This talk introduces my current project, “The Long Today: Nineteenth Century Painting and Environmental Change,” in which I argue for a reading of nineteenth century British and American paintings that finds the ecological future in the small, everyday details that they contain – items that we may easily pass over in an artwork; items that are readily overlooked in the non-human natural world.  It is a historically based reading, exploring shared cultures of close observation, but in looking backwards, one of my major critical tools is contemporary mixed-media art that deploys nineteenth century techniques and motifs to call attention to the long processes of environmental change. Today’s evidence of pollution and global heating found in, for example, lichen, snails, and seaweed, points to a troubled future for pictorial elements that are frequently part of idealized rural scenes, fairy fantasies, or decorate a shoreline. In this talk, I will single out bark for special attention: the bark of the hemlock tree in the United States; the bark of the elm tree in the U.K.  These are species that have been damaged or decimated in recent decades by beetles that have taken advantage of changing climatic conditions. This has radically changed iconic nineteenth century habitats and, in turn, has prompted new work that comments on loss and landscape history.  Yet I will also demonstrate that not all the narratives of environmental futures that we can draw out of nineteenth century paintings are necessarily pessimistic ones: dandelions and mountainside vegetation, for example, point to the potential for rewilding and regenerative projects. Finally, I pose questions about the place of awe and attentiveness in environmental studies – factors that draw together the emotions, the ecological, and the aesthetic.

Summary

By Kirstin Ohrt

Kate Flint, provost professor of art history and English at the University of Southern California, closed this year’s ART 502 Lecture Series with “Reading the Future in the Paintings of the Past: Bark, Beetles, and Arboreal Art” on April 18. Within the scope of her project “The Long Today: 19^th-Century Painting and Environmental Change,” Flint examines British and American landscape paintings for evidence of ecological shifts.

In her lecture, beyond comparing vistas then and now, Flint examined the easily overlookable details on the peripheries of landscape paintings, reframing them as “habitat paintings.” She segmented the sweeping topic into three parts: “the overlooked,” “the functions of bark,” and “bark’s vulnerability.”

Taking an especially close read of the everyday has its roots in the nineteenth century, said Flint, when close observation of the natural was thought to offer access to the divine. Tucked into the nooks or scattered through the background, clues like lichens, snails, seaweed, or the ever-resilient dandelion bear witness to environmental change. Though the arrangement of tree's limbs took precedence over its skin, close examination of tree bark in 19^th-century paintings provides a laboratory for tracing environmental distress to today. Hudson Valley paintings show the ravaging of Hemlock forests by tanneries, for example, with contemporary artist Jean Shin mourning this destruction in a current installation or, similarly, Suze Woolf and Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva spotlighting the decimation of the elm as climate change gives the destructive elm bark beetle carte blanche.

Flint’s lecture was an invitation to practice “participatory art history” and discover the environmental futures latent within these relics. Flint advised paying attention to the small, apparently insignificant objects of the natural world. “They are signs pointing towards our own and their vulnerable future,” she said, asking “How might examining the past help us to evaluate the potential of different but livable futures.”