Marina Zurkow’s Elixir videos are wonderful, as is her Renatured blog. (Thanks to Tim for posting about her work.)
There is something sad and elemental about them, in their depiction of the self-containedness of our worlds and their ultimate vulnerability in the face of the chaos beyond. At the same time, the title suggests an alchemical remedy of sorts. Is this the elixir (of self-awareness) that will heal the rift between us and the cosmos, the child-like Aeon about to be born into the storm, or is it just another placebo, the child’s toy of Heidegger’s account of the Heraclitean Aion (which, after all, is as good as things get in this part of the universe)?
Other things they remind me of:
- Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which you can watch online for free — in fact, all of his films are there (which is amazing; go see them)
- the tragic-absurdist post-apocalyptic eco-restoration performance photography (!) of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison
- the “Fripulia” space-pod structures of Ukrainian performance/installation artist Fedir Tetianych (I can’t find any images of the things I’m looking for online, but I have a video interview I shot with him in 1990 which I may digitize and upload at some point)
- Jakob von Uexküll’s umwelten, which, again, are about the limit of our ability to step out of our own semiotic worlds — correlationism all the way down, as it were (in which case, is the storm raging outside the mathematical chaosmos Meillassoux would like us to access without access? is it possible? P-R theory says no…)
- and a lifetime’s worth of Hollywood visions of the eco-apocalypse.
Ecocritics and ecopsychologists, interpret away.
Crowley’s Aeon (Judgment, in other Tarot decks), the “crowned and conquering child, who dieth not, nor is reborn, but goeth radiant ever upon His Way.”
“And it is night; and because the night is the whole night of space, and not the partial night of earth, there is no thought of dawn. For the light of the Sun maketh illusion, blinding man’s eyes to the glory of the stars. And unless he be in the shadow of the earth, he cannot see the stars. So, also, unless he be hidden from the light of life, he cannot behold Nuit. Here, then, do I abide in unalterable midnight, utterly at peace.
“I have forgotten where I am, and who I am. I am hanging in nothing.”
Human fragility afloat on an ocean of chaos—I now see why it reminds you of Solaris. Beautiful analogy Adrian.
Hey don’t Zurkow’s decanters look a little bit like Buddhas on lotuses? See
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/03/karma-marmite.html
Yes, indeed, poised and hovering over the ocean of samsara… I’ve sometimes wondered what a non-Buddhist Buddha would look like. (They are, of course, all around, and isn’t the best art exactly that – the face of buddha-hood/mind/heart/nature?) Love your follow-up post on that.
By the way, if there’s an ecology without nature, is there a buddha-nature without nature?
cheers 😉
Very thought provoking article.
I came across this quite bu accident – imagine my surprise! Thanks for this wealth of kin you mention. I was actually google-izing for musings on the relationship bet Uexkull’s Umwelts and Latour’s agents. If Latour believes agents vie to make networks with significance (critical mass, albeit temporary), could done say — Uexkull’s symphonic holism aside — that an umwelt seems whole as long as it works, and could be taken apart at any given moment of network failure?
A piece of background on the Elixirs: when I started the series, I thought I could keep inside and outside apart. My ‘program’ was the question of how to render visual the irony that this apartness was an illusion. Hundreds of layers of animated weather bits later, the pieces found their own way to permeate that transparent fragile membrane.
Hi Marina,
Thanks for that background about your Elixirs. I could stare at that piece for a long time contemplating membraneness, form, and the rhythmic flows of inside and outside that are gathered in and around that form.
I’ve always thought that von Uexkull and Latour complement each other without exactly meeting. Latour provides a description from the outside of how networks take on forms; von Uexkull provides one from the inside of what a world looks like to one of the actants within a network. The deer-tick is poised to connect with a passing deer so as to create a new warm-body-blood-network. Its world of poisedness is the Uexkullian umwelt, while the network, once created, is the Latourian world. Somewhere on the cusp of the two is the relational, Whiteheadian/Deleuzian meeting place itself: the subjective arising in response to the star of an actual deer appearing on the horizon of the tick’s Umwelt. The moment of becoming.
Cheers,
Adrian
Crowley’s Aeon and actually the deck itself are beautiful pieces of art. I enjoyed this article.