Resident writer

Michaela hall

 The Body as its own landscape

We may often think about how the body can be visually depicted as a landscape in art. The curves and colours utilised to embody both nature and the human body. Take Georgia O’Keeffe, an artist with an extremely abstracted approach to this, whose floral paintings have long been associated with both visually and symbolically alluding to the female anatomy. These floral paintings are incredibly detailed and intimate portraits of flowers that can be visually familiarised to the intimate female anatomy. Nature is being used here to allude to the body. But what happens when this is reversed, and the body is used as a tool to create a landscape?

The result is impeccable, this is fantastically demonstrated in the work of Carl Warner. Warner, a British artist  who has a background in illustration fell in love with digital photography and set design for its instant and editable quality. Warner is renowned for working with landscapes as his subject, but in a way which may not be what you expect, sets are constructed from food and in this case, also the human body to be photographed as a landscape. The work which I would like to particularly draw attention to is Warner’s series of bodyscapes. What is interesting here is that everything used is natural, the material is the nude human body, or multiple bodies. Yet, the way these models are posed is rather unnatural. This ironically, produces a theatrical and natural landscape image.

Dents, dimples, folds and curves of human bodies harmonise together in these landscape images to create a Saharan desert style horizon, with elbows as mountains, belly buttons as ditches and muscles as sand ripples. We don’t see any facial features, hands or feet in these images, and this creates an even more exotic and intangible feel to the landscapes we are witnessing, they are somewhere of a fantasy, that although realistic, are unreachable and subliminal.

It is difficult for the viewer to try and fathom how these bodies are arranged to produce this image. For this reason, the landscapes seem uncomfortable yet still peaceful. They also have an element of the disturbed, alluding to the unnatural and contortion but again, remain idyllic and inviting. These dramatic juxtapositions feel familiar to those presented by the great landscape paintings of J.M.W Turner that invoke both fear and the sublime.

With the body being depicted throughout art history over and over in different ways, some may have shared the assumption that there wasn’t a way to refresh this and thus present the body in an entirely different sense. However, as we see here, it is evident that the body can not only be used as a reference point for nature and its unpredictable landscapes but as a landscape of its own, with all of its unpredictability and wonder inviting us in to explore the curves and possibilities of our own and others’ bodies as a landscape.

By resident writer - Michaela Hall.

Work By Carl Warner

http://www.carlwarner.com/artist/?bodyscapes

Other opinions, writing & critique

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN AND ROMANTICISM: TENET FILM REVIEW BY ALEKS STANEK

‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath (…) Nelly, I am Heathcliff!’ cries Catherine in the Wuthering Heights. It is no coincidence that her lover’s name comprises literal topographies of pastoral scenery, nor that their bond speaks to eternity that verges on entrapment. Considered to be the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein describes the scale of this oldest, greatest romance between humankind and nature with similar grandeur, throughout the eponymous protagonist’s search for the Creature across rugged landscapes: 

‘(…)no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea, and every sight afforded by these wonderful regions seem still to have the power of elevating his soul from the earth.’

The works of the Romanticist movement ought to be read in the context of the technological singularity of the Industrial Revolution, followed by early 19th Century events such as the boom of British canal building and the construction of the first commercial steamboat. Although industrialisation did not actually democratise travel for the ‘great unwashed’ (who would only marginally cease being conceptualised as such by the ruling elite later in the Century), it stoked the fires of the collective imagination of intellectuals and creatives, with remarkable outcomes. When we look at the most well-known painting of the epoch, Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, what is perched on that mythological chunk of granite is not a character as much as an idea(l) of the unprecedented opportunity to approach the sublime, made possible by the Age of Enlightenment. And yet, the Romanticist shift away from reason and towards horror and awe illustrated that there is no scientific advancement out of Loneliness — that inherent fear of the Void — which technology such as extraterrestrial travel aimed to minimise and which it paradoxically only expanded.

In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, Slavoj Zizek describes Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight as affirmative of the obfuscation of truth for the benefit of the citizen and their avoidance of chaos. In the weeks leading up to the Guide’s release, he reiterated that Nolan is, ultimately, a ‘good liberal’. But take the screenwriter-and-director out of the oeuvre of the superhero fable, and the mask of preference for law and order slips to reveal a preoccupation with something else entirely. In Inception, DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb embarks on the quest of near self-annihilation not only to be reunited with his children but to accept the loss of his wife; by the end of the film, Nolan succeeds in convincing us that it is then no longer a reality that matters — or ever did matter — but the strength of Dom’s faith about what it contains. Interstellar sends its characters across swathes of time and space to save the loved ones they are never to see again. And finally, Tenet — a palindrome which foreshadows the film’s (meta)physics — personifies the Future in a time-bending, non-linear narrative where the Protagonist (John David Washington) finds himself protecting the friends and lovers he does not yet know. 

So is Nolan a para-Romanticist? Academic Timothy Morton writes that the environmentalist adage to “get back to Nature” — ‘that is, achieve greater intimacy with things’ — may have been only partially right, to begin with. His thesis Hyperobjects speculates on the ‘myth’ of capital—n Nature as idyllic and unspoiled; the kind we see on a postcard or screen, from which we can’t help but see ourselves as inherently separate in our post-industrialist condition. On the contrary, Morton urges us to bypass this separation to conceive smog, radiation, and artificial intelligence as always already natives of this world. In other words, it becomes possible to be a Romanticist filmmaker — a filmmaker preoccupied with, essentially, the tragedy of occupying the solitary human body in an ever-expanding world —  if we contemplate that, naturally, nature has changed. 

What has not changed, despite its saturation in residual chemicals and endocrinological disruptors, are the workings of the said human body. It is the body, with all its limitations, which transcends Tenet’s flows of time by stepping over the threshold of the Time Turnstile — a fictional apparatus inviting a myriad of symbolic readings. It is the very human nature which Nolan portrays as capable of repeated sacrifice throughout the story’s recurring and overlapping trajectories, flirting with Rousseau’s belief that humans are, characteristically, good (at least in so far as we don’t aspire to godhood), and leaning into the existentialist ethos that even though life makes no sense, it makes sense to live it well. Nolan’s science fiction genre captures the Orwellian conjecture that to be human is to ‘[be] born alone, live alone, die alone’, with only love and friendship creating the temporary illusion that it is not so. But unlike Orwell, far from making us cynical, he offers up glimpses of hope and beauty through the debris. The extent to which these move us tells us more about our zeitgeist - and Nolan’s ability to comment on it - than perhaps we should be comfortable with. 

Fittingly for a review of a film which envisages time as — amongst other probabilities — cyclical, my final commentary falls on the aforementioned concept of technological singularity. The singularity theory purports, in its simplest form, that at some point technological innovation will eclipse human ability to control it, leading to unforeseeable consequences and thereby ending civilisation as we know it. Such singularities can be theorised to have already occurred in multitudes throughout history; Tenet speaks from the perspective of attempting to prevent the most destructive one so far. Nevertheless, almost a week on from the screening, what I think back to are not the explosions, nor the fast-paced editing or Nolan’s traditionally deafening sound design along with all the other ingredients of Big Cinema™, but one of the final lines in the film, spoken through the arid desert air before its author turns to leave and surrender to fate. 

‘For me, this is the end of a beautiful friendship. For you, it is just the beginning.’  Submitted by: Aleks Stanek

Bio; Aleks Stanek is an artist and writer based in London. Her experience of migration informs her practice, which saw her run two hundred miles along with a borderline, pilot drones over the English Channel, and transports a wall to a cliffside. Previously described as 'reverse archeology', Stanek's body of work is oftentimes referential and inter-textual, building on carefully investigated and constructed layers of narratives. Her work has been covered by Deutsche Welle and It’s Nice That.

Instagram @aleksstanek