Sublime Tar Sands?

dru — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:44:18 +0000

Edward Burtynsky's photography and Canada's extractive industries

For over 20 years, Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky has photographed some of the world’s largest sites of resource extraction and processing. He has documented uranium and nickel mines, stone quarries, oil fields, oil refineries, “urban mines,” including massive tire piles and compacted metal waste, giant factories, the recycling of single-hulled oil tankers and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China-—the world’s largest hydro-electric project. As part of this quest, Burtynsky has also documented the oil industry in Canada, including the Albertan tar sands. However, there is a noticeable difference between his work in Canada and his work overseas. When Burtynsky takes his camera to Bangladesh or China, he reveals human labour as the driving force behind the landscapes of these industrial mega-projects. Human beings are what define these landscapes. In his photographs of the Albertan tar sands, however, the human figure is absent. Why did Burtynsky choose to remove people from his portraits of Canadian industry?

The history of landscape painting and photography may help explain his choices. If people appeared at all in traditional landscape images, they served to show the overwhelming vastness of the subject. In Burtynsky’s pictures of mines, mine tailings, quarries and urban mines from the 1980s and 1990s, he follows this tradition. People, or their residue in the form of tire tracks, parked cars, ladders, or abandoned backhoes, are used to reveal the vast scale of these extraction sites.

Burtynsky has said that he aspires to create sublime landscapes for our time. The sublime landscape in the nineteenth century symbolized the overwhelming power of Nature over Man, represented by a vast and pristine vista of land. It reminded the viewer that Nature can be simultaneously threatening and beautiful. Burtynsky has imagined the twentieth-century version of the sublime as a landscape transformed through human power into something equally beautiful and frightening. His photographs of mines and quarries shock the viewer with their otherworldly appearance, especially once one realizes that they are portraits of a land made unrecognizable through intensive industrial activity.

By eliminating people from the Canadian landscape, Burtynsky shares something else with his nineteenth-century peers. When British painters came to Canada, literally removing Canada’s aboriginal people from the picture served the British agenda of colonization. In his photographs of other countries, Burtynsky has put people back into colonized or capitalist landscapes, but by keeping them out of images of Canada, the agenda he is serving has come into question. In his Canadian photographs, the subject of the immense reorganization of land is the landscape, not the people. The images do nothing to challenge the prevailing Canadian ignorance about the enormous environmental and social consequences that will be the legacy of the Alberta tar sands project for generations to come.

For most of his career, Burtynsky has studiously avoided politicizing his work and he has come under attack for his relentless pursuit to aestheticize his subject and render it ambiguous. However, this ambiguity is what draws viewers in again and again. It is both pleasurable and disturbing to see these transformed landscapes. But the works cannot be labelled “eco-propaganda,” nor do they clearly glorify the industrial practices they present. Sometimes it is even difficult to tell what the subject is. The hundreds of black hills of processed earth that have been photographed with the same sensitivity one would expect from a postcard of the Grand Canyon turn out to be Oil Fields No. 24, Oil Sands, Fort McMurray, Alberta (2001). What looks like a vibrant river of fire is actually the enduring liquid waste of a nickel mine. In this way, Burtynsky masterfully presents the most distasteful industrial wasteland as one of the most spectacular places on earth. This ambiguity allows a myriad of different meanings to be read into his photographs: industry CEOs choose them for their walls; activists point to them as evidence of environmental catastrophe. This is both the potential power of his pieces and the largest point of political criticism of them.

Recently, Burtynsky has started to dispel some of the uncertainty of his environmental views by speaking publicly about the industrial processes he has spent his career documenting. He has collaborated with Jennifer Baichwal on the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, a poignant portrait of what industry is doing to the people and land in China, and he recently wrote an article for The Walrus, in which he decries the resource extraction taking place in Canada. In the article, he calls for the Canadian government to mandate sustainable practices in the extraction and sale of Canada’s natural resources, including the Alberta tar sands. However, a letter to the editor sharply noted that, despite his undisputed talent as a master photographer, "Alas, as an environmental activist, he is a failure."

Indeed, while Burtynsky’s photographs of Canadian industry make for great art, they operate within the Canadian political mainstream and do little to shake up the consciousness of a public content to keep looking away from the social and environmental degradation that is taking place in its own backyard.

Edward Burtynsky’s photographic works can be viewed online at www.edwardburtynsky.com

Burtynsky

Caution: Extreme Shakespeare in Halifax

Sun, 27 Jul 2003 03:32:32 +0000

Generally I am not a person who plans elaborate activities of merriment on calendar holidays. But, once and a while, an opportunity to celebrate gives me that tingling feeling and I am compelled to go out and join the party. It was that kind of crazed motivation that got me out of bed at 3:15 a.m. on July 1 to watch A Midsummer Night's Dream on the wharf of Casino Nova Scotia in Halifax.

A sellout crowd braved the Halifax harbourfront at 4 am to see a Canada Day performance of Midsummer Night's Dream. photo: Sylvia Nickerson

How romantic, I thought, and what a great way to begin Canada Day. Other folks must have agreed, for tickets had been long sold out. A fair-sized crowd of couples, families and theatre fans of all ages gathered in the early hour clutching travel mugs full of coffee, that great stuff Canadians couldn't live without. If June had made them so giddy as to forget that Halifax is under snow six months of the year, being ocean-side at night was a brisk reminder. A place to bare skin by day, the casino's "Seawalk Stage" was covered in a blanket of cold, clammy fog. Seated in lawn chairs on the concrete, audience members huddled together under coats and wool blankets. As a backdrop to the event, the harbour lights of Dartmouth were dimly visible, and large ships loomed in the indefinite moonlight. Under the influence of this stunning scene, I felt more like I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, than Nova Scotia.

The play began well, as the actors exuded the energy befitting the first performance of a season. Their antics and melodrama were appreciated with enthusiastic smiles and laughs from the audience. Occasionally, the faint clinking of slot machines (from inside the casino) could be heard over the lines delivered on stage. The players freely adjusted their lines, as well as their costumes and props, for humorous effect.

After a wholly entertaining first act, the length and difficulty of the play began to show, as the actors increasingly needed assistance to remember their lines (it was a one time "unrehearsed" performance). Former New Democratic Party leader Alexa McDonough held the script and assumed the role of prompter. As the play drew to a close, the timing and energy lagged. The humour culminated in a slap-sticky ending which involved the exposure of much nubile young skin, some radical cross dressing, and men impersonating squeaky female character-types. The play A Midsummer Night's Dream is itself an absurd story of hopelessly frustrated lovers, the vehicle for much biting satire and sexual innuendo. The performance was long -- about three hours long, actually. But, at 7 a.m. on Canada-Day morning, no one had anywhere else to go anyway. The giddiness brought on by the early hour seemed to allow for this long and mischievous ending.

So why did a sold out crowd come to a casino at 4 a.m. on a cold July night to watch actors proclaim sixteenth-century English? It is truly baffling behaviour. In the spirit of recent television entertainment, I would have to qualify this particular experience as "extreme" Shakespeare. The perilous trials observed by all involved in order to organize this event constitute another testament to the enduring appeal of the bard. In the morning, at night, before dinner, in the fog: any time is a good time for Shakespeare. Even when performed ad-hoc to a sleep-deprived crowd, the wisdom, humour and irrepressible spirit of what it is to be human reliably shines through. No one can capture the ironies, foibles and superficialities of love and loss like this playwright.

Shakespeare by the Sea continues performances through July and August in Point Pleasant Park, Halifax, Nova Scotia. For more information call (902) 422-0295 or check out the web site at www.shakespearebythesea.ca.

The Dominion - Sylvia Nickerson

Sublime Tar Sands?

Caution: Extreme Shakespeare in Halifax