As a Gregory Bateson scholar, I have long been fascinated with the notion that art and science might complement one another in the effort to bring forth, understand, and represent the “wholeness” of our more-than-human worlds. Far from pantheistic, Bateson’s notion of wholeness refers to the complex, nonlinear, multiscale relationships by means of which organisms, ecosystems, states of mind, cultural predispositions, and the socio-natural worlds we live in continuously unfold into being. Alas, the tenets of modern science that dominated many disciplines for most of the twentieth century were characteristically reductionist, thus inhibiting scientists from acknowledging and understanding the entangled nature of “natural” and of social phenomena. Even in light of the epistemological revolution that systems thinking portends, the representation of complexity and patterns that connect itself posed—and continues to pose—challenges to scientists and science communication experts.
I believe it was partly due to his awareness of this problem that Gregory Bateson came to defend the idea that art can complement science in our efforts to understand and represent complex phenomena. As former Bateson student Stephen Nachmanovitch explains, although both artists and scientists seek to comprehend and reveal the illusive nature of the dynamics that link phenomena, “neither can do so without reference to larger patterns and contexts.” What is particularly interesting about art is that it “uses story, image, and movement, to evoke layers of reality that cannot be explicitly stated, but which are ever-present” (2007: 1124).
With this blog post I sketch my theorization[1] of the art of botanical illustration[2] as a possible venue to unveil, experience, and convey the inextricability of the more-than-human plant worlds we all inhabit but which tend to be so pervasively invisible in Western, urbanized societies. We will see that historically botanical illustration was, more often that not, allied with the objectification of vegetative orders of being. Botanical illustration was, in fact, deeply intertwined with the emergence of modernity having played important roles in the establishment of science, the rise of European colonial empires, and the globalization of cash crop economies. There is no doubt in my mind that many botanical paintings are the product of the same objectifying Western gaze that arbitrarily divided the world into all manner of dualisms, which, in turn, fueled a plethora of artificially instated hierarchies between society and nature, male and female, civilized and primitive—with all the power politics this entails.
Nevertheless, my research also gives me strong reason to believe that the embodied practice of painting botanical art has the potential not only to challenge but also to alter objectified views of more-than-human worlds and associated politics. I rely on Bateson’s notion of artistry to make this point. Again Nachmanovitch captures the meaning of the concept most effectively when he states: “Artistry entails transformation and expansion of the person into something more inclusive than our limited concepts of identity and meaning. Artistry operates across the slash mark of conscious/unconscious, of self/other. [It] makes us face a series of illusory dichotomies which we accept in our daily lives but which are false, such as mind/body, self/other, organism/environment, conscious/unconscious, thought/feeling” (2007: 1127).
My research suggests, more specifically, that contemporary efforts at botanical garden education departments to teach botanical painting—as well as growing interest in amateur botanical art—are characterized by efforts to develop forms of “botanical artistry” that break down long-held human/animal-plant dichotomies and, therefore, to potentially facilitate engagement with more inclusive concepts of human-plant coexistence. Lest my proposition be mistaken for a romantic take on botanical illustration, it is crucial to understand the genealogy and politics of this art form. It will then be clear that I am more interested in botanical artistry’s potential to unsettle extant politics of plant ontology and representation than in celebrating contemporary pastiches of high-low botanical art forms.
Much has been said and written in recent decades about the fallacies of Western representations of nonhumans. At the heart of these critiques, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have pointed to highly pervasive forms of ontological reductionism and epistemology throughout modernity that translate the heterogeneity of nonhuman worlds into variously abstracted and objectified Natures. Relatedly, the politics of Nature objectification have been central in analysis of the role that images and textual representation play in construing more-than-human worlds as amenable to human intervention, exploitation, and even redemption. The permutations of social, racialized, and gendered violence this entails are manifold and far from fully scrutinized within the social sciences and humanities—notwithstanding the unquestionable significance of the large body of scholarly work that focuses on unveiling these processes and on theorizing their effects.
Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, the art of botanical illustration[3] was pivotal to the development, establishment, and accreditation of modern science. This process intersected with the associated rise of the modern nation state and its impact on formerly colonized nations. Subject to shifting aesthetic conventions, botanical illustration played a crucial role in the standardization of information about known and newly discovered plants within the context of the emerging classificatory schemes[4] that typify modern science. Long before knowledge economies came to dominate the world, plant illustrations were extremely important assets for botanic gardens. They helped legitimize the role of botanic gardens as producers and repositories of scientific knowledge while affording a series of political and economic strategic advantages to the nation states that hosted them.
The rendering of systematized plant representation was also crucial to the objectification of vegetative life-forms as imbued with market exchange value and thus amenable to commoditization within the increasingly globalized economic networks that characterized colonial crop trade.[5] Economic botany was in fact a leading field of knowledge production and power throughout this historical epoch. The combined information that plant illustration and economic botany provided is best appreciated when one considers that the pinnacle of this coalescence took place at a time when moving plants around the globe was highly onerous in financial cost and in risk of loss: the circulation of detailed plant imagery information about the economic potential of specific plants operated as a surrogate to the circulation of plant samples and the performance of horticultural trials by market agents in search of new investment opportunities.
The art of botanical illustration thus affirmed botanic gardens as authorities in colonial botany and, consequently, as instrumental to the empire-building processes of nation-states like Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain that not only hosted but also sponsored botanic gardens of national and international scope within this context. Plant illustrations were no less crucial to smaller and/or poorer botanic gardens that lacked the resources to reproduce plant knowledge at the scale of the former botanic gardens. The acquisition of botanical illustrations incurred lesser costs by orders of magnitude than engaging firsthand in plant exploration but still allowed these gardens to claim legitimacy as holders of plant knowledge assets.
The invention of photography and the massification of sophisticated photographic tools slowly displaced the centrality of botanic illustration at botanical gardens and kin institutions throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Nevertheless, botanical illustration remains useful within scientific domains since, as Botanic Gardens Conservation International puts it, they can “represent clearly what may not easily be seen in a photograph” (there is certainly still a need for botanical illustration because it can represent clearly what may not easily be seen in a photograph).” On the other hand, there are also excellent examples of artists—for example, Niki Simpson or Laurence Hill—who deploy classic botanical art aesthetics in their use of digital means of plant representation.
The contemporary valuation of botanical art/illustration is multifold. While it continues to be in demand within scientific circles, the market for antique originals and/or reproductions of botanical paintings is considerable with original images selling for thousands of dollars. Amateur interest in learning how to paint botanical art has also bourgeoned in recent decades. Artists such as Dianne Sutherland, Anna Mason, Elaine Searle, and Billy Showell run successful and popular botanical art courses online. The literature on how to paint botanical subjects is continuously expanding, as even a simple search will indicate.
Partly banking on the growing popularity of botanical art, many botanic gardens around the world offer courses in this art form. In many instances, these courses provide important sources of revenue to increasingly and chronically underfunded botanic gardens. While some emphasize the development scientific botanical illustration skills, interviews I have conducted at botanical gardens in the United Kingdom and Canada indicate that for many botanic garden education departments, the priority is to get people to engage with the world of plants and, in so doing, begin overcome the a variety of forms of “plant blindness.” To be sure, one of the main concerns educators at botanic gardens face is the predominant lack of plant awareness and plant literacy in contemporary urban society. Their approach to teaching the art of botanical illustration is much in line with Gregory Bateson’s notion of artistry. It seeks to destabilize objectified understandings and representations of plants and in its stead to awaken practitioners to the relationally of human-plant ontology. Botanic gardens have also relied on botanical art exhibits to convert similar conceptual messages. The Rory McEwen exhibit exemplifies this approach.
It is often said that Rory McEwen’s botanical paintings display stricking ability to capture the souls of plants. While I had long been an admirer of McEwen’s work, I never fully understood the meaning of this claim until I found myself standing in front of an exhibition of his work at Royal Kew Gardens UK three years ago. None of the reproductions and prints I had seen previously came near doing justice to the vibrancy of McEwen’s vellum paintings. There is a translucent quality to these plant portraits that, accompanied by painstakingly perfect rendition of a plant’s most intimate details, imbues the images with shifting kaleidoscopes of multisensory, emotional, and cognitive communicative effect. Looking at one of his tulips I could literally sense the fresh softness of the flower’s petals on my fingertips. Feeling the texture of his famous onion illustration, I was awakened to the incredible beauty of this ordinary household veggie.
But it was McEwen’s dying oak leaf that most deeply captured my attention. It moved me beyond words. Confronted with its half-living, half-demised condition, I found myself pondering the lightness of our all existences and the preciousness of being. Although dying, McEwen’s leaf portraits exude so much life that they have a contagious effect on the viewer. It is amazing to think that McEwen’s fascination with dying leafs came when he was diagnosed with the incurable brain tumor that ultimately killed him at 50 years of age. Never had I thought that botanical art could carry such deep communicative power. That day at the McEwen exhibit was the first time I wondered whether there might be more to the art of botanical illustration than mere objectification of nature.
![Karen Kluglein illustrates her technique to an attentive student during her 2016 East Hampton Painting Summer Flowers Workshop. Click here [https://www.facebook.com/KarenKluglein7/photos/a.128095427283780.27872.115226741903982/1066021916824455/?type=3&theater] to see the final version of this hydrangea on Karen’s Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/KarenKluglein7/] page.](http://www.envirosociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Neves1.png)
Karen’s patient and generous teaching provided me with one of the most exhilarating learning experiences of my life. The three-day, five-hour-long sessions that it took me to begin painting, totally botch, and salvage what I could of an apple portrait I undertook at the beginning of the workshop taught me profound lessons about the rewards of sticking to technique and guidance even in the face of apparent calamity. Most importantly, I began to “learn how to learn,” as Bateson would put it, to truly observe the living plant world of which we are all part. Much as I had read in the literature and heard from interviews I conducted over the years with botanical artists, Karen taught me about the art of observation and the embodied relationally that goes into painting botanical subjects. And while I remain a rather inept—though passionate—beginner, Karen’s workshop brought me a whole new level of appreciation of the reasons why so many botanic garden education departments see great potential in this art form to “open up” the otherwise forgotten plant worlds.
Recognition of artistry’s potential to enhance observational skills extends to other forms of scientific illustration. Working within the field of biology Jennifer Landin argues in a blog post she wrote for Scientific American that the abilities to see and “to focus on detail and pattern require training.” Her approach confirms Gregory Bateson’s contention that art can provide a venue to bring forth the patterns that link entangled ontologies mediated by similarity and difference (see Chasing Whales with Daniel and Gregory by Katja Neves for an ethnographically based discussion of this concept). Laundin explains that “if you wish to differentiate fir and spruce trees, look at carefully at how the needles attach to the twig.” One might also add that looking at how these two trees are similar also reveals the evolutionary patterns by means of which they are connected. Most importantly, she adds, “when we draw, we see the things we’d otherwise overlook.” In teaching biological illustration therefore, Laundin’s goal “is not the final product, it’s the process.”
Far from a celebration of the visual over other forms of multisensory and affective engagement with plants, the artistry of botanical illustration can potentially constitute a first step toward greater awareness of more than human plant worlds on which other, complementary, more comprehensive and reflexive approaches can build.
Katja Neves, Associate Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, has investigated the reinvention of botanic gardens as purported leaders of biodiversity conservation through two research projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She was the principal organizer of the international conference Leaders in Conservation: Botanic Gardens in the 21st Century. In 2016 Dr. Neves was awarded a new INSIGHT SSRHC research grant titled “Botanic Gardens and the Politics of National and Transnational Environmental Governance” whereby she and her team have undertaken a groundbreaking interdisciplinary research into newly emerging systems of environmental governance in so-called post-Westphalian orders of governance. Dr. Neves is also completing a book under contract with SUNY Press on biodiversity conservation governance and environmental subjectivity, exploring the historical context and political implications entailed in the emergence of botanic gardens and kin institutions (such as zoos and natural science museums) as key actors in the global, national, and regional governance of biodiversity.
Further reading by author on related subjects:
Neves, Katja. 2009. “The Aesthetics of Ecological Learning at Montreal’s Botanical Garden.” Pp. 145–157 in “Human Nature/Human Identity: Anthropological Revisionings,” ed. S. Aprahamian, K. Neves-Graca, and N. Rapport. Special issue, Anthropologica 51.
Neves, Katja. 2012. The New Roles of Botanical Gardens in Biodiversity Conservation. Encyclopedia of Global Climate Change. Paul Robbins, ed. Sage Publications Online Encyclopedia.
Neves, Katja. 2014. “Reproducing Empire, Subverting Hegemony? Botanic Gardens in Biodiversity Conservation.” EnviroSociety. 4 December.
Neves, Katja. Forthcoming. Post-Normal Conservation: The Re-Ordering of Biodiversity Governance and Environmental Subjectivity. New York: SUNY Press.
Notes
[1] In preparation for submission to scientific journal.
[2] There are many types of botanical art, and different terms are used to refer to them. Generally, botanical illustration refers to the more strictly scientific representation of plants, especially in the context of modern botany. Botanical art often refers to less objective yet more artistic representations of plants. In this post I use the term art of botanical illustration to include a wide range of traditions of plant depiction in modern Western culture. Links in this post, however, provide detailed account of the nuances and genealogies that distinguish different botanical art from botanical illustration stricto sensu.
[3] Here is a detailed discussion of the difference between botanical art and botanical illustration.
[4] See also “Plant Evolution and Taxonomy.”
[5] See Colonial Botany, Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World for in-depth analysis and theorization of colonial botany.
Cite as: Neves, Katja. 2016. “The Art of Seeing: Grasping More-Than-Human Plant Worlds beyond Objectified ‘Nature.’” EnviroSociety, 28 July. www.envirosociety.org/2016/07/the-art-of-seeing-grasping-more-than-human-plant-worlds-beyond-objectified-nature.