Brian Karl Against Rigour in Art A Review of Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco October 24, 2014–January 25, 2015 “A lady visited Matisse in his studio. Inspecting one of his latest works, she unwisely said, ‘But surely the arm of this woman is much too long.’ ‘Madame,’ the artist politely replied, ‘You are mistaken. This is not a woman, this is a picture.’” –Stelarc, “Prosthetic Head: Intelligence, Awareness and Agency,” interview with the Prosthetic Head, an artificial linguistic entity1 n the paragraph-long story “On Rigor in Science,” Jorge Luis Borges takes up a conceit from Lewis Carroll’s fnal novel, Sylvie and Bruno, Ifrst published in 1889: The proposal to expand the scale of map- making to align one-to-one to the areas that each map is meant to represent. In Carroll’s telling, some closer-to-the-earth farmers scuttle the project when they point out how such a map would kill all crops by blocking out the sun. In Borges’s telling, however, the fanciful notion went forward as the ne plus ultra or ad absurdum of representation, only to be abandoned after completion, left to decay through exposure, open to the elements by those next generations “not so fond of the study of Cartography” and who realized that the all-encompassing maps were “Useless” and “not without some Pitilessness.”2 The exhibition Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible? at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, featured work by a group of twenty-one artists working in a broad assortment of approaches and media and engaging with different thematics of representation, hovering around a focus—or, rather, foci—on different ideas of landscape, nature, and environment. Occupying conceptual terrain somewhere between the engaged pragmatics of Carroll’s farmers and the taken-to-the-extreme undertaking/undoing in Borges’s tale, the mostly contemporary works by the artists in the show illustrated, interrogated, and undermined a range of notions related to representation. “Interrogate” and “undermine” would be the adjectives most compelling, it would seem, for the three curators of the exhibition—Betti-Sue Hertz (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Ruijun Shen (Guangdong Times Museum,), and Xiaoyu Weng (Kadist Art Foundation)—who come from overlapping milieus in both the U.S. and China. This ambitious group show—drawing on somewhat divergent sources pivoting around the private collection of the Paris/San Francisco-based Kadist Art Foundation—aimed deep and landed Vol. 14 No. 2 95 wide. The array of work exhibited, following a slightly different installation earlier last year in China, at the Guangdong Times Museum (May 27 to July 27, 2015), spread far in many directions conceptually but refused to cohere around any singular theme, much less resolve itself with any defnitive conclusion. In many ways, the installation of the show’s various artworks demonstrated, in its dense layout, the unruliness of the too many concepts that can be tracked through issues in representing landscape, as well as some of the challenges in using the limited physical environment of a gallery space in attempting to unfold the countervailing logics of expansiveness that can be associated with ideas of landscape. One set of concerns stated by the curators involved those differences between Western versus Chinese precepts for both creating and relating to landscape representation. Another foregrounded interest pointed to questions that newer technologies imply for perception and cognition in contemporary understandings of landscape. Both these thematics remained elusive and mostly oblique, however, across the play of different pieces in the exhibition. Special attention was also given in the curators’ statement to characteristics of the locations of California and China’s Pearl River Delta—for example, their relationship to technology: for Silicon Valley as a technology innovator/producer, and for the Pearl River Delta as a technology manufacturer/supplier. Attention was also given to the more historical utopian and romantic cultural ideologies that might characterize these locations’ relationship to nature, in contrast to their various urban and suburban development actualities. Such themes were not found explicitly addressed in the various artworks of the exhibition itself, however. In their statement, the curators pointed to the notion of a new “Era of the Anthropocene” as an additional theoretical premise for the exhibition, with its unavoidable signs of the changes to actual landscapes that have been wrought by humans in the post-industrial era. This is the theme that perhaps allowed exhibition viewers the most traction with respect to some of the works themselves. For instance, in Simone Pyle’s As Above So Below (2011), a small video monitor was half-buried in a low pile of dark earth on the gallery floor, and on its screen was footage of another monitor half-buried in a forest setting, itself playing images of nature. This work was the most direct, literalist evocation of a new Anthropocene era. Rather differently, Robert Zhao Renhui’s photographs Changi, Singapore (2010–12) and Expedition #46 (2012), each from a larger series, illustrate some of the effects of and responses to interventions resonant with the Anthropocene, including documentation of individual humans in the context of environmental science expeditions to the Arctic Circle and documentation of signs of a massive importation of soil to Singapore from abroad. More tangentially, Paul Kos’s conceptual piece Sound of Ice Melting from 1970—multiple twenty-five-pound blocks of ice, attended by audio gear from the same 96 Vol. 14 No. 2 Simon Pyle, As Above, period, that recalibrate awareness of the subliminal by “marking” in some So Below, 2011, video installation, dimensions way the sound of melting—though not originally intended to address variable. Photo: Phocasso. Courtesy of the artist and such issues, borrowed some value from the exhibition’s setting to imply Yerba Buena Center for the questions about the effects on landscape caused by global warming. Arts, San Francisco. That part of the curators’ afore-mentioned theses that gave credit to Paul Kos, The Sound of Ice shifting technological bases for Melting, 1970, mixed media installation of two 25-pound perceiving landscapes that have blocks of ice, eight standing boom microphones, been implied by the “micro- amplifier, and speaker, dimensions variable. Photo: screens” of recent framing devices by Tommy Lau. Courtesy of such as smartphones and other the artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San computer screens—with all the Francisco. distortions, fractures, flattening, and hyper-accessibility that the digital basis can offer—is a tantalizing notion to consider. But that notion points beyond the almost entirely earlier-generation media technologies featured in the exhibition—that is, flat-screen video monitors, large-scale projection, an old-school film projector, and vintage, commercially manufactured audio gear. The actual technologies in the exhibition did not feature any of the newer technologies—such as satellite views, GPS, or small-screen personal devices—nor did it follow up in any direct way on a reference in the curators’ statement to The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Anne Friedberg’s 2009 book on changing perspectives on the landscape that arise from the proliferation, new framings, and fragmentation of images offered through the mediation of computers and their monitors.3 At the broadest conceptual scale, any connection to Félix Guattari’s theoretical framework of four ontologies—the virtual, the actual, the possible, the real—from which the exhibition’s subtitle, the virtual, the actual, the possible?, is derived were left for viewers/readers to determine on their own (as well as why one of those four terms of Guattari is absent from the exhibition title). Other theoretical explications of representation Vol. 14 No. 2 97 in art practice that might have been invoked—from Plato and Aristotle’s Robert Zhao Renhui, Expedition #46, from the perspectives on the mimetic faculty of art through John Ruskin’s praxis of series The Glacier Study Group, 2012, digital pigment the sublime in landscape painting, and, especially, Walter Benjamin’s “The print, 120.6 x 85 cm. Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Jean Baudrillard’s Courtesy of the artist and Kadist Art Foundation. “Simulacra and Simulation”—were not mentioned. Other cultural reads on the landscape that might have been productively deployed include David Gissen’s recent articulation of sub-nature; that is, those manifestations of “nature” found in humanly developed spaces, such as weeds growing through the cracks in sidewalks, or brush on the edge of a railroad bed. There is also Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which complicate ideas of “nature” beyond a simple false dichotomy of “natural” versus man-made and thus might have been particularly relevant to how many of the actual works in the show function. The contention put forward in the show’s curatorial statement and catalogue essays suggesting something fundamentally “Chinese” as a value system that avoids imposing order on nature versus some implicitly singular and hegemonic “Western way” of approaching “nature” denotes a culturalist starting point that was not especially generative in relation to the works exhibited. In particular, the contention that Western art has put forward a praxis of presenting isolated objects—and, further, isolating humans from nature, even while depicting it—seemed an under-examined theme in the exhibition itself, as well as the curatorial statement attached to it. Even brief recognition of Western attempts that do not align with the notion of simply objectifying nature insulated from human existence (for example, Impressionism or Fauvism) might have been productive in noting more nuanced divergence, as well as in recalling some prior reckonings of the malleability of perception and representation of landscape(s).