Perception and Empathy
Nature and human beings in the focus of Marielis Seyler's work
Art is the reconciliation of mind and nature
Wolfgang Johann Goethe
Art turns to facets of the new
commonality of human beings and nature.
Wolfgang Welsch
There is no doubt: the virulence of the theme "nature" is also noteworthy in the current art scene and art business as well as the polyvalence of its discourses. For obvious reasons Vienna can be cited as an example. Whether “landscape”, “creation” generally, the digital metaphor of the “cloud”, “nature motifs” as a conceptual intermedial technique and visual rhetoric or “climate/deluge/visions” of nature in the field of tension between natural science and art1, a programmatic paradigm shift is taking place in an insightful way, which is being intensified by the current experience with Covid-19.2
It reveals a multi-layered plural concept of nature the narrative of which spans a wide range from the natural sciences (climate data) to the religious (creation).3 In view of developments in genetic engineering as well as the “Nobelisation” and thus ennoblement of the so-called “gene scissors”, this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to its key developers Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna on the grounds, as the Nobel Prize Committee argued, that it is a “tool to rewrite the code of life".4 The postulate of rethinking nature is also a present attitude in artistic discourse.5 In 1998 Wolfgang Müller-Funk commented that "Nature has become more fluid, changeable, more flexible, no longer just dead matter or the result of a unique divine creation".6 With this, “nature” mutates not only into a dynamic phenomenon but is in a characteristic way creative itself.
Any artistic approach to nature is in more ways than one "aesthetic world experience" 7, since as non-nature it aesthetically reflects, reacts and acts on nature as an aesthetic given. There is no mere (artistic) "representation" of nature: every "oppositional" gesture, here human beings, there nature, here artistic expression, there nature remote from art, negates the respective aesthetic implications. It is the semantic potential of the concepts of nature and their artistic reference within which an artistic work can be constituted, be it clandestine or intentional.
Since the late 1980s the artistic work of Marielis Seyler, which has been devoted to the theme of “nature” in many passages, has not focused on the opposition between nature and art but on their intertwining. Numerous series and work cycles deal in various ways with the artistic protection of nature as an everyday phenomenon of experience: “For me, nature is an intact biosphere“.8 Analog photography (of which the artist has a profound knowledge) is the basic gene of her artistic work.
The work series Flying Corn is committed to classic analogue photography. As a silver-gelatin print (photo emulsion) on baryta paper also in the form of an edition as an inkjet print, corncobs found by chance are photographically de-contextualized, thus focused and transformed into a photographic “sculpture“. It is not about an analogization of architecture/structure/ ornament and botanical as we find it with Karl Blossfeldt.9 By opting for black-and-white photography, there is on the one hand an abstraction reinforced by the elimination of any environment and on the other hand a surreal seeming animal-anthropomorphic-figural transformation of the plant and this with a fine sense of humour. The subject of corn opens up a wealth of aspects: globality, one of the oldest cultivated plants, transgenic corn, agricultural crop, landscape formative, basic food for animals and humans. In a paradigmatic way, the relationship between nature and human beings, between cultivated plants and society is also symbolically reflected in corn. The release of the corncob from its usual context can also be seen as a plea for its independent status, as a denial of its total socialisation.
The second extensive series of works presented here is dedicated to trees. Although it is also based on black-and-white photo emulsion, thin transparent paper is used as the carrier material. As a result of rinsing during the development of the photo emulsion and the subsequent drying process, it wrinkles into a fragile torn object, which is accentuated with various colour materials such as pastel chalk, rust, bronze or shellac. This is not only an aesthetic autonomisation and charging of the subject but a gesture of "refinement", through which the preciousness of the tree is referenced, and through the vulnerable tracing paper its industrial endangerment is reported. It reveals a haunting effect of the fragile as an analogue to the fragility of nature itself, which is intensified by the subtle graphic character of the works. In doing so, the artist succeeds in effectively interlacing pictorial material and theme and even more: in merging them. The tree markings form an autonomous part in the trees series. Through the various incisions, they show the human "processing" of tree trunks, tattooed messages of humanoid actions on the skin of the trees.
Humans/bodies and animals are also repeatedly thematised. Over many years, work cycles such as Körperfische (Body Fish) have emerged, which continuously and enquiringly sound out the human body as nature and understand it as part of biological evolution. Cautiously even tenderly, fish and human body intimately meet and thus refer to biological familiarity, the origin of humans in water. This can also be found in the Les escargot sur moi (The snail and me) cycle. Moments of the archaic, the transient and the transformative are worked out artistically. The strategy of an aesthetic of disappearance plays just as important a role as the visualization of the vulnerability of humans and animals qua diaphanous aesthetics. The female body functions as a place and symbol of creativity and is a further signum of both work cycles.
In general, the subject of animals is the predominant theme in the extensive work complex Natur Naturata that has emerged since the early 1990s. The work series “Hase” (Hare) shows that - especially for the generation of Marielis Seyler - the work of Joseph Beuys with its anthropological-shamanistic worldview of a unity of nature/animals and humans as a process of transformation is becoming repeatedly virulent. Seyler was deeply touched by Beuys' dealings with a hare in his legendary action How to explain pictures to a dead hare performed on November 26, 1965 in the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf. She created a photographic cycle of a killed hare whose wounds were bandaged: as a double exposure, crumpled colour photography and partly processed with natural materials, imagined as a protective act, a healing. This procedure can be found in other animal works (birds, deer), for example, also in the form of Christian symbolism (Vogelkreuz/Bird Crucifix from 1994). The artist herself explains: “The arbitrary, violent death of animals induced me to edit the photographs in a manner that reanimates the subject and that with natural materials”!
How relevant the relationship between society, culture and nature is for the artist is shown by the so-called Trample Pictures, which are situated in the field of tension between photography and performance. Thereby reference is made to historical images: the Japanese Sumi-e-Pictures and incidents of the 16th century where the abjuration of the Christian faith was at stake, which was made public by trampling on Christian images of saints (the refusal of which resulted in death). Large-format photo prints with images of different living beings such as butterflies, snails or particular motifs (such as women) are placed on the floor in various public places or rooms for several hours and thus exposed to being trampled on. Through this "further processing" traces of "use" emerge, thus telling of the disregard for the subjects depicted. In this way, the images become a performative testimony to dealing with nature: What do we actually perceive of it in everyday life? Are we degrading it to aesthetic phenomena without reference to existential significance for human beings?
The series of Open Air Pictures, which has been created since 2010, is based on large-format photographs of various animal and natural objects. After the photos are shot, they are exposed to the weather lying on the ground for a long time. This amalgamating procedure interweaves image and nature in a special way, in so far as nature itself is advanced to the status of artist and "participates" in the artistic process through its various weather conditions. It is not about a conscious reference to romanticist natural philosophy (she, nature, is the creator herself) but about a partnership between art and nature. “It is about strategies and forms that show us humans linked to the other beings around us that connect us back to our natural, non-human relatives and partners”, said Wolfgang Welsch.10
Perception and empathy become diverse milestones of artistic exploration of the world and nature in the work of Marielis Seyler. In the best sense of the word as Peter Handke writes, it is about “Weltgerührtheit”.11 What is required in the first place for this is an eye-level relationship that enables closeness and tangible encounters with nature as an equal, which only works if you “ properly look”, as Adalbert Stifter so forcefully formulated.12
The work of Marielis Seyler can thus be understood as an infuriated refusal of a high-tech functionalization of nature and animals with its totalitarian mania for utility. By insisting on moments of untouchability of nature, sensation as a sovereign form of an experience of nature and experience of nature as sensation become an indispensable credo of artistic self-understanding: “Art has the paradoxical privilege or the ability (dynamis) to make nature evident precisely by the fact that it is art (and not nature),” wrote Hartmut Böhme so aptly on the relationship between nature and art.13 This requires a new closeness to nature, which in Marielis Seyler's work is achieved not only through specific pictorial procedures but also through the medium of photography, the "drawing pencil of nature" as Henry Fox Talbot poetically described it. It is not its reproduction of reality that distinguishes it but its anthropologically new image capacity the “authentication of presence” 14: It certifies what it shows.
The dignity of creation has to be asserted.15 In doing so, no striking attitudes of social criticism are attempted: on the contrary, the works contain haunting moments of thoughtfulness that connote care in the best sense of the word. From Romanticism to Land Art, from Naturalism to Expressionism, in the visual arts nature was a place of recreation for people, a place of regeneration for society, in short: an imagined paradise in which even natural disasters became sublime events, and parallel to economic exploitation a place of aesthetic recuperation and intoxication. The multi-layered works by Marilies Seyler, based on the medium of photography gently tell us about the vulnerability and wounds of nature and the need to protect it. The artistic confrontation thus becomes a “Königsweg” to nature. Even more, in view of the gigantic anthropocentric destruction of nature and its diversity of flora and fauna, art becomes a Noah's Ark for nature. What an inverse postulate: Art becomes an Elyisum for nature, in order to once again win nature as an Elysium of our existence!
1 Thus Kunstforum Wien shows a retrospective of Gerhard Richter's landscape works; the Dom Museum dedicates itself to fragile creation; the Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna deals with the relationship between digitality and nature; the MUMOK presents retrospectively and posthumously the work of Ingeborg Strobl, which is dedicated in many ways to aspects of nature; the Kunsthaus Wien sees itself as the first “ecological “ museum in Austria (ÖUZ-certified) and has for some time had a general theme of “nature “ (publications of the same name appeared for the international exhibitions mentioned); see also Die Inszenierung von Natur. Natur- und Landschaftsdarstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (The staging of Nature. Nature and Landscapes from the 20th Century ) in the Würth Collection, ed. by C. Sylvia Weber, Verlag Paul Swiridoff Künzelsau 1999, text contributions from Carl Aigner, Beate Elsen-Schwedler, Sonja Klee.
2 The Serpentine Galleries in London, for example, recently hired their own curator for ecology.
3 See also the article Natur als Philosophie (Nature as Philosophy) by Wolfgang Müller-Funk in this publication.
4 See https://kurierat./wissen/wissenschaft/nobelpreis-fuer-charpentier-und-doudna-fuer-genschere/401056554; the “CRIPSPR / Cas9”, the technical name represents after the discovery and decoding of the human genetic code (DNA), the greatest anthropological turning point in the relationship between man and nature. Irritating how little current socio-political resonance this Nobel Prize award has had (it is probably only partly due to Covid-19); en passant: when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix in 1953, it was essentially based on an image from the X-ray photography of Rosalind Franklin; it was also the visualization of the DNA by the two discoverers in the form of a sculpture, with which the DNA structure (double helix) was represented and thus clearly conveyed.
5 Was ist Natur (What is Nature) is the title of an exhibition in the Museum Sinclair-Haus (Sinclair House Museum) in Bad Homburg; The Skulpturenpark Köln (Cologne Sculpture Park) dedicates itself to ÜberNatur - Natural Takeover and also discusses the concept of “Nature”.
6 „Die Rückkehr der Bilder. Beiträge zu einer‚ romantischen Ökologie“, (The Return of the Pictures. Contributions to a Romanticist Ecology), Böhlau Verlag Vienna Cologne Graz, 1988.
7 Wolfgang Welsch: Ästhetische Welterfahrung. Zeitgenössische Kunst zwischen Natur und Kultur (Aesthetic World Experience. Contemporary Art between Nature and Culture), Wilhelm Fink Verlag Paderborn 2016; “None of what we find in humans is an absolute novelty that would suddenly have come into the world with the arrival of humans, but it is all about further developments of prehumen pre-formed”, p. 41.
8 According to the artist in conversation with the author: The Japanese understanding of nature and its representation is also influential, (meditative) immersion in the object to be represented is a prerequisite for its adequate visual implementation, it is important to become one with it (Zen).
9 See a little about Karl Blossfeldt: Licht an der Grenze des Sichtbaren, Die Sammlung der Blossfeldt-Fotografien in der Hochschule der Künste Berlin, hg. von der Akademie der Künste Berlin, Schirmer/Mosel München, Paris, London 1999 (Light at the Border of the Visible. The Collection of Blossfeldt Photographs at Berlin University of the Arts, ed. by the Art Academy of Berlin, Schirmer / Mosel Munich, Paris, London 1999); with text contributions by Carl Aigner, Hubertus von Amelunxen, Dieter Appelt, Matthias Flügge, Angela Lammert, Lothar Romain; In the research on Blossfeldt's work, it became clear that he had manually trimmed his plant photos in several ways in order to imagine architectural symmetries!
10 Welsch, Ästhetische Welterfahrung (Aesthetic World Experience), cited work., p. 45.
11 Peter Handke: Das Gewicht der Welt. Ein Journal, (The Weight of the World. A Journal), Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1979, p 192.
12 Adalbert Stifter: Bunte Steine (Colourful Stones), RECLAM Verlag Ditzingen 1994 (first published in 1853); Obviously, reference is made here to his opus magnum, the novel Der Nachsommer (The Late Summer) with its grandiose descriptions of nature and the postulate of the unity of nature and culture/art (published in 1857).
13 Hartmut Böhme: Aussichten der Natur (Views of Nature), Matthes & Seitz, Munich 2017; on the phenomenology and aesthetics of nature see also Martin Seel: Eine Ästhetik der Natur (An Aesthetic of Nature), suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main 1996 (1991).
14 Roland Barthes: Die helle Kamme. Noten zur Photographie, (The Bright Chamber. Notes on Photography), Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1985; In this clever book, Barthes states the capability of photography to confirm existence; that is the ultimate in photography, not its "realistic" ability to depict, but that it presents existential testimony to what it shows.
15 Here also reference should be made to a book that has been somewhat forgotten: George Steiner, Grammatik der Schöpfung (The Grammar of Creation), Carl Hanser Verlag Munich Vienna 2001 (English original edition 1990); His plea “not to replace the idea of the creative with the principle of invention" is more relevant than ever.