WDWGN! (on The End of Nature)

Cristina Lucas, "Montaña de Arcilla / Mountain of Clay", from series Montañas (150 x 180 cm. Fotografia color siliconada bajo metacrilato), 2011-2012

In contemporary society, Nature is been eliminated and replaced by a representation of everything else that is fabricated or created by man. The meaning of Nature has changed and has been substituted by its idea. Now, its representation is what satisfies us. Reconstitution is becoming more real than its preservation, and its representation more plentiful than its reality. For instance, through the determination of genetic structures of all known living organisms, or, even further, prostheses, or the regeneration and replacing of organs, or as well cloning when encapsulating the body, together with all the possibilities raised by genetic engineering and biology, as by nanotechnologies; technological devices as infinite memory banks, such as are computers and other portable gadgets; or unnatural landscapes, such as the artificial islands in Abu Dhabi or those urban recreations that can be found in Las Vegas or in China. Only some of the main achievement of a civilization that in the last couple of centuries made and defined a sterile life in where humans had chosen to resign from a world that has been escaping them. A choice that could has started throughout the age of Enlightenment and during the Industrial Revolution when humankind proceeded to recollect, describe, catalogue, and archive in a systematic order particular things found in Nature. In particular, those belonging too distant lands, which had marvellous the intrepid explorers of the new world, and those other belonging to the branch of knowledge about the universe that encompasses us: either through observation of native structures and behaviours, such as sociology or anthropology; or through systematic experiments on particular fields, such as psychology or physics. We were looking to give empirical evidences and assure a level of certainty that did not existed until then, in a society that was still struggling to understand theories that varied in the extent to that which was accepted on by the religious domain. It was a choice denoting an aestheticisation of bare life. The teleological figure that represented Nature, for more than five centuries, as a figure to describe or embody the ideas of life, land, system, truth, has been superseded by an obsessive, all-consuming figure of desire, fantasised, idealised Nature generated and ruled by the economic market.

Throughout her career the Spanish artist, Cristina Lucas (b. 1973, Jaen, lives and works in Madrid), has been working on and been dissecting the main political structures that have been governing and ruling society, such as History, State, Religion, Science, or the idea of Nature. Her inquiry and analysis on what she has called, in 2004, “the old order,” while using the same old means of thinking (through means of History) shows that the way we engage with those governing structures has changed. The capacity or ability to direct or influence our behaviour (and of others), as well as the course of events, no longer answers or satisfy our curiosity about life, in particular, due to the tempt political or beguile social exercise by those same governing structures for power imposition. Lucas’ series Mountains (2011 – 2012) is about the unnatural mountains generated by economic practices – mountains of clay, ashes, sand, coffee, coal, cork, salt, marble, rocks, and tyre. In here, the artist thinks about the essence of Nature, as she has been doing all throughout her practice, not as an existing physical force, but, instead, as an energetic resource for human transaction and consumption – unnatural mountains of raw materials and artificial mountains of disposable manmade goods and finished products. Which, in a way, the photographic work reports to the use of raw, surplus and found materials as been use by artists such as, in the combination of non-traditional materials and objects in a poetic manner by Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008, US), while reporting on the iconography of modern life; or the composite sculptures made from a number of found objects and materials by Jimmie Durham (b. 1940, Washington, US) translating on found clusters and conditions of possibilities; or the eclectic and improvisatory constructions made by Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968, Mexico City, Mexico) on individual identity and that of a place existing in a state of flux.

Cristina Lucas, "Montaña de Cenizas / Mountain of Ashes", from series Montañas (150 x 180 cm. Fotografia color siliconada bajo metacrilato), 2011-2012

In this bodily transfiguration of relations combining aspects of the local with a poetic visual language, Nature’s material quality and how we engage with the course of events, what is problematic is the disappearance, in Lucas’ work, of the structured, consisting forms of what is familiar to us in life (as are in the works of those other three artists). Whether being the way animals walk, in Tu tambien puedes caminar [You Can Walk Too] (2006), or why those natural elevations on the earth’s surface exist; or even major bonding celebrations that moments in history, revolutions, heroic acts use to be, in La Libertée Raisonée (2009). Marking different stages of life while legitimising and ordering them, thus underling the political and social authority or control that is, especially, exercised by a governing system or body, such as History, State, Religion, or Economy. It is the ability to do something or act in a particular way that is used by the artist to designate the amalgamations of arrangements of and relations between the parts or the elements of something complex in a tragicomic way. This quality, in her work, of reinventing roles, questions the notion about how everyone must find his/her own role. Since, for her, neither time, nor institution, nor society can do it. For instance, in a press view, the artist introduced a new element into the processes; the pre-requirement for a question made by any of the journalists or critics present, was that she could question who had just questioned her work/practice. It becomes problematic, firstly, because she meddle with a system that is constituted by parts working together, like a piece of machinery, assorting, arranging, organising, designing, shaping, constructing; or, secondly, while building new processes by which something takes place or are brought about, in a skilfully and inventive way to serve a particular purpose. Her body of work is elevated to the level of a contrivance that rematerializes the world, producing a new body, a transfigured body.

In Cristina Lucas’ work the relations between those constituting parts no longer give predetermine roles to all of us. The links between those authoritarian governing bodies are no longer taken for granted. She has been developing a body of work that puts emphasis on how things connect rather than how they “are” in one instance, a contrivance that could evolve to transfigurations rather than to a “reality” – which will only add to past systems and organisational structures. Her vision, instead, is transfigured in to a new body of knowledge, of experiences. In Tu tambien puedes caminar (2006), Cristina Lucas “sets before us images of dogs walking about on their hind legs in different domestic setting, where women are carrying out their everyday activities” (Fundación NMAC Montenmedio); or, in La Libertée Raisonée (2009), a scene inspired in the painting by Delacroix’s La liberté guidant le peuple (1830), she tells a possible end for the scene that Delacroix imagine, a remarkable expression on the end of the revolution. This is when society evolves, when the void is filled! Since artists experiment; they produce new paradigms of subjectivity. Through their practice they have the potential to create the conditions wherein new connections, compositions, combinations, construction and translations can be pull out. It is when those thoughts that we are immersed in are deprived from institutionalising regulations or laws; when the protracted lives and the protected veil of the establish knowledge are rendered invalid. Her artistic practice makes evident the sense of artificiality of those institutional governing discourses.

Before, the world’s wealth used to be related with what Nature gave. Now it is linked to the circulation of money, goods, services, and information, to what is from the economic system – another human creation. A reinvention of the roles happens while the participation in the transfiguration movement is continuously being extended into new territories and, within those territories, into more subjects in Nature. As Deleuze and Guattari had expressed in A Thousand Plateaus, “every assemblage is territorial in that it sustains connections that define it, but every assemblage is also composed of line of deterritorialisation that run through it and carry it away from its current form” (Parr, 2005). Further adding, an assemblage deals with “machinic assemblages of bodies, actions and passions“ reacting to one another, and it is a “collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and of statements, of incorporeal transformations of bodies.” Lucas, like D&G, hopes to elicit other mental maps, bringing into the realm of existence other latent or potential conditions.

Cristina Lucas, "Montaña de Corcho / Mountain of Cork", from series Montañas (150 x 180 cm. Fotografia color siliconada bajo metacrilato), 2011-2012

Through Lucas’ works, we can perceive that a complex convergent zone is manifest. Equally apparent is that a latent state existing but not yet developed in full by societies’ governing bodies. It is being hidden with a purpose! When a rematerialisation of the world that processes appears to be definitively established, without that tendency of unrelated states to evolve superficially, similar characteristics under similar environmental conditions underline an illusion of a desired body. Henceforth, it seems that nothing can come between the body transfiguration and the dream of the body’s withdrawal from Nature. This underlying illusion tending to be different or develop in different directions establishes an abundance of incompatible and contradictory states. A divergence of thought, using a variety of premises, especially unfamiliar premises in established discourses, is the base for inference, while avoiding common limiting assumptions in making deductions. What we will have is a completely different line of thought or action. One that will be touching the subject but is not intersecting the institutional imposed thought by governing structures and organisms.

Bibliography:
Baudrillard, Jean (2003) Passwords. London: Verso
Parr, Adrian (2005) The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rogoff, Irit (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Accessed February 26th, 2013.

Websites:
Fundación NMAC Montenmedio. Accessed October 4th, 2014

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Cristina Lucas