Amanda Boetzkes, “Contemporary Art Facing the Earth”

Contemporary Art Facing the Earth
Introduction
In this paper, I examine the alignment of aesthetic and ethical strategies, in
contemporary earth art projects that effect a phenomenological experience of nature’s
alterity. The artworks that I will discuss elaborate perception as a deliberate act of
receiving sensation, which I contrast to Maurice Merleau-Pontian mode of tactile vision
which has been associated with postminimalist sculpture and nineteen sixties land art.1
As an alternative to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological model, whereby the subject
intends towards an object, actively reaching out for it, and ultimately apprehending by
‘taking hold’ of it with a penetrating touch, contemporary earth artists deploy the artwork
to both mediate and allegorize the bodily sensation of nature as a disarticulation of
surfaces. They thereby develop a complex ecological stance in which not only is nature
understood to feed into and then exceed one’s field of perception, but the perception of
nature’s otherness becomes an ethical act as well as an aesthetic experience.
The artworks in question, a performance sculpture by Ana Mendieta, a series of
photograms by Susan Derges and a biosculpture by Jackie Brookner, all express
touching, seeing and in one case even tasting nature as a detection of bodily limits. The
reception of sensorial information occurs in spite of, and because of, those limits. In each
artwork, the body is the locus of the human-earth exchange. The body is performed both
as a kind of sculptural object that is entwined with the earth, but also as a surface that
separates itself out from natural activity. More precisely, though these earth artists locate

1 See Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, New York, The Viking Press, 1977 or Alex Potts,
“Tactility: The Interrogation of Medium in Art of the 1960s,” Art History 27 no. 2, April 2004, p. 282-304.

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their bodies within the materiality of the earth, the artwork instigates an inversion or turn
against natural substance in order to gain a perspective of its alterity.
Though contemporary earth art is often described as sculpting with photography,
or photographing sculpture - the more familiar artworks of Andy Goldsworthy and Nils-
Udo have often fallen under this description - what becomes evident is that the discrete
categories of ‘the three-dimensional object’ and ‘the pictorial document’ are no longer
accurate to describe the aesthetic object of earth art practice. More often, earth artists are
concerned with expressing how the art object emerges as a product of the performed
relationship between the body and the earth, and reveals the way the body and the earth
constitute one another through the friction between their respective surfaces. In place of
notions of the three-dimensional sculptural object and its characterization in terms of
material, texture and form, here I use the concept of ‘the elemental’ to describe the
substance in which the contingency of the body and nature is staged. Instead of the
pictorial image, what is usually thought of as a supplement that documents and replaces
the ephemeral artwork, I will be detailing the visual component of these works as a
surface on which ‘the face’ of nature appears. The substance of the elemental and the
appearance of a face are inextricable components of the earth artwork, though neither
effectively delivers the earth as a totalized concept, image or object. It is worthwhile to
take a moment to unpack each concept in slightly more detail.

The Elemental and the Face

The notion of the elemental has appeared recently in the domains of
environmental ethics and eco-phenomenology, in connection with conceptions of the

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earth as an irreducible entity. John Sallis, for example, posits that philosophy’s concern
with sensibility is fundamentally a turn towards the elemental of nature.2 The concern
with the sensible, he explains, is a quest for that which is not intelligible as a thing, but
for the unbounded and indefinite substance from which intelligible things emerge. The
elemental entails this fundamental source of emergence and furthermore, Sallis continues,
the earth is the primary elemental. Most importantly for my purposes is the model of the
earth that Sallis advances. The elemental earth is more than an inert substance that could
be reduced to a schema of production whereby things are merely composed of matter. It
does not compose things, rather, it is that from which things manifest, or as Sallis puts it,
it is the penultimate, “from which of manifestation”.3
In distinguishing between the material composition of the earth and the process of
its manifestation in things, Sallis asserts that the earth possesses an unknown dimension
by which it exists as the foundation for that which emerges from it. He notes that the
earth subtends precisely by withholding itself or closing itself off, thus providing a terrain
on which ‘things of the earth’ might exist.4 Moreover, like their elemental foundation,
earthly things possess the same quality of self-closure. This leads Sallis to discuss the
way in which the earth manifests itself in things, but also how its manifestation resists the
transparency of intelligibility. He describes the earth’s presence in things as a
countenance that is inseparable from a face, “It is the visage of something that withholds

2 John Sallis, “The Elemental Earth,” in Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman (eds.), Rethinking Nature:
Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 2004, p. 135.
3 John Sallis, “The Elemental Earth,” p. 142.
4 John Sallis, “The Elemental Earth,” p. 143.

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itself precisely in offering its physiognomy, of something that displays its secret strength
but in such a way as to keep it secret in the very display.”5
Sallis’ evocation of the visage or countenance of the earth brings me to the idea of
the face, which I use to explain the visual documents that evoke the earth but nevertheless
sustain a certain unintelligibility. Where for Sallis the earth is a visage that withholds
itself, for Levinas the alterity of the other, which is beyond even the idea of otherness,
presents itself in the concept of ‘the face’, which he specifically opposes to a discernable
image. He writes, “ The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of
the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme
under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face
of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me…”6
Though Levinas describes an encounter with a specifically human Other, his notion of the
face resonates with the ecology’s redefinition of the earth in terms of its rupture from
human discursive categories. Accordingly, by elaborating the visual manifestation of the
earth in the artwork as a face, I am drawing attention to the artwork’s recognition of the
earth’s irreducibility. Specifically, what is at stake in the artworks at hand is the
expression of the artist’s encounter with the earth in terms of the earth’s resistance to
representation. I therefore underscore the primacy of the artist’s use of the body, which, I
suggest, is both the locus of contact with the earth, and the device by which the spectator
understands the limits of his or her ability to perceive it.


5 John Sallis, “The Elemental Earth,” p. 142.
6 Emmanuel Levinas quoted in Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas
and Merleau-Ponty, NewYork, Routledge, 1988, p. 88.

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Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas
I begin with a discussion of Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series (1973-1980), a
sequence of performances in which the artist impressed her bodily form into the land in a
practice she called ‘earth-body sculptures’. The imprint in Mendieta’s practice is both a
metaphor for the interpenetration of the body and the earth, and the agent by which
Mendieta performs their differentiation through the reciprocal marking of surfaces. The
imprint encompasses both three-dimensional and two-dimensional elements; by sinking
herself into the elemental substance of the site and asserting her body against it, the artist
ensures that the aesthetic dimension is prompted as a function of both the sensation of the
earth’s volume and depth as well as its surface.
Anne Raine astutely points out that Mendieta’s siluetas initiate an uncanny
oscillation by which her body and inert matter occupy the same space. Yet, more subtly,
in performing her body as imprint, as a shared space that indexes both her body and the
earth but delivers neither as coherent object, the artist expresses the irreducibility of each
to one another. Furthermore, by positioning of the body and the earth as contingent, and
as mutually marking one another, but remaining unavailable to one another and to the
spectator, Mendieta reveals the body’s capacity to receive sensations of the earth and to
do so precisely because the body draws up against the earth and vice versa. Not
coincidentally, then, in a silueta work entitled Incantation a Olokun-Yemayá (Figure 1)
executed in Oaxaca, Mexico in 1977, Mendieta deploys the imprint as the penultimate
figure of touch. The indexical properties of the imprint (its status as a physical marking of
the land through the application of pressure) thus coincide with its metaphoric
connotations (as a representation of tactility).

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Figure 1. Ana Mendieta, Incantation a Olokun Yemayà, sand, black and white photograph,
Oaxaca, Mexico, 1977. © Estate of Ana Mendieta, Galerie Lelong, New York.


In this work, the artist stages a facing of the earth, placing the body inside the
outline of a giant hand. Unlike her other silueta works, the focus here is not the
dissolving imprint – it was not photographed in a sequence of color slides that document
a temporal performance. The key to this work is the division between the body’s surface
and the earth’s surface, and the figuration of that contact as an act of touching and being
touched. Mendieta created the hand by piling sand along the outline. The hand is not
pushed into the land from above, as though to allegorize the artist’s touch; rather, it gives
the illusion that the edges of the hand are pushing out from underneath. The hand is
thereby set in tension with the body’s shape that is pushed into it. The sense of pressure
is further emphasized by the fact that the head of the body’s imprint is set in the opposite

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direction from the fingers. The hand does not echo the imprinted body; it is situated
across from it, the head at the inverse of the finger into which it is laid. Moreover, the
hand does not close around the silueta; it remains open against its surface, receiving the
imprint but not absorbing it. In a now notorious statement Mendieta describes her
siluetas as a way of becoming an extension of nature and of nature becoming an
extension of her body.7 She carries this out, however, not through union with the material
of the earth, but by entering into it and then disarticulating herself from it.
Alphonso Lingis writes that the elemental gives rise to sense, and is itself sensed
as immersion. He is quick to add, however, that sense arises not by an intentional
direction of the viewing eye and the grasping hand aiming at objectives, but by a
movement of involution.8 In pushing her body into the ground, Mendieta immerses
herself in the earth and then, significantly, she withdraws, leaving the imprint. This
involution gives the earth a face - not a literal face but a surface of appearance. In
Incantation, the imprint expresses the character of the open hand’s touch that pushes
against it - the hand receives but does not grasp or enfold. Mendieta pictures this
encounter as an exercise in immersion in and pressure against, thus sustaining a sensorial
reciprocity. In the intimacy of matter on matter the imprint is knotted into the land,
marking Mendieta’s presence on the site, but at the same time evidencing the artist’s
retraction. In so doing, she performs the body as a surface that receives the earth’s
appearance; that is to say, the earth has come forward, constituting and embracing the

7 Ana Mendieta cited in Anne Raine, “Embodied geographies: subjectivity and materiality in the work of
Ana Mendieta,” in Griselda Pollock (ed.) Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts – Feminist
Readings, New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 228.
8 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, New Jersey, Humanities
Press, 1996, p. 125.


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body within it, in order to elicit sensation in that body. Mendieta mobilizes the aesthetic
dimension of the artwork as a confrontation by which the body receives sensation across
and through its limits.

Susan Derges’ Receptive Surfaces
The elemental, in Mendieta’s work is the medium that binds the body and the
earth together, and when deployed as a surface, it illuminates the face of the site. The
photograms of the British artist Susan Derges similarly assert a surface within the
elemental as a means of giving nature a face. In a series of photograms from 1998,
Derges documented periodic changes to the River Taw in Britain (Figures 2-3). The
photogram is an image produced without the use of an optical apparatus; Derges does not
use cameras or lenses to generate it. Instead, the photogram is made on Ilfachrome paper.
Unlike photograph paper, Ilfachrome is a positive paper used to print transparencies as
opposed to negatives. It has three emulsion layers, each sensitized to one of the three
primary colors so that each layer records different color information of the image.
During development, in a process called ‘dye destruction’, unnecessary portions of the
color dye are bleached out.9 To create the necessary contrast between reflected light and
dark background, the artist works at night. She submerges a sheet of paper in the river,
and at the right moment affixes the image by releasing a flash of light. With the flash of
light, the paper absorbs the patterns of the water’s movement.

9 Susan Derges, “A Technical Note,” in Frish Brandt and James Danziger (eds.) Woman Thinking River
New York, Danziger Gallery and Fraenkel Gallery, 1999, p. 79.

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Figure 2. Susan Derges, River Taw (Birch),
Figure 3. Susan Derges. River Taw (Hazel),
12 January 1998, photogram, 66” x 24”.
16 June 1998, photogram, 66” x 24”. © Susan
©Susan Derges.
Derges.


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For Roland Barthes, the photograph is an ineluctable testament to what has been.
The photogram is an even more literal trace than the photograph, however, because it
results from the physical contact of the water on the paper. The pressure of one surface
against another is secured as an image when galvanized by the flashlight. When the light
exposes the water, the photogram is marked with the shapes of the river’s swirling
vortices, as well as the shadows of tree branches. The photogram is literally immersed in
the water, and is a surface on which the contact between the artist and the river is
configured into an image that depicts and reveals a glimpse of the river’s face.
The tree branch that is silhouetted on the image can be thought of as a technical
device that exposes or protects the water, depending on the time of year and the time of
day, and by which the river gleans different qualities of light and color. But more than
this, the shadow of the tree branch creates a tension on the surface of the water. When
activated by the flash of light the photogram assembles it into an undeniable countenance.
Like Mendieta’s performances, the image is a scenario of reciprocal touch. In many of
the photograms, the branches carry a disturbing resemblance to hands with skeletal
fingers. In others, the leaves or branches are less human, but nevertheless evoke the sense
that the river has come forward in a particular stance or address to the spectator. Its
presence eerily mirrors the spectator’s position in relation to the photogram. Indeed, the
human scale of the photogram (at 66 inches long and 24 inches wide) invites a
confrontation between the tree branch and the spectator. Much like the relation between
the giant hand and the imprinted body in Mendieta’s Incantation, the spectator is
prompted to experience the photogram in tactile terms, positioned both within the water
and against the branch.

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Document Outline

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