Anxious Nature: Desire, Animism and Unveiling (text on L'inquiète forêt exhibition)
Paule Mackrous
Nature and our desires
In his book The Botany of Desire, A Plant’s Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan proposes a reversal of the paradigm of humankind's domestication of nature, and adroitly demonstrates how nature instead uses us in the interests of its own survival and evolution.[i] Fuelled by our desires for beauty, intoxication, sugar and control, nature develops strategies for resisting, multiplying and transforming itself. At the same time, our relationship to nature becomes more and more based in fantasy, with most of us perceiving it to be a far-off world, both foreboding and enchanted.
At the heart of Stéphanie Morissette's installation L’inquiète forêt, we find a twofold conception of nature. At first sight, her cut-out forest made of black cardboard bewitches the viewer, starkly contrasting with the white walls of the gallery. This is the nature of fairy tales, found in the imaginations of those who are afraid to enter into it, perhaps in fear of its dirtiness or mystery, perhaps in fear of getting lost. When we get closer, to better see the forms that make it up, a perverted version of nature comes to the surface, a nature shaped by human desire, where the natural and artificial states of elements have become indistinguishable: trees, animals and objects are all born of the same base material, cardboard and black – the colour of oil, of night, of darkness, the colour of the shadow that remains even after the shadow-caster is gone.
The atmosphere is reminiscent of A Fable of Tomorrow[ii], Rachel Carson's apocalyptic tale of future ecological catastrophe featured in the environmental science classic Silent Spring. In Carson's story, one spring morning, birds stop singing, buds stop blossoming, animals can't find food. In L’inquiète forêt, a pipeline snakes across the floor while a deer slips in a puddle of oil (Pipeline, 2015). Vegetation is sparse, and the animals, mechanized, fragmented and amputated, seem unwell (Le loup, 2015; Mes trophées – fessier de cerf, 2015; L’oiseau, 2015; Sur la route, 2015). All that's left is the spectral squawking of scavengers circling around the carcasses of animals that we can only imagine died from hunger or disease (Tornade, 2015). It's as if an evil spell has been cast on this space. Even though, in the words of Carson “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”[iii]
Choosing animism
Within L’inquiète forêt, the meeting of the wonderful and the fearful, the natural and the artificial, produces an effect that we could qualify as being “animist”. Animism describes a relationship with the world where “each object, each thing is inhabited by a spirit”[iv]. In indigenous cultures, the collective representations of animism are transmitted from generation to generation. Comprised of extrascientific, perception-based knowledge, these representations are celebrated in rituals that honour a shifting, living and intentional nature. In a similar way, the elements composing L’inquiète forêt seem to speak to us; they tell us a tale that is part of a much vaster story, the fragments of which we, as viewers, must piece back together.
The animist experience is strangely interwoven with scientific representation, as if to make visible both the differences and the possibility of reconciliation between them. L’inquiète forêt thus stages our propensity to divide and ground natural elements in order to better enter into a relationship with them: framing a feather (Plume, 2015), confining carnivorous plants in terrariums (Les carnivores, 2015), placing condor wings on a table like a hunting trophy (Mes ailes en captivité, 2015). These strategies aim to allow us to observe nature with a certain distance. In natural history museums, our perception, our understanding and our sensations are oriented by way of information panels written by he or she who is in the know. We contemplate nature without ever having to fear the untamed, without ever having to sense a living presence, and above all, without ever having to be part of it.
While humans are indeed becoming more aware of environmental issues and their scientific underpinnings, Richard Louv observes that our “physical contacts, [our] intimacy with nature is fading.”[v] The biologist Carol Kaseuk Yoon concurs, noting that scientific representation is at the origin of our disconnect from nature and the damage we inflict upon it:
The long years of placing science above all other ways of understanding, of believing only scientists tell us what’s right and wrong, has left us blind to our own view of the living world, mute in the language of life, wandering the mall, disconnected from and disinterested in living things[vi].
We are thus faced with a considerable challenge: privileging representations of nature that might help us unlearn our insensitivity to the language of life, while at the same time remaining abreast of current scientific knowledge. With this goal, L’inquiète forêt invokes a collective representation of nature that calls on the imagination to encourage better thinking on environmental issues. While presenting scientific reality, the installation also captures our senses and creates images resembling those that enchanted our childhoods: an expressive nature, filled with singular voices.
Unveiling
L’inquiète forêt allows for the transmission of collective representations of nature that speak to us. But this process necessarily involves the destruction of nature to make itself manifest. In Stéphanie Morissette's work, nature is a sentient being, aware of and worried about its own fate. Nothing gets past it, it assimilates residues to better make visible the polluting aspect of the creative process: a garbage can full of scraps is overturned in the forest (Mes déchets, 2015), a frame shows elements from nature cut up into negatives (Traces, 2015; Assemblez et collez, 2015). Scraps accumulate on the ground, carcasses acting as metaphors for a nature that's been thrown in the recycling bin.
Through this activation of the creative process, L’inquiète forêt evokes the idea that human creation is a sort of destruction. But not exclusively – it is also an “unveiling”, as Martin Heidegger puts it, opening and actualizing that which is hidden.[vii] Morissette's installation stages the representations that live within it, the desires that drive it, and the paradoxes that make it up. Without this unveiling, the forest would just be participating blindly in nature-destroying human activity.
The worried forest tells us that humans leave traces, and always will. Far from being moralistic or judgemental however, or making the viewer feel guilty, the work directs our reflections towards the need for balance. It leads us into the outer reaches of the imagination in order to unveil a reality within which Alexandra Horowitz contends that everything we call "artificial" in fact stems from nature and is unescapably part of it:
Each building is, of course, forged of stone or hewed from a once-living tree. So-called man-made objects are just those that began as naturally occurring materials and are broken apart and recombined to form something customized to our purposes[viii].
In this spirit, all created things can be accepted and understood as a representation of the world. L’inquiète forêt reminds us that the representations of the world that inhabit it are malleable products of our imaginations. This is where our real power resides, as Alexander Von Humboldt observed. Indeed, it is through the imagination, and only through the imagination, that we can learn to know and live with nature.[ix] And to honour it.
Paule Mackrous,
PhD Semiology, Art Historian
[i] Michael Pollan (2001). The Botanic of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. London, Random House.
[ii] Rachel Carson (2002). Silent Spring. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company.
[iii] Ibid., p. 3.
[iv] Sylvia Sahr (2006). Grey Owl, les autochtones et la perception environnementale au Canada au début du XXième siècle. MA thesis, supervisor Matthew Hatvany, Québec: Université Laval, p. 56.
[v] Richard Louv (2008). Last Child in the Woods. New York, Algonquin Books, p. 5.
[vi] Yoon, Carol Kaesuk (2009). Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct And Science, New York: WW Norton, p. 256.
[vii] Martin Heidegger (1982). “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, Harper Collins, 1982
[viii] Alexandra Horowitz (2013). On Looking. Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes. New York, Scribner, p. 43.
[ix] Humboldt, Alexander von (2002). Influence de la peinture de paysage sur l’étude de la nature. Paris : Larochelle.
Paule Mackrous
Nature and our desires
In his book The Botany of Desire, A Plant’s Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan proposes a reversal of the paradigm of humankind's domestication of nature, and adroitly demonstrates how nature instead uses us in the interests of its own survival and evolution.[i] Fuelled by our desires for beauty, intoxication, sugar and control, nature develops strategies for resisting, multiplying and transforming itself. At the same time, our relationship to nature becomes more and more based in fantasy, with most of us perceiving it to be a far-off world, both foreboding and enchanted.
At the heart of Stéphanie Morissette's installation L’inquiète forêt, we find a twofold conception of nature. At first sight, her cut-out forest made of black cardboard bewitches the viewer, starkly contrasting with the white walls of the gallery. This is the nature of fairy tales, found in the imaginations of those who are afraid to enter into it, perhaps in fear of its dirtiness or mystery, perhaps in fear of getting lost. When we get closer, to better see the forms that make it up, a perverted version of nature comes to the surface, a nature shaped by human desire, where the natural and artificial states of elements have become indistinguishable: trees, animals and objects are all born of the same base material, cardboard and black – the colour of oil, of night, of darkness, the colour of the shadow that remains even after the shadow-caster is gone.
The atmosphere is reminiscent of A Fable of Tomorrow[ii], Rachel Carson's apocalyptic tale of future ecological catastrophe featured in the environmental science classic Silent Spring. In Carson's story, one spring morning, birds stop singing, buds stop blossoming, animals can't find food. In L’inquiète forêt, a pipeline snakes across the floor while a deer slips in a puddle of oil (Pipeline, 2015). Vegetation is sparse, and the animals, mechanized, fragmented and amputated, seem unwell (Le loup, 2015; Mes trophées – fessier de cerf, 2015; L’oiseau, 2015; Sur la route, 2015). All that's left is the spectral squawking of scavengers circling around the carcasses of animals that we can only imagine died from hunger or disease (Tornade, 2015). It's as if an evil spell has been cast on this space. Even though, in the words of Carson “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.”[iii]
Choosing animism
Within L’inquiète forêt, the meeting of the wonderful and the fearful, the natural and the artificial, produces an effect that we could qualify as being “animist”. Animism describes a relationship with the world where “each object, each thing is inhabited by a spirit”[iv]. In indigenous cultures, the collective representations of animism are transmitted from generation to generation. Comprised of extrascientific, perception-based knowledge, these representations are celebrated in rituals that honour a shifting, living and intentional nature. In a similar way, the elements composing L’inquiète forêt seem to speak to us; they tell us a tale that is part of a much vaster story, the fragments of which we, as viewers, must piece back together.
The animist experience is strangely interwoven with scientific representation, as if to make visible both the differences and the possibility of reconciliation between them. L’inquiète forêt thus stages our propensity to divide and ground natural elements in order to better enter into a relationship with them: framing a feather (Plume, 2015), confining carnivorous plants in terrariums (Les carnivores, 2015), placing condor wings on a table like a hunting trophy (Mes ailes en captivité, 2015). These strategies aim to allow us to observe nature with a certain distance. In natural history museums, our perception, our understanding and our sensations are oriented by way of information panels written by he or she who is in the know. We contemplate nature without ever having to fear the untamed, without ever having to sense a living presence, and above all, without ever having to be part of it.
While humans are indeed becoming more aware of environmental issues and their scientific underpinnings, Richard Louv observes that our “physical contacts, [our] intimacy with nature is fading.”[v] The biologist Carol Kaseuk Yoon concurs, noting that scientific representation is at the origin of our disconnect from nature and the damage we inflict upon it:
The long years of placing science above all other ways of understanding, of believing only scientists tell us what’s right and wrong, has left us blind to our own view of the living world, mute in the language of life, wandering the mall, disconnected from and disinterested in living things[vi].
We are thus faced with a considerable challenge: privileging representations of nature that might help us unlearn our insensitivity to the language of life, while at the same time remaining abreast of current scientific knowledge. With this goal, L’inquiète forêt invokes a collective representation of nature that calls on the imagination to encourage better thinking on environmental issues. While presenting scientific reality, the installation also captures our senses and creates images resembling those that enchanted our childhoods: an expressive nature, filled with singular voices.
Unveiling
L’inquiète forêt allows for the transmission of collective representations of nature that speak to us. But this process necessarily involves the destruction of nature to make itself manifest. In Stéphanie Morissette's work, nature is a sentient being, aware of and worried about its own fate. Nothing gets past it, it assimilates residues to better make visible the polluting aspect of the creative process: a garbage can full of scraps is overturned in the forest (Mes déchets, 2015), a frame shows elements from nature cut up into negatives (Traces, 2015; Assemblez et collez, 2015). Scraps accumulate on the ground, carcasses acting as metaphors for a nature that's been thrown in the recycling bin.
Through this activation of the creative process, L’inquiète forêt evokes the idea that human creation is a sort of destruction. But not exclusively – it is also an “unveiling”, as Martin Heidegger puts it, opening and actualizing that which is hidden.[vii] Morissette's installation stages the representations that live within it, the desires that drive it, and the paradoxes that make it up. Without this unveiling, the forest would just be participating blindly in nature-destroying human activity.
The worried forest tells us that humans leave traces, and always will. Far from being moralistic or judgemental however, or making the viewer feel guilty, the work directs our reflections towards the need for balance. It leads us into the outer reaches of the imagination in order to unveil a reality within which Alexandra Horowitz contends that everything we call "artificial" in fact stems from nature and is unescapably part of it:
Each building is, of course, forged of stone or hewed from a once-living tree. So-called man-made objects are just those that began as naturally occurring materials and are broken apart and recombined to form something customized to our purposes[viii].
In this spirit, all created things can be accepted and understood as a representation of the world. L’inquiète forêt reminds us that the representations of the world that inhabit it are malleable products of our imaginations. This is where our real power resides, as Alexander Von Humboldt observed. Indeed, it is through the imagination, and only through the imagination, that we can learn to know and live with nature.[ix] And to honour it.
Paule Mackrous,
PhD Semiology, Art Historian
[i] Michael Pollan (2001). The Botanic of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. London, Random House.
[ii] Rachel Carson (2002). Silent Spring. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company.
[iii] Ibid., p. 3.
[iv] Sylvia Sahr (2006). Grey Owl, les autochtones et la perception environnementale au Canada au début du XXième siècle. MA thesis, supervisor Matthew Hatvany, Québec: Université Laval, p. 56.
[v] Richard Louv (2008). Last Child in the Woods. New York, Algonquin Books, p. 5.
[vi] Yoon, Carol Kaesuk (2009). Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct And Science, New York: WW Norton, p. 256.
[vii] Martin Heidegger (1982). “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, Harper Collins, 1982
[viii] Alexandra Horowitz (2013). On Looking. Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes. New York, Scribner, p. 43.
[ix] Humboldt, Alexander von (2002). Influence de la peinture de paysage sur l’étude de la nature. Paris : Larochelle.