Visitors to the Fruitlands Museum Art Gallery will find the current photography exhibits very different from the centennial exhibit of last fall and winter. Where the latter looked to the past, this exhibit looks at the contemporary world and implies the future. Seemingly, Edward Burtynsky’s “The Industrial Sublime” and Ben Brody’s “Afghanistan/Endgame” have little to do with the themes and values of the museum, yet curator Mike Volmar has chosen these two artists precisely because of their connection to the ideals expressed in Fruitlands’ permanent collections.
Sgt. Oscar Cuellar talks with an Afghan boy. (Photo by Ben Brody))
A common theme among the four cultures represented in those collections—transcendentalists, Shakers, Native Americans, and Hudson River School landscape artists—is their connection to the land, their sense of humanity’s oneness with the earth, and their responsibility to respect and protect it, not to ravage it. Photographers Burtynsky and Brody are expressing the same values in their work, depicting through artistic confrontation and irony what the earlier communities expressed in their painting, writing, and lifestyle.
Nineteenth-century transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, who feared the increasing industrialization of his world and withdrew to the Fruitlands farmhouse to try to live a simple life in harmony with nature and be a model for society, would find his worst nightmare embodied in Canadian photographer Burtynsky’s work. Large, in-your-face pictures show the massive scale of the impact of manufacturing, mining, and consumption on the global landscape. The exhibit is aptly named “The Industrial Sublime”—the photos embody a certain irony in that they are at once both mesmerizing and repulsive as they confront us with the question of whether we are paying too high a price for “progress.”
From Shanghai to Breezewood, Penn.
Directly across from the entrance to the large gallery is a photo of a vast expanse of marshland, in the foreground of which is splayed what looks like lava or a giant lacework of orange and red seaweed. But it’s not a natural thing; it’s waste from nickel manufacturing, the vivid color coming from some chemical used in the process.
The south wall is dominated by three cityscapes, two of which are in Shanghai. In one, a dense mass of skyscrapers stretches back as far as one can see. Called “Urban renewal,” this may look like progress until one sees that the high-rises have been built at the destruction of older housing, rows of two- and three-story homes. A few trees remain around some of the old housing yet to be razed. “Renewal” rings with irony.
Another scene from Shanghai is of a highway interchange, a branch of which leads to a bridge—a seemingly expedient structure. But it looks almost like an amusement park ride, the traffic going round and round in seemingly endless circles, all that steel and concrete blocking out the view of the river behind it.
Next is “Breezewood, Pennsylvania,” where an elevated angle lets the camera show a view we can’t normally see: no fewer than five Exxon signs, one of them blotting out trees in the background, along with highway markers and signs for McDonald’s, Subway, and various other eateries and souvenir shops. Burtynsky has stated that this picture shows “the main basis of our modern industrial world”—the automobile. While his statement has a neutral tone, the photo suggests that traffic congestion, abundance of signs, and density of gas stations have been a negative result of this “main basis,” and that the name Breezewood is now a misnomer.
Pictures of mines in Australia and Canada show huge holes in the earth and the elaborate passageways humans have created to extract the resources. In visual irony, “Super Pit #1” in western Australia shows a sprawling city on the edge of a huge open mine. One of the most beautiful pictures is of a granite quarry in Portugal, which looks like a fantasyland built of variously sized white blocks. Burtynsky comments, “In my images of mines, it is the insatiable human appetite for the world’s raw resources that is of primary interest.”
Absurdity of modern warfare
Bronson Alcott, who spent a night in jail rather than pay a tax to support a war he didn’t believe in, would find kinship with Ben Brody’s portrayal of the “absurdity, alienation, and unintended consequences of modern warfare.” The title “Afghanistan/Endgame” captures a number of ironies expressed in the photos, taken over the four years Brody worked as a photographer and writer in Afghanistan.
With the 2014 drawdown, the number of active patrols decreased, leaving soldiers freed of many duties. We see them confined to small bases, overly muscular from working out with weights, and playing video war games. A young woman, dressed in a heavy camouflage uniform, looks at shelves of delicate necklaces in a base store. Dark smoke focuses the viewer’s attention in the center of one photo: With leftover ammunition too burdensome to carry home, troops fire it off into distant mountains. A supply helicopter finally lands after several attempts, the pilot’s vision blocked by the debris the aircraft’s rotors have stirred up.
Several photos show the impact of war upon the landscape. In one, a family flees danger from a bomb strike, pushing across a stretch of hostile terrain. In the middle of a vast stretch of foothills, Afghan soldiers mourn the deaths of innocent people. A section of a huge army base once occupied by U.S. troops now lies abandoned, taking up a large tract of land next to neighboring villages. In the middle of barren foothills and high mountains, a wooden cross atop a heap of rocks pays tribute to a British soldier.
Nostalgia, naiveté, or respite?
In the small gallery between these two photography exhibits, some of Fruitlands’ portraits and landscapes from the 19th century are displayed. The visitor may wonder what curator Mike Volmar intended in his selection of these paintings. The portraits are mostly of children, and two are of beautiful young women; the landscapes are done by a Frenchman, Victor De Grailly, and are remindful of the paintings of the Hudson River School artists in the way they idealize the American landscape. There is a picture of George Washington and of a battle scene where the Americans have been victorious and even a wounded soldier looks hale. Are we to feel nostalgia for the innocence and unspoiled nature before the onslaught of industry and war? Are we to smile sadly at the naiveté of an earlier time? Or is the collection simply a contrast, meant to give us a respite between the disturbing questions the other exhibits force us to confront?
