What informed your views about Nature? Ansel Adams' photographs? Hour-long programs
on the Discovery Channel? Now, what formed your understanding about how human
beings and Nature can coexist? The Greenpeace website? Yogi and Booboo in Jellystone
Park? Camping trips in the Smokey Mountains? When entering Carol LaFayette's exhibit,
"atta," you should leave your preconceived ideas at the door and prepare
to find yourself both fascinated and repulsed by the biological processes of one
small part of the Ecosystem in southeastern Texas. The exhibit charts Ms. LaFayette's
exploration of how human beings and what we consider to be "Nature"
co-exist, co-habitate, share the world.
The investigation began in the spring of 2000 when Ms. LaFayette bought a tract
of land with a house on it outside of College Station, Texas. The property was
formerly a cattle ranch upon which the fields have begun to return to the local
form of woods: lush post oaks and scrubby wateroaks, a few pecans and a whole
world of understorey. With a slow decline from the road, past a flood-fed pond
and down to a sluggish creek, the land is home to the expected range of fauna,
plus wild boars, the occasional bobcat, a menagerie of insects, one visionary
artist and her dog. Ms. LaFayette's first task was to begin reconstructing the
homestead (a rudimentary wood structure rendered complex and interesting by a
series of additions of various shapes and sizes). Then, she began to explore the
art of living in her chosen environment.
In late twentieth/early twenty-first century America, we often conceive of human
interaction with Nature on a cleanly-defined spectrum: from the untouched Nature
of the National Parks, through the modern pastorals of industrial-scale farming
to suburban sprawl, Nature and human beings have strict roles in each phase. However,
evidence abounds that such a spectrum is limited, if not unrealistic. Falcons
have roosted on urban skyscrapers; we feel the need to extinguish fires in order
to "save" old-growth forests. Bears have added opening coolers to rooting
grubs and catching salmon as skills to procure food. Many in suburbia have had
to fend off raccoons, but in new, non-urban residential areas in western states
mountain lions have had to adjust to the presence of human beings. In short, there
are few if any cases in which humanity is cleanly separated from Nature; more
often than not, we adjust to each other and ecosystems develop in areas and in
ways not previously conceived.
How does Ms. La Fayette's collection of film, video and digital images constitute
an artistic investigation? An artist friend of hers once said (paraphrasing),
"If I had the choice, I'd much rather watch an ant-farm than go look at another
exhibit." Ms. LaFayette explores how watching an ant-farm CAN be art, with
the ants acting as actors and creators, interpreted by the selected media and
composed into experiences to be passed on to the viewer. The land, itself, provides
the canvas upon which the natural processes of the ecosystem -- weather, solar
cycle, flora and fauna -- paint patterns that adjust for the presence of one poetically
introspective, sometimes melancholy but always humorous female human being and
her Australian shepherd. Modern technology allows for records of these evolving
interactions, providing motion-detected film clips or time-elapsed sequences of
biological events or daily and seasonal cycles. This exhibit presents sensory
experiences that Ms. LaFayette carefully collected, selected, composed and adapted
to the methods of display that technology affords.
This is not an exhibit of watercolors about some idyllic Arcadia: oilslicks float
on the yearly floods, and carrion fouls the air. Neither is it a celebration that
exhorts to a rhetorical goal; the viewer will be left not with an answer, but
with a question to be investigated. This exhibit trashes the view of Nature as
a benign entity that will not harm human beings as long as it is carefully cordoned
off and left alone. Rather, we are part of Nature which -- for better or worse
-- adjusts to and accommodates us. As the end of one form leads to life for another,
we are intrigued by events so grotesque as to put us off of our lunch. While one
flooded day passes into the next, the breathtaking beauty of spring in Texas is
evaluated by variations in tone and hue. The life of the artist -- one grocery-shopping,
seminar-leading, committee-dealing woman -- launches from these scenes and returns
to them. One wonders to what extent they have affected her heart, or perhaps reflect
what is happening in her psyche. But one NEVER imagines that Ms. LaFayette is
a clinically detached observer or one who has no sympathy for her subject. In
the end, she is herself her own subject, as the exhibit displays the external
features of her daily life. The Nature on her land has certainly been altered
by her presence, and she has not remained an untouched human being. Whether we
recognize it or not, this is but one example of how we all interact with Nature.
In a world in which human excesses on the highways of Houston affect the polar
icecap, and sandstorms from the Gobi desert dump on New England, we can no longer
believe the myth of idealized separation and limited interaction between humanity
and Nature. As Ms. LaFayette put it, "nature is going on all around you,
and you just have to sit down and observe it." The modern, western dialectic
is neither valid nor tenable. If the Great Chain of Being -- a medieval concept
framed by Franciscan theologians -- is also naive, perhaps it can provide an origin
to which we can return in order to form new conceptions about living on this planet.
"Nature" constantly finds a way to live with human beings, and this
exhibit is a challenge to return to an enchanted, fascinated exploration of that
relationship.