Force of nature

The connection between all living things — and the threats they face — is reflected in a new installation.

Janet Laurence’s Cellular Gardens (Where Breathing Begins), 2005. Picture: Jacquie Manning

Many of us think, even if sporadically and inconsistently, that it would be desirable to live in greater harmony with nature. The very rich build expensive houses in remote wilder­nesses, ostensibly to experience intimacy with a pristine natural environment. The less opulent may own a modest bush cottage or even a suburban garden. And because the sense of harmony with nature is a state of mind rather than a matter of material possessions, it may be found in a simple garden as readily as on a grand estate.

But harmony with nature can be hard to reconcile with other things that we want. And that’s why various cultures imagine or postulate it as a state that humanity once enjoyed, in a mythical past, before some sort of rupture led to the state of affairs in which we live now.

The most familiar of such myths is that of the Garden of Eden, in which Adam and Eve had all they needed, without cultivating the soil or killing animals, until they disobeyed God and were expelled into the world of labour, suffering and mortality.

The Greek myth of the Golden Age is similar in the way that it postulates a time when man lived without violence of any kind on the bounty of nature; even animals did not hunt each other. This happy period seems to have come to an end with the first ploughing of the soil by Cadmus; this story told of a fundamental transgression, like the rape of a mother, and is reiterated in more human terms in the tale of Cadmus’s great-great-grandson Oedipus.

But each of these stories of a fall from an imagined primal harmony also tells of the beginning of human history and human achievement. Adam and Eve did acquire something important by eating of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Greeks, too, could see that all progress towards a more ambitious vision of humanity — towards civilisation, knowledge and science — came from breaking with the primitive and unconscious state symbolised by the Golden Age.

Today, the question of living in harmony with nature has become much more than a matter for moral, philosophical or poetic meditation. In the past, humans often have despoiled or destroyed natural environments, but the damage has been limited to circumscribed areas and often has led to a compensating catastrophic drop in the population pressure that brought about the destruction in the first place.

In the contemporary world, population growth has been relentless, especially in poor countries where the population has greatly outstripped the productive resources of the land. The consequent massive increase in the levels of consumption and waste production has been aggravated by the nature of modern technology, which no doubt one day will seem as obsolete as the steam-powered machinery of the early industrial revolution does today.

There is no doubt that fossil fuels have played a vital part in creating the world we take for granted. But everything has a cost, and just as we learned lessons such as crop rotation and even forestry management thousands of years ago, we also can learn to mitigate the costs of current practices and discover more intelligent solutions to the question of energy supply.

But while the most obvious questions of living in harmony with nature may pose themselves at the level of environmental economics, politics and technology, there is also a more personal and private dimension on the other side of the same coin. This personal dimension is the excessive consumption and excessive production of waste that we are all guilty of to varying extents.

The market we live in can make it hard to do better, for example to limit plastic waste when supermarkets increasingly are packaging everything in plastic as they supposedly ban plastic bags.

But we should beware of the culture of disculpation, of the evasion of responsibility, which we see all around us. There is no more dramatic example of this today than in the case of the most immediately obvious symptom of over-consumption, obesity.

A generation ago, this was hardly a problem and now it is a growing crisis. We wonder why we can’t tackle it effectively, as we tackled smoking. The answer is simple: we don’t want to tell overweight people, in some cases, they are responsible for their condition. It is ultimately up to them to make the effort to change their lives.

Of course, the obscene oversupply of junk food, and the cynical way corporations market it to the poorest and least educated classes are reprehensible and should be sanctioned by taxes at the very least. But there is an argument to be made that those who promote so-called “body positivity” are selling a dangerous form of mendacity.

Most of us, however, consume too much: too many material goods, too much media, too much entertainment and distraction. We take a step towards harmony with nature, and we feel happier, as soon as we limit our consumption and the spending that the consumer society tries to make us feel is a necessity of life itself.

Walking through the airports of Sydney, then Dubai and then Rome, I find myself surrounded by thousands of shops selling fashion, jewellery, perfumes, cosmetics, consumer electronics — almost all of which are completely useless and worse than useless since these products are all designed to provoke consumers to want and to spend ever more. Even art should be used sparingly. It is not necessary to read every new novel; it is positively undesirable to look at too much art, and to jump from one entirely different kind of visual stimulus to another — which is why the whole biennale model is inimical to deep engagement with art.

The greatest art, poetry, music can offer us glimpses of transcendent beauty and significance, like fissures through the fabric of banal appearance into a deeper reality; but the depth of such experience is in inverse proportion to frequency and quantity.

In the deepest sense, the individual quest for harmony with nature consists above all in limiting our wants, curbing our desires for useless consumer products — which helps to free us from the tyranny of desire and anxiety — and in cultivating, as philosophers from Buddha to the Stoics and many others have taught, calm and stillness of mind. For in the moments when we enjoy such stillness, our mind ceases being an agitated and opaque obstacle to consciousness and allows us to feel at one with the world beyond the self.

This is the sort of consciousness that Janet Laurence evokes in the new installation made for this exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art: a labyrinth of suspended veils printed with images of trees, yet faintly so that the careless almost may walk through without seeing properly what surrounds them. Those who give the work their attention will feel as though they are walking through a forest, but the insubstantial nature of the fabric reminds us at the same time of the fragility of nature. Nearby are several small installations, with botanical samples, books, diagrams and scientific instruments, in a profusion and variety that deliberately recall the chambers of wonders — wunderkammern — of early modern science.

Janet Laurence’s Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef. Picture: Jacquie Manning

Laurence has a particular fondness for the scientific instruments of this period — tubes and retorts and alembics — that also allude to alchemy, a theme that has long fascinated her.

One of the most disconcerting things about early modern thought, to the modern mind, is its confusion, or at least failure to separate, what we now think of as science and magic. That distinction was the work of the scientific revolution of the 17th century and its continuation in the 18th and 19th centuries.

That was when chemistry was distinguished from alchemy, and astronomy from astrology; the former natural and scientific, the latter supernatural, magical and unscientific.

Of course, we have gained much from the progress of modern science; it has made the modern world and transformed the lives of people of all cultural backgrounds.

But, again, all advances come at a cost, and in this case the cost has been an alienation from nature and a separation between things. As French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote (L’oeil et l’esprit, 1964), la science manipule less choses et renonce a less habiter — science manipulates things and no longer inhabits them.

The contrary of this attitude is illustrated in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of plaited hair and the interweaving rills of running water in a stream. What he is fascinated by is the analogy of form in each case, which to modern scientific thinking is fortuitous, but to analogical thinking is suggestive of profound affinities. And as so often, what we may consider objectively obsolete modes of thought can remain relevant to art and poetry, whose aims are not utilitarian.

Janet Laurence’s Heartshock (After Nature), 2008 / 2019. Picture: Jacquie Manning

Laurence’s work is full of analogical associations between substances of different natures, and even between what we normally think of as organic and inorganic nature. It suggests that there are different and intuitive ways of understanding the phenomena and processes that make up the natural environment. For the realm of nature is in a permanent process of becoming, even if biological and geological time are so different in pace we think of one as changing and the other as permanent.

Many of her works are specifically concerned with the biological domain, with the life of plants. In all these cases, she evokes a sense of wounded or endangered life, from a large dead tree extending across the gallery floor to a collection of plants growing in glass vessels, as though they could no longer survive in their original setting.

Perhaps most striking of all is a large installation, arranged as an aesthetic museum, with clear shelves of coral, seashells and parts of sea creatures. The work is almost all white, with subtle shades of pinks and greens, and seems to be a celebration of the exquisite forms produced as shells and carapaces by marine creatures, until we realise that its whiteness has a disturbingly inanimate connotation.

The installation evokes the bleaching of coral and the tentative hope of recovery, but only if action is taken in a timely fashion. And this means recognising that the beauty of nature is more than a subjective phenomenon: it is, ultimately, an intimation of being and an invitation to recover our own connection to the world that gives us life.

Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until June 10