Convergence Zone: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Ocean in Contemporary Art and Photography
Abigail Susik
I
Gradually over the last century, the ancient symbolic rapport between
humanity and the sea has changed and contemporary culture at large is
taking notice. The formerly awe-inspiring sublimity of the ocean as a
cultural symbol has now given way to a new kind of disturbing awareness:
humanity can no longer fully escape itself through exploration of alien
marine reaches. To be sure, many of the literal and metaphoric
associations of the ocean remain firmly ensconced in place as they have
for centuries. The ocean’s tidal force still threatens human life on a
terrifying scale, just as its depths continue to harbor myriad
scientific mysteries. Yet it is also apparent that the ocean has
submitted in diverse ways to the persistent shaping forces of the human
hand, and this in turn has shifted our conception of its semantic
identity.What was once one of the supreme spaces of otherness from a human perspective has been replaced in the last half-century or so by an often grotesque experience of unavoidable self-reflection. Reversing the subliminal onus of the of prehistoric flood myth, it is rather a tidal wave of man-made materiality that surges to embrace the globe’s seas in a mass of brightly colored plastic bits. As flotsam from around the globe clutters the most remote beaches and swirling vortices of buoyant trash form new islands in the Pacific, the old horror vacui and mortal fear of the oceanic transforms into suffocating claustrophobia and violent auto-critique. Continuing to function culturally as a physical simulacrum of the human unconscious as it long has, the ocean repeatedly regurgitates and resurfaces what most of modern society has been attempting to repress for some time now. As the unwitting toilet and primary commercial highway for global commerce, the world’s oceans starkly uncover the fact that culture and nature now interpenetrate physically and symbolically, and are equivalent in both power and influence.[1]
The general consensus seems to be that the palpable pollution of the world’s oceans with non-biodegradable flotsam is a dangerous problem, and yet most of society assumes a passive pose as to what can be done about it. Meanwhile, these shifting surfaces are unceasingly incrusted with a vast array of commodities being transported, ensuring the endurance of this consumption cycle. Although this condition of passivity certainly plagues us on both practical and psychological levels in an everyday manner, it is also significant that a sizeable subset of the art world is taking notice of this environmental and anthropological situation. Several artists from around the globe have recently turned to the realm of the ocean as subject matter for their photographic work, and notably, each of these artists reflect a similar set of sociological conditions in relation to this watery milieu. Echoing what has become the status of nearly every realm of human experience today, it seems, these works stringently comment upon the way in which the world’s seas have become lucid indicators of the omnipresence of global capitalism and the resulting lifestyle of discard.
Therefore a palpable trend has arisen which, along with communicating something about the predominance of the photographic mode in western cultural manifestations and the important ramifications of this shift itself in late twentieth-century art, also speaks profoundly to the fact that the ocean has once again emerged as paramount cultural indicator at large. Rather than revealing any nostalgic return to the formerly sublime associations of the ocean as a zone of both horror and pleasure, or a modernist understanding of the ocean as a self-reflexive matrix, I argue that new themes arise via this recent influx. The current resurgence of interest in the ocean among contemporary artists, primarily photographers, speaks to the heightened awareness of the ocean as a location which transparently reflects the total permeation of life, and art, with commercial languages. Attached to this is my claim that these works activate political consciousness about environmental issues related to human waste through a complex aesthetic operation involving confrontation with both the beautiful and the repulsive, the desirable and the repellent, thereby creating a kind of convergence zone or tidal vortex for some of our most powerful emotions about modern materiality and our interactions with it.
Such a hybrid emotional cue is not unlike that of the Freudian uncanny, which plays upon the gap separating the familiar and the strange, the known and the forgotten, ultimately creating a heightened awareness of ‘being’ through this dichotomy. In the case of the contemporary ocean photographs, this dualistic viewing experience of repulsion and attraction alerts the viewer to the conflicted nature of their own feelings on this subject, thereby arousing a volatile if not always a proactively critical frustration with current affairs in our world. This kind of ‘unfolding’ or ‘awakening’ of political sentiment through the persuasive rhetoric of the artful image has underlying ties to propaganda, socialist realist art, and reportage. But as will be seen ahead, in the case of contemporary documentary photographs of the ocean, this ‘unfolding’ also establishes a unique breed of social response that is more about calling attention to a general malaise of ambiguity than spelling out any specific political message. It is this malaise of ambiguity itself, by which I mean the deeply conflicted feelings that western society harbors about ecological issues pertaining to the ocean, that arouses a subtle chain reaction of emotions. Such emotional inertia may lead to the political through the aesthetic in an indirect and gradual manner.
Thus I argue that one effect of this new body of contemporary photography about the ocean is ultimately the reversal of the extremely common process of disavowal or repression that occurs in our daily lives regarding our consciousness of ecological issues. Obviously it is not as if culture at large suffers from some kind of collective amnesia about the increasingly polluted state of the world’s oceans. It is a frequent topic of conversation and a commonplace recognition for anyone coming into contact with the ocean on a given day. Nevertheless, such photographic ‘records’ of our world, act as stubborn witnesses and petulant reminders to the situation at hand, and therefore serve to disrupt the mundaneness of the already-known and offer a potential catalyst for social change.
It is important to note that this rise in consciousness of the dominance of economic forces and their manifestation in art far exceeds early modernist preoccupations with the aesthetics of the industrial and the streamlined. While contemporary art about the ocean as an absolute cultural sphere demonstratively shares the same propensity for visual pleasure and beauty expressed in early twentieth-century renderings of the industrial, these new reflections on the ocean simultaneously embody a visceral shock and a subsequent disgust with the sheer magnitude of current material excess. In the act of looking at these contemporary images, the manifest formal beauty of the scenes and objects presented in the ocean context quickly gives way to a sharp psychological awareness of fear and culpability with regards to the potential natural disasters looming in the future as a result of our consumption patterns (more will be said on this developmental viewing process ahead). Assuredly then, it is precisely because the ocean was formerly a site for modernist transcendentalism of various kinds that today’s tendency toward unveiling the ocean as the communal sewer for capitalistic excess is all the more unsettling.
This observation is underscored by the observation that the majority of contemporary art works which take the ocean as subject are either photographs or videos, thus allowing for an even more marked departure from the past legacy of painterly depictions of the oceanic sphere with all their symbolic baggage. Likewise, most of these contemporary works are grounded in a ‘documentary’ aesthetic in the sense that they record scenes from life with apparent objectivity and minimal image manipulation (although, as will become apparent ahead, Chris Jordan and Andy Hughes are the exception to this in my discussion). On the one hand, such a formal choice on the part of these artists might seem to signify a desire for the veracity and professed ‘factuality’ of reportage— and in some measure this impetus is sustained in the viewer reception of these images. The photographs that will be briefly discussed here by Allan Sekula, Edward Burtynsky, and Pam Longobardi (and certain examples by Jordan) maintain a realist edge in the sense that they faithfully record the surrounding visual field and also present scenes of notable social significance for speculation. Further, through their site specificity, made readily apparent through descriptive titles often including dates and/or place names, the viewer ‘learns’ something about the world and its environmental issues in the act of looking. In an aesthetic sense, this choice aligns these photographs with the substantial indexical and denotative tradition of photography. The landscape or object in view becomes the present and immanent ‘subject’ while the disembodied viewing eye observes from a self-aware, detached, and timeless distance. In a political sense, the reportage edge embedded in most of these photographs connects them on an obvious level to the journalistic functions of muckraking and social critique. In other words, the photographs expose a concealed truth and allow the ocean to be seen for what it currently is at least in part: a heterogeneous natural-cultural morass containing significant quantities of plastic and metal flotsam and jetsam.
But as I have mentioned above, these contemporary photographic studies of the marine context should be distinguished from notable examples of social documentary photography by the likes of figures like Jacob Riis and Walker Evans because they linger even more emphatically in an ‘objective’ manner upon the aesthetic beauty of their subject matter (and I employ ‘objective’ here with awareness of the volatile relativity of this concept; hence ‘objective’ would read here more as ‘style’ than de facto ‘category’). This distinction no doubt has much to do with the lack of human subjects in the majority of these contemporary ocean scenes. In terms of genre, these works are closer to landscapes and still lives and so lend themselves more readily to formalized ordering and thus detached looking (at least upon initial glance). In many of these photographs, the intrusion of what we call ‘culture’ into the foreign realm of the category designated as ‘nature’ is confused in the most provocative of ways, which in turn complicates any ecological message that might be appended there in an interesting and productive manner. A photograph of shipping containers makes these objects seem almost as multitudinous in number as the ocean itself is vast (Fig.5). In another, a decommissioned ship is as impressive and poignant as the sight of a beached blue whale (Fig.6). A third photograph shows a knot of tangled netting strewn across shoreline rocks, colorful and intricate like a jellyfish or a bank of living coral (Fig.9). At first, our comprehension delights in these novel similes which seem to show the artificial objects of culture as equivalent to or synonymous or even in harmony with nature itself. Soon thereafter, however, our ecological consciousness resuscitates and reminds us of the attendant disgust we associate with polluted environments, our collective fear of an apocalypse brought on by our own obdurate profligacy, our overwhelming guilt at playing a small part in this unraveling narrative of destruction, and finally our monumental political immobility in the face of these threats.
In this regard, the contemporary photographs of the ocean that I speak of function to a degree like memento mori still lives, in the sense that we are aware on some level of the sober undertones of the scene even while we revel in the sensuous beauty of the presented images. Yet otherwise there are telling differences from the memento mori paradigm that center upon the differences between morality and ethics, religious ethos and politics—and these have much to do with basic differences in context and iconography. In the ocean images, the hubris and gluttony of humanity now extends beyond the realm of home and city, deep into the remote regions of the natural world itself where such forces become anonymous and divorced from individual moral liability. What were formerly objects of ephemeral enjoyment in pre-Enlightenment memento mori scenes have become nearly immortal plastic and metal anti-ruins both large and small in the ocean photographs. The message therefore is not that all our luxurious indulgences will pass away with the fleetingness of our own lives, as was the case with the memento mori, but rather that the fragmented remains of our banal purchasing patterns will long out live us in a horrifying, zombie-like fashion. Moreover, where memento mori scenes commented upon our collective desire to evade the awareness of inevitable death through hedonistic distraction, the contemporary ocean photographs articulate instead the notion that it is the very distraction itself, our stubbornly passive refusal to change our methods of production and consumption, which may accelerate our progress toward death as a species.
However, to return to this question of the ramifications of this recent change in artistic depictions of the ocean, it is important I think to remember the diversity of oceanic imagery in the history of Western art in this discussion. It is not as if the ocean was previously a blank symbolic canvas in the human psyche. Indeed, one of the reasons for its centrality as a symbolic signifier for humanity throughout history has been its pliability, changeability, and general aptitude for multivalence. The ocean has been a favorite cipher for the development of Western modernity over the last few centuries, and the machinations of economics and power have long been imprinted there in text and image. In Europe, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maritime scenes most frequently depicted the ocean as an advantageous (if not always tamable) medium for commerce and military conquest. In contrast to this, however, during the nineteenth centurymany writers, artists, and photographers were drawn to vast marine reaches as a symbolic vehicle for various subjective and idealist states of mind. Arguably this preoccupation often overshadowed its frequent painterly depiction during the nineteenth century as an indicator of imperial expansion, industrial production and distribution, proletarian labor and bourgeois leisure.
For instance, in the medium of painting, Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic oceans, galleons, shipwrecks, harbors and shorelines, evoked the universal isolation of human consciousness in the face of natural law— and at the same time, they served as a metaphor for the projected limitlessness of that human consciousness in itself (Fig. 1). Additionally, for J.M.W Turner, salty bodies of water were often suffused with a divine light and energy that overwhelmed the modern inventions of humankind, suggesting a simultaneously natural and supernatural medium which could never be tamed or surmounted, a foreign and magical animus that spit out whatever human vessel entered there.[2] On a less ecstatic level than Friedrich or Turner, Winslow Homer explored the various moods of the ocean throughout the day and across the seasons of the year. He demonstrated a more flexible and temperamental medium in the ocean, one that was nearly as permissive and generous as it was voracious. His maritime scenes show a watery surface that is unreliable and impervious: a locus of death as well as whimsical pleasure depending on the climate, the tides, and the reliability of one’s ship.
Figure 1: Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea,
1809. Oil on canvas. 110 × 171.5 cm. Courtesy of the Nationalgalerie,
Staatliche Museen ( http://www.smb.spk-berlin.de/ ), Berlin, Germany.
Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany/
Joerg P. Anders/ Art Resource, New York, New York.
With all of its diverse nautical and coastal associations the ocean
was certainly a versatile medium of communication for these painters,
but one that always asserted its autonomy and absolute immunity to
formal and iconographic assimilation. This persistent ontological
distance between the ocean and humanity seems to have as much to do with
questions of scale as with the extreme danger posed by the ocean.
Although the morbid and fearsome qualities of the ocean are a visible
subject in European maritime painting before the twentieth century, a
more consistent theme in visual depictions of the ocean is the
incomprehensible and superhuman immensity of the ocean. Even at the
advent of the twentieth century, Piet Mondrian’s hemmed-in and
gridded-out ocean planes profess an optical dumbfoundedness with regard
to tidal expanses, as if the mechanism of the eye broke down in the face
of that unbounded space past the pier, registering only abstract
fragments of information, plusses and minuses that never add up (Fig.
2). This inability to enframe and delimit the ocean without a doubt made
it all the more appealing to the modernist sensibility. In the hands of
a painter like Mondrian, modernist abstraction was singularly adept at
signifying the ocean as the most mystifying of natural surfaces— at once
literal and resistant at the top layer of its liquid cuticle, but
boundless and unknowable below. In such a way, the ocean became the
perfect metaphor for the formalist-metaphysical interpretation of the
two-dimensional picture plane as simultaneously evoking flatness and
depth. The ocean, like the modernist canvas, embodied this dichotomous
identity in the most direct, dialectical manner, without dependence upon
illusion or pictorial smoke and mirrors of any kind.
Figure 2: Piet Mondrian, Pier and Ocean,
1915. Charcoal and watercolor on paper. 34 5/8 x 44″ (87.9 x 111.2 cm). ©
2012 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International USA. Digital Image ©
The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
Although painterly depictions of the ocean were largely displaced
with the medium of painting itself as the dominant artistic matrix
during the twentieth century, the ocean and various aspects of the
marine environment remained a prominent subject in photography. Indeed,
the ocean’s inherent monochromatic hues and internal structure of light
and shadow lent itself beautifully to the photographic mode, while
nevertheless recalling— perhaps unconsciously, perhaps ironically— the
fluidity and tactility of the medium of painting. It is the
self-reflexive capability of the cipher of the ocean that sustained this
environment as a key symbol for twentieth-century modern consciousness.
Whereas once it was the prospect of endless space presented by the
ocean that had so riveted its observers as an assertion of sublimity
among other things, in the modern age it is certainly the ambivalent surface
of shifting marine waters that became the locus of fascination.
According to Stephane Mallarmé, one if its earliest modernist
proponents, the ocean is the zone of both pure determinacy and
chance—simultaneously a flat slate as well as an impossible abyss,
‘blanchi, étale, furieux,’ [‘raging, whitened, stalled’].[3]
Most twentieth-century artists were content to observe this capricious
force from a safe distance, with the noted exception of Bas Jan Ader,
who was lost at sea in 1975 during his solitary performance project In Search of the Miraculous, in which he attempted to cross the Atlantic in a 12 and ½ foot sailboat.[4]
Like Bas Jan Ader, Tacita Dean is a notable contemporary artist who is
likewise drawn to the potential violence of the ocean and its ability to
dwarf and isolate the human actor in traumatic scenarios of shipwreck
and marooning (Fig. 3).
Figure 3: Tacita Dean, The Sea, with a Ship, Afterwards an Island [Detail], 1999. Chalk on blackboard. 3 parts, 244 x 488 cm each. Photo credit: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel.
In this vein of modernist appreciation of the ocean, it is the placid
surface of the maritime environment rather than its foreboding
profundity that seems to maintain the most interest currently. Today,
there are a handful of artists who carry on this tradition of
contemplation of the ocean’s surface as an abstract and often
monochromatic canvas, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Vija Celmins, and Roni
Horn, among others (Fig. 4). These works, whether photographic or in the
case of Celmins, drawn, seem to comprehend the ocean as an impenetrable
wall or façade protecting and sequestering what is beneath and behind,
and yet these lateral surfaces nevertheless seductively invite careful
and repetitive surface scanning. Operating metaphorically like a screen
for light reflection and random physiological incident, such images
suggest the abstraction of the experience of looking even when that
looking is grounded in figurative specificity. Moreover, the screen-like
nature of their pictorial fields, underlined through the instability of
the vertical versus horizontal image orientation, inevitably invokes
the unadorned but anodyne qualities of common technological devices such
as computer and television monitors. Thus, the ocean’s surface remains
radically empty but also simultaneously replete with abstract detail and
multitudinous metaphoric associations. At once a projection screen for
the psyche and a palimpsest of cultural connotations, it is an ideal
medium for the contemplation of the bewildering circular relationship
between reality and representation, materiality and the subconscious,
immanence and memory.
Figure 4: Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean),
1970. Graphite on acrylic ground on paper. 14 1/8 x 18 7/8″ (36 x 48
cm). Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art
Resource, NY. Celmins, Vija (b. 1939) © Copyright.
However, as I have already suggested another trend has arisen in
contemporary art in which the ocean is something other than the
compelling expressions of sublime infinity, minimalist panorama, or
psychological screen. Following the twentieth-century precedent, the
photograph remains the primary medium for artists working with oceanic
themes, but the images have become largely documentary-based records
with attending social commentary, as opposed to abstracted, metaphorical
or symbolic meditations on the aquatic body. In these recent works, the
ocean is shown as a practical component of civilization rather than a
desolate natural environment or a transcendental metaphor for
consciousness.[5]
Accordingly, the current trend shares most similarities with
seventeenth- and eighteenth- century maritime scenes which reveal the
ocean as a crucial medium for commercial exchange and imperial expansion
between nations and continents. Nevertheless, this cultural re-turn has
its unique causalities, which in reality can only be superficially
equated with historical maritime scenes. Specifically, in the immediate
post-World War II era, the expansion of capitalist production saw the
advent of both the standardized shipping container and the widespread
use of disposable packaging, based primarily on non-biodegradable
plastic. With the development of the advanced capitalist age, the impact
of the throwaway society upon both the surface and the depths of the
world’s oceans became palpable and inevitable.Therefore, this much is clear: in the present plastic age, the ocean and its shores are as much cultural spaces as natural ones. Or rather, the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ have permeated to such an extent that they are now often indistinguishable, as I have asserted before. When the ocean is not manifesting its incredible destructive powers, it is often encountered as just another space available for human manipulation to be entered and inserted into, traversed across, and collected from. Indeed, the ocean has become one of the realms where we are perhaps most haunted by the situation we have lately created for ourselves. As much as one might like to revert to that former experience of boundlessness in contemplation of the ocean, or the self-reflexive emptiness of its façade— the ocean is now frequently a place where we are insistently reminded of the permeation of our quotidian consumer culture through a literal return of the repressed. But at the same time this permeation of the ‘natural world’ by remnants of the manmade has something comforting about it: these familiar objects were lost but are now found; they colonize the hostile habitat and reflect the dominance of the human ego and its drive toward domestication.
II
One of the primary themes of twentieth-century art concerned the
various structures of capitalism, and surely it was the first two stages
of this cycle of commerce that received the most attention, from dada,
to surrealism to pop and beyond: namely, industrial production and mass
consumption. It is telling, however, that contemporary art of today
instead resoundingly invests the most interest in the last stage of the
production cycle, that of discard and waste. A significant amount of
critical literature has emerged regarding this theme, and several
critical terms such as informe, the abject and base, the
outmoded, and others touch upon this constellation of meanings. Various
twentieth-century mediums such as the readymade, the assemblage, the
found object, the accumulation, etc., confront our culture of detritus
head on.[6]
In addition, an intermediary step in that cycle, namely the packaging
and transportation of goods, also appears to be gaining in significance
for artists in the last three decades.While the planet’s oceans are certainly also sites of production (oil, power, etc.) and consumption (seafood, tourism, leisure sports, etc.), contemporary artists have proven to be significantly drawn to contemplate oceans as sites of commercial dissemination and excess. In my mind, this is arguably a partial result of the former symbolic and formal associations of the ocean in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. While the deconstruction of ideology that postmodernism has achieved is undoubtedly a cause for celebration, the breakdown of mythologies linked to the ocean carries with it an invariably tragic ethical message. Whether we like it or not, the ocean is no longer a signifier of boundlessness and self-reflexive emptiness because, like everything else within our reach, we have made full-use of the ocean as just another ‘standing-reserve’ for the prowess of techne, to put it in Heideggarian terms.[7] Although oceans have arguably been a key site for anthropological exploits of all kinds throughout the evolution of humankind, the current state of total infiltration of the human and the oceanic, the near-complete acculturation of the ocean so to speak, has taken on unmatched, super- or sur- natural proportions.
To bolster this point, I will address a selection of works that focus on the ocean’s role as a mega-highway for global capitalism, its role in the incessant transport of commodities. The American artist Allan Sekula and the Canadian Photographer Edward Burtynsky offer two prominent examples of a documentary concern with the shipping industry, wherein gargantuan cargo vessels become the international sentinels of the blue expanse, dramatically transforming global waterways and the many ports that shelter them. Between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s Sekula worked on a remarkable documentary project entitled Fish Story, which took form as large-format color photographs, a continuous slide show of still color photographs, an installation, a book with a long essay by Sekula, and a series of lectures.[8] Sekula continues to work on an extended version of the project and has made two documentary films in the last decade, Tsukiji and The Lottery of the Sea, and one film essay entitled The Forgotten Space (2010) with Noël Burch. One the one hand, for Sekula, Fish Story was a politically-motivated reportage project in which he studied firsthand the impact of maritime economics upon working classes and port towns across the globe. As part of the project, Sekula travelled internationally capturing photographs and video of ships, goods, sailors, ports and markets, even crossing the Atlantic in a cargo ship laden with containers. On the other hand, Fish Story had explicit art historical and sociological implications for Sekula in that he viewed the massive scale of the worldwide shipping industry to be indicative of a shift from a human understanding of the ocean as spatially panoramic, unable to be encompassed, to a view of the ocean as full of atomized details, securely enframed (Fig. 5). On a macrocosmic level, global shipping industries enframe and contain the vast reaches of the ocean through the constant mapping that occurs via crisscrossing routes between different national ports. These routes palpably impact the shifting waters around them, to the extent that the interrupt animal migration patterns and even whale sonar. On a microcosmic level, this containment is epitomized by the standardization of commercial exchange, from the multicolored hues of shipping container boxes to prefabricated product packaging.
Figure 5: Allan Sekula, Panorama. Mid-Atlantic, from Fish Story, 1988-1995. Courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica.In related fashion to the reverse-tactic aesthetics of Sekula’s project, Edward Burtynksy’s large-format photographs of the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh made over the last decade also move into the political through the misleadingly beautiful. Images of mammoth ship skeletons stranded in bays emptied by low tide seem to comment that the panoramic potency once embodied by the ocean has been replaced by the monumentality of commercial tankers and cargo vessels themselves (Fig. 6). Even here, at the end of their lives as objects or tools, these ships now seem to be the most foreboding creatures of the deep, and human scavengers come to strip off their siding like organisms picking the bones of beached carcasses. Thus echoing Sekula, Burtynsky’s studies of container ports also reiterate the point that astonishing vastness is no longer the prime territory of the ocean, but rather also that of human commerce, with its endless stockpiles of new and used goods.
Figure 6: Edward Burtynsky, Shipbreaking #30, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001. Photograph. Courtesy of Edward Burtynsky Photographic Works.
Figure 7: Hans Haacke, Monument to Beach Pollution, 1970. Rubbish installation, Carboneras, Spain, August. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery.
Figure 8: Andy Hughes, El Segundo, California, USA, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 9: Pam Longobardi, Sleeping Giant, from Drifters, 2008-2009. Fuji crystal archive digital print on plexi. 36” x 50.” Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 10: Pam Longobardi, Messages in Bottles, from Drifters, 2008-2009. Fuji crystal archive digital print on plexi. 36” x 50.” Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 11: Pam Longobardi, Defective Flow Chart, 2007. Found plastic marine debris, South Point, Hawaii. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 12: Chris Jordan, Shipping Containers, 2007. 60 x 120.” Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 13: Chris Jordan, Shipping Containers (detail), 2007. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 14: Chris Jordan, Gyre, 2009. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 15: Chris Jordan, Gyre (detail), 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 16: Chris Jordan, Midway Message from the Gyre, 2009. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
To conclude this overview of the trend in contemporary art and
photography toward documentary-based depictions of the ocean, it may
suffice to say that these manifestations acutely embody the way in which
the representation of the real today has its direct correlate in the
fantastic—and also an unsettling grotesquerie. Again, such a reference
should arouse historical associations with the surrealist uncanny as insolite and merveilleux,
but with an important 21st-century twist. This is the case simply
because for most viewers, these images present scenes of monumental
waste and consumption that are almost as unbelievable as they are
literal, and hence their significant power as sites of visual and
psychological convergence zones. As we are everyday more distant as
participants in the production and eradication of consumer goods through
civic waste management, we witness these images as hapless innocents
who nevertheless at the same time comprehend our culpable role of
passivity and participation. Denial, disavowal, monumental repression—
these are the protective measures of the ego that will also make more
probable the approach of environmental catastrophe, which will in turn
take its place among other ‘natural’ disasters in due time. As a result
of this societal orientation, our re-presented experience of the
already-known (whether that already-known is commonplace or just more
distantly understood as ‘actual’ in the world somewhere) can become
shocking in productive ways, as these ocean photographs show. What my
discussion has hopefully demonstrated first and foremost, therefore, is
the way in which the maritime environment has so strikingly shifted from
a space of otherness to one of disturbing familiarity and repressed
intimacy, in which we are constantly confronted and crowded by our own
material proliferation on both an infinitesimal and a massive scale.
Second, I hope to have spoken to the remarkable capability of
documentary-based photographs, however distended or distorted their
actual relationship to ‘reality’ and ‘objectivity’ might be, in a world
in which ‘reality’ itself frequently appears ‘out of order,’ to
instigate emotional response and to therefore ultimately catalyze
societal perspectives away from passivity.[9][1] I am influenced here by Slavoj Žižek’s recent critique of ecology which was in turn influenced by Timothy Morton’s discussion of “dark ecology” in Ecology without Nature. Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007). Žižek, Slavoj. “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses: Parts 1 and 2″, Lacan.com (2007). Rather than fetishizing nature as a pristine category separate from the artificial universe of humanity, Morton and Žižek advocate an overcoming of this dualism and an understanding of culture as part of nature. This expanded understanding of technology as natural is how I would begin to define the concept of “supernature,” which could also be termed “hypernature” or “next nature.” Thus, I am not so much interested in pursuing here an ecological critique of the oceanic pollution caused by consumption and production (partly because I think that critique goes without saying), but rather in analyzing the role of the photographic work of art as a catalyst for individual and societal agency.
[2] I am greatly simplifying this art historical overview of these important artists for the sake of brevity and economy of argument. Much more could be said about the maritime scenes of each of these artists. In particular, J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship of 1840 has divergent associations that depart sharply from his less overtly politicized maritime scenes. I do not take this work into account here, but rather refer to Turner’s other maritime works.
[3] Mallarmé, Stéphane. A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance: Poem (Santa Cruz: Greenhouse Review Press, 1990).
[4]Verwoert, Jan. Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous (London: Afterall Books, 2006).
[5] It might seem tempting here to compare this distinction in styles in contemporary photography of the ocean (empty vs. replete with detritus and objects of commerce) to Michael Fried’s recent application of his categories of theatricality vs. absorption to this medium in the recent book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). Indeed, Fried himself discusses the ‘Seascapes’ of Sugimoto as examples of theatricality in that they persistently deflect the beholding action of the viewer through their serial sameness and their insistence on surface. However, I want to avoid engaging in depth with this dichotomy of repellent vs. immersive primarily because I see it as tangential to my thesis. My discussion focuses more on shifts in broad iconographic categories and the pictorial strategies that render these shifts dynamic and persuasive, rather than phenomenological issues related to reception and the gaze (although reception is important to my argument in a different way). I do think that Fried would probably deem most of the cluttered maritime scene by artists like Sekula and Burtynsky as theatrical rather than absorptive given their emphasis on space beyond the frame and the agency of the depicted objects themselves. However, I do not think this assessment particularly impacts my argument here. For Fried’s discussion of Sugimoto, see: Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998) 294-98.
[6] I will refrain from detailing the theoretical background of these complex terms here. The most helpful text for this line of thought is: Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). Likewise, my dissertation of 2009, deals extensively with such themes. Susik, Abigail. The Vertigo of the Modern: Surrealism and the Outmoded (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2009). Following are just a few of the recent texts on trash: Knechtel, John. Trash (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). Kennedy, Greg. An Ontology of Trash: The Disposable and Its Problematic Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). Vergine, Lea. When Trash Becomes Art: Trash Rubbish Mongo (London, Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto: Skira, 2007).
[7] I refer here in passing to Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” which was first given as a lecture in 1955. Other essays by Heidegger such as, “The Age of the World Picture” [1938] are also relevant to the discussion. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Heidegger’s writing on the interaction between technology, nature and humanity informs my discussion on multiple levels, in particular with regard to his notion that humanity puts forth a challenge to the forces of nature and that as modernity marches forward this challenge becomes more and more successful (which not necessarily a bad thing for either Heidegger or myself, although it is often an alarming one). This thread of thought requires a much more extensive commentary than I can allot here, unfortunately, if I am to spell out the connection entirely. Interestingly, Michael Fried also engages extensively with Heidegger in his recent book mentioned above, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. Fried is particularly interested in Heidegger’s distinction between the concepts of ‘readiness-to-hand’ and ‘present-at-hand’ and how representational strategies reinforce the absorption in the world by Dasein. This discussion has some relevance to my topic in that the photographs of ocean flotsam show ‘equipment’ that has become deficient in ‘reliability,’ and so is more about a problematic ‘present-at-handedness’ in its useless state. However, again, in my mind this line of thought, which would engage more deeply with the ontology of detritus and photographed detritus, is not crucial to the current discussion which has a reception focus.
[8] Sekula, Allan. Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2002).
[9] In a longer discussion, other artists, such as the French watercolorist Yvan Salomone or the British multimedia artist Terry Setch might also enter into this conversation, thus confirming even more concretely the emergence of a new trend in artistic production and symbolic contemplation related to the ocean, one reflecting the invasion of both the shipping industry and waste flotsam into the oceanic environment.
Abigail Susik
is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Willamette University. Her
interdisciplinary work traces metahistorical shifts and transference
across material, textual and visual cultures in European and American
contexts in between the 19th and 21st centuries.
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