Übernatürlich: Jason DeMarte's Augmented Reality

Jason DeMarte: Invasive Apathy

(Photo Assemblage / Pigmented Ink Print, 2018)

I.

The idea of art as an innocent imitation of nature is, of course, a very old one. Indeed, despite everything that's happened during the last 150 years, there are people who still subscribe to this ancient Greek concept of mimesis.

Personally, however, I tend to agree with Nietzsche on this question and view art more as a metaphysical supplement to the reality of the natural world; one that transforms rather than merely represents the latter.

Art is thus a way of either enhancing or diminishing nature; perfecting or perverting reality. And the most interesting artists - artists like Jason DeMarte - understand the ambiguous character of this game; how nature can paradoxically appear more-than-natural and less-than-natural (even unnatural) at one and the same time.        

It's been said that DeMarte's cleverly composed works combining images of flora and fauna with artificial objects and sugary treats would make Mother Nature blush - though whether that would be with pride, passion, anger, embarrassment or shame, isn't clear. His playful yet sophisticated juxtapositions call into question the relationship of nature and culture and what it might mean for man to be translated back into the former, or to conceive of culture as a form of transfigured physis.  


II.

Unlike many visual artists, DeMarte has a clear conceptual insight into his own project, as can be seen from the following statement found on his website that he has very kindly granted me permission to reproduce here in full:


"I am interested in modern understandings of the natural world and how that compares to the way western society approaches its immediate consumer environment. It’s important for me to compare established idealist utopian ways of representing the landscape to the hyper-perfect way products and modern consumer life are represented in media. I’m particularly interested in the idea of disillusionment through false or misleading representation. I’m interested in creating photographs that merge simulated forms of life and colorful processed foodstuffs with idyllic pop material goods, in an effort to create a dialog of consumption, duplicity and homogenized ecstasy.

I work digitally combining images of fabricated and artificial flora and fauna with commercially produced and processed products. I look at how these seemingly unrelated and absurd groupings or composites begin to address attitudes and understandings of the contemporary experience. I represent the natural world through completely unnatural elements to speak metaphorically and symbolically of our mental separation from what is 'real' and compare and contrast this with the consumer world we surround ourselves with as a consequence. Ultimately this work is an investigation into the manipulation of truth.

My process draws from a long history of constructed narratives in photography, artist like Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margret Cameron, were early pioneers in manipulating truth with the medium, while later artists like Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall and Anthony Goicolea made the ordinary surreal with their highly choreographed stills. My process aims to simultaneously embrace a manipulation of truth by hyper exaggerating the ordinary and to also work within a kind of truth by utilizing the inherent believability of the photographic medium.

Like the early tableau photographers I draw inspiration from painting, specifically naturalist painting from movements like the Hudson River School. I’m interested in rekindling the romantic notions of nature while simultaneously subverting those romantic notions by juxtaposing pop consumption and visual gluttony."


III.

I find all of this fascinating: particularly his confession that at the heart of his project (or process as he calls it) is the question of truth - something which Nietzsche decouples from goodness and beauty and provocatively describes as that from which we would perish were it not for the skilful and deceptive reworking to which it is subjected by the artist.

Only art, says Nietzsche, has the power to make experience bearable by providing us with vital illusions. And for that we should be grateful ...  

Notes

Jason DeMarte's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, both in the US and abroad, and featured in numerous journals, books, and other publications. He is currently represented by Rule Gallery in Denver Colorado and is part of the Photographers Showcase at Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe. 

He is also an Associate Professor of Photography in the School of Art and Design at Eastern Michigan University and Assistant Professor of Photography in the College of Architecture, Art and design at Mississippi State University. 

Those interested in knowing more can visit his personal website by clicking here.

Nietzsche was preoccupied with the question of truth in relation to art throughout his writings. He does not reject the importance of the former as a will expressed in science, for example, but does question whether such might prove nihilistic and harmful to life. He proposes that the untruth of art might ultimately be more conducive to human wellbeing. The lines to which I refer above are found in The Will to Power, section 822, and The Gay Science, section 107.   

Notes on Nietzsche's Philosophical Naturalism

Nietzsche (detail) by Robberto

from the personal collection of Naima Morelli

click here for more details 

I think it's fair to characterise Nietzsche's philosophy as a kind of augmented naturalism, that is to say, one that comes with some surprising additional features; or what my mother would describe as naturalism with knobs on.

This is why Nietzsche can never quite bring himself to fully endorse modern science or accept that there is an objective, mind-independent reality governed by natural laws, etc. Hard realism and mechanical materialism aren't quite frölich enough for his tastes.      

Nevertheless, Nietzsche does like to speak of translating man back into nature [BGE 230] and to conceive of culture in terms of physis. So he's basically a 19th-century naturalist and both his atheism and his monism (the world is will to power - and nothing besides) are rooted in this intellectual tradition. 

What's interesting, however, is how Nietzsche relates his naturalism to his wider project of revaluation. Arguing that morality is a method for exercising power over wild nature - including the animal man - he suggests that we can now use the same method to elevate and strengthen, rather than tame and make sickly.    

In other words, having gained mastery of the earth and produced the human being, we can now begin work on the creation of an enhanced nature and a transhumanity: Übernatur und Übermensch, with the latter conceived as a strange and exquisite plant.

In sum, Nietzsche's moral naturalism is an attempt to translate values that many philosophers like to think of as transcendent ideals back into the world as a monstrous phenomenon of will to power and to life in all its splendid immorality. It is preferable, he says, to live as a satyr rather than a saint - and homo natura comes with horns upon his head rather than a halo of light floating above it.

However, we should note that the breeding of such a figure would require cultural and social conditions that are entirely alien to our age, which is why Nietzsche's politics cannot easily be squared with liberal humanism and why to think beyond good and evil remains such a dangerous (and intriguing) proposition.

Note: I also discuss Nietzsche's concept of translating man back into nature (with reference to the work of contemporary artists Willy Verginer and Orly Fayer) in two other recent posts: click here and here.
  

This post is dedicated to Keith Ansell-Pearson for 25 years of Nietzschean inspiration, friendship and support.  

Further Thoughts on the Art of Translating Man Back Into Nature (with Reference to the Work of Orly Faya)

Image by Orly Faya 
orlyfaya.com 

Italian sculptor Willy Verginer - whom I recently wrote of here - isn't the only artist to have made an all-too-literal interpretation of Nietzsche's idea of translating man back into nature ...

Orly Faya, for example, is a body-painting visionary, ecotherapist, and activist from Down Under who also wishes to facilitate some sort of healing of mankind by reminding us that the source of all wellbeing and creativity is the Earth itself.

How does she aim to do this?

By asking models to strip so that she might then merge* them into the natural environment with a clever use of colour; a process she describes as a transformation into the transpersonal - which sounds like fun and philosophically quite intriguing, until we realise this simply means affording individuals the opportunity to discover themselves as authentic human beings via an experience of otherness.

In other words, Ms Faya encourages us to lose ourselves so that we may at last find our true selves; become-other so that we may broaden - not shatter or dissolve - our intellectual and cultural horizons. There's no real abandonment of identity or becoming here - and no real translating of man into nature, which, for a Nietzschean, means rather more than camouflaging subjects into the landscape, be it a forest, desert, or beach.**

Ultimately, rather than transport us beyond good and evil, Orly offers us the same old hippie idealism - born of anthropocentric conceit and middle class privilege - that we encounter all too often in the art world. And that's disappointing to say the least ...   

Notes

*According to Ms Faya's website:  "Merging Ceremonies are a Unique Opportunity to become ONE with yourself and the earth in a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory way [...] to experience ourselves beyond the physical body, unified with nature [...] internalised with light and love and eternalised via photographic art." So it's not just about getting naked, having a quick paint job and then posing for a slightly saucy snap.   

**It's important to understand that when Nietzsche writes of translating man back into nature he is not advocating a Romantic or reactionary return to some primal and pristine state of being, so much as the future overcoming of man as interpreted within modern history and society. In other words, it's a call for a creative rescripting of the self via a becoming-woman rather than a becoming-animal or becoming-plant - for, paradoxically, homo natura is ultimately a question of style. See Beyond Good and Evil, section 230.

Traducendo l'uomo nella Natura: Thoughts on the Work of Willy Verginer

Willy Verginer: Komm, lieber Mai, und mach ... (2015)

Lindenwood and acrylic colour (147 x 107 x 60 cm)

The carved wooden works of Italian sculptor Willy Verginer, with their often dramatic zones of colour, certainly arouse my interest, but, not knowing very much about him, I hesitate to say what his philosophical project is.

It seems, however, to involve translating man back into nature, if I might borrow a phrase from Nietzsche. That is to say, he wishes to show how human being and human culture and society - even at its most technologically advanced - remains part of the natural world.

Verginer does this by demonstrating how vibrant colour can be born from industrial grayness and how, as Lawrence writes, even iron can put forth. Further, Verginer imagines a future in which young bodies begin to (quite literally) blossom in new and different ways, forming delicate contacts between themselves and evolving an intuitive sensitivity, as they become plant.

This idea of a floral or botanical becoming perhaps explains why the faces of Verginer's figures look so blank; for whilst plants have passions and desires, they're not human passions and desires and, as Wilde noted, the beauty of flowers is ultimately rooted in the fact they have no souls. 

Of course, there will be those who will not only find the idea strange and insane, but point to the paradox of translating man into nature via a series of unnatural participations.

As Deleuze and Guattari argue, however, such queer nuptials and unholy alliances are in fact fundamental to nature; for nature should not be thought of as a united kingdom, but rather a perverse multiplicity made up of heterogeneous terms and combinations (or interkingdoms).

verginer.com

Notes

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), section 230.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Almond Blossom', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 259.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, (The Athlone Press, 1996).

For a follow up post to this one, click here.

Chris D. Thomas: Inheritors of the Earth - Six Key Ideas (Part 2: Sections IV-VI)

Chris D. Thomas (Photo: Allen Lane)

IV. Vive la bio-révolution!

According to Chris D. Thomas, we are today in the midst of a great global interchange; a biological coming together, facilitated by humanity, of previously separated species which will conceivably be "the greatest spur to evolution for a hundred or more million years" [169]. Speciation seems to be unfolding in front of us at a pace that Darwin would have found unimaginable, although, of course, the real proliferation of new species will come in a far-distant future.

In another crucially important passage, Thomas writes:

"These new connections are unlike any previous period in the Earth's history. The explosion that killed off the dinosaurs, and the other four major episodes of mass extinction in the last half-billion years, did not transport vast numbers of the survivors around the planet on a timescale of hundreds to thousands of years. There was no equivalent bringing together of species from different regions. ... Given the geographic distances and rapidity of connections that are taking place in the Anthropocene, there is no precedent since multi-cellular life forms colonized the land." [195-96]

He concludes:

"I find it difficult to imagine a period in the entire history of terrestrial life on Earth when the speed of origination of new evolutionary lineages could have been faster, as a result of  the combined forces of populations arriving in new locations and starting to diverge there, the previous residents becoming adapted to the new species that arrive, and new hybrids coming into existence as species meet up for the first time in new habitats and new geographic locations." [196]

In brief: the human era is undoubtedly a time of unusually rapid extinction. But, ultimately, the Anthropocene bio-revolution will almost certainly represent a bright new dawn.


V. On Translating Man Back into Nature

The idealistic separation of man from nature continues to this day, despite the fact that Darwin published his theory of evolution over 150 years ago. Even some philosophers and scientists who really should know better, still insist on the myth of human exceptionalism and regard human abilities and activity as, in some sense, either unnatural or transcendent. Thomas, to his credit, is having none of this:

"When we contemplate the biology and impacts of humans on the Earth, there is no doubting that Homo sapiens is an extremely unusual animal. But at what point in the unbroken sequence of generations should we decide that humans ceased to be part of nature ... There is no scientific or philosophical justification that could be used to separate this continuum of ape-then-human animals into two qualitatively different categories." [207]   

Evolution has been going on long enough so that humans and chimpanzees are recognisably different; but we are still primates, just like them, and whilst it is man who exercises dominion over the Earth, this is still essentially the planet of the apes. And everything that happens upon it - including art, agriculture and architecture - is absolutely natural and represents an "indirect product of evolution" [209]. 

Indeed, even our anthropocentrism has an evolutionary basis; for this will to species self-privileging is shared with other animals: lions, bison, and killer whales, for example, "respond strongly to other members of their own species for exactly the same reasons" [210] we do. When they see others of their own kind, they see potential mates, family members, collaborators, enemies, etc. "Every species is special to itself because the survival of each individual's genes depend on it." [210]

However, whilst evolutionary predisposition encourages us to develop ideas of human uniqueness, it's important to recognise that we are still just animals and that "everything we do ... is natural" [211].


VI. Welcome to Anthropocene Park

Finally, we arrive at the last chapter of Thomas's book, entitled 'Noah's Earth'. Here, and in the Epilogue that follows, he speculates on what we might do today and how the world might look one million years from now. Different, is the answer to the latter question. But difference and becoming isn't something that has been engineered by man. It's built into the very fabric of the universe, including biology.

What we need, therefore, is an environmental philosophy that is based on an acknowledgement of change and the further recognition that change is something beyond good and evil regardless of whether the consequences are beneficial or harmful to human well-being and survival (although, obviously, we will want things to turn out for the best and it's perfectly legitimate for man to attempt to direct life's unfolding in "a desired direction as effectively and efficiently as possible" [230], eradicating deadly new diseases, for example).

As part of this new philosophy, Thomas thinks it worth considering radical conservation projects that don't just try to save a limited number of endangered species in their present location, but dare to move them to new places where they might thrive, just like the yellow-crested cockatoo, for example, which is thriving in Hong Kong, even as it continues a rapid decline in its Indonesian homeland:

"All the many thousands of transported plants and animals that have established populations in new regions have demonstrated time and again that species may flourish outside their historical ranges. In doing so, they normally increase the total number of species that live in each region, they start to evolve into distinct forms and they sometimes hybridize and create new species. Eventually, they will increase the diversity of life on Earth." [235]

And, in the meantime, it means we might get to see African lions hunting in the USA and black rhinos stomping about in Europe. I'm all for that and all for thinking about the creation of new ecosystems and biological communities - including communities made up of deliberately engineered new species (or even extinct species resurrected).

Ultimately, I agree entirely with Professor Thomas that we shouldn't allow those who worry about Frankenstein science prevent us from using all available means to maintain and increase biological diversity in a variety ways that many puritans would regard as not only unconventional, but unnatural and immoral.

See: Chris D. Thomas, Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, (Allen Lane, 2017). All the page numbers given above refer to this edition of the book. 

To read Part 1 of this post (Sections I-III) click here.