Natural Wonders

Suzanne Ramljak

On the Brink:

Surveying the Contemporary Sublime

“Nature” has been aptly called the most complex word in our language.1 Indeed, within this term resides a vast terrain of hope, conjecture, fantasy, and fear. The quest to apprehend this elusive subject has spawned volumes of mythology and theory. In Western thought, the ancient philosopher Heraclitus signaled the interpretive challenge with maxims such as “nature loves to hide” and “no man ever steps in the same river twice.” 2

Over the centuries, the natural world has been coaxed into various imaginative frameworks in attempts to capture its workings. Art history records many of these efforts, as figured most clearly in the genre of landscape. Within the landscape tradition, this book dwells in the realm of the sublime. As an aesthetic mode, the sublime is a region of pleasurable peril, a wondrous land with deep undertows and the pungent scent of suspense. Encounters with sublimity trigger telltale symptoms, including astonishment, ecstasy, stupor, and terror. While the topography of the sublime has varied across time, common to all expressions is a sense of threatened borders and shattered comprehension. Described as a “discourse of limits,” 3 the sublime marks a spot on the brink of containment.

Before probing the contemporary sublime, it helps to touch upon this concept’s storied past. The earliest known study, Longinus’s On Sublimity from the first century ad, used the term in a literary context to describe the ability of rhetoric to ravish an audience. Such sublime eloquence could disarm a listener’s logic, leaving him rapt by a verbal display that “tears everything up like a whirlwind.” 4 While others pondered the subject after Longinus, the text that would hold the firmest cultural grip is Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful of 1757. A blend of philosophy, psychology, and physiology, Burke’s treatise speculated on the causes and effects of this stirring phenomenon. Burke’s sublime is ruled by fear and filled with “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger.” 5 In his anatomy of the sublime, Burke lists seven key features that have the power to unnerve: darkness,

obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness, and suddenness. What prevents such experiences from being truly unbearable is a degree of remove from physical harm. According to Burke, “Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close.” 6 Like a good horror film, sublime manifestations allow for the safe savoring of fright and sweet cathartic pleasure. Herein lies the mixed emotion, the merger of dread and allure, that is a diagnostic trait of the sublime.

For Burke and other eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, sublimity reared its head most boldly within nature, which remained its prime staging ground throughout the nineteenth century. Romanticism approached the natural world as a vital source of inspiration and spiritual sustenance. Through communion with the elements, artists sought to hone their subjective response to nature’s magnificence, which they later infused in their work. The poet William Wordsworth epitomized this artistic quest, describing poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . recollected in tranquility.” 7 Nature gained luster and reverence in the Romantic period, shedding some menace from the previous century. And wonder supplanted terror as the sublime’s reigning affect.

As industrialization reshaped the land, nature came into even sharper relief. Within British landscape painting, responses to the natural world ranged from John Constable’s gentle picturesque scenes to the turbulent visions of J. M. W. Turner, whose sublime spectacles resonated with artists across the Atlantic. Sublime landscape painting took root within the United States, from the east coast of the Hudson River School to the rugged West, with its grandiose geography ready-made for showing nature at its most astounding.

The era’s perception of nature was also colored by the writings of Charles Darwin, whose 1859 On the Origin of Species remapped the boundaries of human understanding. With its exalted language and dizzying perspectives, Darwin’s opus has rightly been deemed a “masterwork of the sublime.” 8 His expedition journals often read more like Romantic prose than scientific study, as in this account of the flora in Brazil: “It is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.” 9

In Darwin’s natural history there are no fixed orders or final causes. Darwin conceived of natural selection, the key mechanism of evolution, as analogous to selective breeding used for domestic animals and plants. The life forms from such artificial selection, as he called it, were nearly impossible to distinguish from nature’s blind creations [fig. 1] Within this brave new Darwinian world, where nothing is

FIG 1

Hand of artist Patrick Jacobs working on diorama, 2011 Photo: Patrick Jacobs

preordained, humans and other organisms are cast in an unrehearsed dance of lifealtering steps. While Darwin’s theories celebrated the mental and even moral superiority of the human species, he still embedded us in the collaborative process of earthly life. In so doing, he eroded the mighty dividing line between nature and culture. It is in this brushy border zone, where natural and artificial selection meet, that the works in Natural Wonders: The Sublime in Contemporary Art most comfortably live. The contemporary American artists featured here also traverse territory of the sublime staked out in former centuries and reveal fresh guises of sublimity evolving before our eyes.

Viewed through a small porthole, the illusionistic dioramas of Patrick Jacobs take inspiration from historical landscape paintings, including those of the Hudson River School. While enthralling in their minute detail and distant horizon lines, these scenes often foreground fungus, mold, or weeds. Showy strains of mold and fungi, among Earth’s first forms of life, ominously lie in wait, ready to decompose any organic arrangement. Weeds are a category with no scientific grounding, as the term is simply reserved for plants deemed useless or unworthy. When these outcasts of the plant world encroach on human interests, they are targeted for extermination. Jacobs puts these scorned organisms center stage in works such as Weed Study. Appropriately, he derives weed imagery from garden pest control booklets and herbicide guides. Rendering death sentences to these “innocent” plants demonstrates artificial selection in full throttle.

The fickleness of human taste in deciding a plant’s fate is revealed in the biography of Queen Anne’s lace. This flowering herb was once grown both as a food and medicinal crop and cultivated in ornamental gardens. Now rated a “noxious weed” by agricultural agencies and considered an economic threat, it can be readily controlled and killed. Mindful of these biases, Jennifer Trask embraces such despised species in her art. Trask’s Queen Anne’s Lace composed of serpent bones and sewing needles, is a potent fusion of vegetable and mineral, organic and manmade. On the other end of the plant scale are cultivars like roses and tulips, both bred for our pleasure. In Trask’s Tulipa, exquisitely carved from animal bone, the uncannily lifelike flora is created from the remains of dead fauna. Tulips were common in seventeenth-century memento mori still-life paintings, and Trask’s serenely disturbing flowers deliver the sublime chill of mortality. Several works in Natural Wonders expose the heavy curatorial impact of artificial selection on other living beings. Lauren Fensterstock’s sculpture often showcases extreme flora wrought by cultivation, as in the Japanese chrysanthemum Kiku, which

is bred to grow ramrod straight with a large single blossom. In this and other works in her Third Nature series, botanicals are rendered in black and geometrically constrained, imposing further order on organic life. Fensterstock’s exploration of gardening history extends to her series of grottos. A distinctive feature of European gardens in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, grottos were ornamental caves encrusted with shells, minerals, and other curiosities, immersing visitors in an enclosed wonderland. While nature seems tamed within such geological confections, all is not sound; as Fensterstock states, “Like a stalactite, the slow dripping of time and substance accumulates, beginning to form something we cannot yet predict.” 10

Layers of history and interpretation also shape Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft’s Voynich Botanical Studies. These darkly lush photographs are based on illustrations of unidentified plants from the obscure sixteenth-century codex known as the “Voynich manuscript.” 11 While these contemporary works have the appearance of historical photos, they originate in the artists’ computer-generated 3-D models, which are then photographed and processed into silver gelatin prints. The resulting images portray plant hybrids that merge the fanciful and plausible to induce a disconcerting sense of wonder. Teetering on the edge of monstrosity, they are nonetheless captivating. Unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, of 1818, these compelling mutants are not the spurned children of hubris gone awry, but rather the beloved offspring of artificial selection, another name for creative license. As the arch-aesthete Oscar Wilde reminded us, “Selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.” 12

Cultivars, hybrids, and garden grottos reveal the human hand and eye brought to bear on other life forms, stretching the mutable membrane between natural and cultural spheres. Wilderness, conversely, is conceived as a region exempt from human touch. The idea of wilderness not only suggests that nature and culture are separate, but that they are hopelessly opposed. In his book Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan tackles what he calls the “wilderness ethic,” which at its root assumes that the “relationship of man and nature resembles a zero-sum game.” 13 Such notions of the wild set up an irreconcilable struggle that underwrites many visions of the natural sublime. Further, by drawing a line between wild and other accessible areas, it wrongly implies that wildness exists only in far-off places and not in our backyards, playgrounds, and city lots. This desire to uncover the ubiquitous “wild” was the impetus behind Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman’s Concrete Jungle book, as discussed on pages 27–29.

Just as nature’s growth cannot be cordoned off, wilderness does not only thrive in the distant reaches of forest and mountain. Untamed organisms teem beneath our feet. This poignant awareness of life always underfoot is embodied in the traditional Indian footwear called padukas [fig. 2] Reflecting the nonviolent principles of Hinduism and Jainism, these sandals have two narrow stilts on the bottom to reduce ground contact and prevent the trampling of insects and vegetation. Likewise, Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking testifies to our inevitable impact on living beings with every step we take [fig. 3].

Along with perpetual direct contact between humans and other life, our influence trickles out far beyond, as chemicals and run-off are freely spread by water and air. In fact, the newly declared geological epoch of the Anthropocene is defined on the basis of radioactive elements and other man-made materials, now widely dispersed across the planet. Even the most remote stretch of land, inaccessible on foot, cannot escape human fallout or the prying eyes of drones and satellites. The impossibility any longer of having untouched virgin nature, conceived of as wilderness, is the focus of many of the works shown here.

Mark Tribe explores pictorial landscape traditions and changing views of wilderness through the use of advanced technology, including drone photography, as in his Plein Air series. His latest body of work, New Nature involves single long-take films shot in land preserves across North America. A seemingly undisturbed site is filmed for a continuous twenty-four hours to provide a voyeuristic day in the life of raw nature. Appearing at first static, these large motion pictures subtly come alive with delicate stirrings and beguile with their portrayals of secluded locales. Yet the very presence of the camera required to make the piece contradicts the notion of a wilderness habitat. This series also questions how we consume our nature today, as it’s more likely ingested on a digital screen, rather than directly in an immersive setting. In his continuing work with designated wilderness sites, Tribe seeks to dig beneath the preserves’ current names and surfaces to reclaim indigenous histories of these once populated lands.

The alluring Caves of Dustin Yellin also encourage musings on the temporal overlay of nature and culture. These layered glass sculptures are densely embedded with collaged and painted imagery, like accreted strata from eons of geologic time. Many of Yellin’s scenes have a post-apocalyptic feel, with toppled towers that conjure the overgrown ruins of lost civilizations. Absorbing worlds unto themselves, these illusionistic cavities invite close scrutiny and suggest monumental geodes that could be mined and sold as souvenirs of nature’s hidden splendor.

This desire to possess and contain a bit of wildness informs Kathleen Vance’s series of Traveling Landscapes, replete with flowing water. These miniature terrains set within vintage suitcases and trunks are often textbook models of sublime geography with the requisite canyons, cliffs, and coursing rivers. Offering safely diminutive encounters with the abyss, her enchanting works could be called “dollhouse sublime.” However, Vance’s landscapes in valises raise serious concerns about land ownership and property rights, resisting notions that the Earth is just a transportable resource for human endeavor. Such a cash-and-carry approach to nature treats land and water as commodities to be subdivided, owned, and moved at will. In a more benevolent light, these portable landscapes deliver nature as solace and steady companion, and a source of the most essential element—water.

As water slowly carves the Earth’s surface, so too does fire, albeit with greater violence and speed. Roxy Paine’s Desolation Row breathtakingly stages a fire-ravaged landscape with still glowing embers. Merging strands from Paine’s series of Replicants, tree-like Dendroids and Dioramas this tour-de-force tableau speaks loudly in the tone of the sublime. While the title would forecast a dismal scenario, there is palpable

FIG 2 Wooden padukas, n.d. wood, brass wire 2 7 8 x 3 1 4 x 10 inches

Collection Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto Image copyright © 2017 Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, Canada

FIG 3 Richard Long

A Line Made by Walking, 1967 gelatin silver print on paper and graphite on board

37.5 x 32.4 cm

© 2017 Richard Long. All rights reserved, DACS, London ARS, NY

ambivalence in the air. Fire is a Janus-headed creature, both destroyer and creator. In nature’s own ecosystem, fires ignited by lightning can prune and pare forests, enriching the soil and heating seedpods to bursting. A beneficial agent in the history of culture, fire also made possible the clearing of land for settlement and crops. Paine’s Desolation Row presents itself like a crime scene with no suspects in sight. Was this arson or a case of spontaneous combustion? This desolate landscape on the brink of rebirth is also a crucial reminder of the cycles of nature and a bold invitation to stop and smell the cinders.

While the issues raised in the works discussed remain ever-pressing, they have long been debated in connection to the sublime and other cultural pursuits. Today we must contend with unforeseen forces redefining our relations with the natural world. These new consuming factors, unknown in past millennia, include environmental toxicity, biotechnology, digital saturation, and diminishing contact with nature. Each of these developments has extended the vocabulary of the contemporary sublime. The industrial

feats of the past two centuries began eliciting the same mix of awe and fright once reserved for the vastness of nature [fig. 4] This migration of astonishment from natural to manufactured marvels, such as bombs and satellites, merited the title of Technological Sublime. The twenty-first century already has a sublime to call its own, the Ecological Sublime. This newly christened landscape is characterized by toxic waste, massive landfills, ocean gyres, and chemical spills [fig. 5] Spectacular and horrifying, the overwhelming scale of this ruination is certainly worthy of an entry in the annals of the sublime. The problem of pollution from fifty years ago has taken a poisonous turn. This shift is captured in the 1971 Keep America Beautiful “Crying Indian” campaign referenced in the interview between Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman (page 30). It now seems quaint to have a campaign for beauty, especially one with such a confident slogan: “People start pollution. People can stop it.” The shared civic values of beauty, care, and even hope have all but vanished. An equivalent public service announcement today would likely urge, “Keep America Livable.” Litter is now landfill, desire slips into despair. Each type of sublime has its dominant affect and the Ecological Sublime is steeped in melancholy.

FIG 5

Landscape with mountainous garbage landfill

Photo: Boibin/Shutterstock.com

FIG 4 Albert Bierstadt Rocky Mountain Landscape, 1870 oil on canvas

inches

Collection of the White House, Washington, DC

Photo courtesy The White House Historical Association

Suzanne Anker’s art is fueled by her educated unease about climate change, species extinction, and toxic degradation of the Earth. She uses a range of media and technologies to call attention both to nature’s beauty and its fragility. Her Remote Sensing series of 3-D printed landscapes look as if they’ve grown from inside their Petri dishes. While the series title suggests a source in satellite or drone imagery, these works are actually based on photos of decaying organic matter, offering landscape as memento mori The laboratory containers employed in this series signal another unsettling recent development, that of bioengineering and genetic modification. Anker herself is a bio-artist working with organic materials as one of her media. In the related fields of bio-design and synthetic biology, living matter is being manipulated, edited, and programmed for various human purposes. What those ends might be, and whether they’ll preserve the integrity of the original organisms, remains to be seen. Deep concern for the alteration and devastation of the natural environment also propels the work of Maya Lin. Her various series reflect a growing commitment to environmental issues, most ambitiously found in the multimedia project What Is Missing?, an interactive global effort that seeks to raise awareness of vanishing species and the depletion of nature’s bounty. Lin refers to this epic work as her “last memorial,” and it accordingly pays homage to habitat loss and aspects of the natural world that are disappearing before our eyes. Among her other projects in this vein is a sculptural series based on the topography of prominent rivers and waterways. The transmutation of this ever more precious fluid into works made of silver or steel helps us perceive the changing contours of these watery bodies and reflect on the contents therein. Increased levels of metal—including copper, nickel, and lead—throughout our ecosystems give Lin’s liquid recreations a glint of dread. Adding to strained relations between humans and the living environment is the ever-rising rate of urbanization that began in the nineteenth century. Today over 80 percent of people in the United States live in metropolitan areas, with little direct access to nature. This urban creep, combined with increasing time spent with digital media, has led to what author James Campbell calls a “fundamental cultural shift away from nature.” 14 Several indicators point to drastic declines in nature-based experience. Environmental Protection Agency statistics suggest that American adults now spend more than 90 percent of their time indoors, sequestered in buildings or vehicles.15 Visits to national parks and forests and outdoor recreation like camping, hunting, and fishing have all steadily declined since the late 1980s, for an overall drop of some 25 percent.16

An interrelated trend is the marked increase in nature-triggered fears, for which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders provides the official diagnosis of “natural environment phobia.” 17 A healthy dose of fear could be expected while outdoors, but current nature aversions are more indiscriminate and akin to free-range anxiety. And while it is tempting to think that such contemporary fright is a sublime strain out of Edmund Burke’s playbook, the chronic phobia we’re now witnessing is instead like a symptom without real cause.

This alarming surge in biophobia is in strict contradiction to the biophilia, or inherent love of nature, posited by biologist E. O. Wilson. With his “biophilia hypothesis,” Wilson argues for an instinct that connects us with other species and natural environments, an “innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” 18 Whether or not such a drive toward nature is hard-wired, the growing disregard for other life forms does not bode well for our future.

One easy counterforce to the widening distance from nature is to spend more time in natural settings. This approach has been formalized in a practice called “forest bathing,” popular in Japan, where it became part of the national health program in 1982. The prescription to enter into nature is now gaining hold in the United States as a means of harnessing the health benefits of being outdoors, whether in a forest or park or at the shore.

As with other phobias and anxiety disorders, there are systematic treatments to counter these mounting fears of nature. Exposure therapy is the behavioral technique that has proved most effective for various phobias. The treatment involves repeated exposure to the feared object in a context devoid of danger. It is significant for art that such therapy is successful even with a surrogate source of exposure, such as a virtual reality experience. Indeed, it could be argued that art can function as a powerful method of exposure therapy. With its aesthetic remove from a dreaded cause, art has long served as a safe venue for confronting fears and desires and as useful preparation for life’s larger challenges.

In her pioneering film and video works, artist Diana Thater examines this very tension between natural environments and their mediated representations. Most often training her lens on animals, Thater also explores the quiet life of flora, as in her mesmerizing video wall The Road to Hana Two, featuring the fantastical “painted forest” of rainbow eucalyptus on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Enlisting a sophisticated repertoire of film-altering techniques—including layered footage, scale shifts, and

extended time cycles—Thater’s videos bring enchantment back to our encounters with nature, reconfiguring subjects as strangely splendorous visions. Her cinematic installations of the last two decades have positioned viewers in new relationships to other living beings, suspended without recourse to narrative or sentimentality.

Another basic means of bridging the chasm between humans and nature is through increased education and information. However, most mainstream commentary about the environment is couched in terms of ecological crisis and accompanied by mind-numbing doses of facts and figures. Though important, such appeals to reason and analysis suffer from a lack of affect. Precisely because environmental issues are so dire, they require modes of address and manners of speaking that are sure to engage and arouse. This question returns us to Longinus and the rhetorical sublime he coined. For Longinus, the adjective “sublime” signified the potency of artifice to persuade and motivate listeners. In a visual arts context, the same sublime dynamic applies, with beholders being moved by affecting demonstrations.

The works selected for Natural Wonders are all endowed with an enticing seductiveness. Their powers of persuasion stem from the artists’ ability to act as impresarios of nature. More than just glamorous natural spectacles, these works use aesthetics toward ethical ends. American philosopher Henry David Thoreau held that “the perception of beauty is a moral test” and bemoaned that “nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her.” 19 Thoreau declared it our duty to perceive nature’s beauty, and these artists assist with this critical aim.

They also initiate us into the glories of wonder, again with a moral dimension. In her book, The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature, Louise Economides argues for “wonder’s aesthetic and philosophical significance as a set of ideas with important ecological ramifications.” 20 At the center of wonder is an open receptiveness, conveyed in the word’s Germanic root of “wound.” Economides positions wonder at a remove from the sublime, which she sees as a condition governed by fear. Unlike the sublime, which shudders and gasps, wonder stretches outward and sighs. The cultivation of wonder was once a well-developed practice. In carefully curated cabinets of curiosity, the choicest of specimens and elaborate oddities—from rocks to relics, mollusk shells to miniatures—were arrayed to excite a sense of discovery. Flourishing in Renaissance Europe before strict divisions between science and art, these wondrous displays, sometimes room-sized, offered both edification and an imaginative field day. With its marvelous assortment of artifice and nature, designed for both pleasure and contemplation, the Natural Wonders exhibition can be viewed as a grand curiosity cabinet brought to life.

Mutability of clouds has also long aroused the wonder of thinkers, artists, and dreamers. T. J. Wilcox’s Equivalents series borrows its title from Alfred Stieglitz’s seemingly non-objective cloud photographs of the early twentieth century. Wilcox enlists the process of lenticular printing to recreate the experience of shifting clouds, with the viewer’s own movements spurring the choreography of these vicarious cloudscapes. Seeking to generate the sense of awe felt in the midst of nature, and to stage the ephemeral within a gallery setting, Wilcox presents us with “an endless parade of abstract morphing shapes.” 21

The Romantic age seemed to have its head in the clouds, where poets and painters sought their inspiration, among them John Constable [fig. 6] and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s verse The Cloud concludes with these lines:

I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. 22

While it is hard to laugh at death, the ultimate sublime, this poem still cajoles us to savor life’s fluctuations. Thus we end where we began, with Heraclitus, whose most notable maxim may be “all is flux, nothing stays still.” 23 Perhaps, indeed, the best we can do is to stand on the brink and behold the fleeting wonders of nature.

FIG 6 John Constable Cloud Study, 1822 oil on paper laid on panel

inches

Collection of Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Photo courtesy Yale Center for British Art

1 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 219.

2 Heraclitus of Ephesus, active ca. 500 BC, was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher whose writings survive in a number of fragments, variously translated, from his only known book, On Nature

3 Louise Economides, The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 19.

4 Longinus, “On Sublimity,” in Classical Literary Criticism eds. D.A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 145.

5 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Forgotten Books, 2015), 47.

6 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry 60.

7 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 111.

8 George Gessert, Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 44.

9 Charles Darwin, Chapter II: “Rio de Janeiro,” in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), entry for 18 April 1832, at http://www.turtlereader.com/authors/charles-darwin/thevoyage-of-the-beagle-day-7-of-167/

10 Lauren Fensterstock, “My Eye: Into the Cave,” Metalsmith 35-1, (January 2015): 26.

11 The Voynich Manuscript is in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Many aspects of this manuscript remain unknown, with the Library’s website describing it as “A mysterious, undeciphered manuscript dating to the 15th or 16th century.” http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/voynich-manuscript. Accessed October 5, 2017.

12 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 978.

13 Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 178.

14 James Campbell, “Op-Ed: Are we raising a generation of nature-phobic kids?” Los Angeles Times July 29, 2016.

15 Neil E. Klepeis, et al., “The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS): a resource for assessing exposure to environmental pollutants,” Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology (2001) 11, 231–52.

16 Oliver R. W. Pergams and Patricia A. Zaradic, “Evidence for a fundamental and pervasive shift away from nature-based recreation,” PNAS, Proceedings of the The National Academy of Sciences of the USA 2008.

17 Introduction date of this diagnostic code found at ICD10Data.com, reference website with current diagnosis and procedure medical billing codes.

18 Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” The Biophilia Hypothesis, by Stephen Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 31.

19 Henry David Thoreau, in Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Book 5), Patrick F. O’Connell, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 120–22; and “The Ponds,” in Walden (Las Vegas: Empire Publishing, 2017), 152.

20 Economides, The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature 5.

21 T. J. Wilcox, unpublished artist statement, October 2017.

22 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Cloud,” in P.B. Shelley: Complete Works of Poetry & Prose, 1914 Edition, Volumes 1-3 (Austin, TX: West by Southwest Press, 2012), 116.

23 “All is flux, nothing stays still” is a common variation of a passage in Plato’s Cratylus, where Socrates states “Heracleitus says, you know, that all things move and nothing remains still.” Cratylus, section 402a, Harold N. Fowler trans., at Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu

Selected Bibliography

Berleant, Arnold, ed. Environment and the Arts: Perspectives on Environmental Aesthetics London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Forgotten Books, 2015.

Davis, Heather, and Etienne Turpin, eds. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.

Decker, Julie. Gyre: The Plastic Ocean London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 2014.

Dion, Mark, and Alexis Rockman, eds. Concrete Jungle New York: Juno Books, 1996.

Economides, Louise. The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Gessert, George. Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010.

Guénin, Hélène. Sublime: The Tremors of the World. Metz, France: Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2016.

Hadot, Pierre. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Translated by Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Hamilton, Clive. Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017.

Kastner, Jeffrey, ed. Nature London: Whitechapel Gallery, Documents of Contemporary Art, 2012.

Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015.

Lafreniere, Gilbert F. The Decline of Nature: Environmental History and the Western Worldview. London and Washington, D.C.: Academica Press, 2008.

Longinus. On Sublimity. Translated by D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom, eds. Classical Literary Criticism Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Morley, Simon, ed. The Sublime London: Whitechapel Gallery, Documents of Contemporary Art, 2010.

Pollan, Michael. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education New York: Grove Press, 1991.

Revere McFadden, David, and Lowery Stokes Sims. Dead or Alive New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2010.

Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Stilgoe, John R. What is Landscape? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.

Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet; Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Weintraub, Linda. To Life!: Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991.

Wilton, Andrew, and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 London: Tate Publishing, 2002.