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.