The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats*

EMILY APTER

OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 21–44. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Life forms are vanishing, landmasses are eroding, holes are widening in theozone, and nations subsist in a state of increasing mineral depletion. If, in the lastten years, considerable debate has focused on “continental subjectivity” (negotiat-ing Eurocentric theories of the subject across nations in the wake of postcolonialtheory), it may now be time to consider the broader implications of how to “thinkcontinents.” Thinking “continentally,” that is to say, seeing the world as a series oflandmasses interlinked by industrial damage and wastage, can be a risky matter,since it colludes all too easily with the denationalizing logic of corporate sovereigntyand the obfuscation of class injustice. As Gayatri Spivak puts it, with her usualknack for articulating crucial political blind spots: “A classless vision of ecologicaljustice made in the USA is hopelessly inadequate to come to grips with thespectralization of the rural.”1 Certainly, many activists, critics, and artists seemvulnerable to Spivak’s charge of a green globalism that consigns the politics ofclass to the shadows. But despite these legitimate concerns, and despite complexpast affiliations with the genres of land art, earthwork, pictorial neo-Romanticism,art made with natural materials,2 and so on, a number of contemporary artists aregiving substance to what might be called an aesthetics of critical habitat that mustbe framed by the politics of antiglobalization.3

* Warm thanks to Mary Kelly, Hal Foster, Anne Higonnet, Aamir Mufti, and Tony Vidler for theircomments and suggestions.1. Gayatri Spivak, “Megacity,” in Grey Room 01 (fall 2000), p. 21.2. A recent installation by Liga Pang provides a good example of the return of art that emphasizesnatural materials as a medium of choice. Her massively scaled wave fabricated of bamboo twigs andknotted fiber aligns its pro-nature position with an implicit critique of late-industrial societies thatdespoil the earth while professing veneration of natural beauty. Liga Pang, exhibition of New Work,Santa Monica Museum of Art, July 28 to September 2, 2001.3. For a useful overview of the intersecting genres of land art and ecologically informed aestheticpractice, see Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon Press Ltd.,1998). According to Kastner, land art was “the apotheosis of formalism and the evolution ofMinimalism.” For Wallis, the tenets of this Greenbergian formalism are challenged by the literalismand ecological functionalism of earthworks made by Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Hans Haacke,and others in the late 1960s. Miwon Kwon’s classic piece “One Place After Another: Notes on SiteSpecificity” also clarifies the genre issue in its discussion of how site-specific work relates to land art,minimalist installation, and topographical realism, in October 80 (spring 1997), pp. 85–110.

Broadly speaking, critical habitat, as I am defining it, applies to art informedby geopoetics; by an ecologically engaged conceptualism (what the poet JohnKinsella has called “radical pastoral”) that critiques the relationship betweenmedia and environment and explores forms of global identification along thelines proposed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their coauthored bookEmpire. Here, the “globalist” economic paradigm of superstates, or surpranationaljurisdictions inhabited by an unbordered citizenry, is appropriated for revolutionaryends: the condition of displacement and disenfranchisement endemic to workersworldwide is seen to produce a new class of “nomadic revolutionaries” whoseinterests are panglobal and whose community of feeling (Einfühlung) spans theparameters of the earth itself, superseding national geopolitical boundaries. Noweven if Negri and Hardt’s romantic invocation of the nomadic revolutionaryinvites problematic associations with transnational terrorism in the wake of theWorld Trade Center disaster, it is conceived to apply most aptly to groups like theeco-activist Earth Liberation Front, mounting actions against the geneticmodification of food and trees; or the Genoa demonstrators protesting the July2001 G-8 summit.4 This transnational “Multitude,” committed to worldwide socialand environmental justice rather than to the nation-state (and as such, the leftcounterpoint to the venture capitalist who sees the globe as a stockpile ofresources ripe for exploitation), contests the environmental fallout of globalizationwhile seeking to move beyond the parochialism of identity or single-issue politicspredominant throughout the 1980s and ’90s.

And yet, to simply make a pitch for critical habitat as an ecologically correctversion of “global-think” is not enough; such a move calls out for furtherqualification. If habitat is invoked here, it must not be in the naive belief that itnecessarily achieves a more successful calibration of the local and the global, norin the hope that it offers an aesthetic ideology fully resistant to globalization theory,but primarily because it focuses attention explicitly on how global financial andinformation economies are being embedded within geopoetic signifying practicesacross media. Fredric Jameson’s idea of “the communicational signifier,” discerniblein “visions of financial transfers and investments all over the world,” is useful herebecause it takes account of the extent to which media and environment areincreasingly difficult to disentangle as a semiotic system. Similarly, Spivak’srethinking of the rural in terms of information technology points to theimbrication of habitat in the economy of capital flow: “The rural,” she writes, “isnot trees and fields anymore. It is on the way to data.”5

If, following Jameson and Spivak, media and environment are conceived ascodes capable of mutual translation, then the idea of critical habitat could be

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4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).5. Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization,ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyosi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 56, andSpivak, “Megacity,” p. 20.

6. Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,”in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press,1983), pp. 21, 26, and 27, respectively.7. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 164.

“located,” so to speak, as a margin of critique inserted in the space where thistranslation process occurs. As such, the term owes a clear debt to the intellectualzone of criticality developed in continental theory by the Frankfurt School, andmust also fully acknowledge Kenneth Frampton’s precursory paradigm of “criticalregionalism,” which stakes its stand against the Megalopolis on architectural formsof resistance; specifically, on an “unsentimental” tectonics of localism capable ofsustaining a “dialectal relation with nature.”6 In addition to being an expressiongrafted from the lexicon of environmentalists, who use it to refer to the minimalconditions necessary to sustain the life of endangered species, I am definingcritical habitat as a concept that explores the links between territorial habitat andintellectual habitus; between physical place and ideological forcefield, betweeneconomy and ecology.

*

The problematic of critical habitat as outlined above is defined in distinctyet representative ways by four contemporary artists working in different media:there is the postcolonial cartography of William Kentridge’s ravaged SouthAfrican landscapes; the problem of “radical pastoral” in the context of endangeredaboriginal cultures in the work of the Australian poet John Kinsella (whichcomes out of a reading of work by the Aboriginal language poet Lionel Fogarty);the use of nature as a counterfoil to virtual environments in the neoromanticblow-ups of Andreas Gursky; the issue of “remote responsibility” in an era ofdigital representat ion, the mult iple meanings of a techno-sublime whosepremise is the “multiuser environment,” and the visualization of the globaleconomy as an ecosystem, exemplified in the digital installations of media artistJohn Klima. These artists are uneasily grouped together since they share nounified, compatible political agenda, common medium, or aesthetic ideology.But each evokes the planetary violence of eco-information systems in order todenaturalize “globality,” “a word serving to hide the financialization of theglobe” in Spivak’s ascription.7

The white South African artist William Kentridge has, since the mid-1980s,been working to transform the traditional genre of landscape painting into amedium of geopolitical critique. In a series of charcoal drawings from 1988 entitledLandscape in a State of Siege, he describes how landscape—the background music ofpainting or the filler between plot and character in a novel—“takes over” the

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privileged space of the interior, much like an act of territorial reclamation by thedispossessed:

For about a year I have been drawing landscapes. They started off asincidental details in other drawings. A window behind a coupledancing, an open space behind a portrait. Gradually the landscapetook over and flooded the interiors. Few of the people in the picturesmanaged to retain their place in them. . . . A few of the drawings are ofspecific places but most are constructed from elements of the countrysidearound Johannesburg.8

Kentridge pastiches South African landscape painting, typified, in the 1920s and’30s, by the work of Jan Ernst Abraham Volschenk and J. H. Pierneef:

The Volschenks and the Pierneefs are empty of tribal images but arenot unrelated. The landscape is arranged into a vision of pure nature,majestic primal forces of rock and sky. A kloof and escarpment, a treeis celebrated. A particular fact is isolated and all idea of process orhistory is abandoned. These paintings, of landscape in a state of grace,are documents of disremembering. (WK 109)

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8. William Kentridge, in William Kentridge (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1999), p. 108. Allfurther references to this work and essays in it will appear in the text abbreviated as WK.

Left: J. H. Pierneef. Rustenburgkloof. 1931.© Transnet.Right: Jan Ernst Abraham Volschenk. Mountains atRobertson. 1921. Courtesy Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Kentridge combats “the plague of the picturesque” through acts of close reading,coaxing the suppressed history of South Africa’s violent past out of geologicalformations. Celebrated landscape singularities—the kloof, the escarpment, thetree—are supplanted by randomly chosen pieces of turf on which industrialincidents are plotted. What interests Kentridge are “pieces of civil engineering,the lines of pipes, culverts, fences” (WK 110).

It has become clear that the variety of ephemera of human interventionon the landscape is far greater than anything the land itself has tooffer. The varieties of high mast lighting, crash barriers, culverts, thetransitions from cutting, to fence, to road, to verge, to fields are asgreat as any geological shifts. . . . There are other traces there too. Anever-ending chronicle of disasters or almost disasters in the sets ofskid marks that punctuate the road. (WK 110)

The slashed turf and zigzags of tire-tracks establish the warp and woof of environ-mental violence, even as they point Kentridge, in Rosalind Krauss’s virtuosointerpretation, toward a reinvestment of drawing, graphic trace, and medium inan era of postmedia.9 For Krauss, this aesthetic commitment to medium is in andof itself a strategy of anti-globalization; a refusal of complicity “with a globalizationof the image in the service of capital.”10 In my own reading, Krauss’s marshaling ofmedium against the global market is only further strengthened by the manifestdimension of eco-critique within Kentridge’s approach to nature.

Colonial Landscapes—a series of charcoal and pastels on paper of 1995–96—isan exercise in the art of doing South African pastoral otherwise. Despoliation andthe ransacking of land make for what Kentridge calls “a desperate sort of natural-ism,” a dark side version of the geography textbook’s approach to habitat, whichpresents the trope of “land and peoples” as natural extensions of each other.Kentridge blasts the bucolic myth of harmony between man and nature; the inter-dependency of ecosystems gives way to visual narratives of forced labor andenslavement. Kentridge’s bid for empirical banality in his “naturalistic drawings”of the South African veld prove that land “holds within it things other than purenature” (WK 111).

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9. Rosalind Krauss, “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” in October 92(spring 2000), pp. 3–35.10. Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on Art in the Age of the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-MediumCondition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), p. 56. Krauss writes: “One description of art within thisregime of postmodern sensation is that it mimics just this leeching of the aesthetic out into the socialfield in general. Within this situation, however, there are a few contemporary artists who have decidednot to follow this practice, who have decided, that is, not to engage in the international fashion ofinstallation and intermedia work, in which art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization ofthe image in the service of capital. These same artists have also resisted, as impossible, the retreat intoetiolated forms of the traditional mediums—such as painting and sculpture. Instead, artists such asJames Coleman or William Kentridge have embraced the idea of differential specificity, which is to saythe medium as such, which they understand they will now have to reinvent or rearticulate.”

William Kentridge. Colonial Landscapes. 1995–96. All Kentridge images courtesy of the artist.

South African novelist J. M. Coetzee has observed that in Kentridge’s films“it is nature, for a change, that is vulnerable to man. The landscape of his films inparticular is the devastated area south of Johannesburg: mine-dumps and slimedams; pylons and power cables; roads and tracks that lead from nowhere tonowhere” (WK 84). What is so fascinating in this work is the “figure in the carpet”leitmotif; the way in which landscape, on closer scrutiny, reveals the signs ofecological travesty. Red pointers and circles appear on these bleak scapes, as if toidentify sites of pollution and illegal dumping. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, indialogue with Kentridge, remarks: “The red pastel surveyor’s marks on your blackcharcoal drawings indicate how the colonial images were like projections onto theland. By observing the landscape itself you discover things you wouldn’t normallynotice: for example that a hill is really an artificial mound left over from a miningdump” (WK 22). The scenery, in other words, is composed of optical illusions thatseen close-up bear witness to environmental damage. According to Dan Cameron,“Not only is Kentridge signaling that this ruined vista is as much his culturalinheritance as the idyllic Eden was to his forebears, but in his refusal to ascribeany ideological position to nature he is also pointing out the inherent connectionsbetween ecology and civil rights” (WK 49, my emphasis).

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Kentridge. Felix in Exile. 1994.

This conjugation of ecology and civil rights is precisely what I am associatingwith critical habitat; it is a literal “grounding” of human-rights violations. MaryKelly’s recent installation Mea Culpa is relevant here, with its furrows of compressedlint photographed to resemble an abstract war zone, juxtaposed with testimonydrawn from war-crimes tribunals. The “works” are identified as Phnom Penh 1975,Beirut 1982, Sarajevo 1992, and Johannesburg 1997, and taken together they suggestan internationalized identification with sites of trauma. Mea Culpa comes across asan antiwar protest that visually documents the devastating impact of global militarytechnologies on the human. The dry prose of data—facts on the poundage ofexplosives dropped, the number of fragments of shrapnel deposited—is threadedthrough gray zones, assigning narrative significance to the dark crater-like patcheserupting beneath lines of text. Where Kelly materializes the vanishing of humanpresence through serial panels of blank gray, wreathed in swags of funereal dust,Kentridge uses the dusty medium of chalk to depict the world beneath the earth’ssurface as a burial chamber for strip miners.

In a nod to Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Kentridge employs stockcharacters—the plutocrat, the capitalist—to dramatize the conversion of humanashes into gold. His 1991 film Mine features the capitalist Soho Eckstein: “Seatedat his desk in the customary pose of the patriarch, Soho punches adding machinesand cash registers, while the fruits of his efforts spill forth in the form of goldbars, exhausted miners, blasted landscapes and blocks of uniform housing”(WK60). Coetzee claims that the film finds “pictorial means to link the notions ofunderground and repressed memory” (WK 84). The landscape as archive ofhuman history and memory is an old idea, of course, compatible with theFreudian analogy between the unconscious and the dark continent. But inKentridge’s drawings and films there is generally an avoidance of subjectivism.The pastoral furnishes no inscape of the soul; but, rather, is deployed to build abrainscape, a CAT-scanned landfill, or mental environment: “Building off thegeological metaphor deployed in Mine,” Cameron writes of the film Weighing . . .and Wanting (1997–98), “the scanned brain transforms into a kind of porous rock.

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Mary Kelly. Beirut 1982. 1999. Courtesy of the artist.

. . . Embedded within the rock . . . are memory layers, fossilized like primordialrecords of long extinguished species” (WK 71).

The allusion to “extinguished” rather than “extinct” species points me to apoem called “Dispossession” by the contemporary Australian language poet JohnKinsella, whose work parallels Kentridge’s in its depiction of landscape pock-marked by industrial waste and the traces of assault on native peoples. Kinsellaemploys the word “extinguishment” (accentuated by an exclamation point) in ariff on the history of Australia’s indigenous population, driven off ancestral landsby mining companies and white hunters:

DispossessionprotectionaggravateddestructionAlmightyconstructionproclamationprobabilityautonomy

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Kentridge. Mine. 1991.

linksqualityvis-à-visthe centralisedLondon dealer in native artlandinglike something out of songlinesthe presscommission/straditionalpunishmentsappropriateauthenticthreadsheresycontrolswhite huntersalcoholabusecustodymotivatingsit-downleadersnominatedbymining companiespastoral leasesprogressiveimpactsand sustainextinguishment!As assistancemodifies actspresencetracesthe localand maintainsrepresentativesauthenticclaimsto constitutionalstrategyfaith

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and ownershipriflesrevisionisthistories: lightsrain the skyshackles11

The idea of “sustaining extinguishment” alludes to how government policiesthat have furthered mining interests mask the displacement of Aboriginalcommunities in a rhetoric of preservationism. It is an oxymoron that undercutsecological idealism (the equation of endangered tribal peoples to endangeredanimals and plants), while capturing in psychic terms the trauma experienced byAustralia’s “stolen generation,” removed from their families by welfare agenciesand surrendered, all too often, to adult lives of poverty and substance abuse.“Extinguishment,” suggesting a landscape burned out by fires that form anarrative of dispossession (complementary to Kentridge’s map of environmentalincidents), exemplifies Kinsella’s theory of “radical pastoral,” which in “hybridising”the “so-called pastoral tradition with the linguistically innovative. . . . ironises thepastoral construct but allows for genuine movement through rural spaces.”12

Kinsella’s high-modernist tendencies make him susceptible to classificationas a “global” writer who exploits Australian regionalism in the name of acontemporary rewriting of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. But this reading ignoresthe language politics of “hybridising” that informs his aesthetic agenda. As areader of the Murri Aboriginal poet Lionel Fogarty, he commends Fogarty’s“communalizing of the lyrical I” (the poet’s land-based antisubjectivism) througha hybrid English that “reterritorializes lost ground.”13 In Fogarty’s verse, hybridEnglish is identifiable as a pidgin that archives slavery’s past while thematizing its

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11. John Kinsella, “Dispossession,” in Visitants (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Bloodaxe Books,1999), pp. 36–37. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated as V.12. John Kinsella in Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry, ed. John Kinsella (North Fremantle,Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999), p. 193. 13. In an essay largely devoted to Lionel Fogarty, Kinsella writes: “For me, the most significant voiceto emerge in the latter years of this century is that of the Murri poet Lionel Fogarty. Fogarty hasmanaged to use English as a weapon against its own colonizing potential. He has created a positivehybrid that undoes the claim of linguistic centrality, and registers the primacy of the oral tradition. . . .While reacting to the colonising of his Murri tongue by English he in effect colonizes English, renderingit subservient to his inheritance, to his spatiality. . . . His is the most revolutionary of languages beingused in Australian poetry. Freedom doesn’t come solely by marking territory and occupying a conceptualspace, a space linguistic in nature. One must reterritorialize lost ground. . . . I’ve referred to the kindsof poetry Fogarty and I write, from entirely different perspectives, as examples of ‘hybridising.’ Byhybridising, I don’t mean a mixing or a production of a third-party alternative from a set of specificmaterial. A hybrid is not a possible next stage in a developmental sense, nor a ‘dilution’ of the componentparts! Nor is it a fusing of traditions. It is, in fact, a conscious undoing of the codes that constitute allpossible readings of a text. It is a debasement of the lyrical I. . . .” (John Kinsella, “The Hybridising of aPoetry: Notes on Modernism & Modernity—The Colonising Prospect of Modernism, and Hybridity asa Means to Closure,” www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/8574/newessays.html)

own dialectal activism (as in the line “Yea my some communication, still manytribespeople / dialect you and old, not sold”).14 In the poem “No Grudge,” ruralradio talks back in a hybrid tongue. Indigenous words plant themselves insideEnglish, and a great ingenuity is applied to the estrangement of English throughsound slippages (as in the play between the words “human,” “new one,” and “upman”) or the phrase “mass translate” (which trumps the absent yet no lessanticipated “mass transit”):

Our educationalist is the yubbaon the koori radio.Nudge nudge human new one up-man-shiprun by himself.But the community be at each others throatsbut we should consider advocatinga hurray wireless playingBlackfella media, not politicalfoot-balling loud-mouth perturbed.A happy-go-lucky broadcasteris one tribalism sparkling radiodisc-jockey we seem to criticise100 psychological conditioningLet the yubba mass translatea mouth communicatingSuppression, hot reply15

While Kinsella’s own language games are clearly indebted to Fogarty’s localformalism, he also crosses theory with pastoral genres in ways that tie him to theAmerican L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, a loosely linked group including CharlesBernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Jed Rasula that by the mid-1980s wastranslating continental theory into writing praxis. Many of the texts in Kinsella’sVisitants collection experiment with ecological phenomenology and transformationalgrammar. The poem “Skeleton weed/generative grammar (for Noam Chomsky),” forexample, suggests a genetics of language or agrilinguistics in its play on languagetrees. Several poems bear epigraphs drawn from Jacques Lacan, Jacques-AlainMiller, and the Australian Lacanian feminist Elizabeth Grosz, and these frame textsfunction as more than intellectual captions. Kinsella uses psychoanalytic conceptsdeveloped by these theorists—panic, fear, anxiety, the uncanny—to stage whatSpivak has referred to as “the spectralization of the rural.” In the poem “keepingyour mouth shut—against conspiracy,” the rural is erased by the alien presence of

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14. Lionel Fogarty, “Jukambe Spirit—For the Lost,” in Landbridge, p. 130.15. Lionel Fogarty, “No Grudge,” in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, ed. John Tranterand Philip Mead (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 452.

chemical plants. Nungalloo becomes the generic site designated as “Area-51” andcorporate names—“Associated Labs,” “Allied,” and “Jennings”—signify the nullifi-cation of territory, the advent of industrial apocalypse in Australia’s wheatlands:

Area-51 was a place called Nungalloojust north of Geraldton. The hugemineral sands processing plantsof Jennings and Allied mutatedout of borderline farmland.As if a neutral zone, Associated Labssat nearby, upwind. Testingmonozite and rutilelate at night a storm hitthe narrative and the x-rayequipment went wild, the gunshooting rays outside its alignment,the telex scripting the electric air,my flesh spread like an internal horizon—a chemiluminescent shadow puppetexperimenting with form,my organs glowed and I watchedthe machinery of my fear,the production of silence. (V 15)

Radioact ive waste creates a toxic luminosit y captured by the neologism“chemiluminescent.” A ghostly body, irradiated and iridescent like electronic texton a dark screen, emerges from a cosmic battle between light rays and X-rays in thenight sky.

Kinsella excels in inventing an ecological uncanny that uses extraterrestrialvisitation as the trope of late industrial catastrophism. In “The Three Laws ofRobotics, Skylab and the Theory of Forms,” the landscape is possessed by “visi-tants” in the form of Soviet space trash, which, as you may recall, does in factroutinely drop from the sky between New Zealand and Australia. In the poem“Phenomenology” (leading off with an interesting epigraph from Donna Haraway,“But with the advance of civilization, this biology has become a problem”), achild’s jerry-rigged telephone system becomes the conduit of “glowing figures withstrange limbs like Roswell aliens” (V 11). Chaos theory, paranormal forces, androbopsychology “wire” the outback, transforming it into a force-field of clashingcommunication systems and inflecting it with manifest spookiness. In “TheSavagery of Birds” “live” nature is haunted by the specter of artificial life:

As smog drifts up from the cityyou realise that the sky is really

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a painted backdrop, and Naturehas no part in it, that all aroundyou is construct—the silos,the sheds, the tractors, the trucks,cybernetic animals wearing fashionable genes, mechanical birds that fly with the gravityand grace of a computer simulationwhile wearing expressions that belongto mythology, making Frans Snyders’sOiseaux sur des branches relevantto the end of the twentieth century,to a place deep down in the South,where grain-eating birds are turningto flesh that tastes like muesli. (V 40)

This poem recalls Lacan’s famous example of Zeuxis’s painting of grapes solife-like that they fool the birds, and Parrhasios’s painting of a veil so convincingthat Zeuxis demands to know what is painted behind it. Lacan reads this as aparable about Vorstellungsrepräsentanz—“that something that stands for representa-tion”—which lures the gaze and allows it to triumph over the eye.16 For Kinsella,the Flemish still-life master of the sixteenth-century, Frans Snyder is deputized asa latter-day Zeuxis. But in Kinsella’s poetic trompe l’oeil it is the birds themselvesthat have become objects of visual fascination. As “cybernetic animals wearingfashionable genes,” their flesh shown mutating into muesli, they resemble allegoriesof a bioengineered nature that converts the mechanical into the living, or theanimal into agricultural byproduct, according to a common genetic code.

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16. Jacques Lacan, “The Line and the Light” and “What is a Picture?” in The Four FundamentalConcepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1973), pp. 110 and103, respectively.

Kinsella’s literary experiments with the interface between artificial natureand virtual environment invite comparison with the work of Andreas Gursky, anartist for whom photographic virtuality is a signature theme. Gursky is mostfamous for his wall-sized photographs of work environments and commercialhubs—the Tokyo Stock Exchange, with its hive-like depiction of traders comingand going, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, with its serially arrayed and replicatedwork stations, the Siemens factory floor with its “wired” spectacle of organizedchaos, the Salerno car lot, a chromatic blanket of commodities, or the formalgrammar of Untitled V (1997), with its sneakers lined up on display shelves like aconveyer belt of fetishes. Not only do these images deliver great spectacle-value,they also offer the intrigue of visual puzzle, since Gursky is known to havemanipulated their Neue Sachlichkeit verisimilitude, emptying out digital informationor using overlays of other digital images. In Untitled V, for example, Alex Alberrowrites, “The artist built a short double shelf, which he then photographed sixtimes, painstakingly figuring out the proper angles from which to shoot andrestocking the shelves with different shoes for each session. The negatives werethen pieced together digitally to make a single, monumental image, reflected onthe floor.”17 Using techniques of digital montage and illusionism, Gurskystraightens and flattens the curved panoramic image into a rectilinear geometry so

Left: Andreas Gursky. Untitled V. 1997. Above: Gursky. Siemens,Karlsruhe. 1991. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

17. Alex Alberro, “Blind Ambition,” in Artforum ( January 2001), p. 109.

that every aspect of the image is frontally engaged. These techniques drawattention to the digital image as a screen of colored pixels that, at high resolution,produce a kind of pointillism, which the eye “corrects” into form. Gursky exploresthe relationship between pixilation and printing; square pixels, once printed, arevisually softened and rendered smoothly transitional, a process referred to asdithering. What the eye accomplishes for pointillism, digital printing accomplishesby dithering, allowing Gursky’s inserts and collages of groups of people toassume their place as if they were always there.

The effects of this image manipulation are particularly unsettling whendirected at the German tradition of romantic nature painting. There is thesend-up of postcard nature in Yogyakarta, a photograph that depicts what lookslike a European park, but which in fact is “a cheap photomural in a greasy spoonin Indonesia,” according to Peter Galassi.18 There are images, such as Ruhr Valley(1993), that seam together multiple camera angles, creating a “real but not quite”effect. As Alberro has noted, the images are stuck somewhere between “simulacrum(a picture of a picture)” and “simulation (in which the image has no origins in thereal), and thus do not entirely cross the threshold into pure virtuality since thefinal results are composites of photographic documents.”19 In Autobahn Mettmann,the view of cows and fields from the window of a highway rest-stop presents avisual field striated by horizontal bars, apparently painted on glass to keepmotorists from being distracted by scenery. The aluminum strips direct as well asdeflect the gaze, cutting into the Gestalt of pastureland and bovine forms, as if toreveal how farmland in the European Union (recently beset by the hellish spectacleof piles of smoldering animal carcasses, the “landscape” of BSE) is subject to amanaged ecology of seeing and not seeing.

Gursky blurs the distinction between ecological habitat and ontologicalhabitus in a curious work that seems, initially at least, to be an anomalous subjectin his repertory. A framed page apparently lifted from a German phenomeno-logical treatise is presented in blow-up format, like a landscape or scroll thatdraws the viewer into its totalizing worldview or Lebensphilosophie.20 The text

18. Peter Galassi, Andreas Gursky (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2001), p. 34.19. Alberro, p. 109.20. The full text reads (in rough translation): “Just as water lilies on water consist not only of leavesand blossoms and white and green, but also of ‘gently lying there.’ Normally they lie there so peacefullythat one doesn’t notice them in their entirety anymore; the feeling must be peaceful, so that the worldis in order, and only sensible relationships prevail in it. It is a sinking or climbing of all humanity toanother level, a ‘sinking up high,’ and all things change in accordance with that. One could say theystay the same, but then they find themselves in another space, or it is all colored by another sense. Insuch moments one realizes that beside the world that everybody knows, the one you can investigateand grasp with your mind, there exists yet a second, moveable, singular, visionary, irrational one thatonly appears to be the same. But we don’t just carry it in our heart or head, as people believe, butrather it stands outside us, just as real and valid as that other one. It is an uncanny mystery and like allthings mysterious, when one attempts to speak about it, it gets easily confused with the most mundanethings. He understood its story. Hundreds of human rules have come and gone; from the Gods to theneedle in the jeweled ornament, and from psychology to the gramophone, each a dark unity, each adark belief, the last to be the one just rising, and every several hundred or thousand years collapsing

Opposite top: Gursky. Yogyakarta. 1994. Bottom: Autobahn,Mettman. 1993. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

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contains intriguing phrases and expressions: “a self-renovation longing,” “self-destitution,” “the state of being, shell-shocked by a group soul,” as in the followingsentence: “And the way this addiction to renewal in one’s existence makes oneperpetually mobile, is motivated by nothing other than destitution, betweenone’s own nebulousness and the already foreign shell that has hardened overone’s predecessor, which once again is a kind of appearance-self, an approximategroup-soul which is shoved onto one.” Who could write this sentence? one is com-pelled to ask. It seems to have something of Walter Benjamin in it, some MartinHeidegger perhaps, but it is not quite either of them, but, rather, a piece ofgeneric German modernism. As it turns out, this is a collaged and seamed versionof Robert Musil’s turn-of-the-century Austrian novel The Man Without Qualities.Performing a kind of digital sampling on the text, Gursky deauthorizes it; inducinglexical seasickness.

mysteriously and deteriorating to rubble and construction, what is this other than a climbing out ofnothingness, tempted every time to search for the other side. (And no trace of it so that we couldcontain it in cycles!) Just as a sand dune is blown by the wind and takes on a certain shape for a while,and then again, is gone with the wind? What is everything we do other than a nervous fear of beingnothing: starting with pleasures that aren’t any, but rather instead are just noise, a stimulating chatterto kill time, because a dark certainty warns us that it will ultimately kill us. All the way through to thosetranscendent inventions, and meaningless heaps of money that kill the spirit, whether one is sustainedor smothered by it, the fearful, impatient modes of the spirit, of clothing, which changes continually.And the way this addiction to renewal in one’s existence makes one perpetually mobile, is motivated bynothing other than destitution, between one’s own nebulousness and the already foreign shell that hashardened over one’s predecessor, which once again is a kind of fake self, an approximate group-soulthat is shoved onto one. And if one pays just a bit of attention, one can always see in the newly arrivedpast the future of coming ancient times (translation by Zaia Alexander).

Gursky. Untitled XII (Musil 1). CourtesyMatthew Marks Gallery, New York.

Gursky is a master of overlay, transforming environments and habitats intodigitally enhanced versions of themselves. Digital modification thus becomesessential to what is “critical” in Gursky’s treatment of habitats, however weak thatkind of critique-through-representation may seem. Gursky’s virtual renditions ofCaspar David Friedrich’s celebrated set-ups of a lone figure confronting alpinemajesty deflate the Romantic sublime by revealing the way in which the sublimehas become compat ible with a globalist vision suffused with commercialproduction values. Factory floors, ski slopes, supermarket shelves, work stations,football stadia, library stacks, these sites become interchangeable insofar as theyrepresent environments that have been profoundly mediated by media; visuallyaltered by the effect of what Roland Barthes calls the “environs of the image,” that “leech” factor of exteriority that allows the outside to “stick” to the idea, and whichmakes the body-image or place-image stick (or “stick out” as the case may be).21

The use of scale, serial repetition, and chromatic alteration—the latter bringingon a kind of “new painterliness” according to the photographer James Welling—all serve to intensify the image of nature, and this extreme technologicalintensification gives nature back an image of itself as visual ideology.

By contrast, the media artist John Klima takes raw digital processes andtransforms them into naturalist imagery. But where Gursky treats nature as avisual commodity, circulating in the marketplace of technological images, Klimatargets the computer environment itself, focusing on interface as a site of trans-formation whereby unrepresentable processes are converted into false pictorialnarratives. Klima makes us aware that a program like “Windows” is a fictiveinterface operating through opaque layering, a mask for the processing of digitalinformation.

Klima’s installation Ecosystm, exhibited at the Whitney Museum’s Bitstreamsshow, provides a fractal of the interface between globalization and mediaenvironments. The work is conceptually predicated on the translation of currencyfluctuations into flocks of birds. Friedrich Kittler’s view of the invisible layering ofsoftware and hardware codes seems appropriate here: the birds are revealed to beallegorical structures pasted over digital structures that are themselves electronicresponses to market processes.22 Klima thus creates an information loop or feedthat ends up in a transparent visual ideology. The flight patterns are true or deicticsigns (in that they stand in for “real time” responses to shifts in monetary value),

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21. Roland Barthes, “The Image,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, Calif.:University of California Press, 1986), p. 352.22. “Programming languages have eroded the monopoly of ordinary language and grown into a newhierarchy of their own. This postmodern Tower of Babel reaches from simple operation codes whoselinguistic extension is still a hardware configuration, passing through an assembler whose extension isthat very assembler. In consequence, far-reaching chains of self-similarities in the sense defined byfractal theory organize the software as well as the hardware of every writing. What remains a problem isonly recognizing these layers which, like modern media technologies in general, have been explicitly con-trived to evade perception.” See Friedrich Kittler, “There Is No Software,” in Friedrich A. Kittler: Literature,Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1997), p. 158.

but the ecological habitat in which they are represented emerges as an arbitrary,fictive interface. In theory, any other screensaver would do. Or would it? The birdsdo in fact seem to have been chosen for a reason: their feeding frenzies andbellicose attacks, patterned after corporate raiding, problematize the impact oflong-distance financial transactions on remote ecologies.

The originality of Klima’s work lies in the way in which it shows how mediaenvironments camouflage what globalization does to local habitats, dissolvingpolitical responsibility in information flows. Trained as a programmer with consul-tant experience for various financial firms, Klima has consistently framed thetheme of remote responsibility. As the publicity blurb of his Postmasters galleryshow informs us,

In a piece called “Go Fish,” the viewer must try to navigate throughtreacherous waters connected to an actual fish tank. “Go Fish” examinesthe mini-world of a fishbowl. Visitors play a video game in which theoutcome affects the fate of a real goldfish. . . . In the game . . . the playeris a fish swimming through dangerous waters. Lose, and a goldfish is

John Klima. Go Fish. Installation view, Whitney Museumof American Art Bitstreams exhibition. 2001.

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shot from a bowl into a tank with menacing oscar fish, that will eat itlater that night. Win, and the goldfish head towards less carnivorouscompany. Players might pity the victim, but the goldfish must lose outsometimes, or the oscars will die of starvation. “It’s the moral dilemmaany pet owner faces when they feed animals to their pets,” says Klima.More than that, it may be the reigning moral dilemma in a zero-sumsystem, where saving one creature means killing another and whereone person’s calm blue water is another’s path to power.

Klima reveals the extent to which media environments, governed by the law of“your loss is my gain,” and long-distance ethics, coordinate the cooperativerelat ionship between globalizat ion and ecological exploitat ion. Interfaceemerges as a habitat in which ecological responsibility is shown to be dissolved

John Klima. Go Fish. 2001.Courtesy Zurich Capital Markets.

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and rearticulated. The flocks of birds function as the picture or visual ideologythat masks the invisible digital process of data transfer and transformation. Butthey also symbolize the digital capture of market exchanges and their translationinto ecosystems. In this sense, Klima offers a literal rendering of Spivak’s idea ofnature in the global economy as “already on the way to data.”

Klima uses the media environment not only as a site for tracking data on itsway to environmental damage, but also as a medium of information transfer thatis causally implicated in the damage. In this regard, a work such as Go Fish contrastssharply with, say, Peter Fend’s satellite images of algae bloom fatal to millions offish (Ocean Earth: Processed Imagery from AVHRR of the North Sea 15–16 May, 1988), orAllan Sekula’s Fish Story (a series of riveting photo documents of the fishingindustry), or Kentridge’s The Deluge (a charcoal-and-pastel drawing featuring atoxic swimming pool with giant amphibians thrashing overhead, dodging flyingdebris in an ominous storm). Each of these fish-themed works enlist s anenvironmental conceptualism in its treatment of medium, and each depicts agrowing social panic about the death of oceans, the ingestion and circulation ofPCBs in the food chain, the precariousness of fishing economies, and theapparition of that supranational sea monster currently crashing the KyotoProtocols that Negri and Hardt associate with Empire. But in Klima’s installations,the computer medium itself is both the tool of environmental damage and therepresentational vehicle of critique. The visible conversion of data transferinto nature (and the reverse) allows the viewer to pinpoint where the survivalof natural habitat becomes critically endangered.

Unlike many artists working with digital technology, Klima avoids thetemptation to show what digital art can do as the next fine art—its success atmimicking, in a new medium, the naturalist topoi of the sublime or the conventionsof pastoral genres. Nor does he simply affirm the naturalization of technologicallysaturated representation (as some critics have accused him of doing, dismissinghim as a superficial technophile interested in computer games and high-jinksinteractivity).23 If anything, his work denaturalizes digital imaging, making theviewer hyper-conscious of the technological mediation of the world and itsimages; extending the reach of environmental activism and providing ecosystemsaccess to self-representation in a visual form other than landscape or naturepictures. In this regard, Klima is complemented by the artist Wolfgang Staehle,whose 2001 “live” WebCam projection of the New York skyline became anovernight sensation due to its inadvertent capture of the World Trade Centerattack. Like Klima's project based on the Japanese game “Go” (in which satellite-

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23. Barbara Pollack’s review of Bitstreams designates Klima’s ecosystm as “the weakest link” in theshow. “Despite the initial thrill of seeing a computer animation projected on a wall, the ultimate wide-screen video presentation, only those completely unfamiliar with Nintendo 64 or Sony PlayStationcould be dazzled by Klima’s graphics. The thrill, if any, comes from finding a video game—geewhiz!!!—in an art museum" (Barbara Pollack, “Back to the Future with ‘Bitstreams,’” in Art in America9 [September 2001], p. 61).

directed robot bugs, beneath a spinning globe, react to electronically “charged”countries by tracing out their economic vital statistics on a drawing pad),Staehle's work provided, however horrifically, the technological support forallowing the world to make itself “happen” as art.

Klima's most recent work on the war in Afghanistan joins geopoetics togeopolitics, once again using the technical medium of digital data transfer toredefine art as the visual interface between resource expenditure and politicalfeed-back. Titling the work The Great Game after the British term for imperialskirmishes with Russia over hegemonic influence and the control of strategicports in Central Asia during the nineteenth century, Klima's real-time websitegrabbed a headline in the New York Times on November 26, 2001: “A War Game(Sort of), but You Can't Control the Action.” In Klima's work, digital reliefmaps of Afghanistan, subjected to manipulation and rotation by mouse, aremade available to the viewer who taps onto the site www.cityarts.com/greatgamein the hopes of interactive engagement, only to discover that control of thevariables—weapons, material, war-planes, weather—is an illusion. The game,quite simply, is not in your hands. As in Ecosystm, the behavior of the icons isbased on real-time responses to data transfer, but in this case, the information,culled from Defense department briefings and other authorized sources of warstatistics, is partial, strictly curtailed by government screening. So, effectively,this 3-D, cartographically credible theater of war shows not the war, but the waythe war looks warped by information holes, camouflaged errors, and imagemanipulations. If the “Great Game” were a generic term for British intelligenceand espionage operations in the age of Empire, it now refers to simulation inthe age of information black-out, where computer-generated flight patternsand military maneuvers, or the teen subculture of computer war games, blockoff access routes to so-called “reality” on the ground.

Klima's The Great Game website works with digitally processed informationas a way of unmasking secret initiatives taking place in political hot spots on theglobe, while experimenting with the visual modeling of information deformitiesand lacunae, but it remains to be seen where his interventions lead politically.If his work defines an aesthetics of critical habitat, it is a hypermediated aesthetics,lacking clear antiwar or antiglobalization political messages. This project raisesthe interesting issue of how technically driven aesthetic procedures adapt tothe conventions of political art (or fail to adapt, as the case may be).

As we have seen, Kentridge, Kinsella, Gursky and Klima are all inextricablyimplicated in the question of habitat, and have contributed potential ways ofmaking that habitat critical by responding to the ecological mandate in theirart practice. The tension in the model that I have been developing then, is, incrude terms, one between the “grounded” and locally critical representation of“real” habitats, suffering real political devastation and trauma—habitats thatare, so to speak, sites of political and social struggle; and the more globally producedhabitats (virtual habitats, if you like) that are constituted by communication

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networks and represented by the front-end software of the web. Such a tensioncannot simply be overcome by a generalized idea of globality (which even in itsdemystified forms has an uncanny ability to gobble up and assimilate environmentalresistance as if it were one of John Klima's vulnerable goldfish), but it can perhapsbe made productive in the context of aesthetic strategies of global identificationthat resist both the trap of a myopic, self-enclosed regionalism and a eulogisticacceptance of new technologies of communication for their own sake.