Being in, on, and of place, by Lisa Le Feuvre, 2023
Mirage is an artwork that celebrates the power of perception and place. Created by artist Katie Paterson and the architecture studio Zeller & Moye, this sculpture is simultaneously a singular and a multiple landscape that, with generous grace, offers an invitation to pause, to think, and to be in place. Mirage is formed of desert sand collected from all over the world. It is a gathering of transnational deserts, a collection of geological times, a pluriverse. Sand is a material that is everywhere – it can be found in the corner of shoes, at the edge of the sea, in industry, architecture, silicon chips, playgrounds, and glass. It is everywhere in art too, both materially and metaphorically. It is in painting, in photography, in film, in sculpture, in Land Art.
Landscape is first shaped by geological history, and secondly by human history. We human beings occupy and mark the surface of the Earth and the surrounding atmosphere with our activities. We claim to know nature through our invented ideas of ‘landscape’ and, as we fear we are losing that very nature, we form nostalgic stand-ins that have little to do with the facts of nature. Sometimes we even seem to forget that we are a part of nature, ignoring the imperatives of reciprocal existence.In the realm of the arts, centuries ago, the idea of landscape was created – a representational protocol making nature controllable, picturesque, distant, and mobile.
An important break to this landscape-fiction came in the late 1960s as Land Art came in to being, developing from the first wave of conceptual art and expanding the possibilities of sculpture. Artists such as Beverly Buchanan, Nancy Holt, Ana Mendieta, Fina Miralles, and Robert Smithson turned their attention to the materiality of landscape, directly working with the matter and material of our planet. For more than two decades, Paterson has addressed these legacies with an erudite and critical sensibility, forming a Land Art for this version of the present. Land Art is a complex and contested art historical term. Zeller & Moye create architecture that breathes with its environment. The ground we stand on is a site of deep-rooted power imbalances between earth-beings, a situation that the artist and architects are acutely sensitive to. Across their powerful practices, they consistently observe, paying attention to what is, amplifying the network of relations on, above, and below this rotating sphere that we inhabit.
Sand is a fragment of landscape, a trace, and evidence of entropic dissolution. It has its own beginnings and biographies that are as varied as the land from which it is formed. It comes from rock, shells, minerals, fossils; from remains of volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, tectonic plate movements, weather events, desiccated mountains. Sand is multitude in its form and use – after water it is the most-consumed natural resource on the planet. When weathered by water, the shape of each grain of sand is angular. When weathered by desert wind, it is round and soft, individuated; its shape useless for the composition of concrete – one of the most prolific industrial uses of sand. Desert sand is resistant, and it holds on to its agency, working in concert with the wind. Desert winds endlessly relocate and deposit sand, moving it like a gas, like an unleashed spirit, ephemeral and never still. Desert sand embodies relational ways of being: it is multitude, relative, insubordinate; it is the result of weathering, and it is an active agent of entropy.
Deserts are the ultimate shifting landscapes, they are in constant change and transformation, crossing continents and borders. A grain of sand is an entire topography, and it can quickly accumulate to form dunes that, to vision, seem infinite. Deserts are locations teeming with life and histories, they are places where scale is subverted, yet these expanses of sand are so often misrepresented as empty projection screens for imagined futures and pasts; sites for movies, novels, Land Art, military operations, and mythmaking. Sand too is replete with symbolism – it finds its way into aphorisms and origin stories, superstitions, and belief structures. Every grain of desert sand has a story and has a place, it is a fragment that collapses the past, present and the future into each other. A single grain of sand is a nomad, it comes from place, it leaves place, it is rooted in its relationship with everything surrounding it, and it brings together the immense and the intimate. Around a billion sand grains are born around the world every second; trillions of sand grains are on the move at every moment. Sand is always simultaneously here and elsewhere; moving from one place to then create another. This flow is reciprocal, circular, never unidirectional. Sand knows no borders; it is a material always in process.
The sand Paterson and Zeller & Moye have chosen has been subjected to alchemical processes to become glass, shaped into more than four hundred solid columns – one of the most basic architectural forms – gathered into an undulating wave seeming to defy gravity. When pressed into function, glass is a material that modernist architects and designers projected the future through, deploying its ability to draw light into space when transparent and to reflect with no shadow when opaque. Here, though, each element has been handcrafted in celebration of tactility and presence. In Mirage the glass simply is: it sits in its slow liquid form – so slow that no person could ever see it change in a lifetime – between the earth and the sky on its own terms, confidently of and on the surface of our planet. It is in place and made of many places. It is subject to gravity and revealed in light. These verticals are almost, but not quite, touching; each a different color, the hue dependent on the material properties of the sand. The grains from the Thar Desert of Gujarat and White Sands in New Mexico are white; from the Antarctic Polar Desert grey; from Israel’s Negev Desert and Australia’s Great Victoria Desert orange; from Iceland’s Sprengisandur Desert black.
Mirage is something magical, something imponderable. It moves between the visible and the invisible, while enduing in a constant tactile form. It pays attention to the how and the what of perception; it insists on a situated understanding of being in the world. To be situated is both to understand the time, place, context of being in the world and to comprehend such situations are plural, not universal.
In 1971, a short book by Rudolf Arnheim titled Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order, addressed relationships between art and entropy – a term taken from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy slipped into the vernacular during the 1950s, as fears of energy depletion became a mainstream concern, and it is an idea that became central to the formation of the new ‘landscape art’. Arnheim opens his discussion stating: “order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand. Arrangements such as the layout of a city or a building, a set of tools, a display of merchandise, the verbal exposition of facts or ideas, or a painting or piece of music are called orderly when an observer or listener can grasp their overall structure and the ramification of the structure in some detail. Order makes it possible to focus on what is alike and what is different, what belongs together and what is segregated”. Order makes sense; it enables assumptions to be made about what can and cannot be perceived, opens a perceptual choice, and suggests that a tendency to seek balance is fundamental to human, or indeed living, operations. Order is generally seen as something to praise: an indicator of good management, efficiency, and care over scarce resources. A desire for order is indicative of a concern with both perception of things and things themselves.
Entropy is the measure of the dispersal of energy in a system that indicates tendencies to and away from equilibrium. In 1973 Robert Smithson, a foundational artist for Land Art, declared in an interview with Alison Sky: “On the whole I would say that entropy contradicts the usual notion of a mechanistic world view. In other words, it’s a condition that is irreversible, it’s a condition that’s moving towards a gradual equilibrium in many ways. Perhaps a nice succinct definition of entropy is Humpty Dumpty. Like Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again”. Smithson was an artist who prized the power of sand for its ubiquitous, fragmentary, and scale-shifting qualities. In 1966 he was invited to be an artist consultant on the development of Dallas Fort Worth airport, and with this project he developed a sense of the possibilities of an expanded notion of large-scale sculpture, one that would later be defined by art historians as Land Art, and of the power of artistic collaborations with industry.
Smithson had a particular understanding of ecological thinking. For him, turning the clock back to reverse the ravages of industry was a naïve myth, instead he believed a productive environmental approach was to show the human impact on the world. Like Paterson, he was an observer; like Zeller & Moye he worked in concert with what was there already. In 1967, Smithson encountered a sandbox in Passaic, a now densely populated New Jersey, and described it as a “vast deposit of bones and stones pulverized into dust. Every grain of sand was a dead metaphor that equaled timelessness, and to decipher such metaphors would take one through the false mirror of eternity”. In A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, a visual essay on a field trip to the New Jersey location where he was born, Smithson refers to this sandbox as a ‘monument’. He singles out bridges, pumping derricks, and pipes, along with the sandbox, as memory holders, as shrines to industrial progress and entropy.
Through an image of this sandbox monument he took with his Kodak Instamatic 400 – the square frame fixing time and showing an unremarkable playground empty of play – he asks his reader to imagine this granular landscape in a before-time, to think about its contents carefully divided into pristine halves of white sand (that would, surely, be either gypsum or crushed coral) and black sand (basalt, most likely). He then asks, in what he calls a “jejune experiment,” us to imagine a child running “hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be the restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy”.
Mirage pays attention to such concerns, re-engaging discussions of entropy with a contemporary urgency. Forms of growth and bursts of energy are at the heart of Paterson’s artistic practice. She harnesses scientific processes to create artworks that are proposals for thought, investigating how the rules of entropy impact on process, event, and perception of space. She looks to the imponderables of time and space, concepts we try to understand through the vagaries of language. An imponderable is something beyond comprehension; descriptive terms can only harness such slippery concepts for a moment.
Paterson looks to the stars, the seas, the earth and, with an ethical generosity, invites consideration of how we might attempt to understand these limits. Zeller & Moye create an architecture that steps aside from imposition, moving instead to form a reciprocal dialogue with place and perception. Mirage is a reminder that art matters. An art that matters makes ideas and questions material by thinking with the difficulties of being in the world. An art that matters is an art that anticipates what is to come, that harnesses burgeoning ideas still to be settled into language. An artist’s task is to add ideas into the world that extend and confound what is thought to be known, repurposing assumptions, colliding systems of understanding and proposing models of perception that extend thought. An architect’s task is to consider how adding something to the world can be an action that is formed by thinking with others, and sustained into the future with that very value. Accumulation of knowledge is an endless and immeasurable process. Art enhances what exists by going beyond what exists and by intensifying what exists. The purpose of art is not to provide beautiful relief from an unfathomable world; rather it is to address paradoxes and uncertainties, to make the world yet more complicated. Art can create a force to raise questions and open thought. An art that matters does not create the future, rather it vibrates with what is already tingling in the nerve endings. Mirage matters.