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British
Art and the Environment Changes, Challenges, and Responses since the Industrial Revolution
Edited by Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède
London: Routledge, 2021 Hardcover. xiv + 243 pages. 20 colour & 37 B/W illustrations. ISBN
978-0367566487
Reviewed
by Isabelle Gapp University
of Toronto
In November 2021, delegates
for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) gathered in Glasgow, Scotland. Among
the conference’s primary goals was reaching a unilateral, global agreement to
secure net zero emissions by 2030 and to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees
Celsius. Phasing out coal and investing heavily in renewable energy were among
the pivotal topics under consideration. As Glasgow became the epicentre of
global climate change conversations, it brought into focus Britain’s own climate
failures and responsibilities. Industrialisation is seen as the catalyst for
the consequences we are now trying to mitigate. Charlotte Gould and Sophie
Mesplède’s timely edited collection, British Art and the Environment,
traces an anthropocentric and “Anglocenic time frame” through British art
history from the Industrial Revolution to the present day [4]. Gould and
Mesplède’s collection, which includes a comprehensive introduction and thirteen
chapters that are materially, geographically, and temporally diverse, offers readers
a newfound, ecologically conscious understanding of Britain’s industrialisation.
From nineteenth-century
industrial developments to twenty-first-century renewable energy to the urban
cityscape and the rural landscape, across visual materials and artistic
traditions, this volume introduces us to alternate and vital ways of
visualising and contextualising British art in our global environment. Gould and Mesplède begin with the
marginality and lithic makeup of Britain’s coastline in order to probe the
question: is there such a thing as British art? Modes of categorisation such as
“national, insular, and imperial” are offered as mediating levels between the
local and global [5]. The rise of typologies
such as “Euroscene,” “Technoscene,” and “Angloscene” endeavour to pinpoint the
origins of anthropogenic climate change within Europe, Britain, and America and
identify them as agents and projects of world domination. Moving across geographical and
national boundaries, Gould and Mesplède structure the history of British
landscape painting and photography, land art, eco-art, and environmental visual
culture over two centuries of industrialisation, colonisation, and
commodification. They note how the “start of the
Industrial Revolution was also the moment Nature began being determined
historically” [19]. The authors also recognise the role of the British art critic John
Ruskin, who with “interests ranging from botany, animal life and beauty,
pollution, geology, meteorology, lakes, harbours and reservoirs, the
individual, and living in the community” casts the “longest shadow” over this book
[3]. In the conclusion to the introduction, Gould and Mesplède
toy with rhetoric, still used today, to narrate British nationalism: “one in
which dominion over the land has become entangled with the emancipation of new
voices, and in which ruling the waves – or any other natural forces – is but a
long lost dream” [21]. The first section of the book indicates a shift from looking at,
framing, and mapping the environment from the exterior to “the body in
its environment, not detached from it” [6]. Vision and visuality are central to
the ensuing four chapters. The use of the Claude glass to distort and frame a
vision of the landscape from behind was decried by Ruskin, who advocated for unmediated
and close encounters with nature. Amy C. Wallace draws attention to the
little-known portable artist studios of Philip Gilbert Hamerton and Hubert von
Herkomer. Writing on natural optics and the transformation of the portable
studio into an optical instrument, Wallace grapples with Ruskin’s exhortations
on a “truth to nature” [29]. Created in-part to protect against inclement
weather, the framing of the landscape through the rigid permanency of the
temporary fixture of the studio only restricts and determines the view that can
be pictorialised. Visual hinderances also find their way into Laura Vallette’s
visually captivating analysis of James McNeill Whistler’s foggy nocturnes of London’s
river and cityscapes. Unlike the studio window’s restrictive framing, Vallette
explores the psychological implications of fog, offering a ‘window’ onto the
individuals’ interiority. The ability of fog to “disturb vision” [46] by
blurring, diffusing, and transcending London’s “urban and liquid landscapes” [53]
alters our understanding and appreciation of the outside world, decries
industrial pollution, and ponders the tonal effects of this low-lying vapour. Meanwhile, atmosphere gains traction in Paul Cureton’s methodologically
intriguing chapter, “Aerial Ontologies”. Cureton conceives of three aerial
ontologies: “the aerial imaginary, aerial agencies, and aerial fidelity”, and
explores the relationship between technology and place [59]. The examples
Cureton employs and artists he draws attention to are not geographically
confined to the British Isles, but rather adhere to the notion that, as Félix
Guattari states, “the only true response to the ecological crisis is on a
global scale” [71]. From the historic process of mapping an aerial topography
from ground level to the mapping of the earth’s surface through drone
photography, Cureton accounts for human influences on and artistic responses to
our ever-changing atmosphere. Shifting geographical scales, an interview with Tim
Martin, artist and curator of Hestercombe House and Art Gallery, draws
attention to efforts made by the estate to “re-frame and re-imagine our [local
and national] heritage” [79]. Pressing the connection between the long history
of Hestercombe’s landscape gardens and contemporary artists responding to local
and national environmental concerns, Martin introduces us to curatorial efforts
responding to the environmental challenges of today. In the second section, Gould and Mesplède shift focus to Britain’s
industrial landscapes, specifically the role human activities have played in
redefining and reshaping the topographical environment. In Aurore Caignet’s contribution,
an atmospheric haziness reappears in the plumes of smoke emanating from the
chimneys of northern England’s industrial landscapes. Caignet perceptively
traces the rise and fall of industrialisation, and industrial architecture, in
Manchester and West Yorkshire over the past two centuries. A chronological
account which encompasses painting and photography looks to the heritage and
history of Britain’s northern industrial landscape to recognise northern
England’s “bygone past and […] uncertain future” [102]. Similarly, by centring
the extraction and exploitation of Britain’s landscapes, Camille Manfredi looks
at Scotland’s unreliable petrocultural environment. Manfredi draws our
attention to visual and poetic responses to the oil and renewable energy
industries off Scotland’s coastline. Engaging global energy issues in
distinctly situational identities, Manfredi deciphers the “petroaesthetics and
petropoetics” [112] that, in some cases, “turn destruction into creation, and
ecocide into art” [111]. The process of
deconstructing, re-envisaging, and re-generating landscapes through art and
architecture re-emerges in Pat Naldi’s chapter on the urban regeneration of the
King’s Cross Estate and the “extreme
reshaping, contrived vistas, and man-made fabrication” [133] of the Bretton
Estate in West Yorkshire. Naldi probes the conflation between urban and rural and
private and public spaces. Drawing connections between north and south, the
constructed and natural, and different temporal frameworks Naldi consolidates how
art installations such as Of Soil and Water : King’s Cross Pond Club (2015-16)
in the Kings Cross Estate indicate the “future possibilities of constructed
ecologies within urban environments” [123]. Naldi’s analysis of the Bretton
Estate (which now operates as the Yorkshire Sculpture Park), notably in its
framing of the estate enacted by the country house window in turn shapes the
domestic garden and views of the surrounding countryside, recalls Gould’s and
Mesplède’s interview with Tim Martin. In a parallel interview which is
also the concluding chapter of the second section, the curator and writer
Adrian George brings into focus the contemporary Welsh art scene. George mirrors
a statement by Gould and Mesplède at the outset, that, for him, “there is no
such thing as Welsh art per se” [136]. Instead, we are introduced to and
reminded of artists who live in, and have been inspired by, Welsh landscapes,
communities, and culture. Articulating the complexities of a Welsh visual and
national identity, George dismantles cultural and geographical borders that so
often construct national image. The fluidity of the Welsh national and visual
border reaches its apex in the Welsh Pavilion at the Venice Biennale where the
artists and artworks were chosen to exemplify “Wales as a devolved, marginal,
one could say postcolonial nation” [140]. The third section of
the book signifies a “greening” of art history and accounts for non-human life,
materials, and the colonisation of nature and nations. Recognising that animals and humans occupy the same realm of
sentience, Mesplède’s chapter offers a shift from the human impact on the
landscape, to a human-animal dichotomy that emerges in William Hogarth’s Portrait
of the Mackinen Children (1747) and Thomas Gainsborough’s The Painter’s
Children Chasing a Butterfly (c. 1756). Accounting for a “species-based
hierarchy” [148] in compositional practices, Mesplède looks to British artistic
practice and aesthetic theory that emerged during the eighteenth century which
fostered an “artist-animal bond” [150]. The interlacing of scientific,
aesthetic, and animal pursuits is insightfully pointed to in these two
paintings of children chasing butterflies. Building upon notions of the
Anthropocene, Frédéric Ogée turns to the term “the anthropos(c)enic,” as
proposed by David Matless, to signify a back-and-forth between past and present
environmental imaginaries to complicate how we contend with our future. By
centring his discussion around three paintings by J.M.W Turner exhibited in
1818, Ogée describes them as “a set of declarative recordings of man’s
footprint” conscious of the extent to which man’s “occupation, construction,
and colonisation” has irrevocably impacted nature [177]. Aware of contemporary
environmental changes, Turner and John Constable approach the landscape as “a
terrain of experiments” [173] in an attempt to chronicle the “vanishing traces
of the nation’s history” [176]. By reversing an art-science dichotomy, Ogée advocates
for us to look at landscape art of the British Romantic period as “evidence”
in an interdisciplinary discussion of the Anthropocene and environmental change
[178]. This push towards a multi-disciplinary study of landscape painting and
visual culture is increasingly evident in an ecocritical art history (for
example, Coughlin and Gephart, 2020; Gómez and Blackmore, 2021; and Kusserow, 2021). From the experimental terrains of Turner’s British landscapes, Thomas
Hughes looks to the role of nature in the processes of line, light, and colour
as delineated in Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing (1857) and Modern
Painters volumes 3 (1856) and 5 (1860). Analogies are found between line,
tone, and colour and nature, love, and sexuality as Hughes deftly describes
that “Ruskin was continually weaving an utter entanglement out of questions of
human knowledge, vision, the body, its passions and sensations, and
other-than-human life” [193]. As politics intertwine with aesthetics in
Ruskin’s essays, Hughes further explores how the practice of drawing and art
production facilitated the liberation of “the Victorian mind from the damaging
effects of industrialisation” [182]. Navigating the complexities of
contemporary industry, Kasiz Ozga’s chapter is captivating in its analysis of
sculptural works by Marc Quinn, Zuzanna Janin, Anya Gallaccio, and Andy
Goldsworthy. Temporality and timelessness, materiality and the immaterial are
central to Ozga’s study. Ozga draws our attention to the role of time not only
as subject matter and material form, but also the role of temporality in the
viewing experience, how “in its evolution produces a dramatically different
sensory experience” [205]. The disintegration of the material, whether it be
blood, cotton candy, flowers, or snow signal the “inevitable disintegration and
decay” of nature and the environment in the hands of industrial commodification
[203]. There is no happy end to our aestheticised environmental reality, with
“Phase-change-based sculptures deny[ing] the viewer a sense of fixity and
closure” [210]. The thread of temporality weaves its way through to the concluding
chapter by Edwin Coomasaru as well. Here, two exhibitions, Ursula Burke’s “A
False Dawn” (2019-2020) and Candida Powell-Williams’ “Command Lines” (2019), are
studied to delve into the emergence of feminist and postcolonial ecological
imaginations in Northern Ireland in the context of ‘The Troubles’ and the
Brexit referendum. “Each exhibition,” writes Coomasaru “[…] reveals the way in
which time itself seems to warp and distort in the context of Brexit” [227].
Coomasaru notes how Ireland is perceived as portraying “a kind of
uncontrollable and unstable [and feminine] landscape” at a time when
patriarchal, masculine British nationalism was on the rise [214]. Like the
interview with George, Coomasaru considers the imperial implications involved
in Irish art production. Where Burke’s imagery captures the contradictions of
Ireland’s supernatural history, Powell-Williams’ confronts the ways in which
tarot and women have been “narrated in patriarchal narratives” [222]. The
entanglements of past and present, of gender, the mystical, colonial,
geopolitical, and ecological are reticent of the challenges Britain and the
globe continue to face as our global environmental future evolves. In Stephen Daniels’ epilogue, the integration of the environment into
the humanities and the complicated processes such an approach holds in British
art history is recognised as a commendable feat and one achieved by this volume.
I would second this reflection. By acknowledging that the world is currently
failing to meet its climate goals, COP26 set procedures in motion that will
keep this possibility alive should countries later choose to enact extreme change.
In other words, our environmental fate remains inextricably bound to human decisions
and interventions. By offering ways to rethink past, present, and future
British environments and visual responses to ecological change British
Art and the Environment marks an important contribution to the field of
ecocritical art history and the environmental humanities more broadly. It encourages
new and promising perspectives on visual responses to our global landscape, of relevance
to art historians whose interests extend across geographical boundaries and
temporal frameworks.
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