Catalogue essay for The Great Divide
Dr Simon Cooper
HUMAN CULTURES, at least since the Enlightenment, have operated according to the ‘Great Divide’, an imposed separation between humanity and nature. This notion underscores our idea of ‘progress’—we free ourselves from nature—but by doing so are free to exploit it.In distancing ourselves from nature we understand it differently, as a resource harnessed for our benefit: as commodity, as source of visual pleasure, as redemptive space whenever the pressures of the industrialised world overwhelm us. From colonialism to tourism, the uncoupling of humanity and nature has governed how we have come to act in the world, often to the detriment of both. Visual regimes from colonial art to contemporary tourism have worked to reinforce this division; pacifying nature for the service of industry or capturing it aesthetically for the spectator.
If the great divide can be implicated in all manner of exploitative projects, such a breach is increasingly untenable. Scientists tell us that we have entered the Anthropocene period where human action directly impacts upon natural systems. With climate change we can no longer regard nature as a passive ‘other’; our fates are linked. Yet the facts are not enough. Many do not want to hear what science tells us. Perhaps another way of undoing the great divide then,is to interrogate,even dismantle the perceptual apparatus that has governed it. Steph Tout’s work takes us in this direction.
Tout’s photos operate at two levels: the larger pieces which reference a traditionally Romantic view of nature, offering up the ‘grand view’, if only to disrupt it, and a series of pinhole exposures that engage a more intimate space—the aspect of nature we admire from the lookout point but rarely get close to. Both sets of works compel us to think not merely about nature itself, but also about the representational practices that have contributed to the Anthropocene era of planetary crisis.
Adorno once remarked that ‘the splinter in the eye is the best magnifying glass’. A similar dialectic of opaqueness and clarity unfolds within Tout’s larger images taken from national parks in Tasmania and Victoria. All three, Lake Lilla from Marion’s Lookout, Lake Dove to Mt Campbell and Squeaky Beach on the Way to Pillar Point, purge our ideologies of the natural by deliberately distorting the stereotypical scenes found in landscape painting,nature photography, calendars and tourist brochures. The photo of Lake Lilla initially signifies a typical Romanticism through its formal composition. The lake forms the focal point of the image, perfectly centred with vegetation in the foreground and a mountain range framing the background, suggesting a natural harmony. Such idealisation is quickly undercut, however, by Tout’s use of a distorted glass filter. A closer look reveals that the left-hand side is blurred and it looks as if water has streaked across the surface of the photo. Such compositional disruption provokes a series of reactions from the naive (the photo is somehow ‘ruined’) to the more reflexive (highlighting the mediation that accompanies all representation).Either way,the use of filter frustrates our conditioned response to such ‘views’ of the natural world. Lake Lilla playfully refers to the practices of tourism; water on the lens is every tourist’s nightmare, while also hinting at how the agency of nature can resist subjective control (it rains a lot in Tasmania).
In these works Tout sets up and then refuses the tourist gaze. In Lake Dove, Mt Campbell is centred within the frame, rising from the shores of the lake. The artist’s mediation is more directly evident here as the foreground of the photo is deliberately blurred, the lake almost a smear of colour. The vegetation has lost its outline, but gains a more abstract, almost kinetic quality. Similarly in Squeaky Beach the image of a pristine crescent beach is corrupted so as to undermine the viewer’s expectations, yet the image gains a vitality as the smudged rocky outcrop and sections of sandy beach almost seem to be moving.Tout’s self-reflexive use of filters, which suggest movement out of stasis,reveal a temporality normally missing from posed nature shots,the deliberate flaw in the gestalt opening up new ways of thinking about the object.
Like the ‘lookout’ photos, the other works in this exhibition also play with the ‘panorama’ effect, but at a different scale. A series of pinhole exposures depict in detail the parts of nature that the larger works capture from a distance so that Forest with Leeches, Heathlands and Rocks and Tide complement the larger works. Each of these forms a montage via the pinhole exposures and is placed within a metal cylinder around the interior wall. Like the larger works these pieces refuse any attempt at visual mastery, but through engaging sensory motility rather than deconstructing an idea.The viewer cannot take it all in, adjusting their gaze to incorporate new detail, becoming aware of the complex properties of movement in our perception, and thus the transient, rather than transcendental conditions underpinning our grasp of the natural world. By isolating the subject within the cylinder there is also a hint of loss and disconnection—being cut off from others is a condition for enjoying nature within this viewing environment and reveals the price to be paid for attempts to master nature. Subjugating nature for our aesthetic pleasure has classical antecedents. Exiting the cylinders one might recall Odysseus listening to the Sirens, strapped to the mast, the ears of his crew plugged so as not to go mad, and remember how the domination of nature is also self-domination.
These enclosed panoramas were derived through Tout’s painstaking use of pinhole photography, and this artistic practice suggests another way of relating to nature outside the parameters of the great divide. Pinhole photography requires immersion, waiting, habitation and exploration on the part of the artist—features antithetical to the accelerated regimes of the digital age. Rather than art providing the means by which we might simply legitimise our use of nature,Tout’s work seduces but also confounds the viewer, inviting us to look more carefully, to rethink the divisions between humankind and nature, subject and object, reality and construction, stasis and movement. We can no longer just stand back and admire nature, nor can we exploit it in the service of growth. If we are to survive the Anthropocene period we need to forge a relationship to nature outside of our received understanding. Tout’s work invites us to do precisely this.