Wk 13 - notes from "On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the work of Joyce Campbell"

(Over the past month or so I've been looking into the work and practice of NZ artist Joyce Campbell. Below are some notes I've taken - there is a lot to unpack from Campbell's practice and methodologies which I will flesh this out into a more in-depth post in future, but for now am organising them here for memory and documentation's sake.)

Artist model: Joyce Campbell

From Ocula:

Joyce Campbell is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist and art educator in New Zealand. Working with historical and contemporary forms of photography, as well as video and sculpture, she examines natural and human systems, and their points of interaction. Born in New Zealand, Joyce Campbell studied for a BFA at the University of Canterbury's Ilam School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1992. In 1999 she graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, where she currently teaches as an associate professor. Her practice revolves around experiments with 19th-century photographic techniques such as ambrotypes and daguerreotypes. The historical processes Campbell employs produce images that capture fine detail, texture, and other elements that contemporary methods do not. Using these methods alongside conventional analogue and digital cameras renders complex organic forms out of incremental processes of change, ranging from the macroscopic to the microscopic: from growing microbial colonies and the formation of crystals to glaciers migrating into the ocean. Art has taken Joyce Campbell beyond New Zealand, enabling her to build up an extensive visual library of natural and human environments. Now predominantly Auckland-based, Campbell previously lived and worked in Southern California for a decade. In 2006 she also undertook a Creative New Zealand-funded artist residency in Antarctica.

The environments Joyce Campbell explores in search of subjects range from the raw ecological biomes of New Zealand forests and river gorges, the Pacific coral reefs, and the Californian desert, to human-impacted spaces such as California's brown-fields—land decimated and contaminated by intensive industry. The final outcome of Campbell's biological and ecological explorations are large-scale photographs and video installations that immerse viewers in those environments.

In her exhibitions, Campbell contextualises her photographs with insights from science, philosophy, and theology. There is often a strong underpinning in Māori philosophies, and reference to the guardians of the mountains, forests, and rivers in her home-region. The resultant exhibitions have been presented at venues around the world.

Flightdream, 2015, FD Video with audio, Sound by Peter Kolovos (USA), Duration 25 minutes. Source

Joyce Campbell, Ghost Scrub, 2018, , three-channel digital video transferred from 16 mm film (installation view). Source

---

Notes from interview (linked to the right):

- discusses her work LA Bloom (2002) which featured in the exhibition Emanations - an exhibition of "cameraless photography" works

- Campbell created her work by surveying the city of Los Angeles, taking soil, dust and plant samples at locations where 4 quadrants of a printed map met

- "We are not the only things that inhabit space"; wanted to visualise this

- worked in a lab cultivating the microbes found in the samples taken at each site, which then became images that comprise LA Bloom

- became interested in the formal qualities of morphogenesis* and the way that time functions in relation to growth, change, shift and perception; wanted to freeze and look hard at the process in a particular way, which in turn lead to Campbell working with photogrammetry

*Morphogenesis is a biological process that causes a tissue or organ to develop its shape by controlling the spatial distribution of cells during embryonic development.

Joyce Campbell, LA Bloom, 2002, cibachrome photographs. Courtesy of the artist, Auckland

---

Literature notes:

I decided to focus on the first four chapters of the book - the rest of it is interesting, but I thought what was outlined in these sections was particularly relevant to what I'm looking at in my studio practice.

Barton, Christina. On the Last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell. MIT Press, 2020.

“Foreword”, Christina Barton (director of the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington), p33-54

• “In its material specificity and semiotic complexity, we treat art as a powerful tool for thinking.” 33

• “...by choosing to use photographic processes that originated in the nineteenth century, [Campbell’s] daguerreotypes, collodion wet plates, and gelatin silver prints sere less as ripostes to the omissions and insensitivities of the past than as their restaging by another historical mode of representation, which delivers images not by human hand but by the reaction of light and chemicals. Campbell produces parallel images to reinscribe what was already there...” 35

• Intro discusses the history of representation of the landscape by Pakeha artists and the colonial forms this has taken, and in turn the national mythology about that landscape that has emerged. In turn, Barton discusses a return to an acknowledgement of Maoridom and the landscape on its own terms; “...the troubling entwinement of colonial depiction with the history of expropriation and loss suffered by Aotearoa’s first people”

• Campbell’s “outmoded photographic techniques...assist in what I would like to call a process of “re-enchantment.” She seeks and portrays what cannot be seen, as Geoffrey Batchen in this book poots it; she photographs “nothing”, with the hope that in this effort “something” may be revealed, suspended on a surface where light has been chemically transformed into an image. She recodes photography not as an instrument of reason (an apparatus of knowledge, information, and control) but as a physical process taking its place amongst others in a situation desperately needing a means to reconnect humans to their world. In Bernard Stiegler’s sense, she takes a. technology long theorized as a problem (in its "capture” and mediation of reality) and treats it as a possible cure (I am alluding to this notion of the “pharmakon”).” 35

“On the Last Afternoon”, John C. Welchman, p 55-94

• “Rather than functioning as a conventional mid-career survey, [Campbell’s exhibition] “On the Last Afternoon” provides a platform for a conceptually reflexive exhibition design that deploys Campbell’s photographic archive as an active document as well as a point of departure for research, building new connections based on a contemporary understanding on environments as zones of radical instability.” 55

• The exhibition title comes from a short story by speculative science-fiction writer James Tiptree Jr., the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon.

• “Using photography and film since the mid-q990s, Campbell has often chosen to work in and around sites or locations that are experiencing various states of transition, degradation, or even imminent catastrophe..." 56

• “”On the Last Afternoon” represents... both a moment of consolidation and a stepping-off point into new work based on principles of accumulation and sorting. Taking its cues from the physical sciences, in which the accrual of knowledge and data is integral to the empirical methodologies through which they are governed, Campbell’s new works entangle recent images of coral reefs, desert washes, and river basins as well as sacred and historic sites associated with colonial trauma with more recent images taken over the last two decades. The archival images are reanimated using a spectrum of formatting devices and technical processes … They give rise to a wide variety of image types … What results is an engagement that underscores issues of biological abundance and enmeshment, by turns equally disturbing, prophetic, and aesthetically salient: the corrosive effects of the modern technical project, the catastrophic implications of climate change, the dispiriting impact of hyper-industrialization on the life of communities and the role of artists and custodians in the producing negentropy by resisting the loss of individuating and local systems of knowledge.”

• “Campbell is especially interested...in the conditions generated by different formations of scale and their ecosocial implications, colliding large and small, near and far, immersion and separation, with reference to different epochs and sites as well as biological, political, and spiritual systems, which are viewed through a range of interrogative and experiential focal lengths. The results reveal that the viewer is not immune to the disruptions of the world underfoot or beyond reach: things are closing in from both microscopic and macroscopic perspectives.”

• “Mobilizing a dialectic between flooding and desiccation, extension and collapse, interconnections of life forms and chemical penetration, “On the Last Afternoon” is structured around zones of liquidity and aridity – a polarity that reflects Campbell’s own biography... This personal history, oscillating between Aotearoa’s verdant east and west costs and the smog-choked, climate-stressed ecosystems of the Californian deserts, informs a practice that collides ecological concerns with the violent legacies of colonialism and their impact on indigenous spirituality. She also draws on science fiction to speculate on possible futures, both utopian and dystopian.” 59

• “Since 2010, Campbell has collaborated with research partner Niania on a series of projects... each welds Niania’s research to images produced by Campbell in order to capture and preserve kōrero (narratives) about the people of Whakapūnake te maunga (the sacred mountain of the Wairoa region) and Ruakituri awa (a major tributary of the Wairoa River): the whānau and hapū (kinship group) of Te Aitanga-ā-Pourangahua in the upper Ruakituri and Ngāi Kōhatu in the lower at Te Reinga Falls, collectively known as Te Paerāuta. Their collaboration seeks to preserve and expand upon an ancient body of knowledge at a time when rural depopulation, urban expansion, and the pervasive technological mediation of everyday life threatens the very continuity of indigenous communities.” 62

• “In the artist’s view, modern cameras and their standardized prints do not lend themselves well to the depiction of subtle or “mysterious” things and events. By contrast, the nineteenth century techniques of the ambrotype and daguerreotype provide the photographer with extraordinary detail, depth, and richness, while also having an innate tendency to produce traces in silver and ether which remain spontaneous and open to interpretation.”

• “While much of Campbell’s work is organized around the arid and the lush, the deserts of Southern California and the forests and rivers of Aotearoa, a significant strand of her research and making has responded to the legacy and contemporary practice of speculative science fiction.” 63

• Ghost Scrub (2018) - “refers to the groves of endemic kānuka and mānuka trees found in the valley, mostly of secondary growth following deforestation, and commonly referred to as “scrub”.” 65

• Ghost Scrub (2018) was projected onto a large wall and was shot on 16 mm film in the Ruakituri Valley. It was accompanied by a soundtrack recorded in a private bird reserve owned by the artist’s parents, closely resembling a dawn chorus that “might have once been” had the area not been sprayed and cleared. The film featured areas of the Ruakituri Valley that had been largely sprayed with selective herbicides by helicopter, that at a distance appeared lush and full but on closer inspection were revealed to be dead. Their ghostly white colour contrasts the living colour - a dark greeny gray that sometimes appears almost black.

• “There are many ways to think about what art does, but Stiegler reminds us that art is inherently political when it is performing its negentropic function: to resist entropic decline is to propagate difference. He identifies artists (if they would only remember their true calling) as pivotal to this activist effort. This is because true creativity is, by his account, an engine of complexity and differentiation within human collectives” 70 (Joyce Campbell, conversation with author, October 16, 2018).

“Nothing to Photograph,” Geoffrey Batchen, p 95-128

• “For Campbell, the decision to use this antique process [of the daguerreotype] was an effort to return to a “precolonial, prehistory of Antarctica...when the effects of modern industry were yet to begin their incremental corrosive work on the ice caps.” More specifically, she says, “I was also responding to my list in George Bush’s America, where I lived in an atmosphere of rampant climate change denial.” For her, the daguerreotype was “a technology whose invention marked the beginning of the modern era, the utilization of which preceded Antarctic exploration altogether, one that was unpredictable, deeply physical, unreproducible and undeniably an artifact of light striking silver at a particular moment in time.” All these points deserve further reflection.” 96-97

• “Campbell’s daguerreotypes are all emblems of either privation or kitsch; they all startle with the harsh materiality of their failed efforts to present the unpresentable... A photograph that denies us the comfort of perspectival rationality, a photograph that channels the nothingness that haunts the whole history of Antarctic photography, a photograph that is no longer photographic even though it is, a photograph that is unable to signify anything other than its own erasure: What could be a more terrifying prospect than that?” 102

• “These vacant daguerreotypes remind us of what we don’t or cannot know of this or any place. They remind us, too, that this place, and this existence, is now under significant threat. And they stage that reminder with a technology drawn from photography’s beginnings, taking us back to the medium’s origins even as the glaciers named after its founding fathers are rapidly melting into oblivious. The bitter irony of Campbell’s ecological art is that its presentation of this disaster is made possible by the very industrial culture that has triggered the disaster in the first place. She reminds us, in short, that only if we can break that cycle, only if we are willing to take collective action to change the culture itself, will any further reflections on Antarctica be possible. Soon, in other words, there really will be nothing to photograph.”

“Art and the Animal,” Elizabeth Grosz, p 129-152

• “3. Art, like science or technology, links living bodies to the earth, not wholesale but through the connections it makes between specific qualities – the shiny objects that appeal to bowerbirds, the balls that attract dogs – and specific organs. But unlike technology which aims to extract useful principles (regularity, predictability, order, and organization) the arts redirect these forces through intensification to produce something no longer regular, ordered, or manipulable but a force which actively alters the forces of the body itself, something appealing, irregular, unpredictable.” 130

• “Each organism is surrounded by its Umwelt, a "soap bubble” in which each living being is housed. The lived world of the organism is precisely as complex as its organs. Each creature, animal and human, Western and non-Western, lives a particular angle on the world, which highlights for it what its organs can perceive and act upon but leaves everything else undiscerned.” 132

• “Organisms are sense-bubbles, isolated worlds, monads composed of fragments of milieus and organs, musical counterpoints creating a melody. The Umwelt is the sensory world of space, time, and objects that form perceptual signs for living creatures; the world that enables them to effect actions, to exercise their organs, to act. Uexküll calls it a “circular island”, a “wall of senses”, a “bubble-world”, much like a creature enclosed in an invisible snow cone, positioning the subject within the centre of a moveable horizon. Each living thing lives in precisely the world which accords with its bodily organs."

• “Home. What defines territory, if territory is the most irreducible spatial terrain for many animals? Many insects do not have territory... They fly back and forth, but they have no home, which is the necessary condition for territory... In building a home, the spider defines both a home and the space surrounding it as territory.” 132-133

• “Each living thing is a melodic line in a symphony composed of the larger and more complex movements provided by its world.” 133

• "Art is that which most directly returns us to the animal lineage to the extent that art’s qualities are not purely bound up with the contents, the concepts, the meanings, and the values art represents but primarily reside in its capacity to affect and transform life, that is, in which it does more than what it means. The animal reminds us of this movement in which we are bound up, this movement beyond ourselves that our art best represents. The animal is that from which qualities emanate, territories proliferate, and life is framed... The animal is that from which the “all-too-human" comes, and that through which the human moves beyond itself into a new kind of artistic animal.” 134