Reflections On Nature —Todd Bartel’s Artist Residency at Weir Farm (Part 1/2)

An Interview by Andrea Burgay
All photos furnished by the artist unless otherwise noted.

AB –I visited Weir Farm in July 2023 to see Todd Bartel’s newest works in his Landscape Vernacular series, which he was preparing for his current exhibition at Anna Maria College’s Art Center Gallery. Entering the studio at Weir Farm during the open studios event marking the end of his residency, I found Todd Bartel immersed in detailing the complex process behind his piece Proportions and Table Manners. He meticulously explained the extensive research that went into each element’s selection, the delicate cutting and reinforcement within the piece, and the double-sided framing that reveals the verso, which reveals even more detail. A fellow visitor, taken aback by the complexity, remarked, “Who knew so much work went into a collage?”

I couldn’t help but laugh to myself, reflecting on the countless encounters I’ve had with Todd Bartel’s art over the past six years. With each encounter unfolds layers of meaning, stemming from his deep exploration of humanity’s historical perceptions of nature and its subsequent reflection in landscape art. These ideas resonate through his painstaking physical crafting process. His description of Proportions and Table Mannerswas really only the beginning.

Through collaborative ventures and curatorial projects, Todd and I have fostered an ongoing dialogue about our respective works and the realms of collage, which has continuously unveiled more about the depth of his thinking within these works. This interview extends our ongoing dialogue, shedding light on Todd’s multifaceted approach and creative process. It also describes his quest to find the pivotal moment when humans were excluded from the definition of “nature” in the dictionary—a moment that deeply shapes our connection with the land—and the discovery of which was sparked by this very conversation.

About Weir Farm

Weir Farm’s Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program is envisioned to be an outstanding National Park Service residency program that reflects the values and character of Weir Farm National Historical Park by continuing the creative conversations started by the Weir Family through the work of contemporary artists. The AIR Program is considered a critical resource in a Park with such deep roots in the history and ongoing pursuit of contemporary American art. Through this program, Weir Farm fosters contemporary artistic expression on site. Weir Farm’s AIR Program prioritizes experimental, new, and thought-provoking approaches to examining and interpreting our world through the medium of contemporary visual art practice. The AIR Program keeps Weir’s experimental tendencies alive through the residencies of today, allowing the Park to share new ideas broadly with ever more diverse artists, communities, and park visitors. 

Todd Bartel and 5 other artists were selected from a pool of 161 artists applying for one-month residencies between May and October of 2024.

AB –A major theme of your work is an investigation into how we relate to land and nature. Can you tell us about the new works you’ve completed at your residency and the concepts behind these works?

TB –I applied for the residency at Weir Farm to work on several pieces I planned to include in an upcoming exhibition at Anna Maria College’s Art Center Gallery in the late winter and early spring of 2024. The exhibition Landscape Vernacular focuses on a research-based series of interlocking collages I have been developing since 2011, and which I have, for the most part, kept out of circulation in order to amass a concentrated body of work. I applied to be an artist in residence at Weir Farm because I needed intensified focus time to realize several of the more complicated projects I planned to include at the Anna Maria College (Paxton, MA) show. While at Weir Farm, I worked on collages about Amazonian deforestation, the concept of wilderness as a human construct, the dual ways in which humanity looks at trees (wild/tame), and the various senses of the term “shoot.” I also initiated a large-scale work addressing the concept of no man’s land and realized my first Eco-Champion series uncollage. 

During the first week, I realized the initial work in what I plan to become a future series of banner uncollages that fuse key works from the history of landscape painting with cartoon, anime, and comic book characters advocating for ecology-based values and sustainable practices. I made a formal proposal to Weir Farm and was granted permission to mount the work on the exterior door of the AIR studio at Weir Farm—the first installation to utilize the studio’s exterior as a site for art in the history of the AIR program. The seven-foot vinyl banner entitled Norrin Radd Considers Earth and Humanity fuses Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer, rendered by John Buscema, from the iconic first page of Silver Surfer’s premier comic book, with a digitally posterized version of Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes. A collection of soliloquies surrounds Silver Surfer that juxtaposes the hero’s celestial wisdom, human blindness, and the splendors of the planet.

The Amazonian deforestation piece addresses the idea of primeval rainforests as lungs while redressing an 1880s petition to the U.S. Congress to complete a robust cross-continental railroad system. Surrender to Commensalism uses as its central imagery the 1889 Man of Commerce Map by A. F. McKay (Superior, Wisconsin) and plays off the image of humanity’s overextended reach as a kind of chokehold on the planet, while the gesture of capitulation encourages a reflection on the piece’s namesake.

Gravity Roads—America Learns to Shoot 1829 – 1888 looks at the century that gave us interstate steam locomotion, the handgun, and the portable camera, all of which share an alteration with sprouting greenery. Gravity Roads examines the “roots” of the most esoteric of definitions for “land”—the grooves inside a gun barrel. 

Dangerous Dualism explores an essay by William Cronon entitled The Trouble with Wilderness and the related work Two Trees extends the exploration with Cronon’s recommendations to redress our relationship with these aspects of nature.

Magnificent Desolation juxtaposes Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin’s first words spoken on the surface of the moon, on the Apollo 11 Moon landing. In the central image of Aldrin’s helmet, I imported the famous and inspirational image of Earthrise—the photograph taken by William Anders on December 24, 1968, on the Apollo 8 mission—into the reflection in his helmet visor and removed all the other objects from the original photograph taken by Neil Armstrong of Aldrin, so only the shadow of man pointing to the Earth is in the reflection. These extra-illustrations are juxtaposed with the definition of no man’s land and text selections from the International Space Treaty.

While the collection process regarding the above Landscape Vernacular works was complete for each work, several of the projects were quite complicated in terms of my plans for the cutting portion. I very much wanted to include each of these pieces in the Anna Maria College show, and I felt it would not feel as well-rounded without them. I feel incredibly fortunate that I was granted the residency, which afforded me the time I so desperately needed to realize these works.

Regarding my interest in nature, I have been troubled by rainforest cutbacks ever since I first learned about it in the late 1980s. What galvanized my interest in nature was encountering the etymology of the word “landscape” at the same time as reading the 6th definition of “nature” found in the American Heritage Dictionary, which excludes humans and human production from the definition. It was reading that particular juxtaposition of definitions, which I thought I knew well, that, in fact, have senses, meanings, and etymology that are quite surprising. When those two words came to my attention in the summer of 1995, the idea of researching the history of landscape painting inspired my first dedicated body of work about nature. That is when language and research practices entered my studio practice in a serious and organized way. The work I did at Weir Farm relies heavily on my research of the past three decades. While the Landscape Vernacularseries will be exhibited for the first time in its entirety at Anna Maria College, I plan to add many more works to the series.

AB –From your work, I have learned so much about the way language around land and nature has changed over time, and how this has shaped humans’ relationship to the natural world. In the Weir Farm Studio studio, looking at definitions of the words “landscape” and “nature” that you’ve collected from historical dictionaries made this trajectory very clear. Can you share more about the role of language in our relationship with nature? What are some of the discoveries that have determined the direction of your work along these lines?

TB –I really appreciate this question, which gets to the heart of my work in general and specifically to the Landscape Vernacular series. In 1995, when I coined the term “landview” in my Terra Reverentia statement, one of the things fueling my work at the time was reflecting on the 6th definition of “nature,” found in my copy of the American Heritage Dictionary: “The primitive state of existence, untouched and uninfluenced by civilization or artificiality.” I thought that particular part of the definition of nature was an odd thing to consider, given that humans are made up of the very same stuff as nature. As Walt Whitman so eloquently wrote, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.” (Song of Myself 31, 1819 – 1892) I was so irked by the definition that my Terra Reverentia series was entirely based on it. For the Terra Reverentiaassemblages, I appropriated medieval landscape paintings and housed them inside boxed assemblages with superimposed frames made of vines and floating patterns of mustard seeds suspended between layers of cut glass, but in my painted appropriations, I omitted all the people and buildings from the imagery so as to leave these areas “untouched and uninfluenced by civilization.” 

The idea of not including civilization in the definition of nature is, of course, ubiquitous today; it is also hubris, reckless, and dangerous.

As my work developed throughout the early 2000s, I kept coming across instances and descriptions of nature in books, magazines, and on the internet, all indicating that nature is everything else in the universe except for humans and what we make. Like anything that evolves over time, the realization that the actual definition of “nature” itself had shifted was not one that came to me suddenly; it was a slow-to-come realization. I admit that while I was and am critical of that particular definition, due to the frequency, familiarity, and proliferation of the idea of the “separation” of humanity from nature, I became desensitized to encountering it in print and on the Internet, even as I worked to criticize it. I turned that around in my studio practice in 2011.

I began the Landscape Vernacular series unintentionally. I had made what I thought was a singular collage that addressed climate change in 2011, referencing the first exhibition I curated at the Thompson Gallery between 2006-07: Sublime Climate. In my collage with that namesake, I included the same dictionary definitions I addressed in my curatorial statement for the exhibition — “sublimate, sublime, subliminal,” which follow each other in the dictionary, and all allude to aspects of global warming. Regarding the “subliminal” bit, you will recall that in 2006, climate change science was largely refuted; ergo, climate change as a subject was below the threahold of average consciousness. After making the collage, I glanced at my collection of dictionaries, and that was when the realization hit me. I had amassed a sizable collection of dictionaries dating from the early 1800s; I wondered if I could find that moment in time when humans removed themselves from the definition of nature altogether. I set out then and there to explore landscape terminology and divine the historical lineage of the concept of humanity’s separation from nature as a major focus of my studio practice, The Landscape Vernacular series was born.

Since then, while I was dedicated to the pursuit of dictionary volumes that document the semantic separation, I also thought that it might be too difficult to locate two dictionary volumes that definitively illustrate the time frame/s when we separated ourselves in the definition. Nevertheless, I sought the change as I explored landscape terminology in the collage series—always with an eye out for the offending definition in physical print. As I came in contact with new dictionaries, I would check their definition of nature, but I didn’t spend hours at a time doing detective work. While at Weir Farm, I intensified my focus and began comparing the dictionaries I brought with me to the residency. That is when I realized there are competing definitions between English dictionaries and American English dictionaries regarding the word “nature.”

The English tend to see “nature” as related to the “character, essence, and the driving ‘force’” of a thing, whereas American dictionaries tend to see “nature” as the external world. Before I recognized these nuances, I began collecting articles and books about Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism and René Descartes’ thesis about humanity’s superiority over nature. I wondered if I could track dictionaries from his time forward. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which appears a hundred years after Descartes, defines “nature” as first “An imaginary being supposed to preside over the material and animal world,” and second, “The native state or properties of any thing, by which it is discriminated from others.” It is not until the eighth definition that Johnson’s Dictionary addresses “nature” as “The state or operation of the material world“—which seems to include civilization.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) first definition of “nature” is “senses relating to physical or bodily power, strength, or substance.” And the OED’s eleventh sense acknowledges and separates “The phenomena of the physical world collectively, esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations,” citing Chaucer as early as the 1380s and Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1667, among others.

Interestingly, while Webster’s definition oscillates between “the world” and “essence,” being the primary definition, it never excludes civilization from its definition of nature. In Webster’s 1828 Dictionary, for example, “nature” is defined holistically: “In a general sense, whatever is made or produced; a word that comprehends all the works of God; the universe.” And the third entry is defined, as “The essence, essential qualities or attributes of a thing, which constitute it what it is.” In the 1974 edition of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, the first definition appears as “the inherent character or basic constitution of a person or thing: essence, disposition, temperament,” whereas the sixth definition denotes “the external world in its entirety.” And now, in 2024, merriam-webster.com defines nature: 1: the external world in its entirety 2: natural scenery 3a: disposition, temperament.”

While I was at Weir Farm, I got my first big break in the case of locating a physical dictionary that illustrates the separation of humanity from nature in the primary sense. As I thoroughly enjoyed the privilege of working for long periods of uninterrupted time, I found myself reflecting on the Landscape Vernacular series as a whole, which brought up many things I yet needed to work out while I was cutting and releasing images. 

Cutting the interlocking fragments to exchange the central image in Surrender to Commensalism.

During the last week of my residency, I couldn’t help but review how America is still unsettled with the definition of nature. As you recall, Andrea,  during your visit to Weir Farm, you and I discussed many of the above realizations about the definition, and we even looked at Proportions and Table Manners—which I brought with me to illustrate the folding frames for the Landscape Vernacular collages that have two sides—and on the front face of that collage, the offending definition is blatantly transferred onto its surface. I remember calling the transferred text to your attention. Ironically, that text was excluded from my conscious pursuit because of where I obtained it, but my realization came out of the close proximity of our conversation and that prompted a question I had never thought to ask before. 

Laugh out loud, the first work I created in the LV series to address the definition of nature—Proportions and Table Manners—provided the answer for where to find an analog dictionary!

After our conversation, while thinking about the problem of wanting a physical dictionary to illustrate the point, I remembered showing you that I had an offending definition in the collage, and that is when it hit me: in 2014, while making Proportions and Table Manners, instead of scanning my copy of the American Heritage Dictionary to obtain text to transfer onto the collage, I just pulled text from my computer’s dictionary and transferred that definition. At that time, I did not connect with where the definition came from because my focus was on the juxtaposition of the definition with the other elements in the collage. Clearly, I was desensitized to reading it! After all, I was, in fact, looking for an analog book; I had inadvertently ignored the digital definition,not realizing that an e-book is, of course, a viable book! How many times did I read my laptop’s definition of nature or my own collage with the exact definition I was looking for?

All ever needed to do was to research the dictionary that Macintosh uses! The answer I was seeking for all those years came swiftly within moments of my Weir Farm realization:

The Oxford American Dictionary.

Oxford American Dictionary, 1980, “nature” p. 443

I stopped everything and ordered a copy of the book, which arrived just a few days after I returned home from the residency. But to my surprise, the definition I was seeking was not in the particular volume that arrived. Instead, I had located a copy of the OAD that included humanity in the definition of nature.

I could not believe my eyes. How fortunate I felt! Instead of obtaining a dictionary with humanity’s removal, I obtained a dictionary with its inclusion! But the problem of where where to find the opposite dictionary remained! At least I had a good idea where to look for a volume with the offending definition. I looked more deeply into the history of Macintosh’s use of the OAD and discovered an entire Wikipedia page on the topic. And that led me to purchase a copy of the New Oxford American Dictionary. The copy I purchased did not arrive until early October.

The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2005, “nature” p. 1132

And once again, my blind enthusiasm got the better of me again! I made that purchase too hastily, as well! What came was a second edition of The New Oxford American Dictionary without a cover. Nevertheless, for the first time since I set the goal to obtain physical dictionaries that illustrate humanity’s separation from the definition of nature in the primary sense of the definition, I had two dictionaries with proof of humanity’s nemesis. Immediately after I realized my error, I located and purchased a first edition of the New OAD, which arrived in early December. 

Despite not having the books in hand at the time, I count my Weir Farm residency as the time and place where I was able to find a dictionary that answered the curiosity that spurred the making of my Landscape Vernacularseries. I also think it was our conversation that lead me to ask the fight question that lead me to the books I caught for more than a decade. 

(Continued on part 2 )