Over lunch one day at the Yale Club of New York, longtime friend and retired movie director Bill Tannen told me that I should take up acting. Not leading parts, mind you, just character roles. I was flattered, but reminded him that I had no thespian ambitions, and even less experience.
“Shut up, Babe,” he shot back. “You’ve been doing standup for years.”
He had a point. Not until later did it dawn on me how right he was. Over the years, I witnessed pedagogy morph into infotainment. As a recovering academic, I began to wonder if we professors had not been working in the sub-basement of the entertainment industry all along. Looking at fine art paintings and sculpture from that perspective cast them in a less flattering light; as upscale decorative accessories for affluent homes and gardens. By comparison, the movie business delivered artistic experiences to anyone everywhere—from ticket holders in darkened theaters, to straphangers gazing into their cellphones. Art-historically speaking, cinema has already eclipsed painting as the signature medium of the 20th century.
Over the course of my lifetime, museums have transformed themselves from rarified temples of culture into infotainment fun zones. Not long ago, a prominent New York art dealer opined to me that the avant-garde had been destroyed by the art market. That was putting it mildly. It seems the 20th-century notion of cutting edge contemporary art has become a dusty hobby horse, in the eternal present of the Society of the Spectacle. What Guy Debord did not foresee, fifty-five years after the publication of his landmark book, was that mass media would contribute to our present environmental crisis, by distracting us from it. In 2005, Bill McKibben asked why artists had not confronted global warming, like the “staggering outpouring of art” created in response to the AIDS crisis. Nearly two decades later, climate change has become a cause celebre for the art world intelligentsia, if not for its moneyed elites.
My first serious attempts at landscape painting occurred during the summer of 1973, as a student at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Apart from struggling to put together a readable picture, and picking bugs out of the paint, landscape painters ran a gauntlet of polemical abstractionists who scorned representation, and seemed oblivious to the wilderness on their doorstep. In hindsight, those students who ventured in the woods set up installation pieces were more closely aligned with my interests. I failed to recognize this at the time because we were then so consumed with issues of style, cults of ego, and critical approval.
Near summer’s end, nature finally gave us all a wakeup call. When handful of students sought relief from genital crab lice, the administration sprang into action. To head off total infestation, all of our mattresses, bedclothes, and laundry, were rounded up, locked in a semi-trailer and fumigated. Those afflicted were given special soap and topical remedies. Only five or six cases were ever confirmed, but we all developed a sympathetic itch. None of us could have imagined that some of our classmates were soon to perish in a mysterious plague that targeted gay men. Unthinkable as that may have been, we face far direr challenges today.
An unspeakable dread arises from deep in my being, as the living earth appears to being mounting a counteroffensive of Biblical proportion against further human intervention. Wildfires scorch the Canadian wilderness, blanketing half the continent with unbreathable air. High concentrations of smoke and other particulate matter contribute to violent rainstorms that inundate farms, towns and cities. From the Iberian coast to the North Sea, Orca pods hunt pleasure boats. Sea lions drive bathers from California beaches. Bear attacks are on the rise. Rising temperatures could soon trigger mass migrations. What remains of humanity might face extinction within a century or two, to perish in a wasteland of its own making.
It’s not as if we had no warnings. In 1864, proto-environmentalist George Perkins Marsh predicted climate change in his landmark book Man and Nature. “Man is everywhere,” he wrote, “a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.” In his 1989 book The End of Nature, Bill McKibben reasoned that as industrial pollutants had forever changed the weather, nature has ceased to exist as a separate realm. Thoreau’s “museum of Divine intentions” had thus become a carnival of human blunders.
In a television commercial aired fifty-three years ago—the same year as the first Earth Day, an indigenous American man paddles a pristine river. Litter floats past his birch bark canoe, which he drags onto a garbage-strewn bank. He comes to a busy freeway. As he watches the traffic in stoic disbelief, the afterbirth of a happy meal lands on his moccasins. Looking back at the camera, he sheds a single tear. This final shot became an instant meme. The “Crying Indian” was played by Italian-American actor born Espera di Corti (Iron Eyes Cody). Ironically, the sponsor—Keep America Beautiful, had been established by a consortium of soft drinks and packaging manufacturers. An icy can of diet soda, pressed to the warm lips of a bikini-clad beauty could sell millions. As roadside litter, it was bad publicity.
LBJ’s Great Society program promoted civil rights, healthcare, consumer protection, environmental protection, education, and the arts. In hindsight, Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautification program may seem like attacking skin cancer with Band-Aids, but it did call attention to the environment. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, FLOTUS 36 observed that,
“‘First, we shape our buildings, and then they shape us.’ The same is true of our highways, our parks, our public buildings, and the environment we create. They shape us.”
The question today is what role can be played by the arts in shaping our environment. There is no single answer, and some of them are quite disturbing. The so-called art world, for example, appears to be working at cross purposes. Wealthy foundations throw money at artists whose works address climate change, while board members of prominent museums reap immense profits from environmental devastation, wreaked by extractive industries. In The New York Times, Zoë Lascaze writes, “By masking luxury consumerism in lofty ideals, the art world offers itself up for satire.”
Even more troubling is a popular belief that the function of art is to entertain people in ways that relocate their priorities to make-believe places, heroes, villains, hopes, and dreams. In Wim Wenders’s 1991 film Until the End of the World, a crackpot scientist {played by Max von Sydow) invents a device that allows his sightless wife (played by Jeanne Moreau) regain her vision. When their son (William Hurt) and the son’s girlfriend (Solveig Dommartin) discover they can use the gadget to replay their dreams, they develop an addiction to their own neuro-feedback. The father takes action by destroying his creation. In hindsight, the German filmregissuer’s foray into science fiction may have been prescient.
The other day, I drove past a hiker, walking alongside a busy road in the Adirondacks. He was staring into his cellphone—oblivious to the wilderness on his right, and the traffic speeding past him to the left. Instagram reels are full of vicarious terrors. Cyclists tumble off cliffs. Skiers are buried in avalanches. Shocking things happen in the real world, but always to somebody else. That is until rogue wildfires melt the Gameboy controllers, gripped in charred hands, or a twister rips the roof off somebody’s man-cave. Even then, many consumers might think it’s just part of the script—like spectators at a Miami art fair who mistook a stabbing for performance art, and the subsequent crime scene as installation art. Not that anybody noticed, but Guy Debord’s eternal present has been here just long enough for us to forget when it arrived.
Whatever distracts us from nature—or what once we called nature—those formerly independent forces are now turning against humanity with a vengeance. Pursuing more sustainable creative practices focused on the environment, social justice, and human dignity might move no hearts and minds right away, but like Lady Bird Johnson’s mild-mannered activism, it could make a difference in the long run. In nature, only destruction is swift. Lightning can split a thousand-year-old tree in an instant. Growth happens slowly, as does decay. Our present predicament did not develop overnight. Nor shall it quickly abate. The road to recovery will be slow. The journey will be long. Much will be lost in the process. Businessmen and politicians; those whose livelihood depends on quick, tangible results seldom look beyond the bottom line or their reelection campaigns. I am coming to believe that that whatever can be done to heal two hundred years of industrially-generated ecological damage will be led by creative professionals, people of faith, and selfless seekers of truth, who can set sustainable examples for others to follow.
So, how could this work? Perhaps the tools we need are already at hand, in practices like transcendental meditation, yoga, leave-no-trace hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, and prayer—anything that deepens our connection to wild spaces, and to our fellow creatures. If we proceed gently, others might slow their pace, begin to notice their surroundings, to discover an abundance of wonders that had been buried under timetables and balance-sheets. To quote John Ruskin,
“Nature is a painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty, if only we have eyes to see them.”
Ruskin knew that it might take a year in the forest before one is truly able to see it. Drawing slows us down. It makes us look closely, in the same way that writing makes us think deeply. 5th-century BCE Athenian artist Agatharchus once bragged how quickly he could finish paintings, to which Zeuxis replied, “’I take a long time.’ For ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of beauty; the expenditure of time allowed to a man’s pains beforehand for the production of a thing is repaid by way of interest with vital force for the preservation when once produced.”
In his essay “The Art of Seeing Things,” naturalist John Burroughs recalls a neighbor lamenting a recent absence of songbirds. During their brief conversation, Burroughs recognized the calls of several species singing nearby. “Power of attention and a mind sensitive to outward objects, in these lies the secret of seeing things,” Burroughs writes. “The thinker puts all his powers of his mind to reflection: the observer puts all the powers of his mind in perception; every faculty is directed outward; the whole mind sees through the eyes and hears through the ears. . . If you are occupied with your own thoughts, you may go through a museum of curiosities and see nothing.” This could also apply to nature— Thoreau’s “museum of Divine intentions.” By shifting our priorities from scoring goals to perfecting practices, the results will take care of themselves. There is something more to consider. Burroughs reminds us that,
“What we love to do, that we do well. Love sharpens the eye, the ear, the touch; it quickens the feet, it steadies the hand, it arms against the wet and the cold. What we love to do, that we do well. To know is not all; it is only half. To love is the other half. . . nothing can take the place of love. Love is the measure of life: only so far as we love do we really live.”
—James Lancel McElhinney © 2023
Selected sources:
John Burroughs. “The Art of Seeing Things.” Leaf and Tendril. 1908
Zoë Lescaze. “How Should Art Reckon with Climate Change?” New York Times. March 25, 2022
Bill McKibben. “What the Warming World Needs is Art, Sweet Art.” Grist. April 22, 2005.
Plutarch’s Life of Pericles. MIT Classics. (Public domain) http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/pericles.html
Now available for purchase: Sketchbook Traveler: New England by James Lancel McElhinney: Have a look inside.
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