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White with red splashes
By Jacob Wamberg
Landscape painting as homeopathic politics
Ever since the 17th century, we in the West have been accustomed to landscape painting as a synonym for illusion.
A two-dimensional surface conjures up the effect of a window looking out towards the natural world, a generous view over wide open spaces, transporting the urban spectator to a soothing atmosphere and creating comfort in our everyday distance from countryside, wilderness, ocean and clouds. Here tired town-dwellers can get a fresh, albeit imaginary, breath of air in their gloomy interiors and dream themselves away to unspoiled realms, far away from the toils of civilisation. As the German philosopher Joachim Ritter has pointed out, these imaginary sights can actually be considered as part of a much broader framework, by means of which we come into contact with nature, for example when we go on an outing into her real layers, the physical terrain. This framework the landscape can actually be considered as compensation for that alienation from nature, towards which urbanisation has largely led. By means of its aesthetic appreciation this framework offers us, at the same time, a kind of atonement for the otherwise calculated abuse of nature inherent in industry, its all too often forgotten shadow. Indeed, with its longing for the freedom of the wild, landscape can also be considered as a sort of de-ideologised echo of that craving for new territories that accompanies imperialism, the partner of industrialisation. In the words of the literary theoretician W.J.T.Mitchell, landscape is almost the dreamwork of imperialism.
Marco Evaristti would like to be known as a landscape painter. But the landscape painting he practises is undeniably of a completely different nature from the illusionism described in the previous paragraph. In preference to painting the landscape, Evaristti chooses to paint on the landscape. The result, therefore, is not a two-dimensional illusion at a distance from nature, but a three-dimensional intervention in it. Nonetheless, this does not mean that Evaristti simply circumvents and confounds our customary natural optics. The very horizon of our expectations, in terms of what landscape and landscape painting represent, is inextricably linked to his paintings-on-nature. In fact one could say that the three locations he has hitherto picked out and made into a trilogy represent almost pornographic examples of what our desire is targeted at, when romantically we pine for nature as landscape. The coldest deserted north, where ice lies untouched under the clear polar sky (The Ice Cube Project, 2004). The highest peak which only heroic mountain-climbers can conquer (The Mont Rouge Project, 2007). And the hottest, most arid desert with sand stretching as far as the eye can see (The Arido Rosso Project, 2008).
These interventions work because they make visible and prick holes in these well-known settings, which are otherwise an inconspicuous filter between nature and us. His means is the erection of an alien element: a screaming shade of red, which has at the same time a more superficially arty-farty and more basely physical effect than the harmonious, atmospheric tonality we are used to in traditional landscape paintings, let alone landscapes themselves. Whether the colour is sprayed over an iceberg in Greenland, a mountain peak in France or a dune in Africa (and it really is, it is not digitally manipulated), it gives rise to an aesthetic shock, because it is unbearably exquisite in its out-of-place artificiality. At the same time it reminds us of blood and calls to mind the expression of nature wounded. This aesthetic shock also serves to confront us with the displacements caused by territorial possession and the abuse of nature, which our contemplation of untouched nature the landscape is paradoxically based on.
The principal is a kind of homeopathy. The medium fortifies and transforms the aesthetic into the political and the ethical. The colour is, therefore, a harmless fruit-based colouring, generally used in soft drinks and meat (approved by DHI Water & Environment), which is quickly dispersed by wind and rain. But given that the media machine keenly reproduces Evaristtis declarations of intent and coloured photographic documentation the two-dimensional gloss of which hark back to romantic, if not therefore easily distorted landscape painting the microscopic effect of the colour is magnified to almost territorial dimensions, which mimic cultures violent, but concealed encroachment upon nature. For example, when Evaristti, in minus 23º C, conquers the iceberg in Disco Bay, pronounces it his own property and sprays it with 3000 litres of red paint, it looks like a rape of the unspoilt polar plains like a penetration of the pure, white, innocent snows virginity. However, this conquest is of homeopathic dimensions when compared to the territorial interests, which fence in the Arctic region on a world political level, and in which Evaristtis chosen country of residence, Denmark is a major player in terms of its colonial power over Greenland. So there is an extra point of irony in the fact that Ice Cube was conceived as a wedding present for Crown Prince Frederik and his consort Mary, inheritors of the Greenlandic territory.
Well concealed behind our sentimental concept of an eternally virginal polar region lies another cynical truth: the countless dumpings and other kinds of pollution, of which the nuclear poisoning of the Thule base and the subsequent evacuation of the local inhabitants constitutes one of the more glaring examples. In the light of this background, the media storm that Ice Cube gave rise to seems totally out of proportion, even though it is perhaps that very distortion of proportions that can satisfy Evaristtis actual purpose: to get people to think and relate to repressed traumas. When, on the Ice Cube video documentary, you see the red paint sprayed over the ice, you come to think of more direct political actions, such as those in which animal rights campaigners sprayed baby seals with paint a defilement calculated to promote the victim as another image of western purity: rich womens fur coats (even though the paint made the seals more visible to polar bears).
The dialectic between small and excessive pollution was revived in the Mont Rouge project to the extent that it caught up with and transformed the action along the way. Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps and once again an image of the ultimate pursuit of purity, has for a long time been incorporated into the tourist industrys money machine. As a result of the infinite number of mountain-climbers that scale it, it has been transformed into a mountain of trash, including piles of frozen excrement. Nevertheless, the local mayor had set in motion a half-hearted clean-up campaign, Montagnes pures, with which Evaristtis excursion was to collide. After the test colouring of a smaller peak Evaristti sculpted a toilet in the snow, which was then also coloured and inaugurated with a trickle of urine by way of marking the territory. This homage to Duchamp resulted in arrest and confiscation of the fruit colouring. That meant that the conquest of the highest peak was instead marked with a cinnabar red, Christo-like awning and, according to plan, the raising of the national flag of Evaristtis utopian nation, Pink State, with its pink, buddhistic elephant. Despite the mayors opposition, Evaristtis visit left a conspicuous natural-political trace: the peak has since been fitted with a proper toilet...
Evaristtis colourings can partly be seen as a development of American Earth Art from the 1960s and onwards. Like artists such as Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer, Evaristti infiltrates out-of-the-way locations and transforms them by means of conspicuous artifice. Like the Earth Artists the presentation, to a great extent, is then transferred to documentation, because the infiltrations themselves are fragile and quickly subject to erosion. However, Evaristtis actions, much more than those of the American artists, seem to be polarised between the romantic and the political. While the act of painting, in combination with the archetypically pure landscapes, recharges our notions of romantic landscape painting, at the same time it points towards a more recent tradition of site-specific painting: for example, Nicolás Garcías Uriburu dyeing the Grand Canal green as part of the 1968 Venice Biennale, or Katharina Grosses multicoloured installations. In Evaristtis hands this act of colouring becomes a graffiti-like gesture, an inscription, which protests against the status quo, while proposing something to replace it. The colourings echo many of Evaristtis other projects, which make an actual physical use of blood, the most extreme example of which was Crash (1995), where he exhibited traces of blood from victims of traffic accidents in Thailand. In this context the red colour calls to mind accidents and the violation of nature. At the same time, though, it is reminiscent of something quite opposite: a return of the Golden Age and the pink utopia, where they will be no more sentimental exploitation of the natural world.
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Joachim Ritter, Landschaft. Zur Funktion des ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft [1963], in: idem., Subjektivität. Sechs Aufsätze, Frankfurt a.M. 1989 (1.ed. 1979), pp. 141-190.
W.J.T. Mitchell, Imperial Landscape, in: idem. (ed.), Landscape and Power, Chicago and London 1994 (pp. 5-34), p. 10.
Interview with Jacob Wamberg, Århus, Denmark, 9 January 2008.
See Petra Schröck, The Tip of the Iceberg: Marco Evaristtis The Ice Cube Project, in Dieter Buchart and Hans Dünser (ed.), Pink State: Marco Evaristti, Kunstraum Dornbirn, 2005, pp. 29-31.
See e.g. Hans Dam Christensen, Etiske modifikationer, in: Marco Evaristti (ed.), LSD. Liv, sex & død, Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 2003, p. 22.
© Copy Right Evaristti 2009
