Man Collides With Nature, Yielding Artistic Results

What did curator Massimiliano Gioni mean when he titled the New Museum’s current exhibition “After Nature”? The ambiguous phrase speaks primarily to the apocalyptic feel permeating many of the works, which depict haunting images of the intersection between nature and mankind.

The paintings, sculpture, video, photography, and performance art included in “After Nature” speak largely to an innately human fear of helplessness in the face of the unknown. A series of photographs by William Christenberry shows rural Southern homes completely overtaken by wild Kudzu vines. Roberto Cuoghi’s painted glass maps feature whimsical outlines of countries classified as part of the “Axis of Evil,” the regions that his wall text describes as “repositories for our nightmares” in the collective consciousness.

Sculptures by Zoe Leonard and Pawel Althamer literalize the collision between man and nature. Leonard’s work reconstructs a hacked-up tree. Once a living unit, the tree now consists of more than fifteen distinct segments reassembled with nuts and bolts. Althamer creates human forms from straw, hemp fiber, wax, hair, and animal intestines, but contrasts these natural materials with factory-made accessories such as cell phones, eyeglasses, video cameras, and digital watches. The unsettling dichotomy between organic and man-made media recalls Frankenstein’s monster—what at first seems an exhilarating triumph of human intelligence ultimately becomes a source of terror and destruction.

“After Nature” is showing at the New Museum through Sept. 21.