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Themes
Environment Collaborations: Moving Image Artists and the Environment 1 Catherine Elwes
‘To be capable of transforming a forest into packaging for cheeseburgers, man must see the forest not as a display of the miracle of life, but as raw material, pure and simple.’ —Michael Zimmerman, 19772 Since at least the 1960s, it has been an ambition of moving image artists to harness the techno logies of film, video and digital media in a quest to reinvest images of landscape with their mythical, associative and poetic meanings. This constitutes a deliberate strategy to displace our ingrained tendencies to aggressively ‘enframe’ landscape, and to resist what the philosopher Martin Heidegger characterized as the drive to ‘challenge forth’ nature’s use value for profit.3 The exploitation of the environment depends on humanity’s ability to see itself as separate from nature and the filmmaker Chris Welsby speaks for many when he asserts, ‘it has been my project to suggest a more collaborative relationship with nature’. He adds perceptively, ‘if this requires that I surrender some creative control then so be it; the cost of control is greater than the loss of 1
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This short essay is a product of an ongoing investiga tion into the theme of Landscape and the Moving Image, the title of a forthcoming book by Elwes for Wallflower/Columbia University Press. The book is itself a development of research carried out from 2008–10, within the Figuring Landscapes project, a touring programme of 55 films and videos across the UK, Ireland and Australia. Elwes consolidated many of the project’s findings in her 2013 chapter ‘Figuring Landscapes in Australian Artists’ Film & Video’. In: (eds) Rayner, J. and Harper, G., Cinema and Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Zimmerman, M. (1977), ‘Beyond Humanism: Heidegger’s understanding of technology’, Listening, vol.12, no.3, p.79. For an excellent exposition of Heidegger’s theories of technology in relation to the environment, see Waddington, D. (2005) ‘A Field Guide to Heidegger: Understanding “The Question Concerning Technology”’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol.37, no.4. Available online: file:///G:/MUM/Articles/ Waddington%20on%20Heidegger%20concerning% 20Technology.htm. [Accessed 12 May 2013].
letting it go.’4 In contrast to more didactic works in which the iniquities of environmental destruction are articulated at the level of content,5 Welsby, along with a number of other artists, including William Raban and more recently, Emily Richardson, Susan Collins, Inge Lisa Hansen and Daniel Crooks, enact a literal collaboration with nature. They devise sys tematic interactions between technology and the elements that together determine the outcome of the work. Owing much to the branch of cybernetics that identified feedback mechanisms in both man-made and natural systems (a worldview popularized in the 1970s by thinkers such as Gregory Bateson),6 Chris Welsby’s practice meshes humanity, technology and nature in a dynamic, indivisible, chiastic loop. In Weather Vane (1972), he rigged up a camera with a small sail and mounted it on a tripod. He set it up on Hampstead Heath on a blustery day and the resulting image was determined by the ways in which the wind was blowing across the duration of the filming. Weather Vane was followed by a series of works made in collaboration with tides, rain, sun and in Seven Days (1974), the rotation of the earth.7 The capacity of film to compress time by the widely used time-lapse technique enables artists to not only devise systems that respond directly 4
Chris Welsby in conversation with Catherine Elwes (2013), ‘Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ)’ vol.2, no.2, forthcoming.
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These might include: Esther Johnson or Mike Latto on coastal erosion; Sandra Landholt on the littering of the Australian outback with obsolete machines; or the Cape Farewell Project on the threat of climate change to the environment of the Arctic.
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See Bateson, G (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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In all these works, Welsby has applied an ecological principle to his practice, as he confirms, ‘I always try to film in such way as to leave, to use the current jargon, a small footprint. All that I left by the stream [in the making of Stream Line (1976)] were two metal pins that were driven into the rock to hold the tracking machine in place.’ Chris Welsby in conversation with Catherine Elwes, ibid.