Forests and Trees. 

More Reflections on Aloi’s WHY LOOK AT PLANTS

(photo: teak trophy in my house)

Can we only appreciate forests if we think like a fairy tale character? Aloi’s chapter “Lost in the Post-Sublime Forest” has me pondering if I am guilty of seeking only “sublime pleasure,” in thinking about forests. Do I just want the thrill of finding myself in the forest dark, lost from the straightforward path?  As he says, it is hard to “[shake] off over two-thousand years of iconographical sedimentations of forest representation.” My gothic romantic tendencies towards forests remain, but now I’m starting to have a framework to interrogate them.

He chooses George Shaw and David Hockney as examples of attempts to do that—-examples which I, of course, appreciate because I’m a painter. He presents George Shaw’s woodland paintings, like (https://www.artsy.net/artwork/george-shaw-b-1966-the-living-and-the-dead), as a successful foray into developing an alternative aesthetic for looking at forests, one that directly addresses dark ecological concerns in both content and tone. (Now I've got another rabbit hole to go down, Dark Ecology,  (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/15/timothy-morton-anthropocene-philosopher)). Aloi finds that Hockney's 2012 IPad-based landscapes do not offer an aesthetic alternative to the iconographic past--he finds them instead to be apathetic and disaffected, even pornographic in their objectification of nature (which he admits as possibly an interesting interpretation). 

Aloi returns to the problem with anthropomorphism in Chapter 2, strongly critiquing the approach of Peter Wohlleben in the popular book, The Hidden Life of Trees (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life-of-trees). Although drawing readers into thinking about plants by analogizing them to humans, this prevents seeing them as they are. I appreciate this particularly because I struggle so with this problem. I feel like my engineer son, trained in theoretical physics, must feel when I ask him about quantum entanglement. “It’s just math,” he says, “nothing more tangible.”  When I read analogies like Wohlleben, I want to say, yes, but plant strategies are so different from human ones, how is conflating them helpful at all?

Among the art examples in the Tree section chapters, I found the ones on teak trees to be the most provocative—mainly because I lived in upcountry Burma/Myanmar for a while in the early 1980s when my father worked at the Forest Research Institute. I saw a lot of teak trees—growing, harvested, and in the lab.

Lucy Davis uses DNA analysis to trace parts of a teak bed back to its source and hopes: “to explore the way a dream in DNA code might seed itself, like teak across the archipelago.”  What she does find are the different “perspectives of country officers, woodcutters, artists, engineers dukun dukun, tree spirits, and DNA code turn[ing] together and break[ing] apart in an urgent struggle over cut wood.” 

As part of the same project Shannon Lee Castleman focuses on the perspective of the villagers of Sulawesi who are forbidden to harvest the teak but in secret give them hidden axe wounds so that they will just fall down on their own. (http://www.shannoncastleman.com/19-photographs/n9f1uypxle2pzwqg4fclgji80mdpzj).  

I still don’t think I can think like a tree or ask one to write a novel as in Chapter 9, Quercus velutina, Art of Fiction, No. 111110011, by Lindsey French, but there is a great deal to think about in these chapters. When I page back through the pages I find how much I have left out.  

Here are most of the chapter headings for Parts 1 and 2: 

Reflections on reading the Introduction to WHY LOOK AT PLANTS by Giovanni Aloi.

I brought some personal baggage to my reading of this book. I don’t want to get too deep in the biographical weeds, but I will share some examples.  

For a college evolutionary strategies class, I wrote a paper about sexual reproduction in red algae. I remember no details of the science, but I clearly remember the feeling that I could just almost grasp something fundamental about the topic, but it remained vague and non-verbal. I did not get a good grade—my attempts to explain this near-epiphany failed miserably.  

Much later, in a graduate history class, I wanted to research the harvesting of chestnuts as a human ritual and activity repeated over centuries and over continents. I was told this was more of an “art” question than a “history” question.

Later still, I came to art and art history and I learned that this type of question was not welcomed there either. It was too specific. “What was I really talking about?” I was asked. Surely it was “repetition,” “time,” or some other broad concept that could be addressed in ways more abstract, more symbolic, and more appropriate to contemporary art than thinking about backs bent under chestnut trees century after century.

This is the background to my delight and to my gratitude upon reading the Introduction to Aloi’s “Why Look at Plants. He beautifully explains the difficulty of articulating and situating such thoughts about plants. He delineates the development of the dominant ways of thinking about plants:  

At this point in Western representation, we witness a peculiar bifurcation in the processes of objectification of animals and plants. On the one hand, the scientific herbaria of natural history objectified plants…by representationally isolating them against a plain background for observation purposes….[the] plant became a specimen….On the other hand, classical painting immersed plants (and animals) in complex anthropocentric/tableaus in which they featured as silent and yet eloquent narrative tools. (p.19-20)

More succinctly later, he sums up the two ways of looking at plants our culture has developed: “the scientific objectification and the metaphorical objectification.”(p. 26)

In contrast to these alternatives, he offers the example of his grandmother’s balcony and terrace, full of plants gifted from others or to be gifted, plants that “emerged through my childhood memories as a sociocultural agent situated in a specific local reality.” (p.31)

That’s where I want to be.