Nothing says ‘Los Angeles’ like cars, celebrity worship, and aversion to urban pedestrianism, and one might with reason think that nothing says ‘Los Angeles’ less than the word ‘Nature’.
But perhaps something more is afoot than what history will probably refer to as ‘the orange coup’. Today I begin my short stay in the land beyond the San Gabriel Mountains, a trip demanded by the temporary presence of Velázquez’s ‘Queen Mariana of Austria’ (1652-53) at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. As great luck would have it, there are also now major shows up by two of my Top 50 artists of the past 50 years, Joseph Beuys and Cai Guo-Qiang. By further chance, both of the latter exhibitions highlight the artists’ conceptions of nature: Beuy’s show is called ‘In Defense of Nature’, and another museum in Pasadena has a large show of Cai’s profound gunpowder drawings, which give powerful expression to his Daoist conception of nature. To the mind that is warped by the love of art and woofed by philosophy, this suggests a series of very short blog posts reflecting upon the differing conceptions of nature embodied in the works of Beuys, Cai, and also Cézanne at the Norton Simon.
We can take our orientation from four major conceptions of nature. First, there is the magnificent conception introduced and articulated by Anaximander over 2500 years ago, the conception of nature as ‘cosmos’. Anaximander’s great and sole fragment characterizes ‘the unlimited’, and (rendered very loosely by me from memory) goes: ‘From where things arise, there also they are destroyed, according to necessity; for they have to pay the penalty for their injustice, according to the ordering of time.’ So Anaximander suggests a beautiful (‘cosmos’ has the same root as ‘cosmetics’) and just order wherein elements or items have determinate, non-contingent (‘necessary’), and especially temporal relations with each other. ‘Nature’ would then carry a kind of ambiguity as either a synonym for ‘cosmos’, or as part of an opposition (nature (phusis) vs. convention (humanity/culture/etc. as nomos) within the cosmos. A second conception would be nature as resources for humanity; on such a conception one might wish to speed up global warming so as to rendering more quickly accessible the mineral resources of what has been traditionally known as ‘Greenland’. A third conception is what is perhaps the most durable one embodied in post-Renaissance European, and given its emblematic form in the many, many works of Claude Lorrain: nature is a well-ordered, beautiful, docile realm at a distance yet fully available for human delectation.
A fourth and final conception is not conception at all, as in the recent influential works of the French anthropologist Phillipe Descola, who forcefully argues for that the very idea of ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’ is an invidious Western conception used among other things in anthropology to misunderstand and indeed mutilate non-Western conceptions of both human life and the natural world.
Where do the artists of Los Angeles stand in relation to these conceptions? I’ll address this daily for the next few days with short posts on Cai, Cézanne, and Beuys.
Print Resources for the forthcoming posts:
Kurt Badt, The Art of Cézanne (1985)
John Foster Bellamy, Capitalism in the Anthropocene
Joseph Beuys, What is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys (2004)
Henry Bugbee, ‘The Idea of Wilderness’
Cai Guo-Qiang, Cai Guo-Qiang: Ladder to the Sky (2012)
--Cai Guo-Qiang: my stories of painting (2016)
Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (2013)
Charles Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (1960)