Contemporary art, archives and environmental change in the age of the Anthropocene Bergit Arends Royal Holloway, University of London Geography Submitted for the degree of PhD September 2017 1 Declaration of authorship I, Bergit Arends, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: ______________________ Date: ________________________ 2 Abstract This thesis considers formulations of environmental change by contemporary visual artists, working primarily in Europe and North America in the period 1970s to the present. These works are situated in the context of both global environmental and artistic discourses of the 1970s and the 1990s and in relation to the present time, which is influenced by the concept of the Anthropocene. Making reference to a broad field of related artistic, curatorial and exhibition practices, the thesis examines in particular three art projects and the complexities of their conceptions, processes and displays within specific places. I describe the content, narrative forms and materiality of the works, paying particular attention to artists’ engagements with the archive in the context of collaborative projects. I pursue answers to two key questions: how do visual artists’ projects engage with contemporary understandings of environment and environment-human relationships? And how does the current debate on environmental change play out in the making and reading of contemporary visual artists’ works? The first section, containing three chapters, provides the theoretical and methodological context and rationale for the thesis. It sets out the analytical framework for the study of the selected artworks, methods and sources. The second section discusses three case studies: Mark Dion’s project A Yard of Jungle, based on the 1915 field work by American scientist William Beebe in Brazil, for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992; Chrystel Lebas’ ongoing collaborative research into ecologist Edward James Salisbury’s personal photographic archive of British plant habitats from the first half of the twentieth century; and the photographic book by Nguyen the Thuc Kohle unter Magdeborn [Coal underneath Magdeborn] (ca. 1976), documenting the impact of open-cast coal mining on a local community in the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s, which was exhibited in the Leipzig archival exhibition Freundschaftsantiqua [Friendship antiqua] (2014) alongside a commissioned series of photographs of the former mining site by Christiane Eisler. The primary resources for these artists’ projects are the archive and related fieldwork. In this context, the archive encompasses not only documentary materials, but also the geological archives of the Earth and the human body as archive. Fieldwork sites referenced in these projects include a variety of locations within tropical and coastal environments as well as a mining region undergoing regeneration. The thesis examines the agency of the materials these sites hold, how and to what ends they are appropriated in the process of artistic knowledge production. The structural device of montage is presented as a means of connecting heterogeneous materials drawn from different temporal and spatial contexts. Throughout, the thesis raises wider questions by situating artists’ representations of environmental change in the context of debates over the ideas of ecology, environment and the Anthropocene. 3 Table of contents Abstract 3 Table of contents 4 List of figures 6 Acknowledgements 14 1. Introduction 15 1.1. Research methods and case studies 2. Art and environmental change 26 2.1. Framing time, defining spaces 2.2. Art, ecology, environment 2.3. Environmentalisms 2.4. Themes of the Anthropocene 3. Archives: textual, material, embodied, performed 57 3.1. The archive 3.2. Performing the archive 3.3. Re-performing the archive 4. Mark Dion and William Beebe: A Yard of Jungle (1992/1915) and 88 ‘My jungle table’ (1923) 4.1. Introduction 4.2. Performing spaces: Arté Amazonas 4.3. Fieldwork in Pará, Brazil: performance and re-performance 4.4. A jungle table at the Rio Earth Summit: performing environment-as-archive 4.5. Conclusion 5. Chrystel Lebas: re-visiting the Sir Edward James Salisbury 133 archive (ca. 1905–1938) 5.1. Introduction 5.2. Evolving a visual framework 5.3. Seeing the landscape 5.4. ‘This state of travel or wandering’: Culbin Sands (Scotland) 5.5. Conclusion 4 6. Deep archive: Nguyen the Thuc Kohle unter Magdeborn [Coal 172 underneath Magdeborn] (ca. 1976) 6.1. Introduction 6.2. Nguyen the Thuc and Christiane Eisler at Freundschaftsantiqua 6.3. Landscape of the Leipzig region in the German Democratic Republic 6.4. Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig in the 1970s 6.5. Conclusion 7. Conclusion 212 Appendix I 223 Large-format reproductions of selected images Appendix II 234 Works of art Appendix III 236 Interviews Bibliography 238 Collections and archives Published sources 5 List of figures Figure 2.1. Earth system trends graphs. Trends from 1750 to 2010 in indicators for the structure and functioning of the Earth System. From ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration’, by W. Steffen, W. Broadgate, L. Deutsch, O. Gaffney, & C. Ludwig (2015), The Anthropocene Review 2(1), 87. [Screen shot]. Figure 2.2. Mark Dion New Curiosities for the Green Vault. Unicorn Horn (2014) [Replica of a narwhal tooth, metal, paint. 540 x 565 x 180 mm]. Photograph: Simon Vogel. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne. Figure 2.3. The ‘Burning embers’ diagram from IPCC Third Assessment Report with EU stabilisation target superimposed on emission scenarios. From: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Summary for Policy Makers: Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability Contribution of Working Group II to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Geneva, Switzerland, 2001. From ‘Conventions of climate change: constructions of danger and the dispossession of the atmosphere’, by D. M. Liverman (2009), Journal of Historical Geography, 35(2), 287. [Screen shot]. Figure 2.4. H. J. Schellnhuber & H. Held. Map of global ‘tipping points’ in climate change. From ‘Inventing an Icon’, by M. Kemp (2005), Nature, 437(October), p. 1238. [Screen shot]. Figure 3.1. Mikhail Karikis Children of Unquiet (2014) [Video still]. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 3.2. Mikhail Karikis Children of Unquiet (2014) [Video still]. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 3.3. David Brooks An Archive Within an Archive Within an Archive (2014). Commissioned by the Visual Arts Centre at the University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 3.4. David Brooks An Archive Within an Archive Within an Archive (2014). Commissioned by the Visual Arts Centre at the University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of the artist. 6 Figure 3.5. David Brooks Repositioned Core (2014) [Rock core, metal scaffolding, modified architecture. Size 28 x 92 x 18 feet]. Commissioned by the Visual Arts Centre at the University of Texas at Austin. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 3.6. Ackroyd & Harvey Conflicted Seeds + Spirit exhibition (2016). David Attenborough Building, Cambridge (UK). Photograph: Bergit Arends (2016). Figure 3.7. Ackroyd & Harvey Seeing Red … Overdrawn (2016) [Detail]. Conflicted Seeds + Spirit exhibition (2016). Photograph: Bergit Arends (2016). Figure 4.1. [Unknown photographer]. (13 June 1992). Photo #122944. Credit: United Nations Photo Library, New York City. Figure 4.2. [Unknown photographer]. (11 June 1992). Photo #281256. Credit: United Nations Photo Library, New York City. Figure 4.3. [Beebe, W.?]. (ca. 1915). Tropical jungle near Pará [Photograph with Caption. Detail Page 1243]. Reproduced in: Beebe, W. (1915) Zoological notes from Pará. Zoological Society Bulletin, XVIII(4). 1241–1243. [Screen shot]. Retrieved from https://ia802708.us.archive.org/0/items/zoologicalsociet191415newy/z oologicalsociet191415newy.pdf. Credit: New York Zoological Society Archive Figure 4.4. Page 1307 [Including photograph [Beebe, W.?]. (ca. 1915). Captioned: Utinga jungle]. Beebe, W. (1916). Exploring a tree and a yard of jungle. Zoological Society Bulletin, XIX(1). New York Zoological Society. 1307– 1316. [Screen shot]. Retrieved from http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/108187. Credit: Biodiversity Library. Figure 4.5. Page 1309 [Including photograph [Beebe, W.?]. (ca. 1915). Captioned: The Cinnamon tree of the birds in the Utinga jungle]. Beebe, W. (1916). Exploring a tree and a yard of jungle. Zoological Society Bulletin, XIX(1). New York Zoological Society. 1307–1316. [Screen shot]. Retrieved from http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/108187. Credit: Biodiversity Library. 7 Figure 4.6. Mark Dion A Meter of Jungle (1992). [2 colour photographs, black overmount, black frame.]. Photograph of the framed photograph: Georg Hofer, Innsbruck, Austria. Courtesy of the artist and Georg Kargl Gallery. Figure 4.7. Entomologist William Overal. Artists into Amazon. Arté Amazonas, (1992). Video by John Arden [Video still photographed from TV monitor (2016)] Photograph: Bergit Arends. Figure 4.8. Mark Dion on fieldwork [On Tropical Nature, 1991?]. Scan from reproduction in the exhibition catalogue Arté Amazonas (1992, p. 45). Figures 4.9.–4.13. Mark Dion A Yard of Jungle (1992) [Installation detail]. Arté Amazonas exhibition (1992). Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photographs: Vicente de Mello.