The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats

Author(s): Emily Apter

Source: October, Vol. 99 (Winter, 2002), pp. 21-44
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779123
Accessed: 29-11-2017 15:54 UTC

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 The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats*

EMILY APTER

Life forms are vanishing, landmasses are eroding, holes are widenin
ozone, and nations subsist in a state of increasing mineral depletion. If,
ten years, considerable debate has focused on "continental subjectivity" (
ing Eurocentric theories of the subject across nations in the wake of pos
theory), it may now be time to consider the broader implications of how
continents." Thinking "continentally," that is to say, seeing the world as
landmasses interlinked by industrial damage and wastage, can be a risk
since it colludes all too easily with the denationalizing logic of corporate sover
and the obfuscation of class injustice. As Gayatri Spivak puts it, with h
knack for articulating crucial political blind spots: "A classless vision of
justice made in the USA is hopelessly inadequate to come to grips
spectralization of the rural."I Certainly, many activists, critics, and ar
vulnerable to Spivak's charge of a green globalism that consigns the po
class to the shadows. But despite these legitimate concerns, and despite
past affiliations with the genres of land art, earthwork, pictorial neo-Rom
art made with natural materials,2 and so on, a number of contemporary
giving substance to what might be called an aesthetics of critical habitat
be framed by the politics of antiglobalization.3

* Warm thanks to Mary Kelly, Hal Foster, Anne Higonnet, Aamir Mufti, and Tony Vidl
comments and suggestions.
1. Gayatri Spivak, "Megacity," in Grey Room 01 (fall 2000), p. 21.
2. A recent installation by Liga Pang provides a good example of the return of art that
natural materials as a medium of choice. Her massively scaled wave fabricated of bamboo
knotted fiber aligns its pro-nature position with an implicit critique of late-industrial s
despoil the earth while professing veneration of natural beauty. Liga Pang, exhibition of
Santa Monica Museum of Art,July 28 to September 2, 2001.
3. For a useful overview of the intersecting genres of land art and ecologically informed
practice, see Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon
1998). According to Kastner, land art was "the apotheosis of formalism and the e
Minimalism." For Wallis, the tenets of this Greenbergian formalism are challenged by th
and ecological functionalism of earthworks made by Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, H
and others in the late 1960s. Miwon Kwon's classic piece "One Place After Another: N
Specificity" also clarifies the genre issue in its discussion of how site-specific work relates
minimalist installation, and topographical realism, in October 80 (spring 1997), pp. 85-110.

OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 21-44. ? 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of

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 22 OCTOBER

Broadly spea
by geopoetic
Kinsella has
media and e
lines propos
Empire. Here
jurisdictions i
ends: the con
worldwide i
interests are
parameters o
even if Neg
invites probl
World Trade
eco-activist
modification
2001 G-8 summit.4 This transnational "Multitude," committed to worldwide social
and environmental justice rather than to the nation-state (and as such, the left
counterpoint to the venture capitalist who sees the globe as a stockpile of
resources ripe for exploitation), contests the environmental fallout of globalization
while seeking to move beyond the parochialism of identity or single-issue politics
predominant throughout the 1980s and '90s.
And yet, to simply make a pitch for critical habitat as an ecologically correct
version of "global-think" is not enough; such a move calls out for further
qualification. If habitat is invoked here, it must not be in the naive belief that it
necessarily achieves a more successful calibration of the local and the global, nor
in the hope that it offers an aesthetic ideology fully resistant to globalization theory,
but primarily because it focuses attention explicitly on how global financial and
information economies are being embedded within geopoetic signifying practices
across media. Fredric Jameson's idea of "the communicational signifier," discernible
in "visions of financial transfers and investments all over the world," is useful here
because it takes account of the extent to which media and environment are
increasingly difficult to disentangle as a semiotic system. Similarly,
rethinking of the rural in terms of information technology points
imbrication of habitat in the economy of capital flow: "The rural," she wr
not trees and fields anymore. It is on the way to data."5
If, following Jameson and Spivak, media and environment are conce
codes capable of mutual translation, then the idea of critical habitat c

4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000
5. Fredric Jameson, "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue," in The Cultures of Glob
ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyosi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), p.
Spivak, "Megacity," p. 20.

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 The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 23

"located," so to speak, as a margin of critique in

translation process occurs. As such, the term ow
zone of criticality developed in continental theo
must also fully acknowledge Kenneth Frampton's
regionalism," which stakes its stand against the M
of resistance; specifically, on an "unsentimental
sustaining a "dialectal relation with nature."6 In
grafted from the lexicon of environmentalists, w
conditions necessary to sustain the life of en
critical habitat as a concept that explores the lin
intellectual habitus; between physical place and
economy and ecology.

The problematic of critical habitat as outline

yet representative ways by four contemporary a
there is the postcolonial cartography of Will
African landscapes; the problem of "radical pasto
aboriginal cultures in the work of the Austr
comes out of a reading of work by the Aborigin
the use of nature as a counterfoil to virtual environments in the neoromantic
blow-ups of Andreas Gursky; the issue of "remote responsibility" in an era
digital representation, the multiple meanings of a techno-sublime wh
premise is the "multiuser environment," and the visualization of the g
economy as an ecosystem, exemplified in the digital installations of media a
John Klima. These artists are uneasily grouped together since they sha
unified, compatible political agenda, common medium, or aesthetic ideo
But each evokes the planetary violence of eco-information systems in order
denaturalize "globality," "a word serving to hide the financialization of
globe" in Spivak's ascription.7
The white South African artist William Kentridge has, since the mid-198
been working to transform the traditional genre of landscape painting i
medium of geopolitical critique. In a series of charcoal drawings from 1988 en
Landscape in a State of Siege, he describes how landscape-the background mus
painting or the filler between plot and character in a novel-"takes over

6. Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resist
in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay
1983), pp. 21, 26, and 27, respectively.
7. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Pr
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 164.

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24 OCTOBER

privileged sp
dispossessed

For about a
incidental
dancing, an
took over a
managed to
specific plac
around Joh

Kentridge p
'30s, by the w

The Volsche
not unrelat
majestic pri
is celebrate
history is a
are documen

8. William Ken
further referen

Left:J. H
Right: Ja
Robertson

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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 25

Kentridge combats "the plague of the picturesqu

coaxing the suppressed history of South Afric
formations. Celebrated landscape singularitie
tree-are supplanted by randomly chosen pie
incidents are plotted. What interests Kentridg
the lines of pipes, culverts, fences" ( WK 110).

It has become clear that the variety of ephem

on the landscape is far greater than anythin
offer. The varieties of high mast lighting, cr
transitions from cutting, to fence, to road,
great as any geological shifts. ... There are o
never-ending chronicle of disasters or almo
skid marks that punctuate the road. (IWK 110

The slashed turf and zigzags of tire-tracks estab

mental violence, even as they point Kentrid
interpretation, toward a reinvestment of drawi
an era of postmedia.9 For Krauss, this aesthetic
of itself a strategy of anti-globalization; a refusal o
of the image in the service of capital."0o In my
medium against the global market is only furth
dimension of eco-critique within Kentridge's ap
Colonial Landscapes-a series of charcoal and
an exercise in the art of doing South African p
the ransacking of land make for what Kentridg
ism," a dark side version of the geography text
presents the trope of "land and peoples" as n
Kentridge blasts the bucolic myth of harmony b
dependency of ecosystems gives way to visu
enslavement. Kentridge's bid for empirical bana
of the South African veld prove that land "hold
nature" (WK 111).

9. Rosalind Krauss, "'The Rock': William Kentridge's D

(spring 2000), pp. 3-35.
10. Rosalind Krauss, "A Voyage on Art in the Age of the Nor
Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), p. 56. Krauss w
regime of postmodern sensation is that it mimics just this
field in general. Within this situation, however, there are a f
not to follow this practice, who have decided, that is, not
installation and intermedia work, in which art essentially f
the image in the service of capital. These same artists have
etiolated forms of the traditional mediums-such as paintin
James Coleman or William Kentridge have embraced the idea
the medium as such, which they understand they will now h

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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 27

South African novelist J. M. Coetzee has observed

"it is nature, for a change, that is vulnerable to man.
particular is the devastated area south of Johannesb
dams; pylons and power cables; roads and tracks
nowhere" (WK 84). What is so fascinating in this work
leitmotif; the way in which landscape, on closer scr
ecological travesty. Red pointers and circles appear on
identify sites of pollution and illegal dumping. Caro
dialogue with Kentridge, remarks: "The red pastel sur
charcoal drawings indicate how the colonial images w
land. By observing the landscape itself you discover t
notice: for example that a hill is really an artificial mou
dump" (WK 22). The scenery, in other words, is comp
seen close-up bear witness to environmental damage.
"Not only is Kentridge signaling that this ruined vi
inheritance as the idyllic Eden was to his forebears,
any ideological position to nature he is also pointing
between ecology and civil rights" ( WK 49, my emphasis).

Q-

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it

AN

4s

OW M oi
iw'

lmw-?? . .......... 0, i X.
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Mi

xv x

MM,

Kentridge. Felix in Exile. 1994.

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 28 OCTOBER

This conjugat
with critical h
Kelly's recent
lint photogra
drawn from w
Beirut 1982, Sa
an internation
an antiwar pro
technologies
explosives dro
through gray
erupting bene
presence thro
Kentridge use
surface as a bu
In a nod to B
characters-th
ashes into gol
at his desk in
and cash regis
bars, exhaust
60). Coetzee c
underground
human histo
Freudian ana
Kentridge's d
The pastoral f
brainscape, a
geological met
and Wanting

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...:. ::::r::::::: ::::::::::: :::: ::::::: ::: ::?::: ::::

Mary Kelly. Beirut 1982. 1999. Courtesy of the artist.

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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 29

g.

OX

Xx

Ig

AA

Kentridge. Mine. 1991.

... Embedded within the rock.. . are memory layers, fossilized like primordia
records of long extinguished species" (VWK 71).
The allusion to "extinguished" rather than "extinct" species points me to
poem called "Dispossession" by the contemporary Australian language poet Jo
Kinsella, whose work parallels Kentridge's in its depiction of landscape po
marked by industrial waste and the traces of assault on native peoples. Kinse
employs the word "extinguishment" (accentuated by an exclamation point) in
riff on the history of Australia's indigenous population, driven off ancestral lan
by mining companies and white hunters:

Dispossession
protection
aggravated
destruction

Almighty
construction

proclamation
probability
autonomy

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30 OCTOBER

links

quality

vis-5.-vis
the centralised
London dealer in native art

landing
like something out of songlines
the press
commission/s
traditional

punishments
appropriate
authentic
threads

heresy
controls
white hunters
alcohol
abuse

custody
motivating
sit-down
leaders
nominated

by
mining companies
pastoral leases
progressive
impacts
and sustain

extinguishment!
As assistance
modifies acts

presence
traces

the local
and maintains
representatives
authentic
claims
to constitutional

strategy
faith

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 The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 31

and ownership
rifles
revisionist

histories: lights
rain the sky
shackles1'

The idea of "sustaining extinguishment" alludes to how government policies

that have furthered mining interests mask the displacement of Aboriginal
communities in a rhetoric of preservationism. It is an oxymoron that undercuts
ecological idealism (the equation of endangered tribal peoples to endangered
animals and plants), while capturing in psychic terms the trauma experienced by
Australia's "stolen generation," removed from their families by welfare agencies
and surrendered, all too often, to adult lives of poverty and substance abuse.
"Extinguishment," suggesting a landscape burned out by fires that form a
narrative of dispossession (complementary to Kentridge's map of environmental
incidents), exemplifies Kinsella's theory of "radical pastoral," which in "hybridising"
the "so-called pastoral tradition with the linguistically innovative.... ironises the
pastoral construct but allows for genuine movement through rural spaces."12
Kinsella's high-modernist tendencies make him susceptible to classification
as a "global" writer who exploits Australian regionalism in the name of a
contemporary rewriting of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. But this reading ignores
the language politics of "hybridising" that informs his aesthetic agenda. As a
reader of the Murri Aboriginal poet Lionel Fogarty, he commends Fogarty's
"communalizing of the lyrical I" (the poet's land-based antisubjectivism) through
a hybrid English that "reterritorializes lost ground."13 In Fogarty's verse, hybrid
English is identifiable as a pidgin that archives slavery's past while thematizing its

11. John Kinsella, "Dispossession," in Visitants (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England: Bloodaxe Books,

1999), pp. 36-37. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated as V
12. John Kinsella in Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry, ed. John Kinsella (North Fremantle,
Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999), p. 193.
13. In an essay largely devoted to Lionel Fogarty, Kinsella writes: "For me, the most significant voice
to emerge in the latter years of this century is that of the Murri poet Lionel Fogarty. Fogarty has
managed to use English as a weapon against its own colonizing potential. He has created a positive
hybrid that undoes the claim of linguistic centrality, and registers the primacy of the oral tradition....
While reacting to the colonising of his Murri tongue by English he in effect colonizes English, rendering
it subservient to his inheritance, to his spatiality.... His is the most revolutionary of languages being
used in Australian poetry. Freedom doesn't come solely by marking territory and occupying a conceptual
space, a space linguistic in nature. One must reterritorialize lost ground.... I've referred to the kinds
of poetry Fogarty and I write, from entirely different perspectives, as examples of 'hybridising.' By
hybridising, I don't mean a mixing or a production of a third-party alternative from a set of specific
material. A hybrid is not a possible next stage in a developmental sense, nor a 'dilution' of the component
parts! Nor is it a fusing of traditions. It is, in fact, a conscious undoing of the codes that constitute all
possible readings of a text. It is a debasement of the lyrical I...." (John Kinsella, "The Hybridising of a
Poetry: Notes on Modernism & Modernity--The Colonising Prospect of Modernism, and Hybridity as
a Means to Closure," www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/8574/newessays.html)

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 32 OCTOBER

own dialectal
tribespeople /
radio talks ba
English, and a
sound slippag
man") or th
anticipated "m

Our educatio
on the koori radio.

Nudge nudge human new one up-man-ship

run by himself.
But the community be at each others throats
but we should consider advocating
a hurray wireless playing
Blackfella media, not political
foot-balling loud-mouth perturbed.
A happy-go-lucky broadcaster
is one tribalism sparkling radio
disc-jockey we seem to criticise
100 psychological conditioning
Let the yubba mass translate
a mouth communicating
Suppression, hot reply15

While Kinsella's own language games are clearly indebted to Fogarty's loc
formalism, he also crosses theory with pastoral genres in ways that tie him to
American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, a loosely linked group including Cha
Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Jed Rasula that by the mid-1980s w
translating continental theory into writing praxis. Many of the texts in Kinse
Visitants collection experiment with ecological phenomenology and transformational
grammar. The poem "Skeleton weed/generative grammar (for Noam Chomsky),"
example, suggests a genetics of language or agrilinguistics in its play on langua
trees. Several poems bear epigraphs drawn from Jacques Lacan, Jacques-A
Miller, and the Australian Lacanian feminist Elizabeth Grosz, and these frame t
function as more than intellectual captions. Kinsella uses psychoanalytic conc
developed by these theorists-panic, fear, anxiety, the uncanny--to stage wha
Spivak has referred to as "the spectralization of the rural." In the poem "keepi
your mouth shut--against conspiracy," the rural is erased by the alien presence

14. Lionel Fogarty, "Jukambe Spirit-For the Lost," in Landbridge, p. 130.

15. Lionel Fogarty, "No Grudge," in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, ed. John Tra
and Philip Mead (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 452.

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 The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 33

chemical plants. Nungalloo becomes the generic

corporate names-"Associated Labs," "Allied," and
cation of territory, the advent of industrial apocaly

Area-51 was a place called Nungalloo

just north of Geraldton. The huge
mineral sands processing plants
ofJennings and Allied mutated
out of borderline farmland.
As if a neutral zone, Associated Labs
sat nearby, upwind. Testing
monozite and rutile

late at night a storm hit

the narrative and the x-ray
equipment went wild, the gun
shooting rays outside its alignment,
the telex scripting the electric air,
my flesh spread like an internal horizon-
a chemiluminescent shadow puppet
experimenting with form,
my organs glowed and I watched
the machinery of my fear,
the production of silence. ( V15)

Radioactive waste creates a toxic luminosity captured by the neolog

"chemiluminescent." A ghostly body, irradiated and iridescent like electronic
on a dark screen, emerges from a cosmic battle between light rays and X-rays in th
night sky.
Kinsella excels in inventing an ecological uncanny that uses extraterrestrial
visitation as the trope of late industrial catastrophism. In "The Three Laws of
Robotics, Skylab and the Theory of Forms," the landscape is possessed by "visi-
tants" in the form of Soviet space trash, which, as you may recall, does in fact
routinely drop from the sky between New Zealand and Australia. In the poem
"Phenomenology" (leading off with an interesting epigraph from Donna Haraway,
"But with the advance of civilization, this biology has become a problem"), a
child's jerry-rigged telephone system becomes the conduit of "glowing figures with
strange limbs like Roswell aliens" (V 11). Chaos theory, paranormal forces, and
robopsychology "wire" the outback, transforming it into a force-field of clashing
communication systems and inflecting it with manifest spookiness. In "The
Savagery of Birds" "live" nature is haunted by the specter of artificial life:

As smog drifts up from the city

you realise that the sky is really

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 34 OCTOBER

a painted ba
has no part i
you is const
the sheds, th
cybernetic a
fashionable
birds that fly
and grace of
while wearin
to mytholog
Oiseaux sur des branches relevant

to the end of the twentieth century,

to a place deep down in the South,
where grain-eating birds are turning
to flesh that tastes like muesli. (V40)

This poem recalls Lacan's famous example of Zeuxis's painting of grapes so

life-like that they fool the birds, and Parrhasios's painting of a veil so convincing
that Zeuxis demands to know what is painted behind it. Lacan reads this as a
parable about Vorstellungsreprdsentanz-"that something that stands for representa-
tion"-which lures the gaze and allows it to triumph over the eye.16 For Kinsella,
the Flemish still-life master of the sixteenth-century, Frans Snyder is deputized as
a latter-day Zeuxis. But in Kinsella's poetic trompe l'oeil it is the birds themselves
that have become objects of visual fascination. As "cybernetic animals wearing
fashionable genes," their flesh shown mutating into muesli, they resemble allegories
of a bioengineered nature that converts the mechanical into the living, or the
animal into agricultural byproduct, according to a common genetic code.
16. Jacques Lacan, "The Line and the Light" and "What is a Picture?" in The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1973), pp. 110 and
103, respectively.

... ....

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V - 4i
lab '

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 ..................... iii~i~i!i!i~ii~i~ii~iiiiiiiiii~iiiiiiiiii.... ...... .....!i~iii

ii

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.. ..... . ...::::?

. .?
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiijiijieiiii:??ii

Kinsella's literary experiments with the interfa

and virtual environment invite comparison with th
artist for whom photographic virtuality is a sign
famous for his wall-sized photographs of work en
hubs-the Tokyo Stock Exchange, with its hive-lik
and going, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, with its
work stations, the Siemens factory floor with its "
chaos, the Salerno car lot, a chromatic blanket of commodities, or the formal
grammar of Untitled V (1997), with its sneakers lined up on display shelves like a
conveyer belt of fetishes. Not only do these images deliver great spectacle-value,
they also offer the intrigue of visual puzzle, since Gursky is known to have
manipulated their Neue Sachlichkeit verisimilitude, emptying out digital information
or using overlays of other digital images. In Untitled V, for example, Alex Alberro
writes, "The artist built a short double shelf, which he then photographed six
times, painstakingly figuring out the proper angles from which to shoot and
restocking the shelves with different shoes for each session. The negatives were
then pieced together digitally to make a single, monumental image, reflected on
the floor."'7 Using techniques of digital montage and illusionism, Gursky
straightens and flattens the curved panoramic image into a rectilinear geometry so

17. Alex Alberro, "Blind Ambition," in Artforum (January 2001), p. 109.

Left: Andreas Gursky. Untitled V. 1997. Above: Gursky. Siemens,

Karlsruhe. 1991. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

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36 OCTOBER

that every
attention to
produce a kin
the relations
visually soft
dithering. W
by ditherin
assume their
The effects
directed at
send-up of p
like a Europe
in Indonesia,
(1993), that s
effect. As Al
(a picture of
real), and th
final results
the view of
visual field
motorists fr
deflect the g
reveal how f
of piles of s
managed ecol
Gursky blu
habitus in a
in his repert
logical treat
draws the vi

18. Peter Galass

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20. The full tex
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things. He unde
needle in the je
dark belief, the

Opposite t
Mettman.

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Gursky. Untitled XII (Musi

Matthew Marks Gallery, New

contains intriguing phrases and expres

destitution," "the state of being, shell-shoc
sentence: "And the way this addiction
perpetually mobile, is motivated by no
one's own nebulousness and the alread
one's predecessor, which once again is a
group-soul which is shoved onto one." W
pelled to ask. It seems to have somethin
Heidegger perhaps, but it is not quite e
generic German modernism. As it turns
of Robert Musil's turn-of-the-century A
Performing a kind of digital sampling on
lexical seasickness.

mysteriously and deteriorating to rubble and construction, what is this other than a climbing out of
nothingness, tempted every time to search for the other side. (And no trace of it so that we could
contain it in cycles!) Just as a sand dune is blown by the wind and takes on a certain shape for a while,
and then again, is gone with the wind? What is everything we do other than a nervous fear of being
nothing: starting with pleasures that aren't any, but rather instead are just noise, a stimulating chatter
to kill time, because a dark certainty warns us that it will ultimately kill us. All the way through to those
transcendent inventions, and meaningless heaps of money that kill the spirit, whether one is sustained
or smothered by it, the fearful, impatient modes of the spirit, of clothing, which changes continually.
And the way this addiction to renewal in one's existence makes one perpetually mobile, is motivated by
nothing other than destitution, between one's own nebulousness and the already foreign shell that has
hardened over one's predecessor, which once again is a kind of fake self, an approximate group-soul
that is shoved onto one. And if one pays just a bit of attention, one can always see in the newly arrived
past the future of coming ancient times (translation by Zaia Alexander).

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 The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 39

Gursky is a master of overlay, transforming

digitally enhanced versions of themselves. D
essential to what is "critical" in Gursky's treatm
kind of critique-through-representation may se
Caspar David Friedrich's celebrated set-ups of a
majesty deflate the Romantic sublime by reveal
has become compatible with a globalist visio
production values. Factory floors, ski slopes, su
football stadia, library stacks, these sites becom
represent environments that have been profou
altered by the effect of what Roland Barthes cal
"leech" factor of exteriority that allows the outsid
makes the body-image or place-image stick (or
The use of scale, serial repetition, and chromat
on a kind of "new painterliness" according to t
all serve to intensify the image of nature,
intensification gives nature back an image of its
By contrast, the media artist John Klima ta
transforms them into naturalist imagery. But
visual commodity, circulating in the marketpl
targets the computer environment itself, focus
formation whereby unrepresentable processes
narratives. Klima makes us aware that a prog
interface operating through opaque layering, a
information.

Klima's installation Ecosystm, exhibited at the Whitney Museum's Bitstream

show, provides a fractal of the interface between globalization and medi
environments. The work is conceptually predicated on the translation of curren
fluctuations into flocks of birds. Friedrich Kittler's view of the invisible layering of
software and hardware codes seems appropriate here: the birds are revealed to b
allegorical structures pasted over digital structures that are themselves electron
responses to market processes.22 Klima thus creates an information loop or fe
that ends up in a transparent visual ideology. The flight patterns are true or deic
signs (in that they stand in for "real time" responses to shifts in monetary value

21. Roland Barthes, "The Image," in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, Calif
University of California Press, 1986), p. 352.
22. "Programming languages have eroded the monopoly of ordinary language and grown into a ne
hierarchy of their own. This postmodern Tower of Babel reaches from simple operation codes who
linguistic extension is still a hardware configuration, passing through an assembler whose extension
that very assembler. In consequence, far-reaching chains of self-similarities in the sense defined
fractal theory organize the software as well as the hardware of every writing. What remains a problem
only recognizing these layers which, like modern media technologies in general, have been explicitly co
trived to evade perception." See Friedrich Kittler, "There Is No Software," in Friedrich A. Kittler: Literatu
Media, Information Systems, ed. JohnJohnston (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1997), p. 158.

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40 OCTOBER

but the eco

fictive inter
do in fact
bellicose att
long-distanc
The origina
environmen
political res
tant experi
theme of re
show inform

In a piece c
treacherous waters connected to an actual fish tank. "Go Fish" examines

the mini-world of a fishbowl. Visitors play a video game in which the

outcome affects the fate of a real goldfish.... In the game ... the player
is a fish swimming through dangerous waters. Lose, and a goldfish is

. . . . . . . . ....

..........

NoO

Me

John Klima. Go Fish. Installat

of American Art Bitstreams e

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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 41

...................

.. .......................

zo.

Ay,

... .. .....

.. ...... ... .

... . ..........

. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . ...
Me:

...... .......

.................

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . .

shot from a bowl into a tank with menacing oscar fish

later that night. Win, and the goldfish head towards
company. Players might pity the victim, but the goldf
sometimes, or the oscars will die of starvation. "It's the moral dilemma
any pet owner faces when they feed animals to their pets," says Klima.
More than that, it may be the reigning moral dilemma in a zero-sum
system, where saving one creature means killing another and where
one person's calm blue water is another's path to power.

Klima reveals the extent to which media environments, governed by the law of
"your loss is my gain," and long-distance ethics, coordinate the cooperative
relationship between globalization and ecological exploitation. Interface
emerges as a habitat in which ecological responsibility is shown to be dissolved

John Klima. Go Fish. 2001.

Courtesy Zurich Capital Markets.

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 42 OCTOBER

and rearticul
that masks th
they also sym
into ecosystem
nature in the
Klima uses t
way to enviro
is causally imp
sharply with,
fish (Ocean Ear
Allan Sekula'
industry), or
toxic swimm
debris in an ominous storm). Each of these fish-themed works enlists an
environmental conceptualism in its treatment of medium, and each depicts a
growing social panic about the death of oceans, the ingestion and circulation of
PCBs in the food chain, the precariousness of fishing economies, and the
apparition of that supranational sea monster currently crashing the Kyoto
Protocols that Negri and Hardt associate with Empire. But in Klima's installations,
the computer medium itself is both the tool of environmental damage and the
representational vehicle of critique. The visible conversion of data transfer
into nature (and the reverse) allows the viewer to pinpoint where the survival
of natural habitat becomes critically endangered.
Unlike many artists working with digital technology, Klima avoids the
temptation to show what digital art can do as the next fine art-its success at
mimicking, in a new medium, the naturalist topoi of the sublime or the conventions
of pastoral genres. Nor does he simply affirm the naturalization of technologically
saturated representation (as some critics have accused him of doing, dismissing
him as a superficial technophile interested in computer games and high-jinks
interactivity).23 If anything, his work denaturalizes digital imaging, making the
viewer hyper-conscious of the technological mediation of the world and its
images; extending the reach of environmental activism and providing ecosystems
access to self-representation in a visual form other than landscape or nature
pictures. In this regard, Klima is complemented by the artist Wolfgang Staehle,
whose 2001 "live" WebCam projection of the New York skyline became an
overnight sensation due to its inadvertent capture of the World Trade Center
attack. Like Klima's project based on the Japanese game "Go" (in which satellite-

23. Barbara Pollack's review of Bitstreams designates Klima's ecosystm as "the weakest link" in the
show. "Despite the initial thrill of seeing a computer animation projected on a wall, the ultimate wide-
screen video presentation, only those completely unfamiliar with Nintendo 64 or Sony PlayStation
could be dazzled by Klima's graphics. The thrill, if any, comes from finding a video game-gee
whiz!!!-in an art museum" (Barbara Pollack, "Back to the Future with 'Bitstreams,'" in Art in America
9 [September 2001], p. 61).

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The Aesthetics of Critical Habitats 43

directed robot bugs, beneath a spinning globe, r

countries by tracing out their economic vit
Staehle's work provided, however horrifically
allowing the world to make itself "happen" as ar
Klima's most recent work on the war in A
geopolitics, once again using the technical me
redefine art as the visual interface between res
feed-back. Titling the work The Great Game af
skirmishes with Russia over hegemonic influen
ports in Central Asia during the nineteenth cen
grabbed a headline in the New York Times on N
(Sort of), but You Can't Control the Action."
maps of Afghanistan, subjected to manipulat
made available to the viewer who taps onto the s
in the hopes of interactive engagement, only
variables-weapons, material, war-planes, wea
quite simply, is not in your hands. As in Ecosys
based on real-time responses to data transfer, b
culled from Defense department briefings and
statistics, is partial, strictly curtailed by gover
this 3-D, cartographically credible theater of wa
the war looks warped by information holes,
manipulations. If the "Great Game" were a gene
and espionage operations in the age of Empire
the age of information black-out, where com
and military maneuvers, or the teen subculture
off access routes to so-called "reality" on the gr
Klima's The Great Game website works with d
as a way of unmasking secret initiatives taking p
globe, while experimenting with the visual mode
and lacunae, but it remains to be seen where hi
If his work defines an aesthetics of critical habitat,
lacking clear antiwar or antiglobalization politic
the interesting issue of how technically drive
the conventions of political art (or fail to adapt
As we have seen, Kentridge, Kinsella, Gursky
implicated in the question of habitat, and hav
making that habitat critical by responding to
art practice. The tension in the model that I hav
crude terms, one between the "grounded" and l
"real" habitats, suffering real political devast
are, so to speak, sites of political and social struggle
habitats (virtual habitats, if you like) that are

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44 OCTOBER

networks an
cannot simp
demystified
resistance as
be made pro
that resist
acceptance o

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