Landscape architect Anne Spirn emphasizes that the misleading character of the dichotomy implied by the term \u201cnature,\u201d especially when contrasted with the human-made, is hardly new.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Anne Spirn, \u201cThe Authority of Nature: Conflict and Confusion in Landscape Architecture,\u201d in Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century<\/em>, ed. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1997), 249\u200a\u2014\u200a61.<\/span> She reminds us that, in Western culture, nature remains a powerful\u200a\u2014\u200aif fraught\u200a\u2014\u200aidea, an overly simplified abstraction that in many other cultures does not exist and never has. The ways in which a society describes nature and assigns meaning to its phenomena are thus often more telling of that society than they are of the portrayed non-human or natural context. As such, in Spirn\u2019s words, nature is \u201cboth given and constructed\u201d\u2009<\/sup>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Ibid., 251.<\/span> and serves as \u201ca mirror of and for culture.\u201d\u2009<\/sup>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid., 251\u200a\u2014\u200a52.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The age of the Anthropocene, and the ensuing notions of relationality and non-duality, affects not only the construction of the term nature, but also the time frame in which its manifestations are perceived to operate. Cultural theorist Timothy Morton examines phenomena that are so extensively spread out across time and space that they surpass traditional spatiotemporal understandings. Examples include global warming (its symptoms and consequences) and released radioactive substances, such as plutonium. He proposes a new category of objects, which he terms \u201chyperobjects,\u201d to encapsulate these radically extensive and entangled phenomena that are both the logical outcome and incubators of the Anthropocene.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Anthropocene is thus less about the vanishing of nature as such and more about the emergence of a new condition for interpretation and for reconsideration of our very capacity to understand and represent our relationship with what we call nature. In this line of thought, concepts such as the andscape and the hyperobject are useful yet raise questions regarding their own postulated \u201csameness\u201d with the material that they designate. As such, they potentially demarcate a seductive m\u00e9lange in which distinguishing features blend together in an undefined hodgepodge, which could become the canvas for new abstractions and projections. They thus run the risk of becoming abstractions as seductive as the concept of nature itself. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind several conceptual consequences. One of these involves our sense of the spatial and temporal implications of human activity and their consequences for the surrounding environment or landscape when confronted by the reconfigurations of traditionally perceived fault lines between human and non-human that are captured by terms such as the Anthropocene. The following discussion about Landscape Painting <\/em>provides introductory pointers for investigating how art can stimulate reflection on our own changed and changing relationship with nature and landscape as constructs, taking seriously the challenges currently confronting established temporal and spatial categories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Landscape Painting<\/em> can be read as an attempt to come to terms with the idea of human-made nature and the suspension of time in its assessment. Von Bismarck probes the construct of nature, particularly through an examination of its surface in two stereotypically natural settings: desert and jungle. The large photograph, Landscape Painting (Desert)<\/em>, depicts a sunny, upward-tilted view of a rocky outcropping, with various types of cactus and dry brush scattered among the vertically oriented rocks and rubble. The accompanying \u201cmaking-of\u201d video documents six local agricultural workers spray-painting the scenery white, until no trace of colour remains. Then, using acrylic paint, rollers, and brushes, the workers reintroduce the original colours in two steps. First, based on their personal memories of the original colours of the familiar vegetation and geology, they mix the appropriate hues of green and brown pigments into the white paint. Second, they cover the entire white surface in these \u201coriginal\u201d colours. The same process was used for Landscape Painting (Jungle)<\/em>, a close-up photograph of a tropical forest, with many leaves and branches within the proverbial arm\u2019s reach. The artwork can best be described as literally painting \u201con\u201d the landscape. The depicted scene remains unchanged except for its surface: a synthetic (plastic) illustration of the painters\u2019 memories of the appearance of the original, found scenery. Landscape Painting<\/em> merges the represented and the representation, placing them on the same perceptual plane, as it overlays the workers\u2019 ideas of the landscape on the landscape itself. From that moment on, the later photographed frame of landscape will be perceived as these workers perceive the land\u200a\u2014\u200anot \u201cas it was\u201d but as an apparently perfect (re-)construction.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The locus of the Landscape Painting<\/em> performance is tightly controlled. It is restricted to the area in view from the position of the camera, through a particular lens, at a specific focal length. The precise outline defined by von Bismarck relates to a number of decisions: practical considerations regarding access and costs, spatial effect (Romantic distance versus real immersion), and formal aspects (for example, the composition of Desert<\/em> is reminiscent of Romantic nature paintings). Yet the experience of the art pieces is defined by the moment of discovery of the human manipulation of seemingly authentic nature. Jungle and desert are two realms that we generally perceive as relatively wild and unaltered by humans though, as we have seen, the very idea of original, untouched nature is a product of human cultural imagination. The observer usually notices the coat of paint stretching across the entire depicted frame only after having seen the making-of films. In retrospect, the matte, uniform surface of the leaves should have been noted as an indicator of the acrylic treatment, but this tends to be ignored, perhaps because of the observer\u2019s familiarity with contemporary forms of image manipulation. As such, the physical act of painting on the photo-to-be constitutes a manual pre-production of the image, pre-empting digital post-production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Morton writes that the \u201crecognition of being caught in hyperobjects is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and familiar strangeness.\u201d\u2009<\/sup>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Ibid., 55.<\/span> His description of the process of becoming aware of the unfathomable dimensions of hyperobjects is curiously reminiscent of the experience of looking at von Bismarck\u2019s painted landscapes. If the landscape is embodied, it is embodied due to the workings of numerous actors and image-building processes, including work done by the perceiver, who thus plays an intrinsic role in the process. This suggests that there are accretions of interpretive and functional hierarchies, cutting across established binaries such as image and place, observer and observed, and the artist as creator and interlocutor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Negated Time<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The process of re-enacting image production provides foundations for a conflicting sense of temporality, which in fact halts or negates linear temporality. Landscape Painting <\/em>encompasses a concrete, familiar place that is richly infused with memories of physical engagement (agricultural labour in the desert; hunting, gathering, and habitation in the jungle) even prior to this intense and physical task of painting. The dense motif of re-establishing a place\u2019s visual identity from personal memory engages past and future, uniting both in the collective act of painting. The activity of restoring colour can be read as a denial of the older, white coat and thus a cancelling out of the time spent painting everything white. In a way, the workers are hired to undo the visible effect of the first part of their employment\u200a\u2014\u200aby adding, rather than removing, a layer of acrylic paint. This additive process pushes the workers to use their knowledge of the place and their memories to reconstitute the original appearance of the coated or framed site: from memory, the workers actively fill in the missing information until the discoloured scenery returns to its \u201cknown,\u201d visually complete, seemingly natural state. The interaction between the workers and the place of this artwork is thus retrospective as much as it is prospective, as they are working toward the reconstitution of the original coloured state. In the final art object (the photograph of the painted landscape), uninitiated observers will not recognize what they are seeing as a painted landscape, partly because it is too unexpected and partly because any indications will likely be interpreted as image manipulation rather than nature manipulation. If Landscape Painting <\/em>denies the time spent painting, it negates time for the Western non-jungle-dwelling or non-desert-dwelling art observer. Crucially, however, this negation of time is possible only because the depicted landscape was so concrete and so embodied by those painting it, and so abstract and clich\u00e9d for those observing it. If this process had been reversed, if the exhibited piece had been produced for people unfamiliar with an idea of an abstract and fragmented mediated nature, the framed scenery would not have the power to cancel out time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The suspension of time in von Bismarck\u2019s piece highlights a surprising understanding of time in relation to the effect of human activity on the world. Whether this effect is visible in altering landscapes and possibly reversing change, or whether it culminates in concepts such as Morton\u2019s hyperobjects (which, in their full extent, exceed our spatiotemporal imagination, so that we can grasp only their symptoms), it changes the prevailing definition of nature. The Anthropocene, with its more culpable aware\u00adness of natural disasters, associated with the speed and consequences of climate change, has its own implied temporality. Landscape (in art) can serve as a projection plane for the changing understanding of time. Thus, whereas in the Romantic experience of the sublime, stylized natural elements provoke an emotive effect on the onlooker from a certain (artistic) distance, the basic premise of the Anthropocene is that such a division or distance is presently unthinkable. The effect of humans on the natural elements is as physically and temporally prevalent as the effect of natural elements on humans. Unlike landscape paintings of the Romantic period, which are sublimely beautiful yet static and inextricably bound to the limits of our mental faculties, von Bismarck\u2019s piece produces a sense of temporal suspension that works through the processual engagement of intrinsically linked human and non-human actors, thereby alluding to the incomprehensibility of hyperobjects, the immensity and historicity of which run parallel to and far beyond their beholders\u2019 existence. <\/p>\n![\"88_DO03_Koerner-Steiner_Bismarck_Landscape](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO03_Koerner-Steiner_Bismarck_Landscape-Painting-Desert-scaled.jpg\")
Landscape Painting (Desert)<\/em>, 2015, detail.
Photo : courtesy of the artist, Marlborough Contemporary & Alexander Levy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nEmbodied Landscape<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"88_DO03_Koerner-Steiner_Bismarck_Landscape](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO03_Koerner-Steiner_Bismarck_Landscape-Painting-Jungle-2-scaled.jpg\")
Landscape Painting (Jungle)<\/em>, 2015, making of<\/em>
Photo : courtesy of the artist, Marlborough Contemporary & Alexander Levy
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"88_DO03_Koerner-Steiner_Bismarck_Landscape](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO03_Koerner-Steiner_Bismarck_Landscape-Painting-Desert-3-scaled.jpg\")
Landscape Painting (Desert)<\/em>, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist, Marlborough Contemporary & Alexander Levy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"88_DO03_Koerner-Steiner_Bismarck_Landscape](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/88_DO03_Koerner-Steiner_Bismarck_Landscape-Painting-Desert2-2.jpg\")
Landscape Painting (Desert)<\/em>, 2015, video still.
Photo : courtesy of the artist, Marlborough Contemporary & Alexander Levy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n