Premiered in the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art 2004. Curated by Julie Robinson , Art Gallery of South Australia. Single Channel Video Installation. In which a forest falls down of its own volition – collapsing in on itself in an act of unexplainable violence.
Catalogue Essay: Anne Finegan
There’s an implicit absence of human fate in this mysterious falling down of the trees. Catastrophe doesn’t always strike at midnight, and is all the more spooky for taking place in the clear skies of a noonday glare. The forest is majestic, rising from the cloud bank with an Ansell Adams black-and-white clarity of picture-perfect detail. In this ordinary state of calm you don’t expect the trees to falter; Conifers are considered reliable.
Sure, they may harbor dark thoughts and the wicked agencies of fairytales: Lynch’s forest in Twin Peaks occupies the same dark corner of our imagination from which Nick Cave drew Deep in the VVoods, but the forest still gives us the figure of the woodcutter on whom we can count. Heidegger meditates on human care and the call of the earth from Baden Baden in the Black Forest.
So when Nature begins to tremble and a black hole seems to emerge in the depths of the forest as the force sucking in the leaf litter, it seems no more than a small energetic disturbance, which will be counterbalanced by the checks of Nature. Through entropy a tree could be expected to fall as the result of the ripple effect of such a barely discernible shift. A giant crashes down from behind the camera into the foreground of the screen. But when the entire forest suddenly starts falling down, it’s the avalanche of a natural disaster.
In cinematic terms, this equates to the distilled time image of the pure event.1 The catastrophe is always incommensurable with the tragedy of human agents. No matter how dramatic their fates, their actions never match the inherent freedom of a disaster event. This is not unsympathetic to a genre which is always uneven at best and torn between the attractions of irrepressible force and a social conscience which should not enjoy itself too much – people are suffering. But Haines has intentionally removed the element of human danger to give full reign to the freedom of catastrophe.
When the trees begin to fall in on each other, destroying themselves; they are attaining the release of chaos. In Blanchot’s terms, the vents follow upon the madness or the folly of the day.2 In the act of falling down the forest is liberating itself, achieving the dream of nature. Freedom as such is a fall from order, a stubborn refusal of the wild to obey what Deleuze called order-words or commands here implicitly imposed in a plantation world-scape. Trees like these conifers should not fall down. This is Nature gone wild, and Haines has certainly accelerated the way Nature creeps into a nature denatured and tamed within the constructed notion of Foucault’s order of things.4 For, its only when the dust has settled that there’s the aftershock, the perception of devastation within a limit. Only after the forest has turned against itself and destructed do you see the artificial wall of the plantation lines.
But it can take a while to work things out, to register that the chaos of the event is an act of freedom, and a comment on a profound disturbance, which is never explicitly named and which impacts at a much different level of the state of things. States are fluid, of Nature and subjected to unfathomable, even sub molecular shifts, and it is against them , or seemingly with them, that humans retrospectively construct their world orders of things, historically, by dividing largish chunks of time events into discernible.5 Nature by contrast was always Born to be Wild.
1. London: Athlone,1992
2. Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Madness of the Day’, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, ed. George Quasha, trans. Lydia Davis, Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999.
3. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
4. Michel Foucalt, The Order of Things, New York: Vintage, 1973.
5. A key concept of Foucalt’s, The Order of things, p 250.