Similar project, commissioned in 2010 by the artistic platform The Anthropologist, was created by Denevan’s team on the frozen surface of the Siberian Lake Baikal in Russia (see the project here). Based on a Fibonacci curve (where each number is a sum of the previous two; the pattern is present in many nature forms), the drawing spanned 31 kilometers square and was created under severe conditions of Siberian winter including extremely low temperatures and blistering winds. The execution of the work was a challenge--in terms of both its scale and the harsh, ruthless circumstances in which it was produced. As Denevan’s other projects, this drawing was executed on an ephemeral canvas, yet lasted a bit longer than others. The massive Lake Baikal drawing dissolved after a few months, due to weather conditions present on site. The surface of the lake melted, the rhythmic circles had to gradually disappear, returning the site to its regular becoming connected to the changes of seasons in Siberia, with its recurring movements and metamorphoses, always different and always new.
Denevan’s most notorious project is his 2009 enormous drawing on the sands of Black Rock Desert in Nevada (United States) for which he used a high tech GPS technology to organize coordinates and create a perfect gigantic circle (containing more than 1000 individual circles) visible form 40,000 feet up in the sky (click here to see the project). For the drawing Denevan and his three colleagues used a roll of chain fencing six feet across pulled by a truck round several times to leave deep traces in the sand of the desert. It took several days to complete the outstanding work. A desert storm washed it away the following week. The work of art was ephemeral from its very beginning as the artist decided to work with the sand which--when shaped in whatever way--resists any form of durability and permanence. Sand easily lends itself to sculpture or drawing, but--in smooth cooperation with water, wind, tides, and rain--the seemingly durable individual grains get recomposed into new structures and new configurations shape-shifting with every movement. It is about constant unfolding, a perpetual, dynamic--even though occasionally imperceptible--metamorphosis. Every shaping and configuration is transitioning into something else. All material forces operating on site are involved in the work of art’s incessant and restless becoming with no final goal or no ultimate shape to be achieved. The work remains fluid until it disappears, erased by the natural site-specific processes. The artist shapes the materiality of the landscape, but this is just a temporary, ephemeral practice that is not invasively changing the texture of the place (although, it does constitute a change!). For a time, the drawing seems to be a specific place thriving in the indeterminate, vast space of the desert. It is in fact a constant process, a perpetual, intense transformation. The artistic intervention is a set of movements within the more encompassing bundle of procedures, all in a way of the same character. The movement triggered by the artist gets eventually annihilated by other movements, testifying to the constant, often unnoticeable, operations of the latter.
It makes us realize the active dimension of the natural environment with all its forces and transformations. Even if we do not notice their operations when they happen, we can recognize their effects. The act of destruction of the work of art is actually an obvious evidence for the multiplicity of processes operating on site. And the extinction of the work of art is a very material process, which makes us think about the incessant intra-active, relational becomings of life.
As evidenced by the selected examples, Denevan’s work exposes the fragility and vulnerability of natural forces, their incessant metamorphous regenerative flow and its susceptibility to new relational becomings and transformations. These processes are productive of new metamorphoses. They are also responsive to non-indigenous interventions, adjusting to the nature of their specificity. The meticulously designed and executed drawings do not last for long—both the natural and the cultural forces will cause their further metamorphoses as they intervene (sometimes in unnoticeable way) into the landscape itself. The material environment is always changing and always moving; it always remains in process. So is the cultural meaning of the artwork—it is always fluid and always different. These works of art, spontaneously yet regularly composed of countess circles and lines, may serve as metaphoric allusion to the never-ending cycle of nature, a constant movement between life and death, rebirth and annihilation; an unfinished process of eternal metamorphosis, or a never-ending becoming-other or different. This becoming, however, is not purely material/natural. Neither is it merely discursive/cultural. It is rather about constant vibrant intra-active entanglement of both in the emergence of the new. The land art by Denevan triggers critical reflection on the agency (which is no longer an exclusively human capacity) and the joint, collective becoming of the work of art, or its material-semiotic unfolding. There are many agents involved in the creation and destruction of the work. The processes, however, cannot be understood as oppositional. Destruction is not a process that would return the site to its original shape from before the artistic intervention. The site never returns to what it was. Rather, it is further creation—a recomposition of the traces of movement performed by the artist, a new configuration of the landscape, a new becoming. Both processes, therefore, should be understood in affirmative manners, that is, in terms of productivity. Different agents are involved in the drawings’ becomings as they remain beyond control of anyone.
In that sense, Denevan’s works provide illustrative examples of the post-anthropocentric ecological turn in arts, conveying a message that the quintessence of the natural-cultural environment is its transience, ephemerality, and always metamorphous “processuality.” This is why the artist cannot “possess” the environment, but can only co-exist or entangle with it and let it speak on the same rights. Thusly conceived geoart opens the artist’s bodily-intellectual subjectivity to the sense of a place and allows for transcending the vision-centered attitude grounded in the quest for control or hunger for dominance. This owns much to the complex operations of material-discursive entanglements. Matter makes possible and sustains meanings assigned to it by artists or audiences, yet at the same time these meanings make matter matter. Hence, Denevan merges with the landscape through an artistic intuitive-rational “intra-action.” What emerges from this assemblage is a new becoming, and a new set of processes in which different agents and forces are involved.
What must be underlined here is that, although benign and non-violent in their character, Denevan’s projects have to be conceived also as interventions, that is, as something that would not have occurred without intentional human-technological activity. In that sense, we need to stay cautious about such artistic processes, as Lucy Lippard postulates in her 2014 book. The beautiful ephemeral drawings are generated in the complex entanglement of natural-cultural forces, leaving memorable—although usually imperceptible—traces on the landscape of the site. Even though they seem to disappear in the multiplicity of the indigenous movements, they still affect their trajectories and further metamorphoses. Noticeably, there is a capitalistic apparatus beneath the emergence of the giant works of art, including the specific equipment employed for visualization purposes (cameras, helicopters, planes, etc.) and for making the works available for wide audiences (distribution, display devices, digital viewing). There is also a complicated machinery used for producing the ephemeral drawings (including cars, bulldozers, trucks, etc.). This also testifies to the entangled natural-cultural and material-semiotic relationality from which these works of art emerge. It is necessary to keep these processes in mind in order not to blindly aesthetisize these movements, but to sharpen the critique, remaining nevertheless in an affirmative new materialist mood.
