The Brooklyn Rail

Julian Charrière’s show Buried Sunshine at Sean Kelly is not altogether in keeping with the artist’s early-career sympathy to the conservationist Earth Art tradition inaugurated by Alan Sonfist in the mid-1960s. In “Glacial Topography,” a 2003 article for Aesthetica magazine, Charrière criticized “the extent of human intervention on glacial landscapes, urging for unification with the natural world.” Rather than eliciting an ecological-political call to curb fossil fuel emissions or underscoring the effects of industrial production, Charrière’s new exhibition treks a more mystical avenue, opening up the natural world to technological reverie rather than the value judgments that colored his more youthful endeavors. Charrière’s current ambit is diametrically opposed to the preservationist idea of nature articulated by the American Transcendentalists and neo-Luddites. This is not to say pessimism has won over. The exhibition prods at the ritualistic relationship between man and nature, veering closer to the ideas of the nineteenth-century German Romantics than those of current, activist environmentalists. Unlike artistic predecessors like Ana Mendieta, who heralded nature as a spiritual matter tethered to the body, Charrière does not preoccupy himself with images of man. His images and objects—sculptural, photographic, and videographic—are an archive of natural and mechanical operations (for Charrière denies their distinction) freed from the imposition of man’s self-image.

Charrière’s film, Controlled Burn (2022), is the centerpiece of a shrine-like installation. It depicts a cascade of pyrotechnic missiles that illuminate the colossal metallic scaffolding of oil rigs. The film does a fine job of making the display of staggering projectiles visually arresting. The careening projectiles, whirring and charting spectral matrices before folding into hissing pockets of effluvium, first strike the viewer as natural phenomena. They could very well be plunging meteors or volcanic eruptions, and the illusion is only overturned in those brief flashes where the darkened background is lit up by the missiles, revealing the concentric steel structures of an oil field.

A duo of obsidian sculptures, both titled Thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows (2020), mark the entryway to the theater, from which the droning clangs of the film emanate. Viewers are invited to sit and gaze at the screen, which is situated like an altar framed by a series of backlit, heliographic aerial views of the oil fields near Los Angeles. These chart a cartographic latticework of lines flowing through empty rolling hills broken by the triangular metal structures of oil rigs. The static images are at odds with the protracted exposure time of the camera obscura technique that Charrière used to capture their likeness. Charrière’s wry visual pun is exacerbated by the placement of these lambent plates along the walls, Controlled Burn figuring as transept. The effect of this visual-technological parallel—which perhaps suggests the fungibility of putative dichotomies such as moving image/static photograph and artificial machine/organic nature—is secondary to the enchanting effect of Charrière’s shrine taken as a holistic installation. The sense of ritual is commanding, furthered by the celestial pockets of propelled light glowing from the heliographs when viewed from the room’s center and the film’s toneless soundscape.

My sense, informed by Charrière’s recent interest in Timothy Morton’s recast panpsychism—articulated in the latter’s essay, “Spectres of the Non-human,” included in the artist’s 2015 catalogue, For They That Sow the Wind—is that romantic enchantment has won over the kind of ecological awareness expressed in “Glacial Topography.” According to Morton, the ecological has little to do with “spending time in a pristine nature […] but [is instead about] appreciating the weed working its way through a crack in the concrete, and then appreciating the concrete.” This is a byproduct of the panpsychist philosophical foundations of Morton’s stripe of ecologism, according to which all objects—organic and inorganic, alike—are imbued with a numinous sense of consciousness. This “flat ontology” does not leave space for the hierarchy of verifiably conscious beings—neither human nor animal—and their ways of life, striking an equivalence between rockets and rodents, oil rigs and trees, skyscrapers and mountains. By extension, Charrière shirks the logical conclusion of their ontological paradigm. Nature inevitably becomes too broad and open a concept to meaningfully endorse conservation—for through wreckage and destruction, fundamental nature is preserved.

In our contemporary epoch, colored by the arrival of ecological disaster, such panpsychist speculation contains implications that go well beyond more established expressions of nature. Charrière admits as much, noting that “I am not directly interested in the question of human survival, but rather more in the traces that humans leave behind, marking their presence.” This is an interesting posthuman pursuit, though he sidesteps the related issue that any intentional ‘marking’ of ‘presence’ or leaving behind a ‘trace’ is a form of survival. Whether it be the documentation of winding rockets bursting like volcanic spittle over oil fields or congealed obsidian boulders, Charrière’s work is intention-laden, betraying an impulse to ‘survive.’ If these are archival images and objects meant not to outlast but chronicle the human animal, they will nevertheless remain images whose form was burnished by mankind’s reasoning. Charrière is an ambitious artist who fruitfully engages posthuman concepts, but his cold mechanical subjects and natural objects remain as human as his youthful conservationism.