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Nature
and Society
Debra Allman / Maxwell Attenborough
/ Daniel Baker / Kiera Bennett / Tim Beckenham / Tony Carter
/ Gordon Cheung / Gerald Davies / Andrew Grassie / Barnaby
Hosking / Katarina Ivanisin / Reece Jones / Ian Kiaer / Tatsuya
Kimata / Ali Mackie / Robin Mason / Alex Gene Morrison / John
Stezaker / Jo Stockham / Tomoaki Suzuki / Esther Teichmann
/ Amikam Toren / Christian Ward
Multi disciplinary exhibition if you go down to the woods
today... curated by artist Robin Mason, took place at the
Rockwell Project space in November 2004. Rockwell Project
was an artist led cooperative set up by a group of Royal College
of Art and Royal Academy graduates, which ran from 2002 to
2007. Rockwell was situated in a deprived area of Hackney,
East London. The idea behind this exhibition space was to
promote the very current on the London / International art
scene, and by doing so to engage the local community as well.
In May this year the space was closed, as it has become an
attractive location for the property developing market due
to the dramatic rise in property prices in the area; partly
influenced by the coming Olympics.
A large number of a younger generation of artists (Maxwell
Attenborough, Reece Jones, Christian Ward) participated in
the exhibition if you go down to the woods today... alongside
a number of established artists (Amikam Toren, Tony Carter,
Andrew Grassie) who continue to actively participate in the
International art scene. The exhibition was well received
by the London art world and many of the works exhibited ended
up in important art collections.
The exhibition was a kind of experiment that was appropriate
to the exhibiting space. There was always an idea to expand
on this experimental event and to consider further venues.
An ideal opportunity occurred when I was offered means to
organise an exhibition at the interesting 'transitional' space
of Zagreb's Skyscraper. At the time it seemed that the project
would have to be realised in a very short period of time.
The opening of the exhibition was to coincide with the opening
of the reconstructed Zagreb's Skyscraper that was due in November
last year. Initially, I intended to tour the exhibition if
you go down to the woods today... to Zagreb, by creating an
event that would involve relevant Croatian artists as well.
I presented the exhibition project to prominent curator Silva
Kal_i_ who then took over selection of the Croatian element
of the exhibition. In the mean time, reconstruction works
on the Skyscraper were postponed and the date of completion
became indeterminate. There was a need for a new space. Parallel
to the space issue, the exhibition started to develop in two
parallel trajectories. Consequently in this period of
postponement, it truly became a 'project'.
Instead of finding a new space, we discovered 'new spaces':
former granary, now the Ethnographic Museum in Dubrovnik and
the former leather factory, now Glyptotheque, Croatian Academy
of Science and Arts in Zagreb. We visited London and got more
of an insight into the UK selection, being further developed
by Robin Mason. Somewhere along the way the exhibition-project
was renamed as: Nature and Society, Parallel lines.
In the UK selection, some of the artists who initially participated
in the exhibition if you go down to the woods today... were
excluded from the new project and other new names were invited
to participate: Daniel Baker, Tim Beckenham, Gordon Cheung,
Lucie Galand, Ian Kiaer, Marko Maetamm, John Stezaker, Esther
Teichman, with the idea to get across, as accurately as possible,
an overview of what is currently happening on the International
London art scene (with an emphasis on the rediscovery of painting
as a medium and enjoyment of man-made objects). The Croatian
selection by Silva Kalcıic´, alongside what is current,
also included an engaged look backwards; a kind of documentation
of successive investigational art in Croatia. Within the wide
generational span and indoctrinated selection, she comprised
prominent art personalities from Ivan Kozıaric´ and
Ivan Picelj to Goran Petercol, Antun Maracıic´, Goran
Trbuljak, Vlado Martek and over to the youngest representatives
of the pulsating Croatian art scene. Parallel lines can also
run in opposite directions, and it is down to the engaged
public to discover the multiple connections between them.
This project/exhibition came to realisation thanks to the
Frankopan family. If it wasn't for their generous support,
the actual flow of parallel lines would be hard to imagine.
The exhibition was also financially supported by the City
of Dubrovnik, the City of Zagreb and City and Guilds of London
Art School. In its organisation, great support came from the
Croatian Architects Association, particularly by their kind
secretary Nela Gubic´. Apart from curators of the Croatian
selection and the UK selection, I particularly wish to thank
Davorka Peric´ Vucıic´ Sıneperger on her admirable
insight into the Croatian art scene.
Katarina Ivanisin Kardum
The Forest Within (catalogue
text)
On a symbolic level, the journey into the forest is a journey
into the subconscious. We travel from the city – the
new home of society – the ‘conscious mind’
of the planet, to the tenebrous and ineffable depth of the
forest – the subconscious aspect of the societal mind.
In earlier millennia, when much of the planet was covered
in forests, it formed the natural home of humankind at a time
when the mind was at a stage of development nearer to that
of the subconscious; instinctive, intuitive, mythological
and imagistic. With the exodus from the forests to cities
we can posit a parallel ‘coming to consciousness’
in the human mind. But in this exponential expansion of consciousness
something was also lost. The technological infrastructure
of the urban environment, with its automation and concomitant
isolation of the individual, has produced a society which
is fractured by the separation of the individual from nature.
The increasing polarisation of the ‘town’ and
the ‘country’, exemplified in heated debates over
hunting rights, the country-dweller’s resentment of
the purchase of second country homes by those living in cities
and the increasing redundancy of farmers in a mechanised market-place,
have served to highlight the ever growing rift between the
forest and the city.
Every country in the world has numerous myths associated with
the forest. From the Bulgarian samodiva or wood nymph and
the German story of Hansel and Gretel to England’s Little
Red Riding Hood and Robin Hood. The forest acts as a collective
depository for society’s subconscious fears but also
as the location of its mythic ‘dreaming’, a realm
of magic and revelation, of history and fantasy, epiphany
and transformation, and these myth are enduring, even in the
twenty-first century.
In many ways society, the city, is destroying nature, the
forest. Thousands of acres of rainforest have been eradicated
in the pursuit of the hyper agriculturisation of the earth.
Forest trees are relentlessly cleared to make way for grazing
land for beef cattle – one of the least efficient forms
of nutrition – usually in the Third World for the ever
increasing demands of consumption in the West. The great forests
of Britain were destroyed during the industrial revolution
to provide fuel for the new machines and factories. We are
now at a point when society threatens with extinction that
most fundamental expression of nature, the forest. Green belts
are being eaten away by the ever-increasing demand for new
housing to serve a relentlessly increasing population and
concerns about the environment are constantly put to the bottom
of the list or priorities.
The forest represents the most profound embodiment of both
the sublime and the uncanny. The human encounter with nature
induces in the subject a transformative sense of awe,
an awareness of the power of the natural world and a register
of humankind’s small place in the greater scheme of
things. This conflation of terror and ecstasy in the face
of the power of the forest underpins our relationship to nature.
Within the dark wood lurks the unknown, and that unknown is
our encounter with our own ‘shadow-self’, the
uncanny encounter with our doppelganger, the sublimated embodiment
of our most hidden desires and our most terrifying fears.
There is an enduring history of artist’s engaging with
the notion of the mythic landscape of the forest in opposition
to the artificial society of the city. From Kasper David Friedrich’s
‘sublime’ forest-scapes (1774–1840) with
their lone figures daunted by the grandeur of nature, to the
German expressionist school of Der Blaue Reiter whose leading
members were Franz Marc (1880–1916), Wassily Kandinsky
(1866–1944), and August Macke (1887–1914). They
too engaged with notions of a romantic relation between the
individual and nature, specifically the forest.
Robin Mason has brought together a diverse group of artists
– many associated with the City and Guilds of London
Art School and the Royal college of Art – who continue
this engagement with themes around the notion of Society and
Nature. They approach this problematic from a wide variety
of strategies, some direct, others more discursive. Alex Gene
Morrison envisions a new and terrifying sublime now transposed
to society from the forest. It is the very elements of an
overloaded over-consumptive society which here mutate and
form the new uncanny. Jo Stockham actually works in a forest
in Oxfordshire, producing work which explores the subtle sensory
relationship to the forest, its less overt and evident aspects.
Nature can be at once terrifying and beautiful and we need
to explore exactly what is the nature of that terror and that
beauty. Esther Teichmann’s photographs place the human
presence within the seemingly nurturing enclosure of the forest.
Amikam Toren’s work Neither a leaf nor a tree, subtly
intervenes in nature, manipulating the venous structure of
a leaf such that we are confronted with a hybrid structure
which is both natural and man-made at the same time, a leaf
within a leaf. As in much of the work in this exhibition our
perception and conception of ‘the natural’ is
disrupted and our assumptions about nature and what is ‘natural’
are questioned.
What all the artists in this exhibition have in common is
an acknowledgement of the dual world within which we now live.
We are ‘outside of nature’ and yet rely on its
relentless exploitation for the maintenance of society in
its current state of hyper-consumption and exponential expansion.
‘Green’ issues – global warming, climate
change, rising tide lines, floods, earthquakes, the disappearing
forest and the increase greenhouse gasses – are constantly
in the media, there is an almost hysterical obsession with
the environment, as if we have only just woken up to the devastation
which we have wreaked upon the planet since the industrial
revolution. It is not so much that art has any political or
moral obligation to engage with these pressing issues, but
more that any art which is fully connected to its age will
inevitably be concerned with the issues of the day. The symbiotic
relationship of nature and society needs to be constantly
and carefully monitored and adjusted such that there is an
harmonious and mutually beneficial balance between the two.
If that balance is disturbed then the inevitable outcome will
certainly be both disastrous and irreversible.
Richard Dyer © 2007
Richard Dyer is News Editor and London
Correspondent of Contemporary magazine, for which he writes
a monthly column on the London artworld; Assistant Editor
at Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and
Culture; and Art Editor of Wasafiri, the magazine of international
contemporary writing. His critical writing has appeared in
Contemporary, Frieze, Flash Art, Art Press, Third Text, Art
Review, Wasafiri, The Guardian, Time Out, Citizen K, Rapid
Eye, Performance Magazine and many other publications and
catalogues. His recent publications include: Electronic Shadows:
The Art of Tina Kean, (Black Dog, 2004); Dan Hays: Impressions
of Colorado (Southampton City Art Gallery, 2006); Riddled
With Light: Corpus Lumen: Susie Hamilton, 1996–2006
(Paul Stolper, 2006), Zineb Sedira: Saphir (Photographer’s
Gallery, 2006) and Transitive Transduction: Breaking the Integument
in the work of Tony Bevan (Ben Brown Gallery, 2007).
Dubrovacki Muzeji (Dubrovnik Museums)
Zitnica Rupe
The Rupe Grannary
Od Rupa 3
10000 Dubrovnik, Crotia
e: dubrovaci-muzeji@du.t-com.hr
t: +385(0) 20 323 013 / 323 018
Open daily 9am-6pm
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