ESSAYS / REVIEWS
ArtsHub, Exhibition review, Heavenly Bodies
2023 This article was published in Vol 62 No 2 of The Journal of Australian Ceramics, (July 2023)
Permission has been given to make it available on this website
© The Australian Ceramics Association (2023)
2022 Ara Dolatian: Mythos of the Island by Nicolas Hausdorf MeMO 2022
2022 Artist Profile - Issue 60
Ara Dolatian’s Heavenly Bodies and Earthly Memories
Francis E. Parker
2023
In 1911, what is now known as one of the most famous artworks in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, 1503, was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris. In 1986, Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman, 1937, was stolen from the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. In 2003, the Mask of Warka, a Sumerian marble face from circa 3100 BCE, sometimes referred to as ‘the Mona Lisa of Mesopotamia’, was stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad.
The curious thing about art theft is that it can often make an artwork better known than before it disappeared. After da Vinci’s painting was discovered to be missing, visitors came to see the empty space where it had been; the loss certainly contributed to the painting, which had been hitherto a work of simply scholarly significance, becoming one of the most recognisable images in Western art. Though fragile, artworks have an aspect of immortality to them. Historical ones have endured already before we encounter them, or their reputations, so we expect that they will remain after us and so are shocked when events conspire to remove them. Their value, both cultural and monetary, ensures their preservation while simultaneously making them vulnerable to theft.
Cultural value had a role in the first of the above thefts. An Italian-born former Louvre employee sought to repatriate a masterwork of the Italian Renaissance. The Picasso was singled out for its high profile and its high price, having been acquired by the NGV for $1.6 million the year before, so that it could be ransomed by the Australian Cultural Terrorists for better arts funding from the Victorian state government. For the Mask of Warka, it was the potential value in the illegal trade in antiquities and the chaos ensuing from the US-led invasion of Iraq that created both opportunity and desperation with thousands of artefacts being looted. For this one, the cultural value trumped market value and a tip-off led to its recovery and return.
Museums are not uniquely the victims of theft, of course. There are countless cultural objects of questionable – or notorious – provenance in museum collections and certain of these institutions are beginning to grapple with repatriation of such objects, either by returning the most sensitive materials or by working with representatives of the cultures to which they belong to keep the objects alive. The comparison of the museum to the mausoleum has often been made but cultural objects can be revived through contact with the world outside. Sometimes it might be a dramatic absence that launches an artwork into the cultural imagination or it might just be through an artist’s practice, reworking and reimagining the particular objects that resonate with them.
In his exhibition Heavenly Bodies, Ara Dolatian draws on the imagery of Mesopotamian archaeological objects, as well as something of the essences of their ancient narratives, while also considering their more recent histories of loss and misplacement from the perspective of his own Chaldean matrilineal lineage. Though it is not visually referenced in this exhibition, the Mask of Warka’s recent history has personal resonance for Dolatian; he has written about its theft and remembers it from childhood visits to the National Museum of Iraq before his family relocated first to Jordan, after the Gulf War and eventually to Australia. The sculpture, named for the location where it was excavated in 1939, is considered to be among the first accurate depictions of a human face and believed to represent Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, war and fertility. Her hair, her jewellery and her eyes have all been lost to time, rendered more poignant by her recent near loss to the Iraqi people.
Dolatian’s ceramic sculptures in Heavenly Bodies invoke Sumerian and Babylonian depictions of animals such as lions, bulls, birds and chimeras such as gryphons. He observes that these animals shifted forms and meanings as they were passed from one civilisation to the next – indeed, Inanna herself also became Ishtar for the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians before possibly influencing the Greek goddess Aphrodite, with all her own reincarnations down the centuries. For Dolatian, this evinces the complex exchanges of materials, images and languages in the ancient world and he notes that the appearance of lapis lazuli in archaeological objects was one of the first signs of commerce. Being a rare instance of blue outside of the sky and coming from the east in the mountains of modern Afghanistan, it was associated with the heavens. For the Sumerians, this blue had the power to repel negative energy, as did eyes, and, as Dolatian points out, Sumerian sculptures often had large eyes to facilitate contact with the heavens. They come together in the evil eye – very familiar in modern culture – and which adorns several of his sculptures.
Dolatian’s sculptures sit comfortably with their malleable historical precents and with his other interests in hybrids and the post-human. As well as the evil eye and the animal features, there are reminiscences in the groupings of works into flanking pairs like the guardians of gates and doorways and the plinths that echo the stepped structure of the Ziggurat of Ur. The cobalt and brilliant synthetic blue glazes are his translation of the ancient lapis lazuli into a contemporary idiom, as if the remembered colour has been rendered more vivid in the mind’s eye. His works are grounded in ancient origins but without being recreations. They hold onto memory, cultural and familial, and mark loss, and the dislocation that comes with permanent departure. Dolatian also embraces experimentation in his work – learning and mastering how to build forms in clay as one step within a much broader sculptural practice – and the freedom of making new interpretations, opening up his recollected museum objects to the heavens.
1 See Ara Dolatian, ‘Moving Between the Past and the Present’, The Journal of Australian Ceramics, vol. 62, no, 2, July 2023.
Francis E. Parker is Curator – Exhibitions at the Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA, Melbourne, where he takes a coordinating role in the artistic program, with highlights including: Reinventing the Wheel: The Readymade Century, 2013; Linda Marrinon: Figure Sculpture 2005-2015, 2015; Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs, 2016; Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy, 2017; Robert Smithson: Time Crystals, 2018; Samson Young: Real Music, 2020; and Renee So: Provenance, 2023.
Artefacts
2021
Exhibition catalogue: Ara Dolatian
Blindside
The collections of the Baghdad Archaeological Museum included precious relics from ancient Mesopotamian, Babylonian and Persian civilisations.
I visited the Museum in my early childhood and teenage years before it was relocated, I was always fascinated by the Artefacts. A time capsule of tools, art, literature, first written laws and mythical creatures. I remember some colours being so vivid despite their age.
The museum was closed to the public since the start of the First Gulf War in 1991.
In 1993 we escaped Baghdad to Amman in Jordan. During our two-year stay one of my new found friends had a father who was an artefacts trader with an office that was built on an ancient Roman burial site. At the time it was used as a site to store large scale Babylonian Artefacts to International buyers and Museums. It was a mixed reaction between the excitement of being able to touch the pieces and not knowing whether the pieces were illegally excavated.
The Museum of Iraq was looted during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq and only some of the stolen artefacts have been returned. With many pieces available online, it’s difficult to determine which pieces were stolen since not all the works were documented or numbered. After the invasion, thousands of other artefacts were taken directly out of the ground at archeological sites. In most cases their whereabouts are unknown.
The work is a tangible visual memory of objects, architectural forms and vessels, my intentions were not to replicate the pieces but draw from them. The ceramic objects are small enough to hold but are not embraceable. Eccentric forms with peculiar colour schemes that resemble functional vessels with pleasing curves and fragile handles inspired by historical decayed architectural sites.
Sites With No Real Name
Exhibition catalogue: By Talia Smith
C3 Contemporary Art Space 2020
My eyes feel thick, swollen.
It is 33 degrees at 2am.
I get up and go outside but the air is just as thick out there. I can taste ash in my mouth and I realise the fires are getting close again. I cannot tell if it is sweat or tears running down my face.
I am just so tired.
Sorry for my late reply.
Apologies.
When I was young there was a tsunami warning, my Mum drove us down to the beach to watch. I remember pressing my face against the window watching the rise of the ocean and being scared and excited. Nothing happened but as we drove away I kept looking out the window just in case.
My ancestors gave back to the land just as much as they took away from it. My other ancestors decimated forests and indigenous people to make way for houses and their way of life.
Sorry to have missed this e-mail.
Once my parents took me to a friend’s house where they had their own telescope, we sat out at night shivering taking turns looking at the moon and the stars. Space scares me as much as the ocean does. The expanse. The depth. The unknown.
I think that maybe the Earth is giving up. It’s had enough now.
My ancestors based progress on how it would benefit a community, now it’s the individual. I wonder if there is a way we can come back from that. Maybe we were always just built to fail, to stumble, to crush, to fold in ourselves, consume everything and everyone until there is nothing left.
Maybe I am just tired.
I’m sorry. It’s late.
Do you think my Grandmother thought of the future of her children and what it could be? Or do you think that maybe she too was just so tired and all she wanted was that last bite of a perfect orange while looking out into her backyard as if she knew it would be the last time.
The scrape of my knee against the concrete leaving imprints of stones and dirt and sand. Every time I move my knee the wound reopens. I guess my Mother was right, I should have watched where I was going.
Sorry.
Site with no real place
C3 Contemporary Art Space 2020
Written by Ara Dolatian
Site with no real place examines the cultural and landscape shifts which have been a major influence on my work’s aesthetic and ideas. In the exhibition the sculptural forms are peculiar spherical objects with a planetary feel; they appear transitory, on the verge of collapse or reform.
"Eurasia was an “uninterrupted landmass stretching from China to the Atlantic”. The theme of the utopia refers to unnatural divisions between the Eastern cultures with their nomadic and spiritual tendencies and the West with its materialistic outlook (1). “Site with no real place” captures a utopian sentiment whilst also a form of pessimism associated with this process of colonial exchange. With the idea of progress having quickly decayed into a perverse ideal that has justified environmental destruction, imperial expansion and human exploitation, it seems appropriate to articulate this notion with forms that are equal parts familiar and unhomely.
The installations represent an imaginative new place where the commodification of biological material, space and technology is visible. The materials I work with
are simultaneously organic and inorganic; the categorisations between the two are denied and blurred as a deliberate ongoing strategy to reflect on multiplicities associated with materiality, culture and gender. (2)
1. Rosenthal, Mark, (2005) Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, The Menill Collection, Houston.
2. Working from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s influential texts, AntiOedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), a number of thinkers in this area conceive of the contemporary subject as ‘multiple’, ‘becoming’ and in a constant state of transformation through its encounters with otherness
‘Narratives- Realties, fictionalising the present and contaminating the fantastical wilderness’
Review by Charlotte Watson
Ara Dolatian’s ‘Narratives-Realities’, now on at Crowther Contemporary, is a sculptural installation that feels calm and clean. With sharp whites and fleshy pinks Narratives-Realities is a new direction for Dolatian, who is most renowned for his sculptures that employ water, plants and terrarium-like systems to comment on social and environmental concerns. While in a similar vein, Narratives-Realities doesn’t have the apocalyptic call to action that often comes with themes surrounding humans, science and nature. Rather, the show pushes those themes from a place of ‘what if’ and into the realm of ‘when’.
Though not his first foray into ceramics, ‘Narratives-Realities’ brings the medium to the forefront and demonstrates Dolatian’s sound aptitude for the material. Earthenware forms, lunar in their crumpled and collapsed state, are placed sparingly around the room on Dolatian’s trademark stilts or bulbous, stylised stands. Coupled with the gallery’s cool blue walls and tiled floor, this new body of work is reminiscent of some futuristic, minimal utopia, that perhaps could have adorned the fictional, architectural interiors of the likes of Superstudio or Archizoom. These ceramic sculptures cross into quasi-functionalism, as they spill, contain or overflow with materials in which nature is either sustained (as with water crystals in Autonomy or Fragment), or stymied (such as the silicone in Fantastical Wilderness).
Also new is Dolatian’s inclusion of photographs. Striking microimagery lends to the sense of otherworldliness, and a nod to his previous installation work. These images sit well against the three-dimensionality of the show, hung above and below standard eye height. The imagery, made from submerged plant matter and glass terrariums, has a planetary feel, and in the context of the show leaves an impression of the kind of ‘landscape’ decor one may have in a future time and place.
This new direction in Dolatian’s work is an interesting and exciting move, suggesting precarious utopias that still contain error or slippage. One wonders if these objects are indicative of some ‘designer’ sustainability, in an inevitably resource-savvy future. Narrative-Realties sees a shift in Dolatian’s work from that of ecosystems which rely on one another, to that of eco-object. With these new works Dolatian suggests a mode of living which, in some future context, will be the commonplace retainer of life.
C.Watson
August 2018
Charlotte Watson is a New Zealand born artist and writer. Her written works include curatorial essays for Five Walls and Tinning Street Projects, as well as short non-fiction and interviews for Niagara Galleries and The Physics Room. She graduated from the University of Canterbury with a BFA in Sculpture in 2011 and has been based in Melbourne since 2012.
Exhibition catalogue: Curated by Charlotte Cornish
Waves
Water is part of an integrated, continuous whole.[1] This is true for the world in which we live and for biological systems. We can’t live without water, and yet there are many troubles that come to the fore when engaging with water as a subject of artistic enquiry. In Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the ChthuluceneDonna J. Haraway outlines a theory about ecological connectivity, arguing for a re-evaluation of our approach to troubled times. Rather than working toward an idealised utopian future or view devastation as too far gone, she suggests that we focus on the uncomfortable present to find solutions: “Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”[2] The curatorial parameters of Waves stems from an interest in Haraway’s proposal. The exhibition presents various artistic interpretations of humanity’s relationship to and reliance on the expansive subject of water.
Clouds of mist permeate from within Ara Dolatian’s interconnected biomorphic sculptures. To control and contain the distribution of water between two systems, Ara has constructed self-perpetuating environments that interlink water from the natural world with industrial processes in a symbiotic relationship. The audience is protected from contaminating the interior self-sufficient environment, yet the interior environment and its function are also visible to us through the translucent plastic form. We can see the porous and borderless mist seeping out of gaps in the translucent forms, and the water transferring from one form to the other through an array of tubes and pumps, powered by electricity. Propped up but sitting precariously on the wooden tripod, their organic form and function appears as if landing within the gallery from another time or world. The connectivity of these environments expresses a system of interdependent processes, between the natural world and industrial worlds, a symbiosis between a living and non-living ecologies. The water flows between the forms, which activate the work, but it would fail to do so if it didn’t rely on electricity to power the pump. In this way, Ara’s work occupies a precarious middle ground between the natural and non-natural worlds. This is a space where there is reliance on industrial processes, but an awareness of the need to build sustainable and mutually beneficial inter-relational systems.
To read the complete essay please visit the Honeymoon Suite website
Exhibition catalogue: Curated by Elyse Goldfinch, September 2017
thing in itself
‘A sculpture that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. It merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a “system” of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real.’ - Hans Haacke, 1968
thing in itself is concerned with the hybridised and symbiotic relationship between human and non-human ecologies. Exploring the poetics of viewing objects within the new geological age, artworks exist within an entangled ecosystem, exploring the mutually dependent web of living and non-living materials. Artists Ara Dolatian, Kath Fries, Hannah Rose Carroll Harris, Zhu Ohmu and Kai Wasikowski employ the aesthetics of nature through complex and embodied encounters with the natural world. This exhibition will unpack anthropogenic processes that have allowed humans to inexorably change the environment around them and to act as a provocation towards the destabilisation of humanist thought.
This exhibition adopts its title from Kant’s theory in which objects in nature exist in a world that sits beyond the rationality, the human mind rendering them intrinsically unknowable. Contemporary philosophies particularly post-humanist theories like Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism have attempted to understand the potentialities within objects – whether living, synthetic, conceptual or otherwise. Likewise, this exhibition rejects an anthropocentric way of thinking about the world but imagines one in which nature and the mind are intimately related. Foregrounding the importance of non-human objects, these artists reject the correlationist dyad of subject/object as artworks adapt, transform and dissipate beyond human intervention.
Artists seeking to expose the economics of power embedded within global catastrophes such as climate change, disrupt our comfortable understanding of the things around us and speculate on the conditions of living in urgent times. European philosopher Santiago Zabala posits that the biggest emergency today is the very absence of a sense of emergency in the hermetic circles of politics, big business and the mainstream media. This is, in part a legacy of the Kantian divide between object and subject which has led to the disembodied language of the global climate crisis.
Ara Dolatian’s practice examines the relationship between contemporary cultural landscapes and natural ecosystems. Gendered Machines resembles a hybridised biological experiment that uses a circulatory system to pass water between two transparent biomorphic vessels. Here, water is an ephemeral and transitory element that flows and dissolves into an incorporeal vapour from one ecosystem to another. This fragile process conjures the visible barriers controlling real and imagined ecologies as the futile act of endlessly transmitting from one place to another whilst imitating the relentless flow of data and energy circulating the earth. Dolatian states, ‘The work has the characteristic of a mechanical metropolis, seen as an imaginative projection of a new place where commodification of biological material, space and technology is visible.’ This work speaks to the failed potential of science fiction and speculates on the utopian future that never arrived. The relationship to the organic world is prefigured by the mediation of the synthetic, sterile plastic, yet not entirely enclosed the mist escapes and evaporates beyond its boundaries.
The artists in thing in itself are concerned with the complexity of material transformations to imagine a nature beyond human understanding. They collapse the boundaries between the organic and synthetic through experiential and sensory manifestations. This exhibition demonstrates that the interdependent relationship between humans and the things they are surrounded by act upon each other - existing in a space of aesthetic awareness. Shifting away from the notion of pure ideas and objective experiences this exhibition unfolds within a realm of interconnected relations as we advance towards a transcendental anthropocentrism.
To read the complete essay please click on the link
Exhibition catalogue: Diego Ramirez - Progress & Passivity - June 2017
The Nightmare of Nathaniel Ward
Progress and Passivity by Ara Dolatian is an exhibition comprised of sculptural terrariums with alien biomorphic forms that speak of mobile places. These objects contain local plants within deformed spheres (unlike spherical terrariums, these are warped and twisted) that are supported by long thin legs. Even though they are fully functional and capable of sustaining plant life for the length of the exhibition, they evoke unnamable shapes – wicked entities that exist somewhere in between a camouflaged insect, a floating island, and a corrupted household object. These uncanny effects are exacerbated in some of the pieces with the use of a misting system and seemingly polluted water, both of which create a worrisome atmosphere by conjuring the otherworldly and the impure. However, Dolatian’s sculptures are also beautiful, as they are shaped by glossy surfaces, a careful execution and uplifting materials (I dare you not to feel good while staring at plants on timber).
When the sculptures are looked at from below, one also notices that the outline of the timber that supports the containers are reminiscent of the geographical delineation of nations, cities or suburbs. With this gesture, Ara Dolatian concretes a fantastical scene, in which the biomorphs appear to be on the verge of departure, seemingly ready to disappear from our gaze and carry their micro-worlds somewhere else. In fact, this act of containing and transporting is intrinsic to the history of terrariums.
The terrarium as we know it was first devised by an amateur botanist from London in the 19th century: Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward. Originally known as the “Wardian Case”, Ward manufactured these containers in response to the pollution that was killing his plants (his house was surrounded by factories). His “discovery” (a nauseating word that evokes the repulsive archetype of an illustrious-white-man enlightening the world with his uncontrollable genius) took place by accident when he sealed an unsuspecting moth with moist soil in a jar and later noticed sprouts growing inside the container. He observed that the moisture condensed on the glass and then returned to the soil, maintaining a continual state of humidity that allowed the vegetation to survive without watering.
This allowed Ward to grow plants in his polluted urban environment, but more broadly, it also solved a colonial issue: how to transport plants during long voyages at sea. In 1833, he successfully shipped British plants to Sydney, and received Australian plants in return. The most interesting aspect of this story being that this is probably how invasive species and noxious weeds landed in your latte-sipping suburb.
In sum, Ara Dolatian’s Progress and Passivity captures the utopian sentiment but also the pessimism associated with this process of colonial exchange. With the idea of progress having quickly decayed into a perverse ideal that has justified environmental destruction, imperial expansion and human exploitation, it seems appropriate to articulate this notion with forms that are equal parts familiar and unhomely. The terrarium catches this sense of passivity, as it is a decorative item that brought fragments of Britain to the home of many Australians at the cost of irreversible environmental damage. Dolatian registers this deterioration of the colonial dream by building terrariums that seem to have mutated into strange shapes during a nightmarish turn.
Hershey, David R. “Doctor Ward's Accidental Terrarium.” The American Biology Teacher, vol. 58, no. 5, 1996, pp. 276–281
Reflection as Ideological Hallucination, 2016
Ara Dolatian
3 June – 24 July at Incinerator Gallery
The body of work “Reflection as Ideological Hallucination” contains a series of micro biospheres containing local biological materials collected from inner-city manmade parks, ponds, wetlands and water sensitive areas that surround the Incinerator Gallery. The biospheres have the morphology of cells and bacteria combined with architecture speculating a hybrid territory and terrain.
Simultaneously the small local habitats and the miniature biospheres function and have the capacity to sustain a certain amount of biological materials. Any disruption can be intrusive and even ecologically destructive.
The apparatus at the gallery space uses technology to keep the water flowing between three systems presented at different heights, one system contains biological materials, the other two act as filtration and oxygenating setup. The apparatus gives the illusion of sufficiency; nevertheless, the biospheres are inadequate and fragile reflecting on the illusions of autonomy and symbolic artificial constructs
The different structures have the characteristics of a metropolis, seen as an imaginative projection of a new place where the commodification of Flora and Fauna is visible. The economic value placed on nature and ecosystems seized by private investors. The landscapes, terrains become inhibited territories, engulfed by visible barriers controlling the flow of biological agents.
We are becoming a geological agent. We have the strength to change the landscape with growing freedom to manipulate the environment, we may call it freedom, but it’s more or less a marginal act driven by economic desire.
Ara Dolatian July 2016
Exhibition catalogue: Kent Wilson - Terrains 2016
Terrains
There are reasons for why we like to say that an idea is planted like a seed, or that concepts germinate in our mind, or that an ideology takes root in a society. The fields of our cultural endeavours are the fertile grounds of natural inclinations. While we extract rocks, liquids and gases from deep within the earth and synthesis these into plastic, chemically-bonded artificial substances, we are also repeating patterns born into our own human DNA through millions of years of cyclical realities and complex patterns of growth and decay. We are but monkeys tinkering with the soil and propelling ourselves through time and space to the rhythmic beat of the seasons, the solar orbit and the collective breath of the planetary atmosphere.
Ara Dolatian is a conjurer of systemic overlay – a pattern player and network knitter. Drawing from a deep knowledge of social configuration and finding his expressive outlet in material propositions, Dolatian cleverly communicates forms of information transfer as both self-sustained enclosed system and as self-generating expansive network. Employing a system aesthetic he makes art that uses the system as a type of medium. Something connects to something else, information or data is transferred via that connection, more connections and relationships are articulated, directing more information and data across the system. Feedback loops are built in to allow information to ‘feed back’ on itself and close in certain flows through the system.
Look closely at the choice of materials and you will notice specificities of indigenous flora, of architectural and domestic products and waste. What you might recognise at first as metaphor, as an ecosystem of natural and artificial components, you’ll come to see as scalable expressive reality in and of itself. After all, you are the one bringing life to the plants with your breath and your heat and your quantumated attention on the experimental subject. You are now networked into this system and sustaining it with your physical being. So too the gallery lights, the gallery ventilation system, the finances Dolatian had to raise to pay the exhibition fee, the photos shared out on the internet, and a plethora of invisible pumps and pipes that hold this artwork together and extend its life beyond the room of its display.
Think of the force of gravity working with the electrical currents in the generation of the water cycle in Dolatian’s Terrains. Then think about where the electricity comes from, down the wires in the street that come from the substation in the next suburb that is fed by coal fired in concrete towers in a provincial valley. Think of evaporation, of carbon dioxide and oxygen transfers between plant and animal. Think of domestic ponds and industrial engineering. This is Dolatian’s gift – a molecular structure carefully composed and delicately balanced on an equilibrium of artistic concern and philosophical contemplation.
We are designed to design. We are designed to care and to nurture. We recognise an affinity for life and we want to try to build and grow. Dolatian’s Terrain provides us with contemplative moments that illuminate the factual presence of life before us and the broader expanse of our own networked realities.
Kent Wilson March 2016
Exhibition catalogue: Natalie Kate Kamber - Convergence & Navigating with uncertainty - 2015
The Wound can be Healed Only by the Spear Which Smote It
The historically and culturally conditioned concept of nature and the relationship between man and nature, in its external and internal dimensions, has become one of the crucial concerns in our modern or late-modern age. Confrontation and mutual enrichment between ecological thinking and the wealth of knowledge we owe to psychoanalysis appear to me to be worth exploring and locating, especially with reference to the relationship between mankind and nature that our technological civilization has rendered increasingly problematic.
A psychoanalytic perspective of ecology elucidates the innate kinship between modern, critical ecological thinking and the assumptions on the nature of the human animal and the ‘drives’ underlying Freudian psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud was very interested in Thomas Hobbes’ analysis of Homo homini lupus, which is a Latin phrase meaning "man is a wolf to [his fellow] man"[1], and refers to what he calls the state of nature, whereby people are believed to have behaved in a way comparably in nature to a wolf, the wolf being an aggressive creature, an animal rather than one whom is civilized. Freud made some analysis of the axiom, locating the wolfishness of humanity within the influence in society of instinctual drives and motivations, these things being kept necessarily in check always within, and for the benefit of a civilized world[2].
Critical ecology engages with the issues posed by a meaningful, ‘sustainable’ design for the relationship between nature and culture; psychoanalysis investigates and engages therapeutically with human self-relations in the field of tension existing between the culture-imprinted and culture-productive self. In applying a psychoanalytic reading to critical ecological thought, my work explores Freud's central concern with the balance or strivings of ‘internal nature’ and the requirements posed by the production of the self via culture and its implications seen in nature.
This work therefore represents the relationship between cultural landscapes and the natural ecosystem. A hybrid ecosystem simultaneously resembles a semi functional apparatus, the model of a utopian city and a biological experiment. It also compares a number of theoretical positions around the use both literally and conceptually of an ‘apparatus’ itself: the Freudian concept of the psychic apparatus (the id, the ego and the superego), with what Slavoj Zizek calls the techno-scientific apparatus[3]. Finally, what I think this work opens up in the end is the possibly that the third apparatus is something different, neither human nor nonhuman but ‘inhuman’.
In the course of history, the accidental relationships between nature and culture have hardened into a dualism. Whatever was wild nature was supposed to be civilized by culture but whatever was culturally molded could not be considered natural. It is through this conceptual antagonism that to this day, we perceive our natural environment. I am reminded here of McKenzie Wark’s post-Marxist account of “shared life,” and his theory that any of its moments amounts to a fetishizing alienation: “Our species-being is lost from shared life when we make a fetish of a particular idea, a particular love, or a particular labour”[4].
As Zizek puts it:
“The power of human culture is not only to build an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as nature, but to produce new “unnatural” natural objects which materialize human knowledge. We do not only “symbolize nature”, we—as it were—denaturalize it from within”[5].
By Natalie Kate Kamber (BLS, MA)
Natalie Kamber completed a MA which examined the politics of pain and victimhood, and the im/possibility of getting over the loss of one’s family, friends and country after war and violence. Her PhD will expand on this, and investigate ‘pain’ in a more complex and comprehensive manner. By using psychoanalytic theory it will examine the pain of loss under Communist Rule in Eastern Europe through a reading of dissident writers and their experience of displacement and exile. It will examine the working-through of subjective/psychic/political trauma, mourning and melancholia through the works of dissident writers Dubravka Ugresic and Herta Muller. It asks whether one can ever bring the couch into the polis? If dissidence only occurs where revolt is facilitated and revolt is engendered, first and foremost, within the realm of subjective interiority. Natalie spent many years working with refugees and asylum seekers who were victims of torture and trauma, and she has spent the past 3 years teaching in political science, sociology, criminology and literary studies at the University of Melbourne. She is also training in Clinical Psychoanalysis with the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis (ACP).
[1] Hobbes, Thomas (1991), Leviathan, edited by Richard Tuck, New York: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Sigmund, Freud (1962), Civilization and Its Discontents, [Ed. and Trans.] James Strachey, New York: Norton.
[3] Zizek, Slavoj (2014), Ecology Against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek onMolecular Red, Blog, Verso Books cited at: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2007-ecology-against-mother-nature-slavoj-zizek-on-molecular-red
[4] Wark, McKenzie (2015), Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropopene, Verso, p. 107.
[5] Zizek, Slavoj (2014), Ecology Against Mother Nature: Slavoj Žižek onMolecular Red, Blog, Verso Books cited at: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2007-ecology-against-mother-nature-slavoj-zizek-on-molecular-red