As Past couldn’t be Changed

     I started a Sunday video call with my mother like usual, as we live half the world apart from each other. My mother asked whether I was informed any news about Australia bushfire earlier began last year. Since I wasn’t a type of responsible environment – lovers who pay their much attentions on researching and protecting the environment, I myself seemed to be, maybe just a bit, inattentive and careless towards this topic. My mother’s facial expression suddenly changed as her eyebrows were raised and jaw dropped down. I was surprised because she was surprised that I only knew little about that intense event. My mother’s favorite niece had called her a day before, from New Zealand, to spit out unaccountable complaints about which her research center was shut down, smoke transferred from Australia was everywhere in her area, and how unfortunate she was to impracticably prepare medication for her sinus allergy. That was a Sunday afternoon in the first week of 2020, I remember laying down on bed for hours, listening to my mother’s talk without ceasing about the bushfire: “hundreds of fires burnt across Australia, nearly 80% Australians were affected by the bushfires. NASA estimated that about 306 million tonnes of CO2 had been emitted, and at least a billion animals likely lost their lives, etc.”. Reasonably, I lost my interest in this topic and definitely doubted about my mother’s memory whether she got incorrect data or she had all the number messed up. I laughed, so unintentionally: “No way such all these things happened”. But sadly, my humanity even couldn’t win over my curiosity. Struggling within an accuracy of my mother’s information, after hanging up the phone, I started googling about Australia bushfire. “What is going on with this world?” was my very, and truly first response. Thousands photographs of suffering animals and burning trees were jumping onto and attacking my eyes. My eyes got burnt, and I couldn’t stand this hot in my eyes anymore. In order to cool them down, the only way was letting my tears burst out.

    I felt my mind such immobile, I even couldn’t digest more information: “What else I have missed out?”. For a very few times in my life, I questioned about my humanity. I personally had witnessed a lot of deaths in my life, enough for me to develop a coldness in which I had confidence to help myself not to be hurt anymore. I was so obscured to believe that I would be fine with such those events. I was wrong. I wouldn’t deny my feelings of being so hurtful while looking at the fire’s photographs, millions innocent animals were painfully hurt and millions beautiful trees were burnt down. It was a powerful slap straightforward to my humanity. I knew climate change and environmental crisis is for real but my human – being was cruel enough to care nothing about them. Perhaps, was it because of the culture where I am from? I couldn’t even blame the education system, where I used to be a member, for wrongfully teaching their students to enrich the country’s economy by exploiting natural resources and doing business without concerns for them. However, it should be better to not focusing on blaming, and instead, it’s more encouraged to focusing on more positive actions. As past couldn’t be changed, but the present and future is. So, the question is that: “what I should be doing for nature as a human – being and how my voice can be listened? Would doing art be considered as a possible option?”

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     As Present is also called Gift

  I first heard about an artistic movement called “Land Art”, a.k.a “Environmental Art” or “Earth Art”, when I took Contemporary Art History. The movement’s given name sounded comparably fancy, expensive, and modern for a traditional folk like me. Introduced since 1960s, Land Art has expended boundaries of traditional art, which was mostly perceived in academic forms and displayed within gallery spaces. Contemporary artists have tried to pursue the primary mission of art: “to enhance our awareness of the true nature of things” (Artist Land Nature by Mel Gooding) through this new art movement. Land Art has lifted traditional restrictions as it opens up art in terms of materials, exhibited spaces, creative forms and scales. At first place, works by Robert Smithson, Richard Long, Nancy Holt, etc., invited me to adjust my sense with a very complex, complicated and unfavored subject matter. Disappointingly, it distracted and dissatisfied my interests at first sight as the representational images were too “plain” and “abstract” for an old – fashioned folk like me. Indeed, even I found those works to be well conceptualized and beautifully achieved, it was still annoying as I could gain no connection between me and those works. I would totally blame myself for being lack of spiritual experience, emotional interaction and physical connection with nature; in a negative emotion, I feel sorry for those works.

    One time, I was struggling reading many Land Art – related – articles for an assignment, my exhausted body asked myself to be less stubborn, to try walking method as mentioned as Hamish Fulton’s well – known approaching art forms. I simply gave it a try as: “to be better understanding about either an artist or his works, the best ways are either encountering the works in person or trying out his making processes, materials, and experiences.” Land Art strongly challenges my understanding about art as it questioned whether the performance, the personal experience could be represented as a piece of art. It is written that: “Fulton’s works consist almost entirely and simply of his movement through the landscape, which is thereby touched by his body as he walks, sleeps, pauses to touch an object such as a boulder of his hand; these things are registered by his senses. These walks are the work, and we know of them only as events that have occurred in time past. We can only contemplate their significance through his records and reminders of them in photographs, diagrams and texts.” (Artist Land Nature by Mel Gooding). How a physical movement could be represented on a photograph, a text, as an art form? And how this art form interprets the artist’s experience and conceptual message?

   With such little choice, I decided to spend a whole morning next day walking around the park, observing, listening, taking note and memorizing. Surprising, the answer I received was a beautiful experience; just one time in that specific moment, I put my guard down and connected the artist’s experience to mine: “Such a lovely song I have never heard, such a gray but warm sky I have never seen. There was mud underneath my boots, but how comfort it is to walk on, etc.”. It felt like, these contemporary artists didn’t try to convey the meaning for their artworks, instead, they gave an opportunity to their people to experience and feel by themselves. Those works, which I used to call to be “too plain” and “too abstract”, now became very friendly, simple (positively), beautiful and meaningful. The photographs, the sculptures, the texts only, visually, have responsibilities as an invisible bridge to connect the viewers to the works’ personas, to the nature of things. The experience from which the viewers gain is more important, as it probably answers the question for us: “What I should be doing for nature as a human – being and how my voice can be listened? Would doing art be considered as a possible option?”. And Yes, it is.

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