We share this planet with an enormous number of other life forms. Artists in turn have depicted these creatures in isolated portraits and in relation to ourselves and each other throughout known human history. Ecologists, in a different form of appreciation, study the many relationships these life forms have with each other. One such relationship is diagramed with food webs that show who is eating who within a given ecosystem. These schematics generalize very complex interactions and are useful in helping characterize “primary”, “secondary” and “tertiary” consumers of energy.
Oddly, art historians have used similar “food webs” to characterize the “development” or “transformation” of artistic production. Traditional histories of art using this “Enlightenment” model narrate changes in art as if one generation of artists feed off their predecessors in an unending upwards march. Alfred H. Barr’s “The Development of Abstract Art” in 1926 is a diagrammatic example of this theoretical praxis. Post-modernists have rightfully debunked this form of “Meta-narration” as simplistic and exclusionary. They argue that history has never “advanced” in a grand linear manner nor advanced towards any “enlightenment” end point. Rather, history is a collection of “mini” narratives that jumble their way through time.
The philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, proclaimed that “(t)he answers you get depend on the questions you ask.” I wondered if asking a different question of art history my yield novel answers and information about the art and artists of the past.
To test this I used an energy flow chart for a common terrestrial forest food web ecosystem as a template to explore the presence of each member of the ecosystem in artworks throughout human history. We queried the online art collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art and other art image databases for the associated organisms and placed them at the appropriate node on the ecosystem diagram. These novel associations of artworks (based on the animals that are in them) are leading to new ways of seeing nature and the human/nature dynamic. This same protocol using ecosystems in e.g. desert, ocean and rainforests is also envisioned in mockup images shown.
Consider also overlaying vector diagrams on unrelated images and text as a guide to their read. Dada.
