Hi, here's a piece I wrote on Rachael Champion (forthcoming in the exhibition catalogue for "The Shape We're In": http://www.zabludowiczcollection.com/london/exhibitions/the-shape-were-in ).
David Hume notices that “[t]he world... resembles more an animal or a vegetable, than it does a watch or a knitting-loom.” The targets of this observation are those who justify their belief in God on the basis of an ostensive similarity between our planet and a designed mechanical object. The world, so their argument goes, is the perfect mechanism. And as such it could only have been made by the perfect mechanic – God.
Hume, however, offers an alternative explanation:
In like manner as a tree sheds its seeds into the neighbouring fields, and produces other trees; so the great vegetable, the world, or this planetary system, produces within itself certain seeds, which, being scattered into the surrounding chaos, vegetate into new worlds.
Hume imagines a universe overgrown with life-spawned life. He does not, it should be emphasised, mean us to take him seriously. He wishes to show that a vegetative story of creation is just as well supported by the available evidence as the theory of Intelligent Design. He concludes that we ought in fact to accept neither hypothesis.
Rachael Champion’s installations provide us with an impetus for taking Hume’s vegetative cosmogony a little more seriously, at least when it comes to the more parochial subject of global industrial and agricultural production. Champion’s work implies that industry and its technological apparatus is seeded and germinated by the world whose resources it so deeply mines; the well-planted landscapes of industrialised countries are shaped and reshaped by the machines to which their fecundity gave rise.
Champion’s work evinces, on the one hand, a Modernist (perhaps even Futurist) reverence for the glory of terraformation; a positive excitement at the prospect of our planet’s being strong-armed into harmony with human existence. Flowered with expansion tanks, industrial icons and ambiguous equipment, her aesthetic is brightly municipal – perhaps even Soviet. The neatly contained crops point to a happy surplus, a harvest-festival gratitude. There is certainly wastage, but it is satisfyingly autumnal in character: colourful, nostalgic and utopic.
Of course, on the other hand, what we see in Champion’s work is also evidently the product and living consequence of a world which has been drained by its own outgrowths, like a mother of twelve left bloated and infirm by childbirth. The grass is sustained by an oily, mineral nourishment which renders it inedible, useful for nothing but further systemic expansion. The land is locked into a recursively exploitative hydroponics. We are witness to a production cycle which scatters pallid seedlings into the surrounding chaos. Across the developing nations, these seedlings seethe in the dirt, vegetating into new worlds.
***
Let us now turn to China, and to a second creation myth.
Pan Gu arrives on what is to become Earth in a cosmic egg. For eighteen-thousand years Pan Gu grows taller, pushing the egg apart. Eventually, the two halves of the shell become the sky and the earth. When he finally reaches his maximum height, the strain he has undergone causes his body to disintegrate. His limbs fall to the ground and became the mountains, his breath becomes the wind and the clouds, and his blood and semen becomes the rivers and seas. All that is left of Pan Gu is his vital force, or qi, which to this day remains the world’s animating principle.
Fengshui developed as a set of practices focused on harnessing and utilising the flow of qi. Suppressed as superstitious after the Great Leap Forward, it has enjoyed a recent resurgence. As the country’s megalopolises stirred with the economic reforms of the 1990s, fengshui’s ability to provide rules and means for understanding dense cohabitation, the construction and placement of houses, roads and municipal structures, has ensured its continued popularity. By correctly directing the flow of qi – by carrying out appropriate changes to his surroundings – a man can, it is thought, have a direct and palpable influence on his fortunes. Fengshui permits a spirituality of capital; a philosophy of possession and of status which is as almost deeply rooted as exchange-value itself.
One might have supposed that fensgshui would mitigate the effects of China’s rapid industrialisation on the country’s environment. But fengshui is just as much a way of explaining why the prosperous prosper as it is a set of instructions on how to live in harmony with the land. If a man who is living in a building known for its bad fengshui suddenly becomes wealthy, the status of his home is reassessed – it becomes an example of good fengshui, to be admired and imitated.
The Chinese landscape must now be exploited with the all of the intensity necessary for the feeding of 1.3 billion citizens. The ability of modern agricultural techniques and utilitarian architecture to deliver this – and enormous wealth besides – paves the way for the redefining of good fengshui for the twenty-first century. The possibility of a formalism of the industrial has arisen; the material conditions required for marketplace success are ready to be translated into aesthetic principles (and vice versa). Qi begins to flow through the money markets with great velocity and force; Pan Gu’s blood and semen take on a newly augmented vitality; and the landscape groans with the effort of change.
***
I have already said that Champion’s installations imply a kind conspiracy between the natural and the industrial; the two, whilst appearing to us as sworn enemies, work together to sustain the mutually parasitic embrace in which they are bound. I would suggest that something like a post-industrial fengshui permeates Champion’s practice; a set of implied rules and rituals which amount to the suggestion that, all along, nature and industry have been partners in crime. Through the auspicious placement of pipes, expansion tanks and dead wheatgrass, Champion mimics the productive flow of life as we know it.
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