Nunc et humanitatis saepius consequat ea. Facilisis parum nisl etiam diam qui. Ut aliquip augue ullamcorper quis odio. Nisl dolore typi dolor option nulla. Eros qui nulla qui id in. Legunt claritatem congue liber claram feugait. Per quarta putamus accumsan aliquam te. Insitam dolor vero seacula imperdiet elit. Erat volutpat typi formas doming tempor. Ut laoreet vulputate sollemnes euismod claram. Eleifend at consequat facit etiam quinta. Molestie legentis quod usus anteposuerit diam. Modo te littera euismod gothica et. Gothica futurum nobis feugiat in cum. Quinta suscipit in legere et feugiat.
Dolore saepius autem ut nibh seacula. Lobortis exerci iusto mazim nobis nam. Dolore eleifend ut mazim consequat quinta. Iis lectorum lius tincidunt commodo nonummy. Magna nunc exerci sit lorem zzril. Humanitatis ea accumsan congue qui nobis. Minim legunt putamus praesent putamus ad. Sit et tincidunt consequat modo dolor. Formas nonummy ipsum vero aliquip mirum. Quam notare qui et nobis seacula.
Usus ea quod littera consequat facer. Te molestie sollemnes facit nihil nobis. Dolore qui litterarum quod quinta est. Eleifend qui litterarum ut putamus sollemnes. Anteposuerit lorem molestie facilisi
formas blandit. Eleifend qui litterarum ut putamus sollemnesqui. Nunc et humanitatis saepius consequat ea. Facilisis parum nisl etiam diam qui. Ut aliquip augue ullamcorper quis odio. Nisl dolore typi dolor option nulla. Eros qui nulla qui id in. Legunt claritatem congue liber claram feugait. Per quarta putamus accumsan aliquam te. Insitam dolor vero seacula imperdiet elit. Erat volutpat typi formas doming tempor. Ut laoreet vulputate sollemnes euismod claram. Eleifend at consequat facit etiam quinta. Molestie legentis quod usus anteposuerit diam. Modo te littera euismod gothica et. Gothica futurum nobis feugiat in cum. Quinta suscipit in legere et feugiat.
Dolore saepius autem ut nibh seacula. Lobortis exerci iusto mazim nobis nam. Dolore eleifend ut mazim consequat quinta. Iis lectorum lius tincidunt commodo nonummy. Magna nunc exerci sit lorem zzril. Humanitatis ea accumsan congue qui nobis. Minim legunt putamus praesent putamus ad. Sit et tincidunt consequat modo dolor. Formas nonummy ipsum vero aliquip mirum. Quam notare qui et nobis seacula.
"Where the glacier meets the sky, the land ceases to be earthly, and the earth becomes one with the heavens; no sorrows live there any more, and therefore joy is not necessary; beauty alone reigns there, beyond all demands."
Haldor Laxness, World Light
Future Perfect entails a photographic sweep of three peculiarly evocative and troubling sites where human intervention and land use are exploring the quality and state of futurity. A Las Vegas desert preserve provides a vision for a sustainable future, Biosphere 2's exploration of controlled ecosystems and space colonization in Oracle, Arizona, and the geothermal landscapes and steam portraits created in Iceland, are worlds apart from each other, but become perfect foils to imagine what the future might look, illuminating the present moment and the environmental choices we have yet to make.
The photographs establish unexpected but compelling resonances between these landscapes to distill and display our hopes, perceptions and misunderstandings of nature, and suggest both the potential and pitfalls of our future on earth. I describe how central nature can be to our lives, and how hopeful and confused we may be in using,
recreating, and changing nature. While I envision these areas as indications of our future, they are also touchingly poignant examinations of our current intentions, our limitations, our own fragility and ultimately human nature.
At once extreme and provocative, the images bring together aesthetic and scientific impulses to embrace a wide range of contemporary concerns—including the relationships between landscape and ideology, human response and responsibility to natural environments, My work invites and provokes opportunities for reflection and analysis, and poetically moves from clear, precise imaging to layers of steam, ambiguity and possibility while examining the global interconnectedness of such strong, yet ultimately fragile and threatened landscapes.
What makes us human? All kinds of nonhumans:
DNA. Skin. Gut bacteria.
Common ancestors. Fish swim bladders (which gave us lungs). Bacteria.
Hospitals. Roads. Ambulances.
Humanities classes. Art. Philosophy.
A flaw in cognition that makes it tremendously arduous to think on scales necessary for ecological action.
A flaw in logic stemming from the origins of agriculture, a flaw that has now gone viral.
Viruses and antiviral agents.
The war of escalation between bacteria and antibiotics.
Cattle. Factories. Cats who eat the rats who eat the corn that is farmed so as to exclude
and eliminate lifeforms now described as pests.
Thoughts. Sentences. Images. Oxygen.
Anxiety. Denial. Fragility. Aggression.
Mindfulness. Awareness. Ignorance. Total dumbass stupidity. Bull in a china shopness.
Predicting futures.
Realizing that futurality as such cannot be predicted. The future perfect, which escapes the lockdown of presence and the present.
Or a horrifying future of perfected anti-life logistics.
Living in the biosphere. Living in Biosphere 2: well maybe that's just Natal. I wish I had.
The beauty and whimsicality of images of frogs and turtles, crowding space impossibly, with laughter. Like a child's textbook.
Frighteningly soft, a weird mist descending over a human of unidentifiable race, gender or class in a hazmat suit. Or is it just a hazmat suit? Or is it not a human at all?
As if the human, enveloped in its orange security blanket, were also disappearing behind its manufactured smoke screen.
As if an unnatural Nature, itself a human product, were wrapping the human in its obliterating miasma.
Veils of ignorance. For how long do they descend?
That's the trouble with nonhumans. They are tricksters, we can never be sure what they are or what they are up to. Yet they are so exquisitely themselves.
Liquid pouring like tentacles.
Springs breaking through a desert floor for 15 000 years. Half as long as all of known human history so far.
And humans. They make us human.
Children, painting.
An amortized Mona Lisa.
An automobile overwhemed by fossil fuels.
Wait a second—is that human, or nonhuman?
The boundary is neither thin nor rigid. Natal makes us know that. How things slip into an uncanny valley between categories.
Imagination. Is it human? Why would we want it to be? Is imagination unthought thought from the future? Natal seems to think so.
Knowing about humans, like humanists (we hope).
Knowing that there are future people and knowing that we must now act with regard to them. What a mockery of utilitarian ethics. Thank heavens, or OMG?
Fear. Shame. Those two often used and completely useless ecological goads.
The attempt to bring imagination up to speed with what we know.
To make some strong antibodies against what attacks us?
But there is always the risk that art will bring other kinds of plague. And that to control these will involve violence.
Think of a horrible future in which we know that we shouldn't exacerbate our autoimmune disorders—like making more lifeforms extinct because we want civilization, with "cufflinks" and "proper roads where you can put your foot down"1 Yet in that future, we have allergies to art, and all kinds of antiseptics to wipe it out. A future of "proper" art.
Art is a pest, not just an antibody. And even antibodies can kill their host.
Depression is an allergy of the intellect to the poor host being that eventually kills it.
Ecological awareness begins with depression. Feeling surrounded and permeated by beings I can't peel off me, of being caught in the headlights of my knowledge and my aggression.
Those who think this way are terrible pests. We bring a plague called ecological awareness.
That's not because we are out to destroy. We are just having a bad allergic reaction to the present. Which has
been going on for 10 000 years.
Brian Eno wanted the future to be like perfume. We want it to be like homoeopathic medicine.
We want to accept and tolerate the others who make up the human, the otherness installed at the very heart of the human, like a thought or an antibody, or enjoyment. And more than tolerate.
Depression appreciated, opening to longing and joy.
We want to live this sentence, written by Adorno and channeled by Judy Natal, who will have come from the future (perfect) to say
Progress means: humanity emerges from its spellbound state no longer under the spell of progress as well, itself
nature, by becoming aware of its own indigenousness to nature and by halting the mastery over nature through which nature continues its mastery.2
The difficulty of understanding this sentence: it is so delicate. Truly understanding it means caring about sentences, which means caring about thoughts. Sentences and thoughts are nonhumans who live in your head and on your screen. Delicate: if you miss a phrase, or don't see how the whole thing flows together as one
thought, you have destroyed it. Delicate: if you don't see how the single thought is made of all kinds of parts that don't add up to it, just like your body, just like an ecosystem, you have destroyed it.
We have realized, in the last ten years or so, that nonhumans are and always were already part of social space. And in turn, we have realized that this means social space was never truly or exclusively human.
And this means that political systems that don't realize this are violent. And not only to nonhumans, since humans are (made of) nonhumans.
Politics only means understanding this Adorno sentence, more or less. Each political form—each cluster of humans and nonhumans sharing one another—is an attempt to work through this sentence. In an ecological future, we will have lived this sentence without destroying it.
The works of Judy Natal understand it.
1. Tom Stoppard, Darkside: A Play for Radio Incorporating
The Dark Side of the Moon (Parlophone, 2013).
2. Theodor Adorno, “Progress,” The Philosophical Forum
15.1–2 (Fall–Winter 1983–1984), 55–70 (61).
Judy Natal's photographs contemplate how human nature defines and reflects alterations of natural landscapes. By 2006, her focus had progressively shifted toward an examination and documentation of landscapes that have been altered by scientists, engineers, designers, and Utopians. Her work continues to describe important aspects of our contemporary world and contribute significant observations about mankind's ideas of nature, our effect on our landscapes, and what the future might hold for us.
Judy Natal is a Chicago-based artist, Professor of Photography, and Co-coordinator of the Graduate Program at Columbia College. She is the author of EarthWords (Light Work, 2004), and Neon Boneyard Las Vegas A-Z (Center for American Places, 2006). Her photographs are in the permanent public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, and the Museum of Art, São Paulo, among
others. Her work has been exhibited at: Projects International, Jack Hanley Gallery, and Photograph Gallery, in New York City; the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City; the Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington, D.C., and the São Paulo Biennial.
She has received numerous grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Travel Grant, Illinois Arts Council Photography Fellowships, Polaroid Grants and New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowships. Natal has also been awarded numerous artist residencies nationally and internationally, most recently in Iceland and the Biosphere 2 for her current work Future Perfect 2040 • 2030 • 2020 • 2010. In 2012, Future Perfect was established as a permanent Archive at the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada.
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, forthcoming), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory (Chicago, forthcoming), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), seven other books and 120 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design and food.
He blogs regularly at ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.
Circuit Gallery specializes in works by emerging and established contemporary artists with an emphasis on photographic, digital and print-based works on paper. Circuit Gallery is the shared vision and collaborative product of Susana Reisman and Claire Sykes.
Reception: Thursday, September 11, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Artist's Talk: Saturday, September 13, 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Circuit Gallery @ Prefix ICA
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 124
Toronto, ON, M6R 2G5
Catalogue essay: Timothy Morton
Publication Design + Programming: Lucas Mulder
© 2014, Circuit Gallery, Toronto
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
copied without permission in writing from Circuit Gallery.