Nature Always Wears the Colors of the Spirit

BY JAMES L. ENYEART

Christopher Burkett’s photographs of nature have bridged a most precarious artistic chasm, which is the critical and aesthetic distance between tradition and new vision. Those artists working within a tradition, or those who are seen to be doing so, are generally sent to the back of the bus in terms of critical interest, especially in America. While we revere history and all of its glorious achievements, we are generally reluctant to nurture it as an ongoing mentor to contemporary life and culture. Although no one denies the lessons to be learned from the past and its traditions, especially those that shine as great contributions to various aspects of culture, it is our sense of the present that is ever the dominant source of our aesthetic philosophies and beliefs. This is the disconnect in American art, which relegates ideas and forms of expression to periods of time as if they were succinct chapters in a book, whole and complete, used up in both content and context. We treat traditions, artistic or otherwise, as the paths upon which we now trod in impatient quest of the new.

 

The motive for change, especially in the arts, is born of discontent with the status quo, which concentrates all of one's energies on events and ideas in one's own time. Somewhere along the way, Americans began to believe in the obsolescence of history itself. The arts, like material goods, are too often viewed with worried boredom in anticipation of annual or shorter periods of change. One need only look to the love affair with the automobile, whose makers long ago developed design obsolescence into their product to satisfy and inspire consumers' obsessions with the new. In the arts, the term "avant-garde" has long represented artists who aspired to being unorthodox and experimental and who were committed to changing or at least challenging the prevailing mainstream ideas of the art world. But in the art world's own form of design obsolescence, that term too has been cast aside as dated in favor of the current terms of choice, "contemporary" and its substitute phrases, which include "cutting edge" and "ahead of the game." Needless to say, when the language of art is equally captive to a preoccupation with the present, there befalls to us all a poverty of usage. All works of art made in their time are contemporary. And in spite of the word game, the term "avant-garde" has yet to be effectively replaced. Its meaning is clear when contrasted with the work of artists who adhere to traditional artistic styles.

 

In all cultural aspects of art and society, the drive for change for its own sake represents a kind of intellectual and emotional tunnel vision that is blind to its own sources. The notion of unique invention and originality is as misguided for the arts as it is for the sciences. We know that all knowledge and accomplishment are derived from interpretation, adaptation, and enhancement of previous ideas and events. Our sense of aesthetics is tied to the past in a way not unlike the genetic structure of our bodies. We can and do create new ideas, but always with a hint of something that has gone before. The creation of a work of art at any given time is either a partner in a continuing idea or attempts to make a break with it. But in either case the outcome is launched by an inherent relation to that idea.

 

The same is true for the tools of art - its technology, which in turn is one of the most consistent causes of change in history. Artistic expression through photography in particular has been driven by each new technological improvement in the medium-color emulsions, light-sensitive salts, optics, films, etc. Mastery of technology, or "craftsmanship," has always been important to the liberation of all forms of aesthetic statements. In this regard, Burkett excels in a manner equal to all artists before him who were admired for their control of the medium and their unique visions, including Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and others before them. Burkett has achieved in Cibachrome what Eliot Porter achieved for dye-transfer or Weston and Adams for black-and-white prints. But the mastery of the technology of photography is in the end just the price of admission for apprehending one's own vision. However crucial craftsmanship might be to the execution of the final work of art, it serves best when it is noticed least.

 

Burkett’s full – spectral realism in landscape and details of Nature have come to the public fore at a time when the enormously successful twentieth-century artistic visions of modernism and postmodernism have been relegated to the present historical dustbin. The newest of the new vision in photography, the current avant-garde, is all about recycling physical characteristics of scale, color, surface, technology, and content issues that include social and environmental concepts, fictional and narrative theatrics, and visual pleasure. By these criteria alone, if one had not seen a Burkett photograph, his work could easily fit into some aspects of such a description and place him among the avant-garde. But his subject matter places him in another realm that is singular in its devotion to the relationship between physical reality and the spiritual qualities of beauty in landscape. He describes his work as "crystal clarity... part of the experience of trying to see the world as it truly is ... full of an infinite number of details. It's only our blindness, in one form or another, that doesn't allow us to see that." (John Paul Caponigro 1997, 13)

 

Even the words used to describe philosophical and aesthetic issues embodied in Burkett's renditions of Nature-truth, beauty, reality, abstraction-are treated as anachronistic by much of the art world today. The reluctance to embrace such timeless issues makes appreciation of Burkett's photographs all the more timely as the art world cycles through many other ideas from the past. The current trend toward social concerns in the visual arts is irrefutably a cyclical tendency of American culture. But the idea that universal issues of Nature and beauty are therefore out of sync with the Zeitgeist of contemporary cultural manifestations is an issue that is not new. In 1931 Edward Weston wrote to the editor of the magazine Experimental Cinema, in answer to critics who thought his photographs of "nature" were irrelevant to his time: "Do the radicals who protested against your publishing my kelp or pepper, also ask of music that it sound like the shriek of a factory whistle, the thud of a police billy, the last groan of a dying worker l?I... To limit art with social duty is a bourgeois attitude, a pedantic premise, —that art is subservient to ethics. Only by working for himself, can the artist fulfill his reason for existence and directly or indirectly serve mankind: he is not as some assume a little god apart from humanity, but he is at the spiritual core of the whole plan... The artist can neither serve the plutocrat, nor the proletarian—he must be free from all but self imposed obligations." (Edward Weston 1931, letter)

 

Nature, self-contained or with metaphoric potential, represents the most enduring of aesthetic interests for artists, poets, and philosophers. From Aristotle to Thoreau, the essence of Nature, divinely inspired, was manifested in works of art devoted to landscape and its infinite details. Henry David Thoreau's essay "From Walden" spoke of the spiritual qualities that Nature held out to art: "It has come to this,-that the lover of art is one, and the lover of nature another, though true art is but the expression of our love of nature." (Eliot Porter, N.P.) It should be of some interest to us that of all the multitude of artistic movements and forms of individual expression since the Renaissance, it is landscape and aesthetic explorations of the beauty of Nature that represent the greatest constant. As a topic of interest to artists, the spirit of the natural subject has been incorporated into every artistic movement right up to the present site-specific conceptual works. From Da Vinci to the impressionists and from the advent of nonobjective abstraction to the whole history of photography, there has never been a time when Nature was absent from aesthetic concerns.

 

The informed public with an interest in the arts has never developed a distaste for realistic representations of Nature, no matter how divergent the prevalent expressions of a particular time might have been. But the public has been intolerant of cliché and facile technique for its own sake. In this difference, there is a wisdom that reaches beyond the concerns of the specialist, be it artist or any other professional. Whatever we might construe as progress in the arts, we cannot dismiss the interest and appreciation of the larger public. This interest has periodically led intellectuals to reinvestigate elements of beauty, truth, and meaning in the arts. For example, a primary motivation of early modernism was the spiritual essence of objects and their formal representation. The resulting love of form inevitably led artists back to Nature and abundant metaphors for emotion and feelings. This aspect of the modernist movement continues to be very much alive in a wide range of artists' works, and again we find Nature and the profane as equal partners in the search for beauty.

 

Burkett describes his role as an artist in this longstanding tradition of landscape in terms of his desire to be an aesthetic conduit for Nature: "There are but a few moments where all of the necessary elements come together to make a photograph, which will give even the briefest taste of ... incredible miraculous moments and millions of wondrous details that surround us at all times. Only the rarest few can be expressed through a photograph.... Most times nothing happens—or it happens so imperfectly that it is as if nothing had happened. In truth, I am a spectator as well as a participant in the whole process. My task is to simply present this reality in the clearest, most luminous and direct way, with the least amount of interference, distraction, or distortion from myself or the photographic process. One is always left with the feeling that much more is possible. Once in a great while, a gift comes to me-—a gift of God's grace to share with others. (Burkett 2001, videotape)

 

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose mid-nineteenth-century essay titled "Nature" reconciled his love of Nature with his belief in God, Burkett brings into the twentieth-first century an updated version of art as the essential transcendental bridge between reality and the divine. In words not far removed from Burkett's, Emerson wrote,"All natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all of her perfection....Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both.... Nature always wears the colors of the spirit." (Emerson 1959, 260, 262)

 

Burkett speaks of luminosity in his work, which is recognized as dramatic light that surrounds and defines his subjects, distinguishing his photographs from those of all other landscape photographers today. But the light of which he speaks is not just the light of day that saturates and reveals abundant flora. Like Emerson and the transcendentalists, he believes it is a spiritual luminosity that emanates from a divine source through Nature. This quality of light, regardless of its source, is the hallmark of Burkett's work.

 

In the mid-nineteenth century, American Luminist painters created ultra-detailed renderings of Nature, in which a clear focus on light made it the binding element of landscape. Burkett's photographs are reminiscent of those works in several ways. The detailed realism of his subjects, bathed as they are in a light that few people have ever observed in Nature, arrests the flow of time as much as a painting of hummingbirds in flight. Burkett's work is also a retreat from the vicissitudes of an urban world, as was the Luminists' work a retreat from the materialism of Victorian society. The difference is that the Luminists also moved away from Nature as a symbol of "Gods plantations," in Emerson's words, toward a real presence of the divine. And today Burkett must do much the opposite by reinstalling in images of Nature a symbol of divinity. Both he and Emerson share perspectives on the divinity of Nature, in part due to their religious backgrounds-Emerson a Church of Boston minister and Burkett a former brother in an Orthodox Christian church. They both invoke an absolute faith in sublime landscape as the work of God, and simultaneously they aspire to share their gifts of observation with the secularity of the art world. But Burkett must convince his audience that the beauty of Nature is not solely the product of geologic and biologic evolution. His aesthetic visions are a "gift" in his words. For both Burkett and Emerson, the spiritual essence of their subjects is revealed by their desire for truth, and in truth, beauty.

 

Among the great formalist artists of the twentieth century, Edward Weston was especially innovative in his ability to reveal inherent abstract elements of natural forms. Among a set of notes he kept in a file for reference were quotes about form and content from many different authors. On one such note attributed to Hsieh Ho, a Chinese sage of the sixth century, Weston handwrote the following: "The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it." (Weston papers N.D.) This sage aphorism speaks directly to Burkett's dilemma. While he maintains that his photography represents as close to absolute reality as he can produce, it is in fact a very abstract quality within his images, that of an enigmatic ethereal light, that he wishes to share with viewers.

 

The visual means by which Burkett "allures the senses" are not just the qualities of light found in his images, as unusual and sensual as they are. It is also his keen awareness of color relationships, which are believable and yet portray unique moments in Nature's cycles that are almost beyond belief. The seeming ease with which he finds and produces these images is a testament to the consistency of his vision and the years of hard searching and extensive travel he has committed to such a quest. Making the chaos of Nature appear coherent requires no small measure of passion and the discipline to wrest inspired moments from the tangle of landscape. Burkett's eye, trained over many years to look for contrasting yet harmonious color relationships in Nature, is what liberates the light he defines as divine.

 

George Santayana, who gave the end of the nineteenth century its most comprehensive philosophical study of the nature of beauty, said of color, "There could be no beauty if there was no conception of independent objects.... And, in fact, form, which is almost a synonym of beauty ... is a synthesis of the seen. But prior to the effect of form, which arises in the constructive imagination, comes the effect of colour; this is purely sensuous, and no better intrinsically than the effects of any other sense: but being more involved of objects than are the rest, it becomes more readily an element of beauty." (Santayana 1955, 47) A quarter-century later, the debate in photography about color versus black-and-white images was finally put to rest in the late 1970s. Prior to that time, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and other proponents of large-format photography had felt the need to defend or deny its validity as a useful aesthetic tool. Therefore, Burkett's choice of color photography, now free of the historical debate, can be viewed on its own terms and those of general philosophic and aesthetic issues.

 

The translations of the acutal into the ideal has always been the central issue for artists from at least the time of Aristotle, whose core idea about beauty (aesthetics) was order and symmetry. The arts were essential even then because they resolved the chaos and accidents of Nature. Yet aestheticians throughout history have not been able to dissect with certainty the exact relationship between art and the spiritual engine behind creativity. The search for beauty in reality, rather than the imagination, has been the subject of a variety of intellectual and religious convictions about the place of the human soul in the scheme of aesthetic perception.

 

It is here that Burkett's color photographs erupt in contemporary society by once again seeking an audience for the sublime in Nature and, hence, reality. While aggressive critics always seem to seek relevance in new and untried ideas, they often miss the courage of artists like Burkett who attempt to draw their inspiration and ideas from a deeply rooted continuum in the history of art. Where, for example, would modernism have found its inspiration, if not in part from earlier centuries of Japanese art? This is not to say that Burkett's photographs are directly based upon earlier artistic styles. Rather, it is his idea about the divinity of Nature, his aesthetic philosophy and approach that connects him to an important universal concern in art.

 

Among other aesthetic precedents to Burkett's concept of beauty and Nature are two advocates for the divine in art, Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses on art in the eighteenth century and John Ruskin in his Modern Painters in the nineteenth century. For both, the divine in Nature is represented as the ultimate task for the artist, whose sole purpose is the revelation of truth about self and humankind. In Reynolds's third lecture delivered to students of the Royal Academy in 1770, he struggled with the contrasting elements of beauty, from the deformed to the ideal. But about one thing he remained certain-that the artist was the reason for our recognition of beauty in Nature at all: “There are many beauties in our Art that seem, at first, to lie without the reach of precept.... This great ideal perfection and beauty are not to be sought in the heavens, but upon the earth. They are about us, and upon every side of us... the whole beauty and grandeur of the Art consists, in my opinion, in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind.... The most beautiful forms have something about them like weakness, minuteness, or imperfection. But it is not every eye that perceives these blemishes. It must be an eye long used to the contemplation and comparison of these forms.... By this means, he [the artist] acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects Nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original... This idea of the perfect state of Nature, which the artist calls the Ideal beauty, is the great leading principle.... This is the idea which has acquired, and which seems to have a right to the epithet of divine; as it may be said to preside, like a supreme judge, over all the productions of Nature, appearing to be possessed of the will and intention of the Creator, as far as they regard the external form of living things.”(Reynolds 53, 54)

 

Burkett recognizes the difficulty of seeking his place in that longer tradition, but like those before him, both poets and painters, he is able to articulate with confidence as easily: "All of our world, each living cell, every stone and drop of water, even the air and light around us, reflects and mirrors the glory and presence of the Creator... Photography is an expression of the world we live in and of what we see and experience. Many contemporary photographs seem filled with negativity and warped, malignant things. That these negative things and perceptions exist now for a time in the world with us is indisputable, but I feel strongly that there is no need to give life and strength to them. Too often, attempting to represent the sacred in nature is maligned as being naïve or simplistic, and is said to be unchallenging and visually unsophisticated. This need not be so. The purpose of my photography is to provide a brief, if somewhat veiled, glimpse into that clear and brilliant world of light and power." (Burkett 1999, brochure)

 

John Ruskin, the other writer of interest in the lineage of those concerned with divinity and beauty in art, was much more polemical in his treatise on beauty and what it owed to a sense of the Creator. Perhaps the most prolific if not the greatest critic of the nineteenth century, Ruskin admitted no intellectual separation from God in his explorations of the theoretic, sensual, and ideal representations of truth and beauty in Nature. "It is necessary," he wrote, "to the existence of an idea of beauty, that the sensual pleasure which may be its basis, should be accompanied first with joy, then with love of the object, then with the perception of kindness in a superior Intelligence, finally with thankfulness and veneration towards that Intelligence itself, and as no idea can be at all considered as in any way an idea of beauty, until it be made up of these emotions... it is evident that the sensation of beauty is not sensual on the one hand, nor is it intellectual on the other, but is dependent on a pure, right and open state of the heart, both for its truth and for its intensity.... For I believe that mere pleasure and pain have less associative power than duty performed or omitted, and that the great use of the associative faculty is not to add beauty to material things, but to add force to the conscience." (Ruskin N.D., 206-207, 224)

 

In the face of more than half a dozen major wars on several continents, the twentieth century has surely brought about a serious discontent among intellectuals with issues of spirituality. But a thorough investigation of the social history of the world would reveal that previous centuries were no different. Lack of faith in humanity to make peaceful progress, thereby engendering a lack of faith in religious ideals, cannot alone account for the dramatic secularization of artistic concerns that Burkett and other artists face today. The answer may lie with the history of art, rather than society. The artistic concerns for gender, justice, racial equity, and environmental issues that predominate today may be due to the distancing of art itself from popular culture in America. The majority of the population has increased religious values as part of the social contract with democracy. Yet museums have not moved closer to religion and politics, restricted as they are by their legal obligation of neutrality toward those issues. Increasingly, however, they have made attempts to appeal to the masses through alternate means. New construction and renovation of museums in America are at an all-time high, and the focus is very much on mall-like spaces and entertainment programs for the public. Education and interpretation of collections have become priorities, which compete with appreciation through direct experience of the object. In academia, whose institutions are similar to those of museums, art historians have fostered a major erosion of interest in the artist and art objects in favor of theoretical and critical concerns. So on the one hand, art and society are in conflict where the core value system meets institutional representation. On the other hand, intellectual enterprise has disenfranchised artists and the objects they make from current historical and critical concerns. Where intellectual and social concerns do intersect in America's institutions, there are increasing confrontations concerning religious values and censorship.

 

It should come as no surprise, then, that artists have fled from the age-old exploration of relationships between aesthetic and spiritual concerns. The desire to liberate the spirit or essence of an object though artistic vision, as manifested by the modernist frame of mind, was aligned with a societal belief system dedicated to the promise of a divine plan for humanity. But as the bifurcation of culture grew into public values on one branch and artistic expression on another, so did the secularization of art, public holidays, and education. Burkett's work brings all of these issues to the surface because he speaks and writes about his shared religious and aesthetic motives. But as with all works of art, the objects themselves can stand alone on one level without explanation or awareness of motives. When works of art are perceived and enjoyed in this manner, it is a purely intuitive connection with visual and sensual pleasures. Even if one does not know of the spiritual overlay on Burkett's work, his photographic window on Nature speaks to deep atavistic longings. When his beliefs are known, the viewer is challenged to reach beyond the intuitive and required to see nature as Nature. The process is somewhat like watching an athlete perform with perfection and then watching the same performance knowing that the act was mentally dedicated to some intense circumstance in the athlete's life. Full knowledge of the creation of a work of art is intended to take appreciation beyond simple visceral responses, and therefore Burkett's belief structure is essential to full appreciation of his images. Burkett describes the process as follows: "The fine print is much more than the reproduction of an im-age. It's the culmination of the inspiration and vision of the photographer. It's the clearest, most direct and powerful form of the image and has the ability to move beyond words, ideas, and concepts, to touch and move the viewer in the most direct and immediate way." (Burkett 2001, videotape)

 

In the final analysis, Burkett's photographs are important precisely because they are seen by some critics to be out of sync with the presumed mainstream. The true nature of the arts today is one of enormous breadth, in which the old notion of a hierarchy of ideas has given way to infinite possibilities. Burkett's photographs of Nature not only infuse the residue of a postmodern art world with yet one more strident bit of evidence of the continuum of the landscape tradition, but they also remind us that "paradise lost" may have other meanings today. These photographs of unusual moments of light, place, and circumstance appear more as a secret paradise than something within reach of everyone. And that is the pity of the sprawling urbanization of the world. The further these images seem to be beyond our reach, the greater the danger that they will, in fact, be lost to reality. If Burkett's Nature is not something we all can experience, it will not be because it was too difficult to preserve the places in which it is found, but because the desire waned for lack of belief that it exists.

 

If the history of art has anything to teach us, it should be that reality and abstraction are cyclical events in the evolution of civilization. What we believe about life and about ourselves is reflected in the dimension between those opposites. It is artists who can most clearly reveal the practical limits of the present in seeing clearly the connection between what we believe and what we experience. Burkett's photographs teach us about the richness of Nature, but equally they teach us about the importance of abstracting from Nature sensual, emotional, and spiritual qualities in ourselves.