Flip it and reverse it How did humans and animals became so detached – with the perverse form of pets being the “only” animal close to humans in Western societies? A striking example of capitalism being trapped in its perpetual mode are notions of the technological solution: Bayer Research runs its own Bee Care Center, where they study why bees die out, while – schizophrenically – Bayer was accused by the European Union as the main cause of their death, due to a pesticide manufactured by the company. Again, Bayer wants to develop a chemical cure for this problem. This year‘s edition of Land Art Mongolia re-considers Land Art and its media representation today, guided by the theme of human-animal-relationship. With the invention of Google Earth, aerial pictures lost their exclusivity. At the time when artists like Smithson, Heizer and Oppenheim practiced Land Art, visual culture had just become richer: „Blue Marble“ was a sensational satellite picture of the earth. “Smithson is interested in the destabilization of the popular visuality of the planet and its surfaces,“ writes Tom Holert in an essay where he studies connections between artistic works and their media representation (Kwon, Kaiser: Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974). How do these conditions of visual culture influence the status of material objects and their natural and artistic arrangements, like that of landscape? The question still remains relevant today, especially in the context of exhibition making. In her book Einführung zu Theorien der Gegenwart art historian Juliane Rebentisch dedicates a chapter to the heritage of Land Art. In this chapter, she differentiates between various artistic references to nature: natural beauty as a technical effect; domestic and non-domestic natural landscapes; nature as an object and construction of natural science and ecological politics; as well as the natural decay of anything man-made. How can art possibly intersect with natural surroundings? What kind of temporary structures and interspecies bonds can evolve in this nonhuman sphere? As much as the real life of “animals” is covered with layers of images, symbols and metaphors, the artistic projects with a sensitive approach towards “animals” can enter the gaps between modern narratives and imaging standards, thereby creating symbolic prototypes for new kinds of human-animal-relationships. Instead of expanded sculpture, which ruled the classic Land Art of the 1960s, artists today are coming from an expanded cross-disciplinary field of art, as Claire Bishop puts it. Artists invent methods of unlearning, borrow narratives from the sciences, question historical art projects and simply study from scratch what we can see with our bare eyes. Oxana Timofeeva elaborates: “Animals have a history. But the logic of this history doesn‘t conform, in my view, to the optimism of the humanistic discourse of progressive liberation and emancipation of animals finally securing their rights. Nowadays we are dealing really with Agamben‘s latent figure of bare life, deprived of any right, and this figure is exactly the seamy side of the official ideology of according to rights of animals.”

Animality was a recurrent topic throughout the 20th century. In a state of overlapping interdependent crises, with climate change as the main global issue, artists and scientists have insisted on alternative thinking on human-animal-relationships. Oxana Timofeeva criticizes animality as a human construction. In her opinion, in the context of arts and science animals become representations, whereas in the new discipline of animal studies as well as in human rights movements, animals tend to be representatives, who represent “their” subjective interest. Artists work with animals as partners, mediators or actors, and subscribe to their autonomy and subjectivity. “Animals seem to know each other, that is really a peculiar situation,” an artist observed after a few days in Orkhon Valley. While being in one spot for several days, interactions between animals step into our perception, reality shifts. An eagle is not afraid of a dog in the grasslands. Esther Kokmeijer made a lamb her companion and travelled from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar. In a conceptual performance by Chris Bierl, a traditional horsefiddle musician played for an animal audience, a group of horses. In Zigor Barayazarra‘s paint action eight horses were colored blue as the sky and Hanan Benammar recorded the clear commands and soft whispers from human to animal. This project is an attempt to study the movements and treatments of animals in Mongolia beyond categories of representation and the representative. Are animals referred to as individual animals? What is the relation between humans and animals? The basic idea was to grasp hyperlocal situations in detail and relate observations and reflections to a macro level. To put it the other way around, artists suggest micro perspectives, use 3D image capture, study site-specific activities – daily routines of nomad families – and make reference to a global scale. Today, Land Art is not necessarily a remote activity, but a form of critical pictorial thinking. It attempts to read the land and its fauna as a code which carries global problems and at the same time potentially has hints and solutions inscribed within it. Badam Dashdondog and Dulguun Baatarsukh embrace locally found materials – animal bones, grass and stones – to create their own totem messages. In Dulguun‘s intuitively holistic view animals and humans die one day and live on as spirits. Batkholboo Dugasuren who compiled a temporary monument to the nomadic way of life, which is reduced to the minimum. In this trip in the field, we also try to break the visual codes of sensational pictures of land and animals and look behind an apparently popular visuality. The posthuman condition shifts Land Art towards a way to introduce new perspectives on nature, whereas an anthropocentric perspective was at the center in the 1970s. In widely known Land Art works such as Spiral Jetty, artists went to the desert to modulate giant parts of natural landscape. During the course of the 20th century, Western countries could not imagine landscapes turning post-industrial, in the way that former coal mining areas become leisure zones or abandonned spaces in shrinking cities. Now we can see nature taking back abandoned factory lots and other industrial sites in some parts of Europe. While at the same time new industrial landscape destruction happen in a even larger and more brutal dimension in the US. Fracking in North Dakota or Wyoming among other states, where indigenous people have to move away from trailer parks because workers in the fracking industry pay more rent than their previous residents. In contrast to 20th century methods for the extraction and processing of natural resources, fracking seems to be a rather short-term work, leaving behind a ghost land with ponds full of poisonous leftovers. What will a post-digital landscape look like? Could this field practice in Mongolia be considered a glimpse of possible future scenarios? Does Land Art become a kind of code hacking? Usually, the place where the human and animal encounter each other in Western culture is in the world of the human modernism. This imaginary space hosts monsters, “figures of the retreat of human, of the failure of the humanist project or the end of the anthropic perspective” (Oxana Timofeeva). The animal and the machine – the two sides of the nonhuman – were both objects and subjects of modernist fears and phobias, but also of desires and hopes. Bees have a long history in philosophy as role models to establish labor division and social order as a sociomorphic role model. Bees produce honey for their own needs and thereby create a self sufficient, closed and organized economic unit. Already Aristotle compared bees to humans as state-creators. In 1919, bees were the subjects of a text by researcher Ferdinand Gerstung, “Socialism in a Bee State” (Der Sozialismus im Bienenstaat), which projected ideals of human social life such as trust, duty and equality onto the insects. Jan Moszumanski takes up this theme with his visit to “the disciplined societies of the bees” in an apiary in the Orkhon Valley. “I can see two basic ways of thinking about land: as potentiality, a mass, ready to being formed, or as a surface below your feet. None of them can be given priority, as long as a living creature is present.” His short film features an interview with the beekeeper, who reflects on her taking care of the honey production process.

ANTHROPOCENE

Recently, the term “Anthropocene” has become widely used in the fields of science, the arts and the media, as a description for a new period of terrestrial development (such as the Holocene). Its particularity consists in the identification of human behavior as the cause of crucial changes on earth and in its surrounding atmospheres (for example, climate change). It was chemist Paul Crutzen who introduced this term. According to Crutzen, the Anthropocene emerged with the invention of the steam engine in the year 1784, which marks the beginning of industrialization. The concept of the Anthropocene, which combines aspects of natural and cultural history, looks at the destructive effect of humans on climate and biological diversity. On the other hand, humans are asked to develop models of action for the future. Land Art Mongolia is situated exactly in the framework of this discourse. Individual projects happen on the hyperlocal level and at the same time draw connections to global issues. This is a way to obtain a cultural understanding through the means of (participatory) observation – macro worlds and nature intersect as two levels which cannot be considered separately. In medical research, imagined monsters of the past became reality – monsters which at the time of their invention were thought of as alternatives to social reality. This is a very pragmatic reality, such as the human-machine (man with a pacemaker). In the laboratory, mice are humanized with stem cells and research is concerned with how whole pig organs can be implanted in the future. Are they among us, the cyborgs envisioned in the 20th century? What do the monsters of the 21st century look like?

EXTINCTION

Today we are confronted with extinction as animals loose their habitat, like the heavily exhausted image of the polar bear, which became an icon of climate change. “Unlike the first five extinctions, the sixth extinction is neither abrupt nor spectacular. No smashing asteroids or giant volcano eruptions. Only the slow, cumulative effects of greenhouse gases, rain forest depletion, and a brand of imperialism that extols the virtues of high mass consumption” (Genese Marie Sodokoff, The Anthropology of Extinction). It is time for an escape route, a dismantling of monsters and cyborgs. And for an all-embracing view of flora and fauna, which also means breaking the tourist frame of sensational landscape imagery. Not a panorama, which can only look like computer-generated imagery, but detailed pictures, recordings, drawings. When walking across the grasslands, one can find plenty of skulls and bones of sheep, cows and goats. Kinez Riza brought with her the national replica of the Homo Floresiensis cranium, found in Flores, Indonesia. She places these in a tableaux vivant photographic construction of an ethnographic diorama on site, including aspects of Mongolian nomadic life and the symbology associated with them. The resulting images represent a romanticised gaze into cultural productions during the sixth mass extinction, combining the discourses of archaeology and natural history whilst creating a satire on the nature of documentary. In a more interactive approach, she placed prints of Pleistocene vertebrates found in Indonesia amongst the grasslands and filmed how grazing goats were forced to interact with them – the intangible notion of extinction represented through prints of extinct grazers. Julieta Aguinaco‘s project is also related to extinction. She created a timeline, a walk scaled to the earth‘s history. By walking backwards, this walk suggests that we rethink Western conceptions of past, present and future. Participants walk through time in big steps, fast forward, but here the body is also involved, bringing it back into the animal-human-land-relationship and questioning scientific certainties about measurements and taxonomies. Borrowing the opposite concept of time from the Aymara, indigenous people in South America, participants of the walk turned their back to the present. In Mongolian culture, horses have the highest status among the five livestock animals. Heini Nieminen‘s installation in the form of a horizontal diagram visualizes the nearly extinct Przewalski’s horse, a wild Mongolian horse, and its relatives based on genetic code.

PERSPECTIVE

Consumer technologies tend to propose very standardized image compositions. With so-called Animal Borne Image Technology, scientists have tried to record the animal-eye perspective. Mostly the tiny cameras get lost while the animal browses through its territory. Some artists experimented with GoPro-Cameras, to document an action – like Julieta Aguinaco projected a time walk onto the green velvet hills which are strikingly perfect for such an experiment since they bear very few traces of civilization. Others used those small wearable cameras to catch first person views of a horseman and his uurga (Mongolian lasso), to have an effect of immersion. If one takes pictures of the Mongolian scenery, the pictures on the camera screen mostly look like images we have seen before – shots taken for travel guides and tourist brochures. It seems nearly impossible to take a picture which has not been published before, which appears different from something seen before. Claire Pentecost takes a different perspective. Her work New Horizon is a place to sit in – a hole dug into the ground. One literally sits below ground level and sees the grassland from the “perspective of the snout.” What Claire celebrates is making her audience feel comfortable with the joys of decentering the human perspective. As the title suggests, it is a new vision for the future. Future and past: the different shades of green which define the Mongolian hills and mountains carry both projections. One could easily imagine extinct species rising up like dinosaurs. Pictures on the first pages of popular geography books often show landscapes like this.
The map by Waiwai and Heath Bunting combines scientific data as well as interviews that they conducted on site with the local population and participants of Land Art Mongolia. Hermione Spriggs uses the method of participatory observation in anthropology to study gestures, human bodies and horses. She is interested in how tools and objects define the space between human and animal, in this particular case the Mongolian lasso called uurga. Equipped with color charts as nonverbal communication starters, Laura Cooper approache a nomadic family to teach her the Mongolian color vocabulary for horses, meanwhile deconstructing a Western standard.

TECHNOLOGY

The question remains, how to recombine technology and nature in a balanced way? Donna Haraway suggests a form of natureculture, an ideal combination of human, animal and technology. As Slavoj Zizek writes in his foreword to Oxana Timofeeva‘s History of Animals: “it is precisely today, when humanity seems on the verge of leaving behind its animality, that the question of animal returns with a vengeance.” Max H. Schneider and Kris Lemsalu created an interactive performance in the woods, referring both to Spinozan materialist philosophy and Mongolian shamanistic practices. Artifacts found in the field, animal costumes and a sound-reactive LED wire make up the ingredients for this time-based work. The land is not literally involved, but of course it always frames whatever haunts it. Here, the land appears as a “stage,” not a modular or modulated mass. On the contrary, Francesco Bertelé‘s project is absolutely low-tech. He is cocooning inside a felt ball – a small capsule with references to architecture and biology (the smallest unit of existence, the cell). By withdrawing into the felt, he also subscribes to the decentering of humans, a process of reverse modernism. Land Art Mongolia suggests leaving behind humans’ traditional position of superiority as actors in the world. Therefore site-specific installations like those of Ganzug Sedbazar, Tamir Purev, Dolgor Ser-Od, Marc Schmitz or Michal Smandek are ephemeral. Just like the nomads, they don‘t leave traces. It is time to rethink how we deal with natural resources, animals and all matter. Reverse modernism means to rethink gigantic infrastructure projects and question the technological “solutions” promoted by old industrial as well as digital companies, without denying technology as such. When watching how animals move in formations across the landscape, like a herd of horses running in one direction or a cow running straight towards the country road – the movement briefly appears as invisible vectors. Vectors which might point to new perspectives.

Vera Tollmann, Curator of the 3rd Land Art Biennial

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