Ashraf Jamal examines the intricate interplay between precarious, reparative, and biological ecologies through the lens of ‘Imminent and Eminent Ecologies’, the groundbreaking exhibition curated by Leora Farber and Brenton Maart at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg
Janneke de Lange, Display Collection, 2024. Wood, glass, bacteria, projector, 13 x 24 x 82cm; Projection dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and VIAD. Photographer: Anthea Pokroy
When did ‘ecology’ take hold as a precept for the analysis of culture? When did art and design become mulch? As for the reversion of the ‘individual’ back to its contrary root source, and as for the ‘indivisible’? Was it when hubris proved unsustainable, greed impermissible? And when might that have been? Any number of tipping points can be cited which have made it impossible to imagine that the centrality and apex of ‘Man’ was ever a good idea. A fundamental error occurs in Genesis 1:26-31: ‘God said “let the earth produce vegetation. Let the earth produce every kind of living creature. God said let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heavens, the cattle, all the wild beasts, and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth” ’. An insidious ventriloquistic exercise – ‘God said’ – disguising an overweening and appalling self-regard? Doubtless the catastrophe of the Anthropocene is by no means as recent as we would like to imagine. The narcissistic man-made destruction of the planet is age-old. We know this in Percy Bysshe Shelly’s great poem, Ozymandias – first published in The Examiner in London in 1818 – in which a monumental folly created by a mad king is now a dereliction: ‘Nothing beside remains: round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away’. We also know human vainglory through the Dutch Vanitas tradition. The list is endless. My point? That so-called ‘civilisation’ has proved far more catastrophic than beneficial. That human life is contagion.
Installation view of Bronwyn Katz artwork. Photographer: Anthea Pokroy
It is unsurprising, therefore, that an acute interest in the microbial has returned, that science and art have synergetically conspired to understand the fatality of the human economy, and to find solutions to alternative modes of cohabitation. In the 1970s, Felix Guattari posited a ‘molecular revolution’. ‘We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes’. It is this becoming with that signals an epistemic shift away from centralised and neurotically egoistic paradigms of being. Contagion need not be understood negatively. On the contrary, it can and must be understood as a productive entanglement. In this regard, consider the omnipresence of mine-dust in Johannesburg, the epicentre of extractive capital in South Africa. Dust is the sine qua non that defines the city – its essential, indispensable, necessary register. To suppose dust a pollutant instead of a fact of life, reveals the neurotic obsession with purgation and cleanliness – and its alignment with godliness – which is the hallmark not only of denialism, but also a constitutive delusory fixation with human exceptionalism. But as Michael Marder bluntly reminds us in his monograph, Dust – ‘Humans are nothing but dust looking through dust at dust’. It is through this chastening self-recognition that we can, more productively, address Guattari’s epistemological shift from haplessly, or arrogantly, being in the world to becoming one with it.
LEFT: Dean Hutton, Floating Bodies, 2024. Steel, wire, SPX33 foam noodles, foraged bamboo, willow, hessian, coconut coir, wetland plants. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and VIAD. RIGHT: Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez, Anchor in the Landscape, 2023. Photographic prints, 50 x 40cm. Courtesy of the artist and VIAD. Photographer: Anthea Pokroy
In 8 CE, Publius Ovid, while in exile, pens Metamorphoses. ‘My purpose’, he writes; is to tell of bodies which have been transformed… from the earliest beginning of the world, down to my own times’. The magisterial nature of Ovid’s need for accountability is salutary. Today, we find that nothing has fundamentally changed. Ours remains a default mode in need of a corrective. Transformation remains key, a transformation that cannot be detachedly understood. For as Louis Pasteur notes in the late 19th century – Every living thing from a living thing – because nothing ever comes from dead matter. If Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – penned in 1818 when she was sixteen – is revealing in this regard, it is because, like Steve Jobs, she sought to animate the inanimate, to ‘galvanise’ the ‘soul’. The catastrophic implication of this vanity is now obscenely present in a metastasised social media, the realm, par excellence, of the soulless and undead. It is a living organism that promises new life. If death defines our technologised cultural economy, it is because we revolve about our corpses. But we can never be the sum of this airless and soulless realm. While we choose to survive in-and-through our hollowed-hallowed silos, while we choose the rage and hatred which captivity, compounded by delusory connectivity generates, we also instinctively know this life-choice to be fatal. Which is why, unsurprisingly, we find ourselves trapped on a besieged earth defined by the death-instinct. Our air, water, ground are under threat. Why have these elements become weaponized instead of remaining a universal common? ‘No agent exerts a more continuous power upon man than the atmosphere by which he is surrounded’, James Boswell notes in the mid-1800s, the Industrial Age. Turner, Whistler, and Monet painted the horror in the sky. Today, our atmosphere has become a violation. Over the last twenty years, there has been a 60% increase in toxic chemical and ambient air pollution. That water, in 2020, became financialised – a commodity derivative on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange – further compounds the evisceration of any planetary humanity, any natural resource.
Click here to read the article in the ART AFRICA , ISSUE 25, CARRYING CHANGE.
