An elemental flow of ideas

Water is not only indispensable for our physical survival but also a source of great aesthetic and spiritual pleasure.

Martina Amati’s Under (Depth) (still, 2015). From Water, Queensland Art Gallery

In the 6th century BC, as Herodotus relates, ­Thales of Miletus successfully predicted a solar eclipse. Modern astronomy can date this event precisely to 585BC. This impressive and, as far as we know, unprecedented scientific feat undoubtedly predisposed his audience to listen when he ventured into a more speculative kind of thinking that we usually consider as representing the beginning of philosophical thinking in the West. He and his followers sought to explain the nature of the material world, the permanent reality that lay beneath or behind a world of apparent multiplicity and constant change.

Thales proposed that this fundamental substance could be water, because we can see it is capable of existing in solid, liquid or gaseous state and because it is the source and sustenance of all life. His successor Anaximander argued that this was too specific and that the underlying substance should be of indeterminate nature, and the third in this tradition, Anaximenes, proposed air. This was taken up by various later philosophers and is among the ideas used by Aristophanes to lampoon philosophers in general and Socrates in particular in his comedy The Clouds (423BC).

Cai Guo-Qiang’s Heritage (installation view) (2013). From Water, Queensland Art Gallery

In the century after Thales, other philosophers developed the idea that the world was made up of four elements: earth, air, fire and water. This hypothesis turned out to be enormously successful and to hold sway effectively until the rise of modern science in the 17th century. It was especially important in medical thinking, by virtue of the theory that the physical constitution of the body was determined by four corresponding humours: black bile (earth), blood (air), yellow bile (fire) and phlegm (water). Even today our everyday language is permeated by terms that belong to this ancient system of thought, starting with all uses of the word humour itself.

For the balance of the humours was not only the cause of health and disease but the key to character as well. That balance was our temperament; if we had a preponderance of blood, we were of sanguine temperament; yellow bile or choler made us choleric; too much of the watery phlegm made us phlegmatic; too much black bile made us melancholy. And our temperament was visible in our colouring — respectively ruddy, sallow, colourless or swarthy: this was the meaning of the word complexion.

Peter Dombrovskis’s Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River (1979). From Water, Queensland Art Gallery.

As medical theory, this model was increasingly superseded by new mechanical and physiological ideas from the 16th and 17th centuries onwards and, despite the pervasive traces it has left in our language, it may seem remote and arcane today. But perhaps it is not so far away after all: a summer of drought, catastrophic fires, scorched earth and then tropical downpours has reminded us of the vital importance of the elements to our health and to our survival.

Of all the elements, moreover, Thales was right to consider water the most important. Life began in the seas, and the cycle of evaporation and precipitation that provides us with rivers and rain is critical to almost every aspect of life, from drinking and farming to washing and industrial production. In most parts of the world, however, with the disastrous explosion of human populations, the demand for water for all of these purposes has exploded in an unsustainable way.

Even in dry countries, city populations in particular live in a fantasy land in which they imagine that they can consume water endlessly without considering where it comes from. At the same time, we compromise precious water sources for short-term and unsustainable profit. One of the most shocking examples in the world was virtual destruction of the Aral Sea, which once produced enormous catches of fish for the Russian market, when the Soviet government drew off its waters to irrigate cotton plantations.

Peter Dombrovskis’s South Cape Rivulet, southwest Tasmania, 1990. From Water, Queensland Art Gallery.

But before we scorn the incompetence and myopia of a totalitarian bureaucracy, we might reflect on what we have done to the biggest river system in Australia, a continent that, unlike Europe, is poor in substantial rivers. Their conservation should therefore be a matter of strategic national importance.

Instead we seem to have wilfully mismanaged the Murray-Darling Basin: why are we growing rice and cotton when we don’t have the water supply to do so safely? Why are we allowing water allowances to become speculative assets? And why are we allowing a few people to enrich themselves while landscapes crucial to national security are left to die?

And water, as several works in the Brisbane exhibition remind us, is not only indispensable for our physical survival but also a source of great physical, aesthetic and spiritual pleasure.

One of the first things we encounter is a series of photographs of young people swimming underwater, evoking the joy, the energy and the sense of vitality that we derive, almost atavistically, from plunging our bodies into water. Even in summer, there is something about diving into cold water that feels akin to dying and being reborn into a new and vivid life.

The experience is taken much further in another piece, a video about free diving, in which the diver swims deep and for prolonged periods on a single breath, without the help of any breathing apparatus. Most people, if say swimming underwater in a pool, would be unlikely to be able to hold their breath for more than a minute or even as long as that; but with training and practice, free divers can get to three or four minutes, or even in some cases longer (the record is around 10 minutes). The secret is mind control as much as breath control, which is why this silent flow through the water becomes a kind of meditation.

Olafur Eliasson’s Riverbed (2014, installation view). Photograph: Natasha Harth, QAGOMA

Another work, adjacent to this, evokes the remote depths of the sea where intercontinental telecommunication cables form tenuous lines only just visible in the sand. In contrast, it is the surface of the sea that is evoked in another video, in which the artist lies on a slab of concrete as the rising tide laps over her legs. The piece evokes the theme of rising sea levels, although audiences are transfixed by a scene-stealing crab that keeps scurrying up towards her body.

The infinite quality of water, and its mysterious ineffability, are suggested by Charwei Tsai’s 40-second video, which readers can see for themselves on YouTube (search for Charwei Tsai Circle 2009). The artist has adapted the age-old Zen Buddhist motif of the enso, the circle that is painted, usually on paper or silk, with a single stroke of the brush. Here, however, she paints on a block of ice, and the ink almost at once begins to spread, diffuse and then to expand disconcertingly until it is out of the frame of the camera.

In another section, there are Aboriginal water vessels made from wood, bark or even large algae, reminding us how drastically limited was the capacity to store or carry the life-giving element in pre-ceramic cultures. Nearby is a video of children swimming in a river, with a voiceover recalling the long tradition of the river’s use but also lamenting its increasingly polluted state.

One of the most memorable parts of the exhibition is a set of three photographs by Peter Dombrovskis (1945-96), a Latvian-Australian photographer who lived in Tasmania and is best known for the part he played in the campaign to save the Franklin River in the successful 1982 “No Dams” battle, the most important conservation campaign in Australia to that date.

The selection includes Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, which was used in a poster during the subsequent 1983 election campaign. Dombrovskis’s photographs are not big by contemporary standards, but they are powerful and infused with deep feeling for the beauty and life of the natural site.

In contrast, the exhibition ends with two examples of the gigantism, one could say the industrial scale, preferred by the well-funded stars of the transnational contemporary art business. It is as though audiences could no longer be trusted to respond to anything less sensational and crudely oversized. These artists are still concerned, or at least claim to be concerned, by the fate of the natural environment, but there is something inherently anti-environmental in the very extravagance of their theme-park installations.

The more innocuous of the two is by Olafur Eliasson, an international favourite whose work is credited with mystical insight and who no doubt is sincerely upset by the degradation of the natural world. His work is a massive hill of river stones with a stream of water running through it, built up in a vast and hangar-like space. Visitors are allowed to climb over the stones; children play with the stream or try to throw pebbles into it while parents attempt to restrain them. The installation is striking at first sight — a prime requirement of Biennale-grade contemporary art — although there is not a great deal more to be gained by climbing up the hill and then down again. The question we have to ask, of course, is whether audiences are so alienated from nature that they have to see a full-scale simulacrum in a museum to experience it in any way. Of course art has always helped us see things in a new way, but Dombrovkis’s photographs convey far more than this ultimately pitiful stream of water; is it that audiences can no longer read images of such subtlety?

Cai Guo-Qiang’s installation is far worse. In another vast space — of course — replicas of dozens of wild animals gather around a waterhole and lean down to drink from it. Many of these animals would, in the usual course of nature, devour each other, but here they are all peacefully drinking side-by-side. The excruciatingly banal and indeed patronising moral of this piece is clearly that we should all get along and share the world’s vital resources in the interests of mutual survival.

The message is painfully obvious and simplistic in the way it ignores all the obstacles that stand in the way of such a desirable outcome; but thematic weakness, as usual with this overrated artist, is also aggravated by pretentious and overbearing scale. There is a fundamental principle of economy in all good art, a proportion between the means employed and the effect achieved. Tsai’s circle drawn on ice is small, inexpensive, almost minimalist, but it is effective and poetic in what it evokes. Here, enormous expense results in kitsch.

This is contemporary factory art, fabricated by specialist workshops with virtually no direct involvement by the artist-entrepreneur. The animal models are the products of the same Chinese factories that have filled the world with monstrous plastic consumer junk and with hundreds of millions of synthetic soft toys that will choke waste dumps for centuries to come. Cai’s ostensibly ecological work is in reality part of a commercial culture of environmental vandalism.

W ater
Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until April 26