Sometimes it’s the heart that is last to go, a knot of dense muscle still recognizable after the other organs have long since vaporized. Sometimes non-combustible material is found among the remains — prosthetic implants, dental filling sand unretrieved jewellery, mingling with hinges and nails from the coffin. Two hours at 900°C is usually enough to reduce us to our bare essentials, the chemicals, gases and minerals from which we originated.
The human body is like that of any other creature, a biological cog in a cyclic enterprise of birth, death and rebirth. But the methods by which we inter our remains reflect our tendency to view death as a final state, an attitude manifested in our burial practices. We have come to face our natural demise in most unnatural ways, with the vast majority of us destined for one of two ends: a formaldehyde-infused corpse in a laminated coffin entombed in a cinder block vault, or a fiery evaporation into ash and nothingness.
The growing understanding of human impact on Earth’s climate, however, has brought about an awareness of our own place within the ecosystem, and an embracing of ourselves — not just our actions, but our very bodies — as an ecological factor rather than an exception. Rather than pre-serve our bodies artificially or seek to escape our natural end, we are beginning to realize we can extend Earth-friendly lives with Earth-friendly deaths. An entire industry is surfacing in North America focused on this end — burial practices that allow us to biodegrade as plants and animals have been doing naturally for millions of years, feeding the ecosystem, rather than poisoning it.
Beyond the fossil fuels consumed in the cremation process, the reduction of the human body to cinders releases a grab bag of pollutants into the atmosphere, ranging from chemicals to heavy metals to sulfur dioxide (a source of acid rain) and carbon monoxide (a contributor to global warming). Included in this long list are dioxin, a known carcinogen, and furan. Emissions of these toxic chemicals can only rise if cremation continues its pace as the send-off of choice.
Traditional funerals are hardly a better option. Manicured expanses of headstone-pocked grass — appearing as nature-friendly as a verdant prairie — conceal a toxic soup of formaldehyde and other preservatives and disinfectants from the embalming process, which is seeping into groundwater and contaminating the surrounding soil. Mortuary chemicals have been linked to increased rates of leukemia and other cancers.
No wonder, then, that the idea of natural burials is taking hold in North America. The movement promotes chemical-free burials in biodegradable containers to gently usher our bodies back into the ecosystem. Buried without embalming fluid, laminated wood, cement chambers, and sometimes even headstone markers, bodies disintegrate into flora- and fauna-dense surroundings, not only reducing the presence of chemical contamination and green-house gases, but providing nutrients for a healthy ecosystem. Though natural burials are offered as a service by some traditional cemeteries, there is a growing impetus for entire cemeteries built upon this concept.
Eco-friendly cemeteries, known as natural burial grounds, first appeared in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, and have since sprung up in North America from New York to Texas. The movement in Canada is being spearheaded by the Ontario-based Natural Burial Co-operative.
Natural burial grounds do more than just reduce pollutants otherwise caused by cremation and traditional burials. Some eco-cemeteries function as wild spaces, marking graves with local rocks and flora rather than headstones, keeping track of burial plots through GPS locators. Rather than a chemical-dense, artificial landmark, people can visit family and friends in a wildlife preserve free of pesticides, herbicides and man-made materials, knowing that their deceased loved ones are nurturing a vibrant ecosystem.
The only point of light in a vast stretch of the frozen Arctic Ocean dimmed slightly last night as the Canadian Coast Guard research icebreaker CCGS Amundsen symbolically joined the global movement for the environment.
For safety reasons, the Coast Guard could only shut off a handful of the ship’s external lights to mark Earth Hour.
Yet the gesture had added significance because the icebreaker is halfway through a 10-month research expedition focused on understanding Arctic climate change. Drawing public attention to the urgency of climate change is the drive behind Earth Hour.
“We’re not a city, but we are doing what we can without compromising our mission or the safety of people on board,” said Captain Lise Marchand.
At 8 p.m. local time, the sun was still shining brightly on the vessel’s location at the 71st parallel of latitude south of Banks Island in the western Arctic.
But when twilight cane shortly before 9 p.m., Coast Guard officers didn’t turn on the spotlight that normally shines on the ship’s funnel, illuminating a maple leaf.
Also left dark were giant spotlights that usually illuminate the ice in front and behind the 98-metre vessel. Some deck lights were dimmed as well but chief engineer Stéphane Dufour said he had to ensure that crew members or scientists didn’t stumble on the extra equipment crammed into every available cranny outside.
The Amundsen, normally bristling with lights here in the ice, was now more like when it is moving through the water.
One exception was the spotlight that shines on the bottom of the ship’s gangway, to provide warning of any curious polar bears that might try to board.
Some of the 40 researchers said they intended to shut down personal computers and douse their cabin lights.
The ship’s lights are the only ones on the frozen Beaufort Sea for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. On land, the nearest artificially lit human settlement is Sachs Harbour, roughly 50 kilometres to the north on Banks Island.
Chief scientist Tim Papakyriakou said Canadians need to be more aware of the valuable research into the Arctic environment made possible by federal funding for the Amundsen and for a network of Arctic scientists.
“Climate change of some kind has been with us for a long time. We need to understand the Arctic system and the natural processes much better if we are going to deal with it,” he said.
Source: Toronto Star, March 30, 2008
The CCGS Amundsen, a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, her crew and scientific entourage returned safely to port last fall after a year of conducting new scientific research in the Northwest Passage of Canada’s Arctic. This icebreaker acted as a floating platform for scientists from around the world in studying the effects of global climate change near the Beaufort Sea.
At 8 p.m, as lights across the Greater Toronto Area went out, the international space station sailed across the darkening sky above the David Dunlap Observatory.
More than 400 people showed up at the Richmond Hill observatory last night for Earth Hour; more than double what organizers hoped for.
Lineups to peer through the outdoor telescopes were dozens deep as families took turns gazing at Saturn.
A native fire burned in front of the large white dome.
Many came in support of the observatory and the island of nature around it, which local environmentalists and heritage activists are trying to preserve as a landmark heritage site.
The land is currently owned by the University of Toronto and may soon be sold.
“This is where the earth meets the sky. That people want to spend Earth Hour here shows there is a obviously a call for it [to stay an observatory]” said an organizer with the observatory defenders’ group.
“This will be sold to a developer, and that is what our fight is to protect against,” she said.
The University of Toronto has declared the facility surplus and are putting the observatory, and the 75 hectares of parkland surrounding it, up for sale to the highest bidder. Despite support by the town through restrictions on lighting and emissions that might cloud its view of the night sky, urban growth around the observatory has reduced its scientific value.
But the property is worth up to $100 million on the open market. Which is money the town doesn’t have. They ideas on frustrating the sale and development of the property but at the end of the day its going to happen.
There are a number of groups that have joined the fight. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada would like to see it become a community observatory to provide astronomy outreach and education.
A group called Save the DDO want to see the David Dunlap Observatory preserved as a historic landmark, an operating observatory for scientific research, and a natural landscape for the people of the GTA to enjoy.
And the Richmond Hill Naturalists see the need to preserve the site for greenspace as there is so little of it left.
I remember how thrilling it was, back on December 31, 1999, to watch new year’s celebrations being launched around the world, beginning with the Marshall Islands. The December news had been filled with debates over last minute generator purchases, reminiscent of the backyard bomb shelter discussions in the 1950s.At midnight, though, amid the celebratory fireworks, the cheery lights were still burning brightly in the Pacific, then New Zealand and Australia, and then west from there.
This March 29, we celebrate Earth Hour, a symbolic acknowledgement of our small blue planet and a global call to action over climate change. Communities around the world are powering down during this hour of contemplation.
Earth Hour celebrations kicked off in Israel yesterday - a day early in recognition of the Sabbath.
Today, New Zealand was the first country to mark the hour, with church bells ringing out from Christchurch Cathedral. It was followed an hour later by Suva, the capital city of Fiji and then the east coast of Australia.
Thousands gathered in Melbourne’s Federation Square for an hour of entertainment and celebration, joining famous landmarks throughout the country including the Sydney Opera House, Sydney Harbour Bridge and Parliament House in Canberra.
Australia has had an enthusiastic response to the hour, with all the capital cities as well as dozens of regional centres taking part in both going dark and hosting a range of themed events. Almost all of the top 100 companies on the Australian Stock Exchange committed to turning off the lights and reduce their carbon emissions by 5%.
The first Earth Hour was held on March 31, 2007, as part of a campaign by the World Wildlife Fund to bring attention to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. An estimated 2 million Sydney residents participated, resulting in a 10.2 per cent drop in energy for the hour, according to Energy Australia.
“We have been overwhelmed by the success of this event,” said WWF spokesman Charlie Stevens. “I think it is the simplicity of that has made it such a huge success. It is a small thing but such a fantastic message.”
Here on the south coast of Canada, we had an opportunity to see the stars again (for the first time since the northeastern blackout of 2003) and, in the new darkness and evening quiet, contemplate the fragility of our small blue planet.
What is amazing is that so many in the global community have pulled together for this celebration.
From over at Drawn!, some very cool street art and maybe food for thought for green projects around the La Ville Reine. A fundraiser for the Red Rocket maybe?
These plastic bag animals spring to life whenever a subway train passes below.
In anticipation of Earth Hour, 8 - 9 pm this Saturday, at which time we are all requested to turn off lights and appliances and take part in community activities that encourage energy savings and acknowledge global warming, let’s remember the blackout that blessed this city on a hot day in August, 2003.
The Northeast Blackout of 2003 was a massive widespread power outage that occurred throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and Ontario, Canada on Thursday, August 14, 2003. It was the largest blackout in North American history.
In areas where power remained off after nightfall, the Milky Way and orbiting artificial satellites became visible to the naked eye in metropolitan areas where they cannot ordinarily be seen due to the effects of light pollution.
There was speculation about terrorism, then finger-pointing at Canada. But a joint federal task force finally identified that the main cause of the blackout was FirstEnergy Corporation’s failure to trim trees in part of its Ohio service area. The report said that a generating plant in Eastlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, went off-line amid high electrical demand, and strained high-voltage power lines, located in a distant rural setting, and later went out of service when they came in contact with “overgrown trees.” The cascading effect that resulted ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants.
It was a magical time here in Toronto, when you could share the camaraderie in a neighbour’s yard where they had a wind-up radio, and marvel at the total blackness, and finally see the stars.
When you drive through Toronto’s northeastern suburbs on the Don Valley Parkway, your eye is momentarily caught by a marginal flash of garish colour in the grass beside the six-lane highway. Someone, long ago, has painted a crude rainbow on the entrance of a lonely pedestrian underpass, a sad and fading trace of desperate humanity on this unwelcoming slab of nature.
For the past several weeks, this most tellingly Canadian scene, entitled Country Rock, has been a source of fascination to hundreds of thousands of people across the pond in London, England. That suburban Toronto touchstone, glimpsed from a passing truck in 1994 and rendered across a huge canvas in watery stripes of lurid oil, is visible everywhere in London these days: on posters and lamp-post banners, on catalogue covers, in big spreads published in every newspaper.
It serves as an invitation to step inside a vision of man and nature that can only have been forged in the Canadian experience, in which the weight of wilderness overwhelms the viewer.
Just as Turner was dazzled a century and a half ago by the industrial-gas sunsets on the banks of the Thames, today’s Europeans are experiencing a similar shock of painterly discovery in the ravine behind the high school, in the police car pulling up to the lake behind the cottage, on that awful stretch of Highway 401 between Montreal and Toronto.
Peter Doig has turned these slush-encrusted visions of the Canadian periphery into the continent’s biggest art sensation. The Tate’s current 25-year retrospective of his works has become the most talked-about exhibition in London, receiving pure adulation from the art press and the mass media.
What are people seeing here? Why are the British critics calling him the 21st-century Turner, the Winslow Homer of the postwar years? On one level, you realize, it is simply great painting, not just technically but as pure, exciting narrative: Doig has an uncanny skill in grabbing you by the shoulders and pointing you at a scene of almost cinematic intensity; his canvases give you the sense that something is about to happen just beyond the edge, just below that weird smear of pink paint in the snowstorm, just as soon as the slouched-over guy finishes walking across the half-frozen pond.
You can talk about his influences – there is, in his dazzling oils, a lot of the stripped-down ponds and pathways of David Milne, the sky explosions of Paterson Ewen and a good swath of the jazzed-up nature of Monet and Lawren Harris, and, since he moved to Trinidad in 2002, some sunnier vibes of Paul Gauguin’s mystery visitors, who populate the edges of tropical lakes that seem every bit as alienating as the Canadian ones of the 1990s.
But you cannot get away from the very singular set of things that he is painting. There are many canoes on many lakes here, but these are not the transcendent, welcoming lakes of Tom Thomson. The boats seem lost, the lakes cruel. There are a lot of people standing on frozen ponds, examining the ground below them, leaving you unsure where they start and it ends. There are buildings that always seem to be in the process of being devoured, the scary banality of nature exposing the futility of architecture.
Sadness, Doig once said, is “a pervasive mood in the work,” and this is the sadness of the median strip, the sadness of the need to hitchhike in the snow. “A lot of the work deals with peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world,” he told one interviewer. “Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices … a lot of the paintings portray a sense of optimism that can often be read as being a little desperate, like the image of a rainbow painted around the entrance to an underpass.”
Many of us had believed, until now, that these were very private sort of things experienced by a small clan of people living north of the 49th parallel, incomprehensible to outsiders. For Europeans, Canada was represented by those Emily Carr visions of a benign and spiritually engaging nature, or perhaps by Harris’ rows of simple shacks against a big forest – nature that wanted you in it.
It took someone like Scottish-born Doig, to tell the world something far truer about the Canadian relationship with nature. It is always there on the edge, threatening to overthrow us.
Without that rainbow-stencilled underpass, it would all be leafy hell.
Peter Doig runs at Tate Britain in London until April 27, after which the exhibition travels to Paris and Frankfurt, Germany.
A half-century after the Hart of London got taken down, something was in the water of Mississauga, a bedroom suburb of Toronto, this morning.
Police shot and killed a steer that escaped from an overturned truck, saying they had no choice because the animal was charging at people. “It charged at one of the officers, right at him, and he had no choice.”
The steer escaped from a cattle truck, along with two cows and a bull. The truck overturned at about 6:40 a.m., snarling traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way near Highway 427. (For you out-of-towners, this is a conjunction of two major rush-hour routes into the Big Smoke on Canada’s south shore, right at the corner of Sherway Gardens mega-mall).
Two of the animals ended up in the backyard of a home on idyllic Brentano Boulevard. Initially, the animals were peaceful, calmly munching away at the shrubs in the garden.
“They were rubbing up against my father’s shed. They were fine in the backyard. I guess when they tried to get them out of the backyard, that’s when they got really restless,” said a resident of the normally bucolic suburb.
The steer got spooked when handlers tried to corral it and force it into a truck. One of a number of portable iron gates used to guide the animals into the truck fell, scaring the steer. This blogger notes that the horde of residents and police might not have been helpful either; just watch the Toronto Star video and draw your own conclusions.
The officer in question then fired something like 30 rounds into the animal after which a second officer helped finish it off with a few more shots.
“He was using a handgun because we weren’t planning on taking the animal down,” noted a constable. “It was a last-minute call by the officer. Most of the streets were closed off. He was not going to endanger anyone’s life.”
Jack Chambers’ 80-minute The Hart of London (1970) is a sprawling, ambitious experimental film that combines newsreel footage of disasters, urban and nature imagery, and footage evoking the cycles of life and death. It is one of those rare films that succeeds precisely because of its sprawl; raw and open-ended almost to the point of anticipating the postmodern rejection of “master narratives,” it cannot be reduced to a simple summary, and changes on you from one viewing to the next.
Through the crushing banality of local television news images, we learn that a deer has wandered into downtown London, Ontario during the winter of 1954. After jumping the fences separating the city’s backyards, the deer is captured by local police. It is bound and placed in a cage made of storm fencing. A policeman pats it on the head. Then a man dressed as a hunter balances his rifle through the wires of the fence. We don’t actually see him pull the trigger.
We see it first in woods, then streaking through backyards and leaping a fence. There is a tension between the subdivided yards and the deer’s graceful movements: this animal was not made for rectilinear housing plots. Townspeople, not sure how to react, point to it, and the footage seems to be displaying the deer as some sort of spectacle, almost like an animal in a zoo. Officials chase, capture, and finally kill it, and its corpse is displayed too, for the camera.
The imagery seems inviting, but as one realizes it is created with the hart as spectacle, alive and dead, in mind, one is also repulsed. The hart is seen as a fleetingly-observed other; even mainstream nature documentaries do a better job of capturing the way animals look and move. The viewer feels at once attracted and pushed away.
The Hart of London combines archival newsreels with original footage while adding an undercurrent of simmering violence to the mix. Superimposing found images of a deer being trapped and killed in downtown London with antiquated images of the city in industrial transition (trolleys and automobiles share the street with horse-drawn carriages), Chambers re-creates an urban history that is original, expansive, and severe.
As a parallel to the thematic motif of the persecuted deer, Chambers introduces chilling colour footage of lambs being slaughtered (photographed on a return visit to Spain) at the film’s midway point. Chambers writes, “In the second part of the film [these slaughterhouse] images become symbolic of the pursuit and death of the deer. This theme is repeated again and again in the real images of everyday life.” These “real images” include several staged, mechanical spectacles (a teenager diving into an icy river, crowds gathering to observe a brush fire), as well as repetitive, banal daily activities (a man trimming his hedges, Chambers cutting his lawn).
The consistent tension generated and sustained over the course of its demanding length, without the aid of musical cues or voice-over exposition, demonstrates why The Hart of London is considered Chambers’ greatest cinematic achievement. Fred Camper, for instance, identifies The Hart of London as “one of those rare films that succeeds precisely because of its sprawl.”
Through the course of the film, man encroaches on nature from every angle. People emerge from underground transport, parachutes fall from the sky and bridges cross water. Even children make sand castles on the beach preparing for the next image of concrete buildings. In the final analysis, nature seems to confront London’s inhabitants as an enigma or threat. At the film’s very end, children (Jack Chamber’s own) approach a hart with food, and their mother whispers warnings; the animal as object, filmed from afar, suffers from a perceptual uncertainty. In the case of a dead wolf, its hunters turn it into their image and have it wave and greet their woman at home, like a man returned from the woods.
While man thrusts himself on the environment, containing it and turning it into his image, Chambers treatment of the filmed image creates a fracture between the filmed and the ‘film’. His jarring superimposition of positive and negative creates particularly interesting deployments of light. In the case of newsreel footage of a horse and cart ploughing the field, he overlays a positive and negative of the same image, and only a small time displacement between the images makes the superimposition readable.Whilst light in cinema creates image and thus life, here Chambers acknowledges this but pushes further asking what it is interpret and recognize, unlike the objective view as propagated by the newsreels he uses and subverts to this end.
Jack Chambers was born in 1931 and began work on The Hart of London in 1969, having been diagnosed with leukemia only shortly before. He died in 1978, struggling with his own care for nine years. He was a Catholic and a poet, and as an artist he secured a reputation as a critically acclaimed and financially successful painter. He began making films in 1966. The Hart of London was the last of five films made by Chambers, and despite the support for experimental film within Canada at the time of its making, remains sorely under-screened in both Britain and North America.
Environmental art is a catch phrase that includes land art, earth-sensitive art and artists working with natural materials. Land art is a phenomenon of the ’60s and ’70s, with artists like Robert Smithson who made his Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Utah, one of those grandiose environmentally insensitive works that transformed the landscape.
Earth-sensitive art is smaller in scale, integrating an assemblage or sculpture in a natural setting, and there is art made with natural materials, which is usually exposed indoors.
~~ John Grande
Art critic John Grande writes about environmental art in his book, Balance: Art and Nature
Believing that artistic expression can and does play an important role in changing the way we perceive our relation to the world we live in, art critic John Grande takes an in-depth look at the work of some very unusual environmental artists in the United States, Canada, and -Europe.
Grande contends that the egocentricity of modern western society and its infatuation with technology and consumerism have increasingly separated us from the natural world. That separation has an impact on the way our art is conceived, formed, marketed and even displayed. Grande proposes that art return to being more “ecocentric,” reminding us that we are derivative and essentially dependent on natural processes. “In developing a nature-specific dialogue that is interactive, rooted in actual experience in a given place and time, and giving these elements an equal voice in the creative process,” he writes, “we are ultimately respecting our integral connectedness to the environment.” Holding such a vision, we will come to see that “nature is the art of which we are a part.”
To develop a dialogue more in touch with nature, Grande argues that artists should favour their specific culture and the diversity of the ecological communities in which they live rather than the homogenizing pressures of internationalism. He asserts that contemporary artists’ preoccupation with international “market recognition,” often reinforced by museums and funders, promotes a “product standardization” that takes precedence over any desire to represent one’s own culture and bioregion. In such a horizontal milieu, artists and their works consequently become easily interchangeable. The attendant appropriation of Third World, tribal and extranational art styles not only mirrors acts of economic expropriation but also often ensures the commercial success of the collusive artists. Such appropriation barely pauses to appreciate the source culture’s context and meaning.
As an alternative, Grande proposes that we celebrate the cultural diversity naturally intrinsic to each ecological community or bioregion. Such a preference would nourish the artistic expression of the cultural symbolism and spiritual values unique to that region. It would enhance an intuitive dialogue with nature in the creation of art, encouraging a healthier relationship with the local environment.
I think, a lot of art has as much to do with fashion and the look of things as it has to do with a kind of search for breakthroughs or a higher meaning. In a way we almost have an over-production situation where art is fine and society is in bad shape. It is one of my main concerns right now, The programs are working. Artists are producing. But the actual society is breaking down in many ways as a collectivity and becoming sort of digitalized. We have become digitalized producers and consumers.
Nature is the house that supports us all. We sometimes forget that. The same thing can be said for the world of art. What really nourishes art, more than ideas, is the physical world, and it is the main sustaining feature of any kind of aesthetic, even so-called immaterial ones.
Art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer, John Grande’s reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photo-graphy, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum. He is also the author of Balance: Art and Nature (a newly expanded edition by Black Rose Books in, 2004), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998), Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engagé (Lanctot, 2001), and his most recent book, Dialogues in Diversity: Marginal to Mainstream published in Italy in 2007 by Pari Publishing.
Sometimes it’s the heart that is last to go, a knot of dense muscle still recognizable after the other organs have long since vaporized. Sometimes non-combustible material is found among the remains — prosthetic implants, dental filling sand unretrieved jewellery, mingling with hinges and nails from the coffin. Two hours at 900°C is usually enough to reduce us to our bare essentials, the chemicals, gases and minerals from which we originated.
No wonder, then, that the idea of natural burials is taking hold in North America. The movement promotes chemical-free burials in biodegradable containers to gently usher our bodies back into the ecosystem. Buried without embalming fluid, laminated wood, cement chambers, and sometimes even headstone markers, bodies disintegrate into flora- and fauna-dense surroundings, not only reducing the presence of chemical contamination and green-house gases, but providing nutrients for a healthy ecosystem. Though natural burials are offered as a service by some traditional cemeteries, there is a growing impetus for entire cemeteries built upon this concept.
I remember how thrilling it was, back on December 31, 1999, to watch new year’s celebrations being launched around the world, beginning with the Marshall Islands. The December news had been filled with debates over last minute generator purchases, reminiscent of the backyard bomb shelter discussions in the 1950s.At midnight, though, amid the celebratory fireworks, the cheery lights were still burning brightly in the Pacific, then New Zealand and Australia, and then west from there.
In anticipation of Earth Hour, 8 - 9 pm this Saturday, at which time we are all requested to turn off lights and appliances and take part in community activities that encourage energy savings and acknowledge global warming, let’s remember the blackout that blessed this city on a hot day in August, 2003.
When you drive through Toronto’s northeastern suburbs on the Don Valley Parkway, your eye is momentarily caught by a marginal flash of garish colour in the grass beside the six-lane highway. Someone, long ago, has painted a crude rainbow on the entrance of a lonely pedestrian underpass, a sad and fading trace of desperate humanity on this unwelcoming slab of nature.
Just as Turner was dazzled a century and a half ago by the industrial-gas sunsets on the banks of the Thames, today’s Europeans are experiencing a similar shock of painterly discovery in the ravine behind the high school, in the police car pulling up to the lake behind the cottage, on that awful stretch of Highway 401 between Montreal and Toronto.
Jack Chambers’ 80-minute The Hart of London (1970) is a sprawling, ambitious experimental film that combines newsreel footage of disasters, urban and nature imagery, and footage evoking the cycles of life and death. It is one of those rare films that succeeds precisely because of its sprawl; raw and open-ended almost to the point of anticipating the postmodern rejection of “master narratives,” it cannot be reduced to a simple summary, and changes on you from one viewing to the next.
As a parallel to the thematic motif of the persecuted deer, Chambers introduces chilling colour footage of lambs being slaughtered (photographed on a return visit to Spain) at the film’s midway point. Chambers writes, “In the second part of the film [these slaughterhouse] images become symbolic of the pursuit and death of the deer. This theme is repeated again and again in the real images of everyday life.” These “real images” include several staged, mechanical spectacles (a teenager diving into an icy river, crowds gathering to observe a brush fire), as well as repetitive, banal daily activities (a man trimming his hedges, Chambers cutting his lawn).
Jack Chambers was born in 1931 and began work on The Hart of London in 1969, having been diagnosed with leukemia only shortly before. He died in 1978, struggling with his own care for nine years. He was a Catholic and a poet, and as an artist he secured a reputation as a critically acclaimed and financially successful painter. He began making films in 1966. The Hart of London was the last of five films made by Chambers, and despite the support for experimental film within Canada at the time of its making, remains sorely under-screened in both Britain and North America.
Art critic John Grande writes about environmental art in his book, Balance: Art and Nature
To develop a dialogue more in touch with nature, Grande argues that artists should favour their specific culture and the diversity of the ecological communities in which they live rather than the homogenizing pressures of internationalism. He asserts that contemporary artists’ preoccupation with international “market recognition,” often reinforced by museums and funders, promotes a “product standardization” that takes precedence over any desire to represent one’s own culture and bioregion. In such a horizontal milieu, artists and their works consequently become easily interchangeable. The attendant appropriation of Third World, tribal and extranational art styles not only mirrors acts of economic expropriation but also often ensures the commercial success of the collusive artists. Such appropriation barely pauses to appreciate the source culture’s context and meaning.
