Out of its curated context, Thomas Struth’s photograph Aquarium looks benign. Tired schoolchildren are resting at the foot of a public aquarium’s great wall of glass.
Brightly colored fish swim past them in an artificial ocean. They dart in and out of an underwater reef glowing green with seaweed and anemones. Aquarium is related to Struth’s earlier series, Museum Photographs, in which he shows a viewing public similarly postured, their heads mostly averted away from a Diego Velázquez painting.
In Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene (through August 3), the aquarium becomes a denatured work of art. A sculptural object that can be admired from a historical distance because it’s now extinct. We can imagine the teachers’ accompanying lesson plan for the children: “This is what the oceans looked like. They contained an ecosystem separate from ours, filled with life, wonder, mystery.”
A curatorial note about the exhibition defines anthropocene as “a new geological epoch marked by human activity.” The human activity photographed in Second Nature isn’t all bad news, but it isn’t great either. Around the corner from Aquarium, Léonard Pongo’s video installation Primordial Earth: Inhabiting the Landscape announces a recurring theme: We’re in trouble. And by we, I mean the people of Planet Earth.
On his website, Pongo describes his mixed-media installation Primordial Earth as a “loose tale of creation/apocalypse and what’s in between.” Sheltered in a corner behind sheer voile drapes patterned with organic shapes, imagery and sound combine forces to depict a confrontation between the industrial and the natural worlds. The artist gives waterways and landscapes a voice, one that howls and bellows with pain. They’re visibly suffering from manmade contaminants. Pollution is turning everything green and blue into a sludgy black.
Second Nature expands on this idea with a section entitled “Toxic Sublime.” Edward Burtynsky, João Castilho and Sammy Baloji all photograph mining companies, the source of various kinds of sludge. Regardless of the location, whether in Chile, Brazil or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the people and the land in these images are tattooed or irradiated with scars.
With 24 adjacent photographs, Castilho created a collage in Morro Vermelho (Red Hill). All of the images are mineral pigment prints in yellow, orange, red and black. But red, the color of warnings and disasters, dominates the field. They’re beautiful in the way a sunset is when it’s populated by exhaust and smoke.
Without reading the explanatory wall placard, Meghann Riepenhoff’s entry is a gorgeous aerial shot of a snowy white land mass dissolving into a sea of cerulean and aqua blues. The title of the photograph instantly changes its surface beauty into an anxiety-inducing tableau. World’s End to the Mouth of the Mashpee River, Deluge from Residual Hurricane Ian Storms, Waves, Hingham to Cape Cod, Massachusetts is part of Riepenhoff’s series Waters of the Americas. Only a broligarch could buy this piece as decorative art for his subterranean bunker or rocket ship while insisting that climate change is the figment of a scientist’s deranged imagination.
Whimsy doesn’t pay a visit to this catalog of worldwide catastrophes, but Second Nature does close with a few tonal shifts. Anna Líndal, James Casebere and Aïda Muluneh all move away from more photo-journalistic approaches by modifying reality or by adjusting reality’s point of view.
Casebere’s Orange House on Water proposes an alternative blueprint for those Tahitian bungalows that float above water on stilts. Some fancy digital effects create a distorted reflection from the dark and moody waters below. This minimalist structure looks like an unreachable outpost for the ghosts of a lost civilization. There’s no sign that it’s ever been, or will be, inhabited.
In an archived interview online, Muluneh explained that her series Water Life focuses on the fact that “access to water is still a challenging issue.” She poses women, surreally, in purple or red dresses within carefully composed deserts. They carry vessels while searching for water in sandy plains and jagged outcrops.
Líndal centers her gaze upon an Arctic camera in Auga (Eyeball) and Vald vitneskjunnar (The Power of Knowledge). She wittily reminds the viewer that someone is paying attention to the melting ice floes while our evil overlords remain intractable and indifferent.
Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene is on view through Aug 3 at Cantor Arts Center, 328 Lomita Dr, Stanford. Hours: Wed & Fri 11am–6pm; Thu 11am–8pm; Sat-Sun 10am–5pm. museum.stanford.edu
