Between art and nature
One could say confidently that the 1997 Perspecta was the best to date, but that did not stop it from being a little frustrating. Never has Perspecta been staged on such a scale, boasting eighty artists, twenty curators and nineteen presenting bodies throughout Australia, including ABC Radio, The Botanical Gardens and the Internet. Its format was Nature-in-miniature: multifarious, impossible to comprehend as a unit. 'Perspecta', like 'Nature', existed as the name for an ineffable abstraction, but residing within this abstraction were pockets of complete and satisfying experience.
Art and Nature is a forbidding title, at first seeming to offer so much that there is little outside it. And in any case Nature, the last of the surviving gods, has been deconstructed out of existence. Nature is no longer the insuperable, energetic, mercilessly neutral force of the Romantics, rather it is enframed within a welter of ideologies: the nonurban, spaciousness, cleanliness, rusticity, honesty. The originary, graceful state of nature, cleansed of doubt has long been in disrepute. That Nature is perhaps a construct like everything else does not however discount an experience of it that is ecstatic or terrifying and thus inescapably real. But how many of us have the patience or belief to experience nature with such simplicity?
It was Pop art that first questioned the viability of Nature by showing life as made of packaged, anamorphous substitutes for it. A television show showcased a talking horse and recently, in film, a whole farmyard was made to converse. Increasingly it seems that one of the greatest feats is to make, as in an alchemical operation, the unnatural from the natural. Technology, which has delivered us from many of Nature's inclemencies