Louis Helbig: aestheticising the unconscionable

Louis Helbig. Bitumen Slick N 57.19.28 W 111.25.44 Syncrude Aurora North

Helbig writes of the image above: Booms confining bitumen floating near the edge of Syncrude's Aurora North tar pond.  This is where industry suffered its most serious massive public relations setback in the spring of 2008 when someone alerted the public and the authorities to flocks of ducks landing on its surface.  In this particular incident about 1,600 ducks were killed.  Syncrude was convicted in 2010 of breaching both federal and provincial environmental reglations.

He has a series of aerial photographs of the oil sands region, and although his view is activist, as one can see from the captions, the images are beautiful.  How is it that our visual acuity has been trained to find abstraction so sublime.  Context is removed and we gaze at such images with the appreciation other eras gave to flowers or girls with pearl earrings.  This is precisely what is so dangerous about the removal of context, scale, consequences and facts.  They are removed.  

We need people such as Louis Helbig to keep explaining not just his photographs, but the abstract nature of the oil sands enterprise itself.  Whatever it does there is a diagram on the map with pipelines dotted in to Texas, maybe to Prince Rupert and on to China.  It is a series of mirrored glass office towers in Calgary and Houston. It is every plastic bag we throw hopefully into the recycling bin, it is the cloud of exhaust everytime we start our cars. 

rockfall net

Rockfall netting, Trans-Canada Highway, Kicking Horse Pass near Golden BCThis is a prosaic image of the steel mesh curtains in the Kicking Horse Pass just east of Golden, on a dangerous, narrow, steep, winding part of the Trans-Canada where there is only half a shoulder and no where to stop.  I usually pass these curtains in the winter and have seen them covered in hoarfrost, or wet and shimmering in the sun, or packed with snow.  They are very beautiful, but it is suicidal to try to take a photo of them while driving.  And one cannot stop.  

This is Burgess Shale territory and both the highway and the railway tracks sit on narrow ledges hacked out of the cliffs cut by the Kicking Horse River.  These cliffs, limestone and slate, shatter with the freeze/thaw cycle and crumble away landing on the road surface, thus the curtains which hang in front to catch falling rock.

A little farther east, the rubble beside the road is pale green, a particular formation that is compressed calcium carbonate, they say.  All this rock is fragile, it weathers easily and continuously.  The road is in a permanent state of repair and reconstruction and is often closed.  There is no radio signal, cell phones do not work: one is in the middle of a large stretch of unalloyed geology.  There are gabions, there are straw erosion bales, there are curtains, there are tiny cars and trucks hurtling their way through it all, there are accidents and a primitive understanding that this is still a dangerous landscape.

destination earth

Tidy segregated piles of construction waste placed in between piles of blasted granite.  They take on a kind of beauty as they subside into the landscape.  The gently sagging drywall might simply be fill, but given that one of the remedial actions on an acidified terrain is to spray it with lime, perhaps gypsum has the same effect. 

Drywall. Sudbury building site, September 2011

Brick. Sudbury building site, Sepember 2011

Concrete. Sudbury building site, September 2011

Aha! The ubiquitous blue tarp. Sudbury building site, September 2011

Tire mat, used to blanket a rock explosion. Sudbury buidling site, 2011

the north

Terminology, very confusing.  As a child I learned that the difficulty in laying down the trans-continental Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s was crossing muskeg, which swallowed tracks and even whole trains.  This is what happened in the north, which I assumed was in Northern Canada, somewhere in the Northwest Territories, and as with things you learn in grade 8, I never examined it again until this past week in Sudbury.  

It is not that muskeg isn't a treacherous thing, great wetlands that form where there isn't drainage: bogs, full of decaying plant material, trapped moose and train tracks which eventually form peat and I suppose, ultimately coal.  No, the other treacherous thing is the word north.

The northern imagination written about by Northrop Fry, Margaret Atwood, embodied in the Group of Seven and Georgian Bay is not the north I thought it was, The North, north of the provinces.  It is actually western Ontario.   
This came as something of a surprise, given that Sudbury sits at 46°N and has a growing zone of 4b.  Calgary, which no one would consider north at all, sits almost 600km north at 51°N in zone 2b.

In another instance, the Ring of Fire is generally known as the zone of earthquake and volcanic activity that rings the Pacific Ocean, where the Pacific tectonic plate grinds against the North American plate, the Eurasian, Australian and Nazca plates.  In the west we hear a lot about it, especially in Vancouver where all buildings have been essentially rebuilt to earthquake standards.

But in Ontario, Ring of Fire is a mine in the James Bay region where chromium was recently discovered and for which a smelter is planned, much to the purported benefit of First Nations in the area.  It is seen as a revitalisation of Ontario's mining interest and will be introducing Chinese development interests to Sudbury.   I only know this because I watched Steve Paikin's Agenda last night on TVO where there was a debate on whether industrial development or species protection was more important in the north.  Their north.  The wishy-washy conclusion was that we should have both, which means that mining and forestry will proceed with glee and with a few ameliorative concessions to fish, birds and migrating herds. Who do not vote.

It is a different country, Ontario.

Preparing the ground for flatland housing development. Lonely yellow hydrant awaits.  
Anyway, this train of thought was triggered by a new subdivision (above) on a ridge that looks down on Sudbury.  Downtown Sudbury has a problem with drainage, sitting as it does on the bedrock of the Canadian Shield.  Water sits in lakes or in muskeggy wetlands, (they'd be called sloughs on the prairie, bogs on the coast).  In older districts, streets and the little houses lining them in the bottom of the basin in which downtown Sudbury sits, regularly flood, the streets become culverts and swales, the water hasn't got a lot of options.  Thus, new development perched on ridges above the city has a certain appeal.  

Putting in services for new development requires, by convention, that they be underground.  But there is no underground here, it is solid rock, so ground is created in a cut and fill way.  The rock is blasted into rubble and shifted around to make flat sites for houses with the sewer and water safely installed beneath.  
There are a lot of similarities between Sudbury and Yellowknife, where new development does exactly this, rock blasted into coarse gravel for developer houses on cul-de-sacs one could find anywhere in Canada.  Aleta Fowler wrote about this in On Site 14: does one go to the north to live as if one was in a southern Canadian suburb?

Kenneth Hayes has introduced the term geo-cosmopolitanism to the discussion of urban development which, in its rough outlines means being aware of and taking into account the deep geo-logic of place.  The naming is important, we can put geo-cosmopolitanism in all its complexity onto a different way of looking at cities, more deeply rooted in their history, their industries, their place in the world. 

the canadian shield, yesterday

17 September 2011, 12:30 EDTWhere the flat, polished Canadian Shield slides into Georgian Bay, and

17 September 2011, 5pm MDTan oncoming storm, east of Calgary, looking over what was Lake Agassiz 10,000 years ago, ice age meltwater caught between the Rockies and the Canadian Shield.

addendum:  well, that isn't quite right.  Evidently we are looking at the Bassano Basin, formed by the same melting of the Wisconsinan Laurentide ice sheet.  Calgary is 1048m elevation, Winnipeg in the Agassiz Basin is 238m, Regina, halfway between them is 577m.   The land sank with the melting of the glacier, and Bassano drains south into the Missouri system, rather than north as does the Agassiz system.  So somewhere on the great flat prairies that seems like a table top if you are driving across it, there is a series of different divides, different ancient watersheds. 

rivers and borders

International Joint Commission map of the Souris River Basin

The Souris River is flooding Minot, North Dakota.  On the CBC news a Minot resident blames Saskatchewan for this, 'they should have done something'.  The Souris eventually joins the Assiniboine, after it crosses the border again, back into Manitoba.  The Assiniboine flooded earlier this spring and will perhaps flood again.  Winnipeg also keeps its eye on Fargo, North Dakota, on the Red River.  The Assiniboine joins the Red in downtown Winnipeg.  In the 1996 Red River flood Winnipegers blamed Fargo for not better controlling the river flow. 

BC Treaty Commission. Statement of Intent. Traditional Territory Boundary, Sliammon Indian Band.The 49th parallel is an abstract political division that serenely ignores topography: global mathematics trumps geophysical realities.  Before the US Survey, before the Dominion Grid, before enlightened Europeans started to delineate territory in this seemingly empty-ish land, there were aboriginal territories: precise, negotiated at their borders by treaty, surveyed orally in a metes and bounds system.  
Sliammon First Nation territory clearly is topographically based: it controls the watershed on the western slopes of the Coast range, the waterway and fishing beds of the inland passage and the opposite beach, securing the whole width of the strait.  Fresh water systems, food, sea borne transportation capacity, security: these are the things that boundaries delineate. 

 Arid Region of the United States, showing drainage districts. Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana-MissoulaThis 1891 map of watersheds in what was called the arid regions of the western United States shows a division of land that could have been a series of small states, with control over their own water resources and all the potential agricultural and animal resources a watershed contains.

Pre-contact North American cultural areasOr, looking at a map of pre-contact cultural zones in North America, one can see how there is a huge territory that controls the Great Lakes.  Another has the whole western watershed of the Mississipi, another group the eastern side.  The Great Divide separates the peoples of the watersheds that go to the Pacific from those of the plains: the north to Hudson's Bay, south to the Gulf of Mexico.  The boreal forest is one huge cultural group, as is the high Arctic. 

Topological environmental divisions as political territories: what a novel idea.  One could only blame oneself for mismanaging one's resources.

building a forest

Colour-infrared image of Sudbury region using Landsat imagery from 1987. Vegetated areas appear in reddish in colour where urban/disturbed areas are green. The yellow boundary represents the study area for vegetation change detection and approximates the municipal boundary of the City of Greater Sudbury.

I heard this story on the news a while ago, but it took a while to figure out the keywords necessary to find it again.  In the lunar landscape that is the old Sudbury nickel mines and smelters there has, over the last 40 years, been a massive tree planting program, however because the soil is so acidic and toxic, there is no forest floor – that blanket of leaf mould, seeds, bugs, little animals, lilies and orchids, wild flowers, birds, from which new trees grow.  

When new roads are hacked out of the wilderness, such as the twinning of the Trans-Canada highway through Banff National Park, first the forest is logged, then bulldozers come and shovel and grade the top metre of ground into road bed.  All the little seedlings and mice die instantly.  

What Sudbury is doing is removing mats of ground cover and top soil from nearby road construction sites and placing them in the reforested areas that lack that essential floor that sustains a biodiverse ecology.

Pictures show the depth of these mats as about 4".  Is that enough?  Is the soil still toxic underneath?  I'm sure someone has figured all this out otherwise the project wouldn't be so extensive, however it does make one realise how very thin the skin is that supports life.  It also questions the expectation that it will be technology that reconstructs the toxic landscape of the oil sands: cutting and laying turf is not high technology.  It hardly even low technology.  Plants and insects are perhaps more powerful agents in reconstruction than we realise.

Land Reclamation 1978-2008. City of Sudbury.

City of Sudbury Re-Greening Program

there is a short video on this CBC report of the programme: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/06/06/environment-sudbury-forest-floor-transplant.html

Primary Russian Oil and Gas Pipelines to Europe

Living in oil & gas industry-obsessed Alberta, I find this map very interesting.  This is why Russia must be kept on side.  This is the underpinning to the cold war; this is all more important than the arms race/reduction treaty. 

OIL: a new town in a resource extraction region

Just a reminder of On Site's exhibition / competition / call for entries for a new town in a resource extraction area. 
We are looking for ideas, ideas, ideas.  There are resource links on the call for entries page for general starting point information, however, you are being asked to figure out what the strategy should be, in 2011, for starting up a new town. 

On the Strand over the weekend there was a piece on video artist Diana Thater's installation on Chernobyl, which was effectively a new city built in the 1970s, something I hadn't realised when it was abandoned just 20 years later.  It is now inhabited by animals, wild horses walk the streets, swans nest on the tailings ponds.  Thater says it is a necessity of nature to persist.  She also talks about what a post-human world looks like, where political systems that built such installations were abandoned along with the site. 

We usually think of designing or planning a new town from point zero, or near to it, that builds into a community with shape and form.  One might also think of the new town when it becomes a discarded post-nuclear installation: what will it say about what we were?

drawing

Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument, on the access road to Canyonlands National Park, Utah

Newspaper Rock is a curious mound, an erratic in the manner of Uluru – a mound projecting from a sandstone wall, covered in petroglyphs that range in age from 2000 to 100 years old, made by a number of groups from the Anasazi to the Navajo.  I saw this first in the mid 1980s on a driving trip to the four corners where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet, in a single point.  A surveyor's dream.  

In those days the American landscape was completely graffitied.  At the time in Canada highway crews painted over all the tags beside the road with carefully matched rock-coloured paint, so in contrast US highways were very noisy with much crude writing. 

Newspaper rock seemed of a piece with all this drawing on stone; an even array of mark-making.  We have given over our ability to make drawings to a variety of professionals.  We don't write any more, everything is typed, we don't make little drawings much: graphic design and photography is so pervasive.  Graffiti on the side of railway cars is the only thing in my environment these days that is personal, hand-done, anarchic. And this is something of a shame.   We should all spend the weekend with a pencil in hand, making lots of little marks on paper.  It would be very interesting to see what it is that we actually draw.  

Chile

What more is to be said about the Chilean mine rescue, given the acres of print about the seamy side of whatever story there is.  Why do we, in the developed nations, do this?  Why are we so intent on turning everything into a sleazy soap opera?  Is there a real problem with how right-wing is the president and whether or not the mining minister, having gone to Stanford and by definition is a member of the comprador bourgeoisie and whether or not miner 18 was separated and was living with someone else – does it matter? 

It was the most amazing saga I can remember since the invasion of Iraq, which I also watched in 24 hrs a day coverage on BBC World.  I remember thinking when the US had reached Baghdad airport, 'holy crow, that is the same distance away from where I live as if a hostile army had reached Calgary airport, a 20-minute dash up the Deerfoot'.

With the miners, yes the Mapuche hunger strike was concurrent, yes, the other miners thrown out of work by the same company that was mining the San José mine are protesting, but the world is now watching.  The attention on Chile is acute.  Canny politicians moving their underdeveloped country into first world status are not able to sweep anything under any sort of rug now. 

The oldest miner, Omar Reygadas, says of course he will go back to the mines.  He is a miner.  It is a reminder of when being a miner was a source of immense pride in the developed nations.  The miner's strike, broken by Margaret Thatcher, put paid to mining in the UK.  The Cape Breton miners, the men of the deeps, went to the wall along with the cod fishery.  However, Canada is still a mining country; we are a primary resource nation.   Would Christian Paradis have spent 50 of the last 70 days at, say, the tar sands, or a potash mine if there was a crisis involving the workers?   Somehow I doubt it.

Ireland Park

Kearns Mancini Architects, Ireland Park Foundation, 2007Paul Whelan has written about Ireland Park in the new issue of On Site.  It commemorates the huge wave of emigrants from the 1847 Irish famine.  Incredibly, over a six-month period, 37,000 immigrants washed through Toronto, population 20,000, on their way to both inland and to the United States. 

Walls with names seems to be a necessary memorial component now: these names of people who died on the voyage or shortly after, about 20% of the total, are inscribed in the interstices of a rough difficult craggy cliff. 
And, also necessary it seems, are the figurative statues, in Toronto's Ireland Park part of a set, the other half being in a park in Dublin: the wraiths who left, and if they didn't die, arrived in North America. 

Migration stories: is there a point at which oral history – the journeys, the reason for emigration in the first place, the subsequent struggle to re-establish a life –is lost?  And is that when we start to build memorials?  

coal mining towns

Eric Ravilious. The Vale of the White Horse,  circa 1939. Pencil and watercolour on paper: 451 x 324 mm Tate Collection N05164. This cutting of small villages into the landscape, especially in the L S Lowry painting (of yesterday's post) where in the front of the village are some fenced off yards as stony as can be, brings to mind the 3000 year-old Uffington White Horse cut into the Berkshire Downs.  These are inscriptions in the landscape, rather than sprawls across its surface. 

Nanaimo, which today sprawls determinedly north and west up the mountain, was originally a coal mining town, incised in the woods as a tidy fan-shaped diagram around the harbour.   You can see it drawing from the British colliery typology: small compact houses in small compact towns.  One can already see, in the 1891 map, new development inching northward.  In 1891, 762 working men lived in the south end; 70% were miners.  
They are almost gone, but Nicol Street (now the Island Highway going south) until fairly recently was lined with tiny miners' houses, no bigger than two rooms.  It was a rough place, early Nanaimo, very unlike its present prosperous and prolific self.

Nanaimo, 1891

unstable surfaces

La Jolla, California, 2007Now, here's an example of the ground beneath one's feet being completely ambiguous, certainly mysterious: how deep is the slump beneath this sink hole?  Is it at the level of the water table, or the aquifer, or a mile deep?  This photo looks like something by Jeff Wall: a small suburban crisis.

If you click on the picture it will take you to a Guardian photo series of other, recent sink holes.

Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky. Ocean V, 2010. 
Chromogenic Print 
366,4 x 249,4 x 6,4 cm. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin.

Andreas Gursky is showing his series Ocean I-VI at Sprüth Magers Berlin right now.  The images are large – all around 2.5-3.5 m x 3m+, and originated in the kinds of views on flight monitors that show whatever the plane is flying over.  These are all images of the oceans, the land shows as busy little fragments around the edge: peripheral and of no great mystery compared to the seas which show as deep and silent.

Gursky apprenticed with Bernd and Hilla Becher, and something of their stillness underlies all his work.  While Ocean I-VI might look like straight satellite images, and indeed the bits of land are from satellite photos, the oceans themselves have been constructed.  There are no clouds or storms, their proportions aren't geographically correct – they take cartographic licence as all maps do.

These pieces of water all have names, but Gursky has called them simply Ocean I, Ocean II; just as land doesn't have all the political and economic markings we understand as constituting land inscribed on its surface, neither do the oceans have pink dotted lines floating on them marking 250-miles limits, or large letters floating across them saying Pacific Ocean.  Really, maps as we know them, are very crude. 

Gursky has, for many years, done large photographs of large things: immaculate and perfectly regimented crowds in North Korea, flattened screens of social housing projects, any repetitive elements that are so vast in number that they become a kind of colour field, which of course is the thing that pulls him away from the often near-identical photographs of Ed Burtynsky.  Repetition and the small shifts in detail in like objects were at the core of the Becher's work: I doubt they were wildly interested in water towers although they photographed hundreds of them. Their project was photographic, setting the camera in a precise and repetitive relationship with the subject, removing all the seductive elements the camera so easily exploits: colour, sun and shade, fast-frame capture of birds, wind, people.

Much is written about Gursky's work as a critique of capitalism: here are capitalism's excesses, with Burtynsky, Gursky and Polidori as a club going about documenting all its evils.  I'm not sure this is quite how it is, or all that it is.  There is a photographic project here, rather than a documentary project.  Oceans I-VI is not documentary, it is a construction of a mystery, of inaccessibility, of understanding something one can only see in the abstract; the near-impossibility of clicking out of the abstract into some sort of existential, phenomenological present, which can only be found at the scale of standing with one's feet in the water at Departure Bay and thinking 'this water goes to Japan'. 

James Trevelyan

James Trevelyan. Frozen Lake, 1986. 27 x 20", mixed media on paperThis drawing came up for auction recently.  There are four large Calgary art auctions a year, each with about 600 lots, maybe 400 of which are paintings of the mountains in landscape format, blue skies, sharp shadows on the peaks, snow at the top, usually a river in the foreground.  The views are often recognisable from the road or from hikes radiating out from the old CPR towns - Banff, Lake Louise, Field, Craigellachie, Glacier, Golden and date from the days when artists came from England or Ontario and Québec via the CPR to Banff to paint.  It established a way of looking at the mountains: from a safe distance, from a valley, in the summer.

Today these same towns are ski centres, contemporary art has long turned away from landscape painting, and although there are some brilliant abstract painters of landscapes across the prairies, few look at the mountains and it is rare indeed to find much work painted from the depths of winter.  The obvious reason is that it is bloody cold in the winter. 

Perhaps a less obvious reason is our fear of winter.  The winter on the prairies and in the mountains is not the cozy Group of Seven kind of winter where snow lies like puffy duvets on everything and shadows are a lovely violet or a deep azure.  This is black and white winter, hard and mean. The frozen lake in James Trevelyan's drawing is scoured clean by a high mountain wind, its ice like basalt.  And yet there is a lovely intimacy in this piece, an ambiguity of surface and light that one never finds in work painted on bright sunny days. 

Like lots of Canadians, lots of Canadian artists go to Mexico for the winter.  I'd take this view of a sere, cold, empty, beautiful winter over the florid landscapes of the south any day.  Visually, I get this climate. 

Roger's Pass

Trans-Canada Highway at Roger's Pass, winter.

How to cross something so impenetrable.  Everyone, from First Nations to the railway to the highways followed the rivers, but rivers drop down from summits, and there is always a point where the mountains must be crossed.  The railways drilled long tunnels through mountains, the highways that followed eighty years later couldn't and so we have a series of rather heart-stopping passes throughout BC: Roger's Pass, Crowsnest Pass, the Creston-Salmo Highway, the Coquihalla, the Hope-Princeton.  One approaches them gingerly and with great respect.  

On this drive, three thin lines: the CPR, the CNR and the Trans-Canada are the only visible signs of our occupation of these huge landscapes.  In the winter there is little traffic, campsites and viewing spots are all closed and under 10' of snow, radio is inaccessible, one can drive for miles without seeing another car.  One is thinking of absolutely nothing other than driving and the road.  It is remarkably calm.  Then a truck hurtles by, throws a rock at your windshield and the rest of the trip has a big silver crack across your view.


British Columbia

This map is from Derek Hayes' 2002 Historical Atlas of Canada, the most beautiful of all the historical atlas projects. The image is linked to Google books where one can see just how beautiful.

One of the conditions of the colony of British Columbia joining Canada in 1871 was the building of an overland link from BC to the rest of Canada.  This was the commission given to the CPR and completed in 1884.  Is BC a different world than the rest of Canada?  They certainly think so.

This map, drawn in the 1870s when much of BC was simply unknown to surveyors and engineers, shows just how much of a conundrum this territory must have seemed. After sailing breezily through the flat land of the prairies where nothing can be hidden from view suddenly there is the wall of the Rockies. Even today, on the much improved Trans-Canada, one cannot get through BC quickly, and the older Highway 3 through the Crows Nest is very convoluted. However, such roads keep one more alert than driving through southern Saskatchewan in a 500 mile straight line.

I like this map for the dismay it seems to exude.  BC was going to be a hard project.

Eric Ravilious: the scale of the land

Eric Ravilious. Chalk Downs, 1940. watercolour. 23 x 14 in. (56 x 47 cm)Eric Ravilious was a British war artist who died in 1944 when the RAF reconnaissance plane he was on disappeared off Iceland.  He did a number of things before the war: murals, woodcuts, graphic design, drawing and painting in the pale, flat sketchy way that a number of artists who had studied at the Slade used in the 1930s and 40s.  Supreme draughtsmanship, coupled in Ravilious's case with a deep love of the Sussex landscape which was at the time under threat from development, informs the painting above. 

It is small, and the brushmarks are those of a watercolour brush, used quite dry, and in places stippled.  It was a way of working that was fast and portable.  For Ravilious, nature is not wilderness, it is the impacted landscape of earth worked for millennia under many belief systems for agricultural use.  The fence line is important: it delineates territory, the road cuts the growing surface of the land the same way as the huge chalk hill carvings such as the Westbury horse, or the Cerne Abbas giant.

The chalk drawings are neolithic, perhaps druidic.  They are made by removing the thin layer of turf to reveal the limestone below.  They will disappear if not kept clear, which they have been for 3000 years.  It is this immense continuity that Ravilious sees in his landscapes, combined with the modernity of the age in which he lived.  A steam train chugs across the plain beneath the Westbury horse.

The Imperial War Museum held a centenary Ravilious (1903-1944) exhibition in 2004.  A most beautiful book was published to accompany it: Imperial War Museum. Eric Ravilious. Imagined Realities. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2003.  Their website gives an overview.

Eric Ravilious. The Westbury Horse, 1939. © Estate of Eric Ravilious 2004