Backbone > Lucid Dreaming
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle…Rethink

Landscape is a theme perhaps more closely identified with our region than any other. Once Thomas Cole founded the Hudson River School, scores of artists followed his lead to create transcendental images of what is now our own backyard, evoking emotions ranging from the pastoral to the sublime. The taste for these quasi-religious, nature-inspired pictures remains strong, as evidenced by a number of galleries that continue to do a booming business by providing just this sort of painting to the tourists and city weekenders who take it to be the artistic summary of the aesthetic, outdoorsy pleasures that they seek here.

The appeal of the mythologizing landscape has changed remarkably little from the mid-19th century to today. One of the things frequently overlooked (or simply painted out) of the original Hudson River School work was the fact that even as they crafted their vision of pristine Nature, in the same breath the River was in the process of being industrialized and settled. From the moment that the great canals (the Erie, the D&H) opened onto the Hudson-which was roughly the time that Cole's work first became popular-the presence of the human hand in the landscape was already inescapable. Yet the very popularity of the Hudson River School was sprung largely on the painters' resolute turn away from the technologically driven reshaping of the land, in favor of an Emersonian vision of transcendental Nature, the ultimate antidote to the corruptions of city life and industrial civilization. So powerful is this myth of Nature that perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised to see it live on so in our own age. From the enviro-aesthetic opposition to the Hudson cement plant (whose major argument, in some quarters, is the prospective factory's visibility from Frederick Church's Olana estate) and the soothing, aestheticized landscapes snatched up by visiting city dwellers to remind them of their "rural" getaways to Minnewaska or Mohonk, there remains a strongly vested interest in understanding nature as something "out there," radically different from the world of culture in which we are all inevitably immersed, and therefore that much more desirable.

Curator Catherine Callahan has put together a terrific show, EXO, at the Kleinert/James Arts Center in Woodstock that counters precisely this tendency. Having herself dreaded the idea of putting together "yet another landscape show," she elected instead to bring together work by artists who are all interested in the environment, but with a decidedly critical edge. The show comprises a full range of media-painting, sculpture, video, and photography-in a survey of various ways that contemporary artists are dealing with the environment. The result is very diverse, although generally speaking, the work tends to focus on the interaction between nature and human activity. From Mark Abrahamson's aerial photographs of Superfund sites to Barbara Bachner's inventive spray paint works that use sprays of artificial lgrass (and the grid substrate that normally supports them) as stencils, a good bit of the work here touches upon both nature and abstraction, providing an excellent opportunity to revisit traditional notions of the separation of nature and culture. Are we humans not also animals, and a part of nature? How exactly does technology relate to (and shape) our ideas of ourselves and of nature? How does human history impose itself upon the environment, and vice versa?

Perhaps the most poignant work in the exhibition provides the most poetic meditation on all these themes. Jaime Davidovich, an Argentinian artist now in his sixties, was the beneficiary of a residency at the World Trade Center completed before September 11. Selected largely because his work had been focused on the Hudson River, he was given a studio overlooking the river on the 91st[?] floor, where he set up a video camera. The projection of the resulting tape unwinds in natural time, providing an atmospheric view of the Hudson abstracted by the formation of clouds outside the window, breaking into drops of rain, and ultimately clearing to reveal the river once again. Of course since September 11, the significance of this video has been irrevocably changed-it is now a view that no longer exists, and through it, one now registers the relationship between the great estuary and human history in an entirely new light.

Sarah Greer Mecklem also explores the trajectory of human history, but this time in relation to the ways in which nature, over time, absorbs and ultimately digests the ruins of culture. In one series of works, she documents, by means of photography and various artifacts collected on the site, two cabins that stood near the Overlook Mountain House. Over time, the abandoned structures fell prey not only to the ravages of time, but also to the less sentimentalizable interventions of bored, youthful vandals. Mecklem gathers together the full range of these elements, from porcupine quills to discarded cigarette butts, to create cultural objects that preserve the dynamic, two-way relationship between the human and the natural.

In recent years, Mecklem's work has made a theme out of the reclamation of waste, as she has turned to found media such as cigarette butts, dryer lint, and the scrap wood lath produced by the renovation of her building in Kingston. When she moved to Kingston a few years ago, she found herself temporarily in the position of having three studios (one here, one in Rockland, and the last in Brooklyn). In consolidating these studios, she decided that she simply had so much stuff that it made no sense to buy art supplies, just to accumulate more. So instead, she's turned her attention to using found objects, drawing out the cultural implications of the material at hand even as she composes beautiful, sculptural and 2-D work out of them. A number of her recent pieces include patches of grass sprouting out or through them, which over time dries out to create a blanched, finely textured reminder of the natural order that provides the ultimate context for understanding the work.

In addition to appearing in the Kleinert/James show, a selected retrospective of Mecklem's work, appropriately titled "Excerpts", will be on view at Gabriel's Café in Kingston through June, sponsored by the Floating Foundation of Photography. From the somewhat more academic "self-images" of the early 1980s through the inventive "Laughing Conch" drawings, in which the eraser plays as great a role as the charcoal, to her proposals for colorful subway mosaic murals, it becomes possible to trace the development of a socially active, ecologically engaged artist, who would never think of retreating into the escapist dream of art and nature so easily sold to so many today. In our current context, such presentness is grace.

EXO: Contemporary approaches to nature, through June 23, 2002 at the Kleinert/James Arts Center, 34 Tinker Street, Woodstock. 679-2079.

Excerpts (Sarah Greer Mecklem retrospective), June 1-30, 2002 at Gabriel's Café, 50 John Street, Kingston. 338-7161.