Wanderers in the Desert of the Real, Part I
William L. Fox
Wanderers in the Desert of the
Real; Wallerawang Powerhouse, 2009
Oil/Pigment/ on Linen
70.9 x 106.3 inches
Courtesy Australian Galleries Melbourne
www.australiangalleries.com.au
During each of the last three years I’ve gone to Australia to write about Australian artists and their environments. In part this is because Australia is the continent most stressed by climate change. This last July I traveled with the artist Mandy Martin, whose paintings Wanderers in the Desert of the Real include industrial sublimes of power plants. Her title makes the point that it’s not the naturally arid lands that we should consider wastelands, but the deserts we manufacture through industrial processes such as clear-cutting and strip mining.
The travel--research for a book titled The Art of the Anthropocene--first took us to Wallerawang, a site that Mandy has been painting since 1982. It’s the farthest inland point Darwin reached in Australia during his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. And it’s where, a hundred miles west of Sydney in the early evening of January 19, 1836, he first saw a platypus.
Darwin promptly compared the exotic creature to an animal with which he was already familiar, an English water-rat. Both were aquatic-based mammals with webbed feet that burrowed into stream banks; but the two animals, despite living in similar environments, were radically different species. This example of “convergent evolution” was a building block in what would become his theory of natural selection.
Mandy and I sat by the small sculpture of a platypus that commemorates Darwin’s visit to the banks of the Coxs River, a stream that was invisible to Mandy and me, drowned beneath the reservoir that Wallerawang Power Station built for its cooling towers. It was beyond irony, that a coal-fired power plant--which, by its contribution to global warming, helps limits the very diversity of species that Darwin studied--had drowned a site where he observed an apex example of that diversity.
The “Anthropocene” was defined in 2000 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen as a new geological epoch following the Holocene, one which began in the 1790s with the arrival of a strata of carbon laid down worldwide by the burning of coal. The Anthropocene is the “era of the human,” an acknowledgment that our species has become the most powerful geomorphological force on the planet’s surface. Mandy’s paintings are a strong example of one kind of art in the latest stage of this new epoch, a stage in which we are becoming aware of our power and the attendant responsibilities.
Next: Wanderers ..., Part 2, Latrobe Valley
Wanderers in the Desert of the
Real; Wallerawang Powerhouse, 2009
Oil/Pigment/ on Linen
70.9 x 106.3 inches
Courtesy Australian Galleries Melbourne
www.australiangalleries.com.au
During each of the last three years I’ve gone to Australia to write about Australian artists and their environments. In part this is because Australia is the continent most stressed by climate change. This last July I traveled with the artist Mandy Martin, whose paintings Wanderers in the Desert of the Real include industrial sublimes of power plants. Her title makes the point that it’s not the naturally arid lands that we should consider wastelands, but the deserts we manufacture through industrial processes such as clear-cutting and strip mining.
The travel--research for a book titled The Art of the Anthropocene--first took us to Wallerawang, a site that Mandy has been painting since 1982. It’s the farthest inland point Darwin reached in Australia during his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. And it’s where, a hundred miles west of Sydney in the early evening of January 19, 1836, he first saw a platypus.
Darwin promptly compared the exotic creature to an animal with which he was already familiar, an English water-rat. Both were aquatic-based mammals with webbed feet that burrowed into stream banks; but the two animals, despite living in similar environments, were radically different species. This example of “convergent evolution” was a building block in what would become his theory of natural selection.
Mandy and I sat by the small sculpture of a platypus that commemorates Darwin’s visit to the banks of the Coxs River, a stream that was invisible to Mandy and me, drowned beneath the reservoir that Wallerawang Power Station built for its cooling towers. It was beyond irony, that a coal-fired power plant--which, by its contribution to global warming, helps limits the very diversity of species that Darwin studied--had drowned a site where he observed an apex example of that diversity.
The “Anthropocene” was defined in 2000 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen as a new geological epoch following the Holocene, one which began in the 1790s with the arrival of a strata of carbon laid down worldwide by the burning of coal. The Anthropocene is the “era of the human,” an acknowledgment that our species has become the most powerful geomorphological force on the planet’s surface. Mandy’s paintings are a strong example of one kind of art in the latest stage of this new epoch, a stage in which we are becoming aware of our power and the attendant responsibilities.
Next: Wanderers ..., Part 2, Latrobe Valley
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