PDF Landscape into eco art articulations of nature since the 60s mark a cheetham download
Landscape Into Eco Art Articulations of Nature Since the 60s Mark A Cheetham
Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://textbookfull.com/product/landscape-into-eco-art-articulations-of-nature-since-th e-60s-mark-a-cheetham/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant download maybe you interests ...
Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel
The Theravada Abhidhamma Inquiry into the Nature of Conditioned Reality Y. Karunadasa
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-theravada-abhidhammainquiry-into-the-nature-of-conditioned-reality-y-karunadasa/ World of Art Interior Design Since 1900 Anne Massey
The Cradle of Humanity: How the Changing Landscape of Africa Made Us So Smart 1st Edition Mark Maslin
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-cradle-of-humanity-how-thechanging-landscape-of-africa-made-us-so-smart-1st-edition-markmaslin/ Wired into Nature The Telegraph and the North American Frontier James Schwoch
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Assocation.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Cheetham, Mark A. (Mark Arthur), 1954– author.
Title: Landscape into eco art : articulations of nature since the ’60s / Mark A. Cheetham.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: “Explores the practices of ecological art, a genre addressing the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. Examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and ’70s, and the historical genre of landscape painting” Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017041163 | ISBN 9780271080031 (cloth : alk. paper)
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
58 Paul Walde, Requiem for a Glacier, 2013 (production still)
59 Isabelle Hayeur, Substances, 2012
60 Isabelle Hayeur, Limulus, 2014
61 Joseph Mallord William Turner, War: The Exile andthe RockLimpet, exhibited 1842.
62 Simon Starling, One Ton II, 2005
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a singular pleasure to acknowledge the many people and organizations who have enabled my research on this book over many years. Invaluable research support came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Banff Centre for the Arts. A generous subvention came from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund at the College Art Association of America. I am grateful to the editors at the following publishers and publications for permission to extend here my work already in print: the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, the Journal of Visual Culture, Leonardo, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Plastic Blue Marble, nonsite, and Word and Image. Thanks as well to the representatives of artists’ estates, Alamy, ARS, SODRAC, VAGA, and the public and commercial galleries who provided images and permissions. Many of the artists whose work I discuss have been exceptionally accommodating in supplying information, images, and permissions. Special thanks to Diane Burko, Isabelle Hayeur, Sean Martindale, Mariele Neudecker, Reinhard Reitzenstein, Rúrí, Paul Walde, and Andrew Wright.
I benefited greatly from opportunities to present work in progress at a number of conferences and institutions. Thanks to the conveners of sessions at College Art Association meetings in 2009, 2014, and 2016, and to my hosts and students at the University of Texas at Austin (Linda D. Henderson, Glenn Peers), Brandeis University (Aida Yuen Wong), the Clark Art Institute (Jordan Bear, Michael Ann Holly, Mark Phillips), the Courtauld Institute (Ayla Lepine), McGill University and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Christine Ross), the McMichael Canadian Collection, Nanjing University (Zhou Xian, Jing Chen), NSCAD University (Bruce
Barber), Washington College (Donald McColl), the University of Toronto, Yangzhou University (Maria Ding, Phillip Xue), and York University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies.
It has been a pleasure to work with Penn State University Press. My thanks to Laura Reed-Morrisson, managing editor; Hannah Hebert, editorial assistant; Keith Monley, copyeditor; and Ellie Goodman, executive editor, whose enthusiasm for this book was a great support. Two anonymous readers were unstintingly helpful with their comments.
The outstanding undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Toronto have been enthusiastic and astute interlocutors on landscape and ecological art. Many have since graduated to important positions in academe and the gallery world. My thanks to Nina Amstutz, Julie Boivin, Emily Ducet, Danielle Forest, Corrie Jackson, Adi Louria-Hayon, Julia Lum, and Gwen MacGregor. Jackson Davidow, Alyssa Kuhnert, Katie Lawson, and Devon Smither provided research assistance. I am especially grateful to Michaela Rife, who was an invaluable interlocutor as I completed this book in mid-2016.
Central sections of this book examine Indigenous engagements with land and landscape. I wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and, most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land. Sincere thanks to Bonnie Devine, Jessica JacobsenKonefall, Alan Michelson, Shelley Niro, and Arthur Renwick, from whom I have learned much (but not yet enough) about land and landscape in Indigenous contexts.
Colleagues, curators, and patient friends have been supportive of this project in myriad ways. Sincere thanks to Amanda Boetzkes, Tim Barringer, Mary Beebee, Suzaan Boettger, Phillip Burnham, Deepali Dewan, Mitchell Frank, Emily Gilbert, Janice Gurney, Linda D. Henderson, Ted Hiebert, Michael Ann Holly, Ihor Holubizky, Susan Jarosi, Caroline Jones, Greg Levine, Keith Moxey, John O’Brian, Andy Patton, Mark Phillips, Ruth Phillips, Tom Rand, Susana Reisman, Kitty
Scott, Ila Sheren, Gary Shapiro, Joy Sleeman, Sarah Stanners, Claire Sykes, Sarah Turner, William Vaughan, and Marilyn Wyatt. My inspiringly brilliant departmental colleagues Jordan Bear, Yi Gu, Elizabeth Harney, Kajri Jain, Louis Kaplan, and SeungJung Kim have my enduring gratitude for conversations about this project. My happiest acknowledgment is to Elizabeth D. Harvey, with whom I had the enduring privilege to visit and discuss many of the artworks pivotal to my thinking in this book, especially Pope’s grotto, SpiralJetty, and Vatnasafn/LibraryofWater.
Toronto, January 2017
C
MANIPULATED LANDSCAPES
One does not have to be a great seer to predict that the relationship between humans and nature will, in all probability, be the most importantquestion ofthepresentcentury.
PHILIPPE DESCOLA, THEECOLOGYOFOTHERS(2013)
Rapid climate change and its increasingly serious consequences worldwide encourage many artists and scholars to ask an old question with renewed urgency: what can we do in the face of these pressing planetary problems? As one commentator suggests, “individual action over lightbulbs or transport seems to make no difference contrasted with the new coal fired power station being built weekly in China.”1 “Eco art” engages this conundrum in ways that make it one of the most vibrant aspects of contemporary art. Eco art emerged in North America and Europe in the 1970s. Much augmented in the 1990s, it is now extensively exhibited and discussed.2 A short form for “ecological art,” it embraces a range of contemporary practices that investigate the interconnected environmental, aesthetic, social, and political relationships between human and nonhuman animals as well as inanimate material through the visual arts. My zeal to explore eco art began with Olafur Eliasson’s celebrated installation The weather project (fig. 1). Displayed indoors and in a quintessentially urban setting, the vast space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003, the spectacle attracted over two million visitors in just six months.3 If Eliasson’s overtly artificial indoor sun and atmosphere promised an experience of “nature,” why would so many people come to an art gallery to
experience what we commonly think of as out of doors and nonurban? This paradox is one of many addressed by contemporary eco art, which consistently questions our understanding and experience of nature. On a smaller scale but with great emotional impact, Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn / Library of Water (2007; fig. 2), in Stykkishólmur, Iceland, focuses our attention on the loss of glaciers worldwide. Sited in the institutional space of a transformed former public library, far away from world art centers, Library ofWater , like The weather project, solicits local reactions to nature within a “climate-controlled” setting. Horn includes a record of a hundred interviews about the weather conducted with Icelanders in 2005–6. Titled Weather Reports You, this component is available in the reading room adjacent to her installation and as a separate artist’s book. Eco art also expands well beyond these art-world contexts. A notable example is the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), based in Los Angeles, a collaborative research group “dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.”4 CLUI’s expeditions and projects question not only land use from the artistic to the military but also the nature of artistic production and research as they engage human interactions with the earth, past and present.
Eco art’s responses to perceived planetary crises are as numerous as the disquiet around climate change is extensive. They are as individual as they are global in implication, and often as material as
they are embroiled in both cultural and scientific ideas. The timeliness and complexity of eco art have led to an extensive range of exhibitions and publications, many with rubrics for coming to terms with the variety and priorities of this phenomenon in the art world.5 More than most contemporary art practices, eco art also transcends conventional borders of inquiry. As many examples throughout this book show, it often incorporates scientific and technological evaluations of environmental concerns. A question and response posed in the exhibition Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture (2013) say it all: “What does culture have to do with climate change? Everything.”6 Thus it is no surprise that understanding eco art’s perspectives on these insistent issues is also a growing priority across the humanities and within art history and the study of visual culture, as witnessed by the emergence of “eco art history.” An understanding of these perspectives is central to this book because it is the lens through which a scholarly understanding of contemporary eco art is perceived. As defined in a College Art Association of America session in 2014, eco art history is designed to “bring together art historians from diverse fields to work toward a more earth-conscious mode of analysis.”7 The initiative has been built on a number of precedents in the discipline, especially Alan Braddock and Christoph Irmscher’s foundational collection AKeener Perception.In his 2009 article “Ecocritical Art History,” Braddock linked ecocriticism in other disciplines with art-historical inquiry: “For art historians, ecocriticism entails a more probing and pointedly ethical integration of visual analysis, cultural interpretation, and environmental history —including aspects of the history of science—than has prevailed in the field” (27). Important too were model discussions in the 1990s, including special issues of the ArtJournaland Leonardo.8 It is only in the later 2000s that the imperatives of eco art have been widely noticed. The collection Landscape Theory, based on discussions in 2006, is a prominent case in point. Respondent David Nye records his “surprise at how little the roundtable focused on the ecological sense of landscape. Environmental history and ecology were apparently not much on anyone’s mind” in the mid-2000s.9 Kirsten
Swenson presciently asked in 2010 if “recent land- and environmental-based practices that blur disciplinary boundaries demand a new form of art history that similarly blurs distinctions between itself and other disciplines, or between theory and practice.”10 That new form is eco art history.
LandscapeintoEcoArtprovides an armature for understanding a wide range of environmentally and ecologically focused art practices in what is now variously called the “Anthropocene”—the controversial term introduced by Paul Crutzen to describe the epoch in which human activity has become a force of nature—the “Capitalocene” (Jason W. Moore), and the “Chthulucene” (Donna Haraway), the last of which underscores the main cause of global warming, industrialization. Jussi Parikka’s memorable neologism, “Anthrobscene,” stresses the obscenity of the wanton disregard for and humiliation of integrity, that of the earth, of humans, of nonhuman animals, and of other organisms and inanimate materials.11 Eco art is not a fashion or style among others: at its best, it is the site of frank engagements with many pressing crises in the Anthropocene, from species depletion to climate disruption to resource shortages,12 issues that entail reassessments of human nature and anthropocentrism in relationship to the planet. Eco art boldly enters into today’s debates on climate science, government policy, and both corporate and individual responsibility. Eco art is not monolithic any more than “science” is; aesthetic experiments and interventions do not promise solutions to climate change, for example, but instead enter into what Bruno Latour optimistically calls the “fruitful cacophony” of discussion.13
I make the case that it is not sufficient to consider eco art only as a phenomenon within contemporary art, as an equally important (or inconsequential) trend among many. Humans have been held responsible not only for the planetary condition called the Anthropocene but also for cognate exploitations witnessed in the older landscape genre. Ian MacLaren calls the picturesque, a default way of seeing in Western societies from the early eighteenth century until the early twentieth, “an almost obscene practice” because of its
integral relationships with colonization worldwide.14 The ways of seeing the earth common to landscape depiction were much more than mirrors of societal attitudes. They reinforced, developed, and disseminated these paradigms of the human relationship to the planet. My approach keeps this history current: to understand contemporary eco art as distinctive and significant in the present, but also as crucially connected to long-standing interactions with the earth in the visual arts and art history of the West, I reassess its artistic and theoretical reengagements with both the landscape genre’s venerable representations of the earth and also with land art of the 1960s and 1970s.15 Landscape’s ascent as a genre occurred in collaboration with the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century a favored starting point for the Anthropocene16 and the imperialisms of the nineteenth century. Earthworks and land art developed at the same time and in the same cultural milieu as midtwentieth-century environmentalism in the United States and Europe. Ongoing relationships with eco art also illuminate the landscape genre and land art retrospectively, as, for example, in Vik Muniz’s Pictures of Pigment series, in which the artist often redeploys famous landscape paintings by building up powdered pigment that he then photographs, and his equally self-conscious revision of land art in Spiral Jetty After Robert Smithson, from the series Brooklyn, NY (1997). I present many more examples of this connection in chapter 2.
Of course, you may say, do we not already understand these parallels? Yes, and no. Consciously echoing Kenneth Clark’s groundbreaking but frequently criticized Landscape into Art (1949; 2nd ed., 1976),17 but not sharing his pessimism about the ongoing potency of the genre of landscape, LandscapeintoEcoArtworks to complicate and ultimately to justify the linkage of historical landscape as a genre, land art, and eco art and to address in new ways the questions of how “land” comes into eco art.18 One objection to Clark’s account of the landscape genre is that he plots a linear progression through which landscape elements, once simply decorative or stage-setting supplements in religious and historical
paintings, achieve independent status in the nineteenth century as “pure” landscape. Accounts of landscape as a genre—and as a more general, fluid response to nature in art—since Clark’s time similarly suggest, with varying degrees of explicitness, that landscape, land art, and then eco art also follow chronologically, dialectically, and in some accounts teleologically one from the other, and that landscape ends as Clark predicted. For example, in his nuanced survey LandscapeandWesternArt(1999), Malcolm Andrews proceeds from the emergence of landscape as an identifiable subset of European art, through a sophisticated thematic reading of its development up to the early twentieth century, to a concluding chapter titled “Landscape into Land: Earth Works, Art, and Environment.” But land art was not simply the next step in a sequence. These tendencies in the 1960s and 1970s had strong but, I believe, understudied relationships to the landscape genre and to land beyond this aesthetic and art-historical context. While the newer work often saw itself as replacing the purportedly outworn genre of landscape painting, it evolved in a dialectical relationship with it that is still operational, though rarely acknowledged, in eco art today. Robert Smithson’s articulation of an antipicturesque in his 1967 essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” and related visual works is a prime case in point. Aiming to augment rather than to curtail material and intellectual connections, as noted above, Smithson dismisses the landscape painting of the museums as restrictive: “Representing nature once removed in lyric poetry and landscape painting is not the same as direct cultivation of the land,” he writes in his long essay praising Frederick Law Olmsted.19 “I think we all see landscape as coextensive with the gallery,” he claimed in 1968, in what seems like a reference to landscape painting.20 As pioneer land artist Michael Heizer asserted colorfully, looking directly at the land was “more interesting than looking at works in the Louvre or Metropolitan.”21 For many land artists, the new approach disrupted ties to the model of the artist in (typically) hisstudio, the gallery system, medium-specific formalism, tired monumental
sculpture in public spaces, traditional art materials and finish in sculptural work, the urban, and especially the landscape genre.
Many art historians and artists have adopted this dismissal of landscape, both as it denotes a genre—a compendium of historical practices—and as an elaboration of “land,” a putatively more fundamental category. In the authoritative Land and Environmental Art, published in 1998, Brian Wallis declares that land art “had virtually nothing to do with such conventional notions of landscape as gardening, open prairies, [or] natural rock formations.”22 Amanda Boetzkes claims that “earth art resists delivering nature as a thematic image, such as a landscape, or a tangible object, such as a specimen in a natural history museum.”23 Calling for an end to traditional landscape conventions in art because they block our access to nature considered more expansively, John E. Thornes also argues that in eco-art contexts “the use of the term landscape is misleading. It implies a static material approach, whereas artists like Constable and Turner, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, painted representations of their total physical and built environment (land, air, water, light, plants, trees, animals, people, buildings).”24 Ginger Strand claims that “[n]o one believes in landscape anymore. As a self-contained genre, pretty vistas and sublime scenes seem compromised.”25 Chapters 2 and 3 show that her view is largely correct, but not if construed as a somehow progressive evolution away from historical landscape practices. A pivotal case in point is the powerful landscape imagery of Icelandic artist Georg Guðni (1961–2011), who stated early in his career that he and his peers believed that “landscape was old-fashioned and uninteresting,”26 but went on to extend the genre to new heights of observation and subtlety. Again promoting the familiar developmental narrative, however, central 1970s eco artists—Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison in the United States and Richard Long in the United Kingdom, for example—reacted to what they perceived as machinedriven interventionist extravagances in American land art of the 1960s and saw their alternative processes as an improvement on the less ecologically refined procedures of much land art. Concerned
mostly with land art as an immediate predecessor, however, early eco artists often ignored the nuances of earlier landscape expression and its ongoing import. In echoing but fundamentally revising Clark’s title, then, my aim is to insist that the landscape genre did not simply end, as he predicted, and that it is far from irrelevant today. Landscape does not easily slide “into” eco art, but neither is it a cast-off remnant of a Hegelian unfolding. Landscape into Eco Art presents a sustained argument for considering continuities between aspects of the landscape tradition in the West, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary ecological art. By attending to a full range of relationships among these modes of engagement with the earth, I recover aspects of the unrecognized history of the landscape genre and also explore the art-historical implications of construing a longer tradition of landscape presentation and representation that includes land art and eco art in an ongoing drama of articulation.
LANDSCAPE, LAND ART, ECO ART
It is ca. 1970, then, that three somewhat distinct modes of engagement with the earth in Western art are designated: the longstanding landscape genre, earthworks and land art, and something new, described with the portmanteau “eco art” and its variants. This description finds clear and influential expression in John Beardsley’s EarthworksandBeyond,first published in 1984 and now in its fourth edition (2006). Linking the landscape tradition to land art, Beardsley claims in his introduction that “[i]n the early 1980s . . . it was clear that landscape was reappearing as one of the most consequential subjects in art a position it had not enjoyed since the midnineteenth century. It was also evident that landscape was emerging in a different guise” (7). Not only does Beardsley imply that earthworks are part of a landscape tradition, but his reference to “beyond” in his title also suggests homologies between land art and eco art now. He has added an afterword called “The Global Landscape” to the latest edition, an account that includes examples of what he calls “environmental art” in an unbroken tradition of
Western landscape depiction. While I agree with Beardsley—and in general with Barbara C. Matilsky, in her groundbreaking exhibition FragileEcologies (1992)—that landscape as a genre and as a loose description of aesthetic responses to land (and other historical examples of “form building in the landscape” such as earth mounds and gardens) is germane to land art and to eco art, I mean to slow down the progression from and intercalation of one form into the other.27 I reexamine what I call the “hinges” between landscape and land art, between land art and eco art, and also between landscape and eco art, the eco art that is more involved with landscape than with land art. One revisionary implication of this procedure is that the break in artists’ practices between early land art and 1974, to use the subtitle of the 2012 exhibit Ends of the Earth, is not as significant as the exhibit’s cocurators (or, before them, Suzaan Boettger in Earthworks) claim.28
While reasons to link landscape traditions with land art and eco art are manifest, the more common move has been for artists and art historians to suggest a break between such practices. Heizer, Smithson, and Wallis (cited above) are examples; more widely read in academic circles is W. J. T. Mitchell’s examination of the genre of landscape in his influential collection Landscape and Power, first published in 1994 and again in an enlarged edition in 2002. Inaugurating this landmark study of new approaches to the genre,29 the remarkable, even Wittgensteinian, “Theses on Landscape” with which Mitchell provocatively begins his own contribution to the volume, “Imperial Landscape,” have an ironic ring today. Dismissing the object of study that he and his co-authors powerfully revise, Mitchell asserts in thesis 8 that “[l]andscape is an exhausted medium, no longer viable as a mode of artistic expression” (5). Unlike many land artists, he does not dispute the genre’s past importance, but with them, he is dubious about its present and future if a restrictive, retrograde version of the genre continues to be employed. My point is that continuities and discontinuities cannot be discussed adequately if we decide on principle that the landscape tradition is irrelevant. To forget or dismiss landscape’s history is to
cut off resources for and recourse to currently relevant practices and theories. We understand less about both landscape and eco art by considering them separately. Yet there is a strong inclination to sever landscape traditions from land art and contemporary practices, an inclination that follows, in part, from the power of such traditions and later artists’ and art historians’ need to be independent. For example, while Nicholas Alfrey and Joy Sleeman are certainly right to warn against “questionable assumptions about the continuity and adaptability of a British landscape tradition,”30 my contention is that both the connections and differences need to be considered rather than dismissed. I am attempting, not to revive landscape in an earlier form, but to remember it, to avoid what artist Maya Lin— using author Jared Diamond’s phrase—calls “landscape amnesia,”31 whether in the sense of landscape depiction of the earth or conceived as a landscape more materially, the abundance of our planetary environment, the decline of which her work tracks. I argue that the future of artistic engagements with the earth has been and remains tied to the specifics of the past of landscape in two principal ways: First, both land artists and contemporary eco artists interact with the landscape genre more significantly than is commonly allowed. Second, landscape, land art, and eco art mutually inform one another, beyond these documented historical interactions, in a manner that becomes visible with hindsight.
Both Patricia Parker and Mieke Bal have theorized the notion of the “preposterous” in ways that can help us think through such temporal relationships. As Parker claims, “Preposterous. . . connotes a reversal of ‘post’ for ‘pre,’ behind for before, back for front, second for first, end or sequel for beginning. . . . the preposterous also disrupts the linear orders of succession and following.” In Bal’s extended usage, it is an activity that yields a preposterous art history, one keenly aware of its own historicality in the present.32 If landscape is best thought of as a medium and as an action (think of landscaping a garden), as Mitchell suggests, then it functions in this book as another hinge, a pivot point, a mediator. Sometimes the connections between historical and more recent work are causal; in
other cases the links are analogical. We could also call this approach “nonlinear” as defined by Manuel De Landa. He suggests that we should not think of human history—in this context, of “landscape”— as “different ‘stages’ . . . that is, progressive developmental steps, each . . . leaving the previous one behind. On the contrary,” he explains, “much as water’s solid, liquid, and gas phases may coexist, so each new human phase simply added itself to the other ones, coexisting and interacting with them without leaving them in the past.”33 The need for nonlinear and nondevelopmental thinking arises, for example, in comprehending the chill we must feel looking at Agnes Denes’s documentation of her rightly famous 1982 Wheatfield—A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan. Photographs of this work feature the World Trade Center’s twin towers, symbols in the 1980s of mercantile power and its avoidance of ecological issues, such as the productive use of the vacant land. The destruction of the towers on September 11, 2001, changes Wheatfield retrospectively: because neither the buildings nor her performative earthwork exist now, Denes’s intervention in 1982 seems darkly prophetic, not of a terrorist attack, but of ecological calamity and the excesses of the Anthropocene, in which the exploitative use of land that Denes revealed is seen as a cause of ecological crises today.
DIRECT ACTION, AESTHETIC SEPARATION AND WITHDRAWAL, ARTICULATION
Eco art today provides a full spectrum of attitudes toward nature, landscape, and ecology and suggests many responses to questions about its purposes or intended efficacy. These can be construed through three interlocking descriptions of its tendencies: direct action, aesthetic separation and withdrawal, and articulation. While not categorically different, the eco-art practices I now turn to tend to emphasize one of these priorities. What Flint Collins instructively calls “site-reformative” eco art is dominant today.34 Its ethic of direct and ameliorative intervention in environmental problems extends the
heritage of earlier land-reclamation projects such as Robert Morris’s 1979 JohnsonPit#30,which relandscaped an open excavation; Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991–93), which extracted toxic heavy metals from soil; and Jackie Brookner’s patented Biosculptures, such as PrimaLingua(1996), which employed plants as water purifiers. On a much larger scale is Viet Ngo’s Devil’s Lake Wastewater Treatment Plant, in North Dakota (1990). Kindred eco-art projects seek to be informative in ways that can change people’s behavior toward the environment.35 A prime example is Subhankar Banerjee’s Arctic Series Photographs (2000–) and his related book Arctic National WildlifeRefuge:SeasonsofLifeandLand(2003), which, by showing this apparently pristine and fragile habitat, spurred U.S. governmental protection of arctic land, species, and Indigenous human populations.36 This positive result echoes the earliest example of collaboration between art forms to sway public and government opinion on the environment, from writings by Thoreau to photographs by Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins to paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, which stood behind the 1864 act in the U.S. Congress to protect the Yosemite Valley. As Sandrine Simon has argued by invoking the emotional register that I examine in chapter 5, “ecological artists have been able to emotionally shake their public, be it society in general or even policy makers, both by portraying the beauty of nature and by expressing their outrage concerning the destruction of the environment. The work of photographers such as Ansel Adams in the Yosemite Valley provided a direct continuity with landscape painting and played an essential role in the creation of the ‘conservation movement’ and national parks in the USA and elsewhere.”37 Though responses to and characterizations of more recent reformative work varies, other examples include the alarming photographs of environmental degradation by Edward Burtynsky or David Maisel and Maya Lin’s What Is Missing?, a multiplatform undertaking, one of whose elements is a melancholic interactive website begun in 2009 that documents what many scientists are calling the sixth mass extinction of life on earth.
Prominent eco artist Jackie Brookner (1945–2015) raised a crucial point about reclamation art, however, one that spurs me to see it as one among several compelling practices rather than the necessary goal of eco art. Referring to her own work but in a way that pertains to Chin’s RevivalFieldand other reclamation projects, she writes:
But if the plants are doing the work, why not just grow them in the ground, as in most bioremediation and ecological restoration projects? Why grow them on sculptures? And why do we need art to do what bioremediation and ecological restoration are already doing? The aesthetic, metaphoric and conceptual functions of Biosculptures™ are important because for true ecological restoration, it is not enough to restore the ecosystems. We need to change ourselves. To bring about a future where we can move beyond restoration, beyond an endless cycle of loss and repair where we keep having to bandage new wounds, we need a restoration of human values. We need to revision what we value and undervalue, in the world, in ourselves, and in our identification of ourselves as species. We need to make the restoration processes visible and understandable, and we need to engage the attention, imagination and heart of the public. To affect values, to create desire, to make people care about something, you have to affect hearts, bodies, unconscious dream lives and imaginations. And this is the work art can do so well.38
How do we distinguish reclamation work from green engineering, design, or social activism, and are such distinctions useful? T. J. Demos’s extraordinarily rich book DecolonizingNaturehas as a main goal “to further enliven [the] intersection of art and activism” (11). Without diminishing the import of these crossings and priorities in eco art today, I provide a different emphasis, one that articulates distinctions between the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of eco-art practices and more overtly political pursuits and is therefore able to bring eco art’s manifold interactions with land art and landscape to the fore. In Alan C. Braddock’s apt phrasing, “What is the art in
ecological art, exactly?”
39 For example, Mel Chin has said that the greatest triumph of his RevivalFieldwas its ability to test and prove scientific hypotheses about hyperconductor plants and soil pollution. For him, the question of whether we call this art or science or engineering is not important.40 But is some degree of separation warranted, perhaps even to uphold art’s ability to make a difference precisely through its difference? I agree with Malcolm Miles’s claim that “art interrupts and exposes contradictions; it intervenes to reinflect the conditions by which it is conditioned; and this dialectical function validates art’s response to climate change, as it also validates political movements, as part of a process of change which is never completed.”41 We can adapt two of Theodore Adorno’s arguments to investigate eco art’s specifically aesthetic dimensions as it confronts climate change, a process I define as “articulation.”42 In Aesthetic Theory (1970), Adorno holds that if art is to remain connected to momentous societal problems, it must fight for an identity distinguishable (if not fully autonomous) from its ambient culture. As he writes, “All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function . . . are doomed” (1). In his terms, “Art’s double character as both autonomous and faitsocialis incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy” (5). On this view, the German artist Herman Prigann’s (1942–2008) many land restorations in Europe, for example, must function as art as well as repair unsightly and toxic strip mines. Art must be identifiable as such if it is to have an effect. There are many possible objections to this stance. Miles claims that eco art “crosses boundaries between art, social research, and environmentalism so that it no longer matters whether it is art or something else.” He suggests, hopefully, that “if the aim is to shift the balance of humanity’s relation to the earth from exploitation to sustenance, this implies a shift in human relations as a point of departure. . . . An ecological aesthetic [can be seen as an] intervention in social conditions, seeing human nature not in a biological sense as beyond history, but as produced in history. . . . Art can intervene in writing the scripts, interrupting the processes of normalization.”43 His prime example is Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s
Touch Sanitation (1974–84), a now-legendary project in which the artist, by shaking the hand of every sanitation worker in New York City, drew attention to the urban sanitation systems that we unheedingly depend upon. But his point, while in keeping with the fundamental ecological premise of the interconnectedness of all phenomena, is made precipitously. Granted, what we humans call a given eco-aesthetic project is of no account to nature. But our naming and categorizing practices do matter profoundly to us and to how humans behave toward nonhumans: these attitudes influence, if not determine, what we see and how we act, as the histories of the overdetermined concepts of “art” and “nature” attest. An example was related by author Jack Burnham in 1967: “I can remember when [Hans] Haacke took me to see an example of his first water boxes (spring 1962), then in the rental collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A secretary commented that the museum personnel had been playing with it for days—it seemed to have caused more joyful curiosity than any number of ‘sculptures’— for that reason the museum never thought seriously of buying it as a ‘work of art.’”44
Adorno wrote powerfully on nature and natural history, but my aim is not to engage with these speculations per se but rather to pose a version of his famous challenge to the aesthetic as it operates in the contemporary. According to Adorno, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”45 Brian A. Oard has glossed his argument: “To persist, after Auschwitz, in the production of monuments of the very culture that produced Auschwitz (Adorno might have spoken of Strauss’s Four Last Songs rather than generalized ‘poetry’) is to participate by denial in the perpetuation of that barbaric culture and to participate in the process (reification) that renders fundamental criticism of that culture literally unthinkable.”46 I can specify my stress on the “art” in eco art by asking if it is legitimate to recast Adorno’s pointed question about the authenticity of artistic expression in light of contemporary ecocide. After all, it is the mechanisms of what we might best call the “modernocene”47 that have allowed our contemporary art world
to thrive. As Kate Rigby has pointed out, the Holocaust and the effects of climate change differ on many counts, not least in the premeditation of consequences in Nazi Germany versus the largescale obliviousness in the drift toward climate catastrophe.48 Can we justifiably make art about nature in full cognizance of anthropogenic climate disruption? Can eco art continue in its creation of objects and interventions in the face of humanity’s undeniable acceleration of global climate change? Looking at the question of ecological thinking in the discipline of history, Dipesh Chakrabarty presents both the reasons for and stakes of any suggestion that “business as usual” is viable: “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history and end by returning to the question . . . How does the crisis of climate change appeal to our sense of human universals while challenging . . . our capacity for historical understanding?”49 Should we continue to produce works and to display them using the same largely capitalist structures and attitudes that spawned our current climate problems? I would say yes, if eco art’s effects lie in reflecting and modifying the longstanding relationships between artistic expression, landscape, and human views of the earth and nature. With Adorno again, it is only from a sometimes-nominal remove that defines it as art that eco art can meaningfully speak to our current climate predicament. How should we respond as a species now that we are what Chakrabarty calls a “geological force”? Ways to proceed are offered in philosopher Lorraine Code’s book EcologicalThinking,among them a process she defines as the “study of habitats both physical and social where people endeavor to live well together; of ways of knowing that foster or thwart such living; and thus of the ethos and habitus enacted in the knowledge and actions, customs, social structures, and creative-regulative principles by which people strive or fail to achieve this multiply realizable end” (26). One way to support living well together, Code elaborates, is to question the largely science-oriented discourses of mastery that are a legacy of the Enlightenment. This eco art does.
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
CHAPTER IV
THIRSTY CHICKENS
It is very funny to see chickens drink. If you have ever watched them you must have noticed how they dive their beaks into the water and then quickly hold up their heads. They do this to let the water run down their throats for, you see, their mouths cannot shut up tightly and keep the water in like yours.
One morning all the chicks felt very thirsty. I expect eating worms makes you thirsty, and I am sure running about with a worm and never getting the chance to eat it must make you thirstier still. So first one and then all the rest ran to their saucer of water. Honeypot ran her beak along the water before holding up her head to swallow it. Of course, the others must imitate her and do the same. When Cheeky came up, of course, he tried to do it too, but there was very little room, the other chicks had got the best places and they crowded him. Honeypot pushed hard against him on one side and Fluffy bumped into him on the other, so that he kept losing the water he had collected in his beak to drink.
“This is a silly game,” he said. “Can’t you let me get a drink?”
The others pretended they hadn’t heard, and kept on bobbing their little heads up and down and took no notice at all. Dolly, whose worm he had taken, was rather pleased to annoy him and gave Fluffy a sly push so that he bumped into Cheeky and nearly upset him.
“Well, you are rude!” cried Cheeky. “I never saw such ill-mannered chicks.”
“Who are you to talk about manners?” said Fluffy, while the others stopped drinking to listen. “Who took Dolly’s worm?”
“And what business is that of yours?” cried Cheeky, getting in a temper and flapping his stumpy little wings.
“Take care or you’ll get a peck!” Fluffy shouted with a threatening poke of his head. It was quite a desperate quarrel, but if you had
been listening all you would have heard was “Peep, peep, peep,” a great many times over.
CHAPTER V
THE FIGHT
You know, I expect, that cocks are given to fighting; that is why you seldom see two cocks in the same run. The hens are different and live together very happily; they are too busy with their eggs and looking after their baby chickens to be quarrelsome. But Fluffy and Cheeky were going to grow up cocks which probably made them more inclined to quarrel. Joan thought, perhaps, they still bore each other a grudge over the worm which neither of them had been able to enjoy. So what began as a quarrel ended in a regular fight. Weren’t they naughty chickens? Cheeky and Fluffy grew so fierce and angry with each other that they began to fight like grown-up cocks. They tried to fly up and pounce down on each other, but their little wings were too short and weak and they could only give little hops. They pecked and jumped and peeped loudly while the other chickens stood round looking on, for they had never seen such a fight before. Cheeky gave one fly up and came down on Fluffy, giving him a really hard peck full on his little breast, when he fell over and lay quite still just as if he were dead.
They began to fight
I should like to be able to tell you that, when Cheeky saw what he had done he was desperately sorry because he had not meant to hurt Fluffy like that. If he had been a child he would have been terribly sad and ashamed of himself, I am sure, but chickens are different. In spite of Joan’s ideas of them they haven’t really much feeling and very little intelligence, and so Cheeky just strutted off and didn’t seem to care a bit. He even began scratching the ground as if the fight had given him an appetite and he was looking for another worm. The others, too, were quite happy and busy, and took no more notice of poor Fluffy lying in a little heap on the ground.
He fell over and lay quite still as if he were dead
CHAPTER VI
FLUFFY’S RECOVERY
I don’t think this fight would have happened if the mother hen had been about, but through some mistake she had been shut up for an hour with some other hens who were not mothers. It was Joan again who came to see what was the matter. She was just too late to save poor Fluffy, and was heart-broken when she saw him lying on the ground so limp and still just as if he were dead. “Oh, you wicked chickens!” she cried, “what have you done to poor Fluffy?” Cheeky cocked his little head on one side as if he knew nothing at all about it, and the other chickens wandered off as if their brother who had got the worst of the fight was no business of theirs.
“What horrid, cold-blooded little things,” thought Joan, “how could they be so unkind?” But it is no good giving chickens credit for tender hearts and clever brains, for if you do you will be disappointed. And it will not be the chickens’ fault, for they can’t help it. Joan found this
out after a time and she loved them for what they were and didn’t expect too much.
Very gently Joan picked Fluffy up and was glad to feel he was still warm. She carried him carefully to the kitchen where cook gave her a cosy little basket with a piece of flannel. She laid him on this and put him near the kitchen fire. Her aunt looked grave when she saw his limp little body, for she thought he was dead, but she let Joan do as she liked.
Poor Fluffy lay still so long that Joan grew tired of watching him and went off to see the cows milked. When she came in to tea she rushed first of all into the kitchen to see if he had moved. He certainly looked better, less limp and even a little fatter, and actually his eyes were open. Joan was delighted, and while she was looking at him he opened his beak and gave a kind of gape. “Oh, auntie!” Joan called out, “Fluffy’s alive, and I believe he wants something to eat.” Wasn’t it splendid? The warmth of the kitchen fire had revived him. After Joan had fed him with a little warm food he was able to get up and walk about. She liked having him to herself like that, but when bedtime came and the other chicks went under their mother’s wing she took him back and he ran in and settled down. I expect he made up his mind it would be a long time before he would have another fight.
CHAPTER VII
HATCHING OUT
Hatching out is an exciting time. The hen has to sit on the eggs and keep them warm and quiet for three whole weeks. It needs a lot of patience, doesn’t it? Joan knew there were some eggs due to hatch out very soon and she did wish she might see them. She knew it was really impossible though because the hen must be left alone then and not disturbed at all.
Joan was very fond of animals and always wanted to do the kindest thing for them; she was a nice child altogether, and tried to
help her aunt with the farm. She was having such a good time and thoroughly enjoying her holidays. Her cousin Lulu had spent her holidays there too and been rather naughty, so Joan’s aunt told her. It seems Lulu had been asked not to go near, or in any way disturb, the hens that were sitting on their eggs, and had promised faithfully not to do so. You may guess the kind of child Lulu was when I tell you she broke her promise.
There was a speckled hen who was a very good mother and had brought up ever so many families, and when Lulu was there her eggs were due to hatch out very soon. They were not the eggs she had laid herself but some very special ones. When they were hatching out that naughty Lulu went to look. She simply didn’t bother about her promise and even pulled one of the eggs out from under the hen to see if it was already broken. The speckled hen was furious and terribly flurried; she had never been interfered with before and took it very much amiss. She didn’t mean to hurt her babies, of course, but she got so worried and nervous that she was not careful enough where she put her feet down and killed five of them. In her excitement she had trampled on them and the poor little things had scarcely lived at all. Of course, Lulu was very sorry, but that didn’t mend her promise nor bring the chickens back to life.
Joan was delighted when her aunt told her she might have a chance of seeing some hatching out. There were some eggs in the incubator which were due out very soon. An incubator is a sort of comfortable box which keeps the eggs as safe and warm as a mother hen, so that they come out in three weeks just as if a hen were looking after them. Only an incubator, not being alive, wouldn’t get flurried or excited at any one looking on. Joan was told there were eggs in it which were due to turn into chickens on Thursday or Friday.
One had still a bit of shell sticking to his back
On Wednesday Joan kept running to look, on Thursday she still haunted the place, but on Friday she began to get a little tired of nothing happening. In the afternoon she was having a game with Cheeky, Fluffy and Co. when she was called in to see a pretty sight. Some chickens had just come out, and one had still a bit of shell sticking to his back. He was looking at the rest of it in such a comical way as if he were asking how he had ever been cramped up in such a little space. They were darling little chicks, and Joan was soon busy giving them names. She always loved them and often played with them, but somehow they never seemed quite as clever nor as human as her first friends.
Salome.
THE PERSIAN KITTENS AND THEIR FRIENDS
CHAPTER I
TOMPKINS AND MINETTE
I want to tell you about two little Persian kittens called Tompkins and Minette. They were the prettiest you have ever seen with their long fluffy fur, their small ears and little impudent stumpy noses. They looked such innocent darlings, you felt you must kiss them, but like most kittens, they dearly loved a little fun, and as for mischief— well, you shall hear all about them.
Their mother was a very handsome Persian cat Salome, with a proud walk and very dignified ways. She had four kittens, but two had been given away and, to tell the truth, Tompkins and Minette were not altogether sorry. Four kittens and a big fluffy mother take up a lot of room in a basket, and theirs seemed getting to be a tighter fit every day.
“We shan’t be quite so crowded now,” remarked Minette with a yawn after the others had gone away.
“And we shall have all the more to eat,” said Tompkins.
“Our mother will love us more, too,” purred Minette.
“The only bother is: she’ll have more time to wash our faces,” said Tompkins. So when Mary, their tender-hearted little mistress pitied them saying, “Poor darlings! how they will miss the others!” Tompkins and Minette were saying in cat language, “Not a bit of it.”
Besides, two kittens are quite enough for a game, especially such rascals as Tompkins and Minette.
The two kittens arched their backs.
Tompkins loved anything in the shape of a ball, and as there was a good deal of knitting going on in the house there were several balls in sight. The grown-ups, however, were careful with theirs; they knew kittens, but Mary, who was only eight and had just begun to knit, seemed the most hopeful, and it was her ball the kittens watched. Her wool was thick, and the scarf she was making never seemed to get beyond the third row, so there was always a nice fat ball of it.
“It does look nice and soft,” said Minette looking at it.
“And wouldn’t it roll finely,” said Tompkins.
One day Mary tried to knit, but her hands got so sticky that the stitches kept dropping off the needles. She got very hot and cross.
“Bother, bother, bother!” she cried at last and flung the knitting down and rushed off into the garden.
The ball of wool was still on the table, but as the knitting was on the floor you may guess it didn’t take those kittens long to pull it down. It bounced off the table and came rolling towards them. It really looked almost like some live animal coming at them, and the two kittens arched their backs and looked quite fierce. When it stopped Tompkins said to Minette, “What a silly to be frightened of a ball of wool,” and Minette answered, “You were frightened, I was only pretending.” But this argument didn’t last long for there was the lovely fluffy ball on the ground waiting to be played with. Tompkins snatched it first and patted it round a chair. Then Minette tried to bite it, and when it rolled away they were like boys after a football, and it was sent all over the room and twisted round each leg of the table.
You see, all cats love pretending even when they are quite babies, so Tompkins and Minette pretended to be grown-up cats chasing a mouse until that bold Tompkins suggested, “It’s really too big for a mouse, let’s call it a rat.” And they grew quite fierce as they hunted it, giving savage miaous and growls just like big cats. But after a little the rat seemed to shrink into a mouse and the mouse into nothing at all for the wool had all come unwound.
It never does to give way to temper, does it? and when Mary returned she was to find it out. She came back and brought her mother to help her with the knitting, and pick up all her stitches for her. They found two tired little kittens with sweet faces and big innocent eyes, and the wool in a perfectly hopeless tangle all over the room.
“What did Mary’s mother say?” you ask. I am afraid she laughed. I know she didn’t blame the kittens, and Mary had to get her wool out of a tangle and wind it up herself. Not for very long though, because when her mother thought she had suffered enough for her temper and carelessness she helped her and they soon got it finished. Mary gave the kittens a good scolding, calling them “nasty, mean mischievous little things.”
CHAPTER II
TWO THIEVES
I am afraid Tompkins was rather inclined to be greedy. He used to watch his mother Salome having her afternoon saucer of milk and he just longed to have some too. It looked so nice and creamy and he was so tired of his own food. He used to watch her lapping it and wish somehow he could get it instead.
Two little heads very busy with the saucer
One day the milk was put down as usual, but Salome didn’t hurry to go to it. The fact was she had come in from the garden, and as she sat on the window-seat, she discovered her paws were rather damp and dirty. She was a fussy and particular cat who thought a great deal of appearance, and she was very busy licking her paws soft and velvety again before having her tea. Now was Tompkins’ chance. He watched his mother very carefully and then stole quietly up to the saucer. But Minette had seen him and she didn’t mean to be left behind, so soon there were two little heads very busy with the saucer. They lapped so quietly that no one noticed them, and it was not till their mother had finished her wash and jumped down to have
her milk that she saw what had happened. And by then the milk was nearly all gone.
What did their mother do?
I know what she ought to have done. Scolded them well and given them a little scratch, but cats are very funny and not a bit like people or dogs. Salome just pretended she didn’t care a bit. She made out she wasn’t thirsty and never mewed for any more milk. She jumped on to the window seat again and stared out of the window, and the naughty little kittens thought themselves very clever indeed.
CHAPTER III
MINETTE FINDS THE KITCHEN
One day Minette smelt a nice fishy smell. It tempted her out of the room, down a passage and round a corner till she arrived at the kitchen. Here she came face to face with a strange cat. The cook was just making fish cakes, and Tibby the kitchen cat was asking for some with loud miaous. Minette was very alarmed at first, she thought this strange cat might scratch her, but Tibby was much too busy to take any notice of a little kitten and kept miaouing and staring up at the fish. Minette thought she would rather like to try a little, it certainly smelt very tempting. At last a scrap fell on the floor. Of course Minette rushed at it. But, oh, dear! how she wished she hadn’t! There was such a noise; Tibby flew at her with a nasty spiteful swear, growled at her, snatched the fish away and ate it up herself. Poor Minette felt so hurt and surprised, it wasn’t a bit how her dignified mother would have behaved.
Tibby was much too busy to take any notice of a little kitten.
The cook was not at all nice either, for instead of pitying Minette and giving her a tit-bit of fish as Mary would have done, she said, “Get out of my way,” and shooed her out of the kitchen.
It was a very subdued and sad little kitten that trotted back round the corner and along the passage, and to tell the truth, Minette was not at all sorry to get back to her own cosy little basket and home where no one was unkind to her.
Still though not very successful, this had been an adventure and Minette pretended to Tompkins she had had a perfectly lovely time.
“This is a dull old room,” she told him, “the kitchen is much finer. It is beautifully warm for there is a great big fire, and there are heaps of saucers and plates, and such delicious smells.”
“Did you get anything to eat?” asked Tompkins.
“Well, just a taste of fish,” Minette replied, enjoying the envious look on Tompkins’ face.
“Did you see any one there?” he asked next.
“Yes, a very grand cat, so beautiful and sleek, she was very kind to me and asked me to come again.” (Oh, Minette! what terrible stories!)
Poor Tompkins was so jealous he could have cried, and when Minette sat purring in the basket with such a superior look on her face, he felt he could have scratched her.
“Never mind,” he told himself, “it will be my turn next.”
CHAPTER IV
THE KITCHEN KITTENS
His chance came that same afternoon. Minette, tired out with her exciting adventure and with all the stories she had told about it, was having a sound sleep, no one was about and the door was open. Tompkins crept through it and down the passage. He was making for the kitchen but on the way he heard a strange noise. It came from a little room next to the kitchen and it made his little heart beat and his tail swell out to twice its size. This curious sound was just the kind of noise that kittens make when they are in the middle of a furious game. Tompkins listened outside the door. “Oh,” he thought, “if I could only get in and join them! what fun it would be, and what an adventure to tell Minette!” and he gave a little plaintive miaou just near the crack of the door. There was a silence for a second, then he heard scratchings inside and a voice called out in cat language, “You push hard and we’ll pull, the door isn’t fastened.” So Tompkins squeezed hard against the door, and at last there was a crack just big enough for him to creep through.
Inside Tompkins saw, to his delight, three small kittens. They were about his own age too, and had got hold of the waste-paper basket with which they were having a splendid game. Next to a ball, I believe, kittens love nice rustling paper, and they were tearing and rumpling these to their hearts’ content.
They had got hold of the waste-paper basket.
Tompkins was a little shy at first, but he soon felt at home with the strange kittens and tore the paper as fiercely as the others. The basket, too, seemed made to be played with. They pretended it was a cage, and one of the kittens got inside and growled so fiercely like a wild beast that Tompkins was almost afraid. At last, when it was upside down and the papers scattered all over the room the kittens began to think they would like a little rest.
They all stared at each other for a bit till Tompkins thought it was time some one made a little conversation.
“What are your names?” he asked.
The kittens looked rather confused and didn’t know what to answer, for somehow no one had thought of christening them. However, they were not going to let a stranger know this, so the prettiest said, “I am generally called ‘Pussy,’ and this”—here she
pointed to the kitten next to her—“is ‘Pet.’ Her real name is PerfectPet, but we call her Pet for short.”
“And what is your name?” Tompkins asked the third kitten. He, however, pretended not to hear and busied himself running after his own tail, which he caught so unexpectedly that it made him sit down with a bump.
“I can tell you his name,” cried Pussy; “he has been called ‘Ugly,’ and I think it rather suits him, don’t you?”
Tompkins was too polite to say how heartily he agreed for it would have been hard to find a plainer kitten.
“It was cook who called me that,” said Ugly quite cheerfully; “she said I looked scraggy as if I wanted feeding up, so I hope she’ll see it’s done.”
CHAPTER V
A SURPRISING CONVERSATION
“Who’s your mother?” Pet asked Tompkins.
“She is Salome, a beautiful gray Persian,” and as Tompkins answered he noticed the three kittens looked rather merry.
“Do you mean that stuck-up silly old fluff-pot?” said Ugly. “We often watch her stalking about the garden, giving herself airs.”
“And looking just as if she wore petticoats,” Pussy joined in.
“What a dull mother to have!” remarked Pet. “Not much fun to be got out of her, I should think.”
Tompkins was thunderstruck. He had never been used to hearing his dignified mother spoken of like this, and thought the kittens were very rude. “My mother is very beautiful and very valuable,” he said indignantly; “besides, she is a nice warm fluffy mother to go to sleep with.”
“Maybe,” said Ugly, “but we shouldn’t care to change with you. Our mother Tibby is the right sort. She never forgets us and isn’t above stealing a little now and then, and if it’s too big for her she lets us help eat it.”
“And look what a sportsman she is!” said Pussy. “You should see her after a mouse. And once, she told us she almost caught a rat.”
“I should like to see your old fluff-pot of a mother running after a mouse,” laughed Ugly. “I am sure she would be much too ladylike to catch it.”
“Why, she would have to pick up her petticoats,” said Pet, and then they all three roared with laughter.
What bad manners they had, thought Tompkins and he felt furious with them. He wouldn’t play with them any more, and with his head up and his tail fluffed out he walked away, looking very like his mother when she was offended.
But Pussy, who was a kind hearted kitten and didn’t like to see him hurt, ran after him and said, “Please, don’t go, we were only in fun. Come back and tell us more about your mother, I’m sure she has her points, and anyhow I don’t expect she boxes your ears like Jane does ours.”
Tompkins was surprised. “Does she really?” he asked, for he had never heard of such a thing.
“Indeed, she does, with her claws out, too, sometimes,” said Pet.
“Yes, she nearly spoilt my beauty,” said Ugly with a grin; “she gave me a horrid scratch over the eye.”
As the kittens had given up teasing and seemed rather nice again, Tompkins settled down and told them how nice and sweet-tempered his mother was and that she was so admired that people always wanted to photograph her. “In fact,” he said, being just a little inclined to show off, “she got so used to the camera that she once tried to take a photograph herself and got my sister Minette to sit for her.”
“Whatever is a camera?” the kittens asked astounded.
“I am afraid I can’t very well explain just now,” replied Tompkins who didn’t know himself, “as it’s time I said ‘Good-by,’” and he trotted off home.
Tried to take a photograph.
A perfect bunch of bad temper.
CHAPTER VI
THE RETURN VISIT
When Tompkins got back, however, Salome was looking anything but beautiful. In fact she was looking as ugly and disagreeable a cat as you can imagine. You see, she wanted brushing very badly and she simply hated it. As soon as she saw her own special brush and comb being brought out, she would hump herself up with her ears back, and look a perfect bunch of bad temper. This time she was worse than usual, for her long fur had got tangled, and as the comb pulled, she turned round and spat at it.
Tompkins and Minette looked on tremblingly; they had never seen their mother in such a rage. Tompkins was glad the kitchen kittens
