A keyword search inside OU’s Library – what an utter treasure trove – brought me to this paper entitled Art, Trees and the Enchantment of the Anthropocene: Caroline Wendling’s White Wood written in 2018.
This paper can only be described as a mind-altering piece of work. It brought together an artwork by Caroline Wending entitled White Wood, which is akin to a rewilding-in-the-city type project, with the work of many others such as Lisa Le Feuvre and Mark Schneider, as well as their own opinions around enchantment.
Macpherson, A (2018) quoted Schneider, M (1993): “Enchantment arises, for Schneider, “when we are confronted by circumstances or occurrences so peculiar and so beyond our present understanding as to leave us convinced that, were they to be understood, our image of how the world operates would be radically transformed. To be enchanted is thus . . . [to be] faced with something both real and at the same time uncanny, weird, mysterious, or awesome.”
I loved the idea of ‘enchantment’ – the need and necessity to become enchanted with the Anthropocene. By becoming enchanted, we wish to know more. By knowing more, we cannot unlearn or un-see things through our new lenses, and it is therefore this enchantment that is necessary in order to change the naysayers’ minds about what we’re doing to our planet.
This entire article, most notably the conclusion managed to bring together some seemingly unrelated pieces of writing, thought and art, in a way that has been so poetically presented as to solve many of the mysteries that I’ve been trying to resolve in my own work.
Macpherson, A (2018) concludes: “In an essay written in response to another future-oriented forest artwork, Katie Paterson’s Future Library (2014), Lisa Le Feuvre begins by asking: “What is the time of an artwork? When does the process begin and when does it end?”50 Le Feuvre’s questions may apply just as appositely to White Wood. Indeed, it is the indeterminacy of the answers that demonstrates how White Wood is an artwork that can help us feel with and think through the Anthropocene. I began this article with a quote from Timothy Morton, who suggested that enchantment could mean “exploring the . . . openness and intimacy of the mesh.” My intention in the first part of the article was to demonstrate how these projects—thinking through the Anthropocene and exploring the mesh—are connected and to show that enchantment, as an affect or sensibility, has a hand in making this connection, because we can find enchantment in the uncanny facticity of the mesh, in the weird facticity of the Anthropocene, but enchantment can also be cultivated through the artistic strategies employed to help our thinking, feeling, and exploring of these conditions. We find these strategies operating in White Wood—through the interconnected themes of regeneration, participation, and temporality, or temporal layering. These strategies have the power to enchant by rethinking use-value as nonuse value; by embracing a radical sense of participation; and by remaining open to future contingency. Morton describes the process of exploring the mesh as thinking “the ecological thought,” which, he says, “is difficult: it involves becoming open, radically open forever without the possibility of closing again.”51 It is precisely this openness that White Woodembraces. And yet, even as the time of the artwork remains radically open, White Wood is present: a real, concrete intervention into the very mesh that it helps us to think; a living artwork that is continually participating and becoming.”
References:
- Le Feuvre, Lisa. “The Time of an Artwork.” Tate Papers, no. 24 (2015), https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/24/the-time-of-an-artwork.
- Macpherson, A. (2018). Art, Trees, and the Enchantment of the Anthropocene: Caroline Wendling’s White Wood. Environmental Humanities, 10(1), pp 241–256. Published on May 01, 2018. https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/10/1/241/134702/Art-Trees-and-the-Enchantment-of-the
Debbie New 