Jon Feinstein describes his series Small Signs as as “a visual interpretation of the ominous intersections between man-made objects and our natural landscape.” It’s remarkable how much this very basic theme comes up in such different sorts of work throughout art history; it is such a basic concept and cliché. Nevertheless, it has been millennia since civilization has built itself up within the cycle of light and shadow and growth and rot. These conflicts are as relevant and contemporary as they are well worn.
I generally feel rather challenged by the artistic notion of the “landscape” — off the top of my head it seems so dull, the stuff of over-the-mantle, mountain-forest-and-trickling-stream painting. That which is described as “landscape” suggests to me a cookie-cutter and benign collection of hills and trees and rocks. There’s no sense of time, tragedy, or entropic anxiety in this; there’s no sense of the regrettable beaten path, no conflict.
Thinking upon past art history classes, the piece of “traditional” landscape that always stuck with me was The Ox-bow by Thomas Cole. I loved how much weirder it seemed than the typical river running through the woods, and particularly loved the term for this anomalous geological formation.
Upon closer look, it turns out that this classic piece, while singing Manifest Destiny in my head, is also in the business of describing and commenting upon the conflict of civilization and the natural landscape. The folks at Wikipedia write: “In returning to painting landscapes, Cole was faced with the dichotomy of the untamed wilderness and land cultivated by man. While other painters of the Hudson River School would merge the two peacefully, Cole did not shy away from portraying the two as opposites and showing how the cultivation would destroy the natural wilderness, and as a result never meet in the painting.”
What follows are several of Feinstein’s Small Signs, sequenced amongst the five-part series Thomas Cole was arduously in the midst of creating when he took a break to paint The Ox-bow. Cole’s series The Course of Empire is a fairly over-the-top and moralizing allegory of mankind’s insatiability and nature’s inevitable restoration of balance when balance goes off-kilter. Feinstein’s work is so subtle in contrast, and certainly not laid out in such a narrative arc; yet, in these works I find thought-provoking formal and thematic parallels.
I think back and remember that this nature vs. man-made dichotomy has made its way through my own artistic concerns, then disappeared, and recurred again, like Cole’s mossy, mountaintop plant-growth. I’m not entirely sure where this is all going.