Eye of Nature

Virgil Hammock is president of the Canadian section of the International
Association of Art Critics and Chairman of the Department of Fine Arts
at Mount Allison University.

This catalogue for a 1989 series of exhibitions held at Banff’s Walter
Phillips Gallery is more than a catalogue, because many of the texts can
stand alone and are not necessarily tied to the three related
exhibitions that took place. As its title suggests, the theme of this
volume is nature, or, to be more exact, postmodern “enviroart” (my
word).

I have recently seen art of this type all over the world—trees in
galleries, suffering-animal photographs, upside-down art, and earnest,
nature-based installations of all sorts. This is not to say that some of
the works are not attractive. The installations of Bill Viola and Laurie
Walker are quite nice, and Jeff Spalding’s paintings are beautiful
objects. However, the remaining visual works illustrated in this
catalogue left me cold.

As for the text, where did these people learn to write? Try this by
Matthew Teitelbaum: “Graham’s tree is a complex sign, at once an
interrogation of a landscape encapsulated by the codified geometries of
territorialization and an acknowledgement of such a control.” And
here’s Maureen P. Sherlock: “Struth’s postmodernism denies the
efficacy of the mimetic and the symbolic in favour of the twice-told
tale of the metropolitan allegory disguised as a documentary of
discontinuity.” Enough said. If only seriousness, much less
earnestness, could be matched by quality, I would be a happy critic.
Skip the book—plant a tree instead.