Abstract
Environmental changes and the age of the Anthropocene demand new ways of seeing. This article contends that montage serves both as form and as argument in representing the modern Western experience of human-nature relations in the supposed Anthropocene. It suggests that montage resists a single narrative of the Anthropocene and allows for modified readings to address race and capital through alternative notions such as the Capitalocene and Black Anthropocenes. Montage in relation to the Anthropocene is exemplified through two works by contemporary British artists that visualize agencies and legacies of human interventions into fluvial geographies, the sea, and whales: the touring film installation Vertigo Sea (2015) by John Akomfrah, and the site-specific intervention BERLINWAL (Berlin Whale) (2018) by Elizabeth Price at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. Both works, though differing in medium, use montage as a structure to hold different materialities and multiple spatial and temporal scales, affording integration as well as confrontation. Their multifocal perceptions and multiple perspectives challenge ontologies and afford a decentering of the viewer toward de-exceptionalizing the human.
The Anthropocene demands new ways of seeing to reveal human interventions into nature.1 While the aesthetics of montage have been discussed as a structural principle of form and perception in the experience of European modernity, little attention has so far been paid to contemporary artists working with montage to address the age of the Anthropocene.2 Montage, as cultural representation rooted in industrial production and in popular image practices from the nineteenth century onward, serves as both form and argument set in relation to a viewer.3 Montage is the process in which found materials are taken up together with the artist’s own materials in order for these to be integrated or, instead, to be confronted with each other.4 This process is a primary cultural technique of Western modernity and has become a widely recognizable form, notably in the twentieth century.5 I suggest that the montage of heterogeneous source materials in visual artworks is particularly apt to point to histories of human interventions and intersections of nature and culture in the Anthropocene. Montage also gives form and offers a forum in which to critically explore narratives of the Anthropocene and, in turn, to read Anthropocenic implications in what is presented through montage. The principle of montage is to act, to “shock” (per Walter Benjamin), against deceptive cohesion through the aesthetic effect of “rupture” (per Theodor Adorno).6 In the context explored in this article, this principle not only challenges Western European modes of seeing human interventions into the environment but leads toward ways of conceptualizing an “Anthropocene-in-the-making.”7
This article exemplifies montage’s relation to the Anthropocene through two contemporary British artists’ works that visualize human interventions into fluvial geographies, the sea, and whales: the touring film installation Vertigo Sea (2015) by John Akomfrah, and the site-specific intervention BERLINWAL (Berlin Whale) (2018) by Elizabeth Price, at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany.8 These works rely on two differently evolved, historically layered environments, namely environments framed as landscape (Akomfrah) and natural history collections (Price). Despite their difference, both works allow us, as the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff urges, to “begin to imagine a different way to be with what we used to call nature. That will be seeing the Anthropocene.”9 How is “seeing” made use of in these two works? As I will show in this article, Vertigo Sea corroborates montage in the filmic tradition from its early twentieth-century beginnings, whereas BERLINWAL complicates and extends the compositional principle into a spatial dimension. Both works offer dialectics of spatial juxtapositions as well as temporal sequences of connected human-nonhuman histories. To complete these juxtapositions, I explore how the viewer is conceptualized in the works. Moreover, and again germane to the context of the Anthropocene, the respective works intersect sociotechnological and environmental temporalities that, considered together, speak to histories of prospecting and harvesting the sea.
The Anthropocene, as a storied narrative originating in the Western sciences, seeks to correlate symptoms of change with its causes to effect political and societal transformation.10 Following the historian of literature and culture Gabriele Dürbeck, five narratives can now be distinguished in Anthropocene discourse: the narrative of catastrophe or apocalypse; the judicial narrative; the narrative of the great cultural-societal transformation; the biotechnological narrative with optimism for an ecomodernism in a good Anthropocene; and the narrative of interdependence.11 In all their differences, these narratives share references, sometimes critical, to humans’ endangerment of the world, a deep-time perspective into past and future, a planetary framework, the dissolution between the categories of nature and culture at the conceptual level of the earth sciences, and finally, the theme of ethical responsibility for and the reduction in environmental destruction, and the threatened survival of human civilization.12 Since the Anthropocene was proposed in the early 2000s, it has been put to work for planetary analytics. But the concept has shunned inherent correlates of capital, imperialism, and coloniality and has been critiqued as foreclosing political and ethical discussions, particularly in relation to race.13 In riposte, specific alternative narratives of global environmental change have emerged, including the Capitalocene and Black Anthropocenes.14 The Capitalocene argues for an integration of capital, power, and nature in the history of capitalism and against a Eurocentric, worldwide appropriation of what the environmental historian Jason Moore refers to as “cheap nature.”15 Formulated by the geographer Kathryn Yusoff, the term Black Anthropocenes, in the plural, seeks to interject and articulate multiple events within historical junctures from 1492 to 1950 in order to counteract the “racial blindness” of the Anthropocene.16 The dates are significant and indicative of the tensions within the debates. The Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter refers to the “1492 event” to connect the European arrival in the Americas and the expansion of European capitalism. The early 1950s have since been confirmed by the Anthropocene Working Group as the origin of the new epoch. This epoch is marked by the “Great Acceleration” of human industrial and consumer activities and by anthropogenic radionuclides associated with nuclear arms testing spread worldwide by Western nation-states. Stratigraphers then sought an unambiguous record of change in environmental archives as a formal requirement for official recognition of a new geological time unit. While the Anthropocene is deemed an “invaluable descriptor of human impact on the Earth system” by the stratigraphers, the formal recognition as a geological epoch was however rejected by them in March this year.17 The effort to address social and ecological justice remains an ongoing task.
Correspondingly, the confrontational and contingent form of montage resists a single consolidated narrative of the Anthropocene. Rather, the cultural technique of montage serves to disrupt the surface to make visible societal “chaos.”18 Montage, then, in its staging between what is actually and what is seemingly known, can convey the uncertainties in assumptions, attributions, and origins of the Anthropocene. Furthermore, for critical readings of changing, historically layered environments as presented in the works in question, this article draws on the alternative propositions of the Capitalocene and Black Anthropocenes. Using the structure of montage, Vertigo Sea and BERLINWAL are works through which the Capitalocene and Black Anthropocenes become legible; and in turn both concepts become useful interpretative lenses for these artworks. The sea becomes a space of uncertainty and an archive of death in Vertigo Sea. Akomfrah not only uses the whale as emblematic for the sea and human violence but also makes explicit the violence toward enslaved Africans of the Middle Passage and present-day migrants across the Mediterranean. BERLINWAL, on the other hand, relates to the fragments of nature archived in the natural history museum. These stratigraphic layers of nature’s remains are presented as integrative to the Museum für Naturkunde, where the artwork is located. This concerns both the museum’s location—the museum is in Berlin—and its institutional logic as a type of museum founded on Western classificatory systems with the human as its center, and its reliance on capital and imperial and colonial infrastructures.19 Recent interpretations of Vertigo Sea by the art historians T. J. Demos and Christine Ross already address aspects of the Anthropocene.20 Through analyses of migrant images and histories of migration, they interrelate histories of modernity, colonialism, slavery, and environmental destruction. Price’s film installations have been interpreted as visceral and at moments mocking critiques of consumer culture, including in analyses by the art historian Tamara Trodd and the art and design researcher Andrea Thoma.21 My analysis acknowledges these interpretations but focuses on analyzing these artworks through their compositional principle. Importantly, I go beyond the level of images in situating the works. Artworks evidence how the material world shapes human minds, bodies, and cultures.22 I seek to advance understandings of contemporary aesthetic practices that ecologize, as it were, material worlds and shared experiences toward empathy and responsibility, through the sensorium and the processes of mind available to us as humans.
Aspects of Montage from Shock to Strange: Inventing “Cacophony” and “Ghostly Fantasies”
Artists, filmmakers, writers, and designers have used montage as a structural principle since the first third of the twentieth century to engage with the fragmentariness of modernity and to represent notably metropolitan life, typified within a human-built environment.23 But in the course of the century artists have also represented rural environments and edge lands in which the transition from urban to rural is negotiated.24 Accordingly, I explore montage in its application to urban as well as nonurban environments and in social, scientific, and human-to-nonhuman interactions within. Anthropologist Hugh Raffles’s research for In Amazonia is especially suggestive concerning how environments in transformation lend themselves to be regarded as montages.25 He describes the nature of the Amazon region as dynamic and heterogeneous, formed again and again from presences that are cultural, historical, biological, geographical, political, physical, aesthetic, and social. Such nature, he writes, “calls for a natural history, an articulation of natures and histories that work across and against spatial and temporal scale to bring people, places, and the nonhuman into ‘our space’ of the present.”26
Montage convenes heterogeneous elements made from different presences. Most important, montage works with shocks of cognizance, also related to defamiliarization, in creating sharp contrasts between the things assembled. The method can be explicit in its juxtapositions of areas of experience and knowledge that are not normally adjacent, thereby bringing disparate elements into closeness. Vertigo Sea continues an artistic approach Akomfrah and his collaborators developed earlier on. He describes the montage of images shown across different channels and the soundscape: “We would bring a certain cacophony to bear, to get things to clash a little bit, and force the meanings out of the clashes, rather than trying to dissolve them.”27 Through a demonstrative shock or rupture, montage can make things strange and unfamiliar, evoking ghosts and fantasies. Price had also previously worked with montage in several works, such as At the House of Mr X (2007). This work marks Price’s move from “post-conceptual artist to an inventor of ghostly fantasies” working with a montage of film, graphics, and text.28 In their evocative allusions, both artworks evoke ghosts and hauntings.
Montage’s capacity to summon can be qualified by different purposes. The philosopher Jacques Rancière, in The Future of the Image, distinguishes dialectical and symbolic montage. Dialectical montage creates clashes and conflict by “assimilating heterogeneous elements and combining incompatible things.”29 It presents the “strangeness of the familiar” by using distance and collision to reveal “the secret of a world—that is, the other world whose writ runs behind its anodyne or glorious appearances.”30 Symbolic montage also relates heterogeneous elements. Yet it assembles unrelated elements not with the logic of the clash, but instead “to establish a familiarity, an occasional analogy, attesting to a more fundamental relationship of co-belonging, a shared world where heterogeneous elements are caught up in the same essential fabric.”31 Both dialectical and symbolic aspects of montage can be used within the same artwork. In this space of clashes, and in the construction of a continuum of copresence, a history rife with contradictions becomes legible. Conversely, contemporary visual conceptualizations also respond to a different, more recent spirit of modernity, to the “essential fabric.” The narrative of interdependence, as an Anthropocene narrative based on connected rather than separate categories of humans and the natural world, is prominent here. Making strange and unfamiliar can then lead to questioning of hitherto perceived hierarchies. The cultural theorist Donna Haraway talks of “naturecultures” and “co-becoming” to engage with the current situation, to reimagine and pursue human-nature relations in which the human is not an exceptional species.32
Both artworks discussed here explore the ontological unruliness of the world by articulating transitions between nature and culture, making use of dialectical as well as symbolic montage techniques. “Weird, byzantine, shiny, viscous stuff” (Price) is interrelated to suggest reconfigurations as much as to recognize human agency.33 Equally, Akomfrah proposes the unfamiliar and uncanny between the subjective, the historical, and the political to go beyond the literalism of historical causality.34 The aesthetics of the transitions between the elements of montage contribute to describing the interrelations between histories, between nature and culture, or between habitat and the objectified remains of species. As discussed above, in montage the effect of the “shock” has been considered paradigmatic since the early twentieth century. Like Rancière, the literary historian Viktor Žmegač characterizes the process of achieving this effect as demonstrative (open, irritating). A distinction is made with earlier and other processes of montage referred to as integrative or concealed.35 In integrative montage fragmentary elements can appear authentic and support an illusion. They may align in creating similarities in mood or be similar in their sensations or thoughts. Integration can work through quotations, as in Vertigo Sea, in which multiple authors are cited, and through analogies, such as in the variations in the motif of migration. In contrast to such poetics that fudge the edges of its construction to shape an integrated (though heterogeneous) work, demonstrative montage specifically shows where one element starts and another one ends, how an element might function on its own, how it is attached to another element, or how these elements combine and function together.36 In demonstrative montage apparent cohesion and surface are disrupted, the rupture is recognized, and its aesthetic effect is exploited and put to use.
However, the application of montage can also differ in its purpose and the unconscious relations evoked; sharp political criticism could equally flip into the language of political propaganda or consumption. These differing trajectories can be observed in the languages of commercial advertising versus explicit political messaging in photomontages, collages, or exhibition design.37 Therefore, montage propositions and the recipient’s critical work to gain insights into relations starts here: with a recognition of the classification of events.38 Moreover, in relation to the viewer, montage is work-eccentric. Its meaning is produced through the recipient’s own experience of the work. At the core of the work, and contingent on it, is the viewer who synthesizes or rejects the correlations suggested in the work and contributes to these suggestions in their own mind or body. At the same time, suggested new interrelations provide productive frameworks for the reading of the Anthropocene, or indeed its alternative propositions, in which disciplinary areas of expertise, knowledge, and experience can be placed in proximity to interrogate histories. To be clear, this article is not a reception theory paper nor is it based on evaluative audience research. Instead, I make inferences from the content and juxtapositions presented in the works in relation to what is presented under the Anthropocene as well as from my experience and insight as a curator of contemporary art.
As a composition principle, montage provisionally connects heterogeneous materials from different origins and from different temporal and spatial contexts to create arguments. It thus provides an epistemic structure (what and how to know) for the viewer. The work can thereby offer dynamic interactions with the observer to associate meanings and to challenge ontologies (separations, categorizations). In its composition, moreover, the technique offers multiple points of view that offer shifts in perspective (aerial, submerged, linear, flat, close-up) to destabilize European conventions of framing landscape and to reflect a world in flux. The viewer constitutes a critical connection to knowing about the world (aquatic, geological, built)—a world in which we are submerged and which we seek to transform, construct, and represent.39 Consequently, I suggest that both BERLNWAL and Vertigo Sea embed the viewer to evoke critical and empathetic effects. Yet embedding anthropos, meaning the interventionist human central to the term Anthropocene, is here not an analogy to the centrality of the human in the Anthropocene. I argue that the artists create another, different complexity by conceptually decentering the viewer in relation to the nonhuman world.
Montage in Vertigo Sea and BERLINWAL
Vertigo Sea (2015) by the Ghana-born filmmaker John Akomfrah (b. 1957) is a mesmerizing forty-eight-minute-long three-screen film installation (fig. 1).
“Oblique Tales on the Aquatic Sublime,” the opening section, speaks to the viewer of the simultaneous beauty and terror of the sea, the sublime. The work presents violence and colonial and social injustices within the still-unfolding histories of slavery, migration, and environmental transformation. The work’s narration relates conflicting experiences and histories of the sea: the sea is a placid location for swaying kelp forests in raking sunlight reaching down below the water’s surface; it is a killing field for enslaved humans of the transatlantic slave trade and a grave site for present-day migrants across the Mediterranean. The sea is the bloodied and relentless hunting ground for whales in the world’s oceans, a seemingly unbounded place entangled with the histories of humans and nonhumans.
Akomfrah is a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective; his cine-essay style evolved out of working for TV and gallery and cinema spaces.40 He now often creates multiscreen film and video installations using archival materials together with natural history documentary footage and structured sound to create montages. Their narrative structures—reliant on history, memory, imagination—function simultaneously to delve into personal and collective memories. The experience of migration and postcolonialism are core themes of Akomfrah’s works.41Vertigo Sea is part of a trilogy on the natural world. The trilogy’s second project, Purple (2017), is described as on “the (be)coming of the Anthropocene” and was shown in the Curve at the Barbican, London, in 2017.42 The third part, Four Nocturnes (2019), focuses on Africa’s declining elephant populations and surveys landscapes of African cultural heritage.43Vertigo Sea brings together photographic and film archive materials and BBC’s Natural History Unit programs found footage (stripped of its original soundtrack),44 and readings from various literary, news, and philosophical sources, including writing by the slaver-turned-abolitionist John Newton (1725–1807) and quotes from Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Heathcote Williams, Whale Nation; and Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Through an abundance of media images Vertigo Sea presents the sea as an archive of histories. Spatialized sequences of fleeting images, moving in different tempi while interrelating with the spoken narrative and a specially composed ambient soundtrack, create haunted and ghostly moments of afterimages and afterthoughts.45 Some images are shown at a high tempo, creating moments of breathlessness, then they are contrasted and amplified by short sequences of slow-motion footage, such as a crocodile attacking a group of gnus in the style of natural history documentary footage. As in previous works, Akomfrah adopted a strategy to “sequestrate” images, words, and sounds, creating a complex montage.46 Here these expressions are associated with the vertiginous seas and linger in the mind of the viewer as the tide of images and words ebbs in and away and which, in the trilogy, intersect readings of the Anthropocene, as the artist himself suggests.
To structure the overwhelming experience of the materials, Vertigo Sea is loosely organized in sections separated by eight intertitles and with motifs (whales, hunting, migration, slavery). The motifs work through images, words, sounds, and voiceover. Whales as a key motif encompasses a spectrum from aerial imagery of a whale with its young swimming in the sea—a human-controlled camera perspective haunting the whale in its journey across the world’s oceans—to spoken word extracts from Williams’s poem Whale Nation (1988), on the majesty of the whale and human disturbance of the sea, and Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851), in which the whale rises from the ocean depths in its effort to live. Human violence toward the whale is made explicit by contrasting film sequences of the back of a whale seen from above and a whale with its young with a captured whale being sliced open by a white man. Together these sequences present a specific economic and media history of human-nonhuman species relations through their intersecting cultural and ecological temporalities. The exemplary role of this history is partly reinforced through the inclusion of different habitats from across the globe throughout the work: the Arctic, deserts, mountains, forests. But it is the sea to which the imagery always returns, anchoring the story by conveying a sense of interlinked ecosystems across the planet and at the same time alluding to similar stories elsewhere, raised but not necessarily answered in Vertigo Sea, but picked up across the trilogy.
Racial and cultural categories, as critically interjected in the conception of Black Anthropocenes, come to the fore in Akomfrah’s work. “The way of killing men and beasts is the same,” Vertigo Sea’s final intertitle purports, making a statement deeply uncomfortable not only for white European gallery viewers.47 The statement invites multiple interpretations. One reading, however, is sequestrated and condensed: the racial typing of Black people to a biological status inferior to white people and their equation with nonhumans, a typing that has underpinned racial colonialism and the evolution of European modern science to the present day. The section summons images of whales drowning in clouds of their own blood and of slaves in shackles within the darkness of a ship on the Atlantic crossing.48 This synthesis is allusive yet pushed further into a different suggestion. The sea becomes a racialized site, not only for transit but for transformation and emancipation. Akomfrah includes staged depictions of mostly Black individuals, one of whom is Olaudah Equiano (1745–97). Equiano was a writer, abolitionist, and explorer in the Arctic. Enslaved in West Africa at the age of eleven and trafficked to Jamaica, he bought his freedom in 1766 and became a best-selling author in Europe and North America. In his writing “the ship and the sea become emblematic of . . . all that works to enslave,” but through the ship and the sea, Equiano rewrites his “structural relationship to slavery.”49 Through sequences of allure and repulsion in Vertigo Sea, the viewer’s potentially critical synthesis can work across human-whale entanglements, slavery, and racial categorization through a range of suggested emotions of allure and repulsion.
Whereas Vertigo Sea is a compelling viewing, drawing the visitor in through enveloping sequences of images, jarring with moments of chilling cruelty and creating “shocks,” BERLINWAL is reticently seductive—and seductively reticent—in its imagery and proposition to the viewer. BERLINWAL was conceived within a thematic and methodology typical for Elizabeth Price (b. 1966, UK), who studies utilitarian objects, clothing, technological apparatus, and product design. In her practice, artifacts act out social occurrences and are bound into technoscientific histories. The work’s title alludes both to cetacean specimens in the municipal collection and to the city divided. BERLINWAL was made with and for the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin.50 Price’s project integrates existing museum architecture with elements created by the artist to entice the viewer to imagine the deep time strata of the river Spree in Berlin from its earliest formations to the Cold War. The narrative relates the times of the deposits laid down about two to three hundred thousand years ago, which settled at the same time as the first anatomically modern human species developed, to the human historical time period of the political history that followed the Second World War until about 1989.
BERLINWAL combined four parts, some mobile and made by the artist, some integral parts of the museum: a wall painting in deepest green of a sharp and precise abstracted form emulating the shape of a diving whale, sited between the existing curtained windows and the vertical glass door that is closed to the public; the view from this museum gallery window-cum-door onto an outdoor space, enclosed by museum buildings, now bureaucratically referred to as Courtyard 3; a group of individual, minimalist, colored metal seats within the gallery, which the user could move around and which thereby invited negotiations of sociability or distancing; and a concertina booklet with an illustrated story to take away, intended as a gift by the artist. The short illustrated text, written by the artist and printed in a specially designed publication inspired by archive labels found in the museum, not only highlights a space but sets it into geological and sociotechnological historical context.51 The text imagines a human leg, an elastic limb of heightened feeling, embedded vertically in the strata below the museum. Price’s intervention integrated these various elements through montage including framing (the view onto the courtyard), imagining and sensing (the leg), and materiality (the concertina publication, the metal stools). The viewer could move within the intervention, but it was the textual narrative that provided a rationale for the different elements.
Price used motifs that made the montage cohere across its diverse elements: whales, strata, temperature, flow, changing shapes. In the story the narrator imagines whales from the arctic seas together with the fluvial sediments of the ancient river and the swamplands in Berlin from about ten thousand years ago.52 In the late nineteenth century, the remains of whales were transferred through the agencies of whalers, traders, and natural scientists from the species’ natural marine habitat into Berlin’s newly built natural history museum. In the narrative the varied strata below Courtyard 3 and the museum are used to chart evolutionary processes. Particular attention is given to the changing shapes of limbs (the human thigh, the fluke of whale), and the circulation of warmth within mammalian bodies, such as the capillary network in the whale’s tail that tempers the warm blood flowing from the heart with cool blood coming from the skin. The story speaks of the historical display of whale remains in the Museum of Natural History, which opened at Invalidenstrasse in 1889, built on Berlin’s geological strata: “Various species were represented including a large bowhead whale, shown with beards of baleen—long bristles used to sift krill from the seawater—fragments of which are now buried in the final layers of sediment.”53
The work not only intertwined geological matters, engineered and labored by humans, with mammalian evolution. It also, like Vertigo Sea, drew out the evolving, and at moments seemingly contradictory, presence of the whale in European human culture: emblematic as leviathan, as an icon of environmentalism, and as an economically exploited species.
Human economic, sociometabolic transformation of a nonhuman species, a capitalist narrative of the Anthropocene, is exemplified in the unequal relationship between whale and human. Whales literally lit up the nineteenth century, their fat having been a common fuel for oil lamps, while their baleen was adapted to modify human body shape in the form of corsets, collar strips, hat peaks, or shoe arches. The exploitation of whales for both energy and the cultural modification of human bodies typifies how nature is both an economic resource and the capital of European modernity. As a counterpoint to the species’ exploitation at an industrial scale, Western environmental discourses became increasingly concerned with species extinction from the early twentieth century on, and later with the destruction of marine habitats, ocean pollution, and ocean acidification. Through a historical framework of European modernity BERLINWAL integrates geo-, techno-, and biospheres in an evolutionary development with technical infrastructures of shipping, railways, roads, and buildings. It is a progression with a catastrophic ending.
The impetus of Price’s work is to narrate how humans are profoundly transforming and socio-metabolizing an environment by seamlessly describing the flows of materials and energy between the lifeworld of the whale and the whale itself, the land and water of the swamps, and Berlin’s society. In BERLINWAL she does so through referring to a specific geological space that is at the same time the site of a natural history archive. She also does so through focusing on a specific species and its ultimate consumption through fire, thereby combining Anthropocene narratives of ecological destruction and transformative energy. Courtyard 3 at the time of the making of BERLINWAL was a behind-the-scenes space in which everyday activities of the museum could be observed: service staff parking their cars, objects being carried across. From 1935 until 1945, this space hosted the Whale Hall (fig. 2).
One of the hall’s spectacular display pieces was a whale skeleton mounted onto a metal frame. “The [whale] skeleton was also partially remodeled using taxidermy techniques to create the appearance of body mass, flesh and skin.”54 The hall was destroyed ten years later in the Second World War Allied firestorm of February 3, 1945 (fig. 3). In Price’s work, the objects’ remains in their consumed-by-fire state are reproduced from a photographic negative taken in the aftermath of the bombing, the image’s lights and darks in reverse, showing “the big, battered bowhead still, amidst the ruin, floating more convincingly now there is no sign of life.”55
In analogy to the transformations of plants in the herbarium, as discussed by Caroline Cornish, Felix Driver, and Mark Nesbitt, Price emphasized the perpetually shape-shifting forms of specimens, object, and archive collections.56 She drew attention to the “flux of objects, coming and going over time—the collection’s changeling ontological status.”57
Montage works with visuals, texts, sounds, and materials as constituent elements. These elements originate from different sources and embody their own history and knowledge. The material object can be such a constituent element and is a way not only of knowing cultural history but is also germane to the natural sciences.58 The natural history museum in Berlin holds about thirty million objects—like most natural history collections, a bewildering gathering of objects, encompassing geological, paleontological, petrological, mineralogical, and zoological specimens brought into close proximity within the walls of the museum. What is the status of these objects in the Anthropocene? To complicate a material culture approach, Price worked with the material presence of objects but by withholding the objects from view. The artist’s visit to the depot, seeing the charred whale bones there, became constitutive to an event of discovery. Inspired by this event, Price spun together geological and social histories into the fantastical journey in which the whale as Anthropocene object is catastrophically transformed and figures solely in silvery-printed reproduction for the viewer to infer its history. Price created a ghostly presence.
Transformation as a narrative of the Anthropocene plays out in BERLINWAL primarily through paying detailed attention to sensing energy resources and to engineering their extraction. The courtyard, now exposed to the open air, incorporates below its surface a relatively recently installed geothermal heat pump to warm and to cool the museum. The text in the accompanying booklet draws a deep timeline from the geological strata below the museum’s building, then pivots into human-made changes that created the “present tarmac” and the “drilling of sixteen ground source heat wells in 2016” to the binaries of weather “hot and cold” and the “heat of the groundwater” that maintains “the climate: the heating and cooling systems of the Natural History Museum. You can probably feel it.”59 The story’s tone of voice invites the reader-viewer to sense strata and time. The vertical is used as compositional device, fictitious though it might be, to delve into the strata. The reader is instructed to imagine a human leg, an elastic limb of heightened feeling, to be embedded vertically in the strata. Alongside the leg, the reader is instructed to “imagine a hose” ninety centimeters long, but then increased a hundredfold, to be used as measurement and through which to pass liquid sodium chloride solution to experience humidity and temperature. BERLINWAL evoked embodied experiences and associative imagery relating to the shapes of mammalian bodies and sending an imagined leg, or a hose of hosiery, or a sock, or a legging on a journey into the moist sediments below the surface. Price’s suggested similarities create relations between objects, a human limb, and geological sediments. Together they evoke familiarity between the imagined leg (also relatable to the viewer’s real leg) and other mammalian body shapes, hose and hosiery, dress and accessory products made of whale baleen and bones to shape the human body, “their own cultured profiles,” together with the warmth and cold of the geothermal pump and the blood flow within the whale. BERLINWAL narrates: “Baleen was common in the dress and grooming products of the period, used particularly in those that modified body shape.” In 2009 Price said about her technique, “I reorganise objects by recognising contingent properties that might link them. I find a materialist premise for a departure into fantasy, so that both social history and fiction are employed in knowing the past. . . . But at the same time, . . . it’s clear that fantasy is a way to form desire, and desire is a political force.”60
An integration of inner sensations evoked in the viewer is contrasted with the authorial voice, almost demonstrative, but definitely knowing and in the grasp of a long history. The artist adopts a fantastical approach to integrate these analogies in drawing attention to mammalian bodies (museum visitors and whales) that are caught up in the same fabric, fostering a co-belonging. She intermingled dryness and wetness of habitats and materials. While the remains of whales were exhibited removed from their watery life habitat, the human leg and its accompanying hose were associated with liquid, providing contrast to the dryness of the mammal’s display. Equally, Price draws out an accelerationist drive toward waste and destruction in human patterns of commodity consumption.61 Through human consumption she considers relationality between species. She retrieves human investment of energy and emotion into commodities and suggests object uses that are “more free-floating, unfixed and unpredictable” to aspire to a life beyond one’s own, beyond existing subject-object relations to reconsider a shared world.62
In quite different ways, Price and Akomfrah use European conventions of seeing the natural world. Price’s work was situated within the boundaries of a museum site where remains of nature are displayed, categorized, and studied, whereas Akomfrah explores the sea through the sublime and its sensation of being unbounded and overwhelming. Price locates the work within the tradition of natural sciences studies originating in European science. Akomfrah situates the work in a European tradition of framing and experiencing landscape. In Vertigo Sea Akomfrah not only integrates found film footage but also films panoramas of nature seen from the shore in a tradition of the sublime, a way of seeing and feeling formulated at the time of industrialization in Europe. The sublime, as initially articulated by Edmund Burke in 1757, evokes strong emotions in the viewer through the simultaneity of terror and beauty, vastness, and loudness. Sounds echo visuals; ethereal whale songs are interrupted by blasts of harpoon cannons and shots of hunting rifles. Some of the mesmerizing and awe-inspiring images of the magnificent sea are in dialectical contrast with images of violence, supported by a mournful soundtrack causing a pensive slowness, almost a tense fatigue, emulating the exhaustion of the sea. Extractive capitalism and the prospecting of the seas is made manifest as an instrument of Western industrialization through the historical slave trade and the whaling industry. Such montaging of images “from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee . . . and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea” formulates an epistemic structure that gives shape to a historical continuum of Black diaspora lives and the violations of lives.63 Equally, the Anthropocene—or better, the critiques it has provoked, notably the concept’s lack of reflection on world-making as human centered and its lack of differential responsibilities as implied in imperialism, capitalism, racism, and their effects on vulnerabilities—then draws attention to “the other world [that runs] behind its anodyne or glorious appearances” (Rancière). The Capitalocene as “alter-cene” evokes the devastating transformation of nature through human exploitation by “relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor.”64 Similarly, in relation to nonhuman species and capitalist exploitation, the Capitalocene speaks to greed and violence and urges protection of marine environments to counter capitalist destruction. The natural history museum’s historical acquisition of the bowhead whale in BERLINWAL took place at a time when the world’s largest cetaceans were progressively destroyed.65 During the late nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century, whales—their habits, migration patterns, and development—became a subject for scientific research and were displayed in natural history museums to embody the wickedness of commercial rapaciousness and to call for humanity’s custodianship of nature, while still relying on the whaling industry.66 Built around these motifs of capitalism, both artworks imbricate economic and social systems in human environment-making and the relations of capital, power, and nature. In this history energy sources have enabled global conquests and appropriation of people and nature from the sixteenth century onward. In Western European modernity these economic, capitalist relations are built on the exclusion of Indigenous peoples, enslaved peoples, almost all women, and many white people (Jews, Irish).67 Together these form “a historically situated complex of metabolisms and assemblages.”68Vertigo Sea and BERLINWAL speak of the historical capture, ownership, and subjugation of Black lives as much as present-day migration and displacement; BERLINWAL, of human relations to geology as expressed in the infrastructural transformation from swamplands into Berlin’s urban fabric.
The Anthropocene, as proposed in the environmental sciences in 2000, emphasizes rather than challenges the very economics of nature, anthropocentrism, and mechanisms of exclusion.69 In the works’ specific context here, this is an Anthropocene whose origins are written into the Columbian exchange from the late fifteenth century onward. Debating these works of art made within European contexts, then, does highlight both the causes and continuing consequences of human-nature relations in and imposed through European modernity. This modified Anthropocene, as put forward by the scientists of global change Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, refers to colonialism and global trade through the exchange, which made people, plant, and animal species mobile for transatlantic trade.70 This origin lies in the tactics of empire and European world-building through circulation, racialization, and forced migration and enslavement, in which the natural sciences cooperated. Reading the Anthropocene through such origin and history as well as the natural sciences then makes legible the encoding of categories that produce subjects and property, material worlds and extractions, and which move across “territory, relation, and flesh,” according to Yusoff.71 How are these transformations relayed to the viewer?
Montage and Space
The two artworks were respectively displayed and contextualized within gallery and museum settings that encouraged specific ways of seeing and of synthesizing information. BERLINWAL, specific to the city of Berlin, literally offered a window onto the changing ontologies of the world. Vertigo Sea, conceived for All the Worlds Futures exhibition, was curated by Okwui Enwezor for the 2015 Venice Biennale and has since toured to different contemporary art gallery venues, initially in the UK.72 Together these various spaces present a plurality of museum histories and typologies of presentations. They are discursively determined sites as fields of knowledge.73 Indeed, Akomfrah claims, “I try to be receptive to all the spaces,” adapting the siting and interpretation to the respective venues.74 For example, when Vertigo Sea was displayed at Turner Contemporary in Margate on the British East Coast, the work was shown concurrently with the exhibition JMW Turner: Adventures in Colours (2016–17). Here a deliberate juxtaposition between the contemporary film installation and the works by nineteenth-century British sea painter Turner was created. Turner’s painting The Deluge (1805) was hung near the installation space for Vertigo Sea and acted as a conceptual and visual bridge, which made the works “play off each other in surprising and illuminating ways.”75 Price, on the other hand, created interactions with the museum as a display site as well as an institution from the inception of the work. Applying integrative montage as an analytical strategy goes further than the art-theoretical criteria of site-specific intervention.76 Natural history museum displays present illusions of assembled habitats and species through dioramas and taxidermy, among other techniques. Price’s intervention was, however, a subtle process with heightened attention to absence, transformation, and loss.77 Price did not create an optical illusion of a space but gestures at the space itself framed by a window. This framing suggests that integrative montage can work in support of a noninterventionist ethics to counter human interventions within the environment. Moreover, with regard to institutional practices, montage then can be conceptually expanded as “epistemic montage” evoking a topography of different forms and diverse fields of knowledge and culture.78 This is where contemporary montage differs from its early twentieth-century application and where it becomes useful to the politics of ecology and the current environmental predicament. Documentary archive materials, natural history museum collections, and curatorial knowledge are such epistemic fields that afford a long-term view onto how the natural world is known in European modernity. Such collections have been created to serve as archives of nature: materials transformed from the field (observation and documentation) via the lab (experiment and analysis) to museum collection and archive (storage, naming) through to a “photo-philosophical montage” for a referencing system across materials.79 In these contexts, montage combines archives and historical collections together with a range of expertise, as well as the spaces of the museum or exhibition venue themselves, to lend texture and tension to accessing environmental histories.
The viewer’s role is constitutive to montage. How can the observer synthesize meanings to see the Anthropocene? Akomfrah’s and Price’s artworks encourage the viewer either to see together with the figure of the observer placed within the work itself (Vertigo Sea) or to become the imaginary and mobile protagonist of the work in order to see (BERLINWAL). In taking part in the realization of dependencies, a decentering in the unfolding of joint human–nonhuman histories can take place. The observer is a central trope within Akomfrah’s work. Vertigo Sea presents various protagonists in types of clothing dating from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, looking at the “aquatic sublime” seen from the liminal space of the shore (fig. 4).80
These protagonists, including the freed African slave and abolitionist Equiano, are, sometimes fleetingly, shown in profile. The reenacted Equiano is a figure to identify with, whereas others appear generic. But mostly, these pensive onlookers are shown as Rückenfigur (a figure seen from behind), similar to those observers of the natural world as in paintings by the nineteenth-century Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), including Monk by the Sea (1808/1810). By analogy, the viewer is invited to identify with the observer within the landscape, emulating that very perspective in looking out from the shore. From the space of the present, however, the shore appears as a “wreck zone.”81
The viewer is with the wreckage of those who came before the now, the disappearances, the migrants, and the slaves of the Middle Passage. In BERLINWAL the whale is the waste of Western capitalist consumer culture and military warfare. Its remains are laid into the hands of the viewer themselves. Within the sharp folds of the installation publication’s dark green wrapper, Price reveals a shimmering still life of ecological catastrophe: the incinerated whale, simultaneously seductive and repulsive. In Vertigo Sea, the recipient is perceptually not able to see all the work’s moving images at the same time because of the simultaneous activities on the triple projection and the viewing surface that extends beyond the human field of vision. The figure of the observer within the work lends some stability to the otherwise multifocal perspectives. Akomfrah combines European traditions of seeing the sublime with montage, thereby organizing looking at the landscape through both fixed views and decentered fragmentation. He thereby spurs the fractures between established perceptual orders and denaturalizes the landscape format. Montage splinters but also reassembles.82 Focusing on the figure of Equiano within the landscape, then, also leads to undermining the sublime—a white sublime, as the critic Paul Gilroy has pointed out. Burke’s sublime associates darkness with the “‘blackness’ of a black woman’s skin.”83 Gilroy counters Burke’s association and the persistent racism it contains by calling not only to redress the aesthetics of modernity but also toward constructing a new canon of Western art—a project that continues. While Akomfrah favors the landscape format, cut by moments of vertiginous immersions, Price contravened by offering a vertical framing.
Moreover, the viewer in BERINWAL is asked to take part as attentive reader and observer, flipping between the spaces of the museum architecture and that of the text. The text is at the same time didactic and explanatory in tone and demanding toward the viewer by requesting their actions there and then (imagine a hose, poke your toe into the ground). The authorial voice thereby implicitly positions the viewer as a consumer-participant in the necropolitics of the museum, in which once living organisms are represented in suspended animation away from their former habitat.
How the viewer is implied with their personal expertise, history, and memory and how the viewer is spatially situated thus brings the intersections of human and nonhuman histories to the viewer’s attention. In that respect, a quasi-anti-Anthropocenic implication of montage is to position viewers so that they can see themselves as decentered and de-exceptionalized in a shared world. With this comes a politics of discomfort that destabilizes the viewer. To recall Rancière, a visual mode not caught up in a choice between depictions of violence and sublime abstractions is what might be necessary for the viewer to actively engage.84 What I have offered here, however, is not only a more complex field of choices but also choices beyond the image. It is not just seeing but sensing the Anthropocene through montage.
Conclusion
BERLINWAL and Vertigo Sea offer different ways of seeing the natural world. One does so via a staged and mediated experience using film imagery and sound, the other through a situated spatial experience within a natural history museum. Montage, and its compositional principle of assembling fragments that are made to speak to each other, functions in reference to the Anthropocene, its critiques, alter-cenes, and origins. While Vertigo Sea relates to a narrative of Black Anthropocenes, both works are underpinned by readings through the Capitalocene. Joint motifs in both works are interpreted and extrapolated through disjunctive narratives of the Anthropocene, which become mutually informing and simultaneous narratives. Such simultaneity also contravenes an obsession with a single narrative and a single origin, which might appear as yet another Eurocentric perspective and way of thinking, indicative of a form of epistemological reductionism.85 At the same time, the artworks’ layering and juxtapositions realized causality and correlation toward joint human and nonhuman histories and co-belonging. Furthermore, thinking with montage can be extended as epistemic to critically interpret artworks that engage with sociohistorical contexts of environmental change. Finally, montage has characteristic techniques that can spatially situate the viewer and affirm their own expertise and sensations. Montage as epistemic structure can thus engage the viewer in taking part and synthesizing meanings of Anthropocene narratives.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the contributions by Paula Orrell, Mandy Fowler (conversations on July 10 and 18, 2019, respectively), and David Lawson (email correspondence). I would like to thank Kellenberger–White, Lisson Gallery, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Elizabeth Price, Turner Contemporary, and Smoking Dogs Films for the use of the images in this article and for my research. For their helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper I thank Marianna Dudley, Ruth Maclennan, Dorothy Price, Pandora Syperek, and Sarah Wade as well as the peer reviewers and editors. The writing of this paper was enabled through my British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Bristol and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Notes
Kern, Culture of Time and Space; Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis; Winthrop-Young, “Cultural Techniques.”
Walter Benjamin, quoted in Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis, 3; and Theodor Adorno, quoted in Žmegač, “Montage/Collage,” 287.
For Vertigo Sea John Akomfrah collaborated with Lina Gopaul, David Lawson, and Trevor Mathison.
Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” 23: “A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted, large-scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to ‘optimize’ climate.” See also Crutzen and Stoermer, “‘Anthropocene.’”
For a narrative of catastrophe or apocalypse, see Sloterdijk, “Anthropocene”; for a judicial narrative, see Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies”; for cultural-societal transformation narratives, see Schwägerl, Anthropocene, and Steffen et al., “Trajectory of the Anthropocene”; for a biotechnological narrative, see Asafu-Adjaye et al., “Ecomodernist Manifesto”; and for the narrative of interdependence, see Braidotti, Posthuman.
See the news announcement by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in March 2024, “Joint Statement by the IUGS and ICS on the Vote by the ICS Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy,” https://stratigraphy.org/news/152 (accessed July 26, 2024).
Chaos as “Durcheinander,” Ernst Bloch (1935/1973), quoted in Žmegač, “Montage/Collage,” 287.
This is a riff on “The Pitt Rivers is in Oxford,” the first sentence of Gosden and Larson, Knowing Things, alluding to the relations between location, people, and knowledge.
See, for example, the work Prevalence of Rituals: Tidings (1965), part of Projections, by the African American artist Romare Bearden (1911–88); or Sammy Baloji’s photo-essay, Essay on Urban Planning (2013), in the context of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This approach to images and sounds was first used in the work The Unfinished Conversation on the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Demos, “Unspeakable Moments,” 60.
Volker Klotz describes this principle as based on technology and not on nature, as referenced in Žmegač, 287.
See Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis, 119–25, for the changing uses and meaning of montage in the example of the career trajectory of the exhibition and graphic designer Herbert Bayer, and on the political potential of montage for totalitarian regimes. See also the art historian Michael White’s analysis of George Grosz’s late photomontage as elusive and ambiguous so as to avoid explicit political messages (White, “Mustering Memory”).
Smoking Dogs Films, “Purple,” September 2017, https://www.smokingdogsfilms.com/projects/exhibition/purple/.
Its previous title was The Elephant in the Room.
Jakob Nilsson refers to the inclusion of materials such as the television series Blue Planet (2001), Planet Earth (2006), and Frozen Planet (2011) (“Capitalocene, Clichés, and Critical Re-enchantment”).
The soundtrack was composed by Tandis Jenhudson.
Akomfrah borrows the phrase “sequestrate or appropriate layers” from Bonaventure Ndikung (Downey, “Vital Materialism”).
Quote from Vertigo Sea transcript, https://akomfrah.site.seattleartmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/33/2020/09/Vertigo-Sea-Transcript.pdf.
The work was commissioned as part of the program Art/Nature: Artistic Interventions at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (2014–18) to develop new modes of criticality in the museum’s practices and engagements with its public (Hermannstädter, “Introduction”).
The publication, as well as other aspects of the installation, notably the seating, was a collaboration with the design studio Kellenberger–White.
Berl, the Slavic word for swamp, is considered the origin of the word Berlin.
Elizabeth Price, BERLINWAL (2018). Quote from the text, which was part of the artwork.
Price, BERLINWAL.
Price, BERLINWAL.
Dahlia Porter, quoted in Driver, Nesbitt, and Cornish, 6–7.
Price, BERLINWAL.
The project curator Mandy Fowler worked with David Lawson from Smoking Dogs to select UK touring venues. The tour of Vertigo Sea was financially supported by Arts Council England’s Strategic Touring Fund. The five venues across England and Scotland (2016–18), in chronological order, were Arnolfini, Bristol; the Exchange, Penzance, Cornwall; Turner Contemporary, Margate; the Whitworth, Manchester; and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh. At the Exchange in Penzance, the emphasis in the accompanying public program was more on ecological awareness of the oceans. The Whitworth in Manchester particularly picked up on the theme of migration in its programming around the work.
John Akomfrah, video interview accompanying Vertigo Sea exhibition, Bildmuseet, Umeå, 2015, https://www.bildmuseet.umu.se/en/exhibitions/2015/john-akomfrah--vertigo-sea/.
Smoking Dogs Films, “Vertigo Sea,” May 2015, https://www.smokingdogsfilms.com/projects/exhibition/vertigo-sea/.
Thoma, “Vertigo of Presence,” 188; in reference to Rancière and a discussion by Georges Didi-Huberman in Remontages du temps subi.
