Here's a short catalogue essay I wrote for Alex James's new exhibition, "Of Form/Combination", coming up in June at Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney. You can see some of Alex's recent work at his site, here: http://www.amrjames.com/.
Of Form/Combination
It is a melancholy fact that in time our lives will have
vanished almost without trace. After death, we will likely be remembered for a
few generations. But this posthumous survival, even at best, will be relatively
short-term. Perhaps something of us—our little unremembered acts of kindness—will
have effects that cascade on for a few generations more. And yet inevitably, if
you look far enough into the future, into the long run that stretches out
indefinitely ahead, then everything we are, everything we do and everything we
care about will have disappeared, given enough time.
For almost all who have ever lived, and almost certainly for us,
this process occurs quite quickly, in less than one hundred years. Some
practices and values take longer, of course. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “tradition
means giving a vote to that most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is
the democracy of the dead.” What Chesterton neglected to add was that
traditions also die out. Even democracy, which is itself a kind of tradition,
will one day be forgotten. This will probably not happen in just a few hundred
years. After all, democracy is an enduring tradition: the name and the practice
it names are already nearly 2,500 years old. But it seems less probable that
democracy will still be spoken of at much more distant dates—in around 100,000
years, for example. Chesterton’s vast democracy is in fact made up of the
unremembered, those whose lives have disappeared into oblivion, taking with the
traditions that once leant those lives meaning. And one day, we too will belong
to that silent majority of the dead, along with nearly everything we value: every
contested principle, every cherished loved one, every transcendent moment of
beauty. Religions promise longer prospects. But at least as concerns the
material Earth, the only world in which we find our happiness or not at all, we
will not be remembered.
At a geophysical level, however, our actions today will
indeed live on, precipitating out in around 100,000 years as a thin layer of
submarine limestone. This is how the oceanic carbon sink works: it is the
ultimate destination of the carbon I emit every time I get in my car, or write
something on a computer, or indeed do almost anything that I tend to do every
day. None of these acts is particularly memorable in itself: they will all likely
be forgotten in days and weeks and months, let alone in centuries. And yet they
will also be inscribed as many tons of calciferous deposits on the ocean floor:
my permanent trace in the geology of the planet, my earthwork. In 2000, Paul
Crutzen, atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize-winner, proposed the concept of
the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch, in which humans are collectively
reshaping the geosystem. The Anthropocene gives a name to this strange paradox:
the fact that our everyday lives, however unimportant, are also now as
permanent as stone. The Anthropocene makes us responsible for our fossilized
future: it makes us dwell in the unimaginable time of the dead. By destroying
the possibility of transience, of ephemerality, and of traceless disappearance
in time, it forces a change of perspective on us.
Western culture has a record of generating and responding to
temporal shocks like this—to jarring disjunctions of drastically discrepant
measures of time. In the final years of the eighteenth century, for instance,
natural philosophers—Hutton, Buffon, Cuvier and others—suggested that the
geological timescales of the earth massively exceeded those of human history,
and indeed potentially stretched back far behind the origin of the human
species. These new ideas of vast inhuman spans of time, of temporal stretches inconceivable
in the terms of human experience, helped inspire Romanticism’s intense interest
in imagining the world without us. The poet Percy Shelley had been reading
Buffon, for example, in the days and weeks leading up to the composition of his
great Romantic lyric, Mont Blanc,
which concludes with a question posed to the mountain:
And what were
thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human
mind’s imaginings
Silence and
solitude were vacancy?
Shelley drew on natural history in Mont Blanc to imagine a universe of destruction, of entropy, in
which human consciousness had no special significance or importance. The world
suddenly appeared much older, and much more alien. It was indifferent to the
collective destiny of the human species, existing in another time, an inhuman
time.
Much of the literature and art of the Romantic period can be
understood as a coming to terms with this newly ancient world. The Anthropocene
replays this Romantic shock of the old in reverse. What it requires us to see
is that humans now also dwell in this geological, inhuman time. It requires us
to think about our role in the deep future, and about the new permanence of our
transient actions. Photography can help in this task, because photography shows
that objects are processes in slow motion. It can do this quite directly—a
burst balloon is the bullet passing through it—but also in more reflective and
less obvious ways. Making objects by slowing processes down is in fact how all
photographs come into being. The medium of photography works by slowing down
the action of light: it slows it down so that we can see this action, so that
it is inscribed, permanently visible.
The early work of Alex James revisited colonial landscapes of
loss—sites of historical drownings in southeastern New South Wales—to capture
images haunted by absence and lack, explorations in darkness visible. More
recently, he has been photographing clouds, reworking Romanticism’s discovery
of the aesthetics of atmosphere for our own climatically troubled times.
“Cloud” is an old word in the English language, a word originally related to
“clod.” “Cloud” once meant a mass of rock, or a hill. So in a sense, to talk of
clouds is to talk of airborne rocks, of mountains hanging in the sky. In an age
of carbon cycles this curious etymology takes on a strange and ironic new truth.
Rocks, quite literally, are clouds slowed down. Alex James’s new work traces
out formal combinations of these different relative speeds and densities. It
deals in the convertibility of processes into objects, using the medium of
photography to picture forth our entanglement with times that exceed our grasp,
that stretch out beyond the limits of our experience. His rocks appear
light—floating, suspended, wanderers each as lonely as a cloud. But they are
also heavy with the geological gravity of our human atmosphere.
Alexander James, Rock at Rest 1, 2014
50 x 40 cm
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