Can we call it “ART”

Life-Casting and Art

A When these life-castings were made in the 19th century, no one thought of them as art. But, if critics today can hail Tracey Emin’s unmade bed and the lights going off and on in a gallery as masterpieces of some kind, then shouldn’t these more skillful and profoundly strange works have a greater claim on our attention?

B Art changes over time; what is art changes, too. Objects intended for devotional, ritualistic or recreational use are re-categorised, by latecomers from another civilisation who no longer respond to these original purposes. Where would New Yorker cartoon be without Lascaux gags in which one bison-painter makes anachronistically “artistic” remarks to another” What also happens is that techniques and crafts judged non-artistic at the time are reassessed?

C In the 19th century, life-casting was to sculpture what photography was to painting; and both were viewed as cheating short-cuts by the senior arts. Their virtues – of speed and unwavering realism – also implied their limitations; they left little or no room for the imagination. For many, life-casting was an insult to the sculptor’s creative gesture; in a famous lawsuit of 1834, a moulder whose mask of the dying Napoleon had been reproduced and sold without his permission, was judged to have no rights in the image – in other words, he was specifically held not to be an artist. Rodin said of life-casting: “It happens fast, but it doesn’t make art.” Others feared that the whole canon of aesthetics might be blown off course if too much nature was allowed in, it would lead art away from its proper pursuit of the ideal.

D Gauguin, at the end of the century, worried about future developments in photography: if ever the process went into colour, what painter would labour away at a likeness with a brush made from squirrel-tail? But painting has proved robust. Photography changed it, of course, just as the novel had to reassess narrative after the arrival of the cinema. But the gap between the senior and junior arts was always narrower than the die-hards implied: painters have always used technical back-up – studio assistants to do the boring bits, cameras Lucida and Obscura; while apparently lesser crafts involve great skill, thought, preparation, choice, and – depending on how we define it – imagination. Life-casting was complex, technical work, as Benjamin Robert Haydon discovered when he poured 250 litres of plaster over his black model Wilson and nearly killed him.

E Time changes our view in another way, too. Each new art movement implies a reassessment of what has gone before; what is done now alters what was done before. In some cases, this is merely self-serving, with the new is using the old to justify itself: Look how all of that points to this; aren’t we clever to be the culmination of all that has gone before? But usually it is a matter of re-alerting the sensibility, reminding us not to take things for granted; every so often we need the aesthetic equivalent of a cataract operation. So there are many items in this show – innocent bit-players back in the last half of the 19th century – which would sit happily nowadays in a commercial or public gallery. Many curators would probably put in for the stunning cast of the hand of a giant from Barnum’s circus.

F The initial impact is on the eye, in the contradiction (which Mueck constantly exploits) between unexpected size and extreme verisimilitude. Next, the human element kicks in: you note that the nails are dirt-encrusted – unless this is the caster’s decorative addition – and the paddy fingertips extend far beyond them. (Was the giant an anxious gnawer, or does giantism mean that the flesh simply outgrows the nails?) Then you take in the element of choice, arrangement, art if you like – the neat, pleated, buttoned sleeve end that gives the item balance and variation of texture. This is just a moulded hand, yet the part stands utterly for the whole: and, as an item on public display, it reminds us, slyly, poignantly, of the full-size original who in his time was just as much a victim of gawping. We are not a long way from Degas’s La Petite Danseuse (which, after all, one critic said should be in the Dupuytren pathology museum); though we are nearer to contemporary art that lazily gets called cutting-edge.

G Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, the liberation of the text from authorial intention, and the consequent empowerment of the reader; he announced this, needless to say, in a text written with a particular intention in order to communicate something very specific to a reader. An own goal of Keith Weller proportions. But what doesn’t work for literature works much better for art. Pictures do float free of their creators’ intentions; over time, the “reader” does become more powerful. Few of us can look at a medieval altarpiece as its painter “intended”, we believe too little and aesthetically know too much, so we recreate, we find new fields of pleasure in the work. Equally, the lack of artistic intention of Paul Richer and other forgotten craftsmen who brushed oil on to flesh, who moulded, cast, decorated and primped a century and more ago is now irrelevant.

H What counts is the surviving object and our living response to it. The tests are simple: does it interest the eye, excite the brain, move the mind to reflection, and involve the heart; further, is an apparent level of skill involved? Much currently fashionable art bothers only the eye and briefly the brain, but it fails to engage the mind or the heart. It may, to use the old dichotomy, be beautiful, but it is rarely true to any significant depth. One of the constant pleasures of art is its ability to come at us from an unexpected angle and stop us short in wonder. That is what many of the objects in this show do. The Ataxic Venus doesn’t make Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad any less intense and moving an image; but she does offer herself as a companion, precursor, and, yes, rival.

Honey bees in trouble

Can native pollinators fill the gap?

A Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment, colony collapse disorder (CCD), that is wiping out the honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields will be sterile, economies will collapse, and food will be scarce.

B But what few accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs. For one thing, in the United States, where CCD was first reported and has had its greatest impacts, honeybees are not a native species. Pollination in modern agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s industry. The total number of hives involved in the U.S. pollination industry has been somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million in recent years. Meanwhile, American farmers began using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop monocultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed native vegetation from field margins and roadsides. These practices killed many native bees outright – they’re as vulnerable to insecticides as an agricultural pest – and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those that remained. Concern about these practices and their effects on pollinators isn’t new – in her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result from the disappearance of insect pollinators.

C If that ‘Fruitless Fall’ has not-yet-occurred, it may be largely thanks to the honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service crops declined. The honeybee has been semi-domesticated since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that determined this choice: the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the kind of agricultural system that was emerging. For example, honeybee hives can be closed up and moved out of the way when pesticides are applied to a field. The bees are generalist pollinators, so they can be used to pollinate many different crops. And although they are not the most efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees have strength in numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single hive. “Without a doubt, if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the honeybee,” says Jim Cane, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The honeybee, in other words, has become a crucial cog in the modern system of industrial agriculture. That system delivers more food, and more kinds of it, to more places, more cheaply than ever before. But that system is also vulnerable, because making a farm field into the photosynthetic equivalent of a factory floor, and pollination into a series of continent-long assembly lines, also leaches out some of the resilience characteristics of natural ecosystems.

D Breno Freitas, an agronomist, pointed out that in nature such a high degree of specialization usually is a very dangerous game: it works well while all the rest is in equilibrium, but runs quickly to extinction at the least disbalance. In effect, by developing an agricultural system that is heavily reliant on a single pollinator species, we humans have become riskily overspecialized. And when the human-honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it has been by colony collapse disorder, the vulnerability of that agricultural system begins to become clear.

E In fact, a few wild bees are already being successfully managed for crop pollination. “The problem is trying to provide native bees inadequate numbers on a reliable basis in a fairly short number of years in order to service the crop,” Jim Cane says. “You’re talking millions of flowers per acre in a two-to three-week time frame, or less, for a lot of crops.” On the other hand, native bees can be much more efficient pollinators of certain crops than honeybees, so you don’t need as many to do the job. For example, about 750 blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria) can pollinate a hectare of apples or almonds, a task that would require roughly 50,000 to 150,000 honeybees. There are bee tinkerers engaged in similar work in many corners of the world. In Brazil, Breno Freitas has found that Centris tarsata, the native pollinator of wild cashew, can survive in commercial cashew orchards if growers provide a source of floral oils, such as by interplanting their cashew trees with a Caribbean cherry.

F In certain places, native bees may already be doing more than they’re getting credit for. Ecologist Rachael Winfree recently led a team that looked at pollination of four summer crops (tomato, watermelon, peppers, and muskmelon) at 29 farms in the region of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Winfree’s team identified 54 species of wild bees that visited these crops, and found that wild bees were the most important pollinators in the system: even though managed honeybees were present on many of the farms, wild bees were responsible for 62 percent of flower visits in the study. In another study focusing specifically on watermelon, Winfree and her colleagues calculated that native bees alone could provide sufficient pollination at 90 percent of the 23 farms studied. By contrast, honeybees alone could provide sufficient pollination at only 78 percent of farms.

G “The region I work in is not typical of the way most food is produced,” Winfree admits. In the Delaware Valley, most farms and farm fields are relatively small, each farmer typically grows a variety of crops, and farms are interspersed with suburbs and other types of land use which means there are opportunities for homeowners to get involved in bee conservation, too. The landscape is a bee-friendly patchwork that provides a variety of nesting habitat and floral resources distributed among different kinds of crops, weedy field margins, fallow fields, suburban neighborhoods, and semi-natural habitat like old woodlots, all at a relatively small scale. In other words, “pollinator-friendly” farming practices would not only aid pollination of agricultural crops, but also serve as a key element in the overall conservation strategy for wild pollinators, and often aid other wild species as well.

H Of course, not all farmers will be able to implement all of these practices. And researchers are suggesting a shift to a kind of polyglot agricultural system. For some small-scale farms, native bees may indeed be all that’s needed. For larger operations, a suite of managed bees – with honeybees filling the generalist role and other, native bees pollinating specific crops – could be augmented by free pollination services from resurgent wild pollinators. In other words, they’re saying, we still have an opportunity to replace a risky monoculture with something diverse, resilient, and robust.