Staying afloat: The Ocean After Nature, Samstag Museum, Adelaide

Allan Sekula’s ‘forgotten space’ is the vast ocean, which has been denatured in a relentless pursuit of trade.

A still from The Forgotten Space (2010). From The Ocean After Nature, Samstag Museum, Adelaide.

Many cultures have myths about a past era in which humankind lived in harmony with nature instead of despoiling it. Hesiod, in Works and Days, evokes a Golden Age, followed by a steady decline from bronze to silver to the Iron Age of injustice and violence. No doubt the metallic association was extrapolated from the real experience of passing from the relatively peaceful Bronze Age to the bellicose and unstable Iron Age.

In the Golden Age, there was neither war nor private property; humans found sustenance freely available in nature in the form of fruits and seeds, but did not kill animals; indeed even animals did not kill each other, and in later paintings of the subject, the wolf and the lamb and other animals that are normally mutually hostile lie down together.

Interestingly, even the first page of Genesis seems to imply an admittedly improbable vegetarian diet for all creatures, since God is said to make fruits for men to eat and grass for animals. Later, however, the Creator despises the sacrifice of Cain, who grows grains, and accepts that of Abel, consisting of a lamb or kid, driving the enraged agrarian to murder the pastoralist.

The end of the Golden Age is symbolised in mythology by the story of Cadmus, son of the Phoenician king Agenor and brother of Europa, who is carried off by Zeus in the form of a bull and taken to Crete where she becomes the mother of King Minos. Cadmus is sent to find her; he fails in his quest but founds the city of Thebes in Greece, bringing the Phoenician invention of the alphabet to Greece in the process.

A still from The Forgotten Space. From The Ocean After Nature. Samstag Museum, Adelaide.

At the site of what will be Thebes, Cadmus encounters a dragon guarding a spring. He kills it, ploughs the earth and sows its teeth. Armed men spring from the field; Cadmus, as instructed by Athena, casts a stone into the crowd and they begin to fight each other until only five are left. He marries his daughters to these men and they become the first generation of Thebans.

This mysterious ancient story tells of the first ploughing of the earth, the primal transgression by which man takes charge of nature instead of accepting his original role as part of the natural order. The ploughing of the earth is a kind of rape of the mother, and the slaying of the serpent, her male consort, represents man’s assumption of the masculine role in relation to nature.

It is not surprising that transgressions so profound should immediately lead to the violence of war, previously unknown: it is as though as soon as we break free from our primitive place as a part of nature and attempt to take charge of its processes, the inherent violence of this act leads to more violence among ourselves. And this myth kept evolving in the retelling, and in the stories of subsequent generations: for the descendant of Cadmus is Oedipus, who inadvertently kills his father and marries his mother.

But the first ploughing of the earth was not the only primal transgression. A second one, also told in one of the most ancient of myths, was the first crossing of the sea in a ship. In the Golden Age, no one sailed; the sea was an inviolate domain. But when Jason set off on his voyage — also the paradigmatic quest story — to recover the Golden Fleece, he had to build a ship, the Argo, a magical vessel that incorporated speaking timbers from the oracular oaks of Zeus at Dodona.

Once again, his quest was accomplished with the help of the gods — in fact Jason also sows some of the Theban dragon’s teeth reserved by Athena, which shows the affinity of the two stories — for this rupture too was a necessary one. Man was not destined to live in the primitive state of the Golden Age, but to embark on a more ambitious, if dangerous, course.

The tragic duality of human destiny is brilliantly evoked in the second choral ode of Sophocles’ Antigone, the tragedy of Oedipus’s daughter (lines 332 ff.), exploiting the unique ambiguity of the Greek word deinos, which means both clever and terrible. There are many deinos things, but none more than man, who has invented language and created laws and found the secrets of medicine. But the primary rupture with the order of nature that makes these achievements possible entails the potential for evil as well as for good.

Hyung S. Kim’s image of Haenyeo Kim Julja (2013).

The chorus recalls the originary transgressions of ploughing and sailing, but interestingly — especially in a story with its roots specifically in the act of ploughing — the ode begins with sailing: man “passes across the grey sea in stormy winds, making his way through the swell and troughs of the waters”. Sailing was a remarkable achievement, defying the immense powers of nature, and always dangerous. From Homer onwards, countless writers speak of the dread of perishing at sea, lost and unburied, bones picked over by fishes.

It is a very different kind of seafaring that is documented in the film The Forgotten Space (2010) by Allan Sekula (1951-2013), which in turn inspired the exhibition The Ocean After Nature at the Samstag Museum. The new world of shipping is based on the invention and rapid adoption of the shipping container in the 1970s. Containers made import and export vastly more efficient and economical, radically cutting down the cost of handling at every stage: goods of whatever nature are packed once at the factory and not unpacked until they reach their destination.

In the meantime, modular steel boxes can be mechanically transported and lifted on and off the decks of enormous cargo ships. There was an immediate reduction in the amount of ­labour required to handle the containers, but with the progress of mechanisation and the improvements in robotic devices, the amount of labour employed will continue to shrink.

Meanwhile the ships themselves, registered in foreign ports under flags of convenience, are manned by skeleton crews of low-paid seamen as they ply their way across the oceans, carrying the consumer goods that we all want to buy cheaply without worrying too much about how they were produced or made their way to us.

Sekula’s “forgotten space” is the vastness of the ocean, which has been, so to speak, denatured in this relentless pursuit of trade. He too evokes a transgression of the order of the natural world, which he intuitively sees as even more fundamental than the more obvious issues of injustice in the way that the crews are treated, for example.

And that rupture with nature seems far more dramatic now that the power of technology has become so much greater. Sophocles evoked the heroic adventure of the sailor negotiating terrifying storms and waves, liable to be swamped at any moment by the immense power of nature. Today, we are instead beset by the fear that we will somehow destroy or poison the natural world around us. This is the dread that lies behind the title The Ocean After Nature: for we all know that life began on this planet in the ocean, and we realise that no other planet has even a remote possibility of harbouring life forms unless there is a vast body of water in which the processes of life could begin in the first place.

We used to think that the ocean was too big to suffer serious damage from human activities, but we now find that we were wrong: apart from the dangers of overfishing and other forms of pollution, the scourge of plastic fragments is beginning to be understood. But how to take effective and globally co-ordinated action, and how to persuade everyone from consumers and big business to illiterate peasants to change their ways remains an unsolved problem.

One work in the exhibition that is suggestive in this regard is a map of the world in which the borders of nations have been extended to include their legal seabed claims. Some seas, like the Mediterranean, completely disappear, divided between the neighbouring nations, and even the world’s biggest oceans are significantly shrunk, allowing for the maritime territories claimed around island possessions as well the mainland.

A still from Peter Hutton’s At Sea (2007). From the exhibition The Ocean After Nature.

With these claims must come responsibility, and if every country involved exerted proper jurisdiction over its maritime territories, the amount of unsupervised ocean would be greatly reduced. Besides, the great powers of the world, acting in concert, should enforce environmental standards even if minor and developing ­nations are unwilling to assume their responsibilities, just as Britain unilaterally outlawed the slave trade around the world in 1808.

As something of an aside, another item consists of a map of Australia that suggests the intriguing idea of digging a canal in South Australia to flood Lake Eyre and create an inland sea, in principle transforming the ecology of the centre of the continent, because a great body of water would produce evaporation and rain, and consequently the regrowth of vegetation in currently arid territories.

Other works in the exhibition deal with subjects as diverse, and arguably disparate, as global migration, pollution, and abalone and conch diving in Korea: these pictures of ancient, sea-hardened crones called haenyeo tell a fascinating story. The population of the island of Jeju had practised the art of free diving for more than 1500 years, but at some point in the 17th and 18th centuries women divers came to outnumber men, and eventually to replace them completely.

The economic importance of the women as primary breadwinners led inevitably to social changes and a relatively matriarchal social structure in the island community. But the life of the haenyeo was always a very hard and demanding one, and today, not surprisingly, fewer young women are learning the art that enhanced the social standing of their forebears.

The most memorable images in the exhibition, however, bring us back to the theme of shipping: where do these enormous ships come from?

Once the world’s great ships were made in Britain or America, then they were made in Japan and Korea, and then in successively cheaper labour markets, leaving colossal disused shipyards behind them.

But where they end their lives is even stranger and more haunting: as we see in a video work here, the immense hulks finish up beached in the shallows of bays in Bangladesh, where swarms of poor workers slowly cut them to pieces for recycling, like ants slowly taking apart the body of a dead animal.

As far as possible from the heroic if transgressive adventure of the Sophoclean seafarer, the huge and impersonal vessels of international trade are cut up for scrap in conditions of desperate poverty and squalor.

The Ocean After Nature

Samstag Museum, Adelaide. Until June 9