Some of us go to exhibitions and know exactly how to decode the images, get the messages, extract their meaning, and decide for ourselves if the artist has lived up to the challenge he set for himself. The rest of us like to have someone explain what we’re looking at. As Harald Szeeman once
remarked “People see through their ears.”
If this exhibition’s subject were simply the collection of beautiful nature photographs composed and manipulated with technical virtuosity, the title could have been “Man Making
the Non-Manmade Manmade”. But luckily, it’s more.
Each individual photograph is certainly very beautiful – Schneebeli knows his craft, but he’s gone further. His groupings address and personalize some of civilization’s oldest preoccupations with nature. On his walks, Schneebeli’s been hunting with a camera for answers to the non-verbal questions nature and mankind exchange. Sometimes he captures the answers, sometimes he captures the questions. His photographs resonate with a recognizable longing for meaning in nature: precisely the same longing for language we feel when looking at art. The single images pay delicious aesthetic attention to one carefully observed moment – a “word” in nature’s visual vocabulary. By pairing and combining the images into groups, Schneebeli creates statements, and thus takes the photographs beyond their individual elegance and beauty. To help expose the thought structure behind the groupings, I’ve written this explanation of one grouping of four photographs. It can serve as a kind of a thought map, a guide to navigating Igor Schneebeli’s cognitive landscape.
CROSS IN THE MEADOW
In the first photograph, “Cross in the Meadow”, we see an object whose construction was clearly meant to convey symbolic significance. It’s a wooden cross, yes, but considering the odd bric-a-brac attached to it, like a wire beaded with deer poop and 2 stretches of raggedy nylon band, it wasn’t a traditional Christian burial ritual that was enacted here. Pagan-looking, strangely beautiful, abandoned, it was obviously intended to deliver a message – but what message? We don’t know the language needed to decode the statement before our eyes. Whatever the language is, we haven’t been taught it, just as with nature, whose language we just can’t seem to fully grasp. We sense meaning, but just don’t get it. Laurie Anderson’s lyric, “All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me” sums up this sensibility. We can’t decipher it; we want an explanation.
TREE AND FIVE OBJECTS
Next to this image is a similar one: “Tree and Five Objects”. It’s less mystical, but no less curious. In the seemingly serene woodland setting, the objects we discover are not mysterious symbols, but identifiable, even common: a snowshoe, a chair, a pair of skis, a scythe. Why is there only one snowshoe, but two skis? And why are the skis in the tree – with a chair? The objects, although manmade and recognizable, tell through their composition a story we want to know. Here, we know the language, but can’t get the story. What happened there in the woods? We want an explanation.
CIRRUS CLOUDS OVER BUSHES
The third of the quartet of photographs, “Cirrus Clouds over Bushes”, is not so much landscape as skyscape. It’s the pure language of nature we’re shown, nothing manmade. The image seizes you with that jolt of emotion you know if you’ve ever faced a sky so beautiful and imposing you were stopped in your tracks, forced to confront what you spend your life ignoring: that in the face of nature you’re about as relevant as a caterpillar underfoot.
Overwhelming power can be stunningly beautiful. The sky looms above, expressive, domineering, undeniable. The small trees look paralyzed in mid-flight downhill. Their (non-)motion captures that panicked dash
for safety, that same fright/flight/freeze reflex we have when face to face with threatening omnipotence. It’s silent, but you get the message loud and clear: it’s big – you’re little. It’s powerful, you’re not. What a perfect picture of the politics of power.
Right about now, observing this scene, you realize that this picture shows a theater in which none of the actors have eyes. The tree does not “see” the sky, nor is the sky “looking down” on it – or on you. Would you have even registered as existing in their realities? Were they even aware of each other? Our senses tell us yes. But how do we “know” this? Does nature “tell” us? And if so, how? This image, unlike the first two, expresses a sense of understanding the language of nature. We’re comprehending, but helpless.
BLACK DRYING FISH RACK
The final photo of the foursome, “Black Drying Fish Rack”, is comforting because it’s a manmade construction devised for a recognizable purpose, drying fish. It stands firm on the shoreline. It’s without mystery, calm in its functionality. It’s simply an expression of the elegance of practical human composition. Compare the tame emotions associated with this image with the emotions registered in the three previous images. Together, the whole grouping articulates three crystalline facets of Igor Schneebeli’s central subject: people’s longing for language and understanding; our irresistible attraction to impenetrable meaning; and how nature best embodies both of these yearnings.
Lize Mifflin Schmid
Each individual photograph is certainly very beautiful – Schneebeli knows his craft, but he’s gone further. His groupings address and personalize some of civilization’s oldest preoccupations with nature. On his walks, Schneebeli’s been hunting with a camera for answers to the non-verbal questions nature and mankind exchange. Sometimes he captures the answers, sometimes he captures the questions. His photographs resonate with a recognizable longing for meaning in nature: precisely the same longing for language we feel when looking at art. The single images pay delicious aesthetic attention to one carefully observed moment – a “word” in nature’s visual vocabulary. By pairing and combining the images into groups, Schneebeli creates statements, and thus takes the photographs beyond their individual elegance and beauty. To help expose the thought structure behind the groupings, I’ve written this explanation of one grouping of four photographs. It can serve as a kind of a thought map, a guide to navigating Igor Schneebeli’s cognitive landscape.
CROSS IN THE MEADOW
In the first photograph, “Cross in the Meadow”, we see an object whose construction was clearly meant to convey symbolic significance. It’s a wooden cross, yes, but considering the odd bric-a-brac attached to it, like a wire beaded with deer poop and 2 stretches of raggedy nylon band, it wasn’t a traditional Christian burial ritual that was enacted here. Pagan-looking, strangely beautiful, abandoned, it was obviously intended to deliver a message – but what message? We don’t know the language needed to decode the statement before our eyes. Whatever the language is, we haven’t been taught it, just as with nature, whose language we just can’t seem to fully grasp. We sense meaning, but just don’t get it. Laurie Anderson’s lyric, “All of nature talks to me. If I could just figure out what it was trying to tell me” sums up this sensibility. We can’t decipher it; we want an explanation.
TREE AND FIVE OBJECTS
Next to this image is a similar one: “Tree and Five Objects”. It’s less mystical, but no less curious. In the seemingly serene woodland setting, the objects we discover are not mysterious symbols, but identifiable, even common: a snowshoe, a chair, a pair of skis, a scythe. Why is there only one snowshoe, but two skis? And why are the skis in the tree – with a chair? The objects, although manmade and recognizable, tell through their composition a story we want to know. Here, we know the language, but can’t get the story. What happened there in the woods? We want an explanation.
CIRRUS CLOUDS OVER BUSHES
The third of the quartet of photographs, “Cirrus Clouds over Bushes”, is not so much landscape as skyscape. It’s the pure language of nature we’re shown, nothing manmade. The image seizes you with that jolt of emotion you know if you’ve ever faced a sky so beautiful and imposing you were stopped in your tracks, forced to confront what you spend your life ignoring: that in the face of nature you’re about as relevant as a caterpillar underfoot.
Overwhelming power can be stunningly beautiful. The sky looms above, expressive, domineering, undeniable. The small trees look paralyzed in mid-flight downhill. Their (non-)motion captures that panicked dash
for safety, that same fright/flight/freeze reflex we have when face to face with threatening omnipotence. It’s silent, but you get the message loud and clear: it’s big – you’re little. It’s powerful, you’re not. What a perfect picture of the politics of power.
Right about now, observing this scene, you realize that this picture shows a theater in which none of the actors have eyes. The tree does not “see” the sky, nor is the sky “looking down” on it – or on you. Would you have even registered as existing in their realities? Were they even aware of each other? Our senses tell us yes. But how do we “know” this? Does nature “tell” us? And if so, how? This image, unlike the first two, expresses a sense of understanding the language of nature. We’re comprehending, but helpless.
BLACK DRYING FISH RACK
The final photo of the foursome, “Black Drying Fish Rack”, is comforting because it’s a manmade construction devised for a recognizable purpose, drying fish. It stands firm on the shoreline. It’s without mystery, calm in its functionality. It’s simply an expression of the elegance of practical human composition. Compare the tame emotions associated with this image with the emotions registered in the three previous images. Together, the whole grouping articulates three crystalline facets of Igor Schneebeli’s central subject: people’s longing for language and understanding; our irresistible attraction to impenetrable meaning; and how nature best embodies both of these yearnings.
Lize Mifflin Schmid