An Environmental Impact Statement: Abstraction of Destruction
“Crime and Punishment,” 2010. Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill on the Gulf of Mexico.
Credit: J Henry Fair/Gerald Peters Gallery.
By Roberta Smith, The New York Times
The vivid color photographs of J. Henry Fair lead an uneasy double life as potent records of environmental pollution and as ersatz evocations of abstract painting. This makes “Abstraction of Destruction,” his exhibition at the Gerald Peters Gallery, a strange battle between medium and message, between harsh truths and trite, generic beauty.
In one way these views of unnatural disasters belong to the great tradition of photojournalistic muckraking; the word could not be more appropriate in this context.
Gangrene, October 2010, Louisiana, USA. Herbicide manufacturing plant (pesticide)
Mr. Fair takes his photographs from airplanes, and occasionally helicopters, often capturing sights deliberately hidden from public view. His subjects include environmental degradation perpetuated on a regular, usually daily basis by paper mills, fertilizer factories, power plants, coal mining operations and oil companies. They include the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Not only does the airplane provide access to restricted areas, it also makes possible panoramic vistas that convey the frightening scale of the destruction, creating the feeling that humankind has wrought its own form of irreversible natural catastrophe. In these vistas you can almost literally watch the poison spread across vast areas of land and sea, creating stains and patterns in a startling palette of deathly grays, lurid rusts and chemical greens and blues. But there is also a reductive side to this process: the expanses of color and texture in Mr. Fair’s pictures often bring to mind slick, printed versions of Abstract Expressionist painting.
Agent Orange, March 2009, South Carolina, USA. Coal ash waste at electricity generation station When coal is burned, various filters and scrubbing methods are used to remove pollutants (sulfur dioxide, mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium and other toxic heavy metals, and trace amounts of uranium) from the exhaust. This does nothing to abate the global warming gasses such as CO2 and SO2 that are produced. These captured solids and the ashes are stored in giant holding ponds, which become massive human and environmental hazards.
These images constitute a kind of toxic sublime. They are most shocking in “The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis,” a book of Mr. Fair’s photographs scheduled for release next month by powerHouse Books. In the book the sights of things like the white, flowerlike aerating ponds of a paper mill, which affect the water table for miles around, provide visceral testimony to the monumental despoiling of the planet. Thanks partly to straightforward, detailed captions, the images’ communicative power and visual force are held in balance. That they look oddly ravishing does not obscure the ravaging they depict.
But it is a different story at the gallery. The main problem, as the show’s title indicates, is that the gallery images seem to have been selected mainly for their abstract impact. While there is considerable overlap between the book and the show, the images in the gallery depict far less often, almost not at all, the factories, smokestacks and earthmovers that do the damage or even the dikes that often contain the sludgy refuse.
Outlet, December 2005, Louisiana, USA. Pipe dumps waste from processing of phosphate fertiliser. Slurry from fertiliser processing is piped into this body of water where the solids (gypsum) will be scooped out before and added to the embankment to increase capacity. The green colour is probably algae, growing in spite of the acidic and radioactive nature of the waste produced in the process, and tends to change over time.
Instead we see mostly effluvia of gorgeous color that bring to mind the painterly strategies of Abstract Expressionists like Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still and countless followers. This focus reworks ground, albeit with bright colors and large prints, already broken by photographers like Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. They proved over a half-century ago that they could find motifs in the real world similar to those created by their Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, as is currently demonstrated by the juxtaposition of their work in “Abstract Expressionist New York” at the Museum of Modern Art.
Ectoplasm, December 2005, Louisiana, USA. Phospho-gypsum fertiliser waste. Effluents from fertiliser production are pumped into this ‘gyp stack’. The solid gypsum is scooped out by excavators before it hardens and is spread on the ‘impoundment’ to build it up and allow for higher capacity. This waste is gypsum, sulphuric acid and an assortment of heavy metals, including uranium and radium. When the price of uranium is high enough, this facility can produce large quantities for sale to the nuclear industry. Small radioactive particles (radionuclides) from the impoundments can become airborne as wind-blown dust that people and animals can breathe, and they can settle out on to ponds and agricultural areas. Many of these impoundments are not lined, allowing the toxic slurry to mix with groundwater, and heavy rainfall will cause it to overflow and mix with surface water.
In certain images the sheer unnaturalness of the color sets off alarms, as with the lime-green water in a waste pond for a herbicide manufacturer in Luling, La. Here and in many other cases the colors seem too intense and artificial, or arty, to be good for the earth.
Untitled, October 2010, Louisiana, USA. Bauxite waste from aluminium production
Elsewhere a certain fuzziness eliminates detail and makes the scale of the images, and thus the extent of the damage, ambiguous. Sometimes we might almost be looking at luscious expanses of paint poured over a rough surface, as in the field of royal blue bisected by a single vein of red in a photograph of the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Untitled, July 2010, Gulf of Mexico. Oil from BP Deepwater Horizon spill on the Gulf of Mexico
Mr. Fair’s presentation at Gerald Peters is shot through with ambivalence about the relative value of art and documentary. The desire that the images be seen as art seems implicit in the trivializing titles that Mr. Fair has added to the images on view, even though the labels go on to provide more factual details.
“Lightning Rods” pictures a holding tank’s coagulated orange liquid and the metal walkway jutting over it at an oil-sands upgrader plant in northern Canada. The fact that one of these plants caught fire this month doesn’t improve the word choice.
“Noche Cristalina, April 2008, Río Tinto, Spain. Run-off pond at Rio Tinto Mine”. The Rio Tinto, a river in southwestern Spain that originates in the Sierra Morena mountains of Andalusia, flows generally south-southwest, reaching the Gulf of Cádiz at Huelva.
Too often, minus the telltale details that provide a sense of scale and also implicate human actions, the images read first and foremost as slick jokes about painting. They evoke the work that usually falls on what might be generously called art’s lightweight side, from Bouguereau’s academic nudes to Dale Chihuly glass sculptures.
Mr. Fair’s most artistically powerful images are the most concrete, conveying as clearly as possible what is going on. In these destruction is not at all abstract; information and form work together, to devastating effect.
“Agent Orange,” June 2010. Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill floating on the Gulf of Mexico.
Credit: J Henry Fair/Gerald Peters Gallery
Original Article and Slideshow
J Henry Fair: Abstraction of Destruction – in pictures, Guardian UK
