo of Mexico City conveys just how staggeringly large this megacity is.
Mendel, portrait Anchalee Koyama, Taweewattana district, Bangkok, Thailand.
From his series: Drowning World, in which he traveled to flood zones across multiple continents to photograph everyday people submerged in water to various extents. In isolation, the photo loses some of the impact of the series, which is striking for showing so many people from such different walks of life caught up in the same climate-driven predicament, but even on its own it is quite a testament to the implacability – and humanity – of Anthropocene-driven catastrophe.
These inherent questions point to deeper challenges to understanding just what the Anthropocene is: should we think of it in terms of nuclear fallout, the composition of the atmosphere, the size of the human population, or other worthy metrics? Just how do you wrap your arms around something so multifarious and unwieldy as the Anthropocene?
Meanwhile, the word has caught on like wildfire in a colloquial sense. The term sparked the need for an artistic examination of its meaning and, hopefully, spurring action in response. Thus: Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene, the exhibition offering breathtaking and provocative looks at what humanity has wrought on this earth.
More than anything else, Second Nature gets across a sense of just how massive and multiple is the thing that we’ve now gotten used to calling the Anthropocene. Taking on a role in the evolution of the globe on a scale to rival massive forces like glaciation, plate tectonics, and sea level change, human activity is now beginning to be seen properly in all its frightening enormity. In the words of Price, “Humanity has been on the Earth for a millisecond, but we’ve had an outsized presence.”
USGS Map of Geological Periods
Special Lecture Series in conjunction with Second Nature.
Todd Gray | Ruth K. Franklin Lecture
Apr 24 | 6pm PT
The Cantor will host the acclaimed artist Todd Gray for a talk in conjunction with the presentation of his work in this group exhibition.
Working between Los Angeles and Ghana, Gray delves into the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections linking Western hegemony with West Africa. His interdisciplinary practice spans photography, performance, and sculpture, and his work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Through his unique process of layering images from his personal archive with African and European landscapes, Gray challenges traditional narratives and examines the enduring impacts of colonial power and racial identity.
Lunchtime Curator Talk | Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene with Joanna García Cherán
May 28 | 12pm PT
Join Joanna García Cherán, Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center, on this special highlights tour.
Lunchtime Curator Talk | Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene with Maggie Dethloff
Jun 26 | 12pm PT
Join Maggie Dethloff, Assistant Curator of Photography and New Media at the Cantor Arts Center, on this special highlights tour.
Lunchtime Curator Talk | Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene with Joanna García Cherán
Jul 23 | 12pm PT
Join Joanna García Cherán, Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center, on this special highlights tour.
Evening Curator Talk | Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene with Maggie Dethloff
Jul 31 | 6pm PT
Join Maggie Dethloff, Assistant Curator of Photography and New Media at the Cantor Arts Center, on this special highlights tour.
While You Are There
OY/YO
Sequence
Rodin Sculpture Garden
Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden
As you can see, there a multiple outdoor sculptures to enjoy, while you are at Stanford. I will just highlight two of them.
Richard Serra's Sequence is another expression of Serra's exploration of torqued ellipses. This one is a Möbius-like double figure-eight of curved, steel walls that form two open circular spaces surrounded by a narrow walkway. If you stand back and watch as people walk through it, you realize that there is indeed an actual sequence to the piece, in that almost everyone does the same thing in the same order. Everyone looks at the walls in the first open circle, then they walk through the outer figure-eight which has a disorienting feel as the walls sinuously narrow and widen, then in the second open space everyone stares up at the sky. When they walk back again through the outer figure-eight they tend to keep looking upwards at the sky. As you explore Sequence, you can feel it change from an object to a space around you.
So, don't try to do the whole thing in reverse just to be different. On the other hand, I applaud those who try something new because they are moved to do so.
Serra, Sequence
Away from the Cantor Arts Center, in a forested nook by Roble Hall, you will find more than 20 stone figures and towering wooden poles carved into animal and human forms. Collectively, they’re known as the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden.
As a result of a cultural exchange, 10 artists and an interpreter lived on the Stanford campus where, over a three-month period, they sculpted and painted works depicting ancient myths and legends, and two more with a bit of inspiration from Rodin. The ambitious project required the transportation from Papua New Guinea of multiple 40-foot-long kwila and garamut tree trunks chosen by the artists. The artists, aged 27 to 74, came from six societies living in the Iatmul and Kwoma regions of New Guinea. At Stanford, they worked in teams of two or three, combining the mythic and artistic knowledge of the older men with the physical strength of the younger.
Kwoma style painting
The center of the garden is laid out in the typical floor plan of “Spirit Homes,” where the men of the villages hold initiation ceremonies and hang out to gossip and chew betel nuts, according to Mary Hoeber, a docent for the Cantor Arts Center. The garden features rows of poles that would normally support a thatched roof, some painted in the reds and blacks of the Kwoma tradition, and others decorated with carvings, in the Iatmul tradition.
[As an aside, I note that many cultures have such gathering places for men to murmur and mutter, and yet women bear the scourge label of “gossips.”]
When Iatmul sculptor Teddy Balangu first saw photographs of the nearby Rodin sculpture garden, he said: “This is nothing. We can do better.” The result – two sculptures that bear the same names as their bronze Rodin counterparts: The Thinker and Gates of Hell.
The Thinker – Iatmul style – tells the story of an ancestor sitting by the hole from which he emerged into the world, thinking about how he might create fellow humans out of clay. His first attempt has just failed, and the broken body parts lay scattered around his feet. The tale harks back to the Iatmul creation legend. “Ours has a deep story behind it, unlike the one you did,” the nearby plaque states.
Iatmul style carving, The Thnker
The Cantor Arts Center is
FREE and open to the public
Wednesdays – Sundays
11am – 5pm
My thanks to Veronica Esposito, The Guardian & Julie Zigoris, SF/Arts.
For more information on Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center, click here.
