Almost everything in existence is now mediated by people. The anthrosphere is blooming, wildly dominating all life on earth and all of what we know to be natural. To gaze upon green pastures as John Constable did, or to contemplate the sublime beauty of landscape as Caspar David Friedrich did has becoming difficult, at least for many people. To some extent ‘nature’ and with it ‘beauty’, in the purest sense, is becoming somewhat fantastical and imaginary. To some degree these terms ‘nature’ and ‘beauty’ are problematic, as they seem to be associated with and to describe some place or something that happened sometime and somewhere in the past. I certainly don’t relate to these concepts as I used to. Somehow, I think there should be other words to describe the kind of beauty and the kind of nature that exists in this time and place. These words ought to describe profound and poignant moments, realisations and observations that are easily coupled with this new reality. Words, divorced from their associated with heavenly vistas, with open landscape, and sunlight dancing over meadows. Really, these words should describe what it means to live in the grid, with the chemicals the detritus the data the noise, the pollution, the speed. Words to describe life as-it-is in detail, in the same way that I think the word ‘beauty’ describes the sublime marble surfaces of the Pietà, rendered carefully, slowly and lovingly by the hand of Michelangelo. Rhett Martyn
(4th floor / Ellis House / Johannesburg)
(4th floor / Ellis House / Johannesburg)
Rhett Martyn is a visual artist living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa.