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Hermann Prigann Thoughts about “Art in Nature” In Search of Another Comprehension of Nature and Art The search is not new. An elementary aspect of the collective artistic evolution was and is the representation of the dialogue with our inner and outer nature. The aesthetization of this dialogue is art, its object of contemplation and reflection is the nature of humans and their existing and yet manipulable environment. In this oscillating process of our cultural history we are now confronted with a new background of questions: How is the antagonism, nature versus culture, as a specific culturally practiced, collective way of thought to be overcome? How must the aesthetization of our dialogue look, that transforms this antagonism into a collaboration – which would be one of the consequences? Certain romanticized and esoterically interpreted cliches about the meaning of this collaborative are to be avoided here. Only with respect to the background of global ecological crisis can this collaboration be an expression of another concrete, namely ecological behaviour. What would be the artefact of an “ecological aesthetic of nature”? Calling the tree “Brother Tree” and healing the wounds of “Mother Earth” the representation of ritualistic images to purify the ground – is this all an expression of an ecological consciousness? Does it express itself in an art that undertakes such endeavours? Art is concrete and nature is concrete. Concerning the perception of both, the wonderful lies in the factual. To humanize nature through language is a behaviour of consumption, both have their purpose in our antagonistic relation to nature and to ourselves. To quote Ernst Bloch: “culture stands in nature like an army in enemy territory”. The evidence of this condition lies before us. It is the state of the ecosystem earth, bearing the imprint of human’s cultural factor. It is thus the result of a collaborative that is neither prepared nor anticipated, but rather self critical, perhaps to be newly recognized. “If there is a law in one place, there must be laws everywhere” (Lévy Strauss in Structures elementaires de la parente).
Nature is the Dance of Evolution and Entropy. Culture is One of the Dancers To make the laws of this dance transparent was and is a perspective of art. The culturally defined polarity between art and nature invites us to a dialogue if we contemplate both phenomena on the axis of signs – language – sounds, and imagine this axis as part of a circular movement that encompasses all the communicating aspects of the ecosystem earth. We contemplate our inner and outer world, that surrounds us as one that is accessible and communicating exclusively by and through the signs that rest and evolve in this context. Only in this connection can we speak of a dialogue between art and nature. The interpretation of the signs in this dialogue is the concern of art. Art was and is a seismographic recording and representation of our experience and knowledge of nature. The pictures of its interpretation are codes of a dialogue with the outer realm, nature as an energetic process of change within the matter, and the inner realm, our psychic experience of being in this universal occurrence. In this sense art is the sign language that represents the understanding of our self relating to these contexts. Yet the decisive difference to the present representation of this dialogue – between art and nature – lies in its new determined site. We could say that the classical form of expression was one that represented nature as appearance, and now this dialogue takes place in nature. What follows then is that the ontological and scientific concept of nature in landscape represents itself in the sign language of art either as an object – sculptural site – or as a geoglyph. Otherwise considered, the historicity and materiality of landscape merge with art into a new expression of the perception of nature. Namely that we are an integral part of a permanent metamorphic process. From this experience of being safe in nature, appears in the realizations of this art an aesthetic of free circumstance. That is, these works in their respective actually experienced condition are never finished. In them, the simultaneity of past, present and future can be experienced. Because these works contain as an aesthetic criterion their change in
time, we can speak of an ecological aesthetic. The evolution of our knowledge
about the contexts of human existence manifests itself on one side, while
on the other side the power of entropy presents itself here as changing
and aesthetic in appearance. Considered in this perspective, nature and
culture are linked symbiotically in art.
YELLOW RAMP 1993-1995 II. and III. Biennale for land art, lignite mining area, Cottbus/Germany.
Art in the Landscape Sub specie aeternitatis, with respect to eternity, looking upon the landscape, creates the consciousness of space – time. Here past and future, in their present time appearance, join us in the dialogue. This process of experiencing landscape becomes highly relevant, as we consider it from the perspective of flying. Here, from this glance, we can read signs in it. The geoglyphs tell us something of intercourse and understanding of humans with themselves in the landscape space of his history. This sign language bends the bow between neolithic time and today, and illustrates how we have given up the once known universal corporeal measure in relation to space in favour of the pragmatic measure, with which structures in landscape are now drawn, whose cause and sense are clearly determined by a utilitarian and exploitative thinking. An archaic world map would show a few paths that are spanning short distances, many astronomical rock formations, figurative mounts, earth pyramids, vast fissures, that bind themselves with others to form directive fields and figures, and apart from that gigantic space still free from human interaction with the terrain. Every manipulation of landscape had a spiritual, imaginary reference and starting point inside the consciousness of a human being. Today they can protect us from the loss of memory and are indicative of a future, in which the sign language of the devastation of the landscape can be transformed into its opposite. That we, in the present state of the landscape can experience and compare the simultaneity of spiritually and industially set geoglyphs should cause us a moment’s pause. Observed with respect to time, the former remain silent, they are no longer to be read in the sense of those who once put them on face of the earth. What remains is their aesthetic atmosphere, their inner power and fascination, that leads us to the contemplation of our being. We enter the poetic space of our own historicity. This approach is still possible today, as art has, through all the changes of time preserved and further developed Ariadne’s thread of the perception of beauty, as the measure of the human body – physical and psychic – in the space of landscape and nature – seen as the dance of entropy and evolution. With the background of this knowledge those terrains get a new meaning, that we have transformed into wasteland while searching for resources for our expanding civilization. They can and should be surrendered to a new formation that creates geoglyphs – signs, landmarks of our epoch. These signs can only find and state art through an intuitive understanding of that archaic sign language, that the powers of nature and the ideas of man about them have set in and on the earth. Signatures of the realization of our being, as integrated creatures of what we call nature. That means, in relation to the concrete object of industrially tuned work in and on it, to give these landscapes back to humans as space. To leave clues in the geoglyphs for following genereations, that we have again resumed the continuation of earth signs and the preservation of living space. In this sense – sub specie aeternitatis – this art continues a dialogue in nature, one which speaks to us from archaic time and points to the future. Nature is neither a thing nor an assembly of things. It is not external or internal, it does not surround us, it is not available, it can neither be destroyed, nor loved. Nature is a word without antonym. It is an all encompassing objectless concept, a condition in movement. Nature as contrary to something else does not exist. Environment that surrounds man is a more exact expression than nature, because nature is the concept that includes humans. Human beings are an aspect, a part of nature, they can influence and destroy the environment, but not nature. Maybe man will step out of history, out of the world’s evolution, but nature remains the same. The currently existing question of survival has apart from the causes determined by industrial development still another cause in the way we understand ourselves in the relationship between nature and humans – one of cultural history, of perception in a broader sense. To perceive the process – the change – the metamorphic in all as beauty is an approach to the development of another – for our culture perhaps new consciousness of ourselves immanent in nature. Nature’s beauty is like all other notions of beauty a result of cultural and social condition and convention. The originality in this sense is pure fiction. What we do in and for landscape – for the space we live in – depends decidedly upon what we perceive of it. One main problem that we have today with landscape is the extensive repression of our own responsibility for its current condition. It has to do with a revision of our understanding of nature and landscape. Because wherever the object of interest is destroyed, the precondition for positive change is eliminated as well. Structures of landscape that form, deform, animate or constrict and waste the lives of its occupants prove the fact that we are not only entangled in record and history but also in the scenarios of the landscape art, that not solely produces more beautiful appearance but utilizes the destroyed landscape for new space of experience, or portrays through objects and cultural sites in the cultural landscape the dialogue of art and nature. The habitus of landscape, its physiognomy, receives fixed points through sculptural sites around which the surrounding is formed. Thereby a possible position of center in the landscape is developed, this effects an experience of being in the world and initiates a communication with the surroundings. What follows from this is that the realized object must be in a definite relation to the surroundings – then a “sculptural space” emerges, an otherwise arbitrary placement of artwork in landscape. These objects within the configuration of landscape facilitate a perception, that allows us to experience the context of nature and culture. As we constitute art with nature in landscape, we create a new correlation, changing the habitus of landscape. Here begins our program. It mediates through the sculptural site in landscape nature as a space of sensation and perception, in which a sensibilization of the relationship environment – human beings – culture – nature is made evident. “Metamorphic objects” from sculptural sites linked to nature in the landscape, in the outskirts of the city as well as in the city. The object as the metaphor and artistic theme becomes the intersection of its environment. In certain ways the object changes, with regard to its intentional substance, everything around it. Art that has to do with natural conditions as material as well as with the site of its effects, affects and influences the ecological relationship. This happens in many ways. Certainly first in the material itself, because here the metamorphosis is immanent as a temporal process of decay. Here the ecological relationship takes a part in the aesthetic statement of the work of art, or in such work of art the aesthetic aspect of this effect is shown. “Beauty of Temporality” not only shines in the fire, it also creates in works of art of this type a history of the decay of an object. Thus it becomes the metaphor of life and through the symbolic character of the object, a metaphor of culture. The aesthetic as well as the metaphoric aspect of decay, of metamorphosis, of dissolution has a long history in the history of art, it is the motif of the “Moderne”.
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