Joan Fontcuberta_ Post-photographic Landscapes

VII Introductory Course to Contemporary Art. POST-ARCADIA
SESSION 2_Joan Fontcuberta (Artist) 30 March 2017.
NARRATIVES, STORIES AND FICTIONS
What does the fictional dimension bring to our vision of nature? What role does art play in the production of narratives about nature? Can we speak of an ethical responsibility of art associated with the production of these narratives? Are these narratives the exclusive heritage of humans? How do these fictions expand the possibilities of the real?
CONFERENCE
Title_ Post-photo landscapes
Summary_ The presentation covers the period delimited by two exhibitions that I curated: in 1984 "Images of the Arcadia" for the National Library of Madrid, which presented an overview of Spanish pictorialist photography; and "A parallel world" in 2016 with Spanish artists who base their work on Google Street View. The two exhibitions highlight the substantial changes in both the status of the image and the reinvention of nature.
In an aphorism, Jorge Wagensberg points out: "The natural is the work of God, the artificial is the work of man and the supernatural is the artificial of God". As art has traditionally been an interpretation of nature (human work over God's work), we must consider the artistic an artificialisation of the natural. Nevertheless, Wagensberg's proposal opens in fact a double discursive thread. One: man is God's work, therefore he is also natural, and therefore the artificial man's work is the natural in a second degree, it is the natural manufactured. Two: whether man is the work of God or whether God is the work of man, everything is natural (there can be nothing artificial) and/or everything is artificial (there can be nothing natural). In short, the artificial would be the real modified by human knowledge where knowledge is a natural achievement of reality. Could there therefore be a #natural nature? The answer is no. In other words, no longer: the presence of man artificialises nature. Creation until the sixth day was nature, but on the seventh day it became artifice. Perhaps the Eden in which Adam and Eve lived was the first botanical garden in history and as such, the result of an effort to bring nature under control. Putting it all together, then, the work of art is a meta-artifice: the artificialisation of the natural which is, in turn, another artifice.
Although a certain nostalgic, romantic, or even more, mystical spirit still permeates the relationship with nature, we can no longer escape the idea that nature is a cultural, ideological, economic and political construct. The framework of postmodernist thought and the emergence of new technologies in everyday life, applied above all to biology and communication, has ended up giving the coup de grace to the unconsciousness of nature. Jeffrey Deitch writes: "With the #landscape of large car parks no more or less real than a forest reserve, or with a genetically enhanced baby no more or less real than a traditional one, there is no longer an absolute truth that will endure after it is stripped of all its layers. It could very well be that the end of Modernism coincides not only with the end of nature but also with the end of truth". To immerse oneself in nature today means to discover layers of chaotic "improvements" introduced by man. A new model of reality has replaced
our previous sense of natural order. Genuine nature can now be more artificial than natural. A walk through the jungle attraction of Disneyland can seem more real to many people than the true experience of the Amazon rainforest. Genetically modified fruits seem to us to be more real in colour and taste than "organic" fruits. Genetic engineering and artificial intelligence determine our collective existence. New generations are growing up in the culture of virtual reality and the simulation of computers and video games. Nature is recreated by biotechnology, by computer scientists, by urban planners and by real estate entrepreneurs. There is no longer any undisturbed nature. Thinking about nature is equivalent to artificialising it: humanising it, culturalising it, twisting it... or museumising it, which would be one of the most intellectually refined ways of doing so.
Photography has been the form of museifying and artificializing nature with the greatest impact. With Panofsky we know that the central perspective of the Renaissance -of which photography is but ...
Complete summary and more information about the conference in Library-Reading Guide www.cendeac.net....

[@juanurrutia6564]

Hace 6 añitos lo predijo Joan...El futuro llego con la I.A > 1.42.20 seg al 1.44.15 seg...Black Mirror !
Un lucido! gracias

[@sagrarioberti6909]

Extraordinaria intervención. Gracias